RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/major-transgender-org-to-recommend-lowering-age-for-hormone-treatment-surgeries/

A transgender health organization will release new guidelines lowering its recommended age to receive gender-transition treatments.

Hormone treatments may begin at age 14, about two years younger than previously recommended, according to new guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The group is expected to publish the new guidance in a medical journal sometime this year, and gave the Associated Press an advance copy of the recommendations.

In addition, some surgeries may be conducted at ages 15 or 17, about a year younger than previously recommended.

Dr. Eli Coleman, head of WPATH’s standards of care, consent of the parents and the maturity of the person who wants to transition should also be taken into account before making a decision to transition.

“Certainly there are adolescents that do not have the emotional or cognitive maturity to make an informed decision,” Coleman told the AP.

The news comes amid rising national debate on gender-transition procedures for minors, including attempts in several states to pass laws barring minors from undergoing gender-transition procedures. President Biden is set to sign an executive order on Wednesday in an attempt to counter such legislation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/the-zombie-war-against-covid/

The last remaining restrictions on normal life are a national embarrassment.

This week, New York City finally made masks optional for children ages two to four in preschools or daycare facilities. They did so despite the fact that the ongoing requirement was clearly meant to be yet another inducement to get more people vaccinated for Covid, a disease that barely affects young children, and one they don’t spread as much as adults do. The vaccine-makers have had trouble showing worthwhile results in the youngest children, and in the meantime, many young children have acquired some immunity by getting sick with, and recovering from, Covid. New York City has finally given up on masks everywhere but on public transit.

The World Health Organization had never recommended masks for children below five years of age. The European Centers for Disease Control noted in its recommendations that young children have trouble wearing masks effectively, often drool into them, can easily become alienated from masked caregivers, and can suffer adverse social and developmental consequences from wearing them. Europeans trusted the science, and their children did roughly as well as Americans did. Better, in fact, because their school closures and disruptions were significantly less severe.

But in America, progressives trusted the science!, which is a very different thing. Mostly it’s about fear and neuroticism as a lifestyle choice, though occasionally it’s about using your child’s face as an anti–Ron DeSantis yard sign.

Not a single elected official in New York City or Los Angeles has ever even attempted to demonstrate with data that the policy of masking two-year-olds was achieving a public-health goal for the city that other people in their states, or in Europe, were foolishly forgoing. They don’t have to do this, because when you are trusting the science!, you don’t have to think or reflect on what you’re telling others to do.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-damage-of-covid-lockdowns

Did the Covid lockdowns save lives? Statistics can help answer the question.

In April, free-market economists Phil Kerpen, Stephen Moore, and Casey B. Mulligan published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19.” Their report considered three variables for all 50 states and Washington, D.C.: health outcomes (measured by adjusted mortality), economic performance throughout the pandemic (measured by unemployment and GDP), and the pandemic effect on education (measured by the percentage of cumulative in-person instruction). The authors investigated the relationships among the three variables using simple linear regression, a tool to summarize and study relationships between two continuous variables. This method yields a correlation coefficient that rates both the strength and the direction of the relationship between the two variables.

The results: locked-down economies did not have better health outcomes, open schools were slightly negatively correlated with health outcomes, and the lockdown of schools and economies were highly correlated.

Since the underlying data are available, I ran my own analysis, and the results were largely the same. Indeed, the relationship between health outcomes and economic effects was statistically insignificant. So, too, was the relationship between health outcomes and open schools. Thus, one cannot conclude that economic lockdowns or school closures were associated with saving lives during the pandemic. A significant relationship existed between states that locked down the economy and closed schools, which means that governments that were willing to lock down businesses also sent students home. Ultimately, whether a state or district locked down the economy or closed down schools hardly predicted the health of those that live there.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/06/is-public-input-on-science-and-technology-policy-worthwhile/

In the throes of a pandemic that won’t quit, many Americans are anxious, but not only about COVID-19; they’re also fearful about vaccines, chemicals, and even (non-existent) “chemtrails,” to name just a few. Inexplicably, even after more than a million U.S. deaths from COVID-19, the U.S. population remains under-vaccinated and under-boosted. While California has gotten more than 70% of its population fully vaccinated, a large number of states – including Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, Wyoming, Indiana – have barely reached 50%, in spite of exhortations by political leaders and medical professionals.

According to Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, we’re witnessing the “death of expertise”: “a Google-driven, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.” 

The pandemic has brought armchair epidemiologists and infectious disease experts out in droves, and especially with policies in flux, this is not a trivial problem. It confounds policymakers and regulators who feel compelled to seek non-expert input on decisions, wasting time and taxpayers’ money, and making them increasingly reluctant to contravene even uninformed, misguided vox populi.

Science is not democratic. The citizenry does not get to vote on whether a whale is a mammal or a fish, or on the boiling point of water; legislatures cannot repeal the laws of nature, although legislators in Indiana once tried to redefine the mathematical constant pi.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-white-house-keeps-stoking-covid-fears-ashish-jha-kids-flu-schooling-11654459689?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford and a founding fellow at the Academy for Science and Freedom.

“I’ve been a huge advocate of keeping schools fully open to in person education since October of 2020,” Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, tweeted last week. “Still am.” So why is Dr. Jha engaged in scare-mongering about the danger of Covid to children?

In a May 30 tweet, Dr. Jha asserted that Covid is “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.” He linked to an article by Harvard Medical School instructor Jeremy Faust, which claims that Covid killed more than 600 children in 2021, whereas the flu kills “an average” of only 120 children annually. But Dr. Faust’s data are severely skewed, for three reasons.

