One of the iconic moments from my Who Is Bill Gates? documentary is the clip of Gates at the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival discussing a proposal to increase funding for public education by diverting money from end-of-life care for the elderly and terminally ill.
Lamenting the skyrocketing tuition rates for college students, Gates tells the Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson, “That’s a trade-off society’s making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, ‘Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient—would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical cost?'”
Then, squirming around in his seat and looking over at the audience, Gates acknowledges that there may be some objection to this line of thinking: “But that’s called the ‘death panel’ and you’re not supposed to have that discussion.”
A decade ago, when Gates made those remarks, it would have been difficult to imagine an idea that was more out of touch with general public sentiment than the idea of “death panels” to free up money to hire more teachers. It was shocking enough to the general public that even the socially inept Gates realized that talking about it was verboten.
But what many sitting in the festival audience that day may not have realized is that the idea of trading health care for the elderly for public education funds is not Gates’ own novel proposal. In fact, this “death panel” discussion has been around for a long time, and that discussion was spearheaded by a relatively obscure—but incredibly influential—branch of philosophy known as bioethics.
Bioethics, for those not in the know, concerns itself with the ethical questions raised by advancing knowledge and technological sophistication in biology, medicine, and the life sciences. This branch of study often leads to serious academic debates about bizarre, improbable, science fiction-like scenarios, such as the ethics of using memory-enhancing drugs or of erasing memories altogether.
While the musings of bioethicists on the case for killing granny and after-birth abortions and other morally outrageous ideas may still seem a little “out there” to much of the public, conversations about these previously unspeakable topics are going to become much more commonplace as we enter the COVID-1984 biosecurity paradigm.
In fact, they already are.
So what is bioethics all about? And what does it have to do with death panels and the birth of the Corona World Order? Find out the dark truth of the modern-day eugenicists in this week’s edition of The Corbett Report Subscriber.
For free access to this editorial, please CLICK HERE.
This content is restricted to site members. If you are an existing user, please log in. New users may register below.
142 Comments