Son Alleges Texas Hospital’s COVID Treatment Plan Killed Unvaccinated Father
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 21, 2023
For decades, Constantine “Gus” Kotsanis was a respected otolaryngologist in Grapevine, Texas. Having emigrated from Greece at age 15, Constantine became a University of Texas-Southwestern medical professor, a cancer and autism researcher and founder of the Kotsanis Institute of Functional Medicine.
In an interview with The Defender, Constantine’s son, Andy Kotsanis, said that in the 1980s, his father helped transform what was previously the Grapevine Medical Center into the Baylor Scott & White Medical Center — Grapevine, affiliated with Baylor University. It is now the largest not-for-profit health system in Texas.
It was in that same hospital, that on March 14, 2021, Constantine “violently lost his life,” his son said — days after being admitted with respiratory problems and a subsequent COVID-19 diagnosis.
Andy said he believes his father’s death resulted from the treatment he received, including remdesivir, fentanyl and other drugs Constantine and his family had not authorized.
Andy also alleges he was “threatened and assaulted by the police and the hospital administrator” as his father was dying, and barred from the room as his father passed away.
Today, Andy is raising awareness about his father’s death — and the stories of others who endured similar treatment — through his own activism and as a social media outreach coordinator for the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation.
Andy discussed his family’s experience around his father’s hospitalization and subsequent death at Baylor Scott & White, and the activism he is now involved in as a result. He shared extensive documentation and photos with The Defender to corroborate his story.
Hospital president to victim’s family: ‘I’m not letting you see him’
Andy told The Defender that he was the very first baby born at Baylor Scott & White’s then-new outpatient operating room. Just days earlier, his father “was the first physician to do a procedure in that operating room,” he said. “So, there’s a very long history with my father and Baylor.”
“This is a story of tragedy, but also betrayal, because he helped build that place,” Andy said.
According to Andy, his father was not vaccinated for COVID-19. “He was not a fan of it,” he said. He said he now believes his father’s vaccination status may have played a crucial role in the treatment he received in the hospital.
After hearing about Gail Seiler’s story, Andy said, “Maybe they played that same game with him and did not tell the truth completely to us,” he said.
Andy said his father spent “a little over six days” in the hospital. He was admitted when “he had a hard time breathing. … He was really struggling, [in] a great state of hypoxia, almost to the point where he was exhausted with breathing.”
At the hospital, his father tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted. According to Andy, the pulmonologist assigned to his father, Dr. Jagadeshwar Gummi Reddy, administered four rounds of remdesivir daily.
“At first, my father was calling me, saying ‘I feel a little bit better, everything’s fine,’” Andy said. “Then things started to go downhill very quickly. … I didn’t understand at the time what remdesivir was, how powerful it was and what it did to people or how deadly it was.”
A few days later, another phone call came from the hospital, this time from nurse Sarah Grice, who told Andy’s mother, “I had to put your husband in restraints, because he was confused about why he had tubes in his lungs.”
After his father’s death, Andy discovered that hospital medical records claimed no restraints were used.
“At the time, I didn’t know that there’s a formula that they follow: They sedate you and they’ll put you in restraints if they have to put remdesivir in you,” Andy said. “We requested to speak to the hospital administrator, Chris York, president of Baylor Grapevine at the time.”
According to Andy, York “arrogantly” told them, “‘I don’t care who your dad was or who your husband was, I’m not letting you see him.’ I said, ‘I think this is criminal. You’re not letting me see my dad. I don’t know what’s going on. Please let me see my father.’”
But York told them, “If you think it’s a crime, call the police,” according to Andy, who said, “I’ll never forget that sentence for the rest of my life.”
Nurse ‘started performing the most violent chest compressions I’ve ever seen’
Grice called the family again, telling Andy’s mother, “Your husband said he wants to die and be put on a ventilator.” This sounded nothing like my dad, Andy said, “because all over his chart, it says he didn’t want to be intubated. No ventilator, no remdesivir.”
“So how do you go from ‘No, I don’t want to be on a ventilator’ to ‘I want to die, put me on the ventilator’ in a matter of less than six days?” Andy asked.
On what turned out to be the day before his father’s death, Andy, his mother and their attorney “barged in the front door … demanding to see my father,” Andy said. “We were ready to press charges if they didn’t let us in.”
Subsequently, York “made the decision to only let my mother in,” Andy said, while Reddy spoke to him in person. According to Andy, this discussion was peculiar.
“He came downstairs with his mask off, with his hands shaking like he was scared, like someone was after him,” Andy said. “He introduced himself [and said] ‘My hands are tied. There’s nothing I can do.’ I said, ‘That’s not a good answer, sir,’ and he just walked away. It was almost like he was being bullied.”
Reluctantly, Andy’s mother approved the use of the ventilator that day, Andy said. But at 5 a.m. the next morning, the hospital called to say his dad was coding.
Again, only one family member was allowed into Andy’s father’s hospital room, so the family decided to let Katerina, his sister, be that person.
Expecting “some humane treatment,” Andy said they were instead met at the front door by Donna, an older nurse, and Demorrius Jones, a policeman, who “arrogantly greeted us in a very rude way.”
According to Andy, they got York on the phone, who said, “No one can go into the room. You have to watch him die through the glass.”
Andy told The Defender that, through the glass, they saw nurse practitioner Rommel Villas Lantajo handing a syringe to Grice, who then injected Constantine.
“Before she injected him, I saw the heart monitor,” Andy said. “He had a pulse of 122. So, I’m thinking to myself ‘Why is he coding? He has a heartbeat.’”
After the injection, “his pulse started to drop rapidly, and she [the nurse] started to do the most violent chest compressions I’ve ever seen,” Andy said.
“His body was bouncing 10 inches off the table. It was like watching someone get chainsawed in half. It was very violent and brutal, and looked more like she was trying to kill him, not save his life,” Andy said.
Andy said his father’s health was “already compromised with all those drugs they gave him” in the preceding day, which included fentanyl, adding that “he was still on the ventilator when she [Grice] was doing what she was doing.”
Grice subsequently stopped administering chest compressions and, according to Andy’s mother, “turned off all the machines.” Immediately following this, “My dad lifted his chest off the table, and then he had a seizure and died in front of my mother” while she was screaming “Stop, stop, stop!”
Andy was not present as his father died, though, because the police officer had “forced me out of the ICU. He threatened to arrest me if I didn’t leave the hospital immediately.”
Father’s death ‘malicious and arbitrary’
“They did this to a very kind, gentle soul,” Andy said, adding that his father’s death was “malicious and arbitrary, on behalf of Chris York, the administrator.”
“I’m still in shock,” Andy said, telling The Defender :
“The aftermath was so bad. I’m still in therapy over it. I’m very sad. I can’t put into words what a panic attack is like. I didn’t have irritable bowel syndrome until my dad died. You only get that when you experience something traumatic. Some people consider that a form of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].”
“I’ve had several panic attacks,” Andy added. “I’ve lost count.” He said he’s “almost had to institutionalize” his mom. “I put my whole life on hold and I’m still, to this day, at her aid, trying to help her. She’s still not the same,” he said.
Andy also noted the anomaly of an extraordinary number of pages — many of them duplicates — in his father’s medical charts. “You’re in the hospital for six days but the chart is 948 pages long?” he asked. Another anomalous document dealt with “permission to be filmed,” he said, calling it “a very suspicious document.”
‘This is a huge cover-up’
His father’s experience led Andy to become an activist, he said.
