"I’m a theological ethicist currently teaching at Villanova University. I am also an award-winning journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including POLITICO, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Globe & Mail, BBC, Playboy, The Economist, Commonweal, and the Boston Globe. I am also a columnist for Christian Century. My first book — Is It God’s Will? Making Sense of Tragedy, Luck and Hope in a World Gone Wrong — will be published in September by Morehouse Academic."
Saturday, September 13, 2025
It's not easy being the judge of the whole universe or the mind of God
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Complete Lives Covid Protocol?
By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, MD
In a shocking departure from traditional hospital policies, a hospital admission has become like reporting to prison. Prisoners in America’s jails have more visitation rights than do COVID patients in America’s hospitals.
One family member, a professional psychologist with a career focus treating victims of trauma, said that in many hospitals COVID patients are treated “little better than animals.”
Shocking recordings of Mayo Clinic-Scottsdale and Banner Health System hospital executives have been released by an attorney on the Legal Advisory Council of Truth for Health Foundation, an Arizona public charity. Executives were discussing coordinated efforts to restrict fluids and nutrition for hospitalized COVID patients and to suppress all visitations for COVID patients.
The COVID protocol that hospital physicians must follow, in lockstep across the U.S., appears to be the implementation of the 2009-2010 “Complete Lives System” developed by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel for rationing medical care for people older than 50.
Dr. “Zeke” Emanuel, who was the Senior White House Health Policy Advisor to President Obama and has been advising President Joe Biden about COVID-19, stated in his classic 2009 Lancet paper: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”
“Attenuated” means rationed, restricted, or denied medical care that commonly leads to premature death.
In 2021, whistleblower doctors, nurses, attorneys, patient advocates, and journalists have exposed egregious hospital abuses, neglect of patients, denial of vital intravenous fluids and basic medicines to hospitalized COVID patients across the U.S.
The Complete Lives Protocol apparently derives from the 1990s UK National Health Service “Liverpool Pathway,” which in effect constituted euthanasia.
Now we see its malevolent manifestation in the “COVID Protocol.” Age-based rationing is happening every day on COVID units of our hospitals, since the overwhelming majority of COVID patients are older than 50, the age at which Emanuel claims that a life is “complete” and not worth the use of medical resources.
"Complete Lives System" and the "COVID Protocol" are pathways leading to suffering and premature death, mainly of older Americans. They achieve the government's goal of reducing Medicare costs. At the same time, hospitals make untold extra millions with extra incentive payments for COVID patients during their tortured path to death, while they are chemically and physically restrained and isolated from families, pastors, priests, and rabbis.
The heartbreaking story of Veronica Wolski, a well-known Chicago Freedom advocate, was widely publicized. Once hospitalized in ironically named Resurrection Hospital, Veronica was given remdesivir, which she had repeatedly refused, denied proper basic medical care that could have been life-saving, and was not allowed access to her family, priest, or healthcare power of attorney. The hospital blocked Veronica leaving the hospital when she and her attorneys demanded release. Her healthcare power of attorney was removed by hospital security. Veronica died alone as a medical prisoner in a Catholic hospital denied even a priest at the end of her life.
Unconscionable hospital violations of human rights, including even violations of the Geneva Convention codes established following World War II to prevent abuses of prisoners, are occurring daily across the U.S.
Patients are coerced to take rapidly approved drugs like Remdesivir, in spite of known risks of kidney and liver failure, and to be placed on ventilators, both of which bring in incentive payments and create huge profits for hospitals.
Patients are denied adequate fluids and nutrition, as well as vitamins, inhaled and intravenous corticosteroids, antibiotics, antivirals, and adequate doses of “blood-thinners” (anticoagulants).
Patients suffer inhumane isolation with use of chemical and physical restraints, in violation of existing guidelines for patient protection.
Hospitals are using law enforcement to deny access to hospital grounds for family and advocates.
Patients and their advocates have been denied information on benefits of early treatments and denied access to such treatment. Autopsies have confirmed many patients died because of inadequate doses of standard anticoagulation, even after family members went to court to demand therapeutic doses to help save lives.
Doctors and nurses risk their careers, their licenses, livelihoods, and even their lives as they courageously speak out to inform their patients and the public with life-saving information. One ICU physician colleague posted this on social media recently
"Just finished a 10-night stretch in the ICU. Patient bashing and blatant meanness have taken on a whole new level within our healthcare colleagues. How can we NOT spiral downwards towards despair when this behavior is allowed and is being normalized?? …I feel I’ve been thrown into a Mean Girls sequel. Making fun of patients and families for not being V’d is the cool thing now. . . . I don’t mind taking care of COVID patients. But this hateful vibe that has permeated my world is what’s going to end my career if it doesn’t end.”
Welcome to the brave new world of government-directed medical care carried out by obedient, profit-focused hospital executives eager for the government handouts of incentive payments for following the “COVID Protocol.”
Thursday, February 25, 2021
Telling black women to abort their future in the name of health and liberation
New ways to oppress blacks. Tell them that aborting their children is reproductive justice and liberation. And feature it during Black History month. I wonder how much these women earn for taking their show on the road. They've been paid speakers as "Christians" for years. More black babies are legally killed in 4 days than 80 years of lynching. Why isn't it called "systemic racism?"
"Ohio State's Center for the Study of Religion for "Religion, Healing and the Movement for Black Lives," from 4:30─6 p.m., featuring these presentations:
• "Black Spirituality and the Creation of Spaces for Healing and Liberation" with Dr. Elise Edwards (Baylor University)
• "Trusting Black Women: Reproductive Justice as Black Liberation" with Dr. Monique Moultrie, Georgia State University"
Friday, February 21, 2020
I think I know where this is going. . . a photo contest
“As engines of economic growth, markets extend the frontiers of human well-being; as sites of innovation, they expand the boundaries of human imagination; as a non-coercive means of coordinating behavior, they diminish the threat of tyranny. However, markets can also concentrate economic power in a way that limits individual opportunity, stifles innovation, and distorts public discourse. The need to respond to market incentives can distort relationships, dissolve communities, and harm the natural environment. The extension of markets into education, health care, and criminal justice threatens to undermine the distinct aims that those institutions were designed to promote. How do markets promote or hinder human well-being? What is the relationship between economic freedom and other freedoms? What are the proper limits of markets? What, if anything, should not be for sale?”
Pretty sure capitalism will be bashed in this photo contest promoted by Center for Ethics and Human Values at Ohio State University. The solutions will be, of course, more government control. . . because markets
- concentrate economic power
- limit individual opportunity
- stifle innovation
- distort public discourse
- distort relationships
- dissolve communities
- harm the natural environment
- undermine distinct aims of institutions
- hinder human well-being
- proper limits
Thursday, October 01, 2015
Friday, March 27, 2015
Gray Matters, vol. 2
It’s difficult for me to put the word ethics and President Obama in the same sentence—he lied about his support for gay marriage in 2008 in order to get elected and then lied again in 2012 and said his view “evolved;” he lied about Obamacare in order to get support from Catholic politicians; he lied about insured Americans being able to keep their plan or doctor when he knew it wasn’t true; he believes abortion is a woman’s health issue and gives our tax money to Planned Parenthood, allowing killing the unborn for any reason, even gender and disability, at any point in the pregnancy; he’s inserted himself into “race conversations” when he didn’t have the facts, like the Boston police incident with Professor Gates and the Trayvon Martin case in Florida; he pulled out the troops prematurely from Iraq ignoring his military advisors allowing ISIS to swarm so he could meet a campaign promise, and then claimed victory; he touts Bowe Bergdahl’s release in the Rose Garden while calling Ft. Hood workplace violence denying the injured special medical benefits; and on and on. No, ethical is not a word that comes to mind.
But here is it: “Commission Releases Gray Matters, Vol. 2 – final response to President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative related request Commission focuses on three controversial issues that must be addressed if neuroscience is to progress and be applied ethically”
See more at: http://bioethics.gov/node/4715#sthash.Q6kR6TQ2.dpuf
Monday, March 23, 2015
If ethics laws apply to wives, they should also cover girlfriends and mistresses, or whatever a boy toy is called
“Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, is demanding that lawmakers report income they make from outside jobs as part of an ethics overhaul. In response, Republican lawmakers say it's only fair to require officials to file disclosures including the finances of domestic partners such as Lee, a successful TV chef and author.”
http://news.yahoo.com/tv-celeb-sandra-lee-pulled-ny-legislative-ethics-225547313.html
From my bookshelves.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Where do rights come from? God.
“The tradition of American civil rights is a noble — and fragile — enterprise grounded in the belief that all people have inherent rights. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…" Truths? Created? Creator? Almost makes you think the American Founders believed that God exists and that rights flowed from Him.
This declaration is a moral precept grounded in centuries of Western history. But as the Founders and countless others understood, any claim of rights must have at their source the belief that man indeed possesses "inalienable rights." Religion, in other words, is the wellspring of the morality that shapes and guides the culture. In our world, Christianity (and Judaism through it) is that wellspring.
Human rights then, depend on a religion that serves as the source of a shared moral tradition and shapes a consensus on basic matters of right and wrong. If that tradition is abandoned the consensus shatters, and our ideas of what constitutes a human right are shorn from their moral moorings. (Think a moral tradition doesn't matter? Reflect on Islam and see how its notions of rights differ from ours. Not religious? Think of the blood spilled over Nazism, Marxism, and other utopian replacements.)”
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Winner of Nobel prize, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka
No need to harvest human embryos in the name of advancing medical breakthroughs. England's Sir John Gurdon and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka from Japan share the 2012 Nobel Prize in medicine for work on stem cells, revealing that mature cells can be reverted into primitive cells. There are both medical and ethical implications.
“The Nobel committee, however, made no mention of Yamanaka’s moral achievement. Not in its presentation, not in its press release, not in its interview with the laureate. It credited him only with developing “new tools” to study disease and develop therapies. Many reporters took the same approach. In its 600-word story, CNN ignored the ethics of Yamanaka’s work. The Los Angeles Times called restrictions on embryo destruction mere “headaches” for scientists. The New York Times said Yamanaka’s work, like other stem-cell technologies, had “generated objections from people who fear, on ethical or religious grounds, that scientists are pressing too far into nature’s mysteries and the ability to create life artificially.”
That’s completely wrong. Even before Yamanaka’s landmark paper, pro-lifers were all over his work. They loved it. The Vatican had followed his research with interest for years. When Cell published his paper, a pro-life coalition immediately declared his method “superior to cloning as a means of obtaining patient-specific pluripotent stem cells.” In a homily distributed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Rigali declared that Yamanaka’s story about looking into a fertility-clinic microscope showed how “God can use a helpless embryo to change a human heart.” People at the National Right to Life Committee were openly rooting for Yamanaka to win a Nobel.”
"When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters. I thought, we can't keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way," this was Dr Shinya Yamanaka, a father of two, in an interview in The New York Times in 2007.
http://www.biospectrumasia.com/biospectrum/influencers/23502/there
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Kline: Morrison thwarted his abortion clinic case
Kline: Morrison thwarted his abortion clinic case | CJOnline.com
Doctors who wrote "passes for teachers skipping classes," will probably not see any charges. Ethics violations are sweet at the feet of the DNC and Obama's reelection committee.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Inalienable moral and legal right to life comes before health
Brown University
272 George St.
Providence RI 02906
Re: The right to health as the unheralded narrative of Health Care Reform, JAMA, December 15, 2010, p. 2639
Dear Dr. Adashi,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
I suppose you could stretch "Life" to include health care, but then you'd first need "life," and have to include the "right to life" as one of those rights too, and until you do, all the UN global health care standards, government regulations, and universal reforms fall flat. Once a baby is chopped up or burned alive and dropped into the trash, all the health standards in all the acts, panels, conferences and world organizations won't make a bit of difference.
Norma Bruce
Faculty Emeritus
The Ohio State University
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Forty years ago--our dilemmas were . . .
So in the introductory essay Henry writes about spending too much money on the space race when millions went to bed hungry, about the exploding population, about junk and toxic waste being spewed into the environment, and of course, the blame the USA needed to accept for the world's problems. And he wrote about the disillusionment in the scientific/technological enterprise and the political arena.
- "In the USA the Watergate scandal, worst since Teapot Dome, brought the world's most powerful nation to a political watershed. The disappointing performance of many modern democracies, the frustrated hopes of those who relied on revolution and growing disenchantment with world political organizations--first the League of Nations and now the United Nations--was wrapped the whole cultural enterprise in a mood of gray doom. . . Is the suppression of a clearly defined national interest a reasonable expectation when the alternative is a murky global communality? Are nations facing extinction by totalitarian superpowers likely to agree that a global police force must replace any and every recourse to military response, if such agreements may portend their own eclipse? On the other hand, if national self-interest is to reign unchecked, in what dread calamity will modern history inevitably explode? It is no secret that the present course, if unaltered, could eventuate in full-scale nuclear warfare before the end of this century."
