The paper, Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic, is raising some serious questions about how the UK’s National Health Service handled the disease in its early days, highlighting what appears to be a deliberate policy established by the NHS to euthanize certain groups of patients, especially those who had respiratory issues.
In the study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, researchers investigated a marked lagged correlation between patients who received the palliative sedative midazolam and COVID-19 excess mortality rates in some parts of the country.
Study author Wilson Sy noted that while the injections and excess deaths were highly correlated, the data is not synchronous because the medication does not take effect immediately. Compounding this issue is the fact that there were some lags in registering deaths as well as dosage reporting.
“The very high correlation (coefficient 91 percent) between excess deaths lagged one month after Midazolam injections is largely due to the first two enormous spikes to early 2021,” he wrote.
The author expressed concerns that the NHS may have abused palliative care policies for coronavirus patients.
He added: “New guidelines were rapidly developed in early 2020 by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for managing COVID-19 symptoms, including those at the end-of-life [22]. The rapidly developed new guidelines effectively opened the door to implement a policy of euthanasia in UK during the pandemic.”
NICE said that they could not follow their usual process for developing guidance given the urgent nature of the pandemic. It instructed healthcare professionals to give patients midazolam to manage breathlessness, along with morphine.
The use of morphine and midazolam in tandem has long been considered controversial in healthcare circles because of reports of abuse in palliative care. During Hurricane Katrina, a Louisiana State University School of Medicine cancer surgeon was accused of abusing the drug combination to euthanize patients, with more than 34 people dying under the care of Dr. Anna Maria Pou under suspicious conditions.
Midazolam has also been the subject of debate over its use for lethal injections for prisoners. In Oklahoma, a prisoner shook for several minutes and vomited after being administered the sedative during his execution, and a group of death row prisoners argued in court that the mix of drugs being used could cause such a high degree of pain that it can be considered “constitutionally intolerable.”
Sy went on to add that every regional subpopulation had a positive correlation between midazolam doses and excess deaths, which means that the effect is likely causal and not due to any significant confounding factors...<<<Read More>>>...
