Archives for category: Science
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

These Tanks Are Storing Tens of Thousands of Frozen Embryos

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2024 //
28
Nitrogen tanks held tens of thousands of frozen embryos and eggs at a fertility lab in New York. CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Do you think that the judges on the Alabama Supreme Court ever saw a storage room in an IVF Clinic that was holding tens of thousands of “extrauterine” children in containers?

The New Republic provided context for the Alabama ruling that frozen embryos are children.

For the first time, a frozen embryo has been recognized by the law as a person with rights. This decision by the Alabama Supreme Court last week is a huge victory for anti-abortion groups, who have long sought to pass fetal personhood laws. This time, by declaring not just a fetus but a fertilized egg in a lab the equivalent of an “unborn child,” the courts have done them one better. If this keeps up, anti-abortion groups may succeed at outlawing both abortion and in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

This case was about whether couples whose embryos have been inadvertently destroyed in a lab can sue for wrongful death. The embryos in question are eggs that have been fertilized outside the uterus and cryopreserved by a fertility clinic for later implantation. The couples’ attorneys cast embryos cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen as “embryonic children” and “human lives.” They seem to have found a receptive audience on the Alabama Supreme Court, with the decision referring multiple times to what the majority called “extrauterine children.”

This case was the culmination of explicit anti-abortion campaigning. The judges based their ruling in part on a recent amendment to the state constitution, enshrining the “rights of unborn children” in law. When voters considered this amendment in a 2018 ballot initiative, the political director of the anti-abortion group Alliance for a Pro-Life Alabama told the Associated Press that the amendment would “position Alabama in the future for public policy decisions on abortion if Roe. v. Wade was overturned.” Indeed, the Christian-right legal advocacy organization that brought the case overturning Roe, Alliance Defending Freedom, celebrated the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in the IVF case, the group’s senior counsel adding they hoped “that this ruling encourages voters, lawmakers, and courts to recognize that life is a human right, no matter the circumstances.”

The article goes on to explain that the next frontier for the anti-abortion movement is embryo adoption.

Categories Alabama, Health, Science

Neuroscientist: We Are Thinking about Memory Loss the Wrong Way

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2024 //
38

Two elderly men are running for President this year. One is 81, the other is 77. Both of them make verbal mistakes, confusing one name for another or mixing up dates. Most of us, regardless of our age, have done the same. We usually call our mistakes “gaffes.”

Being President of the United States is not a television game show; what matters most is not instantaneous recall, but the ability to choose seasoned staff and to make wise decisions. For a President, judgment is what matters most.

Recently, a neuroscientist wrote about memory and aging in the New York Times and tried to clarify the issues. Charan Ranganath is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California.

Dr. Ranganath wrote:

Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, in which he declined to prosecute President Biden for his handling of classified documents, also included a much-debated assessment of Mr. Biden’s cognitive abilities.

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

As an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets. In fact, most of the details of our lives — the people we meet, the things we do and the places we go — will inevitably be reduced to memories that capture only a small fraction of those experiences.

It is normal to be more forgetful as you get older. Broadly speaking, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age. However, age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential depending on the reasons it occurred.

There is forgetting and there is Forgetting. If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter.

Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting.

Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting. Calling up the date that an event occurred, like the last year of Mr. Biden’s vice presidency or the year of his son’s death, is a complex measure of memory. Remembering that an event took place is different than being able to put a date on when it happened, the latter of which is more challenging with increased age. The president very likely has many memories of both periods of his life, even though he could not immediately pull up the date in the stressful (and more immediately pressing) context of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Other “memory” issues highlighted in the media are not so much cases of forgetting as they are of difficulties in the articulation of facts and knowledge. For instance, in July 2023, Mr. Biden mistakenly stated in a speech that “we have over 100 people dead,” when he should have said, “over one million.” He has struggled with a stutter since childhood, and research suggests that managing a stutter demands prefrontal resources that would normally enable people to find the right word or at least quickly correct errors after the fact.

