RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dr-doom-doubles-down-on-face-mask-double-speak/

Throughout his tenure as the leading “expert” on the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci had a bad tendency to engage in double speak when the topic of wearing face masks was thrust into the public spotlight.

For example, in the early days of the pandemic, Fauci appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes, in which he said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

“While masks may block some droplets, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do,” he continued. “Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.”

A few days later, Fauci changed his tune, imploring Americans to wear face masks at all times, in all situations, including when they went outside. Later, he went even further, recommending that Americans wear multiple masks, calling it “commonsense” to do so.

However, we also know, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that Fauci sent an email on February 5, 2020 to a colleague stating, “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.”

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-the-centers-for-disease-control

An advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control is meeting now to discuss recommendations for the updated Covid jabs that the Food & Drug Administration approved yesterday.

Spoiler alert: the committee is likely to press the jabs on most adults, and possibly even children. The group is nominally independent, but Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC deputy director, telegraphed this plan to The New York Times two weeks ago:

Covid can still be nasty even if it doesn’t put you in the hospital. A booster shot will reduce its potency. Shah argues that children (over 6 months old) should also get a Covid shot this fall, even though their own Covid risk is very low.

Which makes this chart, which the CDC buried on page 17 of an 18-page presentation to the committee this morning, even more stunning.

About nine out of 10 Americans over 75 hospitalized this year for Covid have received the mRNA shots. (Not with Covid, for Covid.) Similarly, five out of six Americans aged 65-74 hospitalized for Covid had been jabbed, according to the CDC. And even among adults under 50, two out of three had been vaccinated.—

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/wokeness-has-infected-the-mayo-clinic/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=second

A medical institution that has done so much good over the years is putting politics before health.

In 39 years as a practicing nurse, I urged hundreds if not thousands of patients to consider seeking additional care at the Mayo Clinic. The famous medical center, based in Minnesota and with major campuses in Florida and Arizona, is widely regarded as one of the best in the country. Yet I can no longer in good conscience recommend this once-prestigious institution. The Mayo Clinic is now fully and unashamedly woke, and worse, it’s aggressively pushing its divisive agenda on the rest of health care.

The Mayo Clinic’s descent is deeply troubling because it occupies a unique place in medicine. Its website is wildly popular with patients who want information about conditions; many travel to Mayo locations for care. Hospitals and health-care groups look to it for guidance on everything from treatment protocols to human resources to a thousand other things. As a nurse, I relied on Mayo’s professional-development tools, and physicians across the country depend on Mayo’s continuing-education courses, which cover an astounding 42 topics and specialties. It also offers conferences that draw physicians from around the world. When Mayo says, “We share our knowledge globally, impact policy, and partner with others to create lasting — and much-needed — change,” it’s understating its influence on medicine.

So it matters when the Mayo Clinic pledges a staggering $100 million to the woke agenda, as it did last fall. It’s devoting this money to “eliminate racism and advance equity and inclusion . . . and to improve health equity.” Practically, this money is going to conferences, courses, and communications that are designed to shape the entire medical field around divisive and discriminatory ideology.

I participated in one such event in early August: Mayo’s two-day “RISE for Equity” event, which offered in-person and virtual attendance for continuing-education credit. It was designed for professionals including hospital administrators, hiring managers, and health-care educators, with the goal of “advancing and directing policy, programs and institutional initiatives” across the medical landscape — i.e., every part of medicine. I encountered nothing but indoctrination.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/09/06/why-is-the-cdc-no-longer-collecting-adverse-events-reports-for-covid-19-shots-n1724876

For reasons unexplained, the CDC recently ceased its collection of adverse events reports via its “V-safe” reporting system regarding the COVID-19 mRNA injections deceptively marketed as “vaccines.”

Via Brownstone Institute (emphasis added):

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) V-safe website quietly stopped collecting adverse event reports with no reason or explanation…

VAERS and V-safe are mutually exclusive safety collection databases operated by the FDA and CDC, respectively. VAERS is an older way of collecting safety data where one can fill out a form online, or manually, or by calling a toll-free number, whereas V-safe is a device “app” which requires online registration. Both VAERS and V-safe collect personal information, lot numbers, dates and associated information, but V-safe was an active collection system geared towards a younger app-using demographic.

Here is what the V-safe website reads as of September 2:

Thank you for your participation.

Data collection for COVID-19 vaccines concluded on June 30, 2023.

If you have symptoms or health problems following your COVID-19 vaccination that concern you, please contact your healthcare provider.

You can also report to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

VAERS, as I have documented previously elsewhere, is notoriously unreliable as a gauge of the actual rate of adverse events. As few as 1% of adverse events from injections are reported to the system. There are several potential reasons for this deficiency:

It is a voluntary reporting system, so healthcare providers are not ethically or legally required to report incidents of adverse events among their patients. You can imagine, as many doctors/nurses work within large medical systems intertwined with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, what kind of institutional disincentives might exist to discourage their use of VAERS.
There is no governmental oversight of complaints levied by patients to doctors and/or pharmaceutical companies to ensure that verbal patient reports ever make it into the system.
Like any government program, the VAERS system is a labyrinthine clusterf*** of bureaucratic rigmarole, and navigating it as a layperson is difficult — particularly for a patient or his/her family already distressed by a vaccine injury.
Studies have shown that, in fact, many healthcare providers themselves don’t know how to file a VAERS report.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/06/unexplained-excess-deaths-persist-in-post-covid-era/

According to data reported weekly by the CDC, the death rate in America remains elevated. In the six years prior to the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as the U.S., the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding the 2020, for example, the population growth adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

None of that is true today. The increase in total deaths – deaths from all causes, not just COVID deaths – is up significantly. If the period between October 2019 and June 2023 had adhered to predictable mortality rates, 10.5 million Americans would have died. Instead, during that period, 12.4 people died. This prolonged period of so-called excess deaths, 17 percent above normal, is only rivaled by the estimated 675,000 deaths from Spanish Flu in America in 1918-19 when the country had a much smaller population.

To illustrate how aberrant these grim statistics are, the chart below plots on a blue line the actual weekly deaths from all causes in the United States from the Fall of 2019 through the Spring of 2023. The grey line plots how many deaths would have occurred if mortality rates had adhered to predictable trends based on highly consistent statistics from the six prior years, 2013 through 2019. The data is indisputable, even if the causes remain mired in controversy. During the so-called COVID era, nearly 2.0 million people are dead who, if it had been normal times, would still be alive today.

There appears to be no end in sight, even though the horrific surges appear to be behind us. As shown on the right edges of the chart, going into the summer of 2023, weekly deaths from all causes remained persistently higher than normal. For example, during the last week of June, which is the most recent week for which there is reasonably complete reporting, 55,000 Americans died. Based on historical patterns, only 51,000 Americans would have died. Excess deaths in the U.S. are still about 7 percent above normal.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/medical-doctors-or-social-workers

Can your doctor cure poverty? How about homelessness? Food insecurity? For that matter, does your doctor treat the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination?

Most people answer this question readily: No. Doctors are trained to treat medical conditions, helping patients lead healthier, happier, longer lives. Yet the medical elite think the answer is “yes.” For years, health disparities between white and minority communities have been attributed to the so-called social determinants of health (SDH), which include the effects of poverty on communities, the residue of historic discrimination, and purported ongoing discriminatory practices in health care. But do these factors really determine health—or are they more properly termed “social factors affecting behaviors associated with health status”? That’s not nearly as catchy as SDH. It just happens to be more accurate.

In a 2017 report, “Perspectives on Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health,” the National Academy of Medicine went further, presenting the issue through the lens of critical race theory. As the report frames it, no social comity exists to characterize human social interactions, only a dyad of oppressor and oppressed. The goal of eliminating disparities in the social determinants of health would be the achievement of true health equity, defined as “The optimal conditions for all people by valuing everyone equally, rectifying historic inequities, and distributing resources according to need.” The last phrase evokes a certain nineteenth-century social and economic philosophy. The report goes on to tie health disparities, among other factors, to the portrayal of black men in the media and to the expulsion and suspension of black children in early education.

The report’s clearest message: no one should attribute any health-care disparities to individuals’ self-determined actions. The report also decries “getting distracted by the alleged ‘deficits’ or ‘individual behaviors’ of marginalized communities” and calls for moving away from a “decontextualized, biomedical framework.” 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2023/08/30/the-covid-19-alarmists-want-you-ignorant-and-obedient-how-will-you-respond-n1722957

As we at PJ Media have been warning for some months, the medical alarmists are warming up their scare machines just as children return to school and the weather is beginning to turn cooler—conveniently, just in time for the 2024 primaries, which are just a few months away. Joe Biden is asking Congress for more money for a new vaccine that will be “necessary,” whatever that means. [Narrator: We know what that means.]

The supercilious mask patrols are dusting off their badges and rattling their swords, eager to lord it over their fellow Americans who refuse to go through life terrified, beaten down, and forced into compliance with draconian COVID-19 measures.

One of the “tells” of the coming lockdowns and vax mandates is that the fact-checkers are escalating their attacks on the free flow of information. They are beginning to enforce The Narrative again to ensure you only get information from Approved Government Agencies. In August alone, PJ Media has had nearly a dozen articles demonetized by Google Ads, meaning that we can’t make any money from the articles, even though we still have to pay the writers for their work.

And not only that, but every time we get demonetized, it goes against our Quality Score, which can mean the difference between decent ads for products you might be interested in and an endless parade of ads for toe fungus or intestinal worm remedies (please, anything but those!).

What kinds of articles are they demonetizing? Here are just a few, with all of them being flagged for “unreliable and harmful claims”:

First up is this article from Robert Spencer calling out California congressional candidate Steve Cox, who said this about anti-vaxxers:

Whenever anyone says “we all die from something” (or a variation thereof) to justify not taking precautions to help protect others in this pandemic, we should be allowed to shoot them. “Why are you crying? We all die from something.” For you, it’s that bullet in your gut. [Emphasis added]

But we’re the bad guys for calling out this thug.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-boosts-new-vaccines-for-everybody/

“I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to Congress a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works,” said Joe Biden in Lake Tahoe last Friday, August 25. “Tentatively it is recommended that it will likely be recommended everybody get it no matter whether they’ve gotten it before or not.”

The Delaware Democrat, 80, did not reveal why a new vaccine is “necessary,” though the news report cited a new version of the Omicron strain called XBB.1.5. The new vaccine allegedly “works” and Biden was more certain that “everybody get it,”  whatever they had done before. Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax are “working on doses of the XBB update,” but there’s more to it.

On Monday, August 20, an unnamed “White House official” told reporters the Biden administration urges all Americans to get booster shots to counter a new wave of infections. The announcement came days after the Centers for Disease Control announced that it is tracking a new COVID-19 strain, BA.2.86, discovered in Michigan, Denmark, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

No word where BA.2.86 first appeared and how it arrived in Michigan if the point of origin was Israel, Denmark or the UK. Virologists and evolutionary biologists claim that the BA.2.86 variant will have equal or greater “escape” that the Omicron variants.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is tracking the new variants and the White House, according to the unnamed official, will be “encouraging all Americans to get those boosters in addition to flu shots and RSV shots.” If this leaves people confused, they might dial back to Biden’s top medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Dr. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology. Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), was on record that Fauci “doesn’t understand electronic microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he was, heading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2023.

Dr. Fauci funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to perform gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. The WIV, in turn, received shipments of deadly pathogens courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese national who headed the special pathogens unit at Canada’s National Microbiology Lab. In 2017-2018 alone, Dr. Qiu made at least five trips to the WIV.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/31/we-urgently-need-new-approaches-to-obtain-organs-for-transplantation-one-is-available-immediately/

Modern medicine has produced many high-tech miracles, among them gene therapy, electrical stimulation devices that restore significant function after traumatic spinal cord injury, and robot-performed surgery.

Another sector of medicine that needs a breakthrough is transplantation of solid organs. More than 100,000 Americans are waiting for transplants, and due to a shortage of hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys, at least 17 die each day. Currently, donor organs – from a living person or a cadaver – must match the recipient’s tissue type and size, and often, the match is not perfect. By one estimate, approximately half of transplanted organs are rejected by recipients’ bodies within 10-12 years. Compounding the shortage, the organ procurement system in the U.S. is inefficient, inconsistent, and unaccountable – in short, a mess that causes preventable deaths.

A high-tech approach that uses organs from genetically engineered pigs for transplantation, xenotransplantation, might both eliminate the need for human organ donors and reduce the risk of tissue rejection.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported in JAMA Surgery earlier this month that they had transplanted a pig kidney with 10 gene edits into a brain-dead man, where it functioned normally – producing urine and evading rejection – during a seven-day study.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/08/30/control-versus-choice-n1723088

COVID cases are up. Hospitalizations climbed 24% last week.

But the media make everything seem scarier than it is. The headline “Up 24%!” comes after dramatic lows. Hospitalizations are still less than half what they were when President Joe Biden said, “The pandemic is over.”  

Yet the shallow media keep pounding away: “It may be time to break out the masks” headlined CNN.

Frightened people believe. The movie studio Lionsgate reinstated an office mask mandate. Atlanta’s Morris Brown College mandated masks and even banned parties.

This month, several school districts in Kentucky and Texas closed. “The safety and wellbeing of our students, staff, and community is a top priority,” said the school superintendent in Texas.

But kids rarely get very sick from COVID, and schools aren’t COVID hotspots. Studies on tens of thousands of people found “no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of the coronavirus.” 

A Lancet study found Florida had the 12th-fewest excess COVID deaths in the country, even though Florida students went back to school without masks relatively soon. 

At least Texas’ and Kentucky’s closures were isolated and brief. Long-term closures during the pandemic brought America’s lowest math and reading scores in decades. Florida’s kids suffered less learning loss than kids in other states. 

Sweden, which never closed its schools, suffered no learning loss. Sweden’s education minister wrote that children were “at much lower risk of serious illness” and that “keeping children learning was vital.”