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MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Adam Zivo There’s No Such Thing as a “Safer Supply” of Drugs Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/drugs-harm-reduction-safer-supply-opioids-denver-sweden-uk-canada
Adam Zivo is director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy.

Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.

The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.

Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.

But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.

The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.

How Social Media Pushes Vulnerable Teens Toward Eating Disorders Social media companies must take more responsibility to address how their products are fueling adolescent eating disorders Kristina Lerman

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/eating-disorders-social-media?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

In Chapter 6 of The Anxious Generation, we examined the connections between social media use and adolescent mental illness, with a focus on depression and anxiety. We outlined six reasons why social media harms girls more than boys: (1) girls spend more time on visual social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok; (2) they have a heightened vulnerability to visual social comparisons; (3) relational aggression is more prevalent among girls; (4) girls face greater pressures toward perfectionism; (5) they are more susceptible to the interpersonal spread of emotion; and (6) they encounter an increased risk of sexual harassment and online predation.

Throughout the book, we focused on anxiety and depression as the main categories of mental illness for which we found clear evidence of harm from heavy social media use. We mentioned eating disorders just a few times, especially in the story of Alexis Spence. But if you look at the list we just gave of six ways that social media affects girls, you can see that there may be multiple channels through which social media can push girls into eating disorders (some of which are classified as anxiety disorders).

We’ve been meaning to learn more and say more about links between social media and eating disorders. We were pleased, therefore, when Morteza Dehghani—a friend of Jon’s at the University of Southern California—introduced us to his colleague Kristina Lerman, who had just written a paper on the topic. Kristina is a Research Professor in the USC Computer Science Department, and she is a Senior Principal Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute. She was trained as a physicist, and she now uses her quantitative skills to study networks, crowdsourcing, and patterns in large datasets derived from social media activity.

Her recent paper is titled “Safe Spaces or Toxic Places? Content Moderation and Social Dynamics of Online Eating Disorder Communities.” Written with four colleagues, it is currently under review at EPJ Data Science, and you can read it online here.

Heather Mac Donald Racist—But Underfunded? Universities have gone from arguing that science is biased to claiming that even the overhead on their massive federal research budgets must not be cut.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/nih-university-funding-research-budgets-indirect-costs

It seems like just yesterday that medical institutions were touting their antiracism efforts. In October 2020, the American Association of Medical Colleges published “Framework for Addressing and Eliminating Racism at the AAMC, in Academic Medicine, and Beyond.” The publication calls for “individual self-reflection on systemic racism,” “anti-racism efforts within the AAMC,” “anti-racism efforts within the academic medical community,” and “anti-racism efforts within the broader community.” In 2021, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA launched an initiative called “Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education.” The initiative aims to “mitigate racism in the learning and work environment of medical schools through a formal management change process.” In January 2023, an antiracism committee at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine offered a Facing Microaggressions in the Workplace training, part of the school’s Action for Cultural Transformation. ACT aims to eliminate “structural injustice across Penn Medicine”; it is overseen by the medical school’s vice chairs for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity.

Now the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, and the AAMC are telling a different tale about science and medicine. These fields are unqualified civilizational triumphs, they say, jeopardized not by racism but by MAGA ignorance. What changed?

On February 7, 2025, the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s biggest funder of biomedical research, declared that henceforth it was limiting the amount that it would pay universities for the indirect costs of NIH-funded science. Indirect costs (also known as overhead, or facilities & administration) might include the salaries of administrators across the university, campus-wide building and equipment maintenance and depreciation, utilities across the university, janitorial services, and general office equipment. Direct costs, by contrast, are grant-specific, covering particular researchers’ salaries, lab materials, animal specimens, cell lines, and the like.

Previously, the NIH was adding up to 69 percent of a research grant to cover the facilities & administration infrastructure that allegedly undergirded subsidized research. For every dollar that a university received to support a particular project, NIH would throw in as much as an additional 69 cents for indirect costs, say, bringing the total amount of the grant to $1.69. The NIH negotiated indirect cost rates individually for each university in a complex, resource-consumptive process; after a university’s rate was determined, that rate applied for the next three to four years to every NIH research grant that that particular university might receive, as well as to grants from other federal agencies.

Zeynep Tufekci We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

https://archive.is/CQzbl#selection-723.0-731.59

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.

Dr. Marty Makary’s ‘Blind Spots’ Book Is At Odds With Established Findings By Benjamin Rushe

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/dr_marty_makary_s_blind_spots_book_is_at_odds_with_established_findings.html

Marty Makary is well-known for writing informal autobiographical books critiquing medical practice in America. Given that he is poised to lead the FDA, it should concern people that his book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health, has some serious biased presentation of data inaccuracies. How can Dr. Makary claim he is qualified to run the FDA when he presents controversial data in such a biased style?

Blood pressure

In Blind Spots, Makary rhetorically asks: “Can we lower high blood pressure by improving sleep quality and reducing stress instead of throwing antihypertensive medications at people?”

