Medical Resources: Scarce or Inappropriate?

It is reported that the alleged ‘infectious disease’ called COVID-19, which was proclaimed by the WHO in March 2020 to be a ‘pandemic’, has placed a severe strain on the healthcare systems of all countries around the world due to the vast increase in the number of patients who suffer from this disease and therefore require medical treatment.

It is not the purpose of this article to demonstrate the unproven basis for the idea that the world is in the grip of a deadly ‘viral disease’. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasise that, as discussed in some detail in our book, What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong, there is no evidence that any ‘virus’ is the cause of any disease, which includes the so-called SARS-COV2 ‘virus’.

It is claimed that the ‘pandemic’ has increased the demand for medical equipment such as PPE, masks and test kits as well as ventilators, medicines and other resources perceived to be needed to control this ‘pandemic’ and that supplies are unable to meet this increased demand. The resulting situation is that healthcare systems are said to have been overwhelmed and therefore unable to treat all patients.

The assessment of patients in order to provide urgent attention to those who are most in need, known as triage, is not a new process. However, there is a fundamental question that needs to be raised and addressed, which is: where is the evidence that healthcare systems, and hospitals in particular, have been and continue to be overwhelmed by an influx of ‘COVID patients’?

This evidence seems to be conspicuous by its absence.

In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that the reports about hospitals being overwhelmed by huge numbers of ‘COVID’ patients are not only grossly exaggerated but are often completely false, which raises the question of whether the resources available to these hospitals are insufficient as claimed. Nevertheless, reports about hospitals overwhelmed by the need to treat ‘COVID patients’ have been a source of immense outrage because it has led to a reduction in the treatment of people suffering from other health problems. It has also been claimed that people have died because they were denied ‘life-saving’ treatments and surgeries for their ‘non-COVID’ health problems.

There are clearly a number of problems arising from this so-called ‘pandemic’ that directly affect people’s health and their access to healthcare, but there are two aspects that need to be clarified because they generate much confusion.

The first aspect is the topic of the allocation of limited resources, which was discussed by James Corbett in his March 2021 podcast entitled ‘Bioethics and the New Eugenics’. There are two articles that he refers to with respect to this question. The first is a 2009 paper entitled Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions, which includes one recommendation that younger people are to be prioritised because they have not yet lived a complete life. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this is that ‘older’ patients are not to be prioritised.

There are many objections to be raised against this approach, not least of which is the denial of the importance of the elders of the world and their collected wisdom and experience. The main reason that older patients are not considered to be a priority for treatment is because they often suffer from multiple health problems and therefore require greater access to healthcare resources. This means that they are merely regarded as a drain on healthcare systems and on the resources that could be allocated to young people who have more productive years ahead of them. This is an appalling attitude; it is disgraceful that the majority of the population is perceived by a small group of people merely in terms of their usefulness as units of production rather than being recognised as unique members of the human family.

The second article is more recent and relates specifically to the situation during the current alleged ‘pandemic’. This paper, published in May 2020 in the prestigious NEJM, is entitled Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19; it claims that,

“… it is not merely possible but likely that the disease will produce enough severe illness to overwhelm health care infrastructure.”

The article continues with the statement that emerging pandemics can place extraordinary demands on health systems and that,

“Such demands will create the need to ration medical equipment and interventions.”

This is quite a claim considering that it was made at a fairly early stage of the ‘pandemic’. Nevertheless, it estimates that there would be very large numbers of patients who would require hospital services and states that insufficient resources were currently available. It also indicates that there was insufficient time to produce sufficient resources for the impending high demand that their estimates predicted.

The fundamental issue here, as James Corbett discusses, is the idea that anybody has the ability to decide which patients are to receive attention and which are to be denied ‘essential healthcare’ and potentially left to die because they were ‘untreated’. It is yet another outrageous notion that these people who write such articles believe that they, or others, have not just the ability, but also the right to decide whether a patient’s life has meaning and therefore whether they should be saved – or not.

The second aspect that requires clarification is the underlying assumption that, with adequate resources, all healthcare systems that operate in accordance with the practices of ‘modern medicine’ would have the ability to treat everyone who is ill and restore them all to health.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth; even if sufficient resources were available, ‘modern medicine’ does not provide true ‘healthcare’.

Some of the practices of ‘modern medicine’ are certainly ‘life-saving’ but these are comparatively few and are restricted to procedures, such as constructive surgery, that are used in cases of accidents and emergencies.

By contrast, the vast majority of the procedures employed within ‘modern medicine’ involve the treatment of ‘disease’ and these treatments invariably involve pharmaceutical products, although surgery and radiation may also be employed, depending on the nature of the ‘disease’.

It is important not to equate the ‘treatment’ of disease with the ‘cure’ of disease; they are not the same. Problems can only be resolved by addressing and removing their causes; but the causes of disease are not removed through the use of pharmaceutical ‘medicines’, which are acknowledged to only manage a patient’s disease by ameliorating their symptoms. However, as we discuss in detail in our book, pharmaceutical medicines rarely do more than achieve a temporary reduction of symptoms and have often been proven to exacerbate health problems, not relieve them. This can be seen by the vast array of ‘side effects’ that are associated with each pharmaceutical drug; many of these effects are known to be worse than the ‘disease’ for which they are being prescribed.

There is a name for health conditions that result from medical treatment, including drugs and vaccines; it is called ‘iatrogenesis’.

One of the first analyses of the scale of the problem of ‘iatrogenesis’ in the US was conducted by Dr Barbara Starfield MD and reported in her July 2000 article entitled Is US Health Really the Best in the World?

We cite her article in our book and comment that,

“One of the statistics provided in the article is of particular relevance to this discussion, as Dr Starfield reports that an annual total of 106,000 deaths occurred as the result of ‘non-error adverse effects of medications’; which refers to medications that had been correctly and appropriately prescribed and administered. This particular statistic provides unequivocal evidence not only of the existence of iatrogenesis, but also of the potentially vast scale of the problem.”

Iatrogenesis was also the subject of a comprehensive study entitled Death by Medicine by Gary Null PhD et al that collated statistics from thousands of published studies on all causes of illness. It is widely claimed that heart disease and cancer are the top two leading causes of death in the US; yet this study claimed there were an estimated 783,936 deaths per year from iatrogenesis, a number that exceeds the annual mortality from the two other causes; making iatrogenesis the leading cause of death in the US.

The study did not refer solely to the number of deaths but also to adverse drug reactions and states,

“Each year approximately 2.2 million US hospital patients experience adverse drugs reactions to prescribed medications.”

The reason that pharmaceutical drugs are associated with these adverse effects is because they are almost entirely produced using petrochemical compounds; a fact that is widely recognised, as can be seen by the ACS (American Chemical Society) web page entitled Organic Chemistry, which states that,

“Petroleum is also the raw material for many chemical products including pharmaceuticals…”

The toxic nature of pharmaceuticals can also be demonstrated by a document entitled Pharmaceutical Waste Analysis that was produced in 2006 by the Blacksmith Institute and explains that,

“A variety of priority pollutants are used as reaction and purification solvents during chemical synthesis.”

This document provides a list of some of the ‘priority pollutants’ that are used in the process of chemical synthesis; they include,

“…benzene, chlorobenzene, chloroform, chloromethane, o-dichlorobenzene, 1,2-dichloroethane, methylene chloride, phenol, toluene and cyanide.”

The term ‘priority pollutants’ means that these substances are known to be extremely hazardous chemical compounds; for example, benzene is a proven carcinogen and toluene is a known neurotoxin.

The conclusion to be drawn therefore is that ‘medicines’ manufactured using toxic petrochemicals will be toxic to the human body, which makes it hardly surprising that so many people exhibit severe adverse reactions to them. What is probably more surprising is that there is not an even larger number of people who experience severe adverse reactions. The acknowledged fact that petrochemicals are toxic to the human body raises the question of how they were ever perceived to be health-promoting and life-saving, because they clearly are not. This therefore completely undermines the notion that ‘scarce’ medical resources, especially medicines, need to be allocated to those who deserve them. The only beneficiaries of such a ‘healthcare system’ are the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries because these products are extremely lucrative for them.

It is abundantly clear that nobody should be poisoned in the name of ‘healthcare’ because, as we state in our book,