Displaying posts categorized under

MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Amazon Censored Books on COVID Vaccine After Pressure from Biden White House By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/07/report-amazon-censored-books-on-covid-vaccine-after-pressure-from-biden-white-house/

New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.

As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.

In an email dated March 2nd, 2021, Andrew Slavitt, a former senior advisor for COVID-19 in the Biden White House, asked “who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?”

“If you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up,” Slavitt said in a later email on the same day. “I haven’t looked beyond that but if that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”

In response, officials from Amazon expressed their hesitance at doing the White House’s bidding, saying “We will not be doing a manual intervention today. The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”

The Amazon official later says that another company official “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.” He then admitted that a tweak was in the works at the website which would redirect more customers’ search results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to retract 6 studies, correct 31 after ‘data forgery’ allegations By Rick Sobey

https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/01/23/dana-farber-cancer-institute-to-retract-6-studies-correct-31-after-data-forgery-allegations/
This comes after Harvard’s ex-prez faced plagiarism allegations

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute says the research giant is seeking to retract six studies and correct 31 others, as local scientists face “data forgery” allegations for their cancer research.

This controversy at the Harvard cancer institute comes after the university’s former president, Claudine Gay, resigned amid plagiarism allegations.

Dana-Farber is moving to retract the six manuscripts and correct 31 others following a bombshell blog from scientist Sholto David. His revealing blog took aim at four Dana-Farber researchers, including Dana-Farber President and CEO Laurie Glimcher.

“No doubt Laurie built her career on papers like this one, in Nature Immunology (2003), which includes some impressive contributions to art, but perhaps not to science,” David wrote in the “For Better Science” blog.

“As the whole world furiously argues over whether the president of Harvard did or didn’t use some quotation marks in the right place, scientists at the affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) must breathe a sigh of relief, no one has bothered to critically read their research in years! Far worse skeletons than plagiarism lurk in the archives…,” wrote David, a molecular biologist.

Following David’s explosive post that focused on four researchers, Dana-Farber confirmed that six studies have retractions underway: Requests have been submitted and are being reviewed by the relevant publication, or requests are being prepared.

Also, 31 manuscripts have been identified as needing corrections, which are in various stages of completion. One manuscript with a reported error remains under examination.

“Correcting the scientific record is a common practice of institutions with strong research integrity processes at which basic research is conducted,” said Barrett Rollins, research integrity officer and chief scientific officer, emeritus, at Dana-Farber. “Some of the potential errors that blogger Sholto David flagged had come up in our ongoing reviews.

When Science Is Not Science Joel Zinberg, M.D.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/when-science-is-not-science/

We’ll be a long time recovering from the evidence-free ‘science’ pushed on the public during Covid.

Just 22 percent of all adults and 41 percent of those 65 and older — the most vulnerable group — have received the updated 2023–24 Covid-19 vaccine. The numbers are nearly identical to those of the previous updated (bivalent) Covid-19 booster — 21 percent of adults and 43 percent of people 65 and older. But both updates showed a marked drop-off from the original two-shot vaccine series that 79 percent of adults and 94 percent of the elderly received. Senior FDA officials Doctors Peter Marks and Robert Califf argue that despite the proven benefits of Covid-19 vaccines, we have reached a “tipping point” where this new vaccine hesitancy will result in thousands of preventable deaths.

But low vaccine uptake is not, as Marks and Califf suggest, a result of misinformation, at least not misinformation in the way they mean it. Rather, it is the product of science, specifically public-health science, as practiced during the pandemic, that was evidence-free, politically and personally motivated, dismissive of other points view, and that ended up undermining public trust.

As time has gone by, it has become clear that public-health pandemic science, as personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci — who famously declared, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” — was far removed from the scientific method of unbiased observation and experimentation to ascertain truth about natural processes.

Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently admitted in congressional testimony that the guidelines he championed to keep people six feet apart were not based on scientific data. “They sort of just appeared,” he said. Testimony from the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, confirmed Fauci’s assessment that the six-foot distancing recommendation was not evidence based.

