Like other aspects of medicine, public health is about dealing with life and death. In the international sphere, this involves big numbers. If, as a group, a few million dollars is allocated here, it may save thousands of lives. Actual people living rather than dying, or grieving. If it’s allocated there, it may even promote death – diverting other resources from a more useful approach or causing direct harm.
Dealing with such issues affects people’s egos. Humans are prone to think themselves important if they seem to have power over the lives of others. With international public health staff this is reinforced by people they meet and the media glorifying their work. The public hear little of the high, often tax-free salaries or the travels and five-star hotels that boost these egos still further, but instead are fed pictures of (usually brown) children lining up to be saved by people in (usually blue) vests with nice logos. It all feels good.
The result, inevitably, is an international public health workforce that has a very high opinion of itself. Possessing values that it considers superior to those of others, it feels justified in imposing its beliefs and values on the populations who are the target of its work. As their role seems to them more important than bringing up kids in some random village or working at an airport check-in counter, they can feel virtuous when seeking to impose their superior opinions on others. The WHO’s insistence that countries globally embrace certain Western cultural values supporting abortion on request until time of delivery are a powerful example, irrespective of what one considers its ‘rightness’. All the more as the WHO also claims to support ‘decolonisation’.
Things get tricky when the ultimate source of funding has its own commercial or geopolitical priorities. As example, expenditure of the World Health Organisation (WHO) is now over 75% specified by the funder, including those who stand to gain financially from such work. Large organisations that helped WHO run its COVID-19 response, such as GAVI (vaccines) and CEPI (vaccines for pandemics), were jointly set up by private and corporate interests who are now represented on their boards and directing them.
The interface between these self-interested funding sources and the populations upon whom they seek to impose their will is where the self-righteousness culture of the public health workforce becomes so important. They need enforcers whose culture renders them willing to impose harm and restrictions upon others. Apologists and sanitisers who are in a position of trust.
A captured but willing workforce
If you are going to sell a product, you can advertise it and hope potential buyers are interested. This carries a commercial risk. If a product can be mandated – essentially force the market to buy it – then this risk is eliminated. If you can then remove any liability for harm done, you are simply printing money with no risk at all. This is such a ridiculous and indecent approach that it would never fly in a normal commercial context. You would need a workforce capable, en masse, of putting aside the moral codes that prevent such practices, a shield between the people being managed and the commercial or political interests standing to gain.
Historically, public health has often provided such a shield – a way of sanitising vested interests that would otherwise appear repulsive to the public. In the United States, ‘public health’ was used to implement racist and eugenic policies to sterilise and send into decline ethnic groups deemed inferior, or individuals considered to have lesser mental capacity (or to be socially inferior). The Johns Hopkins University psychology laboratory was founded by proponents of just such an approach. The fascists in Italy and Germany were able to extend this to active killing first of the physically ‘inferior’, then whole ethnic groups claimed by governments and health professions to be threats to the purity of the majority. Examples such as the Tuskagee study show this attitude did not stop with World War Two.
Most of the doctors and nurses implementing eugenics and other fascist policies will have convinced themselves they were acting for the greater good rather than demons. Medical schools told them they and their kind were superior, patients and the public reinforced this, and they convinced each other. Having the power to directly save or not save lives does that, while carting trash and repairing sewers (equally important to public health) does not. It enables people to tell others what to do for a perceived greater good (even sterilisation or worse) and to then stand together as a profession to defend it. They will do this for those who direct them, as health professionals are also trained to follow guidelines and superiors.
Accepting humility
The hardest thing for anyone conscientious serving in what now passes for public health is accepting that none of the above is actually for the public’s health. It is about unleashed human ego, a large helping of greed and a trained and frequently reinforced willingness to bow to authority. Hierarchies feel good when you are near the top.
In contrast, real health depends on mental and social wellbeing, and all the multiplicity of influences from within and without that determine whether each person experiences, and how they deal with, disease. It requires individuals to be empowered to make their own choices because mental and social health, and a large part of physical health, are dependent on the social capital this agency enables. Public health officials can advise, but once they step over the line to coerce or force, they cease to be an overall positive influence.
