Fox’s Dr. Nicole Saphier has an answer for the shortage of ventilators that might make even Marie Antoinette cringe: Long-term coronavirus patients “are gonna have to come off” and “they’re either going to survive” or “either going to die.”
Yesterday, on Fox & Friends, Saphier, who is not an infectious disease specialist but a radiologist specializing in breast imaging at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, “explained” why we should expect more coronavirus deaths this week, with the obvious suggestion that more deaths is an acceptable answer to the critical shortage of ventilators.
SAPHIER: Rates of hospitalization are going down. That is a good thing. That means that fewer and fewer people are having to be hospitalized, specifically in the hot spots, specifically like New York, every day.
But we’re going to start seeing more deaths and let me explain why. Because of the people who are having to be in the ICU on the ventilators, they are being kept on the ventilators for anywhere from one to four weeks. And at some point, they will have to come off the ventilators and they’re either going to survive and they’re either going to die.
And some of the reports that have come out of China and the U.K. have shown mortality rates or fatality rates, the people dying, range from 60 to 90% of the people on the ventilators. Thankfully, here in the United States, that number varies. A study that came out of Washington showed that they had about a 50% fatality rate, which is obviously much better than they’re seeing elsewhere.
So people who have been on the ventilators for several weeks now are gonna have to come out, are gonna have to come off, and yes, we’re gonna see some deaths this week but that’s also gonna mean that there are gonna be ventilators freeing up.
This just happens to synchronize with Donald Trump’s preference for grievance politics over helping to ease the ventilator shortage. And Saphier has long put Trumpism over Americans’ health. You may recall that, shortly after Trump was elected, she complained, on Fox News, that Obamacare has harmed our medical system because too many Americans gained health insurance and medical treatment. More recently, during Fox’s Trump town hall, Saphier began a question for coronavirus task force member Dr. Deborah Birx by slobbering over Trump:
SAPHIER: Thank you. And president Trump, I do believe as a nation that we are beholden to you for your decisive swift action in the beginning with the travel ban. I do think that we would have been in a much different, worse situation had that not happened. However, we still did have a lag in the testing, which of course did not have anything to do with you, but my question is for Dr. Birx and the task force. As we still see across the nation that some people are not able to get tests. I have colleagues that still can’t test some of their patients. Is there a plan to fast track or even parallel track rapid … serological testing to try and get this out there so that we can mobilize more PPE and more hospital beds by doing more testing and being able to isolate those people quickly?
That was after Trump announced he wanted to “open up” the country by Easter, despite the surging pandemic.
Saphier is also a member of Fox’s so-called “Medical A-Team.” She is joined there by Dr. Marc Siegel, the guy who said, “worst case scenario” COVID-19 is like the flu and assured Fox host Pete Hegseth that the more he learns about the coronavirus, “the less there is to worry about.” A previous member of this exalted group of medical professionals is Keith Ablow whose medical license was suspended after accusations he sexually abused his patients. Most recently, his office was raided by the DEA.
You can watch this medical doctor promote a pro-death agenda below, from the April 5, 2020 Fox & Friends, via Raw Story.
Correction: The clip is from the April 5, 2020 Fox & Friends, not the March 5 show, as was originally stated.
There’s no denying that doctors have always taken such difficult decisions, mostly at the fervent request of patients unwilling to spend the rest of their lives in an ICU. Nobody else should make that decision as this poor excuse for a physician has done. What she said is euthanasia, and it is particularly noxious because the motive is economic. Wanna bet she’s a “devout” Christian?
PS: the rumour that Italy and Spain are taking lost causes off the ventilators does not seem to be true, at least with regard to Italy. Were this to be true, relatives would be having hissy fits on every TV channel looking for a scandal. Over three-quarters of the coronavirus related deaths have been people aged over 70 and about half of them had 3 or more co-morbidities. There’s no way to tell how long they would have lived had the virus not pulled the plug.
Italians dearly love their elderly relatives and go to great lengths to include them in family gatherings. Their love is well demonstrated by the fact that they’re doing everything they can to avoid infecting their elderly. Having to give up that beloved presence might actually encourage them to renounce entirely to the traditional Easter-time mass gatherings.
It’s a harsh reality at some point someone makes the decision to give up heroic measures. I get Saphier behaves like you’d expect any Republican to behave and is completely unempathetic about it. But, while being unsentimental about people dying and ambiguous/inarticulate in her presentation, I don’t think she’s saying throw people with a chance of recovery off of ventilators to free one up. Though, given Trump’s incompetent response to this crisis (e.g., paralysis implementing the Defense Production Act), Dear Leader may force us to like Italy and Spain tragically are currently doing.
