More on my case, the law on misinformation, and why other doctors don't challenge their medical boards
Including the misdirection, sloppiness and impaired memory of Dr. Faust, the part-time ER doctor and pundit
The fifth day of my board hearing was May 30, 7.5 months after it began and 16.5 months since I was suspended for charges that the board dropped prior to litigation. No one can remember the details from the beginning, and my attorneys and I have to spend countless hours recapping the previous proceedings as we prepare for each new hearing day. The board hired two expert witnesses to opine against me, and now each has been examined and cross examined. None of the charges against me stood up to scrutiny—not a single one. Neither of the experts provided internally consistent testimony. No one has shown that I did even one thing wrong. Why are we still going forward with these hearings?
Dr. Faust claimed that, only 5 years after becoming board certified in Emergency Medicine (did he fail his boards before that or fail to take them after completing his residency?) his fee of $500/hr was less than he earned at this other jobs. As an ER doctor I would expect him to earn about $150-$200/hr. What would he earn as an editor and writer for MedPage? As the director of a Chorus in Boston? In March, he simply couldn’t say, claiming he did not know what he earned at any of his jobs because he had not done his taxes yet. In May, his taxes should have been done, but he claimed they were not, and he still did not know what he earned at his various jobs. My supposition is that he blatantly lied, and that he does not earn more than $500/hour at any of his real jobs. He had to lie about not knowing what he earns at his other jobs in order to cover his initial lie that $500/hr was less than he earned elsewhere. This hired gun assuredly knows what he earns. Who doesn’t? Why did he lie about this? My guess is that, like Fauci, lying comes naturally, it rolls off the tongue, and it has not tripped him up heretofore. But under oath, in a big case, it can and did trip him up.
Dr. Faust coauthored an article with Rochelle Walensky, the current CDC Director, in the year before she took on that job, in 2020. Faust further claimed he has advised the U.N. and CDC (unpaid) and he wrote in his Inside Medicine substack words close to the following, “Inside Medicine is supported by the CDC, but I would much rather be supported by you.” (I have a hard copy of this at home, but am in Bath, England at the Better Way Conference, starting later today and have no paperwork with me.) However, on March 2 under cross-examination Faust denied receving any CDC funds for Inside Medicine and denied receiving support from the CDC. When I went back to look for the exact quote online it seems to have been removed by Dr. Faust.
On January 10, 2022 Dr. Faust sent an email to Kenji Saito (who was on the Board staff and is both a doctor and a lawyer) which said, "I have done a handful of evaluations for medical-legal cases." Yet Faust told the Board in our hearing on March 2 that this was his first expert witness case. Which statement is true?
Let me be super clear about the 2 ‘forest plots’ I sent to the Board when they asked me for evidence that HCQ and IVM were effective treatments for COVID. This is what they look like today, below (with more papers added in the interim; I have the originals at home.)
Ivermectin studies are found at https://c19ivm.org/meta.html. This is a detailed website with many different graphs and charts. However, it is not hard to discover what Dr. Faust missed, when he claimed the studies were cherry-picked: these are ALL the studies of early treatment. It says so right at the bottom, bolded. There are other graphs of late treatment studies and other things. While claiming he looked at this graph and website, he missed the crucial information of what these studies were. he also missed many pages of detailed methodology which were found later in the website. Dr. Faust claimed there was no discussion of methodology. The $20,000 plus the Board paid for his 40+ hour review and report did not buy much of value. Only 8 of the papers listed here showed HCQ was of negative benefit, while the 30 others showed benefit. Mean benefit over multiple endpoints was 62% while the relative risk was 38%. This means that if you received HCQ early, you were only 38% as likely as an untreated person to reach a negative endpoint like hospitalization, viral persistence or death.
HCQ studies can be found at https://c19hcq.org/meta.html#fig_fp. The results are very similar. There are only 3 negative studies and 14 positive studies. In order to claim that the medical literature found against both drugs, Faust had to find a way to dismiss over 75% of the studies—which he did by claiming that according to the Faust criteria, they were not up to snuff, and so therefore he was entitled to pretend they did not exist. Unlike the forest plot criteria or the Risch criteria for how studies were selected for inclusion in a plot, or selected for good quality, the Faust criteria were (necessarily) unwritten.
This is especially important because Faust said that I should lose my medical license due to my inability to interpret the medical literature. Were this criterion to be applied to Faust, I fear his own license would be revoked.
Now let’s look at Dr. Faust a bit more. While he implied he was not the Editor-in-Chief of MedPage (calling himself only a contractor in March under cross-examination and claiming on May 30 that while Editor-in-Chief was his title, he implied it was not his real job) Faust proudly calls himself Editor-In-Chief of MedPage on his LinkedIn page.
And he advertises for medico-legal consulting on his LinkedIn. Someone should explain to him that being clear, consistent and honest are necessary for expert witnesses, even in Board proceedings.
Below Dr. Faust reveals that his snide, nasty remarks are not confined to the witness stand, as he snarkily comments on Alan Dershowitz and Trumps’ White House doctor Ronny Jackson, now a member of the House of Representatives from Texas.
