Trump Administration Must Bring Moderna to Heel

 Last week, independent journalist Alex Berenson reported that a preschool-aged child died of “cardio-respiratory arrest” after taking a dose of Moderna’s Covid mRNA vaccine during its clinical trials. Despite federal requirements to report all trial information, the company withheld the truth for years as it raked in billions from its Covid shots. 

The extent of the cover-up remains unknown, but Moderna, headed by CEO Stéphane Bancel, disregarded federal law requiring companies to report “summary results information, including adverse event information, for specified clinical trials of drug products” to clinicaltrials.gov. The company, not the government, is responsible for posting all results, and failure to report the death of a child constitutes a clear breach of US law, which threatens civil action against any party that “falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact.”

To this point, pharmaceutical companies have remained largely immune for their role in perpetrating globally-scaled deception resulting in thousands of vaccine injuries and billions in profits. They have enjoyed a liability shield courtesy of the PREP Act, which offers protections for injuries resulting from vaccines; that indemnity, however, does not extend to non-compliance with federal regulations, material misstatements or omissions of fact, or other offenses.

The death of the child only became known because of an obscure European report released last year, which revealed that Moderna has known about the death for over two years while it continues to advertise Covid shots to children as young as six months old. 

Moderna’s European filing also revealed that the company withheld trial results demonstrating that children under 12 who received the vaccine were ten times more likely than those who received the placebo to suffer “serious side effects.” Without any evidence, Moderna claimed that the side effects, including the death of a child, were unrelated to the shots. 

The incoming Trump administration offers a rare opportunity to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable and to investigate the depth of the cover-up.

The FDA is responsible for enforcing the reporting of vaccine trial results, but recent heads of the agency such as Scott Gottlieb and Robert Califf have been fanatical supporters of Big Pharma. Trump’s choice for FDA, Dr. Marty Makary, presents a stark contrast to his predecessors. Makary has criticized the US Government’s reluctance to acknowledge the role of natural immunity in preventing Covid infection, and he opposed the widespread vaccination of children. He testified to Congress, “In the U.S. we gave thousands of healthy kids myocarditis for no good reason, they were already immune. This was avoidable.”

President-elect Trump has tapped Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., perhaps the most well-known critic of the Covid vaccines, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA. He has named Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an author of the Great Barrington Declaration, as his choice to head the National Institutes of Health. Further, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Berenson that he plans to subpoena the FDA once Republicans become the majority party in the Senate this month. 

President Trump’s first term was ultimately defined by his failure to fulfill his pledge to “drain the swamp.” A corrupt bureaucracy, personified in many ways by Dr. Anthony Fauci, aided and abetted by advisors like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hijacked the president’s agenda. Now, the Trump administration has an unlikely yet monumental opportunity for health reform, which can start on January 20 with an investigation into Moderna’s cover-up.

The Covid response doomed Trump 1.0. Whether one regards this as a monumental error, the betrayal of a president by his advisors, an event beyond the president’s control, or a deeper and more complex plot involving everything and everyone associated with the government, both in the US and around the world, there is no question of the scale of the calamity for the public. The shots are part of that, the capstone failure of a long line of foreshadowing with lockdowns and all that was associated with pre-pharmaceutical interventions. The antidote came not as a cure but, for many, the disease itself. 

There must be truth if not justice. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-trump-administration-must-bring-moderna-to-heel/

No, Moderate Drinking Won’t Give You Cancer

 by Allysia Finley

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has done more to politicize science and erode trust in public-health leaders than anyone other than Anthony Fauci. Dr. Murthy was at it again on Friday with a headline-grabbing report that recommends alcohol be distributed with cancer warnings.

The report warns that, for some cancers, “evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.” Note the operative word, may. The link between heavy drinking and throat and mouth cancer is well-established—but not for moderate consumption.

Two weeks earlier the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a congressionally mandated review of the recent evidence on the health effects of moderate drinking, or up to one drink a day for women and two for men. Its more than 200 pages of findings run counter to Dr. Murthy’s 22-page report, though they got scant attention in the press.

