‘The Medical-Pharmaceutical Killing Machine: Facing Facts Could Save Your Life’

Written by Children Health's Defense Team on December 17, 2024. Posted in Current News

Chapter 1. From Quackery To Criminality

The medicinal use of mercury offers a long-running example of medically induced harm.

Although centuries of whistleblowers have warned that dosing patients with it constitutes reckless quackery—and the U.S. government presently places mercury at number three on its “Substance Priority List,” right under arsenic and lead—the heavy metal has figured prominently in the “medical armamentarium” from as far back as the sixth century BC through the present day.

In his important book Evidence of Harm, author David Kirby exposed the pharmaceutical industry’s controversial practice of including mercury preservatives in vaccines. Pointedly using the word “criminal,” Kirby wrote in the foreword to another book about mercury (The Age of Autism by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill) that the “blind belief in a known poison” has been “misguided, immoral, and in some cases, patently criminal.”

The “Messianic” Benjamin Rush

In many ways, the medical practices and beliefs of U.S. Founding Father, physician, and University of Pennsylvania medical school professor Benjamin Rush may have set the stage for modern medicine’s stubborn adherence to dangerous protocols—despite clinical evidence of harm—and its silver-bullet fascination with vaccines “as substitutes for right living,” as Eleanor McBean put it in her 1957 book The Poisoned Needle: Suppressed Facts About Vaccination.

The reportedly “messianic” and “uncompromising” Rush’s late-1700s stock-in-trade was a radical protocol involving bloodletting and purging with—what else?—mercury, a practice that medical historians later dubbed “heroic medicine.” Rush had his own proprietary brand of laxative called “Thunderclappers,” consisting of approximately 60% mercury chloride (also called calomel), which he promoted as “a purgative of explosive power.”

As Rush honed his clinical methods, he passed them on to a phalanx of enthusiastic students and disciples during yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia, where he would bleed and purge up to 100 patients a day.

Although use of calomel was not uncommon among doctors of that era, Rush prescribed up to 10 times more than his medical peers and also recommended the removal of huge amounts of patients’ blood, erroneously believing that the blood would replenish itself in a matter of a day or two. “A patient’s failure to respond to this disastrous therapy,” one historian wrote in 2004, “won [the patient] only another round of bleeding and purging.” In another modern writer’s colorful description, “So much blood was spilled in the front yard that the site became malodorous and buzzed with flies.”

No less a figure than George Washington underwent a rapid and gruesome death after Rush protégé Dr. Elisha Dick (and two other Johnny on-the-spot physicians) poisoned Washington with mercury and removed 40% of the beleaguered general’s total blood volume—a quantity that, to this day, “continues to amaze and appall laymen and physicians alike.” From many historians’ point of view, Washington’s doctors caused his death, a death that may well have changed the course of history.

Rush was enthusiastic about promoting his “heroic medicine” protocol, “proclaim[ing] the success of his cure to the public and his medical colleagues” in newspapers, advertisements, and brochures, and even “harangu[ing] people in the streets.” In addition, he was an early and explicit proponent of smallpox vaccination.

In 1803, he joined with 30 other Philadelphia doctors in signing a public notice “expressing their confidence in vaccination and recommending it for general use.” Significantly, smallpox vaccination represented a turning point in the “medicalization of the general public” in both early nineteenth-century America and Europe, and a boon for the burgeoning medical profession:

Since the late eighteenth century, doctors had intensified their efforts to win government support for their plans to bring the whole population under medical control. . . . Thus Jenner’s method of cowpox vaccination presented medical practitioners with a new chance to increase their prestige and influence on public health affairs [bold added].

Doctors also foresaw an increase in their income through vaccination fees and hoped to establish themselves, with the help of the vaccine, among those classes of the population who had not consulted doctors before.

From 1813 to 1822, the young U.S. government appointed James Smith as the nation’s “federal vaccine agent,” charging him with “maintaining a supply of the smallpox vaccine and distributing it nationwide”; Smith had been a student of Rush’s at the University of Pennsylvania and was a fellow member of the “well-educated medical elite.”

