Health
How the Trump-RFK Jr. coalition could realign US politics against Big Pharma and Big Food
From LifeSiteNews
By Jay Richards
If the unlikely coalition of Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlives the 2024 presidential election, it could reorder our political categories and leave to our children and grandchildren a quite different future.
When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed Donald Trump on Aug. 23, the corporate press and conventional Washington, D.C., analysts mostly missed the real story: It was the moment that a disparate, diverse, and potentially disruptive throng of average Americans became a coalition.
Although RFK, Jr. is famous – or infamous, depending on your view – for his criticisms of vaccines, that wasn’t the theme of his lengthy speech. He spoke instead about an unholy alliance – a cartel – of industries, corporate media, government regulatory agencies, and even nonprofit “charities” that is making us fat and sick. This problem doesn’t fit the simple taxonomy of “public” and “private” or “left” and “right” that served us well during the Cold War.
Kennedy has been a voice in the wilderness warning about this cartel for years. Most Americans first became aware of it during the 2020 pandemic. Here’s the basic story: COVID-19 itself was likely the product of dangerous gain-of-function research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That’s bad enough. But Communist China didn’t act alone. This work was funded, at least in part, by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health and laundered through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
Once the virus was out, the absurd and counterproductive lockdowns and hygiene theater were pushed by global entities such as the World Health Organization. Domestically, Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, worked to undermine independent experts who criticized the federal bureaucrats’ favored policies.
Collins and Fauci even orchestrated the publication of a deceptive article in Nature that claimed the virus had a natural origin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal entities, including the Biden White House, pressured social media platforms to censor even the best-credentialed dissenters.
Attentive Americans soon learned that public health, as a field, focuses on nudging whole populations, rather than seeking the health of individual patients.
Certain pharmaceutical companies – which pay royalties to many NIH staff, including Collins and Fauci – enjoyed a suspiciously fast and less than rigorous approval process for their mRNA “vaccines.” Vaccine mandates then created a massive artificial market for the drugs. And drug companies’ immunity from legal liability allowed them to enjoy the financial benefits of these policies without facing the downside risks from any long-term harm to those who took the vaccines.
Then, during the lockdowns, the growing awareness of the “gender-industrial complex” – media, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and others who push ghoulish “gender-affirming” interventions on people distressed about their sexed bodies – further reinforced the lack of credibility of private and public health authorities.
An American epidemic of chronic diseases
For some, much of this may now seem obvious. What may be less obvious is that blame for the massive spike in many chronic “diseases of civilization” should go to the same cartel. It involves Big Government, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Media that rely on pharmaceutical industry ad dollars, and medical lobbying outfits such as the American Academy of Pediatrics pretending to be sound science crusaders.
In his speech, Kennedy devoted many paragraphs to the “chronic disease epidemic” – including ever higher rates, even among children, of Type II diabetes and obesity, and of Alzheimer’s, which some now refer to as “Type III diabetes.” He spoke of “the insidious corruption at the FDA and the NIH, the HHS and the USDA that has caused the epidemic,” referring to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with the NIH.
But he didn’t stop there. He spoke of “an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid,” including:
ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s Syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the Autism rate was one in 1500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC; nationally, nobody’s talking about this.
He also spoke of the massive spikes in the use of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. Of course, first ladies and surgeons general have launched “healthy lifestyle” campaigns, but these always parrot the conventional wisdom of the cartel. In contrast, Kennedy blamed the cartel itself, not a gluttonous public, for the chronic disease crisis. It was this cartel that gave us the war on healthy dietary fats and the ridiculous food pyramid – heavy on unhealthy ultrarefined carbohydrates and light on fat – which helped make Americans far fatter and sicker than we were before.
His speech hit a nerve, especially among parents who recognize this problem but lack a credible and effective way to fight it. They may engage in private acts of defiance – refusing the COVID-19 or Hepatitis B vaccines for their young children, or disregarding USDA warnings about the consumption of animal fat. So far, however, neither political party has taken up this topic. The Left has tended to give the administrative state the benefit of the doubt. The Right has tended to do the same for corporations.
