One of Joe Biden’s early actions after corporate media claimed he was president-elect was to name members of a task force to recommend actions about COVID-19. Most of the names were neither famous nor infamous, but for one: Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, whose fame comes from family connections (he’s the brother of former Obama chief-of-staff and former Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel) and the infamy gained from a 2014 Atlantic article, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”
Now, to be clear, Zeke did not argue for a “Giver”-style “release to elsewhere” of all 75-year-olds. He explicitly states opposition to legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. And the initial paragraphs of his article emphasize that this is what he wants for himself: “I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75.”
But he should have stopped there. Instead, in that article, he expounds on the vastly-reduced ability of older people to “contribute” or to be “productive.”
What’s more, he writes that “Our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny” — not merely in terms of caregiving needs, but because “there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone” and because “living parents also occupy the role of head of the family [and] they make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch.”
Finally, shockingly, even though he writes nominally in the context of his personal preferences for his life, he goes well beyond the rejection of intensive medical treatments such as heart bypass surgery. He writes:
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. 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. A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
Again, a strict reading of this conveys…
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