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Our Public Health Bureaucracy Is Lost – HotAir

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May 2, 2024
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Our Public Health Bureaucracy Is Lost – HotAir

Radical ideology, and in particular Critical Race Theory, has captured our public health system. 

That is not an overstatement; it is simply a fact, and you better get used to it. It has become not just useless, but dangerous to your health and our country. 

We shouldn’t be surprised, and most of you aren’t. It has been getting more obvious every day, but given how radical the change has been and how sweeping the scope of that change, it’s useful to provide an overview. 

That is what Twitter user and writer Michael Young has done, through his account Wokal Distance. He has done an important public service–one unfortunately too few people will see in entirety. 

I have written many times about the effects of “woke” ideology in our medical schools, with a couple recent articles about UCLA Medical School in the past few weeks. But I haven’t done a deeper dive into the effects that woke ideology has had out in the wild, and it is large and dangerous to our health. 

Over the past few years we all saw how unhinged public health officials became, but pandemic-era policies aren’t the half of it. Radical ideology pervades every aspect of our public health policies, taking the focus off of health and putting it on radical social change. 

Marxism, not healthcare or prevention, is the guidestar of the current bureaucracies. 

It’s not just the shift in focus to issues like “climate change” and social reform that should bother you, but also the way in which the particular policies intended to address these issues are framed. 

For instance, climate change policies need to focus not just on reducing greenhouse gases (thanks CDC for wasting time on this!) but on “climate equity,” whatever that is. The CDC even has an acronym for the principles they use: JEDI, as in Jedi mind trick I suppose. 

Justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) principles are crucial to climate change adaptation planning.

People throughout the United States face climate change-related health risks, but some of us will feel the effects earlier and more severely. This is because of differences in our exposures to climate hazards, our sensitivity to these hazards, and our ability to adapt. (1)

Groups at increased risk include those with low income, some communities of color, immigrant groups (including those with limited English proficiency), Indigenous peoples, children and pregnant women, older adults, vulnerable occupational groups, persons with disabilities, and persons with preexisting or chronic medical conditions. Characterizations of vulnerability should consider how populations of concern experience disproportionate, multiple, and complex risks to their health and well-being in response to climate change.

Mind you, this is the CDC. The Centers for Disease Control is working on this. 

And Disease X. Don’t forget the next election-year pandemic. Riot season is here, so a pandemic must be in the works, right?

Similarly, the American Public Health Association has a major focus on Equity, which runs parallel to the idea being pushed (and has been implemented in many places) that racism is a public health emergency. 

Racism and other forms of structured inequity sap our potential to become the healthiest nation. Racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value to individuals and communities based on race that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and unfairly advantages others. Racism and other “isms” are forces that determine the distribution of the social determinants of health…

These are the people who threw tens of millions of minorities out of work during the pandemic while the laptop class got wealthier. You can’t make this up. 

The CDC’s version is similar:

Launched in 2021, CORE is CDC’s first agency-wide health equity strategy and CDC’s umbrella framework to transform its work by engaging and challenging every part of the agency to incorporate health equity and diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging (DEIAB) as a foundational element across all of its work – from science and research to programs and from partnerships to workforce. CDC strives to move beyond naming differences through “markers,” such as race, to identifying and addressing changeable “drivers,” such as housing, neighborhood conditions. and access to health care. CDC’s 18 Centers/Institute/Offices (ClOs) developed a health equity action plan, which has been integrated into a comprehensive and unified agency-wide strategy. CDC’S CORE Commitment to Health Equity stands on four key pillars: cultivating comprehensive health equity science; optimizing interventions; reinforcing and expanding robust partnerships; and enhancing capacity and workplace diversity, inclusion, and engagement. CDC’s health equity strategy builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to advancing equity, combating discrimination, and supporting communities who are underserved

As a practical matter the DEIAB has had many impacts, ranging from distributing vaccines based on race to changing the way that organ transplantations work. And, as you can see, the CDC is now getting involved in housing policies and “neighborhood conditions,” whatever that means. And, of course, the CDC is now committed to race-based hiring, apparently, although that policy is probably not new. 

Things get really interesting when you start digging deeper into the policy areas that the CDC and public health agencies are getting involved in. 

If you think that the Centers for Disease Control would focus on controlling diseases, you are quite wrong. That is such a boring mission when you can use your power to reshape society. 

Internet access, for instance, is also a public health issue apparently. Free bikes and preventing evictions are too. Childcare is now a CDC priority, as is transportation infrastructure. 

We can Faucize the world!

If you can’t read that, here it is:

State, tribal, local, and territorial governments can:

  • Explore options to provide free or low-cost broadband Internet access  so people can use telehealth and get information on health care and social services.
  • Reassess policies that create barriers for healthcare providers to collect and report data on race and ethnicity and social determinants of health.
  • Partner with public health agencies to evaluate current and proposed policies in transportation, housing, community development, and more for their impacts on health, using a Health in All Policies framework. Prioritize health for communities experiencing health disparities in all policy change.
  • Explore options to protect renters from evictions.
  • Work to expand childcare service options.
  • Increase public transportation services (e.g., free access to city bike programs).

The corruption of our public health infrastructure is complete. What we are seeing at the CDC and the APHA didn’t spring out of nothing, but is the natural result of a system in which the academic institutions that educate our public health officials inculcate a certain set of values and norms into their education, the media amplify those messages, and then the bureaucracy institutionalizes and operationalizes what has been taught. 

And it’s not just words and nostrums. The science itself is corrupted. We saw that again during the pandemic when narratives were enforced, actual science was distorted (masks, vaccines) or even faked (Proximal Origins paper anyone?), and the methods used to evaluate data were skewed to get results that fit within the ideological framework. 

All of this would likely have happened even if Biden had not been elected because public health is one of those government functions that seems to be in the background. We expect it to be science-based and just work, and nobody pays much attention until something draws our attention. 

All those graduates from public health schools move into the bureaucracies, and before you know it the agencies have been hollowed out and restructured. 

Suddenly internet access and free bikes are the way to deal with viruses. 

Oh, and riots. Don’t forget that the riots in 2020 were good for public health. And censorship. Don’t forget the censorship infrastructure that was vastly expanded with the excuse of “public health.”

The corruption runs deep, and I am not sure how we root it out. Certainly it will require firing a large swath of these bureaucrats, and the political implications of doing that are daunting. 

We need a CDC that works. We need a public health infrastructure that works. 

But over the past decade that CDC that worked has been replaced by one that is suffused with Marxist ideology, a thirst for unlimited power, and a dangerous desire to completely restructure our society. 

All while funding gain-of-function research and mandating questionable medical “treatments.” 



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Copyright © 2024 nationalconservativemovement - .