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COVID-19, Doctors, Featured, Health Policy, Law, Politics, What's New

America Out Loud PULSE: Are Medical Boards Helping or Hurting Patients?

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From my America Out Loud Pulse podcast with Kelly Sutton, MD – https://www.americaoutloud.news/are-medical-boards-helping-or-hurting-patients/

The patient-physician relationship is supposed to be sacred, as Hippocrates explained thousands of years ago. Medicine has entered a brave new world of third parties (insurers) telling us what to do. Various laws, particularly in California, are squelching choice for patients and free speech for physicians even with threats of loss of their licenses. Consequently, patients are losing their choice in medical treatment.

In June 2015, California passed a law, SB277 that removed the personal and religious belief exemption from mandated vaccines. Without the 15 to16 vaccines,, a child cannot not attend public schools or day care facilities. In September 2019, California went a step farther to squelch medical vaccine exemptions with SB 276. This applied to private as well as public schools.

Prior to the enactment of SB 276, state law permitted physicians to issue medical exemptions based on their independent medical judgment. Now a State Public Health Officer is the final arbiter. The state will review all medical exemptions at schools where fewer than 95 percent of students are vaccinated, from doctors who submit five or more exemptions in one year and from schools that haven’t shared vaccination rates. The state will cancel waivers written by doctors who are under investigation by the medical board.

The State has the power to revoke the exemption if it decides the exemption is “inappropriate.” Talk about inserting a third party smack dab in the middle between physicians and their patients. If the state determines a physician is “contributing to a public health risk,” it will report the physician to California’s medical board.

The laws are designed to crack down on physicians “practicing outside the accepted standard of care.” But they also target the parents who believe it is their right to make medical decisions for their children. The term “anti-vaxxer” is a pejorative description of concerned parents and physicians who question the “science.” I think Covid-19 taught us more than we want to know about the perversion of science.

Mandates rely on coercion rather than informed consent. Clearly, a parent is left in an untenable position: Vaccines or pull their child out of school. Most parents – if both are working – do not have the ability to homeschool their children. Moreover, this could only be the beginning of the erosion of individual patient rights. We have a major controversy over the appropriate treatment of minors who have decided they want to be the opposite sex. In some states schools have the right to withhold gender issues from the child’s parents. Parents have lost custody of their child over treatment choices that could have life-altering consequences. In some states, schools do not have to inform parents about an abortion of a child over 12 years old.

The silver lining? Medical tyranny has gone so far that more and more patients and physicians are becoming activists.

Bio

Kelly Sutton M.D. completed residency in Internal Medicine and some Pediatrics, and practiced family medicine for almost fifty years, using knowledge from conventional and integrative medicine. She practiced until her medical license was revoked for writing eight vaccine medical exemptions by the state of California in 2022, and by Massachusetts and New York in 2023 based only on reciprocal discipline. There were no patient complaints in any state, and no patient injury. Dr. Sutton is challenging this revocation in court.

See  www.reclaimingmed.org/drsutton for this story, its relation to other doctors’ experience with regulators, and their legal cases.

COVID-19, Culture & Society, Current Events, Featured, Health Policy, Law, Politics, What's New

America Out Loud PULSE: Doctors and Patients or Bureaucrats: Who’s in Charge of Our Medical Care? with Andy Schlafly, JD

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From my America Out Loud Pulse podcast with Andy Schlafly, JD – https://www.americaoutloud.news/doctors-and-patients-or-bureaucrats-whos-in-charge-of-our-medical-care-2/

Political persecution through the legal system has become the new American justice. But it can work both ways – if we have the courage.

President Calvin Coolidge, a strong proponent of limited government, believed that “in order for the Constitution and self-government to survive, the people had to be vigilant in its preservation.” Covid-19 started a government and media censorship juggernaut. It is imperative that we all join to stop it in its tracks. The case currently being argued in front of the Supreme Court, Murthy v Missouri arose from – you guessed it – Covid. Missouri and other states assert that the government’s attempts to suppress so-called Covid misinformation went beyond mere public health information to suppression of speech via social media. At oral arguments, Justice Jackson seemed to feel that suppressing speech is the government’s job. To quote: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.”  The First Amendment to the Constitution says the government cannot abridge freedom of speech. As Justice Brandeis wrote in the 1927 free speech case, Whitney v California, free speech is at the heart of a democratic society and the answer to alleged falsehoods is “more speech, not enforced silence.”

