Dr. Meryl Nass is Honored and Snubbed by Maine State Legislators while "Science" Editor-in-Chief avoids tough questions
Two weeks ago, Maine's State Legislature publicly honored Dr. Meryl Nass. The Democratic wing of this body exited the hall in protest. Meanwhile Holden Thorp escapes any real cross-examination...
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My colleague and friend, Meryl Nass, MD, received a heartfelt commendation from the ME state legislature this month. As she briefly noted on her own substack publication, she received this public acknowledgement of her work at the same time she received a letter from the ME State Board of Licensure in Medicine reminding her that she hadn’t completed the necessary coursework in ethics and telemedicine which the board demanded for her medical license to be reinstated.
Dr. Nass has no intention of complying with these demands. Why should she? Records showed that she conducted her telemedicine patient interviews as well as anyone could have expected at the time. Moreover, with regard to ethics, Nass has time and time again proven herself to be an exemplary model which all doctors should aspire to.
These demands were the result of a hearing which stretched nearly two years during which Dr. Nass’s license to practice medicine remained suspended. The ME board of Licensure in Medicine initially charged her with the spread of “misinformation” because she publicly expressed her opinion that the rapidly and inadequately tested “vaccines” had not been demonstrated to be safe.
The Board dropped their charges with regard to her public comments before the hearing began. They were at least smart enough to remember that we do, in fact, have a Constitution that protects the freedom of expression and that doctors are, in fact, people who possess that right. The decision to suspend her license ultimately stemmed from her unthinkable practice of giving her Covid patients a fully licensed drug called Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).
To readers who are unfamiliar with this story, Meryl brought the Medical Board’s attention to what she was doing herself when she was forced, on one occasion, to tell a pharmacist that a HCQ script which she wrote was for Lyme disease and not Covid in order to ensure the script was filled. Pharmacists should not have the final say in how a drug can be used and doctors should not be forced to mislead anyone in order to treat their patients. Yet beginning in 2020, they were.
In coming forward to bring attention to the overreach of State Medical Licensing Boards and the misguided authority of State Pharmacy Boards, Nass sealed her fate as a practicing physician.
I sat through some of the ME Board of Licensure in Medicine vs Meryl Nass, MD hearings. The most interesting session involved the expert witness testimonies which surrounded the evidence of HCQ’s utility in treating Covid-19.
Cutting to the chase, the Board would have served their intents and purposes much better if they didn’t open this can of worms. Physicians can prescribe a licensed medication for any condition they wish. What would be the point of this exercise to begin with?
HCQ was originally approved as an antimalarial remedy eight decades ago. It was then found to have anti-inflammatory properties and has become a central therapy in treating autoimmune disorders like Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis. HCQ also has been shown to have efficacy in preventing thrombosis in certain clotting disorders.
As early as 2005, HCQ was shown to inhibit SARS-COV1 infection and spread.
Prima facie, it would seem that HCQ would be the ideal treatment for Covid-19 which early on was known to progress in three stages: viral replication, a dangerous inflammatory response by the host and then a period where an increased risk of thrombotic events were occurring.
Add to it the numerous trials which demonstrated a significant benefit, how and why would anyone attest that no benefit existed?
Enter Jeremy Faust, MD…
Faust is a relatively junior Emergency Room physician at The Brigham and Women’s hospital here in my own home town of Boston, MA. He received his Board Certification in Emergency Medicine just a couple of years before the Covid Pandemic struck.
The ME Board of Medicine picked (and paid generously) Dr. Faust to appear and testify that Dr. Nass violated standards of care by treating her patients with HCQ, because it put them at unnecessary risk (HCQ, like many drugs can be toxic if not given appropriately).
In doing so, the Board violated two of its own rules which demand that their expert witness must hold a license to practice medicine in Maine (he does not) and be a peer (Faust is not an internist). Moreover, Faust is not even an epidemiologist or virologist nor does he have any experience in managing Covid-19 as an outpatient. Obviously the Medical Board needed someone to state, for the record, that HCQ doesn’t work. I guess there were no takers in the entire state of Maine.
