In 2020, research was published analyzing the voting patterns of physicians in Texas, California, and New York. The research found that physicians in those states did not vote as often as the general population. In fact, this study indicated that only half of eligible physicians were even registered to vote. This was very disappointing to me.

The fight for the right to vote in this country has been waged for over a century. When our nation was first established, women did not have the right to vote, and Blacks were not even considered fully human. A lot, thank God, has changed for the better since that time. And, since that time, there have been scores upon scores of Americans who have shed their blood and given their lives to give me the right to vote and have my voice heard.

I cannot let that fight, I cannot let the lives of those brave Americans be lost in vain by neglecting to do my duty as a citizen and registering to vote and then voting in every election.

In so many countries in our world, sham elections are held where the dictator receives “99.9%” of the vote tally. In so many countries in our world, people’s lives and livelihoods are placed in danger for daring to have their voices be heard. In so many countries in our world, people yearn for the privileges that we here take for granted. This fact motivates me to get out the vote and let my voice be heard.

Those of us in healthcare – physicians especially – should be at the vanguard of those who consistently cast their ballots in every election, large or small. So much of our profession is regulated by policymakers and legislators who are not in healthcare. So much of what we do is, many times, subject to the whims of politicians and the machinations of electoral and partisan politics. We deserve a say in this process, and as the saying goes, “if you are not at the table, then you are on the menu.” The very first thing we need to do to be at the table is vote and have our voices heard.

In January of this year, another paper was published showing an increasing trend of physician turnout in elections:

This is encouraging to see, and we need to continue this trend.

We all have very busy professional and personal lives. It can be hard, sometimes, to take the time and cast a ballot, especially since election day is usually during the workweek. Take that time, however, we must. It is not only our duty as citizens of this country, but – as this year’s study authors noted: “physicians’ engagement with the political process, particularly through voting, plays an important role in shaping public policy, affecting patient health and clinical practice.”

The post If We Are Not At The Table, We Will Be On The Menu appeared first on Medika Life.

Together, they have earned an extra $10.7 billion over last year’s profits during (and largely because of) the pandemic — a stunning 56% increase. Despite this surge, we ranked Amazon and Walmart among the least generous of the 13 large retail and grocery companies studied in our report. The two companies could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers through their last quarter and still earned more profit than last year.

Stock prices for Walmart have soared 36% since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, worker wages had grown only 6% by the end of 2020 even after last December’s bonuses were announced by the company. Walmart has (along with Amazon) redefined the term “corporate greed”, electing to drop sick and vulnerable employees along the way, viewing them as discarded lumps of diseased flesh not worthy of their billions. Damaged goods that can no longer serve their masters, through no fault of the employee.

If you think that description is a little harsh, it isn’t. It is reflective of a political mindset in America that rewards enslaving and exploiting the poor, often at the cost of their health. It is a mindset that persists independently of the color that occupies the White House, enshrined, entrenched capitalism at its worst. You cannot argue figures away and the graph above may as well be painted in the blood of the employees and families Walmart has destroyed in the last year.

According to figures from a recent study by Human Impact Partners, the extent of the impact of Walmart’s Sick Leave policy during the pandemic is this: at least 7,618 employee cases of COVID-19 and 133 deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented. The effects on the broader public cannot be quantified. By forcing sick employees to return to work, Walmart has knowingly exposed its customers to potential infection from the coronavirus, contributing directly to the spread of the virus in the general population. It’s motivation? Unconscionable greed.

To make matters worse, intentional obstacles to accessing the paltry two days of paid sick leave make it even more difficult for sick Walmart staff to access the funds. Workers have reported barriers like retaliation and lack of communication around the policy in accessing even this meager amount of leave. According to a 2020 survey, 45% of Walmart associates reported they were still likely to come into work if they were sick. Employees reported fear of disciplinary action, loss of wages, and no knowledge of the 48-hour policy as reasons they would choose not to stay home while ill.

Offer your workers only TWO DAYS OF PAID SICK LEAVE and the following two scenarios unfold, pandemic or no pandemic. 

• Your employee is forced to return to work on the third day if they want to put food on the table for their families. If they’ve contracted a virus, this is the time they are at their most infectious, so Walmart is encouraging a policy that exposes the public to grave risk.
• Walmart turns off the pittance it drip-feeds its employees on day three of their illness if employers have even been able to access these funds in the first place. Staff who become seriously ill face a double whammy. Any potential savings, if they are fortunate, are quickly eroded by medical expenses, medication, and the related costs of illness, and their source of income is officially disconnected as per Walmart policy. No money, no food, no medicine. Tell me which part doesn’t upset you?

Add in the institutional obstacles to accessing these funds and staff are automatically coerced into staying at work, despite being ill. This promotes the spread of disease and places the life and health of the employee at risk.

Flawed Business or Flawed America

Take your pick, one or the other or both, the outcomes are the same. Current policies and permitted practices encourage racism, enforce poverty and deprive the poorest communities of the dignity of basic health and access to care. Ask yourself this.

