Category: health

“The latest from the asylum”: New Zealand nurses directed to foster, accept, and prioritize indigenous culture, including specious “ways of healing”

December 13, 2024 • 10:00 am

The bit in quotes in the title may be a bit mean, but it’s the title an anonymous reader gave in an email linking to several articles from a New Zealand site (here, here, and here). The articles describe a new set of standards for registered nurses in the country, standards that I read in the official government document (see below).

Why this seems “asylum-ish” is because the standards are almost entirely directed to prioritizing and catering to the indigenous Māori population of the country, even though they are in a minority of the population (16.5%) compared to Europeans (70%) but also very close in numbers to Asians (15.3%, with most of the remainder being Pacific Islanders).  The standards direct New Zealand nurses to become “culturally competent”, which is okay if it means being sensitive to differences in psychology of different groups, but is not okay if it means medically treating those groups in different ways, or having to become politicized by absorbing the Treaty of Waitangi or learning about intersectionality.  And that is in fact the case with the new standards, which also prompt NZ nurses to engage in untested herbal and spiritual healing, including prayers.  The whole thing is bonkers, but it takes effect in January.

As one of the articles says, “critics argue that these changes prioritise ideology over practical skills.” And I suspect you’ll agree after you read the relatively short set of official standards given below. Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles in the news:

The updated Standards of Competence require nurses to demonstrate kawa whakaruruhau (Māori cultural safety) by addressing power imbalances in healthcare settings and working collaboratively with Māori to support equitable health outcomes.

The standards place a strong emphasis on cultural competency, including the need for nurses to establish therapeutic relationships with individuals, whānau [Māori extended families], and communities. They must also recognise the importance of whanaungatanga (building relationships) and manaakitanga (hospitality and respect) in fostering collective wellbeing.

One of the more significant additions involves requiring nurses to “describe the impact of colonisation and social determinants on health and wellbeing.” Additionally, nurses must advocate for individuals and whānau by incorporating cultural, spiritual, physical, and mental health into whakapapa-centred care (care focused on family and ancestral connections).

The new Standards of Competence have faced sharp criticism from some nurses, who argue the requirements impose ideological perspectives and unnecessarily complicate training processes.

However, none were willing to speak on the record for fear that voicing their concerns could jeopardise their employment.

The standards are unbelievable, so extreme in their catering to indigenous peoples that they seem racist against everyone else. But don’t take my word for it: simply click on the document below and look it over. It’s no wonder that many nurses are flummoxed by the new directive, which, as usual, is heavily larded with indigenous jargon that many (including Māori) don’t understand.  The language is simple virtue flaunting.

The very start of the standards promotes the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti o Waitangi”)—an agreement between some (not all) Māori tribes and the British governance that established three principles. First, Māori would become British citizens with all the rights attending thereto. Second, the governance of New Zealand would remain in the hands of Britain and British settlers (“the Crown’). Finally, the Māori would be able to keep their lands and possessions and retain “chieftainship” of their lands.

Even though this agreement was never signed by all indigenous tribes on the island, it has assumed almost a sacred status in New Zealand, with a newer interpretation that goes something like this: “The Māori get at least half of everything afforded by the government, and their ‘ways of knowing’ would be considered coequal to modern knowledge (including in science and medicine). Further, Māori, as ‘sacred victims’, would get priority in educational opportunities and, in this case, medical treatment.”

If you read The treaty of Waitangi, you’ll see it says nothing of the sort. It simply establishes rights of governance and possession in a deal between Europeans and Māori. But the Māori have used it to inflict considerable guilt on the non-Māori population, to the extent that you simply cannot question the interpretation of the treaty above, or of the increasing forms of “affirmative action” for Māori, because people who raise those questions, like the baffled nurses above, risk losing their jobs. This is the reason that virtually every academic and citizen who writes to me from New Zealand about the fulminating and debilitating wokeness of the country asks me to keep their names confidential.   The fear of questioning what’s happening in that country is almost worse than the burgeoning affirmative action towards a small moiety of the population. Granted, the Māori have been discriminated against and had it bad for a while, but those days are really over now, and it’s time to treat everyone according to the same rules. And of course nurses know that they have to have different bedside manners towards different patients. But that doesn’t mean that they must treat some of them with chants and prayers.

Well, on to the rules. And they begin, in the very first directive, by emphasizing the importance of the Treaty of Waitangi!. I’ll post screenshots as well as text, and will highlight some bits in red. Here’s the first page of “standards of competence”. Te Tiriti doesn’t take long to appear!

“Pou” are “standards”. Here are the first two. Note that the introduction to the document doesn’t say explicitly that these standards are culture-directed and a subset of other standards of nursing skill. No, these are just “the standards.”

Pou one: Māori health. Reflecting a commitment to Māori health, registered nurses must support, respect and protect Māori rights while advocating for equitable and positive health outcomes. Nurses are also required to demonstrate kawa whakaruruhau by addressing power imbalances and working collaboratively with Māori.

Pou two: Cultural safety Cultural safety in nursing practice ensures registered nurses provide culturally safe care to all people. This requires nurses to understand their own cultural identity and its impact on professional practice, including the potential for a power imbalance between the nurse and the recipient of care.

The two pou expanded, which are directives about how registered nurses are supposed to behave.

Under standard (pou) #4, called “Pūkengatanga [expertise] and evidence-informed nursing practice”, we see this.

