What is a public health problem? Human beings are wholes of mind and body. Little that alters the shape of one does not alter the shape of the other. Eviction? That’s a public health problem. So are violence, climate change, and homophobia, according to the CDC. Racism, fake news, police brutality, and social media are a few more answers offered by the expert community of late. The governments of Utah and Tennessee recently passed resolutions declaring pornography a “public health crisis.” People who never marry live about two years less than those who do. Are you responsible to your country for getting hitched, or is your country responsible to you?

The Covid-19 virus is a menace made of pure physical reality. It operates under a logic of its own. It cannot be wished away, it is outside our politics. Public health science is what reveals this reality to us; thus it too, we are told, has no politics. Somehow it is because public health is outside politics that it can claim as its territory all human affairs.

Is the head of the Centers for Disease Control your sovereign? Of the FDA, HHS, or NIAID? Some say that they are even more than this, that they are tyrants. This idea seems at once deranged and timid. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky are not Kim Jong-un and do not have any aspiration to be. But that the person in charge of North Korea is Kim we would not dispute. And that the regulation of fishing limits on Atlantic salmon, the question of the nature of justice, and policies for late library book fines in Terre Haute, Indiana lie firmly outside Kim’s domain we would not dispute either. We would not even think to argue about them.

Our public health agencies are everywhere and nowhere, alpha without omega, beginning without end. No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.