The High-Risk/Low-Risk Fallacy: Part 2
The High-Risk/Low-Risk Fallacy: Part 2
Meet the Sternbach Family
As we explored in Part One, much of pandemic punditry loves to reduce human life to little more than simple numbers on an Excel Spreadsheet. Contrary to the insistence of this pampered laptop classhole brigade, human lives are not simply isolated abstract plots of data on spreadsheet, nor a rough approximation of numbers to be quickly disposed of after they've produced their optimal economic output. Human life is about much more than simply toiling away to boost the quarterly revenue sheets of America's ownership class before aging into unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair: In the context of a socially transmitted virus, Americans are often organized into group units called "families," a radical concept seemingly alien to much of the pandemic punditry world.
From Part 1's collection of 150 random Americans, here are four of them organized into a "family" unit. Can you identify the "high-risk" individuals amongst this grouping? Here, let's make it a little more obvious:
This is the Sternbach family: a mixed-raced American working-class family of four in January 2020: Ralph, Charlotte, Eugene, and Jiang Wenling. Ralph and Charlotte are in their thirties, both work full-time, and raise one mixed-race child: Eugene, who is five years old. Eugene likes rockets and wants to fly wealthy tourists to the moon and back when he grows up. Jiang is in her late sixties, and like her daughter Charlotte, was born in Shenzhen, China. Jiang’s husband passed away a few years prior to 2020.
Soon after Eugene was born, Jiang moved to the United States to assist raising Eugene as a full-time, live-in primary caregiver. Jiang Wenling is our initial "high-risk" family member who cannot "afford" a "normal COVID infection," as unqualified Harvard academic Erik M. Baker put it in Part 1. Many laptop class academics have had terrible ideas of how to keep families such as the Sternbachs safe from the many well-documented harms caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
![ex-Harvard academic Martin Kulldorff tweets: Thank you all 900k who signed the great barrington [online petition] advocating for "focused protection" (not real) instead of school closures and other lockdowns](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F83233503-521c-4270-8d0c-08af260ad0b0_772x331.png "ex-Harvard academic Martin Kulldorff tweets: Thank you all 900k who signed the great barrington [online petition] advocating for \"focused protection\" (not real) instead of school closures and other lockdowns")
For example, the Koch-funded idea of "Focused Protection" under ex-Harvard's Martin Kulldorff's and Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration simply does not work for this family. The expectation that “high-risk” Jiang can be siloed off from society into a Motel-6 and provided free DoorDash - cared for by potentially infected & contagious "low-risk" delivery drivers and caretaker staff, whilst Ralph and Charlotte are expected to be infected (repeatedly, as we now understand) with COVID-19 at work, leaving Eugene home alone and unattended when he's sick from being infected at school - simply fails to pass the smell test.
Do Ralph, Charlotte, and Eugene qualify for "Focused Protection" in order to protect beloved grandma Jiang, even though they're classified as "low risk?" Or are they federally forbidden from being "anti-herders," and forced to embrace SARS-CoV-2, spreading it around their household like a ping-pong ball? These were hard questions that laptop class academics did not seriously consider, because in reality they did not care - they simply wanted unvaccinated children and their working-class parents rapidly infected with a brand new deadly & disabling pathogen, regardless of the physical cost to American families - out of a delusional fantasy that this would quickly end the pandemic.
The 2021-2022 School Year
Instead, we're going to focus on the actual policies that America enacted a little over a year later, in the summer of 2021 under the Biden Administration. Ralph, Charlotte, and Jiang all got vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as it was available. Due to controversy and misinformation campaigns, young Eugene was not vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 before beginning the first grade in September 2021. Everything "seems" normal going into the fall, but ripples of "breakthrough deaths" and "Long Haulers" echo in the background. The Biden Administration does bother adjusting policy in light of these recent developments, focusing instead on "normalcy" in the hopes of ending their first year in office on a positive note.
It is now late November 2021, and a new COVID-19 wave has kicked off before Thanksgiving celebrations. Eugene comes home after school, complaining of a classmate who was coughing throughout the school day. Two days later, Ralph's extended family visits for a large "normal" Thanksgiving feast. Eugene struggles to finish his turkey and nags mother Charlotte for permission to go to bed early instead of playing with the other kids; at least one of which has a runny nose. Worry begins to set in at the back of the minds of Eugene's mother and father.
The entire family is sick just days later, and all four of them end up testing positive for COVID-19. Thankfully, Ralph and Charlotte have seemingly "mild" symptoms. Eugene is having a harsher time than his parents, sadly because he was left without the protection of a vaccine, or any mitigation to reduce the viral load of inhaling six hours of virus from his classmate - or perhaps it was the sick kids at Thanksgiving dinner? Elder Jiang is suffering the hardest, and as her condition deteriorates, is hospitalized alongside many other older Americans as a part of this winter 2021-22 COVID-19 wave, even after being misled that they no longer needed to avoid infection.
