During the Covid crisis, the cry from Covid critics was incessant: “Fauci! Fauci! Fauci!” Fauci was a liar. Fauci was a killer. Fauci was evil. Fauci had to go if we were to regain our healthcare freedom.
Well, Fauci is gone. He is no longer head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the 27 entities that compose the National Institutes of Health, which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He also is no longer chief medical advisor to the president. He left both positions in 2022.
Anthony Fauci
For that matter, we no longer live under Covid lockdowns, and no one is being mandated to take vaccines or wear masks.
So, that means we are now, once again, free with respect to healthcare, right?
Well, that is certainly what many of the Covid critics would say. For some three years, they cried, “Fauci must go! The lockdowns must go! The mandates must go!” So, now that Fauci, the lockdowns, and the mandates are gone, many of the Covid critics would say, “We are once again free! No Fauci, no lockdowns, and no mandates! Yay!”
Unfortunately, however, the reality is different. We are no more free now than we were during Fauci, the mandates, and the lockdowns. Oh sure, the healthcare tyranny has lightened up. It’s true that Fauci is gone and that we are no longer suffering under lockdowns and mandates. But that doesn’t make us free. It simply makes our oppression less oppressive.
As I have long argued, the only way to achieve genuine healthcare freedom is through the separation of healthcare and the state — just as our ancestors separated church and state. So long as government wields the power to impose healthcare mandates and lockdowns and regulate, manage, direct, and provide healthcare, people cannot be considered genuinely free.
Consider Jeanne Marrazzo. Do you know who she is? She is the new director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Does the fact that Marrazzo now heads the NIAID mean that we have now regained our healthcare freedom? Many of the Covid critics would say yes. They would say that since Fauci is gone and Marrazzo has not imposed mandates and lockdowns, we are now free with respect to healthcare.
But they are wrong. So long as government wields the power to impose mandates and lockdowns, we are not free, even if government isn’t exercising that power. That’s because the government can exercise its tyrannical powers whenever it wants in the future, especially whenever a new healthcare crisis comes up.
This is what many Covid critics simply cannot see. They think that so long as government is exercising its healthcare powers in a benevolent, gentle way, people are free. Not so. Healthcare freedom is when government is constitutionally prohibited from exercising any healthcare powers at all. Healthcare freedom is when there is no Department of Health and Human Services, FDA, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other healthcare agency because the Constitution prohibits the federal government from involving itself in healthcare.
The same principle applies at the state level. Under the Constitution, the states are vested with the traditional “police power” that have characterized governments throughout the ages — powers that relate to the “health, safety, morals, and welfare” of the citizenry. But state governments have no more business involving themselves in healthcare (or morals and welfare) than the federal government does. In fact, it was at the state level, not the federal level, that most of the Covid lockdowns took place.
Therefore, the ideal is a constitutional amendment that is similar to the First Amendment and that states as follows: “No law shall be enacted by either the federal or state governments that provides or regulates healthcare or abridges the free exercise thereof.” Is achieving a constitutional amendment difficult? Of course it is, but not impossible. If the Constitution could be amended 27 times, it can be amended again.
It is through the separation of healthcare and the state that we achieve genuine healthcare freedom, just as it was through the separation of church and state that we achieved genuine religious freedom.