The full details of what Dr. Anna Pou did in the hours and days following Hurricane Katrina, and why, may never be known. But the arguments she is making about disaster preparedness — that medical workers should be virtually immune from prosecution for good-faith work during devastating events and that lifesaving interventions, including evacuation, shouldn’t necessarily go to the sickest first — deserve closer attention. This is particularly important as health officials are now weighing, with little public discussion and insufficient scientific evidence, protocols for making the kind of agonizing decisions that will, no doubt, arise again.
The New York Times report reads chillingly like Mengele's selection techniques at Auschwitz: "In the dim light, nurses opened each chart and read the diagnoses; Pou and the nurses assigned a category to each patient. A nurse wrote '1,' '2' or '3' on a sheet of paper with a Marks-A-Lot pen and taped it to the clothing over a patient’s chest. (Other patients had numbers written on their hospital gowns.) Many of the 1’s were taken to the emergency-room ramp, where boats were arriving. The 2’s were generally placed along the corridor leading to the hole in the machine-room wall that was a shortcut to the helipad. The 3’s were moved to a corner of the second-floor lobby near an ATM and a planter filled with greenery." These are the patients allegedly given a lethal dose by Dr. Pou.
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