Weaponized Bureaucracy | Dr. Scott Jensen | EP 349

Should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up! Get your act together! Adopt some responsibility! Put your life together! Develop a vision! Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life.

A real underlying question for me is: why didn't I just keep my mouth shut? Ultimately, I think what happened was, through the recurrent investigations that I was put through, I became somewhat morally protected. I felt like the words of Esther 4:14, "Have you considered you're in the position you're in for such a time as this?" They really rang true in my life. I had access to information people didn't have. I absolutely was doing my responsible duties. I was doing my due diligence. I was reading two, three, four hours a day trying to keep current on all the issues going on with the Minnesota Senate, the COVID pandemic worldwide, and trying to hold my family together as well. In the end, I felt that I was absolutely entrusted to be a voice to watch out for those encroachments on our liberties—to say no, we're not going to let government expand willy-nilly just because they can.

Dr. Scott Jensen has practiced Family Medicine in Carver County, Minnesota, for 35 years. This is also where he and his wife, Mary, a small animal veterinarian, raised their three children: Christie, an anesthesiologist; Matt, a state attorney; and Jackie, a family doctor. Dr. Jensen also served in the Minnesota Senate from 2017 to 2021 and he was vice chair of the Health and Human Services committee.

Good morning, Dr. Jensen.

Good morning, Nate. It's good to see you.

Dr. Peterson, good to see you. I understand it's three in the morning there.

I'm in Rome right now, so I guess this is the best we could do in terms of scheduling, so thank you very much for agreeing to do this today.

Well, you're very welcome. I'm actually in Chaska, Minnesota, and I'm right across the street from the Catholic Church, so we do have something in common, right? Right, right. You're symbolically near Rome. Amen!

Okay, so let's get into this. Let's first of all start by letting everybody know who you are, and then we'll move into what has happened to you right from the beginning in relationship to your entanglement, let's say, with what's supposed to be your professional governing body. So let’s walk through the details of your employment first.

Well, Dr. Peterson, again, thank you for having me on. I'm a small-town kid. I grew up in southern Minnesota in a town named Sleepy Eye. Pretty typical upbringing; it takes a village to raise a child. My mom was my best friend, my dad was my hero. I had three brothers and a sister. I went to the public school and graduated as valedictorian of the class, but that's not such a big deal when you only have 65 kids in your class.

I went to the University of Minnesota and was going to be an orthodontist, but when I got into dental school, I found out that I did not have a love affair with teeth. So, I left dental school and went to the seminary for a year, and at the time, I'd been dating this really wonderful lady. That year in the seminary, I made the decision to ask her to marry me, and we've been together for 45 years. I also made the decision to go into medicine, so I went into family practice, went to the University of Minnesota med school, did my residency. My wife is a veterinarian; we have three wonderful children. Our two daughters are physicians. We're not exactly sure what happened to our son, but he's an attorney, and we love him just as much.

Well, there's four physicians; probably need one attorney. He says that he has to keep the rest of us out of trouble. So that's right, that's where we're landing on there.

Then, I've been practicing medicine for about 37 years in the Chaska-Watertown area, and about eight years ago, I was encouraged to run for the Senate in Minnesota. This had not been one of my bucket list items, so I was leery about it. But after a couple of months of being recruited, I made the decision to run for Senate. I ended up winning and receiving more votes than any other Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota.

During the first three years of my Senate career, I have to confess that I was disillusioned with the process. I was surprised at how easily gridlock was the order of the day. I felt like really genuine, fired-up intellectual curiosity just wasn't a part of the equation, and that frustrated me quite a bit. At the same time, my wife was having some health issues and she was going to have a need for multiple surgeries. So I made the decision to not run for re-election. A few months later, COVID hit.

COVID hit hard; it hit everybody hard. But I think I, like so many other people, suffered from certain personality traits. I'm somewhat skeptical, and medical school taught us to be skeptical. I've always been sort of addicted to context, and I've always thought that if we don't have the context of what we're seeing, we can't really digest what we're dealing with. I had access to more information than many people did because I was vice chair of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Senate, and so I was aware of much of what was going on.

