What Happens When Government Controls People’s Health?

The coronavirus pandemic has elevated cooperation and collusion between governments and health-care providers to levels that give both of them unprecedented power. History furnishes examples of where such fusion of interests can lead. We can gain insight into the current pandemic and the role of government health policy by narrowing our focus to one relevant example: One nation that has been and continues to be a world leader not only in health care, but also in science, technology, economics and culture.

This nation pioneered a system of health care in which all citizens paid taxes to provide mandatory health and accident insurance to pay the doctors’ and pharmacists’ bills for those who suffered injury or disease. This revolutionary system changed the paradigm from each citizen assuming the responsibility and paying the bills for his own health, to the government assuming the responsibility and paying the bills for the collective health of the nation.

Giving the national government greater control over health care resulted in greater emphasis on and funding for the national medical industry. The nation developed a track record of producing advanced pharmaceuticals to address maladies of all kinds. It has also funded research into diet and hygiene and made groundbreaking discoveries, including important links between tobacco and cancer. As illnesses spread and populations grew fearful, response to disease became a major policy area, and the government coordinated and managed more and more aspects of medicine, infectious disease and even hereditary diseases, sex and pregnancy. It also achieved success in the eradication of many disease-carrying pests.

The government promoted the importance of health bureaus, political health-care appointees and other government health-care workers. It assumed the leadership of formerly independent national and medical organizations. It coordinated with pharmaceutical companies to align business practices with government policy, awarding them beneficial regulations and taxpayer funding. It deployed new drugs and new technologies, including mobile medical units manned by armed government agents to screen for infectious diseases. It collected unprecedented amounts of medical data to formulate and implement health policy. It established programs for influencing youth directly, rather than only through their parents. Its institutes of health promoted policy through publications and videos and in coordination with journalists and celebrities.

Among the population, the Bible, confidence in churches, tradition and the importance of the individual was replaced by The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and the importance of the collective. The nation came to trust in a new savior: scientific medicine. Scientific medicine was coordinated by the government, and the government was empowered by the powers and rights it had acquired from the people.

The potential applications for this approach were and are boundless.

The government and the nation applied the power of the state and the logic of evolution to fight bacteria, viruses, insects and rodents. It used these same fundamental principles to fight for the liberation of the working class; to subject wealth, freedoms and rights to the imperative of the state; and to eradicate the pests of society.

The national government assumed temporary emergency powers. It assumed authority previously held by local governments and by individuals. Top politicians were authorized to reinterpret and contravene the constitution. Laws and directives divided the population into citizens with rights and citizens without rights. A person’s license, business, livelihood and fundamental rights could be revoked or denied, sometimes based on a choice he or she had made, sometimes based on things he or she had no choice over.

Empowered by its symbiotic collusion with the government, politically correct science produced new studies on genetics and on the promising new field of eugenics: the selective breeding of human populations for genetic improvement. Politicians and everyday people across all political beliefs commonly used “superior” and “inferior” in reference to human beings and their characteristics.

Exercising its control over who participated in society and how, the government cited scientists and doctors as reasons to ban certain people from certain marriages, sexual relations and having children. Doctors, political appointees and party officials made decisions about treatment, experimentation and execution largely based on saving national resources, channeling the power of natural selection, prioritizing the collective over the individual, and politics.

The government authorized experimental medicines to be tested on the population at large. It authorized experiments, sometimes fatal, to be conducted on the ill to better understand disease. Small numbers of people with certain extreme conditions were sterilized. Some were euthanized. Physicians and others carrying out “racial hygiene” and other government policies were forced into moral dilemmas. But the ultimate authority for morality and ethics was evolutionary theory and the government, not some religion or spiritual reality beyond it. Government scientific policy superseded the individual, superseded the statistics, superseded science itself. The suffering and deaths were considered unfortunate, but the science was clear: This was for the greater good.

Politicians and doctors identified certain groups of people as being responsible for spreading disease, for functioning like pests of society. Opposing politicians and doctors were ignored, mocked, intimidated, accused of dangerous misinformation, and subjected to “cancellation” by peers, doctors, scientists, journalists, entertainers, policymakers and government agents.

This was the state of government medical policy, carried out legally and in polite society, in one of the most industrialized, most sophisticated, most educated, most cultured, most advanced, most admired nations in the modern world: Germany.

In the 1930s.

