Expand search form

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

What a Strange Time to Be a Child

No Comments

Cultures and societies progress, generally in a more civil, moral, ethical direction. Look at our evolution from practices in ancient Greece. Several hundred years ago B.C., Greek elites openly participated in pederasty, meaning “boy love.” This was a relationship between an older male and an adolescent youth. This was done under the guise of the older man educating and mentoring the chosen boy. In return, the man felt young and beautiful. Indeed, homosexual love between adult men was ridiculed. Man-boy love was celebrated. Greek soldiers were accompanied into battle by young boys who served as their sexual partners and sleeping companions. They rewarded the boys by teaching them martial arts. But did this practice survive? No. Our military has both hetero- and homosexual members but they are adult equals, not a mentor-mentee relationship.

Arguably, morality is in the eye of the beholder. However, some truths are universal. One such truth is that children are fragile and need protection. This is why Unicef, Save the Children, Child Fund, and Gays Against Groomers champion the principle that every child has the right to live free from exploitation and abuse.

Since when did drag queens become the model for a new society? There was a time when drag queens and burlesque shows were housed in the tawdry parts of town—the red light districts, “the Block” and the like. Now public libraries have become venues for sexualizing children. This is done under the pretext of teaching love and acceptance. According to the Drag Queen Story Hour website “DSH captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves!”

Children have plenty of innate imagination. They don’t need perverted prodding. The story hours and other inappropriate displays at “family-friendly” venues are exposing children to pornographic material. People face up to 20 years in federal prison and registration as a sex offender for participating in child pornography. Granted, here children are watching people pretending to have sex but are not being photographed pretending to have sex themselves. Otherwise, their parents would be in jail. In my view, this is porn: to quote the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote about obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”

In what world would parents knowingly expose their children to overt sexual X-rated performances? These parents have been emotionally manipulated to believe they are bigoted bad people if they object to having young children witness men acting out hypersexualized clownish stereotypes of women.

This flows into the bizarre push to turn boys into girls. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one million people (out of 330 million) in the U.S. identify as transgender. According to a recent University of California, Los Angeles survey, there are 1.4 million transgender adults and the great majority—1.2 million—are transgender women. Get with the program: biological men are bad. The Urban Dictionary defines a cisgendered male (biological, assigned male at birth) as “useless”. Heterosexual cisgender Caucasian males are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic scum. The Urban dictionary is small potatoes. One of the goals of a medical student group called White Coats for Black Lives is to “dismantle dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.”

This misguided “transitioning” in minors is being mainstreamed in major medical centers despite studies that show that anywhere from 60–90 percent of trans children no longer want to be trans by adulthood. California passed a “gender-affirming healthcare” law (SB 107) that defies the United States Constitution’s mandate to give full faith and credit to judicial proceedings from other states. California is giving itself jurisdiction over would-be transgender children by declaring them victims of abuse at the hands of the parent who is resisting mutilating their child’s body.

We are witnessing the devolution of our society. It starts behind closed doors. Then goes out in the open via euphemistic words (sex-change became “gender affirming” just like how abortion became reproductive health). If you have doubts about this freefall, who would have thought that the brilliant minds running our nation’s capital city would make public urination legally and socially acceptable?

Current Events, Featured, Health Policy, Op-eds, Politics, What's New

Private Practice Trumps Private Equity

No Comments

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been living in a frenzied political atmosphere of inflation worries, unaddressed crime, Covid, Monkeypox, and a variety of social issues. These are distractions from thinking about the big picture: the march toward government and corporate control over our lives, including absorbing medical practice into the statist-corporate complex.

While many say that COVID-19 brought out the flaws in public health, it has also highlighted the joys and advantages of private practice medicine. People who are disappointed in the oft-times unscientific public health recommendations and mandates have benefitted from seeking advice from private practitioners. Sadly, we are on the road to losing private practice, the heart of good medicine.

A recent article about a private equity purchase of a small rural hospital chronicled in great detail how the firm ran the hospital into the ground. The residents were left with no hospital in their area. That was but one example. Until the last 10 or 15 years, most hospitals were owned either by mainly religious nonprofit entities or by states and cities, with ties to medical schools. Private equity ventures have quadrupled over the last 10 years have spent approximately $750 billion during that time period. As Bain Capital put it, 2021 was a “banner year” fueled by an aging population and more chronic illnesses. Private equity firms now control a large swath of hospitals, physician practices, ERs, nursing homes, and hospice centers.

