Tag: health care

Trump Admin Launches Whistleblower Tip Line to Report Chemical or Surgical Sex Changes Being Performed on Minors

President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has established a dedicated tip line for whistleblowers to report cases of chemical and surgical sex change procedures performed on minors.

To enforce Trump’s executive order “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” the new tip line allows individuals to report concerns related to the administration of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex change surgeries on children.

“HHS is committed to protecting whistleblowers to the full extent of the law,” a department’s explainer about the tip line said.

Last week, the department also announced the launch of an investigation into “a major pediatric teaching hospital for allegedly terminating the employment of a whistleblower nurse for exercising her federally protected rights of conscience.”

“The investigation will examine whether the pediatric hospital violated federal law known as the Church Amendments by firing a whistleblower nurse after she requested a religious accommodation to avoid administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children, which she opposed due to religious beliefs about the sterilization effects of these interventions,” the department said in a press release.

HHS did not name the hospital being investigated, but many have speculated that the nurse is likely to be whistleblower Vanessa Sivadge.

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Leaked White House Document Reveals Monster Budget Cut Proposal For Federal Health Agencies

The Trump administration could slash roughly one-third of the federal government’s bloated health budget, a leaked White House proposal shows. The plan, first reported by the Washington Post and detailed in documents acquired by CNN, calls for slashing “tens of billions of dollars” annually, targeting a host of programs across multiple agencies.

The proposal, already sent to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), aligns with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative and tech titan Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, sources say.

The proposal, part of President Donald Trump’s broader push to curb government waste, would eliminate billions in annual spending and reign in a sprawling bureaucracy that employs 82,000 workers across 10 regional offices, with average salaries of $100,000 plus generous benefits.

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California Governor Signs $2.8 Billion Medi-Cal Bailout to Cover Soaring Costs, Including for Illegal Immigrants

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed emergency legislation that will close a $2.8 billion shortfall in the state’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, ensuring continued health care coverage through June for approximately 15 million low-income residents, including hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.

Newsom signed Assembly Bill 100 into law on April 14, according to a statement from his office. The measure is part of a broader response to an estimated $6.2 billion budget gap in Medi-Cal, the state’s sprawling public health care program.

The shortfall followed California’s expansion of full-scope Medi-Cal benefits to all income-eligible adults in 2024, regardless of immigration status—a move hailed by progressives and criticized by conservatives.

The Medi-Cal expansion—implemented in January 2024 under a 2022 law—made California the first state in the nation to offer free, comprehensive health care to all low-income adults regardless of immigration status. The state initially projected that the policy would cost $2.7 billion annually and cover about 764,000 residents without lawful immigration status. Actual program costs have exceeded expectations, contributing to California’s budget crisis, according to state officials.

California state Rep. Carl DeMaio, a Republican, has called for an audit of Medi-Cal spending, saying that California cannot afford to provide free health care to illegal immigrants.

“This puts the health coverage for poor people, children, the neediest among us, at risk,” DiMaio told reporters, according to a video that he shared on social media. “Why? Because we’ve given away the store to noncitizens. We’ve given illegal immigrants free health care at taxpayers’ expense.”

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Chairman of Assassination Task Force Touts Mental Health Bill, While Withholding Mental Health Information About Alleged Shooter

Congressman Mike Kelly—the lawmaker blocking access to critical documents about the Butler assassination attempt—must not be allowed to advance a bill that ignores glaring conflicts of interest in behavioral health linked to the Butler, PA assassination attempt of President Trump. KILL THE BILL: HR 2085

Key Connections Being Hidden:

  • Crooks’ Parents & Behavioral Health Influence: Investigative documents withheld by Kelly’s office may reveal ties between Thomas Crooks’ parents (behavioral health “experts”) and entities like Genesis HealthCare, which employed Crooks at its Bethel Park facility.
  • Genesis HealthCare’s Reach: A major behavioral health and nursing home provider, Genesis has subsidiaries spanning 19 states and investors linked to behavioral health tech firms.

Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP represented Genesis in these matters. What is stunning about the law firm that rescued Bethel Skilled Nursing home from Department of Justice inquiries was that Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP is deeply entrenched in the psychiatric drug sector.

The firm has extensive ties to pharmaceutical companies. In fact, the firm handled one of the largest psychotropic drug settlements in United States history in 2017, M.B. v. Tidball, on behalf of a group of nonprofits that the firm also just happens to represent.

The results of this insider settlement by vested stakeholders, psychotropic drugging continues to skyrocket. Big Pharma and the Behavioral Health Industrial Complex was able to walk away from any accountability without losing access to children in State care.

  • AGR Building Investors: The AGR Building is reportedly tied to stakeholders in behavioral health technology—a sector incentivized by bills like H.R. 2085, which lacks ethical guardrails.

Roper Technologies retains a 49% minority stake in Indicor, the industrial company that owns the AGR Building in Butler, PA, through its subsidiary AGR International.

