RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.israpundit.org/the-experts-science-medicine-all-amazing-all-fallible/

PERSONAL NOTE

I am a longtime Registered Nurse, with years of clinical experience and a lifetime of writing about health-science-and-medical issues; the author and co-author of 12 books (most of them about those issues); and a longtime health-and-science writer for The New York Times (for over 20 years) as well as many other publications. There are no people on earth I respect and admire more than medical doctors and research scientists. I know the education, training, long hours and personal sacrifices they undergo before attaining their degrees and well-deserved status. But there are always bad apples in every profession, hence my contempt expressed in this article for the frauds––including in the media––and the fraudulence inflicted on America during the Covid-19 pandemic.

For thousands of years, going back to the Bible, women have wept and grieved and pleaded to God over their miscarriages. Indeed, it took all these millennia for modern-day pharmaceutical companies to develop solutions to this ongoing nightmare.

In the 1940s, they were happy to offer doctors the ability to prescribe diethylstilbestrol (DES) to prevent miscarriage. “You can tell them you would give it to your wife,” the marketing mavens from Big Pharma suggested to physicians.

And with good reason. This “miracle drug” worked! Women who had experienced no trouble conceiving but were plagued by constant miscarriages were now able to carry their babies to term and deliver quite “perfect” bundles of joy!

But then disaster hit with unspeakable horror. After one or two years of watching their beautiful babies smile and roll over and teethe and then walk and speak and thrive, the little girls began developing hideous vaginal cancers, and those who survived to adulthood experienced higher-than-normal premature births, miscarriages, and ectopic pregnancies.

The little boys, too, had horrible anomalies in their urogenital tracts and are still being watched for higher-than-average cases of testicular and prostate cancers.

In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took DES off the market.

SECOND TIME’S A CHARM

In 1957, another miracle medication, originally marketed as a sleeping pill but also found to prevent miscarriages, was developed in West Germany, and soon found its way to America, where women eagerly took the drug––approved by the FDA––and, again, were thrilled to carry their babies to term.

But unlike DES, where the monstrous effects took months to years to develop, the grotesque and tragic effects of the new drug––Thalidomide––were obvious from the moment of birth: children born with missing arms and legs, eye and urinary tract anomalies, heart problems, et al. The list of horrors went on and on.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/we-never-gave-up-texas-whistleblower-went-toe-to-toe-with-the-gender-industrial-complex-and-won/

Just last week, Dr. Eithan Haim came days away from going to federal prison — and he has no regrets.

As federal prosecutors were preparing to accelerate the now-dismissed criminal case against the Texas Children’s Hospital whistleblower, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department stepped in just in time.

On Friday, the Justice Department’s new leadership dropped the second superseding indictment against the surgeon, who had been accused by the Biden Justice Department of violating the privacy of patients protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The only problem is he didn’t.

Haim disclosed carefully redacted medical records in May 2023, showing that Texas Children’s physicians were surgically inserting hormonal devices into gender-dysphoric pediatric patients as part of the hospital’s transgender program. No individually identifiable health information was unethically revealed. Furthermore, he exposed that the Houston-based hospital was secretly continuing trans medical procedures in violation of Texas law after it had supposedly ended them.

Haim felt it was his moral obligation to tell the truth, even if he was punished for his actions.

“In the very beginning, I knew if I was gonna blow the whistle that we’d have to go fully in no matter the consequences,” Haim told National Review. “I asked my wife, ‘Is this something you’re willing to die for?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ too. It sounds kind of hyperbolic, but that was the only way we would do it.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-how-the-gender-fever-broke-trump-executive-order?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Loving, naive parents believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. Now, with the stroke of a pen, a destructive ideology has been eliminated.

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.

On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

To the practitioners and promoters and numberless devotees of pediatric “gender affirming care”—a euphemism for the vast apparatus pushing junk science on vulnerable children and confused families—it came as a much-needed slap in the face.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-covid-iconoclasts-were-right-about-everything/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

Over the weekend, the CIA issued an updated assessment indicating that the agency now believes, albeit with low confidence, that Covid likely originated in a Chinese laboratory. That intelligence agency joins the Department of Energy and the FBI, both of which favor the lab-leak hypothesis.

It wasn’t that long ago that lending credence to that notion would have branded you a “conspiracy theorist,” and that was gentle treatment. In accordance with the elite consensus, social media outlets attempted to limit the reach of those who failed to summarily rule out that prospect. Heterodox voices at scientific institutions were defamed and intimidated by their colleagues. One unnamed whistleblower described by House Republicans as a “highly credible senior-level CIA officer” alleged that his colleagues who were amenable to the lab-leak theory were offered “a significant monetary incentive to change their position.” Too many in the scientific community led a concerted effort to mislead investigators, like former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil, and make them, in his words, a “victim of deception.”