To provide sensible, true public health, you must therefore be comfortable allowing others to do what you consider to be against their physical interests or some ‘greater good’. When you are convinced that you have superior intellect, this can feel wrong. It is harder again when deferring to the public means breaking ranks with, and losing standing with, peers who consider themselves superior and more virtuous. To do this, one has to accept that intellect has no standing when assessing human worth, and that each human has some intrinsic characteristic that puts him or her above all considerations regarding greater societal good. This is the basis of fully informed consent – a very difficult concept when considered deeply. It has its basis in the Nuremberg Code and post-1945 medical ethics and human rights, and is a concept with which many in our health professions and their institutions disagree in practice, whatever they may say.
Facing reality
We are now entering one of those more extreme periods, where the hierarchy really becomes clear. Those pulling the public health strings have gained enormous power and profit from COVID-19 and are focused on getting more. Their chosen enforcers did their job during COVID-19, turning a virus outbreak that kills near an average age of 80 years and at a rate globally perhaps slightly higher than influenza into a vehicle to drive poverty and inequality. They continue to do this, pushing vaccine ‘boosters’ associated with rising rates of the infection they are aimed against, and with evidence of unusual harm, ignoring prior understanding of immunology and basic common sense.
Now public health is moving further in response to the same masters, the Covid profiteers, promoting fear of future outbreaks. With near-total obeisance they are now supporting a re-ordering of society and health sovereignty through amending the WHO IHR regulations and negotiating a pandemic treaty to build a permanent health technocracy to sustain concentration of wealth and power through recurrent pharmaceutical profit.
This re-ordering of our democracies into pharma technocracies, with the public health bureaucracy being aligned to enforce it, will make the right to travel, work, go to school or visit sick relatives dependent on compliance with health dictates passed down from a massively wealthy corporate aristocracy. Those health dictates will be enforced by people whose training was funded and careers supported by those who directly profit. The modellers who will produce the numbers needed to scare will be similarly funded, while a sponsored media will continue to promote this fear unquestioningly. The institutions above this, WHO and the big public-private partnerships, take funding and direction from the same sources. The proposed pandemic regulations and treaty are just cementing all in place, repeating the massively harmful restrictions on human rights applied during Covid whilst ensuring there is less room for dissent.
We need legislators and the public to reclaim public health and to return to credible concepts of health and well-being – as WHO once did – “physical, mental and social”. This is what was intended when previous generations fought to overthrow dictators, striving for equality and for the rights of individuals over those who would control them. History tells us that public health professions tend to follow self-interest, taking the side of those who would be dictators. If our democracies, freedom and health are to survive, we must accept reality and address this as a basic issue of individual freedom and good governance for which we are all responsible. There is too much at stake to leave this to self-interested corporatists and the notorious enforcers they control.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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I find many comics funny, and appreciate a lot of different comedy, whoever the performer!
But she is just crude, offensive and just totally unfunny. I’m in no way offended by crudity or bad language, but in comedy there should be a reason for it, not just some gratuitous naughty words to get some cheap laughs.
She may be a fine actress, but I wouldn’t want to watch anything she’s in.
Almost all those offered as comedians on the media these days are of the standard we remember when Mrs Thatcher was in office, had just been deposed and sgain when she died. These unfunny people expected laughs just from mentioning her name.
Miriam Margolyes as a performer and actress has proven over decades to be is a multi-faceted talented person.
I also cannot bear her because she uses crudity to shock and amuse and frankly it is incredibly boring and not very interesting.
A great shame but there we are.
Joan Rivers was crude and offensive, but very funny, she was able to pull it off.
Billy Connolly
George Carlin
Chubby Brown (I met someone who knows him, he NEVER swears in his private life apparently)
Derek and Clive
She’s not that great an actress either. No more than competent.
Margolyes is an obnoxious woman who is nowhere near as funny or well-liked as she thinks she is.
I can’t stand any Comedian who tries to force their political opinions on you, just stick to the jokes and the stories.
Someone like Peter Kay, amazingly funny, but never mentions his politics. I saw Jack Dee live, he was the same.
Good point. No ‘comedian’ less funny than Ben F*****g Elton.
Ben Elton is a comedian?
Who’d have thought it.
Never would have guessed that in a million years.
One of the acts at the comedy store some years ago did a lead balloon impression. After – unable to understand his lack of success doing stand-up, he was privately complaining that his day job was a comedy scriptwriter at the BBC.