Simultaneously, Roper is aggressively expanding into behavioral health with its pending $1.65 billion acquisition of CentralReach, a leading provider of cloud-based software for Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy serving autism and intellectual/developmental disabilities (IDD).

CentralReach is projected to generate $175 million in revenue and $75 million in EBITDA for the fiscal year ending June 2026, reflecting Roper’s focus on high-growth, tech-enabled healthcare solutions.

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Another Texas Child Dies a Tragic Death After Recovering from Measles

A Licensed Texas Physician with significant experience successfully treating measles during the current outbreak is reporting a second tragic death of a chronically ill child who had been previously infected with measles in a Texas hospital. Similar to the recent unfortunate death widely but incorrectly reported as primarily caused by measles rather than complicated by measles, this is again a case of a child suffering from pre-existing conditions who was misdiagnosed, and it appears that she may have been improperly medically managed.

In this second case, a young girl who had previously been infected but recovered from a measles infection developed a blood infection (sepsis) after suffering from chronic tonsillitis complicated by chronic mononucleosis. Infectious mononucleosis (IM, mono), also known as glandular fever, is an infection usually caused by the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV). There is no vaccine for EBV, and in most cases children that develop this common infection recover with supportive care. In this case, although she had developed and recovered from measles, the girl had been ill for months with chronic mononucleosis complicated by chronic tonsillitis, and her parents had been arranging for her to have her tonsils removed, a procedure known as a tonsillectomy. Unfortunately, the child developed sepsis, a bacterial blood infection, which progressed to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In this case, blood cultures identified gram-positive cocci in her blood, indicating that her sepsis and ARDS were likely caused by either a Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterial infection.

Her parents brought her to the Texas University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas for treatment of her apparent bacterial sepsis due to underlying chronic tonsillitis and chronic mononucleosis. At the time of admission, the girl’s father specifically requested that she be treated with inhaled budesonide by nebulizer. The UMC Hospital staff refused this request, and appear to have treated her as if she was suffering from COVID rather than ARDS, and administered an intravascular infusion of steroids. IV steroids suppress the immune system’s ability to fight bacterial infections, and the father was aware that inhaled Budesonide is an effective, lower-risk treatment relative to IV steroids when treating ARDS.

For a summary of the definitive clinical trial documenting the “Effect of nebulized budesonide on respiratory mechanics and oxygenation in acute lung injury/acute respiratory distress syndrome” please see this peer-reviewed publication.

Instead of receiving clinically proven standard-of-care treatment with nebulized Budesonide according to the family’s wishes, the young girl was administered IV steroids and sedated with drugs that suppressed her respiratory drive and deep breathing, increasing the likelihood of partial collapse or closure of her lungs (a medical complication known as atelectasis), which reduces the ability of the lungs to bring oxygen to the blood, making it even harder for her to recover from her bacterial pneumonia and sepsis. As a consequence, she passed away due to sepsis resulting from chronic tonsillitis and chronic mononucleosis, complicated by medical mismanagement.

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US Peanut Allergy Epidemic Sprang From Experts’ Exactly-Wrong Guidance

In the 1980s, peanut allergies were almost entirely unheard-of. Today, the United States has one of the highest peanut-allergy rates in the world. Disturbingly, this epidemic was precipitated by institutions that exist to promote public health. The story of their malpractice illuminates the fallibility of respected institutions, and confirms that public health’s catastrophically incorrect guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t an isolated anomaly.

The roots of this particular example of expert-inflicted mass suffering can be found in the early 1990s, when the existence of peanut allergies — still a very rare and mostly low-risk phenomenon at the time — first came to public notice. Their entry into public consciousness began with studies published by medical researchers. By the mid-1990s, however, major media outlets were running attention-grabbing stories of hospitalized children and terrified parents. The Great Parental Peanut Panic was on.

As fear and dread mounted, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a professional association of tens of thousands of US pediatricians, felt compelled to tell parents how to prevent their children from becoming the latest victims. “There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take,” wrote then-Johns Hopkins surgeon and now-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in his 2024 book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.

Ignorance proved no obstacle. Lacking humility and seeking to bolster its reputation as an authoritative organization, the AAP in 2000 handed down definitive instructions: Parents should avoid feeding any peanut product to children under 3 years old who were believed to have a high risk of developing a peanut allergy; pregnant and lactating mothers were likewise cautioned against consuming peanuts.

The AAP noted that “the ability to determine which infants are at high risk is imperfect.” Indeed, simply having a relative with any kind of allergy could land a child or mother in the “high risk” category. Believing they were erring on the side of caution, pediatricians across the country started giving blanket instructions that children shouldn’t be fed any peanut food until age 3; pregnant and breastfeeding mothers were told to steer clear too.

