Former Reporter Alleges ‘Journalistic Rape’ by CBS News Following Termination, File Seizure
The CBS network was accused of “journalistic rape” by a former reporter after it fired her then seized her documents while she was working to “expose government corruption.”
Award-winning reporter Catherine Herridge, whose work included exposing Biden administration scandals, testified to a House Judiciary Committee Thursday that her First Amendment had been violated by the news organization.
“When my records were seized I felt it was a journalistic rape,” Herridge told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who’d asked if she’d wrote reporting critical of the Biden administration, to which she agreed.
Catherine Herridge says CBS’ seizure of her files and records was “journalistic rape” @DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/gBTQmIx8oX
— Nicole Silverio (@NicoleMSilverio) April 11, 2024
“When the network of Walter Cronkite seizes your reporting files, including confidential source information, that is an attack on investigative journalism,” she added.
Elsewhere in her statements, Herridge explained how she was fired by CBS shortly after being held in contempt by a refusing to reveal her sources on a national security story.
“CBS News’ decision to seize my reporting records crossed a red line that I believe should never be crossed by any media organization,” the Emmy award winning reporter stated.
“Multiple sources said they were concerned that by working with me to expose government corruption and misconduct they would be identified and exposed.”
“CBS News locked me out of the building and seized hundreds of pages of my reporting files, including confidential source information.”
Herridge continued:
My current situation arises from a Privacy Act lawsuit. I am only a witness in the case. It is not common for these cases to reach the stage of holding a reporter in contempt, but when such cases happen, they have profound consequences, impacting every journalist in the United States. Forcing a reporter to disclose confidential sources would have a crippling effect on investigative journalism, because without reliable assurances of confidentiality, sources will not come forward. The First Amendment provides protections for the press because an informed electorate is at the foundation of our democracy. If confidential sources are not protected, I fear investigative journalism is dead.
Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson also appeared at the press freedom hearing to discuss her own experiences with the network after she wrote stories critical of the Obama administration.
STATE-RUN MEDIA: Journalist Sharyl Attkisson says in her experience at CBS the government intervened in news coverage everyday.
— Te?asLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) April 11, 2024
She says CBS was constantly pressured by members of Congress, the White House & the intel agencies on what stories CBS should or should not cover. pic.twitter.com/kIWIki7dps
Watch the full “Fighting for a Free Press: Protecting Journalists and their Sources” House Judiciary Committee hearing:
Did Lockdowns Set a Global Revolt in Motion?
My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.
I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.
The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.
There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.
Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.
New literature is emerging to document it all.
The new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony. The revolt is not racial and not geographically determined. It’s not even about left and right, categories that are mostly a distraction. it’s class-based in large part but more precisely about the rulers vs. the ruled.
With more precision, new voices are emerging among people who detect a “vibe change” in the population. One is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “Strongholds Falling; Populists Seize the Culture.” She argues, quoting Bret Weinstein, that “The lessons of [C]ovid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed…The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable.”
A second article is “Vibe Shift” by Santiago Pliego:
The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.
We truly want to believe this is true. And this much is certainly correct: the battle lines are incredibly clear these days. The media that uncritically echo the deep-state line are known: Slate, Wired, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, New Republic, New Yorker, and so on, to say nothing of the New York Times. What used to be politically partisan venues with certain predictable biases are now more readily described as ruling-class mouthpieces, forever instructing you precisely how to think while demonizing disagreement.
After all, all of these venues, in addition to the obvious case of the science journals, are still defending the lockdowns and everything that followed. Rather than express regret for their bad models and immoral means of control, they have continued to insist that they did the right thing, regardless of the civilization-wide carnage everywhere in evidence, while ignoring the relationship between the policies they championed and the terrible results.
Instead of allowing their mistakes to change their own outlook, they have adapted their own worldview to allow for snap lockdowns anytime they deem them necessary. In holding this view, they have forged a view of politics that it is embarrassingly acquiescent to the powerful.
The liberalism that once questioned authority and demanded free speech seems extinct. This transmogrified and captured liberalism now demands compliance with authority and calls for further restrictions on free speech. Now anyone who makes a basic demand for normal freedom – to speak or choose one’s own medical treatment or to decline to wear a mask – can reliably anticipate being denounced as “right-wing” even when it makes absolutely no sense.
The smears, cancellations, and denunciations are out of control, and so unbearably predictable.
It’s enough to make one’s head spin. As for the pandemic protocols themselves, there have been no apologies but only more insistence that they were imposed with the best of intentions and mostly correct. The World Health Organization wants more power, and so does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the evidence of the failure of pharma pours in daily, major media venues pretend that all is well, and thereby out themselves as mouthpieces for the ruling regime.
The issue is that major and unbearably obvious failures have never been admitted. Institutions and individuals who only double down on preposterous lies that everyone knows are lies only end up discrediting themselves.
