RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bad-policies-leaving-next-generation-of-surgeons-unprepared

What is going on in surgery? Why are young surgeons are coming out of residency programs unprepared for clinical practice? A 2013 Annals of Surgery report revealed that 40 percent of surgical residents lacked confidence to practice independently after five years of training, the typical length of a full general-surgery residency. According to the same report, one in five surveyed program directors “felt that new fellows arrived unprepared for the operating room,” and program directors deemed 66 percent of new fellows incapable of operating unsupervised for more than 30 minutes in a major surgery.

While these statistics are frightening, that report is 11 years old. Have things gotten better since? Judging by more recent reports and my conversations with peers, they have not, and in fact, have probably gotten worse. Surgeons I have recently spoken to have observed that too many young surgeons are poorly prepared and need remedial help, such as operating with a more experienced surgeon before they can be trusted to operate on their own. The young surgeons themselves seem to realize their inadequate preparation, as nearly 80 percent of post-general-training surgeons pursue a one or two-year fellowship in a subspecialty, which for some may be a way to get more surgical experience and put off entering general practice.

One possible explanation for young surgeons’ lack of preparation stems from the American Council on Graduate Medical Education’s 2003 decision to limit residents in training to 80-hour work weeks and no more than 24 consecutive work hours. For surgery residents, fewer work hours means less time spent caring for patients and performing surgeries. Only with time and repetition do surgical residents develop the requisite cognitive and technical skills necessary to learn sound surgical judgement—knowing when to operate and what operation to do—and how to operate safely under all circumstances. The hour reductions also have resulted in less continuity, as residents hand off patients to one another, diminishing residents’ sense of responsibility for patient care.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4470475-pfizer-super-bowl-ad-proves-just-how-damaging-bidens-covid-response-has-been-for-america/

Why did Pfizer spend millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad? And why are they paying Travis Kelce $20 million to act as their vaccine spokesperson?  

Because their reputation — and the reputation of America’s medical authorities — needs serious rehabilitation. A Gallup survey conducted last fall found only 18 percent of Americans have a very or somewhat positive view of the pharmaceutical industry, down from 25 percent in 2022. That’s a worse rating than any other industry group but retail.   

This is one of the most damaging leftovers of the Biden presidency.   

Joe Biden’s authoritarian approach to managing the COVID-19 outbreak, forcing all workplaces of 100 or more people to require the vaccine or regularly test their employees and the censorship of opposing views on vaccine side effects and on treatments, not only trampled on Americans’ rights — it may have led to preventable deaths.  

Nothing could have highlighted Americans’ distrust of the pharmaceutical industry more starkly than the Pfizer ad, which aimed to rebuild not only its brand but general attitudes toward medicine. It’s hard to imagine a world where a leading drug-maker feels the need to remind people that science has led to life-saving breakthroughs like the invention of penicillin and treatments for cancer, yet here we are. 

The ad, wedged between promotions for beer and donuts and other more conventional fare, combined a jazzy upbeat tune with pictures of the founders of Pfizer, seeming to place them in the same scientific galaxy as Sir Isaac Newton and Copernicus, who came alive in their portraits long enough to join in the fun. It was memorable, mainly because it seemed so out of place. 

Pfizer’s problem is, first, that sales of its COVID-19 vaccines and therapies have cratered as the disease has faded. But more important, Pfizer is dealing with backlash against Biden’s heavy-handed dictates about vaccines.  

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ignoring-the-science

A new CDC study reports that the first updated Covid-19 vaccine—the bivalent vaccine approved in fall 2022—was about 50 percent effective in blocking infection over a two-month post-vaccination period in children and adolescents aged five to 17. But this limited and transitory benefit does not justify the agency’s official recommendation that everyone in this low-risk age group be vaccinated against Covid-19.

The CDC recommended the bivalent mRNA Covid-19 vaccine—containing the original virus and a later Omicron strain—for persons aged 12 or older on September 1, 2022, and for children aged five to 11 on October 12, 2022. The bivalent vaccine was superseded last fall by a univalent vaccine against a subsequent Omicron variant. Yet limited data are available on the bivalent vaccine and subsequent univalent vaccine’s protection against infection for children and adolescents.

The new study prospectively followed and administered weekly tests to 2,959 participants between the ages of five and 17. It found that the bivalent vaccine was 54.0 percent effective against infection and 49.4 percent effective against symptomatic Covid-19 when comparing those who received it with those who were unvaccinated or received only the original Covid-19 vaccine. The proctors didn’t monitor the participants for long; among participants who received a bivalent Covid-19 vaccine dose, the median post-vaccination observation time was only 50 days.

There is little reason to believe, however, that the bivalent vaccine’s limited protection against disease transmission was durable or that the newer univalent vaccine will be any better. Early last year, Anthony Fauci acknowledged in a coauthored medical article that good scientific basis existed to believe that vaccines against respiratory viruses like the one that causes Covid-19 would provide only “incomplete and short-lived” protection against infection. As time passed and new viral variants emerged, it became clear that while Covid vaccines continued to protect against severe illness and death, their incomplete ability to stop viral transmission quickly faded over a few months.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/07/report-amazon-censored-books-on-covid-vaccine-after-pressure-from-biden-white-house/

New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.

As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.

In an email dated March 2nd, 2021, Andrew Slavitt, a former senior advisor for COVID-19 in the Biden White House, asked “who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?”