For years, health policy experts have been warning about the dangers of private equity and consolidation in medical services. The focus on return on investment by private equity owners puts profits over patients. One study found that hospitals increased their prices after being acquired by private equity firms. Additionally, studies in nursing homes and dialysis centers have found private equity ownership is associated with not only higher prices, but a decrease in quality of care.

Concurrently, consolidation has been on a roll. Five for-profit insurers now control 43 percent of the market, more than 60 percent of community hospitals belong to a health system, and less than half of physicians own part of a private practice. A large California study found that consolidation of the hospital, physician, and insurance markets increased prices of services as well as ACA premiums. Broader research shows that hospital mergers increase the average price of hospital services by 6 percent to18 percent. One industry group places some of the blame on the increase in government programs with the 55 percent increase in consolidation correlating to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA).

Of course, consolidation reduces patient choice.

We need more choice but is expansion of big companies into providing health services the answer? Amazon just made a $3.9 billion agreement to buy OneMedical. How ironic given that One Medical is a primary care service offering 24/7 personalized care. This adds to their purchase of PillPack pharmacy in 2018. Walgreens drug stores will now have in-store clinics staffed by VillageMD personnel and ultimately will own 30 percent of VillageMD.

CVS’ new venture is downright scary. CVS is seeking to purchase Signify Health, a managed care company and/or some other primary care provider group by the end of the year. Some even speculate that CVS wants to buy Teledoc, a major telehealth service. Teledoc already is the exclusive telehealth provider for Aetna. Why is this beyond disconcerting? CVS began its expansion by purchasing multiple drug store chains. In 2006 it added “Minute Clinics” to the stores. In 2007 CVS Corporation and Caremark Rx, Inc. merged, creating CVS Caremark, CVS’ own pharmacy benefits manager. In 2018 CVS merged with the health insurance company, Aetna. (The antitrust judge did rule that as a condition of the approval, Aetna had sold its Medicare prescription insurance plans to WellCare Health Plans). That is called vertical consolidation – one company controls the whole stream of commerce.

There is not much legally that we can do about it except protest with our feet. Seek out private practices where you are treated as an individual human being, not an income generator. The ideal practice is a cash based practice or direct primary or specialty care practice. With direct primary care, a monthly fee covers all doctor visits, drugs dispensed at the office at wholesale prices, and 24/7 access to your doctor. Odd as it may seem, paying cash to see the doctor or have outpatient surgery can be less expensive than buying insurance with its co-pays and high deductibles. All you really need is hospital insurance (unless you are a billionaire). If there is not such a practice near you, find a second opinion via telehealth.

It is up to us to save the patient-physician relationship – and just maybe our republic!

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

The Fox Guarding the Herpetarium

No Comments

Several days ago, a congressman had a nasty encounter with a rabid fox on the D.C. Capitol building grounds. Let’s trust that he is no worse for the wear. But the question lingers: How did the fox know he was from California? Is this some sort of sign from above?

They—whoever they are—say “as California goes, so goes the nation.” Let’s hope not. The California state legislature has put forth some bills that boggle the mind and seek to change family, physicians, and their relationship to the government forever.

First, the governor and the legislature put their imprimatur on the California Future of Abortion (CA FAB) Council recently formed by various “reproductive justice” advocates. They seek to seal California’s legacy as a “reproductive freedom” state and are lobbying legislators to enshrine into law their blueprint for abortion services, Recommendations to Protect, Strengthen, and Expand Abortion Services in California.

The legislators took the bait. The governor has already signed SB 245. This law prohibits deductibles, co-pays or any other payments by insured for abortion services. In other words, abortions must be free. Taking this a step further is SB 1142. This would establish the “Abortion Practical Support Fund” using taxpayer money to provide airfare, lodging, gas money, food, childcare, abortion doula support and more for women coming from other states for their abortions.

To ensure no fetus is left behind, SB 1375 would expand the number of clinicians who can perform aspiration abortions by allowing nurse practitioners (NPs) to do so without an attending physician. Worse yet, SB 1375 eliminates both “minimum standards” and completion of “board-recognized training” in abortion techniques. It also allows NPs and physician assistants (PAs) to determine viability and health of mother (potentially increasing the number of abortions after viability).

