Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip continue to kill and injure hundreds of Palestinians each day, including many people seeking aid amid deepening starvation across the territory. Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that there is “no starvation” in Gaza, a U.S. doctor who just returned from Gaza says the reality is undeniable. “It was evident to me, in my firsthand experience, that what I was seeing was malnourishment in my patients,” says Dr. Ambereen Sleemi, a urogynecologist and the executive director of the International Medical Response Foundation based in New York. “We also saw it in our hospital staff. … Everybody would sit and talk about how hungry they were.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The official death toll in Gaza has topped 58,000, with Israeli forces continuing to shoot at Palestinians seeking aid and talks over a ceasefire agreement stalled in Doha. This morning’s injured were taken to Nasser Hospital, the largest functioning hospital in Gaza, facing fuel shortages and a widening Israeli offensive in the area. Democracy Now! spoke with Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room medical doctor who has been volunteering in Nasser Hospital in Gaza since June, live from Gaza.

“Every day seems to be a new exercise in the depths of human depravity in terms of targeting men, boys, women and children, especially in terms of the youngest children,” says Loubani. “I think every doctor who operates and works in Palestine will tell you that that’s the most jarring, the most terrible part of our job, is just the war on children on every level.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In court, Dr. Nancy Harper comes across as professional and authoritative. Often she begins her testimony by explaining her subspeciality: child abuse pediatrics, which focuses on the diagnosis and documentation of signs of child abuse. Her role, she often reminds judges and juries, is solely medical. Whether or not to remove a child from their home, terminate the parent’s rights or, in the most serious cases, charge a caregiver criminally is not up to her.

According to Harper’s testimony, she and her team at the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children in Minneapolis handle about 700 cases of suspected abuse each year. She has testified that 10% to 20% of those wind up confirmed for physical abuse, although it is difficult to determine if these figures are accurate since child protection cases are not public.

When Harper, the center’s director, and her team diagnose abuse, parents and caregivers often struggle to challenge those opinions. By Harper’s own estimation, she’s never been wrong.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a case where I thought it was abusive head trauma and the other specialist didn’t,” Harper testified in 2023, in the case of a day care provider charged with the death of a child in her care.

The defense attorney in the case pressed her: “Have you ever incorrectly diagnosed a child with abusive head trauma?”

“Not currently to my recollection,” she answered.

But in a handful of cases, judges and juries have found day care providers and parents not guilty of crimes after Harper has testified that abuse occurred, though a verdict cannot necessarily be interpreted as a repudiation of Harper or any other expert witness’ determinations or credibility.

Additionally, two federal lawsuits filed recently accuse Harper of ignoring or even concealing alternative explanations for children’s injuries. And, more broadly, medical and legal experts are increasingly questioning a leading child abuse diagnosis, shaken baby syndrome, which is also known as abusive head trauma.

Harper did not respond to requests for comment. She has yet to respond to either lawsuit. In past court testimony, Harper has said that both shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma are considered scientifically valid diagnoses by the mainstream medical community. Any controversy, she has said, exists primarily in the legal world rather than the medical one.

Kathleen Pakes, a former prosecutor who now specializes in the forensics of child abuse cases for the Office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender, said Harper’s claim of never making an incorrect diagnosis strains credulity.

“There is no other specialty in medicine that has zero error rate. None,” she said.

Below are four cases in which Harper concluded there was abuse but courts or juries determined otherwise.

On July 12, 2017, an 11-month-old boy named Gabriel Cooper collapsed in his high chair at the day care that Sylwia Pawlak-Reynolds operated in South Minneapolis. Paramedics took him to Hennepin County Medical Center, where he was declared brain dead a day later.

Harper reviewed Cooper’s medical records and wrote that “in the absence of a well-documented consistent severe accidental injury, non-accidental trauma or abusive head trauma remains the primary diagnostic consideration.” The child, she wrote, was essentially shaken to death. Before any criminal charges were filed, Pawlak-Reynolds boarded a plane for her native Poland to care for her ailing father, according to her attorney. In February 2018, prosecutors charged Pawlak-Reynolds with two counts of second-degree murder, citing Harper’s diagnosis.

According to her husband, Will Reynolds, they did not realize Pawlak-Reynolds was pregnant when she boarded her flight to Poland. She remained there to give birth to their third child, who is now 6, while Reynolds remained in Minnesota with their two older children, who are now 13 and 16. Reynolds said he and his wife have no confidence that she will get a fair trial, and that she fears she will lose custody of their youngest child if she reenters the country. The family has now been separated for eight years.

Early in the case, Pawlak-Reynolds’ attorneys obtained the same copy of Cooper’s hospital records that had been provided to Minneapolis police, which included the paramedics’ report. The document had been printed out at a significantly reduced scale, shrinking the text to the point that some fields were illegible. Two years later, they obtained a second copy, printed at normal size, which revealed a possible alternate explanation for the injuries: “Mom recalls [patient] did fall 2 days ago, striking the back of his head.”

“That was the sort of proverbial silver-bullet evidence that we’re always looking for in every case and usually never find,” said Brock Hunter, Pawlak-Reynolds’ lawyer.

Polish courts, including an appeals court, have denied extradition requests from the U.S. three times, and the country’s minister of justice has affirmed the rulings. The denials are particularly critical of Harper’s assessment. Polish forensic experts evaluated the case records and took note of a finding by a neurology expert hired by Pawlak-Reynolds, who wrote that Cooper carried a gene tied to a blood clotting disorder.

The ambulance report, the Polish judges wrote, “was concealed from the defense.”

“Then, after the fact was made public, it did not affect the actions of the American authorities in any way,” a Polish district court judge wrote in 2022.

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office certified Cooper’s manner of death as “undetermined” and the date and place of injury “unknown,” a tacit disagreement with Harper’s opinion that Cooper would have collapsed “shortly after infliction of the trauma.”

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office declined to comment.

Then in 2023, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty wrote to Pawlak-Reynolds’ attorneys after meeting with them: “We agree that to resolve the current impasse regarding Ms. Pawlak-Reynolds, the best course for all involved is to dismiss the pending charges without prejudice, and for her to return to the United States.”

But months later, Moriarty changed her mind.

In a statement to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office wrote that the office is completing a “final, thorough review” of the case that will include an evaluation of “concerns regarding the medical conclusions and the overall strength of the case.”

Gabriel’s parents, Joseph and Samantha Cooper, did not respond to requests for comment. In a television interview in June, they denied that Cooper struck the back of his head two days before his collapse. They said that they want justice for their son.

Pawlak-Reynolds declined to comment through her attorney. In late February, her husband filed a federal lawsuit against Harper that claims she “knowingly and intentionally falsified, modified and erased exculpatory information” from her evaluation of Cooper, and she diagnosed abusive head trauma to “promote her own personal, academic, reputational and financial needs.”

Harper has yet to respond to the lawsuit. A spokesperson for Hennepin Healthcare, which operates Hennepin County Medical Center, declined to comment on the case or the lawsuit.

“There is no oversight,” Reynolds said. “It’s the thing they’re most resistant against and the thing that is most necessary to stop this legacy of brutality, that results in kids being taken away from innocent caregivers and innocent caregivers going to prison.”

In August 2017, Kathryn Campbell called 911 after a 4-month-old girl at her day care seemed lethargic and was “breathing wrong.” First responders did not take the baby to the hospital, but her mother eventually did. At the hospital, MRI scans showed fluid in the baby’s brain and doctors noted small bruises.

Dr. Barbara Knox, a child abuse pediatrician then with the University of Wisconsin, told police it was “obvious child abuse.” The Dane County district attorney charged Campbell with physical abuse of a child. Campbell pleaded not guilty.

But before the 2021 trial, Knox left the University of Wisconsin after she was placed on leave for “unprofessional acts that may constitute retaliation” and intimidation of her own staff. A Wisconsin Watch investigation cast doubt on Knox’s judgment in several cases of alleged abuse.

Knox did not respond to the Wisconsin Watch series or to ProPublica’s requests for comment. After two families in Alaska sued her in 2022, alleging she had wrongly concluded their children had been abused, Knox wrote in an affidavit that she has no control over whether police and child protection services workers take children away from parents, that she did not “conspire” with police or anyone else on custody issues, and that she did not personally evaluate one of the children. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2024 after the families agreed to drop the matter.

Knox moved on to a job at the University of Florida. According to a spokesperson for the university, Knox resigned as a pediatrician with the Child Protective Team in late June, effective Aug. 15. He declined to comment on the circumstances.

At Campbell’s trial, Knox’s name was never mentioned. Instead, Harper stepped in as an expert witness. When Campbell heard Knox had been replaced, she was initially hopeful.

“I’m like, oh, great, new eyes,” Campbell said. “They’re going to look at it and go, ‘This is nuts, I don’t agree with this.’ And I definitely was wrong.”

Harper’s assessment affirmed Knox’s diagnosis of abuse. She told the jury that the bruises were likely caused by squeezing by an adult’s hand. A medical expert hired by Campbell’s defense argued that the child’s bleeding could not be precisely dated and that a preexisting medical condition could have caused it.

After just two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a not guilty verdict. Campbell said she is grateful to have the case concluded, though she said she is still haunted by the accusations against her.

“That was the hardest thing too, going home after this case was done, and being like, ‘Am I allowed to be alone with my children now?’” she said. “It’s all because of the quote-unquote experts not doing their due diligence and looking further into underlying issues that these kids could have.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne expressed confidence in both Harper and Knox, saying “their testimony had been consistent with many different medical professionals and experts in their own areas of practice.”

“It is important to note that a not guilty verdict by lay jurors hardly invalidates the widespread acceptance of abusive head trauma as a diagnosis in the medical community nor would it cause us to have concerns about Dr. Harper’s qualifications or knowledge in the field,” he added. “Jurors are not bound to accept any expert testimony as accurate.”

In the winter of 2022, a 4-month-old boy began breathing abnormally at his day care in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. His parents took him to a hospital, where he died days later. A police investigation determined that his day care provider, Joanna Ford, left him and several other children alone in her home for over an hour while she went to a tattoo and piercing parlor.

Prosecutors used Harper as an expert witness in the case. After evaluating the child’s medical records, she concluded that his injuries were “clinically diagnostic of abusive head trauma,” or, put another way, Ford shook the baby violently. She was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. Ford pleaded not guilty.

Ford’s defense lawyers successfully petitioned the judge in the case for a hearing to determine whether Harper’s expert witness testimony would be scientifically valid and admissible at trial. In response to questions, Harper explained why the child’s symptoms — brain swelling, blood under his skull, damage to his eyes — pointed to abuse, and why, despite the controversy surrounding it, the diagnosis of abusive head trauma was scientifically sound. She also explained that, because the baby was not walking or crawling, the fact that none of his caregivers could explain his injuries indicated abuse.

“People should know what happened,” she testified.

On cross examination by Ford’s lawyers, Harper said she couldn’t say for certain what time the abuse would have occurred, exactly how Ford had injured the baby and that there are no “great biomechanical models” for shaken baby syndrome.

A little over a month later, Judge Lisa McDougal delivered a highly critical ruling that barred Harper from telling the jury that the child died as the result of “abusive head trauma, non-accidental injury, child abuse or murder.” She also took issue with the idea that a lack of explanation for injuries is indicative of abuse, calling it a “leap in logic.”

“Offering a conclusive opinion as to how an injury may have occurred crosses a line and does not fit within the dictionary definition of what diagnosis is,” McDougal said. The judge also said that Harper views herself as an advocate, and that that casts doubt on her “fidelity to the scientific validation of abusive head trauma diagnoses, especially when it is a close call.”

The murder charge was dismissed. For leaving the children alone, Ford pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of neglect of a child where the consequence is death. She is serving a 10-year prison sentence. Ford, through her attorney, declined a request for an interview. The Iowa County district attorney also declined to comment.

On Feb. 4, 2022, Paul and Sarah Marshall hosted a dinner for her parents and a family friend at their home in Hudson, Wisconsin. Afterward, their 7-week-old son, Fox, became fussy. Paul Marshall carried him into the mother-in-law unit on the lower level of the house, which was cool and dark, to try to calm him. He emerged minutes later in a panic, yelling that the baby spit up and stopped breathing.

Paramedics rushed Fox to Children’s Minnesota, a hospital about 25 minutes across the state border in St. Paul. Doctors ran tests, and a scan showed Fox had a skull fracture with fluid pooling on both sides of his brain. He died days later.

Harper examined Fox, as well as his twin sister, Liana, and found “skull fractures, likely rib fractures, metaphyseal fractures.”

“This constellation of findings in a nonambulatory infant is clinically diagnostic of inflicted injury or child physical abuse likely occurring on more than one occasion,” she wrote.

But the Marshalls said that wasn’t true. They told Harper that Sarah Marshall had experienced a difficult pregnancy with gestational diabetes and severe anemia, and that Liana had a vacuum-assisted delivery. Both twins had been to their regular pediatrician over health concerns. While Liana’s health improved, Fox’s had not.

A spokesperson for Children’s Minnesota declined to comment on the case.

Because he was the last person alone with Fox before he stopped breathing, Paul Marshall was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. He was also charged with physical abuse of a child for hurting Liana. Sarah Marshall said there was no evidence that her soft-spoken husband had hurt their children.

“The state wanted to cast me as a naive idiot,” she said. “I chose not to believe it because of the logic and facts in my face. I had no reason to believe the accusation.”

At Paul Marshall’s 2023 trial, his defense lawyer, Aaron Nelson, cross-examined the other doctors who treated or evaluated Fox and Liana, and was able to highlight points of medical disagreement. A doctor who tested Liana for genetic disorders said she could not rule out rickets as a possible cause of her bone fractures. A neuropathologist did not agree with Harper that Fox had a trauma-induced blood clotting disorder. By Harper’s own admission on cross-examination, determining the age of the skull fractures in children Fox and Liana’s age was difficult. Nelson called six of his own medical experts to suggest that the difficult birth or a vitamin deficiency could explain the twins’ injuries.

“How many people have to be wrong for Dr. Harper to be right?” Nelson said in closing arguments.

After an 11-day trial, the jury found Marshall not guilty.

In a statement to ProPublica, St. Croix County District Attorney Karl Anderson pointed out that Harper was not the only treating physician who was concerned that Fox and Liana had been abused.

“A not guilty verdict does not mean that the jury concluded that the children were not abused,” Anderson said. “Rather, it means that they did not conclude that the State proved that Paul Marshall caused the death, beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Six weeks after the trial, the family moved three hours away into a century-old farmhouse that is far from the community that they felt wrongfully villainized by.

One of the cruelest impacts of the abuse diagnosis, they said, came after it was clear that Fox would die and the hospital staff began making preparations for his organs to be donated. Sarah Marshall said she had hoped to someday hear her son’s heart beating in another child’s chest. Instead, a court order put a halt to the procedure.

“They were already treating him as evidence,” she said.

The experience of going from a grieving parent to an accused murderer, her husband said, has given the couple post-traumatic stress. Paul Marshall said he is grateful to be with his wife and children, but what he calls a “broken system” has left them unsure whether or not to have another baby or even be left alone with one of their daughters.

“You get pregnant. You go to all of your appointments. You voice all of your concerns. You do everything you’re supposed to do as a parent and your child still dies. And the state tells you it’s your fault,” Sarah Marshall said. “I don’t understand why I live in a world like that.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Lussenhop, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

On a February afternoon in 2022, Dr. Bazak Sharon logged into a remote video meeting from his home office in Minneapolis. He propped up his cellphone next to his laptop and hit record on a video app.

There were several people in the meeting with Sharon, who at the time was a pediatrician with the University of Minnesota. Two hospital leaders, Sharon’s boss and a lawyer were there, too. But the person Sharon was most wary of was in the lower-right corner of the grid of faces: Dr. Nancy Harper, the director of the child abuse team at University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis.

Sharon suspected that the discussion, about the care of a 3-month-old named Hank, was going to be contentious. He worried that someday, perhaps even in court, he might need evidence of his role caring for Hank. He was prepared to argue with Harper if she challenged his clinical judgment, but it was quickly apparent that the quality of the care he provided was not at issue.

Hank was born small and was not eating well or gaining enough weight; sometimes, according to his parents, he just seemed to be in pain. (ProPublica is using a nickname for the child at the parents’ request.) At an appointment in January, a doctor ordered an endoscopy, a procedure where a tiny camera is threaded through the body, and also suggested an MRI.

The scans of Hank’s brain showed fluid pooled under both sides of his skull. The blood was old, possibly months old, and Hank was admitted to the hospital. Sharon met him the next day.

A member of Harper’s team named Dr. Caroline George also evaluated Hank that day. In her opinion, according to court records, the bleeding was “consistent with abusive head trauma.” Sharon had suggested other possible causes, including an injury from birth, an infection or even spontaneous bleeding. Sharon wrote in the child’s medical record that it’s “likely we will never identify the exact mechanism that caused his injury.”

