Social determination of the understanding of health and the fascistization of subjectivities: the so-called “new medicine” at CPAC Mexico 2024

a chamada “nova medicina” na CPAC México 2024

Abstract

The health panel held during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Mexico, in 2024, brought together three central figures in the dissemination of denialist and conspiratorial discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines: physicians Alejandro Díaz, Ryan Cole, and Robert Malone. Their speeches condense discursive strategies that construct a narrative mobilizing the masses through fear, the incitement of individualism, and the channelling of anger. These articulated discursive strategies aim at building a new medicine and a new conception of “health,” breaking with the social perspective and aligning with an individualizing and depoliticized project. This work proposes an interpretation of these speeches through the lens of the social determination of health, articulating them with the process of fascistization of subjectivities and with the concept of “flow of rage,” proposed by Carnut and Holloway. Based on the complete transcripts of the speeches, a discourse analysis was carried out from a Marxist perspective, seeking to understand how the meanings of health and disease are re-signified in the language of the contemporary far right. This is not merely about observing denialism as a phenomenon of scientific ignorance, but about interpreting it as a device for channelling rage, producing subjectivities that submit to the neo-fascist logic.

Alejandro Díaz’s speech opens the panel by invoking God and associating the pandemic with a spiritual threat. He claims that COVID-19 shook the “three pillars of society”—“faith, family, and health”—and compares the health crisis to the biblical battle between David and Goliath. Díaz presents vaccines as “experimental products” and accuses the medical system of serving “evil forces.” The “restoration of values” takes the place of politics and science, turning care into a moral act and shifting health from its collective perspective to an individual field.

Next, Ryan Cole radicalizes the discourse. His speech is marked by rhetoric of hatred and distrust, combining pseudoscience and anti-communism. Cole claims that “Hitler, Mao, and Stalin used public health as a weapon of control” and that vaccines cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. He describes doctors as “puppets of the system” and argues that public health “does not produce health, it produces madness.” The attack on institutional medicine is accompanied by the exaltation of the self-sufficient individual who must take care of himself. Cole states: “The best doctor you can know is right here in this room. Look in the mirror—it’s you. You are your own doctor. [...] Health does not come from the tip of a needle, from a syringe, a pill, or a vial. It comes from the tip of a fork.” This discourse breaks with the perspective of the social determination of health, not because it ignores social aspects, but because it reduces them to individual choices and turns care into a moral dilemma. It does not expose, of course, that even what is “at the tip of the fork” is produced within the unequal and destructive logic of capitalism.

It is at this point that what Carnut and Holloway call the “flow of rage” emerges. Cole’s discourse captures legitimate anger—produced by the precariousness of life and social exclusion—and redirects it against imagined enemies through a strong anti-communist discourse, transforming this rage into a mechanism of ideological cohesion and adherence to neo-fascism. Hatred of science and the State works as a valve for social frustration. The rage that could be mobilized to break with the cruel logic of capital ends up being domesticated through conspiracism.

Finally, Robert Malone, who presents himself as the “inventor of mRNA vaccines,” closes the panel with a discourse mixing technophobia, conspiracy theories, and moral panic. He speaks of “informational bioterrorism” and describes the vaccine as a deliberate weapon of global domination. The core of his narrative is fear of the other. Malone claims that “vaccine nanoparticles spread through the brain and reproductive organs,” and that “all vaccines are contaminated with small DNA circles.” Through the repetition of terms such as “toxin” and “control,” he constructs a paranoid imaginary in which the body becomes a threatened territory, and salvation is only possible through the rejection of health understood collectively. Thus, health ceases to be understood as an expression of the conditions imposed by the capitalist mode of production and becomes a moral and spiritual reward for “good behavior.”

As Reich points out, fascism is not limited to the political sphere; it also operates in the field of subjectivities. It captures repressed emotions—such as anger and fear—reorganizing them as mechanisms of adherence. In the process of fascistization of subjectivities, these feelings are instrumentalized by neo-fascist figures who today occupy central positions in the institutional sphere. The fascistized subject is not born with hatred: he is socially produced through the contradictions of the system and through discourses that offer a sense of belonging in exchange for the elimination of the other. From the perspective of social determination, this phenomenon reveals a profound displacement and a new construction of the idea of “health.” This logic serves the process of fascistization within the current conjuncture of capitalist decadence.

The speeches of Díaz, Cole, and Malone, therefore, cannot be read merely as delusion; on the contrary, they are ordinary human expressions. Pavón-Cuéllar defines this process as the production of normopathy, in which a kind of sick normality adjusts to the logic of capital. Neo-fascism thus emerges as the continuity of life under the capitalist logic, marked by fear, anger, resentment, individualism, and the cult of authority. It is concluded that health has been instrumentalized in the process of fascistization of subjectivities through conspiratorial discourses, the reorganization of anger, and the production of a health shaped by normopathy. The field of Collective Health, long detached from its Marxist foundations, proves little prepared to confront this movement. Fascism results from the violence of capital, which today shapes subjects and redefines the very meaning of health.