That’s a pretty good summary of where we are today, with vast swaths of elite culture facing an unprecedented loss of trust. Elites have chosen the lie over truth and cover-up over transparency.
This is becoming operationalized in declining traffic for legacy media, which is shedding costly staff as fast as possible. The social media venues that cooperated closely with government during the lockdowns are losing cultural sway while uncensored ones like Elon Musk’s X are gaining attention. Disney is reeling from its partisanship, while states are passing new laws against WHO policies and interventions.
Sometimes this whole revolt can be quite entertaining. When the CDC or WHO posts an update on X, when they allow comments, it is followed by thousands of reader comments of denunciation and poking fun, with flurries of comments to the effect of “I will not comply.”
DEI is being systematically defunded by major corporations while financial institutions are turning on it. Indeed, the culture in general has come to regard DEI as a sure indication of incompetence. Meanwhile, the outer reaches of the “great reset” such as the hope that EVs would replace internal combustion have come to naught as the EV market has collapsed, along with consumer demand for fake meat to say nothing of bug eating.
As for politics, yes, it does seem like the backlash has empowered populist movements all over the world. We see them in the farmers’ revolt in Europe, the street protests in Brazil against a sketchy election, the widespread discontent in Canada over government policies, and even in migration trends out of US blue states toward red ones. Already, the administrative state in D.C. is working to secure itself against a possible unfriendly president in the form of Trump or RFK, Jr.
So, yes, there are many signs of revolt. These are all very encouraging.
What does all this mean in practice? How does this end? How precisely does a revolt take shape in an industrialized democracy? What is the mostly likely pathway for long-term social change? These are legitimate questions.
For hundreds of years, our best political philosophers have opined that no system can function in a sustainable way in which a huge majority is coercively governed by a tiny elite with a class interest in serving themselves at public expense.
That seems correct. In the days of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 15 years ago, the street protesters spoke of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. They were speaking of those with the money inside the traders’ buildings as opposed to the people on the streets and everywhere else.
Even if that movement misidentified the full nature of the problem, the intuition into which it tapped spoke to a truth. Such a disproportionate distribution of power and wealth is dangerously unsustainable. Revolution of some sort threatens. The mystery right now is what form this takes. It’s unknown because we’ve never been here before.
There is no real historical record of a highly developed society ostensibly living under a civilized code of law that experiences an upheaval of the type that would be required to unseat the rulers of all the commanding heights. We’ve seen political reform movements that take place from the top down but not really anything that approximates a genuine bottom-up revolution of the sort that is shaping up right now.
We know, or think we know, how it all transpires in a tinpot dictatorship or a socialist society of the old Soviet bloc. The government loses all legitimacy, the military flips loyalties, there is a popular revolt that boils over, and the leaders of the government flee. Or they simply lose their jobs and take up new positions in civilian life. These revolutions can be violent or peaceful but the end result is the same. One regime replaces another.
It’s hard to know how this translates to a society that is heavily modernized and seen as non-totalitarian and even existing under the rule of law, more or less. How does revolution occur in this case? How does the regime come around to adapting itself to a public revolt against governance as we know it in the US, UK, and Europe?
Yes, there is the vote, if we can trust that. But even here, there are the candidates, which are that for a reason. They specialize in politics, which does not necessarily mean doing the right thing or reflecting the aspirations of the voters behind them. They are responsive to their donors first, as we have long discovered. Public opinion can matter but there is no mechanism that guarantees a smoothly responsive pathway from popular attitudes to political outcomes.
There is also the pathway of industrial change, a migration of resources out of legacy venues to new ones. Indeed, in the marketplace of ideas, the amplifiers of regime propaganda are failing but we also observe the response: widened censorship. What’s happening in Brazil with the full criminalization of free speech can easily happen in the US.
In social media, were it not for Elon’s takeover of Twitter, it’s hard to know where we would be. We have no large platform in which to influence the culture more broadly. And yet the attacks on that platform and other enterprises owned by Musk are growing. This is emblematic of a much more robust upheaval taking place, one that suggests change is on the way.
But how long does such a paradigm shift take? Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a bracing account of how one orthodoxy migrates to another not by the ebb and flow of proof and evidence but through dramatic paradigm shifts. An abundance of anomalies can wholly discredit a current praxis but that doesn’t make it go away. Ego and institutional inertia perpetuate the problem until its most prominent exponents retire and die and a new elite replaces them with different ideas.
In this model, we can expect that a failed innovation in science, politics, or technology could last as long as 70 years before finally being displaced, which is roughly how long the Soviet experiment lasted. That’s a depressing thought. If this is true, we still have another 60 plus years of rule by the management professionals who enacted lockdowns, closures, shot mandates, population propaganda, and censorship.
