It is a baseless claim that public health is systematically ignored in favor of pushing the pandemic’s reproduction number down. Do we really expect public health officers to be untrained, stupid, and dismissed? Is that what we really are seeing? Do we really think that public officials are ignorant of the metabolic and social implications of having to drive stakes into society?
It is a fact that in functioning states, public health decisions are taken within an ethical framework of how to do least harm and preserve the most freedom, considering resource availability and longer-term effects of public health decisions, including the interacting feedback loops of the economy and public health.
While overreliance on small metrics is clearly bad, this style of off-hand ignorance of public service is not what we need.