The horrifying monetary incentive for hospitals to put patients “on the vent” during the Pandemic
And a hiphop star’s refusal to be bought that can inspire us all
I realize this was a while ago but before it gets memory-holed or tiktok gets banned or both, I want to preserve both a tiktok video by a hospital nurse who says she witnessed Covid patients getting unnecessarily vented (to death), and from a philosophical standpoint, share with you how and when I realized I too have a price — an amount of money for which I would have gotten the vaxx. Much of my interest in philosophy stems from the way it teaches us how to use questions and deductive reasoning to identify the truth (what is really real). I posit to you that everyone lies and the biggest lies are the ones we tell ourselves, so once I realized I was lying to myself (No amount of money could convince me to get the vaxx! How dare you even imply such a ghastly character defect exists in my psyche?!!), I found myself wondering what it might have been like, emotionally, for hospitals (the administrators) to be unable to resist the $39,000 incentive to put patients on ventilators.
You can watch the video here (I uploaded the original tiktok to my channel). It’s only 6 minutes but start at 4:50 if you don’t have a lot of time. That’s when she starts talking about how the day shift nurses spend all day weaning patients off the ventilators only for the same 2 doctors to come in at night and undo all their efforts. She also says, “we’re not treating the Covid, guys. We’re not treating it.”
You may also remember this other nurse whistleblower who said: “I recorded them murdering patients.” She was the New York whistleblower who recorded patients in the hospital who had tested negative for Covid but then got put on a ventilator anyway — which killed them but earned the hospital a $39,000 payout.
People respond to incentives, as the authors of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics said over and over in both books. And apparently, this includes none other than Ice Cube (who was awesome on Law & Order: SVU). But, not in the way we might expect.
Astonishing. He said no to nine MILLION DOLLARS. Nine!! Million. Because he valued his body autonomy more than money. He chose freedom over coerced medical treatment. (Now it’s fair to point out that this was not his first nine mill. He was already a millionaire so maybe he would have reacted differently under less prosperous circumstances.) Below, please see how I got trolled on twitter for calling him a hero. The person later deleted his tweets, but you get the picture.
And in arguing with this troll, I literally deduced my own price. As tweeted above,
If someone offered me $10 million dollars to take the shot, I’d take it even if it was **guaranteed** to kill me. Do you know what my family could do with that money after I died? Whatever the fuck they want. All your rhetoric tells me is you’ve never been poor.
I realized that, even though I like to think that I can’t be bought, I can. It would just take a LOT of money. Yes, I was willing to and did lose my job for questioning the discriminatory mask/vaccine policy of the Arlington County elected official I worked for (the same day I lost my virginity, 5/21/21 — read about it here) but somehow, some way, I think I knew I would get another job even if I had to work under the table. Or, maybe that’s not quite right. No, I was prepared to be homeless. Literally, to sleep on the street. While reflecting on it now, I see that my parents’ original programming of my brain in early life (the command statement, “do the right thing, no matter what the cost”) was simply triggered by the detection of injustice and abuse of power. Like a dog trained to react to Pavlov’s bell, I had a primal yet also conditioned reaction to an overt con, exactly how Jo and Tom (my Baby Boomer parents) trained me to respond to one. Maybe I’d get fired and still qualify for unemployment insurance benefits. Maybe not. Hopefully. No one should be extorted into submitting to a shot. On principal, I would object to this use of force despite the consequences.
BUT. IF the incentive to get the shot was enough money to never have to work again, well, that would be something else entirely. I’m 42 years old. I certainly hope I don’t live long enough to collect Social Security, so/and, in order to be comfortable in DC until then, meaning living in my safe secure building with a concierge and security cameras, pool on the roof, no car or car insurance, but still factoring in the basic expenses of owning a dog and going to brunch regularly, etc., (I am easily pleased — I don’t have a car: I don’t even have a TV, guys, and the joke in my family is that I don’t have one because I have always assumed my soulmate has one. As my cousin says, he may not have a job, he may not have a car, but yes, Sarah, when you meet him, he WILL have a TV, lol), it works out to require about $60k a year, *before* tax, to be truly comfortable. I have 23 years left before “retirement” (or perhaps my inevitable natural death??) so IF Pfizer would pony up 1.4 million dollars ($60k x 23 years, rounded up to the nearest hundred grand) THEN and only then would I get their antibody dependence inducing experimental vaccine. (Yes, I didn’t account for inflation, darn it — I forgot.)
