The Tyranny of Public Health

Coronavirus: Health is Important, But Must Not Be Dominant


Luke Malpass
Stuff

When does the cure become worse than the disease? That is the question that has to be being asked around the Government's lockdown policy prescription for coronavirus.

Yet consider the following: across the ditch in Australia, the economy has not gone into full lockdown – it is more akin to New Zealand's so-called Level 3. People ought to socially distance, work from home if possible, and large gatherings are banned. Pubs, hotels and restaurants are closed, as is the border.

But some retail is still open, schools are still open, as is childcare – which has now been made free! (although people are advised to keep their children at home if possible). You can still go to the shops, hardware store, buy clothes and generally go about your business.

The Australians are pleased because their Covid infection rate appears to have flattened off without battening all the hatches. It has had more than 5000 cases and 27 deaths. The death rate is much higher than NZ, but the infection rate is similar. Only time will tell which approach was better, if either.

Misleading and Deceptive

A Cancer of Histrionic Exaggerations

The Waitangi Tribunal has come out claiming that the Government is responsible for "failing Maori in the health system."  For our part, we confess we are bored to tears by the endless panoply of histrionic claims about Maori needs and the failure of the Government to provide for those needs.  

Waitangi Tribunal claimant Tureiti Lady Moxon wants the Government to apologise for failing Māori in the health system.  "It's our people dying of preventable diseases, who are the worst off in this country, in a democratic society that's supposed to look after everybody," she said.  "They've failed us constantly."

The tribunal has just released its comprehensive, stage one report from the Health Services and Outcomes Kaupapa Inquiry. It found multiple Treaty breaches and serious failings by the Crown to fix Māori health inequities.  "The prejudice suffered by Māori because of these Crown failures is extensive," said the tribunal in its report.

It said despite the Crown investing some $220 billion into the health system since 2000, there's been little improvement in outcomes for Māori.  The tribunal considered the issue of Māori health to be so urgent it released its 256-page report within three months of finishing the hearings. It also wanted the report and evidence to be included in the Government's health and disability system review currently underway.

During its deliberations the tribunal released screeds of data which gave evidence of the appalling health statistics of Māori.  In its final statement the tribunal asked the Crown to acknowledge its overall failure to improve Māori health outcomes since implementing major reforms nearly 20 years ago. [Stuff]

What is a genuine puzzle, however, is how and why large numbers of Pacific Island migrants to New Zealand don't seem to suffer from a similar malaise.

"It's For Your Own Good, Little Children"

Meet the Calorie Gestapo! 

UK Government to Bring Back Rationing

James Delingpole
Breitbart London


For the first time since wartime restrictions were finally lifted in 1954, the British government is planning a return to rationing.
This has nothing to do with food shortages caused by Hitler’s Germany but with a different kind of totalitarian menace: health and safety Nazis.

The lunatic plan emanates from a body of grotesquely overpaid bureaucrats called Public Health England (PHE)

According to the Daily Telegraph:

Calorie limits will be imposed on thousands of foods sold in supermarkets and restaurants in a bid to combat obesity.  Draft proposals seen by The Telegraph set out detailed caps for ready meals, sandwiches and even portions of vegetables served across the country.

The plans, drawn up by Public Health England (PHE), suggest a limit of 544 calories for any convenience meal – far below many of those sold today.  Sandwiches and main meal salads would be capped at 550 calories, with a limit of 951 calories for restaurant main courses, and varying limits for other specific foods depending on where they are consumed.  The efforts are part of a Government childhood obesity strategy which promises to cut the calories in common foods by a fifth by 2024.

There are a number of problems with these proposals, starting with the fact that – as Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs notes – they will effectively ban many of Britain’s most popular dishes, including fish and chips.

Top Labour Politician Getting Found Out

Incompetent and Dishonest

What to do with an apparently incompetent Minister of the Crown who appears to be telling lies . . .

