Tag: health

‘We Already Fought This Battle’: After Public Outcry, Pennsylvania Health Department Will Rethink Plan to Expand Powers

Following a wave of public opposition — including over 10,000 public comments — the Pennsylvania Department of Health has withdrawn its controversial proposal to grant itself substantially expanded powers during disease outbreaks.

The department had sought sweeping changes to Pennsylvania’s disease control regulations that would have allowed state health officials to impose stringent public health measures during outbreaks — including mandating masks, increasing vaccine surveillance and giving health officials access to students without their parents’ consent.

Commenting on the public response, state Sen. Doug Mastriano said in a statement:

“That is an extraordinary response, and a victory for the people of Pennsylvania. The citizens read what the government was proposing, remembered what happened during COVID-19 and spoke out, because we already fought this battle.”

Rather than proposing a bill and debating it in the General Assembly, the health department sought expanded powers by rewriting its regulations, typically a bureaucratic function.

But after the department submitted the proposal to the Independent Regulatory Review Commission and opened it for public comment, more than 10,000 people and organizations submitted comments, the majority opposing the changes, according to Mastriano.

Among those who opposed the changes was a group of state senators who fired off a 40-page letter detailing their objections.

Late last week, the department said it would rewrite and resubmit the proposed changes at a future date.

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Why Observational Studies Lie to You

If you’ve spent five minutes paying attention to medical news, you’ve undoubtedly seen the headlines: “People who take statins have 30% fewer heart attacks!” or “Breast cancer screening makes women live longer!” or “Menopausal Hormone therapy lowers Alzheimer’s risk.”

These all sound wonderful, don’t they? Just swallow a daily pill, or submit to regular screening, and you’ll join the ranks of the immortal. Were only life so simple. 

Yet before you rush off to demand a prescription, let me introduce you to one of the sneakiest, most persistent mirages from the world of medical research, which we call the “Healthy User Bias.”

Readers of Brownstone were recently introduced to this concept related to the Covid vaccines in an article entitled “A Hall of Mirrors of the Healthy Vaccinee Effect,” which demonstrated that those who were vaccinated were not the same as those who weren’t. Very frail people and those close to death were less likely to get vaccinated, which is understandable, and so those who didn’t get the jab died at a higher rate than those that did. Simple, right?

Understanding this single concept may not, overnight, elevate your medical BS detector from “gullible consumer” to “battle-tested skeptic,” but to be fair, it might help. 

The Kale-Eating, 6 AM Jogger Effect, and the Placebo Effect

What is the Healthy User Bias? It’s embarrassingly simple. In observational studies—where researchers merely watch what people do in the real world rather than running an experiment—the people who voluntarily take preventive drugs or pop daily supplements are fundamentally different from those who don’t. No surprise there, right? 

On average, “healthy users” are wealthier, better educated, and more health-obsessed. They are seriously more obedient when it comes to vaccines (including the Covid vaccine). These sorts of people want to do the best they can within their powers, which includes things that involve some friction: they eat organic kale, jog at dawn, wear seatbelts, don’t smoke, and visit their doctors regularly. They love tests of all kinds. 

A 2006 meta-analysis quantified the healthy user effect (which they called the healthy adherer effect) across 21 studies. What they found is mind-blowing in its implications. It found that those who religiously took their prescribed pills (which we call ‘good adherence’), even if it was a placebo, showed a 44% reduction in mortality (which was identical to adherence to proven beneficial therapy). All this shows is that the obedient, healthy people are more likely to do what most physicians want: they take their medication as ordered by their doctors.

When researchers observe people over ten years and notice they have fewer heart attacks and fewer strokes the light goes on. Hey, they might live longer! This is where pharmaceutical cheerleaders jump up and down, declaring: “Look! It was our pill!”

No. Sorry, it most likely wasn’t the pill. It was the person who took the pill. It was the fact that the patient was already doing 27 zillion other things to stay healthy. Maybe they had a gene that said: don’t do stuff to excess that are known to be bad for you (ie: smoking, drinking, committing violent crimes, extreme sports, being grossly overweight, being a couch potato, etc)

The pill was just along for the ride. Observational research routinely mistakes a healthy lifestyle for pharmaceutical magic. 

By now you’re saying, Okay Mr. Alansmartypants, gimme some examples. 

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“DO THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID?”: Mitch McConnell’s Chief of Staff Remains Smug When Pressed About The Senator’s Ability To Do His Job.

