RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-taps-jay-bhattacharya-for-nih

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.” 

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.” 

As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.  

https://nypost.com/2024/11/27/opinion/trump-picks-marty-makary-jay-bhattacharya-will-disrupt-health-agencies-to-save-lives/

The public health establishment and left-wing media are rushing to discredit President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to lead health agencies. The New York Times smears them as “outside the medical mainstream.”

Circling the wagons, Dr. Paul Offit, an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, lamely observes, “What they’re saying when they make these appointments is that we don’t trust the people who are there.”

You bet.

Trump and the public have every reason to distrust the current agency heads, after the repeated blunders, deceptions and cover-ups during COVID-19. Trump is appointing disruptors with the courage to challenge the status quo.

Like Dr. Marty Makary, nominated to head the Food and Drug Administration.

Makary’s credentials will make it impossible for the Senate to reject him. A Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of public health, Makary was voted into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, a Hall of Fame for doctors.

More importantly, if you’re in the hospital, you want Makary on your side.

Two decades ago, he declared war against the epidemic of medical errors killing as many as 100,000 patients a year. Errors like patients being given the wrong dose of a medication, or a surgeon operating on the wrong body part, or a lethal germ invading the patient’s body to cause an infection.

The medical establishment was hush-hush about them. But not Makary. 

https://newswithviews.com/the-experts-science-medicine-all-amazing-all-fallible/

For thousands of years, going back to the Bible, women have wept and grieved and pleaded to God over their miscarriages. Indeed, it took all these millennia for modern-day pharmaceutical companies to develop solutions to this ongoing nightmare.

In the 1940s, they were happy to offer doctors the ability to prescribe diethylstilbestrol (DES) to prevent miscarriage. “You can tell them you would give it to your wife,” the marketing mavens from Big Pharma suggested to physicians.

And with good reason. This “miracle drug” worked! Women who had experienced no trouble conceiving but were plagued by constant miscarriages were now able to carry their babies to term and deliver quite “perfect” bundles of joy!

But then disaster hit with unspeakable horror. After one or two years of watching their beautiful babies smile and roll over and teethe and then walk and speak and thrive, the little girls began developing hideous vaginal cancers, and those who survived to adulthood experienced higher-than-normal premature births, miscarriages, and ectopic pregnancies.

The little boys, too, had horrible anomalies in their urogenital tracts and are still being watched for higher-than-average cases of testicular and prostate cancers.

In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took DES off the market.

So much for the science!

SECOND TIME’S A CHARM

In 1957, another miracle medication, originally marketed as a sleeping pill but also found to prevent miscarriages,was developed in West Germany, and soon found its way to America, where women eagerly took the drug––approved by the FDA––and, again, were thrilled to carry their babies to term.

But unlike DES, where the monstrous effects took months to years to develop, the grotesque and tragic effects of the new drug––Thalidomide––were obvious from the moment of birth: children born with missing arms and legs, eye and urinary tract anomalies, heart problems, et al. The list of horrors went on and on.

So much for the science!