What up Knight Shift
Richard H. Ebright
@R_H_Ebright
House letter, 11/30/22:
"We write to urge..NIH..to respond to..longstanding
requests to provide..information related to..origins of..COVID-19.., including matters related to..grant to EcoHealth Alliance and subgrant to..Wuhan Institute of Virology"
https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/11.30.22-Letter-to-Dr.-Tabak.pdf
https://mobile.twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1598069805952925697
Josh Guetzkow
@joshg99
Our paper on 'Censorship and Suppression of COVID-19 Heterodoxy' has 149,000 downloads since it was published on Nov 1. Let's break 150K in one month!
If you haven't yet done so, please take a moment to go to this link & press the 'Download PDF' button:
https://mobile.twitter.com/joshg99/status/1597967955412647936
Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH
@CDCDirector
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Tomorrow, I will be joined by colleagues & #PublicHealth leaders as we honor the 623 African American men, their suffering & sacrifice, and our commitment to ethical research and practice.
Quote Tweet
CDC
@CDCgov
·
Nov 28
Official
Join CDC on 11/30 at 1:00PM ET for an event marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Tuskegee syphilis study . The event will include important conversations on crucial mission of addressing health equity.
https://mobile.twitter.com/CDCDirector/status/1597700811102224385
RNA for Moderna’s Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/08/investigative-reports/rna-for-modernas-omicron-booster-manufactured-by-cia-linked-company/
Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant ties to US intelligence.
Earlier this week, the United Kingdom became the first country to approve Moderna’s reformulated version of its COVID-19 vaccine, which claims to provide protection against both the original form of the virus and the significantly less lethal but more transmissible Omicron variant. The product was approved by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) with the support of the UK government’s Commission on Human Medicines.
Described by UK officials as a “sharpened tool” in the nation’s continued vaccination campaign, the reformulated vaccine combines the previously approved COVID-19 vaccine with a “vaccine candidate” targeting the Omicron variant BA.1. That vaccine candidate has never been previously approved and has not been the subject of independent study. The MHRA approved the vaccine based on a single, incomplete human trial currently being conducted by Moderna. The company promoted incomplete data from that trial in company press releases in June and July. The study has yet to be published in a medical journal or peer reviewed. No concerns have been raised by any regulatory agency, including the MHRA, regarding Moderna’s past history of engaging in suspect and likely illegal activity in past product trials, including for its original COVID-19 vaccine.
The approval comes shortly before several Western countries, including the UK, plan to conduct a massive COVID-19 booster vaccination campaign this fall. Moderna has also noted that approval for its Omicron booster vaccine are pending in the US, EU, Australia and Canada – all of which are also planning fall vaccination campaigns focused on COVID-19. The company’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel, has called the reformulated vaccine “our lead candidate for a Fall 2022 booster.”
However, unlike the company’s original COVID-19 vaccine, the genetic material, or messenger RNA (mRNA), for this new vaccine, including the newly formulated genetic material meant to provide protection against the Omicron variant, is being manufactured, not by Moderna, but by a relatively new company that has received hardly any media attention, despite its overt links to US intelligence. Last September, it was quietly announced that a company called National Resilience (often referred to simply as Resilience) would begin manufacturing the mRNA for Moderna COVID-19 vaccine products. Under the terms of the multi-year agreement, “Resilience will produce mRNA for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at its facility in Mississauga, Ontario, for distribution worldwide.”
“Reinventing Biomanufacturing”
National Resilience was founded relatively recently, in November 2020, and describes itself as “a manufacturing and technology company dedicated to broadening access to complex medicines and protecting biopharmaceutical supply chains against disruption.” It has since been building “a sustainable network of high-tech, end-to-end manufacturing solutions with the aim to ensure the medicines of today and tomorrow can be made quickly, safely, and at scale.” It furtherplans to “reinvent biomanufacturing” and “democratize access to medicines,” namely gene therapies, experimental vaccines and other “medicines of tomorrow.”
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In pursuit of those goals, the company announced it would “actively invest in developing powerful new technologies to manufacture complex medicines that are defining the future of therapeutics, including cell and gene therapies, viral vectors, vaccines, and proteins.” It was founded with the reported intention “to build a better system for manufacturing complex medicines to fight deadly diseases” as a way to improve post-COVID “pandemic preparedness.”
