The CDC is deceiving us again — this time covering up for unsafe hospitals
If you have to go to the hospital, you don’t want to end up in a dangerous one. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knows which hospitals are riskiest, but it’s hiding that information from you — your safety be damned. The feds seem to think they work for the hospital industry, not for you.
Whenever a hospital has a superbug outbreak, the CDC conceals its identity, referring only to “Hospital A.” A lot of good that does patients looking for safe care, especially patients with compromised immune systems, cancer or HIV.
It’s no joke to find out, after you’re already in the hospital, that a superbug is raging room to room or has invaded the nursery where your newborn will be placed. That’s what happens when the CDC hides outbreaks.
Now the CDC is playing statistical tricks to hide how many people have caught COVID in hospitals and to block the public from seeing which hospitals have had the biggest problems — “partly on fears of embarrassing hospitals,” Politico reports.
The stakes are high; 21% of patients who catch COVID in the hospital never make it out, Kaiser Health News found — triple the death rate for patients who don’t catch COVID.
Though the pandemic may be fading, vulnerable patients need to know which hospitals proved proficient at preventing the spread of COVID inside their walls. It’s a safety measure.
Over the course of the pandemic, tens of thousands of patients went into the hospital for other reasons — such as hip surgery, kidney disease or a heart attack — and got infected with COVID.
The CDC is rigging the definition of hospital-acquired COVID to hide this problem.
The agency says only patients who test positive after being hospitalized at least 14 days are considered infected by the hospital. That eliminates almost everyone. The average patient stays only 4.6 days.
The CDC definition also excludes any patient who left the hospital and then developed symptoms or picked up the virus in the emergency room.
It’s a coverup. The United Kingdom and many European countries count COVID infections diagnosed seven or eight days after patients enter as hospital-acquired.
At some hospitals, more than 5% of patients caught COVID there, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of state data and Medicare billing data. The CDC refuses to name these hospitals, defying Freedom of Information Act requests from the media.
When a plane crashes, the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t conceal the identity of the airline. Why does the CDC cover up for a hospital?
To be fair, the pandemic hit some regions and some hospitals harder than others. But it’s also true that some hospitals took precautions to stop the virus from spreading and succeeded in providing safer care than others.
Some hospitals tested all incoming patients for the virus and retested days later to be sure. Testing proved critical, because most patients who contracted COVID in the hospitals got it from another patient. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, eight out of nine patients who became infected caught COVID from the patient sharing their room, per the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Why didn’t all hospitals test? Blame the CDC, which left it to the “discretion of the facility.”
New Yorkers should demand to see the data the CDC is hiding. Hospital-acquired COVID is a problem here.
In January, during the Omicron surge, rates of hospital-acquired COVID were higher in New York than the national average, though lower than in Washington, DC, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of unpublished federal data. Trouble is, citywide averages don’t tell you what you need to know — the adequacy of infection prevention in your hospital.
It’s time to end the CDC’s secrecy in the service of hospitals. The CDC’s ploy to hide hospital-acquired COVID is a red flag.
Call the CDC the Centers for Deception and Coverups. The nation should be demanding a health agency that deals honestly with the public. If you have health problems, your life could depend on it.
https://nypost.com/2022/06/28/the-cdc-is-deceiving-us-again-by-covering-up-for-unsafe-hospitals/
*****************************************************Crushing scientific dissenters, as Fauci urges, would kill medical progress
Beware of totalitarian control of scientific and medical thought here in America. Prominent academic publications, medical organizations and even some state legislatures are trying to silence scientific disagreements about COVID-19. That will kill medical progress.
On Friday, Anthony Fauci, the face of the federal government’s COVID response, urged graduates at Roger Williams College in Rhode Island to stand up against disinformation and “the normalization of untruths” about COVID-19. Let’s hope graduates were too busy tossing their mortarboards skyward to heed Fauci’s dangerous advice.
Dangerous because there is no such thing as scientific certainty about COVID-19 or any other disease. Challenging scientific consensus is not “disinformation.” It’s how scientific breakthroughs, including medical ones, happen.
Today’s unorthodox treatment might become tomorrow’s lifesaving standard of care. Crushing scientific dissenters is a sure way to halt medical progress in its tracks.
Fauci claimed recently on national TV that those who criticize him “are really criticizing science because I represent science.” His egotism is enormous, but the problem is bigger than just Fauci.
The American Medical Association voted in November to target health-care professionals who “peddled untested treatments and cures and flouted public health efforts such as masking and vaccinations.” Warning about “disinformation,” the AMA called on state medical boards to suspend or revoke the offenders’ licenses.
A Nature Medicine review article decreed in March: “The spread of misinformation poses a considerable threat to public health and the successful management of a global pandemic.”
Wrong.
Scientific progress has always been a struggle between the status quo and those who challenge it and seek new knowledge.
When Galileo advanced Copernicus’ idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, he was labeled a heretic by the astronomical establishment and the Catholic Church and put under house arrest.
When Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis observed that women were dying in childbirth because physicians in obstetric hospitals weren’t washing their hands, physicians took offense and committed him to an asylum in 1865. He died there, a victim of the establishment’s censorship. His research showed that hand washing with chlorinated lime could reduce deaths to below 1%, but its importance was not understood at the time.
Later, these heretics became recognized as heroes.
Fast-forward to the 1980s, when the AIDS virus began to spread rapidly in America. Physicians devised strategies at bedside like adjunctive corticosteroids and aerosol pentamidine to help their desperate patients. It was the beginning of an explosion of new treatments.
Yet two years ago, when COVID-19 struck — a disease as unfamiliar as AIDS was in the ’80s — the impulse among government health officials was to suppress experimentation and debate.
Democratic lawmakers in California are pushing to require the state medical board to penalize doctors for spreading “misinformation,” defined as disagreeing with government bodies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or “contemporary scientific consensus.”
As The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley points out, that would mean legal penalties against doctors who prescribe drugs like the antidepressant fluvoxamine, which has shown strong results in clinical trials even though it is not yet FDA approved for use expressly against COVID-19.
The standard of care to save COVID-19 patients has evolved rapidly, explains Finley. At the outset, doctors put severely ill patients on ventilators, on which as many as 90% died. Soon some doctors tried oxygenating patients with high-flow nasal tubes instead, and that succeeded. Should those doctors have been penalized for trying an alternative?
In October 2020, three distinguished scientists from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford published the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing that economically devastating lockdowns being imposed across the United States and Europe would save fewer lives than precautions targeted at the elderly and medically fragile only.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, immediately called for stigmatizing and silencing these dissenters. He viciously tarred them as “fringe epidemiologists who really did not have the credentials.” Yet they were right.
Nothing, not even a virus, is as dangerous to our future health as this silencing of medical debate. All of us, of every political persuasion, must denounce it for our own sakes.
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Australia: Queensland records 5804 new Covid cases, hospitalisations climb to record 1078
So Omicron is no different from other strains. It's still the elderly at risk
Almost all Covid deaths in the past two weeks in Queensland have been older people who did not have their booster shots, acting chief health officer Dr Peter Aitken revealed on Sunday.
Queensland recorded 5804 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours while hospitalisations have climbed to a record 1078.
Nineteen people are in intensive care, with 12 on ventilators.
There have also been 110 new flu cases, taking the total active cases to 904, while there are 36 people in hospital due to the flu, three of those in intensive care.
It comes after 7644 new cases and eight deaths on Saturday.
Dr Aitken said 97 per cent of Covid deaths in the past two weeks were people aged over 65, and two-thirds of those didn’t have their booster doses.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
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