When Wokeness Kills
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Megan McArdle has a new piece in The Washington Post recounting a chilling episode from the early days of the pandemic. Faced with clear data on how to save the most lives, health officials instead opted for a policy that sacrificed lives in the name of equity. It’s a maddening, almost unbelievable example of how extreme wokeness can lead good people to do bad things.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece; you can read the whole thing here .
In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the
But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.
In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.
Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail .Tags
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The damage the CDC and other public health officials did to their credibility during the covid crisis could take a generation to recover from, and stories like this will be recalled with ever increasing horror for longer than that. When the history of the period is written, this will be pointed to as an example of just how crazy the woke mind virus makes smart left wing people. They knowingly decided to kill thousands of people, needlessly, because some faddish racist ideology took over their lives.
I recall it well. I thought it was a disgrace at the time.
What terrible policies they came out with. They closed the schools because the Teachers Union wanted them closed, after getting all kinds of federal money to protect the classroom.
They put in place mask mandates without any idea if the masks were even effective.
They lied about what they knew and then about what they didn't know.
It was a terrible period. The left was in charge. It ended with an apology from Rochelle Walensky (CDC Director.)
The whole "it's okay to gather in public to protest racism, but only to protest racism" is where they lost me. The demands of left wing politics controlled them, not the "science" and they were willing to sacrifice lives for it.
Oh yes and let us never forget that while they had mask mandates and vaccine mandates, they let illegal migrants enter without even a covid test or any mention of masking them.
Teachers were prioritized, as essential, to receive the COVID vaccines before the schools were closed. And the schools were not closed to protect the children but to protect the elderly. Wonder how many teachers used their extra free time to attend BLM protests?
Mask mandates were replaced by double mask mandates trying to improve efficacy of masking. Masks became influencer bling. Hospital workers were wearing garbage bags and reusing disposable masks while workers at testing stations were wearing biohazard suits. Then there was the ventilator crisis, the quinine insanity, super magic tests, and all manner of remarkable medical discoveries. On top of that there were all sorts of data collection SNAFUs to improve political PR and compete for free Federal money.
The COVID pandemic demonstrated why the United States has the most expensive health care system that delivers less effective medical care than in many other countries.