Just Puppets on a String

We’ve Outsourced our Thinking

On August 15, 2024, Medscape almost gleefully reported that the American Board of Internal Medicine had revoked the certification of Drs. Pierre Kory and Paul Marik.  The reason was, in the view of the American Board of Internal Medicine, spreading “false or inaccurate medical information” regarding the use of Ivermectin in the treatment of COVID. 

Some things should be noted.  Medscape is owned by WebMD.  A report by Vox exposed possible bias in WebMD due to its heavy support by Big Pharma.  The current exact ownership of Web MD is somewhat tortuous. In 2017, WebMD was acquired  by Internet Brands, a private-equity firm controlled by Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts (KKR)  “financed by advertising, third-party contributions and sponsors”.  This remains current, as reported by PitchBook. However, in 2022 Internet Brands recapitalized with KKR, Temasek and Warburg Pincus.

Warburg Pincus  is another private-equity firm with international scope.  It’s Chair is Timothy Geithner.  Yes, THAT Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury under Obama.  So, does the evidence suggest that Medscape is an impartial vehicle only interested in delivering the “truth” or could there be other political and economic motives in their reporting?  Classic medical journals require a declaration of possible conflicts of interests regarding possible financial bias in their reporting.

While Drs. Kory and Marik raised possible issues of free speech in their defense, the Medscape article was quick to shut this down, quoting bioethicist Arthur Kaplan:

"This isn't a free speech question," said Arthur Caplan, PhD, the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine's Department of Population Health, New York City. "You do have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right to practice outside of the standard of care boundaries," he told Medscape Medical News.

The ABIM action "is the field standing up and saying, 'These are the limits of what you can do,'" said Caplan. It means the profession is rejecting those "who are involved in things that harm patients or delay them getting accepted treatments," he said. 

Dr. Kaplan was also quoted in an earlier Medscape article discussing the circumstances when it was ethical to refuse treatment to an individual not vaccinated against COVID.

It should be noted that for more than 20 years, the medical establishment rejected the study by Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren demonstrating that the bacterium, H. pylori, was responsible for peptic ulcer disease:

At that time when Warren and Marshall announced their findings, it was a long-standing belief in medical teaching and practice that stress and lifestyle factors were the major causes of peptic ulcer disease. Warren and Marshall rebutted that dogma, and it was soon clear that H. pylori, causes more than 90% of duodenal ulcers and up to 80% of gastric ulcers. The clinical community, however, met their findings, with skepticism and a lot of criticism and that's why it took quite a remarkable length of time for their discovery to become widely accepted. They had to just push it harder and harder with all experimental and clinical evidences. In 1985, for example, Marshall underwent gastric biopsy to put evidence that he didn't carry the bacterium, then deliberately infected himself to show that it in fact caused acute gastric illness. This 'self-help' experiment was published in the Medical Journal of Australia [4] to describe development of a mild illness over a course of 2 weeks, which included histologically proven gastritis. This extraordinary act of Marshall demonstrated extreme dedication and commitment to his research that generated one of the most radical and important impacts on the last 50 year's perception of gastroduodenal pathology. Their research made H. pylori infection one of the best-studied paradigms of pathogen biology, paving way for intense and hectic basic and clinical research activity leading to about 25,000 scientific publications till date. To realize the tremendous response of scientific and clinical communities, a dedicated journal called 'Helicobacter' was also started.

They were eventually awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine…

One can only wonder what manner of persecution to which Drs. Warren and Marshall would have been subject if the same level of animosity of today towards challenging “established “(but ultimately proven wrong) therapy existed in their day. They could be seen as urging “practice outside the standard of care boundaries”.  Indeed, most transformative improvements in medicine ARE outside the standard of care boundaries. But that is a whole other topic, involving ethical Informed Consent, something that arguably went out the window with COVID. By giving information on the “risks, benefits and alternatives” to the therapies available, Drs. Kory and Marik were decertified by the American Board of Internal Medicine. Before COVID, Informed Consent was ethically, morally and legally required of a physician. Now it has been criminalized. One can’t help but wonder if Orwell’s 1984 just arrive a few decades late.

Remember, the same assurance that the lab leak theory of the origin of COVID was “misinformation” was made, for years, by those same members of the medical establishment.  Scientific American even opined that raising the possibility that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab made it harder to find the truth!  They repeated the line that “most virologists favor a zoonotic origin of the virus from bats to humans, possibly with the help of an intermediate animal”.

