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AAPS News July 2024 – Lawfare

 Volume 80, no. 7  July 2024

Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent. It is a type of warfare.

According to the website lawfaremedia.org, “The name Lawfare refers both to the use of law as a weapon of conflict and, perhaps more importantly, to the reality that America remains at war with itself over the law governing its warfare with others—as well as the law governing its own national security strategy.”

Topics include the war on terrorism and extremism, and international conflicts in Ukraine and Israel, but the most prominent ones recently are the Trump trials and the Jan 6, 2021, “insurrection.” This site, published in cooperation with Brookings, is clearly unsympathetic to former President Trump, and does not discuss a “war of America with itself” over political dissent or radical cultural movements (also see AAPS News, June 2024, for lawfare over transgenderism).

Lawfare as a means of influencing elections extends beyond Trump himself and protesters on Jan 6 to members of his Administration. Its use also has profound implications for medicine.

Already in federal prison is the President’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro, Ph.D. He is the sole non-felony inmate in the entire penitentiary—for contempt of Congress. He had claimed executive privilege and refused to testify against President Trump. All Americans should know what he did during COVID-19.

In February 2020, amidst the ambivalence of the senior health leadership and the rapidly developing chaos, Peter Navarro developed an ingenious stop-gap strategy to rapidly acquire N-95 respirators, disinfectants, and other protective equipment until domestic production could catch up. Enclosed-head powered respirators,  mandatory for the safety of intensive-care hospital personnel under OSHA Health Worker Safety Guidelines, were swiftly manufactured to safeguard the nurses and doctors at the institutions that followed those standards. These actions  helped to save hundreds of medical workers, writes Steven Hatfill, M.D., who served in the White House as a medical expert for Navarro.

By March, international researchers were demonstrating efficacy for chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in early treatment. The de facto leader of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Anthony Fauci, M.D., ignored the accumulating data on HCQ or dismissed it as “anecdotal,” Dr. Hatfill states.

Navarro, a Ph.D. economist, understands statistics and grasped the role for HCQ. He flung a stack of research papers across the table at Dr. I-am-the-Science Fauci in the White House Situation Room, saying “this is science.” After evidence became available in August 2020 that showed a 47% to 66% decrease in mortality in thousands of hospitalized patients given HCQ immediately upon their admission, Navarro scheduled a teleconference with Dr. Fauci in the War Room of the Old Executive Office Building to discuss early-use HCQ. Dr. Fauci had only five flawed studies to present, all in late stage, and asserted that every drug certified by the FDA was the result of a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). “That is complete nonsense!” shouted Dr. Hatfill.

RCTs have major limitations when assessing drugs for infectious diseases. Only 14% of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Treatment Guidelines are based on RCTs.

Navarro lost the battle over the FDA’s emergency use authorization for HCQ. He had, however, managed to stockpile 62 million doses of CQ and HCQ before India shut off exports.

The effects of this defeat likely affected thousands of physicians and hundreds of thousands of patients, as lawfare-using administrative agencies suppressed prescribing nationwide, based on FDA’s statements. Many physicians faced battles with licensure boards. Some were disciplined or even delicensed for prescribing repurposed drugs or disagreeing with non-evidence-based diktats on masking, distancing, etc., emanating from Fauci’s domain.

Despite Dr. Fauci, as many as 20 million Americans, estimated from national stockpile use and telemedicine prescriptions, have successfully taken early-use HCQ for COVID-19, to  prevent their possible hospitalization and death.

How many were denied HCQ? Before adjourning the teleconference, Navarro left Fauci and his conflict-of-interest-ridden COVID-19 treatment group a verbal note for the future, stating essentially that “if Fauci was wrong about the early use of HCQ, then he was going to be personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

Dr. Fauci also bears significant responsibility for lockdowns, school closures, and forced reliance on toxic remdesivir. His actions paved the way for coercive use of COVID “vaccines.”

Dr. Fauci left government under the cloud of the scandal of his funding of a Chinese military-affiliated virus laboratory and his inaccurate denial of coronavirus gain-of-function experiments. His 480-page book On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service will be published soon—reportedly for a $5 million advance.

Navarro has begun serving a 4-month sentence, and has accumulated nearly $2 million in legal costs (tinyurl.com/2fzf6su4).

“The prosecution of a senior presidential advisor asserting executive privilege conflicts with the constitutional independence required by the doctrine of separation of powers,” his lawyers stated. The Supreme Court declined to intervene (https://tinyurl.com/2pwdwhe3).

Lawfare is war—against the rule of law, the autonomy of physicians, the rights of citizens, and science itself. The body count will not be publicized and will not be known.


