RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-oversells-the-bivalent-covid-shot-hospitalizations-vaccine-booster-omicron-pandemic-pfizer-moderna-china-illness-death-11663793472?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone over 12 receive a “bivalent” Covid-19 vaccine as a booster dose. But only a select group are likely to benefit, and the evidence to date doesn’t support the view that a bivalent vaccine containing omicron or its subvariants is better than the monovalent vaccine. The CDC risks eroding the public’s trust by overselling the new shot.

The existing Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were designed to protect against the original strain of the novel coronavirus, known as Wuhan-1. The strain that left China, however, was D614G, the first variant. Between January 2020 and December 2021, D614G was replaced by the alpha variant then the delta variant. At the end of 2021, Oxford conducted a study to determine whether the mRNA vaccines still provided protection against severe illness and death caused by the variants. They did.

Then things changed. At the end of 2021, the omicron variant (BA.1) and its subvariants (BA.2, BA.3, BA.4 and BA.5) supplanted delta. Not only was omicron more contagious than delta; it also evaded immunity. Even the fully vaccinated were at risk of mild illness, and some of severe illness. A third dose was recommended, then a fourth. The CDC found that both a third and fourth dose reduced hospitalizations.

But not everyone benefited. Those who did fell into three groups: the elderly, people with serious health problems and people who were immunocompromised. As the CDC launches its fall booster dose campaign, it would be wise to focus on those at risk rather than the young and healthy.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/07/17/mit-study-vaccine-hesitancy-is-highly-informed-scientifically-literate-and-sophisticated-n1462591

Vaccine hesitancy is a big problem, according to the Biden administration.  Less than half the public is fully vaccinated while about 56 percent have received at least one jab.

The goal of fully vaccinating the American public appears to have stalled. This should not surprise us. When the vaccines were first approved for emergency use back in December 2020, 40 percent of Americans expressed skepticism about the vaccine.

Trying to shame the holdouts has failed spectacularly. Insulting and degrading them as “morons” or “ignorant” has resulted in a vicious pushback and a hardening of positions on getting vaccinated.

The administration’s plan of sending people door to door to vaccinate them only feeds anti-vaccine skepticism. Trust in authority is at an all-time low, which makes a government-sponsored vaccine program suspect.

Still, most experts agree that some people who should be getting vaccinated aren’t doing so. But the root cause isn’t ignorance or a belief in conspiracy theories. An MIT study on the problem revealed some surprising results.

https://www.city-journal.org/what-does-walenskys-apology-really-mean?wallit_nosession=1

The indigenous wisdom of the Yukon suggests that if wolves are pursuing your sled, it’s a good idea to throw out a piece of meat to buy time. This advice comes to mind in trying to understand what happened last month, when Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), once one of the U.S. government’s most respected public agencies, made a public apology for its failures during the Covid pandemic. “For 75 years,” Walensky told a press gathering on August 15, “CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations.”

Walensky said that the mea culpa was prompted by preliminary findings of an internal panel she appointed in April to improve CDC management. Its conclusions are not yet public. Her confession puzzled Washington’s political and bureaucratic establishment, and uncritical national media has mostly ignored her statement. After such a bombshell, one would expect appearances on television and plentiful commentary. But so far, the establishment and press are treading carefully. Why? Perhaps because they know that this initial disturbance to the pond might send ripples in their direction.

Consider that, just four days before Walensky’s statement, the CDC undid much of the guidance it had spent more than two years inventing, justifying, and enforcing. On August 11, the CDC substantially relaxed its Covid guidance by dropping social distancing, suggesting that masking is needed only around sick people or those with an active case, and dropping the need to quarantine for unvaccinated individuals, suggesting instead a five-day period of self-imposed isolation. Routine testing by employers and schools is no longer part of CDC guidance. The CDC largely removed schools, businesses, and institutions from an enforcement role on social distancing, masking, and quarantining and reduced its suggested booster frequency to once a year.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/covid_fascism_fizzles_out_in_new_zealand.html

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (she/her) held such promise. In the spring of 2020, the then 39-year-old New Zealand prime minister emerged on the world stage as the COVID drama’s anti-Trump.

Ardern was calm, we were told, where Trump was capricious, compassionate where Trump was callous, and disciplined where Trump was improvisational. She was, in short, the modern major general of the emerging fascist new world order, and the media swooned.

The New York Times headlined an April 2020 op-ed, “In a Crisis, True Leaders Stand Out: Swift action, compassion and trust in science mark the most effective responses to the coronavirus.”

