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MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Joseph Ladapo Bucks the Covid Vaccine Orthodoxy The Florida surgeon general’s critics ignore the science and resort to personal attacks.By Allysia Finley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joseph-ladapo-bucks-the-covid-vaccine-orthodoxy-politico-sensitivity-analysis-myocarditis-43201b8b?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_171&cx_artPos=5&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s

Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t the only black conservative target of a recent media drive-by. Last week Politico published a hit piece on Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has long resisted the left’s Covid orthodoxies.

The story, by Arek Sarkissian, claims that Dr. Ladapo “personally altered” a state study last year to show that mRNA vaccines posed a significantly higher cardiac health risk for young men “than had been established by the broader medical community.” In reality, he simply reviewed a study conducted by lower-level staff before publication.

Nowhere in Politico’s piece will you find an explanation of what’s supposed to be wrong with Dr. Ladapo’s edits. It merely quotes people who denounce it, such as Matt Hitchings, an assistant biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, who asserts without elaboration: “I think it’s a lie.” Politico does include a link to the pre-published study, which indicates Dr. Ladapo’s edits and shows how Mr. Sarkissian is making a Matterhorn out of a molehill.

Dr. Ladapo’s study found a doubled risk of cardiac death for men 18 to 39 in the 28 days after vaccination. His offense appears to be that he removed a “sensitivity analysis” in the draft study that showed a statistically insignificant increase in cardiac mortality among young men after the second dose.

What Happened in Hospitals During Covid? By Stella Paul

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/what_happened_in_hospitals_during_covid.html

Hospitals should be places you can trust to provide comfort and healing when you’re most vulnerable. But that trust may have been shattered by brutal Covid protocols that critics claim turned many hospitals into hellscapes of systematic medical murder.

The victims’ stories have been muffled by the mainstream media, but they’re starting to break through. For one thing, lawsuits against three hospitals have been filed in California by 14 bereaved families who claim their loved ones were killed by a deadly protocol. Meanwhile, activist organizations like Protocol Kills, the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, and American Frontline Nurses are collecting and documenting stories from bereaved families about what happened to their loved ones when they entered a hospital hoping for healing and, instead, were led to bizarre and tortured deaths.

I find it heartbreaking to read their stories, which share a haunting similarity, a feeling of being trapped in a highly organized nightmare. The ritual progresses in predictable stages: first, the patient is isolated from family, who are unable to advocate for their loved one or monitor what’s happening. Next, the patient is diagnosed with Covid-19 or Covid pneumonia, even if they came to the hospital because of a broken arm. Then, they’re bullied into getting remdesivir, a highly toxic drug which killed 53 percent of Ebola patients who had the misfortune to take it. Next, according to the California lawsuit, “They are placed on a BiPap machine at a high rate, making it difficult for them to breathe. Their hands are often tied down so they can’t take the BiPap machine off their face.”

I know this is getting unbearably painful to read, but stay with me to the bitter end to memorialize the victims’ suffering.  As the patients writhe in agony, psychiatrists are brought in to diagnose them with agitation and sedate them. Now, shot up with remdesivir, sedated with drugs that make it tough to breathe against the BiPap ventilator, and strapped down in restraints, the victims are denied food and sometimes even water.  Should they try to summon help, they may find the hospital played a vicious trick on them, placing their phone and call button for the nurse out of reach. In the final stages, they are intubated and slowly die alone, left to rot into a skeletal corpse with bed sores. Is this America?

The Dangerous Fad of Transgenderism The gender dysphoria fad shows no signs of abating. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/23/the-dangerous-fad-of-transgenderism/

Fads aren’t always harmful things. Hula hoops, goldfish swallowing, and flagpole sitting have come and gone and generally were not toxic. In the 1970s, various eating disorders were the rage. But they were treated as physical disorders and serious mental health problems. Writing in Psychology Today, Dr. Emily Deans observed, “Eating disorders in adolescents are strongly predicted by the earlier presence of depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety.” Her treatment recommendations included, “A personalized approach, based on treating underlying depression, anxiety, nutritional deficiencies, and teaching that our bodies deserve to be nourished with proper, whole foods can be surprisingly effective.”