Trump has promised that Kennedy will have a leading role in fighting America’s health crisis. That will mean taking on the cartel. But the devil is in the details. A sustained effort to “make America healthy again,” or MAHA – to complement MAGA – must be free of government interests on the one hand and industry funding and lobbyists on the other.
Maybe that’s impossible, but Kennedy as MAHA czar could mean a serious exploration of the role the cartel has played in the following:
- Restricting medical freedom
- The origin of the COVID-19 virus
- The effects of the pandemic lockdowns
- The lack of safety and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines
- The rise in childhood and adult obesity
- The rise in childhood and adult Type II diabetes
- The rise in Alzheimer’s
- The rise in allergies, food sensitivities, and asthma
- Rising rates of depression and anxiety disorders
- Rising rates of neurological disorders such as autism
- The explosion of cases of childhood gender dysphoria
- The collusion between the World Professional Association of Transgender Health and HHS officials such as transgender activist and Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine
- The political agenda of transnational public health bureaucracies such as the World Health Organization
- The medicalization of the treatment for gender dysphoria with “gender-affirming care” (rather than taking a mental health approach)
- The capitulation of NIH, CDC, FDA, and HHS to gender ideology over sound science
- The lack of value and safety of the ever-growing childhood vaccine schedule
- The medical focus on symptoms rather than underlying causes and cures of diseases
- The artificial restriction of medical and therapeutic credentialing of professionals to control supply and competition
- The decline in average testosterone in males
- The rise in infertility
- The rise in opioid addiction and overdose deaths
- Unethical research sponsored by the NIH
- The incompetence of the USDA in dispensing nutrition advice
- The effect of agricultural subsidies on our health
- Environmentalist dogmas masquerading as health and nutrition advice
If Trump appoints Kennedy as the MAHA czar, it would be akin to his COVID-19 Operation Warp Speed during his first administration but without the industry taint.
Of course, that appointment could come to nothing – except that there is already a coalition forming of millions of parents across, and even orthogonal to, the political spectrum, who – as Kennedy has put it – love their children more than they hate each other. It would take both the political will in Washington and a popular constituency of average Americans to fight the biomedical security state and the cartel that fuels it.
We’re getting a glimpse of this motley resistance in the unlikely unity ticket of Trump and Kennedy and the many strange bedfellows supporting them. If this coalition outlives the 2024 presidential election, it could reorder our political categories and leave to our children and grandchildren a quite different future.
Health
LGBT group challenges Alberta pro-family bill, wants puberty blockers for 10-year-olds
From LifeSiteNews
A federally funded pro-LGBT group is challenging Alberta’s pro-family legislation that bans giving often sterilizing puberty blockers to kids, claiming sex “reassignment” procedures are necessary for children.
On December 9, Egale Canada, an LGBT activist group, filed an injunction against Alberta’s newly passed Health Statutes Amendment Act (HSAA), also called Bill 26, at the Calgary’s Court of King’s Bench
“If you deny a kid access to blockers and then they go through permanent changes via puberty, they then have to pursue medical treatment and interventions to undo the effects of [puberty], so that is how the coercion is operating,” Bennett Jensen, legal director at Egale Canada, told CBC News.
Alberta’s new legislation, passed last week, reflects “the government’s commitment to build a health care system that responds to the changing needs of Albertans,” it said.
The bill will amend the Health Act to “prohibit regulated health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors.”
It will also ban the “use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence” to kids 15 and under “except for those who have already commenced treatment and would allow for minors aged 16 and 17 to choose to commence puberty blockers and hormone therapies for gender reassignment and affirmation purposes with parental, physician and psychologist approval.”
Egale Canada, which receives funding from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government, has paired with Skipping Stone and five Alberta families to challenge the new law. The group is using five gender-confused children to argue their case.
They claim that the new legislation violates both the national Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the provincial Alberta Bill of Rights.