The country was assailed several weeks ago with allegations that Middlemore Hospital in Auckland was in dire straits.  It turns out the new government was "spinning"--that is, making things up, distorting the truth, exaggerating the alleged problems, creating a faux calamity.  Why would it do that?  Well, we don't know really. 

At the head of this apparently disreputable and dishonest attack has been the Government's new Minister of Health--one David Clark.  After the media went volcanic over all the allegedly horrible things that have been discovered about Middlemore Hospital, a few wiser heads are starting to ask questions.  It seems that they have been led by the nose ring, pulled and twisted by one David Clark, Minister of Health.

Mark Darrow, one of the Directors of Middlemore Hospital, has been summarily fired by Minister David Clark, despite the Minister never communicating with him at all, apart from the termination notice.  That of itself suggests cowardice on the part of the Minister--and/or fear of the now inevitable allegations of not dealing in good faith.  Here is just one reaction by one reporter who has done a bit more due diligence on our new deceptive and misleading Minister of the Crown.

Unmasking the Real Enemy

Public Health Wowsers

Our public health ideologues more often than not wear the garb of zealots.  It's why the phrase "public health Nazi" has been coined.  They are frequently cast as do-gooders, with an inflated sense of self-righteousness.  They are wowsers.

A recent example of their puritanical zeal in New Zealand has been their opposition to Ronald McDonald Houses at hospitals.  These are well known facilities, funded by fast-food giant, McDonald whereby parents and relatives of sick children are provided free accommodation to stay near their children whilst they are being treated for serious illnesses in hospitals  Many who have benefited from this charity remain deeply grateful.  But the public health zealots have a different view.  To them Ronald McDonald Houses are part of the Evil Empire who do great harm to people.

In reality, it is the food wowsers who are doing far more harm than good.  The ignominy of these zealots has provoked a critical editorial in the NZ Herald.

Zealots in Control

The Ministry of Health Breaches Fundamental Medical Ethics

The disparaging term, "health-Nazi" refers to individuals, companies, or governments who believe in forcing people to do what is deemed good by others.   These days we are awash with officials, authorities, and do-gooders telling us what to eat, what not to eat, how to spend leisure time, how to exercise, and how to breathe.  It's all in the name of doing good.

More often than not, it seems, the advice and the hectoring demands turn out to be wrong, inappropriate, or harmful in the long term.  We remind our readers that two generations have been raised amidst the incessant propaganda that fat is harmful; the best diet reduces fat intake.  The tacit assumption of  this "advice" has been that ingested fat turns to body fat.  It is now clear that this is poppycock, the stuff of nonsense.  But, in the meantime, for two generations health Nazis and officials misled the public.

It's not just that the advice was wrong: it was framed as a moral crusade.

Startling Discoveries

Healing in His Hands

A startling discovery has been made in the area of public health.  Sometimes things surprise.  At other times, the surprise is so surprisey that one ends up staggering around in the daylight like a sleep deprived inebriate.  We still struggle to believe the scintillating insights delivered by a university health study.  Against all expectation the astute researchers made the completely unexpected discovery that obesity is caused by eating too much food. 

You have to have a PhD in social medicine and a second PhD in public health to enable such rarefied  discoveries to be made. 

When it comes to eating, consumers are biting off more than they can chew.  That's the finding a New Zealand study that confirms the link between energy food supply and the global obesity epidemic.  The findings, published today in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, show that overeating is the driving force behind the global obesity epidemic in high-income countries like New Zealand. [TVNZ News]

The lead researcher was one Stephie Vandevijvere.  Her research is so startling and novel that it made the pages of the World Health Magazine.

Almost Everyone is a Progressive Now

Unholy Trade-Offs

An insightful piece from Patterico, explaining why conservatives and classical liberals end up being cheer-leaders for "progressive" (i.e. statist) solutions to social issues.

How does the Leviathan of the federal government grow in size and power every year? One reason is that, when government “solutions” are offered to a problem, it apparently becomes impossible for most people (including conservatives) even to imagine addressing the problem in a different way.

