RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/07/doctor-fix-thyself/

We owe a lot to America’s physicians, the brave men, and women on the front lines of the war against COVID-19. Yet rather than supporting American doctors, flawed public policy will soon reduce Medicare’s physician fee schedule, compounding and magnifying the increased pandemic pressures and economic challenges that physicians have been facing over the past two-and-a-half years.

Current federal policies call for a 4.42% cut in Medicare physician fee schedule payments, effective Jan. 1, 2023. Such drastic cuts for our nation’s physicians will force many small to mid-size practices out of business — particularly those in rural communities — placing an increased, and deeply unfair, financial strain on the ones that remain. The result is entirely predictable, a weakened health care system that endangers the lives of vulnerable patients. Proposed reductions to Medicare’s physician payments will undermine the economic viability of practicing medicine in towns and cities nationwide, and further broaden the health care equity gap for both rural America and lower income communities of color.

These fast-approaching ill-considered cuts magnify the insidious instability of Medicare’s arcane and antiquated physician payment system For quite some time the growing discrepancy between the cost of running a medical practice and the actual payments physicians receive from Uncle Sam through Medicare has become more and more unreasonable and unjustifiable, considering the various administrative red tape and financial burdens of participating in the program. This situation is driving provider consolidation that limits patient choice not just in access to physicians, but in the type of care those remaining physicians can provide.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/04/the-cdc-has-lost-all-credibility/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 15-0 last month to add the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to the recommended childhood schedule.

Given that the panel consists of card-carrying members of the Branch Covidian faith, the unanimous vote came as no surprise. In fact, some committee members voted via video conference while sitting alone in a room, wearing their masks.

Ironic, considering the CDC a month earlier had quietly stopped recommending that patrons and employees in healthcare facilities mask up.

But, forever masking is an essential pillar of the Covidian faith. It must be followed if members are to attain eternal life regardless of changing doctrine and new revelation from on high.

What Does the Vote Mean?

The actual recommendation from the CDC is that children begin getting COVID-19 inoculations at 6 months of age. 

The CDC quickly pointed out that the organization cannot issue specific mandates and that the panel’s recommendation serves only to “help streamline clinical guidance for healthcare providers by including all currently licensed, authorized and routinely recommended vaccines in one document.”

That may be technically true. We know, however, that COVID-19 jabs, regardless of their true efficacy, have become a sacrament within the Branch Covidian church. Moreover, the CDC has significant influence on states and healthcare facilities regarding vaccination schedules. States commonly use CDC guidelines to protect themselves from legal liability when implementing local regulations. So the CDC’s decision will undoubtedly lead Covidian governors to add the CDC’s recommendation to their states’ vaccination schedules. In turn, this will mean parents must have their children vaccinated if they want them to attend public school, daycare, and participate in sports.

https://www.city-journal.org/floridas-reason-and-compassion-on-gender-medicine

Florida has decided to regulate medical care for gender-dysphoric minors. The state’s Boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine ruled that the standard treatment for gender-dysphoric youth under 18 will no longer be puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, but psychotherapy.

Contrary to the media frenzy that erupted, Florida is not planning to prevent minors already on the medical track from receiving hormones—what critics call “forcible detransition.” Instead, the new rule includes a grandfather clause, permitting these individuals to continue their medical transition. As for prospective cases, the Board of Medicine voted not to allow further pediatric procedures, while the Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted to allow them in exceptional cases under an Institutional Review Board-approved research protocol. If proponents of “gender-affirming” interventions want to assert that puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones are “medically necessary,” the onus should be on them to prove it using the standard techniques of scientific corroboration.

In short, Florida seems poised to adopt the Scandinavian—and, it appears, the British—model of caring for gender-dysphoric minors. Rather than imposing legislative actions that put politicians between the doctor and the patient, Florida decided to invoke the existing mechanism for the regulation of health practices, putting the decision in front of state medical boards. The Florida Medical Board’s five-hour televised discussion made it obvious that its practicing physicians are first and foremost professionals who understand the uncertainties of clinical care. Florida medical authorities’ nuanced decision is evidence of how reason and compassion can work in tandem.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nullectomy-physician-assisted-mutilation/

I don’t know how much more of this our culture can take. “Gender-affirming” surgeries are growing increasingly extreme. A source sent me links to websites operated by doctors who perform “bottom surgeries” advertising “genital nullification” — a.k.a. “nullectomy” — procedures that remove genitalia in order to create a “smooth” appearance in the groin.

