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Health

AGs Question Pediatricians Pushing Trans Treatment

Published

5 months ago

9 minute read

From Heartland Daily News

Ashley Bateman

Ashley Bateman

In encouraging the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions, the AAP claims the treatments are reversible. The AG letter says that is “misleading and deceptive.”

“It is beyond medical debate that puberty blockers are not fully reversible, but instead come with serious long-term consequences,”

Attorney generals from 20 states and legislators from Arizona signed an interrogatory letter to the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) about the group’s support of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery for children and adolescents who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

“Often the AAP has exercised its influence responsibly,” states the letter. “… But when it comes to treating children diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the AAP has abandoned its commitment to sound medical judgment.”

The AG letter demanded responses to multiple questions about its child gender policies by October 8, and it stated AAP’s conduct is being reviewed further.

Idaho Attorney General Raul R. Labrador sent the letter, and AGs from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia signed it, as did the president of the Arizona State Senate and the speaker of the Arizona House.

Sounding an Alarm

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), an alternative medical professional organization, has spent years sounding the alarm on AAP-approved transgender treatments.

ACPeds organized a coalition of health care professionals to create the Doctors Protecting Children Declaration, a document urging organizations to stop promoting what ACPeds calls unethical, harmful practices in treating children with gender dysphoria. Some 82,500 professionals and concerned citizens have signed the declaration.

“We have personally reached out to the AAP leadership and leaders of the other named organizations, asking them to put a stop to this, and have not received a response,” said ACPeds Executive Director Jill Simons, M.D.

“Unfortunately, the leadership of the AAP and other organizations have silenced their very members from engaging in medical discourse when they have put in question these harmful protocols, and they continue to double down on them even as they stand without evidence-based research to support their current positions,” said Simons.

Questioning What’s ‘Reversible’

In encouraging the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions, the AAP claims the treatments are reversible. The AG letter says that is “misleading and deceptive.”

“It is beyond medical debate that puberty blockers are not fully reversible, but instead come with serious long-term consequences,” the letter states.

The letter cites the widely recognized Cass Review commissioned by Britain’s National Health Service and published in April.

“The Cass Review was monumental in demonstrating, through the most thorough review of the research and current protocols and outcomes in England, that the current protocols of social affirmation, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones do not improve the health outcomes of children with gender dysphoria and in fact there is evidence of causing harm,” said Simons.

“Dr. Hilary Cass’s recommendation has shut down the practice of transitioning kids in England,” said Simons. “Many other European countries are also reversing course and returning to proven medical care, which is supportive mental health and addressing underlying diagnoses.”

Leaked files from the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) and a recent statement from the American Society of Plastics Surgeons have bolstered the case against surgical and hormonal trans treatments, says Simons.

APA, AMA Uninterested

A growing number of people are recognizing the validity of the studies, says Dr. Tim Millea, chair of the Health Care Policy Committee and Conscience Rights Protection Task Force of the Catholic Medical Association (CMA).

“Physician organizations such as AAP and [American Medical Association] appear to be uninterested in those studies, at the expense of ongoing harm to Americans that they encourage to enter the ‘gender-industrial’ medical system,” said Millea. “It seems to be true that the leadership of these groups prioritize ideology over science, which is a dereliction of duty in the vocation of medicine.”

Doctors Afraid to Speak Out

Most U.S. pediatricians are members of the AAP. Dissent within the organization has led to the development of alternative professional organizations such as ACPeds. The AAP is too radical for most pediatricians, though they are reluctant to say so, says Simons.

“I speak to countless pediatricians who are members of the AAP who disagree with the AAP’s policies and fully support our efforts to put a stop to these unethical protocols, but they are truly fearful of losing their jobs and the harms that will come to them if they speak out,” said Simons. “I unfortunately speak to pediatricians who have been reprimanded and even fired for speaking out.”

Going to Court

The AAP has been named in multiple lawsuits against doctors and hospitals. Members of ACPeds have served as expert witnesses and submitted amicus briefs to fight the AAP’s gender treatment protocols.