What is Rongoā? Ask the Museum of New Zealand, which describes it as “Māori medicine”, characterizing it like this:

In traditional Māori medicine, ailments are treated in a holistic manner with:

  • spiritual healing
  • the power of karakia [prayers of incantations]
  • the mana [supernatural essence] of the tohunga (expert)
  • by the use of herbs.

In other words, nurses are supposed to allow patients to choose their own therapy, even if it includes untested herbal remedies, spiritual healing, supernatural power, and prayers. Is it any wonder that nurses are both confused and opposed to this?

It goes on and on in this vein, consistently outlining standards of care that favor Māori, and then ending with a glossary heavily laden with woke and postmodern terms, Again, these are being given to registered nurses (no, not shamans) to tell them how they must behave. A few items from the glossary, which have no clear connection with nursing:

 

Again, as far as I can determine, these are not just standards for nurses to become culturally sensitive, but appear to be general standards for nurses that want to be qualified as nurses. And the standards have become so ideological and political that—and I don’t say this lightly—they seem pretty racist, favoring one group over another and telling nurses to afford indigenous people care and treatment that others don’t get. Is there to be no cultural sensitivity towards Asians, who have their own form of indigenous herbal medicine?

Here are some sentiments expressed by Jenny Marcroft, the Health Spokesperson for the New Zealand First political party.

It goes without saying that it nurses must do all this stuff to practice their skills, many might be compelled to leave New Zealand and practice overseas, something that the country can’t afford to happen. And so, because opponents of this stuff are silenced, the country, immersed in wokeness, continues to go downhill.

Don’t use too much toothpaste!

November 26, 2024 • 11:30 am

I can guarantee that nearly everyone reading this post is using way too much toothpaste when they brush their teeth. In fact, you’re probably using at least four times the amount you need, and thus you’re paying four times what you should be paying for toothpaste. Not only that, but you may be getting too much fluoride if you are, like most people, using a fluoridated toothpaste. (RFK Jr. may get rid of those!)

How much toothpaste do you need? Several hygienists have told me “the amount about the size of a pea”, and I have verified that from several sites (for example, here, here, and here). Nobody weighs their toothpaste, but this amount is roughly 0.25 grams of paste. That means that a small three-ounce tube should last about six months if you brush twice a day.

And here are photos showing the proper amount of toothpaste to use for both small children and those more than three years old (that includes us):

Source

If you’re dispensing a ribbon of toothpaste that extends the length of the bristles, you’re using (and spending) way too much. STOP IT!

Biden administration lets Medicaid pay for Native American “traditional medicines”

November 5, 2024 • 10:00 am

Just yesterday I wrote about the drive in New Zealand to integrate indigenous medicine (Rongoā Māori, or RM) with modern (often called “Western”) medicine.  The problem is that RM not only uses  spiritual treatments (prayer, singing, dunking the sufferer in water) but also herbal remedies, and neither of these have been tested for efficacy using randomized, controlled, double-blind testing. This is the gold standard used in modern medicine to test the efficacy of drugs and (sometimes) surgery. Without such tests, we simply can’t say that a medical intervention actually works.

But the drive to sacralize indigenous “ways of knowing” is strong, and has spread from New Zealand across the Pacific, where it is growing in both Canada and the United States.  Although it’s one thing—and still a bad thing—to prevent scientists from examining bones and artifacts found on land claimed to be “owned” by indigenous people, it’s a different thing entirely to start treating people with indigenous medicine. Although everyone can decide whether or not they want to be treated with scientifically tried-and-true procedures versus quackery like homeopathy, or even seek religious “cures,” children can’t make such decisions. They are subject to the whims and faiths of their parents, and in Faith Versus Fact I document some horrible deaths of children  propagandized into religious healing by their parents.  (Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, are forbidden to receive blood transfusions because of a wonky interpretation of the Bible.) At least when you take your kids for their vaccinations, you can be almost certain that they’ll acquire immunity to infection.

As I said, this kind of harmful sacralization of medical “ways of knowing” is on our doorstep, and below is an op-ed from the WSJ (by the editorial board) reporting that the Biden Administration has approved funding for “traditional health care practices of Indigenous people.”  And it doesn’t seem to matter exactly what those healthcare practices are! It can be herbs, prayer, touch, chanting, and so on. The government will pay for it!

Click below to read the short piece, which I’ve reproduced almost in its entirety, or find it archived here.

The “housing” bit is tangential, reporting that “the Administration is letting states use federal Medicaid dollars to pay for low-income housing, mini-refrigerators and food. A Biden executive order last month gave states a green light to use Medicaid to pay for ‘gun violence prevention’ counseling.”  I don’t have such strong feelings about that, though it does seem a tad outisde the ambit of what Medicaid is for.

But main part of the article, given below, is about government funding for what seems like quackery.  And if you want to argue that this op-ed is “fake news” because it comes from the op-ed section of the paper (yes, that section leans right), you can find the same information in an NPR article from October 19 of this year.

A long excerpt (bolding is mine):

The Biden Administration is trying to woo Native Americans whose votes could be pivotal in Western states. One pre-election gambit is to let Medicaid pay for Native American “traditional medicine.”

The Health and Human Services Department last month approved requests by Arizona, California, New Mexico and Oregon to use federal Medicaid funds to cover “traditional health care practices” of indigenous people. “We are extending access to culturally appropriate, quality health care in Tribal communities,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

HHS says the Medicaid approvals are “the latest action demonstrating the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to support and invest in Indigenous communities across the country.” In short, this looks like another income redistribution scheme.

