The evidence that "they would have died anyway" is eugenicist bullshit

We know from Boris Johnson's utterly demented "superman of capitalism" speech on February 4th that the eugenicist idea of letting masses of people die in order to "save capitalism" was an idea that had a lot of traction in Tory circles.

If this eugenicist "let them die to save capitalism" mentality wasn't absolutely commonplace  in the Tory ranks, then surely someone would have stopped Boris Johnson from publicly pledging to defy the international consensus, under the delusion he'd be celebrated as a capitalist superhero for deliberately allowing the virus to spread through the UK population like wildfire.

In the end Tory "take it on the chin" eugenics had to be abandoned when it became obvious that letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the population had been a terrible mistake, making the measures needed to contain it far more economically harmful than the standard pandemic protocol of Test, Contact Trace, Quarantine, that they had been so desperate to avoid in the first place.

Many on the political right regard this abandonment of "take it on the chin" as an error, because they believe that if the virus was left to spread freely through the population killing hundreds of thousands of people and utterly overwhelming the health service, it would be somewhat better for the economy.

They can't pretend that allowing the virus to spread wouldn't result in a lot more deaths, so what they try to do is minimise the importance of Covid-19 deaths with claims like "they would have died anyway", and the semantic trickery of quibbling over "died of Covid-19" and "died with Covid-19" as if the deadly viral infection isn't still a contributing factorno matter if the deceased had any other health conditions.

"They would have died anyway" was always obviously vile right-wing eugenicist bullshit, but a new study provides the evidence that it's a total crock.

A group of academics from the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and Public Health Scotland have shown that the average number of additional years of life lost for Covid-19 deaths are 13 for males, and 11 for females.

Here's a link to the study: COVID-19 – exploring the implications of long-term condition type and extent of multimorbidity on years of life lost: a modelling study

It's early days in the research of a strain of virus that's only been known about for six months, so a lot more research will come, but what's absolutely clear is that huge numbers of Covid-19 victims were nowhere near 'death's door' as the hard-right eugenicists like to pretend.

Anyone continuing to push the "they were going to die anyway" type narratives to push for lockdown to be lifted needs to come up with evidence-based research to disprove the research showing that it wipes at least a decade off the average victim's life don't they?

Otherwise they're essentially saying that killing tens of thousands of people over a decade early is what they consider "a price worth paying" to get their beloved capitalist profits flowing again.

According to analysis of the ONS figures, the Financial Times have reported that the real Covid-19 death toll is likely to be over 41,000 by now, meaning almost half a million years of life lost already if the Scottish lefe expectancy study findings are correct.

And if government concedes to the hard-right eugenics brigade and lifts the coronavirus measures before proper Test and Trace measures are in place, hundreds of thousands more years of life will be erased, potentially from your own elderly relatives.

But that's the thing with the hard-right. Stuff like human life, public health, long-term economic sustainability, the environment, fairness, and basic human decency are continually thrown to the wayside, because capitalist profiteering is their ultimate and overriding objective.

And if this capitalist profiteering means lopping a decade or more off your gran's life, they absolutely won't hesitate. All they'll do is continue to lie that "she was going to die anyway".

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