American. Black. Doctor: Uncensored
Let’s stop with the COVID-19 madness, shall we? Let’s stop the shutdowns; quit with the face masks. Dr. Marilyn Singleton — yes, that’s “Doctor” — says the numbers being reported don’t justify the political actions being taken. This “new normal” is a defeatist way of thinking.
The COVID-19 lockdown has its benefits: a chapter a day of the unabridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a study in fear and redefined “normal” values, among many other lessons.
Lately I’ve seen face coverings stenciled with “I can’t breathe.” The beauty of the statement is its dual meaning. It can be a nod to George Floyd, an arrestee who apparently suffocated at the hands of a rogue law enforcement officer or it can be a statement of the wearer’s condition behind the mask. More generally, it can be a statement about the suffocation of society as a whole.
Free speech is the bedrock of our politics, but media manipulation is now rampant. Under the guise of fact-checking, our modern day newspapers—YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—have become the arbiters of what constitutes a worthy opinion or fact in contrast to “misinformation.” Scientists were certain that something heavier than air could not maintain flight. The misinformed Wright brothers proved them wrong.
Vladimir Lenin recognized that the media are propagandists and their information presented should be “easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.” With COVID-19, the media create irrational fear with daily charts of deaths and case numbers without corresponding recoveries. They fail to mention that many deaths were of patients with serious underlying conditions or who were already in hospice and had weeks to live and coincidentally tested positive. The raw numbers are unaccompanied by the CDC’s instruction to classify a death as COVID-19 even if merely suspected or, in some cases, with a negative test. There is no corresponding warning with blinking lights that the tests have false positives or that the daily report of “increases” includes old tests that were not previously reported.
As Lenin noted, “ideas are much more fatal than guns.” Thus, where propaganda and media bias do not succeed, censorship will. Currently, a vocal physician is being silenced and investigated for questioning the motives and possible over-reporting of COVID-19 as the cause of death. Censorship is our polite version of “disappearing” dissidents. We are not Communist China and cannot allow the treatment of Dr. Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist to be the “new normal.” In December 2019, he courageously warned his colleagues on social media about the new SARS-like pneumonia cases but knew that he “would probably be punished.” Indeed, Chinese officials forced him to sign a letter accusing him of “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the social order.” Fortunately for scientific advancement of our relentless search for COVID-19 treatments and mitigation, many questioned the official story about the novel coronavirus coming from a pangolin at a Wuhan wet market.
Censorship, corrupt scientific inquiry, and media bias have no place in medicine. It is not clear that lockdowns are scientifically sound. Curiously, social justice protests are allowed despite lockdowns. One epidemiological analysis concluded lockdowns in Western Europe had no effect on COVID-19 deaths. Additionally, studies show severe psychological effects of quarantines. The 5 states with the most COVID-19 deaths from March through April showed a 35 to 400 percent increase in deaths from various non-respiratory underlying causes, including diabetes, heart diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and cerebrovascular diseases. Some 80,000 diagnoses of five common cancers may be missed or delayed by early June because of disruptions to medical care caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Most reviews conclude that masks do not slow down the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes COVID-19). Studies show non-medical masks do not stop aerosolized droplets less than 2.5 microns. A group of 239 scientists from multiple disciplines from 32 countries have recently agreed that SARS-CoV-2 is spread by such small droplets. They recommend improving indoor ventilation infection controls as the key protective measure. Handwashing and social distancing—but not masks—were advised. The CDC recommends masks.
Faced with a global pandemic, physicians were exploring hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which had been favorably studied during the 2003 SARS epidemic, as a prophylactic or an early treatment. Numerous reports of HCQ’s efficacy on thousands of patients continue to mount. Once the media labelled it “Trump’s drug,” the fix was in. The long-awaited randomized clinical trial showing no benefit was gleefully reported by the media. However, the media were silent when the study was found to be so corrupt that it had to be retracted. Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital’s large 3-month observational study that showed a significant reduction in mortality in hospitalized patients with HCQ and validated HCQ’s over 60-year record of safety garnered little media attention.
These (purposefully) chaotic times are an opportunity for a movement toward government control and the suppression of individuality. Lockdowns keep us apart and stifle the free exchange of ideas and social communion. As Eric Hoffer explained in True Believer, a mass movement deliberately makes the present “mean and miserable. . . . People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident.” Becoming a psychological cripple is not an option.
Is this chaos a new form of plastic surgery? When the bandages (masks) are removed will you be a changed person?
