On the Manufacture of Consent Among Medical Professionals
I began working at the university in 2015 as an adjunct clinical educator. My role was to supervise students training to become acupuncturists while they saw patients, gathered information, formulated diagnoses, and administered treatment. It was part-time work alongside my private practice.
In late 2016, a full-time professor left abruptly, and his position opened. By then, I was supervising clinic and teaching several classes, though I did not consider myself qualified for a full-time associate professorship. To my astonishment, the director of the herbal medicine program told me he was surprised I hadn’t applied. I took the hint and was hired full-time beginning January 2017.
The only problem was the low salary; I tried to negotiate. I was told that the position was officially full-time, but since it was only four-day work weeks for ten months per year the standard offer was “half-time” salary. This left me three days per week for private practice, and six weeks off in the summer.
I accepted it reluctantly. I was newly married. We worked hard. We struggled. She got pregnant. We had a son. I grew my practice.
In 2019, a former student—who had become an administrator at a federally qualified health care clinic (FQHC) affiliated with the university—invited me to supervise students there one shift per week. The work would provide additional income, but required credentialing delayed the start date until May 2020. The timing seemed a minor consideration. It would not remain so.
In late 2019, my wife took our nearly two-year-old son to China to visit her family. I followed reports of a new virus closely. Thankfully, they returned in early March 2020. I remember telling students I doubted we would return after spring break.
We didn’t.
Spring break stretched into the year-long snow day of lockdown. Classes moved to Zoom. The acupuncture clinic closed, replaced by “virtual clinic” role-play and case discussions. I worked from home. The boundary between professional and private life dissolved.
At the same time, the university itself was destabilizing. Between a new president, declining enrollment, and an ever worsening financial situation, there were serious questions about whether the institution would survive at all.
In response, leadership proposed across-the-board salary cuts of roughly ten percent. I was serving both in the University Senate and on the Faculty Council then, which gave me insight and input into these discussions. I spoke up.
Lockdowns had closed my private practice, because acupuncture was deemed nonessential, while liquor stores remained open. My wife’s job waiting tables disappeared when her restaurant shifted to takeout. My university salary was now our sole income. I told the Council plainly that further cuts would leave me unable to pay my mortgage or feed my family.
To their credit, this prompted further review. Weeks later, salary cuts were approved—with two exceptions. A member of the Faculty Welfare Committee quietly told me I had the lowest salary at the entire university. So much for “standard starting salary.”
In the end, every faculty member but two took a pay cut. I, and one of my colleagues in the acupuncture school, received raises. We were the only professors earning under $60,000 per year, which was well below the poverty line for our county. It felt like a win, but without my practice or my wife’s income, we were still struggling.
As time went on, the university failed to meet its financial obligations. Chaos followed. Anonymous emails accused leadership of malfeasance. Faculty fled. The president absconded after two years and an obscenely high salary, leaving the school worse off.
Then another institution swooped in and “saved” us. Overnight, everything changed: we were working five day weeks instead of four, three terms per year instead of two, and expected to work twelve months per year instead of ten. I had planned to reopen my private practice after lockdown, but this schedule made that impossible.
We were told to be grateful that salaries would not be cut. On closer inspection, the new working conditions meant that weekly pay had dropped by about 20%, annual pay by roughly 17%. I could not understand how this was presented with a straight face.
As part of the transition, leadership solicited feedback. By then, I had begun a shift of clinical supervision working at the federally qualified healthcare clinic (FQHC) in addition to my other faculty duties. I had many students, and even more patients, and was thriving. I calculated my total value to the university—clinical supervision and education, FQHC contracting, teaching 14 classes per year, committee leadership, and administrative work—and proposed a compensation figure that would allow me to stay under the new structure.
I wrote a detailed, professional letter to HR, the transition team, and the interim president.
I received no response.
Behind the scenes, the FQHC offered to hire me full-time if I left the university. This mattered. The administrator—who was also my former student—had successfully lobbied for Medicaid coverage of acupuncture. We were the first state to be granted this, and we were the first FQHC in the state to offer it. With that win, they needed a full-time acupuncturist. I was their guy.
I submitted my resignation to the university effective end of summer term, 2021.
By then, Biden was president. What had been called things like the dangerous Trump warp-speed moonshot had transmuted into a sacred Biden miracle. The Faculty Council became zealous about mandating mRNA injections for all students, staff, and faculty.
I objected. “We can’t mandate an experimental medical product for students to attend class.”
“It isn’t experimental.”
“Safe and effective.”
“Settled science.”
All the usual NPC rejoinders were parroted from the Rachel Maddow fan club. One English department faculty member, visibly panicked, sneered: “Aren’t you resigning anyway? Why should we listen to you if you won’t even be here?”
After that, I was no longer welcome at faculty council meetings. Since I was already known to have submitted my letter of resignation, one liberal arts professor accused me of outright misanthropy, “You are leaving anyway, what do you care what happens here, we are the ones at risk—not you! Why should we listen to anything you have to say!” Two other, more diplomatic colleagues promised to keep me looped in. They did not.
Just before my resignation date, I received a call from an administrator at the College of Health Sciences. He offered me a new position at the College of Health Sciences as staff, to be contracted out on a full-time basis to the FQHC, thus superseding the need of the FQHC to break off from the University. The best part was he salary offer was the exact number I had requested months earlier in my letter. I would no longer be faculty, which meant no more endless committees, no more lecturing, no more governance duties, just treating patients and mentoring student clinicians full time. They had capitulated. It was abundantly clear that they did not want to lose the clinic relationship nor its potential revenue.
By fall 2021, I had my dream job. I was earning more than double my original salary, treating patients, training students, and supporting my family on a single income.
Two months later, the White House issued its decree: employers with over 100 employees must mandate vaccination. The FQHC gave me an ultimatum—comply or leave.
I am an identical twin. My brother works in software and had isolated himself during the pandemic. To reenter society (and contrary to my advice), he took a Johnson & Johnson shot. It made him severely ill, and he later landed in the emergency department. All they offered him was shrugged shoulders and Benadryl; they wouldn’t even log the vaccine adverse event. He recovered but was shaken and changed—red pilled. He filled out his own VAERS report.
My identical twin had suffered a serious adverse reaction. Given this obviously relevant fact, I requested a medical exemption.
It didn’t matter.
“You still have to get it,” they told me.
In that moment, it became unmistakably clear this was not about patient safety, public health, or science. It was about power. It had always been about power.
I complied at the last possible moment. To minimize the risk of adverse events, I fasted, and followed a mitigation protocol using ivermectin and Chinese herbal medicine. After the second Pfizer dose, I developed an uncomfortable and embarrassing lymphatic complication in a private area—treatable, but not trivial. I managed it myself.
That is my COVID story.
I did not consent freely. I wrote that I was under duress on the vaccine consent form. It didn’t matter; they didn’t look at the form anyway. I yielded to their force: economic, professional, and institutional. My choice was not between vaccination and safety, but between obedience and unemployment, between compliance and the ability to provide for my family.
This is how consent was manufactured during the pandemic—not through persuasion, but through leverage. Not through science, but through power.
source naturalselections.substack.com