Tag Archives: health care

‘Unacceptable incompetence’

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That’s the description of CDC performance under the then and continuing management of Rochelle Walensky, the Sobbing Doomsayer.

The CDC found itself hoist with its own petard by making 25 basic statistical and numerical errors related to COVID-19, particularly with regard to children, while purporting to expose COVID vaccine misinformation, according to an analysis led by University of California San Francisco epidemiologists.

And they’re still at it.

…nearly as many [errors] were made in the first two months of 2023 as in all of 2021….

The JtN article went on at considerable length concerning the vast numbers of errors—often dangerous errors, especially for our children—the experts of the CDC committed.

TL;DR summary: the CDC is nothing but a bunch of government bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees or this or that science degree. Nothing in the CDC, and no words from CDC bureaucrats, can be taken seriously as long as Walensky and her coterie remain in place.

The Purpose of Medicaid

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State Medicaid programs were created for the explicit purpose of providing health insurance coverage for State citizens on the lower rungs of that State’s economic ladder. The Federal government transfers Federal funds—the tax remittances of all of us citizens regardless of the State of which we might also be citizens—to support those Medicaid programs.

In California’s case, Federal transfers in support of Medi-Cal, that State’s Medicaid program, comprise more than 69% of the program. That amounts to 71.4 billion of our tax dollars.

Now the Progressive-Democrat governor of California, Gavin Newsom, wants Medi-Cal to pay the rent for the State’s homeless.

Newsom has proposed using federal healthcare funds to cover at least six months of rent for homeless California residents and those close to losing their homes.

The foolishness is spreading; California is not the only State pulling this stunt.

California is modeling the program off of similar programs in Oregon and Arizona that have been previously approved by the federal government.

Oregon gets 76%—$8.5 billion—of its Medicaid program covered by the Feds, and Arizona gets more than 80%—$14.3 billion—of its Medicaid funding from the Feds.

Newsom argues—and he’s actually serious—that this will save money in the long run because the State (as JtN cited him)

will not have to pay as much for these people’s expenses in hospitals, nursing homes and prisons.

This is a cynical non sequitur. Nursing homes and prisons aren’t centered on medical care, for all that medical care is a small part of those…services. Those services’ costs also are already factored into their budgets. Too, hospitals aren’t residences—and their medical service costs also are already factored into their budgets, including in part from California’s existing Medi-Cal.

Maybe it’s time to stop sending the Medicaid-related tax remittances of citizens of other States to these States.

Some Wuhan Virus Statistics

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…from the JAMA Network, measured in the 12 months from August 2021. First, some mortality rates for children:

  • 3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year [with their unformed immune systems]
  • 6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years
  • 4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years
  • 5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years

This works out to a mortality rate of around 0.5 per 100,000 for children 14 years old and younger. For 15-19 year olds—the remaining category of “children”—the mortality rate was 1.8 per 100,000.

The leading causes of death among children in 2019, pre-Virus, included these, and their rates, which were changed, if at all, only by the rate of lockdown and school closure:

  • perinatal conditions (12.7 per 100 000)
  • unintentional injuries (9.1 per 100 000)
  • congenital malformations or deformations (6.5 per 100 000)

The Virus represented only 2% of all the causes of child deaths in the report’s period.  In contrast, the mortality rate from the Virus for all Virus cases—which includes adults—was 109 per 100,000 population.

The risk to children from side effects of the various Wuhan Virus vaccines is very small, even as some of those side effects can be quite severe. The risk to children from going unvaccinated is just as small, if not smaller. That makes the risk to children from vaccine side effects not worth the gain in mitigating mortality from an “unprotected” infection. Furthermore, since the vaccines introduce parts of the Virus particles into the body to stimulate an immune reaction and antibody construction, that would seem to make the vaccines especially risky for those babies, who have no effective immune system to be stimulated and so cannot counteract even the partial Virus particles.