The academies found insufficient evidence to support a link between moderate drinking and oral, pharyngeal, esophageal, laryngeal and other cancers. It did find a slightly higher risk of breast cancer with moderate drinking but also a lower risk of death generally and from cardiovascular disease specifically compared with never drinking.

No matter. Dr. Murthy claims that “alcohol use,” not only abuse, is a “leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, contributing to nearly 100,000 cancer cases and about 20,000 cancer deaths each year.” This estimate is based on models of associations from cherry-picked observational studies. But even the report partially attributes only 17% of these estimated deaths to moderate drinking. Of the 609,820 cancer deaths in 2023, this would mean moderate drinking contributed to 3,400, or about 0.6%. Dr. Murthy’s claims about alcohol’s cancer risks are misleading but typical of his reports, which are intended to drive a political agenda.

Let’s review the roll. His first advisory, in 2021, declared “health misinformation” a “serious threat.” It warned that “misinformation has caused confusion and led people to decline COVID-19 vaccines, reject public health measures such as masking and physical distancing, and use unproven treatments.”

The surgeon general urged tech companies to “strengthen the monitoring of misinformation,” “prioritize early detection of misinformation ‘super-spreaders’ and repeat offenders” and “redesign recommendation algorithms to avoid amplifying misinformation.” In other words: Censor Covid views that he and Dr. Fauci didn’t like.

Covid contrarians later sued Dr. Murthy and other public-health officials for violating their speech rights. While the Supreme Court ruled last year in Murthy v. Missouri that there was insufficient evidence to prove tech platforms censored the plaintiffs in direct response to government pressure, the link was far clearer than the one between moderate drinking and cancer.

Next came Dr. Murthy’s 2022 report on “workplace mental health,” which was informed “by the voices of many workers and unions.” The report claimed that jobs are a key cause of mental illness and chronic stress “as more and more workers are worried about making ends meet.” Blame the latter on inflation fueled by Democratic spending.

Dr. Murthy’s solution? Require employers to provide paid family leave and “an equitable, stable, and predictable living wage before overtime, tips, and commission.” He also advocated increasing the minimum wage as a way to reduce the suicide rate, as well as “mitigating harmful impacts in the work environment” with “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” policies.

Dr. Murthy prescribed similar left-wing antidotes in his 2023 advisory on “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” which it says “came to the forefront of public consciousness” during the pandemic. Never mind that Dr. Murthy’s promotion of lockdowns exacerbated the problem. To improve “social connection,” he advised “increased access to public transit.” Has he ever ridden the New York subway?

Next the surgeon general issued an advisory on “Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America.” The report’s recommendations included a ban on ill-defined “assault weapons,” restrictions on concealed- and open-carry permits and increasing criminal liability for shooting a firearm after being attacked if you could have instead “safely retreated.”

Another health hazard: children. Dr. Murthy last autumn issued a report detailing the stresses of raising kids, which he recommended mitigating with government child-care subsidies, tax credits, universal preschool and early childhood-education programs.

More government is Dr. Murthy’s prescription for every social and public-health ailment. Given this record, why would anyone take his latest warning about alcohol and cancer seriously?

He might have done some good had he drawn attention to actual public-health problems like teenage marijuana use or post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans. But such advisories wouldn’t get headlines or advance the left’s goal of expanding government control over Americans. So instead he used his government pulpit to promote himself and progressive policies. Good riddance to him and his fellow health czars in the Biden administration.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/no-moderate-drinking-wont-give-you-cancer-surgeon-general-politicization-d0cdcbe6

How the AMA Undermines Primary Care

 The American Medical Association is the professional association and political lobby of the nation’s physicians. Ever since President Harry Truman proposed national health insurance in 1945, the AMA has been an implacable enemy of a single-payer system, though today many harried doctors wish we had it.

It turns out that the AMA is also a prime driver of the gross imbalance between primary care doctors, who tend to be overworked and underpaid, and specialists who make a fine living and have more control over their schedules. The AMA does this via a secretive panel called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC).

The relative value scale was legislated by Congress in 1989 as a way to assign values to thousands of medical procedures and restrain Medicare costs. The RUC was created by the AMA in 1991 to make sure that that the AMA would dominate the process.

