Public Health is Public

North Western Fever and Smallpox Hopsital, Hampstead, 1871, via UK National Archives. 

 Piece at The Atlantic by the extraordinary Ed Yong putting the concept of "public health" in its US historical context in the Progressive era, with the realization that poverty, inequity, and exploitation were literally making people sick:

A mixed group of physicians, scientists, industrialists, and social activists all saw themselves “as part of this giant social-reform effort that was going to transform the health of the nation,” David Rosner, a public-health historian at Columbia University, told me. They were united by a simple yet radical notion: that some people were more susceptible to disease because of social problems. And they worked to address those foundational ills—dilapidated neighborhoods, crowded housing, unsafe working conditions, poor sanitation—with a “moral certainty regarding the need to act,” Rosner and his colleagues wrote in a 2010 paper.

Providing the slumdwellers with fresh air, clean water, and light protects everybody from tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid, even us upstanding citizens on the right side of the railroad tracks. 

This is such a nice communitarian picture, of something that really existed in our country at one time, through it existed, of course, at the same time as the rapacity and cruelty of the Gilded Age, and the real power was generally wielded by the robber barons who were responsible for the poverty and inequity and exploitation—government being largely their obedient servant, the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" as Marx called it. 

I don't have to!

 

Image by Chloe Cushman, The New York Times.

In a sense, she’s correct, though her words are poorly chosen. There are, I’m sure, dozens, hundreds of democrats who can explain why asylum for undocumented aliens is entirely legal and appropriate.

— Steve (@BroomallSteve) July 5, 2021

I would be shocked if she did. She shows no kind of curiosity. I don't think she's smart enough to realize that she's not very smart.

As Vonnegut wrote, “The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”

— Steve (@BroomallSteve) July 6, 2021

Right Behind You. II

Viceroy (left) vs. monarch, a famous case of adaptive evolution; the monarch, with its diet of milkweed, tastes horrible to birds; the viceroy has evolved to mimic the monarch look so the birds assume, wrongly, that it tastes bad too. In much the same way as David Brooks has learned to mimic the style of socially conscious, compassionate humanism, so that inattentive liberals will swallow his Tory authoritarianism, which they'd spit out if it was coming from Russell Kirk. Photos via Treehugger. 

(continuing from yesterday)

Indeed, the pandemic didn't even come from China, really, as New Yorkers ought to know:

What few people realize is that, yes, the virus originated in China, but the true focus of the epidemic that spread to the world was actually in northern Italy,” says [epidemiologist François] Balloux, who has observed the pandemic from London. “We think it happened in Asia first. But the countries that were seeded most massively, the countries that were hardest hit, were not the countries that had the most contact with China. Many of the countries that were hardest hit were the countries that had contact with northern Italy.”

Orientalism was one of the things that made it happen—the idea that it's the sort of thing that happens in countries where people eat bats, not in places like rich, clean Lombardy, and the idea that there was something hysterically authoritarian in the reactions in China itself, with the sudden massive total lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and also in Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore (which shut down before the virus had even been detected there), and South Korea. 

Right Behind You. I

The right brain is where all the left things are happening. 

I've been reading this long and very well-made piece by David Wallace-Wells for New York Magazine ("How the West Lost Covid"), which begins with some pretty uncomfortable truth: that pretty much every government in Europe and North America, left or right, democratic or authoritarian, globalist or isolationist, pro-science or anti-science, screwed up in the pandemic fatally, in pretty much the same way; while the governments that handled it especially well come from an equally mixed bag, in East Asia and Australasia with just a tiny number of European outliers, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.

I remember starting to get an unpleasant sense of this in the fall and winter, when I was spending a lot of time looking at the statistics of the second wave of infections. You could predict certain outcomes from this or that lockdown or loosening, but you couldn't get a sense that one of your favorite countries in the first group, Canada or Germany, was doing an adequate job. The Trump and Johnson governments were as ignorant and vicious as you thought, but smart politicians in Italy, France, and Sweden—Sweden!—were doing just as badly as the US, or even considerably worse. And the same pattern was going on inside the US, with the better-equipped states, New Jersey and New York and California, doing just as badly as the incompetent and irresponsible leaderships of Florida and Texas. What was that about?

Wallace-Wells has a non-ideological kind of hypothesis for starters, about national cultures rather than politics, which is that the governments that dealt successfully with Covid were the ones that decided to kill the virus—to eradicate it—rather than learn to live with it, or mitigate it until the pharmacologists came up with something. "Basically," he quotes the Edinburgh public health professor Devi Sridhar,