De kreet "Medische noodzaak" stond centraal in het verhoor van Hanneke Schippers bij de parlementaire enquêtecommissie. Binnenkort volgt de diepgravende analyse van dat hele verhoor door Jan van der Zanden.
On July 3, 2026, Hanneke Schipper-Spanninga explained, during the pandemic Director of Constitutional Affairs and Legislation at the Ministry of the Interior, explained under oath how its management tested the corona measures against the constitution.
Terugkerende kernbegrippen waren “medische noodzaak” en "bedreiging/gevaar voor de volksgezondheid" want "Als dat niet aan de orde is, dan is er helemaal geen bevoegdheid om maatregelen te nemen" zei Schipper. Die medische noodzaak moest zij afwegen tegen het recht op leven, artikel 2 EVRM.
So Covid illness and death was weighed against another category: Rights.
That is a flawed comparison because the total Public Health Gain should be weighed against 'rights', not just the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Public health is more than just 'Care' or 'a bad flu'. Health interventions, medical or non-medical, usually also have negative health implications. Any disruption of a natural balance entails risks.
Whether Public Health benefits from an intervention is not determined by weighing (presumed) positive effects on a specific disease against something like a 'right'. Justice is still outside of that.
Commissielid Poortman scheerde rakelings langs het onderwerp: "Eigenlijk staat alleen dat positieve recht op leven tegenover een veelheid aan inbreuken." Schippers antwoordt: "Ja, getalsmatig klopt dat. Maar zo werkt het niet."
But it does work that way with medical issues.
Ze erkent de scheefheid en laat hem staan. En telkens als de logica faalt, heft ze hetzelfde schild: "het is geen wiskunde." De echte weging, zegt ze, is aan de politiek. De jurist toetst smal; de politicus weegt de rest. Handig, want zo hoeft niemand de hele som te maken.
She was partly right: it is not rocket science, but it can be calculated.
The calculation had been made
Quantifying health and medical issues is usually done in QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years) - the instrument with which the Netherlands measures whether care is worth the money, applied as standard by the Healthcare Institute down to the euro for every new medicine.
On May 20, 2020, healthcare consultancy Gupta Strategists did the math. Covid care in hospitals saved 13,000 to 21,000 healthy years of life. Postponing regular care cost 100,000 to 400,000. A factor of ten, in the wrong direction. Gupta Strategists is not an activist club but a respected consultancy firm that, together with professors, advises VWS, among others.
Het rapport werd prompt afgebrand. De factcheckers van Nieuwscheckers noemden de factor tien "onbewezen”, om vervolgens toe te geven dat het opschorten van zorg "zeker voor verloren levensjaren heeft gezorgd". De ruzie ging dus nooit over de richting, alleen over de precieze factor. Over aantallen die, zoals ik in juni 2020 al schreef1Article: Kritiek op het Gupta-rapport weerlegd: niemand heeft gemeten, geforecast, geëvalueerd of zelfs maar geschat. Toch is er 'beleid' gemaakt."
In addition, there was a second piece that could have been useful to them. Economic Affairs officials made a cost-benefit analysis of the 'intelligent lockdown' in March 2020, later made public via a Wob request from former CBS director Jan van der Zanden. There too: an estimated health gain of around 100,000 QALYs versus much greater health and economic damage. Jan van der Zanden, at the time, in an article from July 20222Article: Former CBS director interprets chilling figures “Vandaar mijn best guess dat je de 500.000 qalys uit dat rapport moet delen door 2 a 3. Dan nog is de uitkomst afschuwelijk. (...) Per saldo is de qaly opbrengst gewoon negatief."
That is the kind of calculation with which you fill the empty container of “medical necessity”.
From paradox
Schipper, terugblikkend: "Er is zelden zoveel aandacht geweest voor grondrechten als in de coronapandemie." Dat zal best maar als je Volksgezondheid niet op een of andere manier weet te waarderen of te kwantificeren, hoe durf je dan de term “medische noodzaak” af te wegen tegen nog veel abstractere “rechten”?
It's not even mentioned. Not even by the committee, which is particularly worrying. It may fall outside the scope allotted to them. No finding the truth, no system criticism, while that is precisely where the lessons should be learned. Everyone settles for the meaningless “Medical necessity”. This represents the glorious corona-specific effect of the heavy interventions (or the reduction of the R by 8%-13%). Even though this has never been properly substantiated and those heavy interventions were explicitly discouraged pre-corona by the WHO in their 2019 pandemic guidelines3Pubmed: Evaluation guidelines WHO 2019: It specifically stated that measures such as contact tracing, quarantine of exposed persons and border controls were not recommended under any circumstances, even in a severe pandemic. At that time, only voluntary isolation of sick persons was advised.
The substantiation was hard to find and modellers rivaled a hallucinating AI with frightening graphs.
