RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://kffhealthnews.org/morning-breakout/doctors-having-to-ration-cancer-drugs-amid-shortages/

ABC News reports on impacts ongoing drug supply shortages are having on cancer treatments, with some doctors having to decide which of their patients to treat. Also, Pfizer said an experimental combination of antibiotics is effective at treating some drug-resistant bacterial infections.

ABC News: Cancer Drug Shortage Is Forcing Doctors To Decide Which Patients Get Treatment  Just six weeks ago, Greg DeStefano began a new chemotherapy combination. The 50-year-old, from Northbrook, Illinois, had recently been diagnosed with his fourth round of cancer and doctors were hopeful the medication would treat the tumors growing in his neck. DeStefano was responding well, but then, in late May, he got a call from his doctor and was told one of the three drugs he was receiving — carboplatin — was under a global shortage and because of the way the hospital had to prioritize treatments, he wouldn’t be qualified to receive it anymore. (Kekatos, 6/2)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2023/06/02/trump-needs-a-reality-check-on-the-mrna-jabs-n1700155

President Donald Trump returned to Iowa on Thursday after canceling a rally due to weather in the first-in-the-nation caucus state earlier in May. He met with smaller groups of Iowa voters in a few events canvassing the state. A voter told him at one stop, “We have lost people because you supported the jab.” Then she appears to ask him what he would do differently. Given all we know about the clot shots now, Trump’s response was astonishing.

“Well, you know, everyone wanted a vaccine at that time. And I was able to do something that nobody else could have done, getting it done very, very rapidly,” Trump responded. “But I never was for mandates, so I thought the mandates were terrible. And you know, there’s a big portion of the country that thinks it was a great thing.”

Oh, where to begin? First, the portion of the country that thinks the jabs were a great thing will never vote for President Trump. They are on the side of the aisle with Trump’s new best buddy Andrew Cuomo and still wear masks outdoors. A Rasmussen poll noted in January that almost half of Americans believed the shots were causing unexplained deaths, and more than one in four believed they knew some that had died due to the jab.

At the time, 60% of Republicans believed there was a reason to be concerned about the safety of the mRNA shots. Additional studies have been reported since then that implicate the mRNA shots, specifically the spike protein they generate, to a whole host of medical problems from acute onset blindness to impairing the immune system’s ability to fight COVID-19 infections in the future after repeated vaccinations. Evidence about the shot’s role in causing myocarditis in young men continues to accumulate. And honest providers will tell you that they don’t know the long-term prognosis for young Americans who suffered from heart-related adverse events.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/23/mask-mandates-unmasked/

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “There’s no reason for you to be walking around with a mask.” But the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) soon changed his stance. Although not 100 percent effective, Fauci said, wearing masks is “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing.”

Masks should be worn, he said, even by those who were vaccinated, although they did not need to wear a mask outside. On another occasion, Fauci recommended people wear two face masks. The NIAID boss gave little if any indication that face masks could cause health problems.

“Circumstantial evidence exists that extended mask use may be related to current observations of stillbirths and to reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance in children born during the pandemic.” That is the contention of “Possible toxicity of chronic carbon dioxide exposure associated with face mask use, particularly in pregnant women, children and adolescents,” a recent study out of Germany. The paper highlights “the toxicological aspects of wearing a mask for special user groups resulting from a low-level CO2 exposure.”

During the COVID pandemic in 2020, 77 percent of nations introduced mask requirements, and 58 percent of people around the world “have been confronted with a mask obligation.” In many countries, “children in schools in particular are/have been heavily exposed to the mandatory wearing of masks for long periods.” As it happens, that is not good for the children.

“Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2, while wearing masks more than five minutes bears a possible chronic exposure to carbon dioxide of 1.41% to 3.2% of the inhaled air,” the authors observe. “U.S. Navy toxicity experts set the exposure limits for submarines carrying a female crew to 0.8% CO2 based on animal studies which indicated an increased risk for stillbirths.” 

In addition, “data exists on the exposure of chronic 0.3% CO2 in adolescent mammals causing neuron destruction, which includes less activity, increased anxiety and impaired learning and memory. There is also data indicating testicular toxicity in adolescents at CO2 inhalation concentrations above 0.5%.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-shortages-price-controls-government-fda-white-house-cancer-treatments-b2d08ba4

Politicians like to grouse about high drug prices. Well, now we’re seeing what happens when drug prices are too low: Shortages of essential medicines, which are a portent of what’s to come with the Inflation Reduction Act’s price controls.

Drug shortages aren’t new, but the number in short supply has grown as generic prices have fallen. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists lists 301 drugs in short supply, up from 202 five years ago. These include many local anesthetics, basic hospital drugs, chemotherapy drugs and liquid albuterol for lung ailments.

