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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Hmm, well what Macron is helping to do France is being done elsewhere too, inside and outside the EU. There are other reasons to leave the EU, and other reasons not to wreck your own country. This sounds to me like a case of “be more subtle about things so the plebs won’t notice and we can stay in the EU”.
The serial red arrow fiend strikes again.
Well one out of 51 is not bad.
I’ve given up moaning about downticks!
Should be seen as a badge of honour.
Exactly, the same reason Boris lost his 80 seat majority. They could’ve been popular, but they don’t work for who they claim they work for. At least Starmer was more up front about DAVOS.
This is what Barnier has to say about Marine Le Pen, from The Telegraph:
“She praised British voters for freeing themselves from “European servitude”, and later described the referendum result as “the most important moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
“I have never heard from Ms Le Pen that she regrets that sentence or that she was wrong,” Mr Barnier added.
“I think she still keeps the same mind… my answer is to say – without any kind of aggression, revenge or satisfaction – look at what has happened in the UK since Brexit.”
Aye, and look at what has happened in the UK since Brexit, our establishment has stuck two fingers up to the electorate and ensured that we will never benefit from Brexit. In fact on the back of the Scamdemic the establishment has set about ruthlessly destroying our country from the foundations upward and the political class have just sat back and watched.
Brexit? I wish.
When he says “look at what has happened in the UK since Brexit” I wonder what he thinks he means. I mean, it’s been a shitshow here but that has nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit and everything to do with people exactly like him. He seems like a globalist Next Tuesday to me.
“He seems like a globalist Next Tuesday to me.”
I am delighted to advise that I second that opinion wholeheartedly
At least he was honest, he called the Withdrawal agreement a ‘treaty’.
It was a shitshow before Brexit back to John Major.
Indeed
And they they Gaslight us blaming all the downturn on Brexit or Truss as if Lockdowns never happened. Then they blame the problems implementing Brexit on Brexit and not Remainer MSs & Civil Servants.
There is a good argument that the Drumpf 2016 election win and Brexit were punished by the Corona scamdemic. The entire nexus of the scam of the ‘flying virus’ (all the way from Wuhan and a bat no less); was located in the US and UK and must have been designed to punish the peasants. I find much logic in this theory.
The plan of course is to annul Brexit and reintroduce servitude to the German empire.
Yes please. Frexit now, so that the damage Adenauer and Schuhmacher intentionally did to Germany can start to be undone.
Here’s a question for you as an EU citizen and someone who has knowledge of history. Let’s envisage a time when the U.K., France and Germany are governed sensibly and that Germany is free of the nefarious US influence you believe it is under (and I’m not saying you are wrong). What would be your view on whether the EU should continue and in what form?
I think the EU should absolutely not continue as it’s nothing but a mechanism for keeping pseudo-states like Lithuania where 3.4% of the population of Germany live in an area of 18.3% the size of Germany artifically alive (with German money, obviously). Many of the so-called European states are basically a capital and a lot of empty wilderness and oftentimes, empty wilderness where German farmers used to live before the Russians forced them to leave.
Thanks
”I think the EU should absolutely not continue”
I tend to agree. I think certain countries in Europe share a common heritage and there’s a case for some cooperation between them but I’ve gone off supranational bodies given recent events
Well I have never been a fan of the EU, it is a sleazy, corrupt and out of control monolith that exists purely to hoover money off taxpaying citizens. It is a cartel in exactly the same way as the South American drug cartels – accountable to no one, mendacious, violent and bent.
The EU commission (you seem to be referring to) is a relatively tiny organisation whose job is to create EU draft legislation which is then voted on by both the EU parliament and the Council of Ministers. It’s members are proposed by the council of the heads of governments of the EU member states and appointed if the EU parliament votes in favour of this.
The so-called representative system is certainly optimized for corruption. But it is so everywhere — British politicians are no less corrupt than European or American ones.
If only Heath was honest about the EEC not staying as just a trading block, but having expansionist plans and some being ex Nazis etc.
It’s worth remembering the origins: the post-war European Coal and Steel Community supposedly binding Germany, Italy & France to be interdependent on each other for the essential requirements to build a war machine and thus unable wage war (again) against one another – Ho! Ho!
This broadened into a more general customs union, the EEC, which had the explicit purpose of being a counterweight to the economic dominance of the USA and growing economic power of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
It was a protectionist bloc – only six Countries – keep the foreigners out.
