When I was in training, I often would unwind after a brutal day by watching the PBS series, "All Creatures Great And Small." A James Herriot series about a Yorkshire veterinarian, many of the episodes centered around his struggles to bring modern veterinary science to the backward farming regions of England. Watching stories of farmers burying calves at the barn door to ward off disease instead of following principles of quarantine and sanitation - all that was available in 1937 - made me glad that I was studying REAL medicine - founded upon the Scientific Method and the sacred tenet of free enquiry.
Now I watch in disbelief as my colleagues - well-trained and experienced - walk lockstep with the stomping, marching brownshirts of the American medical regime. Not only is free enquiry out the window, many front-line physicians are perfectly happy to punish their colleagues for questioning the ill-considered and politically-motivated mandates of an elite cabal of medical sellouts.
Decades of American preference polls changed very little: year-on-year, doctors always headed the list of most-trusted; lawyers and used-car salesmen typically swapped positions at the bottom. After the Wuhan virus goat-rodeo, almost nobody I know trusts their doctor to treat flu symptoms; most - and especially the elderly - would take their chances at home. And I'm one of them. A damned shame.
I come from an old school medical family. My own father, a surgeon in his 70s, will no longer go to his GP for exactly this reason. I am terrified about a future without my father. He’s the only doctor I trust.
I spent an hour on the phone last night with my older brother's daughter. Thanks to a lifetime of cigarette-smoking, he's now reaping the benefits of PND - paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea - difficulty breathing at night. He is absolutely terrified, and justifiably so, of going to hospital to be seen for a respiratory problem, thinking that he might end up on a ventilator like his now-dead wife did last year.
I get a few grins when I tell people my goal in retirement is to protect my friends and family from my colleagues, but unfortunately I am serious - literally, deadly serious.
Maybe the medical profession will bring back bleeding and leeches (although medicinal leeches are apparently useful). When you have a profession that routinely is feted and "educated" by big pharma and people such as Dr. "Josef" Fauci getting rich off grants and shilling for the PLA, you have the predictable end result of politicized medicine.
The left has destroyed the scientific method. For years they have belittled those who question global warming and called people who question it deniers. They say the science is settled. It's not. The science is never settled. That is the beauty of the true scientific method. Scientists today are questioning Einsteins theories and Newton laws of gravity. That is how the scientific method is supposed to work, question, question, question, never settle.
I believe in vaccinations. Smallpox was wiped out by vaccines. I was 8 years old during the polio scare and polio is no longer the global threat it was. There are some polio cases from time to time but it is not like it was. However the rush to market the Covid vaccine gives me pause.
Pyzer and Moderna have made billions off their vaccines. If you spread enough money around, even Mother Teresa might be tempted to fudge the figures. and lie.
With respect to Global Warming the science is not just not settled, the science was never used. Science requires scepticism and debate. Before we embarked on a campaign which will destroy our economy and way of life we should have had a debate
I agree we need to continue to explore different ways to mitigate the changes, but 45yrs ago with the more “primitive” tools we had compared to today, we did scientific tests on as many different aspects as we could. Now, however, “Green” politics have taken over rationality IMO and want to block oil & gas while we now need more as we build the infrastructure for cleaner energy.
Absolutely. 100 percent for vaccines that are tested and prevent infection
Vaccines for toddlers that aren't properly tested or studied for an overwhelming non-fatal and relatively mild disease for that age cohort? Madness. Worse - politically driven madness.
It is my understanding that smallpox is the only virus ever completely eradicated by vaccine. That is because it has no animal.reservoir. I do believe that the other traditional.vacci es (measles/mumps/rubella, dtp, etc.) are valid. But I do not trust the research around covid or its vaccines. Largely because without knowing where it came from we will never know exactly what it is.
There is the infamous "Indiana Pi Bill" where someone tried to get the value of Pi legally established. It feels to me a lot of things that are going on now are quite similar. Science by consensus, consensus by fiat, any further research to poke holes into the consensus (if it can get funding) is misinformation.
I was a Science Teacher definitely schooled in Scientific Methods. Did Graduate course in Environmental Engineering in the mid 1980’s. Then wrote & taught a 6th Gr. Environmental Studies course. We have learned a lot since those days, but anyone living in today’s floods, excessive heat & frequent forest fires 🔥 will certainly believe our Climate is changing. Then explore how our oceans are heating up with fish dying and sharks common in northern waters, it is tough to still be in denial.
Climate has never been static. Oceans have been rising and receding for millions of years. You can find sea fossils in the Rockies. We have had ice ages and then the Earth warmed and the glaciers melted.
Maybe you can help to save us from Gender Medicine. I have lost all faith in the medical community and in pharma over this issue even as I can see that doctors are more and more hamstrung by our government activist class.
"Sacrificing health care on the altar of ideology
BY LEIGH ANN O’NEILL AND REID NEWTON, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 10/20/22 2:30 PM ET"
"Medical doctors are among the most highly educated professionals on the planet. Why, then, would the federal government seek to curtail their ability to perform their jobs to the best of their ability? Knee-capping the scientific process in the name of highly contested “gender-affirming” care not only puts patients in a needlessly risky position; it forces physicians to choose between abiding by government edicts and following their own medical judgment.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a proposed rule titled Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities. It will amend the regulations that govern the Affordable Care Act. Not only does the proposal seek to capture significantly more providers within its control, but it would also force them to provide medical treatment they may disagree with."
etc.
I was once very compliant and full of respect for medicine.
Yes, MDs are highly educated - no doubt about that. But looking a little deeper, that does not always translate into Doing The Right Thing.
So, let's take a radiologist, for example - four massively competitive years of college, four brutal years of medical school, five years of residency training. Thirteen years, during which you make no (or a little, later on) income as you watch your high-school classmates begin their lives, businesses, and families. All of that can be rendered void by some medical board somewhere revoking your license - and having your license revoked in one state means automatic revocation in the others in which you are licensed - and there isn't much for a defrocked doctor to do to earn a living.
Secondly, there is the self-selection process: to begin with, you don't get into medical school with a history of being a Bad Boy; you get in by toeing the line, doing the work, showing every sign of conformity and respect for the system. One bad recommendation from a college professor and it's over, so MDs tend to be conformists and respecters of authority.
Thirdly, you have the ongoing continuous peer pressure of your conforming colleagues. Not a formula for bomb-throwers or nonconformists. It is said that in the Third Reich, far from protesting, the physicians were the most ardent Nazis and assisted the regime in some of its most egregious acts. I can see that.
I, OTOH, am a bit of an anachronism. I did other things before medical school: worked in industry, dug coal and sawed logs - born to older parents (my grandpa was born in 1864 during the War of Yankee Aggression), I grew up, for better or for worse, in an Appalachian culture itself a throwback to older times. In college, med school, residency training, I never fit in, had little respect for my city-born colleagues, no respect for the "situational ethics" we were being taught, and never wanted to do so. And as I age, I less and less regret any of it. I had older cousins who were physicians - gentlemen to the last man - for whom the personal and moral aspects of the profession were more important than the technical. Yes, I think the word is anachronism, and I feel it more every day.
"It is said that in the Third Reich, far from protesting, the physicians were the most ardent Nazis and assisted the regime in some of its most egregious acts. I can see that."
I fear you are onto something. Have you read this article?
"Echoes of Eugenics: What the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg Means for Us in the US
On the 75th anniversary of the trial of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg we examine Nazi medicine and gender-affirming care"
"“More than half of all German physicians became early joiners of the Nazi Party, surpassing the party enrollments of all other professions. From early on, the German Medical Society played the most instrumental role in the Nazi medical program, beginning with the marginalization of Jewish physicians, proceeding to coerced experimentation, euthanization, and sterilization, and culminating in genocide...” [Haque et al 2012]
It is a “myth” that “the medical crimes of the Hitler regime [were] committed by a few demonic physicians working in isolation from the mainstream of German medicine. The success of this myth has imperiled the value system of medicine today.” [Seidelman 1995]
“Physicians were the most over-represented academic profession in the Third Reich. ... The Nazi doctrine attracted a profession in economic and political distress ... It drew physicians into its movement by appealing to the medical profession's pride and prosperity in the context of a philosophy that glorified contemporary medical practice. Physicians were attracted to ... tenets that championed biomedical solutions to social problems.” [Cohen 1998]
It worked. In just six years almost all “non-Aryan” physicians left practice, and income for the remaining doctors rocketed 67% from a pre-Hitler low to an all-time high. The crossroads of Eugenic medicine and Nazi politics was good for business, and the medical profession saw that opportunity early. [Hanauske-Abel 1996]"
I liked a subsequent section on Consent. Also,
"Where does this end? I think it doesn’t. It doesn’t end until we make it end. The Doctors Trial at Nuremberg is one model. We don’t need to dream of justice. We don’t need to start at step zero of the Movement Action Plan, to dream that the unthinkable might become thinkable. Our grandparents did the work, and were heroes for it. Maybe we just need to learn from their struggles, dust off their ideas, and learn to connect their work to our challenges."
I think this is where we are now - with most people going along with an ideology or not thinking there's any big deal thing to pay attention to.
My children voice the same concerns. When I visit a physician I’m embarrassed by their lack of “medical detail”. It’s a sad commentary on the perverse state of medical care & quality of medical education. In both mine & my father’s generation a life in medicine required, demanded absolute dedication. Physician’s weren’t part time not did they advertise. Try “laying on the hands” via Zoom or FaceTime. It’s truly depressing. Is it any wonder my children’s friends ask this old physician for advice.
I went for my yearly Medicare wellness visit recently and of course had to fill in several forms. I was what my sex is as well as the sex I was assigned at birth. At the second question I wrote “not applicable.”
I have thus far resisted the pressure to add that to the intake forms in my medical office, but I suspect it will soon be mandated by insurance companies in order for an encounter to be paid.
I have the same situation with my dad, who passed away five years ago. He bemoaned the state of medicine in the last 20 years of his life. I wish every day my dad was still here to bring his common sense to the situation we're facing.
“Now I watch in disbelief as my colleagues - well-trained and experienced - walk lockstep with the stomping, marching brownshirts of the American medical regime”
——————————————
I think it would be easier for people to recognize what this is if the Germans had used the term ‘unsaxonated’ to describe the people they were targeting as undesirable.
LOL yes that’s right I’m doing Saxony jokes this morning. Please feel free to spread this to your friends. I’m recruiting superspreaders for my Saxony jokes.
It's become routine for family doctors to ask if you own a gun. That is not a medical question, it's the medical profession bowing to the authoritarians. And this example is so pervasive, it makes stooges of the doctors
I was asked that question nearly 20 years ago on a "health" survey sitting with my child in a pediatricians' office. I went ballistic. Demanded the head nurse come in and dressed her down for bringing politics into the exam room. The doctor walked in and I asked him to explain why in a survey asking about household dangers there wasn't a single question asking if we had a swimming pool--statistically a much, much greater threat to children. Apparently I made some waves as the practice's managing partner called me a week later after a partner's meeting to apologize. No doubt, though it was only a temporary pause.
Good on you. I'm generally very sympathetic to workers that have to deal with the public, so I don't ruffle them very often, but last fall I was following up at Duke for a shoulder injury and while waiting for my appointment, I nearly made a wrong turn into the ladies' restroom. The gals behind the counter chirped that I was heading into the ladies' room, and before I could stop myself, I stopped and looked at them for a moment as if I was puzzled and said, "But today I feel like a woman!"
I realized instantly that they didn't know whether to take me seriously, and what they were going to do if I was. I started laughing and went into the dude's door. They chuckled when I came out and said I had them going there for a minute. Crazy times. Crazy, crazy times.
Guess that's what makes this part of the country different. When my doctor and I discuss guns, it's mostly to make plans to go out to his ranch for some target shootin'
My reply is, "You mean my ones at home, or the one I'm carrying this very minute?" That usually backs them off a bit. Then: "Of course, I'm just kidding .................... heh heh......."
I refused to answer that question when our pediatrician tried it. I wanted to know what expertise doctors have as regards gun safety. I wanted to know how safe it is to make a record (easily subject to subpoena) that tells any number of individuals and entities that we have guns in the house.
Most of all, I wanted to know why, if they are concerned about gun safety (as all reasonable people are) they didn't disperse info to ALL parents/patients that teaches children the established gun safety rules. Rules like, never touch a gun. Leave the area if you do see a gun. Immediately tell a trusted adult. Realize that all guns can be loaded. Parents: if you do have firearms, here's a list of ways to safely store them away from children.
Doctors don't need to know if you personally have firearms in order to address the issue. Just say, "X number of children were injured or killed by carelessly stored firearms last year. If you do have firearms, be aware of this and store them safely. Here's a simple handout that we give all parents explaining how to teach your children to avoid firearms, and how adults can make sure these accidents never happen to them."
Kids need to know these vital rules---ALL kids. Just because mom and dad don't have a gun in their house does not mean that they will never encounter a gun in other contexts. For instance, a friend of mine was hanging with his friends in the woods back when they were about twelve. One boy pulls out a handgun and most of the kids gathered around. Not my friend---he knew enough to boogie on out of there. That afternoon, one of the boys was accidentally shot with this "unloaded" handgun. He survived, and explained to his parents that he wasn't worried about being shot because he "figured he would see the bullet coming and just dodge out of the way."
Two brothers - young relatives of mine - were screwing around in the 1940s and one shot the other, who died. When that bullet goes down the tube, it's over, boys and girls. Over.
I'm old enough to remember when the NRA sponsored gun-safety courses in high schools around the country. The kids got to shoot, which they just loved - made them feel special - and they were treated like adults and expected to come away with an adult attitude. Two good things. Nowadays, the left would choke itself clutching its pearls.
Normals have a real problem: they are busy actually doing things that make the country function, while the lefties and other soreheads have all the time in the world to gin up mischief. Somehow that has to change.
Which reminds me: Vote. Vote. Vote. Early and often. Especially this November 8th.
When I was in high school there was a rifle range in the basement. We would carry our rifle with the bolt open into the range and shoot. It never occurred to me to load it and shoot up the school, never.
At an early age I was taught gun safety and more people were killed by an "unloaded gun" than any other type of gun accidents. The first thing I do when I pick up a gun is check to see if it is loaded.
I occasionally teach a gun safety course. I tell everyone, "I don't care if Jesus Christ hisownself hands you a gun and tells you it's unloaded, YOU CHECK. Occasionally I'll get a smartass and I hand him a gun and tell him it's unloaded. If he doesn't check, he fails the class and goes home. No f'in around. This is life and death.
I grew up in Maryland in the 70's, which always had lots of gun rules (applied, of course, only to the law abiding), and I knew for as long as I can remember back, don't touch the guns. I respected that rule. As a teen, my father took me to the range, taught me basic gun safety, and taught me to shoot. He even bought me my first gun, which I still have today (the sheriff's office, when I moved to Virginia and tried to register it, asked where I was from and laughed kindly). As you say, not having a gun in your home doesn't mean a friend's home won't have a gun. I like your strategy.
You can teach kids the rules all you want but they won't follow them. This was a test where kids found unloaded guns, AFTER viewing the NRA video and being told not to touch the gun and to tell an adult, and they all pick it up and most point it at themselves or others. https://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/young-kids-guns-parents-22325589
There is a VERY big difference between watching a video and going through firearms training. Would you want your heart operated on by someone who'd seen a video, or by someone who had had surgical training and actually done heart surgery?
Come with me, go through my course, fire my .357 magnum at a gallon jug of water. Especially if you are eight years old. (Actually, an 8-year-old might get the .38 special.) Hear that earsplitting sound, feel the recoil through your arms that shakes your whole frame and then come with me to look at the jug you just shot. Children are ignorant, not stupid. They get the meaning, and after a day's training, you'll never see one shoot somebody else by accident - In His Entire Life.
That doesn't prove that kids won't follows rules. They may have been particularly stupid kids, or it may have been a poorly made video. I've seen a lot of bad "teaching" in my time - maybe they listed a bunch of rules? That isn't teaching. Children need to be taught, somewhat graphically, just enough to wince a bit, what happens when the rules aren't followed. They need to be allowed to question, and have real answers to their questions. Probably won't happen with a video. My kids follow my rules because I explain them, and they know I don't lie to them. They trust me. Plenty of kids follow rules when actually taught be someone they trust.
I agree with you, Scott D, that you can't rely on any amount of safety instruction to keep kids 100% safe relative to all the dangers of life. As adults, we should teach them as best we can and keep doing our part to protect them.
My point was that, if a pediatrician is going to impart some kind of instruction on gun safety, then logically the doctor should educate all parents and all kids---not just the ones who admit to having a firearm in the house.
I agree. Just because someone doesn't have a firearm at the point they see the pediatrician doesn't mean they won't get one in the future. I have zero problems with firearms when they're responsibly owned but when I read about things like kids finding and injuring themselves or others with guns I think the parents should be held fully accountable.
Doctors are forced to comply with these absurd questions. They are mandated by CMS and tied to payment. They don’t have much choice unless they want to work for free.
Doctors gave away their own power. They are now mostly mere employees of corporate healthcare stores. God forbid any of them show a whit of courage or concern for their fellow humans or where the future of our nation is headed with a vaccine schedule that has almost tripled since Pharma manufacturers were granted freedom from liability in 1986. And—what a coincidence—childhood chronic illness has risen from 12 percent to 54 percent in that time period. The medical profession is harming children. That is unconscionable.
A little off-topic here: radiation is my area of expertise, but I know next to nothing about nuclear power generation. Do you have an opinion about thorium molten-salt reactors? I have developed an interest in them, and they LOOK like the solution, but I'm sure I have missed something. I'm thinking that Hyman Rickover was the problem, but he was a nuclear engineer, which I am definitely not.
Greetings Jim, nice, well written piece, IMHO. Including the Brown Shirts metaphor.
So, the estimable Admiral Rickover was an Electrical Engineer (Columbia) but his acerbic personality 'made it happen' and he was also a skilled politician, not something everyone knows.
I met him when I was interviewing for the Nuclear Power program in 1970. Demanding but fair, just like my Dad, so we were on the same page.
He also had zero respect for the commercial Nuclear folks which threw the baby out with the bathwater, again IMHO. RIP Adm. Rickover.
That being said, there is obviously a place for advanced, closed fuel cycle reactor development, including the molten-salt reactor genre. For example, some history you can verify via several sources, the Soviet A;lfa class reactors used a lead-bismuth coolant (think high temperature, molten salt coolant) to power their boats over 50 knots. Small crew, all Officers, really tricky to make it work but they did. Here's a link to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine
The whole profession is waiting to make the next quantum step in perfecting ultra-safe, environmentally neutral, reliable electrical power plants that are cost competitive.
Our problem is the N word. Say Nuclear and everyone's been gaslit to think Fukushima, Chernobyl and (wrongly) Three Mile Island Unit 2. It's hurting us all now and it may take a new generation to get the public trust back.
Thanks much. I'm an EE myself (can't spell geek without EE) and am spending my dotage watching technical stuff on YouTube, including a long one on Adm. Rickover. (What do engineers use for birth control? Their personalities.)
I have become fascinated by the high temperature molten salt reactors - especially the thorium cycle, which seems to have solved all the problems you get when you depend on superheated water at 2100 psi to keep the core from melting down. Ever see the aftermath of a train/steamboat boiler explosion when ALL the water turns to superheated steam? You get the picture.
We probably should take the geek stuff private. I'm getting a stiffie just discussing it, but I'm sure everybody else is tapping their fingers on the desk. Consideration and all that ....
I've spoken to several physicians who feel the same way you do - alone in seeing the squelching of "the sacred tenet of free enquiry." But I wonder... have any of your colleagues begun to see things differently and willing to talk more openly or is everything still the same (lockstep brownshirts)?
There are a (very) few of us who have actually treated patients with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and every one relates a good experience with them. Those doctors, however, are very rare. The conversation with the rest has moved slightly sideways, from "That's crazy!" to "A doctor should be able to use his judgment and experience BUT those medicines are probably not effective." That's about as far as they will go.
Bravo. Let's hope she isn't drummed out as a "heretic." And while she's there, please have her fight the good fight on gender. Nothing to me is more terrifying than the gov't medical complex pushing "transition" on children. I'm not all that religious, but G-d will never forgive us for our sins.
The medical profession abandoned its autonomy to big insurance and big pharma before covid. A very nice lady doctor lamented a month or so ago not being able to interact with patients about the impact of diet on health. I asked why she could not. She responded it was not possible in 15 minutes. And BTW if we turn this around it will be because a lawyer clearly articulates a cause of action that persuades a court. Everybody hates lawyers until they need one.
Some time I'll regale you with the tale of the AMA and how it sold out physicians in the 'eighties. It's disgusting, they were disgusting, and they are still disgusting.
I was "encouraged" to join the AMA when I was an employed physician. Never liked them, still don't. I withdrew my membership when they produced the AMA Guides to Permanent Impairment, 6th Ed., because it was such blatant corruption at the behest of the worker's compensation industry.
In the early 1980s, the AMA was presented by the gub'ment with an ultimatum: help us do the DRG goat rodeo (Diagnosis Related Groups) or we will do it without you. It resulted in a huge bureaucracy whose ostensible purpose was the reduction in medical cost. That it did not. The cost went up, largely due to the expense of running a new gub'ment agency.
Because our billing was so screwed up and we were barely making payroll, I drove to my state capital to meet with the reimbursement czar for our region. She was a tough old bird, and she looked at me with pity in her eyes. "Ok Doctor, let's get something straight. The war is over, and you lost. And you lost because your AMA sold you out. Now let's see if we can get you enough money to pay your staff and at least a little for you."
She later did great things in the medical field. I never forgot our conversation.
Oh, and by the way: the AMA is still corrupt and represents less than one in five doctors, I'm told. None of whom would be - except for a credulous and naïve six-month period after med school - me.
And also by the way - on the corruption front. I see that Dr. Peter McCullouch, a world-famous cardiologist, has been stripped of his certifications by his specialty boards for wrongspeak, to wit:
It keeps getting worse. Oh, well, soon people will just sit at a computer kiosk for their medical care, and we won't have to worry about naughty docs failing to bleat the gub'mint's line of garbage.
I started reading the All Creatures books in high school, 40+ years ago! Still love and re-read them! Loved the show, too. The recent remake of the show is pretty good, but I prefer the original.
My father in law was a small town independent family practitioner. He would be so upset by what has become of his beloved profession.
I heard an ad on the radio by a law firm that if you have a child with autism, and took acetaminophen (Tylenol) while pregnant, you may be entitled to damages, etc. there are ads like this all day for all kinds of medical maladies and questionable causation. Now put this at the doctor level, you’re the OB/GYN, your pregnant patient has headaches, do you suggest Tylenol? If you do and unfortunately this patient’s child is diagnosed with autism, she hears this ad and dials the number, and the doc is sued. Win, lose it doesn’t matter. The doc’s malpractice insurance goes through the roof, if a local community the reputation and trust goes out the window, personal wealth and income takes a hit (talking about large student loans to pay) — next patient with a headache, does the doc recommend Tylenol? It is a “damn shame”, docs today have to have their heads on a swivel (legal issues abound). I don’t recall a single episode of Marcus Welby where he got sued or threatened with a lawsuit. Today’s medical TV shows are driven as much as by legal exposure and costs, as patient care. Another incredibly complex issue to noodle on…
Yet another example of doctor's bring controlled by insurance. And demonization of lawyer's. In my state a patient can die of medical malpractice and damages are capped at $250,000.
Note demonizing lawyers (I am one), legal liability is just a fact of practicing modern medicine. Not all states have caps on malpractice (and there are a smattering of states where such caps were held to be unconstitutional under state law). There are a few states that require a doc to have malpractice insurance, but the vast majority do not. So a doc can often choose whether to have malpractice insurance or not. Even with a $250,000 award (and some states allow for more for noneconomic pain and suffering), plus legal fees, one lawsuit can be a crusher.
Much of that is true. Doctors in some states are not required to have malpractice insurance but most hospitals, partnerships, etc. require it. Laws vary by state but most of them have passed some sort of tort reform legislation. It is justified on the position that you are inferring (I think) that plaintiff's lawyers bring nonmeritorious claims. Some do although most jurisdictions have ways to summarily dispose of claims that indisputably lack merit. But the role of malpractice insurance should not be overlooked either. Doctors perform many services justified by nothing more than if-I-don't-do-this-I-might-get-sued. Of course that they get paid for each such service probably makes that pill a little easier to swallow. Also insurance defense lawyers are called upon to serve two masters - the doctor facing a claim and the insurance company that pays their hourly fee. The insurance company ultimately calls the shots. A doctor who does not cooperate is so deemed and representation can be withdrawn. In the meantime most aintiif's lawyers are working on a contingency and do not get paid unless their client is successful.
Fair analysis, thank you. I would add that the health insurance company that likely pays the medical bill would balk at the “if I don’t do this I might get sued” approach to medicine. Docs have to balance that out too. Further, some plaintiff lawyers (not all) who work on contingency are motivated by the big payday if taking on a case on contingency (especially class action lawyers who, if they “win” it is rarely at trial, mostly settlements, and in my opinion class members are rarely economically made whole). Facing a jury for any corporation on any issue is a scary proposition, thus settlements are more common. In our litigious society, never a shortage of reasons to sue somebody about something or anything and unfortunately not a shortage of lawyers to take their cases.
Boy, reaching back here.... there was actually one M.W. episode where he got sued. Something happened in the middle of the trial where he just got up and left to take care of a patient - something like that. Made the docs look really good and the plaintiff's lawyer look really bad. Ah, the good old days.
A mentor told me that he'd actually been called by a local lawyer to let him know that a patient was shopping for a lawyer to sue him. "I don't sue doctors, but I thought you ought to know." Ah, the REALLY good old days.
By the way, I never paid malpractice insurance. When my costs went up, my fees went up. The patients ended up paying it all. I did notice, however, that there were several billionaire lawyers - all of course from personal liability suits; never heard of a billionaire doctor. My cousin flew a corporate jet for one of the successful lawyers; incidentally, his wife was on the state's supreme court and refused to recuse herself from multiple cases in which her husband was involved. My cousin, a retired air force colonel, told me that it was like living in a different world.
You stay home; I'll go to the doctor and follow vaccination and immunization schedules recommended by doctors and scientists. Let's see who lives longer.
Except the doctors and 'scientists' are being ordered around by medical boards and governments that are giving money, not practicing medical professionals.
First, LOL at "scientists" in quotes. Second, I guess you think that science was a bigger boon to society when the only people who could practice it were those who were independently wealthy and had the free time to investigate whatever the hell they wanted. Yeah, I'm sure that was way better for everyone.
Right...engineers and scientists are completely different things. I think you might be a bad engineer if you don't know that. Also, just looking at the fatality rate independent from the how transmissible the virus is or how many resources are required to keep someone alive is poor science. So you might be an even worse scientist than you are an engineer.
Seems to me, that you have joined the "burry-the-calf-at-the-barndoor-crowd". Sorry to read that.
Your talk about "marching brownshirts" in this context is, no matter on which side You stand on the issue, blown way out of proportion and feeds into the extremist narrative, that getting vaccinated is somewhat equal to getting shipped into a Nazi death camp like Anne Frank was.
I find this kind of rhetoric not only tasteless, but deeply insulting to any victim of Nazi terror or other totalitarian mass murder. I consider people who use this kind of nazi-comparisms routinely to muddy the water of debate unfit to join any civilized discussion about any political and/or scientific issue. That's why I refuse to reply to You on the issue in question.
This is not rhetoric. Jumping right to the "final solution" of Nazi Germany as the comparison ignores the subtle, less direct steps that the Nazis used to "other" non-Aryan Germans prior to the implementation of full blown concentration camps. And those steps are exactly what our government, medical and communities, media outlets, and, ultimately, our general society followed during 2021 through early 2022. As an unvaccinated person, I was denied the right to move freely in my own country, ACTUALLY denied healthcare, and there were calls for the withholding of medical treatment (i.e. death) for me and my unvaccinated family members until mid 2022. That is very much analogous to the beginnings of Nazi terror, and all we needed were "quarantine camps" to make the whole scene repetitive of history.
I do not compare everything I don’t like to Nazism. That is a mischaracterization of my position. You know, the Nazis were known for mischaracterizing arguments………
“…cannot do the math.” You just read an article by a tenured professor of evidence-based medicine who says the balance of the risk-benefit data suggests that the one-size-fits-all approach of the CDC is wrong; we could stratify the COVID vaccine recommendations by age and health status. Are you sure you’re not the one ignoring the best evidence?
Was wondering when you'd show up. You missed the point of the article. It's about the CDC including the COVID vaccines in the childhood immunization schedule and the potential that has for further eroding the credibility of our public health institutions. You're too focused on the vaccine itself and the anti vaxer Boogeyman you can't appreciate that this decision by the CDC could result in exactly what you are afraid of, people not trusting them when it matters. This pieces does not discuss vaccine efficacy or the dangers of the vaccine. Lastly, you seem convinced that anyone who shows any level of skepticism regarding the COVID vaccine is an "anti vaxer" worthy of scorn. I counter that healthy skepticism is rarely a bad thing, and our public health institutions did not do a great job of allaying fears given the great effort they went to to silence people who questioned it. The Barrington declaration comes to mind...of course that's probably just more misinformation in your mind.
If Rochelle Walensky represents your "science " savior I think I'll just take my chances with God. And when Fauci owns up to how much money big pharma has fed him over the course of his bureaucratic career (and gives it all to needy communities) maybe I'll consider his altruistic side. You don't see a happy ending because your blinders are way too comfortable.
Rouge? I don't care about the makeup choices of others
Celia is spot-on with her assessment of you as a troll. But I guess you're having fun pretending to be smart?
Interesting you would use odds calculated based upon data we KNOW is inaccurate and grossly underreported.
Both the FDA and CDC keep accurate adverse events tallies, and neither is releasing them to the public for scrutiny.
What you don't understand is that we are flying blind, and that the enormous uptick in sudden deaths by healthy young people needs to be investigated, but that is not happening.
I ran a tally on sudden deaths among professional athletes, and it is up precipitously. At least 400%, but I think it was much larger than that. The number of athletes who have died on the field in the last year nearly matches the total in the last thirty years.
And you can easily find montages of people collapsing on camera. One questioner passed out during a British political debate. I've been on the planet a while, and have never seen anything remotely like this.
I understand your sentiment, but how can I trust anything related to the Emergency Use Authorization(EUA) 'vaccines' - who have immunity - when their own designers didn't even really test them and we now know they don't prevent transmission or immunization?
Speaking of data... Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, Feb 2020, 3,700 people on board in complete isolation, 800 tested positive, 15 died = 0.4% fatality rate. The same as the flu.
None of this was ever needed in the first place. That is where the lack of credibility started and ended with medical professionals choosing their job over practicing science.
Check out Dr. Steve Kirch's substack about unexplained deaths after vaccination and other prominent doctor's shouting out to STOP using these 'treatements'.
Yes, I think they would definitely love to make our military less effective. You do GET, right, that Globalists are not nationalists, and certainly not patriotic Americans?
And in a sane world why would we rely on VAERS for anything? Why would we not use the qualitatively much better data from the CDC and FDA?
Well, they won't release it, yes, but is that not THE problem?
"Comparing our estimate with the CDC-reported VFR (0.002%) suggests VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20, consistent with known VAERS under-ascertainment bias. Comparing our age-stratified VFRs with published age-stratified coronavirus infection fatality rates (IFR) suggests the risks of COVID vaccines and boosters outweigh the benefits in children, young adults and older adults with low occupational risk or previous coronavirus exposure."
You didn't actually read the article, did you? Comparing deaths from the vaccines to the likelihood of death from COVID itself makes them medically useless for nearly all populations for all purposes, and certainly for children, which is what the original article is about.
I'll use small words here: if a medicine is more dangerous than a disease, then that medicine should not be used. Any part of that unclear? And that is what Columbia is claiming, based on GUESSES made necessary by the refusal of the CDC to release the actual data.
And how does that work? They approve these jabs for kids without giving doctors or parents any evidential basis on which to evaluate the risk/benefit ratio.
And it is widely known that only about 1/10th of the actual cases are reported on VAERS because it is a pain in the ass to use. Life insurer's are reporting a 40% increase in deaths and professional soccer players - the most fit in society - are dropping dead weekly. "Sudden Adult Death Syndrome" anyone? I mean, what the hell is that other than another narrative for us to ponder.
I know three healthy young ladies who abruptly miscarried after the jab(funny how BigPharm did NOT test pregnant women) and two healthy 40 year old men who died two weeks after jab three.
Sorry, we don't know anything other that these 'vaccines' were not tested at all.
I refused my US Army mandated anthrax 'vaccine' precisely because I distrusted the unproven manufacturing processes.
You fail to realize that a new strain of virus, "a real killer," will not be mitigated by vaccines for other viruses. Effective vaccines are strain specific, which is why annual flu vaccines vary in efficacy - they have to predict which strain will be prevalent, and are not always correct.
VAERS data is incredibly flawed and incomplete. Data from Europe is much more complete and shows risk-benefit analysis for vaccinating children with current COVID vaccines does not justify this practice.
The U.S. is very much an outlier in recommending COVID vaccination for children.
"You go play doctor. I’ll listen to mine." That is the ultimate goal that our medical system didn't achieve the last two years by command of medical boards who had BigPharm and government money in mind versus independent health care.
This is another example of how corrupt our institutions have become. Vaccines have saved countless lives, but to mandate a vaccine for a demographic that has consistently shown to be one of the least vulnerable to the disease in question is a purely political, rather than a medical, decision.
The real tragedy, I think, is that because of these people’s decisions, millions of people now have a deep-seated mistrust of any decision that public health officials make.
Imagine if a more virulent and deadly disease were to spread now. Mere anarchy.
Have they though? I know that CFR data "proves" they have but let's not dismiss how that data is based on far milder variants. Alpha and Delta were evidentially deadly, but the vaccines were only distributed when Lambda and Omicron were the dominant strains. I really do wonder what today's CFR would be if no vaccine existed.
I didn’t mean just the Covid-19 vaccine. I meant vaccines overall since Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine.
