Discovery Institute’s Wesley J. Smith Breaks Down Ezekiel Emanuel’s New COVID Approach

Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith joined Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson on Chicago’s AM 560 The Answer to break down Ezekiel Emanuel’s new approach towards COVID-19, expressed in a recent column in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Emanuel acknowledges that the “Zero COVID” is an unachievable goal and that we simply must accept COVID-19 as one of many respiratory viruses we live with day-to-day. However, Emanuel’s corollary to this would not be a return to normal life, but instead treating all respiratory ailments as one thing by aggregating statistics. Emanuel writes:

The “new normal” requires recognizing that SARS-CoV-2 is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more. COVID-19 must now be considered among the risks posed by all respiratory viral illnesses combined. Many of the measures to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (eg, ventilation) will also reduce transmission of other respiratory viruses. Thus, policy makers should retire previous public health categorizations, including deaths from pneumonia and influenza or pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19, and focus on a new category: the aggregate risk of all respiratory virus infections.

The objective of this approach is to keep society terrified, says Smith, thus empowering public health bureaucrats even more and lending itself to a never ending barrage of “emergency” measures intended to “keep us safe.”