Tag: health care

When Did Obesity Become a Drug Deficiency?

Look at almost any photograph of an American crowd taken 60 years ago. It can be a baseball game, a high school graduation, a beach, an airport terminal, a factory floor, or simply people walking down a city street. Something is immediately noticeable to modern eyes, although almost nobody in the photograph would have considered it remarkable: most people are relatively thin.

They did not have continuous glucose monitors, smartphone applications that counted calories and macronutrients, wearable devices reminding them to stand, boutique fitness studios, bariatric surgery centers, or medications capable of producing 15 or 20 percent reductions in body weight. They were not necessarily more virtuous than we are, and they certainly did not possess superior genes. They lived in a different metabolic environment.

The data backs up what we see in those old photos. In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of American adults were obese. By August 2023, that number had jumped to 40.3 percent, with another 31.7 percent considered overweight and nearly one in ten classified as severely obese.[1] This trend isn’t just in the United States. A huge study of over 220 million people from 200 countries found a dramatic global rise in obesity between 1990 and 2022.[2] Our genes haven’t changed much in that time. Something else has.

We’re now at a turning point in medicine. Faced with one of the biggest and fastest changes in human health, we’re treating the results as a condition that needs lifelong medication. The newest drugs are very effective, and that’s important to recognize. Semaglutide and tirzepatide have led to weight loss that older nonsurgical treatments rarely matched.[3,4] Semaglutide has also reduced the risk of major heart problems in people with overweight or obesity and heart disease who didn’t have diabetes.[5] Tirzepatide has greatly improved sleep apnea in people with obesity.[6] These results are significant, and these drugs are much more than cosmetic weight-loss aids.

That’s why we need to look closely at what’s happening now. The problem isn’t that these drugs don’t work; they clearly do. The real concern is that they might work so well that we stop asking why so many people need them in the first place. We could be seeing a major medical breakthrough, but at the same time, we might be accepting that the effects of an unhealthy environment should just be managed with medication. The real question isn’t whether these “GLP-1” drugs are effective. It’s whether their success is making us stop looking for the root causes of the obesity epidemic.

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The Lancet Jumps the Shark

The Lancet’s latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence.

Titled “Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective,” it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives.

Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years.

What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it.

It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language.

The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant.

The review describes mRNA vaccines as a “transformative advance” characterised by “rapid clearance,” “lack of genomic integration,” and a “favourable safety profile.” It concludes that the accumulated evidence “affirms” the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable.

Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail.

Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn’t.

The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles “remain largely localised to the injection site” with “limited distribution” to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days.

But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of “rapid clearance” and “short-lived antigen expression” — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant.

Only last year, members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people.

When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review.

Residual DNA is treated similarly.

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Zohran Mamdani Administration Signs Multimillion Dollar Contracts With Vendors for ‘Gender-Affirming’ Care for Minors

The administration of Zohran Mamdani in New York City has just signed contracts worth upwards of $9 million with vendors who will provide ‘gender-affirming care’ to minors, including puberty-blocking drugs.

This issue seriously hurt Democrats in 2024, and they clearly do not care. They simply refuse to let go of it, no matter what the public thinks.

Their activist base won’t allow them to move on.

The New York Post reports:

The Mamdani administration is entering into two contracts totaling $8.9 million to provide “gender-affirming” sex reassignment care to transgender patients under the age of 18.

The move backs a policy the federal Department of Justice has challenged as medically dangerous and illegal.

The city Department of Health identified two vendors — Callen-Lorde and Nonprofit Organization for Philanthropic Initiatives — to provide the services in contracts that run from 2027-29.

“This includes the prescription and administration of puberty-blockers and hormone replacement therapy to all minor patients for whom such services are medically necessary based on the prevailing standards of care,” the DOH said in a public notice.

“Services will be performed by qualified medical providers with current New York State licensure, and will be provided consistent with state laws governing parental consent.”

Critics blasted Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team, claiming they are trying to circumvent the federal ban on gender care services for minors.

“They’re making an ideological decision instead of a medical decision,” said state Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar.

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Abdul El-Sayed Is Either Lying or Very Stupid

“If you think health care is expensive now, wait till you see how much it costs when it’s free!” said PJ O’Roarke, famously. 

