By: Jane M. Orient, M.D.
In addition to being subjected to various forms of censorship, for the first time in living memory American doctors are getting threat letters from licensure boards warning them against distributing “harmful misinformation.” Medical boards in 12 states have disciplined doctors because of this allegation. While it is claimed that there’s an epidemic of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the warnings don’t spell out what that means.
We don’t have an epidemic of patients dying because doctors told them to refuse treatment or to drink Clorox or aquarium cleaner.
In fact, no patients need to have suffered any harm at all for the medical board to investigate a doctor’s no-longer-free speech. All it takes is an anonymous complaint.
Pharmacists who were converted into the overseers of physicians’ prescribing practices will complain that a doctor had prescribed ivermectin for COVID-19.
Or an employer might complain that a doctor supported a worker’s request for a medical exemption that wasn’t on the CDC’s list of acceptable reasons.
Or the doctor might have spoken at a political meeting at which mask mandates were being challenged.
Or a patient might complain that a doctor wasn’t wearing a mask in his private consulting room, even when no COVID-19 patients were anywhere near and the doctor had demonstrated immunity.
Or a pathologist might have stated publicly that his busy lab was seeing a higher percentage of cancers in vaccinated patients.
“Harmful misinformation” appears to mean anything that contradicts or asks questions or raises doubt about the dogma that “vaccines are safe and effective,” or suggests a treatment not endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and their corporate sponsors.
One source of the allegedly “harmful misinformation” is a database created and maintained by the CDC, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Anybody can enter a suspected vaccine adverse reaction, and the public can access it. So, “it can be abused by people trying to sow fear,” write Shayla Love and Anna Merlan in VICE News. One person filed a fraudulent report, promptly removed, claiming that an influenza vaccination had turned him into the “Incredible Hulk.”
Flawed as it is, VAERS is the best CDC has to offer for looking for “danger signals.” Of course, correlation doesn’t prove causality. As Lindy McGee from Texas Children’s Hospital correctly pointed out, “I can report if I get hit by a truck after I’ve gotten a vaccine and that would be reported as associated with a vaccine. It does not make any implication of causality.” However, there is a double standard. If you get hit by a truck, but test positive for COVID-19, the hospital will get paid for counting you as a COVID death.
Adverse reports to VAERS are many times higher for COVID-19 vaccines than for all other vaccines combined since the database was established in 1988. The website vaers.hhs.gov clearly states: “Knowingly filing a false VAERS report is a violation of Federal law (18 U.S. Code § 1001) punishable by fine and imprisonment.” So, presumably most of the approximately 20,000 reports of death concern people who really did die soon after getting the jab, most within a few days. It could be 20,000 coincidences, but the count is not “misinformation.”
Love and Merlan call the compilers of VAERS information at openvaers.com/covid-data “dumpster divers.” Matt Motta of Oklahoma State University and Dominik Stecuła of Colorado State University refer to that January article favorably in their Aug 25 essay that says VAERS is only good for researching “vaccine hesitancy.” They don’t mention that the featured VAERS death count of 329 from Jan 22, 2021, has steadily increased.
Also viewed as “misinformation” is the opinion of physicians and researchers that hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other “repurposed” drugs are beneficial in COVID-19, as shown in more than 1,000 studies. Reports of dying patients who recovered when hospitals were legally forced to step aside and allow off-protocol treatment are ignored.
The safe option for doctors is to promote the jab or keep silent, and not to suggest anything different from what Anthony Fauci approves. By silencing doctors who are ethical professionals, one opens the gates for the reckless charlatans.
Recall that in Orwell’s Newspeak, the meaning of words is inverted. The Ministry of Love is in charge of torture; the Ministry of Plenty, of starvation; and the Ministry of Truth, of propaganda.
Is the Minitrue defining “misinformation” today?
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Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
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