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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I used to be a subscriber to the New Scientist, as I’m very interested in science and technology. Then after a while nearly every story had something shoehorned in about climate change, often pushing the anthropomorphic angle, and the magazine became overtly anti-brexit.
In the end I cancelled my subscription as I was just getting increasingly annoyed by the bias which was detrimentally affecting the content of the magazine. I wanted to read interestring science stories, not be preached at or propagandized.
New Scientist? Non Scientist more like!
Me too.
I stopped about 5 years ago.
Theirs is the ONLY way to the truth and light – climate change, covid, lockdowns, vaccines lgbt etc.
And they have the cheek to carry on calling themselves a Science Magazine.
SPAM!
The New Scientist, clearly not a paper concerned with Science but concerned with conscensus, I suspect a few hundred years ago the same paper if it had existed would have cancelled those who claimed the earth to be round.
No one believed the earth was flat from about 300 BC onwards. That is 19th century bullshit found in fake histories. Columbus’ problem was that he lied about the distance to the east Indies and those who needed to fund him, intuited that. Last time I checked the President of the Flat Earth Society was a Darwinian Climate Changer. How appropriate.
What’s your point? mine was that Science conducted properly is all about debate, about research, data, evidence and about challenge, it is not a static discipline, it must not be closed, it has to take challenge, if it does not permit, or closes down alternative evidence, data and theories then its not really science, its dogma.
Where we would we be today if challenge and debate had not taken place around the nature of disease and its spread, the need for strict hygiene when performing an operation, the fact that setting fire to herbs in the corner of a room would ward off the evil vapours causing disease.
More relevant is that the Catholic Church only withdrew its condemnation of Galileo’s proposition of a Sun-centric system in 1992. From what I’ve read the general public, and the whole of China (until the 17th century) believed the Earth to be flat.
SPAM!
A tragic indicator of the times. But let me briefly comment on the Stop Press.
Hypocrisy is evident here, as cancel culture started in the biology community, and particularly with Jerry Coyne, who in maintaining the hegemony of the old Neodarwinian paradigm publicly smeared his colleague at Chicago, James Shapiro, of “Creationism” for daring to propose non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution.
Indeed, one of the authors on my own blog, an accomplished biologist who then had a senior job at the NIH, was constrained in what he could write for us as he knew Coyne, and was seriously worried that the latter would create trouble both for him and for the NIH.
The pot, here, is calling the kettle black.
Evolution is about as anti-science as one can get. Shrew to you. Just took trillions of years. I have spent 25 years looking for proof of the pigeon breeders metaphysics. They are well hidden notwithstanding the massive corrupt investments in the theology. Suggest you start with Tony Flew and work from there. Detox slowly.
I may have been there already. 65 years interest in zoology and palaeontology, Cambridge natural sciences, career in medicine and 14 years post retirement studying the science, history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, theology of science. A lot of Aquinas, a bit of Flew, etc etc. Conversation partners in all camps. A couple of books.
You’re right that the crux is metaphysics, not science.
You see, this is where the Daily Sceptic really earns it’s laurels, having readers on board who are immensely well read and informed who can shed deeper insights into these and other issues. Thanks Jon.
Dissidents needs its interlechewals, init?
Am I right in thinking that the comic is to be renamed “New The Scientist”.
I am worried that GWPF believes and wants the public to know that it is in broad agreement with IPCC, as if that was relevant to the issue in hand.
IIRC the majority of the IPCC reports are reasonably sound. The alarmists write the Executive Summary section which is the only bit that all of the policy wonks and MSM are interested in.
Another example, if another one was really needed of the tyranny that exists on this issue. In science scepticism is the highest calling and blind faith the one unpardonable sin. Not being able to question things means it is NOT science. But then it was never about science from the very beginning. The dogma of Climate Change survives only by a multitude of lies and fabrications. The three main tools are DECEIPT FEAR and GUILT. In science a theory must be capable of being falsified, but global warming depends almost entirely on modelled scenarios —–“The data does not matter, we are not basing our recommendations on the data, we are basing them on climate models”. (Professor Folland, Hadley)—- Yet even as all the models have so far not just been wrong, but very wrong, more model scenario’s are simply churned out as evidence of impending catastrophe and this all gets called “science”. ———–No, it isn’t. Models are NOT science and are NOT evidence of anything. “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful” (David Frame of Oxford School of Enterprise and the Environment)——–But useful for what? For POLITICS, not for science. ————-Alleged consensus and manufactured crisis is NOT science. Without this fabricated science and state of fear about a climate emergency the politics cannot survive. The whole Sustainable Development Eco Socialist Agenda collapses. That is why the compliant media (BBC, SKY, CNN, Guardian, Independent etc etc and formerly scientific publications now hijacked by politics keep it going with their phony pretend to save the planet junk science reporting and the banishing of any and all dissent from current orthodoxy.
