The Impact of Censorship on COVID-19 Policy Formation in the United States

FOREWORD: This article was first published in late April 2023 in the open-access journal of the European Society of Medicine (ESMED), Medical Research Archives (https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3822). Free republication is authorized by ESMED “under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.”

The article was previously reproduced as lead-item in the Indian journal Mass Media (http://www.mediastudiesgroup.org.in/), in English in no. 135 and in Hindi in no. 138. But it has not previously appeared in any journal with an audience among the Western left. It is here republished in slightly expanded form with significantly amplified references.

The article's trajectory began with Socialism and Democracy, in the form of a book review I wrote in 2022 which attracted over 400 viewers.¹ The book I reviewed was co-authored by Dr. Peter McCullough, a prominent cardiologist and one of the leading practitioners of remedial medicine for COVID-19. McCullough challenged the reigning orthodoxy regarding the prevention and treatment of COVID. His work (along with that of a number of other doctors) was therefore stigmatized and came under a blanket of censorship. The completeness of the taboo is illustrated by the conduct of Wikipedia, which, violating its own principle of airing conflicting views on controversial topics, applies the all-purpose term “misinformation” to characterize the findings of McCullough and his colleagues. As a consequence, the orthodoxy – especially regarding vaccine roll-outs – was embraced without question by otherwise critical thinkers such as Noam Chomsky as well as by progressive media outlets such as Democracy Now.

It was my review of the McCullough book that led ESMED to contact me about writing for their journal.

Introduction

A striking paradox characterizes the politics of COVID-19. On one hand, with the ubiquitous masking, tracking, and testing, the issue became glaringly visible in the life of every person. This should have made it an unbeatable topic for massive democratic deliberation. On the other hand, even scientific debate on the issue was throttled from the outset by a blanket of censorship, both governmental and corporate.² This occasioned consequences at multiple levels. Most immediately, by suppressing anti-viral treatments that could have been used early in the pandemic, it led to uncounted numbers of preventable deaths.³ Subsequently, after the vaccines were released (roughly nine months into the pandemic), it cast a continuing pall over discussion of their merits and risks. Perhaps even more important in the long term, however, has been the impact of censorship on the political alignments that shape the range of future policies – a topic we explore below.

To fully understand the impact of medical censorship, we must view it in relation to the larger context of public health, including in particular the evolution of chronic illnesses,⁴ the deterioration of the natural environment, the political impact of the pharmaceutical industry, and the chaos and suffering triggered by heightened social polarization under neoliberal capitalism. In the background, in the case of the United States, is an extraordinary tradition of tolerance for conflicts of interest.⁵ Each of these themes could warrant an extended narrative in its own right, but they come together in any attempt to grasp the COVID-19 experience and the dimensions of an effective response to it.

One feature of the current debate has been the claim of policymakers to speak in the name of “science,” endowing their pronouncements with a pretense of infallibility. Such a proclamation, by tying science to specific affirmations rather than to a method of inquiry, is inseparable from the censorship impulse. It clashes with the whole evolution of scientific understanding, which thrives on challenging hitherto unquestioned assumptions. No single individual or agency is the repository of scientific truth. Indeed, those who claim such authority have at times been forced, on the basis of new evidence, to accept conclusions that they had previously rejected.⁶

How does one arrive at the truth in such matters? I view this not as a matter of absolutes but rather as a process of successive approximations, in which at each step one encompasses a greater and greater portion of the entire picture. The various positions represented in the debate around COVID correspond to identifiable locations within the social fabric. The most fundamental obstacle to effective policy is the intrusion of proprietary interests – in this case, those of Big Pharma – into shaping the steps that are taken. The pattern of political attack and counterattack that has emerged serves to obscure the defining role of those interests.

Public health in the United States

It has been clear from the onset of COVID-19 that the severity of its impact on a given individual is closely related to that person’s general state of health. Early on, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recognized that 94 percent of the deaths attributed to COVID involved other morbidities as well.⁷ Under US legislation, however, there was a financial incentive for hospitals, in their reports of death, to single out COVID as the decisive if not exclusive factor.⁸ The resulting pressures on hospital staff were extraordinary. An award-winning nurse at Houston Methodist Hospital, who herself was fired for refusing the mRNA jab, witnessed “coders” (whose job was to code patient records) being threatened with firing if they refused to classify deaths as being from COVID. This was part of a general culture of intimidation reported by nurses who sought to advocate for their patients in the face of rigid protocols that often clashed with patients’ needs.⁹

