Biden Taps Zeke Emanuel, Who Supports Medical Rationing, for COVID Task Force By Tré Goins-Phillips for Faith Wire
President-elect Joe Biden, who has spent months ridiculing outgoing President Donald Trump for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, has tapped Dr. Zeke Emanuel, the brother of former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, to his COVID-19 task force.
Emanuel, a 63-year-old oncologist, is known for his support of health care rationing as well as his desire to die by the age 75.
In 2009, Emanuel, the then-head bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, suggested age is a proper metric for determining who receives care, should resources become scarce. He wrote in an article for Lancet:
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Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.
While he admitted in the paper embracing the so-called “complete lives system” would have been “premature” at the time, Emanuel was certainly laying the groundwork for embracing such an apparatus in the future.
He went on to write in a subsequent article for the Hastings Center Report that “services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” Emanuel added, “An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”
In a 2014 editorial for The Atlantic, Emanuel explained he does not want to live to be older than 75 years, because by the time he reaches that age, he “will have lived a complete life.”
