RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/09/12/medical-breakthrough/

Making conservative health reform popular

For a generation of Republican political candidates, Obamacare was a gift that kept on giving. The Democrats’ enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 gave the GOP historic gains in that year’s midterms; its bungled implementation handed them the Senate in 2014; and soaring premiums helped Donald Trump capture the White House in 2016.

But the Trump administration fell well short of its promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” and many Republicans have become wary of entering a complex policy minefield. This aversion has had electoral consequences: Voters who cited health care as their most important issue cast their ballots three to one for Biden over Trump in November 2020 — accounting for much of the swing from 2016.

Any Republican hoping to win the White House in 2024 cannot simply run against Obamacare, but must have a health-care agenda that is compelling to voters — and, once in office, will need the ability to deliver on it.

With a combination of $1.2 trillion per year in private insurance and $1.9 trillion per year of public spending on health care, Americans enjoy the best access to cutting-edge medical care in the world — without comprehensive rationing of drugs, physician services, or hospital procedures. Yet America’s great willingness to pay for access to ever-improving medical capabilities has led it to neglect keeping costs under control. In November 2021, while 82 percent of Americans rated the quality of the health care they received “excellent” or “good” (only 3 percent judged it “poor”), 77 percent were dissatisfied with the nation’s health-care costs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/top-med-schools-weed-out-applicants-who-dont-support-dei-new-report-says/

The best medical schools in the country are weeding out applicants who are insufficiently devoted to the leftist creed of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), according to a new report released by the non-profit Do No Harm.

Do No Harm, a nonprofit dedicated to “protect[ing] healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology,” conducted an analysis of medical school application processes which found that these selective institutions are raising an additional barrier to entry on top of the strenuous testing and grade requirements.

“A review of the admissions process at 50 of the top-ranked medical schools found that 36 asked applicants their views on, or experience in, DEI efforts,” reads the Do No Harm report, which was obtained by National Review. “Many were overt in asking applicants if they agreed with certain statements about racial politics and the causes of disparate health outcomes.”

According to the report, medical schools are asking these questions in order to “turn ideological support for health equity and social justice initiatives into a credential that increases an applicant’s chance of acceptance,” “screen out dissenters,” and “signal to all applicants that they are expected to support this new cause.”

“Top medical schools have woven their commitment to woke politics into their application process, asking future doctors to prove their commitment to divisive ideologies or risk being rejected from medical school.” concludes the report.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb founded Do No Harm after serving as associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. In his view, the use of ideologically slanted application questions will stunt the development of those applicants who do make it through the gauntlet to enter a top medical school.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/yes_some_universities_are_emstillem_requiring_the_covid_shot.html

Rutgers University is one of many schools of higher education that will require masking and COVID vaccination for the coming school year.  Antonio M. Calcado, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Rutgers, has written that “face coverings are required in all indoor teaching spaces, libraries, and clinical settings.  Compliance is mandatory.”  And “all students and employees are required to be fully vaccinated, obtain a booster when eligible, and upload records to the university vaccine portal.”

In light of what has been learned about the COVID jab, for those parents who will be shelling out $133,828 in tuition for their Rutgers undergrads, this edict may come as an additional shock on top of the sticker price for an education.

Recently, Dr. Robert Malone cited an analysis titled “COVID-19 Vaccines and Informed Consent” by Mr. John Allison (J.D.).  Allison’s law practice was “devoted to the litigation of cases involving medical, toxicological, industrial hygiene and product safety issues.” He was “Assistant General Counsel in the legal department of a Fortune 100 company with overall responsibility for product liability, environmental and commercial litigation.”  In addition, he was also “the lawyer for the company’s Medical Department, including Corporate Toxicology, Epidemiology and Product Responsibility.”

Allison’s 53-page analysis should be mandatory reading when deciding to send a child to a university or college mandating the jab.  Below are some highlights of his analysis.

 1. Government misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, censorship of credible scientific and medical information about the risks of death and serious adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccination coercion are depriving people of their ability to give informed consent to vaccination.

2. Safe and effective drugs on the market for many years, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, have been proven by reputable doctors to be successful in the early treatment of COVID-19.  If those affordable drugs had been allowed to be more widely used in the United States before people needed to be hospitalized, many tens of thousands of people who died from COVID-19 would probably be alive today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/monkeypox-outbreak-leveling-off-no-thanks-to-government/

People have incentives to protect themselves from infection without government mandates.

Something that apparently surprised government bureaucrats and left-wing commentators but is, in fact, completely predictable is happening: The growth in new monkeypox cases is leveling off and may be starting to decline, and the government had little to do with it. In New York City — the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak — the seven-day average of new cases actually peaked at the end of July and has been declining since. Similarly, new cases in California — the other most common site of U.S. illness — appear to have peaked in early August and subsequently declined.

Contrary to what some observers think, there is nothing perplexing about these developments. Economists have long known that people voluntarily change their behavior to avoid the risks and costs of infectious diseases. These changes in individual behaviors usually precede any government action and have a greater impact.

During the Covid pandemic, studies of cellphone-mobility data showed that people started to reduce their time outside the home and that businesses had declines in customer traffic before the government-imposed lockdowns. Canadian economist Douglas Allen reviewed nearly 20 studies that distinguished between voluntary and mandated lockdown effects. All of them found that mandated lockdowns had only marginal impact and that voluntary changes in behavior explained most of the changes in cases and deaths.

The current monkeypox outbreak is unusual in that it involves human-to-human transmission and has been almost exclusively between men who have sex with other men. We would expect members of the gay and bisexual community who value their health to engage in self-protective behavior.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_con_game_legal_tyranny_is_bad_for_babies.html

When Katie Chubb’s baby was due in early 2020, her husband Nicholas had to drive her from Augusta, Georgia, where they live, to a freestanding birth center in Atlanta — nearly 150 miles away.  During her pregnancy, she made 15 round trips to the center for prenatal care.  The Augusta area does not have centers for natural childbirth, so from her own experience, Chubb saw an opportunity for a small business to provide a much-needed service and decided to set up one.  But Georgia has denied the center permission to operate, so she is suing the state because the reason for denial — while valid under current state law — is unreasonable by the norms of free-market economics and violates important individual rights.

Imagine the authorities denying Wells Fargo permission to open a branch because the local Bank of America tells it the new outlet isn’t needed, as it would duplicate BoA’s services.  Seems unthinkable.  But Certificate of Need (CON) requirements in health care, created in the 1960s and in operation in 35 states and Washington, D.C., demand that hospitals in an area endorse the need for a new hospital or health care facility, even for the acquisition of new equipment.

For freestanding birth centers, which are legal in all states, CONs are required only in 15 states.  Such centers aren’t hospitals, but they handle low-risk deliveries on a midwifery and wellness model.  They do not provide general anesthesia or perform Cesarean sections or other surgical procedures.  Some offer alternative practices like water birth and lotus birth, with relaxing music playing and paternal participation in the process.  A doctor is on board for supervision and early identification of complications, and the centers typically have hospital transfer arrangements for emergencies.  Less expensive than hospitals, staffed with trained nurse-midwives, they provide a hygienic, low-stress setting for delivery.  Many women choose them over hospitals, and in poor or rural areas without hospitals, they serve to bring down infant and maternal mortality rates.