This complex of ultimately financial pressures was integral to a larger failure on the part of the US capitalist order – not just the medical-industrial complex, but all the enterprises and regulatory bodies affecting the population’s living conditions – to take a holistic approach to public health. The single-minded focus on COVID and the consequent drive to develop a one-size-fits-all response to it – in the form of inoculations that would be mandated for almost the entire population – reflect in part the extraordinary influence of the pharmaceutical industry. To an even greater extent, though, they embody a broader consensus of capitalist interests which is routinely manifested in the ever-expanding search for secure markets and in a disdain for the diversity and complexity of the natural world (whether the biosphere or the individual human body).¹⁰

In terms of impact on public health, the capitalist approach had already led to agricultural practices that deplete soil-quality; to a food industry that, with its over-processed products, brought an explosive rise in obesity, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses;¹¹ and, more generally, to extractive and manufacturing processes – as well as consumption patterns – that treat both the environment and the workforce as expendable. The same approach, through its political agents, persistently blocked the popular demand to establish a system of universal health care that would be free at the point of service. Now, faced with a potentially deadly virus, this approach dictated the suppression of existing anti-viral medications and of immunity-enhancing treatments using vitamins,¹² and the promotion, instead, of a new type of vaccine (mRNA) that would be deployed “at warp speed,” generating vast revenues for the producer before its side-effects could be identified via clinical trials.

Both the genesis and the implementation of this strategy display, in a number of ways, systemic indifference to conflicts of interest and other corrupt practices. First, the drug companies themselves are trusted to conduct definitive trials of their own products. Second, the governmental agencies tasked with assessing the products are not only funded by these same companies, but also have revolving-door links with the companies’ top personnel. Thus, 9 out of 10 of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA)’s past commissioners between 2006 and 2019 moved into high-level management in the pharmaceutical industry.¹³ Third, the politicians who spearhead drug-related legislation are themselves heavily funded by drug companies. A landmark law reflecting this influence was the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which, in response to massive public outcry and litigation over cases of brain damage from the diphtheria pertussis tetanus (DPT) vaccine, prohibited the public from suing vaccine producers, establishing instead a division within the CDC, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), to file reports of adverse events resulting from vaccination.¹⁴

The distinctive vulnerability of the US population – or at least of a sufficient portion of it to make the country’s global health indicators among the least favorable in the industrialized world – is the outcome of a whole complex of policies and practices, of which the quasi-religious embrace of unlimited vaccination is only the most extreme expression. Ever since vaccine producers were shielded from liability, new pretexts for vaccination have constantly been found, often involving hypothetical disorders that might appear later in life, while immediately entailing for young children a multiplicity of shots (sometimes even simultaneous) whose potential negative effects researchers are firmly discouraged from exploring.¹⁵

In the 1970s, vaccine injuries were taken seriously, attracting coverage in the corporate media.¹⁶ “Vaccine hesitancy” was subsequently stigmatized, but remained marginal as long as vaccination was not ubiquitous and its recognized adverse effects remained rare. The COVID-19 vaccines, in being administered to a wider segment of the population – often by coercive mandates – and in eliciting far more reports of “adverse events,”¹⁷ have drawn a new level of attention to general questions about the determinants of public health.

The negative practices we have noted in agriculture, food production, and environmental pollution contribute to a general condition of stress on the human organism. Adding to the stress are a number of easily observable conditioning factors and outcomes that are distinctive to the United States, or at least more pronounced in the US than in other industrialized countries. Among the conditioning factors are low wages, imposed overwork, the absence of any universal requirement for vacation time, inadequate access to health care, extreme indebtedness, a vast and growing degree of social inequality, the exceptional proliferation of firearms (including automatic weapons), and an inordinate proclivity to violence on the part of the police.¹⁸ Among the outcomes are destitution, homelessness, drug addiction (to prescribed opioids as well as to outlawed substances), mental as well as physical illness, and a high incidence of mass killings. With regard to COVID-19, it is noteworthy that the severity of its impact – its death count – correlates closely with poverty and social isolation.¹⁹

The institutional response to COVID-19

As COVID’s disproportionate impact on the poor suggests, the institutional response to it follows the contours of already prevalent practice. The absence of a system of universal health care – extraordinary for an advanced country – reflects the exceptional weight of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry in defining the limits of public policy. In relation to COVID, beyond limiting access to treatment, the capitalist-based health care system signals the absence of any restraint on Big Pharma’s controlling influence over pertinent public information. The most striking expression of this is the Pfizer Corporation’s conspicuous role in sponsoring the most widely diffused talk shows on US television networks.²⁰ Not surprisingly, news coverage by these networks is uncritical in its reporting on vaccination campaigns.

