The Record and the Wound, Part II: Why I Won’t Disappear

What you do when the system you trusted destroys you

You can find an overview of my case at case.kevinnbass.com.

This is Part II of The Record and the Wound, my attempt to make public what usually stays hidden when a medical school quietly destroys someone’s career. In Part I, I laid out the record: evidence that Texas Tech edited my dismissal hearing, and the public-records fight that followed. Here, I want to talk about something harder to document: what that did to me, why I refuse to disappear, and what I think the wound is for.

In Part I I said the next post would cover the “threat” I was accused of; that will now be Part IV after this piece and one on academic mobbing. I think will make that episode and what follows easier to understand.

I was dismissed from Texas Tech’s medical school after my criticism of the COVID-19 response went intensely viral on Twitter/X—seen by more than a hundred million times, regularly amplified by high-profile scientists and commentators, and followed by a sustained mobbing campaign, especially from other physicians, that washed back into my institution in the form of reputational panic and complaints. Only then did I discover that even the official record of my dismissal hearing appears to have been altered—a fight I began to document in Part I.

I need to say plainly why I keep returning to this story. And why I am escalating.

I didn’t set out to have a fight with a big institution, or to build some grand theory about how they work. For most of my life, I tried to play by the rules and move forward inside the system. I did not change. What changed was what happened to me.

If none of this had happened, I would still be in the clinic, doing the work and minding my own business. I am not a born crusader; social media was always just a hobby, and if I ever came across otherwise, it was only because that was the vehicle through which important ideas had to be carried. I wanted to make a difference, but I always thought that would come as a hobby as a physician. The only reason I’m writing any of this is that the system I trusted turned on me and left me with a choice: swallow it quietly and collude in it, or follow the logic of what had been done all the way out into the open.

Most people today talk about a “career” in medicine. “Career” is a word that exploded in usage in the 1950s to describe what we call a profession. It rose in response to massification and bureaucratization of the professions and the thinning out of their thick, moral character—what some scholars have called deprofessionalization.

I believe in something more than a career. I believe in medicine as a vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin word vocatio. It means to be called. I believe in medicine—and science—as a calling. For me, this is not a “career.” It never was.

I do not expect vindication. I cannot afford to pin everything on that. What if I do not get it? One thing I can do, though, is tell the truth. It is what I believe that I am called to science and medicine to do.

And I can do a little more than that, too. Something that has a small chance of making this about something more than me. I can contextualize my story. I can diagnose the system. Then I can try to make it better.

That’s medicine.

And so that’s what I will do. I will use my story to illustrate the larger patterns that are harming medicine and public health.

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What happens to people like me

I was subjected to complete reputation destruction. It happened externally through social media mobs, internally through mobs that weaponized procedure, but also through internal–external channels, where social media mobs, mostly doctors, amplified the internal destruction. It continues unceasingly to the present day. There is no returning for me to science or medicine.

When an institution systematically destroys the reputation of one of its members, there are a few paths that people take.

Most disappear. Recently I was told a story about an extremely accomplished MD/PhD, a professor of medicine with elite credentials, who, after something similar happened to him, now works as a tennis instructor. He keeps quiet and avoids his former colleagues. His entire life’s work wiped out. And so now he teaches rich people tennis.

Others fight. It goes through the courts. It is interminable and exhausting. Then, just at the last minute, the institution offers a settlement to avoid discovery. Excited for things to finally be over—vindication!—the victim agrees. NDAs are signed. Money exchanges hands. Then, the victim seeks jobs. They interview at dozens of institutions. They are offered contracts. Then, ghosted. Over and over and over.

It’s the “whispers”, as some of us have come to call them. If someone who fights an institution goes on to be successful somewhere else, that makes the institution look bad. So that isn’t allowed to happen. Daggers are drawn in private. Apparent vindication is in fact an illusion. The victim is right back where they started, with settlement money, unable to pursue their life’s calling.

This is not victory.

Once an institution turns against you, and especially once they use underhanded means to do it, you’re done. They have dehumanized you. And if they have dehumanized you, then, well, I am reminded of the dark line from the Roman historian Tacitus (Agricola 42.3):

It is characteristic of human nature to hate those you have injured.

When we cause injury to others, we are even more predisposed not to help them or remedy the situation—not more. In fact, we are downright averse to it: “what does that say about me, that I would hurt an innocent person?” Thus, those in institutions instinctively shut down. They do not correct the situation. They rationalize their behavior.

It’s just the way things are.

The problem is not just psychological either. It’s structural. After such an abuse of power, if these institutions don’t do everything they can to obstruct every procedural remedy, they expose themselves not just to career and reputational damage, they also become exposed to cumbersome oversight and future litigation.