Senator Mitch McConnell’s Chief of Staff, Terry Carmack, was pressed by The Gateway Pundit reporter, Myles Morell, on the Senator’s health status and his cognitive abilities to do his job in the Senate.

Upon spotting Carmack, Morell asked him if he believed that pushing the Senator around in a wheelchair is a good look for both him and Carmack. Morell received no response.

Morell was then joined by independent journalists Aulden Nance and Anthony Pellegrino, with Nance questioning Carmack if he is concerned over the Senator’s legacy.

Pellegrino then asked if McConnell is able to talk and communicate clearly with Carmack “behind closed doors.” He received no response.

Morell and Nance continued to press Carmack on McConnell’s failure to give any public video statements since his extended absence from the Senate starting in June, while Pellegrino asked about what closed-door communications are like once again.

Morell ended the interaction by asking Carmack if he would address public concerns about the Senator’s ability to do his job properly, resulting in nothing but crickets once again.

Carmack refused to answer a single question and had a smug look on his face the entire time.

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McConnell Has to be Told How to Vote on Farm Bill

Senator Mitch McConnell had to be told how to vote on the “Farm Bill 2.0” on Wednesday.

On Monday, McConnell announced that he would return to the Senate to cast a vote after a three-month absence.

McConnell was hospitalized on June 14 after he was found unconscious at his DC home.

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The 84-year-old Kentucky Senator said he was hospitalized after he took a fall.

Until Monday, the public had only seen two ‘proof of life’ photos of McConnell in the last three months.

In a statement on Monday, McConnell said he is “not quite back to 100%.”

“Today, I’ll cast my first Senate vote since I took a bad fall back in June. I’m really looking forward to being back on the Senate floor and seeing my colleagues,” McConnell said.

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Pennsylvania Democrats ERASE “Mother” and “Woman” From State Health Code — Replaced With “Postpartum Individual” in Radical Gender Ideology Push

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration is quietly attempting to erase women and mothers from the Commonwealth’s health code in the name of radical gender ideology.

Buried inside a sweeping 502-page regulatory proposal from the Pennsylvania Department of Health are multiple revisions that strike the words “woman” and “mother” and replace them with dehumanizing, gender-neutral terms such as “individual” and “postpartum individual.”

The changes were first uncovered by The Daily Wire. The proposed overhaul of 28 Pa. Code Chapter 27, which governs communicable and noncommunicable diseases, was published in the Pennsylvania Bulletin on August 8.

The Shapiro administration apparently believes the words “mother” and “woman” are now too offensive for Pennsylvania’s official health regulations.

You simply cannot make this up. Under the proposed changes:

  • “Pregnant woman” becomes “pregnant individual.”
  • “Mother of a newborn” becomes “postpartum individual.”
  • “Mother of stillborn” is replaced with “case of stillbirth,” while references to the mother are changed to “postpartum individual.”
  • A “mother’s medical record” becomes a “postpartum individual’s medical record.”
  • Language referring to medical professionals attending women during childbirth is rewritten to say they attend “individuals.”

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HHS Sec RFK Jr.: We’ve Been ‘Mass Poisoning’ Kids with Ultra-Processed Foods

Monday on FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. laid out the Trump administration’s plan to eliminate ultra-processed foods from school lunches, which he maintained were contributing to childhood obesity.

Kennedy described offering those ultra-processed foods as “mass poisoning.”

“You know, as you said, when my uncle was president, 3% of American kids were obese,” Kennedy said. “And he was also so alarmed with that, because it was double what the European numbers were. And he launched the Presidential Council on Physical Fitness. Today, 20% of the — of kids are obese and, you know, many more of them are overweight. Seventy-seven percent of our kids can’t qualify for military service. And it’s not because they suddenly became indolent or hungry or lazy. It’s because we’ve been mass poisoning them with ultra-processed foods.”

He continued, “The new rules are going to get rid of 70% of the calories that our kids take today are ultra-processed foods. That is why the obesity crisis is happening. We’re getting rid of that with the new school lunch program. We’re getting rid of ultra-processed foods. We’re putting protein at the center of the plate. We’re getting rid of the refined grains and putting in whole grain. We’re getting rid of the fruit juices, which they’ve been using to substitute instead of feeding them actual fruit. And then we’re also — my agency is adding to this, adding to what Brooke’s putting in, $32 million to help these schools bring back their kitchens, and to do other things. You know, it’s a one-time grant to schools who start cooking from scratch again, like we saw when we were kids.”

