As Race 'Equity' Advances in Health Care, Signs of a Chilling Effect on Dissent / Doctors' Dilemma: Replacing Colorblindness to Favor Minority Care (2/2)

Part 1

Still from 2021: 

As Race 'Equity' Advances in Health Care, Signs of a Chilling Effect on Dissent

"The national movement to eradicate what activists call systemic racism and white privilege from medicine and health care has few public critics in the medical profession. A possible reason: Skeptics who have questioned these efforts have been subject to harsh Twitter campaigns, professional demotions and other blowback.

A podcast of the Journal of the American Medical Association caused a furor this year when one of its editors suggested that discussion of systemic racism is an unfortunate distraction that should be taken off the table. In response to a protest petition, the AMA launched an internal investigation into the creation of the podcast (and a since deleted Tweet that promoted it). Eventually, the Journal’s top two editors, who are both white, resigned – the editor-in-chief’s departure coming after he issued a public apology in which he affirmed the existence of structural racism in the United States and in the health care field.

In Minneapolis, Hennepin Healthcare System removed gynecologist Tara Gustilo, of Filipino descent, from her position as chair of the OB/GYN department after members of her department questioned her “ability to lead.” The demotion followed her series of Facebook posts criticizing critical race theory, Black Lives Matter and “How to Be an Antiracist” author Ibram X. Kendi, and her insistence that her department must strictly adhere to race-neutral policies with regard to patient care.

Colleagues and other doctors on Twitter denounced as racist University of Pittsburgh cardiologist and professor Norman Wang, who is ethnically Chinese, after his peer-reviewed paper last year critiqued affirmative action as illegal and discriminatory. The Journal of the American Heart Association, which published the paper, soon retracted it, alleging “deliberate misinformation or misrepresentation.” Wang’s employer demoted him from his role as director of a fellowship program for physicians, barred him from contact with fellows and residents, and temporarily prohibited Wang from contact with med students. Kathryn Berlacher, director of the cardiology fellowship program, reprimanded him in an email: “It is clear to us that any educational environment in which you partake is inherently unsafe, increasing our learners’ risk for undue bias and harm."

In each case, the dissenting doctors broadcast opinions counter to the official positions and policies of their organizations. The American Heart Association and Pitt officials, on Twitter and in public announcements, said Wang’s critique of affirmative action was inconsistent with their institutional values of diversity and inclusion.

Such incidents are noteworthy because of their eerily scripted language of moral outrage and public denunciation, coming from the nation’s highest levels of professional achievement, often on internal issues that would typically be handled with sensitivity and discretion as personnel matters.

“Rise up, colleagues!”Mayo Clinic cardiologist and diversity director Sharonne Hayes Tweeted in August in response to Wang’s article. “The fact that this is published in ‘our’ journal should both enrage & activate all of us.”

Berlacher  announced Wang’s demotion in a Tweet. “We stand united for diversity, equity and inclusion,” she proclaimed. “And denounce this individual’s racist beliefs and paper.”

The American Heart Association chimed in: “JAHA is editorially independent but that’s no excuse. We’ll investigate. We’ll do better.”

Those who are concerned by the social justice fervor sweeping through the medical profession say that such examples are evidence of the movement’s chilling effect on open debate of complex social issues.

“Most in academic medicine who are troubled by this are keeping their heads down and keeping their mouths shut,” said Thomas Huddle, who retired this year as professor at the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “They’re deeply afraid of social media mobs and of academic administrative superiors who’ve taken this stuff on.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing last year, the social justice movement has generated tremendous support. Brittani James and Stella Safo, both African American doctors, drew more than 10,000 signatures for their petition to review and restructure JAMA in the aftermath of the February podcast...

James, a Chicago-based physician and assistant professor in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, said she has little patience with accusations that social justice fosters cancel culture.

“I have to chuckle,” James said. “As a black woman, I absolutely cannot express my opinion, ever.

“I have to consistently think whom I’m in the room with. And I will be fired quickly without fanfare, without anyone advocating for me,” James said. “This idea that they’re uniquely persecuted is totally divorced from reality. My entire life has been a tightrope of being careful what I say, because there’ll be retribution against me.”...

Erica Li, a West Coast pediatrician and FAIR volunteer active in the development of the medicine chapter, agrees that racism exists in some situations, but said that racial disparities could have multiple causes. She opposes using affirmative action and other race-based standards to achieve equity, a term that refers to mandating equal outcomes by race.

Li said she is not fearful of retaliation, but asked that her precise location not be disclosed in this article. She said she “has taken great lengths to take my photos and contact information off the Internet” after a colleague received death threats over an issue not related to critical race theory."

If you are for racial non-discrimination, you are racist, unsafe and will lose your job 

If you're a left wing "minority", thinking that you're a victim of discrimination is proof you're one, but if you're not on the left, even if you get fired you're not a victim of cancel culture.

 

Doctors' Dilemma: Replacing Colorblindness to Favor Minority Care

"In March 2020, when the pandemic prompted fears that overwhelmed hospitals would run out of beds and equipment, two medical ethicists proposed an ostensibly race-neutral framework for rationing ventilators to save patients’ lives.

Writing in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, University of Pittsburgh bioethicist Douglas White and University of California, San Francisco, professor emeritus Bernard Lo reiterated the longstanding view that ventilators should “not be allocated on the basis of morally irrelevant considerations, such as sex, race, religion, intellectual disability, insurance status, wealth, citizenship, social status, or social connections.”

Less than a year later, race was no longer a “morally irrelevant” consideration for White and Lo. In a February 2021 paper about “mitigating inequities” in intensive care, they wrote: “Although at first glance it seems unproblematic to focus on saving as many lives as possible with scarce critical care resources, this approach may disproportionately deny critical care treatment to persons of color and the poor.”

Thus saving as many lives as possible in a colorblind manner becomes a classic example of systemic racism: a neutral standard that benefits white people. That’s because people of color, with lower life expectancies, are more likely to be downgraded in priority for emergency lifesaving measures.

“In our view, when society is substantially responsible for creating disparities through unfair social policies, there is a special obligation to prioritize disparity mitigation,” they wrote, “even if doing so results in somewhat fewer overall lives saved compared with purely utilitarian triage.”

Although White and Lo could not be reached for comment, the differences between the two papers published less than a year apart reflect the remarkable velocity of change that has occurred in medicine during the past year...

“To achieve equitable access and distribution of care, critical race theory must be a part of the process utilized to create broad, population-focused guidelines,” four doctors wrote in a Health Affairs article last year...

The public may be receptive to race-based medicine. According to two independent online surveys conducted in September 2020, “respondents endorsed prioritizing racial/ethnic communities that are disproportionately affected by COVID-19.”

The tradeoffs involved in this moral rebalancing of competing interests encapsulate the underlying source of the tension: individual rights versus group rights. White and Lo seek to achieve the best of both worlds, but they acknowledge that improving outcomes for some groups in the name of racial justice comes with a price: It may result in a greater loss of life.

Others have articulated a similar moral position when deciding who should be prioritized for vaccinations: essential workers, who are disproportionately minority, or the elderly, who are disproportionately white.