Why is it that hard-working Americans are required to petition employees for BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS? BASIC HEALTH? BASIC DIGNITIES? Clearly, that little piece of paper referred to as a constitution appears to be fundamentally flawed and may require a redraft. The rights of all working Americans to the dignity of something as simple as paid sick leave, particularly at the time of a pandemic should be enshrined in law, vigorously enforced by legislation, and actively policed for transgressors. Fail to do this, to recognize basic human rights, and the subsequent costs of a failed system skyrocket. Particularly for healthcare.

Walmart isn’t just killing its staff and exposing the public to danger with its despicable profit-based policies, it’s contributing to the downfall of the American Healthcare system. Vote with your feet to register your outrage and do the right thing. Shop elsewhere until this greedy corporate entity decides to recognize its employees as human beings. 

Both Democrats and Republicans need to focus more on resolving basic inadequacies like these that affect large swathes of Americans. You cannot build new infrastructure on rotten foundations, President Biden, and your current building is teetering on the verge of collapse. You can read the full HIP report here: Walmart’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic: How lack of paid sick time prolongs the pandemic and increases mortality

The post Walmart’s Paid Sick Leave Policy is the Punchline to an Abusive Employer Joke appeared first on Medika Life.

In terms of context, our publication, Medika Life, deals on a daily basis with medical con artists, quacks, and dishonest individuals seeking to exploit the health concerns of a very vulnerable sector of our population. We apply a label to these individuals, that of Predatory Health Practitioner (PHP). These individuals prey on the weak, the vulnerable, and the uneducated for the purposes of self-enrichment. They are a global phenomenon but in the US they have embedded themselves within the Republican Party.

It is an impossibility in modern medicine to separate politics and healthcare. The two are intrinsically linked, bound by staggering sums of money, kickbacks, favors, and good old-fashioned sell-outs orchestrated by skilled lobbyists, who in turn, are bankrolled by large medical conglomerates.

The predatory practitioners we’ll meet below have taken this system and given it a digital upgrade. While commercialism of their quackery matters, there are also other factors at play, influenced by alliances they have formed. Links to QAnon, white supremacist groups, and conspiracy theorists offer a window into a depraved world where any and every tool is fair game in a propaganda war with ambitious designs.

Destabilizing established medical practice, depriving racial minorities of access to care through medical misinformation and fear, furthering their political careers, creating a platform of supporters from whom they can draw funding, and other twisted agendas all meld together under the unified blanket of the radicalized Republican.

We write about these quacks and con artists at length, exposing them one at a time and it has become glaringly obvious that their base of operations resides firmly within the GOP. The graphic below reads like a rogues gallery of Republican radicals and PHP’s. They are now so embedded as to appear a part of the GOP and they’re feted by the party loyalists like long-lost war heroes.

Here then the shocking truth of what really lies behind Covid misinformation in America and how these propaganda tools are being used to frighten racial minorities away from healthcare.

The Health&Freedom conference poster that speaks volumes

Take a really close look. Do you see the connection and the propaganda? It’s glaringly obvious, linking the concept of health to freedom and creating the perception that somehow healthcare is under threat in America. Don’t trust “the man” and don’t trust his medicine. Notice the choice of colors? Remind you of anyone? While we cannot disagree that personal freedoms are under attack, that’s old news. They’ve been under attack since they were handed out to us. Attaching these attacks to healthcare, however, is a recent tactic. One that’s taken center stage during the pandemic.

We’ll show how the Predatory Health elements, QAnon, White supremacists, and conspiracy theorists are now managing a Republican sanctioned attack on American healthcare. Strange bedfellows that have found comfort in their twisted views of society. You can argue till you’re blue in the face but the poster above spells it out more clearly than any article or confession ever could.

If you are a contributing member to the Republican party you are in effect funding racism, medical misinformation, and contributing to the attempted destruction of the American healthcare system by elements that have taken over your party and are eroding it from the inside out.

These are the same people who stormed your Capitol building. They are insurrectionists, con artists, and die-hard racists intent on dismantling healthcare, democracy, and any other form of rational democratic governance in America. The last item on the itinerary for their meeting was a public mask-burning event. You, as a GOP member, are aware of these elements unless you’ve been living in a cave, and by choosing to look away, you allow them to continue with their agendas, to grow, and to thrive.

Let’s examine a few of the faces on this poster.

Dr. Simone Gold — Political Affiliation, Republican

Photographed in the Capitol building among other insurrectionists, she is part of a countrywide network of quacks and a pharmacy chain, Ravkoo Pharmacy, trying to profit from the pandemic by selling unproven medication to people who they’ve frightened off the vaccine, She is a despicable example of an educated person who takes advantage of a vulnerable community, using her knowledge to incite fear and then profit by selling her “remedy”. You can read our damning expose of her scam here.

Dr. Christiane Northrup — Political Affiliation, Republican

Once feted by Oprah Winfrey, this doyen of women’s health has sunken into the slippery quagmire of conspiracies and medical misinformation, adopting causes like the dangers of 5G, criticizing vaccine safety, and sowing distrust in peoples minds with regards to the pandemic, vaccines and the dangers of the coronavirus. She is featured on Medika’s Quack Scale and you can read our detailed list of the medical misinformation she sells online.