In her defense, Dr. Nass and her attorney, Gene Libby called upon Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory, founding members of the The Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, an organization that has published proven results that HCQ in combination with other repurposed medications is effective against Covid. Marik is a giant in critical care medicine. Marik and Kory together have published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers in the biggest and best journals.
Nass’s team also called upon eminent epidemiologist, Harvey Risch, MD, PhD to help the Board of Medicine understand the significance of the hundreds of studies that support the use of HCQ in Covid-19.
Risch is Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine.
He holds a PhD in mathematical modeling of infectious epidemics from the University of Chicago.
He was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Toronto before coming to Yale.
Dr. Risch is Associate Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Editor of the International Journal of Cancer, and for six years was a Member of the Board of Editors, the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Dr. Risch is an author of more than 400 original peer-reviewed research publications in the medical literature and those research papers have been cited by other scientific publications more than 49,000 times.
The end result was that the Board proved that this hearing was no more than a dog and pony show which, to any objective observer, backfired badly. Notably, in its judgement against Nass, she was not required to take any remedial courses around how to use the medicine which put her in the hot seat to begin with.
In the end, the Board members felt that because she lied to a pharmacist once (and reported it immediately) it was an offense that could not be overlooked and had to be punished with a licensure suspension that has ended her career as a practicing physician.
Members of Maine’s State Legislature speak out in Nass’s support
I suggest watching the personal statements by three of Maine’s state Reps who poignantly recounted how Dr. Nass expertly treated and saved their family members’ lives during the height of the pandemic. Nass received a standing ovation—from those who were present.
In an act of political solidarity, Democratic representatives left the hall in protest of these proceedings. What are they incensed by??
That a doctor in the little town of Ellsworth successfully treated Maine residents in the midst of a pandemic? That a world expert in bioterrorism, anthrax and the anthrax vaccine was acknowledged for her career contributions?
Apparently her efforts in helping ME residents in medical crises and aiding the world to better understand the origin of pandemics paled in comparison to her transgressions: improper record keeping and protesting the overreach of pharmacists during the pandemic.
Like the kangaroo court held by the state Medical Board, this was a political statement and one made in particularly poor taste.
Faust defends Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of Science
On Friday, Dr. Faust wrote in his popular substack publication “Inside Medicine” that the Editor-in-Chief of Science attended to himself well during his appearance at the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability which has been investigating the failures of scientific publications and their editorial processes during the pandemic. He writes:
“This week, editor-in-chief of Science Dr. Holden Thorp gave testimony to Congress on these issues. He described his experience at the helm of one of the world’s top scientific peer review journals. I found his comments to be compelling and transparent.”
Compelling and Transparent? Really?
Thorpe was treated with kid-gloves in my opinion. The only criticism he faced was around a tweet he released soon after former NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, appeared before the same subcommittee last year, when he acknowledged that the lab origins hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory but a valid consideration.
That didn’t stop Thorp from tweeting afterwards:
“One side has scientific evidence. The other has a mediocre episode of Homeland.”
(Homeland is an American espionage thriller television series)
Thorp acknowledged in open session that he “…was not as careful in expressing my personal opinions on my personal Twitter page as I should have been. That does happen on social media from time to time.”
Yes, it does. But why was he compelled to express personal opinions on a hotly debated scientific issue in a tweet in the first place? Is it even possible to do so carefully in a tweet?
He has since gotten off that platform which has “made his life better” and reports:
“I don’t have to take my blood pressure medication anymore. I apologize for that. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Okay. No harm done. Glad your BP is under control, sir.
The problem is that you are the Editor-in-Chief of a highly influential scientific publication and the evidence of lab origins and the suppression of that evidence goes back to the early months of 2020. We are to somehow accept that you can be so biased against a theory that you will publicly (and smugly) tweet about it but can, without prejudice, decide what your publication chooses to disseminate?
This fact seems to have been lost on Faust who mused,
“What bothers me is that there seems to be a political agenda among many who believe that Covid-19 came from a lab leak in Wuhan.”
and
“They’d be a bit more credible to me if their agenda was to make sure that good science was being done while adhering to the most rigorous of safety protocols.”
