OPINION:
Who is laughing at death panels now?
As former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin goes to court next month in a defamation trial against The New York Times, her most sensational claims from a decade ago are proving entirely true.
Yes, Virginia, there really are death panels. And your federal government is gleefully enforcing them.
When Mrs. Palin first issued her warning about death panels, she argued that any government big enough and powerful enough to provide you “free” health care would necessarily have to be big enough and powerful enough to decide when you had gotten enough “free” health care.
And take it away. You know, turn off the machines. Pull the plug.
Eventually, other people’s “free” money runs out. And if we are going to celebrate the government for giving everybody “free” health care, she argued, we must also be honest about who makes what decisions about taking that “free” health care away.
It is kind of the whole problem with “free” government health care in the first place.
Once again, COVID-19 has torched all the political rhetoric and laid bare the scalding truth.
When the so-called “vaccines” were first released a year ago, government bureaucrats picked and chose who would be the first onto the lifeboats. You better believe that among the very first were the politically connected — even those politicians who had spent the previous 10 months trashing former President Donald Trump’s herculean effort to develop the shots at warp speed.
Now, as the “vaccines” prove to be increasingly ineffective, our attention turns to therapeutics to save people who catch the disease they thought they were vaccinated against.
Enter the death panels Mrs. Palin warned us about.
“In New York, racial minorities are automatically eligible for scarce COVID-19 therapeutics, regardless of age or underlying conditions,” the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month.
“In Utah, ‘Latinx ethnicity’ counts for more points than ‘congestive heart failure’ in patients’ ‘COVID-19 risk score’ — the state’s framework for allocating monoclonal antibodies. And in Minnesota, health officials have devised their own ‘ethical framework’ that prioritizes black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds — even though the latter are at much higher risk of severe disease.”
All of this, of course, comes at the explicit direction of the federal government’s Food and Drug Administration.
“When the FDA issued its emergency use authorizations for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals, it authorized them only for ‘high risk’ patients — and issued guidance on what factors put patients at risk,” the Free Beacon reported. “One of those factors was race.”
In other words, they’re not just death panels. They’re racist death panels.
Hmm, where have we seen that before?
Perhaps Mrs. Palin’s greatest gift to politics was her guts. She was among very few mainstream politicians willing to call out the death panels, and she never backed down.
Among the few carrying on her fight today is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who now finds himself in the crosshairs of the Biden administration’s never-ending effort to politicize every aspect of the pandemic.
Most recently, death panelists at the Department of Health and Human Services slashed federal shipments of life-saving therapeutics going to Florida, forcing Mr. DeSantis to find other sources for the innocent citizens of his state. The DeSantis administration recently purchased 3,000 doses of monoclonal antibody treatments from GlaxoSmithKline to help offset President Biden’s death panel decisions.
The reign of death panels has become so prevalent — and shameless — that even hospitals are now getting in on the game.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston just kicked a 31-year-old father of two off a heart transplant list because he refused to get the COVID-19 “vaccine” — a “vaccine” that nobody pretends anymore actually vaccinates anyone against COVID-19.
And The New York Times told us there was no such thing as death panels.
Good luck, Mrs. Palin!
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
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