To “ensure the growth of a network of clinicians trained in abortion,” AB 1918 would establish the California Reproductive Health Service Corps to recruit, train, and retain a workforce of reproductive health care professionals, focusing on students from “historically excluded populations.” This includes scholarships and stipends for new reproductive health students, and loan repayment. The students must agree to complete abortion training and commit to working at a corps-approved site in a specified area with a specified “underserved” population. Is this an extension of black-on-black violence?

California is not satisfied with basic abortions. The ghoulish AB 2223 prohibits civil or criminal liability with regard to abortion for the mother or “a person who aids or assists” in the abortion, including perinatal death. As written, the bill essentially decriminalizes infanticide via neglect for up to one month after the baby’s birth.

Now for the tyranny imposed on those out of the womb.

The famous Dr. Pan, whose SB 871 proposes COVID vaccinations for all students, sponsored a trifecta. AB 2098 would charge physicians with unprofessional conduct for dissemination of yet-to-be-defined “misinformation” regarding the COVID virus, vaccine, prevention and treatments. A sister bill, SB 1390, would prohibit a social media platform from “amplifying” subjectively “harmful content” defined as “[d]isinformation or misinformation, including, but not limited to, false or misleading information regarding medicine or vaccinations, false or misleading information regarding elections, and conspiracy theories.”Platforms in violation could be fined up to $100,000. SB 1464 would require law enforcement to enforce public health orders, with no state funds for such agencies that publicly oppose or adopt a policy to oppose the orders.

Further intruding into the family unit, SB 866 would permit California children 12 and older to be injected with various vaccines without parental notification or consent.

Finally, authoritarian agendas tend to ignore the facts. COVID is waning, the current vaccine was formulated for a virus that is no longer dominant and does not prevent infection or transmission as evidenced so well by the outbreak among White House personnel and Congresspersons, including thrice-vaccinated Speaker Pelosi. Nonetheless, AB 1993 would require proof of the COVID vaccine for all employees and independent contractors beginning January 2023. The bill was pulled by the author due to push back from labor unions. It’s too bad regular citizens don’t have that much clout.

These soulless legislators would not even move out of committee SB 1042, a bill to place human trafficking within the definition of a violent felony and serious felony for the Three Strikes Law.

There is some good news. At least one judge still believes in the Constitution. AB 979 mandated that corporate boards satisfy certain racial, ethnic, and LGBT quotas. The Court reasoned that this was not a case where discrimination should be remedied by more discrimination and ruled that the law “violates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution on its face.”

I feel sorry that the congressman was bitten and sorry for the new mama fox who had to be euthanized. But I’m sorrier still that our legislators have hearts of stone and minds of fertilizer.

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

Real Americans and the American Oligarchy

No Comments

Driving across our country makes one appreciate this glorious and (dare I say) exceptional country. The diverse landscapes are a feast for the eyes. Food for the soul is the affirmation that most Americans love their families, treasure America, and enjoy their fellow Americans whether they be white, black, or somewhere in between.

Daily, the media dutifully inform us coastal and urban residents about gender fluidity, diversity training, and decarbonizing energy systems to avert the coming environmental Armageddon. When the media could not flog us with a juicy Covid-19 tragedy, they resurrect a tired but effective angst-inducing headline about the imminent big earthquake.

Why would the media-government complex want to demoralize its citizens and have them live in fear and anxiety even when a “crisis” has resolved? To make them rely on the government, rather than themselves for their day to day needs. To steer them from respecting the democratic republic formed by our Constitution to accepting government control of their lives. Fear lays the groundwork for unquestioning compliance.

Federal and state governments have used Covid as a justification to cross the line from public safety measures into tyranny. Despite the decreasing Covid cases, the national Covid emergency declaration was extended beyond March 1, 2022. The national emergency designation gives the President more than 100 special powers that can bypass legal procedures ranging from banking to public health and anything else the government wants to control.

Despite a long tradition of differing opinions regarding medical disease processes and treatments, the government discouraged such discussions regarding Covid. First, the Surgeon General simply asked us to help stop “misinformation” because it “pollutes our information environment.” A few short months later, the feds are demanding that social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites. Translation: divergent opinions will be censored once the government discovers how to do so. What happened to our respect for the marketplace of ideas?

If tracking our computer use doesn’t work, we have the National Patient ID, a single number issued by the federal government containing all the details of a person’s medical records from cradle to grave. The concept has been around for more than 25 years as part of HIPAA. However, Congress banned itself from funding such an undertaking. In 2019, Congress lifted the funding ban despite the very real possibility that a National Patient ID could allow for large-scale tracking of Americans through their healthcare records. What happened to the confidential patient-physician relationship based on trust and privacy?

Such government overreach and intrusion are becoming commonplace. We are perilously close to losing government of, by, and for the people. Our government is increasingly populated with close-minded lifelong bureaucrats like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the influential career politicians who are hardly the working man’s heroes like Nancy “let them eat ice cream” Pelosi. Universities—grooming our future leaders—have become politically imbalanced and intolerant of open discourse.

We hear about how the evil Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs who profited from political unrest are pulling the strings of their government. We are trending toward our own classic oligarchy, the rule by a few. We have our own wealthy idealogues who have transitioned from mere annoying elitists into toxic powerbrokers promoting their own agendas. Notables include Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Washington Post), Bill Gates (Microsoft), George Soros (Open Society Foundation).

Meanwhile, runaway inflation is making it harder for Americans to afford basic necessities. Filling one’s automobile with gas is now an exercise in emotional and financial misery. The reaction of Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg and Vice President Harris are indicative of their disdain for the average American. Can’t afford gas? Buy a $45,000 electric car. This dismissive rhetoric does not comport with reality. In 2020, there were 286.9 million cars in the US with 1 million electric vehicles. Moreover, the electric grid absolutely could not support a sudden influx of electric vehicles, given the brown-outs across the country in winter and summer.

This political and powerful class of people want to change the way we live and think—whether we like it or not. We will never have as much money to buy political influence as do the American oligarchs. But we do have our voices. Parents are speaking up about  their schools’ curricula and toxic overtly racist policies that perversely segregate students by skin color and laws that bypass parental input into their children’s medical decisions. Physician office practices are changing to meet the needs of patients, not insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Physicians who have fought for open medical discussion about vaccine safety and efficacy are leaving their mark. CDC Director Walensky finally publicly admitted that the Covid vaccines do not stop transmission of the virus. Many physicians have gone from looking at their unvaccinated patients in horror to “I respect your choice.”

The oligarchs do not represent the real America. It’s up to us to carry on the legacy of American heroes who thought for themselves and bucked the system.

 

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

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

No Comments

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, Featured, Op-eds, Politics, What's New

Covid 2022: A New Year, New Fears

No Comments

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

No Comments

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.

 

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

The Pandemic Will Not End

No Comments

Guest column by Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn

Americans may not be mentally prepared to hear the really bad news.  The COVID pandemic is not going to end.  What the government is doing (and not doing) will ensure no end to the pandemic.

Just released is a new forecast of the coming COVID death toll on March 1, 2022.  It comes from the group that has been doing the most thorough studies and modeling of the US pandemic.  It is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research center at the University of Washington.  It forecasts a total of one million COVID deaths by that date.

That means in about 3.5 months there will be another roughly 250,000 COVID deaths.  That is over 70,000 deaths a month.  That compares to about 65,000 a month since the pandemic began.  Does that sound like progress?  Does that sound like the mass vaccination effort is the solution?

Their projection may underestimate what will be happening because “That forecast may be optimistic because we have not yet built into the modeling that we are releasing right now the explicit analysis around waning immunity for vaccine-derived immunity.”  And there is now a strong consensus among medical experts that current vaccines lose their effectiveness in about six months.  That is why booster shots are now being pushed so hard.  An endless pandemic will mean billions of dollars going to big drug companies for vaccines and a new group of expensive pills announced by Merck and Pfizer.

Here is the crucial point to keep in mind.  Current vaccines, including booster shots, do not kill the virus and do not prevent spread of the virus from fully vaccinated people.  And the loss of effectiveness, especially for variants like delta, explains why countless more people will get breakthrough infections that are killing some people, like what happened to Colin Powell recently.

Breakthrough deaths fit into the category of COVID deaths.

