This article is reprinted from National Review with the permission of the author.

The medical establishment is laying the groundwork for imposing left-wing political policies from the top down and disguising them as health-related.

If you want to see what is going to go wrong with society next, read the professional journals. Many of our most notable publications no longer restrict their content to technical descriptions of new scientific advancements or the outcomes of experimental medical treatments. They also energetically promote progressive authoritarian ideological agendas.

Bias in the professional journals matters

First, ideological favoritism reduces the trust we can have in the actual science they do publish. But perhaps more than that, political advocacy in journals such as Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and others of their ilk often exerts undue influence over our politicians, regulators, and judges, making it easier for these politically progressive ideas to make their way into public policy.

Here are just a few examples:

• “Gender-affirming care” for minors: Several years ago, articles began to be published in medical and bioethics journals arguing that children with gender dysphoria have the right to have their natural puberty blocked medically — and even that, if parents don’t consent, the state should push them aside and do it anyway.

Other articles argued that surgeries such as mastectomies and facial reconstruction should be provided for dysphoric minors. At the time, interfering with natural maturation seemed unthinkable. Today, countless minors have been prescribed puberty blockers, and many hundreds of teenage girls who feel that they are boys have been subjected to mastectomies. Things have gotten so extreme that progressive states such as California and Minnesota have enacted transgender-sanctuary laws that remove gender-dysphoric children from parents who refuse consent for such interventions.

• Euthanasia conjoined with organ harvesting: At one time, euthanizing mentally ill and disabled patients, and then harvesting their organs, would have caused horror. But about 15 years ago, organ-transplant journals began publishing articles recommending conjoining euthanasia — where legal — and organ procurement. Today, Belgium, Netherlands, and Canada routinely permit people to go to hospitals to be killed by lethal injection — including the mentally ill in the first two examples — and then their bodies are wheeled into a surgical suite to have their organs removed for transplantation.

• Vaccine mandates: Professional journals have long touted making certain vaccinations mandatory. When Covid hit, mandate advocacy went into overdrive, leading to federal, state, and local governments — as well as private employers — instituting vaccine mandates (which turned out to be an absolutely terrible policy).

Everything becomes a public health issue

Lately, columns in professional journals have argued repeatedly that our most contentious political controversies be redefined into issues of public health. For example, more than 200 medical journals published identical editorials declaring climate change and biodiversity loss to be “so severe as to be a global health emergency.” This supposed crisis, the editorial insists, requires a radical remaking of society: “Governments must make fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organised and how we live.” More:

Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more.

Needless to say, such policies involve issues well beyond traditional public-health parameters.

Racism is another issue that supposedly constitutes a public-health crisis requiring massive changes in the U.S. medical system and public policy. A typical example of this genre published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine labeled affirmative action a matter of population health because racism causes its victims to engage in harmful personal habits. “State bans on affirmative action were associated with large and persistent increases in adverse health-related behaviors (smoking and alcohol use) among Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents, including those whose college prospects wouldn’t have been directly affected by the policies.” An article in The Lancet called for similar politically oriented social action. A 2021 study published at Frontiers in Public Health went so far as to declare the need to change the economics of medicine to fight racism: “An infrastructure that prioritizes and maximizes opportunities for profit from oppression must be abolished.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci co-authored a long piece in September 2020 in Cell — usually dedicated to arcane studies involving molecular and cellular biology — explicitly arguing that preventing future pandemics is a legitimate public-health excuse to “remake the infrastructure of human existence.” The scope of Fauci’s technocratic ambitions should send cold adrenalin surging through your veins. “In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.”

That isn’t all: “Equally important are ending global poverty, improving sanitation and hygiene, and reducing unsafe exposure to animals, so that humans and potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact.” Imagine the iron-fisted regulatory control that would be necessary to even attempt such a top-to-bottom restructuring of society.

What’s the point of all this? Removing our most contested public-policy debates from the democratic sphere into the jurisdiction of public health would facilitate the construction of an international technocracy ruled by “experts.” Indeed, as you read these words, a treaty is being negotiated at the United Nations to grant the WHO powers to declare international health emergencies, which would include, not coincidentally, the power to control the flow of information and therefore the acceptable parameters of public discourse.

It need not come to pass. In this election year, let’s vote less on whether a candidate made a sarcastic quip about “childless cat ladies” and more about what actions those seeking our vote will take to thwart the looming health authoritarianism. The freedom we save may be our own.