Volume 78, no. 2 February 2022
The U.S. Supreme Court split the baby on the vaccine mandates cases. In both, the key issue is the power of the administrative state to force people to accept an unwanted and potentially harmful medical intervention as a condition of employment. The stay on the OSHA mandate on employers of 100 or more workers to enforce vaccination or weekly testing was upheld while the CMS mandate on healthcare workers at Medicare- and Medicaid-certified facilities and suppliers (other than physicians’ offices) was allowed to be enforced immediately. Why the difference?
The Court stated that CMS has long imposed conditions on funding, including the protection of the health and safety of beneficiaries as the Secretary determines appropriate. But the government has less power over workers paid by private industry.
In the 1950s, the debate was over federal aid to education. My sage 7th grade math teacher, W.R. Keith (WoRK), told my mother, “If you take their money, they’ll tell you how wide to make the door.” And eventually, as he probably could not imagine, tell you to teach the children that they are an oppressor or victim based on skin color, that they can and possibly should change their sex, and that there are no right or wrong answers to math problems.
The decision on the CMS mandate implies that the federal government thinks that it owns workers paid with federal money and can demand that they take a product with no long-term safety data, unprecedented numbers of reports of adverse effects including death or permanent disability (which the Court did not even consider), disregard for natural immunity, and no evidence that it reduces workplace transmission of disease.
As Justice Thomas wrote in his dissent, “These cases are not about the efficacy or importance of COVID–19 vaccines. They are only about whether CMS has the statutory authority to force healthcare workers, by coercing their employers, to undergo a medical procedure they do not want and cannot undo.” We presume, he states, that Congress does not hide “fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague or ancillary provisions.”
Justice Alito, also dissenting, wrote: “Today, however, most federal law is not made by Congress. It comes in the form of rules issued by unelected administrators. In order to give individuals and entities who may be seriously impacted by agency rules at least some opportunity to make their views heard and to have them given serious consideration, Congress has clearly required that agencies comply with basic procedural safeguards…. In these cases, the relevant agency did none of those things, and the Court rewards this extraordinary departure from ordinary principles of administrative procedure (https://tinyurl.com/ycku3fsy).
In the per curium ruling, the Court admitted that promises made by President Lyndon Johnson are null and void: “Lastly, the rule does not run afoul of the directive in §1395 that federal officials may not ‘exercise any supervision or control over the… manner in which medical services are provided, or over the selection [or] tenure…of any officer or employee of’ any facility. That reading of section 1395 would mean that nearly every condition of participation the Secretary has long insisted upon is unlawful.”
As indeed it is.
The Impact on Medicine
AAPS surveys have long predicted an exodus of physicians. In 2003, 62% of respondents said they planned to retire at an earlier age than expected 5 years previously, citing “increased government interference,” followed by “increased regulatory burden.” Money ranked number six. (https://tinyurl.com/5v8yf9zz).
The AMA is now talking about the “great resignation,” stating that “one in five physicians say it is likely they will leave their current practice within two years” (tinyurl.com/2p89uz48). It suggests “making employees feel valued,” with no mention of mandates or Medicare constraints and threats.
The COVID vaccine mandate could cause the British National Health Service to lose 6% of its workforce or 80,000 workers (https://tinyurl.com/musa6nby).
As Lee Beecher, M.D., points out, mandates make the jobs of medical workers even less desirable. We can expect the quality of workers as a group to keep decreasing. Intelligent young people will try to avoid this career path even more than now.
The Only Escape
Short of death or abandoning their profession, the last option physicians have, to avoid constant pandering to their owners, is to opt out of federal programs. “There’s only one ethical ‘single payer,’ here or abroad,” writes a Minnesota internist, “our next patient!” Government is the problem, never the answer.
Some are building a parallel private system, and there is a desperate need for facilities willing to offer COVID-19 treatment outside the Fauci/NIH lockstep protocol that is apparently de rigueur (with positive and negative “incentives,” https://tinyurl.com/3zt3bu3f) in almost all American hospitals. There should be many physicians and nurses available to staff it.
It is human nature to endure adverse circumstances, as most Jewish physicians did in Nazi Germany, hoping they will be temporary. It’s as described in a horrifying clip from The Silence of the Lambs (https://tinyurl.com/mud5hw63). Clarice opened the gate to the pen. The lambs who were about to be slaughtered could have run—but didn’t.
We must nonetheless try to save as many as we can.
Vaccination Data
150,000. After a judge ruled that FDA and Pfizer would have to answer their FOIA requests over a few months, not 55 to 75 years, Pfizer’s “Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports” reveals that it received more than 150,000 serious adverse event reports within 3 months of rolling out its COVID shot (https://tinyurl.com/562d7mxx).