Americans are understandably concerned about the advanced age of the two top contenders in the coming presidential election (Mr. Biden is 81 and Donald Trump is 77), although some of these concerns are rooted in cultural stereotypes and fears around aging. The fact is that there is a huge degree of variability in cognitive aging. Age is, on average, associated with decreased memory, but studies that follow up the same person over several years have shown that, although some older adults show precipitous declines over time, other “super-agers” remain as sharp as ever.

Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about their cognitive status or where it will head in the near future.

I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job. Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence, and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal or greater importance.

Ultimately, we are due for a national conversation about what we should expect in terms of the cognitive and emotional health of our leaders.

And that should be informed by science, not politics

Categories Biden, Elections, Science, Trump

Abortion Foes Plan Onslaught of New Restrictions if Trump Wins

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2024 //
64

Well, that was fast!!

At 9 a.m. I posted about a New York Times article published yesterday revealing that Trump wanted a 16-week ban on abortions. Since 93% of abortions are performed by the 13th week of abortion, that would essentially render the Dobbs decision ineffective.

But Trump’s anti-abortion pals got wind of his intention and let it be known that they will play every trick in the book—including reviving an 1873 law—to make abortion illegal everywhere.

The New York Times reports today:

Allies of former President Donald J. Trump and officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights if he returns to power that would go far beyond proposals for a national ban or the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.

Behind the scenes, specific anti-abortion plans being proposed by Mr. Trump’s allies are sweeping and legally sophisticated. Some of their proposals would rely on enforcing the Comstock Act, a long-dormant law from 1873, to criminalize the shipping of any materials used in an abortion — including abortion pills, which account for the majority of abortions in America.

“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” said Jonathan F. Mitchell, the legal force behind a 2021 Texas law that found a way to effectively ban abortion in the state before Roe v. Wade was overturned. “There’s a smorgasbord of options.”

Mr. Mitchell, who represented Mr. Trump in arguments before the Supreme Court over whether the former president could appear on the ballot in Colorado, indicated that anti-abortion strategists had purposefully been quiet about their more advanced plans, given the political liability the issue has become for Republicans.

“I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Mr. Mitchell said of Mr. Trump. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election….”

In policy documents, private conversations and interviews, the plans described by former Trump administration officials, allies and supporters propose circumventing Congress and leveraging the regulatory powers of federal institutions, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice and the National Institutes of Health.

The effect would be to create a second Trump administration that would attack abortion rights and abortion access from a variety of angles and could be stopped only by courts that the first Trump administration had already stacked with conservative judges.

“He had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” said Roger Severino, a leader of anti-abortion efforts in Health and Human Services during the Trump administration. “That track record is the best evidence, I think, you could have of what a second term might look like if Trump wins.”

Categories Elections, Gender, Health, Science, Trump

Trump Supports National Ban on Abortion at 16 Weeks

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2024 //
24

The New York Times reported that Donald Trump has been telling friends privately that he supports a national ban on abortion at 16 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother.

A 16-week national ban would eliminate the authority of some 30 states that do not have abortion bans, but it would cancel the highly restrictive laws of states like Florida that have enacted a six-week ban, that is, before women know they are pregnant, and Texas, where abortion has been outlawed.

Very clever! A 16-week ban would restore abortions wherever it has been prohibited.

A 16-week ban would not end many abortions: nearly 94 percent of abortions happen before 13 weeks in pregnancy, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control. Nor is such a ban grounded in medical research. Even 15 weeks falls before the point when significant screens take place in a pregnancy to examine the fetus for rare — but potentially fatal — conditions. Instead, it has become a position that some Republicans, based on polling, believe will be the most politically palatable to voters.

Trump makes clear that this is a political calculation. It would please many in red states who support abortion rights, and he could still say he was against abortion.

For most of his life, Trump has been pro-abortion but turned against it when he realized he needed the support of Catholics and Evangelicals.

He has boasted to his right flank that he delivered what he promised: a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.

But he recognizes that voters are angry about the loss of abortion rights, and Republicans are losing elections because of abortion restrictions.

So now, at his transactional best, he proposes a 16-week ban that enables almost every abortion to proceed at the same rate as before the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe. He would openly revive abortion, bypassing the Supreme Court.

