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MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Bill Seeks to Muzzle Doctors Who Tell the Truth About COVID by Joseph Mercola

https://www.theepochtimes.com/bill-seeks-to-muzzle-doctors-who-tell-the-truth-about-covid_4447941.html

If these new proposed bills pass, your doctors could have their licenses taken away, simply by speaking the truth about the COVID fiasco. To appease bureaucrats, they would have to censor their thoughts about lockdowns and vaccines, and even avoid advising you about effective treatments.

Story at-a-glance
A California bill is now threatening to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with. California Assembly Bill 2098 designates “the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct” warranting “disciplinary action” that could result in the loss of their medical license
Misinformation related to SARS-CoV-2 includes “false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” But as far as what might constitute “misinformation” or “disinformation” is unclear and basically left open for interpretation by the state
Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat each patient as an individual, and to ensure each patient receives the safest and best care. Bill 2098 will turn doctors into government agents, leaving no one to advocate for patients’ health
California has also introduced six other bills seeking to enshrine tyranny into law, including bills to criminalize “amplification of harmful content,” create a centralized vaccination registry, strip funding from law enforcement that refuses to follow public health orders, mandate COVID jabs for school children, authorize minors to consent to vaccination, and require school districts to conduct routine COVID testing
If you live in California, please review these bills and VOTE NO

One of the most stunning parts of this pandemic has been the denial of basic science, and one of the most shocking developments from that has been the attack on medical doctors who try to set the record straight.

COVID: The Lessons We Dare Not Forget Phil Shannon

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/06/covid-what-we-have-learned-and-dare-not-forget/

As COVID fever, in contrast to actual cases, continues to subside globally it is time to take stock of two-plus years of irrational fear and policy madness.  Learning from the economic, social and political debacle of the global response to the virus is essential to ensure the temptations of authoritarian rule by public health ‘experts’, in cahoots with their political enablers, are resisted when the next health ‘crisis’ hits (monkeypox, anyone?).

Below are fifteen of these COVID lessons. 

LESSON #1: Viruses will do what viruses do

The path to the COVID policy disaster began with the failure to recognise that any new virus will do what every respiratory virus has done – spread rapidly until the more lethal variants die off with their more vulnerable hosts and more transmissible, but less deadly, variants become dominant, resulting in the familiar Gompertz Curve of rapid rise, followed by a plateau and then swift decline as herd immunity develops from robust, naturally-acquired infections amongst the healthy and their immune systems.

SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus that is behaving exactly in accord with this evolutionary blueprint and it is the utmost hubris to imagine humanity can ‘socially distance’ it into defeat, and it is the height of unwarranted technophilia to think it can be vaxxed into submission with either  revolutionary, rushed-into-production concoctions subjected to scant and hurried clinical trials. Governments can only pretend, for political reasons, to alter or prevent the predictable trajectory of a virus, a fact by now which should be apparent to all.

We wasted two enormously costly years by failing to remember this very old lesson about viruses being viruses and doing what viruses do.  This was the foundational error that set in train all the policy errors that followed.

LESSON #2: Unethical, anti-democratic, unscientific and ineffective 

The verdict is in after the world’s first-ever global social experiment in locking down entire populations of healthy people to stop the spread of a virus.  Every cross-comparative analysis between national and state jurisdictions, in chart after chart of viral incidence, hospitalisation and mortality the world over, shows that lockdowns do not make a bit of difference, not even the brutal, full-strength Chinese brand.

Different Outcomes, Not Different Treatment Most studies of alleged discrimination in medical care document racial disparities in clinical results, not biased treatment. Stanley Goldfarb

https://www.city-journal.org/political-distortion-of-medical-research

The political distortion of medical research has a sordid history, but it’s unfortunately not just a thing of the past. Today, a popular narrative has taken hold that a racist medical establishment is the reason that blacks have shorter life expectancies, worse clinical outcomes for many diseases, and even excess maternal and infant mortality. The claim is unsupported by evidence, however, and believing it won’t do anything to improve black patients’ health.

Search for the terms “racism” and “medicine” in the National Library of Medicine database, and thousands of scientific publications appear. Journalists and a growing number of doctors regard this as proof of medical discrimination. But most of these studies do not prove any causality; they merely document disparities in clinical outcomes and medical services for black Americans. Nonetheless, they increasingly serve to justify such discriminatory practices as preferentially reserving scarce Covid-19 therapies for blacks.

A rush to find racism typifies most of the many thousands of opinion pieces, original investigations, and review articles on the topic of clinical outcomes for black patients. That literature supports a media that has eagerly adopted the narrative of racism embedded in American health care. The result undermines the trust in medical care needed for successful patient- physician relationships and diverts scarce resources in combating a nonexistent factor in poor health outcomes.

