No Religious Exceptions for Vaccines
and more conspiracy theories on how the pandemic was premediated!
US Healthcare Spending has cross $4 Trillion
To ease burdens on state governments over the course of the pandemic, the US federal government has taken on a lot of their expenditures. In total, this was an increase of over 35% since 2020.
However this figure includes not just federal spending but also out of pocket spending, private business spending, and state and local government spending. Although expenditures for each of the last 3 declined slightly more than 3% each over the past year.
Graph of increasing enrollment in Medicaid/CHIP
Supreme Court will NOT block the New York Vaccine Mandate
Supreme Court rule won’t block New York vaccine mandate
On Monday, Dec. 13, the Supreme Court declined to block New York’s vaccine mandate on healthcare workers despite emergency requests from a group of medical providers.
The issue came into fruition when a group called We the Patriots USA, Inc, challenged the mandate and argued that it allowed exemptions for those with medical objections but not those with religious objections. The anonymous group of nurses and doctors consists almost entirely of Catholics.
Health care workers that fail to comply with the mandate will be faced with termination and will be ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits. Workers in hospitals and nursing homes, home health agencies, adult centers, and hospices are all under this rule.
The group challenged the absence of religious exemption in September, arguing it violated the First Amendment and federal civil rights laws. However, a note approved by Pope Francis from exactly a year ago said that receiving the vaccine was morally permitted.
Other objectors claimed that they could not ethically take the vaccine because of the distant relation to fetal cell lines from abortions in the 1970’s and 1980’s. New York Attorney General Letitia James denies that the vaccines contain aborted fetal cells and stated that cell lines currently grown are thousands of generations removed from the ones collected from a fetus in 1973.
Despite the Pope’s decision and James’ statement, nurses in the group said that they are “devote Christians” and "object to deriving any benefit -- no matter how remote -- from a process involving abortion."
The Amplatzer septal occluder is as effective as surgery
The heart beats millions of times during one’s lifetime to pump blood throughout the body. The right side of the heart brings in deoxygenated blood and sends it to the lungs while the left side of the heart is responsible for pumping oxygenated blood to the entire body. In total, the human heart has four chambers, two atria and two ventricles.
The left atrium has a tiny pouch-like structure called the left atrial appendage (LAA), sometimes blood can collect in this pouch for a while. Stagnant blood is not a good thing, it clots, just like blood on the skin of a wound. This happening inside the heart is not a good thing! When clots form in the LAA, they can move down to the ventricle and be circulated in the rest of the body increasing the risk of a stroke.
To address this, Abbott recently got FDA approval for its LAA occluder (aka Amplatzer septal occluder). This device is implanted over the LAA and overtime, a layer of tissue will form over it which will trap all blood clots within the LAA preventing them from entering the bloodstream.
This device improves over the current standard of care which is performing surgery on the LAA. There were 1878 patients whose data was pooled in for tallying these results. Compared to the standard, this device was able to reduce both minor and major adverse events while maintaining a similar level of effectiveness. The implant also reduced patient hospital stays from 3 days to 1 day and overall costs from an average of $90,000 to $60,000.
Overall, the Amplatzer septal occluder improves upon the current standard of care by reducing overall patients costs and hospital stays while being as effective as surgery. It has also shown success in reducing patient anticoagulant use, with 80% patients stopped using anticoagulants after receiving this device.
Featured Fake News
Just because someone expertly uses their knowledge of history to predict a future event, doesn’t make that future event premeditated.
This past week, Dr. Peter McCullough explained to Joe Rogan that our current covid pandemic was premeditated.
Yeah… no.
The 2017 SPARS Pandemic scenario he is bringing attention to was not even a symposium. It was a multidisciplinary collaboration of experts in the field of social responses to health disasters and medical anthropology to write up what the effects a hypothetical pandemic could have on the modern world.
They were informed by history, and using that information they were able to accurately predict what would happen in a pandemic. Their hypothetical scenario was meant to be used as a call to action to improve healthcare. It was not a warning that someone behind the scenes is going to unleash a pandemic.
This is just another case of hindsight becoming 20/20. The same way some experts predicted that a plane hijacking terrorist attack like 9/11 before 9/11. The only thing most of them got wrong was that it wouldn’t be performed by the Japanese, whose world war 2 kamikaze attacks were the inspiration for many of these theories.
Anyone with a sufficiently deep understanding of historical events can make a pretty accurate prediction of the social and political responses to any major event. Just because they release those findings before the event happens, isn't proof that they caused the event or that the event was premeditated.
For more specific information on this particular piece of fake news, check out this article by Reuters!
Last week
we gave you the most up to date facts on Omicron, discussed inequities in anti-covid pill distributions, and discussed AI medical scribes in the clinic. To read the full newsletter, you can check it out here:
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