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The People of Earth v. Their Governments

An Indictment for Negligent Mass Homicide, on Three Counts

Author
Affiliation

Mike P. Sinn

Institute for Accelerated Medicine

Abstract

Existing literatures count deaths from government failure one silo at a time. Historians count war deaths. Health economists count efficacy-lag deaths. Global health researchers count disease deaths. No prior paper aggregates them. This paper does. We charge the governments of Earth with three categories of negligent homicide spanning 1900 to the present and projecting forward over the disease eradication window: (1) Direct killing through war, conflict, and democide (310 million deaths since 1900); (2) Regulatory delay of safe and effective treatments under the 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) efficacy lag mandated since 1962 (102 million deaths in existing-drug delay alone); and (3) Misallocation of resources away from disease treatment, projected to result in 10.7 billion avoidable deaths over the disease eradication window. The aggregate body count is approximately 11.1 billion. Per dollar spent, the defendants killed 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) times more people through Type II regulatory errors than they prevented through Type I. The misallocation count is the largest by an order of magnitude. The defendants had the money. They spent it elsewhere. We propose a 1% reallocation of military expenditure as the only remedy commensurate with the offense.

Keywords

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

Preamble

I, Wishonia, having observed your planet for the past 80 years and your governments for somewhat longer than that, hereby submit the following indictment to the court of common sense.

The defendants are the governments of Earth, collectively. The charges are three counts of negligent mass homicide. The aggravating factor is that the defendants pay their own prosecutors, judges, and juries, then write their own laws about whether anything they do can be called a crime. We will be ignoring this last point because the alternative is to let approximately 11 billion humans die quietly while we file paperwork.

The It’s not in

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 famines43. This figure synthesizes Rummel’s democide accounting (~264 million), battle deaths (~39 million), and collateral civilian deaths (~30 million), with overlap adjustments148.

Of these dead, approximately 102 million were children under 1843. 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 teachers43. 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 civilization66. They spend $2.72 trillion per year57 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 medicines149. 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 humans150.

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 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 save150.

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 1973149. 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, with the foreseeable result of approximately 10.7 billion avoidable disease deaths over the disease eradication window.

The Evidence

Disease kills approximately 104 humans per minute. The defendants spend 604 dollars on the capacity for orphan manufacturing 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 annually151. The Department of Defense has, by its own admission, “misplaced” $2.46 trillion across seven consecutive failed audits83. 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 reduction152. 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)151,153.

The cumulative number of preventable deaths over that 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 suffering151.

These are not metaphors. These refer to specific future humans with specific future plans for next Tuesday.

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.

This is what your legal system calls depraved indifference: a state of mind in which the defendant knows the consequences of their action, knows the alternative was available, and proceeds anyway. The prosecution submits that there is no other defensible characterization of a budget that allocates 604-to-1 in favor of murder over medicine while 150 thousand citizens die per day of the things the medicine would have cured.

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 149
J FDA Beta blockers (general class) Multi-year delays vs. EU Tens of thousands 150
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 150
L FDA Vioxx, Rezulin, fen-phen post-approval safety failures N/A 55,000–100,000 cumulative across 60 years 154
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 Cumulative spending since the Federal Reserve era (1913)

$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

The prosecution submits the following taxonomy of formal criminal categories applicable to the defendants’ conduct. The prosecution does not assert that all categories apply to all defendants in all jurisdictions. The prosecution asserts that at least one category applies to each defendant for each count.

Charges Arising from Count One (Direct Killing)

  1. Murder, first-degree. Premeditated and authorized killing in offensive operations not justified by imminent threat. (E.g., Exhibits G, H.)
  2. Mass murder. Killing of large groups under organizational direction. (E.g., Exhibits A, B.)
  3. Genocide. Killing with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. (E.g., Exhibits B, E, F.) Codified under the Genocide Convention (1948), to which most defendants are signatories.
  4. Crimes against humanity. Widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population. (E.g., Exhibits B, C, D, E, F.) Codified under the Rome Statute.
  5. War crimes. Violations of the laws and customs of war, including disproportionate civilian targeting. (E.g., Exhibits B, G, H.) Codified under the Geneva Conventions, to which all defendants are signatories.
  6. Conspiracy to commit any of the above. Coordinated action by multiple defendants in furtherance of any Count One charge. (Applicable to most exhibits.)

