#gender thalidomide

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Benjamin Ryan

Published: Jan 23, 2025

The most rigorous academic analysis to date of the research backing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as treatments for gender-related distress in young people has found it has produced ‘very uncertain’ evidence.

A pair of major new analyses of research into providing gender-transition drugs to adolescents and young adults have indicated that a prevailing orthodoxy in the U.S. medical community  — that such treatments are safe and effective for gender-distressed minors — is largely based on “very uncertain” scientific evidence.

The most rigorous such analyses of their kind to date, these new academic papers are the latest reports to cast doubt on the transgender movement’s battle, now on the defensive, to protect minors’ access to ultimately irreversible gender-transition treatments. The new analyses reach the damning conclusion that almost all the research assessing such treatments is decidedly unreliable at anticipating risks and benefits alike, thanks to consistently weak study designs that leave the door wide open for biased and unreliable results.

This sweeping finding echoes the four-year independent assessment of the field of pediatric gender medicine, called the Cass Review, that was commissioned by Britain’s National Health Service and published to great fanfare in April. The nearly 400-page report was anchored on the finding that the field was based on “remarkably weak evidence.” 

These critical assessments of the controversial medical practices – which in recent years have been banned for minors in 24 states – stand in direct conflict with a nearly united front among American medical associations who endorse the prescribing of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors experiencing gender dysphoria, which is distress stemming from a conflict between an individual’s sex and gender identity. Prominent societies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association have touted such treatments as effective and even life saving – since, advocates claim, gender treatments prevent suicides. 

Dr. Gordon Guyatt, a physician and professor at McMaster University in Ontario, effectively begs to differ, having found that there is no such clear-eyed certainty about the impacts of these treatments on young people. Known as the “godfather of evidence-based medicine,” Dr. Guyatt on Thursday published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood a pair of systematic review papers of pediatric gender medicine that are the first of their kind to pool study findings and conduct meta-analyses regarding particular outcomes among young people who have received these interventions. 

One of the analyses examined studies on puberty blockers given to youth with gender dysphoria. The other looked at studies of cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults.

Dr. Guyatt and his colleagues concluded in both papers that there is “considerable uncertainty regarding the effects” of each intervention, given that the available research almost entirely yielded evidence of “very low certainty.” Regarding hormone treatment in particular, the authors concluded that “we cannot exclude the possibility of benefit or harm.” The only research finding they considered to be of “high certainty” was that a small percentage of people who started cross-sex hormones subsequently experienced cardiovascular health events.

“These papers come to the same conclusion as many other evidence syntheses — which is that we do not have a good evidence base to suggest that these treatments are effective,” said Dr. Ronny Cheung, a consultant general pediatrician in London. Dr. Cheung is the lead author of a recent peer-reviewed rebuttal to a white paper spearheaded by Yale University pediatrician Meredithe McNamara that sharply criticized the Cass Review. 

The publication of these two papers from Dr. Guyatt is certain to provoke a chorus of disapproval among the many fierce defenders of pediatric gender medicine in America in particular, given their response to the Cass Review. That report has led the UK to ban puberty blockers outside of a promised clinical trial; and it has been broadly cited in litigation in the U.S. by opponents of these interventions for minors. Striking back, a coterie of academics such as Dr. McNamara has mobilized to cast doubt upon the report’s methodology and conclusions. 

These champions of pediatric gender medicine have asserted in a string of recent publications, most of which have not been peer reviewed, that, for example, Cass has held these medical interventions to an exceptionally and impossibly high evidentiary standard. Pediatric treatments for all sorts of conditions, some of these champions have pointed out, are routinely based on low-certainty or very-low-certainty evidence (as opposed to moderate- or high-certainty evidence).

“It is true that many treatments in medicine have been, and are, used without a satisfactory evidence base. Sometimes this has led to belated evidence gathering in terms of clinical trials, which have subsequently shown benefit,” Dr. Cheung said in an email. “Equally, others have resulted in disastrous outcomes for patients despite the best intentions and biological plausibility. But it is a logical fallacy to say that because many treatments are given without sufficient evidence base, therefore any treatment without sufficient evidence base should be given.”

Moti Gorin, an associate professor of philosophy at Colorado State University said that given the “complexity and vulnerability” of pediatric gender dysphoria cases, “our standards should be very high.” 

The Sun asked the lead authors of all of the recent Cass critiques to comment on Dr. Guyatt’s new papers. The sole respondent was Chris Noone, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Galloway, who argued that the new papers comment “on already identified limitations of research on these interventions related to sample size and comparison groups that are inevitable due to the small population, the impossibility of blinded comparison groups, and the ethics of preventing access to these interventions.” 

As he has previously, Dr. Noone criticized the particular tool Dr. Guyatt’s team used to score the quality of the evidence, which he said, “given the aforementioned limitations will automatically lead to a judgment of very low certainty in the evidence.” 

“The authors fail to articulate how a study of puberty blockers or hormone therapy for young people with gender dysphoria could ever produce evidence that is considered certain” by this tool, Dr. Noone said.

Dr. Guyatt was not available for comment.

The Trans Turning Point

The stakes have never been higher for the beleaguered and politicized medical field of pediatric gender medicine. The Supreme Court is set to rule, probably in June, on the constitutionality of state bans on gender treatments for minors in a case, first marshalled by the ACLU, in which the Biden Administration challenged Tennessee’s law. And while Donald Trump has yet to make good on his campaign promise to further restrict access to pediatric gender-transition treatment, within hours of his inauguration on Tuesday he signed a sweeping executive order attacking what his administration calls “gender ideology” throughout federal law. 

This turning point in the history of transgender advocacy writ large follows a decade of dramatic growth in the population of young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria or otherwise identifying as trans, both in the United States and across the Western World. A research letter out of Harvard published in JAMA Pediatrics on Jan. 6 found about one in 1,000 privately insured 17-year-olds received cross-sex hormones between 2018 and 2022; and recent trends suggest this figure was likely considerably higher at the end of that period, especially among biological girls.

Another paper published Thursday in the Archives of Disease in Childhood reported that between 2011 and 2021, diagnoses of gender dysphoria among adolescents in primary care practices in England surged by more than 50-fold. Following a pattern well documented in the United States, diagnosis rates were similar between biological boys and girls until 2015, at which point they split, until the rate among natal girls was nearly twice that of boys in 2021. By that time, about one in 250 youths had such a diagnosis at age 18. Levels of anxiety, depression, and self-harm were high among this overall population, especially the girls.

The 2020s has seen the publication of a slew of systematic literature reviews – the gold standard of scientific evidence – assessing the quality of research and the resulting reliability of the evidence it produces among studies of gender-transition treatments for youths. All these papers have reached essentially the same conclusion: that the evidence backing prescribing gender-transition medications to minors is wanting and highly uncertain. 

Such critical findings have led the health authorities in a swath of Northern and Western European nations, including the UK, to reclassify such treatments as experimental and to sharply restrict access to minors — or to at least consider pulling back on such access. In America, which lacks a comparable centralized health authority, medical-practice standards tend to be set by medical associations; and with the exception of one group representing plastic surgeons, those societies have overwhelmingly held firm in their support of such interventions. 

The Evidence-Based Medicine Revolution Confronts Pediatric Gender Medicine

With Dr. Guyatt as one of its talismen, the field of evidence-based medicine emerged during the 1990s as a movement to hold scientific evidence to a higher standard. The goal was to assess the likelihood that the findings of research on any particular subject would actually bear out in clinical practice and that the recommendations based on that evidence were arrived upon in a rigorous and transparent way. 

The field, for example, sought to confront the fact that, even if multiple studies reach similar findings, this might be due to the fact that they were all biased in a similar way and not because the results were valid. The type of analyses pioneered by Dr. Guyatt are meant to identify potential sources of bias in scientific research and to separate the evidentiary wheat from the chaff.

“Systematic review procedures block opportunities for cherry-picking studies that support only one side of an issue and help ensure all relevant studies are included,” said James Cantor, a Toronto psychologist and sex researcher who has often served as a paid expert hired by states to aid in defending their bans of this treatment. (Dr. McNamara has conversely often served as a paid expert for the other side. Both she and Dr. Cantor have been criticized for never having treated gender dysphoria in a minor.)