Maar ja - een ‘medische noodzaak’ met mogelijk negatief effect op de Volksgezondheid? Die paradox is niet recht te breien. En "we moeten toch íets doen!"? Dat geeft de Rule of Rescue the scientific term for a reflex that anyone with common sense will question, as I did in April 2020.4Article April 2020: Why Public Health
Therefore, no one needs to see the term 'medical necessity' thoroughly elaborated; because imagine if it turns out negative.
Een rekensom die het kabinet bij een pilletje nooit zou overslaan, werd bij de zwaarste vrijheidsbeperking sinds de oorlog niet gemaakt en zo dekt een waardevrij woord een eenzijdige afweging. Een balans zonder debetkant wordt als positief beoordeeld door een jurist met de mededeling "ik heb geen verstand van boekhouden, dat moet de politiek maar doen".
No one was allowed to die from Covid. The division of tasks between lawyer and politician ensured that the only question that mattered - 'do the dead outweigh the dead?' - did not end up on anyone's desk in its entirety.
Footnotes
- 1
- 2
- 3Pubmed: Evaluation guidelines WHO 2019
- 4Article April 2020: Why Public Health
Fundamental rights are fundamental rights for a reason. You should always stay away from that or you should always leave it in place.
The bizarre thing is that Schipper, in her own belief, built a kind of legal cathedral to justify the proportionality of restricting fundamental rights in relation to public health. Quicksand. See my reflection on her interrogation.
Yes, completely agree. That is the 'spirit' of the law and that is what common sense says. But academic intellect often gets in the way of that common sense. They always find a legal trick to circumvent common sense with one or another 'letter' of the law.
The Gupta report was from May 2020 (Nice discussion, Anton and also seen by Volkskrant, MK colleagues!). A case of using the knowledge of the time.
Unfortunately, PEC appears to suffer from dyscalculia.
Numbers and jersey numbers (handing out cards to the players who avoided/avoided responsibility) are not something they do, unfortunately.
Van Dissel could not be deviated from his simple course by any information.
Keeping people at a distance of 1.5 meters from each other: limiting contact, regardless of who it concerned and regardless of the ventilation context, was at the top of his hierarchy and was sacred. Rest was irrelevant.
Legal reflections are nice but, apart from Calculie's side, they still fall flat. There was no broad assessment including numbers. Seems like something for general matters to do a proper weighing, but yes, there was Captain van Dissel, who...
This is largely correct, but unfortunately that legal basis was crucial to maintain the proportionality of the curfew in the emergency appeal at the Court of Appeal.
Be sure to read my review of Hanneke Schipper: you will be at your beck and call there...
Hanneke Schippers seems to adhere to the belief that the physical integrity of person A may be sacrificed (possibly with coercion) for the right to life of person B. At least, that is what I deduced from her answers.
This could also imply that if person B needs a kidney transplant, person A could be forced to donate a kidney.
It will probably not come to that, but it does show that the right to life should certainly not always come first.
The right to life is stated in the ECHR, not in our Constitution. Physical integrity, yes. Unfortunately, international treaties take precedence over national legislation.
However, the prioritization of conflicting Fundamental Rights is a matter for the House of Representatives. Prioritization should not be decided in backrooms. And that has now happened.
She has also expressed some rather bold views on 3G and 2G policy (see the broadcast by Marianne Zwagerman and Maurice).
I found this interrogation quite shocking: the ease and certainty of this official. It seems as if she no longer notices that it concerns people. It's scary.
100% agree. Read my very critical review of her interrogation...
And in the meantime, this is the result of these criminals:
https://x.com/TheDefiantGhost/status/2073140519396372530
That medical necessity made something clear to me. Namely that this medical necessity had to be constructed by the OMT advice. De Jonge, Rutte and possibly Grapperhaus have fixed this via the OMT.
That also explains why this need keeps cropping up in the interrogations.
I hope that this will also be taken into account as a recommendation, so that something will be achieved.
What kind of recommendation are you referring to?????
I have to look for it. I think I read in the WOB/WOO requests that more medical advice was needed to substantiate lockdowns.
Grapperhaus described that, right? There had to be more serious advice – and that came. He still thought that was poor, but left the judgment to the House. And they voted for as much intervention as possible.
Mona Keizer warned last night on cross news that what has been recorded about the intervention could lead to the next time... if the rooms are still handled in the same way, then our fate is sealed... Watch it again if you haven't seen it yet. She keeps talking about traps and in my opinion that is the worst form of tunnel vision. My opinion: It has never, really never been about public health and it still isn't. To make you despondent. The bright spots are all the people who see the systemic rot (worldwide) and try to do something about it.
Didn't Kuipers beg for all that madness to be included in the law? “Otherwise I will be left empty-handed,” he said. So the Senate agreed; imagine that a Minister is prevented from taking devastating measures...
It was about public health, but about a tiny part of it: The ICUs and the people who largely only had a few months to live anyway.
