Man With Disabling COVID Vaccine Injury and Mental Illness Euthanized

Written by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. on November 6, 2024. Posted in Current News

An Ontario, Canada, man in his late 40s whose health declined after receiving three COVID-19 shots and who also had a mental health condition was euthanized in Canada as part of its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty reported.

The program assessors concluded that his clinical presentation was a post-COVID-19 “vaccination syndrome” known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome.

The case is one of several highlighted in an expert review of MAiD deaths in Ontario that caused concerns. The report, which did not reveal the man’s name, is intended to identify and prompt improvements that need to be made to Canada’s legalized euthanasia program.

“This case report shows how the Canadian healthcare system abandoned a suicidal patient in need of real medical and psychiatric care,” Kheriaty wrote. “If it had not come from a government report I would have had difficulty believing this horrifying case history.”

According to the brief case report, the patient went through extensive specialist consultations and clinical testing but “without determinate diagnostic results.” He also suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

While he was “navigating his physical symptoms,” the man was admitted to the hospital with suicidal ideation. Psychiatrists raised concerns about mental illness, the report said. During a second incidence of suicidal ideation, he was involuntarily hospitalized and received in-patient psychiatric treatment.

“The MAiD assessors opined that the most reasonable diagnosis for Mr. A’s clinical presentation (severe functional decline) was a post-vaccine syndrome,” the report said.

His cause of death was listed as “post-COVID-19 vaccination somatic symptom disorder with post-traumatic stress disorder and depressive disorder.” MAiD is not listed as the cause of death on death certificates in Ontario.

In their report, experts raised concerns about whether the man’s mental illnesses should have rendered him ineligible for MAiD and whether the duration of the psychiatric treatment he underwent was adequate to evaluate if more treatment might help him.

Other members of the panel questioned whether a condition “previously unrecognized in medicine” — his “post-vaccine somatic syndrome” — could be considered incurable, given limited available clinical knowledge and research.

Dr. Joel Wallskog, a Wisconsin orthopedic surgeon who stopped practicing medicine after being injured by Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, told The Defender, “I am truly shocked by the trend of offering active euthanasia to those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.”

Wallskog, co-chair of the vaccine-injured patient advocacy group React19 added:

“This program ignores the basic principle in medicine of ‘first do no harm.’

“Second … this program highlights the gaslighting and the sheer abandonment of the COVID-19 vaccine-injured community. We need research, providers that acknowledge these injuries, and effective diagnostics and treatments. We don’t need to be sent off to slaughter.

“Third, this program is a sad reflection on the course of humanity in general. The COVID-19-injured community needs hope and support. They don’t need active euthanasia.”

MAiD expert Alexander Raikin, visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has been documenting and analyzing the program for years, told The Defender the case captures the worst of the problems with MAiD and MAiD oversight.

“It shows that certain people with depression, with disabilities and other illnesses are not equally protected under Canadian law as healthy Canadians,” he added. “If this man did not also have an illness caused by taking a vaccine, then he would still be alive today.”

MAiD: the world’s fastest-growing assisted-dying program

Canada established the MAiD program in 2016 when it legalized euthanasia. The program includes assisted suicide (providers give patients the means to take their own lives) and euthanasia (the provider administers a patient’s lethal injection).

According to Raikin, over 99% of the deaths in the program happen through euthanasia.

Originally, people eligible for the program included only those with “a “reasonably foreseeable” death. In March 2021, the law was changed to make people with chronic conditions who no longer wanted to live eligible for the program. The two groups are called “track one” and “track two” respectively.

Supporters argue that MAiD provides an important solution for those who want to end their suffering from terminal or chronic illness. They believe the program has key safeguards in place to ensure vulnerable people aren’t pushed into assisted death.

Safeguards include things like an informed consent requirement to participate in the program and a 90-day assessment, or waiting, period for people with chronic conditions who decide to undergo euthanasia. Those who have a “foreseeable death” don’t have an assessment period.

