RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hardly-anyone-is-buying-bidens-bivalent-boosters-vaccines-public-health-trust-dr-fauci-covid-shot-elderly-seniors-11670175190?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Marketing 101: Don’t puff up your product. When it doesn’t live up to the hype, the public won’t trust what you’re selling the next time around. That’s the problem the Biden administration faces as it tries to peddle “bivalent” booster shots for Covid-19.

Vaccines have served a useful purpose by reducing severe illness among the vulnerable and seniors. But many Americans who rolled up their sleeves for the original two-doses and even third ones were led to believe the vaccines would prevent them from getting sick. Many nevertheless fell ill. Some were knocked out for days with flulike symptoms—exactly what they were trying to avoid by getting vaccinated and boosted. Can you blame them for not buying the administration’s pitch that the new and supposedly improved bivalent boosters will “protect” them and their families?

The Health and Human Services Department has been running ads during the World Cup: “As we know, immunity doesn’t last forever. Updated vaccines offer additional protection against Omicron. Don’t miss the game.” Such a misleading statement might get a vaccine maker sued for deceptive advertising.

Omicron has been supplanted by numerous distant relatives. The bivalent vaccines target the original Wuhan strain as well as BA.4 and BA.5 variants—grandchildren of Omicron. Those variants predominated when the Food and Drug Administration directed vaccine makers to produce the bivalent boosters this summer, but they now make up less than 15% of viruses sequenced.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/dei-in-the-er/

Rising wokeness in medical schools is a problem for patients everywhere.  

Contrary to popular belief, the United States is no longer home to the best education system in the world. According to the World Top 20 Project, an international organization that gathers educational data from more than 200 countries, the U.S. lags well behind countries like Finland, Denmark, and South Korea. From elementary schools to colleges and universities, the U.S. education system is in crisis. Academic standards have drastically slipped, with a woke madness gripping classrooms across the country. And no school is immune—not even the most prestigious medical schools in America. 

In September, Stanley Goldfarb, a UPenn medical school professor, warned Americans that “anti-racism” policies have lowered admission and teaching standards, corrupting the world of medicine. Instead of focusing on recruiting the “best and brightest,” Goldfarb argued that an increasing number of medical schools are more interested in picking students based on their skin color. The blame for these recent shifts should be laid at the feet of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.  

For the uninitiated, DEI focuses on building diverse workplaces and classrooms, on creating environments that are equitable and inclusive. To many, this sounds like progress. But on closer inspection, DEI is dangerous and unmeritocratic. Accidents of birth like race, sex, and ethnicity are the only things that matter in a world where DEI reigns supreme. As Goldfarb shows, these initiatives punish white and Asian applicants. Contrary to the ideology that underlies DEI, individual academic achievement and the ability to finance are the only things that should matter when applying for medical school. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/02/the-science-deniers-at-the-new-england-journal-of-medicine/

The New England Journal of Medicine has published an article called “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy.” It is the latest example of using denialism to denigrate any opinion contrary to that of the latest set of experts to claim sovereignty over a controversial subject. The technique is to stifle debate and force discussion from the subject to defense of an unrelated issue. This is what the NEJM paper does to perfection.

The authors place the management of transgender and transgender expansive (TGE) people as an issue between concerned scientists on the one hand and ignorant science deniers on the other. In their view everything on the subject is settled; they have the prescription for the management of TGE, and there is no room for discussion or debate. The laws passed in several states to protect children are, in their view, malicious examples of science denial which should be reversed without any further discussion.

Of course, the paper itself is an example of science denial as there is little, if any, science in it. There is no discussion of which people are included in the TGE category. The authors include no diagnostic criteria for this disease. They likely would deny that it is a disease, despite its treatment with potent drugs and surgery. They offer no discussion as to why TGE, which until recently was an extremely rare problem, has ballooned into ubiquity. 

They also use past attitudes about homosexuality to justify what they think is appropriate management of TGE. In their view, falsehoods that “contain inflammatory statements that gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy alone thereby evoking the same dangerous stereotyping that once pathologized homosexuality” apply to gender dysphoria. Nobody today wants to treat homosexuality with psychotherapy, drugs, or surgery. If the authors think that gender dysphoria should be treated with these three modalities, it is they who are pathologizing TGE. These treatments are being dispensed by physicians at medical centers. Have the doctors and hospitals gone into the management of non-diseases? Non-diseases that will require lifetime follow-up. Who are the science deniers?

https://www.foxnews.com/media/critical-race-theory-related-ideas-found-mandatory-programs-58-top-100-us-medical-schools-report

CriticalRace.org, which monitors critical race theory (CRT) curricula and training in higher education, has expanded its Medical School Database and found that 58 of the nation’s top 100 medical schools have some form of mandatory student training or coursework related to the polarizing idea that racism is systemic in America’s institutions. 

“Medical School education is in crisis, with ‘social justice’ and race-focused activism being imposed on students, faculty, and staff,” William Jacobson told Fox News Digital. 

Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and founder of the Legal Insurrection website, founded CriticalRace.org’s sprawling database that has also examined elite K-12 private schools, 500 of America’s top undergraduate programs and military service academies.

Earlier this year, the group uncovered that 23 of the 25 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory CRT-related student training or coursework. CriticalRace.org expanded the study and found that 46 of the top 100 medical schools have offered materials by authors Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi, whose books explicitly call for discrimination, according to Jacobson. 

“Approaching the doctor-patient relationship through a Critical Race lens is being implemented under the umbrella of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ and other euphemisms, such as Ibram Kendi’s ‘anti-racism’ approach. ‘White privilege’ and similar concepts, pushed by Robin DeAngelo and others, are being infused into the medical school culture,” he said. 

The schools examined were based on the rankings by U.S. News’ rankings of America’s top medical schools. The study also found that 38 of the top 100 medical schools have some sort of mandatory CRT-related training for faculty and staff. 

For students, 14 schools were found to have department-specific mandatory training, 31 were found to have school-wide mandatory training and 41 have school-wide mandatory curricula. When it comes to faculty and staff, 18 schools have department-specific mandatory training, 30 have school-wide mandatory training and five have hiring committee-specific training. 

CriticalRace.org details the exact curricula and trainings at each school, along with contact information and an overview of every university. 

“A patient-centric ethos is being drowned out by politics and activism,” Jacobson said, adding that CRT being pushed on medical students is particularly alarming even compared to other areas of higher learning. 

“Because there are only just over 150 accredited medical schools in the U.S., and they are so hard to get into, students really have no options. Unlike universities and colleges, where students may be able to avoid a race-obsessed campus climate, with medical schools students have to submit to race-focused medical education or give up their career hopes,” Jacobson said. 

“We have analyzed CRT-related training in colleges and universities and elite private K-12. As bad as those institutions have become, things are much worse in medical schools because the stakes are so high. Patient care and people’s lives are at risk when doctors and medical providers view patients as proxies for racial or ethnic groups in sociological and political battles,” he continued. “Every person has the right to be treated equally as an individual, based on his or her medical condition, without societal racial politics influencing treatment. Yet increasingly we see the medical establishment, including the American Medical Association, demanding that medical students and physicians become race-focused activists.”

The subjects of mandatory training and coursework are worded and phrased differently at individual schools, but use terms including “anti-racism,” “cultural competency,” “equity,” “implicit bias,” “DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion” and critical race theory, according to CriticalRace.org.

For example, the study found that Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University’s Department of Surgery will “assess and improve upon the current state of surgical trainee evaluation to eliminate the impact of implicit and explicit bias.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/public-distrust-of-health-officials-is-anthony-faucis-legacy-covid-pandemic-chinese-lab-mask-mandates-misinformation-disinformation-11669566642?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Anthony Fauci gave his final press conference last week as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post he has held since 1984. Regrets about how he handled the Covid-19 pandemic? He had a few, but too few to mention.

Asked how “dubious” public-health advice from the Trump White House affected progress during the pandemic, Dr. Fauci boasted: “Well, you remember, if you were around, that at this podium I contradicted those, which set off a whole series of things in my life.”

He added: “The people who have correct information, who take science seriously, who don’t have strange, way-out theories about things but who base what they say on evidence and data need to speak up more, because the other side that just keeps putting out misinformation and disinformation seems to be tireless in that effort.”

“Strange, way-out theories”? You can only guess whom he had in mind—those who argued Covid likely leaked from a Chinese lab, opposed lockdowns in favor of focusing protection on the most vulnerable, questioned the “science” of mask mandates, and said schools should remain open since children were at low risk of illness.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-case-for-a-pandemic-early-warning-system

The lab-leak hypothesis for Covid-19’s origin, once a forbidden topic in the press and on social media, is now the subject of fierce debate among scientists and journalists. But the very possibility of a lab leak should be alarming, and not just retrospectively. A recent report based on documents from the National Institutes of Health reveals wide variation in how institutions respond to lab accidents involving dangerous pathogens. Regardless of whether the U.S.-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology released Covid-19, policymakers should change their attitudes toward this kind of research in the future.

What form should this rethink take? Some have called for a crackdown on “gain-of-function” research, in which an existing organism is modified to enhance a given feature. Others have advocated stricter safety standards for research funding or better training in labs that handle pathogens. Still others want independent oversight of especially high-risk research. All these proposals are worth serious consideration—but an under-discussed possibility would be to acquire better, earlier data on lab leaks. The current approach to detecting lab leaks is insufficiently proactive: if an incident happens, the world will know only if scientists and lab techs self-report it or if enough people develop symptoms. An early-warning system that uses large-scale genetic sequencing would strengthen security against lab leaks and other pathogenic threats.

