Tag: health care

Canada’s Liberal Government Pushes Bill Allowing Doctors to Euthanize Unwitting Dementia Patients

Canada’s Liberal government has introduced legislation that would allow doctors to euthanize unwitting dementia patients.

The bill, introduced Tuesday, would allow Canadians to request euthanasia in advance, meaning doctors could carry out the procedure after a patient becomes incapable of providing informed consent.

Justice Minister Sean Fraser said the legislation would ensure that people diagnosed with incurable illnesses could have their wishes respected even if their condition deteriorates.

He insisted that the government would introduce safeguards to prevent patients from being pressured into ending their lives.

The proposal marks another expansion of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, which allows the euthanasia of vulnerable and seriously ill patients.

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Texas Children’s Hospital officially opens first-ever ‘detransition clinic’ after settlement with AG Paxton

Texas Children’s Hospital has officially opened its first-of-its-kind detransition clinic under a settlement it reached with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in May.

Paxton, who is also the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Texas, announced the opening of the clinic on Tuesday.

“BREAKING: The nation’s first-ever Detransition Clinic is now open as a result of my historic settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital,” he wrote on X.

An accompanying press release from his office described the new care center as “a multidisciplinary clinic that provides medical care to patients who previously underwent gender-transition interventions.”

Patients can receive detransition-related medical care through age 21, while detransition-related obstetric and gynecologic care is offered to patients older than 21. Paxton’s office added that patients may receive services at different Texas Children’s locations, depending on their individual needs and care team recommendations.

The clinic is a major pillar of the settlement, which additionally required the hospital to pay $10 million for claims brought by Paxton under the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act for billing Texas Medicaid for “unallowable and illegal ‘gender-transition’ interventions.”

Multiple physicians were also stripped of their medical privileges for performing mutilating treatments on minors.

Texas Children’s previously offered a range of controversial services to gender dysphoric minors seeking to “change their gender,” including puberty blockers — medications intended to “pause” puberty, and hormone therapy — hormones including testosterone and estrogen used to promote the development of physical characteristics associated with the opposite sex.

The settlement also permanently prohibited Texas Children’s from performing surgical procedures on minors, which can sterilize and remove healthy tissue from patients.

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Harvard Medical School Holds Panel Raising Whether Weight Loss Drugs Are An Imperialistic, Militaristic Plot

Harvard University is facing another controversy after its medical school held an event on “the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” The most surprising part is that it was not a reference to the Harvard faculty itself. Rather, a panel composed of non-medical experts was railing against anti-obesity drugs as part of “indoctrination” to support the ills of “empire and imperialism.” Welcome to the state of higher education in America.

The panel was devoid of actual medical experts. It was dressed up in medical terms with the use of the word “pathology.” It could have easily been billed as “GLP-1 Anti-Body.” The panel included such experts as Da’Shaun L Harrison, who recently drew notoriety for claiming at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago that GLP-1 medications constitute “genocide” against fat people.

Another headliner was Roxane Gay, the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University – New Brunswick and the artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School. Professor Gay (the cousin of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay) had called for the release of Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, two years ago.

Despite her extremism and penchant for murderers like Mangione, Gay writes for the New York Times and apparently likes to flip off people in public. Harvard decided she was exactly what they needed to help shape their medical students. She is part of the radical chic of higher education, where no views are too far left (while departments purge conservatives and libertarians).

Harrison quickly picked up where she left off at the Socialist Convention with bizarre claims. Rather than claiming that drug companies were engaging in the genocide of fat people with weight-loss drugs, she explained that the companies were really militarizing an imperialist state: “This practice of forcing people into manipulating and changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarisable. Building up a military to defend an imperialist state.“

She further claimed:

“A lot of doctors, medical professionals and folks who collaborate with them – be it through the government or media – are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe.

It then becomes about creating this ideal body that you are always being pushed and pulled towards, as a way to represent this patriotism that is intended to indoctrinate one into the military, into the defense of the country.”

The suggestion that weight loss is an imperialist militaristic plot is obviously bonkers. It is the kind of raving you would expect on a subway from someone wearing a handmade cardboard sign and a tin foil hat.

However, Harvard Medical School views that person as a serious expert on the pathologies of weight loss.

Notably, not a single Harvard faculty member expressed unease over the programming. Medical students are facing an array of tough technological and economic conditions. Yet, the administration wants them to sit through far-left indoctrinations from the likes of Gay and Harrison.

Harvard is not alone. Various medical schools have incorporated radical social agendas into their curricula or events. We recently discussed how UCLA Medical School held a panel on which psychiatrists defended self-immolation in protesting Israel. In an earlier post, we discussed a mandatory lecture at UCLA of one of the university’s “activists-in-residence” replete with anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric.

The hiring of figures like Gay and the radical programs at these schools show that faculty have little intention to change the ideological echo chamber in higher education. It is truly a pathology of unruly bodies.