That’s my price. $1.4 mill. Freedom of time is the most valuable thing to me. It’s the reason I never wanted kids (but encourage others to! Many! At LEAST five!). Admittedly, it would be a gamble, knowing I could die suddenly. And I take an epistemological kind of pride in knowing that yes, I have a price. But it’s so high, no one would ever pay it!
But, if my price is $1.4 million and the hospitals were getting millions of dollars a DAY to put people on vents unnecessarily, then it may have been an offer too good to refuse for those hospital administrators — and I don’t even want to begin to imagine how the administrators incentivized individual residents (doctors who work only at that hospital) to keep people on a vent they knew would kill them. The question then becomes: How do we resist this type of diabolical temptation? What is the wisest, the most ethical, and the most moral response to the fact that such a choice is even CAPABLE of being presented to us?
As you may know if you are a long time subscriber, I believe we live in hell but because I don’t think I can prove that thesis without citing religious texts, I have revised it to “all of earth is a dungeon and one day God lets us out through the mercy of death.” The legislation of a financial incentive to mass murder human beings, turning hospitals into slaughterhouses, appears to me to be more evidence with which to prove my claim.
One could practically feel justified in crafting an argument to morally defend opting out of such an unethical scenario altogether. Yes, one day God will let us out of the prison cell we perceive as a physical body but we almost always have the option to leave, to use our free will to let ourselves out of the dungeon “early” so to speak (BUT DON’T, please — that’s why I said one could practically feel justified, and in a future piece, I will present an argument against suicide which also analyzes root causes of anguish and despair).
I believe that life is a series of opportunities to forgive, and to protest injustice, and to object to abuse of power, specifically abuse of power by authority. I pray for world peace and world joy every day. But it dawned on me that perhaps my prayer ought not be, God, please make the pain stop. It might ideally be, Please, God, increase my pain tolerance.
I have married these two human desires in an attempt to compromise and to avoid seeing the world in black and white (or red and blue, if you prefer). I ask, God, please, if you can’t or won’t make the pain stop, please increase my pain tolerance. Let there be world joy. And then please give me the inspiration and drive to take action to answer my own prayer.
Earlier I asked, what is the wisest, the most ethical, and the most moral response to the fact that such a choice was even capable of being presented to people in a position of authority over our quantity and quality of life? I try never to ask rhetorical questions so you have just read my real time reasoning toward the answer: If legislation caused the incentivizing of death, then passing legislation which outlaws incentivizing death is one solution. It’s flawed though. Remember, the hospitals got the money if the person was ventilated, regardless of whether or not it killed them or they would have died (and did die) anyway. I skim over that because that’s what really makes the first whistleblower’s video even more horrifying.
But let’s continue to resist the irresistible and fight forces of greed anyway. Let’s fight back, and fight hard, to the best of our ability. Anyone who gave doctors who have taken the Hippocratic Oath that choice, indeed that motive in the criminal sense of the word, to choose death over life, is (probably) a sadist. I ask God to fill their hearts with divine love, replacing all greed and cruelty with joy and good will. I do this on principle and hope you might join me.
Thank you for reading, dear substack subscribers!!
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Want to read about the glass of life being half filled with water and half filled with air? Click here.
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Everyone has a price. But my measure today is, I cannot be bought, I cannot personally be threatened, but threats too those I hold dear may sway me until I took action against those making the threats. A man.
Yep, we all have a price.
If only the mother WEFers would realize that, we could have voluntary population control.
Scandinavia has accomplished this.
Give people a decent life where everyone can work and live in a friendly society and people will self regulate. There is less pressure on women and men to have children if they know they'll be taken care of when they're older.
But no, they had to go the ham fisted greedy ass hole way, like a bully.
Fine, that's why people are seeing through the bullshit of
- pseudoscience
- pseudo-economics
- pseudo-politics
Now they're worried about losing trust at the glorious WEF. I wonder why... Dolts!