“The methods also work to ensure that all studies get evaluated with the same standards, minimizing opportunities to be more critical or favorable with studies on one side,” Dr. Cantor continued. “Because so many authors have been engaging in exactly these kinds of biased tactics when claiming what the science says about the effects of medicalized transition, the anti-bias methods of systematic reviews are even more important than usual.” 

For the new paper on puberty blockers published Thursday, Dr. Guyatt and his colleagues scoured the relevant medical literature and settled on 10 key studies to analyze. Those papers, they concluded, “provided very low certainty evidence,” meaning the investigators had very little confidence the findings reflected the true impact of the treatment on gender dysphoria, global function (how well a person functions in daily life), depression, and bone mineral density.

Dr. Guyatt’s puberty blocker paper also highlighted a review paper out of England that recently called into question the veracity of the oft-repeated claim that the treatments are “fully reversible.” 

The cross-sex hormone analysis examined 24 studies in which the average participant was younger than age 26 upon starting treatment (the average age ranged from age 15 to 25). These papers, the authors concluded, largely provided very low certainty evidence regarding such treatment’s impacts on gender dysphoria, global function, depression and bone mineral density changes. One study, which had an untreated comparison group, provided simply “low certainty” evidence—meaning the investigators had merely “limited confidence” it reflected the true effect of the treatment—that taking hormones was linked to a somewhat lower odds of having depression.

The only outcome the investigators considered to be of “high certainty,” meaning they were “very confident” it was close to reflecting the treatment’s true impact in clinical practice, was that there was a 4% rate of cardiovascular events among biological females 7 to 109 months after they started testosterone. That was due to a 2019 research letter by Dutch investigators that found that estrogen use in patients who were born male, with a median age of 30, was tied to a nearly doubled rate of stroke and a greater than fourfold higher rate of blood clots; and that testosterone use in biological females, with a median age of 23, was tied to an almost quadrupled heart attack rate.

Dr. Noone said that particular study could not isolate the impact of hormones on such outcomes, and that the heart disease events might have been driven by higher rates of tobacco smoking among trans people or the impacts of anti-trans stigma.

Overall, the design of the puberty blocker and cross-sex hormones literature reviews meant they could provide insights into the quality of life of youth on the drugs, the study authors concluded. But the analyses could not answer questions about the impacts of the drugs, such as whether quality of life or global function is better among those receiving the medications compared with others who were not.  

The Battle Over Research Standards

Many advocates of pediatric gender medicine have insisted that randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, of gender-transition treatments for minors are not ethical—because, they argue, the benefits of these interventions are already so well established. 

There is broader consensus among research experts that RCTs might not be feasible. For one, it would be impossible to blind such a study, since it soon becomes obvious to any young person whether they are experiencing physical changes indicative of being on hormones or off of blockers. And youth randomized to an untreated control group might be disinclined to remain in a study they saw as providing them no benefit.

All that said, Dr. Guyatt and his colleagues wrote in their new papers that to understand the impacts of both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on young people, “methodologically rigorous studies,” such as those that follow a population over time “are needed to produce higher certainty evidence.” They noted that this includes “RCTs (if ethical)” for blockers in particular. 

Thus, the study authors did not insist on “high certainty” evidence, as many critics of the evidence-based approach to assessing pediatric gender medicine often attest, accurately or not, is the topline argument stemming from systematic literature reviews of the field; they called for higher certainty. 

Similarly, despite a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that the Cass Review set the standard at the RCT level, the British report actually made a more general call for improved methodological rigor in studies of these treatments. 

Dr. Guyatt’s papers further argued that physicians counseling young people about receiving these interventions have an obligation to communicate to these patients and their caregivers about the very low certainty of the supporting scientific evidence. Acknowledging the crucial role that patients’ so-called values and preferences play in such clinical decision-making, the investigators called upon the authors of clinical guidelines and policy makers to be transparent about “whose values they prioritize when developing treatment recommendations and policies.”

Supporters of minors’ access to these medications often claim that the rate of regret-based detransitioning — in which someone stops gender-transition drugs and reverts to identifying and presenting as their birth sex — among those who started treatment as minors is extremely low. The Cass Review, though, found that due to limited patient follow-up, the true detransitioning rate is unknown. 

Approximately two dozen detransitioners have filed lawsuits against their care providers, often claiming to have suffered irreversible harms to their body. Many of these plaintiffs are represented by a Texas firm established by a quartet of former white-shoe attorneys who set up their practice for the sole purpose of representing detransitioners — a population that they anticipate will only grow given the recent surge in trans identification among adolescents. 

The authors of the two new analyses found they could reach no conclusions about rates of regret, anxiety or pelvic pain tied to receiving puberty blockers or hormones. Nor could they reach any conclusions about whether cancer was connected to hormone use or whether puberty blockers were linked to the suicide death rate. The analysis on hormones referenced one two-year U.S. study, published in 2023, in which, among 315 persons who started cross-sex hormones between ages 12 and 20, two died by suicide. Dr. Guyatt’s team deemed this association based on very low certainty evidence. 

Nor did these analyses provide any substantial insights into a key concern: fertility. Concerns that providing treatment for childhood gender dysphoria with blockers and hormones might cause infertility have motivated many critics of this medical field to call for a higher quality of evidence than might otherwise be acceptable for pediatric medical interventions. 

Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies pediatric gender medicine, praised Dr. Guyatt’s new analyses as the most “methodologically rigorous systematic reviews” in this field to date. He said that a notable shortcoming of the papers was the limited information they provided about various potential harms of these treatments — a fault he attributed to the wider medical field.

“Gender clinics and clinicians are usually the ones who study medical interventions in this area,” Dr. Sapir said, “And they have little interest or incentive to conduct rigorous, longitudinal studies on the harms of the interventions they adamantly support.” 

Following the Science

Dr. Guyatt’s papers are likely to impact ongoing litigation over pediatric gender medicine. Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, made that evident in a statement to the Sun, when he praised the new papers and said they confirmed “that states like Alabama are on firm footing in restricting these treatments for minors and by encouraging the medical community to finally follow the science itself.”

The papers did not, however, call for such bans, rather for better research. Some of the nation’s major pediatric gender care research hubs are in states that have passed such bans, which threaten to end their research entirely.

As Mr. Marshall’s scathing amicus brief to the Supreme Court for the case over Tennessee’s ban laid bare, records that the attorney general subpoenaed from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a prominent transgender medical-activist group, revealed that WPATH suppressed publication of systematic reviews it had commissioned from evidence-based medicine experts at Johns Hopkins University as it developed its 2022 revision to its widely referenced trans-care guidelines.

“It is no great mystery why WPATH acted the way it did,” said Mr. Marshall. In a nod to Dr. Guyatt’s advice for guidelines committees, Mr. Marshall continued: “As these latest systematic evidence reviews confirm, there is woefully insufficient evidence to support WPATH’s strong recommendation that kids be given puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to treat their gender-related distress.”

Dr. Guyatt’s papers are likely to be attacked due to their funding source. The research was commissioned by the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, or SEGM, which is a collective of physicians and researchers who are skeptical of the evidence supporting pediatric gender medicine and are regarded as an adversary by the transgender rights movement. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center has gone so far as to brand SEGM a hate group that traffics in pseudoscience. (The SPLC has itself faced heavy criticism from the right in recent years for expanding its label of hate groups to apply broadly to religious conservatives and other groups that oppose liberal orthodoxy.) However, a three-day conference SEGM held in New York City in the fall of 2023 was almost entirely lacking in politics or any trace of prejudice or animus against transgender people. Instead, it offered a trenchant crash course in evidence-based medicine principles and their application to this field. 

That said, SEGM’s critics assert that the organization leans on such intellectual principles as a mere pretext to sow doubt among the public and policymakers alike and, above all, to lend academic credibility to efforts to outright ban these interventions.

In an interview, SEGM cofounder Zhenya Abbruzzese, a health researcher, firmly denied any such political motivation. She further said that Dr. Guyatt’s team kept her organization “at arm’s length” throughout the work on the review papers, and, unlike the Johns Hopkins team’s ultimate arrangement with WPATH, the academic team had full right to publish regardless of the findings. 

