Judge: NHS values life of Capt Tom less
CONTROVERSIAL former judge Lord Sumption yesterday suggested NHS chiefs would value the life of 100-year-old fundraising hero Captain Sir Tom Moore less than a 25-year-old if resources were limited.
The ex-Supreme Court judge made the comment only a day after causing outrage with a similar remark to a cancer patient.
War veteran Captain Tom raised £33million last year to help the NHS fight coronavirus by walking 100 laps of his garden.
Anti-lockdown campaigner Lord Sumption, 72, was asked on TV yesterday what value the life of a 99-year-old who had signed a Do Not Resuscitate order carried.
He replied: ‘It depends what you mean by value. If you are making a policy choice, for example, in the NHS… and you cannot devote resources to both that man and a 25-year-old… in a serious road accident then obviously you have to take account [that] the quality [of the] years ahead of the man of 25 are much greater. This is absolutely basic.’
ITV’s Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan then revealed he had been talking about Captain Tom, who asked doctors to put a Do Not Resuscitate notice on his hospital door after he suffered a fall.
Lord Sumption said: ‘You’re not listening to what I’m saying. I have not said that he has less value as a person.’ He insisted: ‘This is a tool for policymakers – it’s not a way of valuing individuals like Captain Tom Moore.’
He also stressed that policymakers ‘have to operate on metrics – and they do all the time’. Lord Sumption was previously condemned for telling cancer sufferer and BBC podcaster Deborah James, 39, during a television debate that her life was ‘less valuable’ than others.
He later told the Mail the remark was made in the context of his argument that the young should not be sacrificed to save the old.
Professor Karol Sikora, a consultant cancer specialist and professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham Medical School, agreed that medics sometimes had to put a value ‘on the length of life’.
But he said the ‘inspirational’ Miss James had been ‘completely correct’ to challenge Lord Sumption’s apparent assertion that, as a cancer patient, her life was less valuable.