Public Health Quotes

“Adult obesity and overweight statistics have increased by about 50 percent since the Dietary Goals were announced. [by the federal government, in 1977] That bears repeating: a 50 percent increase in obesity/overweight correlated with a 10 percent decrease in fat content in the diet.”
― Larry McCleary MD, Feed Your Brain, Lose Your Belly

“Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements--better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation--had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindles as a result of vaccinations. Cains wrote, "The death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra, and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases.... To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“It wasn’t until nearly 400 years later [since capitalist privatizations at home in Britain, i.e. the Enclosures starting in 1500s] that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise. […] It happened slightly later in the rest of Europe, while in the colonised world longevity didn’t begin to improve until the early 1900s [decolonization]. So if [capitalist economic] growth itself does not have an automatic relationship with life expectancy and human welfare, what could possibly explain this trend?

Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention […]: [public] sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property [note: the Enclosures required state violence to privatize land], and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done.

The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Can the CEO of a pharmaceutical company prioritize opioid addiction as a top concern if they are making a profit from opioids?”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“If [Hurricane] Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP [Deepwater Horizon] disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP has spent weeks failing to plug the hole in the earth that it made. Our political leaders cannot order fish species to survive, or bottlenose dolphins not to die in droves. No amount of compensation money can replace a culture that has lots its roots. And while politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water, and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

“Nearly all large healthcare organizations make their top executives extremely rich, a perverse incentive to profit off the sick.”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“Doubt is crucial in science—in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward—but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge."

...Individual clinicians cannot single-handedly combat this kind of antiscience, a climate that has only been fostered by some political and religious leaders and by the social media. But at the very least, we can make our patients aware of the forces at play and the mind games that such merchants of doubt employ.”
― John Halamka, The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine: Leveraging Innovation, Seizing Opportunities and Overcoming Obstacles of mHealth

“Medical errors—third leading cause of death in the U.S.—signifies a moral, professional, and public health dilemma.”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“Can specialty physicians prioritize preventative health, physicals, and early screenings if they are doctors for people who are sick?”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“This brings us to the saddest episode int he whole smoking-cancer controversy: the deliberate efforts of the tobacco companies to deceive the public about the health risks. If Nature is like a genie that answers a question truthfully but only exactly as it is asked, imagine how much more difficult it is for scientists to face an adversary that intends to deceive us. The cigarette wars were science’s first confrontation with organized denialism, and no one was prepared.The tobacco companies magnified any shred of scientific controversy they could. They set up their own Tobacco Industry Research Committee, a front organization that gave money to scientists to study issues related to cancer or tobacco—but somehow never got around to the central question. When they could find legitimate skeptics of the smoking-cancer connection—such as R. A.Fisher and Jacob Yerushalmy—the tobacco companies paid them consulting fees.”
― Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

“When the #COVID19Pandemic is over, the world needs to come together and create a unified vision for public health. What we consider our public health strategy lacks vision, agility and innovation and is in serious need of disruption. The societal pause is an opportunity to develop a new vision that is consistent with the requirements of a hyper-connected mobile society.”
― Tom Golway

“In the U.S., whichever party was in power wasn't interested in support for public health. Public health never competed well for resources in either the House or the Senate. Countries were like people: they didn't value health until they lost it. And then once they got it back, they returned to their old complacency.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“It is the pinnacle of arrogance to assume that whatever it is that “the experts” believe now is in fact the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Scientists have believed and public health officials have promoted many wrong things over the years, for both honorable, and not so honorable reasons. Sometimes the public health message is dead wrong.”
― Heather E. Heying

“The mosquito is the deadliest animal in the world... When it comes to killing humans, no other animal even comes close.”
― Bill Gates with Collins Hemingway

“You cannot serve needs you do not know”
― Dr. Tiffany Anderson

“An investment in the well being of families transforms the community for families!”
― Dr. Tiffany Anderson