Even if they know internally that the victim is right, they will never admit to it. And they will do everything that they can to prevent that from coming to light. If the victim tries to move on, they will drag daggers in private at every opportunity, because success of a victim later threatens to provide credibility, invert the narrative about what happened, and make the institution look bad and bring about all of the above.

If the destruction isn’t complete, you’ll limp along. “It will never be the same,” one physician told me. That physician kept his practice. But the damage was done: “It will never be the same.”

But if the destruction is complete, what then? Daggers behind the scenes.

Look. For the things I wanted to achieve in medicine, I’m finished. “It will never be the same” is right.

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The two honest options

At that point, there are only two honest options. You can disappear, call it a private tragedy, and build some second life on the ruins. Or you can refuse to disappear; you can decide that if your own career is already gone, the one thing you still control is whether what happened stays hidden.

I am choosing the second. After what I’ve seen, doing anything else would feel like colluding in a lie about what happened. Given how I’m wired, there is only one path: tell the truth. Expose everything. Bring it all out in the open. Never quit.

Then the daggers disappear.

So that is what I am going to do. And in the process, I will build something else. I don’t have a choice.

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What I’m not doing this for

Given this, it is worth dispelling two misconceptions.

I am not doing this for attention. Although I can at times command large audiences, this is not my interest at present. The basic story of my dismissal has already reached far more people than I ever expected. That has not resolved the problem. So attention is not my aim—though I will use it when it serves that aim.

Nor am I driven mainly by anger or a desire for revenge. What happened to me is outrageous, but anger is a bad operating system. In cases like mine, those responsible are almost never held accountable. Whatever private consequences they may face, none of it enters the public ledger. Only allegations about me do. That’s the structure of these conflicts: the institution with power remains opaque, while the individual without it is scrutinized.

No amount of “naming names” will change that, and even in the best-case legal outcome, the compensation would be modest and the past would not be undone. Revenge, even if it were possible, would be self-indulgent and would miss the point: what happened to me is a symptom of a broader failure.

That is not the same thing as forgiveness. I do not forgive what was done. I am not going to pretend it was acceptable, or offer a cheap public absolution so that everyone can feel comfortable again. I will not anesthetize myself—or anyone else—to the reality of what happened.

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Turning injury into moral formation

Today, moral injury is usually spoken of as trauma. “I’m traumatized.” “That traumatized me.” The dominant response is therapeutic: regulate your emotions, “let go,” “move on,” treat the injury as a private psychological wound to be managed.

I do not deny that people are wounded. I have been wounded. But I think something essential is missing in that framing.

When I refuse unilateral forgiveness and “just move on,” I am not clinging to my hurt for its own sake. I am saying that serious injustice ought to work on us—morally. The right question is not “How do I stop feeling this?” but “What does this require of me?”

What if we treated moral injury not mainly as trauma, but as material for moral formation? Not as something that just happens to us, but something that happens for us, if we are willing to learn from it. Not something to dissolve for our own comfort, but something to metabolize so that we are less likely to participate in similar harm ourselves.

The word holy comes from the Proto-Germanic hailagaz. It means that which is inviolate, whole, unbroken, preserved from defilement. From the same root we get wholeness, holistic, and health. Wholeness, in this sense, is not about avoiding harm. It is about refusing to let harm hollow out our moral core.

Maybe, instead of “letting go” in the therapeutic sense, we need to let the wound sit in us long enough to understand it. Process it. Search for solutions. Stay curious. Then act on it, and let that make us into something bigger and stronger.

If we rush to escape our pain, we create more of it in the long term by never really addressing the injury. We become morally, spiritually, and psychologically weak.

Refusing to anesthetize ourselves to injustice does not have to corrode us. It draws new moral boundaries, sharpens our sense of right and wrong, and gives us a clearer map of life. It can make us stronger. If we never do that work—internally or externally—we stay morally ambiguous. And sooner or later, we will do the same thing to someone else that was done to us. It happened to me.

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So what is my motivation?

My motivation is to tell the truth about what happened, to identify the failure mode(s) that produced it, and to do what I can to make this less likely to happen to someone else. Along the way, I want to see how the dysfunction in this one place connects to dysfunction elsewhere in the country—and what people like us can actually do about it.

In the process, I will form myself. I don’t really have a choice about that. I’m ready to do the work I wanted to do, but the way my institution handled things makes that impossible. So I’m going to make the best of it and use it as the starting point for something else.

There is another way to describe all of this, which is the one I hinted at earlier: a vocation, a calling. I didn’t choose it in advance, but I choose it now.