Whooping cough is a funny example, since most adults are in fact not vaccinated for it -- in the US anyway, the vaccination rate for pertussis is under 30%. The reason newborns aren't dying from whooping cough is not that we vaccinate everyone. Instead, we make the vaccine widely available for people who want it (I got my booster at one of my wife's ultrasounds), and we tell parents not to expose their newborns to anyone who isn't vaccinated, until the baby can get their own. So for whooping cough specifically, it really is up to the parents, and I would say more of an individual responsibility thing.

Yes, it would have effects on people's health but those effects would be both positive and negative. They'd both have to be summed together, but even then, health isn't everything. A healthy society run by totalitarians is still a deeply unpleasant society to live in.

Whooping cough vaccines and vaccines in general would still exist without public health. The difference is that it would be an individual decision to buy them, based on whether they believe it helps themselves and others, or not. It wouldn't be a government decision.

>gov has the responsibility to take care of all people.

This is where the fundamental disagreement lies. Many people including myself do not agree with this statement and view that statement itself as totalitarian

It IS NOT the government role to take care of me. I do NOT need or want the government to provide that service

In a free society the government is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties;

Anything beyond that "night watchmen" framework and you go beyond free society into authoritarian and totalitarian governance

Risk sharing is best done through insurance. The government has no need to be involved in healthcare, beyond subsidizing premiums to some extent for those who are too poor to pay the full cost.

There is nothing more anti-social or anti-human than public health. Look at what they did to us. They stopped people visiting their dying parents in hospitals in a failed attempt to stop the spread of an airborne virus. They told people not to get close to each other, they shut down as much of the economy as they could. They forced us all behind screens, to rely for everything on enormous tech firms that automate every interaction. Absolutely every single action they took was calculated to maximally destroy the humanity of society because they believed, wrongly, that each naturally human act they destroyed was increasing transmission by some trivial percent. And then when Sweden ended up with some of the best results in Europe they ignored it and pretended it didn't exist.

"The only reason you can use the internet is a stable functioning society."

The internet was created by the least totalitarian society on Earth due to fear of attack by the USSR, a maximally totalitarian society that never developed an equivalent to TCP/IP, never even successfully developed a software industry. And today one of the countries that restricts the internet the most, is the country that was welding people into their apartments long after the rest of the world got over COVID and moved on. We can use the internet today because luckily, some people recognized the dangers of totalitarian collectivism and resisted it. Now we must do the same for public health, otherwise next time it's gonna be us behind the welded doors.

> This is such a frustrating comment to read. There is plenty of debate in public health about what is and isn’t appropriate.

Ordinarily. My dad and most of his friends are in the field, and they’re all smart, thoughtful people who tackle incredibly complex things like how to get third world villagers to use maternal health services when all they’ve ever known is midwives with no formal medical training. But they all somehow turned their brains off when COVID happened and started acting like parrots. And now they’re paying the price for that in terms of public trust.

The public trust of lay people in experts of all stripes rests on following established processes and norms. When experts deviate from those, such as by concededly lying to the public about mask effectiveness, public trust evaporates. There is never any excuse that justifies that. When judges and prosecutors and police cut corners on process “because lives are at stake” large swaths of the public rightfully come to distrust the system. The same is true for public health or any other field.

There are still restrictions. I named a big one in the comment already. Biden admin just extended the ban on foreign arrivals based on vaccine status for more months so gotta assume the ban will last until the Dems next lose the White House. That's a ban on a big fraction of the population of most countries. Other countries don't do that because it's pointless but still have some restrictions like mandatory masks in some contexts in Germany.

During COVID I compared claims made by public health officials to the actual data their own agencies were publishing and so often they didn't match. Not just my perception. I have a friend, at the start of it all we often argued because I had already realized public health was corrupt, but he hadn't. I dropped the topic rather than try to convince him. Some months later we were drinking and he told me his views had changed, was now hard-core skeptical about it all. Changed because he did the same as me, watched a press conference by the government, got curious about something, went to the websites with that data and downloaded it. Found they didn't line up, that the government scientists and health minister were lying about what the numbers said. Then he admitted he'd been wrong to argue with me about it.

Lots of people had experiences like that. Public health communication trying to make us "willing to take actions that will help ourselves" was always whatever would sound convincing in the moment, not what was true. So it's all worthless.