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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Corrupt Government – Corrupt Science


John R. Houk, Blog Editor

© January 24, 2023

 

Not only is the U.S. Government corrupt, but there is every appearance our government promotes harm to its citizens (once known as WE THE PEOPLE) to maintain rule and control.

 

Today examining:

 

o   CDC Aware of Hundreds of Safety Signals for COVID Jab; Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola; Mercola.com; 1/23/23

 

o   [INTERVIEW (Glen Jung-Dr. Henrion Caude video)] Fear, Division & A Solution: A Vaccine That Could Alter DNA -Dr Alexandra Henrion Caude, Geneticist; By Gord Parks; Bright Light News; 1/23/23

 

o   A War Is Still Being Waged Against Doctors Who Question COVID Orthodoxy; By PIERRE KORY; Daily Caller News Foundation; 1/21/23 12:20 PM ET

 

o   Major New Statement on Medical Freedom; By Staff BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE; Brownstone Institute; 1/22/23  

 

JRH 1/24/23

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CDC Aware of Hundreds of Safety Signals for COVID Jab

 

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

January 23, 2023

Mercola.com

 

Rumble VIDEO: After Forcing The CDC To Release V-SAFE Data, Excessive COVID Vaccine Injuries Are Made Public!

[Posted by Sunfellow On COVID-19

Published October 5, 2022

 

MORE DESCRIPTION]

 

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

 

Ø In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. The CDC refused. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has now forced the release of these data, and they are stunning

 

Ø The CDC’s PRR monitoring has identified several hundred safety signals, including for Bell’s palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death. In individuals aged 18 and older, there are 770 safety signals for different adverse events, and more than 500 of them have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis

 

Ø In the 12- to 17-year-old age group there are 96 safety signals, and in the 5- to 11-year-old group there are 66, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease and vitiligo

 

Ø The proportions of deaths, which were only provided for the 18-plus age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines

 

Ø The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring, using empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times asked the FDA to release its monitoring results in July 2022 but, like the CDC, the FDA refused, only to admit in December 2022 they’d confirmed the Pfizer shot was linked to pulmonary embolism

 

In September 2022, The Epoch Times asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining results. PRR1 measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

 

According to the standard operating procedures2,3 for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is run jointly by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC is required to perform these data mining analyses.

 

Not only did the CDC refuse to release the data, but it also provided false information — twice — in response to The Epoch Times' questions about the monitoring being performed. As reported by The Epoch Times back in September 2022,4 the CDC initially claimed PRR analyses were "outside the agency's purview" and that no monitoring was being done by them.

 

Eventually, the agency admitted it was doing PRRs, starting in February 2021, only to later claim they didn't perform any PRRs until March 2022. The Epoch Times also cited several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claimed their data mining efforts had come up empty handed.5 Now, we find that was all a pack of lies.

 

CDC Monitoring Reveals Hundreds of Safety Signals

 

In reality, the CDC's PRR monitoring reveals HUNDREDS of safety signals, including Bell's palsy, blood clots, pulmonary embolism and death — all of which, according to the rules, require thorough investigation to either confirm or rule out a possible link to the shots. As reported by The Epoch Times in early January 2023:6

 

"The CDC analysis was conducted on adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022. The Epoch Times obtained the results through a Freedom of Information Act request after the CDC refused to make the results public …

 

PRR involves comparing the incidence of a specific adverse event after a specific vaccine to the incidence after all other vaccines. A signal is triggered when three thresholds are met, according to the CDC: a PRR of at least 2, a chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and three or more cases of the event following receipt of the vaccine being analyzed. Chi-squared tests are a form of statistical analysis used to examine data.

 

The results obtained by The Epoch Times show that there are hundreds of adverse events (AEs) that meet the definition, including serious conditions such as blood clotting in the lungs, intermenstrual bleeding, a lack of oxygen to the heart, and even death. The high numbers, particularly the chi-squared figures, concerned experts.

 

For many of the events, 'the chi-squared is so high that, from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID vaccines is essentially zero,' Norman Fenton, a professor of risk management at Queen Mary University of London, told The Epoch Times in an email after running the numbers through a Bayesian model that provides probabilities based on available information."

 

Myopericarditis Is Far From the Only Problem

 

One of the few side effects of the COVID jabs that the CDC has actually acknowledged is myocarditis (heart inflammation), and a related condition called pericarditis (inflammation of the heart sack). Alas, the PRR monitoring results reveal there are more than 500 other adverse events that have stronger warning signals than either of those conditions.