Although other physicians of the day argued that smallpox vaccination was both dangerous and ineffective, then—as now—defenders of the practice prevailed by using “more or less perverted statistics,” with one doctor urging his “professional brethren to be slow to publish fatal cases of small-pox after vaccination” and others passing off vaccine-induced fatalities as some other disease.

Reflecting on Rush’s medical legacy, U.S. Army medical officer P.M. Ashburn made remarks in 1929 that highlight one of the many reasons why Rush’s cautionary tale is still pertinent today. Ashburn wrote that by virtue of Rush’s “social and professional prominence, his position as teacher and his facile pen,” the Philadelphia physician “was more potent in propagation and long perpetuation of medical errors than any man of his day,” thereby “blacken[ing] the record of medicine.”

This observation illustrates how social prestige—coupled with “unyielding devotion to dogma”—often helps practitioners of dangerous medicine beat back their critics.

In Rush’s time, those critics included fellow physician Elisha Barlett, who opined about Rush’s medical theories, “In the whole vast compass of medical literature, there cannot be found an equal number of pages containing a greater amount of utter nonsense and unqualified absurdities,”.

As well as feisty British journalist and pamphleteer William Cobbett, who dared to publish tracts asserting that Rush’s yellow fever treatments were both ineffective and dangerous—and “a perversion of nature’s healing powers.” In response, Rush sued Cobbett for libel and won, in “one of the largest libel awards in American history at the time.”

One of Cobbett’s fascinating observations—which reverberates uncannily in the COVID era—was that extreme fear (in this instance, of yellow fever) made members of the public far more willing to subject themselves to Rush’s “experiments” than they otherwise might have been. Cobbett wrote:

[Rush] seized, with uncommon alacrity and address, the occasion presented by the Yellow Fever, the fearful ravages of which were peculiarly calculated to dispose the minds of the panick-struck people to the tolerance, and even to the admiration

, of experiments, which, at any other time, they would have rejected with disdain.

Interestingly, after Rush’s libel victory, Cobbett exacted a modicum of revenge by assembling data from municipal records (acknowledged today as “an epidemiological tour de force”), which pointed to a 56% mortality rate among Rush’s yellow fever patients that contrasted starkly with the physician’s own claim of a greater than 90% survival rate.

When word of those dismal statistics got out to the public, Rush’s medical practice suffered. Undaunted, Rush went on to become Treasurer of the U.S. Mint under President John Adams. As the author of America’s first psychiatric textbook, he is also revered today as “the father of American psychiatry.”

Rush proposed the same general treatments for madness that he favored for physical ailments, supplemented by straitjackets and other “modes of punishments” for tough cases.

For his part, in 1800, a disgusted Cobbett returned to London, where he continued to hold medicine’s feet to the fire, including condemning smallpox vaccination as “quackery.”

A “Patently Criminal” Model

Some modern medical historians are willing to go so far as to characterize medicine, in periods and places like 18th-century America, as “deplorable,” and to suggest that back then, “a doctor was just as likely to kill you as save you.”

Most, however, frame medical barbarity as a thing of the past. Shielded by high-end machines, complex drug technologies, glossy scientific publications, and lingo like “rigorous” and “evidence-based,” the current medical-pharmaceutical-regulatory establishment and its hagiographers would have the public believe that “safe and effective” now rules the day.

There is ample evidence to show that pledges of safety often are either disingenuous or false, and there are indications that Kirby’s description of the medical model as sometimes “patently criminal” was squarely on the mark.

At the level of individual medical practitioners, law firms specialized in malpractice note that if a doctor “appears to be indifferent to patients’ well-being or safety,” that indifference can be grounds for criminal liability.

A search of the word “criminal” on the website of Medpage Today (a conventional news service that is generally protective of medicine’s reputation) brings up countless articles about doctors and other health care providers running “pill mill” operations, carrying out fraud, taking kickbacks, tampering with drugs, faking data, sexually assaulting or abusing patients, and engaging in other types of “unprofessional” and unethical conduct.

