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Wokeness Kills Grandmas
There’s a lot of competition, but I think I found the most disturbing thing the New York Times has ever printed. In a piece discussing who should receive the first doses of the COVID vaccine, the elderly at most risk of dying or essential workers, reporters interviewed a morally bankrupt “ethicist” who posited,
Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
But to protect older people more at risk, he called on the C.D.C. committee to also integrate the agency’s own “social vulnerability index.”
I’m not really sure how this is a debate, but, to state the obvious: we should be trying to save as many lives as possible. And this kind of reasoning is, terrifyingly, the end result of seeing people as labels: black, brown, white, etc.
These are the voices the New York Times is amplifying in this life and death debate over who gets vaccinated first, the 35-year-old lawyer deemed an “essential worker” or the 85-year-old grandmother.
Also, the reasoning for why it is supposedly ethically preferable to prioritize essential workers is astoundingly shoddy.
It would:
1) Needlessly inflame racial conflict.
2) Sacrifice thousands of elderly Americans.
3) And *still* kill more black people than the alternative! pic.twitter.com/nqCjlJgYoh
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) December 18, 2020
Here’s hoping the CDC makes the choice that will save the most lives, not win it the most woke points.
Published in General
Yet another German Intellectual trying to live down his nation’s history of racist “science” by reverse engineering it to apply to the people formerly designated as Untermensch.
It is evil in both cases.
Herr Schmidt should write for the Babylon Bee- the famous headline- “World to end Tomorrow-Women and Minorities Affected the Worst”.
As I grow older (I bought my first “senior” movie ticket this week), I am socially promoted from being an infrequent object of derision or distress (sex, skin color, politics) to being someone in danger of being pushed down the stairs of life. It is a peculiar application of the term “ethics” to describe a worldview that places so little value on the living.
“Ethicist” is really just a pithy way of saying “morally bankrupt.”
I can see vaccinating healthcare workers just before, or simultaneously with, the elderly. But that’s a prudential choice and not a moral one. Blacks have proven to be more at risk than whites, so one could make a prudential case for moving them up in the line all else (e.g., age and co-morbidities) equal. But to move category X ahead of Y, not because Xs are more at risk but to get “even with” or “revenge on” all Ys is outrageous.
I think Schmidt’s statement read better in the original German.
Fr Neuhaus: “A bioethicist is to ethics what a whore is to sex.”
James Watson, while directing the human genome project, when he rebuffed questions about ethics “explained that nobody should worry about the morality of what they were doing since the project had allocated millions of additional dollars “to get the best ethicists that money can buy.”
Covid mortality rates for men, both black and white, are significantly higher than for women. From an equity perspective, women should be last in line for the vaccine. Or, to speed things along on the equity front, we can just execute some women to make it more equitable. I think I just became a medical ethicist!
Bethany,
I should think that the 35-year-old lawyer designated as an “essential worker” would be given the vaccine that has terrible side effects. Then after a few months, the elderly can be given the vaccine that doesn’t have terrible side effects.
As far as the so-called ethicist, I think that the American Philosophical Society should sue him for falsely claiming to know anything about ethics. If the suit fails because the American Philosophical Society is found not to have standing or some other excuse, then Schmidt should be shot at sunrise.
Regards,
Jim
I think we should put this guy at the very, very end of the line.
Nah, ethicists are the most essential people of all. They should be at the head of the vaccine line, whether they want it or not.
Tell me again, where does one go to earn the title “ethicist?”
Apparently the same place one goes now to get the title “Doctor”.
Sick man . . .
Jim,
You know this is a very important question. A lot more important than Jill Biden (as much fun as it is to roast her). Ethics is the province of the Philosophy Department. Let’s get Aug to give us a professional opinion. @augustine
Regards,
Jim
I find Yascha’s line comical, “The CDC’s own projections show that prioritizing older Americans for the vaccine would save lives. If it nevertheless decides to prioritize essential workers, it would be morally responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of people and seriously damage its credibility.” After this year and some of the statements about Wu Flu that have come out of the CDC, I’m not sure how much credibility it has left.
To be fair to Watson, he might have been ignorant about how incredibly dumb the leading bioethicists are. He was kinda busy advancing the human understanding of both the universe and ourselves.
“This is Eugenics, this is eugenics on intersectionality. Any questions?”
He is arguably negatively essential.
This seems debatable.
You just have to know what it means. When someone is said to be an expert in ethics, you can bet that Hitler was a piker compared to whatever he has planned.
“So, Doctor Singer, what’s the inhuman perspective on all this?”
Bingo!
No, no, no. You aren’t giving him credit. Maybe he’s volunteering to be last in line.
Well, don’t you have a lot of nerve, according to this gentleman of principles.
I am tired of monsters projecting their evil onto us. The left is the Joker in the Dark Knight