While I don’t subscribe to the MSM narrative, I would say that the data shows that Covid vax has saved millions of lives, too. However, the very fact that we’re debating this proves my point: public health officials have become political agents.
That isn’t true. Delta didn’t arrive until most people that were going to get vaccinated already had been. The vaccines same a lot of lives in the delta surge.
It's hard to know what's true or not, as I implied. But Delta was listed as the dominant variant 6/2021, and although 300m shots had been administered by then just one month later, following a death spike, CDC pushed for boosters. So were people actually vaccinated? Per CDC, no. Did CFR actually decrease until L/O became dominant variants? no.
Death rate from Delta was ~16x lower if you had your primary series of shots. But that's just a raw rate, but since older, more at risk individuals were disproportionately more likely to be vaccinated the risk reduction was much higher. That report shows >65 year olds had a ~11x reduction in risk of death with the primary series but ~61x reduction with the booster during the Delta surge...
You could extrapolate if you want. IFR was ~8% in the >65 unvaccinated group, but ~3% in the primary series and ~2.7% with the booster. But that also gets compounded by the drop in the infection rate, which was 5x lower with the primary series and 22x lower with the booster. So total risk of death was reduced some 93%, at least in that time window.
The primary series saved A LOT of lives, and boosters do have their place in the elderly who apparently struggle to generate lasting protection. (And this is not inconsistent with prior knowledge of immune system aging. Like our brains, our immune system is better at learning new things when we're young.)
No, it's not easy to know, and for every academic paper claiming one thing there are others that claim the other. Hence the mess.
The irrefutable fact is that covid ceased to be something to be deathly afraid of (spring 2022) once the L/O variants became dominant (Jan 2022) . One, like you, could argue that was because of vaccines, but like I said in my original reply: who knows, could just be that L/O aren't all that dangerous.
"for every academic paper claiming one thing there are others that claim the other."
That's not true for the primary series of shots. I don't really care to site 15 papers showing you are wrong, but you are free to do your own research. Papers on the boosters, on the other hand, are bit like what you say, particularly if they don't do a good job stratifying by age. Ie you'll see boosters are great for 18+, but then in an other study, it will show near zero effect in 18-49, but then strong effect in 50+, etc.
I'm with you on Omicron being more mild, but that has been hard to nail down because so many people are vaccinated or had prior infection, many times undocumented, and it's been hard to detangle that prior immunity from changes to the virus itself.
I started saying during Covid that it felt like "just a test". A test to weaken everyone's trust of the govt. just in time for something REALLY bad and deadly to come along in a few years and wipe out everyone. Sheesh...
Distrust in institutions is a recurring theme in recent CS posts - cf Liz Truss, transgenderism, universities and Today’s. I fear all this will end somewhere really not good. No easy solution obvious.
Pre-marketing drug testing involves a couple years of testing in animals. Animals are dosed, and after a time interval, sacrificed, their tissues dissected and examined under a microscope for any pathology. It’s also done in pregnant animals and their offspring are examined for two generations. From what I have been able to find, Pfizer did not do these studies before testing in humans and proceeding to market. We are the guinea pigs. And one of the adverse effects is a disruption in menstrual cycles among women. Why? What is going on with hormones, ovaries? Shouldn’t Pfizer be studying this? Gee, weren’t we told how safe the mRNA in a lipid nanoparticle is? Except now we read they tweaked one part of the mRNA molecule so it couldn’t be degraded easily. And now they want to inject this into my granddaughter?
Food additives like Splenda have more animal safety data than this vaccine.
You make an excellent point! I have been in pharma R&D for my entire career - 37 yrs, and for the last 25, in Regulatory Affairs. I used to defend FDA and their high standards. Covid has changed that (as well as FDA's approval of Aduhelm, the "Alzheimer's drug" (in quotes because its a poor excuse of drug and isn't even marketed at this point). So then the question is, how can CDC list this as a recommended vaccine WHEN IT HAS NOT GONE THROUGH THE NORMAL, PAIN-STAKING, AND DEEP preclinical and clinical testing, as well as the years of CMC development? I've lost all faith, so I guess it's good I am less than a year from retiring. Makes me sad and disgusted.
The FDA and drug companies seem to have gotten way too cozy. When I was dealing with the FDA, it almost felt adversarial, and the easiest thing they could do was say, No. Now it looks like they are pressured to say, Yes with way too little data and time to digest it all. The appearance of adverse effects could halt a product, but with these vaccines, adverse effects don’t even cause a pause. They just broaden to include babies.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb went directly from heading the FDA to the board of Pfizer. He then tried to silence reporter Alex Berenson in the summer of 2021 when Berenson discovered that the Covid vaccine didn’t actually prevent transmission. He urged Twitter to ban Berenson from the platform, and generally tried to have him silenced.
Agree! It's sad that his intelligence and knowledge has been sucked into the $$$$ vortex of board seats and DC grab-assing. The man is smart, but it's being used in the wrong way. He's a political animal out to make millions. As I've told my kids, whenever there is bad behavior or someone's moral compass is gone, guaranteed it's sex, or money....or both!
Impose personal liability. Every person who suffers a negative outcome should be able to sue Gottlieb personally. Ruin him. Ruin every government official and corporate flack who was behind this.
But, but, but lawyers!!!! They are ranked down there with used car salesmen! Seriously the character assassination of lawyers through tort reform and othe Democrat policies may be where liability started to unravel.
Absent specific knowledge of the Berenson situation I’ll stipulate to your assertions. However Gottlieb had a more nuanced take which he lays out in detail in his book”Uncontrolled Spread”. Worth a read even where there is much to disagree with.
100% agree. Every single (approved) drug has a benefit, and risks. All of the risks for these vaxes seem to have evaporated into thin air. I've worked for large, med and small companies and I have seen a LOT. And although I do think there are good scientists at FDA, frequently they are asleep at the wheel and only wake up when something is politically hot, or there's a serious side effect that's erupted. If you want your head to spin, do some research on FDA's approval of Aduhelm. The approval was so unjustified, there was a neurology group in the DC area that placed an orange sign on their door that said "if you're here to sell us Aduhelm, do not come in". How much more do you need to know?
I’ve been on a few medications that worked very well for me but were pulled because some subset of patients had some side effect that wasn’t detected during approval testing. Celebrex was one.
Celebrex returned to the market after a larger subset who turned to OTC NSAIDs had higher rates of gastric bleeding.
These are complex issues requiring years to resolve.
The COVID shot fetish is going to have extensive impacts we’ve not yet even imagined.
The worst part is that the whole thing is a man made catastrophe.
My father-in-law nearly bled to death on Celebrex. I mean within minutes of graveyard dead. He was a German Lutheran living in Wisconsin - a very strong believer in authority, and under no circumstances would he buck or even question his quack physician - who was the worst I have ever seen, and I've seen a lot - who tried to put him back on it after he recovered from the radical stomach surgery that saved his life.
Unfortunately, those who love big government think that the bureaucracy problem is solvable, not an inherent aspect of bureaucracy. And they TRUST bureaucracies made up of people who share their political views.
Abramson’s recent book “sickening” and earlier ones recount in great detail the infiltration of Pharma money into every element and phase of the medical system, including FDA, the medical journals etc since the late 1980s. What happened with Covid seems to be classic playbook.
Funny you should mention Splenda. I am highly allergic to sucralose (Splenda) and the FDA was well aware of the gastric distress it causes. But did they put a warning label on the product? No they did not.
Wonder why? And now that poisonous garbage is in every food product imaginable. Try to buy a protein supplement that doesn't have it. Including protein bars etc.
Ugh, all artificial sweeteners are bad! I’m trying unsuccessfully to convince my fiancé to give up Coke Zero. The amount of garbage US citizens consume and call “food” is insane.
Several of these new sweeteners make me throw up, and unfortunately they are often hidden/not labeled in an informative way. They are included in regular (not diet) soft drinks in Europe to address the WHO’s anti-sugar concerns. 
I got on the anti-sugar bandwagon only to learn it is bankrolled by the artificial sweetener industry. Yes I know sugar is an inflammatory so I moderate my intake. The same thing happened with no-fat years ago and lead to mass consumption of trans fats. Think for yourselves. It is the only way to navigate the various snake pits.
My husband went through a nutrition phase two decades ago. First it was no eggs ever. That lasted 6 or 7 years. Then it was two per week. Now it’s two every morning.
Me? I’m not going to spend my life hoping some easy answer to the mystery of life expectancy is lying in a statistician’s data set. I eat what I want in moderation. The St Augustine Diet I call it
Me too. Otherwise it is like a dog chasing its tail. Additionally I think that individuals are different and one size fits all. That is probably true of this vaccine as well - it may be okay for some and very bad for others
Fortunately for me (considering that I have Type 1 diabetes), I have not have bad reactions to any artificial sweeteners. But I know people who do. Labeling needs to be required.
I read that the animal studies were replaced with computer simulations. Any computer simulation is only as good as the data entered. Whereas animal studies produce readily observable results.
Are you insane? There were more man-hours committed to development and testing of these vaccines than virtually every vaccine in history. You're using the wrong measure. Also, the vaccine literally saved lives. You know who's not around to complain about the vaccine? People who died of COVID before they could get vaccinated.
You cannot do a 2 generation repro study and a 2 yr carcingenicity study with more man hours.
Do we know whether the vaccine causes reproductive toxicity? No we don’t. Yet pregnant women were given the vaccine. And women’s menstrual cycles have been disrupted, suggesting some unexpected effect on hormones or ovaries.
Do we know whether the mRNA or its spike protein is carcinogenic? No, we don’t. It takes 2 yrs to assess that.
I also think that rushing to get the vaccine out in 2020/21 was justified given the actual crisis at hand. Now, we have a different situation. Not only do we understand more about the risks of the vaccine, we also have the data to understand the risks of getting covid across age groups and comorbidities. That data should guide decision making, not blanket mandates.
I don't know NCMaureen but I'll take a wild guess that she, indeed, is not insane.
It would be great if you can share your reference that shows that 'more man hours committed to development and testing of the covid vaccines than virtually every vaccine in history'.
If you ‘self certify’ that you are a citizen when you get your driver’s license, in Washington, you get to vote.
(reason Smiley can’t win)
If you say the word ‘asylum’ at the border, like fidelio in Eyes Wide Shut, you get to live in America.
$200 billion in unemployment funds were stolen because the form online allowed you to simply declare you are eligible.
(So that’s 2 million people stealing $100,000 each, or some other combination of large numbers.)
If you claim you object sincerely on religious grounds to taking the experimental vaccine that TV host Donald Trump hired a veterinarian to produce, you are told by the government to go screw yourself.
This is not about health and safety for children or anyone else. It's strictly the drug companies receiving a lifetime funding line from the government. Just think of the billions over the years the drug companies will get, and they predominately support one party. Guess who? Anyone remember during that worldwide lock down; the Dems were in Puerto Rico on the beaches for a conference paid for by Pharma.
You already have serious concerns about the long-term studies that have not been done. So, what the Hell, jab the kids, what could go wrong? The minority communities already distrust the government on diseases and vaccines, with reason by the way. Add in the distrust of a very large segment of the population that sees the Liberals wanting to keep that club to beat people into following their absolutely shit for brains policies and programs and we have the population looking at the CDC as a political action committee. Who actually says, The CDC says it's good, let's go do it? No one ever!
I for one would rather follow the Scandinavian Countries policies versus the political riddled CDC that kisses ass to stay important. Just another example of the government reacting to Liberal impulses versus that pesky old SCIENCE.
Hopefully if the Dems lose the majority, this can be reversed. But I put no faith in any politician.
What you say is true. However, remember it was under Trump that the “Warp Speed” jab was developed. It was the Republican N.H. Governor who vetoed the Ivermectin sale. Outside of Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, both the Republicans and the Dems both do the bidding of their big Pharma donation bosses. Don’t be fooled - either party will throw you under the bus for a few million dollar donation to their campaign.
Also he took every recommendation his medical advisors gave him, which is appropriate for a president, and during that time was viciously criticized both when he followed their advice and when he opposed it.
It never mattered one bit what Trump did, they were always going to blame the CDC's failure on Trump. Heck, I have Facebook posts from March 2020 saying that's what they would do, and they did.
But again the "both sides" argument is nonsense. One side was resisting these abuses and the other side was gleefully and sanctimoniously attacking anyone who resisted the abuses. No comparison.
Definitely the pandemic killed his chances for reelection. I believe otherwise he would have handily beaten an idiot like Biden. Did he really handle the pandemic that poorly? I guess history will judge (if we have any decent, trained historians in the future).
I specifically meant Fauci and Birken. But they were perceived as the experts and that is his MO - rely on people who know. I do think he tried to course correct but it was too late.
yes if Trump had done the right thing and fired him, the Dems would have screamed for his impeachment... again... and once again wasted the country's time and resources on another pointless trial... and failed once again... whilst being chear-led by the corrupt media and big tech.
Every decent President (as well as CEO's and other leaders) course corrects; it's what makes them good leaders. But every little thing Trump tried was attacked, and any successes were distorted and decried as failures. The Democrats and tech allies deployed reality distortion filters on Google searches and every single mainstream news organization, creating a sort of mass formation psychosis (as described recently by an eminent psychologist) among people.
Just the other day, I was at an event in New York City and a white Boomer liberal started blubbering about how happy she was that the NY AG was going after Trump for his real estate tax evasion (or whatever the frameup is). A friend tapped her on the shoulder and murmured something, pointing in my direction (I'm a known conservative in these circles) and she shut up. Which was fine, but it doesn't matter; I am not so childish as to go and start or continue a ridiculous political fight.
Let the liberals stamp and wail like the babies they are. Their comeuppance is coming.
Big Pharma “capture” of the CDC, NIAID, NIH, etc… will not change with a Republican majority in Congress. Both parties are responsible for this mess. The money is too big to say no.
You’re spot on. As a parent of 2 young kids, I am now questioning every childhood vaccine presented to us at the pediatrician’s office. I am now fearful of nearly every additive in the “essential” vaccines, as I have zero confidence in the Covid vaccine. The CDC seems to be incredibly corrupt.
You're smart to be skeptical. People need to wake up to the likelihood that the spectacular corruption circus we've witnessed with the Covid vax is not in its first run; this is the Pharma playbook in action, just newly laid bare for the public to see.
There is so much I respect about Vinay Prasad's courage in taking on the Pharma-funded regulatory/medical establishment cabal over this vaccine, but his final paragraph shows he has not looked into the facts surrounding the supposed "fraud" of the Wakefield et al study, namely that its linking of the MMR to autism appeared as a single comment in the conclusion of their brief (five page) paper. The 13 authors, who were investigating the health issues of kids with autism and had noted what appeared to be a new bowel disorder in such children, included a statement (after much internal debate) that most parents reported that the symptoms first appeared after the MMR, and the authors recommended further investigation of this claim. That was it. It was NOT a "deeply flawed" study about autism and MMR, which is what most people believe thanks to the media and medical complex's crucifixion of Wakefield, at Pharma's behest.
There are many many more details of the story, but the main point is: we now know how effectively the cabal can spread lies and propaganda to take down, sideline, or annihilate the career of anyone who threatens their power and profits. Wakefield and his co-authors didn't have the benefit of social media channels through which to defend themselves and the facts, but now that such channels exist we are seeing the cabal's recent victims being revealed, as facts leak through to expose the lies.
I wish Prasad would extend his skepticism and curiosity to question whether this level of corruption and incompetence is really a new phenomenon that's only emerged with Covid. Because that really isn't a strong probability when you consider that every major Pharma company has paid out multiple millions in fraud damages for dangerous products they got on the market through misrepresentations of safety (and the assistance of their cronies in the regulatory process). In fact, it ONLY makes sense if we trust that these companies have placed all their ethical people in their indemnified vaccine divisions, where lawsuits cannot compel discovery of fraud claims.
Yes. That last paragraph pretty much ruined his essay. It was completely unnecessary to his other, valid points, imo. He showed his pro-vax-at-all-costs-and-don’t-look-too-close self. He’s made an exception with covid shots, but that’s it. Oh well, gotta start somewhere, and I’ve noticed that there are quite a few folks on the comments that are likely learning some new things! That’s a good thing!
You're right - they are lucky. They might get Chickenpox, but at least they won't be filled with aluminum, mercury and monkey tissue. Most parents don't do any research prior to blindly injecting their children with toxins. Do your own research before you judge :) Have a nice day!
Why do I suspect that "your own research" is reading your Facebook feed as opposed to controlled studies in your basement? Why do people think that Googling and reading results that agree with their preconceived ideas counts as "research"?
Maybe we should leave the "research" to actual researchers. But I'm sure you know WAY better. Hopefully your kids will grow up to be more critical thinkers than their mom.
I have read multiple books, scientific studies, and listened to 100+ hours of podcasts by well-known and respected doctors and scientists. Additionally, I have used the NIH and CDC websites as resources. I also have a wonderful new MD who believes in certain vaccines and knows others are not worth the risk. Bet you're someone who just complies and doesn't bother to ask any questions because the CDC and your doc "know what's best for you". Ah, to live in such blissful ignorance. Must be nice!