HHS doesn’t plan to restrict the types of traditional medicine that Medicaid will cover, nor the types of “healers.” Each tribal “facility can tailor provider qualifications for their traditional health care practitioners,” HHS says.

An American Medical Association brief on the state Medicaid proposals says “traditional healers are often identified in their Tribal community by their innate gift of healing” and “typically work informally.” Their “healing services” could include sweat lodges, prayers, purification rituals, songs, dance, herbal remedies and shamanism.

One healer who advocated for Medicaid coverage told the Salt Lake Tribune in February that he sometimes prescribes a “special ceremony against the negative energy of diabetes.” Herbs, he said, are also a favorite remedy for chronic illnesses including cancer plus a “special expression of prayer to the deities that made those herbs.”

Herbal remedies may have their uses, but Medicaid is supposed to cover evidence-based treatments. HHS says “demonstration projects” can determine if traditional medicine improves health outcomes. But lack of access to modern medical care—not lack of traditional remedies—is why Native Americans suffer more disease and worse health outcomes.

The last paragraph is correct in both assertions: Medicaid isn’t supposed to pay for quackery (seriously: “sweat lodges, songs, dance and shamanism”?) and Native Americans do lack sufficient access to modern health care.  The first bit is documented here:

Alternative treatments that haven’t been proven in scientific studies usually aren’t covered by Medicaid. Some procedures, such as chiropractic treatments and acupuncture, are sometimes covered. These treatments are more likely to be covered if they are recommended or prescribed by a doctor. Other alternative treatments that are occasionally covered include massage, pain treatments, and nutrition therapy. Some treatments, such as herbal and homeopathic therapies, are usually not approved for Medicaid payment.

Well, I’m not so sure that many chiropractic therapies, or any form of acupuncture, has been “proven in scientific studies”. But your tax dollars are paying for it! Now get ready for your tax dollars to pay for sweat lodges, songs, dances, and ceremonies. And you don’t even have to live in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Oregon to be dunned for quackery. The fund for Medicaid comes from all of us.

 

h/t: Frau Katze

Canada’s newest medical school goes full DEI

October 14, 2024 • 11:30 am

According to the National Post, Canada has a new med school (Torontoo Metropolitan University, or TMU), slated to open next year, has bought into the full DEI ideology that seems to be waning in the U.S.

This is an op-ed piece, and of course reflects a conservative opinion with statements like the first one below one, but read the facts for yourself. At any rate, I’m not keen on the paragraph below, as we don’t know how admissions will work (the “sob stories” bit is somewhat invidious):

All considered, most of TMU’s prospective med students will be getting in on student personal statements, sob stories and extracurriculars — factors that actually tend to bias admissions in favour of those who are well-off, but perhaps less competent. That’s who many of these diversity doctors will likely be.

The particulars (indented) and remember this is a conservative partisan view, so the language is inflammatory. Look at the links to ensure that their conclusions are supported.

Canada’s newest medical school is slated to be one of the most discriminatory programs of its kind when it opens in 2025. Straight, white, “privileged” men won’t be warmly welcomed as MD candidates at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), as only a quarter of seats will be open to their kind.

It’s the exact kind of over-the-top, explicit, proud racism that diversity advocates assured us would never happen. Well, it’s here, and it’s vile, and in another decade, it might be the reason you switch to a medical AI for general needs and a Mexico-based private specialist for anything more complex.

You see, 75 per cent of spots in the Ryersonian med program will be reserved for “equity-deserving” folk: Indigenous people, admitted through their own stream, Black people, who also get their own stream, and everyone else who can check a diversity box, who get lumped into a final catch-all admissions pathway.

That list of diversity boxes is long, including LGBT people, disabled people, non-white people, children of non-white immigrants, poor-upbringing people, people over the age of 26, and people who have “faced familial and/or socio-cultural barriers such as loss of both parents, long term involvement with the child welfare system, and/or precarious housing.”

The standards for acceptance into the program, you should know, are quite lax. Applicants are required to have a degree and have achieved a GPA of at least 3.3 on a 4.0 scale, or a high B, but even that’s a soft floor — diversity candidates (i.e. most candidates) are eligible for consideration below that 3.3. No MCAT results are required, because the faculty is still under the false impression that standardized testing isn’t inclusive. Not all demographics perform as proficiently on these tests, but the data overwhelmingly show that it is predictive of academic ability across all backgrounds, which is what matters when we’re selecting future doctors.

But here is one thing I really object to (bolding is mine):

The administrators overseeing the place won’t be much better: as we speak, the faculty is searching for a “social accountability” associate dean to lead social justice and decolonization initiatives. They’re also looking for an “other ways of knowing” lead to ensure non-scientific perspectives are represented.

Seriously? What other “way of knowing” is there besides science construed broadly: empirical observation, experiment, doubt, replication, and all the stuff that enables us to understand the universe. Here’s from that page:

This is a bow to indigenous ways of knowing related to medicine but if that knowledge has been supported using modern scientific tests, it becomes “modern medicine”. I hope they won’t teach any indigenous “way of knowing” that haven’t been tested to see if they’re medically efficacious.

More from the article:

Hence, TMU Med aims to “Intentionally recruit diverse faculty and staff and those with a demonstrated commitment to (DEI)“; “include (DEI), intersectionality, health equity, human rights and the social determinants of health in curriculum.” That’s code for more courses about racist, systemic biases in health care more medical academics positioned to churn out bogus scholarly articles about microaggressions and race grievances, and the addition of political capacities, such as the ability to diagnose patients with “climate change”.

. . . Especially concerning for a program that should be rooted in reality is its rejection of absolute truth with regard to health: the school was designed with sensitivity to “ageism,” “fatphobia,” and “anti-madness.” It was also designed clearly to generate activist-doctors: “we work to acknowledge, understand, and challenge systems of power that privilege some groups over others,“ reads one planning document. “We take a race-conscious approach that recognizes the way racism is perpetuated in the healthcare system and that encompasses perspectives like Critical Race Theory.”

The rest of the article is more or less a conservative diatribe against these standards, but of course there is a concern when one prizes diversity over merit in a field like medicine: lives are at stake.  So the $64 question is this: would you be hesitant to go to a doctor who got their degree from this school? Would you vet them more carefully than usual?  Check out the links and weigh in below.

Doctors Without Borders Accused of violating its own policy of political neutrality to impugn Israel, and my cessation of donations

July 21, 2024 • 9:40 am

A while back I was a big fan of Doctors without Borders (or “MSF”, for “Médecins Sans Frontières”).  It was put in my will to get a big bequest, and when I auctioned of a copy of Why Evolution is True, autographed by many famous scientists and nonbelievers, and illustrated and illuminated by Kelly Houle, every penny of the $10,000+ we got on eBay went to MSF.

Then I heard that the organization was anti-Israel (this was well before October 7 of last year). Checking up on the Internet, I found some confirmation of that claim, including several reports that MSF refused to cooperate with Israeli medical teams working in the same location. This, from the article below, may be what I remember (Rossin is named as “secretary general of MSF in the 1970s”)

Rossin recalled his experience in 2010 on a mission to Uganda when an MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team dispatched to help. Rossin remembered it as an episode of “one-way empathy,” where prejudice had poisoned the MSF team’s ability to cooperate with Israel in their shared goal of helping civilians.

(See also here, though MSF denies all these allegations.)

I subsequently wrote MSF asking them if they ever used Israeli doctors in their relief efforts.  I got no reply, even though in the letter I told them I was a donor. Their ignoring me after the dosh I’d given them was, well, uncharitable.

Now I can’t really criticize MSF’s humanitarian efforts: they’ve done a great deal of wonderful medical work during crises all over the world.  No, here I’m pointing out an article in Canada’s National Post that documents a pervasive anti-Israel—a former MSF secretary calls it “antisemitic”—attitude on the part of the organization, an attitude reflected in its refusal to criticize Hamas for the terrorist’s group own blocking or hijacking medical aid and turning Gaza hospitals into terror centers.  In the piece below, quite a few former directors and employees of MSF, not to mention donors, weigh in criticizing the organization on this account.

My own decision, based on what I’ve read over the years, is to stop donating to MSF, and I’ve taken them out of my will, replacing them with other humanitarian organizations (and that is a fair amount of dosh!).  Read the article below for yourself (click on the headline) and decide if you want to support them.  The article is free, and you can also find it archived here.

I’ll simply give a number of quotes from the article. According to its charter, MSF is supposed to be politically neutral and impartial, but former executives, donors, and employees say that when it comes to Israel, that’s not the case.

Former leaders and a major Canadian donor of Doctors Without Borders are distancing themselves from the venerable aid organization after its employees celebrated the October 7 atrocities, gave aid to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, ran a one-sided social media feed and internally circulated articles accusing Israel of creating Palestinian “death worlds.”

“To be frank, I was very, very, surprised because it’s not the MSF I knew,” Alain Destexhe, the secretary general of the organization, popularly known by its French acronym MSF, from 1991 to 1995, told National Post.

Destexhe said MSF’s messaging throughout the Israel-Hamas war is markedly different than past conflicts.

“We used to make statements, you know, in Bosnia and Rwanda, but not taking sides like this,” he said. “We always took into account the political context, but not to take sides from one group to another. In the Gaza War, I really got the feeling that MSF was totally biased.”

From a donor:

Destexhe wasn’t the only MSF loyalist to have an October 7 wake-up call. One major Canadian Jewish donor told the Post he urged his mother to support the group despite pushback from family members cautioning him against MSF’s reputation of being institutionally biased against Israel.

“I think most people know that they have a history of not being the friendliest towards Israel,” the philanthropist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Post.

He said he reassured his mother, following conversations with MSF Canada’s leadership, that the organization was duty-bound to be apolitical and strictly adhere to its mission of providing aid and observation. However, the inconsistencies between their initial promise and their treatment of Israel reached a boiling point in November 2023 when the patron confronted MSF Canada’s executives.

“I will be honest,” the donor told then-executive director Joe Belliveau in an email shared with the Post, “the more I review MSF public communications (Instagram, specifically), the evidence is overwhelming that the MSF stance has a pronounced bias. There is still not one single mention of the 200+ civilian hostages; not one mention of Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire into civilian centers, both of which are war crimes and violations of the Geneva conventions,” he wrote in late November.

