If Toto succeeds in pulling back the curtain, and IF the public finally sees what has gone on-the needless suffering and death, the broken dreams, the crushing of the education of a generation, the raw exercise of injustice for the sake of power and greed—this is what SHOULD happen:
Primum non nocere!
“First do no harm” has been the rule for generations of physicians. Although some modern writers have urged a more “nuanced” understanding of this phrase
it was clearly understood for hundreds of years. The straw-man argument that, “Well shots hurt, so obviously nobody can follow this rule” must be rejected as ridiculous. It is interesting to contrast these “nuanced” articles, most of which appeared after the COVID Disaster (I refuse to call it a pandemic, as so much harm was added by our response) with this one from more rational times:
It emphasized the role of medicine to not only NOT cause harm (understood by any adult as unnecessary or unreasonable harm) but to prevent it. Have we done that? I think not. It has been obvious for over a year to any critical thinker that the mRNA agents, the forced masking and the lockdowns have done significant and increasingly manifest harm to our entire society with minimal, if any, benefit.
The pseudovaccines must be stopped! If that is a bridge too far, at least the forced mandates must be stopped and true Informed Consent re-instituted. Aren’t the growing stories of otherwise healthy young adults dying suddenly enough to wake the public from its slumber? This is the ONLY situation where Informed Consent has been criminalized. Sanctions against health care professionals for fulfilling their duty towards their patients must be halted immediately. Medical Licensing Boards and Certifying Boards must immediately cease their activity vilifying physicians for giving Informed Consent regarding COVID and its treatment. These genetic agents are not like the true polio or measles vaccines. They do not stop transmission and arguably have been the cause of the rapid mutation of the virus. THAT is the science, not a proclamation from authoritarian figures who cites no evidence but demand blind adherence to their opinion without robust debate and consideration of alternative research.
But this will only stop things from getting worse…. That will stop the harm…yes, that must be first, but is it enough? I don’t think so. Much more needs to be done for justice to be served and to restore faith in our public health agencies and the entire medical system.
Like many others, I have seen the road forward to be threefold:
• Restore, to the extent possible, those who have been injured by our flawed response;
• Investigate those in authority (political, medical, economic) who knew, or should have known, the disastrous consequences of their actions;
• Rehabilitate, as much as possible, those individuals in government, healthcare professions and business who stood by and watched this happen without speaking up.
These three elements are indeed complex and it will take a national commission to formulate the proper response. Certainly, some restoration is possible. Those terminated because of their refusal to take this mRNA agent could be rehired, with compensation, though I wonder how many would want their jobs back under the very people who terminated them for unjust reasons. But how can you restore those who lost their lives needlessly? How can you compensate those who lost loved ones because of policies that some now see were rooted in greed and power? How can you give children their lost education? I don’t know…I do know it will be imperfect but I also know that unless an attempt is made, unless those who knew or should have known of the consequences of their actions are punished, the situation will only get worse. Unless we institute changes to prevent this from happening in the future, medicine will NEVER be trusted again.
There are some individuals, I don’t know who and how many, who will need severe punishment for their actions. A fine paid by their employer will not be sufficient to deter future inappropriate actions. Personal responsibility must be restored. Permanent removal from positions of public trust must be exercised. Investigation, trial and punishment if found guilty must be undertaken. Given the deadly consequences of some of these actions, prison must be considered. Forfeiting of public pensions should be on the table.
The incestuous relationship between Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Politics and our Public Health agencies must be intensively investigated. Conflicts of interest must be terminated. Those whose job is regulating the industry must absolutely be separated from monetary, or other, compensation from those they should be regulating. Fraudulently withholding true drug trial information must be punished. Genuine, robust oversight that benefits the public, not Big Pharma or Big Medicine, must be restored at all costs. “Emergency Use Authorizations” must be granted ONLY when there are not alternative treatments available (not the case with COVID-19). Safety studies must be ongoing and authorization terminated when safety signals are triggered. Blanket freedom from liability must be re-thought. An across-the board increase in compensation to institutions for adding a certain diagnosis code to a patient, regardless of its lack of plausible significance to the admission, or utilizing a certain expensive treatment or drug, without proof it has a reasonable chance to be of benefit to that patient.