Three days after Hank was admitted, Sharon said he learned that a county child protection services worker was preparing to come to the hospital to take custody of the baby, as well as his 2-year-old brother, William.

Sharon said that he was stunned that no one had spoken to him since he was Hank’s primary doctor. So he did something that seemed to put him at odds with George, Harper and hospital leadership: He told Hank’s parents, CPS and police he didn’t think the bleeding alone was enough evidence to say this was abuse.

Sharon was also concerned that separating a sick infant from his parents based only on a suspicion of abuse would cause more harm to Hank. Working with the detective assigned to the case, he admitted William, though the older boy was not sick, so that the whole family could stay in the hospital under the supervision of a nursing assistant while doctors continued to treat and monitor Hank.

But four days later, according to Sharon, his supervisor told him that he was being removed from Hank’s care team, and that he should not communicate further with the parents. When Sharon asked why, he said he was told it was at Harper’s recommendation. “The care,” he said, “changed the second she got involved.”

In less than 48 hours, a judge determined that Hank and William were in need of child protection services and their parents were forced to leave the hospital without them. The same day, Sharon said, he was summoned to the first of two meetings with hospital leadership and Harper. When his supervisors scheduled the second meeting — titled “Review of CPS Patient” in the emailed invitation — less than a month later, Sharon came prepared to record it.

Before all this, Sharon had an appreciation for Harper’s formidability and for her influence in the world of child abuse pediatrics. She began her career as a pediatrician in the U.S. Navy before leading a child abuse team at a hospital in Texas. In 2014, she became the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Safe and Healthy Children.

A certified child abuse pediatrician for almost 16 years, the 56-year-old Harper consulted on suspected cases of abuse for several Twin Cities hospital systems, testified as an expert witness in child abuse trials across the U.S. and lectured on diagnosing signs of abuse. She was also the vice president of the Ray E. Helfer Society, a national nonprofit organization for physicians who work on the medical aspects of child abuse and neglect, and she became its president in 2023.

Sharon, now 53 years old, was also well-respected. Originally from Israel, he came to the U.S. in 2003 to continue his medical studies. He began as a fellow at the University of Minnesota in 2006 and had been on faculty for 12 years. Specializing in infectious diseases, he became medical director of the university’s pediatric COVID-19 clinic and was a contributing member of the state Health Department’s Long COVID Guiding Council. Sharon was also a hospitalist, meaning he directed the care for admitted patients like Hank, coordinating with other doctors and specialists.

As the online February meeting progressed, it became clear to Sharon that, in a face-off with Harper, his medical expertise and the fact that he considered many of the people on the call to be friends counted for little. The lawyer noted that differing medical opinions could open the hospital or the doctors themselves up to a lawsuit. George added that the differences in opinions had also “made things difficult for particularly law enforcement.”

“I’m not a child abuse expert,” said Dr. Sameer Gupta, the chief medical officer of the hospital, on the call. “But, you know, my experience is this: Try to be completely aligned. That’s one story that’s coming from the medical team as much as possible, to avoid the potential for, one, litigation, two, to let the experts really drive the ship.”

Sharon became increasingly agitated during the call, shaking his head. He was angry that the conversation had revolved around protocols and the hospital’s legal liabilities, rather than Hank’s care.

“I think I did the best any doctor can do at that point in making sure that my patient is getting the best care while I’m not trying to hide any potential abuse,” he said during the meeting, the video of which he shared with ProPublica. “I felt very uncomfortable that CPS are showing up unannounced and taking two children away from the parents without having a discussion with the doctors who take care of this patient. I hope no one expects me not to say something when that happens in front of me.”

But Harper seemed to suggest that Hank might have been seen by too many doctors, and that Sharon had interfered with her team’s ability to “frame” the case to CPS and law enforcement. She said she did not consider it her role to be concerned about what could happen to a family after a diagnosis.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “if I spent all of my time worrying about … what’s going to happen with child protection and foster care or the cost for the legal stuff afterwards, I wouldn’t be able to do my job.”

Sharon began to protest. He said he had been reading the scientific literature on abusive head trauma and found it unconvincing, a conclusion more and more doctors were coming to. Harper cut him off. “If I spent two weeks reading the literature on COVID, would you consider me as qualified as you are?” she asked. “I’ve been doing this for decades.”

Gupta abruptly shut down the conversation. He said that Sharon’s plan to keep the family in the hospital was the “wrong decision and will never, ever happen again,” and then he ended the call.

As the screen went blank, Sharon let out a long, deep sigh. Though disturbed and frustrated, he did not yet realize his actions on behalf of Hank and his family would affect his career. Over time, Sharon came to see Harper as the main driver of a campaign to get him to fall in line with the child abuse team.

“She’s very black and white, right and wrong, no gray area,” he said, “which is not the way to do medicine or pediatrics.”

Harper did not respond to requests for comment. She and a spokesperson for University of Minnesota Physicians, which is the clinical practice for the university’s medical school faculty, also did not respond to a detailed list of questions. But the spokesperson wrote that the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children, as it is now called and which is led by Harper, provides “trauma-informed medical care and psychosocial support while addressing research, prevention, advocacy, policy and education.”

“When healthcare providers and community organizations refer patients to CSCH, the team only makes decisions about diagnoses and subsequent medical care based on expert assessment of medical evidence (e.g., medical history, physical exam, lab and radiological findings, input from other medical specialists and information provided by caregivers),” the spokesperson added. “Further investigations and legal determinations are outside of our team’s scope.”

A spokesperson for Fairview Health Services, which owns Masonic Children’s Hospital, said in a statement that although Harper is an employee of University of Minnesota Physicians, “we obviously take these concerns seriously and are actively reviewing the matter.”

“Our highest priority is the safety, dignity, and wellbeing of our patients and families — especially in moments of crisis. We are aware of concerns being raised regarding the conduct of a University of Minnesota Physicians (UMP)-employed provider who practices in a UMP-led clinic within the M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital,” the spokesperson added. “We are in close communication with our academic partners and are evaluating any steps we may need to take to preserve the trust our patients and families place in us.”

Harper’s arrival in Minnesota coincided with the fallout of a high-profile tragedy: the 2013 death of 4-year-old Eric Dean.

Dean lived with his family in sparsely populated Pope County, in west-central Minnesota. According to an investigation by The Minnesota Star Tribune, teachers and caregivers reported signs that Dean was being abused to child protection workers at least 15 times before his stepmother threw him across a room, causing injuries that would kill him. She is in prison serving a life sentence.

In response, then-Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order in 2014 creating the Governor’s Task Force on the Protection of Children. The next year, along with a slew of other reforms, the state Legislature created a $23.35 million grant to give counties money based partially on the number of open child protection investigations.

She’s very black and white, right and wrong, no gray area, which is not the way to do medicine or pediatrics.

The number of child abuse cases soared. For instance, in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, cases of physical abuse more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, before dropping over the next several years. Child abuse experts attributed the rise to what Joanna Woolman, a law professor who specializes in child abuse law, called “a moment of hyper-awareness around medical child abuse and child abuse in general.”

“We were convening a task force that was heavily made up of people with the view that we needed to do more, have more eyes on, be more aware,” added Woolman, who is also the executive director of the nonprofit Keeping Families Connected Minnesota, which provides free legal services to families going through child protection proceedings.

A subspecialty of pediatrics first recognized by the American Board of Pediatrics in 2006, child abuse pediatrics focuses on the diagnosis and documentation of signs of abuse. A diagnosis can help determine whether a parent loses custody of their child or faces criminal investigation. In cases where children die, it can mean murder charges. Harper was one of the first certified child abuse pediatricians in the country — the board counts over 350 subspeciality certifications nationwide — and is one of seven currently certified in Minnesota.

“Physicians with less training on child abuse and neglect both over- and under-identify injuries in children, whether they’re physical abuse injuries, sexual abuse injuries,” she testified in a 2019 trial. “A child with a missed injury could come back later with a more serious injury or even die. And so these are sort of issues where we realize that we needed expertise.”

Harper was hired as director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Children by the University of Minnesota the same year as Dayton’s executive order. According to testimony she gave in a 2019 criminal trial, the university recruited her to build up the center and create a regionwide child abuse consultation system.

“When I’m on call, I can be covering up to six different places where children can be seen,” Harper testified.

In 2016, the Otto Bremer Trust, a private charitable organization based in St. Paul, announced a $2.5 million grant to fund Harper’s ambitions to expand the center, which is based at Masonic. Harper is also program director for the university’s Child Abuse Pediatrics Fellowship, a three-year training program, giving her influence over the next generation of child abuse pediatricians. A spokesperson for the trust added that it does not have any “role in the day-to-day operations of the Center.”

Hennepin County has a contract with Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, to provide medical consultation, expert witness testimony and case consultation with county attorneys. According to testimony Harper has given in the past, she and her team handle about 700 cases of suspected abuse each year. She has testified that 10% to 20% of those wind up confirmed for physical abuse, although it is difficult to determine if these figures are accurate since child protection case records are not public. She has given different answers on the witness stand when asked if she has ever testified for the defense; in 2021, she said she’d testified for the defense in a “half dozen or a dozen” cases. In 2023, she said she’d done so twice.

In 2018, Harper’s center began cohosting an annual Child Abuse Summit with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. In 2022, she received an introduction during a panel discussion from Dan Allard, senior assistant Hennepin County attorney, that illustrated the close relationship between Harper and her team and county prosecutors.

“If you haven’t heard Dr. Harper testify, she does a wonderful job. She knows her stuff,” Allard, who is also the head of the county attorney’s child abuse team, said at the summit. “We just barely try to keep up understanding what she’s talking about. So we just kind of let her go.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, Daniel Borgertpoepping, a spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, wrote, “Since our office represents Hennepin County in CPS matters, we are unable to comment.”

Before Sharon’s encounter with Harper, he hadn’t given much thought to her team’s practices, which included evaluating and treating some of the worst cases of physical and sexual abuse of children. While he said he had referred a dozen or so cases of suspected neglect to her team, he viewed their work as a bleak side of pediatrics. He was happy to avoid it.

“I had a lot of respect for the child abuse doctors, like, ‘Thank you for doing that for us,’” he said.

But for roughly 15 years, the world of child abuse pediatrics has been roiled by criticism of the diagnosis once known as shaken baby syndrome and now categorized under the umbrella term abusive head trauma. A triad of symptoms — brain bleeding, brain swelling or injury, and blood in the retina — was once considered evidence that a child had been violently shaken, even if there were no other injuries or even bruising.

In court testimony, Harper has said that both shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma are considered scientifically valid diagnoses by “the mainstream medical community,” and that the controversy is more of a legal one than a medical one. She has acknowledged there are medical conditions that mimic possible signs of abuse, including bruises, bone fractures and head trauma symptoms, but she said that her assessments take all of that into account in concert with specialists like neurosurgeons and radiologists.

“We take a very detailed history from the family. We do a physical examination, look at past medical history, other medical conditions, the initial laboratory and X-ray reports,” she testified in 2023.

Sharon readily concedes that he wasn’t an expert in child abuse medicine. But as he and the other doctors tried to understand the bleeding in Hank’s brain as well as his lack of weight gain, he spent his evenings reading the scientific and legal literature about shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma, scribbling notes to himself. He read a key American Academy of Pediatrics statement reaffirming its belief in the diagnoses; he also read studies that challenged the science underlying them.

“It is wrong to fail to advise parents and courts when these are simply hypotheses, not proven medical or scientific facts,” Sharon wrote on a copy of one law review article.

He read about how the first neurosurgeon to posit the theory of shaken baby syndrome said in an interview years later that he was “disturbed that what I intended as a friendly suggestion for avoiding injury to children has become an excuse for imprisoning innocent parents.” According to the National Registry of Exonerations, over 40 people convicted in cases related to the diagnosis have been exonerated since the 1990s, often over increasing doubts that the three symptoms can be interpreted so definitively.

Sharon also learned that the subspecialty of child abuse pediatrics itself has also been under increasing scrutiny. Perhaps the most famous child abuse pediatrician case became the basis for the Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya,” in which a 10-year-old girl’s pain syndrome was diagnosed by a child abuse pediatrician as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. A jury found the hospital liable for medical malpractice and awarded the family over $200 million; the hospital has appealed. Several families are suing a Pennsylvania hospital for what they say are false diagnoses of abuse by Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen, who led its child abuse team. A series of allegations of overzealous diagnoses of abuse have followed Dr. Barbara Knox from her job leading a child abuse team at the University of Wisconsin to similar positions in Alaska and at the University of Florida.

The child abuse pediatrician community is tightknit. After Knox left Wisconsin, Harper replaced her as an expert witness in some criminal cases. Esernio-Jenssen wrote Harper a nomination letter for a Ray E. Helfer Society award, calling her “an unstoppable force.”

Esernio-Jenssen and Knox, as well as the Helfer Society, did not respond to requests for comment. In a response to the lawsuit, attorneys for Esernio-Jenssen and her former hospital network wrote that they “are being attacked and demonized for protecting children from abuse and following the law,” and that the allegations of bad-faith abuse investigations are “obviously untrue.” The lawsuit is ongoing.

Knox was sued by two families in Alaska who accused her of leveling false accusations of abuse against them. In response, Knox said in an affidavit that she has no say over whether child protection takes children away from their parents, that she did not “conspire” with police or anyone else on custody issues or criminal prosecution, and that she did not personally evaluate one of the named children. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2024 after the families agreed to drop the matter.

According to a spokesperson for the University of Florida, Knox resigned her job there as a pediatrician with the Child Protective Team, effective Aug. 15. He declined to comment on the circumstances.

From the start, Sharon thought what was happening to Hank — a child struggling with eating and weight gain, with abnormal results on his endoscopy and weeks-old, unexplained cranial bleeding without any other symptoms of abuse — fit into his wheelhouse treating complex and even mysterious cases more than it fit into Harper’s. After poring through the literature on abusive head trauma, he was even more convinced.

Sharon followed his supervisor’s instruction not to speak to Hank’s parents. But after the couple’s attorney approached him, he provided a five-page account of Hank’s medical treatment. He included several potential alternative diagnoses.

“It is clear to me that missing child abuse is as serious as missing bacterial meningitis and should be considered as malpractice,” he wrote. “But also, as a hospitalist, who frequently manage children without clear definitions of their diagnosis, I’m used to ambiguity.”

Dr. Matthias Zinn, Hank’s neurologist, agreed with Sharon that the fluid in Hank’s brain, what he called “subdural collections,” could not be definitively tied to abuse. He provided a letter to the couple’s attorney as well. Zinn, who said he’s consulted on hundreds of cases of suspected abuse, said Harper’s child abuse team was by far the most aggressive he’s worked with.

“It was just crazy,” he said. “I remember speaking to them and saying, ‘What evidence do you have, other than the subdural collections?’ And they made it clear that they did not respect my opinion.”

Zinn has since left the University of Minnesota for a position in Florida.

Both a CPS investigator and a police detective spoke to Sharon repeatedly, and according to Hank’s parents, they also relayed Zinn’s opinion and begged CPS to talk to him as well. But the CPS petition alleging Hank was a victim of abuse only cited George’s assessment. There’s no mention of Sharon or Zinn.

George did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Hennepin County declined to comment on individual cases or to respond to a detailed list of questions. But she provided a statement from Kwesi Booker, the director of Hennepin County Children and Family Services, which oversees child protection services. In that statement, Booker said “child protection social workers appropriately rely on the subject matter expertise of trained medical professionals in situations involving complex medical issues.”

Unable to let the matter go, Sharon wrote letters to the hospital’s leadership council about what he called “dangerous overreach” by Harper’s child abuse team. In response, Gupta said he referred the letter for review to the hospital’s Committee for Professional Enhancement. Citing privacy laws, hospital administrators would not tell Sharon the outcome of the committee’s review.

Separately, Gupta wrote Sharon a “peer review” letter informing him that, in several of his cases, there were concerns about his conduct, professionalism and a disregard for hospital protocol. Sharon said he was aware of his reputation for being strong-willed and, at times, dismissive or even rude to colleagues. The letter warned him against doing anything that could be seen as “retaliatory” toward other members of the staff. Gupta gave three examples related to Sharon’s purportedly improper procedures for prescribing medications for pediatric COVID-19 patients; he also referred to Sharon’s interaction with the child abuse team.

“Your documentation in the chart and communication with law enforcement was contrary to what was being stated by the child abuse team,” Gupta wrote in the peer review letter. “This created confusion with the community workers and with the family in a situation in which consistency is very important.”

Gupta did not respond to repeated requests for comment or to a list of questions.

Hank’s family had a limited view of what was going on behind the scenes at Masonic Children’s Hospital, even though Hank’s mother, Kay, worked in the neonatal intensive care unit there. She recognized Sharon and knew of George, though she hadn’t worked closely with either. Because Hank’s parents both work in the pediatric field and for the privacy of their children, they asked that ProPublica not use their full names.

