Ashes of COVID Part One: The collapse of medical skepticism amidst our blind faith in doctors

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

-Albert Einstein

“If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power.”

-Carl Sagan

Bernie Sanders, a passionate advocate of Universal healthcare, has implored Robert Kennedy to resign.  Sanders believes that as a vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is out of the mainstream and dangerous.  To Sanders, as he stated in a New York Times editorial and in multiple Senate hearings, the medical establishment, represented by such groups as the AMA, American Heart Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC and FDA, among others, are experts who elucidate proven science and provide medical consensus.  Sanders is most irate that Kennedy seeks to limit or at least not mandate COVID boosters and to discourage them for young people.  To Sanders, the homogenous support for such vaccines among doctors and medical organizations proves their efficacy and validates Kennedy’s danger to medical science and patients.

Say what you want about Kennedy, but when it comes to medical organizations and COVID, his skepticism is warranted, while Sanders is either naïve, ignorant, or simply playing a political game.  We know based on many recent studies that COVID vaccines saved no lives in young people and in fact may have maimed and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them.  This is not speculation; it is proven science, which is why most countries strongly discourage their use in people under age 65.  We also know, based on recent WHO data, that nations that received the COVID vaccine in the highest penetrance had the worse COVID outcomes.  We know that the American Academy of Pediatrics advocates COVID vaccines for infants without citing any robust data, a position totally out of sync with recommendations in Europe and the rest of the world.  We know that same academy takes copious funds from the pharmaceutical industry, as do the AMA, CDC, FDA, American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and virtually all agencies upon which Sanders relies for his “unassailable” scientific position, something well documented including in my recent book A Return to Healing.  We also know that the leadership of most of these groups, especially the CDC and FDA, are former drug company executives with stock options, and many others will immediately flock to Big Pharma once they retire from those agencies.

And yet, Bernie Sanders, a man who claims to speak in the language of science by blindly parroting the dogma expressed by self-interested medical groups and doctors, who advocates healthcare for all Americans within a corporate medical industrial complex seeking to profit from disseminating misleading information that pushes more drugs, tests, and procedures and that relies on specialists and hospital care incentivized to promote sickness (rather than primary care which takes a more nuanced and less profit-driven approach to care) believes he can transplant our dysfunctional system to all Americans.  We spend $5 trillion a year for the worst outcomes in the industrialized world, and that’s what Sanders contends constitutes the best of medical science.  To be skeptical of the system and its advocates, to Sanders, is akin to medical heresy.

Yes, Kennedy is a skeptic and is very skeptical about the efficacy/safety of the COVID vaccine and many other erroneous medical gospels spread by groups at the hands of their Big Pharma handlers.  (Of note, he did support the initial vaccine, while assailing the boosters based on solid data).  Sanders is not a skeptic, for he accepts the words of these organizations at face value (never evaluating their evidence) and relies on doctors who have strong ties to industry.   Now he demands Kennedy’s resignation, because not only is Kennedy a skeptic of certain vaccines and other modalities of care lacking any scientific validity, not only is he pro-choice while Sanders and others in the Democratic leadership believe in forced medicalization as they did during COVID, but he also wants to purge groups like the CDC and FDA of their drug company leadership and funding, while turning his back on groups like the American Heart Association funded by Big Phara to promote drugs under a manufactured scientific façade, and on doctors who rely on such groups as the bastions of medical truth.

The marriage between medicine and the drug industry did not originate in COVID; we spend much of A Return to Healing dissecting its history and prevalence.  So many other books do as well, most recently the scathing No More Tears by NYT journalist Gardiner Harris, have shown how deep the penetration of the pharmaceutical industry is among the very doctors and organizations Sanders holds up as sacrosanct. COVID exacerbated the trend of relying on drug-tainted medical “experts” and organizations and, in an oppositional binary, labeling any who are skeptical of such groups and ideas as anti-science goons.

What makes Sanders so dangerous, and what has become drastically more toxic since Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and our political parties politicized medical binaries pitting us against them during COVID by insisting on blind compliance to a singular dogma is the idea of labeling anyone who questions drug-tinged medical liturgy as a skeptic.  Yes, they are, Kennedy is, I am, and so should every doctor be. 

