Once again, we find politics creeping into the coronavirus crisis…
Or in the infamous words of former President Obama’s Chief of Staff and later the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” What he meant was you use a crisis to further your progressive socialist democrat agenda and march further toward authoritarianism.
But it is Rahm’s brother, Dr. Ezekiel “EZ-KILL” Emanuel, the former architect of Obamacare and a proponent of using an equation to determine how much healthcare should be provided for senior citizens, who is busy criticizing President Trump’s news conference as if that is the sole government response to the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking on MSNBC's "Hardball," Emanuel, now a special adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that Trump's comments indicated how little the president knew about public health.
He also stressed that health officials still do not know vital information about the virus, which first appeared in China and has since infected more than 80,000 people in more than three dozen countries. The U.S. has reported 60 confirmed cases of the virus.
"I found most of what he said a little incoherent," Emanuel said, pointing to Trump's admission that he was shocked by the number of people who die from the common flu annually.
"You know, [Trump's] a guy that admitted that he’s surprised that 25,000 to 69,000 people each year die of the flu. That just tells you how little he actually knows about public health and about the health of the American public," he added. "He just revealed how ignorant he is about the situation. We don’t know how similar or dissimilar this is to the flu.
"We know one thing. It is actually more communicable than the flu. It passes between people very, very easily."
The comments came just moments after Trump announced that Vice President Pence would lead the administration’s coronavirus response as he sought to bolster U.S. confidence in the White House's handling of the disease. The news conference on Wednesday night came amid warnings that an outbreak in the U.S. was "inevitable" and as lawmakers dubbed Trump's emergency funding request insufficient. <Source>
It is not President Trump’s duty to be a fact-expert on medicine; it is a job to assist in calming a jittery population and to ensure that citizens know that government medical experts and private industry is working diligently to minimize social and economic impacts of the coronavirus, not just in the continental United States but worldwide.
Moreover, you didn’t see one piece of legislation from the Democrat-majority House of Representatives allocating funds for the fight against coronavirus – and THEY have the sole power of the purse and the duty to control spending. Such hypocrites. Without hearings, somehow, they know the amount of money needed and deem Trump’s multi-billion starting point as being “insufficient.”
Dr. No…
For those who were shocked at 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s remarks on senior healthcare: “If you show up with prostate cancer, and you’re 95 years old, we should say, ‘Go and enjoy…Lead a long life. There’s no cure; we can’t do anything.’” You shouldn’t be surprised because this is the default position when progressives run single-payer government healthcare programs.
In a recent New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article, former Obama administration officials have also advocated a more indirect form of rationing. They’ve proposed a fixed cap on aggregate private medical spending (not just government spending). Such a cap has already been enacted into law in Massachusetts and the authors wish to extend that to the rest of the country. Of course, any cap on private medical spending necessarily means the government must restrict Americans’ right to spend their own money for their own medical care.
One of the co-authors of this NEJM article, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, has already laid the intellectual groundwork for overt rationing in a 2009 Lancet article, “Principles For Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” Dr. Emanuel is a former White House health care advisor and the brother of Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff.
Dr. Emanuel proposes rationing based on a combination of factors including patient age, expected “quality adjusted life years,” and the patient’s “instrumental value” to “society.” Given that the government would be making (and paying for) these rationing decisions, value to “society” will become “value as determined by the government.”
Such rationing completely inverts the relationship between the individual and the state. Rather than the state existing to serve the individual, the individual’s existence is sustained at the discretion of the state. This is the opposite of the American founders’ intention that the government be the people’s servant, not their master. <Source>
Of course, in remaking his remarks, Emanuel was billed as a “special adviser” to the director-general of WHO (the United Nations’ World Health Organization) that is notorious for overstating medical impacts to raise media awareness, fundraise, and to promote supra-sovereignty powers to deal with disease.
The corrupt WHO …
If you do not believe that the coronavirus is being politicized, just consider the following article from The Atlantic.
Guiding Trump’s response is a hardheaded nationalism. On January 31, the administration announced strict travel bans: Most foreign nationals who’d recently been to China were barred from entering the U.S., and Americans were warned to stay clear of the country. These measures—which career public-health officials argued were needed to delay the virus’s spread—broke with guidance from the World Health Organization, which did not recommend curbs on travel or trade. The restrictions did, however, reflect the alarm coming from Trump’s base. <Source>
It appears that Trump’s travel ban did keep American citizens safer than they would have been had the United States followed WHO’s guidelines which would have made the U.S. less safe. Also, let us not forget that the WHO is a political body with an inherent conflict of interest – allow the virus to spread and enlarge their own powerbase.
Bottom line…
Perhaps EZ-KILL and his progressive ilk should be practicing in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea, where individual lives are not valued except for their utility to the State. Think about the degree of hypocrisy to tell us that spending a large amount of money based on “it saves only one life” is noble and worthy while saying that the lives of seniors are less important, and they should not receive specific healthcare interventions.
IMAGINE WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOU OR YOUR FAMILY SHOULD THESE PROGRESSIVE COMMUNIST DEMOCRATS TAKE POWER?
AND NOT PROGRESSIVE PHYSICIANS WHO ARE MORE POLITICIAN THAN PHYSICIAN!
What does it say about a political party that engages in fear-mongering to gain political advantage? Suggesting we employ drastic measures immediately without regard for the facts. Within the pages of the New York Times, some commentators going so far as to label the coronavirus as the Trump Virus. Despicable.
If we were faced with a major natural disaster, would the progressive socialist democrats run around like chickens with their heads cut off in the media instead of taking action?
We are so screwed.
-- steve