I grew up in a segregated neighborhood where within three months of our Doberman’s death, our house was burglarized 4 times. Thus, a new architectural feature: burglar bars. I can’t imagine my old neighborhood with no police to protect us. Our experience reflected the 2016 and 2019 studies showing no racial bias in police shootings—what Harvard’s Roland G. Fryer Jr. called “the most surprising result of my career.”
Year after year, this Boomer Black woman has seen the country change for the better. It was the ever-present burglar bars that made me appreciate integration all the more. Now I can live in any neighborhood I choose. As Black people moved through an integrated society, negative attitudes changed. While the Great Society’s federal poverty programs helped around the edges, the rules for some programs encouraged mothers to jettison their children’s father from the home. Fatherless children are more likely to be high school drop-outs, thus limiting their opportunities for the future. There must be more to social policy than throwing federal dollars at “the underserved.” Reliance on government money is the road to a permanent low income. This saps the recipient of dignity and the spirit of achievement.
Welfare programs hurt more than they have helped by marrying the recipients to the government. Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver said it well: “What we have to do is organize people in free institutions that can put them to work, and then they can draw their living out of our economy, not out of the federal treasury. …If we [create projects] through the state like President Roosevelt did with the New Deal, you augment the power of the state. But if you do it through decentralized structures that are controlled by the people, then we maintain our freedom, within a free institution.”
Black activists complained that cities were run by White men. For years we’ve had Black mayors, chiefs of police, and school superintendents. Sadly, little has changed. As of 2013, only 59 percent of Black males finished high school. High school drop-outs have a 70 percent chance of going to prison. Black folks cannot partake of the opportunities in front of them without a good education. Many times, the worst teachers are shunted to poor neighborhoods with substandard schools. Meanwhile, “progressives” bow down to the unions and oppose school choice, and paradoxically champion the free flow of illegal aliens for cheap labor thus displacing Black high school drop-outs from these unskilled jobs.
Social Justice Warriors and White teenagers from well-heeled neighborhoods seem to think there were no successful Black folks until the SJWs decided to rescue us. My grandfather graduated from a White medical school in 1905. My mother’s “big sister” became a dentist in the 1940s. Repeat: Black female dentist, 1940s.
Oh yes, the SJWs lovingly suggest you read self-flagellating books about how every White person is a racist. Why don’t they ever suggest 1950s tennis trailblazer Althea Gibson’s “I Always Wanted to Be Somebody.” Or “Why Should White Guys have All the Fun” by Reginald Lewis, a poor Black kid who attended college on a scholarship and Harvard Law School, worked his way up in the financial world of leverage buy-outs, and in 1987 bought Beatrice International for $985 million.
Predictably, the SJWs find an excuse for why some Blacks are able to make something out of their lives and are eager to blame faceless White devils for the failures of Black folks. Tell this to a regular guy from Twitter: “I’m a 33 year old Black male and I have NEVER been oppressed. . . I can buy a car, I can buy a home, I can obtain a passport, I can WORK. I love this great country and proud to be an American. . .” Of course, he was labelled with the obligatory Uncle Tom moniker.
Democrats had the presidency, the House, and the Senate for 2 years during Barack Obama’s presidency. It’s curious that there were no mass nationwide protests under Obama’s watch, even with police-involved deaths. Did the civil rights advocates think he was actually doing something for Black people? Was he given a pass because he is Black? Of course, giving Black people a pass is so racist; it implies that Black people are not up to the task. What is going on now is beyond protesting. It is sick, cult-like behavior. White people kneeling in front of Black people professing their brokenness and begging forgiveness. For what? The immutable trait of their skin color? What about the descendants of Black slave owners? If you can find them, they should probably be thrashed. I would have not a scintilla of respect for anyone who knelt before me and apologized for being alive.
Let’s stipulate that some people (both Black and White) are actual racists. Tarring all people with the same brush is a dangerous road to travel and risks the loss of good will. While protesters say they want a conversation about race, why would anyone converse with a disdainful overlord wannabe who has determined that you are lower than a worm’s belly at the outset? This is a recipe for a race war, not peace.
As a physician, I cannot ignore the plain fact that the people who champion social distancing and mask shaming are silent about the current large gatherings of protesters standing shoulder-to-shoulder. This must be one smart virus that can tell the difference between anti-economic lockdown/let me feed my family protesters and Black Lives Matter protesters.