Then, in the early days of April of 2020, when I received an email from the Department of Health with a link to the CDC advising me as a physician that they were going to adjust the way death certificates were completed. Without meaning to be any kind of grand whistleblower, I ended up making comments about this on a local TV program that I'd been on the news for.

What did it mean to adjust death certificates? Basically, in the Minnesota Department of Health communication to the physicians, they said if you believe that COVID-19 may have contributed to the cause of death, you can go ahead and put it down as the cause of death. And that’s not right.

The CDC, for decades, has said that our job as physicians when we complete a death certificate is to try to identify the initiating event that started the process of demise for the patient. So for example, if I have a heart attack tomorrow and a month later I have congestive heart failure, and we find that the heart attack was so substantial that I've lost the ability to effectively pump blood and we learn that I'm not a candidate for transplant and there's no remedies for my situation.

Over time, I falter and become more and more frail, and perhaps I go on hospice knowing that I have end-stage heart disease. If, on my last 48 hours of life on Earth, I get exposed to COVID-19 without ever being tested or even having any symptoms of it, when I die, I died of a heart attack. The underlying cause of death would be coronary artery disease, and that led to a heart attack which led to congestive heart failure. But it should not say that COVID-19 was the cause of my death.

We were being encouraged to go ahead and they said in this document, if you think that COVID-19 was a contributing condition, you can put it down as a cause of death. I said no, there's a box too on a death certificate called contributing conditions. That's where you put contributing conditions. If it's emphysema, if it's asthma, influenza, we put it in the contributing conditions box. We were being told with this disease we could put it as a cause of death.

I raised a ruckus and said this isn't right. I did not get any response from the Department of Health; instead, I was asked to be on numerous national TV programs. I was asked to be on the Ingram Angle, and subsequently Rush Limbaugh came to my defense, and we had Tucker Carlson show on inviting me. But the bottom line is, this was April of 2020.

In June of 2020, I received a letter with red letters stamped confidential from the Board of Medical Practice advising me that for the first time in my career, my license was under investigation.

So, the CDC suggests to physicians that they alter their death notification practice in the case of COVID, listing, as you pointed out, contributory cause of death as a primary cause of death. This begs three questions: first of all, why in the world would they do that in the case of COVID? Second, who would do that? And third, what does that do to the reliability of the death statistics that are used to calculate the virality and lethality of COVID?

Those three questions are frankly the critical ones and they're interrelated. The first one is: why would the CDC do this? It felt to me like there was a movement or a strong motivation to, if you will, elevate the seriousness of the COVID pandemic. I think that it was already elevated substantially, and that troubled me deeply. I raised that question early on. I said I think we're making an epidemic of fear as much as we're responding from a public policy perspective.

So when the CDC did that, it felt to me like they wanted to ensure that they got our attention and that there would be numbers to support that. As to who would do that, I think later on we found out that some of the major characters were people that were indeed in charge of the public policies that were going to govern the world, if you will, for the next three years. Specifically, you had people like Dr. Tony Fauci, you had Dr. Deborah Birx, you had some of these people who had, if you will, high-placed positions from which to speak. They literally had absolute power, and I'm a big believer that absolute power corrupts.

The third question is probably the most important one, Dr. Peterson: what impact would this have on the reliability of our federal registrar in terms of cause of death? For instance, every year in America, approximately 650,000 people die of heart disease; we have approximately 600,000 people die of cancer. If those deaths are recorded instead of cardiac causes and putting it down as COVID, numerous things happen.

One is we might get a false impression that we're making headway on heart disease when we're really not. You might see pharmaceutical companies coming to the fore saying, see we told you if you take our drugs, if you prescribe our drugs, put more people on Lipitor, we will reduce the heart cause of deaths, and that would be not true. That would be a corruption of the actual data. There would be all kinds of nefarious opportunities for people to grab hold of corrupted data and make a case for something that wasn't real.

When I raised that point, I didn't get a legitimate discussion. There was no robust questioning. It was, you’re spreading conspiracy theories and you're having the audacity to compare COVID to influenza, and those were a couple of the first.

So, let me ask you a nasty question then—to play the devil's advocate. So we walked through your career and really, very briefly your life, and it’s a real American fairy tale life—a small-town American fairy tale life.

