Thread by @Andre__Damon

As doctors+nurses fight to save lives, a media offensive is underway to deny the severity of the pandemic, desensitize the population to mass death, claim that Omicron is “mild” and insist that nothing can be done to stop it.

Please share this 🧵

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@nytimes columnist @DLeonhardt writes that “Covid now appears to present less threat to most vaccinated elderly people than the annual flu does."

Covid increasingly resembles the kind of health risk that people accept every day.”

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nytimes.com/2022/01/05/bri…

In the Wall Street Journal, financial executive Rob Arnott concludes, "The prudent response to Omicron might be to encourage vaccinated people and even unvaccinated young adults to catch it." 3/

wsj.com/articles/omicr…

The Biden administration has given up any pretense that it is seeking to stop the spread of the pandemic. The (CDC) has instructed workers to return to their jobs just five days after testing positive, guaranteeing the continual mass infection. 4/
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Many states have already ended the reporting of daily cases, and the CDC has been discussing measures to end daily case reporting altogether. 5/

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In an attempt to legitimize and give pseudo-scientific credibility to mass infection, former White House adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, together with other former Biden administration health advisers, called Thursday for COVID-19 to become the “new normal.” 6/
jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

The statements by Emanuel and his co-writers were hailed in the media with front page coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post, and they led the COVID-19 segment on NBC Nightly News Thursday. 7/

nytimes.com/2022/01/06/us/…

Emanuel's essay, “A National Strategy for the ‘New Normal’ of Life With COVID,” criticizes the Biden administration, not for allowing hundreds of thousands of Americans to die, but for claiming that the pandemic could be ended in the first place.

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The US must treat “Covid like other respiratory viruses.” Emanuel told NBC, “We have to reorient our goal so we can get it to a manageable state and we can continue with our normal life while Covid is around, just like we do with flu.”
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Emanuel says argues that the number of people who die from COVID-19 should no longer even be counted: “Policy makers should retire previous public health categorizations, including deaths from...COVID-19,"
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Rather than take measures to end the pandemic, the US political establishment is promoting the equivalent of an accounting trick, aimed at burying and concealing #covid19 cases and deaths by not reporting them.

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Emanuel's “new normal” is premised on the rejection of the #zerocovid policy that has enabled China, a country of 1.4 billion people, to have just 5k COVID-19 deaths. If China had a death rate similar to the US, 3.4 million
people would be dead
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The “new normal” of perpetual #covid19 is indistinguishable from “herd immunity” advocated by the Trump administration and expressed in the Great Barrington Declaration, while doing away with the myth that mass infection would end the pandemic.

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The US government is adopting the policy of mass death in perpetuity, or, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it, “no more fucking lockdowns: let the bodies pile high.”
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@ZekeEmanuel is the Jack Kevorkian of public health policy. He has long promoted the idea that the growth of life expectancy and the provision of health care to the elderly are imposing intolerable costs on society.
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theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

@ZekeEmanuel has declared waged war on the sacred precepts of the medical profession: the Hippocratic oath, the pledge to “do no harm” and the belief in the fundamental duty to save lives and treat every human life as equally valuable.

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@ZekeEmanuel identifies the problem of “overutilization” as being rooted in the Hippocratic oath, with its “admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost.” 16/

To those who say that denying the elderly medical care “discriminates against older people,” and that “Age-based allocation is ageism,” @ZekeEmanuel answers: “allocation by age is not invidious discrimination.” because “everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.” 16/

The last society to declare war on the Hippocratic oath was Nazi Germany, where sections of the medical profession were integrated into the apparatus of state murder that killed tens of thousands of disabled people because they "cost" too much. 17/
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“How does the Hippocratic oath square with an oath to the Führer,” asks a doctor in the German television series Charité at War, depicting the corrupting influence of the Nazi eugenics program.
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The open promotion of mass infection comes at point where there is growing resistance in the working class. Thousands of teachers San Francisco, are taking a stand to defend their lives and the lives of their students and the population as a whole.

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#covid19, which in 2020 alone reduced life expectancy by two years, has proven to be manna from heaven for the capitalist class. It has no intention of ending it. It will continue killing, predominantly those above the age of retirement, together with the chronically ill.
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The fight against the pandemic is a class question. The capitalist class is fighting tooth and nail against a humane and rational response. It is the task of the working class, organized behind a #socialist program, to fight to end the pandemic. 21/

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