Tag: health care

San Francisco Health Department Hires Obese Woman to Promote Fatness — Report

The Health Department of San Francisco hired an obese woman named Virgie Tovar for the role of ‘weight stigma czar’ who’s job it will be to consult on ‘weight stigma and weight neutrality’, reports The Gateway Pundit.

Tovar, an influencer in the ‘fat positive’ movement is a self-described expert on ‘anti-weight-based discrimination’. She wrote the book ‘You Have the Right to Remain Fat’ which promotes obesity. She took to social media Tuesday to express her gratitude toward the new role.

“I’m UNBELIEVABLY proud to serve the city I’ve called home for almost 20 years in this way! This consultancy is an absolute dream come true, and it’s my biggest hope and belief that weight neutrality will be the future of public health,” Tovar said in a social media post Tuesday.

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NATO Head Says “Wartime Mindset” Needed; Redirect “Pensions, Health, Social Security” To Military Spending

Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who was this year selected as the Secretary General of NATO, has stated that Europeans need to “shift to a wartime mindset” and that military spending must be increased, likely at the expense of things like health care.

Rutte made the remarks at, ironically, a meeting of The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels, declaring that Russia is trying to “crush our freedom and way of life.”

“Hostile actions against Allied countries are real and accelerating… These attacks are not just isolated incidents. They are the result of a coordinated campaign to destabilise our societies and discourage us from supporting Ukraine,” he added.

Rutte further asserted that Russia is using unconventional “hybrid warfare” attacks against Europe, circumventing NATO’s traditional defence and bringing “the front line to our front doors. Even into our homes”.

“Ukrainians are fighting against Russian swarms of drones. That’s what we need to be prepared for”, Rutte told the conference.

“I know spending more on defence means spending less on other priorities. But it is only a little less,” he continued, adding that “On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems.”

“We need a small fraction of that money to make our defences much stronger, and to preserve our way of life,” he proclaimed, reasoning that “freedom does not come for free.”

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Hospitals Are Giving Pregnant Women Drugs, Then Reporting Them to CPS When They Test Positive

According to a new investigation from The Marshall Project, hospitals are giving women drugs during labor and then reporting them to child welfare services when they later test positive for those same drugs. These cases are one of the more maddening side effects of an out-of-control drug war combined with strict mandatory reporting laws. 

“Hospital drug testing of pregnant women, which began in the 1980s and spread rapidly during the opioid epidemic, was intended in part to help identify babies who might experience withdrawal symptoms and need extra medical care,” writes The Marshall Project reporter Shoshana Walter. “Federal law requires hospitals to alert child welfare agencies anytime such babies are born.” 

The problem is that these pee-in-a-cup tests are frequently inaccurate and vulnerable to false positives. One 2022 study cited by Walter found that 91 percent of women given fentanyl in their epidurals tested positive for it later. Making matters worse, in several cases reviewed by Walter, a simple lack of due diligence played a major role. In these cases, “doctors and social workers did not review patient medications to find the cause of a positive test. In others, providers suspected a medication they prescribed could be the culprit, but reported patients to authorities anyway,” Walter writes. 

One woman Walter spoke to was reported to child welfare services soon after she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She had tested positive for benzodiazepine—the same drug she was given before her emergency C-section. Another woman was given morphine to ease her pain during childbirth and was reported to child welfare services after her baby’s first bowel movement tested positive for opiates—even though the morphine was noted in her medical records and a drug test she took shortly before she went into labor showed no drugs in her system. After another woman tested positive for meth, her four children—including a newborn—were taken from her and kept in first care for 11 days. They weren’t returned until another drug test showed that the positive test was triggered by a heartburn medication she had been given at the hospital. 

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‘This Is Stupidity’: Why We Need to Oppose WHO’s Plan to Centralize and Control Global Health

Durk Pearson died recently. He was one of the pioneers of natural medicine — but really so much more than that, being a polymath.

Amongst Durk’s many endeavors; as a physicist, he developed guidance systems for cruise missiles; as a creative, he wrote screenplays for Clint Eastwood, such as “The Dead Pool”; as a longevity researcher, he kicked off the wellness revolution with his New York Times bestseller, “Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,” and; as a freedom advocate, his case against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), won an appeal in the Supreme Court and brought by my colleague, now ANH-USA General Counsel, “FDA Dragon Slayer,” attorney Jonathan Emord, burst the doors open to a liberalized market for natural health products in which truthful structure/function claims could be made to inform consumer choice.

