RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/fda_takes_down_its_propaganda_demonizing_ivermectin_as_a_treatment_for_covid.html

We will never know how many Covid sufferers died because they shunned treatment with ivermectin, but at least the FDA has stopped spreading the lie (aka, disinformation) that the medicine is for animals, not humans.

(source: FDA tweet via American Greatness)

This retreat is taking place because:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reportedly settled a lawsuit brought by three doctors who who accused the health regulator of interfering with their ability to practice medicine and prescribe Ivermectin to treat COVID.

But the FDA is not conceding that ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for Covid. To do so would invalidate the emergency use authorization for the mRNA drug incorrectly called a vaccine.  Bypassing the normal tests for new drugs with an emergency use authorization requires that there be no effective alternative therapy.

Via The Epoch Times:

Within 21 days, the FDA will remove another page titled, “why you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19,” according to the settlement announcement, which was filed with federal court in southern Texas.

The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals,” the page currently states. It also says that data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19, despite how some studies it cites show ivermectin is effective against the illness.

The FDA in the settlement is also agreeing to delete multiple social media posts that came out strongly against ivermectin, including one that stated: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

In exchange, doctors who sued the agency are dismissing their claims, the filing states. (snip)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/state_of_american_health_care.html

Once the envy of the world, American medical care continues to be infected with Leftist woke ideology with abysmal and terrifying outcomes.

Under the term “health equity” the only parameter that matters appears to be a person’s melanin level, not his need for timely medical treatment.

Consequently:

More than 10 million nonblack Americans with chronic kidney disease may have seen their treatments or transplants delayed because of policy changes enacted after 2020.  Some of those patients now face greater risk of death because national transplant organizations have embraced racial activism.

Patients of all races deserve a formula that accurately estimates their individual kidney function, not one that favors one racial group at the expense of others. 

Then there is the Advil Pain Equity Project to end “systemic pain racism.”  It should be noted that Advil is owned by Pfizer. In fact, as explained in FortuneWell,

According to a study, three out of four Black people believe there is bias in how their pain is diagnosed. Now Advil, a popular pain relief brand, is aiming to address inequity in pain diagnosis and treatment with the Advil Pain Equity Project.

As part of the multiyear project, Advil is awarding grants to the Morehouse School of Medicine and BLKHLTH, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, to support the development of patient resources and a course for medical school students to address pain equity both in and outside of medical facilities.

Dare one ponder the possibility that this is merely “a plan to sell $50 million more in pills to Black people – disguised as a fight to end ‘pain racism?’”

On the other hand, keynote speaker at the 2023 Social Justice Awards sponsored by Institutional Diversity & Equity (ID&E), “author, physician, and thought leader Dr. Uche Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, is committed to dismantling racism in health care and closing the gap in racial health inequities.” 

Consequently, in 2024, is the American patient caught between the greed of pharmaceutical companies and the vise of leftwing social justice activists?  And this does not even begin to analyze the spiraling health care costs that have long confounded Americans.

Moreover, faith in American medicine has certainly been tarnished by the treatment afforded those health care workers who dared to question the federal government’s edicts concerning the mRNA Covid-19 “vaccines.” 

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo declared that “COVID-19 vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings” and called for a complete halt of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.  Ladapo issued this warning “based on overwhelming evidence that the COVID-19 shots that Pfizer and Moderna assured us were ‘safe’ are contaminated with plasmid DNA.” 

Consider the fact that the government continues to purposefully censor truthful information. In fact, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, the psychiatrist who challenged the University of California Irvine Vaccine Mandates was fired for this.  It has led to what is being called the most important free speech case in a generation known as Missouri v. Biden (Murthy v. Missouri).

In 2023 Kheriaty asserted that “[a]lthough this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/19/long-tyranny-a-greater-threat-than-long-covid/

The policy response to the coronavirus outbreak was as deadly as the disease.

Not to downplay the damage done by COVID, but we’re still dealing with a far worse disease and will be for some time. It has no medical name but if it did, we’d call it the tyrannococcus.

