The role of public health officials is to ensure the health and safety of the public. When large numbers of people are not healthy, public health has failed.
The Hillsdale Initiative
On Aug. 23, 2022, the newly established “
Academy for Science and Freedom” at the Hillsdale College published a statement on the ethical principles of public health.
The
13 co-authors explained that “during the SARS2 coronavirus pandemic, fundamental principles of public health were ignored, and trust in public health has been damaged. As experts in public health, medical science, ethics, and health policy, we propose the following ten principles to guide public health officials and scientists, in order to ensure the credibility of public health recommendations and to help restore public trust.”
A Brief History of Public Health
Ancient Romans were the first people we know of to recognize the importance of sanitation for public health. Even before the first century B.C., the Romans had sanitary sewers that took human waste water through underground pipes out to marshes outside town. These marshes then acted as bioswales to process the human waste.
In the Ancient World, the Romans decided that infrastructure was important: sanitary sewers, running water, flat roads, and public baths for hygiene. Roman citizens paid taxes to the state and the state, in return, helped create a clean and healthy environment for the people.
In stark contrast, Early America had no clean running water, no sanitary sewers, and no public baths for hygiene. Throughways were rutted cart tracks, more akin to deer paths than paved highways, primitive in comparison to what had been invented millennia earlier by Ancient Romans.
Though it
happened slowly, as thought leaders in various states in the United States began to better understand that contagious diseases, like tuberculosis, could be controlled by better hygiene, government officials started to build infrastructure to protect the public, making clean running water available and constructing sanitary sewers for human waste.
Incidents of cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and other contagious diseases like measles and rubella, were vastly reduced by these public health initiatives.
In the early 1950s, people—and public health officials—realized polio could be curtailed by
chlorinating public swimming pools. While the
polio vaccine is usually credited with curtailing the spread of polio, others argue that it was polio becoming endemic along with better sanitation, as well as a
change in how we defined paralytic polio, that caused polio rates to plummet.
Eroding Trust
In the past two and a half years, public health authorities have
failed the public, ignoring fundamental principles of public health. This has led to regular people—those who have always had the utmost respect for doctors and public health authorities—to feel distrustful of the government and suspicious of public health’s motives.
“I think COVID has given us the greatest decline in confidence in our trust in our public health officials in history,” said James Neuenschwander, an integrative physician based in Ann Arbor, Michigan with over 30 years of experience.
Instead of safeguarding the public during a time of uncertainty about the transmission, virulence, and treatment of coronavirus, America’s public health authorities have given inconsistent advice, mandated interventions that were scientifically shown not to work, and misled the public about everything from the
safety and
efficacy of the
mRNA vaccines to
mask-wearing and lockdowns.Neuenschwander said that he has seen people’s physical and mental health suffer as a result of both masking and lockdowns.
“Even non-medical people have seen that the government’s recommendations have failed to follow the science that has been publicly available,” Neuenschwander said.
Fundamental Principles of Public Health
The “Statement on the Ethical Principles of Public Health” lists 10 fundamental ethical principles. Among the signatories are Scott W. Atlas, a medical doctor at Stanford University who was an early voice of dissent against draconian government policies; Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine at Harvard University; and Ellen Townsend, a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham.These principles stipulate that public health advice must:
- Consider the Impact on Overall Health
Myopic advice from a public health authority that is solely concerned with a single disease—as was the case with COVID-19—leads to causing the public more harm than good overall. “[A]lways consider both benefits and harms from public health measures and weigh short-term gains against long-term harms,” the statement advised.
Public health policy is about protecting everyone, not just a privileged few, which means that public health policies must consider the most vulnerable members of society: children, economically disadvantaged people, those with disabilities, and the elderly.
A failure to help minorities has been especially pronounced in the past two years. For example, people with hearing impairments, breathing difficulties, and sensory processing disorders were barred from entering public spaces because they could not safely wear masks. Parents of black and brown children who have chosen not to vaccinate continue to be
discriminated against in some states. Religious minorities have had their rights taken away as well.
The fifth principle on
the declaration reads: “Public health requires public trust. Public health recommendations should present facts as the basis for guidance, and never employ fear or shame to sway or manipulate the public.”
America continues to sensationalize the COVID-19 pandemic, and to fuel new fears of other contagions, like monkeypox, snail fever, and tomato flu. Keeping people in a constant state of fear is unhealthy in and of itself, as we know from recent research on how stress negatively impacts the immune system.
- Educate the Public, Not Force or Coerce
Ethical public health officials share information with the public about any given intervention or recommendation. They openly and honestly explain the benefits, the disadvantages, and other options. This is the principle of “informed consent,” whereby medical doctors speak to their patients about treatment options. Those who practice ethical medicine based on informed consent tell their patients that one option is always to do nothing. “Medical interventions … should be voluntary and based on informed consent,” the authors of this initiative wrote. “Public health officials are advisors, not rule setters…”
- Avoid Conflicts of Interest
For years, vaccine safety advocates have been pointing out that people working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have a profound conflict of interest in that the CDC takes
large amounts of money from vaccine manufactures and other stakeholders.
During 2021 alone, nearly 500 billionaires were minted—a new billionaire every 17 hours,
according to Forbes. Many of these are now multi-billionaires and many owe their new wealth to capitalizing off the public’s fear of coronavirus.
These include an Italian whose family manufactures glass vials for the vaccines; an Indian physician whose hospital chain changed its focus to coronavirus; the co-founder of BioNTech, and the CEO of Moderna.
As
reported by the Wall Street Journal, these new millionaires and billionaires appear to be more concerned about buying luxury real estate, not ensuring the public’s health.
A Revolving Door Between Industry and Government
Public health officials and government employees in America and other countries have a practice of leaving their public service jobs for more lucrative positions in the pharmaceutical industry.
When those tasked with vaccine safety oversight become insiders in the pharmaceutical industry, the public finds it very difficult to trust public health officials.
Which is why in their declaration the Hillsdale thought leaders insisted that conflicts of interest must be avoided and those that cannot be avoided must be honestly and openly disclosed.
“The government has been so perverse, hasn’t it?” said Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “getting Pharma to produce expensive drugs, untested, and then throwing them out to the public with the false promise that they’re safe, when they’re not.”
Seneff, who was not one of the authors of the Hillsdale initiative, insisted that it was wrong of public health officials to impede the ability of doctors to use safe and established natural methods and repurposed drugs to treat COVID and alleviate symptoms early on.
“It is morally reprehensible what the government is doing,” Seneff said. “They should have been promoting safe methods as they discovered them and instead, they just blocked everything.”
May the Force Be With Brave Scientists
The public’s trust will not be restored overnight. In order for health authorities to regain the public’s trust, they must prove to us that they actually have our best interests in mind.In the meantime, these 13 scientists have risked their careers by insisting on ethical public health principles and speaking out against misguided COVID-19 policies.
Given how dangerous some of the current public health recommendations are,
especially to young people, we are heartened to see that other medical doctors and scientific researchers are also voicing their disapprobation, as we have
written about before. Speaking out against the medical establishment puts them at risk of retaliation. Indeed, doctors who have criticized COVID-19 protocols have lost their medical licenses, been de-platformed, and also been insulted and vilified by their colleagues.
May the force be with them all.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here. 
