Ralph Marxen Jr. had just turned 70 and was enjoying life with his wife of 49 years, Lynda, and his adult children and grandchildren. The Minnetonka, Minnesota, native was in good health and, according to his daughter, Nicole Riggs, walked long distances daily and wasn’t on any medications.
In August 2021, several members of Riggs’ household contracted COVID-19, including, presumably, her parents. A week later, while most family members were recovering, Marxen’s condition deteriorated leading him to be admitted to Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis on Aug. 23, 2021.
Marxen would never leave the hospital — he died there on Sept. 7, 2021.
During his stay, Marxen, who had not received a COVID-19 vaccine, was administered more than 50 medications, including remdesivir, vancomycin, fentanyl and midazolam, and in the days prior to his death, he was placed on a ventilator.
Riggs toldThe Defender the treatments she and her family requested for Marxen, including ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies and vitamins, were refused.
She said she did not believe her father’s refusal of the COVID-19 vaccines played a role in his illness — in fact, she argued that her father’s non-vaccinated status — and the COVID-19 protocols prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — were factors in the treatment he received from the hospital and its medical staff.
‘Is this a hospital or a prison?’
“My dad went to the ER seeking help for dizziness and nausea,” Riggs said. “He was 70 years old and took no daily meds. He was unvaccinated and refused to take their unreliable PCR tests.”
In a separate interview with Minnesota’s Alpha News, Riggs said that two of her father’s friends had gotten vaccinated “and they both got vax-injured.” As a result, “He was adamant that he was not going to get the vaccine.”
“I think this played a part in him not getting good care,” Riggs told The Defender.
Riggs recounted the chain of events that led her father to end up in the hospital.
“In the middle of August 2021, my household of four, plus my parents, became ill with fever and fatigue, and a few of us had chest congestion,” Riggs said. “Myself, my husband and my two boys were spit-tested for COVID and were all told we were positive for COVID. We assumed my parents had the same.”
But after a week of being sick, she said they noticed that her father “didn’t seem to be bouncing back like the rest of us. He was having trouble walking to the bathroom because he was so weak and dehydrated.”
Due to his older age, his family “decided to call the ambulance and get him checked out,” Riggs said. Paramedics recommended Marxen go to the hospital for further evaluation, so he was admitted on Aug. 23, 2021, after an ER visit.
“From the beginning, the medical records indicate they wanted to get him on remdesivir even though they couldn’t get him to PCR test,” Riggs said.
“Within a day, a friend of the family who had been working with COVID patients for the past year told us to call the hospital and request that my dad be given monoclonal antibodies (a.k.a. Regeneron),” Riggs said. However, the nurse treating her father said he “had never heard of that before, and that was the end of that discussion.”
“That seemed strange to me, but I still trusted them at that time,” Riggs said.
The day after her father was admitted to the hospital, her mother also was admitted, after her oxygen levels dropped to the low 90s.
“My parents were soon hospital room neighbors,” Riggs said. “COVID medications were started, which we later learned was hospital protocol with remdesivir and dexamethasone.”
Despite being in neighboring rooms though, Riggs’ parents could not visit each other. “My mom wanted to go see my dad since he was in the room right next door, but she realized that her bed had an alarm that sounded when she tried to get up. She also learned that both of them were locked in their rooms as well,” Riggs said.
She added:
“My mom’s nurse thought ‘it wasn’t appropriate,’ and refused to let her go see my dad. They had to wait until that nurse was off her shift before the doctor would OK my mom to go into my dad’s room for a short visit.
“Is this a hospital or a prison?”
It wasn’t long before Riggs began to receive more disturbing updates about the treatment her parents were receiving in the hospital.
She told The Defender :
“My brother started a CaringBridge site to keep our whole family updated. It wasn’t long before I started to receive unsettling messages from people I knew and trust. One was from my dad’s old neurological chiropractor, saying ‘no remdesivir and no ventilator, that’s asking to die.’ He also sent me information on how to get a lawyer involved.
“It was then that I started to research and realize the dangers of the deadly hospital protocols put in place by the NIH and CDC, especially for those on Medicare, as the hospital is given a 20% bonus payment if certain steps are followed with those patients, starting with a positive COVID PCR test.”
According to Riggs, this was evident in her father’s medical records.
“One of the doctors actually wrote this in the medical records: ‘I don’t think it’s impossible to use remdesivir without a PCR positive,’” Riggs said, adding, “My dad initially refused a nasal PCR test because he knew they could be inaccurate and wanted to be treated by symptoms, not a PCR positive COVID test result.”
However, the hospital told Marxen and his family this was not possible. According to Riggs, the doctor said, “Certain treatments may not be available without PCR-proven COVID, and that if his condition worsened such that he required intubation, we would run the nasopharyngeal swab.”
“Basically, my dad was told he wouldn’t get access to ‘certain treatments’ until he submitted to their request to be PCR tested,” Riggs said. “And if he got bad enough, they would test him anyway.”
The hospital also told them if Marxen’s condition deteriorated enough that they needed to put him on a ventilator, they would do the test without his permission.
Her father finally “relented” and tested positive for COVID-19. That’s when the hospital administered remdesivir “and many other harmful drugs,” Riggs said, and denied their request for safer alternatives.
‘It all happened so fast’
From this point forward, “It all happened so fast,” Riggs said. Her father was transferred to progressive care on Aug. 26, 2021, and to the ICU the next day.
“My dad was denied visitation by anyone under the guise of ‘COVID isolation,’” Riggs said. “Even my mom, who was in the same hospital with COVID.”
Marxen’s condition quickly deteriorated. “My dad was told he needed to get on the ventilator so he could get relief and a feeding tube,” Riggs said. “By this time, my dad hadn’t slept in two days and hadn’t eaten in five days.”
“After two days in the ICU, he was freaking out, pulling off his mask and pulling out his IV,” Riggs said. “They got him ‘reoriented’ and brought in the doctor. If you knew my dad, you would know that this was totally out of character for him. He was the kindest, most loving man and father. He was one of my best friends.”
“Soon, he felt he had no other option but to be put on a ventilator,” Riggs said. “A decision he had to make scared and alone because we were kept from him … They had finally got him desperate enough to submit to getting on a ventilator.”
Marxen was intubated on Aug. 29, 2021, and placed on fentanyl and propofol, Riggs said, “even though, reading the records, they knew that wasn’t the solution, but they did it anyway.”
Riggs said she and her family again requested monoclonal antibodies be administered, “but were denied because it was too late in the progression of the disease to be a benefit.”
They also requested “vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin,” but were denied “and told they refused to go off of protocol, ‘because the one time we did that, the patient died,’” Riggs added.
“My dad’s medical records indicate vitamin D was ‘deemed not appropriate during this admission,’” Riggs noted. “We asked them to take him off vancomycin because that can make you retain fluid and he was already doing that. They told us no, and that the drug was ‘the gold standard.’”
‘He was kept from everyone that truly loved him’
According to Riggs, she would call the hospital every day at 6 p.m. for updates, and her brother would do so daily at 6 a.m. This continued until Sept. 7, 2021, the day her father would be placed “off quarantine” and allowed to see family members again.
However, “on Sept. 7, we were told that the ‘infectious disease team’ said he needed another seven days of quarantine,” Riggs said. “This decision was not even made by his ICU doctor.”
Instead, Riggs and her family were told “the nurses would set up a Facetime for us for the evening of Sept. 7,” Riggs said. “After that call, I was crying and pacing in my house. My thoughts were, ‘Are we going to just leave him in there to die alone?’ I needed to actually do something.”
Riggs said she decided to request her father’s medical records from the hospital, “so I could see exactly what was going on there.” However, she was told the records could not be released “unless he signed the release form” — even though her father was sedated and on a ventilator “and it wasn’t possible for him to sign anything.”
In response, the hospital told Riggs that she “would need to provide his death certificate for the records if we hadn’t already set up power of attorney.”
“So, he had to die before I could access his records?” Riggs asked. “How did this nightmare become our reality?”
Within a few hours of this exchange, Riggs received a call that her father was “actively dying” and if they wanted to see him, they needed to do it soon, because he would pass away during that night.
“Now that he was dying, we were able to come see him — but hours before we couldn’t? This made zero sense to me,” Riggs said.
On arriving at the hospital, she and other family members “were required to wear space-like soft helmets, which made it impossible to even kiss my dad goodbye.”
According to Riggs, she and her family “gave the OK to remove him from the ventilator so we could pray scripture over him through his transition.”
“I thought removing him from the ventilator would cause him to pass away because he couldn’t live without it,” Riggs said. “But I can’t help but wonder if that’s really how it went down. His records show that he was given fentanyl at 5:10 p.m. and midazolam at 5:32 p.m. He passed away at 6:22 p.m.”