And yet, people say that history is moving faster now than in the past. If a future of freedom is ours just lying in wait, we need that future here sooner rather than later, before it is too late to do anything about it.
The slogan became popular about ten years ago: the revolution will be decentralized with the creation of robust parallel institutions. There is no other path. The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.
Alex Jones Responds To Revelation That FBI/CIA Attempted To Silence Him And Shut Down Infowars
SHOCK VIDEO: Hundreds of Illegal Aliens Flood Penn Station In NYC
Penn Station was slammed by hundreds of illegal aliens arriving in New York City this week.
Also:
The Population Explosion Disaster that Never Happened
I do not hear much talk about world population these days, the way I did growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. People were supposedly starving, dying, with tens of millions more sure to die. The problem back then was that there were just too many, well, people.
Population numbers coming out of China and India were unthinkable, and projections indicated many more people were going to be born into this dire situation. There were over twenty thousand people in my hometown and as far as everyone was concerned, that was enough already!
People were dying! We were told to eat our broccoli and clean our plate because there were starving children in China. Everyone knew that was a stretch of the imagination because we all knew that Chinese people only ate rice.
The book The Population Bomb was published in 1968 by Stanford University’s Paul and Anne Ehrlich. They wrote that hundreds of millions of people would soon die because of hunger in the next decade and there was nothing we could do about it. There were just too many people.
The first Earth Day was held in April 1970 in honor of the earth.
We were told we were ruining the earth. We were overpopulated. And we were going to die. Back then they told us that we were causing a new ice age.
Of course, all of the inflammatory predictions of the Ehrlichs’ bestselling book did not come to pass. Just like “peak oil” never came to pass. Just like all the current predictions are not panning out and must regularly be changed to keep people fixated on the issue.
The problem with the people who make such predictions is that they worship the earth and want to keep it for themselves and don’t want to share it with others. They really want to reduce or eliminate people. They do not care about people or science. Most concerned people have been fooled into these peoples’ agenda.
The current crop of depopulationists hide under the cloak of “climate change.” Such people as Bill Gates, Senator John Kerry, Greta Thunberg, and Klaus Schwab tell us to be terrified of “climate change.”
They want to substitute “sustainability” policies, or we will all face the manmade consequences that include rising sea levels, scorched lands, and all manner of apocalyptic conditions in which we will all surely die.
They want to sustain the earth for the earth’s sake.
A similar but very different policy is “conservationism.” This is a set of individual actions that has the aim of conserving the earth and the resources it contains for the MOST valuable uses of humans, present and future generations. Conservation is the normal condition that humans live in without respect to government policy. It is driven by how all of us value everything.
So, that might mean keeping a valley in pristine natural conditions just for the sake of its view or future use. Or it might mean turning the whole thing into a giant subdivision to house a multitude of families who want to live there. It’s the owner’s choice. When it’s the government’s choice, things always go awry.
California is a good case in point. That state imposes some of the most far-reaching and draconian land use policies in the world. As a result, only a tiny fraction of land is used for human habitation. It now has some of the worst housing conditions in the country, despite all its wealth and supposedly super smart legislature. Its working class is impoverished not by wages or jobs, but by housing costs and commute times.
Now, back to the environmentalists and the global climate-change community. They ask us to accept their demands and that we engage in sustainability by using alternative energy sources and by consuming alternative foods.
What is left unsaid is that these alternatives are poor substitutes for the real things. Alternative energy is both more expensive and less efficient in terms of using up the earth’s resources. Alternative foods are also more expensive and less efficient.
Cows pooping and farting in the fields produce a better taste and more nutrition than you will get from factory-made artificial chicken strips.
Using alternatives, or ersatz production of artificial things, means higher prices and less production of the two things that modern humans need to live: food and energy. Less food and fuel means fewer humans, plain and simple, and they don’t want to talk about that, especially in the less developed countries.
When the Ehrlichs published their book more than half a century ago, there were fewer than four billion people. Now there are more than eight billion people, and thanks to the adoption of free-market policies in India and China, more than two billion people have lifted themselves out of poverty! We did not do that! People today make good livings doing jobs like “social influencer” and “data analyst,” which were unthinkable back in the day, but in a world of eight billion people things like that are possible.
What might be possible in a world of one hundred billion people? Or what problems might be faced in the future with the depopulation-demographic problems in places like Japan and some European countries?
Also, a half century later, none of the alarmist climate predictions have materialized. The world has not frozen over. It has not been turned into a scorching desert. The seas have not risen in a great flood. Climate change has been a total bomb despite all the TV weathermen in the world’s best efforts to tell us otherwise.
Alex Jones Responds To Revelation That FBI/CIA Attempted To Silence Him And Shut Down Infowars
BREAKING: Republican Congressmen Call for Official Investigation into FBI/CIA Setup of Alex Jones
Alex Jones should definitely pursue legal action against the FBI and CIA after an undercover exposé featured an agent admitting the controversial radio host was unjustly targeted, GOP lawmakers are urging.