Take health care for poor people. We used to have a well-developed system of charity care, premised on the principle that doctors were expected to do a certain amount of work without compensation, simply because it was needed and the patient could not afford it. LBJ came along with Medicaid and largely destroyed this centuries-long tradition.

Now, it is taken for granted, even by “conservatives,” that if we were to restrict or eliminate Medicaid, we would not be advocating a market solution (i.e. a better, more efficient, higher quality solution) to the problem of health care for the poor. No, we would simply be against health care for the poor. Period.

If It Disappears, Resurrect It

Obamacare Exchanges on Life Support

by Michelle Malkin 

May 15, 2015

National Review Online

At a recent White House science fair celebrating inventors, a Girl Scout who helped design a Lego-powered page-turning device asked President Obama what he had ever thought up or prototyped. Stumbling for an answer, he replied: “I came up with things like, you know, health care.” 

Ah, yes. “Health care.” Remember when the president’s signature Obamacare health-insurance exchanges were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, the remote control, jogger strollers, Siri, the Keurig coffee maker, driverless cars, and Legos all rolled into one? The miraculous, efficient, cost-saving, innovative 21st-century government-run “marketplaces” were supposed to put the “affordable” in Obama’s Affordable Care Act. 

Know-it-all bureaucrats were going to show private companies how to set up better websites (gigglesnort), implement better marketing and outreach (guffaw), provide superior customer service (belly laugh), and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse (LOLOLOL).

Letter From America (About Nimbyism)

That's Not What We Meant, At All

The whole animation of Obamacare is that the wealthy end up paying more so as to subsidise the health care of those less wealthy than they.  The mechanism to achieve this would be the the socialisation of health insurance premiums.  The wealthy's premiums are rising in order to subsidise the premiums of those who are not so wealthy.   Obama and the Democrats "got away" with it by swearing black and blue that this was not so.  In other words, the lie was deliberately forged and propagated by cunning elites.  The rest of the Democrats remained ignorant and just parroted the official "talking points".  Silly "useful idiots"--they trusted their leaders.  How quaint.  

Now Harvard academics are "finding out what's in the Bill"--and they are mad--despite being strongly supportive of Obamacare, and, despite some of their colleagues having been donkey-deep in its design. "Not In My Back Yard" rules amongst the Harvard elites.

Letter From the UK (About Smoking in Australia)

Plain Packaging Fails 

Cigarette Sales Rise in Australia

by Andre Walker  

6 Jun 2014

Breitbart London

Cigarette sales in Australia have increased since the introduction of plain packaging, according to the Australian. The increase has come from budget brands that are no longer identifiable as being cheaper due to their packaging.

Total sales in the first full year since the new packaging came in showed an overall increase of 59 million individual cigarettes across the country. This represents one of the few incidences of cigarette consumption increasing in a modern Westernised country. The increase of 0.3 percent reverses the downward trend of 15.6 percent in the previous four years.

Plain packaging was introduced in December 2012 and was hailed at the time by Labor Health Minister Nicola Roxon as the "world’s toughest anti-smoking laws". But the plan appears to have backfired as half of the increase in sales have come from the cheaper brands, suggesting that smokers merely switched brands and smoked more because they were cheaper.

The Poison of Nanny McPhee

 A Disastrous Diet With Deadly Consequences

Never trust "official science"--that is, the science being pushed by government agencies.  If scepticism is the good oil of solid scientific research, once the science becomes "official" in the sense of being accepted by government programmes and enforced by government regulations, healthy scepticism withers on the vine.  At that point, science has become intermingled with, if not captured by, propaganda: the trustworthiness of science diminishes substantially.

To make matters worse, there are lots of vested interests vying for commercial advantage when science becomes "official".  Engineer a government "tick" and millions can be made.  Achieve the promulgation of a government programme, and millions can be parlayed into billions of dollars.  It becomes, in the coarse words of US Vice President, Joe Biden, a "big . . . deal"--that is, a crude joke.

