The United States may never recover from the wreckage left behind by the federal healthcare bureaucracy’s handling of COVID-19, according to a new analysis.
The report, “COVID-19: A Weapon to Fundamentally Transform America,” describes how the government’s response to COVID-19 served the interests of the public health establishment and others who stood to gain from its policies.
“What many Americans were led to believe was well-intentioned concern for our safety and health has turned into a morass of ever-changing rules designed not for our health, but to accustom us to government control of our lives,” writes Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D. in the report, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
The Human Cost
The damage wrought by lockdowns and other measures leading to human isolation was widespread, the report states.
“A mere 2 months into the 2-week ‘flatten the curve’ lockdown, liquor sales were up 55 percent,” Singleton writes. “Anti-anxiety prescriptions were up 34 percent. Verifiable domestic violence doubled in 6 months. Some 80,000 diagnoses of five common cancers might have been missed or delayed by June 2020 because of disruptions to medical care. Moreover, despite increases in telemedicine, evaluations of cardiovascular risk factors have dropped by 50 percent.”
Mental Health Declines
The decline in mental health was particularly alarming, Singleton writes.
“The CDC reported that 40 percent of thousands surveyed reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral condition,” the report states. “Thirteen percent started or increased substance abuse to cope with stress or emotions related to COVID-19 lockdowns. Eleven percent seriously considered suicide.”
Children also fared poorly. Singleton cites a health study from FAIR, an independent non-profit tracking private health insurance, that found health insurance claims for pediatric health visits doubled in March and April of 2020.
‘Media Manipulation,’ Data Misconstrued
Singleton writes that she believes the “hysteria and media manipulation surrounding the very real SARS-CoV-2 virus and its COVID-19 disease” are being used to pave the way for extreme social engineering.
“The U.S. political elite and the assorted rich and powerful have one overarching goal: to maintain and accumulate more power at all cost,” Singleton writes.
“The news presented COVID-19 deaths and ‘cases,’ rarely making the distinction between those who are ill and those who simply had a positive test for SARS-CoV-2 but had no symptoms,” Singleton writes. “Further, the CDC’s little-noticed March 24, 2020 rule on death certificates diverged from earlier policy and allowed unconfirmed COVID-19 to be listed as the cause of death rather than a contributor to death from an underlying condition.”
The result was an inflated COVID-19 death figure.
Suppression of Free Speech
Many physicians have felt their speech about COVID-19 was suppressed, Singleton writes.
“Physicians must be free to discuss options and treat their patients without fear of repercussions from government bureaucrats,” the report states. “The government medical arm has not merely refused to acknowledge but has silenced open scientific discussion of the advantages of various protocols for the early treatment of COVID-19 with proven safe medications affordable by anyone. More perniciously, the people behind the curtain try to sully the reputations of individuals who have not succored to groupthink.”
Singleton writes about Stanford University’s Hoover Institution physician scholar (and Trump advisor), who was “excoriated in the widely read Journal of the American Medical Association for having an opinion that differed from the scientific inconsistent Dr. Anthony Fauci.” Similarly, a northern California surgeon was relieved of his directorship “for the crime of expressing in writing his concern that his county’s lockdown was doing more harm than good,” Singleton writes.
Singleton’s point was confirmed in mid-August when YouTube (owned by Google) suspended Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, M.D., for one week over a video in which he said masks were ineffective against COVID-19. As Singleton notes, Google, Twitter, and Facebook regularly purge what they claim is “misinformation” about the coronavirus.
‘Part of a Pattern’
“It is impossible to formulate good policy based on inaccurate data,” Jane Orient, M.D., president of the Arizona-based American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, tells Health Care News.
“Government has multiplied the number of cases by massive testing of healthy people, using an overly sensitive test with a very high rate of false positives; incentivized hospitals to diagnose COVID in patients in the hospital for other reasons; and suppressed information about vaccine adverse reactions and early treatment successes,” Orient said. “It’s part of a pattern, like manipulation of temperature data to be consistent with global warming. The accepted government figures are messaged to fit the prevailing narrative.”
Bonner R. Cohen, Ph.D., (bcohen@nationalcenter.org) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Internet info:
Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D., “COVID-19: A Weapon to Transform America,” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Summer 2021.
This article was updated on September 9, 2021.
