…A more relaxed approach to raw, unpasteurized, milk is another topic that has provoked a great deal of noise from critics of the current DHHS regime. To read some of them, it would seem that any easing of the requirements for the pasteurization of milk entering the US food system would lead to mass infection… Read More »
The hullabaloo over Covid-19 vaccine recommendations in the US raises some interesting questions about other areas where public health elites have been outraged about shifts towards policies that many of us in Europe would take for granted… Mandates may be the right policy in the US context of small government and family privacy but let… Read More »
Democracy should certainly be informed by expert knowledge but democratic governments are entitled to take their own view on the policies that might follow. Benajmin Disraeli, a 19th century UK conservative politician, once commented, after a major extension in the franchise, that political elites must now educate their masters. Disraeli showed a degree of humility… Read More »
The constitutional processes are now complete and Robert F Kennedy, Jr has been confirmed as Secretary for Health and Human Services despite a vicious, and at times vitriolic, campaign waged by the biomedical and public health establishment. For more than fifty years, I have been reading work by US medical sociologists on the power and… Read More »
It is widely reported that one of the first acts of the incoming Trump administration will be to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). Predictably, responses are divided. US nationalists dislike the growing efforts to turn WHO into some form of world government with authority to dictate health policies to individual states. Against this,… Read More »
The proposed appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr as Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) has provoked howls of outrage from many prominent figures in the US medical, bioethical and public health establishment. No doubt it was intended to do so. One does not have to accept his answers to many of the key… Read More »