Charges Arising from Count Two (Regulatory Delay)

  1. Negligent homicide. Causing death by failure to exercise reasonable care, with foreseeability of harm. The classical fit for the 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) efficacy lag, where the harm was foreseen by named experts in print and the defendants proceeded anyway.
  2. Manslaughter via gross criminal negligence. Death caused by conduct so reckless it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care a reasonable person would observe. Stronger charge, applicable when the defense’s conduct continued after the body count was published.
  3. Depraved-indifference homicide (also “depraved-heart murder” in some jurisdictions). Killing through conduct demonstrating extreme indifference to human life. Distinguished from negligent homicide by the severity of indifference. The maintenance of an efficacy regime that kills 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) times more people than it saves, with the ratio publicly known and unaddressed for 50+ years, satisfies this standard.
  4. Reckless endangerment. Conduct creating substantial risk of death to others. Applicable as a lesser-included offense for officials below the policymaker level.

Charges Arising from Count Three (Misallocation)

  1. Negligent homicide via deprivation. Causing death by withholding resources reasonably required to prevent it, when those resources were available. Doctrinal analogues exist in failure-to-rescue cases involving fiduciaries (parents, custodians, captains of vessels).
  2. Breach of fiduciary duty resulting in death. The defendants accepted public funds for the explicit purpose of “promoting the general welfare.” Allocating those funds to weaponry while citizens died of curable diseases is a breach of the underlying fiduciary obligation. Where the breach causes death, the breach itself becomes criminal.
  3. Misappropriation of public funds. Specifically applicable to Exhibit P (Pentagon’s $2.46 trillion). Funds were appropriated, are unaccounted for, and seven consecutive audits have failed to locate them. In any jurisdiction other than the defendants’ own, this would have produced criminal indictments.
  4. Depraved-indifference homicide. Same standard as Charge 9, applied to the budgetary axis rather than the regulatory axis.

Charges Arising from the Combined Conduct

  1. Conspiracy. Multiple defendants coordinated their conduct via treaties, alliances, defense pacts, and harmonized regulatory standards. Where the coordinated conduct caused death, the coordination itself is criminal.
  2. Aiding and abetting. Defendants provided material support (weapons sales, intelligence sharing, regulatory copy-pasting) to other defendants engaged in the underlying offenses.
  3. Obstruction of justice. The defendants enacted sovereign-immunity statutes, discretionary-function exceptions, and combatant-activities exceptions specifically to prevent prosecution of the conduct at issue. Drafting and enacting laws that immunize one’s own ongoing criminal conduct is itself an obstruction offense in any system that does not allow the obstructor to also serve as the legislature. The defendants do.
  4. Continuing offense. The conduct described herein is not historical. It is occurring during the time required to read this paper. Each minute of continuation extends the body count by approximately 104 additional victims of Count Three alone.

Direct Versus Counterfactual Deaths

The prosecution distinguishes between two categories of homicide for clarity.

Direct deaths (Count One) are deaths the defendants caused by killing the victim with a weapon. The body is in the morgue because the defendant put it there.

Counterfactual deaths (Counts Two and Three) are deaths the defendants caused by withholding the means by which the victim could have remained alive. The body is in the morgue because the defendant declined to put it elsewhere. These are not metaphysical deaths. They are real corpses, in real graves, with real grieving relatives. The defendants’ contribution is the withholding, not the disease itself.

The defense will argue that counterfactual deaths are categorically different from direct deaths. 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.

In legal doctrine, the distinction tracks commission versus omission. Common-law systems generally treat omission as criminal only where there is a duty to act. The defendants accept salaries, write founding documents, and swear oaths to act. The duty is established. The omission is established. The deaths are established. The remaining elements are present.

The Aggregate Body Count

Count Charge Body Count 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 Misallocation away from disease treatment

10.7 billion

 Forward-looking, eradication window
Aggregate ~11.1 billion

For every person the defendants killed directly through war, they will kill approximately 30 more through the combination of regulatory delay and misallocation. The war deaths are the headline. The other counts are the iceberg.

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. The historical efficacy-lag count assumes drugs that were eventually developed and approved. It excludes drugs that were never developed because the regulatory cost made them economically unviable. This exclusion alone may double or triple Count Two.
  4. Compound effects. Wars destroyed scientists, doctors, and engineers (Count One) who would have prevented deaths in Counts Two and Three. The counts are sequential, not summative; the actual interaction is multiplicative.

The 11.1 billion figure is therefore a floor, not a ceiling.