"Older populations are whiter," Harald Schmidt, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, explained in The New York Times in December 2020. "Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit."...

This year a number of states sought to give priority for vaccinations to black, Hispanic and other at-risk residents, but most states used proxies for race, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index. 

They were following the October 2020 recommendation of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine...

U.S. courts have never considered a case over the use of race to allocate scarce health care resources, according to an October 2020 paper co-authored by Schmidt, who wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court is not likely to approve an explicitly race-based allocation policy. He urged public health agencies to devise proxies to achieve their intentions.

“The Supreme Court is likely to uphold racially neutral vaccine allocation criteria, which are designed to capture worse-off minorities but not explicitly,” Schmidt and his co-authors wrote. “A vaccine distribution formula, therefore, could lawfully prioritize populations based on factors like geography, socioeconomic status, and housing density that would favor racial minorities de facto, but not explicitly include race.”

Hesitating to proceed with this ethical tightrope act would amount to a dereliction of duty, the authors suggested...

One active case study of explicit racial favoritism is a medical reparations pilot project at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston that provides “a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service.”

The project, explicitly anchored in critical race theory, seeks to repay “the outstanding debt from the harm caused by our institutions, and owed to our BIPOC patients.”...

They acknowledge that offering preferential care based on race may prompt legal challenges, but they say there is ample evidence that the current societal systems “already unfairly preference people who are white.” They further note: “Our approach is corrective and therefore mandated.”"

 

Ironically, covid hysteria was justified as protecting the elderly. 

Disparate impact is good if it benefits "minorities".

Liberals and Mental Health

Someone was crowing that Jonathan Haidt's finding that the younger and more liberal you are, the more likely you are to have been diagnosed with a mental health condition was wrong, but claimed that he was unable to show proof because of the conditions of the licence (the licence just says "you may not download, republish, retransmit, reproduce or otherwise use any such content as a stand-alone file").

He was probably hoping that no one would actually look at the data and expose him (he even taunted me with "It will take some expertise to open and process an SPSS file, but surely you're clever enough to do that?"), but too bad, I did (of course, if Haidt had really been lying, it's curious why no one had exposed his academic fraud for years).

His lies were really brazen.

He claimed "This survey didn't even feature the question whether the respondent is a conservative or liberal" and that "it didn't ask the person if they ever went to a doctor to talk about their mental health (which must be a prerequisite for any statistical conclusions like the one you did)"

The first claim is categorically false, because if you download Pew's American Trends Panel Wave 64 dataset, the variable F_IDEO shows the respondent's ideology. It's true that in the Wave 64 questionnaire, they were not asked about their political ideology - but that's because this is panel data and they already have this data from previous waves.

The second claim might be true in a very narrow technical sense, but the question asked (which you can verify in the questionnaire in the PDF in the dataset download) was "Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?" But what we're seeking to measure here is not mental health awareness - whether people go to the doctor to talk about their mental health - but mental health state (whether people have mental health conditions).

But the biggest lie is about what the data show. And they indeed confirm Haidt's charts:

- The older you are, the less likely you are to have a diagnosed mental illness

This is interesting because this variable is monotonic - once you have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, you can never truthfully say no to the question: "Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?"

You would expect older people to be more likely to have been diagnosed as such in their lifetime since they have been alive longer, yet young people are more likely to answer this question in the affirmative

Of course, the cope is that older people are just in denial, or don't seek medical attention for mental health issues. But if 41% of a population (young, very liberal women) report having a mental health diagnosis, this suggests that if the concept of mental health is to have any meaning at all, there must be overdiagnosis in some form, or it makes a mockery of the concept of mental health. In other words, if everybody is insane - no one is insane.

- The more liberal you are, the more likely you are to have a diagnosed mental illness

Naturally, the cope here is similar to the above. But we see a clear dose-response effect across sexes and ages - the more liberal you are, the more likely you are to have a diagnosed mental illness (with the possible exception of going from Very Conservative to Conservative). So for this cope to work, left wingers need to throw Moderates and Liberals under the bus - not just Conservatives - and claim that they are in denial as well. Apparently only Very Liberal Women are in touch with their own mental health - and everyone else is just suffering from false consciousness.

Furthermore, we know that liberals are less happy than conservatives, and that happiness has an inverse relationship with mental health (the original poster claimed that "Jon Haidt's piece was already debunked in a research paper. And in the most obvious way" but besides never making that claim, the paper he cited also cited many articles about liberals being less happy than conservatives). So the further cope needs to be that conservatives are not just refusing to go to the doctor - they are also in denial about being happy. But of course, any "theory" that can make conservatives look bad is a good theory.

- Women are more likely to have a diagnosed mental illness than men

Across basically all age groups and ideologies, women consistently are more likely to have a diagnosed mental illness than men.

Once again, one cope is going to be similar to the above, but another is going to be about "patriarchy". Yet, the gender equality paradox reveals that increasing gender equality is actually associated with worse female mental health (relative to male).

This supports the hypothesis that grievance politics and left wing ideology drive poor mental health (rather than objective oppression).

For a robustness check, I sliced and diced the data some more.

Looking at the data by race, black non-Hispanic respondents pretty much have similar levels of diagnosed mental illness regardless of ideology. Hispanic conservatives, very conservative and moderate respondents have similar levels of diagnosed mental illness, but liberal and very liberal Hispanics have significantly worse mental health. But it's white people who are really driving the ideology effect.

So for the earlier cope about conservatives being in denial or refusing to go to the doctor to hold, left wingers need to throw black liberals under the bus now, since black very liberal respondents (sample size of 76 notwithstanding) have almost half the mental health diagnosis rate of black liberal respondents. And liberal and very liberal Hispanics also have lower rates of diagnosed mental illness than their white fellow travellers.

Of course, one could come up with further cope about racial disparities in healthcare access but this would work in the opposite direction from the oppression-as-a-cause-of-mental-health-issues claim. The layers of cope are starting to collapse on themselves.

What Is Happening to My Profession? (Wokeness in Medicine)

From 2021:

What Is Happening to My Profession?

"Twenty-one years ago, I wrote a book called PC, M.D. How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. One chapter explored “multicultural counseling,” a form of therapy that encouraged white clinicians to ask themselves, “what responsibility do you hold for the racist oppressive and discriminating manner by which you personally and professionally deal with minorities?” Another chapter documented flaws in research studies purportedly showing that physicians, as a matter of routine, were racially biased against their patients. I devoted another chapter to the quest for social justice in the field of public health. In the epilogue, which I called “The Indoctrinologist Isn’t In…Yet,” I cautioned: “those who care about the culture and practice of medicine must be alert to the encroachment of political agendas.”

Today, the Indoctrinologists are officially in. These health professionals argued early in the COVID pandemic that, if hospitals were forced to ration ventilators, they should ration based partly on minority status rather than exclusively by standard criteria, such as clinical need or prognosis. They urged vaccine priority for black Americans to compensate for “historical injustice.” And 1,200 of them cheered, via open letter, the message of an epidemiologist from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who told would-be marchers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” In each instance, the experts allowed their own moral commitments, not objective metrics of risk, to shape their advice.