Speaking to the effort in modern medicine to treat gender dysphoria in young people with blockers and hormones, Ms. Abbruzzese said, “We are operating in the dark. But we don’t have to be.” 

She pointed to the robust national health databases in many European nations, in particular in Scandinavia, and argued that researchers could reach at least moderately certain conclusions about the potential impacts of these treatments by conducting research based on those health records. 

“It’s time to look at that data in a very rigorous way,” Ms. Abbruzzese said. 

Researchers have already conducted such health-database analyses regarding gender transition surgery’s association with mental health outcomes in Swedish adults and cross-sex hormones’ link to suicide deaths in Finnish youths. 

Both studies found the interventions were tied to no such benefits.

[ Archive: https://archive.today/GSsQP ]

==

History will judge this as worse than thalidomide. It's been clear for a long time that there's no evidence supporting the effectiveness of these 'treatments.' The evidence in support is of poor quality, while the evidence against shows that these treatments are not only ineffective but also harmful. Unlike thalidomide, which was withdrawn very quickly, the present day scandal continues on despite everything we already know solely because of suicidal empathy.

[abigailspinach]

Currently I believe it would be uncommon for pharma sponsored US Clinical trials exclude women automatically.

The IRB and FDA would kick it back to you and make you rewrite it before you start unless you can provide a legitimate rationale.

Legit rationale could be something like the investigational product is only intended for cis men (I’m thinking something like erectile dysfunction?) Or if you have preclinical animal data showing teratogenic effects.

From Time “In March of 2024, a major advance occurred when President Joe Biden signed an executive order for the White House Initiative on Advancing Women’s Health Research and Innovation with the goal of “getting women the answers they need about their health” and providing greater funding for this research. This follows the passage of a 1993 law, mandating the inclusion of women in human clinical trials for all research funded by the National Institutes of Health.”

Also, “In a 2022 study in Contemporary Clinical Trials, researchers evaluated the enrollment of female participants in 1,433 clinical trials of drugs and devices in the U.S. between 2016 and 2019. Of the 302,664 participants, on average 41% were female; this was true in cardiovascular disease and cancer.”

This may not be due to researcher’s sexism. It is also probable that that women, bearing the bulk of household and child rearing duties, do not have the available time to make it to study visits.

I enrolled in a Covid vaccine trials and it was nine visits of 1-3 hours over a year. My relative who is a single mother would not have been able to attend that number of visits.

I work in pharma clinical research operations. Monitoring is predominantly women… like a 75% women to men ratio. (We tend to be nurses who move into research then monitoring and then up the ladder into all the other aspects). Data management seems to be a bit more 50/50.

It is true pregnant women are generally excluded from phase 1-3 trials. The FDA might require a post approval study specifically requiring a study of pregnant persons. Or the pharma company will be monitoring AE reporting and collect information from insurance companies. It’s not ideal. The thalidomide disaster is used in every GCP ICH training. There is much ongoing discussion on this topic.

Also there is work ongoing to make clinical trials for diverse for gender identity.

Is this enough? No. Is my experience limited to industry pharma trials (no academic research) Yes.

But I have worked on 70+ trials and I think two were exclusive to men and I am working on one now specific for pregnant persons. So it’s complicated.

I found out one of the excuses they use for only doing clinical trials on cis men is that experimental drugs ‘may do harm to a woman’s reproductive tract’. As if there aren’t teratogens that affect sperm. As if that’s a valid reason to never test the efficacy of a substance on AFAB individuals. They really do see us as just a womb and nothing else and see that womb as inherently unknowable and unpredictable.

[erebusvincent]

Something is going wrong in our genes. What if the problem isn’t naturally-occurring but rather the result of too many drugs in our systems, particularly those of pregnant women?

Unless drugs cause obvious birth defects—think of the thalidomide disaster of the late 1950s and early 60s that resulted in tens of thousands of babies being born with heartbreaking deformities such as limbless torsos—they seldom make headlines. Even widely used anti-seizure medications, known to cause physical and mental impairments in exposed offspring, are barely known for these effects. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this whole ordeal it’s that countless millions of you are walking around oblivious to the (sometimes massive amounts of) drugs you were exposed to in utero. Almost all of your records are long gone, and you will likely never know their impact on your development.

…

More importantly, we should consider other common medications that impact hormone signaling and also affect sexual differentiation of the brain. It’s not only synthetic sex hormones that alter how sex hormones work. This also includes anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, anti-epileptic drugs, general anesthesia, and medications used in IVF and assisted reproduction. Add to that a whole soup of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our environment. To some extent, we are all still guinea pigs.

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day.

Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday.

‘Sushi’ means sour rice.

The ‘prat’ in ‘pratfall’ means ‘buttocks’.

Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud.

69 has been sexual slang since at least 1790.

Optimists are, on average, cleverer than cynics.

Farmers get the most sex out of any profession.

The Roman Catholic Church is richer than Croatia.

People with bigger brains take more daytime naps.

Earth has lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years.

In the 1870s, New York had a school for aspiring criminals.

Houses in Britain numbered 13 cost £9000 less than average.

Your immune system has the ability to kill you in 15 minutes.

Entomologist John Midgely has just discovered a fly that can’t fly.

A gender-neutral equivalent of ‘sugar daddy’ is ‘glucose guardian’.

Athletes appear larger if they wear a bigger number on their jersey.

'Playing chess with the pope' is an Icelandic euphemism for having a poo.

One in four currently charting pop songs in the UK samples an older song.

In 1805, British manufacturers made a chamber pot containing Napoleon’s head.

45% of men in the UK would be uncomfortable saying “I love you!” to a male relative.

If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, we could save one million lives a year.

Students who complete a ‘Science Of Happiness’ course are happier than those who don’t.

In 2014, a pine tree planted in memory of George Harrison died after an infestation of beetles.

When a group of people are laughing, people tend to look at the person they trust/like the most.

In 1907, French waiters went on strike for better pay, more time off and the right to have moustaches.

According to new research, Vlad The Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, may have been vegetarian.

In 2010, McDonalds mistakenly packed and distributed 5000 Happy Meals with a condom instead of a toy.

When a drone bee mates with the queen, he releases his sperm with such force that it can cause an audible pop.

Due to their many customisation options, there are 383 billion different ways to order a latte at Starbucks.

The average woman absorbs up to five pounds of damaging chemicals a year thanks to beauty products.

Caffeine is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, the same as cocaine, thalidomide, nylon, TNT and heroin.

When a woman no longer gets frustrated and upset with you, you can almost guarantee that she doesn't care anymore.

When German economist Edgar Jaffé died, D.H. Lawrence sent a letter to his widow saying he was glad Edgar was dead.

Fish from the Phallicthys genus (literally ‘penis fish’) can have phalluses as big as half their total body length. (Crikey!)

John Cena, WWE superstar, has granted more than 400 Make-A-Wish requests, more than anyone in the charity's history.

Scientists say the brain purposely forgets certain memories in order to avoid information overload and emotional hangovers.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has towns called Intercourse and Paradise. It takes six minutes to get from one to the other.

Stephen Hawking once held a party for time travellers. However, nobody came because he sent out the invitation after the party.

50,000 fake PhDs are estimated to be purchased every year in the United States, while only 40,000 PhDs are earned legitimately.

Studies show that by eating a big breakfast, you won’t feel as hungry the rest of the day, which can lead to more nutritional food choices.

According to a new paper in Nature Human Behavior, opposites do not attract. Over 80% of traits in couples were rated as similar and only 3% of their traits were substantially different.

Male palm cockatoos make drumsticks out of tree branches and rhythmically tap them to attract females. When they are done drumming, they tend to throw away their drumsticks.

In 2018, robbers in Belgium were told by a shop owner that he might have more cash for them to steal if they came back at 6:30. When they returned three hours later, they were promptly arrested by police who’d been tipped off.

Some football matches are now filmed with AI-powered cameras designed to track the ball during play. Much to the annoyance of viewers, during a 2020 Inverness Caledonian Thistle vs. Ayr United match, one camera kept confusing the ball with a bald-headed linesman.

