RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-whos-power-grab

The response to Covid was the greatest mistake in the history of the public-health profession, but the officials responsible for it are determined to do even worse. With the support of the Biden administration, the World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking unprecedented powers to impose its policies on the United States and the rest of the world during the next pandemic.

It was bad enough that America and other countries voluntarily followed WHO bureaucrats’ disastrous pandemic advice instead of heeding the scientists who had presciently warned, long before 2020, that lockdowns, school closures, and mandates for masks and vaccines would be futile, destructive, and unethical. It was bad enough that U.S. officials and the corporate media parroted the WHO’s false claims and ludicrous praise of China’s response. But now the WHO wants new authority to make its bureaucrats’ whims mandatory—and to censor those who disagree with their version of “the science.” 

The WHO hopes to begin this power grab in May at its annual assembly in Geneva, where members will vote on proposed changes in international health regulations and a new treaty governing pandemics. Pamela Hamamoto, the State Department official representing the U.S. in negotiations, has already declared that America is committed to signing a pandemic treaty that will “build a stronger global health architecture,” which is precisely what we don’t need. 

If we learned anything from the pandemic, it was the folly of entrusting narrow-minded public-health officials with wide-ranging powers. The countries that fared best, like Sweden, were the ones that ignored the advice of the WHO, and the U.S. states that fared best, like Florida, were the ones that defied the White House Coronavirus Task Force and the Centers for Disease Control. This wasn’t a new lesson. Previous research had shown that giving national leaders new powers to respond to a natural disaster typically leads to more fatalities and economic damage.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-saying-no-to-nihs-racial-preferences-medical-research-7f205c2c?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Williams is a physician, a professor of cardiovascular sciences at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, and a visiting fellow at Do No Harm.

Do I deserve to jump the line? If I say yes, I may play a leading role in ending the scourge of atherosclerosis—also known as hardening of the arteries. If I play fair, I may lose the opportunity to save people around the world from heart attacks and strokes. I’m angry at the National Institutes of Health for putting me in this position. I’m even angrier it has done so in the name of racial equity.

My quandary comes down to whether I should “check the box” on an upcoming NIH grant application attesting to my recent African heritage. Since at least 2015, the NIH has asserted its belief in the intrinsic superiority of racially diverse research teams, all but stating that such diversity influences funding decisions. My family’s origins qualify me under the federal definition of African-American. Yet I feel it’s immoral and narcissistic to use race to gain an advantage over other applicants. All that should matter is the merit of my application and the body of my work, which is generally accepted as foundational in atherosclerosis research.

I discovered my African heritage as an adult, though I had wondered about it since elementary school. My father, Ferd Elton Williams, a professor of physics at the University of Delaware, was a Renaissance man who talked with his children about everything—except his background. His skin was dark and his black hair tightly curled, but he fooled everyone by saying that he was a small part American Indian. He hid his birth family even from our mother, revealing only after a decade of marriage and four children together that he had two siblings.

My siblings and I slowly gleaned additional information—that two of his four grandparents were members of an African Methodist Episcopal church, for instance—but the full truth long eluded us. I stumbled on it after taking a genetic test in 2011: Through my father, I am part Bantu, a major ethnolinguistic grouping in West, Central and Southern Africa.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/the_new_racism_is_poisoning_america.html

The idea that past racism can be undone with more racism is ludicrous.  Affirmative action, established in the 1960s, emphasized equality of opportunity.  But it has transmogrified — through the politics of DEI, sexual orientation, and gender identity — into a new form of racism emphasizing equality of outcome.

Unconstitutional quotas deny college admissions and government jobs to whites and non-black, non-Latino, non-Native groups.  The worst is the recent invasion of healthcare by DEI-driven policies.  Belonging to a DEI-privileged group outweighs need.  White patients may have to wait longer than blacks or Hispanics for cardiac care or kidney transplants.  All in the name of “health equity” and righting past wrongs done to those groups.

This column will examine four recent lawsuits—among the many—against such policies. It will also show how a retribution-focused movement to embed racial preferences in medical treatment has gained traction over the last few years in the healthcare industry.

The first case is from Montana, where in 1991, the 52nd legislature enacted and codified House Bill 424 (originally House Joint Resolution 28) as Montana § 2-15-108, MCA. The law aimed to “take positive action to attain gender balance and proportional representation of minorities” in state boards, commissions, committees, and councils. Bias was alleged to cause the imbalance.

In September 2023, two vacancies opened for the 12-member Board of Medical Examiners, but the governor has been unable to make appointments since the appointments must adhere to DEI.  Do No Harm, an organization representing physicians and healthcare workers countering DEI in medicine, has filed a suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana (Helena Division), saying Montana § 2-15-108 violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/fda_takes_down_its_propaganda_demonizing_ivermectin_as_a_treatment_for_covid.html

We will never know how many Covid sufferers died because they shunned treatment with ivermectin, but at least the FDA has stopped spreading the lie (aka, disinformation) that the medicine is for animals, not humans.