“I’m trying to promote my story on my website and to inform everyone, the whole planet, that we’re witnessing the collapse of the healthcare system. … They’re using drugs in hospitals that are clearly not working,” he said. “I’m trying to show people that this is what they did to me. This is what they probably plan to do to you if you’re in there.”
“If that’s how you want to say goodbye to a loved one, go to Baylor Scott & White,” Andy said. “They’ll be more than happy to accommodate you if that’s your desire. That’s how I feel about this organization.”
“Hopefully, in the future, this can be a reference point for people to go, ‘We don’t want to be like Baylor, don’t pull a Baylor, don’t be like Baylor.’ That’s where I’m going with this,” Andy said. “This was so vicious and atrocious. I’ll never forget it.”
Aside from his website, Andy’s activism has included “putting road signs out, [placing] cards on doors,” he said, adding that such acts are “perfectly legal in the state of Texas” due to the Texas Citizens’ Participation Act.
However, just weeks after Andy began these activities, he was warned by local police and a local detective to “be careful” where he placed his signs and cards because his “First Amendment rights are limited.”
Andy said he experienced more difficulty with police when he attempted to press manslaughter charges against Baylor Scott & White. Local police referred him to Baylor Police and the Texas Rangers. When Andy contacted the Rangers, they advised him to “start a paper trail” by calling Baylor Police.
Yet, Baylor Police refused to take a report, telling him to “call our legal department.”
“So, this is a huge cover-up,” Andy told The Defender. “The police are covering up, in my opinion, what I would consider a homicide.”
Andy said his efforts, though, have managed to secure a degree of professional difficulty for York. According to Andy, “He orchestrated this, and now he’s no longer in the state of Texas. For a small while, he was an administrator in Arkansas, but thanks to my efforts informing his new employer, he’s no longer [there].”
In addition to his individual activism, Andy joined the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, which advocates on behalf of victims of COVID-19 hospital protocols and others with similar experiences. He described them as “the best group you can find if you’re a victim.”
“We’re on a mission,” Andy said. “We’re here to help as many people get as many stories out there and turn the narrative around.”
Many people have reached out to him through the FormerFeds Group but also through his own website, said Andy, describing similar treatment that they or loved ones experienced at hospitals, including at Baylor Scott & White.
Referring to the COVID-19-related hospital protocol prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Andy said he is not certain if it was followed by Baylor Scott & White in his father’s case. But he noted that his and other victims’ experience make it sound like “there’s a formula they’re following.”
Andy said these efforts are important to everyone, even if they haven’t been victims of COVID-19 hospital protocols or similar treatment.
“We all get old and will need a little extra attention,” he said. “The question is, what kind of attention is that going to be? I’m hoping it’s going to be a real standard of care.”
Andy shared some words of advice for individuals who have had similar experiences or who may end up in the hospital for similar reasons.
“If you can get the chart, get the chart, print the chart. Read it before you do any reporting. Do your own homework,” he said.
He also recommends seeking professional help to grieve. “It’s okay to ask for help.”
“Also, understand that there are people like me out there, a lot of us that are going to, for as long as we’re alive, try to turn this thing around,” he added. “Don’t give up because you feel like you’re going nowhere. I have felt that way many times. … Believe in yourself. Don’t give up. Be persistent.”
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.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Hurricane Katrina and the “Angels of Mercy”
Ethical boundaries in medical decision-making
By Jonathan Engler and Jessica Hockett | HART | August 21, 2023
The debate as to how much “pandemic” harm was caused not by a virus, but rather by the dystopian response to the perceived threat of a virus, has been raging for some time now.
Jonathan tweeted about this last year in relation to Lombardy and that thread was turned into this Panda article.
An analysis of the spatial characteristics of deaths during the spring 2020 wave in Northern Italy was carried out by him along with a Panda colleague; this suggested that it looked nothing like a spreading virus, and more like the sudden imposition of a policy response.
More recently, Jessica has essentially come to the same conclusions about New York: that something terrifyingly unnatural appears to have happened, which cannot be explained by the sudden spread of a deadly virus.
It surely does not require any scientific understanding whatsoever to glance at the below graph of total mortality rate in NYC going back to 2015 and see that what happened in a few weeks during spring 2020 suggests an abrupt episode of ferocious lethality which was at odds not only with anything observed anywhere at the time or thereafter, but also with even the highest estimates of the infection fatality rate alleged to have caused “the pandemic”.
If we look back even further, it can be seen that the reported spring 2020 mortality spike in New York is actually around double that observed in the autumn of the 1918 pandemic. But other places in 2020 did not see waves of deaths anywhere near those observed during the 1918 pandemic.
Moreover, unlike elsewhere, the increase in deaths was seen across a younger demographic, not exclusively in the elderly.
As shown in the graph below, all-cause hospital inpatient weekly death counts in the 20-59 age group were dramatically elevated for a short period, by a shocking 6-fold at their peak, with nearly all these deaths being coded as ‘covid’.
In fact, in New York, the % increase in all-cause deaths during the spring “1st wave” period was the same in the 20-69 year old age group as in the 70s and over:
In other places, however, what we were told was the same disease caused by the same virus left the younger age groups largely untouched, with nearly all deaths being in the elderly.
This discrepancy remains completely unexplained. It seems unarguable that certain difficult questions certainly need asking about what happened in New York in 2020 if we are to unravel the truth about what happened there.
Of course, the narratives emerging from Northern Italy and New York in 2020 were instrumental in driving fear and hysteria worldwide. Moreover, the number of deaths in both places informed early estimates of the IFR. These inciting incidents directly sparked much of the worldwide exaggerated, fear-driven response to what we now know was (if anything) a virus mainly affecting the frail and elderly, to which most people already had sufficient immunity to prevent severe illness.
For these reasons, it is essential that particular attention is paid to try to ascertain precisely what happened in these specific places.
It’s worth detailing – as evidence for the deeply dystopian mindset operating at the time – just some of the many deviations from normality that adversely affected human health and immunity, or which constituted sudden changes to healthcare practice.
These included (but were not limited to):
- Stress and anxiety from confinement (being told to stay home) and fear propaganda
- Discouragement to attend hospitals if ill
- Reduced community prescribing of broad-spectrum antibiotics
- Low staff levels in healthcare settings due to self-isolation of those “testing positive,” even with no symptoms
- Isolating the elderly
- Barring loved ones from hospital and care homes
- Fear (on the part of HCWs) of tending to covid positive patients, compromising basic medical and care needs.
- Early and inappropriate invasive ventilation
- Overuse of midazolam and opiates
Inevitably, and rightly, some researchers have started to perform post-pandemic autopsies analysing the motives and reasoning used to justify policies and other changes in behaviour and to examine their real world consequences.
Some medical practitioners have taken umbrage at any suggestion that the stressful environment and sudden expectations and pressures laid upon them may have resulted in well-meaning medical staff crossing ethical lines, or violating the Hippocratic Oath.
Those who wish to point out that there is historical precedent for medical staff behaving diabolically while thinking they are doing good often invoke atrocities during the 1930s and 1940s (and receive opprobrium as a result).
However, there is a much more recent example, and one which we were oblivious to until recently, despite this incident being totally “out in the open”, the subject of a lengthy investigative article, book, and a TV mini-series: the post Hurricane Katrina incident at Memorial Hospital Center in New Orleans in 2006.
Wikipedia provides the basic facts:
In the hurricane aftermath, the basement of Memorial Hospital Center flooded, power failed, and battery power for essential equipment started to run out. Most, but not all, patients were successfully evacuated.