ACPeds also filed a lawsuit against the Biden-Harris administration for its rule requiring doctors to perform gender transition procedures on minors against their medical judgment.

“The American College of Pediatricians is filing this lawsuit against HHS because doctors should never be forced to violate their sound medical judgment and perform life-altering and sterilizing interventions on their patients,” stated ACPeds news release. “Our doctors take an oath to do no harm, but the Biden administration’s rule forces them to violate this oath and perform procedures that are harmful and dangerous to our patients– vulnerable children. What the Biden Administration is calling for is wrong and unlawful.”

Over the past several years, the CMA has been involved in gender intervention cases around the country and plans to file an amicus brief for the Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti, scheduled to be heard during the current session.

Changing the Culture

CMA hosted a two-hour panel discussion on September 8, 2024, in which several de-transitioners recounted the harms they suffered from gender transition procedures as minors. The organization wants to make sex-change procedures among children, teens, and young adults unthinkable, says Millea.

“There are three areas of emphasis to accomplish that goal, and two of them are judicial and legislative,” said Millea. “The third is of greatest importance, and that is cultural. The public needs to learn and understand the negative and lifelong risks and complications of gender transition.

“We remain hopeful that doctors will push back against these protocols and follow their oath to do no harm,” said Simons. “There will be a tipping point when doctors are no longer fearful and will speak out.”

Ashley Bateman ([email protected]) writes from Virginia.

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Addictions

There’s No Such Thing as a “Safer Supply” of Drugs

Published on March 29, 2025

By

By Adam Zivo

Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.

[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. We encourage our readers to subscribe to them for high-quality analysis on urban issues]

Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.

The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.

Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.

But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.

The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.

Most doctors quickly abandoned the experiment, and it was shut down after just two years and several high-profile overdose deaths, including that of a 17-year-old girl. Media coverage portrayed safer supply as a generational medical scandal and noted that the British, after experiencing similar problems, also abandoned their experiment.

While the U.S. has never formally adopted a safer-supply policy, it experienced something functionally similar during the OxyContin crisis of the 2000s. At the time, access to the powerful opioid was virtually unrestricted in many parts of North America. Addicts turned to pharmacies for an easy fix and often sold or traded their extra pills for a quick buck. Unscrupulous “pill mills” handed out prescriptions like candy, flooding communities with OxyContin and similar narcotics. The result was a devastating opioid epidemic—one that rages to this day, at a cumulative cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. Canada was similarly affected.

The OxyContin crisis explains why many experienced addiction experts were aghast when Canada greatly expanded access to safer supply in 2020, following a four-year pilot project. They worried that the mistakes of the recent past were being made all over again, and that the recently vanquished pill mills had returned under the cloak of “harm reduction.”

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Most Canadian safer-supply prescribers dispense large quantities of hydromorphone with little to no supervised consumption. Patients can receive up to 40 eight-milligram pills per day—despite the fact that just two or three are enough to cause an overdose in someone without opioid tolerance. Some prescribers also provide supplementary fentanyl, oxycodone, or stimulants.

Unfortunately, many safer-supply patients sell or trade a significant portion of these drugs—primarily hydromorphone—in order to purchase more potent illicit substances, such as street fentanyl.

The problems with safer supply entered Canada’s consciousness in mid-2023, through an investigative report I wrote for the National Post. I interviewed 14 addiction physicians from across the country, who testified that safer-supply diversion is ubiquitous; that the street price of hydromorphone collapsed by up to 95 percent in communities where safer supply is available; that youth are consuming and becoming addicted to diverted safer-supply drugs; and that organized crime traffics these drugs.

Facing pushback, I interviewed former drug users, who estimated that roughly 80 percent of the safer-supply drugs flowing through their social circles was getting diverted. I documented dozens of examples of safer-supply trafficking online, representing tens of thousands of pills. I spoke with youth who had developed addictions from diverted safer supply and adults who had purchased thousands of such pills.

After months of public queries, the police department of London, Ontario—where safer supply was first piloted—revealed last summer that annual hydromorphone seizures rose over 3,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. The department later held a press conference warning that gangs clearly traffic safer supply. The police departments of two nearby midsize cities also saw their post-2019 hydromorphone seizures increase more than 1,000 percent.

