Tag: hhs

CNN Freaks Out Over Trump Making RFK Jr. HHS Chief

CNN freaked out over President-elect Donald Trump making RFK Jr. Secretary of Health and Human Services, with Jake Tapper accusing Kennedy of engaging in “quackery”.

Announcing Kennedy would head up the post on Truth Social, Trump asserted that it was a victory for Americans who have been “crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies.”

Trump added that Kennedy “will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

This caused heads to explode at CNN, with Tapper raging that RFK was “somebody who has been pushing quackery, who has been pushing lies, who has been pushing conspiracy theories.”

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HHS Funds AI Tool to ‘Inoculate’ Social Media Users Against HPV Vax ‘Misinformation’

University of Pennsylvania researchers — using U.S. taxpayer dollars — are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to “inoculate” social media users against “misinformation” about the HPV vaccine posted on social media, grant documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is funding the $4 million “Inoculate for HPV Vaccine” randomized controlled trial running from April 2022 through March 2027. The National Cancer Institute, part of HHS, is facilitating the funding. Funding for year three was released in April.

The study is headed up by Melanie L. Kornides, associate professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, whose research focuses on increasing vaccine uptake, and also on “strategies to combat misinformation.”

Kornides is joined by a team of digital health communication experts, software and program designers, social media analysts and machine learning systems experts who will help her run the “inoculation” experiment on 2,500 parents of children ages 8-12.

The team is collecting user data from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where people talk about HPV and using natural language processing to train an AI tool to identify “HPV misinformation,” or posts that are critical of vaccination — whether or not the information in the post is true or false.

They will then develop and test their “inoculation tool,” exposing subjects in three study arms to different types of messaging meant to make them immune to such misinformation.

A control group will get no particular messaging and two test groups will be exposed either to messaging designed to inoculate viewers against content critical of of HPV vaccines and content critical of anti-vaccine arguments.

The subjects will get “booster” doses of messaging at three and six months after their first inoculation.

If successful, the researchers wrote, this novel approach to combating health “misinformation” can be used in “wide-scale social media campaigns” addressing pandemics, childhood vaccination and other health issues.

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On habeas corpus, probable cause, warrants, detention and extrajudicial state killing under declared public health emergencies.

Below are excerpts from email exchanges about HHS-CDC’s demonstrated use of quarantine authorities under 42 USC 264, 42 CFR 70 and 42 CFR 71, to arrest and detain 3,000 cruise ship passengers at US military bases in March 2020, killing at least 10 people while they were held in detention.

Sasha Latypova is working on a second report about this. Her first report was published in June 2024 in video (Jane Ruby interview) and written format:

The information below is from my replies to readers seeking more information about federal quarantine law.

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Biden HHS Redefines ‘Lawfully Present’ To Give ‘Free’ Health Care To Illegal Immigrants

So much for a border crisis. The Biden administration recently finalized regulations that will provide taxpayer-funded benefits to individuals who came into this country lacking authorization, by defining them as “lawfully present.”

The final rule follows regulations proposed last spring. It will have the same major effects as the initial proposal by expanding access to taxpayer health benefits for specified populations, but seems craftily drafted in a way to avoid, or at least minimize, legal challenges.

Medicaid Expansion Not Finalized

The prime controversy in both last year’s proposed rule and this year’s final version is over health coverage for individuals participating in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Both regulations would revise the definition of “lawfully present” to include DACA participants for purposes of participation in health programs under Obamacare.

One major difference lies in the applicability of the regulatory changes. Whereas last year’s proposed rule changed the definition of “lawfully present” for both the insurance exchanges and Medicaid, the final regulation only applied the change to the exchanges, at least for the moment.

As a practical matter, not finalizing the Medicaid change will have little impact on DACA participants. Unlike most other populations, DACA participants will not need to earn income equal to the poverty level ($15,060 for a single person in 2024) to qualify for exchange subsidies. And because Biden-era enhanced subsidies remain in effect next year, the lowest-income recipients can qualify for subsidies that require no out-of-pocket premium for a benchmark health plan.

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Children’s Health Defense Supports the Motion Against U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Alleging Fraud in Omnibus Autism Proceeding

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Senior Staff Attorney Rolf Hazlehurst filed a motion in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims alleging that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), representing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), committed fraud in its representation of HHS in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding (OAP) in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).

The OAP was established to consolidate and adjudicate the approximately 5,400 claims filed on behalf of children who regressed into autism following vaccination.

In 2003, Hazlehurst filed a claim in the program on behalf of his son Yates, diagnosed with autism after suffering adverse reactions following routine childhood vaccines. Hazlehurst’s claim was one of six original “test cases” in 2007 that would decide the fate of all the other claims in the OAP.

