By David Potter

Reality is stranger than fiction. Today, people with computerized brain implants inhabit the earth. Though ethical concerns and hardware limitations remain, biotech companies seem determined to move forward with their plans to bring such devices to the masses as health agencies across the globe are even giving a greenlight for further testing.

Neural implants will be beneficial to medicine and perhaps in other ways. However, the misuse of these implants would be one of the greatest threats to civil liberties ever known to man if free will could be compromised.

Currently, these chips have limited functionality and serve as medical devices for people with neurological disorders and injuries. However, it is not outside the realm of possibility that one day brain chip implants (BCIs) could be used to harvest data in the form of thoughts, influence a person’s behavior (mind control), and widen the socio-economic divide by providing cognitive enhancements only to those who can afford them. Policymakers should assume that there will be people who seek to misuse BCIs and start laying a policy framework to prevent that, Manning said.

Synchron, a New York based biotech company working on an implant, is the first of its type to be granted Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to conduct human-based trials in July 2021. Enrollment for six U.S. patients began in 2021. According to Synchron’s July 2021 press release, “Four patients have received the Stentrode implant and are utilizing this neuroprosthesis for data transfer from motor cortex to control digital devices. Data from the first two patients in this study, which were published in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery (JNIS) in October 2020, demonstrated each patient was able to control their devices to text and type through direct thought.”

Phippip O'Keefe, a BCI patient who is suffering from paralysis, is the first known human to send a Tweet by using direct thoughts with no physical input. He created the Tweet on Thomas Oxley's account, the CEO of Synchron. O’Keefe wrote: “no need for keystrokes or voices. I created this tweet just by thinking it. #helloworldbci…”

Snynchron calls themselves a "brain data transfer company" and their BCI is implanted with a non-invasive surgery in less than two hours using the brain's endovascular system. Considering the human brain is packed with 400 miles of thousands of blood vessels, Synchron claims the Stentrode implant can be placed everywhere throughout the human brain and interface with it. Future applications are said to include treatments for Parkison’s disease, depression, hypertension and epilepsy, among other conditions.

Other BCIs, such as Elon Musk's Neuralink, require an intensive skull-drilling procedure to be installed. Some groups have accused Musk of unethical animal experimentation after 15 out of the 23 monkeys receiving the implants reportedly died. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a non-profit who opposes the use of animals in medical research, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) against Neuralink and the University of California, Davis, where the testing was taking place, for alleged violations of the Federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA). Neuralink responded by stating that their facilities and protocols exceed the AWA and have never been cited during USDA inspections. They also mentioned that the allegations come from a group they say opposes all animal research.

Despite the problems it has encountered, Neuralink seems poised to seek FDA approval for trials soon as they are currently hiring for a Clinical Trial Director. The job posting emphasizes that they’re looking for someone with previous experience in obtaining an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE). IDEs are for significant risk devices and require informed consent to protect human subjects, and for good reason.

Article VII of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which the U.S. is a treaty partner, expressly forbids coercive human experimentation, and is based on earlier protections like the Nuremberg Code. These types of protections are to prevent the types of brutal human experiments on unwilling subjects the Nazis committed in the Holocaust. Given the risks, patients have to know exactly what they’re signing up for, and the risks involved.

After overcoming device issues such as overheating, Neuralink has achieved functionality in animal models. Pager, a nine-year-old Macaque monkey with a Neuralink implant, is exceptionally talented at playing Pong with his mind and can be seen playing on YouTube. The device uses artificial intelligence to decode electrical activity from neurons into actionable thought outputs. Given the pace of recent advances, it seems inevitable that Neuralink and similar companies will apply and eventually receive FDA approval.

Musk says giving people with spinal cord injuries the ability to regain movement may be achieved quite soon. Some of Neuralink’s eventual goals include treating memory loss, hearing loss, blindness, depression, insomnia, extreme pain, seizures, anxiety, addiction, strokes, and brain damage. Science is still catching up and learning the neuropathology of some of these ailments. Nevertheless, without proper controls, this research and the technological advances it produces could lead to humanity into dark future.

Theoretically, mind hacking could exist. Given that BCI devices could be designed to connect to the internet, the thought of an external source controlling what electrical signals are uploaded from, and downloaded to, the brain is terrifying.  If the chips were ever entirely overwritten and controlled by an undesignated, outside source, this would constitute mind control and a violation of human autonomy, or could result in brain damage or death.

Unless cybersecurity makes an unforeseen breakthrough, there will always be at least some threat of hacking these devices if they are in fact connected to the internet or just the internet of things. Lawmakers should impose severe penalties for this type of violation. International mind hacking from foreign actors would constitute nothing less than an act of war.

Another egregious outcome could be non-consenting data collection by private companies (or governments) spying on users' thoughts. Meta (Facebook), Google, and Apple have complex data collection protocols and are already very influential in human behavior. Data collection on users is already a problem. The potential harvesting of human thoughts from unwilling and perhaps unknowing human subjects is about as 1984 and dystopian as it gets and so it should be banned.

There is also a fear of the brain chip leading to an even further divergence of economic classes. If somehow BCIs can one day incorporate artificial intelligence into the human brain, we would literally have some people with superhuman intelligence and other people with normal cognition. This could affect success in business and life in general.

In response to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting limited trial approval of neural implant devices by the company Synchron in July 2021, Americans for Limited Government President Richard Manning warned that Congress should put strong guardrails on the practice: “This is one of the few times that Americans for Limited Government will call for Congress to take strong action to ensure that firewalls are put into place to prevent the abuse of technology. We have learned over the past two years that health bureaucrats cannot be trusted. It is Congress’ job to make it absolutely clear what is an acceptable risk to meet the needs of people in the disability community and what is not acceptable in this extreme experimentation with human consciousness.”

Elon Musk claims that the only way to beat the dystopian artificial intelligence (AI) of the future is to become one with the AI, telling viewers on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2018 that “Best case scenario, we effectively merge with AI… The merge scenario with A.I. is the one that seems probably the best like if you can’t beat it, join it.” Is he right?

Although some of the aforementioned concerns are slightly speculative, policymakers must consider them now and start contemplating guidelines. Proactivity is virtuous in this context. Despite the shaky ethics of brain-computer interfaces, they are still advancing. We are on the verge of entering the 4th industrial revolution and AI will only accelerate the capabilities of neural implants. Today and now, as crazy as it sounds, humans are interfacing with machines. Technically speaking, some of us are already cyborgs, and our laws will either need to eventually embrace or reject that reality if it proves too dangerous.

David Potter is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/03/reality-stranger-than-fiction-as-fda-allows-human-trials-for-computerized-brain-implants/

 

ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured oped from FoxNews.com, Dr. Marty Makary says the American people deserve an apology from medical experts after all the mistakes they made in response to Covid:

Dr. Marty Makary: Americans deserve an apology from the medical experts

By Dr. Marty Makary

The medical establishment has marched in lockstep on COVID-19, presenting a consensus of expertise as they marginalized physicians who had different opinions. Two years into the pandemic, it’s fair to ask, how did public health officials do? 

Surface transmission 

Wash your hands like crazy (at least 20 seconds) and pour alcohol-based solutions on your grocery bags to stop COVID transmission, you were told for months. Despite being an expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci immediately applied the influenza surface transmission model to COVID. The logical starting hypothesis should have been that COVID was aerosolized. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID, participates in the White House COVID-19 Response Team's regular call with the National Governors Association on the White House campus on Dec. 27, 2021. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

There are only three coronaviruses that cause serious illness in humans: SARS, MERS and COVID. SARS and MERS spread by air. Why did Dr. Fauci think COVID was so different? The NIH could have done the definitive experiment in one day to get the answer. It’s OK to be wrong in science, but not for months when the National Institutes of Health could have spent a fraction of its $42 billion budget to instantly establish how COVID spreads.  

No hospital visitation 

The barbaric policy of banning loved ones from holding the hand of their dying loved one and saying goodbye was a human rights violation that spanned much of the pandemic. All the so-called experts and the medical establishment were complicit, allowing this cruel policy to be instituted while abandoning their duty to respect the dignity of human life. As a physician, I can assure you there are things worse than dying. 

Closing schools 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argued they were using science to close schools, but many private schools and most schools in Florida and other states remained open throughout (with no difference COVID outcomes). The CDC director initially said schools were safe but was swiftly corrected by the White House the following day. It later came out that the teachers’ unions had made edits to the draft school closure policy before it was issued (kids did not have a chance to make edits).

