The High-Risk/Low-Risk Fallacy: Part 1

Vexillology of Pestilence Management

Across the political spectrum, many who championed COVID-19 infections pretended to do so out of care for the “vulnerable.”

Since early 2020, an incredible amount of ink has been spilled attempting to divide American society into two groups of people in relation to their relative risk for harms from COVID-19 infection: "High-risk" and "low-risk" Americans. You heard this earliest from the billionaire Koch-funded Great Barrington Declaration, which insisted that a mass infection policy combined with a fundamentally unserious strategy of "focused protection" would protect those most at risk for death from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. (“The Great Barrington Declaration Wasn’t a Plan For Public Health Officials. It Was a List of Absurd Demands of Them” via Science Based Medicine)

"Focused protection" which was simply an afterthought to GBD authors and laptop class academics Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Martin Kulldorff (ex-Harvard), and Sunetra Guptra - barely a page at most - yet sadly this artificial binary of "high-risk" and "low-risk" Americans was lobbied across the political spectrum, from the viral sycophants of far-right extremism, into even some "progressive" or "leftist" circles.

For example, Erik M. Baker is a "progressive" Harvard academic, who on March 19th, 2023 wrote on Twitter from the account erikmbaker:

"The horror of the ongoing pandemic is exactly the opposite: a relatively small number of vulnerable people continuing to die while most people don't care because it doesn't affect them and their risk is low. That’s the problem we need to confront. It is ableist to deemphasize the ongoing threat that many disabled people face from normal COVID infection in favor of fearmongering about the risk of abled people becoming disabled in ways that are dolent of the most pernicious ableist medical conspiracy theories."

Ironically, this is a "left-wing" Harvard academic who specializes in "science & labor," and yet is completely ignorant of the mountains of scientific research showing brain, heart, and other organ damage from "mild" COVID-19 infections, yet also utterly ignorant of the millions of formerly-abled American workers and children becoming disabled from "low-risk" COVID-19 infections - with Americans becoming disabled after their first, third, or even fifth bout with the virus. In fact, back in 2021, Erik M. Baker endorsed an opinion editorial that Long COVID disability was simply “psychosomatic,” just a “mild” mental illness - as claimed by many anti-vax quacks.

Emily Oster is a laptop class economist funded by billionaires like Koch, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and others - her advocacy to infect unvaccinated kids with COVID-19 repeatedly killed, crippled, and orphaned countless American children.

Instead, Harvard’s Erik M. Baker is blindly repeating right-wing Koch billionaire propaganda about how unlimited COVID-19 infections are harmless to "abled people." Will he next begin professing "left-wing" arguments about the other Koch billionaire ideals, such as the fantasy that climate collapse is fake, or that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born socialist Manchurian Candidate? One would hope not.

As much as American culture likes to delude itself, human beings are not fully atomized and isolated individuals that are wholly divided from one another. In the context of a socially transmitted, airborne virus such as SARS-CoV-2, in which so far over a million Americans have died because - with some exceptions - a fellow American transmitted the virus into their body via the process of exhaling the virus into the air, and they inhaled the aerosol containing said virus, causing the disease COVID-19, which killed them. These needless chains of transmission have killed and crippled countless Americans and made our labor force much weaker as a result, as any labor academic would hopefully understand.

Many wish to treat COVID-19 infection as a simple binary. Much like the real world, the problems are much more complicated.

Sadly, this binary fallacy is now commonplace in pandemic policy and punditry - yet on its face, is completely absurd. Do Americans live in completely isolated pods? Do "high-risk" Americans need to don big yellow badges informing the "abled" that they can't afford "mild" COVID-19 infections - a serious proposal Scotland once suggested. Or does the reality of how many millions of Americans have been harmed by a socially transmitted, airborne virus shine a grim light on how truly interconnected we are as a society?

It’s long past time to deconstruct this "High-Risk," "Low-Risk" binary and toss it in the wastebin of pandemic history.

This is a survey of 150 Americans, pulled at random. Can you identify the "high-risk" Americans from this pool? No?

Here, we've identified the high-risk Americans in blue and separated them. Now, we're going to introduce a mass-infection strategy, and mark in the red the “low-risk” Americans who have now developed long-term complications from "mild" COVID-19 infections: including vascular damage, organ damage, chronic fatigue, "brain fog," etc. - many of these conditions fall under the umbrella term "Long COVID:"

Oopsie, we made a flag: The United States of Pestilence.

This is our “endemic” (another bastardized term) reality of endless COVID-19 reinfections, before we even get started talking about the dead, including those killed by COVID-19, or died as a result of complications from a “mild” COVID-19 infection, or those who wound up disabled from a “mild” COVID-19 infection and after losing their career, were driven to poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair.

So much of pandemic punditry treats human lives as little more than numbers on a spreadsheet to play with - marking off “disposable” souls to be crushed and quickly forgotten, and that there’s some sort of happy medium to be negotiated with unprofessionally dishonest, anti-vaccine quacks who can only derive self-worth by abusing their supposed “inferior” on social media.

In Part Two, we’ll look at the reality that dividing Americans into a “low risk/high risk” binary willfully ignores: that most Americans live in a family.

For homework, try to answer this simple question: Can you identify the “high-risk” individual(s) of this random working class American family?

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