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A controversial stand: should elderly Covid patients be left to die naturally?

Possibly, according to ex-Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.


‘Health dictatorships’ are failing to consider economic costs of crisis, says Abbott in The Guardian.


Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister tipped to become a UK trade envoy, has railed against Covid “health dictatorships”, saying politicians need to balance allowing more elderly Covid patients to die by nature taking its course, with the economic costs of an extreme lockdown.

He said it was costing the Australian government as much as $200,000 (£110,000) to give an elderly person an extra year’s life, substantially beyond what governments would usually pay for life-saving drugs.

He said not enough politicians were “behaving like health economists trained to pose uncomfortable questions about the level of deaths we might have to live with”.



The goal of government has moved from preventing hospitals being overwhelmed with coronavirus patients to achieving zero transmission, he said. And the cure for the pandemic, including extended lockdowns, was creating a “something for nothing mindset” among young people living on furlough.

“It’s a bad time for anyone with the virus, but it is also a bad time for people that would rather not be dictated to by officials, however well meaning,” he said in a speech at the Policy Exchange thinktank in London.


“In this climate of fear it was hard for governments to ask ‘how much is a life worth?’ because every life is precious, and every death is sad, but that has never stopped families sometimes electing to make relatives as comfortable as possible while nature takes its course.”

Abbott said he could not comment on his likely appointment to the UK board of trade by Boris Johnson, saying “it is not yet official”. (...)


However, it was his remarks on Covid that showed how Abbott’s courting of controversy made his possible appointment by Johnson a high political risk.

He said Australia was suffering not just from a stop-start economy, but a stop-start life in which young people were losing a sense of personal responsibility.

“It is not possible to keep 40% of the workforce on some kind of government benefit, and to accumulate a deficit not seen since the second world war, while the world goes into a slump not seen since the Great Depression, caused as much by the government response as the virus itself.”

In the absence of a vaccine, “we have to as some point just live with this virus”.

He said the response to the virus was causing a form of deep psychic damage. “People once sturdily self-reliant looking to the government more than ever for support and sustenance, a something-for-nothing mindset, reinforced amongst young people spared the need of searching for jobs.

“Every day it goes on, it risks establishing a new normal,” he said, adding, “fear of falling sick is stopping us from feeling fully alive”.


He also claimed officials were getting trapped in crisis mode for longer than they need, “especially if the crisis adds to their authority or boosts their standing. Six months into this pandemic, the aim in most countries is still to preserve almost every life at almost any cost, with renewed lockdowns [being] governments’ instinctive response to any increase in the virus.

“On the way their objectives have shifted from flattening the curve so hospitals would not be overwhelmed, to suppression to zero community transmission.


He accused the media of “virus hysteria in a bid to show the deadly threat is not confined to the very old, the already very sick or those exposed to massive viral loads”.

“After six months it is surely time to relax the rules so that individuals can take more personal responsibility and make more of their own decisions about the risks they are prepared to run.

“The generation of the second world war had been prepared to risk life to preserve freedom. This generation is ready to risk freedom to preserve life.”



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