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