The fact that the rest of the VGZ was hit six times as hard by it did not interest the driving quartet (Rutte, De Jonge, Grapperhaus [but at least he still had some idea that they were wrong....] and Schoof) did not care, or they did not see it, or they did not want to see it, or the others including Mona, did not have the cigar box calculation to show that they were horribly wrong.... And also not that the costs were 75 times higher than the normal standards used for VGZ.
So the discussion about proportionality remained stuck in vague notions, emotions and fear. Unfortunately, Mona didn't really do well in her interrogation. She also went along with the nonsense measures for a long time, because she (apparently still doesn't) understand the essence of what exactly is disproportionate. Otherwise she could have made a difference much sooner or had to resign. She too was afraid (albeit especially in the beginning). She admitted that too. But just then the wrong paradigm of the Rule of Rescue was deployed. My analysis of her interrogation follows….
Let us not undermine the term public health, which is essentially about the general interest, about the population as a whole and not about advantages or disadvantages for a specific sector, patient group or individual patient. Or does anyone see it differently?
Jan, you are right that that proportionality calculation could have been made very well. Unfortunately, they would have had to change the policy. That's why I think there was something else at play that we (the citizens) weren't allowed to know.
Now I'm going to speculate:
Suppose classified security information had revealed that it was a laboratory virus, probably a bioweapon. In that case, I would still have some understanding for the choices made, especially if it was suspected that the virus has been engineered in such a way that it is not very deadly in the short term, but can cause a lot of damage to public health in the longer term (e.g. infertility or all kinds of conditions that lead to death after a few years).
It is logical that in such a case you want to prevent as many people as possible from becoming infected before there is a working vaccine. And I also understand that you keep it a secret to avoid chaos.
This would also explain why they wanted to vaccinate young people and children even though they did not get sick from the virus. And also explains why they took (and concealed) the large number of side effects for granted.
Unfortunately, it doesn't explain why they started with the old ones. That must have had to do with credibility. After all, it was always about protecting the vulnerable.
The fact that no minutes were taken of the Catshuis discussions also fits into this picture.
Israel has the most and best spies in the world. Israel in particular was very fanatical about vaccinations. That was a reason for me to think: they know more than they tell us. It was also one of the reasons for me to take a vaccine, which subsequently made me very ill.
It may also be that the possibility of a bioweapon was not an issue at all. Maybe it was something else that was deliberately kept secret. Or it's just incompetence and they never properly discussed the proportionality issue.
One thing has become very clear from the interrogations: they talk about the proportionality issue with so much in their mouths that the committee has to ask much further questions about this in the second round.
Ah, yes, that's right. Grapperhaus found the OMT advice too “light” and only wanted to agree after better substantiation. But if you heard the interrogation correctly, he hoped that it would fail/bleed to death. In any case, he hoped that it would fail in the House of Representatives... Because, according to him, it really went too far. But yes... After approval, he went to the safety meeting with it...
Emotion enters the brain before logic. People make decisions based on feelings and justify this with added 'logic'. This is how the brain has been shown to work.
Sorry to be so 'blackpilled', but for me these puppets from the puppet show are mainly 'filings in a magnetic field' that - through their insiders network - focus on 'continuing to earn well'.
People who live outside the biological tribe of these insiders are given nominal compassion. For the stage. A biological consequence of economies of scale. To her, my life is a number on paper.
I have no interest in the lies they themselves believe. If they do not have to be truly accountable for the unnecessary deaths that, in my opinion, they are partly guilty of through their actions, then justice stops. Because it hasn't happened, and it never will.
Count your winnings, Hanneke. Will you get through it unscathed? What about your new pool? Have you already been promoted for proven loyalty?
I say: Hanneke, don't forget your booster.
** By biological I do not mean blood related, but the social order of tribes created by evolution.
Yes. Although 'continuing to earn well' is not even the main focus in my opinion. Just as important is not wanting to be ostracized by their peers and certainly not by those above them. 'continuing to fit well into their social embeddedness' and 'protecting and strengthening their position' are, in my opinion, the strongest motivations. Salary is a derivative of this - and therefore applies simultaneously.
Haha, if only you were a number. Really and truly.
Then, if you are reasonably healthy, you would have a value of (84 -/- your_age) qalys.
And that applied to all approximately 18 million Dutch people.
And the measures cost you/us all approximately 0.03333 qaly or something per person. Then you arrive at a very high number. Approx. 600,000 qalys.
RIVM has already calculated a loss of 320,000 qalys and has therefore admitted it in 2022!
At most 100,000 have been saved. Count your losses!
On top of that, it has cost €150 billion in prosperity and therefore health loss.
That should have made Van Dissel think too...
In short: if only you were really like a number by Mrs. Mr. Hanneke Schipper treated. Then you and we would all have been much better off...
The point is: disproportionality remains a hollow concept if it is not expressed numerically in a cost/benefit analysis.
As the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport does every day when calculating drug therapies, etc., etc.