The latest manifestation of Indoctrinology is a 54-page document from the American Medical Association called Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts. The guide condemns several “dominant narratives” in medicine. One is the “narrative of individualism,” and its misbegotten corollary, the notion that health is a personal responsibility. A more “equitable narrative,” the guide instructs, would “expose the political roots underlying apparently ‘natural’ economic arrangements, such as property rights, market conditions, gentrification, oligopolies and low wage rates.” The dominant narratives, says the AMA, “create harm, undermining public health and the advancement of health equity; they must be named, disrupted, and corrected.”

One form of correction that the AMA recommends is “equity explicit” language. Instead of “individuals,” doctors should say “survivors”; instead of “marginalized communities,” they should say, “groups that are struggling against economic marginalization.” We must also be clear that “people are not vulnerable, they are made vulnerable.” Accordingly, we should replace the statement, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” with “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.”

Although the guide contains page after page of “medical newspeak,” as linguist and New York Times commentator John McWhorter called it, a solid kernel of truth lies buried within it. The guide rightly calls attention to the “social determinants of health”—the psychological, social, and cultural contexts that contribute to disease and shape people’s choices regarding their health...

The guide recklessly stretches context beyond the realm of clinical outreach. It rebuffs “programmatic fixes,” such as the case manager who arranges for a patient’s transportation, because such fixes “ignore the social responsibility of corporations and government agencies.” With its emphasis on “power relations” and its push to “redistribute power and resources,” the guide reads more like a postmodern manifesto than an actionable blueprint for physicians. 

In important ways, I hardly recognize my profession. After the death of George Floyd, however, the radical justice project caught fire. Last year, the Association of American Medical Colleges, a major accrediting body, informed medical schools that they “must employ anti-racist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” One of my colleagues told me that her school jettisoned lectures in bioethics to make room for the anti-racist curriculum. “Which is ironic,” she said, “because that was where students were taught about subjects like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.” What other essential subjects will anti-racism training displace? 

The implementation of the social justice agenda has constrained collegial discourse, challenged the maintenance of standards, and suppressed honest analysis of certain problems. In her article called “What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?,” Katie Herzog wrote of “doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism) … I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.” 

Two cancellations have attracted notice. Last year, Norman Wang, a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who expressed skepticism about mandatory affirmative action after conducting a careful review of the data was stripped by his department of his directorship of the electrophysiology fellowship and barred from having contact with medical students, residents, or fellows because his views were “inherently unsafe.” His peer-reviewed paper, ‘Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America from 1969 to 2019,’ which appeared in March 2020 in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) was retracted by the journal without Wang’s consent. The American Heart Association, which publishes JAHA, tweeted that his article “does NOT represent AHA values.” The cardiologist has sued both the university and the American Health Association. 

In another case, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association was effectively forced to resignlast June for a somewhat tone deaf, but otherwise unremarkable, 15-minute podcast on racism in medicine and because of a tweet advertising it. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor-in-chief, I am ultimately responsible for them,” he said in a statement. What other examples have escaped attention?...

Especially vexing, as Huddle and I have commiserated, is the reflexive attribution of group differences to systemic racism. “It’s axiomatic at this point,” said a colleague who had participated in a group discussion of stress and rising suicide in black youth. The tacit rule was that only fear of police aggression and subjection to racial discrimination were allowable explanations, not the psychological torture of bullying by classmates or the quotidian terror of neighborhood gun violence.

I strongly agree that much of black Americans’ disadvantage in health and access to care is the cumulative product of legal, political, and social institutions that have historically discriminated, and sometimes continue to discriminate, against them. Systemic racism may indeed have broad explanatory value regarding health disparities, but, as an analytic framework, it doesn’t yield realistic prescriptions. Just what are physicians supposed to do? Become activists? The AMA’s answer is yes. In a strategic plan it released last spring, the organization urged doctors to “push upstream to address all determinants of health and the root causes of inequities, dismantle structural racism and intersecting systems of oppression.”

This is no solution. Physicians cannot—and should not—“dismantle racism and intersecting systems of oppression” as part of their clinical mission. To imply that such activity falls within our scope of expertise is to abuse our authority. Doctors can reasonably lobby for policies directly promoting health, such as better coverage for patient care or more services, but we will lose our focus and dilute our efforts to care for patients if we seek to address the perceived root causes of health disparities.

After all, even seasoned policy analysts can’t readily tease out strong causal links between health and sprawling upstream economic and social factors. With so many intervening variables at play, reforms in the service of health may well create unwanted repercussions elsewhere in the system. Any physician is free, of course, to pursue progressive reform as a private citizen but, as doctors, we already have a job: to diagnose and treat...

I had my own encounter with intolerance in academic medicine... My talk was about the year I spent assisting with treatment efforts in Ironton, a small, embattled town in south-eastern Ohio that was reeling from the opioid crisis...

The residents told the chairman that my talk, coming only two days after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, “was further traumatizing to us.” They wrote that, “the language Dr. Satel used in her presentation was dehumanizing, demeaning, and classist toward individuals living in rural Ohio and for rural populations in general … We find her canon to be beyond a ‘difference of opinion’ worth debate.”  My earlier writing on health disparities was deemed a “racist canon.” They expressed “shock and disappointment” at the chairman’s failure to “take a public stand against” me and questioned his commitment to the department’s anti-racist agenda. “Will you continue to invite Grand Rounds Speakers with racist and classist mindsets, like Dr. Satel?” the residents asked.  Although they requested that the chairman “revoke” my lectureship at Yale, he did not do so. 

Academic medicine is in the midst of a risky institutional experiment. How will the AMA’s new call to “focus attention on inequitable systems, hierarchies, social structure, power relations, and institutional practices” affect the formation of trainees’ professional identities? Are we truly to believe that health is so thoroughly contingent on malign forces that doctors shouldn’t bother educating patients about how they can take responsibility for their wellbeing? And how will the adoption of a zealous social justice agenda affect public trust?

Some of the people who are refusing the life-saving COVID vaccine are alienated from mainstream institutions, which they view as house organs of the political Left rather than trustworthy arbiters of truth. They may see the AMA’s prescription as further confirmation of their suspicions.

Most important, will patients benefit when the AMA and other leaders position medicine as a vehicle for activism? We must remember that “Do no harm” is a covenant that doctors make with their patients, not with political systems and hierarchies."

 

Medicine's Getting Major Injections of Woke Ideology (1/2)

From 2021:

Medicine's Getting Major Injections of Woke Ideology (Two-Part Series)

"The national racial reckoning over reparations and critical race theory is taking over the world of medicine and health care. Prestigious medical journals, top medical schools and elite medical centers are adopting the language of social justice activism and vowing to confront “systemic racism,” dismantle “structural violence” and disrupt “white supremacy” in their institutional cultures.

Some activist physicians describe the present-day health care system with such ominous terms as a “medical caste system” or “medical apartheid”...