The Canadian government quietly dropped its support for safer supply last year, cutting funding for many of its pilot programs. The province of British Columbia (the nexus of the harm-reduction movement) finally pulled back support last month, after a leaked presentation confirmed that safer-supply drugs are getting sold internationally and that the government is investigating 60 pharmacies for paying kickbacks to safer-supply patients. For now, all safer-supply drugs dispensed within the province must be consumed under supervision.

Harm-reduction activists have insisted that no hard evidence exists of widespread diversion of safer-supply drugs, but this is only because they refuse to study the issue. Most “studies” supporting safer supply are produced by ideologically driven activist-scholars, who tend to interview a small number of program enrollees. These activists also reject attempts to track diversion as “stigmatizing.”

The experiences of Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Canada offer a clear warning: safer supply is a reliably harmful policy. The outcomes speak for themselves—rising addiction, diversion, and little evidence of long-term benefit.

As the debate unfolds in the United States, policymakers would do well to learn from these failures. Americans should not be made to endure the consequences of a policy already discredited abroad simply because progressive leaders choose to ignore the record. The question now is whether we will repeat others’ mistakes—or chart a more responsible course.

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Health

RFK Jr. says ‘everything is going to change’ with CDC vaccine policy in Michael Knowles interview

Published on March 29, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

New Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the CDC’s own reporting system ‘captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries. It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.’

When Michael Knowles asked new Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if anything will change regarding the public’s justifiable concern with the growth of vaccines, Kennedy quickly shot back, “Everything is going to change.”

Kennedy pointed to the Centers for Disease Control’s current flawed VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) online mechanism.

By way of example, he said, “None of the vaccines that are given during the first six months of life have ever been tested for autism. The only one was the DTP vaccine. And that one study that was done, according to the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, found that there was a link.”

But “They threw out that study because it was based upon CDC’s surveillance system, VAERS, and they said that system is no good.”

“That begs the question, why doesn’t CDC have a functional surveillance system?” he asked. “We’re gonna make sure they do.”

“They don’t do pre-licensing safety testing for vaccines” he continued. “They’re the only product that’s exempt. So what they say is, if there are injuries, we’ll capture them afterward.”

However, “they have a system that doesn’t capture them. In fact, CDC’s own study of its own system said it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries,” Kennedy said. “It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.”

“Why have we gone for 39 years and nobody’s fixed it?” he wondered, promising, “We’re gonna fix it.”

“We have DOGE (which) knows how to manage data. We’re going to be able to get into these databases and give answers to the American public,” Kennedy predicted.

“We’re going to do replication of all of our studies, which CDC has never done. We’re going to publish our peer review, which CDC has never done,” Kennedy vowed. “So people are going to have real answers for the first time.”

The new HHS head also discussed more broadly his mission after taking over the department’s helm, the mess created by the Biden administration, his job’s challenges, and recent developments thanks to DOGE.

“HHS is a $1.9 trillion agency. It’s the biggest agency in the government. And during the Biden administration, President Biden increased its budget by 38% and increased the workforce by 17%.”

“And by every metric by which we measure public health, health accelerated its decline.”

“When I came to HHS, what I found was a sprawling bureaucracy,” with functional duplication of departments, rampant redundancy and overstaffing, with various sub-agencies often acting in a territorial, self-protecting manner rather than a synergistic one.

“Perverse incentives” sometimes drive employee’s work,” he noted.

Despite his short tenure at HHS, with the help of DOGE, Kennedy has already released 20,000 “bureaucrats” from the department’s ranks.

“We’re going from 82,000 personnel to 62,000,” said Kennedy, carefully pointing out, “We’re keeping the scientists and frontline providers.”

Kennedy said that it has been really hard to fight against the problems at HHS and NIH over the last 40 years from “the outside.”

But “now I’m on the inside,” he declared. “This is the purpose of my life. It’s what I’m going to do over the next four years.”

He concluded:

President Trump promised to return the American dream to Americans.

A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person only has one.

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