It is now becoming clear that generations of diet advice--official diet prescriptions--backed by scientific research, is wrong.  In fact, it has done enormous damage to human health.  A significant essay recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, by Nina Teicholz:

Deadly Official Dietary Advice, Part II

Public Policy Demands Science Be "Settled and Certain"

Public Policy Requires Junk Science

In our previous post on this subject, we canvassed how much  "official" dietary and food advice of the past fifty years is turning out, not just to be counter productive, but actually harmful.  This advice has been delivered with emphatic certainty, as if those giving it were utterly convinced of the accuracy and truthfulness of what was being purported.  And they no doubt were.

The reason for such certainty turned upon the overwhelming veracity of  Science.  The discipline which exploded all myths, errors, and superstitions, replacing them with certainty and truth was Science.  That is an overwhelming presumption of our world.  "Science says" is tantamount to the word of a god in our  understanding--an understanding held in common by officials, governments, scientists, the Commentariat and even the common man.

Much of the research into diet and human health relies upon statistical research and analysis.  Much of the research and inferences there-from are flawed.

Going Viral

Response That Tells a Story

We posted a piece recently about the perverse effects of protecting children from being children.  It specifically focused upon what has happened in a school where "health and safety" rules were abolished in the playground.  The effects have been salutary and very positive.  The post was entitled Unintended Perverse Effects.

Once the story became public, the school principal has been inundated with requests for information and general interest.  This, as reported in Stuff:

An Auckland principal who bravely ditched the playground rulebook has been overwhelmed by the positive international response to his story.  The phone has been buzzing with calls and interview requests from around the world for Swanson Primary School principal Bruce McLachlan.  "It's been a busy week, I didn't expect it. It's the reaction against the cotton-woolling of kids, helicopter parenting and nanny states."

It's gone viral--showing that there is unease at the grassroots over the state's nannying propensities in the vain attempt to protect people from themselves and to make the world one without risk, threat, or injury.

Unintended, Perverse Effects

 The Paradox of Cotton Wool

The pejorative term "nannying" has achieved widespread usage in the last twenty-five years.  Surprisingly, it just happens to co-incide with the rise of the ubiquitous state and its endless "health and safety" rules.  The more the state has sought to micro-legislate and regulate our lives, the more cynical and bitter its ungrateful subjects have become.

Probably in New Zealand the nadir was reached when the infamously nannying government led by "Auntie Helen" was proposing to regulate the length of showers in the nation.  Why?  To combat the terrible, dreadful, looming threat of global warming, you plebian numbskulls.  Don't you know what's good for you. Fortunately, the people achieved a moment of rare sanity and unceremoniously voted Auntie Helen out.

There are many drivers of this malignant nannying disease in the body politic.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Hygiene Lectures From Typhoid Mary

Posted on Thursday, January 23, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

 

A bill now before the Idaho legislature raises a thorny question. The choice facing our legislators is this. If they vote yes, and they remove the religious exemption shield, then they will be seen as encroaching on the religious freedom of parents to care for their children according to their conscience. But if they vote no, they will be seen as saying that parents must take reasonable care of their children — unless the parents are religious nuts, in which case all bets are off.

All of this is just one more glaring instance that shows us how neutrality is impossible in any society. Whenever we choose to do anything, the question “by what standard” is going to be (legitimately) raised. Because I am a Christian, I want the standard that is applied to be Christian. I do not want voodoo standards to applied, for example. There is no neutrality anywhere, and when we pretend to ourselves that there might be, we only get ourselves increasingly confused.

That said, I would urge legislators to keep the religious exemption shield in place (for the present) for the following reasons.

Draining the Swamp

Fraud, Corruption, and Conspiracies

It is an old adage that when one is uncovering and exposing a rort one needs to follow the money.  Where is the payoff going?  Who is benefiting?  In New Zealand we have had an example recently where traditional opponents conspired together to cream off some money from the tax payers to feather their own nests. 

