RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/19/haul-newsom-and-other-blue-state-officials-to-congress-for-hearings/

What is happening to the people of Shanghai is an atrocity. China’s zero-COVID policy has literally imprisoned millions in their own homes in that nation’s most populous city. Police beatings have been reported, as have cases of extreme hunger, and “​​constant mental anguish and anxiety.” Don’t think that could never happen in America. We, too, have tyrants in government. And every one of them should be compelled to sweat under the hot lights of a congressional investigative hearing.

Maybe then they would not be so eager to put Americans under house arrest again.

We now have two reports confirming what so many of us already knew: lockdowns were a colossal mistake. The first analysis, a meta-study of dozens of other studies, found that “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects,” and “​​should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.” The second discovered that the states with the most laissez-faire pandemic policies fared better than the COVID police states.

The public officials, both elected and unelected, who in essence caged their states, counties and cities, knew better. It was clear early on, and shown later, that few were at serious risk of death from COVID-19. Yet entire populations were told to stay inside and businesses were forced to close. Policymakers treated us all as if were at equal risk of death.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/keep-politics-out-of-the-doctors-office-racism-woke-ideology-crt-critical-race-theory-medical-care-minorities-systemic-racism-covid-19-regulation-11650308028?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Healthcare is being infected by the radical ideology that has corrupted education and public safety. But while critical race theory and crime waves have been in the news, the public is largely unaware of medicine’s turn toward division and discrimination. Americans deserve to know that their health and well-being are at risk.

At the heart of this is the claim that healthcare is systemically racist—that most physicians are biased and deliver worse care to minorities. Health disparities do exist among racial groups, but physician bias isn’t the cause. The psychological test at the root of this narrative, the 1998 Implicit Association Test, has been widely discredited, and I know from long experience as a medical educator and practitioner that physicians address the needs of each patient, regardless of skin color. Moreover, attacking physicians is dangerous. It degrades minority trust in healthcare while undermining health outcomes for everyone.

Consider what’s happening in medical research. The National Library of Medicine database shows more than 2,700 recent papers on “racism and medicine,” which generally purport to show physician bias leading to racial disparities in health outcomes. Yet the most commonly cited studies are shoddily designed, ignore such critical factors as pre-existing conditions, or reach predetermined and sensationalized conclusions that aren’t supported by reported results. These papers in turn are used to source even more shoddy research. This is a corruption of medical science in service to political ideology.

Prominent medical journals are complicit in the crusade against medical professionals. The New England Journal of Medicine touts its “commitment to understanding and combating racism as a public health and human rights crisis,” while Health Affairs is implementing a strategy to “dismantle racism and increase racial equity” in healthcare. They publish piece after piece calling, explicitly or implicitly, for a fundamental change in the medical profession. They’re also bringing race and other nonacademic factors into the peer-review process, threatening the scientific analysis on which physician practice and patient health depend.

Medical schools increasingly are preparing physicians for social activism at the expense of medical science. Such student groups as White Coats for Black Lives demand that administrators reframe curriculum around reparations for slavery, decarceration of prisoners, and other topics with no bearing on training doctors to care for individual patients. Medical schools and residencies are lowering admissions standards. The result will be fewer talented physicians providing high-quality care to fewer patients.

Physicians are being pushed to discriminate. Hospitals, state health authorities and the federal government have all authorized race-based formulas for rationing Covid treatments. Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston (Harvard’s teaching hospital) is moving toward “preferential care based on race” across the board. And the Biden administration is offering higher Medicare reimbursement rates to hospitals and physicians who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” To fight their supposed bias, physicians are being bribed into discriminating by race.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mask-mandate-goes-down-federal-judge-kathryn-kimball-mizelle-cdc-biden-administration-11650318701?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

This has been a rough few months for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 orders. First its eviction moratorium went down last year. On Monday it lost again, as a federal judge blocked the agency’s mask mandate on airlines and other forms of public transportation (Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Biden).

Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the CDC exceeded its statutory authority and never clearly explained its justification for the broad mask mandate, among other legal infirmities. It’s a strong opinion based in a careful reading of the Public Health Service Act of 1944, which was the basis for the CDC’s order.

Judge Mizelle says the agency stretched the meaning of the word “sanitation” in the law, which was never intended to justify such sweeping control over the behavior of millions of Americans. She quotes the words of Jeff Sutton, Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the vaccine mandate case that “this is no ‘everyday exercise of federal power.’”

It certainly isn’t, which helps to justify the judge’s national injunction in the mask case. National injunctions should be rare, but it would be hard to narrow, by geography or type of transport, a nationwide mask requirement for all public transportation.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_doctor_who_exposed_faucis_fallacies_and_got_harassed_and_fired_from_hhs_for_telling_the_truth.html

Dr. Paul Elias Alexander was a well credentialed, internationally known epidemiologist invited by Trump administration officials to be part of the COVID 19 response team at the White House in April of 2020. He packed up his family, leaving a secure and prominent position in Canada to move to Washington, DC.  

