When Obamacare was signed into law, I interviewed many physicians and medical association representatives for news reports. I was startled by the number of doctors who were angry and depressed about it. Suicides among physicans soared afterwards. Doctors began leaving the profession in record numbers.

A decade later (and now with the weight of the pandemic on their shoulders), about 400 physicians die by suicide each year. Hundreds more harbor serious thoughts of suicide. The suicide completion rate among doctors is 44% higher than the expected population; female physicians have a higher suicide completion rate than male doctors.

Late last week, one physician, a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), shared the federal guidelines enacted in 2020 for how the medical industry must report COVID deaths:

“COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to the death.”

“Assume?” my doctor friend asked. I could hear his voice crack. “Caused or contributed to the death? This has been utilized to blow up the death counts for COVID-19. They want everyone to stack the deck.”

“Physicians don’t like to admit it, but there is an ever growing disillusionment with the unethical environment in the medical industry,” he said. “It’s leading to more people just giving up. I mean leaving practice, checking out and taking their own lives. It wasn’t meant as a joke, but when we learned that a colleague–a good doctor–hung himself, one of my peers angrily blurted out matter-of-factly, “he died of COVID too, huh?”

Federal Guidelines

Minnesota State Senator Dr. Scott Jensen believes new evidence shows a need for an audit of COVID deaths. A year ago, he criticized the Minnesota Department of Health regarding how the state was using federal guidelines on recording coronavirus deaths.

“I sort of got myself in hot water way back in April when I made the comment that I was, as a physician, being encouraged to do death certificates differently with COVID-19 than with other disease entities,” Jensen said.

“For 17 years, the CDC document that guides us as physicians to do death certificates has stood, but (in 2020) we were told, through the Department of Health and the CDC, that the rules were changing if COVID-19 was involved.”

“If it’s COVID-19, we’re told now it doesn’t matter if it was actually the diagnosis that caused death. If someone had it, they died of it,” he said.

Recently Jensen, along with another State Representative Mary Franson, raised awareness after reviewing thousands of death certificates in the state. They found that 40% DID NOT have COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death.

“I have other examples where COVID isn’t the underlying cause of death, where we have a fall,” Franson exposed. “Another example is we have a freshwater drowning. We have dementia. We have a stroke and multiorgan failure.”

She said that in one case, a person who was ejected from a car was “counted as a COVID death” because the virus was in his system.

Franson said she and a team reviewed 2,800 “death certificate data points” and found that about 800 of them did not have the virus as the underlying cause of death.

Tennessee

The “deck stacking” isn’t limited to Minnesota. A family in Tennessee was left furious after a loved one’s death certificate listed COVID-19 as the cause of death despite the patient having tested negative for the virus on three separate occasions leading up to his death.

“Oh, it was a slap in the face,” said Deborah Hughey after losing her father, Hal Short. “I felt like it was a slap in the face to our family, a couple of days before my dad died, we knew he was dying, me and my mom had a conversation that he had these COVID tests, and they were all negative, and at that point she said, ‘If I get his death certificate and it says COVID-19 was his cause of death I’m going to be furious.'”

“We weren’t in the COVID unit, never even suggested, on the last day, the day that he dies all of us got to go in there without a mask, and other members of extended family, got to say goodbye,” said Dean Short, Hal Short’s wife.

TriStar Centennial Medical Center in Nashville later apologized and blamed it on a “clerical error.”

Colorado

In Colorado, the coroner’s office in Montezuma County, corrected the state’s claim that a Coloradan died in the town of Cortez due to the coronavirus.

Montezuma County Coroner George Deavers said that while the unidentified person did test positive for the coronavirus, the cause of death was alcohol poisoning, according to the Durango Herald.

Deavers says an investigation he and a pathologist conducted showed the person’s blood alcohol content (BAC) was 0.55, seven times higher than the legal driving limit, and determined ethanol toxicity was the cause of death. A BAC of 0.3 is typically considered lethal.

“COVID was not listed on the death certificate as the cause of death. I disagree with the state for listing it as a COVID death and will be discussing it with them this week,” Deavers said.

Physican Suicides Increasing

Dr. Pamela Wible, a family physician in Eugene, Oregon, is a sought after speaker, writer and researcher on physician suicides. She keeps a register of over 1200 doctor suicides.

“Physician suicide is a public health crisis,” she said. “More than one million Americans lose their doctors to suicide each year—just in the United States.”

“Several of these suicides on my registry are related to the toxic medical system and are what I call ‘statement suicides.’ The victims are making a statement about an unethical medical system by way of their suicides. They seem to believe that finally someone will pay attention and do something to stop the abuse and criminal activity that they’ve witnessed.”

In her speeches, Dr. Wible discusses actual cases. One is Dr. James Evan Astin, who she describes as a “bright, caring, compassionate second-year internal medicine resident. Why did he die? He first felt suicidal in medical school. He made that clear in his suicide note. He was disillusioned with for-profit medicine, discontent as a factory worker…He wrote in a suicide note, ‘I just wanted to be a scientist who helped people and that is not at all what I do.’ He died due to misery in medicine feeling like he was in the wrong career—a career that had been degraded in such a way that he could no longer actually help patients. He was unwilling to participate any longer and could see no other way out.”

In another case, Wible explains the cause of another physician’s death. It was the “same sort of thing as some previous victims. Disillusionment and despair with medicine. He wanted to do geriatrics and churning elderly patients through seven-minute visits while maximizing billing codes was not the future he wanted for himself…He would have been a great geriatrician, but not when trained to be a factory worker. His mom claims he died of a broken heart and soul. I happen to concur. He died due to assembly-line medicine.”