Unlike 1776, the threat to freedom does not come from a faraway British King or his military force as our ancestors faced. In 2020, we face an invisible enemy, the COVID-19 virus unleashed by China on the world, and political enemies within our own borders who are using the medical crisis of COVID-19 as a political weapon to curtail our freedoms in every sector of our lives.
As a physician and as an American, it makes me overwhelmingly sad—and angry—that a treatable medical problem has been so weaponized by the opponents of our freedom that we have lost our most fundamental freedoms. 
Striving for LIBERTY is literally in my very DNA: my ancestor Thomas Gray was one of only 50 out of 600 colonists who survived the Starving Times at Jamestown 1609-1611, which was America’s first failed attempt at socialism. My other ancestors fought for liberty in the first American Revolution in 1776. My Quaker ancestors fought to end slavery. Others fought in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. I have fought for medical freedom for my entire medical career. Fighting for liberty is quite literally at the very core of who I am—as an American and as a physician.
Our Nation was founded by those courageous men and women who chose to fight for the freedom to live their lives without tyrants controlling their every move and interfering with their ability to worship God as they chose. For two hundred and forty-four years following the signing of the Declaration of Independence and then the defeat of the British at Yorktown, the American Experiment has carried out the quantum leap idea in human history: LIBERTY and LIFE are unalienable rights given to us by our Creator. Our freedom is not based on the whim of any human-created government. 
Yet 244 years after this momentous July 4, 1776, we are facing the most devastating and unparalleled assault on EVERY dimension of our independence and freedom as Americans. Suddenly, under the guise of “protecting” us from COVID-19, we have abruptly lost:

>  Freedom to travel and move freely around our communities and country

>  Freedom of worship – churches remain closed, while anarchists gather in groups of thousands to wreak mayhem on our communities

>  Freedom of speech: at work, on line, in schools, in print and broadcast media. The media propaganda and censorship are worse than I witnessed during the Cold War

>  Freedom to assemble peacefully for normal activities: exceptions of course granted for the thousands gathering for riots, looting, burning our cities, businesses, historical monuments, and terrorizing peaceful citizens

>  Freedom to work normally

>  Freedom to play and recreate 

>  Freedom to breathe freely without a mandated facial covering or mask when we leave our homes

>  Freedom to preserve our life with medical doctors and treatments of our choosing, such as hydroxychloroquine that has become a demonized and highly restricted medicine, previously widely available, cheap, safely used worldwide since FDA-aproved for safety and effectiveness in 1955. For 65 years, doctors in every country have been using this medicine for many different diseases, including viral ones

Our own governors and mayors have become the NEW tyrants, little dictators over their fiefdoms, micromanaging every aspect of our lives and work and worship. They are worse in their destruction of our independence in daily life than British King George’s tyranny imposed on the early colonists. 

Like the British King, the political elite and their families are exempt from the controls placed on you and me.
Former President Obama played golf on a course closed to everyone else. New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio was chauffeured across town to exercise in a park while ordering the citizens of New York to stay home. New York Governor Cuomo restricted hydroxychloroquine from being used by everyone outside a hospital-based clinical trial, i.e. all outpatients and all nursing home residents, but then his brother Chris reported that he used HCQ to treat his own COVID-19. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s husband was free to carry out his personal pleasures denied to everyone else in Michigan. The list goes on and on.
These obscene and illegal double-standards have cost lives, and livelihoods, and caused much mental anguish from the mainstream media’s ginned up fear designed to cause economic and medical uncertainty. Mainstream media outlets are no longer the independent free press envisioned by our Founders as the watchdog to protect citizens from an out of control government. They are themselves agents of the radical left seeking to destroy our freedom. Citizen journalists, much like Thomas Paine and his Common Sense booklets during the Revolutionary era, are the ones digging for truth, sharing information and correcting lies from the politicized corporate media serving the radical agenda. That is the purpose of America Out Loud, and other citizen-run outlets that are our beacons of TRUTH today.
All of these are tactics of totalitarian governments throughout human history⏤whether carried out by a king or dictator or an elected official suddenly gone rogue.

What I am seeing in America today has become worse that the oppression my husband and I experienced in our visits to the communist Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain countries of Eastern Europe in the 1970s during the Cold War.

As a physician, I am shocked and outraged at the unprecedented manner in which medical information is being distorted, manipulated and the outright lies in the political agenda of the radical left to disrupt the 2020 Presidential election and overthrow our Constitutional Republic form of government. Medical experts who don’t treat patients, and some who have never practiced front line clinical medicine (such as Dr. Anthony Fauci), have become little Napoleons dictating our every move, even contradicting themselves, in an attempt to control the population.
Dr. Fauci’s flip-flops on wearing masks are one of many examples of misleading or false medical information. Mask-wearing ordered by governors and mayors, and promoted by Dr. Fauci, is about control, getting the population accustomed to subjugation. Wearing your mask is not about protecting you from viruses. None of the surgical type masks, and certainly not the homemade cloth face coverings, can stop the 0.03 micron average viral particle from passing through to your nose and mouth.
“Experts” insisting on masks, social distancing and lockdowns claim we do not have effective treatments for COVID-19 so all of these draconian intrusions on our independence are medically necessary. That is simply not true!
Medically, COVID-19 is a very TREATABLE medical illness if caught easily and people have access to common, safe, effective antiviral medicines, such as hydroxychloroquine, widely used in countries around the world. With more testing, we find that COVID-19 has no significant increase in deaths over that seen with the yearly influenza seasons, and fewer deaths than with the 1918 Flu Pandemic and the 1968 Hong Kong flu. In spite of the media headlines hyping “surge in cases” in many states, the numbers that matter are going down significantly: hospitalizations, ICU admissions of COVID, and deaths due just to COVID.
Media articles make frightening comments about “hospitals and ICUs nearing capacity,” which are taken out of context to frighten and control people to justify these draconian lockdowns.
Hospital CEOs across America WANT to run their hospitals at 85-90% capacity for optimal revenue and staffing efficiencies. That is normal. Hospitals running at 78% capacity, or lower, is not normal, and causes significant loss of revenue that is damaging in the long run.
Consider this recent quote from Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist Medical Center in Houston TX: “At Houston Methodist, we are somewhere in the low 90s right now in terms of capacity of ICU beds, but let me put that in perspective – June 25, 2019 exactly one year ago…it was at 95%. We are highly experienced at utilizing our ICU beds for the sickest of the sick patients day in and day out…and it is completely normal for us to have capacities that run in the 80s and 90s. That’s how all of us run hospitals, and how all hospitals operate.”
But the lay public doesn’t know that fact and has become alarmed by statistics presented without context to explain normal hospital operations. 
On this Independence Day, my warning and medical advice to Americans is this:
Wake Up America! COVID-19 is today’s political weapon modern tyrants are using to destroy our independence. All of us must speak out, for our health, for our safety, for our life, for our freedom, and for our childrens’ and grandchildrens’ future.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ― Edmund Burke

Celebrate your Independence by doing everything in your power to preserve it.