My colleague Andrew Bolt offered exactly those views back in August:

Most people dying of this virus are over 80. More than two thirds dying in this Victorian wave are in aged-care homes …
Surely putting a tighter lock on those homes makes more sense than trying to stop all infections everywhere by shutting businesses.
Note: 40 per cent of aged-care home residents die within nine months. The average stay is just under three years.
So Victoria’s bans are doing huge damage to – essentially – save aged-care residents from dying a few months earlier.

For this, Bolt copped the full granny killer treatment.
“It’s an attitude that certain kinds of lives are disposable,” chief executive of the Council on the Ageing, Ian Yates, told the Guardian.
“Logically the next step would be to ask, ‘Why do we have nursing homes at all, why don’t we just bang them on the head?’”
Alex Wake, president of the Journalism Education and Research Association, told the same publication: “Everyone in the community has parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and great-grandparents who have spent their lives contributing to the community and deserve dignity.”
And the ABC’s Michael Rowland denounced “commentators who are saying that old people in aged care homes who get coronavirus were going to die soon anyway”, adding: “Every life is valuable. Every family feels pain.”
Interestingly, just a few months later, Norwegian health authorities are using precisely the same priority-based argument as Bolt following deaths due not to the coronavirus but to the coronavirus vaccine.
“Twenty-three people died in Norway within days of receiving their first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, with 13 of those deaths – all nursing home patients – apparently related to the side effects of the shots,” the New York Post reported last week:

“Common reactions to the vaccine, including fever and nausea, ‘may have contributed to a fatal outcome in some frail patients,’ Sigurd Hortemo, chief physician at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, said.
“All 13 were nursing home patients and at least 80 years old …”

You know where this is going.
“We are not alarmed by this,” Steinar Madsen, the agency’s medical director, told Norwegian media.
“It is quite clear that these vaccines have very little risk, with a small exception for the frailest patients.”
Madsen also proposed that “those who are very frail and at the very end of life” not receive the vaccine. “Doctors must now carefully consider who should be vaccinated,” he said.
Norway already has some of Europe’s strictest travel barriers and earlier this month introduced further measures, including a nationwide booze ban in restaurants and bars and a two-week suspension of any at-home socialising.
But when it comes to the vaccine, Norway is a little more flexible. Sure, the old and frail may die, but there’s no point compromising the majority just to benefit the few.
We now await an outraged response from the “every life is valuable” camp.



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