And why do only some Black lives matter? Nineteen persons were killed in Chicago during the last weekend of May as the Black Lives Matter protests rolled on. With its Black superintendent of police and Black mayor, from January 1 to June 1, 2020, Chicago had 236 homicides, 165 of whom were known to be Black. None were killed by the police. Most were under 30 years old. Where are the national television stories and public vigils? Read these names and weep.
Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is Immediate Past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School. Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers.
Politicians are a strange lot. Not content with merely being Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi is moonlighting as Surgeon General, opining on what medications the President should be taking. Service to the public is a distant memory. The new charge is to invent catchy phrases, like the “new normal,” to quietly coax us into obeying dictates, while ignoring facts and science.
It is not normal to base lifting the lockdowns on the trend in positive novel coronavirus (aka SARS-CoV-2) tests. Predictably, positive tests (with many folks never becoming symptomatic) will continue to increase as more tests are done. Given that the stated goal of lockdowns was to lessen the strain on hospital resources, using hospitalization trends makes more sense.
It is not normal for New York and Minnesota governors to insist that COVID-19 patients be admitted to nursing homes, even after it became clear that nursing homes were a hotspot for infections and up to 81% of COVID-19 deaths.
It is not normal for healthy people to walk around wearing masks—particularly when it is not recommended by the sainted World Health Organization.
It is not normal to never see your parents, children, or grandparents. Older folks suffer from loneliness in the best of times.
It is not normal for children to stay home from school indefinitely. When children do go back to school, it is not normal to tell them they have to wear masks and might not be able to play or eat with one another. Meanwhile, the CDC’s latest report tells us that the infection fatality rate for those aged 0-49 years is 0.05%. The CDC’s latest numbers are what Stanford researchers predicted in April.
It is not normal to have cellphone apps that track your movements. I suppose helicopter parents and stalkers would make good use of them.
It is not normal to propose “immunity passes” enabling the holders to move about society unimpeded. Immunity passes make no scientific sense given that the serology tests are unreliable, the length of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, and invites social stigmatization.
The real “new normal” is politicians being blatant with their old games. It is normal for California’s Governor Newsom to make a secret $1 billion deal with BYD, a Chinese-based electric bus maker, to manufacture N95 masks at $3.30 a piece. Kudos to his fellow Democrat legislators for seeking transparency about his pandemic spending spree. To his credit, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti purchased 24 million “Made in America” masks from Honeywell at 79 cents a mask.
COVID-19 is a handy justification for Congress to promote a political ideology rather than propose targeted measures to assist those struggling with the consequences of the virus. The HEROES Act, the fourth stimulus bill, presents a path to universal basic income by paying some workers more to stay home than they would receive by returning to work. The CARES Act suspended student loan payments, but the HEROES Act paves the way for free college tuition for all by forgiving up to $10,000 of student loans for every borrower.
Moreover, the HEROES Act contains a multitude of other agenda-driven programs like access to financial services and the marketplace for minority-owned cannabis-related businesses, diversity in banking, a Post Office bail-out, $50 million to the Environmental Protection Agency for environmental justice grants, economic impact payments to illegal immigrants, permanent voting by mail, and the clearly relevant requirement that the President inform Congress of the reasons for not filling a vacancy for an Inspector General position.
The proposed Medicare Crisis Program Act of 2020 would provide health insurance for those who lost their health insurance due to the COVID-19 lockdown and its consequences. We want to help those who lost their jobs, but why use a newly-minted premium-free Medicare program as the vehicle? Is it to get people accustomed to Medicare covering all age groups?
The CONTACT initiative requires the CDC to work with states to implement a national system for testing, contact tracing, surveillance, containment and mitigation of COVID-19. (Have we done this for the infectious and deadly flu?). The CDC regulations, instruct authorities to use the “least restrictive means” in implementing public health measures. However, “when an individual is identified as a threat to the health and welfare of others, such as refusing medical treatment at a healthcare facility and refusing to self-quarantine, the government may take the individual into custody.”
The government has been known to abuse its power—whether through cultivating fear, regulatory force, or by individual miscreants. Frederick Douglass warned, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.” We cannot let a declaration of a public health emergency become the new gauge of what it takes to break our spirit of liberty.
It seems like some folks have used the ghost of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara as their guide through the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States. “To send men to the firing squad [job loss, suicide, substance abuse], judicial [scientific] proof is unnecessary… This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate [of President Trump].”