A skeptic would say, especially a skeptic who's arguing from the other side, would say, "Well, you missed the limelight there." We go because you were no longer involved in the political scene, and you got a little bit of attention because you complained about a perfectly reasonable request from the CDC to be, what would you say, hyper-cautious in relation to the lethality of COVID. Then a bunch of right-wing conspiratorialists like Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson rushed in and you got some attention on the national stage, and that went to your head.

So, it was in your best interest to cast aspersions on the motivations of people who were only trying to benefit public health. And this is on you, which I presume is the tack that the governing board of your profession essentially took when they came after you with this confidential letter.

So, how do you—what sort of soul-searching did you do when this first came up, and how do you protect yourself against those sorts of insinuations, allegations and even doubts?

That's a good question. I think it's important to look a little bit at the timeline. It was in the summer of 2019, which was well in advance of the COVID pandemic, that I had made the announcement that I was done with politics. My wife's health was an issue and she was going to have multiple surgeries, so I had already announced that I was not running for reelection.

So in 2020, when the COVID hit, I was serving my last year as a senator. I was vice chair of the Health and Human Services Committee. I carried a large insulin bill through and worked with Democrats to get it done, and Governor Walz signed that.

At that point in my life, I had made it pretty clear that I was not interested in being in the limelight. I was interested in stepping away from politics and being there for my family. My wife's health was an issue, but I'd also been blessed with five grandchildren within the span of about two or three years, and they were all under the age of I believe four at the time, or perhaps even under three. So, it was time for me to continue to practice medicine, take care of my wife, and be a grandpa, and I was very content with that.

In terms of some underlying deep-seated desire for fame and infamy, I would say that that's almost ridiculous because the slings and arrows I ended up taking were hurtful. I had never been in a situation like this.

Well, you also had some limelight, politically speaking, already—the fact that you'd run a political campaign, you’d been out in public. You had your reasonable share of public attention, but you're also interestingly well situated because you are a physician of long-standing and also you were a senator and was vice-chairman of the Health Services Committee.

Yes, and the other thing—so you'd think that you would have demonstrated— you’d think that all of that would have demonstrated your qualifications to speak on such matters.

Dr. Peterson, when I was a resident, I was named one of the 15 top residents in the country through the Amy Johnson Award program. In the late 1990s, I was awarded a Bush Fellowship to study leadership computers and plastic surgery techniques. In 2016, I had been named the Family Physician of the Year in Minnesota. I've had a wonderful career. I feel at times a little bit like Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. There was no reason for me to put all of that at risk and put myself in a position where people would ridicule me, literally monitor every word I said, in order to try to play that gotcha game and hit me with something.

It was tough on my wife during that last year in the Senate, the first year of the pandemic, 2020. It was a painful year. I'm not going to deny it. We had schisms within my own family; we had plenty of tears. It would have been fun to not have to go through that.

People have asked me, they said, "Dr. Jensen, what was that like? How did you know all this was going to happen?" I've told people: I didn't know. Quite frankly, I feel a little bit like Jonah in the Old Testament, where he was asked to do some tough duty in Nineveh and he said, "No thanks! I'm going to take a cruise on the Mediterranean." That's what I feel like, but then this whale got in the way, swallowed me up, and spit me out on this pathway of ridicule.

We'll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new documentary, Logos and Literacy.

I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jumpstarted the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm; the pastor’s home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80 percent of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone—from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine, to civilization itself; it is the most influential book in all history. Hopefully, people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

When I spoke with Jay Bhattacharya recently, he went through a similar experience at Stanford. Very similar. He's an outstanding physician and an extremely reputable person, and he expressed some extreme skepticism about the COVID hysteria, and Stanford basically turned its back on him. He lost 35 pounds in three months, and it just about killed him. I mean, I've talked to probably a hundred people now who have been in the situation that you were in, a situation that I've been in a number of times, and virtually all of them were pushed to the limits of their psychological and physical tolerance by that process of cancellation and mobbing and exclusion.

Some of the people I know quite well, who are as stable of personalities as you'd ever hope to encounter, were driven right to the edge of madness by this insane mob-inspired persecution. I actually think that the degree to which that affects you is proportionate to some degree to your moral integrity, in that a person who's highly conscientious and hardworking, diligent, detail-oriented— all of that, is also tends to be somewhat guilt-prone.

