WHERE ARE THERE DOCTORING DOCTORS?

January 9, 2023

Where are the Intellectually Curious Doctors?

By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. at American Thinker:

Medicine, like most sciences, entails thinking and hypothesis creation to explain the myriad complexities of the healthy and diseased human body.

Hypotheses are tested and refined, with new information or insights nudging or abruptly shifting current knowledge in a new direction.

For examples, bloodletting with leeches is no longer standard medical practice for most ailments as it was up until the late 19th century. More recently, Vioxx was considered a safer painkiller, until it was found to cause heart attacks and strokes, similar to another “safe and effective” product introduced about two years ago. Oxycontin was marketed as a nonaddictive pain killer until it devasted hundreds of thousands of lives and families and was shown to be otherwise.

Physicians, upon medical school graduation, recite the Hippocratic Oath. Quoting from the revised version (simply because the language is easier to understand), physicians swear, “I will not be ashamed to say, ‘I know not’” and “Above all, I must not play at God.”

Saying “I don’t know” is what drives the pursuit of new or alternate hypotheses. Physicians of a few hundred years ago saw their bloodletting patients die and didn’t know why, so they devised better treatments by asking questions and not playing God.

Some modern physicians play God by declaring, “I am the science,” as if they are the final arbiter in all of medicine. I assume Dr. Anthony Fauci recited the Hippocratic Oath when he graduated medical school.

What questions should physicians have been asking over the past two years? Are they staying mum because they believe the science is settled and challenges to the status quo are heresy? Or are they cowed into silence over fear over losing their ability to practice the profession which they spent a decade learning and from which they earn their living?

Start with the highly touted COVID-19 vaccines.

In the United States, 80% of the population have received one dose and 68% two doses. Yet almost three years into the pandemic, this recent headline from ABC News suggests that there is no end in sight, “WHO sounds the alarm: New COVID variant is most transmissible yet.” And the Washington Post cautions “COVID hospitalizations rising post-Thanksgiving.”

Can we ask why? Wasn’t mass vaccination supposed to prevent this?

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky in April 2021 told the world, “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Any challenges to this statement were deemed anti-vaccine disinformation. Until nine months later when the science changed, “CDC Director Rochelle Walensky went on CNN and said that vaccines cannot prevent transmission of COVID-19.” Yet most physicians did not question the initial and incorrect assertion.

On their website the CDC states, “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.” Dr. Fauci told us, “Vaccinated people essentially become ‘dead ends’ for the virus to spread within their communities.”

Then why is COVID still around and why are many who have had multiple boosters still getting COVID? Can that be asked? Or is this all considered Russian or Q-anon propaganda?

As a necessary disclaimer, I am not anti-vaccine, having received a full course of COVID vaccines two years ago. But as a physician, I am all about asking questions and challenging existing dogma when a new or better approach should at least be considered.

Regarding safety, can we ask about the M-word, myocarditis? VAERS data notes 25,000 cases post vaccine. Steve Kirsch calculated the VAERS underreporting rate as a factor of 41, meaning there could be a million or more cases of myocarditis, many subclinical. If any other medical product yielded such a safety signal, physicians would certainly be asking questions.

Yet such questions are labeled misinformation, vile, or conspiracy theory, leading to media censorship and potential loss of employment or medical license. This is despite numerous peer-reviewed studies showing an association between COVID vaccines and myocarditis. Association is not causation but warrants questions that few physicians are asking.

This leads to Damar Hamlin’s collapse during a recent NFL game. No one knows why this happened, so we need to ask and think. If it is attributed to “commotio cordis” as virtually all the corporate media insist, then questions must be considered. Such as why in a football hit that occurs multiple times per game, in hundreds of games per year, in a hundred-year NFL history, has this not happened previously? Could other cardiac anomalies, congenital or acquired, be a factor? Possibly but these conditions are screened for during the extensive preseason evaluation of NFL players.

