Researchers Hid Data Showing Fluoride Lowers Kids’ IQs, Emails Reveal
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 30, 2023
A team of pro-fluoride researchers led by California’s dental director intentionally omitted data from a study seeking to undermine the forthcoming National Toxicology Program (NTP) report linking fluoride exposure to neurodevelopmental damage in children, according to documents released last week.
The documents — obtained through a California public records search and posted in a press release by the Fluoride Action Network — show that the team, led by Dr. Jayanth V. Kumar, a dental surgeon, conducted a meta-analysis of the scientific literature on fluoride’s neurotoxicity and found a link between fluoride exposure and lowered IQ in children at low levels of exposure.
However, they omitted the data and wrote a paper concluding there was no evidence of a link.
Four rounds of peer review rejected Kumar’s manuscript as “poorly researched,” “internally inconsistent” and committing “unashamed exaggeration” before the journal Public Health finally published the study last month.
NTP report: ‘no obvious threshold’ at which fluoridating water is safe
Kumar et al.’s study was published online less than a week before the NTP’s May 4 Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC) meeting where advisors would finalize any recommended changes before the NTP publishes the final version of its report on fluoride’s neurotoxicity.
The NTP, an interagency program run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that researches and reports on environmental toxins, conducted a six-year systematic review to assess scientific studies on fluoride exposure and potential neurodevelopmental and cognitive health effects in humans.
Its groundbreaking report on those findings — which consists of a “state of the science” monograph and meta-analysis surveying the literature on the links between fluoride exposure and cognitive health effects — concluded that prenatal and childhood exposure to higher levels of fluoride is associated with decreased IQ in children.
It also found that given that children are exposed to fluoride from multiple sources, there was “no obvious threshold” at which fluoridating water would be safe.
That means even when water is fluoridated at lower levels (typically 0.7 mg/L), studies found children had dangerous levels of fluoride in their systems.
The study’s findings contradict mainstream assumptions, the position of the dental industry, the sugar industry and the health regulatory agencies on the safety and benefits of fluoridating water to prevent cavities, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, including a series of studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
At the BSC meeting, the American Dental Association (ADA), with whom Kumar is affiliated, used his meta-analysis as evidence there were problems with the NTP study and argued that the NTP report should therefore be postponed.
This was just the latest in a series of attempts by industry and regulatory agency officials to “weaken, delay, or kill” the report.
The report is a key document in the ongoing lawsuit filed by Food & Water Watch, the Fluoride Action Network, Moms Against Fluoridation and private individuals against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seeking to end water fluoridation.
The lawsuit was put on hold for more than two years pending the finalization and publication of the report. After the NTP scientists finalized their draft in May 2022 — which they deemed ready for publication — U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled the EPA could no longer delay the trial.
The case is moving forward as the report goes through the final stages of review.
The plaintiffs hope the report will be published in final, rather than draft, form prior to the next phase of the trial in January 2024.
The report was subject to an unprecedented number of peer reviews and agency commentary, and as a direct attempt by the NIH to block its publication, internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) revealed.
The final step in its publication will be for the NTP director to consider the BSC’s suggestions and make any amendments to the report prior to publication.
The BSC recommended the NTP include comment on the recently published meta-analyses, but they were not aware that Kumar et al. buried data in order to support their findings.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Connett, partner at the law firm Waters Kraus & Paul, provided the evidentiary documents to the NTP last week so the agency can consider the omitted data in its long-awaited final review of fluoride’s neurodevelopmental toxicity.
Connett told The Defender :
“We felt it was important to make the NTP aware of the omitted data as it directly contradicts the paper’s conclusion, and further undermines the dental lobby’s main talking point that the neurotoxic hazards of fluoride only occur at high doses.”
How researchers manipulated ‘the science’
Email exchanges between Kumar and his co-authors and transcripts from Kumar’s deposition in the lawsuit show Kumar and his co-authors are professionally committed to water fluoridation.
Kumar is a member of the pro-fluoridation ADA’s National Fluoridation Advisory Committee and one of the nation’s leading promoters of fluoridation. He admitted in the deposition that his job is “to promote fluoridation.”
Dr. Susan Fisher-Owens, one of his co-authors, receives funding from Colgate, which also promotes water fluoridation.
Kumar also admitted that part of his job was to work with the ADA’s marketing consultant to come up “with the best messaging and strategies for how to best advocate for fluoridation,” including messaging to “inoculate policymakers” with pro-fluoride information before they speak with anyone questioning the policy.
The documents show the researchers set out to prove there was no link between low levels of fluoride and lowered IQ in children, specifically to undermine the NTP report.
In a presentation to the Association of State and Territorial Dental Directors in February 2021, Kumar told his colleagues he was hoping to pre-empt the NTP monograph by publishing his own meta-analysis and finding a “friendly editor” to publish it.
He reiterated this point in an email to his co-authors in July 2022, in which he emphasized there was “urgency” to get their paper published. “I wanted to publish the paper before the NTP report,” he wrote.
But publishing their desired results met a series of roadblocks as peer reviewers at the Journal of the American Dental Association rejected the study twice, finding the “discussion is unbalanced and misleading.”
One reviewer expressed concern that “the misinformation in this manuscript will fuel more controversy rather than stimulate prudent science-based decisions.”
Reviewers at Pediatrics Journal similarly rejected the study as marked by “fallacious” reasoning with conclusions that were “internally inconsistent.” Another reviewer said that a “facile style of citation increases concern about the balance of the work.”
But reviewers were unaware that Kumar also omitted data that contradicted his desired conclusions.
In an email to Kumar in February 2022, the study’s biostatistician Honghu Liu, Ph.D., told Kumar he thought the results of his analysis were “headed in the right direction.”
But on March 5, 2022, Liu wrote to Kumar explaining they had done analyses trying to find a safe threshold — ideally, around 1.5 mg/L — for fluoride in water, below which there is no association with reduced IQ in children. However, he wrote, “the results are opposite to what we hoped for.”
Liu told Kumar he would keep trying to produce different results. “Although hard, we can test more models to try to identify a threshold that can lead to a nonsignificant fluctuation in IQ before the threshold and a significant drop in IQ after the threshold,” he wrote.
But further analysis continued to show an association between low levels of fluoride exposure and decreased IQ. According to Liu, the dose-response analysis was “unfortunately not showing what we like to show.”
To resolve the problem, they eliminated the analysis from the study.
On March 24, 2022, Kumar sent his colleagues an email, quoting the particular parts of the NTP monograph that he sought to invalidate with their paper and raising concerns that reviewers would question their research if they included a certain figure that contradicted their conclusions.
When the team submitted the study to Public Health for publication, the analysis showing an association between low-level water fluoridation and IQ deficits had been removed.
The study concluded, “These meta-analyses show that fluoride exposure relevant to community water fluoridation is not associated with lower IQ scores in children.”
