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MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Social-Justice Activism Invades Medical School By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/social-justice-activism-invades-medical-school/

“These “social justice” moves won’t improve medical care; they will waste time and resources on ideological distractions.”

Almost none of the people who run educational institutions in America these days can resist the temptation to signal their virtue (and curry favor with various interest groups) by embracing “social justice,” “anti-racism,” and other leftist tropes. It was bad enough when it was happening in English departments, but now we find it in more worrisome places, such as medical schools.

The University of North Carolina’s medical school is one of them and in today’s Martin Center article, John Sailor examines the controversy.

After criticism of the school’s initial announcement of its new initiatives, it released an “Update” document. Sailor finds that document to be neither clarifying nor relieving. He writes, “Many of the recommendations flirt with violating academic freedom. They include ‘Revise Promotion and Tenure Guidelines to include a social justice domain required for promotion’ and ‘Directors of all phases will begin to examine and change content as needed to include anti-racist concepts as defined in the objectives.’”

Most Americans Are Moving On from Covid. Progressive Elites Aren’t By Nate Hochman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/most-americans-are-moving-on-from-covid-progressive-elites-arent/

Mandates and masks and fear are no longer normal — unless you read or write for the New York Times.

T he chaotic news cycle in Ukraine has overshadowed a significant development domestically — the drastic shift in public opinion on Covid-19 precautions. “Two years after the start of the pandemic, the nation is ready to move on,” Axios reported last week. “64% of survey respondents now favor federal, state and local governments lifting all COVID-19 restrictions, up 20 percentage points since early February.” (Although “three in four say they’d go back to masking if infections increase again where they live,” it noted.) On top of that, “84% say their state of emotional well-being is good, the highest shares for both since May 2020.” And “75% said the country is moving toward a time when COVID won’t interrupt daily life, up from 66% last month.”

Notably, it’s Democrats who are reporting the largest shift in views toward the pandemic. According to recent numbers from Morning Consult, “the share of adults who say COVID-19 is a severe health risk in their local community fell to an all-time low of 17%, driven by a roughly 20-point decrease among Democrats in recent weeks. Just under a quarter of Democrats now say COVID-19 is a severe local risk, compared with 12% of Republicans, a level that has also fallen since late January.” From January 14 to March 13, the share of American adults who see Covid as a “severe” health risk fell 17 points, from 34 to 17 percent. Among Republicans, that number fell 11 points, from 23 to 12 percent. But among Democrats over that time period, it fell 23 points, from 46 to 23.

In New York City, the leftist war on children continues under a new health tsar By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/in_new_york_city_the_leftist_war_on_children_continues_under_a_new_health_tsar.html

If there are only two things that the last two years have taught us, they are (1) that young children do not get extremely sick or from COVID nor do they spread it, and (2) that cloth and paper masks are ineffectual against a virus. However, New York City’s new health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, doesn’t let little things like facts get in the way. He’s doubled-down on keeping children five and under smothered in masks for the indefinite future, even as mandates for adults are finally going away. Because there is no health reason behind it, the only reason, a sinister one, can be to train both children and their parents to obey the government at all times.

The Daily Mail has the story:

New York City‘s new health commissioner sparked outrage after announcing that children aged five and under should wear face masks indefinitely, bucking the national trend of ditching masks and going in the face of vast evidence that kids are at little risk from Covid-19.

‘I think it’s indefinite at this point,’ Dr. Ashwin Vasan said Friday during a COVID-19 briefing in Queens. ‘People who have tried to predict what’s going to happen in the future in this pandemic have repeatedly found egg on their face, as they say, and I’m not going to do that here today.’

The woke commissioner, who lives in Brooklyn with his partner and three children, including a four-year-old son, argued he wanted to mask children because under fives are not vaccinated.

First, Do Some Harm: Peachy Keenan

https://americanmind.org/salvo/first-do-some-harm/

While we are finally starting to win the fight for our children’s minds, we are losing the battle for control of their bodies.

First, the good news. Recent legal wins over woke schools in Florida have the education industrial complex reeling. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis successfully banned his state’s education lunatics from “injecting,” as he likes to say with a twinkle in his eye, depraved gender poison into the state’s Kindergarten-through-3rd grade curriculum. This is the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” Act, which produced some hilarious meta-content, like braindead woke celebrities screeching “Gay!” repeatedly on social media.

