CDC is already mismanaging H5N1

 Concern about Avian flu (H5N1) is heating up. Yesterday, the New England Journal featured the case of a dairy farm worker who contracted the disease.

Interestingly, the worker had predominantly eye symptoms and no respiratory tract symptoms. The worker only came into contact with HEALTHY cattle and not sick animals. The worker was shown to have H5N1. Let’s be clear: the case suggests only that he caught it from one the animals, and likely in his eye. If only he had been wearing a cloth mask!

Next, Stat news interviews the CDC’s “top” flu scientist, whose inadequate answers should make you concerned.

In response to the first question, she makes it clear that she is going to blame the states for H5N1 and is taking no responsibility — the hallmark of the CDC is issuing guidance that obliges others to act a certain way, not running randomized studies to test that guidance, and then ultimately blaming others for following your guidance (this was the COVID19 playbook).

She says she can’t monitor anything until she gets an invitation.

Let’s remember that during the COVID19 pandemic the CDC did not perform regular seroprevalence work and relied on others to do that basic tracking. If the CDC can’t do anything, why do we spend tens of billions on the agency?

In response to the Texas case, look at this answer

The CDC did not even check if his relatives contracted H5N1. How is this defensible?

This is a particularly amazing reply.

Let’s not forget during the COVID-19 pandemic the CDC could not even count the number of dead kids accurately, masked 2 year olds, promoted school closure, boosted young men who had already had COVID and were at risk of myocarditis, recommended cloth masks, and pretty much got every major policy decision wrong.

What is the only conclusion a sensible person can reach: The CDC’s ability to manage pandemics is poor.

Given that, let’s imagine the worst case scenario that we actually get human to human transmission of H5N1. Undoubtedly, given this is an election year, it will be a cataclysmic occurrence. Particularly the policy response. So let’s remember the facts.

1. There is no evidence that community masking slows influenza like viruses. That is the conclusion of the Cochrane review of randomized trials and the CDC has not generated evidence on this topic. There are literally no studies of community N95 recommendations. Mandates have no data to support them.

2. There is no evidence that school closure slowed the spread of COVID19—- the best evidence suggests it did not. Even if pandemic flu is more lethal in kids, closing schools should only be considered if it can be tested (in step wedge or other design). Since, the CDC has not shown they can run studies, schools should not be closed.

3. Vaccines for H5N1 may be generated quickly, but I won’t be taking one, unless a randomized trial shows a reduction in severe disease and includes people like me (young and healthy and thin).

4. The use of lockdown and other government restrictions has no evidence to support it, and I will personally relocate or resist if faced with these restrictions

5. The media-industrial complex and the incumbent administration have repeatedly shown a zeal for unproven, restrictive policies, and a desire to silence critics on social media. At a time of scientific uncertainty, they are dangerous. I will be skeptical of any data they provide, and recommendations they make. In an election year, particularly.

H5N1 is gaining news coverage. We should follow it closely and make sure we do not relive the errors of 2019-2023.

Vinay Prasad, Hematology Oncology Medicine Health Policy Epidemiology Professor

https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/the-cdc-is-already-mismanaging-h5n1

The Party Of ‘Death To America’

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There was, if hazy memories recall correctly, a time when the Democratic Party was merely an alternative to the Republican Party and not a threat to the country. Those days are gone. Today’s Democrats are in the business of wracking, ruining and razing.

The Biden administration, says former Hawaiian Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, is “​​destroying the foundational, fundamental elements of our country and what it means to be an American.”

Speaking recently to Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report, Gabbard noted that “we have seen now consistently throughout his entire administration over these last three and a half years, consistently pushing policies that undermine our freedom, that make our country less safe and less secure, and that is very quickly unraveling and” wrecking the backbone of the country.

Though Gabbard left the party not even two years ago, what we’re seeing is not new. The political left, says author David Horowitz, has long been filled with radical activists who “cannot be negotiated with.”

“There is no living alongside it. Either Americans defeat the Neo-Nazi Left or the Neo-Nazi Left defeats America,” says Horowitz.

While there were Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s, and a few in the 1980s, who were centrists in both name and deed, the party is now owned by this “Neo-Nazi Left.” The takeover (or was it a willing surrender?) is complete, having reached the point that today Democrats are closely aligned with terrorists. In 2024, they are:

• Refusing to demand that university officials stop the on-campus threats to Jewish students.
• Going soft on pro-Hamas protesters, some of whom kept pamphlets calling for “death to America.”
• Funding those protesters.
• Calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza war, which Hamas will break again just as it did on Oct. 7.
• And bullying Israel while treating the terrorists who invaded that country as if they’re a voting constituency.

Mark Levin, author, talk show host and chairman of Landmark Legal Foundation, wrote a book last year about the party’s war on this nation’s values and foundations. Levin said it was important for him to write “The Democrat Party Hates America” because “the 800-pound gorilla that is responsible for virtually every single cultural, political, societal confrontation that we have is the Democrat Party.”

And why is this the case?

“Because,” he says, “the Democrat Party is built on hate.” 

The evidence is in schools that teach students that the U.S. is a murderous, racist nation built on stolen land and slave labor; in the media and entertainment realms, where “news” and show business productions are intended to turn Americans against the Western ideals of liberty and civil society; and of course in the politics of the Democratic “squad” that is made up of lawmakers hostile to the country yet has been allowed, in some cases encouraged, to aggregate more power in the party.

Even Elon Musk, who in the past voted “overwhelmingly” for Democrats, recognizes that they “have become the party of division and hate.”

What they want is a new America that is nothing like the country the founders gave us and would more closely resemble an authoritarian state ruled by, yes, the Neo-Nazi Left.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/07/the-party-of-death-to-america/

Biden voter registration meeting raises eyebrows on Capitol Hill: ‘Election interference’

House Republicans investigating the Biden administration ahead of the 2024 election are raising concerns over revelations from documents reported by the Washington Examiner about a key meeting between the White House and left-wing activists on voter registration.

GOP lawmakers are growing increasingly worried that an executive order issued by President Joe Biden in 2021, which mandated that federal agencies develop voter registration plans with “approved” outside groups, will be unlawfully weaponized this November to boost Democratic turnout. The Biden administration has framed the unprecedented operation as nonpartisan, though internal documents show the government hosted a July 2021 order planning call that appeared to serve overwhelmingly as a platform for left-wing organizations to suggest sweeping election policy changes.

“President Biden’s EO is an overreach of the executive branch’s constitutional authority and disregards the Constitution’s federalist election system,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told the Washington Examiner. “The states set the time, manner, and place of their own elections, and this EO must be looked at seriously.”

House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said the internal meeting notes reveal “illegal coordination” between the Biden administration and progressive activists to plot “election interference,” adding that lawmakers are investigating the 2021 executive order “to ensure our elections are free and fair.” Stefanik is widely considered as in the running to be former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick in 2024.

According to a RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump leads Biden by roughly 1 percentage point. To Republicans, who have launched investigations into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s funding of a progressive-left group that lawmakers say helped tilt the 2020 election for Democrats, the 2021 “Bidenbucks” order is legally questionable. The order directs agencies to solicit and facilitate the approval of “nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”

The order, in the minds of lawmakers and conservative legal experts, is unconstitutional and flouts numerous federal rules, including the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from spending funds beyond those approved through Congress, and the Hatch Act, a law restricting government employees from engaging in certain political activities.

The meeting notes reviewed by the Washington Examiner, which were obtained through separate records requests by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and Foundation for Government Accountability, show attendees from activist groups discussed topics such as registering illegal immigrants and integrating voter registration into public housing as a requirement under federal law. The Oversight Project said in a memo last week that it’s clear the 2021 executive order is a partisan “attempt to influence the outcome of future elections through the use of federal resources, infrastructure, and reach.”

Former President Donald Trump, left, and President Joe Biden, right. (Curtis Means/Pool Photo via AP, and AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The 2021 meeting was virtual over the platform Zoom and attended by representatives from the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice, among other agencies, as well as staffers from groups such as the Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center, End Citizens United, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

Stewart Whitson, an attorney who works for the Foundation for Government Accountability, said the touted proposal related to public housing is evidence of a coordinated effort between the White House and left-wing activists to target vulnerable populations determined to be likely Biden voters through the unlawful order. The housing proposal was mentioned at the 2021 meeting by Laura Williamson, a then-employee at the left-wing Demos think tank who now works for the Southern Poverty Law Center. GOP lawmakers have said Demos crafted a document in 2020 that ended up appearing “nearly identical” to the Biden order.

Like other lawmakers, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said the meeting notes reveal a coordinated and since-secretive effort by Biden to work with progressives “to figure out a way to leverage federal resources and enhance Democrat political power.”

“It’s all political in nature, and it’s totally wrong,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told the Washington Examiner.

At the 2021 Zoom meeting, a representative from the League of Women Voters urged agencies to register people to vote at citizen and naturalization ceremonies run by federal courts.

Meanwhile, one representative from the Sentencing Project, a left-wing group that supports defunding prisons, called for the use of federal resources to register inmates to vote in prisons, noting, “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression.”

The 2021 executive order at the center of the meeting has also prompted an investigation by the GOP-led House Small Business Committee, which is looking into the Small Business Administration over its voter registration efforts.

One lawmaker on the panel, Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA), said it’s clear Biden is working hand in hand with progressives — not nonpartisan groups — “to enlist the federal government in a national voter registration operation” that is likely unlawful.

The House Small Business Committee is, in particular, “extremely concerned that the Biden administration is using the SBA as a campaign arm in the battleground state of Michigan,” according to Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), the panel’s chairman.

“My colleagues and I are troubled by this alleged electioneering and allocation of taxpayer dollars to activities blatantly outside of the SBA’s jurisdiction,” Williams said. “The committee will continue to use every tool at our disposal to stop these blatant political acts.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/2992655/biden-voter-registration-meeting-capitol-hill-election-interference/

Almost all counterfeit oxycontin pills contain fentanyl, finds study

 Lab tests of counterfeit oxycodone (Oxycontin) pills seized by police in Rhode Island in 2022 found 99.3% also contained dangerous fentanyl.

It was typically mixed with another potentially deadly drug, xylazine.

Both drugs make overdose more likely and more fatal, experts note.

As too many American families have tragically come to know, "counterfeit prescription pills have been associated with adverse outcomes, including fatal overdose," said a team of researchers led by Dr. Rachel Wightman. She's associate professor of epidemiology and emergency medicine at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Wightman's team published its findings May 6 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

For years, the makers of illicit fake prescription opioids, amphetamines and tranquilizers have adulterated their pills with fentanyl and, more recently, the animal tranquilizer xylazine.

Fentanyl is 100 times more powerful than morphine and 50% more powerful than heroin, and is increasingly to blame for overdose and death among people who are addicted to opioids or who take counterfeit meds recreationally.

Deaths linked to illicit pills containing xylazine, a horse tranquilizer, are also soaring. According to a study released last summer, the number of xylazine-involved OD deaths nationwide rose from 102 in 2018 to 3,468 in 2021.

In their report, Wightman's group obtained state forensic drug chemistry lab test results for 1,176 counterfeit pills seized by law enforcement in Rhode Island between early 2017 and the end of 2022.

"The number of pills obtained during seizure incidents range from a single pill to thousands," the researchers noted. "Any pill that yielded a result other than the expected active ingredients as marked was considered counterfeit."

The bulk of the counterfeit pills fell into three classes: Oxycodone (686 pills); alprazolam (brand name Xanax, 312 pills); and amphetamines (174 pills).

According to lab analyses, almost all the fake oxycodone pills seized during 2022 contained fentanyl—that's a steep rise from about 10% of pills found to contain the drug between 2017 and 2020, the researchers noted.

Fentanyl was detected in 2.6% of the fake Xanax pills. None of the counterfeit amphetamine pills contained fentanyl, the tests showed.

Xyalzine was almost always found in counterfeit oxycodone pills that were also contaminated with fentanyl, the researchers said.

"Of 137 pills containing xylazine, 135 (98.5%) were counterfeit oxycodone," the researchers wrote, and "xylazine was detected with fentanyl in 136 of 137 pills."

Dr. Kimberly Sue, an addiction medicine doctor at Yale Medicine in New Haven, Conn., said there likely are some people who are specifically seeking out xylazine for illicit use on its own.

"But I would say for the majority of people, they don't know they're using it and they don't intend to be using it," she added.

Pat Aussem, vice president of consumer clinical content development at the Partnership to End Addiction, noted that xylazine is a depressant that slows brain activity and causes extreme drowsiness.

"It can result in slowed breathing and heart rate in people who use it, as well as dangerously low blood pressure," she said. "The risk of overdose is amplified when combined with other substances like fentanyl."

Xylazine further increases a person's risk of fatal overdose because it does not respond to the OD rescue drug naloxone, experts said.

More information: Rachel S. Wightman et al, Substances in Counterfeit Prescription Pills Seized by Law Enforcement, 2017-2022, JAMA (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jama.2024.6161

Learn the warning signs of fentanyl overdose and how you might save a life at UC Davis Health.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-05-counterfeit-oxycontin-pills-fentanyl.html