Lockdown Care Homes Scandal

So, now what I and many others pointed out over the last two years is official.  More than 20,000 people died in care homes, as a result of the NHS sending people back into them carrying COVID, the courts have ruled.   The government has had to take the blame for this policy, because it has final responsibility, but, of course, the operational decisions were taken by an NHS bureaucracy that itself oversaw at least the same number of deaths within the NHS itself as a result of people being infected with the virus after they came into hospital with other illnesses.  And, the real culprit is the policy of lockdown itself, for which others have far more culpability than the government.

The real issue, in respect both of the deaths in care homes, and deaths in the NHS, and wider care system, is the fact that the government was pressed to impose a blanket lockdown of society rather than to focus resources on protecting that relatively small proportion of the population - at most about 20% - that was at any serious risk from the virus.  That is, those of 60, and more specifically those over 75, or who had some other underlying medical condition that compromised their immune system.

But, instead, as the moral panic expanded exponentially, a sensationalist, ratings hungry media, seeing a cornucopia of cheap headlines demanded that only the most sweeping, most dramatic measures were sufficient to deal with what was presented as an existential threat to society, even though the vast majority of society was at no risk from COVID whatsoever, and even the large majority of the 20% at risk, would not suffer serious illness, or death.  That fact was known from more or less Day One, based upon the data that came out of China, where the virus had been abroad already for months, as well as from Italy, where it had swept though its healthcare system, hitting elderly patients.

Yet, the media continued to insist that the virus was indiscriminate in who it affected, which was a blatant lie that was also promoted by opportunist opposition politicians, and by nearly all of the petty-bourgeois Left, with anyone who dared to challenge what became a totalitarian level of propaganda and social pressure, being deliberately cancelled.  As Professor Mark Woolhouse put it in his book, described by the Guardian,

"There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.

And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”

But, the fact is that Gove himself was, at the time, acting under immense pressure from that sensationalist media, from opportunist, opposition politicians, and from organisations like the WHO, which not only continually got it wrong, and chopped and changed their positions, but did so themselves under pressure of that moral panic, which had been whipped up on the basis of scare stories out of the Medical Industrial Complex, and predictions from the likes of Imperial College that proved as wildly inaccurate as had been their previous predictions in relation to Swine Flu back in 2009.

So, its not the government that bears the greatest responsibility for all of these tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in care homes, the NHS and care sector, but all of those in the media, the opposition politicians, the petty-bourgeois Leftists and so on that actually wanted a blanket lockdown imposed even earlier, even more extensively, and even more harshly.  It is all those who claimed that the virus was indiscriminate, even when it was clear that it wasn't, and who again tried to cancel anyone who challenged that view, and then when it was undeniable sought to shift the argument on to other grounds such as vacuous and unsubstantiated claims about long-COVID, or, as in China now, demands for zero-COVID infections, even though there is absolutely no point of that.

By claiming that the virus was indiscriminate, so as to make the case for a society wide blanket lockdown, the focus on the need to protect the actual minority at risk was missing.  In fact, the task of effectively locking down that minority, concentrated in care homes, hospitals and in their own homes with the support of care workers, should have been the easiest to achieve of all.  That minority was already identified, and was concentrated in these locations, where simple, almost cost-free measures of common sense could have ensured that they never came in contact with the virus.

In hospitals, the measures of old, of having isolation hospitals, or wings in existing hospitals was a basic common sense measure that would have avoided tens of thousands of other patients being infected with the virus.  According to NHS data, more than 25% of the people it treated for COVID only contracted it after they had come into hospital for treatment for other illnesses.  Given that a high proportion of them would also be elderly, or otherwise at risk, a correspondingly higher proportion of them would have than become seriously ill and died from the virus.  That in itself is a scandal that ranks with all the previous scandals in the NHS such as the organ harvesting scandal, the Stafford hospital scandal, Shrewsbury hospital baby deaths scandal, the MRSA and C-Dif scandals.  It again shows that this huge, Stalinoid, state capitalist monstrosity cannot meet the needs of workers, and a democratic, worker owned and controlled alternative is required.

In fact, the hierarchic, bureaucratic nature of the NHS, and the role of the Medical-Industrial Complex made such basic almost cost-free, common sense measures impossible.  Having isolation hospitals is easier when you have a multitude of smaller local hospitals, and the task even within the individual hospital of separating given wings for such purposes is easier.  But, the NHS is based upon the building of personal empires, for which ever larger, centralised hospitals, based on multiple floors, where everyone has to pass through one area after another, made that much more difficult.  Where separate hospitals were created, it came in the form of the millions of pounds spent on Nightingale hospitals, whose actual purpose seems to have been an expensive publicity stunt.

The one at the Excel Centre in London was opened with great fanfare promising to be able to cater for around 5,000 patients, as the moral panic was in full swing, promising that mass burials and cremations were going to be required.  Not only of course, did the latter never happen, but the hospital itself never catered for more than 25 people at any one time, and only about 60 people in total.  Some of these white elephants never saw a single patient cross their doors.  This was all a huge amount of time and resources that could instead have gone into ensuring that elderly people in hospitals were isolated from any contact with the virus, as well as anyone with the virus was themselves isolated, including from elderly people in care homes.  It could have diverted resources to those care homes, ensuring proper PPE for staff, contact protocols, and so on, and the same principles could have been applied to car provided to the elderly in their own homes.

Instead, huge resources were devoted to the pointless task of locking down the whole of society, of passing ridiculous, unenforceable, illiberal laws to that effect, and in the process crucifying the economy, and so making the provision of the resources require for a targeted lockdown strategy that would have saved the lives of tens of thousands, impossible.

As again Professor Woolhouse put it,

“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt. All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.”