When the “liberal” Ardern promised “the most significant restrictions on New Zealanders’ movements in modern history,” the Times praised her for her “swift and decisive action.”

The Atlantic outgushed the Times. “Since March, New Zealand has been unique in staking out a national goal of not just flattening the curve of coronavirus cases,” wrote Uri Friedman, “but eliminating the virus altogether. And it is on track to do it.”

Ardern was common sense personified. “She justified severe policies with practical examples,” Friedman continued. “People needed to stay local, because what if they drove off to some remote destination and their car broke down?” OMG!

Added Friedman, “She said she knows as a parent that it’s really hard to avoid playgrounds, but the virus can live on surfaces for 72 hours.” Right… science.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/09/13/cdc-finally-admits-it-lied-about-covid-vaccine-safety-monitoring-n1629231

The Epoch Times is reporting that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), finally spilled her guts and admitted what most of us already presumed: the CDC lied about researching certain adverse effects related to the COVID-19 vaccine.

Dr. Walensky had claimed that the CDC would scrutinize certain types of adverse event data referred to as Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). An official at the CDC quietly admitted in June that those reports were ignored and went so far as to say that “data mining is outside of the agency’s purview.”

An official from the CDC, Dr. John Su, told The Epoch Times in July that the CDC began performing PRRs in February 2021 and “continues to do so to date.”

A CDC spokesperson repeated this in August 2022.

Here is a copy of Walensky’s letter to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), in which she admits that the PRRs were not analyzed between February 26, 2121, and Sept. 30, 2021.

The letter gives no indication as to why the CDC wasn’t honest.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/14/denmark-will-no-longer-offer-covid-jabs-to-healthy-people-under-50/

Denmark has just tacitly admitted that the risks of mRNA injections outweigh the benefits for healthy people under 50.

The Nordic country will no longer offer COVID-19 boosters and vaccines to persons under 50, the Danish Health Authority (SST) announced on Tuesday.

The SST has banned COVID vaccines for healthy people under 50 even though COVID has not ended, and the agency says it “expects that the number of covid-19 infections will increase during autumn and winter.” In other words, Denmark’s health department believes most people are better off getting the coronavirus than getting any more mRNA jabs.

According to  notice on the agency’s website, people under 50 who are at a higher risk of becoming severely ill from the virus will still be offered COVID vaccinations, but all others under 50 will no longer need to take the vaccine because they are already “well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19” due to past vaccinations, and/or prior infections.

SST reasoned that there is already “good immunity among this part of the population” so there is no need for them to take the mRna jabs.

“The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death,” the agency said. “Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.”

In contrast, health authorities in the United States plan to recommend that everyone but the elderly and immunocompromised get COVID boosters once a year, starting with the new untested  shots now rolling out. The government plans to recommend that elderly people and those with weakened immune systems get the jabs more frequently.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/life-expectancy-in-the-covid-era/

New life-expectancy estimates are out for 2021, and they paint a grim picture: Life expectancy declined in 2021 by 0.9 years to 76.1 years, the lowest it has been since 1996. This followed a decline in 2020 leading to an overall decrease in life expectancy between 2019 and 2021 of 2.7 years for the total population. Covid-19 was responsible for 50 percent of the 2021 longevity decline. A grab bag of other causes of death was responsible for the balance with unintentional injuries being the most common (16 percent).

But closer examination of the tables from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reveals an interesting fact. While Hispanics and blacks both had substantially greater life expectancy losses than whites during 2020, in 2021 the situation was reversed. The white population saw a one-year decline in life expectancy while blacks saw a 0.7 year drop and Hispanics saw a 0.2 year drop.

Many public-health experts and media pundits blamed the disproportionate losses suffered by people of color in 2020 on “structural inequalities” and “systemic racism.” Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, for example, wrote that the foremost cause of “disproportionate reductions in life expectancy among racial and ethnic groups in the US” in 2020 was “systemic racism.” Now these experts are scrambling to explain what happened in 2021.

The New York Times quotes Woolf as saying that the worse 2021 outcomes for whites “reflects the greater efforts by Black [sic] and Hispanics to get vaccinated, to wear masks and take other measures to protect themselves, and the greater tendency in white populations to push back on those behaviors.”

Put these lines of reasoning together and the relatively worse outcomes for people of color in 2020 was whites’ fault (systemic racism) and whites’ relatively worse outcomes in 2021 was their fault too (intransigence and failure to “follow the science”).

