No, We Don’t Need a Nuremberg 2.0

COVID Victims Are Hungry for Justice

Last week, a packed US Senate meeting room listened as Gail and Brad Seiler recounted Gail’s treatment at the hands of hospital staff at a Plano, Texas, hospital in December of 2021. Gail had been isolated from her family, denied food for twelve days and water for seven days. She had been left naked and uncovered, and had suffered “physical, verbal and psychological abuse” from nurses when they learned that she had not received the Covid-19 vaccine.

The Seilers had chosen Medical City Plano because they knew it had previously used Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. However, when staff learned that Gail was unvaccinated, they told her that she was “going to die” and only offered her the treatment options of remdesivir and ventilation. They also gave her a “Do Not Resuscitate” order against her wishes.

After twelve days, her husband Brad entered the ICU with the intention of bringing his wife home. After a six-hour standoff with police and the intervention of a state senator, Gail was finally allowed to leave. Hospital staff warned that she would soon be dead. But at home, using Ivermectin and other therapies she had been denied in the hospital, she recovered fully.

On Monday, the Seilers were joined by nineteen others who testified at US Senator Ron Johnson’s roundtable on the Covid-19 hospital protocols, including

• Family members—most of them not as fortunate as Gail and Brad,

• Doctors and nurses fired from their jobs for refusing to use protocols they (correctly) believed to be dangerous, and

• An attorney who testified that in the cases where he was able to help patients gain access to Ivermectin, 95.8% of those patients survived. In the cases where he did not prevail, and the patients were forced to remain on the official hospital protocols, every single person died.

What happened to Gail Seiler was not an isolated incident. Early on, patients who went into hospitals with symptoms were told to go home and do nothing until they were struggling to breathe. As Gail and many others learned, treatments such as Ivermectin that were effective against the symptoms were largely prohibited and information about them suppressed. Even therapies as simple and well-established as Vitamin C and Vitamin D were not part of the official protocols, and those who advocated them were censored and, in some cases, stripped of their medical licenses.

Instead, a set of official protocols was implemented. These included the use of remdesivir, an incredibly toxic drug that had been developed for use against Ebola, but was removed from trials because of its deadly effects. Also included was the liberal use of ventilators—a dangerous intervention normally only employed as a last resort. These were the protocols that nearly killed Gail Seiler, and—according to testimony and a mounting body of evidence—may have killed the family members of many who spoke at Senator Johnson’s roundtable—along with countless thousands of others across the country.

These, and other deadly treatments, were encouraged via the CARES Act and other government funding schemes. Such programs provided billions of dollars to hospitals that implemented these protocols, with some states receiving as much as $471,000 for each COVID case, plus additional bonus money for each use of certain “covered countermeasures”—including remdesivir.

Remember: This came after hospitals in most states had been ordered to stop elective surgeries and other medical treatment deemed “non-essential.” For many hospitals, these procedures paid most of their bills, thus making the government’s COVID-measures bonus money all the more attractive.

Meanwhile, hospitals and the medical professionals who implemented the deadly protocols were shielded, via the PREP Act, from the consequences of their actions. They could not be held liable for any harm they caused (beyond the difficult-to-prove-in-court “willful misconduct”), as long as they were following the approved protocols. No advanced education in incentives and outcomes is required to predict the results this was going to produce.

Indeed, it now appears that a great many of those who were reported to have died “from Covid-19,” died instead from these hospital protocols. To the extent that this is true, what would be the culpability of the individuals who subjected patients to these protocols, which, as has been alleged, may have caused over a million deaths in the United States alone?

COVID Has Opened Many Eyes

For anyone still under the illusion that the powers of the US government are in any meaningful way limited by the Constitution, the year 2020 provided an important object lesson. For decades, Americans had found ways to rationalize being subjected to invasive searches and molestation as a condition for air travel, warrantless assaults on private homes and their residents, and other grotesque violations of our rights. But with the arrival of SARS-Cov2, the US government, along with many other governments around the world, brought institutionalized violations of our fundamental rights to a whole new level—making it impossible not to see.

We learned that—with a frivolous disregard for anything the Constitution might have to say—our federal, state, and local governments can restrict our lives and activities in pretty much whatever ways they want. They dictated whether our businesses may remain open, and under what conditions. They told us when we may leave our homes. They demanded that we cover our faces with masks whenever they say so. They compelled us to undergo medical interventions in order to participate in much of society.

We learned that our lives, our livelihoods, and our society exist only at the pleasure of the state.

If you didn’t know in 2019 that the US government was largely unaccountable and unbound by its own constitution, capable of perpetrating such acts upon the people who live under it, you know it now.

Nuremberg 2.0 Is Not the Solution for Covid Crimes

It is now late 2026, and a rage for real justice is rumbling across the country. A growing number of people are calling for “Nuremberg 2.0,” a reference to the post World-War II war-crimes trials. As a result of these trials, officials and others who killed innocent human beings and violated the principle of informed consent, all while acting within the confines of the law, were executed for their offenses. Four of them were physicians.

In this spirit, some are seeking to have criminal charges brought against US government officials and others who imposed these protocols, as well as against those in hospitals who implemented them.