I have this visual image of Trump looking at his anti-abortion followers and cynically smirking, “Fooled you! Hahaha.”

Categories Elections, Health, Science, Trump

How Many People Drank Bleach, as Trump Suggested?

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2024 //
38

During the outset of the pandemic, when Americans were frightened and confused about how to protect themselves from the deadly virus, President Trump held a news conference where he added his non-scientific opinion as to what people should do to avoid catching the highly contagious COVID. Trump believed in his deep knowledge of science because, he once said, he had an uncle who taught at MIT.

The New York Times reported that Trump’s suggestion about how to avoid COVID caused a large public response, as well as warnings from public health agencies:

WASHINGTON — In Maryland, so many callers flooded a health hotline with questions that the state’s Emergency Management Agency had to issue a warning that “under no circumstances” should any disinfectant be taken to treat the coronavirus. In Washington State, officials urged people not to consume laundry detergent capsules. Across the country on Friday, health professionals sounded the alarm.

Injecting bleach or highly concentrated rubbing alcohol “causes massive organ damage and the blood cells in the body to basically burst,” Dr. Diane P. Calello, the medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, said in an interview. “It can definitely be a fatal event.”

Even the makers of Clorox and Lysol pleaded with Americans not to inject or ingest their products.

The frantic reaction was prompted by President Trump’s suggestion on Thursday at a White House briefing that an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or isopropyl alcohol could help combat the virus.

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” Mr. Trump said after a presentation from William N. Bryan, an acting under secretary for science at the Department of Homeland Security, detailed the virus’s possible susceptibility to bleach and alcohol.

“One minute,” the president said. “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was sitting to the side in the White House briefing room, blinking hard and looking at the floor as he spoke. Later, Mr. Trump asked her if she knew about “the heat and the light” as a potential cure.

“Not as a treatment,” Dr. Birx said, adding, “I haven’t seen heat or light —” before the president cut her off.

Mr. Trump’s remarks caused an immediate uproar, and the White House spent much of Friday trying to walk them back. Also Friday, the Food and Drug Administration warned that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, two drugs that the president has repeatedly recommended in treating the coronavirus, can cause dangerous abnormalities in heart rhythm in coronavirus patients and has resulted in some deaths.

Later, Trump insisted he was being sarcastic, not serious.

After Trump’s press conference, reports to poison control centers spiked.

Time magazine reported on a bulletin from the American Association of Poison Control Centers, which held that reports of poisoning from ingesting bleach and other disinfectants rose after Trump’s remarks.

The Hill reported a sharp increase in calls to poison control centers after Trump made his remarks.

The Michigan Poison Center reported an increase in calls to poison centers in at least five states after Trump’s remarks. The makers of Clorox and Lysol issued statements urging the public not to ingest their products.

The Harvard Business Review published an article asserting that we can never know for sure how many people drank bleach and how many died, because so many people who answer survey questions don’t understand the question or the answer.

The NIH concluded that no one died of ingesting bleach because 100% of those surveyed gave answers to the questions that were silly, mischievous, or ignorant. The author of the Harvard Business Review article was a contributing author to the NIH study.

Politico posted a reminiscence of the day that Trump recommended ingesting bleach exactly one year later, when he was no longer in office.

One year ago today, President Donald Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid. It was a watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential briefings. It arguably changed the course of political history.

Some ex-Trump aides say they don’t even think about that day as the wildest they experienced — with the conceit that there were simply too many others. But for those there, it was instantly shocking, even by Trump standards. It quickly came to symbolize the chaotic essence of his presidency and his handling of the pandemic. Twelve months later, with the pandemic still lingering and a U.S. death toll nearing 570,000, it still does.

“For me, it was the craziest and most surreal moment I had ever witnessed in a presidential press conference,” said ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, who was the first reporter at the briefing to question Trump’s musings about bleach.

For weeks, Trump had been giving winding, stream-of-consciousness updates on the state of the Covid fight as it clearly worsened. So when he got up from the Oval Office to brief reporters gathered in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on April 23, there was no expectation that the day’s proceedings would be any different than usual.

