“Woke” Social Justice is never been about society nor justice. It’s activism, and if BLM and Antifa have taught us anything, it’s that far-left activism can have deadly consequences.
On December 5, the New York Times published an article titled, “The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?” With the ocean of daily news, it didn’t make much of a blip, but it’s getting some much-needed scrutiny now that Noah Rothman, associate editor of Commentary magazine and author of “Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America” is making some noise about the content.
The TL;DR version is basically this: “Medical experts say it’s ok to let old people die because most of them ware white.”
It’s the Zeke Emanuel mode, really. Emanuel, brother to former Obama advisor and mayor of Chicago, Rahm, wrote in The Atlantic in 2014 that he thought living past the age of 75 is basically worthless.
Zeke Emanuel has been named as one of the members of Joe Biden’s Coronavirus Task Force.
The NYTimes article begins with the heated question about who should be at the front of the line for the COVID-19 vaccine.
With the coronavirus pandemic surging and initial vaccine supplies limited, the United States faces a hard choice: Should the country’s immunization program focus in the early months on the elderly and people with serious medical conditions, who are dying of the virus at the highest rates, or on essential workers, an expansive category encompassing Americans who have borne the greatest risk of infection?
Health care workers and the frailest of the elderly — residents of long-term-care facilities — will almost certainly get the first shots, under guidelines the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued on Thursday. But with vaccination expected to start this month, the debate among federal and state health officials about who goes next, and lobbying from outside groups to be included, is growing more urgent.
It’s a tough decision for the CDC. With the COVID tracker on CNN giddily reporting the rise in cases and deaths, and that echoed in every mainstream media outlet, there’s a lot of pressure to stop the spread of the virus and save lives. But, when it comes to COVID, those are two different things.
“If your goal is to maximize the preservation of human life, then you would bias the vaccine toward older Americans,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, said recently. “If your goal is to reduce the rate of infection, then you would prioritize essential workers. So it depends what impact you’re trying to achieve.”
Source: New York Times
The article notes that the definition of “essential worker” is rather vague and comprises nearly 70% of the American workforce.
The CDC convened a panel of “independent medical experts” to decide who should be getting the vaccine after the nursing home residents and healthcare workers. CDC Director, Dr. Robert Redfield told the advisory panel, “future recommendations that, based on vaccine availability, demonstrate that we as a nation also prioritize the elderly.” This is consistent with the recommendations of the World Health Organization, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and many countries that insist that the priority should be on saving lives rather than reducing the spread of the virus. This would mean the focus should be on the elderly and the sick who are at the highest risk rather than the nebulous and large group of “essential workers.”
But the panel is not just relying on The Science™, they are also weighing social justice concerns in the vaccine rollout. The result? The NYTimes reports, “In a meeting last month, all voting members of the committee indicated support for putting essential workers ahead of people 65 and older and those with high-risk health conditions.” (Emphasis added.)
