RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/covid-public-authorities-pushing-health-practices-contrary-to-medical-and-scientific-knowledge

Times have changed. Two years ago, tennis great Novak Djokovic could not play in the U.S. Open tournament. It was not because he had Covid-19 and posed a danger to fellow athletes and fans. Djokovic could not come into the country because of President Biden’s proclamation banning the entry of unvaccinated noncitizen air travelers into America.

Now, U.S. sporting officials let American sprinter Noah Lyles compete at the Olympics with an active case of Covid-19, putting his fellow athletes at risk of contracting the disease and impairing their performance.

Lyles tested positive on Tuesday. But he was allowed to run the 200-meter semi-final on Wednesday and the final Thursday, despite having a fever. It was hard not to notice Lyles talking with and hugging other athletes, exposing them at a time when he was surely contagious. Yet, Lyles said that he never considered withdrawing from the event. Nor did he notify anyone of his condition outside of the USA Track & Field medical staff that allowed him to compete.

Lyles was not alone. The World Health Organization reported that at least 40 Olympic athletes have tested positive for the virus. Yet the International Olympic Committee has removed all requirements for health measures or notifications. And the Paris Olympics officials have likewise taken a hands-off approach, letting athletes and teams determine for themselves how to respond to infection.

Amid this change, however, one finds a Covid constant: public authorities have consistently promulgated health requirements that have been, and remain, contrary to medical and scientific knowledge. Imposing a vaccination requirement on noncitizen air travelers, but not citizens and other types of travelers, made zero sense. Moreover, it has long been clear that the vaccine’s primary utility is to protect the person vaccinated from severe disease—the guard against infection is limited and short-lived; thus, vaccine mandates could not be justified as protecting the public.

Public authorities also seemed intent on denying the existence of natural immunity resulting from earlier infections. In Djokovic’s case, he had already had Covid twice. It was common medical knowledge that natural immunity is generally as good as or better than vaccine immunity, though, in the case of Covid, the public health authorities tried to ignore this for years. By April 2022, even Anthony Fauci acknowledged that natural immunity was just as protective as vaccinations for Covid.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-consensus-no-longer

The main justification for “gender-affirming care” for minors in the United States has been that “all major U.S. medical associations” support it. Critics of this supposed consensus have argued that it is not grounded in high-quality research or decades of honest and robust deliberation among clinicians with different viewpoints and experiences. Instead, it is the result of a small number of ideologically driven doctor-association members in LGBT-focused committees, who exploit their colleagues’ trust. Physicians presenting different viewpoints are silenced or kept away from decision-making circles, ensuring the appearance of unanimity.

As the U.K.’s Cass Review pointed out, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the U.S. Endocrine Society were especially important in forging this consensus, and they did so by citing each other’s statements, rather than conducting a scientific appraisal of the evidence. The “circularity” of this approach, says Cass in her report to England’s National Health Service, “may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor.”

Perhaps because it has never really depended on evidence, this doctor-group consensus has shown remarkable resilience in the face of major system shocks, including several whistleblowers, revelations from court documents that WPATH manipulated scientific evidence reviews, the Cass Review, a bipartisan commitment in the U.K. to roll back pediatric medical transition, and a growing international call for a developmentally informed approach that prioritizes psychotherapy over hormones and surgeries.

https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/09/human-genome-project-untold-story-how-single-volunteer-became-genetics-foundation/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

STAT is co-publishing this investigation by Undark.

They numbered 20 in all — 10 men and 10 women who came to a sprawling medical campus in downtown Buffalo, N.Y., to volunteer for what a news report had billed as “the world’s biggest science project.”

It was the spring of 1997, and the Human Genome Project, an ambitious attempt to read and map a human genetic code in its entirety, was building momentum. The project’s scientists had refined techniques to read out the chemical sequences — the series of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs — that encode the building blocks of life. Now, the researchers just needed suitable human DNA to work with. More exactly, they needed DNA from ordinary people willing to have their genetic information published for the world to see. The volunteers who showed up at Buffalo’s Roswell Park Cancer Institute had come to answer the call.