Riggs said the “official” cause of death was determined to be “respiratory failure with underlying COVID-19.”
When her father died, he had multi-system organ failure. Riggs said she did not believe her father died of COVID-19, but instead due to the CDC- and NIH-approved protocols.
“He was isolated and kept from everyone that truly loved him for 16 days,” Riggs said. “Then, under the guise of ‘palliative care,’ he was finished off with fentanyl and midazolam.”
According to Alpha News, the price tag from the hospital for the treatment her father received during those 16 days was $1.2 million.
A statement provided by Abbott Northwestern to Alpha News said the following:
“Allina Health respects the privacy of its patients and is unable to comment on specific patient care.
“We have great confidence in the exceptional care our medical teams provide to our patients, which is administered according to evidence-based practices by our talented and compassionate care teams.”
‘To honor my dad, I have put my grief into action’
Riggs said her father’s death had knock-on effects on her and her family.
“Now my mom, who survived remdesivir, can’t afford to keep their home,” Riggs said. “She had to sell almost all of their possessions accumulated over 50 years to move into one of the bedrooms of my two-bedroom home. Two of my boys … now share a bedroom in our living room.”
“She can hardly make the bed without being out of breath and she struggles mentally with what they endured and getting a grasp on her new life without my dad in it,” Riggs added.
Despite these challenges, Riggs said that “to honor my dad, I have put my grief into action,” getting involved in activism for victims of hospital protocol deaths.
Riggs is now the Minnesota chair of the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, a national coalition that has documented cases involving COVID-19 care protocols at hospitals.
“I don’t want the families … to be isolated and alone in their pain of losing their loved one,” Riggs said, adding that she has launched weekly Zoom calls for Minnesota families and survivors of hospital protocols, and is also launching in-person meetups.
Riggs also recently attended the Halt Hospital Homicide rally, which she described as the “first national rally for hospital protocol deaths.”
She drew parallels with those who died of COVID-19 vaccine injuries. “The vax-injured are ignored and not believed, just like those of us who have had a family member die or get injured by the hospital protocols,” she said.
“My dad, Ralph, will go on in our memories as a wonderful husband of 50 years, dad, grandpa and great-grandpa, as well as a fun fisherman and the best homemade French fry maker around.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
Don’t Let the Gene Out of the Bottle powerfully conveys the threat to the human and environmental microbiomes as well as the permanent corruption of nature’s gene pool. Yet it inspires hope, revealing viable solutions to protect nature from this gene-altering technology, sometimes referred to as GMO 2.0.
The movie inspires powerful emotions and a desire to take action. It presents real-world examples of lab-enhanced GMOs with the capacity to cause catastrophes such as threatening terrestrial plant life, altering weather patterns, or even creating enhanced viruses far more dangerous than COVID-19.
The film features experts in the field such as Dr. Elaine Ingham, Dr. Jonathan Latham, Claire Robinson, Kiran Krishnan, Jim Thomas and Michelle Perro, M.D.
The history of the CDC during covid has been, at best, a checkered one.
Given what we now know about the complete failure of covid vaccines to provide sterilizing immunity, stop infection, or stop spread as well as the fact that such issues were not even tested for in the drug trials that approved them, certain questions would seem overdue in the asking:
Just what was this “Data from the CDC today” that suggested that “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus?”
Was there, in fact, any data at all?
Or was this a completely fabricated claim used to underpin the mass rollout of a product that failed so spectacularly right out of the gates and:
There seems to be an awfully large body of claims made by CDC that appear to have lacked foundation in fact or data. Both Dr Walensky and her predecessor Robert Redfield would seem to have a great deal to answer for here.
This talking point was simply everywhere all at once.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla certainly pushed this narrative. Presumably, the fact that he was allowed to do so (itself quite an exceptional situation) implies the acquiescence of FDA, CDC, and other regulators.
Upon what was this seemingly widespread consensus based?
The matter appears to have never even been studied at the time the claims were made.
Why were the usually strict and fastidious US regulators so sanguine about such unusually aggressive and certain statements?
This is a most unusual situation and such an extraordinary outcome would seem to demand an extraordinary explanation.
Yet none seems forthcoming.
“The mRNA and the spike protein do not last long in the body” constitutes another key early safety claim similarly rooted in opaque or absent evidence or perhaps simply assumed or invented. (before being quietly retracted later).
This claim also proved extravagantly incorrect.
Wherever one looks, it seems one finds that these grand claims of safety and efficacy were underpinned by a paucity or utter absence of supporting evidence.
Even the definitions themselves such as “Any positive for trace covid from a PCR test at a 40 Cycle Threshold is covid” or “No disease outcomes from vaccines are to be counted until 2 weeks after the second (or third) dose” which left a large window (4-6 weeks) during a period of known immune suppression from the jabs uncounted or even, in many cases, attributed to the unvaccinated in a manner that can make placebo look like high efficacy preventative are so unusual and inconsistent with past practice or sound science as to demand the most pointed of questions as to how such practices came to be and who the decision makers who put them in place were.
This series of unfounded claims and distortionary definitions seems both a poor and a deeply dangerous practice for Public Health.
If we are to have any hope of restoring faith in this field, we must ask and answer the pointed questions of “How did this happen?” and “At whose behest?”
Someone made these choices for some reason. Who and why would seem to be the bare minimum of post mortem here.
It is oft opined that a bad map is worse than no map at all and in this, I must wholeheartedly agree. The public health agencies in America have become the most calamitous of cartographers.
If we would seek to have the agents of public health act as something other than a marketing arm and apologist for the revolving door of Pharma with whom they seem to so regularly swap staff and sinecure then it must once more be turned to serve the public. It may do so only if it regains the public trust and such trust, once lost, may only be restored by asking the hard questions and diligently following the answers wherever so they may lead until we may understand what went wrong, hold the malefactors to account, and effect the means to prevent this from happening again.
Please make no mistake, if nothing is done and this is swept beneath some august Congressional rug or societal memory hole, it will happen again. And soon. This is not a choice I would have for America and one I do not believe you should countenance.
This is the second part of a discussion by a consultant surgeon of the damage done by the government’s irrational Covid policies. You can read Part 1 here. Part 2 focuses on the betrayal of informed consent.
It isn’t enough to get permission from a patient before you carry out an intervention. For consent to be valid it has to hold up to certain preconditions. Patients must be properly informed of all their options, including not having any treatment. They must be warned of the pros and cons of each choice. It has to be voluntary with no coercion, no intimidation and no threats. Patients should be allowed to ask questions. For example, what is in the vaccine? What are my individual risks of having it? (From Pfizer’s own data, serious adverse events were later reported at 1 in 800.) What is my absolute risk reduction from the intervention?
Other valid questions have remained the province of alternative media, raised only when they escaped censorship. Were aborted foetal cells used? Why was the spike protein (supposedly the most lethal part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus) produced for the vaccine? How much spike protein would be made? Would there be any risk to the body by its introduction?
At the time of the vaccine rollout we had been living under nine months of severe government restrictions, lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates and bans on travel and even visits to a pub or restaurant. Sage’s SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours) and the ‘nudge unit’ had done a fantastic job along with the rest of Government and the MSM in scaring us, while dangling the freedom carrot on a vaccine stick. This was nothing if not coercive. Were the population clearly told that they would be receiving an experimental, novel, unproven gene therapy with no long-term safety data? No. They were told with a repetitive singularity that it was ‘safe and effective’ and anyone asking legitimate questions was labelled dangerous, a misogynist, a racist, an idiot, reckless and a danger to society. A ‘granny killer’. Against all the principles of medical ethics, a combination of fear, isolation, restriction of freedom, propaganda and information suppression was used to ‘persuade’ the population into signing up to being part of a mass experiment. Almost everyone I knew told me they had the vaccine only so that they could travel to see loved ones or go on holiday. If not coercion, it was certainly bribery. For the unvaccinated and unmasked it was difficult to access medical treatment. In some parts of the world a medical apartheid existed.
A further blow to medical ethics came with vaccine mandates, first for care home workers and then for all NHS and private healthcare workers, the latter rescinded only at the 11th hour. Mandates are anathema to medical ethics. They fly against the third pillar – the fundamental right to bodily autonomy and personal choice. Forty thousand care home workers lost their jobs in the UK for asserting this right and have never been compensated. Many, many more in the US lost their livelihoods or were coerced into mandatory vaccination.
Despite this systematic crushing of medical ethics, the vast majority of the 280,000 UK doctors stood silent. The Royal Colleges of physicians, surgeons, nurses etc went along with the Government narrative. The General Medical Council, which issues guidance to doctors on what it means to be a Good Medical Doctor, remained silent.
