Covid Just Killed The Last Man Living In An Iron Lung

Paul Alexander, the last man on Earth living in an iron lung after surviving polio as a child, was just killed by covid.

The shame of it.

Nothing quite sums up the hegemonic project of covid normalization, and the total disregard for the lives of the vulnerable, like a polio survivor being killed by covid.

This was a social murder.

Paul Alexander barely ever left his iron lung. His life was entirely at the mercy of the people who came and went from his room, and the viruses they brought with them, or not.

He died because actually living and breathing vulnerable people are deemed far less important than the feeling of a normal.

All it would have taken to keep Paul alive was a mask. That’s it. The sheer banality of it.

The ease with which his life could have carried on, verses the supposed hardship many have been convinced this simple act imposes on people, is grotesque. Utterly grotesque.

His death required many stages and a huge amount of normalising propaganda:

• If you’re vaccinated you can’t spread it

• If you’re vaccinated you can’t die

• Masks don’t work

• It’s mild now

• We have to live with it

• The pandemic is over

And many more.

Paul’s death required all these lies to bubble away in the background and in the minds of those who came in contact with him long enough for them to infect him with a deadly dose of covid.

That was March 2024. For others it will be April, or May. 2025. 2026.

This is not to blame his death on any one individual. We don’t know the details of his interactions or the precautions that were taken.

Again, this was a social murder.

Paul died because, from 2020, capitalists were figuring out how to get people to absorb the risk this new virus posed rather than figuring out how to rid the world of it.

He died because cleaning the air and controlling the spread of the virus costs money.

He died because acknowledging covid as an ongoing threat would hit profits.

Because it would hit consumer confidence.

He died because politicians wanted to declare victory over covid for political reasons.

Because public health authorities put their loyalties to business before their responsibility to the health of the people.

His death, like the deaths of so many since the dropping of all control measures, was the collateral damage necessary for us to move on.

It’s a disgrace.

This is being compounded by the virtual media blackout on his cause of death. Very few articles even mention that covid killed him.

Paul is only the most high profile vulnerable person that has died of covid recently that we know of. The reality is that large numbers of vulnerable people are dying of covid every day, many of them after being infected in hospitals, places that should be safe.

Physical reality has been shunted aside for a socially constructed reality necessary for the maintenance of the system as it is.

Because the system, as I have written about before, cannot survive the truth.

With Paul Alexander’s death we see how utterly the system has failed to control a new virus because it required the administrators to adapt their model of the world.

Unlike flu, covid is not seasonal. Unlike measles, it is not one-and-done vaccine preventable. Unlike cold-causing rhinoviruses, it is not mild. Covid challenged governments to create new protocols for a virus that couldn't be plugged into existing mental or practical frameworks about infection control.

They utterly failed.

Will Paul’s death change anything? It shouldn’t have to. This kind of weight should not be placed on it. He didn’t sacrifice himself for covid awareness.

It should however be a reminder of our responsibilities to each other, especially to vulnerable people, in a world where the infectious disease landscape has changed. And in a world where institutions have abrogated their responsibilities to the people.

And if it re-awakened in those who used to take covid seriously their responsibility to protect vulnerable people, if it shook them from their roles as normalising agents, well, that would be a bonus.