Yet this explanation makes little sense.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/when_you_are_sick_do_you_want_dr_woke_or_dr_smart.html

Medical school and postgraduate training is a long and arduous journey, often taking 8-10 years beyond college. There is much to learn, process and assimilate. Clinical judgement stems not only from experience but also from intelligence.

Medicine is a high stakes game. Sickness and health lie in the balance, as does life and death (or vision and blindness in my professional world of retina surgery). Medical errors can be due to accidents, incorrect judgement calls, or lack of knowledge.

When your health or life is on the line, you want the smartest physician caring for you, making critical decisions, or performing challenging surgery. I would want the best and the brightest caring for me. I am not as much concerned with my doctors’ bedside manner, wokeness, or social skills but rather that they be smart, capable, and competent.

Are woke doctors necessarily the smartest? If they are thinking more about proper pronouns and social justice, are they thinking less about blood tests and MRI findings?

YouTube screen grab CC BY 3.0 license

Dr Stanley Goldfarb is a physician-writer, like yours truly. He is “A board-certified kidney specialist, a former Professor and Associate Dean for Curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has been widely published in medical journals, as well as The Wall Street Journal.”

Dr Goldfarb would be considered a “Dr Smart”. He founded an organization called “Do No Harm” with a mission to, “Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology. We believe in making healthcare better for all – not undermining it in pursuit of a political agenda.”

He recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Post, calling out top medical schools for shifting from a hundred years of educating and training “Dr Smart” in favor of their new preferred student “Dr Woke”. His opening line, “Elite medical schools are deliberately recruiting woke activists, jeopardizing their mission of training physicians.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/09/uk-announces-it-will-no-longer-offer-covid-jabs-to-children-under-12-amid-new-data-that-shows-risks-outweigh-benefits/

Children under 12-years-old in the United Kingdom will no longer be offered COVID injections, except for those in clinical risk groups, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) confirmed this week. The agency said the offer of COVID shots to healthy 5 to 11-year-olds was always meant to be temporary.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said children who had not turned five by the end of last month would not be offered a vaccination, in line with advice published by the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) in February 2022. UKHSA said the offer of Covid jabs to healthy five to 11-year-olds was always meant to be temporary.

The risks of the COVID “vaccines” have always outweighed the benefits, especially when it comes to children. According to the Guardian, the JCVI has acknowledged that young children are at very low risk of developing severe disease from COVID, and most will gain natural immunity from infections.

Adam Finn, professor of pediatrics at the University of Bristol, and a member of the JCVI, pointed out that in the UK, the number of parents who had chosen to have their young children immunized has been small, despite the offer being open.

“The main policy focus right now though … is to try to immunize those who are at highest risk of severe acute COVID as per the recent announcement on the autumn booster program,” said Finn.

In the United States, only seven percent of parents of 6 months to 4-year-olds have had their tots injected with a single dose or more.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) own VAERS data, 19 serious adverse events have been identified in vaccinated babies and toddlers. Those adverse events include “death, life-threatening illness, hospitalization or prolongation of hospitalization, permanent disability, congenital anomaly or birth defect.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/med-school-misinformation-course-misinforms-on-puberty-blockers-gender-affirming-care/

A new class being offered at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine purports to teach the next generation of doctors how to dispel medical misinformation, but a recent article on the class suggests it may be doing the opposite.

The course, Improving Scientific Communication and Addressing Misinformation, was designed to teach “tomorrow’s health professionals how to tackle things in a way that reaches the public where they’re at,” Dr. Vineet Arora, a course instructor and the dean of medical education at the school, told the Chicago Tribune.

Sara Serritella, who co-teaches the class with Arora, said that they aim to level the playing field and “make it a fair fight” between experts and those who would propagate falsehoods about public and individual health.

But even in the Tribune‘s glowing profile of the course, the tension between this apparent mission and the real world consequences of overconfident “anti-misinformation” campaigns quickly becomes glaringly apparent.

As part of their coursework, students are tasked with creating an infographic that dispels medical myths, and one project cited approvingly by the newspaper tackled those surrounding “gender-affirming hormone care.”

According to the Tribune, the student “wrote in his infographic that use of puberty blockers — medication that can be used to temporarily suppress puberty in transgender and gender nonconforming children — can ‘give families time to explore their child’s gender and gather information without causing distress to the child’ that can sometimes be brought on by puberty. He wrote that, ‘If stopped, puberty will resume normally as the sex assigned at birth.’”

The problem is that almost all of the information described as being conveyed in the infographic is subject to vigorous scientific debate, and so doesn’t lend itself to the binary “misinformation” vs. “information” framework embedded in the curricula.