 

The proportions of reported deaths was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines.”

 

In individuals aged 18 and older, there are safety signals for 770 different adverse events, and two-thirds of them (more than 500) have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those 770 signals, 12 are brand-new conditions that have not been reported following other vaccines.

Topping the list of safety signals are cardiovascular conditions, followed by neurological conditions. In third and fourth place are thromboembolic conditions and pulmonary conditions. Death is sixth on the list and cancer is 11th. Considering the uptick we've seen in aggressive cancers, the fact that death tops cancer really says something.

The number of serious adverse events reported between mid-December 2020 and the end of July 2022 (just over 19 months) for the COVID jabs is 5.5 times greater than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the U.S. over the last 13 years (approximately 73,000 versus 13,000).

Twice as many COVID jab reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%), which meets the definition of a safety signal.

The proportions of reported deaths, which was only provided for the 18+ age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines. As noted by Fenton,12 "If the CDC wish [sic] to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine adverse event results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines the onus is on them to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference."

In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there are 96 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell's Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetency, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmia, thrombosis, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain and increased troponin levels (indicative of heart damage).

In the 5- to 11-year-old group, there are 66 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki's disease, menstrual irregularities and vitiligo.

 

 

It's worth noting that the CDC didn't perform its first safety signal analysis until March 25, 2022 — 15 months after the shots were rolled out. Why the long wait — especially since the CDC had announced it would begin monitoring in early 2021? Just consider, for a moment, how many lives have been lost because the CDC failed to properly monitor safety, and still drags its feet when it comes to warning people about the risks involved.

 

FDA Still Refuses to Share Safety Data

 

The FDA is also required to perform safety monitoring using another technique called Empirical Bayesian data mining. The Epoch Times first asked the FDA to release its monitoring results back in July 2022,13,14 but like the CDC, the FDA refused and insisted the data showed no evidence of serious adverse effects. In other words, "Just trust us. We're experts."

 

According to the FDA, the only potential signal they'd found through April 16, 2021, was for raised body temperature.15 Then, in mid-December 2022 — just four months after The Epoch Times tried to get these data — the FDA announced that pulmonary embolism (blood clots that block blood flow in the lungs) had met the threshold for a statistical signal, and continued to meet the criteria after in-depth evaluation, but it was only linked to the Pfizer jab.16

 

As noted by The Epoch Times,17 pulmonary embolism is also identified as a signal in the CDC's PRR analysis for individuals as young as 12, which really ought to strengthen concerns.

 

The FDA also admitted it had already evaluated three other warning signals: lack of oxygen to the heart, immune thrombocytopenia (a blood platelet disorder) and intravascular coagulation (a type of blood clotting), but none of these continued to meet the threshold after analysis.

 

If the FDA was evaluating four warning signals, why did they tell The Epoch Times there was no evidence of ill effects, and why did they claim the only potential signal they'd found was slight fever? Are we to believe they discovered these signals after The Epoch Times asked for the monitoring results and then completed four in-depth investigations in four months?

 

Whatever the truth, it's clear that both the CDC and FDA are not being transparent. Worse, they've hidden data, knowing it could mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people.

 

CDC Has Ignored Clear 'Death' Signal

 

The CDC ignoring a clear signal for death is probably the most egregious example of its failures as a public health institution. As early as July 2021, Matthew Crawford published a three-part series18,19,20 detailing how the CDC was hiding safety signals by using a flawed formula. In August that year, Steve Kirsch informed the agency of these problems, but was ignored.

 

Then, in an October 3, 2022, article,21 Kirsch went on to show how "death" should have triggered a signal even when using the CDC's flawed formula (which is described in its VAERS standard operating procedures manual22). Here's an excerpt:23

 

"The formula the CDC uses for generating safety signals is fundamentally flawed; a 'bad' vaccine with lots of adverse events will 'mask' large numbers of important safety signals … Let me summarize the key points for you in a nutshell: PRR [proportional reporting ratio] is defined on page 16 in the CDC document24 as follows …

 

Table 4 proportional-reporting-ratio-calculation

 

A 'safety signal' is defined on page 16 in the CDC document as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE [adverse event] following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest. This is the famous 'and clause.' Here it is from the document:

 

safety signal is defined on page 16

 

Only someone who is incompetent or is deliberately trying to make the vaccines look safe would use the word 'and' in the definition of a safety signal.

