Mark Robinowitz: Quacks, hypocrites, corporate takeovers threaten our public health

My name is Mark Robinowitz, longtime Eugene citizen of a quarter century, and one of the websites I run is SustainEugene.org, which is about greenwashing and environmentalism and all claims of environmentalism. And this also applies to health care, how we could improve on health care and threats to it, including corporate takeover of health care, but also the denial that health care is necessary.

[00:00:36] In Eugene-Springfield, PeaceHealth is one of the state’s flagship resources for medical care. We have a lot of specialty expertise for just about anything that can go wrong with you. These are under threat from corporate takeovers. Some of you readers and listeners may know about the corporate buyout of Oregon Medical Group, one of the region’s larger—formerly locally-owned—medical practices.

[00:01:13] It is now owned by the largest medical company in the country, UnitedHealthcare. And they have downsized and kicked out a lot of their patients and cut the services that they offer. This is a very long and complicated topic, but I recommend Health Care For All Oregon at hcao.org as a gateway for understanding what we would need for a single-payer health care for everybody. And recently, Eugene City Club in June and July had programs about this corporate control of the medical system.

[00:01:53] We also, at the national level, have the threat of Project 2025, which wants to gut Medicaid and Medicare, abolish the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, and replace it with the Department of Life to promote anti-abortion, misogyny, bigotry of a variety of kinds, etc.

[00:02:18] This is getting more attention as the national election campaign heats up. But even if Trump doesn’t get another term in office, these dangers are likely not going away after election day.

[00:02:34] We also have the problem of denying that health care is even needed. For example, the Koch Industries, famous for their anti-climate change propaganda, is a very large funder of what can best be called medical denialism to downplay the dangers of the COVID pandemic, notably through their funding of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested that everyone should get infected with COVID to make the pandemic last less time so that we could all go back to work.

[00:03:14] Unfortunately, catching COVID does not guarantee you can’t catch it again. Some diseases are one and done, but COVID is definitely not one of them. Mostly because it mutates too much.

[00:03:26] And for details, I recommend a book and a website. The book is from a medical doctor who served in a hospital in New York City called We Want Them Infected, and the website RespectfulInsolence.com has a number of essays refuting that this is basically dangerous eugenics and anti-public health.

[00:03:55] So we have this contrast between excellent health care, which is available if you have the financial means or the insurance to access it. And on the other side, we have a minority that is quite vocal that says that medicine should be avoided in favor of magical thinking and cures that may or may not have validity. And this is causing immense tension in our need to provide health care for the whole populations.

[00:04:28] In Lane County, we had one of the lowest death rates from COVID of any county in the country. Our death rate was comparable to that in Canada, which was a much lower death rate than the United States as a whole.

[00:04:46] But just to the south of us in Douglas County and Josephine County, where Roseburg and Grants Pass are, they had some of the highest death rates among the counties, comparable to Alabama. And this is solely because of politics and belief systems. Those counties are mostly Republican and the vaccination rates were much lower than in Lane County or Multnomah County where Portland is, and they got overwhelmed in their hospitals, whereas Lane County, not so much.

[00:05:23] Now, we do have a left-wing anti-vax movement, but they are a minority. Most of the anti-vaxxers in Lane County tend to be conservative and Republican.

[00:05:38] At PeaceHealth RiverBend, after vaccinations were rolled out, they put out a chart showing that they had 1,000 COVID patients hospitalized later in 2021, and more than 90% were unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated. So, vaccines do not guarantee that one can’t contract a disease, but they help prepare your immune system to respond quickly to the pathogen.

[00:06:13] And they reduce the severity of a disease and this was not just true for COVID, but for almost all vaccines. And since most people recover from COVID, whether vaccinated or not, regardless what else they do during their course of infection, it’s easy for some people to pretend that they don’t need to follow medical advice, that they don’t need to be vaccinated, that they don’t need to take actual medication if they run into problems and get a worse outcome than most others.

[00:06:49] It’s a form of fear and denial and the internet has amplified all sorts of false claims without the ability to fact-check. And it’s always worth remembering that close to a million and a half people died of COVID in the United States. That is more than the deaths from all U.S. wars from 1776 to the present.

[00:07:18] If a foreign country did that to us deliberately (and I don’t mean China, I mean more Trump administration), we would consider it an act of war. And during the June debate between Biden and Trump, Trump said more people died of COVID under Biden’s administration than under Trump’s administration. And that’s technically true.

[00:07:43] But what Trump left out is that the deaths under Biden were mostly unvaccinated Republicans. And so many unvaccinated Republicans died from COVID after vaccines were made available that it probably had some impact on the midterm elections in 2022 and might again have an impact this November.

[00:08:08] I know of a number of people who died unvaccinated after refusing it and they made their choices, but sometimes bad choices come with bad consequences. You know, COVID was lethal enough to kill a lot of people, but that was also because it was mostly so infectious.

[00:08:29] You know, this was not a disease that killed a third of the people who got it, but it spread so fast that even 1% or 2%, that adds up really quick and it overwhelmed the medical system and it burned out a lot of doctors and nurses, especially in communities where the medical people got abused by patients and relatives who didn’t want to admit that this was actually what was going on to their loved ones.

[00:08:57] Lots of scapegoating, rather than taking acceptance, responsibility and acceptance for what happened.

[00:09:03] It’s theoretically possible that there was a lab leak. There have been leaks from other labs, but today, all the evidence suggests it actually came from the so-called wet market in the middle of Wuhan, even the genetic evidence suggests that. And SARS 1, which was a similar outbreak, but not as infectious 20 years earlier, also came from a spillover from bats in the wild, and the distance between the caves where it originated and Hong Kong, where it first appeared in people, was a similar distance.

