Covid-19 and the U.S.: Societal disaster trumps individual heroism, scientific prowess
Is it so shocking that a caste-based society that exalts individualism and prioritizes profit above wellness — one of the only industrialized nations without universal health care — would fail to rise to the challenges of a collective health crisis? –Sarah Smarsh, The New York Times, September 12, 2021
The United States is on track to register more than 700,000 deaths from Covid-19 by the end of 2021. That is a needless tragedy. Despite the entrenched economic and racial inequalities that afflict the nation, the predatory nature of our mercenary medical complex, and our utterly miserly social safety net, it did not have to be this bad.
In spite of everything, only a fraction of those hundreds of thousands of deaths would have taken place if we had adopted a united, science-based, tough policy from the start. Instead, excess deaths in 2020—the number of deaths occurring last year compared to the number expected in a normal year—were greater than during the great influenza pandemic of 1919.
The reason we didn’t institute a necessarily hard-edged Covid-19 policy and instead kowtowed to the lowest common denominator—demagogic politicos, medical quacks, magical thinkers, the paranoid and the vaccine-phobic—is the same reason we don’t have universal health care, a decent social safety net, and greater economic and racial equality. Unlike our cherished myth that America is a democracy where the people rule, this country is a plutocracy in which money begets power and power begets money in an endless circle of depravity.
For many at the very top, excess death is an acceptable price to pay for extraordinarily high profits and very low taxes. For them, voting out the party that caters to the whackos who form the hardest core of the GOP base would be a bad bargain.
President Joe Biden has finally had almost enough of playing half-speed softball with the unmasked, the unvaccinated and their political enablers. Almost… His new mandates are a significant step in the right direction, but way too flaccid. A large majority of Americans support tough policies that respect people’s fundamental rights but deny the recalcitrant mask-free and unvaccinated minority all the privileges and pleasures they don’t deserve. They should accomplish a very fundamental task vis-à-vis this group: change the cost benefit calculus of the vaccine resistant. Policies like requiring vaccination to fly, stay in a hotel, visit a public park or beach, dine indoors, attend large gatherings, shop anywhere (except for food and medicine or online).
And here is the toughest one of all: since hospital workers have been exposing themselves to great risk and angst because of the unvaccinated, all hospital administrators, who unlike physicians are not subject to the Hippocratic oath, should set an-end-of-the year deadline beyond which no unvaccinated adult suffering Covid-19 will be admitted to the hospital. No excuses except medical ones.
Even if such a draconian but entirely necessary rule is implemented, there will still be the unreachable, the ones who would drink the Jim Jones Kool Aid willingly and force it on others, the Heaven’s Gate crowd that followed the leader of their cult into oblivion while waiting to be picked up by a comet that would save them from the apocalypse that was about to destroy the Earth.
True, you can’t prevent people from committing suicide even if they are locked up. No more than Texas Governor Gregg Abbot can make good on his lame promise to preempt rape trying desperately to rationalize the Republican-backed state law virtually outlawing abortion in the state. But we can and we should use all available means to prevent suicide, including making vaccinations hard to avoid.
In the end, however, there is no way to prevent every suicide or every rape. That is an individual choice, albeit one taken within a person’s psyche and social matrix. And according to Albert Camus, “the only serious philosophical question is the question of suicide.
But we must do the utmost to prevent the Kool Aid drinkers from foisting the poisonous deadly on anyone else. No more Ms., Mr., and Mrs. Nice. Finally, let’s build a wall, a wall to keep them away from us who have sacrificed by being responsible and disciplined. Let’s be hard, harsh even, and build an impenetrable cordon sanitaire, an epidemiological barrier to keep them out of our space.
And to the unvaccinated and the unhinged, often one and the same, although you will vote for the party of injustice and cruelty known as the GOP in the next election, I don’t root for your demise.
Wake up before it’s too late. American scientists showed the world where the true greatness of the nation lies when they developed multiple vaccines in record time that are saving hundreds of millions, even billions, of lives. Take advantage of living in the country that accomplished something really great instead of listening to lying demagogues or looking for American greatness in all the wrong places.