We ignore polymaths at our expense, and certainly the expense of future generations. Imagine if we’d ignored Aristotle, da Vinci or Turing? Or, in the East, if the Han Dynasty had ignored Zhang Heng?

Well, it’s now time to take heed of what Durk had been saying about medical freedom for over half a century. Durk said in an interview with Life Extension magazine back in 1998, “The price of liberty is vigilance.”

While often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, it seems this is more likely an abbreviation of a segment from a speech made by Irish orator and politician, John Curran, delivered in Dublin in July 1790, where he said, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

Let me stray no further and move our attention to the issue we face today with efforts to centralize control over human health.

I can’t say it any other way: but this is stupidity. If I tried to be kinder, it would come out something like this: it is ignorant of the available facts, it is misguided, simple-minded, or lacking in judgment.

But, in my view, the adjective “stupid” does the job just fine — it’s short and to the point.

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The FDA’s War Against America’s Health

In 1906, the first FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was created in response to massive public protests against adulterated food and drugs (e.g., rotting food partially preserved with food additives or counterfeit consumer products). To stop it, food industry lobbyists attempted every tactic imaginable, eventually taking over the Department of Agriculture and in time forcing the dedicated public servant leading it (Harvey Wiley) to quit. Because of this, many toxic food additives Wiley fought against gained “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) status and remain in use today.

•The handicapping of the FDA came to a head in 1962, when thalidomide was just barely prevented from devastating America’s children, prompting Congress to give the FDA much broader powers to police the safety and efficacy of drugs.

•Unfortunately, this law backfired, as the FDA created an impossible to reach standard of efficacy that it selectively enforced to protect the pharmaceutical industry and simultaneously began utilizing increasingly brazen (and illegal) police tactics against anyone promoting effective natural therapies.

•Because of this, many life-changing medical therapies (discussed throughout this article) were blacklisted by the FDA and faded into obscurity. This, along with the FDA’s tendency to push unsafe and ineffective therapies (e.g., vaccines or antidepressants) onto the market regardless of how much data argued against doing so, led to the FDA becoming the most protested agency in the federal government.

•Nonetheless, every attempt to fix the FDA failed. In this article, I will review the structural issues that have perpetually caused the FDA to succumb to incompetence and corruption. I propose potential solutions that can utilize the unprecedented window created by the Make America Healthy Again movement to end the FDA’s war against America’s health.

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Disabled Brits Fearful as UK Pushes Assisted Suicide Bill

Multiple disabled individuals in Britain have expressed fear or anxiety that if the bill the UK Parliament just approved becomes law, people in the country will not only be able to choose to kill themselves if they have a terminal diagnosis, but those lives deemed less valuable could be ended by an anti-life medical system. After all, British babies have been taken off life-support against their families’ wishes in the past because doctors didn’t want to treat them.

The Nazi mentality of ending lives that the authorities consider arbitrarily to be valueless has spread from justification for abortion to justification for assisted suicide—and what is essentially murder of the elderly and sick. “I am a doctor and I have a disability,” posted Dr. Callum Miller from London, England. “I am telling you without a shadow of a doubt Doctors do NOT have the time or the understanding to protect disabled people from assisted suicide[.] Doctors will be killing vulnerable disabled people if this bill passes.” 

MP Nigel Farage agreed, “The right to die may become the obligation to die.”

The UK House of Commons has reportedly voted to approve a bill that would allow those with a terminal diagnosis of less than six months to live to kill themselves in medically assisted suicide. The Christian values of honoring sufferers and praising brave deaths have been replaced by the pagan desire to end physical pain through any means possible, even suicide or murder. But it is easy to predict that once assisted suicide is allowed, even for a few exceptions, it will soon be encouraged for many other reasons, too.

Miller is not the only person worried that disabled Brits will be pressured into killing themselves. Catholic campaigner and mother Caroline Farrow posted, “People in wheelchairs openly weeping, here outside of Parliament. The atmosphere is one of profound sadness and terror. A dark cloud has descended over the UK.” 

Disability Rights UK announced it was “deeply dismayed” by the House of Commons vote, arguing, “This legislation sends a chilling message: the government prioritises the right to die over the right to live.”