Rare is the doctor who is willing to publicly question claims of white privilege and implicit bias in the healthcare system, and already several doctors who have publicly pushed back have been demoted and have filed legal actions alleging retaliation. This year the medical profession received an unequivocal message when two editors of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association resigned under pressure over a podcast that aired opinions expressing skepticism that the United States is plagued by systemic racism.

While racialized politics has infused every corner of American life, the moral stakes in the health care arena go far beyond, say, the perceived slights called microaggressions. The medical literature, lately drawing on critical race theory, depicts the health care industry itself as a historical source of illness in — and even killing of — black and brown bodies. That would make medicine analogous to policing and criminal justice, the other social institutions directly blamed for maiming and murdering black people...

The movement is just beginning reshape the practice of medicine, but a primary assumption is that white doctors and institutions are pervaded with unconscious bias, and that black doctors, who are significantly underrepresented in the profession, would provide better care to black patients. But because black students typically get lower scores and lower grades, increasing the ranks of African American and other minority practitioners would likely require moving away from a reliance on conventional measures of academic qualification, such as undergraduate grades and standardized test scores...

Efforts to improve health outcomes for black patients are advancing on many fronts. They include a Boston hospital pilot project to offer preferential admissions to non-white patients for heart care; prioritizing non-whites for COVID-19 vaccinations; and the changing of a United States Medical Licensing Examination test from a graded score to pass/fail to help minority students succeed. 

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education is adding a diversity requirement for accrediting U.S. residency and fellowship programs for newly minted doctors; and Northwestern University and its Feinberg School of Medicine are seeking to improve diversity by eliminating a six-decade-old Honors Program in Medical Education.

Medical schools are adding units on critical race theory, intersectionality, implicit bias, identity, oppression, allyship, power and privilege to their curricula. Medical students are learning about medical exploitation and medical experimentation on enslaved blacks, black prisoners and other unwitting subjects. And staple reading assignments in med schools feature such non-medical polemics as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.”  

This year alone, six state medical boards have added a requirement for training in “antiracism,” implicit bias or cultural competency for doctors in some practice areas to be eligible for a medical license, raising the total to 13 jurisdictions that require such training; eight other board are reviewing such proposals, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards.

All of this comes at a time when medical schools are experiencing dramatic changes on the gender front as well, where it is becoming customary for medical professionals to announce their gender pronouns as a matter of standard etiquette, and some medical schools are replacing the phrase “pregnant women” with “birthing people” in the interest of inclusiveness. Indeed, the issues of race and gender are intersectionally linked in the world of social justice advocacy, and some anti-racist and equity manifestos include a sex and gender platform, such as adding more chest binders and gender-affirming practices, reducing heteronormative bias, and advocating for “LGBTQIA2S+” causes...

Such developments trouble skeptics worried about the repercussions for patient care and for the training of physicians. They say the moral fervor reduces complex policy to simplistic slogans and indiscriminately blames all racial disparities on a nebulous menace – white supremacy or systemic racism – while discounting the influence of cultural differences and individual initiative. It then attacks the perceived problem through blunt weapons as such racial preferences, ideological conformity and emotional blackmail.

“The fundamental problem with social justice in public health is that there are no limiting principles to it,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and author Sally Satel wrote in the journal Liberties this year...

Satel is among those who doubt equity is attainable, given the complex underlying factors that shape human health. But some medical ethics experts are pushing in the other direction and going so far as to argue that equalizing group outcomes between blacks and whites may necessitate tolerating a greater loss of life...

“It’s a very ideological approach to things: ‘People are going to die, so you have to agree with everything I say. And if you disagree with it, you want people to die apparently,’ ” said William Jacobson, clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, which runs the conservative websites legalinsurrection.com and criticalrace.org.

“And it also is extremely lucrative for consultants and administrators who have a vested interested in perpetuating the problem and these efforts,” said Jacobson, who is involved in litigation against SUNY Upstate Medical University for internal communications related to the school’s planned equity strategy.  

Lurking just under the surface of this debate is the sensitive question no one wants to discuss on the record: the quality of med students and doctors who have lower test scores and worse grades, and presumably would not have been admitted if not for affirmative action. That’s an issue broached by Norman Wang, a University of Pittsburgh cardiologist whose peer-reviewed article questioning the legality of racial preferences was, four months after publication, retracted, leading to Wang’s demotion and public denunciation by his employer and by the journal that initially saw fit to run his article...

Among the 164-page task force report’s charges: “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of these health disparities.” All students and staff are to receive training in “bystander intervention” for bias, all new faculty hires would be required to sign a written pledge affirming a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, and staff with advanced training in anti-racism would be identified by wearable buttons. Medical school applications would add questions about the applicant’s commitment to social justice, and include “a statement that if the student does not have this desire they may not want to consider [SUNY] Upstate.” 

WhiteCoats4BlackLives, a medical student organization that has grown to some 75 chapters out of the National White Coat Die-In demonstrations in 2014, represents up-and-coming leaders in the medical profession. The organization supports the Palestinian liberation movement, advocates the “abolition of police forces,” and urges medical schools to research the backgrounds of their founders and leaders for racist and oppressive pasts. WC4BL’s 289-page report from 2019 says the med school curriculum must explicitly teach that “it is the dominant groups’ pursuit of power that contributes to illness.” Among the group’s policy proposals: Medical schools must eliminate racial grading disparities, compensate “community advocates and people of color” for anti-racist activism, and equip physicians-in-training with tools to dismantle systemic racism, including “training in activism and organizing.”...

A 2019 study, referencing more than 300 papers on racial health disparities, noted that the racial outcomes are impervious to social class: “At every level of education and income, African Americans have a lower life expectancy at age 25 than do whites and Hispanics (or Latinos), and blacks with a college degree or more education have a lower life expectancy than do whites and Hispanics who graduated from high school.”

For the past quarter-century, public health experts had accepted a general explanation for these disparities – attributing them to “social determinants of health” – a term that covers living conditions and socioeconomic factors that ultimately determine one’s life expectancy. But these social determinants existed somewhere out in the world, beyond the scope of doctors, and the medical solutions seemed speculative, unknown or ultimately unknowable.

Over time, public health researchers began attributing the racial disparities with growing insistence to an anterior cause – an invisible force operating within American society, ranging from unconscious bias to policing patterns and even to the practice of medicine itself. In other words: systemic racism. Framing the disparities as the result of social determinants of health left the medical profession powerless – for how can a health care provider treat a patient suffering from social conditions? But zeroing in on systemic racism has thrown open the doors to a whole new set of interventions, which translate into the anti-racism movement now sweeping through the medical profession.

“It’s the thing that causes the adverse impact of social determinants of health on specific communities,” said Matthew Wynia, a University of Colorado professor of medicine and director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. “To just say it’s because ‘they live in bad neighborhoods,’ that is not a full explanation. This is all about 400 years of history.”

Wynia said there are only a handful of possible explanations for why black people have consistently worse health outcomes: bad genetics, irresponsible behavior, individual racism on the part of whites, or social structures. Wynia said the first two explanations – bad genes and bad choices – are the very definitions of racism, and individual white racists do exist but within the context of a larger problem: “Societal factors have got to be the favorite there.”...

