CNN — A federal judge has ordered the government to cease its communication with social media companies due to concerns that "the government may have overreached in combating COVID disinformation."

Why does left-leaning corporate news support government censorship?

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1676357966898003969

@KanekoaTheGreat

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NEW — A federal judge has issued an order instructing the FBI, DHS, and other government agencies to cease their collaboration with social media companies in censoring First Amendment-protected free speech.

Happy Independence Day! 🇺🇸

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1676355109914308608

@KanekoaTheGreat

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zero_anthropology

July 4, 2023, 21:04

Injunction ruling In Missouri v Biden. Historic.

Join @AaronKheriaty

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THE STATE & PRIVATE EMPLOYERS ENGINEERED THESE DEATHS
More on the case of Alisha Seebaran

The coercion first came from the WHO, which the Trinidadian state then adopted and amplified. The Prime Minister proclaimed a new slogan: "vaccinate to operate". Private employers then adopted the dictum as their own, and even after vax passes have ended, they continue today to demand that prospective new employees bring their vaccine cards to job interviews.

Here we hear from Deborah Maillard and Dr. Rajiv Seereeram from the Covid-19 Transparency Advocacy Group (CTAG)....

(continued in the comments below)

#ThreeEleven #covid19 #Pfizer #vaccine_dangers #vaccine_deaths #TrinidadAndTobago #Caribbean #mandatory_vaccination #crimes_against_humanity #Nuremberg2

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The truth behind the placebo effect

EXTRACTS:
Even without deception, a placebo can still be effective – provided certain precautions are taken before it is administered. A study by CNRS experts at the TIMC interdisciplinary health laboratory offers an explanation.

The placebo effect is a real phenomenon that illustrates the power of the brain over the body. Based on the simple belief that it will relieve symptoms, a medicine that contains no active substance, called a placebo (for example, sugar capsules or a saline solution) may nevertheless prove effective in 30% to 60% of people! A bit like a mother’s kiss alleviates a child’s pain after a fall, or the prospect of a cure may improve a patient’s general state of health.

Medicines, and massages or surgery, etc., have been studied for decades; the placebo effect can be seen with many different types of treatment. It has thus shown its efficacy against a variety of symptoms: pain, insomnia, depression, anxiety, headaches, back ache… the list goes on. The problem is that its widespread use is limited by ethical guidelines, because it involves deceiving the patient into believing that they are receiving a real medicine. But this situation may change, and partly thanks to results obtained by scientists in the Techniques for Evaluation and Modeling of Health Actions (ThEMAS) team at the TIMC laboratory, near Grenoble (southeastern France)....

...Several studies performed in recent decades have demonstrated that the patient’s conviction that the placebo will improve their state may trigger various cerebral and physiological changes that are indeed likely to relieve their symptoms: a stimulation of immunity, changes to blood pressure or variations in the secretion of certain biological molecules such as cortisol (stress hormone), endorphins and enkephalins (neuromodulators produced naturally by our brains)....

“Our results have restored the possibility of administering a placebo under ethical conditions,” Pinsault enthuses. “They could contribute to greater medical democracy, considering that an increasing number of patients want to understand how the treatments they are offered actually work, so that they can participate in the decisions regarding their health.” Indeed, since the 1990s, the traditional paternalistic model of healthcare, where the carer alone decides on the treatments to be prescribed, is losing ground to the benefit of a different concept called “shared medical decision-making”. According to the French national health authority (HAS), this new model implies “exchanges of information and discussions in order to take joint decisions concerning the individual health of a patient”. As Pinsault puts it: “Because this involves explaining to a patient what the placebo effect is and how it works, the educated placebo fully meets these new expectations”....

CONTINUE HERE:
https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-truth-behind-the-placebo-effect

#placebo #studies

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The Soft Tyranny of Modern Medicine

EXTRACT:
A little more than a year ago, I attended a virtual symposium on “Nudges in Health Care.” The conference focused on how hospital systems, insurers, and private employers might promote better health by applying an approach known as “nudging,” developed in the field of behavioral economics. Nudging refers to the practice of altering an individual’s choices by structuring her so-called “choice architecture,” often without her awareness. Doing so, according to nudge advocates, can help individuals make decisions that benefit them and society.

Often-cited applications of nudging include making retirement contributions opt-out, rather than opt-in, and requiring restaurant patrons to ask for plastic utensils rather than simply giving them out by default. In both cases, individuals’ “choice sets” aren’t restricted; they are simply rearranged in a way that predisposes people to make decisions deemed beneficial. This is what sets the nudge approach apart from more coercive forms of social engineering: It promises to reprogram behavior while preserving freedom. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, whose 2008 book, Nudge, furnished the movement with a manifesto, call this “libertarian paternalism.”

Behavioral economics has been making inroads into American medicine for quite some time, and the nudge technique was given a major boost by the Obama administration, in which Sunstein served from 2009 to 2012. The Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, included nudges designed to coax individuals into purchasing private health insurance on the open marketplace. Since then, the approach has steadily gained steam: A quick search for the term “behavioral economics” in the National Library of Medicine database shows an exponential uptick in papers published on the subject in recent years.

