A New Covid-Related Scandal: Midazolam and the Refusal to Provide Treatment of Old People

 It seems there's a new Covid-Related scandal in progress as we speak.

This is the refusal by the NHS to treat older Covid patients, or patients that present with Covid-like symptoms. 

By refusal to treat, I mean the withdrawal of Oxygen, the refusal to treat symptoms and the basic lack of care. It's the same sort of caring that was exhibited by the Liverpool pathway. Anyone that knows anything about the Liverpool pathway and it's barbaric withdrawal of basic needs like food and water to assist dying should be just as shocked by this new scandal.

I've heard through a few friends of a chap that was admitted to the local hospital because he was coughing up blood. 

They did various tests for TB etc, but couldn't pin down the cause of the issue. That's what they said. Within three days, the man had deteriorated so much that they told the family they should come in to pay their last respects. 

By then every time they removed oxygen from the patient, his sats crashed. Supposedly, there was nothing they could do.

So the doctor's plan was to say to the family to spend the day getting their affairs in order, say their goodbyes and then the next day they would withdraw the oxygen. 

In order to "help" him during this time, they would administer Midazolam so that as he died, he would not struggle to breathe. Midazolam is a muscle relaxant. So instead of struggling to breathe as someone with oxygen deprivation would, they would relax his muscles so he wouldn't struggle and would eventually die in a peaceful manner.

The family are now reporting they all have Covid. 

So the questions start:

If it was Covid and the patient was coping on oxygen, why remove oxygen from him? Why not keep administering the oxygen until his body gained resistance against the virus and he could breathe again?

Why refuse to treat the patient if Covid was the cause?

Why wasn't the patient tested for Covid?

Why is this not an isolated case? I have heard of this so-called treatment from a few sources now. It seems the NHS is not treating patients and making all effort to make them better now, but instead assisting them in dying. 

This has got to be yet another criminal scandal. 

Why is the NHS doing this? Are there statistical limits at play?

Is the cost of oxygen so high that they can only administer it for a short period? Does it mean that if your condition requires more than 3 days-worth of oxygen, the preferred treatment by the NHS is to kill you off?

I'd heard of this happening online, but now I've had first-hand confirmation that it is happening.

It's a fucking scandal and like the DNR scandal that still hasn't been brought to light by the media or investigated by the authorities, people need to be investigated for criminal activity. 

I've yet to add the final clue as to why this is happening: the chap in question was 82. As I had with my mother and the lack of care and treatment while she was in hospital, it seems there's a policy in place at the NHS with an arbitrary limit on the age at which they will actually treat a patient. Over that limit, the "treatment" is mitigation only and if there's a fear the patient will use those resources over a limit of (say) three days, then it's time for the mitigation to be withdrawn and any treatment to be withdrawn. 

Come to think of it thinking back with my mother the three day thing seemed to crop up too. After three days they were trying their best to push her off to the recovery or rehabilitation department, which ended up in her being re-admitted to A&E and back into the hospital, because the rehabilitation unit said she was still too ill to be there. In effect she hadn't recovered.

This is at the very least, gross negligence manslaughter, although I'd go further and argue there is no neglect here, this is a very deliberate policy.

GNM is defined thussly:

Gross Negligence Manslaughter is when the most likely cause of death is due to grossly negligent action or inaction. An example of gross negligence manslaughter is if a doctor administers a drug knowing the patient is allergic to it and that patient dies as a result if the reaction to the drug.

Manslaughter implies there is no intention to kill. It's my contention that's exactly the intention in this case. The doctors know exactly what the withdrawal of oxygen would do. The evidence of that is the administering of Midazolam to reduce the effects caused by the withdrawal and the "easing" of their transition to death. The only negligent aspect of this case is the failure to test for Covid, although from what I am hearing from around the country, that wouldn't have any effect on the actual outcome. 

Some would call it murder.

During the writing of this, the penny has dropped. There is a record of when a patient is admitted to a ward. The clock starts ticking and I wonder there is a 4-day time window to treat the patient and get them of the ward. I think this is for general admissions and not for specialist units like strokes, heart attacks, etc. where the treatment and recovery takes longer than 4 days. I know there's a 4-hour limit for A&E admissions, but I'd wager there is also a limit for patients on wards too.

So is the NHS answer to time limits on wards to kill off patients? 

The evidence kinda says yes. If the NHS can reasonably argue that the patients death was inevitable or there is also an age limit beyond which some other reporting metric is not invoked because they expect an older patient to die. 

So for instance they can reasonably get away with a lot of post-80-year-old patients dying without repercussions.

I'd love to delve deeper into NHS reporting metrics and prove my theory true. I'd also love to disprove it, as then that's killing someone that could be treated for no reason. At least with a reporting metric bearing down on a ward administrator, it's easy to see under what circumstances killing a patient rather than taking the time to treat them becomes an acceptable practice.