Matt C. Abbott
Expert: health care system, government pushing fear, death
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By Matt C. Abbott
November 19, 2009

From a Nov. 2 story on nwi.com (excerpted; for the full article, click here):

    'Some cancer patients, heart attack sufferers and burn victims would be removed from ventilators and left to die if pandemic flu patients overwhelmed Indiana's hospitals. The goal would be to save the most lives as possible, according the Indiana State Department of Health.

    'But a draft copy of Indiana's 'Altered Standards of Care' guidelines reveals that if faced with overwhelming demand, Indiana hospitals would establish what amount to 'death panels.' A 'triage review officer' would decide who gets access to hospital staff and equipment and, likely, who lives and who will die.

    'In a pandemic emergency, hospital patients and those seeking care would be scored every day using a system known as the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment. The same system would be used across the state to ensure accountability and gain public confidence, according to the August 2008 draft guidelines. Based on their score, patients either would receive treatment, get to stay in their hospital bed for another day or be sent home to die....

    'President Barack Obama declared on Oct. 23 that the H1N1 flu pandemic, also known as swine flu, is a national emergency. That declaration gives the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the power to bypass federal rules and open additional hospitals or other centers for treatment....'

I asked Ron Panzer, a nurse and the president of Hospice Patients Alliance, to comment on the above story. Panzer's slightly edited response (via e-mail) is as follows:

    'First of all, people need to know that the term, 'pandemic' was redefined by the U.N. to heighten alarm over the swine flu/H1N1 virus. What the U.N. did was to remove consideration of the severity of the epidemic from the determination. In other words, it is only how many people become infected, not how severe the cases are. So, if much of the world becomes infected with a new virus form, it becomes a 'pandemic,' whereas formerly, it would not be considered a high level pandemic unless there was a severity to the symptoms among many who became infected.

    'The swine flu epidemic is quite mild worldwide and the declaration that this is a 'national emergency' is pure nonsense. Approximately 30,000 people die of the regular seasonal flu each year in the U.S., while the swine flu has produced nowhere near that number of deaths. The media and government are completely hyping the risk of swine flu. In addition, official assertions to the contrary, flu vaccination has not been proven effective in preventing flu infections. Many years they simply get the wrong strain of the virus. In addition, there have been thousands of serious and sometimes fatal side effects from the vaccine itself, as well as thousands of chronic conditions probably linked to side effects of the vaccine.

    'What we do know is that the pharmaceutical industry is a huge donor to the campaigns of many elected officials. Their lobbyists are very active and have great access to both sides of the political aisle. Billions of dollars are being made through the big push to vaccinate everyone.

    'The elected officials are pushing for expanded powers of the government through many means. The health care system becomes a tool of the government in times of crisis, whether real or created/manipulated. Health care workers in hospitals and elsewhere will be told to follow the government (U.S. Public Health Department policy) and will have to do so if they are to retain their jobs.

    'Health care agencies all around the country are paranoid about following these guidelines regarding swine flu vaccinations, just as every agency is paranoid about not violating the newly invigorated enforcement of the privacy regulations (HIPAA and the new HITECH act of 2009). You may or may not realize there are new fines from $100 up to $50,000 per violation that can be levied against individual nurses, aides and other workers if they share private patient health information. The veil of secrecy behind which health care works is becoming ironclad.

    'Now, couple policies for triage of patients deemed to not have a 'good prognosis' during times of bogus emergency pandemic conditions and the rationing of health care resources desired by health care and economic advisors to the administration, and you get a 'perfect storm' type of opportunity to knock off the elderly and disabled with the full sanction of the lawmakers, courts and the public health departments. The Nazi leaders did the same thing in the time period up to and during World War II. Let there be no mistake about it: The elderly and severely disabled are being actively targeted for elimination.

    'I hear regularly from families and friends of patients who are either tricked into entering hospice or who are kidnapped or coerced into entering hospice and then promptly overdosed on morphine and sedatives and simultaneously denied any fluids. They die shortly thereafter even though many of them have no clinical condition requiring morphine in high doses.

    'While it is true that in a true emergency, triage of patients is necessary, the scenario discussed where ventilators are taken away from patients who are already on those ventilators is pure passive euthanasia, not real triage. The honest, desired result is that those patients die. Real triage is taking in patients who are not already receiving care and deciding who gets what type of care. Those certain to die, for example, may be given pain relievers and sedatives — such as given to soldiers after massive injury on the battlefield — while those who can benefit are sent to surgery to be saved.

    'Taking ventilators away from ventilator-dependent patients who are already on them is not triage in the usual sense but an act to assure their death. Those patients may actually live if they would be allowed to continue on the ventilators. And physicians are notorious for getting it wrong when it comes to predicting who will live and who will die, or how long someone will live. Determining which patients have 'the highest probability of mortality' is not a science or even an art; it is quite subjective and quite affected by the personal bias of the physician. Some physicians are aggressive in giving morphine, even when it is not needed for pain, to the very elderly. Medical studies show that some doctors will increase the dosage of morphine simply because the patient is very weak or very old.

    'When government legislatures and public health departments institute rules justifying the removal of ventilators from patients currently under treatment and giving the ventilators to others, it is deliberate passive euthanasia that is being instituted, not triage!'

© Matt C. Abbott

 

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Matt C. Abbott

Matt C. Abbott is a Catholic commentator with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication, media, and theatre from Northeastern Illinois University. He also has an Associate in Applied Science degree in business management from Triton College. Abbott has been interviewed on HLN, MSNBC, Bill Martinez Live, WOSU Radio in Ohio, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's 2019 ‘Unsolved’ podcast about the unsolved murder of Father Alfred Kunz, Alex Shuman's 'Smoke Screen: Fake Priest' podcast, WLS-TV (ABC) in Chicago, WMTV (NBC) and WISC-TV (CBS) in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s been quoted in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and other media outlets. He’s mentioned in the 2020 Report on the Holy See's Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick (1930 to 2017), which can be found on the Vatican's website. He can be reached at mattcabbott@gmail.com.

(Note: I welcome and appreciate thoughtful feedback. Insults will be ignored. Only in very select cases will I honor a request to have a telephone conversation about a topic in my column. Email is much preferred. God bless you and please keep me in your prayers!)

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