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Health

Recovered ‘brain dead’ man dancing at sister’s wedding reminds us organ donors are sometimes alive

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4 days ago

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TJ Hoover and his sister on her wedding day

From LifeSiteNews

By Heidi Klessig, M.D.

Since brain dead people are not dead, it is not surprising that the only multicenter, prospective study of brain death found that the majority of brains from ‘brain dead’ people were not severely damaged at autopsy.

In 2021, a supposedly brain dead man, Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II, opened his eyes and looked around while being wheeled to the operating room to donate his organs. Hospital staff at Baptist Health hospital in Richmond, Kentucky assured his family that these were just “reflexes.”

But organ preservationist Natasha Miller also thought Hoover looked alive. “He was moving around – kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed,” said Miller in an NPR interview. “And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was visibly crying.” Thankfully, the procedure was called off, and Hoover was able to recover and even dance at his sister’s wedding this past summer.

Last month, this case was brought before a U.S. House subcommittee investigating organ procurement organizations. Whistleblowers claimed that even after two doctors refused to remove Hoover’s organs, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates ordered their staff to find another doctor to perform the surgery.

Because brain death is a social construct and not death itself, I can tell you exactly how many “brain dead” patients are still alive: all of them. When brain death was first proposed by an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School in 1968, the committee admitted that these people are not dead, but rather “desperately injured.” They thought that these neurologically injured people were a burden to themselves and others, and that society would be better served if we redefined them as being “dead.” They described their reasoning this way:

Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death. There are two reasons why there is need for a definition: (1) Improvements in resuscitative and supportive measures have led to increased efforts to save those who are desperately injured. Sometimes these efforts have only partial success so that the result is an individual whose heart continues to beat but whose brain is irreversibly damaged. The burden is great on patients who suffer permanent loss of intellect, on their families, on the hospitals, and on those in need of hospital beds already occupied by these comatose patients. (2) Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.

Since brain dead people are not dead, it is not surprising that the only multicenter, prospective study of brain death found that the majority of brains from “brain dead” people were not severely damaged at autopsy – and 10 actually looked normal. Dr. Gaetano Molinari, one of the study’s principal investigators, wrote:

[D]oes a fatal prognosis permit the physician to pronounce death? It is highly doubtful whether such glib euphemisms as “he’s practically dead,” … “he can’t survive,” … “he has no chance of recovery anyway,” will ever be acceptable legally or morally as a pronouncement that death has occurred.

But history shows that despite Dr. Molinari’s doubts, “brain death,” a prognosis of possible death, went on to be widely accepted as death per se. Brain death was enshrined into US law in 1981 under the Uniform Determination of Death Act. Acceptance of this law has allowed neurologically disabled people to be redefined as “dead” and used as organ donors. Unfortunately, most of these people do not, like TJ Hoover, wake up in time. They suffer death through the harvesting of their organs, a procedure often performed without the benefit of anesthesia.

Happily, some do manage to avoid becoming organ donors and go on to receive proper medical treatment. In 1985, Jennifer Hamann was thrown into a coma after being given a prescription that was incompatible with her epilepsy medication. She could not move or sign that she was awake and aware when she overheard doctors saying that her husband was being “completely unreasonable” because he would not donate her organs. She went on to made a complete recovery and became a registered nurse.

Zack Dunlap was declared brain dead in 2007 following an ATV accident. Even though his cousin demonstrated that Zack reacted to pain, hospital staff told his family that it was just “reflexes.” But as Zack’s reactions became more vigorous, the staff took more notice and called off the organ harvesting team that was just landing via helicopter to take Zack’s organs. Today, Zack leads a fully recovered life.

Colleen Burns was diagnosed “brain dead” after a drug overdose in 2009, but wasn’t given adequate testing and awoke on the operating table just minutes before her organ harvesting surgery. Because the Burns family declined to sue, the hospital only received a slap on the wrist: the State Health Department fined St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, just $6,000.