. . . and a former MSF executive:

The donor’s November 2023 email rattled Byron Sonberg, who’d proudly served as MSF Canada’s treasurer for two years. He’d begun to sense the organization straying from its principle of impartiality, especially after he was copied on the donor’s email chain expressing growing frustration with the group. But the final straw came in mid-February 2024 when he, and hundreds of MSF global leaders, were forwarded an article: “Israeli necropolitics and the pursuit of health justice in Palestine.” [JAC: I found some of that article here; just read the “summary box”]

It was shared by Ruby Gill, president of MSF Canada’s board of directors, to provide “more insight” into the ongoing conflict. It argued that “framing Palestinian violence on October 7 as provocation and Israeli violence as response is ahistoric and indicates indifference to the everyday violence experienced by Palestinians.”

In other words, Israel “had it coming” on October 7. And the article was apparently sent out by MSF!  More:

Hamas receives a single passing reference in the piece, while Israel is cited nearly eighty times to bolster the claim that the Jewish State’s military response is unjustifiable. It accuses Israel of creating “death worlds” for Palestinians. The ideas expressed in the article, and the silence of MSF’s leadership, disturbed Sonberg, a self-described political moderate.

This concentration on Israel and complete neglect of Hamas is distressing in light of the fact that Hamas repeatedly impedes medical efforts in Gaza, including highjacking medical supplies, turning hospitals into terror bases, and even shooting Gazan civilians.

From another former MSM executive:

Richard Rossin, who served as secretary general of MSF in the 1970s and later co-founded Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), said that he perceived a tone shift within the organization several decades ago.

“I think it was perceptible around the beginning of the ‘80s,” Rossin told the Post by phone from his home in southern Israel. Antisemitism within MSF “began under the cover of anti-Zionism.”

See the quote from Rossin in the opening paragraphs.

One of the most distressing parts of this narrative is that MSF blamed Israel for the attack on the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17 of last year, an “attack” that did not involved Israel at all, but came from a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad that landed in the hospital’s parking lot, with the casualties greatly exaggerated by Hamas. MSF never retracted its accusation, which has been abandoned by everyone familiar with the evidence, including the Associated Press (no fan of Israel), which summarizes the evidence. (there’s also a telling conversation between two Hamas operatives saying the rocket was “from us).

By comparison, after the al-Ahli Hospital blast on Oct. 17, 2023, MSF rushed to blame Israel.

“We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable,” MSF International wrote on X on the day of the explosion.

Although the blast was the result of a misfired rocket from Gaza, likely launched by a Palestinian group, MSF never corrected the record. The post, as well as several Instagram posts published by major chapters — including Spain, Canada, Brazil, and France – remain active. No apology or correction has been issued.

To a scientist, refusal to retract an accusation like this is shameful. But that’s MSF. Here’s their tweet, still up on X, but with “context corrections”:

More:

After Hamas invaded and killed over a thousand people, MSF did not release a single post addressing the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust and it has not called for the return of kidnapped Israelis. Five days after the terrorist attack, the group issued a statement drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. [JAC note: I think the link is meant to go to the MSF “X” feed, not to just one post.)

“We are horrified by the brutal mass killing of civilians perpetrated by Hamas, and by the massive attacks on #Gaza now being pursued by Israel,” MSF International wrote on Oct. 12. The remainder of the thread denounced Israel for “indiscriminate violence and the collective punishment of Gaza.” Two days later, the group called on Israel to “show humanity.”

The tone set by MSF International trickled down to its chapters across the globe.

By Oct. 17, MSF Canada wrote, “unconditional humanity needs to be restored in Gaza,” calling Israel’s response “unimaginable” and “inhumane.” The statement made no reference to Hamas or their invasion, which ignited hostilities.Before October 7, several nations facing humanitarian issues were highlighted in MSF Canada’s social feeds – including Malawi, Venezuela, Sudan, Haiti and Burkina Faso – but its coverage following the Hamas attack veered near-exclusively to covering Israel. At one point, in early November 2023, MSF Canada’s Instagram account was blanketed with six red-bolded calls for an immediate ceasefire, something not previously done as part of its advocacy for Sudan or Ukraine.

No calls on Hamas to “show humanity,” not just towards Israel but to civilian Gazans?

Despite the fact that the Gaza Ministry of Health, run by Hamas, is known to exaggerate death tolls, which have been revised strongly downward by even the UN, MSF continued to use them. Another comment from MSF’s former secretary-general:

MSF’s relationship with the Hamas-run Ministry of Health was another major reason why Destexhe lost faith. Their failure to admit “health facilities (are) being used by Hamas and by soldiers,” he told the Post, left him “really sad, and then I became angry.”

More:

MSF International’s Instagram page was comparatively muted in February 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling the situation “extremely worrying.” Within a month, the organization’s focus had quickly shifted to Libyan refugees, midwives in South Sudan, and social workers in the Palestinian Territories.

The messaging inequality was studied by Gerald Steinberg, founder and leader of NGO Monitor, a watchdog organization based in Jerusalem, who combed through MSF’s X feed. He found over a hundred tweets between the Hamas invasion and late November, “not one (solely) mentions Israeli victims.” There were five instances when Israelis were mentioned, but always alongside Palestinians.

Steinberg has grown accustomed to this discrepancy. “MSF is both a humanitarian and advocacy organization, and on Israel and the Palestinians, the partisan dimension is dominant and destructive,” Steinberg told the Post by email. He recalled the group showing similar favouritism during an earlier flare-up in 2009.

