Author: sabhlok

INVITATION TO CO-AUTHORS TO SELECT CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK TO IMPROVE

Dated 20 May 2026

As I’m coming to the last quarter of the preliminary sketch of the public health textbook, I think the picture of what this could look like is emerging.

This is (in my view) a worthwhile project not just for science but for journalists and laypeople.

I will try to finish a preliminary sketch of the book, then possibly do a full edit to get a preliminary draft out.

Thereafter one co-author has already committed to join but I’d hope that many co-authors will join to refine/ improve the book – and effectively take over the PERPETUAL MANAGEMENT AND IMPROVEMENT OF THIS BOOK.

It is like the WIKIPEDIA OF PUBLIC HEALTH – but written in the form of a systematic book.

A basic condition: no one will be paid for their time or expertise. Its payoff is in reduced public health terrorism.

https://sabhlok.open-ph.org/Docs/Textbook-SPH-draft.pdf

I suspect the PH textbook will ultimately go into a few thousand pages – close to 1 million words. It is already over 300k words long and every time I look into any issue, there are further layers to examine.

The length doesn’t really matter because people can search electronically for the words they are interested in. The one thing this book doesn’t do is to “sell” anything, either nutrition or drugs or vaccines.

6 March 2026: Western life expectancy increased by 50 years since capitalism emerged

8 February 2026: What if the smallpox vaccine had not been invented? – Part 3

31 January 2026: What if the smallpox vaccine had not been invented? – Part 2

23 January 2026: What if the smallpox vaccine had not been invented? (Part-1)

23 April 2025: Why public health must always be led by economists

31 March 2025: How can we prevent a repeat of covid totalitarianism?

20 February 2025: Does the estimate of 154 million lives saved by vaccines since 1974 stack up?

9 February 2025: Milk won the battle against measles long before antibiotics and vaccines – Part 1 | Part 2

11 January 2025: School closures fail to stop disease but cause great harm

24 December 2024:  Non-pharmaceutical interventions should be approved by the drugs regulator – Part 1 | Part 2

14 November 2024: For the welfare of humanity, the Great Barrington Declaration should be abandoned

29 June 2024: A global conference for abolition of quarantine

9 June 2024: The livestock model of public health

19 May 2024: Ethics must be expunged from public health

1 February 2024: A need to re-think human rationality

29 May 2023: Recognising Dr Charles Maclean’s path-breaking work

7 May 2023: Quarantine is a fool’s errand – Part 1  | Part 2

24 April 2023: Social distancing and focused protection don’t work

10 April 2023: Public health ethics is useless at best, harmful at worst – Part 1| Part 2

6 April 2023: Border closures and lockdowns must be banned – Part 1 | Part 2

1 February 2023: Public health is not a science

17 December 2022: The case for disbanding public health in its current form – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Version 1.01 – slightly updated, 31 August 2026

WHY

KEY FEATURES

Funding: Purely private. Any government funding will poison the well of public health science.

Location: Private universities such as Stanford and Buckingham appear to me to be possible entities to locate the centre. Or Hillsdale College.

If no university is willing to take up this task, the centre will need to start as an independent nonprofit entity somewhere in the world (ideally in the USA/ UK), and work towards ultimate absorption within a good university.

Headed by wellbeing economist: The centre should be headed by an economist like Paul Frijters or Gigi Foster who specialises in human wellbeing. The centre would hire doctors, engineers and statisticians, as appropriate.

Would write textbooks: The centre would start by rewriting almost all public health textbooks. I have advanced two textbooks to a modest degree – one, a general textbook and another on quarantine. These will need to be fact checked, edited and professionally produced. All textbooks would be placed free of cost (in perpetuity) in the public domain as PDF documents – to educate not just public health students but everyone, including journalists and politicians.

Would organise conferences: The centre would organise global conferences on key topics such as the abolition of quarantine and vaccine mandates.

Initial cost: Although an ideal endowment for such a centre should be in the range of USD$100 million, a much smaller endowment can start off the centre. A minimum funding of three years for around six senior PhD qualified staff (a couple of economists, one or two statisticians/ epidemiologisits, one or two medical doctors) plus an editor to convert raw material into formal textbooks can help kickstart the work. (The centre would need its own publishing team ultimately, since it will also act as a publisher – of OpenPublicHealth textbooks). Let’s say a donation of USD$5-7 million to kickstart the centre.

Could ultimately award degrees. Once textbooks are complete and a strong team of teachers established (each with their own textbooks), the centre could start teaching and award Masters and doctorate degrees. The goal would be to create future leaders in public health – who can then spread out and teach scientific public health in all parts of the world.

A proposed masters degree program is outlined below.

COURSE OUTLINE FOR A MASTERS DEGREE IN PUBLIC HEALTH

Personal attendence in class would be mandatory. And a Socratic method of teaching used, wherever possible.

This is a preliminary proposal.

FIRST YEAR
– Elementary high school biology
– Economics 101
– Statistics 101 and elements of Epidemiology
– Comprehensive scientific public health – mandatory (all chapters of the book I’m writing) – this book could be split into two parts for the whole year.
– Quarantine textbook – mandatory
– CBA methods

SECOND YEAR
– Comprehensive history of classical public health (this would include reading the works of Charles Maclean, Bentham, Chadwick, Southwood Smith and J.S. Mill)
– Comprehensive history of “modern” public health (the socialists, the communists, the eugenicists, the quackery of quarantine, ethics)
– Sewerage and water supply – key engineering methods and options to reduce costs
– Pasteurisation, food safety (engineering, regulations, etc.)
– Drug safety (regulations, rationale for FDA, etc.)
– Vaccines – full textbook (to be written) which includes all issues, safety, effectiveness, etc.
– Epidemiology and advanced statistical methods for public health
– Assessing research papers (critical review of bad “peer reviewed” papers)
– One 10,000 word thesis by the student on any topic related to public health

Also these two courses:

# Seminar on social justice and climate change
# Harms and good caused by public health practitioners

– these course will largely be in the form of debate and presentations by students on these topics, presenting both sides of the case (as randomly allocated by the teacher).

