The Back Road: Death from COVID-19 becomes him

The Island Now

Andrew Malekoff

Unvaccinated people now account for 99.7 percent of new coronavirus cases in the U.S. On June 29 the Associated Press reported that “nearly all COVID deaths in the U.S. are now among unvaccinated.”

At the same time, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated that the effectiveness of the vaccine is such that “nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable.”

Despite the stark reality reflected in these statements, the paradox that we continue to live with is that Donald Trump and his acolytes spend day and night discouraging use of the vaccines he credits himself with spearheading. His silence, which amounts to reckless endangerment, is the most potent force in proliferating the spread of the most transmissible variant, known as Delta, to date.

There is no point, here, in discrediting the countless myths circulating about the vaccine. The American Academy of Family Physicians COVID-19, for one, has done a good job of debunking a number of them including that vaccines were developed too fast with not enough clinical trial participants to be safe, vaccines will deliver a microchip into one’s body and the vaccines change your DNA.

Someone is guilty of reckless endangerment when he or she exhibits depraved indifference to human life by recklessly engaging in conduct that creates a grave risk of death to another person.

Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that Trump will ever be charged and tried for negligent homicide in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Short of legal remedy, a higher power will be left to judge his depraved indifference. In the words of Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference . . . and, the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.”

One five-minute PSA extolling the use of the very vaccines that he fast-tracked to record completion, is all it would take for the former president to save lives.

Yet, the delusional crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, TX (July 9-11), where Trump was the headliner, cheered against COVID-19 vaccinations.

“It’s horrifying,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Biden. “They’re cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives.”

The former president will never deliver such a life-saving message because there is nothing in it for him. He persists in believing that what he wishes or expects will affect what really happens. That is what renowned developmental psychologist Jean Piaget referred to as magical thinking, most befitting the cognitive functioning of a pre-pubescent child.

When Donald Trump was sworn in as president, like Alice in Wonderland he disappeared down a rabbit hole to an imaginary place full of bizarre adventures.

Perhaps Alice is his alter ego imagining, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.”

Sadly, his fantasy is nonfiction and has become America’s nightmare. And, he will not so much as lift a finger to prevent his adoring lemmings, our fellow Americans, from jumping off the cliff. No Kool-Aid is needed. Death becomes him.

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