[00:09:47] SARS CoV 1 was much more lethal, but also much less infectious. People did not get asymptomatic cases. If you had SARS 1, you were too sick to get on an airplane or go to the grocery store or nightclub. And something like almost 10% of the people who caught SARS 1 died. But it was not as infectious and standard public health measures were able to control it and keep it from becoming the worldwide problem that’s SARS CoV 2 was (or is still).

[00:10:21] But the reaction from a lot of people that they couldn’t imagine that this was even possible. The only surprise with COVID was the timing, the idea that this was likely to happen at some point. There’s no shortage of public health experts who’ve been warning about this for decades.

[00:10:41] And there are plenty of other diseases that have resulted from eating wild animals, invading the last wild lands in Asia and Africa. You have HIV, which came from chimpanzees; Nipah virus, which is spread from bats in Southeast Asia, and is accelerated by deforestation; SARS 1 came from bats; MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) also came from bats via camels.

[00:11:17] There’s a long list of zoonotic transfer from wildlife into people, and what’s scarier than contemplating a lab leak is the idea that we’re probably not going to stop ravaging the last wild places in nature. If we are really concerned about pandemics, we would strengthen public health surveillance, guarantee health care for all, and leave the last wild places alone.

[00:11:47] And none of those seem to be on the agenda anywhere right now.

[00:11:51] One of the key considerations is to recognize that some of the worst spreaders of this fearmongering don’t believe it themselves. So Donald Trump (who I’m not a fan of) spread all sorts of ridiculous claims in 2020, like drinking bleach and hydroxychloroquine, which doesn’t do anything against COVID, among other problems.

[00:12:24] But he was first in line to get vaccinated himself, and in 2021, after he was president, he said the vaccine works, but some people aren’t taking it. The ones that get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. And around the same time, Gov. DeSantis said, “If you are vaccinated, fully vaccinated, the chance of you getting seriously ill or dying from COVID is effectively zero.”

[00:12:57] If you look at the people that are being admitted to the hospitals, over 95% of them are either not fully vaccinated or not vaccinated at all—so the contrast between the Republicans spreading divisiveness, but privately they were first in line to get vaccinated. It’s not exactly news that Republican politicians are sometimes hypocrites, but this is not just policies that don’t matter to many people. This is a matter of life and death.

[00:13:30] Even worse, we have a whole presidential campaign right now based solely on anti-vax and virus denial through Robert Kennedy Jr., who used to be an environmentalist, but has mutated into a diehard virus denier. He claims HIV does not cause AIDS, that poliovirus does not cause polio, and today, Mother Jones magazine even suggested that if he was elected, he wants to set up government-run camps, camps! For people addicted to drugs or antidepressants to grow food for the government for a period of several years.

[00:14:18] You can’t make this stuff up.

[00:14:20] There’s also a real far-right aspect to some of this stuff. There’s a group in Lane County, they promote polio denial in their newsletter. They promote homophobia in their newsletter. And it’s bizarre to see anybody promoting the idea that viruses don’t exist.

[00:14:45] I mean, I wouldn’t miss these viruses if they didn’t exist. I personally wouldn’t miss yellow jackets and poison oak if they didn’t exist. But exist they do, whether I want them to exist or not.

[00:15:00] You know, we live on the land of the Kalapuya people, who were absolutely decimated by the introduction to smallpox virus, which their ancestors had not experienced, and they had no immune memory that this was even something to deal with.

[00:15:20] So, in a way, denying that viruses exist is denying what happened to the Indigenous people of this land and the damage that they suffered when European American settlement happened here in the 1800s.

[00:15:36] I want to mention childhood vaccination rates. If you look on the website of Eugene Village School, they have a chart showing that half their students are not vaccinated against standard child diseases, including polio. They don’t say this is a bad thing.

[00:15:58] And an associated school, Eugene Waldorf School, has similar refusals for vaccination. And apparently, since they are private schools and not public, they don’t have to follow public health rules. Polio is coming back. We’ve already had cases in the United States. It was almost eradicated, two generations ago.

[00:16:24] One of the last people who lived in an iron lung died earlier this year after over 70 years living in an iron lung, but we came so close to eradicating polio and the anti-vax movement is doing its best to bring it back. RFK Jr. claims poliovirus doesn’t cause polio. Some of his associates are writing similar things. I’ve heard people echo the idea that it’s caused by pesticides, even though that’s just beyond ridiculous.

[00:16:59] Two other resources I want to share about this confluence of this sort of thinking with far-right politics is the website and book Conspirituality.net, Conspirituality podcast and book. The RFK Jr. campaign is, of course, the quintessential conspirituality campaign.

[00:17:26] Naomi Klein’s newest book, Doppelganger, is an exploration of what she calls the mirror world of hyper-conspiritual thinking that isn’t exactly correlated with fact-checking. In particular, COVID, but it has metastasized to many other aspects of understanding as well. It’s not limited at all to COVID.

[00:17:53] And there are real conspiracies out there. It’s just, there’s also a lot of fake conspiracies. And the worst is when there’s a mix of real and fake, because unraveling and differentiation becomes difficult. We need conspiracy literacy in the disinformation age. And a good place to work on that sort of differentiation is to remember that physical facts matter. And education matters. And just reading weird claims on the internet doesn’t exactly form, you know, a credible universal understanding of something. So just because someone says the government is lying does not mean they are telling the truth.