Jiang would sadly die at the age of 68 from a breakthrough COVID-19 infection before Christmas. The Sternbach family is heartbroken. Ralph and Charlotte struggle to make sense of how to maintain dual incomes & ensure Eugene is looked after. Eugene puts 2-and-2 together in his head, how he got sick at school, brought COVID-19 home to his family, and was forced to play a central part in the death of his grandmother. By October 2021 it was understood that hundreds of thousands of American children had already lost a primary caregiver, many because the child was infected in school and were forced to play a central role in the death of a loved one - and bereavement is one of the greatest contributing factors to academic hardship. This did not factor into any pandemic pundit's thinking when they became advocates for viral infection.
The Biden Administration and it's captive Centers for Disease Control & Prevention fail to revise their COVID-19 policies & guidance in a meaningful fashion after the disastrous 2021-22 winter season - in which the pediatric COVID-19 total doubled in just a few months of “normalcy.”
The 2022-2023 School Year
Eugene fails to maintain his grades and progress through grade school after losing Grandma Jiang, for a multitude of reasons including bereavement, but manages to be passed forward to the second grade. His parents, under a misguided belief that previous COVID-19 infections conferred lasting immunity, fail to vaccinate their child. The Biden Administration lurches forward to a "post-pandemic" phase, a "new normal" of repeatedly infecting America's population with COVID-19 and simply ignoring the complications this results in: InfinityCOVID radicalism is now the dominant ideology across a United State of Pestilence. The Sternbachs are now wondering why they are constantly ill - and unqualified pandemic pundits line up to tell them that this is due to "immunity debt," a fictional concept meant to distract from well documented harms of COVID-19 infections on the immune system.
It's now the fall of 2022, and young Eugene is reinfected with COVID-19 at school. Both Ralph and Charlotte also fall ill, again. It's a painful experience, considering the events of the previous year. Now, this family is technically comprised of all "low-risk" members of American society, and we're supposed to assume that they can “afford” this "new normal" - of constant family illness. Unfortunately, this second bout with the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaves Charlotte bedridden, with a mysterious lingering chronic fatigue that is later identified as Long COVID. The Sternbachs started 2020 as a family of four, with two full-time laborers, and is now in just a couple of years reduced to three with a single full-time laborer, Ralph. Eugene struggles to understand why his mother doesn't have the energy she used to, and the family stress further inhibits his ability to focus and learn in school - the supposed justification for infecting unvaccinated children with COVID-19 as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, some months later in Spring 2023, Ralph does what many men do when a spouse is hit by chronic illness and disability - and abandons his family. In fact, men are seven times more likely to abandon a spouse who develops chronic illness than women. Charlotte's mother and father have passed away, and she's now a newly disabled single mother struggling with a new mysterious illness and no real support system - she's denied disability assistance from the government, as the majority of LongCOVID disability claims are simply dismissed, partly due to academics like Vinay Prasad of University of California San Francisco who profits from openly denying the condition & mocking the afflicted on social media.
This is an incredibly rough hill to climb - and with Eugene regularly bringing home new COVID-19 variants from school, Charlotte's Long COVID condition continues to decline. She struggles to keep Eugene's attendance up. Eventually the school and Child Protective Services get involved, stripping Eugene away and putting him into foster care. Left with no family, no career, and no support - Charlotte eventually succumbs to despair and takes her own life.
The End of the Sternbach Family
Eugene never returns to "normal," and since foster care funding runs out after one reaches the age of 18 - Eugene winds up homeless and with nowhere to go in life. He is also struggling with organ damage & other long-term health complications as a result of at least a dozen COVID-19 infections received over the course of his academic career. He will die alone of a drug overdose in the mid-2030s, and the father who abandoned him will only find out months after this tragedy.
The Sternbach family became just another pointless casualty in the construction of this "new normal," an elaborate fantasy of a "post-pandemic" America.
While this narrative may sound extreme, these are all examples based upon real-world outcomes related to “mild” COVID-19 infections and chronic illness - many of which are already afflicting millions of American children. Pandemic punditry misled the American public into believing in a false binary that only COVID-19 deaths were a relevant metric to guide public health policy and demanded endless SARS-CoV-2 reinfections be forced upon working families and their children. This added stress of population-wide pestilence is only making the public's tangible health increasingly worse, and creating added stress for families - collapsing many of them. This reality is politically inconvenient for the Biden administration, professionally inconvenient for laptop class pandemic pundits, and as such, protecting these pathetic egos has become yet another burden for working Americans to shoulder throughout the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. A burden of upholding an unsustainable fantasy.
Ironically, the group to which the label "high-risk" most applied to is the society that is willing to grind their own population's health into dust to live in a temporary delusion - a bracket that tragically includes all of us.
