This infographic explains the striking distance of different public health measures, from micrometers to kilometers. The general rule of thumb is this—if the virus is anywhere near your face, something has gone terribly wrong.

The truth is that the best public health is invisible and far away. It operates 1,000 km above your head. It is global infrastructure that hums away in the background, keeping viruses from getting anywhere near your pretty face at all.

The worst public health, by contrast, is all up in your face. It’s strapped millimeters from your skull. Like masks, which stop the virus right at your cake-hole. Or home tests, which detect virus already living in your nose. Or vaccines, which defend your internal organs.

If the disease is anywhere near your orifices, official channels have broken down.

These measures are all life-saving and good—obviously mask up and get vaccinated—but it’s important to remember that these are desperate measures. They’re only there because everything above has gone terribly wrong.

The key to the future is avoiding such desperate times at all. Understanding that involves understanding not what good public health is, but where. At what distance are we able to fight off disease. That’s what this infographic tries to show.

The Worst Public Health Is Personal

Let’s start from the bottom cause we here. The whole team fucking here.

In White Empire, ‘mask up and get vaccinated’ is the sum total of public health, when in fact it’s barely public health at all. If you get vaccinated good for you, but as Dr. Tedros of the WHO said, no one is safe until everyone is safe. If you wear a mask excellent, but it means your community is still covered in a viral fog.

All of these measures are fighting the virus at the micrometer and millimeter level, where it can still mutate and win. It is also just fucking weird and terrifying fighting a deadly pathogen with your own body. We’re all foot soldiers of the fall. This is somehow made into a mark of personal responsibility, but it’s really a sign of social collapse.

Hence the problem is not really anti-vaxxers or that dumbass with his mask beneath his nose. It’s a society that mounted no other public health responses at all.

The Best Public Health Is Social

In capitalist societies, the pandemic has been made into a series of commodities, brands, and essentially consumer choices. This obviously doesn’t work. Luckily we have examples that do.

China is the best example of a pandemic response (which the western media stubbornly doesn’t report on because they chose this moment to start Cold War 2). In terms of raw numbers, less than 5,000 people have died compared to over 2 million in White Empire, and yes you can trust the numbers, for reasons we’ll get into.

Instead of having the ‘freedom’ to deal with this terrifying shit on our own, China handled public health at a much higher level, where it should be. Official channels, not orificial.

China handled COVID-19 at the kilometer level. That means entire cities (like Wuhan or Xi’an) were locked down and entire cities were tested (like Shenzen). Then every single case was found, contacts were traced, and they were placed in institutional quarantine, not left on their own.

Unlike the self-testing and self-isolation of western countries, this actually finds, records, and isolates every single case across a population. They have been able to rinse and repeat this process, defeating multiple outbreaks. Instead of hating on them, we should all be copying this approach which is actually far less draconian than having our lives suck forever.

After brief lockdowns Chinese cities get back to almost completely normal life, because they beat COVID at the kilometer level, not right in front of their noses. If you want a society, try socialism. If you want public health, you need a sophisticated public response.

Satan-Tier Public Health Is White Empire

Where China tried but could not operate was at the megameter level (1,000 km, ie global). Instead of uniting against a shared threat, dumbass western governments made COVID-19 a battleground in Cold War 2. This actually didn’t hurt China, but got millions of westerners and everybody else killed.

White Empire blamed China for discovering the outbreak, talked shit about their vaccines, shot-down India and South Africa’s proposal for patent-free vaccines, and then banned all of Africa for having the temerity to discover Omicron. While global cooperation and vaccination could have stopped COVID-19, these corrupt people just want to sell us boosters forever.

It’s just been a carnival of fuckery and these are the biggest (killer) clowns. As The Lancet said, “Rich countries behaved worse than anyone’s worst nightmares.”

After Europe and America infected most of the world through sheer laziness (they never tested/traced/isolated at all) they then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by monopolizing mRNA vaccines. And so we have this ever mutating virus which they don’t care about because it creates more demand for their pharma companies. Get vaccinated and mask up! Forever!

Given that the virus doesn’t see borders, our public health response can’t either, but all these people see is dollars. That’s why we’re so screwed.

God-Tier Public Health Is Global

Anyways, let me talk about an imaginary world because that’s more hopeful. In this imaginary world, COVID-19 would spur the building of global pandemic infrastructure, just as SARS spurred infrastructure in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, etc.

What that would mean is something like:

1. Constant wastewater monitoring to track any outbreak, even retroactively.
2. Massive PCR infrastructure enabling the testing of entire populations.
3. Laws and facilities for snap lockdowns and quarantines.
4. Dedicated contact tracing teams and technology.
5. mRNA factories everywhere to churn out patent-free vaccines when shit really hits the fan.

What this means is the kilometer level defenses shown by China (or any of the above) plus the megameter level coordination to protect us all. This should be the response, but we are left with the “have you tried dying for capitalism?” idea of White Empire which has unfortunately infected the world. Their grand contribution was the idea of ‘living with the virus’ rather than just getting off their asses and not dying.

So thus we across Empire—even provincial peasants like me—are thrust face first into a pandemic, which is just the first of many. We’re supposed to stop the vaccine micrometers from our internal organs, millimeters from our face, and we’re supposed to blame the people who tried a 1,000 km view.

If this infographic teaches you anything, please let it be this. We should not be facing this or any pandemic alone. We should not be ‘facing’ pathogens at all. We should treat our environment better, work with each other closer, and test/trace/and isolate inevitable problems that occur.

If this pandemic feels impossible for you to handle alone, that’s because it’s true. If you’re triple vaxxed, double masked, and completely furious, you’re onto something. This problem is bigger than you or me, and we need to pull our faces out of the meat-grinder for a clearer view.