AAPS Statement regarding the July 29 Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) call to delicense physicians who “generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation”
The FSMB statement was followed less than a month later by an article in the widely distributed publication MedPage Today lamenting that no physicians had so far been disciplined for “COVID-19 falsehoods.”
AAPS has the following concerns:
- Complaints to medical boards are generally kept confidential unless and until an unfavorable adjudication is made, but MedPage Today is publicly listing names even before an investigation can be done.
- The names include highly respected physicians, with hundreds of peer-reviewed articles to their credit.
- These physicians have treated hundreds or thousands of COVID-19 patients with excellent results. Physicians can be ruined even if not a single patient is harmed.
- The article assumes guilt and apparently favors silencing dissenters immediately: “Physicians who have advanced false COVID information…are free to continue to misinform their patients and the public, even as the Delta variant surges.”
- “Falsehoods” and “misinformation” are not defined, but apparently mean anything that suggests treatment outside “recommendations” of the National Institutes of Health, or that expresses any doubt about the safety or effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.
- AAPS and the few physicians who offer early treatment or who will consider a medical vaccine exemption are being deluged with calls from patients whose doctors refuse to treat them or even to return their calls.
- Most patients’ treatment—or nontreatment—is being dictated by “expert” bureaucrats. If hundreds of thousands die unnecessarily because of expert therapeutic nihilism, the experts are free of any liability, and patients and families will receive no compensation.
- If their physicians are intimidated by threats to their livelihood, patients cannot expect to receive the treatment their doctor thinks is best.
- Optimal treatment results from open discussion and freedom, not from censorship and centralized control by bodies like FSMB.