Notably, beginning last year, Vires Law Group and Florida gubernatorial candidate Rachel Rodriguez sent criminal referral requests to the attorneys general of all fifty states, asking for investigations and prosecutions of Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, and others, including hospital administrators and medical professionals. The crimes alleged include murder, racketeering, human trafficking, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and assault and battery, among others.

So far, no state attorney general has responded publicly. In April of 2025, Vires said that there are “two open criminal investigations by county prosecutors in two states.” However, the firm did not specify the counties or the states, and there have been no further updates. As much as such efforts might satisfy a desire for justice, they are unlikely to succeed. Why? For the same reasons that the Nuremberg Trials themselves are not a solid model for ensuring accountability.

(As an aside, there may be more prospects for civil suits, which are not dependent upon the whims of an attorney general, such as that brought by Rebecca Charles over the death of her daughter Danielle by Northwell Health Glen Cove Hospital staff in 2021.)

These people are not wrong to seek justice—including justice that transcends the laws of any particular nation or state and upholds fundamental, universal rights. A civilized society absolutely requires this kind of justice. But neither our existing legal system nor a re-enactment of the Nuremberg Trials can reliably provide this.

The uncomfortable truth about the Nuremberg Trials is that they have failed to fulfill the vision, set forth at the time, of creating a meaningful deterrent against future such horrors. State-sponsored atrocities such as those committed by the Soviet Union, the regime of Mao Tse-Tung, and Pol Pot followed on the heels of those trials.

To understand why they have failed, we must understand what the trials were—and what they were not.

The mythology of the Nuremberg Trials goes something like this: Regardless of the laws of any specific nation at any specific time, there are universal laws or principles that must never be violated. During the reign of the National Socialists in Europe, a great many people committed acts that violated these principles, even though they did not violate their nation’s laws at the time. The Nuremberg Trials famously held some of these actors accountable for crimes they committed under the authority of the state, even though they were “just following orders.”

Needless to say, the trials did not prosecute everyone known to have committed such crimes. Nor did they purport to. Indeed, some of those who might have been charged were instead brought to the United States by the US government, in order to benefit from their particular skills and knowledge.

Likewise, these principles were for the most part not applied to those acting on behalf of the Allied forces, who themselves committed atrocious crimes against innocent civilians both during and after the war.

It has become a truism that only those on the losing side are ever tried for war crimes, and this truism gets to the heart of why the Nuremberg Trials have not succeeded in protecting humanity from future mass atrocities committed by state actors: Nuremberg may have established critically important principles regarding the rights of individuals against the state, but it did not establish a means for reliably enforcing those principles.

Who Watches the Watchers?

Meaningful enforcement of a set of rules requires an enforcing body independent of the entity that might violate those rules. Everyone recognizes this problem in the world of private enterprise. “Industry cannot police itself” is a common refrain. Yet we expect government to police itself, imagining that, somehow, creating different branches of a single entity will generate the required independence.

History has shown this to be a dangerously false presumption.

The weakness in looking to the Nuremberg Trials as a model for implementing justice is that they were the product of a monopoly state—a single entity that has no outside entity to which it can be brought for justice. A monopoly state might on occasion do the right thing. It might sometimes punish those who have systematically violated the rights of innocent people. A state’s attorney general might on occasion agree to investigate and charge people in high positions of authority who have committed serious crimes. But we cannot count on it to do so reliably. And we most certainly cannot count on it to do so when the perpetrators are themselves agents of that state.

In such a system, justice only happens at the whim of the state.

As a coercive monopoly, there is no way to hold a state accountable for its actions, or to ensure that it reliably pursues real justice. The state may decide to prosecute mass murderers when those criminals are from a different nation—or it may not. But just as the architects of the Nuremberg Trials were never going to apply their principles to the war crimes that were perpetrated on their own side, it is unlikely that we will see the perpetrators of Covid-19 crimes held accountable by the very entity that produced them.

This is what we are up against. What is desperately needed—what Nuremberg promised but could not deliver—is a way of holding government actors accountable.

Someone Other Than the Fox Should Watch the Henhouse

The crimes committed by people in positions of power, medical professionals, hospital administrators, and others during the COVID era demand justice. Our civilization, if it is to continue, must have some kind of reliable system for providing that justice. Some entity—one that is not part of the government—must have the power to act.

It need not be perfect, but people living in a civilized society need to have a strong expectation that their most fundamental rights will be protected by that society, and that anyone who violates this right will face consequences commensurate to the crime. No matter who that person is. This is the most basic outcome that we expect from a system of justice, and our current system is failing spectacularly.

As old institutions lose Americans' trust, as some of these institutions collapse, and as new institutions are forged, it is essential that they are built on foundations more solid than the institutions they replace. This is nowhere more true, or more desperately important, than in the realm of justice and law.

We know that genuine monopolies cannot be held accountable. A monopoly justice system is no exception. Such a system can never give us the solid ground we need in order to build a healthy, flourishing society whose members can have a basic level of confidence that their rights will be protected.

Ideally, perhaps, we could move to a condition of self-government and consensual order, in which all provision of justice is private and decentralized. But whether we make this transformation or not, we desperately need to come up with something better.