The day after Hank’s admission, Kay and her husband, Ross, explained to George about the baby’s difficulty with breastfeeding, his inexplicable pain and his inability to tolerate formula. When George asked her about possible accidents or injuries, the only thing Kay could think of was a time when she was driving and slammed on the brakes with Hank in his car seat.

After she read the CPS petition alleging her children were victims of physical abuse, Kay said that she came to suspect that George had been trying to collect information to use against her and her husband, not to treat Hank.

“I think she was sitting there hoping that I was just going to confess or tell her that I thought my husband might have done it,” Kay said. “And I was just hoping that she was going to help me.”

While Hank and William were in foster care, police confiscated the couple’s cellphones, laptops and baby monitors, and interviewed various family members and friends. In April 2022, Hennepin County decided not to pursue criminal charges.

CPS found no additional evidence of abuse, and after nearly four months, a judge ordered both boys returned to the couple, though it was on the condition that a grandparent live in the home full time as well. In June, just before a trial to determine if Hank had been abused, CPS agreed to begin the process of dismissing the matter, though the agency still made a “finding of maltreatment” by an “unknown offender.”

In late July, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office signed off on the dismissal. It had been nearly seven months since Hank was first admitted to the hospital.

Around the same time, Kay and Ross took Hank for genetic testing, which showed he carried an abnormal gene duplication with unknown effects. He was also put on medication that resolved his stomach sensitivity issues and increased his appetite. One of Sharon’s theories was that the bleeding under his skull was due to poor feeding, dehydration or vitamin deficiency, though no one has been able to identify a definitive cause.

“He’s just been our little mystery baby, but he is a beautiful, healthy, thriving little 3-year-old,” Kay said.

William, she said, still has nightmares about being taken from his parents. At 5 years old, he insists on sleeping in their bed every night. Defending themselves, Kay said, plus the cost of additional caregivers amounted to roughly $100,000 for the family.

Kay never met Harper and only later came to understand the role she played. Because there was no trial, she never had the chance to confront Harper or George, or lay out any of the arguments that she and her husband had been falsely accused of abuse.

But just before the case closed, Kay saw an advertisement for the 2022 Child Abuse Summit, with Harper as a featured panelist. She bought a ticket to the event and sat right in front of Harper.

“They do these things and probably never have to see the people again, outside of places where they’re in charge,” she remembered thinking. “You’re going to have to see me.”

Sharon did not know it at the time, but he was far from the only person struggling in recent years to keep a family from losing their children after Harper’s involvement. In his job as an attorney for indigent parents at Hennepin County Adult Representation Services, Scotty Ducharme has dealt with horror stories and seen cases of extreme child abuse up close. But when allegations have arisen almost exclusively from a medical diagnosis from a child abuse pediatrician, which he calls a “CAP,” he has also seen signs that not all the doctors on the child’s treatment team are in lockstep.

“If you read the medical records written by the CAPs versus the regular doctors in the cases I’ve worked on, you can see the breadcrumbs by the regular doctors who don’t believe what the CAPs are saying,” he said. “I’ve only caught, on the record, doctors directly contradicting each other a few times.”

In the spring of 2023, Ducharme met María Alejandra Ramírez Rodríguez and her husband, Cristian Andrés Guzmán de la Ossa, a couple in their 20s. Recent arrivals from Colombia who spoke no English, they brought their 4-week-old son to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis after noticing bruises on his thighs, back, forehead and face. They had taken photos of previous bruises as well, which they shared with doctors. (ProPublica is not naming the child to protect his privacy.) The couple also brought him to the hospital when he was 12 days old because his umbilical stump wouldn’t stop bleeding.

Harper examined the baby and reviewed X-rays of his skeleton. The results were alarming; he had 14 healing rib fractures, as well as fractures in his arms and legs in various states of healing. Harper wrote that the baby was “at grave risk for further injury, morbidity and mortality,” and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed an expedited petition to permanently sever the parents’ rights. The baby was placed in foster care with a woman who worked as a nurse.

When Ducharme looked at the medical records, he saw that the baby had gone through a number of blood tests, including ones to check for clotting disorders. Several metrics were marked slightly outside of the normal range, including a reading for a protein tied to a genetic clotting disorder called von Willebrand disease. Ducharme zeroed in on a particular note, perhaps a “breadcrumb,” written by the pediatrician who saw the baby before Harper; he wrote that the baby would need more follow up from the hematology department “if more bruising develops.”

While in the care of the foster parent, the baby developed new bruises and Harper evaluated him again. A new abuse investigation was opened against the foster parent, and he was moved to a second foster family — in this case, a pediatrician and her husband. Once again, the baby developed new bruises, according to his visitation supervisor.

“This is medical, something weird is going on here,” Ducharme remembered thinking.

But according to notes from the CPS investigator, Harper declined to change her determination or to perform additional blood clotting disorder tests as the first doctor had advised: “Would not be any different now so they did not repeat those tests,” he wrote. He added that in Harper’s opinion, whoever bruised the baby in April was the most likely offender in subsequent incidents.

In her notes, Harper also questioned whether the marks noticed on the baby while he was living with his second foster family were true bruises. Instead, prosecutors posited a new theory in the case: that Ramírez and Guzmán were surreptitiously abusing their son during visits, even though the visits were supervised by a woman who works as an observer in CPS cases. To Ducharme, that strained credulity. He became concerned that Harper was too unwilling to change her diagnoses, and that prosecutors were reluctant to challenge her.

“She has this level of cachet with prosecutors, it’s like a trauma bond. I’m sure she’s right more than 90% of the time,” he said. “They’re unwilling to see her failures.”

But not everyone is. In several cases in recent years, judges and juries have found Harper’s diagnoses unconvincing. In 2024, a Wisconsin judge barred Harper from telling the jury that a child died as the result of “abusive head trauma, non-accidental injury, child abuse, or murder.”

“Dr. Harper sees herself as an advocate, at least in part, and this blurs her role as scientist and clinician with the role of advocate against child abuse, further calling into question her fidelity to the scientific validation of abusive head trauma diagnoses, especially when it is a close call,” the judge said.

In another Wisconsin case, Paul Marshall was found not guilty in 2023 of shaking his 7-week-old son, Fox, to death. Harper examined the boy at Children’s Minnesota, a hospital in St. Paul. A spokesperson for Children’s Minnesota declined to comment on the case.

“We were put through the grinder,” Marshall said. “We don’t get our son back, and we don’t get a lot of the closure that we should have had as a family. That was robbed from us.”

After Ducharme became convinced that there was a medical explanation for Ramírez’s baby’s injuries, he prepared a memo that pointed out a number of possible contributing factors, including that Ramírez had gone days without eating while she was pregnant and traveling across the U.S.-Mexico border from Colombia and had a difficult delivery in Minneapolis. Ramírez got her own medical records from Colombia which showed that, as a child, she’d also experienced unexplained bruising.

To challenge the prosecutors’ theory that the baby’s new bruises were from further abuse by the parents, Ducharme spoke to their visitation supervisor. She provided a sworn affidavit saying that she did not witness any abusive behavior from the parents, and that she’d become so stressed in part from the pressure to say she had witnessed abuse that she asked to be taken off the case. She also wrote that CPS workers were lying to and about the couple, claiming that the foster parents spoke Spanish, which they did not, and that Ramírez and Guzmán were unreliable about keeping visitation appointments.

“The parents attended every visit. They never cancelled,” the supervisor wrote. “Even when their tire popped on the way to their first supervised visitations, they got an Uber and were only about five minutes late.”

A judge ruled that there was “no evidence” that the parents were abusing their baby at visits and ordered a second medical opinion. But before that could happen, the county agreed to drop the termination of parental rights petition after Ramírez and Guzmán agreed to acknowledge that their son “sustained serious injury” while living with them, without admitting guilt. The case was converted to a regular child protection matter, which allowed the couple to have home visits. They eventually regained custody, and the case was closed in April 2024.

“There’s no accountability. There’s no finding of fact,” Ducharme said. “You think: ‘You get your baby back. None of the rest of it matters.’ But it matters.”

The couple found the entire experience bewildering and traumatic. Although they are now reunited, they missed six months of their newborn son’s life. Ramírez didn’t have the chance to breastfeed after the first foster parent began feeding her son formula instead of the breast milk she was pumping.

“We didn’t see him crawl. We didn’t see him turn over —” Guzmán said.

“We didn’t see him sit up,” Ramírez said.

Although they worry about doing anything that might draw attention from immigration authorities, in late May they filed a federal civil lawsuit against Harper and the institutions she works for. Ducharme, who left his job at Hennepin County and is now in private practice, is representing the couple in the lawsuit, which alleges that Harper acted in “bad faith,” and that because of her actions there was no “genuine investigation” into the baby’s medical condition.

According to a spokesperson for Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, they have not been served with the lawsuit yet and have not responded to the allegations.

“Why, after they didn’t find any physical abuse, did the hospital not keep doing exams to see if there was something medically wrong with him?” Guzmán asked. “They robbed us of our child without any real explanation.”

In late May 2023, a year and a half after Hank’s case, Sharon was on his way home from work when he got a phone call. A new case had come into the emergency room at Masonic Children’s Hospital that needed his consultation: a 3-month-old boy named Daniel. An MRI had shown fluid on his brain. CPS was already investigating whether this was abuse.

“Not again,” Sharon recalled thinking. He turned his car around.

At the hospital, he learned the unusual circumstances that had brought Daniel to the hospital: His mother, a pediatric nurse, had volunteered her son for an academic study that needed the MRIs of healthy children as a baseline. Someone on the research team noted fluid in Daniel’s brain, and a report was made to child protection services.

After meeting with the parents, examining Daniel and reviewing the MRI report, Sharon wrote up a one-page note. Among other things, he recommended that CPS continue assessing Daniel for possible abuse. But after what had happened with Hank’s case the year before, Sharon also put his views on the record.

“One should practice extreme caution attributing isolated intracranial fluid collection to abusive head trauma when no additional clinical signs or symptoms are found,” he wrote, “as the evidence to support this is controversial and has been questioned by many authorities (medical as well as legal).”

After a day in the hospital, Daniel and his parents, Grace and Paul, were allowed to go home together, although they said the CPS investigation remained open for a month. George, the same doctor involved in Hank’s case, asked Daniel’s parents to bring him back two weeks later, where Grace said he screamed as he was pinned down for additional X-rays and to check for bruises. According to medical records, George determined that Daniel had experienced an “accidental trauma” but did not attribute the cranial fluid to abuse.

Nevertheless, according to Sharon, his supervisor called to tell him that, once again, Harper was concerned about the legal liability created by his note, and that his opinion about the bleeding was “beyond the scope” of his practice. Struck by the similarities in Daniel’s and Hank’s cases, Sharon wrote another letter reiterating his concerns from the conference call in February 2022. He said that he’d spoken to many colleagues at the hospital who shared those concerns, and that he strongly believed “our organization must acknowledge and address these concerns in a transparent manner.”

In late June, University of Minnesota records show that three complaints were filed within days of one another against Sharon. Because the complaints were closed without discipline, they are protected personnel data under Minnesota law.

The first complaint was filed the same day he said he received an invite to a meeting with Dr. Joseph Neglia, head of the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Pediatrics, physician-in-chief at Masonic Children’s Hospital and one of the people included on the February 2022 call. The second complaint was filed a few days later, while the third came the day before the meeting took place.

According to Sharon, an attorney for University of Minnesota Physicians at the meeting told him he was “weaponizing” his notes. A week and a half after that, Sharon said, Neglia brought him in again and gave him a choice: resign or be terminated on the spot. Sharon was shocked. He ultimately resigned.

Under an agreement with University of Minnesota Physicians, Sharon stayed on the job for several months with strict guidelines, including that he was prohibited from working with the infectious disease division. Neglia warned Sharon in a letter to “maintain a high level of professionalism and decorum” and not to engage in “any behavior that could be perceived as retaliation,” echoing the language in Gupta’s peer review letter to Sharon.

“You will refrain and remove yourself from involvement in any cases of suspected child abuse or potential non-accidental trauma,” Neglia wrote. “This includes any interactions with or communication with parents or guardians of a patient in such a case.”

Neglia did not respond to requests for comment.

At the time of his departure, Sharon was one of only a small number of doctors in the country who treated a complicated immune disease with behavioral symptoms in children known by the acronym PANDAS or PANS. Parents of Sharon’s patients were so upset by news of his resignation that they went to the local newspaper.

The coverage prompted an investigator from the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office to reach out to Sharon, and Sharon said he took the opportunity to share his concerns about the child abuse protocols at his former workplace. He said he has yet to hear back. A spokesperson at the attorney general’s office declined comment.

On a recent April afternoon, Sharon arrived at a restaurant in a suburb of Minneapolis. Tucked in a back corner table was Daniel, now a blond-headed 2-year-old, Grace, Paul and Grace’s mother. Sharon had not seen them since that day in the emergency room two years ago, and the family wanted to thank him for what he’d done. (Because Grace is a pediatric nurse and because she wants to protect her son’s privacy, ProPublica agreed to withhold the families’ full names.)

Grace still feels traumatized by the 24 hours she spent at Masonic Children’s Hospital, not sure if she’d be allowed to take her son home. She remembers that the one person who seemed to be in her corner was Sharon and how it felt to read that single line in her son’s medical report that may have cost Sharon his job.

“That was the light in the darkness at that point,” she said.

Since the incident, Grace said, she has had to work with George on cases of suspected child abuse and said she has become more understanding of how parents are treated.

For his part, Sharon characterizes the entire experience as “surreal.” He commutes from Minnesota to Colorado and Wyoming for temporary hospitalist and clinical work, but he is still looking for a full-time job. He wants to get back to treating infectious diseases and thinking about pediatric immunology, and he worries that he could be hurting his own reputation by speaking out about how hospitals deal with cases of suspected child abuse.

At the same time, he said he feels that he has to push back against the attempt to get him, and other physicians like him who may disagree with a child abuse pediatrician, to “fall in line.”

After leaving his job, Sharon got a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm, a quote attributed to Albert Einstein he said reflects his thinking and his actions at Masonic Children’s Hospital: “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

Mariam Elba contributed research. Melissa Sanchez and Agnel Philip contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Lussenhop, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney.

In Gaza, at least 41 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since midnight, including more Palestinians targeted by Israeli forces while seeking food and humanitarian aid. This comes as UNICEF is warning Gaza is facing what amounts to a “man-made drought” with children at risk of dying from thirst due to Israel’s blockade. We go to Dr. Mark Brauner, an emergency medicine physician who is currently volunteering at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza. He describes “execution-style” killings of Palestinians at food distribution sites and the desperate lack of baby formula leading to the deaths of children suffering from malnutrition and starvation.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Mehfuza Khatun shared the Facebook post on April 24, two days after the Pahalgam attack in which 26 people were killed. She alleged that gynaecologist Dr C K Sarkar had “refused” to treat her pregnant sister-in-law on account of the latter’s faith. A call recording was also released by the patient’s family, where one voice is heard confronting the other about some remarks made earlier.

This was a time when reports of retributive hate crimes against minorities started pouring in from various parts of the country in response to the Pahalgam massacre. According to survivors’ accounts, the terrorists had tried to single out non-Muslims from the tourists.

Alt News spoke with the patient and her husband and examined the phone from which calls were made to the doctor and her messages were received. Our investigation independently established that the doctor had indeed made Islamophobic comments and asked the patient to never go back to her since “people from her religion killed others.”

What Exactly Happened at Dr C K Sarkar’s Clinic on April 24

According to the aggrieved patient’s testimony given in the presence of her husband, she called up Dr Sarkar around 1:30 in the afternoon on April 24 and asked whether Dr Sarkar would be available at her home clinic in Maheshtala which is in the same apartment complex where the patient lived. Dr Sarkar agreed to see her between 3 and 4 pm. This was the fifth time she was visiting Dr Sarkar.

When the patient visited the clinic with her three-year-old daughter, and stated her full name, the doctor appeared offended. She then said, “I have decided not to see Mohammedan patients henceforth.”

When asked why, the doctor responded, “You’re killing people in Kashmir.” The patient replied, “What do I have to do with that?” The doctor then said, “People from your religion are killing people from my religion… how do I treat Mohammedan patients after that?”

The patient told us that she could only respond by saying, “The ones who are doing it are ignorant and uneducated.” The doctor allegedly then went on a communal rant in front of the three-year-old child, which lasted about 15 minutes. The patient could not recall everything that was said to her, as she “went blank”. Some of the remarks she remembered included, “You go to mosques and madrassas, and that is where terrorists are made”; and, “If you were on your honeymoon and your husband had been killed by people from my religion, then you would realise how painful it is.”

After her communal rant, the doctor clinically examined the patient and wrote out a prescription. The consultation fee was paid via UPI. As the patient was leaving the clinic, the doctor told her not to return, stating that she would no longer be seeing Muslim patients. However, she wrote ‘Review after 3 weeks’ in the prescription. Alt News has seen the prescription.