I hadn’t realised that the New Scientist was a faith-based publication.
There’s nothing Scientific about Dogma.
In the new fundamentalism, science journals, such as the New Scientist, have capitulated to the dominant creed and that means no one associated with rational discourse or honest, robust debate on the issue of climate change will be tolerated. The GWPF, which started one week after the climategate email scandal, states that it is there to: “bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant.” Not so long ago, that would have been widely welcomed, seen as a solid and reasonable set of goals to have but no more. Now anyone even associated with such heresy shall not be given a platform regardless. Bit by bit, they shut down any attempt at debate, and censor and cancel at will. Nowadays, you have to be squeaky clean, preferably wearing a rainbow badge, and, even more preferably, not a white older male. Just another nail in the coffin of the old world.
$cientism. A religion. Church of. Money. Get published. Control. Own resources. Nothing to do with real facts or how the natural world operates. What idiot could possibly believe that hydrocarbon ’emissions’ from humans – a rounding error mole fraction of nothing – causes anything.
“science thrives on debate and scrutiny”
Yes but only if it’s about science in the first place. New Scientist are now the ‘respectable and informed’ face of the cult.
Welcome to that new dark ages, the new witch hunters are all around us, The age of enlightenment and learning is dead. The west now survives, not from the survival of the fittest, but from the survival of the thickest. This new dark age has been approaching slowly in the past, it will soon speed up its approach as an avalanche that will crush all the things we took for granted, free speech, free thought, freedom of expression, money, movement, choice. Civilisational peaks of the past, Greek, Roman, etc, all were followed by a darker age, welcome to ours.
“Survival of the thickest”, a perfect summary.
New Science seems to be taking a leaf out of the science practiced during less enlightened times. The Vatican may no longer be conducting the inquisition and subsequent excommunication, but the torch has neen passed on it seems.
A closer parallel might be Rome’s response to the exposure of abuses at the Reformation. The corruption of the Pope and his power structures was taken (by said Pope and power structures) as an attack on Christianity itself, or rather upon God (“tearing the seamless robe of Christ).
And the rationale was much the same: just as the faith (the spiritual reality of the universe) was assumed to be the same as the human organisation, so science (the physical reality of the universe) is assumed to identical with the human edifices of science. In both cases, the realities point an accusing finger at the organisations.
We have vigorously re-entered “less enlightened times”. 2 + 2 = 5 because we we say it does or wish it so.
When was the last time Tony Blair was banned from publishing, speaking or being interviewed due to his involvement in the Iraq War? I thought not…
An American counterpart of mine said on the occasion of Blairs election win. Beware, a rattle snake always smiles before he bites. I have never found fault in his statement.
As I said throughout the lockdown era, there’s a formula which defines how we run our lives today: Politics+Science=Politics. Substitute ‘science’ for any other discipline and the same applies. Politics has replaced the Church of old. The Church itself was at the forefront of much scientific investigation until certain forces within felt threatened.
Today, politics has become a religion. ‘I’m a socialist!’ some people proudly claim. ‘I’m a Green’ say others. It’s no different from proclaiming yourself Catholic or Protestant in the past. Unfortunately, the modern political religions are far more destructive. Most historic religious strife that turned violent was really about land ownership rather than doctrine. The modern political religion is closer to ISIS, wanting your absolute obedience and destroying our history to get what it wants. It’s psychopathic enough that it will gladly freeze thousands of people to death in the winter by creating an artificial fuel crisis. About 100 years ago, the Soviet Union came into existence. Now, the West has slowly become the Soviet Union, with a dash of Maoism and ISIS.
The Hijacking of Science.
Out of interest, I’ve now read through the first example of this brilliant essay which took me from Covaxxes are great! to Gender theory is about something real and important! (instead of Some nonsense of no concern to anyone but its inventors.) These are obviously – and intentionally – loaded paraphrases. Considering these two statements, I can’t help thinking that the problem of the autors seems to be that they excepted the woketards would never come for them when they only resolutely stood aside and made noncommitted handsigns while they were coming for everyone else. Now, to their surprise, they find themselves in the crosshairs and rather devoid of allies who could still help them.
Didn’t someone write a short poem about something very similar?
SPAM!
Read the Coyne/Moraja article. Worth 20 minutes
Galileo and Copernicus come to mind while reading this.
If the new Scientist was in existence then we might still believe that the Sun revolved around the earth.
The essence of true science is the debate and discussion of ideas and theories, backed up by evidence.
Unfortunately too much of science has become an ideology or religion, not true science.
Maybe the name could be changed from ‘New Scientist’ to ‘Not Science’.
Free thought got a boost by putting a statement on a church door in the 1500’s.
Maybe something similar has to happen again.
Next – burn the heretics?