Maybe this belongs in Great Debates, or even the Pit, IDK, but while a COVID death is unfortunate in any case and a tragedy in some, unless those people crossed paths with a medical serial killer, I don’t think they were murdered. Some people seem to think so.
Fire away.
Haven’t heard that one. The common one I hear is that this is purely political and is purposely being blown out of proportion by the left to get rid of Trump and that HCQ works just fine but the left isn’t allowing doctors to prescribe it. Many of them seem to believe that this will all go away as soon as the election is over (or if/when Biden is in the White House).
What those people don’t seem to have an answer for is when you say “fine, you might be right, it makes sense, but if this is political, why is it happening all over the world? If the left is blocking doctors from prescribing the miracle drug HCQ, why aren’t doctors in other countries prescribing it to their patients? Surely, every country in the world (including many that are getting back to normal) can’t be left leaning enough to influence whether or not people are allowed to have certain meds”. I have yet to see someone come up with a good answer to that.
This also ignores the fact that HCQ isn’t illegal to prescribe, doctors just aren’t allowed to prescribe it for covid-19.
I’m constantly hearing “None of this would have happened if we had done X, Y and Z first” and we just don’t know that.
That’s 100% true, unfortunately we didn’t even try X, Y or Z, or much of anything else. There are so many things that, had we tried them and they weren’t effective, it wouldn’t have hurt anything. One of the things that I’m seeing more and more often when people say they don’t believe in masks, is to explain that if they’re right and the mask is useless, then it’s not going to do anything. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose by wearing it.
I wouldn’t call the deaths murder.
It’s collateral damage due to poor leadership and a diseased medical system in this country.
It’s sad
Life is never a mathematical equation. Nevertheless, we can easily see what has worked both here and in other countries. We can apply that knowledge to the timeline of taking actions. It is as certain as real world hindsight ever can be that taking the actions that work earlier and applying them strictly to everyone in the country would have lessened the death toll.
Any argument that tries to deny this is scientifically suspect.
Whether that means that COVID victims were murdered is an entirely different argument. Negligent homicide would be a better term. There’s no doubt in my mind that certain leaders who utterly failed to lead are criminally liable, if only morally.
Since this is largely an ethical argument, I think it’s better for Great Debates.
Colibri
QZ Moderator
I don’t consider a covid victim murdered unless their infection can be traced to a maskhole who was refusing to wear a mask while fully aware that everyone wearing masks can reduce the spread of the disease. Since that pretty much never would be known, I wouldn’t call any victim of covid murdered.
I do consider maskholes to be willing to murder people, and trying to murder people, when they refuse to wear masks despite knowing better. Nobody can really know which of them are succeeding, of course.
The title: I seem to be one of the few people who does not believe that COVID victims were murdered
From the OP’s first post: “Some people seem to think so”
From the OP’s second post: “I’m constantly hearing “None of this would have happened if we had done X, Y and Z first” and we just don’t know that”
It went from most people believe it to be murder, to some people believe it to be murder, to some people believe it could have been prevented.
And your point is?
That you moved the goalposts several times in your own post. You can’t seem to agree with yourself how many people actually think it’s murder. And thus it’s not clear which of those claims we should be debating.
For the record, my logic is similar to @begbert2’s, though I would also add when it’s some callous asshole in power who didn’t care about people dying as well.
That said, that means that a lot of them were murdered, just we don’t know which ones. If the reason they are dead is because someone was so selfish they didn’t care about the lives of the other person and knew their actions would cause death (which is more than simply negligence), then that is at least some form of murder in my eyes.
But I’m generally loathe to actually call it that lest it be seen as an overreaction. I just call it “killing,” which is less controversial. Maskholes are killing people. Trump killed people. Some state governors killed people, while others just didn’t know what they were doing. And some would have died anyways, and were only “killed” by the virus.
Point is, a lot of people died who didn’t have to, and a good portion of that was from people who deliberately acted in a way that they knew would result in their deaths. Those people are evil, by the definition of evil.
I suppose if you KNEW you were infected and deliberately tried to infect others, it could be a form of homicide.
Agreed.