Once the patient left the clinic, she called up her husband immediately and recounted her ordeal. Some time later, at 4:26 pm, she gathered courage to call up Dr Sarkar again and confront her about the incident. This call had been recorded on the patient’s phone.

The Phone Call: “I won’t see any Mohammedan patients anymore… Don’t ever come to me again. You kill others.”

Here is a transcript of the conversation that took place:

Patient: *address* theke bolchi
I’m speaking from *address*.

Doctor: Hain bolo bolo
Yes, go ahead, speak.

Patient: Apni amake jei kotha gulo shonalen na ma’am, amar khub kharap legeche.
Ma’am, the things you said to me really hurt me.

Doctor: Keno? Ki kharap legeche?
Why? What hurt you?

Patient: Apni amake je bollen Mohammedan aar dekhbona.
You told me you won’t treat Mohammedans anymore.

Doctor: Dekhbona toh, ami ekhon theke promise korchi.
I won’t, I’m promising from now on.

Patient: Amar uchit chhilo apnake oi muhurte oshomman kore beriye chole asha.
I should have humiliated you and walked out at that very moment.

Doctor: (Unclear) Amar ki boye geche, ami aar dekhbona ekhon theke.
(Unclear) What do I have to lose? I won’t treat (Muslims) anymore from now on.

Patient: Na na, ami jabo o na apnar kache dekhate. But apnara skhikkhito… (unclear)
No, no, I won’t come to you for treatment either. But you are educated…

Overlapping voices…

Doctor: Tomra khun korbe… manush ke… (unclear) j dhormo bole khushir Eid.. Pabitra Eid.. (unclear)… manush ke khun kora ta ki pabitra Eid?
You people will kill… people… (unclear) the religion which celebrates Happy Eid, auspicious Eid… Killing people is auspicious Eid?

Patient: Accha ma’am, onekshomoy toh ache jara Hindu ra Muslim ke maarche… Amra ki kichu jani je ke maaarche, ke korche?
Ma’am, there are also times when Hindus kill Muslims… Do we even know who is killing whom?

(Doctor’s words are unclear for some time)

Doctor: Tomra shob jeneo chup kore thaako…(unclear)
You all stay silent even after knowing everything…(unclear)

Patient: Apni amake bokchen. Ami ki jani je ami ki korchi? Apni ekta shikkhito manush hoye erom byabohaar koren…
You’re scolding me..  You’re an educated person behaving in this way with me…

(Doctor’s words are unclear for some time)

Doctor: Tomader (unclear) shekhano hoy.
You people are taught (unclear).

Patient: Apni ekta shikkhito daktar hoye amar shonge… apni patient dekhben. Apni patient er shaathe orokom byabohaar korun.. koren tahole…
You, being an educated doctor, should be treating patients. If you treat patients like this then…

Doctor: Na ami dekhbo na, keno dekhbo, je dhormer lokera amar dhormo ke ebhabe maare?
No, why should I treat them? Why would I treat people of a religion who attack my religion like this?

Patient: Keu kauke marchena… (unclear)
No one is killing anyone… (unclear)

Patient: Ami apnake patient dekhate gechi, ami toh maarte jaini ghore.
I came to you as a patient, not to kill anyone in your house.

Doctor: Hain oitoh bari giyei tomar mathar modhhye shob dhukiye diyeche oigulo, jani toh.
Of course, those things have been stuffed into your head at home, I know that.

Patient: Barite keu dhokayeni madam… apni amake bollen… khub kharap lagchilo.
No one has brainwashed me at home, madam… Whatever you said to me… I felt very bad.

Doctor: Kharap lagar kichu nei, tumi jeta kharap (unclear) jara terrorist taader ke mere dite hobe.
There’s nothing to feel bad about. What is wrong… (unclear)… the terrorists must be killed.

Patient: Apnake osomman korbona bole apnake dekhiye ami elam. Apni khub kharap byabohaar korechen amar shaathe.
I did not want to humiliate you, hence I sat through the consultation. You misbehaved with me.

Doctor: Na ekdom kharap korini. Ami aar ekdom e dekhbona, ami aar kono Mohammedan patient dekhbona.
No, I didn’t behave badly at all. I just won’t treat… I won’t treat any Mohammedan patients anymore.

Patient: Apni dekhben na, apni bhaar mein jaan apni dekhben ki dekhben na, apnar byapar.
Whether you treat or not, you go to hell.. whether you treat or not, that’s your business.

Doctor: Asho keno amar kache? Lojja korena ashte?
Then why do you come to me? Don’t you feel ashamed to come here?

Patient: Ami jaani apni ekta boro terrorist?
I know you’re a big terrorist, right?

Doctor: Aar konodin ashbena amar kache. Tumi khun koro manush.
Don’t ever come to me again. You kill others.

Patient: Apnio khun kora manush.
You also kill people.

It is clear from the above conversation that when Dr Sarkar was confronted about her remarks, she remained defiant and repeated that she would not be treating Muslim patients in future.

After the Facebook post describing the patient’s ordeal had gone viral, Dr Sarkar sent an apology text to the patient.  In her messages sent through WhatsApp, she said she was sorry if she had ‘disheartened’ the patient. She says that she was sick “due to loss of my close family members relatives.” (sic) “Don’t take it otherwise and don’t harrass me unnecessarily”. Dr Sarkar, in a third message, said that a few patients had been cruel towards her in the last few days. She was upset and thinking of closing her practice in the area, and so she said that. “U r my good patient I will always take care of u if u feel so ,” (sic) she wrote. Alt News is in possession of a screenshot and a screen recording of the WhatsApp chat, but we are not making it public.

“If she is trying to justify why she said something, she must have said something reprehensible”, the patient’s husband observed, while showing us the WhatsApp messages.

After the patient’s ordeal was reported by some media outlets, Dr Sarkar went on to issue a video statement saying, “I am Dr C K Sarkar. I have been a medical practitioner for the last 30 years in Behala, South 24 Parganas. I believe in medical ethics. All patients are equal to me, I prioritize all my patients equally. I see no value in caste, religion and race. I try to treat my patients properly and ethically. If some people had a problem with me… please do not listen to the rumours. I know there have been attempts to sabotage my career on social media and in news reports. These kinds of rumours are spread during a time of crisis. I hope you will not fall for it.” The statement was uploaded on Facebook by an anesthesiologist named Promod Ranjan Roy.

The ‘Domestic Help’ Theory

When The Quint contacted Dr. Sarkar, she denied the allegations and stated that she had many Muslim patients and thus had no reason to discriminate. “I was talking to my maid about what had happened in Pahalgam when she (the patient) visited me. I never made such communal remarks, why would I?” She also stated that she had sent an apology to the patient. When asked about the call recording, Dr Sarkar alleged that the call recording had been tampered with.

She made the same allegation in a chat with a journalist named Anindya Chowdhury. “I never said that I would not see Mohammedan (Muslim) patients. She wrongly interpreted my words,” she said in a telephonic interview. Throughout the interview, Dr Sarkar reiterated that the phone call recording had been tampered with.

The West Bengal Doctors’ Forum (WBDF) said in a statement, “It appears that some discussions unrelated to the patient, involving members of the doctor’s household, may have inadvertently been overheard. If any such conversation was not to the patient’s liking, it is beyond the professional purview of the doctor to address private matters of household conversations.”

Responding to these claims, the patient told Alt News that at no point did the doctor address her house-help while making those remarks. The house-help’s working hours coincided with the patient’s appointment, and she was present around the house. She had left a few minutes before the patient’s departure. The patient also categorically stated that when Dr. Sarkar asked her not to go back to her ever again, the domestic help had left by then.

WBDF also asked for “an independent investigation involving the doctor and the aggrieved person to unearth the truth in a neutral way.”

Propaganda Outlets Question Veracity of Call Recording

Taking a dig at The Quint for reporting on the incident, propaganda website OpIndia published a ‘fact-check’ of the incident. OpIndia called the patient’s ordeal a “fake story” and proceeded to provide what they called ‘evidences’ to invalidate it. While refuting the patient’s allegations, OpIndia has claimed that the phone call recording is ‘unverified’. The outlet emphasized the need for a forensic investigation of the purported audio clip.

OpIndia posted a thread of their ‘fact-check’. Here are the archive links of each tweet of the thread: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

#Exclusive

Do you remember the story of a Kolkata-based doctor who ‘denied’ treatment to a Muslim patient over the Pahalgam terror attack?

Turns out it was fake news.

It was peddled by The Quint, Maktoob Media & others to create the narrative of ‘Muslim victimhood’

(1/n) pic.twitter.com/tWIxxbo1su

— OpIndia.com (@OpIndia_com) April 30, 2025

Only Fact, run by Vijay Patel who identifies himself as an investigative reporter, published a fact-check as well. Quoting Dr Sarkar, they also claimed that the recording was fake and edited. Here is an archive of the ‘fact-check’.

No, Dr. Champakali Sarkar Did Not Refuse Treatment to a Muslim Patient After Pahalgam Attackhttps://t.co/0ag5l5yBDJ

— Only Fact (@OnlyFactIndia) April 30, 2025

When this correspondent visited the patient’s house on May 1, Alt News received access to the phone from which the call to Dr Sarkar was made. We examined it by going to the Phone app (inbuilt app), from which the call was made, and played the recording. The call was made at 4:26 pm on April 24.

A screen-recording of the whole process can be seen below. The dialed number (that of the doctor) has been purposely hidden. Alt News tried to reach out to Dr Sarkar on the same number. The person who answered the call identified herself as Dr Sarkar, but refused to comment.

From the video of the call recording and the metadata of the video, we can conclusively say that the call recording released by the victim’s family has not been tampered with. Consequently, it can also be ascertained that Dr Sarkar admitted to making communal remarks while defending herself, where she generalized Muslims as people who kill others.

“I don’t have a problem with the doctor refusing to treat my wife in future. Though it is perhaps unethical, it is her call. What I strongly object to is the communal discrimination. What she told my wife is an expression of a mindset that has the potential to disrupt communal harmony in a society. That is what bothers me so much,” the husband of the patient, who is an optometrist by profession, said.

The post ‘People from your faith kill others. Don’t come to me again,’ Kolkata doctor told pregnant Muslim woman appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Columbia University has agreed to a $750 million settlement with 576 patients of a former doctor who sexually abused them while working at the school.

In 2023, a ProPublica investigation, published with New York Magazine, revealed how Columbia had ignored women, undermined prosecutors and ultimately protected a predator. Obstetrician-gynecologist Robert Hadden worked at the university for 20 years despite decades of complaints about him.

The university had even cleared Hadden to see patients three days after he was arrested when a patient called 911 to report that he had assaulted her during a postpartum exam. University higher-ups had been informed of the arrest but allowed Hadden to continue working for another five weeks. Patients he saw during that time also reported being assaulted.

The latest settlement, combined with payouts from previous cases, means that Columbia will have paid out more than $1 billion to resolve claims of sexual abuse by Hadden. Columbia also said that it has now settled more than 1,000 claims of sexual abuse by Hadden’s former patients.

Hadden was convicted of sex crimes in federal court in January 2023 and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Laurie Kanyok, the patient who called 911, said the settlement is bittersweet. “It’s emotional because it’s been 13 years,” she told ProPublica.

She also said that financial compensation does not amount to justice.

“I’m grateful that I’m involved in this,” Kanyok said. “At the same time, I feel like I want to see people held accountable and not just somebody’s insurance company or checkbook.”

Unlike in other high-profile cases involving sexual abuse by doctors, no administrators from Columbia have been fired or have stepped down as a result of the Hadden case.

In a statement, Columbia acknowledged failing to protect Hadden’s patients. “We deeply regret the pain that his patients suffered, and this settlement is another step forward in our ongoing work and commitment to repair harm and support survivors,” the statement said. “We commend the survivors for their bravery in coming forward.”

The latest settlement puts Columbia on par with the largest payout ever by a university to settle sexual abuse claims. In 2021, the University of Southern California agreed to pay $1.1 billion to survivors of George Tyndall, a university gynecologist who abused thousands of women.

Anthony DiPietro, the attorney who handled most of the Columbia claims, said the lesson from this week’s settlement is clear: Institutions “cannot continue to cover up sexual exploitation and abuse by their doctors because they’re going to be held accountable.”

Weeks after ProPublica’s investigation, Columbia announced that it would set up a $100 million settlement fund for patients who did not want to file civil suits. Survivors have about another week, until May 15, to submit a claim.

As part of the same announcement, Columbia also said it would notify all of Hadden’s nearly 6,500 former patients of the doctor’s crimes and that it would commission an external investigation to examine failures that allowed the abuse to go on for so long.

Asked about the status of that investigation, which was announced a year and a half ago, the university said it is ongoing. Columbia did not give a time frame for the report’s completion.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Bianca Fortis.

Striking senior New Zealand doctors have hit back at the Health Minister’s attack on their union for “forcing” patients to wait longer for surgery and appointments, due to their 24-hour industrial action.

Respiratory and sleep physician Dr Andrew Davies, who was on the picketline outside Wellington Regional Hospital, said for him and his colleagues, it was “not about the money” — it was about the inability to recruit.

“We’ve got vacant jobs that we’re not allowed to advertise,” he said. “It’s lies that they’re not getting rid of frontline staff.

• READ MORE: Gallery: Doctors, health workers challenge NZ government over national crisis

“The job is technically there on paper, but if you’re not going to advertise for the job, you’re not going to fill it.

“In our department, we’ve waited months and months and months to fill some jobs, and you don’t just get a doctor next week. It takes six months for them to come.”

Dr Davies said no-one wanted to strike and have their patients miss out on care, but thousands of patients were already missing out on care every day, due to staff shortages.

“Every week, we’ve got empty clinics,” he said. “There is space in the clinics that’s not being used, because there’s not a doctor in the chair there.

“While, today, that’s 20 percent of the work of the week gone, because we’re on strike, in some departments, it’s 20 percent every week.

“Every day of the week, there’s a 20 percent deficit in the number of patients people are seeing.”

5500 doctors on strike
Nationwide, about 5500 members of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists are on strike until 11:59pm today, causing the cancellation of about 4300 planned procedures and specialist appointments.

In a social media post, Health Minister Simeon Brown blamed the union for the disruption, saying an updated offer last week — including a $25,000 bonus for those moving to “hard-to-staff regions” — was rejected by the union, before members even saw it.

Union executive director Sarah Dalton said she would be very happy to facilitate a meeting between doctors and the minister — or he could accept the invitation to attend its national conference.

“They would love to feel like someone up there was listening,” she said. “They don’t at the moment.

“We need to move away from rhetoric, and actually have some time and space for meaningful discussion.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re on strike today. After eight months of negotiating, there was nothing on the table from the employer.

“It was only after we called for strike action that anything changed, so let’s do better.”

Critical workforce shortages were undermining patient care and the current pay offer, which amounted to an increase of less than one percent a year for most doctors, would do nothing to fix that, Dalton said.

“How do you tackle vacancies? You put more time and effort in good terms and conditions for your permanent workforce, and you stop spending spending $380 million a year on locums and temps.

“We shouldn’t have that heavy reliance on those people, so we’ve got to change it.”

NZ training doctors for Australia
After many years of study subsidised by the New Zealand taxpayer, Maeve Hume-Nixon recently qualified as a public health specialist, but may yet end up going overseas.

“I actually thought last year that I would have to go to Australia, where I would be paid another $100,000 minimum, because there were no jobs for me here, basically.

“In the end, I managed to get an emergency extension to my contract and this has continued, but I don’t have security and it’s a pretty frustrating position to be in.”

Neurologist Dr Maas Mollenhauer said he was not able to access the tests he needed to provide care for his patients.

“I’ve seen patients that I have sent for urgent imaging, but they didn’t receive it, and then I got an email from one of my colleagues who was on call, telling me that patient had rocked up to the Emergency Department and, basically, the front half of their skull was full of brain tumour.”

Cancer patients waiting too long
Medical oncologist Dr Sharon Pattison said the health system had reached the point where it was so starved of people and resources, it had become “inefficient”.

“Everyone is waiting for everything, so everything takes longer, and we are waiting until people get seriously ill, before we do anything about it.”

The government’s “faster cancer treatment time” target — 90 percent of patients receiving cancer management within 31 days of the decision to treat — would not give the true picture of what was happening for patients, she said.

“For instance, if I have someone with a potential diagnosis of cancer, there are so many points at which they are waiting — waiting for scan, waiting for a biopsy, waiting for a radiologist to report the scan to show us where to get the biopsy.

“That radiologist may be overseas, so if I want to talk to that specialist I can’t do that. Then the wait for a pathologist to report on the biopsy can now take up to 6-8 weeks.

“We know that, for some people with cancer, if you wait for that long before we can even make your treatment plan, we’re going to make your outcomes worse.

“The whole system is at the point where we are making people more unwell, because we can’t do what we should be doing for them in the framework that we need to.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Since at least April 2021, the Montana medical licensing board has had evidence, including thousands of pages of patient files and medical reviews, that Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, a popular Helena oncologist, had hurt and potentially killed patients, ProPublica and Montana Free Press have learned. Yet in that time, the board renewed his medical license — twice.

Weiner directed the cancer center at St. Peter’s Health for 24 years before he was fired in 2020 and accused of overprescribing narcotics, treating people who didn’t have cancer with chemotherapy and providing substandard care. Weiner, who has denied the allegations, was the subject of a December ProPublica investigation, which revealed a documented trail of patient harm and at least 10 suspicious deaths. Many of the records cited in the story had been in the medical board’s custody for nearly four years, St. Peter’s recently confirmed.

The Board of Medical Examiners renewed Weiner’s medical license in March 2023 and this month, authorizing him to treat patients and prescribe drugs. While lawyers for the state agency that oversees the medical board collected records from the hospital under subpoena, including medical reviews that criticized Weiner’s care, that inquiry languished at the staff level, according to one current and one former board member. It’s unclear why Weiner’s case was not elevated to the governor-appointed board members.

Sam Loveridge, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor and Industry, the board’s umbrella agency, did not answer a list of emailed questions, including whether the records provided by the hospital were reviewed by members of the board.

Kathleen Abke, a lawyer representing St. Peter’s, told ProPublica and Montana Free Press that the hospital initially surrendered to the licensing board 160,000 pages of documents relating to the care of 64 patients; the state received those records in early 2021, just months after Weiner was fired.

As part of the subpoena, St. Peter’s supplied the medical records of Scot Warwick, whom Weiner diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in 2009. Even though there had not been a lung biopsy to confirm that Warwick had the disease, Weiner proceeded to give him chemotherapy and other treatments for 11 years. After Warwick died in 2020, an autopsy — which St. Peter’s said it gave to the medical board — found no evidence of cancer. Weiner maintained the patient had terminal cancer for 11 years and said a pathologist and post-mortem medical examiner missed the disease.

Lisa Warwick, Scot’s widow, sued St. Peter’s for his wrongful death and settled for an undisclosed amount. Warwick learned from ProPublica and Montana Free Press this month that the state had her husband’s records and other evidence for years. She called the situation “appalling.”

“I would just like to know what information they’re reviewing that sways their determination to renew this man’s license,” she said. “Because if they are truly doing their job and are reviewing these things and looking at all the cases that have been brought forth — the people who have died, the circumstances under which they died — there is no way they can justify renewing this man’s license.”

Anthony Olson, another Weiner patient who inappropriately received chemotherapy for nearly a decade, expressed shock when he learned Montana regulators had information about his case as early as 2021. Three biopsies confirmed that Olson never had cancer, according to court and medical records. That chemo created severe health complications for Olson.

“So they just really don’t care?” Olson asked. “It gives me the shakes. My heart’s racing, and I literally don’t know what to feel right now.”

Weiner blamed other doctors for Olson’s misdiagnosis but acknowledged he received toxic treatments “needlessly.”

In Montana, medical licenses are up for renewal every two years. A few months after the board renewed Weiner’s license in 2023, its staff subpoenaed the hospital for additional records. Abke said St. Peter’s provided the board with thousands more internal documents and medical reviews. Yet, she said, no one from the hospital was called by the board to testify about Weiner’s practices.

St. Peter’s confirmed that the second tranche included the medical records of Nadine Long, a 16-year-old girl who, court and medical records show, died in 2015 shortly after Weiner ordered the injection of a large amount of phenobarbital, a powerful sedative. Weiner has denied wrongdoing in the case. Maintaining that the girl’s condition was terminal, he said he was providing comfort.

St. Peter’s also reported Weiner’s removal to the National Practitioner Data Bank and alerted the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to his alleged narcotics practices, according to records and interviews.

“We provided information to every entity that had the ability to do something about this,” Abke said. “St. Peter’s took these allegations extremely seriously.”

Dr. James Burkholder, a member of the medical licensing board from 2016 to 2023, told ProPublica and Montana Free Press that Weiner’s name “never came up” during board deliberations. Burkholder, a retired family doctor from Helena, said he’s certain the case didn’t reach the board level because he knows Weiner professionally and would have recused himself. He also served on the screening subcommittee that would have first reviewed the state’s investigation into Weiner and passed it up to the full board to be adjudicated.

Dr. Carley Robertson, a current board member, said she’s never heard of Weiner.

It’s unclear how many complaints have been filed against Weiner, as the medical board keeps information about cases that weren’t substantiated secret. ProPublica and Montana Free Press confirmed that at least one licensing complaint against Weiner, filed in 2021, was pending for three years before being dismissed in December.

A few months after reading local news reports about Weiner being fired by St. Peter’s, Marilyn Ketchum decided to act on concerns about her husband, Shawn Ketchum, who died back in 2016 while under Weiner’s care. After reviewing his medical records, she told the board that Weiner altered her husband’s code status without permission. If his heart stopped, he wanted to be a full code, she said, meaning he wanted to be resuscitated. Instead, when he was rushed to the hospital, Weiner maintained that Ketchum was a DNR/DNI — do not resuscitate and do not intubate — his medical records show. Ketchum died without intervention soon after, according to the records.

In its internal reviews of Weiner’s care, St. Peter’s alleged that unilaterally changing patients’ code status was a “standard practice” of his, which it called “a serious violation of the standard of care and medical ethics.” Weiner did not respond to questions about Ketchum’s case and has denied that he ever changed a patient’s status without permission.

Ketchum, who now lives in Arkansas, said a state employee did not interview her until two years after she made a complaint against Weiner’s license. “I was on their ass to do something about it,” Ketchum said, emailing or calling someone from the labor department “every couple of weeks.”

In a letter sent in late 2024, the board provided no explanation for why it had dismissed her complaint.

Weiner has said he’s not currently treating patients because he can’t get malpractice insurance.

Following the ProPublica investigation published in December, the Montana Department of Justice launched a criminal inquiry into Weiner, according to three people with direct knowledge of the case. Weiner has not been charged with a crime. In separate cases last year, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Weiner and the hospital, alleging they defrauded federal health care programs. The hospital settled for $10.8 million. Weiner has denied the allegations through an attorney and petitioned the court to dismiss the case.

Last month, Weiner lost an appeal of a yearslong court battle over his firing. The Montana Supreme Court ruled that the hospital’s actions were “reasonable and warranted due to the quantity and severity of Weiner’s inappropriate patient care.”

Still, since Weiner’s firing, many Helena residents continue to defend him, including by funding billboards that proclaim “WE STAND WITH DR. WEINER.” Weiner’s supporters, often citing his renewed medical license, have accused the hospital of orchestrating a smear campaign against a dedicated oncologist. Since the winter of 2020, they’ve held protests outside of the hospital.

Abke said many St. Peter’s employees are exhausted by the blowback from Weiner’s supporters and are working to regain trust in Helena. Asked about concerns that the hospital unfairly targeted Weiner, Abke said, “No hospital would want to take the financial, the PR, the personal hit for no reason.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by J. David McSwane, ProPublica, and Mara Silvers, Montana Free Press.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Since at least April 2021, the Montana medical licensing board has had evidence, including thousands of pages of patient files and medical reviews, that Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, a popular Helena oncologist, had hurt and potentially killed patients, ProPublica and Montana Free Press have learned. Yet in that time, the board renewed his medical license — twice.

Weiner directed the cancer center at St. Peter’s Health for 24 years before he was fired in 2020 and accused of overprescribing narcotics, treating people who didn’t have cancer with chemotherapy and providing substandard care. Weiner, who has denied the allegations, was the subject of a December ProPublica investigation, which revealed a documented trail of patient harm and at least 10 suspicious deaths. Many of the records cited in the story had been in the medical board’s custody for nearly four years, St. Peter’s recently confirmed.

The Board of Medical Examiners renewed Weiner’s medical license in March 2023 and this month, authorizing him to treat patients and prescribe drugs. While lawyers for the state agency that oversees the medical board collected records from the hospital under subpoena, including medical reviews that criticized Weiner’s care, that inquiry languished at the staff level, according to one current and one former board member. It’s unclear why Weiner’s case was not elevated to the governor-appointed board members.

Sam Loveridge, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor and Industry, the board’s umbrella agency, did not answer a list of emailed questions, including whether the records provided by the hospital were reviewed by members of the board.

Kathleen Abke, a lawyer representing St. Peter’s, told ProPublica and Montana Free Press that the hospital initially surrendered to the licensing board 160,000 pages of documents relating to the care of 64 patients; the state received those records in early 2021, just months after Weiner was fired.

As part of the subpoena, St. Peter’s supplied the medical records of Scot Warwick, whom Weiner diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in 2009. Even though there had not been a lung biopsy to confirm that Warwick had the disease, Weiner proceeded to give him chemotherapy and other treatments for 11 years. After Warwick died in 2020, an autopsy — which St. Peter’s said it gave to the medical board — found no evidence of cancer. Weiner maintained the patient had terminal cancer for 11 years and said a pathologist and post-mortem medical examiner missed the disease.

Lisa Warwick, Scot’s widow, sued St. Peter’s for his wrongful death and settled for an undisclosed amount. Warwick learned from ProPublica and Montana Free Press this month that the state had her husband’s records and other evidence for years. She called the situation “appalling.”

“I would just like to know what information they’re reviewing that sways their determination to renew this man’s license,” she said. “Because if they are truly doing their job and are reviewing these things and looking at all the cases that have been brought forth — the people who have died, the circumstances under which they died — there is no way they can justify renewing this man’s license.”

Anthony Olson, another Weiner patient who inappropriately received chemotherapy for nearly a decade, expressed shock when he learned Montana regulators had information about his case as early as 2021. Three biopsies confirmed that Olson never had cancer, according to court and medical records. That chemo created severe health complications for Olson.

“So they just really don’t care?” Olson asked. “It gives me the shakes. My heart’s racing, and I literally don’t know what to feel right now.”

Weiner blamed other doctors for Olson’s misdiagnosis but acknowledged he received toxic treatments “needlessly.”

In Montana, medical licenses are up for renewal every two years. A few months after the board renewed Weiner’s license in 2023, its staff subpoenaed the hospital for additional records. Abke said St. Peter’s provided the board with thousands more internal documents and medical reviews. Yet, she said, no one from the hospital was called by the board to testify about Weiner’s practices.

St. Peter’s confirmed that the second tranche included the medical records of Nadine Long, a 16-year-old girl who, court and medical records show, died in 2015 shortly after Weiner ordered the injection of a large amount of phenobarbital, a powerful sedative. Weiner has denied wrongdoing in the case. Maintaining that the girl’s condition was terminal, he said he was providing comfort.

St. Peter’s also reported Weiner’s removal to the National Practitioner Data Bank and alerted the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to his alleged narcotics practices, according to records and interviews.

“We provided information to every entity that had the ability to do something about this,” Abke said. “St. Peter’s took these allegations extremely seriously.”

Dr. James Burkholder, a member of the medical licensing board from 2016 to 2023, told ProPublica and Montana Free Press that Weiner’s name “never came up” during board deliberations. Burkholder, a retired family doctor from Helena, said he’s certain the case didn’t reach the board level because he knows Weiner professionally and would have recused himself. He also served on the screening subcommittee that would have first reviewed the state’s investigation into Weiner and passed it up to the full board to be adjudicated.

Dr. Carley Robertson, a current board member, said she’s never heard of Weiner.

It’s unclear how many complaints have been filed against Weiner, as the medical board keeps information about cases that weren’t substantiated secret. ProPublica and Montana Free Press confirmed that at least one licensing complaint against Weiner, filed in 2021, was pending for three years before being dismissed in December.

A few months after reading local news reports about Weiner being fired by St. Peter’s, Marilyn Ketchum decided to act on concerns about her husband, Shawn Ketchum, who died back in 2016 while under Weiner’s care. After reviewing his medical records, she told the board that Weiner altered her husband’s code status without permission. If his heart stopped, he wanted to be a full code, she said, meaning he wanted to be resuscitated. Instead, when he was rushed to the hospital, Weiner maintained that Ketchum was a DNR/DNI — do not resuscitate and do not intubate — his medical records show. Ketchum died without intervention soon after, according to the records.

In its internal reviews of Weiner’s care, St. Peter’s alleged that unilaterally changing patients’ code status was a “standard practice” of his, which it called “a serious violation of the standard of care and medical ethics.” Weiner did not respond to questions about Ketchum’s case and has denied that he ever changed a patient’s status without permission.

Ketchum, who now lives in Arkansas, said a state employee did not interview her until two years after she made a complaint against Weiner’s license. “I was on their ass to do something about it,” Ketchum said, emailing or calling someone from the labor department “every couple of weeks.”

In a letter sent in late 2024, the board provided no explanation for why it had dismissed her complaint.

Weiner has said he’s not currently treating patients because he can’t get malpractice insurance.

Following the ProPublica investigation published in December, the Montana Department of Justice launched a criminal inquiry into Weiner, according to three people with direct knowledge of the case. Weiner has not been charged with a crime. In separate cases last year, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Weiner and the hospital, alleging they defrauded federal health care programs. The hospital settled for $10.8 million. Weiner has denied the allegations through an attorney and petitioned the court to dismiss the case.

Last month, Weiner lost an appeal of a yearslong court battle over his firing. The Montana Supreme Court ruled that the hospital’s actions were “reasonable and warranted due to the quantity and severity of Weiner’s inappropriate patient care.”

Still, since Weiner’s firing, many Helena residents continue to defend him, including by funding billboards that proclaim “WE STAND WITH DR. WEINER.” Weiner’s supporters, often citing his renewed medical license, have accused the hospital of orchestrating a smear campaign against a dedicated oncologist. Since the winter of 2020, they’ve held protests outside of the hospital.

Abke said many St. Peter’s employees are exhausted by the blowback from Weiner’s supporters and are working to regain trust in Helena. Asked about concerns that the hospital unfairly targeted Weiner, Abke said, “No hospital would want to take the financial, the PR, the personal hit for no reason.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by J. David McSwane, ProPublica, and Mara Silvers, Montana Free Press.

Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress discussed the Middle East without any mention of Palestinians. This comes as Trump has called for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and posted an AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a resort town with a golden statue of Trump. Congressmember Bonnie Watson Coleman attended the speech with her guest Dr. Adam Hamawy, an Army veteran and reconstructive surgeon who recently volunteered at a Gaza hospital. “The whole issue of Gaza, with the exception of the president wanting to make it a spa for millionaires, was being overlooked at a time when the infrastructure is absolutely devastated, the people are devastated,” says Watson Coleman.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Trump administration claims an order to withhold funds from hospitals that offer gender-affirming care to transgender youth is “already having its intended effect” as hospitals announce a halt to gender-affirming care for trans patients. The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and others filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of transgender youth who say the order is depriving them of medical care “solely on the basis of their sex and transgender status.” ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio says the situation is “catastrophic for transgender people of all ages, particularly transgender youth,” and notes Trump’s near-daily attacks are targeting a community that makes up less than 1% of the U.S. population. “We need to see people standing up.” We are also joined by pediatrician Dr. Jeffrey Birnbaum, who has vowed to keep working with transgender youth patients in New York. “Keep politics out of science,” says Dr. Birnbaum.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As the Israeli military continues its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, which have included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances and the killing of medical personnel, among other violations of international law, we speak to a doctor currently volunteering in Beirut. Dr. Bing Li is an emergency medicine physician and U.S. Army veteran who also volunteered at Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza earlier this year. Li recounts her experiences in Gaza, where “it feels like death is everywhere,” and warns that Israel’s latest forced evacuation, of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, is “essentially a death sentence” for patients, including children in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Now in Lebanon, Li describes how providers are scrambling to increase healthcare capacity in anticipation of additional attacks.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On September 10, the junior doctors marched to the Swasthya Bhavan (the state health department office) in Sector V, Salt Lake, in the afternoon with their charter of demands. People from various walks of life joined the march in solidarity.

A video clip of a woman being interviewed by a TV journalist has gone viral in this context. In the clip, she is asked about her reasons for joining the junior doctors’ protest. The woman replies saying that the Supreme Court asked the junior doctors to go back to their duties as several lives had been lost owing to their cease-work. She adds that she finds this a one-sided argument. Then she says, “It is true that people have lost their lives. But people die every day — that should also be taken into consideration.” At this point, the video has been clearly edited and the line — people die every day — has been slowed down and repeated.

The video is being shared with the claim that the woman in the video is a doctor who accepts that people are dying because of the protests by the junior doctors and that she is fine with it.

Verified X (formerly Twitter) user Sanghamitra Bandhopadhyay (@SanghamitraLIVE) tweeted the video and wrote, “She is a doctor. She is accepting that people are dying because of protests by junior doctors. She is fine with it.”

She is a doctor.
She is accepting that people are dying because of protests by junior doctors.
She is fine with it. pic.twitter.com/4phYSiPH7Y

— Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay (@SanghamitraLIVE) September 10, 2024

The tweet has garnered over 16,000 views at the time of this article being written.

