Collectivist Bullies
The American people find themselves under increasing pressure to entrust their lives to collectivists who don’t even believe in the right to life. Anthony Fauci and company preside over a culture of abortion that grows more macabre with each passing year.
“The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has funneled at least $2.7 million into a University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) project that utilizes a tissue bank with organs from aborted fetuses, according to a release from Judicial Watch Tuesday,” reported Fox News last week.
It continued:
Earlier this year, Pennsylvania’s state legislature held a hearing in which members discussed an experiment involving grafting fetal scalps, containing “full-thickness human skin,” onto rodents. That particular project utilized tissue from the university’s human tissue bank. It was also supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is led by top coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci. While it’s unclear exactly how much federal money was spent on that project, it was funded through two large grants — one $1,498,642 and one $430,270.
The Biden administration has given the green light for more and more research along these lines. In April, it eliminated the Trump administration’s restrictions on the use of tissue from aborted fetuses.
Biden is hectoring Americans into handing health care decisions over to Fauci and his friends at the very moment those doctors immerse themselves more deeply in a culture that flouts the Hippocratic Oath. The crassly utilitarian moral philosophy that they espouse makes it impossible to believe that they have the American people’s best interests at heart. We value every life, they say. No, they don’t. In supporting abortion, they explicitly reject an ethic that respects all life.
The American people are right to be wary of Fauci’s calls for the suspension of freedom in the name of a collective good. Such calls conceal a great deal of mischief. Controlling people’s health care decisions means controlling their moral and religious lives. Why would the American people cede that to a ruling class so hostile to religious freedom and so committed to a culture-of-death ethic?
Politico reported recently that the Biden administration is considering “bioethicist” Ezekiel Emanuel to be its Food and Drug Administration commissioner. “A prominent figure in Democratic health policy circles, Emanuel helped craft the Affordable Care Act as an adviser to the Obama administration. The 63-year-old has since become a strong ally of President Joe Biden, advising his campaign and later serving on the transition’s Covid-19 advisory board,” reported Politico.
What is Emanuel’s moral philosophy? He gave Americans a glimpse of it once in an article entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” He called his piece an “argument that society and families — and you — will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly.
Emanuel is the Biden administration’s idea of a trustworthy bioethicist and medical expert. In the aforementioned article, he writes, “Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.” But when he himself turns 75, Emanuel breezily writes, he won’t bother with flu shots or almost any other medical treatment:
I take guidance from what Sir William Osler wrote in his classic turn-of-the-century medical textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine: “Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those ‘cold gradations of decay’ so distressing to himself and to his friends.”
My Osler-inspired philosophy is this: At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless.
Is it any wonder the American people are resisting the Biden administration’s we-know-best bullying? That bullying is coming from figures like Emanuel, whose philosophy of medicine is manifestly warped. The collectivism toward which they are driving America rests on an ethos that views the sick and weak as burdens, treats unborn children as fodder for science, and dismisses “individual rights” as an impediment to central planning.
The Founding Fathers proposed a government of, by, and for the people. They did not envision a tyranny in the name of “public health.” The collectivists seek to cow the people into silence by casting all COVID-related issues as purely “medical.” But they are not. They raise fundamental moral and philosophical questions, essential to the preservation of freedom, to which the Faucis have all the wrong answers.