Despite this history, the country responded to the CIA’s revelations with a gaping yawn. That’s understandable, even if it is regrettable. Those who knew long ago that the lab-leak theory had too much going for it to be so easily dismissed are underwhelmed by this late confirmation of their priors. Others who enforced the omertà around China’s role in the pandemic don’t want to dwell on their embarrassment. Thus, a conspiracy of silence has been replaced by a conspiracy of boredom. It should not be so. The unduly confident arbiters of American public discourse who raked dissenters over the coals — and whose faith in their own sagacity is matched only by their incuriosity — should be forced to confront their failures.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/gender-medicine-trans-movement-donald-trump-election

The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse,” Donald Trump declared in a 2024 campaign video. “On Day One,” Trump vowed, he would sign an “executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” He would also ask Congress to ban child sex-change procedures, prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars “to promote or pay for these procedures” in adults, “support the creation of a private right of action for victims to sue doctors who have unforgivably performed these procedures on minor children.” He pledged to unleash the Department of Justice to “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.”

Demonstrating how even gender ideology’s critics have been conditioned to use its language, Trump said that he would ask Congress to pass a bill declaring that there are only “two genders,” which are “assigned at birth.” Presumably, he meant two sexes, which are determined at conception and recognized at or before birth.

Assuming that these are not empty promises, Trump’s victory in November poses a serious threat to the gender medicine industry. That industry, however, was already on the defensive on the eve of the presidential election. Since 2021, 24 states have passed laws banning the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for youth who feel discomfort with their sex. An additional two—Arizona and New Hampshire—have prohibited the use of surgeries, but not hormones. A challenge to one of these laws, from Tennessee, is on the Supreme Court’s 2025 docket. The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, will determine how states can regulate gender medicine—and, with its 6–3 conservative majority, the Court likely will rule in Tennessee’s favor.

Nearly two dozen de-transitioners—young men and (more often) women who were given drugs and surgeries, only to realize later that what they really needed was counseling and time to mature—are now suing their doctors and clinics for medical mistreatment. Though these lawsuits are tough to win, even a single multimillion-dollar verdict or out-of-court settlement could send malpractice insurance premiums soaring and create a chilling effect in states where “gender-affirming care” remains legal.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=5edc814ed7

“Ultraprocessed foods.” That sounds really bad. In fact, not just really bad, but really, really bad. Bad on a level with, maybe, “assault rifles” or “cis-heteronormativity.” Definitely, with a condemnatory name like that, “ultraprocessed foods” would be something that no sensible person would ever eat, or at least certainly not in large quantities.

The term “ultraprocessed foods” has been in usage for a while, but the frequency seems to have exploded everywhere in the past few months. Perhaps that has resulted from the naming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made a thing about proclaiming a health crisis in the U.S., which he asserts is substantially brought about by our “broken food system.” On November 15 — just after President-elect Trump tapped Kennedy to lead HHS in the new administration — The New York Times had a piece outlining Kennedy’s critiques of the “food system.” Number one on the list of Kennedy’s critiques identified by the NYT was “ultraprocessed food.”

After reading this, I thought it might be time for me to get on top of what this “ultraprocessed food” stuff might be. Is this something that you need to really be concerned about, or is it just another one of the usual scare tactics of the left to try to take more control of your life? The answer, as will not surprise you, is the latter.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/10/zuckerberg_people_in_the_biden_administraiton_told_us_to_censor_true_information_about_vaccine_side-effects.html

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan an interview that aired Friday that “people in the Biden administration” pressured them to take down posts on Facebook and Instagram that discussed vaccine side effects, whether the claims were true or not:

MARK ZUCKERBERG: So, in the beginning, it kind of seemed like, OK, we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this.

But when it went from, you know, 2 weeks to flatten the curve to, you know, in like in the beginning, it was like, “OK, there aren’t enough masks, masks aren’t that important,” to then it’s like, “Oh no, now you have to wear a mask.” And, you know, like everything was shifting around.

It beaome very difficult to kind of follow, and this really hit the most extreme, I’d say during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. Yeah, I’m generally like pretty pro-rolling out vaccines. I think on balance the vaccines are more positive than negative.

But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it, and they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true, right? I mean, they, they basically pushed us and said, you know, “Anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.”

And I was just like, well, we’re not gonna do that. Like we’re we’re clearly not gonna do that. I mean that that that that is kind of inarguably true.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s telling you to take down things to talk about vaccine side effects?

