This is What Freedom Looks Like

 

Money and power corrupt. We keep learning more about the many ways corruption has infiltrated our lives – government, politics, health care, education, corporations -and the more the betrayal of those we should be able to trust is exposed, the less naïve we become and the more determined we are to take our country back. We fight with one hand tied behind our backs because a free and honest press, intended by our founders to be a powerful weapon for exposing corruption and preserving freedom, has been abandoned in favor of spreading political lies. They have become the greatest enemy of freedom.

 

Andrew Montequin is a PhD student from Northwestern University who has a summer Fellowship at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  It would have been excusable if his front-page article last Monday titled “Vaccination Rates Low as Start of School Approaches - Misinformation Spreads Doubt Over Safety, Need” was just a case of an inexperienced “reporter” escaping the watchful eye of whoever should have been mentoring him, but this shoddy opinion piece masquerading as serious journalism is what we expect from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

 

The piece began with the typical trashing of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. RFK “has a history of spreading doubt and misinformation around vaccines. He wrapped up June by making false statements that pediatricians encourage vaccinations to make profits.”  After the misrepresentation came the “substantive” part of the article which cited a 2024 Wisconsin vaccination rate for the seven-vaccine series recommended by age 24 months at 68.8%. (The rate was reported at 69.7% for the entire country by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). The assertion that parents have “vaccine hesitancy” was addressed by Margaret Hennessy, a physician representing the Wisconsin chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) with a condescending and meaningless answer to the question of why children should be vaccinated: “disease is bad”. She went on to elaborate that illnesses we vaccinate against can cause death or permanent health problems like blindness.

 

Montequin suggested the vaccination rate may be the result of “hesitancy” driven by misinformation and parents who are oblivious to the need because vaccines have been so successful over the years they don’t perceive the threat from the dreaded diseases.

 

Honest and objective investigative reporting could have provided useful insights into what parents may be thinking as they make important decisions about their children’s health and might have made this a piece worth reading.

 

The ever-widening cracks in the myth that we can assume goodness and integrity form the foundations of most of our major institutions began about the time Donald Trump first came on the scene as a political figure willing to challenge and disrupt the status quo.  This created the backdrop for today’s skepticism and pushback from the American people who are no longer willing to passively believe what they hear or do as they are told.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a Political Target

 

RFK, like Donald Trump, is a man targeted for destruction by those he threatens.  The lies about him never end. RFK is not anti-vaccine. He is vaccinated and his children are vaccinated.  He is pushing hard to require the same rigor in testing for vaccines that is required for other drugs before they are called safe and effective.  He is deeply concerned about the epidemic of chronic illness in America’s children.  He wants to know why obesity, autism, diabetes, depression, anxiety and many other illnesses that were nearly non-existent 50 years ago are destroying so many lives today.  He believes we must get to the root causes by examining everything that has changed. He logically maintains until we know with certainty what the causes are, we cannot say with certainty what they aren’t.  Nothing is off limits for scrutiny and the significant increase in the number of vaccines recommended for children (from 8 diseases in 1970 to 17 diseases and up to 70 doses by the age of 18 today) is just one of the things that has changed during this period. The medical hierarchy’s insistence there is “no evidence” vaccines have played a role does nothing to satisfy the serious questions concerned parents have.  No evidence and certain proof are different things.

 

Kennedy wants the payment incentives for physicians and other providers to enable them to practice the best possible medicine with no conflicts of interest. He has expressed concerns that they are pressured into one size fits all standards because of how they are evaluated and paid and this has been twisted by the media and other detractors into “pediatricians give vaccinations to make a profit”.

 

The Guys in the White Hats are Working for the People Now

 

Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine and Health Economics at Stanford University and Marty Makary, a surgeon and Professor at Johns Hopkins University are well known for their character and expertise. They were heroes during the COVID pandemic, insisting on speaking the truth and questioning the science while the medical hierarchy viciously tried to silence and destroy them. Bhattacharya became known as “the man who talked back” and in a recent interview he described how America’s medical elite irreversibly destroyed their own credibility. Early in the pandemic when it became clear that the risks of COVID and the benefits of the COVID vaccine to young healthy children were small, and young men were experiencing high rates of myocarditis associated with the vaccine, there should have been serious discussions with parents about potential risks and benefits of vaccinating these groups. This did not occur. Likewise, there was no sound science to force lockdowns or masking the entire population but open debate was not allowed. The lesson, according to Bhattacharya: whenever risk is exaggerated on any side of an issue by so called experts, you cannot believe them.

 

Today, they stand shoulder to shoulder with RFK, Bhattacharya as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Makary as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They are going to bring a high level of integrity to these agencies and focus exclusively on the welfare of the American people. I expect them to uncover a lot of dirt before they are finished.

 

 Broken Trust is Hard to Restore

 

The conduct of the medical establishment during the COVID pandemic has disqualified them from any future presumption of our trust. They allowed science to be politicized and lied to the American people about the difference between best available evidence and proven facts.  Medical bureaucrats were willing to destroy medical colleagues who questioned the science and allowed the American people to suffer great harm at the hands of those who imposed government mandates without cause while they stood silently by.  They will not enjoy the benefit of the doubt again. 

 

 Think for Yourself

 

Parents have good reason to be very wary of the bureaucratic elites from the medical establishment who are politically connected, dominated by liberal ideology, and control the official positions of their professional associations.  In their arrogance, they often convey a strong preference for parents who blindly follow their advice without question.  The practice guidelines that flow from these bureaucracies are “consensus recommendations” based on “expert opinion”.  This means the “strength of the evidence” for the things they recommend varies widely from no science to strong science and must always be questioned and thoroughly evaluated by doctors and patients together in determining the best plan of care.

 

Last year, Marty Makary authored a book titled “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong and What it Means to Our Health” in which he details how medical group think has often led to public harm. One of his examples is how the “management” of peanut allergies in the 1990’s with no solid science at all produced the serious allergy problem experienced by children today.

 

Some of the “expert recommendations” from the American Academy of Pediatrics are outrageous and include obesity medication for 12-year-olds and bariatric surgery for obesity as young as 13. They attribute obesity to an “increasingly obesogenic environment” rather than choices, and urge providers to use victim-like “first person language” such as “child with obesity” rather than “obese child”.

 

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology along with the World Health Organization all promote the lie that a person can change their gender and a recent AAP update on gender reaffirmed support for “giving transgender adolescents access to the health care they need”.

 

Is it any wonder parents throughout Wisconsin and across the country are saying “no” to blindly following the medical “experts”?

 

This cloud has a silver lining.  Droves of pediatricians and primary care providers who take wonderful care of patients every day are committed to the truth and are as ideologically distant from the upper echelon of the medical hierarchy as their patients are.  They respect the decision-making responsibility of parents and support them with the best information and advice they have. Parents, working in partnership with physicians they trust and often love, consider the information they have, their children’s unique health situations, their beliefs and values, and make the decisions that are best for them and their families.  They cherish freedom and will never relinquish their right to self-determine. Good doctors will never ask them to.  If Andrew Montequin had approached his subject in the spirit of inquiry rather than the extreme bias that characterizes most of journalism today, he might have learned something. This is what freedom looks like.