Amnesty? NO! We Need Accountability!
Our Response to the "COVID Disaster"
When I was a child playing games, I noticed that there were individuals who, when they were losing, wanted to stop and “call it a draw”. Well, those children grew up and are with us today as adults. They are the ones who, when faced with some egregious action on the part of someone with whom they agree, blurt out “Well, both sides do it!” The truth of the matter is that both sides do not do it and unless we have the courage to accept that, we will continue to make very, very bad mistakes as a society.
A case in point is the recent article in The Atlantic by Emily Oster:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/
If you haven’t read it, chances are you have heard about it. I strongly recommend you read it yourself. Check if my take on it is valid. Professor Oster seems to be saying that mistakes were made on both sides. The people who pushed for lockdowns, meaningless social distancing, cloth masks, etc. just did it because they did not have all the information. The fog of fear clouded perception. She contends that those who actually got it right were just lucky and shouldn’t gloat:
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
She then goes on to castigate those who recommended injecting yourself with bleach:
Obviously, some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
Who recommended “bleach injections”? Certainly not Donald Trump. This was a figment of the imagination from a journalist who took what he or she wanted from a suggestion by the President that some form of disinfection may be a valid approach. It turns out, Trump was right. As a surgeon who unfortunately dealt with what the public calls “flesh eating bacteria”, I know that one of the most effective ways of treating this rapidly progressive infection is indeed with an “injection” of hypochlorous acid with inflow and outflow catheters:
Nasal irrigation with a dilute povidone iodine solution has been found to be effective and safe in some cases of chronic sinusitis:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31560120/
Asking the reasonable and what in reality were highly scientifically accurate questions was a far cry from “recommending you inject yourself with Clorox”.
But Professor Osler is indeed right on one count:
Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem.
This problem remains with us, and if anything, has intensified : Who actually decides what is “misinformation”? Remember that Galileo was tried for “misinformation” because he said the earth revolves around the sun. Semmelweis was driven from medicine because he recommended hand washing. The medical elite of the time thought it was “misinformation”. More recently, it took medicine 20 years to finally admit that ulcer disease was caused by a bacterium and the discovery was not “misinformation”:
Oster’s article has been discussed by many individuals. I’d like to add my take on it.
First of all, it looks as though those who “got it right” were not just lucky, but quite perceptive. What was ridiculed as Conspiracy Theory is looking more and more like actual fact. The supposed origin of COVID from the wet market is now all but untenable. Cloth masks and social distancing had little actual scientific basis, and some knew it and tried to proclaim it. Lockdowns actually made things worse. Some wondered why liquor stores were “essential businesses” and churches were not. They were correct, and common sense, even at the time, would have indicated that. Those who pointed out the gain of function research that most likely led to the creation of the virus were shouted down by the “public health experts” who, as it turns out, probably knew much more than they let on to the public.
In September 2020, Dr. Li-Weng Yan, a whistle blower FROM the Wuhan laboratory went on national television to state the virus was intentionally created in the laboratory:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6191134384001
The political fact-checkers of course immediately decried this as “Misinformation!”, although they have since tried to cover their tracks:
https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/
But I guess they get a pass, too, because “we just didn’t know at the time”. Those who believed this whistle blower, though, were just lucky rubes who didn’t believe in science….at least according to those who arguably are guilty of spreading massive misinformation themselves.
As more and more hidden information is discovered, it seems that there were elements of COVID that actually were planned. Perhaps it was indeed a “Plandemic”:
https://www.amazon.com/Plandemic-Fear-Virus-Truth-Cure-ebook/dp/B094185QML
Maybe those who looked at Event 201 were not just lucky, but informed:
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/event201/about
There is no moral equivalency between those who strenuously lobbied for early multi agent therapy for what was a rapidly evolving deadly disease and those who insisted just “sicken at home” and await a vaccine.
But let’s just leave all that aside for now. The truth WILL come out, perhaps sooner than people realize. Assuming all of this is true, and I admit the definitive answer is not clear at this time, what are we to do? Is an amnesty without accountability the answer? The answer should be, must be, an emphatic NO!
Almost 50 years ago, the topic of Organizational Learning was explored by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon:
https://hbr.org/1977/09/double-loop-learning-in-organizations
An amnesty without accountability destroys the value of double-loop learning whereby errors are corrected and not repeated in the future. Unfortunately, medical organizations seem uniquely incapable of performing double-loop learning:
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=14310
Tucker and Edmondson discovered that the technique of work-arounds instead of process re-engineering actually insured that the problems would remain. Amnesty without accountability is exactly such a work-around.
