Misinformation is a Label—Not a Fact
I’ve recently read an article by Randy Dotinga investigating "misinformation" by physicians. In Dotinga's JAMA Open Network article, Dotinga interviewed Richard S. Saver, JD. In this article, Dotinga reports that Saver told him state medical boards weren't punishing enough doctors for license violations, including punishing doctors for spreading "misinformation."
I am, as a rule, no fan of the state legislation governing medical boards. These boards operate in complete secrecy, so they are held to no measure of integrity and can under-punish or over-punish anybody they choose to without any consequences for their actions. The state legislatures which created them do not provide any oversight of their actions or protections for the accused physicians. Indeed, the North Dakota Supreme Court ruled that they could not render a decision on the actions of the North Dakota medical board. Any complaints about North Dakota medical board action would have to be presented before the state legislature. In effect, the state of North Dakota created a licensing board over which the state provides no oversight, no protections, and no remedy for physicians from biased board actions.
Saver's notion that state medical boards have failed to punish doctors, with some states punishing doctors more than others, in no way provides better consumer protection. Everything is secret. All a state medical board’s low punishment rate means is fewer punishments. There is no relationship to quality of the decisions punishing physicians. The decisions often have little to do with safety or protecting patients. The decisions often have more to do with retaliation or putting competition out of business. The public is unaware of how political medical boards are.
Both under-punishment and over-punishment cause serious patient harm. After all, “taking out” a well-qualified doctor to remove competition (more often the case for sanctioning physicians rather than patient safety) is harmful to thousands of needy and deserving patients, but medical boards fail to consider this. Instead, medical boards claim they are preventing patient harm. Medical boards make this claim without documenting in any way the real harm done to patients with the removal of a physician.
In short, impunity, according to Wikipedia, is the ability to act with exemption from punishment, losses, or other negative consequences because there are no effective measures to find or gauge illegal activity and assign punishment.
That being said, the definition of “misinformation” is vague and more importantly, constantly changing. The word misinformation is difficult for medical boards to discern. As honest and informed doctors would say, “What is gospel truth today could be misinformation tomorrow or vice a versa.” Dr. Vinay Prasad and Dr. Adam Cifu have described medical reversal in their book. So, the concept of misinformation changes over time. Even over a short period of time.
Unlike Saver, Megan Ranney and Lawrence Gostin believe state medical boards should rarely sanction physicians for misinformation:
There are certainly exceptional cases of disinformation that undoubtedly violate medicine’s precepts of honesty, integrity, and “do no harm.” Punitive measures, whether by federal or state agencies or the criminal justice system, can certainly be justified. But sanctions should be reserved for the clearest and most egregious cases. We live in a free society, where First Amendment freedoms are a bedrock constitutional principle. We can protect patients and incentivize quality health information while remaining faithful to America’s values and constitutional traditions.
In this regard, the medical boards have a very big job. There are many working definitions for misinformation. Then there's the issue of propaganda labeled as misinformation. People who believe COVID vaccinations provided protection from the disease accuse those who questioned the science and safety of COVID vaccinations as spreading misinformation.
On the other hand, scientists who question the COVID vaccine safety based on scientific research believe the pro-vaxxers are spreading misinformation.
As a physician, I am primarily concerned here with misinformation as it pertains to the people who believe in science. For three years I have avoided speaking publicly about my take on COVID and the vaccinations. I have watched what has happened to many physicians who questioned the use of COVID vaccinations because the science for the benefits of the vaccination simply wasn't there.
In the beginning of the pandemic, as physicians, we were told by the federal government to have people stay at home and become very sick before coming into the hospital to be given remdesivir, even though many later died from untreated bacterial pneumonia or kidney failure.
In my clinic, we treated COVID differently. I saw people the day they called and they were treated with zinc, magnesium, vitamin D, and erythromycin. None of our clinic patients died, and they all felt better in a couple days.
Obscene amounts of money were pumped into Big Pharma to make the shots “free.” Massive amounts of money were pumped into many places, including Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and Sinovec made $90 billion in profit on their vaccines in 1921 and 1922. Vaccine producers were paid from many sources, including Advanced Purchase Agreements, (APAs) which give upfront financing for development and production transferring risk from suppliers to payers, but of course the main payer was the U.S. Federal government. These pharmacies received at least $86.5 billion through these APAs. But the exact amount is hard to pin down and could be much higher because companies and government have not been transparent about these APA agreements.
These APAs do not require companies to return money used to develop and produce vaccines even when development failed and the vaccines were never delivered. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna chose to increase the price of their vaccines by 56 percent and 73 percent respectively between 2020 and 2022. As indicated in the SOMO article, article, fewer vaccines will be sold in the coming years. Most companies have already announced plans to quadruple their latest known prices, maintaining great profitability.
We are being told by government health agencies how and what to think, and worse yet, we are being punished for even thinking about good science.
We have had many federal agencies captured by Big Pharma money. From 2006 to 2019, nine out of ten Federal Drug Administration (FDA) commissioners left the FDA and relocated to Big Pharma companies they were once in charge of regulating. These include Mark McClellan, who was former FDA commissioner in charge of regulating Johnson & Johnson. He is now on the Johnson and Johnson board of directors. Scott Gottlieb, who was former FDA commissioner in charge of regulating Pfizer is now on the Board of Directors of Pfizer. Stephen Hahn, who was FDA commissioner in charge of regulating Moderna, is now the current chief medical officer of Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital firm behind Moderna. James C. Smith, who was CEO of Reuters in charge of informing people about COVID-19 vaccines is a current member of the board of directors of Pfizer. Anthony Fauci, who was the Director of National Institute of Allergies and Infection Diseases (NIAID) part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is now working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to develop bioweapons research.
To say these former government employees are or have been for sale is probably an understatement.
Richard Saver is making the kind of assumption that really makes no sense and is clearly not warranted. Extrapolating from the number or amount of medical board actions to some kind of vague salute to public quality is not justified. In fact, nobody knows how much damage the medical boards can do either way, because nobody asks the real victims, who are the public. Medical boards can take out the competition to privately inure themselves and their friends while exacerbating the physician shortage and depriving thousands of patients of good care. Medical boards can act with impunity because they act in secret and the state legislatures creating the medical boards allow them to work without any oversight or protection for accused physicians. All of the real victims, including the public, are neutralized. And no, just because some boards are more active than others doesn’t mean they are in any way doing a better job. Nothing is really measured, and nobody really knows. Anything can be called misinformation with no requirement for a reality check.
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I once testified at a state medical board in support of a friend who was accused of providing poor care. The case was ridiculous and untrue. But there was a new member on the board and you could see in his eyes the desire to impress the other members by ruling against the physician. 'When all you have is a hammer, all the world's a nail,' as it were. So often such bodies see their role as punitive rather than simply investigative. And, as this article points out so clearly, miss the potential harm of their actions. Great piece, thanks!