The term MAID is a new one on me. It stands for ‘medical assistance in dying’. It’s been legal in Canada since 2015. Its first year of operation was in 2016 when there were 1,018 recipients of MAID. Since then, it’s increased rapidly. In 2021 there were over 10,000 cases, 3.3% of all deaths. In British Columbia, 4.8% of all deaths were via MAID. The total for 2022 looks like being over 13,000.
If you’re interested in any aspect of MAID can I recommend this Canadian Government report – after all, I suspect it’s only a question of time before it comes to the U.K.
Canada’s not alone. In the Netherlands there are over 7,500 assisted suicides per year, more than 5% of all deaths. Assisted suicide is also legal in Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, parts of the U.S., Colombia, New Zealand, Spain and Australia. It looks like it will also soon be possible in Germany, Austria and Italy.
Personally, I’m not opposed to assisted suicide; it looks to me like a rather more attractive proposition than many of the alternatives. I think it was John Mortimer on being asked why he didn’t stop smoking replied: “There’s no pleasure worth giving up for an extra year or two in an old-people’s home.”
(Incidentally, Canadian retailer Simons has been in the news this week for using assisted suicide as a promotional tool in an advertisement ‘All is Beauty’. I’m genuinely at a loss to know where this would stand in light of the Government’s proposed Online Harms Bill – is it promoting suicide or beauty products, or both?)
In the Canadian Report, the profile of MAID recipients, while skewed heavily towards those terminally ill with cancer, still bears a remarkable similarity to that of Covid victims. Recently, the controversial category ‘non-RFND’ (non-reasonably foreseeable deaths) has been added to those eligible for MAID. It includes people with mental health conditions such that they wish to end their own life. It remains to be seen how this will impact on the numbers in the future.
By the end of 2022 the cumulative total of MAID deaths since 2016 seems likely to be 45,000, with about 13,000 in 2022 alone. By comparison, by the end of 2022 the cumulative number of Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic will be about 50,000 with 13,500 deaths in 2022 alone.
Figure 2 shows cumulative Covid deaths against cumulative MAID deaths.
According to Our World in Data, Covid deaths in Canada in 2020 were 15,736, in 2021 there were 14,584 Covid deaths and in 2022 they’re likely to finish at about 19,000. That’s an interesting statistic on its own. 34.2 million Canadians have been vaccinated – over 92% of the population – and yet Covid deaths are higher in 2022 than in either of the prior two years.
At the current rate of growth, by 2023 or 2024 the number of MAID recipients will be higher than the number of Covid deaths in any of the past three years.
Last time there was a debate in the U.K. Parliament to legalise assisted dying it was defeated 330 votes to 118. However, if I was a betting man, I would put money on it getting through in the not too distant future. Figure 3 shows how, if the U.K. were to follow the rate of progress observed to date in Canada, we could expect to see about 60,000 medically assisted deaths per year within 10 years.
I’m not trying to make a point about the morality of assisted dying. The issue for me is the paradox at the heart of the pandemic response in virtually all countries. The Canadian Government will have spent billions of dollars supposedly saving the lives of exactly the same demographic of people they’re routinely killing off.
In the U.K. we’ve used the concept of QALYs (quality-adjusted life years) to try to objectively quantify whether the taxpayer should fund medical treatment. A few years ago there were frequent newspaper headlines about whether we should fund some new wonder drug, invariably an ill child was featured and the minister of the day was pilloried for not spending X millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to save little Johnny. Either the minister backed down or a celebrity stepped forward and saved the day. A QALY was generally set at about £30,000.
How the QALY is applied depends largely on the age and condition of the patient – there are no hard and fast rules. The life of a 1 year-old child with 85 years to live could justify the expenditure of £30,000 x 85 = £2,550,000. Conversely, we’d probably begrudge the expenditure of £30,000 on an 85 year-old with one year to live.
The National Audit Office’s (NAO) Covid Tracker website reports that we taxpayers have run up a bill of £376 billion to June 2022 supporting all manner of largely pointless pandemic response measures. Of course, this £376bn ignores the costs in terms of reductions in tax receipts due to reduced turnover and profits and losses to individuals and businesses. Be that as it may, let’s accept the NAO June figure and just see how many QALYs we might have expected such an investment to save.
£376,000,000,000 ÷ £30,000 = 12,533,333 QALYs
We know the average age of Covid fatalities is about 82. We also know that the vast majority have comorbidities, but let’s be generous and assume that the average Covid fatality would have gone on to live another five years. If we then divide the number of QALYs by five we can see how many saved lives our £376bn should have got us:
12,533,333 ÷ 5 = 2,506,666 lives
Let’s go back to March 2020, when we thought we were trying to save the 450,000 lives Ferguson said were at risk. In the event, nearly three years later, we’ve now reported just over 200,000 Covid fatalities. Let’s, for the sake of argument, accept that the pandemic response saved 250,000 people. That still looks like we spent more than 10 times per life than the QALY approach would recommend.
