“If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity.”
-Albert Einstein
As a graduate student at the University of Maryland I just received the following email from Dr. Marinopoulos, the school’s chief medical officer: “Specifically, KN95 masks continue to be required in all classroom settings, including all final examinations. Additionally, we strongly encourage everyone to wear a K95 mask indoors in all situations. Wearing a KN95 mask provides significant protection against infection, and that protection increases when more of us wear our masks in the same common area.”
When I received this important a message (during a “surge” in which barely anyone was getting ill) from so illustrious a doctor—a representative of both academia and our medical community—I knew that everything in it was blatantly false, and yet, to say so would not only be heresy but also would likely get me kicked out of college. For what is college but a forum in which to shut up and listen and do what you’re told? Especially if what you say is construed as being Misinformation.
Einstein, early in his career, fled from Germany not because of antisemitism, as we discussed in a prior blog, but because of the German education system’s reliance on rote memorization over thinking; blind obedience to the teacher who is viewed as an unassailable authority figure; and a discouragement of creativity, critical, thinking, and an inquisitive mind. Said Einstein: “Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think.” In fact, his theory of relativity was labeled as both Jew Science and Misinformation by the majority of German scientists, many of whom joined the Nazi party because, in the end, that’s where this type of dogmatic thinking leads us. As I said before, Einstein would be targeted as a major misinformer, and he certainly would not wear a mask!
I have been on the front lines of the pandemic, I studied and authored academic books about COVID, and I know that Dr. Marinopoulos’ prescription for keeping the virus at bay—masks, forced immunization of the young, banning social events, closing school at times—kills and maims far more people than it saves, while destroying lives (especially young lives) and decimating the very soul of science. And yet, saying anything like that, anything to contradict the COVID gospel and the wise words of Dr. Marinopoulos and all those who speak his language, is misinformation. I could be kicked off campus, even lost my medical license, for merely uttering such dangerous slander. In fact, I almost did!
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in his Schenk decision, when there is a “clear and present danger” then the government can shut you up if your words constitute dangerous misinformation. In other words, misinformation can be censored, and the COVID squad has gone out of its way to do just that, even though the Schenk ruling was overturned. Misinformation is now being targeted because the powers that be claim it is the reason so many people have died during COVID, not their misplaced policy.
Lately we’ve heard a lot about the dangers of misinformation, and I’m thinking, what does that word mean? President Biden, aka The Science President, recently proposed we punish anyone who disseminates misinformation, echoing the Alien and Sedition acts from President Adams and the laws in most antebellum southern states that prevented publication of any “facts” that challenged the science of white supremacy and slavery. In this way, as I mentioned before, Biden and the COVID squad sound a lot like John Calhoun and the pro-slavery southerners, spouting “science” as justification for their oppression of people and of anything that contradicts their dogma, anything that they claim is misinformation.
Yea, abolitionists were dangerous and unscientific misinformers according to most Americans and race experts back then. In Hitler’s Germany, Goebbels made it clear that misinformers who opposed Hitler’s racial laws and policies were dangerous and had to be punished, much like today’s very passionate broadcasters on CNN and MSNBC, as I have discussed. Martin Luther King was a vile misinormer; you could have asked any Southern governor or common citizen at the time, they’d tell you that the guy was spitting out dangerous misinformation and had to be banned for everyone’s safety. So, what is misinformation?
After much head pounding, I finally arrived at a definition. The rest of this blog will tell you how I got to this point and why I am so proud to wear the mantle of misinformation on my chest.
Misinformation is a truth that challenges the blind faith of zealots exploited by authoritarian leaders to augment their hold over people through plausible deception.
In all societies there is a dogma to which everyone is told they must comply lest they be deemed dangerous. In Christianity, there was the Trinity, the Divinity of Jesus, the social order in which peasants had to know their place, and of course Christian science that held that the sun goes around the earth and the earth was created in six days. To deny any of these unassailable truths was considered misinformation, and those who spewed out any defiling contradictions to the one and only truth paid a steep price, typically death. For Galileo, even though he discovered beyond a shadow of doubt that the gospel was mistaken and that actually the earth revolves around the sun, he kept his misinformation to himself, because facts be damned, he didn’t want to end up without a head on his shoulders, and that’s the price of misinformation, as he well knew. Hence, my first stab at a definition of misinformation:
Misinformation is anything that questions or doubts what we are told must be true.
