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| Rochelle Walensky of the CDC |
You probably got an inkling about your fate last January, when the nation's chief public health officer said, right out loud, that it's a good thing that the old, the sick and the immunocompromised are dying from Covid-19 in such far greater numbers than are the people who are still well enough and young enough to continue contributing to the Economy.
“The overwhelming number of deaths — over 75 percent — occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with — and, yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Walensky added a plug for getting vaccinated and boosted, before underscoring her earlier comment: “We’re really encouraged by these results.”
Now, with the news that more than 90 percent of the Americans dying from Covid-19 are over the age of 65, Rochelle Walensky has actually accomplished the incredible feat of making the cynical holiday tune Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer seem like a feel-good Hallmark Christmas card. You see, even when Grandma dies in a snowdrift after a Santa hit-and-run, her surviving family members still celebrate as if nothing had ever happened. Because not even death can interfere with the mindless consumption of material goods and the watching of TV sports.
Life without Grandma is simply getting back to normal and moving on with life, and ignoring one of the worst public health catastrophes in human history.
If Joe Biden declared the pandemic to be over, then it must be over, even with close to 600 people now dying from it every day in the United States. Thank goodness, our elite policy-makers are probably muttering to themselves, that these vulnerable disposables are mostly in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and probably out of the workforce
This is precisely why the government is currently only recommending that people don masks in public settings like grocery stores, where all those excess old people are prone to shop when they need to eat. Because as the cult of neoliberalism has drummed into us, masking is not so much a matter of protecting others. It's about protecting yourself. (not to mention your own future Social Security and Medicare benefits.) To mask or not to mask is not even a question. This, the public health experts say, is purely about your own comfort zone and your personal choice and freedom, and being the entrepreneur of your own life.
And for Walensky, being in the zone means doubling right down on her own serial callousness. Not content to limit her disdain to the disposable victims of this pandemic, she also recently congratulated the deceased Black victims of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments for their "sacrifice" on behalf of American medical research. Since sacrifice, by definition, is all about making an informed, personal choice, she insinuates that these men knew all the risks of being unwitting guinea pigs, and chose to participate in their own destruction anyway.
In case you were wondering why Walensky still has her job, it's because she is a staunch team player in the Neoliberal Thought Collective still running this country on behalf of the oligarchy and the military-industrial complex. Her casually racist remarks on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Tuskegee atrocities are all of a piece with the recent New York Times revelations about our nation-state's junior ROTC (pre-officer training) program. The thousands of freshman high school students who are being unwillingly enrolled in this federally funded program are disproportionately Black, Brown and poor. By dint of their race, ethnicity and social class, they are being purposely groomed to fight in the US Imperium's forever-wars. And when it's the their inevitable turn to get maimed and even die, they'll get thanked for their sacrifice, too.
Meanwhile, even though Congress just miraculously forced railroad workers back on the job without sick or personal time off, and allocated billions more for the Arms Industry's Ukraine proxy war with Russia, it is said to still be struggling to do anything for regular people of any age or color, other than to urge them to "share the sacrifice" for the greater good of Wall Street and the war industry. In other words, we must learn to live with a resurgence of eugenics, or what Andre Damon of the World Socialist Website aptly calls "social murder."
But who (besides Walensky, Biden and the whole merry band of professional pathocrats, that is) said we should accept our doom graciously? Not only should we not go quietly into that good night, we should all join together, as Dylan Thomas advised, to "rage, rage against the dying of the light."
And on a related note, if you ever happen, like Robert Frost, to stop by woods on a winter evening, and you happen to see Grandma lying in a snowdrift, give her a hand. And put on a mask. Despite what "medical ethicist" Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel trumpets about gracefully dying by age 75 to avoid being a burden on society, we are all of us, at every age, in this together. We have miles to go before we sleep.
5 comments:
Some of us were outraged but not surprised when the sitting President made these comments at an election rally in 2020:
Trump belittled the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing, “It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects.”
“That’s it. You know, in some states, thousands of people, nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody,” the president continued. “They have a strong immune system, who knows? You look — take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune system. But it affects virtually nobody.”
Of course Trump has no medical background or training. Walensky, on the other hand, is highly trained and very aware of medical science. So the common thread in their remarks relate to their ideological, political and economic biases which are really the core perspectives used to set policy.
So, yeah, what the hell is she still doing in that job?
Thanks, Thorstein. I copied your comment here from the Amtrak Joe post, because this is where I think you meant to place it. (Note to readers: I'd originally conflated the Dylan Thomas poem with the Robert Frost poem, because the themes are so similar, and had given Frost credit for both. Apologies to Dylan Thomas!)
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning
they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-- Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953
Each morning I routinely read obits from 3 different states' local newspapers where I used to live: NH, MT, and AZ. In the past several weeks, maybe a month, I've noticed an increasing number of obits refer specifically to "sudden, unexpected" deaths in people in their 40's to 60's.
These are small town newspapers, representing a relatively small population. The towns are predominantly conservative, Republican, anti-vax. So to me it doesn't seem likely that these sudden deaths are from vaccines. Most people stopped getting boosters long ago, if they bothered to get any at all. Judging from photos, they looked healthy.
Who knows what the death certificates read for these sudden, unexpected deaths. Natural death? Is an autopsy performed in these small towns? By whom?
I read 5 new "sudden, unexpected" death notices just this morning. Before recently I have never seen an obit include that info and I'm a long time obit reader!
Hi annenigma, will you expand on this? You feel this uptick of sudden/unexpected deaths is occurring among un-vaccinated people, are you suggesting that they are undiagnosed COVID-caused deaths?
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