On Wednesday, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) told Benny Johnson that Jones should politically fight back against being targeted by the DOJ’s weaponization of the justice system, as admitted by a CIA contractor in a recent undercover exposé.
?BREAKING: Rep. Troy Nehls calls for subpoenas and a Congressional investigation into the CIA contractor ADMITTING the agency targeted Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 10, 2024
He also encourages Alex and Tucker to go after the Federal Government if the allegations are true. pic.twitter.com/OjGCcvqb2y
“Alex Jones if you’re listening, Alex Jones, you have a right to be a little bit flustered, right?” Nehls said. “Your feather should be flustered right now with what that agent, that former CIA guy, or that CIA guy, said about you — and same with Tucker. I’ll tell you go after them, go after them.”
“This weaponization that the Republicans have said has happened with the DOJ, it’s true America,” he continued. “They’re coming after Donald Trump. They’re coming after anybody that’s a MAGA movement individual. We got to push back.”
Asked if he believed Jones should pursue a congressional subpoena against the CIA contracting officer in the video, Gavin O’Blennis, Nehls responded, “Hell yes!”
“Listen, everybody says a lot of stuff up here, Benny, you say this, you say that – this guy kind of, I looked at the guy, he looked a little like he’s a little different – but what I would do is I would try to confirm, verify what he said and if it’s true, if it’s true, and if it’s accurate, I think Alex Jones should go after — they should go after the federal government, without question. And I think Tucker and everybody else should do it.”
“These are abuses that the American people will not tolerate we will not tolerate these abuses by the DOJ. The weaponization has been taking place. They’ve gone after Donald Trump for years. It’s all going to stop. Trump 2024, baby, he’s coming back,” Rep. Nehls added.
Nehls’ appearance with Johnson comes on the heels of another interview with Rep. Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who confirmed members of Congress are also being spied on by US intelligence agencies under orders to treat conservatives as “domestic terrorists.”
? BREAKING ?
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 11, 2024
Rep. Luna CONFIRMS members of Congress are SPIED on by American intelligence agencies through FISA loopholes, labeling conservatives as “domestic terrorists”
Q: Is Congress spied on?
A: “Yes. 100%. I am quite confident in some capacity that I am on a list…” pic.twitter.com/57hqd9rw0e
The legislators’ warnings follow similar alerts by other GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who warned a reauthorization of the FISA Act could imperil US citizens’ privacy rights.
“This isn’t national security. This isn’t law enforcement. This is fascism,” Lee said.
“We can put anyone in jail if you know what to do.”
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 10, 2024
This isn’t national security.
This isn’t law enforcement.
This is fascism.
Yet another reason why we’d be crazy to reauthorize FISA 702 without a warrant requirement. https://t.co/OQKUiWs8eO
“Yet another reason why we’d be crazy to reauthorize FISA 702 without a warrant requirement,” he added, referring to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress is currently debating whether to reauthorize.
Likewise, Rep. Greene wrote, “Alex Jones and many others have been the target of the deep state for many years. Congress can not pass FISA authorization without STRONG warrant requirements. We have to end this.”
Alex Jones and many others have been the target of the deep state for many years.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene ?? (@mtgreenee) April 10, 2024
Congress can not pass FISA authorization without STRONG warrant requirements.
We have to end this. https://t.co/2KJXeQTMn6
A Retired Physician’s View of American Healthcare
In my opinion, the healthcare system in this country is currently on life support. The level of trust is lower than it’s been in at least 50 years and deservedly so. While many probably believe that the negative impact on the healthcare system’s reputation is based on the nation’s Covid response, I will endeavor to provide, from the perspective of a retired physician and patient, a roadmap that brings all of the elements of the healthcare system together to explain how the disastrous Covid response merely highlighted the rot, rather than being its cause. While I’m keenly aware of the forces outside the healthcare system that played important roles in this drama, for this article, I will stick with all things medical.
The healthcare industry can be divided into four interrelated disciplines: 1) Hands-on care providers; 2) Researchers; 3) Public health professionals; and 4) Designers and administrators of health systems infrastructure. The Prime Directive (for you Star Trek fans) for each of these disciplines is different. For the hands-on care providers, it’s: ‘First do no harm.’ For the researcher, it’s: ‘Find something/discover something.’ For the public health professional, it’s: ‘Do something’ (usually spoken in a loud shrill voice); and for the designers and administrators of health systems infrastructure, it’s a take-off on the movie, “Field of Dreams:” ‘If you build it, patients will come.’