Maybe

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The Wuhan Virus has been spreading rapidly throughout the People’s Republic of China since President Xi Jinping lifted the Virus-related restrictions he’d been imposing for the last three years.

Sun Yang, a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, presented the figures [250 million infected with the Virus since the restrictions were lifted] during a closed-door meeting of high-level officials, according to the Financial Times. The figure, which accounts for 18% of the population, includes 37 million people who were infected on Tuesday [20 Dec] alone.

Some think this outbreak also will give an indication of the “true” lethality of the Omicron variant of the Wuhan Virus, since that seems to be the prevalent version in this outbreak. After all,

In countries including the US, high levels of Omicron-fueled infections are translating into less severe disease compared with earlier waves.
But Covid-19 vaccines and prior infections have bolstered immune defenses in the US and elsewhere, public-health experts said, lowering risks of hospitalization and death as the pandemic goes on.

However, a lethality assessment based on the PRC’s outcomes would require that PRC government-published data can be believed. That government routinely downplays and conceals infection and mortality rates related to its three-years of Virus presence (along with inaccurate reporting of a host of other, unrelated, data—for instance, the nation’s economic performance).

Tracking Omicron’s impact in [the PC] will be a challenge because undercounted deaths could obscure its deadliness and blind residents to the full danger, public-health experts said. They, along with relatives of deceased patients, have said they think the government isn’t publicizing the full toll from the virus.

For instance:

[The PRC’s] National Health Commission said there had been no new deaths [since 20 Dec]—and that it was retracting one of the Beijing fatalities from the official tally of Covid’s toll. No explanation was given.

The PRC’s NHC also has…altered…its definition of death by Wuhan Virus: henceforth it can only be by pneumonia or respiratory failure linked directly to the coronavirus; the presence of other factors—heart disease or any other comorbidity, even if only a co-factor, with the Virus the primary cause (by objective criteria)—mean the Virus could not possibly have been the cause of death.

Any Excuse

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…to extend an “emergency” in order to continue Government’s expanded powers and reduced individual liberties, an expansion that depends on that continued emergency. Here’s the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics in a letter to President Joe Biden (D) and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (D):

…unprecedented levels of RSV happening with growing flu rates, ongoing high numbers of children in mental health crisis and serious workforce shortages are combining to stretch pediatric care capacity at the hospital and community level to the breaking point[.]
…
Your ongoing response to COVID-19 has successfully supported strategies to mitigate the impact of health care capacity issues for adult patients. Please take this action to allow these same strategies to be employed in service of our nation’s children.

Understand that this is the same American Academy of Pediatrics that promotes “gender-affirming care”—gender-affirming: destigmatizing gender variance—in children who, even at their tender age, think they’re confused about their sex—including in some cases puberty blockers. The Children’s Hospital Association also actively supports gender-affirming care. These are entities wholly unqualified to have medical or psychological opinions regarding the health and well-being of our children.

Notice, also, that this same hysterical “overloaded hospital” bleat was made during the Wuhan Virus situation—and no, hospitals were not, in the main, overloaded then. On the contrary, those Wuhan Virus situation strategies did nothing useful regarding the virus, but they did hammer our economy and do long-term damage to our children while expanding government powers over us average Americans.

Withal, keep in mind the origin of any shortages of medicines or medical facilities for handling the present outbreaks of respiratory virus and influenza in our children.

This situation is a direct result of school lockdowns and other moves to isolate our children from each other and from adults outside the immediate family, lockdowns and other moves that were pushed zealously by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, teachers union managers, these medical “experts,” and the Left generally.

This forced isolation blocked continued development of our children’s immune systems, which left our children vulnerable to viruses against which they would have developed natural resistance absent that shameful, deliberate isolation. It’s no wonder viral outbreaks in our children are spiking.

We might have expected these Medical Wonders to understand and predict the impact of isolation on children’s immune systems and prepare for just these outbreaks.

No, this demand to extend a “medical” emergency is just another naked power grab by Party and Party supporters.