The corporate media not only fail to report adverse effects of the vaccines (which, if taken into account, would preclude mandates and would justify withholding the jabs at least from certain age-groups);²¹ they also give abundant free air-time to promoters of the vaccines, while failing to note even officially admitted uncertainties about the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness, as expressed in the FDA’s definition of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) category under which the vaccines against COVID were rolled out:

Under an EUA, FDA may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.²²

The first half of this statement acknowledges the possible disadvantages of the products in question (in this case, the vaccines); the second half points to the legal requirement that in order for these favored yet unapproved products to receive emergency authorization, any realistically available alternatives must be disqualified. There is nothing to prevent such disqualification from being decreed before the uncertainties surrounding the favored products have been resolved. This is exactly what was done in the case of COVID when the CDC, some nine months before the mRNA vaccines were rolled out under the EUA, imposed its ban on out-patient prescription of the widely used remedies Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin (anti-parasitic drugs with anti-viral properties) for the treatment of COVID.²³

The official predisposition to favor the vaccines grew out of several overlapping forces. At the most general level is an approach to health based less on assuring the proper conditions for human development – taking into account all the dimensions of life, including diet, personal security, community support, and natural immunities – than on targeting particular pathogens for frontal attack.²⁴ The latter, highly focused approach has long been the one favored by capitalism, partly because of its apparent rationality and efficiency, but more fundamentally because it implies almost unlimited markets for a whole range of commodities, such as drugs, vaccines, and certain remedial or elective services for which a need – real or imagined – arises only because the more basic requirements for healthy living have not been met.

The pharmaceutical industry, as it has evolved in the United States, is the quintessential embodiment of this approach. Its modus operandi is well described in the 2005 bestseller by Marcia Angell, M.D. (former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine), The Truth About the Drug Companies.²⁵ Big Pharma enjoys a special advantage compared to other businesses, in that its products can be imposed upon their consumers – in the case of certain vaccines, by law and as a precondition for school, jobs, and travel. Its marketing depends on a singular blend of (a) direct advertising to potential buyers with (b) an agenda-setting role in the domain of medical education and research. The advertising has the dual function of promoting particular products while at the same time setting parameters for the content of sponsored media-programs and, by extension, for the range of acceptable public discourse on matters of concern to the drug companies. At the same time, Big Pharma guides medical education not only through research grants to medical schools and advertising in medical journals, but also through a steady stream of special seminars for doctors at all stages of their careers, often in recreational settings.²⁶

Although Dr. Angell’s exposé pre-dates COVID-19, it offers a revealing look at the methods used by Big Pharma to maximize profits. Relatively little of its budget goes toward the discovery of new treatments. A large portion, both of its advertising and of its tutorials for doctors, goes toward encouraging the use of drugs such as statins or anti-depressants that can potentially become part of a patient’s permanent regimen. Closely related to this is Big Pharma’s practice of promoting as though they were innovations “me-too” drugs that differ hardly at all from the ones they are touted to supersede. The “new” drugs in turn are tested not against their earlier equivalents, but rather against placebos, thereby avoiding the possible finding that they brought no improvement over their predecessors.²⁷

Similar methods would be deployed later when the goal was to justify the COVID vaccines. The most important investigative practices have involved decisions about what to report, what to count, and how to classify. We have already noted the practice of blaming COVID for deaths involving other morbidities. Another practice is categorizing persons who died less than 14 days after receiving a shot as being “unvaccinated.” Yet another is failing to conduct autopsies in cases where vaccine-injury is suspected.²⁸ On a broader canvas is the non-mention of vaccination status in registering COVID-related deaths. Comparisons of the general health of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated individuals have been rare. One such comparison was done in an early Pfizer trial of their mRNA vaccine, in which it was found that although the vaccinated group fared better than the placebo group in terms of deaths from COVID, it fared less well in terms of all-cause mortality.²⁹ Moreover, we should keep in mind factors limiting the percentage of vaccine-injuries that are made known to the CDC, notably, the fact that doctors are not required to report them and are discouraged from doing so both by the uncompensated time and effort it requires and by fear that their questioning of the vaccines might be held against them.³⁰ Similar pressures are also exerted on nurses.³¹ Finally, the CDC’s agency for addressing vaccine injuries, VAERS, was never equipped to adequately handle the huge numbers of filings that it received with the onset of COVID (jumping from 60,000 annually in 2015 to one million in 2021, of which “nearly one in five meet the criteria of serious”).³²

The debate over the COVID vaccines became increasingly complex as the protective effect of the initial shots waned, as the virus mutated, and as mandates then extended to a succession of boosters, which in some cases brought severe side-effects of their own, leading some proponents of the earlier campaign, such as the prominent British cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, to reverse course, arguing that the vaccines, with their threat of myocarditis (heart-injury acknowledged even by Pfizer as a possible side-effect), had become more dangerous to many than the virus itself.³³ Dr. Malhotra’s epiphany climaxed a long-running undercurrent of informed opinion on the part of dissident doctors (Ryan Cole, Pierre Kory, Robert V. Malone, Paul Marik, Peter McCullough, Meryl Nass, Harvey Risch, and Paul Thomas, among others), buttressed by increasingly frequent reports of unexplained sudden deaths among athletes and other young people³⁴ and also by widespread popular exchanges – typically over social media – about individual instances of vaccine-injury,³⁵ often unacknowledged by doctors fearful of being sanctioned.