One advocate suggests a redefinition of a physician’s scope of practice: Doctors have a moral obligation to become politically active so they can work to dismantle the social structures that harm their patients’ health...

The critics say that applying critical race theory to medicine too often devolves into an exercise in confirmational bias that seeks only the evidence that confirms the theory of systemic racism, ignores or disallows contradictory evidence, and imposes forced interpretations on complex data.

“They start with the conclusion. And there can be no deviation from the conclusion,” said Jacobson, the conservative law professor at Cornell. “You cannot question the conclusion because the conclusion of systemic racism is the starting point. It stifles dissenting views. It stifles open inquiry.”

Other scholars express similar frustrations. Satel’s article in the Liberties journal, titled “Do No Harm: Critical Race Theory and Medicine,” cites an anonymous colleague who related participating in a group discussion about stress and suicide among black youth. “The tacit rule was that only fear of police aggression and subjection to discrimination were allowable explanations,” the anonymous doctor recalled, “not the psychological torture of bullying by classmates or the quotidian terror of neighborhood gun violence.”"

Clearly when you a priori rule out answers you don't like, you can only get the answers you want - "societal factors", aka racism/opression, are always to blame.

Part 2 (live 12 February)

Medical School Has Gotten Too Political

Medical School Has Gotten Too Political

"Over the past decade, we’ve grown ever more concerned about dubious strains of social-justice advocacy infiltrating medicine. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, doctors’ pursuit of social reform coalesced, almost overnight, into a mission.

Within a week of Floyd’s death, for example, the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is a co-sponsor of a major accrediting body, announced that the nation’s 155 medical schools “must employ antiracist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” A year later (and again in 2024), the American Medical Association released a Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity that encouraged physicians to dismantle “white patriarchy and other systems of oppression.” Over two dozen medical schools issued their own similar plans.

According to Columbia University’s department of medical humanities and ethics, advocacy is “the bridge that links patient care with efforts to address social determinants of health, institutionalized prejudices, and structural dislocations faced by patients and communities.” The department sought to develop a “cadre of advocates with expertise in achieving policy change at the local, state, and national level.”

Medical students are now immersed in the notion that undertaking political advocacy is as important as learning gross anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology. This is the wrong lesson. Their professors should lead them, instead, to ponder important questions about the impact of advocacy on patients and the profession.

Today, doctors perform political advocacy in myriad ways. State medical boards have added a requirement for training in “antiracism” in order to be eligible for a medical license, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards. The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) created a document titled “Anti-Racism and Race Literacy: A Primer and Toolkit for Medical Educators.”

Certain debates have become off-limits. Consider, for instance, a 2020 incident involving Norman C. Wang, a cardiologist with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After Wang published a peer-reviewed critique of affirmative action in a respected medical journal, his colleagues denounced him on social media for his “racist thinking” and condemned his paper as scientifically invalid and “racist.” The journal retracted his article and the school removed him as director of the electrophysiology program. (Wang sued for retaliation and discrimination, but was unsuccessful.)

Researchers are promoting unscientific modes of thinking about group-based disparities in health access and status. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity decrees “structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequities,” despite the fact that this is at best an arguable thesis, not a fact. (The center was shut down last month.) The Kaiser Family Foundation states that health differentials “stem from broader social and economic inequities.”

In what borders on compelled speech, the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University issued a 164-page report from a diversity task force insisting that “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of [Black-white] health disparities.” Other variables influencing the course of chronic disease, prominently the patient’s health literacy and self-care, receive scant attention.

Some medical professionals have even endorsed racial reparations in health care decision-making. At one point, the CDC vaccine advisory committee proposed prioritizing the anticipated Covid vaccine by race rather than age, solely because older cohorts disproportionately comprised whites. This plan would have delayed vaccination of the elderly — the highest risk group — and, according to the CDC’s own projections, resulted in more overall deaths. Other sponsors of health equity lobbied for a rationing scheme that prioritized the assignment of ventilators to Black patients, negating customary triage procedures.

Perhaps the most dramatic recent display of ideological intrusion into the medical sphere took place last June at the UCSF Medical Center, where keffiyeh-draped doctors gathered on the grounds to demand that their institution call for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. Their chants of “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!” echoed into patients’ rooms.

These doctors were not putting patients first — if anything, they were offending and intimidating patients. They were putting their notion of social justice first.

As doctors, we believe that it is enough for us to demand of ourselves that we be good at taking care of patients. But for individual doctors who wish to responsibly leverage their professional standing to effect political change, we propose three guidelines. They should advocate for policies that 1) directly help patients and 2) are rooted in professional expertise, while 3) ensuring that their advocacy does not interfere with their relationships with their colleagues, students, and patients.

First, the reform they promote must have a high likelihood of directly improving patient health. “Dismantling white patriarchy and other systems of oppression” is not an actionable goal. Our primary job is to diagnose and treat, and to do no harm in the process. We have no expertise in redistributing power and wealth. Even seasoned policy analysts cannot readily tease out strong causal links between health and economic and social factors that lie upstream.

Indeed, with so many variables at play, manipulating policy in the service of health may not have the intended effect — and can easily create unwanted repercussions elsewhere in the system. The costs and benefits would be almost impossible to assess ahead of time. Moreover, patients suffering today have no time to wait for fundamental societal reorganization.

We do not deny that much of the health disadvantage suffered by minority groups is the cumulative product of legal, political, and social institutions that historically discriminated against them. But past discrimination is not necessarily a factor sustaining those problems now. We must address the discrete causes that operate today.

Second, physicians’ actions or their advice to policymakers should be rooted in expertise that is unique to their profession. Opining and advocating on behalf of general social issues exploits their moral authority, turns medicine into a vehicle for politics, and risks the trust of the public. Medical professionals will, of course, have their own views of the public good. They are free to take to the barricades as citizens — but not while wearing their white coats.

Third, doctors must not lose sight of the impact of advocacy on patients and students. While advocating for one’s own patients is a basic obligation of being a doctor, advocating on behalf of societal change can work against those patients, drawing time and attention away from their care.

The faculty must also protect medical students’ education, an imperative complicated by advocacy, which seeks change rather than knowledge. Taking strong political stands at work also risks alienating trainees and colleagues with whom faculty members must collaborate in caring for patients. Trainees who hold different political views may withhold their opinions out of concern for their career prospects.

Our health-care system has many problems, including high costs, limited access, and plummeting trust following the Covid-19 pandemic. As America’s poor and marginalized bear these and other burdens most acutely, it is natural that some physicians will want to go beyond the day-to-day care of individual patients.

One meaningful action that young doctors — who are among the most left-leaning, politically active in medicine, and most apt to assume leadership roles — could take is to work in underserved areas. According to a 2020 analysis led by Adam Bonica of Stanford University, young physicians in the prior decade had been moving so “sharply to the left” and flocking so densely to urban areas — “ideological sorting,” the authors called it — that rural areas were suffering from shortages of physicians.