What should be obvious is that these four Prime Directives can be in conflict with each other, so unless there is collaboration between their respective practitioners, chaos can ensue, largely dependent on the complexity of the health emergency. In the case of the nation’s Covid response, chaos reigned, at least partly because a small cadre of public health professionals and Big Pharma took over, while the hands-on practitioners and infrastructure professionals were pushed aside and given their marching orders. In the case of hands-on practitioners, threats were used, when necessary, to obtain compliance.
What’s worse, the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to believe that the chaos was by design, in order to distract the lay public from recognizing that the collaboration of professionals representing all four disciplines hadn’t occurred. The importance of this is that the lay public’s relationship with the healthcare system is largely through their primary care physician. Would the public have reacted differently if they were aware that the person they trusted most to help them navigate the healthcare system was beholden to someone other than them?
At this point, a legitimate question that can be asked: why should anyone listen to what I have to say? My answer is that I am part of a group that constitutes maybe 1% of the physicians in this country that have had training, knowledge, and experience in all four disciplines; and I’ve done so over a period of 50 years. Believe me when I say that I did not set out on this career track. Rather, it was the vagaries of my professional life that brought me to this point; some of it very painful and difficult. In addition, being retired provides an added advantage in that I’m no longer engaged in work where my focus favors one discipline over any of the others. I’ve come to recognize that that gives me a perspective that few in my profession have.
Specifically, I had 7 years (1973-80) of medical training (SUNY Downstate Medical School and Kings County Hospital IM Residency). While there, I saw virtually everything, from St. Vitus’ dance to uremic frost. Of note, the one thing I never saw, heard of, or read about was Type 2 diabetes in anyone under the age of 30-35, something that is epidemic in young people today. That’s because the US Department of Agriculture’s recommendations to substitute carbohydrates for fats in the American diet didn’t occur until the late 1970s. The unintended consequence of this shift was that the American diet increased, on average, by 500 calories/day, thus generating the twin epidemics of obesity and young age Type 2 diabetes.
I recall predicting in 2005 at a session covering ‘Healthy People 2010’ at the annual American Public Health Association meeting that within the next 5-10 years, life expectancy in the US would start to decline due to a critical mass of premature deaths from obesity and young-age Type 2 diabetes. In fact, 2015-2017 saw the first 3-consecutive-year decline in life expectancy since the flu pandemic of 1918-20. While this was attributed primarily to deaths of despair, I believe obesity and young-age Type 2 diabetes were at least as important. I’m providing these details, because, as I’ll show, it is relevant to the current state of the entire healthcare system.
Getting back to my medical training; while Anthony Fauci bragged about having seen HIV/AIDS as early as 1981, which was early, I saw my first case of what we later came to recognize was HIV/AIDS in September 1977. When NYC had a major Legionnaires’ outbreak in 1978, I happened to be the senior resident on the Kings County Hospital pulmonary ward where the two index cases were admitted. I did the case presentations at the Grand Rounds, which was attended by infectious disease specialists from around the country, including folks from the CDC, who were also involved while the index patients were still in the hospital. That was a high point for the CDC. How far the mighty have fallen! I also had extensive training in the care of tuberculosis patients, which was still fairly prevalent in Brooklyn. Overall, I had almost as much training in infectious disease as someone who had done an infectious disease fellowship.
My medical school and residency training was followed by almost 40 years of healthcare experience, including 19 years of direct patient care in a rural setting as a Board Certified Internist; 17 years of clinical research in the areas of substance use, HIV, and HCV at a private-not-for-profit healthcare agency, where I was lead or co-author of approximately two dozen papers published in peer-reviewed medical journals. I also had over 35 years of involvement in public health, most prominently as a 10-year member of the Quality of Care Advisory Committee of the NYS Department of Health AIDS Institute. My health systems infrastructure and administration activities were primarily in the areas of Quality Improvement and Compliance, where I was responsible for the development, implementation, and directorship of these programs at the institutions where I was affiliated or worked.
When I retired 6 years ago, I became a member of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the agency where I had done clinical research. I have been IRB Chair for the past 4 years, so even though I am retired, I’m still in the arena. Based on the foregoing, I believe I am as qualified, from a healthcare perspective, as anyone to wade through the “noise” to get to the facts and data that are truly important.
My Covid journey began on Friday the 13th of March 2020, the day that the 2-week lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’ was announced. I came down with what I suspected was peri-myocarditis, and presumed it was from Covid infection. Doctor’s offices were shut, and there were reports (which turned out to be largely false) of many deaths at the hospitals near me in Queens, NYC, so I literally decided to ride it out. My symptoms were of decreasing duration and intensity over a period of seven days, and were gone by day eight. By day 10, I was back doing my 20-mile bike rides twice weekly without incident. The significance of this will become clear later.
At the time, I accepted the ‘Flatten the curve’ strategy, since I hadn’t yet seen (because the censorship goon squads were already up and running) the papers by John Ioannidis or Jay Bhattacharya indicating that the published fatality rates were wildly exaggerated, even in the elderly. However, as soon as I saw that the 2-week period was going to be extended, and the term lockdown came into vogue, I began to smell a rat.
