Ashes of COVID Part Three: The Autocracy of Experts

Recently new blood pressure guidelines spread across the news and the medical world with gusto.  Orchestrated by “experts” embedded in the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, these guidelines pushed normal blood pressure lower than ever, with anyone  having a bp over 120 being told they have a disease needing urgent treatment.  No age limits curtained these aggressive numerical norms, no patient-centric nuance, no conception of science and experience.  In fact, even though (as we discuss in our book, A Return to Healing) only one very flawed study (SPRINT) suggests dramatic blood pressure reduction is helpful (in about 1/1000 people), and every other study demonstrates harm that ensues by pushing the pressure so low (SPRINT too documents harm), we now have decided as a medical community that the lower the better when it comes to blood pressure.  Because those who created our new blood pressure liturgy are deemed to be experts, not needing data to back up their position, they can rest on their laurels as masters of the blood pressure gospel and create a new reality lacking any scientific basis of fact.

Who are these experts?  No one asks or cares.  In fact, like the American Heart Association, most live in the pockets of Big Pharma, either receiving direct funding from the very drug companies that seek to sell drugs to push blood pressures very low, or who conduct studies for those companies and thus sit on their laps.  It doesn’t matter if they are from Harvard or the CDC; their true masters are their drug company handlers.  And most too have limited clinical experience, deriving their findings from a tiny selection of flawed studies, not truly cognizant of the real-world impact of their declarative conclusions.

In fact, we know the new blood pressure guidelines are dangerous; that aggressive treatment of blood pressure especially in the elderly can increase the risk of kidney disease, stroke, falls, fatigue, confusion, dizziness, and organ failure; and that the benefits of such aggression are unproven.  Still, many organizations fell in line behind the guidelines, citing the unassailable wisdom of priestly experts as being more important than data.  As these guidelines are turned into protocols and calculators, as adherence to these guidelines is enforced by insurance companies who ding those of us not compliant with the new liturgy, doctors too not only will fall in line but will proselytize.  That’s just what complaint doctors lacking critical thinking skills always do.  And when that happens, when we start prescribing more drugs to push pressures even lower, the medical catastrophe that will ensue will only further feed those very doctors, and those very drug companies, since more illness is profitable to our medical industrial complex.

Our reliance on experts pre-dates COVID, but COVID certainly fueled the flames of a medical society relying on priests and gospel rather than facts and experience.  This is why we have the lowest lifespan, the most chronic disease, and the highest costs of care in the industrialized world.  COVID made all this worse.  The COVID tsars, mostly in the media but also in our government, deemed certain people to be experts and certain people to be heretics.  This oppositional binary launched our nation into an abyss whereby we clung to unsubstantiated and ultimately deleterious advice at the hand of our anointed experts, leading us to the worst outcomes in the world both in terms of COVID deaths and non-COVID deaths.  While Sweden’s life expectancy actually increased during COVID, ours dropped by 4 years.  Why?  Because Sweden followed science, relied on data and observation, allowed many voices to be involved, and consistently changed course when circumstances and data demanded it.  They threw out masks early, put kids back in school, and largely kept society open, focusing on the elderly.  We, on the other hand, relied on our experts who consistently uttered the same dogma repeatedly, refused to listen to anyone who contradicted their scripture, authorized no studies and ignored the ones that were done elsewhere, and relied on meaningless rituals to curb deaths while harming kids and elders through endless quarantines and fearmongering.

During most of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, a group of hand-selected drug-tainted “experts” from academia, and news anchors whose stations received copious drug company funding drove our nation into a ditch.  They invented treatments and prevention strategies that they essentially fabricated, they refused to acknowledge treatments that worked or the consequences of their barbaric dictates, and as more and more Americans died both of COVID and of the quarantines they merely doubled down on their flawed policies to quash any discussion or dissention and to demonize any who dared question their impeccable credentials.  Experts led us into this hell because we decided to believe them, and they abused that faith to create a medical religion that created gospel and stamped out any semblance of science.

Fauci is hardly an expert in anything.  He has no clinical experience.  He is a well-known scientific autocrat who is more about his own ego than any desire to learn the truth or to help people.  He is deeply embedded in the pharmaceutical industry, earning millions of dollars from them during the crisis and even before that.  And yet, we declared him to be an expert, his word being as though from God, his doubters being akin to Satan.  The absurdity of his dictates, the fact he authorized no studies and accepted no criticism, the idea that he publicly stated that he alone represents science and that his words are sacrosanct, all of this should have given us pause.   Especially since his dictatorial posturing, his refusal to ever evaluate data and change position, led to more deaths and suffering here than anywhere else in the world.   But his obvious unflinching and anti-scientific actions seemed to only increase his status, turning him into an touchable god, a man who epitomized science and hope.  Liberals especially embraced this most illiberal and anti-scientific “expert,” embraced this self-serving pawn of large corporations who derided free speech and personal choice and whose policies harmed children and the elderly, they embraced him because they considered him an expert, THE expert, a man above facts, above criticism, above the very soul of science.  And that is why the idea of relying on so-called experts is suicidally dangerous.