First, while flu is seldom tested, everyone admitted to a hospital for any reason gets a Covid test. Between October 2018 and September 2019, 1.4 million flu tests were reported to public-health and clinical labs. As of May 31, 2022, there had been 897 million PCR tests for Covid.

Second, evidence from audits of death certificates found that 35% of all pediatric deaths in 2020 “had co-occurring diagnosis codes that could not be plausibly categorized as either a chain-of-event or significant contributing condition,” according to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Put another way, in at least 35% of pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the cause.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/bill-seeks-to-muzzle-doctors-who-tell-the-truth-about-covid_4447941.html

If these new proposed bills pass, your doctors could have their licenses taken away, simply by speaking the truth about the COVID fiasco. To appease bureaucrats, they would have to censor their thoughts about lockdowns and vaccines, and even avoid advising you about effective treatments.

Story at-a-glance
A California bill is now threatening to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with. California Assembly Bill 2098 designates “the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct” warranting “disciplinary action” that could result in the loss of their medical license
Misinformation related to SARS-CoV-2 includes “false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” But as far as what might constitute “misinformation” or “disinformation” is unclear and basically left open for interpretation by the state
Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat each patient as an individual, and to ensure each patient receives the safest and best care. Bill 2098 will turn doctors into government agents, leaving no one to advocate for patients’ health
California has also introduced six other bills seeking to enshrine tyranny into law, including bills to criminalize “amplification of harmful content,” create a centralized vaccination registry, strip funding from law enforcement that refuses to follow public health orders, mandate COVID jabs for school children, authorize minors to consent to vaccination, and require school districts to conduct routine COVID testing
If you live in California, please review these bills and VOTE NO

One of the most stunning parts of this pandemic has been the denial of basic science, and one of the most shocking developments from that has been the attack on medical doctors who try to set the record straight.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/06/covid-what-we-have-learned-and-dare-not-forget/

As COVID fever, in contrast to actual cases, continues to subside globally it is time to take stock of two-plus years of irrational fear and policy madness.  Learning from the economic, social and political debacle of the global response to the virus is essential to ensure the temptations of authoritarian rule by public health ‘experts’, in cahoots with their political enablers, are resisted when the next health ‘crisis’ hits (monkeypox, anyone?).

Below are fifteen of these COVID lessons. 

LESSON #1: Viruses will do what viruses do

The path to the COVID policy disaster began with the failure to recognise that any new virus will do what every respiratory virus has done – spread rapidly until the more lethal variants die off with their more vulnerable hosts and more transmissible, but less deadly, variants become dominant, resulting in the familiar Gompertz Curve of rapid rise, followed by a plateau and then swift decline as herd immunity develops from robust, naturally-acquired infections amongst the healthy and their immune systems.

SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus that is behaving exactly in accord with this evolutionary blueprint and it is the utmost hubris to imagine humanity can ‘socially distance’ it into defeat, and it is the height of unwarranted technophilia to think it can be vaxxed into submission with either  revolutionary, rushed-into-production concoctions subjected to scant and hurried clinical trials. Governments can only pretend, for political reasons, to alter or prevent the predictable trajectory of a virus, a fact by now which should be apparent to all.

We wasted two enormously costly years by failing to remember this very old lesson about viruses being viruses and doing what viruses do.  This was the foundational error that set in train all the policy errors that followed.

LESSON #2: Unethical, anti-democratic, unscientific and ineffective 

The verdict is in after the world’s first-ever global social experiment in locking down entire populations of healthy people to stop the spread of a virus.  Every cross-comparative analysis between national and state jurisdictions, in chart after chart of viral incidence, hospitalisation and mortality the world over, shows that lockdowns do not make a bit of difference, not even the brutal, full-strength Chinese brand.

https://www.city-journal.org/political-distortion-of-medical-research

The political distortion of medical research has a sordid history, but it’s unfortunately not just a thing of the past. Today, a popular narrative has taken hold that a racist medical establishment is the reason that blacks have shorter life expectancies, worse clinical outcomes for many diseases, and even excess maternal and infant mortality. The claim is unsupported by evidence, however, and believing it won’t do anything to improve black patients’ health.

Search for the terms “racism” and “medicine” in the National Library of Medicine database, and thousands of scientific publications appear. Journalists and a growing number of doctors regard this as proof of medical discrimination. But most of these studies do not prove any causality; they merely document disparities in clinical outcomes and medical services for black Americans. Nonetheless, they increasingly serve to justify such discriminatory practices as preferentially reserving scarce Covid-19 therapies for blacks.

A rush to find racism typifies most of the many thousands of opinion pieces, original investigations, and review articles on the topic of clinical outcomes for black patients. That literature supports a media that has eagerly adopted the narrative of racism embedded in American health care. The result undermines the trust in medical care needed for successful patient- physician relationships and diverts scarce resources in combating a nonexistent factor in poor health outcomes.

The rules for conducting robust scientific research require scientists to try to disprove their own theories. One can never absolutely prove a hypothesis correct; one can only show that experiments fail to disprove it. The investigator should begin by doubting the hypothesis and do his best to disprove it with carefully designed experiments. Unfortunately, too many studies on medical racism are carried out by investigators who, following the prevailing political trend, set out to confirm their ideas of a racist health-care system. A biased experiment can easily lead to a desired outcome, and emphasizing some results while ignoring others can lead to a faulty conclusion.