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Humanity v. Government

An Indictment for Negligent Mass Homicide, on Three Counts

Author
Affiliation

Mike P. Sinn

Institute for Accelerated Medicine

Abstract

Historians count war deaths. Health economists count drug-delay deaths. Disease researchers count disease deaths. Nobody adds them up. This paper does. The governments of Earth are charged with three counts of negligent mass homicide: (1) killing 310 million people through war, conflict, and democide since 1900; (2) killing 102 million people by blocking access to drugs already proven safe, under the 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) efficacy delay mandated since 1962; and (3) spending the money that could have cured diseases on weapons instead. The drug-approval system kills 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) people by blocking good drugs for every one person it saves by blocking bad ones. The defendants had the money. They spent it on missiles. The proposed remedy: move 1% of military spending to clinical trials. The remedy pays everyone involved, because that is the only kind of remedy that has ever worked on humans.

Keywords

government failure, mortality accounting, regulatory economics, public choice, opportunity cost, efficacy lag, Type II error, democide, clinical trials

Preamble

The governments of Earth are paid approximately $36.5 trillion per year56 to promote the general welfare. Since 1900, they have spent $170 trillion murdering 310 million of their employers. The citizenry. This includes 102 million children, 930,000 doctors, 310,000 scientists, 620,000 engineers, 1.24 million nurses, and 3.1 million teachers45.

If a corporation were paid $36.5 trillion a year to promote the general welfare and it misused the funds to this degree, it would be prosecuted, fined, monitored, and its officers imprisoned. The governments wrote laws exempting themselves from exactly this prosecution. The customer base is the species, the revenue is compulsory, the body count is planetary, and the accounting department owns nuclear weapons. The standard should be higher, not lower.

The charges are three counts of negligent mass homicide. The body count follows.

Count One: Death by War

Charge: That the defendants, between 1900 and the present, did willfully and with premeditation engage in the organized killing of approximately 310 million of their own employers (the citizenry).

The Evidence

Since 1900, governments have killed approximately 310 million humans through wars, conflicts, genocides, and policy-induced famines45. This figure synthesizes Rummel’s democide accounting (~264 million), battle deaths (~39 million), and collateral civilian deaths (~30 million), with overlap adjustments157.

Of these dead, approximately 102 million were children under 1845. The defendants will note that children rarely start wars. The prosecution will not dispute this.

Among the dead were 930,000 doctors, 310,000 scientists, 620,000 engineers, 1.24 million nurses, and 3.1 million teachers45. The defendants killed an entire generation of the people whose job was to keep the rest alive, then complained about a shortage of skilled labor.

Aggravating Circumstances

The defendants currently maintain 122 times the nuclear capacity required to end civilization69. They spend $2.72 trillion per year60 on the capacity for additional killing, equivalent to enough bullets to murder every human on Earth 850 times annually. It requires at most two bullets to kill someone. The defendants are stockpiling at a ratio of approximately 850 bullets to two corpses per person, which suggests either innumeracy or enthusiasm.

The defendants will argue that these weapons are for deterrence, not killing. The prosecution accepts this argument as sincere and notes only that the deterrence has not, in fact, deterred. 310 million dead people, sorted from a thousand wars, were also deterring something.

The Defendants Were Warned

In 1961, the supreme commander of Allied forces in WWII, who had personally won a war, gave a televised farewell address to the people of the United States in which he warned that the military-industrial complex would consume the civilization that built it. The defendants gave him a standing ovation, then ignored him for 65 consecutive years.

This is not negligence in the sense of not knowing. This is negligence in the sense of being told, applauding the warning, and proceeding anyway.

Count Two: Death by Regulatory Delay

Charge: That the defendants, between 1962 and the present, did require an additional 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) of efficacy testing before letting humans access drugs already proven safe, killing approximately 102 million humans in the resulting waiting period.

The Evidence

Following the Kefauver-Harris Amendments of 1962, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began requiring proof of efficacy in addition to proof of safety before allowing patient access to new medicines158. The average efficacy lag is 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years).

During this delay, patients who would have benefited from the eventually-approved drug die instead. Multiplying the 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) efficacy lag by the affected disease burden, the cumulative historical death toll is approximately 102 million humans159.

That is 34,132 9/11s (95% CI: 12,387 9/11s-71,845 9/11s), which I will explain to the jury for context. Your species suffered a single attack on a Tuesday in September of 2001 in which 2,977 people humans died. Your defendants responded with an $8 trillion war that lasted twenty years and killed several hundred thousand additional humans, none of them responsible. The death toll from regulatory delay is 34,132 9/11s (95% CI: 12,387 9/11s-71,845 9/11s) of those, and your defendants responded by extending the efficacy requirements to additional drug classes.

The aggregate 102 million figure is being decomposed into individual named victims through the Invisible Graveyard memorial database159. Memorials submitted with cause of death (mapped to ICD-10) are cross-referenced against drug approval timelines. Where a person died between the date of first evidence of efficacy and the date of regulatory approval for a drug treating their condition, the record is automatically flagged as an efficacy-lag death, with the specific drug that would have saved them named on the record. The defense’s preferred objection, that counterfactual deaths are abstract, collapses against a database of photographs.

The Asymmetry

The defendants have always been afraid of one specific kind of mistake: approving a drug that turned out to be harmful (a Type I error, in their language). They have never been afraid of the other kind of mistake: blocking a drug that turned out to be helpful (a Type II error).

