HEALTH CAREANALYSIS Lessons From COVID-19: How Governments Abuse Public Health Crises to Gain and Maintain Power

 Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist who directs the Bioethics and American Democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, chose to speak out against the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, That decision cost him his job at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine.

The biomedical security state is the public health infrastructure that we saw rolled out during COVID

• The first time we've had a major outbreak like this in a population where we had the technological ability to monitor the movements and the location and all kinds of other data and information about each individual in the population through smartphone technology
• It's also been an occasion for the accumulation of power, mostly by the executive branch of government

Deployment of technologies of mass surveillance to monitor and nudge and control behavior at a very micro level

• Increasingly militarized public health apparatus
• Digital technologies of surveillance and control
• Police powers of the state used to enforce public health directives passed non-legislatively on an emergency basis
• The biomedical security state is a threat to liberal democracies
• COVID was just the beginning, we need to recognize that COVID, in a sense, was only the beginning and look forward to the future

The pretext of public health and safety has proven to be a good fulcrum, a good lever to get people to do things that otherwise they would be very reluctant to do

• It's also been an occasion for the accumulation of power, mostly by the executive branch of government
• The president gains 128 additional extra constitutional powers during a declared state of emergency
• Biden announced coming into the midterms that the pandemic was over, which was true, it's been over for quite some time
• How you can predict three or four months in advance that an emergency will be over at that point is an interesting epistemological question

This is precisely why I think we're seeing these efforts, like the one that you just mentioned, to declare other issues, whether it's abortion or climate change, a public health crisis.

• During the lockdowns of 2020, 1,200 public health academics and bureaucrats wrote a letter declaring that protests against racism were OK, even though everyone else was supposed to be staying at home
• Racism apparently trumped COVID-19, which was then required by the COVID pandemic

The Nuremberg Code

• Informed consent is the doctrine of informed consent that in order to intervene on an individual medically, or enroll an individual in a medical experiment, you can only do so with the individual's full knowledge of what they're agreeing to and uncoerced consent
• Every adult of sound mind has the right to decide what medical interventions they will accept or will decline after being given adequate information about the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives to that treatment
• This is central doctrine of 20th-century medical ethics

Historical Analogies

• The Nazis never overturned or did away with the Weimar Republic's constitution. They just bracketed it.

Be very, very careful about the use of emergency powers and the framing of all kinds of social and political and moral issues as public health issues

• During these kinds of crises that we need to adhere more firmly to our constitutional principles of free speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association and a free press that's not subjected to government censorship

Other Doctors Raising Concerns

• Dr. Kheriaty's decision to speak out against the vaccine mandate at the University of California ultimately cost him his job.
• There have been a number of doctors who have raised concerns about the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines deployed during the pandemic
• Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist in Great Britain, is calling for a halt to the mass vaccination program with these vaccines out of concerns for the cardiac harms which he believes are more common than our public health agencies have admitted

The Great Barrington Declaration

• Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor, and Martin Kulldorff, a Brownstone Institute fellow, are among the private plaintiffs challenging the government censorship regime in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit
• “We've seen a fair amount of critique of these policies. Unfortunately, we now know that many voices were suppressed or silenced”

There have been some critics of the sociopolitical elements of what we’ve seen during the pandemic.

• Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher from Italy, has written a lot about the issue of the state of emergency, state of exception
• Others have written about the economic forces that were at work during the Pandemic nudging us toward policies that were economically advantageous for Big Tech and other global elites, but harmful to the working class and the middle class

Dr. Kheriaty: That understanding is so critical if we have hope of change and course-correcting.

• Allen: I know that you wrote the book not just to share a lot of bad news, but as a signal to Americans and to society as a whole to say, "Hey, we need to be aware of what's really happening here."
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/02/06/lessons-from-covid-19-how-governments-abuse-public-health-crises-to-gain-and-maintain-power/