In 2020, the retired Maltese Professor Patrick Pullicino described “the misuse of sedatives in care houses as euthanasia”.
Blog post by Marica Micallef
We all remember how often governments worldwide hammered that it is important to protect the vulnerable during Covid-19 and thus, this made care home residents face visiting restrictions for almost two years throughout the pandemic. But was protection of the elderly the true, real motive?
‘According to Jeremy Richardson, the manager of Four Seasons Health Care, “some care home residents ‘gave up and died’ because Covid rules barred them from seeing family.
He added that one of the ‘biggest scandals’ over the past two years was denying residents their liberty due to Covid.“
Speaking at a care conference in Birmingham, The Dail Mail reported him as saying that:
‘We defined essential carers as people who work in care homes, not people who are the loved ones of people who live in those care homes.
And I know for a fact that there were a number of people in our homes who gave up and died because they didn’t have social interaction. They gave up the will to live.‘
Has this situation led to abuse of the elderly by the managers and the medical staff of care houses?
The Mail Online enquired also on the use of sedatives at the care homes during the so-called Covid pandemic, since official figures showed that the prescriptions for the drug midazolam, a powerful sedative had doubled during the height of the pandemic, increasing by more than 100% in April of 2020 compared to previous months. This raised fears that midazolam was used to control elderly residents in care homes, who got depressed or agitated because they were not seeing their loved ones. It goes without saying that such an excessive use of this drug hastened their deaths.
The media portal stated that:
“An anti-euthanasia campaigner last night said he suspected that the spike was evidence that many people had been put on end-of-life protocols or ‘pathways.’
Whistle blowers also claimed to have witnessed misuse of sedatives, with staff told to give them to dementia patients to stop them wandering the corridors.”
Midazolam is considered to be one of the four essential drugs needed for dying patients because it reduces pain and anxiety but it can also, according to retired Maltese neurologist Professor Patrick Pullicino, repress respiration and hastens death. In other words, it is potentially fatal. In 2020, before the pandemic, Pullicino had strong words against its misuse because “it changes end-of-life care into euthanasia”. Considering that breathing problems were also associated with Covid-19, was midazolam the cause for breathing problems in the elderly in care homes and not Covid-19 virus as was being stated by Health Authorities worldwide? In other words, was the misuse of this drug causing breathing problems in the elderly and conveniently misdiagnosed as Covid-19?
According to Health Freedom Ireland, large numbers of elderly people died in Irish nursing homes at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Then in January 2021 there was a spike in deaths which coincided with the rollout of the Covid 19 vaccine.
It is now becoming clearer that our governments failed to ‘protect the vulnerable’ during the pandemic. What is strange in all this is that Europe is starting to talk and discuss abuses that happened on our elderly, while in Malta, a country which followed these protocols to the letter remains deadly silent. Clearly the Western world, and Malta included, has failed to properly protect our elderly generation who survived a war, poverty and worked hard all their lives. Instead of being in a care home to rest, some were left to die a cruel death, under the guise of protection from Covid-19.