Medical freedom for doctors and patients is becoming a distant memory. Physicians are afraid to go into pain management for fear of being labelled a pill pusher. Patients with chronic pain are resorting to getting heroin on the streets rather than be put in a government database. Physicians are bullied by medical boards with the specter of losing their licenses for having valid alternative views regarding medical treatment plans.

Lawyers—who we all know can strike fear into our hearts—can be a big part of preserving our liberty. The legal fights to reign in government overreach are about more than Covid. Lawyers are here to help protect the rights of the individual citizens. They are our last defense against government oppression and corporate corruption. Lawsuits can amplify a few lone voices and let those in power get the message: Our bodies and minds belong to us, not to the government.

I love quotes. Let me give you a few of my favorites on this topic:

“Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.” Graham Greene

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”  Albert Einstein

“All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.”  Adlai Stevenson

“The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”  Carl Sagan

“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.”  Thomas Jefferson

Attorney Andy Schlafly a wonderful friend of the show and general counsel to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is here today to discuss freedom of speech and a recent case headed to the Supreme Court.

Link to amicus brief PDF: https://aapsonline.org/judicial/aaps-amicus-murthy-v-missouri-2-7-2024.pdf

Bio

Andy Schlafly is general counsel to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. He received a B.S.E. in electrical engineering and certificate in engineering physics from Princeton University. After graduating from Princeton, Mr. Schlafly briefly worked as a device physicist for Intel, then became a microelectronics engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He then attended Harvard Law School along with Barack Obama. For two years Mr. Schlafly was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, Mr. Schlafly served as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall Law School and worked for a large law firm before beginning private practice. Mr. Schlafly created the wiki-based Conservapedia in November 2006 to counter the apparent liberal bias in Wikipedia.

COVID-19, Featured, Law, Medical Ethics, Politics, What's New

America Out Loud PULSE: Informed Consent and Medical Coercion in the Age of Covid

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From my America Out Loud Pulse podcast with Greg Glaser, JD –https://www.americaoutloud.com/informed-consent-and-medical-coercion-in-the-era-of-covid/

Informed consent is the keystone of medical autonomy and participating in our own medical care. It is the physician’s ethical and legal duty to provide informed consent, and patients have the right to make decisions about their own health. Informed consent is generally something people only think about when they are about to undergo a surgical procedure. Thankfully, now “informed consent” is on the tips of the tongues of newly minted advocates of medical freedom.

Many patients and physicians had lost their curiosity about the effects of many medications, including vaccines. But we must not be lazy about exercising our rights. We need informed consent before subjecting our bodies to any outside intervention – even if it is “for our own good.” Assuming you have the mental capacity to make the decision, informed consent must include an understandable explanation of the intervention with the risks and benefits of the medical intervention and the probability that the risk or benefit will occur. Informed consent must voluntarily, without coercion or duress. The physician might not agree with your decision, but the decision is yours to make.

The Covid fiasco has brought to light the element of coercion with the vaccination mandates. The government authorities banned children from in-person schooling, people—including critically needed health care professionals—lost their jobs.

However, the government’s vaccine tyranny did not begin with Covid. We have laws on the books like the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act enacted in 2005. The PREP Act provides nearly blanket immunity from liability for manufacturers, distributors, and administrators of certain drugs meant to counteract an epidemic or pandemic. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) merely determines that something either is or may become a public health emergency. Then HHS can make a “declaration” that certain entities and “countermeasures” (including vaccines) are covered by the PREP Act.

The federal government has given itself a lot of power. Today we’ll discuss returning some of that power to the people with my guest, Greg Glaser, JD.

COVID-19, Current Events, Guest Column, What's New

COVID-19: Shall You Rush to Inject Your Toddler?

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Guest Column by Jane M. Orient, MD

        I hope you are staying well in these troubled times.

        Many parents are said to be relieved that they can now take their toddler or 6-month-old infant for their COVID shots. The federal advisory committee considering the shots voted 22 to zero to recommend Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for both Pfizer and Moderna injections for children at least 6 months old, and FDA and CDC approved them with lightning speed. Thus, the shots that the federal government already bought and paid for won’t have to be wasted.

        The shots only have an EUA, not FDA approval, and you will need to sign a consent form. Some data you might like to consider: As of May, there had been 60,442 adverse events involving liver damage reported to the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including 204 in children under age 12. Some involved death or need for a liver transplant.

 

        Evidently, children under age 12 were being given unauthorized shots.

        Observers of the hearings pointed out:

  • The trials in young children enrolled 4,500 subjects, but 3,000 (67%) dropped out.
  • No actual health benefits were shown, so they used “immunobridging”—comparing antibody response to that of older subjects in a previous trial. A number of experts said that antibody response did not correlate well with immunity, especially against the new variants.
  • Committee members received risk: benefit documents (190 single-spaced pages) at most two days before the meeting, so they did not have adequate time to study them.
  • By fall of 2021, 26 high-quality studies from outside the U.S. showed a two- to seven-fold increased risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) from mRNA shots.

        While the shots are “free,” children and their parents will pay the costs of any adverse reactions.

        Parents need to do due diligence. In particular, they need to be alert to mild symptoms that could warn of myocarditis. Doctors need to have a “high index of suspicion” for checking blood troponin levels and other indicators of heart damage to allow early diagnosis and treatment.

Jane Orient, M.D., Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, jane@aapsonline.org

COVID-19, Culture & Society, Guest Column, Politics, What's New

On Covid and Conscience

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Guest Column by Robert S. Emmons, MD

What has harmed you more, Covid-19 or loneliness? While daily we watched ominous dashboards of Covid deaths, delayed medical care, barriers to self-care, drug overdoses and suicides all made mortality rates rise. For my part, I have learned how to do my work via videoconference, and I have never been so busy with new referrals in my entire career as a psychiatrist.

As our preoccupation with all things Covid lets up, fear is loosening its grip on our minds. Now we can gain the perspective we need to recognize the outsized influence of unconscious moral impulses on personal and communal risk management.

We like to imagine that we regularly reason our ways through life’s problems, but most of our actions are driven by the unconscious algorithms that enable us to make daily decisions small and large, without expending undue mental energy in well-worn territory. The same is true for problems of conscience. Our unconscious moral algorithms are partly inherited. They also are profoundly shaped by institutional messages, popular culture, trauma and our earliest moral role models.

Various institutions, media and corporations know very well that moral responses drive many of our decisions, so when they have something to sell, they routinely provide us with a window-dressing of topical information, coupled with relentless, breathless calls to conscience as seemingly our only mode of motivation. For nearly two years now, we have been bombarded with the same kind of messaging around matters of medical science.

Well-intentioned appeals by public officials to conscience — “Do your part for your community!” — have, predictably, been appropriated as fodder for the moral outrage sales machine. Provisional scientific opinion on public health has too often been inflated to imperative in wildly punitive ways: “Comply, or you’ll kill Grandma!” “Don’t comply, or government will kill you!”

In my practice of motivating patients toward effective lifestyle behaviors, I deliver information about the links between today’s choices and tomorrow’s effects in carefully calibrated, nonjudgmental language. I teach my patients to self-reinforce small successes, rather than tally up the wages of failure. It only brings up resistance for me to imply, no matter how subtly or unintentionally, to a patient that they are bad if they do not follow my advice. Coercive pressure almost always backfires by undermining trust.

Exactly the same principles apply in the field of public health. A media milieu of algorithm-driven shaming and blackballing has hardly improved the quality of decision-making by elected officials, health officers, their audiences or doctors. We can have more confidence in health decisions taken in the private sphere where pressure tactics cannot reach.

Just like Covid, public health controversies are here with us to stay. As you devise your own personal risk management protocols, language that implies right and wrong can be your dependable guide to recognizing science information that is contaminated by the unconscious moral-emotional complex.

“Misinformation” and “disinformation” head the list of the words I ban from my professional lexicon. These necessarily elastic pieces of journalistic shorthand mainly encourage negative moral impulses toward sources rather than rational evaluation of evidence. I routinely discount medical information presented by sources that campaign aggressively against “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As a clinical scientist, I place my confidence in the experts, agencies, and publications that rigorously eschew browbeating and threats.

In our hearts, we know the difference between false trust based on idealization of celebrity, deference to authority and manufactured group affiliation as well as authentic trust based on the respect, care and reciprocity that can only happen at a one-to-one level. If you need help interpreting medical science, then, your personal physician is your best guide.

Each one of us can do our part for our communities, going forward, by abstaining from all morally charged language when speaking to public health topics. If you see a neighbor practicing their own medical risk management in ways different than yours, please give them the benefit of the doubt, not the finger.

This post is by Robert S. Emmons, M.D, of Moretown who has maintained a private psychiatric practice in Vermont for 33 years. He is a member of the volunteer clinical faculty at University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, where he has taught the topics of professionalism, ethics and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. https://www.robertemmonsmd.us

Previously published in the VTdigger, https://vtdigger.org/2022/02/28/emmons-on-covid-and-conscience/

COVID-19, Culture & Society, Current Events, Doctors, Featured, Op-eds, Politics, What's New

It’s Black History Month: Let’s Get Real

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I knew we were turning the corner on Covidmania when I walked by two little girls, one black, one white, playing on their front lawn. They had cheerful, mask-free glowing smiles. They proudly showed me the twisty little creatures they made with pipe cleaners. What a welcomed sight!

As Covid fear was waning, unnerved by the thought that we might regain our happy lives, the government-media complex blared that our society is systemically infected with racism and white people must repent.

The deafening drumbeat of race, racism, and more race is leaving its mark. New York City is using race as a criterion allocating Covid-19 treatments. That will certainly erode trust in the medical system. President Biden is undermining the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by pledging to fill a vacancy, not with the best person, but a black female. The issue is not that black female bright legal scholars do not exist, but that the only stated criteria were gender and skin color. Of course, it didn’t matter that Bush nominee former California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown was a black female when her confirmation for the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. was delayed for two years for the crime of not supporting affirmative action.

To prove their anti-racist creds schools, corporations, and government entities instituted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) “training.” Is that like house-breaking a dog? Are white people to be figuratively rapped on the nose with an old newspaper? And if obedience school is unsuccessful, we can tax them into submission.

California’s year-old, “first-of-its-kind” Reparations Task Force has determined that reparations should be limited to descendants of slaves who were “kidnapped from their homeland.” Black immigrants are excluded because they have a country to which they can return if they are unhappy with the racist United States. Missing the irony, California’s black female slave descendant Secretary of State posited that Barack Obama had the gumption to run for president only because he was not a descendant of slaves. Thus, he was not—these many generations later—“stunted” by the psychological impact of slavery that left slaves with only enough energy to merely survive. Moreover, Obama did not have limitations “drilled in his psyche.” Exactly who is doing the drilling today? California elected officials? Television shows with black stars? Teachers? Homeboys in the ‘hood? Absentee parents?

Wow! So black people can’t aspire to greatness if they had a slave as an ancestor. Talk about the bigotry of low expectations. Show me the excuse for the success of slave descendant entrepreneur and philanthropist Madame C.J. Walker, considered the first female millionaire in the United States in 1910. And James Derham who went from slave to physician and treated patients of all colors in Louisiana in the 1700s.

Mr. Antiracism himself, Henry Rogers (aka Ibram X. Kendi) may have bamboozled corporate America into spreading the toxic instruction to find racism in every action and thought in every minute of one’s waking hours. Disturbingly, the American Medical Association as part of its Health Equity Plan aims to “excise the myth of meritocracy.”

With big money at stake, professional football players are chosen for their ability, not their skin color. Is winning games more important than saving patients’ lives? Should we not be teaching our students to be scientifically curious, compassionate, and have the health of individual patients as their prime concern? Should physicians not attain knowledge at the highest level possible?

Now it seems that political agendas, not patients have taken precedence. A medical school group called White Coats for Black Lives is making the rounds at medical schools. Its stated goals are (1) to “dismantle dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism;” and (2) to rebuild a healthy future for marginalized communities by abolishing prisons, establishing federal universal health care, ensuring reproductive and environmental justice, and “queer and trans liberation.” Many of us want to improve health care for those who have poor access—black, white, and otherwise. But let’s not sacrifice quality care for individual patients for a broad political movement.

