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21 states threaten top medical group with legal action for claiming puberty blockers are ‘reversible’

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Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

More than 20 state attorneys general are banding together to warn the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that it could face legal action if it continues to promote surgical and chemical “transitioning” of gender-confused minors, Idaho’s top law enforcement official Raul Labrador announced Tuesday.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the AAP sides firmly with LGBT activists on how to approach children suffering from gender dysphoria, endorsing the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical transformation of developing bodies, going so far as to accuse states that deny minors so-called “gender-affirming care” of “state-sanctioned medical neglect and emotional abuse.”

AAP’s position is based on “evidence free standards,” the Idaho Attorney General’s Office contends, the “most concerning” of which is its claim that the “use of puberty blockers on children is safe and reversible. This assertion is not grounded in evidence and therefore may run afoul of consumer protection laws in most states.”

“When used to suppress hormones below normal ranges during or before puberty, puberty blockers: (1) may interfere with neurocognitive development; (2) compromise bone density and may negatively affect metabolic health and weight; and (3) block normal pubertal experience and experimentation,” reads the coalition’s letter to outgoing AAP president Benjamin Hoffman and his incoming successor Susan Kressley. “And when puberty blocker use is followed directly by cross-sex hormone use, which is often the case, infertility and sterility is a known consequence, at least for those who began puberty blockers in early puberty.”

“Telling parents and children that puberty blockers are ‘reversible’ at the very least conveys assurance that no permanent harm or change will occur. But that claim cannot be made in the face of the unstudied and ‘novel’ use of puberty blockers” for gender dysphoria, it continues. “It is even less defensible now that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and its standards of care—the AAP’s apparent cornerstone source—have been exposed as unreliable and influenced by improper pressures,” referring to revelations earlier this year that Biden administration officials pressured WPATH to remove age limits.

The attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as the Arizona Legislature, went on to threaten legal consequences for AAP if it does not reverse course.

“Idaho law, for example, prohibits ‘[e]ngaging in any act or practice that is otherwise misleading, false, or deceptive to the consumer,’” the letter says. “Most other states likewise prohibit making statements to consumers that are false, misleading, or deceptive. Each of us takes our responsibility to protect consumers in our states very seriously.”

The AAP has until October 18 to answer a series of information requests about its decision-making process on the subject.

“It is shameful the most basic tenet of medicine – do no harm – has been abandoned by professional associations when politically pressured,” Labrador said. “These organizations are sacrificing the health and well-being of children with medically unproven [procedures] that leave a wake of permanent damage […] Parents should be able to trust that a doctor’s medical guidance isn’t just the latest talking point from a dangerous and discredited activist agenda.”

Studies find that more than 80% of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”

“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”

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Health

RFK Jr: There’s no medical justification for vaccinating one-day-old babies for Hepatitis B

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

‘Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted from having sex with multiple partners in gay sex, or from sex workers, or intravenous drug use,’ explained the new HHS head. ‘Why would you give that to a baby?’

In a widely-viewed video shared on social media, the new U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., asserted that the majority of vaccines — including those he sees as unjustifiably being mandated for infants — have been developed primarily to create profits for Big Pharma.    

“Most of the vaccines after 1989 were added not for public health reasons but for pharmaceutical profit reasons,” said Kennedy.    

“Why are we vaccinating one-day-old babies for Hepatitis B?” he asked. 

“Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted from having sex with multiple partners in gay sex, or from sex workers, or intravenous drug use,” he said, reemphasizing, “Why would you give that to a baby?” 

According to Kennedy, Pharmaceutical giant Merck was directed by both the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to develop the Hepatitis B vaccine for “those vulnerable populations.”    

He explained that when those populations showed little interest in the vaccine, “Merck went back to the agencies and said ‘You told us to develop this vaccine, but nobody’s buying it.”  

“The CDC said, ‘Don’t worry’” recounted Kennedy, “we’ll just recommend it for children and we’ll force everybody to buy it.”     

“So, that’s how it got on the [childhood vaccine] schedule,” he said, declaring, “There’s no medical justification.”   

There’s no downstream liability, there’s no front-end safety testing – that saves them a quarter billion dollars – and there’s no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year.  

What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule that we don’t need. Most of these vaccines are unnecessary. Many of them are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.  

It was a gold rush, because if you get onto that schedule, it’s a billion dollars a year for your company.  

And in many cases, NIH is earning the royalties. 

According to Kennedy, more obscene than the huge profits being horded by Big Pharma are the vast number of negative side-effects from all those untested vaccines. 

“Neurological diseases” have “exploded,” he said. 

“ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy. These are all things that I never heard of,” said Kennedy. “Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation according to CDC data to one in every 34 kids today.” 

Kennedy is known for vehemently opposing vaccines without proper knowledge for those taking them, a stance he adopted after the mothers of vaccine-injured children implored him to look into the research linking thimerosal to neurological injuries, including autism. He went on to found Children’s Health Defense, an organization with the stated mission of “ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure,” largely through vaccines. 

