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Health

How the Trump-RFK Jr. coalition could realign US politics against Big Pharma and Big Food

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11 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Jay Richards

If the unlikely coalition of Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlives the 2024 presidential election, it could reorder our political categories and leave to our children and grandchildren a quite different future.

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed Donald Trump on Aug. 23, the corporate press and conventional Washington, D.C., analysts mostly missed the real story: It was the moment that a disparate, diverse, and potentially disruptive throng of average Americans became a coalition.

Although RFK, Jr. is famous – or infamous, depending on your view – for his criticisms of vaccines, that wasn’t the theme of his lengthy speech. He spoke instead about an unholy alliance – a cartel – of industries, corporate media, government regulatory agencies, and even nonprofit “charities” that is making us fat and sick. This problem doesn’t fit the simple taxonomy of “public” and “private” or “left” and “right” that served us well during the Cold War.

Kennedy has been a voice in the wilderness warning about this cartel for years. Most Americans first became aware of it during the 2020 pandemic. Here’s the basic story: COVID-19 itself was likely the product of dangerous gain-of-function research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That’s bad enough. But Communist China didn’t act alone. This work was funded, at least in part, by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health and laundered through the nonprofit  EcoHealth Alliance.

Once the virus was out, the absurd and counterproductive lockdowns and hygiene theater were pushed by global entities such as the World Health Organization. Domestically, Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, worked to undermine independent experts who criticized the federal bureaucrats’ favored policies.

Collins and Fauci even orchestrated the publication of a deceptive article in Nature that claimed the virus had a natural origin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal entities, including the Biden White House, pressured social media platforms to censor even the best-credentialed dissenters.

Attentive Americans soon learned that public health, as a field, focuses on nudging whole populations, rather than seeking the health of individual patients.

Certain pharmaceutical companies – which pay royalties to many NIH staff, including Collins and Fauci – enjoyed a suspiciously fast and less than rigorous approval process for their mRNA “vaccines.” Vaccine mandates then created a massive artificial market for the drugs. And drug companies’ immunity from legal liability allowed them to enjoy the financial benefits of these policies without facing the downside risks from any long-term harm to those who took the vaccines.

Then, during the lockdowns, the growing awareness of the “gender-industrial complex” – media, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and others who push ghoulish “gender-affirming” interventions on people distressed about their sexed bodies – further reinforced the lack of credibility of private and public health authorities.

An American epidemic of chronic diseases

In his speech, Kennedy devoted many paragraphs to the “chronic disease epidemic” – including ever higher rates, even among children, of Type II diabetes and obesity, and of Alzheimer’s, which some now refer to as “Type III diabetes.” He spoke of “the insidious corruption at the FDA and the NIH, the HHS and the USDA that has caused the epidemic,” referring to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with the NIH.

But he didn’t stop there. He spoke of “an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid,” including:

ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s Syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the Autism rate was one in 1500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC; nationally, nobody’s talking about this.

He also spoke of the massive spikes in the use of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. Of course, first ladies and surgeons general have launched “healthy lifestyle” campaigns, but these always parrot the conventional wisdom of the cartel. In contrast, Kennedy blamed the cartel itself, not a gluttonous public, for the chronic disease crisis. It was this cartel that gave us the war on healthy dietary fats and the ridiculous food pyramid – heavy on unhealthy ultrarefined carbohydrates and light on fat – which helped make Americans far fatter and sicker than we were before.

His speech hit a nerve, especially among parents who recognize this problem but lack a credible and effective way to fight it. They may engage in private acts of defiance – refusing the COVID-19 or Hepatitis B vaccines for their young children, or disregarding USDA warnings about the consumption of animal fat. So far, however, neither political party has taken up this topic. The Left has tended to give the administrative state the benefit of the doubt. The Right has tended to do the same for corporations.

Trump has promised that Kennedy will have a leading role in fighting America’s health crisis. That will mean taking on the cartel. But the devil is in the details. A sustained effort to “make America healthy again,” or MAHA – to complement MAGA – must be free of government interests on the one hand and industry funding and lobbyists on the other.