 

Using 'and' means that if any one of the conditions isn't satisfied, no safety signal will be generated. As noted below, the PRR will rarely trigger which virtually guarantees that most events generated by an unsafe vaccine will never get flagged.

 

The PRR value for the COVID vaccines will rarely exceed 1 because there are so many adverse events from the COVID vaccine because it is so dangerous (i.e., B in the formula is a huge number) so the numerator is always near zero. Hence, the 'safety signal' is rarely triggered because the vaccine is so dangerous."

 

A Fictitious Example

 

Using a fictitious vaccine as the example, Kirsch explained how an exceptionally dangerous vaccine will fly under the radar and not get flagged, thanks to this flawed formula:25

 

"Suppose we have the world's most dangerous vaccine that causes adverse events in everyone who gets it and generates 25,000 different adverse events, and each adverse event has 1,000 instances.

 

That means that the numerator is 1,000/25,000,000 which is just 40 events per million reported events. Now let's look at actuals for something like deaths. For all other vaccines, there are 6,200 deaths and 1 million adverse events total.

 

Since 40 per million is less than 6,200 deaths per million, we are not even close to generating a safety signal for deaths from our hypothetical vaccine which killed 1,000 people in a year … The point is that a dangerous vaccine can look very 'safe' using the PRR formula."

 

Calculating Death Signal for the COVID Jab

 

Next, Kirsch calculates the PRR for death for the COVID jab — using VAERS data and the CDC's definitions and formula. As of December 31, 2019, there were 6,157 deaths and 918,717 adverse events total for all vaccines other than the COVID shot. As of September 23, 2022, there were 31,214 deaths and 1.4 million adverse events total for the COVID jabs. Here's the formula as explained by Kirsch:26

 

"PRR = (31,214/1.4e6) / (6,157/918,717) = 3.32, which exceeds the required threshold of 2. In other words, the COVID vaccine is so deadly that even with all the adverse events generated by the vaccine, the death signal did not get drowned out!

 

But there is still the chi-square test. Chi-square test results were 18,549 for 'death,' which greatly exceeds the required threshold of 4. The CDC chi-square test is clearly satisfied for the COVID vaccine. Because the death signal is so huge, it even survived the PRR test.

 

This means that even using the CDCs own erroneous … formula, all three criteria were satisfied:

 

1.PRR>2 [PRR greater than 2]: It was 3.32

 

2.Chi-square>2 [Chi-square greater than 2]: It was 18,549

 

3.3 or more reports: There were over 31,214 death reports received by VAERS … which is more than 3

 

A safety signal should have been generated but wasn't. Why not? … Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been lost due to the inability of the CDC to deploy their own flawed safety signal analysis … It's been known since at least 2004 that using reporting odds ratio (ROR) is a better estimate of relative risk than PRR.27 I don't know why the CDC doesn't use it."

 

The CDC is also hiding the severity of side effects in other ways. As explained by Fenton,28 the way side effects are categorized by the CDC help obfuscate the scale of certain problems. For example, "cardiac failure acute," "cardiac failure," "infarction," "myocardial strain" and "myocardial fibrosis" are listed as separate categories, even though in real life they're all potential effects of myocarditis.

 

By separating them, you end up with fewer frequency counts per category, thereby giving you an underpowered chi-square test so that a warning signal is not triggered. If related categories were merged, far stronger safety signals would likely emerge.

 

CDC Has No Reasonable Defense

 

The CDC is responsible for monitoring both VAERS and V-Safe, and between these two databases, there's no possible way they could ever say they didn't know the shots were harming and killing millions of Americans.

 

The CDC also has access to other databases, including the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which (before it was intentionally altered29) showed massive increases in debilitating and lethal conditions, including a tripling of cancer cases.30

 

The findings in these databases have never been brought forward during any of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings or the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meetings, at which members have repeatedly voted to authorize the jabs to people of all ages, including infants and pregnant women.

 

They even added these toxic shots to the childhood vaccine schedule — which allows states to mandate them for school attendance — without addressing any of the 66 safety signals found in the CDC's PRR analysis. The fact of the matter is that the CDC has known about these risks all along, and there's no excuse for not sharing and acting on these data.

 

Help Spread the Word

 

Mainstream media are ignoring all of this, so help spread the word. Everyone needs to know what the CDC's safety data reveal. To that end, here are a few suggestions for how you can help:

 

·       Write or call your members of Congress and ask them to investigate the CDC's safety monitoring — We cannot have a public safety agency that is incapable of monitoring safety and taking appropriate action when problems are found, be it correcting a flawed formula or announcing that a safety signal has been detected. Of course, they must also publish their findings once an investigation has been made.

