Beware of Phony Public Health Emergencies

Rule by unelected public health officials.

As Dr. McCullough characterized the problem in his January 23, 2022 speech from the Lincoln Memorial, medical freedom is like a circle linked to the circles of social and economic freedom. As he put it: 

If we allow the circle of medical freedom to be touched, let alone broken, all of the circles fracture.

Because humans are capable of inflicting physical harm on others, the State has always reserved the right to arrest anyone who threatens others with violence. When SARS-CoV-2 arrived, the State applied the same logic to everyone. 

Everyone, we were told, could harbor the deadly virus, and therefore the State reserved the right to place everyone under house arrest. Thus we see how a purported Public Health Emergency can become the mechanism for subverting our Constitution.

Shortly after SARS-CoV-2 arrived, Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, declared a Public Health Emergency, thereby providing legal justification for the massive pandemic response. The exercise was so profitable for a host of public and private interests that the Biden Administration couldn’t resist the temptation to do the same trick with Monkeypox. On August 22, 2022, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra declared the disease a Public Health Emergency.

In a society of reasonable grownups, a “public emergency” is a clear and present danger, to borrow Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s standard for justifying the restriction of freedom of speech. A hypothetical danger of infectious disease—presented in erroneous or fraudulent simulations and modeling—is not sufficient to declare a Public Health Emergency.

When a true public emergency arrives, reasonable grownups— or people of “ordinary prudence,” to use a legal expression—are likely to recognize it and take steps to avoid it unless their powers of perception are distorted by propaganda or some other means of mass deception. The scenario of a phony public healthy emergency, such as Monkeypox this year, was spoofed in the 2010 Simpsons episode House Cat Flu.

“The Center for Disease Disinformation predicts with sone degree of probability that the Cat Flu might spread in the following hypothetical outbreak pattern.”