Two doctors interviewed by The Defender called for an investigation into the Federation of State Medical Boardsâ funding and whether ties to Big Pharma are behind the organizationâs attacks on practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine and physicians who question the governmentâs COVID-19 narrative.
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender
Dr. Emanuel Garcia, a New Zealand doctor who said he believes he lost his medical license for questioning and speaking out against the official COVID-19 narrative, also believes that the U.S.-based Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) played a role.
âWe desperately need a real and deep investigation into this private entity that is pulling strings worldwide,â Garcia told The Defender.
Garcia â a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986 â is board-certified in psychiatry and neurology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He has lived in New Zealand since 2006.
Garcia was a public health consultant psychiatrist until the end of October 2021, when he resigned from his position at the Hutt Valley District Health Board rather than get a COVID-19 vaccine, he said.
His medical license came up for renewal with the Medical Council of New Zealand at that same time.
Garcia reapplied for his license to keep it â but instead of receiving a successful renewal notice from the countryâs medical council, Oct. 29, 2021, he received a letter stating that the council had âresolvedâ to suspend him from practicing because, âDr. Garciaâs conduct raises one or more questions about the appropriateness of his conduct or the safety of his practice.â
In an interview with The Defender, Garcia said:
âApparently, the chief psychiatrist of my hospital reported me to the medical council because I made these videos wherein I spoke about natural immunity, the early treatment, how ridiculous it was to try to eliminate a respiratory environment.â
The council found fault with Garciaâs lack of âadherenceâ to the councilâs May 6, 2021, guidance statement, âCOVID-19 Vaccine and Your Professional Responsibility,â and his lack of âadherenceâ to other statements made by the council.
Council Chair Dr. Curtis Walker said there was no place for âanti-vaccine messagesâ in a medical professionalâs practice â or on their social media.
In its letter, the council listed complaints about Garciaâs behavior, including that he wrote an open letter to the prime minister titled, âAnother Disastrous National Lockdown,â posted videos about COVID-19 on Voices For Freedom, YouTube and Odysee, and voiced opinions about the handling of COVID-19 on social media that did not align with the councilâs statements.
Garcia called the letter âa farce.â He said none of the things he did were âgreatâ or ârevolutionaryâ â in his mind, he was pointing out âbasic thingsâ to the public as he witnessed the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic and the New Zealand governmentâs response to it.
Garcia didnât fight the suspension because he was âsick of their duplicityâ and âwanted out.â
âMy lawyers were advising me to fight and to sign a so-called âvoluntary undertakingâ which would have muzzled me,â he said.
If he had signed the voluntary undertaking, Garcia would have agreed to not say anything that ran counter to the councilâs statements on COVID-19. The idea was, he said, that doctors who signed a voluntary undertaking were signaling to the council that they were willing to âplay by their rulesâ and that the council, therefore, would âbe more lenient with the punishment they dole outâ â such as fines or suspension of the doctorsâ license.
âI refused,â Garcia said. âI gave a lot of talks at parliament during the protests here in New Zealand, and I spoke freely â unfettered.â
Garcia said he chose to retain his freedom of speech and was able to âfully disengageâ from the council through the use of common law, or equity law, to legally sever his professional ties to the council.
âAccording to the rules and principles of equity, I exercised my equitable right to annul, abrogate and cancel my registration with the Medical Council of New Zealand,â Garcia said.
Soon afterward, Garcia learned about the councilâs connection with the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA), which is the international arm of the FSMB.
âThe Chair-Elect of the IAMRA, Joan Simeon, just happens to be the CEO of the Medical Council of New Zealand, and the Secretary of the IAMRA, Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, just happens to be the President and CEO of the FSMB,â Garcia said.
Doctors worldwide who have âquestioned thingsâ have come under attack by their medical boards â and these medical boards âall come under the aegis of the FSMB,â Garcia said.
Garcia told The Defender:
âWe have to do something different. We have to create an entirely new medical system that is out of the grip of these board-run matrices, one that honors basic medical precepts and practices rather than following algorithmic guideline-driven procedures engineered by bureaucrats.
âThere is an opportunity for a magnificent renaissance of healthcare and it WONâT happen within the existing totalitarian system, it has to come from us.â
FSMB report targets practitioners of alternative medicine
Most doctors have not heard of the FSMB and are unaware of its influence, according to Garcia. He, himself, was unaware until his colleague, Dr. Bruce Dooley, a U.S.-trained medical practitioner who also lives in New Zealand, told him about it.
Dooley recently spoke out publicly about his knowledge of the FSMB.
In an âexplosiveâ Sept. 24 interview with FreeNZâs Liz Gunn, Dooley explained that the FSMB and IAMRA are private âregistered charities with âhidden and anonymousâ donors who oversee disciplinary action of licensed medical doctors.â
Dooley â who trained at Jefferson Medical College (now called Sidney Kimmel Medical College) in Philadelphia, has a masterâs in immunology and virus research from Villanova University and is a medical practitioner licensed in Hawaii, Florida and New Zealand â said the FSMB and IAMRA particularly target clinicians working beyond the Big Pharma paradigm, whom they label as âfringeâ or âquack.â
âBig money must not be allowed to beat integrity and experience,â said a New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science spokesperson in a Sept. 28 press release about Dooleyâs interview with Liz Gunn.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, while he was the president of the Florida chapter of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), Dooley witnessed first-hand the FSMBâs attack on doctors who practice complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
ACAM is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating physicians and other healthcare professionals on the safe and effective application of integrative medicine.