In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant.

Trust the Science? Fauci Finally Admits Pandemic Errors

https://amac.us/newsline/society/trust-the-science-fauci-finally-admits-pandemic-errors/

Former leading government scientists have finally admitted, albeit unintentionally, that they botched the response to COVID-19. But what we don’t yet have – and what the public deserves – is any sense of accountability for the immense harm inflicted on the American people under the pretense of “trusting the science.”

In testimony on January 9 before the House select subcommittee investigating the federal government’s COVID policies, Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently retired from his position as Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in which capacity he was the face of the federal COVID response, admitted that some of his ”scientific” recommendations during the pandemic were based on purely arbitrary judgments.

Most notably, according to the subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who is also a physician, Fauci acknowledged that his “recommendation” that people “socially distance” by six feet (rather than, say, three, or twelve, or any other number) to minimize the virus’s transmission was “likely not based on scientific data,” but “sort of just appeared” to him.

But Fauci was unrepentant about the deleterious effects his randomly chosen recommendation had on American life – most notably school shutdowns throughout the country (since few schools had room to set up classrooms with students sitting six feet apart), closed businesses (for similar reasons), massive federal spending (often wasted) to try to keep businesses afloat and workers paid, kids prevented from playing with their friends, and so on.

Even worse, in contrast with what every parent who observed how little their children were being taught from online classes could see, Fauci still denied that there was any proof that the school shutdowns caused learning loss at all.

In reality, a multitude of studies issued by reputable research organizations have confirmed such losses. For instance, the Center for School and Student Progress, operating in conjunction with the Northwest Evaluation Association (a nonprofit educational testing organization) reported, “In nearly all grades, achievement gains during 2022–23 fell short of pre-pandemic trends.” More precisely, the study found that the average student will need the equivalent of “4.1 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.5 months in math,” and that ”marginalized [that is, minority or low-income] students remain the furthest from recovery.”

Patients, Not Medical Students, Are a Vulnerable Population By Sheldon Rubenfeld

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/patients-not-medical-students-are-a-vulnerable-population/

Baylor College of Medicine’s cancellation of a lecture on antisemitism in medicine is just one sign of the troubling consequences of DEI.

Two months after Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, Baylor College of Medicine canceled a lecture scheduled many months before on “Antisemitism in Medicine,” to be given by me and another physician who has received many antisemitic threats, some of which led to police protection. Last year, my long-running course at Baylor on medicine and the Holocaust was canceled. It has become increasingly evident that medical schools, medical-licensing bodies, and medical organizations are reluctant to acknowledge, let alone confront, the fact that their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies breed antisemitism in medicine.

For the past 20 years of my nearly 50-year affiliation with Baylor, I offered an elective course, Healing by Killing: Medicine during the Third Reich, to first-year medical students. The course describes Hitler’s adoption of the German medical profession’s eugenic racist ideology and the central and indispensable role of physicians in designing and implementing the Holocaust. It also includes many disquieting photos and film clips from Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps. Judging by essays submitted in earlier years, the students took to heart the lessons about the potential for physician abuse of patients.

In April last year, I gave the fifth of the course’s nine lectures, “Why the Jews?” The first half of the lecture outlines the history of antisemitism; the second half is about countertransference, a common psychological phenomenon that occurs when a physician allows his or her feelings to influence a patient’s treatment. I asked the students to identify personal biases that could interfere with good patient care, such as biases against patients with a particular diagnosis, disability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political party affiliation, religion, educational level, personal features such as tattoos, and so on, and gave as an example my experience as a young doctor with a suicidal Palestinian graduate student, an example I had used many times before.

The New Segregation on Campus UCLA’s medical school divides students by race to teach ‘antiracism.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ucla-school-of-medicine-antiracism-course-do-no-harm-office-of-civil-rights-8143c3ae?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare.

The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.

