Knowwhy

Michael Kuhn – Arguing about theories and political opinions

Corona Virus 6: Health care politics curing a national population – how to use the virus as a medicine against the virus

Newly infected people in Germany on 17th of April: About 3000. Statement of the German Minister for Health: ” Now, we have everything under controle.”

As I wrote in Blog one: The health care politics do not aim at the health of individual people but at securing the state sovereignty over the people handling people as a service for the state and the economy – Economists call this human capital – and that this, caring about this human capital as a whole, implies and calculates with all the ill and dead people and that this, the ill and dead people, are a means for a health policy securing a healthy population.

This is the health policy, which in the case of this virus is performed as the controlled dissemination of the virus in order to build an immune national society.

Usually, this, securing a healthy population, is what is done with the help of the accordingly constructed medicine as in the case of influenza, vacine taht also caclulates anually with a number of ill and dead people. In this case of this Corona virus there is not such medicine, however, the strategy of the same health political aims at the same healthy population, and operates due to lacking medicine in this case with different means. And these means are telling, last but not least about what this health policy means for the people, the clients of these health care politics.

Nothing can express this better than the German word “Durchseuchung”, used among the pandemia experts, how health care policies, aiming at a healthy population, works if there is no such medicine as in the case of influenza. (There is no English word for “Durchseuchung”, this is a linguistic privilege of the German language: the meaning is a concept of heathcare as the active spread of an infectious disease as a strategy to create an immune population). Durchseuchung is the name for a health care policy against this virus that uses the abilities of infected humans to create anti-body if they are infected and which uses this ability to create anti-body as a replacement of a medicine as a means for steering the number of infected and dead people towards an immune population, otherwise done with a vacine. The art of Durchseuchung is to control the spreading of the virus with the help of medical facilities towards creating an immune population with the help of the virus infection. The people infected with the virus become the medical means to create immunity, thus the infected people replace the non-existing medicine to create a healthy population. This works by balancing the percentage of people which are infected not exceeding the number of infected the healthcare system can care about, with the aim to leave them as healed, that is as now immune people. This means, it is the ill people who create via this medically supervised process of Durchseuchung step by step an immune national population, carefully documented by counting a) infected, b) healed and c) dead people, all this statistically supervised by observing the rate to which the population becomes successfully durchseucht.

Therefore, for this supervision of a successful Durchseuchung, and to collect information about the level to which the virus has already infected people, for measuring this, it is not necessary to test everybody, in order to know who is ill and who needs medical treatments. Ill people, never detected or treated by the healthcare system are a part of this controlled spread of the virus and it is therefore enough to test as many people, as needed for a statistical sample, that allows to get enough data to assess the degree of Durchseuchung in the popualtion as a whole and the effect of this strategy, that there is a number of non-tested and unknown number of infected people, is an intended instrument of this Durchseuchungsagenda (agenda for Durchseuchung), since these infected help to spread the virus and thus to create a growing immune population. As said before the strategy of this controlled virus spreading is anything else but protecting people to get the virus. Spreading the virus and included in this infecting people is a very part of this Durchseuchungsstrategy.   

Saying that there are not enough capacieties to test more people, this is the lie of the helath care politics of a Durchseuchung, a lie, that pretends that the health care politics are aiming at avoiding infected people and with which this strategy of Durchseuchung only justifies, that it is not their intention to avoid infected people as much as possible but that they count on infected people because they need and use the unknown and untested people for this controlled spreading of the virus. The example of Austria, where they only now decided to test all people in elderly homes, shows that the spread of the virus and the creation of infected people is the what the Durchseuchungsstrategy is all about. Avoiding that people get infected by the virus is not their strategy, they operate with the infection of people for the creation of a immun population. And if and where this controlled spreading of the virus kills too many people, they take action to avoid infections for particular groups of people, as in the case of Austria, since this shows to obvious that this strategy of Durchseuchung operates with infected and dead people.

The controlled infection of the people by those people, who are not tested nor known, with the virus is the medicine of the healthcare system in this war of state policies against the virus. For this controlled infection of people, the live of people is adjusted to this controlled spreading of the virus and for this all those political measures ruling people’s life priorities are part of this controlled spread of the virus gearing this controlled infection of people towards creating a growing immune population, therefore supervized by accompaning statistics about the number of infected, healed and dead people. This, using the controlled infection of people for creating an immune population, is why this Durchseuchung of a population is somehow rightly called a war, because it implies the controlled infection of the people with the virus, controlled by the health care facilities and the politics intervening with restrictions ruling the life of the citizens towards the aims of this war.

And there are variations carrying out this war, the controlled spreading of the virus across the population towards creating via this spreading a growing immune society. There are countries, which purposefully enforce different scales of restrictions, different ways to test people and ways to count on and to count the infected people, and different ways to treat them in hospitals if needed. Some countries do not force them to stay at home etc, but let them do their normal business. Japan and Sweden were such cases for a strategy less restricting the normal life of people. They tried in a different variation of this strategy of “Durchseuchung” a population another kind of balancing the controlled spreading of virus infections and the economic damages, counting on the strategy, that leaving more or less the normal life conditions would also spread the virus with the infected people and with these infected people create the immun population and that this way of spreading the virus without restrictions would not excced the number of infected people the health care system could handle for those infected people which need medical help, and that the national economy could digest these infected people better than closing down major parts of the economy, inlcuding the economic damages this closing down creates for the future. The UK, another way, tried with no restrictions, let the virus spread in order to create in this radical way with the infected people an immune population and prioritized running the business as usual and then later shifted to the policies towards the controlled Durchseuchungsstrategy, just as those other countries have done it with a different way of balancing the infections and the economic damages, prioritizing to firstly have a phase of the more controlled infections of people, the above described Durchseuchungsstrategy, and as a part of this, closing down parts of their economy, and to do this until they reach the right balance between infected and immune people in a population. The criteria and the aims are in all strategies the same.