The Department of Health and Human Services then deputized the AMA’s RUC panel to determine how Medicare should compensate different forms of care. HHS accepts about 87 percent of the AMA committee’s recommendations. Medicare compensation in turn heavily influences other compensation.

Though primary care physicians account for more than a third of all doctors, the AMA makes sure that specialists are grossly overrepresented on the RUC panel. The panel typically has between 22 and 26 specialists and subspecialists, out of 32 members.

As a consequence, the standards that the panel uses are biased toward interventionist procedures that favor specialists, and against prevention and engagement with patients, of the sort that good primary care doctors prize. The result is a disparity of pay, which in turn intensifies the squeeze that is leading to primary care doctor burnout, as well as increased costs to the system.

Family physicians and pediatricians typically earn around $200,000 or less. Surgeons earn upwards of $500,000, and more if they are subspecialists. Dermatologists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists, oncologists, and radiologists are also paid handsomely relative to primary care doctors.

There is one other gross conflict of interest. The value scale is based partly on diagnostic codes known as CPT codes, which were also invented by the AMA. Amazingly, CPT codes are copyrighted by the AMA. All hospital systems have to pay the AMA a royalty to use the codes. AMA royalty income runs around $300 million a year, dwarfing other sources of AMA income. This by itself is an appalling and costly capture of a function that should be public.

More than other nations’, the American medical system is biased in favor of intensive and costly surgical procedures and against basic public health. Part of this neglect reflects the fact that despite the Affordable Care Act, close to 100 million Americans spend some part of each year uninsured. Tens of millions more are underinsured, given high deductibles and co-pays, and high rates of claim rejections by insurance companies.

However, the failure to use less costly public-education and public-health strategies to keep Americans healthy is also the result of our disproportionate reliance on costly specialists and invasive procedures. The specialist domination of the RUC panel is one factor among many, but it reinforces the imbalance and the burnout.

I recently wrote an investigative piece on the dominant vendor of electronic databases for hospitals, Epic Systems, which hospitals use to bill. Hospitals that use the AMA-licensed CPT codes to add diagnoses to patients, even if they are not treating those ailments, earn higher reimbursement from Medicare. Most of the burden of this time-consuming data entry—not for clinical uses but for profit maximization—falls on primary care doctors.

So the undervaluing of primary care, courtesy of the AMA, and the administrative chores added by Epic interact to promote doctor burnout. It’s no accident that the campaign by doctors to unionize, even at the nation’s most prestigious hospitals like Boston’s Mass General Brigham, is led by burned-out primary care doctors.

THE AMA IS SUCH A POWERFUL PLAYER POLITICALLY that the Department of Health and Human Services, even under Democrats, has never had the political guts to challenge its domination of the system. In fact, there is an alternative to the AMA’s copyrighted CPT codes. It’s called the International Classification of Diseases, operated by the World Health Organization, and used by most countries. And the ICT is in the public domain.

On a few occasions, Congress has threatened to change the system, but the AMA invariably finds a way to cut a deal. In 2003, the Senate actually passed legislation to switch to the ICD, but the AMA reportedly got that killed by agreeing to support the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, which added privatized Medicare drug coverage.

Studies have found that the AMA domination of the Medicare payment system inflates costs, not just by promoting overreliance on specialists, but by inflating how procedures are compensated. In many cases, a new procedure is simpler and less time-consuming than the one it replaced, but research shows that the RUC often sets fees based on older, more costly procedures.

The right likes to go after the administrative state as if it had a left-wing mind of its own. But the AMA capture of the fee-setting process is yet another case of the state being the instrument of private special interests at public expense.

In a normal country, especially one with national health insurance, payments to specialists and general practitioners (GPs) are determined by government, not by an interest group. In Britain, where there is a shortage of GPs, the British Medical Association has been a force for improved pay and working conditions of GPs. Their American cousins at the AMA play the opposite role.

In the U.S., possible counterweights to overreliance on specialists are either bought off or part of the systemic corruption. You might think the big hospitals would want to economize by reducing what they spend on specialists and relying more on primary care doctors. But specialists are a far more lucrative source of hospital income, so hospitals are another force for maintaining the imbalance.