There are some individuals who will need less severe punishment. There are some who will need not punishment but re-education and a re-commitment to fulfill their oaths to society, be it in politics, medicine or business. We rely upon professionals to have the critical thinking and courage to stand up for what is right, even if it is difficult. Somehow, that must be encouraged. I do not know what this will look like, but I DO know what will happen if it is not done….Let me explain.
Most people have never heard of Dr. Franz Lucas. I know I did not know of him until recently. But we may hear more about him very soon:
Post-War Photograph of SS Doctor Franz Lucas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Lucas
Supposedly, the excuse “I was only following orders” is insufficient to avoid guilt. While that was true for the “Crimes Against Humanity” adjudicated in the Nuremberg Trials from 1945-1946, that did not hold in the Second Auschwitz Trials held in Frankfurt from 1963-1965:
The Frankfurt trials were held under the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany. Inexpicably, “only following orders” WAS a valid defense against a charge of murder! While Dr. Lukas did indeed select prisoners on the ramp of Auschwitz for extermination, he could only be charged with the lesser crime of “being an accomplice to murder”. One could only be charged with murder if he or she was NOT doing it under orders. One could send hundreds or thousands to the gas chamber and only be an accomplice to their murder.
Lucas was imprisoned for 3 years and 3 months, then released and went on to open a private practice of medicine, which he operated from 1970 to 1983. He died in 1994 at the age of 83. One can only wonder if justice was indeed served, and if any deterrence for the same type of, at the very least, immoral and unethical medical behavior was accomplished…
A similar lack of societal learning and personal responsibility affected my own family. Eighty years ago while Dr. Lucas was “following orders” at Auschwitz, two of my mother’s first cousins were murdered in the Jasenovac Death Camp. Most likely, their murderers were only “following orders”. Scores more of my extended family just disappeared. Most of them were turned in to the government of the fascist state of Croatia by friends and neighbors who….”were only following orders”.
The wounds of that time were never adequately addressed. Marshall Tito used his power to beat the people of the former Jugoslavia back into submission, but the underlying hatred and mistrust never healed.
In the early 1960’s, I visited Donji Karin on the Dalmatian Coast outside of Zadar, the place of my maternal grandfather’s birth. The family had lived there for hundreds of years, brought as Serb border guards by the Kingdom of Hungary to protect the area from the Ottomans. The house was completely made of stone—stone walls, stone floor, stone roof. No glass in the windows, no running water. The animals lived on the first floor to help provide heat in the winter. The family lived on the second floor. It was absolutely immaculate…
But thirty years later, the old hatreds boiled over as the Balkan Wars of the 1990’s erupted. I lost all contact with my remaining family as they were ethnically cleansed, probably by others “only following orders”…..
Then this past year, one remaining cousin, the great-granddaughter of my grandfather’s brother, sent me this photo:
The porch and massive outside stairs to the entry into the living quarters remain but the roof was caved in. It is a wreck and uninhabited…
That stone house which stood for centuries succumbed to human evil and people just “following orders”. Nobody knows what happened to the rest of the family…
Such is what happens when justice is never done and people are excused from their actions because they were “following orders”.
Will those hospital administrators and Chief Medical Officers who denied a chance for treatment and life with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin claim they were “only following orders”? What about the Deans of medical schools whose defense for their actions will be “I was only following the orders of the CDC?” Or the leaders of Medical Licensing Boards, and Specialty Boards who attempted, and continue to attempt, to destroy the lives of fellow physicians who insisted on honestly treating their patients because they followed “higher orders”? Or those who were discharged from the military, first responders or just ordinary people who were terminated from their job or lost their business because of someone “just following orders”?
At some point in time, we need to demand personal, as well as collective, responsibility for actions of commission AND omission. If we fail to do so, we will reap even greater disasters. As a society, we cannot just wipe the slate clean and proceed as if nothing happened. “I was just following orders” can NEVER be an excuse in the future!