But today, bulimia and anorexia are passé and have been replaced by gender dysphoria, which is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda. In fact, the organized nature of the movement has left many parents in a horrible position. For example, in Washington State, SB 5599 was just passed, which allows the state to legally take children away from their parents if they don’t consent to their child’s gender transition surgeries. Washington State Senator Marko Liias issued a statement that summed up the new law. “Under current law, if a child who has run away from home goes to a licensed shelter, that shelter is required to notify the parents unless a compelling reason applies. The bill allows certified shelters to contact the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) in lieu of parents in certain additional instances, such as when a youth is seeking reproductive health services or gender-affirming care.”

But what is the depth of the problem?

A staggering 99.4 percent of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group. The 0.6 percent of the adult population who are gender dysphoric—a condition that causes extreme distress—certainly deserve empathy and respect.

The Spike A growing number of scientists are sounding the alarm about the risks of both COVID and its cures: Clayton Fox

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/the-spike

Those raising evidence-based concerns about the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines are often labeled purveyors of misinformation, and derided as anti-scientific conspiracy theorists and paranoid kooks. Or worse. Bill Kristol tweeted in late 2021 that, “there is blood on the hands in 2021 of the unvaccinated and especially their enablers and encouragers who know better.” However, there are a number of prominent scientists, doctors, and independent researchers who are wary of both COVID infection and the vaccines.

Many of these figures are worried about one particular piece of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: the spike protein, which allows the virus to enter your cells, and which was chosen to be the featured element used in the Moderna, Pfizer, J&J, and AstraZeneca vaccines. The available evidence shows that COVID, especially in light of new forms of treatment, is not as acutely deadly as once feared, and while mortality attributable to the COVID vaccines has not been definitively characterized, it is likely relatively rare. But some scientists are concerned by the potential effects of repeated exposure to the spike protein, and therefore the advisability of further boosters that contain it, given that we are going to be frequently reexposed to the circulating virus. Those voicing these concerns, however, have been subjected to censorship, ostracization, and damaging attacks on their reputations.

Take, for example, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. On his DarkHorse podcast on June 21, 2021, Weinstein sat down with mRNA pioneer Dr. Robert Malone (COVID-vaccinated) and Silicon Valley inventor turned COVID investigator Steve Kirsch (COVID-vaccinated) to discuss the potential dangers of the vaccines rapidly being distributed around the country and across the world. The focus? The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which is produced when the mRNA from the vaccines enters your cells.

Looking for Answers to the Autism Epidemic in All the Wrong Places Joan Swirsky

https://www.thepostemail.com/2023/04/20/looking-for-answers-to-the-autism-epidemic-in-all-the-wrong-places/

According to the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest statistics, in 2020 one in 36 children (approximately four percent of boys and one percent of girls) was estimated to have autism spectrum disorder, estimates that are significantly higher than those in all previous years. White children are about 19 percent more likely than black children and 65 percent more likely than Hispanic children to be diagnosed with autism.

Experts offer various reasons for the general increase in this condition:

The role that being an older parent plays not only in the incidence of autism but also Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities.
Genes.
“Something” in the environment.
The increasing number of vaccines given to infants and children, which today routinely number 16.

What is consistently omitted, however, is the role that ultrasound exams during pregnancy may and probably do play not only in this seeming black/white disparity, but in the rapidly escalating incidence of the condition. More about that below.

WHAT WE KNOW TODAY

Autism is a neurological disorder that affects the normal development of the brain, causing self-defeating behaviors and an inability to form social relationships. It usually appears before the age of three. Most scientists believe that autism is strongly influenced by genetics but allow that environmental factors may also play a role.

To be diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, a child must have deficits in three areas:

Communication (most children can’t make eye contact; others can’t speak).
Social skills (typified by disinterest in both people and surroundings).
Typically “normal” behavior (many autistic children have tics, repetitive behavior, inappropriate affects, et al).

Those diagnosed on the autistic spectrum range from high-functioning, self-sufficient people, even geniuses, to those who need lifelong supportive help.

Pandemic and Panopticon: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/pandemic_and_panopticon_the_rise_of_the_biomedical_security_state.html

The pandemic of 2020 saw the imposition of shocking restrictions. For the first time, healthy people were confined to their homes. Vaccines cleared for emergency use – meaning not rigorously tested – were forced on all citizens. Debate, even by scientists, was censored. Refusal to obey these arbitrary impositions could mean arrest, legal action, or, as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty found out, losing one’s job.

