By: Daniel John Sobieski

New York Governor and nursing home serial killer Andrew Cuomo’s recent interview by George Stephanopoulos on Disney/ABC’s Good Morning America proved an oft-repeated statement by Sean Hannity:

Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night put the “leftist media” in its place, saying that if President Donald Trump “could actually cure cancer,” the “media still wouldn’t be happy.”

The news that thanks to President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, drugmaker Pfizer has a vaccine that is 90 percent effective against COVID-19 and is ready to roll thanks to $2 billion from and a distribution infrastructure built by the Trump administration, did not make the media, Stephanopoulos and totalitarian Democrats in the mold of Cuomo happy. Those who decried Trump’s alleged slow speed response to the pandemic cannot stomach Donald Trump’s warp speed success in finding a vaccine, and perhaps more than one, to end it. They want to wait for Joe Biden and his hand-picked Obama leftover, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. As Breitbart News reported:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told Good Morning America on Monday morning that while the development of an effective coronavirus vaccine was “good news,” it was “bad news” that it would arrive while President Donald Trump is in office….

George Stephanopoulos: We were talking yesterday about the importance of vaccine distribution in the next two months. What do you make of this news?

Cuomo: Well, it’s good news/bad news, George. The good news is the Pfizer tests look good and we’ll have a vaccine shortly. The bad news is that it’s about two months before Joe Biden takes over, and that means this administration is going to be implementing a vaccine plan. The vaccine plan is very important and it’s probably the most ambitious undertaking since COVID began. … And the Trump administration is rolling out the vaccination plan and I believe it’s flawed. I believe it learns nothing from the past. They’re basically going to have the private providers do it, and that’s going to leave out all sorts of communities that were left out the first time when COVID ravaged them.

So what is Joe Biden’s vaccination plan that’s so important that it would be better to have people die from COVID while we wait for it? Perhaps we should ask Dr. Emanuel, one of 13 “experts” picked by Biden to populate his COVID-19 Advisory Board. From January 2009 to January 2011, Dr. Emanuel served as a special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. He was one of the architects of Obamacare and held controversial and appalling views about who should live and who should just get out of the way to die, views which prompted 2008 GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin to warn of Obamacare “death panels.” Ironically, Joe Biden is 77 and Zeke Emanuel has argued it is not worth living past 75:

Oncologist Dr. Zeke Emanuel, one of 10 advisory board members named to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force, argued in a 2014 essay that he doesn’t want to live past 75.

Emanuel, 63, wrote that “by 75, creativity, originality and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us” in his 2014 essay “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

“Since 1960, however, increases in longevity have been achieved mainly by extending the lives of people over 60. Rather than saving more young people, we are stretching out old age,” Emanuel wrote in the essay….

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., criticized the selection of Emanuel for the advisory board on Monday.

“A member of Biden’s new coronavirus task force is a lockdown enthusiast who has written that living past 75 isn’t worth it,” Cotton wrote on Twitter. “Americans want our country opened up, not creepy bioethicists who enjoy playing God.”

Dr. Emanuel will personally be a key architect in Biden’s plan on vaccine distribution, on who gets the vaccine first and distribution priorities. His selection for Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board is cheered on by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who infamously put COVID-infected patient s into nursing homes and senior care facilities, killing them by the thousands. That is perhaps not so surprising considering Emanuel’s views.

“Calls for changing physician training and culture are perennial and usually ignored. However, the progression in end-of-life care mentality from ‘do everything’. to more palliative care shows that change in physician norms and practices is possible,” he writes in a June 2008 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

He sees a problem in the Hippocratic Oath doctors take to first do no harm compelling them “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others” thereby avoiding the inevitable movement toward “socially sustainable, cost-effective care.”

In other words, Dr. Emanuel believes that some lives are simply just not worth saving – or being first in line for a vaccine. One of the proposed Obama constructs was something called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) whose purpose was to prioritize the allocation of Medicare spending resources. It was to be the means to the end of cost-effective healthcare or Emanuel’s dream of “socially sustainable, cost-effective care.”

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee, called IPAB “essentially a healthcare rationing body” which “will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them,” wrote Dean, who is also a physician. That is the kind of thing Dr. Zeke Emanuel embraces.

The frightening specter of government appointees deciding who lives and who dies by controlling the availability or withholding of treatment based on cost-effectiveness has been a grim reality in Britain and Canada. Sarah Palin was right when she referred to ObamaCare’s IPAB as a death panel whose decisions would result in the rationing of healthcare to the point that they would be in effect deciding who lived and who died as has happened under Britain’s National Health Service.

The concept behind deciding who lives and who dies and how finite resources should be allocated was once described by Dr. Emanuel. In his paper, “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions” he expounds on what he calls “The Complete Lives System” for allocating treatments and resources. He says: “When the worse-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable…” Allocating is Latin for rationing.

This is scary stuff. With Dr. Emanuel advising Biden, will vaccine decisions be based on whose lives are most worth saving? Will blue states get priority over red states? Will politically correct groups get a higher priority? Will seniors continue to get the shaft as they did in Cuomo’s nursing homes? Will the “woke” crowd be the first in line while the “deplorables” are put in the back. Already there are calls for the making of lists of Trump supporters for retribution.  A list for denying vaccinations perhaps?

Ask Dr. Emanuel, who once thought something like a “death panel” was a perfectly acceptable idea.

*Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.