 

·       Contact your local newspaper and urge them to investigate and report on the CDC's failure to act on safety signals.

 

·       Share the data on social media and ask why no one in the media, Congress, academia or medical community is investigating these matters.

 

·       Share this information with your doctor and members of the medical community.

 

·       Also share it with university administrators, and ask them to explain how and why, in light of these data, they are still mandating COVID shots.

 

Sources and References

 

1 All About Pharmacovigilance PRR

2 VAERS Standard Operating Procedures January 2021

3 VAERS Standard Operating Procedures February 2022

4, 5, 13, 15 Epoch Times September 10, 2022

6, 7, 10, 17 Epoch Times January 3, 2023 (Archived)

8 Josh Guetzkow Substack January 4, 2023

9, 12, 28 Where Are the Numbers? Substack January 4, 2023

11 Public Tableau PRR VAERS Data Summary 12/14/2020-7/29/2022

14 Josh Guetzkow Substack September 14, 2022

16 Epoch Times December 17, 2022 (Archived)

18 Rounding the Earth Newsletter Part 1

19 Rounding the Earth Newsletter Part 2

20 Rounding the Earth Newsletter Part 3

21, 23, 25, 26 Steve Kirsch Substack October 3, 2022

22, 24 CDC VAERS Standard Operating Procedures January 29, 2021

27 Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Safety August 2004; 13(8): 519-523

29 WISPolitics February 10, 2022

30 Steve Kirsch Substack February 5, 2022 DMED

 

© 1997-2023 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.

 

++++++++++++++++++++++

[INTERVIEW] Fear, Division & A Solution: A Vaccine That Could Alter DNA -Dr Alexandra Henrion Caude, Geneticist

 

By Gord Parks

January 23, 2023

Bright Light News

 

Dr. Alexandra Henrion Caude, Geneticist and Director of Research at the French NIH (21 years), has serious concerns about the effects of the Covid-19 mRNA “vaccines” and the way in which they were rolled out.

 

Through three planned waltzes, an unsuspecting public trustingly rolled up its sleeves starting December 2020. First waltz: fear. Second: division. And the final being a solution to the fear: an unproven, harmful and, in many cases, deadly experimental injection.

 

On top of the overwhelming global data to support the mRNA shot harms, Dr. Henrion Caude warns of the potential for the messenger RNA to alter human DNA, both within the vaccinee and their offspring.

 

Dr. Henrion Caude shared her expertise and the relevant scientific data with us in Orlando, FL, January 7, 2023.

 

If you find this interview valuable, then PLEASE DONATE HERE TODAY so that we can bring you more or BY E-TRANSFER to gord@brightlightnews.com.

 

Rumble VIDEO: [UPDATED] Fear, Division & A Solution: A Vaccine That Could Alter DNA -Dr Alexandra Henrion Caude

[Posted by Bright Light News

Published January 24, 2023

 

MORE DESCRIPTION]

 

[Blog Editor: The rest of the Bright Light News post are links and PDF-info to the science of Dr. Henrion Caude exposing the dangers of the mRNA Jab.]

 

Copyright © 2023 Bright Light News

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++

PIERRE KORY: A War Is Still Being Waged Against Doctors Who Question COVID Orthodoxy

 

 

Heart Check - Go Nakamura/Getty Images

 

By PIERRE KORY

January 21, 2023

Daily Caller News Foundation

 

Two years of one-party rule in Washington are over, and the new Republican House majority must now restore balance through vigorous oversight. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is expected to focus on allegations of collusion between social media companies and the Biden administration.

 

But it should expand its focus to include the government’s use of COVID to wage war against doctors — which continues to this day.

 

The suppression of doctors’ freedom to advise and treat patients began early in the pandemic. Promising alternative courses of treatment, such as generic drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, were shouted down by false news narratives.

 

Media companies took their cues from public health agencies, which exaggerated concerns over people using medicines to treat COVID in ways that were not intended and against medical advice. Positive clinical data was ignored.

 

The next major front in the war on doctors opened up with the vaccine rollout. President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public officials promised these novel, rushed vaccines would prevent illness and even transmission.

 

Biden’s declaration that, “If you get vaccinated, you won’t get COVID” has now been exposed as a lie, but it’s crucial to understand how it came to this.