The institutional threat to those who challenge vaccine-orthodoxy was already a powerful force for years before COVID-19. A landmark case was that of the British gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 reported on cases of autism observed in children shortly after they received the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine. He did not posit or even hypothesize a causal link but merely wrote that the possibility of such a link merited investigation. As he subsequently wrote in his memoir, “the practice of claiming coincidence without first excluding possible causes has no place in clinical medicine.”³⁶ But he was accused of claiming more than he did, and on that basis his refereed account of the cases was repudiated by its publisher, and he was stripped of his license to practice medicine. The stigma he bore in England followed him when he moved to the US. Ironically, his specific findings were replicated in later studies.³⁷

The taboo against dissent has an immediate impact on individual patients who face vaccine-mandates at their workplaces. Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was a professor in the University of California Irvine School of Medicine for fifteen years until being fired for refusing to accept a COVID jab and filing suit against the university’s vaccine-mandate, tells of a rheumatologist who in 2021 advised a young and otherwise healthy patient with an auto-immune condition not to be vaccinated. The patient needed a medical exemption in order to keep his job, but the rheumatologist would not endorse his request for the exemption, for fear of being stripped of his medical license.³⁸

COVID-19 in the public sphere

The blanket of censorship appears on multiple fronts. At its center has been the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), headed from 1984 through 2022 by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci gained attention and a degree of credibility during the presidency of Donald Trump by taking on the role of Trump’s public adversary. But he can hardly be viewed as a disinterested representative of the public interest. His whole tenure at NIAID was marked by a close partnership with Big Pharma, and in particular by the relentless suppression of any research that challenged Big Pharma’s priorities. Immediately prior to the eruption of COVID-19, he collaborated with the Defense Department in sponsoring gain-of-function research aimed at enhancing the lethality and transmissibility of pathogens.³⁹ His career is documented in exhaustive detail in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci – a research work that sold over a million copies in the US but was barred from most bookstores and was not reviewed in any major news or scientific publications.⁴⁰

Decrees, legislation, and court-challenges have emerged not only over vaccine mandates and mask mandates, but also over the right of health care providers to exercise their professional judgment regarding appropriate treatment of their patients. Doctors challenging the dominant protocols have been fired from hospitals and have had their licenses revoked.⁴¹ In California, a law was passed (though overturned after a court-challenge) establishing criminal penalties for doctors purveying “misinformation,” defined as opinion “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus.” The “consensus” with regard to COVID meant in practice whatever was proclaimed at a given moment by the CDC, even though this was subject to reversals,⁴² which could potentially confirm opinions that would previously have been criminalized under this type of law – such as the assertion that the vaccines would not necessarily prevent transmission.

In fact, legislation in various jurisdictions has gone in both directions – sometimes in synch with the California law and sometimes, on the contrary, aimed at protecting the autonomy of health care workers. The pattern in the US corresponds at present to the clash between Republicans and Democrats, with Democrats seeking to enforce the CDC’s guidelines and Republicans more likely seeking to neutralize them. Considering the role of Big Pharma in shaping the CDC’s guidelines, and considering the Democrats’ New Deal legacy of challenging concentrated economic power, this alignment is paradoxical. But it has had a significant impact in weakening the majoritarian drive toward universal health care, because it has forfeited to Republicans the role of criticizing Big Pharma on the public stage, even when such critique targets Big Pharma’s quintessentially capitalist practice of prioritizing profit over people. Many of the leading dissident doctors appeared on the Tucker Carlson show (on the right-wing Fox News channel). These included even Aseem Malhotra,⁴³ whose views on health care issues, as expressed in a November 2022 London speech,⁴⁴ have nothing in common with Fox’s hyper-capitalist credo.

Indeed, the cooptation of solid critique onto reactionary platforms has become a distinctive feature of present-day US politics. It reflects the dissolution of an older political landscape in which there was greater mutual acceptance between Democrats and Republicans, such that there could be smooth alternation between the two parties going into and out of office. Underlying that alternation was the experience of the post-World War II years of US global economic supremacy (and of still relatively high trade-union membership), during which time Republicans abstained from mounting a frontal challenge to the progressive social legislation of the 1930s. As the US lost its economic supremacy in the 1970s, however, a right-wing counterattack began to gather force.⁴⁵ Its neoliberal economic agenda was so attractive to the country’s ruling class that it drew top Democrats as well as Republicans into its orbit. The regressive economic measures of Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration (1981–1989) were carried even further under the Democrats led by Bill Clinton (1993–2001). This set into motion a downward spiral in the conditions of the working class, culminating in the economic slump of 2008. The resulting discontent – dramatized in 2011 by the widely supported Occupy Wall Street movement – and the Democrats’ failure (under Barack Obama, 2009–2017) to adequately address it set the stage for the breakdown of constitutionalism signaled by the rise of Donald Trump.