This is the ultimate truth: We cannot vaccinate our way out of the pandemic.  When more reliable data in other countries are considered, compared to awful data from the CDC, we see that very large fractions of people being hospitalized or dying from COVID are fully vaccinated.  Booster shots just create the illusion of doing something really effective.  Mostly, they just postpone bad health impacts.

The entire emphasis by our government on vaccines is the biggest mistake in the history of medicine and pandemic management.  As many recent analyses have shown, the CDC data are undercounting both adverse health impacts of vaccines and deaths.

Steve Kirsch has done a good summary analysis of CDC data undercounting.  Here are some excerpts:

“The COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in human history.  They are 800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine which was the previous record holder.  The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans and permanently disabled even more.  They don’t make sense for anyone of any age.  The younger you are, the worse it gets.  For kids, it is estimated that we kill 117 kids for every COVID death we prevent.”

“So we are ‘saving’ fewer than 10,000 lives at the expense of over 150,000 (vaccine) deaths.  In short, we kill 15 people to save 1.  That’s incredibly stupid.”

Full details defining the vaccine dystopia we have entered are available.

The eminent Dr. Peter McCollough has emphasized: “You are about five times as likely to die of the vaccine than you are to take your risks with COVID-19.  Therefore, those who ‘chose not to get the vaccine,’ in fact ‘made a smarter choice.’”  Another point made is that those who have recovered from the disease and have natural immunity have a 56% greater chance of severe side-effects should they afterwards take the jab.  When such a recognized medical expert says these things, the anti-mandate movement receives credibility.

A recent medical research article said: “A novel best-case scenario cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic.”  It was also noted that several studies: “have shown independently that the deaths following inoculation are not coincidental and are strongly related to inoculation through strong clustering around the time of injection.”  ”Our independent analyses of the VAERS database confirmed these clustering findings.”

Sarah Zhang has recently made some incisive observations about the never-ending pandemic.  Here is what she said:

“The coronavirus becomes endemic, and we live with it forever.  But what we don’t know—and what the U.S. seems to have no coherent plan for—is how we are supposed to get there.”  But talking about an endemic just means a constantly maintained level of COVID-19 infections and transmissions.  It means living with the pandemic, but just calling it an endemic.  It is a poor semantic solution.

Here are more words of wisdom:

“The Delta variant and waning immunity against transmission mean herd immunity may well be impossible even if every single American gets a shot.  So when COVID-related restrictions came back with the Delta wave, we no longer had an obvious off-ramp to return to normal—are we still trying to get a certain percentage of people vaccinated?  Or are we waiting until all kids are eligible?  Or for hospitalizations to fall and stay steady?  The path ahead is not just unclear; it’s nonexistent.  We are meandering around the woods because we don’t know where to go.”

“But the level of COVID-19 risk we can live with is also not an entirely scientific question. It is a social and political one that involves balancing both the costs and benefits of restrictions and grappling with genuine pandemic fatigue among the public.”

“The Delta variant and waning immunity against transmission mean herd immunity may well be impossible even if every single American gets a shot.”

Accepting the ugly reality that the pandemic will not end is consistent with the findings of a recent medical research article titled “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.”  The clear meaning is that mass vaccination does not work effectively to eliminate COVID impacts.  Here is a main conclusion: “The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta variant and the likelihood of future variants.”

Indeed, it is clear that a number of countries, including Gibraltar, with high vaccination rates are still fighting serious COVID outbreaks and impacts, including Israel now pushing booster shots.  When Israel rolled out boosters in August, they also saw spikes in infections and deaths.

Should everyone get booster shots?  Especially, those with natural immunity from prior infection and vaccine immunity from full vaccination?  This is called hybrid immunity.  Here is what MedPage Today said:

“With a COVID-19 booster shot available for a segment of the U.S. population, an emerging group may wonder if they really need it — those with “hybrid immunity.”

These are the people who are fully vaccinated but have also recovered from a case of COVID-19.  Mounting evidence is clear: a bout with the virus does provide extra immunity, making a booster shot helpful but not necessary, experts say.

If you have hybrid immunity, “I would call yourself a victor,” said Paul Offit, MD, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. ‘Call it a victory and bow out.’”

Yet many groups seem on the verge of saying that without a booster shot people will not be considered fully vaccinated and booster mandates are being discussed.