Participants in “Nudges in Health Care” suggested interventions like sending patients text reminders containing “social norms,” meant to elicit certain emotive responses in the recipient (for example, reminding patients that “9 out of 10 people attend” their appointments). Another presentation explored “gamification” as a way to increase physical activity among patients with diabetes. Patients were given a wearable step counter and then sorted into different groups. The groups’ aims ranged from collaboration (patients worked together to score “points” corresponding to things like weight loss and improvements in blood sugar) to competition (patients were notified of others’ progress in an effort to boost their own motivation to exercise).

As a practicing physician, I felt a vague unease about the exercise of soft power being celebrated at the conference. The underlying assumption seemed to be that patients can’t be trusted to recognize their own failings; it is therefore the responsibility of the enlightened medical-research-industrial complex to forestall their undesirable decisions and optimize their health outcomes. Listening to the presentations of distinguished psychologists, economists, and physicians, I got the distinct sense that, in their vision of the world, there are two groups of people, divided by their degree of mastery over their own cognitive machinery. Those in full possession of such mastery, it would seem, should be empowered to manage the lives of those who lack it....

...As long as those with more or less direct access to the levers of power can focus their time and effort (and public funds) on nominal behavioral interventions like nudging; and as long as these efforts are supported by a cadre of experts, it’s safe to assume that those levers will remain largely untouched by those disempowered and dispossessed in market society....

(continued below)

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(continued from above)

...What we should be wary of are those accounts of innateness that, like now-discredited Victorian race science, are adduced to explain—and thereby legitimize—existing patterns of inequality. The incursion of intellectual programs like behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology into the practice of healing are merely the newest iterations. If we are to heed Rudolf Virchow’s dictum that “medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale”—and in doing so, to realize medicine’s emancipatory potential—we need to rid it of this sort of biodeterministic casuistry once and for all....

CONTINUE HERE:
https://compactmag.com/article/the-soft-tyranny-of-modern-medicine

#nudge #psyops #ethics #TheScience #racism #structure #agency

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Masks offer 'small' benefit against COVID, increased CO2 may be tied to stillbirths: research
CO2 concentration after 5 minutes jumps higher than U.S. Navy "exposure limits for submarines carrying a female crew," German researchers find. 12-hour D.C. bar exam may dump mask rule after memo leak.

EXTRACT:
The termination of the COVID-19 national emergency has not ended mask mandates in various jurisdictions and settings such as healthcare, even as more peer-reviewed research suggests that face coverings can cause more harm than good.

The Annals of Internal Medicine published the "final update" to a three-year "living, rapid review" of research on mask effectiveness against COVID infection, which concluded masks in healthcare and community settings "may be associated with a small reduction in risk" — 10-18% — but that the evidence is weak.

That echoes the recent assertion of former White House COVID advisor Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years. A forceful proponent of masking, he nonetheless told The New York Times Magazine last month that "masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent."

The Oregon Health and Science University researchers reviewed three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and 21 observational studies. Reductions were "nonstatistically significant" in a Danish RCT and Canadian case-control study and statistically significant in a small Brazil study.

"The evidence for mask use versus nonuse and more versus less consistent mask use remained insufficient," they concluded. Both observational studies and RCTs had "imprecision" and methodological limitations.

A much longer ongoing review of mask effectiveness against viral transmission, both COVID and influenza, found masks "probably make little to no difference" based on RCTs, the most rigorous form of scientific evidence.

A "scoping review" based on a "systematic literature search" of carbon-dioxide exposure and mask use, published in the Cell Press journal Heliyon, found that wearing a mask for more than 5 minutes can increase CO2 exposure to 1.41% to 3.2% of inhaled air, far above the 0.04% concentration in fresh air.

"US Navy toxicity experts set the exposure limits for submarines carrying a female crew to 0.8% CO2 based on animal studies which indicated an increased risk for stillbirths," the German researchers wrote, while mammals "chronically exposed" to 0.3% CO2 show "irreversible neuron damage in the offspring, reduced spatial learning" and "reduced circulating levels of the insulin-like growth factor-1."

Data also show "testicular toxicity in adolescents" in concentrations over 0.5%, they said.

"Circumstantial evidence exists that extended mask use may be related to current observations of stillbirths and to reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance in children born during the pandemic."

The findings are in line with an Italian mask study published in Environmental Health Insights last fall that found 5 minutes of CO2 buildup "approached the highest acceptable exposure threshold recommended for workers" under U.S. and European labor law, and "concerningly high concentrations" in minors and "virtually" everyone wearing high-quality respirators.

New York City's municipal health system recently reiterated it is still requiring masks for everyone 2 and older "regardless of vaccination status," and activists are pressuring a local hospital to reinstate its mandate by projecting slogans on the building.

The D.C. Court of Appeals, which administers the bar exam for the District, entered damage control after the Washington Free Beacon published its May 18 memo to test-takers requiring masks for the 12-hour exam scheduled for this summer. D.C. courts removed their own building mask rule in April....

CONTINUE HERE:
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/masks-offer-small-benefit-against-covid-increased-co2-may-be-related

#ThreeEleven #covid19 #masks #studies

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