In that, any accusation of abdication of duty strikes a person like that to the heart because they are in fact dutiful. Now, if you're incompetent and unconscientious and parasitic in your fundamental orientation towards others, and someone accuses you of not doing your duty, you don't ever—you have never regarded that as a necessity or a virtue in the first place, and so those criticisms fall on deaf ears. But if you’ve been gone after, after having checked off all the proper boxes, let’s say both practically and morally, then it can be incredibly damaging.

It also does produce this internal schism in family because, of course, it’s easy for people to think, well, you know, if— or at least for people to fight about the issue of, well maybe it would have been better had you just never said anything rather than having exposed yourself and others within the family to risk.

And you know, there is an argument to be had about that because it's not obvious, but you should just shut the hell up and keep on struggling forward. Because, you know, every bureaucracy has its inadequacies, and you can't complain about everything. And when you finally have to stand up and say something, of course, that is going to cause tensions within families, especially if you're also under other forms of stress by this time.

Had your wife recovered from her medical troubles?

Mary had gone through two surgeries and then had a third surgery. She'd had her neck fused; she'd had a new joint put in; and so she was recovering. But while she was recovering, unfortunately, a lot of the conversations the two of us would have at home while she's convalescing seemed to always come back to COVID-19. So that was a challenge. And, you're exactly right, Dr. Peterson. There was a real underlying question for me as to why didn't I just keep my mouth shut?

Ultimately, I think what happened was through the recurrent investigations that I was put through, I think that I became somewhat morally protected. I felt like the words of Esther 4:14—"Have you considered you're in the position you're in for such a time as this?" They really rang true in my life.

I felt a little bit like a pit bull with a pork chop in my mouth, and I wasn't going to let anybody take that pork chop of truth out of my mouth. I had access to information people didn't have. I absolutely was doing my responsible duties. I was doing my due diligence. I was reading two, three, four hours a day trying to keep current on all the issues going on with the Minnesota Senate, the COVID pandemic worldwide, and trying to hold my family together as well. In the end, I felt that I was absolutely entrusted to be a voice to watch out for those encroachments on our liberties—to say no, we're not going to let government expand willy-nilly just because they can.

And I found myself getting tenacious. I remember someone very close to me said, well, why is it so important to be right? I said, I don't think it's about being right. I think it's about being fearful of what I was seeing. When a rubber band is stretched beyond its capacity, it never returns to its normal shape and configuration. That's what I'm worried about with the United States, Canada, nations across the globe. We've seen something happen over a three-year period that prior to those three years, most of us would say couldn't happen.

If it had been put in a movie, we would have said, someone's been watching too much grade B fiction, but the bottom line is it was happening right in front of us, and we were stunned.

Alright, so you picked up this letter, it had "red confidential" written over it.

Well, here are a couple of questions about that damn letter. The first is you'd think that if—and what's the precise name of the board that sent you the letter?

This is the governing board of physicians in Minnesota. This is the physician's regulatory agency regarding licensure and it's called the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice—the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, or MBMP.

More to bet, the Board of Medical Practice. Okay, so you get a letter from the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice; now here's some mysteries about that. So the first mystery is why in the world did they think that you were going to be a credible target?

I mean, look, you've got a stellar reputation on the educational front, and you have a stellar reputation as a physician as attested to by multiple forms of achievement and recognition. Plus, you’d been a senator, and so you’d think that just procedurally, the people who were sitting on this board would have been wise enough to think that, barring self-evident malfeasance, you were probably someone best left alone.

So that's an interesting question—why they would actually be clueless enough to target you without a smoking pistol.

And then the next question is, what exactly did they claim in their first attempt to discipline you?

I think in fairness to the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, individuals who serve on that board, their collective perception of what they're to do is that their mission is to investigate all complaints that come forward. So in Minnesota, you can go on the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice webpage, dribble out a complaint; you have no obligation to do any due diligence; your personality, your vital information about who you are will remain anonymous. The person you accuse has no way of getting your name; you will be protected by anonymity; you will not be identified.

So it's relatively easy to make a complaint. You don't have to know the person you're complaining about; you don't have to ever have received a health care service from them. But the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice has taken the position: if there's a complaint, we'll investigate it.

