RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/shake-up-hhs

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services has the press corps in the D.C.–New York corridor flummoxed. The Washington Post reports that “Public health experts” call the pick “alarming and unprecedented.” The Wall Street Journal labels it a “strange choice.” And New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci opines that “among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks,” his selection of Kennedy “stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause.”

No federal department needs a major institutional shakeup more desperately than the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency’s “expert” authority was the basis on which President Biden and the vast majority of governors issued a variety of mask, vaccine, and lockdown mandates that undermined Americans’ basic freedoms, while achieving next to nothing in return.

Kennedy took the poster boy of the mask-and-lockdown regime to task in his bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci. But that book, a compelling and generally well-researched indictment of the public-health establishment, also makes clear that the agency’s problems extend well beyond one unscrupulous, attention-hogging bureaucrat. As former Trump advisor Scott Atlas reports in his own book, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and National Institutes of Health—all HHS agencies—appear to be infested with groupthink. During the pandemic, Atlas notes, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Deborah Birx, then-CDC director Robert Redfield, and Fauci “shared thought processes and views to an uncanny level,” and “virtually always agreed” with each other.

https://www.thefp.com/p/rfk-jr-health-human-services-flouride-vaccines-covid-trump-europe
The media describes the new HHS chief as a conspiracy theorist. But how many of his ideas are actually used in Europe? More than you’d think.

The media describes the new HHS chief as a conspiracy theorist. But how many of his ideas are actually used in Europe

A number of American commenters have been hand-wringing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be the secretary of Health and Human Services, which would put him in charge of such critical agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

“He supports people being able to purchase raw milk, don’t you know!” 

“He wants to discourage municipal water plants from adding fluoride!” 

“He says MMR vaccines cause autism!”

After Donald Trump nominated RFK Jr. for the post, Time magazine called him “a vaccine skeptic who spreads medical disinformation and conspiracy theories,” and quoted Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law as saying of his nomination, “I can’t think of a darker day for public health and science.”

But I think we need to draw distinctions. 

After looking at the whole range of RFK Jr.’s positions, I’ve come to the view that while some are extreme, others are genuinely worthy of debate—and still others are correct. And there is a way to sift the good from the bad and the debatable. When you hear one of RFK Jr.’s ideas, ask yourself a simple question: Do other nations do what he thinks the U.S. should do? If the answer is yes, then the HHS nominee’s idea is not necessarily apocalyptic, and we should be able to discuss it openly. 

Let’s take a look at some of his most controversial opinions:

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rfk-jr-wants-disrupt-our-powerful-health-care-complex-terrified

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is right– the U.S. is flunking health care. 

Our country spends nearly twice as much on medical care per person than other wealthy countries but our outcomes – measured by life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes and heart attack mortality — are far worse. This is an industry that begs to be disrupted. 

Whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President-elect Trump has nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is the man for the job remains to be seen. Give him this: he has been fearless in calling out the obvious failures of the status quo. 

The health care “establishment” is outraged by RFK Jr. ‘s nomination, but they only have themselves to blame. Gallup reports that merely 31% of the country thinks of our health care industry positively, while 51% have a negative view. Imagine: our medical establishment has lower approval ratings than Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Why would that be? First, disenchantment with our medical officials soared during COVID. Anthony Fauci and others in charge had no idea what they were doing but nonetheless made up rules on the fly that required toddlers to wear masks, closed schools, shut down businesses and — later on — mandated vaccines and lied about their efficacy. And yet, for all the Draconian measures, the U.S. lost more people per capita to the pandemic than most other prosperous nations.   

Second, people are not stupid; they know they spend too much for health care, that it’s too complicated and that the government’s ever-expanding intrusion into the field has made it inefficient. According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the U.S. spends about $1,000 per person solely on administrative costs related to medical services, “almost five times more than the average of other wealthy countries and more than [the country] spends on long-term health care.” That, folks, is the tail wagging the dog. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/make-america-responsible-again

For several months, a telehealth company, Hims & Hers, has run full-page ads about obesity in the New York Times. The ads promote the idea that obesity is a medical condition that can be eradicated only with Ozempic and other new obesity drugs. They go on to demand insurance coverage for those drugs. The Sunday, November 17, Hims & Hers ad complained that “access to effective treatment” for extreme obesity “remains out of reach for many,” unlike treatments for breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and HIV. “It’s time to change that,” concludes the pitch.

The Hims & Hers argument—that obesity is a genetic disorder like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, largely outside the control of its victims—may be self-interested, but it has also been the position of the public-health industry for years. We are to believe that the sharp rise of obesity in the U.S. over the last several decades is due to genetic changes in Americans’ susceptibility to weight gain. To portray obesity as something brought on by behavior—overeating and under exercising—is to blame the victim and to commit “fat-shaming.” This insistence that being overweight is outside individual control is driven in considerable part by racial considerations, since black females are disproportionately overweight. But the rule against invoking personal responsibility is also part of a larger elite mindset. By medicalizing behavioral issues, the elites transfer power from the individual to themselves, the dispensers of technocratic responses to social problems.

It is absurd, however, to claim that Americans’ genes have changed in the last half century in such a way as to make Americans gain weight. (The same fallacy applies to the equally fat Brits.) Genes takes centuries, not decades, to change. The recent alteration in the Anglosphere’s diet and lifestyle is massive and obvious, however: snacking throughout the day, a diet of highly sweetened processed foods, and a lack of exercise or even of merely walking modest distances. Members of gyms wait several minutes for the gym elevator to arrive rather than walking up one flight of stairs, even though they are presumably there to burn calories, rather than merely to take advantage the gym’s inevitable snack-food vending machines.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/watchdogs-launch-ad-campaign-exposing-hospitals-with-worst-child-sex-change-programs/

Two nonprofits involved in parental rights activism launched a six-figure media campaign exposing hospitals across the country with particularly egregious child sex change programs.

The organizations, the American Parents Coalition (APC) and Consumers Research, are targeting Children’s Minnesota, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Featured on the StopTheHarm Database’s “Dirty Dozen,” these facilities have administered high numbers of gender-transition procedures and hormone therapy to minors. For example, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has had 396 total sex-change patients, including 27 children who received surgery, according to the database. For those kids, 3,551 prescriptions were written, with $799,044 in submitted charges to insurance companies by providers or pharmacies.

APC will deploy mobile billboards at the hospitals noting the number of children harmed by these interventions. The hospitals will also be highlighted via targeted digital advertising in the cities where they’re located. A new website from APC, StoptheDocs.com, calls out specific gender practitioners at the hospitals, such as Dr. Nadia Downshen at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Gender and Sexuality Development Program.

Nonprofit Do No Harm found that between January 2019 and December 2023, 13,994 children received gender-transition treatments, with 5,747 undergoing sex-change surgeries and 8,579 getting hormones and puberty blockers. A majority of the body-modification procedures were conducted on minors around the age of 15.

“Parents deserve to know the truth about the irreversible damage these hospitals are doing to children through gender interventions right in their own backyards,” APC executive director Alleigh Marré said in a statement to National Review. “Sex-change surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones are not treatments – they are interventions that create lifelong patients and customers. Hospitals are allowing activists and politics to cloud the indisputable data showing the risks and damage associated with these procedures.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/tb-the-silent-killer-crossing-our-border/

Open borders allow deadly narcotics and criminal gangs to invade our country. But there’s a silent killer also making its way across the border: tuberculosis.

America’s woke public health authorities are more concerned with equity — redistributing health resources among racial groups — than with keeping a disease the U.S. once nearly eradicated from becoming a threat again.

Reported cases of TB shot up 34% from 2020 to 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and continue to rise. More than three quarters of the cases are foreign-born people who picked up the disease in their home countries or traveling through countries with high TB rates. The TB incidence rate is 60 times higher in Haiti than in the U.S.

In New York City — the No. 1 destination for migrants — the incidence of TB is two and a half times the national average and still rising.

A staggering 89% of TB patients in the Big Apple are foreign-born. The Flushing/Clearview areas of Queens, Sunset Park, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan are the neighborhoods most affected. The single largest national group with reported TB cases is from China, according to the city’s most recent Annual Tuberculosis Summary.

TB is no laughing matter. Globally it has just overtaken COVID-19 as the biggest infectious disease killer on earth. There is no effective vaccine for it, but most cases — except severely drug-resistant ones — can be treated with antibiotics, provided they’re taken daily without interruption for several months or longer. Not easy.

Western Europe, Scandinavia and North America are all reporting rising TB rates as migrants from poorer countries — where TB is common — arrive. UK health authorities are alerting the public to the distinctive cough that comes with TB.

The National Institutes of Health, which provides funding for breakthroughs in medical science, has long enjoyed a trustworthy reputation. But, in keeping with the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government equity agenda,” the NIH has shifted its priorities away from science and toward “the science of scientific workforce diversity,” subordinating medicine to the latest ideological fad: diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

With the help of Open the Books, a nonprofit research organization, we have obtained documents detailing the NIH’s descent into left-wing racialism. The agency, which is supposed to prioritize hard science, has made DEI a top priority, shelling out millions on “diversity” initiatives that do nothing to advance medical research.

At the beginning of his term, President Biden signed an executive order implementing DEI throughout the federal bureaucracy and Congress directed the NIH to develop “a strategic plan with long-term and short-term goals to address the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities at NIH.” In short: less focus on curing cancer, and more attention to making sure no one cures cancer without acknowledging his “responsibility to correct systemic racism and inequities.”

The NIH immediately got to work implementing the executive order across the mammoth agency. The plan, which applied to fiscal years 2023 through 2027, required “the participation of all 27 Institutes and Centers (ICs); Offices within the Office of the Director (OD); and working groups, staff committees, advisory groups, and employee groups across NIH.” Altogether, the agency reported, it had “identified a community of almost 100 offices, committees, and groups working within the NIH-wide DEIA ecosystem.”

Overseeing this bureaucracy is the NIH’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which has more than 50 employees. The office’s mission: to “identify and eliminate discrimination from the agency’s personnel policies, practices, and working conditions.” As part of its efforts, it has created digital information hubs on “Understanding Systemic Racism” and “Racism in Health,” and planned an “Anti-Bullying Training” session for employees—all methods to advance racialist ideology, rather than the department’s scientific mission.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/return-of-the-masks

Regardless of Americans’ preference for seeing each other’s faces and breathing in fresh air, many public health officials are still fond of masks mandates. Accordingly, almost five years after Covid-19 hit our shores, a handful of counties encircling the San Francisco Bay have announced new mask mandates in various health-care facilities. San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Napa Counties have all declared mask mandates for health-care workers in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, or both, starting the day after Halloween and extending until early spring.

San Mateo County, which borders the southern part of San Francisco, has announced that its mask mandate in skilled nursing facilities will also cover family members and friends who visit patients. The county’s health officer has asked the local sheriff and chief of police to “ensure compliance with and enforce this Order,” as a “violation of any provision of this Order constitutes an imminent threat and immediate menace to public health.” She declares that such violations are “punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.”

One of the great lessons from the pandemic should have been that America’s founders knew what they were doing when they separated the powers of government, and when they entrusted policymaking to the legislative branch. Americans shouldn’t be put in the position of potentially being tyrannized by one kingly official wielding largely unchecked powers. Yet the source of the mandates in at least three of these counties, and likely in all five, is a lone individual: the county health officer (joined, in Alameda County, with the city of Berkeley’s acting health officer).

The health officers are dictating medical protocols to doctors. Many doctors don’t want to wear masks because they compromise interaction with patients, because they force people to breathe in unhealthy levels of their own carbon dioxide, and—most importantly—because the best scientific evidence suggests that they don’t work. But, convinced that they know better, the health officers are ordering doctors to obey their commands or else face punishment by law enforcement for being a “menace to public health.”

For the record, cloth masks won’t qualify as acceptable face coverings, at least not in San Mateo, Santa Clara (home of San Jose, Stanford, and Silicon Valley), or Napa (home of the French Laundry restaurant). The good news is that, in all three counties, masks won’t be required in the health-care facilities’ gift shops. So, even if you don’t get to smile at your loved one when you visit, you’ll still get to shop for souvenirs or knick-knacks unimpeded.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/advocates-of-woke-medicine-play-victim-while-still-pushing-their-agenda/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

It’s pretty brazen to pretend to be on the defensive when your effort is having real-world consequences for doctors and patients.

The forces driving the politicization of medicine have a complaint: People are starting to notice what they’re doing.

Their effort to view health care through a DEI lens, which has proceeded almost unabated for years, has only recently begun to have genuine opposition. And this is supposedly threatening their cause’s very existence. “It’s very taxing,” Chandra L. Ford, a professor at Emory University and founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health, recently lamented to the Washington Post. “This anti-DEI movement creates a climate of fear.”

Sheldon Rubenfeld would be surprised to learn that Ford and those like her are on the defensive. Rubenfeld had been clinical professor of general medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. But this past summer, the medical school officially ended its relationship with him. It’s just the latest chapter in a story that demonstrates both the extent of the problem and the need to confront it.

Rubenfeld’s service at Baylor went back decades. It encountered a major stumbling block last year, however. The medical school abruptly canceled Healing by Killing: Medicine during the Third Reich, an elective course he had been teaching for 20 years. Rubenfeld, also the author of Medicine after the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond, believes the course was an effective way to warn aspiring doctors against letting their prejudices influence how they treat their patients. Doing so ultimately “leads to all sorts of nastiness,” he says, “and Jews are always the first ones to experience it.”

One student, however, thought the course itself was a source of nastiness and filed an “anonymous grievance” after a lecture in which Rubenfeld pressed his students about their own potential biases. As he wrote in National Review earlier this year, all he learned about the nature of the complaint is that the student objected to his use of the word “Palestinian” — somehow now a charged term after the campus convulsions surrounding Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s response. Despite the filing of no further anonymous grievances, Baylor canceled the course.