The hurricane occurred on 29th August. A shocking finding was made in the aftermath, as described in the Wikipedia article:
On September 11, mortuary workers recovered 45 bodies from the hospital. Toxicology tests were performed on 41 bodies, and 23 tested positive for one or both of morphine and the fast-acting sedative midazolam [branded as Versed in the US], although few of these patients had been prescribed morphine for pain.
In the following weeks, it was reported that staff had discussed euthanizing patients. Some reports went further; Bryant King, an internist at Memorial, told CNN that he believed “the discussion of euthanasia was more than talk.”
LifeCare told the state Attorney General’s office that nine of their patients might “have been given lethal doses of medicines by a Memorial doctor and nurses.”
King publicly charged that one or more healthcare workers had killed patients, based on conversations with other health care workers. King told CNN that when he believed a doctor was about to kill patients, he boarded a boat and left the hospital. King explained his actions in terms of his opposition to Pou’s alleged actions, arguing “I’d rather be considered a person who abandoned patients than someone who aided in eliminating patients.”
Following an investigation into the deaths described above, the local DA (“District Attorney”) decided there was sufficient evidence to charge three medical staff with four counts of second-degree murder. Charges against two were later dropped in exchange for testimony.
The prosecution was deeply unpopular. Despite substantial evidence of deliberate actions taken to terminate lives – indeed, enough to satisfy the legal definition for homicide – many members of the public felt medical staff were simply “doing their best” under very trying circumstances. According to a local reporter the incident “ignited a furious debate in New Orleans and elsewhere about whether sharp ethical boundaries can be drawn around decisions on patient comfort made in a crisis.”
The DA failed to win re-election, and when the new DA convened a Grand Jury* at an undisclosed location, much of the previously amassed evidence was not presented and some of the key witnesses not called. The Grand Jury decided that charges should be dropped.
Unsurprisingly, several commentators (e.g., Loyola University Law Professor Dane Ciolono) opined that the Grand Jury was convened and run in such a way as to ensure charges would be dropped while providing “cover” for such an outcome.
Whatever actually occurred at Memorial Hospital, or whatever the staff’s motives, the incident speaks to an unsettling, yet undeniable truth: during a crisis, “ethical red lines” – however deeply held and valued – may be easily crossed. Society may judge those decisions acceptable or understandable, as appears to have happened with the Memorial Hospital case.
In summary, it would appear that the legal process was manipulated to assure an outcome which accorded with public opinion – that is to say to extinguish the possibility of prosecution while maintaining the pretence of due legal process. In this way, facing up to the stark reality – that as a society we mete out justice arbitrarily when we wish to – was avoided. Perhaps the well-ordered rules-based system suggested by statutory definitions of what actions constitute crimes, is to some extent just “for show”.
The Memorial Hospital case obliterates – with a relatively recent example – the notion that doctors and nurses all have the same ethical boundaries which they simply will not cross under any circumstances.
Could such boundaries have been crossed during the recent covid event?
A number of commentators are considering the possibility that changes in the policies and practices around the use of certain drugs (midazolam and opiates), and procedures (invasive ventilation) – sometimes in combination – may have contributed to the high mortality reported, at least in some specific places.
In relation to drugs, in an article published on his Substack last year, the blogger known as Bartram’s Folly explored the possibility that (in the UK) sheer fear and panic may well have driven medical staff to use midazolam and opiates more liberally in patients with covid, which may have encompassed anyone with a positive covid test.
In the UK one such mechanism which may have encouraged this measure is the NICE Guideline NG163 (no longer on their website but available here or as PDF download here), about which others have also written in detail. This guideline effectively transposed the advice for treating end-stage cancer patients with midazolam and opiates into that for covid patients. More detail on this here.
Of the guideline, Bartram said,
“… the NICE guidelines appear to have introduced a pathway for doctors which allowed for (perhaps even encouraged) more than a gentle nudge for those who were ill with Covid towards death, some of whom might well have survived given the chance. This iatrogenesis hypothesis would mean that at least some of the deaths recorded as with Covid might well have been a direct result of the care guidelines as set out by NICE.“
Later, Bartram makes the point that the pretext of a crisis situation or emergency may establish the grounds for ethical boundaries to be crossed or disregarded, at least temporarily, under the auspices of ignorance or ‘doing one’s best’ with the information said to be known or available at the time:
It is important to note that in the iatrogenesis hypothesis it isn’t necessary for some people to have had an evil intent – it is entirely possible that individuals promoted and exercised a policy that resulted in needless deaths while believing that they were ‘doing the right thing’ (e.g., see Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil).
In particular, ‘petty bureaucrats’ appear to be readily able to think up policies without seeing the need to consider the full consequences, and when these consequences are eventually revealed will usually point to the minutes from endless meetings with other petty bureaucrats to show that they weren’t personally responsible for the policy and they were simply following process.
Of course, once a framework had been decided front-line staff might have been grateful for the guidance offered given the challenging times, at least until the negative consequences of the guidance became painfully clear.
It should also be remembered that – in the US at least – certain extraordinary policy measures may have been important factors. For example, during the emergency NYC Governor Cuomo issued executive orders and suspended laws which gave doctors and nurses immunity and absolved hospitals of the responsibility to keep close patient records. (The order itself can be found here, and some legal commentary on it here.) Articles in JAMA can be interpreted as giving ethical permission for physicians to issue unilateral DNR orders, avoid CPR, and ration ventilators and critical care beds.
Moreover there are numerous examples of doctors, nurses and others in the US who later said they were following guidance, learning as they went. (See this interesting essay by Dr Kory, for example.) Under these circumstances it is easy to see how they could assume that something which ordinarily might have been questionable would become acceptable as “everyone else was doing it”.
Evidence of increased midazolam use can be seen in the US as well as in the UK. This graph from a study describing the use of 7 specific drugs in 47 hospitals in NY shows the daily count of patients (blue) who received midazolam and the disproportionate quantities used (orange) between March 1 and May 16, 2020.
Moreover, midazolam is currently listed by the FDA to have been in short supply since 2 April 2020:
This Guardian article from 13 April 2020 reports on a letter sent by “a group of prominent medical practitioners and experts” to capital punishment states imploring them to:
“release their stocks of essential sedatives and paralytics that they hoard for executions” so that they can be “used for intubations and mechanical ventilation of the most severely ill coronavirus patients who cannot breathe for themselves”.
The tone of this letter can be taken to illustrate the sense of sheer panic prevailing at the time – certainly not conducive to rational decision-making – combined with the assumption that invasive ventilation was going to be extensively required and used.
This takes us to the question of invasive ventilation, whether it might have been used too often, inappropriately, and why.
As well as panic, the role of fear on the part of healthcare workers cannot be underestimated. Here is Dr Vinay Prasad stating that:
“It is a unique situation in medicine. In our whole medical career, doctors have never been personally afraid the way they were [with covid].”
Official guidance (see for example this from a British anaesthetists’ professional association) certainly reinforced the idea that one of the benefits of early intubation was to reduce the aerosolization of virus, such that it would be safer for those caring for the patients, compared to when non-invasive forms of ventilation were used.
This JAMA Clinical Update “Care for Critically Ill Patients With COVID-19” published on 11 March 2020 strongly supports the idea that the thinking was very much that non-invasive oxygen augmentation could be dangerous for healthcare workers:
The journalist Alex Berenson was early to point out that ventilator shortage may have more to do with overuse “to protect staff” than to being overwhelmed by patients in respiratory failure.