Apparently, Ché was on to something. Forty-three percent of U.S. adults and 52 percent of low income adults say they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut due to the outbreak. How can any American stuck at home not be disgusted by politicians who are still collecting their full paychecks while the middle class and working poor descend into an abyss. To be fair, Michigan’s governor announced that she would take a 10 percent pay cut in solidarity with the people who had a 100 percent pay cut. Nonetheless, many have unquestionably accepted the government’s oft times contradictory mandates.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that despite the disruption of their lives 80 percent of Americans say strict shelter-in-place measures are worth it to protect people. This blind acquiescence is evidenced by unthinking people wearing masks while driving alone in their cars with closed windows. And perversely, designer face masks are proliferating. Wearing a mask is a sometimes necessary, serious, unpleasant thing to do. It is not fun. It is not cute.
It is not only the evil Chinese Communists that caused panic about the coronavirus in the U.S. via text messages falsely saying President Trump was imminently going to lock down the entire country. The media are complicit in the hysteria. Again, Ché Guevara had it right: “Foreign reporters—preferably American—were much more valuable to us at that time than any military victory. Much more valuable than recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” Media hacks are collecting their paychecks to scare our bodily fluids out of us with day in, day out, COVID, COVID, COVID. We’re all going to die! (Of course, they don’t discuss the 1,300 people a day who die of complications of high blood pressure.)
COVID-19’s angel of death spares most people: 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths occurred among persons aged 60 years and over; about 25 percent of all deaths were sick and elderly residents of long term care facilities; nearly 90 percent of persons hospitalized have one or more underlying medical conditions. Oddly, the CDC is boosting the official death toll by including not only people who died due to COVID-19 but those who died of other causes and had the virus that causes COVID-19 in their system.
Antibody testing studies in Santa Clara and Los Angeles (California) and Miami Dade (Florida) counties revealed that infection with the virus that causes COVID-19 is more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. The mortality is likely 0.1 percent (like the seasonal flu). Many researchers concluded that the data indicated that the virus is widely circulating, we will get infected but likely not die, and the population may develop immunity. The tyrants-in-waiting use the data to mandate lock downs until every last vestige of COVID-19 has disappeared from the face of the earth or a vaccine materializes—which may be never.
Americans have been terrified into accepting tyranny and poverty, softened with assurances that the current state of affairs is “normal.” The airwaves’ constant blare of “we’re all in this together” does not make it so. Some people remain more equal than others. Just ask Nancy Pelosi with her $24,000 refrigerator filled with $13 a pint ice cream that she “gets by” on. Or professional athletes who received their elective surgeries while the rest of the peasants were denied their cancer treatment or the treatment of a painful joint. Or the TV star who complained about being “in jail” in her $45 million home.
Meanwhile, liquor sales are up 55 percent, calls to suicide hotlines and suicides have dramatically increased, domestic violence is rising, and anti-anxiety medication prescriptions are up 34 percent since the virus consumed our lives. We are on the path to becoming fat, depressed, drunken wife-beaters. We are told to ignore statistics because every death is tragic. If the lockdowns persist, every life is a tragedy in the making.
This epidemic has become the opportunity to change the U.S. from a free, energetic, resourceful individualistic society to an authoritarian, collectivist society of broken souls addicted to government largesse. To wit, a Los Angeles version of wealth redistribution: People can’t work so they can’t pay their rent. The mom and pop landlords can’t pay their property taxes. The city then buys the “distressed” properties from desperate landlords at cut-rate prices and turns them over to the homeless. Ché would be proud.
Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is Immediate Past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School. Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers.
By Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD
During my last visit to the grocery store, after directing me to the hermetically sealed conveyor belt, the clerk grinning proudly said, “welcome to the new normal.” No, thank you. These ad hoc restrictions on our liberties are not normal—at least in the United States of America.
In the name of public health, prisoners have been released from jail, physicians are being restricted in what drugs they can use to treat their COVID-19 patients, and cancer patients are having their treatments delayed as “elective.”
Every day 7,400 people die in the United States from many causes, including infectious diseases, but running totals are not broadcast on every medium. The unceasing barrage of news programs about the coronavirus/COVID-19 have become a means to whip us into submission.
The mayor of Los Angeles is perversely proud that 99 percent of “non-essential” businesses are closed and threatens to sue those who have not closed. A local town has issued 129 citations at $1,000 a pop for non-compliance. Riverside county plans to cite residents witnessed to have their faces uncovered.
Obamacare’s architect, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, has suggested that the country stay on lockdown for one and a half years, or “until we find a vaccine or effective medications.” This is lunacy.