Maybe that’s impossible, but Kennedy as MAHA czar could mean a serious exploration of the role the cartel has played in the following:

  • Restricting medical freedom
  • The origin of the COVID-19 virus
  • The effects of the pandemic lockdowns
  • The lack of safety and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines
  • The rise in childhood and adult obesity
  • The rise in childhood and adult Type II diabetes
  • The rise in Alzheimer’s
  • The rise in allergies, food sensitivities, and asthma
  • Rising rates of depression and anxiety disorders
  • Rising rates of neurological disorders such as autism
  • The explosion of cases of childhood gender dysphoria
  • The collusion between the World Professional Association of Transgender Health and HHS officials such as transgender activist and Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine
  • The political agenda of transnational public health bureaucracies such as  the World Health Organization
  • The medicalization of the treatment for gender dysphoria with “gender-affirming care” (rather than taking a mental health approach)
  • The capitulation of NIH, CDC, FDA, and HHS to gender ideology over sound science
  • The lack of value and safety of the ever-growing childhood vaccine schedule
  • The medical focus on symptoms rather than underlying causes and cures of diseases
  • The artificial restriction of medical and therapeutic credentialing of professionals to control supply and competition
  • The decline in average testosterone in males
  • The rise in infertility
  • The rise in opioid addiction and overdose deaths
  • Unethical research sponsored by the NIH
  • The incompetence of the USDA in dispensing nutrition advice
  • The effect of agricultural subsidies on our health
  • Environmentalist dogmas masquerading as health and nutrition advice

If Trump appoints Kennedy as the MAHA czar, it would be akin to his COVID-19 Operation Warp Speed during his first administration but without the industry taint.

Of course, that appointment could come to nothing – except that there is already a coalition forming of millions of parents across, and even orthogonal to, the political spectrum, who – as Kennedy has put it – love their children more than they hate each other. It would take both the political will in Washington and a popular constituency of average Americans to fight the biomedical security state and the cartel that fuels it.

We’re getting a glimpse of this motley resistance in the unlikely unity ticket of Trump and Kennedy and the many strange bedfellows supporting them. If this coalition outlives the 2024 presidential election, it could reorder our political categories and leave to our children and grandchildren a quite different future.

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Addictions

Alberta closing Red Deer’s only overdose prevention site in favor of recovery model

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Alberta’s Minister of Mental Health and Addiction, Dan Williams, at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton on Sept. 11 2024. [Photo credit: Alexandra Keeler]

By Alexandra Keeler

Alberta’s Minister of Mental Health and Addiction explains the shift from overdose prevention to recovery amid community concerns

On Sept. 23, Alberta announced the city of Red Deer would be closing the community’s only overdose prevention site by spring 2025. The closure will mark the first time an Alberta community completely eliminates its supervised consumption services.

The decision to close the site was taken by the city — not the province. But it aligns with Alberta’s decision to prioritize recovery-focused approaches to addiction and mental health over harm-reduction strategies.

“The whole idea of the Alberta Recovery Model is that unless you create off-ramps [from] addiction, you’re barreling ahead towards a brick wall, and that’s going to be devastating,” Alberta Minister of Mental Health and Addiction Dan Williams told Canadian Affairs in an interview in September.

However, the closure — which parallels similar moves by other provinces — has sparked debate over whether recovery-oriented models adequately meet the needs of at-risk populations.

The Alberta Recovery Model

The Alberta Recovery Model, which was first introduced by Alberta’s UCP government in November 2023, emphasizes prevention, early intervention, treatment and recovery.

It is informed by recommendations from Alberta’s Mental Health and Addiction Advisory Council and research from the Stanford Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis.

“Alberta, in our continuum of care, has everything from low entry, low barriers, and zero cost [for] detox, to treatment, to virtual opioid dependency, to outreach teams working with shelters,” said Williams.

Williams said that Alberta intends to continue funding safe consumption sites as short-term harm-reduction measures. But it views them as temporary components in the continuum of care.

This is not without controversy.

At the Feb. 15 Red Deer council meeting where councillors voted 5-2 to close the city’s safe consumption site, some councillors noted that safe consumption sites play an essential role in the continuum of care.

“Each individual is at a different stage of addiction … the overdose prevention site does play a role in the treatment spectrum,” said Coun. Dianne Wyntjes, who voted against the closure.