It seems like fear may well have been augmented by official guidance to result in significant overuse of this measure.
It is important to understand the differences between the Memorial Hospital incident and what may have happened in the early stages of the covid crisis. In New Orleans, it may indeed have been reasonable to assume that it was going to be impossible to evacuate the patients (who were given midazolam and opiates to ease suffering) in time, and that they were indeed unsaveable due to the extraordinary circumstances. (Whether or not this was actually the case will probably never be known, because of the legal shenanigans described above.)
However, whether that applies to all, some, or just a few of those who died in spring 2020 after being administered the same or other drugs (or placed on mechanical ventilators or issued a unilateral DNR, etc.) is still a matter of debate whereas for sure, Hurricane Katrina was self-evidently an extreme weather event that created devastation and emergency conditions in its fury and wake.
Certainly, it seems clear that personal fear and a belief in the lethality of this infection drove much medical decision-making in the early days. It is not hard to imagine actions being taken which were then rationalised by imagining the suffering that had been prevented, limited resources preserved, and many lives saved. The deaths witnessed could easily have acted as positive reinforcement in the minds of healthcare workers as to how serious the illness was. These protocols could lead to the deaths of patients who were not particularly old and frail and thus reinforce the message that the virus was potentially fatal even in such people
The decisions that healthcare workers made, and the influences on and factors involved in those decisions, will be discussed and dissected for decades to come. When humanity is ready to confront what occurred – and admit that ethical inversions in hospitals and care homes contributed to unintentional iatrogenic death, we can move toward keeping it from happening again.
* (A Grand Jury in the US is a specific type of court empowered by law to determine whether probable cause exists to support criminal charges for a suspect in a crime. Louisiana – in which New Orleans is situated – is one of 23 US states that use grand juries for indictments in serious crimes.)
Eris vaccine marketing hits Germany, complete with panic about a nonexistent August “Covid wave”
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | August 20, 2023
We will not be free of the virus until we are free of the vaccinators.
The leftist taz newspaper on 17 August: New German Wave: The new Covid variant Eris has arrived in Germany. Concerns about a new wave are growing – but the country is not well prepared.
The pandemic is over, but the virus is still dangerous: Reports of the new variant EG.5.1. seem to confirm this analysis. EG.5.1. (Eris) has been considered a “variant of interest” since 9 August. According to the WHO, the phenotype does not differ fundamentally from other Omicron lineages and does not require special public health measures …
With the announced end of the pandemic, virtually all mandated protective measures have been lifted in Germany. The most important instrument in the fight against Covid-19 is thus the immunisation of the population through infection or vaccination.
Das Erste, state media, on 19 August: Covid Variant “Eris”: How Dangerous is the New Mutation EG.5?
The World Health Organisation WHO has upgraded the new Covid mutationEG.5. This variant, called “Eris,” now belongs to the “variants of interest.” …
As WHO Covid expert Maria Van Kerkhove explained in Geneva on Wednesday, more severe outcomes have not been observed with Eris, but vaccination confers less protection than with other virus variants. …
Even though the new variant is unlikely to cause severe disease, the [German vaccine regulatory authority] STIKO still recommends getting vaccinated – above all to avoid possible long-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection and to protect employees in medical and nursing care.
n-tv, a subsidiary broadcaster of RTL, on 18 August: The Number of Coivd-19-Cases Continues to Rise.
The pharmaceutical company Moderna has announced that its updated Covid vaccine according to an initial study is effective against the Eris sub-variant. The company now expects to launch the new vaccine in time for the autumn vaccination season. Approval from vaccine regulators however is still pending.
Moderna, like vaccine manufacturers Novavax and Pfizer, has developed versions of its vaccines with Biontech SE that target Eris subvariants. Shortly before, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer had reported that its revised vaccine had been effective against Eris in a study with mice. …
Most recently, it was suspected that the cinema hype surrounding the feel-good film “Barbie” and the gloomy biopic “Oppenheimer” may have caused many infections. At the same time, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) recorded an increase in the number of reported Covid infections. Experts, however, see no reason for concern so far.
Frankfurter Rundschau, a regional Frankfurt paper, on 17 August: Covid comeback with “Eris”: First experts demand return to masking.
Is Covid on the attack again? There are indications that the virus is once on the rise once more. …
British doctors are already calling for a return to masking. [Relentless virus charlatan and deranged hypermasker] Trisha Greenhalgh suggests that, “in view of the spread of new variants,” masking in high-risk situations should be considered.
The [virus surveillance] of the Federal Ministry of Health shows that the numbers are also on the rise in Germany. … “Eris” is already responsible for every fourth corona infection, according to new figures from the RKI. “The number of Covid-19 cases reported to the RKI .. seems to be related to the increasing circulation of this ‘variant of interest’,” the Robert Koch Institute says.
The increase in the case numbers – at least in Great Britain – coincides with the opening of the blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in British cinemas, which has given rise to talk of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon. It is well known that larger crowds in enclosed indoor spaces are associated with an increased risk of corona infection. So is it time for a mask renaissance?
In the USA, more and more voices calling for one. [Relentless virus pest] Eric Feigl-Ding … used the hashtag #MaskUp on Twitter to call once again for protecting oneself from Covid infections with masks. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach shared the post, warning that the latest Covid data from New York is “worrying.” …
“There is still a risk that a more dangerous variant will emerge, which could lead to a sudden increase in cases and deaths,” emphasises WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Not only adapted vaccines that take the new variants into account, but also wearing a mask would then help to protect oneself and others, Frankfurt virologist Martin Stürmer told Spiegel.
tagesschau, state media, on 17 August: Covid Case Numbers are Rising Again.
The number of laboratory-confirmed Corona cases in Germany is rising again – but at a relatively low level. This development has been ongoing for around a month, reports the Influenza Working Group at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) … According to the report, about 2,400 confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported nationwide last week. This is more than double the number reported in the week ending 9 July, when there were about 1,000. …
According to the RKI report, the activity of acute respiratory diseases in general in the population was “at a low summer level.” … “Anyone with symptoms of an acute respiratory infection should stay at home for three to five days and until the symptoms have clearly improved,” advises the RKI. …
Despite all of this obnoxious verbiage, absolutely nothing of virological note is happening in Germany. Official Covid testing has been all but abolished here, forcing our journaloids to unearth statistics from RKI influenza surveillance – something they refused to do during the pandemic itself, because the flu people routinely posted data that undermined their panic narrative. Here, I’ve circled in red the scary rise in infections from the latest RKI report that we’re meant to be worried about:
This microscopic uptick is dwarfed by the February/March wave that peaked between weeks 8 and 13. Our media luminaries took next to no notice of this frightening late-winter surge, and as I type this, Covid diagnoses have not even re-achieved their June levels. The difference between the state of things now and the state of things in February is not the unremarkable Eris variant. XBB was also debuting across Europe early this year, driving the post-February case peak, and nobody cared. The only thing that is different now, is the proximity of the autumnal vaccination liturgy and the prospect of new, updated vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax. That is why we are hearing about variants and masks and Long Covid all over again. It is also why many of these articles contain buried within them somewhere the advice to line up for the shiny new anti-Covid juice this Fall. This whole thing is, very plainly, a psy-op, if a very low-effort one.