 

In the past, broad skepticism would have greeted plans to mass distribute a “safe and effective” vaccine that was developed and approved in just 12 months.

 

And society would have flatly rejected government mandates that pushed people to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs and becoming social outcasts. Science and medicine, practiced correctly, should challenge the powers that be, not blindly follow them.

 

But in our ongoing ordeal, no skepticism has been allowed, no discussion, no options. Those who raised questions or suggested different approaches were smeared as “deniers” or even worse, “anti-vaxxers.”

 

Even as the public learned more about the virus’s actual threat, the vaccines’ disappointing performance, and the tragic reality of vaccine injuries which began occurring at an unprecedented scale, the political imperative from Biden and Fauci never wavered.

 

They continued to preach a single-minded focus on the experimental vaccines. More and more vaccine products were rushed through Emergency Use Authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration, resulting in astronomical profits for their manufacturers.

 

This unholy alliance of government, the pharmaceutical industry and media deprived the public of full and fair advice from the medical community. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), a nonprofit organization that certifies physicians’ medical licenses, has issued letters to me and my colleagues threatening our ability to practice medicine.

 

They accused us of spreading “misinformation” — ignoring the huge disconnect between the government’s statements and the medical reality on the ground. Despite their status as a private organization with no statutory authority, the ABIM has morphed into the “enforcement” arm of the government, wielding the ability to control certification and the livelihood of doctors, who are subject to career-ending threats for veering from the government’s narrow and singular approach.

 

And this month, California’s new law empowering state agencies to disbar medical professionals who deviate from the party line has taken effect. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently called California the “True Freedom State.” The scores of its residents—and its doctors—fleeing for Florida and Texas know better.

 

A “one-size fits all” approach to vaccines, or to any other health issue, is almost never warranted. Here, proponents of vaccine (and of government and big-tech coercion and censorship) flatly refuse to consider patient factors, such as age, medical history, and overall health, to determine who needs what treatment.

 

By virtue of their professional training, doctors must advise patients on available treatments and known risks of any treatment or procedure. By threatening doctors who might provide information different than their preferred worldview, ABIM is disrupting the doctor-patient relationship.

 

When allowed to practice their craft freely, physicians can prevent societal disaster by focusing on individual patients, informed by clinical experience.

 

Groups like the ABIM, and public medical officials like Fauci, should support and encourage evidence-based debate and patient-centered care.

 

Instead, they have suppressed both that debate and treatment approach by persecuting its proponents. This campaign must be stopped, its origins and evolution must be thoroughly documented, and it must never be allowed to recur. Physician autonomy must be restored lest all patients suffer.

 

Oversight is a core congressional function, and it’s particularly important when the government is under divided party control.

 

The new Select Subcommittee has a long to-do list, but the people deserve a thorough accounting of the ongoing war on doctors.

 

Pierre Kory is President and Chief Medical Officer for the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

 

©2023 The Daily Caller, Inc.

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Major New Statement on Medical Freedom

 

Teenage Gal Heart Check

 

By Staff BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

January 22, 2023

Brownstone Institute

 

This letter has been signed by Dr. Rachel Corbett, Dr. George Fareed, Dr. Melanie Gisler, Dr. Brian Hooker, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Katarina Lindley, Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Liz Mumper, Dr. Meryl Nass, Dr. David Rasnick, Dr. Richard Urso and hundreds more physicians, scientists and medical professionals.

 

The original authors are Michael Kane and Meryl Nass, M.D., and it is being distributed by Children’s Health Defense. Medical and scientific professionals can sign the letter, which is a basic statement of principles that should be at the core of medicines but which have sidelined or violated since the beginning of the crisis.

 

Executive Summary

 

1. There is no scientific rationale for continuing any COVID-19 mandates in 2023 and beyond.

 

2. Mask and vaccine exemptions must be offered at the discretion of the physician and patient as opposed to one-size-fits-all government edicts.

 

3. Parental rights and decisions must be preserved to ensure the health and well-being of their children.

 

4. The ability of medical professionals to speak freely to their patients and the public must not be compromised.

 

Informed consent is the basis of medical ethics. Shared decision-making is a model of the patient-physician relationship that is considered the most desirable by both the US and UK government health establishments. Patients want to make their own medical decisions, and they have the legal right to do so. They expect their physicians to share knowledge with their patients to inform the best choices.

 

The corollary to informed consent is that medical decisions ought to be made by individual patients based on their individual situation and personal best interest. ‘One-size-fits-all’ medicine is incongruent with these principles. It denies informed consent and personal autonomy.

