This is really good.

It's just wrong to deny people access to ventilators on the grounds that they have a disability, unless that disability *directly* interferes with their ability to benefit from the ventilator. https://twitter.com/TedKennedyJR/status/1247168361085038592

2/ E.g.: suppose a disability compromises lung function so severely that if you get a bad enough case of COVID-19, a ventilator cannot help you.

In that case, someone else should get the ventilator: it will not help you, but it might help them.

3/ But this rationale clearly does not imply that someone who is e.g. blind, or who uses a wheelchair, should not get the ventilator.

4/ Relatedly, MD's allocation plans say that if you will not live for more than a year because of some preexisting condition, then you should have lower priority for ventilators. The idea here is to give lower priority to someone who is about to die of some OTHER cause.

5/ But MD does not go on to say: if we need to choose between people who are not going to die within a year, we should choose the one who has more life expectancy. One reason: people from historically oppressed have lower life expectancy.

6/ If injustices have led, say, African-Americans to have lower life expectancy, we should not take the results of that injustice as a reason not to give them ventilators.

Likewise for people who have lower life expectancy because of a disability.

8/ What states like Alabama are doing is just wrong, imho. Good for the authors of this piece for explaining why.

9/ PS: One thing about Alabama: among the people they think should have lower priority for ventilators are people in a permanent vegetative state.

10/ One standard way of dealing with this case is to say: just as a patient should lost priority if s/he cannot benefit from a ventilator, s/he should also lose priority if s/he cannot perceive any benefit from getting a ventilator.

11/ (Not just at the moment, when e.g. s/he might be under anaesthesia, but generally.)

This is an argument that *does not* rely on the idea that we should give lower priority to people who are not very smart.