The American Cancer Society warned this month that “first-line treatments for a number of cancers, including triple-negative breast cancer, ovarian cancer and leukemia often experienced by pediatric cancer patients,” are facing shortages that “could lead to delays in treatment that could result in worse outcomes.” Healthcare providers say they’re having to limit access to some drugs to the sickest patients. They can substitute therapeutic alternatives when possible, but this increases risk of medication errors and inferior results. What’s going on?

Headlines have focused on shortages of the ADHD drug Adderall and new weight-loss treatments, which owe to increased demand. But most drugs in short supply are older generics that are off-patent and complicated to make. Manufacturers have stopped producing them because profit margins are too thin, resulting in one or two suppliers.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-harm-caused-by-masks

Evidence continues to mount that mask mandates were perhaps the worst public-health intervention in modern American history. While concluding that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” in preventing the spread of viruses, a recent Cochrane review also emphasized that “more attention should be paid to describing and quantifying the harms” that may come from wearing masks. A new study from Germany does just that, and it suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers may have substantial ill-effects on their health—and, in the case of pregnant women, their unborn children’s.

Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open. “[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.” How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.”

In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.

The German study, a scoping review of existing research, aimed “to investigate the toxicological effects of face masks in terms of CO2 rebreathing on developing life, specifically for pregnant women, children, and adolescents.” The latter two groups, of course, have been among those most frequently subjected to mask mandates in schools, despite Covid’s low levels of risk for them and the evidence that masks don’t work.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-vaccines-neglected-side-effects-neuropathy-nih-fda-cdc-transparency-react19-8afa87b1?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Brianne Dressen was an energetic mom, an avid hiker and a preschool teacher—until she got a Covid vaccine.

Ms. Dressen, 42, was among the first Americans to be vaccinated. She volunteered to participate in AstraZeneca’s trial, and she received her first dose on Nov. 4, 2020, at a clinic in West Jordan, Utah. “I am pro-science and pro-vaccine,” Ms. Dressen says. “I was more than glad to participate in the scientific process.”

But even highly beneficial vaccines can have rare serious side effects. Minutes after the shot, Ms. Dressen’s arm began to tingle, her vision grew blurry, and sounds became muffled. The clinic suggested she see a neurologist, who directed her to the emergency room. The ER couldn’t figure out what was wrong and sent her home.

Her condition steadily deteriorated over the next 2½ weeks. She experienced extreme nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, painful vibrating sensations, pins and needles in her arms and face, numbness, tremors, brain fog, heart palpitations and fever. Physicians were mystified. They diagnosed her with a “silent migraine” and “anxiety due to the Covid vaccine” after a hospital stay. She was provided occupational and physical therapy but spent weeks in bed, unable to tolerate sound, light or even her children’s touch.

In the ensuing months, she faced not only debilitating symptoms but also bureaucratic indifference—though government officials tried to be helpful at first. On Jan. 11, 2021, her husband, Brian, a U.S. Army chemist, contacted Avindra Nath, intramural clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Dr. Nath responded immediately that he would discuss her condition with other National Institutes of Health neurologists. He asked for blood and spinal-fluid samples for analysis, and he ominously mentioned that “the current political climate is another aspect that we need to keep an eye on.”

Dr. Nath didn’t elaborate, but by now the politics of the Covid vaccines are familiar. Bitter disputes over mandates fed skepticism of the shots and claims, often false and outlandish, about their dangers. At the same time, public-health authorities, anxious to promote vaccination, played down risks that were real if rare, leaving patients like Ms. Dressen in limbo

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/top-us-non-profit-hospitals-and-ceos

OpenTheBooks.com auditors investigated America’s healthcare system and found so-called “non-profit” hospitals and their CEOs are getting richer while the American people are getting sicker and poorer.

Topline

The 20 largest non-profit hospitals in the country continued making massive profits while their cumulative net assets soared to $324.3 billion in 2021 from $200.6 billion in 2018. The year 2021 is the latest year available for cross-comparison purposes.

Those hospital systems received congressional Covid bailouts of $23 billion and only two providers partially paid their Covid bailout back.

Meanwhile, hospital executives racked up Wall Street-sized compensation packages which frequently exceeded $10 million per year. For example, the CEO at Ascension Healthcare based in St. Louis, Missouri made $13 million in 2021 – with three-year pay exceeding $22 million.

Furthermore, American life expectancy during this period sharply declined by a staggering 2.5 years from 2019 through 2022. While “comparable country averages” rebounded from a Covid-related drop in 2021, the U.S. continued declining in life expectancy.

Yet, the cost of health care is still astronomically high, as the average family paid $22,463 in health insurance premiums in 2022. That does not include out-of-pocket costs like co-pays and deductibles, which can be thousands more.

This has led to medical debt for about 100 million Americans.

In 2020, the Trump administration issued, and the Biden administration finalized (January 2021) a healthcare transparency rule – to spur market competition and inform patients.

Yet, two years after the rule took effect, an independent audit found that nearly three-quarters of hospitals in the country were not complying— flouting the mandate that prices be posted clearly and comprehensively.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/08/a-much-better-and-more-trusted-cdc/

“The end of the COVID-19 public health emergency marks a tremendous transition for our country, for public health, and in my tenure as CDC Director,” proclaimed Dr. Rochelle Walensky last week. The CDC boss is stepping down from the job, which she took “with the goal of leaving behind the dark days of the pandemic and moving CDC—and public health—forward into a much better and more trusted place.”

Before they place more trust in an allegedly better CDC, embattled Americans might review events that took place on Walensky’s watch, including the sudden departure of a key CDC figure. 

In April 2021, the CDC reassigned Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). In a May 7, 2021, White House briefing, Walensky suddenly announced that Messonnier would be stepping down. 

“Dr. Messonnier has been a true hero,” Walensky told reporters. “And through her career, in terms of public health, she’s been a steward of public health for the nation. Over this pandemic and through a many-decade career, she’s made significant contributions, and she leaves behind a strong, strong force of leadership and courage in all that she’s done.”

Walensky did not explain why, exactly, Messonnier was leaving the CDC and did not detail any of the “significant contributions” the NCIRD director had made. That invites a review of what the “true hero” Messonnier managed to accomplish in those “dark days of the pandemic.”

In November 2020, Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board called for Messonnier to take a central role in briefings on the pandemic as a way to elevate science and restore public trust in the Centers for Disease Control. The chosen messenger got right to it. 

In a CDC telebriefing on January 17, 2020, Messonnier mentioned “the outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan City, China, which has been identified as being caused by a novel coronavirus.” It was “a serious situation,” and the CDC official cautioned about travel to and from Wuhan. 

In a January 24 briefing, Messonnier said “we expect to find more cases of novel coronavirus in the United States associated with the ongoing and expanding outbreak in Wuhan, China.”  Sarah Owermohle of Politico wanted to know “what kind of dialogue are you guys are having with Chinese health authorities, and “if there is any inkling” of the origin of the novel virus.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/05/new-scientific-study-undercuts-rationale-for-gender-affirming-care/?utm_source=

The data do not clearly support hormonal and surgical interventions meant to ‘transition’ children. Instead, they point to many possible harms.

The United States has become the world’s most adamant promoter of what is called “gender-affirming care” for children and adolescents who identify as being other than their sex. This approach ranges from “social affirmation” (the use of preferred pronouns, for example) and “medical affirmation” such as puberty blocking to radical “surgical affirmation,” meaning mastectomies, facial feminization or masculinization, cosmetic procedures, and, in a few cases, even genital removal and refashioning.

Beginning to “transition” kids while they are still immature remains intensely controversial. But the increasingly woke medical establishment claims that the gender-affirming approach is “settled science” and the only efficacious approach to treating these children. “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy,” a recent column published in the New England Journal of Medicine, denigrated legislative efforts to restrict medical and surgical affirmation as “science denialism”:

A virulent brand of science denialism is emerging in the U.S. legal system, as states enact bans on gender-affirming health care. Misused clinical research and disinformation have provided legal cover for bans on essential treatments for transgender and gender-expansive (TGE) people.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/04/the-wages-of-woke-are-death/

Going woke means more than, as the saying says, going broke. It also means the ultimate loss of life. The grip of wokeness on our society will eventually kill Americans.

Let’s begin with health care. Medical school students, whose learning should be focused on the healing arts, are being taught social justice ideology. Apparently white supremacy, oppression and structural racism must be addressed by America’s doctors-to-be, as well as the sin of being white.

Diversity, equity and inclusion studies are being required at some schools, which of course crowds out time used in the past to acquire the knowledge and develop the skills needed to be a good doctor. Politics have no place in medical schools, but there they are.

At the same time, some schools, as many as 40, are dropping standardized testing for diversity’s sake, reports the Daily Caller. The Medical College Admission Test, which “determines an individual’s ability to problem solve, think critically, and understand concepts about medical study,” does not serve the purposes of the social justice mafia. Now there are other legitimate academic avenues to medical school outside the MCAT. But as we’ve seen in other institutions of higher learning, standards designed to demonstrate and ensure competence are being killed off.

Given these facts, it’s a certainty that many of this country’s doctors of tomorrow and beyond will not have the competence needed to keep patients alive and well. Americans will die or suffer unnecessarily because wokeness demanded that the medical community marginalize them.