But then he criticized the public health mandates by Drs. Fauci, Collins, and Birx and showed them research that proved they were wrong about lockdowns, school closings, masking, and social distancing.

Following that, he was silenced, harassed and then fired. 

The Trump White House staff and leadership knew what was happening but did nothing to stop the Fauci and NIH/CDC-led deep state malefactors.

I was enraged reading Dr. Alexander’s personal account, excerpted below, telling of the DC savagery.  I knew he had left McMaster University in Ontario where he was part of the GRADE Working Group, an international consortium of medical researchers promoting reliable, evidence based medical research (EBM).  Doctor Alexander has been a stand-up man advocating good medical science his whole career. The details of this truthful doctor’s mistreatment in DC were shocking and maddening.
Excerpts below tell the story of Dr. Alexander in DC via his essay.  I will provide excerpts and ellipses to get you through the 3000-plus word essay.  Read the whole essay at this link

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/12/americas-reliance-on-china-for-pharmaceuticals-could-result-in-ukraine-like-drug-shortages/

Immediately following Russia’s unprovoked invasion, hospitals and pharmacies across Ukraine witnessed a severe interruption in the drug supply chain. Pharmacies were looted and shelves were quickly emptied with no replenishment in sight. In just a few days, the profound benefits of a century’s worth of modern pharmaceutical development were nullified, with lifesaving drugs for heart disease, high blood pressure, infections, diabetes, cancer, and innumerable other conditions suddenly unavailable. 

Americans who think that such shortages could never happen here should think again. In fact, we are already experiencing them. University of Chicago researchers in 2018 surveyed 719 pharmacists at large and small hospitals across the country and found that all of them reported experiencing at least one drug shortage over the previous year, and 69% had experienced at least 50 shortages in that time. The majority were generic injectable pharmaceuticals commonly used in hospitals, including analgesics, cancer drugs, anesthetics, antipsychotics for psychiatric emergencies, and electrolyte solutions needed for patients on IV supplementation. According to the Food and Drug Administration, there are currently shortages of 120 drugs, many of them commonly used and critically important.

One of the reasons is that we, like Ukraine, are at the mercy of foreign sources for our pharmaceutical supply. China has become the world’s largest producer and exporter of the essential “active pharmaceutical ingredients” (APIs) used in the manufacture of drugs in many countries, including the United States. According to the World Health Organization, 36% of pharmaceutical manufacturing plants are government owned, and that figure roughly doubles when calculated on facility square footage rather than facility numbers. Even India, a dominant manufacturer of generic drugs, is dependent on China for its APIs.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/new-yorks-child-masking-madness/

Mayor Eric Adams can and should disregard the erroneous advice of his health team.

One of the more curious storylines playing out in the early days of Eric Adams’s tenure as mayor of New York City is his stance on masking preschoolers. Adams, who projects a tough-guy, no-nonsense persona, ready to make the tough decisions, has decided to maintain the requirement that schoolchildren under the age of five wear masks even though the science is clear that they face little to no Covid risk and that, as I discuss below, masking that age group comes with a risk of significant harm.

Adams lifted the mask mandate for K–12 schoolchildren in early March and promised he would lift the mandate for preschoolers, ages two to four, on April 4. Then, citing a “slight uptick” in cases, he backtracked.

When a state supreme court justice enjoined city officials from enforcing the requirement on April 1, calling it “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable,” Adams announced that the city would appeal. That evening, an appellate division justice stayed the injunction, effectively restoring the preschooler mandate until a full hearing takes place.

A week later, Adams announced the mandate would continue for at least another week. He claimed he’d like to lift the mandate but “I’m totally at the mercy of my health team.” That would be the one led by his new health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, who continues to recommend masks “for most of us,” particularly for children under five because that age group is not yet eligible for vaccination.

Dr. Vasan’s reasoning makes little sense. The currently predominant Omicron variant — especially the subvariant BA.2 that is now dominant in the New York City area — spreads easily despite vaccination. Mayor Adams, who has just tested positive himself, can attest to that. If masks are necessary for toddlers, they should be necessary for everyone. In fact, Dr. Vasan’s own tweet from March 30 shows that case rates in the city are lowest in the zero-to-four age group and, far and away, highest among 25- to 34-year-olds.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/08/doctor-crashes-fda-meeting-and-shares-the-whistleblower-story-they-ignored/

A doctor “crashed” a Food and Drug Administration’s meeting with outside vaccine experts earlier this week, to share a whistleblower’s story about the data integrity issues that plagued one of Pfizer’s clinical trials.

In September of 2020, a researcher from an organization testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas, emailed a complaint to the FDA, informing the agency of the company’s dangerously shoddy research practices. The FDA took no action on her email, and Pfizer continues to use the company.

Last week, the FDA authorized a second round of booster shots for people 50 and older and for those with certain immunocompromising conditions.