According to the newly filed motion, the DOJ attorneys engaged in a series of acts of fraud upon the courts, beginning in the NVICP and ultimately impacting the Supreme Court of the United States.

In the NVICP, DOJ attorneys concealed from the special masters and petitioners that the government’s top expert witness, a world-renowned pediatric neurologist, revised his opinion on whether vaccines can cause autism.

The expert explained to the DOJ attorneys that vaccines can cause autism in a subset of children. The witness had been scheduled to testify in the first test case in the OAP.

However, the DOJ abruptly dismissed him as a witness once they learned of his clarification. Without the witness’s knowledge, DOJ attorneys repeatedly misrepresented his prior case-specific written opinion in the OAP to argue there is no scientific basis that vaccines cause autism.

Ultimately, all of the 5,400 OAP claims were dismissed, leaving vaccine-injured children and their families with no recourse.

“The DOJ’s first act of fraud upon the court snowballed into a massive scheme of deception with far-reaching implications. Their fraudulent scheme denied justice to Yates and the thousands of other children in the OAP,” said Hazlehurst.

“By hiding that their own expert’s opinion had changed to favor Yates and other children in the OAP, the DOJ effectively closed the NVICP’s doors to the injured children with similar claims who have followed.”

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The Era of Informed Consent is Over

In a significant blow to patient autonomy, informed consent has been quietly revoked just 77 years after it was codified in the Nuremberg Code.

On the 21st of December 2023, as we were frantically preparing for the festive season, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a final ruling to amend a provision of the 21st Century Cures Act. This allowed 

…an exception from the requirement to obtain informed consent when a clinical investigation poses no more than a minimal risk to the human subject…

This ruling went into effect on January 22nd, 2024, which means it’s already standard practice across America. 

So, what is the 21st Century Cures Act? It is a controversial Law enacted by the 114th United States Congress in January 2016 with strong support from the pharmaceutical industry. The Act was designed to

…accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of 21st-century cures, and for other purposes [?]…[emphasis added]

Some of the provisions within this Act make for uncomfortable reading. For example, the Act supported: 

High-risk, high-reward research [Sec. 2036].

Novel clinical trial designs [Sec. 3021]

Encouraging vaccine innovation [Sec. 3093].

This Act granted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) legal protection to pursue high-risk, novel vaccine research. A strong case could be made that these provisions capture all the necessary architecture required for much of the evil that transpired over the past four years.

Overturning patient-informed consent was another stated goal of the original Act. Buried under Section 3024 was the provision to develop an

Informed consent waiver or alteration for clinical investigation.

Scholars of medical history understand that the concept of informed consent, something we all take for granted today, is a relatively new phenomenon codified in its modern understanding as one of the critical principles of the Nuremberg Code in 1947. It is inconceivable that just 77 years after Nuremberg, the door has once again opened for state-sanctioned medical experimentation on potentially uninformed and unwilling citizens.  

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The Newly Unveiled HHS Rationale for Rescheduling Marijuana Underlines Drug Warriors’ Dishonesty

Last week, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Houston lawyer Matthew Zorn, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed the rationale for its August 2023 recommendation that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. The document not only contradicts the position that the DEA has long taken on this issue; it contradicts the position that HHS itself took in 2016, when the DEA rejected a 2011 rescheduling petition. The reversal shows that marijuana’s classification has always been a political question rather than a legal or scientific matter.

On October 7, 2022, the same day he announced a mass pardon for people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law, President Joe Biden instructed HHS and Attorney General Merrick Garland to “initiate the administrative process to review expeditiously how marijuana is scheduled under federal law.” Biden noted that Schedule I, which includes “heroin and LSD,” is “the classification meant for the most dangerous substances” and is “even higher than the classification of fentanyl and methamphetamine—the drugs that are driving our overdose epidemic.” On Twitter, he reiterated that “we classify marijuana at the same level as heroin” and treat it as “more serious than fentanyl,” which he said “makes no sense.”

In short, it was clear that Biden did not expect HHS to confirm its previous position that marijuana belongs in Schedule I. He expected HHS to recommend that marijuana be moved to a lower schedule, which is what it ultimately did. As the details of the HHS recommendation clarify, that decision was not based on new scientific evidence. It was based on a reinterpretation of the criteria for Schedule I that could have been implemented much sooner if HHS and the DEA had been open to it, or if a previous president had encouraged it.

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Top Biden Health Official In Touch With DEA About Marijuana Rescheduling Recommendation

The head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says his agency has “communicated” the agency’s “position” on marijuana rescheduling to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and has continued to offer additional information to assist with the final determination.

HHS for the first time confirmed that it had recommended moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) on Friday, releasing a trove of documents it submitted to DEA last year amid a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit initiated by attorney Matt Zorn.