AAPS Denounces ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion’

         “Our country has been besieged by the Marxist-based ideology, known as ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ which is infiltrating the practice of medicine through medical schools, biomedical research, hiring practices, and government regulations. Intrusion of DEI ideology into medical education and medical care is dangerous for patients and compels AAPS to issue this statement” (https://tinyurl.com/484pepxz).

         Key points of the statement include:

·  Medical ethics based on the Oath of Hippocrates obliges physicians to provide the best possible care individualized for each patient. Physicians need to have the intellectual capacity, motivation, academic achievement, and moral compass to meet this obligation.

·  Standards for medical students and postgraduate trainees must be the same regardless of race, gender, or other social metrics, and include a level of competence measured by academic achievement and standardized tests. They must not include adherence to, or promotion of, ideologies that contradict fundamental Hippocratic principles of medical ethics.

·  Patients must not be prioritized, or discriminated against, based on race, gender, or other politically favored, or disfavored status. 

·  Vigorous and urgent actions must be launched to eliminate the destructive DEI ideology from every aspect of the medical profession. Patients’ lives depend on it.

 Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D., R.I.P.

AAPS grieves the loss of our dear friend and leading warrior, Marilyn Singleton, M.D., J.D. (1947-2024). A third generation physician, she graduated from Stanford University when Black students weren’t supposed to go there, then from medical school at the University of California San Francisco. She was a resident at UCSF and Harvard’s Beth Israel, and an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins. She completed law school at UC Berkeley while working as an anesthesiologist. In 2012, she ran for Congress with a message of personal freedom and limited government.

Dr. Singleton served as president of AAPS in 2018-2019. Her many brilliant op-ed pieces and journal articles are available on aapsonline.org; she compiled our very popular section on mask-facts. Her legal expertise was invaluable in our legal initiatives.

Recently, she conducted numerous interviews with physician leaders in her America Out Loud Pulse podcast. As a visiting fellow of Do No Harm, she was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and was published in the Washington Post explaining the dangers of “implicit bias” training in medicine.

She has left a legacy of eloquent advocacy for ethical medicine and for a return to principles of constitutional government and a restoration of our free American republic.

 X X X

“There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer

AAPS Signs Declaration to Protect Children

 The Doctors Protecting Children Declaration, authored by the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) and signed by AAPS and numerous other organizations, calls on prominent American medical institutions to halt current harmful protocols promoted for children and adolescents who express discomfort with their biological sex (https://tinyurl.com/45j7a7y4).

President-elect Erika LeBaron, D.O., M.S.N., represented AAPS at the press conference announcing the declaration (https://tinyurl.com/3yys5d7z). She stated that “the protocols currently being pushed on children and adolescents violate the fundamental precepts of Hippocratic medicine which are to ‘prescribe regimen for the good of patients’ and ‘do no harm.’”  She added: “It is past time for our profession to end the harm being done and instead provide care to children that is both rooted in science and principles of medical ethics that put patients, not political ideology, first.”

“Gender affirming” clinics in the U.S. base their treatments upon the “Standards of Care” developed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which collaborates with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) (tinyurl.com/92y8pzvu). Age minimums were not lowered (to 14 for hormonal therapy, 15 for mastectomies, 17 for genital surgery) under pressure from the Biden regime due to concerns about political opposition (https://tinyurl.com/6btxkrem).

WPATH standards have been recently criticized in the Cass Report commissioned by the UK’s NHS (https://tinyurl.com/pr2r5u6t). The 387-page report was summarized for the CMDA  by Andrè Van Mol, M.D.  (https://tinyurl.com/ypx8vves).

The Declaration focuses on the scientific case against transgender treatments.

There can be back-and-forth arguments about the merits and flaws of pro and con articles, but fundamentally it is not a scientific argument, writes AAPS executive director Jane Orient, M.D. “The transgender ideology needs to be engaged on the philosophical/religious ground. If the premises are absurd (e.g., ‘being trapped in the wrong body’) and the advocated methods (castrating and mutilating children) are immoral or criminal, then scores on psychological surveys and p-values are distractions and pretexts attempting to justify the indefensible” (https://tinyurl.com/bdzjxcrt).

The Declaration ruins the narrative that “science is settled” and that “all experts” agree. So far, the mainstream medical organizations it addresses have failed to respond. Many left-wing-aligned individuals have expressed anger on social media. There have been two negative ad hominem articles, on Substack and in the New Republic (tinyurl.com/mpk3xnhd).

AAPS Calendar

July 13. Missouri chapter meeting, Lake Ozark, MO.

Sep 18-21. 81st Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX.

ACTION OF THE MONTH

Scholarships are available to help medical students and residents attend the AAPS 81st Annual Meeting, Sept 18-21, 2024, in San Antonio. Details at https://aapsonline.org/2024am.