Finally, there are further claims in the article that a sizable percentage (a third) of MSF staffers celebrated the October 7 massacre, that some MSF employees have been linked to terror groups, and that MSF had donated to Gaza’s Ministry of Health but refused to respond when asked how MSF ensured that medical supplies weren’t getting hijacked by Hamas.

And a final comment by another former secretary general of MSF:

Rossin, a former secretary general who predated Destexhe, remains pessimistic that MSF can take a more balanced approach to Israel and Gaza moving forward.

“It cannot be fixed,” he said, exasperated. “How can you fix antisemitism, which is not an opinion but a mental disease?”

Although I long ago decided to give no more money to MSF, but divert it to organizations that have a “more balanced approach”, readers may wish to have a look at this article.  I was angered by MSF’s failure to even respond to my email about Israel, despite Kelly Houle and I having given them a substantial lump of money. (I haven’t asked Kelly for her opinion on this article.)

If you’re looking for reputable organizations that do good humanitarian health work without constantly impugning Israel and making unretracted false claims, I’d suggest you do what I did: go to Peter Singer’s list of reputable charities called The Life You Can Save. It shows a number of charities (not all involved with health), all of which have been vetted by Singer’s uncompromising criteria of providing the most assistance for the least money. The second time Kelly and I did an eBay auction of an autographed and illustrated book, my Faith Versus Fact, we deep-sixed MSF and gave all the money to Helen Keller International, a charity that prevents blindness and death in children by giving them inexpensive vitamin A supplements. The charity provides a lot of bang for the buck.

And you can bet that in my rewritten will, the part that goes for children’s health and poverty (the other parts go for wildlife conservation and purchasing lands for reserves) isn’t directed to MSF, but to Singer’s charities.

Pamala Paul: Ideology impedes gender treatement in U.S.

July 13, 2024 • 10:45 am

If you’ve followed this website regularly, you’ll know that the UK’s Cass Review, which evaluated and criticized the NHS’s treatment of gender dysphoria, has been widely accepted in the UK, causing the country to slow down on “affirmative care”, following the lead of other European countries.  No longer will the NHS run a conveyer belt from childhood gender dysphoria to universal acceptance by therapists that a dysphoric child needs to transition, and from there on to puberty blockers, other hormones, and then, perhaps, surgery.  (See here, and here, for example.)

Despite the realization of European doctors and therapists that unbridled “affirmative care” is not only dangerous, but isn’t very effective, the United States has resolutely ignored Cass’s review, persisting in offering affirmative care despite the paucity of evidence that it works. Even the Biden Administration, with its increasing wokeness, has been lax about dealing with gender issues.

This is all discussed in a new article by NYT op-ed writer Pamela Paul—a thorough and sensible piece of reporting that will nevertheless infuriate gender ideologues and all the “progressive” NYT writers who beef on the paper’s Slack channel.

Gender issues are one thing that the Biden administration has fouled up, and here’s one example from Paul.  (WPATH is The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which isn’t very attuned to what the rest of the world is doing, but obstinately fights for affirmative care, no matter what):

The Biden administration has essentially ceded the issue to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, incorporating gender-affirming protocols into Department of Health and Human Services policy. Moreover, recently revealed emails indicate that President Biden’s assistant secretary of health, Dr. Rachel Levine, a pediatrician and transgender woman, successfully pushed WPATH to remove age requirements from its guidelines for gender medicine before their publication, because — mixing political and public health concerns — she thought supporters of gender treatment bans might cite them to show that the procedures are harmful. (WPATH’s draft guidelines had originally recommended age minimums of 14 for cross-sex hormones, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgery and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies.)

Now there are no guidelines! Surgery and hormones at any age!

Paul is heterodox and brave, but her piece is now the third I’ve seen where the NYT reports objectively and sometimes critically on affirmative care. The progressive staffers, of course, got in a tizzy about the previous pieces, and Paul’s will increase their ire even more. But the fact that a Left-leaning paper is willing to publish stuff like this—it’s well referenced, too—may signal a sea change in the attitudes of “progressivists” towards affirmative care in the US. Click to read; you can also find the piece archived here archived here:

I’ve written about nearly all of what Paul says, but if you haven’t followed the controversy, her piece is the place to start.  As I’ve said, I think that in a decade or two Americans will look back at the dosing and mutilating of American adolescents and ask, “What were we thinking?”  Of course many people are happy with their medical transitioning, but remember that many cases of gender dysphoria in children and adolescents who aren’t treated with affirmative therapy tend to “resolve,” often with the young people becoming gay.  If you can cure dysphoria that way rather than by permanently changing bodies with hormones and surgery, then that’s surely a route worth investigating.

Here’s a long quotation from Paul’s piece, which is itself long:

Imagine a comprehensive review of research on a treatment for children found “remarkably weak evidence” that it was effective. Now imagine the medical establishment shrugged off the conclusions and continued providing the same unproven and life-altering treatment to its young patients.

This is where we are with gender medicine in the United States.

It’s been three months since the release of the Cass Review, an independent assessment of gender treatment for youths commissioned by England’s National Health Service. The four-year review of research, led by Dr. Hilary Cass, one of Britain’s top pediatricians, found no definitive proof that gender dysphoria in children or teenagers was resolved or alleviated by what advocates call gender-affirming care, in which a young person’s declared “gender identity” is affirmed and supported with social transition, puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. Nor, she said, is there clear evidence that transitioning kids decreases the likelihood that gender dysphoric youths will turn to suicide, as adherents of gender-affirming care claim. These findings backed up what critics of this approach have been saying for years.