If people are locked down in their homes, it seemed inevitable to me that someone would introduce the virus into the home, turning it into a Petri dish. With my knowledge and experience in infection control, I was surprised that no one (other than Dr. Ben Carson) ever mentioned the size of the ‘inoculum’ as a determinant of how sick you might get. I also knew that contact tracing for an airborne infection was a fool’s errand. That’s what you get when physicians like Fauci and Deborah Birx, who have spent the bulk of their careers dealing with HIV, which is transmitted sexually or by intravenous drug use, are put in charge of dealing with an airborne infection.
I also knew that masks were useless. I remember hearing at the time that stopping a virus by wearing a mask was about as useful as stopping mosquitoes by putting a chain link fence around your yard! That analogy has withstood the test of time quite well. I was also keenly aware of the risk of CO2 narcosis from wearing a tightly fitted mask. This knowledge stemmed from my training days when the use of Librium or Valium to treat panic attacks was barely on the radar screen. What we did was to have the patient breathe into a brown paper bag until CO2 narcosis calmed them down. Worked quite well, actually! I still remember a woman with frequent panic attacks who would show up in the emergency department only when her home supply of brown paper bags was exhausted.
When I finally was able to see my primary care doctor in July 2020, the diagnosis of peri-myocarditis was essentially confirmed (I had T-wave inversions on EKG that later resolved). Most important to me, I was hoping that I had made antibodies to the Covid virus. I didn’t! That was of concern since, from my perch, it was very difficult to get a good handle on whether hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc or ivermectin were effective. While I suspected that they were effective (I already knew from my practice years that the safety concerns were wildly exaggerated and/or totally false); the censorship efforts were such that I had some doubt. I did notice however, that the studies showing that these medications were ineffective were not done on the cohort for whom they were being used; namely, people who had had symptoms for less than 3-4 days.
It was during the fall of 2020 that I first saw the definitive paper on influenza pandemic mitigation by Donald Henderson, MD, MPH published in 2006:
The guidance in this paper was diametrically opposed to the Covid response I was witnessing. Given Henderson’s experience as leader of the team that rid the planet of smallpox, and at the time of his death in 2016, he was leading teams that were on the verge of eradicating polio and measles, his credentials were impeccable.
In addition, Sweden provided a naturally occurring control group, in that there were no lockdowns, no school closures, no mask mandates, and no social distancing requirements. Despite this, the country had no deaths in children under the age of 18. Their morbidity/mortality rates overall were no worse than countries that had locked down, and the social and economic disruptions were much less than their peer countries.
Based on the information that I’ve described above, I decided that when the Covid jab was released, I would take it, but only after at least 10 million others had taken it without significant adverse event rates, since I still believed that for those 65 years of age or older, it had value. From the foregoing statement, you can see that at that point, I was not yet aware of the lengths to which the public health agencies had gone to hide the number of serious adverse events from the jab. Of course, before taking the jab, I planned to retest for antibodies first to see whether I had developed natural immunity.
This brings us to a corollary of the physician’s Prime Directive: ‘First do no harm.’ When the FDA approves a new pharmaceutical for patient use, even under the usual approval process, you never, ever want to be among the first group of physicians to prescribe this new product, except in very rare situations. Why is this? It’s because the number of patients that have participated in the research to complete Phase 3 trials is not very large. Therefore, when the product is released, the number of patients placed on the new pharmaceutical is usually many times the number of research participants. As a result, bad reactions, including deaths, from the new product that were not seen during the research can emerge. Just about once per year, the FDA will remove from the market a pharmaceutical it had previously approved due to bad occurrences seen after widespread use…and this has been the case for at least the past 40 years.
During my years in primary care practice, physicians were frequently surveyed as to when they would begin prescribing a new pharmaceutical product. A few percent would prescribe it as soon as it was available; a few percent would prescribe it after a few of their colleagues had used it; about 70-80% would prescribe it only after it had been used fairly extensively; and about 10-15% wouldn’t prescribe the product until it was considered the “gold standard.” When I was in practice, I was almost always in group #3. The rare situations when you would want to be first in line would be when a patient had been on every treatment regimen available and was still doing poorly. An example would be patients with seizure disorder, who, at best, were still having daily seizures despite having been on every approved regimen.
Given that the Covid jab, under Emergency Use Authorization, was released while it was still a Phase 3 research product, there should have been even greater post-marketing surveillance than usual. I had written about these oversight deficiencies previously for Brownstone:
Everything changed for me in December 2020 when I contracted symptomatic Covid for a second time. Without getting into too much detail, I had respiratory insufficiency due to Covid-induced cytokine storm complicated by bilateral bacterial pneumonia. I was hospitalized for 11 days. If it weren’t for the increased pulmonary reserve from my years of bike riding, I surely would have died. Incidentally, I was offered Remdesivir, but by then, I knew that the only people benefiting from that drug were Fauci and Bill Gates. I took a pass. Six weeks after discharge, I was back doing my 20-mile bike rides.