If there’s one thing government is horrible at it is estimating how much things will cost. I don’t recall a single incidence where the official estimates were well under what a program actually cost, though it has to have happened in the thousands of government programs that exist. 

But healthcare is something they are especially awful at estimating. When Medicare was originally passed, the official government estimates of costs had the entire program costing $12 billion a year by 1990. It cost that much in 5 years, in 1990 the program cost about $100 billion. That’s quite a big miss, don’t you think?

That miss, however, did not give the federal government pause or even have them thinking about repeal, “reform” or really changing the program to cut costs at all. It was only 5 years old, it would have been fairly easy to do, or at least much easier. Yet, they did nothing – and by “they” I mean politicians. 

What Abdul El-Sayed is promising is nothing new, Democrats have been pushing for one degree or another of socialized medicine for decades, and every little step they’ve taken – every time they’ve messed with the system to “improve” it has been designed for that very purpose. 

Obamacare was not only destined to fail; it was designed to. The only problem Democrats had was it failed too soon – right from the start – allowing voters to notice their lies and associate the cost increases with the Democrats directly responsible for them. They also noticed the lack of being able to keep their plan and the doctor they liked, not to mention the fact that the $2,500 in premium savings didn’t materialize, it just went in the other direction. 

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Trump Wants to Give $90 to Seniors and $76 Billion to Health Insurers

With less than a month from the midterm elections, President Trump announced that more than 20 million seniors would get a payment of “nearly $100” to help with their Medicare Part B premiums. The White House later said the actual amount of the one-time payment is $90 and will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund which was created in 2008 to improve traditional Medicare. The White House says it holds about $2 billion.

Congress had been planning to tap the fund later this year to help finance a modest Medicare pay increase for doctors and extend several health programs, including funding for community health centers and bonuses for doctors participating in certain alternative payment models. With the fund now being used for the $90 payments, lawmakers will have to find the money elsewhere or put those plans on hold.

Money is money and I am all for helping American seniors with their medical bills, but $90 won’t cover even half of one month’s premium. After a record increase this year, the standard Part B premium is $202.90

But what’s not in the announcement is far more important than what’s in it: Neither Trump nor CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz has said a word about clawing back the tens of billions of dollars Medicare overpays private insurers every year. Neither did any administration before them, at least not in a way that stuck. In 2026 alone, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) estimates Medicare will pay Medicare Advantage plans $76 billion more than it would spend on the same people in traditional Medicare.

So the $2 billion Trump plans to hand out is less than 3% of what insurers will collect in excess payments this year.

If the $76 billion troubles you then the bigger picture is going to be truly startling. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that if nothing changes, overpayments will total about $1.2 trillion through 2035. That is all money that big insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare, Aetna and Humana get to keep. And it’s money that they don’t want to give up – again with taxpayers being stuck with the bill.

And seniors themselves pay part of that bill. CRFB estimates Medicare Advantage overpayments will add $230 billion to Part B premiums over the next decade. Those higher premiums are paid by everyone enrolled in Part B, including seniors in traditional Medicare who never signed up for a private Medicare Advantage plan.

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The Great Cholesterol Lie and The Dangers of Statins

The more I study science, the more I come to see how often fundamental facts end up being changed so that a profitable industry can be created. In the case of heart disease, I very much believe that is the case and in this publication, I’ve tried to expose the erroneous information that predominates our understanding of this subject (e.g., previously I’ve discussed why our model of how the heart pumps blood in the body is incorrect, the forgotten Russian research that shows the heart intelligently controls how blood moves within the body, and how blood pressure management is filled with erroneous premises that exist to perpetually sell medications).

Within cardiology, I believe one of the most damaging falsehoods is that cholesterol causes heart disease and that taking statins (or their newer lucrative equivalents), which lower cholesterol, are the key to preventing heart disease. This is because, in addition to those “facts” being incorrect, statins are also some of the most dangerous and widely used pharmaceutical drugs on the market.

Cholesterol and Heart Disease

Frequently, when an industry harms many people, it will create a scapegoat to get out of trouble. Once this happens, a variety of other sectors that also benefit from that scapegoat existing will jump on the bandwagon. Before long, a false belief that harms society becomes an unquestionable dogma that becomes very difficult to overturn because many corrupt parties have a vested interest in maintaining the lie.

