A Holocaust of 'Public Health'

Do you know that the Holocaust was perpetrated in the name of safeguarding public health?

Typhus served as a convenient pretext to justify mass murder.

Nazi officials used typhus prevention as an expedient strategy to deceive prisoners into believing they were receiving medical treatment when in fact they were being gassed.

Jews were identified as carriers of disease -- and a therefore a public health risk -- to justify forcing them into ghettos. 

In her book "Murderous Medicine," Naomi Baumslag documents the complicity of German doctors and pharmaceutical companies in murderous medical experiments related to epidemic typhus to further Jewish genocide. 

The primary purpose of her book, subtitled Nazi doctors, human experimentation, and Typhus, is to explain how epidemic typhus served in the Jewish genocide.

The following excerpts are taken from a book review by Evelyne Shuster:

"Containing typhus epidemics provided a rationale for quarantine, ghettoization, and 'delousing baths' or 'disinfection.' Delousing baths were camouflage for gas chambers. But ghettoization, of course, fueled rather than contained the epidemic, and this, in turn, reinforced the 'prevention' strategy, i.e. disinfection. German and Austrian doctors favored overcrowded and unsanitary conditions to permit the epidemic to flourish, killing as many people as possible...

"Baumslag, a pediatrician at Georgetown University School of Medicine with a master of public health degree, explains that she chose to focus on typhus because the disease was rampant and the epidemic was used as a weapon of mass destruction with the 'silent complicity' of the International Committee of the Red Cross...

"Baumslag argues that doctors pressured Nazi officials to proceed swiftly to quarantine and ghettoization to further the 'eradication' of the disease — not typhus, but the Jews themselves. Typhus prevention rituals, including shaving and gassing, were used under the subterfuge of providing health care. Several million Jews were murdered as a direct consequence. Underlining the point that the goal was to kill Jews, she notes, 'with all their barbaric and unethical experiments the German researchers were unable to control typhus and get rid of lice.' Jews were left in a diseased environment and doomed to die." [1]

However, upon further reflection, "public health" wasn't merely a convenient pretext to assist in genocide. It served as the very basis and rationale for mass murder. It provided context for the racism that made the Holocaust possible.

The alleged imperative for "public health" demands that citizens make sacrifices for the greater good.  Nazi Germany took this idea to what appears to be an extreme, but in fact is nothing more than its logical application. National or public health -- Volksgesundheit --took total precedence over individual rights.

In the name of "racial hygiene," or eugenics, many scientists and medical doctors legitimized Nazi policies aiming to "cleanse" German society of people who were alleged to be "biologic threats" to public health.

If someone can be identified as a public health risk, his/her humanity no longer matters. S/he must be marginalized and eliminated at all costs.

As Susan Bachrach, PhD, points out in her essay In the Name of Public Health, Nazi racial-hygiene measures began with the mass sterilization of the “genetically diseased” and ended with the near-annihilation of European Jewry. 

According to Baumslag, we still face the challenge of educating physicians, health care workers, and researchers "to have a conscience and a love for humankind." She insists that there can be "no medical science without a moral basis."

In my opinion, her analysis falls short. The problem here isn't just the moral vulnerability of doctors, scientists, or the Red Cross. It is a societal morass of moral ambiguity that has errantly embraced the premise for "public health policy" in the first place.

In Judaism, an individual is NEVER sacrificed for the good of the public. Individual rights are sacrosanct.

In a society of sound moral conscience, we may not eliminate one person to save the life of another unless the former was actively pursuing the latter to kill him. Each and every life has infinite value. Any attempt to characterize an individual as a "threat" to the public must be corroborated with actual empirical evidence. Theories or statistical models are insufficient.

Putative pandemics may not be cited as a pretext to encroach on any individual's essential human freedoms without exercising "strict scrutiny."

We may not coerce an individual to receive an experimental vaccine, or any vaccine for that matter, if it carries the slightest risk, even for the sake of the so-called herd. All vaccines entail risks. That is a well-documented fact. Consequently, the very notion of mandatory vaccine policy is morally odious, and a grave violation of the Nuremberg Code.

Proponents of mandatory vaccination argue that the societal benefit outweighs the risk to the individual, and that if one child suffers death or lifelong injury from a vaccine, it's a justifiable sacrifice for "public health."

If the untimely death of one child is "par for course," then one can likewise rationalize the deaths of 1.5 million children in the Holocaust, and Dr. Mengele's cruel experimentation on his hapless victims, all in the name of "public health."

It's time for our society to disavow the spurious morality of "public health policy" once and for all.

Let us proclaim resolutely that each and every human life is sacred. Every human being deserves informed consent.

Say no to mandatory vaccination. There's too much at stake.

Let's heal our society from the scourge of "public health" tyranny.

Notes:

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1297275/

[2] https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/07192004-nazi-racial-hygiene-bachrach.pdf

[3] In Judaic law, the individual has infinite value, and may NOT be sacrificed for the sake of the community. 

Our sages taught:

If gentiles will demand one of a group of women, saying: "Yield us one of among you and we will defile her, if not we will defile you all", let all be defiled, rather than surrender to them one soul in Israel. [Mishna, Terumos 8:12]. Likewise, if gentiles will say to a group of men: "Yield us one of you and we will kill him, if not we will kill you all", let all of them be killed rather than surrender to them one soul in Israel. If, however, they single out the one, saying: "Give us that man, if not we will kill you all", if he be guilty of a capital crime, as, for example, Sheba son of Bichri [Samuel II 20:1], they may surrender him to them, but it is not commendable to advise them to do so; if he be not guilty of a capital crime, they all must submit rather than surrender them one soul in Israel.

Mishneh Torah, Yesodei Hatorah 5:5