Did you know there is currently a class action lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol? There is now evidence (30+ years later) that it can cause Autism in utero. Betcha haven't heard about that one yet! Its a big world out there... much for us ALL to learn! Science is never settled.
"don't trust the CDC"..."i used the CDC websites as resources". Make up your mind. "Scientific studies"? Please - if that were true, you wouldn't be getting in arguments on the internet - you'd have better things to do with your time, Doctor.
Also, there's ALWAYS a class-action lawsuit against everyone; that's how lawyers make money - by tricking stupid people into thinking they'll get free money if they make a a claim against a big company. Also, LOL at "Tylenol causes autism". According to nutjobs like you, EVERYTHING causes autism.
Life has risks. If you think that a small number of negative outcomes invalidates overwhelming benefits of scientific progress then you're not a very critical thinker. Why do all you brilliant people who are so quick to look for examples of negative outcomes in medical science not cease driving your cars the moment you see a story about a fatal crash on the highway? Seems that your "think, don't believe" approach only applies to things that don't agree with your ideology. Unfortunately, I doubt that you are better than that.
So your proposal is for scientists to hold back on their vaccinations for, say, 20-30 years until they've done studies on the effects that would satisfy you? Or should it be longer? And in the meantime, if someone contract a disease that could have been mitigated by the vaccine, that's too bad for them. Because J Campbell isn't satisfied.
Scientists in the US have done too well - they've literally made the diseases they protect against no longer threatening. Funny how people were literally lining up for vaccines when they were introduced in the mid-1900s because they had REAL experiences with the diseases these vaccines protected against. Then just a few generations later, morons like you make baseless claims about risk then insist that there's danger in vaccines because no one cares to prove you wrong.
To this point re: liability, I have seen mentioned (whispered, rather, because 2022...) that the CV vax-makers will only benefit from the liability shield IF it's added to the childhood schedule. I (we all) should look into this.
Yep. Everyone is scratching their heads, wondering why they've pushed this shot so hard for kids, who are at significantly higher risk for adverse events from it than they are for any complications from Covid. The answer is: they need to get it on the kids schedule in order to maintain liability for the manufacturers after FDA approval (which they've essentially succeeded in doing, since the ACIP just voted 15-0 last week to recommend the shot be added to the CDC's adult AND KIDS vaccine schedules). This is also why Cominarity was not available/used in the U.S. after its approval; everyone in America was still given the EUA version because that's the product that still had liability protection for Pfizer. The entire trajectory from the outset of these shots has been to get them on the CDC childhood schedule and thereby protect the profits for the manufacturers.
This will definitely metastasize perfectly rational skepticism of COVID vaccines for kids into irrational skepticism of useful vaccines. The 'experts' and 'leaders' making this decision have to know this.
So are they playing a game of political chicken with half the country's kids? Or are they little more than children themselves, chronically bowing to peer pressure?
Are you so sure it is irrational to question vaccines, or at least the vaccine schedule? I know people who are true anti-vaxxers and I thought they were nuts, but now I'm not so sure. All my kids were vaxxed as well without questions but I will absolutely never take a flu shot again.
In addition to the skyrocketing autism rates. When I was a kid (I’m 42), I knew zero autistic kids. Now they’re saying if the rates continue apace, 1 in 10 boys will be on the spectrum by the next decade. Something is causing that. Interesting correlation with how the vaxx schedule has also increased so rapidly for our babies and the pressure on pregnant women to be vaccinated. I’m not anti vaxx but common sense tells you something is VERY wrong. Maybe it’s roundup, maybe it’s all the rancid seed oils, maybe it’s all the fucking sugar everywhere, maybe it’s a combo of everything but there is nothing irrational with questioning.
Many vaccines have stood the test of time- IPV, DTP, MMR- and I am thankful my kids had them. Also the meningococcal vaccines for college kids are important.
For many (most) children, Hep B could be delayed. The others- rotavirus, varicella, Hib, PCV, Hpv, influenza and now Covid- it’s a lot.
I don’t take the flu shot. I had a really nasty bout of influenza in 1998. Since recovering from that bout I’ve not had influenza, not even the swine flu everyone freaked out about in what, 2005? My kids caught it but I was fine.
The wonders of the human immune system aren’t fully understood. The wages of greed, however, have been catalogued for ages.
Our daughter and her husband have been able to remain unvaxxed vs. the Crud. One reason was that they were planning on starting a family. We are SO happy now that they don't have to be concerned about possible dodgy-stuff happening in their reproductive systems and other organs after mRNA and spike proteins.
Grandson was born last month--YAY! They have found a pediatric practice that definitely recommends the traditional serious vax like polio, but gives parents a ton of info about each vax and lets the parents decide. They are interested in spacing the shots out a bit, which makes sense. Seems like the fact that they now live in Texas has something to do with them being able to find a pediatric practice that is more willing to consider alternatives.
I questioned the vaccine schedule when my children were small, because the risks of injecting multiple immune system challenges all at once into children under the age of 6 months did not seem rational or safe. My kids got their vaccinations, but on a delayed schedule.
I don't take flu shots, due to the many issues with those. I took the pneumonia vaccination recommended for older people last year, having been told that I would not need to take it again. Lo and behold, I am now being pressured to take the "updated" pneumonia vaccine. No thank you!
Step 1: Create Venn diagram with recommended childhood vaccinations in 1) USA 2) UK 3) Denmark 4) Sweden 5) Japan (countries with very diverse and different health systems)
Step 2: Anything the USA "recommends" that is not in at least TWO other lists can be safely ignored
This article demonstrates that the most valuable thing for any organization is it's reputation.
When the CDC consulted with the teacher's unions and ignored the teachers and the parents (yes, I included teachers) - they severely damaged their reputation.
It will be interesting to see if they can recover it. Adding the Covid vaccine to their guidelines was probably not a good move.
Thank you, for separating teachers from unions. I teach in a state that is an exception. My department was drug in and out of school, while the rest of students and staff remained home. I have students who just returned to "in-person" school, for the first time since March 2020. I had no say over what occurred. I was furious. The majority was afraid and all logic went out the window. Consequences didn't matter. Profound, willful denial. School systems are driven by fending off lawsuits and policies created by people who have no idea what's happening in the classrooms.
The absolute irony of this CDC recommendation is that the vaccine is not APPROVED for ages 6 mon-12 yrs...it's still under an EUA (Emergency Use Authorization)!!!!! Here's Pfizer's branded page for the vax: https://www.comirnaty.com/#safety-information
HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? I know...they're all in bed together. this sickens me.
Excellent article. However, I have a small quibble with one assertion. Just as some public school education is substandard, so is some homeschool education. Much homeschool education is excellent and I find it irresponsible to label it all as substandard.
The homeschoolers I know are very well educated. Both of mine went on to college (one has already graduated). Home schooling is definitely NOT substandard.
Based on the sat scores it is a falsehood entirely. The SAT scores for homeschool kids is higher than the average. They try to debunk it by saying it is self selection but everyone self selects to take the test.
I have no doubt that conscientious parents find ways to homeschool their kids that produce results superior to what the public school system offers. The concern is for the children whose parents are not so motivated. The reports I have read regarding online “learning” during the pandemic are revealing and alarming. A large portion of kids never tuned in.
I think the key to educational success is parental involvement, whether home schooling or public/private schooling. I’m betting that the kids who didn’t fall behind during the classroom lock outs had parents that got involved in their education.
The last year I homeschooled our youngest daughter before she went to public high school, we enrolled her in a new online school that was "open enrollment" in our state, which meant we didn't have to pay for it.
Despite the fact that I was closely involved in her schooling, the online school was a disaster. Her teachers were not meaningfully present. The curriculum (based on Common Core) was a complete mess, to the point that I had to get directly involved in finding and teaching material that was being taught out of order. Eventually she simply started resisting participation (in something she had been eager to try at the beginning of the year).
Homeschooling has to be geared to the needs of the student, not to the needs of the parent or the needs of the school system.
Personally, I think I would have done well in an online school as a child (not that such a thing was more than a sci-fi fantasy at that time). Our middle son would done well. I am sure that our oldest son would have done just as poorly with it as our youngest daughter did.
But I can tell you from personal experience that whether online school is successful or not depends a lot more on the child's learning style than on the parents' involvement.
It does seem likely! It hurts to consider how many business, services and institutions were closed during the pandemic, perhaps reducing the possibility that other parents were at work. Here in the Atlanta area, the school systems came up with really inventive ways to make sure kids could study online. My county bought untold numbers of laptops for kids to check out, and one county drove school businesses into neighborhoods to serve as hotspots where there was below par connectivity.
I would have to say that neglecting your children’s future potential may be a sign of despair.
Online school is a mess. For my daughter's last year of homeschool, we signed up for an online school that had just become available in our state as an "open enrollment" option (meaning that it didn't cost us anything).
The teachers were mostly AWOL, but parents were not expected to be part of the process either. The students were expected to work through online units with little or no direct instruction from teachers. Math and science were poorly designed "Common Core," with the result that kids were expected to be familiar with material they had not yet been taught (I had to look through the textbook, find the relevant material, and teach it to my daughter myself so that she could do her online work). Eventually, my daughter resisted doing her schoolwork at all.
I would never recommend online school for any but the most self-motivated kids. I would have done well in such a system, I think. And our middle son probably would as well. But it was a nightmare for our youngest daughter and it probably would have been a nightmare for our oldest son.
I will be eternally grateful for the Home School Assistance Program that our school district in Cedar Rapids was operating when we lived there. It gave me the courage and resources to homeschool our sons when they desperately needed an alternative to what their schools were offering. It provided a supervising teacher for free (ours was an art teacher by education, so she brought art projects each month when she visited). It also provided textbooks to choose from. And the most wonderful part of it all was that it provided group activities that our kids could attend, including band, choir, science fair, spelling bee, geography bee, field trips, and once-a-week PE and art classes with other kids in the program. The benefit for the district was that they got funding--not as much as if the kids were in classrooms, but more than if the students were being homeschooled with no connection to the district.
The district we lived when our youngest daughter was homeschooled had no such program. The best we could do was dual enrollment, so she could go to art and PE. And the online school had nothing good about it at all.
I am a former democrat and a ONE ISSUE voter now (in GA). I am hoping to see all this criminals where they belong. Rand Paul has been sniffing Fauci’s ass long enough to give me hope that he will go after him and all the medical cartels who orchestrated this madness and attacked our constitutional rights with their (STILL GOING ON) emergency bullshit. Most damage was done to our poor and underprivileged children by removing them from their communities and now they want to force their fucking poison into their bodies. I lost trust in the medical establishment many years ago after I killed my cat with the “annual health checkups”. Never again, not me, not anyone else in my family, furry or not. And btw, I grew up in Romania where measles was a “childhood disease” with some fever and a week home from school. Glad to see parents are questioning everything now, might be the one good thing we get out of this.
THESE criminals. All of them: Fauci, Bourla, Walenski, Daszak, all the WH minions suppressing free speech, all medical professionals who swept damaged lives under the rug.
Either the members of the advisory panel are fully aware of the fact that these shots are of no benefit to kids or they are dumber than a box of hair. I believe it’s the former. Fifteen to zero?? GMAFB. So why recommend to add the shot to the immunization schedule? This is 100% about shielding the manufacturers from liability. It has nothing to do with public health. As with school closures and nearly 2 years of mask mandates, once again, our kids are being thrown under the bus.
Why shouldn’t we believe these people are on the take?
Someone who cares about the health of children and their fellow citizens.
Someone who realizes that the whole point of their position on such a board is to make the very tough calls.
Someone who cares more about good medicine than their career.
Hell if they thought they would be the only voice of dissent, then speak loud and get a book deal when they get ran out of the board room.
Evil previals when good people do nothing.
(My comment...rant...is not directed at you Terry, but all the people who don't see the danger of going along to get along or deny the slippery slope of incremental power grabs and corruption. Neither happen in big steps until its too late to stop.)
The CDC has been politicized for years; its leadership are anti-gun activists, who routinely claim that guns are a "public health emergency". Now physicians are being advised to ask patients during routine medical exams: "Do you own any guns?" (The only safe and correct answer to such an intrusive question is "No", followed by "Mind your own business!")
Their behavior during the Wuhan Virus pandemic has been equally appalling, issuing reckless guidelines from on high and persecuting any scientists and physicians who dared question them. Until a new study emerges proving the CDC wrong, again, and they then revise the guidelines with no apology to those brave, intelligent practitioners whose careers were ruined.
If I had the stomach, I could also go into the CDC's opinions on delusional gender bending that they are promoting in the school systems.
Is it any wonder that such a corrupt, radicalized agency has lost all trust and credibility with millions of Americans?
When I was in training, I often would unwind after a brutal day by watching the PBS series, "All Creatures Great And Small." A James Herriot series about a Yorkshire veterinarian, many of the episodes centered around his struggles to bring modern veterinary science to the backward farming regions of England. Watching stories of farmers burying calves at the barn door to ward off disease instead of following principles of quarantine and sanitation - all that was available in 1937 - made me glad that I was studying REAL medicine - founded upon the Scientific Method and the sacred tenet of free enquiry.
Now I watch in disbelief as my colleagues - well-trained and experienced - walk lockstep with the stomping, marching brownshirts of the American medical regime. Not only is free enquiry out the window, many front-line physicians are perfectly happy to punish their colleagues for questioning the ill-considered and politically-motivated mandates of an elite cabal of medical sellouts.
Decades of American preference polls changed very little: year-on-year, doctors always headed the list of most-trusted; lawyers and used-car salesmen typically swapped positions at the bottom. After the Wuhan virus goat-rodeo, almost nobody I know trusts their doctor to treat flu symptoms; most - and especially the elderly - would take their chances at home. And I'm one of them. A damned shame.
I come from an old school medical family. My own father, a surgeon in his 70s, will no longer go to his GP for exactly this reason. I am terrified about a future without my father. He’s the only doctor I trust.
I spent an hour on the phone last night with my older brother's daughter. Thanks to a lifetime of cigarette-smoking, he's now reaping the benefits of PND - paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea - difficulty breathing at night. He is absolutely terrified, and justifiably so, of going to hospital to be seen for a respiratory problem, thinking that he might end up on a ventilator like his now-dead wife did last year.
I get a few grins when I tell people my goal in retirement is to protect my friends and family from my colleagues, but unfortunately I am serious - literally, deadly serious.
Maybe the medical profession will bring back bleeding and leeches (although medicinal leeches are apparently useful). When you have a profession that routinely is feted and "educated" by big pharma and people such as Dr. "Josef" Fauci getting rich off grants and shilling for the PLA, you have the predictable end result of politicized medicine.
The left has destroyed the scientific method. For years they have belittled those who question global warming and called people who question it deniers. They say the science is settled. It's not. The science is never settled. That is the beauty of the true scientific method. Scientists today are questioning Einsteins theories and Newton laws of gravity. That is how the scientific method is supposed to work, question, question, question, never settle.
I believe in vaccinations. Smallpox was wiped out by vaccines. I was 8 years old during the polio scare and polio is no longer the global threat it was. There are some polio cases from time to time but it is not like it was. However the rush to market the Covid vaccine gives me pause.
Pyzer and Moderna have made billions off their vaccines. If you spread enough money around, even Mother Teresa might be tempted to fudge the figures. and lie.
With respect to Global Warming the science is not just not settled, the science was never used. Science requires scepticism and debate. Before we embarked on a campaign which will destroy our economy and way of life we should have had a debate
And not rely on models that are laughably inaccurate and based on highly debatable "data" or fraudulent information.
You are absolutely correct
I agree we need to continue to explore different ways to mitigate the changes, but 45yrs ago with the more “primitive” tools we had compared to today, we did scientific tests on as many different aspects as we could. Now, however, “Green” politics have taken over rationality IMO and want to block oil & gas while we now need more as we build the infrastructure for cleaner energy.
SallyJones
Absolutely. 100 percent for vaccines that are tested and prevent infection
Vaccines for toddlers that aren't properly tested or studied for an overwhelming non-fatal and relatively mild disease for that age cohort? Madness. Worse - politically driven madness.
It is my understanding that smallpox is the only virus ever completely eradicated by vaccine. That is because it has no animal.reservoir. I do believe that the other traditional.vacci es (measles/mumps/rubella, dtp, etc.) are valid. But I do not trust the research around covid or its vaccines. Largely because without knowing where it came from we will never know exactly what it is.
Wiped out in nature. Stored in USA and other countries
I mean… I’ve got a pretty solid guess where it came from.
There is the infamous "Indiana Pi Bill" where someone tried to get the value of Pi legally established. It feels to me a lot of things that are going on now are quite similar. Science by consensus, consensus by fiat, any further research to poke holes into the consensus (if it can get funding) is misinformation.
Spell check, it’s actually spelled pfi$er.
I was a Science Teacher definitely schooled in Scientific Methods. Did Graduate course in Environmental Engineering in the mid 1980’s. Then wrote & taught a 6th Gr. Environmental Studies course. We have learned a lot since those days, but anyone living in today’s floods, excessive heat & frequent forest fires 🔥 will certainly believe our Climate is changing. Then explore how our oceans are heating up with fish dying and sharks common in northern waters, it is tough to still be in denial.
