Covid and our chronically ill country

February 23, 2023

Chronic disease is the real killer, much more so then any virus, any pandemic.

It has been a truism from the beginning of the pandemic that co-morbidities are the driving force alongside if not behind over ninety percent of "Covid deaths."In essence, Covid has been an opportunistic killer, wreaking havoc on immune-suppressed people and populations, while the epidemiologists, 'experts,' political media hacks, and the president ignore this harsh but self-evident reality.

Another truism is that the effects of the policies using Covid as the rationale have been much more devastating than has been the medical and physical impacts of the virus and its variant(s).

Another truism is that good hygiene and herd immunity can play and have played a more positive role than has been publicly acknowledged. As Dr. Vince DiPietro told me years ago, "Healthcare is what you do; medical care is what doctors do." The best 'cure' is prevention, the proverbial, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Those things we learned from the nuns -- wash your hands, cough into a Kleenex, keep your hands to yourself, avoid crowds of strangers -- worked back then and work today, and are more important than ever.

Another truism is that, just as the virus most adversely impacts the physical health marginalized, Covid political, social and economic policies have most adversely impacted the financially unhealthy. The rich get richer at the expense of the poor, a reversal of the previous, Trump-based economy, where all economic levels improved, and no one was going backwards. For some poor people, they will have a hard if not impossible time trying to recover from Covid policies, much harder than recovering from the Covid virus.

Which takes us back to the chronically ill data. Americans have grown soft and, worse, more dependent on government to fix the things that individuals themselves have broken. Bad diets, poor nutrition, little exercise, substance abuse, addictions to social media, and other risky or damaging personal choices make for a population highly susceptible to viruses, infections and other natural attacks on one's health. Americans have surrendered personal responsibility and preventive strategies for entitlements and expensive treatments, entitlements and treatments paid for by taxpayers and claimed as new 'rights' by a woke generation of poorly educated people who have put themselves in poor shape, financially, health wise, socially and psychologically.

Years ago, Michael Novick questioned the critical assumption in the American bishops' Peter on the economy, where they claimed that people were poor "through no fault of their own." Novick pointed out the critical untruth of this claim, that poverty was very often the result of series of poor choices, and to absolve people of personal responsibility for their well-being is both irrational and a recipe for social and economic disaster.

Years later, in class, I showed a video that included a bold claim by Nelson Mandela that poverty was unnatural and structural when, in fact, poverty is the natural state, i.e., we are born with nothing and we die with nothing. You may be born by the oft-claimed "accident of birth," to wealthy/high-income parents or in a 'rich' country but make no accident, you are poor even if those around you are not.

Pope Francis claims that family size is not related to poverty, namely that large families are not likely to be poor. My observation is that, in 'poor' countries, large families -- sex within marriage -- are the most common driver or cause of a life of poverty, while in 'developed' and entitled 'rich' countries, the erosion of the traditional family, i.e., sex outside of marriage, is the largest driver of lives lived in poverty. The 'cure' for poverty is prevention, not aid programs, just as the cure for poorly prepared college students is better preparation, and not admission to a challenging university. There is no justice in virtue signalinging or in good intentions alone. Polcies to prevent sickness and poverty are more important and much less expensive than policies to repair or correct sickness or poverty. We simply need to make these choices a s matter of public policy, to practice prosocial leadership, where positive goes for the common good require effective management of the methods to achieve those goals. Amen.