After two years of manufactured fear, negativity, and learned helplessness courtesy of loudmouthed ideologues fomenting unrest, we need a dose of reality. White people are not stamped with the mark of the devil. Every friendly gesture is not a feeble attempt at reparations. It’s just a fellow human being cheerful. Plenty of black and other persons of color have intelligence, strength and ingenuity. We are able to do more than merely survive.

As Ezra Pound said, “a slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.” Don’t wait. Free yourselves.

 

COVID-19, Current Events, Guest Column, What's New

Tips for Starting Your Business in the Post-COVID Market

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Guest column by Lance Cody-Valdez

Major world events like pandemics have a way of forcing us to re-evaluate our priorities. In the face of a rapidly changing world, we have to ask ourselves: Do I enjoy how I’m living? For many people, the answer is no — and, according to Medical News Today, work is a major source of life dissatisfaction. Since the pandemic has led to more people working from home (and proving themselves self-motivated in the process), many experts expect to see a rise in the COVID-preneur.

If you’re a hopeful “green” business owner who has been inspired during the pandemic, you fall into this category. Although that means you’re in good company, it also means you need to make the right moves in order to ensure your business can stand out among the crowd.

Embrace Technology From the Start

Right now, it’s important that any business entering the market is accessible online. Technology use was already on the rise before the pandemic, but it has really taken off since. COVID-19 led to a boom in virtual connections, social media use, and other online tools and services. This makes remote work an ideal setup, so take the steps necessary to create a healthy, balanced workspace in your home.

Whether you carve out space in your bedroom or upgrade a detached garage, a work-from-home solution is an efficient and economical way to get your venture off the ground. Note that outbuildings often need extra TLC before they are livable, so if you choose this solution you may need to start with pest control. Finding a local, qualified pest control pro is easier than ever — simply Google “rodent exterminator near me” and use Angi.com to filter through customer ratings and reviews, then call a handful of contractors for quotes.

Businesses that start now will need to have an online presence in order to compete in this space. For example, you might want to consider creating a mobile app for your business. If you go this route, remember that your product needs to stand out from the crowd. DIY app builders offer a pretty lackluster product that’s likely to look just like hundreds of other apps out there. Hiring mobile app designers can help you to create an app that has a look, feel, and function that’s unique to your business and brand.

Investigate Market Trends

RetailNext notes that another important step all business owners should take is to investigate the latest market trends. Taking customer needs and desires for granted is never wise, but it’s an even worse move right now. The pandemic has changed so much about our lives that a lot of the assumptions we might make about the market are likely to be off base.

For example, for a while, experts were predicting that primarily shopping online could be here to stay, even after the pandemic threat has passed. However, a recent poll from Morning Brew shows that US adults are just as likely to shop in-person. E-commerce isn’t going away, but it’s not going to take over the market the way some had predicted. Other trends, such as the boost in vegan grocery consumption and increased interest in environmental sustainability should inform and motivate the moves you make as a business.

Start Small

One of the best ways to set yourself up for success is to figure out how to start your business on a small, achievable scale for the immediate term. For example, you might decide to pick up side work as a freelancer for a while or sell handmade goods through an online shop rather than quit your day job or rent a storefront. Smaller moves might not be as exciting, but they offer a lot in terms of experience and stability.

You should also establish your business with the state. This ensures you remain in compliance with necessary tax and labor laws. When choosing a business structure, opting for an LLC can be the ideal choice as a newbie entrepreneur. It’s the easiest entity to set up, and it comes with personal asset protection and tax advantages. To register your LLC, use an affordable online formation service to expedite the process.

When you start small, you give yourself time to figure things out without taking a massive risk right from the jump. This warm-up period will allow you to hone in on a brand image, figure out your workflow, and identify your target audience — all while bringing in some extra income. This puts you in a great position to plan and lay the groundwork for making your idea into a full-time career.

With the right plan, you can create a business that meets post-pandemic needs while standing out from the pack. If starting a business is your next big career move, we hope this article helps you come up with the best techniques to make it happen.

About the author: A few years ago, burned out and miserable from his job in corporate marketing, Lance Cody-Valdez decided it was time to invest in himself. He quit his job the following day and used his meager savings to stay afloat as he built a career as a freelance writer and content marketer. He created free-lance-now.com to help others use freelancing to escape the 9 to 5 daily grind.