Actor Jack Nicholson grew up believing his biological mother was his sister. When his mother got pregnant at a young age, his grandmother (who he thought was his biological mother) raised him as her son. Nicholson didn't find out this information until 1974, when he was already in his thirties.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.

[thearbourist]

Children Are Bring Harmed - The Lack of Ethics in "Gender Affirming" Medicine

If you are violating one of the principles of human medicine – first do no harm – it may be wise to reconsider your position on ‘gender-affirming treatment’ regardless of how lucrative it is. “Children are being harmed. Young people are being harmed.  In many ways, this story is not new. From snake oil to thalidomide, from lobotomies to opioids, medicine has a long history of fake cures and…

[jh-newman-opn]

ok actually back on this--- @ everyone going "I'd judge them but it's none of my business" my guys. this is not a random hypothetical. this happens. the literature describes it as "femicide", "female feticide" or "infanticide" and it's literally banned under Indian law because the practice (remains!) so widespread. You don't get to be like. "Sure that sounds abhorrent but you're always gonna get a few freaks so we shouldn't require nice normal people like me to give a reason for wanting an abortion bc obviously nobody sane would do this." PEOPLE DO THIS. It's illegal in the UK under the Serious Crime Act of 2015 bc gender testing was being abused to just abort female babies until parents got a boy. It's been observed that in cultures in which sex-selective abortion is seen as acceptable, this leads to neglect and infanticide of female children after they're born.

Y'all are like. western gaze this white privilege that. get out of your blinkered individualist bubbles and be like. wHy Do I CaRE wHaT oThER pEoPLe dO WitH tHeIR bOdiES--- because maybe we should care about other people's lives and wellbeing on a societal level hmmm how about that. Y'all seem perfectly happy with to """control women's bodies"" when it comes to drinking or taking thalidomide during pregnancy but for some reason telling people they maybe shouldn't be killing children that aren't the right sex is unacceptable bc uhhhh freedom I guess. think about that maybe.

This is a bad idea but:

[incoherentbabblings]

Sometimes I re-read my old undergrad essays from and nodding my head sagely as I read what I assumed made perfect sense at the time but now looking back I can only go wooft if you know what I mean. I both miss being that involved in academia but also thinking I didn't do enough I didn't hold enough of my own opinions. I needed more time in a way. To have a second wack at some of what I wrote knowing what I know now? Argh, that's the problem ain't it?

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

To my knowledge testosterone doesn't render you infertile until your ovaries have atrophied from prolonged usage (and you can probably tell because that causes severe cramping). You can easily get pregnant on T, but it's advised to stop taking it during gestation to avoid complications. However, there's no telling what kind of long-term effects this might have on a child that developed in a woman's body that's been altered to an unknown degree, which is pretty concerning.

I once had a disagreement with a nurse friend of mine over my wondering aloud about the possibility that the elevated estrogen levels in the water supply (due to the massive production of birth control pills the past 60 years) that have led to observable birth defects in, for instance, frogs, might also be a contributing factor to the rise of subtler things like gender dysphoria and asexuality in humans.

Her only response was to repeat the Alex Jones "it's turning the frogs gay!" viral moment, even though, as I understand it, Jones was fundamentally correct in the information he was sharing, he just misspoke in the moment by saying 'gay' when he actually meant 'hermaphrodite'.

Thinking she might have some medical reason to dismiss the idea out of hand that I was unaware of, I asked for her to explain more, but she, perplexingly, had nothing more to add. She just entirely rejected the idea out of hand and wouldn't explain why.

It's been something I've been thinking on for a long time after finding out that around the same time thalidomide was being given to pregnant women (late 1950s-early 60s), large quantities of testosterone were also being experimentally given to pregnant women to help with morning sickness. The horrific 10,000+ birth deformities that accompanied thalidomide being administered are well documented, and quickly led to it being taken off the market, but the long-term effects of testosterone - and, in the pill and hormone replacement, estrogen - may have gone unnoticed because of them having no similarly obvious surface physical manifestations. The only example of this I'm aware of being studied is with testosterone given to mothers being linked to autism, which has, after all, itself been defined as the 'extreme male brain'.

I just want to stress my position is not that mass-produced male and female hormones are THE cause of any of the above, only that they may be an underlying long-term factor that is being completely overlooked.

[metamatar]

relevant again.

For example, the number of fingers on a human hand or toes on a human foot is genetically determined: the genes code for five fingers and toes in almost everyone, and five fingers and toes develop in any normal environment. But the heritability of number of fingers and toes in humans is almost certainly very low. That’s because most of the variation in numbers of toes is environmentally caused, often by problems in fetal development. For example, when pregnant women took thalidomide some years ago, many babies had fewer than five fingers and toes. And if we look at numbers of fingers and toes in adults, we find many missing digits as a result of accidents. But genetic coding for six toes is rare in humans (though apparently not in cats). So genetically caused variation appears to be small compared to environmentally caused variation. If someone asks, then, whether number of toes is genetic or not, the right answer is: “it depends what you mean by genetic.” The number of toes is genetically determined, but heritability is low because genes are not responsible for much of the variation.

Conversely, a characteristic can be highly heritable even if it is not genetically determined. Some years ago, when only women wore earrings, the heritability of having an earring was high because differences in whether a person had an earring were “due” to a genetic (chromosomal) difference. Now that earrings are less gender-specific, the heritability of having an earring has no doubt decreased. But neither then nor now was having earrings genetically determined in anything like the manner of having five fingers. The heritability literature is full of cases like this: high measured heritabilities for characteristics whose genetic determination is doubtful.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The inclusion of sex-specific information in textbooks is dependent on the availability of sex-specific data, but because women have largely been excluded from medical research this data is severely lacking. Even the very basics of sex determination have a sex data gap: since the landmark 1990 paper that identified the Y chromosome as ‘the’ sex-determining region, the female sex has – the irony – been seen as the default. But in this case, the default didn’t mean we focused on the female. Rather, research instead focused on testes development as the supposedly ‘active’ process, while female sexual development was seen as a passive process – until 2010, when we finally started researching the active process of ovarian determination. Most early research into cardiovascular disease was conducted on men, and women continue to be underrepresented, making up only 25% of participants across thirty-one landmark trials for congestive heart failure between 1987 and 2012. 

Women represent 55% of HIV-positive adults in the developing world, and in parts of Africa and the Caribbean women aged five to twenty-four are up to six times more likely to be HIV-positive than young men of the same age. We also know that women experience different clinical symptoms and complications due to HIV, and yet a 2016 review of the inclusion of women in US HIV research found that women made up only 19.2% of participants in antiretroviral studies, 38.1% in vaccination studies and 11.1% in studies to find a cure. 

Because of their routine exclusion from clinical trials we lack solid data on how to treat pregnant women for pretty much anything. We may not know how a disease will take hold or what the likely outcome may be, although the WHO warns that many diseases can have ‘particularly serious consequences for pregnant women, or can harm the foetus’. Some strains of influenza virus (including the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus) have ‘particularly severe symptoms during pregnancy’. There is also evidence that SARS can be more severe during pregnancy. It is of course understandable that a pregnant woman may be reluctant to take part in medical research, but this doesn’t mean that we have to just throw our hands up in the air and accept that we know nothing: we should be routinely and systematically tracking, recording and collating pregnant-women’s health outcomes. But we aren’t – not even during pandemics: during the 2002-4 SARS outbreak in China, pregnant-women’s health outcomes were not systemically tracked and ‘consequently’, the WHO points out, ‘it was not possible to fully characterize the course and outcome of SARS during pregnancy’. Another gender data gap that could have been so easily avoided, and information that will be lacking for when the next pandemic hits.