I’ve heard it as a conspiracy theory that vocal anti-maskers (like Louis Gohmert R-Dipshit) are being intentionally infected.
Moved the goalposts and substantially changed the claim from “A majority of people think is murder” all the way down to “Some people claim it could have been prevented”. You actually seem to be debating yourself at this point.
If I don’t know whether I’m infected (and have been carelessly exposing myself to the degree that I plausibly might be), then it’s probably no more murder, than, say, picking up a revolver that I know has at least one bullet in it, spinning the cylinder, and then firing it at a crowd.
That’s not murder, right? I have no chosen target. I don’t know the chamber has a bullet in it. And I can even claim that I’m not doing it with the intent to hurt anybody, but that my god-given right to wave guns at crowds and pull triggers is a matter of personal freedom.
I just don’t believe that either.
Who has called COVID-19 deaths murder? Can you provide some cites so that we can have some context, like if it was maybe meant hyperbolically?
It’s just good to know who is being debated for or against, you know?
OP is one of the few, OK? One of the few. It’s a tough place to be.
I hadn’t been thinking of the word “murder” thinking about how the US (and especially Trump) has handled coronavirus, but I’ll take the bait and argue that our government’s response was essentially murder. I think the thought that comes to mind more prominently than murder is “kings don’t need to concern themselves with thoughts of peasants”.
In Ken Burns’s Vietnam War documentary, there’s a section where they discuss all the private letters that showed LBJ didn’t believe the war was winnable and was only staying in the war for political reasons. The doc immediately shows one of the US vets they’ve been following saying (paraphrasing) “I can understand leaders making decisions they genuinely believed were in the interests of the country, making mistakes and winding up throwing away millions of lives. But if you throw away American lives knowing there no benefit to the country, now you’re letting people die for your own ego.” This is basically the way I feel about how our political leaders have handled this crisis.
I live in Massachusetts, and while I think there were things we could have done differently at first, our state (as well as New York) got hit with the pandemic at a time when people didn’t even know whether or not they should be wearing masks. We’ve now found out that if you don’t shut things down to some extent and have mask requirements, cases and deaths are just going to keep growing. We found out the hard way so that the country at this point didn’t have to.
We also hit the peak of our issues while Donald Trump was stealing medical supplies from blue states (in Mass, Robert Kraft and Governor Baker had to cook up a scheme to smuggle medical supplies into our own state so our own federal government wouldn’t steal them from us) and we now know that at the same time Jared Kushner decided it wasn’t important to coordinate a federal response because covid was hitting blue states anyway.
Since then, Trump himself still has not learned a single thing from this. This doesn’t really need to be restated because he sets expectations so low, but he has spent the entire time promoting conspiracy theories, downplaying the severity of the pandemic and promoting crackpot treatments. He even subjected military members to hydroxychloroquine at dangerous amounts to prove a point. All of that is frankly criminal negligence and the fact that no one expects better from him shouldn’t change the severity of all the senseless public confusion he’s created while hundreds of thousands of Americans died.
We’ve also seen many governors who have completely ignored the warnings from states like Massachusetts and New York and are now seeing similar spikes. While obviously some GOP governors (like mine) have done a good job and some Dems have done a bad job, an element of this that can’t be overlooked is that GOP governors are dealing with an unhinged president who keeps turning their own voter base against any attempt to quell the spread. It’s the union of Trump’s callous indifference and the rest of the GOP’s political cowardice. This is no longer an issue of not knowing what policy path to follow, we now have a playbook and it’s also criminally negligent to fail to follow it.
I don’t think most people had a very high opinion of American political culture before all this but just think about this one detail: When Trump threatened to deny funding to Michigan after Gov. Whitmer made a completely reasonable comment about not getting enough help from the federal government, did you ever think that the other 49 governors would publicly denounce him? Did you even think all or most of the Demoratic governors would? Of course not because we already know Trump runs this country like he’s a king and any governor who actually wants to help out their constituents knows they’re better served kissing the ring than reminding him who he works for.
I wish we were in a spot where we were arguing about which well-intentioned policy path had the most unintended consequences rather than the multitude of points where our leaders showed complete disregard for the lives of their people. Whether or not you want to call that murder is semantics.