Here’s the first one (I am not linking, as I wouldn’t want to be even indirectly complicit in anyone’s voluntary butchery):

Your Smooth Bottom Line: Nullectomy, Nullification, Nullo:

Nullectomy is the removal of internal and external genital structures to create a smooth appearance from the abdomen to the groin. Glans (penile or clitoral) and nerve tissue can be “buried” in the mons to retain a focused nerve center for sensation while maintaining a smooth appearance, can remain present as an “outie,” or can be removed.

For someone starting with a penis and testicles, nullectomy can include:

penectomy (removal of the penis)
orchiectomy (removal of the scrotum)
scrotomectomy (removal of the testicles)
urethral shortening

For someone starting with a clitoris, vulva, vagina, and uterus (if not already removed,) nullectomy can include:

hysterectomy with or without oophorectomy
vaginectomy (if a vaginectomy is chosen, a hysterectomy is required)
vulvectomy (partial or radical)
clitorectomy
urethral modification

How filled with self-loathing must one be to subject one’s body to such extreme desecration?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/now_the_disgraced_covid_experts_want_amnesty.html

In her recent article in The Atlantic, a Brown University professor, Emily Oster, is calling for “pandemic amnesty.”  She is telling me to “forgive and forget” everyone who was yelling obscenities at me for not wearing a mask in a public park or calling me a mass murderer for posting a picture with a friend visiting.  I must forget all this, the author insists, because all those people had nothing but my well-being in mind!

The author admits that many (if not most!) measures imposed on us by “the experts” were harmful and destructive.  But “dwelling on those mistakes” is “counter-productive.”  After all, people who made these mistakes had only good intentions.

“As we now know,” the author concedes, cloth masks are practically useless.  People who got vaccinated spread COVID as easily as those who did not.  Keeping children locked up at homes had disastrous consequences on their development.  And some of the COVID “mitigation” measures — like beach closures in California — were outright dumb.  But let’s not “dwell” on them — because those were “complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.”

“We didn’t know!”  the author laments.

After three years of living through the pandemic, the author all but admits that “the experts” were just as clueless about how to approach it as your next-door neighbor.  “The experts” did not know even the most obvious things.

They didn’t know that wearing a dirty piece of cloth over your face would not amount to anything other than a sinus infection.  Seemed like even a third-grader could’ve figured that one out — and many did.

They didn’t know that walking on the beach was the safest activity one could do during a pandemic.  Sunshine and fresh air are the best disinfectants known to men, and a beach in early spring is the best place for “social distancing.”  You don’t need a crystal ball to understand that surfing in the ocean is not “a super-spreader event.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/10/29/transgendering-language-n1641125

As has become flagrantly obvious over the years, the political left and its myrmidons in the media, medical industry, social agencies, public libraries, and school system have become slickly adept at framing the cultural debate between conservatives and “progressives” by mutilating discourse, fudging long-accepted distinctions, and decoupling terms from their culturally ascribed referents. What was understood for centuries and millennia as decency becomes indecency, good becomes bad, virtue becomes vice, settled tradition becomes feral violence, family and marriage become barbarism and bondage (the feminist mantra), and so on. Conversely, what is destructive of customary order becomes enlightened transformation.

A comparatively recent and most egregious case in point involves what is now called “conversion therapy,” the target of the non-binary and transgender prepossession preaching “diversity” to minors — a cult that has now acquired conventional status. But what is “conversion therapy”?

It is a term calculated to deceive, to reverse normal assumptions by condemning parents concerned about their children’s sexual identity. Thus, to take an instance of adroit dissimulation, according to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “So-called ‘conversion therapy,’ sometimes known as ‘reparative therapy,’ is a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation.” The truth is precisely the opposite. Responsible parents do not wish to “change” or “convert” their children’s sexual orientation but to retain it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-tour-dhorizon-of-the-transgender-anglosphere/

It’s a cartoon, but it’s not meant as a joke. It depicts a woman in a hospital bed holding her newborn baby. A man, apparently her significant other, is sitting on the bed. At the foot of the bed stands a midwife or nurse, who asks: “Who’s going to be breastfeeding?” Both parents’ hands are raised. Indeed, while the mother is breastfeeding the baby, the man has breasts – a real set of knockers – that are connected to a breast pump.

Again, it’s not supposed to be funny. The accompanying text explains that “induced breastfeeding” means “nursing a child to which you yourself haven’t given birth,” and that “you can choose to nurse, whether you are a cis or trans person, and whether you gave birth to the child or not.”

I ran across the cartoon on Facebook, where it had been posted by somebody who’d glimpsed it on the Instagram page of the rural, remote Swedish county of Värmland. It appears to have originated at the website of the RFSL, a Swedish LGBT+ rights group.

(As an extra PC bonus, incidentally, the midwife in the cartoon is wearing a hijab. But as one Facebook commenter noticed, her arms are uncovered, which means that when she goes home after work, her husband and the other men in her family will beat her to a pulp for being haram.)

Bottom line: the trans insanity is everywhere. In the Western world, anyway.

In the U.S., of course, transgender ideology is already the reigning orthodoxy throughout the health-care system. But trans activists operating within that system aren’t satisfied yet. They’re still on the advance, targeting younger and younger children for so-called “gender-affirming health care.” In August, it emerged that Boston Children’s Hospital had been “promoting ‘gender affirmation’ for kids as young as two.” In September, Christopher F. Rufo reported that Lurie Children’s Hospital, the largest facility of its kind in Chicago, was pushing transgenderism on pupils at Windy City middle schools and high schools.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/27/the-updated-mrna-covid-boosters-are-a-bust-two-new-studies-show/

The new, heavily promoted mRNA booster shots from Pfizer and Moderna are not all they’re cracked up to be, according to two new preprint studies.

The boosters perform no better against Omicron than the fourth jab with the original formulation,” a new study from scientists at Columbia University in New York City found. The updated Covid-19 booster shots have been advertised as “bivalent,” meaning they target the original coronavirus strain as well as the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants.

However, the Columbia paper found that the newer Omicron variants easily evade both types of boosters, Alex Berenson reported on Substack.

The report strongly suggests anyone who received mRNA shots should hope the next Sars-Cov-2 variants remain mild as the current Omicron variants, because those folks will have very little protection from future Sars-Cov-2 variants going forward.

In other words: immune imprinting and original mRNA vaccine antigenic sin are real, and they’re spectacular (spectacularly bad).

About the only good news in the study actually comes from vaccine failure. People who had three shots and then were infected with Omicron had markedly higher antibody levels than people who received either booster.

The boosters were reportedly authorized for human use based on data from eight baby mice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cdc-pushes-to-vaccinate-toddlers-again-advisory-committee-children-schedule-covid-19-fda-risks-shot-evidence-public-health-11666529146?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention trying to give vaccine skeptics a shot in the arm? That’s the message its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices sent last week with its vote to add Covid-19 vaccines to childhood vaccination schedules.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf stressed that the CDC isn’t mandating vaccines for kids. “Mandates are not the remit of either CDC or FDA,” he tweeted on Oct. 19. Didn’t the CDC argue the opposite in court when defending its mask requirement for public transportation?

It’s true that states and localities don’t have to follow the CDC’s recommendations when deciding which shots kids must receive to attend daycare and school, but they usually do. One CDC panelist said the vote was merely symbolic. But symbolism matters.

Why else did face masks become so controversial? Given the scant evidence supporting widespread use of nonmedical-grade masks, many conservatives perceived masking as another instance of liberals imposing scientifically baseless rituals on nonadherent Americans. The same is now true with vaccinating children.

Most conservatives don’t oppose vaccines per se. But never before has the CDC recommended, or the FDA authorized, a vaccine for children based on such thin evidence of benefits and lack of clarity on potential risks.