Letter from a pediatrician

Dear Families,

I was your child’s doctor until I was fired by my clinic. What happened? I was placed on unpaid administrative leave a few months ago for “failing to comply” with the “show me your papers” vaccine mandate from my state governor. My employer abruptly cancelled my already booked clinic schedule and I have no idea what they told you about why I “disappeared.” I chose to stay silent for the last few months so that the clinic could not say that they fired me because I spoke out about what was happening. Now that they have made their final move, I can speak with the certainty that they fired me only due to my refusal to comply with the unconstitutional vaccine mandate.

I am not “anti-vaxx” as I have spent my entire career advocating for vaccines and counseling parents about the pros and cons of their decision. It is ironic that I have lost my clinic position due to this situation; however, I am 100% certain that I am acting on the right side of history.

I made a choice to STAND UP and risk my entire career for the sake of MEDICAL FREEDOM; I told my former employer that I WILL NOT COMPLY with the order to share my personal medical information. They gave me the option of filing a religious or medical exemption in order to keep my position in the clinic. Why was my own personal choice not a good enough reason for my refusal to comply? The answer is an easy one: they are wrong. As free human beings, we each have the right to say “no” and that is reason enough. To be clear, I made this decision to “not comply” to help protect your rights as much as I did to protect my own, regardless of the decision that your family made about taking the vaccine. We will all stay free only if we fiercely protect our freedom and keep others from taking our freedom from us.

I am just as healthy today as I have been for the last two years of this pandemic. I would have easily and safely continued to care for your children as I have done throughout my entire lengthy career as a physician. As it is, I can’t even communicate to tell you what happened because my large multi-specialty health care system employer controls everything. That should scare you. They control everything. If they control what I do or do not inject into my own body then it will not surprise you that they increasingly control what I tell you regarding your child’s health care and what I can and cannot prescribe. Your formerly confidential doctor-patient visit now has additional forces in the room and these pharmaceutical, governmental and employer influences keep physicians from providing the best care for your family member without a massive conflict of interest. This limits medical freedom for your family and erodes your personal freedom as well as mine. None of us will have freedom if we continue traveling down this road into a terrifying new world.

I may or may not have taken the Covid 19 vaccine. This is my own personal and private information and it has nothing to do with patient safety. How so? The CDC Director has clearly told us, and we all have seen, that vaccinated people can and do catch and transmit this virus. Unvaccinated people also catch and transmit this virus. Knowing that someone has been vaccinated does not tell you that they can’t transmit the virus to you. Put another way, the vaccine does not “stop the spread” of this infection. Thus, the vaccine mandate makes no sense when it comes to protecting the health of others and is quite simply tyrannical governmental and employer overreach into a decision that each individual has the right to make without duress. This vaccine will not make this virus magically disappear. The decision to take it must be your own private health care choice as you weigh your individual risks and benefits. There is a risk to vaccinating and there is a risk to catching the virus; when there is risk you must have the personal choice to decide how to act.

Our actions in medicine right now are ethically, morally and legally wrong. We are actually threatening our colleagues, employees, and citizens with job termination if they do not comply with the vaccine mandate. We are restricting access to parts of society for non compliance with this mandate. Please look back at history and see how dangerous this is rapidly becoming. Think about where this road leads us if we continue to go down it as a nation. Tyranny historically has always started with intentions initially defined as being for the “common good.” Never have the words “show me your papers” or “you must because we say so” ended well for entire populations of people. Please tell me how informed consent for this medical procedure can possibly exist when a person is threatened, coerced, bullied, intimidated or otherwise forced to agree?

The medical world is changing rapidly into a tyrannical system where doctors can no longer use their own training and common sense to make decisions. I used to see professional and respectful dialogue and debate. I now see a concerning suppression of any critical thinking and the immediate silencing of expert voices who dare argue for the correct and scientific interpretation of data. Increasingly, only one narrative is handed down from above and physicians are threatened with the potential loss of their medical licenses if they speak out. Your doctor is being silenced and censored. Physicians received a letter in late 2021 from the Federation of Medical Boards stating that providing “misinformation” regarding Covid 19 would result in the risk of losing the medical licenses that they worked so hard to earn. The definition of “misinformation” was not provided making the messaging crystal clear——deviate from the plan being sent from positions of power in the medical world, dare question what is being said, and your license to practice medicine could be taken away. In short, your doctor was directly threatened into compliance and into silence.

Fear drives this entire process in the push to take away our freedom. Yes, the Covid 19 virus is real and it is dangerous for a very small group of people. Fortunately, your otherwise healthy children have a 99.998% chance of surviving this infection. Stated another way, your otherwise healthy children have close to a 0% chance of dying from Covid 19. I have seen many children with Covid 19 in the last year and a half; all have had minor symptoms and rapidly recovered. Serious admissions to the pediatric ICU for children are relatively rare despite what the media will tell you to scare you. When you are scared, you are much more likely to give away your freedom in exchange for a plan that is portrayed as providing safety.