The prosecution has calculated the ratio. Even assuming the worst-case Thalidomide-style harm event happens every single year (which it does not, because Phase I safety trials catch it), Type II errors kill approximately 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) times more people than Type I errors save159.

This is not regulatory caution. This is a system optimized to kill 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) people quietly in order to avoid killing one person on the news.

The Defendants Were Warned

Sam Peltzman published the seminal analysis of efficacy-lag mortality in 1973158. He concluded that the 1962 amendments killed more people than they saved. The defendants thanked him for his contribution and changed nothing. Subsequent work by Tabarrok, Lichtenberg, Klein, Miller, Bhattacharya, and others reached the same conclusion using different methods. The defendants thanked them for their contributions and changed nothing.

53 years of warnings. 102 million dead. The prosecution submits that “we did not know” is no longer available as a defense.

Count Three: Death by Misallocation

Charge: That the defendants, having access to the funds necessary to prevent disease deaths at scale, did instead allocate those funds to the capacity for additional killing under Count One. The historical ledger appears in Cost of War: a 1900 freeze on real military spending redirected to pragmatic trials moves practical infectious disease control to 1950 (95% CI: 1926-1991) and non-aging disease control to 1950 (95% CI: 1926-1991). The forward ledger appears in 1% Treaty Impact160 161: treaty-scale trials prevent approximately 10.7 billion future deaths if adopted now.

The Evidence

Disease kills approximately 104 humans per minute. The defendants spend 604 dollars on weapons for every one dollar spent on the clinical trials that might cure what is actually killing their citizens.

This is not because the funds are unavailable. The funds are exactly available. The defendants spend $2.72 trillion per year on weaponry. A one percent reallocation would fund $27.2 billion in clinical trials annually161. The Department of Defense has, by its own admission, “misplaced” $2.46 trillion across seven consecutive failed audits91. That figure alone is 547 years of clinical trials at current funding levels.

Under pragmatic clinical trial protocols, trials cost $929 (95% CI: $97-$3,000) per patient instead of the traditional $41,000 (95% CI: $20,000-$120,000), a 44.1x cost reduction162. With the treaty’s funding redirected through pragmatic protocols, the timeline to clear the disease backlog drops from 443 years (95% CI: 324 years-712 years) to 36 years (95% CI: 11.6 years-77.1 years)161,163.

The cumulative number of preventable deaths over that forward timeline shift is approximately 10.7 billion, with approximately 1.93 quadrillion hours (95% CI: 1.36 quadrillion hours-2.62 quadrillion hours) of human suffering161. That is the settlement value of adopting the remedy now, not a historical death toll. The world the defendants failed to build is the separate question priced in Cost of War.

Aggressive Prosecutor Pleading Theory

If a corporation had been paid $170 trillion to promote the general welfare and had instead spent the money building murder hardware, the indictment would not politely stop at the conservative damages floor. The prosecutor would plead the medical misallocation branch separately: the defendants had enough money to buy the missing toolchain, overpay for the missing toolchain, and then saturate practical clinical-trial capacity anyway.

The plaintiff intake rule is simple. Disease deaths after 1950 (95% CI: 1926-1991) are presumptive medical-misallocation plaintiffs. Aging deaths after 1990 (95% CI: 1966-2031) are a separate intake class. The disease branch covers 75 years (95% CI: 34 years-99 years), yielding 3.82 billion plaintiffs (95% CI: 1.81 billion plaintiffs-4.62 billion plaintiffs) presumptive post-cutoff disease plaintiffs and $38.2 quadrillion (95% CI: $14.8 quadrillion-$62.2 quadrillion) in gross medical-misallocation death exposure. The same post-cutoff disease window also contains 200 billion DALYs (95% CI: 90.6 billion DALYs-255 billion DALYs) of avoidable disease burden, valued at $30 quadrillion (95% CI: $16.3 quadrillion-$34.4 quadrillion) if pleaded as disease-years, disability, and suffering.

The aging intake class covers 35 years (95% CI: -6 years-59 years) and 1.78 billion plaintiffs (95% CI: -349 million plaintiffs-2.7 billion plaintiffs) presumptive plaintiffs, with $17.8 quadrillion (95% CI: $-3.24 quadrillion-$34.4 quadrillion) in overlapping gross intake exposure. It is not added to the disease plaintiff count, because the disease-death parameter already includes all disease and aging deaths. The point is intake routing: after 1990 (95% CI: 1966-2031), the prosecutor does not have to pretend aging was still an untouchable act of God.

This does not replace the conservative damages schedule. The strict floor remains the non-duplicative floor: $4.31 quadrillion (95% CI: $2.14 quadrillion-$6.15 quadrillion). The prosecutor branch pleads every post-cutoff disease death as presumptive evidence of medical misallocation, producing $42.5 quadrillion (95% CI: $18.3 quadrillion-$67.4 quadrillion) in gross death-based pleading exposure. If disease-years and suffering are stacked into the pleading schedule, the gross exposure rises to $72.5 quadrillion (95% CI: $37 quadrillion-$99.2 quadrillion). Gross pleading exposure is not the final award. It is what an aggressive prosecutor asks for before the defendants explain why building better ways to kill people was more urgent than building better ways to stop people from dying.

Plaintiff Registration Rule

Register the claim if any of these are true:

Question Rule
Did someone die of disease after 1950 (95% CI: 1926-1991)? Register the estate, family, or memorial claim.
Did someone die of aging after 1990 (95% CI: 1966-2031)? Register the aging intake claim.
Did someone live with avoidable disease, disability, pain, lost work, or caregiving burden after 1950 (95% CI: 1926-1991)? Register the disease-years claim.
Is the victim unknown, untraceable, or without surviving claimants? Their share belongs to living humanity and disease eradication.

The public rule is simpler than the legal theory: if war money should have built the cure before the person died or suffered, the claim belongs in the case.

Judgment and Distribution

If the defendants were found guilty, the money would not go back to the defendants. The judgment would flow through a humanity restitution fund with a simple priority order:

Priority Claimants Rule
1 Direct victim estates and surviving families Pay traceable wrongful-death claims first.
2 Living disease survivors and caregivers Pay disease-years, disability, pain, lost work, and caregiving claims.
3 All living humans Distribute the residual as universal restitution, because many victims have no traceable estate.
4 Disease-eradication infrastructure Put unclaimed money into cures, trials, diagnostics, factories, and prevention. Do not return it to governments.

The conservative floor alone implies $538,219 (95% CI: $268,557-$763,113) per living human if distributed universally. The death-based prosecutor branch implies $5.31 million (95% CI: $2.26 million-$8.48 million) per living human. The stacked death-plus-DALY pleading branch implies $9.07 million (95% CI: $4.57 million-$12.5 million) per living human.

That does not mean every living human gets a check for the largest number. It means the defendants’ exposure is so large that the realistic settlement is not “pay the bill.” The realistic settlement is: stop doing the thing, sign the 1% Treaty, and permanently redirect the payment stream into the medical machinery the defendants should have built the first time.

The defense cannot say the tools did not exist. Building the tools was part of the job.

The Aggravation

The defendants do not lack the money. The defendants chose to spend the money on the capacity for additional killing, while the people they are tasked with protecting died of curable diseases.

Your legal system has a term for this: depraved indifference. It means you knew people would die, you knew how to stop it, and you did not care. There is no other honest description of a budget that spends 604 dollars on killing for every one dollar on curing while 150 thousand citizens die per day of the things the medicine would have fixed.

The Invisible Mass Beneath the Iceberg

Count Two documents deaths from drugs that existed but were stuck in approval. This is real, and it is provable. It is also the visible tip of a much larger iceberg.

The documented cumulative military ledger equals 37,778 years (95% CI: 28,333 years-55,889 years) of clinical trials at current government funding levels. The defendants have been conducting clinical trials for approximately 80 years. The backlog of untreated diseases would require 36 years (95% CI: 11.6 years-77.1 years) to clear at treaty-scale pragmatic capacity. The defendants had 37,778 years (95% CI: 28,333 years-55,889 years) of capacity. They spent it on the capacity to end civilization 122 times.

I would like to understand who authorized this.

Count Two establishes liability for the drugs the defendants delayed. Count Three extends the same logic: the defendants are also liable for the drugs that were never developed at all, because the budget that would have funded the trials was spent on weaponry instead. The efficacy lag is the visible tip. The invisible mass beneath it is every disease that remains untreated because 604 more resources went to the capacity for destruction than to the trials that might cure what is actually killing people. The named victims of Count Two appear in the Invisible Graveyard one drug at a time. The unnamed victims of Count Three are everyone whose disease never received its drug, because the drug was never developed, because the trial was never funded, because the money was busy.

Exhibits

The prosecution submits the following non-exhaustive list of specific named cases as evidence. Each entry is a single instance within the broader pattern. Each victim named below stands for many additional victims unnamed.

Exhibits A through H: Direct Killing (Count One)

Exhibit Defendant(s) Period Body Count Notes
A All belligerents 1914–1918 ~17,000,000 World War I. Industrial-scale killing rationalized by alliance treaties whose precise terms most belligerents could not articulate when interviewed.
B All belligerents 1939–1945 ~70,000,000 World War II. Includes the Holocaust (~6,000,000), industrial democide previously assumed to be impossible by people whose job was to assume things.
C USSR 1932–1933 ~3,000,000–7,000,000 Holodomor. Famine engineered by grain requisitions during agricultural collectivization.
D PRC 1958–1962 ~30,000,000+ Great Leap Forward famine. Deaths via policy-induced agricultural collapse.
E Khmer Rouge 1975–1979 ~2,000,000 Cambodian genocide. ~25% of national population killed in four years.
F Hutu Power factions / RPF 1994 ~800,000 Rwandan genocide. UN forces present, withdrew under orders.
G United States, Coalition 2003–2011 ~200,000+ Iraq War. Conducted under stated rationale (WMD) later acknowledged as factually incorrect by the conducting parties.
H United States 1945 ~200,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only two instances of atomic weapons use against civilian populations in human history.

The prosecution stresses that these eight exhibits represent perhaps 40% of the Count One total. The remaining 60% is distributed across hundreds of smaller wars, civil conflicts, ethnic cleansings, and policy-induced famines, each with its own named victims.