Skepticism is the very soul of science.  To blindly accept what “authoritative experts” proclaim to be truth, as Carl Sagan and Albert Einstain and others have warned us, paves a path to scientific tyranny.  It enables those who deceive us within a faux science costume to exploit our fears and blind faith, to use political polarization and monetary gifts to achieve a self-promoting objective, and to vilify any who oppose them or are skeptical of them as being the enemies of science; their goal is not health, truth, or democratic discourse, but rather it is to feign scientific expertise by essentially demonizing any who oppose their schemes. This is incredibly dangerous.  And as we will show in the next few blogs, not only is Sanders and other like him, including much of the media and congress, merely puppets on a string at the employ of a medical industrial complex, but our doctors and medical institutions are drones that, rather than enlighten us and provide reliable scientific guidance, push us down roads that are costly, dangerous, and self-serving.  By decrying skepticism in science, and enshrining doctors and medical institutions as saintly beacons of truth, Sanders and others have essentially transomed science into a religion, thus depriving us of the requisite research, skepticism, and free and open communication needed for any healthcare system to flourish. 

COVID has made all this exponentially worse, something that evidence clearly demonstrates even though by even saying that, by being skeptical, even when uttered by liberals like myself and so many others whose voices were quashed during COVID, we will be placed into the oppositional binary of those who oppose science.  Why?  Because we realized that the dirty nature of medical groups and doctors who promoted an agenda that clearly had no scientific backbone, was designed to sell drugs, and likely led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths as we will discuss.  Because in believing in a pro-choice, pro-discourse, robust science that seeks the betterment of humanity and possesses a soul of skepticism, we challenged so many alleged scientists and their supporters who drove this nation and its people into a pit of hell.  We are a threat to them by merely stating the truth.  And they will continue to bash skeptics and true scientists because it’s the only way to deflect the warranted scrutiny of what they wrought on this nation.

The first cardinal rule of any open-eyed assessment of our medical system and the COVID fiasco must start with doctors, for they are the soldiers of the medical industrial complex.  Without them, the corporations and organizations Sanders and others validate could not achieve any objections.  We will track their complicity (often unintentional due to their poor training and lack of critical thinking skills) not only in our COVID mess, but also in the transformation of medical science into medical religion. 

The first half of A Return to Healing delves into the flawed thinking of doctors that sews into their cognitive processes a robotic adherence to often self-serving ideologies lacking any scientific merit. Their simplistic, ritualistic protocol-based thinking is clearly not scientific, it is religious, as we will demonstrate throughout this blog series. As philosopher Giorgio Agamben said during COVID: “In order to describe the phenomenon [of COVID dogmatism], the media — especially the American press — obsessively resort to the word ‘apocalypse,’ and often explicitly evoke the end of the world. It is as if the religious need that the Church is no longer able to satisfy is groping for a new habitat — finding it in what has already become, in effect, the religion of our time: science. Like any other religion, this faith can produce fear and superstition, [and] only tyranny, only the monstrous Leviathan with his drawn sword, can be built upon the fear of losing one’s life.”

When Bernie Sanders assails anyone who dares to question the wisdom of doctors and the organizations he holds up on a saintly plain, he is part of the flock of true believers who refuse to be skeptical.  He simply recites doctrine and does not think critically about issues.  He somehow looks past the strong financial incentives that doctors and their organizations possess to deceive us into doing more of what is helpful to them, harmful to us, and bankrupting the system.  And he does this despite being critical of “millionaires and billionaires” and corporate perfidy in almost every other field.  We must understand why he and others are so blindsided by the alure of our medial priests, why they label them as scientists rather than salesmen, how they somehow look past the decrepit of our healthcare system that in the end is the full fault of doctors—since they prescribe drugs, order tests/procedures, and recite the liturgy of truth they borrow from industrial protocols—and simply place these people and their institutions on an ill-deserved pedestal.  Studies show that doctors only understand about 10% of what they say, always exaggerating the benefits of medical interventions and minimizing the risk.  That they use statistics and flawed data fed to them by industry, they place that data into calculators and protocols that they tout as being irrefutable, they see no nuance in their one-right-answer prescriptions, and they lack the most crucial critical thinking skills or even a willingness to delve into medical data beyond the headlines that compose most of their educational sources.

A recent article illuminates the robotic nature of doctors and reinforces the tocsin that I and others have elucidated in our writings, one that warns us against blindly following the advice of medical priests who are far more compliant to the power structure than to real science or patient care, despite what Sanders and other believe. In “On Medical Ideology and the Production of Docile Doctors,” author Eric Reinhart breaks many of the very ideological tenants her presents, but overall his central thesis is compelling.  As a liberal who detests Trump (like me) he points much of his venom at Kennedy without any substantiation.  But he says nothing accusatory about Democrats who break all his cardinal rules.  This includes Bernie Sanders’ support of large medical organizations like the AMA; Joe Biden’s decree to remove funding from any colleges that did not mandate the COVID vaccine as well as his censorship of anything that diverged from CDC dogma and his attempt to introduce legislation to punish doctors who offered alternatives to the CDC-Fauci plan; and Tim Walz’s (VP candidate) and Gavin Newson’s (upcoming presidential candidate) attempts to pull licenses away from any doctors who spoke out against federal institutions like the  CDC during COVID.  He also lumps all doctors into one category, failing to distinguish the motivations, ideas, and reimbursement incentives of specialists and even academics and how they compare to primary care doctors, for instance.  Still, his overall ideas are valuable, and I will quote them at length.

