One of the top doctors Joe Biden will tap for his new coronavirus task force once wrote a piece on how it was better if old people went ahead and died at 75 to keep from being a drain on their families and society.
And no, that’s not an exaggeration.
CBS News reports that Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the medical "experts" Biden will select to run the team that will supposedly help us defeat a virus that almost exclusively kills old people.
Which disinteresting, given that in his piece entitled “Why I Hope To Die at 75,” Emanuel explains that living past three-quarters of a century makes one more likely to be “no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”
“Americans may live longer than their parents, but they are likely to be more incapacitated. Does that sound very desirable? Not to me,” he writes.
He goes on to explain that the longer a person lives, the more likely they are to experience debilitating physical conditions, disease, memory problems, and at best, difficulties getting around. He postulates that by the time he’s 75, he will have lived a “full” life with his children and grandchildren, apparently feeling that any memories or experiences made with his loved ones past that point won’t be worth the physical limitations his body may experience with age.
On top of that, going ahead and kicking the bucket at 75 will relieve your children of the stress of having to take care of your decrepit self, a kindness that saves them money and spares them from the “pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone” and “have enough time for their own lives, out of their parents’ shadows.”
“I will leave aside the very real and oppressive financial and caregiving burdens that many, if not most, adults in the so-called sandwich generation are now experiencing, caught between the care of children and parents. Our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny,” Emanuel writes.
The solution? For Emanuel, it’s not to proactively end his own life at 75, but rather to stop trying to prolong it. He writes that he will refuse cancer screenings, treatment for disease, surgeries, or any proactive measures to fight death after 75 – including the flu shot.
“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,” he writes.
Again, to remind, this man is about to be placed on a coronavirus task force designed to defeat a disease known for killing old people, most of whom presumably don’t want to die.
Ironically, Emanuel is about to be hand-picked for a COVID team by a 77-year-old president who seems to repeatedly have trouble remembering what office he was running for.