Often, the median wait time between requesting MAiD and death is 11 days, according to Health Canada.

Detractors, like Raikin, argue that even the minimal safeguards often aren’t followed, problematic cases aren’t criminally investigated, and the program amounts to “essentially legally sanctioned murder.”

When the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized euthanasia and assisted suicide, it directed parliament to create “a stringently limited, carefully monitored system of exceptions,” Raikin has written. Instead, it has become the world’s largest and fastest-growing euthanasia program.

Raikin said that since the program began, the number of deaths from MAiD increased thirteenfold, from 1,018 in 2016 to over 13,200 in 2022, the last year for which full reporting is available.

A coalition of organizations advocating for Canadians with disabilities in September filed a legal challenge against the “track two” MAID provision, arguing that it discriminates against people with disabilities and has resulted in premature deaths, The BMJ reported.

“We are witnessing an alarming trend where people with disabilities are seeking assisted suicide due to social deprivation, poverty, and lack of essential supports,” said Krista Carr, executive vice president of Inclusion Canada in a statement.

“This law also sends a devastating message that life with a disability is a fate worse than death, undermining decades of work toward equity and inclusion. It’s time to put an end to helping people with disabilities commit suicide and start supporting them to live.”

Raikin said the rule is blatantly discriminatory. “If you’re a healthy Canadian, and you say, ‘I want kill myself,’ the government, the police, the suicide hotlines, the medical system, they would all say ‘don’t.’ But if you have a disability or an illness …?”

A Health Canada annual report found that more than a third of Canadians who participate in the program do so because they feel like they are a burden to their family and friends. Others say they feel socially isolated.

Raikin said there is extensive evidence showing that a major part of the problem is a lack of adequate support for the ill and disabled in Canada. For example, he said, in 2023, the median wait time to get a CD scan in Canada was over 60 days — but in the first seven months of 2024, the wait time to see a MAiD practitioner was only 2.2 business days.

“I don’t know any other procedure under Canada’s public healthcare system that you can get as quickly as MAiD,” he said. It’s not just Canada, the problem exists in many countries, he said.

Case likely representative of other cases 

Raikin said the cases discussed in the recent expert review were flagged by the coroner’s office and sent to the board. He said the actual number of cases sent for review are unknown. However, the cases sent to the board for discussion typically are representative of more than one case.

“The fact that there is a case study on an individual case of vaccine damage implies that there were other similar cases, but we don’t know how many,” he said.

From his reading of the report, Raikin said it’s clear the man did not receive adequate medical support and care. He said it was also important to understand that the physicians who diagnosed the patient and offered to end his life are euthanasia advocates.

The case raises serious questions, particularly about people in the “track two” category of the MAiD program and the types of care and support they receive before being considered for MAiD, he said.

Wallskog said that some vaccine-injured people also died through euthanasia at the Pegasos Clinic in Switzerland.

React19 represents 36,000 vaccine-injured people, he said. Having spoken with thousands of vaccine-injured people Wallskog said he has found that if a person is marginalized before their injury, it is exponentially more disabling to them.

“In this situation, these people need more help, not less,” which his organization’s advocacy program seeks to provide. “Mental health issues should never be a reason that active euthanasia is considered.”

“The COVID-19 vaccine-injured community is traumatized at least twice,” Wallskog said. “Once by their injury. Second, by how they are gaslit and abandoned. Active euthanasia programs are just pure evil and should be exposed as such.”

Molecular biologist Christina Parks, Ph.D., told The Defender that from a scientific standpoint, there was not a lot of medical information in the report for external reviewers to analyze.

However, she thought it raised a broader point. “When you mandate an experimental medical intervention that destroys health, and then you offer euthanasia as a solution, that looks a lot like population control.”

It begs the question, she said “Are we human beings? Or are we just seen as some sort of animal that can be herded and culled ‘for the greater good?’”

See more here The Defender

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