“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass concluded. Instead, she wrote, mental health providers and pediatricians should provide holistic psychological care and psychosocial support for young people without defaulting to gender reassignment treatments until further research is conducted.

After the release of Cass’s findings, the British government issued an emergency ban on puberty blockers for people under 18. Medical societies, government officials and legislative panels in Germany, France, Switzerland, Scotland, the Netherlands and Belgium have proposed moving away from a medical approach to gender issues, in some cases directly acknowledging the Cass Review. Scandinavian countries have been moving away from the gender-affirming model for the past few years. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, called the review’s recommendations “seminal” and said that policies on gender treatments have “breached fundamental principles” of children’s human rights, with “devastating consequences.”

But in the United States, federal agencies and professional associations that have staunchly supported the gender-affirming care model greeted the Cass Review with silence or utter disregard.

There’s been no response from the Department of Health and Human Services, whose website says that “gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents” and which previously pushed to eliminate recommended age minimums for gender surgery. Nor has there been a response from the American Medical Association, which also backs gender-affirming care for pediatric patients.

When I reached out to H.H.S. officials, they declined to speak on the record. The A.M.A. referred me to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. The Endocrine Society, the primary professional organization of endocrinologists, told me, “the Cass Review does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in” the society’s own guidelines. (Cass’s mandate was to assess the quality and importance of existing research.)

Who is to blame for the situation in America? Ideologues—and those include WPATH, the many doctors and therapists who push affirmative therapy onto young people, and, of course, the Biden administration, especially Rachel Levine. It is worth considering that it may have been unwise to put the issue of age limits (i.e., none) on affirmative care and surgery into the hands of a transgender woman.

Why is this happening in the U.S. while Europe has taken a more cautious and sensible attitude towards this type of therapy? Paul gives several reasons, which includes more pervasive “progressive” ideology in the U.S., the fact that centralized medical care like that in Europe makes it harder to “give patients what they ask for” (and no, not all kids who ask for gender transitioning should automatically get it), and the litigious climate of the U.S., which make doctors hesitant to change course because they could get sued for admitting they were wrong.

I’m a big fan of Paul, not because she’s “antiwoke,” but because she’s sensible and has the courage to speak truths that will get her demonized in the fraternity of NYT “progressives”.  And, of course, because we tend to have confluent opinions.  We also agree on how gender dysphoric young people should be treated, and I’ll finish with Paul’s take, which agrees with the conclusions of The Cass Review:

The Cass Review recommends a more holistic approach to treating gender dysphoria in kids. This involves untangling gender discomfort from common pre-existing conditions like autism spectrum disorder and A.D.H.D. and treating it alongside frequent comorbidities, which include anxiety, self-harm and eating disorders. A mental health counselor can help children with any difficulties during puberty and in coming to terms with their sexual orientation — without pathologizing either.

The goal throughout is to help. This includes working with kids to understand the causes of their gender dysphoria, relieve its symptoms, help resolve it or, in a case that proves persistent, consistent and insistent, help kids understand the pros and cons of pursuing gender reassignment for when they enter adulthood.

Once again we see ideology not only impeding science, but screwing up people’s lives.

The lab leak theory for the origin of the Covid virus is once again deep-sixed

July 1, 2024 • 9:30 am

Yes, I fell for a recent NYT article (June 3) by Alina Chan, a piece dismantled in the article below by infectious disease specialist Paul Offit.  Chan’s piece was called “Why the pandemic probably started in a lab, in 5 key points,” and it was a long and animated op-ed.  Being ignorant of the data, I took her bait and said that Chan’s article buttressed my own view that a lab-leak theory was becoming increasingly credible. (She’s a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute.)

But since I consider Offit the most credible source of information about Covid, I’ve now let go of the bait, and agree with his arguments, in the Substack article below, that a wet-market origin of the Covid virus is the best hypothesis by far.

I guess a lot of other people fell for Chan’s article, too, but I’m especially culpable because I already knew Offfit’s arguments, for last March I’d posted his defense of the “wet market theory” for the origin of Covid.  I simply forgot!

From the new piece, here’s Offit dismissing the lab-leak theory once again:

On June 3, 2024, the New York Times published an op-ed titled, “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.” The article was written by Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute in Boston. Chan had also written a book titled Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, which also supported the notion that SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a Wuhan laboratory. Chan’s book has been roundly criticized by scientists who investigated the events in Wuhan. Nonetheless, two thirds of the American public, independent of political affiliation, believe that SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

Chan’s book, by the way, was coauthored by Matt Ridley.

Click below if you want to see Offit defending the wet-market theory, and, along the way, making Chan and the NYT—which should have had an expert vet her assertions—look sloppy and ignorant.

First, Offit isn’t alone in his opinion; in fact, a wet-market origin seems to be the consensus of Those Who Know:

In her op-ed, Chan wrote, “Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.” Chan was wrong to claim the existence of a “growing body of evidence.” On the contrary, her op-ed contained only conspiracies, innuendos, and blatantly false claims. Although several scientists have stepped forward to counter Chan’s claims, the best single take-down was by Dr. Vincent Racaniello, a virologist who hosts a popular podcast called This Week in Virology (TWiV).

