When I worked for the New Jersey Attorney General, I spent one day each year enforcing election laws. This easy assignment entailed waiting in the county courthouse for those turned away from the polls to seek judicial authorization to vote by providing evidence that they met State voting standards.
I, and a small team of colleagues, spent chunks of each election day reading documents from our existing cases while we awaited intermittent five-minute court hearings. We also chatted with election officials—who did not ooze bipartisanism or integrity—and with police assigned to the courthouse.
A chunky cop, around 50, with a graying blonde buzzcut assigned to New Brunswick on one election day told me and the other attorneys that he was about to retire. Seated and smiling, he boasted that he had spent the past three years very actively patrolling and ticketing in that college town. He explained that his pension would be based on his final three years of wages and that, by working abundant overtime during those years, he could boost his income and thereby pad his pension. He said that he targeted college students because students loved to challenge tickets. Cops testify against those whom they ticket. They’re paid, at overtime rates, for their court time, most of which was spent waiting for their cases to be heard. He said that many cops bulked up their pensions by doing what he was doing.
It angered, but didn’t surprise, me that people charged with enforcing the law proudly gamed the system and gleefully harassed others for personal gain.
Al Sharpton infamously said, “Everybody’s got a hustle.” And his personal experiences may support that observation. But he exaggerates. Plenty of people work hard and/or smart for what they bring home.
Public health officials are high-echelon hustlers. Especially at the national and international levels, these self-important bureaucrats receive high salaries, live in places like Switzerland and toney New York and Washington, DC nabes and suburbs, travel business class to meetings across the globe, enroll their kids in private schools, have vacation homes, get lavish pensions and eat at trendy restaurants.
Many people naively admire public health officials. People are easily swayed by labels and appearances. On its face, what seems more noble and sophisticated than safeguarding the health of multitudes? Superficially, who seems to help humanity more than do the World Health Organization (“WHO”), the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”) and the Centers for Disease Control (“CDC”)? Public health operatives are seen as secular Mother Theresas; only better, because they’re smart “scientists” who dress stylishly and lack un-PC religious baggage.
But instead of helping people, the public health apparatus—which encompasses national and international bureaucracies, NGOs, Med/Pharma and private funders—badly hurt billions of people over the past three years. This authoritarian juggernaut overreacted badly by prescribing lockdowns, school closures, social distancing, hand-washing, masking, mass testing and tracing, and “vaccines.”
Interstate and international comparisons show that all these measures failed. Countries that didn’t implement as many measures that restricted or impoverished their people, such as Sweden and Tanzania, had Covid outcomes similar to those that opted for lockdowns and other authoritarian “mitigation.” Similarly, the American states that locked down the hardest typically fared worse, at least according to the thoroughly dubious official case and death figures, than did more lenient states.
Worse, these mitigation measures caused tremendous damage in the US. Lockdowns bored and depressed people, thus facilitating substance abuse, domestic violence and weight gain. Young people lost irreplaceable experiences and social development opportunities. Stealing this time was far more criminal than is stealing wallets.
Lockdowns created even bigger problems abroad, where more people live on the brink of survival. Market closures further reduced access to food and lowered farm, and other, earnings. Given the importance of tourism to the service and retail industries, lockdowns and travel restrictions harmed billions of people in other nations, especially women, and the children they support.
By promoting measures that disrupted supply chains and health care access, those in global public health positions abroad knowingly caused widespread hunger and an immediate and sustained increase in malaria, pneumonia and other acute infectious disease. By restricting access to tuberculosis and HIV care, the death rate of those already infected increased, while also promoting transmission and locking in greater future mortality. These diseases kill at a far younger average age than does Covid.
Since mid-2021, WHO, UNICEF (an agency formerly dedicated to child health) and various NGOs and private partners, such as the Gates Foundation, have continued to push for mass Covid vaccination of 70 percent of low-income country populations. Yet, mass injection can’t significantly advance public health because most African people are under 20 years of age and are therefore, not at Covid risk. Besides, most Africans had broad, effective post-infection immunity by late 2021, and the jabs don’t reduce viral transmission. Buying millions of shots drains financial and human resources from programs addressing bigger, health-influencing problems. Thus, the misguided Covid vaxx crusade has cost, not saved, lives.
In the US and especially abroad, instead of costly “Pandemic” measures, many more lives—especially young lives—would have been saved by improving nutrition and sanitation, and by allowing economies and schools to operate normally. Public health experts should have encouraged—but never mentioned—natural immunity, healthy eating and weight loss, exercise, sunlight exposure and the use of inexpensive supplements and therapeutics. But Med/Pharma obtains sharply higher returns on investment than do food growers, vitamin makers or toilet manufacturers.