To provide context on how easily legalized assisted suicide could be abused, in 2018, British baby Alfie Evans (see photo above) was ordered taken off life support against the wishes of his parents. Italy granted Alfie citizenship, and the Vatican offered to treat Alfie at a hospital there, but UK authorities refused, and Alfie was taken off life support and died. In 2023, a UK judge ruled that baby Indi Gregory needed to be taken off life support, and authorities would not let her be evacuated, even though, once again, a Vatican hospital was willing to provide little Indi the care she needed to survive. She died in November 2023. 

In both of these cases, the UK authorities arbitrarily decided the babies’ lives were worthless and not only refused care, but actively prevented the Vatican from providing care, ensuring the babies would die in the UK. 

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Biden DOJ Seeks To Gag Texas Doctor Who Blew Whistle On Child Trans Surgeries

Federal prosecutors seek to silence Eithan Haim and his attorneys after they exposed major problems in the Biden Administration’s criminal targeting of the Dallas surgeon who blew the whistle on the mutilation of minors.

Last week, federal prosecutors filed a Motion to Gag both Dr. Haim and the lawyers defending him against criminal charges the Department of Justice filed against the Texas physician in May 2024. The Biden Administration indicted Dr. Haim on spurious grounds after he leaked evidence a year earlier to journalist Christopher Rufo that the Texas Children’s Hospital was removing the healthy breasts and genitals of children. 

Currently, Dr. Haim faces five criminal counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, brought by a Second Superseding Indictment. Federal prosecutors filed a Second Superseding Indictment after the first two indictments against Haim included glaring mistakes — ones Haim and his counsel pointed out in various X posts.

Those posts caught the ire of the Department of Justice, with the federal prosecutors arguing in their Motion to Gag  that the posts on X “could interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the Government or the administration of justice because they discuss and characterize the substance of pretrial proceedings that would ordinarily be excluded from consideration by the jury, and disparage the prosecutors and the case in inflammatory language.” 

To support the motion, government lawyers filed two exhibits, including various threads posted on X, but inexplicably filed the materials under seal even though the posts appeared on the social media platform. That prompted the should-be-satirical-but-isn’t news aggregator, Not the Bee, to file a Motion to Intervene and Motion to Unseal. In addition to the two sealed exhibits of X posts, Not the Bee also sought the unsealing of two other court filings, one providing notice of an intent to seek a Second Superseding Indictment and the second related to the withdrawal of an Assistant U.S. Attorney from the case.

Long-time federal judge David Hittner, a Ronald Reagan appointee, denied Not the Bee’s Motion to Intervene, but granted its motion to unseal the filings, revealing the supposedly disparaging and inflammatory language prosecutors claim supports a gag order. 

A review of the various posts, however, shows Dr. Haim and his lawyer merely reiterating the same legal points made in briefing and argument before the court.

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The U.S. Disease Epidemic and MAHA

Despite the huge amount of appropriated funds and the strenuous efforts of many individuals working in healthcare, Americans have increasingly suffered from a range of acute and chronic conditions over recent decades. As an influential member of the Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have the opportunity to begin a reversal of this trend. He is developing plans to revamp the Federal agencies that regulate the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

Mr. Kennedy has presented incontrovertible data about the state of our health. He says the first step towards change is reforming policies and restoring compromised government oversight.   

It will take a concerted effort to convert a system that has allowed an array of degrading health conditions and an avalanche of human suffering. The statistics compiled by reliable scientific sources reveal details of this staggering crisis.

~ Six out of ten adults in America are living with a chronic illness. Seventy-four percent of American adults are overweight or obese. Rates of kidney disease and autoimmune conditions are going up. Cancer rates among young people are rising.

~ One-third of American teens are taking a prescription drug and nearly 30% are pre-diabetic. More than 18% of adolescents have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. In 2020, 77% of young adults didn’t qualify for the military based on their health scores, forcing the military to lower its standards.

~ Health problems of young Americans begin at an early age even as they receive vaccines to protect them from illness. The CDC currently recommends at least 70 doses of 18 different vaccines from infancy until age eighteen, yet children have never had more acute and chronic ailments. These vaccination protocols urgently need re-evaluation.