Now studies are revealing the catastrophic harm to a generation of children – significant motor and cognitive declines and a mental health crisis. In Baltimore, many kids never logged on to virtual learning and were never seen in class again. 

Ignoring natural immunity 

Ironically, when public health officials insisted that those who had natural immunity be fired for not being vaccinated, they fired those least likely to spread the infection in the workplace.  Drs. Fauci and Rochelle Walensky never talked about natural immunity and instead created the imprecise construct of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. In reality, most unvaccinated Americans have antibodies that neutralized the virus, but they are antibodies that the government did not recognize.

Eventually the data came in. Natural immunity was 2.8 times better in preventing hospitalization than vaccinated immunity and having both meant you had the same protection as natural immunity alone. 

The singular focus on vaccines meant that little attention was paid to lifesaving therapeutics.

Downplaying therapeutics 

The singular focus on vaccines meant that little attention was paid to lifesaving therapeutics. For example, Paxlovid is an antiviral medication that reduced COVID deaths to zero in the clinical trial, yet not enough has been produced. Fluvoxamine, an $10 anti-depressant medication that has been available for years, was found in two reputable studies to reduce COVID death, up to 91% in the latest study (no study suggests it’s not effective). Yet, few doctors are aware of these data because our public health officials have never talked about Fluvoxamine. 

Not spacing out vaccine doses 

Spacing out vaccine doses makes a vaccine more effective and lowers the side effect profile. It also would have allowed the U.S. to save more lives when we were rationing a scarce vaccine supply. Yet public health officials dismissed pleas to space out the doses as many of us called for. 

Ironically, just three weeks ago, after 250 million Americans received the vaccine, the CDC finally changed their guidance to recommend longer intervals between doses. The CDC acknowledged it was to reduce serious adverse effects such as myocarditis. Myocarditis is now recognized to occur in 1 in 1,862 young males after the second vaccine dose. 

Cloth masks 

The U.S. remains an international outlier by masking toddlers. At this point the only people in America still forced to wear masks are children, waiters, servers and staff. The NIH could have funded researchers to properly study each mask type in the first 10 days of the pandemic, but they failed to pivot funding to do so. Current data suggests that covering the faces of children for two years with a cloth mask had zero benefit and some harm. 

Promising no vaccines mandates, then breaking it 

This was a stated promise made by President Biden, Fauci and many others – a social contract. They then broke their promise insisting that any unvaccinated workers, regardless of their risk or natural immunity, be fired. They demanded that soldiers be dishonorably discharged and nurses be laid off in the middle of a staffing crisis. 

This policy ignited a debate over civil liberties, which ultimately divided the country and hardened many toward the idea of vaccination. At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration has been delinquent in authorizing the Covaxin and Novavax vaccines, which use traditional vaccine technology. 

Downplaying a lab leak 

A bombshell investigation by "Special Report" host Bret Baier of Fox News revealed that prominent U.S. virologists told Drs. Fauci and Francis Collins of their concern that the virus may have been manipulated and originated in the lab, but then suddenly changed their tune in public comments days after meeting with the NIH officials. The virologists were later awarded nearly $9 million from Fauci’s agency. 

Boosters for young people 

Two top FDA officials quit in protest because of political pressure to approve boosters in young people. The FDA issued the authorization by not convening their Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee – a highly unusual break from historic precedent.  A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the mortality risk of an un-boosted person under age 30 was zero. You can’t lower a risk of zero any further with a booster. 

Throughout the pandemic, all COVID decisions were made by a small group of like-minded government doctors who often replaced the scientific method with medical dogma. They had tremendous influence over medical universities, scientific journals and medical societies. In fact, nearly all of these entities received funding from Drs. Fauci and Collins and from Big Pharma. It’s no surprise, then, that with one united voice, the leaders of these organizations joined the groupthink bandwagon as the media parroted whatever they said.  

At this point, the everyday Americans who paid the price for the errors of the medical establishment can evaluate their performance.  This partial list of catastrophic errors begs for a complete overhaul of our health agencies. The American people, and children in particular, deserve an apology. 

To view online: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/10-biggest-covid-mistakes-americans-apology-dr-marty-makary