There are multiple possible causes for Damar’s cardiac arrest but to dismiss certain possibilities out of hand because they are politically incorrect is a disservice to every professional football player in America who, if vaccinated, must be wondering if this could happen to him.

Good medicine is asking questions and forming a differential diagnosis, ruling out possibilities based on science, not on politics.

Here is cardiologist Dr. Sanjay Verma asking these questions and forming a thoughtful differential diagnosis which is the basis of medical diagnosis. Few however are asking, instead they just accept the party line – commotio cordis or shut up.

Young healthy athletes can suffer cardiac arrest and death while playing their sport, and in past decades this ranged from 30 to 60 per year. In the past two years, we have seen that many deaths each month. Is anyone asking why? If breast cancer deaths suddenly increased tenfold, doctors would be asking questions.

Then there are masks, lockdowns, and distancing. After being told for years that these measures were ineffective in viral pandemics, they suddenly became lifesaving and mandatory. Ask questions or want to see the prospective randomized clinical trial results supporting these measures and get cancelled or investigated by the medical establishment for “disinformation.”

We are also not to inquire about off-label medications, FDA-approved for human use with decades of safety, but not to be considered or even discussed as early outpatient treatment options for COVID because these human medicines are suddenly horse medicine or they “will kill you.”

Several recent news articles should also raise questions from the medical community.

First this, “A survey by Steve Kirsch found sudden death is the No. 1 cause of death among those under the age of 65 who got the COVID jab.” Then this, “Over 260 athletes and former athletes in the United States have died from cardiac arrests or other serious issues after taking COVID-19 vaccines, according to data from a recent peer-reviewed letter to the editor.” Or this, “UK: ONS Whistleblower Reveals Massive Spike in Excess Deaths Since ‘Vaccine’ Rollout, More Than 1000 a Week.”

Speaking of sudden deaths, three young Massachusetts police officers “passed away suddenly in the last seven days.” There were also the two ABC News producers, aged 28 and 37, that “died suddenly and unexpectedly.” Is “sudden death” now perfectly normal and if you question otherwise, it’s “conspiracy theory”?

So many sudden and excess deaths, far more than the norm, and it must not be questioned, instead attributed to climate change. I am not asserting cause and effect, but simply an association that warrants scrutiny to see if vaccines are a risk factor in these events, much like identified risk factors for other diseases. It is a public health disservice to ignore known risk factors.

If doctors aren’t curious about any of this, average Americans are. Rasmussen Reports, “Nearly half of Americans think COVID-19 vaccines may be to blame for many unexplained deaths, and more than a quarter say someone they know could be among the victims.” If nonphysicians are curious, why isn’t the medical establishment?

Are these sudden deaths all odd coincidences? Should we just scratch our heads, move along, and shut up? Or should physicians be asking how and why these anomalies are occurring? What happened to curiosity and thought?

Not only is this bad medicine, but it destroys the credibility of the medical profession. According to Pew Research, “confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public” has dropped from 40 to 29 percent over the past two years of COVID. Perhaps physicians asking questions about important public health issues would be more confidence-inspiring than promoting transgender surgery or using the proper pronouns.

America has the best and most innovative medical care in the world. Woe to this noble profession if politics, fear, and censorship replace questioning, challenging, and discovery.

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a physician and writer.

“Santos is a disgrace.”….And So Are Most Dems IN TODAY’S CONGRESS!

January 8, 2023

Scandal champ George Santos is now accused of being a white supremacist

By Rajan Laad at American Thinker:

There is an old joke about politicians which never ceases to lose its relevance.

Question: How do you know a politician is lying?

Answer: His lips are moving

We do expect a certain amount of embellishment when politicians talk about their records.

Even regular people unknowingly overstate or understate their records, or at times, the human memory plays tricks.

But there is a difference between embellishments and blatant lies, not a product of confusion, but instead an attempt at self-aggrandizement.

In the matter of fabrication, few can surpass Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On March 17, 2008, Hillary claimed that as first lady she landed “under sniper fire” during a trip to Tuzla, Bosnia, she made in March 1996. The goal was to depict herself as the fearless first lady who placed herself in peril to comfort the people of war-ravaged Bosnia.

Well, it soon turned out to be a complete fabrication.

Videos began to surface that showed Hillary arriving on the tarmac and being greeted by a child who offers her a copy of a poem. It was such a massive lie that even the Democrat mouthpiece the WaPo had to step in and fact-check Hillary.

When caught, Hillary said she ‘misspoke’

Hillary is not a combat soldier who has been in various wars and confused one occurrence with another. She did not misspeak; she fabricated to deceive her voters. 

Hillary’s lies are many and continue to this day.

We move to George Santos, who seems to have received a doctorate from the Hillary Clinton University of fabrication.

Santos did not embellish his resume, he instead created a fictional character.

Santos fabricated his education, his work experience, his religion, and even his charity work.

Santos claimed that he graduated from Baruch College, New York, and worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. But there is no evidence that he received a college degree or worked at either financial giant.

Santos claimed to have founded a tax-exempt animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats. 

All of these were complete falsehoods.

He claimed he was Jewish and had ancestors who fled the Holocaust. This was a vile fabrication and an affront to the survivors of one of the darkest chapters in human history. 

He claimed to have “lost four employees” at the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016. There is absolutely no evidence to support the claim.

Santos claimed to be from a wealthy family fortune that owned 13 properties. That, too, is a lie.

Under intense political pressure, Santos admitted to fabricating some of the claims and stood by others, despite contradictory evidence.

The lies are numerous, purposeful, blatant, and unjustifiable.

Santos is a disgrace.

It is baffling that the liberal media, Santos’s political opponent, and even government agencies who relish targeting Republicans failed to do an elementary investigation of Santos.

But Santos unknowingly revealed a lapse or perhaps a flaw in the electoral system.

Currently, individuals running for the House, Senate, or presidency become candidates when they raise or spend more than $5,000 in contributions or expenditures.  

Candidates must register using a Statement of Candidacy within 15 days of becoming a candidate.

The form requires candidates to enter their personal information and details about their postal address. Also required is the name of the campaign and the various other PACs.

However, there seems to be no place for education, work experience or charity. 

This information should be mandatory. Nominations must be accepted only after a thorough background check of the claims made in the form. In Santos’s case, a few phone calls would have exposed his lies. 

This is part of the swamp culture.

The GOP House must pass a law that mandates thorough background checks that the candidate has to pay for if he intends to run in any elections.

Now for the big question:

What happens to Santos now?

Santos appeared determined to try to weather the scandal.

Santos told the New York Post: “I campaigned talking about the people’s concerns, not my resume… I intend to deliver on the promises I made during the campaign.”

He was sworn in just yesterday and is now the first openly LGBTQ Republican to be elected to Congress. But no Democrat is celebrating this inclusiveness, in this case, they are not wrong.

Federal and local prosecutors in New York have opened investigations into whether Santos violated any laws during his campaign. And, in Brazil, prosecutors said they planned to revive fraud charges connected to a stolen checkbook.

Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat who Santos defeated during the November midterm election, said he should resign and face him again in a special election. 

The media is also very outraged and some are demanding that Santos resign.

The gist of their outrage is that voters were given false information and any voting decision based on lies is unacceptable. Hence the election is invalid.

They also used the story to attack Trump and all of the GOP.

The media is responsible for most of the big lies of our times. It is hence quite ironic that they are suddenly pontificating about the importance of being factual. But the self-righteous often fail to comprehend irony and neither do they possess any self-awareness.

What about the 2020 election where government agencies, the news media, and big tech have colluded to block the Hunter Biden laptop story? 

Suppressing damaging information about one candidate is the equivalent of fabrication because facts remain hidden from voters.