Connett sent the omitted analysis along with an explanation of how Kumar’s conflicts of interest influenced the outcome of his study in a letter to the NTP last week and urged them to take it into consideration as they evaluated the meta-analysis.
He wrote:
“The public counts on NTP to provide the best available science on the chemicals that impact their lives. I recognize this is a challenging task, particularly for chemicals with significant political interests at stake, but it is vital nonetheless.”
Through FOIA and public records requests, the plaintiffs revealed how high-level public health officials blocked the report’s publication after the NTP determined it was finalized.
They also showed how the ADA sought to influence the “independent” National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics to insist on further review.
Commenting on what else they might uncover about efforts to protect pro-fluoridation interests, Connett told The Defender :
“The only reason we were able to get Kumar’s emails is because he’s a government official who is subject to Freedom of Information requests. It raises the question of what else we would learn if the emails of private actors, like the PR strategists who Kumar works with, were also accessible.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Why Are Hospitals Still Using Remdesivir?
By Stella Paul | Brownstone Institute | May 30, 2023
Nobody believes in Remdesivir anymore. How can you possibly make a case for it? Remdesivir is so lethal it got nicknamed “Run Death Is Near” after it started killing thousands of Covid patients in the hospital. The experts claimed that Remdesivir would stop Covid; instead, it stopped kidney function, then blasted the liver and other organs.
As word got around, some patients started showing up in the emergency room with signs saying, “NO REMDESIVIR” and refusing to take it. (Not that their refusal helped: many were given it anyway, often without their knowledge.)
When I heard that Remdesivir is still being used, I couldn’t believe it. How could hospitals be so brazen as to push this killer drug, even after the lawsuits started flying? Fourteen California families are now suing three hospitals, claiming their loved ones suffered wrongful deaths from what they call “the Remdesivir protocol.” Expect other lawsuits to follow, because the Remdesivir carnage was nationwide.
I began to poke around to see if hospitals are still giving Remdesivir and I think I’ve found the smoking gun. Two smoking guns, in fact. First, it’s still listed on the NIH web site as its standard of care for Covid. Second (and in my opinion, more importantly), the CMS.gov official website says, “The COVID-19 public health emergency (PCE) ended at the end of the day on May 11, 2023.” Two sentences later, it states, “The enhanced payments described on this page will end on September 30, 2023.” And there it is, listed in bold: Remdesivir.
Allow me to translate the bureaucratese. “Even though we acknowledge the Covid emergency is over, the federal government will continue to pay lavish bonuses to hospitals who kill their patients with Remdesivir through the end of the fiscal year.”
Money; it all comes down to money. There’s SO much money in the Covid con game. The CARES Act of 2020 slathered $2 trillion across the country to deal with Covid, and lots of it went to hospitals. The 20 largest hospitals enjoyed a 62 percent increase in their combined net assets during those glorious Covid years, providing many top executives with a $10 million salary or more.
Alas, the federal government insisted that if hospitals wanted to get paid, they had to treat Covid patients with Remdesivir. The fact that this drug was made by their good friends at Gilead Science and everybody was getting rich from the deals they cut had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course. It was all done for love of the people. But just to make sure that Remdesivir could attain its current billion-dollar status, the feds incentivized hospitals with a 20 percent boost to the entire hospital bill of patients treated with Remdesivir.
And here’s the kicker: the feds did not allow hospitals to even consider using safe, cheap drugs like ivermectin.
“Remdesivir caused a lot of renal failures,” Ralph Lorigo told me. Mr. Lorigo is a lawyer in Buffalo who spent last year helping families rescue loved ones who were trapped inside hospitals that were killing them. “If you got Covid, the hospital put you on this government protocol and didn’t even check if you have kidney disease. There was a real lack of monitoring.”
“I was surprised when the FDA approved it, even though The World Health Organization (WHO) had advised against using it. But Big Pharma had the strength to push it through.”
He added, “Hospitals had stopped doing elective cases, which is how they made money. So now they made money giving people Remdesivir and putting them on ventilators, which the government also paid big bonuses for. Every day you’re on a vent, it’s damaging you. When I managed to get people out of the hospital and off the vent and they got ivermectin, they lived. When I couldn’t get into court or lost the case, they died.”
It’s way past time for there to be a hard stop on the use of Remdesivir. And we must work fast to save the children. “In late April 2022, the FDA even approved remdesivir as the first and only COVID-19 treatment for children under 12, including babies as young as 28 days, an approval that boggles the mind, considering COVID-19 is rarely serious in children while remdesivir is ineffective and carries a risk of serious, and deadly, side effect,” writes Dr. Joseph Mercola.
In all my reporting on the Hospital Death Protocol, I’ve never heard a single person say, “You’re wrong. My mother perked right up when they gave her Remdesivir and the ventilation made her bounce out of bed. They saved her life!”
Instead, my inbox and Twitter feed are filled with messages that would make you break down and cry. The Bereaved Army in America needs an investigation into exactly who shattered their lives and why.
Stella Paul is the pen name of a writer in New York who has covered medical issues for over a decade. In 2021, she lost her husband in a locked down nursing home in New York City where he had been brutally isolated for almost a year. He died one week after getting the vaccine. Stella is focused on exposing the Hospital Death Protocol to honor her husband’s memory and to support thousands of bereaved families.
Iran, IAEA put to bed allegations of ‘near weapons-grade’ uranium
The Cradle | May 30, 2023
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has closed a case that alleged Tehran enriched uranium particles to 83.7 percent purity. This claim has fueled accusations by the US and Israel that Tehran is “days away” from building a nuclear bomb.
According to the Islamic Republic’s Mehr News Agency, citing informed sources, the IAEA recently held technical negotiations with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) to resolve two outstanding cases.
One of these was the discovery by IAEA inspectors of uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent in Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear site last year.
To build a nuclear weapon, uranium needs to be enriched to 90 percent purity. Iran maintains that its centrifuges are configured to enrich uranium to a 60 percent purity level.
Despite the IAEA report specifying they only found particles of the enriched uranium — and that it was unknown whether their presence was “an unintended accumulation” in the centrifuges — western media and officials latched on to the news to fuel decades-long paranoia over Iran’s alleged desire to build a nuclear bomb.
The second resolved case involved the Abadeh nuclear site. Information has yet to be made available regarding the UN nuclear watchdog’s concerns over this site.
The Abadeh site made headlines in 2019 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed it had been used to “develop nuclear weapons” before being destroyed once “Iran realized that we uncovered the site.”
The IAEA is due to issue quarterly reports on Iran this week, ahead of a regular meeting of its 35-nation Board of Governors next week.
Earlier this month, Tehran allowed the IAEA to reinstall cameras across certain nuclear facilities, hoping to resolve a disagreement with an organization it has accused of being “hijacked and exploited” by Israel.
In February, the head of the AEOI, Mohammad Eslami, revealed that over a quarter of the 2,000 inspections carried out worldwide by the IAEA in the past three years were conducted in Iran.
“There are 21 nuclear facilities in Iran, while there are 730 facilities in the world, meaning that a quarter of the IAEA’s inspection rounds around the world are dedicated to Iran,” Eslami said in a press statement on 1 February.
While Iran made up one-quarter of all IAEA inspections in the past three years, inspectors have never been allowed to visit Israel’s nuclear facilities.
Israel’s nuclear capabilities have never been revealed; however, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that the country has around 80 nuclear warheads.
Meaningless rhetoric from the PA and the international community over Ein Samiyah
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | May 30, 2023
As Israeli colonial violence resulted in the forced displacement of the 200 residents of Ein Samiyah in Area C of the Occupied West Bank, the range of reactions, from silence to pathetic commentary, only increased impunity for the settler-colonial enterprise. A day after Al Jazeera reported on the recent Palestinian displacement, EU diplomats issued yet another futile reproach urging Israel to stop settlement expansion, warning that “settlement expansion has resulted in increased settler violence”. Do Palestinians really need EU diplomats to point out what they have been experiencing daily for decades?
Ein Samiyah’s displaced residents have now moved to Al-Mughayyir and Al-Nuwaimah, still within reach of settler violence, and illustrating how Israel’s ongoing Nakba has been perfected by the state for normalisation by the international community.
As expected, the Palestinian Authority excelled in nothing but complacency. Comments to Al Jazeera by the PA’s presidency spokesman, Ibrahim Melhem, not only highlighted Ramallah’s complicit silence, but also the carefully crafted impunity which it enjoys as a result of its collaboration with Israel.
“The PA does not have the ability to prevent such crimes,” Melhem stated. “It is a victim of these crimes, since the international community does not implement the agreed-upon decisions in dealing with Israel.”
The statement is partly true – the international community relishes non-binding resolutions when it comes to Israel’s war crimes and international law violations. However, the PA is to blame for its blind endorsement of the two-state paradigm, which provided Israel with the opportunity to expand into Palestinian territory, just as the 1947 Partition Plan paved the way for the colonial enterprise to take shape.
When Israel creates refugees, the PA stays silent, not because it is a victim, but because it does not want to veer away from the role the international community and Israel intended it to play. The current term of forcibly displaced Palestinians conveniently detracts from the perpetual cycle of refugees which Israel created since the 1948 Nakba. Yet, for the PA to stop at forced displacement is a form of political violence which Palestinians should not be suffering from their illegitimate, expired leadership.
Even if the PA does not have the ability to prevent settlement expansion – its illegitimate rule adds to its restrictions already imposed by the international community – there is much it could do if Palestine and Palestinians were truly a political concern. The PA stands in the way of political change by refusing to hold democratic elections, by failing to give refugees the necessary political space, by detaining and torturing its opponents, by exploiting the cycle of refugees Israel creates for the sake of temporary rhetorical embellishment and meaningless international solidarity gestures.
“Our main goal is to pressure for their return to their lands, not to submit to moving,” Melhem declared of the Ein Samiyah residents. The question is, how? How can the PA call for return when it persists in ignoring Palestinian refugees? At some point, the collective Palestinian refugees, who have now become a nameless multitude, were also current concerns. How long before Ein Samiyah’s people suffer the same fate, and the PA lapses into the same silence about Palestinian refugees’ political rights?
Conspirators for the Constitution: When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition
By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | May 30, 2023
Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.
To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being the driving force behind the January 6 Capitol riots, one doesn’t have to engage in violence against the government, vandalize government property, or even trespass on property that the government has declared off-limits to the general public.
To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, one need only foment a revolution.
This is not about whether Rhodes deserves such a hefty sentence.
This is about the long-term ramifications of empowering the government to wage war on individuals whose political ideas and expression challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
This is about criminalizing political expression in thoughts, words and deeds.
This is about how the government has used the events of Jan. 6 in order to justify further power grabs and acquire more authoritarian emergency powers.
This was never about so-called threats to democracy.
In fact, the history of this nation is populated by individuals whose rhetoric was aimed at fomenting civil unrest and revolution.
Indeed, by the government’s own definition, America’s founders were seditious conspirators based on the heavily charged rhetoric they used to birth the nation.
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been charged for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.
Had America’s founders feared revolutionary words and ideas, there would have been no First Amendment, which protects the right to political expression, even if that expression is anti-government.
No matter what one’s political persuasion might be, every American has a First Amendment right to protest government programs or policies with which they might disagree.
The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.
Every individual has a right to speak truth to power—and foment change—using every nonviolent means available.
Unfortunately, the government is increasingly losing its tolerance for anyone whose political views could be perceived as critical or “anti-government.”
All of us are in danger.
In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.
For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
According to one FBI report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”
In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
And then there is the treatment being meted out to those such as Julian Assange, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.
Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.
This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.
This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers.
The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.
Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.
We’re almost at that point now.
Eventually, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we will all be seditious conspirators in the eyes of the government.
We would do better to be conspirators for the Constitution starting right now.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
Joe Biden Launches His War on Antisemitism
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 30, 2023
As promised, the White House hosted a virtual event followed by the issuance of a fact sheet and detailed strategic report last Thursday that described in some detail a sweeping plan that will be implemented to confront what it describes as surging antisemitism. I reported last week how the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, who participated in the ceremony, has articulated the Biden Administration’s somewhat hyperbolic view that “Antisemitism is not a niche issue…it is an existential threat to democracy.” She had also regretted that “America has never done something like a national plan to fight antisemitism.” It should be noted that Lipstadt’s brief as ambassador is to confront what she perceives to be antisemitism all around the world, though it is likely that her role will expand to include domestic authorities under whatever new arrangements emerge as the Biden plan is implemented.
The plan that was unveiled was developed by an interagency task force created by Joe Biden last December, which was headed by “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff, who is both Jewish and has the misfortune to be married to Kamala Harris. It reportedly incorporates contributions and insights from claimed discussions with no less than “more than 1,000 community leaders” including various Jewish religious denominations and also representing both Jewish and non-Jewish civic organizations in the United States. Prior to the virtual event and press release, President Biden promised that the plan would “include more than 200 measures that government agencies, social media platforms and elected officials can adopt to counter rising antisemitism.” The measures will reportedly include at least 100 “provisions” that will require congressional action.
That the plan will be considered a success by inter alia suppressing what once passed as free speech in the United States seems to have bothered none of the Jewish groups that applauded the development. Occasionally sensible liberal leaning J Street enthused how “In a period when the threats of antisemitism, far-right extremism and white nationalism are surging in the United States, it’s deeply encouraging to see the White House make this a top priority and adopt a nuanced, well-considered, comprehensive approach.”
J Street’s President Jeremy Ben-Ami, who describes George Soros as a “Jewish philanthropist,” misses the point that Israel, which will be a principal beneficiary from stomping down on the First Amendment as nearly any criticism of the Jewish state will become a “hate crime, is preeminently a country awash in “far-right extremism.” He slyly concludes that “The struggle against antisemitism and all forms of bigotry is far too important to become a mere proxy for debates over Israel,” making the entire issue vanish in typical J Street fashion. Nor does that particular irony appear to have bothered any Congressmen or anyone in the mainstream media, such is the power of the Jewish establishment over both the press and the two joined-at-the-hip on this issue political parties that alternately govern us.
Note how the Plan, relying on wildly exaggerated statistics relating to what are often contrived or alleged antisemitic incidents, not by coincidence, seeks to protect Jews from a malignant force which is presumed to be the “white supremacists” that Biden and his cohorts have been otherwise targeting and also labeling as “terrorists.” That accomplishes two things politically: it gets the powerful Jewish/Israel Lobby and their controlled media fully on board to reelect Biden and it also identifies the enemy as likely to be conservative Republicans. In so doing, you take highly visible steps to protect the Jews (whether or not they actually need protection) and you create a credible enemy that everyone can identify and attack.
So what does the White House’s May 25th press release entitled “Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Releases First-Ever US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” tell us about what will be put in place to protect America’s wealthiest and already most powerful ethno-religious group? A sub-heading and the lead paragraphs summarize it this way: “[The] Administration announces over 100 new actions and over 100 calls to action to combat antisemitism, including new actions to counter antisemitism on college campuses and online; whole-of-society strategy includes new stakeholder commitments.
“Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is releasing the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. This strategy includes over 100 new actions the Administration will take to raise awareness of antisemitism and its threat to American democracy, protect Jewish communities, reverse the normalization of antisemitism, and build cross-community solidarity.
“While antisemitic incidents most directly and intensely affect the Jewish community, antisemitism threatens all of us. Antisemitic conspiracy theories fuel other forms of hatred, discrimination, and bias—including discrimination against other religious minorities, racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQI+ hate. Antisemitism seeks to divide Americans from one another, erodes trust in government and nongovernmental institutions, and undermines our democracy.”
The Fact Sheet and the full report explain in frightening detail how Biden is dedicating significant financial and human resources to essentially pander to Jews and Israel over their concerns that they are being perceived badly, something that might be attributed to their own behavior. Admittedly, some concerns were expressed that Israel would be immune from criticism in spite of the fact that it is widely recognized as an apartheid state that commits crimes against humanity and even war crimes on a nearly daily basis. Most recently this has included a Flag Day march in East Jerusalem in which settlers chanted “Death to Arabs.” The Times of Israel subsequently printed an article calling for the extermination of the Palestinians. Willfully blind to that reality, the fact sheet has only this to say: “In addition, the strategy reaffirms the United States’ unshakable commitment to the State of Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, and its security—and makes clear that when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.” In other words, because Israel is the self-designated Jewish state criticism of it will be ipso facto regarded as a hate crime, antisemitism.
I will not bore the reader by reviewing most of the 60 page long “Strategy” report’s more intrusive features, but it is worth observing that it commits itself to have “The US government…harness our collective resources to increase education about antisemitism and its threat to democracy, the Holocaust, and Jewish contributions to American society.” “Collective resources” of course includes taxpayer money, which will be flowing in the billions to Jewish businesses and facilities for “protection,” as is already happening with Department of Homeland Security discretionary grants, more than 90% of which support increased security for Jews and their organizations.
The “Strategy’s” four “Pillars” as elaborated in both the fact sheet and the full text are:
- Pillar 1: Increase awareness and understanding of antisemitism, including its threat to America, and broaden appreciation of Jewish American heritage
- Pillar 2: Improve safety and security for Jewish communities
- Pillar 3: Reverse the normalization of antisemitism and counter antisemitic discrimination
- Pillar 4: Build cross-community solidarity and collective action to counter hate
One should expect major initiatives in requiring educational courses in holocaust and other Jewish issues, compulsory training and re-education sessions both in government and the corporate world on the threat posed by antisemitism, and creating law enforcement mechanisms backed by new legislation that will provide empowerment to investigate and criminalize various antisemitic acts as “hate crimes.” One “Strategic Goal” that might be of particular interest to readers of this article might be “Tackling Antisemitism Online,” which includes “Ensure terms of service and community standards explicitly cover antisemitism. The Administration commends platforms with terms of service and community standards that establish ‘zero-tolerance’ for hate speech, including antisemitism. All online platforms are encouraged to adopt zero-tolerance terms of service and community standards” and “to permanently ban repeat offenders, both personal accounts and extremist websites.” It calls for “algorithms” to be employed on social media sites to block any and all antisemitic content. Somewhat bizarrely, it also calls for “Establish[ing] relationships with Jewish community organizations to share best practices related to reporting hate speech and utilizing platforms to lift up Jewish stories.”
So, in effect, the US government’s national security agencies would be answering to and propagandizing for “Jewish community organizations,” which one might think to be inappropriate. But the fact sheet and report itself do not mention what legislation will be in the works to penalize those who choose to be non-cooperative, though the model would likely be the laws that have been passed in 26 states and counting to punish or deny benefits to those who either support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or are in favor of any nonviolent action directed against Israel. Note particularly that “college campuses” are explicitly mentioned as targets by the White House fact sheet since BDS, seen as a major threat by the Israeli government and by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), is increasingly popular among students at a number of universities.
And speaking of BDS, where even Biden has perhaps hesitated to go too deep too directly, there is always a boneheaded congressmen who is ready to take up the pander to Israel mission. Senator Marco Rubio, who has never been bothered by having to think anything through, has introduced a bill that would prevent US companies and individuals from participating in boycotts of countries “friendly to the US.” Israel is not named in the legislation, but the Congressmen involved have freely admitted that it is directed particularly against BDS. Rubio claims that “The BDS movement is the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare against the Jewish state of Israel. This bill, which previously passed the Senate, would mark an important step toward bringing an end to the movement’s discriminatory efforts.” The bill’s cosponsor Republican Senator Bill Hagerty added that it would “Provide state and local governments [with] the tools they need to counter ‘the discriminatory and hate-inspired conduct of the anti-Semitic BDS movement aimed against Israel our closest ally in the Middle East.’”
Make no mistake, the “Strategy” and all that will develop from it is misguided, overkill, and the death of freedom to speak, write and associate. It is a consequence of the immense Jewish power over the United States government and is in no way justified by developments. One notes how conservative critics of the Biden Administration Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have recently been called antisemites without any real evidence demonstrating that to be the case. Joe Biden’s plan of action will surely similarly open the door to what will quickly become an open season on alleged antisemites. It will subsequently be easy for politicians and the media to label critics of domestic issues like the state of the Mexican border or international issues like the pointless and highly dangerous war against Russia as “haters” and by a tortuous extension antisemites. Appropriate punishment will follow.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Sandu targets media freedom in Moldova with new censorship institution
By Ahmed Adel | May 30, 2023
President Maia Sandu announced during a press briefing that a new tax-payer-funded institution intended to supervise and limit press freedom in Moldova would be established. Amid the economic meltdown in the country, Sandu is trying to control the media narrative while also attacking Russia.
“The best antidote against the information war is the development of citizens’ resistance to the real facts. Today I am announcing the legislative initiative to create an institution to combat propaganda and defend citizens from manipulation. I will propose to the Parliament the creation of the National Center for Information Defense and Combating Propaganda, called Patriot. The institution will have two basic responsibilities: to transmit truthful information to citizens and to identify, evaluate and combat disinformation,” Sandu said on May 29.
According to the president, the legislation initiative will be sent to the Parliament by the end of June.
“I know that this announcement will stir the hornet’s nest working against the Republic of Moldova. They will invoke the right to freedom of expression. But this right cannot be a screen for lying and intoxication. I have confidence in the Republic of Moldova, I am sure that we have a chance to build a European state, I want the citizens to have confidence in the Republic of Moldova,” Sandu added.
Her ambition to limit Russian-friendly media to impose a Western narrative monopoly in a dictatorial manner comes as the EU steps up its support for Moldova. 46 EU and European leaders will be in Chisinau on June 1 to offer financial and political solidarity with Moldova and show strength against Russia.
French President Emmanuel Macron initially envisaged the European Political Community (EPC) as a platform for unity across the wider European front. The EPC will meet for the second time in Chisinau, only eight months after its inaugural meeting. The meeting brings together the leaders of the 27 EU member states and Ukraine, Turkey, the UK, and other countries in the Balkans, but not Russia or Belarus.
Security and energy supplies, which have been part-funded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), are expected to be at the top of the agenda. The EBRD invested €525 million in Moldova in 2022, accounting for 4% of its GDP. The investment comes as Moldova struggles with high inflation and the economic repercussions of the war in neighbouring Ukraine, in addition to problems in Transnistria, a breakaway region and post-Soviet conflict zone with a majority Slavic (Russian-Ukrainian) population.
To assist Sandu’s ambition to sever Russian-Moldovan ties, the EU will provide financial muscle with the help of the EBRD and an €87 million EU contribution to so-called non-military logistical aid. This aid will include a mission in Chisinau, which will staff up to 50 officials. Opening on May 30, the office aims to build Moldova’s resilience against disinformation and cyber-attacks, with support at strategic and technical levels.
Sandu is expected to use the EPC summit to push for quicker EU access, which she claims is the only guarantee against becoming Russia’s next target, even though no such ambitions exist.
“We do believe that Russia will continue to be a big source of instability for the years to come and we need to protect ourselves,” said Sandu, on the sidelines of a Council of Europe summit in Iceland earlier in May. “We do believe that this [EU membership] is a realistic project for us and we are looking forward to see this happening as soon as possible.”
Although accession could take years to achieve, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia won official candidate status to join the EU. For this reason, Sandu is taking advantage of heightened Russophobia in the West to project it in Moldova, which has a high level of Russophilia. However, this path of serving Western interests to oppose Russia is significantly affecting the economy.
In May, Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean said that before the Ukraine war, his country was 100% dependent on Russia for its gas, but “Today Moldova can exist with absolutely no natural gas or electricity from Russia.”
Moldova is currently struggling to deal with the spillover effects of the war in Ukraine, which has significantly impacted households, the economy, and public finances. The war also oversees a considerable drop in Moldova’s GDP due to the disruptions in trade, remittances, and the energy crisis. Therefore, ordinary Moldovans suffer despite Recean’s boasting of cutting Russian gas.
As Valeriu Ostalep, former diplomat and ex-Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration for Moldova, said: “Sandu and her Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) are involved completely in the Western geopolitics of the region; they just copy and paste the West’s rhetoric. It would not be a problem (to take) a position like that, but Sandu and PAS have lost the connection to the real problems of Moldova and the population. They are concentrated exclusively on the ‘fight against Russia’.”
“So we have total support by the West for Sandu and PAS and a complete disaster in the realities on the ground in Moldova, including the growing disdain of the population against Sandu and PAS,” he added.
By establishing Patriot, Sandu attempts to control the media narrative and criticism against her government by inadvertently targeting Russophile media. In fact, for Sandu’s supposed defence of liberalism and universalism, it is proven beyond doubt that these are not values that she defends but only buzzwords used to secure funding and support from the West.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Poland’s “Russian Influence Commission” Shows The Ruling Party’s Fear Of The Opposition
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 30, 2023
Polish President Andrzej Duda from the ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS) party just signed into a law a bill mandating the creation of a commission for investing alleged “Russian influence” in the country from 2007-2022 according to Reuters. Associated Press added that this newly formed body will have “powers to ban people from public positions and to reverse administrative and business decisions”, which the “Civic Platform” (PO) opposition believes will be used against them.
Former Prime Minister and European Council President Donald Tusk hopes to return to office during this fall’s elections, but he and leading figures in his erstwhile government could potentially be barred from doing so if they’re implicated in an alleged “Russian influence” plot by this commission. Considering that PiS only narrowly won re-election in summer 2020 by just around 2%, it’s possible that they might exploit this latest law to carry out a witch hunt against PO in order to ensure that they don’t lose power.
This development represents their latest pre-election spectacle after seizing a Russian Embassy-run school in Warsaw in late April in an attempt to pressure Moscow into breaking off ties first, renaming Kaliningrad in early May, then pleading for Zelensky to condemn Bandera’s genocide of Poles. Each of these moves was aimed at boosting PiS’ electoral prospects in the face of the anti-establishment Confederation party’s rising popularity since they don’t want to enter into a coalition with them.
These moves only ever had the chance of appealing to PiS’ conservative-nationalist base, however, and not PO’s liberal–globalist one. Both parties are anti-Russian, but the former is much more so when compared to the latter, whose embrace of Western socio-cultural causes like abortion and LGBT+ takes precedence over their followers’ hatred of Russia. Moreover, PO is considered to be a German proxy whose return to power could resubordinate their country to its western neighbor.
Foreign policy rarely plays a major role in American or European elections, with Poland being no exception in this regard, which is why PiS should have focused more on the home front than on the regional one. The ruling party overlooked this due to its ideologically driven obsession with restoring Poland’s long-lost commonwealth in a modern form through the merger of it and Ukraine into a de facto confederation in parallel with participating in the NATO-Russian proxy war and destabilizing Belarus.
Their pollsters presumably only just realized that these policies and their recent stunts haven’t succeeded in giving PiS a comfortable edge over PO, but there isn’t enough time left to try changing the socio-cultural views of the latter’s base, which has always been a long shot anyhow. Out of desperation to remain in power, the ruling party therefore decided to devise the pretext for possibly banning the opposition, including its leader Tusk.
The only possible way of deflecting Western criticism from this is to claim that it’s directed against Russia, but even that might not be sufficient since PO is much more popular among Poland’s partners than PiS is and their media are already skeptical of the official reason behind this move. Had the ruling party realized long ago that they might have to resort to this form of election meddling to win, then they could have cooked up a more plausible reason for investigating and possibly banning Tusk if need be.
Implying that the period of comparatively better Russian-Polish relations under his tenure was the result of a conspiratorial Kremlin influence campaign ignores the political reality of practically every EU country following Germany’s lead to improve ties with Moscow around that time. If anything, Tusk was either going along with the latest trend since he and his team calculated that it was in their country’s best interests to do so or they were operating under some degree of German influence.
Whichever of these two explanations was the case, neither of them extends any credence to PiS’ innuendo that “Russian influence” was responsible for the renaissance in bilateral relations back then. The ruling party knows that declaring an investigation into German influence would immediately prompt unprecedented condemnation from the EU’s de facto leader and likely result in it leveraging all agents of influence across the continent to do their utmost to ensure that PiS loses this fall’s elections.
Even if they win, they’d probably then be shunned by the entire bloc and possibly even sanctioned on whatever pretext Berlin concocts since it would regard PiS as an adversarial political force that threatens the EU’s unity at its most decisive moment since conception. Aware of how strategically disadvantageous it could be to directly challenge Germany for leadership of Central & Eastern European amidst their heated rivalry over this region, PiS decided to persecute PO on a ridiculous anti-Russian basis instead.
It’s too early to tell whether the “Russian influence commission” will ban Tusk and his allies from politics, but it’s difficult to imagine any other practical reason why the ruling party created this body, let alone at this particular time. At the very least, PiS’ investigation into PO appears aimed at manipulating on-the-fence voters’ perceptions of the opposition. This spectacle risks backfiring, however, if undecided voters turn against PiS to protest their tactics and/or the EU doesn’t recognize the election if Tusk is banned.
Moscow might cut all ties with London over UK’s rabid Russophobic hostility
By Drago Bosnic | May 30, 2023
There’s hardly a shortage of Russophobia in the political West, whether it’s the previously latent one or the much more blatant hatred unashamedly demonstrated in recent times. In most countries dominated by the United States this has become the “new normal” since February 24, 2022. However, of all Washington DC’s allies and satellite states/vassals, there’s one that makes even such endemically Russophobic countries like Poland or the Baltic states seem “moderate” – the United Kingdom.
In recent announcements, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said that it could completely cut diplomatic ties with the UK over its extremely escalatory actions such as the delivery of ever more advanced and longer-range weapons to the Kiev regime. In a statement for Russia’s RT, published on Friday, the Russian MFA cited London’s significant and ever-growing meddling in Ukraine, as well as other actions aimed against Russia, particularly when it comes to arming and directly assisting the Neo-Nazi junta forces. Although the MFA stated that cutting ties with the UK might be an “extreme measure”, it was left without virtually any other option, so this move is being considered very seriously.
“The severing of diplomatic ties with the UK would be an ‘extreme measure’, but [Russia] could end up taking the step considering London’s significant involvement in the Ukraine conflict,” the Russian MFA warned on Friday.
On May 18, The Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that “UK special forces from the British Army’s SAS [Special Air Service] and SRR [Special Reconnaissance Regiment] regiments and the Navy’s SBS [Special Boat Service] units are operating very close to the front lines in Ukraine”. The WSJ presented the report in a way that indicates these actions constitute a supposed “split” in policy with the US, as Washington DC has allegedly “held back sending special forces to directly assist the Ukrainians on the front lines of fighting”. However, such claims are rather laughable, especially when considering numerous reports about American special forces and intelligence assets operating in Ukraine.
Worse yet, intelligence sources are adamant that special services operators sent by the US are directly supporting the Kiev regime forces, including by directing their attacks on not just the Russian military, but also targets deep within Russia. The WSJ report implies that the only supposed difference between the US and UK special forces and intelligence assets is that those sent by London directly take part in hostilities on the frontlines while their American counterparts “only provide advisory services”. What’s more, the aforementioned UK special forces are believed to be directly involved in planning and assisting cross-border sabotage operations and terrorist attacks, including the latest one against civilians in the Belgorod oblast (region).
When asked by RT about these controversial (to say the least) reports, the Russian MFA stated: “[Moscow] is well aware of consistent efforts by London aimed at providing military assistance to the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.”
“The UK’s support includes the supply of domestically produced and foreign military hardware to Ukraine, the training of Ukrainian troops in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, intelligence sharing, consulting support and likely participation in the operational-tactical planning by the [Ukrainian] military, including sabotage, other operations, direct provision of cyber-security, [and] deployment of mercenaries,” the Russian MFA said in an official statement, further adding: “We can’t rule out that the British participated in the planning, organization and support of terrorist attacks carried out by the Kiev regime on the territory of Russia, including through the provision of intelligence information.”
Deborah Bronnert, the UK ambassador to Russia, has been summoned several times by the Russian government which demanded explanations of London’s unadulterated enmity. However, the policy of escalating confrontation with Moscow, started under former prime minister Boris Johnson, seems to be going on unabated. According to various sources, during the first several months of Russia’s counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe Johnson even actively worked to prevent peace talk initiatives between Russia and the Kiev regime, some of which could have stopped the conflict from escalating and causing further bloodshed. Worse yet, the former UK PM also personally and repeatedly urged the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky “not to give an inch of compromise with the Russians”.
Since then, regardless of who was at its helm, the UK has only escalated its already extensive military support for the Kiev regime. Apart from training the junta’s forces, London was also the first to pledge the deliveries of heavy armor and various missile systems, such as the “Brimstone” (against ground targets) and “Starstreak” MANPADS (man-portable air defense system).
More alarmingly, the UK also delivered depleted uranium munitions, as well as the stealthy “Storm Shadow” (also known as SCALP-EG in French service) air-launched cruise missiles. Reports indicate that the Russian military destroyed the depleted uranium munitions in a recent strike, while the transonic “Storm Shadow” missiles have been used in combat, but proven largely ineffective against Russia’s second-to-none air defense.
However, there’s no indication London will stop escalating, as it’s now at the forefront of the initiative to deliver F-16 fighter jets to the Neo-Nazi junta. Moscow is well aware of this and has made efforts to communicate with the UK, but to no avail. London’s rabid Russophobia seems to be clouding its judgment, leaving Russia with no other option but to just cut contact, which would be yet another step closer to a world-ending thermonuclear conflict between Moscow and the political West.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Russia Reacts Harshly to Ukrainian Terrorist Attacks With NATO Weapons – Shoigu
Sputnik – 30.05.2023
MOSCOW – The Russian armed forces are reacting as harshly as possible to terrorist attacks by Ukraine against civilians in Russia using NATO weapons, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday.
“Using NATO weapons, the Kiev authorities continue to strike at social facilities, carry out terrorist attacks against peaceful Russian citizens. Our armed forces react as harshly as possible to the actions of Ukrainian militants,” Shoigu said at a conference call.
The Western support to Kiev only prolongs the conflict but will not affect the outcome of Moscow’s special military operation, Shoigu said.
“Military support for Ukraine only prolongs the hostilities, but cannot affect the outcome of the special military operation,” the minister said.
Shoigu also said that the West supplies more and more military equipment to Ukraine.
“We monitor the amount and routes of supply and, when we detect them, we strike,” Shoigu said.
The defense minister added that Western curators continue to demand from Ukraine to launch mass offensive operations.
“Despite the significant losses of Ukrainian armed forces, Western curators continue to demand that the Kiev regime switch to large-scale offensive operations,” Shoigu said.
Ukraine lost more than 16,000 military in May as a result of the military operation, Shoigu said.
“Groups of Russian troops continue to inflict effective fire damage on the enemy. This month alone, its [Ukraine’s] losses amounted to over 16,000 military,” Shoigu said during a conference call.
Ukraine also lost 16 aircraft, five helicopters, 466 unmanned aerial vehicles, more than 400 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, 238 field artillery pieces and mortars, the minister added.
Additionally, Russian air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 29 UK Storm Shadow cruise missiles and almost 200 HIMARS long-range guided missiles in May, Shoigu said, adding that Russian troops have recently hit another US Patriot anti-aircraft missile system in Kiev.
The drone attack carried out by Ukraine early on Tuesday targeted civilian facilities of Moscow, minister said.
“This morning, the Kiev regime carried out a terrorist act in the Moscow region. I would like to note that it was against civilian targets. Eight aircraft-type unmanned aerial vehicles were involved in it. All of them were hit,” Shoigu said during a conference call.
Ukraine attacked the Russian capital with eight unmanned aerial vehicles early on Tuesday, all drones were shot down, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Three of these drones were suppressed by means of electronic warfare, lost control and deviated from their intended targets, another five unmanned aerial vehicles were shot down by the Pantsir-S anti-aircraft missile and gun system in the Moscow region, the ministry added.
Correction: Transgender Surgery Provides No Mental Health Benefit
By Andre Van Mol, Michael K. Laidlaw, Miriam Grossman and Paul McHugh | Public Discourse | September 13, 2020
A major correction has been issued by the American Journal of Psychiatry. The authors and editors of an October 2019 study, titled “Reduction in mental health treatment utilization among transgender individuals after gender-affirming surgeries: a total population study,” have retracted its primary conclusion. Letters to the editor by twelve authors, including ourselves, led to a reanalysis of the data and a corrected conclusion stating that in fact the data showed no improvement after surgical treatment. The following is the background to our published letter and a summary of points of the critical analysis of the study.
A Crisis of Irreproducibility in Psychology and Medicine
It has been an open secret for some time that there is a crisis of irreproducibility of scientific studies in medicine and other fields. No less a figure than the Director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, wrote that, “the checks and balances that once ensured scientific fidelity have been hobbled. This has compromised the ability of today’s researchers to reproduce others’ findings.” For example, the National Association of Scholars reports, “In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 ‘landmark’ studies in hematology and oncology, but could only replicate 6 (11%).” In 2015 an article was published in Science in which there was an attempt to replicate 100 studies from three well-known psychology journals in 2008. In the original studies, nearly all had produced statistically significant results, whereas in the study replications, only a little over a third produced similar significant results.
Perhaps nowhere in medicine and psychology is this problem of irreproducibility worse than in studies of people who claim to have a mismatch between their sex and their internal sense of being male or female.
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When we first analyzed the study last October, it was obvious that it had major shortcomings. Dr. Van Mol led our team—which includes endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, child and adolescent psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, and Johns Hopkins professor of psychiatry Paul McHugh—to summarize our findings into a compact, 500-word letter to the editor. We were not the only clinicians to question the study’s legitimacy. A total of seven letters, all critical of the study, were published on August 1, including our own. The editors included a response from the original authors, and they explained why it took ten months to publish the letters.
Let’s look at the study and the shortfalls we found. The Swedish Total Population Register of 9.7 million people and national patient databases were used to assess the effectiveness of “gender-affirming hormone treatment” and “gender-affirming surgery” in affecting three endpoints: prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, healthcare visits for mood or anxiety disorders, and post-suicide attempt hospitalizations. The study authors, Bränström and Pachankis, concluded that gender-affirming hormones offered no effect but that surgery did reduce mental health treatment. They further asserted the finding “provides timely support for policies that ensure coverage of gender-affirming treatments.”
The authors used an odd combination of retrospective data collected over an eleven-year period from 2005 to 2015, together with limited psychiatric outcomes over a “prospective” one-year period during 2015 and no control group. Qualifying criteria were, to be alive in Sweden as of December 31, 2014, and to have a diagnosis of gender incongruence. The first graphic in the study specified “time since last gender affirming surgery” and traced back ten years. That chart could easily be misinterpreted as a prospective ten-year follow-up.
Where the Study Falls Short
One problem leading to irreproducibility is loss to follow-up. This refers to patients who participated in a study but at some point are considered “lost”: they are either unwilling or unable to communicate, missing, or dead. Loss to follow-up is frequently seen in studies that validate the benefits of transition, and it was strongly implied in the Bränström study by several metrics. First, the authors reported that 2,679 Swedes were diagnosed with “gender incongruence.” Though seemingly large, the numbers are a full order of magnitude below what DSM-V prevalence statistics would project. Where did the remainder go?
A paucity of gender-affirming surgeries also suggested loss to follow-up. Table 3 of their study showed that only 38 percent of people diagnosed with gender incongruence had any type of affirmative surgery, and only 53 percent of those—about 20 percent of the total—had surgery of the reproductive organs. Gender affirming surgery is free in Sweden, so where are these patients? And for those whose last surgery was ten or more years earlier, how many completed suicide, died of other related causes, or emigrated from Sweden prior to the study timeline?
In terms of follow-up care, the authors only measured three outcomes as listed above. Overlooked were key data of completed suicides, healthcare visits, prescriptions, and hospitalizations for the litany of other medical or psychological diagnoses potentially related to gender-affirming treatments. Such information was available through Sweden’s multiple registry databases, so why not use it? These omissions suggested cherry-picking data in order to obtain the desired results.
We concluded our letter by comparing this study to the one we consider perhaps the best of its kind, also from Sweden, the 2011 Dhejne study. The Dhejne team made extensive use of numerous, specified Swedish registries and examined data from 324 patients in Sweden over thirty years who underwent sex reassignment. They used population controls matched by birth year, birth sex, and reassigned sex. When followed out beyond ten years, the sex-reassigned group had nineteen times the rate of completed suicides and nearly three times the rate of all-cause mortality and inpatient psychiatric care, compared to the general population. These important findings could have easily been updated by Bränström and Pachankis to the more current time frame.
Which brings us back to the August AJP and why seven critical letters took ten months to see print. Along with the letters, the AJP editors published a correction that explained their need “to seek statistical consultations.” These consultants “concurred with many of the points raised.” The study’s authors were asked to reanalyze their data, and the results demonstrated “no advantage to surgery” for their three endpoints in the subject population. The authors noted in their response letter that their “conclusion” “was too strong.”
Unresolved Problems
The AJP correction is significant, but the study still suffers from numerous problems. This has been a win for patients insofar as sex-reassignment surgery has been demoted from improving mental health to having no effect. The reanalysis on the other hand showed an increase in treatment for anxiety after surgery. Why was there not also an expected increase in post-surgical depression, as Drs. Malone and Roman argued in their letter to the editor? Increased post-surgical anxiety without an accompanying increased depression rate is a highly unusual finding. Were these subjects also lost to follow-up?
With respect to cross-sex hormones, it has been shown that 23 percent of patients on high-dose anabolic steroids like testosterone, which is prescribed to every female-to-male patient, meet criteria for a major mood syndrome, and 3 to 12 percent have developed psychotic symptoms. Why is this not reflected in the study or the reanalysis?
There remain major deficits in knowledge that the authors easily could have filled by examining the Swedish databases. One of the strengths of the 2011 Dhejne study is that an increase in mortality is clearly seen at around 10 years. The current study fails to look at available data over a similar time course to assess if mortality has been affected. Similarly, completed suicide information is missing from Bränström. How can one understand suicidality in relation to hormones and surgery by only looking at suicide attempts and not deaths? Likewise, if one wants to understand the full range of psychiatric disorders in this population by examining medication data, then the use of all appropriate pharmaceuticals should be included, not only anti-anxiety and anti-depressant agents. However, simply tabulating prescriptions for psychiatric medications provides a limited and inadequate measure of the degree of emotional distress in any population. Many distressed individuals decline to seek professional help or will refuse pharmaceuticals if they do. The effects of these gaps in knowledge are much like holes cut out of a portrait; the full picture is lost and distorted when the key facial features are removed.
Our co-author Dr. Paul McHugh ended sex reassignment surgeries at John Hopkins Medical School when a study from his department revealed that the mental and social health of patients undergoing sex reassignment surgery did not improve. He adds here that this paper, and even the correction, misdirects clinical thought in many ways. Most crucially it presumes an unproblematic future for these subjects, despite evidence that the psychological state of many will, after surgery, worsen with time. Our experience at Hopkins, when we first recognized that the psychological well-being of patients undergoing surgery did not improve, rested on relatively short-term assessments. The long-term Swedish study of Dhejne demonstrated that the serious fallouts including suicide emerged only after ten years. None of this clinical experience is reflected in this paper or its correction.
Now how will the thirteen-year-old girls who have had breast amputations and testosterone fare? Abigail Shrier writes in her excellent exposé Irreversible Damage that, “Nearly all of the detransitioners I spoke with are plagued with regret. . . . They possess a startlingly masculine voice that will not lift. . . . They live with slashes across their chests . . . and flaps of skin that don’t quite resemble nipples.”
How about children who are ultimately sterilized by puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones and even gonad removal? These unethical surgeries are receiving funding by the very NIH that claims to be working to correct problems of irreproducibility. These experiments are beyond reproducibility problems: they are ethical failures by which doctors cause long-term harm to children and adolescents, all based on political activism supported by faulty science.
The Bränström study reanalysis demonstrated that neither “gender-affirming hormone treatment” nor “gender-affirming surgery” reduced the need of transgender-identifying people for mental health services. We appreciate the editors, the study authors, and other letter writers for carefully scrutinizing the study and publishing these findings. However, our team believes that many of the pro-transition studies we have read fare no better. Fad medicine is bad medicine, and gender-anxious people deserve better.
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Interview with Jennifer Bilek
On The Transgender Agenda
Lies are Unbekoming | May 12, 2016
I’ve been following Jennifer Bilek’s reporting on the Transgender Agenda for the last year.
In my opinion, she is doing the best investigative journalism, in the world, on the top-down nature of this society deforming “input” and “normalization”.
What we don’t understand is the scale of money behind this push, and the individuals controlling this weaponized capital. These are questions that go to the heart of Jennifer’s work. … continue
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- Ex-Israeli special forces agent says he went ‘undercover’ at UCLA protest encampment
- The mainstream media distorted our anti-Vietnam War protests 50 years ago. They’re following the same strategy today
- Pete McCloskey, longtime supporter of Palestinians and USS Liberty veterans, has passed away
- Israel will kill Palestinians just fine without US heavy payload weapons; humanitarian crisis spirals – Day 216
- International Solidarity Movement
- The Right to Resist Genocide by Land and By Sea
- Women Support Center in Nablus empowers women and girls, resists gendered violence and the Occupation
- Palestinian Family at Um Darit Harassed and Isolated
- Occupation Forces Targeted Series of Strikes Kills 7 Aid Workers in Gaza
- Israeli army and police escalate repression of human rights volunteers following Knesset hearing.
- Illegal Israeli Settlers Continue Attacks on Shepherds in Masafer Yatta
- Second Friday of Ramadan at Qalandia Checkpoint
- Deceptively “quiet” first week of Ramadan in Jerusalem: a result of restrictions at Qalandia checkpoint
- Masafer Yatta: Israeli Settlers Burn a Family Car in Um Dhorit
- Violent arrest of Palestinian women in Susiya, Masafer Yatta
- Richie Allen
- The Richie Allen Show Returns Tomorrow Wednesday April 24th
- Call Richie Today Monday March 11th From 4.30pm
- Connect To The Richie Allen Show WhatsApp Today
- NHS Asks Patients To Choose From 12 Genders, 10 sexual Preferences & 159 Religions
- The Richie Allen Show Moves To A New Time Slot From Monday Nov 20th
- Starmer Will Sack Shadow Ministers Who Vote For Gaza Ceasefire
- AI Tool Can Predict Heart Attacks Years In Advance
- Nepal Bans TikTok To Preserve Social Harmony
- Bloke Appointed Boss Of Womb Health Charity
- WHO – “Gaza’s Biggest Hospital Becoming A Cemetery”
- No Tricks Zone
- New Paper: Global Warming Leading To HIMALAYAN COOLING, Preventing Glacial Melt!
- DNA Evidence Reveals Domestic Cats, Dogs, African Wildcats, Frogs Lived In The Arctic 9000 Years Ago
- -80°C: Antarctic Vostok Station Records “Extreme Winter Cold”…Not Even Winter Yet!
- The German E-Vehicle Nightmare, 2024 Q1 Sales Plummet 14%… “Graveyard” For Unsold Cars
- Newly Discovered 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Reveal How Much Higher Sea Levels Used To Be
- Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens As Green Revolution Causes Economy To Bleed To Death
- Water Vapor Absorbs 84 Times More Radiation Than CO2 … Clouds Drove 89% Of 1982-2018 Warming
- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
- Post-1980s Increases In Shortwave Radiation Explains Europe’s Warming Trends Far Better Than CO2
- “A Thing Where Every Part Of Your Life Just Confirms What It Is That You Want To Believe”
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