According to what is billed as an “exclusive” report by the Washington Post, doctors who refused to go along with the rapidly changing information coming out of the federal government have only rarely been punished.
Across the country, doctors who jeopardized patients’ lives by pushing medical misinformation during the pandemic and its aftermath have faced few repercussions, according to a Washington Post analysis of disciplinary records from medical boards in all 50 states.
State medical boards charged with protecting the American public often failed to stop doctors who went against medical consensus and prescribed unapproved treatments for covid or misled patients about vaccines and masks, the Post investigation found.
At least 20 doctors nationally were penalized for complaints related to covid misinformation between January 2020 and June 2023, according to board documents, which The Post obtained by filing requests with state medical boards and reviewing public records. Five of those doctors lost their medical licenses — one had his revoked, while four surrendered theirs. Discipline is typically connected to patient care, not just what doctors say.
It is impossible to know how many doctors were spreading misinformation because most states do not monitor or divulge those complaints. But The Post’s requests to the boards yielded at least 480 covid-misinformation-related complaints in the last three years — meaning only a tiny fraction of those led to disciplinary action.
In my view, what the Washington Post portrays as a failure is a success.
Medical boards’ ability to determine unprofessional conduct and mete out discipline varies widely by state, with boards typically requiring punishment for misinformation to be linked to patient harm — not merely espousing treatments debunked by science.
No American has to surrender their right to free speech to appease some unelected “professional” organization. If actual harm to patients came out of the medical care provided, there are mechanisms for addressing that. But torquing the elites is not an actionable offense and hasn’t been since around 1765.
If punishment were in order for passing on medical information that was demonstrably false and damaging, Trump’s entire public health apparatus would be in Guantanamo Bay right now. As Johns Hopkins physician and researcher Marty Makray noted, most of what the public health establishment passed on as information turned out to be bullsh**. Here are his top 10.
Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
Misinformation #2: Masks prevent COVID transmission
Misinformation #3: School closures reduce COVID transmission
Misinformation #4: Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection
Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
Misinformation #6: Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates
Misinformation #7: COVID originating from the Wuhan lab is a conspiracy theory
Misinformation #8: It was important to get the second vaccine dose three or four weeks after the first dose
Misinformation #9: Data on the bivalent vaccine is ‘crystal clear’
Misinformation #10: One in five people get long COVID
(As an aside, I find it impossible to believe that this misinformation resulted from good-faith mistakes, as all of the errors cut in one direction: controlling the population.)
We can all add our own to this. For instance, we were told the COVID vaccine protected us from infection and prevented the spread of COVID. That is false. We watched as playgrounds and public beaches were closed down as a safety measure—with zero scientific backing. We were told we had to wear a mask to get to our restaurant table, but we could remove the mask once we were seated.
The Post found just one doctor whose medical license has been revoked for spreading covid misinformation or misleading patients.
Oregon’s state medical board revoked the license of Steven LaTulippe, a family medicine doctor, in September 2021 and fined him $10,000 for refusing to follow covid guidelines in his office and endangering public health and patient safety. The board also cited what it characterized as his professional negligence in treating chronic opioid patients, an accusation he disputed during the board hearing.
At the height of the pandemic, before vaccines were available, LaTulippe and his staff did not wear masks. Patients said they were told to take off their masks when they entered his clinic in Dallas, Ore. Wearing a mask was dangerous, he told them erroneously, because it could contribute to strokes, carbon dioxide poisoning and collapsed lungs, according to disciplinary records and interviews with patients.
Virtually all of the messages that have been debunked were questioned at the time, and the people questioning the “official” information were accused of being crackpots. The Washington Post offers no apology for its role in creating the hysteria and validating guidance that was stupid even at the time, but now it is doubling down and whinging that not enough dissenters were punished.
If there was one clear takeaway from the COVID pandemic, it is that people who claim to be “public health” experts are largely idiots. The corollary to that is a paraphrase of Georges Clemenceau’s “War is too important to be left to generals.” A public health emergency is too important to be entrusted to doctors. While they may, arguably, know what they are talking about in regards to the disease, though, COVID calls that presumption into question, they generally have too much hubris and too little respect for the rule of law, our institutions, and their fellow citizens to be allowed to make decisions on a grand scale.
Without open and vigorous debate, we will repeat the tragedy of COVID, where bureaucrats attacked our rights and freedoms by using our safety as the reason. The Post’s unwillingness to go after the imbeciles who shut down the nation, moved COVID patients into nursing homes, lied to us about the disease, and forced critically ill people to die alone in hospitals ,and instead try to punish individual doctors shows that conformity and control, not any desire to defend the truth, are the goals—and that nothing was learned from the debacle most of us survived.