The cause d'jour was workplace health and safety.  The conspirators were traditional opponents--the Council of Trade Unions ("CTU") and Business NZ.  Together they persuaded the government owned Accident Compensation Corporation to pay out $20m over ten years to the respective organisations/pressure groups to "train" employees in health and safety practices.  This from the NZ Herald:

Government Wowsering

Up in Smoke

In New Zealand we have a messianic crusade to make the country "smoke free" by 2025.  The definition of this paradisaical state is as follows:

 What does Smokefree New Zealand 2025 mean?

• Our children and grandchildren will be free from exposure to tobacco and tobacco use
  

• The smoking prevalence across all populations will be <5%. The goal is not a ban on smoking.
  

• Tobacco will be difficult to sell and supply.  [http://smokefree.org.nz/smokefree-2025]

Of course this is being promulgated by government and its agencies, and driven by particular wowser-politicians.  We do not question the motives of said protagonists.  Smoking can cause much harm.  But we do question the wisdom of the wowsers. 

Moreover, we are also deeply sceptical of government promoted programmes and causes where the underlying object is to restrain government spending on health (as is the case of the anti-tobacco movement).  The reason is straightforward: when an entire population (that is, more than 5 percent) is dependant upon government provided healthcare, the government has been given a license to control human behaviour to an extraordinary extent for its own ends.  In this case, the broader campaign against smoking shows every sign of not being driven primarily by concern over smokers welfare, but by a desire to restrain public health expenditure.

Misleading Unhelpful Poverty Propaganda

Charity is Mandatory

The chattering classes were all agog and aghast for a couple of days earlier this month over child poverty in New Zealand.  Such a problem is worthy of attention and concern.  Unfortunately the protagonists are once again proving to be dishonest traders and so have devalued their cause in a silly attempt to shock and (in marketing speak) achieve cut through to the common mind.  They have grossly exaggerated child poverty in New Zealand. 

A few years ago, the cause d'jour was violence against women (by men).  We were painted as a terribly violent society, since research "showed" that one in four women had suffered abuse.  But common sense is a tenacious beast.  Folk (both men and women) started to think, "Well, I know lots of women--and I am very sure that one in four of them have not suffered abuse at the hands of men.  Where did that figure come from?  Well, in a specious, dishonest attempt to gain attention and traction, the cause-protagonists decided to define abuse so broadly that abuse itself became an inflated, devalued concept.  The end result: people dismissed it and stopped listening.  Those who continued to quote the mantra ("one in four women in this country has suffered abuse") were increasingly seen as coming from the lunatic fringe. 

Now similar folly is being perpetrated by the child abuse industry.  Sadly, the cause is worthy; the issues are genuine.  The propagandists, however, are dishonest brokers.

The Annals of Soft-Despotism

It's Unique, So It's Gotta Be Good

A government which sets forth to care for everybody becomes an inevitable soft-despotic monster.  But the monster is incompetent, bumbling, and stupid.  Irremediably so.  The only solution the monster can proffer to overcome its bumbling failures is to throw millions more of "good money" after bad.  It's only solution is to double down on folly. 

Now this is not to say that private (non-state) enterprise is always efficient.  Far from it.  But private enterprise has an enforcer, a ruthless, take-no-prisoners punisher of business incompetence and failures.  Mr Competition is relentless in punishing and driving the bumbling incompetent out of business.  But the soft-despot has no competitors.  It is a despot after all, protected by law. 

We offer yet another illustration of the follies and self-destructive pathogens of a bumbling  soft-despotic government: the Obamacare website.

Obamacare: 500M Lines of Code, $500M, 60% Complete, No Surprise

by John J. Xenakis  

30 Nov 2013, 9:59 PM

Breitbart

The historic IT disaster known as the Obamacare web site has been of intense interest to me, since I've been a Senior Software Engineer for decades, and I have personally participated in, witnessed, and reported on (as a technology reporter) a number of IT disasters. But even so, the size of the Obamacare web site catastrophe on October 1 still takes my breath away.

When I first heard, shortly after October 1, that there was 500 million lines of code in Healthcare.gov, I quickly rejected that figure, because it's impossible.