So I think—

Right, but that doesn't mean—

But in Canada, tell me if it’s the same in the United States.

So it’s exactly the same situation that you just described with regards to the regulating board of psychologists in Ontario. Anyone, anywhere in the world can submit a complaint for any reason. Now, the Ontario board of psychologists, the College of Psychologists, is legally obliged to investigate every complaint, which means at least to consider the complaint, but they are not obligated to pursue the investigation if they believe that the complaint was frivolous or vexatious.

And that's obviously a necessary corollary when the accuser is given the protections that you just described, which is that there is no pressure incumbent upon them to even provide documentation of the validity of their complaint, nor any requirement to have had any even second-person contact with you.

So it may be the case that the board members felt that it was necessary for them to consider the complaint, but that does not mean that it was necessary for them to pursue you. They decided to pursue you, and that doesn’t follow logically from the mere fact of the complaint, especially because you had practiced for— you said 37 years without any complaints and also in an obviously stellar manner.

So there's something more going on than the mere proclivity of the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice members to do their duty. The Minnesota Board of Medical Practice in their first investigation of me pointed out that there had been allegations that I had spread conspiracy theories and I was providing reckless advice by comparing influenza to COVID, which by the way is exactly what Dr. Fauci and other leading speakers to the narrative had done.

But I think the pattern of behavior by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice attests to your concerns. Dr. Jordan, investigation number one came at me with allegations and I responded and received a letter. It was dismissed. Investigation two was similar; investigation three, I was never advised that there was a pending investigation or that there were allegations on the table. I was simply sent a letter by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice indicating, "Oh, by the way, further allegations have come in; they have been dismissed."

I was not even provided an opportunity to respond. Investigation four went back to the first two where they investigated me. I responded; they dismissed them. But investigation number five is where it gets interesting. That came into being.

Okay, so how many—over what span of time did these five investigations occur, and what did that mean in terms of disruption to your practical life, your psychological state, and the stability of your family and your practice?

The recurrent Minnesota Board of Medical Practice investigations had a devastating effect on my life. While I was in the Senate, I felt hamstrung. In my personal life with my family, I felt the tension of differing viewpoints, and as I mentioned earlier, people wondering why is it so important to Scott Jensen to be right when I was trying to advocate? This isn't about being right; this is about something being terribly wrong and that we cannot stand for it.

I think this took place from June of 2020 to November of 2021, so that's a 15 to 18 month span of time. By then, do you have any idea how many allegations had been levied against you that you had to respond individually to, and did you require legal counsel during that time? What sort of expense was that?

The first four investigations, I elected to treat them like any regular family doctor in the trenches would do. So, I read the allegations, I responded to the best of my ability, I provided a narrative explanation, and I, if you will, substantiated what I had to say with articles and references. So I did that myself, and that took literally hundreds and hundreds of hours with each investigation.

The fifth investigation was put forth in November of 2021. I was in the middle of a governor's election race. I was one of the leading candidates for the Republican party, and when I received that investigation, I was asked to respond. I did, and that time was the first time I was asked to provide patient records. That made me very nervous—violating patient confidentiality—so I was meticulous in making certain that I de-identified whatever I sent to them.

The other thing that went with that was I had made the comment that I had used off-label medications for a handful of patients when asked to do so in exceptional situations. That really seemed to change the nature of what was going on. At that point in time, the Board of Medical Practice came back to me and said, "Okay, we’re not sure that we like where you're at here." We asked for a response; you gave it to us. We've asked for more information as well as patient records.

I submitted those; they said to me, "We've received your records," and that's where it stopped. It stopped there for a full year. All the other investigations—I want to interject here for a minute for any professionals, medical professionals who are listening—one of the reasons that you do get a lawyer very quickly in these circumstances despite the expense and the potential self-admission perhaps that—the apparent risk of admission of wrongdoing—is that once an investigation of this sort commences and you provide additional information, you open up a whole rat's nest of additional potential avenues for persecution.

The first time the College of Psychologists came after me; the allegation they ended up nailing me for this was back in 2017. Had virtually no resemblance to the initial complaint it emerged as a consequence of the need for boards of this type, especially once they've started to go down a particular rabbit hole repeatedly to convince themselves that they were justified in their initial inquisition by any means whatsoever.

