The COVID-19 pandemic has tested the leadership of countries and found them woefully lacking. In the United States, President Trump had an “Apollo-style” crash program to develop therapeutics and vaccines in record time, but turned to jingoistic attacks upon China during an election year. President Biden took a “me-first” approach on the vaccine rollout, and watched helplessly as Delta and Omicron shredded his approach, with variants arising from pockets of the world denied access to minimal vaccine coverage. Demoralization and despair sets in, and the genocidal ideology of Malthusians, Nazis, and Ezekiel Emanuel moves in for the kill.
The latest from Emanuel, aka “EZ-Kill,” “A National Strategy for the ‘New Normal’ of Life with COVID,” proposes such ostensibly reasonable terms of surrender. To preempt any more mismanagement from politicians, we’ll first redefine COVID as one among several “respiratory infections,” notably including flu. Then, we recalculate such “respiratory” hospitalizations, deaths, etc., including COVID in the group. We liberally pick out the worst week of the year for these numbers, and recalibrate the needed health workforce (such as school nurses, and others) that can be brought to the front for the “surge” week. COVID becomes another flu, and rational government guidelines for vaccines, masking, etc., can be decided, based upon the numbers. This is entitled, “Redefining the Appropriate National Risk Level.” Some, apparently including co-author Michael Osterholm, will find solace in the promise of something advertising rationality in decision-making.
But this is the seduction of planning for the crisis that we would like to imagine, and not the one that has been rolling over us—with new variants moving faster than public policy and action. Nothing short of universal and modern nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare could possibly work. Anything else is dancing with the devil. And worse, it is coming from the sort of medical “ethicist” who can calmly explain why most people should simply not live past 75 years. Don’t argue whether 65 or 85 is the better number—the problem is the underlying Malthusian conceit, that humans are simply animals that breed faster than nature can provide; the underlying Nazi ideology, that there is such a thing as a life not worth living.
