RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2023/04/how-fashionable-to-prescribe-the-cruellest-cuts/

Suppose I decided one fine day to self-identify as a non-binary pineapple. Je suis un ananas. Mes pronoms sont Ze, Zir, Zirs et Zirself. I forgot to mention, a French pineapple.

You might understandably think I’m mentally unbalanced. But, being a kindly sort of person, you might humour me. If your young son or daughter came home from school one day claiming that they were pineapples, you would not humour them for long. Maybe five minutes, before you told them not to be silly and to go wash their hands before having something to eat and drink.

Children are suggestible but I found both as a child and as a parent that a sharp dismissive grounding retort, particularly from a dad, was usually enough to dispel unfounded anxieties and delusions. Before you knew it, little Johnny or Jill was playing happily if young or preoccupied with juvenile pursuits if older. What you don’t do is to indulge fantasies beyond a playful and indulgent few minutes. What you certainly don’t do is to affirm fantasies; unless it’s Santa Claus. Unfortunately our society, or an influential segment of it, including the political class, sees virtue in affirming dangerous and debilitating fantasies in children and teenagers.

When a child or teenager believes they have been assigned the wrong biological sex; that really they are a male with female anatomy or a female with male anatomy, then they are living a fantasy. That must be our assumption. There is a gulf of genetic difference between males and females going way beyond surface appearances. If the fantasy persists, the only reasonable conclusion is that the youngster concerned is mentally troubled and in need of professional help; help which is squarely aimed at ridding the affected youngster of their delusion and bringing them back to reality. That isn’t the prevailing zeitgeist among officialdom.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/10/unc-doctors-slam-hurtful-surgeon-who-denounced-affirmative-action-in-medical-schools/

Dr. John Calhoon was smeared as ‘racist’ after he emphasized merit as the primary indicator of success in the surgery profession.

As it turns out, it is nearly impossible today not to trigger woke health care.

In January 2023, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), a society of the leading heart surgeons in the nation, held a conference where the outgoing president, Dr. John Calhoon, emphasized merit as the primary indicator of success in the profession.

“Affirmative action is not equal opportunity,” he wrote in a PowerPoint presentation. The “best metric is whether someone does good.”

He also wrote that “defining people by color, gender, religion only tends to ingrain bias and discrimination.” 

This is of course true. Studies by Harvard University professor James Dobbin found that most diversity trainings and workshops have little to no effect on the perceptions of colleagues toward one another. They may even be counterproductive, with some studies reporting greater animosity toward other races out of annoyance at the heavy-handed nature of courses. 

Immediately, medical news outlets called Calhoon a racist, white privileged, and other monikers of derision, but they weren’t the only ones. The Society for Thoracic Surgeons condemned Calhoon’s slide in a statement, describing his talking points as “inconsistent with STS’s core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Mind guards at some surgery clinics also issued their own internal responses, and my organization Color Us United has found a particularly egregious one.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/china-controls-your-meds/

Democrats and Republicans battered TikTok’s CEO at a House of Representatives hearing on Thursday — for good reason. The Chinese app poses a national security risk, accumulating troves of data on its American users. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s slithery comment that “I don’t think spying is the right way to describe it,” only heightened concerns.

Too bad another Chinese threat — bigger and more immediate — isn’t getting the same attention. China has a chokehold on our medication supply chain. Beijing controls many — in some cases, all — active ingredients for the remedies in our medicine chests, the drugs used in emergency rooms and even antibiotics administered to soldiers on the battlefield.

The med bottles in your cabinet don’t say “Made in China,” but nearly all are, including 97% of U.S. antibiotics, by some estimates.

In a tense situation, Beijing could simply cut off shipments of antibiotics, cancer drugs and other meds, forcing the U.S. to cede to its demands. Our survival hinges on their goodwill. Terrifying.

