Joe Biden has announced the creation of a “Public Health Advisory Committee,” consisting of Democratic experts to advise him about how to best grapple with the coronavirus during the campaign. Okay. Good public-health practices are worthy goals for any candidate.
But I don’t think receiving such information requires the naming of a big-name board and a major press announcement. Rather, it seems to me that the committee’s true purpose is to be a “shadow” task force that will second guess the Trump administration’s actions to the media and strive to make Biden appear presidential in the face of the threat. If so, this is politics at its most cynical and could inhibit effective public response to the ongoing panic by creating a competing center of information and communication. The unnecessary speech Biden made about not shaking hands or hugging anymore — and the press response thereto — backs up my suspicion.
The bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel — a prime architect of Obamacare — is the most famous person on the committee. Why is that important? Emanuel made headlines a few years ago by writing in The Atlantic that he wants to die at age 75 — younger than Joe Biden is today — and he thinks we should want that too. From his piece:
Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.
(Cont.)
Gellieman