The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met in an open session on April 6 to discuss “considerations for use of COVID-19 vaccine booster doses and the process for COVID-19 vaccine strain selection to address current and emerging variants.”

Dr. Peter Doshi, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical health services at the University of Maryland, and an associate editor at The British Medical Journal (BMJ), took the opportunity to tell the whistleblower, Brook Jackson’s, story.

In the fall of 2020, Jackson was the regional director for the Ventavia Research Group, the company that was conducting Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial in Texas. She told the BMJ last November that she witnessed researchers falsifying data, unblinding trial participants, and employing inadequately trained vaccinators. She also said researchers were slow to follow up on adverse events.

Jackson has submitted her evidence to a federal court.

During an interview with the Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz in February, the whistleblower said Pfizer’s clinical trials were so riddled with fraud and abuse of the scientific process there was zero credibility left.

https://nypost.com/2022/04/05/the-cdc-created-a-depression-epidemic-in-our-teenagers/

The Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote of sailing to an imagined Byzantium because his was “no country for old men.” The pandemic has proven that the United States is no country for the young.

A new Centers for Disease Control study reveals how badly teens have suffered from COVID policies — that the CDC itself pushed.

Many of us have lamented the terrible damage done to younger children by school closures and mask mandates — years of learning loss that may never be made up. Now we learn that the isolation and anxiety that accompanied school shutdowns have taken a heavy toll on adolescents.

The CDC found that more than a third of US high-school students reported poor mental health during the pandemic. Nearly half — 44% — said they felt sad or hopeless. A horrifying near-20% said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months.

The lifeline for those who made it through unscathed? Per the CDC data, it’s an obvious one: a feeling of “school connectedness.”

Teens who felt connected to both adults and their school buddies were far less likely to experience those feelings of sadness or despair: 35% vs 53%.On suicidal thoughts, the numbers are even starker, with 14% who felt connected having such thoughts vs. 26% of those who didn’t. And when it comes to actual suicide attempts, 6% of those who felt connected made the attempt vs. 12% of those who didn’t.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/frances-academy-of-medicine-urges-great-medical-caution-in-blocking-puberty/

The Biden administration acts as if “the science” supports “gender affirming care” — i.e., puberty blocking, hormone administration, and even mastectomies and genital surgeries — as clearly the best approaches to treating children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

But that isn’t true. The brakes are being put on this approach in the U.K., Sweden, and Finland. And now, France’s National Academy of Medicine is holding up a big “SLOW DOWN!” sign on joining the transgender moral panic. Specifically, it warns that these interventions might not be warranted and have potentially significant deleterious potentialities. Moreover, there has been a worrying explosive increase in the number of cases. From the translated press release:

While this condition has long been recognized, a sharp increase in demand for medical interventions has been observed first in North America, then in Northern Europe, and, more recently, in France, particularly among children and adolescents. A recent study of a number of high schools in Pittsburgh revealed a prevalence that is clearly higher than previously estimated in the United States: 10% of students declared themselves to be transgender or non-binary or were unsure of their gender. In 2003, the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne diagnosed only one child with gender dysphoria, whereas today it treats nearly 200.

It used to be infinitesimal! More:

Whatever the mechanisms involved in adolescents — excessive engagement with social media, greater social acceptability, or influence by those in one’s social circle — this epidemic-like phenomenon manifests itself in the emergence of cases or even clusters of cases in the adolescents’ immediate surroundings. This primarily social problem is due, in part, to the questioning of an overly dichotomous view of gender identity by some young people.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/04/05/woke_medicines_got_a_tricky_operation_coming_up_grafting_systemic_racism_onto_hard_science_824726.html

Just a few years ago, concepts such as “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “structural intersectionality” were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. These are now the guiding ideas in a February special issue of “Health Affairs” that focuses on medicine and race.

Featuring nearly two dozen articles with titles such as “Racism Runs Through It” and “Sick and Tired of Being Excluded,” as well as a poem called “Identity,” the Washington, D.C.-based, peer-reviewed journal analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of  “whiteness,” along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis – a sampling of terms that come up in the February issue.

Health Affairs, dubbed by a Washington Post columnist as “the bible of health policy,” represents something much more ambitious than woke virtue signaling. Its February issue reflects the effort of newly empowered “anti-racist” scholars to transform concepts that are still considered speculative and controversial – and some say unprovable – into scientific fact. This growing effort to document, measure, and quantify racism is being advanced by other high-profile publications, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Scientific American, which last year ran articles entitled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.”

But this scientific aspiration faces major challenges. Science demands verification, testability, and replicability, whereas race is a social construct that can be difficult to separate from factors like class or culture, and explaining the data often remains dependent on academic theories about systemic racism. The articles in Health Affairs indicate that elevating the concept of systemic racism from moral certitude to scientific fact will require developing new tools and methods – and even more theories – in the face of skepticism and resistance from dissenters who view this direction in research as unscientific and ideological.