China cornered the market for drug ingredients fast. Until the mid-1990s, the West and Japan produced 90% of the world’s active pharmaceutical ingredients. By 2017, China was producing 40%. Now almost all drug pipelines start in China. Even India, the other drug producing giant, relies on China for 70% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Gary Peters warns that foreign dependence is “an unacceptable national security risk.” But talk is cheap.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/04/timing-is-everything/

When it comes to all things COVID, it seems as if the worm is turning.

The past few weeks have seen the release of a “gold standard” report essentially saying the mask mandates did nothing, a pair of government agencies now say the “lab leak” hypothesis is most likely the correct COVID origin story, the “Twitter Files” are forcing society to look at the reality of government-induced censorship, and the legacy media is actually starting to run stories that maybe – just maybe – the whole lockdown thing may have been a teensy bit misguided.

In other words, everything that got people banned from social media and polite society last year is no longer misdisconspirafomation but are reasonable arguments that should be discussed rationally.

And that is very good; at least it’s a start.

But the past three years have taught those paying attention to look beyond public pronouncements and to ask “why the change?” and “why now?”

Why the change is relatively simple and a bit heartening: lies cannot live forever, especially when those being lied to stop believing.  Homer Simpson made an excellent point when he said “It takes two to lie – one to lie and one to listen.” 

But the “why now?” is more complicated and, as everything else is today, politically motivated.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/31/lets-end-the-era-of-covid-tyranny/

America and the rest of the world have suffered under big government’s smothering hand during the three-year COVID “emergency,” which has been used to silence critics and force obedience to nonsensical medical edicts. It’s time to reclaim our ancient liberties and live free again.

And here’s a good start: A Republican-led bill to declare an official end to the COVID emergency passed the Senate for a third time Wednesday, this time by a 68-23 majority. While President Joe Biden “strongly” opposes the measure, a White House source told Associated Press, he’ll sign it anyway.

Why? Rising public anger over the COVID lies, lockdowns, closed schools, mandatory masking and vax edicts has become a serious political issue for Democrats. In a Rasmussen poll taken last week, 59% agreed with the statement: “The experts in charge of the government’s COVID-19 policy ‘were wrong about almost everything?’ ”

After more than a million U.S. COVID deaths, Biden and other elected Democrats just want to walk away.

The Senate’s move to end our government-caused COVID nightmare came after a long series of revelations about the deep damage that the federal response to COVID inflicted on us.

A piece by the Brownstone Institute’s Justin Hart summed up the lengthening list of governmental, bureaucratic and corporate incompetence, duplicity and outright misconduct:

Medical errors increased in hospitals due to the constraints on health care resources and mandates. Millions of cancer screenings were missed, potentially causing a future surge in late-stage cancer cases. HIV testing was disrupted, leading to delayed diagnoses and treatment. Additionally, the pressure to report Covid deaths led to inaccurate death counts, prompting more fear and furthering egregious policies.

https://johnhabelesmd.substack.com/p/how-a-false-hydroxychloroquine-narrative?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

An exposé of the shameful history of suppression of HCQ use in Covid , a very useful antiviral and anti-inflammatory drug – also a zinc ionophore – that could have saved millions of hospitalisations and deaths .

“……..It is remarkable that a large series of events taking place over the past months produced a unified message about hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and produced similar policies about the drug in the US, Canada, Australia, NZ and western Europe.  The message is that generic, inexpensive hydroxychloroquine (costing only $1.00 to produce a full course) is dangerous and should not be used to treat a potentially fatal disease, Covid-19, for which there are no (other) reliable treatments. 

Hydroxychloroquine has been used safely for 65 years in many millions of patients.  And so the message was crafted that the drug is safe for its other uses, but dangerous when used for Covid-19.  It doesn’t make sense, but it seems to have worked.

In the US, “Never Trump” morphed into “Never Hydroxychloroquine,” and the result for the pandemic is “Never Over.”  But while anti-Trump spin is what characterized suppression strategies in the US, the frauds perpetrated about hydroxychloroquine and the pandemic include most western countries.