“The only reason for a newborn to be infected with the hep B virus is that the mother who is infected can pass this virus to her child during the birthing process. Therefore, any vaccine injuries or related deaths for infants caused by the hep B vaccine for other than an infected mother are unnecessary.”
― Stephen Heartland, Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma: Vaccines, Drugs, and Healthcare in the United States

“Up to 7% or more' of newborn infants are given antibiotics within the first three days after birth and almost all of them will receive a hep-B shot within the first day or two of life. This is a bad combination. To protect them from sepsis is understandable, but it is obviously overdone. This is another reason why hep-B vaccines should not be given routinely to all newborns. Toxins within the hep B vaccine plus antibiotics equals potentially adverse outcomes for these infants which can easily be avoided. After taking antibiotics yeast in the body can grow out of control, causing a variety of problems. Then to make things worse, we add more yeast into the infant’s body with the hep B vaccine, which contains brewer’s yeast. The combination of hep B vaccine and antibiotics directly after birth is not a good idea.”
― stephen heartland, Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma: Vaccines, Drugs, and Healthcare in the United States

“Pediatric offices are receiving money from Big Pharma, insurance companies, and/or the government to promote vaccinations. (Chapter 3 and 4 – Solution #1). This is a blatant conflict of interest. This corruption has gone too far. If you decide you don’t want any vaccines for your child, or you decide to stop the vaccines due to a post vaccine reaction or illness you suspect may be due to the vaccines given, then the pediatric office may kick you out or turn you away from their practice. (Chapter 3 and 4 - Solution #2). This is unconscionable. But it is happening somewhere every day in our country. This is wrong. These offices should be there for their patients. They should not rule over us. Pediatric offices are businesses. As businesses, they should not be able to discriminate against people due to their personal beliefs and choices.”
― Stephen Heartland, Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma: Vaccines, Drugs, and Healthcare in the United States

“Solution #1. ELIMINATE PAYOFFS IN CLINICS TO PROMOTE VACCINATIONS. It should be illegal for doctors to accept bonuses or other incentives from insurance or pharmaceutical companies for vaccinating patients. This practice is clearly a conflict of interest.

When you take your child to a doctor, you want them to focus on your child and their health, and not on a yearend bonus some other company is paying to push vaccines. These bonuses/kickbacks provide a monetary incentive to the doctor and their office not related to the patient’s health, which is clearly a conflict of interest, and should be illegal. Without this bonus/kickback in their minds, perhaps the doctors can get back in the business of simply taking care of their patients, answering their questions, and providing them with better overall healthcare. If the pediatric office has no money dangling over them in the form of bonuses/kickbacks, then there should be no incentive to bar entrance to any family who wants to receive healthcare, unless the office is so full that they cannot accommodate new patients. This taking away of the bonus/kickback money will remove prejudice and bias against those who do not want to follow the recommended vaccine schedule, or who question the safety of the vaccines. And thereby, all patients will receive equal healthcare service under the law without bias. After all, isn’t this, shouldn’t this be the goal?”
― stephen heartland, Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma: Vaccines, Drugs, and Healthcare in the United States

“Solution #2. PRACTICE INFORMED CONSENT WITHOUT PREJUDICE. Parents and their children should not be refused service by any pediatric office due to their personal beliefs on vaccinations, nor should they be kicked out of these offices for refusal to take any vaccines or by not complying with following the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule. The doctors should be practicing informed consent, educating parents and children on vaccines and their benefits and risks, and allowing them to decide whether or not they wish to vaccinate.