(source: FDA tweet via American Greatness)

This retreat is taking place because:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reportedly settled a lawsuit brought by three doctors who who accused the health regulator of interfering with their ability to practice medicine and prescribe Ivermectin to treat COVID.

But the FDA is not conceding that ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for Covid. To do so would invalidate the emergency use authorization for the mRNA drug incorrectly called a vaccine.  Bypassing the normal tests for new drugs with an emergency use authorization requires that there be no effective alternative therapy.

Via The Epoch Times:

Within 21 days, the FDA will remove another page titled, “why you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19,” according to the settlement announcement, which was filed with federal court in southern Texas.

The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals,” the page currently states. It also says that data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19, despite how some studies it cites show ivermectin is effective against the illness.

The FDA in the settlement is also agreeing to delete multiple social media posts that came out strongly against ivermectin, including one that stated: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

In exchange, doctors who sued the agency are dismissing their claims, the filing states. (snip)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/state_of_american_health_care.html

Once the envy of the world, American medical care continues to be infected with Leftist woke ideology with abysmal and terrifying outcomes.

Under the term “health equity” the only parameter that matters appears to be a person’s melanin level, not his need for timely medical treatment.

Consequently:

More than 10 million nonblack Americans with chronic kidney disease may have seen their treatments or transplants delayed because of policy changes enacted after 2020.  Some of those patients now face greater risk of death because national transplant organizations have embraced racial activism.

Patients of all races deserve a formula that accurately estimates their individual kidney function, not one that favors one racial group at the expense of others. 

Then there is the Advil Pain Equity Project to end “systemic pain racism.”  It should be noted that Advil is owned by Pfizer. In fact, as explained in FortuneWell,

According to a study, three out of four Black people believe there is bias in how their pain is diagnosed. Now Advil, a popular pain relief brand, is aiming to address inequity in pain diagnosis and treatment with the Advil Pain Equity Project.

As part of the multiyear project, Advil is awarding grants to the Morehouse School of Medicine and BLKHLTH, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, to support the development of patient resources and a course for medical school students to address pain equity both in and outside of medical facilities.

Dare one ponder the possibility that this is merely “a plan to sell $50 million more in pills to Black people – disguised as a fight to end ‘pain racism?’”

On the other hand, keynote speaker at the 2023 Social Justice Awards sponsored by Institutional Diversity & Equity (ID&E), “author, physician, and thought leader Dr. Uche Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, is committed to dismantling racism in health care and closing the gap in racial health inequities.” 

Consequently, in 2024, is the American patient caught between the greed of pharmaceutical companies and the vise of leftwing social justice activists?  And this does not even begin to analyze the spiraling health care costs that have long confounded Americans.

Moreover, faith in American medicine has certainly been tarnished by the treatment afforded those health care workers who dared to question the federal government’s edicts concerning the mRNA Covid-19 “vaccines.” 

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo declared that “COVID-19 vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings” and called for a complete halt of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.  Ladapo issued this warning “based on overwhelming evidence that the COVID-19 shots that Pfizer and Moderna assured us were ‘safe’ are contaminated with plasmid DNA.” 

Consider the fact that the government continues to purposefully censor truthful information. In fact, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, the psychiatrist who challenged the University of California Irvine Vaccine Mandates was fired for this.  It has led to what is being called the most important free speech case in a generation known as Missouri v. Biden (Murthy v. Missouri).

In 2023 Kheriaty asserted that “[a]lthough this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/19/long-tyranny-a-greater-threat-than-long-covid/

The policy response to the coronavirus outbreak was as deadly as the disease.

Not to downplay the damage done by COVID, but we’re still dealing with a far worse disease and will be for some time. It has no medical name but if it did, we’d call it the tyrannococcus.

From the top we acknowledge that the novel coronavirus killed millions around the world. This is not a statistic but a procession of tragedies, and they happened despite the policy responses from those who claimed to be our guardians. Now, four years later, the experts are telling us to treat the disease similar to the way we treat the flu. The much-feared “long COVID appears to manifest as a post-viral syndrome indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses,” says Medical Xpress.

Yet the damage wrought by governments, spread by the tyrannococcus machine, will continue well beyond 2024. “We will be dealing with the harm done for decades,” says Martin Kulldorf, the biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist who was fired from his Harvard faculty position because he objected to COVID vaccine mandates.

Rather than respond in any sort of reasonable way, elected and unelected officials acted as tyrants, closing businesses, restricting our freedom to move about, limiting the number of people who could gather in private homes, requiring mask use and mandating vaccinations. “There was very little oversight or limitation on the powers conferred to” the agencies that made those decisions, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They simply gave themselves power they should have never wielded.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lessons-learned-four-years-later-596a9fa9?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Four years ago this week Vice President Mike Pence announced the White House’s “15 days to slow the spread” campaign. What followed was the unprecedented use of lockdowns, school closings and other sweeping measures to mitigate Covid-19. Four years later, we know what many of us suspected then: None of those policies were successful, and many were gravely damaging.

