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MEDICINE AND HEALTH

The Issue Is Never the Issue: Senate Hearing Turns Into Proxy War RFK Jr.’s Senate grilling wasn’t about COVID or the CDC—it was a proxy battle over power, Trump, and who controls the narrative. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/07/the-issue-is-never-the-issue-senate-hearing-turns-into-proxy-war/

The issue is never the issue.

The appearance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, before the Pfizer Tribunal at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Thursday reminded me of the truth of that famous saying of Saul Alinsky.

The issue is never the issue. What is always the issue, according to that community organizer nonpareil, is power.

Ostensibly, Secretary Kennedy came to answer questions about COVID (remember that scam?) and the performance of people at—or, rather, recently at—the Centers for Disease Control. He recently fired the new, freshly confirmed director, Susan Monarez, for being “untrustworthy,” and some 1000 staffers walked out in solidarity or—what’s that other word beginning with an “s”?—Oh, right: in a snit.

One by one, the senators, mostly Democrats but also a few Republicans, screamed and gesticulated at Kennedy, accused him of being a “charlatan” and worse, and demanded that he resign or be fired.

One friendly questioner asked whether Kennedy thought that the response to COVID had been “politicized.” Indeed, it had, Kennedy said. Moreover, the government and the media lied to the public about many aspects of the disease, beginning with its origin. (No bats were involved in this entertainment.)

The public was also aggressively lied to about the danger of the virus—overwhelmingly, the only vulnerable parts of the population were the elderly, the obese, and the diabetic. We were lied to about the efficacy of “social distancing”—it was a made-up nostrum—and cloth masks. They are worse than useless. I still see damaged souls driving around in cars or walking outside by themselves wearing a mask. You might as well, as some wag proposed, wear a seat belt while walking around as a sort of safety blanket.

But the largest load of lies concerned the various COVID vaccines. Kennedy’s views about the efficacy and safety of vaccines are often caricatured. You may or may not always agree with him, but his views are nuanced, well-informed, and subtle. Several senators seemed surprised that Kennedy could agree with the proposition that President Trump deserves the Nobel Prize for overseeing Operation Warp Speed, which produced a spate of COVID vaccines in a matter of a few months, while also remaining highly critical of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines.

NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Honesty and Transparency Will Get Better Results Than Vaccine Mandates

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/09/05/nih_director_dr_jay_bhattacharya_.html

NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Newsmax on Thursday night that he supports Florida’s plan to end all vaccine mandates and researching concerns about vaccine side effects raised by HHS Secretary Kennedy.

Bhattacharya argued that mandates are not the most effective way to get the most people vaccinated. “The European strategy is different, and they’ve had better results than we do on essential vaccines like MMR,” he said. “In the UK, Sweden, and Denmark, all vaccines are voluntary. None of them have mandates for any of their vaccines. What they do have is public health that doesn’t lie to their people.”

“They’re not coercing people—they’re reasoning with them. I’m not making an announcement for the administration; I’m giving you my view as an epidemiologist. That seems the better approach: talk to people, show them the data, be honest when there are problems, and treat people like adults, especially parents, so they can make good decisions for their families,” Bhattacharya said.

“I don’t think the MMR vaccine causes autism, based on my reading of the scientific evidence,” he also said. “But I also know we don’t understand the rise in autism. The recent prevalence numbers are 1 in 31 kids; a few decades ago, it was 1 in 10,000. We really don’t know the etiology.”

“As NIH Director—at the behest of Secretary Kennedy and President Trump—I’ve ordered an honest evaluation of the causes of autism,” Bhattacharya said. “Through the normal NIH process, 250 research groups across the country competed, and we’ll select the top dozen based on scientific review. Those projects should be ready to start by the end of this month—in record time. We need to open our minds, ask the real questions, and get answers with excellent science. That’s the right way—instead of all this disputation.”