Like the failure to include women in anatomy textbooks, the failure to include women in medical trials is a historical problem that has its roots in seeing the male body as the default human body, but this traditional bias was radically enhanced in the 1970s, to the great detriment of women’s health, following one of the biggest medical scandals of the twentieth century. In 1960 doctors began prescribing thalidomide to pregnant women who suffered from morning sickness. The drug, which had been available as a mild over-the-counter sedative in many countries since the late 1950s, was considered safe because its developers ‘could not find a dose high enough to kill a rat’. But while it didn’t kill rats, it did affect foetal development (something that in fact the manufacturers knew as early as 1959). Before the drug was taken off the market in 1962, over 10,000 children had been born around the world with thalidomide-related disabilities. In the wake of the scandal, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidelines in 1977 excluding women of childbearing potential from drug trials. This exclusion went unquestioned. The acceptance of the male norm went unquestioned. The male norm continues to go unquestioned by many today, with some researchers continuing to insist, in the face of all the evidence, that biological sex doesn’t matter. One public-health researcher revealed that she had received the following feedback on two different grant applications: ‘I wish you’d stop with all this sex stuff and get back to science’, and ‘I’ve been in this field for 20 years and this [biological difference] doesn’t matter’. It isn’t just anonymous notes, either. A 2014 op-ed published in the journal Scientific American complained that including both sexes in experiments was a waste of resources; in 2015 an op-ed in the official scientific journal of the US National Academy of Sciences insisted that ‘focusing on preclinical sex differences will not address women’s and men’s health disparities’.

Alongside insisting that sex differences don’t matter, some researchers advocate against the inclusion of women in research on the basis that while biological sex may matter, the lack of comparable data arising from the historical data gap makes including women inadvisable (talk about adding insult to injury). Female bodies (both the human and animal variety) are, it is argued, too complex, too variable, too costly to be tested on. Integrating sex and gender into research is seen as ‘burdensome’. It is seen as possible for there to be ‘too much gender’, and for its exclusion to be acceptable on the basis of ‘simplification’ – in which case it’s worth noting that recent studies on mice have actually shown greater variability in males on a number of markers. So who’s too complicated now? Beyond the argument that women’s bodies, with their fluctuating, ‘atypical’ hormones, are simply inconvenient research vessels, researchers also defend their failure to include women in trials by claiming that women are harder to recruit. And it is certainly true that, due to women’s care-giving responsibilities they have less leisure time and may find it harder to make, for example, clinic appointments during the school run. However, this is an argument for adapting trial schedules to women, rather than simply excluding them, and in any case, it is possible to find women if you really want to. While reviews of FDA-mandated medical product trials found that women made up only 18% of participants in trials for endovascular occlusion devices (used if your foetal blood vessel hasn’t closed of its own accord) and 32% of participants in studies on coronary stents (which, incidentally, are another device where women have worse outcomes than men), women represented 90% and 92% of participants in facial wrinkle correction trials and dental device trials, respectively. 

- Caroline Criado-Pérez’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

[cha0ticg0th]

Thalidomide <- gender neutral name

Formaldehyde <- girl name

Asbestos <- boy name

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir

Published: Apr 4, 2024

Across the United States, thousands of parents have consented to having their children’s puberty stopped with a class of drugs called gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists. Known colloquially as “puberty blockers,” these drugs overstimulate the pituitary gland to the point of preventing it from sending signals to the ovaries or testes to start producing the hormones responsible for puberty.

Parents who have consented to these drugs for their children love their kids dearly, but they’ve consented under entirely false pretenses. The doctors who’ve advised them say that puberty blockers are known to improve mental health — that they are even life-saving — and that they are fully reversible and just give kids “time to think.” None of this is true.

Major American medical associations say that “gender-affirming care” for kids is “medically necessary” and “life-saving.” Health authorities Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the U.K. disagree. Last month, the National Health Service of England decommissioned puberty blockers as a treatment of adolescent gender dysphoria. “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” the NHSE explained.

Imagine if American doctors told parents the following truths. The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQ and brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well. Over 93 percent of kids who take these drugs go on to cross-sex hormones, which lead to permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers function as suicide-prevention measures. Finland’s top gender clinician has called the suicide narrative “purposeful disinformation” and “dangerous.” For all these reasons, health authorities in a growing number of countries, including some of the most LGBT-friendly, are now prioritizing talk therapy.

How many parents would consent to puberty blockers under these circumstances? Very few, if any.

It is common for drugs to enter pediatric use after evidence of their success in adult medicine. The opposite happened in gender medicine. It was the failure of “sex reassignment” in adult men to achieve satisfactory cosmetic outcomes and improve life functioning that led a group of clinicians in the Netherlands to propose starting the “reassignment” process in childhood.

Their hypothesis was as technologically appealing as it was ethically dubious: since males could not reverse the effects of testosterone-fueled puberty to pass as women, it would be beneficial to these men to have their puberty bypassed altogether.

The Dutch recognized the dilemma but thought they found a way around it. Relying on their experience using puberty blockers to treat a condition known as central precocious puberty (CPP), they argued that blockers were fully reversible and thus part of the diagnostic process. If it turned out that the kid wasn’t “truly trans,” the drugs would be discontinued and puberty allowed to resume.

Their argument was dubious from the get-go. First, CPP has an objective diagnosis, based on a blood sample, whereas gender transition is based on the adolescent’s feelings and experiences, which are subject to change. In a political climate such as ours, in which mere exploration of the reasons for rejecting one’s body can be labeled “conversion therapy,” differential diagnosis becomes impossible.

As Dr. Jason Rafferty, author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current policy statement on “gender-affirming care,” has put it, “the child’s sense of reality and feeling of who they are is the navigational beacon to sort of orient treatment around.” The AAP statement has been witheringly critiqued, and Rafferty and the AAP are now defendants in lawsuits by former patients.

Second, in CPP puberty suppression is by definition temporary; the goal is to delay puberty to its appropriate developmental window. In gender dysphoria, a “successful” prescription is where puberty is bypassed altogether. The assumption about reversibility, never tested and highly questionable form the start, proved to be the ethical foundation for the entire Dutch experiment, and it quickly crumbled. Over 93 percent of adolescents who are put on puberty blockers for gender issues continue down the medical pathway to cross-sex hormones. Some go on to surgeries.

Gender clinicians do not see this suspiciously high figure as a reason to rethink their approach. They see no possibility of iatrogenesis — a medical intervention that unintentionally induces harm, in this case by causing gender distress or confusion to persist artificially. On the contrary, they regard the high persistence rate as proof of their own remarkable diagnostic abilities.

More modest and scientifically-minded clinicians and researchers see things very differently. “Blocking puberty,” writes Sallie Baxendale, a professor of neuropsychology and author of an important new study on puberty blockers, “prevents the critical rewiring in the brain that underpins the ability make complex decisions. Puberty blockers may give children time to think but they simultaneously rob them of their developing capacity to do so.”

What is likely happening is that an ongoing youth mental health crisis whose origins predate and have little to do with gender is being misdiagnosed and mistreated with harmful and experimental drugs. Puberty blockers are the definition of a “quick fix” solution.

Researchers incorrectly refer to what the Dutch did as an experiment. In an experiment, falsifiable hypotheses are proposed, alternative interventions are tested, outcomes are monitored and competing explanations for observed results are thoughtfully ruled out.

The Dutch did nothing of the sort, according to a comprehensive scholarly examination of their study. Further, the only attempt to replicate that study, which was done in the U.K., failed. The researchers had to be forced to disclose their disappointing findings. Any scientific-minded person willing to put in the effort and read the literature will come to the same conclusion: Pediatric gender medicine is an industry built on fraud.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the Dutch pseudo-experiment with puberty blockers “escaped the lab” and became entangled in a fast-growing international social movement for transgender recognition. In the U.S., the drugs are being prescribed at numbers far exceeding anything the Dutch could possibly have imagined. Most adolescents referred to pediatric gender clinics are teen girls who have no history of dysphoria in childhood but who do have other mental health challenges that predate their distress with their bodies.

American medicine is no stranger to scandal — lobotomy, “recovered memory” and OxyContin are just a few examples. What makes pediatric gender transition unique is that it has been framed as a nonnegotiable civil right and defended by powerful civil rights groups, the Democratic Party and their ideological allies in the mainstream media.

A key reason for the divergence between U.S. and European medical authorities, as I’ve explained in a previous essay, is the latter’s greater willingness to follow principles of evidence-based medicine, including reliance on systematic reviews. Jack Turban, a prominent American gender clinician, revealed in a deposition that he seems not to know what a systematic review of evidence is.

Another reason is that in the U.S., doctors who practice child “transition” demand and often receive deference as the experts on the evidence for their practices; abroad, such clinicians are seen as having conflicts of interest. When the National Health Service of England appointed the highly respected Dr. Hilary Cass to lead its review of its youth gender service, it did so precisely because she was “a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area.” Sweden and Finland delegated the evaluation of evidence to experts with no personal involvement or stake in pediatric gender medicine.

Parents should never have been put in the position of having to decide whether to “allow” their kids to go through puberty. Those who would put the onus on parents are letting charlatans in the medical profession off the hook. Puberty is difficult for all teens, and it is not a disease. Puberty blockers offer teens in distress — especially girls with history of sexual abuse, autistic kids and gay kids — false hope by casting puberty as optional.

Puberty is a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood, responsible for the development of the body’s major organs and systems and not just its external sexual features. Puberty blockers rob children of their right to an open future.

[americanmysticom]

Flawed CDC Study Wrongly Concludes COVID Vaccines Safe in Pregnancy

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that pregnant women get the COVID-19 vaccine is based on limited data, poorly matched cohorts and inexcusably low representation of pregnant women in their first trimester.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month recommended women who are pregnant, recently pregnant, who are trying to become pregnant now or who might become pregnant in the future get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The CDC made the recommendation after concluding, in a Jan. 7 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, that data support the safety of COVID vaccination during pregnancy.

By comparing COVID vaccination during pregnancy to those unvaccinated during pregnancy, the agency determined COVID vaccines were not associated with preterm birth or with delivering a child who was born smaller or less developed than expected, also known as small-for-gestational-age (SGA).

In this article, we examine flaws in the CDC study that led to the agency’s wrongful conclusion that COVID vaccines for pregnant women.

First, some background.

Including pregnant women in clinical trials

Pregnancy is a precarious time not just for the expectant mother but most importantly the developing fetus. Expectant mothers are advised not to drink alcohol or caffeinated beverages and not to eat raw foods such as sushi and deli meats.

A lot of medications are contraindicated during pregnancy including simple pain meds like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (Ibuprofen), antidiarrheals, decongestants, antihistamines, nasal sprays and expectorants.

Women are advised not to take these medications during pregnancy because they pose potential risks to the developing fetus.

For decades, expectant mothers have been considered a vulnerable group to be shielded from potential harms of research for the sake of their fetuses’ health.

In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines excluding pregnant women and women “with childbearing potential” from phase I and phase II clinical trials, where new drugs are tested for safety and efficacy.

This view stemmed, in part, from tragedies caused by two now-infamous drugs that were widely prescribed to pregnant women in the mid-20th century: thalidomide, which caused thousands of children around the world to be born with flipper-like limbs and other birth defects, and diethylstilbestrol, which was linked to higher rates of cancer in both mothers and the daughters born to them.

This view changed however in 1993, with the passage of the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, which sought to increase gender and racial diversity in clinical trials.

Federal regulations currently require any study involving pregnant women to meet 10 criteria, including that, “where scientifically appropriate,” data first be collected on pregnant animals and non-pregnant human subjects to assess risk, and that any risk to mother or fetus be “the least possible for achieving the objectives of the research.”

Reproduction toxicity studies in animal models hinted at dangers early on

While the companies developing the COVID-19 vaccines have done preliminary studies in animals, their studies were limited to rodents. The vaccine makers did not conduct studies on non-human primates, recognized as the closest animal models to humans regarding genetics, physiology and behavior.

Nevertheless, Moderna’s own Assessment Report to the European Medicines Agency Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use on March 11, 2021, included a study for reproductive and developmental toxicology on female rats during gestation.

The report noted (page 50: Reproduction Toxicity) an increase in the number of fetuses with common skeletal variations of one or more rib nodules and one or more wavy ribs. Additionally, the number of pups born to vaccinated rats was lower than the number in the unvaccinated rats.

Most importantly, the authors explicitly stated, “In this study, no vaccine dose was administered during the early organogenesis [the period during embryonic development of an animal when the main body organs are formed], to address the direct embryotoxic effect of the components of the vaccine formulation.”

One month earlier, Pfizer reported in its Feb. 19, 2021, Assessment Report to the same committee that pregnant rats demonstrated a greater-than-2x increase in pre-implantation loss in exposed animals compared to controls.

The authors of the Pfizer report further stated (Page 50: Reproduction Toxicity) that “a very low incidence of gastroschisis, mouth/jaw malformations, right-sided aortic arch, and cervical vertebrae abnormalities” occurred in litters of exposed rats, and that these findings were within historical control data.

This finding brings up an important question: Why compare the incidence of these major congenital abnormalities with “historical” controls and not with the controls themselves?

As late as April 2021, the CDC still maintained there was limited data surrounding the safety of COVID vaccines for women who were pregnant or breastfeeding. The agency advised women who were pregnant or breastfeeding to consult with their physician before getting vaccinated.

But were obstetricians made aware of the potential safety signals appearing in animal models?

And how were physicians able to decide whether or not a COVID vaccine was appropriate for their pregnant patients if the CDC wasn’t offering any guidance at that time?

CDC’s latest study: a closer look at the details

Using data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink — a CDC vaccine safety monitoring system the public cannot access — the CDC study identified 46,079 pregnant women with live births and gestational age.

Of those, 10,064 (21.8%) received ≥1 COVID vaccine doses during pregnancy from Dec. 15, 2020, to July 22, 2021.

Nearly all (9,892, or 98.3%) of the pregnant women included in the study were vaccinated during the second or third trimester.

The authors found that among unvaccinated women, the rate of premature births was 7% compared to 4.9% in those who had received either one or both vaccine doses.

The rate of small-for-gestational-age in both vaccinated and unvaccinated mothers was equal (8.2%).

The authors thus conclude that “… receipt of COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy was not associated with increased risk for preterm birth or SGA at birth.”

5 flaws in the CDC analysis

On closer examination, we identified the following five deficits in the CDC study:

Cohorts were not well matched. There were greater than three times more African American women in the unvaccinated group than in the vaccinated group. The CDC acknowledges the African American race is a risk factor for preterm birth and may be as high as 50% greater than in white women.

There were also greater than 50% more mothers in the unvaccinated group classified as having inadequate prenatal care. Obesity, also a risk for preterm birth, was also overrepresented in the unvaccinated group (29% vs 23.9%) compared to the vaccinated.

No adjustment for mothers with a history of preterm birth of SGA. The authors did not address this potential confounder.

COVID infection, another potentially important confounder, was present in the unvaccinated group at a 25% greater incidence than in the vaccinated cohort (3.5% vs 2.8%). There was no mention of when in the pregnancy the infection was detected.Viral infections early in pregnancy are particularly deleterious to the developing fetus. This should have been an important risk factor to quantify independently, especially when establishing a risk-versus-benefit ratio of vaccination.

The CDC data indicate a 7.7% risk of preterm birth in mothers having received one of two vaccines. This represents a 10% greater risk than in unvaccinated pregnancies. This increased risk is not mentioned in the discussion. Moreover, the adjusted Hazard Ratio (aHR) in this population is given as 0.78, indicating a 22% risk reduction in preterm birth in vaccinated mothers, seemingly conflicting with the raw data. (A request for clarification from the corresponding author was not answered).

The most glaring deficit in the CDC analysis is the scarcity of vaccinated mothers who received a vaccine in the first trimester in this study. The risk of untoward outcomes (birth defects, miscarriages) in pregnancy is greatest during the first third of pregnancy, a time when crucial embryonic structures are developing. This is the period of time where maternal health is particularly important, and exposure to toxins, infections and certain medicines must be minimized or eliminated entirely if possible.

Only 172 of more than 10,000 (1.7%) vaccinated mothers in the study received a vaccine in the first trimester. The incidence of preterm birth and SGA were not mentioned in this small cohort because of limited numbers.

Nonetheless, the authors arrive at the stunning conclusion: “CDC recommends COVID-19 vaccination for women who are pregnant, recently pregnant (including those who are lactating), who are trying to become pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future (4) to reduce the risk for severe COVID-19–associated outcomes.”

