My conversation with the dean of the largest medical school in the U.S.

Jay Hess - Dean, Indiana University School of Medicine

A few weeks ago, I went to my first meeting of the Brownstone Midwest Supper Club.

I encouraged a few friends to go as well.

Maybe most interesting was that this group, which began earlier this year and has met for monthly dinners here in Bloomington, Indiana, is forging sort of a new way, together recognizing that the only reasonable response to the level of deceit, corruption and coercion that were revealed during Covid and the onslaught of vaccine mandates is for people who were awakened to this tyranny to come together, make connections, and start rebuilding, in small community groups like this one.

I don’t think anyone in that room watches television, or if they do, they don’t believe much of what is said on the news channels. They are readers, thinkers, questioners. The talk, by Bret Swanson, was followed by a lively round of questions and statements from those in the audience. Three of them were professor friends (finance, economics, computer science); one is the founder of the local chapter of Hoosiers for Medical Liberty and was my partner in organizing the rally in opposition to the IU Covid vaccine mandate; another is a friend from Mooresville whose husband was killed by the Covid hospital protocols and is now about to announce her run for state legislature; another is a neighbor, a pro-freedom 80-something hippie who created and runs a housing co-op (actually called a permaculture village); another is a doctor friend who has her own independent medical practice in town.

There were also two foreigners in the group, a female doctor from the Netherlands and her boyfriend, who is from Brazil. They are doing a tour of Brownstone Institute supper clubs around the country. I met the female doctor after the talk. She said she left medicine because of what happened in the Netherlands during Covid. She and her boyfriend went to live in Brazil, but now are looking to resettle in the United States because of the revolution in health policy being led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at HHS.

Walking away that night, I was reminded how many people were forever changed by what happened in 2020 and 2021 — not so much the virus, but the response to it. Who can ever trust hospitals again knowing that they can kidnap your loved one, put them on a ventilator against your wishes, refuse to allow alternative treatments, bar your access to them and gaslight you by telling you they would have died anyway? How can we trust public health officials again, and universities?

A few days after the dinner I went to a meeting of the Board of Trustees of Indiana University, a statewide university system with nine campuses, two law schools, a medical school and a budget of $4.5 billion.

The medical school — the IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis — is actually the largest medical school in the United States.

As it happened, the dean of the medical school was there, sitting in the row in front of mine, and to the left. I recognized him from his headshot on the medical school’s website.

It was the IU School of Medicine that had led the university’s Covid response, which included one of the nastiest and most tyrannical vaccine mandates issued by any major university in that it threatened to cut off Internet access and meal cards to any student who dared show up for school in August of 2021 without having been fully vaccinated with one of the Covid vaccines. And it warned that VERY FEW religious exemptions would be granted — an outrageous violation of the First Amendment rights of students, faculty and staff.

Several professors in the IU School of Medicine told innumerable lies about the vaccine. The most high-profile was Aaron Carroll (aka Dr. Aaron), an assistant professor of pediatrics, who authored several opinion pieces for the New York Times and as of April of 2022 was complaining in the Times about the mask mandate on planes being struck down and warning that the pandemic was not over and insisting that people could not be allowed to “live normally again” especially since drugs to treat Covid are "not equitably available to everyone.”

Like many in the public health establishment, his ego had been burnished by the attention people had paid him during the early days of the pandemic and he was not happy that people no longer cared very much what he had to say as they were anxious to resume normal life after TWO YEARS of restrictions.

But it was another IU School of Medicine professor I was thinking of when I saw the dean, Jay Hess, sitting there in the row in front of me. I was thinking of Caroline Rouse, an obstetrician-gynecologist who testified before the Indiana General Assembly in November of 2021 that the experimental Covid vaccines were perfectly safe and effective for pregnant women and that if legislators allowed women an exemption because they were pregnant, they’d be doing something very dangerous and foolish. But Caroline Rouse didn’t mention that at the time she was speaking, more than 3,800 pregnant women had reported to VAERS that they’d had an adverse event following the Covid vaccine and 1,444 reported they’d miscarried or had a premature birth.

I’d sent a letter to Caroline Rouse detailing this, and had sent a copy to the speaker of the Indiana House; to the Indiana House Majority Floor Leader; to the chair of the IU School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and to Jay Hess, the dean of the IU School of Medicine. I’d sent actual paper copies, in separate 9 x 12 envelopes, to all of them.

