The early days of the pandemic were filled with panic and a lack of understanding of the disease, and it is an unfortunate fact that many patients died needlessly. However, a new study in the Medical & Clinical Research journal points to the chilling possibility that some patients may have actually been euthanized.

The paper, Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic, is raising some serious questions about how the UK's National Health Service handled the disease in its early days, highlighting what appears to be a deliberate policy established by the NHS to euthanize certain groups of patients, especially those who had respiratory issues.

In the study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, researchers investigated a marked lagged correlation between patients who received the palliative sedative midazolam and COVID-19 excess mortality rates in some parts of the country.

Study author Wilson Sy noted that while the injections and excess deaths were highly correlated, the data is not synchronous because the medication does not take effect immediately. Compounding this issue is the fact that there were some lags in registering deaths as well as dosage reporting.

"The very high correlation (coefficient 91 percent) between excess deaths lagged one month after Midazolam injections is largely due to the first two enormous spikes to early 2021," he wrote.

The author expressed concerns that the NHS may have abused palliative care policies for coronavirus patients.

He added: "New guidelines were rapidly developed in early 2020 by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for managing COVID-19 symptoms, including those at the end-of-life [22]. The rapidly developed new guidelines effectively opened the door to implement a policy of euthanasia in UK during the pandemic."