Page 168 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

choices informed by ethical considerations. In the US, recessions
do indeed kill a lot of people because the absence or limited

nature of any social safety net makes them life-threatening. How?
When people lose their jobs with no state support and no health
insurance, they tend to “die of despair” through suicides, drug
overdoses and alcoholism, as shown and extensively analysed by

Anne Case and Angus Deaton. [145] Economic recessions also
provoke deaths outside of the US, but policy choices in terms of
health insurance and worker protection can ensure that there are

considerably fewer. This is ultimately a moral choice about
whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that
favour the destiny of the community. It is an individual as well as a
collective choice (that can be expressed through elections), but
the example of the pandemic shows that highly individualistic

societies are not very good at expressing solidarity. [146]

In the immediate post-pandemic era, following the first wave in
early 2020 and at a time when many economies around the world
are sliding into deep recessions, the perspective of more severe

lockdowns seems politically inconceivable. Even the richest
countries cannot “afford” to endure a lockdown indefinitely, not
even a year or so. The consequences, particularly in terms of
unemployment, would be horrific, resulting in a dramatic fallout for

society’s poorest, and individual well-being in general. As the
economist and philosopher Amartya Sen put it: “The presence of
disease kills people, and the absence of livelihood also kills

people.” [147] Therefore, now that testing and contact-tracing
capacities are widely available, many individual and collective
decisions will of necessity involve complex cost–benefit analyses
and even sometimes a “cruel” utilitarian calculus. Every policy
decision will become an exceedingly delicate compromise

between saving as many lives as possible and permitting the
economy to run as fully as possible. Bioethicists and moral
philosophers often argue among themselves about counting life

years lost or saved rather than just the number of deaths that
occurred or that could have been avoided. Peter Singer, a
professor of bioethics and author of The Life You Can Save, is a
prominent voice among those who adhere to the theory that we

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