Accountability and taking responsibility for actions is one of the, if you like, bedrocks of medical practice, certainly in private practice, and through my own journeys I do at times get asked to give opinions in medical legal matters and also assist sometimes in issues where doctors are required to do additional education, or have some aspects of their practice audited. And that’s all essentially because they have transgressed, and I think it’s fair to say that the threshold for taking action against doctors is quite low. Now whether that’s good or bad, again people have their own opinions of it and each case does need to be assessed on its merits, but certainly there is, I think quite correctly, a view in the public and probably from regulators and the profession in general that people do need to take responsibility, and nobody is perfect. So it’s not that people meant to do the wrong thing in the vast majority of instances, but responsibility if you have done the wrong thing, and even if you thought it might have been the right thing at the time, is important.
There seem to be some exceptions to this rule, and it seems that the higher up you are the less that applies. And yes, I’m talking about Anthony Fauci. Some of you may have watched his congressional appearance in front of the Senate committee chaired by Senator Rand Paul, where I think the count is on 111 occasions he claimed the Fifth Amendment. Now, I’m pretty sure you’re all familiar with the Fifth Amendment under American law — and look, please, I’m not a lawyer — that you are not obligated to say anything that might be used against you or incriminate you.
Interestingly, even when being asked what day it was and what color tie he had on, he stated that he declined based on his advice from counsel, declined to answer, invoking his rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which again is his right to do. He had been pardoned by former President Joe Biden for all acts committed between 1 January 2014 and 19 January 2025. It’s a fairly long period of time to give somebody a pardon. And I think at the time the question was raised, and in my opinion quite correctly, why does he need to be pardoned? What might he have done that would require such a blanket pardon over such an extended period of time? We’re talking six and a bit years before we even knew about such a virus called COVID, but there it was.
But it also means that in invoking the Fifth — and again, lawyers out there please put comments if I’m completely wrong about this — that if you’ve been pardoned you can’t be prosecuted, and if you can’t be prosecuted, then how can you incriminate yourself? Now I think one catch in all of this is that he can be charged or pursued by state governments in America, or lawyers within a state jurisdiction, but not federally. The pardon only applies to federal jurisdiction. So look, again, he’s taken the advice of counsel, and I think if I were him I would have done the same, but interestingly we really do see how politicized health has become, and to its detriment, because really we’re seeing the media pretty much line up on Fauci’s side. Oh, he’s hard done by, isn’t it? How unfair it is. And probably those perhaps on the Republican side, and generally worldwide on the, in inverted commas, conservative side — although this is not absolute, it is not absolute — very much look, he’s getting his comeuppance.
An open letter by 155 scientists, physicians, and public health advocates called on elected officials to end the vilification and harassment of scientists. How is holding people responsible for their actions vilification and harassment? As I said, I’ve seen significant instances where doctors are called to account for what they’ve done. It’s not deemed to be vilification and harassment. It’s deemed to be you need to be accountable for your actions. And in the main, all of those might have affected a single individual person or a few people, but very limited numbers. In the instance of COVID-19, the policies affected almost every single person on the planet. And you might say, well, Fauci was responsible in America and not in other jurisdictions, and we know Sweden got it right, but most other countries just basically followed America’s lead.
And in Australia, we know that all the chief health officers essentially all sang from the same hymn book. And that hymn book was written by Dr. Anthony Fauci. So it doesn’t really seem that anybody did their own homework or their own due diligence, or say, maybe ask the question — is this the best way to go? And in my opinion, again, people have different opinions on this, it actually gets worse, because any doctor who suggested otherwise faced prosecution and potentially deregistration for asking questions like — is this the right way to go about it?
Well, it’s a fair enough question, and history now shows — and this is by admissions from a number of people in charge at the time in various positions — that it wasn’t right. There was never any basis for masks. There was never any basis for lockdowns. There was never any basis for standing variably one and a half metres or six feet away. But everybody was forced to do it anyway.
So I’ve gone back into the archives, and long before I was doing this podcast, I did have a blog, and I’m going to quote from myself for once — I don’t generally do this.
The real damage from COVID-19 will not be the mild illnesses, or even that a small number will succumb to it rather than the regular flu. The real damage will come from panic and overreaction, with its impact on markets and the real economy. This is already happening. It will be significant and long-lasting.
This is from March 2020.
Previous generations lived through world wars. We may now have to watch Netflix for 14 days. This is when we had two weeks to flatten the curve. For those of you who can remember back, as a society we have lost any form of resilience. When this settles, hopefully the perpetually outraged will have more perspective. It doesn’t look like that’s happened. And this is really what I think still applied, and it’s now been shown to be correct. And I don’t want any credit for this — I was certainly not the only person saying this. Ultimately, COVID-19 will go the way of every other doomsday prediction. Till then — and again, this is March 2020 — keep living your life, support your immune system, and try to see the funny side of human behavior.
I think the funny side did get lost.
And by later that year, it was already becoming apparent. In fact, John Ioannidis, even in March, had outlined that the infection rate was likely to be similar to seasonal flu. And yes, people with existing or pre-existing illnesses, or people over the age of 80, 85, were at higher risk — same as flu, and so it tended to be. But even by the middle of the year there were voices saying that there was going to be problems in terms of people not attending normal medical appointments — so delayed diagnosis for cancer, for example — that mental health could be affected. And we saw significant increases in presentations to emergency department mental health facilities, particularly amongst teenagers and children, but adults as well. And not in Australia, but in America, they were looking to mask two-year-olds. And there’s also been plenty of work showing that development of some of these children has been impacted, and not insignificantly. So these are what we call side effects, or adverse effects. And normally in medicine that is a consideration. If anybody is prescribed a medication, they’re told about the side effects. And people actually do have the right, with some exceptions, to decline treatment if the side effects are worse than the actual effects.
But that was not an option for people during the COVID pandemic.
So whether it’s not probably that helpful to point fingers and apportion blame, and I do understand why there’s reluctance to do that, but equally, there should be the same standard applied to public health officials as applied to anybody else. And that’s not just including doctors. In the financial sector, people are responsible for actions that they do. In fact, in most private transactions, or private businesses or industries, people and boards and companies are held responsible for what they’ve done, even if they thought they were doing the right thing at the time. It just seems that governments don’t get the same standards applied to them. And I think that’s, and in my opinion that’s wrong, but maybe nobody’s asking my opinion.
So yes, people should be held to account, and whether you’re a doctor or a scientist or a candlestick maker really doesn’t matter if you’re being asked to be accountable for your actions. That is not vilification and harassment. That is you are being asked to take responsibility and be accountable for what you’ve done. And anybody who feels they need to take the Fifth Amendment over a hundred times, clearly in my opinion — and again, people may have different opinions on that, and that’s fine — has something to hide. And again, for those who’ve had a look at the emails, this argument about private emails unfortunately for Dr. Fauci also doesn’t stand up, because anything done on a government server in the United States, and I suspect it’s the same in other countries as well — if you’re sending emails from a government on a government server, then that can be and remains the property of the government. So it’s not private emails if you sent them from your government computer and government email address.
So if he wanted to keep his diaries private, all he needed to do was send it from his personal email. But he didn’t, and the rest, as they say, is history.
We can learn. So apart from looking backwards and not forgetting the lessons of history — and we know that if we don’t learn the lessons of history we will make the same errors again — so we can learn and think about what to do next time. And at some point there will be another virus — in fact there are viruses all the time, but there will be another virus, and it might be a bit novel and unique. And rather than locking down the whole world and putting masks on two-year-olds and telling everybody to have vaccines, which they can have, it is quite useful to have vaccines where they actually do stop you getting the virus and do stop transmission — and the COVID vaccines didn’t, and that’s been clearly demonstrated as well, they just didn’t — then we can have a much more reasonable and appropriate response.
And as a sort of final point, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and his colleagues, who put out the Great Barrington Declaration in the second half of 2020, essentially argued for society to continue as normal and have focused protection of those who are most at risk. And rather than heeding that call, Fauci and his cronies sought to shut that down and vilify — I want to talk about vilification and harassment — vilified Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who now has got the head of the NIH. So, you know, karma has been kind, as it should be, to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and his colleagues as well, who got it completely correct.
So ultimately, what is the real take-home message in this? We need a contest of ideas overarching everything else. As soon as we shut down debate and discussion and assume that a few individuals have all the answers, we are in trouble, because nobody knows everything and there needs to be discussion. There needs to be debate. There needs to be multiple voices heard. And then, after that, people can make the best decision that they feel they can on all the available information. But when you don’t have all the available information, and certain opinions and certain views are censored because they don’t agree with that of big public health, we get what we got. I don’t think there’s a large number of people out there who are going to say “I would like to go through that again.”
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Source:
MedPage Today — Washington Watch
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Dr Joe Kosterich – Doctor, Health Industry Consultant and Author
Doctor, speaker, author, and health industry consultant, Joe is WA State Medical Director for IPN, Clinical editor of Medical Forum Magazine, Medical Advisor to Medicinal Cannabis company Little Green Pharma and Course Chair, and writer for Health Cert. He is often called to give opinions in medico-legal cases, has taught students at UWA and Curtin Medical schools and been involved in post graduate education for over 20 years.
A regular on radio and TV, Joe has a podcast – Dr Joe Unplugged, has self- published two books and maintains a website with health information. He has extensive experience in helping businesses maintain a healthy workforce.
Past Chairman of Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association, current Vice President of Arthritis and Osteoporosis WA, Joe previously held senior positions in the Australian Medical Association and has sat on numerous boards.
