Health
Biden’s Covid-19 advisory team features ‘death panel’ doc who suggested dying at 75 is ‘not a tragedy’
Emanuel is perhaps best known for supporting a limit on human life expectancy of 75
Presumptive US president-elect Joe Biden’s pandemic advisory team includes oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel, who famously argued life should end at 75. Given Covid-19’s risk profile –and Biden’s own age– the choice has raised eyebrows.
Biden’s team unveiled a 13-person expert advisory panel focused on managing the Covid-19 epidemic on Monday, in keeping with the campaign’s efforts to present Biden as the champion of science and reason. One of the panel’s goals, according to a statement from Biden, is “protecting at-risk populations” – the elderly, the sick, and those with multiple comorbidities.
But Emanuel is perhaps best known for supporting a limit on human life expectancy of 75 – an age, it’s hard not to notice, that coincides with a steep observed uptick in vulnerability to and risk of dying from the novel coronavirus. In a 2014 article for the Atlantic, the University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist argued the US shouldn’t worry that its population’s average life expectancy is among the lowest in the developed world, because living too long was just as bad as dying prematurely.
He was also one of the chief architects of the 2010 Affordable Care Act’s “death panels” – an ethical framework for rationing healthcare based on the age, fitness, and presumed future productive capacity of the patient. Emanuel has argued for decades that the young should be given priority in healthcare over the old, an argument he carried into this year’s coronavirus pandemic – and which has made itself felt in troubling ways both in the US and abroad as some hospitals sneaked ‘do not resuscitate’ orders into the folders of some of their most vulnerable patients.
Emanuel also stands accused of profiting off the confusing pandemic guidance implemented under the Trump administration, which shied away from blanket restrictions, leaving space for states to pass their own patchwork of regulations. As a consultant at COVID-19 RECoVERY Consulting, he is paid to decipher “confusing” science and offer guidance to businesses petrified of running afoul of rules that often come with fines or steep penalties attached.
If he is inaugurated, Biden will be the oldest president in American history at 77 years old. His detractors might argue he proves Emanuel’s points about late-life mental and physical decline – the medical ethicist lamented that those who stick around past their sell-by date are often remembered as “feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.” And certainly, the doctor’s descriptions of septuagenarian decline seem written with the US’ bumper crop of superannuated politicians in mind. “Age associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established. Conversely, distractibility increases…We literally lose our creativity.”
But given that Emanuel’s thesis for much of his work has been that living “too long” isn’t just harmful to the individual or even to the family, but to society at large – because finite health resources are being spent to keep aging ‘useless eaters’ on life support rather than curing the diseases of the young – some are alarmed at his return to making US healthcare policy.
In the Atlantic piece, Emanuel quotes a century-old medical textbook that deemed pneumonia “the friend of the aged” because it allows the elderly to gracefully shuffle off this mortal coil with an “acute, short, not often painful illness” rather than “those ‘cold gradations of decay’ so distressing” to friends and family – a description which could have been written about Covid-19. The pandemic roared through East Coast nursing homes “like fire through dry grass” in the words of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose policies forcing nursing homes to readmit patients without testing them for the virus led to sky-high death rates among the elderly. But most of its victims died relatively quickly, especially compared to the drawn-out agony of cancer or Alzheimer’s dementia, both of which have devastated or killed far more Americans than the coronavirus.
Ironically, Emanuel’s brother Rahm is the former Chicago mayor who infamously advised politicians should “never let a crisis go to waste.” In the first two months of the pandemic, nursing homes accounted for nearly half of all Covid-19 deaths.
Emanuel is far from the only controversial figure on Biden’s coronavirus panel, however. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm has almost gleefully warned Americans to “get ready” for a national lockdown and a hefty case surge during the inevitable “dark winter” predicted by Biden and his campaign. Obama’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is also on the team, as is Rick Bright, the former Trump administration whistleblower who claims he quit the Department of Health and Human Services over its supposedly-unscientific promotion of hydroxychloroquine, an off-patent malaria drug approved as emergency treatment for Covid-19 in many countries outside the US.
Health
FDA Committee Members Reviewing Pfizer Vaccine For Children Have Worked For Pfizer, Have Big Pfizer Connections
“The industry defends the attempts to influence committee members as simply efforts to best present their case”
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee is holding a virtual meeting Tuesday October 26 to discuss authorizing a Pfizer-BioNTech Coronavirus vaccine for children between the ages of 5 to 11 years old.
This committee has a lot of sway with the FDA and their findings will be relevant, considering the Biden administration is getting ready to ship vaccines to elementary schools and California has already mandated the vaccine for schoolchildren pending federal authorization.
But the meeting roster shows that numerous members of the committee and temporary voting members have worked for Pfizer or have major connections to Pfizer.
Members include a former vice president of Pfizer Vaccines, a recent Pfizer consultant, a recent Pfizer research grant recipient, a man who mentored a current top Pfizer vaccine executive, a man who runs a center that gives out Pfizer vaccines, the chair of a Pfizer data group, a guy who was proudly photographed taking a Pfizer vaccine, and numerous people who are already on the record supporting Coronavirus vaccines for children. Meanwhile, recent FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is on Pfizer’s board of directors.
HERE’S THE MEETING ROSTER: Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee October 26, 2021 Meeting Draft Roster.
Acting Chair Arnold S. Monto was a paid Pfizer consultant as recently as 2018.
Steven Pergam got the Pfizer vaccine: Building trust in safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines (fredhutch.org)
Committee member Archana Chatterjee worked on a research project related to vaccines for infants between 2018-2020, and the research project was sponsored by Pfizer.
