Inoculating the fascist body against contamination
By 
MAHA is just very lightly repacked eugenics:
In the event of a sudden pandemic, what should we do? This month, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, offered a remarkably blunt answer: nothing.
It’s been nearly six years now since the United States’ first reported cases of Covid-19, and the country is in a merciful lull when it comes to pandemic recriminations, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ongoing war on vaccine confidence now dominates the public health culture wars. But Bhattacharya, writing with his deputy Matthew Memoli in City Journal, returns with a bill of Covid complaints, arguing that to prepare for a future infectious disease threat, the country should toss out the longstanding “pandemic playbook” and focus instead on making the population “metabolically healthy” — what you might think of as being fit.
Forget social distancing, in other words; forget masks and forget even a next-generation equivalent of Operation Warp Speed to deliver a next-generation equivalent of miraculous Covid vaccines, which saved millions of American lives and tens of millions of lives abroad. The best way to fight off a novel infectious disease, Bhattacharya and Memoli write, is to get the country into better physical shape before the emergency arrives and bet that our fitter bodies will be capable of simply fending it off, whatever the pathogen, however quickly it might spread and however deadly it might be.
Perhaps this sounds half reasonable since, theoretically, a healthier population should fare better facing any health threat. Or perhaps it sounds like eugenics, since it suggests that we should think of infectious disease as a kind of fitness test for the country — and should worry more about getting Americans to pass that test than about protecting those who can’t. How exactly might we go about doing that? “By stopping smoking, controlling hypertension or diabetes, or getting up and walking more,” Bhattacharya and Memoli write.
Basically the only risk factor that meant a goddamned thing in the context of the Covid pandemic, pre-vaccines, was age. After the vaccines became available, and saved millions of lives, the two relevant risk factors were age and vaccination status.
Contrary to RFK Jr’s wildly ahistorical revisionism, the public health establishment has been obsessed with making Americans “fitter” for more than 60 years, with thinness being used as a proxy for fitness. These efforts have had, given the relevant proxy for “health” (thinness), a 100% failure rate, although perhaps the latest generation of pharmaceutical interventions will change this. (It of course remains to be seen if making people thinner through drugs will make them healthier.)
In any event, the entire MAHA discourse is simply warmed over social Darwinism, which dovetails nicely with the Calvinist faith that if you get sick it’s because God hates you, which makes sense because of the kind of Total Depravity that produces a nation of sinners eating Cheetos in front of the TV.
And of course all of this has deep connections to fascist ideology, which fetishizes “fitness” as a kind of inoculation against contamination by (((foreign))) viruses etc.