Riley Gaines slams Lia Thomas after trans swim champ takes issue with Biden’s proposed Title IX changes

 Former All-American swimmer Riley Gaines slammed ex-college swim champ Lia Thomas over the trans athlete’s vocal stance on the Biden administration’s proposed changes to Title IX.

Biden, the 80-year-old Democrat, announced that his administration wants to establish that outright bans on transgender athletes would violate Title IX.

However, schools that grab up federal dollars could still enact policies that limit transgender students’ participation, specifically in high school and college sports.

Thomas, a transgender woman who swam for the women’s swim team at the University of Pennsylvania, supported part of the new rule but said it was not enough in an Instagram video she posted Monday.

“This rule is a good start. However, it is not enough. During this time of intense anti-trans backlash, the trans community needs explicit protection from discrimination in order to live our lives freely and equally,” Thomas said.

Her problem is that the rule would not prevent discrimination against trans kids at the “high school and college levels under the guise of competitive fairness.”

She also said growing up swimming provided her with numerous opportunities and it “breaks my heart to see trans kids across the country lose out on these opportunities.”

Riley Gaines slammed Lia Thomas for her statement on Title IX.

Elliott Hess

Gaines, who competed for the University of Kentucky and raced against Thomas, slammed the comments in a tweet she posted Tuesday.

“Under the guise of competitive fairness? Are you really trying to say you would have won a national title against the men?” Gaines said.

“Does it not break your heart to see women lose out on these opportunities? The Biden Admins proposed bill denies science, truth, and common sense.”

Gaines also said Thomas’ “take is selfish and shows an utter disregard for women. The Biden Administration is actively and aggressively working to pass laws that erase decent and fair treatment for women in sports.”

Thomas previously competed for the men’s swim team at UPenn before she swam for the women’s team in her senior year of college.

Thomas dominated the field and was the first trans athlete to be named Division I NCAA champion.

Lia Thomas previously competed for the men’s swim team at UPenn before she swam for the women’s team in her senior year of college.

AP

Gaines also displayed excellence, swimming to several All-American titles and conference championships for Kentucky.

Biden’s proposal makes it harder for schools to prohibit a transgender girl in elementary school but would leave room for schools to stop trans athletes from joining teams on more competitive sports to avoid sports-related injuries and ensure fairness. 

The potential rule still faces a lengthy approval process.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/18/riley-gaines-slams-lia-thomas-statement-on-title-ix-biden-proposal/

'Life expectancy declining, FDA commissioner blames misinformation'

 Life expectancy in the U.S. has declined in recent years and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf says misinformation is playing a role. 

Califf told CNBC that where people are getting their health information is leading to declining health outcomes. 

"Why aren't we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influenced their thinking," Califf told the outlet.

He told CNBC that rooting out misinformation remains a priority of his.

"You think about the impact of a single person reaching a billion people on the internet all over the world. We just weren't prepared for that," Califf told CNBC. "We don't have societal rules that are adjudicating it quite right, and I think it's impacting our health in very detrimental ways."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. life expectancy at birth has dropped from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.1 years in 2021. Data for 2022 is not yet available. 

With a 2.7-year drop in life expectancy in the last two years, it marked the largest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-23, the CDC said. At 76.1 years, it is also the lowest life expectancy the U.S. has had since 1996.

Health misinformation especially came to the forefront during the push to get Americans vaccinated against COVID-19. The CDC led efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. 

The issue of health misinformation isn't just an issue in the U.S. The World Health Organization noted the challenges of false health information spreading on social media platforms. 

"Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are critical in disseminating the rapid and far-reaching spread of information," said a review conducted by the WHO. The organization says, "Repercussions of misinformation on social media include such negative effects as 'an increase in erroneous interpretation of scientific knowledge, opinion polarization, escalating fear and panic or decreased access to health care."

https://scrippsnews.com/amp/stories/life-expectancy-declining-fda-head-blames-misinformation/

UN Plan to Promote Abortion Worldwide Fails When 22 Pro-Life Nations Object

 The fifty-sixth annual United Nations Commission on Population and Development ended abruptly on Friday, April 14, in New York City. The Commission ended with a thud, not a bang, and turned the entire weeks-long process into an exercise in futility.

Why?

There was not enough sex and abortion in the plan of action’s draft document, and the EU, USA, and Canada inserted radical and never before agreed upon language to begin making Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE) a human right. National Right to Life vehemently opposes CSE because it would allow minor children to seek abortion providers without their parent’s knowledge or consent.