In relation to conflicts over COVID, the key aspect of this development was that the language of politics increasingly shifted from debate to repression, as shown most brazenly in the steps taken by Republicans at every level to curb the electoral participation of the poor and transient population-sectors – predominantly communities of color – that would be most inclined to favor progressive policies. The Democrat leadership, for its part, failed to mount a full-scale defense of voting rights – a failure that makes sense in light of its own rejection of the policies that a broader popular electorate would demand. Republicans and Democrats alike were trying to navigate a crisis deeper than what either party was disposed to seriously address. The Republican strategy in Congress became one of sheer obstructionism, culminating in their almost unanimous acquiescence in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. When the COVID crisis erupted, the Republicans found an ideal opportunity to articulate grievances against a corporate establishment in which they and the Democrats were equally complicit but whose mass media and social media branches (network TV, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Facebook, YouTube) tended, for strategic reasons, to favor the Democrats.

With Democrats and corporate-liberal media in the arms of Big Pharma, Republican politicians and right-wing media became the most convenient platforms for doctors, researchers, and ordinary citizens to reach a mass audience with their critique of the dominant approach to public health policy. This has given rise to some rather remarkable anomalies, such as sober medical scientists like Dr. Robert V. Malone applauding Donald Trump or, in the case of Dr. Meryl Nass, denying the severity of the climate crisis, or politicians like Senator Ron Johnson, who supports draconian anti-abortion legislation, providing the only congressional venue for challenging the state’s power to legislate what must be injected into everyone’s bodies.⁴⁶ More generally, the basic assumptions of scientific investigation have been turned upside down, as research that shows limits to the effectiveness of vaccines is either withheld from public view or else self-negated with declarations that the findings should not be allowed to encourage “vaccine hesitancy.”⁴⁷ As Dr. Aaron Kheriaty remarks, citing a February 2022 New York Times report on the CDC, “Instead of altering vaccine policies when new data contradicted them, public health agencies buried the data to save the policies.”⁴⁸

Conclusion

The practical issue underlying the COVID debates is that of how best to promote public health. The political alignments that have arisen over COVID, in the US context, reflect the inherent difficulty of serving the general interest within the parameters of capitalism. The United States presents the most unrestrained expression of capitalism among the advanced or wealthy countries. With its politics suffused by financial interests, its ruling elites have resisted the popular demand for universal health care while routinely promoting unhealthy consumption patterns and production activities, leading to an increase in chronic illnesses and hastening the breakdown of a healthy natural environment.

What is ironic is that, as we have seen, many of those who stand in opposition to this dynamic have been giving political support to the very sectors that most vehemently perpetuate it. Dissident doctors who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s program thus gave credibility to a network which is otherwise contemptuous of the public health priorities to which they are committed. This raises a particular challenge for the medical and public health communities. Traditionally, these communities, in their public pronouncements, have sought to stay clear of political engagement. This stance corresponds to a view of science as being “apolitical.” But any pursuit involving or affecting large numbers of people has an inherent political dimension, if only in terms of whether, to what extent, from what sources, and on what terms the pursuit will receive the material support it needs. This dimension remains inconspicuous under “normal” conditions, but is thrown into sharp relief under conditions of emergency.

In the COVID-19 emergency, an unprecedented level of overt pressure has been placed on doctors to obey the official dictates. This has provoked a determined resistance. But because of the surrounding political and institutional framework, the resistance has been amplified in a manner that clashes with what its protagonists – the affected health care providers – would have to seek in order for their concerns to be advanced over the long term. Specifically, the major amplifying venues in the US for challenging the COVID-19 protocols are at the same time the most intransigent opponents of efforts to bring not only health care but the underlying conditions for public health as far as possible under social control.

The logical direction that would need to be taken by those resisting the dominant agenda would be one that addresses the underlying problems that we have noted, including the agro-chemical complex, the processed food industry, environmental toxins, widespread poverty, and the stresses associated with overwork, social antagonisms, and endemic violence. It would also include challenging the habitual capitalist-driven orientation toward medical care, whereby, instead of respecting and when possible enhancing natural immunities, doctors treat the human body as “dumb matter to be entirely externally manipulated.”⁴⁹

Under a policy free of capitalist priorities and pressures, greater numbers of health care workers would be trained; clinics would be established in every neighborhood; patients would be better known to their health care providers; health education (especially about nutrition) would be improved; and pharmaceutical production and distribution – as well as hospitals – would be brought under social control. Or, at the very least: the mass-marketing of drugs would be outlawed, corporate sponsorship of research would be prohibited, treatment would be made free at the point of service, and the over-reliance on medication and vaccination would be restrained.

