Dear Editor,
Dear Sir,
Life and livelihood both are health issues
The feature article [1] analyzing UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s understanding of the covid-19 pandemic and his strategy to counter it as a Chancellor of Exchequer has revealed inadequacies in appreciating the true dialectical relation between health and economics. Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that Sunak’s balancing acts between the two could neither mitigate the damage to either of them. When Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) advocated for lockdown to reduce the infection rate and mortality, Sunak opposed it over its economic fallout and implemented the scheme of Eat Out to Help Out, which did help people but its negative economic consequences outstripped the benefit.[1]
Rishi Sunak, while talking about his takes away from the pandemic that “We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,” adding, “If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed”, is rather disparaging and disheartening. It is worth recalling, the German pathologist and politician Rudolf Virchow, who characterized medicine as a social science as much as a biological science for promoting and improving public health. His words “medicine is social science and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale”, continues to be relevant even today. If Sunak was tilted more towards economic and social wellbeing, his critics were overwhelmed by the virulence of the covid pandemic. They should have collaborated and supplemented each other in framing the policy to tackle the pandemic and protect and promote the ‘health’ of the people, which has been defined by the WHO in 1948 : “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Thus, health and wealth should not be have been articulated as a binary. Medical and economic interventions both are equally important to address and sustain health.
Reference :
[1] Richard Vize. Rishi Sunak’s covid record- and what it tells us about his views on health, wealth, and the value of science. BMJ 2022;379:o2715
Re: Rishi Sunak’s covid record—and what it tells us about his views on health, wealth, and the value of science