A Media Research Center poll revealed that 16% of Biden voters said they would have voted differently if Hunter Biden’s laptop story was known to them. Another survey showed that a whopping 79 percent of Americans suggest President Trump likely would have won reelection if voters had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Some may say that Santos’ scale of lying was much worse than Hunter Biden’s story being suppressed. But the scale of lying is irrelevant, what matters is that it affected voting decisions.

If Santos is forced to quit, why should Biden remain in office?

You would think that Santos suffered enough controversies for one human at any juncture.

But there was more.

The NY Post carried a story that accuses Santos of flashing a white power symbol in the House Chambers. While casting his 10th vote for Kevin McCarthy for House Speaker. Santos unfolded his arms to reveal his left hand making a sideways “O.K. gesture,” a symbol co-opted by white supremacists.

This claim seems as ludicrous as Santos’s resume.

The media is fabricating about a fabricator.

So how should the GOP handle this?

If Santos resigns or is forced out of office, it would prompt a special election in a swing seat, and lead to a potential loss which will narrow further the GOP’s already razor-thin majority.

The GOP doesn’t have to support Santos but they do not have to actively work towards dethroning him.

If Santos is unseated, the GOP must remind voters of how similar the situation is to that of the 2020 elections. While it will change nothing, it will help highlight the disparity in standards applied to both parties.

Santos can redeem himself by voting for the right issues.

That McCarthy Battle!

January 8, 2023

The Long Fight for the House Speakership

By Clarice Feldman at American Thinker:

Much has been made of the fact that it took 15 votes until Republican Kevin McCarthy finally secured the Speakership of the House. Powerline Blog has rounded up a series of the internet cartoons and memes about the long fight. With their salaries on the line, I never imagined the fight would continue much longer. It would appear that the extended debate may at last result in Congress more skillfully playing the role designed for it in the Constitution and a much-needed return to the regular order of business in the House.

Many emphasized that the fight represented a disastrous split in the party whose hold on the House is but a rather thin majority. Others, like the priceless Babylon Bee, noted it was a very big deal that the House members actually showed up to work for four days. 

As usual, the Bee underlines a serious point. Too many of the members have not shown up in person to work, but have been phoning it in per Nancy Pelosi’s permission to do so.

But that’s not the worst thing about the Pelosi House: Increasingly the Congress has whiffed on its responsibilities to legislate — writing broad laws and leaving it to unelected bureaucrats to fill in the important blanks. On really important legislation like ObamaCare, members never even had an opportunity to read the Bill before voting on it. The level of mendacious doings on the Hill seemed to have reached new heights.

So, unlike those who made fun of the heated debate which preceded the final McCarthy victory, I think it was healthy and overdue.

It’s too early as I write this to know all the promises and concessions. Perhaps later on Sunday or Monday we will know more. I have read that one of the concessions is that members would get 72 hours advance time to read bills before the vote is taken. With bills now thousands of pages long, that’s the least that should be done. No more the Pelosi garbage about having to pass a bill into law to know what is in it.

The BBC reports, “Mr. McCarthy promised to make bill-passing more like the good old days, with members of Congress outside of the top leadership having more say over how bills are proposed, amended and passed.” No more secret negotiating at the top and shoving it down the throats of members without even an opportunity to read, let alone debate it.

It appears more conservatives will be seated on the important House Rules Committee which means per the BBC “conservatives will be able to shape the kind of legislation the House produces before it fully takes shape — and nip undesired proposals in the bud.” McCarthy’s promised fiscal restraints (though he will have to negotiate with the opposition so despite this promise, we can’t be sanguine about the prospects for a much-reduced federal budget).

McCarthy promised to prioritize the problem of border security. For some reason he was forced to concede allowing an early vote on term limits, something rather ephemeral and meaningless in my eyes because it would require a Constitutional amendment.

he Washington Post reports that a PAC aligned with McCarthy (the Congressional Leadership fund) promised to  stay out of open House primaries for safe Republican seats.

One of the most interesting of the reported concessions is the long-deserved disciplining of the sociopathic liar, Congressman Adam Schiff, detailed in Paul Sperry’s article, following the revelation that Schiff had tried to force Twitter to ban Sperry after he revealed the name of the source Schiff was relying on during one of the failed Trump impeachments. 