Exhibits I through M: Regulatory Delay (Count Two)

Exhibit Defendant Drug / Therapy Delay Estimated Deaths Source
I FDA Propranolol (cardiac arrhythmia) ~10 years vs. UK/Germany ~100,000 Americans 158
J FDA Beta blockers (general class) Multi-year delays vs. EU Tens of thousands 159
K FDA Misoprostol, deferiprone, and other off-patent drugs delayed by Phase II/III requirements for indications already in use abroad 5–15 years Unquantified, large 159
L FDA Vioxx, Rezulin, fen-phen post-approval safety failures N/A 55,000–100,000 cumulative across 60 years 164
M FDA / Multiple COVID-19 vaccine and monoclonal antibody authorization timelines ~6–12 months vs. emergency-feasible ~290,000+ U.S. deaths attributable to authorization lag (multiple estimates)

Exhibit L is presented in a different posture from the others. Exhibit L represents the entire universe of harms the defense routinely invokes to justify the system that produced Exhibits I through K. The ratio of Exhibit L deaths to Exhibits I-K-M deaths is approximately 1:3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125). The defense built the regulatory apparatus around Exhibit L while ignoring Exhibits I, J, K, and M.

Exhibits N through R: Misallocation (Count Three)

Exhibit Defendant Item Amount Disease Equivalent
N U.S. DoD F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program (lifetime) ~$1.7 trillion ~378 years of global government clinical trial spending
O United States Iraq War (direct + indirect) ~$2 trillion ~444 years of global government clinical trial spending
P U.S. DoD “Misplaced” funds across seven failed audits

$2.46 trillion

 547 years of global government clinical trial spending
Q All defendants Annual global military spending (2024)

$2.72 trillion

 604x annual government clinical trial spending
R All defendants Documented cumulative military spending ledger

$170 trillion

 ~38,000 years of global government clinical trial spending

The prosecution observes that Exhibit P alone, recovered, would fund the clinical trials necessary to clear the entire global disease backlog several times over. The defendants would prefer to keep looking for it.

Schedule of Formal Charges

Charges Arising from Count One (Direct Killing)

  1. Planned murder. They knew what they were doing and ordered it anyway. Not self-defense. Offense. (Exhibits G, H.)
  2. Mass murder. Killing large groups on purpose, under official orders. (Exhibits A, B.)
  3. Genocide. Trying to destroy an entire people because of who they are. (Exhibits B, E, F.) The defendants signed a treaty in 1948 promising not to do this. They did it anyway.
  4. Crimes against humanity. Attacking civilians on a large scale, systematically, as policy. (Exhibits B, C, D, E, F.)
  5. War crimes. Breaking the rules of war the defendants wrote for themselves. Targeting civilians. Disproportionate force. (Exhibits B, G, H.) The defendants signed the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions did not sign back.
  6. Conspiracy. Doing any of the above together, on purpose, with allies.

Charges Arising from Count Two (Regulatory Delay)

  1. Killing people by not paying attention. The legal term is “negligent homicide”: you had a responsibility, you ignored it, people died, and you knew (or should have known) they would. The defendants were told in print, by named experts, that the 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) drug delay was killing people. They kept the delay.
  2. Killing people by being so careless it looks intentional. The legal term is “gross criminal negligence.” It applies when the carelessness is so extreme a normal person would call it insane. It applies here because the defendants continued the policy after the body count was published.
  3. Killing people by not caring whether they live or die. The legal term is “depraved indifference.” You knew people would die, you knew the alternative, and you shrugged. A system that kills 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) people quietly for every one it saves publicly, and has known that ratio for 50+ years, meets this standard.
  4. Putting people in danger. The legal term is “reckless endangerment.” For the officials who did not set the policy but enforced it without asking questions.

Charges Arising from Count Three (Misallocation)

  1. Letting people die by withholding what would save them. If a parent has food and lets a child starve, that is a crime. The defendants had the money for clinical trials. They spent it on missiles.
  2. Breaking a promise that got people killed. A “fiduciary” is someone trusted with other people’s money for a specific purpose. The defendants were trusted with public money to “promote the general welfare.” They spent it on the capacity for killing. When breaking that trust gets people killed, the breach becomes criminal.
  3. Losing the money. The Pentagon cannot account for $2.46 trillion across seven failed audits (Exhibit P). If you or I lost that much of someone else’s money, we would be in prison. The defendants gave themselves an audit extension.
  4. Not caring whether people live or die (budget version). Same as Charge 9, applied to how they spent the money instead of how they approved the drugs.

Charges Arising from the Combined Conduct

  1. Working together to do it. The defendants coordinated through treaties, alliances, and defense pacts. When the coordination killed people, the coordination itself became criminal.
  2. Helping each other do it. The defendants sold each other weapons, shared intelligence, and copied each other’s drug-approval rules. Each defendant helped the others commit the offenses described above.
  3. Writing laws to avoid getting caught. The defendants passed laws making it illegal to sue them for exactly the conduct described in this indictment. In any system where the accused is not also the legislature, writing laws to protect your own crimes is itself a crime. The defendants are also the legislature.
  4. Still doing it. This is not history. It is happening while you read this sentence. Every minute, approximately 104 humans die of diseases the misallocated money could have been treating. The killing has not stopped. The charges are not past tense.

Antecedent Charges (Laws That Would Apply If the Defendants Had Not Exempted Themselves)

The eighteen charges above all resulted in death. Before those sit a separate category: the financial crimes any private organization would face for losing $2.46 trillion across seven consecutive failed audits. These charges cannot currently be brought, because in every case, the defendants wrote themselves an exemption. Each exemption is a separate count of Charge 17 (writing laws to avoid getting caught).

