Stewart Brand Is 81—and He Doesn’t Want to Go on a Ventilator

The legendary thinker and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog raises a public conversation about end-of-life care during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Stewart Brand

From Wired: Brand is a legendary writer and thinker, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and cofounder of the Long Now Foundation. He is also 81, and his tweet Fwas a way of opening a conversation on a subject that was impossible for him to avoid during the Covid-19 pandemic: When is it time to say no to treatment?

This end-of-life question didn’t arrive with the new coronavirus. For people who are older or have serious medical conditions, the possibility of having to make frightening health decisions in an emergency always lurks in the back of the mind. Covid-19 drives those dark thoughts to the foreground. While the virus is still a mystery in many ways, experts have been consistent on at least one point: It hits older people and those with preexisting medical conditions the hardest. And one of the worst complications—acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)—can come on suddenly, rapidly accelerating to the point where treatment dictates admission to an intensive care unit.

Brand now was posing a question: Should you just not go there? That’s when he opened it up to Twitter. “The main thing I’m looking for is data,” he wrote. “Anecdotes. Statistics. Video. INFORMATION … The stuff that good decisions are made of.”

Supporting his quest was Brand’s wife, Ryan Phelan, who has a background in health care. (She founded a consumer health website that was acquired by WebMD in 1999 and later founded DNA Direct, a consumer genetics company, which Medco Health Solutions bought in 2011. )

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