"so people were sick and dying and doctors couldn't get internet"
Email is not internet. The lists that Spamhaus produce are intended as part of a spam reduction system, not for just out-right blocking. The intention is that organizations would use their lists in calculating the probability of the message being spam (Spam filters tend to look at multiple factors, not just origin to determine if a message is spam)
Of course, those Hospitals / schools are likely to have been blocked because they were sending out spam. I have seen numerous hospitals and schools that were compromised and used to relay spam . Just this morning, I got a message from compromised email account at UC Berkley trying to sell me Viagra. I had another form a hospital trying to to sell knock-off designer clothing. Students and doctors tend to be the worst when it comes to InfoSec and if the IT folk aren't paying attention, the organization may well be a major source of spam. That does discount the malicious admins out there working for peanuts that sell access to their servers to spammers to amke some cash on the side (Hospitals and schools tend to pay their IT personnel quite badly, many working for not much more than minimum wage)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
