Who are the enemies, foreign and domestic, American leaders promise to defend against when they take the Oath of Office?
Since the nation’s founding, belligerent nations and despotic warlords have threatened our territorial integrity and way of life with bombs and blood. Respondents to a 2021 Economist/YouGov poll placed China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran at the top of the United States’ greatest enemies. Terrorists–cowards plotting heinous acts in desert caves and trailer parks–took center stage in 2001, though the US doesn’t seem to be very good at fighting them. After spending $5.8 trillion to battle the so-called “War on Terror”, Iraq is as unstable as ever and the terrorists have taken over Afghanistan. Mission accomplished?
I’d even include bears, wolves, and other deadly critters we don’t often encounter in modern urbia. What if dinosaurs invade San Diego or hyper-intelligent apes declare war on humans? Non-human species have been used in warfare for millenia, and surely the newest branch of the military established in 2019, Space Force, is monitoring for hostile alien activity. In other words, enemies are not limited to only humans and their weapons of war, and we should define an enemy as any beast, man or woman, imported or home-grown, who would threaten to overthrow our rule of law by killing us all and replacing our civilization with their own.
However, there’s one enemy nested in this definition we tend to overlook because, well, we cannot see it. An invisible enemy that can emerge from the wilds or leak from a lab at any time. I’m talking about pathogens. Viruses. Bacteria. Microscopic agents that cripple populations with disease and destroy entire civilizations (See: smallpox). Tiny beasts we inhale and ingest that disrupt homeostasis and threaten to shut down our bodies unless medical science intervenes. Pathogens are an enemy by any definition. You cannot have a nation nor promise to defend a Constitution if you and your countrymen are murdered by a foreign virus.
So, to protect the United States from enemies, foreign, domestic, and pathogenic, I urge the President to form a new branch of the military, Nurse Force.
Nurse Force will be an elite squadron of doctors, nurses, and therapists deployed to battle disease, physical and mental, in emergency rooms across the nation. Operating from an expanded network of federal hospitals, Nurse Force will liberate us from the grip of employer-sponsored health insurance by offering routine medical and surgical care to civilians and active military personnel with no out-of-pocket costs or insurance premiums. Congress does not need to regulate health insurance and hospitals when the military can sidestep them entirely.
Congressional Democrats are supposed to be the party addressing the untenable costs of healthcare, but they refuse to take any substantive action because it would cut them off from vital campaign funding. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has had a blank check budget for decades ($1.98 trillion in FY 23) and can fail audits repeatedly without penalty, so Nurse Force, as an extension of the military, is the only viable way to bring nationalized medicine to America.
The president can act unilaterally to create Nurse Force and declare war on pathogens. The 1973 War Powers Resolution does not apply because “hostilities” are between the enemy (pathogens) and civilians (patients) on US territory, not abroad, and any risk to the soldier (the doctors, nurses, and therapists serving in Nurse Force) is entirely eliminated through the appropriate use of personal protective equipment (PPE). Furthermore, the military has an established medical operation (Military Health System) and a history of hiring civilian healthcare workers. The President isn’t creating something new, he’s merely reorganizing the medical services already under his control as Commander-in-Chief.
When you think about it, deploying military force to heal the nation is the most American way to do healthcare. We love war! As of 2023, the US has only had peacetime in 15 years out of 247 since its founding in 1776. Though we ended the War in Afghanistan in August 2021, the proxy war with Russia via Ukraine kicked off only months later in February 2022. The war machine continues!
To win the War on Disease, Nurse Force needs the appropriate equipment, supplies, weapons, and training to defeat the pathogens attacking American civilians. This includes medical equipment you’d expect to find in a hospital, like wheelchairs and x-ray machines, but also critical PPE supplies, such as masks, gowns, and gloves. Shortages of ventilators and masks in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains and raised concerns about our ability to respond to future health crises. Nurse Force will oversee the reshoring of domestic manufacturing capacity and maintain adequate inventory levels for any future health emergency.
