With the elderly representing the largest demographic cohort of lives claimed by the coronavirus, the Vatican’s top official on life issues has warned against selective care practices that prioritize young patients.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, in an interview with Crux noted that with many hospitals facing shortages of essential equipment such as ventilators at times give preference to patients with better perceived odds of survival, which generally disadvantages the elderly.

“This is the ‘throwaway culture’ in action, forcefully condemned by Pope Francis. [It’s] ‘justified’ by the lack of medical instruments, in turn due to healthcare policy choices that cut costs,” Paglia said, calling the decision to base healthcare and educational funding on cost-saving measures “wrong and misleading.”

He also noted this is happening at the same time courts in Italy, which still leads the world in deaths due to the virus, are debating a possible liberalization of the country’s euthanasia law.

Euthanasia itself is not permitted in Italian law, but in 2017 lawmakers passed a bill allowing adults, together with their doctors, to determine their own end-of-life care, including the terms under which they are able to refuse treatment. The law also allows citizens to write living wills and to refuse medical treatment, artificial nutrition and hydration.

In September 2019, courts ruled it is not always a crime to assist someone in “intolerable pain” to kill themselves. The case involved music producer FabianoAntoniani, who became tetraplegic and blind after a 2014 car accident and three years later was driven by a member of Italy’s Radical Party to Switzerland, where he underwent assisted suicide.

“It is delusional to place age as the only and decisive criterion for care, for salvation or condemnation, which, obviously, relegates the elderly to being too many. Can the weak and elderly be ‘discarded?’

The lack of medical instruments forces choices and do younger people and those with greater hope of recovery receive assistance first? This is the “throwaway culture” in action, forcefully condemned by Pope Francis. It’s “justified” by the lack of medical instruments, in turn due to healthcare policy choices that cut costs.