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Trump DOJ Nails Los Angeles Medical Fraud Ring Accused of Stealing Nearly $2 Billion — Sham Rehab Lured Homeless and Addicts, Unnecessary Surgeries Injured Patients, Phony Hospice Billed for Non-Dying Seniors

Federal agents and prosecutors under the Trump administration struck another massive blow against California’s runaway healthcare fraud industry Thursday, charging 15 defendants, including six medical professionals, in schemes that collectively submitted over $1.8 billion in fraudulent claims to Medicare, private insurers, and other programs.

The Justice Department’s announcement, led by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli and Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald, targeted what prosecutors described as the largest substance abuse treatment fraud scheme the department has ever prosecuted, along with unnecessary invasive artery procedures that injured patients and multiple hospice fraud operations where beneficiaries were not terminally ill, New York Post reported.

Eight defendants were arrested, with others charged and expected in court.

The cases include a father-son operation and Texas recruiters accused of trafficking vulnerable people, including the homeless and those in recovery programs, to Southern California for sham treatment, according to the DOJ.

Nathan Young, 39, and his father David Young, 71, both of Los Angeles, along with Honey Phipps, 42, and Cody Phipps, 36, of Greenville, Texas, face charges in a years-long scheme that billed private insurers more than $1.6 billion.

Prosecutors allege they controlled dozens of purported treatment facilities and used “body brokers” to lure addicts and unhoused individuals with free flights, apartments, cash, drugs, and other inducements.

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More Than 18,000 Children Vaccinated Under Anesthesia At Children’s Hospital Colorado Since 2020, Report Says

More than 18,000 children, including children with neurocognitive conditions, have received vaccines while they were under anesthesia or sedation at Children’s Hospital Colorado since 2020, according to a report by independent journalist Jon Fleetwood.

Fleetwood reported Thursday that a March 2026 article in AAP News, the publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics, confirms the figure. The article, co-authored by Dr. Caroline Pasquariello of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Dr. Kim Strupp of Children’s Hospital Colorado, promotes the administration of vaccines during surgical and procedural care, he wrote. Fleetwood quoted the article as saying “additional vaccinations are administered” particularly to “children with neurocognitive conditions who are unable to tolerate vaccination without sedation.” This report follows his story a day earlier that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia injected 2,054 children with flu vaccines under anesthesia.

The Colorado program began in October 2020. In 2021, Healio reported that the “best practice alert” for children scheduled for “elective general anesthesia” was activated, and 25 weeks later 1,063 children had been vaccinated, with “very few concerns” from families, according to Dr. Tyler Morrissey, the University of Colorado anesthesiologist who initiated the program. According to Healio, only 30 vaccinations were given in a six week period prior to the best practice alert, so the 1,063 represented an increase of roughly 3,500 percent. “No vaccine-related complications were reported,” Healio wrote.

As The High Wire noted, Children’s Hospital Colorado had administered more than 7,000 doses of vaccine to children under anesthesia between 2020 and February 2024. Fleetwood’s figure of more than 18,000 children since 2020 is more than double that number, though one figure counts doses and the other counts children.

Dr. Madhava Setty, a board-certified anesthesiologist, called the practice “stunningly irresponsible” on X, The High Wire reported. About 11 to 16% of kids who receive the flu vaccine will develop a fever, and about 1% will develop a rash, according to The High Wire, and telling a vaccine reaction from an anesthetic drug reaction is harder in a sedated child. “Vaccinating children undergoing procedures with anesthesia is malpractice,” said Dr. Peter McCullough on the platform.

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DEI Continues: DOJ Discovers Discrimination Against Whites and Asians at Ohio State Medical School Despite Supreme Court Ruling

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that Ohio State’s medical school was found to have discriminated against white and Asian applicants in violation of federal law.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division cited admissions practices for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes, saying that the school violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on color or race, according to a news release.

The Justice Department also mentioned the 2023 Supreme Court decision of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively banned affirmative action.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said, “Despite SFFA, OSU Med allows some applicants to bypass its own screening process and skip interviews solely because of the color of their skin.”

“A university’s admissions process, and all its stages, should apply equally to all applicants regardless of race,” she continued. “The use of a separate admissions process based on race is plainly illegal under federal law, and this Department will not allow these appalling practices to continue at OSU Med or any other federally funded higher ed institution.”

The release went on to describe how OSU used a “Holistic Approach” as a workaround to admit so-called “underrepresented minorities.”

In addition, the medical school’s admissions process has an interview stage, but the DOJ discovered that black applicants who are screened and interviewed “are about 2.8 times as likely to be admitted than Asian applicants with equal credentials.”

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Washington Outspends the World on Healthcare: $2.5 Trillion in Taxpayer Money

With the Nov. 3 midterm elections less than three weeks away, healthcare has become a central Democratic campaign issue. An Associated Press analysis of AdImpact data found that healthcare was the most common issue in Democratic House and Senate ads since Sept. 1.

Democrats have made four claims: that Washington spends more on war than on healthcare, that most Americans lack health insurance, that Trump’s Medicaid changes take coverage away from poor Americans, and that socialized medicine provides better care. All four claims are false, as the spending figures, insurance coverage data, Medicaid provisions and international comparisons below demonstrate.

U.S. national health spending reached $5.3 trillion in 2024, or $15,474 per person, according to CMS data. That spending was equal to 18.0 percent of GDP. The federal government paid for 31 percent of total health spending, and state and local governments paid for 16 percent. Combined, government at all levels paid roughly $2.5 trillion.