At the rate ACAM was growing during the late 1990s, the âworldâs medical sceneâ would have become a âtotally different thingâ if the FSMB had not attacked integrative doctors 25 years ago, Dooley told The Defender.
âWe had 1,200 members,â Dooley said, as doctors from New Zealand, Australia and Europe who were exploring integrative medicine were joining ACAM in large numbers and bringing with them their financial resources.
âWe had a million dollars in the bank,â he added.
As a leading CAM practitioner, Dooley testified about the value of CAM during the Clinton administration for the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.
During this time, Dooley also investigated the FSMB by attending its annual meetings as a paying conference participant. He noted how during conference sessions, FSMB leaders encouraged doctors to harass their fellow doctors who were offering natural health treatments.
Moreover, Dooley obtained a report produced by the Special Committee on Health Care Fraud (later renamed the Special Committee on Questionable and Deceptive Health Care Practices) showing that the FSMB perceived CAM and doctors who practiced it to be a ârisk to public health.â
The FSMBâs governing body in April 1997 accepted the committeeâs report as policy.
The report â which is no longer available on the FSMB website but which Dooley shared with The Defender â negatively labeled CAM as âquestionableâ practices that could constitute âhealth care fraud.â
The report said:
âIn April 1995, Federation President Robert E. Porter, MD, established a special committee on health care fraud. The need for such a committee arose from the proliferation of unconventional and unproven medical practices and promotions in the United States, some of which may be questionable and thereby pose a risk to public health, safety and welfare.â
But according to Dooley, the committeeâs motivation was not to ensure public well-being but to ensure that Big Pharma continued to get money. Natural and integrative medicine treatments, such as CAM, were getting in the way of profits for pharmaceutical companies.
The committeeâs report said, âIt has been estimated that up to $100 billion is lost to health care fraud in the United States annually.â
The committee members added:
âMedical interventions that do not conform to prevailing scientific standards are becoming increasingly popular.
âIt is estimated that in 1990, Americans made 425 million visits to providers of âunconventionalâ medicine, exceeding the number of visits to all U.S. primary care physicians, at a cost of approximately $13.7 billion.â
According to Dooley, the committeeâs statements are essentially anti-competitive. âItâs such an anti-competitive piece,â he told The Defender, adding:
âBasically, the end says to the medical councils, âLook, weâve got to stop this. This questionable medicine stuff is growing too fast. You need to get on board with us to pretty much slap down these doctors.ââ
Now, 25 years later, Dooley said, the FSMB is employing a similar tactic against doctors who share what the FSMB calls âmisinformationâ or âdisinformationâ about COVID-19.
Some doctors, like Garcia, who questioned the pharma-driven global response to the COVID-19 pandemic had their licenses suspended.
Moreover, the FSMB actively seeks to influence federal and state legal policies, thus suggesting it may have played a direct role in generating Californiaâs new law, signed last week, that punishes doctors who share âmisinformationâ or âdisinformationâ about COVID-19 with their patients.
The FSMBâs report obtained by Dooley openly stated:
âThrough its Legislative Services Department and government relations firm, the Federation monitors federal legislative initiatives to identify proposals that could impact state medical boards.
âUpon the identification of such measures, the Federation develops strategies to intervene and oppose measures that could negatively affect state medical boards. The committee supports and encourages the Federation in its legislative efforts to protect the authority of state medical boards to regulate the practice of medicine, both conventional and unconventional.â
Indeed, the FSMBâs current website says it plays a âcrucial roleâ in advocating for federal and state policies that âpositively impact the health and safety of patients and the medical regulatory system.â
Could Sherman Anti-Trust Act be key to exposing FSMB?
Dooley agreed with Garcia that there needs to be a full and transparent investigation into who exactly funds the FSMB.
An effective way to accomplish that, he said, would be for a group of doctors who practice CAM or who have lost their licenses due to sharing COVID-19 âmisinformationâ to form a class-action lawsuit against FSMB for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Dooley said he voiced this idea in the late 1990s, to a class-action law firm. âAfter I went to two of their [FSMBâs] meetings, I actually took tapes and everything they had given out.â
âTheyâre quite arrogant, and they just tape everything. People are talking about âquack thisâ and âhow to get the quackâ in your area,ââ he said.
Dooley said he told the law firm:
âLook at this. This is anti-competitive. I can get 100 doctors together who have all been âbeaten upâ by their medical boards, all in the same way. Then we can, under discovery, find out who supports this âmonster.â
âBecause thatâs the only way youâre going to get their books.â
Garcia and Dooley participate in New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science, a group that has written letters to the New Zealand government expressing concern about the Pfizer COVID-19 shot, âas well as the implication from our regulatory bodies that we would be considered incompetent in our duties if we provided fully informed consent about this procedure.â
Garcia told The Defender that New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science steering committee member, Dr. Matt Shelton â a primary care medical doctor since 1985 and a lecturer and examiner in integrative medicine â has had his license suspended twice.
The Defender contacted Shelton, but he was unable to give an interview by deadline.
In a Sept. 28 press release for Dooleyâs interview with Liz Gunn of FreeNZ, New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science said it âagrees with Ontario Supreme Court Judge Pazaratz,â who asked if âmisinformation is even a real word ⊠or has it become a crass, self-serving tool to pre-empt scrutiny and discredit your opponent?â
Watch Dooleyâs interview with Liz Gunn on FreeNZ here:
Categories: Corruption, Health