RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-shuts-out-its-own-experts-in-authorizing-another-booster-covid-vaccine-pandemic-science-11649016728?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The Food and Drug Administration last week authorized Americans 50 and over to get a fourth Covid vaccine dose. Some of the FDA’s own experts disagree with the decision, but the agency simply ignored them. It will convene its advisory committee this Wednesday to discuss future vaccine needs. That’s like having lawyers present arguments to a judge who’s already issued a verdict.

Eric Rubin, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, sits on the advisory committee. He told CNN last month that he hadn’t seen enough data to determine whether anyone needs a fourth dose whose immune system isn’t seriously deficient.

Another committee member, Cody Meissner, agrees. Dr. Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Children’s Hospital, told me last week that the fourth dose is “an unanswered scientific question for people with a normal immune system.”

A third member of the committee, Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told the Atlantic that he advised his 20-something son to forgo the third shot, which the FDA recommends for everyone 12 and over.

At the crux of the broad opposition to second boosters is the recognition of B- and T-cells, which public-health officials have long ignored. They talk only about antibody levels, which tend to decline in the months after vaccination. B- and T-cells, activated by the primary vaccine series or an infection (and augmented by a single booster in older patients), are highly and durably effective at preventing serious illness from Covid. An additional vaccine dose induces a fleeting high in antibody levels, offering only mild and short-lived protection against infection.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/medical-experts-question-fdas-evidence-second-covid-booster-refusal

he federal government’s enthusiasm for COVID-19 vaccine boosters is not matched by some of its outside advisers and other medical professionals, including the head of a leading medical journal who questions the evidence behind the decisions in the past several months.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized a fourth mRNA dose for ages 50 and older, expanding its availability beyond immunocompromised people, without input from its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed hours later without consulting its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The FDA previously overruled VRBPAC in November by authorizing a third mRNA dose for ages 16 and older. The agency’s top two vaccine officials, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause, resigned earlier in the fall when the Biden administration promoted boosters for all adults before the agency could weigh in.

Johns Hopkins University medical professor Marty Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, asked sarcastically whether “bypassing the typical voting process” of the VRBPAC was “following the science.”

Instead, the agency plans to convene its outside experts to “discuss” the FDA’s decision, which is like “a judge issuing a verdict and then having lawyers make their arguments,” Makary wrote in a tweet thread.

“There is zero clinical data that a 4th dose reduces hospitalization risk,” he said. “There isn’t even any evidence that a 3rd dose reduces hospitalization risk in young people.”

VRBPAC member Eric Rubin, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, told CNN he has only seen fourth-dose data “for participants followed for just a few weeks.” The committee needs to know how well it protects “highly vulnerable people against serious disease and death.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/social-justice-activism-invades-medical-school/

“These “social justice” moves won’t improve medical care; they will waste time and resources on ideological distractions.”

Almost none of the people who run educational institutions in America these days can resist the temptation to signal their virtue (and curry favor with various interest groups) by embracing “social justice,” “anti-racism,” and other leftist tropes. It was bad enough when it was happening in English departments, but now we find it in more worrisome places, such as medical schools.

The University of North Carolina’s medical school is one of them and in today’s Martin Center article, John Sailor examines the controversy.

After criticism of the school’s initial announcement of its new initiatives, it released an “Update” document. Sailor finds that document to be neither clarifying nor relieving. He writes, “Many of the recommendations flirt with violating academic freedom. They include ‘Revise Promotion and Tenure Guidelines to include a social justice domain required for promotion’ and ‘Directors of all phases will begin to examine and change content as needed to include anti-racist concepts as defined in the objectives.’”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/most-americans-are-moving-on-from-covid-progressive-elites-arent/

Mandates and masks and fear are no longer normal — unless you read or write for the New York Times.

T he chaotic news cycle in Ukraine has overshadowed a significant development domestically — the drastic shift in public opinion on Covid-19 precautions. “Two years after the start of the pandemic, the nation is ready to move on,” Axios reported last week. “64% of survey respondents now favor federal, state and local governments lifting all COVID-19 restrictions, up 20 percentage points since early February.” (Although “three in four say they’d go back to masking if infections increase again where they live,” it noted.) On top of that, “84% say their state of emotional well-being is good, the highest shares for both since May 2020.” And “75% said the country is moving toward a time when COVID won’t interrupt daily life, up from 66% last month.”

Notably, it’s Democrats who are reporting the largest shift in views toward the pandemic. According to recent numbers from Morning Consult, “the share of adults who say COVID-19 is a severe health risk in their local community fell to an all-time low of 17%, driven by a roughly 20-point decrease among Democrats in recent weeks. Just under a quarter of Democrats now say COVID-19 is a severe local risk, compared with 12% of Republicans, a level that has also fallen since late January.” From January 14 to March 13, the share of American adults who see Covid as a “severe” health risk fell 17 points, from 34 to 17 percent. Among Republicans, that number fell 11 points, from 23 to 12 percent. But among Democrats over that time period, it fell 23 points, from 46 to 23.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/in_new_york_city_the_leftist_war_on_children_continues_under_a_new_health_tsar.html

If there are only two things that the last two years have taught us, they are (1) that young children do not get extremely sick or from COVID nor do they spread it, and (2) that cloth and paper masks are ineffectual against a virus. However, New York City’s new health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, doesn’t let little things like facts get in the way. He’s doubled-down on keeping children five and under smothered in masks for the indefinite future, even as mandates for adults are finally going away. Because there is no health reason behind it, the only reason, a sinister one, can be to train both children and their parents to obey the government at all times.

The Daily Mail has the story:

New York City‘s new health commissioner sparked outrage after announcing that children aged five and under should wear face masks indefinitely, bucking the national trend of ditching masks and going in the face of vast evidence that kids are at little risk from Covid-19.

‘I think it’s indefinite at this point,’ Dr. Ashwin Vasan said Friday during a COVID-19 briefing in Queens. ‘People who have tried to predict what’s going to happen in the future in this pandemic have repeatedly found egg on their face, as they say, and I’m not going to do that here today.’

The woke commissioner, who lives in Brooklyn with his partner and three children, including a four-year-old son, argued he wanted to mask children because under fives are not vaccinated.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/first-do-some-harm/

While we are finally starting to win the fight for our children’s minds, we are losing the battle for control of their bodies.

First, the good news. Recent legal wins over woke schools in Florida have the education industrial complex reeling. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis successfully banned his state’s education lunatics from “injecting,” as he likes to say with a twinkle in his eye, depraved gender poison into the state’s Kindergarten-through-3rd grade curriculum. This is the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” Act, which produced some hilarious meta-content, like braindead woke celebrities screeching “Gay!” repeatedly on social media.

Even better, the dead-eyed do-nothings who sit on school boards and the moldering teachers’ unions who control them are getting b*tch slapped—finally—by outraged parents who are taking the fight to them. The battle is over who, exactly, has control over a child’s mind. Until now, the people in full control of the minds of our youth have been the army of 31-year-old TikTok-and-Adderall addicts with multiple piercings and furry fetishes and baroque multisyllabic pronouns who seem to work at every preschool and elementary school in the country. I don’t know where these weirdos come from, but I want to thank the China-owned TikTok app for giving them a platform on which to expose themselves. 

These “teachers” get their jollies by stocking kindergarten bookshelves with dystopian titles like “She’s My Dad” and “I’m Not a Girl” and by instructing five-year-olds who barely know how to wipe themselves properly about how fun it is to touch their own private parts.

You should see what they do on Show-and-Tell day.

We are slowly chipping away at the rotted American education colossus. It feels good to notch a few Ws in our belt. Been awhile, right? 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/eliminating-dr-dooms-job-lloyd-billingsley/

“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator in chief.’ No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”

That was Sen. Rand Paul and the dictator is Biden advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, a government bureaucrat since 1968 and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.

Paul, a physician for more than 33 years, has “never encountered someone with the gall to proclaim himself ‘the science’ and portray anyone opposing him as ‘attacking science.’ That is, until Dr. Fauci became the COVID dictator-in-chief.” Paul mourns “those we lost to the crushing and overbearing lockdowns and mandates that were based on junk science.”

Paul will introduce an amendment to eliminate Fauci’s NIAID position and establish three new institutes headed by presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, and serving a term of five years. As Paul explains, “my amendment, which will get a vote this week, will finally force accountability and fire Dr. Fauci.” Such a move is long overdue, and the timing is right.

“You may be done with COVID,” Fauci told reporters last month,  “but COVID is not done with the United States, nor is COVID done with the world.” Fauci’s dictatorial clout, coupled with junk science, empowers the NIAID boss to fulfill his own prophecy.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-road-to-serfdom-were-almost-there_4347402.html

We are learning March 18 something that apparently slipped under the radar for a few days.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “quietly” made some changes to its data tracker website on March 15, removing tens of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, nearly a quarter of which were those for young people under 18.

They tell us this occurred because of a “coding logic error.”

I wonder how many they would have had to remove if they included those who were registered by hospitals—for profit or otherwise—as having died from the virus when they had multiple other of what we have learned to call co-morbidities. (If there’s one thing we can say for the pandemic, it built our vocabularies.)

In other words, they didn’t necessarily die of COVID-19, but the hospitals said they did, a different kind of coding error, I guess.

The number would likely be staggering.

This supposed “coding logic error”—whatever that may be; the CDC doesn’t precisely tell us—could indeed be symbolic of, or even actually encompass, the entire pandemic.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/dei-will-cause-people-to-die-medical-education-wokeness/

In the comments to the crackpot Yale Law students post, my good friend JonF suggests that this is not a big deal, really, that the protesters will grow up to mature into normalcy, and pose no threat to common sense. I pushed back, saying that may have been true in our generation (we’re the same age, Gen X), but that pattern changed with the Millennials, who marched through the institutions and changed them.

Here’s a chilling — seriously, chilling — example from the medical profession. John Sailer, on the National Association of Scholars website, writes:

In October 2021, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association jointly released its 54-page Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narratives and Concepts, which received widespread criticism for its ideologically-charged language and recommendations. The guide suggested physicians update their language using “equity-focused alternatives,” trading terms such as “vulnerable” for “oppressed” and “disadvantaged” for “historically and intentionally excluded.”