This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality—particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces—influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”

It’s also illegal. According to Do No Harm, a group that describes its mission as “eliminating racial discrimination in healthcare,” the practice violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a letter to the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights, Do No Harm wrote this week that the school’s racial caucusing groups “illegally segregate and separate its first year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin” in violation of Title VI.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo Calls For a Halt in the Use of COVID-19 mRNA Shots By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/03/florida-surgeon-general-joseph-ladapo-calls-for-a-halt-in-the-use-of-covid-19-mrna-shots/

On Wednesday, Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo called for a complete halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines” due to DNA contaminants in the products that can affect unintended parts of the body and lead to “turbo cancers” among recipients.

Without a proper assessment of the risks of DNA integration, “these vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” the surgeon general said in a press release.

Dr. Ladapo’s move comes after sent a letter to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Mandy Cohen last month demanding answers to his questions regarding the discovery of billions of DNA fragments per dose of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA injections.

Ladapo, a Harvard-trained MD and PhD, was not satisfied with the FDA’s response

In his December 6 letter, the Surgeon General had outlined his “concerns regarding nucleic acid contaminants in the approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA.”

Code red: DEI is in the ICU Opposition to programs based on racial discrimination is mounting Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/code-red-dei-is-in-the-icu/

One of the most important political developments of 2023 was the growing pushback against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Those DEI programs and the ideology that underpin them are under siege politically and legally, and they are losing. They had grown rapidly, thanks to a mixture of support, indifference and timidity. But that began to ebb last year and will continue to recede in 2024.

The wounded patient was wheeled into the intensive care unit when the Supreme Court undermined a crucial foundation for DEI and related affirmative action programs. The decision came in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a similar case against the University of North Carolina. SCOTUS ruled the universities were illegally discriminating when their admissions favored some minorities and effectively penalized others. Neither public nor private universities had the right to do that.

Those lawsuits were brought against universities on behalf of Asian-Americans, but their victory has reverberated through the world of corporations, non-profits and government agencies. That’s not surprising since those institutions have a host of programs and practices similar to those at Harvard and UNC. They, too, discriminate in hiring and promotion, in hopes their “affirmative” policies will create more inclusive, racially-diverse workplaces. One question sure to reach the High Court is whether these programs are illegal.

The programs also raise practical questions. One is whether they actually achieve their aim of creating more inclusive workplaces. Or do they create more hostile, racially-divided ones and wider public resentment beyond them? Another question is whether institutions committed to these programs can find ways to work around the court decisions and hide their efforts.

The policies used to pursue these goals are sometimes called “reverse discrimination” because they benefit groups, primarily African-Americans, who had long been subjects of pernicious discrimination, segregation, and, indeed, racial hatred.

The terminology of “reverse discrimination” is outdated and misleading. We live more than half a century after the tectonic changes of the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson and a supportive Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and a series of massive government programs, many of them meant to assist historically-disadvantaged groups. After that long span, the beneficiaries today are the children and grandchildren of those who were harmed by segregation and Jim Crow laws.

Leprosy, Polio, Malaria, TB, Measles … and Massive Unscreened Illegal Immigration James Varney

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/27/leprosy_polio_malaria_tb_measles__and_massive_unscreened_illegal_immigration_1000817.html

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Vaccination in Pakistan, one of two countries where polio is still endemic. The other is Afghanistan, source of an estimated 90,000 taken into the U.S. since America’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal. 

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

A Health Care Checkup On Justin Trudeau’s Canada

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/29/a-health-care-checkup-on-justin-trudeaus-canada/

For decades, Americans have been told that the only humane, decent health care system is one run by the government. The oft-uttered complaint is that it’s a shame that the richest country in the world doesn’t have universal medical care. The reality is that the universal systems in other wealthy nations are cruel, cold bureaucracies.

If there are any doubts that this is true, look northward, to Canada, where waiting lists for treatment are leaving “patients frozen in line,” Pacific Research Institute President and Chief Executive Officer Sally Pipes recently wrote in Forbes.

“When everyone within a country is trapped in a public health insurance system,” says Pipes, patients suffer through a median waiting time “for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner” for an average of 27.7 weeks.

“That’s over six months – the longest ever recorded,” she adds.