No! English victims of the first wave of Covid-19 did not die from the drug midazolam

Circulating on Facebook among users close to the No vax idea, the sharing of a post reporting a conspiracy theory also leaked by Scottish nurse Lesley Robert and Filipino data analyst Willson Sy, according to which Many English people did not die in the first wave. of Covid-19 in 2020 was due to SARS-CoV-2, but rather to a cocktail of deadly treatments, among which the drug midazolam stands out, administered massively to simulate the pandemic. The author of the article in question uses their theses to sow doubt about the coffins of Bergamo, shown parading through the city on board military vehicles at the same time. Let's see why these are baseless theses. This type of story has been circulating since 2021, as shown in a previous analysis by colleagues at Complete fact.

For those in a hurry:

• According to Scottish nurse Lesley Robert, a protocol would have been applied in Scotland to euthanize Covid-19 patients, who would therefore not have died from the disease.
• According to a pre-publication by analyst Willson Sy, Covid deaths in the UK were linked to the administration of midazolam, while SARS-CoV-2 was almost absent at the time.
• Euthanasia in the UK is illegal.
• The protocol denounced by the nurse was a medical triage procedure, which on the contrary makes it possible to maximize the number of patients saved.
• Midazolam is prescribed to support patients already at the end of life, in order to relieve their suffering.

Analyzes

The share about the drug midazolam is posted with the following caption:

In 2020, in England, people did not die from Covid but were killed by a deadly drug, Midazolam. At this point we have to ask Conte and Speranza if the same thing happened in Italy. Why did the Conte government ask to cremate the bodies of Bergamo?

The “revelations” of the whistleblower nurse

The sources for the story in question about the alleged midazolam massacre are a tabloid article. Scottish Daily Express which reports the statements of Robert, presented as a “whistleblower nurse” and the “study” of the analyst Sy.

According to what was reported by the journalistic source, Robert would have reported the Scottish government to the police for “corporate murder”, because he would have pushed to “not resuscitate” older patients suffering from Covid-19. The nurse was referring to NG163 protocol on the “end of life” which remained in force until March 21, 2021 and replaced the following month by NG191 protocol. This is the resurgence of old controversies concerning the application of specific protocols for the application of medical triage. This also happened in Italy. Remember when we talked about doctors choosing who would live and who would die? We managed it well in the first wave. In our article we explain that it's not about choosing at all, but about saving as many lives as possible.

We're talking about a time when intensive care services were collapsing. With the exhaustion of resources, it is not possible to grant the same priority of intervention to all cases of Covid – this is not even done today in emergency rooms – apply the rule of “ first come, first served” would only make the situation worse. Absurdly imagine that a hospital, to please conspiracy theorists, decides to give priority to all cases with little hope of survival. It would happen that in addition to losing these patients anyway, they would be joined by many patients who, if they had been quickly helped, could have been saved. It would be choosing who lives and who dies.

Was midazolam used to “create” the pandemic?

We have a clear reference to the drug midazolam in the second source, namely a preprint from last January, which has not yet been accepted for publication in a scientific journal. Let's read some parts of the summary:

This article shows that the spike in deaths in the UK, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, was not due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent, but was due to widespread use Midazolam injections. which were statistically very strongly correlated (coefficient greater than 90%) with excess mortality in all regions of England during 2020. […] The iatrogenic pandemic in the UK was caused by deaths by Midazolam euthanasia and probably also by COVID injections, but their relative impact is difficult to measure from the data, due to the causal proximity of euthanasia.

The author brings together the correlations between the administration of midazolam and the deaths of patients with conjectures that his work cannot demonstrate, such as the virtual absence of the new Coronavirus in the United Kingdom, or the serious accusation, attributed to the British government, of having performed euthanasia in a country where this procedure is illegal.

If we look at what midazolam is and why it is prescribed, it is easy to understand that the Filipino analyst found a false correlation between the drug and deaths. In fact, we are talking about a benzodiazepine that can be used as an “anticipatory medicine” because it accompanies patients already at the end of life, relieving their suffering. It is therefore completely normal that it is often prescribed to patients who are on the verge of dying in intensive care following a serious form of Covid. It therefore takes a lot of imagination to assert that it was midazolam which caused the deaths of the patients.

“Was the Bergamo massacre caused by the same deadly drugs? – asks the author of the Italian blog -. What we need to understand is whether the same dynamics seen in England occurred in Italy. » Clearly no. In fact, at the slightest verification we understand that this dynamic never existed.

Conclusions

We saw that deaths in the first wave of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom and Italy were due to severe forms of Covid-19, in a world where we could only rely on fleeting natural immunity. Medicines prescribed to accompany dying patients, such as midazolam, clearly cannot be the cause.

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