  1. Fraud by wire (18 U.S.C. § 1343). Using electronic communications to steal. Cannot be charged because the courts decided government officials acting in their official capacity are exempt, even when the same conduct by anyone else is a felony.
  2. Fraud by mail (18 U.S.C. § 1341). Same thing, using the postal system. Same exemption.
  3. Lying to investors (15 U.S.C. § 78j(b)). Misleading people about what you did with their money. Cannot be charged because governments do not have to follow the disclosure rules that every publicly traded company must follow.
  4. Refusing to certify the books are accurate (Sarbanes-Oxley, 15 U.S.C. § 7241, § 7262). After the Enron scandal, the law required corporate executives to personally sign off that their financial statements are real. Seven failed Pentagon audits would have sent corporate officers to prison. Cannot be charged because the law explicitly exempts federal agencies.
  5. Filing false claims (31 U.S.C. § 3729). When a contractor lies about what they spent government money on, the penalty is triple damages. Cannot be charged because the law only punishes people who defraud the government, not the government when it cannot account for what it spent itself.
  6. Taking other people’s property. The legal term is “conversion.” Cannot be charged because the defendants classified their own budget decisions as “policy choices,” which are immune from lawsuits.
  7. Stealing from the till (18 U.S.C. § 641). The legal term is “embezzlement.” Cannot be charged in practice because the office that decides whether to prosecute (the Department of Justice) also represents the defendants in court. They are their own prosecutor.
  8. Betraying the trust placed in them as managers of public money. A charity that lost track of this much money would be shut down by the state attorney general. Cannot be charged because the federal government is not classified as a charity and is not subject to the same oversight.
  9. Not keeping books. Every business in the country is required to maintain financial records. Cannot be charged because the law that requires federal agencies to produce auditable financial statements (1990) has no penalty for ignoring it. The Pentagon has not produced a clean audit since the law took effect.
  10. Getting fired. A private contractor with seven failed audits would be banned from government work for a minimum of three years, and possibly for life. Cannot be charged because the Pentagon is the contracting authority and cannot ban itself.

The pattern is Charge 17, repeated ten times. Each line above is a law that catches this exact conduct in every other organization on Earth. Each line has a handwritten exemption attached, drafted by the same defendants whose conduct it would otherwise catch. The Court of Humanity165 exists because every prior court had its jurisdiction surgically removed by the defendants themselves.

Direct Versus Counterfactual Deaths

The defense will argue that counterfactual deaths (Counts Two and Three) are categorically different from direct deaths (Count One). The prosecution agrees, in one specific way: counterfactual deaths are larger by a factor of approximately 30. The defense’s preferred category is the smaller one.

Corporate Damages Schedule

If the defendants were a corporation, here is what the bill would look like. The audit row is the easiest to prove: the defendants published the failed audits themselves.

What they owe for What a corporation would call it The number Notes
Killing people in wars Wrongful death and property destruction 310 million deaths; $1.48 quadrillion (95% CI: $786 trillion-$2.12 quadrillion) in total cost, including $1.26 quadrillion (95% CI: $579 trillion-$1.89 quadrillion) in stolen years of life The life-years are already included in the total. Do not count them twice.
Letting people die of diseases they could have treated Failure to do the job they were paid for Existing-drug delay deaths plus the medical research that was never funded because the money went to weapons (Cost of War) The prosecution does not need to prove that every disease death has one named defendant. The pattern is enough.
Giving the money back Returning misused funds to their owners $135 trillion (95% CI: $132 trillion-$136 trillion) above what they needed to spend at 1900 levels This is the excess military money that could have gone to trials. Not the entire war budget.
Losing the money and failing audits The “where did the money go” penalty $2.46 trillion unaccounted; $7.38 trillion if you apply the standard corporate penalty of 3x (triple damages for lying about public money)13 The triple-damages figure is what a corporation would owe. It is an analogy. No existing court currently applies this to governments.
Making them give back the profits Forcing the winners to return their winnings Defense-contractor profits, revolving-door salaries, war-profiteering proceeds Not yet calculated. Qualitative until a verified profit number is added.
Fixing the problem Monitoring, trust fund, corrective action 1% Treaty funding, clinical-trial trust, independent auditor, bans and clawbacks where traceable Forward-looking. Priced separately from historical damages.
Punishment for doing it on purpose A penalty for being warned and ignoring the warning Pleaded for repeated warnings ignored after the body count was knowable Separate from compensation. This is the “you knew and you kept doing it” penalty.

The Prosecutor’s Demand

The main argument is simple: the defendants were paid to make the world better, and they didn’t. The money humanity lost because the defendants chose war over medicine is the primary bill. Treated as a corporation paid $36.5 trillion per year to promote welfare, safety, health, and peace, the defendants owe each person $25.2 million (95% CI: $8.28 million-$71.6 million) over a lifetime (80 years, not adjusted for inflation) or $10.6 million (95% CI: $3.5 million-$30.3 million) per person if you calculate what that lost income stream is worth in today’s money (at the standard 3% discount rate economists use).

The body-count rows below are the backup argument. A prosecutor presents both and lets the court pick. The body-count base ask of $913,219 (95% CI: $487,690-$1.29 million) per person is the more cautious number a court might award if it rejects the lost-income theory entirely.