From the top we acknowledge that the novel coronavirus killed millions around the world. This is not a statistic but a procession of tragedies, and they happened despite the policy responses from those who claimed to be our guardians. Now, four years later, the experts are telling us to treat the disease similar to the way we treat the flu. The much-feared “long COVID appears to manifest as a post-viral syndrome indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses,” says Medical Xpress.

Yet the damage wrought by governments, spread by the tyrannococcus machine, will continue well beyond 2024. “We will be dealing with the harm done for decades,” says Martin Kulldorf, the biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist who was fired from his Harvard faculty position because he objected to COVID vaccine mandates.

Rather than respond in any sort of reasonable way, elected and unelected officials acted as tyrants, closing businesses, restricting our freedom to move about, limiting the number of people who could gather in private homes, requiring mask use and mandating vaccinations. “There was very little oversight or limitation on the powers conferred to” the agencies that made those decisions, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They simply gave themselves power they should have never wielded.

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FEquity-Over-Accuracy-in-Kidney-Care.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

“Health equity” could be claiming new victims. More than 10 million nonblack Americans with chronic kidney disease may have seen their treatments or transplants delayed because of policy changes enacted after 2020’s “racial reckoning.” Some of those patients now face greater risk of death because national transplant organizations have embraced racial activism.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a quasi-governmental nonprofit that runs American transplant centers, enacted a significant policy change. The network compiles the national waitlist for kidney transplants and consults a formula that helps determine which candidates it will prioritize. Before 2020, the network used a formula that measured serum creatinine concentrations to assess a patient’s estimated glomerular filtration rate—the best-known measure of whether a patient has chronic kidney disease. Since black patients typically have higher serum creatinine concentrations than nonblacks with the same kidney function, the formula had applied an adjustment for black patients to ensure a more precise GFR estimate.

Activists in the wake of George Floyd’s death claimed that the formula’s adjustment was racist. This prompted the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology to create a task force to “reassess inclusion of race in the estimation of glomerular filtration rate.” The task force decided to nix the racial adjustment and set to work choosing a new formula that would not take race into account, which it released in 2021.

In December 2022, the board of UNOS’s transplant system issued a directive requiring all transplant centers to apply retroactively the new formula to determine black patients’ spots on the national waitlist. Last December, the network announced the results of its application of the new formula. Removing the racial adjustments had moved the waitlist’s more than 6,100 black patients up by an average of 1.7 years, with just over 500 receiving a transplant. Of course, this meant that some nonblack patients were correspondingly pushed back in line.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-prophets-da-henderson?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Welcome back to The Prophets, our new Saturday series about fascinating people from the past who predicted our current moment and make our world more understandable today.

Last week, we showed how civil rights hero Bayard Rustin predicted the rise of identity politics and affirmative action—and how they would divide us today. Today, Joe Nocera spotlights D.A. Henderson, the epidemiologist who warned that pandemic lockdowns won’t stop a disease, but could instead lead to a public health disaster. Bari Weiss

“In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism—and was quickly forgotten.

As it turns out, that paper, titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” was Henderson’s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country—indeed, our world—could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid. 

This month marks the four-year anniversary of lockdowns on a global scale. And though the pandemic has passed, its consequences live on. The lockdowns embraced by the U.S. public-health establishment meant that millions of young people had their education and social development disrupted, or left school for good. Mental health problems rose substantially. So did incidents of domestic violence and overdose deaths.

It didn’t have to be that way. 

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fdrug-price-controls.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

In his State of the Union address, President Biden touted the drug-price controls in his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Though the price controls have yet to take effect, Biden proposed expanding these measures, which threaten to destroy pharmaceutical innovation and harm the nation’s health.

The IRA’s drug-price controls are a solution in search of a problem. Two years ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that per capita prescription-drug spending in real terms had fallen as a percentage of total spending on health care since the mid-2000s. Retail prescription drug prices have gone up at a slower rate than have hospital prices and health-care prices generally. According to researchers at the health-care data group IQVIA, U.S. drug spending is lower as a percentage of national health expenditures than the average drug-spending share across 11 developed countries.

While price-control proponents focus on drugs’ high list prices, the average net price of a prescription—the amount that users actually paid after subtracting manufacturers’ discounts and rebates—has been falling, according to CBO. This reflects the increased use of generic drugs, which cost far less than name-brand pharmaceuticals and now account for nine out of ten prescriptions. In fact, U.S. patients use more generics and pay less for them (16 percent less, on average) than do patients in other developed countries.

https://okaythennews.substack.com/p/science-summary-covid-19-vaccines?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email

An unofficial series of 4 crucially important medical journal articles (JECP4), 2 by me, appearing in major academic publisher Wiley’s Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice reveals that claims made about COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness and safety were exaggerated in the clinical trials and observational studies, which significantly impacts risk-benefit analyses. Also discussed are the concerning topics of myocarditis, with evidence indicating that this one adverse effect alone means that the risks outweigh the benefits in the young and healthy; and perceived negative effectiveness, which indicates that the vaccines increase the chance of COVID-19 infection/hospitalisation/death, to say nothing about other adverse effects.

Whilst already planning for a holiday overseas on the advice of my treating team, I fortuitously was invited to share my research and discuss my ongoing persecution alongside brilliant and courageous doctors, scientists, academics, lawyers, and activists, such as Dr Robert Malone, who declared this research to be “excellent”, and “some of the best work, academically, in reevaluating the data”, culminating in an invitation to testify for US Senator Ron Johnson. So for those who are here because of the associated videos, and anyone else interested in this topic, please enjoy this much more detailed summary.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/why_americans_no_longer_trust_the_healthcare_system.html

Trust is foundational in relationships, whether between individuals or between individuals and institutions. A Gallup survey from last summer found, “Americans’ faith in major societal institutions hasn’t improved over the past year following a slump in public confidence in 2022.”

Notable other examples where surprisingly few Americans have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in major institutions include Congress at 8%, big business and television news at 14%, and the criminal justice system at only 17%. The medical system fared slight better with 34% of Americans expressing confidence. But two thirds have lost trust.

YouTube screen grab

Doctors, hospitals, and healthcare systems used to be held in high esteem, but no more. Aren’t these the “experts” in white coats? What happened to that trust? Why do only 1 in 3 Americans trust what was once a sacred healing profession?

Rasmussen Reports recently asked American adults three questions

On health-related issues, how much trust do you have in experts who give advice on TV and other media?
In terms of your own health-care decisions, which is closer to your attitude, that it’s safe to trust advice from experts, or that it’s important to do your own research?
Thinking back on the COVID-19 pandemic, were most of the experts basically right or wrong?

Not surprisingly, trust is low. What is interesting is the partisan divide, with Democrats far more trusting in medical instructions than Republicans.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bad-policies-leaving-next-generation-of-surgeons-unprepared

What is going on in surgery? Why are young surgeons are coming out of residency programs unprepared for clinical practice? A 2013 Annals of Surgery report revealed that 40 percent of surgical residents lacked confidence to practice independently after five years of training, the typical length of a full general-surgery residency. According to the same report, one in five surveyed program directors “felt that new fellows arrived unprepared for the operating room,” and program directors deemed 66 percent of new fellows incapable of operating unsupervised for more than 30 minutes in a major surgery.

While these statistics are frightening, that report is 11 years old. Have things gotten better since? Judging by more recent reports and my conversations with peers, they have not, and in fact, have probably gotten worse. Surgeons I have recently spoken to have observed that too many young surgeons are poorly prepared and need remedial help, such as operating with a more experienced surgeon before they can be trusted to operate on their own. The young surgeons themselves seem to realize their inadequate preparation, as nearly 80 percent of post-general-training surgeons pursue a one or two-year fellowship in a subspecialty, which for some may be a way to get more surgical experience and put off entering general practice.

One possible explanation for young surgeons’ lack of preparation stems from the American Council on Graduate Medical Education’s 2003 decision to limit residents in training to 80-hour work weeks and no more than 24 consecutive work hours. For surgery residents, fewer work hours means less time spent caring for patients and performing surgeries. Only with time and repetition do surgical residents develop the requisite cognitive and technical skills necessary to learn sound surgical judgement—knowing when to operate and what operation to do—and how to operate safely under all circumstances. The hour reductions also have resulted in less continuity, as residents hand off patients to one another, diminishing residents’ sense of responsibility for patient care.