Public health is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organized efforts of society, communities, organizations, and informed choices by individuals.
At least that's what it's supposed to be. In reality it is a captured organization that has not served the people in any meaningful way aside from sanitation.
But it's better to at least have a broken public health system than none at all right?
Wrong. The core issue with this is that individuals, companies, and governments offload their public health trust onto these institutions.
For example, let's say there's a food that has a cancer causing preservative in it. The FDA notices this but because of a variety of factors decides to downplay the risks and green lights the product. Now individuals and businesses see the product and assume that because it is FDA approved, it is safe. Everyone does this almost blindly. If there were no FDA, yes there might be no regulations but people would be significantly more weary of what they were buying. Ingredients labels can be enforced without a public health agency.
But public health changes have saved millions of lives
This is true but up until a point. Certain advances like improved sanitation saved millions. Vaccines are usually credited with this but it's not true and before the advent of vaccines many diseases had already decreased by 99% with improved basic public health measures alone. The actual impact of vaccines on mortality is very small. On serious cases is more notable but still very low. Two notable examples are:
- Polio: Less than 1% of polio infections resulted in serious illness. Another fraction of that resulted in deaths among the entire population. And an even smaller fraction of a percent of deaths among otherwise healthy individuals. So even for a real public health crisis like polio, the actual risk to an otherwise healthy person was a fraction of one percent.
- Measles: Before the vaccine came along, measles was treated similar to the chicken pox. In 1962, a year before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, there were 400-500 deaths from measles in the united states annually with 3-4 million cases. There were in the low thousands of serious issues though. You'll hear measles was killing millions globally, yes that's true but they were not developed in terms of living standards.
And this extends to many other vaccines. The key flaws come into play when you consider ever vaccinated person as cured and that every vaccine injury is just the price to pay. This isn't to say that vaccines are not useful or don't save people, they can - not always do. Like everything in science and medicine they are something to be questioned and proven safe repeatedly with all the facts. Not sheltered as untouchable.