What was the basis of the AAP’s pronouncement? The organization was simply parroting guidance that the UK Department of Health had put forth in 1998. Makary scoured that guidance for a scientific rationale, and found a declaration that mothers who eat peanuts were more likely to have children with allergies, with the claim attributed to a 1996 study. When he checked the study, however, he was shocked to find the data demonstrated no such correlation. The study’s author, Irish pediatric professor Jonathan Hourihane, was himself shocked to see his study used to justify the policy. “It’s ridiculous,” he told Makary. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”

Despite the policy’s lack of scientific foundation, the US government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) fully endorsed the AAP guidance. In time, it would be all too apparent that — as with public health’s later response to Covid-19 — the experts weren’t erring on the side of caution, they were erring on the side of catastrophe.

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1 In 10 Say They Have Been Harmed By The NHS, Survey Finds

One in 10 people say they have been harmed by the NHS, according to a study published in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal.

Researchers surveyed over 10,000 people across England, Wales, and Scotland between 2021 and 2022 and found that 988 of them (9.7 percent) had reported experiencing physical or emotional harm caused by the health service in the previous three years.

According to researchers at the University of Oxford’s Population Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), 6.2 percent said they experienced harm owing to care they had received.

The remaining 3.5 percent blamed the harm on having a lack of access to treatment.

The study, published on Tuesday, found that just 17 percent of people chose to take formal action by making a complaint, with an even smaller proportion (2.1 percent) taking legal action.

Higher Rate

The reported harm rate exceeds that of previous surveys in 2001 (4.8 percent) and 2023 (2.5 percent). However, researchers suggest this increase may be down to a broader definition of “harm” that now includes mental distress and harm caused by lack of access to health care, alongside physical harm.

Researchers found that more women had reported harm than men, with there being higher rates among the unemployed and those with disabilities or long-term health conditions.

Men were also found to be less likely to share their experiences, along with older people and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Older people were also less likely to make a formal complaint.

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Supporters Call on Idaho Lawmakers to Override Governor’s Veto of Bill Prohibiting Medical Mandates

Idaho Gov. Brad Little on Saturday vetoed a bill passed by Idaho lawmakers that would have prohibited nearly all medical mandates in the state.

The Idaho Medical Freedom Act was meant to “protect the rights of Idahoans to make their own medical choices free of the fear of losing their jobs or being excluded from normal daily life,” according to the bill’s author, Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund.

The bill, cosponsored by Sen. Daniel Foreman and Rep. Robert Beiswenger, would have prohibited businesses and Idaho local, county and state governments from requiring medical interventions for employment, admission to venues, transportation, or providing products or services.

It also would have blocked schools and colleges in the state from requiring medical interventions for school attendance or entry into campus buildings.

The Idaho House of Representatives passed the bill March 19 in a 47-23 vote, after the Senate voted 19-14 on Feb. 26 in favor of the legislation.

Little vetoed the bill Saturday morning, an hour before the deadline. “Medical freedom is an Idaho value,” Little wrote in a letter explaining his veto, but he said the bill would have jeopardized “the ability of schools to send home sick students with highly contagious conditions.”

Little listed medical freedom measures he had supported in the past but said parents “do not need government imposing more limitations on keeping children safe and healthy from contagious illnesses at school.”

Manookian told The Defender that Little’s claim is “an absolute fabrication” because nothing in the bill changes existing pertinent rules or codes that allow schools to exclude children if they are sick.

“Little is hiding behind a lie,” she added. If a child is sick, “a school has every right to send them home,” she said. They just wouldn’t be able to dictate to the parents how that illness should be treated — they couldn’t force the child to take a test, wear a mask or take a drug.

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Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine

Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. 

It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.

This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can’t replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time. 

There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.

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Major Cuts to HHS – Spending Has Not Improved America’s Health Crisis

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced plans to cut its workforce by a quarter, eliminating 10,000 positions. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to gut the entire agency in his effort to Make America Healthy Again, vowing that eliminating excess bureaucracy will allow the agency “to do more with less.”

The agency plans to cut $11 billion in public health funding, and while Kennedy admits there will be a “painful period” ahead, one must look at the numbers and realize that these inflated agencies have not led to improved health care. “All of that money,” Kennedy said of the department’s $1.7 trillion yearly budget, “has failed to improve the health of Americans.”

America is one of the sickest nations in the developed world. Critics believe that these cuts will damage public health, but America is spending nearly 18% of its GDP on health care initiatives without results. The average American will not live to see 80 years of age. The average life expectancy stands around 76.4 years, according to the CDC, with women living an average of 79.3 years and men expiring sooner at 73.5. Those figures have been steadily declining each year. In comparison, the global average is 82.5 years.

The US ranks 32 out of 38 OCED nations for life expectancy. Yet, the US spends far more per capita on health compared to other developed nations. In 2023, America spent $13,432 per capita. In comparison, Switzerland and Germany, the second and third highest spenders, only pay a bit over $7,000 per capita and have healthier populations.

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