What’s the problem here?
The problem is that Faust had no problem stepping outside his field of expertise, Emergency Medicine, to serve as the appointed expert on the use of a medicine with a complicated mechanism of action against a viral infection whose pathogenesis is still being defined, yet he apparently cannot make sense of evidence if it is offered by someone who might have a political agenda.
This very well could be how Faust decides what is credible scientifically. After listening to his testimony against Dr. Nass and HCQ, I am inclined to think that Faust believes that HCQ is ineffective because doctors with different political views than his think it works.
Faust and Thorp are birds of a feather. Both think that the scientists and doctors who disagree with them are politically motivated and neither has any problem offering their opinion on topics they are unfamiliar with. And of course, both are Editors-in-Chief of large publications (Faust’s is MedPage Today).
Here’s Faust interviewing Thorp on MedPage Today regarding academic fraud last year.
The House subcommittee let Thorp off easy. I feel that the subcommittee members were so grateful that he accepted their invitation to appear that they forgot to ask any tough questions.
His personal opinions haven’t been limited to one-line tweets.
In October, 2022 Thorp used his platform on Science to publish this scathing editorial piece about Florida Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD which begins:
“When the advocacy group America’s Frontline Doctors appeared on the steps of the United States Supreme Court in 2020, falsely stating that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID-19, their pronouncement was virally shared by right-wing media and soundly debunked by medical academicians. A year later, one of these frontliners, Joseph Ladapo, became the surgeon general of Florida and a faculty member at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He has continued to spread dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 while his academic colleagues are shamefully silent.”
Josh Mitteldorf, PhD, covered this in an article on The Defender where he asks, “How many errors are squeezed into this one opening salvo?”. Summarizing Mitteldorf:
Nobody said that HCQ was a “cure” for Covid-19, only that it could be used in combination with other medicines to treat it.
Experienced clinicians have shown that it works.
Thorp cites no study, nor does he allude to any article which explains how it has been “soundly debunked”.
Thorp further ignores hundreds of studies which have shown HCQ’s benefit
Thorp implies that Ladapo’s faculty appointment at the University of Florida was some kind of perk offered in exchange for his willingness to spread misinformation while ignoring the fact that it was a step down from his prestigious and previous position as faculty at UCLA. Ladapo took the position to champion evidence based medicine in the only state that allowed this practice to flourish.
Thorp also never mentions the fact that Dr. Ladapo has an MD and PhD from Harvard and had, as of 2021, authored 81 peer-reviewed articles. Then again, why would he mention the doctor’s impressive credentials if he chose to refer to him as “Joseph Ladapo” without listing his degrees as is customary in scientific publications? Perhaps the Editor-in-Chief was not aware of this.
Mitteldorf accurately describes Thorp as “a natural scientist, a competent but unexceptional chemist. He was still a young man when he moved from research to science administration.”
Nevertheless his rise through academia was meteoric. Thorp earned a PhD from CalTech in just three years and did post-op work at Yale before returning to his Alma Mater, UNC in 1993 to teach undergraduate chemistry as a visiting assistant professor. He was made a full professor just six years later.
According to Wikipedia, between 1996 and 2005 Thorp also co-founded two biotech companies, Alderaan Diagnostics (renamed Xanthan, Inc.) and Viamet Pharmaceuticals, both of which were able to secure tens of millions in venture capital. He became the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 2007. A year later, he was named chancellor of the University. In 2013, Thorp resigned from the position of chancellor amid allegations of widespread academic fraud. He was then appointed Provost of Washington University where he served until he accepted his present role of Editor-in-Chief of Science.
Does a competent chemist with a knack for moving up through administrative ranks in academia have the wherewithal to offer critique of a distinguished physician/scientist like Dr. Ladapo? Perhaps. But Thorp doesn’t.
