On Thursday, we received a copy of an open letter to Richard Hart. The letter is 47-pages long and deals with Hart’s September 23 public comments about Loma Linda and the Covid-19 pandemic. The author is Doug Hackleman. While Fulcrum7 does not necessarily share every viewpoint of the author, we found the letter to be a fascinating read, offering insights into Covid-19 and generational and corporate Adventism.
We wouldn’t ask our readers to read 47-pages, so we are including several disconnected excerpts from the open letter to stimulate interest. Here they are:
Dear Dr. Hart September 27, 2021
Two of your recent writings about the COVID-19 crisis, “Special message from our President on the COVID-19 vaccine” (July 22) and another more extended “Notes From the President” (August 26) both on the LLUH news site seem somewhat misinformed, surprisingly shaming, socially divisive, and almost threatening to employees who are already apprehensive both about the pandemic and their employment.
Your most recent public comments (September 23) about the virus were embedded in a congratulatory, appreciation-focused review of how heroically the Loma Linda University Health work force performed during the construction of its 17-story new hospital, and all of that despite the ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.
You and I share a considerable irony. We find ourselves the indirect beneficiaries of William Miller on whose infamous eisegesis SDA founders, Joseph Bates, James White, and Ellen Harmon doubled down to conceive a denomination which continuing growth depends on the selective obscurantism that permits it simultaneously to utilize the science of targeted proton-beam cancer therapy even as it insists on a world created in six 24-hour days less than 10,000 years ago. It is a church which teaches that the United States government is the shape shifting beast of Revelation 13 even as its flagship center of healing in 2009 and 2010 moved heaven and earth to become an Accountable Care organization that could accept obscene amounts of money from that beast to treat so many patients of the optimistically named Inland Empire.
For nearly two years now most of the human race has attended a never-ending masquerade ball wearing face coverings to stop the Wuhan virus.
I wear them publicly to avoid conflict but feel foolish and a little dishonest doing it.
Research doesn’t support masking in hardly any situation, especially driving your car alone with the windows up and the AC blasting. It is one of the funniest things you see around Southern California, but it is frightening to realize that the same people sit on juries.
There is evidence that, standing alone, seems to affirm parts of your one note samba about vaccines, and there is evidence that assuredly challenges it. But the big media outlets television, cable, publications (print and online), and internet platforms of enormous reach have openly conspired (oxymoron alert) to tell just one story and to ignore, block, and trash counter evidence and narratives or make certain their evidence and rationale are not mentioned or platformed.
It may be that you have not balanced the data from all sides—not because you might not like to, but because those who control our media and internet platforms have hidden or shouldered aside so much diversity of assessment and research. If I manage what I intend here, I hope to persuade you that your implicit trust in agencies such as the CDC and the FDA is naïve and misplaced.
So, Dr. Hart, would you explain to the LLUH family sometime the basis for your faith in the FDA? For the CDC? For the NIH? For the AMA? For the WHO? And why are you still using Remdesivir in your patient protocol for COVID-19?
With righteous indignation I can insist—and you should share my outrage—that monopoly platforms that deny users the opportunity to access an alternate viewpoint, especially in matters of life and death, are far more dangerous than the potential harm of whatever alleged misinformation Berenson might share, even if any of his work product is demonstrated to be mistaken.
Do you see yourself here, Dr. Hart, as on the side of Galileo or of Pope Urban?
The rest of your letter seems to affirm only those “who accept the reported science and believe vaccinations are the only solution to the pandemic.” Did you place the word “reported” in the sentence intentionally to avoid writing about “the science,” as if it is settled, as is so often the claim by the dominant media messengers regarding vaccinations or the efficacy of masks or the uselessness of almost any form of pre-hospitalization treatment, whether repurposed medications or FDA approved?
Those of us who have had the privilege of watching human nature for many years remember similar battles around compulsory use of seat belts, motorcycle helmets, fluoridation of water supplies, and various other public health mandates. Perhaps the most pertinent example is smoking.
As long as your smoking was just a danger to you, we were willing to let you pursue your habit. But when research showed that second-hand smoke from you is damaging my health, the tide turned, and smoking bans were instituted in public places (Richard Hart).
Do you have any idea how many people you trigger merely by the inartful, undiplomatic way you put that? “We were willing to let you.” Wow! How generous of you to let me live my life as an adult with considerable agency unmolested by your dictates. That is the response many of us have to a sentence like that.
But what has made “we” insistent on lock-step obedience? Perhaps it is because you have been watching and listening for too long to that tendentiously selected “information” or “data”—“the science”—the media provide you so uniformly, from channel to channel to channel.More relevant to this conversation, is the misapprehension your example reveals. Because as we are learning from Israel, England, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, it is becoming decreasingly clear that the unvaccinated are a greater source of COVID-19 spread than are those who have been vaccinated.
So, who is the greater danger to who? You have been trying to shame the unvaccinated into getting the jab as a way of being good citizens based very likely on your misunderstanding of an evolving reality. You must not pronounce on “the science” as if you know what it is. But you go on to lecture the unvaccinated on the basis of comparing risks that are very poorly established.
And in both your editorials you use the emotionally gratuitous phrase, “placing children and others at risk of the infection,” like some teacher’s union flak protecting their retirement benefits.
The frustration and even anger from many of these working health professionals caring for ill and dying patients is increasingly being expressed (Richard Hart).
What about the frustration and even anger from many patients with COVID-19 who are offered nothing by LLU urgent care or their primary care physician but the direction to return to the ER when their oxygen levels drop—when they can hardly breathe.
How do you decide who to trust? We are in a uniquely obvious crisis of epistemology exacerbated by those who flagrantly de-platform experts whose writing or testimony disagrees with the CDC, FDA, NIH, etc. and by those who make their near-monopoly search engine radically skew search results on contested or politically sensitive topics.
What you have written to the LLUH family does not evidence your having accessed all sides by any reckoning, not I imagine because you might not like to, but because you apparently are hardly aware of research and data that calls into question the recommendations and mandates from authorizing entities.
We can’t resolve this issue here. The new obscurantism, the pandemic of censorship, precludes me from knowing the truth. I’m simply trying to explain to you why the vaccination resistors around you are not all right-wing wackos, or African Americans with Tuskeegee Institute PTSD, or Adventists obsessing on end time scenarios.
It is of concern to some of us that one of the scientists involved in the development of the mRNA delivery mechanism, Dr. Robert Malone, has been expressing his severe doubts about the wisdom of delivering these vaccinations in the middle of a pandemic. He believes the potential for ADE is real and if realized would be catastrophic. Dr. Malone took one of the vaccines and became quite ill but recovered, he says, with the help of ivermectin.
You will not find discussions with Dr. Malone on Youtube. And if you google him, you will get a collection of warnings, because the proponents of the new methodology only sing Home on the Range where “the skies are not cloudy all day.”
And if the administrative state, and Dr. Fauci, and you, Dr. Hart, have your way, there will be only subjects in this grand, Brobdingnagian experiment.
You would think that with nothing else to offer, that LLUH and the American public health entities might continually be health educating about immune supporting diets, supplements, and lifestyle, rather than threatening the employment of physicians who are concerned about the lives of their patients.
But there are other things to offer, most notably (because it is not being slimed by the mainstream media) those monoclonal antibodies. Why are you suddenly so recklessly compliant in this one area of reality and so judgmental of those who are not?
LLU’s motto is, “To make man whole,” and its mission is to “further the healing ministry of Jesus Christ,” not to help create new pharmaceutical billionaires by only fighting COVID with jabs.
We have a legacy of whole person care, and, Dr. Hart, this vaccine-only strategy doesn’t even remind me of Loma Linda’s ethos.
My closing thoughts assume that ultimately your vexation is about lives, their health and safety.
But if lives are what matter, your singular focus on vaccines is inexplicable, especially with your background as a Seventh-day Adventist and as a health educator.
The monoclonal antibodies sit on the shelf. I hear rumors that Ivermectin has gotten some use at LLUH; at least I know some of your care providers have prescribed it on the down low.
I find myself resenting the ubiquitous, pell-mell, monomaniacal, incongruous pursuit of vaccines to the exclusion of—even defamatory rejection of—life saving treatments in the service of agendas about which we are left to surmise.
You may recall the insight of C. S. Lewis on this point:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Dr. Hart, I want to wind up these lamentations on a positive note. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll love the peroration and its constructive recommendations.
First, take every CD or DVD of that same self-congratulatory, gag-me-with-a-spoon “many strengths one mission” radio spot that has been running on Inland Empire radio stations for the past decade and replace it with something that will make people think you care about them.
Tell them that during this maddening and sometimes scary pandemic there are things they can do—besides take the needle—that will increase their odds of fighting off any variant of the virus. It’s as though Rip van Wrinkle is running the LLU Office of Marketing. Surely you as an old health educator will appreciate an approach like this.
Instead of “many strengths one mission,” tell them . . .
You can improve your chances and fortify your immune system—with or without the jab—by minimizing the jelly rolls, the ice cream, the candy, and the emptiest of carbohydrates (fries, Cheetos, potato chips, French toast, etcetera). Pig out mostly on protein and healthy fat and fresh vegetables for a while (fruit is okay too). Drink water, most any kind of tea, even milk rather than sodas and adult beverages. Not only will you fortify yourself against that gain-of-function virus but in just a few days you’ll feel better, think better, and even look better.
That’s the best advice your friends at Loma Linda University Hospital can give you. If the virus still gets you, come see us; we’ll be ready with some monoclonal antibodies. Just don’t wait too long.
While you may encourage the public that vaccinations are available and free, if people present or test ill with COVID-19 to any of your facilities (urgent care, ER, doctor’s office) and the monoclonal antibodies are being rationed by the federal government on some woke, intersectional priority, you will be failing your Hippocratic oath if you do not offer them a therapeutic cocktail of ivermectin, doxycycline (or azithromycin), plus . . . Leaving patients with nothing is unconscionable.
Dr. Hart, for the sake of so many you impact, you do need to get your knee off of Fichte’s neck and rehabilitate the heuristic dialectic. We need to hear competing points of view before we devise mandates for how others should live. And our default instinct must be to let others decide for themselves.
It was liberty and justice that got us this far.
Doug Hackleman MA
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