The few doctors who were bold enough to question the narrative and did raise concerns were investigated and suspended by the GMC. Doctors who were pro-narrative and stated incorrect facts were left unsanctioned by the GMC. The double standards were clear to see and set a warning to any dissidents of what lay in store if they questioned the narrative.
When I published a video on Twitter questioning the safety of the Covid mRNA gene therapy shots, I was contacted by the national medical directors of two private hospital groups I work out of. They told me anonymous complaints had been made and I was to stop posting on Twitter and to take down my video, under threat of possible future action including review of my practising privileges. I argued that as a doctor it was my duty of care to speak up especially regarding patient safety issues. I was also following GMC guidance items 23 and 24 in the Good Medical Practice guide.
Guidance 23 states that to help keep patients safe you must: contribute to confidential inquiries, adverse event recognition, report adverse incidents involving medical devices that put or have the potential to put the safety of a patient, or another person, at risk, and report suspected adverse drug reactions and respond to requests from organisations monitoring public health, while always respecting patients’ confidentiality.
Guidance 24 says you must promote and encourage a culture that allows all staff to raise concerns openly and safely.
I haven’t stopped my social media posts and I will continue to raise awareness of the harms that I am seeing from these ‘therapies’. Referring to GMC guidance, other doctorsshould perhaps be braver about standing up to such attempted censorship.
Informed consent is not bound by one moment in time. Patients need to be made aware of new information that might affect their choice and future decisions, for example the emerging evidence that the shots do not remain in our arms only; that the lipid nanoparticles travel across the blood-brain barrier and throughout the body including reproductive organs. We were told the mRNA could not be written into our DNA, but a 2022 study shows that this can happen within six hours of taking the shot. Pfizer themselves produced a document listing hundreds of potential complications. Such risks are referred to by the MHRA but consistently downplayed or dismissed. Yet their Yellow Card reports show nearly 500,000 people impacted by adverse events, the majority seriously, despite which the MHRA repeats and insists on its ‘safe and effective’ mantra. Have patients being offered boosters been made aware of any of this?
It is hard to understand the MSM culture of silence and avoidance of anything that seems like a critique of either the mRNA ‘vaccines’ or of the government health agencies, who refuse to review the collateral health damage even though informed consent and patient safety are at stake. The bodies that are meant to defend the patient and stand up for medical ethics remain quiet. The journalists, media outlets, celebrities, influencers and activists who speak out on ‘climate emergency’ or the UK getting there first on the vaccine remain deadly quiet when it comes to the greatest medical experiment inflicted on humankind.
Every week doctors tell me in whispered conspiratorial tones that they agree with me, that they support what I am doing, and that they won’t have any more shots. But when I ask them why they don’t go public, they shake their heads and look down at the ground. They are scared of losing their jobs and livelihood, of course. A neurologist mentioned to me how he had never been so busy; that he was seeing bizarre and rare conditions on an ever more frequent basis. When I asked what was driving this, he answered under his breath ‘the vaccines’, even though we were the only two in the room. I asked if he would go public, and he shook his head and walked away.
As a member of a private closed Facebook group for doctors numbering in the thousands, I witnessed the virtue signalling, professional hubris and groupthink and how they ridiculed colleagues and patients who chose not to have the vaccine. What I didn’t see was compassion, empathy and respect for people’s choices.
The fact that doctors, of all people, couldn’t see the hypocrisy and lies underlying the fear-mongering, manipulation and censorship is cause for grief.
Doctors have let their patients down badly. They have blindly followed the government narrative. They have abandoned any pretence at medical ethics. They now refuse or are reluctant to admit that there are mRNA gene injuries or see them for what they are, and help address them. This is medical gaslighting at its finest.
The public are not blind to this. Every day I get messages informing me that trust in the medical profession is dead, that it will never be regained.
If we, the medical profession, hope to regain that coveted position of most trusted profession, we need to first acknowledge a mistake was made (duty of candour), apologise, prevent it from happening again and seek to remedy and put to right the wrongs.
To stay silent is to be complicit to the greatest breach of our human rights and medical ethics in human history.
WHEN it comes to the last three years, there is a lot I do not know. What I do know is that I have many questions. Was the ‘pandemic’ a ‘plandemic’? It certainly felt like it. Did the virus escape from a lab? What exactly is a virus? What precisely was the role of the US Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Dr Anthony Fauci in the origins of SARS‑CoV‑2? Why would anyone in their right mind carry out gain of function experiments; isn’t this simply biowarfare by another name? Why did our Government, in lockstep with most other countries, introduce lockdowns, mask mandates and social distancing when there has never been any evidence to show their efficacy? Why were alternative, cheap and easily available therapeutics not considered, instead ridiculed and even banned? Surely in the presence of a lethal pandemic one would explore all options?
I do not understand why the UK introduced lockdown on March 20, 2020, when one day earlier the government had downgraded SARS-CoV-2 as no longer a high consequence infectious disease. I do not understand why certain billionaires and personalities held so much sway over domestic and international politics especially when it comes to health and in particular Covid policies. I do not understand why our governments would self-inflict such tremendous damage on their already weak economies through their Covid policies. And why did questioning the Covid narrative and government result in censorship and de-platforming on all major social media platforms? Why, if the masks worked, did we have to stand six feet apart? If standing six feet apart worked, why the need to wear masks? If both worked, why the need for lockdowns? If all three worked, why the need for a rushed vaccine? And make no mistake, it was rushed. If the vaccines were safe and effective then why the added ‘no liability’ clause? How, finally, can an experimental novel gene therapy be called a vaccine?
What I do know, as a surgeon who qualified 25 years ago, is quite a lot about medical ethics and informed consent. Medical ethics are the moral principles by which doctors must conduct themselves, that govern the practice of medicine. The four pillars of medical ethics are Non-maleficence (to do no harm), Beneficence (doing good), Autonomy (giving the patient the freedom to choose freely, where they are able) and Justice (ensuring fairness).
Non-maleficence is often described by the Latin phrase Primum non nocere, which means ‘first, do no harm’. Given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good. It prompts vigilance as to the possible harm that any intervention might do. That is why alarm bells rang for me in late spring 2020 when there was much discussion about how vaccines would get us out of the pandemic. Never before had we been able to produce a vaccine for a coronavirus (one of the common cold viruses) due to their high rate of mutation. Drug development is a notoriously long drawn-out affair taking roughly a decade to complete multiple key safety steps, each of which must be passed to progress to the next. First, preclinical drug trials when the drugs are tested using computer models and human cells grown in the laboratory. In these studies researchers determine the following information about the drug: its absorption, biodistribution, metabolisation and excretion. Next, animal trials. Finally come the human clinical trials.
The clinical stage usually has three to four phases. Phase I tests the safety of a new treatment. Phase II tests the new treatment against a placebo or other treatments. Phase III trials involve larger numbers of patients, usually in the hundreds and thousands. Finally Phase IV trials come after a drug has been approved to test its ongoing efficacy and safety.
The Covid vaccines were all rushed through the normal process. Questions remain about which steps were skipped. While I identified three early animal studies: Corbett et al (2020): Evaluation of the mRNA-1273 Vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 in Nonhuman Primates, New England Journal of Medicine; Vogel et al (2020): A prefusion SARS-CoV-2 spike RNA vaccine is highly immunogenic and prevents lung infection in non-human primates, bioRxiv; Vogel et al (2021): BNT162b vaccines protect rhesus macaques from SARS-CoV-2, Nature, none looked at the safety and potential adverse effects of the Covid vaccines.
Were any biodistribution studies carried out? Was the safety profile of the lipid nanoparticles, their biodistribution and toxicity levels ever tested? Were animal tests done specifically looking at this? These questions have not been answered, suggesting either that none were or they were never published – both equally reprehensible.
It is safe to say the world had never seen vaccines like these before. Both the use of lipid nanoparticles and mRNA are novel and experimental. Yet at the time the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Pfizer emergency use authorisation, the company ended their trial prematurely. This was when they gave the vaccine to the placebo arm (the trial comparison group), thereby removing the possibility of critical long-term comparative safety and efficacy data. Pfizer claimed it was unethical to withhold the vaccine from the placebo group as it was safe and effective, though it was scientifically impossible to assert this at that early juncture. It was certainly unethical to end the study and deprive us of critical long-term safety data.
It was also unethical to claim, as they did, that their experimental vaccine had 95 per cent efficacy. This piece of statistical conmanship was premised on a deeply misleading relative risk reduction percentage calculation when what actually matters is the absolute risk reduction. Absolute risk reduction gives the actual difference in risk between one group and another. This is important since the absolute risk reduction in this case was less than 1 per cent – information which if known might well have changed people’s opinions as to the vaccine’s value to them, or to society for that matter. It leads us straight to question of informed consent, the critical second pillar of medical ethics. I will discuss this in Part 2.
Much like a Bill of Rights, a principal function of any Code of Ethics is to set limits, to check the inevitable lust for power, the libido dominandi, that human beings tend to demonstrate when they obtain authority and status over others, regardless of the context.
Though it may be difficult to believe in the aftermath of COVID, the medical profession does possess a Code of Ethics. The four fundamental concepts of Medical Ethics – its 4 Pillars – are Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice.
Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice
These ethical concepts are thoroughly established in the profession of medicine. I learned them as a medical student, much as a young Catholic learns the Apostle’s Creed. As a medical professor, I taught them to my students, and I made sure my students knew them. I believed then (and still do) that physicians must know the ethical tenets of their profession, because if they do not know them, they cannot follow them.
These ethical concepts are indeed well-established, but they are more than that. They are also valid, legitimate, and sound. They are based on historical lessons, learned the hard way from past abuses foisted upon unsuspecting and defenseless patients by governments, health care systems, corporations, and doctors. Those painful, shameful lessons arose not only from the actions of rogue states like Nazi Germany, but also from our own United States: witness Project MK-Ultra and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
The 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics protect patients from abuse. They also allow physicians the moral framework to follow their consciences and exercise their individual judgment – provided, of course, that physicians possess the character to do so. However, like human decency itself, the 4 Pillars were completely disregarded by those in authority during COVID.
The demolition of these core principles was deliberate. It originated at the highest levels of COVID policymaking, which itself had been effectively converted from a public health initiative to a national security/military operation in the United States in March 2020, producing the concomitant shift in ethical standards one would expect from such a change. As we examine the machinations leading to the demise of each of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID, we will define each of these four fundamental tenets, and then discuss how each was abused.
Autonomy
Of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, autonomy has historically held pride of place, in large part because respect for the individual patient’s autonomy is a necessary component of the other three. Autonomy was the most systemically abused and disregarded of the 4 Pillars during the COVID era.
Autonomy may be defined as the patient’s right to self-determination with regard to any and all medical treatment. This ethical principle was clearly stated by Justice Benjamin Cardozo as far back as 1914: “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”
Patient autonomy is “My body, my choice” in its purest form. To be applicable and enforceable in medical practice, it contains several key derivative principles which are quite commonsensical in nature. These include informed consent,confidentiality, truth-telling, and protection against coercion.
Genuine informed consent is a process, considerably more involved than merely signing a permission form. Informed consent requires a competent patient, who receives full disclosure about a proposed treatment, understands it, and voluntarily consents to it.
Based on that definition, it becomes immediately obvious to anyone who lived in the United States through the COVID era, that the informed consent process was systematically violated by the COVID response in general, and by the COVID vaccine programs in particular. In fact, every one of the components of genuine informed consent were thrown out when it came to the COVID vaccines:
Full disclosure about the COVID vaccines – which were extremely new, experimental therapies, using novel technologies, with alarming safety signals from the very start – was systematically denied to the public. Full disclosure was actively suppressed by bogus anti-“misinformation” campaigns, and replaced with simplistic, false mantras (e.g. “safe and effective”) that were in fact just textbook propaganda slogans.
Blatant coercion (e.g. “Take the shot or you’re fired/can’t attend college/can’t travel”) was ubiquitous and replaced voluntary consent.
Subtler forms of coercion (ranging from cash payments to free beer) were given in exchange for COVID-19 vaccination. Multiple US states held lotteries for COVID-19 vaccine recipients, with up to $5 million in prize money promised in some states.
Many physicians were presented with financial incentives to vaccinate, sometimes reaching hundreds of dollars per patient. These were combined with career-threatening penalties for questioning the official policies. This corruption severely undermined the informed consent process in doctor-patient interactions.
Incompetent patients (e.g. countless institutionalized patients) were injected en masse, often while forcibly isolated from their designated decision-making family members.
It must be emphasized that under the tendentious, punitive, and coercive conditions of the COVID vaccine campaigns, especially during the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” period, it was virtually impossible for patients to obtain genuine informed consent. This was true for all the above reasons, but most importantly because full disclosure was nearly impossible to obtain.
A small minority of individuals did manage, mostly through their own research, to obtain sufficient information about the COVID-19 vaccines to make a truly informed decision. Ironically, these were principally dissenting healthcare personnel and their families, who, by virtue of discovering the truth, knew “too much.” This group overwhelmingly refused the mRNA vaccines.
Confidentiality, another key derivative principle of autonomy, was thoroughly ignored during the COVID era. The widespread yet chaotic use of COVID vaccine status as a de facto social credit system, determining one’s right of entry into public spaces, restaurants and bars, sporting and entertainment events, and other locations, was unprecedented in our civilization.
Gone were the days when HIPAA laws were taken seriously, where one’s health history was one’s own business, and where the cavalier use of such information broke Federal law. Suddenly, by extralegal public decree, the individual’s health history was public knowledge, to the absurd extent that any security guard or saloon bouncer had the right to question individuals about their personal health status, all on the vague, spurious, and ultimately false grounds that such invasions of privacy promoted “public health.”
Truth-telling was completely dispensed with during the COVID era. Official lies were handed down by decree from high-ranking officials such as Anthony Fauci, public health organizations like the CDC, and industry sources, then parroted by regional authorities and local clinical physicians. The lies were legion, and none of them have aged well. Examples include:
The SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a wet market, not in a lab
“Two weeks to flatten the curve”
Six feet of “social distancing” effectively prevents transmission of the virus
“A pandemic of the unvaccinated”
“Safe and effective”
Masks effectively prevent transmission of the virus
Children are at serious risk from COVID
School closures are necessary to prevent spread of the virus
mRNA vaccines prevent contraction of the virus
mRNA vaccines prevent transmission of the virus
mRNA vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural immunity
Myocarditis is more common from COVID-19 disease than from mRNA vaccination
It must be emphasized that health authorities pushed deliberate lies, known to be lies at the time by those telling them. Throughout the COVID era, a small but very insistent group of dissenters have constantly presented the authorities with data-driven counterarguments against these lies. The dissenters were consistently met with ruthless treatment of the “quick and devastating takedown” variety now infamously promoted by Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins.
Over time, many of the official lies about COVID have been so thoroughly discredited that they are now indefensible. In response, the COVID power brokers, backpedaling furiously, now try to recast their deliberate lies as fog-of-war style mistakes. To gaslight the public, they claim they had no way of knowing they were spouting falsehoods, and that the facts have only now come to light. These, of course, are the same people who ruthlessly suppressed the voices of scientific dissent that presented sound interpretations of the situation in real time.
For example, on March 29, 2021, during the initial campaign for universal COVID vaccination, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky proclaimed on MSNBC that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” or “get sick,” based on both clinical trials and “real-world data.” However, testifying before Congress on April 19, 2023, Walensky conceded that those claims are now known to be false, but that this was due to “an evolution of the science.” Walensky had the effrontery to claim this before Congress 2 years after the fact, when in actuality, the CDC itself had quietly issued a correction of Walensky’s false MSNBC claims back in 2021, a mere 3 days after she had made them.
On May 5, 2023, three weeks after her mendacious testimony to Congress, Walensky announced her resignation.
Truth-telling by physicians is a key component of the informed consent process, and informed consent, in turn, is a key component of patient autonomy. A matrix of deliberate lies, created by authorities at the very top of the COVID medical hierarchy, was projected down the chains of command, and ultimately repeated by individual physicians in their face-to-face interactions with their patients. This process rendered patient autonomy effectively null and void during the COVID era.
Patient autonomy in general, and informed consent in particular, are both impossible where coercion is present. Protection against coercion is a principal feature of the informed consent process, and it is a primary consideration in medical research ethics. This is why so-called vulnerable populations such as children, prisoners, and the institutionalized are often afforded extra protections when proposed medical research studies are subjected to institutional review boards.
Coercion not only ran rampant during the COVID era, it was deliberately perpetrated on an industrial scale by governments, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment. Thousands of American healthcare workers, many of whom had served on the front lines of care during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 (and had already contracted COVID-19 and developed natural immunity) were fired from their jobs in 2021 and 2022 after refusing mRNA vaccines they knew they didn’t need, would not consent to, and yet for which they were denied exemptions. “Take this shot or you’re fired” is coercion of the highest order.
Hundreds of thousands of American college students were required to get the COVID shots and boosters to attend school during the COVID era. These adolescents, like young children, have statistically near-zero chance of death from COVID-19. However, they (especially males) are at statistically highest risk of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis.
According to the advocacy group nocollegemendates.com, as of May 2, 2023, approximately 325 private and public colleges and universities in the United States still have active vaccine mandates for students matriculating in the fall of 2023. This is true despite the fact that it is now universally accepted that the mRNA vaccines do not stop contraction or transmission of the virus. They have zero public health utility. “Take this shot or you cannot go to school” is coercion of the highest order.
Countless other examples of coercion abound. The travails of the great tennis champion Novak Djokovic, who has been denied entry into both Australia and the United States for multiple Grand Slam tournaments because he refuses the COVID vaccines, illustrate in broad relief the “man without a country” limbo in which the unvaccinated found (and to some extent still find) themselves, due to the rampant coercion of the COVID era.
Beneficence
In medical ethics, beneficence means that physicians are obligated to act for the benefit of their patients. This concept distinguishes itself from non-maleficence (see below) in that it is a positive requirement. Put simply, all treatments done to an individual patient should do good to that individual patient. If a procedure cannot help you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. In ethical medical practice, there is no “taking one for the team.”
By mid-2020 at the latest, it was clear from existing data that SARS-CoV-2 posed truly minimal risk to children of serious injury and death – in fact, the pediatric Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19 was known in 2020 to be less than half the risk of being struck by lightning. This feature of the disease, known even in its initial and most virulent stages, was a tremendous stroke of pathophysiological good luck, and should have been used to the great advantage of society in general and children in particular.
The opposite occurred. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 causes extremely mild illness in children was systematically hidden or scandalously downplayed by authorities, and subsequent policy went unchallenged by nearly all physicians, to the tremendous detriment of children worldwide.
The frenzied push for and unrestrained use of mRNA vaccines in children and pregnant women – which continues at the time of this writing in the United States – outrageously violates the principle of beneficence. And beyond the Anthony Faucis, Albert Bourlas, and Rochelle Walenskys, thousands of ethically compromised pediatricians bear responsibility for this atrocity.
The mRNA COVID vaccines were – and remain – new, experimental vaccines with zero long-term safety data for either the specific antigen they present (the spike protein) or their novel functional platform (mRNA vaccine technology). Very early on, they were known to be ineffective in stopping contraction or transmission of the virus, rendering them useless as a public health measure. Despite this, the public was barraged with bogus “herd immunity” arguments. Furthermore, these injections displayed alarming safety signals, even during their tiny, methodologically challenged initial clinical trials.
The principle of beneficence was entirely and deliberately ignored when these products were administered willy-nilly to children as young as 6 months, a population to whom they could provide zero benefit – and as it turned out, that they would harm. This represented a classic case of “taking one for the team,” an abusive notion that was repeatedly invoked against children during the COVID era, and one that has no place in the ethical practice of medicine.
Children were the population group that was most obviously and egregiously harmed by the abandonment of the principle of beneficence during COVID. However, similar harms occurred due to the senseless push for COVID mRNA vaccination of other groups, such as pregnant women and persons with natural immunity.
Non-Maleficence
Even if, for argument’s sake alone, one makes the preposterous assumption that all COVID-era public health measures were implemented with good intentions, the principle of non-maleficence was nevertheless broadly ignored during the pandemic. With the growing body of knowledge of the actual motivations behind so many aspects of COVID-era health policy, it becomes clear that non-maleficence was very often replaced with outright malevolence.
In medical ethics, the principle of non-maleficence is closely tied to the universally cited medical dictum of primum non nocere, or, “First, do no harm.” That phrase is in turn associated with a statement from Hippocrates’ Epidemics, which states, “As to diseases make a habit of two things – to help, or at least, to do no harm.” This quote illustrates the close, bookend-like relationship between the concepts of beneficence (“to help”) and non-maleficence (“to do no harm”).
In simple terms, non-maleficence means that if a medical intervention is likely to harm you, then it shouldn’t be done to you. If the risk/benefit ratio is unfavorable to you (i.e., it is more likely to hurt you then help you), then it shouldn’t be done to you. Pediatric COVID mRNA vaccine programs are just one prominent aspect of COVID-era health policy that absolutely violate the principle of non-maleficence.
It has been argued that historical mass-vaccination programs may have violated non-maleficence to some extent, as rare severe and even deadly vaccine reactions did occur in those programs. This argument has been forwarded to defend the methods used to promote the COVID mRNA vaccines. However, important distinctions between past vaccine programs and the COVID mRNA vaccine program must be made.
First, past vaccine-targeted diseases such as polio and smallpox were deadly to children – unlike COVID-19. Second, such past vaccines were effective in both preventing contraction of the disease in individuals and in achieving eradication of the disease – unlike COVID-19. Third, serious vaccine reactions were truly rare with those older, more conventional vaccines – again, unlike COVID-19.
Thus, many past pediatric vaccine programs had the potential to meaningfully benefit their individual recipients. In other words, the a priori risk/benefit ratio may have been favorable, even in tragic cases that resulted in vaccine-related deaths. This was never even arguably true with the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Such distinctions possess some subtlety, but they are not so arcane that the physicians dictating COVID policy did not know they were abandoning basic medical ethics standards such as non-maleficence. Indeed, high-ranking medical authorities had ethical consultants readily available to them – witness that Anthony Fauci’s wife, a former nurse named Christine Grady, served as chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, a fact that Fauci flaunted for public relations purposes.
Indeed, much of COVID-19 policy appears to have been driven not just by rejection of non-maleficence, but by outright malevolence. Compromised “in-house” ethicists frequently served as apologists for obviously harmful and ethically bankrupt policies, rather than as checks and balances against ethical abuses.
Schools never should have been closed in early 2020, and they absolutely should have been fully open without restrictions by fall of 2020. Lockdowns of society never should have been instituted, much less extended as long as they were. Sufficient data existed in real time such that both prominent epidemiologists (e.g. the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) and select individual clinical physicians produced data-driven documents publicly proclaiming against lockdowns and school closures by mid-to-late 2020.These were either aggressively suppressed or completely ignored.
Numerous governments imposed prolonged, punishing lockdowns that were without historical precedent, legitimate epidemiological justification, or legal due process. Curiously, many of the worst offenders hailed from the so-called liberal democracies of the Anglosphere, such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and deep blue parts of the United States. Public schools In the United States were closed an average of 70 weeks during COVID. This was far longer than most European Union countries, and longer still than Scandinavian countries who, in some cases, never closed schools.
The punitive attitude displayed by health authorities was broadly supported by the medical establishment. The simplistic argument developed that because there was a “pandemic,” civil rights could be decreed null and void – or, more accurately, subjected to the whims of public health authorities, no matter how nonsensical those whims may have been. Innumerable cases of sadistic lunacy ensued.
At one point at the height of the pandemic, in this author’s locale of Monroe County, New York, an idiotic Health Official decreed that one side of a busy commercial street could be open for business, while the opposite side was closed, because the center of the street divided two townships. One town was code “yellow,” the other code “red” for new COVID-19 cases, and thus businesses mere yards from one another survived or faced ruin. Except, of course, the liquor stores, which, being “essential,” never closed at all. How many thousands of times was such asinine and arbitrary abuse of power duplicated elsewhere? The world will never know.
Who can forget being forced to wear a mask when walking to and from a restaurant table, then being permitted to remove it once seated? The humorous memes that “you can only catch COVID when standing up” aside, such pseudo-scientific idiocy smacks of totalitarianism rather than public health. It closely mimics the deliberate humiliation of citizens through enforced compliance with patently stupid rules that was such a legendary feature of life in the old Eastern Bloc.
And I write as an American who, while I lived in a deep blue state during COVID, never suffered in the concentration camps for COVID-positive individuals that were established in Australia.
Those who submit to oppression resent no one, not even their oppressors, so much as the braver souls who refuse to surrender. The mere presence of dissenters is a stone in the quisling’s shoe – a constant, niggling reminder to the coward of his moral and ethical inadequacy. Human beings, especially those lacking personal integrity, cannot tolerate much cognitive dissonance. And so they turn on those of higher character than themselves.
This explains much of the sadistic streak that so many establishment-obeying physicians and health administrators displayed during COVID. The medical establishment – hospital systems, medical schools, and the doctors employed therein – devolved into a medical Vichy state under the control of the governmental/industrial/public health juggernaut.
These mid- and low-level collaborators actively sought to ruin dissenters’ careers with bogus investigations, character assassination, and abuse of licensing and certification board authority. They fired the vaccine refuseniks within their ranks out of spite, self-destructively decimating their own workforces in the process. Most perversely, they denied early, potential life-saving treatment to all their COVID patients. Later, they withheld standard therapies for non-COVID illnesses – up to and including organ transplants – to patients who declined COVID vaccines, all for no legitimate medical reason whatsoever.