CDC not required to provide access to its data or subject its analysis to peer review

The Vaccine Safety Datalink uses data reported from nine large healthcare organizations, serving only 3% of the U.S. population. The system collects electronic health data from each participating site.

This database is accessible only to researchers outside the CDC and only by request. Requests may be accommodated after a research proposal is submitted and approved by the Research Data Center of the National Center for Health Statistics.

CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports can, as in the case of the agency’s analysis of COVID vaccine safety in pregnant women, be based on data that is not necessarily publicly available.

The agency’s analyses are not subject to peer review. Nevertheless, the reports are often widely cited as the official scientific position.

Conclusions

The CDC’s determination that COVID vaccination is safe in pregnant women is unfounded.

Cohorts were poorly matched. There was an inexcusably low representation of women who were vaccinated early in their pregnancy in their analysis. This is a period where any exposure to medical interventions will have a greater potential for risk to the fetus.

Broadly recommending vaccination for all pregnant women including those who are trying to become pregnant is particularly unwarranted.

This report places the CDC’s purported commitment to its mission of disease control and prevention on full display. The agency’s conclusions arrive more than a full year after the CDC authorized COVID vaccinations and are based on retrospective data alone.

In other words, the CDC is willing (and apparently allowed) to make safety determinations only after the experimental vaccines have been widely and indiscriminately deployed.

This is a shocking departure from the higher standards of prudence that are demanded during pregnancy, a time where two lives are potentially at risk and poor outcomes can lead to a lifetime of potential consequences.

It should be noted that several of the authors of this study reported potential conflicts of interest.

One author reported institutional research funding from Pfizer, and another from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. A third author has a career grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-study-wrongly-concludes-covid-vaccines-safe-pregnancy/

BUY TODAY: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s New Book — 'The Real Anthony Fauci'

[mi6021aidan]

research links

https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2020/12/11/puberty-blockers-consent-treatment-analysis-high-courts-ruling/

https://www.contemporaryobgyn.net/view/gnrh-alternative-hysterectomy-uterine-fibroids

https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/puberty-blockers-high-court-ruling-under-16s-barriers-keira-bell-case-778622

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1333735295309721600

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/sep/01/thalidomide-scandal-timeline

https://www.oncozine.com/thalidomides-secret-past-the-link-with-nazi-germany/

http://thalidomidestory.com/story/other-notables/historical-figures/hermann-wirtz-sr/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-018-0892-3

https://www.hse.ie/eng/health/az/g/gender-dysphoria/causes-of-gender-dysphoria.html#:~:text=Malfunctioning%20hormones&text=This%20could%20be%20caused%20by,working%20properly%20within%20the%20womb.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Emily Yoffe

Published: Jan 25, 2025

The courageous Texas surgeon was facing a decade in federal prison for blowing the whistle about gender surgery for minors. Trump just dismissed the case.

Until this afternoon, Dr. Eithan Haim, 34, was facing a potential decade in federal prison for revealing publicly that Texas Children’s Hospital was continuing to perform gender transitions on children even after declaring a moratorium on the controversial practice. For this, Haim, a Texas surgeon, became the target of the Biden Department of Justice, which indicted him for allegedly violating patient privacy laws.

There was no violation of patient privacy. What Haim blew the whistle on were surgeries to insert hormonal devices that prevent children from going through puberty. The records he revealed about these interventions carefully redacted identifying information about the patients. What’s more: He had caught the hospital in a bald-faced lie about the very existence of the program. Most dangerous for Haim was that he had run afoul of the Biden administration’s unquestioning support of medical transition of young people distressed about their gender.

“Eithan Haim was the only person with the courage to stand up for what was right,” Haim’s wife, Andrea, wrote on X about her husband taking on the powerful children’s hospital, the country’s largest. “For him, it wasn’t even a decision. Kids were being harmed, and he had to stop it.”

It came with a high price. The couple lost close friendships, all their savings, and their peace of mind. But they never budged.

On Friday came vindication.

At around 2:30 p.m. on Friday, Haim received notice that the Trump DOJ issued a dismissal of all charges against him, with prejudice—meaning the charges cannot be refiled. In a conversation with The Free Press, while he and his wife were celebrating over champagne, he said, “We didn’t think it was going to happen. We took on the federal leviathan and we won.” He added, “This is epic. This is like Lord of the Rings.”

Although Haim had raised more than $1.2 million in a GiveSendGo account, mounting a case to stay out of federal prison has cost $2 million. “We’ll be paying legal bills for 20 years,” he said.

Andrea knows about federal indictments. She herself is an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas—her husband was indicted in the Southern District. Andrea, who gave birth to their daughter four months ago, said of their ordeal, “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a year without worrying my husband would be in prison and I would be raising our daughter alone. We are now going back to normal life.”

As the Trump administration got underway, Haim had an upcoming jury trial on the Biden-era indictment. “I was facing a kangaroo court in a few weeks,” he said.

Marcella Burke, Haim’s attorney, said she and his other lawyers began to ask everyone they knew with any connection to the new administration to make the dismissal of Haim’s case a priority. But she said she had no warning that their efforts had been successful.

“We thank everyone who helped along the way to bring this massive injustice to light, and we are grateful to secure this victory on behalf of our client,” Burke said in a statement. “The fight against the evils he exposed continues, but this dismissal represents a repudiation of the weaponization of federal law enforcement and the first step in accountability for the misdeeds we have all witnessed in this case.”

Missouri senator Josh Hawley went on X Friday afternoon to tout the effectiveness of his lobbying to get the charges against Haim dismissed. He wrote, “Following my call this morning, I am delighted to report the Trump DOJ is now moving to DISMISS this illegitimate prosecution.”

Andrea Haim wrote on X that the couple had no regrets. “[I]f you ask either of us, we would do it again in a heartbeat. Because of Eithan, the world is a better place for children, including our daughter. There is no greater gift we can give her than the knowledge that her daddy is a hero.”

To support Eithan Haim and his family, please click here.

[ Via: https://archive.today/eS9WS ]

==

Somehow, blowing the whistle on gender lobotomies is a crime, but illegally performing gender lobotomies is not.

🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️

[hello-delveinsight]

Multiple Myeloma Market Size Forecast, Epidemiology Analysis, Emerging Drug Uptake and Key Companies Assessment by DelveInsight

(LAS VEGAS, US) The Multiple Myeloma Market size across the 8MM  i.e. the United States, Eu5(the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain), China and Japan, was $16.27bn in 2019 and is increasing with a modest CAGR during the study period (2017-2030), according to DelveInsight, a leading company in healthcare analytics and consulting.  

The market size for Multiple Myeloma therapies will increase dramatically by 2030 due to the arrival of upcoming therapies that will carve out niche roles in the drug landscape. DelveInsight's latest report on Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology and Market indicates that the impressive growth in market size is due to the rise in incident cases of Multiple Myeloma in 8MM, incorporation of immune-therapies in treatment landscape increased patient adherence and adoption of newer therapies. Also, rich emerging pipeline, better diagnosis, rising awareness and expected increase in investment in the R&D activities are some additional factors that are going to fuel the market.

Some key highlights from the report:

The     total incident cases of Multiple Myeloma are expected to reach 91,520 in     2020 in the 8MM

Higher     usage of bortezomib based regimen observed across the US, EU5 and JP;     Bortezomib + Lenalidomide + dex regimen is the preferred treatment choice     in the US and Japan in the first-line compared to Bortezomib +     Melphalan ± Prednisone and Bortezomib + dex regimen in EU5. In the case     of China, higher usage of thalidomide based regimen found in the     first-line setting

Among     emerging therapies, Bristol Myers Squibb and Bluebird Bio's anti-BCMA CAR     T Cell Therapy Idecabtagene Vicleucel (Ide-cel, bb2121) is expected to     result in significant revenues owing to promising results, one-time dosing     and premium pricing in heavily pretreated patients

Key     Companies fuelling the Multiple Myeloma market size growth are     GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Roche, Janssen Research     & Development, Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., Pfizer, Takeda, Amgen,     AstraZeneca etc.

Patent     expiry of multiple blockbuster drugs like Revlimid, Pomalyst, Darzalex and     Kyprolis is on the lines to expire from 2026 onwards, and this will erode     the sales value significantly and the market is expected to decline from     2028 onwards due to cumulative impacts of patent expiry.

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Though Multiple Myeloma is not common cancer; still, it is the second most diagnosed blood cancer in the United States. It is worth highlighting that it is a heterogeneous haematological malignancy in which epidemiology plays an increasingly important role. Over the past years, intensive clinical and molecular epidemiological research has extended the information about its pathogenesis, risk factors, and prognostic components which aided the approval of new drugs. Despite arduous research endeavors, the etiology remains enigmatic. The untimely or prolonged diagnosis has a severe impact on the clinical course of Multiple myeloma and a negative impact on disease-free survival. It's an unfortunate fact that approximately 95% of all the Multiple Myeloma cases are diagnosed at distant stages. The report reviews the changing epidemiology and provides the forecasts upto 2030, highlights treatment patterns, and the health disparity observed in important subgroups of Multiple Myeloma.

Multiple myeloma report contains epidemiological analysis segmented as the following: 

Total     Multiple Myeloma Incident Cases 

Total     Multiple Myeloma Incident cases by Age Distribution

Total     Symptomatic Multiple Myeloma Cases 

Cases     of Multiple Myeloma by Treatment Line 

Gender-specific     cases of Multiple Myeloma

Multiple Myeloma Market Scenario

The current standard of care of Multiple myeloma treatment includes stem cell transplant, conventional chemotherapy, targeted therapy, surgery, and radiation therapy. Chemotherapies can be given alone or in conjunction with other drugs including corticosteroids, proteasome inhibitors, immune-modulators, and monoclonal antibodies, anti-resorptive agents such as bisphosphonates and NSAIDs, or narcotics.  Currently, Lenalidomide is the market leader in multiple myeloma treatment landscape, and usage as monotherapy and also in combination with other therapies can be found across all the settings. Darzalex is also being used by the healthcare experts in combination as doublet, triplet, and quadruplet with existing therapies for the good treatment strategies and better result outcomes and has impacted the MM treatment landscape significantly. Label expansion along with higher usage of Darzalex has translated into higher revenues and expected to generate maximum revenue by 2025 before the competition and expected patent expiry would erode the sales value. At present, among the IMid's agents, Revlimid dominates the Multiple Myeloma market in the 8MM, where it is included in all lines of Multiple Myeloma therapy either as monotherapy or in combination with other drugs. In 2017, Revlimid generated a revenue of USD 7,140 million in the 8MM. Despite the loss of patent exclusivity among the major markets and approval of other potential pipeline candidates, it will continue to maintain a strong presence during the forecast period as a molecule. The novel emerging therapies are expected to bring a paradigm shift in the Multiple Myeloma treatment landscape by catering to larger unmet needs.

 Report includes exhaustive analysis of Multiple Myeloma Pipeline Therapies

Idecabtagene     vicleucel (ide-cel): Bristol Myers Squibb and bluebird bio

Venetoclax     (Venclexta, Venclyxto): AbbVie

JNJ-68284528     LCAR-B38M/JNJ-4528): Janssen Research and Development

Keytruda     (pembrolizumab): Novartis

Melflufen     (melphalan flufenamide): Oncopeptides

Cetrelimab     (JNJ-63723283): Janssen Research and Development

REGN5458:     Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

Iberdomide:     Celgene

NY-ESO-1     C259 T Cells: GlaxoSmithKline

Braftovi     (encorafenib): Pfizer

JCARH125:     Celgene Corporation

Felzartamab     (MOR202): I-Mab Biopharma

Chidamide     (Epidaza): Shenzhen Chipscreen Bioscience

The past couple of decades have shown vast changes in the treatment landscape of Multiple Myeloma, starting with the use of stem cells trailed by the availability of novel treatments such as immunomodulators and proteasome inhibitors that have transformed the natural history of the indication, leading to increased survival times. Ongoing advancements in  emerging Novel therapies such as CAR-T cell and monoclonal antibodies are showing promising results in treating multiple myeloma patients and are also expected to drive the growth of the market. Recent years have witnessed an influx of several pharma companies exploring the Multiple Myeloma market through novel targets and therapies. Although the emerging pipeline candidates will reduce the gaps however, the opportunities will still remain. As a ray of hope, the launch of new drugs have extended the median overall survival of Multiple Myeloma patients to 4-6 years; however the stark reality is that the ten year survival rate is 3%. The long term burden of the therapies makes life pretty difficult for the patients. There is a dire need for a permanent cure. Another hurdle is the existing expensive treatment options that create a barrier for the aged uninsured population to get hold of costly therapies. The factors like drug-induced toxicities, differences in clinical care, access to the therapies in real-world settings are the observed gaps between trial-based and real-world outcomes. DelveInsight believes that the Multiple Myeloma market is an attractive prospect for the companies due to the high unmet needs and low regulatory hurdles. 

Key Trends of Multiple Myeloma Market Report: https://www.delveinsight.com/report-store/multiple-myeloma-market

Scope of the Report

Geography     Covered: 8MM - The United States, EU5 (Germany, France, Italy, Spain,     and the United Kingdom), Japan, and Chine.

Study     Period: 3-year historical and 11-year forecasted analysis (2017-2030).

Markets     Segmentation: By Geographies, By Therapies (Forecasted + Historical).

Companies     Covered: GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Roche, Janssen     Research & Development, Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., Pfizer, Takeda,     Amgen, AstraZeneca, and several others.

Analysis:     Comparative and conjoint analysis of emerging therapies, Attribute     Analysis,

Case     Studies

KOL's     Views

Analyst's     View

The Multiple Myeloma Marketed drugs covered report are:

Sarclisa     (Isatuximab): Sanofi

Darzalex     (Daratumumab): Janssen Research and Development

Empliciti     (Elotuzumab): Bristol-Myers Squibb and AbbVie

Velcade     (bortezomib): Takeda

Pomalyst     (Pomalidomide): Celgene Corporation

Revlimid     (Lenalidomide): Celgene Corporation

Farydak     (panobinostat): Novartis Pharmaceuticals

Kyprolis     (Carfilzomib): Amgen

Ninlaro     (ixazomib): Takeda Pharmaceuticals

Blenrep     (Belantamab Mafodotin): GlaxoSmithKline

Table of Contents

1

Key Insights

2

Executive Summary of Multiple Myeloma

3

KOL Views

4

SWOT Analysis of Multiple Myeloma 

5

Multiple Myeloma Market Overview at a Glance

6

Disease Background and Overview: Multiple Myeloma 

7

Diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma

8

Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology and Patient Population

9

The United States Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

10

EU-5 Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

11

Japan Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

12

China Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

13

Multiple Myeloma Treatment

14

Unmet Needs in the Multiple Myeloma Market

15

Patient Journey of Multiple Myeloma

16

Key Endpoints of Multiple Myeloma Clinical Trials

17

Multiple Myeloma Marketed Therapies

18

Multiple Myeloma Emerging Therapies

19

Multiple Myeloma 8 Major Market Analysis

20

8MM Multiple Myeloma Market Size

21

The United States Multiple Myeloma Market Size

22

EU-5 Multiple Myeloma Market Size

23

Japan Multiple Myeloma Market Size

24

China Multiple Myeloma Market Size

25

Market Access and Reimbursement of Multiple Myeloma (MM)  Therapies

26

Multiple Myeloma Market Drivers

27

Multiple Myeloma Market Barriers

28

Appendix

29

DelveInsight Capabilities

30

Disclaimer

31

About DelveInsight

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Related Report:

CAR T-Cell Therapy for Multiple Myeloma-Market Insights and Market Forecast-2030 : This report delivers an in-depth understanding of the CAR T-Cell Therapy use for Multiple Myeloma as well as the CAR T-Cell Therapy market trends for Multiple Myeloma. It provides current treatment practices, emerging drugs, CAR T-Cell Therapy market share of the various CAR T-Cell Therapies for Multiple Myeloma, the individual therapies, current and forecasted Multiple Myeloma CAR T-Cell Therapy market Size from 2017 to 2030.

About DelveInsight

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Contact Us: Shruti Thakur  info@delveinsight.com  +1(919)321-6187  www.delveinsight.com 

SOURCE DelveInsight Business Research, LLP