AAPS Wins Landmark 1st Amendment Victory

         In July 2022, the AAPS Educational Foundation sued three medical specialty boards (ABIM, ABFM, ACOG) and the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (AAPS News, August 2022). The district court dismissed the case, with prejudice, for lack of standing, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously in favor of AAPS on key issues. Judge James C. Ho wrote a separate, powerful statement in support of the 1st Amendment.

         “In this case, a medical association contends that certain medical boards and federal officials have conspired—and continue to conspire—to censor and even destroy the careers of any physician who dares to express the ‘wrong’ viewpoints on a wide range of medical topics, including but not limited to Dr. Anthony Fauci, COVID-19 lockdown policies, mask mandates, vaccines, and abortion” (https://tinyurl.com/bdhnp8y3).

Judge Ho noted the need for “open and rigorous discussion—not self-censorship and cancellation.” He cited reports that “At the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, the longtime National Institutes of Health official [David Morens] encouraged colleagues to evade federal records requirements…[to] protect his high-profile former boss Anthony S. Fauci and others from unwanted scrutiny.” Fauci’s former top adviser “worked to keep the public in the dark and thwart investigations into Covid’s origins.”

Judge Ho disagreed with the majority that the dissolution of the Disinformation Governance Board mooted the case. “[W]hen government officials voluntarily cease some action in response to litigation, courts are supposed to be skeptical. That’s because an official ‘could engage in unlawful conduct, stop when sued to have the case declared moot, then pick up where he left off, repeating this cycle until he achieves all his unlawful ends.’”

 “During oral argument, counsel for the government refused to assure us that the Department would neither reconstitute the Board nor replicate its functions through other means.”

Judge Ho concludes that: “As the Supreme Court recently reminded us, our Constitution is premised on our firm conviction that ‘viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society’…. Intolerance of differing views contradicts our Founding principles.”

The Eighth Amendment

The 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which comes almost verbatim from the 1689 English Bill of Rights, reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” 

What does this mean? We no longer use the rack or thumbscrews, but is prolonged solitary confinement “cruel and unusual”? What about imprisoning an elderly woman with health problems, and canceling her hip surgery, for praying inside an abortion clinic? What about caging a woman with a six-foot-tall male multiply convicted sex offender who now identifies as a woman? Is that a state-prescribed punishment or simply an administrative decision by private prison employees? What about confining an elderly, nonviolent person who filed a form incorrectly with young violent criminals known to beat or rape other inmates?

In The GULAG Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described how the regular criminals brutalized political prisoners. The late Gonzalo Lira described how he was extorted and tortured in a Ukrainian jail—by prisoners, not by guards. One even apologized for beating him, saying he was coerced. Could this happen here? What is an excessive fine (https://tinyurl.com/3r8ej2b8)? One such that a multi-billionaire like Donald Trump cannot pay it, over a matter in which no one suffered a loss? Nearly $1 billion in judgments against Alex Jones for spreading incorrect information? Bankrupting fines over Environmental Protection Agency rules applied to mud puddles? Huge fines on medical practices concerning violations of HIPAA administrative rules? And what about the enormous legal fees the complex process entails? Is “the process is the punishment” concept constitutional?

The tyranny of the courts or the administrative state trickles down to the smallest practice or business.

Whistleblower Threatened with Prison

Houston surgeon Eithan Haim, M.D., has been indicted for alleged HIPAA violations carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison after he revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) had lied about pausing “transgender services” to children (https://tinyurl.com/2fuhh5fk). It had been providing such services in secret to children as young as 11. Dr. Haim released this information as an anonymous whistleblower to Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo, who exposed it in the City Journal.  Soon after, the Texas legislature made such procedures on minors illegal (tinyurl.com/yc5yjpf4). Patient privacy was not compromised, as identifying information had been redacted. However, TCH claims to have suffered financial harm. The federal indictment alleges that Dr. Haim obtained data “under false pretenses, with intent to cause malicious harm to the hospital” (tinyurl.com/53urn9w9).

TCH Nurse Threatened

Following his May 2023 story about Dr. Haim, Vanessa Sivadge, R.N., approached Rufo to claim that TCH was pushing “gender-affirming care” on young patients while ignoring their underlying psychological problems. Two weeks later, two FBI agents followed her home. “They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker,” she reported. “They said I was ‘not safe’ at work and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.”

Sivadge has also accused doctors at TCH of Medicaid fraud for billing gender interventions for minors to the program. The state of Texas prohibits Medicaid funds from being used for “sex change operations” (https://tinyurl.com/3xu39zez).