The company initially marketed its manufacturing capabilities as “the Resilience platform”, and offers principally “RNA Modalities”, including RNA development for vaccines, gene editing and therapeutics; and “Virus Production”, including viral vectors, oncolytic viruses (i.e. a virus engineered to preferentially attack cancer cells), viruses for use in vaccine development and gene-edited viruses for unspecified purposes. It is worth noting that, to date, many controversial “gain-of-function” experiments have justified modifying viruses for the same purposes as described by National Resilience’s Virus Production capabilities. In addition, National Resilience offers product formulations and other modalities, such as biologics and cell therapies, to its clientele and the “Virus Production” of its website has since been removed.
National Resilience, being such a young company, has very few clients and there is little publicly available information on its manufacturing capabilities aside from the company’s website. The firm only acquired its first commercial manufacturing plant in March 2021, located in Boston, MA and purchased from Sanofi, followed shortly thereafter by the acquisition of another separate plant located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Makeovers were announced for the plants, but little is publicly known about their progress. Prior to the acquisitions, the company had been subleasing a Bay area facility in Fremont, California. Reporters were puzzled at the time as to why a company with roughly 700 employees at the time had acquired a total of 599,00 square feet of manufacturing space after having only emerged from stealth less than 6 months prior.
In April 2021, National Resilience acquired Ology Bioservices Inc., which had received a $37 million contract from the US military the previous November to develop an advanced anti-COVID-19 monoclonal antibody treatment. This acquisition also provided National Resilience with its first Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory and the ability to manufacture cell and gene therapies, live viral vaccines and vectors and oncolytic viruses.
Despite being in the earliest stages of developing its “revolutionary” manufacturing capabilities, National Resilience entered into a partnership with the Government of Canada in July of last year. Per that agreement, the Canadian government plans to invest CAD 199.2 million (about $154.9 million) into National Resilience’s Ontario-based subsidiary, Resilience Biotechnologies Inc. Most of those funds are destined for use in expanding the Ontario facility that Resilience acquired last March and which is now manufacturing the mRNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 products. Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, asserted at the time that the investment would “build future pandemic preparedness” and help “to grow Canada’s life science ecosystem as an engine for our economic recovery.” More recently, in 2022, the company has announced a few new clients – Takeda, Opus Genetics and the US Department of Defense.
According to National Resilience’s executives, the company’s ambitions apparently go far beyond manufacturing RNA and viruses. For instance, Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi has claimed that the company is seeking to build “the world’s most advanced biopharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem.” Yet, Singhvi has declined to offer much in the way of specifics when it comes to exactly how the company plans to become the planet’s most elite biomanufacturing company.
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In an interview with The San Francisco Business Times, Singhvi states that Resilience is looking to fill its massive manufacturing plants with “technologies and people that can set and apply new standards for manufacturing cell therapies and gene therapies as well as RNA-based treatments.” Prior to Resilience, Singhvi was CEO of NovaVax and an operating partner at Flagship Pioneering, which played a major role in the creation and rise of Moderna.
Singhvi has further insisted that National Resilience is “not a therapeutics company, not a contractor and not a tools company” and instead aims “to boost production using the new therapeutic modalities” such as RNA-based treatments, which have become normalized in the COVID-19 era. Whereas contract manufacturers “are like kitchens, with pots and pans ready for any recipe,” “what we’re trying to do is fix the recipes,” Singhvi has explained. One member of Resilience’s board of directors, former FDA Commissioner and Pfizer Board member Scott Gottlieb, has described the company as seeking to act as the equivalent of Amazon Web Services for the biotechnology industry.
Essentially, Resilience bills itself as offering solutions that will allow “futuristic” medicines, including mRNA vaccines, to be produced more quickly and more efficiently, with the apparent goal of monopolizing certain parts of the biomanufacturing process. It also appears poised to become the manufacturer of choice for mRNA vaccines and experimental therapeutics in the event of a future pandemic, which some public health “philanthropists” like Bill Gates have said is imminent.
Perhaps the company’s most noteworthy ambition relates to their claims that they support clients through the government regulatory process. Given the company’s emphasis on speedy mass production of experimental gene therapies, its stated intention of getting the “futuristic” medical products it manufactures to market as quickly as possible seems at odds with the slower, traditional regulatory processes. Indeed, one could easily argue that the approvals of mRNA vaccines for the first time in human history during the COVID-19 crisis were only possible because of the major relaxing of regulatory procedurse and safety testing due to the perceived urgency of the situation.