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 40 percent of women, 37 percent of men and nearly half of parents with a child younger than 18 years old report they have either lost their job, income, or had their hours reduced without pay. A classic 1979 study found that for every 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate, mortality increased by 1.2 percent, cardiovascular disease by 1.7 percent, cirrhosis of the liver by 1.3 percent, suicides by 1.7 percent, arrests by 4 percent, and reported assaults by 0.8 percent. Pre-pandemic, nearly 20 people per minute were physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. Predictably, episodes of domestic violence and child abuse have now increased. Closed businesses have become easy targets for thieves.
There is a rational course of action without shutting down human contact and the economy. Sweden has no more deaths or symptomatic infections per capita than many other countries despite choosing to merely encourage its citizens to physically distance as much as possible.
We must allow physicians to treat their patients as they see fit with effective drugs. Multiple physicians around the world are reporting success with hydroxychloroquine: a new off-label use for this FDA-approved drug for a new virus. If this virus is akin to Armageddon, then all reasonable ideas should be welcomed. The erection of barriers to the use of this potentially life-saving drug by many governors and state medical boards is appalling and unforgiveable. Hydroxychloroquine was approved for medical use in the United States more than 60 years ago. It has been safely used for years for malaria prophylaxis, autoimmune disease, and porphyria, a blood disease affecting hemoglobin (that carries oxygen to our tissues). Hydroxychloroquine is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, the “most effective and safe” to meet the most important needs of a health system. Widespread use of this inexpensive drug could obviate the need for ICU beds and ventilators.
In addition to early treatment, we must have a rational policy for getting people back to work. All states are not affected equally. Let’s test every working person for antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. We may find that many have had an asymptomatic infection. These immune individuals will not pass the disease to others. At-risk individuals can choose to stay at home.
Ending the lockdown is not about Wall Street or disregard for people’s lives; it about saving lives. Advanced stages of non-COVID diseases, suicides, domestic violence, increase in substance abuse and mental health disorders, permanent poverty, and dissolution of the middle class are unacceptable. Our society must not be fractured into those who live in gated communities and those who live in the streets, trailer parks, and decaying homes that they can no longer afford to keep up.
We all want to do our part to attenuate the number of serious COVID infections in our communities. But we cannot hand our lives over to the government, particularly when the virus has become an opportunity for Congress to pass pork-filled legislation, for showboating governors to out-quarantine each other, and for politically connected tech companies to share cell phone tracking data with the government. I would hate to think some have a financial incentive for promoting a yet-to-be tested and approved vaccine in lieu of an effective, inexpensive and readily available treatment.
People are saying America will never be the same. Hopefully, this will not mean the statists have succeeded in using COVID as an excuse to enact laws that will permanently curtail our liberties and freedom to practice medicine in the best interest of our patients.
Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is Immediate Past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School. Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers.
By Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD
While on lockdown to save our neighbors from a lonely death from the disease called CoViD-19, many of us have turned to movies. I beg you not to rent Pandemic, Contagion, or 28 Days Later. Try Harriet instead. Harriet Tubman was the epitome of bravery and courage in the face of insurmountable odds. Her escape from slavery and returning again and again into the belly of the beast to save others should inspire us all. The health professionals working day and night to care for an ever increasing number of sick patients make me proud to be a doctor. And kudos to the grocery store workers, postal workers, police and many others who are performing essential jobs with a smile.
This is the time for positive action, not panic. For background, coronaviruses are a big family of RNA viruses named for the crown-like spikes found on their surface. They exist around the world cause mostly upper respiratory tract infections (“common colds”) in adults. This new coronavirus is in the same family as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) identified in humans in 2002 and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) identified in 2012. The CoViD-19 virus is called SARS-CoV-2 for its similarity to SARS-CoV.
While scientists are furiously experimenting with possible vaccines, the virus is sprinting from country to country despite travel restrictions. There are likely among us “healthy carriers” of the virus who have no signs or symptoms of the disease but can infect others. So if CoViD-19 is here for a while, the world has to look to effective treatments of afflicted individuals today—not a year from now. Some researchers seem to have found a strong contender.
Separate studies from a major medical center in France and jointly from South Korea and China have found that inexpensive, readily available anti-malarial drugs chloroquine phosphate or hydroxychloroquine are an effective treatment. But the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is dragging its feet, despite the President’s urgings, to approve the drug for anti-viral use. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the White House’s advisor has dismissively called the studies “anecdotal” meaning “based on or consisting of reports or observations of usually unscientific observers.”