A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that newly licensed clinicians from top-ranked medical institutions were half as likely to initially practice in socioeconomically deprived areas as graduates from other medical institutions. Specialists were also less likely to practice in deprived areas compared with primary-care clinicians.

Our profession appears to confront a growing paradox. Young physicians trained at elite schools are least likely to care for patients in the places they are most needed and could do the most good. At the same time, they are the most apt to promote vague goals of social justice as a professional duty. In so doing, they are helping neither patients nor the profession."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 18th January 2026 (3 - Covid-19)

Mike Benz on X - "The same people cheering the murder of the head of UnitedHealth because you have to challenge the medical establishment were the same people wanting you dead for criticizing Pfizer because you can't challenge the medical establishment."

Why I'm disinviting my unvaccinated friends from my dinner parties (Kate Mulvey)
I'm a single woman of 63, and I feel friendless and lonely (Kate Mulvey)

Meme - MaskTogetherAmerica is in University of Utah. May 19 at 8:43 PM: "“I debated about walking in my graduation ceremony. Some students expected that I might finally have the mask off, but I didn’t. I think maybe by showing up, I can encourage others to be less afraid of being seen masked. One woman stopped me on the way to my seat, to say she was glad there was a way for me to participate.” Behind the @3m 6000 series half-face respirator with P100 cartridges is 🧑🏻‍🎓Melanie Bunch ( @melaniebunch ) who just earned a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from University of Utah (@universityofutah ) School of Art and Art History. 👏👏👏 Melanie could have her BFA sooner if it wasn’t for the pandemic, which started when she was planning to transfer from a community college to the university as a Junior. Everyone in the household started wearing a P100 respirator mask EVERY time they left the house because one of the members is immunocompromised. To protect each other, Melanie postponed her dream. “I waited a few years after getting my Associates degree, to see if COVID-19 would become less of a problem - but it didn’t. It finally became apparent that I could not put the rest of my degree on hold forever. So in the fall of 2023, I began my time at the University of Utah - fully masked. Everyone seemed very supportive. But a lot of teachers struggled to hear me through the respirator. After the first semester, I learned to get the seat closest to the teacher, and to project my voice every time I had to present to the class. I ate packed lunches in my car, if I had a longer day of classes. My classmates and instructors got used to seeing me in my mask, and by the time I had finished the program, I felt like I was pretty accepted and liked. No one ever brought up the subject of me taking the mask off, not even once. Completing my degree while masked was a challenge, and may not be for everyone. But I am glad that I did. Staying healthy and keeping my household healthy was worth it. And I got to find out just how much I can accomplish just by staying determined. Stay strong out there!” Join #MaskTogetherAmerica to congratulate our masked graduate!"
Covid hystericists in 2025 were still bonkers. And of course they cannot tolerate criticism and block everyone else

Heart attack deaths plummet 90% in 50 years – but three other conditions are surging, study warns - "researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine analyzed age-adjusted heart disease death rates among adults 25 and older from 1970 to 2022."
Damn vaccine!

Job one for Canada in this scary new world is to stop being stupid - "When it comes to COVID-19 post-mortems, inquiries and audits, scrutinizing the ArriveCan debacle shouldn’t really be at the top of the list. But beggars can’t be choosers: If we can’t get a proper reckoning for having kept schools, summer camps, playgrounds, skate parks, golf courses and restaurant patios closed for reasons that look highly suspect in hindsight, even to quite cautious people, we might as well appreciate the feds getting pilloried for their spectacular failure in producing what ought to have been a very simple app... “This report has no (new) recommendations but (rather) confirms weaknesses raised in previous audits. Rather than repeat previous recommendations on procurement, this audit re‑confirms that policy should be well understood and properly applied.” Is anyone involved embarrassed? Apologetic? A bit chagrinned, at least? There hasn’t been much sign of that. But Mark Carney has been cutting an interesting figure since taking over as prime minister: If Trudeau was Captain Apology — for past governments’ sins, for his own government’s sins, for his own idiocies, vacation-related and otherwise — Carney seems not at all interested in apologizing for pursuing Canada’s best interests, at least as he sees them. Invite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7? The fellow whose government Trudeau accused quite recently, and credibly, of involvement in the assassination of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil? After Liberal partisans spent years accusing Canadian conservatives of cozying up to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, with former prime minister Stephen Harper leading the charge, tenting his fingers, rictus of evil, as head of the insidious International Democracy Union? Well, sure. We need trade with India, don’t we? And China too, come to think of it. Invite Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman to the G7? The guy U.S. intelligence officials think ordered the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018? Whose family had … shall we say … uncomfortable links to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which 24 Canadians died along with thousands of others while screwing up the whole world for decades? Well, yeah. It’s Saudi Arabia. We’re Canada. They matter more. We can’t dictate terms to the rest of the world... the ArriveCan debacle offers a tantalizing proposition for Carney, or indeed any other incoming new prime minister from any party: How much of Canada’s failure to thrive is just a matter of our politicians, deputy ministers and senior civil servants just being complacent, back-slapping scroungers? What if instead of farming out something like ArriveCan to the usual assortment of no-account grifters and hangers-on — or for that matter, something 25 times more expensive; military procurement, say? — we just did what any private company would have done and contracted it out for a quarter of the cost, at most, to the best reasonable bid?"

Covid vaccines ‘saved far fewer lives than first thought’ - "Covid vaccines saved far fewer lives than first thought, a major new analysis has concluded, with researchers criticising “aggressive mandates”. Last year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) claimed jabs had prevented the deaths of 14.4 million people globally in the first year alone, with some estimates putting the figure closer to 20 million. However, new modelling by Stanford University and Italian researchers suggests that while the vaccines did save lives, the true figure was “substantially more conservative” and closer to 2.5 million people worldwide over the course of the pandemic... Overall 5,400 people needed to be vaccinated to save one life, but in the under-30s this figure rose to 100,000 jabs, the paper suggests. Researchers criticised “aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost”, adding that the findings had implications for how future vaccine rollouts were handled... “In principle, targeting the populations who would get the vast majority of the benefit and letting alone those with questionable risk-benefit and cost-benefit makes a lot of sense. “Aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost were probably a bad idea.” More than 13 billion Covid vaccine doses have been administered since 2021. But there have been mounting concerns that vaccines could be harmful for some people, particularly the young, and that the risk was not worth the benefit for a population at little risk from Covid. More than 17,500 Britons have applied to the Government’s vaccine damage payment scheme, believing they or loved ones were injured by the jabs. In June, manufacturers added warnings for myocarditis and pericarditis to the prescribing information of Covid messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines... earlier modelling may have used overly pessimistic infection fatality rates and overly optimistic vaccine effectiveness, while failing to consider how quickly protection waned. Earlier studies may also have underestimated how many people had already been unknowingly infected by the time they had the vaccine. Dr Angelo Maria Pezzullo, a researcher in general and applied hygiene at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, said: “Before ours, several studies tried to estimate lives saved by vaccines with different models and in different periods or parts of the world, but this one is the most comprehensive because it is based on worldwide data. It also covers the omicron period. “It also calculates the number of years of life that was saved, and it is based on fewer assumptions about the pandemic trend.” The team calculated that around 14.8 million life-years were saved, one life-year per 900 vaccine doses administered... The over-70s made up nearly 70 per cent of the lives saved, while those aged 60 to 70 accounted for a further 20 per cent. In contrast, under-20s made up just 0.01 per cent of lives saved, and 20 to 30s were 0.07 per cent... Sir David Davis, the former Brexit secretary who fought against vaccine mandates, said: “Frankly it’s a good cautionary tale that if we have another pandemic we should be far more clinical about the risk-benefit ratio. “We knew pretty quickly who the most susceptible groups were and we should have focused very strictly on them, rather than placing people who were at little risk in hazard’s way. “The level of aggression of trying to force people to become vaccinated and shutting down people who were raising concerns, the reasons for those concerns are all validated in this report.”"
Damn anti-vaxxers need to be fired for spreading misinformation!

