You can't delete public health and expect unchanged levels of care individually. Health at the individual level very much depends on public health policies.
Don't believe me? Have fun watching your newborn die from whooping cough!
Don't believe me? Have fun watching your newborn die from whooping cough!
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.
Regarding vaccines, I chose the whooping cough example on purpose. This vaccine is only 60% efficient. The risk of newborns being killed or gravely ill would be highly increased if used only at the individual level, including for a particular person choosing to vaccinate.
Your view of risks and benefits involved is very much skewed by your overconfidence in individual medicine. It is widely known that poulation-level interventions aka public health are the most effective (e.g. the Cuban system).
Covid response made it clear that this directive went out the window. Practitioners in the medical industry may whole-heartedly believe and follow this goal, but public health is now much too political for it.
Plenty of examples in the US. To name a few: Faucci's masking debacle
New York City's handling of elderly patients during the peak of their outbreak
approval of vaccines under the age of 5 after a study with only 30 participants
Biden's holiday speech from the Oval Office attacking anyone who didn't get vaccinated
Initial vaccine trials data bastardized by public health officials, claiming vaccines stop the spread when that was never tested.
The list goes on, but public health has been made a political game driven by few who they know what's best and are willing to saw what they think will get compliance rather than sharing what is and isn't known and doing no harm by fostering another core principle of informed consent.
How do you know? Because you were told by the same system that claimed Comirnaty was 95% effective?
For those of us who generalize from public health in the COVID years to public health in general, why is that generalization wrong, in your view?
It's been known for decades, and knowing that is part of my job. I'm in Europe, where this vaccine is part of the basic plan for all children.
> For those of us who generalize from public health in the COVID years to public health in general, why is that generalization wrong, in your view?
Most public health interventions do not make money for corporations or in fact, for anybody. They mostly spare taxpayer money by increasing efficiency across the healthcare system. COVID is a very particular case where a new technology became our best guess, and made money for powerful people. So COVID can't be generalized to other interventions at all.
Mmm yeah not surprised, was already thinking your posts sounded just like the sort of things public health people say. But that didn't answer the question. How do you know?
"Most public health interventions do not make money [ - ] so COVID can't be generalized to other interventions at all"
That's a non-sequitur. Nobody mentioned money or corporations in this thread. You're answering an imaginary objection instead of the one we're actually raising, which says a lot. My prior that public health [-adjacent] people are all so left wing that they don't even realize how ideologically biased they are just got incremented again.
The problem here is not corporations or money or some people getting rich. The observation we are generalizing beyond COVID is that people who work in public health seem to lie a lot. Specifically, they lie any time they think a lie will make people act in ways that please them, and what pleases them is anything where everyone is forced to act in exactly the same way all at the same time.
By "public health" we mean here government officials, academics, researchers and the people who speak for them. Hey we don't trust Pfizer either but if it weren't for the public health sector forcing us to buy and consume their products, we could just ignore them, or make case-by-case decisions, so the root problem is not them.
I'm not that left wing and most docs are not lefties at all. Honestly, I don't think the academic/medical arm of public health has a political agenda. We just don't care who is in charge, but it's frustrating to see people working against their best interest when you're spending 70+ hours a week attempting to improve a catastrophic situation. Regarding the lying, I fear you're attributing to malice what is in fact just ignorance. Academics were asked for recommendations, sent back their best guess about a very uncertain situation, and got backlash about everything they guessed wrong. I have to say that the american way of extremely polarized political opinions spreading to everything feels really alien to me.
I notice you never answered how you know the 60% figure is accurate, given others haven't been.
"I don't think the academic/medical arm of public health has a political agenda."
You're surrounded by it so you can't see it, but to the rest of us it's obvious and extreme. In the UK one prominent epidemiologist turned out to be dating someone in Extinction Rebellion and another is a member of the Communist Party. Both were advising the government, nobody within public health thought there was anything strange about that, let alone a problem. The WHO blindly trusted everything from China, and when the BLM protests/riots happened where was the uproar from public health? Nowhere - lockdowns had been essential but suddenly protests mattered more, unless you were protesting against public health policies in which case, those protests were somehow still too dangerous to allow.
Public health is nothing but politics and ideology. We all got taught that in the harshest way possible.
"got backlash about everything they guessed wrong"
They got backlash for lying, like having no clue what they were doing yet claiming their understanding was perfect and their predictions were guaranteed to happen, even that millions would die if their instructions weren't followed exactly. If they had admitted up front they didn't know how to predict epidemics and then shut up, they'd face far less hostility today. If they'd done these things in the private sector they'd be in prison. Just look at Elizabeth Holmes to see.