If so, then misinformation may be true if the “one and only truth” to which we are told we must adhere is, well, is not true. Galileo’s misinformation, just like Darwin’s and so many other misinformers during the era of Christian hegemony over knowledge, turned out to be the truth, even if at the time they were perceived as dangerous heretics, dangerous misinformers.
I apologize to Dr. Marinopoulos, who I am sure is a very expert doctor on all things COVID, but nothing he said happens to be true, and none of the policies he advocates—all of which have strangled education and the lives of ninety million young people in a noose of fear and lies for over two years—have helped anyone other than those who promote a false gospel for power and profit. As I’ve noted in my mask factsheet below, there is indisputable evidence that masks do not prevent the spread of COVID or death from COVID in college-age kids, despite the reputable doctor’s absolutism to the contrary. In fact, they may be harmful to that population. Not a single study or investigation has shown masks, in fact, to help anyone. In long term care, where I work, we’ve been wearing masks since March of 2020 and virtually all my patients have contracted COVID through those masks, many two or three times, and nationally we’ve lost about 400,000 elders in long term care despite rigorously enforced mask mandates. Masks don’t work, period. But to say such a thing is blatant, dangerous misinformation that can get me censored, lose my license, or be kicked out of college.
I know that because CNN and the Washington Post and Dr. Fauci and his cronies have made it very clear that anti-mask misinformation leads to death and peril, and President Biden says it’s dangerous malarkey to deny the importance of masks, the evidence be damned. He wants to ban such misinformation for the good of society! When I merely stated a fact about masks—that all my many hundreds of long-term care patients were infected by COVID through masks in facilities with strictly enforced mask mandates—my State Medical Board pulled my license, stating that I was spreading misinformation. An interview with me was pulled off a liberal radio show in New England because the host told me that by citing facts about nursing home deaths that occurred despite mask mandates, I was disseminating dangerous misinformation that might cause people to question mask use.
Hence, another definition of misinformation:
Misinformation is anything, factual or not, that contradicts what people want to believe is true.
Let’s take vaccines. Since we’ve been giving vaccines, more people are dying of COVID, and in states with the highest vaccination rates we have also the highest COVID death rates. That’s just a fact. I’m not questioning vaccines, they may work for some people, but we have to figure out who those people are if we are going to be intelligent about this. I mean, mandating that kids and young adults receive a vaccine for a disease that is less likely to kill them than 12 other things we don’t ever talk about (car accidents, gun death, pneumonia, flu, drug overdoses, depression, suicide, cancer, to name a few), to deny this largely untested vaccine ever hurts people despite copious evidence it does, to not care about long term effects of the vaccine in people who don’t benefit from it in the first place, to me that is medically negligent; it violates the Hippocratic Oath (first, do no harm), it is a crime against humanity (as per the Geneva Convention that states we can’t force people to take dangerous substances against their will), and it is shameful for any doctor to support it. It reeks, as I have said before, of how doctors acted during Hitler’s Germany, spearheading policies under the guise of science that, in the end, slaughtered both people and science in one of the most shameful physician-directed moments in human history.
And yet, for me to doubt the absolute and unassailable truth that universal vaccination for COVID (even in infants) is necessary and lifesaving and must be mandated, for me to even ask questions about these miracles of science that we must take for the good of us and all the world, I am spreading misinformation. My medical board told me that if I said anything at all that tinges the absolute necessity and truth of COVID vaccines I could lose my license. I have had several of my patients develop blood clots soon after taking the vaccine, but their very informed and dogma-loving specialist doctors declared that the vaccine didn’t do it because it couldn’t do it, because that’s just the undisputed truth. I received my first two Pfizer vaccines a year and a half ago and I have had a severe diminution of my breathing capacity since then, and a drop in my platelets from 300 to 100, and yet to state such things could be related to the vaccine is misinformation. If I had COVID and developed these conditions, that’s Long COVID and it’s a serious condition. But it’s misinformation to state that the vaccine causes trouble, and so my own health problems are either from COVID I didn’t know I had, or maybe stress, because they can’t be from the vaccine since the vaccine is a reflection of God himself. Similarly, it’s misinformation to state that natural immunity is at least as good as vaccinated immunity, even though science has certified the benefits of natural immunity for a century. Thus must my patients who had COVID and have high antibody levels still get the vaccine; we don’t want to disappoint Pfizer and Dr. Fauci! It's misinformation to state that the last two boosters were completely ineffective against the prevailing Omicron variant and that more people are getting severe COVID who had the booster than who have not, as shown on the table below.
Sure, the table—tabulated by Walgreens, who actually has an interest in your getting vaccinated—might cite facts, but those facts are misinformation because they challenge dogma. The dogma of COVID is that masks work, selfish unvaccinated people put everyone else at risk and fill the hospitals, handwashing and six-foot separation are crucial in slowing disease (even though COVID doesn’t live on hands, another irrelevant fact easily dismissed by the fact that handwashing must work and thus it does), closing schools and having kids wear masks and get vaccinated saves lives, general societal shutdowns are beneficial since they reduce COVID upticks, and so much more. All of these truths have been debunked by real science, but that science is misinformation since it can’t be science since science states that they all work and they do. When Fauci says it works, when the science president says it works, when CNN says it works, when “experts” at drug companies and academic institutions financed by drug companies say it works, then bless the Lord, it works, so stop all your misinformation for Christ’s sake!
And, oh, here’s a fact sheet compiled by CDC data on the benefit of masks in kids, documenting something Europeans figured out a while ago: they don’t work! But God forbid anyone says such a thing, because it’s misinformation. Dr. Marinopoulos would kick anyone out of school who uttered such heretical facts, and kids will continue to wear masks everywhere and anywhere despite these facts, because the COVID dogma holds that masks work for everyone, period, and facts should not get in the way of dogma, or those facts are misinformation. Dangerous misinformation. Lethal information.
To even discuss the detrimental effects of closing schools and society, to show evidence that lockdowns have killed hundreds of thousands of people and saved no lives, all of that is true, but it’s misinformation, because CNN and Dr Fauci don’t need facts to prove that such measures actually do work since the gospel says that they must. Hell, we as a nation had the highest COVID death rate and the highest overall death rate in the world during COVID (our life expectancy dropped by over 3 years, and as I have shown, none of that drop is related to COVID itself but rather to our lethal COVID policies) but we refuse to state we did anything wrong other that having misinformers not follow our unassailable COVID gospel. You know which country had the lowest death rate? Sweden, the nation that did everything wrong, the nation that built its entire COVID policy on the bricks of misinformation, the country that rejected masks and school closures and shutdowns. This is a fact, recently stated by the WHO. But it is also misinformation; CNN tells us all the time that anyone who states Sweden did well is a dangerous misinformer, and many people have called for censoring this misinformation.
If Sweden did well, then everything we know to be true isn’t, and thus Sweden must have done poorly. Again, misinformation must be suppressed if it challenges our dogma, and thus must we continue to mask up, keep schools under lock and chain, suffocate the population with mask mandates if there is an uptick of cases, close society, scare people to death, slaughter the elderly by locking them up and denying them any semblance of life, and keep a running ticker tape on CNN of COVID cases while ignoring all other causes of death and misery. We’re still wearing masks in long term care and keeping people isolated and testing ourselves twice a week and forcing immunization on everyone even though none of that has worked. Still, we must shut up or we will be fired. Misinformation kills!
I recently told someone that many infections have been as bad as COVID, and that the death count from COVID is exaggerated because COVID deaths are tabulated as anyone who died of or with COVID (have a car accident and test positive for COVID, it’s a COVID death) and that hospitals are incentivized if their patients have COVID. “First of all,” this educated liberal former friend said, “it is right-wing conspiratorial banter that COVID deaths may be from something else and that hospitals get money if people die of COVID. And also, how can a doctor merely dismiss a million deaths in two years and say it’s like any other virus? That’s cruel and dead wrong.” I answered: “Well, every year a million Americans die of obesity and cigarette smoking, and we don’t ban fast-food and cigarettes and shut down society and blame hospital overcrowding on preventable bad health habits. In fact,” I continued, “if people ate better and lost weight, many fewer would have died of COVID.” And guess what he said to me? “You know, I could report you for spreading misinformation, so you better watch out.” You notice I said he was a former friend.