While Red Deer is home to Alberta’s first provincially funded addiction treatment facility, Wyntjes noted there had been reports within the community of the facility lacking capacity to meet demand.

She pointed to Lethbridge’s experience in 2020, where overdose deaths spiked after its consumption site was replaced with mobile services.

The Ontario government’s recent decision to close 10 safe consumption sites located near schools and daycares has prompted similar concerns.

In August, Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones told reporters that the province plans to “very quickly” replace the closed sites with Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) hubs that prioritize community safety, treatment and recovery. But critics — including site workers, NDP MPPs and harm-reduction advocates — have warned these shutdowns will lead to an increase in fatal overdoses.

It is possible that Alberta, Ontario and other jurisdictions will make other moves in tandem in the coming months and years.

In April, Alberta announced it was partnering with Ontario and Saskatchewan to build recovery-focused care systems. The partnerships include sharing of best practices and advocating for recovery-focused policies and investments at the federal level.

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‘Mandatory treatment’

Another controversial component of Alberta — and other provinces’ —  recovery-oriented strategy is involuntary care.

The UCP government has said it plans to introduce “compassionate intervention” legislation next year that will enable family members, doctors or police officers to seek court orders mandating treatment for individuals with substance use disorders who pose a risk to themselves or others.

“If someone is a danger to themselves or others in the most extreme circumstances because of their addiction, then we as a society have an obligation to intervene, and that might include mandatory treatment,” said Williams.

Critics have raised concerns about increasing reliance on involuntary care options.

“Over the last two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in reliance on involuntary services [such as psychiatric admissions and treatment orders], while voluntary services have not kept up with demand,” the B.C. division of the Canadian Mental Health Association said in a Sept. 18 statement published on their website.

The statement followed an announcement by B.C. Premier David Eby — who was recently reelected — to expand involuntary care in that province.

Research from Yale University’s School of Public Health indicates involuntary interventions for substance use are generally no more effective than voluntary treatment, and can in some cases cause more harm than good. The research notes that “involuntary centers often serve as venues for abuse.”

A 2023 McMaster University study that synthesized the research on involuntary treatment from international jurisdictions similarly found inconclusive outcomes. It recommended expanding voluntary care options to minimize reliance on involuntary measures.

Williams emphasized that the province’s involuntary care legislation would target “a very small group of people for whom all else has failed … those at the far end of the addiction spectrum with very serious and devastating addictions.”

‘Off-ramps from addiction’

Over the past six years, Alberta has incrementally increased its mental health and addiction budget from an initial $50 million to a cumulative total of $1.5 billion.

The funding boost has enabled Alberta to eliminate a $40 daily user fee for some detox and recovery services, add 10,000 publicly funded addiction treatment spaces, and expand access to its Virtual Opioid Dependency Program, which offers same-day access to life-saving medications.

To support addiction prevention, Williams said Alberta is expanding CASA Classrooms in schools. These offer mental health support and therapy to Grade 4-12 students who have ongoing mental health challenges, and equip school staff and caregivers to support these students.

“Mental health and addiction needs to be as connected to the emergency room as it is to the classroom,” Williams said. “We need to be able to understand low-acuity chronic mental health challenges as they begin to manifest [in the community].”

The province is also in the process of establishing 11 residential recovery communities across the province. These centres provide free, extended treatment averaging four months — which is longer than most recovery programs.

Oct. 23 marked the one-year anniversary of one such centre, the Lethbridge Recovery Community. The $19-million, 50-bed facility served more than 110 clients in its first year and expects to serve about 200 individuals in 2025.

“I’m coming to see that entering treatment is only the start,” said Sean P., a client of Lethbridge Recovery Community, in a government press release celebrating the anniversary.

“With the support of the staff and the community here, I’m beginning to face my past and make real changes. Recovery is giving me the tools I need for this journey, and I’m genuinely excited to keep growing and moving forward with their help.”

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Alberta

Media melts down as Danielle Smith moves to end ‘transitioning’ of children in Alberta

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From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

After Alberta’s Danielle Smith put forth legislation to protect kids from being gender ‘transitioned,’ the Canadian media went on a predictable melt down, citing ‘experts’ who blatantly lie to advance the LGBT agenda.

A year after announcing her intention to combat transgender ideology and protect children, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has tabled three pieces of UCP (United Conservative Party) government legislation: 

  • The Education Amendment Act 2024 will require parental consent for “socially transitioning” children under the age of 16 (changing a child’s name or “preferred pronouns”). The bill also gives parents an “opt-in” option for any sexual or content at school. Smith has emphasized that the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission has the power to discipline teachers if they decide to break the law. 
  • The Health Statues Amendment Act 2024 will ban the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, as well as prohibit sex change surgeries on minors. 
  • The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will ban trans-identifying men from female sports teams.  

Together, these three bills represent the most definitive pushback against gender ideology in Canada by any premier. Smith’s decision to announce her intent to pursue such legislation and then wait has turned out to be politically savvy—it has given the UCP government a good look at the LGBT response, and during that time the U.K.’s Labour government has successfully fought to maintain a similar ban in the courts and publicly rebutted many of the scare tactics used by LGBT activists.

Smith and the UCP are thus walking into this debate with eyes wide open, and are clearly certain that the public is on their side (it is) and that the legislation can survive the court challenges surely coming from LGBT activists. The policies are clearly popular with the UCP party’s base, who handed Smith a staggering 91.5% approval rating in her leadership review at UCP gathering in Red Deer last Saturday.  

The party also passed 35 policy resolutions, including several that indicate the UCP’s willingness to go further in fighting transgender ideology, with resolutions that would restrict “exclusively female spaces” like bathrooms and changerooms to females and designating transgender surgeries as “elective cosmetic procedures” not funded by the taxpayer. The motions received near-unanimous support.  

The Canadian press, unsurprisingly, is working hard to present policies that the vast majority of Canadians support as an attack on fundamental norms (albeit norms that only surfaced in the last few years and were never presented to voters). Global News ran the headline: “Alberta unveils 3 sweeping bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth.” It is important to note that the press accepts the premises of transgender ideology as the starting point for their reporting, with heavy usage of nonsensical phrases like “gender-diverse youth,” which implies that there are many genders. 

In fact, Global News and other Canadian outlets trotted out talking points that have been definitively rebutted by the U.K.’s Cass Review and multiple medical studies—in fact, even the New York Times has been reporting on the permanent harms of puberty blockers over the past several years. An example from Global News: 

Alberta parents of gender-diverse youth like Haley Wray believe the new laws will give kids less choice — especially when it comes to health-care that is not permanent but instead, gives kids time to work through their identity struggles. 

‘Hormone blockers are a very valuable tool,’ Wray said, explaining they have a very small window of effectiveness to pause, but not prevent, puberty. ‘It is reversible because nothing changes. And what that does is it allows youth and families to have that that pause, that break to explore further, validate, understand what this means and know that permanent changes aren’t happening.’

Wray believes the proposed legislation will make the province a less safe place for tens of thousands of Alberta kids who aren’t straight. It’s why, Wray says, a growing number of families with transgender children are now grappling with whether Alberta is a place they can stay. ‘I know people who have, and I know people who genuinely feel like there is likely nowhere to go,’ she said. 

This is incorrect. Puberty blockers cause permanent damage, and children may be rendered permanently sterile after taking them for a relatively short period of time. Puberty is not something that can be “paused,” and it frequently causes irreversible rather than reversible damage. Smith and her government understand this, which is why they have decided to pass this legislation—not, as nearly every press outlet claimed, to “target trans youth,” but to protect them. 

The CBC chimed in with sentences like this one: 

Terms like ‘biological female’ and ‘biological male’ can be used to imply that transgender people are still their assigned sex at birth, despite their identity. 

To translate: a scientifically accurate and precise statement is now an ideological one, but inherently ideological language invented by the transgender movement over the past decade is, in fact, technically accurate. People can identify as anything they want; it is irrelevant to their biology. The CBC presents pointing this out as some sort of propagandistic attack on vulnerable people. 

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Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National PostNational ReviewFirst Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton SpectatorReformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture WarSeeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of AbortionPatriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life MovementPrairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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