Resilience seems intent on seeing that phenomenon repeat itself. As previously mentioned, the company claims to allow for the setting and application of “new standards for manufacturing cell therapies and gene therapies” and also says it plans to become a “technology-aggregating standards bearer that helps therapies come to market more efficiently.” It previously offered on its website “regulatory support” and “strategy consulting” to clients, suggesting that it would seek to mediate between clients and government regulators in order to fulfill its goal of having the products it manufactures taken to market more quickly. In addition, upon launch, the company claimed it planned to obtain unspecified “regulatory capabilities.” If so, it is certainly notable that former top Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials are either on the company’s board or, as will be noted shortly, played a major role in the company’s creation.
The People Behind Resilience
Resilience was co-founded by Biotech venture capitalist Robert Nelsen, who is known for listening “to science’s earliest whispers, even when data are too early for just about anyone else.” Nelsen was one of the earliest investors in Illumina, a California-based gene-sequencing hardware and software giant that is believed to currently dominate the field of genomics. As mentioned in a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation, Illumina is closely tied to the DARPA-equivalent of the Wellcome Trust known as Wellcome Leap, which is also focused on “futuristic” and transhumanist “medicines.” Nelsen is now chairman of National Resilience’s board, which is a “Who’s Who” of big players from the US National Security State, Big Pharma and Pharma-related “philanthropy.”
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However, while Nelsen has been given much of the credit for creating Resilience, he revealed in one interview that the idea for the company had actually come from someone else – Luciana Borio. In July of last year, Nelsen revealed that it was while talking to Borio about “her work running pandemic preparedness on the NSC [National Security Council]” that had “helped lead to the launch of Nelsen’s $800 million biologics manufacturing startup Resilience.”
At the time of their conversation, Borio was the vice president of In-Q-tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA that has been used since its creation in the early 2000s to found a number of companies, many of which act as Agency fronts. Prior to In-Q-Tel, she served as director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the Trump administration and had previously been the acting chief scientist at the FDA from 2015 to 2017.
Borio is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, a consultant to Goldman Sachs, a member of the Bill Gates-funded vaccine alliance CEPI, and a partner at Nelsen’s venture capital firm ARCH Venture Partners, which funds Resilience. Nelsen’s ARCH previously funded Nanosys, the company of the controversial scientist Charles Lieber. Around the time of her conversation with Nelsen that led to Resilience’s creation, Borio was co-writing a policy paper for the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security that recommended linking COVID-19 vaccination status with food stamp programs and rent assistance as a possible means of coercing certain populations to take the experimental vaccine.
Borio is hardly Resilience’s only In-Q-Tel connection, as the CEO of In-Q-Tel, Chris Darby, sits on the company’s board of directors. Darby is also on the board of directors of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation. Darby was also recently a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), where members of the military, intelligence community and Silicon Valley’s top firms argued for the need to reduce the use of “legacy systems” in favor of AI-focused alternatives as a national security imperative. Among those “legacy systems” identified by the NSCAI were in-person doctor visits and even receiving medical care from a human doctor, as opposed to an AI “doctor.” The NSCAI also argued for the removal of “regulatory barriers” that prevent these new technologies from replacing “legacy systems.”
Another notable board member, in discussing Resilience’s intelligence ties, is Drew Oetting. Oetting works for Cerberus Capital Management, the firm headed by Steve Feinberg who previously led the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under the Trump administration. Cerberus is notably the parent company of DynCorp, a controversial US national security contractor tied to numerous scandals, including scandals related to sex trafficking in conflict zones. Oetting is also part of the CIA-linked Thorn NGO ostensibly focused on tackling child trafficking that was the subject of a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation.
Oetting is also the co-founder of 8VC, a venture capital firm that is one of the main investors in Resilience. 8VC’s other co-founder is Joe Lonsdale and Oetting “started his career” as Lonsdale’s chief of staff. Lonsdale is the co-founder, alongside Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, of Palantir, a CIA front company and intelligence contractor that is the successor to DARPA’s controversial Total Information Awareness (TIA) mass surveillance and data-mining program. In addition, Oetting previously worked for Bill Gates’ investment fund.