In a one-hour video, the TWiV team addressed each of the “Five Key Points” proffered by Chan. The group consisted of Vincent Racaniello (virologist), Alan Dove (microbiologist), Rich Condit (viral geneticist), Brianne Barker (immunologist), and Jolene Ramsey (microbiologist). The video was released on June 10, 2024, one week after Chan’s publication in the New York Times. This wasn’t the first time that the TWiV team had discussed the origin of SARS-CoV-2; it was the ninth. Previous guests have included evolutionary biologists who had directly investigated the events in Wuhan; specifically, Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, and Robert Garry, who had collectively published a paper in the journal Science in 2022 titled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan Was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This paper showed that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 clustered around the southwestern section of a wet market in Wuhan where animals susceptible to coronavirus were illegally sold and inadequately housed. Worobey and his team had shown that 1) the early cases had direct or indirect contact with the market and 2) none of the early cases occurred around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This single paper was devastating to Chan’s hypothesis.

Chan’s arguments about a lab leak are already cast into doubt by Worobey et al.’s paper described in the second paragraph above (I haven’t heard the TWiV podcast, but readers say it’s very good.)  The epidemiology alone is almost dispositive.

But Offit goes on to dismantle each of Chan’s five arguments.  I’ll put them in bold and give a very brief summary of his refutation.

1.) “Bat corona spillover events in humans are rare.” Not true: many people who live near bats show antibodies indicating exposure to coronaviruses from bats. Further, the potential for spillover events is high given the frequency of contact between humans and carriers like civets.

2.) The Wuhan lab was researching how to make bat coronaviruses more infectious. Although the Wuhan lab studied coronaviruses, there’s not the slightest evidence that those viruses could be precursors to those causing covid.

3.) The Wuhan lab worked under insufficiently strict biohazard conditions. Offit says that the conditions were “Biosafety Laboratory-2”, which, even if the Chinese viriologists were working with SARS-CoV-2, are considered “adequate”.  But they weren’t working with that virus!

4.) Chan says that there was “no way to distinguish between the market [origin] and a [human] superspreader.” Further, she said, “not a single infected animal has ever been shown to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.”  Here Offit destroys her, and I’ll have to quote him.

Re distinguishing origins:

It is at this point that Chan’s op-ed defies common sense. Two different lineages of SARS-CoV-2 virus were detected early in the outbreak. Chan would have us believe that two different SARS-CoV-2 viruses were created in the laboratory and then taken directly by human superspreaders to the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market exactly where you would have expected an animal-to-human spillover event to occur. Why didn’t one or both superspreaders go to any of the 10,000 other places in Wuhan to begin a pandemic.

And re the lack of infected animals:

Chan wrote, “Not a single infected animal has ever been shown to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.” When the outbreak began, Chinese authorities shut down the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, disinfected the area, and killed the animals likely to have served as intermediates between bats and humans. In other words, no animals were available to test. This was in direct contrast to SARS-1, another animal-to-human spillover event that originated in a Foshan, China, wet market. In that case, the market continued to operate. For that reason, animals that were the likely source of SARS-1 were available for testing. This is perhaps Chan’s most disingenuous comment. You can’t go back in time and test animals that no longer exist.

This relates to Chan’s fifth point:

5.) “Chinese authorities have not done an intense search for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2.”  Again I’ll quote Offit:

True. Mostly because all the animals in the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market were immediately slaughtered. Researchers did, however, find genetic evidence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in carts, drains, a feather-and-hair remover, a metal cage, and machines that process animals after they’ve been slaughtered in wet market stalls that were at the epicenter of the outbreak. In the same specimens, they found mammalian DNA consistent with raccoon dogs, bamboo rats, and palm civets, all likely intermediate hosts as bat coronaviruses spilled into the human population.

Given Offit’s credentials and accomplishments, and his strong defense of the wet-market theory above, I agree with his conclusion that the evidence for a wet-market origin is “overwhelming.”  And yes, given that he knows his onions, I’ll apologize for having been so credible with respect to Chan’s NYT article.  The first thing to correct is Chan’s piece, but I don’t expect that the NYT, who could have had her piece looked at by people like Offit, went with it.  And that despite the fact that in 2021 the paper had already reported controversies about Chan’s theories, which included the lab-leak hypothesis.

But let’s put aside the paper’s lack of due diligence, for it’s really important to pinpoint the origin of this virus.  If we want to prevent future pandemics, we need to know whether wet markets can give rise to them, for in that case we can do something tangible to prevent them. On the other hand, if foreign scientists were manipulating coronaviruses and an infectious one escaped the lab, there’s not much we can do.

Fortunately, the first hypothesis seems to be the case, and Offit suggests several fixes: hold the Chinese government accountable for not supervising wet markets, including those that sell illegal animals prone to carrying bat-derived viruses (Offit says that 31 of 38 species in the market were animals protected under Chinese law). Further, he argues that once there’s evidence of a pandemic starting, the Chinese government must allow international teams of scientists into the country, which they didn’t at first dp in Wuhan.  Offit ends by saying, “It’s time we put aside the fruitless, dead-end hypothesis of a lab leak and do the work that is necessary to prevent the next pandemic.”

I’ll keep an eye out for further developments, and again I’m sorry for being credulous about Chan’s paper.  She may be craving the limelight, or may really passionately believe she’s right (or both), but given that the evidence against her theory was already known when she published her op-ed, she’s not acting like a good scientist. And in this case,sloppy science can put people in severe danger.

 

h/t: Frau Katze