In 2015, George Pickering III was declared brain dead, but his father thought doctors were moving too fast. Armed and dangerous, he held off a SWAT team for three hours, during which time his son began to squeeze his hand on command. “There was a law broken, but it was broken for all the right reasons. I’m here now because of it,” said George III.

Trenton McKinley, a 13-year-old boy, suffered a head injury in 2018 but regained consciousness after his parents signed paperwork to donate his organs. His mother told CBS News that signing the consent to donate allowed doctors to continue Trenton’s intensive care treatment, ultimately giving him time to wake up.

Doctors often say that cases like these prove nothing, and that they are obviously the result of misdiagnosis and medical mistakes. But since all these people were about to become organ donors regardless of whether their diagnoses were correct, I doubt they find the “mistake” excuse comforting.

However, Jahi McMath was indisputably diagnosed as being “brain dead” correctly. She was declared brain dead by three different doctors, she failed three apnea tests, and she had four flat-line EEGs, as well as a cerebral perfusion scan showing “no flow.” But because her parents refused to make her an organ donor and insisted on continuing her medical care, McMath recovered to the point of being able to follow commands. Two neurologists later testified that she was no longer brain dead, but a in minimally conscious state. Her case shows that people correctly declared “brain dead” can still recover.

READ: Woman with no brainwave activity wakes up after hearing her daughter’s voice

Brain death is not death because the brain death concept does not reflect the reality of the phenomenon of death. Therefore, any guideline for its diagnosis will have no basis in scientific facts. People declared brain dead are neurologically disabled, but they are still alive. “Brain dead” organ donation is a concealed form of euthanasia.

Heidi Klessig MD is a retired anesthesiologist and pain management specialist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ harvesting and transplantation. She is the author of “The Brain Death Fallacy” and her work may be found at respectforhumanlife.com.

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Brownstone Institute

Is the Influenza Threat Exaggerated?

Published on October 25, 2024

By

From the Brownstone Institute

By Tom Jefferson 

I  beg all of you who were or will be offered an influenza vaccination to consider the content of this post when deciding whether to accept.

We have published posts presenting evidence that the influenza threat has been inflated.

The US authorities knew that fraud was essentially taking place, and they bent over backward to defend each other and cover up the scam.

Here’s the first part of the story of why I have suspected and then known about this for at least 25 years.

In the mid-1990s, as the Cochrane Collaboration was starting, some of us in its Acute Respiratory Infection Group started writing protocols for Cochrane reviews on the topics that interested us (Cochrane being then a volunteer bottom-up organization).

In my case, it was influenza and other respiratory agents. So, we wrote protocols and published reviews on the effects (effectiveness and harms) of influenza vaccines (all types of inactivated and live attenuated) on children, adults, asthmatics, the elderly, and those who care for the elderly.

We initially looked only at randomized controlled trials and then bowed to pressure to include observational data. The latter were quickly ditched to preserve our sanity. That’s because observational data, in this case, told you everything and its opposite—not a new story.

I was eventually kicked out of the asthmatics review, but the other four were updated continually until we realised there was no point in going on, and 3 of the reviews were stabilized (no more updates). The three stabilized reviews are:

  1. Demicheli V, Jefferson T, et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults. 2018
  2. Jefferson T, Rivetti et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children. 2018
  3. Demicheli V, Jefferson T et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in the elderly. 2018
  4. Thomas RE, Jefferson T, et al. Influenza vaccination for healthcare workers who care for people aged 60 or older living in long-term care institutions. 

(The fourth review is currently being updated.)

The reviews have been cited several thousand times and read many more times. They include data from 105 (real) placebo-controlled trials involving over 100,000 individuals.

So that’s the background. By this stage, you will be asking: so what?

The so what is that randomised (real) placebo-controlled trials give you a good idea of the incidence of influenza (in the older trials, by a rise in antibody titres and or a viral positive culture isolate). When you pool the data together, you are not looking at one trial or dataset; you are looking at several data sets observed and recorded at the height of the “winter crisis” season.

