This week the Washington Post reported that COVID-19 is present in one out of ten nursing homes and has so far killed 10,000 residents and workers. In this country, a president who simultaneously claims absolute power but no responsibility refused to mobilize federal resources to save sick, elderly people imprisoned within a private nursing home system that has long been a national scandal for its health violations, understaffing and unpreparedness to deal with infectious disease outbreaks. In the UK, the pandemic was deliberately allowed to run amok for more than a month, until exploding death rates forced the government to reluctantly impose stay-at-home orders. In both cases the principle of profits over lives has been translated into policy. According to The Sunday Times, Cummings told a private gathering in March that the government’s goals were “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.” He and Johnson were apparently emboldened in their laissez faire approach by early advice from the government’s super-secretive Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies that supported the herd-immunity idea, despite the absence of any data about whether or not catching the virus conferred any long-term immunity. But man, we gotta take some risks to get back in the game and get this country back up and running.”Īcross the Atlantic, Boris Johnson’s é minence grise, Dominic Cummings, was advocating the same chilling idea. Later he reiterated that “nobody wants to die.
He was echoing Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick who had suggested to Tucker Carlson that “lots of grandparents” were willing to die in order to save the economy. Mehmet Oz, told Sean Hannity on Fox that reopening schools “may only cost us two to three percent in terms of total mortality,” a “trade-off some folks would consider.” A month ago, Trump’s favorite quack physician, Dr.
We should recognize a similar, semi-genocidal logic at work in the willingness of right-wing leaders to sacrifice the aged for sake of business. Included were elderly people suffering from dementia. Probably the single most sinister term in the Nazi lexicon was lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” It was the label worn by the hundreds of thousands of little children and adults murdered by the SS because of some physical or mental disability.
0 kommentar(er)
