Episode 10: Dr. Kat Lindley on The Global Health Project

Hello Illusion of Consensus subscribers,

On today’s podcast episode, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya hosts Dr. Kat Lindley, president of The Global Health Project, for a one-on-one interview. They discuss her background living in a communist country, opposing the WHO’s pandemic treaty, and maintaining ethical patient-physician relationships without government coercion.

We hope you enjoy.

— The Illusion of Consensus podcast

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Dr. Kat Lindley explains her Global Health Project:

(Link)

One of the reasons The Global Health Project came together was to discuss what has happened so it doesn't happen again. And the hashtag that we like to use is #NeverAgain. The reason why is because of what's going on with WHO, for example. They are negotiating the pandemic treaty and the amendments to the IHR (International Health Regulations). The purpose of both is actually the same.

The idea is with these amendments and the treaty, the director general would be given more powers to in an event that there is some kind of potential health emergency. And then if he declares it that it is an emergency, it would give powers to WHO to go into the country. Actually, it used to be recommendations, but now they're going to become obligations. They would decide how we would respond to whatever happens. Moreover, the WHO in June adopted the digital health passport that the European Union used during COVID. So if there is something that happens in the future, the Director General can say you need a digital health passport and you need certain vaccines.

They can say what type of treatments we can offer to the patients, what type of tests we can have. So everything that happened would happen again, but this time it wouldn't be recommendations from WHO. It would be actually something that they would implement in every country that's a member of the WHO. The votes on this are gonna be in May of next year.

If you look at the amendments to the IHR, they do go after national sovereignty. And the reason why is if you have this entity that has nothing to do with your country, come and say, you have to put all your health resources and this is how you do it, they are attacking our national sovereignty because they're attacking this fundamental relationship between physician and patient, exactly what happened in these past two, three years. So, you know, the threat is real.

So where does that leave us in the building and past? Do we go to what it used to be the rule or can they implement a new? Who knows? I would say that consensus is we're not exactly sure if they can implement it, except for the fact that IHR, the International Health Regulations, are already a part of our international law. So that only really needs a signature or acceptance from HHS. So I would say it's a real danger and we should be aware of it.

Dr. Lindley on why universal medical recommendations fail:

Having recommendations on things that we know work would not be faced with vigorous but asking the world to be in a lockstep and to one-size-fits-all when we know that…they're not taking in consideration any variables. And I would say that in medicine and science, there are many variables that we need to take in account, and one-size-fits-all will never work. I just don't like the idea of a body that has nothing to do with our own country and our own values telling us you must do it this way.

Dr. Jay summarizes Dr. Lindley’s opposition to the pandemic treaty

So let me just try to summarize your arguments, which I agree with, by the way. So one is that if you have a lockstep treaty like this that enforces one pandemic response, you're not going to get countries and areas that try different ways so you can learn, right?

So you're not going to get us another Sweden, which demonstrated to the world that lockdowns, mandatory lockdowns, closed schools, all those draconian policies were not necessary to protect the population. Sweden has lower all-cause excess death rates through the whole pandemic than the rest of Europe. So what was brought by those lockdowns that many other countries followed? You would never get a Sweden, you'd never get a counter example, you'd never get an Uttar Pradesh.

We need countries and regions to try different experiments that allows us to learn about how to manage something deadly like this. And a treaty that prevents that actually may lock us into a disastrous policy that harms everybody with no capacity of learning to do something different. Right, so that's one. And then related to that, I thought it was a really interesting response you had that there's a distinction between public health and medicine. And a public health sort of authority saying, everyone must do X, isn't taking into account the nuances of what patient circumstances are.

Different patients are gonna have different needs, and there's no way a single authority can know what those needs are. And we as in medicine have an ethical obligation to treat the patient in front of us, not as a patient, not as a cog in a big machine. If it's right for the patient to do something, to not abide by some idea that public health wants the patient to do, well then your obligation as a doctor is to like stand up for the patient, not stand up for public health, I think. And so you're saying that the World Health Organization Treaty, and I agree, I think violates both of those two principles, one of subsidiarity of us where different areas might have different needs, and then one of medical ethics, that we have an obligation to stand up for our patients so they're individual people that have autonomy and rights.

Physicians have an obligation to stand up for them. Not so that they fit into what public health wants, but so that they can fit into what they need for their own life and for their own health.

Dr. Kat Lindley discusses experiencing the pernicious force of state censorship when growing up in Yugoslavia:

Until I came to the States, I didn't realize what really censorship in communism was. But I do remember as a child, I wasn't really supposed to talk about the fact that I go to church. You know, I wasn't supposed to say that in school. I definitely wasn't supposed to say that, you know, when my dad works and stuff, because religion is frowned upon in communist countries.

Dr. Lindley on her opposition to medicare-for-all:

I've always been a firm believer that socialized medicine doesn't work. Medicare for all doesn't work. Obamacare doesn't work. One size fits all doesn't work. And I always felt that that's a way to introduce socialism into government, because health care is a huge bureaucracy. And if you can have government completely control health care. you know, you have a potential of deciding the longevity of a population. Plus you can decide how to, you know, which protocols to use or whatever. So I've always thought that. So even before this, I was kind of involved with the Trump administration on several bills. So that transparency in healthcare executive order that he passed at hospital have to, um, kind of announce the pricing. That was one of the bills that. one of my groups worked with because I was doing direct primary care, which is independent practice of medicine. And what we've shown that you can actually have blood work, radiology, medicine outside of the system, cash price is a lot cheaper than the system itself. And I think, you know, for whether you like Trump or not, he understood that free market works.

Dr. Jay on the weaponized rhetoric of “anti-vaxxer”:

I was also a big advocate for recognizing that immunity after COVID recovery was a really important phenomenon and that should affect whether someone should be recommended to take or not take the vaccine. I thought that the scientific evidence very strongly suggested that. It stunned me that public health actively ignored that. But again these are nuanced conversations based on reads of data. These are conversations that normally physicians would have with their patients. But if you said anything that went against the dogma — “everyone must have a vaccine, two vaccines, three vaccines in their arm or else” — well then all of a sudden you're an ‘anti-vaxxer.’ And it was a slur. It was aimed at trying to exclude people, even people with a lot of credentials and a lot of knowledge and their ability to read data.

Dr. Lindley on the vital power of friendly disagreement:

I always shared the story, you know, one of my best friends in medical school is Jewish and I'm Christian. And we used to have these great debates about the Bible.

But we disagreed about one big thing. We disagreed about Jesus, right? But we still remained great friends and had great talks. And I learned a lot of stuff from him and he probably learned some stuff from me. But we always ended, at the end of the day, still as great friends. And if we did the same thing from the beginning... and actually had these debates with each other and saying, well, I don't think the math works on this one, well, I think they do work because of this…we could have found this middle that would have been okay for everyone. And I think a lot of people would not have to suffer if we were able to talk.

That's, I think where we abandoned the scientific spirit really.