“If you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up,” Slavitt said in a later email on the same day. “I haven’t looked beyond that but if that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”

In response, officials from Amazon expressed their hesitance at doing the White House’s bidding, saying “We will not be doing a manual intervention today. The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”

The Amazon official later says that another company official “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.” He then admitted that a tweak was in the works at the website which would redirect more customers’ search results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/01/23/dana-farber-cancer-institute-to-retract-6-studies-correct-31-after-data-forgery-allegations/
This comes after Harvard’s ex-prez faced plagiarism allegations

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute says the research giant is seeking to retract six studies and correct 31 others, as local scientists face “data forgery” allegations for their cancer research.

This controversy at the Harvard cancer institute comes after the university’s former president, Claudine Gay, resigned amid plagiarism allegations.

Dana-Farber is moving to retract the six manuscripts and correct 31 others following a bombshell blog from scientist Sholto David. His revealing blog took aim at four Dana-Farber researchers, including Dana-Farber President and CEO Laurie Glimcher.

“No doubt Laurie built her career on papers like this one, in Nature Immunology (2003), which includes some impressive contributions to art, but perhaps not to science,” David wrote in the “For Better Science” blog.

“As the whole world furiously argues over whether the president of Harvard did or didn’t use some quotation marks in the right place, scientists at the affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) must breathe a sigh of relief, no one has bothered to critically read their research in years! Far worse skeletons than plagiarism lurk in the archives…,” wrote David, a molecular biologist.

Following David’s explosive post that focused on four researchers, Dana-Farber confirmed that six studies have retractions underway: Requests have been submitted and are being reviewed by the relevant publication, or requests are being prepared.

Also, 31 manuscripts have been identified as needing corrections, which are in various stages of completion. One manuscript with a reported error remains under examination.

“Correcting the scientific record is a common practice of institutions with strong research integrity processes at which basic research is conducted,” said Barrett Rollins, research integrity officer and chief scientific officer, emeritus, at Dana-Farber. “Some of the potential errors that blogger Sholto David flagged had come up in our ongoing reviews.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/when-science-is-not-science/

We’ll be a long time recovering from the evidence-free ‘science’ pushed on the public during Covid.

Just 22 percent of all adults and 41 percent of those 65 and older — the most vulnerable group — have received the updated 2023–24 Covid-19 vaccine. The numbers are nearly identical to those of the previous updated (bivalent) Covid-19 booster — 21 percent of adults and 43 percent of people 65 and older. But both updates showed a marked drop-off from the original two-shot vaccine series that 79 percent of adults and 94 percent of the elderly received. Senior FDA officials Doctors Peter Marks and Robert Califf argue that despite the proven benefits of Covid-19 vaccines, we have reached a “tipping point” where this new vaccine hesitancy will result in thousands of preventable deaths.

But low vaccine uptake is not, as Marks and Califf suggest, a result of misinformation, at least not misinformation in the way they mean it. Rather, it is the product of science, specifically public-health science, as practiced during the pandemic, that was evidence-free, politically and personally motivated, dismissive of other points view, and that ended up undermining public trust.

As time has gone by, it has become clear that public-health pandemic science, as personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci — who famously declared, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” — was far removed from the scientific method of unbiased observation and experimentation to ascertain truth about natural processes.

Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently admitted in congressional testimony that the guidelines he championed to keep people six feet apart were not based on scientific data. “They sort of just appeared,” he said. Testimony from the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, confirmed Fauci’s assessment that the six-foot distancing recommendation was not evidence based.

In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant.

https://amac.us/newsline/society/trust-the-science-fauci-finally-admits-pandemic-errors/

Former leading government scientists have finally admitted, albeit unintentionally, that they botched the response to COVID-19. But what we don’t yet have – and what the public deserves – is any sense of accountability for the immense harm inflicted on the American people under the pretense of “trusting the science.”

In testimony on January 9 before the House select subcommittee investigating the federal government’s COVID policies, Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently retired from his position as Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in which capacity he was the face of the federal COVID response, admitted that some of his ”scientific” recommendations during the pandemic were based on purely arbitrary judgments.

Most notably, according to the subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who is also a physician, Fauci acknowledged that his “recommendation” that people “socially distance” by six feet (rather than, say, three, or twelve, or any other number) to minimize the virus’s transmission was “likely not based on scientific data,” but “sort of just appeared” to him.

But Fauci was unrepentant about the deleterious effects his randomly chosen recommendation had on American life – most notably school shutdowns throughout the country (since few schools had room to set up classrooms with students sitting six feet apart), closed businesses (for similar reasons), massive federal spending (often wasted) to try to keep businesses afloat and workers paid, kids prevented from playing with their friends, and so on.

Even worse, in contrast with what every parent who observed how little their children were being taught from online classes could see, Fauci still denied that there was any proof that the school shutdowns caused learning loss at all.

In reality, a multitude of studies issued by reputable research organizations have confirmed such losses. For instance, the Center for School and Student Progress, operating in conjunction with the Northwest Evaluation Association (a nonprofit educational testing organization) reported, “In nearly all grades, achievement gains during 2022–23 fell short of pre-pandemic trends.” More precisely, the study found that the average student will need the equivalent of “4.1 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.5 months in math,” and that ”marginalized [that is, minority or low-income] students remain the furthest from recovery.”