Photo Credit: Pexels

COVID-19, Current Events, Featured, Op-eds, Politics, What's New

Covid 2022: A New Year, New Fears

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By now, Dr. Fauci’s Covid “fearspeak” has become background noise. Yes, the new “Omicron” variant is making its way around the world. Fortunately, reports from South Africa as well as other studies indicate that Omicron’s illness is milder than Delta. Even Fauci-friendly public health physicians have cautioned that there is “absolutely no reason to panic.”

In 2022, we should panic because opioid overdoses took the lives of 100,000 fellow Americans from April 2020 to April 2021—an increase of 28 percent from the same period the year before. The statistic is appalling but not surprising given the Covid lockdowns coupled with millions of doses of fentanyl and other illicit drugs flooding across a porous border.

We should panic because one in ten Americans has diabetes and one in three Americans has prediabetes. Moreover, 89 percent of the diabetics are overweight (Body Mass Index over 25). Just over 73 percent of the U.S. population are overweight and 42.5 percent are obese (BMI over 30). Worse yet, obesity among adults, age 18 to 25 years increased from 6.2 percent to 32.7 percent over the last 40 years. Instead of Dr. Fauci telling us we have to relinquish our individual choices when it comes to the increasingly ineffective current Covid vaccines, he should emphasize the effect of obesity on Covid outcomes. According to the CDC, about 78 percent of people who have been hospitalized, needed a ventilator or died from Covid-19 have been overweight or obese.

We should fear the loss scientific medical practice, when to avoid being stressed out, patients are demanding informed consent to be weighed in the doctor’s office. Yet curiously, informed consent is not required for experimental mRNA vaccines.

We should fear the blatant abuse of power by our public servants in the name of public health. We should be afraid when our top health bureaucrat, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary declared “it is absolutely the government’s business” to know people’s vaccination status.” We should panic when elected representatives jump on the medical privacy-be-damned bandwagon. The House of Representatives handily approved the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act of 2021 which would establish yet another government database. This one is an “immunization information system,” that can share every vaccine dose with not only with other governmental but private entities.

We should be afraid when the FDA sends threatening letters to pharmacists, trying to limit the use of a safe drug shown to be 60 percent effective in improving outcomes of Covid. Why? It has side effects such as skin rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, facial or limb swelling, neurologic adverse events (dizziness, seizures, confusion), sudden drop in blood pressure, severe skin rash potentially requiring hospitalization and liver injury. We’ve seen no such letters regarding molnupiravir, the new kid on the block for Covid treatment that can cause diarrhea, dizziness, headache, hives, itching, skin rash, nausea, redness of skin, vomiting, bone and cartilage damage in children, birth defects, cancer and is only 30 percent effective.

We should panic knowing that pharmaceutical companies spent $266,846,347 lobbying Congress, and the American Medical Association’s top corporate donors are pharmaceutical companies.

We should panic about the federal government establishing guidelines (future regulations?) for news and social media on suppression of health “misinformation.” We should worry that Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook engages in Soviet-style silencing certain political viewpoints.

We should fear social engineering and panic about the media becoming the new form of re-education camps. It’s hard to miss the oohing and aahing over the first transgender person to make it to the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions. Did they fawn over the first male, the first black person, the first white person, the first Asian person? No. BTW, the first Tournament winner was a woman, and a black man won years before women and blacks knew they were inferior, weak-minded oppressed persons. Someone, please come forward and enlighten us as to why a transgender person answering questions on a game show is headline news. Viewed in the most favorable light, perhaps the media were providing welcomed distraction from Dr. Fauci and his smug and smarmy self.

We should fear misguided attempts to stop racism with racism. In the name of social justice, colleges, businesses, medical schools, and K-12 schools have fallen into the trap of promoting Marxist race warfare where students and employees can learn that minorities are permanent victims of the irredeemably racist white people.

We should fear becoming accustomed to a new socially acceptable apartheid: segregation by race, vaccination status, and mask-wearing.

Most of all, we should fear how readily our fellow Americans acquiesced to unreasonable, unscientific demands at the altar of Covid-19.

When it comes to Covid in 2022, opt for prudence, not panic. Eat well, get enough vitamin D, exercise, wash your hands, engage with your friends, cough or sneeze in your elbow, and stay home if you are feeling unwell. If you do get sick, seek medical care immediately.