The rules for conducting robust scientific research require scientists to try to disprove their own theories. One can never absolutely prove a hypothesis correct; one can only show that experiments fail to disprove it. The investigator should begin by doubting the hypothesis and do his best to disprove it with carefully designed experiments. Unfortunately, too many studies on medical racism are carried out by investigators who, following the prevailing political trend, set out to confirm their ideas of a racist health-care system. A biased experiment can easily lead to a desired outcome, and emphasizing some results while ignoring others can lead to a faulty conclusion.

UPenn Med School Leaders Turn on Former Dean over ‘Racist’ Affirmative-Action Criticism By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/upenn-med-school-leaders-turn-on-former-dean-over-racist-affirmative-action-criticism/

Senior administrators at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine recently leveled a reputation-destroying accusation at a former colleague who was, up until a few years ago, a member in good standing of America’s elite medical community.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb had a long, distinguished career in medicine that culminated with his being appointed professor emeritus and associate dean of curriculum at Perelman. He retired from his role as associate dean in 2019 but retained his emeritus title. That honor and the career that made him worthy of it weren’t enough to earn him the presumption of good faith from his former colleagues.

Goldfarb’s offense? Publicly questioning whether racial discrimination is as pervasive in medicine as the conventional elite narrative suggests. Responding last week to a study which suggested that systemic racism explains why minority medical residents tend to receive worse performance evaluations than their white peers, Goldfarb asked: “Could it be they were just less good at being residents?”

The White House’s Specious Gender Manifesto The White House is claiming that the debate about childhood gender medicine is settled—even as numerous international experts are coming forward to say it‘s not. Bernard Lane

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/
“How will history judge gender-affirming care if professional groupthink has in fact served to improperly justify the medicalisation of vulnerable minors with no good evidence to confidently predict the effect on their welfare? ”

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of medicalised gender change for young people. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care” —from puberty-blocker drugs to interrupt natural development, on to lifelong synthetic hormones, even surgery. And now we have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health” for children and teens who identify as transgender or non-binary.

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.

If You’re the Right Race, Your Doctor Will See You Now Critical race theory in medicine can kill you. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/if-youre-right-race-your-doctor-will-see-you-now-daniel-greenfield/

50 years after the end of the Tuskegee Experiments, the Biden administration brought back racism into medicine with a rule providing financial incentives to doctors embedding the horrifying racist ideas of Ibram X. Kendi into their practices.

The form of racism misleadingly described as “anti-racism” believes that all white people are evil and that any medical problems are the result of identity politics, not individual choices.

The racist Biden Medicare rule falsely claims that “systemic racism is the root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially defined racial groups” while demanding that “practice guidelines ” be “aligned with a commitment to anti-racism”.

Do No Harm, an organization formed to oppose the injection of critical race theory in medicine, filed a suit to oppose, what Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, calls a  “discriminatory and illegal policy advocated by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi being imposed on our health care system.”’

This move is the latest effort by conservatives and traditional liberals to push back against the destructive incursion of critical race theory into medicine which harms patients, imposes political tests on medical professionals, and raises costs while lowering quality of care.

Monkeypox Business The Democrats’ new Pox Americana?Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/monkeypox-business-lloyd-billingsley/

“We have had this monkeypox in large numbers in the past. We have vaccines to take care of it,” Joe Biden said Monday in Tokyo. “It is a concern in that if it were to spread it would be consequential. That’s all they told me.” Here Biden is likely referring to the federal Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC is monitoring six people in the United States for possible monkeypox infections. The six reportedly sat near an infected traveler who had symptoms on a flight from Nigeria to the UK early this month.

Other reports cite 80 confirmed cases worldwide, 50 suspected cases in the USA and others in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Canada, all in people with no history of travel to Africa. At this writing, no monkeypox deaths have been reported but experts are puzzled.

With 80 confirmed cases of the disease worldwide, the U.S. has only confirmed a pair of cases after a man in Massachusetts was diagnosed with the disease. Another man in New York City reportedly tested positive.

“Monkeypox does not occur naturally in the United States,” the CDC explains, “but cases have happened that were associated with international travel or importing animals from areas where the disease is more common.” A 2003 “outbreak” traced to a shipment of animals from Ghana to Texas. The various African squirrels, mice, pouched rats, porcupines and such were “housed near prairie dogs” at a facility in Illinois.

Biden’s Covid Policy Is Incoherent — but That’s Politics By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/bidens-covid-policy-is-incoherent-but-thats-politics/
It sure as hell isn’t leadership.

Yesterday afternoon, I received an email from a family member who is coming to visit me in July. He was asking whether the United States still requires travelers from outside the country — including U.S. citizens — to provide proof of a negative Covid test before they may enter the country. I was halfway to saying that no, all that is over, when a little red flag went up in my head and prompted me to check the State Department’s website, where I learned that, actually, the United States does still insist upon this, and that it does so without exception.

