{Reposted from The Lid blog}
On December 5, the New York Times published an article titled, “The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First? At first glance, this seems like a reasonable question about a moral conundrum. Healthcare workers will get the first vaccines, but who comes next? If the elderly are next, it means the priority is to preserve life but going with the essential workers means curbing the virus’s spread is most important.
But the NY Times jumped on the “social justice” crazy train. Instead of relying on science, the Times came up with a third option—base the decision of who goes next on race.
“It’s a question increasingly guided by concerns over the inequities laid bare by the pandemic, from disproportionately high rates of infection and death among poor people and people of color to disparate access to testing, child care and technology for online schooling.”
Then they went through a litany of people who agree with their position like:
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.”
Ah—kill grandma because she may be white. I wonder if that’s why NY Gov. Cuomo created the policy that led to all of the senior citizen deaths?
Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities. “Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said. “Of course they should be treated better, but they are not among the most mistreated of workers.”
Teachers of any race are essential to the future of America. The only exception to that rule are Professors of Epidemiology at Harvard and USC Pediatrics professors:
“To me, the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country, and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among essential workers,: said Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a pediatrics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and a member of the committee of medical experts that advises the C.D.C. on immunization practices.
The NY Times article is not making its vaccine decisions based on the best science or solving the moral conundrum of saving lives vs. or slowing CORONA’s spread. Instead, the bible of progressivism’s article supports the redistribution of human life the same way it supports redistribution of income—a disgusting suggestion.