Xavier Becerra, secretary of HHS, told The New York Times in a new interview that his department “communicated to them our position” and “put it all out there for them,” referring to the comprehensive scientific review it conducted and submitted to DEA as part of a scheduling directive from President Joe Biden.

“We continue to offer them any follow up, technical information if they have any questions,” Becerra said.

The status of DEA’s review is currently unknown, though some suspect the release of the cannabis materials in the FOIA lawsuit may indicate the scheduling decision announcement is imminent. Marijuana Moment reached out to DEA for clarification on the timing, and a spokesperson referred the inquiry to the Justice Department, which has not responded to requests for comment.

Congressional lawmakers, meanwhile, have touted the HHS Schedule III recommendation following Friday’s disclosure of the review documents.

“I’m encouraged by this news & urge the DEA to follow this common-sense scientific recommendation to move cannabis to Schedule III,” Rep. Dwight Evans (D-PA) said on Friday. “I continue to support full legalization but this would be a positive action.”

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Feds Will Release Marijuana Rescheduling Memo And Related Documents ‘In Their Entirety’ In Response To Lawsuit

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has agreed to release documents related to its recommendation to federally reschedule marijuana “in their entirety” amid litigation over a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that was filed by a lawyer last year.

“Good afternoon and thank you for your patience,” a Department of Justice attorney handling the case said in an email to attorney Matt Zorn on Thursday. “The agency has advised that it will release the letter and its enclosures in their entirety.”

Zorn posted a screenshot of the email on his blog, noting that the release could mean that “rescheduling is imminent—or not.”

When the government announces a marijuana rescheduling through a Federal Register notice, he pointed out, it would “attach the letter and its enclosures” to that posting.

Zorn last month obtained more than 250 pages of the rescheduling advisory letter and supporting documents sent by HHS to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) last year, though the vast majority were released only in highly redacted form.

In a phone interview with Marijuana Moment, Zorn said the new development comes after a “little scuffle” with the federal government over the timeline in his FOIA lawsuit. The Justice Department had filed a motion to vacate a deadline for summary judgement that was set for January 18, and while Zorn said he would typically accept such a request, he instead filed an opposing brief and the judge ultimately denied the government’s motion.

He added that, “realistically, the lawsuit could have accelerated” the timing of the government’s scheduling announcement, though it’s also possible that just the letter will be released without DEA immediately announcing a decision in the ongoing scheduling review.

In October, HHS released a highly redacted version of the one-page letter from the health agency to DEA in response to public records requests by news organizations such as Marijuana Moment and lawyers, including Zorn.

Shane Pennington, a lawyer who co-writes the On Drugs blog with Zorn, applauded his colleague’s work in pushing for the documents to be released.

“Matt has demonstrated once again that litigation is a powerful tool for unlocking doors, solving problems, and doing the ‘impossible,’” he told Marijuana Moment in an email. “I’m proud to work with him on On Drugs and so many other projects.”

Broadly, the documents are believed to discuss new scientific information that’s come to light in recent years, which HHS suggests might necessitate rescheduling marijuana.

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DEA Tells Congress It Has ‘Final Authority’ On Marijuana, Regardless Of Health Agency’s Schedule III Recommendation

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is telling lawmakers that it reserves “the final authority” to make any scheduling decision on marijuana following an ongoing review, regardless of what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommends.

In a letter sent to Congressional Cannabis Caucus co-chair Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), DEA Acting Chief of the Office of Congressional Affairs Michael Miller gave a general overview of the scheduling review process that was initiated under a directive from President Joe Biden in October 2022.

That started with a scientific assessment from HHS that reportedly advised DEA to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Once HHS made its recommendation in August, “DEA conducts its own review,” the letter, sent last month and first reported by Punchbowl News, says.

“DEA has the final authority to schedule, reschedule, or deschedule a drug under the Controlled Substances Act, after considering the relevant statutory and regulatory criteria and HHS’s scientific and medical evaluation,” it says. “DEA is now conducting its review.”

The agency’s statement came in response to an earlier letter from 31 bipartisan lawmakers, led by Blumenauer, that implored DEA to consider the “merits” of legalization as it carried out its review. That initial letter also criticized the limitations of simply placing cannabis in Schedule III, as opposed to fully removing the plant from CSA control.

“While Congress works to send the President comprehensive cannabis legislation, the urgency of full descheduling should inform DEA’s position on overall cannabis reform and appropriate enforcement centered on advancing public safety, not unjust criminalization,” the lawmakers’ letter said. “Marijuana’s continued inappropriate scheduling is both arcane and out-of-touch with the will of the American people.”

In that context, DEA’s response offered little insight, with the agency declining to address the lawmakers’ key arguments and instead simply outlining the procedural details of the scheduling review.

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