10th February 2023
Susan Michie the communist “public health expert”
“If you look at the publications coming out from the behavioural group of SAGE, many, many of them talk about the problems of inequality in our society, and the dangers of inequalities, the fact that the pandemic itself and the response have increased those inequalities and the need to reduce inequalities. And there’s a large group — we call it SPI-B — on the Behavioural Science Group. And we never talk about each other’s politics. I assume there’s a very broad range, but everybody’s unanimous about wanting a more equal society.
“And in order to get a fairer and more just society, it does require the government that’s been elected to have policies that reduce rather than increase inequalities. Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to embarrass you or make it a personal point. It’s just, we’re in a strange world where politics and science have got very close all of a sudden, and I wonder, do you regret that, do you wish that – I think there is a sort of ideological difference, I suppose, with public health science, taking a more population-wide view of things: how do we deal with this across the population? How do we deal with this as a society? How do we make things less unequal and fairer, and that is a different kind of emphasis coming from public health, population health science, to what I don’t see a lot of amongst my colleagues maybe, but certainly the media, and especially the papers that you mentioned, would have much more emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, rather than taking a sort of more collective population approach.
“But the reality is, that this pandemic has shown everybody that no individual is an island. We’re very interconnected. And no one community or no one socio-economic group within society can think that they can solve it for themselves and protect themselves, because it’s not like that.”
She says, “What I don’t see a lot of amongst my colleagues, is much more emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, overtaking a sort of more collective population approach.”