Myron Levine has mentored some U.S. post-doctoral fellows, and one of his proteges happens to be Raphael Simon, the senior director of vaccine research and development at Pfizer.
James Hildreth, temporary voting member, made a financial interest disclosure for this meeting in which he disclosed more than $1.5 million in relevant financial interests, including his work as president of Meharry Medical College, which administers Pfizer Coronavirus vaccines.
Geeta K. Swamy is listed as the chair of the “Independent Data Monitoring Committee for the Pfizer Group B Streptococcus Vaccine Program,” a committee sponsored by Pfizer. Duke University states that “Dr. Swamy serves as a co-investigator for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial.”
Gregg Sylvester previously served as a vice president for Pfizer Vaccines, where he launched Pfizer vaccines including one for children.
Among the meeting’s “temporary voting members,” Ofer Levy, Boston Children’s Hospital, is for the Pfizer vaccine for children, Eric Rubin is pro-vaccine for children, Jay Portnoy supports authorizing Coronavirus vaccines for kids, and Melinda Wharton complained over the summer about how orders for the CDC’s “Vaccines For Children” program dropped.
FDANews stated last December: “FDA advisory committee members in the past have frequently been the target of heavy politicking by industry representatives of whatever drug they were considering for a recommendation at in-person meetings. That process has been somewhat altered by the fact that during COVID-19, meetings are being held virtually. But it’s likely that behind-the-scenes pressuring still goes on. The industry defends the attempts to influence committee members as simply efforts to best present their case.”
Health
FDA Panel Backs Pfizer Shot For Kids: “We’re Never Going to Learn About How Safe This Vaccine Is Unless We Start Giving It”
The same FDA panel approved the rollout of boosters earlier this month based off “gut feeling” rather than data.
An FDA vaccine advisory panel on Tuesday voted unanimously 17-0 in favor shooting up kids aged 5-11 with Pfizer’s experimental mRNA injection with panelist Dr Eric Rubin stating, “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it.”
Full context:
“We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it,” Dr Rubin said, urging other panelists to vote for it. “That’s just the way it goes.”
The panel voted in favor of experimenting on tens of millions of helpless children with zero long-term data on side effects because 94 children between 5 and 11 have died with COVID-19 (they claimed “of”) and “all have names. All of them had mothers,” to quote the emotional gobbledegook uttered by panelist Patrick S. Moore.
From The Washington Post:
“To me, it seems that it is a hard decision but a clear one,” said Patrick S. Moore, a University of Pittsburgh microbiologist and committee member. He noted that 94 children between 5 and 11 have died of covid-19, and “all have names. All of them had mothers.”
As the WSJ reported:
Members of the FDA’s vaccine-advisory panel supported Moderna’s booster dose even though the evidence for it was from a small study and had mixed results.
“It’s more a gut feeling rather than based on really truly serious data,” said Patrick Moore, a member of the committee and a professor of molecular genetics and biochemistry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The data itself is not strong, but it is certainly going in the direction that is supportive of this vote.”
This is how they “follow the science.”
Health
Governor takes over state’s PRIVATE businesses, mandates vaccines for all
‘His message was crystal clear, obey or lose your job’
The governor of Washington has begun a process that could result in a statewide mandate for all workers to accept the experimental COVID-19 shots in order to be able to get a paycheck.
Across America already, universities, schools and hospitals have COVID vaccination mandates – even though as experimental treatments those actions remain under court challenge in many cases.
President Biden also has ordered the vaccinations for federal workers and the military. And companies with more than 100 employees.
But now Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee in Washington has moved the agenda even further.
A report at the PostMillennial explains under Inslee, the Washington Department of Labor and Industries has proposed an emergency package of rules addressing the “emergency powers” given Inslee to respond to COVID-19.
“This package, which is an extension of current mandates, grants Inslee the ability to enforce COVID vaccine mandates on all private businesses in the state of Washington, according to elected officials,” the report said.
It was a statement from Republicans Jim Walsh and Jesse Young of the legislature that revealed the actions.
“This mandate from L&I demonstrates a complete lack of transparency, which dilutes public trust in our government and fails to show the agency’s good faith in promulgating the rule. The reality is this move by L&I is a blank check for the agency to enforce any of the governor’s mandates or edicts on private employers,” they wrote.
They explained if the state agency wants such a rule, officials should request it in “an open and transparent manner that allows public review and comment.”
“Even if an opportunity for review and comment is not afforded the public, L&I’s website should host the proposed rulemaking to grant easy access to the public,” they said.
They also warned about arbitrary enforcement because of the proposal’s vagueness.
“There is no clear case for ‘good cause’ or ‘the preservation of the public health, safety, or general welfare’ as the governor’s proclamation already addresses these issues, making L&I’s mandate arbitrary and capricious,” they said. “We call on the governor to immediately repeal this mandate. If L&I wants to push this policy, it needs to go through the proper channels and work with the Legislature.”
The report explained Inslee’s recent vaccine mandate was unlike others in that it provided no opt-out for testing instead.
“His message was crystal clear, obey or lose your job,” the report said. “Despite mass protests across the state with thousands of state workers in attendance, Inslee followed through on his orders and terminated thousands that decided not to comply.”
The report warned, “If Inslee follows through on L&I’s emergency rulemaking package, all businesses and employees in the state of Washington will be subjected to submitting proof of vaccination as a condition of employment.”
Real Clear Policy earlier explained that Americans simply don’t like Biden’s orders and mandates.
The article pointed out that health authorities have openly misled the public, including top medical adviser Anthony Fauci’s multiple flip-flops on COVID issues.
He deceived the public, for example, by saying the public didn’t need to wear masks, then again when commenting about “herd immunity.”
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