Privately, however, some of his aides were worried. The Covid task force had met earlier that day — as usual, without Trump — to discuss the most recent findings, including the effects of light and humidity on how the virus spreads. Trump was briefed by a small group of aides. But it was clear to some aides that he hadn’t processed all the details before he left to speak to the press.

“A few of us actually tried to stop it in the West Wing hallway,” said one former senior Trump White House official. “I actually argued that President Trump wouldn’t have the time to absorb it and understand it. But I lost, and it went how it did.”

Trump started his press conference that day by doing something he’d come to loathe: pushing basic public safety measures. He called for the “voluntary use of face coverings” and said of his administration, “continued diligence is an essential part of our strategy.”

Quickly, however, came a hint at how loose the guardrails were that day. Trump introduced Bill Bryan, head of science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. “He’s going to be talking about how the virus reacts in sunlight,” the president said. “Wait ‘til you hear the numbers.”

As Bryan spoke, charts were displayed behind him about surface temperatures and virus half-lives. He preached, rather presciently, for people to “move activities outside” and then detailed ongoing studies involving disinfectants. “We tested bleach,” he said at one point. “I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.”

Standing off to the side, Trump clasped his hands in front of his stomach, nodded and looked out into the room of gathered reporters. When Bryan was done, he strode slowly back to the lectern.

“A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself, “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”

Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s former coronavirus response coordinator, sat silently off to the side as the president made these suggestions to her. Later, she would tell ABC, “I didn’t know how to handle that episode,” adding, “I still think about it every day.”

Inside the Biden campaign, aides were shocked as well. They were working remotely at that juncture, communicating largely over Signal. But the import of what had happened became quickly evident to them.

“Even for him,” said one former Biden campaign aide, “this was stratospherically insane and dangerous. It cemented the case we had been making about his derelict covid response.”

In short order, the infamous bleach press conference became a literal rallying cry for Trump’s opponents, with Biden supporters dotting their yards with “He Won’t Put Bleach In You” signs. For Trump, it was a scourge. He would go on to insist that he was merely being sarcastic — a claim at odds with the excited curiosity he had posing those questions to Birx. His former team concedes that real damage was done.

“People joked about it inside the White House like, ‘Are you drinking bleach and injecting sunlight?’ People were mocking it and saying, ‘Oh let me go stand out in the sun, and I’ll be safe from Covid,” said one former administration official. “It honestly hurt. It was a credibility issue. … It was hurting us even from an international standpoint, the credibility at the White House.”

That Trump was even at the lectern that day was head-scratching for many. For weeks, he and his team had downplayed the severity of the Covid crisis even as the president privately acknowledged to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that it had the potential to be catastrophic. But as it became clearer that the public was not buying the rosy assessments, Trump had decided to take his fate into his own hands — assembling the press on a daily basis to spin his way through the crisis.

He loved it. The former administration official said Trump was elated with the free airtime he was getting on television day after day. “He was asking how much money that was worth,” the aide recalled. The coverage was so ubiquitous that, at one point, Fox News’ Bret Baier attended the briefing and peppered the president with questions because his own show was being routinely interrupted.

The bleach episode changed all that.

Aides immediately understood what a public health quagmire Trump’s remarks had created. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted he was being taken out of context.

“President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing,” McEnany said in a statement issued the next day. “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”

His aides realized that it was not a good strategy for him to present medical advice to the public, but Trump loved the attention.

Categories Accountability, Health, Science, Trump

Steve Ruis: How Many People Died of COVID Because They Took Trump’s Advice?

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2024 //
44

Steve Ruis has been wondering how many people died of COVID because they followed Trump’s advice? Early on in the pandemic, as people’s fears were high, Trump suggested two treatments to ward off the deadly virus: injecting yourself with bleach or taking a drug called hydroxychloroquine, which usually prescribed for malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

He found a recent scientific study that estimated the number of people who took hydroxychloroquine and died, in five countries. Were they following Trump’s advice? Very likely. How would they have learned about this drug if he had not touted it?

We don’t know yet how many people injected bleach.

Ruis notes that Trump got the best medical treatment when he had COVID. It did not include bleach or hydroxychloroquine.