The weapons in the Nurse Force arsenal are the chemicals and machines we put in our bodies to treat disease: the pills, the ointments, the shots, the patches, the drops, the implants, the pacemakers, etc. Nurse Force will directly negotiate with pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to control costs, and if they refuse, the president can invoke the Defense Production Act to guarantee supply of critical drugs. In this context, pharmaceutical manufacturers are weapons manufacturers after all.
Unfortunately, American doctors have been prescribing drugs based on pharmaceutical manufacturers’ interpretation of clinical trial data, not the actual data itself. We really have no idea if the drugs we’re putting into our bodies are safe or effective. As revealed in Dr. John Abramson’s 2022 book, Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It, pharmaceutical manufacturers go to great lengths, from clever messaging to outright fraud, to ensure their drugs are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The cost of American healthcare has skyrocketed because Big Pharma has tricked doctors into prescribing drugs that are no better than existing therapies, but cost hundreds or thousands of dollars more.
Some FDA-approved drugs may even cause harm with no benefit whatsoever. The watershed moment in pharmaceutical deception occurred in June 2021 when the FDA approved Biogen’s ADUHELM (aducanumab) for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, even though 10 of 11 FDA committee members voted “No” and “expressed their reluctanc[e] to suggest approval of aducanumab [ADUHELM] for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease due to the insubstantial evidence shown” (emphasis mine).
Not only is ADUHELM not effective at treating Alzheimer’s, but Biogen’s own safety data showed 40% of patients had increased incidence of brain swelling or brain bleeding. The FDA finally admitted this danger two years later when they updated ADUHELM’s label to warn of the increased risks. Abramson initially estimated Medicare could spend “$57 billion annually” to cover Biogen’s new drug that does nothing but increase your risk of death, but fortunately the agency decided to only cover ADUHELM for patients “who receive it as participants in a clinical trial.”
To restore trust, pharmaceutical manufacturers must voluntarily release all clinical study reports (CSRs) and manuscripts, thousands of pages of documentation compiling all clinical trial data and results, not just the cherry-picked information that Big Pharma wants doctors to read in medical journals. If they refuse, Nurse Force will have no choice but to seize the data itself to draw its own conclusions on drug safety and efficacy. There is absolutely no reason for this data to be secret, yet Abramson explains that peer reviewers and medical journal editors do not have access to complete clinical trial data when they make their treatment recommendations. What!?
The foxes are in the hen house. After the ADUHELM debacle, we have to assume that the FDA has been compromised by Big Pharma. There’s no reason this drug should have been approved. The FDA, along with her sister agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will be reorganized under Nurse Force to weed out dangerous corporate influence and conflicts of interest. Until this happens, I recommend you:
- Do not take any pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA after June 2021.
- Do not take any pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA before June 2021 unless you absolutely have to.
- Stop taking the mRNA COVID vaccines. If you insist, ask for the Novavax flavor, which uses a protein subunit technology that was first used over 30 years ago for hepatitis B.
Merging the alphabet soup of health agencies under the banner of Nurse Force has practical implications. As separate agencies, the FDA, NIH, and CDC primarily focus on regulation, research, and public health, respectively, but together they will enable Nurse Force to play a critical role in establishing national standards for clinical trial design, statistical analysis of drug safety and efficacy, and independent clinical practice guidelines untainted by corporate interests. Nurse Force can even facilitate the real-time release of clinical trial data as it’s collected to prevent tampering by pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Capitalism cannot and will not cure Alzheimer’s or cancer. The big industry players scheme and plot against each other to ensure their “cure” is first-to-market, even though they should be working together to conduct large-scale trials that study all potential therapeutics head-to-head. But a for-profit company is never going to engage in studies where the competition may come out as the winner. The Pentagon’s infinite budget can bankroll the necessary clinical trials to ensure the drugs you’re putting into your body are safe and effective compared to established treatments and lifestyle modifications. Only Nurse Force can conduct the studies that the private market will not. The United States desperately needs an independent arbiter like Nurse Force who can make recommendations not just on what doctors can prescribe, but what they should prescribe.
In a country obsessed with war, only a military institution like Nurse Force can garner the public support and funding it needs to restore trust and transparency in American healthcare.
And think about it… wouldn’t pink camo fatigues be fun?