ROB SCHMITT, NEWSMAX: You saw [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] silenced a lot during this hearing as he attempted to disprove a lot of the allegations that were hurled at him. I thought that was so interesting—the people who never let somebody talk are trying to claim that they’re the good guys. That can’t be right.

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: Well, free speech suppression was a key tactic of public health during the pandemic. I can tell you from firsthand experience, so it wouldn’t surprise me. But I thought Secretary Kennedy got a lot of great points in—even though he wasn’t given much opportunity to respond.

Surgeon wore Palestinian badge while operating on Jewish patient

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/surgeon-wore-palestinian-badge-while-153023650.html

A surgeon at a London NHS hospital wore a Palestinian badge while operating on a Jewish patient.

The patient, who had an operation at the Royal Free Hospital in Belsize Park, north London, last month, was left “extremely distressed” after spotting the badge on the member of staff’s lanyard.

She said she “found it extremely stressful to be treated by this doctor, given her blatant political views” and that “she felt the doctor could do her some harm”.

Earlier this year, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said he would ban NHS staff from displaying pro-Palestinian badges as part of a crackdown on anti-Semitism in the health service.

In a letter to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in May, Mr Streeting vowed to snuff out “the appalling experiences of anti-Semitism affecting Jewish staff and patients” in the NHS.

UK Lawyers for Israel, which the patient contacted after the operation, accused the Royal Free London NHS Trust of breaching equality legislation.

In a letter to trust bosses, the group said staff wearing the Palestinian flag badge could constitute harassment by the hospital, breaching Section 29 (3) of the Equality Act 2010, since it may create “an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for Jewish patients.

The lawyers’ group said the display of the badge “indicates support for the Palestinian cause, and conversely, opposition to the State of Israel”. It said the surgeon, who has not been named, was “prioritising her own political opinions over care and empathy for her patients”, which breached General Medical Council regulations.

Whistleblower Dr. Marvin Rapaport Exposes Political Medicine and its Elusive “Hidden” Allergy by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28779/whistleblower-dr-marvin-rapaport-exposes

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

In my January 30, 2022 article, “A Short History of Medicine and Megalomania,” I explain how holistic medicine is actually the original western medicine established on the principle of strengthening the immune system to fight off pathogens in the environment. It is traditional western medicine that is the alternative medicine because its fundamental premise is that medications are required to be healthy:

My point is that the chemical/pharmaceutical companies are pouring toxic chemicals into the environment that destroy public health -> then the chemical/pharmaceutical companies offer more chemicals and pharmaceuticals to “cure” what they caused in the first place. It is a never-ending cycle of destruction of public health. The United States is at the bottom of the totem pole in world health because the American medical community is driven by unscrupulous globalists and the corrupt politicians who serve them.

RFK Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, is enlightening in this regard because it connects the dots and shows how John D. Rockefeller actually set the stage for the corruption in medicine and academia today. Rockefeller funded the medical education and research that supported the germ theory, but all with his political agenda. If anyone is responsible for political medicine and monsters like Gates and Fauci, it is John D. Rockefeller.

Rockefeller politicized medicine because he understood that vaccines could be used for population control and total social control. The medical tyranny of Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci today, began with John D. Rockefeller and has spun out of control. Big Pharma IS a military wing of the government––medicine has been weaponized and is being used against innocent populations––including our own.

Until President Trump resumed office in 2025, the science was being controlled by corrupt eugenicists like Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates who offer political medicine disguised as public health. The staggering profits made by Big Pharma at the expense of public health during the COVID19 debacle is a stupefying crime perpetrated with the protection of indemnification from vaccine harm. Hopefully, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now at the helm of the Department of Health & Human Service (HHS), this unconscionable indemnification will be terminated. But what about Big Pharma’s lesser-known crimes?

Jonathan Alpert Therapy’s Identity Politics Problem The field has embraced left-wing racialism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/therapy-psychology-wokeness-identity-politics

Psychotherapy used to be a refuge from politics, but it’s become another front in the culture war. Therapists once helped people face reality. Today, more and more, they urge patients to interpret it through a hierarchy of oppression.

