Deadly Medicine and Missing Witnesses

In a recent article,

Jonathan Engler

made important connections between the UK Parliament’s newly-passed assisted dying law and Nazi-era euthanasia programs. Closer to my home (Illinois), lawmakers have pushed for similar measures that would legalize state-sanctioned killing under the guise of “medical aid in dying.” The latest attempt failed—but proponents are expected to try again soon.

Deadly Medicine

Such assaults on the sanctity of life — including those committed in the COVID Era — call to mind a powerful and instructive exhibit I saw 20 years ago at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. (Web version archived here.)

Experiencing the exhibit firsthand deepened my understanding of just how widely eugenics was embraced—including by American elites—and how such ideologies evolved and spread, ultimately laying the groundwork for the Nazi Party’s rise and its deliberate, systematic extermination campaigns.

Heinous experiments and concentration camps didn’t pop up overnight. Years of propaganda paved the way for the worst atrocities, seeding messages that were embraced by and made possible in part via compliance of willing medical professionals.

The exhibit book (which I own and recommend) features posters, photos, and documents framing the removal of those deemed “less than,” “dirty,” or “unclean” as noble and necessary for the greater good.

In the preface, USHMM director Sara Bloomfield underscores timeless themes and poses provocative, unsettling questions that resonate in the wake of the COVID Event. An excerpt follows:

During the Holocaust, every institution established to uphold civilized values failed - the academy, the medical, the judiciary, law enforcement, the churches, the governments, and, yes, the medical & scientific disciplines as well.

In the name of utopian ideals, many traditionally charged with the protection of the public good subscribed to the grossest violations of human rights--even mass murder. As has often been said, indifference always is evil's greatest accomplice.

This points to the mission of our Museum: to teach not just the history of the Holocaust but its lessons as well; to teach that nations require of their institutions and citizens an attentive commitment to individual rights, social justice, and respect for humane values.

The exhibition speaks directly to issues that matter now, in our own time.

• What responsibility do medical professionals have to their patients?

• What are the implications of the ways we acquire and apply scientific information?

• Is it always possible to balance the needs of the society as a whole with the right of the individual?

It is our hope that the questions [this exhibit] raises will challenge our visitors to make connections between the past & the present...

Bloomfield’s reflection extends beyond the barbarities of the Holocaust, of course, and apply to other genocides and crimes against humanity and the human body. She correctly identifies institutional failure, with a reminder that institutions don’t act—individuals do. Those who swear oaths to “protect,” and subsequently choose obedience over conscience, conformity over courage, or silence over speaking up are accomplices, if not perpetrators, of lesser and greater evils.

Without equating the Holocaust and the COVID era in motive, severity, duration, or consequence, I remain deeply troubled by the collective unwillingness to confront what medical professionals did—and failed to do—beginning in 2020.

“Murder” may be best reserved for individual acts, but there’s little doubt that public officials and private administrators worldwide activated protocols that led to medical manslaughter. Many analysts - self included - say iatrogenic; increasingly, I wonder if this isn’t a functional euphemism that keeps uncomfortable truths from surfacing.

That so many actions were carried out in the name of stopping or slowing a SARS-related virus never proven to be new, transmissible, or the cause of a unique illness is one of the foundational deceptions that, in my view, makes the COVID Democide among the most egregious crimes against humanity of my lifetime.

Missing Witnesses

Reflecting further on my visits to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: I’ve been there five or six times, and one of the most convicting features (for me) is the black marble wall in the main atrium engraved with words from Isaiah 43:30: “You are my witnesses.”

On the most basic level, a witness is someone who sees an act or event take place. The USHMM preserves those firsthand accounts in myriad brilliant ways, guiding the visitor through that documentation such that one feels like a witness.

During my last visit in January, I couldn’t help but reflect on the “witnesses” to early 2020, when their numbers were suddenly, and I believe deliberately, reduced as third parties (i.e., those who were neither employees nor patients) were barred from healthcare settings. In places like Bergamo and New York City, where extraordinary and unprecedented death spikes were reported, the absence of witnesses commensurate with the toll strongly suggests that the public was shown a distorted version of reality.

Setting aside the question of whether a new, spreading disease was on the scene — and the widespread mistreatment of patients and care home residents around the world — the removal of visitors alone almost certainly increased the risk of patient harm and death. So, in many cases, we are left with witnesses who have a vested interest in saying…nothing.

Sara Bloomfield asked: What responsibility do medical professionals have to their patients? I would add: What responsibility do they have to posterity?

Where are the doctors, nurses, and paramedics who haven’t become social media stars or been given book deals? When will we hear more authentic, unvarnished testimonies—like Pietro’s—about what was seen, what was done, and who was at the helm?

Where are the Charlottes?

No Courage, No Calls, No Inquiry

The year 2025 is half over, and I’ve yet to see a single appointed or elected official in my country muster the courage to create the conditions for medical professionals to come forward and testify. No one in a position of power or influence has called for a serious investigation into what actually happened in hospitals, where, as I and others have repeatedly shown, the majority of deaths occurred in key U.S. locations during the spring of 2020.

Instead, I hear excuses, blame-shifting toward abstractions like “lockdown” or “the response,” and a fixation on the post-shot period that has turned the injection into the centerpiece of advocacy, sometimes (but not always) at the expense of uncovering what actually happened during the first year of the feigned emergency.

Maybe someday there will be an exhibit in some museum somewhere that attempts to tell the true story of the “deadly medicine” and “missing witnesses” in the COVID event.

Or maybe not — if the silence persists, like the official narrative it protects.