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Palliative drugs normally reserved for the dying were widely administered to COVID-19 patients in U.K. long-term care homes and other settings in 2020. That practice caused a large number of avoidable deaths and dramatically inflated the virus’s reported fatality rate, according to medical commentator John Campbell, Ph.D.
“This is a complete national outrage that is largely being ignored,” he said.
In an interview on political commentator Russell Brand’s “Stay Free” podcast, Campbell said the routine use of midazolam and morphine — drugs intended for end-of-life care — to treat COVID-19 patients created a lethal combination that suppressed breathing and oxygenation.
In terminal care, clinicians often escalate doses of opioids and sedatives to control pain and agitation. When used repeatedly, those drugs depress respiration, Campbell said.
During the pandemic, similar drug regimens were administered to COVID-19 patients who were not actually dying.
In April 2020, the U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence issued COVID-19 guidelines for managing symptoms, including at the end of life. The guidance recommended using midazolam and morphine together to treat breathlessness in adults during the final days or hours of life.
Senior care facilities broadly used those protocols, Campbell said. Doctors “were often writing up end-of-life drugs” for patients diagnosed with COVID-19.
End-of-life drugs falsely inflated COVID death rates
According to Campbell, in the U.K., patients with a respiratory infection were frequently given morphine and midazolam simultaneously — a combination he said any non-specialist could recognize as dangerous because the combination impairs breathing. He said many patients died as a result.
Campbell cited research by Wilson Sy, Ph.D., published in February 2024 Medical & Clinical Research, that examined excess deaths in the U.K. alongside shipments of midazolam to care homes. Sy tracked the volume of the drug distributed and compared it with death data in subsequent months.
Campbell said on his YouTube show that the analysis showed “precise correlations” between increases in midazolam shipments and rises in excess deaths about one month later.
When researchers shifted the death data back by a month to account for distribution delays, Campbell said the curves matched closely, following each other “like salt and pepper,” he told Brand.
Midazolam treatment was ‘essentially euthanasia on a huge scale’
Campbell argued that this pattern suggests drug use — not COVID-19 itself — drove much of the mortality seen in care facilities during 2020.
The resulting deaths made COVID-19 appear far deadlier than it was, creating the impression of an infection fatality rate of 24%, Campbell said. Later estimates placed the rate closer to 0.18%, he added.
“The majority of these patients, in my view, in care facilities that died in 2020, if they’d just been supported and not [given] morphine and midazolam, the vast majority of those would have made a full recovery,” Campbell told Brand.
It was “essentially euthanasia on a huge scale,” he added.
According to Campbell, the inflated fatality rate helped justify sweeping emergency measures, including lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns and mask mandates.
“All those COVID restrictions — you could argue that many of them came in as a result of this artificially inflated infection fatality rate when, in actual fact, the lockdowns and the vaccinations didn’t work against midazolam overdose, which was a big part of the problem,” he said.
Watch the ‘Stay Free’ clip here:
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