10 Red Flags. FDA’s risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine in children aged 5–11 is “shoddy” and “used tortured logic (that would be rejected by any proper academic journal) in order to reach a predetermined result that is not based in science,” writes Toby Rogers (https://tinyurl.com/2p8ane8x).
NNTV = 915,641. Using Pfizer and CDC data, the number of children needed to be vaccinated to avert a single COVID death is 915,641, or 1,831,282 per injection (tinyurl.com/bd86hm34).
50:50? Is it a pandemic of the unvaccinated? Some say it’s 50:50; some say spread is worse from the vaccinated, writes Dr. Paul Alexander (tinyurl.com/25xatzuy). The CDC identifies four of the top five U.S. counties with the highest percentage of fully vaccinated population (99.9–84.3%) as “high” transmission counties (https://tinyurl.com/4nvmt8n7).
500,000 Deaths/year. This mortality from tobacco use is not a high enough threshold to trigger a compelling government interest in meaningfully curtailing use (https://tinyurl.com/bp7857n4).
150 Times. The mortality from COVID injections appears to be more than 150 times the rate of 0.8 deaths/million doses of smallpox vaccine, one of several ways in which mandates fail the Jacobson test, write Harvey Risch and Gerard Bradley (ibid.).
30,000 Menstrual Irregularities. Although no menstrual problems have been acknowledged as a potential side effect, the UK flag system has >30,000 reports (tinyurl.com/4x2cbwk2).
International Dispatches
Germany. A nurse being fired for declining the jab states that there are hardly any COVID patients in a large Berlin hospital, but many young patients in the cardiac unit (tinyurl.com/2p8p7nkt).
UK. Official guidance has been published on “rare” post-jab myocarditis. “Where appropriate the patient should be seen face to face and this assessment should include their vital signs.” A cardiac MRI may be indicated (https://tinyurl.com/y3etdszy).
EU. President Ursula von der Leyen, “one of those figures most people have never heard of but who decides everything that matters,” called for the compulsory vaccination of half-a-billion people and the dumping of the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation, writes Mark Steyn (tinyurl.com/5xuucwu3).
Global. “Build back better” (https://tinyurl.com/2vyczd9r).
“When we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.”
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1954
FDA-Authorized or Approved COVID Drugs
Remdesivir (Veklury™). Fauci’s “standard of care” is now approved for out-patient use also. See NIH Table 2f for comparisons with non-approved drugs (tinyurl.com/pf63p2t2). WHO recommends against its use (tinyurl.com/ytv6sdcw). The risk of acute renal failure is 14 times the expected rate (https://tinyurl.com/ycktkavw).
Baricitinib (Olumiant™). Available under EUA for oxygen-requiring patients, it has a black-box warning for causing blood clots (https://tinyurl.com/46yukfz8).
Tofacitinib (Xeljanz™). This Janus kinase inhibitor, found to have unclear efficacy in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 pneumonia (tinyurl.com/yckhjje9), has a black-box warning for “serious infections and malignancy” (tinyurl.com/mr248xt4).
Paxlovid™. Pfizer’s touted “wonder drug” is a combination of a protease inhibitor and the HIV drug ritonavir, which is needed to prevent its rapid breakdown but has many serious adverse effects (tinyurl.com/45dhu98t). Ivermectin, Daniel Horowitz points out, is a far more effective protease inhibitor and has 19 additional mechanisms of action (tinyurl.com/ydzmuyef).
Molnupiravir. Merck’s nucleoside analog was abandoned as an influenza treatment because of its mutagenic action and the risk of mutant viruses. Even the FDA advisory committee admitted that the drug poses a risk of birth defects (ibid.).
FDA is at least acknowledging the need for early treatment, but despite the dubious effectiveness and poor safety of its green-lighted products, the war against long-approved drugs, and the doctors who prescribe them, continues (tinyurl.com/2s46a28k).
It’s about the Money
It’s not about ivermectin, writes Beth Brelie. “It’s about what COVID-19 exposed in America’s health care system. The federal government, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies hold the reins on what care hospital administrators can offer. They never looked at your chart, but have a say in your treatment, and doctors who stray from administrative protocol can kiss their careers goodbye.” Culprits include the shortfalls in Medicare and Medicaid payments; the medical-loss-ratio provision in the Affordable Care Act; Accountable Care Organizations and Pay for Performance, which require matching diagnosis and treatment codes in the electronic record; and quality improvement organizations that assign the equivalent of a social credit score. For 15 years, “doctors have been unable to think on their own.” Even what they must study for continuing medical education is determined (tinyurl.com/3w6f8tav).
AAPS Calendar
February 11-12, 2022. Winter meeting, Venice, Florida.
October 13-15, 2022. 79th annual meeting, Springfield, MO.