I heard back from no one.

But here I had my chance. Surely, Jay Hess would remember getting this letter. It cannot be very often that he receives such a letter, detailing a case in which one of his professors, in the school he leads, lies to the state legislature in testimony at the state capitol. Surely people don’t write letters like this to him every week!

So, during a break in the meeting, I walked up to him, introduced myself and then asked if he’d remembered getting my letter. He said he couldn’t recall it. So I summarized it for him, and then also broadened things, saying it was disturbing that so many professors in the school of medicine — his employees — had said so many things during the pandemic and about the vaccine that were not true and that turned out to be absolutely false, such as that the vaccine would prevent infection and transmission and that it was perfectly safe, when VAERS showed so many injuries and deaths.

His face did not really show any change. Slight discomfort maybe. No, irritation. He was irritated.

“What would like you like me to do"?” he asked.

He said it quickly and flatly. But I took the opportunity, nevertheless and plunged in.

What you should do, I said, as the leader of the IU School of Medicine, is to establish a commission to look at the medical school’s entire response to the pandemic and honestly assess what was gotten wrong and what was done right. As scholars, as scientists, you have an obligation to do this, I said. I might have gone on along these lines. I probably did. But I didn’t go on for very long, because he was a cold fish. Not reacting in any way.

When I stopped, he said, simply, “Thank you,” and walked away from me, back towards his seat.

I went back to my seat and the board meeting began again.

It was maybe a half hour in that I looked over and noticed that he had left. The meeting went for several more hours, but he did not return.

The encounter confirmed what I suspected. People like this medical school dean, Dr. Jay Hess, are well aware of how wrong they were. And he doesn’t particularly care. He’s not embarrassed. He’s not curious about what he got wrong and why. He is not sorry for the harms he’s caused or the harms caused by anyone who works for him. He regrets nothing and has no intention of being held accountable.

The word unrepentant comes to mind.

Dr. Hess doesn’t want anything to change. He wants to continue earning more than $1 million a year…

…and marching in the Pride parade in Indianapolis and telling doctors who are Christians to shut it and keep their stupid backward beliefs to themselves.

He doesn’t want to understand how, with all of his training, he ended up pushing a vaccine on people who didn’t need it and who ended up dying in far greater numbers because of it.

But the change is already happening, in our national health policy.

Here in Indiana, our new Governor, Mike Braun, has already linked up with Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., holding a big press conference with him in Indianapolis, and opening the floor to a lot of people in the medical freedom movement to ask questions about vaccines and VAERS — something that never happened during the pandemic as the former governor and his staff made sure to keep people who would ask probing questions about such things (like this reporter) out of the room.

Braun also cut the budget of the state health department by a stunning 70 percent, from $150 million to $40 million, though it’s hard to understand why an agency that did nothing during the pandemic but parrot the dictates of the CDC would even need anywhere near $40 million. The department could have been sanded down to a handful of staffers working out of the back of a real estate office somewhere in Indianapolis, and the health of Hoosiers would not have been affected in the least. It likely would improve, actually.

But what should be done with the schools of medicine? They are training the next generation of doctors. They are shaping the future of medicine in America. Many of them are reliant on millions of dollars in research grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH). And the NIH is now under the thumb of RFK, Jr. So it would seem they’re going to have to change their tune.

There is also hope, here in Indiana, for major change in the recent so-called “MAGA” takeover of the Indiana University Board of Trustees. I use the term “so-called” because it isn’t really a MAGA takeover. But what’s happened is that the governing body of the university that has been derelict for years now, finally has board members who understand their power (state law gives them authority over all curriculum, all hiring, all money, buildings, everything…) and the need to exercise it. A state-funded university cannot be allowed to operate as a Democrat jobs program and deans of medical schools cannot be allowed to prance around in Pride parades and refuse to acknowledge massive mistakes that led to the deaths of thousands of people. Some friends in the medical freedom movement say there is no saving western medicine, and no way to change our medical schools. But I say they’re wrong. Tyrants burrow in and work for years to take over institutions and bend them to their wishes. We must burrow in and get them back. Imagine what kind of change we could make at the largest medical school in the country if a dean like Jay Hess was replaced by a Dr. Pierre Kory. It would be the beginning of a revolution in health care in America, starting at the source.