Like me and others, Reinhart believed that the catastrophe of COVID and the way we handled it as a nation should have promoted calls for foundational changes in our healthcare infrastructure.  Instead, doctors and organizations have simply doubled down on the very ideological and institutional for-profit system that triggered the COVID disaster.  Showing that doctors are unwilling to self-criticize their modes of thinking in which they were trained, he states that “the US medical profession was expressly organized, trained, and primed to defend itself against criticism of America’s for-profit healthcare system,” trained to follow the status quo.  Relying on ideals from Foucault—who believed that in a liberal society people are programmed subtly through society’s institutions and apparatus to unknowingly support the power structure—he shows that doctors are unwilling to tolerate any dissent against the prevailing healthcare dogma as perpetrated through education and disciplinary devices.  Assailing the medical curriculum and organizations such as the AMA, he states that we are given a script and “are simply taught that this his how things must be done,” creating “a fundamentally conservative model for learning that suppresses critical thinking while working inside a system that has, at its foundation, perverse incentives.” In A Return to Healing we show how this system emerged and why it has become so normalized and accepted, something Reinhart does not do.  But he deftly describes the result: unquestioning doctors who attack anyone who breaks from the mold of ideological and organizational compliance.

By perpetuating this system through a medical education apparatus aimed at buttressing a for-profit model and then disciplining doctors when they push back, “the US medical profession [has created] over many decades through its selection in medical school admission, cultivation in training, and promotion into leadership roles of what we might call docile doctors defined in large part by a dedication to systems justification.”  Such docile doctors believe they are being scientific, and many gain financially when they are robotically compliant.  By relying on dogma fed to them by manipulative sources, and then dressing that dogma into a faux scientific wrapping, both doctors and patients become often unintended accomplices of a medical culture that puts profits over patients and science.  As we will see, that became far more entrenched during COVID, when doctors more than any other players normalized a narrative that played the corporate card at the expense of science, democracy, and survival.

During COVID I almost lost my license for merely stating a fact about masks.  Other friends met the same fate.  Doctors largely invited such retributive assaults upon free speech, scientific integrity, and a self-serving liturgy that relied on faith-based solutions to what should have been a treatable pandemic.  The inordinate death rate in this nation from both COVID and also our COVID policy was proclaimed to be inviolable science, and in the oppositional binary of US health care all who cared about the data, thought critically, and cared about how COVID and our policies harmed humans fell into the pit of being misinformers, skeptics, and ironically, anti-science.  Reinhart describes that doctors tow the line and punish all those who dare question medical dogma.  As a medical resident he was told: “you need to learn to talk like us, to think like us, to look like us, to walk like us.  And you need to have the humility to accept that.”  Research and protocols, he reminds us, are created in the defense of profit and then rebranded to appear scientific and humanistic; the medical profession purports to advocate humanistic causes more as a front to conceal its true intentions.  And the army of those who carry out this religious movement are our docile doctors, trained to be pawns to those in power despite a visage of scientific integrity.  That is the science Bernie Sanders relies on, an injurious façade that germinates conditions that prevent the very Universal healthcare he seeks to implement.

As we navigate through the ashes of COVID, some of what is discussed may seem controversial, but it should not be.  While many still adhere to the narrative of the CDC and Dr. Fauci and support their policies despite their leading us to the worst outcome in the world, while many still have faith in masks and other debunked rituals, while many see a binary between anti and pro COVID vaccine camps, while many continue to obtain their information from authoritative institutions, the media, and “expert” doctors all of whom profit from fear and compliance, it is important to dig into facts and motivations of the COVID engineers and strip away the toxic paint that is obscuring our clear vision.  COVID merely accentuated forces already transforming healthcare from a science to a religion, from something relying on skepticism to one relying on blind obedience, and now those heretics who dare question the priests and churches are crucified and disregarded. Nothing is more dangerous than the religion of medicine, especially when it erases the skeptics who seek to change direction and acknowledge reality. Doctors are the primary barrier to having a functional healthcare system, and until people like Bernie Sanders accept that, we are doomed to continue down this self-destructive road.