DISABILITY campaigners reacted with horror today to further reports that do-not-resuscitate (DNR) notes are being applied to people with learning disabilities who contract coronavirus.

The campaigners also condemned the government’s failure to place people with learning disabilities in a priority category for vaccination.

Charity Mencap said that it had received reports from people with learning disabilities in January of them being told that they would not be resuscitated if they were taken seriously ill with Covid-19.

Paula Peters of direct action group Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) told the Morning Star that “people with a learning impairment have been horrendously discriminated [against] during the coronavirus pandemic.

“A recent report from Public Health England has shown that people with a learning impairment are six times more likely to die from coronavirus than the rest of the population and, if in the 18-34 age group with a learning impairment, 30 times more likely to die from coronavirus.

“That is a travesty and could have been preventable if DNRs had not been placed on their medical records.”

Ms Peters said that people with a learning impairment are being denied the right to healthcare and treatment, with DNRs imposed without their or their families’ knowledge or consent. 

This practice reflects the view that the life of a disabled person with a learning impairment is of less value, she argued.

Ms Peters called for “the practice of placing DNRs on people with a learning impairment … to be stopped and removed with immediate effect.”

She said that people with learning disabilities in care homes “have yet again been forgotten about as a vaccination priority.

“This, coupled with DNRs being forced illegally onto them, shows clearly how little value this government place on the lives of disabled people,” Ms Peters insisted.

Mencap chief executive Edel Harris said: “It’s unacceptable that within a group of people hit so hard by the pandemic and who, even before Covid, died on average over 20 years younger than the general population, many are left feeling scared and wondering why they have been left out.”