Joe Biden’s Coronavirus Team Includes Ezekiel Emanuel, Who ‘Hope[s] to Die at 75’

Joe Biden announced a proposed coronavirus team Monday for his new administration — and it includes Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who once wrote that he did not hope to live past the age of 75.

Emanuel, the brother of President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is known for his role in designing Obamacare. Once mocked as “Dr. Death” in debates over the rationing of end-of-life care, Emanuel wrote in 2014 that “living too long” was a state to be avoided.

As Breitbart News noted in April:

Emanuel has had a longtime and controversial fascination with healthcare rationing, writing scores of papers over the years on the ethics of allocating medical resources to a population. He is also a hyper-partisan champion of progressive policies that have sought to fundamentally transform the U.S. economy and healthcare system.

He once wrote a piece titled, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” In the 2014 Atlantic article, Emanuel made clear that he was serious about his wish to die at 75 and even argued that “living too long is also a loss.”

Emanuel wrote:

I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.

But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

Emanuel posited that “for many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop.”

Biden will be 78 if he is inaugurated in January.

A full list of advisors can be found here.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.