Thank you kindly for this wonderfully enlightening article. I’m afraid there will not be enough prison room nor gallows for the “just following orders “ crowd. From the beginning most innocently felt I was on the wrong side of issues. Now the truth and reality are beginning to be exposed. Keep up the good work
Masterfully composed and expressed; a rich and thoughtful, clear, perfectly focused comment that, coming from a medical professor and practitioner, is far overdue and most welcome in the present, epic debacle.
The piece should have infectious quality among your peers. Giving voice to a moral conscience, professional decency, and a social wisdom rooted in historical evidence, yours is the equivalent in medicine of Elie Wisel's to all the world in years past.
My Belgian-born mother survived and, later here, carried me to birth, only because a Righteous Christian in Liege secretly protected her Jewish identity and, thus, her very life and relative freedom from -- and at the price of her own life if such protection were discovered by -- the murderous Nazi occupiers until Belgium was liberated in early 1945. The heroes in the ongoing atrocity in our time need to be identified in time and properly recognized.
Your voice is a new crying-out in the wilderness -- at present, this merely sporadic saving effort. It needs to be read and heard, accepted and replicated, but mostly practiced.
True medicine -- in committing a needed, saving set of highly valued actions and not omitting carrying them out, and intentionally not committing an immoral set of condemnable inactions -- must not perish from the collective, trusted vision and imagination of the sick and the diseased. Much healing, perhaps a majority, you may agree, is in fact accomplished by the patient's belief that his or her physician has both the technical power, as well as the dedicated, conscientious courage and will to heal.
And the dedicated diligence to avoid, at all possible costs, a treatment or practice-method that harms more than helps, kills more than saves, deceives more than conscientiously, completely explains -- with full consent granted -- beforehand. The Nuremberg Code must not be relegated to the status of a curious, antiquated attempt to do what's right and good in true medicine by finding it mentioned casually and incidentally, merely footnoted in possibly future "medical" and "public health" texts of a tyrann-authoritarian, transhumanly dystopian age.
Thank you kindly for this wonderfully enlightening article. I’m afraid there will not be enough prison room nor gallows for the “just following orders “ crowd. From the beginning most innocently felt I was on the wrong side of issues. Now the truth and reality are beginning to be exposed. Keep up the good work
Masterfully composed and expressed; a rich and thoughtful, clear, perfectly focused comment that, coming from a medical professor and practitioner, is far overdue and most welcome in the present, epic debacle.
The piece should have infectious quality among your peers. Giving voice to a moral conscience, professional decency, and a social wisdom rooted in historical evidence, yours is the equivalent in medicine of Elie Wisel's to all the world in years past.
My Belgian-born mother survived and, later here, carried me to birth, only because a Righteous Christian in Liege secretly protected her Jewish identity and, thus, her very life and relative freedom from -- and at the price of her own life if such protection were discovered by -- the murderous Nazi occupiers until Belgium was liberated in early 1945. The heroes in the ongoing atrocity in our time need to be identified in time and properly recognized.
Your voice is a new crying-out in the wilderness -- at present, this merely sporadic saving effort. It needs to be read and heard, accepted and replicated, but mostly practiced.
True medicine -- in committing a needed, saving set of highly valued actions and not omitting carrying them out, and intentionally not committing an immoral set of condemnable inactions -- must not perish from the collective, trusted vision and imagination of the sick and the diseased. Much healing, perhaps a majority, you may agree, is in fact accomplished by the patient's belief that his or her physician has both the technical power, as well as the dedicated, conscientious courage and will to heal.
And the dedicated diligence to avoid, at all possible costs, a treatment or practice-method that harms more than helps, kills more than saves, deceives more than conscientiously, completely explains -- with full consent granted -- beforehand. The Nuremberg Code must not be relegated to the status of a curious, antiquated attempt to do what's right and good in true medicine by finding it mentioned casually and incidentally, merely footnoted in possibly future "medical" and "public health" texts of a tyrann-authoritarian, transhumanly dystopian age.