The increasing use of prescription drugs by all Americans presents a dire warning. However, due to the unprecedented influence of lobbyists, elected representatives have allowed the pharmaceutical industry rampant freedom to sell questionable products.

Washington has not solved the problem of the revolving doors between Big Pharma and government regulators. This is the primary reason federal agencies are paralyzed by corporate interests and remain negligent in their protective roles. 

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BlackRock Buys Blood-processing Facility, Pharmaceutical Lab as It Bets on Growing Profits in Healthcare

Global investment management firm BlackRock bought a blood-processing facility and a pharmaceutical lab in Australia as the first seed assets for its $1.5 billion Life Sciences investment platform, Financial Review reported.

The world’s largest asset manager partnered with Australian fund manager Wentworth Capital to make the purchase after the two firms determined that the life sciences real estate sector — including laboratories and research hubs — is a new asset class attractive to global investors and likely to be profitable.

Ben Hickey, head of Australian real estate for BlackRock, said the company thought that the sector is poised for long-term growth “driven by increased government and infrastructure spend[ing]” along with existing industry capabilities.

BlackRock launched the strategy after it surveyed European investors who invest in alternative asset strategies in September and found that a third of them were investing in life sciences real estate, the Financial Review reported.

Life sciences real estate, which refers to facilities built for medicine and healthcare, includes spaces for biotech, pharma and medical device companies. Examples include Merck’s recent expansion of its human papillomavirus or HPV vaccine production facility in Virginia, and Moderna’s new Innovation and Technology Centre for vaccine manufacture and mRNA research being constructed at an “unprecedented speed” near Oxford, England, in partnership with the U.K. government.

Hickey said Australia offered a high-growth low-risk market for the investment strategy and it was likely to see growth trends similar to what is happening in the European Union and the U.S., where rising industry demand is leading to the expansion of the life science and biomedical innovation hubs, according to the financial standard.

JLL, a different asset management company, forecasts in its 2024 report that worldwide pharma sales will be 80% higher by 2030 compared with 2023, driven largely by a doubling of revenue from “biologics.” Those include vaccines, gene therapies and monoclonal antibodies made from living cells that are altered through biotechnological methods. JLL predicts that growth will drive a recovery in the life sciences real estate market, which faltered in recent years.

However, as the number of biotech startups explodes, they are scrambling for new space, the report said, and demand for smaller life sciences spaces is already on the rise and should drive expansion of the market as a whole.

Anticipating this growth, BlackRock purchased two facilities owned by different investment funds previously managed by Charter Hall, an Australian property development and funds manager company, according to Financial Review.

The first is one of only four blood-processing facilities in Australia, operated by the Australian Red Cross Society under the name Lifeblood. BlackRock didn’t reveal what it paid for the 12,700-square-meter 24-hour facility in Alexandria, but Charter Hall paid $159 million for it in 2021.

The second is an 8,113-square-meter laboratory and office building in Macquarie Park currently rented by Israeli multinational Teva Pharmaceuticals, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of generic medicines. Charter Hall paid $53 million for the building in 2021.

BlackRock said it expects its new investments in life sciences to yield returns in line with its assets such as childcare facilities, which typically have a 4.5-5.5% rate of return.

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Healthcare Workers Reject COVID, Flu Shots Amid ‘Tremendous Erosion of Trust’ in Health Agencies

The number of healthcare workers receiving COVID-19 and flu vaccines declined during the 2023-24 cold and flu season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Only 15.3% of acute hospital workers and 10.5% of nursing home personnel received a COVID-19 vaccine during the 2023-24 season — down from 17.8% and 22.8% respectively, the CDC said in its Oct. 31 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Based on data from the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, flu vaccine rates for the same healthcare worker groups were higher than COVID-19 vaccine rates — 80.7% for acute care hospital personnel and 45.4% for nursing home personnel.

However, the rates remained “persistently below the levels during the prepandemic period.” For example, the flu vaccine rate for hospital workers in 2019-20 was 91%.

The CDC figures also showed that nearly 1 in 100 healthcare workers reported “a medical contraindication” to receiving either the COVID-19 (0.71%) or flu (0.89%) vaccine. The CDC figures did not provide information on the rate of vaccine side effects reported by healthcare workers.

The CDC said more research is needed “to identify effective strategies to improve vaccination at a time when health care personnel are susceptible to low vaccine confidence.”

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