For example, various easily addressable factors (which often exist in the first place because they benefit an industry) are responsible for the chronic diseases we face in society and our vulnerability to infectious diseases (e.g., the obese and diabetics were much more likely to catch COVID-19). However, by saying all diseases result from insufficient vaccination, it gets all those destructive industries off the hook and creates a huge market for selling vaccines and treatments for these illnesses. Thus, since there are so many vested interests behind the vaccine paradigm, it is very difficult to overturn—despite the fact there’s no evidence vaccines ended the era of infectious disease but the existing evidence does show they are responsible for the massive epidemic of chronic disease that is sweeping our country.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over what caused heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit. On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin’s work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.

Note: a case can also be made that the mass adoption of vegetable oils lead to this increase in heart disease. Likewise, some believe the advent of water chlorination was responsible for this increase.

Ancel Keys won, Yudkin’s work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion.

However, what many don’t know (as this study is still frequently cited) is that this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., one author illustrated that if Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite would have been found).

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Multi-Million Dollar TRICARE Fraud Bought A Gold-Plated Cybertruck And Casino Parties

Millions of dollars spent on casino-themed parties, expensive hotels and a gold-plated Cybertruck. It sounds like the spending spree of a character from The Wolf of Wall Street. Instead, federal prosecutors say the absurd spending was financed by a 64-year-old mental health clinic owner named Kevin Darnell Curry.

Curry, who owned and operated Acuity TMS of Plano, Acuity TMS of Fort Worth and Emerald Coast TMS of Fort Walton Beach, was convicted of submitting roughly $26 million in fraudulent claims to TRICARE, which paid out approximately $17 million.

These clinics, which offered transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, operated in areas with substantial military populations. His Fort Walton Beach clinic sat in the same Florida Panhandle military community as Eglin Air Force Base and Hurlburt Field, while his Fort Worth operation was near Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth. A third clinic operated in Plano, north of Dallas, Texas.

The scheme involved an unknown number of active duty service members, veterans and military family members covered by TRICARE, though the indictment did not identify where they lived or which installations, if any, the active-duty beneficiaries were assigned to. Curry falsely presented himself as a medical doctor, using fake credentials to convince service members and families to sign up for the treatment.

Curry was convicted of three counts of health care fraud, three counts of offering and paying illegal health care kickbacks and three counts of engaging in monetary transactions in criminally derived property. Federal authorities previously seized approximately $200,000 in assets connected to Curry’s case, including $136,022 in cash and the gold-plated Cybertruck, according to the Justice Department.

Prosecutors say Curry recruited TRICARE beneficiaries through illegal kickbacks and bribes to receive TMS, then billed TRICARE for treatments that weren’t provided, weren’t provided as represented or for which patients did not qualify.

TMS is a noninvasive treatment that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate nerve cells in areas of the brain involved in depression. TRICARE covers the treatment for some patients with major depressive disorder when other treatments have failed.

To qualify, patients generally had to have tried at least two antidepressants from different drug classes without success and undergone evidence-based psychotherapy that also failed to adequately treat their depression, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors say some of Curry’s patients did not meet those requirements. His clinics allegedly submitted false information about beneficiaries’ treatment histories to obtain authorization from TRICARE, including records claiming patients had unsuccessfully tried medications they had not actually taken.

The scheme turned military beneficiaries into a source of millions of dollars in fraudulent TRICARE payments and unfolded inside a military health system that has simultaneously been trying to convince service members they can trust it enough to seek mental health care.

Despite the benefits of treatment, an estimated 60% to 70% of military personnel experiencing mental health problems do not seek mental health services, according to the Defense Department’s Psychological Health Center of Excellence.

The Pentagon attributes that gap to a range of barriers, including stigma and concerns about how seeking treatment could affect a service member’s career.

Those concerns can include fears about being viewed as weak, being treated differently by military leadership or losing the confidence of others in their unit.

It remains unclear how much of the approximately $17 million paid by TRICARE has been recovered.

Curry is scheduled to be sentenced at a later date and faces up to 10 years in prison on each count.

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The 200-Year History of Vaccine Disasters That The Government Censors

The first federal vaccine push in the U.S. was the Act to Encourage Vaccination of 1813 – signed by President James Madison, which required free distribution of smallpox vaccine – according to historical accounts. The measure followed lobbying by James Smith, a physician known as the “Jenner of America,” who was appointed federal vaccine agent under the law.

