medical freedom – Outsider Insight

Are you a burden on society?

Few slopes are as slippery as the 35 pages of the new Assisted Dying Bill in England and Wales, replete with enigmatic terminology and subjective reassurances. In a sign of the times, the second reading passed through the UK Parliament by 330 to 275 votes. A few powerful speeches gave me hope that some MPs might rethink in time for the third reading, but few can deny that the establishment supported what they deceptively call dignity in dying. Indeed, a well-funded lobby group of the same name, formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, in cahoots with the woke global media empire behind LBC and The News Agents (featuring none other than Jon Sopel, Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall), plastered the London Underground with posters portraying photogenic middle-aged adults, presumably with a hidden terminal illness, celebrating the end of their physical existence on planet earth.

Before 2020, public opinion firmly opposed any moves towards the legalisation of euthanasia, which, for the sake of clarity, means intervening to cut short someone else's life when we have the means to let life go on. This may involve either active euthanasia by administering lethal drugs or gases, or passive euthanasia, with the withdrawal of life-sustaining nourishment, basic bodily care, or treatment. Most edge cases concern switching off the life-support systems of patients in an irreversible coma. The development of functional MRI scanners and electroencephalograms (EEG) has enabled clinicians to determine whether someone's brain remains functionally alive, but in rare cases, people have survived prolonged comatose states.

The Terminally Ill Adults Bill technically restricts assisted suicide to over-18-year-olds with less than six months left to live, but who determines how long someone is likely to survive? The course of many life-threatening illnesses, such as cancer, is extremely hard to forecast with accuracy. Many have defied the prognosis of medical experts. Indeed, sceptics of invasive treatments such as chemo and radiotherapy have long pointed to the disturbingly high incidence of remission compared to natural remedies like the Gerson method or immunotherapy. We now effectively have a cancer industrial complex, if I dare coin the term, with nearly one in two adults expected to develop cancer at least once in their lifetime. Recent US data from 2017-2019 shows men have about a 41.6% lifetime risk, while women have a slightly lower risk at 38.7%.

Medical Meddling

Proponents of the assisted dying bill are keen to emphasise the importance of choice and, wait for it, bodily autonomy, but they also tend to favour the proactive administration of medications and invasive procedures for the common good of wider society, something they like to call modern medicine, rather than a more holistic approach focusing on diet, exercise, a strong immune system and natural remedies. The mechanistic approach, favoured by euthanasia advocates, assumes that we should conform to the needs of a complex society that exploits technology not only to stop the spread of perceived pathogens but also to cleanse itself of irreparably defective individuals, who, as George Bernard Shaw once opined, can no longer justify their existence. It gives a new meaning to the original purpose of public healthcare to look after us from cradle to grave. The medical profession is now involved in every aspect of our intimate lives, from conception and fertility treatment to end-of-life ceremonies, as well as every step in between. Doctors can now artificially lengthen or shorten our lives, with plausible deniability about any adverse effects of their preferred prescriptions.

The counterargument is obviously that modern medicine has helped boost life expectancy at age 5 in much of the world from around 60 or below at the turn of the 20th century to over 80 by the year 2000. The rise in life expectancy at birth is even more dramatic due to a dramatic decline in infant mortality. In 1900, it was just around 45 in most of Western Europe when most mothers still gave birth at home with the help of lay midwives and without access to incubators or other medical advancements we now take for granted. Nonetheless, if you could survive early childhood, were well-nourished, had access to clean water and air, kept fit with a strong immune system and escaped serious accidents, you could still live into your 60s, 70s and beyond, but life was shorter and fraught with adversity. Unsurprisingly, people in traditional low-tech societies counted each new day as a blessing. People had a much more spiritual outlook on life, tended to trust in God and reconciled themselves to nature's fate.

Of greater philosophical importance is our respect for both human life and free will. It took the best part of two millennia for modern civilization, as it evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries, to afford all human lives the same intrinsic worth. If all lives really do matter, irrespective of your social status, perceived intelligence, prowess, or physique, then as a matter of principle, we should always discourage others from taking the easy way out of their malaise through suicidal ideation or by using subtle means to promote self-sacrifice among atomised individuals with low self-esteem.

What matters is not so much how long you live but that you live your best life in a society that values both self-determination and human survival. Historically, most people now confined to care homes, wasting away their final years in a strictly controlled environment with minimal personal independence and often diminishing dignity, would have died of natural causes. We might simply have learned that a sixty-five-year-old grandfather had collapsed while chopping wood for his stove. The true cause of death may well have been mild dementia or a heart attack, but the unfortunate incident happened in the pursuit of autonomy. The flip side of proactive medical interventionism is that it often undermines human nature and, most of all, our desire to be masters of our destiny as free agents.

Do Not Resuscitate notices epitomise all that's wrong with modern healthcare, placing our lives in the hands of strangers. A better approach would be a clear statement telling medics not to intervene without your consent. While most of us may want the public health service to be there in the event of serious accidents or medical emergencies, we do not necessarily want to be lulled into institutionalised numbness surrounded by condescending nurses amid kitsch memorabilia and piped music. Some of us would rather muddle our way through life than schedule our demise to suit someone else's agenda. If we take life in our stride, we may well live to a ripe old age, but natural tragedies may get the better of us without round-the-clock medical vigilance. Live and let live!

Corporate Censors and Fact Fabricators

Every Little Thing is Going to be Alright

If you get your news from the likes of the BBC and the Guardian, billing themselves as bastions of liberal progressivism, you might be forgiven for knowing little about the biggest anti-establishment protest in London since the massive February 2003 demonstration against the invasion of Iraq. No doubt, if such a large anti-government protest had taken place in Minsk or Moscow, this would have been headline news. You may have just heard that a few thousand demented antivaxxers staged a super-spreader event, undermining our collective struggle against the virus, and attacked brave police officers whose sole mission was to protect public safety.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of thousands of people travelled from all over the UK to stand up for basic civil liberties, scientific truth and humanity as we have known it for countless generations. I feel guilty only because I could not take time off to join the crowds. Many ethical issues may divide us, but the prospect of a permanent bio-security state should horrify anyone concerned about society’s steady drift towards a technocratic dystopia.

Luckily, the event was livestreamed on alternative media. Unlike other large gatherings in the English capital over the years, the mainstream media did not publicise it at all, in stark contrast with the mass-marketed pro-EU and anti-Trump demos. Despite coronavirus restrictions last year, the venerable BBC gave favourable live coverage of the much smaller Black Lives Matter protests. They downplayed the scale of violence against police who had earlier taken the knee, while completely ignoring regular episodes of police violence against peaceful anti-lockdown protesters. The only minor skirmishes at yesterday’s demonstration occurred after the police attempted to break up crowds of youngsters playing live music in Hyde Park. The police were massively outnumbered and unwisely attempted a baton charge against hundreds of fit young men and women, who did little more than hurl food scraps at retreating officers. I feel sorry for the police forced to wear face nappies on a sunny day and enforce scientifically flawed public safety measures detrimental to people’s emotional and physical health.

Ministries of Truth

As my week-long Twitter suspension neared its end, I checked reactions to yesterday’s events. Two stood out. One from BBC’s notorious Marianna Spring would not look out of place in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, effectively denouncing hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people as dangerous conspiracy theorists intent on undermining the UK’s glorious mass vaccination campaign.

We may note Ms Spring’s obsession with the QAnon phenomenon and her constant reference to false claims. The adjective false is meaningless unless you can refute an assertion you claim is false. Just because the government and the BBC’s corporate partners such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation claim that an assertion is false does not make it true. Tony Blair dismissed any suggestion that his government supported the occupation of Iraq to retain control of the oil supply as wild conjecture you may read on the Internet, which was still in its infancy back in 2003. Subsequent events proved the so-called conspiracy theorists right, although keeping the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency also played a role. Caitlin Johnstone and Wikileaks have exposed how the QAnon movement was most likely a CIA-driven pied piper operation, focusing on claims that Trump had someone code-named Q embedded in the Deep State to expose the cabal’s widespread ritual satanic sexual abuse. Back in the real world, Trump not only appointed war hawks to the highest levels of his administration, but he also collaborated with the biotech industrial complex in the roll-out of experimental mRNA injections going so far as to claim credit for Operation Warp Speed. However, most disturbingly Marianna Spring has lent her rhetorical weight to calls for the censorship of any means of communication that big corporations cannot control. She disparagingly refers to Telegram as an encrypted channel that facilitates conspiracy theories. Both Labour and Tory politicians have already called on the government to take tougher action against vaccine misinformation. Yet even the government’s own Yellow Card reporting system has detailed over 160,000 serious adverse reactions as of 14^th April 2021 and admits elsewhere this accounts for fewer than 10% of actual adverse events. We do not know how many of the excess deaths of frail nursing home residents in January and February this year, assigned to covid-19 were expedited by adverse reactions to the Astra Zeneca or Pfizer injections. However, testimonials by nurses and carers would suggest much higher numbers than those revealed in the Yellow Card reporting system.

Another message retweeted by the NHA Party (who amazingly still follows me) accuses protesters of antisemitism because they likened the prospect of medical apartheid via vaccine passports with the plight of Jews forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany. If Christine Williams had done her homework, she would know mainly Jewish protesters in Tel Aviv made the same comparison. Are they antisemitic too? More important many prominent scientists, such as Dr Mike Yeadon and Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, have warned us of the prospect of death on an unprecedented scale as corporate forces take full control of every aspect of our private lives and are busy building a new urban landscape clearly designed for fewer people. All the warning signs are there, discrimination, dehumanisation and polarisation.

Manufacturing Reality

Well-funded fact-checkers, as promoted by the mainstream media, academia and establishment politicians, employ a simple modus operandi. They focus on a few obvious falsehoods, which may have enjoyed some limited currency in the alternative media space, while either dismissing or ignoring the big questions. Once they have impressed the gullible with their cogent debunking of a claim of little consequence (e.g. do facemasks contain worms?), they proceed to cite peer-reviewed research favourable to the interests of their corporate funders. Very occasionally, fact-checkers will try to win public trust by highlighting a few cases of genuine corporate malfeasance or political corruption, but usually only to distract us from larger crimes or to discredit outmoded practices or expendable politicians.

Free speech, as in intellectual freedom, logically lets anyone make any claims about current and historical events. Many conscientious political activists may make claims based on limited knowledge or second-hand sources. Few of us can employ researchers to verify each claim we make. However, we can report what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears. Once we go down the road of subjecting all pronouncements to moderation by official experts or artificial intelligence, we will have no way to verify if the official experts are lying.