The unions are well aware that the run up to Christmas is a time of prayer and ala in an average year, but this happens when the health service is on its knees.
All the more reason for the Government and NHS senior management to offer an apology and a full explanation to the public of how this scandalous situation came to be. We know they like to blame Vladimir Putin for everything, but the current sorry state of the NHS is ALSO attributable to the lockdown and catastrophically poor judgment decisions.
According to shocking new figures from the OECD, the NHS shut down more services in the first year of the pandemic than almost every other nation in Europe. Cancer-related surgery fell by more than a quarter compared to 2019. It was the second highest drop among the 30 countries included in the Health at a Glance 2022 report. The UK only performed better than Romania. Yes, a budget of £150bn a year and the NHS managed to outperform Romania. In contrast, Denmark hardly saw any interruptions in cancer surgery with a drop of just 0.6 percent in 2020.
If you were a Dane with stage 2 cancer in 2020, chances are good that you had surgery and are now doing well. If you were British with stage 2 cancer in 2020, you probably died at home or are in hospice care. I’m sorry to be frank. Actually, I’m not sorry. Someone somewhere made the fatal decision to shut down or reduce key medical services that has caused thousands of preventable deaths in this country and still causes several hundred excess (non-Covid) deaths every week.
Who was? We would like a name please. If she was more than one person, let’s have full disclosure. And you know the worst? They’re not even sorry. In a mind-boggling article in the Spectator on Matt Hancock’s pandemic diaries, which she co-authored, Isabel Oakeshott observes: “As the NHS morphed into a ‘Covid service’ there seems to have been very little discussion at the top of the government about the risk of compromising standards of care for people with other serious illnesses.” Hancock, he says, “admits that the NHS misled patients about this sorry state of affairs by declaring that all was well.”
The person who can reasonably be expected to balance the needs of all patients is England’s chief medical officer, Sir Chris Whitty. Along with Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Chris is co-author of a report on the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK which was published THIS MONTH. Both men admitted that Britain will face a “protracted period” of excess deaths after operations were canceled and people “avoided the NHS” during the pandemic. Sir Chris said delays in presenting patients, cutting back on preventative drugs (such as statins) and canceling surgeries and tests “will have led to later and more severe non-COVID illness.” Zero trash, Sherlock!
“The combined effect of this will likely lead to a prolonged period of non-Covid excess mortality after the worst period of the pandemic is over,” Whitty and Vallance concluded. “Undoubtedly, some people who would (and could) have come forward did not do so out of a sense of altruism or the perceived risk of being in the hospital.”
Frankly, listening to these guys, who were awarded gongs for their work, felt a bit like two arsonists commenting on the potential safety implications of setting a highly combustible building on fire. Offering advice to their successors on how to deal with any future pandemic, Whitty and Vallance said the speed with which Covid vaccines were being developed could “lull politicians into a false sense of security, with other new diseases possibly requiring social distancing and longer lockdowns. ”.
No. No. No. We are now living the consequences of a blind pursuit of restrictions that has impoverished our economy for a generation and overwhelmed healthcare to the point that an elderly man with a broken hip is told an ambulance won’t come, never. . We can hardly call ourselves a civilized country, yet the most public defenders of that ruinous policy have the nerve to suggest that, next time, we could block even more.
How quickly we forget. At this time last year, the champions of Covid restrictions were agitating for another Christmas lockdown. Ignoring the good news from South Africa about the milder Omicron variant, several professors opined that “Plan B restrictions don’t go far enough.” Only an early departure of Lord (David) Frost from the Cabinet and a hundred Conservative MPs suddenly rediscovering a backbone prevented more carnage.
This Christmas, we are in lockdown by default due to multiple strikes, and the NHS is under siege due to lockdown by design. The “Nothing to do with us, boss” attitude of Hancock, Whitty and Vallance cannot be sustained. Only by owning up to mistakes and promising not to make them again can trust be rebuilt.