The Biden administration’s position on Covid-19 is now perfectly absurd. It is evidently the official position of the federal government that the Covid-19 virus represents a sufficiently serious threat to Americans to justify testing fully vaccinated tourists before they may fly to the United States, but that the Covid-19 virus does not represent enough of a crisis to justify maintaining the Title 42 rules that govern how illegal immigrants are treated when they unlawfully cross the southern border. Speaking before Congress earlier this month, an attorney at the Justice Department, Jean Lin, insisted that Title 42 ought to “terminate as soon as practicable” on the grounds that it is an emergency health measure, not a permanent policy, and that it “is disrupting the processing of immigration laws that Congress enacted.” Legally, Lin is correct, but for her objection to have any force, the same rule must be applied to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Covid-testing regime, which is also the product of an emergency health measure and which also disrupts the processing of immigration laws that Congress enacted. Ultimately, the Biden administration needs to decide: Do we have a crisis on our hands, or not? If we do not have a crisis on our hands, then all of our crisis measures ought to be rescinded forthwith. If we do have a crisis on our hands, then those measures ought to be maintained. Whichever course he picks, it must be consistent.

On student loans, the administration is equally incoherent. When President Biden is asked to justify his continuation of the “pause” in the collection of debt (“pause” is a curious word to use to describe a policy that has lasted longer than an entire Congress), he explains that there’s a pandemic raging, don’t you know, and that, anyhow, if he doesn’t keep extending the policy, “millions of student loan borrowers” will “face significant economic hardship, and delinquencies and defaults could threaten Americans’ financial stability.” Elsewhere, however, the economic picture Biden paints is rather rosy. “Our economy has gone from being on the mend to being on the move,” the president proposed last week. “And now, we’re outpacing the world.” This, Biden says, is the result of the “historic infrastructure investments, creating record job growth, and rebuilding our economy.” Apparently, we are expected to believe that the Biden-led, record-job-creating, on-the-move American economy is strong enough to be the envy of “the world,” but also so weak that to ask college graduates (whose unemployment rate is 2 percent) to resume paying back their loans would bring the whole thing crashing down. Convenient!

Woke Medicine: A Prescription for Disaster REVIEW: ‘Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns’ by Stanley Goldfarb, M.D.Christine Rosen

https://freebeacon.com/culture/woke-medicine-a-prescription-for-disaster/

It is a popular sport among those on the progressive left to dismiss conservatives’ concerns about the spread of “woke” ideology (such as Critical Race Theory and “antiracism” training) in public education and corporate culture. Parents are scolded for suggesting that seeing the world through the “lens of CRT” or the factually challenged posturing of the 1619 Project might be harmful to their children’s education, and employees are chastised for questioning the effectiveness of new mandates on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The implication is that only a racist would resist the new “antiracism.”

And yet, there is one arena in which woke thinking is not merely politically polarizing, but deadly. As Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a nephrologist and associate dean for curriculum at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns, the “quiet woke revolution” that had been going on in medicine for some time “erupted in spring 2020 into a full-blown revolution”—one with ongoing negative consequences.

That year, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing protests, and amid a global pandemic, doctors and medical students began going well beyond their remit as physicians to embrace the role of social justice activists. “Led by a cadre of woke administrators who embraced the tenets of critical race theory, the medical establishment was committing itself to a misguided focus on anti-racism and equity in all aspects of the health-care system,” Goldfarb writes.

Groups of physicians organized under names such as White Coats for Black Lives, and issued manifestos that were little more than crypto-Marxist argle bargle: A June 2021 statement outlined the group’s mission of “dismantling dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism,” for example. When “just what the doctor ordered” means a lecture on the harms of the cisheteropatriarchy, it is clear medicine has strayed far from its professional purpose.

Goldfarb makes short work of many of the faulty “antiracism” medical studies that take as their starting point the new popular assumption that medicine is racist.

Primary source of COVID misinformation is the feds, scientists and scholars tell surgeon general Academic freedom groups warn feds not to chill research that challenges conventional wisdom or adjudicate “properly scientific questions.”By Greg Piper

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/primary-source-covid-misinformation-feds-scientists-and-scholars-tell

U.S Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently asked the public how COVID-19 misinformation “in the digital information environment” had affected health outcomes, trust in the healthcare system and “likelihood to vaccinate,” among other issues.

According to vaccine and healthcare policy experts who joined with Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, the misinformation is coming from inside the house.

They filed a comment in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proceeding, accusing the CDC and other health organizations of promoting falsehoods and shoddy research that “shattered the public’s trust in science and public health,” which will “take decades to repair.”

Rokita and epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford School of Medicine and Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard Medical School, also took aim at official government figures for COVID deaths that are repeatedly cited in the media.

“The government spent close to $5 trillion fighting COVID-19, but still can’t provide Hoosiers with an accurate number of deaths or hospitalizations from COVID-19,” Rokita said in a press release.

While the comment doesn’t mention National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, the press release specifically calls him out for “misleading messages” about the abilities of vaccines, masks and asymptomatic testing to stop COVID transmission.