Live your life. After all, there are 14 more letters after omicron in the Greek alphabet.

COVID-19, Culture & Society, Current Events, Featured, Medicine, Op-eds, What's New

A Constitutional Cure for Covid-19

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Covid, Covid, Covid. Variant, variant, variant. Trust me, I’m the government’s highest paid employee, and “I represent science.” Show your papers, wear a mask, take a shot or lose your job. And the beat goes on for an infection where 99.95 percent of infected persons under age 70 years recover. It’s becoming clear that Covid-19 is not merely a disease but an excuse to concentrate power in the government.

It’s time for the political histrionics to stop. Multiple studies have shown that the consequences far outweigh any potential (and illusory) benefits of masks, lockdowns, and school closures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director admitted that the current Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, while helpful in reducing deaths and hospitalizations, do not stop transmission of the virus. “Breakthrough” cases in vaccinated persons are on the rise. Moreover, the current vaccines likely are not effective for the new, likely less lethal Omicron variant. Public health experts opine that the SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes Covid-19) and its multiple variants are becoming endemic. That means SARS-CoV-2 and its infinite number of variants will not be eliminated, but become a manageable part of the human-viral ecosystem.

Sadly, our government is not responding in accordance with the scientific facts. Instead, federal and some local governments are mandating more vaccines, culminating in proof of vaccination to engage in society and continue living as a normal human being. This is not science. This is nascent totalitarianism.

Two lines from the 1990 Cold War era spy film, The Hunt for Red October foreshadowed our government’s warp speed trajectory to authoritarianism. “Privacy is not of major concern in the Soviet Union, comrade. It’s often contrary to the collective good.” And a White House official casually boasted, “I’m a politician that means I’m a cheat and a liar.”

It didn’t take long for President Biden to tell the big lie. As president-elect, Mr. Biden said there would be no vaccine mandates. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (the third in line for the presidency) brilliantly illustrated the intersection of lying and privacy. As late as August 2021, Speaker Pelosi said, “We cannot require someone to be vaccinated. That’s just not what we can do. It is a matter of privacy to know who is or who isn’t.”

Without skipping a beat, the executive branch issued three separate vaccine mandates: all federal contractors (including remote workers), an Occupational Health & Safety Administration (OSHA) requirement for businesses with more than 100 employees, and a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requirement for employees, volunteers and third-party contractors of health care providers certified by CMS.

The judicial branch is fighting back against the President’s attempt to jettison the Constitution’s separation of powers clauses, a large chunk of the Bill of Rights, and Supreme Court precedents on bodily autonomy with these mandates. On November 9th, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put the OSHA mandate on hold. The Court reasoned that the mandate “threatens to substantially burden the liberty interests of reluctant individual recipients put to a choice between their job(s) and their jab(s).” And “the loss of constitutional freedoms ‘for even minimal periods of time … unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”

Citing the lack of congressional authorization and harm to access to medical care, on November 29th aMissouri federal district court placed a temporary halt on the CMS health care workers “boundary-pushing”mandate. The government planned to enforce the mandate by imposing monetary penalties, denial of payment and termination from the Medicare and Medicaid program. The ruling covers providers in Kansas, Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

On November 30th, a Louisiana federal district court blocked the CMS mandate issuing a nationwide injunction in a lawsuit brought by 14 states (Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia). “If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands. … [C]ivil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”

That same day, a Kentucky federal district court issued a hold on the federal government contractors mandate, citing lack of authority of the executive branch—“even for a good cause”. The court reasoned that if a procurement statute could be used to mandate vaccination, it “could be used to enact virtually any measure at the president’s whim under the guise of economy and efficiency.” The ruling covers Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

The mainstream media finally reported on the toxicity and poor results of Dr. Fauci’s “standard of care” treatment, remdesivir. This prompted families to use the courts rather than watch their relatives needlessly die. Victories for patients are growing. A Chicago area judge recently ordered a hospital to “step aside” and allow a physician to administer ivermectin in an effort to save a dying patient. It worked.

People are tired of lies. When Google employees are signing a “manifesto” to fight the mandates, you know the seeds of revolt have sprouted.

 

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