RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/political-distortion-of-medical-research

The political distortion of medical research has a sordid history, but it’s unfortunately not just a thing of the past. Today, a popular narrative has taken hold that a racist medical establishment is the reason that blacks have shorter life expectancies, worse clinical outcomes for many diseases, and even excess maternal and infant mortality. The claim is unsupported by evidence, however, and believing it won’t do anything to improve black patients’ health.

Search for the terms “racism” and “medicine” in the National Library of Medicine database, and thousands of scientific publications appear. Journalists and a growing number of doctors regard this as proof of medical discrimination. But most of these studies do not prove any causality; they merely document disparities in clinical outcomes and medical services for black Americans. Nonetheless, they increasingly serve to justify such discriminatory practices as preferentially reserving scarce Covid-19 therapies for blacks.

A rush to find racism typifies most of the many thousands of opinion pieces, original investigations, and review articles on the topic of clinical outcomes for black patients. That literature supports a media that has eagerly adopted the narrative of racism embedded in American health care. The result undermines the trust in medical care needed for successful patient- physician relationships and diverts scarce resources in combating a nonexistent factor in poor health outcomes.

The rules for conducting robust scientific research require scientists to try to disprove their own theories. One can never absolutely prove a hypothesis correct; one can only show that experiments fail to disprove it. The investigator should begin by doubting the hypothesis and do his best to disprove it with carefully designed experiments. Unfortunately, too many studies on medical racism are carried out by investigators who, following the prevailing political trend, set out to confirm their ideas of a racist health-care system. A biased experiment can easily lead to a desired outcome, and emphasizing some results while ignoring others can lead to a faulty conclusion.

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/
“How will history judge gender-affirming care if professional groupthink has in fact served to improperly justify the medicalisation of vulnerable minors with no good evidence to confidently predict the effect on their welfare? ”

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of medicalised gender change for young people. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care” —from puberty-blocker drugs to interrupt natural development, on to lifelong synthetic hormones, even surgery. And now we have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health” for children and teens who identify as transgender or non-binary.

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/if-youre-right-race-your-doctor-will-see-you-now-daniel-greenfield/

50 years after the end of the Tuskegee Experiments, the Biden administration brought back racism into medicine with a rule providing financial incentives to doctors embedding the horrifying racist ideas of Ibram X. Kendi into their practices.

The form of racism misleadingly described as “anti-racism” believes that all white people are evil and that any medical problems are the result of identity politics, not individual choices.

The racist Biden Medicare rule falsely claims that “systemic racism is the root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially defined racial groups” while demanding that “practice guidelines ” be “aligned with a commitment to anti-racism”.

Do No Harm, an organization formed to oppose the injection of critical race theory in medicine, filed a suit to oppose, what Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, calls a  “discriminatory and illegal policy advocated by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi being imposed on our health care system.”’

This move is the latest effort by conservatives and traditional liberals to push back against the destructive incursion of critical race theory into medicine which harms patients, imposes political tests on medical professionals, and raises costs while lowering quality of care.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/monkeypox-business-lloyd-billingsley/

“We have had this monkeypox in large numbers in the past. We have vaccines to take care of it,” Joe Biden said Monday in Tokyo. “It is a concern in that if it were to spread it would be consequential. That’s all they told me.” Here Biden is likely referring to the federal Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC is monitoring six people in the United States for possible monkeypox infections. The six reportedly sat near an infected traveler who had symptoms on a flight from Nigeria to the UK early this month.

Other reports cite 80 confirmed cases worldwide, 50 suspected cases in the USA and others in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Canada, all in people with no history of travel to Africa. At this writing, no monkeypox deaths have been reported but experts are puzzled.

With 80 confirmed cases of the disease worldwide, the U.S. has only confirmed a pair of cases after a man in Massachusetts was diagnosed with the disease. Another man in New York City reportedly tested positive.

“Monkeypox does not occur naturally in the United States,” the CDC explains, “but cases have happened that were associated with international travel or importing animals from areas where the disease is more common.” A 2003 “outbreak” traced to a shipment of animals from Ghana to Texas. The various African squirrels, mice, pouched rats, porcupines and such were “housed near prairie dogs” at a facility in Illinois.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/bidens-covid-policy-is-incoherent-but-thats-politics/
It sure as hell isn’t leadership.

Yesterday afternoon, I received an email from a family member who is coming to visit me in July. He was asking whether the United States still requires travelers from outside the country — including U.S. citizens — to provide proof of a negative Covid test before they may enter the country. I was halfway to saying that no, all that is over, when a little red flag went up in my head and prompted me to check the State Department’s website, where I learned that, actually, the United States does still insist upon this, and that it does so without exception.