Measles outbreak can be traced to Trudeau politicizing COVID vaccines, Tory MP claims - "An Alberta Conservative MP said she thinks the measles outbreak in her province can be traced back to the COVID pandemic and loss of trust in vaccines due to the federal government’s lack of transparency about their risks. “ Years after COVID, broken trust in government health directives has not been addressed for many Canadians,” Michelle Rempel Garner, formerly the party’s health critic during the pandemic, said in a lengthy social media post. Rempel Garner said the downplaying of “rare but serious” side effects of COVID vaccinations by the Liberal government, led by then prime minister Justin Trudeau, spurred broader vaccine hesitancy, leading to a drop in childhood measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccinations. Trudeau notably waved off a spring 2021 notice from National Advisory Council on Immunization raising a possible link between the AstraZeneca jab and rare blood clots, urging Canadians to take the first vaccine they were offered . (AstraZeneca pulled the vaccine worldwide last year.)... Rempel Garner’s post said Trudeau deserves much of the blame for making vaccinations a polarizing wedge issue before the 2021 federal election. “Trudeau dined out on using dehumanizing and politically loaded terms to describe the vaccine hesitant, including ‘anti-vaxxer’,” writes Rempel Garner. Rempel Garner says Trudeau made even more vaccine-hesitant Canadians “dig in” when he doubled down on this rhetoric during the early 2022 convoy protests. “The Liberal government has never issued a public apology for its vehemently hostile rhetoric toward vaccine-hesitant individuals … As a result, it has entrenched a partisan divide in society, where vaccination status is viewed as a political virtue signal rather than a public health objective to be pursued collaboratively,” she writes. Rempel Garner also speculated that the post-COVID surge in immigration has contributed to the measles outbreak, and suggested that health authorities track the citizenship status of infected individuals. Olivier Jacques, a professor of health policy at the University of Montreal, said the 2021 Liberal campaign’s rhetoric surrounding vaccinations could have contributed to the drop in MMR uptake. “It might have knocked down uptake by one or two per cent, but even that one or two per cent is dangerous when it comes to herd immunity,” said Jacques."
Clearly, this cannot be it and the solution is even more stigma and mockery of and discrimination against "anti-vaxxers", even though left wingers are usually against all those things

The pandemic aged our brains, whether we got Covid or not, study finds - "Using brain scans from a very large database, British researchers determined that during the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022, people’s brains showed signs of aging, including shrinkage, according to the report published in Nature Communications... The aging effect “was most pronounced in males and those from more socioeconomically deprived backgrounds,” said the study’s first author, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham, via email. “It highlights that brain health is not shaped solely by illness, but also by broader life experiences.” Overall, the researchers found a 5.5-month acceleration in aging associated with the pandemic... An earlier study on how teenagers' brains were affected by the pandemic discovered a similar result. The 2024 research from the University of Washington found that boys’ brains had aged the equivalent of 1.4 years extra during the pandemic, while girls aged an extra 4.2 years... Other research has suggested that environmental factors might cause a person’s brain to age prematurely. One study conducted in the Antarctic tied living in relative isolation to brain shrinkage."
The cope is going to be that all of them got covid, so this clearly shows that there needed to be even more lockdowns and fear mongering to protect people from covid

Instagram - "78 people (9 short of sell out!) from all over Washington gathered in Seattle this past weekend for a concert surrounded by Far UV, air purifiers, and required masking to look out for each other in an ongoing albeit disappeared pandemic. As with other gatherings like this popping up across the world, they showed there is a way to take part in traditional entertainment experiences without leaving disabled or further disabled from unmitigated airborne pathogen infection.   I am so thankful to all in attendance for trusting @cleanairevents to facilitate that experience and once again provide proof that there is huge value in community and mutual aid should we have the willingness to try. Punk rockers, all. #cleanairevents"
From 2025

B.C. judge protects hospital that fired unvaccinated doctor - "although the government mandated that all health-care workers must be vaccinated, since it didn’t say that unvaccinated staff had to be disciplined or fired, it cannot be said that Szezepaniak’s Charter rights were"

PoIiMath on X - "Here is the problem with "oh no, we're defunding universities, all the smart people are going to go away"  Our universities are not really filled with the best and brightest. Even in many of the technical fields, we are spending billions of dollars on a lot of "science" that just kind of sucks.  In @davidzweig 's "An Abundance of Caution", he talks about Covid modeling and how there was a "COVID-19 Forecast Hub" where teams of researchers from all over the country could submit models of Covid spread.  "Three of the top four most accurate modelers were from outside the public health field... A team from a management consulting firm, along with - to be frank, two random guys - outperformed teams with researchers from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, Columbia, and the University of Michigan, the famed IMHE and the US Department of Energy's elite Los Alamos National Laboratory"  The people who failed to accurately model Covid spread were people who *study* pandemic spread! It is their job, their life's work, they are spending all of their time and all of our money to be worse at their jobs than some nerdy weirdos who decided to suddenly pick up their profession as a hobby to noodle around in their free time.  Any reasonable observer would look at this situation and say "This is unacceptable". Anyone who thinks we should demand excellence from public funding should be pretty upset about this. If they don't like what is currently happening, they need to propose their own solutions.  People are getting awfully impatient with our elite expert class sucking this bad and never getting better."

Meme - "r/ZeroCovidCommunity
NoCovid_1
Daughter wants me unmasked at her wedding
Hi all, I'm a single retired dad. My daughter lives out of state 1700 miles away and is getting married early next year. She wants me to walk her down the aisle and in all photos unmasked. She lives her life as if Covid does not exist. She also has a step dad, and I suggested to her that he should walk her down the aisle too, since he's been a great a dad to her. I'd like to as well but feel very uncomfortable doing so. Thoughts?  Background on my CCness: I'm very extreme in my covid carefulness, live like a hermit, avoid people indoors and out, and have not traveled, nor been unmasked near anyone since the emergence of Covid. I feel wearing a mask also stands up for my principles around covid and sets a good example. The only exception to masking near people is dental or oral surgery appointments which are always monday mornings, 1st appointment 3-8 weeks after my boosters. (the staff do N95 and use HEPA, and from Nov-Mar require patients masking)  I only visit with family outdoors (and friends but super rarely), if they KN95/N95 mask. All shopping is online delivery. Even for Amazon returns, I have the UPS Store employee pick up my packages at the door, and the restaurants I give business to hand me my orders outside 😀"
The comments are even wilder

Meme - "Imagine being someone who rides a motorcycle with no helmet and wears a mask outside while riding it."

