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The Incoherence of Spending Billions on Lockdowns to ‘Save Lives’ While Assisting Many of the Same People to Commit Suicide

by Nick Rendell
1 December 2022 11:00 AM

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.

Tags: Assisted suicideCanadaCovid deathsCOVID-19EuthanasiaLockdownMAIDSuicide

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13 Comments
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jsampson45
jsampson45
2 years ago

I see that the “All is Beauty” video has been removed.
There must be a continuum between assisted suicide and murder.

26
-1
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
2 years ago

“Personally, I suspect that the pandemic response will prove to have cost lives rather than to have saved them”

I think the verdict came in on that one a while ago.

I think it’s slightly misleading to write that the billions were spent to save lives. That was the stated reason, but at best I think we can say it was to give the appearance of saving lives. At best.

90
0
FerdIII
FerdIII
2 years ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Billions spent to erect the infrastructure for the NWO Technocracy. Rona Fascism was about ending lives (Midazolam etc) and ending society (LDs, forced stabs, ignore every law imaginable, the Nuremberg Codes etc)

11
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huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
2 years ago

“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.”

I take serious issue with this statement. Taxpayers most certainly have NOT”run up a bill of £376 billion.” This is very sloppy journalism.

For those who can see that what is being played out by the grotesque, wasteful and useless covid spending is simply part of Agenda 2030 the expenditure is understandable. A central feature of Agenda 2030 and “sustainable development” is the destruction of current Western financial systems and this explains the repeated insistence on wasting taxpayers money. Fishy’s profligacy was sufficient to outdo the economically incontinent Gordon Brown at his worst / best. What followed was the CCP apparachick Chunt with his recent budget which is deliberately intended to create more national debt.

A fundamental failure in this article is the suggestion that all government expenditure these last three years was allegedly aimed at saving lives. The reality in fact is just the opposite. Which takes us to another less obvious aspect of Agenda 2030 – depopulation. The numbers quoted above may be relatively small but with targets to meet it is clear that governments are working on an “every little helps” basis.

Once national impoverishment kicks in how many more might wish to avail themselves of government assisted suicide particularly when the medium to long term adverse “vaccine” effects kick-in?

Furthermore, stripping people of all they have worked for is an extremely effective way of destroying morale. Once cash is taken away our freedom is taken too and we become nothing but slaves. Will this generate sufficient despair such that thousands decide to ‘opt out.’

To quote Neil Oliver once again:

“It’s not always about what they say it’s about.”

Last edited 2 years ago by huxleypiggles
70
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Chris P
Chris P
2 years ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

If depopulation is the objective, the primary purpose of the vaccines could be sterilisation, as described by the writer of the Utopia TV series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQPQsUiaaEc

10
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Mogwai
Mogwai
2 years ago

You can tell they desperately had to think of something beginning with ”i” so as not to call it “MAD”! Jeez…how transparent. And ”mad” it most certainly is.

24
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huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
2 years ago
Reply to  Mogwai

Everything being done is “hidden in plain sight” Mogs. It’s their way of rubbing our noses in their schemes.

34
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blunt instrument
blunt instrument
2 years ago

Perfectly coherent once you pivot to the view that the goal of those in power is to rob, kill and enslave us.

39
0
Freddy Boy
Freddy Boy
2 years ago

Wancock got his showbiz break after doing for 40k old uns!

21
0
Freddy Boy
Freddy Boy
2 years ago
Reply to  Freddy Boy

& his TEN year in prison promise to normies for filling there post holiday form in in correctly ! Chunt !!!…

17
0
RW
RW
2 years ago

There’s absolultely nothing odd here once one starts to look at the real drivers of government COVID policies. Then, you’ll first find rich and powerful boom babies like Susan Michie approaching the age where COVID was said to be particularly dangerous and the idea that they were pushing for a policy they expected to benefit from themselves at the expense of all younger people doesn’t seem to far fetched.

Taking the bigger picture into account, boom babies approaching … etc are very likely by far the largest group of voters who actually vote. Which provides a powerful motivator for politicans: Lock down now or there will be carnage among the group whose votes you should be chasing most. In contrast to this, the lifes of most school children will remain politically valueless for at least the next two or three election and no democratic politican looks that far into the future.

COVID in a nutshell is: Democracy is inherently corrupt. And when important voters seem mortally threatened by something, anything goes. That’s the real priority of the system, anything else is just window dressing.

Last edited 2 years ago by RW
4
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Judy Watson
Judy Watson
2 years ago

TBJ I take issue with the 200,000 deaths due to ‘covid’. As all on here know about the useless latera lflow tests, poisonous jabs and anyone dying from whatever cause within 28 days of a dubious positive test is classed ‘covid’

It’s all been a great big fear-mongering lie which the sheeple have lapped up.

23
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Pilla
Pilla
2 years ago

Of course they’ve got their moral compasses skewed – they’ve lost them altogether because they’ve got rid of (or think they have) God. So if they don’t get you one way with all this, they’ll get you by another – there’s no hope outside hope in Jesus Christ!!

5
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