By Mary Budinger, NTP

California’s new law, AB2098, took effect January 1, 2023, giving that state’s medical board the ability to sanction doctors who dispense Covid “misinformation” to their patients. The law defines Covid misinformation as advice “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus.” Critics are calling it a chilling case of suppression of constitutionally protected speech. Various legal maneuvers are in play to overturn it.

“One of the things many patients want to discuss is the current vaccine booster and whether they should take it,” Dr. LeTrinh Hoang wrote to the Board in a legal filing December 6. She is a pediatric osteopathic physician in Arcadia, California, licensed by the Osteopathic Medical Board of California for more than 25 years. “In addition to advising patients that the booster has been authorized for use by the FDA, I advise patients that it has only been tested in less than a dozen mice. The data supporting the use of booster was not reviewed by the FDA’s scientific vaccine advisory committee … I have reviewed AB 2098 and I cannot tell from the law whether providing these facts to patients is ‘Covid misinformation.’”

Houston, we have a problem. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a virtual conveyer belt of changing information and misinformation from public health authorities beginning with “Don’t mask.” No wait, “Do mask.” Health experts ignored that blue disposable masks are designed to stop larger bacteria particles, not the smaller viral particles. Even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said so early on. Later studies in California and Europe found no benefit from mask mandates. In September 2022, the CDC dropped its mandate for masking in health care settings.

From the beginning, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the media, and just about everybody else said the vaccines prevented transmission. “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations,” President Joe Biden told a CNN Town Hall. ” Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Health, claimed that when you get vaccinated, “you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community.” Whoops. There was no scientific data from the vaccine makers to back that up. Walensky, Fauci, and Biden were among the many who caught Covid despite being vaccinated. However, preventing transmission was the foundation of the controversial employer vaccine mandates.

The accusation that “it is a pandemic of the unvaccinated” proved to be false. A peer-reviewed 2021 study in the European Journal of Epidemiology Vaccines study found that increases in Covid-19 were unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States. Iceland and Portugal, for example, where more than 75% of their populations were fully vaccinated, had more Covid-19 cases per 1 million people than Vietnam and South Africa, where only about 10% of the populations were fully vaccinated. More recently, a November 2022 analysis of CDC data conducted for the Washington Post found that 58% of all Covid deaths are amongst the vaccinated.

The controversial PCR test was used to diagnose Covid-19. Health authorities made the test so sensitive – setting a high threshold for cycles – that it generated boatloads of false positives. The CDC finally called for an end to use of the PCR test as of January 1, 2022. But the damage was done; inflated case numbers were used to justify restrictions, lockdowns, and vaccinations.

Kicking to the Curb the Tried and True

The public health protocol in use for more than 100 years has been to quarantine the sick and let the healthy go on with their normal business. But with Covid-19, authorities did the opposite; people were told to stay home unless they were an “essential worker.” And not for two weeks to “flatten the curve,” but for months. A January 2022 John Hopkins study looked at lockdowns in the US and Europe. “We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on Covid-19 mortality,” researchers wrote. But they did have “devastating effects” on the economy and contributed to social issues, the study concluded.

Dr. Pierre Kory said, “You don’t just sit around and wait for an infected patient to become ill.” Kory is a critical care physician; triple board certified in internal medicine, critical care, and pulmonary medicine; and part of the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), which was among the first to publish Covid treatment guidance. “Dr. Fauci’s treatment strategies began once all these under-medicated patients were hospitalized. By that time, it was too late for many of them. It was insane. It was perverse. It was unethical. It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures, he aggressively suppressed them.”¹

Fauci never advocated for early treatment; there were no campaigns for zinc or vitamins C and D for prevention. Doctors who simply explained online how the immune system would use such nutrients to prevent Covid were censored. Fauci made no effort to identify repurposed medicines. Doctors who explained the logical use of time-tested antivirals early on to stop the virus from replicating lost their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Dr. Peter McCullough, another outspoken doctor successfully treating Covid patients, said that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies show that early treatment could have saved about 80 percent of deaths attributed to Covid – a full 80 percent.²