What the government has failed to do is promote valid alternatives to COVID vaccines.  It has not used a flexible policy using personalized medicine principles that would support use of generic medicines to treat and prevent COVID infection.  For example, using fluvoxamine that a recent journal article said was effective, as well as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.  Nor has the government fully recognized and given mandate credit for natural immunity obtained from prior COVID infection, and that considerable data have shown is better than vaccine immunity.

This should be clear: Vaccine mandates will not end the pandemic.  But there is no hint that government leaders are interested in taking a new fresh approach to addressing the pandemic.  Hundreds of thousands of people will die unnecessarily in the US and even more globally.  More deadly than the virus are feckless government officials.

Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles, podcasts and radio shows on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades.  His work is available on Substack as the Pandemic Blunder Newsletter.  As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine.  As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings.  He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years.  He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.

 

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

Sometimes It Takes a Puppy

No Comments

A few years back I returned from setting up our make-shift medical clinic in El Salvador after braving washed out roads and trying to stay on the right side of MS-13 to an “incident.” I had stored a banana in my purse to enjoy on the airplane. Upon arrival in San Francisco, I was approached by a Customs agent and his cute little beagle who had alerted him to the smell of contraband—my now-consumed banana.

I only hope the beagles who gave their lives for a perverted science experiment will similarly “bust” Dr. Fauci. We all know he has done much worse: suppressed possible life-saving treatment to AIDS patients, funded dangerous “gain of function” studies making viruses more deadly, suppressed early treatment of COVID-19, promoted ineffective, toxic remdesivir to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and fanatically pushed for experimental mRNA “vaccines.”

Sometimes it takes a puppy.

But sometimes it takes all of us to turn back the clock from 1984. This story of a society held together by “thoughtcrimes” and “Newspeak” was supposed to be a cautionary tale to alert us to the insidious rise of totalitarianism. Sadly, apathy was the would-be overlords’ ally. Civil debate with exchange of facts and opinions based on those facts has all but disappeared. Many Americans became all too comfortable with silencing of views with which certain corners of society disagree.

Science was supposed to be the pursuit of knowledge through uncensored factual experimental or observable data. Now well-researched medical articles that challenge the party line have been “removed” from public view for unstated reasons.

The silver lining of COVID-19 is that the unscientific responses and public policies have exposed breaches of scientific integrity. It has also brought to light the assault on the patient-centered practice of medicine. This assault has been years in the making. First, the insurers called us providers. What a degrading term! We didn’t object. No matter what one’s health care skill is, we are healers, not mere service providers. Once we accepted being mere cogs, the insurers and Medicare could more easily insinuate themselves into the patient-physician relationship. Play by our rules or you don’t get paid. Purchase of physician practices by private equity firms, regulation of formularies, factory-like working conditions with patient over-bookings, dehumanizing electronic medical records have become routine rather than a source of outrage.

The last straw may be the AMA’s most recent foray into the world of pre-Marxist ideology. With a straight face in the pursuit of equity, the AMA has released a document filled with “Newspeak”. It wants to erase the “narratives grounded in white supremacy,” “meritocracy and individualism” and use “a rich tradition of work in health equity and related fields, including critical race theory” to guide our thoughts and speech. We can no longer use the term “white paper” which of course has nothing to do with racial identity. We can no longer say vulnerable because “people are not vulnerable; they are made vulnerable.” Minority is out and BIPOC is in. We are to avoid saying “target,” “tackle,” “combat” or other terms with violent connotation when  referring to people, groups or communities. Do they really think anyone is going to pay attention to such drivel?

I guess we should send this document to President Biden who said we have to keep punching at the problem of violence against women, or poor kids are just as bright as white kids or that Barack Obama was articulate and bright and clean.

The tide is turning. Toxic critical race theory and usurpation of parents’ rights was defeated in Virginia. Protests against medical tyranny are growing. States are filing lawsuits against vaccine mandates. The truth is coming out. The British Medical Journal has proudly published and spread through social media an article whose title speaks for itself: Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial. Some authorities are backing off on vaccine mandates (here and here).

And as for Dr. Fauci, he will be the next Greek mythical hero, felled by his hubris. Let’s all send him copy of Arthur Guiterman’s poem, On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness.

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar’s bust is on my shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself.

His time is coming.