Meme - Liz Churchill @liz_churchill10: "Indian authorities to Pfizer... “You can either lose 1.38 BILLION customers…or allow us to do an independent investigation to determine whether your product is safe and effective…” -India
“We would rather give up 1.8 billion customers…” -Pfizer"
"Pfizer drops india vaccine application after regulator seeks local trial"
One "fact checking" site tried to pretend that a lack of emergency use authorisation didn't mean it was banned

Which countries have the best, and worst, living standards? - "IN THE THROES of the covid-19 pandemic—when hospitals overflowed, schools and offices shut, and economies seized up—many asked when the world would recover. Five years later, the data show that the setback to living standards could endure. The Human Development Index (HDI), produced by the UN, tracks progress in life expectancy, education and income. After GDP it is one of the most widely used measures of development. The global score fell in 2020 and 2021—the first declines since the index began in 1990. It recovered somewhat in 2022. The latest report, released on May 6th, shows that the pace of improvement in 2023 was the slowest on record... After decades of narrowing, the gap between countries at the top and bottom of the index has widened for four years running. The world’s poorest countries have stalled on other indicators, too. Extreme poverty has barely fallen since 2015. Measures of public health have declined since covid. And since the mid-2010s economic growth rates in poor economies have been slower on average than in richer ones. Cuts to aid budgets by governments in America and Europe will make things worse for poor countries. According to the HDI, countries in the Arab world and Latin America and the Caribbean have had the slowest post-pandemic recovery in living standards"
Too bad covidiots opposed even harsher lockdowns, which would've reduced the harm from covid, like in China

We may never recover from the lockdowns - "From its pre-pandemic trend peak of $58,100, real GDP per capita has fallen seven per cent, for a loss of $4,200 per person — equal to about $160 billion in lost GDP per year. Can this loss be recovered? The report warns that it will not be easy. To get back to trend by 2030, the Canadian economy would have to generate annual real GDP growth of 1.7 per cent (as shown in the nearby graph), a rate well above Canada’s experience in recent decades when growth rates averaged 1.1 per cent or lower.  The latest numbers paint an even more difficult struggle for Canada. In 2023, GDP per capita fell 1.3 per cent, followed by another decline of 1.4 per cent in 2024 — at a time when the country needs 1.7 per cent growth to get back to trend by 2030. In the current economic environment, filled with trade wrangles, massive government deficits and a trend toward greater government involvement in directing the economy, the odds of recovery from the 2020 pandemic lockdown are even slimmer than they were a year or two ago."
Time for more regulation and to "tax the 'rich'"

If I said my husband had a bike accident, people would say how sorry they were - but because he's been left disabled by the Covid vaccine, they question if it's true - "Three years ago in April, Jamie suffered a catastrophic bleed on the brain after being given the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine.  Doctors were convinced it was a death sentence but, astonishingly, the previously fit and athletic then 44-year-old – a keen skier, mountain biker and runner – pulled through. A 'walking miracle', in Kate's words.  He is far from the same man, however. His vision is impaired, he can no longer hold down his high-flying software engineer job, drive a car, or follow complex conversations.  The toll it has taken on the family has required a huge amount of adjustment. To make matters worse, it has been unfolding against a backdrop in which the Scotts – and the dozens of others like them who have lost loved ones or watched them battle grievous consequences following an adverse reaction to the Covid vaccine – feel they have been silenced... Equally difficult to navigate, she says, is the Government's compensation scheme (known as the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, or VDPS), currently limited to a payout of just £120,000 – and even then, only when those affected have gone through a draconian process in which they are judged on whether they meet 'the threshold' for payment, a brutally specific figure of '60 per cent or more disabled'... 'Because now it's been confirmed in black and white that the vaccine caused his injury, and he's 60 per cent disabled, and that is our 'win'. But it's not a win, is it? That's our life now. And £120,000 doesn't touch the sides of what we have lost in terms of income, and will lose over the decades to come.'  It is one reason that Kate has fought so passionately for the voices of vaccine victims to be heard at the ongoing Covid-19 Inquiry, a desire which was fulfilled last week when, on Wednesday, she gave evidence for half an hour on their behalf... 'At the inquiry the lead counsel said it is accepted that with any medicine, including vaccines, there's injury and death,' she says. 'But after what we've been through, the question is, how many is unacceptable? Because we know that 13,000 people have applied for the compensation scheme, and we know that 250,000 have reported an adverse reaction. So at what point does it tip over to becoming unacceptable? And if it is acceptable, why is it not accepted that there should be a fair and adequate compensation scheme?'... 'He didn't need it for himself, like most of us he did what he thought was the right thing. He thought it was safe and effective and would protect others,' Kate says...  'Jamie had read something about it somewhere and did ask for the Pfizer vaccine, but he was told they didn't have any and he would be fine,' says Kate. 'He didn't get any patient information.'... 'I've tried to be compassionate about it,' she says of people's discomfort. 'I think it's because Covid touched everyone. But it angers me that even now I have to say we're not anti-vaccine. You can say the vaccine rollout saved lives while also saying lives were damaged, both things can be true. But people seem to struggle to accept that.'  She hopes the inquiry will help with this disconnect... Last week, it emerged that the payment scheme has cost taxpayers more to run than it has paid out to victims – a key reminder, says Kate, that urgent reform is needed."

Dozens of British women have seen their breasts grow after the Covid jab - experts reveal why - "The revelation comes days after shocking images showed how a 19-year-old Canadian woman's breast quadrupled in size in what experts believe is a rare reaction to Pfizer's Covid jab dubbed the 'Pfizer boob job'... doctors have argued that the link between the unusual reaction and the vaccine is indeed plausible.  Making their case in a recent medical report about a young woman who suffered the complication, they theorize that a bizarre immune system reaction to the vaccine may have caused cells in the breast to overgrow."

The economic cost of locking down like China: Evidence from city-to-city truck flows - "Containing the COVID-19 pandemic by non-pharmacological interventions is costly. Using high-frequency, city-to-city truck flow data, this paper estimates the economic cost of lockdown in China, a stringent yet effective policy prior to the Omicron surge. By comparing the truck flow change in the cities with and without lockdown, we find that a one-month full-scale lockdown causally reduces the truck flows connected to the locked down city in the month by 54%, implying a decline of the city’s real income with the same proportion in a gravity model of city-to-city trade. We also structurally estimate the cost of lockdown in the gravity model, where the effects of lockdown can spill over to other cities through trade linkages. Imposing full-scale lockdown on the four largest cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen) for one month would reduce the real national GDP by 8.7%, of which 8.5% is contributed by the spillover effects."