ACTION OF THE MONTH
If you offer early treatment for COVID-19 by protocol similar to those at c19protocols.com, please add your name to a list we are compiling to help patients at .
Flashback
In 1974, in AAPS v. Weinberger, which challenged Professional Standards Review Organizations, government attorneys argued: “Patients whose medical care is provided by public funds have no constitutional right to whatever care [their physicians] using the “highest standards of medical practice” … may “judge necessary” … or to obtain that care “from a physician *** of their choice” [emphasis added]. Moreover, they stated that “Congress need not agree to pay for whatever care appellants desire to provide” and can, §1801 notwithstanding, “influence both the standard of care and the identity of its provider by prior review no less than by review designed to achieve the same purpose” (https://tinyurl.com/33w5af7j). The Supreme Court declined an appeal.
AMA Strives to ‘Cement ACA’s Success’
Thrilled about the Affordable Care Act’s “legal status affirmed by three Supreme Court decisions,” AMA president Gerald E. Harmon, M.D., writes that further refinements will enable ACA to “fulfill its mandate” to get all Americans covered. He credits AMA’s Voice for the Uninsured campaign, launched in 2007, with building momentum that culminated in the adoption of the ACA just a few years later (tinyurl.com/yj78nvjd). Medical practice independent of control by the government/insurance/pharmaceutical/hospital complex becomes rarer still.
The latest case, brought by Texas and others (tinyurl.com/mrxz97ux), was dismissed for lack of standing without considering any of the substantial issues (tinyurl.com/n87vtka4).
SCOTUS Absent on Individual Rights
The Supreme Court’s decisions on both OSHA and CMS mandates were also based on narrow technical grounds, with no findings of fact, no reference to Jacobson, and no reference to individual rights. Apparently, both sides agree that “experts” should decide health questions, but differ on which experts or which level of government should be involved. “Nothing in the Constitution supports this approach,” writes Toby Rogers. “The Constitution did not envision a society of technocrats making decisions on behalf of society. The founders were well aware of the fact that power corrupts everyone and so they returned decision-making on matters of fact to ordinary citizens” (tinyurl.com/2yf7xuxa).
Hospitals Block 90% of IVM Legal Actions
In the past year there have been more than 100 court cases trying to get access to ivermectin for very ill patients believed to have little chance of surviving. Only about 10% of these legal actions have been successful. Hospitals file endless motions and sometimes go to appeals courts to defeat or at least delay favorable decisions until the deathbed patient succumbs—despite evidence that IVM sometimes saves patients even very late in the course of the disease. Joel Hirschhorn reviews cases from several states, concluding that the only consistency is that hospitals invariably fight all attempts and are totally on the side of government agencies. Most judges are stubbornly wed to the idea that hospitals know what works best, despite the very high death rate of late-stage COVID patients on their protocol (tinyurl.com/yrytne89).
They’ve Got a Little List
If you apply for a religious exemption to the COVID vaccine, which may be the only way to avoid it if you want to keep your job, you are likely to be on a list. Some 25 federal agencies are actively tracking religious exemption requests from employees of federal agencies along with any contractors, consultants, interns, and volunteers associated with them. Notices of the new tracking system were only made public in the Federal Register. The Department of Transportation’s database, in particular, became effective on the day it was published, with no opportunity for public comment (https://tinyurl.com/y4fuvswc).
If you request free home test kits, your information will be used to provide company and product fulfillment information about that testing kit to a federal executive agency. Collection is authorized by 39 U.S.C. 401, 403, 404, and 411. Information may be disclosed as required by law, e.g., “to government agencies in connection with decisions as necessary” (tinyurl.com/3s7c8yam).
Tip of the Month: We are hearing frightening reports of what happens when a COVID patient is admitted to a hospital. A hospital may claim that the patient is unable to make medical decisions for himself, and then deny visitation by family while the hospital makes improper decisions to further its own agenda. To overcome this, everyone should designate in writing a trusted person to hold the medical power of attorney, also called an advance directive. Rather than attempt to specify all treatment instructions, which a hostile hospital or court can misinterpret, the better approach is usually to designate a trusted person who knows what the patient would want. Listing only one person, and then a successor person if the first designee is unavailable, might be best. Then the hospital, when presented with that document, should abide by the person’s decisions. States vary in their requirements of what should be in the document, so it is best to check online about your own state.
Criminal Investigation Opened
On Dec 20, 2021, a group of activists and law firms lodged complaints against UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), according to Unity News Network (UNN), which was founded in 2018 as “an alternative to the old media in the UK” (https://tinyurl.com/mpecf43r). The complaints allege numerous serious crimes including misfeasance and misconduct in public office, which are the subject of Metropolitan Police Crime Number 6029679/21 and International Criminal Court (The Hague) case number OTP‐CR‐473/21.