A psychiatry professor in good standing at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), Dr. Kheriaty became persona non grata when he demurred to the mandatory vaccine policy, claiming natural immunity as a Covid-recovered individual. Not caring for scientific debate, the university declared him a “threat to the health and safety of the community,” suspended him without pay, barred him from campus, and eventually fired him.

It did not matter that his psychiatry clerkship was the highest rated clinical course at UCI’s medical school; that he’d been chosen keynote speaker to address incoming medical students; and that when the pandemic broke out, he had risked his life to work long hours at the hospital, often uncompensated, while many colleagues stayed home in safety.

Uncowed, Dr. Kheriaty sued the university. In a more far-reaching action, he authored The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, a sober analysis and exposure of the tyranny of pandemic policies and the devastation they wrought. The book traces the roots of state interference in, and control of, the biomedical aspects of citizens’ lives to utilitarian ideas that began with Galton and Darwin, and trickled into eugenics, which he says is falsely viewed as entirely a creation of the Nazis when in fact American states were enforcing sterilization from the 1900s to the 1960s.

The core idea, he says, is this: the freedom of a citizen to make health and life decisions can be annulled by the state for the greater good, especially during emergencies. The questions it raises are: Who makes these decisions and on what basis? Who decides what is the greater good? Who is to be held responsible for errors of judgement? What checks and balances do we have, then, against the dictatorial inclinations of the powerful? Ancillary to the idea, he says, is the dangerous circular logic of the state of exception: those who declare an emergency in which citizens’ rights – including the right to question the declaration – stand suspended will believe that in that instance it is morally and politically justified!

The lies about hydroxychloroquine were the worst of the COVID era By John Klar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/the_lies_about_hydroxychloroquine_were_the_worst_of_the_covid_era.html

There has been little accountability for the lies of the COVID pandemic. 

Clearly the disease originated at the Wuhan Virology Lab.  The mRNA vaccines were not nearly as effective as touted (if they worked at all), and possibly unsafe. 

Another glaring dishonesty, exposed by doctors like Meryl Nass, relates to the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID.

Whether or not hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID, government authorities thwarted doctors from honestly attempting to find out, and interfered with doctor-patient relationships to do so.  Agencies conspired to undermine and discredit doctors like Dr. Meryl Nass, discouraging alternative therapies possessing strong safety records while hard-selling experimental and relatively untested mRNA vaccines.

In the case of Dr. Nass, a nationwide pattern of censorship against physicians who supported hydroxychloroquine was reflected when the State of Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine suspended her medical license and referred her for a psychiatric evaluation.  The Board slandered the good doctor by claiming her provision of care constituted “an immediate jeopardy to the health and physical safety of the public” and even suggested she might be using drugs:

The information received by the Board demonstrates that Dr. Nass is or may be unable to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety to her patients by reason of mental illness, alcohol intemperance, excessive use of drugs, narcotics, or as a result of a mental or physical condition interfering with the competent practice of medicine.

Dr. Nass was not doing anything extreme in her patient care: she was targeted because she spoke up forcefully against the mRNA vaccine narrative.  She got in the way of efforts by politicians and pharmaceutical companies to ensure maximum jab compliance. 

The immediate insistence by authorities that Covid skipped species in an open air market flew in the face of common sense—that it may have come from a lab studying that very virus with gain-of-function methodology, using bats carrying that virus, in the city where that virus then broke out.  Similarly, the rush to dismiss hydroxychloroquine as a potentially effective therapy could not have been known without study (much like early dismissals of natural immunity).  Banning its use made no sense.

As a person who had taken hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for many years for Lyme Disease, the slandering of the drug (and doctors who prescribed it) was rather stunning to me.  I knew the risks of the drug were minor.  Yet Dr. Anthony Fauci and others very aggressively opposed trying to save lives with this drug before mRNA vaccines were available, using illogical and extremist justifications.

Dr. Nass stood up boldly and early.  At her website and in her newsletters, she has competently established that:

– studies purporting to discredit HCQ employed excessive doses and were designed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

– the government limited HCQ use by reducing supplies to pharmacies.

– the government used the reduced supplies to suggest doctors who prescribed HCQ for Covid patients were depriving patients from using HCQ for traditional purposes.

– government propaganda fabricated and elevated dangers of the drug, and the FDA and CDC limited its use using false claims.

– trials were unreasonably limited to already-sickened patients.

Half of Illegal Immigrants in NYC Are Not Vaccinated for Polio, Health Commissioner Warns Madeline Leesman

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/04/18/immigrants-polio-vaxx-n2622053

Half of illegal immigrants pouring into New York City are not vaccinated against poliovirus, the city’s health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, said.

This month, Vasan sent an eight-page letter to doctors outlining the health risk migrants living in the city pose to residents. In the letter, Vasan pointed out that the migrants come from countries with high rates of infectious tuberculosis, chickenpox and other illnesses (via the New York Post): 

“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City (NYC) in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. As more people arrive and many make NYC their home, the scale and scope of need continues to grow,” Vasan said in an eight-page letter, dated April 11, sent to physicians and other health care providers. A copy was obtained by The Post.  

“I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum … The scope of this letter represents the scale of the need. It is incumbent upon us as a welcoming city to comprehensively evaluate and meet these needs.”

[…]

“Vaccination rates for certain diseases are low in some of the most common countries of origin, with rates hovering around 50% for polio as an example,” the commissioner said.

Biden’s Open Borders Bringing Diseases to Your Neighborhood Betsy McCaughey

https://townhall.com/columnists/betsymccaughey/2023/04/19/bidens-open-borders-bringing-diseases-to-your-neighborhood-n2622113

Ready for another pandemic? New York City’s health commissioner announced last week that the influx of migrants from the southern border — more than 50,000 to New York City alone in the past year — is delivering contagious diseases, including tuberculosis and polio, to our neighborhoods.

The same disease threats are also endangering other migrant destinations, including California, Texas and Florida.

In a letter to physicians and health care administrators citywide, Commissioner Ashwan Vasan explained that “many people who recently arrived in NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB.”

TB, short for tuberculosis, is a bacterial infection. It is treatable with antibiotics, but it generally takes six to nine months of medication to recover. Not a walk in the park.

TB spreads through the air, like flu or a cold. Stand next to someone with TB for a long subway ride or sit next to them every day at school and you can catch it.

New York City’s TB rate, at 6.1 cases per 100,000, is more than double the national rate. Close to 9 out of 10 (88%) of these TB cases are people born outside the United States. Every neighborhood in the city has had at least one case.

Vasan’s letter called on New York to pull out all the stops providing health care, food and legal services to migrants. Not a word about protecting the people who already live here.

Open borders import disease. Immigrants who lawfully apply for a visa must undergo health screenings and show they are vaccinated, and refugees are screened for TB before entering the U.S. Not so for those wading across the Rio Grande.

Lessons Lost to History: the Tragically Unheeded 2008 Warning of Biolab Threat By Ben Bartee

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/04/14/lessons-lost-to-history-the-tragically-unheeded-2008-warning-of-biolab-threat-n1687401

We ignore prescient warnings in the present at the peril of our future selves.

This one comes from a decade and a half ago, a full twelve years before the course of world history was literally changed forever for the worse by forced lockdowns, masking, and medical mandates unimaginable prior to 2020.

Via Scientific American, 2008:

In an opinion that echoes those of several public health scientists, Keith Rhodes, the Government Accountability Office’s chief technologist, told a congressional hearing in October 2007 that “we are at greater risk today” than before of an infectious disease epidemic because of the great increase in biolaboratories and the absence of oversight they receive.

Nevertheless, Michael Kurilla, NIAID’s director of extramural research, says that “we’re much better off” having spent $41 billion on bioterror research since 2002.

The study’s author, John Dudley Miller, offered his unheeded warning in the context of the anthrax score of the aughts.

Note how often these biomedical security state threads lead back to, and intertwine with, the post-9/11 War on Terror waged by the Bush Administration and continued by its predecessor.

In many ways, this is all one continuous, ever-evolving permanent emergency. The referent objects and threats (real or manufactured) change, but all of the unending crises that we are subjected serve to justify increased national security powers in some form.

The overarching message I wish to convey when discussing AI developers or virologists tinkering with forces beyond their control in a lab is: these people do not know what they are doing.