RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=5edc814ed7

“Ultraprocessed foods.” That sounds really bad. In fact, not just really bad, but really, really bad. Bad on a level with, maybe, “assault rifles” or “cis-heteronormativity.” Definitely, with a condemnatory name like that, “ultraprocessed foods” would be something that no sensible person would ever eat, or at least certainly not in large quantities.

The term “ultraprocessed foods” has been in usage for a while, but the frequency seems to have exploded everywhere in the past few months. Perhaps that has resulted from the naming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made a thing about proclaiming a health crisis in the U.S., which he asserts is substantially brought about by our “broken food system.” On November 15 — just after President-elect Trump tapped Kennedy to lead HHS in the new administration — The New York Times had a piece outlining Kennedy’s critiques of the “food system.” Number one on the list of Kennedy’s critiques identified by the NYT was “ultraprocessed food.”

After reading this, I thought it might be time for me to get on top of what this “ultraprocessed food” stuff might be. Is this something that you need to really be concerned about, or is it just another one of the usual scare tactics of the left to try to take more control of your life? The answer, as will not surprise you, is the latter.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/10/zuckerberg_people_in_the_biden_administraiton_told_us_to_censor_true_information_about_vaccine_side-effects.html

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan an interview that aired Friday that “people in the Biden administration” pressured them to take down posts on Facebook and Instagram that discussed vaccine side effects, whether the claims were true or not:

MARK ZUCKERBERG: So, in the beginning, it kind of seemed like, OK, we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this.

But when it went from, you know, 2 weeks to flatten the curve to, you know, in like in the beginning, it was like, “OK, there aren’t enough masks, masks aren’t that important,” to then it’s like, “Oh no, now you have to wear a mask.” And, you know, like everything was shifting around.

It beaome very difficult to kind of follow, and this really hit the most extreme, I’d say during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. Yeah, I’m generally like pretty pro-rolling out vaccines. I think on balance the vaccines are more positive than negative.

But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it, and they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true, right? I mean, they, they basically pushed us and said, you know, “Anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.”

And I was just like, well, we’re not gonna do that. Like we’re we’re clearly not gonna do that. I mean that that that that is kind of inarguably true.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s telling you to take down things to talk about vaccine side effects?

MARK ZUCKERBERG: It was people in the Biden administration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/01/the-national-institutes-of-health-needs-an-overhaul/

The agency is driven by activity, not results, and wastes money on pointless and counterproductive projects and DEI initiatives.

During the first 60 years of the 20th century, United States life expectancy rose, on average, by 0.37 years per year. After 1960, the rate of improvement suddenly dropped by more than half to 0.15 years per year before the Covid-19 effects.

A significant factor in this slowdown was rapid expansion of and mismanagement by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). During the first 60 years, NIH spending increased by $139 million per year in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars. After 1960, it increased by five times that amount — $703 million per year:

(NIH, CDC, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis)

The nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, with his openness to change and dedication to rigorous science,  offers an opportunity to fix the agency’s failures. There are talented scientists funded by NIH grants achieving important breakthroughs. Unfortunately, the size and failures of NIH result in wasted money and too-slow progress toward improved health.

NIH applies a “pipeline” model to research where scientists pick their topics, often focusing on what they consider “basic” questions. Experience shows that pipeline research is less innovative and effective in delivering results than the alternative “mission” research model that begins with an objective such as “eliminate polio.” Most privately funded research follows the mission model, with better results.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/jay-bhattacharya-nih-gender-medicine

In 2015, the National Institutes of Health launched the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office. Its purpose: to rectify the absence of health data on this cohort by prioritizing research and improving data collection. While the new office (SGMRO) does not have grantmaking authority on its own, its wide sphere of influence shapes the nature of the grants being considered for funding and the overall spirit of research on sexual and gender minorities (SGM). Moreover, the SGMRO and its associated working group and coordinating committee function as connective tissue linking the NIH’s various institutes, centers, and offices, allowing them to spread their understanding of the health of “individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, non-binary, Two-Spirit, queer, and/or intersex.” While many of the SGMRO’s priorities are laudable and in principle worthy of scientific inquiry, in practice they have enshrined activist assumptions about the nature of “gender identity,” “gender-affirming care,” and the causes of “health inequities” at NIH.

The catalyst for establishing the new office was a 2011 report commissioned by the NIH to survey the known research on “LGBT” health. Conducted by what is now the National Academy of Medicine, the report stated, “All aspects of the evidence base for transgender-specific health care need to be expanded.” The authors noted a need for more research on how treatment for gender dysphoria should be managed “under the new paradigm of greater diversity of gender identities” and on both the benefits and harms of sex-trait modification procedures, particularly related to hormone use.

