Note to Doctors: Checked Your 1947 Nuremberg Code Today?

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen of the Medical Profession:

            I’m old enough to remember when physicians were held in regard like deacons. Medicine was understood to be “not a profession but a calling” (as the cliché ran). It was not uncommon to see a car parked haphazardly with a “Physician on Call” sign on the dashboard, and no one gave it a second thought, such was the regard for medical doctors. Watch old re-runs of MASH for fine portrayal of how this “calling” was once understood to act as a special moral beacon within society.

            Of course I noticed how many doctors were Jewish. Perhaps it was for that reason that I gravitated to a number of Jewish professors. hey seemed normal and admirable. Brilliant. Smart. Sane. They said one sentence, then another sentence, and I understood why the second sentence followed from the first. They were unlike other humanities professors, who spoke in jargon bordering on incantations.

            One great teacher who (Sane-Lefty as he is) had a tremendous influence on my life, eventually gave me some titles by Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism was one. Some of what I see and write about today is informed by instincts born of reading that book. But the Arendt book that shook me, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study on the Banality of Evil.

            The basic narrative is well-known: Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution (the liquidation of European Jewry) was hiding out in Argentina post-WWII. In 1960, Mossad agents captured him and returned him to Israel. There, a special courtroom was built to house hundreds of the world’s journalists, and Eichmann was put on trial. The world’s journalists dutifully filed stories about the monster in the courtroom, the man who had liquidated 6 million Jews, reported on the terror they felt (sensitive beings that they are) at being in a  room with such a villain…

      Hannah Arendt wrote something else entirely. She looked at Eichmann and saw a man in a grey flannel suit, a mediocrity who (and she marshalled evidence to support this) did not particularly dislike Jews. He initially sought to resettle the Jews in Palestine, or build a reservation for them in Madagascar or within Poland, but when that became impossible he went with Plan B and created an industry to liquidate them. He saw himself like one would who made schedules for trains: he plotted the needs, calculated the resources, counted back the requisite number of steps, and built the execution checklist and the schedule. There is no evidence that he gave it more thought than one would do in calculating a garbage-removal system for a large city. No evidence he gave it moral deliberation, said Arendt. Eichmann was less a monster and more a representative of modernity’s great marvel: a faceless bureaucrat accomplishing great evil.  

            Therein lies the nature of modern evil, reasoned Arendt. In ages past evil was associated with “greatness” of some kind, such as Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost (or, for modern example, think of Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs). But in the 20^th century, she said, great evil could be accomplished by bureaucrats building schedules. The genius of the Nazi’s had been to break evil up into millions of little pieces and scatter it across society, so few pairs of hands belonged to someone who understood himself as evil. Yes, we know of the German guards who killed prisoners and later said, “I was just following orders.” Such men were in direct contact with the evil and their obtuseness is scarcely credible. But what of the man who scheduled train runs? Most days he made sure a train of coal got where it needed to so a city did not freeze, or moved a train of goods from factories to cities. But once in a while he made room in a schedule for a death train to leave a Jewish ghetto and get to Dachau. He was a minor gear in a great machine.

      It should be mentioned that Hannah Arendt was for a time the lover of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was a giant of “Continental Philosophy”. That is philosophy as it is practiced on the Europe continent (i.e., not the UK), which is to say, poorly, obscurely, but sometimes with panache. And Heidegger was for some significant number of years not just a giant of Continental philosopher, but also an enthusiastic member of the German Nazi Party. Which one would think in this hyper-sensitive time of Cancel would preclude him from becoming a pillar of the academic Left, but that would be to imagine that Cancel culture is about truth (hence consistency) rather than power (hence capriciousness).

            Once when I was sick, the mother of a Jewish friend came to visit me, and was horrified to see Arendt’s book on my shelf. She filled me in on the secret: within intellectual circles, she informed me, the book was considered highly controversial, even inflammatory. She warned me that Arendt was what her community called “a self-hating Jew” and warned me never to bring her up in a conversation with Jewish people unless I knew them well. The professor who had had me read Arendt told me the offense was not caused by Arendt’s claims about Eichmann, but about her claim that the leaders of Jewish ghettos who had cooperated with the Nazis had sometimes survived, made it to Israel in the years after the war, and had gone on to be leaders in the Knesset. This was the real truth that the Jewish community could not face in Arendt, he told me.

            In any case, the socialist experiment that was National Socialism left us with a number of clear-cut lessons. The single most gruesome aspect of Nazism (medical experiments done on unwilling prisoners) gave birth to the most clear-cut and greatest lesson of all, the Nuremberg Code of 1947. The Nuremberg Code holds that medical experiments can only be performed on people with voluntary and informed consent. That is to say: the subject must be informed of the risks;  the subject must consent to having the experiment performed, and that consent must be voluntary (not coerced).  This obligation to ascertain compliance falls upon every person involved in the process. That, in sum, is Principle #1 of 10 in the Nuremberg Code, which I now quote in full:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

– Nuremberg Code Principle #1 (quoted in its entirety)

So that this most gruesome aspect of the Nazi era (medical experiments on the unwilling) never be repeated, the world signed off on the Nuremberg Code of 1947. Humanity agreed that medical experiments required the voluntary and informed consent of the subjects. There could be no more clear-cut line between a lawful order and savagery that this line. In fact, I believe its violation is considered a crime against humanity, and I note that of all the crazy things that have happened around the world for the last three decades, from the Yugoslavian disintegration to the Rwandan massacres, of all kinds of war crimes, mass killings, amputations, raping… in all my life I don’t recall hearing of a single instance of prosecution of medical experimentation that did not observe the Nuremberg Code. For all the crazy tyrants out there, that is one line that no one  (that I can think of)  has neared since WWII.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the medical profession: Your oaths mean that you are not mere employees, but scientists seeking the best for your patients (at least enough to know what “first do no harm” entails).  You are failing your oaths. American physicians are violating the Nuremberg Code of 1947. Their example is leading physicians around the world to follow.

Please review Dr. Simone Gold’s website America’s Frontline Doctors (an organization of 1,500 emergency room physicians from across the USA) and the research aggregated there regarding Covid treatment. In particular note their ample and well-organized scientific research on vaccines. Or for a recent well-researched article that brings the right links together in once place, see “The Unvaccinated Are Looking Smarter Every Week” (American Thinker, October 16, 2021).

If you are up on this research, you know at this point that what society is being told to do is medically irresponsible:

• For example, despite the overwhelming evidence cited above of the efficaciousness of HCQ, Ivermectin, Zinc, and Vitamin C in early treatment of Covid-19, it remains standard hospital protocol in the United States to tell people who present with positive diagnosis of Covid to go home and rest.
• By way of second example, of 100,000 children who get Covid-19, 2 die (versus 1 for the common cold). To forestall that, we are going to vaccinate the full 100,000 kids with a “vaccine” (that is not a vaccine so much as  nanotechnology medical device whose testing has been necessarily short-term), and which evidence already shows will accumulate in the ovaries of the females? Do we have any idea what the long-term effects of that will be? Answer: No, no one does (which is why it is still experimental in children, that experiment due to be complete in 2026).

Look at the vials of the vaccine: they all say “EUA” on them. “Emergency Use Authorization”. You have been led to believe that they have since been authorized even with the “EUA” label, but this is not clearly the truth. In fact, the FDA’s letter on the matter is surprisingly opaque and poorly-drafted, and from my eye that may have been done just to create ambiguity on this point.

Now look again at the opening of Principle #1 of the Nuremberg Code:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision

– Nuremberg Code Principle #1

You know that your patients are not making this decision voluntarily.  People coming in now are people who are having their lives and livelihoods threatened. They are being coerced.

Which means it is not voluntary.

In addition, given our understanding of the decaying short-term benefits of vaccination along with our total lack of understanding of long or even mid-term risks (and our fast-evolving understanding of the short-term risks), there is simply no chance in hell you can say that you are administering this vaccine to people who are properly informed. No one is properly informed (which is why the new results appearing about ADE are shocking to so many).

Which means you are participating in a medical experiment where the subjects have been coerced and they are not informed of the risks.

So you are violating the Nuremberg Code of 1947.

Which is a crime against humanity, Doctor.

I would say you are not the guard- at-Auschwitz-guilty, but I would put you a notch or two worse than the railway-schedule-maker-guilty. You are cogs, but not minor cogs. Information about what you are doing to your subjects is not as clear to you as it was to the Dachau guards, for example, but on the other hand, like them, you are in direct contact with the people being hurt.

Beyond such analysis of your professional obligations and the Nuremberg Code, I would feel remiss not also mentioning that you are going along with the implementation of fascism. We are transforming into a tyrannical society, and the thin edge of that wedge is the medical tyranny being implemented as a putative response to Covid. I am not sure that you have a special professional obligation to resist the implementation of fascism, but you ought to consider it as a personal choice.

Yet I think that analysis of your professional obligations and the Nuremberg Code of 1947 should get you there on their own. Put is this way: if Hawkeye Pierce read up on Ivermectin, and believed it helped in early treatment, I do not see him taking an order from a hospital bureaucrat not to prescribe it. I just don’t see it happening. I see him taking a stand, knowing he might lose his job. I see him perhaps printing this essay out and giving it to colleagues, and perhaps seeing if he can get a dozen of his colleagues to stand up together and say, “I am not going to participate in this any more. And folks, I think this may well turn out to be a crime against humanity.” But he would do it even if he was alone.

That was the essence of the Hawkeye Pierce character, in one image. He’s the one who would stand up and say, “Nope. I became a doctor for more than a paycheck and I’m not participating in this any longer. None of the rest of you should either, but I know I am not.”

Someday the Plandemic is going to be over. Whether there will be a reckoning or not may depend upon the psyop’s outcome. But I do not see an outcome where you do not face the results of your decisions, in one way or another. I hope you are giving them the moral reflection appropriate to a possible war crime, and not a train schedule.

                                                                        Very respectfully,

                                                                        Patrick M. Byrne