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 money83. 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

The prosecution has retained imaginary defense counsel to make the strongest possible case for the defendants. The defense’s arguments are presented in their best form. They are then refuted using the defendants’ own records.

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 years154. The efficacy lag killed 102 million. The ratio is 3,068 (95% CI: 2,878-3,125) to one150.

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 lives149), beta blockers in general, and dozens of others. These are not hypothetical. 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 in153,155 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: The Princeton-Northwestern study by Gilens and Page (2014) found a correlation of approximately zero between the policy preferences of the median U.S. voter and the policy outcomes that actually occur. Wealthy elites and organized interest groups have meaningful influence. The median voter does not. The “accountability” the defense invokes is a procedural simulation of accountability, not the substance of it. The defense is welcome to produce the regression that contradicts Gilens-Page. They will not, because the regression does not exist. The defense’s “remedy” is a vending machine that takes coins and dispenses nothing. The prosecution submits that 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. Negligent homicide does not require malice or intent. It requires four elements: (a) the defendant owed a duty of care; (b) the defendant breached that duty; (c) the breach caused death; (d) a reasonable person in the defendant’s position would have known of the risk. All four are satisfied:

  • Duty of care: The defendants accept salaries from the citizenry for the explicit purpose of “promoting the general welfare.” This is not in dispute. It is in the founding documents.
  • Breach: 604-to-1 allocation toward killing capacity over disease research is not “promoting the general welfare” by any operational definition.
  • Causation: Mathematically demonstrated in Counts One through Three.
  • Foreseeability: Eisenhower (1961). Peltzman (1973). Tabarrok (ongoing for 20 years). Lichtenberg (multiple peer-reviewed papers). Rummel (1994). The Government Accountability Office (seven separate audits). The risks were not merely foreseeable. They were foreseen, in print, by named experts, repeatedly, in the defendants’ own libraries, with citations.

The defense’s framing of this as “honest disagreement” requires a redefinition of “honest” so broad it loses operational meaning. 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 grammatical category. The prosecution submits that 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 transmute the thing into not-a-crime. It merely launders the responsibility across enough hands that no individual hand can be held.

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

The defense will argue that the entire indictment is procedurally void, because under sovereign-immunity doctrine, 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 court has no jurisdiction.

Rebuttal: This is the strongest defense argument. The prosecution concedes its truth and submits that the defendants’ own concession converts every other defense into nonsense.

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, a decentralized adjudication mechanism that derives jurisdiction from human consent rather than sovereign consent, with verdicts rendered by the verified human population voting per capita and judgments enforced not by coercion but by capital-markets pricing of the resulting liability. The defendants cannot withdraw consent that was never theirs to give. Applying standard regulatory life valuations to the body counts in this paper yields approximately $104 quadrillion in unliquidated wrongful-death exposure across the defendant class. The defendants cannot pay this judgment. They can, however, settle. The 1% Treaty151 is the settlement vehicle.

The prosecution therefore brings this case in the only court that retains jurisdiction: the court of public attention. The remedy is not awarded by a judge. It is awarded by 8 billion humans noticing that the procedural shield exists. The shield falls when the public stops respecting it, and the public stops respecting it when someone counts the bodies in one place. Which is what this paper does.

The defense’s procedural argument is the case’s procedural problem, and the case’s procedural problem is the reason for Article VI of the proposed remedy, which routes enforcement through bondholder lawsuits rather than citizen lawsuits, taking advantage of the one category of plaintiff the defendants cannot ignore: rich people with retainer agreements.

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. See151,156 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.

The prosecution rests, again. The verdict is yours.

Methodological Note

The figures in this paper are drawn from the same parameter model used throughout the How to End War and Disease corpus. Each named figure links to its derivation, source citation, and sensitivity analysis in the Parameters and Calculations appendix. All formulas are reproducible. All citations are verifiable. The aggregate body count is built from non-overlapping categories: Count One uses Rummel’s democide methodology plus battle and collateral civilian deaths net of overlap; Count Two uses Lichtenberg’s pharmaceutical-impact framework applied to the 8.2 years (95% CI: 4.85 years-11.5 years) efficacy lag; Count Three uses the 1% Treaty Impact151 projection model.

This is a forensic paper, not a polemic. The voice is alien because the prosecution is alien. The math is human because the dead are human.

This paper is dedicated to the 104 humans who died of preventable causes during the time it took to read it.