Many Americans, when told of the need for a public health system, become slack-jawed, with an incredulous look on their face, having no idea what a public health system really is. In an Aug. 6 article for National Public Radio (NPR), titled, “Detroit Once Tried To Privatize Public Health, Now It’s Trying To Rebuild,” author Anna Maria Barry-Jester insightfully describes what a public health system is, and how Detroit’s was utterly destroyed through privatization. This was the fate of other cities’ health systems as well. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/08/06/1024933341/detroit-public-health-privatize-covid-bankruptcy]
It is an American health system that Dr. Joycelyn Elders, U.S. Surgeon General in 1993-94, and in 2020 co-initiator of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has tirelessly attempted to educate others about, both in the United States and internationally.
Detroit’s city health department was housed in the Herman Kiefer public complex, a sprawling complex in central Detroit, founded in 1911, to serve as a public health hospital; to combat rampant infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, mumps, measles, and others. Barry-Jester reported on her interview with public health nurse Vernice Davis Anthony, who worked for the Detroit Health Department in the 1970s. Barry-Jester writes:
“She [Anthony] and her co-workers walked the neighborhoods building connections and trust, visited the home of every new mom, and worked in schools, tracking cases of infectious diseases and making sure kids got immunized. Wearing health department badges and uniforms, she particularly liked doing home visits in vibrant Southwest Detroit, then an ethnically diverse community that was home to Black people from the South, white people from Appalachia and many other residents with roots in Puerto Rico, Mexico and the Middle East.”
But the health department had resources to back up its mission: “a world-class laboratory and a pharmacy that provided discounted medicines to city residents. It ran clinics throughout the sprawling neighborhoods.” At its high point, the health department employed 700 employees.
But the City of London-engineered U.S. economic collapse of the 1990s and early 2000s sent the highly industrialized City of Detroit, with one of the highest concentrations of machine tools in the world, into a self-feeding tailspin, aided by Malthusian city planners. In 1950, Detroit supported a population of 1,850,000; by 2010, that had been slashed to 714,000 after the 2007-2010 mortgage-backed securities-triggered collapse. Some people talk about that crisis in financial terms, but its physical effects were more profound. From 2008 to 2010, cash-strapped Detroit shed 70% of its employees. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder had already stripped the Health Service to the bone, but when the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2012, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, Bing and Snyder, and the creditors sold the husk of the Health Department to a “nonprofit,” and named it the Institute for Population Health. The Herman Kiefer public health complex was shut down, and became prey to mold and vermin.
At this point, the Detroit Public Health System, which had once had 700 proud, productive employees, was down to 5.
And the wolf came to the door. When COVID-19 struck in the spring of 2020, Detroit, even though it had started to build up its public health system, was completely, criminally unprepared. Detroit suffered 2,400 coronavirus deaths, twice the number of Baltimore, which has less population. Detroit’s COVID-19 death rate is roughly double the national average.
Today, just 34% of Detroit’s residents are vaccinated against COVID. If this can happen to what was America’s fourth most populous and most industrialized city, think of what it must be like to live in a nation that has no public health system. [ref].