UK was a founder member of EFTA, seven Countries, not a customs union, but a loose trading association excluding any arrangements for farming or fishing. It was doing fine.
UK then was also trading freely with Commonwealth Countries.
Why did we join the EEC? Why do we have Net Zero? Why the Covid crazy? Idiots in charge.
Let’s envisage a time when the U.K., France and Germany are governed sensibly
I consider myself a monarchist. In Germany, that’s principally a political crime which may be punished with jail time. That’s because, while the cartel of establishment parties in Germany rarely lets a legislative period pass without changing the constitution in some way, this area is absolutely off limits for mere people. These may only occasionally ‘vote’ for their preferred party. Considering this, what’s sensibly governed?
Or, let’s try another example: In the run-up to the EU elections, there was a big scandal about the AfD top candidate because during an interview, he had said that not all members of the armed SS (Waffen-SS) had been criminals. The Waffen-SS was just a branch of the regular army with different uniforms and most of its members were just regular conscripts. Even a famous, hard-left German author (Günter Grass) once belonged to it. Nevertheless, such claims must not be made in public. They’re not outright illegal but it was decreed that all these conscripts turned criminals the moment they put on the uniform for the first time by TPTB.
The mindest of these TPTB, prominently embodied by Nancy “Der Feind steht rechts” Faeser, SPD home secretrary, is that they’re ruling on behalf of the international forces of good over an unwilling population which is principally their enemy and must be treated as such.
Depressing stuff.
“I consider myself a monarchist.” I don’t pretend to have answers about a satisfactory way to govern a country, but the obvious question is what do you do if the monarch turns out to be a terrible one?
Define terrible.
Minus a habit of making too many foreign enemies¹ which would end up becoming its downfall, the Prussian/ German state has empirically worked pretty well before the world powers (of that time) Britain and France set forth to destroy it at any cost.
¹ German historians prior to them being threatened with prosecution and jail should they dare to contradict the official Anglo-Saxon history of the 20th century usually ascribe this mainly to Germany being immensely successful, thus raising the envy of its competitors and making itself a valuable target for thorough plundering which duly happened (and is still ongoing).
Eg, it’s claimed that German fleet building activities prior to WWI were simply what conventional wisdom claimed to be necessary for states with global trade interests and that the German fleet was never meant to challenge British naval supremacy. It was just supposed to be large and modern enough to deter an attack à la Copenhagen 1807. That’s consistent with the fact that Germany was principally a continental power surrounded by enemies which would always need to put its largest effort into having a strong army.
Terrible I suppose would be undue restrictions on civil liberties, wasting taxpayer money on useless stuff.
Like being bribed by the pharmaceutical industry to do one’s utmost to raise the perceived level of personal threat because of a basically harmless virus until the mRNA cavalary is ready to ride to the rescue?
I think something like that happened not that long ago and it wasn’t being engineered by autocratic tyrants, rather, the exact opposite: Belarus was one of the countries which never had any COVID measures because the local despot decreed that the pandemic was just a conspiracy of foreigners to weaken the state of Belarus.
The record of our Human rights, oh human rights! hymning so-called democractically elected representatives was a rather different one.
Oh indeed I’m not saying any of our governments have not been terrible – but we have the option of throwing them out. Of course a lot of our fellow citizens seem to like terrible governments. What can you do?
Well, compare the following two (simplified) scenarios:
For the latter case, the Corona situation should also be considered: Powerful vested interest have swayed members of all parliamentary parties to do as is best for their profits and other agendas. The only political difference between members of different parties is how exactly the details of the implementation of the generally agreed upon are going to look like, as true for Net Zero as it was for COVID.
A monarchial government is less vulnerable to this because members of government need to keep the monarch in good humour and the monarch, by virtue of being rich and independent/ souvereign, cannot easily be bribed. Not to mention that he also has a few hundreds or of years of tradition to live up to.
Could hardly be worse than what we have I would think.
How would MPs be elected in scenario 1? On what basis? Would you allow political parties? They could not really have a legislative agenda as that would really come from the monarch.
The above is a simplified description of the political system of the German empire vs the one we’re used to now and I don’t really want to go into more detail at the moment, no the least because I’m writing here intermittently while working on my code.
Thanks; food for thought.
We (they) have been conditioned to want a 247 nanny!