With the benefit of hindsight, the 2011 report contains signs of things to come—for instance, recommendations to consider “intersectionality” and “minority stress” as guiding principles. But in many ways the document reads like a relic from a bygone era of scientific discourse, full of genuine humility and a desire for more scientific data on LGBT health more broadly. The report concluded that overall data on LGBT health was so sparse that a substantial research program was needed. In 2012, what is now known as the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Coordinating Committee issued a report that accepted the 2011 findings and recommendations, culminating in the founding of the SGMRO in 2015.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/12/30/how-dei-is-helping-fuel-a-huge-rise-of-antisemitism-in-health-care-and-hospitals/

More than a year has passed since the hate-fueled encampments and rallies targeting Jews became fixtures on college campuses and in cities across America. Over time, the emerging narrative centered on the assumption that those participating in sowing the antisemitic chaos were confined to specific industries, such as Hollywood and academia, or were among an ignorant cast of undergrads steeped in an ecosystem of radical progressivism. 

Unfortunately, in a disturbing phenomenon plucked directly from a Nazi-era playbook, a troubling rise of antisemitism in the medical community is now manifesting as an alternative and potentially deadly avenue through which Jew hatred is spreading across the US. 

In its first published study of “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: A Survey Study of Reported Experiences,” the Data and Analytics Department of StandWithUS, a Jewish civil rights group, surveyed 645 self-identifying Jewish healthcare professionals, 74 percent of whom are physicians. The study found that nearly 40 percent of respondents recounted direct exposure to antisemitism within their professional or academic environments. 

The results of the survey confirm an underacknowledged reality — that the healthcare arena is emerging as a new and dangerous stronghold for antisemites to exert their influence. If left unchecked, this movement will rupture the integrity of America’s medical professionals. 

The rise of anti-Jewish attitudes in healthcare stems from several factors, including the decision made by some medical schools to supplant critical instructional time with toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that supposedly focus on cultural inclusion and social inequities. 

Unsurprisingly, when combined with a deterioration of academic standards, medical students educated in this pedagogy prove prone to gravitating towards a framework that designates Israel, and by extension, all Jews, as privileged colonialists.  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/27/the-cure-for-vaccine-skepticism/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

The only way to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine – is to put a well-known vaccine skeptic in charge of the vaccine research agenda. The ideal person for this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

At the same time, we must put rigorous scientists with a proven track record of evidence-based medicine in charge of determining the type of study designs to use. Two ideal scientists for this are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who have been nominated to lead the NIH and FDA, respectively.

Vaccines are – along with antibiotics, anesthesia, and sanitation – one of the most significant health inventions in history. First conceived in 1774 by Benjamin Jesty, a farmer in Dorsetshire, England, the smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly developed the COVID vaccines, saved many older Americans. Despite this, we have seen a sharp increase in general vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine scientists and public health officials who did not conduct properly randomized trials made false claims about vaccine efficacy and safety and established vaccine mandates for people who did not need the vaccines, sowing suspicion and damaging public trust in vaccination.

What went wrong? The purpose of the COVID vaccines was to reduce mortality and hospitalization, but the randomized trials were only designed to demonstrate short-term reduction in COVID symptoms, which is not of great public health importance. Since the placebo groups were promptly vaccinated after the emergency approval, they also failed to provide reliable information about adverse reactions. Despite these flaws, it was falsely claimed that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission.

Governments and universities then mandated the vaccines for people with superior natural immunity and for young people with very low mortality risk. These mandates were not only unscientific but with a limited vaccine supply, it was unethical to vaccinate low-mortality-risk people when the vaccines were needed by older high-risk people around the world.

Since government and pharmaceutical companies lied about the COVID vaccine, are they also lying about other vaccines? Skepticism has now spread to tried-and-true vaccines that are proven to work.

And there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions. Seminal work from Denmark has shown that vaccines can have both positive and negative non-specific effects on non-targeted diseases, and that is something that must be explored in greater depth. Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) scientists studying asthma and aluminum-containing vaccines concluded that while their “findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines … additional examination of this hypothesis appears warranted.”

While VSD and other scientists should continue to do observational studies, we should also conduct randomized placebo-controlled vaccine trials, as RFK has advocated. Since we have herd immunity for many diseases, such as measles, trials can be ethically conducted by randomizing the age of vaccination to, for example, one versus three years old, while spreading the trial over a large geographical area so that the unvaccinated are not all living close to each other.

https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/an-open-letter-to-harvard-president

Dear President Garber

One actionable way you can show that Harvard has a commitment to academic freedom, and the free exchange of a range of ideas is to reinstate Professor Martin Kulldorff and other staff and faculty who were wrongly terminated at Harvard and it’s affiliate hospitals due to the vaccine mandates that were advanced by the Biden administration.

As you know, the use of mandates, particularly for medical products administered to individuals, has a long, complicated, and at times ignoble history. A general prerequisite to consider such mandates is that the benefit provided the third parties has to exceed the loss of individual autonomy. Notably, this has never been demonstrated for the covid-19 vaccine, which is unable to halt transmission, and whose repeated administration barely dampens it.

