February 2020:
After my sudden departure from the free-standing emergency room on New Year's Eve 2019, I contacted an ER group I had interviewed with a year prior. That trip to Seattle also included an impromptu wellness-check with my friend's parents shortly before their passing. Strange how the events of our lives weave themselves together so seamlessly in hindsight.
The first meeting with that ER group went well, but the timing of my move to Washington State didn't line up with their more immediate need. Jobless in 2020, I was in luck – they were looking again. As a formality, I went in to officially tour the hospital, glad-hand the higher ups, and sample the coming misery; the usual when joining a new emergency medicine group as a physician assistant.
At the end of the visit, I sat with two physicians in the ER lounge and discussed the hospital's plan for the potential coronavirus outbreak that was right around the corner. There had been memes and Corona beer jokes about the coming apocalypse, but apparently it was actually going to be a thing. The hospital wanted us to test people in the parking garage, triage patients in utility closets, and treat the sick and dying in picturesque foyers next to couches and coffee tables and the piano nobody is allowed to use.
We actually laughed about the genie already being out of the bottle.
"It's already in the community," one of the physicians said. “I'm not sure what difference they think it will make.”
She was right, it was all insanity. We just assumed that it was the hospital being overly cautious. But that was before the propaganda, before the hypnotic death ticker on Fake News that tallied soul after soul, minute after minute, seducing our minds until we gave up and strapped into the Metaverse to watch panic porn all day.
As the hospital began probing my background as if I was applying for a top secret nuclear Q clearance, lockdowns came and went, masks came and stayed, and I began to see medical fallacy become tyranny…
***
March 2020:
I had just eaten two or maybe three edibles (okay it was four) when word got out that Washington State was doing some kind of lockdown. “All non-essential businesses,” whatever that meant. It was getting late and my wife and I decided that we had better get ahead of the zombie apocalypse and do some emergency shopping. She was seven months pregnant, so alone I hopped in the truck that I inherited from my recently deceased not-dad and drove to the grocery store in Gig Harbor.
Behind me was everybody else.
A caravan of headlights trailed me in the dark and rainy Pacific Northwest night. It was an eerie feeling as we all parked and hurried inside. The fluorescent glow seemed unusually dim and soul-sucking. We all shopped in a controlled hysteria, like subdued passengers on a plane making an emergency landing due to some unknown malfunction that didn't seem catastrophic, but what’s the difference when you're not in control?
The edibles began coursing through my bloodstream and The Fear set in; carts bumping into one another, people cursing behind surgical masks, bare shelves with slim pickings. I had to get out the hell out of there. End times were near. Panicking, I threw three large packages of ground beef in my cart, the 20% fat kind because that's all that was left. Navy beans? Who even eats those? Doesn't matter, buy them all. Rice? Gone, not a single bag remaining. Toilet paper? Forget about it.
When I finally got in line my cart was full of an eclectic mess of strange rudimentary ingredients. I tried to survey my haul but the number of irritable shoppers behind me was growing longer by the second. I was somewhere on the edge of Barstow and the bats were closing in. The cashier shook her head.
“What's with these people?” She asked, basically meaning me.
“There's some kind of lockdown happening,” I said. “Starts in the morning, sounds serious.”
“Yeah, but we're open tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
I realized in my sedated stupor that she was right. I was the zombie.
***
Working in medicine, the first major tell that this entire fiasco wasn’t on the level was the mask mandate. Lectures in training all those years ago taught me that surgical masks were not likely to impact the spread of a respiratory virus in any meaningful way. We memorized those boring, well-cited Powerpoints like everything else.
But were the mandates nefarious, or just hysteria and panic on the part of public health? I ran a PubMed search on masking and it was all the same as I was taught. The preponderance of evidence shows that surgical masks do not lead to a statistically significant reduction in viral respiratory illness. Even N95's are not the panacea that people think. The burden of proof was on those imposing the mandates, so I refused to wear one. I was called every name you can imagine, but you know what’s better than avoiding conflict? Not being brainwashed.
When every normal treatment for viral pneumonia was suddenly shunned by major medical journals, only to be retracted several weeks later, I knew something far more sinister was occurring. Ibuprofen and nebulized albuterol contraindicated? It made no sense. Aside from antibiotics for secondary infection, those are two mainstays of treatment for a viral illness like COVID.
Then two studies were published by The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine attempting to discredit hydroxychloroquine shortly after President Donald Trump touted it as a possible treatment based off of this study from 2005 involving SARS1. Both were also quickly retracted.
The narrative was being established; Wait and Intubate was born. Public health officials never deviated from the messaging in spite of overwhelming new evidence. Questionable data about causes of death and cases rolled in, and the same deranged doctors and politicians continued showing us models and graphs that looked like high school science fair projects.
I tried to explain to friends and family why, medically, it was all bullshit. Many providers tried to sound the alarm online, but we were silenced across social media. So many basic rules were being broken. If a test doesn't change your medical decision making, why do it? If someone is asymptomatic, what does that even mean? Track-and-trace a respiratory virus? Good luck.
It was all a blatant attempt to pump up the fear and promote compliance. I knew why: The vaccine. They were going to make the vaccine mandatory with a digital passport system. But very few around me listened and even fewer took my advice to stop complying. After all, I was just a conspiracy theorist.
It was all forming into a massive vortex, one that would only grow in breadth and ferocity. As I wallowed there in the damp, dark forest on the Puget Sound, all I wanted was to return to work, to actually bear witness so people would believe me, and to help the sick and dying. I just wanted things to go back to normal.
Then my new ER group broke the bad news that my hospital privileges were approved, but they were forced to lay off all midlevel providers indefinitely due to a 50% reduction in patient volume.
George Floyd, the Purge Week, and the 2020 Election were still months away.
The Great Reset was just beginning.
"But you know what's better than avoiding conflict? Not being brainwashed."
Great statement.
Please never stop telling these stories DR. Cody. I found you on Twitter & followed you here, & glad I did. History will remember this. Thank you 🙏.