The published emails of Dr. David Morens , Dr. Tony Fauci’s assistant, have shed light on the extent of the efforts made to conceal the gain of function research done at the Wuhan Laboratory.  The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic was able to force Dr. Tony Fauci to admit that the lab link was a possibility and NOT a conspiracy theory.

What would you say if the President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine, the very organization that expelled Drs. Kory and Marik, participated as a speaker at a conference on medical “misinformation” organized by Weber Shandwick, the PR firm for Moderna and Pfizer?  And what if that same PR firm ran the communications for the CDC vaccine program? Some of you may think this is perfectly normal, with no potential conflict of interest. Some may not.

You probably think I am making all of this up, right?  Follow the links and make the determination for yourself as to who exactly is engaged in “misinformation”.

Look at the records of Dr. Kory and Dr. Marik.  Look at their ground breaking treatment for septic shock.  Then look at what happened to them when they actually had the temerity to treat COVID instead of instructing the patients to sicken at home, wait until they couldn’t breathe, then go to the hospital and be put on a respirator and given Remdesivir. There is a concerted effort to erase not only their work with COVID but to denigrate their prior work on shock.   Strange, but Medpage Today is right there.

Most people do not realize that hospital payments were increased when COVID patients were managed this way instead of treated early as an outpatient.

COVID is a multistage illness.  The first stage  is the viral replication phase, lasting 3-5 days, followed by the disastrous inflammatory phase where real organ damage occurs.  Some physicians clamored to use an early multiagent approach as an outpatient when the virus was susceptible to treatment.  These voices were universally ignored, and the physicians cancelled as the patients were urged by the CDC to wait for the development of the “vaccine”. 

There is another element that some may say was a significant reason for discouraging early treatment.  The mRNA agents were not “approved” at first, but given “emergency use authorization”.   In order for an “emergency use authorization” to be given, there could not be an adequate, approved and available alternative.  In the Spring of 2020, both Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, the two drugs mentioned in the action against Dr. Marik and Kory, had an adequate supply, were approved and available!  But they had to be given early while the disease was in the viral replication phase and needed to be given in the proper dosage and with other agents such as zinc.

It must be understood that when a drug is “approved” by the FDA, it can be used both for “labeled” use as well as “off-label use”.   In the BC Era (Before COVID), as much as 20% of drugs were prescribed for off-label use.  Use of Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin to treat COVID was not illegal nor unethical. Yet the CDC issued a directive aimed at discouraging the use of hydroxychloroquine outside of the hospital. In other words, the drug could only be used after it would be too late to work in the viral replication phase!

Hydroxychloroquine had been available for over 50 years and given in doses much, much higher than the short term used to treat COVID.  As an Ophthalmology resident, I would monitor patients for retinal changes.  I would only see the early changes after years of therapy. While some patients may have had heart problems, I never saw that.

Torsade de Pointes is the specific cardiac arrhythmia of concern with Hydroxychloroquine. A study done in 2003, (in the “Before COVID Era”) did not list Hydroxychloroquine among the 20 most common drugs associated with this arrhythmia. Sotalol, a beta blocker, was number one and Erythromycin, an antibiotic, was number four.

As a physician for almost 50 years, I am forced to say that medicine no longer can be trusted to police our profession.  Those in positions of leadership seem to lack the critical thinking skills to make unbiased decisions. Many practicing physicians are controlled by corporate or academic interests which may have a differing set of values.  They must choose between their conscience and their job.  It is not an enviable choice, but one that many physicians, as well as nurses, first-responders and members of the military have made.

We are now in the period of Postmodern Medicine, where truth is relative and ideology is everything. We have become like puppets on a string of AI and protocols.  We have outsourced our thinking to the puppet masters of Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Politics.  We have become the instruments by which their interests, and not those of the patients, are furthered.  Can any medical publication be trusted, or is it all just propaganda??

Fortunately, we still do have heroes.  Those like Dr. Pierre Kory and Paul Marik.  I long for the day when more of my colleagues emulate them, and those like them, who stood up these past 4 years for truth and their patients and against corporate and political interests.

Medicine cannot reform itself at the present time.  That must come from outside.  We must insist that in addition to excellence in STEM subjects, critical thinking, ethics, courage and moral responsibility become touchstones for entry into and advancement within our profession.  If not, I shudder to think what will happen:

Recall the ending of Orwell’s 1984:

He loved Big Brother.