Another Doctor Dares to Challenge Tyranny

The drug cartel of the north has ways of bending physicians to its demands, until challenged by courageous individuals.

Physicians who dare to tell the truth about COVID and the COVID vaccines are up against some powerful money.  Let’s examine the case of Richard Eggleston MD, a physician in the State of Washington who publicly disputed the official COVID talking points.  Dr. Eggleston writes articles on medical topics at the Lewiston Tribune, an Idaho newspaper.  He has appeared on the Voices for Medical Freedom blog and podcast, started by basketball legend John Stockton.

Now Dr. Eggleston is fighting for his medical license against the censors in his state government.  Those state actors are threatening the doctor’s medical license, though he has been retired from patient care for a decade.

Last year I wrote here and here about the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), which is a private organization, having no recognized government role by any statute written by any legislature.  Yet FSMB is a privately-funded organization that exerts influence over medical boards in all fifty US states.  FSMB promoted opioid prescribing at a time when excessive use of such drugs culminated in the deadly opioid epidemic.  The FSMB then promoted remdesivir and vaccines over far safer early treatments during the COVID years.

Despite the FSMB’s lack of formal governing authority, somehow the Washington Medical Commission, which is the WA state administrative agency that licenses MDs in that state, became a member organization of the FSMB, as are most other medical boards in the US.  The FSMB claims that it “represents the 71 medical boards within the United States, its territories and the District of Columbia.”

And the FSMB dictates the following to their member organizations:

“Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

Never mind what the law says about how a physician is to be licensed or, in extraordinary circumstances, de-licensed.  Never mind the public’s necessary reliance on the vast education and experience of physicians, culminating in the doctor’s valuable medical judgment applied specifically to individuals’ health circumstances.  The FSMB’s pronouncement, and the medical boards’ ignominious submission, is as if to say: You’d better get your ideology in line, doc, and don’t even think of speaking out of turn, if you know what’s good for you and your livelihood.

We have seen recent attacks against Ryan Cole MD and Mary Talley Bowden MD.  And there have been many hundreds of such attacks on the medical licenses of forthright physicians throughout the US in the COVID era. 

Now when Pharma exerts undue influence over politicians and other government actors, the public is so used to this most powerful of all industries, the drug cartel of the north shall we say, pulling the strings that it wants, in order to get its way that we see it as a sad fact of life in the US.  Yes, the US is only one of two countries that allows drug ads on television. Yes, Pharma has more lobbyists in Congress than all other industries combined.   Yes, people no longer seem concerned that the industrial force behind Hitler was IG Farben (the parent company of Bayer), which provided toxic chemicals to the Nazis, and built concentration camps where slave labor was used.

In our time, the US public has come to rely on the courts for pushing back against such outsize influence of Pharma.  But what do we do if or when the courts also come under Pharma hypnosis or financial influence?

Dr. Richard J. Eggleston MD, a retired but licensed physician in the State of Washington, had dared to express his medical judgment on the following COVID-related topics.   

Dr. Eggleston pointed out the inappropriate reliance on a PCR test for COVID infections (a fact that the late PCR inventor, Kary Mullis, PhD, had emphasized.)  

He pointed out that the COVID vaccines do not stop transmission, (a fact later confirmed by the CDC, when the CDC’s own statistics showed that the majority of COVID-hospitalized patients had received the mRNA vaccines.)

Dr. Eggleston pointed out that the COVID vaccines were correlated with many deaths (although the modest number of 6,000 that he cited, while a cautious estimate at the time, is now known to be an underestimate; statisticians’ calculations of COVID vaccine-caused deaths is now in the 100,000’s for the US alone, worldwide in the millions). 

He pointed out that natural immunity acquired from SARS-CoV-1 could plausibly be protective against SARS-CoV-2. 

He pointed out that ivermectin had already had four decades of safe use, and that four billion doses had already been taken around the world before the COVID era, and was already shown in randomized trials to be very effective against COVID.

Dr. Eggleston was then accused by the Washington Medical Commission of “unprofessional conduct” due to “COVID-19 misinformation,” even though the number of peer-reviewed studies that support his statements now number in the thousands. I cited over 500 in my 2021 book, The Defeat Of COVID. That Commission has threatened him with revocation or suspension of his medical license, under the pretext of “unprofessional conduct.”

Responding to these charges, Dr. Eggleston argued the First Amendment as well as his right under Washington’s Constitution “to freely speak, write and publish on all subjects.”  He also argued a federal case in the Ninth District Court, Pickup v Brown, 740 F.3d 1208, 1227-28 (9th Cir. 2014).  In Pickup v. Brown, it was determined that a physician’s speech, outside of the context of a particular physician-patient interaction, is fully protected under the First Amendment, and that it cannot be regulated by government.

Dr. Eggleston had sought an injunction against the Washington Medical Commission, and the trial court denied him that injunction and, for some reason, failed to uphold his constitutional rights. (Why would the lower court do that?  Aren’t the courts the last bastion of our rights?}

Fortunately, the lower court decision was then reversed at the higher court, the Court of Appeals, and now Dr. Eggleston is granted judicial review, “discretionary review,” of the lower court’s ruling. The ruling is here.

While this is a good development, the injustice is that a retired physician who no longer sees patients must be dragged through months, perhaps years, of litigation, simply to retain his medical license, when no patient complained of harm.  Is this how a doctor must close his career, in sharing his decades of valuable medical wisdom and knowledge with the public, by strenuously defending his very right to speak? If you think that Dr. Eggleston should be heard by the public, you may want to let Butch, the editor at the Lewis Tribune know your thoughts at city@lmtribune.com.