(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Facemasks prevented two British doctors from properly communicating about a patient’s medication, which caused a junior doctor to administer a lethal dose of an anti-epileptic drug, according to a coroner’s report.
Coroner Graham Danbury analyzed the death of John Skinner, who came into Watford General hospital in May 2020 because he had suffered from seizures, Breitbart reported.
Danbury’s report stated that an unnamed senior doctor ordered a junior doctor to administer Phenytoin to Skinner at “15 mg/kg,” which the subordinate “heard as 50 mg/kg.”
“As a result of a failure in verbal communication between the doctors, aggravated as both were masked,” the junior doctor administered 3,500 mg of Phenytoin.
Britain’s National Health Service recommends a dose “between 200mg and 500mg a day, taken as 1 or 2 doses.”
Skinner died from acute heart failure and Phenytoin toxicity about 15 minutes after receiving the improper dosage.
The situation alarmed Danbury so much that he wrote a “Report to Prevent Future Deaths.”
“In my opinion there is a risk that future deaths will occur unless action is taken,” he wrote. “In the circumstances it is my statutory duty to report to you.”
The most obvious problem is that the junior doctor did not know safe Phenytoin dosages.
Even if the junior doctor had sought a senior doctor’s advice, he should have known the reasonable bounds within which Phenytoin could be given.
Danbury did not tell the NHS to revoke the mask mandate, but he told the administration to consider reforms.
“This is a readily foreseeable confusion which could apply in any hospital and could be avoided by use of clearer and less confusable means of communication and expression of number,” he wrote.
Britain’s National Health Service has mandated that hospital staff and patients wear masks at all times, even though masks impair communication and learning, stifle breathing, and fail to protect against viral transmission.