In his appearance at the House subcommittee hearing, Representative Richard McCormick, MD (R-GA) asks Thorp if he would agree that Cochrane reviews are the gold standard in assessing medical evidence. Thorp makes this stunning admission:
“I’m not a physician so I’m not sure I know exactly what you are referring to…”
Thorp doesn’t know about the Cochrane library of medical evidence reviews? Why then is he opining on medical matters at all?
A year before his attack on Dr. Ladapo, once again using his pulpit at Science, Thorp penned this commentary dismissive of any wrong doing by Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance and colleagues at the University of North Carolina.
Michael Balter, once a journalist at Science writes about it here:
In his editorial, Thorp noted that Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance received funding to introduce proteolytic cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses and that the appearance of these cleavage sites on the SARS-COV2 virus is a mystery. He is also aware that such sites “enable the virus to efficiently infect human cells.”
Nevertheless he concludes:
“…the experiments, which hardly posed a threat, were not conducted and were proposed by UNC scientists.”
How does he know the experiments were not conducted by UNC scientists? Are we to take him on his word because he was chancellor of UNC at the time? Or was he hiding an uncomfortable truth about what was going on at his alma mater?
The fact that he felt that these experiments “hardly posed a threat” might be the biggest understatement of this century.
Back in November, 2021 Thorp was attempting to paint the lab leak theory as the result of poor communication by the scientific community that “have provided fodder for conspiracy theorists”. In his opinion these facts have given rise to unsubstantiated suspicions:
A “leaked” grant proposal to do Gain of Function (or something very, very close to it) research at UNC
EcoHealth Alliance did not promptly report that their research resulted in a bat coronavirus that became more infectious than anticipated in laboratory mice
NIH Director Francis Collins attesting that his agency did not fail in monitoring EcoHealth Alliance’s research yet simultaneously admitting that they did not comply with the stipulations of the grant the NIH awarded them
One member of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologics Panel Advisory Committee abstained in a vote to authorize the Pfizer Covid vaccine for children because they felt it was not adequately tested and was marginally effective
All these things have given the public reason to believe that “scientists look like they can’t get their stories straight and are hiding facts.”
The irony here is that Thorp is laying out exactly why these suspicions are, in fact, substantiated. What we see here is an attempt to spin reality by invoking the pejoratives of antivax, conspiracy theory and anti-science. It’s astonishing that the Editor-in-Chief of a major scientific publication is willing to stoop to this level to make his point.
Conclusion
Holden (may I call you that?), I appreciate that you chose to appear in front of Congress, unlike the editors at Nature Medicine (which published the infamous Proximal Origins paper) and The Lancet (responsible for publishing a massive study on HCQ based on imaginary data which “proved” HCQ dangerous). Your willingness to appear given your record of public statements was either an act of pure courage or stupidity.
But you haven’t given me any sense of impartiality as a person. I understand that everyone has biases, but you haven’t demonstrated good judgement in how you comport yourself on social media as the purveyor of scientific information to a extensive audience.
You are effectively serving as a judge in a court who decides what evidence is admissible. Your flippant comments on social media scream of deep seated prejudices against those who have valid opinions, backed by evidence, that run counter to your skin-deep understanding of “the Science”. The fact that you have still not recused yourself of your role speaks volumes about your inability to be objective.
I also cannot understand why you would go so far in your editorial and opinion pieces, shamelessly attacking at least one brilliant and courageous physician, insinuating that he arrived at his position because of political motivations.
What were the circumstances around your appointment to this powerful position in August 2019, coincidentally just a few months before the eerie “Event 201” symposium which warned us of an unavoidable pandemic from a respiratory borne illness and the threat of misinformation and antivax sentiment that would surely erupt?
You also seem to have a knack for not being at the wrong place at the wrong time, leaving UNC for Wash U while Gain Of Function research was being conducted by Ralph Baric and his colleagues at UNC.
Perhaps one day we may find out how and why someone who is not aware of the Cochrane library of medical research but who has a demonstrated proclivity for being loose-lipped and openly opinionated can find their way to the helm of a publication with enormous influence called “Science” of all things.
It all seems like a rather good episode of “Homeland”, doesn’t it?