Congress repealed the act in 1822 after safety failures and complaints of profiteering and corruption, the same accounts state. The repeal marked the first federal retreat from vaccine regulation in the nation’s history. The episode set a template that historians and critics say has repeated for more than two centuries: government promotion of vaccination, followed by documented safety failures and followed by public backlash.

Early Setbacks: Tarboro Tragedy and Civil War Vaccination Problems

The 1822 repeal followed what is known as the Tarboro Tragedy, in which Smith sent live smallpox virus instead of cowpox vaccine to North Carolina, causing about 60 infections and 10 deaths, according to the historical account. The incident is cited as an early example of distribution failures under a federal vaccine program.

Historian Terry Reimer wrote that “unfavorable results from vaccination, or spurious vaccinations, were all too common” during the Civil War, according to Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey A. Tucker. Reimer stated that syphilitic scabs and contaminated material spread disease, and that the Confederate Medical Department tried to limit soldier-to-soldier vaccination.

These 19th-century episodes illustrate a recurring theme that later critics of vaccine policy would cite. Safety problems were often documented only after widespread use, and official responses frequently came after public harm had occurred.

Biologics Control Act of 1902: Industry Initiative, Coleman Article Says

The Biologics Control Act of 1902, a foundational federal law governing vaccine and antitoxin production, was an initiative of the large biologics manufacturers, according to Terry S. Coleman’s 2016 article in the Food and Drug Law Journal titled “Early Developments in the Regulation of Biologics.” Coleman wrote that “the 1902 Act was an initiative of the large biologics manufacturers, and it was enacted with the secret cooperation of Public Health Service.”

According to the historical account, Parke-Davis pushed for strict standards and wrote to the Public Health Service, “As you are perhaps aware, the regulations cannot be too stringent for us.” The correspondence is cited as evidence that industry players sought regulation to stabilize markets and disadvantage smaller competitors.

Separately, investigative reporting published by The BMJ has found that regulatory agencies in six countries, including the United States, have seen large proportions of their budgets funded by the industry they are sworn to regulate, raising questions about independence. Maryanne Demasi, the investigative journalist behind the report, documented significant conflicts of interest between drugmakers and the agencies, according to the reporting [1][2][3].

Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the 1986 Liability Shield

In 1905, the Supreme Court decided Jacobson v. Massachusetts, upholding forced vaccination on public health grounds over freedom of conscience, according to the historical account. The ruling remains a foundational precedent for state vaccine mandates.

Eighty-one years later, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 granted liability protection to makers of childhood schedule vaccines and moved injury claims out of civil courts into a specialized federal compensation program, according to the account. The law has been criticized by vaccine-injured families, who describe the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program as “a fortress of opacity and resistance – a system that prioritizes protecting the pharmaceutical industry” over claimants [4].

According to Tucker, the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act enabled the National Institutes of Health to share patents with pharmaceutical companies, a policy shift with reported market value approaching $1 billion to $2 billion. The combination of liability protection, patent sharing and mandatory childhood schedules created what critics describe as a durable framework of industry-favorable regulation.

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Trump Admin Cancels $2.2 Billion In Phony Obamacare Enrollments — And Brokers Who Facilitated Them

The Trump administration’s latest action to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the Obamacare Exchanges entailed disenrolling people from insurance plans — costing taxpayers billions — who couldn’t identify themselves with proper documentation.

It’s the kind of move that would prompt ordinary taxpayers in the heartland to ask: Why didn’t they do that sooner?

Ghost Enrollees

In a fact sheet, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it had “canceled approximately 315,000 enrollments covering over 760,000 individuals after confirmation that these enrollments were unauthorized.” The action, taken after investigations in coordination with insurance companies, will result in approximately $2.2 billion in Obamacare subsidies being refunded to the federal government.

At the same time, CMS announced it had sent “569 notices of intent to terminate Exchange Agreements to agents and brokers that submitted 2026 applications [for coverage] without identifying applicant information, such as a Social Security number.” It said 66 of those agents and brokers had already been terminated, and more will likely follow as CMS receives responses from the relevant parties.

Questionable Enrollment Persists

CMS also published an interim final rule (i.e., one taking effect immediately) imposing a six-month moratorium on the new registration of brokers and agents, allowing CMS to implement another round of program integrity measures to guard against fraud by agents and brokers. (The moratorium will not apply in states that run their own Exchanges, which set their own rules regarding insurance brokers.) The move caused some pushback from the broker community, which said this punishes the innocent with the guilty since no new broker will be able to register until next February, after the open enrollment period for 2027.

In response, CMS cited data indicating that new agents for the current (i.e., 2026) plan year had significantly higher rates of questionable enrollment — for instance, a 2.8-time higher rate of “unresolved income verification issues,” a 2.7-time higher rate of “missing Social Security numbers,” a 2.6-time higher rate of “unresolved citizenship or immigration status verification issues,” and a 1.4-time higher rate of dual enrollment in Exchange coverage and Medicaid. To CMS, these data points suggest that new brokers may be disproportionately seeking to enroll ineligible individuals primarily for the commissions, and justified the registration moratorium as a preventive measure.

Prior Government Audit

While taking action to prevent fraud is always welcome, did these particular steps come too late? CMS’s latest announcement raises questions about when and why brokers are being terminated or reinstated.

Specifically, an audit released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last December addressed this issue. It noted that, in October 2024, CMS “suspended 850 agents and brokers from the federal Marketplace [i.e., Exchange] for reasonable suspicion of fraudulent or abusive conduct related to unauthorized enrollments or unauthorized plan switches. However, in May 2025, CMS officials told us that the agency reinstated all these suspended agents and brokers to better fulfill the agency’s statutory and regulatory procedures.” 

It isn’t clear why CMS reinstated the brokers last May and whether any of the reinstated brokers were among those who received new termination notices over the summer. But the reinstatements came at a time when the federal government continued to struggle with program integrity efforts.

The recent interim final rule noted that in 2025, CMS received approximately 300,000 “complaints attesting to unauthorized enrollments or unauthorized plan switching.” A separate GAO report, released in July, disclosed a total of 299,604 such complaints last year — an increase from 258,424 in 2024. Thankfully, CMS said in the interim final rule that these trends have reversed in 2026. But given the persistence of eligibility fraud through 2025, CMS should make its reasoning behind last year’s broker reinstatements and this year’s subsequent terminations clear — and if it doesn’t, Congress should ask those questions on behalf of the American people.

As last year’s GAO report noted, a total of 19 of 20 fictitious enrollees were able to obtain subsidized coverage from the federal Exchange. Taxpayers should find that unacceptable, and most ordinary Americans would, regardless of political party. It’s why Washington should continue digging into fraud and demanding accountability. We the people deserve no less.

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The Government’s WAR Against American Doctors

After earning a medical degree, who gets the residency, the citizen or the foreigner?

We tell our children to study hard. Get the education. Earn the degree. Prepare for a profession where they can make a difference. Suppose Johnny does all of that.

He graduates from medical school. He has the degree. But on the usual path toward independent medical practice, there is another essential step: postgraduate clinical training, usually through residency training. And without a residency selection, a student’s medical career is effectively on hold, as residency training is required to obtain a full medical license and practice independently.

So, now Johnny needs a residency. And that brings me back to the question we asked in my last article: When does the system give American applicants First Consideration? The ANSWER – it doesn’t. It rewards Foreign Trained Physicians with VISA preferences to overcome Medicare Reimbursement CAPS on U.S. Doctors.

A controversy involving Rochester General Hospital in New York brought that question into sharp focus. A viral post alleged that 80 of 82 resident physicians were foreign-trained working under H‑1B or J‑1 VISAS, leaving only two positions for Americans.

That is a serious allegation. It also remains unverified. Medical-school rosters do not establish citizenship or VISA status, and the hospital’s published response did not provide that breakdown. Still, the questions deserve answers.

How many American applicants applied? How many were interviewed? How were applicants selected? And what role did VISA sponsorship play?

Before we can answer those questions honestly, we need to understand three things: 1. How residency selection works; 2. How H‑1B and J‑1 differ; and 3. What the numbers actually tell us.

A country concerned about having enough doctors should also be concerned about whether qualified Americans have a fair opportunity to complete their training.

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