SallyJones
Climate has never been static. Oceans have been rising and receding for millions of years. You can find sea fossils in the Rockies. We have had ice ages and then the Earth warmed and the glaciers melted.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2003/04/global-warming-is-not-so-hot-2/
Mandatory euthanasia for unpopular people.
You must be Canadian
why Canadian? there are other countries looking at this
where do we start ?
Maybe you can help to save us from Gender Medicine. I have lost all faith in the medical community and in pharma over this issue even as I can see that doctors are more and more hamstrung by our government activist class.
"Sacrificing health care on the altar of ideology
BY LEIGH ANN O’NEILL AND REID NEWTON, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 10/20/22 2:30 PM ET"
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3697283-sacrificing-health-care-on-the-altar-of-ideology/
"Medical doctors are among the most highly educated professionals on the planet. Why, then, would the federal government seek to curtail their ability to perform their jobs to the best of their ability? Knee-capping the scientific process in the name of highly contested “gender-affirming” care not only puts patients in a needlessly risky position; it forces physicians to choose between abiding by government edicts and following their own medical judgment.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a proposed rule titled Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities. It will amend the regulations that govern the Affordable Care Act. Not only does the proposal seek to capture significantly more providers within its control, but it would also force them to provide medical treatment they may disagree with."
etc.
I was once very compliant and full of respect for medicine.
Yes, MDs are highly educated - no doubt about that. But looking a little deeper, that does not always translate into Doing The Right Thing.
So, let's take a radiologist, for example - four massively competitive years of college, four brutal years of medical school, five years of residency training. Thirteen years, during which you make no (or a little, later on) income as you watch your high-school classmates begin their lives, businesses, and families. All of that can be rendered void by some medical board somewhere revoking your license - and having your license revoked in one state means automatic revocation in the others in which you are licensed - and there isn't much for a defrocked doctor to do to earn a living.
Secondly, there is the self-selection process: to begin with, you don't get into medical school with a history of being a Bad Boy; you get in by toeing the line, doing the work, showing every sign of conformity and respect for the system. One bad recommendation from a college professor and it's over, so MDs tend to be conformists and respecters of authority.
Thirdly, you have the ongoing continuous peer pressure of your conforming colleagues. Not a formula for bomb-throwers or nonconformists. It is said that in the Third Reich, far from protesting, the physicians were the most ardent Nazis and assisted the regime in some of its most egregious acts. I can see that.
I, OTOH, am a bit of an anachronism. I did other things before medical school: worked in industry, dug coal and sawed logs - born to older parents (my grandpa was born in 1864 during the War of Yankee Aggression), I grew up, for better or for worse, in an Appalachian culture itself a throwback to older times. In college, med school, residency training, I never fit in, had little respect for my city-born colleagues, no respect for the "situational ethics" we were being taught, and never wanted to do so. And as I age, I less and less regret any of it. I had older cousins who were physicians - gentlemen to the last man - for whom the personal and moral aspects of the profession were more important than the technical. Yes, I think the word is anachronism, and I feel it more every day.
I send you my sincere blessings!
"It is said that in the Third Reich, far from protesting, the physicians were the most ardent Nazis and assisted the regime in some of its most egregious acts. I can see that."
I fear you are onto something. Have you read this article?
"Echoes of Eugenics: What the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg Means for Us in the US
On the 75th anniversary of the trial of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg we examine Nazi medicine and gender-affirming care"
https://pitt.substack.com/p/echoes-of-eugenics-what-the-doctors
It's long but here's a bit:
"“More than half of all German physicians became early joiners of the Nazi Party, surpassing the party enrollments of all other professions. From early on, the German Medical Society played the most instrumental role in the Nazi medical program, beginning with the marginalization of Jewish physicians, proceeding to coerced experimentation, euthanization, and sterilization, and culminating in genocide...” [Haque et al 2012]
It is a “myth” that “the medical crimes of the Hitler regime [were] committed by a few demonic physicians working in isolation from the mainstream of German medicine. The success of this myth has imperiled the value system of medicine today.” [Seidelman 1995]
“Physicians were the most over-represented academic profession in the Third Reich. ... The Nazi doctrine attracted a profession in economic and political distress ... It drew physicians into its movement by appealing to the medical profession's pride and prosperity in the context of a philosophy that glorified contemporary medical practice. Physicians were attracted to ... tenets that championed biomedical solutions to social problems.” [Cohen 1998]
It worked. In just six years almost all “non-Aryan” physicians left practice, and income for the remaining doctors rocketed 67% from a pre-Hitler low to an all-time high. The crossroads of Eugenic medicine and Nazi politics was good for business, and the medical profession saw that opportunity early. [Hanauske-Abel 1996]"
I liked a subsequent section on Consent. Also,
"Where does this end? I think it doesn’t. It doesn’t end until we make it end. The Doctors Trial at Nuremberg is one model. We don’t need to dream of justice. We don’t need to start at step zero of the Movement Action Plan, to dream that the unthinkable might become thinkable. Our grandparents did the work, and were heroes for it. Maybe we just need to learn from their struggles, dust off their ideas, and learn to connect their work to our challenges."
I think this is where we are now - with most people going along with an ideology or not thinking there's any big deal thing to pay attention to.
Thanks so much. I'll file those references.
"lifetime cigarette smoker"
"afraid of going to the hospital"
yes, because going to the hospital is the decision that might increase his risk of dying. LOL
And we aren't even joking about teaching hospitals in July.
Yes, I agree. Hospitals are in the business of murdering people.
Congrats; this is the dumbest statement on the internet today.
Nope. 100% amazing. Simply means: do what you want re: vaccinations.
Sorry you don't get it.
But yes, Mike - please elaborate on the deeply ingrained "collectivism/collective" cultural ethos/tradition in America.
Lol.
Can't WAIT to hear this....
Yeah....I think if he comes clean about this history of smoking or they look at his medical history/charts, that's pretty unlikely.
My children voice the same concerns. When I visit a physician I’m embarrassed by their lack of “medical detail”. It’s a sad commentary on the perverse state of medical care & quality of medical education. In both mine & my father’s generation a life in medicine required, demanded absolute dedication. Physician’s weren’t part time not did they advertise. Try “laying on the hands” via Zoom or FaceTime. It’s truly depressing. Is it any wonder my children’s friends ask this old physician for advice.
I went for my yearly Medicare wellness visit recently and of course had to fill in several forms. I was what my sex is as well as the sex I was assigned at birth. At the second question I wrote “not applicable.”
I faced a similar form recently. My answer:
SERIOUSLY?
Now that’s a good one. I’m going to use that response too unless I come up with something even more snarky.
I have thus far resisted the pressure to add that to the intake forms in my medical office, but I suspect it will soon be mandated by insurance companies in order for an encounter to be paid.
Of course! It’s an insurance requirement! Not even doctors are free of this nonsense.
Even better!
I have the same situation with my dad, who passed away five years ago. He bemoaned the state of medicine in the last 20 years of his life. I wish every day my dad was still here to bring his common sense to the situation we're facing.
“Now I watch in disbelief as my colleagues - well-trained and experienced - walk lockstep with the stomping, marching brownshirts of the American medical regime”
——————————————
I think it would be easier for people to recognize what this is if the Germans had used the term ‘unsaxonated’ to describe the people they were targeting as undesirable.
"Unsaxonated." Superb! I'm stealing that.
LOL yes that’s right I’m doing Saxony jokes this morning. Please feel free to spread this to your friends. I’m recruiting superspreaders for my Saxony jokes.
😂😂😂
You're on a roll, Kevin..
😂😂🥳🥳
I like your “angle”!!
That's why the Germans lost WWII: didn't take all the Angles into account. ba-dum-bum.
I'm howling o the floor now.
It's become routine for family doctors to ask if you own a gun. That is not a medical question, it's the medical profession bowing to the authoritarians. And this example is so pervasive, it makes stooges of the doctors
I was asked that question nearly 20 years ago on a "health" survey sitting with my child in a pediatricians' office. I went ballistic. Demanded the head nurse come in and dressed her down for bringing politics into the exam room. The doctor walked in and I asked him to explain why in a survey asking about household dangers there wasn't a single question asking if we had a swimming pool--statistically a much, much greater threat to children. Apparently I made some waves as the practice's managing partner called me a week later after a partner's meeting to apologize. No doubt, though it was only a temporary pause.
Good on you. I'm generally very sympathetic to workers that have to deal with the public, so I don't ruffle them very often, but last fall I was following up at Duke for a shoulder injury and while waiting for my appointment, I nearly made a wrong turn into the ladies' restroom. The gals behind the counter chirped that I was heading into the ladies' room, and before I could stop myself, I stopped and looked at them for a moment as if I was puzzled and said, "But today I feel like a woman!"
I realized instantly that they didn't know whether to take me seriously, and what they were going to do if I was. I started laughing and went into the dude's door. They chuckled when I came out and said I had them going there for a minute. Crazy times. Crazy, crazy times.
Fabulous. I'd try it, but the men's room is usually smellier than the ladies'!
🤣
Guess that's what makes this part of the country different. When my doctor and I discuss guns, it's mostly to make plans to go out to his ranch for some target shootin'
"going ballistic" about guns and "making waves" about pools - great way to put it.
My reply is, "You mean my ones at home, or the one I'm carrying this very minute?" That usually backs them off a bit. Then: "Of course, I'm just kidding .................... heh heh......."
I refused to answer that question when our pediatrician tried it. I wanted to know what expertise doctors have as regards gun safety. I wanted to know how safe it is to make a record (easily subject to subpoena) that tells any number of individuals and entities that we have guns in the house.
Most of all, I wanted to know why, if they are concerned about gun safety (as all reasonable people are) they didn't disperse info to ALL parents/patients that teaches children the established gun safety rules. Rules like, never touch a gun. Leave the area if you do see a gun. Immediately tell a trusted adult. Realize that all guns can be loaded. Parents: if you do have firearms, here's a list of ways to safely store them away from children.
Doctors don't need to know if you personally have firearms in order to address the issue. Just say, "X number of children were injured or killed by carelessly stored firearms last year. If you do have firearms, be aware of this and store them safely. Here's a simple handout that we give all parents explaining how to teach your children to avoid firearms, and how adults can make sure these accidents never happen to them."
Kids need to know these vital rules---ALL kids. Just because mom and dad don't have a gun in their house does not mean that they will never encounter a gun in other contexts. For instance, a friend of mine was hanging with his friends in the woods back when they were about twelve. One boy pulls out a handgun and most of the kids gathered around. Not my friend---he knew enough to boogie on out of there. That afternoon, one of the boys was accidentally shot with this "unloaded" handgun. He survived, and explained to his parents that he wasn't worried about being shot because he "figured he would see the bullet coming and just dodge out of the way."
Two brothers - young relatives of mine - were screwing around in the 1940s and one shot the other, who died. When that bullet goes down the tube, it's over, boys and girls. Over.
I'm old enough to remember when the NRA sponsored gun-safety courses in high schools around the country. The kids got to shoot, which they just loved - made them feel special - and they were treated like adults and expected to come away with an adult attitude. Two good things. Nowadays, the left would choke itself clutching its pearls.
Normals have a real problem: they are busy actually doing things that make the country function, while the lefties and other soreheads have all the time in the world to gin up mischief. Somehow that has to change.
Which reminds me: Vote. Vote. Vote. Early and often. Especially this November 8th.
When I was in high school there was a rifle range in the basement. We would carry our rifle with the bolt open into the range and shoot. It never occurred to me to load it and shoot up the school, never.
At an early age I was taught gun safety and more people were killed by an "unloaded gun" than any other type of gun accidents. The first thing I do when I pick up a gun is check to see if it is loaded.
I occasionally teach a gun safety course. I tell everyone, "I don't care if Jesus Christ hisownself hands you a gun and tells you it's unloaded, YOU CHECK. Occasionally I'll get a smartass and I hand him a gun and tell him it's unloaded. If he doesn't check, he fails the class and goes home. No f'in around. This is life and death.
I grew up in Maryland in the 70's, which always had lots of gun rules (applied, of course, only to the law abiding), and I knew for as long as I can remember back, don't touch the guns. I respected that rule. As a teen, my father took me to the range, taught me basic gun safety, and taught me to shoot. He even bought me my first gun, which I still have today (the sheriff's office, when I moved to Virginia and tried to register it, asked where I was from and laughed kindly). As you say, not having a gun in your home doesn't mean a friend's home won't have a gun. I like your strategy.
You can teach kids the rules all you want but they won't follow them. This was a test where kids found unloaded guns, AFTER viewing the NRA video and being told not to touch the gun and to tell an adult, and they all pick it up and most point it at themselves or others. https://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/young-kids-guns-parents-22325589
There is a VERY big difference between watching a video and going through firearms training. Would you want your heart operated on by someone who'd seen a video, or by someone who had had surgical training and actually done heart surgery?
Come with me, go through my course, fire my .357 magnum at a gallon jug of water. Especially if you are eight years old. (Actually, an 8-year-old might get the .38 special.) Hear that earsplitting sound, feel the recoil through your arms that shakes your whole frame and then come with me to look at the jug you just shot. Children are ignorant, not stupid. They get the meaning, and after a day's training, you'll never see one shoot somebody else by accident - In His Entire Life.
That doesn't prove that kids won't follows rules. They may have been particularly stupid kids, or it may have been a poorly made video. I've seen a lot of bad "teaching" in my time - maybe they listed a bunch of rules? That isn't teaching. Children need to be taught, somewhat graphically, just enough to wince a bit, what happens when the rules aren't followed. They need to be allowed to question, and have real answers to their questions. Probably won't happen with a video. My kids follow my rules because I explain them, and they know I don't lie to them. They trust me. Plenty of kids follow rules when actually taught be someone they trust.
I agree with you, Scott D, that you can't rely on any amount of safety instruction to keep kids 100% safe relative to all the dangers of life. As adults, we should teach them as best we can and keep doing our part to protect them.
My point was that, if a pediatrician is going to impart some kind of instruction on gun safety, then logically the doctor should educate all parents and all kids---not just the ones who admit to having a firearm in the house.
I agree. Just because someone doesn't have a firearm at the point they see the pediatrician doesn't mean they won't get one in the future. I have zero problems with firearms when they're responsibly owned but when I read about things like kids finding and injuring themselves or others with guns I think the parents should be held fully accountable.
Doctors are forced to comply with these absurd questions. They are mandated by CMS and tied to payment. They don’t have much choice unless they want to work for free.
Doctors did it to themselves because they refused to address costs in-house. I am not sympathetic.
Doctors gave away their own power. They are now mostly mere employees of corporate healthcare stores. God forbid any of them show a whit of courage or concern for their fellow humans or where the future of our nation is headed with a vaccine schedule that has almost tripled since Pharma manufacturers were granted freedom from liability in 1986. And—what a coincidence—childhood chronic illness has risen from 12 percent to 54 percent in that time period. The medical profession is harming children. That is unconscionable.
We are mostly coders now. They don’t care about actual care delivered, just documentation and billing
Word
Side note but I read and reread the James Herriot books. Still own them. They are wonderful!
My parents made a trip to meet him, found him gracious, then later discovered they had no film in the camera. 😂
If you're ever in Yorkshire, Herriot's home/office in Thirsk is now a museum that is well worth the stop if you are a fan of the books.
Oh no! Fortunately the memory lives on
Working 50 years in Nuclear Power, may I add that once public trust is damaged, it affects your profession.
A little off-topic here: radiation is my area of expertise, but I know next to nothing about nuclear power generation. Do you have an opinion about thorium molten-salt reactors? I have developed an interest in them, and they LOOK like the solution, but I'm sure I have missed something. I'm thinking that Hyman Rickover was the problem, but he was a nuclear engineer, which I am definitely not.
Greetings Jim, nice, well written piece, IMHO. Including the Brown Shirts metaphor.
So, the estimable Admiral Rickover was an Electrical Engineer (Columbia) but his acerbic personality 'made it happen' and he was also a skilled politician, not something everyone knows.
I met him when I was interviewing for the Nuclear Power program in 1970. Demanding but fair, just like my Dad, so we were on the same page.
He also had zero respect for the commercial Nuclear folks which threw the baby out with the bathwater, again IMHO. RIP Adm. Rickover.
That being said, there is obviously a place for advanced, closed fuel cycle reactor development, including the molten-salt reactor genre. For example, some history you can verify via several sources, the Soviet A;lfa class reactors used a lead-bismuth coolant (think high temperature, molten salt coolant) to power their boats over 50 knots. Small crew, all Officers, really tricky to make it work but they did. Here's a link to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine
The whole profession is waiting to make the next quantum step in perfecting ultra-safe, environmentally neutral, reliable electrical power plants that are cost competitive.
Our problem is the N word. Say Nuclear and everyone's been gaslit to think Fukushima, Chernobyl and (wrongly) Three Mile Island Unit 2. It's hurting us all now and it may take a new generation to get the public trust back.
Thanks for your interest,
Thomas Herring, PE
Thanks much. I'm an EE myself (can't spell geek without EE) and am spending my dotage watching technical stuff on YouTube, including a long one on Adm. Rickover. (What do engineers use for birth control? Their personalities.)