This sadistic streak that the medical profession displayed during COVID is reminiscent of the dramatic abuses of Nazi Germany. However, it more closely resembles (and in many ways is an extension of) the subtler yet still malignant approach followed for decades by the United States Government’s medical/industrial/public health/national security nexus, as personified by individuals like Anthony Fauci. And it is still going strong in the wake of COVID.
Ultimately, abandonment of the tenet of non-maleficence is inadequate to describe much of the COVID-era behavior of the medical establishment and those who remained obedient to it. Genuine malevolence was very often the order of the day.
Justice
In medical ethics, the Pillar of justice refers to the fair and equitable treatment of individuals. As resources are often limited in health care, the focus is typically on distributive justice; that is, the fair and equitable allocation of medical resources. Conversely, it is also important to ensure that the burdens of health care are as fairly distributed as possible.
In a just situation, the wealthy and powerful should not have instant access to high-quality care and medicines that are unavailable to the rank and file or the very poor. Conversely, the poor and vulnerable should not unduly bear the burdens of health care, for example, by being disproportionately subjected to experimental research, or by being forced to follow health restrictions to which others are exempt.
Both of these aspects of justice were disregarded during COVID as well. In numerous instances, persons in positions of authority procured preferential treatment for themselves or their family members. Two prominent examples:
According to ABC News, “in the early days of the pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo prioritized COVID-19 testing for relatives including his brother, mother and at least one of his sisters, when testing wasn’t widely available to the public.” Reportedly, “Cuomo allegedly also gave politicians, celebrities and media personalities access to tests.”
In March 2020, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine directed nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, despite warnings against this by trade groups. That directive and others like it subsequently cost tens of thousands of lives. Less than two months later, Levine confirmed that her own 95 year-old mother had been removed from a nursing home to private care. Levine was subsequently promoted to 4-star Admiral in the US Public Health Service by the Biden Administration.
The burdens of lockdowns were distributed extremely unjustly during COVID. While average citizens remained in lockdown, suffering personal isolation, forbidden to earn a living, the powerful flouted their own rules. Who can forget how US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi broke the strict California lockdowns to get her hair styled, or how British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defied his own supposedly life-or-death orders by throwing at least a dozen parties at 10 Downing Street in 2020 alone? House arrest for thee, wine and cheese for me.
But California Governor Gavin Newsom might take the cake. At first glance, given both his BoJo-esque, lockdown-defying dinner with lobbyists at the ultra-swanky Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry, and his decision to send his own children to expensive private schools which were fully open for 5-day in-school learning during the prolonged California school closures, one might think of Newsom as a COVID-era Robin Hood. That is, until one realizes that he presided over those same punishing, inhumane lockdowns and school closures. He was actually the Sheriff of Nottingham.
To a decent person with a functioning conscience, this level of sociopathy is difficult to comprehend. What is crystal clear is that anyone capable of the hypocrisy that Gavin Newsom displayed during COVID should not be anywhere near a position of power in any society.
Two additional points should be emphasized. First, these egregious acts were rarely, if ever, called out by the medical establishment. Second, the behaviors themselves show that those in power never truly believed their own narrative. Both the medical establishment and the power brokers knew the danger posed by the virus, while real, was grossly overstated. They knew the lockdowns, social distancing, and masking of the population at large were kabuki theater at best, and soft-core totalitarianism at worst. The lockdowns were based on a gigantic lie, one they neither believed nor felt compelled to follow themselves.
Solutions and Reform
The abandonment of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID has contributed greatly to an historic erosion of public trust in the healthcare industry. This distrust is entirely understandable and richly deserved, however harmful it may prove to be for patients. For example, at a population level, trust in vaccines in general has dramatically reduced worldwide, compared to the pre-COVID era. Millions of children now stand at increased risk from proven vaccine-preventable diseases due to the thoroughly unethical push for unnecessary, indeed harmful, universal COVID-19 mRNA vaccination of children.
Systemically, the medical profession desperately needs ethical reform in the wake of COVID. Ideally, this would begin with a strong reassertion of and recommitment to the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics, again with patient autonomy at the forefront. It would continue with prosecution and punishment of those individuals most responsible for the ethical failures, from the likes of Anthony Fauci on down. Human nature is such that if no sufficient deterrent to evil is established, evil will be perpetuated.
Unfortunately, within the medical establishment, there does not appear to be any impetus toward acknowledgement of the profession’s ethical failures during COVID, much less toward true reform. This is largely because the same financial, administrative, and regulatory forces that drove COVID-era failures remain in control of the profession. These forces deliberately ignore the catastrophic harms of COVID policy, instead viewing the era as a sort of test run for a future of highly profitable, tightly regulated health care. They view the entire COVID-era martial-law-as-public-health approach as a prototype, rather than a failed model.
Reform of medicine, if it happens, will likely arise from individuals who refuse to participate in the “Big Medicine” vision of health care. In the near future, this will likely result in a fragmentation of the industry analogous to that seen in many other aspects of post-COVID society. In other words, there is apt to be a “Great Re-Sort” in medicine as well.
Individual patients can and must affect change. They must replace the betrayed trust they once held in the public health establishment and the healthcare industry with a critical, caveat emptor, consumer-based approach to their health care. If physicians were ever inherently trustworthy, the COVID era has shown that they no longer are so.
Patients should become highly proactive in researching which tests, medications, and therapies they accept for themselves (and especially for their children). They should be unabashed in asking their physicians for their views on patient autonomy, mandated care, and the extent to which their physicians are willing to think and act according to their own consciences. They should vote with their feet when unacceptable answers are given. They must learn to think for themselves and ask for what they want. And they must learn to say no.
Clayton J. Baker, MD is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
The most powerful and destructive perception in the world today is that using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change. This belief, marketed by every major government and corporate institution in the Western world, is the foundational premise underlying a policy agenda of stunning indifference to the aspirations of ordinary people.
The war on fossil fuel is a war on freedom, prosperity, pluralism, independence, national sovereignty, world peace, domestic tranquility, and, most ironically, the environment itself. It is a war of rich against poor, the privileged against the disadvantaged, corporate monopolies against competitive upstarts, Malthusians against optimists, regulators against innovators, and authoritarians against freedom-loving people everywhere.
But this war cannot be won unless the perception is maintained. If fossil fuel is allowed to compete against other energy alternatives for customers as a vital and growing part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, this authoritarian political agenda falls apart.
It is reasonable to question the assertion that eliminating fossil fuels will inevitably result in an impoverished society subject to punitive restrictions on individual behavior. But the numbers are compelling and can be distilled to two indisputable facts: First, fossil fuel continues to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide. Second, if every person living on planet Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to double.
Several inescapable conclusions derive from these two facts, if one assumes that energy is the driver of prosperity. Just in case that is not obvious, imagine Americans living with half as much energy as they use today. Where would the cuts occur? Would they drive their cars half as much? Heat their homes half as much? Operate manufacturing, farming, and mining equipment half as much? They would need to do all those things and more. The economy would collapse.
These consequences don’t escape the intelligentsia who promote “net zero” policies. These consequences explain the policies they advocate. The recent promotion of “15-minute cities” that will inform rezoning and redevelopment to put all essential services within a 15-minute walk of every residence. The rise of “congestion pricing” to charge automobiles special tolls if they drive into an expanding footprint of urban neighborhoods. “Smart growth.” “Infill.” “Urban Service Boundaries.” Bike lanes. “Smart buildings,” “smart meters,” and “smart cities.”
These innovations, all in progress, only begin to describe what is coming. By restricting new development and systematically reducing the use of fossil fuels, the global middle class will shrink instead of grow. The wealthiest elites will buy their way out of the smart slums. Everyone else will be locked down. This is how energy poverty will play out in the modern era. It cannot be emphasized enough: If energy production is restricted, this will happen. It’s algebra. It is objective fact.
Hardly less speculative is the reaction outside the Western world. What are our elites thinking? Do they intend to start World War III? Perhaps they do. Because nothing short of war is going to stop the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Nigerians, or Bangladeshis from developing every source of energy they possibly can. Just those seven nations account for half the world’s population. That’s 4 billion people. Will they stop developing energy until they at least achieve half the per capita energy consumption that Americans currently enjoy? Not a chance. Will they get there by relying exclusively on wind and solar? Dream on.