There are several patterns in the German reporting that are worth noting. First of all, the latest hysteria was unleashed on 17 August, prompted by a report on Eris from the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Particularly in the realm of routine reporting, the news agencies are a powerful coordinating force, and their influence here means that the full media panic machine is not engaged. We’re looking instead at pieces thrown together by low-level staff desperate to fill column inches. Second, all the German stories are firmly downstream from Anglophone sources, going so far as to recycle from British tabloids the improbable theory of a “Barbenheimer” wave (it is painful even to type this stupid word). Third, at least German health authorities – Karl Lauterbach excepted – resolutely refuse to provide virus doom quotes. Thus the Frankfurter Rundschau had to appropriate the tweets of Anglosphere mask hysterics like Greenhalgh and Feigl-Ding to make Eris sound scary.
I know there are rumours that American authorities are planning to bring back mask mandates and other restrictions in the coming months, and I’ll be honest: We should be so lucky. If the pandemicists try to kick up another round of non-pharmaceutical interventions this fall, they’ll be flirting with self destruction. There are important prerequisites for virus panic: You need a plausibly novel pathogen, the risk of which can be exaggerated. You need a prevailing sense of stability, with nothing else much going on, because the public health interventions themselves have to seem new. Risk, excitement and the prospect of a break from routine are important enticements. That’s all gone now. Covid is not a new scary virus anymore; nearly everyone has had personal experience with it. Solid majorities everywhere have learned to hate lockdowns, despise masking and avoid the mRNA vaccines. The pandemicists need a plausibly new virus to reopen the circus, and they need a lot of people to forget about what a misery the last pandemic response was. They’ll have another chance in ten or fifteen years, I’d guess. Then, it’ll be time to worry.
Critics Slam JAMA Study Claiming 52 U.S. Doctors Spread COVID ‘Misinformation’
By Monica Dutcher | The Defender | August 18, 2023
Critics of a study published this week in JAMA concluding 52 doctors from across the U.S., propagated “COVID-19 misinformation about vaccines, treatments, and masks on large social media and other online platforms” called the study nothing more than “propaganda.”
“Ultimately, misinformation is just a weaponized term meaning nothing,” said Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH. “People who use it are often completely ignorant of science and truth.
Prasad and others pointed to several flaws in the study, including the researchers’ definition of “misinformation,” the reported percentage of those with post-COVID-19 condition, or “long COVID” and the false claim that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine alone led to deaths — as deaths also have been linked to the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
The CDC as the arbiter of COVID truths
The University of Massachusetts researchers who produced the study defined misinformation as “assertions unsupported by or contradicting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] guidance on COVID-19 prevention and treatment during the period assessed or contradicting the existing state of scientific evidence for any topics not covered by the CDC.”
But in an Aug. 16 Substack article, Prasad — a hematologist-oncologist and professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco — challenged the notion of using the CDC as the litmus test for pandemic-related information.
CDC “made many errors,” Prasad wrote, citing a paper he published in March, documenting 25 statistical or numerical errors made by the CDC that he said raised questions about the agency’s “real or perceived systematic bias.”
It’s also well documented that the agency constantly changed its mask guidance and published conflicting information about vaccine effectiveness.
Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies medical misinformation, told USA Today, “The guidance kept on changing … Communication around the vaccine was horrible.”
Dr. Jeff Barke, an Orange County, California, primary care physician and founding member of America’s Frontline Doctors, called the CDC “a captured agency,” saying “it makes no sense whatsoever to recommend this toxic product [COVID-19 vaccines] to children.”
The CDC never came out with early treatment guidelines, Barke said. It was always about vaccines and masks. Barke recalled prescribing ivermectin to his patients and the pharmacists not filling it, asking him for the “diagnostic code” in order to proceed.
Barke told The Defender :
“The pharmacy never asks for a diagnostic code if you prescribe OxyContin for a patient. So it’s OK for a doctor to prescribe a Schedule II narcotic — no questions asked — but I can’t prescribe a product that has a proven safety record of 50 or 60 years.”
Barke is a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit to stop a California law that subjects the state’s doctors to discipline, including the suspension of their medical licenses, for sharing “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19 with their patients.
What exactly is ‘misinformation’?
The study’s authors identified four categories of “misinformation”:
- Claiming vaccines were unsafe and/or ineffective.
- Promoting unapproved medications for prevention or treatment.
- Disputing mask-wearing effectiveness.
- “Other misinformation,” to include conspiracy theories and the virus’s origins.
The authors reviewed COVID-19-related posts from doctors on the social media platforms Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, Parler and YouTube between January 2021 and December 2022.
The researchers initially focused their Twitter review on America’s Frontline Doctors’ profile because of the organization’s “volume of COVID-19 misinformation in its tweets” and “large following.”
Physicians who followed America’s Frontline Doctors’ Twitter page were targeted on Twitter and other platforms.
Using the search terms “COVID,” “vaccine,” “doctor,” “physician,” “ineffective,” “pharmaceutical,” “ivermectin,” “hydroxychloroquine” and others, the authors of the study identified 52 doctors — 50 licensed and two unlicensed — who used social media to spread COVID-19 “misinformation.”
Results showed most of the 52 physicians (76.9%) who posted “misinformation” did so in more than one of the four categories identified. The majority posted vaccine “misinformation.”
Dr. Meryl Nass — who on Thursday sued the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and its individual members, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution — called the JAMA study “a piece of propaganda.”
Nass said:
“There is no science. They [the authors] are trying to make it look like they’re doing something quantitative when they’re not. There was a lot known about the ineffectiveness of the vaccines at the time they were working on this paper.”
Unpacking the misinformation in the misinformation study
The University of Massachusetts researchers said doctors’ claims that myocarditis was common in children who received the vaccine and that the risks of myocarditis outweighed the risk of vaccination were “unfounded.”
But myocarditis “does outweigh the benefits of vaccinations for some ages — in men — and some doses,” said Prasad, citing an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
The paper, which focused on booster mandates at American universities, concluded the mandates were unethical because they could result in greater health risks, like booster-associated myocarditis, than benefits to healthy young adults.
Several other studies have shown either myocarditis deaths across all age groups, or elevated myocardial injury after vaccination.
The researchers also flagged any posts discussing pre-pandemic studies that definitively concluded masks do not prevent the spread of respiratory viral infections. And they deemed as misinformation any post that undermined the role of masks in slowing the spread of the infection and that pointed to rising cases in areas with mask mandates.
But a plethora of studies on mask ineffectiveness emerged during the time the Massachusetts team was conducting its research on physicians and “misinformation.”
There were also reports on “The Foegen effect” — the idea that deep re-inhalation of droplets and virions caught on facemasks might make COVID-19 infection more likely or more severe. German physician Dr. Zacharias Fögen introduced the concept in a study that concluded: “mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.”
“The totality of the evidence to date shows no benefit from community mask wearing,” said Prasad, who pointed to Cochrane’s multiple analyses.
According to the JAMA study, doctors who said the COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective at preventing COVID-19 spread or that the virus originated in a lab in China were propagators of misinformation.
Yet plenty of data show the vaccines did not prevent transmission, and scientists even testified to evidence that COVID-19 could have resulted from controversial gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In the wake of the pandemic, multiple organizations have published guidelines on “medical misinformation” — including YouTube and the American Medical Association (AMA).
Last June, the AMA adopted a new policy to limit medical disinformation, including ensuring that medical licensing boards can take disciplinary action against health professionals who spread health-related disinformation.
In California, however, a judge ruled in January that the state does not have the power to penalize doctors who spread “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
“COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus,” the judge decided.