 

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

Covid Coincidence

No Comments

“They” say there is no such thing as coincidence. They must have known about Covid-19, the political viral disease.

Is it a coincidence that the year of the Covid is also the year that scientific integrity died? Discourse is the lifeblood of science. I thought we had gotten past jailing or guillotining or dismissing as crackpots people whose scientific theories with which we disagreed. Many scientific mavericks were vilified: William Harvey describing the circulatory system, Ignaz Semmelweis’ advocating for simple hand-washing, Barry Marshall determining that H. pylori, not spicy foods caused peptic ulcers, to name a few. We have a modern day version of public humiliation and worse. Data that does not fit the “official story” is removed from popular social media sites, not reported on mainstream television channels, and hidden from easily accessed public websites.

Was it a coincidence that an all-out campaign to debunk the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment for Covid-19 occurred after President Trump had good words to say about it in an election year? The denigration was relentless, despite 60 years of use in autoimmune diseases for its anti-inflammatory effects. Hydroxychloroquine was also found to have anti-blood clot effects. And with several viruses it was shown to inhibit viral entry into cells and viral replication. All of these properties would be effective in treating Covid-19 symptoms.

Another anti-parasitic medication, ivermectin, has 20 possible mechanisms of action against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including interrupting viral entry into cells and anti-inflammatory action. Significantly, ivermectin is a protease inhibitor, that is, a substance that blocks proteins that allow viruses to reproduce themselves.

Is it a coincidence that Pfizer’s new anti-Covid pill, PF-07321332 is also a protease inhibitor? Notably, Pfizer’s drug would have to be given early after the onset Covid symptoms. This is also the recommendation for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin—a recommendation that many studies ignored when dismissing the value of these anti-parasitic medications.

Is it a coincidence that Merck, who distributes ivermectin, is seeking fast-track approval for molnupiravir, an antiviral agent to treat Covid-19? How convenient that the U.S. government will purchase $1.2 billion worth of the yet-to-be-approved drug. And how predictable that vaccine maker Moderna’s stock fell 11 percentafter the announcement. Vaccines are yesterday’s cash cow. Is it a coincidence that ivermectin costs no more than $100 dollars per treatment course and molnupirivir costs $700 per 10-day course of treatment?

Is it a coincidence that the pharmaceutical and health products industry, to keep their seat at the table, has spent $171,262,239 so far this year in lobbying and that Pfizer and Merck were among the top five clients?

Is it a coincidence that Dr. Fauci, in dismissing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, resurrected his same excuses for not using a drug that frontline physicians found effective for AIDS patients? Physicians begged Dr. Fauci to publicize the use of the sulfa drug, Bactrim, as prevention and treatment for PCP (Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia) in AIDS patients. According to investigative author Sean Strub, “Fauci refused to acknowledge the evidence and … even encouraged people with AIDS to stop taking treatments, like Bactrim, that weren’t specifically approved for use in people with AIDS.” Dr. Fauci told activists there was “no data to suggest PCP prophylaxis was beneficial and that it may, in fact be dangerous.” Thousands of deaths could have been avoided. This sounds chillingly familiar to his position on Covid treatments. Damn the clinical success. I don’t care if the drugs work; I’m waiting for my pet drugs with high price tags!

Is it a coincidence that Dr. Fauci’s personal favorite AIDS drug, AZT (zidovudine), was ramrodded through the FDA? And that it was toxic, didn’t work, and in fact killed people, like his favorite anti-Covid drug, remdesivir? Remdesivir’s toxic effects were known when it was tested against Ebola virus disease in 2019. By April 2020, it was known that 60 percent of Covid patients given remdesivir had adverse effects, including liver and kidney injury. Worse yet, remdesivir did not improve survival. Indeed, a few months later the World Health Organization recommended against its use, but Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) still has it on its treatment protocol at $3,120 per treatment course.

I have a broader question about why diversity of thought is squelched. Tyrants despise free thinkers. It is not coincidence that President Biden, who wants to exert more federal government control over our lives through vaccine mandates, bought all of Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatments that were not in short supply but were being successfully used by “red states.” He vowed that “if governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.”

Health and Human Services framed the sequestration more kindly: “This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country.” Is it a coincidence that “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods” sounds like socialism?

 

1 2 3 … 10
Close Menu