In 2004, separately a Belgian virologist and our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that chloroquine inhibited SARS-CoV growth in primate cells when given before or after exposure to the virus. Human trials could not be done because thankfully the SARS epidemic had just ended. Fast forward to February 2019. In South Korea, these drugs were given by physicians and scientists in the CoViD-19 Central Clinical Task Force. These studies showed “certain curative effect” with “fairly good efficacy.” Further, patients treated with chloroquine demonstrated a better drop in fever, improvement of lung CT scan images, and required a shorter time to recover compared to parallel groups.
More promising is a study of 36 patients actively ill from CoViD-19 by a noted research team from France. Of the 20 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone, 70 percent had no detectable virus within 6 days; those treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (an antibiotic with some anti-viral action) had a 100 percent success rate. Yes, the study is small, but these are extraordinary times.
On March 22, Gov. Cuomo announced that the FDA is allowing New York state to start a trial of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Let’s move on this!
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are approved by the FDA for malaria, rheumatoid arthritis, and systemic lupus erythematosus. The FDA is well aware that physicians prescribe plenty of drugs that are “off label,” that is drugs approved by the FDA for other conditions. Indeed, one fifth of all prescriptions are off label. For example, aspirin was approved for pain relief, but had many years of off-label success for the prevention of heart attacks before the FDA finally approved the off-label use.
Mike Tyson said “we all have a plan until we are punched in the face.” FDA’s “plan” is to regulate products and promote safe and effective drugs. This is the FDA’s moment to bravely keep us safe by shifting gears and deregulating a valuable product. Pharmacists must be allowed to fill such prescriptions. Let doctors do what they do best: use their independent judgment. Let physicians consult with their patients and let them choose to take the off-label medicine, or approved anti-viral medicines that have failed against CoViD-19 in studies—or no treatment at all.
While people are struggling to pay for their next meal, we need bold action now. For 6 billion dollars all Americans could be treated—saving hundreds of billions of dollars in lost income and retirement savings.
Bayer began with donating 3 million tablets to our government. More companies are stepping up. Novartis has pledged a global donation of up to 130 million hydroxychloroquine tablets, pending regulatory approvals for COVID-19. Mylan is increasing production in West Virginia to make 50 million tablets. Teva is donating 6 million tablets to hospitals around the U.S. For context, each patient’s treatment would use up to14 tablets.
Do your job, FDA and protect the public. Approve hydroxychloroquine now for COVID-19. Meanwhile, physicians may legally prescribe these drugs because they are approved for other indications.
Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is Immediate Past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School. Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers.
In today’s brave new world, imagine receiving a letter from the school principal about your only child: Your son will not be home tonight but your daughter will be home in a few days.
Science deniers are teaching and molding our children. Regardless of scientific data about genetics and biology, some folks—including our august politicians—contend that people can change genders. Science lesson: there are 2 genders. The X chromosomes and Y chromosomes determine sex. With rare exceptions of random abnormalities, female is XX and male is XY. People who undergo sex reassignment procedures do not become the opposite sex; they merely change their outward appearance.
For several years, California law has allowed students to participate in sex-segregated school programs, activities, and facilities, including bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams, consistent with their gender identity, regardless of the gender listed on the student’s records. Privacy alert: when in gym class locker rooms, most high school girls don’t want to undress in front of boys who identify as girls. With regard to safety and competitive fairness, biological males retain their natural advantages over female athletes despite testosterone hormone suppression. Ignoring reality, the House of Representatives passed the “Equality Act” which requires schools to allow biological males who identify as girls to compete in female sports, ironically disadvantaging women.
Parents are left out of the equation, as the government usurps their right and duty to raise their children. In Wisconsin, the “Guidance and Policies to Support Transgender, Non-binary & Gender-Expansive Students” mandates that children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
Going three steps farther, California permits children to receive contraceptive hormones and abortions without parental consent based on the student’s right to privacy. Now the California Teachers Association wants to extend student privacy to the provision of hormones to students who want to change their gender. Such a decision should not be within the purview of teachers, particularly when trading heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and infertility for what could be a phase or manifestation of an unrelated emotional problem in a developing brain is at stake.
A number of studies found that 85 percent of children experiencing gender nonconformity or gender dysphoria before the age of 10 years did not assume that gender role in adolescence. Because of our “limited ability” to predict whether gender nonconformity in a child will persist in the future, pursuing medical intervention in children was not recommended.
In adolescence, there is some question whether there is “social contagion” involved with gender issues. Some 87 percent of parents reported that along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, the child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar timeframe, or both. The study concluded that rapid onset gender dysphoria was a maladaptive coping mechanism, similar to anorexia. “‘Gender dysphoria’ may be used as a catch-all explanation for any kind of distress, psychological pain, and discomfort that an [adolescent] is feeling while transition is being promoted as a cure-all solution.”
Would ethical physicians even consider acquiescing to the demands of patients with body integrity disorder? This condition also begins in early adolescence when the patient feels the need to have a healthy limb amputated.
Nonetheless, the age at which children are medicalized is getting younger. Puberty-blocking drugs are routinely given to prepubescent children. Girls as young as 12 are injected with testosterone, while teen boys are treated with feminizing hormones. The rate of “gender-confirming” surgeries are increasing each year and are being performed on minor children. Girls as young as 16 have had their breasts, uterus, and ovaries removed. Given the uncertainties and fluidity of childhood gender issues, invasive medical intervention crosses the line into child abuse.
How far will the “educators” go to expose children to alternative gender and “queer” life choices? Public libraries are hosting “Drag Queen Story Hours” for children aged 3 to 11. Some schools bring the drag queens into the classrooms where students are a captive audience. According to the organizers, the point of the Drag Queen Story Hour is to “give kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” I remember a time when drag queen entertainment was reserved for night clubs. Teaching tolerance and acceptance of others is an admirable goal, but exposing children needlessly to adult fare goes too far.
And No, I’m not an unwoke LGBTQaphobe. Take it from a drag queen: “I have no idea why you [mothers] want drag queens to read books to your children. What in the hell has a drag queen ever done to make you . . . admire them so much, other than put on makeup and jump on the floor and writhe around and do sexual things on stage? I have absolutely no idea why you would want that to influence your child.”
Home schooling never looked so good.
As the death toll and cases of 2019- nCoV (aka novel coronavirus) infection rises, our curiosity increases as to the epidemic’s when, why, where, and how. Is the new virus naturally occurring, animal to human transmission, a bioweapon? “Official stories” aside, the world wide information highway is our best available tool to look for answers. The truth will eventually be revealed. As of the first week in February, folks are being quarantined as some 4,000 cases a day are diagnosed. And the physician who warned officials early on was verbally quarantined as a rumor monger, now has died of the disease.
Censorship has consequences not only for public safety but for shrinking the marketplace of ideas. Thus, with all the issues about which to educate ourselves, we should all be outraged at Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to censor “disinformation” on social media. Now her plan to “create civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating false information” is limited to influencing elections. But once acquiesced to, censorship tends to metastasize to other areas. The paternalistic powers that be, worried that the unwashed masses will not be able to discern conspiracy theories from alternate positions, will determine your opinion for you.
Social media, while ubiquitous and public, are private speech. For years, social media platforms have “moderated” content using opaque algorithms that are finally coming to light. While safeguards were designed to eliminate dangerous or abusive content, certain viewpoints are more likely to be censored by Twitter and Facebook than others, perverting the marketplace of ideas.
Censorship has now infiltrated our routine social interactions under the guise of offensiveness. There was a time when the seven words you cannot say on television were blatant profanities. Now it’s like whack a mole trying to keep up with what we are allowed to say not only online but in polite mixed company. California tried to pass a law where someone using “he” instead of “she” could face a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail. It’s gotten to the place where animal lovers are offended if we call our dogs “pets” rather than our companions.
Most importantly, political opinions should go viral, not be quarantined. Many folks with opinions differing from those of the tribal chieftains find themselves whispering in dark corners like drug dealers. Actually, drug dealers in San Francisco have it better: they can sell drugs openly on the street without recourse. The LGBT tribe attempted to quarantine gay conservatives who did not fit the mold by cancelling scheduled #WalkAway town hall venues citing #WalkAway as a hate group. The hate? Encouraging LGBT folks to leave the Democrat party. Undeterred, they move the town halls to the streets. Scott Presler, a conservative gay man who is cleaning up inner cities across America, concludes that “what the left fears most is other people seeing that we exist.”
We have presidential candidates with disparate views from socialism to freedom from government regulations. We want Bernie Sanders to explain why public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries is something that would improve our lives in the long term and how that is consistent with our Constitution. Or Pete Buttigieg to defend abolishing the electoral college. What we don’t want is the power brokers quarantining those who do not bow to their orthodoxy. Why is it that CNN excluded Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (who is known for not being influenced by special interest groups) from its town halls despite her having higher poll numbers than participants Andrew Yang and Deval Patrick? Why did the Democratic National Committee change the debate rules for Michael Bloomberg but not for Julian Castro or Cory Booker?
When it comes to medical care, physicians want to be free to discuss all sides of any issue with patients. If a physician believes mutilating young children at the altar of transgenderism is wrong, she should be free to say so. If a physician wants to discuss the pros and cons of vaccination with his patients, his license should not be at risk.
If some physicians believe that single payer health care is wrong for the country’s medical care, we want a discussion—not to be labelled a heartless, cruel ignoramus. If we do not want medical decisions to be made by bureaucrats, do not want rationing, and do not want decreased medical innovation, we want the chance to present the facts. While rank partisanship keeps legislation that promotes personalized medical care from being brought to the House floor, Walmart and CVS are opening clinics staffed by nurse practitioners. We cannot let patients’ only options be big corporations or big government.
As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without a demand…The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.” We cannot cede our personal power to the government. Surely the government has its Constitutional duties, but just like with containing the 2019-nCoV virus, we still must wash our own hands and cough into our own elbows.
By Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bond to Service for a Term of Years [i.e., indentured servants], and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons [i.e., slaves].” U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 2.
In the spirit of fake news, Black History Month provides a forum for news pundits to lament that the Founding Fathers thought the relative worth of black persons was three fifths of a person. They should (and likely) know better. The Three-fifths Clause is not about black or white but was a formula for counting slaves for purposes of congressional representation and taxation. Clearly slavery dehumanizes the enslaved, but the Three-fifths Clause was a compromise that was a partial win for abolitionists.
Free black persons existed long before the Constitution was written. The first Africans brought into captivity to colonial Virginia in 1619 became indentured servants who were freed typically after 7 years just as their white counterparts. Other slaves were freed when they converted to Christianity.
The proposed Constitution allowed one representative to Congress for each 30,000 inhabitants in a state, in contrast to the existing Continental Congress, where each state had an equal vote. The initial suggestion at the sometimes contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention was that representation be based on all free persons. But slaves were half the population in some southern states. Despite slaveholders counting slaves as their property, they also wanted to count slaves as if they were free inhabitants (i.e., “whole persons”), thus increasing the South’s representation in Congress—and essentially be rewarded for having more slaves. Cleverly, Northern abolitionists argued that if the South could count slaves, then the North should be able to count livestock for purposes of representation.
To resolve the issue, liberal Pennsylvania delegate and future Supreme Court justice James Wilson proposed the Three-fifths clause as a necessary compromise to gain the South’s support for the new Constitution. The three-fifths of a vote provision applied only to slaves, not to free blacks in either the North or South. Thus, the much-maligned clause actually benefitted the abolitionists and the slaves by limiting the pro-slavery States’ representation in Congress.
The first U.S. census in 1790 showed a population of about 4 million Americans. Nineteen percent were black and about 13 percent of those black Americans were free. By 1860, as more states abolished slavery and slaves were voluntarily freed or purchased their freedom (manumission) in the South, about a half million free blacks lived in the U.S. with more in the southern states than in the North.
Electorally, slave status mattered. Free blacks could hold office in some states and could vote. As Justice Benjamin Curtis noted in his dissent in the infamous 1856 Dred Scott decision, “Several of the States have admitted persons of color to the right of suffrage, and, in this view, have recognised them as citizens, and this has been done in the slave as well as the free States.” Black votes were not trivial: black votes helped to ratify the new Constitution and in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1700s, more blacks than whites voted in elections.
Today’s “woke” social justice warriors rail that the racist Founding Fathers should have abolished slavery altogether right then and there. Our Founders would have preferred to do so. Great Britain was making boatloads of money from the slave trade and prevented the abolition of slavery in the colonies. In 1774, at the First Continental Congress, delegates Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin called to end the importation of slaves by December 1, 1776. This provision was put in the Articles of Association of the Continental Congress. At the January 9, 1776 Second Continental Congress, a resolution to end of the importation of slaves to America was passed. Of course, the 13th through 15th Amendments freed the slaves, gave them full citizenship, and males the right to vote.
Witnessing our current vitriolic political divides over less weighty issues, it is hard to imagine the determination and negotiating skills our Founders’ needed to bring differing philosophies together to form a new country with new values based on liberty for all. Rectifying our social ills begins with telling the whole truth. Truth #1: The Three-fifths clause was not about the relative worth of a black person. Truth #2: Black people owned slaves (as workers, not family). Truth #3: All white men are not bad—now or 400 years ago.
Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is Immediate Past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School. Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers.