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[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.
Remember when our Underarm Deodorant was suppose to be punching Hole in the O-Zone? and what’s become of Raidon Gas and Acid Rain? As well as the Rainforests? Just more OF Their Green Scams like Pesticides and Over Population just Big Time Scams
Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich two of the most notorious Population Control Freaks in History
When I was doing my first clinical at a local hospital while studying
to be a nurse, I saw a man in his thirties lying in a bed with what
looked to me like tubes coming everywhere out of his body. His
brain was no longer normally functioning. The nurse said he was
a New York City businessman who was asthmatic and had an asthma
attack while out on the street. He did not have his inhaler with him.
The ambulance was delayed in helping him and his inability to breathe
meant no oxygen to his brain – and a permanent vegetative state.
That’s how crucial it is for people with asthma to have inhalers that
work. It’s been forty-two years and I can still vividly picture that poor
man. I don’t have asthma but as a nurse, it has always made me realize
what a deadly serious condition asthma is.
If you have asthma or love someone who does – you should be particularly
infuriated at this latest phony climate change culprit. The evil on the Left
is staggering.
I must admit I though this was a satire at first.
I had pneumonia at 8 years old and was left an asthmatic. I’ve has several episodes that put me in the ER. Over the years the attacks became less frequent and now after 7 decades they have become rare, especially after I stopped smoking. I do still keep an inhaler but I don’t need it more than a couple times a year.
I had always been told by my doctors that asthmatics require less oxygen due to their condition. Shouldn’t that offset those few carbon molecules emitted from a couple puffs a year?
This is yet another case of “do what I say, not what I do”. These tone-deaf millionaires who fly around private jets don’t see the irony in telling us that the rest of us plebes must be the sacrificial lambs in this environmental “sky is falling” BS narrative.
I believe Obama Administration started this lie and tried to ban OTC inhalers. Don’t think it worked but obviously the liars are at it again hurting people to perpetuate their restrictions on free people.
If you believe that any significant climate change that is happening is man-made, why not hold the pharmaceutical companies responsible, and require them to plant a tree for every however many inhalers they produce? The cost would be negligible, and would in any case be passed on to customers – and it has to be less than increased hospitalisations, with associated overheads and loss of the patients’ work hours.
“Environmentalists don’t really want to save the planet, they want to kill us”…or, they want you to kill yourself, eat bugs, be unable to reproduce, abort babies, get sick and die quickly.
You are the carbon they want to reduce.
Saving the planet from “whatever” they can think up is just another way to commit genocide without sending people directly to the gas chambers.
The planet is too crowded for us to exist but not for them to exist.
Then they go ahead and open the gates to flood Western countries with poor migrants and criminals to overload the hospitals, schools, welfare to make life miserable and dangerous for the pre-existing citizens. Then they blame the problem they create with Open Border “migration” on climate change.
Are not carbonated beverages releasing more co2 than inhalers?
When is the ban on soda pop coming?
The Leftists never mention this one……
Nord Stream Pipeline Rupture Caused Largest Methane Leak Ever Recorded, UN-Study Finds
(.pipeline-journal.net) .
Strange.
Previous to the use of inhalers, children and adults were limited to oral medications taking time to work during which the asthmatic episode often worsened significantly. It was the prescribed use of an inhaler that provided my son with a significant reduction in our required trips to the emergency room for shots of epinephrine so he could breathe.
Even today, there are hideous misunderstandings about the potential lethality of an asthma attack and I guarantee you that neither an adult or parents of children managing asthma give a damn about the left’s latest insanity. I do care that we have an AMA more fixated upon the approval of these maniacal environmentalists than they are in offering the best possible, medically effective, interventional medications for those gasping to breathe.
Today, urgent care can provide nebulizer treatments opening up constricted airways providing immediate relief but often such treatments might have been unnecessary had an inhaler been used at the earliest onset of the attack.
Watching someone heaving to breathe, gasping for air, the ease of which most of us take for granted, is a gut-gripping experience for a parent, spouse or caretaker of someone they love.
People die from severe asthma attacks even those from a seemingly innocuous onset. An episode can be triggered by an allergen exposure, some kind of respiratory illness or by something as normal as daily exercise or play.
Addressing a child’s fear and emotional duress about having to immediately seek further treatment at an urgent care or emergency room is something heart wrenching. I have been there too many times to count before my son was prescribed an inhaler and having one was the result of my doing independent research and finding a pediatric physician up-to-date on effective asthma treatment and daily management. This singular, immediately effective, inhaled medication allowed my son a measure of freedom he had lost as an infant.
While I work diligently to manage extreme, emotional responses, this is one that enrages me. Why? Because struggling to breathe in a country with access to interventional medication that is immediately effective and that can also be preventative in an asthma attack becoming more threatening, should NEVER BE AT RISK because of ideological stupidities driving erroneous, environmental policy.
So your claim is that the American Medical Association is trying to kill asthma patients. As a regular Greenfield reader, I must say this is one of your stupidest rants ever. It’s kind of beautiful, in its brazenness and complete disregard for basic logic.
Extra kudos for this one, Daniel!
Claiming an essential medication used in the fundamental management of asthma is the cause of a critical environmental issue, while simultaneously avoiding addressing the CO2 emissions by elitists flying in private jets seems to be an essential argument of this insanity. Along with this, should we return you to the basic symbiosis of photosynthesis? Surely, you understand that the plant life across our globe uses emitted CO2 as a photosynthetic agent that upon cyclic completion regularly releases oxygen back into our environment. Human arrogance, often capitalizing upon itself, lacks any kind of self examination instead choosing to shoot the messengers of factual information and truth among people who mistake passionate research and communication for rants.
Are you even capable of following rational thought? Given your comment, it’s seems such frontal lobe functions for you are severely limited. Maybe you can benefit from education and I hope you never experience the fear and terror of being unable to breathe since your implied advocacy would easily render you dead if you too had to survive such a potentially life threatening heath crises.
Want to help the environment? Plant more trees and oxygen producing plant life instead of passively facilitating the removal of such an invaluable medication!
As per the link: “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,” Rabin said.
When ‘cost’ and ‘carbon savings’ are mentioned in one breath, maybe placed on a par even, we have a problem. It’s sad enough when the cost of saving a life is a critical factor, and it often is: on the battlefield, during a plague, or when an experimental remedy costs a million dollars per patient–which roughly entails the work of ten people to keep one person alive, long term.
If climate change were in fact an existential threat, that is, an issue of survival for a large fraction of the human race, then there might be justification for bringing a carbon footprint into the equation of medical treatment. But the truth is there exists no body of scientific literature even addressing a climate danger that threatens human existence, except for a very few papers noting the fact I just mentioned. The IPCC abandoned the “hockey stick,” and it never took James Hansen’s book seriously (“Storms of My Grandchildren”). The peer reviewed literature rejects absurd claims of “catastrophic climate change” –these are the inventions of Marxist propagandists conning the West into de-industrializing and disarming and accepting Socialism.
And so poor Africans die for lack of affordable energy, and poor Europeans close their swimming pools, while China opens a new coal plant every other week. And indeed, the AMA has suckered for the propaganda. –AGF