'When you don't try, you're creating an inhumane death, and you're creating an absolute certain death,' said Amanda Finnefrock, a mother whose twins were refused medical care after birth at 22 weeks and 5 days. //

While many corporate media outlets painted Trump’s Born Alive E.O. as another “appeal to religious voters,” or an “appeal to the right,” moms like Finnefrock see it not as a political stunt, but a “glimmer of hope.”

“We’ve been waiting so long, three years, for justice, or even an attempt at justice,” Finnefrock said. “We feel like for the first time in three years our sons’ death wasn’t in vain.”

Since the pandemic began, more Americans think U.S. health care is below average compared to other nations, and the possibility of moving to a system of universal coverage is up for debate. One potential model is Switzerland, which has achieved universal coverage while preserving the private marketplace. William Brangham reports as part of our series, The Best Health Care? America & the World.

Worldwide, malaria infects more than 500 million people annually, and kills at least 1 million. Most of the victims--375 million--are women and children.

"That's more victims than there are people in the United States and Canada combined," said Roy Innis, national chairman of the U.S.-based Congress of Racial Equality.

"We [have] emphasized fears about speculative risks from trace amounts of insecticides and ignored the real, immediate, life-or-death risks that those insecticides could prevent," said Innis. "The result has been another holocaust of African mothers, fathers, and children every few years, a death toll since the 1972 DDT ban that surpasses World War II's--over 50 million people. It is a travesty worse than colonialism ever was, a human rights violation of monstrous proportions."

"The result of the DDT ban has been an unspeakable death toll," observed film producer and preventive medicine doctor D. Rutledge Taylor in the March 20 issue of American Daily. "It is about the greatest human death toll in the known history of man, far greater than the holocaust and all the wars combined. It is time that we as generations of humans wake up and do what is right for humanity."

EU Threatens Africans

European Union officials and nongovernmental organizations, who claim DDT spraying inside Ugandan huts may result in trace levels of the chemical being found on exported Ugandan crops, threatened to restrict the import of Ugandan crops in retaliation for the nation's use of DDT. //

No Threat to Crops

Today, DDT is used in carefully controlled campaigns that spray tiny amounts of the chemical on the inside walls of canvas, mud-and-thatch, or cinder-block dwellings. A single treatment lasts up to eight months (versus eight hours for bug repellants with DEET, the most common active ingredient in mosquito repellants currently legal worldwide), keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from entering homes, irritates any that do come in so they don't bite, and kills many of those that land on the inside walls.

Used this way, virtually no DDT ever enters the surrounding environment, and results are astounding.

"Within two years of starting DDT programs, South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, and Swaziland slashed their malaria rates by 75 percent or more," Innis noted.

Ban Keeps Africans Poor

In addition to the direct annual death toll, malaria strangles African economies, preventing them from escaping near-universal poverty. According to a March 22 statement from the United Nations Integrated Regional Information Networks, "Economically, malaria drains the wealth of nations and households.

"Recently the [World Health Organization] reported that malaria costs Africa $12 billion a year. In countries where this disease is endemic, it grinds down the per-capita economic growth rate by 1.3 percent yearly. Poor households can spend up to 34 percent of their total income fighting malaria," the statement continued.

Weighing the risks.

Tens of thousands of health care workers across the United States are going without pay today, even as providers in the nation's hot spots struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

This "tale of two hospitals" is a function of clumsy, if well-intentioned, federal and state directives to halt all non-emergency procedures, which appeared at first blush to be a reasonable precaution to limit unnecessary exposure and safeguard staff, beds and equipment.

But instead of merely preserving hospital beds and other resources, this heavy-handed injunction has created a burden of its own design: a historic number of empty beds in systems left untouched by the pandemic.

Those hospitals have resorted to unprecedented levels of furloughs to stave off temporary budget shortfalls, but industry and economic trends point to more lasting outcomes unless immediate action is taken. //

Outpatient services account for half of all hospital revenue, which means hospitals are now making, and spending, half what they were this time last year.

It's not surprising, then, that the industry shed a record 43,000 health care workers in the first month of this crisis. Experts expect equal or greater layoffs this month, when the sustained forbearance has made revenue even more urgent.

Even before this crisis, one in four rural hospitals were vulnerable to closure. Now, many of these rural systems have more empty beds than ever before.

It doesn't take an economist to understand the underlying economics here. And it won't just be rural health care that will suffer—hospitals in every corner of the country might close for good. //

In the past 30 years, there have been only four months where the industry destroyed jobs. What used to be the worst case, in 2003, was just one-quarter of the losses experienced in March.

Hospitals are in the business of treating patients, but few are any more—which means more furloughs are ahead unless and until hospitals are allowed to perform their basic function: provide health care.

Because one in eight Americans is employed in health care, the fastest way to get Americans back to work is to allow hospitals to treat patients. Allowing these workers to get back on hospital payrolls will also save the federal government as much as $2 billion a day through safety net benefits.

Federal and state governments are making a massive gamble about a little-understood new virus. They are betting our future as a nation. //

The current gamble seems to be to shut down the nation indefinitely to suppress a virus that is especially deadly to some demographics and experts agree cannot be contained, only slowed. The New York Times claims the basis of many U.S. officials’ decisions so far is a report from Imperial College London, and other models that spit out similar results. It says to contain the virus it will be necessary to quarantine Americans for two- to three-month stretches repeatedly over the next 18 months. //

Just one competing projection, from the Hoover Institution, suggests “the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000″ (emphasis added). This is near the annual death rate due to flu in the United States alone. We don’t know if that estimate is accurate either, but that’s the point.

Here’s another hysteria skeptic with impeccable medical and statistical knowledge, John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from ‘influenza-like illness.’ If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.
Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? //

Sharyl Attkisson has gone through the U.S. deaths to March 17, and as in other countries they are overwhelmingly among the very elderly and people with pre-existing conditions. The entire population is not at severe risk from coronavirus — although we are at severe risk from a wrecked economy and welfare expansions beyond Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wildest dreams.

Six deaths are claimed to be caused by vaping. Approximately 1250 people A DAY die of smoking related illnesses. The loss of tax money is killing large municipalities that subsist on sin taxes and the federal government's largesse. Check the donor lists of the House and Senate members screeching loudest about taking away another right from us, and you will find Big Tobacco at the top of the list. Mr. Mills' statistics are right on, as they demonstrate the governments attachment to tobacco's teat. If the Feds are concerned with young people dying due to illnesses caused by nicotine delivery systems, why aren't they going for the throat and banning cigarettes outright?

The media is trumping up a fake national health crisis, but the only thing vaping poses an existential threat to the tobacco industry’s business model. //

The Trump administration last week announced plans to ban most flavored e-cigarettes. New York just announced an emergency order to ban flavored vaping. A sixth person has died from vaping-related lung disease, according to the alarmists in news media. //

A few weeks ago, my son shared with me that his public school anti-drug program focused almost entirely on discouraging vaping. That’s right, our leaders have prioritized the “threat” of vaping over heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and smoking. //

In contrast to the six deaths now linked to vaping, cigarette-related illnesses account for 480,000 deaths every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Tobacco kills almost half a million Americans per year. In a typical month in America, smoking kills approximately as many Americans as died in the entire length of the Vietnam War.

Vaping, we are told, is not an overall benefit to public health because it draws its customers from non-smokers. This is a lie. The real outcry is a result of the fact that vaping poses an existential threat to the tobacco industry’s business model. Sales of cigarettes declined 11.2 percent in May 2019. This follows 18 consecutive months of decline in tobacco sales.

In the future, these declines in cigarette purchases will translate directly to a decline in deaths. An 11.2 percent decline in smoking sales means that nearly 500,000 deaths-per-year figure could, in the years to come, also decline as fewer smokers introduce tobacco into their lungs. //

On average, local governments collect $1.73 per pack of cigarettes on top of the approximately $1.00 per pack the federal government collects. This translates to billions of dollars in tax revenue that federal, state, and local governments have come to depend upon. In theory, taxes accomplish the public good of discouraging people from smoking. But in practice, the hysteria over vaping shows our leaders care more about collecting taxes than they do about the health and well-being of their fellow Americans laboring under the self-destructive addiction of cigarettes. //

Is vaping safe? Compared to breathing fresh oxygen and eating kale round-the-clock, probably not. But it doesn’t need to be safer than kale. It needs to be safer than smoking. Since vaping is causing a rapid, voluntary decline and perhaps eradication of the dangerous habit of smoking tobacco, panic is being stoked to protect big tobacco.

The average list price for the antivenin is $3,198. The hospital charged $16,989.