Canadian Physician Detained, Drugged
Dr. Mel Bruchet, an 81-year-old retired family physician, was taken from his home in handcuffs, detained in a psychiatric hospital, and forcibly medicated with antipsychotics. He had called attention to an increase in stillbirths in British Columbia in COVID-vaccinated mothers, spoken out about the blocking of ivermectin, and together with Dr. Daniel Nagase filed complaints against the Executive Board of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia alleging financial conflicts of interest. He was interviewed by Sam Dubé (https://tinyurl.com/3jm35mw7).
Correspondence
Another Mandate Blocked. The Biden Administration suffered another setback on Jan 21 when U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown ruled that the jab-or-no-job mandate for federal employees was “overbroad,” noting that even full-time remote workers were not exempt (tinyurl.com/2p867269). Like hospitals that conduct sham peer review and ruin physicians’ careers and reputations, authoritarians always appeal. As the Wall Street Journal points out, with 98% of federal workers already vaccinated, Biden’s appeal seems to be “more about punishing than protecting people.” Perhaps Biden refuses to back down despite legal defeat because mandates and coercion are popular with progressive voters. A Rasmussen poll reports that 59% of Democrat voters would support confining the unvaccinated to their homes, and nearly half also thought the government should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of vaccines on social media (WSJ Jan 22-23, 2022). Nikita Khrushchev predicted in 1959 that “your children’s children will live under Communism.” He may be proved correct.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Hospital Care Disaster. Ohio Governor DeWine has deployed additional National Guard members as a response to shortages of health workers, especially nurses, in a COVID-19 surge, bringing the total to 2,300. Qualified skilled professionals are being removed and replaced with clueless, untrained big-government national guards. I am witnessing this all first-hand; it is worse than a third-world country! The nurses are all outsourced and do 12-hour shifts and are off to another state the next day. All patients are highly endangered by the substandard care.
While hospitals still are not allowing loved ones in to see patients, there is something that might be done. Each hospital has to have an R.N. patient advocate who can get people ADA Life Partner Status and bypass the nonsense. They can get one-on-one contact access any time, any day, even if COVID lockdown mandates and no-visiting policies are being enforced. The Americans with Disabilities Act is federal, so it overrides state laws everywhere. Usually the nurse advocate will inform the patients’ doctors that patients want to be with their loved ones. It goes as an order in the patients’ medical record. ADA Contacts are to stay in the rooms with the patients. See, for example, https://tinyurl.com/2vy435p2.
I have witnessed many cases of ADA violations, especially in prisons and jails; cases can be won. §504 of the Rehabilitation Act and §1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) also apply.
Gina Reghetti, D.O., Warren, OH
The Cost of Mandates. Biden’s vaccine mandates would put nearly 700,000 Kentucky workers (34% of the labor force) at risk of losing their jobs. Using Biden’s figures, compliance would cost Kentucky businesses $50 million (tinyurl.com/2p873fdf).
Sen. Rand Paul, M.D.
Slipped through Facebook Censor. An ER nurse posted that 3 hours into her shift she had treated a 36-year-old with a heart attack, a 44-year-old with a stroke, and a 29-year-old with a lower leg blood clot (first two critical). All recently got a COVID shot.
Kathryn Serkes, Denver, CO
Facebook Censors BMJ. The actions of Facebook, Twitter, CNN, et al., are not much different from those of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus. Censorship is tolerance. Bias is equality. Zuckerspeak is diversity. Unauthorized truth is hate. Why did nothing get done when Republicans might have acted?
BMJ’s report, “Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial,” calls into question the “science” behind Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Because the report does not unquestioningly praise the jabs as “safe and effective,” Facebook “fact-checked” it and deemed it as containing “false information” (tinyurl.com/2bc6x88k).
Joseph Scherzer, M.D., Paradise Valley, AZ
CDC Misconduct. I have personal knowledge of many non-forthcoming actions by the CDC, comparable to what a former director told me about refusal to discontinue a narrative about AIDS prevention that they knew to be false but believed had to be maintained to avert a perceived negative. Especially egregious is an MMWR article that cleverly manipulates and obfuscates data to appear to support the position that naturally immune people should be vaccinated. Attorneys have threatened to file a formal complaint and “hold the authors of this study individually accountable for the deprivation of millions of Americans of their rights, including a number of previously infected individuals whose employers directly relied on this deceptive study to terminate their employment” (tinyurl.com/nhavb98j).
Bose Ravenel, M.D., Winston-Salem, NC
True Believers’ Self-Justification. The pathological mechanism of projection prevails among leftists. As Victor Davis Hanson notes, the privileged damn privilege, colluders invent collusion, deniers scream denialist, and racists cry racism (tinyurl.com/muup5ys9). True believers see malice and evil in others who disagree, causing the current severe polarization.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
