Disease Mongering at a New High
The Broken Spirit of Public Health Now Forcing Society Onto a Destructive Path of Pandemic Paranoia
Deformed Philosophy of Public Health
There is something inherently disturbing about an approach to public health based on massive preparation for non-existent, possible disease events that might happen, but have not happened. If we expend massive efforts and resources preparing for non-existent, possible disease events, then we divert massive efforts and resources away from actual, disease-free life that most certainly does exist in the present.
When a disproportionate amount of consciousness, effort, money, and time is invested in what has not happened, anxiety about what could happen robs life of what does happen. All this energy could be invested in a positive direction of improvement, instead of in a negative direction of defending against feared impending doom. Choosing the direction of anticipated doom allows envisioned accidents that have not taken place and unknown terrorists who have not yet acted to control society. Things that do not exist dictate exclusively to things that do exist. Life itself becomes hijacked by fear that disables truly living.
Does this style of existing constitute a healthy life? Is this what we really want to perpetuate as a definition of public health? I contend, No - this is a mentally-disturbed re-definition of human life and public health. This is living in fear of being human and in fear of being alive.
If we want to avoid accidental release of harmful biological agents, then preventative efforts should rightfully consist of trying to eliminate facilities, means, and availability of ingredients that enable such agents. If we want to avoid being the target of biological terrorists, then intelligence operations should rightfully be strengthened to anticipate and to halt terrorist missions, instead of being wasted on less serious operations. International relations should be more carefully negotiated to avoid creating enemies that might stoop to using biological weapons.
There are other potential threats of doom for which there are zero massive international cooperative efforts to prepare for. Why is disease the chosen target of potential doom? Could it be that fear of disease is simply more profitable for those who claim to have proper preparations for it, namely pharmaceutical companies? If we want people, and by extension, entire populations to be healthier, then we need to get off the pharmaceutical bandwagon, and get on the lifestyle bandwagon, where we gear information, recommendations, and policies towards whole-lifestyle health.
Maybe this view is overly idealistic. Maybe the world we live in now really is a world of heightened impending bio-security doom. If such is the case, then, at least, the proposed approaches should have a high probability of actually working, instead of being dreamland scenarios of rushed, scientifically-questionable fanfare pretending to be safe and effective. Furthermore, the proposed approaches should be respectful of the humanity in day-to-day life now. My personal research does not reveal any such legitimately safe, effective, humane foundation for the current global health security agenda, where leaders obsess on medical countermeasures revolving around genetic-platforms. Instead, a dive into the facts reveals a disastrous trend that is anything but healthy.
Governments and organizations around the world are trying to convince basically healthy people to be afraid of unknown biological threats, obscurely designated with a catch-all label of "Disease X". These governments and organizations, in conjunction with the World Health Organization, are trying to coerce people into accepting a public-health philosophy that embraces rapidly-produced, inadequately-tested, medical countermeasures. By their very nature, such rapidly-produced, inadequately-tested medical countermeasures would have health risks of their own. A world-wide framework of focused, intense cooperation would be created specifically for mass-producing these countermeasures for feared diseases that are unknown and non-existent.
A higher form of disease mongering, thus, has emerged.
Disease Mongering and Our Awareness of It
In 1992, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. published a book by medical journalist, Lynn Payer (now deceased) entitled, Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick.
Payer described disease mongering as the big business of trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill. She pointed out the medical establishment's use of increasingly expensive medical care for minimal benefit and how this was taking a heavy toll on lower-to-middle-income groups. She claimed that Food-and-Drug-Administration (FDA) rules favor such a practice. According to her analysis, disease mongering exposes people to the risks of unnecessary treatment or even death, and it also exposes people to social discrimination. She emphasized that disease mongering often presents magical solutions to a problem, when the problem may have only a partial solution. According to the book's forward, by Philip Caper, M.D., evidence had been accumulating since 1977 that much of medical decision making was not firmly grounded in scientific evidence.
As of this writing, Payer's book was written over thirty years ago. Clear evidence to support it started accumulating over forty years ago. Jump forward to the year 2018, and we find an entire series of papers on the subject, featured at PLOS ("Public Library of Science"), which is an open-access journal of science and medicine. All of the papers featured there date from year 2006, but, interestingly, they all surfaced as a collection about one year before COVID-19 started.
Ten years after Lynn Payer published her book, BMJ (British Medical Journal) published an article (2002) by Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, David Henry, entitled Selling Sickness: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Disease Mongering, in which they made the following observations:
Some forms of “medicalisation” may now be better described as “disease mongering”— extending the boundaries of treatable illness to expand markets for new products.
Alliances of pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, and patients groups use the media to frame conditions as being widespread and severe.
Disease mongering can include turning ordinary ailments into medical problems, seeing mild symptoms as serious, treating personal problems as medical, seeing risks as diseases, and framing prevalence estimates to maximise potential markets.
The phrase, "extending the boundaries of treatable illness", means changing the definition of illness to include conditions that previous definitions did not encompass. It also means treating mild cases of an illness as serious cases. In the case of COVID-19, it means treating a disease as more serious than it really is, and erroneously treating people with zero symptoms as infectious, asymptomatic transmitters.
The Further Advancement of Disease Mongering
Even though clear knowledge of corruption in the field of medicine had existed well before 2019, the world still allowed the COVID-19 debacle to overtake it. COVID-19 is a case where big business, in cooperation with big government, attempted to convince essentially well people that they are at risk of getting sick or of dying from a largely survivable illness. It is a case where a government/business alliance attempted to convince well people that they are infectious disease threats to others. It is a case where businesses, governments, and organizations around the world tried to force risky, unnecessary mRNA vaccines into the bodies of every human being on the planet. Highly effective treatments, already in existence but suppressed by this same government/business/organization alliance, negated any need for a new vaccine to begin with.
COVID-19 was the second time that the World Health Organization (WHO) obviously facilitated an unnecessary, global vaccination campaign for an overly-hyped illness, by declaring a pandemic. The other obvious time was in 2009, when WHO declared a "swine flu" pandemic, which helped launch an equally unnecessary vaccination campaign that wasted resources and caused threats to health.
We are now entering a new era, where governments, businesses, non-government organizations, and news media have aligned themselves to convince healthy and slightly-unhealthy people that Disease X threatens them all. "Disease X", remember, is the catch-all term for unnamed, unknown, non-existent diseases that require an intense, focused, global, cooperative effort to prepare for. From this perspective, life and health, as we have known it is over. Life is now under threat of constant attack by this unnamed, unknown, non-existent entity, and the world must mobilize massive resources to anticipate its arrival. This, apparently, is the new face of public health.
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