Monica Dutcher is a Maryland-based senior reporter for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Can You Overdose on Ivermectin? Dr. Pierre Kory’s Answer Will Shock You
The Vigilant Fox | Vigilant News | August 17, 2023
“Of all the harmful misinformation spread over the past couple of years, one of the most disturbing false narratives was targeted at the Nobel-Prize-winning, human medicine ivermectin,” expressed filmmaker Mikki Willis in his ground-breaking documentary titled, Ivermectin: The Truth.
Ivermectin is “one of the safest and most effective medicines of this era. A medicine that, according to the numerous top scientists I’ve interviewed … could have ended the pandemic before it began.”
But Ivermectin is “horse dewormer,” the media said. “It could put you in a coma.” “It can kill you,” pundits warned.
But is this actually true?
Popular podcaster Greg Hunter, AKA USA Watchdog, asked Dr. Pierre Kory, one of the world’s leading experts on Ivermectin, straight-up, “Can I OD (overdose) on Ivermectin if I get two or three times the [standard] dose. Can I kill myself?”
“Let me answer scientifically. So there is a world-famous toxicologist named Jacques Descotes, and he’s French. And two years ago, he was commissioned to do a scoping review of the entire data on the safety of Ivermectin in its history. And his conclusion after doing this comprehensive review is that he does not believe that there has been one single case of anyone dying from an Ivermectin overdose.”
Prof. Jacques Descotes: Image – Academica.edu
“Oh, Lord,” reacted Greg Hunter. “How many pills have been given worldwide? I heard 4 billion, but it must be more than that.”
“Over 4 billion,” Dr. Kory confirmed. “Now, people have died where the deaths were reported as caused by Ivermectin. But when he [Prof. Jacques Descotes] reviewed those cases, he didn’t think those arguments [were] credible.”
Let’s dive deeper into Prof. Descotes’ analysis.
But first, a quick look at his impressive credentials. “Pr. Jacques Descotes, MD, PharmD, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Claude Bernard University of Lyon (France), [is] a world-known toxicologist with a 40-year track [record] as an independent consultant for the pharmaceutical industry as well as an advisor to regulatory bodies worldwide,” BusinessWire wrote.
In March 2021, he conducted a review of Ivermectin’s safety profile based on over 350 articles – plus accessible web sources. Here are his conclusions:
“Ivermectin has been administered orally to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world in the past three decades. The assessment of reported adverse events temporally associated with Ivermectin exposure shows that Ivermectin-induced adverse effects have so far been infrequent and usually mild to moderate.
“It is noteworthy that no deaths have seemingly ever been reported after an accidental or suicidal overdose of Ivermectin. No greater toxicity of Ivermectin has been substantiated in elderly people despite repeated assertions that an ageing blood-brain barrier might lead to increased Ivermectin toxicity level. The positive clinical experience accumulated with Ivermectin administration led many medical experts to break away from early adamant contra-indications in pregnant women. Finally, several national pharmacovigilance networks around the world released information and opinions to ascertain Ivermectin safety in human subjects. So far, there are no critical safety limitations to Ivermectin prescription in current indications.
I also want to point out that no severe adverse event has been reported in dozens of completed or ongoing studies involving thousands of participants worldwide to evaluate the efficacy of Ivermectin against COVID-19.”
“In order to overdose from Ivermectin, you have to take either a hundred or a thousand times the standard dose,” declared Dr. Kory.
“And there have been accidental poisonings where people have taken large amounts. But you know what happens every time? When they take these massive amounts of Ivermectin, it tends to affect them neurologically. They’ll get confused. They might be stumbling — uncoordinated. They go to the hospital, and there’s no treatment required. But within days, the patients return to normal. So, there’s been no life-ending injuries. No deaths reported with Ivermectin. So, that shows you why it’s one of the safest drugs in history, even at massive overdoses.
Greg Hunter’s full interview with Dr. Pierre Kory is available to watch.
Medical Board Chief who wanted Doctors delicensed for ‘misinformation’ in bed with PR firm tied to CDC, Pfizer, Moderna
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 18, 2023
The head of a national medical organization who publicly called for doctors to lose their licenses unless they supported government narratives on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines concealed his relationship with a public relations firm whose client list also included Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Richard Baron, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is a client of Weber Shandwick, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported on Wednesday.
In late 2021, Baron publicly pushed for doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19 and the vaccines to lose their license and certification. Baron said then that “putting out flagrant misinformation is unethical and dangerous during a pandemic.”
Weber, the world’s second-largest PR firm, has branded its team as “misinformation and disinformation” experts and says it provides clients with services to help manage any perceived threats posed by spreaders of such information.
The firm has organized conference panels on “medical misinformation” in which Baron participated.
Last year, Baron partnered with Weber Shandwick to propose a South by Southwest (SXSW) panel titled “When Doctors Prescribe Misinformation.” The proposal was subsequently accepted and the panel took place at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 13.
According to Thacker, “Weber Shandwick’s panel featuring Dr. Baron has been widely promoted by the PR firm’s employees,” including Sarah Mahoney, executive vice president, Healthcare Communications, Strategy & Planning for Weber Shandwick, who in a LinkedIn post, wrote she “can’t think of a more important topic right now.”
The CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) in September 2020 awarded Weber a $50 million contract “to promote the vaccination of children, pregnant women and those at risk for flu and increase the general acceptance and use of vaccines,” according to the PR firm’s website.
Under the contract, Weber employees were embedded in the NCIRD to “communicate the risks and recommended actions for outbreaks and convey vaccine recommendations to healthcare providers,” according to Thacker.
Medicine has always been ‘in bed with Big Pharma’
Several doctors have faced disciplinary action by state medical boards for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” One of them is internist and biological warfare epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of Children Health Defense’s scientific advisory committee.
Nass on Thursday sued the Maine Board of Licensure, which suspended her license in January 2022.
The board’s suspension arose from its adoption of a position statement promulgated by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) threatening physicians “who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” with suspension or revocation of their medical license.
In 2021, ABIM and FSMB collaborated to create the statement used to discipline Nass.
Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements, primarily related to demonstrating competence in one’s field of specialization, including completing a residency, being certified by the residency director, and paying for and passing the board examinations.
Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements. She explained:
“You complete a medical residency in your field of specialization. Your residency director certifies your competence and moral character, and you must pay for and pass your board examination to demonstrate your command of your specialty.
“When you’ve paid them for board certification and successfully completed all the requirements, how can they change the rules 20 or 50 years later and say, ‘we’re going to decertify you now because we don’t like your viewpoint?’
“There was nothing in any documentation from the Board of Internal Medicine about misinformation, or any other standards that the board can impose apart from competency to practice when it issued certifications.”
Dr. Richard Eggleston, a retired ophthalmologist in Clarkston, Washington, also faces disciplinary action — by the Washington Medical Commission — arising from articles he published in a local newspaper in 2021, questioning the official narrative and medical advice related to COVID-19.
Doctors aren’t being targeted exclusively for spreading “misinformation” — some, like Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton, an integrative physician, were targeted for their less-than-100% support for COVID-19 vaccines.
Last month, the Massachusetts medical board revoked Sutton’s medical license, claiming she improperly exempted eight children from required school vaccinations. This came a year after California also revoked Sutton’s medical license.
Sutton told The Defender, “The voice of medicine today is determined by the marketing wisdom of Madison Avenue, not by what is sound information from scientific research.”
Sutton said the whole practice of medicine rests on sharing and providing information necessary for informed decisions and consent. When specialty boards issue vague accusations, they engage in “harassment,” and an “egregious overreach of power” and are obstructing the practice of medicine.
