The public’s health is under attack in America like never before. We have lost well over a million Americans despite being the wealthiest country in the world. It is estimated that a third to half of those deaths could have been prevented with adequate and timely public health measures, including vaccinations, if we truly had a system of universal health in this country.
The unprecedented level of this attack on public health is central to building a social base for fascism in this country. Fueled by misleading social media sound bites, and newscasters and elected officials with political agendas, the politicizing of public health has to be seen in the context of the January 6th insurrection, the multi-state attack on voting rights, and the gutting of Roe vs. Wade.
Because essential workers such as food processing workers, grocery workers, and health care workers were often first to succumb to the virus, especially before vaccines and other effective treatments became available, many called them disposable workers. Some businesspeople and even elected officials had the audacity to say of these deaths, “well, that is the cost of doing business.”
Similarly, today public health workers, including health officers and directors have become disposable people for speaking inconvenient truths. Since March of 2020, 17 out of 58 of California’s counties have lost their health officer and 27 lost their health director. Some have resigned due to threats against their person, or their families as happened in Orange County. Some have been fired as happened in Shasta County, or their contracts were not renewed as happened in Merced County. In 2021 fifteen hundred cases of harassment of public health workers were registered in California, and 222 people left their jobs as a result. As if dealing with the Pandemic and burnout of health care professionals were not enough, fully 53% of public health workers qualified for a PTSD diagnosis or had symptoms of mental health illness over the previous two weeks in a recent poll.
The messengers of public health are being silenced even though they have prevented thousands of deaths. Wearing or not wearing masks has become part of a culture war to further fuel the social base for fascism, Ultimately, this is because prevention and public health are not profitable in a profit driven economy. There are forces that want to prioritize only that which is profitable and are prepared to let people die in order to do so. Misinformation and mixed messages leave the public confused, leading to mistrust of public health and anti-government sentiment, leaving broad swathes of the nation’s population at increased risk.
An anti-science message has even been promoted by some health officials during the COVID pandemic. Florida’s surgeon general and Idaho’s health commissioner discourage vaccines for healthy kids. Some even promote discredited and dangerous treatment, while rejecting effective and proven treatment and prevention options. Nationally, a very similar picture is unfolding, ranging from death threats against Fauci to resignations under duress of state health officers such as Amy Acton of Ohio.
Delays in taking the threat of disease transmission seriously caused confusion, lost time, and lives lost. Overreliance on market measures to deal with a critical lack of protective equipment, and a dysfunctional distribution system was revealed once PPE and immunizations became available.
In the U.S., unlike other countries, there is a sharp separation between public health and the health care delivery system and pharmaceutical industry. Despite having available the most highly developed technology and scientific breakthroughs in history, effective measures to stem the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic were seriously hampered by the very lack of an effective public health infrastructure in this country.
Pharmaceutical companies are among the most profitable investments to make on the stock market. Pfizer’s profits more than doubled in 2021. We pay for their profits with our income taxes, as we pay for the initial development costs of vaccines and pharmaceuticals before they are turned over to private companies. This is called socializing the costs and privatizing the profits. Now pharmaceuticals stand to make even more money by charging individuals for vaccines once covered by the federal government, as the State of Emergency is anticipated to end February 28, 2023.
Prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, few people even knew what public health did. Historically, public health has been invisible because deaths and hospitalizations prevented by immunizations go unseen, and ensuring the safety of food by inspections, hazardous material control, and insuring safe, clean drinking water all happen without fanfare and are taken for granted. Problems are noticed only when they occur, such as mass casualties, a toxic spill, an outbreak of foodborne illness, or a pandemic.
In times of crisis such as epidemics and pandemics, population-wide measures are necessary. Enforcement measures have never been applied equitably for protection of the working class, especially Black, Brown and immigrant workers, but in the early twentieth century , capital backed public health measures because they were accepted as essential for industry to flourish. Today, as the global financialized economy increasingly relies on labor-replacing technology, the current pandemic confirms that capitalism’s institutions are not constructed to ‘protect and serve’ but rather to ‘control and secure’ the value of commodity exchange over human life.
Measures to protect the public’s health and particularly the health of essential workers throughout the course of the Covid Pandemic have been unacceptably deficient, given the vast wealth and resources of the United States. In one rare instance, a sheriff ordered the Smithfield meat processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to close because of a large outbreak among the plant’s workforce leading to hospitalizations and deaths. This was reversed by then-President Trump’s enactment of the Defense Production Act, mandating that “essential workers” continue to work, as the nation’s food supply was in jeopardy.
The reality is that public health, particularly in state and local health departments, has been intentionally underfunded and dysfunctionally fragmented for decades preceding the pandemic. Covid is not over, given the current BA.5 surge and looming threat of quickly mutating variants that transmit more easily and evade vaccine protections precisely because large reservoirs exist of unvaccinated children and unconvinced adults in the U.S. Plus, there is under-vaccination of poor countries due to lack of profitability—all providing ample opportunity for more mutations, variants, and vaccine resistance developing. To make matters worse, poor countries have been denied access to vaccines due to patent laws. We ignore the reality that with global travel, new pandemics in the making spread at the speed of jets[SS1] .
Unfortunately, declaring the pandemic over has been done in so many words by Democratic President Biden, the CDC, and state health departments—eager to put the pandemic behind us as the midterm elections approach. Unfortunately, we are still losing 300 to 800 Americans per day. Relying heavily on vaccinations and now therapeutics options like paxlovid , gave a false sense of everything getting back to normal. Relaxing masking requirements in public indoor settings, on public transportation, particularly airlines, are examples of premature and unscientific actions. This gives a false sense of security as more easily transmitted new variants of Covid strike Europe, which typically precedes surges of Covid in the U.S. In addition, large outbreaks of influenza, also preventable with masks and vaccinations, struck Australia and the far East earlier this year, which presages an anticipated influenza surge in the U.S. this winter.
We already have the technology and the people eager to monitor and treat the public’s health. For example, wastewater surveillance for Covid has proven to be a valuable tool not only as an early warning sign of Covid and its developing variants, it also finds and warns us of influenza, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and other pathogens before they strike. Ventilation design and monitoring systems show tremendous potential for reducing the spread of airborne diseases like Covid and TB, as well as improving indoor air quality from wildfires, etc.
Loan forgiveness programs are being promoted to keep young, sharp, fresh-out-of-school minds in public health departments, rather than moving to private companies due to the financial strain of having to repay burdensome educational loans. Science should serve the public interest, not enrich the pharmaceutical and other profit driven interests.
Our priorities as a nation are wrong and must be repurposed. Every human being is essential and has value, whether a farm laborer, a homeless person, a bus driver, a laundry worker, a nurse, or a public health worker. The “public” interest should be foremost in public health, whether for unpopular but necessary emergency measures or to promote prevention and community health. In the long run, that is most effective in preventing needless deaths, let alone being most cost effective. In truth we have it within our means to remake the health care system for the common good. Let’s be clear. We don’t want to repair a damaged system. We want to remake it to serve humanity’s needs. That’s a hard-fought lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Related article from Tribuno Del Pueblo: Silencing the Messenger
November/December 2022 vol.32. Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.