In a way, the world was lucky that Covid-19 wasn’t worse. Though the disease killed perhaps 1 million Americans (and many more globally), its infection fatality ratio was quite low. Smallpox, on the other hand, killed around 10 percent of its victims, while untreated bubonic plague and Ebola kill around 30 percent. And novel pathogens with no known treatment have a non-zero chance of emerging every year. Industrial-scale animal farming, wet markets, and human encroachment onto animal habitats may increase the risk of new pathogens, which rapid intercontinental travel can spread around the world.

Of course, natural threats don’t tell the whole story. Pathogens engineered to be more dangerous—whether for benign or nefarious purposes—present another threat. In the 1980s, using biotechnology that would today be considered primitive, a Soviet bioweapons program developed antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax and other diseases, estimating death counts in the hundreds of thousands with merely one successful city attack. In the future, technological development will make creating lethal diseases even easier: gene editing through CRISPR and its successors will improve; more predictive computer simulations will make lab work more efficient; and the proliferation of DNA-synthesis companies will reduce barriers to entry.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/the_gods_of_diversity_are_killing_the_golden_age_of_medicine.html

Those who came of age in the second half of the 20th century or later, have been blessed to witness a time of extraordinary medical progress. Now, though, thanks to academia’s mindless push for diversity, we are almost certainly on the precipice of a steep decline in the quality of medical care in America.

Beginning in the late 19th century, modern medicine brought us anesthetics and sophisticated germ theory that allowed safe surgeries, antibiotics, the understanding and treatment of chronic diseases, organ transplants, dramatically decreased maternal and child mortality, unimaginably successful treatments for cancer, vision-correcting surgery, and so much more. In the first world, the human life span roughly doubled compared to the lifespan people could expect just 150 years ago. It truly was a time of wonders and miracles.

As medicine grew more sophisticated, doctors’ standing in society increased. Medicine ceased to be an apprentice-type trade and became a high-cachet profession, with gratifying financial awards. By the middle of the 20th century and for several decades thereafter, medical schools were able to limit themselves to the best of the best from every college class. Sure, there were bad doctors, but even if they were bad, they were still smart. (Small consolation, of course, when you’re on the receiving end of malpractice.)

We conservatives knew that socialized medicine threatened all of this and we fought against it for decades. The moment the government takes over medicine, killing the profit motive, it begins rationing care. People have access to doctors; they just don’t have access to treatments that save or improve their lives.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-inflation-reduction-act-comes-for-medicare-ira-elderly-voters-payments-benefits-cuts-revenue-losses-subsidies-11669060307?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden has accused Republicans of scheming to cut Medicare. In fact it is his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, that will lead to benefit cuts and premium increases for seniors. Medicare’s popular drug-coverage program is headed for a painful amputation.

The private plans participating in Medicare’s prescription-drug program, known as Part D, currently draw on three sources of revenue to finance prescriptions: out-of-pocket payments from patients, premium payments made by plan members, and subsidies from the federal government. In 2025, under the Inflation Reduction Act, both government subsidies and out-of-pocket payments by patients are scheduled to be cut sharply. The difference will have to be made up by premiums. But the statute inhibits this third revenue source, which is also subsidized, from increasing more than 6%. That’s hardly enough to cover inflation, let alone compensate for the other two revenue losses.

We estimate that beginning in 2025, plan subsidies—specifically, the reinsurance subsidies for the beneficiaries with the most drug spending—will be cut $30 billion, out of revenue that currently totals about $110 billion. With $30 billion less to finance prescription benefits, something will have to give. Plans currently have far too little profit to span the chasm that the Inflation Reduction Act opens between expenses and revenue.

Existing plans have room to cut benefits, although the original Part D statute limits their ability to do so. As plans are under no obligation to take a loss, their other choice is to exit the market, which from the patient’s perspective means that all the benefits disappear. In essence, the Inflation Reduction Act statute may prohibit Part D plans from being economically viable, even if it doesn’t explicitly ban them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-progressive-paradox-on-marijuana-new-york-weed-kathy-hochul-john-hickenlooper-11669072860?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

New York state’s Cannabis Control Board voted Monday to approve its first 36 licenses to run marijuana dispensaries. It’s another big step toward legal pot sales, though the black market isn’t struggling to meet demand, as every nose in Manhattan can attest. Meantime, the paradox in progressive attitudes toward marijuana continues to grow like skunk weed.

A study published last week in the journal Radiology finds that smokers who used marijuana (often in addition to tobacco), instead of tobacco alone, had higher rates of emphysema, airway inflammation, and other conditions. “There is a public perception that marijuana is safe and people think that it’s safer than cigarettes,” one radiologist told the Journal. “This study raises concerns that might not be true.”

Where might people have gotten the idea that marijuana is safe? To blame politicians for this would vastly overstate their persuasive powers. Yet it’s remarkable how liberal politicians have tried to take a rhetorical puff to fit in with the cultural cool kids. On April 20, which is cannabis culture slang, Twitter was a veritable haze.

“Happy 4/20 Colorado! You’re my best bud,” said Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper.