Who in Your Family Will Die for Supervisor Jim Desmond?
‘Herd immunity’ is the Macarena. Sure, it sounds good when you first hear it. But trust me, you don’t want to see what happens next. --Ebola survivor and Physician Craig Spencer
America’s science-denying “freedom fighters” are asking you to make a choice; either continue with data-driven levels of health restrictions or name the relative you’d like to see sacrificed in the name of the economy.
Because if they get their way, lots of very young (31% of COVID-19 hospitalizations are under 2 years of age) or very old people are going to be suffering real soon. Of course, it will be just a coincidence that people of color will die at proportionally higher rates, right?
Let’s call it what it is: passive eugenics.
Yesterday, August 31, the United States passed the six million mark in COVID-19 cases. August was the deadliest month for COVID-19 cases in California. More than 180,000 people have died nationwide. Our rate of infection surpasses most of the industrialized world.
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1300801926263500806?s=20
While it seems as though new cases and deaths have plateaued in California, they are nowhere near the level that places like New York City have achieved before loosening restrictions.
It’s bad enough that the Governor of California has prioritized business reopenings over schools with his latest color-coded plan.
Shout Out to Scott Lewis at Voice of San Diego for his blistering assessment of a lack of sane priorities:
Does the governor even remember the summer? It was May heading into June. Things were going well. The rate of transmission was going down, the county was testing more. A few people protested the lockdown. Mayor Kevin Faulconer, Supervisor Greg Cox and others convened business leaders and proclaimed that San Diego was ready to reopen.
None of them thought for a second about schools or the need to make sure that children would be able to continue their education as soon as possible. They never once prioritized getting schools open to serve that crucial function in our society. And even if they were wholly obsessed with the economy, they were blind to the reality that, to be productive employees, parents would have to have assurance that their kids would be getting educated and be safe all day.
National policy is now being imagined (led seems like too strong a word) by a physician whose expertise in the subject is apparently derived from the number of times the President has seen him appear on Fox News.
Locally, the newly authorized reopenings are not enough for science deniers like Supervisors Kristin Gaspar and Jim Desmond. They’ve gone all-in on the mythology about Sweden’s “herd immunity” response to COVID-19.
Via the Washington Post:
Sweden’s handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticized by public health officials and infectious-disease experts as reckless — the country’s infection and death rates are among the world’s highest. It also hasn’t escaped the deep economic problems resulting from the pandemic.
But Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’s liberties.
That this approach is even being discussed in the White House is drawing concern from experts inside and outside the government who note that a herd immunity strategy could lead to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lost American lives.
https://twitter.com/JReinerMD/status/1300397149130313728?s=20
Since medical evidence says Sweden’s approach didn’t work, Desmond’s approach is to gin up an argument over who is an essential worker? The superficial and selfish answer is that everybody who depends on a paycheck is essential. So is every small business owner.
https://twitter.com/jim_desmond/status/1300516397215182848?s=20
Don’t be fooled. It’s not the work that’s essential; it’s the income.
What the COVID-19 denier set is doing amounts to distraction from the bigger problem; some people are more essential than others when it comes to financial support.
Most everybody got $1200; some people received extra unemployment payments.
Some companies got paycheck protection loans. Local banks were allowed to make those decisions, and despite having no risk involved, gave money to their usual clients.
Former Congressman Darrell Issa received a paycheck protection loan for his real estate company somewhere in the range of $150-$350 thousand dollars. A few weeks later he wrote his congressional campaign a check for $150,000.
Here’s an example from NBC News:
A Government Accountability Office report issued July 29 noted that one-third of the federal contract dollars obligated in response to the coronavirus through June went to 10 companies. One of them, Parkdale Mills, a privately held first-time contractor in Gastonia, North Carolina, bought out its minority stakeholder for $60 million less than a week after signing a $531.9 million deal to make surgical gowns for the government, according to Securities and Exchange Commission and federal contracting records.
Since the start of the crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank has bought more than $2.3 trillion in Treasury notes and mortgage-backed securities, along with billions of dollars in corporate debt from household-name companies like AT&T, UnitedHealth Group and Comcast.
We’re seeing the same fiscal selfishness as we saw in 2008; the Fed makes cheap loans to commercial banks, commercial banks make cheap loans to firms that don’t need them, the firms spend that money on buybacks or other financial restructuring.
How is it that the stock market is setting records, while the gross domestic product shows double-digit losses? One in five American workers is unemployed and roughly a million more each week are filing for unemployment. 47% of Americans in households that have experienced pandemic-related job losses don’t believe those jobs will come back, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
There is absolutely no reason to believe the right’s “safe opening” arguments would return the economy to where it was in 2020. Too much water has flowed under the bridge. Consumer buying habits have changed. And those arguments get even more absurd when you realize those making them are personally avoiding the simple stuff, like wearing a mask.
The County requirement about businesses operating indoors requiring customers to sign in, just in case coronavirus tracing is needed is being denounced as “tyranny” by these very same politicos.
https://twitter.com/jim_desmond/status/1300595347291398144?s=20
https://twitter.com/TonyKrvaric/status/1300572049992110080?s=20
Yes, people need income. No, the ‘good old days’ aren’t coming back. Maybe we should try something that seems to have worked elsewhere, like any of a number of Northern European Countries. Of course, we’d have to put up with the right yelling about “socialism,” even as they scheme to steal more of our money.
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Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com