Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro suggested that a 30-year-old life was worth more than an 80-year-old life in a discussion with Dave Rubin on Wednesday about when the coronavirus lockdowns should be rolled back.
Said Shapiro: “Nobody just wants to say the obvious truth, which is we’re all making actuarial deductions about what are the costs in terms of how many human lives, how many years of life, because that is an actual issue in actuarial tables. If somebody who is 81, dies of Covid-19 that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of Covid-19. … If grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81, and that’s tragic and that’s terrible, also the life expectancy in the United States is 80. So, that is not the same thing. In moral terms, you want to save every life you can. At the same time, to pretend that it is of the same, it is the same calculation, the age of the person, no public policy acts like that, not a single public policy in America acts like that.”
Writes Mediaite: “Shapiro’s notable sang froid about elderly people being struck down by the coronavirus stands in stark contrast to his tone several years ago, when wrote an anti-Obamacare piece for the far right website, Breitbart, that was not-so-subtly titled ‘The Death Panels Are Coming.’ In that piece, Shapiro railed against the prospect of the Affordable Care Act resulting in ‘rationing of care’ and listed several examples of federal healthcare guidelines that suggested curtailing preventative tests like mammographies, colonoscopies, and PSA screening for adults in their seventies and eighties as a cost-saving measure.”
The full interview:
Ben Shapiro, 2017: "A first-trimester fetus has moral value… more value than just a cluster of cells. If left to its natural processes, it will grow into a baby. The real question is, where do you draw the line?"
— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) April 29, 2020
Ben Shapiro, 2020: Your grandmother should be dead already. https://t.co/kRs9EbiCqu