The site’s “Investigative Roundups” feature stories (often formulated as questions to soften the impact) with titles like “Columbia protected predator doc?”, “Psychiatrist held patients against their will?”, “$15K surgery shakedown?” or “Doc pushed unneeded surgery?” Other Medpage Today headlines flamboyantly bandy about words like “deadly,” “loophole,” “games,” “tactics,” “unethical,” and “secretive.”

Sometimes, individuals who defend the medical status quo blame whichever reports of misbehavior manage to surface (many do not) on “a few bad apples.” Others, such as Harvard scientist and patient safety advocate Lucian Leape, do the reverse, shifting the blame from “bad people” to nebulous “bad systems;” Leape suggests that a cycle of disrespect is “learned, tolerated, and reinforced in the hierarchical hospital culture.”

The fact is, however, that medical harms flow from both individuals and institutions. Most health care providers operate in broader organizational and corporate contexts—and it is policymakers and decision-makers at those levels who often give medical-pharmaceutical corruption and criminality a green light.

This is illustrated by the phenomenon (for which there is even an academic field of study) called “clinicide,” defined as serial medical killers responsible for “the unnatural death of multiple patients in the course of treatment;” not infrequently, the killers’ host institutions countenance or “enable” this clinicide by choosing to ignore red flags.

As an extension of the “bad apples” argument, some upholders of the status quo point to the fines that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) routinely levies on hospitals and pharmaceutical corporations, suggesting that these are an adequate mechanism to catch and punish players engaged in malfeasance.

However, given that medical-pharmaceutical culprits not infrequently are criminal recidivists and that the fines gener ally amount to “little more than a slap on the wrist,” it is fair to ask “whether such a monetary punitive system really does much to prevent bad behavior.”

Moreover, DOJ rarely prosecutes or holds corporate leaders accountable, despite having a “powerful legal tool” at its disposal to go after the executives at the helm of medical misconduct; it has done so only 13 times since the year 2000.

Instead, many signs point to a wink-and-a-nod sub rosa understanding between the various parties, with the penalties doing nothing to prevent future harms but instead furnishing a generous flow of kickbacks that prosecutors and regulators can funnel into various sectors of the federal budget (see Illegal But Profitable). In fact, under the False Claims Act, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gets a 20 to 1 return on every dollar it “invest[s] in prosecutions and investigations.”

Illegal but Profitable

In 2018, the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen published a report summarizing 27 years of pharmaceutical industry criminal and civil penalties. The report concluded:

To our knowledge, a parent company has never been excluded from participation in Medicare and Medicaid for illegal activities, which endanger the public health and deplete taxpayer-funded programs.

Criminal prosecutions of executives leading companies engaged in these illegal activities have been extremely rare. Much larger penalties and successful prosecutions of company executives that oversee systemic fraud, including jail sentences if appropriate, are necessary to deter future unlawful behavior. Otherwise, these illegal but profitable activities will continue to be part of companies’ business model.

Iatrogenocide Takes Center Stage

Even before COVID, available data indicated that 20th- and 21st-century Western medicine had failed to improve health in any meaningful way, instead trading off the industrial-age diseases of yore for modern chronic disease epidemics, many or most with iatrogenic causes or contributors. Unfortunately, recent events suggest that medicine—forging an unhealthy partnership with government—may now be more dangerous than it has ever been.

Until 2020, the Americans who were most concerned about medical risks and medical criminality belonged to groups already adversely affected, such as those injured by vaccines or opioids. However, with the advent of life-threatening COVID “countermeasures” and lethal protocols in U.S. hospitals and in other countries such as the UK, medical pharmaceutical gangsterism—seemingly occurring with government cognizance—has begun attracting more widespread notice.

When governments began parlaying the dubious health “emergency” into an excuse to authorize and mandate the COVID vaccines and boosters—and proceeded full tilt even when unprecedented injuries and deaths immediately began piling up—some segments of the public saw the contours of an officially sanctioned medical crime.

As Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Vera Sharav communicated in her docuseries Never Again Is Now Global, medical coercion and the suspension of constitutional freedoms have never led anywhere good. Unfortunately, history shows that governments intent on “state repression, brutality and genocide” can usually count on the readiness of some doctors to serve as accomplices, even if their complicity has the potential to turn them into “mass murderers on an exponential scale.”

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