Movements favoring this approach are already present in US society, but they are regrettably dispersed across antagonistic political camps, given that many of the most persistent critics of Big Pharma – those who are independent of Big Pharma in their approach to healing (such as the psychiatrist Peter Breggin, an avid Trump-supporter) – are unalterably opposed to socialized health care. The great challenge for the health of future generations is to recognize that the clash between these two perspectives is unnecessary. The hostility between them has no raison d’être for the vast majority of people. It is at this level that a massive advance in understanding needs to take place.

Contrary to the view advanced by right-wing ideologues, what threatens people’s wellbeing is not public authority as such, but rather public authority shaped by private interests. There is no way the needed improvements in public health can be attained without government playing a role. The Right plays upon people’s fear of government by invoking Orwellian images of totalitarian intrusion into everyone’s private life. But such intrusion is carried out by private as well as governmental entities;⁵⁰ furthermore, when we consider governments – or public authority in general – we need to keep in mind that an alternative scenario is possible: one that could indeed appeal to majorities on both sides of the above-noted divide. In this scenario, public authority would be exercised not on behalf of any privileged stratum, but rather on the basis of a deliberative process that would include the entire citizenry. In such a setting, any necessary public knowledge about individuals could be obtained by directly asking them, because the justifications for deception would have been dissolved.

Although this scenario may well be viewed as remote, it offers a reference-point for assessing practical alternatives. The deterioration in public health now joins environmental breakdown and the threat of super-power military confrontation as constituting a crisis that demands a sweeping response.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08854300.2022.2131234

2 For a comprehensive survey, see Shir-Raz, Yaffa, and Etty Elisha, Brian Martin, et al., “Censorship and suppression of Covid-19 heterodoxy: tactics and counter-tactics,” Minerva, 1 Nov. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4. On censorship by social media, see, e.g., Bhattacharya, Jay, M.D., interviewed about Twitter (Dec. 2022). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUBJjK_rKZY

3 See Leake, John, and Peter A. McCullough, M.D., M.P.H. The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex. Dallas, TX: Counterplay Books, 2022, 155 and passim.

4 “Nearly half … of all Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease, and the number is growing.” Raghupathi, Wullianallur, and Viju Raghupathi, “An empirical study of chronic diseases in the United States: A visual analytics approach to public health.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15:3 (2018). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5876976/

5 A common example of this is the administration of elections by state officials who belong to one of the contending parties.

6 E.g., Dr. Peter Hotez in his claims about the properties of mRNA vaccines (below, note 42).

7 CDC, “Conditions contributing to deaths involving COVID-19, by age group, United States. 2/1/2020 to 12/5/2020.” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/health_policy/covid19-comorbidity-expanded-12092020-508.pdf

8 “According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the CARES Act created a 20% add-on to be paid for Medicare patients with COVID-19.” Leake and McCullough, The Courage to Face COVID-19, 181. NVSS [National Vital Statistics System] guidelines encouraged such a designation: “In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID-19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely …  it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.’” NVSS Report No. 3 (2020), https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf

9 Testimony of Jennifer Andrews and nine other nurses, in video symposium organized by Steve Kirsch, “Covid Whistleblowers: What the Nurses Saw” (18 Jan. 2024), https://rumble.com/v47o0uo-vsrf-live-110-covid-whistleblowers-what-the-nurses-saw.html

10 For fuller discussion of this parallel, see Wallis, Victor, “Climate, COVID, class, and capital.” Capitalism Nature Socialism (2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2023.2175974

11 See Fung, Jason, M.D., The Obesity Code (2016) and The Diabetes Code (2018), both from Vancouver: Greystone Books; and Bittman, Mark, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2021.

12 For details of this approach, reflecting especially the research and practice of Dr. Paul Marik on vitamin therapy, see Leake and McCullough, The Courage to Face COVID-19, 91-94. Marik was applying insights derived from his earlier work in treating sepsis and septic shock, as described in a co-authored 2017 article in Chest Journal, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chest.2016.11.036. On therapeutic applications of Vitamin C (including to myocardial injury), see https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-C#cardiovascular-disease-treatment. A study critical of Vitamin C’s effectiveness in COVID treatment (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871402121003441?via%3Dihub#bib9) cites Dr. Marik’s 2017 paper and acknowledges (in its closing paragraph) that Marik’s use of the vitamin in combination with other agents “confounds our study finding [which denied that Vitamin C could help].” For our present purposes, what matters is: (1) Marik’s professional prerogative in responding to an emergency situation; and (2) the fact that his approach was met with suppression.

13 Demasi, Maryanne, “From FDA to MHRA: Are drug regulators for hire?” British Medical Journal 2022: 377, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o1538. Presented by Dr. John Campbell on his 7 Nov. 2022 podcast, “WHO, YouTube, and funding.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05GGaCBk9Mo (beginning at min. 6:30).

14 Moskowitz, Richard, M.D., Vaccines: A Reappraisal. New York: Skyhorse, 2017, 122. VAERS is discussed below (text to note 32).

15 Moskowitz, Vaccines: A Reappraisal, 149–150. The point here is not to deny the benefits of vaccines to certain populations and for certain illnesses (e.g., smallpox). What I take issue with is their uncritical adoption and their coercive imposition. The extent to which society-wide vaccine protocols augment the incidence of chronic disorders is beyond the scope of this article, but we may note that while the US population is the world’s most heavily vaccinated, it is very far from being the healthiest. Protection against a targeted illness may be only temporary and – as suggested even in Pfizer’s own trial of its COVID vaccine (see note 29) – may trigger susceptibility to other health issues. For numerous examples from the medical literature of such side-effects (including with regard to the polio vaccine), see Kennedy, Robert F. Jr., and Brian Hooker, PhD, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak. New York: Skyhorse, 2023.

16 Wallace, Mike (CBS 60 Minutes) Exposes the 1976 Swine Flu Pandemic Vaccine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jx243DHyg

17 “Roughly 782,900 people reported seeking medical attention, emergency room care, and/or hospitalization following COVID-19 vaccination. Another 2.5 million people reported needing to miss school, work, or other normal activities following an adverse health event after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.” Alliance for Human Research Protection, report (10 Oct. 2022) at https://ahrp.org/cdc-officials-concealed-millions-of-adverse-events-reported-to-cdc-v-safe-system-following-covid-jabs/ A review of the research literature from a pro-vaccine perspective (doi.org/10.2147/IJGM.S400458) does not deny the incidence of serious adverse effects but concludes that the effects are “mostly mild or non-severe.” That severe effects are rare, however, does not mean that they are negligible. See note 21.

18 For an overview, see Wallis, Victor, Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2019.

19 Rancourt, Denis, “All-cause mortality” (video, 2023). https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/media-resources/denis-rancourt-on-all-cause-mortality-video/, reports that the correlation between poverty and excess [i.e., above average] deaths in the US since the onset of COVID was +0.86 (1.0 being perfect correlation). On the other hand, excess mortality in the years of COVID does not correlate with age. Excess mortality in the US during COVID was highest in age-group 25-44 and – unlike mortality from COVID itself – declined steadily at more advanced ages (graph at min. 45). OECD data from 2022 through late 2023 show a consistently high number of excess deaths (typically>10 percent) in member-states, of which in most of the countries much less than half of the excess deaths were from COVID (see Dr. John Campbell’s presentation [23 Dec. 2023], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7vTqEmlkvw).

20 https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/19/montage_pfizer_sponsors_news_abc_cbs_nbc_cnn.html

21 On the vast scale of the adverse effects, see Dowd, Edward, “Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022. New York: Skyhorse, 2022. Factual reports of adverse effects are routinely censored under the guise of “misinformation.” An example of such censorship was disclosed by journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger in their investigation of how Stanford University’s Internet Observatory Initiative (aka Virality Project) helped federal authorities suppress reports of vaccine-adverse events on social media platforms (see interview of Liber-Net director Andrew Lowenthal on The Hill’s podcast, Rising, 14 Nov. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWvmMK56uHA). Further examples of such censorship are cited in litigation underway as of November 2023, under the heading of “Missouri vs. Biden.”

22 https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emergency-use-authorization-vaccines-explained

23 On Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a retrospective observational study conducted in Marseille (France) and published in New Microbes and New Infections vol. 55 (Oct. 2023) (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nmni.2023.101188) found that “Among 30,202 patients for whom information on treatment was available, 191/23,172 (0.82%) patients treated with HCQ-AZ died, compared to 344/7030 (4.89%) who did not receive treatment with HCQ-AZ.” On Ivermectin, see, e.g., Hope, Justus R., M.D., "India’s Ivermectin Blackout,” Desert Review, 13 Aug. 2021 (https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/national/indias-ivermectin-blackout-part-ii/article_a0b6c378-fc78-11eb-83c0-93166952f425.html). More generally, see Kory, Pierre, M.D., The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic. New York: Skyhorse, 2023, esp. 97f, 109f, 128 (where he documents Big Pharma’s broad awareness of IVM’s potential effectiveness but lack of interest in promoting it – referring to the account given by IVM’s co-discoverer [Nobel laureate Professor Satoshi Omura] of the correspondence between Kitasato University and the Merck corporation).