The Biden administration’s position on Covid-19 is now perfectly absurd. It is evidently the official position of the federal government that the Covid-19 virus represents a sufficiently serious threat to Americans to justify testing fully vaccinated tourists before they may fly to the United States, but that the Covid-19 virus does not represent enough of a crisis to justify maintaining the Title 42 rules that govern how illegal immigrants are treated when they unlawfully cross the southern border. Speaking before Congress earlier this month, an attorney at the Justice Department, Jean Lin, insisted that Title 42 ought to “terminate as soon as practicable” on the grounds that it is an emergency health measure, not a permanent policy, and that it “is disrupting the processing of immigration laws that Congress enacted.” Legally, Lin is correct, but for her objection to have any force, the same rule must be applied to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Covid-testing regime, which is also the product of an emergency health measure and which also disrupts the processing of immigration laws that Congress enacted. Ultimately, the Biden administration needs to decide: Do we have a crisis on our hands, or not? If we do not have a crisis on our hands, then all of our crisis measures ought to be rescinded forthwith. If we do have a crisis on our hands, then those measures ought to be maintained. Whichever course he picks, it must be consistent.

On student loans, the administration is equally incoherent. When President Biden is asked to justify his continuation of the “pause” in the collection of debt (“pause” is a curious word to use to describe a policy that has lasted longer than an entire Congress), he explains that there’s a pandemic raging, don’t you know, and that, anyhow, if he doesn’t keep extending the policy, “millions of student loan borrowers” will “face significant economic hardship, and delinquencies and defaults could threaten Americans’ financial stability.” Elsewhere, however, the economic picture Biden paints is rather rosy. “Our economy has gone from being on the mend to being on the move,” the president proposed last week. “And now, we’re outpacing the world.” This, Biden says, is the result of the “historic infrastructure investments, creating record job growth, and rebuilding our economy.” Apparently, we are expected to believe that the Biden-led, record-job-creating, on-the-move American economy is strong enough to be the envy of “the world,” but also so weak that to ask college graduates (whose unemployment rate is 2 percent) to resume paying back their loans would bring the whole thing crashing down. Convenient!

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/primary-source-covid-misinformation-feds-scientists-and-scholars-tell

U.S Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently asked the public how COVID-19 misinformation “in the digital information environment” had affected health outcomes, trust in the healthcare system and “likelihood to vaccinate,” among other issues.

According to vaccine and healthcare policy experts who joined with Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, the misinformation is coming from inside the house.

They filed a comment in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proceeding, accusing the CDC and other health organizations of promoting falsehoods and shoddy research that “shattered the public’s trust in science and public health,” which will “take decades to repair.”

Rokita and epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford School of Medicine and Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard Medical School, also took aim at official government figures for COVID deaths that are repeatedly cited in the media.

“The government spent close to $5 trillion fighting COVID-19, but still can’t provide Hoosiers with an accurate number of deaths or hospitalizations from COVID-19,” Rokita said in a press release.

While the comment doesn’t mention National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, the press release specifically calls him out for “misleading messages” about the abilities of vaccines, masks and asymptomatic testing to stop COVID transmission. 

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/17/bidens-acting-nih-director-refuses-to-condemn-chemically-castrating-kids-despite-irreversible-damage/

Lawrence Tabak, the acting director of the National Institutes of Health, doubled down on the Biden administration’s push to institutionalize chemical castration and other gender experiments on children Tuesday after Republican Sen. Marco Rubio questioned him on the irreversible damage those dangerous procedures can cause.

As Rubio noted in the congressional hearing, so-called “gender transforming care” is “not an FDA-approved use for puberty blockers and hormone therapy” yet the Biden administration is openly endorsing it and pushing it on American minors.

“As NIH is America’s medical research agency, what work have we done to determine if this non-FDA approved use of these medicines, this off-label use of these medicines, is appropriate for minors seeking ‘gender transforming care?’” Rubio asked.

In response, Tabak parroted “observational” NIH-funded studies, some of which were specifically “designed to justify chemically sterilizing children who suffer from gender confusion or dysphoria,” as Jane Robbins and Erin Tuttle reported for The Federalist in 2018.

“NIH funds a small number of observational studies to gather the data on the effects of treatments that transgender youth and their parents have chosen. And there are also a small number of studies that describe the health issues and risks, including HIV, that are unique to these transgender youth. But all of the research in this space is observational. We do no interventional work,” Tabak said.