John Anderson, on public health. “One aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns was the emergence of a…

John Anderson, on public health. “One aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns was the emergence of a sense that essential freedoms were somehow gifts to be bestowed by government, rather than rights inherent to the people.” /1 https://t.co/SszaJBfe1u

“It revealed a troubling nonchalance about the principles of civil liberty that were so hard-won in the history of Western liberal democracy and should not be easily discarded.” Anybody with even the faintest understanding of history should recoil in horror here. /2

To oppose public health to freedoms and liberties is beyond the pale. The ‘lives and livelihoods’ bullshit we’ve heard throughout Covid. As if those are TWO things! You have no livelihood, without a life. /3

Civilisation itself is the control of infectious disease more than any other thing. The Old Testament is all about plagues. They knew, then, where the battle lay. Human life expectancy doubled in the past century through the control of infection and infectious disease. /4

Humans have no native, individual rights. No ‘essential freedoms’. Those come only from ‘collective’ life. Social life. Without social life, we’re all just Robinson Crusoe on his island. It’s our collective life that GIVES us *individual* freedoms and liberties. /5

There’s no binary here. We are freer the *more* we are bound to others in collective responsibility. It’s called economies of scale, division of labour. Otherwise again you’re on Robinson’s island, trying to avoid eating sand and drinking salt water. /6

The greatest progress by far in civilisation came with the control of infectious disease, only at the very latest hour of history, in the past century. That modern conservatives went to war with the public health that did it is a sign of how dangerous they are. /end