Instead, Fauci told hospitals to use remdesivir even though the World Health Organization had dismissed the drug as too toxic. Hospital ventilator protocols were the wrong approach; some 80 percent of the people put on them died. The new “Right-to-Try” law was blatantly ignored when loved ones wanted hospitals to administer ivermectin. Attorney Thomas Renz calculated that hospitals, at a minimum, make $100,000 extra per Covid patient provided they do not deviate from the standard of care protocol – remdesivir and ventilation. Federal money engendered hospital compliance.

Public health experts denied the time-honored medical fact that natural immunity acquired through infection would be superior to an Emergency Use Authorized vaccine with no track record. How did that make sense? Where was a network linking the world’s front-line doctors to develop best practices? Where was the program to address the obesity crisis since the obese were at high risk?

Never in the history of modern medicine in the United States have agencies directed doctors to stand down and do nothing until the patient was critically ill and had to go to the hospital. And it didn’t work. The United States recorded more Covid deaths by far than any nation.

“It Failed the Million Americans Who Died”

As of December 23, 2022, there have been 33,334 deaths voluntarily reported to the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) during Covid. Where is the safety review? Where are the autopsy reports? Why did Pfizer want to hide its vaccine trial data for 75 years?

There were messy journal retractions after hydroxychloroquine was demonized. There were changes in definitions of what a vaccine is, what constitutes a pandemic, and herd immunity was no longer described as naturally derived but rather created only with vaccines. There were windfall Pharma profits, and conflicts of interest regarding oversight of gain-of-function studies. The White House and Fauci directed social media companies to censor debate. Doctors and scientists accused Covid policymakers of crimes against humanity. Finally, there came an admission from the CDC in August 2022 that they did a poor job. 

The Washington Examiner opined the CDC’s problem was “its arrogant and politicized leadership, which was unable to tell the truth. That is why no one trusts the CDC anymore or cares much for its guidance, whatever it happens to be. The cure begins with Walensky’s resignation.” That does not appear to be forthcoming.

And no wonder the public did not have a good grasp of the risks of Covid-19. A Franklin Templeton–Gallup study released July 2020 showed that Americans believed that people under the age of 44 made up about 30 percent of deaths, when the actual figure was less than 3 percent. More than half who were between the ages of 18 and 24 also said they feared “significant health consequences” were they to get infected, when in reality this age group accounted for a mere 0.1 percent of Covid deaths. Those 55 and older actually made up more than 90 percent of all Covid deaths in the U.S. The report said, “these results are nothing short of stunning … we find a gross misperception of Covid-19 risk, driven by partisanship and misinformation.”

According to WebMD as of January 2022, about 98.2 percent of known Covid-19 patients in the US survived. So why the panic?

‌In August of 2022, science and technology writer Ari Schulman said the public health response to Covid19 was in many ways a failure:
“It failed the million Americans who died. And it failed the living by being bumbling‌ and incoherent … The follow-the-science logic we have lived under during Covid demands wartime sacrifices from the public while rationalizing sloth from leaders and institutions in mobilizing tools to relieve the burden. It became an easy out for bureaucratic turf protection, lost dynamism and institutional fecklessness. ‘Follow the science’ became a failure to lead, a way to shift the onus of responsibility from presidents, Congress, health authorities and school boards onto the public.”

How can a state medical board accuse doctors of giving patients Covid misinformation when public health officials so generously dispensed “official” Covid misinformation in the last three years? Shall doctors be unable to engage in the time-honored practice of providing patients a second opinion?

Contemporary Scientific Consensus

“In my first week in medical school, one of the professors told us that 50 percent of what we would learn would be wrong; but which half that was, they did not know,” said Dr. Linda Wright of Arizona. “Today’s standard of care is very limited because it relies almost exclusively on Pharma solutions – the classic cut (surgery), burn (radiation), and poison (drugs). I see people struggling with long Covid and they are responding well to the non-pharmaceutical agents – ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen chamber, correction of gut bacteria imbalances, and administration of basic nutrients like vitamins C and D and minerals that the body needs to repair itself.”

With Covid-19, doctors who stuck their necks out to do what they felt was right for patients have been attacked for using “unproven therapies” to treat the virus, even though drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have been in use for decades and their safety record is well established.

“Show me what’s proven,” Dr. Pierre Kory said in an interview last August. “There’s no organized effort to try to identify, in a controlled fashion, what’s working. We’re left trying to doctor the way old school doctors did – by observation, experience, knowledge of pathophysiology, and knowledge of pharmacology. We’re just doctoring.”

Kory and others have advocated, despite considerable push-back, for the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in early treatment protocols because they were in the trenches and clearly saw that these drugs work. But, in board rooms, it was a different story. “The science around the efficacy of ivermectin has never been more inconvenient to the pharmaceutical and vaccination industry in history,” Kory said, adding that the Covid experience is a clear example of regulatory capture of health agencies by the vaccination and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Ivermectin costs only pennies per pill because its patent expired long ago. Its human medicinal benefits were awarded the Nobel Prize; it is an inexpensive and efficient treatment for onchocerciasis (river blindness) and other parasitic infections. Researchers theorize its on-going use in the African continent accounts for the “African Enigma,” meaning Covid vaccine distribution was low, but Covid deaths were also very low. Like many other drugs, ivermectin has multiple methods of action. It was FDA approved as a human anti-parasitic, but it also has shown itself to be anti-viral. In 2017 – before Covid and its politics – the Journal of Antibiotics proclaimed: “Ivermectin: enigmatic multifaceted ‘wonder’ drug continues to surprise and exceed expectations.”

When the FDA learned that doctors were writing 88,000 prescriptions a week for ivermectin, the agency issued the infamous tweet: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” But many people saw a bigger picture. They read that four billion doses of ivermectin have been consumed by human beings with few adverse events. They had read that off-label uses for drugs are commonplace: one out of five prescriptions is written for an off-label use. And many saw firsthand that it worked; they even took it into hospitals to save their loved ones.

In late 2021, Pfizer got emergency use authorization for an antiviral “investigational drug” called Paxlovid to treat mild to moderate Covid. In other words, the first semi-authorized early treatment. The US government paid $5.3 billion for 10 million courses of Paxlovid; a five-day course costs $530. But it didn’t perform as well as ivermectin. People experienced the “Paxlovid rebound” – after five days, they tested positive again, often with symptoms (including Walsenky, Fauci, Biden). Merck came out with its investigational antiviral, molnupiravir, but phase three clinical trial data were disappointing and it isn’t often prescribed. Monoclonal antibody treatments were disappointing too.

Medical Freedom?

Now the Medical Board of California wants to double down on the official party line. The State could determine that a physician has violated AB 2098 by sharing an unconventional opinion regarding Covid with a patient and go after his or her medical license. Yet existing regulations already give California’s medical board the authority to take action against doctors for “gross negligence,” “repeated negligent acts,” “incompetence,” and “any act involving dishonesty or corruption.”

In his signing statement, California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged he was “concerned about the chilling effect” of legislating doctor-patient conversations. This law, he wrote, “is narrowly tailored to apply only to those egregious instances in which a licensee is acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the required standard of care while interacting directly with a patient under their care.”

Many observers believe the law will not withstand the forthcoming constitutional challenges. In the meantime, there is a definite chill in the air.

References

1. Kennedy, RF Jr. Skyhorse Publishing, 2021. The Real Anthony Fauci – Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, page 9
2. Ibid, page 8

Mary Budinger, NTP, is a certified nutritional therapist and an Emmy award-winning journalist in Phoenix, Arizona, who writes about nutrition and integrative medicine. She is the creator of www.OriginalFoodFix.com ; 602-494-1999.