An essay by Tom Penn.
Friday, October 1 saw the launch of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), to mark a ‘new era of public health’ wherein by ‘putting prevention at the heart to help people live longer, healthier and happier lives’ the UK shall be ‘levelled up’.
Using Government’s Covid-19 response as a comparative barometer, on scrutiny OHID’s ethos appears rather more fanatical than its benign objectives suggest. One could be forgiven for thinking that they exist merely to pour additional fuel onto a blazing fire of interventionist public health measures already well out of control, after all it is Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty the man providing OHID’s leadership. Responsible for the recent rebranding of Pfizer’s Cominarty – from Covid-19 vaccine dispensable for children, to indispensable, intramuscularly-administered juvenile antidepressant – he is not to be trusted with a toothbrush let alone a more expanded role in public health.
OHID’s driving aim is to identify trends, based on geographical location, ‘of a person’s life expectancy and the years they can expect to live a healthy life’ and then implement the appropriate preventative healthcare measures so as to, you guessed it, reduce pressure on the NHS.
It appears that after a year and a half of bowing to the vacuous maxim ‘Protect the NHS’ the public shall now be asked to take their hypochondriacal adherence to Covid-19 directives and apply it to a plethora of other domains in defence of the same agitprop institution; the most pressing of which OHID have identified as tobacco, alcohol, and recreational drug use, obesity, work, housing, and education – in short, life itself.
To tackle this further rebranding of Covid-19 – from foreign invader to home-grown terror cell – OHID will work collaboratively with ‘the NHS, academia, scientists, research and industry’ to apply ‘cutting-edge science, technology, evidence and data to target support where it is most needed.’ I daren’t entertain high hopes for this ambitious sounding, clearly bogus humanitarian credo, as all aforementioned entities have become state controlled, and although throughout the pandemic they have indeed collectively identified the most vulnerable of society, they have also unequivocally failed to offer them targeted support, using them instead for target practice.
OHID shall address the ‘unacceptable health disparities that exist across the country and reduce the pressure on the health and care system as work is done to reduce the backlog’. This all sounds rather convoluted and expensive when for no cost at all and with negligible effort, the office could simply demand that all surgeries, hospitals, care homes and other healthcare settings resume normal service, or better still, stop declaring hysterical health emergencies where there are none in the first place, but I suppose one should never look a gift-Trojan horse in the mouth.
Vaccine passports were a once ludicrous and unimaginable concept, and yet we find ourselves on the cusp of their introduction. What kind of similarly fanciful yet now ultimately feasible additional controls might we expect from OHID in the future, based upon their already clumsy sounding and corruptible social philosophy: rationed alcohol? A weekly sugar allowance? Mandatory monthly VO2 max tests? Cholesterol level-based access to Deliveroo?
In all likelihood OHID shall become pivotal in edging us closer to a digital identification system more comprehensive in scope than we may initially have thought possible: a health passport encompassing not only one’s Covid-19 vaccination status but potentially also one’s Body Mass Index, and lung, liver and artery performance levels. Hence, the poor shall be at a disadvantage from the get-go; immediately the most exposed to this revamped meddling and modelling.
This might all sound rather fantastical, yet we have only to cast our minds back a mere matter of months to when we were being told how many people we could have round for dinner, to know that anything is possible in this new age of militarised public health and wellbeing controls.
OHID are not the only new kids on the health bloc however:
‘As Public Health England is replaced, the new UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) will have a laser-like focus on health protection.’
The UKHSA also became officially operational as of October 1, and according to gov.uk have been built on ‘the legacy of Public Health England, NHS Test and Trace and the Joint Biosecurity Centre to help keep the nation safe.’
SAGE, SPI-B, SPI-M, NHS T&T, the JBC, and now the UKHSA and OHID: targeting the deprived oppressed (everyone) with the hostile lasers of their preventative health and safety war, and with no ceasefire in sight.