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Also worth noting is the presence of Joseph Robert Kerrey, former US Senator for Nebraska and a former member of the conflict-of-interest-ridden 9/11 Commission, on Resilience’s board. Kerrey is currently managing director of Allen & Co., a New York investment banking firm which has hosted an annual “summer camp for billionaires” since 1983. Allen & Co. has long been a major player in networks where organized crime and intelligence intersect, and is mentioned repeatedly throughout my upcoming book One Nation Under Blackmail. For instance, Charles and Herbert Allen, who ran the firm for decades, had considerable business dealings with organized crime kingpins and frontmen for notorious gangsters like Meyer Lansky, particularly in the Bahamas. They were also business partners of Leslie Wexner’s mentors A. Alfred Taubman and Max Fisher as well as associates of Earl Brian, one of the architects of the PROMIS software scandal – which saw organized crime and intelligence networks cooperate to steal and then compromise the PROMIS software for blackmail and clandestine intelligence-gathering purposes. Allen & Co. was a major investor in Brian’s business interests in the technology industry that Brian used in attempts to bankrupt the developers of PROMIS, Inslaw Inc. and to market versions of PROMIS that had been compromised first by Israeli intelligence and, later, the CIA.
In addition to these intelligence-linked individuals, the rest of Resilience’s board includes the former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Susan Desmond-Hellmann; former FDA Commissioner and Pfizer board member, Scott Gottlieb; two former executives at Johnson & Johnson; former president and CEO of Teva Pharmaceuticals North American branch, George Barrett; CalTech professor and board member of Alphabet (i.e. Google) and Illumina, Frances Arnold; former executive at Genentech and Merck, Patrick Yang; and Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi.
To Boost or Not to Boost
It is certainly telling that the normally publicity hungry Moderna has said so little about its partnership with Resilience and that Resilience, despite its ambitious plans, has also avoided the media limelight. Considering Moderna’s history and Resilience’s connections, there may be more to this partnership that meets the eye and concerned members of the public would do well to keep a very close eye on Resilience, its partnerships, and the products it is manufacturing.
Given that we now live in a world where government regulatory decisions on the approval of medicines are increasingly influenced by corporate press releases and normal regulatory procedures have fallen by the wayside for being too “slow,” there is likely to be little scrutiny of the genetic material that Resilience produces for the “medicines of tomorrow.” This seems to be already true for Moderna’s recently retooled COVID-19 vaccine, as there has been no independent examination of the new genetic sequence of mRNA used in the Omicron-specific vaccine candidate or its effects on the human body in the short, medium or long term. For those who are skeptical of the outsized role that intelligence-linked companies are playing in the attempted technological “revolution” in the medical field, it is best to consider Resilience’s role in the upcoming fall vaccination campaign and in future pandemic and public health scenarios before trying its “futuristic” products.
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>Resilience
Whitney Webb
@_whitneywebb
FYI - ex FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb (who wrote this drivel) is on the board of a CIA linked company that is poised to play a major role in any post-Covid biosecurity crisis (whether manufactured or real)
Controversial new research suggests SARS-CoV-2 bears signs of genetic engineering
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/10/22/a-new-paper-claims-sars-cov-2-bears-signs-of-genetic-engineering
Astring of about 30,000 genetic letters were all that it took to start the nightmare of covid-19, the death toll from which is likely to be more than 20m. Exactly how this story began has been hotly contested. Many think that covid-19’s emergence was a zoonosis—a spillover, as so many new pathogens are, from wild animals, for it resembles a group of coronaviruses found in bats. Others have pointed to the enthusiastic coronavirus engineering going on in laboratories around the world, but particularly in Wuhan—the Chinese city where the virus was first identified. In February 2021 a team of scientists assembled by the World Health Organisation (who) to visit Wuhan said a laboratory leak was extremely unlikely. However, this conclusion was subsequently challenged by the who’s boss, who said ruling out this theory was premature.
Two recent publications appear to have bolstered the case for a natural origin connected to a “wet market” in Wuhan. These markets sell live animals, often housed in poor conditions, and are known to be sites where new pathogens jump from animal to human. Early cases of covid-19 clustered around this market. But critics counter that there are so many missing data about the epidemic’s initial days that this portrait may be inaccurate.
…
Ottawa Gestapo
@OttawaGestapo
🤔
@WesternU
is hiding twitter replies of two former students who have died suddenly at age 20, and 21 shortly after announcing their lifting of mandatory vaccines.
It'd be a shame if this went viral.
https://mobile.twitter.com/OttawaGestapo/status/1597983572358332416
San Francisco will allow police to deploy robots that kill
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/us/san-francisco-will-allow-police-to-deploy-robots-that-kill/ar-AA14IFkJ
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Supervisors in San Francisco voted Tuesday to give city police the ability to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations – following an emotionally charged debate that reflected divisions on the politically liberal board over support for law enforcement.