Recently I put together a factsheet about Paxlovid, a new anti-viral being touted as an essential treatment for COVID, one that will save lives and must be used. Here it is:
I have been down the Paxlovid “miracle drug” road before, I have seen my patients bamboozled by high-priced emergency authorization drugs (buttressed by flawed and tiny drug-company directed studies) touted as life savers but which, after they were given to real people, killed tens of thousands of trusting souls, and Paxlovid is just like those drugs. We have medicines that work well for COVID, cheap medicines, but we’re told they don’t work, Dr. Fauci and the public health doctors told us (and me) not to use them because it went against the narrative that only expensive drugs and vaccines work (we saved dozens of lives by going with the misinformation and using them anyway, shhhh), so we are told we must use Paxlovid. The Washington Post and CNN say, Dr. Fauci says, YOU HAVE TO USE PAXLOVID IMMEDIATELY OR YOU WILL DIE! Biden bought six-billion dollars of the stuff, and my patients called me one after another demanding the drug, some leaving my practice after I said that I would not prescribe it. So, I made the fact sheet. The facts show that Paxlovid is likely to be dangerous and that older cheaper medicines that we’ve use since the beginning of the pandemic are very effective, but to speak such heresy is misinformation since it challenges the COVID dogma that states anti-virals work and that all the other drugs that saved lives don't work.
And then, soon after I published this Paxlovid misinformation on my website, Atlantic printed an article showing that Paxlovid may well be very dangerous. Still, it’s misinformation to say such a thing, even if facts show it to be true, and the history of drug-company studies has shown them to be flawed and misleading most of the time, leading to copious death and injury. I mean, the companies that makes drugs also study them, and then “hire” esteemed academic doctors whose very careers and salaries are predicated on their allegiance to these drug companies who tell the world on CNN and in The New York Times that the drugs are good and safe and must be used lest everyone die, and that’s not good science? Well it must be, since anything that contradicts it is misinformation.
Hence, another definition of misinformation:
Misinformation is anything that gets in the way of what those in power deem to be necessary for the public good but which actually is being done to augment their wealth and power.
Yes, history has shown us that misinformation poses a danger to those who want us to believe a certain dogma that benefits them. Some of the great misinformers of history are shameful people, and sadly I and all the COVID misinformers are following their dangerous and heretical script. These include, in addition to the ones I mentioned (Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Martin Luther King): Our founding fathers, Nelson Mandala, Gandhi, Rosa Parks and all those in the Civil Rights movement, Fredrick Douglass, WEB Dubois, Martin Luther, Socrates, Newton, Les Walesa, Sophie Scholl and Raul Wallenberg and all those who defied the Nazi’s and hid Jews, Margaret Case Smith and others who dared challenged Joseph Mccarthy, and virtually all the doctors and scientists who defied dogma and changed how we think about the world.
We are part of a dangerous legacy, us misinformers. And as the horde of mask-wearing zealots sneer at us and tell us how dangerous and anti-scientific we are, as politicians and paid-off scientists and ignorant doctors scoff at our unwillingness to adhere to the one and only gospel of truth, as true believers on TV and social media blame us for all the world’s woes as they cling to their dogma without letting facts get in the way (in fact they suppress those facts, since they constitute misinformation), we misinformers hold firm to what we know to be true, we fight against a tide of blind adherence to the dictates of those who seek to deceive us and wrap us in a never-ending saga of misery and lies, and we refuse to shut up. We know that even the symbol of the mask is vile and dangerous, and yet every day we must navigate through a sea flowing with masks, as we are but a trickle in an ocean of deception.
One day, as our many drops of truth fill that ocean, when the drops turn into a spicket and then into a powerful flow, then the ocean will change, and those people who once called us beacons of misinformation will thank us for saving the world. That’s why we must persevere, and we must wear the label of misinformation proudly upon our hats. Without us, there is no hope.