MARK ZUCKERBERG: It was people in the Biden administration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/01/the-national-institutes-of-health-needs-an-overhaul/

The agency is driven by activity, not results, and wastes money on pointless and counterproductive projects and DEI initiatives.

During the first 60 years of the 20th century, United States life expectancy rose, on average, by 0.37 years per year. After 1960, the rate of improvement suddenly dropped by more than half to 0.15 years per year before the Covid-19 effects.

A significant factor in this slowdown was rapid expansion of and mismanagement by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). During the first 60 years, NIH spending increased by $139 million per year in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars. After 1960, it increased by five times that amount — $703 million per year:

(NIH, CDC, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis)

The nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, with his openness to change and dedication to rigorous science,  offers an opportunity to fix the agency’s failures. There are talented scientists funded by NIH grants achieving important breakthroughs. Unfortunately, the size and failures of NIH result in wasted money and too-slow progress toward improved health.

NIH applies a “pipeline” model to research where scientists pick their topics, often focusing on what they consider “basic” questions. Experience shows that pipeline research is less innovative and effective in delivering results than the alternative “mission” research model that begins with an objective such as “eliminate polio.” Most privately funded research follows the mission model, with better results.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/jay-bhattacharya-nih-gender-medicine

In 2015, the National Institutes of Health launched the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office. Its purpose: to rectify the absence of health data on this cohort by prioritizing research and improving data collection. While the new office (SGMRO) does not have grantmaking authority on its own, its wide sphere of influence shapes the nature of the grants being considered for funding and the overall spirit of research on sexual and gender minorities (SGM). Moreover, the SGMRO and its associated working group and coordinating committee function as connective tissue linking the NIH’s various institutes, centers, and offices, allowing them to spread their understanding of the health of “individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, non-binary, Two-Spirit, queer, and/or intersex.” While many of the SGMRO’s priorities are laudable and in principle worthy of scientific inquiry, in practice they have enshrined activist assumptions about the nature of “gender identity,” “gender-affirming care,” and the causes of “health inequities” at NIH.

The catalyst for establishing the new office was a 2011 report commissioned by the NIH to survey the known research on “LGBT” health. Conducted by what is now the National Academy of Medicine, the report stated, “All aspects of the evidence base for transgender-specific health care need to be expanded.” The authors noted a need for more research on how treatment for gender dysphoria should be managed “under the new paradigm of greater diversity of gender identities” and on both the benefits and harms of sex-trait modification procedures, particularly related to hormone use.

With the benefit of hindsight, the 2011 report contains signs of things to come—for instance, recommendations to consider “intersectionality” and “minority stress” as guiding principles. But in many ways the document reads like a relic from a bygone era of scientific discourse, full of genuine humility and a desire for more scientific data on LGBT health more broadly. The report concluded that overall data on LGBT health was so sparse that a substantial research program was needed. In 2012, what is now known as the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Coordinating Committee issued a report that accepted the 2011 findings and recommendations, culminating in the founding of the SGMRO in 2015.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/12/30/how-dei-is-helping-fuel-a-huge-rise-of-antisemitism-in-health-care-and-hospitals/

More than a year has passed since the hate-fueled encampments and rallies targeting Jews became fixtures on college campuses and in cities across America. Over time, the emerging narrative centered on the assumption that those participating in sowing the antisemitic chaos were confined to specific industries, such as Hollywood and academia, or were among an ignorant cast of undergrads steeped in an ecosystem of radical progressivism. 

Unfortunately, in a disturbing phenomenon plucked directly from a Nazi-era playbook, a troubling rise of antisemitism in the medical community is now manifesting as an alternative and potentially deadly avenue through which Jew hatred is spreading across the US. 

In its first published study of “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: A Survey Study of Reported Experiences,” the Data and Analytics Department of StandWithUS, a Jewish civil rights group, surveyed 645 self-identifying Jewish healthcare professionals, 74 percent of whom are physicians. The study found that nearly 40 percent of respondents recounted direct exposure to antisemitism within their professional or academic environments. 

The results of the survey confirm an underacknowledged reality — that the healthcare arena is emerging as a new and dangerous stronghold for antisemites to exert their influence. If left unchecked, this movement will rupture the integrity of America’s medical professionals. 

The rise of anti-Jewish attitudes in healthcare stems from several factors, including the decision made by some medical schools to supplant critical instructional time with toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that supposedly focus on cultural inclusion and social inequities. 

Unsurprisingly, when combined with a deterioration of academic standards, medical students educated in this pedagogy prove prone to gravitating towards a framework that designates Israel, and by extension, all Jews, as privileged colonialists.