The vote was 8-3, with the majority agreeing to grant police the option despite strong objections from civil liberties and other police oversight groups. Opponents said the authority would lead to the further militarization of a police force already too aggressive with poor and minority communities.
Supervisor Connie Chan, a member of the committee that forwarded the proposal to the full board, said she understood concerns over use of force but that “according to state law, we are required to approve the use of these equipments. So here we are, and it’s definitely not a easy discussion.”
The San Francisco Police Department said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns. But the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie said in a statement.
“Robots equipped in this manner would only be used in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives,” she said.
Supervisors amended the proposal Tuesday to specify that officers could use robots only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means. Only a limited number of high-ranking officers could authorize use of robots as a deadly force option.
San Francisco police currently have a dozen functioning ground robots used to assess bombs or provide eyes in low visibility situations, the department says. They were acquired between 2010 and 2017, and not once have they been used to deliver an explosive device, police officials said.
But explicit authorization was required after a new California law went into effect this year requiring police and sheriffs departments to inventory military-grade equipment and seek approval for their use.
The state law was authored last year by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu while he was an assembly member. It is aimed at giving the public a forum and voice in the acquisition and use of military-grade weapons that have a negative effect on communities, according to the legislation.
A federal program has long dispensed grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms, bayonets, armored vehicles and other surplus military equipment to help local law enforcement.
In 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an order reviving the Pentagon program after his predecessor, Barack Obama, curtailed it in 2015, triggered in part by outrage over the use of military gear during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown.
San Francisco police said late Tuesday that no robots were obtained from military surplus, but some were purchased with federal grant money.
Like many places around the U.S., San Francisco is trying to balance public safety with treasured civilian rights such as privacy and the ability to live free of excessive police oversight. In September, supervisors agreed to a trial run allowing police to access in real time private surveillance camera feeds in certain circumstances.
Debate on Tuesday ran more than two hours with members on both sides accusing the other of reckless fear mongering.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who voted in favor of the policy authorization, said he was troubled by rhetoric painting the police department as untrustworthy and dangerous.
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“I think there’s larger questions raised when progressives and progressive policies start looking to the public like they are anti-police,” he said. “I think that is bad for progressives. I think it’s bad for this Board of Supervisors. I think it’s bad for Democrats nationally.”
Board President Shamann Walton, who voted against the proposal, pushed back, saying it made him not anti-police, but “pro people of color.”
“We continuously are being asked to do things in the name of increasing weaponry and opportunities for negative interaction between the police department and people of color," he said. “This is just one of those things.”
The San Francisco Public Defender's office sent a letter Monday to the board saying that granting police “the ability to kill community members remotely" goes against the city's progressive values. The office wanted the board to reinstate language barring police from using robots against any person in an act of force.
On the other side of the San Francisco Bay, the Oakland Police Department has dropped a similar proposal after public backlash.
The first time a robot was used to deliver explosives in the U.S. was in 2016, when Dallas police sent in an armed robot that killed a holed-up sniper who had killed five officers in an ambush.
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https://twitter.com/BradPorcellato/status/1597964270603476999
Brad Porcellato
@BradPorcellato
CNBC: “What does [Biden] mean we're going to ‘end drilling?’”
Biden Energy Advisor Amos Hochstein: “Eventually we are – we’re going to be phasing out the use of oil.”
T(w)itter Takeover News
@TitterTakeover
BREAKING: Twitter will increase video file size limit to 40GB and duration limit to two hours for Twitter Blue subscribers
https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/1598022469147062272
Long Covid may be ‘the next public health disaster’ — with a $3.7 trillion economic impact rivaling the Great Recession
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/why-long-covid-could-be-the-next-public-health-disaster.html
𝓖ö𝓷𝓰𝓾 𝓓ó𝓽𝓽𝓲𝓻 ©® _ 🇮🇸 ___ ( 🇩🇪 )
@DottirGongu
The great roar this afternoon in Gran Canaria was not produced by any earthquake. At our seismic stations we see the noise of some kind of unknown explosion. What we see is sound.
Therefore this is outside of our competences 😂
https://twitter.com/DottirGongu/status/1598012517481328640
Alexandros Marinos
@alexandrosM
Fukushima goes nuclear
Quote Tweet
New World Odor™
@hugh_mankind
·
Nov 29
🔥 Dr Masanori Fukushima, Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University, warns about vax harms to the 🇯🇵 Ministry of Health:
"You are ignoring science! It's a disaster. You spend billions on the vaccine & force people to inject it…due to the vax, natural immunity has been suppressed"
https://mobile.twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1597786332327456768
Christopher Mahon
@misterchrism
“In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children laid out policies & procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, incl scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies…”
catholicregister.org
Assisted suicide plans for children unveiled at Toronto's Sick Kids hospital
https://mobile.twitter.com/misterchrism/status/1595776329336635392
https://www.catholicregister.org/item/28133-assisted-suicide-plans-for-children-unveiled-at-toronto-s-sick-kids-hospital
(2018)
Assisted suicide plans for children unveiled at Toronto's Sick Kids hospital
TORONTO – In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children have laid out policies and procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, including scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies.
The article appears just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to Parliament on the medical consensus about extending voluntary euthanasia in circumstances currently forbidden by law. The Canadian Council of Academies is specifically looking at extending so-called assisted dying to patients under 18, psychiatric patients and patients who have expressed a preference for euthanasia before they were rendered incapable by Alzheimer's or some other disease.
The Sept. 21 paper written by Sick Kids doctors, administrators and ethicists was published in the British Medical Journal's J Med Ethics and backed by the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics.
In a flowchart that outlines how a medically induced death would occur at Sick Kids, authors Carey DeMichelis, Randi Zlotnik Shaul and Adam Rapoport do not mention conversation with family or parents about how the child dies until after the death occurs in the "reflection period."
Patient confidentiality governs the decision about whether or not to include parents in a decision about an assisted death, the authors said. If capable minors under the age of 18 stipulate they don't want their parents involved, doctors and nurses must respect the patients' wishes.
"Usually, the family is intimately involved in this (end-of-life) decision-making process," they write. "If, however, a capable patient explicitly indicates that they do not want their family members involved in their decision-making, although health care providers may encourage the patient to reconsider and involve their family, ultimately the wishes of capable patients with respect to confidentiality must be respected."
The proposed policy for Sick Kids argues that there is no meaningful ethical distinction between a patient choosing to refuse burdensome treatment and accepting an inevitable death versus patients who choose to die by chemical injection before the disease brings on death. Legally, Ontario does not require parents to be involved in a capable minor's decision to refuse further treatment, therefore there is no legal reason to require parent involvement in an assisted death, according to the Sick Kids policy.
Bioethicist Bridget Campion said she is neither surprised nor shocked by the article.
"The fact is medical assistance in dying is now legal. And it's legal in many places around the world," said the researcher, lecturer and writer with the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute. "Now that it is legal, many practitioners are saying, 'How do we do this?' I'm not surprised at all."
Opponents of assisted suicide are concentrating their efforts on a fight for conscience protections, she said, both for individual clinicians and for religious health care institutions.
"It's a tough thing to know what to do next under the circumstances. This is now legal," she said. "In my opinion, if we are committed to building a culture of life, forget the legislation. That ship has sailed. There are some things that we absolutely must make sure stay in place – that there can be Catholic health care, that there can be conscientious objection. But, to me, the biggest thing is, 'OK, how do we build a culture of life? How do we build a culture of care?' If we can do that and make it so that people don't want medical assistance in dying, then we will have achieved something."
Like other Catholic bioethicists, Campion finds the assisted suicide argument based on patient rights and autonomy simplistic and overly narrow. But the Sick Kids policy seems to take no account of collective rights or values, as it concentrates on patient autonomy.
"These days, what I'm thinking about is that we tend to think of medicine as a highly private thing – between the patient and the clinician," she said.
"We have to be thinking about communities of health as well, communities of wellness."
Sebastian Kowalski2🐭💥💥💥TruthNews 🇵🇱🇬🇷
@xenosstinkriti2
BREAKING #Greece
The Ministry ofHealth and the management of the medical institutions are obliged to immediately implement the Council of State’s decision which ruled the suspensions were unconstitutional and must immediately reinstate the medical workers
https://mobile.twitter.com/xenosstinkriti2/status/1598041632024428547
Dr Clare Craig (not one of her impersonators)
@ClareCraigPath
France has as many patients in hospital with a covid label on 29th Nov 2022 as they had on 29th March 2020.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ClareCraigPath/status/1598004278891016192
good night anons
o7