Is the Biden Administration trying Murder Its Opponents?

(William Sullivan) Imagine a doctor standing at a patient’s bedside. The patient is deathly ill, and will likely die without the aid of that life-support device resting by his bed.

“Thank God for these devices, and thank God we don’t have any supply issues in getting large quantities of them,” the doctor thinks to himself.  He leans over to administer the life-saving treatment but then pauses.  “Wait a minute… is this Joe Smith?  The same Joe Smith who called me a dirtbag at the country club last month and argued with me about mask mandates in our kids’ school?”

Now, the question.  If the doctor wheels the life-saving device out of the room while citing the fact that someone else might need the device in some other hospital at some unknown time in the future, would that be murder?

If the answer to that question is yes, then it is nowhere near approaching hyperbole to suggest that the Biden administration is murdering its opponents by rationing life-saving monoclonal antibody treatments and specifically withholding them from red states due to an apparent grudge.

In fact, the only problem with that assertion is that it implies that Biden is murdering only his opponents.

In Florida, for example, the state was expecting 72,000 treatments, but the Biden administration supplied only a ration of 30,950.  As Emerald Robinson of Newsmax reminded Jen Psaki, “half of the people” seeking treatment in South Florida are fully vaccinated.

That’s right.  They put their trust in the government, followed the state-approved “science,” and many undoubtedly voted for Biden.  None of that matters.  Their lives have been weighed in the balance by Biden’s death panel, and will not be saved.

“Maybe [she’s] better off not having the surgery, but taking a pain pill,” Barack Obama told a woman asking whether or not her elderly mother should receive life-sustaining treatment in 2009, back when the notion of “death panels” were still the stuff of right-wing conspiracies.  The idea being promoted by Obama, of course, was confirmation that death panels were the goal of the government’s intrusion into healthcare.  The value of the old woman’s life was weighed in Obama’s mind, and without knowing her at all, she was deemed unworthy of treatment that could be provided for others whose lives Obama believed to be more valuable.

The Biden administration has taken that cold calculation to new, wickeder heights.  Not only is the government rationing care based upon the broad assumptions of one’s human value, but in consideration to the political disposition of the state in which one lives, and in spite of the fact that there appears to be absolutely no apparent need to ration this particular care at all.

Perplexingly, the reason that Florida won’t be getting the treatments that Floridians need from the Biden administration, according to the logic provided by Jen Psaki, is that the state needs the treatments in the first place:

Monoclonal antibodies are life-saving treatments that are used after infection.  So, clearly, the way to protect people and save more lives is to get them vaccinated so that they don’t get, uh, the COVID to begin with.  But over the last month, given the rise in cases due to the delta variant, and lower number of vaccination rates in some of these states — like Florida, like Texas — just seven states are making up 70-percent of the orders.  Our supply is not unlimited, and we believe it should be equitable across states across the country.

“There’ve been no reports of a lack of supply,” Emerald Robinson responded, which is unquestionably a relevant point.  We’ve seen COVID outbreaks of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths occur in regional waves in the past.  There is ample supply for the immediate need among affected states and time to ramp up supply for potential outbreaks in the future.

But Psaki disagrees.  “I think our role,” she goes on, “as the government overseeing the entire country, is to be equitable in how we distribute [the treatments].”

In this exchange, Psaki accomplishes something spectacular, in that she both invokes the Marxist principle of equitable distribution administrated by the government and simultaneously inverts the promises of Marxism.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”  This is the enduring slogan of Marxism, popularized by Karl Marx in 1875’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

Well, those with the ability have created an ample supply of life-saving monoclonal antibody treatments.  Floridians need the treatments while the federal government is hoarding and withholding them as obvious political punishment for noncompliance.

The inconvenient truth is that this is always the end result of Marxism.  “Equity” becomes a virtue that supplants liberty, and the government invariably abuses its power in controlling both the means of production and distribution of resources to punish its political enemies.

When Ukrainian farmers opposed Stalin’s agricultural collectivization efforts in 1928, he accused them of a bourgeois sense of nationalism for defying the ruling party.  Millions of men, women, and children were sent to collectivist farms in Siberia, and when production stalled, the promises of “to each according to his need” were certainly not afforded to them, as the Soviet government withheld life-saving food and murdered millions in the Holodomor.  Food that could have been given to the starving kulaks was instead given to workers in the cities and sold abroad to finance Stalin’s industrialization efforts (which was the “infrastructure spending” of his day).

Florida is not experiencing anything close to the scale of suffering in the Holodomor, thank God.  And the unvaccinated are not yet having treatments withheld due to their vaccination status.  But it’s hard to imagine how this might be much different if they were.  Right now, if you are a vaccinated Floridian who is in a hospital, there is a chance that the Biden administration has decided to withhold life-saving treatment from you as punishment for your neighbors’ refusal to abide by his command to be vaccinated.

This is also a feature of Marxism — collective, rather than individual, political punishment by the State for noncompliance.

For the Biden administration, there is a dark political victory being sought, which will come at the cost of all these Floridians’ lives.

Killing Floridians by denying them readily available life-saving treatments will cause death tolls to rise in Florida, in spite of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths having been on the wane for weeks.  Nothing has vexed the super-smart scientists who were wrong about nearly everything when it came to COVID mitigation as much as Florida has (except, perhaps, Sweden, which they ignore).  New Jersey, for example, did everything the government-approved “science” said to do, and it has a per capita death rate that is roughly 30-percent higher than Florida, which did everything the state-approved science said not to do while, incidentally, having the second-oldest population in the country.

Florida is a far-too-visible testament to the fallibility of the federal government’s “experts,” and they haven’t suffered enough for refusing to “follow the science.”  And for that, the Biden administration has decided that more Floridians must die.  We shouldn’t delude ourselves by believing that there’s anything nobler than that behind all of this.