FSMB and Professional Standards

It is very clear that under military law, there is a protection against commanders going off the rails by making it clear that illegal orders should never be followed. In principle, the same applies to doctors. Any doctor who allows political or commercial influences, or anything besides medical information to intrude upon the doctor/patient relationship, is violating his Hippocratic oath. Most countries in the world, including the USA are signatories to the Nuremberg Code, which states:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

British Medical Journal No. 7070, Vol. 313: Page 1448.

On July 29th, 2021, the Federation of State Medical Boards, made an announcement that clearly puts politics above medicine, and therefore categorically undermines any trust in the doctor/patient relationship.

With this announcement, the FSMB places itself in the same league as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his 1964 order stating that he could not describe pornography, but “I know it when I see it.” Their announcement uses terms like “misinformation” and “disinformation” and “inaccurate COVID-19 information,” all which are as ill defined as judge Potter’s porn. Anyone who follows the news even a little bit must have become aware that what was disinformation yesterday can be information today, such as the lab leak theory. In the past 18 months, people got censored and even de-platformed for entertaining that theory, until the evidence became too hard to avoid.

A growing list of respectable scientists have criticized the Covid vaccination campaign for a variety of reasons, either categorically, based on the mRNA technology specifically, or otherwise, even if they have given the vaccines the benefit of the doubt, have faulted the strategy of indiscriminate mass vaccination as a cause of rampant mutations and eventually probably immune escape, thus aggravating the pandemic instead of ending it. They have included Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former Pfizer VP and chief science advisor for respiratory diseases, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi a highly reputable retired German microbiologist, Dr. Geert vanden Bossche, a Belgian vaccine developer, and Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who won a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for his work in discovering the HIV-virus. They don’t necessarily all agree on the details, but the overall conclusion must be that there are plenty of questions about the wisdom of the indiscriminate mass vaccination strategy that was chosen, even aside from the question if the current vaccines should have received an EUA at all.

The VAERS reports reflect the issues well enough and they are variously thought to capture perhaps as little as only 1% of the actual issues. But most interestingly, the US State Department as of 8/9/21 has the following advisory:

Iceland Travel Advisory

Travel Advisory August 9, 2021

Iceland – Level 4: Do Not Travel

Do not travel to Iceland due to COVID-19 related restrictions.

Read the Department of State’s COVID-19 page before you plan any international travel.   

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a Level 4 Travel Health Notice for Iceland due to COVID-19, indicating a very high level of COVID-19 in the country. Your risk of contracting COVID-19 and developing severe symptoms may be lower if you are fully vaccinated with an FDA authorized vaccine. Before planning any international travel, please review the CDC’s specific recommendations for fully vaccinated and unvaccinated travelers.

Visit the Embassy’s COVID-19 page for more information on COVID-19 and restrictions and conditions in Iceland.

Read the country information page.

If you decide to travel to Iceland: 

Last Update: Reissued with updates to COVID-19 information.

In short, the State Dept. declares Iceland, a country with the highest vaccination rates in the world, to be too dangerous to travel, but on August 2nd, 2021, the “fact checkers” at Reuters had labeled the same thing misinformation. And so Iceland joins the list of countries with the highest vaccination rates who are experiences significant positive year over year increases in cases from July 2020 to July 2021. And beyond these country statistics, which are very instructive, there are new studies coming out, leading to serious questions about the safety and effectiveness of the current crop of vaccines.

Medicine or politics

FSMB should decide if it wants to practice medicine or politics, it cannot do both, lest it become part of the emerging censorship and intrude upon the doctor-patient relationship, thus obliterating the trust in doctors, which they claim to want to protect. Science is a process, and at times a messy process, and no organization should attempt infallibility lest it becomes ridiculous and part of the problem that is holding up scientific progress. In the history of science, attempts to raise any paradigm to a level of infallibility have always failed. If in doubt, just ask the Vatican, who finally forgave Galileo 350 years after the fact.

Disclaimer: I have no standing in this matter, as I am not a physician. However, I am the son of one, a psychiatrist, who, in the decades after World War 2, specialized in KZ Syndrome, (KZ = Konzentrationslager = concentration camp) and was instrumental in getting it recognized as a diagnosis in Holland. He wanted me to become a doctor, and he drilled the Hippocratic oath and the Nuremberg Code into my head since I could walk and talk. I understand that if these principles are out the window, so is the trust in the doctor/patient relationship and therefore so is medicine.