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‘The Bacteria Are Winning’: How Factory Farms Cause Human Sickness

Intensive farming, where animals are kept in close quarters, creates environments that encourage the evolution of harmful bacteria and other pathogens so that they gain traits making it easier to infect people and more difficult to cure, a new study suggests.

Hygiene and welfare standards are often low on industrial farms, also called factory farms, and the rising widespread use of antimicrobials has led to concerns that overuse in animal farming is playing a key role in driving antimicrobial-resistant infections in people.

To gain insights into how intensive animal farming influences the evolution of harmful bacteria, a new study investigated how modern densely populated chicken farms have shaped the evolution of strains of Campylobacter jejuni bacteria, which are the leading cause of gut illness and diarrhea from bacterial food poisoning in people, typically after eating contaminated chicken.

Chickens are of particular interest because populations have shot up sevenfold since the 1960s due to agricultural growth and increasing demand for poultry. Today, roughly 31 billion chickens inhabit the globe. Together, poultry accounts for around 70% of all bird biomass on Earth.

The results showed that C. jejuni evolved rapidly in chickens, developing genetic strains resistant to antimicrobials and more likely to adapt to other species, which makes it easier for them to infect people.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the universities of Oxford and Sheffield in the United Kingdom analyzed the genetic information of 2,747 C. jejuni samples from wild birds and chickens.

They found that since 1900, the transmission between chickens and wild birds has increased by more than 100-fold.

Farming intensification has changed how pathogens interact between populations of wild birds and domesticated chickens, says Oakem Kyne, a lead researcher on the study at the University of Oxford.

There is a much wider variety of chicken-adapted C. jejuni strains now than before they were domesticated, with a large jump since 1900 when modern poultry farming intensified, says Kyne.

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US spy tech agency IARPA ‘MOVES’ to diagnose people’s neurological conditions from video clips

IARPA, the US spy tech agency, is working on how to diagnose various  neurological conditions by analyzing video clips of how people move. 

Intelligence& Counterterrorism

Last April, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced the launch of its Movement Observation and Video-based Evaluation System (MOVES) program aimed at diagnosing neurological  health conditions from open source video clips.

These neurological conditions include:

  • Parkinson’s Disease
  • Huntington’s Disease
  • Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
  • Cerebellar Ataxia
  • Essential Tremor
  • Dystonia

Shakes, tics, tremors, gaits, jerks, imbalances, and difficulties in walking, talking, swallowing, and breathing are all to be analyzed and diagnosed from video clips that may not have great angles or resolution.

And the people in the videos may be wearing all types of clothing like winter jackets, tunics, kurtas, headwear, and camo that could obfuscate their neurological conditions.

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Mitch McConnell Discharged From Rehab Center – Provides Health Update in New Statement

Senator Mitch McConnell was discharged from the rehab center and said he will continue his recovery at home.

McConnell was hospitalized on June 14 after he was found unconscious at his DC home.

“Earlier today, I was discharged from the rehabilitation center to continue my recovery at home. Elaine and I are grateful for the many well wishes and support from friends, colleagues, and Kentuckians, and for the attentive care I’ve received from excellent doctors, nurses, therapists, and hospital staff,” McConnell said in a statement.

“On the advice of my doctors, I’ll maintain an intensive regimen of physical therapy from home during the state work period, and I’ll continue to engage with my staff and colleagues on important Senate business,” McConnell said.

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What is Going on with Mitch McConnell? – Several Lawmakers Weigh in on Governor Andy Beshear’s Ultimatum To McConnell

Former leader of the Republican Senate Caucus, Mitch McConnell, R-KY, has been in the hospital for almost 50 days.

He was hospitalized in mid-June, and nobody knows his current condition. Why is it taking so long to get a clear, definitive answer.

“Proof of life photos” were released over the past few weeks that allegedly show McConnell with his wife in the hospital, but many suspect that these photos are misleading.

McConnell’s current condition is still seemingly unknown.

McConnell is 84 years old and has served in the U.S. Senate since 1985.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear demanded that McConnell either address the people of Kentucky directly or resign from the Senate.

Beshear even sent a letter to President Trump about the situation.

In response to Beshear’s request, McConnell’s autograph was used on the letter, further drawing in speculation that his condition is a “cover-up” to avoid a special election for his seat.

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