[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
After blaming the imminent destruction of the planet on cows, babies and supermarket shoppers, environmentalists have found a new villain to scapegoat and persecute.
Asthma patients.
Remember the ‘ozone hole’ crisis that was supposed to wipe out the planet when the atmosphere would disappear any day now and flood us with deadly radiation? That particular fake environmental crisis in a series of them (overpopulation, global food shortages, ice ages, global warming) led to a crackdown on hairsprays, fridges and air conditioners.
Asthma inhalers were exempted because environmentalists didn’t believe that even liberals were quite ready to kill a quarter of a billion people in the name of ‘saving the planet’.
Maybe that has changed.
Most people have forgotten about the ‘ozone layer’, but the war on asthma inhalers has been heating up. The latest shot was fired in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is supposed to advocate for patients, rather than against them, claiming that asthma inhalers release as much carbon dioxide as 530,000 cars or an entire conference of the American Medical Association.
Emissions from asthma patients trying to breathe “drive global warming”, a JAMA editor’s note falsely claimed. A ‘researcher’ at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine huffed and puffed that “inhalers add to the growing carbon footprint of the US healthcare system.”
The “carbon footprint” being the health and lives of hundreds of millions of human beings.
The researcher neglected to apply the same number crunching being used to condemn the asthma inhalers that millions of patients depend on to the private jet of David Geffen, a Hollywood billionaire, which has been listed as emitting 158.7 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or as much as 28 asthma patients with inhalers could emit over a lifetime of trying to survive.
UCLA shamefully admitted to emitting 279,834 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s the equivalent of 12 million asthma inhalers. If we had to choose between the existence of UCLA and millions of asthma patients, it’s no choice at all. But obviously David Geffen is not about to stop flying his private jet, most recently to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, and UCLA is not about to stop handing out degrees in transgender poetry that could just as easily be dispensed via Zoom to AI-driven bots programmed to be woke, but asthma patients have to sacrifice.
At a campaign rally in Virginia, President Trump had complained that post-Ozone hysteria hairsprays were less effective. That’s obviously true. But less effective hairspray doesn’t kill people. Less effective asthma inhalers do. The push to get asthma patients to switch to ‘dry powder’ inhalers and other ‘environmentally friendly’ inhalers has severe consequences.
Another study published in JAMA earlier this year found that veterans in the VA system who were switched from metered-dose inhalers to ‘dry powder’ inhalers suffered increases in hospitalizations and ER visits.
“We had hoped that the inhaler formulary change would have had a neutral effect on clinical outcomes because the dry-powder inhaler was both less expensive and better for the environment, but the analyses showed that patients taking fluticasone-salmeterol dry-powder inhaler experienced more adverse health outcomes — likely offsetting some of the health system’s cost and carbon savings,” one of the researchers said. Though if the veterans had died, some environmentalists would have viewed that as a net ‘carbon savings’.
Those concerned more about a fictional environmental crisis that was made up yesterday and will be forgotten tomorrow than about the suffering of asthma patients keep claiming that ‘patient education’ is the way to go. Except that some asthma patients are using their medication during moments of stress and breathing difficulties, others are elderly, and metered dose inhalers are simple and simply work, which can make all the difference between home and a hospital trip.
Asthma patients already struggling to breathe are trying to suck in powder because environmentalists would rather ration the precious ‘carbon’ so that it can instead be used to offset the next trip by environmentalists to a global conference on how the world will end unless we outlaw asthma inhalers, supermarket shopping bags and human reproduction.
The level of environmentalist cruelty knows no decency, no boundaries and no limits.
The war on asthma inhalers has had numerous side effects on patients, with some newer medications only being made available in the more challenging ‘environmentally friendly’ and patient unfriendly inhalers, and the rush to patent new ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘patient friendly’ propellants is further raising the price of already expensive medications. And giving insurance companies another reason to reject them from their narrowing formularies.
Asthma patients are having their lives and health threatened by environmentalists over a claim that their inhalers emitted less than 25 million tons of carbon dioxide over ten years.
The current estimate of 2 million tons of carbon dioxide a year from asthma inhalers also happens to be roughly the annual carbon emissions from the United Nations. Which one should we save and which one should we sacrifice: asthma patients or the United Nations?
Environmentalists of course aren’t advocating a shutdown of the UN while its various delegates, terrorists and appeasers hold their sessions via Zoom. Instead they want to grow the UN and destroy the lives of asthma patients over nearly the same number of carbon emissions.
It was never about the fictional problem of carbon emissions, but about inflicting misery.
Environmentalists don’t really want to save the planet, they want to kill us. The various fake crises are a pretext for wrecking lives, causing pain, and taking away even basic necessities while they jet off to their various conferences that ‘emit’ ten times as much of whatever.
If they treat asthma patients this way, imagine how they intend to treat the rest of us.