In the healthy adult’s review, the placebo arm picked up 465 cases out of 18,593 participants. So, of the folks with symptoms, 97.5% were not caused by influenza. No trials were able to detect deaths, and hospitalisations were relatively rare. The trials spanned 50 years of data, so we had all the highs, the lows, and the maybes and even 2 influenza pandemics.

Trials are studies where researchers can control things, verify, and follow up on cases. The placebo arm incidence is essential for an accurate view of what is happening. Models are not required. Once we started looking at the verified influenza deaths in the placebo arm, we saw that the number of cases was in the hundreds. Complications were very rare; for deaths, we found zilch—certainly not the figures put forward by the CDC, which not even Anthony Fauci believed. This fits with the data we showed here and here.

So influenza is rare, loads more agents causing the same signs, symptoms are lumped under the appalling term “flu,” and population interventions such as inactivated vaccines do not stand a chance against a relatively rare moving target like influenza. So you see my mummy was right when she used to say to me: “Tommy darling, never use the F word.”

In the next posts, TTE will explain how and why inflating the threat is essential to keeping unethical bodies like the CDC and the UKHSA going (I mention these two, but they are all at it) and analyse some misleading statements and policies based on deceptive and inflated data.

This post was written by an old geezer who’s been working on this for three decades and hopes that the content of posts like these will be his legacy.

Other Relevant Work

Jefferson T, Di Pietrantonj C, Debalini M G, Rivetti A, Demicheli V. Relation of study quality, concordance, take home message, funding, and impact in studies of influenza vaccines: systematic review BMJ 2009; 338 :b354 doi:10.1136/bmj.b354

Jefferson T. Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence BMJ 2006; 333 :912 doi:10.1136/bmj.38995.531701.80

Jefferson T, Di Pietrantonj C, Debalini MG, Rivetti A, Demicheli V. Inactivated influenza vaccines: methods, policies, and politics. J Clin Epidemiol. 2009 Jul;62(7):677-86. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.07.001. Epub 2009 Jan 4. PMID: 19124222.

Doshi P. Are US flu death figures more PR than science? BMJ. 2005 Dec 10;331(7529):1412. 

Doshi P. Influenza: marketing vaccine by marketing disease BMJ 2013; 346:f3037 doi:10.1136/bmj.f3037

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Tom Jefferson

Tom Jefferson is a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford, a former researcher at the Nordic Cochrane Centre and a former scientific coordinator for the production of HTA reports on non-pharmaceuticals for Agenas, the Italian National Agency for Regional Healthcare. Here is his website.

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Health

Doctor withholds results of study that fails to show transitioning improves kids’ health

Published on October 25, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

A prominent doctor has been refusing to release the findings of a federally funded “transgender youth” study she began in 2015 because the results did not match the conclusions she hoped for, according to an explosive report in The New York Times.

The Times reported that Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Trans Youth Health & Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, “recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers,” then “followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health.” She told the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that she expected to find that the kids would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”

However, the study did not show the children doing better than they started. “Before receiving the drugs, around one-quarter of the group reported depression symptoms and significant anxiety, and one quarter reported ever having thoughts of suicide,” the Times says. “Eight percent reported a past suicide attempt.”

In an interview with the Times, Olson-Kennedy attempted to argue that the children’s starting point actually wasn’t so bad after all, and therefore the lack of change was not concerning: “They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years.” On follow-up, she claimed her “good shape” comment was referring to data averages, and her conclusion about the full data was still pending.

Regardless, in the nine years since the study commenced, Olson-Kennedy has still yet to publish any of the data for outside observers to analyze for themselves, which she justified by claiming, “I do not want our work to be weaponized. It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may 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 that “transitioning” is the best solution.

In December, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin considering arguments about the permissibility of state laws prohibiting the gender “transitioning”” of minors.

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