That figure is nearly double the entire health budget of China, the world’s second-largest economy. According to China’s National Health Commission, China’s total health spending in 2024 was an estimated 9.09 trillion yuan, about $1.27 trillion in public and private spending combined, with the government paying 24.9 percent. Per person, the OECD’s health division head told the Senate Special Committee on Aging that U.S. government health spending per capita was greater than in all other OECD countries.

That spending funds coverage for more than a third of Americans. The Census Bureau found that 92.0 percent of Americans, 310 million people, had health insurance in 2024. Employer coverage was the most common type at 53.8 percent, followed by Medicare at 19.1 percent and Medicaid at 17.6 percent. Overall, 66.1 percent of Americans had private coverage and 35.5 percent had public coverage. Government coverage is concentrated among low-income Americans. Public coverage rates fall as income rises: Census figures show 77.0 percent of children and 50.7 percent of adults in poverty had public coverage, compared with 6.7 percent and 5.7 percent of those at or above 400 percent of the poverty line.

Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4, 2025, and Democrats have since described its Medicaid provisions as taking healthcare away from vulnerable Americans. In a May 2025 press release, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the bill “the largest healthcare cut in our country’s history” and said millions would lose Medicaid coverage. A statement from Jeffries and House Democratic leaders said the law takes healthcare and food assistance from millions of people to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said Republicans would strip healthcare from the Americans most in need.

The law does not kick poor people off Medicaid, and it does not raise the income eligibility threshold, which remains 138 percent of the federal poverty line. It simply requires able-bodied adults to work, study or volunteer 80 hours a month.

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The Epistemic Corruption of Biomedical Science

Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid‑19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity.

The Blind Spot of Science Studies

Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational., The “critical turn” in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn’s account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn’s examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power.,

Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which “knowledge” reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests.

Epistemic Corruption, Propaganda and Institutional Capture

One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result “epistemic corruption:” a knowledge system that “loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it,” because it has been co‑opted by interests at odds with its central goals.

Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent.

One lynchpin is “ghost management,” in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front‑stage “authors.” This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility.

Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific “advances” the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage.

Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving‑door employment., The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator’s budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the fact, and report results selectively – practices that would be flagged as manipulative in non-commercial research.

Peer-reviewers, the supposed guardians of scientific quality, are themselves deeply entangled with industry. A recent JAMA study found almost sixty percent of peer-reviewers for leading medical journals received payments from drug and device manufacturers, totaling US$1.06 billion between 2020 and 2022. Journals scrutinize authors’ conflicts of interest but rarely reviewers’, opening an opaque channel for industry influence over what gets published and how rigorously it is vetted.

Industry ties shape findings too: in research on mercury and autism, 86 percent of industry-affiliated studies found no association, compared with 21 percent of unaffiliated studies. Medical journals depend on advertising revenue and the prestige of industry-sponsored research; the Lancet’s editor Richard Horton conceded they had “devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” When conflicts of interest pervade gatekeeping institutions, the appearance of neutral science becomes the very medium through which propaganda operates.

The results are well documented: routinely concealed harms; repeated convictions meeting official definitions of organized crime; and whole narratives – from the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression to the benefits of Tamiflu – that proved false or radically overstated.,,, Selective publication does much of the work: of 36 antidepressant trials the FDA judged negative, only 8 percent were published as negative and 31 percent were spun as positive, so 94 percent of published trials appeared positive, against 51 percent in the FDA’s full data. More broadly, diseases are redefined to expand markets, mild symptoms pathologized, and drugs of minimal efficacy marketed as breakthroughs.

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COVID Pandemic’s Corruption of Science Threatens Patient Care, Immunologist Warns

The future of patient care is at stake when scientists are discouraged from challenging prevailing views, immunologist Robert Clancy, Ph.D., told medical commentator John Campbell, Ph.D.

“Who would want to go into medicine today?” Clancy asked during an interview last week. “It’s been so controlled, and the bureaucracy is suffocating.”

Clancy, an Australian medical researcher, author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, and University of Newcastle emeritus professor, said the pressure extends beyond COVID-19 studies. Medical journals sometimes reject work unrelated to COVID-19 if the researchers have a history of challenging the mainstream pandemic narrative.

“It’s not just that they’re blacklisting articles related to COVID. They’re blacklisting people who [were] foolish enough to write on these topics,” he said.

Clancy’s new book, “COVID and the Corruption of Medical Science: A Quadrant Chronicle,” examines what he sees as the pandemic response’s lasting damage to scientific independence.

The book collects 14 essays he previously published in Quadrant, an Australian literary, cultural and political journal. Clancy said he turned to the publication during COVID-19 because “it tells things as it is.” Other journals and media outlets “would not publish the data and the evidence and the truth,” he said.

Campbell agreed, saying some mainstream medical journals “have been infiltrated by … this dominant narrative that only one way of thinking is allowed. It’s quite an alarming situation,” he said.

Clancy added, “It’s happening … in a not-so-subtle way right across the medical profession.”

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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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