I found this one (below) to be Dr. Faust’s most unpleasant tweet of all, which was associated with video taken on a plane of passengers clapping when the end of the mask mandate was announced: “Imagine celebrating the deaths of a small number of kids so that you don’t have to wear a mask on a plane.” The Daily Mail picked it up. Did he think masks worked for the wearer? If so, wear them. Did he think COVID was killing kids? Instead of looking at the CDC’s uninterpretable data, which lumps everyone with a positive COVID test (asymptomatic or not) as a COVID case, he could have looked at countries in western Europe or Israel, where healthy kids were not dying from COVID. In fact, not a single person aged 18-49 who was previously healthy died from COVID in Israel, population 9 million. (Data are from Israeli Ministry of Health’s available information.) Sounds like maybe their government didn’t incentivize ventilators and remdesivir?
Dr. Faust wrote a letter to the editor of the BMJ, published March 20, 2020, at the start of the pandemic. This is board exhibit 233. He ended the letter noting the "importance of aggressive, early mitigation to minimize spread of infection." Yet Dr. Faust told us that I, Dr. Nass, was wrong for providing early drug treatment, while he failed to provide such treatment. Isn't this contradictory?
Faust’s own publication, MedPage Today, ran an article urging that medical boards should not punish physicians who perform illegal abortions in states that ended abortion. I think it further claimed that boards that investigate physicians who perform illegal abortions are being weaponized and/or politicized. (In other words, how dare they investigate this crime?) Yet he apparently feels that boards who prosecute physicians like me for misinformation (which is free speech according to the First Amendment) and who committed no crime should have their licenses revoked. Faust apparently failed to notice the bias inherent in this position, when he was asked by my attorney about whether he could serve as an unbiased witness.
To recap my case: the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine voted unanimously to suspend my medical license on January 11, 2022 for spreading misinformation despite no patient complaints and without a hearing, because I was an alleged danger to the patients of Maine for warning them about the dangers of COVID vaccines and treating them for COVID with antiviral drugs that worked.
It is now 16 months later, and any doubts that the so-called COVID vaccines are safe and effective have been allayed: they are neither. Prescribing antivirals off label is admitted by all to have been legal. My speech regarding important medical products is protected by the First Amendment, and the cowards that suspended my license for misinformation were unwilling to actually bring a case against me for it. So they then concocted a new set of claims about my incompetence, despite no allegations claiming any failures in my care—ever. Now all these secondary, bogus allegations that were litigated in lieu of the original charges have all been shot down, shown to be incorrect, fanciful hot air. Similar to what comes out of Dr. Faust’s mouth when sound emerges.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has advised Congress that the charge of ‘misinformation’ will not stand. The Supreme Court has only upheld the charge of misinformation when fraud, perjury or defamation were involved, according to the CRS. As I have said before, the USG and its proxies are still trying to create a crime where one does not exist: misinformation and/or disinformation. They continue to assert it is a crime, but they do not dare to bring a case to court. Yet the collusion of government and media has led most people to believe that misinformation is a real crime—and it is held over many peoples’ heads to keep them in line. This is government by lies and innuendo. We must end it.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12180 A snippet is below.
But the bottom line in the prosecution of doctors for upholding their oaths and trying to protect their patients with honest care, undeterred by harmful government edicts, is:
a) the price of admission to a courtroom, and
b) the price to a doctor’s career, even if he or she wins their case.
It is costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend myself against defamatory, career-ending charges that are entirely without substance. CHD has supported my defense, otherwise I too would have had to shut up and accept the loss of my career. The black mark on my record can never be erased, even if I win. Were I to seek employment or a license in another jurisdiction, the black mark of an immediate suspension will follow me forever.
The Board staff are dragging this out forever in what appears to me to be an attempt to run up the costs of my defense. That is how the game is played when you are losing: you delay delay delay and you bleed the other side.
You can see why few doctors willingly challenge these charges, and instead try to keep their heads down and find a way to keep practicing.
You can see why the Boards want to keep their ridiculous processes secret, in which they can behave in as arbitrary and capricious a manner as they like, negotiating sealed agreements with physicians under attack. (One example of board lawlessness was Dr. Gleaton, the sleepy board chair, telling me it was against the law to record the meeting where the Board first heard about my case and suspended me. I had no lawyer, and I was not allowed to speak, and no transcript was made. This violated Administrative Law, but she did not care so long as I had no one there to guide me. Luckily, I recorded it anyway, since my recorder was already on, and I did not believe her. A second example is the board suspending my license without a hearing, when there are statutory requirements for such an immediate suspension, and my case did not meet them.)
So you can see why the doctors who publish the c19study.com website with the forest plots, and many other practicing doctors who challenge the system, keep their names hidden or write under pseudonyms. Doctors and nurses live in a climate of fear. Winning my case, and countersuing the Board, is only the first step in turning this around. And we must, if we want the practice of medicine to be a sacred mission in which only the doctor and the patient are in the room together, trying to do the best for only that patient. Pharma, the insurance companies, the government and its boards, and the W.H.O. need to be tossed out of the exam room, for good. I’m working on it.
We need a war chest. You can see how drawn out this crazy case has been so there has to be money up front to go forward, because you can't run out in the middle of a case. Luckily, we already have some. Which may be why the board is dragging this out. They might fear what happens when it's over. Malfeasance, anyone? I included the donation page for CHD in another comment.
I just can't stop laughing over the fact that his name is literally FAUST. Although I'm sure this whole ordeal is anything but a laughing matter for you, Dr. Nass. Stay strong and keep up the fight.