Tag: healthcare

This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.”  

Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur. Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.”

The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants.

ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.

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Boston hospital set to offer ‘preferential care based on race’

A Boston hospital says it will offer “preferential care based on race” and “race-explicit interventions” in an attempt to engage in an “antiracist agenda for medicine” based on critical race theory.

A Boston Review article titled “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine” lays out a plan from Brigham and Women’s Hospital that implements a “reparations framework” for distributing medical resources in order to “comprehensively confront structural racism.”

“Together with a coalition of fellow practitioners and hospital leaders, we have developed what we hope will be a replicable pilot program for direct redress of many racial health care inequities,” Harvard Medical School instructors Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse wrote in the article.

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‘Super Gonorrhea’ is spreading like wildfire thanks to COVID-19

2020 hasn’t been kind to anyone, but it’s almost over. Unfortunately, if you find yourself with a case of “Super Gonnorhea” you might feel the effects of this terrible year for an extended period of time. Doctors are now warning of the increasing spread of the antibiotic-resistant strain of STI, and they’re blaming the coronavirus pandemic for helping it gain momentum.

According to a report from The Sun, the problem has gotten so bad that the World Health Organization has taken notice. The issue is that as the coronavirus pandemic was ongoing, many clinics and hospitals used antibiotics in the treatment of patients and to prevent the cross-infection of hospitalized individuals. That overuse of antibiotics has given a boost to antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, according to WHO.

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COVID-19 RELIEF BILL DOUBLES HEALTH CARE BUDGET — FOR CONGRESS

IN A FLURRY of last-minute legislating over coronavirus relief, congressional leaders abandoned hazard pay for essential workers and emergency funding for local governments that may be on the brink of municipal bankruptcy.

But lawmakers did find funding to dramatically increase the budget for the exclusive government-run health clinic that serves Congress. 

The Office of Attending Physician, which provides medical services to lawmakers, received a special boost of $5 million, more than doubling its annual budget, which is currently around $4.27 million. 

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