Political Medicine

You don’t have to be an ‘anti-vaxxer’ to question Public Health measures

Brian Peckford, former Premier of Newfoundland

Our public health system knows only one thing: Covid-19. It has crowded out all other concerns. Which shows that public health is always a political matter, never just about ‘the science’ or even medicine. It’s a balance of politics and medicine, and getting it right is a fine art we have never quite mastered.

Right now, public health is badly out of kilter, and not just in Canada. Each country has its own variant of dysfunction. Britain is openly discussing the failings of the National Health Service, one of their holiest of holy cows. They are now willing to admit that the problems are systemic and run deeper than lack of money. We in Canada, with a similar system, have yet to admit that. In Victoria, trying to get a prescription filled or a simple blood test can take a week, at least. There appears to be no cooperation between the public health care system and the privately run labs. I had to walk over my blood test request and deliver it personally because the two outfits weren’t communicating. They were too busy blaming each other. I hear the same stories from my friends, who, unlike me, actually have real live doctors instead of a voice on the phone.

The entire system is fraying and close to collapse due to mismanagement, panic and moral decay. That’s why we need to have an overdue, rational public discussion about Public Health, its role in a democracy, and how to fix its sclerotic failings.

I write from the outside in, that is, whatever is happening in my life prompts a deeper look on my Substack posts, culled from seemingly disconnected, random events. Like lost blood test requests, or watching a Dr Lustig on YouTube or standing in the freezing, muddy grass in front of the BC Legislature on December 9th, with hundreds of people who were there to commemorate the signing of The Nuremberg Code, a relic of the Nazi era and an historical reminder about what the state and doctors can and cannot do to you. The rally was well organized, with several speakers. The crowd was big, diverse, of all ages, incomes and ethnicities. Very Canadian.

The third speaker was the former premier of Newfoundland, Brian Peckford. He was enlightening people about how long it took to get the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms passed into law in 1981, and finally signed by HM Queen Elizabeth II in 1982. It is only the legal protection against government overreach that Canadians have.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms

As one of the provincial Premiers, Peckford was on the committee that debated and argued over it. And at this Vigil, he was visibly upset because both the letter and the spirit of the Charter are getting trampled by all levels of government. I wrote the damn thing, he yelled into the mic, as the crowd roared its approval. The Charter guarantees all Canadians the right of religious choice, free assembly, free speech, and perhaps most importantly, the rights of the person, as laid out in Section 7, with unforeseen consequences: The Charter’s Section 7 guarantee of personal liberty led the Supreme Court to strike down the Criminal Code provision against abortion in 1988. This transformed women’s reproductive rights. (See also Henry Morgentaler.)

It is the enshrined rights of the person that are being violated daily with vaccine mandates and the restrictions on the unvaccinated. As Peckford pointed out, governments are obliged to follow this law, and when they do not, we have the right, and the duty to protest.

Ironically, far from being lawless, this gathering was about reminding our government to obey the Laws of Canada, and that they can’t ignore or trample them. Which is a very Canadian thing to do.

Historically, Canadians have always loved peace, order, and good government, unlike our more rambunctious cousins in the US. And as Peckford said, in order to invoke a State of Emergency, the government has to prove that there is one and to limit it. So far, neither Trudeau nor the BC government has done that. A legal challenge based on the Charter against Premier Horgan, Health Minister Dixon and her holiness, Dr Bonnie Henry, is already underway. The people I stood with on that muddy lawn were there to put the government on notice that we are watching and not waiting. That the endless, deeply damaging uncertainty about vaccine passports, restrictions, haphazardly applied, runs counter to our legally enshrined freedoms. The crowd was still swelling as I left around 4pm.

https://www.lawnow.org/the-use-of-the-peace-order-and-good-government-clause-in-canadas-constitution/

We may have the law on our side, but that’s only half the equation. The other half is about public awareness and propaganda by so called ‘stakeholders’ who want to make a buck. Better yet, a billion bucks. This is where Dr Lustig comes in.

Dr Robert H Lustig, MD, MSL, Emeritus Professor, Division of endocrinology, Department of Pediatrics Institute for health Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco, comes from the world of public health policy, where he has become a leading voice in the fight against obesity, diabetes, and metabolic disease as they relate to the consumption of sugar, in particular. What makes him different is that he is as interested in the political aspects of public health as the strictly medical ones. And it is in this contested field of political medicine that the two men meet. For both of them, a moral compass and a strong legal framework are the underpinnings of good policy. Alas, we find that all too often, in public health commercial interests trump the greater good. We should not forget or discard these historical lessons.

One of the most egregious examples is how the obesity epidemic ballooned and become enormous due to a corrupted public health policy. The corruption and deliberate misdirection came from the powerful, well-funded, and sophisticated sugar lobby in the US, which managed to outfox public health officials with an award winning (!) public relations campaign that convinced everyone that sugar was a good thing, and that we should simply have more of it. They managed to stall and stymie all efforts to inform people of the dangers of drinking pop. This should be an easy thing to teach the public, but it never happened. The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, tried to curb pop consumption by limiting the size of servings. OMG. Bloomberg ran into a sophisticated and successful campaign funded by the pop industry that convinced everyone the Mayor was a communist dictator. So, to this day, people are drinking gallon size pop and getting ever fatter and unhealthy in NY. All in the name of profit, of course. As Dr Lustig shows, the sweet success of the sugar lobby lasted for over half a century and is largely responsible for the current explosion of diabetic numbers and a public health crisis that is ongoing though nobody is paying much attention. Public Health is hyper focused on Covid and blind to every other need.

Meanwhile, average citizens are just trying to get through the pandemic without losing their minds, so drinking alcohol, gulping down pop and scarping junk food is on the increase. The majority of the population reports that they have gained weight. And no wonder. They’re not getting any help or guidance. Nobody is talking about the rising incidence of obesity in children since the pandemic began. Instead, we are normalizing the vaccination of our obese children, even toddlers—with unknown, long-term consequences for growing bodies and developing immune systems. What kind of society uses its children to protect the adults? Whose commercial interests are at work here? We won’t find out for sure for at least a decade if the past is any indication. But we should be asking these questions of our political leaders as well as the public health officials. And not let go until real answers are forthcoming.

One might also reasonably ask why our public health officials fail to release daily stats on the diabetic numbers and deaths, as they do with Covid. After all, diabetic cases are rising because of inactivity, stress and bad diet. We never hear about the things one might do to prevent getting diabetic in the first place. Nor do we hear much about the missed cancer diagnosis, the cancelled cancer treatments, or indeed the previously much ballyhooed opioid epidemic. According to Harper’s Index, 2020 was the number one year for opioid overdoses. Apparently, none of those crises and the people who suffer them matter anymore.

The question in public health is always about finding the right balance for the allocation of scarce resources. Right now, we are failing badly, and people are suffering dire health consequences. It’s time to right the public healthcare ship before further Covid waves swamp and sink it completely.