I recently woke to a slew of links to reports suggesting that the UK government had euthanized thousands of elderly patients with the drug Midazolam, reporting the deaths as COVID-related for obvious nefarious purposes. After some research, I doubt it.
The assumption is based on statistical data showing a spike in administered doses that coincide with early deaths among elderly care patients (here is the relevant preprint). I don’t doubt there was a spike but as little respect as I have for the Medical Industrial Complex post-COID-response, we should avoid the desire to jump to conclusions. That is, after all, the hallmark of both Pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical intervention failures in response to COVID.
COVID is the flu. The flu kills the old and frail. There is no doubt that the COVID response resulted in countless unnecessary deaths and that far too many people making those decisions or enforcing them against better judgment are responsible. The problem with the Midazolam mass-murder conspiracy theory is that the drug “can legitimately be used for patients who have terminal restlessness or respiratory distress.”
Midazolam and Morphine are used to allow patients to tolerate active treatment e.g. high flow oxygen, by managing their symptoms (which were overwhelming). These medications, if used appropriately, aid symptom management. Systematic reviews have shown no respiratory suppression and no hastening of death due to sedative medications.
In preparation for the arrival of the virus, care home residents were asked whether they wanted to be admitted to hospital should they catch SARS-CoV-2 and develop COVID-19. As the only treatment for the frail was oxygen, many said they would rather not be admitted. Consequently, if a resident who had expressed a wish to remain in the care home subsequently deteriorated and was felt to be dying, midazolam prescriptions, along with prescriptions for painkillers and anti sickness medications, were written in anticipation of these being needed.
Given the large number of people who died of a respiratory disease in April 2020, it is unsurprising that higher numbers of Midazolam prescriptions were written during that period. However, an increase in prescriptions does not necessarily equate to an increase in drugs actually administered to or taken by patients.
Armed with this legitimate medical application as a possible explanation, I went looking for support for or against the notion and landed on Dr. Pierre Kory’s substack.
The seeming perception of policy makers that they were in a mass casualty when it appears they were not led the care home residents to die of Covid at needlessly excessive rates due to lack of access to hospital support devices. Which then led to many developing severe breathlessness in the home with the only available care options to be those of “comfort meds.” It seems the reason why they put in a medication protocol as part of their policies, is that they knew they would be needed as a result of insufficient hospital capacity with inability to make available the use of non-invasive and invasive ventilators and high-flow oxygen devices.
Dr. Kory cites a number of missteps that we’ve come to know well as responsible for needless excess deaths. Many of us know people who got severe illnesses and ended up victims of protocol, not so much from the virus. Malfeasance and misfeasance were rampant.
More from Dr Kory.
Further, these policies likely explain so many of the troubling reports by patients and their families of being denied care and thus causing the premature death of patients. But again, I believe (although I was not there, I have read some of the investigations into what happened) that it was the policies that caused the excess deaths, not the meds (although I suppose one could argue there is little difference given that the meds were part of the policy, but I personally do see a distinction – the meds were secondary, albeit an unfortunate and ugly part of the whole mess in that early wave). …
But?
But again, although terrible actions were taken by some providers out of fear and confusion as to what the “right” thing to do was, I cannot ascribe the intent of murder or euthanasia systematically to a population of health care providers. Although I, like many others, recognize that individual providers in certain situations may have “lost their minds”,, a.k.a “ethical bearings” and thus may have actually committed those acts out of some combination of ethical ignorance and fear but I refuse to accept they did it out of malice.
Mistakes were made. A lot of them, with mortal consequences. This is not an effort to dismiss those. We continue to stand behind our past reporting, but this analysis about Midazolam being deliberately used to murder the elderly before we really even knew what we were dealing with reeks of a counter-intelligence media trap set to ensnare people so embedded in the anti-globalist agenda that they can’t help but repeat it.
More likely, it is hyperbolic clickbait, but there is a medical/treatment explanation for its use, specifically in the UK, where socialized medicine has, for decades, crippled access to care. In other words, the killer in this story is not Midazolam. It is the system that so ruined itself that a spike in comfort drugs was the best they could do, and while people died, the drugs were not administered to kill them.
They died because of the system, not the medication (in this case). At least, that’s how this looks from where I sit.
You are, of course, encouraged to disagree.