Tip of the Month: Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is investigating harm by private equity in medical care. Between 2001 and 2020, the annual investments by private equity in acquiring hospitals, medical practices, nursing homes, etc., increased by a factor of ten. Private equity typically extracts the assets, such as real estate owned by hospitals, while piling on suffocating debt. When it all collapses, patients are stranded, while tax loopholes enable private equity to write off their losses against unrelated profits, and come out ahead. For example, after a private equity firm took $695 million in fees and dividend recapitalizations from a hospital in San Antonio, it shut the hospital down in 2019 and laid off almost a thousand workers. Beware of giving private equity managers control of your medical practice or hospital.

Correspondence

Beyond ‘Disruptive.’ It’s bad enough that we have the vague and subjective “disruptive” physician concept where facial expression, tone of voice, and body language can be used to prosecute a physician. Now the Oregon Medical Board has added  “microaggressions” to the definition of “unprofessional conduct.” It is mandatory for physicians to report such behavior or face discipline themselves. Microaggressions are grouped with fraud, sexual assault, and ordering unnecessary or harmful surgeries. There is no glossary of forbidden language, but terms such as “melting pot” have been considered racist (tinyurl.com/tj2wny34). My advice—talk as little as possible at work, about professional matters only.  No jokes. No off-the-cuff comments. But be friendly. I am aware of one case in which a doctor was accused of not smiling enough when passing people in the hall.

 Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY

A Republic? As the Trump verdict shows, the ruling party in the U.S. has criminalized opposition and made normal politics impossible. The party that is so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it’s prepared to invent crimes out of whole cloth to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you’d want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war. America is not a land of laws, but of men: whether for the 45th president or a “niche Canadian,” we’re in basic “Who? Whom?” territory, as the Leninists would say. I’ve got just two lousy cases, and I’m ruined—utter ruination is the difference between the U.S. legal system and the rest of the West. Will appeals courts intervene? Maybe, but a judges’ republic is a contradiction in terms. Much of the U.S. is now institutionally evil (e.g., the bodily mutilation of middle-school girls). On America’s watch, all of Western civilization is sliding off the cliff. Can this be reversed?

Mark Steyn, https://tinyurl.com/588fb2ju

Missouri Sues N.Y. over Lawfare. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced he is filing a lawsuit against the state of New York for what he called the “direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump.” He alleges that the investigations and subsequent prosecutions of Trump appear to have been conducted in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice (https://tinyurl.com/p32fnrvz).  Whenever the DOJ goes after an election candidate, it is election interference. Lawyers who have grown up to disrespect the law and be gamers know exactly what they are doing. The Missouri AG is on to something. 

 John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX

Globalism Is the New Communism. Rebranded as globalism, communism has its tentacles dug deeply into the flesh of nations on such a large scale that Stalin and Khrushchev would be envious. Apparatchiks are using environmentalism, illegal immigration, hate speech (which is any speech they disagree with), and new racial segregation to keep the country divided. The concept of “class struggle” and racism are the tools of communist propaganda and agitation. As communism was never taught in U.S. schools, young generations do not understand what it is.

Ileana Johnson, Ed.D., https://tinyurl.com/4dzjabdd

Does the FBI Want You? While trying to find a suspected money launderer, federal investigators obtained court-approved subpoenas for any YouTube viewers who watched tutorials on mapping via drones over a one-week period. The subpoena included names, addresses, telephone numbers, and browsing history for Google accounts for as many as 30,000 people, and IP addresses for non-Google  users (tinyurl.com/mrycr2f7).

Willie Soon, Ph.D., Salem, MA

CDC’s Failure. By the end of 2023, at least 87% of Americans had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to and thus had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, this in spite of the mammoth, protracted and booster-repeated vaccination campaign that led to about 90% of Americans taking the shots. Public health policies caused unnecessary and avoidable damage to millions of lives.

Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/58us9cab

[Peter Navarro’s Substack account is temporarily being handled and managed independently of him.]

Doctor Indicted for Not Giving Vaccine. Michael Kirk Moore, M.D., of Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah has been indicted and could face 15 years in prison for allegedly disposing of $28,000 worth of COVID-19 vaccine instead of injecting it into patients who did not want it. He also provided them with vaccine cards (https://tinyurl.com/4ytz6p47). The prosecution has filed a Motion in Limine to preclude a necessity defense.

Craig Wax, D.O., Mullica Hill, NJ

TCH Doctor Teamed up with TG Activists and PhRMA.  Richard Ogden Roberts III, M.D., alleged to have committed Medicaid fraud in billing for transgender treatments (see p 3),  is in an alliance with transgender activist groups backed by drug companies that manufacture puberty blockers and hormones used in “transitioning” (https://tinyurl.com/4fr2vn9c).

Richard Amerling, M.D., St. Augustine, FL

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