There are three groups of people involved in the COVID Disaster (I am calling it a “Disaster” because it accurately depicts the problems from both the virus and our response to it):
· The Architects
· The Enablers
· The Victims
Rather than “calling it a draw”, we need to formulate a response that directly deals with these groups of people AND a path forward that helps assure this sort of a disaster will not happen again. Let’s actually do some double-loop learning.
The Architects
This is easy. If this disaster was planned, they need to be punished. Laws shielding these people and organizations from legal liability must be reversed.
The Enablers
This is much more difficult, as the damage done by this second group of individuals and thus their culpability, is on a continuum. Those who implemented the disastrous responses, such as hospital officials, leaders of academic medicine, politicians who reveled in their power, journalists who printed what they knew to be false, or should have known to be false, need to face some degree of accountability and restitution commensurate with their actions. Likewise, those who enforced censorship because of supposed "misinformation” or “disinformation” must, at the very least, NEVER be in an official position to do that again. Leaders in academic medicine, public health and medical boards and licensing agencies who supported this must, at the very minimum, be removed from positions of power. Additional restitution should also be in order.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4
The low-level employees who just “went along to get along” need to somehow be rehabilitated as much as possible.
The Victims
Those hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions when all the effects of our response are compiled) of people who died needlessly will of course never be given compensation for their sacrifice. Nor will their relatives and loved ones. Neither will those who suffered permanent adverse reactions from a misrepresented mRNA inoculation.
How are we to compensate those who lost employment, businesses or years of education because of misguided policies that were enacted more out of political rather than medical reasons?
These are all difficult questions. Certainly, those who were fired because they refused to take an inoculation that was known to be ineffective in preventing both disease and transmission of the virus need to be given their jobs back, if they even want them, and compensated in some sort of way. The courageous medical professionals who were vilified for speaking the truth must be restored and made whole as much as possible.
Unfortunately, the track record on such restorative actions is abysmal. Attempts to punish those responsible for the horrific actions of the fascist governments of the last century had a very spotty record of success. For reasons still debated, and of key significance to understanding the present COVID Disaster, physicians joined the Nazi Party at alarming rates, far exceeding other professions:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/fernandes-doctors-who-became-nazis
Equally alarming was the extent to which physicians complicit in actions later seen as the horror they were, saw them as actions necessary for “public health”.
Even within the charmed racial circle, the ethics of confidentiality were rapidly eroded. Illness was now less a private than a public matter, being regarded above all as something that deprived the community of labour and imposed other costs. In sum, Hitler's regime aspired to total control over bodies as well as minds. The means by which Germans should fulfil their Pflicht zur Gesundheit (their essentially community-oriented 'duty to be healthy') was ultimately to be determined by political authority rather than by professional judgment. From: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/014107689709000616
If this doesn’t sound frightening, it should……
Ultimately, it will be necessary for entrance into the health professions, and advancement within them, to be guided by an individual’s capacity for, and evidence of, critical thinking, courage, ethics and moral responsibility. Excellence in the STEM subjects is necessary, but far from sufficient, for success as a care giver.
These are the conclusions from the collective and individual actions of medicine in the Holocaust articulated by Reis, Wald and Weindling:
It is about the major ethical questions of our time: the soul of care, equity in healthcare, resource allocation, pharma ethical conduct, non-exploitation of the vulnerable, poor and marginalized, rights of the disabled, beginning and end of life issues…and more. It is about current and future health professionals being cognizant of the inherent danger of abuse of power in medicine and the need for “immunizing” ourselves for prevention. (Emphasis added.) From: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31248455/
Unfortunately, unless these traits are fostered early in the education of health professionals, they will never occur. Medical school is much too late. Besides, academic medicine has been one of the primary perpetrators of the COVID Disaster. They cannot be expected to be part of the solution in their current form. It must be accomplished during undergraduate education or even before, in secondary and middle school.
Ideally, an academic institution with reach into each of these areas will take up the challenge. Hillsdale College is uniquely qualified to lead this initiative. They offer an excellent undergraduate education. They can reach into even younger students with their Hillsdale Affiliated Classic Schools. And they can influence health policy on a national level with their Academy for Science and Freedom. I sincerely hope they, and others with the vision, will take up the challenge. Restoration of faith and trust in our system of healthcare and individual caregivers hangs in the balance.
As an MD , I am, for the first time in my 47 years of practice , embarrassed and furious by the actions of our organizations and individual physicians in the COVID debacle.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful examination. One point that sits squarely in the foreground of solutions to me is--- let's reverse the oppression, the mandates, the toxic injections, the targeting of children and infants and the preborn, the masking, the lockdowns and the misinformation labeling. Let us get rid of it all. Amnesty does not occur BEFORE the wrong behavior is reversed.