And so, you know, if you hadn't done the wrong thing that you were accused of, well, obviously the fact that you'd been subject to four investigations and multiple allegations means that there's fire where there's smoke. If we can't get you on the fire on the left side of the furnace, we’ll get you on the fire of the right side of the furnace.

A good lawyer can help you provide minimal information to boards of investigation of that sort, so that you're less likely to lay out traps for yourself to step in. Then there's this issue of turning over patient records. You know, by the end of my private practice, as a clinical psychologist, I was taking at most extraordinary minimal formal notes because I knew that the probability that I would be required at some point to break client confidentiality—which might be even more important for psychologists than for physicians, although it's a toss-up—was virtually certain.

I could no longer trust the inviolability of my records to inappropriate and paranoid board of governance screening, and so there's also an awful situation for professionals to find themselves in where the notes they take to ensure that they're on top of their patients' health can now be used as a means of, what would you say? Breaking the privacy walls surrounding the patient which is a critical issue of importance, but also as endless fodder for the continuation of costly, expensive, punitive, pointless and punishing investigations, especially those that are politically motivated.

So if this happens to you, professionals who are watching, I would recommend, and maybe Dr. Jensen can give his opinion on this, you should get yourself a lawyer damn quick. And then I’ve got a couple of things to say about lawyers too: there is nothing more expensive than a bad cheap lawyer. So don't just get a good lawyer. Get a good lawyer because a good lawyer who will be expensive is way less expensive than a bad lawyer who makes mistakes.

So to your point, Dr. Peterson, you're spot on. I think the first four investigations, I had to deal with that age-old question: do I stuff it to the side and try to keep it private or do I come public with it? I made the decision on the first investigation, at the recommendation of several close friends and colleagues, to go public. I was told that if I don't go public with it, literally I would at some point in time be placed on defense, and I would never be able to get around that. They said, "You've got to go on offense," and that's what I did.

But I did make—I probably made a mistake with the first four investigations by believing that if I was just responsive, thoughtful, measured, balanced, that they would dismiss these allegations, which is what happened the first four times. But at some point it changed, and at that point in time, I think I had to give up my normalcy bias. In my brain, I thought, "This can't be happening to me! This happens to other people! You read about it in the newspaper, but this doesn't happen to this small-town kid from Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, who's had the life of Jimmy Stewart and It's a Wonderful Life.”

I kept—I think I was unable to really get my arms around that this was happening to me in real life, real time, and my license—each investigation was more and more at risk. So with the fifth investigation, when it went on for a full year, then the election took place and I lost, and two months later, I got a letter from the Board of Medical Practice providing additional allegations based on exactly what you said, based on my response to the fifth investigation, including patient records.

Now I was being accused of having handwriting that wasn't always as legible as some reviewers would have liked. Now I was being accused of, well, you also did this and you did this, and by the way, you did this. At that point in time, they said, "We're not accepting your written responses as good. We're now asking for a notice of conference." That meant we're going to meet with you, and at that point in time, I said, "I probably need to get an attorney," and I got a good attorney out—Mr. Greg Joseph is an attorney in Minnesota who's done a lot of different kinds of law, but has really landed on understanding, I think, the nature of that line between professional conduct as it relates to patient care versus free speech.

Now, in the United States, I don't believe that that line has been determined with precision. That's one of the remaining questions regarding my situation. Recently, we did have that conference with the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, and I don't mean to get ahead of myself, but 18 allegations were being addressed at one time. They were from soup to nuts. It had to deal with masks; it had to deal with vaccines; it had to deal with comparisons of COVID and influenza; it had to do with how we complete death certificates; how we remunerate hospitals and doctors based on diagnosis codes used. It ran the gamut. But in the end, when the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice says we're dismissing all of the allegations, at that point in time, we still don't know that critical question: where's the line between professional conduct and free speech? Because I would submit that physicians get to be wrong.

If we say on a Monday that this is what we think—perhaps we say something like this: eggs have cholesterol, you have high cholesterol, you should not eat eggs, and maybe four days later we come across material that says, gee, eggs aren't so bad.