The medical people execute this agenda and how they do this is what the health care system and the medical people are always doing, also under normal circumstances. The medical staff, medical doctors on the top, always treat people in a way that enables them to go back to normal life and to work. Raising the question, why their patients tend to come back so frequently with the same diseases, about which it is very well know what causes them, raising such questions is not what medical doctors consider as their mission. The mission of medical services is to provide healthy people and these are people who are in a constitution to carry out their ordinary lives, do their jobs, provide their services in their jobs. These are healthy people of a healthy population the medical services create, medical services which are judged by the criteria how these medical services serve this mission, providing a population that is able to do their services in the jobs and elsewhere.

This is the national mission the medical people provide and which they are especially proud of in situations when this mission is challenged by extraordinary situations like this one with this virus. No medical doctors have any problem with their moral principles, if the healthcare policies, they put into practice, as the one of a controlled spread of a virus relies on their medical abilities and that includes all the ill and dead people.  No wonder that this mission implies that medical doctors, who are proud of this mission, present this mission therefore as what it is, a service for their nation state: „Wir sind an der Front, ganz ohne Munition. Wir müssen von jedem Patienten ausgehen, dass er potentiell infiziert ist.“ („We are at the front, but without ammunition. We must assume each patient, that he is potentially infected.”) Presenting the lacking masks as munition fighting in the war at the war front lines, this war speech is the speech of the passionate medical doctors in a war mission for their nation state.

One may object that under the circumstances that there is no medicine against this virus, there is no other way than doing it this way, the Durchseuchung does it and that it is also true, that no more people could be tested due to lacking testing facilities and that therefore not more people could be prevented from becoming infected. And, let aside raising the question, how it is possible that societies which are able to do all kind of super high tech things, but which in the medical sectors are making little progress with all those diseases which are considered as “Volkskrankheiten” (such as cancer, high blood pressure most people die of, stress) and thus as a natural part of people’s life, and let us therefore als assume, that this, the lacking medicine against this virus, was not the consequent result of how this health care systems cares about health organized as a business, such as it’s business calculations not creating any medicine that does not promise business.  Let us assume that this virus appearance is just a bad coincidence, maybe even the result of any decision errors in any research agendas about such virus infections, so that there is no medecine, mistakes, one may say, that can always happen. 

Assuming all this, there is though one option, handling such coincidences or correct such mistakes, capitalist societies do not have in such a case and this option is to reorganize life in a way that people are not paying the price with their damaged health as they do in this Durchseuchungsagenda. Reorganizing life in the way that above all priorities were given to the health of people and nothing else but this, this is an option capitalist societies do not have, because criteria deciding about people’s life, criteria which prioritise anything in this society along the question, what would be the best for the people’s needs, such criteria would violate what capitalist societies prioritise very fundamentally.  

What counts in these societies, living in a nation state supervised market economy, becomes very clear along the decision, that anything might be closed down, shops, schools, public life etc, but that not working at all is no option, because not working damages the economy of this society and therefore working still must go on, what ever the risk to be infected is. And this, working must go on, does not only apply to work that produces things people do need for living. This, work must go one, disregarding any infection risks, is the work in to the whole business world independent from what they produce and what the usage of their products provide for the needs of people.  This society does not have the option to limit work to those products needed for people to live, because what people need is not the criterion for the production of anything this society produces. The criterion for what and what for anything is produced in capitalist societies is not if it is useful for people, but if producing and selling things results in more money than has been invested. And, for this, anything is produced that sells and only then and only for that purpose, making the amount of money growing things are produced. What counts in this society is the growth of money and it is only for this reason, why any business must go on, no matter if working spreads diseases among the working people during the war against a virus. In capitalist societies, more dangerous than diseases is the danger to damage the growth of money of the investors, because if this money does not grow, there are indeed even not those products people need for living. This is how capitalist societies work, what they prioritise and this is why reducing work to what is needed for poeple to get on with their lives in such a situation, is no option for capitalist societies. Without this growth of the money of the investors, this economy geared towards the growth of money would collapse.      

Not really surprising, new debates have just started, introducing a distinction within the population and this is only consequent, consequent from the point of view of a war against a virus that aims at securing a national population. Many countries discuss nowadays the question, how long these societies are able to cope with the economic damages, this strategy of “Durchseuchung” implies and if one should not think about distinguishing the population of a country along the criteria, who is needed for running the economy and who not. Hence, old and therefore economically useless people are discovered as the main victims of the pandemic and the questioned is discussed, if not more people of the useful part of the population, those who are able to work, should not be allowed to go back to work, while the old people should be locked away. Newly selecting and balancing the population of a nation state according to the services they provide for the national economy and, looking at the economic damages, locking all people non-selected away, arrives at considerations, if the risk for those, who are needed to keep the economy running, should be re-considered and those, who are not needed for any work, but become with their vulnerability a burden for the healthcare system, should be looked at differently and treated more restrictively. The idea is, let the useful people go to work and lock the old ones away by force. This, the distinction of all the equal citizens according to their services for the nation and selecting out old people as a threat for the health care system, they unnecessarily occupy with their diseases, a health care system that should be available for those, who could get the virus while doing their services for the nation, this selection of people according to what their services for the nation state and the national economy are, this might sound like a Nazi-like view on a national population – it is, indeed, but there are no Nazis far and wide, who have a say, these are the very normal political considerations of very normal state politicians and all sorts of pandemia experts.  

” Now, we have everything under controle.”


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