Hitler’s Science

Otto von Bismarck united Germany in the 19th century. When he introduced his insurance model, he started to tie the working class and the medical industry to an authoritarian state. The drugs Germany developed were experimental, like those developed in any other leading nation. But in Germany, the government gave drug companies authority to test these experimental drugs on the whole population. One of these companies, Bayer, is famous for inventing aspirin in 1899. It also promoted, all the way until 1912, treating children’s colds and coughs with heroin.

After switching over to producing chemical and biological weapons for World War i, Bayer and other manufacturers switched back to making drugs, and the fundamental dynamic of government-controlled health care remained in place in Germany. There, scientific advancements, the theory of evolution and the evolution-based theory of socialism were spreading rapidly among the educated and the sophisticated.

The National Socialists of the 1930s did not take a perfectly good government health-care system and alter it radically. They built on it. They did not twist evolutionary theory; they tried to apply it.

Granted, the party that led German politics from 1932 to 1945 was unique in many ways—but not as unique as we might think. Certainly one of the tools through which it exerted power—national socialized health care—is frighteningly more familiar to us than we would like to believe.

In Germany, one step led to another. It was predictable, logical and all but unavoidable that if the government could gain power over health policy, it would use that power, and would use it for its political ends.

In the quest for what you might call “non-Aryan zero,” the National Socialists were able to take ultimate control of health and almost all fundamental aspects of personal life. Evolution, atheism and socialism explicitly state that there is no higher power, force, moral or ethic than the human mind, especially when organized into the state. It is, thereore, logical—even valid and good—that the state, especially in wartime, bend physicians to its policies, allow pharmaceutical companies to experiment on people, enslave thousands of non-Aryans to work in pharmaceutical factories, victimize hundreds of non-Aryans to be tortuously experimented on.

Millions of Germans followed a “logical” progression that led all the way from revoking people’s rights to concentrating a certain ethnicity in slave camps—a “logical” progression that led from using the same pesticide that fumigated the factories and cleansed the environments of the workers, to gassing unfathomable numbers of innocent people the government had identified as the evolutionary, eugenic equivalents of pests who needed to be cleansed from the environment of human civilization.

This development of Germany’s health tyranny, along with the historic documentation, is described by, among others, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and anthropologist who directs the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.; and Miguel Faria, M.D., editor in chief of the Medical Sentinel.

Why Hitler’s Science Was Banned

On Aug. 20, 1947, the International Medical Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, passed judgment on 23 doctors and bureaucrats for their roles in medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. In a January 2016 article in Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology, Francisco López-Muñoz wrote the following on the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials: “Despite the sterilization and euthanasia programs, there were also drug research projects in physically and mentally disabled in hospitals and universities did not have any informed consent. … Those tests were generally related to the treatment of infectious diseases, such as typhus, erysipelas, scarlet fever or paratyphoid diarrhea, and death rates of experimental subjects were extremely high.”

But the research into diseases was only a small part of National Socialist medical studies. In “Nazi Medicine and Research on Human Beings,” Prof. Volker Roelecke noted in December 2004: “Rassenhygiene (a German equivalent for eugenics) was perceived as an applied science founded on the laws of genetics and as essential for improving the health of the volk, or race.” Drugs were also said to have played a huge role in keeping Germany’s soldiers marching.

“The Nazis regarded Auschwitz as the ideal place for experimentation, for the creation of supermen, and Josef Mengele was the symbol of Nazi cruelty and mysticism,” said Israeli jurist Gideon Hausner, chief prosecutor at the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and the head of the Mengele tribunal.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, M.D., Ph.D., known as the angel of death, was not the only example of National Socialist medical tyranny, but he was likely the worst. He conducted twisted, torturous experiments on concentration camp prisoners, particularly twins, in Auschwitz. After the war, he escaped to Latin America. A sudden, inexplicable rise in the births of twins, most of whom were blonde-haired and blue-eyed, in a small Brazilian town may be evidence of his work. Here again, the result traces back to cruel experiments made possible by some of the worst tyranny. History.com noted that under Mengele’s supervision about 3,000 children at Auschwitz-Birkenau “were exposed to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical ‘research’ into illness, human endurance and more.”

The scientists were ordered by the state to find ways to better equip German soldiers in military combat situations or to recover from wounds. Other experiments were aimed at aiding the development of new weapons.

In later legal trials, Nazi physicians justified the casualties by comparing them to the death of civilians in military strikes, such as the Allied bombings on German cities. The audacity of these scientists may display the worst of human nature while at the same time showing how easy it is for humans to get off track without God’s guidance.