So I tell my patient, "You know what? You can eat eggs." Now, is that misinformation? Perhaps. Is it disinformation? Certainly not. But the bottom line is, as a physician, if I make those comments in the exam room or if I make those comments on stage at a meeting, a rally, or perhaps a church event, either way I get to make those comments.

Well, there's a more ominous element to your story as well that is still implicit in what we've discussed, and so I'm going to pull some of that out now. Now, you have been in the Senate and you decided to pull out of political life, but now you're running for governor.

While you're running for governor, these investigations are happening.

So the first thing we should clear up for everyone is that given that you had decided to make an exit from the political stage, why did you decide to return?

The next issue is: were you credible as a candidate for governor? And then the third question is: why the hell did the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice presume that it was appropriate, ethically, to conduct an investigation into the conduct of a physician in the middle of a political campaign? Because if you can't see how that raises evil specters of possibility, you're not thinking.

Because what it means is that the investigative process, which puts all the power in the hands of the accuser, can obviously be weaponized for political purposes. Now, it has been, and it has been in many cases and that’s going to get much worse before it gets better, but in your situation, it’s particularly egregious because you were a physician with an actual credible political career and you were running for the highest office in your state.

So what do you think about the fact that the investigations ramped up while you were running for governor? What do you think that implies for the stability and sanctity of the political process? And what effect do you think the investigations into your conduct and the public element of that had on the outcome of the gubernatorial race?

2020. My last year in the Senate was obviously the first year of the COVID pandemic. The pandemic and the public policies that came with it really were like this powerful magnetic pull for me to not leave the political field. I had thousands of people reach out to me and say, "Dr. Jensen, you've been a courageous voice offering hope and reasonable analysis of what's going on. You've been deeply embedded in context. You've been a skeptic. You've accessed information. You've done your due diligence. You've taken seriously that you've been entrusted with a voice to speak for thousands and thousands of Minnesotans and people across the globe.”

That collectively is what really pulled me into the race. I think again I'm a faith-based individual and the words of Esther 4:14 for such a time as this, joined with the words of Hebrews 4:14, "Hold fast to the beliefs you profess," just did not seem to give me an out from politics.

So I stepped into that arena with my wife's blessing.

Was I a credible candidate? We accomplished more as a conservative candidate running in Minnesota than had been accomplished in decades—in some situations ever. We received more votes than any Republican governor candidate has ever received in Minnesota. We raised more money than any Republican governor has ever raised in the campaign committee itself.

We had over 100,000 people join our email team; we had 40,000 unique donations. We had approximately the same percentage of voters in the election that Governor Tim Pawlenty had in 2002 when he won. We went against six other candidates and prevailed in getting the endorsement and then going to the general election.

So from that perspective, we created a movement, and that movement was born of energy, conviction, and Americans—everyday Americans that were horrifically concerned about what is going on in our world.

So then the question is, okay, you've got the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice holding this gray cloud over your head over the campaign for literally the majority of the campaign. It had a devastating effect. I knew that everywhere I went, I was being tracked and recorded. I knew every word I said didn't just enter the political speech; it was going to be filed and indexed and forwarded to the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice. There was no relief from the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice.

I reached out to them in 2022 asking a question: I don't want to do something that's not up to the standard of care. If I prescribe certain off-label drugs, is that problematic for you or not? Is that the standard of care or not? And I was given a short answer from an administrative staffer that said, "We don't create the standard of care; we can't tell you that. But if you do it and we get a complaint, we're going to investigate you."

They were basically saying, "You want to know the standard? You want to know what this—yeah, you want to know what the standard of care is? We're not telling you! But if someone says you didn't meet the standard of care, we're coming after you for that."

The rest was a death standard of terror for these investigative boards.

Well, we don't really know what we're doing, but we’ll sure whack you if we have any suspicions that you do something wrong. Post hoc—I mean, I've had exactly the same experience with the College of Psychologists in Ontario trying to get them to clarify their policies around certification of new practicing psychologists, for example.

There isn't a chance in the world that they'll clarify their stance a priori. This is part of the reason you need a lawyer. When they come after you, it's because then it's not as if the standards are well-defined, and it's certainly not as if the practitioners on these boards are sufficiently credible either professionally or ethically to be doing what they're doing.

