USA: DOCTORS ASK DEATH PENALTY STATES TO GIVE UP EXECUTION DRUGS FOR COVID-19 PATIENTS

April 27, 2020:

There’s a national shortage of the drugs used to treat COVID-19 patients in ICU beds, and a group of doctors penned a letter asking Oklahoma to share its supply with local hospitals. The drugs were originally designed for medical use.
The doctors say they can be used to subdue Covid-19 patients who need to be hooked up to ventilators. Drugs being requested include the sedative midazolam, the paralytic vecuronium bromide and the opioid fentanyl.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University in Atlanta, helped write the letter. The doctor was already an outspoken critic of using medicine in lethal injections. Now, he says states’ drugs are badly needed. "My question is, if states have execution drugs — or rather drugs, that in my hand are for the purposes of healing and in their hand are for the purposes of killing — if you’ve got them, I respectfully ask that you hand them over," Zivot said. The drugs are needed because putting a patient on a ventilator “with no drugs … would be torture”. Zivot said the request is not about obstructing the death penalty. He’s only interested in getting medicine to his patients.
Zivot said he sent the letter to each of the 28 states that authorize executions.
While some states contacted by The Associated Press, including Alabama and Florida, didn’t respond to inquiries about the letter, others, including Arkansas, Texas and Utah, limited their comment to mainly saying they don’t have the medications in question. Tennessee wouldn’t confirm whether it has the drugs and indicated it has no plans to give any medications to a hospital. Oklahoma said it hadn’t received any requests for such medications from state hospitals.
States may be hesitant to turn over their drugs because they have had problems securing them as many pharmaceutical companies oppose their use in executions, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 2011, 13 states have enacted new statutes that conceal information about the execution process, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions.