Health
Top Canadian psychiatrists urge gov’t to halt expansion of euthanasia to the mentally ill
From LifeSiteNews
Dr. Sonu Gaind, chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, said history shows that when enacting new laws relating to sensitive life matters, ‘The evidence shows that we are right less than half the time.’
Top Canadian psychiatrists warned that the country is “not ready” for the coming expansion of euthanasia to those who are mentally ill, saying expanding the procedure is not something “society should be doing” as it could lead to deaths under a “false pretense.”
As noted in a recent National Post opinion piece, seven of 17 chairs of psychiatry have written to Canadian Health Minister Mark Holland and Justice Minister Arif Virani to demand that the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pause the expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) as it is known.
On March 9, 2024, euthanasia in Canada, or MAiD as it is known, will expand to include those suffering solely from mental illness. This is a result of the 2021 passage of Bill C-7, which also allowed the chronically ill – not just the terminally ill – to qualify for so-called doctor-assisted death.
The mental illness expansion was originally set to take effect in March. However, after massive pushback from pro-life groups, conservative politicians and others, the Liberals under Trudeau delayed the introduction of the full effect of Bill C-7 until 2024 via Bill C-39, which becomes law next year.
Dr. Sonu Gaind, who works as the chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, said that history shows when it comes to enacting new laws relating to sensitive life matters, “The evidence shows that we are right less than half the time.”
Proponents of MAiD have argued that there comes a point in time when a mentally ill individual is simply not curable. However, Gaind said that the notion of “incurability” might not even be possible.
Gaind said that as the evidence shows being wrong half the time, “That means that at least half the people who assessors say, ‘You’re not going to get better from your mental illness, and you can get MAID,’ at least half of those people would have gotten better.”
“Meaning, we would have provided death under a false pretence,” he added.
Gaind said there seems to be “no consensus on this issue,” and said he “firmly” thinks “we’re not ready for further expansion.”
As it stands now, a special joint parliamentary committee on MAID has reconvened to investigate the looming expansion of MAiD to the mentally ill.
Recently, LifeSiteNews reported on how pro-euthanasia lobbyists want Canada’s assisted suicide via lethal injection laws to be extended to drug addicts, which critics warn could lead the nation down a dangerous path nearing “eugenics.”
The delay in expanding MAiD until 2024 also came after numerous public scandals, including the surfacing of reports that Canadian veterans were being offered the fatal procedure by workers at Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC).
Offering MAiD to the mentally ill is not something ‘society should be doing,’ psychiatrist says
Dr. Jitender Sareen, head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba, said that when it comes to MAiD, there is too much left in the hands of those who do the procedure.
“Offering people death instead of appropriate treatments” is something that “really goes against what we as a society should be doing,” Sareen said as per the National Post.
Sareen also said there is no guidance as to whether a doctor can determine whether a person is suicidal or simply wants to kill themselves via MAiD.
Recent attempts by the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) to stop the expansion of MAiD have failed.
MPs in the House of Commons voted down a private members’ bill introduced by CPC MP Ed Fast that would have repealed the expansion of euthanasia laws to those suffering from mental illness.
Pro-life advocates, such as Angelina Ireland, president of the Delta Hospice Society (DHS), have warned the Trudeau government expansion of MAiD to those who are mentally ill will lead to allowing “MAiD allows agents of the state to kill us and it’s actually called ‘non-culpable homicide.’”
Ireland recently told LifeSiteNews that it was important she made clear to participants who attended to “speak to some inconvenient truths” about just how bad MAiD is for Canada.
“There is no avenue for us to ‘sue’ them (the government) or charge them with murder. We have abdicated our power and given the government the supreme authority — the right and the privilege to murder us,” Ireland said to LifeSiteNews, which she also told the event participants.
Euthanasia deaths have gone through the roof in Canada since it became legal in 2016.
According to Health Canada, in 2022, 13,241 Canadians died by MAiD lethal injection, which is 4.1% of all deaths in the country for that year, and a 31.2% increase from 2021.
The number of Canadians killed by lethal injection since 2016 now stands at 44,958.
Health
RFK Jr. talks fluoride, vaccines with MSNBC the day after Trump’s victory
From LifeSiteNews
By Stephen Kokx
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised a shake-up of government agencies with the intention to make America healthier.
Medical freedom activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a revealing interview to MSNBC today about his plan to make America healthy again after Donald Trump’s landslide victory.
Kennedy was in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was asked a variety of questions near and dear to the hearts of pharmaceutical companies, including vaccines, fluoridated water, and whether various health agencies need to be eliminated altogether.
Some departments at the Food and Drug Administration “have to go,” Kennedy said. “The nutrition departments … they’re not protecting our kids.”
Kennedy was quick to note, however, that “to eliminate the agencies, as long as it requires Congressional approval, I wouldn’t be doing that … (but) I can get the corruption out of the agencies.”
On the subject of fluoridated water, Kennedy remarked that while he wouldn’t ban it outright, there is overwhelming evidence it lowers IQ in children and that he would provide “good information about the science” to cities that use it.
“I think fluoride is on the way out,” he said, pointing to a recent ruling by a federal judge calling on the FDA to more tightly regulate the compound.
Jamel Holley is an adviser to Kennedy. He posted on X this morning that at 1 p.m. EST today there was to be a teleconference meeting involving CEOs of some of the most powerful Big Pharma companies in the country. LifeSite has not been able to verify if the meeting occurred, though given that Kennedy’s agenda threatens to frustrate their plans, it would not be unrealistic they are coordinating for the future.
Several social media users joked about what pharma executives are likely thinking now that Kennedy will be overseeing their companies.
During Kennedy’s interview, his slammed the government’s handling of COVID-19 when he was pressed on how he would have managed the pandemic differently.
“(The American people) should not have confidence in the people who are managing our pandemic. We have the worst record of any country in the world. We have 16% of COVID deaths in the United States of America. We only have 4.2% of the globe’s population. So whatever we were doing in this country was the worst of every country in the world,” he forcefully replied.
Kennedy was also pressed on the subject of vaccines, which he has often warned about on the campaign trail.
“I’m not gonna take away anybody’s vaccines,” he said. “If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not gonna take them away. People ought to have a choice and that choice ought to be informed by the best information. So I’m gonna make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is gonna be good for them.”
Last weekend, Trump told NBC News that Kennedy’s desire to remove fluoride from public water supplies “sounds okay to me.” Trump has told attendees at his political rallies that he wants to allow Kennedy to “go wild” on health, food, and medicine.
The Washington Post reported that Kennedy is urging Trump to pick Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo as his nominee for the Health and Human Services Department. Ladapo notably refused to push many of the mainstream media’s talking points surrounding COVID-19. He also questioned and even expressed opposition to the shot itself, calling it at one point the “antichrist of all products.”
Health
How the Trump-RFK Jr. coalition could realign US politics against Big Pharma and Big Food
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
For some, much of this may now seem obvious. What may be less obvious is that blame for the massive spike in many chronic “diseases of civilization” should go to the same cartel. It involves Big Government, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Media that rely on pharmaceutical industry ad dollars, and medical lobbying outfits such as the American Academy of Pediatrics pretending to be sound science crusaders.
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.
-
Agriculture2 days ago
2024 harvest wrap-up: Minister Sigurdson
-
Alberta2 days ago
39 percent increase in funding for RCMP instigates discussion about future policing for rural Alberta
-
Health2 days ago
How the Trump-RFK Jr. coalition could realign US politics against Big Pharma and Big Food
-
Business2 days ago
Canada’s struggle against transnational crime & money laundering
-
Red Deer2 days ago
Chamber urges city council to look harder at cutting costs
-
Addictions2 days ago
Alberta closing Red Deer’s only overdose prevention site in favor of recovery model
-
espionage2 days ago
Scathing Report Reveals How Deadly Pathogens and Sensitive Research Walked Out the Door Under Justin Trudeau’s Watch
-
Alberta1 day ago
For second year in a row, Alberta oil and gas companies spend more than required on cleanup