Defining Disgraceful & Dishonourable

Do we want doctors to be mindless, obedient robots?

An important hearing begins tomorrow. A hearing that demonstrates why the Freedom Convoy trucker protest was so necessary.

During COVID, a large swath of Canadian society became hypnotized. The values we supposedly cherish - free speech, informed consent, bodily autonomy, due process - were cast aside by some of our most highly educated, highly paid, and prominent individuals.

Thank goodness the truckers provided a counterbalance and profoundly altered the overall trajectory. Yet much of the COVID insanity lingers. This isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

Photo is a screen capture from a video interviewed conducted 1 June 2022. Click image to watch the video.

Tomorrow’s hearing concerns Dr Crystal Luchkiw. On February 23, 2022 - mere days after the Ottawa protest had been violently shut down - the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons restricted her medical license. A month later, they suspended it. But don’t look to the College for a straightforward description of her alleged sins.

A Notice of Hearing posted on its website provides few concrete details yet plenty of pompous, prejudicial, emotionally-charged language. In three pages, the term professional misconduct gets used seven times. Terms such as incompetent and unprofessional are uttered repeatedly. There are also three separate instances of the words disgraceful and dishonourable.

It’s only by consulting a newspaper article that we learn the approximate meat and potatoes of the matter. Dr Luchkiw has been accused of:

1. granting a single patient a vaccine medical exemption

2. expressing inaccurate (aka non-government approved) opinions about the pandemic and COVID vaccines during an interview and on Facebook

3. failing to follow COVID protocols (apparently by continuing to employ an office receptionist who had a face mask exemption)

4. refusing to hand over confidential patient medical records to the College

5. failing to respond to certain other demands by the College

None of these allegations have been proven. But even if every last one of them turned out to be true would that really amount to disgraceful and dishonourable conduct? Is it not possible we’re looking at a conscientious doctor who was acting in good faith? Who was making the kind of nuanced judgment calls doctors are required to make every day? Who may, in fact, have been following the advice of her lawyer (in instances 4 and 5 above)?

Do we not want doctors to be independent, critical thinkers? Or does the College think it’s in the business of forcing physicians to behave like mindless, obedient robots? What’s the point of studying and training for years if College officials who’ve never met the patient insist they know best?

Dr Luchkiw aside, it’s vitally important that our society talk about unprofessional conduct. Many doctors, medical schools, and medical research organizations took pharmaceutical funding. Corporations in a clear conflict-of-interest, corporations that stood to earn billions from COVID vaccines, were handing out money like candy at the height of the pandemic. Multitudes of doctors ate that tainted candy.

For some of us, this is the definition of disgraceful and dishonourable.

Please see this important piece of journalism:

Pfizer Quietly Financed Groups Lobbying for COVID Vaccine Mandates: Many of the supposedly independent consumer, medical and civil rights groups that created the appearance of broad support for the mandate received funding from one of the vaccines’ manufacturers.

Lee Fang points to a 28-page list of grants distributed by Pfizer. These are US grants only. For the first half of 2021 only. Among them is half a million dollars to the Advertising Council. I guess that buys anyone a bit of goodwill.

It’s clear from this document that the entire healthcare cosmos is saturated with Pfizer money. Universities. Hospitals. Medical schools. Medical colleges and academies. Here’s a small sample of what’s in those 28 pages:

• Boston University School of Medicine (3 grants totaling $557k)

• Johns Hopkins University & its Bloomberg School of Public Health (2 grants totaling $550k)

• Rutgers University School of Pharmacy (2 grants totaling $1.9 million)

• National Medical Association - $250k

• American Academy of Pediatrics - $200k

• American College of Cardiology Foundation - $150k

• American Pharmacists Association - $202k

• American Society for Clinical Pathology - $199k

• Lancaster General Hospital - $100k

• Men’s Health Network (3 grants totaling $137k)

• National Breast Cancer Coalition (2 grants totaling $125k)

• Prostate Cancer Foundation - $255k

• Task Force for Global Health - $4 million

---

Pharmaceutical funding isn’t just an American problem. I wrote these articles back in 2021:

• Awash in Big Pharma Funding, Expert Urges COVID Vaccines for Kids Canadian doctor James Kellner receives $3 million from pharmaceutical giants, but is portrayed as a disinterested expert by journalists.

• News Story Relies Solely on Pharma Funded Doctor When a doctor has financial relationships with 4 vaccine manufacturers, every word he utters about vaccines is suspect.

• COVID Vaccines, Heart Attacks & Pharma Funding Are COVID-19 vaccines damaging hearts? Cardiologist says some researchers are keeping quiet for fear of jeopardizing their pharma funding.