Health
Dr. Peter Hotez predicts rampant spread of diseases once Trump takes office
From LifeSiteNews
Dr. Peter Hotez says it will be ‘dangerous’ if the Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Prominent “vaccine scientist” Dr. Peter Hotez issued an eerie warning during an interview this week, listing a litany of diseases that may begin to spread starting on January 21, President-elect Donald Trump’s first full day in office.
Speaking with Nicole Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline White House about how supposedly “dangerous” it would be for the country if the Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Hotez began warning of diseases that will start to spread on January 21 while slamming vaccine skeptics. Hotez has a long history of attacking “anti-vaxxers” who have raised legitimate concerns about COVID and other vaccines.
“We have some big picture stuff coming down the pike starting on January 21. Mr. (Mike) Bloomberg mentioned H5N1 that I’m really worried about,” Hotez said. “It’s all over wild birds on the western part of the United States and going up in the north. It’s getting into the poultry, we’re seeing sporadic human cases, no human-to-human transmission yet, but that could happen. It’s in the cattle, it’s in the milk. And that’s just the beginning.
“We have another major coronavirus likely brewing in Asia; we’ve had Sars in 2002, Sars2, COVID-19 in 2019. And we know these viruses are jumping from bats to people thousands of times a year.”
“But there’s still more; we know that we have a big problem with mosquito-transmitted viruses all along the Gulf Coast. Where I am here in Texas, we’re expecting dengue and possibly Zika virus coming back or Oro Pouche virus, maybe even yellow fever, and there’s more. Then we have this sharp rise in vaccine-preventable diseases going up because, in part, the anti-vaccine activists,” Hotez said.
The scientist then reiterated that we might start to see these outbreaks on January 21 under the new Trump administration.
“All that’s gonna come crashing down on January 21st on the Trump administration. We need a really, really good team to be able to handle this,” Hotez said.
There have been several responses to Hotez’s strange comments, including by cardiologist and leading COVID establishment critic Dr. Peter McCullough, who said during an appearance on Live from Studio 6B on Real America’s Voice that Hotez and “vaccine lobbyists” are pushing an “agenda of fear.”
“To lay it down and say it’s all gonna happen the day Trump takes office, you can tell what the agenda here is. There’s an agenda of fear being pushed by the vaccine lobbyists to constantly keep Americans in fear about the next viral threat so they can hold power and because they know in their minds that the only thing they’ll offer is more vaccines,” McCullough said.
LifeSite reached out to Hotez, asking him to clarify exactly what he meant by his comments, but has yet to receive a response.
However, he did offer a response to the backlash from his statements on X, saying his comments were being misinterpreted by “extremist media.”
“(I) outlined the tough infectious disease challenges the Trump appointees will face and inherit when they begin in January. They twisted it to claim we will launch new viruses at them, as totally ridiculous as that sounds,” Hotez wrote.
Hotez was a major proponent of the COVID vaccines and has slammed vaccine skeptics. In a 2022 World Health Organization (WHO) video about “misinformation” surrounding the COVID vaccine, he called those who had concerns about the vaccine a major killing force.”
Last year, after an appearance by RFK Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast in which they discussed his concerns over vaccines, Hotez blasted them for “misinformation” in an X post. His post prompted Rogan to challenge him to debate RFK Jr. on his show. While RFK Jr. agreed to the debate, Hotez never responded.
Health
UK to ban puberty blockers for minors indefinitely
From LifeSiteNews
UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced Wednesday that he will indefinitely extend a ban on puberty blockers for minors under the age of 18. The only exception is for clinical trials.
Puberty blockers will be banned indefinitely in the U.K. for under 18-year-olds, except for clinical trials.
In May of this year, the then-government of Rishi Sunak used emergency legislation to temporarily ban puberty blockers for minors. Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced on Wednesday that he will indefinitely extend the ban on the supply and sale of puberty blockers.
The Department of Health cited the Commission on Human Medicines’ (CHM) expert advice that said there was “currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children.”
The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) already halted the prescription of puberty blockers to children in March. In May, the then-Conservative government introduced a ban, preventing the prescription of puberty blockers by European or private prescribers and legally restricting the NHS’s use of the drugs to clinical trials.
The ban was upheld in July by the High Court after pro-LGBT activists brought a challenge to the ruling because they “were concerned for the safety and welfare of young trans people in the UK.”
The prohibition of prescribing harmful puberty blockers for children was prompted by the Cass Review, an extensive report by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass that pointed out the significant risks of the medication and the lack of evidence regarding the alleged benefits of puberty blockers.
Health Secretary Streeting said that he would “always put the safety of children first” and added that his approach would “continue to be informed by Dr [Hilary] Cass’s review, which found there was insufficient evidence to show puberty blockers were safe for under-18s.”
Earlier on the same day that the nationwide ban was announced, the Parliament of Northern Ireland had voted unanimously to permanently ban puberty blockers in order to prevent the province from becoming a “back door” for the distribution of the drugs in the U.K.
The co-founder of the advocacy group “Our Duty,” Keith Jordan, applauded the decision by Northern Ireland to ban the harmful drugs indefinitely.
“This marks a significant step in safeguarding children, preventing Northern Ireland from becoming a ‘back door’ for these unregulated treatments – a concern highlighted by Susie Green’s earlier attempts to circumvent mainland restrictions,” he said.
Susie Green is a transgender activist who set up a clinic in Northern Ireland in an attempt to circumvent the restrictions in mainland Britain.
