Folks are debating the justification and impetus for the Biden administration to grant access to monoclonal antibody treatments for COVID-19 not strictly according to need.  Ryan Saavedra reports for The Daily Wire:

[Biden spokeswoman Jen] Psaki then said that the treatments are used after a person becomes infected and said that the way to save more lives was to get more people vaccinated, even though vaccinated people can still sometimes become infected with the coronavirus.

Psaki then said that the administration does not have an unlimited supply of the antibody treatments and that the administration is focused on making the distribution of the treatments “equitable.”

The argument is whether Biden is doing this for entirely political purposes (to undermine his opposition) or to ensure that states that don’t press vaccination don’t monopolize treatments, making them unavailable in other states when need arises despite vaccination.  The fact that this is up for debate is what I find important.

This is a warning.  Putting management of healthcare in the hands of our political establishment inevitably means that politics will be a factor in the management.  The only question is what politics.  It’s a system for balancing interests, so what types of interest will prove dominant?

The likeliest answer is that the fairness of the decisions will be inversely related to the challenge of the management.  When there are plenty of doses of something, the distribution will be entirely fair.  When doses are scarce, crass politics will play a greater role.  When resources are drained (as socialism tends to accomplish), winning elections (or otherwise gaining power) becomes a matter of life or death for each faction.

That approach may look attractive to people who think their faction will always be the strongest and will, therefore, offer them protection, but history suggests otherwise.  Eventually, only the top of the top remain protected, and the harder they hold on to power, the worse things get.

The safest approach all around is to leave politics out of it.

Featured image by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash.