“What will they think of us, when they assess our myth and lore? We caused most of the damage, from our misguided thoughtless cure.
By telling us we’re all at risk, that society must close Our scientists and leaders, became science’s greatest foes. We convinced ourselves that we had no choice, but to listen and obey. We could have done so much more for this, in a scientific way.
Fauci and his cohorts lacked any common sense, They sounded arrogant and ignorant, just like Trump and Pence. The doctors and our leaders, in whom we put our trust, All drowned us in their tales and lies, and turned our world to dust.”
-From the song What Will They Think of Us, Geriatrics Vengeance Club
Perceived as being among the most respected members of society, doctors have a huge responsibility to utilize their medical training in a way that benefits mankind and is sound scientifically. Far too often our medical practitioners have slid down the path of ignorance and deceit. They recite from a script without truly understanding its language and substance, base their decisions on protocols and ideas fed to them by those with a more insidious agenda, sheepishly adhere to the dictates of authoritative figures who tell them what to do. They conceal their bad deeds in the clothing of necessity and compliance, turning their backs on the oath they took to do no harm as they bathe themselves in fabricated truths.
We have seen such behavior throughout history, whether it was doctors who believed in and followed the once-sanctified gospels of racial science, eugenics, or Nazi ideology, among others. American doctors promoted sterilizing the handicapped and limiting immigration of genetically inferior races (including Jews and Italians and Chinese); historically, doctors led Jews into the gas chambers and experimented on them; they injected African Americans with syphilis and studied the results. All these actions were sanctioned by societal and governmental mandates under the assertion of scientific and medical exigency. By twisting their training into a bridge toward someone else’s agenda, doctors helped to justify horrid actions through a mangled concoction of science and necessity, but which really reflected their own ignorance and obedience to a theoretical notion of truth.
But, too, doctors can be heroes, they can fight back against their more obsequious and technocratic colleagues, they can show how “authoritative” leaders and agencies must not to be followed blindly, that the truth spit out by those with an agenda must always be questioned, that in the end true science and true humanism are not correlated to what a government or its instruments says is true but rather must be verified and sanctified by careful study and by a huge dose of common sense and decency.
All of us doctors take an oath to do no harm. Sometimes doctors believe that they are promoting the public good and not exacting harm when they carry out some of the acts that I mentioned above and when they imprison society, mask and immunize kids, lock elderly people in prisons, and turn our world into a concentration camp fueled by fear and bereft of liberty. To many doctors, this is all necessary and thus whatever harm ensues from it is a fair price to pay for the results, whether such results are removing bad genes from our society (eugenics), extirpating a cancer from the body politic (Nazism), or focusing on COVID at the expense of everything else. When doctors fall into the haze of medical righteousness, they often turn their backs on decent and smart colleagues who seek to demonstrate the harm of what they are suggesting alternative approaches that are less insidious. Doctors do this because it’s how we’re trained; modern medicine, as we’ll see in the next blog, is all about following orders. I can’t tell you how many doctors have said to me: How can you question the CDC and Dr. Fauci, they speak for science. And yet, these doctors have never investigated how the CDC and Dr. Fauci arrived at their conclusions. Doctors easily are misled by agencies and protocols to which they ascribe religious-like absolutism. And once these doctors latch onto a fabricated declaration of medical dogma spit out by authoritative sources, they declare to all the world that their truth is THE TRUTH, and that all who dare take another path are defying medical reality. Myopic perception has led our medical profession down a dark road for centuries, causing doctors to embrace horrific cures in the name of their truth and in the service of the authoritative agencies or people to whom they declare allegiance.
When I wrote the above song for Geriatrics Vengeance Club in the early summer of 2020, it was already clear to me that our medical system and doctors had gone off the rails of science and decency, that our most vocal doctors were enabling a charlatan and self-promoting political-driven creature of industry to lead us down a path of self-destruction, that the CDC and FDA and far too many University doctors—all swimming in the blood of pharmaceutical funding and the delusion that numerical calculations and not human life were the only measures of success—became unassailable priests of scientific chicanery that must never be challenged lest disaster ensue. I wrote my book and its songs to protest a world morphing in front of my eyes into a medical concentration camp, my patients slaughtered by a cure that doctors and public health leaders assured us was necessary, by medical myths that enabled leaders—who trusted these doctors—to strip us of our rights and inflict upon us almost two years of confinement and mask-based fear, all in the name of a necessity that defied common sense, humanism, and scientific scrutiny, all in the name of what the doctors insisted was THE TRUTH.
That I fought back from day one was not a difficult decision given how obvious were the deceptions and half-truths uttered by Fauci and the CDC and the media. As I lived through the first wave of COVID and studied the disease through a lens of scientific and humanistic clarity—because as doctors we have to be smart in defining who to treat and how to treat them and what the consequences of our treatment may be to whatever group or person we treat—it was clear to me just how wrong were the words of Anthony Fauci, just how politically tinged and self-serving were the dictates of our medical leaders, just how non-scientific was our response. That so many doctors chose instead to just follow orders and trumpet the deleterious idiocy of Fauci and his cronies is not surprising either; I’ve spent my life fighting such blind compliance to dogma in my profession, because the religion of medicine (as we’ll discuss in our next blog) has taken such firm root in the minds of its priests. That others didn’t fight back, that many—including former friends and colleagues—smart people and doctors willingly became among Fauci’s willing executioners; that tugs at my hide every day, knowing well how those who have earned an MD and the public trust so depraved the medical oath to which they swore allegiance.
But the reason I’m writing this is not to defame those who took the dark and easy road to blind compliance, but rather to thank the medical heroes who didn’t. There are many doctors who fought back and tried to nudge this nation along a road of sensible science and human decency, even if most of them were censored and degraded and had their careers threatened and have been called anti-science (and even mass murderers) because they dared to speak out and be brave. When this moment of global insanity ends, when the deaths we caused by our cure are finally acknowledged and counted, when the obsequious flock of doctors who led us into a societal mass grave are finally berated, I hope that the brave leaders of the medical resistance will too be recognized for how they courageously upheld their oath to science and humanism and how valiantly they refused to be led into Fauci’s swamp by colleagues and media trolls who tortured them day and night for their unwillingness to merely fold.
When the heroes line up, we have to start with the author of the Great Barrington Declaration—a document that laid out a sensible medically-sound and humanistic path to defeating COVID and sparing lives from a cure that made no medical sense and that was both ineffective and deadly—who has been fighting against the madness of Fauci-induced medical dogmatism from day one, and whose recent article in Newsweek should be read by everyone not matter what their views are on this issue. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Stanford physician, epidemiologist, and public health expert. His credentials should have deflected him from the ire of the dogmatists who refused to acknowledge anything but Faucian gospel, but it did not. He was hit hard, and the barrage of hate thrust against him by the media, by colleagues, by politicians, and by COVID extremists continues unabated. And yet, he quietly but methodically perseveres, placing his trust in science and decency rather than in the vitriol of those who assail him. Apolitical and reserved, no one could have guessed Dr. Bhattacharya would stand up as the most prominent defender of science and freedom, of life and liberty, against so vile a retribution and so thick a haze of dogma. And yet he has done just that with a dignity that is admirable by any standards.
His article above elucidates what I spell out in the Geriatrics Vengeance Club and what any perspicacious, caring, and science-oriented physician should have ascertained from studying the virus and the data relating to its spread and destructive power. As he shows in this article, COVID hits the elderly and not the young, and yet we failed to protect the former while unnecessarily frightening and damaging the latter. In fact, there is clear and convincing evidence that closing schools and forcing kids to wear masks causes substantial damage to these kids without preventing a single COVID death. Similarly, our lock-them-up-and-wear-masks policy in long term care has not stopped death but has instigated death and suffering among this most vulnerable population. COVID is not deflected by the use of masks, as historical evidence the only two randomized studies clearly demonstrate, while mask-faith has prevented us from adapting more rational policies. In fact, mask use is a symbol rather than a scientific tool. While immunization is an effective tool to avert death and spread of virus in vulnerable populations, there is no reason to vaccinate those who have had COVID, since natural immunity is as good or better than vaccinated immunity. By forcing those health care workers who are already immune—because they contracted the virus while caring for the sick—to get immunized is medically irresponsible and will only exacerbate our health care shortage while having no scientific backbone. And he shows too the collateral damage to which our President, Dr. Fauci, the CDC and the media has turned a blind eye, the many hundreds of thousands or even millions who will die and suffer because of the foolish policy we have chosen to espouse.
While he does not specifically discuss the loss of liberty, he does discuss the pernicious impact of censorship, of the fear among his colleagues that if they speak out they could lose their research grants, their jobs, and their prestige. We know that almost 900,000 prominent doctors and scientists signed the Great Barrington Declaration, and many hundreds of thousands more are afraid to talk due to fear of reprisal. Censorship and retribution are rampant in our Faucist nation, as I and Dr. Bhattacharya and so many others know from personal experience. Those who seek to be scientific, open, and helpful are struck by the disciplinary force of a binary of us against them, science against anti-science. You follow Dr. Fauci or you are destroyed. And yet, Dr. Bhattacharya is not intimidated and will not bend, which is why he is a hero. He ends the article with this observation: “ The evidence is in. Governors, journalists, scientists, university presidents, hospital administrators and business leaders can continue to follow Dr. Anthony Fauci or open their eyes. After 700,000-plus COVID deaths and the devastating effects of lockdowns, it is time to return to basic principles of public health.”
Another medical hero, Dr. Vinay Prasad, has been saying as such also from day one. In his own quiet, convincing, apolitical, and scientific way he has educated us in his weekly columns, gently pointing out the flaws of our current approach, the lack of scientific proof for our unassailable policies, the rampant censorship that has prevented us from confronting COVID through the lens of medial science, and ultimately the potential threat to our liberties as the government and its authoritative bodies control the narrative and punish any who dare ask questions. For this last observation, Dr. Prasad was skewered, but he continues to push on, to demand scientific and ethical standards that our current Faucist state and its medical adherents eschew, and for that he is forever a hero.
Then, of course, there’s Scott Atlas, another doctor who from day one understood that Fauci’s approach to this would cause tremendous death and devastation without necessarily helping reduce the impact of COVID. For this position he was attacked viciously; Brianna Keiler and others called him a mass murderer, others labeled him a charlatan and an anti-science right wing fanatic. When he helped steer President Trump—unsuccessfully—toward a more rational COVID policy, the attacks only intensified, and he had to step down. But from day one, his predictions proved to be accurate, and his solutions could have deflected the suffering and carnage that Fauci’s megalomaniacal priesthood inflicted upon this nation. He too is a medical hero.
But most heroes are quieter. My good friend, a geriatric doctor who did so much to help patients through COVID (often going to their homes late at night, delivering oxygen and medicines) and who was wise enough to teach me and other doctors how to treat COVID patients in a way that kept them out of the hospital and alive, he has also been sanctioned by the Board of Physicians and may have to retire from the profession. He is being forced to be immunized even though he had a horrid case of COVID in the line of duty and has antibody levels higher than anyone could get with immunization. He is a treasure, a lifesaver, a hero, and because of his ethics he would rather rip up his license than comply with a scientifically negligent mandate that makes no sense and that could cause him harm. And so does another non-doctrinaire doctor fall prey to the medical wave of dogmatism that has swept our nation.
A recent article talks about 3,100 doctors who signed a petition declaring that Anthony Fauci has committed crimes against humanity. I said just that in my book, or at least my main character did, and for that he paid a hefty price. If I were to say such a thing publicly, my license would again fall prey to the whims of a Board of Physicians that seeks to control what doctors are allowed to write and think no less than any fascist or totalitarian dictator ever has. In fact, under no repressive regime in history, have people been forced to be medicated lest they lose their careers and rights. Many silent doctors believe that Faucism and its adherents have instigated a mass slaughter in the name of science, many believe that the deprivation of our liberties is the first step to a total control of our bodies and our rights. But they remain quiet because they are so frightened by reprisals.
I never will be muffled by such fear; in fact, the day I received my sanction by that Board of Physicians that I can’t post “bad words” on social media again, I immediately released their letter on social media and posted more bad words. In the end, those of us who fight dogma, who truly believe in science and liberty, and who refuse to bend to the will of a misled majority will triumph. The medical heroes will one day be recognized for being just that. But just how many have to suffer because our nation’s doctors have bent to the will of those who mangle science for their own gains? How long will we have to wait to reform our health care system and the training of physicians so that we have smart, scientific, and humanistic doctors who fight for people instead of fighting against them?
When I think of my own experience during COVID—treating hundreds of my patients with the disease, suffocating in gowns and masks and shields, having to comply with thoughtless public health dictates that through any lens are inhumane and more likely to kill and maim than to help, having my freedoms and those of my children stripped from me by a liberal democracy—I don’t view myself as a hero. That I cared for my patients during an epidemic is simply part of my job, nothing more. That we are labeling doctors as heroes for doing their jobs—any google search for “heroic doctor” inevitably shows pictures of doctors wearing masks—and complying with orders is an insult to the word hero. Any heroism I have exhibited, however feeble and feckless, is from my willingness to fight a medical religion that has devastated our nation and injured the very patients it swore an oath to protect. Thank goodness for our medical heroes who dare stand up to the masked hysteria that has so suffocated our nation. At least to me, after reading Dr. Bhattacharya’s article, I have some faith that the war for science and humanity has perhaps turned a crucial corner.
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