Even better, the dead-eyed do-nothings who sit on school boards and the moldering teachers’ unions who control them are getting b*tch slapped—finally—by outraged parents who are taking the fight to them. The battle is over who, exactly, has control over a child’s mind. Until now, the people in full control of the minds of our youth have been the army of 31-year-old TikTok-and-Adderall addicts with multiple piercings and furry fetishes and baroque multisyllabic pronouns who seem to work at every preschool and elementary school in the country. I don’t know where these weirdos come from, but I want to thank the China-owned TikTok app for giving them a platform on which to expose themselves. 

These “teachers” get their jollies by stocking kindergarten bookshelves with dystopian titles like “She’s My Dad” and “I’m Not a Girl” and by instructing five-year-olds who barely know how to wipe themselves properly about how fun it is to touch their own private parts.

You should see what they do on Show-and-Tell day.

We are slowly chipping away at the rotted American education colossus. It feels good to notch a few Ws in our belt. Been awhile, right? 

Eliminating Dr. Doom’s Job Rand Paul introduces an amendment. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/eliminating-dr-dooms-job-lloyd-billingsley/

“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator in chief.’ No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”

That was Sen. Rand Paul and the dictator is Biden advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, a government bureaucrat since 1968 and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.

Paul, a physician for more than 33 years, has “never encountered someone with the gall to proclaim himself ‘the science’ and portray anyone opposing him as ‘attacking science.’ That is, until Dr. Fauci became the COVID dictator-in-chief.” Paul mourns “those we lost to the crushing and overbearing lockdowns and mandates that were based on junk science.”

Paul will introduce an amendment to eliminate Fauci’s NIAID position and establish three new institutes headed by presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, and serving a term of five years. As Paul explains, “my amendment, which will get a vote this week, will finally force accountability and fire Dr. Fauci.” Such a move is long overdue, and the timing is right.

“You may be done with COVID,” Fauci told reporters last month,  “but COVID is not done with the United States, nor is COVID done with the world.” Fauci’s dictatorial clout, coupled with junk science, empowers the NIAID boss to fulfill his own prophecy.

The Road to Serfdom—We’re Almost There: Roger Simon

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-road-to-serfdom-were-almost-there_4347402.html

We are learning March 18 something that apparently slipped under the radar for a few days.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “quietly” made some changes to its data tracker website on March 15, removing tens of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, nearly a quarter of which were those for young people under 18.

They tell us this occurred because of a “coding logic error.”

I wonder how many they would have had to remove if they included those who were registered by hospitals—for profit or otherwise—as having died from the virus when they had multiple other of what we have learned to call co-morbidities. (If there’s one thing we can say for the pandemic, it built our vocabularies.)

In other words, they didn’t necessarily die of COVID-19, but the hospitals said they did, a different kind of coding error, I guess.

The number would likely be staggering.

This supposed “coding logic error”—whatever that may be; the CDC doesn’t precisely tell us—could indeed be symbolic of, or even actually encompass, the entire pandemic.

DEI Will Cause People To DIE of Medical Education Wokeness Rod Dreher

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/dei-will-cause-people-to-die-medical-education-wokeness/

In the comments to the crackpot Yale Law students post, my good friend JonF suggests that this is not a big deal, really, that the protesters will grow up to mature into normalcy, and pose no threat to common sense. I pushed back, saying that may have been true in our generation (we’re the same age, Gen X), but that pattern changed with the Millennials, who marched through the institutions and changed them.

Here’s a chilling — seriously, chilling — example from the medical profession. John Sailer, on the National Association of Scholars website, writes:

In October 2021, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association jointly released its 54-page Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narratives and Concepts, which received widespread criticism for its ideologically-charged language and recommendations. The guide suggested physicians update their language using “equity-focused alternatives,” trading terms such as “vulnerable” for “oppressed” and “disadvantaged” for “historically and intentionally excluded.”

BIDEN’S TEST TO TREAT COVID PLAN: BAD POLICY BY HENRY MILLER M.D.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/17/bidens-test-to-treat-covid-plan-good-sound-bite-bad-policy/

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the co-discoverer of a critical enzyme in the influenza virus and was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.

As someone who has closely followed and written extensively about the development of COVID-19 vaccines and drug treatments since the beginning of the pandemic, one pronouncement in President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech raised red flags: “We’re also ready with antiviral treatments. If you get COVID-19, the Pfizer pill reduces your chances of ending up in the hospital by 90% … And we’re launching the ‘Test to Treat’ initiative so people can get tested at a pharmacy, and if they’re positive, receive antiviral pills on the spot at no cost.”

Highly effective antiviral pills, given out in a timely way – and free. Good sound bite, but bad idea – which Biden’s medical advisers should have warned him about.

The “Pfizer pill,” Paxlovid, consists of two kinds of tablets – drugs called nirmatrelvir and ritonavir. The first of these is the actual antiviral agent, while the second inhibits an enzyme that degrades the first, thereby increasing the concentration of nirmatrelvir in the blood. The problem is that ritonavir has problematic interactions with a huge number of commonly prescribed drugs, especially in the patient population most in need of COVID-19 treatment: Paxlovid is available under an Emergency Use Authorization for adults with a positive COVID-19 test “who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death” – in other words, the elderly and others with one or more comorbidities.

10 biggest COVID mistakes – Americans deserve an apology from the medical experts The American people, and children in particular, deserve an apology Dr. Marty Makary

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/10-biggest-covid-mistakes-americans-apology-dr-marty-makary

The medical establishment has marched in lockstep on COVID-19, presenting a consensus of expertise as they marginalized physicians who had different opinions. Two years into the pandemic, it’s fair to ask, how did public health officials do? 

Surface transmission 

Wash your hands like crazy (at least 20 seconds) and pour alcohol-based solutions on your grocery bags to stop COVID transmission, you were told for months. Despite being an expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci immediately applied the influenza surface transmission model to COVID. The logical starting hypothesis should have been that COVID was aerosolized. 

There are only three coronaviruses that cause serious illness in humans: SARS, MERS and COVID. SARS and MERS spread by air. Why did Dr. Fauci think COVID was so different? The NIH could have done the definitive experiment in one day to get the answer. It’s OK to be wrong in science, but not for months when the National Institutes of Health could have spent a fraction of its $42 billion budget to instantly establish how COVID spreads.  

No hospital visitation 

The barbaric policy of banning loved ones from holding the hand of their dying loved one and saying goodbye was a human rights violation that spanned much of the pandemic. All the so-called experts and the medical establishment were complicit, allowing this cruel policy to be instituted while abandoning their duty to respect the dignity of human life. As a physician, I can assure you there are things worse than dying. 

Closing schools 

What if the COVID-19 vaccines are not really vaccines? By Paul S. Gardiner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/what_if_the_covid19_vaccines_are_not_really_vaccines.html

Evidence has come to light strongly indicating that the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines are not really “vaccines” in the medical and legal sense of the word, but rather “experimental gene therapies.”  If proven true, the significance and legal ramifications of this allegation are profound.

This article summarizes a presentation by Dr. David Martin, a national intelligence analyst and founder of IQ100 Index, a developer of linguistic genomics, and molecular biologist Dr. Judy Mikovits.

In the presentation, Dr. Martin states, “You cannot have a vaccine that doesn’t claim to result in either immunity or blocking transmission.”  He goes on to say, “By their own patents and reference material, neither Pfizer nor Moderna claims this.  Rather, they only classify their products as ‘gene therapy.'”

Dr. Martin states the Moderna and Pfizer products “do not prevent you from getting the COVID-19 infection, nor do they prevent its spread.  They are really experimental gene therapies — unlike real vaccines, which use an antigen of the disease you’re trying to prevent, the Moderna and Pfizer injections contain synthetic RNA fragments encapsulated in a nanolipid carrier compound, the sole purpose of which is to lessen clinical symptoms associated with the S-1 spike protein, not the actual virus.”

If indeed Moderna and Pfizer corporations are misrepresenting their experimental gene therapies as bona fide vaccines, Dr. Martin states that “the legal ramifications of this deception are immense — from a legal view, both Moderna and Pfizer qualify as using illegal deceptive practices by making medical claims without clinic trial proof of immunity and transmission blocking.  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S. Code, Section 41, outlaws such deceptive practices.”