Sadly, the seductive pitch America’s climate crisis lobby lobs at the elites running the aspiring nations of the world may find the strike zone. It goes like this: Let us help you keep your people in poverty and misery because we will make sure you stay rich while our military helps you stamp out insurrections. And as we prevent your nations from achieving food and energy security, we will drown you in debt to pay for imported food aid and “renewables” projects. But as one of us, you will not suffer with your people. You will have a Swiss bank account and a mansion in Malibu, where you will be feted by stars who honor you for helping prevent a climate catastrophe.
Fossil Fuel Will Not Cause a Climate Catastrophe
If you only believe half of the preceding arguments, you must realize that Americans have been backed into a corner. If anyone calls for abundant energy—or abundant anything, since energy, and fossil fuel in particular, is the prerequisite for virtually all goods and services—they are shouted down as “climate deniers.” And the way to upset the entire edifice is not to merely argue that fossil fuel is essential to the survival of civilization. Because the counterargument is that eliminating fossil fuel is essential to the survival of the planet.
That is an unwinnable argument. It is not possible to reason with an opponent of fossil fuel if you concede their fundamental premise: that burning fossil fuel will cause catastrophic climate change. You either become a “denier,” or you submit to energy poverty.
This is the tough decision facing Americans. And it’s accurate to also say it is a decision facing Republicans since literally every prominent, mainstream, housebroken, accommodating establishment Republican will not challenge the assertion that we’re experiencing a “climate crisis,” even though most of them know better. But this should be a bipartisan issue. For Republicans, this is an opportunity to show some backbone by rejecting the most destructive and fraudulent premise of our time. In so doing, they would unify their party, attract independent voters, and realign the nation.
Claiming that climate change is not catastrophic and unprecedented, or that fossil fuel is necessary to power civilization, remains today the territory of outliers. Tagged as contrarians at best, more often as eccentrics, lunatics, fanatics, shills, dupes, and morons, the “denier” community remains on the fringes. Joining this community risks losing personal credibility and the ability to work with every self-styled moderate, serious activist that just wants to recognize the political and commercial reality in America and get along.
And then there’s Donald Trump.
Alone among major politicians in America, Trump openly proclaims that anthropogenic carbon dioxide causing a climate catastrophe is a poorly supported theory, not a fact that is supposedly beyond debate. He’s right, but he’s given the climate crisis crowd another label with which to stigmatize deniers with guilt by association. Now they’re MAGA Nazis, part of the terrifying plot to engineer a fascist coup and plunge America into a dark age.
The irony is stupefying. Without fossil fuel, America will enter a dark age, and the only way to control a restive population that’s seen its standard of living plummet will be through the establishment of a technology-driven police state. They are the fascists. The so-called climate deniers are fighting for prosperity and freedom.
Matching the irony here in its shocking, stupefying absurdity is the arrogance and certainty of the climate alarmists. From the brainwashed ignoramuses pouring out of public education year after year, to pseudointellectuals marinated for decades in NPR newspeak, to brilliant scientists who spend their entire careerist careers bouncing around in a brilliant echo chamber without ever considering opposing scientific viewpoints, listening to these minions recite the approved narrative is reminiscent of a cult. The climate cult. The useful, smothering, sanctimonious, intolerant, indignant, self-righteous, energized, pacified, out-of-control but controlled and manipulated, Kool-Aid guzzling climate cult, driving humanity off the cliff.
If you want to save civilization, be a denier. Say it loud and without reservations, and say it every chance you get. Demand that politicians publicly refute climate alarmism. It isn’t necessary to claim that the powers behind the climate cult want to enslave the world. We don’t know what motivates them. Some just want to get rich on renewables. Some want to use climate change to advance American global hegemony. But all of them rely on a fundamental moral justification: By eliminating fossil fuel, we are saving the planet from certain destruction. Focusing on the possible ulterior motives of climate alarmist leaders without first challenging their core moral argument is a fool’s errand.
The scientific body of evidence against climate alarmism is robust, but you won’t find much if you search Google. You have to dig it up piece by piece. One good denier database can be found here. Organizations and individuals posting useful climate contrarian material and links on Twitter include Climate Dispatch, Patrick Moore, Climate Realist, Steve Milloy, and Pierre Gosselin, and many, many more. Like all movements, the climate contrarian movement has its share of hacks and hyperbole. So be careful and diligent, but be resolute. Examine the data. Check and recheck sources. Make up your own mind. And make yourself heard.
There are plenty of environmental challenges. Being an environmentalist is a good thing. But there has to be balance, and there has to be debate. Claiming that anthropogenic CO2 will not cause catastrophic climate change is a credible, necessary point of view backed up by scientific evidence. If more people make that claim, the climate cult can be broken, and civilization can be rescued from oblivion.
A primary schoolteacher has lost her job and is facing a raft of investigations from various regulatory bodies for questioning the advice from Stonewall and Mermaids to encourage a ‘gender transition’ of an eight year-old pupil without any medical evidence.
The child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons and is known only as ‘Child X’, believed she was born in a wrong body and wanted to be treated as a boy.
Based on the advice from trans rights organisations such as Mermaids and Stonewall, the council instructed all school staff always to refer to the child by male pronouns and her chosen male name and that she should use boys’ toilets, dressing rooms and dormitories as requested.
The teacher known as ‘Hannah’ (not her real name) invoked the school’s and the council’s whistleblowing procedure to argue that this approach was not based on medical evidence or compliance with the safeguarding procedures and was putting the child’s health and welfare at risk.
Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, Hannah relied on several expert reports from scientists and doctors highlighting the dangers of encouraging ‘gender transition’ in young children.
After her concern was brushed aside, Hannah brought a claim for judicial review against the school and the council.
The court ordered that the local council, the school and all its staff must remain anonymous to ensure this does not lead to a jigsaw identification of the child.
In response to Hannah’s legal action, the school summarily dismissed her for divulging confidential information to her lawyers and to the court.
The school reported Hannah to the Information Commissioner for a criminal offence under the Data Protection Act. The Information Commissioner has concluded there was no evidence of a criminal offence and decided to take no further action.
The school also reported Hannah to the professional regulator, Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), for an alleged confidentiality breach. The TRA is currently investigating the case. If found guilty of professional misconduct, Hannah may face a lifelong ban from the profession.
Reporting Hannah to the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), the school sought to bar her from teaching. The DBS, however, has declined to impose a ban pending further enquiries following an investigation.
After a life-long career as a professional teacher, Hannah has been forced to find a job in a sandwich bar.
She has now brought a claim in Employment Tribunal against the school for victimising her for whistleblowing, unfair dismissal and religious discrimination.
She has alleged that the school dismissed her, and reported her to a raft of regulators, for blowing the whistle on the school’s practice which endangered the child’s safety, health and welfare.
The Employment Tribunal is expected to hear the claim in August 2024.
Her case and the TRA investigation come despite a scathing report published last month by think tank Policy Exchange.
The report reveals the disturbing extent of extreme transgender and gender identity ideology in U.K. schools. In the foreword to the report Rosie Duffield MP writes: “A generation of children are being let down, because well-established safeguarding standards are being compromised.”’
The report goes on to say that in relation to sex and gender issues: “Safeguarding principles are being routinely disregarded in many secondary schools, which are neglecting their safeguarding responsibilities in favour of a set of contested beliefs in a way that risk jeopardising child wellbeing and safety.”
Hannah said:
Like all teachers at the school, I owed a safeguarding duty to Child X. From day one I believe that I acted in Child X’s best interests as I had a legitimate belief that the treatment of Child X amounted to a serious safeguarding issue.
I followed all the correct procedures, I backed all of my concerns with expert evidence and believed the action I took was in the public interest.
It is because I care so much about children that I am taking this action. This isn’t about me simply trying to prove that I am right, but about the safety of a seriously distressed child.
I could not participate in causing harm to Child X. The tragic stories of ‘detransitioners’, the Policy Exchange report and clear expert scientific evidence, back and vindicate me.
Teachers are being bullied not to question trans affirming policies when evidence shows that the actual result of the approach is to put the welfare of children at serious risk.
I am determined to pursue justice over how I have been treated, but my number one concern and motivation is to protect this child and other children in this country from harm.
The explosion of transgender medicine (TGD) as a new clinical segment of internal medicine is aimed at treating gender dysphoria. Does sex change really make gender dysphoria go away? One proxy for the psychological impact for better or worse is mental health care costs. A recent study reported shocking results in the wrong direction.
Hisle-Gorman et al from Department of Pediatrics, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD published a retrospective cohort (N=3754) study using military healthcare data from 2010-2018 identifying mental healthcare diagnoses and visits, and psychotropic medication prescriptions among TGD youth who received care for gender dysphoria before age 18, and their siblings.
Hisle-Gorman E, Schvey NA, Adirim TA, Rayne AK, Susi A, Roberts TA, Klein DA. Mental Healthcare Utilization of Transgender Youth Before and After Affirming Treatment. J Sex Med. 2021 Aug;18(8):1444-1454. doi: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2021.05.014. Epub 2021 Jul 8. PMID: 34247956.
Sadly, TGD adolescents were more likely to have a mental health diagnosis (OR 5.45, 95% CI [4.77-6.24]), use more mental healthcare services (IRR 2.22; 95% CI [2.00-2.46]), and used psychotropic medications (IRR = 2.57; 95% CI [2.36-2.80]) compared to normal siblings. Diagnoses included adjustment, anxiety, mood, personality, psychotic disorders, and suicidal ideation/attempted suicide. Among 963 TGD youth (age ~18 yrs) using gender-affirming pharmaceuticals, mental healthcare did not significantly change (IRR = 1.09, 95% CI [0.95-1.25]) and psychotropic medications increased (IRR = 1.67, 95% CI [1.46-1.91]) following gender-affirming pharmaceutical initiation.
These data suggest transgender medicine makes the overall burden of psychiatric disease worse and clearly increases the costs of psychiatric care. Parents should understand that transgender medicine is not effective in handling the psychiatric drivers of gender dysphoria in their teenagers.
Spiked has published a spiteful article by Fraser Myers that claims HART is “notorious for its anti-vax statements”. This follows a debate between him and Andrew Bridgen MP on GB News in which Bridgen brought along facts and Myers repeated the phrase “anti-vax conspiracy theory” numerous times. In turn, the debate had come about after Myers had published a shoddy attack — short on facts and heavy on invective — on Bridgen a week previously. The Spiked article was brutally dismembered by Will Jones at Daily Sceptic.
Perhaps stung by this, Myers produced the offending article, bringing HART into the picture after we asked for clarification about funding that Spiked had previously received from Pfizer. Nick Dixon, also of Daily Sceptic, has attempted to triangulate the state of play. We have written a longer piece about this episode; numerous others have opined on the matter. David Paton stated that Myers “would have more credibility in this debate if Spiked addressed their inexcusable support for sacking unvaccinated care workers” having supported this policy in July 2021.
Myers’ unpleasant statement about HART sits alongside various incorrect facts. We are happy to put the record straight and — as Myers has stated that this is his final word on the matter — we are pleased that this debate can be put to bed… unless, of course, Myers was just shooting from the hip with that statement and intends to continue the discussion.
Myers claims it is wrong to call the vaccines experimental. The injections were always experimental, which was why Pfizer’s Chief Scientific Officer described Israel as a “sort of laboratory” for the covid vaccines and why the world eagerly awaited evidence that they might work. The Pfizer phase 3 trial for safety does not officially conclude until 31st December 2023, but they destroyed the control by offering them the vaccine so the proper phase 3 safety studies will never complete. The safety aspect of Pfizer’s pregnancy, immunocompromised and myocarditis/pericarditis studies do not complete until 31st March 2026. The appropriate phase 0 pre-clinical work to measure the amount of spike protein produced in the body and how long it lasts has still not been done, or has not been made public.
Myers claims it was wrong to call the injections a gene therapy simply because they are not thought to alter a person’s DNA. According to Moderna’s filing in June 2020 “mRNA has been characterised as a Gene Therapy Medicinal Product.” BioNTech agreed in a filing in March 2020 saying, “mRNA therapies have been classified as gene therapy medicinal products.” Do these companies not know what they’re talking about?
Myers quotes early safety data saying that there were 139 adverse reactions in the vaccine arm and 97 in the placebo arm, claiming that it “isn’t an enormous difference”. These figures are from table 2 of the paper he references but he has not read the whole of table 2. This works out at an extra 12.5 events per 10,000 participants, which is 1 in 800 and exactly what Bridgen claimed. In the UK that would account for 52,000 such injuries after the second dose alone and would be properly defined as “uncommon” not “rare”. It is worth remembering that this terminology is designed for describing the harms from drugs given for treating people who are already sick. Serious harm caused to healthy people at a rate of 1 in 800 is totally unacceptable. Remember these were only the worst adverse events – life changing events, hospitalisations or deaths – which had all occurred during the short period of follow up at the very beginning of the safety trials. There had only been a median of 2 months follow-up at that point. For some participants the ink was metaphorically still wet on their consent forms. Any events that occurred after the cut off were not included in the study. He is right that others have criticised that paper but none of the critics have attempted their own analysis to estimate the scale of harm. It is also worth noting that this is a very high rate of serious adverse events — more frequent than 1 in 1,000 is properly termed ‘uncommon’ rather than ‘rare’ and certainly not ‘very rare’. Assuming a similar adverse reaction rate for later doses, such a rate would amount to over a hundred thousand such serious adverse events in the UK after 151 million jabs.
Myers then complains that 1 in 800 refers to the number of events, not the number of people affected. The same paper points out that the published trial data is inadequate to make that assessment. FDA data showed twice as many vaccine recipients had multiple adverse events as placebo participants which further suggests a genuine issue here.
Myers then claims the number needed to vaccinate (“NNV”) calculations from UKHSA were based on 2023 data. That is not correct: they were based on data from July 2022. At the time vaccines were still being pushed on the whole population. The estimates they calculated of thousands to hundreds needing to be vaccinated to prevent a serious hospital admission tally well with the estimates HART carried out for the NNV to prevent a single death from the Delta wave, using UKHSA’s own data.
HART can cite multiple other sources to evidence the claim that the covid injections were harmful and caused deaths, but what do we know? Myers has, after all, declared that HART is “notorious for its anti-vax statements”. But at least we’ve looked into the matter and attempted to shed light on some very iffy claims made by the authorities. If that has saved one person from suffering an unnecessary adverse effect, our consciences are clear — we will sleep well knowing we did what we could.
Others, however, will have to look themselves in the mirror for evermore and know what they have done.
Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo sent an open letter to the FDA and the CDC. The letter asks all the right questions about COVID vaccines – and exposes the FDA and the CDC as charlatans engaging in medical quackery.
Here’s the letter:
A very nice statement at the bottom summarizes the state of things:
Ladapo: Your organizations are the main entities promoting vaccine hesitancy – Florida promotes the truth. It is our duty to provide all information within our power to individuals so they can make their own informed health care decisions. A lack of transparency only harms Americans’ faith in science.
Vaccine Medical Quackery
Reminder: promoting unproven, untested, and non-working medications is called medical quackery, and promoters of such are called charlatans.
Ladapo exposes this medical quackery by asking several questions, each showing that the FDA (and the CDC) attempted to hide facts that reveal the dangers and ineffectiveness of Covid vaccines. Summary follows:
Why were randomized clinical trials not conducted for “Covid boosters” (such trials were necessary to establish that they are safe and effective)
Why did the FDA ignore many subclinical myocarditis reports and allow Pfizer to postpone its report on subclinical myocarditis?
Why were vaccine side effects intentionally ignored in V-Safe?
Why did the FDA allow Pfizer to hide the results of its clinical trial of Covid vaccines in pregnant women, that ended in 2022?
Why are the FDA and the CDC hiding negative effectiveness of Covid vaccines?
All these questions demonstrate that the FDA and the CDC intentionally conspired with vaccine manufacturers to hide adverse events of Covid vaccines and violated their own rules.
Covid Reckoning Instead of “Pandemic Amnesty”
The questions, growing more pointed daily, show that the long-hoped-for Covid reckoning is coming, as I explained:
Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Ladapo, is working hard to protect Floridians from Covid vaccines. However, he is not stupid and probably angling to become the next United States Surgeon General.
Asking questions such as the above will hopefully help enact “regime change” and allow new players, not tarnished by reckless “Warp Speed” vaccine programs or by vaccine mandates, to take over.
While I do not expect an honest answer from the FDA or the CDC, I wish Dr. Ladapo all the best and hope to see him appointed the US Surgeon General in 2024.
Marc Dutroux, Belgian pedophile, sadist, and serial killer with friends in high places
By Aedon Cassiel | Counter – Currents | December 23, 2016
To reiterate a point that should be clear to the more astute reader, my goal in this series (part 1, part 2) has not been to defend “Pizzagate” as such. My goal has been to defend the people who want to investigate it against specific accusations levied against them by people who think Pizzagate has revealed no intriguing information at all—for a specific reason, which I will be honing in and focusing on much more directly in this closing entry.
Whereas the mainstream critics of Pizzagate would have you believe that the dividing line is between paranoid conspiracy theorist followers of “fake news” and level-headed people who follow trustworthy news sources and rely on cold, hard reason to determine the truth, my goal has been to show that—whatever is or is not happening with Pizzagate itself—this framing of the issue is arrogant, insulting, and the product of extremely narrow tunnel vision. … continue
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