Freedom is one of the basic foundations of the United States of America. Yes, there have been times in the relatively brief history of our nation when we have gotten this wrong. We are a beautiful work in progress. Yet if we give away our freedom as if it has no value then we will surely fall as a nation. You are seeing tyrannical overreach right here in America. You are seeing our constitutional rights trampled. You are watching people give their freedom away as if it has no value. By staying silent, you are taking part in the destruction of our country with the resultant loss of individual rights and the suppression of free speech. If tyrannical forms of government are so wonderful, why does history show us that countless millions have fled from this type of government or died under its power?

As your child’s former physician, I am willing to risk my entire career by adding my voice to the growing outcry to save our nation. We have to preserve our freedom. Your children deserve to grow up in a world in which they live as free people. They deserve to make their own future choices; to not be enslaved by their employers and by their government. We are rapidly heading into a situation where we will live as modern day slaves and our government and employers will directly tell us what we must or must not do. They will control us. Do you doubt this? Look to the recent horrific tyrannical situation in Canada’s city of Ottawa for details of how this will happen. Look to what is happening in Australia and in Europe; to the anti-freedom decisions that our own government is endorsing. Our actions now will determine how our future descendants will live. AMERICA, STAND UP AND SPEAK OUT! DO NOT LET THEM TAKE YOUR FREEDOM AND THE FREEDOM OF YOUR CHILDREN & GRANDCHILDREN AWAY!

You have the right to make your own medical decisions. Let me say that again: you have the right to decide what personal medical procedures you agree to allow. Please understand that this is not about who is or is not vaccinated. There is a goal to divide us and to encourage us to fight against one another. Please, now is the time to stand up TOGETHER. Stand side by side and UNITE for YOUR COLLECTIVE rights. You cannot afford to sit this one out. You cannot afford to say nothing and to watch as this country just gives its freedom away. Once personal freedom is given away, you will NOT easily get it back. Our nation’s Founding Fathers (& Mothers!) fought for our liberty and freedom. They did not fight so that we could sit idly by and say that freedom doesn’t matter. Faith, Freedom and Family are the very foundation of the United States of America and are absolutely worth defending.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free”

—President Ronald Reagan

We the People have been blessed with this beautiful country and we know that our US Constitution and our God given rights must be defended and protected. Our children and grandchildren are worth every ounce of our effort and one day they will thank us because they will happily live as free people.

America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Be Brave, America. We are the majority in this nation!

California wants to listen in at your next doctor’s appointment

There is a new bill making its way through the California Legislature that could punish doctors for straying from “the contemporary scientific consensus” for COVID-19: California’s AB 2098 would discipline physicians for disseminating or promoting “misinformation” or “disinformation” as it relates to COVID-19.

Aside from the problem that the “consensus” on COVID-19 is constantly changing, the bill’s language is ambiguous and, as some California lawyers say, almost certainly infringes upon physicians’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

While the bill authors intend to protect patients from harm, there are already existing mechanisms for disciplining doctors who harm patients through negligence or by deviating from the standard of care. But the current bill specifically targets speech and would only “consider” if there is harm, negligence or malicious intent instead of requiring such things for physician punishment.

The way the bill is worded would lead physicians to self-silence unorthodox opinions or anything that may not be entirely aligned with “consensus,” even though those opinions may eventually be proven correct. Physicians who may be ahead of the curve or rapidly adopt new data into patient care may be unjustly punished. Furthermore, science advances because of scientists and physicians who are brave and insightful enough to rightfully challenge orthodoxy.

In the last two years alone, we were told by officials that COVID was mostly spread via droplets at short distances, but now we know it is predominantly airborne and lingers in the air. We were told long-term school closures were necessary to slow the spread and protect children, but we now know prolonged closures of school and outdoor spaces were unnecessary and in fact very harmful to children. We were told that cloth masks would protect, but now we know they are highly unreliable.

While vaccines continue to offer protection against severe disease from COVID-19, we initially believed they would prevent infection and transmission, but it has now been clarified they are unreliable at preventing both infection and transmission; as stated recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, they “will not offer long-term protection against mild illness.” We were told “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection,” and its existence was ignored in vaccination guidelines, but now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and numerous additional publications support its robustness, particularly against severe disease, which may be similar to if not superior to vaccination alone.

Our understanding of the above and many other topics has advanced because the consensus was challenged by doctors and other medical experts who dared to speak out. Silencing unconventional views would do more harm than good. In a free society, we do not allow the government to determine the “current scientific consensus,” let alone silence those who disagree.

We were warned about a situation like this not only in George Orwell’s “1984” but also in our own recent history where, according to the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in a 2018 California free speech case, “regulating the content of professionals’ speech ‘pose[s] the inherent risk that the Government seeks not to advance a legitimate regulatory goal, but to suppress unpopular ideas or information.’ ... Throughout history, governments have ‘manipulat[ed] the content of doctor-patient discourse’ to increase state power and suppress minorities.” As Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said, AB 2098 could turn “doctors into agents of state public health rather than advocates for their patients.”