Categories Elections, Health, Hoax, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

Florida: State Attorney General Asks State Court to Strike Abortion Referendum Because Voters Won’t Understand It

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2024 //
58

The Orlando Sentinel editorialized about the DeSantis administration’s effort to kill a voter referendum that would put reproductive rights into the state constitution. Last year, Governor DeSantis signed a highly restrictive ban on abortion—that it was prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, when few if any women realize they are pregnant.

Let it be noted that Republican legislators in Mississippi are also trying to block a state referendum on abortion. They are afraid it will pass, and they are not willing to take that chance.

The Orlando Sentinel editorial board wrote:

Next week, Attorney General Ashley Moody will come before the state Supreme Court and argue that Floridians can’t be trusted to understand a ballot initiative that would protect abortion rights in Florida — and because of that, they should be stripped of the right to demand them.

Moody is asking the state’s high court to crush an abortion rights initiative that’s already supported by nearly 1 million Floridians (and counting). If it makes the ballot, it’s likely to pass: Most polls show that voters support abortion rights, regardless of party. Without this amendment, the Legislature has already shown it will do everything in its power to destroy those rights.

Voters in six states, including solidly conservative Kentucky and Kansas, have already voted to project abortion rights. At least a dozen other states could vote on abortion this year.

That’s why Florida voters deserve to have their say — and why Florida’s anti-reproductive-rights leaders are so desperate to make sure they don’t.

Here’s what voters will see on the ballot:

No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.

The DeSantis administration insists that voters won’t understand this amendment so should not be allowed to vote on it.

One million Floridians have already signed a petition to put it on the ballot.

The DeSantis administration is afraid that voters will understand it and pass it.

Will the conservative state Supreme Court of Florida allow the people to decide?

Categories Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Gender, Health, Science

Michael Hiltzik: The Most Dangerous Quack in the Nation

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2024 //
3

Michael Hiltzik is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times who writes about business and whatever else he wants. In this column, he calls out Florida’s “Surgeon General” as “the most dangerous quack” in the country.

That would be Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, chief medical advisor to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor selected Dr. Ladapo because of his strident opposition to COVID vaccines.

Hiltzik writes:

It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.

That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.

This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”

For several reasons, this advisory ranks as the single most dangerous statement by a government health agency since the start of the pandemic, if not for all time.

First and foremost, it’s based on a claim in a paper co-authored by known anti-vaccine activists that was almost instantaneously debunked upon its publication in October.

Hiltzik pointed out that Ladapo’s advisory comes at a time when COVID cases are on the rise and also when hesitancy about vaccines threatens to encourage refusal to take other vaccines. He points to a measles outbreak in Philadelphia,

Finally, he writes:

One must consider the source. Despite his state post and a tenured position as a professor of medicine at the University of Florida — courtesy of his patron Ron DeSantis, the extremist anti-vaccine Republican governor — Ladapo has zero credibility within the medical establishment. Taking medical advice from Ladapo makes about as much sense as taking investment advice from Sam Bankman-Fried or your view of academic integrity from Christopher Rufo.

Ladapo has become a card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia. Just before Christmas, he appeared on a podcast hosted by anti-vax agitator Del Bigtree, who stirs up his audiences with hysterical rants against vaccines and who was recently appointed communications director for the presidential campaign of notorious anti-vax figure Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He also was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

His colleagues at the University of Florida Medical School denounced Ladao’s claim that men between 18 and 39 should avoid the COVID vaccines because they posed a risk of cardiac failure.

Hiltzik noted:

In fact, the research indicated no such thing; rather, it showed that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, in any case, was lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19.

Dr. Ladapo then went full throttle, as you would expect, and insisted that no one should get the COVID vaccines. He maintained that they contained ingredients that damages one’s DNA.

In a Dec. 6 letter to the FDA and in the Florida Department of Health advisory, Ladapo raised “concerns regarding nucleic acid contaminants in the approved … vaccines, particularly in the presence of lipid nanoparticle complexes, and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA. … The presence of SV40 promoter/enhancer DNA may also pose a unique and heightened risk of DNA integration into human cells.”