I have become fascinated by the high temperature molten salt reactors - especially the thorium cycle, which seems to have solved all the problems you get when you depend on superheated water at 2100 psi to keep the core from melting down. Ever see the aftermath of a train/steamboat boiler explosion when ALL the water turns to superheated steam? You get the picture.
We probably should take the geek stuff private. I'm getting a stiffie just discussing it, but I'm sure everybody else is tapping their fingers on the desk. Consideration and all that ....
Yep.
The Body of Knowledge Diaspora is real.
Good talking.
Tom
I've spoken to several physicians who feel the same way you do - alone in seeing the squelching of "the sacred tenet of free enquiry." But I wonder... have any of your colleagues begun to see things differently and willing to talk more openly or is everything still the same (lockstep brownshirts)?
There are a (very) few of us who have actually treated patients with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and every one relates a good experience with them. Those doctors, however, are very rare. The conversation with the rest has moved slightly sideways, from "That's crazy!" to "A doctor should be able to use his judgment and experience BUT those medicines are probably not effective." That's about as far as they will go.
But we know why you can’t use those two drugs - they much to cheap, they would rather load us with crap then give us a cheap drug as a therapeutic.
Well said as usual, sir. My daughter is proceeding with medical school... precisely to re-establish scientific method.
Bravo. Let's hope she isn't drummed out as a "heretic." And while she's there, please have her fight the good fight on gender. Nothing to me is more terrifying than the gov't medical complex pushing "transition" on children. I'm not all that religious, but G-d will never forgive us for our sins.
The medical profession abandoned its autonomy to big insurance and big pharma before covid. A very nice lady doctor lamented a month or so ago not being able to interact with patients about the impact of diet on health. I asked why she could not. She responded it was not possible in 15 minutes. And BTW if we turn this around it will be because a lawyer clearly articulates a cause of action that persuades a court. Everybody hates lawyers until they need one.
Some time I'll regale you with the tale of the AMA and how it sold out physicians in the 'eighties. It's disgusting, they were disgusting, and they are still disgusting.
I was "encouraged" to join the AMA when I was an employed physician. Never liked them, still don't. I withdrew my membership when they produced the AMA Guides to Permanent Impairment, 6th Ed., because it was such blatant corruption at the behest of the worker's compensation industry.
In the early 1980s, the AMA was presented by the gub'ment with an ultimatum: help us do the DRG goat rodeo (Diagnosis Related Groups) or we will do it without you. It resulted in a huge bureaucracy whose ostensible purpose was the reduction in medical cost. That it did not. The cost went up, largely due to the expense of running a new gub'ment agency.
Because our billing was so screwed up and we were barely making payroll, I drove to my state capital to meet with the reimbursement czar for our region. She was a tough old bird, and she looked at me with pity in her eyes. "Ok Doctor, let's get something straight. The war is over, and you lost. And you lost because your AMA sold you out. Now let's see if we can get you enough money to pay your staff and at least a little for you."
She later did great things in the medical field. I never forgot our conversation.
Oh, and by the way: the AMA is still corrupt and represents less than one in five doctors, I'm told. None of whom would be - except for a credulous and naïve six-month period after med school - me.
And also by the way - on the corruption front. I see that Dr. Peter McCullouch, a world-famous cardiologist, has been stripped of his certifications by his specialty boards for wrongspeak, to wit:
https://www.independentsentinel.com/dr-peter-mccullough-stripped-of-all-board-certifications-for-wrongspeak/ (edited for spelling)
It keeps getting worse. Oh, well, soon people will just sit at a computer kiosk for their medical care, and we won't have to worry about naughty docs failing to bleat the gub'mint's line of garbage.
I started reading the All Creatures books in high school, 40+ years ago! Still love and re-read them! Loved the show, too. The recent remake of the show is pretty good, but I prefer the original.
My father in law was a small town independent family practitioner. He would be so upset by what has become of his beloved profession.
I heard an ad on the radio by a law firm that if you have a child with autism, and took acetaminophen (Tylenol) while pregnant, you may be entitled to damages, etc. there are ads like this all day for all kinds of medical maladies and questionable causation. Now put this at the doctor level, you’re the OB/GYN, your pregnant patient has headaches, do you suggest Tylenol? If you do and unfortunately this patient’s child is diagnosed with autism, she hears this ad and dials the number, and the doc is sued. Win, lose it doesn’t matter. The doc’s malpractice insurance goes through the roof, if a local community the reputation and trust goes out the window, personal wealth and income takes a hit (talking about large student loans to pay) — next patient with a headache, does the doc recommend Tylenol? It is a “damn shame”, docs today have to have their heads on a swivel (legal issues abound). I don’t recall a single episode of Marcus Welby where he got sued or threatened with a lawsuit. Today’s medical TV shows are driven as much as by legal exposure and costs, as patient care. Another incredibly complex issue to noodle on…
Yet another example of doctor's bring controlled by insurance. And demonization of lawyer's. In my state a patient can die of medical malpractice and damages are capped at $250,000.
Note demonizing lawyers (I am one), legal liability is just a fact of practicing modern medicine. Not all states have caps on malpractice (and there are a smattering of states where such caps were held to be unconstitutional under state law). There are a few states that require a doc to have malpractice insurance, but the vast majority do not. So a doc can often choose whether to have malpractice insurance or not. Even with a $250,000 award (and some states allow for more for noneconomic pain and suffering), plus legal fees, one lawsuit can be a crusher.
Much of that is true. Doctors in some states are not required to have malpractice insurance but most hospitals, partnerships, etc. require it. Laws vary by state but most of them have passed some sort of tort reform legislation. It is justified on the position that you are inferring (I think) that plaintiff's lawyers bring nonmeritorious claims. Some do although most jurisdictions have ways to summarily dispose of claims that indisputably lack merit. But the role of malpractice insurance should not be overlooked either. Doctors perform many services justified by nothing more than if-I-don't-do-this-I-might-get-sued. Of course that they get paid for each such service probably makes that pill a little easier to swallow. Also insurance defense lawyers are called upon to serve two masters - the doctor facing a claim and the insurance company that pays their hourly fee. The insurance company ultimately calls the shots. A doctor who does not cooperate is so deemed and representation can be withdrawn. In the meantime most aintiif's lawyers are working on a contingency and do not get paid unless their client is successful.
Fair analysis, thank you. I would add that the health insurance company that likely pays the medical bill would balk at the “if I don’t do this I might get sued” approach to medicine. Docs have to balance that out too. Further, some plaintiff lawyers (not all) who work on contingency are motivated by the big payday if taking on a case on contingency (especially class action lawyers who, if they “win” it is rarely at trial, mostly settlements, and in my opinion class members are rarely economically made whole). Facing a jury for any corporation on any issue is a scary proposition, thus settlements are more common. In our litigious society, never a shortage of reasons to sue somebody about something or anything and unfortunately not a shortage of lawyers to take their cases.
Boy, reaching back here.... there was actually one M.W. episode where he got sued. Something happened in the middle of the trial where he just got up and left to take care of a patient - something like that. Made the docs look really good and the plaintiff's lawyer look really bad. Ah, the good old days.
A mentor told me that he'd actually been called by a local lawyer to let him know that a patient was shopping for a lawyer to sue him. "I don't sue doctors, but I thought you ought to know." Ah, the REALLY good old days.
By the way, I never paid malpractice insurance. When my costs went up, my fees went up. The patients ended up paying it all. I did notice, however, that there were several billionaire lawyers - all of course from personal liability suits; never heard of a billionaire doctor. My cousin flew a corporate jet for one of the successful lawyers; incidentally, his wife was on the state's supreme court and refused to recuse herself from multiple cases in which her husband was involved. My cousin, a retired air force colonel, told me that it was like living in a different world.
You stay home; I'll go to the doctor and follow vaccination and immunization schedules recommended by doctors and scientists. Let's see who lives longer.
Except the doctors and 'scientists' are being ordered around by medical boards and governments that are giving money, not practicing medical professionals.
First, LOL at "scientists" in quotes. Second, I guess you think that science was a bigger boon to society when the only people who could practice it were those who were independently wealthy and had the free time to investigate whatever the hell they wanted. Yeah, I'm sure that was way better for everyone.
Early data showed this to be a flu(0,4%) fatality rate and never changed.
As an engineer it is my job to monitor 'science', buddy. And they were wrong, but took a shitload of your tax money.
Right...engineers and scientists are completely different things. I think you might be a bad engineer if you don't know that. Also, just looking at the fatality rate independent from the how transmissible the virus is or how many resources are required to keep someone alive is poor science. So you might be an even worse scientist than you are an engineer.
"Oh yeah? Well you're ugly." :-D
Seems to me, that you have joined the "burry-the-calf-at-the-barndoor-crowd". Sorry to read that.
Your talk about "marching brownshirts" in this context is, no matter on which side You stand on the issue, blown way out of proportion and feeds into the extremist narrative, that getting vaccinated is somewhat equal to getting shipped into a Nazi death camp like Anne Frank was.
I find this kind of rhetoric not only tasteless, but deeply insulting to any victim of Nazi terror or other totalitarian mass murder. I consider people who use this kind of nazi-comparisms routinely to muddy the water of debate unfit to join any civilized discussion about any political and/or scientific issue. That's why I refuse to reply to You on the issue in question.
This is not rhetoric. Jumping right to the "final solution" of Nazi Germany as the comparison ignores the subtle, less direct steps that the Nazis used to "other" non-Aryan Germans prior to the implementation of full blown concentration camps. And those steps are exactly what our government, medical and communities, media outlets, and, ultimately, our general society followed during 2021 through early 2022. As an unvaccinated person, I was denied the right to move freely in my own country, ACTUALLY denied healthcare, and there were calls for the withholding of medical treatment (i.e. death) for me and my unvaccinated family members until mid 2022. That is very much analogous to the beginnings of Nazi terror, and all we needed were "quarantine camps" to make the whole scene repetitive of history.
So basically you’re recommending holding off on the Nazi comparisons until it is way too late. Something to consider.
Reminds me of how we have to wait until the government fully seizes the means of production before we are allowed to say
“Hey, umm, these people are communists.”
No. I'm recommending to quit comparing everything You don't like to Nazism.
I do not compare everything I don’t like to Nazism. That is a mischaracterization of my position. You know, the Nazis were known for mischaracterizing arguments………
😂😂😂
Exactly my kind of humor, Mr Godwin.
But you did reply.
Not on the issue. And I won't, for the reason I pointed out.
I don't care about your feelings. I care only about your arguments.
Do You really think throwing around nazi comparisons is an argument for anything?
I don't care about your feelings. I care only about your arguments.
“…cannot do the math.” You just read an article by a tenured professor of evidence-based medicine who says the balance of the risk-benefit data suggests that the one-size-fits-all approach of the CDC is wrong; we could stratify the COVID vaccine recommendations by age and health status. Are you sure you’re not the one ignoring the best evidence?
Please don't feed the troll!
Was wondering when you'd show up. You missed the point of the article. It's about the CDC including the COVID vaccines in the childhood immunization schedule and the potential that has for further eroding the credibility of our public health institutions. You're too focused on the vaccine itself and the anti vaxer Boogeyman you can't appreciate that this decision by the CDC could result in exactly what you are afraid of, people not trusting them when it matters. This pieces does not discuss vaccine efficacy or the dangers of the vaccine. Lastly, you seem convinced that anyone who shows any level of skepticism regarding the COVID vaccine is an "anti vaxer" worthy of scorn. I counter that healthy skepticism is rarely a bad thing, and our public health institutions did not do a great job of allaying fears given the great effort they went to to silence people who questioned it. The Barrington declaration comes to mind...of course that's probably just more misinformation in your mind.
Please don't feed the troll!
If Rochelle Walensky represents your "science " savior I think I'll just take my chances with God. And when Fauci owns up to how much money big pharma has fed him over the course of his bureaucratic career (and gives it all to needy communities) maybe I'll consider his altruistic side. You don't see a happy ending because your blinders are way too comfortable.
Rouge? I don't care about the makeup choices of others
Celia is spot-on with her assessment of you as a troll. But I guess you're having fun pretending to be smart?
To be fair, your content was just the thing I found lacking. Threw in the rogue barb just for fun
Interesting you would use odds calculated based upon data we KNOW is inaccurate and grossly underreported.
Both the FDA and CDC keep accurate adverse events tallies, and neither is releasing them to the public for scrutiny.
What you don't understand is that we are flying blind, and that the enormous uptick in sudden deaths by healthy young people needs to be investigated, but that is not happening.
I ran a tally on sudden deaths among professional athletes, and it is up precipitously. At least 400%, but I think it was much larger than that. The number of athletes who have died on the field in the last year nearly matches the total in the last thirty years.
And you can easily find montages of people collapsing on camera. One questioner passed out during a British political debate. I've been on the planet a while, and have never seen anything remotely like this.
Please don't feed the troll!
I understand your sentiment, but how can I trust anything related to the Emergency Use Authorization(EUA) 'vaccines' - who have immunity - when their own designers didn't even really test them and we now know they don't prevent transmission or immunization?
Speaking of data... Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, Feb 2020, 3,700 people on board in complete isolation, 800 tested positive, 15 died = 0.4% fatality rate. The same as the flu.
None of this was ever needed in the first place. That is where the lack of credibility started and ended with medical professionals choosing their job over practicing science.
Check out Dr. Steve Kirch's substack about unexplained deaths after vaccination and other prominent doctor's shouting out to STOP using these 'treatements'.
Please don't feed the troll!
Yes, I think they would definitely love to make our military less effective. You do GET, right, that Globalists are not nationalists, and certainly not patriotic Americans?
And in a sane world why would we rely on VAERS for anything? Why would we not use the qualitatively much better data from the CDC and FDA?
Well, they won't release it, yes, but is that not THE problem?
Oh, and you want a study? Here is a summary of one from Columbia, the Ivy League school Obama supposedly went to (but where no one remembers him even from his specific department). The original is easy to look up. I post this because my time has likely already been wasted: https://thelibertydaily.com/new-columbia-university-vaccine-study-drops-bombshell-vaers-deaths-undercounted-by-factor-of-20/
"Comparing our estimate with the CDC-reported VFR (0.002%) suggests VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20, consistent with known VAERS under-ascertainment bias. Comparing our age-stratified VFRs with published age-stratified coronavirus infection fatality rates (IFR) suggests the risks of COVID vaccines and boosters outweigh the benefits in children, young adults and older adults with low occupational risk or previous coronavirus exposure."
You didn't actually read the article, did you? Comparing deaths from the vaccines to the likelihood of death from COVID itself makes them medically useless for nearly all populations for all purposes, and certainly for children, which is what the original article is about.
I'll use small words here: if a medicine is more dangerous than a disease, then that medicine should not be used. Any part of that unclear? And that is what Columbia is claiming, based on GUESSES made necessary by the refusal of the CDC to release the actual data.
And how does that work? They approve these jabs for kids without giving doctors or parents any evidential basis on which to evaluate the risk/benefit ratio.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
And it is widely known that only about 1/10th of the actual cases are reported on VAERS because it is a pain in the ass to use. Life insurer's are reporting a 40% increase in deaths and professional soccer players - the most fit in society - are dropping dead weekly. "Sudden Adult Death Syndrome" anyone? I mean, what the hell is that other than another narrative for us to ponder.
I know three healthy young ladies who abruptly miscarried after the jab(funny how BigPharm did NOT test pregnant women) and two healthy 40 year old men who died two weeks after jab three.
Sorry, we don't know anything other that these 'vaccines' were not tested at all.
I refused my US Army mandated anthrax 'vaccine' precisely because I distrusted the unproven manufacturing processes.
You fail to realize that a new strain of virus, "a real killer," will not be mitigated by vaccines for other viruses. Effective vaccines are strain specific, which is why annual flu vaccines vary in efficacy - they have to predict which strain will be prevalent, and are not always correct.
VAERS data is incredibly flawed and incomplete. Data from Europe is much more complete and shows risk-benefit analysis for vaccinating children with current COVID vaccines does not justify this practice.
The U.S. is very much an outlier in recommending COVID vaccination for children.
"You go play doctor. I’ll listen to mine." That is the ultimate goal that our medical system didn't achieve the last two years by command of medical boards who had BigPharm and government money in mind versus independent health care.
Great article.
This is another example of how corrupt our institutions have become. Vaccines have saved countless lives, but to mandate a vaccine for a demographic that has consistently shown to be one of the least vulnerable to the disease in question is a purely political, rather than a medical, decision.
The real tragedy, I think, is that because of these people’s decisions, millions of people now have a deep-seated mistrust of any decision that public health officials make.
Imagine if a more virulent and deadly disease were to spread now. Mere anarchy.
Credibility squandered is far more difficult to revive than anyone in that or any other agency realizes.
"Vaccines have saved countless lives"
Have they though? I know that CFR data "proves" they have but let's not dismiss how that data is based on far milder variants. Alpha and Delta were evidentially deadly, but the vaccines were only distributed when Lambda and Omicron were the dominant strains. I really do wonder what today's CFR would be if no vaccine existed.
I didn’t mean just the Covid-19 vaccine. I meant vaccines overall since Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine.