24 See Levins, Richard, “Is capitalism a disease?” In: Lewontin, Richard, and Richard Levins. Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007, 297–320. Available at: https://monthlyreview.org/2000/09/01/is-capitalism-a-disease/

25 Angell, Marcia, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. New York: Random House, 2005.

26 See also Sekerka, Leslie E., and Lauren Benishek, “Thick as thieves? Big Pharma wields its power with the help of government regulation.” Emory Corporate Governance and Accountability Review 5 (2018), 113–141.

Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/ecgar/vol5/iss2/4

27 Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies, 74–91.

28 Kennedy, Robert F., Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. New York: Skyhorse, 2021, 73f, 89.

29 Canadian Covid Care Alliance, “The Pfizer inoculations for COVID-19 do more harm than good.” https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-COVID-19-Inoculations-More-Harm-Than-Good-REV-Dec-16-2021.pdf. On patterns of excess deaths (which exceed those from COVID), see Campbell, John, podcast of 11 Feb. 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNT-YNLhprw

30 Anonymous [team of Israeli doctors], Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth. Children’s Health Defense, 2022, 105–111. On the obstacles to patients filing complaints, see Moskowitz, Vaccines: A Reappraisal, 130-132. On censorship of reported complaints, see note 21.

31 See “Covid Whistleblowers: What the Nurses Saw” (note 9). One nurse reports a tenfold increase in heart problems among children after the vaccine roll-out. Several nurses cite taboos against questioning any of the COVID protocols (such as isolation and intubation) even when their implementation worsened patients’ conditions.

32 Block, Jennifer, “Is the US’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System Broken?” British Medical Journal (10 Nov. 2023), https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2582

33 Malhotra, Aseem, M.D., “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine.” Journal of Insulin Resistance, 5:1 (2022). https://insulinresistance.org/index.php/jir/article/view/71/224

34 For documentation of hundreds of such cases (most of which go unreported except in local media), see Dowd, “Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths. The particular vulnerability of younger people, during the period of vaccine mandates, is reflected in statistics on excess deaths cited above (see note 19) and given in fuller detail in Dowd, 184.

35 For an unrehearsed example (19 Feb. 2023), see https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/ive-been-having-chest-pains-ever

36 Wakefield, Andrew J., M.D., Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines—The Truth behind a Tragedy. New York: Skyhorse, 2010, 13f. With regard to the COVID vaccines, their suspected causal link to injuries has been recently addressed in Hulscher, Nicolas et al., “Autopsy findings in cases of fatal COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis,” ESC Heart Failure (2024), doi.org/10.1002/ehf2.14680, which, examining all available autopsy reports where a link was suspected, finds “high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death from myocarditis.”

37 Several such studies are listed in Moskowitz, Vaccines: A Reappraisal, 263n29.

38 Kheriaty, Aaron, M.D., The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2022, 103.

39 On involvement of the military in the gene-therapy research that underlies COVID vaccine technology, see interview of pharma entrepreneur Sasha Latypova by Mathew Crawford for Rounding the Earth: “Examining DoD Involvement in the Pandemic” (video, 17 Dec. 2022). https://sensereceptornews.com/?p=16453

40 Kennedy’s long May 2019 interview on Fauci was banned by YouTube “for violating our Terms of Service.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLi6ZrFp6vQ (YouTube’s far-reaching criteria for vaccine “misinformation” are listed, with examples, at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11161123).

41 See, e.g., the testimony of Dr. Paul Marik, in Leake and McCullough, The Courage to Face COVID-19, 240, and the case of Dr. Meryl Nass (who was disbarred in Maine), as described in a 13 Dec. 2023 report (https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/meryl-nass-rejects-maine-medical-board/).

42 See Shir-Raz et al., “Censorship and suppression” (note 2). The changing positions of leading vaccine advocate Dr. Peter Hotez can be seen in a rapid montage at https://merylnass.substack.com/p/peter-hotez-seeking-faucis-job-flip

43 Malhotra, Aseem, M.D., interviewed by Tucker Carlson (Dec. 2022). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3MPnBpfrRk

44 Malhotra, Aseem, M.D., “Has Big Pharma hijacked evidence-based medicine? Uncovering COVID vaccine data.” Speech at Friends House, Euston, London (14 Nov. 2022). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw7YXUZ1SL0

45 See Mayer, Jane, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Anchor Books, 2017.

46 https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2022/1/video-release-sen-ron-johnson-covid-19-a-second-opinion-panel-garners-over-800-000-views-in-24-hours.

47 Illustrating the latter practice is a Canadian Journal of Cardiology article (“Myocarditis and Pericarditis After COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination: Practical Considerations for Care Providers,” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0828282X21006243) which, after saying that “patients with established myocarditis/pericarditis after the first mRNA vaccination should defer a second dose indefinitely,” adds in its Conclusion the vague statement, “Vaccination continues to be recommended in all eligible individuals.”

48 Kheriaty, The New Abnormal, 72.

49 Kheriaty, The New Abnormal, 176.

50 See Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.