When the Rules Change, You Have to Stop Playing the Game

Photo by Paris Bilal on Unsplash

Two media items this past week caught my attention.  The first was the opinion piece by Senator Rand Paul on the COVID Cover-Up by 15 governmental agencies.  Senator Paul outlines the 2018 DEFUSE Proposal presented to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) by Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance. The proposal was a grant request for insertion of a furin cleavage site into a bat corona virus to enhance its infectivity to humans in order to guard against such an eventuality.  This was surprisingly similar to what eventually became the agent of COVID-19 and was a joint project with Duke Medical School, the University of North Carolina, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center (Madison, Wisconsin) and the Palo Alto Research Center.

Senator Paul stated that, although DARPA declined to fund the project, it continued at the Wuhan Institute.  His point was that even after it was clear that Wuhan was the epicenter of the origination of the virus, and it possessed the same characteristics as in the proposal, not one of the 15 governmental agencies aware of the original proposal came forward to announce this fact.

A courageous Marine Major, Joseph Murphy, attempted to engage military investigators regarding this project.  Apparently, he was ignored and even disparaged by sympathetic left leaning media outlets in in an effort that became standard to anyone who dared to question the truthfulness of the official reports at the time. 

Senator Paul’s point was controlled outrage at the fact that people who knew the answers just didn’t speak up:

Millions of people died from COVID-19. We now know that over 15 government agencies, as well as the investigators Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and scientists at NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Lab, all knew of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s desire to create a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, a virus pre-adapted for human transmission.

And no one spoke up. We only know of this DEFUSE proposal because a whistleblower, one brave Marine, Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy, came forward with the truth.

On the same day I read this, I watched Tucker Carlson’s interview of Dr. Pierre Kory.  Dr. Kory is one of the true Heroes of COVID.  Despite immense personal cost, he continues to stand up for the once-treasured ideals of medicine and the welfare of his patients and society.  He successfully has treated hundreds, if not thousands of patients, including one of my relatives.  He made many exceptional points in the interview, but one that I think deserves highlighting is that of the culpability of the editorial leadership in medical journals. Dr. Kory explained how editorial practices such as accepting substandard articles and rejecting valid ones based on ideology is now the rule in medical journals. This has a cascading effect, as presence in print shapes opinion in medicine.  While once ideology played no role whatsoever in “Truth” in science, it now plays a central role.

In the 2020 Presidential election, a number of scientific journals made no bones about their political biases.  The New England Journal of Medicine broke a 208-year tradition!  Ditto with Scientific American.  Certainly, everyone, including scientific editors, has a right to their own political opinion.  However, the open political campaigning on their part represents a quantum change.  It cannot be undone.  Science in general and medicine in particular have now openly admitted they are now part of the Postmodern World.  Ideology is central….truth is relative.

The Rules Have Changed!

This realization catapulted me a half-century back in time to 1972. I was a medical student at the Medical College of Wisconsin, sitting in the library.  Most students today would not even recognize the scene.  The library had stacks and stacks of bound medical journals.  If you wanted to research a topic, you couldn’t just go to your computer terminal.  You had to look in multiple copies of the Index Medicus.

For 125 years this was a print version of much of the world’s medical literature.  One would search a topic through multiple years of the Index, copying down references and then going to the stacks to pick the relative journals for the articles.  Researching the references of those articles would in turn yield to other possible sources to find and sift.  Writing a paper was a LOT of work!

Sometimes, I would just lose track of what I came to investigate and get lost in the journals themselves.  Some still had the ads and other superfluous material intact.  It was like a time capsule.

I had spent the 1969-1970 academic year at the University of Vienna.  It was a very rewarding experience on so many levels, some of which only became apparent when, in 2020, I had to face some troubling realities. 

I found myself thumbing through the 1938 volumes of Wiener klinische Wochenschrift and Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift.  I can’t remember now which, but one of them and maybe both, showed a dramatic change in the editorial board corresponding to the March Anschluss uniting Austria with Germany.  The ensuing months saw a wholesale Nazification of Austrian Medicine, particularly among the medical and academic elite:

In this respect the University of Vienna was quite well prepared for the “Anschluss” and the racial and political cleansing which was conducted between 12 March and 22 April, and which is unique. At no other university have so many scientists been dismissed for racist and—to a lesser extent—for political reasons in such a short time. On 22 April the University of Vienna and its five faculties received the names of 252 professors and lecturers who had to take leave immediately. The list for the Faculty of Medicine was by far the longest. Over nine pages, 143 lecturers and professors were named, including those who had been retired in the previous years but still had their “venia docendi“. Until 1945, 175 of the 321 physicians who had belonged to the teaching staff of the University of Vienna as professors and lecturers until the “Anschluss“, were expelled “for reasons of the public good“, as it was stated cynically in the personal letters to the individuals affected. These 175 members of the Medical Faculty represent around 55 % of the 320 persons dismissed from the University of Vienna in general, and 55 % of all medical scholars (n = 321) of the University of Vienna. About 125 of them managed to escape, most of them fleeing to the USA [52].

In the current 2024 nomenclature, they were cancelled because of their ideology and spreading misinformation.

As to the situation in Austrian medicine, ideology could only replace reality for so long.  It took a disastrous military defeat, but 1945 eventually put an end to the overt continuation of the monstrous actions in which many Austrian physicians participated, either actively or passively through their inaction.  Attempts at “Denazification” were made, but their success was mixed at best.  Some prominent members of the medical elite escaped atonement and indeed, kept their positions.  The “Era When Ideology Ruled Austrian Medicine” cast long shadows, as the experience of Evy Mages shows.  She was born to a single mother in 1965 and ended up spending time as a subject at a “Child Observation Station” (Kinderbeobachtungstation) seemingly run under a philosophical extension of some of the bizarre remnants of the Nazi psychiatric tenets.

This has ominous implications for any society wishing to rid itself of the effects of ideology on medicine.  Ideological memes are stubborn things.  They may be impossible to completely eradicate.  My landlady in Vienna had been a Party Member and still was a passionate anti Semite in 1969.  An effective break from a powerful ideology may need a change in generations.

Max Planck famously stated, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die”.  This has been paraphrased to “Science progresses one funeral at a time”.  This is even more true of science captured by ideology!

For medicine in the United States to finally escape the horrors of The Great COVID Disaster, a complete change in academic medical leadership, public health and scientific organizations and journal editorial boards may be necessary. We will be unable to return to objective truth in medicine until a repudiation of Postmodernism itself is established.  The experience in Austria as well as in the former Soviet Union under Lysenkoism paints a dismal picture at effective reform when the same leadership is continued. 

The old rules need to be in force again.  Truth needs to be objective, and ideology must be divorced from science and medicine if we are to survive.   Otherwise, the “Nightmare of the Elite” described by Bill Rice at the Brownstone Institute will become reality. We will tumble into the Abyss…