In articles for RealClearInvestigations, I outed his anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with one of Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment committee, Sean Misko.

My reporting cast fresh doubts on Schiff’s claims that the 2019 impeachment process happened organically. The New York Times had already busted Schiff lying about prior contacts with the whistleblower. Initially, Schiff publicly stated his office never spoke with the whistleblower before he filed his complaint against President Trump, when in fact a Schiff staffer had huddled with him, something Schiff’s spokesman Patrick Boland was forced to admit after the Times broke the story. (The staffer was never identified.) The prior contacts led to suspicions Schiff’s office helped the whistleblower craft his complaint as part of a partisan operation. 

Sperry reports, “House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, now battling for the speakership, has vowed to block Schiff from serving as the intelligence panel’s top Democrat.”

Long overdue. Schiff has, as Perry details, a long history of making bald-faced lies and covering up the facts. Among them, in 2017 he peddled total lies about Trump collusion with Russia when his access to classified information may well have added credence in the public eye to falsehoods. And then Sperry continues:

We now know most of the preposterous rumors Schiff dramatically read into the public record came from a source who was invented by the dossier’s authors. In his hyping of the dossier, Schiff smeared and defamed not only Trump, but also Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign adviser, whom Schiff falsely painted as a Russian agent.

The next year, Schiff would be caught lying about the so-called Nunes Memo exposing FBI abuse of the FISA wiretap process to spy on Page. Schiff claimed then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes misled the public when he said the FBI heavily relied on the debunked dossier to swear out the warrants. In his own memo, Schiff, as ranking member, insisted the FBI’s warrants were based on other evidence and were above-board.

In 2019, the scathing Horowitz Report proved it was Nunes who was telling the truth. Schiff, who had access to the same classified FISA information as Nunes, knew better.

It may well be that the voters of Schiff’s district do not care that they are represented by an inveterate liar who abuses his position of trust, but it’s time there were some consequences imposed for such outrageous conduct, and the battle for the speakership seems to have resulted in a promise to do the maximum in the speaker’s power to impose sanctions for such behavior.

“What? A NEW JOSEPH MCCARTHYISM? NONSENSE!

ELECTIONS

The New McCarthyism

Expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker of the House.

By Roger Kimball at American Greatness:

January 7, 2023

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That seems to be Kevin McCarthy’s favorite mantra. Friday night, on the 15th vote for speaker of the House, he finally got his moist little palm around Nancy Pelosi’s still-warm gavel. Welcome to the new Republican-ish speaker of the House! 

The contest was brutal, occasionally absurd, and the occasion of hilarity and consternation among the punditocracy on both the Right and the Left. The Left clucked their tongues about the “chaos” on view on the other side of the aisle. Some among the GOP agreed and wondered why “their side” could not govern as effectively as the Democrats. Would Nancy Pelosi have put up with this level of dissension among the Democratic rank and file? Others said, no, no, the 20 freedom caucus members (and others) holding up the inevitable were just giving the world a reality show, live-action look at how “democracy” (if not quite Our Democracy™) works and should work. 

I am of two minds about that. My own take is that McCarthy is an unreliable ally for those on the Right. He was only too happy to shovel billions of your and your children’s money to Ukraine while doing little to secure our southern border. McCarthy is from California, so, naturally, he likes to spend money. He even got behind such improvident and mendacious schemes as raiding Medicare to pay for the U.S. Postal Service. He was happy to fund the January 6 kangaroo court, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and support mandates for the useless—indeed, dangerous—COVID vaccine for the military. In plain terms, his voting record is only intermittently conservative.  

Kevin McCarthy, in short, is a swamp creature masquerading as a swamp critic. The Swamp loves its own, and so it was no surprise that McCarthy eventually prevailed, just barely. He did so at considerable cost to the power of the speaker’s office but also considerable benefit to people who care about accountability. 

