The Priceless, Unseen Gifts of Fatherhood in the Age of COVID — The FLCCC News Capsule for June 18, 2023

A Compendium of the Latest COVID-19 News, Facts & Features

On this Father’s Day, we are departing from our traditional FLCCC News Capsule format to reflect upon the priceless, yet unseen, gifts bestowed upon children by their fathers.

Today is Father’s Day.

It is now the second Father’s Day that has arrived without my father.

Though today I will celebrate, as always, the other dear fathers in my life—my husband, my son and sons-in-law, and my brothers and brothers-in-law—this day is tinged with sadness. Many of you reading these words who have lost your fathers know this feeling well.

Last week, my eyes quickly clouded with tears while perusing the Father’s Day cards at the grocery store. I recalled years past when I would take the greatest care in choosing just the right card that would epitomize my relationship with my father and the man that he was. Sometimes—especially in the last few years of his life—I would end up making my own cards for him. Such was the uniqueness of the precious life lessons he modeled for me.

As I write this, I am looking at the words on the screen as I type trying to will the tears away—so that I can see and think more clearly; and choose just the right words to convey to you how my father’s boundless acts of human compassion throughout his medical career is inextricably linked to my work with—and love for—the FLCCC. Of this I am certain.

Let me explain.

In 1934—at the age of 9—my father watched helplessly as his father became desperately ill with tuberculosis and was sent away for several months to a sanatorium. My father was so afraid that his dad was going to die that he vowed to himself that one day, in fact as soon as he could, he would become a doctor and save not only his father if he ever became sick again but anyone, anywhere who was in need of medical help.

My father, Jack Kamen, at age 3 with his sister Fay in Chicago, circa 1929. The family, like many of the era, grew up in extreme poverty.

I believe his deep-seated need to save people and help them overcome challenging illnesses was why my father cared little about remuneration for his services. In the earliest days as a General Practitioner in a poor, economically-depressed area of northwest Indiana in the 1950s and 1960s, my father knew that most of his patients could ill afford medical care—much less the medicines that they needed to get well.

I remember my Dad coming home many, many times with sweets his patients had baked for him, slippers they had knitted for him, or crocheted throw blankets large enough to cover a whole couch. My mom explained to us that Dad received those gifts from patients who could not afford to pay for him to take care of them. Dad did not want their money. He wanted their good health. That’s all he ever wanted.

Even after he became an anesthesiologist in the early 1960s and opened and operated the first ICU in the state of Indiana, followed by a coronary care unit and respiratory care unit, he would still waive his physician fees for any patient who struggled to pay.

Towards the end of his life (and only because my siblings and I asked), my Dad estimated that in his 51 years of practice, he had forgiven well over $1 million in patients’ fees. We knew why he did it. And we also knew he hadn’t a single regret. The preservation of human life and health was his sole concern—whether it was his own father—or anyone else. One patient at a time. That’s all that ever mattered to him.

Dr. Jack Kamen with a breathing machine at St. Mary Mercy Hospital in Gary, Indiana circa 1970.

My father’s example of unstinting dedication to humanity is the most powerful lesson he ever imparted to me. So in late March 2020, when a friend sent me a letter written by Dr. Paul Marik to then-Governor Andrew Cuomo pleading for him to read and share Dr. Marik’s lifesaving COVID-19 protocol, I instantly recognized in Dr. Marik’s pleadings a compassionate humanitarian behind the words of his opening sentence. I had seen it before.

“People are dying needlessly,” Dr. Marik’s letter began.

Dr. Marik went on to explain to Governor Cuomo that his protocol included FDA-approved drugs along with natural interventions such as Vitamin C, melatonin, quercetin, and zinc. He wrote that these interventions could be of real benefit to dying patients.

Then came this passage:

“Dr. Fauci and others are supporting the idea of performing Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). I believe it is unethical to do such trials. How can you offer patients a placebo when testing a drug you believe may have clinical efficacy?”

Oh whoa. Was it just a coincidence that the very same questions of adherence to ethical standards of medical care had passed my father’s lips so many, many times over the decades?

After reading the letter through and sharing it with my husband, a pulmonologist who had read dozens of Dr. Marik’s innumerable peer-reviewed, published medical papers for years, I was in. Really IN.

DR. MARIK’S MARCH 20, 2020 LETTER TO THEN NEW YORK GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO

My first instinct about Dr. Marik (and the physician group he would soon convene) was spot on. In the three years since the founding of the FLCCC, I have witnessed over and over and over again the resolute adherence of all of our founding physicians — each one a father himself — to the highest ideals of human kindness, and deep, deep reverence for life. Many of them have also treated their struggling patients without expectation of payment. They have stayed the course when others might have fallen from unforgiving, villainous winds of censorship, persecution, and slander…sustaining colossal personal losses.

It is only individuals with exceedingly strong moral character and commitment to the highest ethical standards that are able to withstand such unspeakable personal destruction and still remain in the fight for the preservation of human life.

Every day, I hear the echoes and witness the spirit of my father’s humanitarian fortitude in the words and deeds of the FLCCC’s critical care team… who valiantly rose beginning in 2020 to defy the de-facto COVID-19 treatment narrative that doomed millions to die.

Deep in the throes of a relentless pandemic, it is easy to understand that these champions had neither the time nor the propensity to tease out exactly what their daily acts of human kindness were teaching and instilling into their own children as critical life values.