Andrew Wakefield — Political Affiliation, Republican

We’ve avoided the use of the term doctor here, as this individual was stripped of his medical credentials by the British General Medical Council for manipulating data in a now famed fake paper on vaccines and their supposed link to autism. In addition, it was shown how he performed unsanctioned medical procedures on children and sought to profit by providing his own alternative vaccine, in the place of the MMR vaccine he was attempting to discredit. He’s a firm favorite now in Republican circles, meeting with Trump and other high-ranking members in the party. Shamed and disgraced in his home country, he’s now found a new home and continues to spread health misinformation. You can read our article on his disgraced past and form your own opinion.

Mike Lindell— Political Affiliation, Republican

This slick con artist and CEO of MyPillow was another favorite under the Trump term, invited into the inner sanctum of the Whitehouse where he attempted to sell his covid quackery to the President. Medika published an article in December of 2020, examing Lindell’s involvement with the fake covid cure, Oleandrin, he tried to sell to the Whitehouse. His recent ban on Twitter for promoting election fraud lies has led him to attempt to set up his own social media platform.

Lin Wood — Political Affiliation, Republican

Wood has continued to push numerous baseless conspiracy theories that the presidential election was fraudulent, which led Twitter to suspend his account. The State Bar of Georgia investigated two complaints filed against him and ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and he is the current subject of investigation for alleged voter fraud. His links to QAnon are evident and on public display.

Sidney Powell — Political Affiliation, Republican

Powell was banned by Twitter on January 8, 2021, for promoting the QAnon voter fraud conspiracy theory in the 2020 US elections. She has promoted personalities and slogans associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. Powell alleges that a secret international cabal involving communists, “globalists”, George Soros, Hugo Chávez, the Clinton Foundation, the CIA, and thousands of Democratic and Republican officials — including Trump ally and Georgia governor Brian Kemp — used voting machines to transfer millions of votes away from Trump to Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Her unsubstantiated claims rapidly became an embarrassment to Trump’s legal defense (among which she numbered) and Rudy Giuliani and issued a November 22 statement that Powell was “practicing law on her own” and was not (or was no longer) a part of the Trump legal team. The President however still kept in contact with her. In the meanwhile, she’s received a $100,000 bill From Wisconsin, as the Governor demands legal fees over her election lawsuit.

Richard Bartlett — Political Affiliation, Republican

Most famously known for going public with budesonide (an inhaled steroid) as a cure for Covid in July of 2020, this doctor made various unfounded and unverified claims relating to the efficacy of the steroid in treating and curing patients with Covid. Hi suggestion to part of Japan, Singapore, and Asia had avoided deaths because of their use of budesonide was without basis and although this steroid may offer some relief to patients with covid it is a very far cry from a cure. As far as his claims to treating patients, at the point he went public, he’d treated two patients with budesonide, via remote health platforms. They were using other medications and suffered from additional medical conditions. Hardly what you’d call a clinical trial or hard evidence. Bartlett also suggested that a vaccine isn’t needed if inhaled budesonide is being widely used. After advancing the baseless claim about Taiwan’s wide adoption of the steroid, he stated:

“Taiwan, 24 million people, they don’t need to wait for a vaccine — they don’t have a problem that you should vaccinate 24 million people for.”

We could go through almost every name that appears on this poster and their stories would echo with an all-too-familiar ring. Voices tainted with conspiracy, racist bias, misinformation, and dystopian views promoted with the single intent of destabilizing America and its healthcare platform. We have identified some of the key motivators that drive these individuals.

• Financial self-enrichment and personal aggrandizement are key drivers for many of the individuals featured above. There are huge sums of money to be made and instant stardom awaits among a growing fan base.
• Racial agendas focused on restoring white supremacy to America. This is achieved by actively discrediting coronavirus vaccines and suggesting the virus carries no risk. The most at-risk populations suffer the most. There is sufficient data to show the success of their strategy among African-American and Hispanic communities and to encourage them to further action.
• Political gain, within the rapidly expanding base of support enjoyed by these groups, with aspirations for higher office and the associated perks.

Don’t make the mistake of dismissing these individuals as crazy kooks and conspiracy head cases and hope they’ll fade quietly away. They’ve struck a chord with a significant number of Americans who claim allegiance to the Republican party. They are intelligent, willful, and manipulative and these three traits combined with an intent to do harm to achieve their own goals make them extremely dangerous.

Does this mean the Republican party is essentially a racist institute populated by white supremacists and QAnon collaborators? No, Not yet, but left untended, the disease will consume the patient.

Alternatively, the larger portion of the GOP can begin a much-needed purge of the insidious cancer that is festering in its bosom, but I would encourage urgency as you don’t have much time left. The clock is ticking and you’re no longer just risking your own party’s stability by not acting. but the future of America as a whole. That fragile balance of opinion that has served democracy so well for generations, an evenly balanced two-party system, is under threat. We’ve provided you with the poster, now it’s up to you.

The post How Republican Radicals Are Weaponizing Healthcare in America appeared first on Medika Life.