Conflicts of interest should be removed from these offices, and families should never be forced to “follow the vaccine schedule, and keep up with the vaccines, or find a new pediatrician.” The pediatrician’s job should be to inform and advise, and not to use excessive force or pressure to promote vaccinations. Who is serving who? Parents should have the ultimate authority to decide if and when vaccines should be given to their children.”
― stephen heartland, Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma: Vaccines, Drugs, and Healthcare in the United States

“Solution #3. PARENTS SHOULD DECIDE WHAT IS RIGHT FOR THEIR CHILDREN. No drugs, vaccines, or medical procedures of any kind should be given or done to any child without the knowledge, approval, and consent of the parents or guardians of that child. No federal funding for children’s services within individual states for foster care or adoption should be allowed, as this violates the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, and encourages medical kidnapping by the states. Medical kidnapping by the state and their children’s health services due to a difference of professional medical opinion in health treatments for children should be disallowed. Doctors make mistakes. Therefore, one doctor’s diagnosis or opinion should never be considered enough evidence to take a child away from their parents. The parents/guardians, along with the advice of their own healthcare providers and not the state, shall determine what the acceptable treatment, if any, for any health condition present in their children should be. Parental rights and determination regarding children’s health treatment in cooperation with a licensed healthcare provider supersedes any local medical or governmental authority.

This recent movement to take away the rights and responsibilities from parents or their guardians must stop. It makes no sense. Children are not old enough or mature enough to make decisions which could affect the rest of their lives. They are children, and do not have the experience to make such decisions. This is a parent’s job. Parents are the ones responsible for their children, not the state, the school, or the doctor’s office. If others do these things without parental consent or knowledge and the child is killed or injured permanently from medical treatments, procedures, drugs, or vaccines, then who will be responsible for burying the child, or taking care of the disabled child for the remainder of their lives? It is the parents. Therefore, parents should have the ultimate authority over their children and their healthcare until the children become adults, at which time they can then make their own decisions for their lives and their healthcare options. The exception to this rule is if the children (<18 years old) are emancipated from their parents and/or are living apart from their parents and are responsible for their own welfare.”
― stephen heartland

“If people know the vaccines which are available, and understand their benefits and risks, they will come of their own volition and take the vaccines themselves or request them for their children. There should be no compulsion by the state to force vaccinations of any kind. If these vaccines are worthy of merit and consideration, and the people are given enough information concerning their risks and benefits, then the people will seek them out of their own accord and be able to decide whether or not the vaccinations are right for themselves and their families...

...The people of the United States are intelligent people. Provide the information and allow them to decide. Vaccination should always be a choice, and never a mandate.”
― stephen heartland, Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma: Vaccines, Drugs, and Healthcare in the United States

“Hegemonic powers, whether agents themselves or coalitions, pose a major threat to realizing health equity by seeking to maintain the public health economy to their advantage.”
― Christopher Williams

“The day that we realize consciousness as illusory, dreamlike, and negligible, this is the day that the moral clarity will come. We are merely vessels of embodied light and energy, weighed down in temporal-spatial dimensionality. We do not exist outside of embodiment.”
― Christopher Williams

“What I came to appreciate— what I hope to communicate here— is that measles isn't just one more childhood disease. It is the quintessential human pathogen. Measles does more than cause fever and a rash. It teaches us about ourselves— our capacity to learn, remember, and forget. It moves through crowds at astonishing speed. It has shaped and continues to shape our history. We have a vaccine to prevent measles, one that is battle-proven to be able to eliminate the disease from whole countries, even continents. However, what we've accomplished with that vaccine isn't just an example of scientific triumph, as the persistence of measles also provides evidence for our ongoing failures to reckon with poverty, inequity, racism, and the myriad legacies of colonialism.”
― Adam Ratner MD MPH, Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health

“Colonists were grateful for the perceived blessing of massive depopulation of indigenous people by infectious disease. A 1643 publication titled New England First Fruits conveys that message clearly, numbering smallpox first among a long list of divine gifts. In their minds, God cleared a path for their progress, and the chosen implement was contagion.”
― Adam Ratner MD MPH, Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health

“...population aging is a major successful outcome of public health interventions of the past 100 years”
― Linda P. Fried

“When science is disbanded in the name of policy, public health becomes political theater—and the audience is the world’s children.”
― Lawrence Nault

“It reminded me that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other -- but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection