How would Matt Hancock have decided who lives and who dies?

[Eve223]

What factors would have been taken into consideration?

Age? Comorbidities? Childless?

It's utterly sickening and chilling to know what this despicable monster wanted to do.

Yep. I know of a lady who is brain damaged but otherwise physically well. Her rehab journey has been amazing. She was told she was DNR if she struggled with Covid.

Another lady I know was told she would not even be considered for a ventilator if needed.

And then on MN, we had people saying that unvaccinated people should have been the lowest priority.

@psychoanalyticnonsense your husband isn't wrong

Weren't those with learning disabilities thought to have been on the list too ?

People with learning disabilities had to fight to get on the priority list for the vaccinations. Lots of people with learning disabilities have physical issues as well that put them more at risk than the general population.

The government was and is entirely without decency.

And millions of Tory voting idiots will still vote for them.

Some ridiculous answers on this thread, but in reality, whoever cost more to keep. So your young, healthy working people would be picked over a disabled person with multiple medical conditions. He'd be deciding the parameters, not case by case.

Added to that, that would be instead of an actual clinician standing by the bedside of a patient. "I could save him but Matt Hancock says I need to give the ventilator to the athlete in the next bed".

Sorting hat?

😄

OMG he and Trump are surely cloned from the same stupid cells.

This is so similar to Trumps idea to rinse people out with disinfectant

I agree with @DistrictAndCircle in that how ever much of a fuckwit MH is- his office is exactly the place where in extremis, triage policy would need to be set. Horrific as any kind of life of death triage would be - if not the government- who is going to make those awful decisions? Imagine individual doctors in a completely overwhelmed situation faced with ten patients and one ventilator. Without a central policy you put the decision on an individual in a crisis situation and that is completely unfair. Obviously you would hope that MH himself would not be making those decisions without medical people guiding him, but the responsibility for prioritising lives does have to come back to elected ministers. Whether as a country we had elected the best people to be making those decisions is a different point . I am hoping that somewhere in this enquiry grownups are doing the the thing that needs to be done - which is assessing the outcome of pivotal decisions in order to learn which turned out to be right or wrong for the next time. If we get a second even more deadly pandemic in future , ridiculous what’s app spats are neither here nor there.

It's in the realms of a dystopian nightmare. Minister for death. The contempt these politicians hold for the majority of the population is astounding.

I think as a nation we should be allowed to decide if Matt Hancock lives or dies. Certainly if not literally then by refusing to have that absolutely cockwomble being even mentioned by the media or appearing on our screens. He craves recognition and popularity, the best we can do is completely erase him from the public consciousness (after ripping him to shreds for his behaviour during Covid).

I don't know. The best way to find out would be in a courtroom where he should face manslaughter charges for sending people to their deaths in care homes (and a number of other charges).

He'd have culled the herd.

Old, sick, disabled, of less economic value, not of breeding age, an element of racism, not white British. Eugenics in its purest form.

So what exactly does everyone think should have happened if covid had got to the point we literally could not have treated everyone?

If you have a 90 year old and a 9 year old competing for a ventilator please all of you tell me who should get priority?

Most posters here are ignoring the actual reality of the fact there would have had to be some awful choices if we'd got to that stage, and I wonder how many of you would choose an elderly person over a young person, however awful that is.

And obese people were less likely to survive so maybe that meant putting people with higher survival chances up the list.

I agree the conservatives as a political party have destroyed the NHS over many years but Matt Hancock didn't do that alone. And they were voted in by a majority.

But really in the worst situation what and who would YOU choose????

Survival of the fittest basically. Let everyone catch it, most will survive and those who don’t were ‘weak’ anyway. Hancock obviously has a God complex.

I'm with@Cathpot and @DistrictAndCircle , and I don't like the way this has been reported, including by the BBC, who should know better. The headlines all have a tone of scandal, but that is just clickbait. They were scenario planning for a hypothetical situation - not enough ventilators to go around. If an individual doctor, or team of doctors were to decide another person's relative has higher priority than yours, you would want to know why. You would want to see the policy, and you would want to know who signed off the policy. Ultimately, the buck stops with the Department of Health, which MH was leading at the time. If the policy had ever been created, medical advisors would have been involved in preparing it, but if there were differing views MH would have needed to be the final decision maker. Makes sense to me (as a non-partisan pragmatist who has never voted Conservative).

I mean, there are literally thousands of disturbing details about this whole thing.

But I don't think the Health Secretary saying he should put in place some sort of national framework/policy/parameters is necessarily one of them.

Posted too soon.

This is actually a living breathing real time embodiment of the dead cat at work.

The clickbaity tone of the reporting of this faff, and the way it's made people jump up and down in a really reactionary way is exactly what was needed by the government.

We make ourselves seem simple, and we let them away with far worse, when we act like puppets on the strings of sensationalist media.

I was on Twitter a lot during the pandemic. I didn't watch the news (can't stand Hancock) but read what he was saying in the papers and onlie, and I said, loads of times, that this man is thoroughly enjoying the power he has over the lives of millions of people. Turns out he wanted power over their deaths, as well.

This is probably an unpopular opinion but I think Hancock is being very unfairly treated over this particular thing (I think her probably deserves to be totally lambasted over other things, mind).

From the way it’s being reported you’d think that he was sat in a high-winged chair, stroking a white cat and laughing maniacally whilst saying ‘I shall choose who lives and who dies!!!’

Exactly @DistrictAndCircle . I despise the tories but in any situation in which healthcare is being rationed someone is going to die that could otherwise have been saved. The NHS has been doing this for years. Maybe we are already in a dystopian nightmare!

But surely he was saying ‘If the NHS is overwhelmed, I as the Secretary of State should be the one responsible for setting out the national policy on who gets treatment, as opposed to leaving those awful decisions in the hands of individual doctors to make on a case by case basis with no guidance to fall back on’

This is absolutely wrong and totally unnecessary

Clinicians don't need "guidance" to either triage or reverse triage. It is a core part of their competence. It is, in the aftermath of major incidents, a normal part of their role. It is, in a day to day sense, also a core part of the role (arranging lists, deciding on treatment options, and when those run out.

They absolutely do not need a SoS and advisors making those decisions for them, with no regard to the actual patients in front of them, and who can be saved. As that political decision might not map well with actual hospital-by-hospital illness patterns.

We don't have much of a "national policy" on who gets treatment for anything. The postcode lottery of local commissioning over-rides that, and is a policy that the Tories introduced and are very much wedded to shows us that. So it's illogical at least to think it's a good thing to impose one, especially if you are doing so because you think important decisions about provision and withdrawal of care cannot be safely left at a regional/local level.

But why is it Hancock's decision, and not a suitably qualified medical ethics committee (or something like that)?

What Hancock needed to do was provide the political top cover for reverse triage.

Which is what in effect the policy became (the "three wise men" - a local, clinician-led approach)

And of course don't forget that this was used. Don't let covid amnesia blot out that there weren't enough ICU beds to go round - not everyone who might have benefited from one got one. And some people were considered too unwell/frail to benefit from one. And yes, led to deaths.

But it has not led to people seeking answers demanding to see the policy, or escalating to SoS, because it would have been explained locally by the clinicians involved.

By letting it rip through care homes...