To take part in the study was to assume risks that were hard to calculate or predict. If the volunteers were publicly outed, project scientists told them, they might be contacted by the media or by critics of genetic research — of whom there were many. If the published sequences revealed a worrisome genetic condition that could be tied back to the volunteers, they might face discrimination from potential employers or insurers. And it was impossible to know how future scientists might use or abuse genetic information. No one’s genome had ever been sequenced before.

But the volunteers were also informed that measures had been put in place to protect them: They would remain anonymous, and to minimize the chances that any one of them could be identified based on their unique genetic sequence, the published genome would be a patchwork, derived not from one person but stitched together from the DNA of a large number of volunteers. “If we use the blood you donate” to prepare DNA samples, the consent form read, “we expect that no more than 10% of the eventual DNA sequence will have been obtained from your DNA.”

Soon, however, those assurances began to wither. When a much-celebrated working draft of the human genome was published in 2001, the vast majority of it — nearly 75 percent — came from just one Roswell Park volunteer, an anonymous male donor known as RP11.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-white-houses-transgender-tangle

New evidence suggests that the White House is taking its marching orders on so-called gender-affirming care for kids from transgender interest groups. A messaging blunder last week revealed that the Biden administration likely knows that gender hormones and surgeries for kids are unpopular but fears that saying so will alienate the powerful organizations that support these controversial procedures.

In late June, documents released in Boe v. Marshall—a case challenging Alabama’s ban on sex-trait modification procedures for minors—revealed that the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Rachel Levine, pressured the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) to eliminate age minimums from its latest “standards of care,” due to fear that specifying adolescent ages for surgeries would invite political backlash and result in legal restrictions on teen gender surgeries.

Even worse for a group that claims the mantle of medical science, internal emails reveal that WPATH suppressed the publication of evidence reviews that it had commissioned from researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As The Economist reported, WPATH also required the researchers to secure the organization’s approval before publishing their findings. And, according to a court document, WPATH forced the authors to add a disclaimer that they were “solely responsible for the content” of their published work.

Within days of the Alabama documents being unsealed, the White House told Fox News and the New York Times that it opposes gender surgeries for kids. It did so despite the administration’s longstanding, well-documented support for these very procedures. On July 2, 19th News, a progressive news site, published another statement that it had received from the White House. This one reiterated the Biden administration’s opposition to surgeries but added that the White House “continue[s] to support gender-affirming care for minors like mental health care and respect[s] the role of parents, families, and doctors in these decisions” (emphasis added). Notably absent was explicit support for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones; the statement seemed to equate “gender-affirming care” with “mental health care.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-supreme-court-showdown-looms-on-transgender-surgeries-and-puberty-blockers/?utm_source=recirc-

The Supreme Court took seven cases this morning to hear next year, including a long-running lawsuit by Holocaust survivors against Hungary for expropriation of property. The big one is United States v. Skrmetti, a Biden administration challenge on equal-protection grounds to Tennessee and Kentucky laws that restrict the use of potentially irreversible gender-transition treatments such as transgender surgeries and puberty blockers on minors.

I explained, back when the lawsuit was filed in May 2023 as part of Merrick Garland’s campaign to stamp out self-government in the states on any issue where states dissent from cultural progressivism, why it was nuts:

The legislature reached its own conclusions about whether the treatments at issue were medically supported or abusive to children. . . . Are these really interests no legislature is permitted to consider? The complaint cites the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (“DSM-V-TR”) as “an authoritative source for psychiatric conditions,” ignoring how often the DSM has been revised — and politicized — over the years. Of course, unlike the Tennessee legislature, the authors of the DSM are neither representative of, nor accountable to, a democratic populace. Moreover, on transgender issues, there is a significant divide between the American medical establishment and the European medical establishment. I’m as rah-rah USA as the next guy, but when that happens, it’s at least reasonable to allow the democratic process to consider the possibility that the Americans are wrong. Once upon a time, the American medical profession refused to accept the European consensus that doctors should wash their hands.

We may get a sense of how this Court resolves this question soon in this term’s big abortion case, Moyle v. United States, in which the Biden administration and the liberal justices argue that a federal statute puts an unelected national “medical consensus” above the elected legislatures in determining the standards for emergency-room care. Then again, Moyle is a statutory case rather than a constitutional one, and it might well be resolved on other grounds.

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Dr. Richard Ogden Roberts III is a pediatric endocrinologist at the Texas Children’s Hospital who’s administered puberty blocking and cross-sex hormone medications to young patients suffering from gender dysphoria. He was also one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that sought to halt a ban against child sex changes, leveraging his medical credentials as he worked alongside radical activist organizations.

Now he’s found himself at the center of a new scandal at the hospital, which has been enveloped in criticism after one whistleblower exposed the hospital for lying to the public about their offerings of transgender medical interventions to children and was then targeted by the federal government as a result.

New allegations that Roberts committed Medicaid fraud have cast further doubt on his so-called “gender-affirming care” operation, with a whistleblower claiming that the hospital “is illegally billing Medicaid for transgender procedures” with the help of Roberts, who is now being investigated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton since the state bars the use of Medicaid funds for any and all medical interventions that seek to change people’s sex.

Roberts embodies the partnership between radical transgender ideologues and the medical establishment. A closer look at Robert’s effort to halt Texas’ ban on child sex changes indicates that the doctor formed an alliance with far-left ideologues and activist groups, many of which enjoy the backing of the pharmaceutical companies that stand to profit from transgenderism in the process.

https://www.afterbabel.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

The U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has long been a leader on the youth mental health crisis. He wrote a book in 2020 on loneliness (Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World), and in 2023 he issued a landmark report on loneliness. In 2023, he also published a major report, a Surgeon General’s Advisory reviewing the research on social media and concluding that:

The current body of evidence indicates that while social media may have benefits for some children and adolescents, there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.

Yesterday, June 17, Dr. Murthy dropped a bomb: An essay in the New York Times in which he called for government-mandated warning labels on social media, akin to those that a previous Surgeon General called for in 1964, on cigarettes.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-murky-business-of-transgender-medicine
The “gender-affirming care” business has always had an aura of madness around it. Wielding the authority of white coats and prestigious degrees, doctors have convinced large swaths of the public that some children are “born in the wrong body.” The solution? Stop puberty, prescribe cross-sex hormones, and then, with the stroke of a knife, remove body parts—most commonly breasts, less frequently genitalia.

These medical practices use scientific rhetoric to affirm what is, at bottom, an ideological program. And gender activists have been successful enough at capturing the legitimizing institutions—medical societies, regulatory bodies, and teaching hospitals—to repel most challenges to the burgeoning child sex-change industry. 

Now, though, the consensus appears to be shifting. European governments have backed away from many of these dubious procedures. In England, the Cass Review has raised grave questions about the scientific evidence behind “gender-affirming care.” In the United States, the public has turned decisively against the use of puberty blockers and gender surgeries on minors, with some state legislatures banning the practice. 

I have reported on one of these programs, the pediatric gender clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital. Last year, I published an investigation demonstrating that, though it had promised to shut down its program, Texas Children’s had continued to administer hormone drugs to children as young as 11. Following the story, the state attorney general launched an investigation, and state legislators passed a bill, SB 14, prohibiting all transgender medical interventions on minors.

While these scandals caught the headlines, another story involving the same institution was brewing in the background: medical fraud. 

According to a new whistleblower, doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital were willing to falsify medical records and break the law to keep practicing “gender-affirming care.” Caught in the wave of ideological fervor, two of the hospital’s prominent physicians, Richard Ogden Roberts and David Paul, cut corners and, according to the whistleblower, committed Medicaid fraud to secure funds for the hospital’s child sex-change program.

(Texas Children’s Hospital, Roberts, and Paul did not respond to a request for comment.)

This is a story of fanaticism, hubris, and the murky business of transgender medicine. It would have remained hidden, except for the courage of two people inside the hospital, a surgeon named Eithan Haim and a nurse who has now decided to come forward. Both have risked much to alert the public to the barbarism that is occurring at the nation’s largest, and arguably most prestigious, children’s hospital.