A California law aimed at punishing doctors for providing “misinformation” to their patients is now in “legal limbo” following conflicting rulings in state courts earlier this year, which could affect Sutton’s and other California doctors’ cases going through the courts.
This trail of evidence demonstrates medical boards are not simply acting on their own authority but in collusion with state governments, federal agencies and private companies.
“There’s no one who is a ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ expert whose opinion does not align with the government and with the corporations,” Thacker told The Defender. “That’s what makes them an ‘expert.’”
“What’s always been true is that medicine has been in bed with Big Pharma,” he added. “It’s now becoming a lot more transparent. These relationships are much more transparent.”
‘A very political attempt to shut down people from having alternative viewpoints’
According to Thacker, Baron began his “crusade for the biopharmaceutical industry” in September 2021. In a post for ABIM’s blog, Baron said, “I want to state unequivocally that ABIM can and does take action, independent of state licensing boards, to remove certification from physicians for unprofessional and unethical behavior.”
For Thacker, Baron’s concern about “misinformation” was first triggered when physicians spoke out against COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy and side effects. “These are the same concerns held by Weber Shandwick, who Pfizer and Moderna are paying big buck[s] to promote their vaccines,” he said.
“Baron’s relationship with Weber Shandwick was not disclosed” by JAMA, Thacker said, “nor in an accompanying viewpoint Baron wrote for JAMA.”
After an inquiry by Thacker, JAMA’s editor-in-chief, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, said, “We initiated our internal investigation earlier this week, in accordance with our standard processes for allegations of non-disclosure of conflicts.”
“It is notable that Baron has done his best to mislead the public and other physicians about what he is doing,” Nass said. “He claims the ABIM is trying to ‘protect the legitimacy of medical expertise’ rather than censoring viewpoints it does not like.”
Nass said Baron “conjures up examples of what the board might censure.” She pointed to a Feb. 23, 2023, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article Baron co-authored with attorney Carl J. Coleman, which stated:
“When a licensed physician insists that viruses don’t cause disease or that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people or connect them to cell towers, professional bodies must be able to take action in support of fact and evidence based practice.”
“Yet this is a fabrication,” Nass said, adding:
“Instead, Dr. Baron, who earns about $1.2 million yearly from the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation, has decertified Drs. Peter McCullough, Paul Marik and Pierre Kory — all highly celebrated, published and esteemed doctors in their fields.
“None of them have uttered any mumbo-jumbo about cell towers, magnetism or a non-viral etiology for COVID-19. All have had their board certifications revoked for the viewpoints they expressed — viewpoints that are supported by a preponderance of the medical literature.”
In a January 2022 article for Health Affairs, Coleman wrote, “Licensing boards are state agencies subject to the First Amendment, and as such they are limited in their ability to penalize physicians based on the content of their speech.”
Yet, a 2022 NEJM article co-authored by Baron argued that while “Differences of opinion in medicine are necessary for progress … there are some opinions that have been so thoroughly repudiated by existing evidence as to be considered definitively wrong.”
‘All this money is sloshing around now for misinformation research’
According to Thacker, “PR firms are now moving into the ‘disinformation’ space after decades of deceit on behalf of multiple industries,” with Weber Shandwick having “expanded into the disinformation space in late 2021,” promoting tactics that help “brands combat misinformation and disinformation that may implicate them.”
Speaking to Thacker, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said, “The ABIM is clearly part of this ‘medical misinformation’ push, which is orchestrated by pharmaceutical companies and their PR allies” and which serves “the interests of Big Pharma.”
Remarking on the presence of a “medical misinformation” panel at SXSW, long known as a music, film and technology festival, Thacker told The Defender, “Anyone and everyone is getting involved in ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”
“Baron has given a TED Talk, for instance. Why is TED Talks involved in this?” he asked.
In 2019 Baron delivered a talk at TEDx Chicago titled, “Please Don’t Confuse Your Google Search with My Medical Degree.”
For Thacker, the answer relates to financial interests. “All this money is sloshing around now for ‘misinformation’ research. Anyone can hop up and down saying ‘I’m an expert on misinformation and disinformation, get me a grant, get me on a panel,’” he said.
Weber embedded staffers within the CDC while representing Pfizer, Moderna
Thacker wrote that prior to discovering Baron’s ties to Weber Shandwick, he had confirmed the PR firm’s ties to COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna.
These ties did not prevent the CDC from awarding the $50 million contract to Weber Shandwick in September 2020 to push vaccines. The Daily Mail subsequently reported Thacker’s findings.
Medical Marketing and Media reported “Weber’s duties include providing 10 on-site health communications staffers, seven health comms specialists, two health research specialists and one social media specialist” to NCIRD, as well as “generating story ideas, distributing articles and conducting outreach to news, media and entertainment organizations.”
In October 2020, a blog post by Stacy Montejo, senior vice president at Weber Shandwick, disclosed that Pfizer is one of the firm’s clients. A month later, with Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine awaiting Emergency Use Authorization, the company hired Weber Shandwick to handle the vaccine’s publicity, according to PR Week.
Such relationships have continued to the present. In June, Moderna announced a new communications strategy “to further educate the world about Moderna’s mRNA technology and its promise to transform the future of human health.”
The effort is led by Laura Schoen, “who is sometimes titled president of global healthcare at Weber Shandwick, and other times chief healthcare officer at IPG DXTRA, Weber Shandwick’s parent company,” Thacker wrote.
Lucy Rieck, a Weber Shandwick employee, previously publicly tweeted support for a panel Moderna proposed for this year’s SXSW, titled “COVID, Monkeypox, Disease X, What’s Next?” That proposal does not appear to have been accepted for presentation.
Conflicts of interest between Weber Shandwick, the CDC and NCIRD, and Pfizer and Moderna do not appear to have been disclosed.
In October 2022, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sent a letter to the CDC inquiring about its relationship with Weber Shandwick and requesting “information regarding the nature of Weber’s work for the NCIRD.” It’s unclear whether the CDC complied with the request.
Todd S. Richardson, one of the attorneys representing Eggleston, told The Defender “While it is certainly understandable that governmental agencies will hire PR firms to help them get their message out … it becomes of real concern to me when those agencies, or people working within the agencies, try to silence those who disagree.”
According to Thacker, the web of relationships between Weber Shandwick doesn’t just extend to Big Pharma companies, the CDC and its agencies, or to doctors such as Baron. Academics such as Brown University’s Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a key figure in the “misinformation research” space, have participated in some of the firm’s events.
Wardle, a professor of the practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown University who has no scientific or medical credentials, participated in an online meeting organized by Weber Shandwick in October 2020 to discuss “election misinformation.”
Subsequently, Wardle played a key advisory role in the Biden administration, federal agencies, social media platforms and Ivy League institutions as they sought to censor content that ran counter to the government’s COVID-19 narrative.
According to Thacker, she “helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups … with funding from Google” and later sent Twitter a report aimed at countering the “growing threat of disinformation to trust in COVID-19 vaccines.”
Thacker said the biopharmaceutical industry is “the smartest at putting out disinformation. What other industry has bought off the medical community and the science community?” he asked. “They bought off the researchers, the government, the academic journals.”
Thacker said he believes much of what is labeled “misinformation” in medicine and academic research “is really just corporate PR,” and that “Congress needs to take a harder look at funding for ‘misinformation research.’“
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.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Dr. Meryl Nass sues Maine Medical Board over suspension, alleges Board violated her first amendment rights
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 17, 2023
Dr. Meryl Nass today filed suit against the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and its individual members, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution.