At this point, I should address those who believe that the scamdemic was not caused by a virus. Based on my two episodes of illness, I totally reject that notion. It was the lethality of the virus that was wildly exaggerated, not its existence!
In early 2021, the recommendation was that even if you had antibodies to Covid, you should receive two mRNA jabs three months after testing negative for the virus post-illness. For me, this would have been late April or early May of 2021. My plan was to test for antibodies in late April, and to refuse the jab if I made antibodies, despite the recommendations from the chief of pulmonary medicine at the hospital where I had been an inpatient. The justification given for the jab just didn’t make sense to me, and was contrary to 2,500 years of knowledge regarding immunity.
During the ensuing 3 months, good research was published clearly indicating that natural immunity was at least as effective as the jab. When I tested positive for antibodies, there was no way I was going to get jabbed. The fact that more and more evidence is emerging that some people are susceptible to severe artery clogging from the jab, and given my family history of early death from coronary artery disease, the decision not to jab may very well have saved my life. By the way, the CDC did not publicly acknowledge the value of natural immunity until late January of 2022, and even at that late date, they buried it in a graph without mention in the narrative that accompanied the graph.
The next significant event, from my perspective, was when the jab was up for consideration by the FDA for children 12-17 years of age. The same week that the FDA Advisory Committee was doing their review, a study from Israel showed that in less than 100,000 children given the jab, there were 1,200 cases of myocarditis. For a supposed vaccine, that’s a horrendously high rate of serious adverse events. The fact that no child was hospitalized was immaterial.
I saw this study within a day of its release. This study, coupled with the fact that in countries that had good records on deaths from Covid in children, the number of deaths was zero, led me to believe that there was no way that the jabs would be approved for this cohort. Boy was I mistaken! At the time, I thought that this constituted scientific misconduct that had crossed the line into criminality. If anything, subsequent events have added many exclamation points to that assessment. So much for following the science! Some European countries did not approve the jab for those under the age of 18, and still haven’t.
To add insult to injury, I saw two interviews with Randi Weingarten done about 6-8 weeks apart. Within 7-10 days after each interview, the CDC released guidelines for handling children’s education and healthcare that I was certain came directly from those interviews. Sure enough, the email exchanges between Weingarten and Rochelle Walensky, then CDC Director, were released showing unequivocally that Weingarten was providing the CDC with their marching orders. Given that Weingarten is vicious, nasty, has no medical training, and is childless makes her the last person you’d want to have the power to determine how your children should be educated and the healthcare they should receive. It’s like having Hansel and Gretel on continuous loop, except that the wicked witch always wins!
I then came across the following study, which I thought was fairly well done:
It showed that among Medicare patients receiving the initial two-shot regimen in early 2021, there was benefit over a period of 6 months. On the basis of this study, I still maintained that the jab was of value for this cohort. However, it did not escape my notice that over the next two years, studies in other cohorts extending out for 6 months or more were not forthcoming. What was even more surprising was that there was no extension beyond 6 months in the cohort from the study referenced above. Given the poor quality of almost all studies coming from our public health agencies (the above linked study was a very rare exception), I became convinced that when they tried to extend the study beyond 6 months, the results were so poor that they couldn’t even attempt to manipulate the data, as they had done on so many other occasions (and were almost always caught).
Of note, from September 2021 until late 2023, I regularly participated on the MedPage site, which was restricted to healthcare professionals. During my time on MedPage, I went from being an outlier, who was accused of all the usual Covid epithets to being one of the leaders of what came to be a 75% majority. It took about a year for the transition to occur. Believe me, there was a fair amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth by the Covidian goons. Whenever I would challenge the group to provide a study that was comparable to the study linked above, there was nothing but crickets, yet they continued to support giving the jab to anyone with a pulse. By the end of 2023, the Empire Struck Back with the goon squad regaining control. At that point, I unsubscribed. I subsequently found out that MedPage is a Big Pharma-controlled site. If true, I’m surprised that I was able to contribute for as long as I did.
Given the Covid debacle, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that other supposedly ‘settled’ elements of healthcare, especially with regard to pharmaceuticals, were fudged. Recently, I’ve had what I believe were very constructive interactions with Brownstone contributors, who for the most part are not healthcare professionals. I’ll characterize one of these discussions as an extrapolation of the Covid jab problems to the flu shot. A key point from that discussion was that the quality of the data supporting the utility of the flu shot appears to be even worse than for the Covid jab, which would seem inconceivable, but is probably an accurate description.