The court filing effectively argues that if the Alberta bill is upheld, the gender-confused children, some as young as ten, will not be able to halt naturally occurring puberty through artificial means, which presents an impediment to their ability to “transition.”
While some are objecting to the common-sense legislation, the Alberta bill has found the support of an alliance for detransitioners who regret their “gender transition” process.
Despite the claims of LGBT activists, there is overwhelming evidence showing that people who undergo so-called “gender transitioning” are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not given irreversible surgery.
Transgender surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, and infertility.
Meanwhile, a recent study on the side effects of transgender “sex change” surgeries discovered that 81 percent of those who had undergone “sex change” surgeries in the past five years reported experiencing pain simply from normal movement in the weeks and months that followed – and that many other side effects manifest as well.
Fraser Institute
Canada’s median health-care wait time hits 30 weeks—longest ever recorded
From the Fraser Institute
By Mackenzie Moir and Bacchus Barua
Canadian patients in 2024 waited longer than ever for medical treatment, finds a new study released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“While most Canadians understand that wait times are a major problem, we’ve now reached an unprecedented and unfortunate milestone for delayed access to care,” said Bacchus Barua, director of health policy studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2024.
The annual study, based on a survey of physicians across Canada, this year reports a median wait time of 30 weeks from referral by a general practitioner (i.e. family doctor) to consultation with a specialist to treatment, for procedures across 12 medical specialties including several types of surgery.
This year’s median wait (30 weeks) is the longest ever recorded—longer than the 27.7 weeks in 2023 and the 20.9 weeks in 2019 (before the pandemic), and 222 per cent longer than the 9.3 weeks in 1993 when the Fraser Institute began tracking wait times. Among the provinces, Ontario recorded the shortest median wait time (23.6 weeks, up from 21.6 weeks in 2023) while Prince Edward Island recorded the longest (77.4 weeks—although data for P.E.I. should be interpreted with caution due to fewer survey responses compared to other provinces).
Among the various specialties, national median wait times were longest for orthopedic surgery (57.5 weeks) and neurosurgery (46.2 weeks), and shortest for radiation (4.5 weeks) and medical oncology treatments (4.7 weeks). For diagnostic technologies, wait times were longest for CT scans (8.1 weeks), MRIs (16.2 weeks) and ultrasounds (5.2 weeks).
“Long wait times can result in increased suffering for patients, lost productivity at work, a decreased quality of life, and in the worst cases, disability or death,” said Mackenzie Moir, senior policy analyst at the Fraser Institute and study co-author.
Median wait times by province (in weeks)
- In 2024, physicians across Canada reported a median wait time of 30.0 weeks between a referral from a GP and receipt of treatment. Up from 27.7 in 2023.
- This is 222% longer than the 9.3 week wait Canadian patients could expect in 1993.
- Ontario reported the shortest total wait (23.6 weeks), followed by Quebec (28.9 weeks) and British Columbia (29.5 weeks).
- Patients waited longest in Prince Edward Island (77.4 weeks), New Brunswick (69.4 weeks) and Newfoundland and Labrador (43.2 weeks).
- Patients waited the longest for Orthopaedic Surgery (57.5 weeks) and Neurosurgery (46.2 weeks).
- By contrast, patients faced shorter waits for Radiation Oncology (4.5 weeks) and Medical Oncology (4.7 weeks).
- The national 30 week total wait is comprised of two segments. Referral by a GP to consultation with a specialist: 15.0 weeks. Consultation with a specialist to receipt of treatment: 15.0 weeks.
- More than 1900 responses were received across 12 specialties and 10 provinces.
- After seeing a specialist, Canadian patients waited 6.3 weeks longer than what physicians consider to be clinically reasonable (8.6 weeks).
- Across 10 provinces, the study estimated that patients in Canada were waiting for 1.5 million procedures in 2024.
- Patients also suffered considerable delays for diagnostic technology: 8.1 weeks for CT scans, 16.2 weeks for MRI scans, and 5.2 weeks for Ultrasound.
Mackenzie Moir
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