New research claims that the academic discipline of public health promotes radical anti-capitalist policies. Activism is presented as objective research by activist academics leaning on their scientific credentials.
The discussion paper Anti-Capitalism and Public Health is published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and is available for download here. Author Dr Christopher Snowdon shows how leading figures in the public health establishment now propose the overthrow of the market economy, with a shift of focus from health concerns to an attack on the entire global economic system (albeit with some selective exemptions for China, Cuba, and Venezuela—and the World Health Organisation).
Snowdon shows how, within the lifetime of public health as a so-called academic discipline, it has gone from targeting a few “unhealthy commodity industries,” such as tobacco, to attacking all “commercial entities.” He claims
Anti-capitalist rhetoric is far from uncommon in academia, but the field of public health has become rabidly opposed to free markets and free trade in the last decade. Public health has become more of a militant political enterprise than an evidence-based, scientific movement.
The same ‘militant enterprise’ credentialed European Commission chief Ursulan von der Leyen, who in 2001 obtained a Master of Public Health degree at the Hannover Medical School. Subsequently, in March 2016, she survived a formal investigation by the same institution, prompted by claims that over 40% of the pages in her doctoral thesis contained instances of plagiarism.