Personally, I suspect that the pandemic response will prove to have cost lives rather than to have saved them, but I suppose someone might persuade me that 25,000 lives were, if not saved, perhaps prolonged for a while. In which case the tax-payer spent 100 times more per life saved than might have been the case following a QALY approach.
Are these different cases or have the Canadians, the Dutch, the Belgian’s etc. got their moral compass hopelessly messed up? Governments are spending 10 to 100 times more than they should trying to save, essentially, the same cohort or old, infirm and vulnerable people, that they’re offering assistance to bump off through programmes such as MAID. You may argue that assisted suicide is a personal choice whereas a Covid death isn’t. But you have to admit, it’s an odd way to spend vast amounts of money.
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Just put a stop to it now because it is nothing more than a pisstake. I have been to Hull and I knew a woman from Hartlepool and she was as good as gold but her life was nasty. Coldplay is the epitome of everything that is crap about neoliberalism. This is cruel and unusual punishment.
They closed down any hope of a p ositive future and now they have to live on Universal Credit, Housing Benefit and a bit of income on the side in a town where there isn’t much money sloshing about. This is sick to put your own people through this. With all the diminution of self-esteem and civic pride that it entails. Family life impossible even when it is strongly desired. You would never do that to your country if you loved it.
You consign whole towns and cities to live on benefits and then you import cheap labour and the criminal class because they will work for peanuts. Is it really that difficult to see this situation as treachery and treason. If it is then you are too far gone and you might as well just step aside.
They took your country over in 2020 please understand this. That was the pivotal moment for them. Nothing is coming back. They call it pushing the envelope. They pushed it and you did nothing. There will still be enclaves for white people but they aill get smaller and smaller.
Money worship only ends one way. Your children are screwed and your parents are screwed and next year will look very different from any year before. Once critical mass has been reached with immigraton you aren’t coming back. Just be respectful and try to cut down on the pork and booze because these things can cause problems.
I will not change what I eat or decide to eat for any man!
Can’t think of anything worse than having to listen to Coldplay.
No mention of the great Hull band from the 1980s, the Red Guitars? Good Technology and Marimba Jive are great songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs0OkiCZNRI
Ex-Coldplay fan here. I loved all their stuff and they did some amazing tracks which will always evoke happy memories for me. However, it was a great shame when Chris and the band outed themselves as total nobtards regarding this whole climate lark. I wish bands would stay out of politics and agendas, full stop. It’s like when the Kaiser Chiefs’ Ricky went on about who’d had what death jab at one of their concerts. Another band I used to like scratched off my list, although I’ll still listen to their old stuff. It just leaves you cold and turns you right off when artists you’d long respected go on like this. They should just stick to music and quit alienating large chunks of their fanbase.
Very true….Rammstein comes to mind.
I think it’s unrealistic and unhelpful to worry about the opinions and character of people who produce art. That said, I might decide not to give them any more of my money, and not to see them in concert so I didn’t have to listen to the preaching. But yes I listen to tons of stuff I already own by people I know have very different views to me.
I can’t think of a single Coldplay song though.
Don’t forget to add Springsteen to that list, another childhood hero revealed as a total banker….
Am.i alone in seeing the irony of socialists who formerly demonised Margaret Thatcher for the deindustrialisation of Britain now doing everything in their power to choke the life out of any manufacturing industry that may be left in the country?
What isn’t clear is whether they are too stupid to understand that you can’t have competitive manufacturing without cheap energy or whether they have simply started to openly and brazenly despise the British working class.
Maybe both.
It could be worse. Let’s hope the don’t do any Oasis covers such as: “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.
Very amusing in a grim sort of way, and I agree completely, but would question only the idea that the oceans are not polluted. Not so sure about the air – seems ok to me! But yes, the rest of what Coldplay are about is undistilled crap.
The oceans are not polluted.
Unless you mean by oil which gets thrust into it in enormous quantities whenever the sea bed shakes a bit.
“and a satellite stage at each of the London shows will be powered fully “by the audience via kinetic flooring and power bikes”
The levels of blind ideological fervour necessary to pay large amounts of money for the privilege of cycling furiously or jumping up and down relentlessly (both offering up particularly hilarious sights during any ballads!) whilst trying to enjoy a concert are quite staggering.
Anyway Coldplay should have gone the full turn-back-time hog (a la windmills being reintroduced for power creation) and chosen treadmill-based generators instead;
Thus even more graphically displaying the complete debasement and enslavement of humanity demanded by the Green religion.
Shirley, they should be performing in a field, powered only by wind and sun and perhaps Ed running furiously in a hamster wheel, lit only by candles made from earwax, and dressed only in wool dyed with locally sourced nettles (The Goodlife), now that little disaster would be worth seeing….
Powered by bikes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaeIfGWMbvg
Freddie Starr Speeded up Singing
Forget heat pumps. All the climate virtue signallers can wear masks to capture all that hot air and that can then be pumped into a hot air national grid to be piped around to peoples houses. Much like our sewage, this hot air will have to go through a filtration system to remove all the words along with the harmful self righteous sentiment. The last thing anyone wants is the faint noise of haranguing coming from the radiators, or from under the floor!