Doctor… Doctor… Mr. MD…
Can you tell me what’s ailing me?
And he said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…
— “Good Lovin’ ” by the Young Rascals, 1966
Back at the beginning of my legal career I worked for the Florida agency that regulates the medical profession. Among the cases I worked on was one in which a patient in Miami was killed during surgery… not “died”, killed… by the doctors.
Here’s how the media reported the incident at the time.
The case received national publicity because the patient was an award-winning photographer for the Miami Herald newspaper. So the regime media, being first and foremost about themselves, treated it as a major news story deserving national coverage in the New York Times.
I participated in the investigation of that death, and compiled the evidence for review by the State Board of Medicine. All these years later, I recall the details.
He was killed because of a tragic series of failures of safety protocols by the doctors, that culminated with gluteraldehyde being injected into the patient’s spine, killing him instantly. But none of the doctors realized he was dead for nearly an 30 minutes.
(I recall thinking that compared to the awful ways I saw people die when I was a medic, being painlessly embalmed while zonked out under anesthesia was not a bad way to go.)
Explaining how that is even possible would require delving into extremely technical aspects of the surgery (re-injecting spinal fluid to ‘check for leaks’), and minutia of operating room procedures (bringing outside items into the operating room), that are beyond the theme of this column — which is the lack of integrity of some members of the medical profession. With one notable exception, all the physicians involved did their utmost to cover their own (and each others’) assess – including one caught lying under oath.
An advantage of working on behalf of the Board of Medicine was being able to call on whatever resources within that profession we needed in an investigation. One we employed in this case was a nationally renowned expert in his specialty, who was the chair of his department at one of the medical schools in Florida.
After hearing the evidence, he said something “off the record” that I still recall, exactly as he said it.
“We’re just lucky *$%^-ups like this don’t happen more often!”
That reality is kept from the public by the facade of infallibility so many in that profession seek to perpetuate.
That expert’s comment, the circumstances of the Miami case, and other investigations of physicians on behalf of the Board of Medicine, reinforced the impressions of the medical profession I had formed during my tenure as a medic. Despite their best efforts to place themselves on a pedestal, they are only human. They make mistakes and suffer from the same character flaws as anyone else.
One of those flaws — lying — has been exposed for the world to see in the handling of the Wuhan virus pandemic. There has been evidence for a while now that much of what the self-professed ‘medical experts’ were telling us about vaccines and masks was false.
I’ve written about some of that evidence before in this forum.
What’s now emerging is evidence that, at the time, some physicians were making public pronouncements about vaccines they knew it weren’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Some… in the gullible public who believed those lies… and in the media who enthusiastically perpetuated them… are “shocked – SHOCKED – to learn” that physicians would deliberately lie. Those of us who have worked around enough of them aren’t surprised.
If you play God for long enough, you can justify anything to yourself — and withholding the truth from patients, on the premise it’s for their own good, is a longstanding physician protocol.
There is no longer any dispute about the concerted effort by social media and the government to suppress the opinions of any physician who contradicted the “official” narrative about vaccines… despite the fact recommending “getting a second opinion” was/is a common practice among physicians.
So what changed? I suggest it was a combination of ego and greed.
It’s a recognized phenomenon that when there are live TV cameras in courtrooms, egos of some attorneys can subvert their judgment. I’ve been in that situation and made it a point to ignore the cameras. Others played to them — often to the detriment of their client’s interest.
Physicians are no different. Because playing to an audience is not a usual part of what most physicians do, they can easily become intoxicated by the camera and the sound of their own voice being broadcast to the world.
If you then add the adoration of a sycophant media, already inflated egos can completely take over. What you then get is Dr. Anthony Fauci publicly proclaiming himself the personification of “science”, and spreading (what we now know to be) misinformation under that guise.
That’s the ego.
Now add in the greed.
The numbers gleaned from Dr. Fauci’s own required financial disclosures as a public official speak for themselves (res ipse loquitur) about how much he profited during the pandemic.
But this isn’t just about Dr. Fauci. He’s merely emblematic of too many among the medical profession for whom it’s become all about the money.
If the “wallet biopsy” of a patient admitted to a hospital through an emergency room reveals gold-plated insurance coverage, physicians magically appear to offer their services — and mutually-back-scratching referrals are rife.
Okay… I hear some of you muttering as you read this: “For a member of the legal profession to call another profession greedy is the epitome of a pot calling the kettle black!”
I’m in no way excusing the greed of many lawyers. But the faults of many in my profession don’t mitigate those of another.
Fortunately, as public prosecutor my entire career I never had to concern myself with the economics of a legal practice, and could focus on the law alone. It’s a principle reason I never went into private practice.
The hospital softball team shirt we wore, on a base I served at as a medic, had the image of the Grim Reaper and the words Sepelimus errata (“We bury our mistakes”). The physicians who deliberately mislead us about the vaccines are now trying to bury their lies by claiming they were telling the truth “at the time”.
Their egotistical self-perpetuated image of infallibility won’t let them admit they were faced with an unprecedented situation, in which they were unsure of what to do — so they told the public what they thought it needed to hear — but now recognize they were wrong.
I believe most of us could accept that candor.
What we won’t accept is now attempting to rationalize lies with some “it was true at the time.” No, it wasn’t — and they knew it, “at the time”.
Apparently, like life itself, to those physicians… truth is transient.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.