This election year presents an unprecedented medical issue, observes the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS): whether Americans can go back to work and rebuild their lives and our economy, as President Trump promises, or endure a stringent, federally dictated lockdown, as they fear Joe Biden may impose.
Joe Biden stated that “no serious doctor” agrees with Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, that COVID-related restrictions on businesses and human activities should be loosened. “Nobody thinks he makes any sense.” Kamala Harris, during a Michigan visit, has blamed President Trump for not doing enough quickly enough. They promise to “follow the science” and public health experts, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, on “when to issue stay-at-home orders,” and to “implement mask mandates nationwide.”
AAPS issued the following comments on this issue:
- The Great Barrington Declaration, to which Biden refers, has been signed by more than 11,000 physicians and scientists worldwide.
- The Declaration states: “As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.”
- Initial lockdown orders, which were supposed to last 15 days, were based on computer models that were wildly wrong in predicting 2 million U.S. deaths.
- Current policies, especially in states such as Michigan, California, New York, and Oregon, are violating basic constitutional rights and destroying the livelihoods of people arbitrarily declared to be “non-essential.”
- There is no “evidence-based medicine” showing effectiveness of lockdowns and mask-wearing in lowering the ultimate mortality from COVID-19.
- Dr. Fauci predicts that life will not get back to normal until the end of 2021.
- There is vast evidence for the effectiveness of early out-patient treatments denied to most Americans because of statements and actions by official agencies. For example, for hydroxychloroquine, “the probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 121 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 27 million (p = 0.000000037).”
- When Dr. Fauci was AIDS czar in 1987, some 17,000 patients may have died needlessly because he refused to suggest prophylactic sulfa drugs to prevent pneumocystis pneumonia while waiting for more studies. Applying the same “no early treatment” strategy to COVID may be responsible for 100,000 needless deaths, according to Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch.
“This election may determine whether health policy and allowable treatments will be dictated by a central bureaucracy, imposing views like those of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and Dr. Anthony Fauci—or whether Americans will have the freedom to make their own decisions,” stated AAPS executive director Jane M. Orient, M.D.