The CDC is no different.  As we illuminate in our book, and as so many journalists and doctors have revealed during the past few decades, the CDC is little more than an instrument of Big Pharma.   Much of their funding flows from the CDC Foundation which is entirely funded by drug company money, and most of their leaders are former drug company executives or people destined to become drug company executives.  This is true of the FDA too.  Both organizations have been called out for burying data that gets in the way of their pro-industry recommendations, of almost always pushing drugs and tests that are beneficial to drug companies despite potentially dangerous repercussions, for relying less on robust research than on expert advice.  When I called them out for recommending that elders must get two pneumonia vaccines, including a new expensive Prevnar vaccine whose company many CDC officials came from, when I pointed out that the only study of Prevnar was conducted on people who did not get the initial vaccine and thus we don’t know if two vaccines are dangerous or effective, they wrote that their experts disagreed.  When I criticized them for suggesting that elderly people could get multiple vaccines at once (we know historically that elders don’t have a sufficiently robust immune system to make antibodies to two simultaneous vaccines, which is why we tell them not to get the flu shot when they’re sick because they can’t make immunity to two insults at once), they stated that they had no data to support their recommendations but relied instead on their experts.  I asked who these experts were, and they did not respond.

The danger of relying on experts should be apparent to anyone with a functioning brain.  Our horrific outcomes during COVID and the fact that our nation boasts the worst longevity and health in the world before and after COVID seems not to dent those who are religiously devoted to expert proclamations.  Everything Fauci and the CDC has recommended, from their absurd ritualistic approach to COVID to their suppression of treatments that other nations proved to be effective to their quarantines and vaccine policies has caused harm.  Even the new policy of simultaneous vaccines has led to unending viral respiratory outbreaks in long term care and among the elderly; all these COVID vaccines have not stopped COVID, but giving them at the same time as the flu vaccines has triggered a hurricane of flu cases, even in the summer when we never see flu.  And what have we done about it?  Pushed more simultaneous vaccine, more quarantines, more masks, all of which are entirely contradicted by science.

We don’t expect doctors to question the experts, since most doctors are on the leash of protocols and expert advice and have minimal ability or interest to think critically.  Or from the media, which benefits from drug company largesse, as do academic medical centers, hospitals, and medical societies. But what about the public? Why have they so compliantly accepted the words of experts even as our medical status drops farther into the gutter and our costs increase so much as to cripple our society? How have these self-declared experts, these self-serving charlatans, garnered so much status as to have the faith of the populace in the absence of and often in opposition to facts, experience, and science?

It seems we simply have a fascination with those who deem themselves to be experts, as though their god-like confidence is more soothing than hard facts.  We don’t ask for their credentials, we don’t demand data, we simply want to believe them.  That’s not new.  Political “experts” have tossed us into pits of hell for decades, declaring certain truths to be unchallengeable even as they convince the public to follow them into wars, bad policies, and other nightmares.  Phillip Tetlock’s book Expert Political Judgment shows that most political experts are proven wrong with time.  And the Wall Street Journal often runs a piece showing that financial experts are no better than those who throw a dart at a dartboard in determining the best stocks in which to invest. And yet we read these experts in our newspapers and journals, we listen to them on TV, we buy their books, and we tend to have more faith in them than in reality, much to our detriment.  In healthcare, though, our blind obedience to these experts likely has cost us millions of lives and a large chunk of our national fortune.

It is difficult for someone like me, someone who reads studies and who has decades of experience, to fully understand the appeal and acceptance of the experts who line the medical landscape.  One would think that our terrible outcomes during COVID and our declining health status over the past several decades would push us away from reliance on those whose words led us down dangerous roads.  One would think that the clear ties of these people to industry and to their own needs would give people pause.  During COVID, so many experts had ties to the vaccines and the anti-virals—both of which could not get emergency FDA approval unless a lot of people died and no other treatments were deemed to be effective—that their declarations punishing any of us who successfully treated COVID patients, and defrocking those doctors and scientists who demanded more research and better policies, should have caused public uproar.  It did not.  Even today, any self-declared expert seems to grab our ear, and anyone who uses data and common sense to shoot that expert down seems to engender our wrath.  Dr. Fauci, who nearly destroyed our nation and who attained great financial rewards for doing so, is now a Professor at Georgetown and was declared the scientist of the century.  Such is the alure of experts.

In our next blog, we’ll show how financial self-interest drove most of our COVID policy, how far that self-interest deviated from science, and why we are left with a medical infrastructure that values profit over human life and yet which remains popular and vibrant.