Explains a lot that does.
She played Professor Sprout, a sort of Dickensian teacher, in a film featuring an institute of higher learning that Labour would certainly tax until the quaffles squeaked.
She could have refreshed her repertoire at the Festival by recounting her knowledge of the inspiration for the plots of these stories that come from great literature. Cerberus is well-known. More impressive would have been such an example as the exploits of Uther Pendragon and his knights with Merlin’s appearance-altering potion.
Brilliant, honest article by Duke Maskell, with a powerful ending.
This sentence summed up the problem:
“Was this to be the signature note of the evening – fat old lady with posh voice says rude words and audience erupts into laughter?”
Many modern comedians, and their audiences, mistake “wit” for words describing crude bodily functions, orifices, secretions and sexual organs, all of which drag the human consciousness down to a lower level, a demonic level: a Soul Trap.
“To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “insisted that political institutions must serve the highest good of developing the human soul in all of its moral, artistic, and spiritual dimensions.”
“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.”
Better still, bored and Jewish.
No. Elizabeth Dilling was an enthusiastic Zionist until she started translating the Jewish Talmud into English, for the benefit and instruction of Christians, particularly Protestants, who have been taught to admire the Jews as “elder brothers” in worshipping God. She was deeply shocked to discover what she called the “obsession with excrement” and other disgusting obsessions and depravities in that supposedly “holy book”.
I guess we’re all different but wild horses would not drag me to any live show where I was unsure about the performer, performance and audience. My default assumption is that all new artistic material will be woke or lame bollocks for a woke and/or lame audience, until proven otherwise. The same goes for films and TV shows though they are less risky – they cost less and you can just switch off. Ditto modern books.
We’ve got up and walked out part way through a performance at the Edinburgh Festival too. It was a play not a comedy act. It was just boring. Then we saw another one where I’m glad we were sat at the back as the huz fell asleep and started snoring, though he blamed the beer, so it is hit and miss if you’re going to see more obscure acts. I went once just for the experience, but I have a low boredom threshold and I’ve yoghurt sat in the fridge that’s more cultured than me, so once was enough just to say I’d been. But there was some fun stuff there too, plus Edinburgh’s always a gorgeous place to visit and we were meeting friends.
This was donkey’s years ago and I think ‘woke’ wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary so I dread to think what it’s like nowadays.
I like the yoghurt analogy
I don’t think I’d be welcome in Scotland – I’m not sure I am welcome in England any more (but it’s my country so I’m bloody staying)!
I’m currently watching re-runs of The New Avengers on telly – that’s about as recent as I dare go without a thorough vetting.
Well done.
The British are so timid about these things.
It is best to get up an leave as soon as you decide you are going to and not wait for the interval to vanish.
It is then a statement as well as a huge relief to get out of the auditorium.
Dirty and disheveled, looks as though she spent the run sleeping in a doorway.
Hasn’t she been memory holed yet for putting on a Chinese accent when overdubbing on the Water Margin in the 1970s?
“and Miriam Margolyes is known to be a clever woman and a good actress.”
Well on the few occasions I have seen Margoyles on the telly I have never thought “wow she’s clever.” Actually what I have thought is ‘hmm, she thinks she’s clever.’ She also for a reason that I cannot fathom thinks she is funny. She is rude and crude but that is not funny in the way that Chubby Brown treats rude. And it must be said, she is decidedly not a sight to marvel at. As the saying goes… “some people are born with the right to be ugly but she abuses the privilege.”
It seems to me that paying to see this nasty, unpleasant woman constitutes a degree of virtue signalling on the part of the customer. Margoyles reminds me of that other so and so who is far too full of himself, Eddie Izard who is also about as funny as a wet weekend in Wales.
I would be demanding a few grand before deigning to put up with either of the above. In fact I would probably prefer a night on a hospital ward before either of them.
”And it must be said, she is decidedly not a sight to marvel at. As the saying goes… “some people are born with the right to be ugly but she abuses the privilege.”
So does that mean we can rename her ‘Miriam Gargoyles’?? LOL
It’s interesting how we feel comfortable passing comment on people’s looks when they’ve shown themselves to be unpleasant people. I’ve done that with Dianne ‘Hippo’ Abbot and ‘Horse face’ Arden, of course. And while I’m in full-on ‘Biatch mode’ I do think the presenter on GB News ( is it Nana, with the long hair? ) has a very strange face.
Crikey, ”meow”, there’s a saucer of milk with my name on it….
And let’s not forget the fount of beauty that is Jo Brand – mouthy, crude, vindictive and certainly not anything I would like to wake up to. And another one who goes to great efforts to look tramp-like scruffy.
To be honest, go to see Margolyes you get what you expected to get. Why an entire page on the blindingly bleeding obvious?
LOL.
Thank f&*) no one is calling her a national treasure.
Some treasures are best buried and lost forever.
Actually she is probably on the verge of ‘national treasurehood,’ especially if she gets all her Winter jabs and boosters like a good woketard should.
They call her a national treasure because she has a sunken chest.
Although I agree that some of the criticisms on here of Margolyes are justified, she can be very funny when it being political and she doesn’t deserve this bullying playground pile on
Good article.
Never could abide the woman.
Didn’t really see the point of that rambling, sorry, don’t like the person stay away, seemed to me more interested to see her reactions because she’s Jewish, not how she performed.
Ms Margoyles demands a second opinion. “Okay, you’re ugly as well”
Miriam Gargoyles?
Her cousin.
Margolyes is an absolute grotesque and an extremely unpleasant woman. That the BBV glorify her tells you all you need to know
She’s nothing more than a talentless, foul mouthed bigot. And about as funny as a hernia. She’s been getting away with it for years only because she has the ‘correct views’ Awful woman.
No. She is gifted and talented in her craft and still gets work because of her range and skills.
But beyond that I cannot bear the woman.
“It wasn’t a good sign that she introduced Dickens as the greatest writer in the language. He is, without doubt, a very great writer – perhaps (except for the author of Anna Karenina?) the greatest novelist in the language.”
Good article, but, as a friend has just pointed out to me, the bit quoted above is a bit…odd.
Dickens was a fine writer and up with the best in English literature but there are many above.
D H Lawrence
George Elliot
Wilfred Owen
Some bloke called Shakespeare. Andrew Marvell and his contemporaries.
Morris West, Kipling, Auden, Betjeman, Elizabeth Acton, Delia Smith….and on and on…
All debatable, of course – but I was only querying the claim that Tolstoy was an Englishman!
ps, Delia Smith?
Lawrence, Eliot (one L), Owen, Delia Smith (?!) Elizabeth Acton (?!)…
What criterion are we using here to discuss literary merit – the best to prepare asparagus?
I meant, of course, “the best WAY to prepare etc etc”
I once tried a Delia Smith recipe and vowed to ignore all.
It did not work.
Specifically one of the ingredients [from memory pineapple] reacted badly with the other ingredients and completely destroyed it.
It seemed to me that dear old Delia included recipes in her book she had not tested herself.
Perhaps she did not even write the book herself?
Who knows?
Anyway – anything Delia is off the menu in my house forever.
And so much for her literary merit.
Might she be the greatest writer of fictional foods the world has ever seen?
As I will not touch her work with a barge pole I will never find out.
One buys cookery books for reliable recipes.
PS. I followed her instructions faithfully for all the good it did and it is a rare thing in my house that a recipe goes wrong.
Also: “English literature” – Morris West?
More fool him for paying 25 quid to find out what the rest of us have known for years.
Just an unpleasant personality.
A corpulent, flatulent, unfunny and unpleasant person. Why anyone would pay money and waste life-hours listening to her is beyond my understanding.
It is art Darling.
The Philistines and Great Unwashed notoriously don’t understand art.
After all look at the over-reaction to an artistic Olympic parody of the Last Supper.
Yes indeed, though we are expected to pay for it.
I remember when she was spontaneous.
Combustion?
That would be a novelty.
All the hot air?
Watched her on the Real Marigold Hotel series. Obnoxious, crude, arrogant, vulgar and deeply unpleasant. (By contrast, Paul Nicholas was tremendous fun!)
You watched the Real Marigold Hotel?
Are you on medication by any chance?
The first one was crap so I was most surprised when they made a sequel.
Maybe it was a bet to prove it possible to do worse?
I hope the medication helped.