History will judge us harshly for our response to this pandemic. We are America, the nation on earth possessed of the greatest treasure of resources with which to address the pandemic and yet we are faring worse than most other industrialized nations.

Only in America would such a tragic occurrence as the rapid spread of this disease be viewed as an opportunity. The proof of this statement can be seen in that, rather than a countrywide, single coordinated attack on the virus we can see differences in response drawn sharply along red state, blue state lines.

Perhaps the best example from the medical side of the equation is the reaction to hydroxychloroquine. This drug, in use for 65 years, has had 51 global studies, all positive, yet our FDA and the government’s medical advisors dismiss its use out of hand and deny doctors the same ability to prescribe it off label as is done with hundreds of other medicines. To add insult to injury, social media platforms have taken on the role of medical advisors and with zero medical training are censoring expert medical posts that conflict with their ideological views. By doing so they are also complicit in any deaths that ensue from missed opportunity to receive medical treatment that involves drugs they seek to keep from the public.

Medical decisions should always be between a patient and his or her doctor. There is no room for the opinions of politicians, bureaucrats or social media mavens.

Could it be that those drugs that are being touted for use all provide huge profits for the pharmaceutical industry while hydroxychloroquine is out of patent and available for about $1.00 per pill? Who would have ever thought that people in the USA would be allowed to die in order to further political agendas, skew election results or insure corporate profits? Yet we seem to have arrived at that juncture in our history.

Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, to name just a few, were mass murderers all. But you can be sure that when any of these men looked into a mirror they did not perceive a monster looking back at them. Those who have politicized this pandemic for personal gain, either in power, wealth or simply to advance their ideological views are as culpable in mass murder as were the men named earlier and like those named, they too will not perceive monsters looking back from the mirror. One and all, they believe their actions to be for the common good.

But due to their callous disregard for human life, there is no kinder term than “murderer” for each of them.

Politics has no place in medicine and those medical advisors, charged with steering the course of the nation’s response to a pandemic, should not be financially involved in companies producing possible treatments. Yet that is the case with several of those responsible for telling the rest of us how to react.

The attitude of so many of our so-called leaders can be summed up in Governor Cuomo’s response to a question about the high number of deaths in New York’s nursing homes, “Those people are old,” he said, “they’re going to die anyway.”

Our children are our most precious commodity and, as many experts have testified, keeping them out of school does nothing to increase their safety but creates irreparable harm to their education and social development. Despite ample evidence that they are at no risk of contracting or spreading the virus, many of our “leaders” have elected to keep the kids out of school. It can be noted that school closures are among those aspects of the virus response that follow the red state, blue state split.

Twenty-two European nations have opened their schools and they are being safely operated on a day to day basis. The difference is that in those nations the virus has not been politicized. Again, only in America.

We have a presidential election coming soon and, without regard to who wins, with the passing of that event a large part of the reasons for politicizing this virus will disappear. Perhaps then the country will reopen and the medical community will be allowed to use every means at its disposal to eradicate the disease.

As for those who have perpetrated this mass injustice, they will probably never face consequences for their actions but the stain will be on their souls. Maybe God will forgive them, the nation can not and should not.