None of the steady stream of corporate media articles attesting to heartbreaking shortages of medical equipment in coronavirus-ravaged areas in the US—“A NY Nurse Dies. Angry Co-Workers Blame a Lack of Protective Gear” (New York Times, 3/26/20), “Unprotected and Unprepared: Home Health Aides Who Care for Sick, Elderly Brace for Covid-19” (Washington Post, 3/24/20), or “The Hardest Questions Doctors May Face: Who Will Be Saved? Who Won’t?” (New York Times, 3/21/20), for instance—have stopped to ask why the laws of supply and demand have so catastrophically failed in this crisis. Shortages of masks, ventilators and hospital beds are presented ahistorically, as though there is no cause; problems to be solved, but problems somehow without origins.
A Washington Post piece (3/28/20) noted that personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers cannot be bought from private vendors “because companies manufacturing masks and other emergency gear are demanding cash payments on delivery.” The same piece quotes Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam: “Allowing the free market to determine availability and pricing is not the way we should be dealing with this national crisis at this time.” But if you’re looking for criticism of the market-driven inability to provide life-saving equipment to frontline workers, you won’t find any in this article.
Similarly, the New York Times (3/29/20) ran a piece titled “The US Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed”:
The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.
This is a blow-by-blow account of the failed ventilator project, but it is as shallow in analysis as it is rich in detail. The subhead reads, “The collapse of the project helps explain America’s acute shortage,” but, really, all it does is describe it.
As superficial and cursory as these two mentions of market failures are, they are the exception; hundreds of articles about the pandemic run every day without even this much.
‘Moral trade-off’ of lives vs. profits
Given the blasé response to the market’s inability to deliver life-saving equipment to those who need it, because it’s not “sufficiently profitable,” it is perhaps not surprising that the view that profits are more important than lives has been treated as a reasonable opinion by corporate media.
As if on cue, in mid-March political and economic elites started talking about the need to “get the economy going again,” making sure “the cure isn’t worse than the problem,” and public-health restrictions having “gone too far.” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested senior citizens should be willing to get ill and die so we “don’t sacrifice the country.”
Corporate media treated the idea as legitimate. The Washington Post’s story (3/24/20) on Patrick’s comment went so far as to frame it as a “he said, she said,” Republicans vs. Democrats issue:
Patrick (R) faced a sharp backlash Tuesday for suggesting that older Americans should sacrifice their lives for the sake of the economy during the coronavirus pandemic, with Democrats arguing that public health should remain the country’s top priority.
The Post (3/24/20) covered Trump’s “raring to go by Easter” pronouncement in a similar manner: “Trump’s optimism contradicted the warnings of some public health officials who called for stricter—not looser—restrictions on public interactions.” “Some” public health officials here means all public health officials, and what the Washington Post calls Trump’s “optimism” would more accurately be described as his utter disinterest in anything or anyone that does not profit him personally.
The Times (3/23/20) did no better:
President Trump, Wall Street executives and many conservative economists began questioning whether the government had gone too far and should instead lift restrictions that are already inflicting deep pain on workers and businesses.
So on the one hand we have those concerned that “many more deaths” will occur if we loosen social distancing practices, and on the other hand we have the investor class that thinks public health has “gone too far.” The equanimity with which these corporate outlets discuss the trade-offs of lives and profits is truly appalling.
Dorothee Benz is a writer, organizer and strategist.