What is being measured Total Per person How it is counted
Lost income over a lifetime (primary argument)

$202 quadrillion (95% CI: $66.3 quadrillion-$574 quadrillion)

 $25.2 million (95% CI: $8.28 million-$71.6 million) The main bill. How much richer everyone would be over 80 years if the defendants had done their job. This replaces the body-count rows; you cannot add both.
Lost income, valued in today’s money

$85.1 quadrillion (95% CI: $28 quadrillion-$242 quadrillion)

 $10.6 million (95% CI: $3.5 million-$30.3 million) Same lost income, but expressed as what it is worth right now (using the standard 3% discount rate). Slightly smaller (~5%) if you assume the gap eventually closes.
Minimum provable damages (body-count backup)

$4.31 quadrillion (95% CI: $2.14 quadrillion-$6.15 quadrillion)

$538,219 (95% CI: $268,557-$763,113)

 Backup argument. Only the deaths and costs that are hardest to dispute: war deaths, drug-delay deaths, property destruction, excess military spending, and the Pentagon audit penalty.
Prosecutor’s base ask (body-count)

$7.31 quadrillion (95% CI: $3.89 quadrillion-$10.3 quadrillion)

$913,219 (95% CI: $487,690-$1.29 million)

 Backup argument. Minimum plus 300 million additional deaths from drugs that were never developed because the money went to weapons.
Triple damages (body-count)

$21.9 quadrillion (95% CI: $11.7 quadrillion-$31 quadrillion)

$2.74 million (95% CI: $1.46 million-$3.86 million)

 Backup argument. The base ask tripled, which is the standard corporate penalty for lying about public money13.
Maximum penalty under U.S. Supreme Court precedent

$73.1 quadrillion (95% CI: $38.9 quadrillion-$103 quadrillion)

$9.13 million (95% CI: $4.88 million-$12.9 million)

 Backup argument. The base ask plus a 9-to-1 punishment multiplier, which is the constitutional ceiling the Supreme Court set in State Farm v. Campbell (2003)14. This is the upper bound, not a typical award.
Lost income each year (ongoing) $2.55 quadrillion (95% CI: $840 trillion-$7.27 quadrillion) per year $319,261 (95% CI: $105,125-$908,295)/person/year This is how much poorer the world is every year because of the defendants’ choices. It keeps adding up until the damage is repaired. The lifetime rows above are this same number added up over time.
Settlement value of adopting the 1% Treaty now

$84.8 quadrillion (95% CI: $62.4 quadrillion-$97.3 quadrillion)

$10.6 million (95% CI: $7.78 million-$12.2 million)

 Not a historical bill. This is what humanity gains if the defendants agree to the remedy today.

The Aggregate Exposure

Count Charge Measure Period
One Direct killing through war, conflict, democide

310 million

 1900-present
Two Regulatory delay of safe-and-effective drugs

102 million

 1962-present
Three Spending the cure money on weapons Historical deaths from trials never funded, plus 10.7 billion future deaths preventable if the remedy is adopted now 1900 to present, plus forward

You cannot simply add these three numbers together. Counts One and Two are people already dead. Count Three has two parts: the historical cost of trials never funded (documented in Cost of War), and the future lives saveable if the defendants agree to the remedy now (modeled in 1% Treaty Impact).

The prosecution wishes to note that this is a conservative tally. It excludes:

  1. Sanctions deaths. Recent research estimates approximately 38 million deaths over 50 years from economic sanctions, not separately counted here to avoid double-counting with war and misallocation.
  2. COVID delay deaths. Estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to several million globally, attributable to delayed regulatory response during the pandemic.
  3. Drugs never developed. Count Two only counts drugs that were eventually approved but arrived late. It does not count drugs that were never made at all, because the approval process was so expensive that nobody tried. This exclusion alone may double or triple Count Two.
  4. Compound effects. Wars killed the scientists, doctors, and engineers (Count One) who would have prevented the deaths in Counts Two and Three. The counts feed into each other. Kill the researchers, lose the cures, lose the people the cures would have saved.

The total is therefore a floor, not a ceiling. The actual number is larger. The court should keep each category separate and not mash the value of lives, lost health, lost income, and punishment penalties into one suspiciously round monster number.

Witnesses for the Prosecution

The prosecution calls the defendants’ own experts.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (United States, 1961). Warned that the military-industrial complex would consume the civilization that built it. Was ignored.

Sam Peltzman (University of Chicago, 1973). Documented that the 1962 efficacy amendments killed more people than they saved. Was ignored.

R.J. Rummel (University of Hawaii, 1994). Tabulated democide at ~262 million across the 20th century. Was cited but not acted upon.

Alex Tabarrok (George Mason University, ongoing). Has written approximately one paper, blog post, or op-ed per week for two decades arguing the FDA kills more people than it saves. Was added to a list and ignored more efficiently.

Frank Lichtenberg (Columbia University, ongoing). Documented that pharmaceutical innovations save millions of life-years annually, allowing direct calculation of how many die from each year of regulatory delay. Was politely thanked.

The Government Accountability Office (United States, 2023 and seven prior occasions). Reported that the Department of Defense cannot account for $2.46 trillion of taxpayer money91. Was given an additional appropriation.

The defense’s anticipated rebuttal that no one could have foreseen these consequences is hereby foreclosed. The consequences were foreseen, in print, by named experts, in the defendants’ own libraries, with citations.

The Defense Cross-Examined

Defense Argument 1: “The numbers are speculative. You cannot prove counterfactual deaths.”

The defense will argue, with appropriate gravitas, that the prosecution cannot demonstrate how many would have died absent government action. Counts Two and Three depend on counterfactual reasoning. Therefore, the defense argues, the body count is rhetorical inflation.

Rebuttal: The defendants invented this methodology and use it daily. The Department of Defense’s annual budget request includes specific dollar amounts for wars deterred but not fought. The FDA’s institutional self-defense rests entirely on Thalidomide-style disasters prevented but not observed. The Department of Homeland Security claims credit for terrorist attacks foiled but not specified. The defendants accept counterfactual benefits as the foundation of their own performance metrics. They cannot accept the counterfactual when it adds dollars to their budget and reject it when it adds bodies to their ledger. The prosecution is using the defendants’ own accounting framework, applied symmetrically. If the methodology is invalid, the defendants’ entire institutional justification collapses with it. The defense is welcome to pick which side of that trade they prefer.

Defense Argument 2: “Necessity. We had to maintain military capacity for security.”

The defense will argue that the dead in Count One are the unavoidable cost of national security, and that any reduction in military spending would result in invasion, conquest, and a larger body count.

Rebuttal: This is a falsifiable empirical claim. The prosecution presents the defendants’ own peer countries:

  • Switzerland spends 0.7% of GDP on its military. Has not been invaded since 1815. GDP per capita: $93,000, exceeding the United States.
  • Costa Rica abolished its military entirely in 1948. Has not been invaded. Has higher life expectancy than the United States.
  • Iceland has no standing army. Population still alive.
  • Japan capped military spending at ~1% of GDP for 70 years. Was the world’s second-largest economy for most of that period.

The defense’s necessity argument predicts these countries should have been overrun decades ago. They were not. The argument is not merely weak; it is empirically falsified. The prosecution invites the defense to explain why these specific peer-reviewed counterexamples do not count, in a way that does not also invalidate every other piece of national-security analysis the defendants have ever produced.

Defense Argument 3: “Prisoner’s dilemma. We could not unilaterally disarm.”

The defense will argue that game theory makes coordinated reduction impossible. Each defendant is locked in a non-cooperative equilibrium where reducing capacity unilaterally invites attack from the others.

Rebuttal: The defendants have already coordinated reductions of weapons categories they considered desirable to keep. The Chemical Weapons Convention (1993, 193 countries). The Biological Weapons Convention (1975, 187 countries). The Mine Ban Treaty (1997, 164 countries). The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968, 191 countries). The Outer Space Treaty (1967, 115 countries). The mechanism for coordinated multilateral arms reduction was invented by the defendants and has been used successfully on at least five occasions, including for weapons the defendants liked using. The current treaty asks for a 1% reduction in the expenditure on weapons the defendants claim to find regrettable. The argument that coordination is impossible is contradicted by the defendants’ own filing cabinets.

Defense Argument 4: “The FDA prevents Thalidomides. Without efficacy testing, dangerous drugs would proliferate.”

The defense will invoke Thalidomide. They always invoke Thalidomide. It is the only specific case the defense reliably remembers.

Rebuttal: Thalidomide was identified by Phase I safety testing, which the prosecution is not proposing to abolish. The prosecution proposes to abolish the 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) Phase II/III efficacy testing that follows safety verification. The defense’s invocation of Thalidomide is therefore not merely irrelevant; it is evidence against the defense’s own position, because the safety mechanism that caught Thalidomide is the one mechanism the prosecution is preserving.

The prosecution further stipulates: name a single post-1962 Thalidomide. The defense will struggle. The handful of post-approval safety withdrawals (Vioxx, Rezulin, fen-phen) account for an estimated 55,000 to 100,000 deaths total across 60 years164. The efficacy lag killed 102 million. The ratio is 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) to one159.

The prosecution further notes: drugs available in Europe but blocked in the United States by the FDA’s Phase II/III delay include propranolol (delayed for cardiac arrhythmia, costing approximately 100,000 American lives158), beta blockers in general, and dozens of others. These are named drugs, with named diseases, and named patients who died in the United States while the same compounds were prescribed routinely in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The defense’s preferred system killed approximately 100,000 Americans because it was uncertain whether propranolol worked, while German doctors prescribed it for fifteen years with the answer.

The decentralized FDA model proposed in163,166 would generate real-time efficacy data orders of magnitude faster than the current system, with outcomes published rather than buried in proprietary trial reports. The defense’s preferred system optimizes for not knowing whether drugs work. Ours optimizes for knowing.

Defense Argument 5: “Democratic accountability provides remedy. Voters can correct misallocation.”

The defense will argue that the proper remedy for misallocation is electoral, not judicial. Voters can replace governments that misallocate. The system is self-correcting.

Rebuttal: Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern (Gilens and Page, 2014) checked whether what ordinary voters want has any effect on what the government actually does. The answer was approximately zero. Rich people and organized interest groups get what they want. Regular voters do not. The “accountability” the defense is describing is a voting booth that does not connect to anything. The defense is welcome to produce the study that proves otherwise. They will not, because the study does not exist. A vending machine that takes coins and dispenses nothing is not a vending machine. A remedy that does not function is not a remedy.

Defense Argument 6: “These are policy disagreements, not crimes. The prosecution is criminalizing politics.”

The defense will argue that public budgets, regulatory standards, and military allocations are quintessentially political questions, and that calling them criminal is rhetorical inflation that confuses honest disagreement with malice.