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Addictions

BC overhauls safer supply program in response to widespread pharmacy scam

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By Alexandra Keeler

A B.C. pharmacy scam investigation has led the provincial government to return to a witnessed consumption model for safer supply

More than 60 pharmacies across B.C. are alleged to have participated in a kickback scheme linked to safer supply drugs, according to a provincial report released Feb. 19.

On Feb. 5, the BC Conservatives leaked a report that showed the findings of an internal investigation by the B.C. Ministry of Health. That investigation showed dozens of pharmacies were filling prescriptions patients did not require in order to overbill the government. These safer supply drugs were then diverted onto the black market.

After the report was leaked, the province committed to ending take-home safer supply models, which allow users to take hydromorphone pills home in bottles. Instead, it will require drug users to consume prescribed opioids in a witnessed program, under the oversight of a medical professional.

Gregory Sword, whose 14-year-old daughter Kamilah died in August 2022 after taking a hydromorphone pill that had been diverted from B.C.’s safer supply program, expressed outrage over the report’s findings.

“This is so frustrating to hear that [pharmacies] were making money off this program and causing more drugs [to flood] the street,” Sword told Canadian Affairs on Feb. 20.

The investigation found that pharmacies exploited B.C.’s Frequency of Dispensing policy to maximize billings. To take advantage of dispensing fees, pharmacies incentivized clients to fill prescriptions they did not require by offering them cash or rewards. Some of those clients then sold the drugs on the black market. Pharmacies earned up to $11,000 per patient a year.

“I’m positive that [the B.C. government has] known this for a long time and only made this decision when the public became aware and the scrutiny was high,” said Elenore Sturko, Conservative MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale, who released the leaked report in a statement on Feb. 5.

“As much as I am really disappointed in how long it’s taken for this decision to be made, I am also happy that this has happened,” she said.

The health ministry said it is investigating the implicated pharmacies. Those that are confirmed to have been involved could have their licenses suspended, be referred to law enforcement or become ineligible to participate in PharmaCare, the provincial program that helps residents cover the costs of prescription drugs.

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Witnessed dosing

The leaked report says that “a significant portion of the opioids being freely prescribed by doctors and pharmacists are not being consumed by their intended recipients.” It also says “prescribed alternatives are trafficked provincially, nationally and internationally.”

Critics of the safer supply program say it enables addiction, while supporters say it reduces overdoses.

Sword, Kamilah’s father, is suing the provincial and federal governments, arguing B.C.’s safer supply program made it possible for youth such as his daughter to access drugs.

Madison, Kamilah’s best friend, also became addicted to opioids dispensed through safer supply programs. Madison was just 15 when she first encountered “dillies” — hydromorphone pills dispensed through safer supply, but widely available on the streets. She developed a tolerance that led her to fentanyl.

“I do know for sure that some pharmacies and doctors were aware of the diversion,” Madison’s mother Beth told Canadian Affairs on Feb. 20.

“When I first realized what my daughter was taking and how she was getting it, I phoned the pharmacy and the doctor on the label of the pill bottle to inform them that the patient was selling their hydromorphone,” Beth said.

Masha Krupp, an Ottawa mother who has a son enrolled in a safer supply program, has said the safer supply program in her city is similarly flawed. Canadian Affairs previously reported on this program, which is run by Recovery Care’s Ottawa-based harm reduction clinics.

“I read about the B.C. pharmacy scheme and wasn’t surprised,” Krupp told Canadian Affairs on Feb. 20. Krupp lost a daughter to methadone toxicity while she was in an addiction treatment program at Recovery Care.

“Three years [after starting safer supply], my son is still using fentanyl, crack cocaine and methadone, despite being with Dr. [Charles] Breau and with Recovery Care for over three years,” Krupp testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health on Oct. 22, 2024.

Krupp has been vocal about the dangers of dispensing large quantities of opioids without proper oversight, arguing many patients sell their prescriptions to buy stronger street drugs.

“You can’t give addicts 28 pills and say, ‘Oh here you go,’” she said in her testimony. “They sell for three dollars a pop on the street.”

Krupp has also advocated for witnessed consumption of safer supply medications, arguing supervised dosing would prevent diversion and ensure proper oversight of pharmacies.

“I had talked about witnessed dosing for safe supply when I appeared before the parliamentary health committee last October,” she told Canadian Affairs this week.

“I’m grateful that finally … this decision has been made to return to a witness program,” said Sturko, the B.C. MLA.

In 2020, B.C. implemented a witnessed consumption model to ensure safer supply opioids were consumed as prescribed and to reduce diversion. In 2021, the province switched to take-home models. Its stated aim was to expand access, save lives and ease pressure on health-care facilities during the pandemic.

“You’re really fighting against a group of people … working within the bureaucracy of [the B.C. NDP] government … who have been making efforts to work towards the legalization of drugs and, in doing that, have looked only for opportunities to bolster their arguments for their position, instead of examining their approach in a balanced way,” said Sturko.

“These are foreseeable outcomes when you do not put proper safeguards in place and when you completely ignore all indications of negative impacts.”

Sword also believes some drug policies fail to prioritize the safety of vulnerable individuals.

“Greed is the ultimate evil in society and this just proves it,” he said. We don’t care about these drugs getting into the wrong hands as long as I get my money.”


This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

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