As U.S. forces beat a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, defeated after 20 years by the primitive Taliban, who clung to their guns and their faith, America’s invincibility as the “world’s only superpower” might be disputed.
Joe Biden told Americans, when speaking about his gun-control agenda, that to move against the government one would need F-15s and perhaps nuclear weapons. The Taliban lack those, although they have acquired a treasure trove of advanced weapons left behind by Americans.
Against Americans, the U.S. government might not deploy F-15s, nukes, bombers, or killer drones, but it has other means of compulsion, backed up by SWAT teams with assault weapons: prisons, ruinous fines, deprivation of licenses and permits, withholding of benefits on which one has become dependent, no-fly lists, or freezing one’s financial assets.
In the “war” against COVID-19, the government is showing its willingness to deploy all of these against anyone who might interfere with its strategy: lockdowns and mandatory warp-speed vaccine.
In war, civil rights get suspended. There is no freedom to express dissenting views; no freedom to work, to travel, to choose your medical treatment, or to decline treatment to which you object; no right to habeas corpus or a speedy trial; no right to compensation for taking your property. And “refuseniks” are even being denied medical care of any kind.
In the war against COVID, the U.S. is counting on its magnificent pharmaceutical industry to deploy novel drugs and vaccines. Meanwhile, it is engaged in unilateral disarmament, trying to thwart the use of the primitive remedies being used in less affluent countries that for some reason have much lower COVID death rates.
By March 2020, there were reports of successful treatment with chloroquine (CQ) or hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), derivatives of one of the oldest lifesaving remedies known, quinine from cinchona bark. The Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy was able to acquire 62 million doses of these drugs before both China and India shut off their exports to the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Azar directed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to develop an Expanded Access Investigational New Drug (IND) authorization for HCQ. Instead, with the advice of Janet Woodcock, who is now acting FDA Commissioner, then-BARDA Director Rick Bright restricted access through an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for hospitalized patients only.
No EUA is needed for “off-label” use of an approved drug. But combined with official pronouncements about alleged danger to the heart and the lack of “sufficient” evidence of benefit, few patients received HCQ. Supporting the global and U.S. fear campaign against HCQ were the federal government’s many allies: state medical and pharmacy boards, organized medicine, Big Tech, and the mainstream media. Hundreds of thousands of patients may have died needlessly for lack of early treatment, but “the Science” was saved.
Now ivermectin, another drug that has been used safely by hundreds of millions of patients for decades, is coming under attack by the disarmament advocates. Master of sarcasm Rachel Maddow is ridiculing people trying to save their lives by taking “horse dewormer.” That is one of many uses for this Nobel-Prize-winning drug. Poison control centers are reporting an “alarming” 550 percent increase in calls (from 23 to 150 over 8 months in Texas). Doctors wrote some 88,000 prescriptions for ivermectin in just one week. They are evidently persuaded by evidence of benefit, even if CDC isn’t. Many patients who can’t find a doctor who will prescribe for them or a pharmacy that will dispense are resorting to veterinary products—a practice no physician would recommend.
The Biden Administration strategy is to get novel, genetically engineered COVID-19 jabs into every arm. As the “fully vaccinated” population in the U.S. has climbed to nearly 53 percent, cases continue to surge. That is blamed on the unvaccinated or perhaps the need for a “booster.”
Products available under an EUA are by law supposed to be voluntary. FDA approval would remove that theoretical barrier to increasing coercion. Now, FDA has approved Comirnaty, made by the German firm BioNTech, which is virtually unavailable. The “nearly identical” Pfizer product is still under an EUA. FDA demands after-marketing studies, especially of myocarditis, with a 5-year follow-up.
So far, more than 5,000 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis, more than 6,000 heart attacks, nearly 18,000 permanent disabilities, and nearly 14,000 deaths post jabs have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). So far, no cardiac damage from HCQ has been reported.
It could be that our main approved weapon is safe and effective, the thousands of deaths and disabilities are coincidental or not as bad as the disease would have been, and the feared long-term effects are conspiracy theories. Or it could be that the intelligence from FDA, CDC, and other authorities is as reliable as what we had in Afghanistan.
Maybe F-15s and nukes are not needed to destroy America.
About the author: Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.