When one sees the hunger of Christians of all denominations and theological bents starving their souls while nursing at the government grant teat for food pantries, housing and neighborhood renewal, job training programs, and even marriage workshops, it's obvious that churches now find their calling in meeting bureaucratic goals.
"Not since the fall of the Roman empire have social decay and political unrest been as widespread as today," he concludes. It seems to be a very human frailty to believe you have it worse than any who came before, whether you are evangelical, atheist, humanist, or spiritually eclectic.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Decisions about disclosure
- "Early in my career, one of my patients with HIV infection, Robin, a recovering heroin addict, had re-enrolled in school and was newly engaged. Her fiance was unaware that she was HIV infected and she would not discuss using condoms, let alone her HIV infection, with him. I encouraged her to confide her infection to her fiance--for the integrity of their relationship and for the value of his health--at each of our clinical encounters. Finally, she did so. He left her. She stopped taking her antiretroviral medications and restarted using heroin. Although the fiance may have reduced his risk of infection, the consequences of my intervention were tragic for my patient. Robin's case reinforced that disclosure is a risky business because the truth can trigger an unexpected, sometimes devastating chain of reactions."
Friday, October 30, 2009
The Green MBA
- And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business came in 24th on the list of the “Beyond Grey Pinstripes Global 100” of the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education. “The CBE equips business leaders for the 21st century with a new management paradigm—the vision and knowledge to integrate corporate profitability and social value. . . CBE is a part of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program (BSP), an organization dedicated to developing leaders for a sustainable global society [which] creates opportunities for executives and educators to explore new pathways to sustainability and values-based leadership.” Van Jones, the White House Green Jobs czar who escaped to John Podesta’s think tank when his Communist and radical ties were exposed, was one of the invited speakers at the 2008 Ideas Festival of the Institute.
Hello Agriculture, Political Science and Social Work students--I guess you’ll have to become the bankers and financiers, the investors and CEOs. It has captured all your buzz words -- global sustainability, greening the business world, building a just economy, climate change, climate justice, economic justice, emerging green economy, environmentally responsible. Now all we need is someone to make money and invest again in America.
The founder and “mother” of the CBE, Judith Samuelson, wants the White House to go much further in its plan to control executive compensation. She seems completely unaware of the extent that government interference in business has brought us where we are in this Wall Street Journal article.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Do not underestimate the power of the culture of death
Thirty years ago, who could have imagined such a thing as partial-birth abortion! When I ask myself why so many people have been slow to realize how easily today’s atrocity can become tomorrow’s routine, one answer I come up with is that it was due in part to a failure to realize something very important about choice, namely that choices last.
Each time we make policy on abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic experimentation, we are changing the moral ecology of our country. We are either helping to build the culture of life or cooperating with the culture of death. It hasn’t helped that the elite media, the powerful foundations, the sex industry, and the vast profit-making abortion industry have done their best to disguise the truth of what was happening."
Mary Ann Glendon
Monday, October 12, 2009
Comparing the 2009 Health Care Agenda with the 1993 plan
Hillarycare was a lot shorter, clearer and better researched than any of the present House and Senate versions (Obamacare), and involved much more input from the general public and specialists as opposed to just staffers and lobbyists writing what Congressmen needed to say. However, the public didn’t like an unelected official taking over their health care, and disliked her personally, although in hindsight and considering what we’ve got today from a group of Marxist and socialist advisors in the White House, her version seems much less bureaucratic and cumbersome. In any event, within a year, it was dead. Obama and friends think it was talked and debated to death, and that’s why they’ve renamed a crisis and tried to ram jam cram it down our throats in the dead of night during a recess period in August. The Republicans have been helpless to stop it; it's all in the Democrats' lap now. The start date for Obamacare is so far in the future there is no way to know what diseases, technology or cures may be on the horizon by then, so cost projection is just a fantasy. Think what has changed just within the technology of medical records, surgery for obesity and the treatment of AIDS since 1993.
But essentially the ethical underpinnings of Obamacare is unchanged Hillarycare. It has just grown to obese proportions.