More like weaken the West economically. Isn’t that what the WEF Reset is all about, changing the economic system. The World Bank & IMF tried to bribe Belarus to introduce health fascism for a bunce.
Never forget …. France voted against the proposed EU Constitution. Like the Brits, the French people didn’t want a Federal EU but got it anyway.
This is their opportunity to break it. I hope they take it.
Even if most left the EU and returned to being Independent Nations, major damage has been done to European culture. Every town and city is awash with migrants, our energy systems have been turned into a ginormous clutter of turbines solar panels, and the energies that work decimated. Our Industrial base trashed by Green ideology and our politics riddled with Race, Gender, Equality and Diversity garbage. We are obsessed with stuff of no importance to anyone and get ourselves into such a tizzy that we think we are occupying the moral high ground if we let men swim and run against women and let men in our daughter’s toilet. ———-So by all means please leave the EU but what an almighty mess there is to clear up.
Trans and Woke won’t last, but Islam that is riding on the back of it will, and will dispose of them in good time.
Sorry, but macron has done nothing except follow orders from his beloved WEF. That is it folks. Nothing to look at.. Move on.
Been to Paris lately? What a filthy dump.
Was there in May. Shocking. Worked there in the 90s. The change is incroyable. Now it is just another African-Muslim shithole, outside of the tourist areas squatting along the Seine.
Seen the Froggie men’s football team?
Was there in 1990, beautiful place then with the Arts, Cafes, women etc.
The EEC/EU is a protectionist customs union, modelled on French protectionist and State economic direction policy to keep foreign competition out, and to discourage domestic new market entrants and small business expansion, to keep prices high and protect established producers and their profits, at the expense of consumers.
Standardisation, like perfection, is the enemy of creativity and progress.
Harmonisation to facilitate an internal, single market, standardised manufacture, labour rules, product specification, etc. This makes experimentation, market testing, impossible. The World invents, innovates, the EU stagnates.
France’s 35 hour week, strict labour laws (virtually impossible to fire anyone), high payroll taxes, high personal and corporation tax, business activity a complex, bureaucratic nightmare has driven companies away and made it unattractive to newcomers.
France has a large rural community and agricultural economy. Via the CAP a large part of this sector is small farms which are not economically viable, but have been keep on life support for decades via the CAP welfare.
““It is my conviction that we have to pay huge conviction and great respect to what people on the ground think in some very poor regions.”
But it’s what they wanted. Didn’t turn out as expected? Tant pis.
No Country or customs union can cut itself off indefinitely from the global market. It inevitably has to trade externally. France, and EU Countries, now find they lack competitiveness. Companies take their activities to friendlier, lower cost places, new business doesn’t emerge because of standardisation and regulation.
Germany has run a net trade surplus for years, which means capital is flowing out, not in – nobody wants to invest in Germany. Its resources are used to benefit foreigners not Germans. Crazy people think this is good, because trade deficit, bad…
The people blame ‘globalisation’ – that has been around since the Bronze Age – but they should blame themselves. They wanted jobs protected, farmers wanted protection, they wanted their companies protected, they wanted lots of free stuff, they wanted shorted hours and more pay.
Everything has a cost. That cost is now unemployment, jobs moved abroad, Hugh taxes, debt, old business activity lost with nothing new to replace it, and in France a large farming community hardly making ends meet kept afloat on welfare.
Brexit was supposed to deliver us from that, but old habits die hard. Cronies want their businesses protected, farmers can’t compete because there costs are too high because we have kept EU agricultural rules intended to keep competition out and pander to the animal welfare lobby, but without the tariffs to stop imported food costing less.
The myth that there is a huge job-mountain waiting to be reduced by cheap labour, so let’s import it, still persists. The amount of work done depends on cost. The value of the imported labour is below minimum wage so in most cases doesn’t get done. Where low cost labour is employed and subsidised via the welfare system, this compresses the wage scale at all levels, reduces productivity and costs us all more = makes us poorer.
I can’t fathom why anyone sane and intelligent wants to vote for this.
In the UK 52% voted against it, but the Conservatives reneged on their promises and never truly extracted us from the EU quagmire, and a Labour Government will only push us deeper into it.
Then just in case we might manage not to sink without trace – Net Zero… the killer volley of torpedoes to sink the ship.
Didn’t Macron once say that he thought France would vote to leave if given the chance – which of course is why they won’t be given it.