While that sounds like a good idea to someone who doesn’t know any better, it leaves something out. According to the NIH, essential hypertension makes up 95% of hypertension cases and has no modifiable cause (i.e., it’s not sleep or stress-related, it’s genetic). In other words, it exists in people who already get plenty of sleep and are at a good weight, et cetera. That is fundamental knowledge known by medical students and non-degreed ancillary healthcare workers. To the extent Makary implies otherwise, he’s just wrong.

Blind Spots promotes using silicone and other breast implants for cosmetic surgery. Makary states in his book chapter titled “Silicone Valley” that “…evidence was never presented that silicone breast implants caused any woman to suffer lupus, cancer, or another condition” (emphasis added). That is a statement so outrageously wrong that suggests that he never actually reviewed the data, and/or raises the possibility that Makary’s book or chapter was ghostwritten by a nonscientist.

Here are the actual facts: The largest ever study performed (nearly 100,000 patients) at the University of Texas showed that silicone breast implants are associated with a higher risk of certain autoimmune disorders, as well as stillbirth, scleroderma and melanoma.

Jay Bhattacharya’s promise on vaccine safety By Matthew Williams

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/jay_bhattacharya_s_promise_on_vaccine_safety.html

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is best known for his dissent from the establishment during the pandemic response. He famously — some may say infamously — drafted, signed, and fervently supported the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed Draconian-style lockdowns and mask mandates. Dr. Bhattacharya warned of the long-term consequences these policies would inflict on mental and physical health. He predicted a surge in cancer cases due to delayed diagnoses, as well as an economic downturn that would far outweigh any perceived benefits of quarantining the entire population. Instead, he advocated a more targeted approach: protecting high-risk individuals while allowing low-risk populations to sustain economic and social stability.

Unfortunately, his predictions proved correct. Cancer diagnoses surged post-lockdown, with many cases detected at later stages. The lockdowns and subsequent economic interventions, such as stimulus checks, have wreaked havoc on the economy.

Dr. Bhattacharya’s appointment to the National Institute of Health (NIH) has sparked controversy, particularly among those on the political Left. One of the most contentious aspects of his leadership is his call for additional studies on vaccine safety, including potential links to autism. The medical establishment has long dismissed this topic.

From a purely data-driven perspective, the case for new vaccine studies may seem unnecessary. Vaccines are among the most rigorously tested medical interventions, backed by not only decades of research but also historical accounts of their success. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell aptly pointed out, he witnessed the transformative power of the polio vaccine firsthand. Given the prevailing public distrust in scientific institutions, revisiting vaccine safety — if only to reaffirm their efficacy — could be crucial to restoring confidence.

John Tierney Jay Bhattacharya’s Confirmation Hearing Was an Embarrassment for Democrats Senators who once denounced the NIH nominee’s ideas had nothing to say about pandemic lockdowns, mandates, or lessons learned.

ttps://www.city-journal.org/article/jay-bhattacharya-nih-senate-confirmation-hearing-covid-pandemic

Jay Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing in the Senate last week was as close as we may ever get to a formal surrender in the long war over Covid-19 pandemic policies. While some public-health officials, academics, and journalists continue to defend the Covid restrictions and oppose Bhattacharya’s nomination to direct the National Institutes of Health, Democrats at the hearing unanimously abandoned the fight against his supposedly “fringe” ideas.

Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and economics, had been a leading opponent of Covid measures supported by Democrats on the committee, including the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal employees and for workers at private companies. One of the senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, had been so worried about the “dangerous” policies in Florida and other states that he advocated a national mask mandate in 2020 and introduced legislation to prod recalcitrant states. Last week, however, Markey and his Democratic colleagues studiously avoided discussing the mandates or any issue related to Covid. Pandemic? What pandemic?

Instead, they used their time to rail at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaving it to the committee’s Republicans to address the most consequential public-health edicts ever imposed on Americans. The Republican senators catalogued the costs of the lockdowns, the learning loss from school closures, and the ineffectiveness of the restrictions. They praised Bhattacharya for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns and school closures, and they thanked him for his court testimony opposing mask mandates for students. They criticized social media platforms’ censorship of his views and the smear campaign egged on by Anthony Fauci and the former NIH director, Francis Collins, who dismissed Bhattacharya and his coauthors as “fringe epidemiologists.”

“You showed incredible courage in speaking the truth about Covid-19 when much of the rest of the world stayed silent about it,” Indiana senator Jim Banks told Bhattacharya. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you.” Banks then asked him to define the role of the NIH director during a pandemic.

“The proper role of scientists in a pandemic is to answer basic questions that policymakers have about what the right policy should be,” Bhattacharya replied.

The vindication of a heretic Jay Bhattacharya is right: ‘scientism’ is a menace to truth and liberty. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/07/the-vindication-of-a-heretic/

He might not be as brash as Elon Musk. He might not wield his sword of reform with as much gleeful abandon as Donald Trump does his. Yet Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is nonetheless fighting an essential fight. His target? Scientism. The tyrannical trend whereby ‘science’, in his words, ‘stands on top of society and says “You must do this, this and this or else”’. He wants to restore science’s older, nobler goal of providing people with ‘knowledge and freedom’. Everyone who values reason should hope he succeeds.