Why do I say “Never Over”?  I am expanding on this claim with a), b), c) on August 30. Later in the paper additional evidence is provided.

a) Because if people were treated with HCQ at the onset of their illness, over 99% would quickly resolve the infection, avoiding progression to the late stage disease characterized by cytokine storm, thrombophilia and organ failure. Despite claims to the contrary, this treatment is very safe.  (Yet outpatient treatment is banned in many US states.) UPDATE Jan 15: The CDC forgot to rewrite its guidance on malaria and hydroxychloroquine during Covid.  CDC says hydroxychloroquine “can be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers…”  Only “when it is used at higher doses for many years, a rare eye condition called retinopathy has occurred.“

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/21/drug-shortages-upend-cancer-treatments

Supplies of some essential drugs used in hospitals are hitting 10-year lows, forcing rationing and pharmacy workarounds.

Driving the news: Drug shortages are the worst they’ve been in a decade, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists — a sign of how much we rely on low-margin manufacturers with limited capacity for basics like the inhalation drug albuterol and some common cancer treatments.

What they’re saying: Quality control issues, selected plant closures and other manufacturing woes have added up, Michael Ganio, senior director of pharmacy, practice and quality at ASHP told Axios.

Between the lines: Oncology drugs have been hit particularly hard in recent months, putting experts on high alert.

Those in short supply include methotrexate, an injectable chemotherapy drug, and one of several generics produced by Illinois-based Akorn Pharmaceuticals, which shuttered operations last month due to bankruptcy.
Manufacturing delays and increased demand have also led to shortages of the cancer treatments cisplatin, and fluorouracil, per ASHP.
Pluvicto — used to extend survival among patients with metastatic prostate cancer — will take months to be made available to patients again, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“People will die from this shortage, for sure,” Jonathan McConathy, director of the division of molecular imaging and therapeutics at the University of Alabama, told WSJ.
A survey of health systems conducted by the group End Drug Shortages Alliance found the injectable Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG), used for treating bladder cancer, was being rationed or was not available for use at all.
“This is a terrible crisis. We should be doing everything we can to give every single one of these patients the best chance of survival,” Laura Bray, a board member of the alliance, told CNN.

Between the lines: Manufacturing delays and quality problems are blamed for the shortages. But that’s often because there aren’t many alternative sites to pick up the slack in the system due to the challenging economics of the market, experts say.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/doctors-are-losing-their-calling-union-mass-general-brigham-resident-suicide-depression-representation-burnout-7f72ab6?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Physician-trainees at Mass General Brigham are attempting to unionize. If they succeed, the union would be the largest of its kind in the country with more than 2,500 members, joining the estimated 15% of U.S. medical trainees who’ve assembled under the Committee of Interns and Residents in recent years. At the center of the doctors’ unionization efforts is a desire to reclaim their identity as service-driven providers and to fight for the autonomy and fair working conditions that they’ve lost as their profession becomes more commercialized and centralized.

Doctors are proud of their occupation’s mixture of sacrament and science in service to society. Urbanely trained at universities, these learned professionals once left the city to settle into solo practices or small partnerships in the towns they served. This autonomy allowed them to charge patients what they could afford—some more, some less and some not at all. Meanwhile, their authority allowed them to advocate effectively on behalf of their patients, even on nonmedical matters. Their familiarity with their neighbor-patients encouraged participation in the community, both economically and socially.

But as teaching hospitals were subsumed into larger corporate systems, and healthcare grew more expensive from the mid-20th century onward, hospital systems lobbied for policies that created a regulatory environment too thick and expensive for private practitioners to remain solvent. For doctors, hospital-acquired practices held the promise that as employees they could forget about red tape and bottom lines because the hospital would handle it. Doctors would purportedly get to focus on practice instead of administrative tasks.