Once this far-reaching pro-abortion language was added, twenty-two countries, representing over 1 billion people, withdrew their support of the document. The negotiations then spiraled into chaos – if the plan of action is to move forward, the United Nations requires total consensus of all voting member states.

At one point, the Pakistani delegation stated that the largest crisis children are currently facing is that because of the fallout from COVID, nearly 100 million children worldwide are not being schooled. That statement was immediately followed by a retort from the Dutch delegation claiming that the REAL crisis is the lack of Comprehensive Sexual Education.

You can’t make this up.

A United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs representative argued that too many babies in Sub-Saharan Africa are detrimental to education. Only to then be outdone by the delegate from Argentina who claimed that all UN language regarding so-called “Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights” is akin to post-Vatican II Catholic teaching.

By the end of the last week, lines had been drawn, and positions were hardened. So much so that no outcome document or plan of action was produced.

And that’s a good thing.

This was a substantial pro-life win. It has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to include protective language in any UN document. It takes all we have to hold back new hysterical pro-abortion language from the far left.

National Right to Life was there to support the courageous members representing the twenty-two countries who took on the rest of the world. Many countries contacted Austin Cherry, who was in the NGO Gallery, to thank NRLC for our assistance and encouragement.

https://www.lifenews.com/2023/04/18/un-plan-to-promote-abortion-worldwide-fails-when-22-pro-life-nations-object/

Students engineer socks for on-the-go neuropathy treatment

 Need a little spring -- or buzz -- in your step? A wearable electrical-stimulation and vibration-therapy system designed by Rice University engineering students might be just what the doctor ordered for people experiencing foot pain and balance loss due to diabetic neuropathy.

Rice engineering students in the StimuSock team -- Abby Dowse, Yannie Guo, Andrei Mitrofan, Sarah Park and Kelly Xu -- designed a sock with a smart insole that can deliver both transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) and vibration therapy that block pain signals to the brain and provide haptic feedback to help with balance issues, respectively.

The team will present its device at the annual Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen showcase and competition April 13 at the Ion.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2022 estimates, over 37 million people in the U.S. suffer from diabetes. About half of them will develop some form of diabetic neuropathy, a type of nerve damage that occurs most often in the legs and feet.

The StimuSock team sought to combine the best aspects of existing therapies into a single, user-centered design.

"Existing products or devices used to treat the symptoms of diabetic neuropathy are either pharmaceuticals or large at-home vibration devices users stand on," Dowse said. "But none of them can both treat pain and improve balance, which our device aims to do by combining the TENS and the vibrational therapy in one wearable, portable, user-controllable and easy-to-use device."

A lot of the team's effort went into making the device as low-profile as possible.

"The intent is for the patient to be able to wear the device for the whole day," Guo said. "Even when everything's off and they don't want the electrostimulation or haptics effect, they can still wear their device. … You don't want it to look like you're wearing an ankle monitor."

Patients use a smartphone app to control the type, intensity and duration of the desired therapeutic stimulus. The system also allows users to target a specific area of the foot.

"We have three regions: one in the front of the insole, one in the middle and one at the back," Park said. "Our aim is to allow patients to be able to control both the amplitude of the vibration and the location where it's delivered. Some patients might only want vibration at the front of their feet and some only at the back."

Mitrofan said the team anticipates the device's final form will have sufficient battery life to provide the recommended maximum of four 30-minute sessions of TENS therapy per day and operate on standby the rest of the day.

The team's mentor is bioengineering assistant teaching professor Sabia Abidi .

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230413154132.htm

Russian-Installed Donetsk Chief Meets Belarus President, Kyiv Protests

 The Russian-installed head of the Moscow-controlled part of Ukraine's Donetsk region met Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk on Tuesday and said he had discussed ways of boosting trade.

The visit by Denis Pushilin prompted Ukraine to protest about what it called a "blatantly unfriendly act" by Belarus, a close ally of Russia that allowed Moscow's forces to use its territory as a launching pad for the February 2022 invasion.

Pushilin, writing on Telegram, said he was interested in quarry equipment, tractors and buses as well as building products and furniture.

In return, his region was ready to export grain to Belarus, in addition to existing shipments of sunflower seeds.

The so-called Donetsk People's Republic is one of the four regions in Ukraine that Moscow proclaimed as its own last September in an exercise Ukraine and its allies called a "sham", coercive referendum.

In a statement, the Ukrainian foreign ministry called on Minsk to stop taking "destructive steps" and said it was recalling its ambassador to Belarus for consultations.

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-04-18/russian-installed-donetsk-chief-meets-belarus-president-wants-more-trade

Biden’s EV Plan Could Be Key To China’s Global Economic Dominance

 by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “strongest-ever” vehicle emissions standards designed to drive mass adoption of electric cars within a decade will increase the United States’ dependence on China, experts warn.

“It benefits the Chinese Communist Party because they control the critical minerals supply chain that is going to be necessary to build out the batteries for those electric vehicles,” said Mandy Gunasekara, director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank, in an April 17 interview with The Epoch Times.

Gunasekara served as chief of staff in the EPA under former President Donald Trump. She argued that the Trump administration did a better job of integrating environmental, economic, and strategic considerations than the Biden team, including when it came to the critical minerals used in electric vehicles (EVs) and other technologies.

“There was a concerted effort to ensure we weren’t setting regulations that shut down industrial activity here in the United States, knowing good and well that productivity doesn’t go away—it just materializes somewhere else, and typically a place like China,” she said.

The agency anticipates that with the new standards, two-thirds of new light-body vehicles will be electric by the model year 2032, up from less than six percent today.

The proposed rules, which would go into effect with cars from model year 2027 onward, target tailpipe emissions from light-, medium-, and heavy-body vehicles.

The EPA claims the standards would “significantly reduce climate and other harmful air pollution, unlocking significant benefits for public health, especially in communities that have borne the greatest burden of poor air quality.”

‘Industrial Suicide’

“This is industrial suicide,” said James Kennedy, a U.S. mine owner and rare earths expert, in an April 17 interview with The Epoch Times.

“By design, their goal is to wipe out, to destroy, to effectively terminate the massive economic investment that the auto companies have made in the internal combustion engine,” he said.

He outlined China’s long-range, strategic plan to dominate the mining and refining of rare earths, as well as the production of downstream technologies.

“No one in the West will accept the reality that China has total domain control at every level,” he added.

The rare earth metals terbium, holmium, and dysprosium are one key choke point for Chinese control over EV production.

Kennedy explained that the elements enable neodymium magnets to function at the high temperatures found in the motors of electric cars.

“China is the only country in the world, period, exclamation point, that can separate those materials,” he said.

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/industrial-suicide-bidens-ev-plan-could-be-key-chinas-global-economic-dominance

Over half of top selling Medicare drugs have low added therapeutic benefit

 Brand-name drugs cost two to three times more in the U.S. than in other countries, but many of the top-selling brand name drugs may provide little added therapeutic benefit. A new study led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a founding member of Mass General Brigham, used public Medicare data to identify the 50 highest-selling brand-name drugs in 2020.

The researchers evaluated their therapeutic benefit compared to existing standards of care, based on ratings from the national health technology assessment (HTA) organizations of Canada, France, and Germany. The team found that 27 of the 50 drugs received low added therapeutic benefit ratings from these agencies despite comprising 11 percent of net Medicare prescription drug spending. Results are published in JAMA.

"Unlike many industrialized countries, the U.S. has long had no national process for assessing the clinical benefits of drugs compared with existing treatment options and then negotiating prices based on the added therapeutic benefits they offer to patients," said first author Alexander C. Egilman, BA, of the Brigham Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics. "Therefore, our primary motivation was to understand the added benefits of high expenditure Medicare drugs according to foreign HTA organizations."

Most of the top-selling drugs were used to treat endocrine conditions including diabetes, cancer and respiratory diseases. Data from HTA organizations were available for 49 of the drugs.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will for the first time allow Medicare to negotiate the price of top-selling drugs. According to initial guidance released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, negotiations will be heavily influenced by a drug's comparative effectiveness against therapeutic alternatives. The new study found that seven of the ten drugs likely to be selected for negotiation this September had low overall added benefit.

"The new model of price negotiation under the Inflation Reduction Act provides a great opportunity for Medicare to stop paying excessively for top-selling drugs that do not offer meaningful clinical benefits over less expensive treatments," said corresponding author Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, of the Brigham Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics. "Our results suggest that Medicare has lots of bases on which to negotiate so top-selling drugs are, at a minimum, not priced higher than therapeutic alternatives."

Therapeutic benefits of each drug were determined based on the most favorable HTA rating, and ratings were not always available from all three countries. Extrapolating therapeutic ratings from foreign HTA agencies to the U.S. may not always be warranted, and the researchers suggested that the U.S. could benefit from establishing its own national HTA organization to determine therapeutic benefits.

More information: Egilman A et al., Added Therapeutic Benefit of Top-Selling Brand-Name Drugs in Medicare, JAMA (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jama.2023.4034. jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/ … cle-abstract/2803804

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-medicare-drugs-added-therapeutic-benefit.html