As a psychotherapist with more than two decades of experience, I have observed this shift firsthand. Hundreds of patients have come to me after being frustrated or even harmed by previous therapists, who encouraged them to interpret their struggles through the lens of identity politics.

A black man, for example, came to me after a failed round of therapy with another provider. He wasn’t just anxious; he was disillusioned. “I went in for help managing anxiety,” he said. “But the therapist kept steering the conversation back to racism, even though I never brought it up. I left feeling like I was being treated as a black person first, and a human being second.”

A gay man told a similar story. “I wanted help managing stress at work,” he said. “But every session focused on supposed shame over being gay, even though that wasn’t why I was there. I felt pushed into a narrative that didn’t fit me.”

Graduate programs are no longer producing healers, but political activists with therapy licenses. Instead of teaching students to treat anxiety, depression, or relationship issues using evidence-based methods, many programs now encourage trainees to develop “critical consciousness.” That means guiding clients to interpret their distress through the lens of systemic oppression, rather than addressing individual agency, patterns, or choices.

Ian Kingsbury Medical Schools Still Discriminate Based on Race, Records Show The Trump administration should investigate them to stop potential violations of federal civil rights laws.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/medical-schools-racial-discrimination

It’s been two years since the Supreme Court banned racial discrimination in college admissions. Nonetheless, at medical schools, evidence suggests that the discrimination continues.

That’s my conclusion after submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to all 93 public medical schools. I asked for several years of admissions data, including on students who matriculated in 2024, following the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. I sought data on race, undergraduate grades, MCAT scores, and admission status, in order to assess whether racial disparities in admission standards persisted after the decision.

Twenty-three medical schools have answered my request, including flagship institutions in states like Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Mexico, and Colorado. The data they provided make it clear that schools are at least skirting the Supreme Court’s decision, if not violating it outright.

Accepted black applicants had lower average MCAT scores than accepted white or Asian students at all but one school, Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Thirteen schools accepted black students with average MCAT scores lower than the score of the average rejected Asian or white applicant. That suggests black applicants receive significant preferential treatment.

In fact, at two schools—Eastern Virginia Medical School and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health—black applicants were about ten times likelier to be accepted than were Asian and white applicants with similar grades and test scores.

The Disgraceful Campaign Against a Top FDA Official

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-disgraceful-campaign-against-vinay-prasad-health-politics-trump?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It’s America’s loss that Vinay Prasad will not be able to make the changes necessary to restore trust in public health officials.

Three months ago, Dr. Marty Makary, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, named Dr. Vinay Prasad to serve as the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, a division that “regulates biological products for human use” and oversees their safety and effectiveness. In making the announcement on X, he described his new hire, a well-known oncologist, Substacker, and frequent critic of the public-health establishment, like this: “Dr. Prasad brings the kind of scientific rigor, independence, and transparency we need at CBER.”

We have long admired Prasad for precisely the reasons Makary cited, and have been proud to publish his pieces on such subjects as scientific fraud and the loss of trust in public health. One of his early policy decisions as the head of CBER was to end the unnecessary and divisive federal recommendation that young children be vaccinated against Covid-19. Dr. Prasad was an outspoken critic of government overreach during the pandemic, and with this act, it seemed possible that he could help restore the public’s lost faith in federal health institutions. 

Which is why we were so dismayed to read on Tuesday that he had abruptly left the agency. (You can read the backstory here, reported by our Gabe Kaminsky.)

Technically Prasad resigned, but it was under pressure from an ugly and unfounded smear campaign carried out by strange bedfellows, including Wall Street Journal editorial writer Allysia Finley, right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and, it would appear, by Sarepta Therapeutics, a company whose recently approved drug he had halted when two teenage patients and a young boy in Brazil died after taking it. 

