Paul Manship, “Prometheus,” 1934; Bronze. Rockefeller Center, New York
Photo credit Balon Greyjoy, Made available by CC0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35519044
The most celebrated Titan held in perpetual punishment at Rockefeller Center is not Atlas burdened by the earth, but his brother, Prometheus bound to it. He is held in chains to a rock and preyed upon by Zeus who takes form as an eagle. Considered the god of technology, Prometheus stole fire from a workshop on Mt. Olympus and shared it with humans on Earth, thereby seeding the arts and sciences and planting civilization. An inscription at the icy cell of the skating rink describes the fate of one who would defy the higher power to benefit lowly mortals.
Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire
that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.
Prometheus was believed to have the ability to see into the future. When given a way out of torture by Zeus who was curious to know of his fate, Prometheus refused to act slavishly to his captor, sacrificing his body to secure freedom of his mind and spirit.
Rockefeller Center is the ambitious project of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., namesake of tycoon, John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937). A recent biography of the senior figure by Ron Chernow, (appropriately entitled, “Titan,”) critically examines the magnate’s controversial businesses including the monopoly, Standard Oil—an antitrust dissolved in 1906—and the eugenics program advanced by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the nation’s first and largest philanthropic institutions. The breakdown of Standard Oil provided little relief to competitors as Rockefeller retained control over 90% of American oil refineries through the various holdings.
The Foundation established two outfits: Rockefeller University and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. The Foundation’s International Health Division promoted global field work to study and treat disease. It provided the prototype for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the United Nations’ outfit, World Health Organization (WHO). Midcentury, Rockefeller’s grandson, Nelson Rockefeller oversaw establishment of UN headquarters in New York, a complex built on 16 acres of land purchased with an $8 million donation by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. [Like the Vatican, the UN is its own international territory or city-state, with its own police and jurisdiction.]
In 1910, the Rockefeller Institute partnered with The Carnegie Foundation and a group associated with Johns Hopkins University to establish within the American Medical Association (AMA) a special committee to research and assess medical education. Frederick Gates, Rockefeller’s business and financial advisor amassed support for the venture. A devotee of Taylorism, Gates was active in the ‘efficiency movement,’ a concern of industrialized nations aligned with the ‘conservation’ and ‘technocracy’ movements. [Incidentally, Gates’s home was situated down the street from my high school and my father’s law office in Montclair, N.J.]
Gates held the bulk of the Rockefeller fortune at Kuhn Loeb & Co., the New York-based multinational bank that evolved into Chase Manhattan Bank; American Express; and the now defunct Lehman Brothers. Capital ventures that proved lucrative included investment in the Northern and Pacific railroads; the Western Union; and electricity (Westinghouse, a rival to General Electric. Westinghouse is the parent company of Columbia Broadcasting Co., C.B.S., now Viacom and the world’s leader in nuclear technology).
The 1910 project sought to assess the state of healthcare in North America, from the education of physicians to medical practice. It was headed by Abraham Flexner, a teacher who admired the top-down, academically–driven model of medical education practiced in Wilhelmine Germany, as outlined in the publication, “Medical Education in the German Universities”, a text by Theodore Billroth. Flexner’s committee assessed the curriculum at every medical school in North America and issued a report to Congress in 1910. The Flexner Report spurred federal legislation enabling the Hopkins circle to gain influence over curricula and forge standardized medical education and practice across the country.
A noble intention of regulating medical education and healthcare was to safeguard patients from scammers such as Devil Bill. But the process of assessment and revision would dismiss as quackery homeopathy, naturopathy, and other forms of non-invasive healthcare that attempted to diagnose and treat the root cause of disease and restore patients to good health. What came to be known derisively as ‘Rockefeller medicine’ would establish a dominant business model with built-in sustainability. Patients suffered chronic and cascading illness as a result of the program, conveyed by the slogan, “A pill for every ill”. Time-consuming diagnostic and curative measures dependent upon a physician’s individual talent were superseded by universal prescriptions and easy-to-replicate protocols promising fast-relief that often served to mask progressive illness and incur side-effects.
As allopathic medicine became the focus of physician training, it came to dominate therapeutic options. Protocols deemed scientific and superior to methods favored by country doctors included therapies such as bloodletting and the injection of heavy metals like lead and mercury – treatments that would be regarded with suspicion today. Surgery was also promoted, despite brutal conditions and high mortality rates. [A sense of the historical period is suggested by “The Knick,” a television series from several years ago that may still be available by HBO.]
The successful reception of the Flexner Report led to the formation of a medical system of specialized research programs housed at elite academic institutions including, Johns Hopkins and Yale. Supported by charitable grants, clinical professorships freed doctors from the duty of managing patient care. They were able to dedicate themselves to surgery, research, and teaching. To a considerable extent, this arrangement—prevalent today—created a schism between medical research and physical healthcare.