The 15 ethical values as the base of the Clinton Plan as printed in The Lutheran, Dec. 1993 p. 32. These will look very familiar.
1. Health care is a fundamental human right.
2. Access to health care must be universal.
3. Benefits must be comprehensive and basic.
4. The benefits must be distributed equally to be a fundamental social good.
5. No pre-existing conditions can deprive a person of this community good.
6. It will be supported in a proportionate way by those most able to pay.
7. It will be intergenerational without weighting toward the elderly.
8. It will be rationed in a prudent and humane way because resources are finite.
9. Only truly effective treatments will be offered.
10. It will be high-quality.
11. It will be streamlined and will simplify the bureaucracy.
12. Individual choice will be evaluated and balanced against the community good.
13. Each person will contribute to the common good by being responsible and not wasting health-care resources.
14. Physicians will not be asked to engage in activities that are inconsistent with their professional commitments and their integrity will be protected.
15. There must be an effective appeal mechanism to protect individuals.
Folks, there is NO CRISIS. About 10% of American citizens (30,000,000 according to the President's last speech) do not have adequate health care. We have a huge government medical program now which covers some very well, and others very poorly, and some have chosen to not have either government nor private insurance. Under the "new" improved plan, there will still be about 5% not covered. This is a power grab. Not a reform.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Obama's triumph?
"Last week, President Obama removed virtually all restrictions on fetal stem cell research, claiming a triumph of science over “ideology.” The hope, of course, is that science may find new ways to prolong and improve our lives, now that the shackles of moral restraint, humility, and ethics have been removed. It seemed fitting, therefore, to repost this older essay, pondering whether the “victories” which science now has in store for us will be indeed Pyrrhic." Continue here with Dr. Bob on what does it mean to be human.Thursday, February 12, 2009
Who bears the responsibility?
If the managers and owners of Peanut Corporation of America knew about the salmonella contamination, they are worse than pond scum and should go to jail. But what about all the workers, the ones who now say they saw the filth, the rats, the chipped paint above roasters?- Terry Jones, a janitor, remembered the peanut oil left to soak into the floor and the unrepaired roof that constantly leaked rain.
And James Griffin, a cook at the plant, recounted how his observations led to this simple rule. “I never ate the peanut butter, and I wouldn’t allow my kids to eat it.”
In interviews, these three men and another employee who worked at the now-closed plant, provided an inside glimpse into the day-to-day sanitation lapses there. AJC.com
So now a government that can't provide enough employees so the FDA can keep the plants inspected using regulations and laws long on the books is going to spend massive amounts of our money dabbling in less critical facets of our lives, like universal pre-school, light bulbs to save energy and dangerous to dispose, and rewriting marriage laws so gays don't feel left out.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Liberals are so transparent
The new black kid on the block is being banned by Congress; a white female conservative was run out of town on a rail by NBC. You gotta love 'em--they are true to their phony core. Just-Us. - The former Illinois attorney general said he was "not seeking to have any type of confrontation" over taking the seat that he was appointed to by embattled Gov. Rod Blagojevich. But Burris, who would be the Senate's only black member, also said he was considering a federal lawsuit to force Senate Democrats to seat him.
- NEW YORK Apparently NBC was "Drudged." Columnist/author Ann Coulter, bounced from a Today show appearance today, has been re-booked for tomorrow.
Michael Calderone at Politico reports: "Coulter has been talking up being bumped by NBC for the past two days, both on other networks and the radio. A controversy erupted when Drudge splashed that she’d been 'banned for life,' leading NBC to deny that she was banned, and later offering her a new segment.
"On her website, Coulter writes that 'Drudge gets results: Today show changes mind.' She'll be appearing during both the 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. hours.
"So in the end, NBC will probably get more viewers and Coulter will sell more books—or at least further convince those in her camp that the MSM isn’t on her side."
Coulter appeared on the CBS morning show today and was accused of being "goofy" by Harry Smith.
Oh, and about Burris. Emmanual has denied any connection with Blagojevich and the senate seat; Jesse Jackson Jr. likewise; and also Obama says he's pure as the driven snow on the issue. If no one struck out, was the pitch thrown? If no one talked to Blago, where is the impeachable offense; and he hasn't been impeached for not talking to the Illinois three; and he's innocent until proven guilty under our system and is still the legal governor of Illinois. So Burris meets all the qualifications, including being a resident of Illinois--was probably even born in the USA.