Thread by @YouAreLobbyLud

1/ The great success of the 20th century was the driving down of rates of infectious disease, with the global elimination of many. Why do so many supposed public "health" doctors now want to allow COVID to flourish? They should change their title to public "illness" doctors.

2/ I mean, did we say "let's live alongside TB"? No, we didn't, and the rates were in massive decline long before effective treatment arrived in the late 40s. Why? NPIs.
This whole situation is incomprehensible to me. It's like a death wish. It's deliberate self-harm.

3/ It's like the whole message of public health, the whole idea of it, is being tossed away. Apart from Koch Brothers money, what really drives the Great Barrington Declaration? Why is the notion of universal health so repellent to the far right?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bar…

4/ Is it really, as many have told me, that the COVID pandemic represents a challenge to neoliberalist notions of "small government", because it demonstrates that crises of this magnitude require government intervention, WHICH IS ACTUALLY VERY EFFECTIVE?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolibera…

5/ I fear that may be correct, in which case we are all being held hostage, with literal guns to our heads, so that the obscenely rich can become even richer by exploiting a totally deregulated market environment.

6/ And if that is the case, a conclusion which seems increasingly inescapable, then this rehearsal, this "war game" for dealing with the even greater existential crisis we face, the climate crisis, is giving us some important information. But can we act on it?