An insightful, easy-to-read, essay by Thomas P. Duffy, M.D., reconsidered the Flexner Report on occasion of its 100th anniversary. It appeared in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 2011. Dr. Duffy cited a lament of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino—a bioethicist at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University—who sensed a technological sabotage of the physician’s art:1
The science of medicine eclipsed the active witnessing of…patients…
doctors had become neutered technicians
with patients in the service of science
rather than science in the service of patients.
Dr. Pellegrino observed that doctors were disempowered by the scientism of the Rockefeller medicine platform. Once imaginative and investigative, their creative thinking was dulled and curbed by technology. Deleterious (perhaps unintended) outcomes of the elite medical model included a withered role played by general practitioners; the fostering of a culture of drug dependency; and the growth of chronic illness. The pharmacologic system polluted the culture of native peoples, frontiersmen, and farmers, fostering a drug-dependent mindset in communities where an ethos of self-reliance had once been robust.
A remarkable passage in Dr. Duffy’s 2011 essay is cited in full for its relevance:
Did the Flexner Report overlook the ethos of medicine in its blind passion for science and education?
What was the cost of our success, and who has borne that burden?
Review of medical care in the last century documents that the trust and respect that were extended to the profession 50 years ago have been substantially eroded.
There has been a fall from grace of our vaunted profession.
Physicians have lost their authenticity as trusted healers.
We have become derelict in many realms.
Bioethicists are strident in drawing attention to the major moral failing of the profession in the last century; its failure to address and care for the problem of pain ― this an omission by a group that has ready and singular access to the means for resolution of pain.
The $14 million SUPPORT study to understand and improve care for patients at the end of life found that more than 40 percent of families were unhappy with the fashion in which their loved ones were cared for as they died.
The discontent with doctor’s errors, doctor’s silence, doctor’s experimentation, and the crass monetary orientation of the profession is legion.
The profession appears to be losing its soul at the same time its body is clothed in a luminous garment of scientific knowledge.
As the Hopkins circle was establishing standardized care, Rockefeller helped found the American Cancer Society (ACS) in 1913. It is located in Atlanta. Rockefeller died in 1937 as construction of his son’s project, Rockefeller Center neared completion. In 1939, the Rockefeller Foundation brokered partnership with the German chemical company, IG Farben. The conglomerate of Hoechst, Bayer, and other companies, IG Farben produced the cyanide-based pesticide, Zyklon B that was used to gas slave-workers and prisoners in extermination camps. Today, the Rockefeller Foundation’s holdings have expanded to include the Hoeschst and Bayer affiliates, Monsanto; Sanofi-Aventis; Bristol-Myers Squibb; Proctor and Gamble; and Roche. The Foundation’s pharmaceutical enterprise constitutes a medical empire, representative of over half of U.S. interests. It is the largest drug manufacturing conglomerate in the world.2
A potential pharmacological use of poison gas emerged from assessment of chemical warfare introduced by Germany in World War I. During World War II, pharmacologists from Yale School of Medicine (Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman) were recruited by the U.S. Department of Defense to conduct research. They discovered that mustard gas reduced white blood cell counts (lymphoid and myeloid suppression). The study led to the advent of chemotherapy, which has since become credentialed as standardized treatment for most cancers. It is a cytotoxic intervention intended to kill cancer cells before killing the patient.
In 1946, the government established the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, then called the Communicable Disease Center). Like the ACS, it is situated in Atlanta. The agency is a military outfit within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, Executive branch) whose original mission was to prevent the spread of malaria.
Before the world wars, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), had been conceived by German immunologist, Paul Ehrlich (Nobel Prize, 1908) who regarded them as targeted treatments, a “magic bullet” (Zauberkugel). MAbs are a class of molecular medicine that may pose less risk to bone marrow and systemic health while expanding the time horizon for therapeutic intervention of immune-related diseases such as cancer and AIDS. They are genetically cloned from a single animal protein. Medicines of this ilk are indicated by the suffix, ‘mab’, such as Trastuzumab (Herceptin) used to treat breast cancer; and the combination treatment, casirivimab–imedevimab used to treat Covid-19 (Regeneron). Some mAbs block proteins that hinder the immune system from attacking cancer cells. Others attach themselves to cancer cells to make it easier for the immune system to recognize; this process is called ADCC, antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, a succession of mAbs targeting SARS variants was made available as prophylactics and treatments for people with two or more co-morbidities. The medicines were rationed, perhaps due to expense of manufacture and supply. Biopharmaceutical New Technologies (BioNTech, Mainz, Germany) and ModeRNA Therapeutics (Cambridge, MA) are pharmaceutical companies founded with the mission of developing immunotherapies to treat conditions such as cancer, and AIDS. These outfits were among those to procure standardized treatments for Covid-19 in the U.S., as determined by the CDC. A repurposed antiviral—remdesivir—was also approved, but often administered too late in the course of infection to be effective. Other repurposed drugs were banned by the CDC, despite having been found to be effective by frontline clinicians across the world. Late into the pandemic, a protease inhibitor cocktail was provided in pill formulation as an at-home treatment.
I had always held up the socialist model of state-run healthcare as preferable to the capitalist free-market insurance system. I had looked positively at France, Sweden, the UK, and Canada and wished that Americans might enjoy similar benefit as a civil entitlement. The American insurance system brokered with employers until/unless workers qualify for Medicare/Medicaid (CMS) seemed to me onerous to the middle-class. Hard-working people were made to bear sole or shared cost of high premiums and deductibles. It seemed to me that some deductibles and exclusions of benefits precluded preventative healthcare, degraded it to crisis management.
Like so many things revealed by the SARS pandemic, this conviction began to crumble as I perceived the hard reality of the federal healthcare system, the underbelly that I had not been able to imagine in my idealism. I might have given better consideration to complaints of veterans suffering under the dysfunction of federal healthcare for decades.
Because insurance relies on medical diagnostic codes to process payment of tests and treatments, the healthcare system—particularly federally-run CMS—was manipulated by the government that held the purse strings. People with means to access concierge doctors and naturopaths whose business evaded financial capture may have fared better to obtain candid counsel and individualized care than patients whose healthcare was strapped to universal standardized protocols.
Physicians in healthcare systems that accept Medicare/Medicaid (the vast majority of hospital systems depend on it) who like Prometheus had the temerity to defy authoritative diktats were bullied by administrators, dogged by insurance companies, and scrutinized by medical boards. Some were stripped of the privilege to practice medicine.
Nursing home residents and hospitalized patients were held hostage in wards, bound to government sanctioned care, often unable to refuse medications and protocols such as remdesivir and intubation. Some family members have described their horror finding loved ones chained to their hospital bed so that medicine might be forcibly administered.
Although advancements in surgical procedures have made great strides since the days of the Knick, surgery remains a risk and contributes to the medical error determined to be the third leading cause of death in the country (behind heart disease and cancer).3
Treatment of non-acute illness lags behind expectations and chronic illness has risen exponentially within my lifetime alone. Some conditions such as diabetes can be understood as the result of sodas, sweeteners, corn syrups, the standard American diet. Others, such as AIDS remain mysterious, nearly impossible to cure, deemed a syndrome or disorder. Recently, a study suggested correlation between aluminum exposure and asthma. But little is understood of the impact of environmental pollutants and pesticides. Although some physicians speculate as to causes and mechanisms of syndromes, there is yet no consensus as to their origin or cure.
People struck with strange maladies such as Lyme disease often grow weary of a tedious medical journey, that sends them from one specialist to another. Many with means to navigate past network providers eventually venture beyond credentialed systems to pursue ‘alternative practices.’ The psychological stress of gaslighting is the last thing that patients desperately seeking salvation would hope to encounter. Unfortunately, it appears to be the one guarantee as physician’s are embarrassed to admit that they lack the knowledge to treat the vast majority of these afflictions. This is the subject of a 2021 memoir by Ross Douthat, “The Deep Places”.
Mysterious maladies emerged in the 20th century and drone on, calling into question the true state of the medical art:
Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS, 1916);
Lyme disease (1920s);
myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME, 1934);
autism spectrum disorder (ASD, 1943);
sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS, 1969);
chronic fatigue syndrome (1980s);
acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS, 1981);
sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS, 1980);
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, 1987);
Gulf War syndrome (1995);
Havana syndrome (2016);
multi-symptom inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C, MIS-A, 2020).
The devastation of democracy and public health under corrupt governance is the true subject of, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” an in-depth investigative chronicle by environmentalist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., founder of Children’s Health Defense. The tome addresses the failed regulation of toxins (pollutants and poisons) aggravating a precipitous decline in public health since the 1980s. The study is a well-examined expose of elite capture of world governments by a technocratic elite and the havoc wrought by their business especially on vulnerable populations unable to outmaneuver their powerful grip.
Now the book is joined by a two-part documentary film, available free online for a limited time: Oct 18- 28, 2022. Part 1—released today—revisits the 1980s to contrast the government responses to the AIDS and SARS epidemics. I urge you to take a moment to consider the diverse views and issues raised by the insightful thinkers interviewed by the filmmakers and to have the courage to form and share your own opinion.
Thank you for reading.
Peace and love,
Poppy
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Thomas P. Duffy, MD, “The Flexner Report —100 Years Later,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, Sept, 2011, PMCID: PMC3178858
Rockefeller Foundation, Wikipedia
Giuliana Manca, “Medical Error Is Third Leading Cause of Death in America, Behind Heart Disease and Cancer,” Epoch Times, May 4, 2016