💊 When Dr. Pierre Kory testified in December 2020 before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs about the efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID, he knew he was placing his very livelihood at risk. Yet, there he was, powerfully, confidently telling the people of the world that there was a way to save themselves. This taught his children that if even one human life could be saved, their father would do everything within his power to save that life—regardless of the risks and personal costs.

💊 When Dr. Joe Varon worked every day, for 715 days straight in his Houston, Texas ICU—which was filled to overflowing for months with critically ill COVID patients—he placed his entire life on hold to save every patient possible. He did this so that the people in the low-income community served by his hospital would have ready access to the highly effective MATH+ protocol that was saving mostly every patient in the hospitals where it was being used. Dr. Varon’s children could clearly see that above all else, their father valued the life of every human being—regardless of race, religion, social condition, ethnicity, or economic status.

💊 When Dr. Paul Marik—the nation’s most highly published critical care doctor—was told by his hospital in 2021 that he could no longer use ivermectin (as well as other co-interventions that were part of his treatment protocol) to save his COVID patients in his ICU, he filed suit against his employer. Realizing that this action would likely result in his hospital privileges being suspended (it did), Dr. Marik said that filing the lawsuit was necessary because “I could not watch my patients die when I knew they could be saved.” Dr. Marik’s children saw their father rise to defend the sick and defenseless in his care and, in so doing, sacrifice his luminous career as a critical care physician.

💊 When the licenses of medical providers who prescribed ivermectin to their patients were threatened by state medical boards, most rose to defend themselves against that which they knew was ignoble because it imperiled the health of their patients. The children of these warriors have learned to recognize moral courage in their fathers’ faces.

Then there’s you. Yes, YOU. The noble, tenacious force that is the indomitable FLCCC army. Speaking to all—but especially to the fathers we honor today—I offer the following:

You sought out truth, propriety, and scientific integrity because the things major media were asking you to believe and swallow whole just weren’t making sense.

💊 You saw that Remdesivir, mandated by most hospitals for COVID patients because the official narrative said so, did far more damage than good.

💊 You intuited that the unprecedented media blackout on the words “ivermectin”, “hydroxychloroquine”, and “repurposed drugs”—delivered as urgent supplications from mouths and minds of some of the world’s most accomplished and clinically experienced researchers, physicians and scientists—meant that the information they tried so hard to hide, if liberated, would mortally wound the deadly official narrative that poorly concealed the profit motive behind it.

💊 You put a Geiger counter to the sand as you diligently searched for deeply buried data and guidance about the highly questionable safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines.

💊 You knew that pervasive reporting in both major media and medical media alike arguing that long COVID and vaccine injury were made-up syndromes was dangerously deceitful. You saw for yourself the suffering caused by the syndromes and the reluctance of patients to seek treatment for fear of being mocked and marked with a scarlet letter.

💊 You insisted that your medical care, and that of your family, would be delivered in collaboration with your medical provider — and not directed by a faceless, one-treatment-fits-all “system”.

These actions and so many more etched your beautiful, laudable, lifesaving audacity into your children’s consciousness in perpetuity. Flawlessly done, my friends. Flawlessly done.

••••••••••••

Just months before my father’s death, I found an old box of his office papers in the upstairs storage closet. The box, still unopened after my parents’ move from Gary, Indiana to Indianapolis 35 years before, contained dozens upon dozens of letters written to my father by his grateful patients. I had never before seen these letters…which he had so carefully preserved—unbeknownst to any of us. Each one was an expression of love and profound appreciation for his myriad merciful acts of kindness and compassion.

Today is Father’s Day.

Now that my father is gone, I can only glimpse the passing shadows of my deeply ingrained memories of his humanness and how he cared so lovingly for his patients. I saw it myself… going on house calls with him as a little girl, spending a day with him at his office, hearing from his patients and co-workers how beloved my father was to them, and working at his hospital one summer as a ward clerk where I was (most undeservedly) well-respected. That was because I was Jack Kamen’s daughter.

I have often thought about the very first time—in March of 2020—I read Dr. Marik’s letter to Governor Cuomo. It is quite possible (if not probable) that had the words and concepts of human kindness that ran through the letter as a glittering, golden thread of brilliant benevolence not summoned memories of my father’s quintessence, I might have chosen NOT to help Dr. Marik create the press release he needed… I might have simply passed the task off to another… never having participated in the life-affirming experience of the founding and the diligent cultivation of the FLCCC.

Oh, the inestimable impact of a father’s influence on a child—mostly imperceptible until, in the fullness of time, it is revealed in its entirety at last.

Though I am not a physician (much to my father’s disappointment), I feel that somehow, my work with the FLCCC over the last three years—and that of our prodigious staff, magnanimous donors, and stalwart corps of volunteers—has contributed to the saving of myriad lives around the world. So on some level, I now understand with even more clarity the immense sense of inner solace—and genuine joy—my father experienced as he saved life after life after life.

In his precious 9-year-old mind, my father envisioned himself building a career as a lifesaving doctor. He came to that role pure of purpose. Because he lived, so did thousands of others. My father’s lifelong mission will forever be at one with that of the FLCCC.

So Dad, in a very real way, you are still saving lives. And, I am certain you know that I was always so proud to be “Jack Kamen’s daughter.”

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

All my love, Joyce