While I admit that my nearly unconditional support for giving the flu shot has been shaken, I will still continue taking it annually, as I’ve done for 42 of the past 44 flu seasons, and I would still recommend it for persons over the age of 65, and children under the age of 18. Why would I do that? It’s because my experience tells me that after 60 years of use, the flu shot has proven to be extremely safe (in sharp contrast to the Covid jab), and my clinical judgment is that good data would show that it reduces morbidity and mortality from flu, even if that reduction is modest. In other words, I believe that the risk/benefit ratio is favorable…but it would be nice to have good data to support or refute that judgment.
A second discussion was on the use of statins for hyperlipidemia. While the data supporting its use as secondary prevention for someone who has had a cardiovascular event looks to be solid, use of these medications for primary prevention appears to be on shakier ground. This is an issue, given the potential for significant side effects from long-term use of statins. An important point was that the level of lipid elevation that warrants primary prevention treatment has been lowered over the years. My own sense is that this has been pushed by Big Pharma in the quest to get everyone in the country on medication, rather than any demonstrated value for patients.
Once again, clinical judgment is key, specifically in the area of proper patient selection. Again, I’ll use myself as an example. I have a family history of early cardiac death on the male side that would choke a horse! Therefore, when I was found to have moderate hyperlipidemia about 25 years ago, along with moderate-to-severe hypertension, I was aggressively treated for both. I have now outlived all of my close male relatives, and with no cardiovascular events. I have no doubt that the use of these medications has been a significant factor in that outcome.
At this point, let me shift gears to the healthcare system in general. Within the past week, I read the following article posted on a Brownstone chat:
The paper describes the expected deleterious impact of the transition from the Flexnerian model of physician training, which is what I received, to what can be described as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)-based model. It was pointed out that Abraham Flexner, who released his seminal report in 1910, was not a physician. However, he was a hospital administrator, and his father and all of his brothers were physicians, so at the very least, there was a wealth of healthcare experience that could be drawn upon in compiling what became known as the Flexner Report. It was then pointed out that Flexner was adversely influenced by corporate interests, rather than the interest of improved physician training and competence.
Accepting these criticisms as having at least some validity, in order to put all this in proper context, it requires that events must be examined using the proper timeline. While I agree with those who believe that the quality of America’s healthcare system has been declining for at least the past 20 years, it was not because of failures of the Flexnerian model. The Flexnerian model reigned supreme from the 1910s until the early 1990s. During that period, the center of gravity of healthcare advancement worldwide shifted from Europe to the US.
That shift accelerated after WWII when Europe adopted the ‘socialized medicine’ model, and went into warp speed during the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Despite this success, the dismantling of the Flexnerian model began in earnest in the mid-1990s, even though the effort to increase medical school enrollment of women and minorities started in the early 1970s, when I began my medical school education, and had achieved a certain level of success. Apparently, the powers that be were not satisfied with the diversity efforts.
My theory as to why the accelerated advancements from the late 1970s to the early 1990s happened is that when engineering as a career died during the entire decade of the 1970s (yes, that did happen), a large number of pre-engineering students went pre-med. In fact, the largest overall percentage increase in medical school applicants occurred during that decade. As a consequence of having engineering students enter the medical profession in large numbers, there was an explosion of technological and pharmaceutical advances that helped very large segments of the adult population. Examples included the adaptation for medical use or the new development of sonography, CT scans, MRI, angioplasty, flexible endoscopy, laparoscopy, beta-blockers, angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), etc., etc., etc.
All of that and more occurred during that brief 15-year period. I had the privilege of training during that period, and being able to bring those advancements to my patients. These advances extended the length and quality of adult patients’ lives in ways that had never been seen before nor, in my opinion, have occurred since.
To be fair, it was not only the intrusion of DEI-like initiatives in the mid-1990s that had negative impacts on the healthcare system. The other development was the transition of physicians from private practice (predominantly in large single-specialty or multi-specialty groups) to employees of large regional healthcare systems, insurance companies, or other mega-sized institutions. Brownstone contributors have documented the hell out of the fact that this transition intensified the damage caused by the Covid response, because physician autonomy was destroyed, computer algorithms, based on what we now know can be dubious databases (garbage in, garbage out) replaced clinical judgment, and cowardice reigned.
Is it any wonder that we are where we are? I mentioned earlier that life expectancy declined for three years in a row beginning in 2015. The fact is, since 2017, the general trend in life expectancy has continued to trend downward. While lifestyle is certainly an important factor in this decline, we better start looking at whether our healthcare system is adding to this disaster. A major impediment, in my opinion, is that the people best positioned within the healthcare system to make the necessary changes have been rendered impotent. Potentially worse, the new system for training physicians may not provide this critical group with the skill sets needed to understand what has to be done to turn this ship around.
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