One Chart To Kill The Medicaid Lies For Good

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/31/one-chart-to-kill-the-gutting-medicaid-lie-for-good/

Can anyone guess what is wrong with the following headline? “Democrats use new tactic to highlight Trump’s gutting of Medicaid: billboards in the rural U.S.”

That appeared in The Guardian newspaper over the weekend.

How about this one from NPR: “GOP governors stay silent amid plans to slash Medicaid spending in their states.”

Or this one from AP: “Rural hospitals brace for financial hits or even closure under Republicans’ $1 trillion Medicaid cut“

Or this one from NBC News: “Another report suggests Medicaid cuts could lead to thousands of deaths.”

Or countless others like these published in the wake of President Donald Trump’s signing the One Big Beautiful Bill?

What’s wrong with them all? They are all based on one big, fat lie. There are no cuts to Medicaid.

Howard H. Fenn, Kurt Miceli Leading Medical Journals Care More About DEI Than Major Diseases A new report finds that the JAMA Network ran more articles recently mentioning “inequity” than “asthma.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/jama-network-science-diseases-dei-inequity

In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann describes wealthy European consumptives who retreat to a sanitorium high in the Swiss Alps, convinced that thin air aids in treating pulmonary tuberculosis. In their self-contained community, they affirm their faith in contemporary medical practices while delaying the demands of life in the “flatlands.”

Medical researchers, it seems, are retreating to a sanatorium of their own. Based on our analysis, leading medical journals increasingly lean left and are abandoning scientific principles in service of progressive ideology.

We began by conducting a keyword search of every article published in the JAMA Network—a group of 13 medical journals affiliated with the American Medical Association—between April 1 and May 31. The phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” appeared 56 times, more often than atherosclerosis (45) and osteoporosis (16). Another progressive-coded term, “inequity,” showed up 99 times—more than asthma (75) or opioid use disorder (65).

Lurie Children’s Hospital Leftists Increase Stress for Parents A children’s hospital stay should comfort families—not confront them with activist symbols, controversial ideologies, and moral agendas masked as care. By Laurie Higgins

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/20/lurie-childrens-hospital-leftists-increase-stress-for-parents/

My young granddaughter was just discharged from Lurie Hospital after a six-day stay preceded by two weeks of headaches and daily vomiting. Her stay included blood draws, an EKG, an MRI, and a lumbar puncture. While the medical care she received was excellent, the visit was egregiously marred by the ignorance and lack of compassion demonstrated by the “LGBTQ+” activism seen everywhere.

Most of the staff who entered her room wore the controversial political “pride” flag pins designed by Daniel Quasar, which incorporate the “trans” “pride” flag designed by Monica Helms.

Quasar is a middle-aged man who identifies as “non-binary” and uses “they/them” pronouns (eyeroll). “Monica” Helms is an elderly cross-dressing man who is faux-married to another elderly cross-dressing man.

During the week at Lurie, it was rare to see a staff member not wearing the controversial pins.

And it was not just pins.

A desk attendant stationed just outside my granddaughter’s room and who entered her room was a young Asian man wearing long ladies’ fake fingernails painted a frosty white. A bald male doctor from Infectious Diseases who visited her room wore long, dangling women’s earrings.

Imagine how theologically orthodox Christian, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish parents, already under extraordinary stress,s feel about having to explain the pins and peculiar fashion accouterments of adult staff to their young, sick children.

The hospital made available a “pride” craft in the Panda Room that said something like, “We are a family of love.” Apparently, affirming disordered feelings and risky experimental medical “treatments” is akin to love in the moral universe that Lurie has socially constructed.

If parents believe homoerotic acts are not moral acts or if they believe healthy, properly functioning bodies are good and ought not be chemically or surgically manipulated, they are hateful.

And the library section of the Panda Room had displays of picture books intended to normalize homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation. The display included ABC Pride, Kind Like Marsha: Learning from LGBTQ+ Leaders, and perhaps worst of all, Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag.