“The Ethical, Moral and Intellectual Rot in Our Institutions”

A couple of great articles came to my attention that merit your perusal.

One is by Dr. Jane Lindell Hughes in the current issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. It discusses various issues reflecting institutional rot including DEI, “climate change”, elite academia, governmental censorship, transgender treatments and the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. There is particular attention to the “subterfuge and treachery” committed by Dr. Deborah Birx. I urge you to take a look.

Here are a couple of excerpts (HT:AAPS):

The decay of intellectual inquiry and the censorship of dissenting voices that we are now experiencing did not happen overnight or as a direct result of COVID. However, the disastrous management of a serious infectious disease by institutional bureaucrats, mainstream media, and politicians has cracked the armor of the ‘expert.’ Mandates, coercion, censorship, and outright delusional thinking were tolerated with very little resistance…

There seems to be no area in the Western world untouched by scandal and deceit, and science is no exception…

Lack of integrity in medicine and public health exploded into the limelight with the concerto of deceit, fraud, propaganda, and persecution of dissidents that characterized the COVID pandemic management.

The second is an article by Dr. Steven Kritz at the Brownstone Institute website. He focuses on the rot in American healthcare. He has held a number of different types of positions over the last fifty years and I will excerpt some of his comments:

(T)he disastrous Covid response merely highlighted the rot (within healthcare), rather than being its cause…

The Prime Directive (for you Star Trek fans) for each of these disciplines is different. For the hands-on care providers, it’s: ‘First do no harm.’ For the researcher, it’s: ‘Find something/discover something.’ For the public health professional, it’s: ‘Do something’ (usually spoken in a loud shrill voice); and for the designers and administrators of health systems infrastructure, it’s a take-off on the movie, “Field of Dreams:” ‘If you build it, patients will come’…

In the case of the nation’s Covid response, chaos reigned, at least partly because a small cadre of public health professionals and Big Pharma took over, while the hands-on practitioners and infrastructure professionals were pushed aside and given their marching orders. In the case of hands-on practitioners, threats were used, when necessary, to obtain compliance.

What’s worse, the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to believe that the chaos was by design, in order to distract the lay public from recognizing that the collaboration of professionals representing all four disciplines hadn’t occurred. The importance of this is that the lay public’s relationship with the healthcare system is largely through their primary care physician. Would the public have reacted differently if they were aware that the person they trusted most to help them navigate the healthcare system was beholden to someone other than them?…

At the time, I accepted the ‘Flatten the curve’ strategy, since I hadn’t yet seen (because the censorship goon squads were already up and running) the papers by John Ioannidis or Jay Bhattacharya indicating that the published fatality rates were wildly exaggerated, even in the elderly. However, as soon as I saw that the 2-week period was going to be extended, and the term lockdown came into vogue, I began to smell a rat…

(P)hysicians like Fauci and Deborah Birx, who have spent the bulk of their careers dealing with HIV, which is transmitted sexually or by intravenous drug use, are put in charge of dealing with an airborne infection. 

I also knew that masks were useless. I remember hearing at the time that stopping a virus by wearing a mask was about as useful as stopping mosquitoes by putting a chain link fence around your yard! That analogy has withstood the test of time quite well…

(I)t was very difficult to get a good handle on whether hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc or ivermectin were effective. While I suspected that they were effective (I already knew from my practice years that the safety concerns were wildly exaggerated and/or totally false); the censorship efforts were such that I had some doubt. I did notice however, that the studies showing that these medications were ineffective were not done on the cohort for whom they were being used; namely, people who had had symptoms for less than 3-4 days. 

It was during the fall of 2020 that I first saw the definitive paper on influenza pandemic mitigation by Donald Henderson, MD, MPH published in 2006. The guidance in this paper was diametrically opposed to the Covid response I was witnessing. Given Henderson’s experience as leader of the team that rid the planet of smallpox, and at the time of his death in 2016, he was leading teams that were on the verge of eradicating polio and measles, his credentials were impeccable. 

In addition, Sweden provided a naturally occurring control group, in that there were no lockdowns, no school closures, no mask mandates, and no social distancing requirements. Despite this, the country had no deaths in children under the age of 18. Their morbidity/mortality rates overall were no worse than countries that had locked down, and the social and economic disruptions were much less than their peer countries…

This brings us to a corollary of the physician’s Prime Directive: ‘First do no harm.’ When the FDA approves a new pharmaceutical for patient use, even under the usual approval process, you never, ever want to be among the first group of physicians to prescribe this new product, except in very rare situations. Why is this? It’s because the number of patients that have participated in the research to complete Phase 3 trials is not very large. Therefore, when the product is released, the number of patients placed on the new pharmaceutical is usually many times the number of research participants. As a result, bad reactions, including deaths, from the new product that were not seen during the research can emerge. Just about once per year, the FDA will remove from the market a pharmaceutical it had previously approved due to bad occurrences seen after widespread use…and this has been the case for at least the past 40 years…

Given that the Covid jab, under Emergency Use Authorization, was released while it was still a Phase 3 research product, there should have been even greater post-marketing surveillance than usual. I had written about these oversight deficiencies previously for Brownstone…

I was offered Remdesivir, but by then, I knew that the only people benefiting from that drug were Fauci and Bill Gates. I took a pass. Six weeks after discharge, I was back doing my 20-mile bike rides…

It was the lethality of the virus that was wildly exaggerated, not its existence!..

By the way, the CDC did not publicly acknowledge the value of natural immunity until late January of 2022, and even at that late date, they buried it in a graph without mention in the narrative that accompanied the graph…

(T)here was no way that the jabs would be approved for (children). Boy was I mistaken! At the time, I thought that this constituted scientific misconduct that had crossed the line into criminality. If anything, subsequent events have added many exclamation points to that assessment. So much for following the science!..

(T)he email exchanges between Weingarten and Rochelle Walensky, then CDC Director, were released showing unequivocally that Weingarten was providing the CDC with their marching orders. Given that Weingarten is vicious, nasty, has no medical training, and is childless makes her the last person you’d want to have the power to determine how your children should be educated and the healthcare they should receive. It’s like having Hansel and Gretel on continuous loop, except that the wicked witch always wins!..

Given the poor quality of almost all studies coming from our public health agencies…, I became convinced that when they tried to extend the study (regarding the vaccine) beyond 6 months, the results were so poor that they couldn’t even attempt to manipulate the data, as they had done on so many other occasions (and were almost always caught)…

Given the Covid debacle, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that other supposedly ‘settled’ elements of healthcare, especially with regard to pharmaceuticals, were fudged…

To be fair, it was not only the intrusion of DEI-like initiatives in the mid-1990s that had negative impacts on the healthcare system. The other development was the transition of physicians from private practice (predominantly in large single-specialty or multi-specialty groups) to employees of large regional healthcare systems, insurance companies, or other mega-sized institutions. Brownstone contributors have documented the hell out of the fact that this transition intensified the damage caused by the Covid response, because physician autonomy was destroyed, computer algorithms, based on what we now know can be dubious databases (garbage in, garbage out) replaced clinical judgment, and cowardice reigned. 

Is it any wonder that we are where we are? I mentioned earlier that life expectancy declined for three years in a row beginning in 2015. The fact is, since 2017, the general trend in life expectancy has continued to trend downward. While lifestyle is certainly an important factor in this decline, we better start looking at whether our healthcare system is adding to this disaster. A major impediment, in my opinion, is that the people best positioned within the healthcare system to make the necessary changes have been rendered impotent. Potentially worse, the new system for training physicians may not provide this critical group with the skill sets needed to understand what has to be done to turn this ship around.