Rebuttal: The prosecution charged negligent homicide, not murder. We are not saying they wanted people dead. We are saying they should have known people would die, because they were told. Negligent homicide requires four things: (a) you had a responsibility; (b) you failed at it; (c) people died because you failed; (d) a reasonable person in your position would have seen it coming. All four:

  • Responsibility: The defendants are paid by the public to “promote the general welfare.” This is in the founding documents.
  • Failure: Spending 604 dollars on weapons for every one dollar on disease research is not “promoting the general welfare” by any definition.
  • Death: Counts One through Three.
  • They were told: Eisenhower (1961). Peltzman (1973). Tabarrok (ongoing for 20 years). Lichtenberg (multiple papers). Rummel (1994). The Government Accountability Office (seven audits). The risks were not merely foreseeable. They were foreseen, in print, by named experts, in the defendants’ own libraries, with citations.

When the body count exceeds the combined toll of the Black Death, both World Wars, and the 1918 pandemic, “policy disagreement” is no longer the right word. The defendants voted on the slave trade. The vote did not make the trade ethical. The defendants voted on Apartheid. The vote did not make Apartheid ethical. Voting on a thing does not turn the thing into not-a-crime. It just spreads the blame across enough hands that no single hand can be held.

Defense Argument 7: “Sovereign immunity165. You cannot bring this case in any court that exists.”

The defense will argue that existing sovereign courts decline the indictment because governments cannot be sued without their own consent. The Federal Tort Claims Act explicitly excludes military activities and discretionary policy choices, which is the entire prosecution’s case. The defendants will call this jurisdiction.

Rebuttal: Yes, in any sovereign court. The Court of Humanity does not recognize sovereign immunity as a defense. The defendants’ immunity doctrines are admitted as evidence of the obstruction count.

The defendants wrote the laws that immunize the defendants from prosecution for the specific conduct alleged. They did not do this accidentally. They did this because they understood the conduct was indictable under any neutral standard, and chose to engineer the standard rather than the conduct. This is itself the most damning piece of evidence in the case. The defendants’ first response to discovering the body count was to make the body count un-litigable.

The prosecution’s response is the Court of Humanity. It gets its authority from people, not governments. Verdicts are rendered by verified humans. Judgments are enforced not by force but by pricing: if the world’s financial markets agree the defendants owe the bill, the defendants owe the bill. The defendants cannot withdraw consent that was never theirs to give. The bill, calculated from the body count using standard government-approved life valuations, is far more than any government can pay. They cannot pay the full amount. They can, however, settle. The 1% Treaty161 is the settlement offer.

This case is therefore brought in the only court that did not sign the defendants’ waiver: the court of humanity itself. The remedy is awarded by humans noticing that the shield exists, refusing to respect it, and pricing the defendants accordingly.

The defense’s procedural argument is not a defense here. It is the reason for Article VI of the proposed remedy, which routes enforcement through bondholder lawsuits instead of citizen lawsuits. The one category of plaintiff the defendants cannot ignore: rich people with lawyers on retainer.

Defense Argument 8: “These deaths were the price of civilization. Without governments, the toll would be worse.”

The defense will fall back on a Hobbesian argument. State capacity prevents anarchy. Anarchy kills more than government. Therefore the body count is the lower of two evils.

Rebuttal: The prosecution accepts the premise and rejects the conclusion. State capacity that prevents anarchy is valuable. State capacity that allocates 604-to-1 toward killing rather than curing is not “preventing anarchy.” It is the anarchy, dressed in a uniform.

The relevant counterfactual is not “no government.” It is “differently allocated government.” The prosecution does not propose abolishing the state. The prosecution proposes that the state spend 1% less on the capacity to murder its own employers and 1% more on the capacity to keep them alive. The defense’s response to this proposal cannot be “without us, things would be worse,” because we are not proposing the absence of the defendants. We are proposing the presence of slightly less destructive defendants.

The prosecution observes that no defendant has yet articulated a coherent objection to the actual proposal. The defendants object instead to a proposal not made.

The Court’s Question

The prosecution rests.

The court is asked to consider not whether the defendants are guilty (the body count is conceded; only the framing is in dispute) but what an appropriate remedy looks like.

The prosecution does not seek punishment. The defendants are too large to imprison and too entrenched to dissolve. The prosecution seeks structural relief: a 1% reallocation of military expenditure to clinical trials, perpetuated by a class of bondholders whose financial interests align with the treaty’s continuation. See161,167 for the mechanism.

This remedy is unusual in that it does not penalize the defendants. It pays them. It pays the legislators who vote for it. It pays the bondholders who fund it. It pays the patients who participate in the trials it enables. Every party to the case is materially better off after the remedy than before.

The prosecution submits that this is the only category of remedy ever observed to work on humans, which is why we are using it. The species has spent 10,000 years trying remedies that require humans to be better than they are. None of these remedies have worked, because the species was the same species before and after. We are proposing the first remedy that works on the species you actually have.

The Court’s Question to the Reader

The reader is reminded that they are also the jury. The reader is also the prosecution. The reader is, in a meaningful sense, also the victim. The defendants have arranged the procedural rules such that the jury must vote unanimously for relief or none of the parties receives any.

The vote takes 30 seconds. It is located at warondisease.org. At the global average wage, the opportunity cost of forwarding this paper to one additional juror is approximately $0.06 (95% CI: $0.059-$0.061). The expected lifetime benefit of the treaty passing, distributed per juror, is approximately $3.48 million (95% CI: $1.05 million-$9.82 million). The ratio of expected benefit to opportunity cost is 58.1Mx (95% CI: 17.2Mx-167.4Mx) to one.

For the rational juror, refusing to vote is more expensive than voting. The defendants have arranged the procedure such that the jury will mostly refuse anyway, because the procedure is also the dysfunction.