It was way back in May when I described state responses to the Wuhan pandemic as “the Moloch Option”. The cult of lockdown and restriction that has gripped Western governments is effectively sacrificing the young to save a small minority of the very old and very, very unhealthy.
I was speaking metaphorically, of course. But, as it turns out, the literal is also true. In August, a northern NSW woman’s unborn child died when she was refused permission to make a short trip across the Queensland border for emergency surgery.
Now, four more tiny humans have been sacrificed on the altar of COVID panic.
Victoria’s stage-four lockdown prevented four sick newborn babies who subsequently died from being flown from Adelaide to Melbourne to receive lifesaving cardiac surgery.
The babies, the fourth of whom died only last Friday, would normally have been taken by a team from Adelaide’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital and flown to Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital for specialist heart surgery.
But with Melbourne under lockdown the distraught families of the infants were told that their children were not permitted to enter Victoria for the operations.
And SA Health was also of the view that the babies should remain in Adelaide for fear of exposing them to the virus in Victorian hospitals as they were immunocompromised.
So, they might have been exposed to the virus, but they definitely did die because they were denied specialist surgery. Truly, they had to kill the babies in order to save them.
The deaths of the babies emerged at a distressing hearing of the SA parliament’s public health committee on Tuesday, during which obstetrician John Svigos confirmed the lockdown meant the children could not receive the usual care.
Professor Svigos said the starting point for the problem was the failure of the SA government to fund a specialist paediatric service, but that the Melbourne lockdown had also left the four babies with no hope.
The problem also emerged because South Australia has refused to set up a specialist paediatric cardiac service in its state. Instead, SA has relied on transporting cases to Melbourne. But Dan Andrews put paid to that option.
Professor Svigos[…]said that while SA Health spent $5m a year transferring sick babies and children interstate, a specialist unit at the WCH would cost $6m to establish and $1m a year to operate.
[Bernadette] Mulholland told The Australian doctors had advised her “that in these four cases, the issue was Victoria not being able to retrieve the babies’’.
But, of course, lockdowns are all about “saving lives”. Or so they tell us.
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