The old implicit compact between doctors, patients, and society is broken and may never be repaired. Americans’ confidence in doctors to act in the public’s best interest has changed since the pandemic.
In a major new statement on medical freedom, authored by Michael Kane and Meryl Nass, MD, and signed by hundreds of physicians, scientists and medical professions, we are warned that there is no scientific rational for continuing COVID-19 mandates in 2023 and beyond; mask and vaccine exemptions must be offered at the discretion of the doctors and patients as opposed to a one-size-fits-all government edicts; parental rights and decisions must be preserved to ensure the health and well-being of children and the ability of medical professions to speak freely to their patients and the public must not be compromised.
An attack on the free speech of doctors and medical scientists is being waged across America today. While controversy is inherent in scientific advancement, and scientific knowledge continuously evolves, disagreement with the federal public health recommendations has led to draconian censorship and suppression.
Informed consent is the basis of medical ethics. Shared decision making is a model of the patient-doctor relationship. Patients want to make their own medical decisions and they have the legal right to do so.
The corollary to informed consent is that medical decisions ought to be made by individual patients based on their individual situation and person best interest. One-size fits-all medicine is incongruent with these principles and denies informed consent and persona autonomy.
During the last three years we have experienced unprecedented interference with the doctor-patient relationship by government. Considerable financial incentives were paid to medical industries and medical providers to offer certain treatments while refusing others.
Yet when financial incentives did not achieve universal vaccination, mandates were imposed requiring vaccinations for healthcare workers whose employers received Medicare payments even though common knowledge proved that vaccinations did not protect patients from infections. Grants to school districts were conditioned on mask mandates with imposed incentives and punishments for noncompliance which fly in the face of long-established medical ethic.
There is general agreement that all available COVID-19 vaccines fail to prevent viral transmission and only briefly reduce cases. After several months, people who are vaccinated become more susceptible to COVID-19 infections than the unvaccinated. Therefore, mandates for COVID-19 vaccines are scientifically and logically indefensible. Yet the CDC continued to exhort Americans to receive more COVID jabs and support federally imposed vaccine mandates.
Essentially everyone has been exposed to COVID by now and nearly everyone has been infected at least once. And while we can anticipate that we will continue to face evolving variants, we can also anticipate that their severity will keep weakening over time.
Mandates must end and patients and doctors must reassert their human and legal right to determine the medical care each patient receives. Patients are individuals and experience different risks from vaccinations and infections. Pretending that these differences don’t exist is denying reality.
Historically doctors have always been able to issue waivers for masks and vaccinations but during the pandemic many health and education departments have begun nullifying these waivers, superseding physician authority. States have also been investigating and punishing doctors for issuing medical waivers.
States are responsible for the decision on the age of consent and until that age, parents are wholly responsible for their children, with a few limited exceptions. But during the past two years we have seen a dangerous trend where states are requiring that parents cooperate and consent to vaccinations for their underage children. This is a dangerous usurpation of parental rights and violates both state and federal law. While Congress could have nullified these decisions, they failed to act.
An attack on free speech of doctors and medical scientists is being waged across America. Doctors who defended patient’s rights or refused to follow dictated protocol that goes against their medical decisions lost their board certifications and in some cases their medical license.
This suppression of medical professionals’ speech is illegal according to the First Amendment and state statutes and must immediately end.
Source: Major New Statement on Medical Freedom by Brownstone Institute