For instance, there was a time when a patient seeking removal of a small wart, a cryogenic procedure that takes less than a minute, would get it done by a primary care doctor. Today, that takes a referral to a dermatologist, who can bill at a much higher rate. From the perspective of profit maximization, generalists are useful mainly as a source of referrals to specialists.

For at least 40 years, the federal government has tried various gimmicks to contain costs in the health care system. The private players have responded with ever more convoluted inventions to complicate the system and increase their profits. Costs keep inflating. As long as health care is dominated by private interests, trying to contain costs by tweaking payment systems is a fool’s errand.

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.

https://prospect.org/health/2025-01-07-how-ama-undermines-primary-care/

EyePoint started at Buy by Citi

 Target $33

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=EYPT&ty=c&ta=1&p=d

Acadia upped to Overweight from Sector Weight by KeyBanc

 Target $70

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=ACHC&p=d

Mexico drops migrants in troubled resort as it disperses them far from US border

About 100 migrants from various countries wandered directionless and disoriented through the streets of the troubled Pacific coast resort of Acapulco.

After walking for a couple weeks through southern Mexico with hundreds of other migrants, they accepted an offer from immigration officials to come to Acapulco with the idea they could continue their journey north toward the U.S. border. Instead, they found themselves stuck on Monday.

Two weeks ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Mexico continues dissolving attention-grabbing migrant caravans and dispersing migrants throughout the country to keep them far from the U.S. border, while simultaneously limiting how many accumulate in any one place.

The policy of “dispersion and exhaustion” has become the center of the Mexican government’s immigration policy in recent years and last year succeeded in significantly reducing the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border, said Tonatiuh Guillén, former chief of Mexico’s immigration agency.

Mexico’s current administration hopes that the lower numbers will give them some defense from Trump’s pressures, said Guillen, who left the administration of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after Trump threatened to impose tariffs over migration during his first presidency.

Acapulco would seem to be a strange destination for migrants. Once a crown jewel of Mexico’s tourism industry, the city now suffers under the thumb of organized crime and is still struggling to climb back after taking a direct hit from devastating Hurricane Otis in 2023.

On Monday, Mexican tourists enjoyed the final hours of their holiday beach vacations while migrants slept in the street or tried to find ways to resume their journeys north.

“Immigration (officials) told us they were going to give us a permit to transit the country freely for 10, 15 days and it wasn’t like that,” said a 28-year-old Venezuelan, Ender Antonio Castañeda. “They left us dumped here without any way to get out. They won’t sell us (bus) tickets, they won’t sell us anything.”

Castañeda, like thousands of other migrants, had left the southern city of Tapachula near the Guatemalan border. More than a half dozen caravans of about 1,500 migrants each have set out from Tapachula in recent weeks, but none of them made it very far.

Authorities let them walk for days until they’re exhausted and then offer to bus them to various cities where they say their immigration status will be reviewed, which could mean any number of things.

Some have landed in Acapulco, where about a dozen sleep at a Catholic church near the immigration agency offices.

Several dozen gathered outside the offices Monday looking for information, but no one would tell them anything. Castañeda, who had just received money from his family and was desperate to leave, picked a van driver he judged to be the most trustworthy among various offering rides for up to five times the normal price for a bus ticket to Mexico City

Some migrants have discovered the permits authorities give them allow them to travel only within the state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located. Other migrants have better luck.

On Sunday, the latest migrant caravan broke up after hundreds received free transit permits to go anywhere in Mexico for a specified number of days.

Cuban Dayani Sánchez, 33, and her husband were among them.

“We’re a little scared by the lack of safety getting on buses, that they’re going to stop us,” she said. Mexico’s drug cartels frequently target migrants for kidnapping and extortion, though many migrants say authorities extort them too.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum insists her immigration strategy has a “humanitarian” focus, and has allowed more migrants to leave southernmost Mexico. But some migration advocates note that migrants are being taken to violent areas.

It’s a concern shared by the Rev. Leopoldo Morales, the priest at the Catholic church in Acapulco near the immigration agency office.

He said that in November two or three immigration agency buses arrived with migrants, including entire families. Last weekend, two more arrived carrying all adults.

Even though Acapulco isn’t on the usual migration route and was unprepared to receive migrants, several priests have coordinated support for them with water, food and clothing. “We know they’re going through a very difficult time, with a lot of needs, they arrive without money,” Morales said.

Migrants quickly realize that finding work in Acapulco is difficult. After Otis’ destruction, the federal government sent hundreds of soldiers and National Guard troops to provide security and start reconstruction. Last year, another storm, John, brought widespread flooding.

But violence in Acapulco hasn’t relented.

Acapulco has one of Mexico’s highest rates of homicides. Cab drivers and small business owners complain – anonymously – of rising extortion. Large companies have balked at rebuilding under the current circumstances.

Honduran Jorge Neftalí Alvarenga was grateful to have escaped the Mexican state of Chiapas along the Guatemalan border, but was already disillusioned.

“To an extent they lied to us,” said Alvarenga, who thought he was going to Mexico City. “We asked for an agreement to send us to (Mexico City) for work” or other places like Monterrey, an industrial city in the north with more work opportunities.

Now he doesn’t know what to do.

https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-international/ap-mexico-drops-migrants-in-troubled-resort-as-it-disperses-them-far-from-us-border/

Nvidia’s stock heads for worst drop in months after CES speech

 Nvidia stock (NVDA) fell as much as 5% Tuesday, reversing earlier gains fueled by CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at the tech industry’s annual CES trade show in Las Vegas the previous day.

Huang's presentation gave a flurry of updates on upcoming Nvidia products, previewing what’s next in the burgeoning artificial intelligence market and for other emerging technologies. Ahead of his keynote, Nvidia notched record close Monday. Shares jumped as much as 2.5% early Tuesday before a sharp drop.

Nvidia stock's decline comes amid a broader slump in stocks Tuesday after November job openings data came in mixed and separate economic data stoked inflation concerns.

Nvidia shares are still up roughly 190% from last year. Its updates at CES fueled more bullish takes on the stock.Analysts at Stifel, Wedbush, and Truist Securities on Tuesday reiterated their Buy ratings on the stock. On average, Wall Street analysts tracked by Yahoo Finance see Nvidia shares rising to $172.80 over the next 12 months.

“[T]he company continues to position itself more favorably — not just in the datacenter but increasingly at all areas of the edge — from client compute to autonomous vehicles to robotics — supporting revenue growth and our Buy rating on the stock,” Truist Securities analyst William Stein, who holds a Buy rating on the stock, wrote in a note to investors Tuesday morning.

One of Nvidia's most notable updates at the trade show: a new, pint-sized artificial intelligence superchip called GB10 used in its (also new) client supercomputer.

The supercomputer — sized to fit on the average-sized desk — is part of Nvidia’s Project DIGITS announced Monday, advertised to developers, researchers, and students, and the device will be available in May for $3,000.

Jensen Huang speaking at NVIDIA Keynote at Michelob Ultra Arena in Las Vegas, NV, on Jan. 6, 2025. Credit: DeeCee Carter/MediaPunch /IPX · DeeCee Carter/MediaPunch/MediaPunch/IPx

Nvidia also unveiled major updates about its robotics strategy. The chip giant debuted its Cosmos platform, which offers AI models for developing humanoid robots as well as autonomous vehicles.

Nvidia shares closed at a record high of $149.43 Monday ahead of Huang’s keynote — eclipsing its prior record close of $148.88 reached on Nov. 7.

Wedbush analyst and Nvidia bull Dan Ives said he sees robotics and autonomous technology representing a $1 trillion market for the company. Huang put that number higher in his keynote, saying that autonomous driving technologies alone “will likely be the first multitrillion-dollar robotics industry."

Additionally, Nvidia showcased new Blackwell-generation gaming GPUs (graphics processing units) and applications for developers to launch their own custom AI agents. Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley reported that Nvidia could debut a successor to its Blackwell generation AI chips during its GTC conference in March.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-stock-falls-after-notching-record-high-on-ces-ai-superchip-debut-161512270.html