The idea here is that students need to understand bad arguments equally as they need to understand good arguments. Only by understanding both sides can students decide the one with more scientific evidence.

**Possibly a course on mental health, as well (Maybe it would be optional).

Evolution of the idea

2 August 2024: First thought on a centre for scientific public health.

“For public health to ultimately become a form of science rather than political ideology, it will need to focus entirely and rigorously on empiricism, willing to prove to any intelligent person its recommendations. A number of reforms are needed in the way public health is conceptualised and taught, but that is the topic for a separate declaration. At this stage we resolve to [fund/recommend] the creation of a Centre for Scientific Public Health. The centre will focus on things such as the science of quarantine and the scientific methods suitable for public health”

6 October 2024: Why an econmist must head the centre.

31 December 2024: Proposal to name it Maclean-McKeown centre

5 January 2025: The centre must be entirely funded privately

14 February 2025 Further thoughts on why McKeown’s name must be included

5 November 2025: Elaboration on the centre.

11 November 2025: Notes on what a masters degree issued by the center might look like   and this.

AT THE MID-POINT OF MY PUBLICH HEALTH REVIEW, THESE ARE SOME OF MY RECOMMENDATIONS (in no particular order)

– Abolish all forms of quarantine (restrictions on the movement of the healthy)

– Instead, develop stronger procedures for isolation of the sick, including a strong and separate Isolation Hospital system for all infecious diseases

– Strongly advocate for capitalism to Third World countries so they can develop resources (better homes, better infrastructure) to improve sanitation and reduce infectious disease mortality (do NOT fund the Third World directly – only provide knowledge to improve capitalist processes).

– Stop over-hyping vaccines: they are a good thing but have played a very minor role in improving life expectancy in the West (my estimate: around 1-2 per cent).

– Abolish all forms of vaccine mandates, even for people in the medical profession. Let all people choose.

– Require all NPIs to be formally approved by the FDA (or relevant country regulator), which will set the highest possible standards of science for such approval and stop the free-for-all in which any random academic or “health officer” can publish crazy “models” or impose totalitarian policies to terrorise the world. In addition to abolition of quarantine, this formal approval process should get rid of virtually all contact tracing and definitely all mass testing (PCR)

– Abolish all epidemiological models – which are not just useless but positively dangerous. Abolish all “ethics” in public health, but ethics should continue in normal medicine (Hippocratic oath, etc.)

– Cut out and torch vast parts of public health which serve no purpose other than causing chaos and disruption. In particular, there should be no “health guidelines” for the public, nor any attempts to regulate food through taxes or unnecessary information requirements on business. Let ordinary doctors deal with people’s normal health choices. There can be no hard-and-fast rule about eating fast food. Let everyone eat everything they wish, in moderation.

– Completely re-write all public health textbooks to provide a sense of perspective to students about real contributors to human health (capitalism and sanitation), and eradicate socialist themes (such as “social justice”, “racism”, “climate change”) that have become the dominant theme in public health for the past 120 years.

– Set up Quarantine Studies as a full-fledged branch of public health so that there is always high quality expertise at hand when the public panics and demands lockdowns. Even after quarantine is abolished, fool doctors and journalists will always demand quarantine – such demands will need to be opposed by strongly knowledgeable people well into perpetuity.

– Set up Panic Studies as a full-fledged branch of public health, so newer and better solutions are found to the chronic problem of human panic (which can never be totally avoided, since man is the only irrational animal). If medical panic can be reduced, the general people will stop panicking.

– Set up at least one Centre for Scientific Public Health (entirely in the private sector) which will completely re-do public health to ensure it is based on science and evidence, not on ideology or “ethics”. Such a centre should always be headed by an economist with specialisation in human well-being and happiness. Only a economist can bring a truly scientific approach to public health through a deep understanding of society-wide health trade-offs (opportunity costs) and a sense of proportion about different diseases: two things which the medical profession has no training in. The Centre should also have sufficient medically trained staff and engineers (the latter for inventing better and cheaper methods of sanitation, and improving Isolation Hospitals). But no sociologist under any circumstances (!). Maybe one or two psychologists to provide inputs on human panic.

There are many other minor (and associated) recommendations which I’ve not discussed here. My final review document will provide all such details.

I expect my review to take another two years to complete, given the nature of the work involved.

Note that my views on the general reform of the medical profession (e.g. abolition of occupational licensing), reform of drugs and vaccines approvals processes, do not form part of my PH review and should form part of a (separate) review of health policy

7 December 2024 video

24 June 2024 video

Please consider signing this call for abolition of quarantine – via this google form.

Those who have signed the form are listed publicly here.

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER SIGNING

A summary of reasons: Preliminary Declaration for Abolition of Quarantine

Detailed reasons: Book 6: Preliminary draft) Human Quarantine: Deadly quackery and scientism

Please write to me if you have any further questions: at [email protected]

A video I’ve made to explain why: