Senator Rand Paul mentions Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical State in his book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. Dr. Kheriaty’s online biography includes the following information:

Dr. Kheriaty is a plaintiff in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden challenging government censorship on social media. . .. Dr. Kheriaty also serves in teaching and advisory roles at the Brownstone Institute, the Zephyr Institute, the Paul Ramsey Institute, and the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.

For many years, he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCI [University of California—Irvine] School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years. He was fired from the University of California after challenging the University’s covid vaccine mandate in federal court.

The New Abnormal’s Prologue

Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue is titled “Nuremberg, 1947.” It is the right place to begin in understanding the COVID-19 control program. Following the more famous 1946 trial of the top Nazis, the trial of Nazi doctors led to prison sentences for nine and death sentences for seven defendants. As part of the opinion of the tribunal, the Nuremberg Code was published, which contained ten items that established the criteria for conducting ethical human experimentation.

Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue only explores the first item of the Code, but it is the foundation, addressing informed, noncoerced consent. Those interested in reading an analysis of all ten items of the Code are directed to Dr. Nicholas Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program. Dr. Bednarski concludes that all ten items of the Nuremberg Code have been violated.

The New Abnormal’s prologue identifies the connection between the work of the Nazi doctors and the eugenics movement, which is disturbing for Americans initiated in the United States. The New Abnormal reveals, “Eugenics programs received funding from major foundations, including those of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Kellogg. Intellectuals at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton endorsed the movement’s aims and participated enthusiastically.”

Pursuit of eugenics was not restricted to the private sector but extended to state governments and the federal government:

In the 1920s an impoverished young woman from Virginia, Carrie Buck, was diagnosed with “congenital feeblemindedness” and slated for forced sterilization. She challenged the state of Virginia’s law in federal court, and her case, Buck v. Bell, went to the Supreme Court in 1927. The court upheld the state’s eugenic sterilization law, resulting in Carrie’s forced tubal ligation.

The New Abnormal continues, “Hitler himself remarked, ‘I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would . . . be of no value, or injurious to the racial stock.’”

The New Abnormal’s prologue concludes, “While the Nuremberg Code did not enjoy the binding force of international law, its principles did inform the laws of most nations, including the United States. The principle of free and informed consent was further developed in the influential World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki in 1964.”

Subsequent Chapters

The New Abnormal focuses on the role of declared emergencies in establishing invasive government policies that destroy our personal freedoms:

[Government policy] . . . from lockdowns and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates or passports—received its supposed legal justification from the declared state of emergency. But tellingly, the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, et cetera—was deliberately never defined.

Who has this power?

At the federal level, with the backing of the president, that person is now Xavier Becerra, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC, among other divisions. Becerra, a lawyer and former attorney general of California, has no medical training and zero public health experience.

How extensive are these powers? Dr. Kheriaty reveals that in a state of emergency the president gains access to an additional 136 statutory powers. He summarizes the implications of this concentration of power:

The full significance of what transpired in March 2020 may have escaped our attention. Without realizing it we lived through the design and implementation of not just a novel pandemic strategy but a new political paradigm—a system far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously attempted by Western nations. Under the biosecurity model, “the total cessation of every form of political activity and social relationship [under lockdowns and social distancing became] the ultimate act of civic participation.” Neither the pre-war Fascist government in Italy nor the Communist states of the Soviet Union ever dreamed of implementing such restrictions.

We have encountered new terminology that was not medical according to Dr. Kheriaty:

It is instructive to reflect on the chosen phrase, “social distancing,” which is not a medical term but a political one. A medical or scientific model would have deployed a phrase like physical or personal distancing, but not social distancing. The term suggests not a new model for health but for organizing society, one that limits human interactions by six feet of space and by masks that cover the face—our locus of interpersonal connection and communication.

According to Dr. Kheriaty, “To see where this biomedical security state will lead, many point to the Chinese social credit system—and this is a useful shorthand for the dystopian future this regime portends.”

He continues, “University biomedical security systems were also sustained by a near constant stream of propaganda generated by administrators, with catchphrases that would make even bureaucrats at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth cringe. For example, administrators constantly admonished students, faculty and staff to ‘hold one another accountable.’”

That is Orwellian, of course, but it is a good description of how people were encouraged to betray each other to the gestapo and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Neither of these infamous security organizations had access to the digital technology that is so pervasive today. How was this used to surveil citizens during the COVID-19 control program?

“In May of 2022, Vice broke the story that during the previous two years the ‘CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed COVID lockdown orders.’ . . . What descended on us was not just a novel virus but a novel method of social organization and control.”

Dr. Kheriaty identifies two influences on his thinking—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Although it would be imprudent to do so, one might dismiss Brave New World as fantasy. But Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago describes a seventy-four-year experiment in real social organization and control in the Soviet Union. Dr. Kheriaty makes a compelling case that we in the United States are on the road to a similar kind of tyranny.

Dr. Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State should be read if it is the only book on the COVID-19 control program one reads. But for a broader view, begin with Dr. Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program, and then read Senator Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. The COVID-19 control program is a many-tentacled monster. It is easy to surrender to information overload.

Dr. Bednarski’s series describes an internationally recognized set of ten criteria for human experimentation by which COVID-19 control measures might be measured. He concludes that all ten were violated in the COVID-19 control program. Senator Paul explores the source of the COVID-19 organism and the efforts made within government, in particular, to cover up the facts through propaganda. But if there is any belief that the COVID-19 control program was a one-time phenomenon, Dr. Kheriaty dispels that delusion. That is a perspective we need in order to fully understand the implications of the COVID-19 control program.

 

Phil Duffy is a regular contributor to WFYL’s We the People, the Constitution Matters, a lifelong student of history, and the author of the forthcoming A Tale of Four Cities, an investigation about who really wrote the first modern text on economics and why it matters today.

 

Phil Duffy | Mises Wire

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The Cuban dictatorship was built and sustained on planned executions, so this recent move by its National Assembly to legalize “dignified death” seems a bit belated. I guess, like Western Elites, they needed Political murder to feel like a kindness.

 

The Communist-run country’s National Assembly passed the measure as part of legislation updating the nation’s legal framework for its universal and free healthcare system.

“The right of people to a dignified death is recognized in end-of-life decisions, which may include the limitation of therapeutic effort, continuous or palliative care, and valid procedures that end life,” the final draft of the legislation stated.

Euthanasia and medically assisted suicide, opposed by most religions, sparks huge controversy around the world where just a handful of countries allow the practice and some equate it with murder.

 

Cuba is, of course, doing the deal in reverse. They’ve been killing off the political resistance (democide) for the entirety of their existence. Locking people up for years over the smallest slight. How convenient for them to have learned from Western progressives how to address the problem of overcrowded prisons. Sorry, I meant “patients.”

Almost anyone could suddenly take ill or request they be put to sleep like a dog, and since this is Cuba, you can’t complain unless you’d like to pay a visit to the ‘Vet’ for your last ‘vaccination.’

Closer to home, the depopulationist social engineers among us are coming at the problem from the other direction. Pretend it’s about people in pain and then expand the scope until the state can hide political executions behind assisted suicide.

And yes, there are useful idiots who honestly believe that the practice would never grow beyond expediting the voluntary deaths of terminal patients in pain. But it has, it does, and it will. This is not a pleasant reality to face, but it is better for the community and society if the government is not permitted to manage the terms and circumstances of chemical death beyond investigating murder. There will be some suffering, but you won’t have to deal with the State using euthanasia policy to end people’s lives because they are sad, poor, or there are just too many of them. Or they’ve done the government wrong.

It’ll happen if it hasn’t already. The best course of action is not to go there at all.

 

HT | GatewayPundit

The post Slippery Meet Slope: Cuba Embraces Assisted Suicide as If They Didn’t Already Have It appeared first on Granite Grok.

I read somewhere that the SPLC had fingered GraniteGrok as anti-government. I feel certain they are honored now more than ever, given that The Government has become the thing that drove the Founders to Declare their independence.

 

 We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 

There is a lot of safety and happiness these days, and you can blame the government for that. The cabal of connected insiders bilking the people and the planet for their own benefit. A sort of Global confidence scam, though that wasn’t where I intended to go. The SPLC, a scam all its own, is another establishment tool, but it has been struggling to find relevancy.

Labeling the ‘Grok anti-government isn’t the gesture to get them there beyond this audience, so they’ve come up with a new thing. It’s called CAPTAIN.

 

That stands for Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives. …

What they are doing with CAPTAIN is reviving one of [SPLC founder Morris] Dees’ rare flops, an example of when the fundraising prodigy got too far out ahead of his target market. Two entire decades ago, Morris teamed up with some autogynephilic big brains like economist Donald-Deirdre McCloskey and semiconductor scientist Lynn Conway to try to cancel anyone who’d given a nice blurb to Northwestern U. psychology professor J. Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen.

 

Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.

I’m no expert, but I find it unlikely this will take off the way they hoped. It’s too long. It’s cumbersome and conceptually late to the party. Science is no longer the driving force behind the militant transgender agenda. It’s about fear and intimidation. The battle has moved from the streets to grade-school classrooms where groomers and activists are immersing other people’s kids in gender faith dogma.

Munchausen, by proxy in all its forms, is the captain. People, schools, teachers, and parents desperate for attention and acceptance in the go-viral or bust digital world are sacrificing children for clicks and views. They then mislabel it as compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance – none of which has a thing to do with science.

The science  is that it is unhealthy to leave kids alone and let them develop naturally. It is better to inundate them with sexualized literature that includes fringe heterosexual abuse as well as so-called LGBT themes that the average non-anit LGBTQ pro-science apologist should find offensive.

Drugs, cutting, rape, smoking, alcohol abuse, assault, adult child sex and suicide.

It is true that some members of the LGBTQ community are more inclined toward all of the vices, so perhaps that’s at least honest. Even in the most encouraging communities, nearly half will consider or attempt suicide. So, sure, that content might pass as actual LGBTQ “science” if we’re talking psychotherapy, which, if you ask a real scientist, will tell you that is not science at all. It’s pseudoscience. And look, it’s all coming together.

CAPTAIN is really about advancing LGBTQ pseudo-science narratives, which is what everyone else is doing.

Not new. Not likely to make a splash, but they at least got an anti-government blog post out of it on the ‘Grok.

 

The post Have You Met the SPLCs’ New CAPTAIN? appeared first on Granite Grok.

First, she delays her decision. Then she announces her decision. Next, she suspends her decision. The Secretary of State is not usually a high-profile state government position, but Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is making the most of her moment in the spotlight.

She is shining the light on her bad decision-making, bringing political activism into a neutral position, inability to grasp the limitations of her job, and driving a wedge between rural Conservatives and urban WOKE dwellers.

Shenna Bellows posted her decision on her personal X account (@shennabellows), and the 34-page document illustrated her consistent bias through this process of challenges, hearings, and decisions.

This is her conclusion:

I do not reach this conclusion lightly. Democracy is sacred, and the highest court of this State has repeatedly recognized that “no right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live.” Melanson v. Secy’ of State, 204 ME 127, 114, 861 A.2d 641 (quoting Burdick .v Takushi, 504 U.S. 428, 41 (1992) (cleaned up). I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection. The oath I swore to uphold the Constitution comes first above all, and my duty under Maine’s election laws, when presented with a Section 336 challenge, is to ensure that candidates who appear on the primary ballot are qualified for the office they seek.

The events of January 6, 2021, were unprecedented and tragic. They were an attack not only upon the Capitol and government officials but also an attack on the rule of law. The evidence here demonstrates that they occurred at the behest of, and with the knowledge and support of, the outgoing President. The US.. The Constitution does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government, and Section 36 requires me to act in response.

I conclude that the Rosen and Royal Challengers have met their burden under 21-A M.R.S. § 337(2)(B). They have provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate the falsity of Mr. Trump’s declaration that he meets the qualifications of the office of the presidency. Therefore, as required by 21-A M.R.S. § 336(3), I find that the primary petition of Mr. Trump is invalid.

Her conclusion shows her decision is based more on her shared views of the challengers and less on the law. She is making accusations that the President was involved in an insurrection against the country, yet she will not be able to justify this as Trump was never charged or found guilty of such a crime. She also claims the challengers provided sufficient evidence but neglects to say the other side also provided sufficient evidence to the contrary. Her decision and conclusion is a political tool.

After 34 pages of Kamala Style word salad and a definitive conclusion, she suspends her decision in the same document. She went on:

Given the compresed timeframe, the novel constitutional questions involved, the importance of this case, and impending ballot preparation deadlines, I will suspend the effect of my decision until the Superior Court rules on any appeal, or the time to appeal under 21-A, Section 37 has expired. C.f nI er Manie Clean Fuels, Inc,. 310 A2.d 736, 74 (Me. 1973) (noting administrative agencies are free to fashion their own rules of procedure).

This decision and immediate suspension are further evidence of her inability to perform her job objectively. One thing she has done is keep the Maine Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court busy going into the New Year.

 

The post Bear Pond Conservative Chronicles: What Is Bellows Endgame appeared first on Granite Grok.

The College Fix went back through its 2023 archives to find things it reported on that someone on one campus or another decided were racist. A White Tower Guide for 2023, if you like. It’s quite the eclectic list.

We won’t duplicate all 71 of them, but instead, pick a few that caught our attention—not wearing a mask, for example. There were several black people on the list who were considered racist, like Sen. Tim Scott or black police officers. Fast Food is racist, as are clean pantries, Body Mass Index, and Public Health Departments.

Clowns, the movie Wonka, the American Flag, Art Therapy, and The Apostle Paul – all racist.

Justice Antonin Scalia

Conservatives

President Abe Lincoln

Governor Ron DeSantis

President Donald Trump

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Ambassador Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Vice President Mike Pence, Governor Chris Christie.

All racist.

The Outdoors is racist, as are Florida, the Kansas City Chiefs, and white paint. Math, Dance, Dating Apps, and White People. Racist! In other words, anything, anywhere, at any time, is racist if it fits the circumstances in which racism is the crutch needed, and we’ve been warning the culture warriors about this for a while. The fake hate hoaxes, of which there were at least 19 on US campuses in 2023, according to the College Fix. The ease with which the idea is peddled in circumstances where it has no place.

If you overuse the thing, it will lose its power. At some point, people who were once terrified of being labeled racist and, as such, went out of their way to prevent or avoid actual racism – perhaps even working to end it – won’t give a damn.

That time is now, and it has been coming since the election of Obama. Barry is the black president who destroyed decades of progress almost overnight. He did it to destabilize the nation, and that worked, too. To pit us against each other instead of against a government working every day to make all of us its slaves.

The BLM riots enshrined that division in modern history but only improved a handful of black lives who happened to vote Democrat and used (at least some of) the money they raised by mansions in primarily white neighborhoods.

Given the Democrat party history, the systemic racism of its ideological ancestors, the Left’s modern-day urban plantations, and the failure of black support for Democrats to improve their lives in any meaningful way is being called racist just another institution the Left needed to destroy?

And what happens to black voters when Democrats don’t need them anymore?

 

The post What Happens to Black Voters When Democrats Don’t Need Them Anymore? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The State Chittenden County Prosecutor Sarah George stated at Burlington’s Community Forum on public safety that the overall justice system is not set up for timely investigation and prosecution of repeat-shoplifters.

“There isn’t a legal avenue to just hold people in jail while their cases are pending,” she said. “It is literally against the law and our Constitution to do that. So if someone is stealing repetitively from a store, I would first say that it’s often two months at least until our office knows anything about it, and that’s if we get the cases from law [enforcement].”

She said the police have to finish their investigations before her office gets involved.

“If the cases are investigated and solved, and then those cases come to us, it’s often two months at least until our office knows anything about it. So in that time, people are of course able to continue to engage in that behavior without our office ever knowing it’s happening so much later on,” she said.

She also said that her office cannot lock up anyone without a conviction.

“And then by the time we do, we can’t just hold people in jail,” George said. “They are entitled to their freedom and they are presumed innocent until we have proven at trial that they are guilty and that is another delay while we are attempting to do that so that’s how our system works.”

She continued that she wishes both the police and her office could collect, investigate, and prosecute shoplifting in a more timely manner, but “that is not how our system is designed to work, unfortunately” she said.

The clip can be seen here.

Burlington Mayor says meth and Fentanyl fueling crime

Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger was on the Morning Drive radio show on Wednesday talking about how Fentanyl and meth are fueling the crime crisis.

“Since 2020 Fentanyl and meth have become the dominant drugs in the area and that has been a game changer,” Weinberger said. “Fentanyl is a much more powerful opioid, a much higher risk and overdose and death, it’s an opioid that people have to consume much more frequently, it used to be people if they were heavily addicted they would be using these drugs every 8-to-10 hours, now it’s every 2-to3 hours. People are injecting or smoking this drug 8-to-10 times a day.”

He also talked about how meth makes people behave worse.

“Meth has this terrible side effect of making people very agitated and at times more likely to commit crimes or create other problems,” he said. “That is really the biggest change that I believe is driving this real Vermont-wide and really country-wide challenge with legal drugs right now. The fact that we have so many more homeless people is driven by our problematic housing market is another big component of it. And of course, our ability to address this is also impacted by the loss of officers that we faced.

More thefts over the holiday

There were more thefts over the holiday, especially on Tuesday. There was a request for information put out by state police after someone robbed an Aubuchon Hardware store in Moretown.

The report states, “Troopers received a report of a retail theft that occurred the previous week. Aubuchon Hardware in Moretown, Vermont reported multiple items taken from their store.”

A still from a security camera can be seen here.

Also on Tuesday, there was a car theft at the St. J Subaru dealership. A man on security camera can be seen checking car doors throughout the parking lot and when he finds one that is unlocked with a key still inside, he drives it away.

Stores are not the only target for thefts. The same day there was another incident involving two white men in a red SUV-type vehicle taking four snow tires and four aluminum rims from a residence in Glover.

 

Michael Bielawski | Vermont Daily Chronicle

The post State Prosecutor Says System Not Designed To Investigate and Prosecute Shoplifters … appeared first on Granite Grok.

I’ve tossed the idea out there that Chris Christie is playing bad cop to Haley’s good cop when it comes to Donald Trump. The NJ Governor runs the smear campaign so Haley can take the high road. If she gets the job, Christie gets one, too.

It might only look like that, but it feels right, and a recent report from a Haley Town Hall in New Hampshire makes it feel right, too.

 

A 9-year-old on Thursday labeled former UN Ambassador and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley the “new John Kerry” at a town hall event in New Hampshire, adding that they agree with her political opponent Chris Christie that she is too soft on former President Donald Trump.

“So Chris Christie thinks you’re a flip-flopper on the Donald Trump issue and, honestly, I agree with him. You’re basically the new John Kerry,” the boy, who self-identified as, Adam, told Haley, prompting laughter from the audience. “How can you change your opinion like that in just eight years, and will you pardon Donald Trump?”

Haley said at the town hall that if Trump, who currently faces 91 felony counts, is convicted, she would pardon him.

 

Haley has said nice things about her former boss, but she’s convinced he’s not the guy we need now. She is – High Road.

Another report, not too far separated in the arc of this supposed plot, calls for Christie to drop out so Haley (or DeSantis) can benefit from his voters. By which I mean Haley.

 

 Chris Christie is directly pushing back on calls for him to drop out of the 2024 Republican presidential primary in a new seven-figure ad buy debuting in New Hampshire on Thursday, according to details shared exclusively with CNN.

“Some people say I should drop out of this race. Really? I’m the only one saying Donald Trump is a liar,” the former New Jersey governor, who trails the former president significantly, says in a direct-to-camera ad launching on broadcast and digital platforms.

 

Christie says he can’t drop out. He’s the only Not-Trump candidate taking it to the former president. The low road. He’s in it to smear Trump, and he’s got the TV ad buys to prove it, which should not be construed as Christie trying to improve his standing in either Iowa or New Hampshire. He’s got no chance in hell. He’s less liked than every other candidate by a wide margin. All the numbers are against him, so there is no reason to drop a 7-figure ad buy unless it’s to help someone who can win.

Haley again.

 

“I told you, I think he was the right president at the right time. I told you that I agreed with a lot of his policies. But do I think he’s the right president to go forward? No,” Haley responded to the child, saying that both “pro-trumpers” and “anti-Trumpers” disagree with her critical approach to Trump. “We can’t handle the chaos anymore.”

 

Christie, again.

 

Christie has sharpened his response to voters who question why he stays in the race, arguing that he’s the only one taking on the GOP front-runner directly. …

He told a voter at a house party in Portsmouth last week that if Haley showed him “she was actually running against Donald Trump,” then he “might” consider supporting her.

But, Christie argued, “Nikki won’t answer the question” as to whether she would accept a vice presidential role from Trump, something he and DeSantis have both said they would reject.

 

Maybe I’m wrong, but I still believe this is all for the show. If Haley has real momentum (and that’s subject to debate), she will need Trump fence-sitters and Trump voters to get there. They won’t vote for her if she smears him. She is also the most viable not-Trump candidate this week, and Chrsite will never be viable. It is also the former NJ governor’s mission, and that of his donors, to sideline Trump, and he has performed well as a conduit for campaign cash aimed in that direction.

It makes more sense if true, but when did political decisions or campaigns ever have to make sense?

 

The post Haley Accused of Being Soft on Trump, She Says Christie is Too Hard on Him (So, Am I Right About Those Two?) appeared first on Granite Grok.

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999, the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana.

A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist, and vaccination programs are not robust.

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

Neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the Department of Homeland Security would discuss the issue with RealClearInvestigations. Legal immigrants are required to receive vaccinations for a host of diseases, but the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged it does not have vaccination records for the millions who have entered the U.S. since the Biden administration relaxed border controls upon taking office in January 2021.

“It’s not like there is some Typhoid Mary out there, but this is something people are seeing and thinking about, even if they don’t want to discuss it publicly,” said Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the Biden administration’s border policies.

The reticence of federal agencies has not stopped some local officials, however, from raising public health alarms over massive immigration. New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan warned in April that at least half of the migrants who have poured into the city had not been vaccinated against polio. The potentially paralyzing and life-threatening virus remains endemic in two countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the World Health Organization. Since President Biden ordered what proved to be a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, an estimated 90,000 Afghans have come to the U.S. under the terms of Operation Allies Welcome.

It is not clear if those migrants met the polio vaccination requirement. DHS did not respond to a question about whether medical histories were reviewed in the fast-tracked entry of Afghans who got out of their country before the Taliban reimposed its control.

Vasan’s warning pointed directly to the southern border, which has seen record-shattering arrivals on the Biden administration’s watch.

“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border,” he wrote in an 11-page letter. “I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum.”

Citing outbreaks of chickenpox in shelters for illegal immigrants, Vasan also noted the arrival of newcomers who either began their journey in a country where tuberculosis is present or passed through such countries en route to the U.S.

The New York City Health Department did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations or to a request to speak with Dr. Vasan, but the numbers have only grown since he sent his letter. Since spring 2022, more than 100,000 migrants have arrived in the city, and more than 67,200 were living in taxpayer-funded housing at the end of November, according to the New York Times.

Last year, the first recorded polio case in the U.S. since 2013 was diagnosed in New York State, with the victim described only as an “unvaccinated man.” Also, in 2022, poliovirus was found in the water supply of four New York counties, including Long Island and New York City. Another positive test result was recorded in Rockland County this year, according to the state.

In the U.S., polio vaccinations remain part of “the routine childhood immunization process” under which the CDC recommends four doses. Adults who grew up in the U.S. are vaccinated, the agency said.

The last occurrence prior to the New York diagnosis had been in 1979. Since November 2022, the CDC has begun wastewater testing for the poliovirus, so long extinct in the U.S., in selected areas, but the agency did not respond to questions about those investigations. It does provide information on COVID and monkeypox, the latter a disease that primarily afflicts the gay population.

A thorough investigation, exploring all avenues of transmission and trying to source a virus to its root, is common among virus hunters, and the idea that millions of people coming to the U.S. could inadvertently carry with them some infectious disease is but one possibility. For example, thus far researchers have been unable to pinpoint where the infamous Ebola virus originates in equatorial Africa.

‘Historically Atypical Countries’

The situation in the United States is further complicated by the fact that DHS officials don’t know where all of the more than 7.5 million migrants who’ve arrived since Biden took office are living. Those whom Border Patrol agents have encountered and processed have immigration court dates, but those dates are years in advance. Many people with uncertain immigration status lack health insurance and stay off the grid as much as possible, meaning even if the U.S. launched some kind of vaccination program, it would not know where to concentrate its efforts.

In addition, the historic flood of illegal immigration during the Biden administration has also featured a much more global population. DHS uses the term “historically atypical countries” to describe the panoply of countries outside of Mexico and Central America from which illegal immigration has soared. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of annual encounters involving immigrants from historically atypical countries soared from fewer than 8,000 to almost 1 million. The first six months of 2023 saw more than half of official encounters – these numbers do not include what Border Patrol calls “gotaways” for whom little information is available – from historically atypical countries. But infectious diseases largely forgotten in the U.S. remain public health issues in both hemispheres, and many of those nations have much less robust vaccination programs than most modern Western nations.

In 1988, when the World Health Organization launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, wild poliovirus was evident in 125 countries, but the zone where it remains endemic has shrunk to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with most recent cases occurring along the countries’ nearly 1,600-mile border, according to the CDC. Vaccination campaigns have proved problematic under the militant Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, according to the CDC. Oral vaccines in “parts of the south and northeast regions” are “allowed only at health facilities, mosques, and polio vaccination sites.”

In March, Al Jazeera reported that the Taliban would allow a polio vaccination program for children, but precise figures on the country’s overall vaccination rate remain unclear. The World Health Organization estimates that 76% of Afghanistan’s children have received a polio vaccine.

But some countries have even lower vaccination rates. On Nov. 30, for instance, some 700 people, including many from Senegal and Nigeria, walked into the U.S. at the Texas border. Only 63% of Senegal’s children have been vaccinated for polio, and various fevers, hepatitis, and malaria are endemic there. Measles, which the U.S. declared eliminated here in 2000, are an issue, too. The WHO estimates 22 million children missed their first measles vaccine last year and more than half of them live in just 10 countries, all of which fall in the “historically atypical” immigration list.

Measles cases have risen in the U.S., from 13 individual cases in 2020 to 121 in 2022, according to the CDC. Recent outbreaks in Ohio and Illinois have all occurred among unvaccinated children, according to state health officials. The age and nationality of victims is not made public, but the measles vaccination rate is below 70% in many countries that have sent immigrants to the U.S. recently.

While few are publicly pushing the panic button, some public health officials worry that a creeping mistrust of vaccines in the wake of the pandemic may make more Americans vulnerable to dangerous and even deadly scourges. Syphilis, for example, has been on the rise for many years but rose sharply during the pandemic.

COVID-19 has drawn the lion’s share of attention from the public health bureaucracy since 2020, leading to shortfalls in other areas, some experts said.

“All of these diseases are more prevalent in part because of lockdown policies which diverted public health resources and attention worldwide away from its traditional priorities of controlling the spread of these deadly infectious conditions,” Dr. Bhattacharya said, referring to measles and other maladies.

And just as there is no cure for polio, there is no vaccine for some infectious diseases. Malaria, for example, the mosquito-borne fever that killed more workers than yellow fever did when the Panama Canal was built, remains endemic in tropical zones, and its path to rare outbreaks in the U.S. usually follows either a trip made abroad or someone moving here, according to health officials in Florida.

Department spokesman Jae Williams told RCI the exact sources of many infectious disease outbreaks in the Sunshine State remain unknown, but the huge increase in illegal immigrants could be a clue.

“It’s always a possibility, and our most recent malaria cases appeared to be a strain from Central America,” he said. In other words, the malaria could have been brought by a newcomer or picked up by someone who traveled there and returned.

Central Florida this summer saw leprosy return, although the exact source remains a mystery, Williams said. Information about the age, sex, and nationality of victims is not public, and most of those who contracted the infectious, skin-disfiguring disease were described only as “landscapers.” Various accounts have speculated armadillos are to blame, but armadillos are not newcomers to the region. The theory holds that somehow the leprosy bacteria, which generally requires prolonged contact and against which most humans have developed immunity over millennia, is in the dirt armadillos wallow in, and the cases that broke out among landscapers then would be linked to the animals they encounter.

But leprosy is not endemic in Florida. It is most common in parts of southeast Asia, equatorial Africa, and Brazil.

“The influx of people, sure it’s a problem and it’s always a possibility,” Williams said. “But we don’t really know.”

Nevertheless, the questions are being asked with more frequency. On Dec. 19, Ashley St. Clair, a conservative commentator, set off a firestorm on X, formerly Twitter, that her Delta flight from Phoenix to New York was filled with people who had recently been processed, released, and brought to the airport by Border Patrol.

“All the pilots, airline staff, and passengers want to know is: what medical screenings are being done?” she wrote.

Delta did not respond to questions from RCI about what knowledge it had been provided about its passengers.

 

James Varney | RealClear Wire

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