US PRESS CORPS ONLINE: Global Health and the Art of Really Big Lies

Really big lies are so divorced from reality that listeners will assume their own perception of reality is flawed

Lesser lies are perceived as sufficiently close to known reality to be provably wrong
Inventing truth can be more effective than bending it
Integrity is a poor career choice, whilst good team players support false narratives

COVID-19 opened the way for a much sought-after pandemic future
The pandemic response provided a template not only for vastly-increased corporate income but for job certainty and expansion of opportunity for the army of mostly-Western bureaucrats and health professionals filling the offices, meeting rooms and business-class seats of its implementing organizations

The pandemic appears to be a poor disease choice to facilitate a societal reset
Death is heavily concentrated in old age, over 75 years in Western countries
COVID vaccines have been unhelpful as high vaccination rates failed to noticeably impact transmission
Average hospital admissions during the pandemic declined

Largely by playing on fear, divorcing data from context, and disseminating false information widely and incessantly, a whole new belief system has been constructed in public health to replace the evidence-based orthodoxy of former years
Reality has been replaced with dogma so divorced from any basis in fact that it is easier to go with the propaganda than deal with the dissonance that would otherwise result
For healthcare workers to keep this consistent line, it has been necessary to introduce an array of new dogmas equally divorced from reality and contradictory to what they were taught, and their organizations proclaimed, prior to the 2020 WHO pandemic guidelines
Disease burden should be measured in raw mortality, and not include metrics such as life-years lost
Medium and long-term harms due to poverty and reduced healthcare access should not be considered when assessing the value of an intervention
A modeled effect on the target pathogen is the only relevant metric
It is appropriate to misinform the public on age-related risk and relative disease burden and better to instill fear in order to achieve compliance with public-health directives
Growth of viral transmission in a community follows an exponential curve, rather than a steady deceleration (e.g. Gompertz curve) as the proportion of recovered (immune) people accumulate
Banning students from school for a year protects the elderly, while not locking in generational poverty

Standing on 2019 principles and practice, refuting the above falsehoods, has been sufficient for health practitioners to be denigrated and forced out of employment in many Western countries
Whilst growing their industry's finances, public health professionals are degrading themselves and betraying society
The way out of this is simply to refuse to lie, or to cover for the lies of others

The teller of very big lies from my former workplace was only respected by those who also lied, and those who remained fooled

Thursday, November 3, 2022