In the third and fourth quarter of 2021, the Biden administration, based on the advice of a handful of ill-informed advisors, decided to advance vaccine mandates across America. They utilized the power of the federal government, and OSHA to push these mandates. They also privately sought the agreement of major corporations and universities. This impetus led Harvard University and the affiliate hospitals to implement the mandate. Notably, the mandate did not exempt individuals who had previously had covid-19, a bizarre modern tactic— to compel vaccination in those who have natural immunity— that has no precedent in the history of vaccine mandates.

Martin Kulldorff was a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the Brigham and Women’s hospital. Because his primary appointment was in the hospital, he likely was subject to particularly harsh treatment under the false premise that there is a special obligation for people in patient facing roles to be vaccinated. That obligation cannot exist for a vaccine product that does not eliminate transmission, and barely blunts it. Moreover, Martin is not in a patient-facing role.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/11/the-quiet-radicalism-of-jay-bhattacharya/

Of all Donald Trump’s spicy picks for government, the wisest, in my view, is Jay Bhattacharya. The unassuming Stanford professor and famed lockdown sceptic might not come with an army of wellness bros, like RFK Jnr. He might not be as wisecracking as the state-dismantling DOGE double act of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. And his presence in the corridors of power is unlikely to freak out the deep state as much as, say, Tulsi Gabbard’s. And yet he will bring something precious to the second Trump administration, a virtue that is as essential as it is rare: the art of doubt.

This week, Bhattacharya gave his last health economics lecture to his Stanford students before he heads to Bethesda in Maryland to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dickens himself would have struggled to conjure up such a reversal of fortunes. For four, long years Bhattacharya was shamed as a scientific heretic. His blasphemy was to question lockdown. To give impious voice to his honestly held belief that it was wrong to lock down the entire population in response to Covid-19. For this, he was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, a threat to life itself, just as past heretics were branded the polluters of men’s souls and warpers of men’s minds whose ideas might even kill.

Yet here he is, in 2024, off to run the US government’s public-health research agency. The very agency whose aloof boffins and smug bureaucrats joined in the witch-hunting of him in the Covid era. The Hill calls it ‘the right kind of revenge’. For in appointing Bhattacharya to the NIH, Trump isn’t just flipping a fake-tanned middle finger at ‘the libs’. No, he’s handing the NIH to someone who is ‘eminently qualified’ to run it – Bhattacharya has been an esteemed professor of medicine for years – while also ‘replacing the arrogant, believe-our-science elitists’ with ‘a person they regularly disparaged’. Bhattacharya is being rewarded for his heresy, and it is richly deserved.

We should remind ourselves of the censorious lunacy that ruled in the Covid years. Bhattacharya’s thoughtcrime was to pen the Great Barrington Declaration along with two other scientists worried about lockdown: Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The declaration’s proposal was fresh and modest: that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be preferable to blanket shutdowns of society. Yet if you went by the elites’ frothing response to the declaration, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Bhattacharya and Co had proposed that every Covid-addled youth snog the nearest 80-year-old.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yale-historian-writes-in-the-lancet-that-slavery-is-at-the-bottom-of-everything/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom“:

We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh?

Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny:

Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment to this, teaches us that freedom is negative, a matter of being at liberty to oppress other bodies.

In that way of regarding the world, fear replaces care: the fear we believe we must instill in others, and our own fear that we will lose our dominion. And, of course, most people are not free at all, even in this fearful sense. If we understand what is wrong with this philosophical tradition and this history, the right to health care becomes undeniable.

I don’t try to instill fear in others. And I see people caring for each other all around me. How about you?

Snyder reminds us, in his fashion, that we are not islands. True. But really — this?

No one can become an individual without help. And in order to remain free, we must know ourselves—the task, par excellence, that cannot be achieved in solitude. We all go through life with a piece of metaphysical spinach between our teeth. If we think we know everything we need to know about ourselves, we are wrong, and therefore vulnerable to those who see how we can be manipulated. And, of course, the most tempting error is precisely the belief that we did it all ourselves and will do it all ourselves.

And that leads us to . . . slavery!

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/jay_bhattacharya_will_transform_the_nih.html

Unlike the other cabinet nominees that Donald Trump has selected who will battle with their organizations and take no prisoners, I suspect that Jay Bhattacharya will define his actions and responsibilities differently. He’s not afraid to argue and protest injustices when he’s trying to protect citizens from the deluded powers-that-be; but he will make changes with determination and clarity, and hopefully remove those people in power that have demanded unreasonable responses to the health needs of the public.

Bhattacharya has many reasons to take retribution, especially against Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. When Bhattacharya produced the Great Barrier Declaration, he was lambasted by Collins, now retired from the NIH:

The declaration called for speeding herd immunity by allowing people at low risk to get infected while protecting those most vulnerable, like the elderly.

It was denounced by many public health experts as unscientific and irresponsible. ‘This is a fringe component of epidemiology,’ Collins told The Washington Post shortly after the document was released. ‘This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment.’