The complaint alleges the board engaged in retaliatory conduct against Nass, a practicing internal medicine physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory board, when the board suspended her medical license for publicly expressing her dissenting views on official COVID-19 policies, the COVID-19 vaccine and alternative treatments.
“Because she was outspoken, the board targeted Dr. Nass as someone to silence,” her attorney, Gene Libby told The Defender.
In fall 2021, the board issued a position statement, quoted in the complaint, stating that licensees could face disciplinary action if they “generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation.”
In October 2021, soon after the statement was issued, the board received a complaint alleging Nass was spreading misinformation online and soon after launched an investigation.
The board suspended Nass’ medical license on Jan. 12, 2022, without a hearing, accusing her of engaging in “unprofessional conduct” by spreading “misinformation about COVID-19.”
It also accused her of improperly prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for three patients for off-label uses of those drugs.
The board suspended Nass’ license and ordered a neuropsychological evaluation, implying she was mentally impaired or a substance abuser and incompetent to practice medicine.
“There were no grounds to order a mental health examination,” Libby said. “That was simply a means to communicate to the public that there was something wrong with Dr. Nass, to discredit her and tarnish her reputation.”
After Nass moved to have the board dismiss its complaint against her, alleging First Amendment violations, the board on Sept. 26, 2022, withdrew its accusations of “misinformation”, just prior to her first hearing date, Oct. 11, 2022.
The board’s case now rests on Nass’ alleged non-adherence to the medical “standard of care” as it pertained to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 and on the alleged “record-keeping” issues.
Nass told The Defender :
“The two primary complaints against me were that my statements were misleading and that I was prescribing drugs off-label. My speech — which I should note, was not simply opinion, it was an educated opinion developed after consulting the medical literature — is protected by the First Amendment.
“And prescribing drugs off-label is a perfectly legal thing to do, as explicitly stated on the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] website. Somewhere between 20-50% of drugs are prescribed off-label. The lawyers on the board staff know all of this. It’s their job to know the law with respect to medicine.
“They didn’t do this because they thought I had committed some kind of violation. They did it because they thought I’m older and I wouldn’t have the money to challenge them and so they could get away with it — they thought they could turn me into a poster child to scare all the doctors in the country.
“It is part of this broader attempt by the U.S. government and governments across the world to criminalize dissent by criminalizing so-called ‘misinformation.’”
Libby said the remaining allegations against Dr. Nass “are simply a pretext to discipline her. Because now, from an institutional standpoint, the board has to do something. She’s been under suspension for 19 months, which is the longest suspension that I’m aware of for any physician in the state.”
The board refused to schedule hearings on Nass’ suspension on consecutive days. Instead, it has held one day of hearings every other month. There have been six days of hearings so far over 10 months — and Nass’ license has been suspended the entire time.
“This is fundamentally unfair to Dr. Nass, but she’s within the grip of an institution that doesn’t want her speaking out,” Libby said.
In her lawsuit, Nass alleges the board and its members used their power to “crush dissenting views and chill disfavored speech.”
Nass is asking the court for declaratory relief, for an injunction to stop the board from continuing to retaliate against her and for monetary damages and legal fees.
CHD is providing financial and legal resources to Nass’ Maine-based legal team.
CHD President Mary Holland told The Defender :
“CHD is proud to support Dr. Nass’ lawsuit against the Maine medical board and its individual members.
“The board and its members have deprived Dr. Nass of her license and livelihood for over a year with no basis whatsoever. This kind of censorship, intimidation and punishment of doctors of conscience must stop.
“People need independent, thoughtful, caring physicians like Dr. Nass to be honored, not hounded as the board has done.
“I am pleased to see this case move forward in the courts in the interests of justice, for Dr. Nass, her patients and the broader society.”
Board provided resources to ‘combat spread of vaccine misinformation’
The Maine board’s Fall 2021 position statement expressed its support for a statement by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) — a private organization with no regulatory authority — which threatened physicians “who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” with suspension or revocation of their medical license.
According to the statement, physicians have a high degree of public trust and therefore a responsibility to “share information that is factual, scientifically grounded and consensus-driven for the betterment of public health.”
The Maine board’s statement endorsed the FSMB statement, encouraged physicians to address misinformation when encountered, directed physicians to use circulated materials from the American Medical Association (AMA) and said that questioning the COVID-19 vaccine qualifies as “misinformation,” according to the complaint.
The AMA materials provide scripts, talking points and strategies for “combating the spread of vaccine misinformation.”
The Maine board’s chair, Dr. Maroulla Gleaton, is also an FSMB director.
Nass is a widely recognized expert on the anthrax vaccine and biological warfare. She testified before Congress six times and was quoted in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.
She has also been a prominent critic of governmental handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the suppression of effective treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and the safety and risks of the vaccine — all topics she has discussed in her Substack, on the radio, in interviews and elsewhere.
But, the complaint notes, her positions have been in conflict with those asserted in the position statement and the resources it highlights as “supporting the fight against COVID-19 misinformation.”
This was merely an attempt by the board to justify its decision to immediately suspend Nass and to intimidate her, the complaint alleges.
Board’s only concern was ‘silencing’ Nass and ‘branding her as crazy’
When Nass questioned the board’s authority to investigate a complaint unrelated to the practice of medicine and instead “focused entirely on a statement made in her private life,” the board responded, on Oct. 14, 2021, that she was engaged in “alleged unprofessional conduct” by provisioning “misleading and/or inaccurate” information.
In the January board meeting where the board decided to suspend her license, the conversation focused on Nass’ “unprofessional conduct due to the spreading of misinformation about COVID-19.”
The board also cited three matters related to treating patients, alleging Nass improperly diagnosed a patient “over the phone,” that she had provided misinformation to a pharmacist about why she was prescribing ivermectin for a patient, and that she had improperly issued another prescription.
On Sept. 7, 2022, Nass moved to dismiss the complaint, alleging the board was violating her First Amendment rights.
The board responded by withdrawing all charges based on her speech, retaining only the charges related to the treatment of three patients.
Libby told The Defender that through the entire investigation and hearings, the board never even spoke to the three patients. It did not inform them their medical records had been subpoenaed, or ask them about their treatment by Dr. Nass.
“Yet the remaining disciplinary charges are all predicated on Dr. Nass’ consultation with and advice to these patients.”
Libby called the patients to testify in Nass’ hearings. They all made “glowing comments” about her availability, her medical advice and her handling of their cases and expressed anger that Nass was being targeted by the board for their cases.
Libby said he interpreted this to indicate the board’s singular focus was not to ensure patient well-being, but rather “silencing Dr. Nass and attempting to brand her as crazy.”
According to the complaint, the board’s animus against Nass is also demonstrated by the fact that it is flouting its own rules for selecting and paying expert witnesses.
Board guidelines stipulate that witnesses can be paid a maximum of $125/hour for preparation and $175/hour for testimony and that the witnesses should have the same specialty as the practitioner in question and be licensed to practice in Maine.
But the board is paying Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room physician from Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, $500/hour to testify.
And board member Gleaton, who has conflicts of interest because of her position as FSMB director and has acted in openly mocking ways, has refused to recuse herself.
The next medical board hearing is set for mid-September.
But in the meantime, Libby said “The actions of the board are so outrageous, they need to be acted on legally.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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From the Archives
A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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