The rules are basically: watch yourself, and if you make a mistake, look the hell out! The mistakes are defined after the act.

I mean, I've been calling on them publicly in Canada rather repeatedly to get on with the inquisition, but at the moment they're hiding behind a variety of bureaucratic idiocies to make the case that they have the right to delay the investigation beyond the statutory limitations for it that they've even imposed upon themselves.

Right, because there's a 150-day period within which, if I understand correctly, these are supposed to be brought to something approximating a conclusion once they've been initiated, so that you're not hung out to dry forever.

But you know, there's always a reason for bureaucrats to get around their own bureaucratic limitations, and that's certainly happening in the Canadian situation.

But did they give you the sense that you better continue to step lightly, Dr. Jensen, because with your reprehensible history of six investigations, it's only a matter of time until you say something else cataclysmically inappropriate and we haul you in front of ourselves again?

Or do you think maybe they've gone back into their layer to find someone else to torment?

I think there was a clear understanding that there were a couple of things that were really problematic for them and that if I would once again engage in that kind of activity, I would very likely appear before them again.

I think specifically—so what would those be?

Yeah, I think specifically the off-label use of— off-label medications for the treatment of—not just physicians do that all the time. Physicians do that all the time, I pointed that out to them. I pointed that out that many pediatricians would have more than 50 percent of their prescriptions would be off-label.

But specifically, the off-label use of Ivermectin was very problematic for them.

And how dangerous is Ivermectin?

If you look at the various reports, if you look at the history of the medication, the FDA data, and the VAERS data, I think Ivermectin, for a five-day course, is extremely safe. Now, whether or not—looks like it's about as safe as water, right?

I don’t— I don't think you'd have to scour the medical literature long and hard before you found a drug with as low a proportion of side effects to benefit as Ivermectin.

There have been millions of doses given, and the side effect reporting is so remarkably low that it's a kind of miracle. So if you're going to administer an agent off-label, it's hard for me to see how you could do something that would bring about less likely harm than Ivermectin.

Do you think that's a reasonable position?

I think Ivermectin is very safe. I think a lot of people don't realize that it's available over the counter in topical forms. I think there's a medicine called Sklice that people could purchase on their own, but I think that the Board of Medical Practice made it clear that this was a big deal.

I think they also made it very clear what they perceive the standard of care to be. They often talked about the minimum standard of care. They asked me, "What do you think the minimum standard of care is?" I said, "I've never really thought about the minimum standard of care because that's never what I've aspired to provide. I've always thought that I wanted to provide the best quality of care, and I think that’s what I've done."

So in terms of going forward, your question is extremely pertinent. Is there going to be a seventh investigation? Is someone from the public going to say we’re going to keep making Dr. Scott Jensen's life a living hell until he shuts up? I'm going to guess that's going to happen.

That's why I keep coming back to the point we do not have a clearly defined line that we need to have between my rights as a First Amendment speech and the Minnesota Board's obligation to make certain that my professional conduct, as it pertains to the practice of medicine, is above the minimum standard of care.

To me, that’s what needs to happen yet, and so I don't think we could possibly be done with this issue in America. I think we need the courts to weigh in and say listen, if states have put together statute language that violates the Constitution, it's unconstitutional.

If regulatory agencies are stepping beyond their bounds thinking that they get to do this and this and this, and it’s unconstitutional, it needs to be declared that because if there's one thing that COVID-19 has done, it has put a spotlight on regulatory agencies that can go after you, me, the hair salon person, the pub owner, the restaurant runner—everybody. We are all at risk.

Frankly, Dr. Peterson, that's why I wrote my book, We've Been Played. Because I said we need to make certain we’re seeing what's going on in our world—the world of big tech and big pharma and big government colluding and having a similar mission. It's happening right in front of our eyes.

I'm saying that people like you and me, we have an obligation to expose that. We saw big government protect big pharma. We saw big pharma and big tech scratching each other's back. We saw the DOD in the United States provide more money to Pfizer in 2022 than they did to Boeing! The Department of Defense spends more money paying Pfizer than they spend on Boeing, which is going to make weaponry and aircraft that will protect our nation!

We've gone upside down and we need to stop this.

Well, Dr. Jensen, that's a pretty good place to end, I would say.

Hello everyone, I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.