The Covid health benefits of mandatory lockdowns were tiny. Lockdowns in the U.S. prevented between 4,000 and 16,000 Covid deaths. In an average year 37,000 Americans die from the flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lockdowns also failed to reduce infections more than a trivial amount, in part because people voluntarily alter their behavior when a bad bug is in the air. Coercive government policies generated few benefits—and massive costs.

Public-health agencies exacerbated the damage by failing to keep their heads and follow standard pandemic-management protocols. Before 2020, it was recognized that communities respond best to pandemics when government measures are only minimally disruptive. During Covid, however, officials junked that practice by green-lighting restrictive practices and intentionally stoking fear. That response overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of those caused by the virus.

Those harms are captured, in part, in excess deaths—the number beyond what would have been expected without a pandemic. Non-Covid excess deaths from lockdowns, the shutdown of non-Covid medical care, and societal panic are estimated at nearly 100,000 between April 2020 and at least the end of 2021. The number of lockdown and societal-disruption deaths since 2020 is likely around 400,000, as much as 100 times the number of Covid deaths the lockdowns prevented.

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FEquity-Over-Accuracy-in-Kidney-Care.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

“Health equity” could be claiming new victims. More than 10 million nonblack Americans with chronic kidney disease may have seen their treatments or transplants delayed because of policy changes enacted after 2020’s “racial reckoning.” Some of those patients now face greater risk of death because national transplant organizations have embraced racial activism.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a quasi-governmental nonprofit that runs American transplant centers, enacted a significant policy change. The network compiles the national waitlist for kidney transplants and consults a formula that helps determine which candidates it will prioritize. Before 2020, the network used a formula that measured serum creatinine concentrations to assess a patient’s estimated glomerular filtration rate—the best-known measure of whether a patient has chronic kidney disease. Since black patients typically have higher serum creatinine concentrations than nonblacks with the same kidney function, the formula had applied an adjustment for black patients to ensure a more precise GFR estimate.

Activists in the wake of George Floyd’s death claimed that the formula’s adjustment was racist. This prompted the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology to create a task force to “reassess inclusion of race in the estimation of glomerular filtration rate.” The task force decided to nix the racial adjustment and set to work choosing a new formula that would not take race into account, which it released in 2021.

In December 2022, the board of UNOS’s transplant system issued a directive requiring all transplant centers to apply retroactively the new formula to determine black patients’ spots on the national waitlist. Last December, the network announced the results of its application of the new formula. Removing the racial adjustments had moved the waitlist’s more than 6,100 black patients up by an average of 1.7 years, with just over 500 receiving a transplant. Of course, this meant that some nonblack patients were correspondingly pushed back in line.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-prophets-da-henderson?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Welcome back to The Prophets, our new Saturday series about fascinating people from the past who predicted our current moment and make our world more understandable today.

Last week, we showed how civil rights hero Bayard Rustin predicted the rise of identity politics and affirmative action—and how they would divide us today. Today, Joe Nocera spotlights D.A. Henderson, the epidemiologist who warned that pandemic lockdowns won’t stop a disease, but could instead lead to a public health disaster. Bari Weiss

“In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism—and was quickly forgotten.

As it turns out, that paper, titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” was Henderson’s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country—indeed, our world—could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid. 

This month marks the four-year anniversary of lockdowns on a global scale. And though the pandemic has passed, its consequences live on. The lockdowns embraced by the U.S. public-health establishment meant that millions of young people had their education and social development disrupted, or left school for good. Mental health problems rose substantially. So did incidents of domestic violence and overdose deaths.

It didn’t have to be that way. 

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fdrug-price-controls.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

In his State of the Union address, President Biden touted the drug-price controls in his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Though the price controls have yet to take effect, Biden proposed expanding these measures, which threaten to destroy pharmaceutical innovation and harm the nation’s health.

The IRA’s drug-price controls are a solution in search of a problem. Two years ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that per capita prescription-drug spending in real terms had fallen as a percentage of total spending on health care since the mid-2000s. Retail prescription drug prices have gone up at a slower rate than have hospital prices and health-care prices generally. According to researchers at the health-care data group IQVIA, U.S. drug spending is lower as a percentage of national health expenditures than the average drug-spending share across 11 developed countries.

While price-control proponents focus on drugs’ high list prices, the average net price of a prescription—the amount that users actually paid after subtracting manufacturers’ discounts and rebates—has been falling, according to CBO. This reflects the increased use of generic drugs, which cost far less than name-brand pharmaceuticals and now account for nine out of ten prescriptions. In fact, U.S. patients use more generics and pay less for them (16 percent less, on average) than do patients in other developed countries.