The 12 Forgotten Principles of Public Health

1. Public health affects all health outcomes, not just a single disease such as Covid19. It is important to consider the harm resulting from public health measures.

2. Public health is about the long term rather than the short term. Spring lockdowns simply delayed and postponed the pandemic to fall.

3. Public health affects everyone. It shouldn't be used to shift the burden of disease from the rich to the less well off, as lockdowns have done.

4. Public health is global. Public health scientists need to consider the global impact of their recommendations.

5. Risks and damages cannot be completely eliminated, but they can be reduced. Zero-COVID strategies backfire, making matters worse.

6. Public health should focus on high-risk populations. Many Covid19 public health measures have never been used to protect high-risk older people, leading to unnecessary deaths.

7. While contact traceability and isolation are critically important for some infectious diseases, it is useless and counterproductive for common infections such as influenza and COVID19.

8. A case is a case only if a person is sick. Mass testing of asymptomatic individuals is detrimental to public health.

9. Public health is about trust. To gain trust, public health officials and the media must be honest and trust the public. Shame and fear should never be used in a pandemic.

10. Scientists and public health officials must be honest with what is not known to them. For example, epidemic models should be run with the full range of plausible input parameters.

11. In public health, the civil debate must be open and deeply critical. Censoring, silencing, and defaming lead only to fear of speaking, to the thought of the flock, and to distrust.

12. It is important that scientists and officials listen to the public experiencing the consequences. The pandemic shows that many non-epidemiologists understand health better than epidemiologists.

For more information about Focused Protection, and to see the 850,000+ signatures of Doctors worldwide who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, click below:

https://gbdeclaration.org/focused-protection/

-Tamicam