The classroom has become a clinic: Public school has become Big Pharma’s frontline.
Something quietly sinister is happening in our time. Healthcare—once a public good—has been captured by private interests, its ethics hollowed out and its purpose rewritten. In today’s profit-driven system, reimbursement codes and insurance procedures have replaced common sense and compassion. The simplest prescriptions—drink water, rest, eat a bowl of spicy chicken soup—are often dismissed or omitted outright. Now every cough, fever, or ache must be met with a lifetime treatment plan or a new vaccine.
Why? Because vaccines make money for the companies that produce them. Chronic patients guarantee constant profits. And both vaccines and the over-supply of chronic patients buy healthcare providers the moral halo of public goodwill. Homemade remedies, on the other hand, yield no dividends. There’s no ticker symbol for rest, no IPO for good nutrition.
Healthcare has changed. It is no longer a calling—it’s a colossal business, an empire of white coats and reimbursement contracts. And because of that, the way we think about medicine must change too. More crucially, the relationship between these private enterprises and the public must be redefined. The connection between medicine, the state, and our most vulnerable institutions—especially our public schools—must not only be questioned; it must be severed.
The argument is simple: just as government has no authority over your conscience, it has no authority over your body. Conscience is immaterial, and the state already claims to defend its sovereignty. But what of the material vessel that houses conscience—the human body itself? You cannot protect the freedom of thought while ignoring the freedom of flesh.
By extension, your children—your biological heirs—belong to you, not to the government. The state is an abstraction, a social construction; your child is real, flesh and blood. The bond between parent and child is biological, immutable, and sacred. It is the foundation of the Traditional African concept of human liberty: your body and your children belong to you—and no one else. The health of your body is your choice, and only yours to make.
A wall of separation must now rise between medicine and the state, just as one exists between church and state. This wall is the only defense against the creeping collusion of government power and corporate greed. It protects citizens from the quiet coercion of “public health” campaigns that mask private profit. Organizations like the WHO, USAID, UNICEF, GAVI, private hospitals, and pharmaceutical giants—all peddling drugs under the banner of charity and “global health”—must be kept at a constitutional distance from our public institutions. Medicine must remain a personal and family matter—beyond the reach of civil authority. The state may protect this freedom, but it must never dictate its contents.
And yet, public schools—the very spaces meant to nurture our children’s minds—have become testing grounds for medical overreach. Children, too young to give consent, are lined up in dusty courtyards for injections produced by multinational corporations, while parents are kept at bay under the pretense of “universal care.” Even well-informed parents, aware of medicine’s excesses, are powerless to intervene. This is not progress; it is coercion disguised as compassion.
Certain boundaries must remain inviolable. Civil government exists to safeguard material welfare—security, order, and property. Healthcare conglomerates exist to safeguard their profit margins. We entrust the state with the protection of our bodies from external harm, not with surrendering those bodies to corporate exploitation. Yet today, governments act as middlemen, collecting taxes from citizens to bankroll the profit ambitions of pharmaceutical cartels that answer not to voters, but to shareholders.
In sum, our tax money should never be used to coerce pupils in public schools to accept injections for HPV vaccines or any other product of multinational drug companies. Public spaces must not become marketplaces for for-profit enterprises seeking government contracts under the guise of benevolence. Let healthcare companies remain within their commercial fortresses, and let the state return to its proper role: defending the autonomy and sovereignty of the human body.
If we fail to build this wall now, we may wake up in a world where the classroom becomes the clinic, and the citizen becomes the patient—forever medicated, forever managed, and never truly free.