During the war, Hitler’s atrocities were not fully known, yet Winston Churchill warned British Parliament and the whole world, “[I]f we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

“What Churchill said then is even more relevant today,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry noted. “The ‘new Dark Age’ he warned about is upon us. Science has created even more-formidable, more-destructive weapons. The dangers threatening our world are proliferating. How could it be any worse? We must wake up and see reality! We need help from God! We all truly need to recognize that!” (“Churchill’s Final Warning,” Feb. 18, 2020).

Parallels to Today

The rapid development of the coronavirus vaccines in 2020 has been heralded as an unmatched scientific achievement, and its actual efficacy is being determined by simply giving the vaccines, at taxpayer expense, to millions of people. Advancements are being made in genetics, and scientists are talking about decoding the human immune system. Science and scientists—especially government-empowered scientists—are promoted as our great hope for salvation.

During the coronavirus pandemic, governments conducted studies in the role of genetics in relation to the severity of covid-19 cases. At the end of 2020, Scottish scientists had found five gene variants that favor a severe illness. Such studies may or may not be in the public’s interest, but they do show how our world today isn’t much different from the world a hundred years ago.

“Is modern genetic testing and the Human Genome Project the first step to a new eugenics?” Micozzi asked decades before the public had ever heard the word “coronavirus.” Oxford Languages describes eugenics as “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.” The Nazis called it rassenhygiene: racial hygiene.

All the studies into genetics today reveal heritable characteristics that are favorable and unfavorable. For some, the next logical step would be eugenics. Of course, people don’t believe that we have Nazi scientists in our midst. But it’s imperative to ask: Could it happen again?

Another study the Nazis obsessed over was finding cures to cancer. Cancer remains virulent to this day, and politics and science are merging again to find cures. Billions are invested into projects intended to save millions of lives. How far will mankind go to find a breakthrough? How many experiments and potential casualties are morally acceptable given the lofty goal? Those are the questions we still wrestle with. Are we immune from the reasoning that we must accept casualties to advance science for humanity’s greater good?

As science advances and political goals merge with monetary interests, the temptation to exploit science is the same today as it was a century ago. The new research and technologies in the field of genomics today could transform the fantasies of the past into reality. The coronavirus has advanced fields of medical studies at an unprecedented rate. This is just one of many examples that show science today is working with the same building blocks Nazi scientists used to build their medical tyranny.

The stage is set for what could become an even worse medical tyranny. Will today’s scientific advances that are heralded as humanity’s hope morph into its doom? Will we again see the worst of medical practices reappear?

The Bible indicates we will.

Nazi System Prophesied to Reemerge

The medical system was only a part of the overall Nazi tyranny the world suffered under in World War ii. This whole tyrannical system is prophesied to rise again in our time. You can read this in Revelation 13 and 17.

These prophecies are in the context of the return of Jesus Christ. While they point back to events already fulfilled, they also point to the future. Revelation 17:8 warns, “The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder … when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.”

“The word translated ‘bottomless pit,’ or abyss, in verse 8 actually means underground. That’s where the Nazis have been since before the end of World War ii,” Mr. Flurry explains in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire.

During Hitler’s day, God sent Herbert W. Armstrong to warn the world of Nazi Germany and the soon-coming resurrection of that empire. Jesus Christ Himself warned that conditions would become so bad that no man would be saved alive unless God intervened (Matthew 24:22).

But along with this warning, God prophesied that the good news of His coming Kingdom would be proclaimed (verse 14). For decades, Mr. Armstrong proclaimed that our world would enter another resurrection of tyrannical government before Christ would return to set up His Father’s Kingdom. The Trumpet, under the leadership of Gerald Flurry, continues to trumpet this same warning message today (Revelation 10:11).

“And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space” (Revelation 17:10). In his booklet Prophesy Again, Mr. Flurry writes: “Notice! This prophecy is dated. There are seven kings here, but five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come. It’s almost as if God freezes time there—during the time of this sixth king out of seven.

“This prophecy implies that God is going to bring His man on the scene during the time of the sixth of the seven heads of the Holy Roman Empire. It also implies that the seventh head would not come while the end-time Elijah was on the scene. Mr. Armstrong was here when ‘one is, and the other is not yet come.’ This prophecy refers to a specific period of time when God sends His end-time type of Elijah to explain what is happening.”

To understand the commission of God’s Church today to sound the alarm, request Prophesy Again, by Gerald Flurry. This free booklet will not only help you understand the biblical prophecies that foretell Germany’s rise, it will also show you the great hope there is in God’s warning work.