 

During the last three years, we have experienced unprecedented interference with the doctor-patient relationship by the government. Considerable financial incentives were paid to medical industries and medical providers to offer certain treatments and to refuse others.

 

When financial incentives did not achieve universal vaccination, mandates were imposed. One way this was done was by requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers whose employers received Medicare payments after we had learned that vaccinations did not protect patients or coworkers from infection.

 

Grants to school districts were conditioned on mask mandates in schools. These newly imposed incentives, and punishments for noncompliance, fly in the face of long-established medical ethics, especially informed consent and shared decision-making. They must end.

 

COVID-19 Mandates

 

There is general agreement that all available COVID-19 vaccines fail to prevent viral transmission and only briefly reduce cases. After several months, people who are vaccinated become more susceptible to COVID-19 infections than the unvaccinated. Therefore, mandates for COVID-19 vaccines are scientifically and logically indefensible.

 

In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adapted its guidelines for managing COVID-19, quietly suggesting that both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans should be treated identically with respect to isolation, quarantining and testing. Yet the CDC continues to exhort Americans to receive more COVID-19 vaccine booster doses and supports federally imposed vaccine mandates.

 

Essentially everyone in our country has been exposed to COVID-19 by now, and nearly everyone has been infected at least once. We can anticipate that the US will continue to face evolving COVID-19 variants, but we can also anticipate that COVID-19’s severity will keep weakening over time. 

 

Yet patients and doctors are still not permitted to choose the COVID-19 therapies best suited to each patient. Mandates must end, and patients and doctors must reassert their human and legal rights to determine the medical care each patient receives.

 

Vaccine and Mask Exemptions

 

Patients are individuals. They experience different risks from vaccinations and may have medical or psychological issues that preclude safe masking. Pretending that these differences don’t exist is denying reality. Historically, doctors were able to issue waivers for masks and vaccinations, as they were considered to have the best knowledge and judgment to issue such waivers.

 

Although every state by law accepts that doctors can issue medical waivers for vaccines and masks, many health and education departments have started nullifying these waivers, superseding physician authority. States have also been investigating and punishing doctors for issuing medical waivers. It appears that federal and state governments want to make themselves the arbiters of these medical decisions. This must not stand.

 

Parental Rights

 

States decide on the age of consent, and until that age is reached, parents are wholly responsible for their children, with a few limited exceptions. But during the past two years, we have seen a dangerous trend. State requirements that parents must consent to vaccinations given to their underage children are being ignored in multiple jurisdictions. This happened in Washington, DC, for children ages 11 and older by order of the Mayor and City Council. The law they passed kept the fact that their children had a medical procedure secret from the parents. While Congress, which oversees the law in the District of Columbia, could have said no, it instead failed to act. A lawsuit challenging this law was won in November 2021, so the law no longer stands in DC.

 

However, in Philadelphia, PA, San Francisco, CA and Kings County, WA, the local health officers issued guidelines in early 2021 allowing local medical providers to vaccinate children as young as age 12 without parental permission, which still stand.

 

This is a dangerous usurpation of parental rights by local public health authorities. It also violates state and federal law. Furthermore, there has been a recent accompanying trend by ‘medico-legal’ professionals to assert in published journal articles that 12-year-olds have the maturity to decide on their own medical procedures.

 

Most states don’t allow children to consent to use tanning salons or get tattoos below the age of consent. To bypass parents and allow underage children to decide what gets injected into them is inconsistent with state laws, medical ethics, common sense, and optimal medical care of children. It needs to end.

 

Free Speech for Medical Professionals

 

An attack on the free speech of doctors and medical scientists is being waged across America today. While controversy is inherent in scientific advancement, and scientific knowledge continuously evolves, disagreement with the federal public health recommendations has led to draconian censorship and suppression. Doctors have been investigated, lost their specialty board certifications, and even lost their medical licenses for speaking out publicly against federal guidelines.

 

Yet no health authority is infallible, and the COVID-19 pandemic proved this. In fact, both the World Health Organization (WHO), NIH and CDC changed their COVID-19 policies, guidelines, and recommendations numerous times throughout the pandemic.

 

The suppression of medical professionals’ speech is illegal, according to the First Amendment and state statutes, and must immediately end.

 

This letter continues to be signed by medical professionals and scientists around the world. View the growing list of signatures.

 

The Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

 

© 2023 All rights reserved. Brownstone Institute


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