While I don’t subscribe to the MSM narrative, I would say that the data shows that Covid vax has saved millions of lives, too. However, the very fact that we’re debating this proves my point: public health officials have become political agents.
I agree, and I think they probably have too. But I do still wonder how different the outcome would have been without them. Millions? maybe.
Maybe. It’s hard to estimate, for sure.
It probably would have effected 3rd world countries more (like any disease), and reliable statistics from areas like that aren’t necessarily reliable.
That isn’t true. Delta didn’t arrive until most people that were going to get vaccinated already had been. The vaccines same a lot of lives in the delta surge.
It's hard to know what's true or not, as I implied. But Delta was listed as the dominant variant 6/2021, and although 300m shots had been administered by then just one month later, following a death spike, CDC pushed for boosters. So were people actually vaccinated? Per CDC, no. Did CFR actually decrease until L/O became dominant variants? no.
https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html
https://covid.cdc.gov/COVID-data-tracker/#vaccination-trends
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00
No, it's pretty easy to know. CDC reports show it, but so do plenty of academic papers:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm
Death rate from Delta was ~16x lower if you had your primary series of shots. But that's just a raw rate, but since older, more at risk individuals were disproportionately more likely to be vaccinated the risk reduction was much higher. That report shows >65 year olds had a ~11x reduction in risk of death with the primary series but ~61x reduction with the booster during the Delta surge...
You could extrapolate if you want. IFR was ~8% in the >65 unvaccinated group, but ~3% in the primary series and ~2.7% with the booster. But that also gets compounded by the drop in the infection rate, which was 5x lower with the primary series and 22x lower with the booster. So total risk of death was reduced some 93%, at least in that time window.
The primary series saved A LOT of lives, and boosters do have their place in the elderly who apparently struggle to generate lasting protection. (And this is not inconsistent with prior knowledge of immune system aging. Like our brains, our immune system is better at learning new things when we're young.)
No, it's not easy to know, and for every academic paper claiming one thing there are others that claim the other. Hence the mess.
The irrefutable fact is that covid ceased to be something to be deathly afraid of (spring 2022) once the L/O variants became dominant (Jan 2022) . One, like you, could argue that was because of vaccines, but like I said in my original reply: who knows, could just be that L/O aren't all that dangerous.
"for every academic paper claiming one thing there are others that claim the other."
That's not true for the primary series of shots. I don't really care to site 15 papers showing you are wrong, but you are free to do your own research. Papers on the boosters, on the other hand, are bit like what you say, particularly if they don't do a good job stratifying by age. Ie you'll see boosters are great for 18+, but then in an other study, it will show near zero effect in 18-49, but then strong effect in 50+, etc.
I'm with you on Omicron being more mild, but that has been hard to nail down because so many people are vaccinated or had prior infection, many times undocumented, and it's been hard to detangle that prior immunity from changes to the virus itself.
I started saying during Covid that it felt like "just a test". A test to weaken everyone's trust of the govt. just in time for something REALLY bad and deadly to come along in a few years and wipe out everyone. Sheesh...
And a more deadly disease will come down the pike. It is inevitable.
Distrust in institutions is a recurring theme in recent CS posts - cf Liz Truss, transgenderism, universities and Today’s. I fear all this will end somewhere really not good. No easy solution obvious.
I think it’s because many institutions have abandoned common sense.
Good observation.
It’s not pleasant to consider.
I don't know about that - this last one did a pretty good job of only killing ignorant, anti-science people after the vaccines came out.
Pre-marketing drug testing involves a couple years of testing in animals. Animals are dosed, and after a time interval, sacrificed, their tissues dissected and examined under a microscope for any pathology. It’s also done in pregnant animals and their offspring are examined for two generations. From what I have been able to find, Pfizer did not do these studies before testing in humans and proceeding to market. We are the guinea pigs. And one of the adverse effects is a disruption in menstrual cycles among women. Why? What is going on with hormones, ovaries? Shouldn’t Pfizer be studying this? Gee, weren’t we told how safe the mRNA in a lipid nanoparticle is? Except now we read they tweaked one part of the mRNA molecule so it couldn’t be degraded easily. And now they want to inject this into my granddaughter?
Food additives like Splenda have more animal safety data than this vaccine.
You make an excellent point! I have been in pharma R&D for my entire career - 37 yrs, and for the last 25, in Regulatory Affairs. I used to defend FDA and their high standards. Covid has changed that (as well as FDA's approval of Aduhelm, the "Alzheimer's drug" (in quotes because its a poor excuse of drug and isn't even marketed at this point). So then the question is, how can CDC list this as a recommended vaccine WHEN IT HAS NOT GONE THROUGH THE NORMAL, PAIN-STAKING, AND DEEP preclinical and clinical testing, as well as the years of CMC development? I've lost all faith, so I guess it's good I am less than a year from retiring. Makes me sad and disgusted.
The FDA and drug companies seem to have gotten way too cozy. When I was dealing with the FDA, it almost felt adversarial, and the easiest thing they could do was say, No. Now it looks like they are pressured to say, Yes with way too little data and time to digest it all. The appearance of adverse effects could halt a product, but with these vaccines, adverse effects don’t even cause a pause. They just broaden to include babies.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb went directly from heading the FDA to the board of Pfizer. He then tried to silence reporter Alex Berenson in the summer of 2021 when Berenson discovered that the Covid vaccine didn’t actually prevent transmission. He urged Twitter to ban Berenson from the platform, and generally tried to have him silenced.
Agree! It's sad that his intelligence and knowledge has been sucked into the $$$$ vortex of board seats and DC grab-assing. The man is smart, but it's being used in the wrong way. He's a political animal out to make millions. As I've told my kids, whenever there is bad behavior or someone's moral compass is gone, guaranteed it's sex, or money....or both!
Sociopaths come in all shapes and forms. Not all are murderers. I used to work for one.
Impose personal liability. Every person who suffers a negative outcome should be able to sue Gottlieb personally. Ruin him. Ruin every government official and corporate flack who was behind this.
I’m reminded of an old lament among design professionals -
“engineers get sued for their mistakes, doctors bury theirs”
But, but, but lawyers!!!! They are ranked down there with used car salesmen! Seriously the character assassination of lawyers through tort reform and othe Democrat policies may be where liability started to unravel.
Absent specific knowledge of the Berenson situation I’ll stipulate to your assertions. However Gottlieb had a more nuanced take which he lays out in detail in his book”Uncontrolled Spread”. Worth a read even where there is much to disagree with.
100% agree. Every single (approved) drug has a benefit, and risks. All of the risks for these vaxes seem to have evaporated into thin air. I've worked for large, med and small companies and I have seen a LOT. And although I do think there are good scientists at FDA, frequently they are asleep at the wheel and only wake up when something is politically hot, or there's a serious side effect that's erupted. If you want your head to spin, do some research on FDA's approval of Aduhelm. The approval was so unjustified, there was a neurology group in the DC area that placed an orange sign on their door that said "if you're here to sell us Aduhelm, do not come in". How much more do you need to know?
I’ve been on a few medications that worked very well for me but were pulled because some subset of patients had some side effect that wasn’t detected during approval testing. Celebrex was one.
Celebrex returned to the market after a larger subset who turned to OTC NSAIDs had higher rates of gastric bleeding.
These are complex issues requiring years to resolve.
The COVID shot fetish is going to have extensive impacts we’ve not yet even imagined.
The worst part is that the whole thing is a man made catastrophe.
My father-in-law nearly bled to death on Celebrex. I mean within minutes of graveyard dead. He was a German Lutheran living in Wisconsin - a very strong believer in authority, and under no circumstances would he buck or even question his quack physician - who was the worst I have ever seen, and I've seen a lot - who tried to put him back on it after he recovered from the radical stomach surgery that saved his life.
Yeah I learned a long time ago to be my own medical advocate!
For reasons unknown, probably genetic, some people react very badly to Celebrex. Others like me rely upon it.
Ultimately any pharmaceutical can have unexpected results in individuals.
The question is how many, how bad and all the other components of cost/benefit analysis.
Glad your FIL came out okay on the bad end of a drug reaction!
Don't most sentient beings understand that large, unwieldy bureaucracies are not effective?
The same people want the entire US medical system run by a bureaucracy.
Unfortunately common sense is rare.
Unfortunately, those who love big government think that the bureaucracy problem is solvable, not an inherent aspect of bureaucracy. And they TRUST bureaucracies made up of people who share their political views.
Abramson’s recent book “sickening” and earlier ones recount in great detail the infiltration of Pharma money into every element and phase of the medical system, including FDA, the medical journals etc since the late 1980s. What happened with Covid seems to be classic playbook.
There is too much money to be made.
Funny you should mention Splenda. I am highly allergic to sucralose (Splenda) and the FDA was well aware of the gastric distress it causes. But did they put a warning label on the product? No they did not.
Wonder why? And now that poisonous garbage is in every food product imaginable. Try to buy a protein supplement that doesn't have it. Including protein bars etc.
Ugh, all artificial sweeteners are bad! I’m trying unsuccessfully to convince my fiancé to give up Coke Zero. The amount of garbage US citizens consume and call “food” is insane.
My holistic doc just told me that Stevia - the natural, plant-derived sweetener - is bad too. Apparently it harms gut bacteria.
I’ve heard recently too that Stevia is no good. Bottom line for me is real sugar but only a little of it.
Several of these new sweeteners make me throw up, and unfortunately they are often hidden/not labeled in an informative way. They are included in regular (not diet) soft drinks in Europe to address the WHO’s anti-sugar concerns. 
I got on the anti-sugar bandwagon only to learn it is bankrolled by the artificial sweetener industry. Yes I know sugar is an inflammatory so I moderate my intake. The same thing happened with no-fat years ago and lead to mass consumption of trans fats. Think for yourselves. It is the only way to navigate the various snake pits.
My husband went through a nutrition phase two decades ago. First it was no eggs ever. That lasted 6 or 7 years. Then it was two per week. Now it’s two every morning.
Me? I’m not going to spend my life hoping some easy answer to the mystery of life expectancy is lying in a statistician’s data set. I eat what I want in moderation. The St Augustine Diet I call it
Me too. Otherwise it is like a dog chasing its tail. Additionally I think that individuals are different and one size fits all. That is probably true of this vaccine as well - it may be okay for some and very bad for others
.
I tell my husband each of us will die eventually. No I don’t want to die today (yet, just started PT so give it time!) but one day.
Life is too short to spend it denying oneself life’s small pleasures in hopes the denial *might* give one an extra 48 hours on the planet.
Wow I had not realized that, good to know.
Fortunately for me (considering that I have Type 1 diabetes), I have not have bad reactions to any artificial sweeteners. But I know people who do. Labeling needs to be required.
I read that the animal studies were replaced with computer simulations. Any computer simulation is only as good as the data entered. Whereas animal studies produce readily observable results.
Edited to correct the d$*n autocorrect.
And I’m here to tell you code is easily manipulated.
Oh I know about upcoding. I think there was a lot during covid.
I have been in pharma R&D for 37 yrs (still am) and we still do animals studies in animals...no simulations.
Are you insane? There were more man-hours committed to development and testing of these vaccines than virtually every vaccine in history. You're using the wrong measure. Also, the vaccine literally saved lives. You know who's not around to complain about the vaccine? People who died of COVID before they could get vaccinated.
You cannot do a 2 generation repro study and a 2 yr carcingenicity study with more man hours.
Do we know whether the vaccine causes reproductive toxicity? No we don’t. Yet pregnant women were given the vaccine. And women’s menstrual cycles have been disrupted, suggesting some unexpected effect on hormones or ovaries.
Do we know whether the mRNA or its spike protein is carcinogenic? No, we don’t. It takes 2 yrs to assess that.
And you want babies to be given this?
I also think that rushing to get the vaccine out in 2020/21 was justified given the actual crisis at hand. Now, we have a different situation. Not only do we understand more about the risks of the vaccine, we also have the data to understand the risks of getting covid across age groups and comorbidities. That data should guide decision making, not blanket mandates.
I don't know NCMaureen but I'll take a wild guess that she, indeed, is not insane.
It would be great if you can share your reference that shows that 'more man hours committed to development and testing of the covid vaccines than virtually every vaccine in history'.
I am in favor of strictly enforced vaccine mandates.
The mandates would go like this: Everyone who supported vaccine mandates would be mandated to take a shot of this stuff every 4 months from now on.
Enjoy, scumbags.
Butt but but......"why do you hate your neighbors?" "Wouldn't Jesus want you to take the jab?"
Scumbags doesn't even begin to capture my loathing for these sanctimonious cretins.
I love that approach. Kinda like sending illegals to sanctuary cities
If you ‘self certify’ that you are a citizen when you get your driver’s license, in Washington, you get to vote.
(reason Smiley can’t win)
If you say the word ‘asylum’ at the border, like fidelio in Eyes Wide Shut, you get to live in America.
$200 billion in unemployment funds were stolen because the form online allowed you to simply declare you are eligible.
(So that’s 2 million people stealing $100,000 each, or some other combination of large numbers.)
If you claim you object sincerely on religious grounds to taking the experimental vaccine that TV host Donald Trump hired a veterinarian to produce, you are told by the government to go screw yourself.
Seems fair. Great job, everyone.
This post is false. Tell me you know nothing but right-wing talking points without telling me you know nothing but right-wing talking points.
This is not about health and safety for children or anyone else. It's strictly the drug companies receiving a lifetime funding line from the government. Just think of the billions over the years the drug companies will get, and they predominately support one party. Guess who? Anyone remember during that worldwide lock down; the Dems were in Puerto Rico on the beaches for a conference paid for by Pharma.
You already have serious concerns about the long-term studies that have not been done. So, what the Hell, jab the kids, what could go wrong? The minority communities already distrust the government on diseases and vaccines, with reason by the way. Add in the distrust of a very large segment of the population that sees the Liberals wanting to keep that club to beat people into following their absolutely shit for brains policies and programs and we have the population looking at the CDC as a political action committee. Who actually says, The CDC says it's good, let's go do it? No one ever!
I for one would rather follow the Scandinavian Countries policies versus the political riddled CDC that kisses ass to stay important. Just another example of the government reacting to Liberal impulses versus that pesky old SCIENCE.
Hopefully if the Dems lose the majority, this can be reversed. But I put no faith in any politician.
What you say is true. However, remember it was under Trump that the “Warp Speed” jab was developed. It was the Republican N.H. Governor who vetoed the Ivermectin sale. Outside of Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, both the Republicans and the Dems both do the bidding of their big Pharma donation bosses. Don’t be fooled - either party will throw you under the bus for a few million dollar donation to their campaign.
While President, Trump didn't urge the CDC to make the jab mandatory. He ridiculed excessive masking, and urged schools to reopen.
Also he took every recommendation his medical advisors gave him, which is appropriate for a president, and during that time was viciously criticized both when he followed their advice and when he opposed it.
It never mattered one bit what Trump did, they were always going to blame the CDC's failure on Trump. Heck, I have Facebook posts from March 2020 saying that's what they would do, and they did.
But again the "both sides" argument is nonsense. One side was resisting these abuses and the other side was gleefully and sanctimoniously attacking anyone who resisted the abuses. No comparison.
No she is right there are Republicans complicit as well. We really need to ferret them out.
He ridiculed all masking because he's an idiot. Did you get the bleach injection he recommended yet?
Which is exactly why I say, I put little faith in either party. Politicians by nature only care about power, self, and re-election.
Personally I think Trump's Covid management was his biggest failure. He brought the odious Fauci and scarf lady on board.
Definitely the pandemic killed his chances for reelection. I believe otherwise he would have handily beaten an idiot like Biden. Did he really handle the pandemic that poorly? I guess history will judge (if we have any decent, trained historians in the future).
I specifically meant Fauci and Birken. But they were perceived as the experts and that is his MO - rely on people who know. I do think he tried to course correct but it was too late.
And once Fauci was beatified and canonized by the mainstream press he became untouchable.
yes if Trump had done the right thing and fired him, the Dems would have screamed for his impeachment... again... and once again wasted the country's time and resources on another pointless trial... and failed once again... whilst being chear-led by the corrupt media and big tech.
Every decent President (as well as CEO's and other leaders) course corrects; it's what makes them good leaders. But every little thing Trump tried was attacked, and any successes were distorted and decried as failures. The Democrats and tech allies deployed reality distortion filters on Google searches and every single mainstream news organization, creating a sort of mass formation psychosis (as described recently by an eminent psychologist) among people.
Just the other day, I was at an event in New York City and a white Boomer liberal started blubbering about how happy she was that the NY AG was going after Trump for his real estate tax evasion (or whatever the frameup is). A friend tapped her on the shoulder and murmured something, pointing in my direction (I'm a known conservative in these circles) and she shut up. Which was fine, but it doesn't matter; I am not so childish as to go and start or continue a ridiculous political fight.
Let the liberals stamp and wail like the babies they are. Their comeuppance is coming.
Big Pharma “capture” of the CDC, NIAID, NIH, etc… will not change with a Republican majority in Congress. Both parties are responsible for this mess. The money is too big to say no.
$$$ for drug companies and I believe some extra liability protection
I agree with the author.
COVID vaccinations should be analogous to flu vaccinations rather than to standard childhood vaccinations.
You’re spot on. As a parent of 2 young kids, I am now questioning every childhood vaccine presented to us at the pediatrician’s office. I am now fearful of nearly every additive in the “essential” vaccines, as I have zero confidence in the Covid vaccine. The CDC seems to be incredibly corrupt.
You're smart to be skeptical. People need to wake up to the likelihood that the spectacular corruption circus we've witnessed with the Covid vax is not in its first run; this is the Pharma playbook in action, just newly laid bare for the public to see.
There is so much I respect about Vinay Prasad's courage in taking on the Pharma-funded regulatory/medical establishment cabal over this vaccine, but his final paragraph shows he has not looked into the facts surrounding the supposed "fraud" of the Wakefield et al study, namely that its linking of the MMR to autism appeared as a single comment in the conclusion of their brief (five page) paper. The 13 authors, who were investigating the health issues of kids with autism and had noted what appeared to be a new bowel disorder in such children, included a statement (after much internal debate) that most parents reported that the symptoms first appeared after the MMR, and the authors recommended further investigation of this claim. That was it. It was NOT a "deeply flawed" study about autism and MMR, which is what most people believe thanks to the media and medical complex's crucifixion of Wakefield, at Pharma's behest.
There are many many more details of the story, but the main point is: we now know how effectively the cabal can spread lies and propaganda to take down, sideline, or annihilate the career of anyone who threatens their power and profits. Wakefield and his co-authors didn't have the benefit of social media channels through which to defend themselves and the facts, but now that such channels exist we are seeing the cabal's recent victims being revealed, as facts leak through to expose the lies.
I wish Prasad would extend his skepticism and curiosity to question whether this level of corruption and incompetence is really a new phenomenon that's only emerged with Covid. Because that really isn't a strong probability when you consider that every major Pharma company has paid out multiple millions in fraud damages for dangerous products they got on the market through misrepresentations of safety (and the assistance of their cronies in the regulatory process). In fact, it ONLY makes sense if we trust that these companies have placed all their ethical people in their indemnified vaccine divisions, where lawsuits cannot compel discovery of fraud claims.
Yes. That last paragraph pretty much ruined his essay. It was completely unnecessary to his other, valid points, imo. He showed his pro-vax-at-all-costs-and-don’t-look-too-close self. He’s made an exception with covid shots, but that’s it. Oh well, gotta start somewhere, and I’ve noticed that there are quite a few folks on the comments that are likely learning some new things! That’s a good thing!
Don’t go down the rabbit hole of aluminum adjuvant.
So you're risking your children's health because you don't understand science? Got it. They're lucky to have you.
You're right - they are lucky. They might get Chickenpox, but at least they won't be filled with aluminum, mercury and monkey tissue. Most parents don't do any research prior to blindly injecting their children with toxins. Do your own research before you judge :) Have a nice day!
"do your own research"
Why do I suspect that "your own research" is reading your Facebook feed as opposed to controlled studies in your basement? Why do people think that Googling and reading results that agree with their preconceived ideas counts as "research"?
Maybe we should leave the "research" to actual researchers. But I'm sure you know WAY better. Hopefully your kids will grow up to be more critical thinkers than their mom.
I have read multiple books, scientific studies, and listened to 100+ hours of podcasts by well-known and respected doctors and scientists. Additionally, I have used the NIH and CDC websites as resources. I also have a wonderful new MD who believes in certain vaccines and knows others are not worth the risk. Bet you're someone who just complies and doesn't bother to ask any questions because the CDC and your doc "know what's best for you". Ah, to live in such blissful ignorance. Must be nice!
Did you know there is currently a class action lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol? There is now evidence (30+ years later) that it can cause Autism in utero. Betcha haven't heard about that one yet! Its a big world out there... much for us ALL to learn! Science is never settled.
"don't trust the CDC"..."i used the CDC websites as resources". Make up your mind. "Scientific studies"? Please - if that were true, you wouldn't be getting in arguments on the internet - you'd have better things to do with your time, Doctor.
Also, there's ALWAYS a class-action lawsuit against everyone; that's how lawyers make money - by tricking stupid people into thinking they'll get free money if they make a a claim against a big company. Also, LOL at "Tylenol causes autism". According to nutjobs like you, EVERYTHING causes autism.
I think your 4th Covid jab is causing some neuro issues….
Life has risks. If you think that a small number of negative outcomes invalidates overwhelming benefits of scientific progress then you're not a very critical thinker. Why do all you brilliant people who are so quick to look for examples of negative outcomes in medical science not cease driving your cars the moment you see a story about a fatal crash on the highway? Seems that your "think, don't believe" approach only applies to things that don't agree with your ideology. Unfortunately, I doubt that you are better than that.
So your proposal is for scientists to hold back on their vaccinations for, say, 20-30 years until they've done studies on the effects that would satisfy you? Or should it be longer? And in the meantime, if someone contract a disease that could have been mitigated by the vaccine, that's too bad for them. Because J Campbell isn't satisfied.
Scientists in the US have done too well - they've literally made the diseases they protect against no longer threatening. Funny how people were literally lining up for vaccines when they were introduced in the mid-1900s because they had REAL experiences with the diseases these vaccines protected against. Then just a few generations later, morons like you make baseless claims about risk then insist that there's danger in vaccines because no one cares to prove you wrong.
To this point re: liability, I have seen mentioned (whispered, rather, because 2022...) that the CV vax-makers will only benefit from the liability shield IF it's added to the childhood schedule. I (we all) should look into this.
Yep. Everyone is scratching their heads, wondering why they've pushed this shot so hard for kids, who are at significantly higher risk for adverse events from it than they are for any complications from Covid. The answer is: they need to get it on the kids schedule in order to maintain liability for the manufacturers after FDA approval (which they've essentially succeeded in doing, since the ACIP just voted 15-0 last week to recommend the shot be added to the CDC's adult AND KIDS vaccine schedules). This is also why Cominarity was not available/used in the U.S. after its approval; everyone in America was still given the EUA version because that's the product that still had liability protection for Pfizer. The entire trajectory from the outset of these shots has been to get them on the CDC childhood schedule and thereby protect the profits for the manufacturers.
This will definitely metastasize perfectly rational skepticism of COVID vaccines for kids into irrational skepticism of useful vaccines. The 'experts' and 'leaders' making this decision have to know this.
So are they playing a game of political chicken with half the country's kids? Or are they little more than children themselves, chronically bowing to peer pressure?
Are you so sure it is irrational to question vaccines, or at least the vaccine schedule? I know people who are true anti-vaxxers and I thought they were nuts, but now I'm not so sure. All my kids were vaxxed as well without questions but I will absolutely never take a flu shot again.
I’m not sure how old your kids are but look at the schedule now. It’s insane and every rational parent should question it.
In addition to the skyrocketing autism rates. When I was a kid (I’m 42), I knew zero autistic kids. Now they’re saying if the rates continue apace, 1 in 10 boys will be on the spectrum by the next decade. Something is causing that. Interesting correlation with how the vaxx schedule has also increased so rapidly for our babies and the pressure on pregnant women to be vaccinated. I’m not anti vaxx but common sense tells you something is VERY wrong. Maybe it’s roundup, maybe it’s all the rancid seed oils, maybe it’s all the fucking sugar everywhere, maybe it’s a combo of everything but there is nothing irrational with questioning.
And I have an Aspie kid, can’t say I ever blamed vaccines. I am curious why boys are so afflicted though.
Many vaccines have stood the test of time- IPV, DTP, MMR- and I am thankful my kids had them. Also the meningococcal vaccines for college kids are important.
For many (most) children, Hep B could be delayed. The others- rotavirus, varicella, Hib, PCV, Hpv, influenza and now Covid- it’s a lot.
I don’t take the flu shot. I had a really nasty bout of influenza in 1998. Since recovering from that bout I’ve not had influenza, not even the swine flu everyone freaked out about in what, 2005? My kids caught it but I was fine.
The wonders of the human immune system aren’t fully understood. The wages of greed, however, have been catalogued for ages.
Our daughter and her husband have been able to remain unvaxxed vs. the Crud. One reason was that they were planning on starting a family. We are SO happy now that they don't have to be concerned about possible dodgy-stuff happening in their reproductive systems and other organs after mRNA and spike proteins.
Grandson was born last month--YAY! They have found a pediatric practice that definitely recommends the traditional serious vax like polio, but gives parents a ton of info about each vax and lets the parents decide. They are interested in spacing the shots out a bit, which makes sense. Seems like the fact that they now live in Texas has something to do with them being able to find a pediatric practice that is more willing to consider alternatives.
If you look at the years of results regarding the flu shot, it is an abject failure.
I questioned the vaccine schedule when my children were small, because the risks of injecting multiple immune system challenges all at once into children under the age of 6 months did not seem rational or safe. My kids got their vaccinations, but on a delayed schedule.
I don't take flu shots, due to the many issues with those. I took the pneumonia vaccination recommended for older people last year, having been told that I would not need to take it again. Lo and behold, I am now being pressured to take the "updated" pneumonia vaccine. No thank you!
My comment was in no way an endorsement of every other shot on the market, and I’m not sure how you got there.
Step 1: Create Venn diagram with recommended childhood vaccinations in 1) USA 2) UK 3) Denmark 4) Sweden 5) Japan (countries with very diverse and different health systems)
Step 2: Anything the USA "recommends" that is not in at least TWO other lists can be safely ignored
Yes, and it might also be worth chronicling the relative incidence of autism, ADHD, asthma and allergies overseas.
Side note: 5-way Venn diagrams really suck.
This article demonstrates that the most valuable thing for any organization is it's reputation.
When the CDC consulted with the teacher's unions and ignored the teachers and the parents (yes, I included teachers) - they severely damaged their reputation.
It will be interesting to see if they can recover it. Adding the Covid vaccine to their guidelines was probably not a good move.
Thank you, for separating teachers from unions. I teach in a state that is an exception. My department was drug in and out of school, while the rest of students and staff remained home. I have students who just returned to "in-person" school, for the first time since March 2020. I had no say over what occurred. I was furious. The majority was afraid and all logic went out the window. Consequences didn't matter. Profound, willful denial. School systems are driven by fending off lawsuits and policies created by people who have no idea what's happening in the classrooms.
👆x1000
The absolute irony of this CDC recommendation is that the vaccine is not APPROVED for ages 6 mon-12 yrs...it's still under an EUA (Emergency Use Authorization)!!!!! Here's Pfizer's branded page for the vax: https://www.comirnaty.com/#safety-information
HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? I know...they're all in bed together. this sickens me.
And does anyone else find the labeling to be an oxymoron: what’s the emergency for these kids? They might get a cold?
Excellent article. However, I have a small quibble with one assertion. Just as some public school education is substandard, so is some homeschool education. Much homeschool education is excellent and I find it irresponsible to label it all as substandard.
The homeschoolers I know are very well educated. Both of mine went on to college (one has already graduated). Home schooling is definitely NOT substandard.
Based on the sat scores it is a falsehood entirely. The SAT scores for homeschool kids is higher than the average. They try to debunk it by saying it is self selection but everyone self selects to take the test.
I have no doubt that conscientious parents find ways to homeschool their kids that produce results superior to what the public school system offers. The concern is for the children whose parents are not so motivated. The reports I have read regarding online “learning” during the pandemic are revealing and alarming. A large portion of kids never tuned in.
I think the key to educational success is parental involvement, whether home schooling or public/private schooling. I’m betting that the kids who didn’t fall behind during the classroom lock outs had parents that got involved in their education.
The last year I homeschooled our youngest daughter before she went to public high school, we enrolled her in a new online school that was "open enrollment" in our state, which meant we didn't have to pay for it.
Despite the fact that I was closely involved in her schooling, the online school was a disaster. Her teachers were not meaningfully present. The curriculum (based on Common Core) was a complete mess, to the point that I had to get directly involved in finding and teaching material that was being taught out of order. Eventually she simply started resisting participation (in something she had been eager to try at the beginning of the year).
Homeschooling has to be geared to the needs of the student, not to the needs of the parent or the needs of the school system.
Personally, I think I would have done well in an online school as a child (not that such a thing was more than a sci-fi fantasy at that time). Our middle son would done well. I am sure that our oldest son would have done just as poorly with it as our youngest daughter did.
But I can tell you from personal experience that whether online school is successful or not depends a lot more on the child's learning style than on the parents' involvement.
It does seem likely! It hurts to consider how many business, services and institutions were closed during the pandemic, perhaps reducing the possibility that other parents were at work. Here in the Atlanta area, the school systems came up with really inventive ways to make sure kids could study online. My county bought untold numbers of laptops for kids to check out, and one county drove school businesses into neighborhoods to serve as hotspots where there was below par connectivity.
I would have to say that neglecting your children’s future potential may be a sign of despair.
Online school is a mess. For my daughter's last year of homeschool, we signed up for an online school that had just become available in our state as an "open enrollment" option (meaning that it didn't cost us anything).
The teachers were mostly AWOL, but parents were not expected to be part of the process either. The students were expected to work through online units with little or no direct instruction from teachers. Math and science were poorly designed "Common Core," with the result that kids were expected to be familiar with material they had not yet been taught (I had to look through the textbook, find the relevant material, and teach it to my daughter myself so that she could do her online work). Eventually, my daughter resisted doing her schoolwork at all.
I would never recommend online school for any but the most self-motivated kids. I would have done well in such a system, I think. And our middle son probably would as well. But it was a nightmare for our youngest daughter and it probably would have been a nightmare for our oldest son.
I will be eternally grateful for the Home School Assistance Program that our school district in Cedar Rapids was operating when we lived there. It gave me the courage and resources to homeschool our sons when they desperately needed an alternative to what their schools were offering. It provided a supervising teacher for free (ours was an art teacher by education, so she brought art projects each month when she visited). It also provided textbooks to choose from. And the most wonderful part of it all was that it provided group activities that our kids could attend, including band, choir, science fair, spelling bee, geography bee, field trips, and once-a-week PE and art classes with other kids in the program. The benefit for the district was that they got funding--not as much as if the kids were in classrooms, but more than if the students were being homeschooled with no connection to the district.
The district we lived when our youngest daughter was homeschooled had no such program. The best we could do was dual enrollment, so she could go to art and PE. And the online school had nothing good about it at all.
I am a former democrat and a ONE ISSUE voter now (in GA). I am hoping to see all this criminals where they belong. Rand Paul has been sniffing Fauci’s ass long enough to give me hope that he will go after him and all the medical cartels who orchestrated this madness and attacked our constitutional rights with their (STILL GOING ON) emergency bullshit. Most damage was done to our poor and underprivileged children by removing them from their communities and now they want to force their fucking poison into their bodies. I lost trust in the medical establishment many years ago after I killed my cat with the “annual health checkups”. Never again, not me, not anyone else in my family, furry or not. And btw, I grew up in Romania where measles was a “childhood disease” with some fever and a week home from school. Glad to see parents are questioning everything now, might be the one good thing we get out of this.
THESE criminals. All of them: Fauci, Bourla, Walenski, Daszak, all the WH minions suppressing free speech, all medical professionals who swept damaged lives under the rug.
Either the members of the advisory panel are fully aware of the fact that these shots are of no benefit to kids or they are dumber than a box of hair. I believe it’s the former. Fifteen to zero?? GMAFB. So why recommend to add the shot to the immunization schedule? This is 100% about shielding the manufacturers from liability. It has nothing to do with public health. As with school closures and nearly 2 years of mask mandates, once again, our kids are being thrown under the bus.
Why shouldn’t we believe these people are on the take?
Who would vote "no" under such circumstances, knowing it would destroy their career?
Someone with a spine.
Someone who cares about the health of children and their fellow citizens.
Someone who realizes that the whole point of their position on such a board is to make the very tough calls.
Someone who cares more about good medicine than their career.
Hell if they thought they would be the only voice of dissent, then speak loud and get a book deal when they get ran out of the board room.
Evil previals when good people do nothing.
(My comment...rant...is not directed at you Terry, but all the people who don't see the danger of going along to get along or deny the slippery slope of incremental power grabs and corruption. Neither happen in big steps until its too late to stop.)
In other words someone with integrity.
Absolutely! It seems to me integrity is a lost value, or at least undervalued in the US these days.
One of my favorite quotes is "we are who we are in the dark" and pops into my mind every time I have a tough decision to make.
Someone who took Hippocratic oath?
Someone who is about to retire or resign. Even those people are afraid to jeopardize their pensions.
The CDC has been politicized for years; its leadership are anti-gun activists, who routinely claim that guns are a "public health emergency". Now physicians are being advised to ask patients during routine medical exams: "Do you own any guns?" (The only safe and correct answer to such an intrusive question is "No", followed by "Mind your own business!")
Their behavior during the Wuhan Virus pandemic has been equally appalling, issuing reckless guidelines from on high and persecuting any scientists and physicians who dared question them. Until a new study emerges proving the CDC wrong, again, and they then revise the guidelines with no apology to those brave, intelligent practitioners whose careers were ruined.
If I had the stomach, I could also go into the CDC's opinions on delusional gender bending that they are promoting in the school systems.
Is it any wonder that such a corrupt, radicalized agency has lost all trust and credibility with millions of Americans?