Transcript
Speaker: The American military incursion into Venezuela is on everyone's mind these days. Dictatorships and authoritarian governments are usually a disaster for public health.
Speaker: The Maduro government was a major setback for the health of the Venezuelan people. When a junta runs a country like Venezuela, pollution and extraction of natural resources by multinational corporations takes precedence over the health of the local people.
Speaker: As a result, cancer rates rise over time and cancer hotspots emerge locally. In Venezuela, hospitals were often shuttered, running out of supplies and trained personnel. Routine prevention, such as immunizations against the preventable infectious diseases of childhood, become scattered or fail altogether, resulting in widespread outbreaks and mortality.
Speaker: Diseases that were considered eliminated, like measles, come roaring back. The government directs national spending to military purposes and away from healthcare. Patriotic slogans replace policy.
Speaker: Women are encouraged to stay out of the workforce and have more children. Mussolini was a big fan of patriarchy, control of women's bodies, and large families with stay-at-home moms.
Speaker: Emergency response systems can also start failing, and maternal and infant mortality start rising. These are well-known indicators of social stress and breakdown. Under these conditions, medical personnel also start fleeing the country.
Speaker: Some of the citizenry can become passive and despairing, giving up hope that their voice and democratically expressed wishes have any impact on strongman rule. Self-medication through drugs and alcohol can become epidemic.
Speaker: The lifespan of Russian men 20 years ago had fallen to 59 years, largely due to vast consumption of vodka and resultant liver cirrhosis, although an anti-drinking program in Russia has since improved those numbers.
Speaker: But Putin is clearly no savior of public health.
Speaker: I will not attempt to predict what happens next in Venezuela. There are too many unknowns, but every characteristic about public health in Venezuela that I just mentioned is also true in the United States to varying degrees.
Speaker: Consider the skyrocketing costs of American healthcare. care With the end of subsidies under the Affordable Care Act January 1st, at the same time the US military budget is bloated beyond recognition.
Speaker: Hospitals in rural states and red states will see reduced services, staff shortages and bankruptcies at accelerating rates as Medicaid funds vanish.
Speaker: Patients will have to drive hundreds of miles for a stroke, a heart attack, a broken finger to deliver a baby. A lot of ambulances will not make it in time.
Speaker: Food assistance programs were suspended late last year before federal judges reversed the government diktat. Consider also the a re-emergence of measles and whooping cough and rising maternal and infant mortality, especially in Trump voting counties.
Speaker: Oil industry pollution has long been identified as an origin of high cancer prevalence, especially, for example, in the notorious Cancer Alley of Louisiana, and fracking in Colorado and Pennsylvania are linked to acute leukemia in kids.
Speaker: Environmental protections are being undone at an alarming rate, and we should expect more cancer death in America. Physicians and scientists are also leaving the United States in growing numbers as the manufactured stress continues to destroy America's healthcare and medical research infrastructure.
Speaker: Consider also the proposal to strip American married women of their vote by declaring the name on a birth certificate must match that on the voter registry. Women who've changed their names by marriage are therefore immediately disenfranchised.
Speaker: The health and rights of women and children in a patriarchal society are usually sacrificed to the egos of the white male ruling class. Patriotic slogans about the Monroe Doctrine and the new imperial America bullying the whole world may speed the heart rates of some supporters but will not hide the deep destruction of public health.
Speaker: America is looking less and less like Canada, with its robust educational and health systems and longevity, and more and more like Venezuela or even Russia, in denial that the game is already over and the whole world sees it.
Speaker: American voters seem passive, showing up for demonstrations but in not nearly large enough numbers, and returning to TikTok and Instagram and online shopping for their entertainment.
Speaker: Margaret Atwood seems to be sitting in an armchair to my left, sipping her black tea quietly and avoiding eye contact.
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Speaker: See you next time.
