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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As per the start of the podcast, super self confident public schoolboy fluffs his lines for a full 30 second Biden moment
Sorry about the Guardian link but most go straight to the Pepa Pig content
Search YT ‘boris johnson pepa pig’, brings up loads.
Yes, the Peppa Pig thing is a bit of a red herring. (The character does look like a Picasso version of a hairdryer – that’s quite a witty quip – and although I thought the CBI was mainly about real industry it turns out I was wrong and it also represents members in “creative” fields, so Peppa is on-topic for such an audience.) More relevant is his seeming like a confused person a decade or two older than his actual age, losing it for quite some time, and sniffing as if…as if he felt some kind of irritation in his nose, shall we say. Fat boozers aren’t thin on the ground among British politicians – a mid-50s, clinically obese, drunkard is the norm – but it’s no secret that this particular one is especially debauched, so who knows? Two more screwups like this would be enough to finish his stint in Number 10 – possibly even one in the right context, such as for example saying something truly egregiously ignorant or joky or confused about SARSCoV2 or pandemic policy or an operationally serious foreign policy matter such as Channel fishing, the Polish-Belarusian border, or hey, why not an issue he’s inserted his foot into his mouth over before – Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe?
The whole sequence starts with him reading his lines quite normally but when he loses it he can only stammer brief repetitions if what he has already said.
Most news film reports start after that, perhaps the editors are reserving the earlier footage for when they really want to stick the boot in.
In part of that ramble bozo praises the idea of people having the confidence to remain in the area where they grew up.
Wtf is that all about?
Pushing and trying to normalise the idea of no travel for the oiks from birth, perhaps?
Something along those lines perhaps or internal Passports for we plebs.
You’d think for an award-winning contrarian, TY would have at least evolved his opinion, but no he’s still hung up on
postive PCR casesinfection numbers, Jesus wept!According to a Savanta ComRes survey: 45% in Britain support an indefinite unvaccinated-only lockdown starting in December, against 32% who oppose, with the figures being 55%-26% among those aged 55+.
32% of the population joining an international general strike wouldn’t be bad going at all. And among 18-34s it’s “only” 29% supportive of house-arrest for the unvaxed, with 39% opposed, so the strikebreakers will have an older age profile than the humans. Shall we give it a whirl? Let’s see how good the horrible “Do What You’re Told and Hail the State” killjoys in their 60s are at lifting bins etc.
It’s interesting that an exact month was named in the question.
Savanta ComRes | 1,720 followers on LinkedIn. We are Savanta ComRes – the interface of a global intelligence business with a boutique political research consultancy. | ComRes is the leading research consultancy specialising in Corporate Reputation, Public Policy and Communications. We bridge the worlds of research and communications.
Does that ‘we manufacture BS for the highest bidder’?
People voting for something to bring everyone into line with what they have already done. Not really surprising especially as there is an element of punishment for the resistors.
Companions in misfortune. An awful situation is easier to bear if you can get everyone else in the same boat.
That’s how junkies and smackheads behave towards any of their number who might try to go straight.
They will go to great lengths to keep ‘quitters’ hooked because if that individual is successful it merely confirms the inadequacies of those left behind.
Unless, of course, that boat is the Titanic…
Not to mention having to care for their own aged relatives.
How to alienate 95% of your audience;
“James Delingpole and I talk about our days at Oxford”.
You’re not interested in “How to get into Oxford with two Bs and a C, assuming pater can phone the admissions tutor at Brasenose and get him to nullify his rejection letter?”
My Comprehensive schoolmate went to Cambridge.
The son of WW2 Polish refugees he wrote his thesis on oil bearing shales off the Northumberland coast well before that was topical and based his lucrative career on it.
Cabinet Office note to journalists: the correct term now is “VACCINE MANDATE”, so go easy on calling it “compulsory vaccination”. Thanks, guys!
For example, Liam Hoare does well in this piece in the Guardian: “vaccine mandate” gets mentioned in the header, the caption, and eight times in the body text, not counting a number of appearances of the word “mandate” on its own, adding even more cuddliness. He only uses “compulsory” three times, starting at the end of the second paragraph that most readers won’t reach, since it’s way past the header, strapline, picture, caption, and lede. Nice work, Liam. The Newspeak medal is on its way.
(PS Those of us in the resistance may wish to consider using the word “forced” rather than “compulsory”, in some circumstances at least. Stay supple!)
How many people, when first coming across vaccine ‘mandate’ thought
‘oh yeah, that’s what we did to Palestine and Transjordan after WW1 to pretend they weren’t just more colonies’?
Must have been quite confusing for them.
Well, I find it all VERY offensive. No mention (or should that be womention?) of womandate at all!
I put Johnson’s decline in his cognitive capabilities down to the jabs.
And continuous brow-beating from Carrie, the well-known horror show!
Toby still can’t bring himself to admit James might be right can he?
If you call it a vaccine, you’ve already lost the argument!
Sage words from the incisively intelligent and authoritative Dr David Martin. It were well that commenters and bloggers listened up. I’d hope to see a lot more of his information featured at dailysceptic.org.
https://eraoflight.com/2021/01/18/dr-david-martin-this-is-not-a-vaccine-it-is-a-medical-device/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Tu6gojaDSrsd/
A Must Watch¡¡ Dr David Martin And Judy A Mikovits – This Is Not A Vaccine¡
2021-02-16
https://www.bitchute.com/video/6xu20c1_urI/
Call To Action: Share This Widely! Focus On Fauci – 5Th Of January
2021-01-04