There are two Orwellianisms that can justify virtually anything in our society: National Security and Public Health.
National Security is the foreign policy version. It’s ISIS and WMDs and why we must arm Ukraine without end. It’s why we can’t know sensitive information about how our government spends (and apparently is unable to account for) trillions of dollars, much of which is off the books and beyond scrutiny. It’s why Edward Snowden lives in exile and Julian Assange is in prison. It is the umbrella under which George Bush and Dick Cheney could spend $6 trillion, kill a million Iraqis, find no weapons of mass destruction and yet avoid accountability entirely. “It’s a matter of national security!”
Public Health is the domestic policy arm. It’s why we had “14 days to flatten the curve” that morphed into an emergency declaration that was not rescinded until more than three years later. It’s why we had lockdowns, mandatory masks and experimental mRNA injections. It’s why you needed to show your papers to enter a restaurant. It’s why the government transferred tens of billions in taxpayer money to Pfizer. If you ask why basic civil liberties were violated without your consent or input, the answer was “It’s a matter of public health!”
Virtually any encroachment on your rights, any expense can be justified by “National Security” or “Public Health.”
The pharmaceutical conglomerates are to public health as the arms manufacturers are to national security — massive for-profit operations fronting as our protectors from disease and foreign adversaries, respectively.
Does anyone not on the payroll really believe we are more safe from destabilizing the Middle East or Central America or waging proxy war with Russia? Is our military industrial complex truly concerned with protecting our borders from plausible foreign invasion, or is it instead creating new enemies by the millions while administering to its own geopolitical aims and enriching its stakeholders?
Is our medical industrial complex substantially different? The cholesterol-heart hypothesis has been destroyed, and yet every doctor tests for cholesterol, and statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) remain among the most prescribed. The mRNA shot has killed thousands worldwide (this is not in dispute, even by the countries that mandated it!) in order to protect people against one particular kind of cold with an IFR of .15 percent (much lower among healthy people.)
Hospitals unnecessarily killed people by the thousands with ventilators during the height of the panic, and failed to treat bacterial pneumonia with antibiotics, something that was routine during prior flu seasons (apparently viruses weaken the immune system, and it’s the ensuing bacterial infection that’s responsible for much of the mortality.) Hell, the third leading cause of death in America is medical error, and these are only the errors to which they admit!
Does anyone wonder why the childhood vaccination schedule is up to 60 shots? Do you think the same medical system that brought you “if you get vaccinated, you won’t get covid,” has sufficient understanding of the complex system known as human immunity to intervene so aggressively in its development. Is it possible the epidemics of chronic disease, autoimmunity and, yes autism, are related to this heavy-handed (and highly profitable) meddling?
Now this is not to argue nation-states don’t need national defense or citizens within them don’t need medicine. There are such things as foreign invasions, and people really do get sick and need to be treated by competent professionals honoring their professional oaths. But these functions are now almost completely captured, and so long as that’s the case, the military industrial complex is, on balance, putting us at greater risk of attack, while the medical industrial one is making us sicker. And both are doing so while enriching themselves beyond belief and bankrupting both the state and the ordinary person.