The Trojan Horse of “Public Health”
Thomas DiLorenzo

At the recent Mises Institute Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina Tom Woods made some flattering comments about Yours Truly regarding my 2000 book coauthored with James T. Bennett entitled
From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (Transaction Publishers).  That’s the year 2000, not 2020.  Tom’s comment was the result of his discovery that my coauthor and I had smoked out the dishonesty and left-wing political gimmickry of the “public health establishment” nearly a quarter of a century ago.

The “public health” movement was created shortly after the Civil War with the creation of state and local government “health departments” that concentrated on sanitation issues, disease research, enforcing quarantines, inoculations, controlling mosquitoes, waste disposal, swamp drainage, immunizations, and attempting to control communicable diseases in general.  The American Public Health Association (APHA) was founded in 1872 as a trade association for public health professionals.  It is almost shocking today to read about how post Civil War cities in America were full of such things as pig pens, cesspools, privy vaults, and manure piles!

For the first several decades of its existence the presidents of the APHA were all people with scientific training – surgeons, medical statisticians, chemists, sanitarians, experts in bacteriology, hygiene, anatomy, and even botany.  Great progress was made in controlling diseases and eradicating some of them, like Yellow Fever, and improving mortality rates.  Economic growth surely played an important role as well, enabling Americans to attain better nutrition and living standards in general.

By the 1950s the dire problems that existed in the post-war years had pretty much disappeared, confronting the public health establishment with a major dilemma: With its mission essentially accomplished, how would it continue to justify its existence and its tax-funded support?

Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” explosion of welfare state spending during the 1960s provided the answer.  The federal government’s “Kerner Report” of 1968 on the “root causes” of poverty was fully embraced by the APHA.  In doing so the public health establishment changed its focus entirely from controlling disease to creating a healthy society through welfare statism.  The goal was no longer enhancing individual health but “curing” society’s ills.  That’s where the big tax money was.  Fewer and fewer medical and health professionals were among “public health” professionals, with more and more lobbyists, political activists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists.  The public health establishment began crusading for increased welfare payments, a guaranteed annual income “for all Americans,” government housing subsidies, racial hiring quotas, and school busing.

Keynote speakers at APHA conventions were no longer likely to be medical and health professionals but such figures as former AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.  The annual conference began to have themes like “Social Justice in Public Health.”  The conferences began calling for a “radical redistribution of wealth,” and declaring that illness is supposedly caused by a “power imbalance” that is “inherent in a capitalist society.”  Just like that, the public health establishment was captured by radical socialist political activists.

The notion that individuals are responsible for their own health was abandoned and the APHA declared that “Government holds ultimate accountability for the nation’s health.”  The implication of this is that you do not own your own body and are therefore not responsible for your own health.  You are now owned by government and government, not you, is the responsible party.

“Social programs” were now what was supposedly needed to cure “society.”  Every left-wing political fad and platitude imaginable became part of the public health mantra during the 1960s and ‘70s.  The APHA endorsed nationalized medical care, the pursuit of zero population growth through sterilization of men and women, government central planning of the energy industries, a condemnation of the automobile as “an immediate health and safety hazard,” more government make-work “jobs” programs, general praise for the communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and especially communist Cuba, a super minimum wage law, subsidized abortions, nationalized child care, and the notion that gun ownership is a disease.  “Guns are a disease that must be eradicated,” announced one Dr. Katherine Christoffel of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

No longer did the public health establishment maintain that health comes from individual choices regarding lifestyle, diet, exercise, etc. but from “participation in the political process” as two card-carrying members of “the new public health” establishment wrote in a 1996 article in Health Education Quarterly.

More and more medical school graduates chose the Anthony Fauci career path. Instead of practicing medicine they used their medical degrees to land jobs in the federal bureaucracy.  Fauci himself was never a practicing physician but an NIH bureaucrat straight out of medical school who, for many years, directed billions of dollars of government-funded research, so much of which, we now know, was useless or ridiculous and did nothing to improve public health.  In fact, it created great harm.  As the most successful of all such public health bureaucrats, he engineered fake health scam after fake health scam all throughout his government career ( Ebola! Swine Flu! Hong Kong Swine Flu! Bird Flu!  Zika Virus! Monkeypox!!) as a means of boosting his agency’s budget year after year after year.  In his book The Real Anthony Fauci Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. showed that every one of these was a scam and a fraud.  They were used as excuses to rush to market “vaccines” that proved to be useless or harmful, but made billions for Big Pharma, which is joined at the hip with the National Institutes of Health bureaucrats who profit handsomely themselves by owning patents on some of these dangerous drugs.  Sound familiar?

Governmental powers and tax revenues always balloon whenever there is a crisis or the perception of a crisis.  This is the business the public health bureaucracies are now in.  They are a permanent Halloween show, constantly coming up with one “health scare” after another, forever crying wolf to dupe American taxpayers into acquiescing in an exponential increase in their budgets and perks.  They are the political whores of the pharmaceutical corporations in a system that can only be described as fascism.  And of course it was Anthony Fauci who orchestrated the Sovietization of American society in 2020/2021 with his Hitlerian declarations that HE was science.  Science is not science, he said; HE was science.

All the powers of the central government were used to censor criticism of the covid “vaccine” scam; to prohibit life-saving medicines like ivermectin; and to destroy the careers and lives of medical professionals who dared to speak up.  All so that Big Pharma could continue to rake in billions while throwing a few crumbs to pathetic political whores like Anthony Fauci and his public health fiefdom.

In just a few years since the covid debacle the public health establishment has thankfully become widely acknowledged as an enemy of the public, a generator of fake health emergencies that only serve to give it even more totalitarian powers and to extract more tax dollars from the public.  It continues to call for more covid shots, but only 4 percent of Americans are reportedly complying.  The rest are giving the public health bureaucrats a big middle finger.

All of this is nothing new: It began in the 1960s when that establishment decided that the Big Money was in pretending to be able to “cure society’s ills” rather than improving individual human health.

 

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and president of the Mises Institute. He is a former professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a longtime member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and he has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, George Mason University, and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Professor DiLorenzo is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe; How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country from the Pilgrims to the Present; The Real Lincoln: A New Look a Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War; From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (with James T. Bennett); The Food and Drink Police: America's Nannies, Busybodies, and Petty Tyrants (with James T. Bennett); Underground Government: The Off-budget Public Sector (with James T. Bennett); Unfair Competition: The Profits of Nonprofits(with James T. Bennett); and CancerScam: The Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds for Politics(with James T. Bennett).

His articles have appeared in such scholarly journals as Public Finance Quarterly, The Independent Review, Review of Austrian Economics, and Public Choice.

 

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