Bhattacharya gave us a glimpse of his beliefs at his Senate confirmation hearing this week. In his humble, professorial style – anyone hoping for a rerun of RFK’s fiery confirmation hearing will have been sorely disappointed – he outlined his plans for the NIH. He wants it to be a freer, more open-minded place. For too long, he said, scientists at the NIH and elsewhere have displayed a ‘lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs’. Now, under me, there’ll be ‘a culture of respect for free speech in science’, he promised.

That Bhattacharya is even heading to the NIH, never mind taking it over and shaking it up, is extraordinary. He was a target of its invective once. In 2020, he went from being a ‘low-profile researcher at Stanford University’ – in the snooty words of the Guardian this week – to being a headline-making heretic. His blasphemy? He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which posited that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be a better way to combat Covid-19 than the blanket shutdown of society.

The stake was readied. Insults flew. He was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, ‘fringe’. That last slight came from the NIH itself. Its then director, Francis Collins, fired off an email in October 2020 branding Bhattacharya and his ilk as ‘fringe epidemiologists’. Collins called for a ‘quick and devastating’ rebuttal of their dissenting declaration. That shameful cry for scientists to act like a latter-day priestly elite, to go out and issue ‘devastating’ edicts against the Barrington apostasy, is no doubt what Bhattacharya had in mind when he told the Senate that the NIH has become infected by ‘a culture of cover-up, obfuscation and a lack of tolerance’.

Now, amazingly, the heretic is taking power. The man on the ‘fringe’ is off to the beating heart of scientific endeavour: the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with an annual budget of more than $47 billion. The only thing being ‘devastated’, Mr Collins, is the old NIH that you and others helped to turn into a political machine. But Bhattacharya’s mission is less one of personal vengeance than of scientific restoration. He told his hearing that he wants to bring back ‘the very essence of science’ to the NIH. And what might that be? ‘Dissent’, he said.

The Medical Establishment’s Persistent Zeal to Impose DEI in Education By Wesley J. Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-medical-establishments-persistent-zeal-to-impose-dei-in-education/

No matter election outcomes, presidential executive orders, and the ebbing support for the “woke” agenda among the general public, the medical establishment — epitomized by the New England Journal of Medicine — continues to push DEI ideology in medical school admissions policies.

A recent advocacy article in the NEJM pledges fervid fealty to DEI, primarily focusing on gender ideology. From, “Facing Political Attacks on Medical Education — The Future of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Medicine” (citations omitted):

In recent years, the United States has seen an onslaught of legislation aimed at dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education, including medical education. Although these legislative actions are often construed as focusing only on race, they also explicitly or implicitly target members of sexual and gender minority (SGM) groups. The deluge of legislative and policy attacks, including a slew of executive orders in the current administration, is a component of a larger political movement that seeks to exclude people who have been historically underrepresented and marginalized in many sectors of society, including medicine.

Baloney. Opposing the invidious DEI agenda isn’t about excluding anybody from a fair shot at personal achievement. It’s about ensuring that the doctors of tomorrow are the most excellent practitioners we can license, and so students’ acceptance into medical school should be based on merit. In other words, capability should matter most. Identity should be irrelevant.

The authors believe otherwise:

The goal of DEI in health care and public health is to ensure that leaders of health care systems value all people equally and that all people can obtain the power, knowledge, resources, conditions, and opportunities that enable them to achieve optimal health. In medical education, this goal requires addressing disparities in recruitment and retention of people who have historically been excluded from the profession, as well as directly addressing inequities in patient outcomes. In health care, a diverse workforce including people with a range of racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities can serve patients better than a workforce that is far more homogeneous than the population itself.

We Can’t Afford Timidity in Revamping Medicaid Sally Pipes

https://www.newsmax.com/sallypipes/medicaid-cuts-entitlement/2025/03/05/id/1201567/

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution by the narrowest of margins. The most controversial component of the bill concerns Medicaid.

Democrats have castigated the resolution on the grounds that it would make steep cuts to the joint federal-state public healthcare entitlement. Even some Republicans have expressed unease about that possibility.

But the hand-wringing about Medicaid cuts is misplaced.

The program is bloated and rife with fraud and waste, and it has veered significantly from its original intent of caring for the poor and disabled. It’s long overdue for paring.

First, some background.

Back in 2010, Obamacare loosened the eligibility requirements for Medicaid, extending coverage to all Americans earning up 138% of the federal poverty level, or $44,367 for a family of four as of this year. In order to entice states to go along with this scheme, Obamacare stipulated that the federal government would cover 90% of the cost of covering this “expansion population” in perpetuity.

The rest of the Medicaid population — which is to say, even poorer people and disabled Americans — receive much less federal support. For these beneficiaries, the feds cover anywhere from half to a little over three-quarters of the cost, leaving the rest to the states.