By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

Changing the direction of a dinosaur was, presumably, hard for any who tried. Especially when the direction of the dinosaur was highly profitable to its minders. While paleontology does not fully support the analogy, the picture describes the new Global Health Strategy just released by the US government. Someone is trying hard to return the dinosaur - the largest source of funding for international public health there is - back toward a path that addresses healthcare and real diseases.

Someone else wants to keep it steered on the path preferred by the World Health Organization (WHO), Gavi, CEPI, and the corporate industrial complex that has co-opted public health. Both are trying to look like 'America First.'

Within all this, a thread emerges that does seem to be pushing for a more stable, healthier world. The hope is that the strategy document's confusion just reflects an underlying transition, and the glimpses of a return to common sense and good policy will become more obvious as it is implemented.

The strategy has three pillars, which read as if written by people with very different ideas. The first attempts to claw back what the pandemic industry lost when the US administration defunded the WHO and Gavi. The second aligns with the US HSS stated approach of evidence-based policy and reduced centralization (i.e. good public health). The third plugs (not unreasonably) for US manufacturing, and its future really depends on which of the first two pillars is doing the administration's bidding.

Pillar One: Supporting the Pandemic Industrial Complex

Pillar One, 'Making America Safer,' deals with outbreak risk and essentially reiterates the talking points of the WHO, Gavi, and CEPI, which the current US administration has been defunding.

Whilst the White House is telling us that Covid-19 was almost certainly the result of a lab leak after reckless gain-of-function research (a logical assumption), the strategy document would have the US public believe that pandemics of natural origin (within which they still include Covid) pose an existential threat to Americans in America, and that the US has stopped "thousands" of such outbreaks in recent years.

Ebola. COVID-19. Swine Flu. Zika. The world has experienced multiple epidemics and pandemics in the 21st century, and the threat of a future pandemic is increasing with global connectivity amongst humans and between humans and animals at an all-time high.

This is massively disappointing to read in a serious document. Global data indicates that mortality, and probably outbreak frequency, declined for the decade pre-Covid as infectious disease mortality has generally. The last major mortality outbreak likely of natural origin, the Spanish flu, was in the pre-antibiotic era over a century ago. Medical technology has progressed since then, not just propaganda.

We are better at detecting and distinguishing epidemics from the background of disease because we invented PCR, point of care antigen and serology tests, gene sequencing, and digital communications. Much of this came from America, but is here being used against it to purloin more resources on the pretext that if we lacked the technology to detect a pathogen previously, then the pathogen could not have existed.

Does anyone seriously believe that a hundred years of technological development, improved living conditions, and wildlife eradication actually leaves us more vulnerable?

A return to this poorly-evidenced pandemic rhetoric is a win for the pandemic industrial complex and those who see a need to continue what the strategy document calls elsewhere "perverse incentives to self-perpetuate rather than work towards turning functions over to local governments."

The strategy plans to detect outbreaks within seven days, and will staff countries considered to be high risk for this purpose. This is where logic breaks down. If Covid is indeed a product of gain-of-function research, then the focus should ...