Followers of anti-vaccine propaganda will find familiar features in this statement. For one thing, it sounds science-y as hell, filled to bursting with abstruse terms and jargon. One would have to be an expert in the field to identify it as total balderdash. The statement also bristles with scary references to DNA contamination and cancer and to “billions of fragments [of DNA] per dose….”

The research paper on which Ladapo based his intimation that the vaccines breach the FDA’s DNA contamination standard is self-refuting. The paper, which was based on an analysis of 24 vials of the mRNA vaccines, actually found that in all cases the fragments were well below the concentration limits set by the FDA.

The FDA, in responding to Ladapo’s Dec. 6 letter, told him that studies of the vaccines showed “no evidence” that the shots damaged recipients’ DNA and that the experience of “hundreds of millions of individuals” who received the vaccines “indicate no evidence indicative of genotoxicity….”

Florida’s death rate from COVID of 375 per 100,000 people is among the worst in the country. (California: 283.) You can ignore the defense that the difference is due to Florida’s relatively older population; states with even older median ages have done much better: Vermont (170), New Hampshire (245) and Maine (252). The difference is the indifference of Ladapo and DeSantis to their own residents’ health.

Categories Disruption, Extremism, Florida, Health, Science

Study: Trump’s Favorite COVID Remedy Was Deadly

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
62

Politico reports on a new European study of the efficacy of hydroxycholoroquine, a drug recommended to the public by President Trump at the height of the pandemic. Note: Neither he nor his family took that drug. Instead they received FDA-approved vaccinations. .

Politico EU reports:

Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.

The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.

That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.

Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.

As President, Trump recommended the drug and said, “What do you have to lose? Take it.”

Categories Health, Lies, Science, Stupid, Trump

Biden Wants to Lower Prices on Drugs Developed with Public Funding

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2023 //
45

David Sirota’s blog “The Lever” is a source of excellent investigative reporting. It recently revealed that President Biden is taking on Big Pharma. Some advocates said he needed to go further, but this is a huge opening move to establish the principle that the federal government may cap the prices of drugs developed with public money. The following was written by Katy’s Schwenk.

White House Takes On Pharma Patents

The White House plans to exercise its authority to lower the price of costly medications that were developed with public funding — a potentially powerful new tool in the battle against sky-high medication prices.

The Biden administration announced last week that it had concluded, after a months long review, that it had the authority to break the patents of drugs developed with public funding if their cost was too high. This authority — dubbed “march-in rights” — has never been used, and is likely to encounter major pushback from Big Pharma.

Take, for instance, the case of the drug Xtandi, which is used to treat prostate cancer. The drug was developed at the public University of California, Los Angeles, using federal funding from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Army. The university then licensed the drug to a pharmaceutical company called Medivation, which is now owned by Pfizer, and the Japanese pharmaceutical behemoth Astellas. Pfizer and Astellas have made billions selling the drug worldwide. In the U.S., Xtandi costs on average $190,000 a year, more than five times higher than in Canada and Japan.

The Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed more than 30 years ago, allows the federal government to use march-in rights to intervene if drugs developed with public money are not being made accessible to the public. Despite Xtandi being more or less a perfect case for the use of this authority — a cancer drug developed with public money being sold at an egregious premium — the Biden administration declined to use march-in rights in March to seize the patent and allow a generic competitor to enter the market, forcing down the drug’s cost.

Since then, though, federal officials have been reviewing march-in authority. And now, the White House’s announcement signals that they may begin using it to fight drug profiteering.

While the announcement is a critical step forward, the White House’s framework has still drawn some blowback from some advocacy groups for being less aggressive than it could be. In this week’s announcement, the Biden administration implied it would exercise march-in rights only in the most extreme cases of price gouging by Big Pharma. “Where most drug prices already are egregious and force rationing, few drugs will seem ‘extremely’ priced by comparison,” argued the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

But even the prospect of limited use of march-in rights has stoked fear in the pharmaceutical industry, which is spending more than ever to oppose drug pricing reforms. Industry groups have already declared their opposition to the measure. It’s a sign of how much is at stake for Big Pharma — and for those paying a premium for life-saving medication.

Categories Biden, For-Profit, Health, Science
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »