The ghouls of the NHS (Britain's National Health Service) are demanding that another soul be sacrificed to burnish their "infallibility" bona fides.

Young Alfie Evans, a 21-month-old boy in England, is suffering from an unknown neurological disorder.  The NHS claims he is in a "semi-vegetative" state, while the parents insist he responds to them, a response the physicians (without documentation) say is merely "seizure activity."

The hospital treating Alfie has gone full "Charlie Gard" in their bid to remove Alfie from life support and sedate him until he dies.

"Our aim is always to try and reach an agreement with parents about the most appropriate care plan for their child.  Unfortunately there are sometimes rare situations such as this where agreement cannot be reached and the treating team believe that continued active treatment is not in a child's best interests," said the hospital.

This statement came in response to a court denying Alfie's parents' request to transfer their child to Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome, where physicians believe they can help the boy.

As with the Charlie Gard case last year, the socialized medicine juggernaut cannot brook insurrection once its solons have declared further treatment "futile."  Those health grandees are willing to take parents to court to terminate their parental rights, freeing the hospital to ensure that their predictions come true by killing the child.

Through a maze of legislative maneuvers, the government has so weighted the position of the NHS in such disputes as to render the court process a mere formality.  The state gets what the state wants, and the state wants Alfie Evans to quit being an embarrassment to British pediatric medicine.

As with Charlie Gard before him, if Alfie responds to treatment outside the NHS, the resulting loss of legitimacy for the findings of NHS physicians (and their tick-box accountant overlords) may prove fatal to the concept of government as both payer and provider of medicine.

To ensure that their authority remains unchallenged, they were prepared to sacrifice Charlie Gard, and now Alfie Evans, on an altar of bureaucratic expediency.

God, protect all those who are forced to enter a British hospital with their ailing children.  Increasingly, those kids aren't coming back home.