Opinion: The Enormous Failure of American Medicine: Did a Million Americans Need to Die?

The death toll from COVID-19 is staggering. So far a million Americans and more than six million people worldwide have perished. Even though the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, is far from the most populous nation on earth, we have experienced, by far, the greatest number of reported deaths.

Should we just shovel them under and move on, happy that we are still among the living? Or should we demand accountability from those responsible?

Why did our medical establishment do so poorly, when physicians in the Third World did so much better with fewer resources? The answer has more to do with politics than medicine, more to do with a political elite that considers itself smarter than everyone else, and more to do with a concentration of power in a few bureaucrats whom we have allowed to become dictators.

A similar question would be: Why did twenty five million Africans perish in the latter half of the 20^th century? That debacle also involved a political elite that decided to elevate Rachael Carson’s classic but flawed Silent Spring into a manifesto against an insecticide (DDT) that protected sub-Saharan Africa from the ancient scourge of malaria. Deaths from malaria plummeted in the 1950s, as scientists developed a multi-pronged attack on the Anopheles mosquito that carries malaria by rotating the use of insecticides effective against those mosquitoes, to prevent them developing an immunity to any one of the insecticides.

When elitists pressed a political effort to ban DDT, they succeeded against the advice of competent scientists who understood the grim consequences of banning a vital tool that protected the poorest of the poor. The result was a resurgence of malaria that took 25 million lives, lives that were easily ignored, because most were black. Today, DDT is quietly back controlling mosquitoes. The concerns that elitists amplified beyond all reason have been addressed by avoiding the indiscriminate use of all insecticides. Twenty five million would not have died if we had prevented the hijacking of the science by ignorant political operatives.

The COVID-19 pandemic is somewhat different, because credentialed medical “experts” were involved from the beginning in treating this nation and the world. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, Dr. Deborah Birx, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky were your physicians in the United States, whether you realized it or not. They controlled the strategy for combating the virus and prevented other strategies from being utilized, even when alternate approaches proved amazingly effective elsewhere. Their ultimate devotion was not to your welfare but to the welfare of the bureaucracy they served. They vigorously canceled doctors who dared to disagree, even when it was plainly obvious that the bureaucratic approach was far from adequate.

Their strategy was to develop vaccines in record time, by forgoing the animal testing that is supposed to uncover dangerous side effects. To get an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), they would have to show that no effective treatments for COVID-19 were otherwise available.

The problem is that effective treatments emerged almost immediately, as independent physicians began trying various medicines with known antiviral properties that they already had in their medicine chest. Hydroxychloroquine was the first remedy to be shown to be effective against COVID-19. It was used as far back as the American Revolutionary War to protect General George Washington’s Continental Army from malaria.

One of the first acts of the Continental Congress was to appropriate $300 to purchase Cinchona tree bark from Peru. Lacking this remedy, much of the British Army in Virginia became ill with malaria, including General Charles Cornwallis. Cinchona bark was an early source of quinine, which today has been improved into hydroxychloroquine.

What the bureaucracy did in response to hydroxychloroquine and still better alternatives like ivermectin was unconscionable. They badmouthed them, claiming that they were dangerous and ineffective. Ivermectin was denigrated as ‘horse-medicine’ and hydroxychloroquine as ‘Trump-medicine.’ The bureaucracy moved to ban their use for COVID and to discipline physicians who prescribed them for that purpose. Yet both medicines have impressive safety profiles.

Meanwhile, physicians in other countries not under the control of the American medical establishment continued experimenting with these and other therapies. Because the treatments were inexpensive and substantially effective, death rates from COVID were far lower in many Third World countries than in the United States, even with the vaccines eventually available to Americans. Countries like El Salvador boast a death rate less than one quarter of ours. If we had copied their approach and added vaccinations when they became available, 750,000 Americans might still be alive today.

The loss of life in the United States has been enormous. Some argue that it has been exaggerated, because it is hard to determine a cause of death, when someone dies of multiple causes. But the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) compilation of all deaths in the USA shows roughly a million Excess Deaths from all causes. Since COVID and its related effects, like despair from lockdowns and economic hardship resulting in suicides, are the only unusual health problems of the past two years, we are safe to assume that COVID is the cause of a million American deaths.

What did the American medical establishment offer us, as they were rushing to create vaccines? They offered a century old remedy that did not work for the Spanish Flu of 1918. You were suppose to wear a mask when near others. Then masks were mandatory. Airline stewardesses became fervent mask police, as were employees at my local Costco. The idea of ordering customers to comply became an odd business strategy, getting approval from Democrats and condemnation from Republicans. Democrats did not care if masks worked, which they did not, only that people complied.

Curiously, ‘testing’ was their other remedy. Somehow you were safer if tested. When a very compliant friend of mine and most of his family came down with COVID after Christmas, he spent his illness driving around town trying to get COVID test kits! The really old-fashioned idea that you stay at home when contagious did not occur to him.

Individual physicians were generally no better at managing the pandemic. One that I interviewed said she would do nothing for us if we tested positive, until we ended up in the hospital with breathing difficulties! I found another who was willing to recommend a now standard regimen of ivermectin, vitamins C and D, and zinc. But months later he dropped the ivermectin recommendation for fear that his license would be suspended. The medical establishment had even poisoned the close relationship between physician and patient.

All who became ill in the year before vaccines were available and those unwilling to use experimental vaccines when available had to look to pharmacies in other countries, notably India, to secure sufficient ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID in its early and easily treatable stages. Since that supply chain is long and COVID can develop rapidly, those choosing therapies over vaccinations had to be proactive. Many with known risk factors purchased the necessary course of treatment, were well prepared, and had an easy time with COVID when it found them.

ALL who mismanaged the pandemic in the USA need to be held accountable for the absolute disaster they delivered. Yes, I know that the doctors, politicians, and bureaucrats who managed the death of a million Americans would prefer to forget about it. We have other crises that promise more grim mismanagement from the same political crowd that mismanaged COVID. Should we just move on to Putin’s War in Ukraine, Biden’s inflation, the price of gasoline, reverse racism, homelessness in cities too long controlled by one party, gender pronouns, and climate alarmism?

The resounding answer has to be NO! Those who botched the COVID response need to be punished for a monumental number of unnecessary deaths. Anthony Fauci will probably retire before he is thrown out. But others who manage crises incompetently need to realize that they will not get away with it.

The era of arrogant and incompetent rule must end.

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He has a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.