“However, we must remain vigilant, as the demand for these drugs may drive young people to unregulated, dangerous sources,” Jordan stressed, urging lawmakers to prioritize safeguarding children.
Health
The People Cheering Brian Thompson’s Murder Can’t Have the Medical Utopia That They Want
Whether private or public, third-party payment for health care is a huge problem.
Evoking a collective scream of despair from socialists and anti-corporate types, police in Pennsylvania arrested Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson, they insist, stood in the way of the sort of health care they think they deserve and shooting him down on the street was some sort of bloody-minded strike for justice.
The assassin’s fans—and the legal system has yet to convict anybody for the crime—are moral degenerates. But they’re also dreaming, if they think insurance executives like Thompson are all that stands between them and their visions of a single-payer medical system that satisfies every desire. While there is a lot wrong with the main way health care is paid for and delivered in the U.S., what the haters want is probably not achievable, and the means many of them prefer would make things worse.
“Unlimited Care…Free of Charge”
“It is an old joke among health policy wonks that what the American people really want from health care reform is unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge,” Michael Tanner, then of the Cato Institute, quipped in 2017.
The problem, no matter how health care is delivered, is that it requires labor, time, and resources that are available in finite supply. Somebody must decide how to allocate medications, treatments, physicians, and hospital beds, and how to pay for it all. A common assumption in some circles is that Americans ration medicine by price, handing an advantage to the wealthy and sticking it to the poor.
“Today, as everyone knows, health care in the US can be prohibitively expensive even for people who have insurance,” Dylan Scott sniffed this week at Vox.
The alternative, supposedly, is one where health care is “universal,” with bills paid by government so everybody has access to care. Except, most Americans rely on somebody else to pay the bulk of their medical bills just like Canadians, Germans, and Britons. And while there are huge differences among the systems presented as alternatives to the one in the U.S., third-party payers—whether governments or insurance companies—do enormous damage to the provision of health care.
Third-Party Payers, Both Public and Private, Raise Costs
“Contrary to ‘conventional wisdom,’ health insurance—private or otherwise—does not make health care more affordable,” Jeffrey Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow with the Cato Institute, wrote in 2013. “The third party payment system is the principal force behind health care price inflation.”
In the U.S., the dominance of third-party payment, whether Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare, one of its competitors, Medicare, Medicaid, or something else, makes it difficult to know the price for procedures, medicines, and treatments—because there really isn’t one price when third-party payers are involved.
Several years ago, the first Trump administration required hospitals to publish prices for services. My local hospital offers an Excel spreadsheet with wildly varying prices for procedures and services, from different categories of self-pay, Medicare, Medicaid, and negotiated rates for competing insurance plans.
“A colonoscopy might cost you or your insurer a few hundred dollars—or several thousand, depending on which hospital or insurer you use,” NPR’s Julie Appleby pointed out in 2021.
That said, savvy patients paying their own bills can usually get a lower price than that paid by insurance.
“When government, lawyers, or third party insurance is responsible for paying the bills, consumers have no incentive to control costs,” Arthur Laffer, Donna Arduin, and Wayne Winegarden wrote in the 2009 paper, The Prognosis for National Health Insurance. After all, the premium or tax is already paid, right?
Other Countries Struggle With Similar Issues
Concerns about rising costs, demand, and finite resources apply just as much when the payer is the government.
“State health insurance patients are struggling to see their doctors towards the end of every quarter, while privately insured patients get easy access,” Germany’s Deutsche Welle reported in 2018. “The researchers traced the phenomenon to Germany’s ‘budget’ system, which means that state health insurance companies only reimburse the full cost of certain treatments up to a particular number of patients or a particular monetary value.” Budgeting is quarterly, and once it’s exhausted, that’s it.
Last year in the U.K., a Healthwatch report complained: “We’re seeing a two-tier system emerge, where healthcare is accessible only to those who can afford it, with one in seven people who responded to our poll advised to seek private care by NHS [National Health Service] staff.” Britain’s NHS remains popular, but it has long struggled with the demand and expense for cancer care and other expensive treatments.
And Canada’s single-payer system famously relies heavily on long wait times to ration care. “In 2023, physicians report a median wait time of 27.7 weeks between a referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment,” the Fraser Institute found last year. “This represents the longest delay in the survey’s history and is 198% longer than the 9.3 weeks Canadian patients could expect to wait in 1993.”
You have to wonder what those so furious at Brian Thompson that they would applaud his murder would say about the officials managing systems elsewhere. None of them deliver “unlimited care, from the doctor of their choice, with no wait, free of charge.” Some lack the minimal discipline imposed by what competition exists among insurers in the U.S.
We Need Less Government Involvement in Medicine
“Policymakers need to understand that the key to ‘affordable health care’ is not to increase the role of health insurance in peoples’ lives, but to diminish it,” Cato’s Singer concluded.
My family found that true when we contracted with a primary care practice that refuses insurance. We pay fixed annual fees, which includes exams, laboratory services, and some procedures. My doctor caught my atrial fibrillation when he walked me across his clinic hall on a hunch to run an EKG.
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma famously follows a similar model for much more than primary care. It publishes its prices, which don’t include the overhead and uncertainty of dealing with third-party payers.
Those examples point to a better health care system than what exists in the United States—or in most other countries, for that matter. They’re probably not the whole answer, because it’s unlikely that one approach will suit millions of people with different medical concerns, incomes, and preferences. But making people more, rather than less, responsible for their own health care, and getting government and other third-parties as far out of the matter as possible, is far better than cheering the murder of people who supposedly stand between us and an imaginary medical utopia.
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