Throughout the whole of 2021 and 2022, people were calling to tell me about all of the forged vaccine passports that were circulating everywhere, especially in major cities. Travel, public access to dining and libraries, and employment were being conditioned on getting the COVID-19 shot. Many people had doubts about its efficacy and safety.
No one knew for sure how many of these vaccine passports were fake, but they were rather easy to duplicate because the record was not electronic. Still, doing so was highly risky. Government was going after people hard. Even if they only caught a fraction, for anyone in professional good standing, to be caught in such a deception could be devastating.
For many doctors, the mandates imposed a genuine moral dilemma. They had all taken the Hippocratic oath, which pledges to do no harm. The safety of these shots could not be guaranteed. One such man was cosmetic surgeon Dr. Kirk Moore of Utah. Responding to the anxieties of many, he made available saline shots and signed cards for refuseniks.
Attorney Jeff Childers said this about him: “Dr. Moore is a soft-spoken Utah physician with a titanium spine and a moral compass approximately the size of Jupiter. Back in 2021, while hospitals were kicking families apart and kids were getting jabbed on school bleachers, Dr. Moore quietly offered desperate parents a choice: a saline shot and a vaccine card—instead of a needle full of experimental mRNA. 1,500 people took him up on it. The Biden DOJ called it a ‘mill for falsified medical records.’ Others of us called him what he actually is: a hero.”
The Department of Justice got wind of this and persecuted him. They arrested him and incarcerated him for 12 days before putting him on trial. By the third day of the trial in Salt Lake City, a large crowd had gathered in front of the courtroom to defend him and call him a hero. He faced 35 years in prison for saving people from government poisoning.
The implications of this case are huge, and so is the precedent. It amounts to an official admission that the passports and mandates were wrong, and those who defied them were in the right.
It’s hard to recreate those days in one’s mind today. It was terrifying. Many people I knew were considering making a false record, using editing software available on any laptop computer. It was unclear whether and to what extent government was cracking down and what the consequences would be for getting caught. The media was certainly not friendly to such people, treating them like thieves and money launderers. It was a dangerous time.
Even those of us with large platforms worried about writing on the subject, even in defense of the fake records, for fear of drawing attention to the ubiquity of the practice and thus intensifying the crackdown. Instead, there was nationwide silence, with people whispering in person and speaking on encrypted chats.
Untold numbers of these cards were created, but it was especially difficult to find a physician who was willing to give a saline shot and create an excellent, if misleading, record about it. We don’t know how many others did this, maybe thousands. We only know about Dr. Moore because his case gained the attention of activists as a prominent physician.
Meanwhile, there are at least 21 other people who were targeted and prosecuted for distributing false credentials. They were hounded, smeared, and bankrupted. Some did jail time. It is unlikely that they will ever see justice.
It is about time we have a serious national conversation about this subject. No one ever imagined that we would find ourselves in this position as a nation. The Founders did not set up a government to force physicians to inject patients with experimental potions as a condition of employment and travel, and persecute those who refuse to go along.
Making matters worse, the mainstream media was brutal on the subject. I don’t watch TV, but I did spend time with my mother in the summer of 2021, and her home has a TV. I was absolutely astonished at the pressure to get vaccinated. It seemed to come up every 15 minutes on some show. It wasn’t even a partisan demand. All channels and all voices seemed to agree that the unvaccinated were prolonging the disease.
The pressure was unbearably intense. In five major cities, the unvaccinated were not allowed in any public space. The status of churches and other houses of worship was unclear, but most major religions complied entirely—in effect, excommunicating the people who did not go along with government edicts to take their meds. For many people, it was a matter of keeping their jobs.
I once spoke with a libertarian influencer who told me that this is not coercion because employees could always just quit. The problem is that there were not always easy jobs to get in that particular profession. If you were a nurse or professor or financial professional, the entire industry had mandates, so there was no choice.
My sympathies are with companies that went along because they too were being hounded by government regulators and the media. Any infection within their ranks could be publicized by the media and cause a loss in profitability and stock performance. Plus, they all had human resources departments that insisted on compliance, even though the Supreme Court said that the mandates do not pertain outside a health care setting.
The lesson is that such mandates create grave moral conflicts throughout society. Doctors, in particular, have a duty of care as a first principle. Some just hoped against hope that the shot was safe. Others recommended against it, as did my mother’s doctors. Some went the extra step and saved their patients from unemployment and social exclusion by giving out fake cards and administering fake shots.
This last group are heroes for taking on the burden and risk of noncompliance. That they faced jail time and media smearing just goes with the territory of doing the right thing sometimes. That’s tragic, which is precisely why such mandates should never be part of the protocols of a free and just society.
The Department of Justice should never have prosecuted this case, but it is a great thing that they have pulled back and dismissed it. It could have been otherwise. We can easily imagine a world in which the government did not listen to the activists and instead pressed this all the way to 35 years in prison. In the end, Dr. Moore was guilty as charged; the problem is that the law was unjust.
No society should ever impose such burdens on doctors or anyone. Thank goodness he is free at last.