McCarthy had to make many concessions to his vociferous opponents in order to entice enough of them to his side (or in the case of a couple, to absent themselves from the House so that McCarthy could win with fewer than 218 votes). Henceforth, a single Congressman can move to remove the speaker. A new committee modeled after the “Church Committee” will be empaneled to investigate abuse by the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence services. More generally, three members of the Freedom Caucus are guaranteed seats on the nine member and all important Rules Committee. That’s not a majority, but it is an agenda-influencing percentage. 

There were other important concessions, though how and indeed whether they will happen is not clear. I am keen on term limits, and so were the holdouts. They got McCarthy to agree to put the matter to a vote, though I don’t know anyone who believes that this popular idea (popular with those not holding office, that is) has a ghost of a chance of passing.

More promising is the agreement to end the profligate and insulting practice of passing huge “omnibus” spending packages at the last possible moment so that, as Nancy Pelosi said about a previous assault on fiscal sanity, you “have to pass it to know what is in it.” Henceforth, or so it was agreed, members of Congress will get at least 72 hours to read bills before they are required to vote on them. That is bad for earmarks, good for accountability. 

The bottom line is that McCarthy’s prerogatives as speaker have been curtailed, which is a good thing. Also, he has made public promises on important matters that it will be difficult to walk away from without cost. At the same time, I get the distinct feeling that not a lot is going to change. Will there be a meaningful investigation of the January 6 protest at the Capitol? (Where was Nancy Pelosi? Why was the offer of deploying the National Guard not accepted? Who, finally, is Ray Epps and was he correct in saying he “orchestrated” the protest and entry into the Capitol?) Will the partisan and grotesquely un-democratic actions of the January 6 committee presided over by anti-Trump fanatics receive the scrutiny they deserve? I doubt it. 

I expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under the reign of this new McCarthyism. I might, of course, be proved wrong. I hope I will be. 

Above all, what just happened in Washington reminded me that Democrats as a group understand power and how to use it much better than Republicans do. The 18th-century Whig writer and politician Horace Walpole once remarked that “no country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.” That Machiavellian observation may be unedifying. It may also be true. I note that Donald Trump, much to the surprise of some, endorsed McCarthy after the third vote ended in failure. Trump’s support did not seem to move the needle much one way or the other. Perhaps that is a sign of his faltering political support. Perhaps it is a sign of his canniness. We’ll know the answer to that soon.

About Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence

Will America’s Senile President Biden EVER END HIS GANGSTER LIFE?

JANUARY 8, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

ABBOTT TO BIDEN: DO YOUR JOB

Joe Biden is finally visiting the southern border–a small slice of it, anyway, in El Paso. The town has been frantically cleaned up, Potemkin-style, for the president’s appearance. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott isn’t fooled. Today he hand-delivered to Biden the letter that is embedded below.

Abbott’s letter calls on Biden to do his job. It chastises him for violating his constitutional duty to enforce the laws:

All of this is happening because you have violated your constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws.

Abbott contrasts Biden’s abysmal record with that of President Trump:

Under President Trump, the federal government achieved historically low levels of illegal immigration. Under your watch, by contrast, America is suffering the worst illegal immigration in the history of our country.

Governor Abbott wants Slow Joe to do his job. Specifically:

* You must comply with the many statutes mandating that various categories of aliens “shall” be detained, and end the practice of unlawfully paroling aliens en masse.

* You must stop sandbagging the implementation of the Remain-In-Mexico policy Title 42 expulsions, and fully enforce those measures as the federal courts have ordered you to do.

* You must aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry, and allow ICE to remove illegal immigrants in accordance with existing federal laws.

* You must immediately resume construction of the border wall in the State of Texas, using the billions of dollars Congress has appropriated for that purpose.

* You must designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

Joe Biden is a scofflaw. Unfortunately, the entire Democratic Party supports him in his disregard for the law and for his constitutional obligations.

Here is Governor Abbott handing Biden the letter: