Trump v. academia
New England Journal of Medicine published letter saying narcotics aren't addictive
Trump is turning over the tables at the universities and chasing the elitists with a whip of cords. This is good politics because most of his supporters never went to college and non-collegians are a majority in America. This also is sound economics because the nation is $36 trillion in debt and blows billions on unnecessary studies. The same Democrats who want to tax the rich also want to give billions to untaxed Harvard which is sitting on a $53 billion endowment.
It reminds me of the CCR song, Fortunate Son.
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don't they help themselves, Lord?
But when the taxman come to the door
Lord, the house lookin' like a rummage sale, yeah
That actually happened.
In the final weeks of the Illinois governor’s race, one unusual topic has been stealing headlines: J.B. Pritzker’s toilets.
Pritzker is the Democratic nominee, a venture capitalist, and a very wealthy man—an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, he's worth $3.2 billion.
In 2007, Pritzker and his wife bought a second mansion next to the one they live in on Chicago's Astor Street, for $3.7 million. As The Chicago Sun-Times reported, that mansion remained vacant and was allowed to fall into disrepair.
And then in October 2015, according to a report by Cook County Inspector General Patrick Blanchard, the Pritzkers had five toilets removed from the second house so that it would be classified as “uninhabitable” in a property tax appeal filed by the Pritzkers. Cook County assesses vacant properties at 10% of the market value.
Rummage sale, indeed.
Dumb me. I pay plumbers to keep both toilets working.
But I am dragging myself off today’s topic which is Trump the defender of the nation taking on the souls who run academia, which exists to pass on knowledge. Instead, they promote propaganda such as Critical Race Theory (whites caused all your problems) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (white men need not apply—unless they are gay or tranny).
STAT News says it is “reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine.”
It reported, “New England Journal of Medicine gets swept up in U.S. attorney inquiry into alleged bias.
“Targeting of prestigious publication—and perhaps others—could signal a coming clash between journals and the Trump administration.”
The story said, “The New England Journal of Medicine’s editor in chief, Eric Rubin, received a letter from the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Edward R. Martin Jr. in recent days in which the prosecutor asked six questions, largely about alleged bias in the decision to publish unspecified content. The journal told STAT it responded by affirming its commitment to evidence-based recommendations and editorial independence.”
So why not just answer the questions?
Retraction Watch says it is “tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.” Among the retractions it watches are NEJM’s.
On January 10, 1980, NEJM published a letter from Jane Porter and Hershel Jick, M.D., of the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance, Program Boston University Medical Center, Waltham, Massachusetts, under the headline, “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.”
The letter said, “Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.”
Over the next 37 years, that 101-word paragraph letter was cited thousands of times in various scientific articles. In 2017, four scholars in Toronto finally wrote the NEJM to cry foul and their letter was published that year on June 10.
Their letter said, “We identified 608 citations of the index publication and noted a sizable increase after the introduction of OxyContin (a long-acting formulation of oxycodone) in 1995. Of the articles that included a reference to the 1980 letter, the authors of 439 (72.2%) cited it as evidence that addiction was rare in patients treated with opioids.”
Well, we all know what happened following OxyContin. Oh boy, do we know it in the coalfields. West Virginia has led the nation in per capita deaths by overdoses for more than 20 consecutive years.
NEJM hasn’t really retracted the original letter, choosing to slap on an editor’s note atop the letter, reading, “For reasons of public health, readers should be aware that this letter has been ‘heavily and uncritically cited’ as evidence that addiction is rare with opioid therapy.”
It cited the second letter.
The refusal to say the original letter was just plain wrong is odd, considering pharmaceutical executives admitted the obvious a decade earlier that narcotics are addictive.
The second letter said, “In 2007, the manufacturer of OxyContin and three senior executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors, and patients about the risk of addiction associated with the drug. Our findings highlight the potential consequences of inaccurate citation and underscore the need for diligence when citing previously published studies.”
According to Retraction Watch, this is one of 25 retractions NEJM has made; it made three since that one in 2017, so it not like the journal is sloppy.
But NEJM is powerful and it should not take 37 years to issue a half-assed correction, especially after all the damage done by opioids. Of course the media blindly rallies behind the medical journals.
NYT reported, “Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.”
Well, considering NEJM’s 37-year lag to sort of retract a letter that said narcotics aren’t addictive, the Trump administration has a point.
Trump and Kennedy, graduates of Penn and Harvard respectively, are questioning the work of scholars and the racial bias of university administrators. Instead of crying independence and delivering Orange Man Bad tirades, our scientists and administrators should be answering the very valid questions.
The NEJM like almost all medical journals are bastions of woke political activists. There is not a single issue of the “rag” that doesn’t have some racial/equity study or editorial. They had to retract a fake study related to hydroxychloroquine (during Covid) in their jihad against President Trump during his first term.
The Journal is also all in on the medical “consequences” of “climate change” and support the transgender insanity and treat it like it isn’t a mental illness!
Medical science in this country has been completely Lysenkoized. Thank goodness Trump II is trying to do something about it.
I recall in 2020 within a few weeks of Trump announcing hydroxychloroquine use for COVID19 NEJM, Lancet and JAMA all published studies downplaying its use. These studies were all methodologically flawed and clearly biased but were seemingly ready to be published rather quickly after Trumps press conference. Our esteemed medical journals have been captured. There are still the occasional worthwhile published studies but the general trend is DEI.