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Feature News | Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Swedish doctor fights for elderly victims of COVID-19

Launches 'Oxygen for All' campaign to urge ethical treatment at home and in hospitals

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From left: Dr. Jon Tallinger and headlines regarding Sweden's response to the coronavirus, from the New York Times (center) and the Christian Post.

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From left: Dr. Jon Tallinger and headlines regarding Sweden's response to the coronavirus, from the New York Times (center) and the Christian Post.

MIAMI | Just as the U.S. tops the charts for having the most COVID-19-related cases and deaths, it’s also fairly well-known that one country in Scandinavia decided early on to do things decidedly differently in terms of pandemic management. 

Opting to spare the economy and keep workers and students from falling behind — while hoping to achieve something toward a herd-immunity effect among the population — Sweden chose to forgo stringent lockdown measures and the enforced social distancing found in neighboring Scandinavian countries. 

Health officials in Sweden simply suggested avoidance of gatherings of more than 50 people and encouraged people to use their own judgment about social distancing. Facemasks have not been widely encouraged. Sure enough, the infection and fatality rate there is the highest in the region. 

The number of COVID-19-related deaths in Sweden has been dwarfing those registered in Denmark and Norway. Sweden was consequently shut out of COVID-related re-openings by Finland, Norway and Denmark, as those nations began to lift international travel restrictions among themselves. 

That much is more or less well known, but there is more. 

Dr. Jon Tallinger, a general practitioner based south of Stockholm, has been trying to call the world’s attention to what he says is an official policy in Sweden of declining standard medical interventions for COVID-19-ill senior citizens and those living in elder care facilities. 

Instead of being given oxygen treatments at home or admitted to a hospital even when there is ICU capacity to treat them, the elderly and people over 60 with risk factors, Dr. Tallinger says, are often being prescribed morphine or other palliative pain medication (which does nothing to improve breathing) while being kept at home where they are essentially left to expire. 

“How would you feel if you find out that your parent in the nursing home will not be given critical care, or curative care, or oxygen therapy, because they are deemed ‘irrelevant,’” he wrote in a May 21, 2020 online essay. 

“If an elderly patient eventually loses the fight with COVID-19, I say as a doctor that it is far more humane to let them die of narcosis and carbon dioxide after we have done our best to save the patient, instead of resorting primarily to morphine and breathing complications when they have contracted COVID-19 — all while denying them oxygen therapy and necessary medical attention,” he wrote. 

John Campbell, a retired nursing educator based in England with nearly a million followers on YouTube who tune in for his discourses on the COVID-19 pandemic trends, medical developments, studies and treatments, recently invited Dr. Tallinger on his program. 

There, Dr. Tallinger said he has paused his medical career to promote his “Oxygen for All” public awareness campaign and to call for a national effort to get ethical at-home or hospital-based treatment to all who need it in Sweden. 

He also gave voice to perhaps his gravest concern: as the pandemic’s impact is being felt in populous poor countries such as India, Brazil, and the African nations, those countries may likewise be tempted to a kind of “senicide,” or elder euthanasia, when faced with expensive or scarce medical resources. 

“I would like to work vigorously to eradicate the virus and at the same time trying to get oxygen to as many people as possible around the globe. We put a man on the moon, can’t we do this oxygen?” Dr. Tallinger said. 

Sweden, he said, “will never recover (its reputation) if this goes through,” Dr. Tallinger said. “We will be ashamed forever if we don’t do something now to stand up for the weak and elderly.”

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