Because of our founding emphasis on health, and our investment in sanitariums and hospitals, the Seventh-day Adventist Church finds itself unusually closely associated with what might be called the Medical-industrial complex. As most of our readers know, the SDA Church, to its shame, did not avoid the trap of becoming a shill for the vaccines and the vaccine mandates. Hence, this article is pointedly appropriate for us. —Ed.
I am thinking of a certain industry. See if you can guess what it is.
This industry is huge, constituting a large portion of the nation’s GDP. Millions of people earn their living through it, directly or indirectly. The people at the top of this industry (who operate mostly behind the scenes, of course) are among the super-rich. This industry’s corporations lobby the nation’s government relentlessly, to the tune of billions of dollars per year, both to secure lucrative contracts and to influence national policy in their favor. This investment pays off richly, sometimes reaching the trillions of dollars.
The corporations supplying this industry with its materiel conduct advanced, highly technical research that is far beyond the understanding of the average citizen. The citizens fund this research, however, through tax dollars. Unbeknownst to them, many of the profits gained from the products developed using tax dollars are kept by the corporations’ executives and investors.
This industry addresses fundamental, life-or-death issues facing the nation. As such, it relentlessly promotes itself as a global force for good, claiming to protect and save countless lives. However, it kills a lot of people too, and the balance is not always a favorable one.
The operational side of this industry is emphatically top-down in its structure and function. Those who work at the ground level must undergo rigorous training that standardizes their attitudes and behavior. They must follow strict codes of practice, and they are subject to harsh professional discipline if they deviate from accepted policies and procedures, or even if they publicly question them.
Finally, these ground-level personnel are handled in a peculiar manner. Publicly, they are frequently lauded as heroes, particularly under declared periods of crisis. Privately, they are kept completely in the dark regarding high-level industry decisions, and they are often lied to outright by those at higher levels of command. The “grunts” forfeit fundamental civil liberties for the privilege of working in the industry.
What industry am I describing?
If you answered, “the military,” of course you would be correct. However, if you answered “the medical industry,” you would be every bit as right.
In President Eisenhower’s farewell speech of January 17, 1961, he stated that “…in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Sixty-three years on, many Americans understand what he was referring to.
They see the endless cycle of undeclared wars and decades-long foreign occupations that are undertaken on nebulous or even false pretenses. They see the ever-hungry mega-industry that produces super-expensive, high-tech killing devices of every form imaginable, as well as the steady stream of traumatized soldiers the system spits out. War (or, if you prefer its Orwellian nickname, “defense”) is big business, and as Eisenhower warned, if those profiting from it drive national policy, it will not only continue, it will continue to grow.
Other mega-industries – the medical industry in particular – have generally fared better in public perception than the military-industrial complex.
Then came Covid.
Among its many harsh lessons, Covid has taught us this: if you substitute Pfizer and Moderna for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and swap the NIH and CDC for the Pentagon, you get the same result. The “medical-industrial complex” (or pharmaceutical-industrial complex) is every bit as real as its military-industrial counterpart, and it is every bit as real a problem.
As a physician, I am embarrassed to admit that until Covid, I possessed only an inkling that this was so; more accurately, I knew it, but didn’t realize how bad it was, and I didn’t worry about it too much. Sure (I thought), Pharma engaged in dishonest practices, but we’d known that for decades, and after all, they do make some effective drugs. Yes, physicians were increasingly becoming employees, and protocols were dictating care more and more, but the profession still seemed manageable. True, healthcare was far too expensive (gobbling up a reported 18.3 percent of the US GDP in 2021), but healthcare is inherently expensive. And after all, we’re saving lives.
Until we weren’t.
By early-to-mid 2020, it became obvious to those paying attention that the Covid “response,” while promoted as a medical initiative, was more like a military operation. Martial law had effectively been declared approximately on the Ides of March 2020, after President Trump was mysteriously convinced to cede the Covid response (and practically speaking, control of the nation) to the National Security Council. Civil liberties – freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, the right to travel, to earn one’s living, to pursue one’s education, to obtain legal relief – were immediately rendered null and void.
Top-down diktats on how to manage Covid patients were handed down to physicians from high above, and these were enforced with a militaristic rigidity unseen in doctors’ professional lifetimes. The mandated protocols made no sense. They ignored fundamental tenets of both sound medical practice and medical ethics. Those at the top of this military-style operation shamelessly lied about well-known, tried-and-true medicines that appeared to be working, whereas the protocols they ordered—“run-death-is-near,” ventilators—killed people.
Those physicians and other professionals who spoke out were effectively court-martialed. State medical boards, specialty certification boards, and large healthcare system employers virtually tripped over each other in the rush to delicense, decertify, and fire dissenters. Genuine, courageous physicians who actually treated patients, such as Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Scott Jensen, Simone Gold and many others, were persecuted, while non-practicing bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci were hailed with false titles like “America’s Top Doctor.” The propaganda was as nauseating as it was blatant. Worse was to come.
How did this happen to medicine? It all seemed so sudden, but in fact it has been in the works for years.
Covid taught us (Covid has been a harsh tutor, but haven’t we learned so much from her!) that the medical-industrial complex and military-industrial complex are deeply connected. They are not just twins, or even identical twins. They are conjoined twins, and so-called “Public Health” is the tissue shared between them.
The SARS CoV-2 virus, after all, is a bio-weapon, developed over a period of years, funded by US tax dollars in a joint effort between Anthony Fauci’s NIH and the Department of Defense to genetically manipulate the transmissibility and virulence of coronaviruses (all done in the name of “Public Health,” of course).
Once the bioweapon was out of the lab and into the population, the race was on within the medical-industrial complex to develop and market the supremely profitable antidote to the bioweapon. Cue the full-on military takeover of medicine: the martial law lockdowns, the suppression of cheap and effective treatments, the persecution of dissidents, the ceaseless propaganda and anti-science, and the unabashed whoring of most hospital systems for CARES Act money.
We know the rest. The ill-conceived, toxic, gene-therapy antidote, falsely billed as a “vaccine,” was foisted upon the population by blackmail (“the vaccine is how we end the pandemic”), the effective bribery of medical authorities and politicians, as well as other Deep-State directed psyops designed to divide the population and scapegoat dissenters (“pandemic of the unvaccinated”).
The end result even sounds like the aftermath of a war lobbied for by the Military-Industrial Complex: Millions are dead, many millions more are injured and/or psychologically traumatized, economies are in tatters—but quite a few warmongers are fantastically rich. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel (who, incidentally, oversaw the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology years ago) is a freshly minted billionaire. (According to Forbes, the Covid saga created some 40 new billionaires.)
And the troops are still standing at attention. As of this writing, virtually all the major healthcare systems, specialty regulatory boards, specialty associations, and medical schools are still in lockstep with the received – and clearly false – narrative. Their funding, be it from Pharma or the Government, still depends upon their obedience to the narrative. Barring dramatic change, they will respond in the same fashion when orders come down from above in the future. Medicine has been fully militarized.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower said something else that I believe is most prescient here. He described that a military-industrial complex fostered “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”
Enter Disease X.
Clayton J. Baker, M.D. has 25 years’ experience practicing internal medicine. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
This article first appeared at The Brownstone Institute and is republished here under under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License