"School age kids are largely spared from this disease. Allowing herd immunity to develop in the young will protect our most vulnerable." -Conservative propagandist Justin Hart, who has zero medical credentials, September 21st 2020
One of the more atrocious aspects of policy debates around COVID-19 has been the exploitative abuse of the term "the vulnerable," suggesting that repeated infections with a SARS virus is only harmful to an extreme minority of society. This concept of the "vulnerable" can vary wildly depending on who you ask. While yes, COVID-19 has mostly killed older Americans, it's also killed plenty of young people, including thousands of children - overwhelmingly unvaccinated. Inept economist turned National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya became infamous for his claim that COVID-19 is harmless to basically everyone under the age of 70, and that public health only needed to protect this rare bracket of "the vulnerable.”
Jay & the new head of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, disgraced anti-vaccine crank Martin Kulldorff, proposed this could be achieved by hermetically sealing off countless Americans in motels for a mere 3-6 months as the virus burned through society like an unchecked wildfire. It was a recipe for disaster, made clear by a mere five minutes of basic critical analysis, or referencing literature about the original SARS-CoV-1 outbreak published in 2010. This is why you don't trust economists, especially those bankrolled by wealthy billionaires, with informing policy during an infectious disease pandemic.
"The low risk of infection among the vulnerable arises from the maintenance of herd immunity through constant reinfection" -Great Barrington Declaration author Sunetra Gupta, January 2022
After a single virus has killed over a million Americans in a mere five years, questions of just how "the vulnerable" were identified should have invited serious inquiry. Yet, we've instead seen that the term has been laundered across the political spectrum into the mainstream, with little thought into the moral & ethical quandaries posed by deeming broad swaths of society, including many of our loved ones, as mere "vulnerable" individuals. This was little more than a branding campaign, designed for the sole purpose of misleading Americans into dropping precautions to prevent COVID-19 transmission & infection.
"I'm done with COVID is short for: Continuing draconian restrictions at this moment is inflicting far more damage on vulnerable populations (especially kids) than benefit, and I will no longer participate your inability to consider trade-offs" -UCSF Oncologist Vinay Prasad before joining the Food & Drug Administration to sabotage pediatric vaccinations with zero relevant qualifications, January 23rd, 2022
There was no serious policy discussions about protecting "the vulnerable" from COVID-19, essentially abandoning them to unchecked transmission of the virus. It doesn't cost you anything to fire up Twitter and post that we should "protect the vulnerable." This was about writing off a massive amount of death as a minor inconvenience, something not worth bothering to prevent.
Shouldn’t we consider such behavior quite shameful?
"If you thought a bit further you would realise that the best way we can protect the vulnerable children is to ensure that most of the other children have infection acquired immunity...trying to delay infections among healthy children won't help vulnerable children." -University College of London's Irene Petersen, January 8th, 2023"
Modern medicine, for all of its incredible advancements across the past century alone, does not possess the technology from Star Trek. Medical doctors, much less conservative economists, do not possess psychic abilities that grant them perfect awareness of a patient's underlying conditions. It's reckless to dictate policy in a public health crisis based upon rough approximations that are politically motivated by a sense of denial. The construction of "the vulnerable" was a political project to downplay the threat the SARS-CoV-2 virus posed. If someone in your community falls under the brand of "the vulnerable," you shared no responsibility to protect them from COVID-19 beyond embracing the virus, preferably in the Spring of 2020.
"Knowing who exactly is dying from covid can help us identify who is truly vulnerable." -Brookings Institute “Senior Fellow” Leana Wen for The Washington Post, January 13th, 2023 legitimizing an anti-vaccine conspiracy theory that COVID-19 deaths were overcounted - we’ve known since 2021 that COVID-19 deaths are undercounted by 15-30%
Previously we talked about The Binary Fallacy, in which death is foolishly considered the only meaningful bad outcome of COVID-19 in order to mislead the public into embracing a new SARS virus. A mountain of evidence in the form of peer-reviewed medical research contradicts this narrative, as well as countless instances of non-"vulnerable" people who were previously in good health developed serious health complications after a "mild" bout with COVID-19. As such, the only legitimate conclusion we can come to is that everyone is vulnerable to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in one form or another.
This makes the entire conception of organizing the "normals" into embracing the virus to somehow shield the "vulnerable" absolutely obscene. There's zero logical explanation of just how the mechanics of such a strategy would function. We have children who have been infected with COVID-19 half-a-dozen times, just how did the five previous infections protect them from transmitting the virus to teachers, parents, and fellow kids on the sixth bout with the disease? There was never any hard evidence given to support such a ridiculous, utterly unscientific hypothesis.
"We should run a randomized control trial (two months is enough) before removing mask mandates in hospitals that the clinically vulnerable - like cancer patients - cannot avoid" -Princeton sociologist & New York Times opinion-editorial writer Zeynep Tufekci, proposing a wholly unethical, unscientific, and impossible study, April 2nd 2023
Prominent voices have talked about "The Vulnerable" like some sort of inherently subhuman cohort of lab rats, denying them the agency to advocate for themselves. People don't like to consider oneself amongst the "vulnerable," essentially thrown to the wolves by their political leaders. All the while, academics sitting behind the safety of a laptop saw fit to propose obscenely unethical randomized control trials without a care in the world if they ever happened. Much like they never lifted a finger to shield “the vulnerable.” Funny how that keeps happening!
"SARS-CoV-2 infections do not stop. Deaths will continue to occur in some vulnerable groups...This cannot be prevented" -Marc Veldhoen, Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine, April 30th, 2024
So much of the worst commentary around the COVID-19 pandemic has been the wealthy & comfortable seeing fit to play God with the lives of their fellow countrymen. Visualizing "the vulnerable" as little more than mere datapoints in an Excel spreadsheet. The ease in which they shrug off a massive amount of death and disability as not worth preventing. All of this is little more than a perverse power fantasy; demanding others shoulder a horrific viral burden for one's own personal luxury and comfort.
Hopefully, this begins to make clear the necessity of universal public health measures such as vaccine mandates. When we start taking a scalpel to society like one trims the fat off a steak, we choose to indulge in our worst traits as human beings. Even worse, we're shrugging off the suffering of those who don't fit neatly into the "vulnerable" category and aren't considered worthy of "focused protection."
As the population burden of unmitigated COVID-19 continues to grow, with more Americans joining the "vulnerable" class after numerous reinfections, the professional class who prioritized absolving themselves of responsibility for navigating this calamity will only look all the more craven. Worse yet, an ascendant white nationalist movement seeking to revive all the worst aspects of the Third Reich will do everything they can to snuff these "useless eaters" out, before inevitably moving on to eliminate other "inferior" classes.
In the end, the American people were hoodwinked to write off parts of their communities, and as a result, we are now all vulnerable to something far, far worse than COVID-19.
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