Schadenberg calls for criminal investigation on long-term care deaths
Paul Tuns:
An assistant chief nurse at a long-term care home in Laval, Quebec was directed by the provincial health department to administer morphine to coronavirus patients instead of caring for them to treat their illness with an eye to survival, an inquest was told.
“I had never seen deaths happen so quickly,” Sylvie Morin, a nurse at Sainte-Dorothée, a nursing home where more than 100 residents died during the first wave of COVID-19 last year, told a coroner’s inquest on the high number of COVID deaths at long-term care homes in Quebec.
The Montreal Gazette reported, “The objective is not to find a guilty party but to formulate recommendations in order to avoid future tragedies.”
Morin said that residents suspected of having COVID were placed under a “respiratory distress protocol” that included morphine, the sedative Ativan, and the anti-nausea drug scopolamine.
The Mayo Clinic notes that a common side effect of injected morphine is “difficult or troubled breathing” or “irregular, fast or slow, or shallow breathing.” The website drugs.com cautions that people with respiratory problems – COVID-19 is a virus that causes respiratory problems, especially among the elderly — “should not take morphine” based on peer-reviewed data.
The Mayo Clinic advises that Ativan is not given with narcotic pain medicines, which might exasperate respiratory problems. Morphine is a narcotic.
Patrick Martin-Menard, a lawyer for the family of Anna Jose Maquet, who died suddenly at the age of 94 in April 2020, asked Morin whether the cocktail of morphine, Ativan, and scopolamine “leads to death?” She replied, “yes.’
Morin said the protocol was put in place to make patients “more comfortable,” and not to kill them, but that many people died quickly after a positive COVID test and treated according to the protocol. “They didn’t all die but most did,” said Morin. She stressed that the policy was not the home’s initiative: “They made us put them all on the respiratory-distress protocol” she said of the Health Department’s order.
The floor supervisor, Morin told the inquest, was preparing for a large number of deaths. “She had 250 death certificates, 250 forms for the respiratory-distress protocol,” Morin told the inquest. “I looked at it and I said, ‘come now, they’re not all going to die’. But it was all set up ahead of time.”
The nursing home procedures were ordered by the provincial Health Department so that long-term care residents did not overwhelm hospitals.
The Globe and Mail also reported that a health board planning document also filed at the inquest revealed that the families of LTC residents were contacted—it is not clear by whom—to change their loved ones’ level of care to “move towards C and D levels.” Under A and B levels, patients receive medical treatment to prolong life, but C and D levels of care aim to alleviate pain as a patient approaches death.
Jean-Pierre Daubois, Maquet’s son, told the Montreal Gazette that in retrospect, “the decisions that were taken to call the families and change the level of care, for me, were nothing but death sentences.”
Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, said “these are cases of murder” that call for criminal investigation. “This should be treated as a criminal case,” Schadenberg told LifeSiteNews. “It should not be treated as, ‘We’re going to investigate what we did wrong to make sure we’re going to do it right next time.’ These were criminal decisions.”
Schadenberg said that many Canadians died this way, especially during the first wave of COVID, and not only in Quebec. “This is a massive number of people in Canada who actually died this way. Thousands, not hundreds. Not a dozen. It’s horrific.”
He said that the medical directions by provincial or local authorities explains the “incredibly high death rate amongst its seniors.”
The Canadian Institute for Health Information said Canada suffered the highest proportion of long-term care home deaths among wealthy countries during COVID.