Another X user, Spandan Gain (@GainSpananLIVE), who claims to be a journalist, has shared the same video with the same claim.

She’s a protesting doctor, acknowledging patient deaths due to medical negligence during the #RGKar protest. And she’s seemingly okay with lives being lost every day. Slow clap… pic.twitter.com/PsEjEm5UA0

— Spandan Gain (@GainSpandanLIVE) September 10, 2024

Fact Check

We identified the woman in the video interviewed by ABP Ananda (the channel’s logo is visible on the mic). Her name is Debopriya Bandyopadhyay. She is not a doctor, but a theatre artiste and a former student of Calcutta University, where she pursued an MA degree. Below is a screenshot of her Facebook profile:

We also found that Debopriya herself had shared a post on Facebook stating that she had been misquoted and a part of her statement to the TV channel was clipped and shared out of context. In the Facebook post, she attached a screenshot of the tweet by @SanghamitraLive.

We then looked through ABP Ananda’s coverage of the August 10 demonstration at Salt Lake and found the original clip. In it, journalist Sandip Sarkar can be seen interviewing Debopriya.

The conversation goes like this:

Journalist: Which Hospital are you from?

Debopriya: I am a citizen, not a doctor.

Journalist: Okay. So, you want to join the doctors’ procession?

Debopriya: Yes, most definitely.

Journalist: What are the reasons for your participation and support for the doctors’ protest campaign today in front of the Swasthya Bhavan?

Debopriya: Yesterday the Supreme Court asked the junior doctors to go back to their duties soon because people are losing lives because of their their cease-work protest. This is a one-sided argument. It is true that people are losing their lives but one also has to consider the fact that people die every day. Are all those deaths caused by junior doctors’ strike? If 7,300 junior doctors have stopped working aren’t all the other doctors working? They definitely are. Besides, there is information that medical facilities are available at R G Kar. Hence, we won’t accept this one-sided narrative.”

So, it is clear, that the latter part of the conversation was edited out. Not only that, at the very outset, Debopriya clarified that she was not a doctor, but a common citizen. This part, too, was edited out.

We also spoke to Debopriya. She told Alt News, “Each of those 23 deaths is unfortunate and heartbreaking. I just made the point that there must be some kind of verification before one claims that all of those deaths were caused by the cease-work by junior doctors. It is being taken as a gospel truth and the junior doctors’ protest is being maligned based on that. How can one be sure that the doctors’ protest singularly caused those deaths? My statement was edited, distorted and portrayed in a manner that suited a particular agenda.”

Hence, it is clear from the above findings that the video being shared while questioning the morals of doctors is edited and misleading. The woman seen in the viral video clip is not a doctor, but a stage actor. A part of her statement to a TV channel has been made viral out of context.

Ankita Mahalanobish is an intern at Alt News.

The post R G Kar stir: Protestor falsely identified as doctor; video edited to distort statement appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.

Tanya Haj-Hassan is a pediatric intensive care physician who has volunteered in Gaza multiple times over the past 10 months. She joins us to recount what she witnessed there and to explain why she is calling for an end to U.S. support for the Israeli military and the resumption of comprehensive humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Over the course of Israel’s assault, Haj-Hassan has treated victims of “massacre after massacre,” with injuries and casualties “enabled by American bombs.” She joins demands for Palestinian voices to be allowed to address the convention onstage and argues that Democratic Party leadership’s refusal is part of a systematic “process of dehumanization” targeting Palestinians.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A group of American doctors who treated patients in Gaza held a press conference in Chicago on Tuesday to describe the suffering they saw among Palestinians injured and killed in Israel’s war on the territory. The press conference, taking place during the Democratic National Convention, was organized by the Uncommitted National Movement, which is pressuring Democrats for an end to blanket U.S. support for Israel. Among those who spoke was Dr. Ahmed Yousaf, who returned from Gaza just weeks earlier. “When we got to the hospital, everything I saw on TikTok and Instagram and all the television, all the stuff that we had in alternative media … it was 100 times worse than I could have ever imagined,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This article was produced by The Salt Lake Tribune, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Sexual assault is not health care, and it isn’t covered by Utah’s medical malpractice law, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. The decision revives a lawsuit filed by 94 women who allege their OB-GYN sexually abused them during exams or while he delivered their babies.

In 2022, the group of women sued Dr. David Broadbent and two hospitals where he had worked, wanting to seek civil damages. But a judge dismissed their case because he decided they had filed it incorrectly as a civil sexual assault claim rather than a medical malpractice case. The women had all been seeking health care, Judge Robert Lunnen wrote, and Broadbent was providing that when the alleged assaults happened.

The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica covered the decision, speaking with women about the lower court ruling that made it harder for them to sue the doctor for his alleged actions. After that story ran, the state Legislature voted to reform medical malpractice law to exclude sexual assault. But the new law didn’t apply retroactively; the women still had no way to sue.

So they took their case to the Utah Supreme Court, where their attorneys argued that the lower court judge had made an error in his decision. The high court agreed. Broadbent’s alleged conduct, it found, was not a part of the women’s health care — and therefore, not covered by Utah’s medical malpractice laws.

“Here, the [women] do not allege they were injured by any health care that Broadbent may have provided them,” Justice Paige Petersen wrote in the unanimous ruling. “Rather, they allege that he abused his position as their doctor to sexually assault them under the pretense of providing health care.”

“The point of their claims is that his actions were not really health care at all,” Petersen added.

Stephanie Mateer was the first woman who spoke out publicly about Broadbent, detailing her experience on the “Mormon Stories” podcast in 2021. In the episode, she described what she said was the painful way the doctor examined her, how it left her feeling traumatized and how she discovered online reviews that echoed her experience.

She said on Thursday that she cried “tears of relief” when she read the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling, and that she hopes it gives other alleged victims the courage to speak up and to seek their own justice.

Adam Sorenson, an attorney for the women who sued, noted on Thursday that it’s been almost two years since Lunnen threw out their case — which he said was a “sad and disappointing day.”

“But the Utah Supreme Court’s decision today affirms everything these women have said from the beginning, and tells every person in Utah that sexual abuse by a health care provider never has been, and never will be, ‘health care,’” he said.

“It is difficult to describe how good it is to hear that from our highest court,” he continued, “but any joy I feel is nothing compared to the women who suffered sexual abuse, [who] were told it was just health care, have fought for three years, and can now say that the law in Utah is on their side on this important issue.”

For the women who sued, having their case characterized as malpractice reduced the time they had to sue to two years and limited the amount of money they could receive for pain and suffering.

With the Utah Supreme Court’s decision, the case now returns to Lunnen’s courtroom. Their suit alleges that Broadbent inappropriately touched their breasts, vaginas and rectums, without warning or explanation, and hurt them. Some said he used his bare hand — instead of using a speculum or wearing gloves — during exams. One alleged that he had an erection while he was touching her.

An attorney for Broadbent has denied these women’s allegations, saying they are “without merit.” The OB-GYN agreed last year to stop practicing medicine while police and prosecutors investigate.

He was charged in June in 4th District Court with one count of forcible sexual abuse, and prosecutors say their investigation is continuing. Broadbent is expected to make his first court appearance Monday.

Broadbent’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Neither Utah Valley Hospital nor Mountainstar Health, which owns Timpanogos Hospital, reacted to the ruling in statements released Thursday. Both hospitals are named as defendants in the lawsuit, and both emphasized that Broadbent had privileges to practice at their facilities but was not an employee.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad is a Palestinian-American emergency physician who has made numerous relief trips to Gaza. Dr. Ahmad is Assistant Program Director for the Emergency Medicine Residency Program at Chicago’s Advocate Christ Medical Center. He also serves as the Global Health Director and Medical Ethics Director for the Emergency Department at Advocate Christ. Dr. Ahmad is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a board member for MedGlobal, a medical humanitarian NGO that works at building healthcare capacity and reducing health inequities globally.

I don't think [Palestinian healthcare workers] get enough credit for what they've had to deal with over these last several months… These doctors are also displaced. Their families are displaced. They are living out of tents and they are showing up every day at the hospital to treat the community that's there. They've not been paid—the health ministry collapsed—they have no money. They're totally dependent on the scarce aid that gets in. These doctors are showing up to work when they should be in line at the bakeries that are producing some of the bread—where they should be in line collecting some of the aid that's being distributed. But they're showing up.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad

I work with MedGlobal. They're doing fantastic work on the ground. They're in Gaza—more than 110 physicians and nurses who are Gazans are running medical points throughout the Gaza Strip. They have a malnutrition center that they're also using to help with the starvation that we were talking about. So I think that that's an excellent organization to contribute to—medglobal.org .

Dr. Thaer Ahmad

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law.  Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.

[On Trump v. United States]: The court gave nothing more than the equivalent of, “We know when it's not immune when we see it, but otherwise you try to guess what that's going to be.”

Bruce Fein

It's a judicial counter-revolution. It's a violation because it basically turns the Constitution into a scrap of paper—it means whatever the Justices want it to mean. It doesn't have to find even a single word in the Constitution to justify the opinion.

Bruce Fein

It's really a judicial coup d'etat that occurred on July 1, 2024. It's hard to fathom the belief that these six judges think they're going to get away with it. There is going to be all kinds of damage to all kinds of people—regardless of their political labels—and there's going to be a big pushback. Do they think they're going to get away with it? These unelected, lifetime-position judges?

Ralph Nader

News 7/10/24 

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis

1. Haaretz reports that in the immediate wake of the October 7th attack, the Israeli Defense Forces implemented the ominously named “Hannibal directive” which “directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity.” In other words, the explicit order of the Israeli military was for Israelis to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage by Hamas, in order to deny the group leverage in negotiations. As Haaretz reports, this directive also put civilian lives at risk. The Hannibal Directive had been a secretive but official Israeli policy since the 1986 capture of three soldiers by Hezbollah in Lebanon, but was formally revoked in 2016. 

2. Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, has published a study estimating that as many as 186,000 people have been killed in Gaza as a direct or indirect result of the genocidal Israeli military campaign. This casualty count, far higher than the commonly cited figure of under 40,000, supports estimates offered by advocates. If accurate, this would mean Israel has wiped out nearly 8% of the total population of the Gaza Strip.  

3. Due to previous legal entanglements, the United Autoworkers union is subject to a consent decree with the federal government. Included within this consent decree is a federal monitor assigned to the union. Yet, the Detroit News reports that this monitor, Neil Barofsky, went far beyond his mandate to pressure the union over its position on the crisis in Gaza. According to this report, following UAW’s official call for ceasefire, Barofsky called UAW president Shawn Fain to share his “concerns” about the union’s position. Later, Barofsky signed off on an email which included an ADL complaint about the union’s call for a ceasefire. Benjamin Dictor, outside counsel for the UAW, wrote to Barofsky saying “Your call to President Fain on an issue so blatantly outside of the Monitor’s jurisdiction was inappropriate…[and] represents a surprising lack of integrity.”   

4. More misbehavior from the ADL is on display in a recent expose from the Guardian. According to this report, based on a leaked internal memo from 2020, “the ADL collected information on a Black Indianapolis activist, Tatjana Rebelle, who worked on Deadly Exchange, a national campaign against an ADL-backed program to send US police officials for training with the Israeli military.” Rebelle is quoted in this piece saying “It scared the s**t out of me…It stopped me from moving forward because I don’t want to put people in my life at risk – I work with youth, so it stopped me in my tracks.” The ADL calls itself the “leading anti-hate organization in the world,” with a straight face. 

5. AP reports Boeing has taken the deal offered by the Department of Justice, and will “will plead guilty to a criminal fraud charge stemming from two crashes of 737 Max jetliners that killed 346 people.” The plea deal, which must still be approved by a federal judge, dictates that Boeing must pay an additional $243.6 million fine and submit to independent monitor-ship for three years, among other provisions. Ike Riffel, whose sons Melvin and Bennett died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, is quoted saying “Boeing has paid fines many a time…When people start going to prison, that’s when you are going to see a change.” 

6. President Biden shows no intention of stepping aside as the Democratic nominee. This is despite open calls from prominent Democratic lawmakers, such as Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff, as well as a full-blown revolt from major Democratic donors like Abigail Disney. Recent polls show Biden losing most swing states by a substantial margin, including an AARP poll in Wisconsin showing him running 12 points behind Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin. Infuriating many of those who wish to avoid a second Trump term, Axios reports “President Biden indicated…[in his interview with George Stephanopolous] that he would be at peace if he lost to former President Trump ‘as long as I gave it my all.’” 

7. Hurricane Beryl is ravaging Texas, leaving millions without power, according to CNN. This widespread power outage will only compound an incoming heatwave, with the Houston heat index reaching 100 degrees on Tuesday. Las Vegas hit a record high temperature of 120 degrees the same day, per Fox 5. As many have remarked, this is likely to be the coldest summer for the rest of our lives. 

8. The Daily Beast reports the Pope has excommunicated Carlo Maria Vigano, an ultra-conservative archbishop who served as the Vatican’s ecclesiastical diplomat to Washington from 2011 to 2016. A long time opponent of Pope Francis, Vigano has become increasingly unhinged in his criticisms, including accusing the supreme pontiff of being a “servant of Satan.” Other wild claims he has made in recent years include retweeting a Marjorie Taylor Greene post stating that  “The Covid vaccines are killing people,” and calling Black Lives Matter protests the machinations of “the children of darkness.” Vigano was accused of schism and found guilty.  

9. In the United Kingdom, the New Arab reports five pro-Gaza independent candidates won seats in the House of Commons, including Shockat Adam, who defeated shadow Cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth. Most prominent of these however is Left-wing luminary and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who successfully defended his seat in Islington North after being expelled from the Labour Party over his criticism of Israel. Reuters reports that upon his victory, Corbyn said voters are “looking for a government that on the world stage will search for peace, not war.”  

10. Finally, beating all expectations, the French Left emerged victorious from the second round of legislative elections. The New Popular Front lead by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, won the most seats, followed by Macron’s centrist bloc, after the two formed a “Republican Front” to defeat the Far-right, led by Marine Le Pen. Now, negotiations are underway to choose the country’s next Prime Minister, according to France24. Mélenchon has campaigned on a very simple platform, stating “I'm not saying we will create a paradise from one day to the next, but we will put an end to hell.” 

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.  

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Verified X user Raushan Sinha, who shares and amplifies communal disinformation on social media on a regular basis, shared this clip stating that the ‘patients’ were to be blamed for the ‘idiocy’ of visiting such quack doctors. At the time of this article being written, the video has accumulated more than 30 Lakh views and has been reshared over 3,200 times.

What kind of idiocy is it? I blame these women for going to such frauds…

And if something goes wrong, everybody will blame the govt..pic.twitter.com/cLgBj0GFX6

— Mr Sinha (@MrSinha_) July 4, 2024

Other X users have also made the claim with sarcastic jibes at the ‘treatment procedure’.

Fact Check 

We noticed a watermark on the viral video which said ‘Peace TV’. Taking a cue from this, we ran a relevant keyword search, which led us to this Facebook video, uploaded by a Facebook profile called ‘Peace Tv BD‘. The profile, run from Barisal, Bangladesh, has 14 Lakh followers, and describes itself as a ‘Media/News company.’

The video was shared on February 2, 2024.

We went through this video, which is much longer than the clip that went viral across social media platforms. The viral part occurs from the 0:03 minute-mark onward, and goes on till around the 5:19-minute mark.

The last two frames of the video show a cautionary message and a title card, respectively. The message in Bengali says: “It is your responsibility to protect yourself from such ‘babas'”. The title card says: “Directed by Peace Multimedia”.

These suggest that the video is a scripted one made for awareness purposes.

The Facebook page also has a a link to a YouTube channel, which shared the same video. The channel describes itself as an organisation from Bangladesh, covering, among other things, ‘short film(s)’ and ‘Islamic drama(s)’.

We also noticed that the other videos uploaded by this channel dealt with similar social and domestic issues, ranging from infidelity to gender injustices, as well as instances of imposters getting caught and punished.

Moreover, the actor who is depicted as the fake doctor in the viral video can be seen in several other videos from the channel, donning different avatars.

This proves that the videos are dramatic ones and do not depict real incidents.

It can be concluded that the viral video of the fake doctor is scripted and from Bangladesh.

Prantik Ali is an intern at Alt News.

The post Scripted video from Bangladesh showing fake doctor ‘treating’ patients viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

More than eight months into Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, the territory’s healthcare system is barely functioning, with the World Health Organization reporting this week that there have been 464 Israeli attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system since October 7, affecting 101 health facilities. Gaza’s Health Ministry warns that the few remaining hospitals still partially functioning could completely shut down due to Israel’s near-total blockade of the territory, which is keeping out parts needed to maintain hospital diesel generators, as well as crucial medical supplies. Over 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, and nearly 85,000 Palestinians have been wounded. “The situation in Gaza … remains catastrophic,” says Dr. James Smith, an emergency medical doctor just back from Gaza, where he treated patients for nearly two months. “There are no fully functional hospitals any longer in Gaza and no health facilities that are able to absorb the sheer scale of need now.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Democracy Now! speaks with Dr. Adam Hamawy, one of around 20 American medical workers trapped in Gaza after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. A plastic surgeon and Army veteran, Hamawy is on a volunteer mission with the Palestinian American Medical Association at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Like many Gazans, the U.S. medical workers are now facing dehydration and other deadly health conditions. “We’re continuing to do our job. … It’s tiring, but this is exactly what we need to be doing,” says Hamawy, who calls on President Biden to stop supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza. “If my best friend is a serial killer, I’m going to stop being his friend.” Hamaway describes treating “massive” injuries to civilians in Khan Younis, where much of the city has been destroyed and vandalized in Hebrew. “It’s going to haunt all of us. … I’m here. I see it with my own eyes. At some point in time, everyone is going to see it.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The World Food Programme is warning northern Gaza has reached a “full-blown” famine that is spreading south. This comes after the Israeli military has spent months blocking the entry of vital aid into Gaza, attacking humanitarian aid convoys and opening fire on Palestinian civilians waiting to receive lifesaving aid. We get an update on conditions among the besieged and starving population of Gaza — including of children now suffering from the psychological effects of intense and prolonged trauma — from Dr. Walid Masoud, a vascular surgeon and a board member of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund who is just back from heading a medical mission to Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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In late 2020, Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna gave her a stark warning. Work faster, or the company might fire her.

That was a problem for Day because she felt her work was too important to be rushed. She was a medical director for the health insurer, a physician with sweeping power to approve or reject requests to pay for critical care like life-saving drugs or complex surgeries.

She had been working at Cigna for nearly 15 years, reviewing cases that nurses had flagged for denial or were unsure about. At Cigna and other insurers, nurses can greenlight payments, but denials have such serious repercussions for patients that many states require that doctors make the final call. In more recent years, though, Day said that the Cigna nurses’ work was getting sloppy. Patient files that nurses working in the Philippines sent to her, she said, increasingly had errors that could lead to wrongful denials if they were not corrected.

Day was, in her own words, persnickety. If a nurse recommended denying coverage for a cancer patient or a sick baby, she wanted to be certain it was the right thing to do. So Day said she researched guidelines, read medical studies and scrutinized patient medical records to come to the best decision. This took time. She was clearing fewer cases than many of her peers.

Some of her colleagues quickly denied requests to keep pace, she said. All a Cigna doctor had to do was cut and paste the denial language that the nurse had prepared and quickly move on to the next case, Day said. This was so common, she and another former medical director said, that people inside Cigna had a term for these kinds of speedy decisions: “click and close.”

“Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” said Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. “If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”

In a written response to questions, Cigna said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” The company said it was unaware of the use of the term “click and close” and that “such behavior would not be tolerated.”

During Day’s final years at Cigna, the company meticulously tracked the output of its medical directors on a monthly dashboard. Cigna shared this spreadsheet with more than 70 of its doctors, allowing them to compare their tally of cases with those of their peers. Day and two other former medical directors said the dashboard sent a message loud and clear: Cigna valued speed. (ProPublica and The Capitol Forum found these other former Cigna doctors independently; Day did not refer them.) One of Day’s managers in a written performance evaluation called the spreadsheet the “productivity dashboard.”

Measuring the speed and output of employees is common in many industries, from fast food to package delivery, but the use of these kinds of metrics in health care is controversial because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing if a rushed server forgets the fries with your burger. It’s another entirely if the pressure to act fast leads to wrongful denials of payment for vital care. Walgreens in 2022 dropped measurements of its pharmacists’ speed from their performance reviews after some alleged that practice could lead to dangerous mistakes.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum examined Cigna’s productivity dashboards for medical directors from January and February 2022. These spreadsheets tallied the number of cases each medical director handled. Cigna gave each task a “handle time,” which the company said was the average amount of time it took its medical directors to issue a decision.

Day and others said the number was something different: the maximum amount of time they should spend on a case. Insurers often require approval in advance for expensive procedures or medicines, a process known as prior authorization. The early 2022 dashboards listed a handle time of four minutes for a prior authorization. The bulk of drug requests were to be decided in two to five minutes. Hospital discharge decisions were supposed to take four and a half minutes.

“Medical directors would message me and say, ‘We can’t do these cases in four minutes. Not if you want to do a good job,’” Day recalled.

Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers. If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.

As ProPublica and The Capitol Forum reported last year, Cigna built a computer program that allowed its medical directors to deny certain claims in bulk. The insurer’s doctors spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each of those cases. Cigna at the time said the review system was created to speed up approval of claims for certain routine screenings; the company later posted a rebuttal to the story. A congressional committee and the Department of Labor launched inquiries into this Cigna program. A spokesperson for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the congressional committee, said Rodgers continues to monitor the situation after Cigna shared some details about its process. The Labor Department is still examining such practices.

One figure on Cigna’s January and February 2022 dashboards was like a productivity score; the news organizations found that this number reflects the pace at which a medical director clears cases.

Cigna said it was incorrect to call that figure on its dashboard a productivity score and said its “view on productivity is defined by a range of factors beyond elements included in a single spreadsheet.” In addition, the company told the news organizations, “The copy of the dashboard that you have is inaccurate and secondary calculations made using its contents may also be inaccurate.” The news organizations asked what was inaccurate, but the company wouldn’t elaborate.

Nevertheless, Cigna said that because the dashboard created “inadvertent confusion” the company was “reassessing its use.”

Day was afraid to look at the dashboards. Anyone could see that by Cigna’s measures, she was a laggard. In January 2022, only a third of her peers had lower scores, and in February 2022, it was just a quarter.

In a recorded phone call and in emails with supervisors, Day complained that Cigna’s metrics failed to account for the quality of decisions. She said she and others asked higher-ups how often medical director decisions were overturned on appeal but nobody would say.

Day gave Cigna written permission to discuss her employment with ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The company described Day as a “disgruntled former employee” and said her “personal view is not an accurate representation of the work of the many medical directors and clinicians we employ.” Cigna added that prior authorization requests are often time-sensitive and the company’s “mission is to ensure our patients receive the right care as quickly as possible.”

Cigna rejected the assertions that denying cases was an effective way of working faster. “Even if medical directors were incentivized to review more claims — which they are not — it makes no sense to suggest that this incentivizes denials; it would be far quicker to approve all claims,” the company spokesperson wrote. The insurer said that denials take more time because they require a deeper review of clinical data, potentially requesting additional reviews by senior clinical directors, drafting denial letters and possibly phoning the treating physicians.

But another doctor who had worked at Cigna also said that denying a request for payment was far quicker than approving one since the nurses served up language that could be used to justify the denial. That former Cigna medical director said, “Sometimes you just have to accept the nurse and click and close if you had too much work.” (That doctor asked not to be named because they feared repercussions if they commented publicly.)

When Debby Day got her job at Cigna in November 2005, she thought it was a godsend.

She had been working for a health insurance startup in North Carolina. The charismatic founder of the company, Day said, had told her and a handful of principal executives to expect a windfall when the company went public. That never happened, and Day was eventually left with no job and no severance.

When a recruiter mentioned the medical director job at Cigna, it sounded like a perfect fit. The job was based in North Carolina, but Cigna didn’t mind that she was licensed in California, where she did her residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. She was ready to leave the executive track, and the position allowed her to put her medical training to good use without the daily grind of working in a clinic.

The daughter of an ophthalmologist, Day had watched her father perform eye surgery when she was a child, and she found medicine fascinating. When Day started practicing, she learned quickly that while she enjoyed the intellectual challenges of medicine, the hands-on work of seeing patients drained her. As a medical director, she said, “I could really take care of patients without having to talk to them all day long.”

Cigna, like all health insurers, makes patients get approval in advance for certain treatments. Day became one of the people who reviewed these prior authorization requests, deciding what to cover and what to deny. Everyone Day worked with was under one roof in Raleigh, North Carolina. The office buzzed with conversations among colleagues, and she was able to consult with specialists on complex cases.

She never felt pressure to do anything but make the right decision for the patient. At the same time, she said, she didn’t hesitate to reject treatment she thought was improper.

A couple years into her time at Cigna, Day noticed some doctors prescribing a costly treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG, that helps patients with weakened immune systems fight off infections. Only she found they were prescribing it in cases where it didn’t make any medical sense. That wasn’t good for patients or for Cigna. “Some of these guys were pouring it into every patient they could get their hands on and then making hundreds of thousands of dollars billing for it,” she recalled.

At the time, Cigna didn’t have a policy for when IVIG should be used, so Day developed one based on the scientific evidence available at the time. Day said this saved millions of dollars and that Cigna rewarded her with bonuses and stock options.

“In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business,” she said.

As Day neared the end of her first decade at Cigna, the company closed regional offices in favor of a nationwide review system, she said. With medical directors working from home, Day could no longer pop down the hallway to consult with doctors in other specialities.

Cigna had used a productivity dashboard for years, but by 2019, these metrics began playing a more prominent role in the company’s evaluations of medical directors, Day said. Now, making a fast decision seemed more important than making the right decision, she said. In February 2019 emails to her managers, Day openly questioned this system.

Her boss responded: “We all understand that many cases are involved and take more time,” he wrote. “We have tried to account for that additional time in the allotment allowed for certain cases.”

Still, he made it clear that transaction volume — the metric on the dashboard that was similar to a productivity score — was one of the factors “we use to determine merit raises, bonus” and stock awards. When asked about this, Cigna said that “any assertion that our Medical Directors’ compensation (cash or stock) is tied to denials or their handle time for cases is false.”

In that same 2019 email, Day’s boss added, “We want to assist every medical director who wishes to improve his or her efficiency.”

Day shot back, “Some of our newer MDs are quite terrified of the ‘counting,’” she wrote. “All ask — ‘how is quality measured?’”

Soon, Day realized that her boss wasn’t talking in the abstract about improving efficiency; he was talking about her. She learned that managers were going to help her pick up the pace of her reviews.

When bosses reached out, they didn’t discuss whether she was making the right call, only how long it took her to decide, she said.

In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business.

By then, Day said, Cigna had shifted much of the nursing work to the Philippines. She found mistakes in the case files that these nurses sent. In an email to Day, a fellow medical director lamented the amount of time it took to untangle one case and said the reports by “the overseas nurses” were “messes.”

Some of the more astonishing problems that Day spotted have stayed with her. In a case involving a newborn who needed an epilepsy evaluation, Day noticed that a Cigna nurse had listed the mother’s name as the patient, rather than the baby’s. Day fixed that mistake, avoiding what certainly would have been a denial. In another case, a nurse recommended denying payment for an ultrasound of the neck because the treatment wasn’t medically necessary. But the nurse had gotten the body part wrong. It was a hip that was injured, and the imaging was needed. An appeal that landed on Day’s desk involved Cigna’s decision to reject payment for a test because it wasn’t medically necessary for a patient with a sexually transmitted disease. But Day figured out that the patient had toenail fungus, not an STD.

Day said her bosses didn’t want to hear that she was catching errors. By October 2020, Cigna had placed Day on a performance improvement plan that required her to raise her “productivity level” — referring to the score on the dashboard — to at least 70%, which would be a significant jump for her but was slightly below the median for medical directors. The company made the consequences crystal clear: If she failed to successfully complete the plan, she could be terminated.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum asked Cigna how it calculated that score, but the company wouldn’t say. “Transaction volume helps gauge productivity and efficiency — the amount of work done, not the speed at which it is done,” a Cigna spokesperson wrote. The company said this metric measured the time a medical director spent on tasks involving medical judgment versus other work, such as internal meetings or training.

On the early 2022 productivity dashboard, though, a different calculation could explain Day’s score, and this math reflects how fast medical directors reviewed cases. ProPublica and The Capitol Forum multiplied the number of cases Day handled by the time Cigna allotted for each type of case, then divided that total by the hours she worked that month. The resulting percentage equaled her score. Medical directors who spent every available minute of their workdays clearing cases within the time constraints Cigna set would score at least 100%. Indeed, some medical directors had scores greater than 100%, meaning they cleared cases in even less than the allotted time. The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

Day said her bosses told her that the way to boost her score was to review more cases during her normal work hours.

Responding to questions, Cigna said the productivity dashboard was “primarily used to ensure that we have enough medical directors to perform the amount and type of work that needs to be done.” It is not used, the company said, to evaluate the performance of medical directors or track the speed at which individual doctors do their work.

Cigna, however, later said of the dashboard that “in the unusual situation that a medical director is a significant outlier to peers performing similar types of reviews, managers might use this metric as one data point to understand and discuss the variance with the medical director.” It also said Day was placed on a performance improvement plan “to help her meet the most basic standards to support patient care.”

During the time Day spent on the performance improvement plan, she refused to change her approach, which she felt was necessary to make the right call.

In December 2020, she appealed to the human resources department, figuring that colleagues there would see that it was wrong to fire a medical director for taking care to decide critical medical questions.

She was wrong.

“You feel that the time constraints/metrics, which are in place to review these cases are unreasonable, for some cases are very complex consisting of multiple pages to review,” a Cigna human resources employee wrote, summing up Day’s feelings as the matter escalated.

And while Day’s supervisor “appreciates your attention to detail,” the human resources employee wrote, he “also realizes that there are metrics in place that he must hold everyone to.”

When asked about this, Cigna said, “Dr. Day raised questions about her performance improvement plan through appropriate internal ethics channels available to all employees, and there was no wrongdoing found.”

Eventually, the daily stress of being pushed to work faster coupled with the threat of being fired took a toll on Day. Sleepless and fighting depression, Day was at the breaking point.

“I actually sort of had a mental breakdown,” she recalled.

At the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.

On a recorded call with her boss about her lagging productivity score, Day brought the subject back to the quality of the decisions she was making. Her boss made it sound like Day was a broken record.

“We have the same discussion every time we talk,” he said. While saying “nobody’s asking you not to do quality work,” her boss said, “you must know I just have to redirect our discussion.”

But Day continued: “When there is no measurement of quality, then the discussion will continue to have that element to it.”

The supervisor said he heard Day’s concerns “loud and clear” but warned that “at the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.”

The focus on metrics was proof Cigna was losing its way, Day told her boss. When she started working at Cigna 15 years earlier, there was a “commitment to quality and taking care of our customers.” Day said that it was still important to her and other medical directors that “we go home at the end of the day and think we’ve done a good job for Cigna.”

In a response to questions, Cigna said the supervisor, who works in California, was unaware that he was being recorded and that under that state’s laws, it is illegal to record a private phone call without all parties’ consent. Day said that she was in North Carolina during the call and that North Carolina law allows a person on a call to record without getting the consent of others.

Day took a monthslong leave from the job in mid-2021 that allowed her to work part time, and she found a therapist who helped her manage the depression. When she returned, Day said, it was more of the same.

In the late spring of 2022 she decided to retire from Cigna.

Maya Miller contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum, and David Armstrong, ProPublica.

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In late 2020, Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna gave her a stark warning. Work faster, or the company might fire her.

That was a problem for Day because she felt her work was too important to be rushed. She was a medical director for the health insurer, a physician with sweeping power to approve or reject requests to pay for critical care like life-saving drugs or complex surgeries.

She had been working at Cigna for nearly 15 years, reviewing cases that nurses had flagged for denial or were unsure about. At Cigna and other insurers, nurses can greenlight payments, but denials have such serious repercussions for patients that many states require that doctors make the final call. In more recent years, though, Day said that the Cigna nurses’ work was getting sloppy. Patient files that nurses working in the Philippines sent to her, she said, increasingly had errors that could lead to wrongful denials if they were not corrected.

Day was, in her own words, persnickety. If a nurse recommended denying coverage for a cancer patient or a sick baby, she wanted to be certain it was the right thing to do. So Day said she researched guidelines, read medical studies and scrutinized patient medical records to come to the best decision. This took time. She was clearing fewer cases than many of her peers.

Some of her colleagues quickly denied requests to keep pace, she said. All a Cigna doctor had to do was cut and paste the denial language that the nurse had prepared and quickly move on to the next case, Day said. This was so common, she and another former medical director said, that people inside Cigna had a term for these kinds of speedy decisions: “click and close.”

“Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” said Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. “If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”

In a written response to questions, Cigna said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” The company said it was unaware of the use of the term “click and close” and that “such behavior would not be tolerated.”

During Day’s final years at Cigna, the company meticulously tracked the output of its medical directors on a monthly dashboard. Cigna shared this spreadsheet with more than 70 of its doctors, allowing them to compare their tally of cases with those of their peers. Day and two other former medical directors said the dashboard sent a message loud and clear: Cigna valued speed. (ProPublica and The Capitol Forum found these other former Cigna doctors independently; Day did not refer them.) One of Day’s managers in a written performance evaluation called the spreadsheet the “productivity dashboard.”

Measuring the speed and output of employees is common in many industries, from fast food to package delivery, but the use of these kinds of metrics in health care is controversial because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing if a rushed server forgets the fries with your burger. It’s another entirely if the pressure to act fast leads to wrongful denials of payment for vital care. Walgreens in 2022 dropped measurements of its pharmacists’ speed from their performance reviews after some alleged that practice could lead to dangerous mistakes.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum examined Cigna’s productivity dashboards for medical directors from January and February 2022. These spreadsheets tallied the number of cases each medical director handled. Cigna gave each task a “handle time,” which the company said was the average amount of time it took its medical directors to issue a decision.

Day and others said the number was something different: the maximum amount of time they should spend on a case. Insurers often require approval in advance for expensive procedures or medicines, a process known as prior authorization. The early 2022 dashboards listed a handle time of four minutes for a prior authorization. The bulk of drug requests were to be decided in two to five minutes. Hospital discharge decisions were supposed to take four and a half minutes.

“Medical directors would message me and say, ‘We can’t do these cases in four minutes. Not if you want to do a good job,’” Day recalled.

Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers. If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.

As ProPublica and The Capitol Forum reported last year, Cigna built a computer program that allowed its medical directors to deny certain claims in bulk. The insurer’s doctors spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each of those cases. Cigna at the time said the review system was created to speed up approval of claims for certain routine screenings; the company later posted a rebuttal to the story. A congressional committee and the Department of Labor launched inquiries into this Cigna program. A spokesperson for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the congressional committee, said Rodgers continues to monitor the situation after Cigna shared some details about its process. The Labor Department is still examining such practices.

One figure on Cigna’s January and February 2022 dashboards was like a productivity score; the news organizations found that this number reflects the pace at which a medical director clears cases.

Cigna said it was incorrect to call that figure on its dashboard a productivity score and said its “view on productivity is defined by a range of factors beyond elements included in a single spreadsheet.” In addition, the company told the news organizations, “The copy of the dashboard that you have is inaccurate and secondary calculations made using its contents may also be inaccurate.” The news organizations asked what was inaccurate, but the company wouldn’t elaborate.

Nevertheless, Cigna said that because the dashboard created “inadvertent confusion” the company was “reassessing its use.”

Day was afraid to look at the dashboards. Anyone could see that by Cigna’s measures, she was a laggard. In January 2022, only a third of her peers had lower scores, and in February 2022, it was just a quarter.

In a recorded phone call and in emails with supervisors, Day complained that Cigna’s metrics failed to account for the quality of decisions. She said she and others asked higher-ups how often medical director decisions were overturned on appeal but nobody would say.

Day gave Cigna written permission to discuss her employment with ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The company described Day as a “disgruntled former employee” and said her “personal view is not an accurate representation of the work of the many medical directors and clinicians we employ.” Cigna added that prior authorization requests are often time-sensitive and the company’s “mission is to ensure our patients receive the right care as quickly as possible.”

Cigna rejected the assertions that denying cases was an effective way of working faster. “Even if medical directors were incentivized to review more claims — which they are not — it makes no sense to suggest that this incentivizes denials; it would be far quicker to approve all claims,” the company spokesperson wrote. The insurer said that denials take more time because they require a deeper review of clinical data, potentially requesting additional reviews by senior clinical directors, drafting denial letters and possibly phoning the treating physicians.

But another doctor who had worked at Cigna also said that denying a request for payment was far quicker than approving one since the nurses served up language that could be used to justify the denial. That former Cigna medical director said, “Sometimes you just have to accept the nurse and click and close if you had too much work.” (That doctor asked not to be named because they feared repercussions if they commented publicly.)

When Debby Day got her job at Cigna in November 2005, she thought it was a godsend.

She had been working for a health insurance startup in North Carolina. The charismatic founder of the company, Day said, had told her and a handful of principal executives to expect a windfall when the company went public. That never happened, and Day was eventually left with no job and no severance.

When a recruiter mentioned the medical director job at Cigna, it sounded like a perfect fit. The job was based in North Carolina, but Cigna didn’t mind that she was licensed in California, where she did her residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. She was ready to leave the executive track, and the position allowed her to put her medical training to good use without the daily grind of working in a clinic.

The daughter of an ophthalmologist, Day had watched her father perform eye surgery when she was a child, and she found medicine fascinating. When Day started practicing, she learned quickly that while she enjoyed the intellectual challenges of medicine, the hands-on work of seeing patients drained her. As a medical director, she said, “I could really take care of patients without having to talk to them all day long.”

Cigna, like all health insurers, makes patients get approval in advance for certain treatments. Day became one of the people who reviewed these prior authorization requests, deciding what to cover and what to deny. Everyone Day worked with was under one roof in Raleigh, North Carolina. The office buzzed with conversations among colleagues, and she was able to consult with specialists on complex cases.

She never felt pressure to do anything but make the right decision for the patient. At the same time, she said, she didn’t hesitate to reject treatment she thought was improper.

A couple years into her time at Cigna, Day noticed some doctors prescribing a costly treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG, that helps patients with weakened immune systems fight off infections. Only she found they were prescribing it in cases where it didn’t make any medical sense. That wasn’t good for patients or for Cigna. “Some of these guys were pouring it into every patient they could get their hands on and then making hundreds of thousands of dollars billing for it,” she recalled.

At the time, Cigna didn’t have a policy for when IVIG should be used, so Day developed one based on the scientific evidence available at the time. Day said this saved millions of dollars and that Cigna rewarded her with bonuses and stock options.

“In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business,” she said.

As Day neared the end of her first decade at Cigna, the company closed regional offices in favor of a nationwide review system, she said. With medical directors working from home, Day could no longer pop down the hallway to consult with doctors in other specialities.

Cigna had used a productivity dashboard for years, but by 2019, these metrics began playing a more prominent role in the company’s evaluations of medical directors, Day said. Now, making a fast decision seemed more important than making the right decision, she said. In February 2019 emails to her managers, Day openly questioned this system.

Her boss responded: “We all understand that many cases are involved and take more time,” he wrote. “We have tried to account for that additional time in the allotment allowed for certain cases.”

Still, he made it clear that transaction volume — the metric on the dashboard that was similar to a productivity score — was one of the factors “we use to determine merit raises, bonus” and stock awards. When asked about this, Cigna said that “any assertion that our Medical Directors’ compensation (cash or stock) is tied to denials or their handle time for cases is false.”

In that same 2019 email, Day’s boss added, “We want to assist every medical director who wishes to improve his or her efficiency.”

Day shot back, “Some of our newer MDs are quite terrified of the ‘counting,’” she wrote. “All ask — ‘how is quality measured?’”

Soon, Day realized that her boss wasn’t talking in the abstract about improving efficiency; he was talking about her. She learned that managers were going to help her pick up the pace of her reviews.

When bosses reached out, they didn’t discuss whether she was making the right call, only how long it took her to decide, she said.

In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business.

By then, Day said, Cigna had shifted much of the nursing work to the Philippines. She found mistakes in the case files that these nurses sent. In an email to Day, a fellow medical director lamented the amount of time it took to untangle one case and said the reports by “the overseas nurses” were “messes.”

Some of the more astonishing problems that Day spotted have stayed with her. In a case involving a newborn who needed an epilepsy evaluation, Day noticed that a Cigna nurse had listed the mother’s name as the patient, rather than the baby’s. Day fixed that mistake, avoiding what certainly would have been a denial. In another case, a nurse recommended denying payment for an ultrasound of the neck because the treatment wasn’t medically necessary. But the nurse had gotten the body part wrong. It was a hip that was injured, and the imaging was needed. An appeal that landed on Day’s desk involved Cigna’s decision to reject payment for a test because it wasn’t medically necessary for a patient with a sexually transmitted disease. But Day figured out that the patient had toenail fungus, not an STD.

Day said her bosses didn’t want to hear that she was catching errors. By October 2020, Cigna had placed Day on a performance improvement plan that required her to raise her “productivity level” — referring to the score on the dashboard — to at least 70%, which would be a significant jump for her but was slightly below the median for medical directors. The company made the consequences crystal clear: If she failed to successfully complete the plan, she could be terminated.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum asked Cigna how it calculated that score, but the company wouldn’t say. “Transaction volume helps gauge productivity and efficiency — the amount of work done, not the speed at which it is done,” a Cigna spokesperson wrote. The company said this metric measured the time a medical director spent on tasks involving medical judgment versus other work, such as internal meetings or training.

On the early 2022 productivity dashboard, though, a different calculation could explain Day’s score, and this math reflects how fast medical directors reviewed cases. ProPublica and The Capitol Forum multiplied the number of cases Day handled by the time Cigna allotted for each type of case, then divided that total by the hours she worked that month. The resulting percentage equaled her score. Medical directors who spent every available minute of their workdays clearing cases within the time constraints Cigna set would score at least 100%. Indeed, some medical directors had scores greater than 100%, meaning they cleared cases in even less than the allotted time. The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

Day said her bosses told her that the way to boost her score was to review more cases during her normal work hours.

Responding to questions, Cigna said the productivity dashboard was “primarily used to ensure that we have enough medical directors to perform the amount and type of work that needs to be done.” It is not used, the company said, to evaluate the performance of medical directors or track the speed at which individual doctors do their work.

Cigna, however, later said of the dashboard that “in the unusual situation that a medical director is a significant outlier to peers performing similar types of reviews, managers might use this metric as one data point to understand and discuss the variance with the medical director.” It also said Day was placed on a performance improvement plan “to help her meet the most basic standards to support patient care.”

During the time Day spent on the performance improvement plan, she refused to change her approach, which she felt was necessary to make the right call.

In December 2020, she appealed to the human resources department, figuring that colleagues there would see that it was wrong to fire a medical director for taking care to decide critical medical questions.

She was wrong.

“You feel that the time constraints/metrics, which are in place to review these cases are unreasonable, for some cases are very complex consisting of multiple pages to review,” a Cigna human resources employee wrote, summing up Day’s feelings as the matter escalated.

And while Day’s supervisor “appreciates your attention to detail,” the human resources employee wrote, he “also realizes that there are metrics in place that he must hold everyone to.”

When asked about this, Cigna said, “Dr. Day raised questions about her performance improvement plan through appropriate internal ethics channels available to all employees, and there was no wrongdoing found.”

Eventually, the daily stress of being pushed to work faster coupled with the threat of being fired took a toll on Day. Sleepless and fighting depression, Day was at the breaking point.

“I actually sort of had a mental breakdown,” she recalled.

At the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.

On a recorded call with her boss about her lagging productivity score, Day brought the subject back to the quality of the decisions she was making. Her boss made it sound like Day was a broken record.

“We have the same discussion every time we talk,” he said. While saying “nobody’s asking you not to do quality work,” her boss said, “you must know I just have to redirect our discussion.”

But Day continued: “When there is no measurement of quality, then the discussion will continue to have that element to it.”

The supervisor said he heard Day’s concerns “loud and clear” but warned that “at the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.”

The focus on metrics was proof Cigna was losing its way, Day told her boss. When she started working at Cigna 15 years earlier, there was a “commitment to quality and taking care of our customers.” Day said that it was still important to her and other medical directors that “we go home at the end of the day and think we’ve done a good job for Cigna.”

In a response to questions, Cigna said the supervisor, who works in California, was unaware that he was being recorded and that under that state’s laws, it is illegal to record a private phone call without all parties’ consent. Day said that she was in North Carolina during the call and that North Carolina law allows a person on a call to record without getting the consent of others.

Day took a monthslong leave from the job in mid-2021 that allowed her to work part time, and she found a therapist who helped her manage the depression. When she returned, Day said, it was more of the same.

In the late spring of 2022 she decided to retire from Cigna.

Maya Miller contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum, and David Armstrong, ProPublica.

Warning: This article contains graphic images.

Throughout the past five and a half months, Israel has waged a full-spectrum war against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The United States and other Western nations have supplied not only the weapons for this war of annihilation against the Palestinians, but also key political and diplomatic support.

The results of the actions of this coalition of the killing have been devastating. Conservative estimates hold that more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,000 children. More than 8,000 people remain missing, many of them believed to have died in the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks. Famine conditions are now present in large swaths of the Gaza Strip. The fact that the International Court of Justice has found grounds to investigate Israel for plausible acts of genocide in Gaza has not deterred the U.S. and its allies from continuing to facilitate Israel’s war.

The massive scale of human destruction caused by the attacks would pose grave challenges to well-equipped hospitals. In Gaza, however, many health care facilities have been decimated by Israeli attacks or evacuated, while a few remain open but severely limited in the care and services they offer. Israeli forces have repeatedly laid siege to hospital facilities, killing hundreds of medical workers and taking captive scores of others, despite thousands of internally displaced Palestinians sheltering in the health care complexes. This week, Israel again launched raids on Al-Shifa Hospital, reportedly killing more than 140 people.

For months, doctors across Gaza have performed amputations and other high-risk procedures without anesthetics or proper operating rooms. Antibiotics are in short supply and often unavailable. Communicable diseases are spreading, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in makeshift shelters with little access to toilets or basic sanitary supplies. Many new mothers are unable to breastfeed and infant formula shortages are common. Israel has repeatedly blocked or delayed aid shipments of vital medical supplies to Gaza. Basic preventative medical care is nearly nonexistent, and medical experts predict that malnutrition will condemn a new generation of young Palestinians to a life of developmental struggles.

The result of the onslaught against medical facilities is that there is only one fully functional hospital remaining in the territory, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and plastic surgeon, just left Gaza where he spent 10 days at the hospital performing eye surgeries on victims of Israeli attacks. It was his second medical mission to Gaza since the war began last October.

What follows is a transcript of a lightly edited interview with Khan.

Jeremy Scahill: Before we talk about your latest medical mission to Khan Younis in Gaza, I wanted to ask you a bit about your background and your medical practice.

Yasser Khan: Well, I’m from the greater Toronto area here in Canada, and I’ve been in practice for about 20 years. I’m an ophthalmologist, but I specialize in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery.

So that’s my sub-specialty and that’s what I’ve been doing for about 20 years. And I’m a professor. I’ve been to over 45 different countries on a humanitarian basis where I’ve taught surgery, I’ve done surgery, I’ve established programs. And so I’ve been to many types of areas and zones in Africa, Asia, and South America.

JS: And Dr. Khan, tell us about how you ended up going to Gaza for the first time. I think you went on your first mission over the winter period, but talk about how you ended up even getting on an airplane to go into a war zone where the Israelis were raining scorched earth down on the Palestinians of Gaza.

YK: Well, you know, all these things, you never plan for them. You never plan to go to an area like Gaza. And I was on the first North American mission. It was about eight of us that went, seven or eight of us that went, surgeons from both the U.S. and Canada, and you can never plan for these and it was just a random conversation with one of my surgical colleagues, who’s a thoracic surgeon, by a scrub sink. And, you know, we’ve been watching this mass killing or slaughter for the last — at that point in time for about three months — livestreamed for the first time ever, I think. And so I think a lot of us were suffering, and he caught me in my down moments. He goes, “Listen, I’m going to Gaza.” And I said, “What? How? I mean, how are you getting in? Nobody’s going there, right?” He [says] they’ve been trying for six weeks, and finally the WHO [World Health Organization] gave them the green light and so everything’s fine. “You may not be approved. I know it’s probably too late, but let me send your information in. I mean, who knows? I need your passport, your medical degree, and your blood type.” And to be honest, I didn’t even know what my blood type was. I just guessed AB, and at the time I just sent it to him right away. And two days later, miraculously, I was approved. To get into Gaza, first of all, nobody but a health care worker or a physician or a team can get in, and to get in you have to be approved by the WHO, by the Israeli authorities, and the Egyptian authorities. So that’s how I got in first.

JS: Describe that journey of how you then go from Canada to Gaza. What is it like? How do you end up getting into Gaza?

YK: Well, I had one day to book my flight. I booked my flight. I got as many supplies as I could together, and I flew into Cairo. And from Cairo, you meet a U.N. convoy that leaves every Monday and Wednesday, nowadays, at about 5 a.m., and it’s about an eight, nine-hour journey through the Sinai Desert. It’s long because you go through multiple checkpoints. It’s a demilitarized zone and so there’s Egyptian army checkpoints all the way through. And then we get to the Rafah border, which is right now controlled by Egypt and has been forever. And then you go through your immigration and then you get to the Gaza side and that’s controlled by the Palestinians.

JS: What was your first impression on that first trip once you crossed over from Egypt into Palestinian territory, into Gaza?

YK: I got there at about 6:30 p.m. at night and nobody travels at night. In fact, the U.N.’s time limit is 5:00 p.m. because anything moving at night, the Israeli forces attack through drones or other missile attacks. But, you know, the two guys that came to pick me up from the hospital said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Trust God.” And so I still went.

So just to describe to you, my first 20 minutes were when I was driving through at night. We were the only car on the road. And it was dark because there’s no fuel, there’s no electricity, so it’s dark, and the road was empty. And I mean, that was quite scary. I basically made my peace with God, and was ready to go at any point in time. But, I’ve never been more happy to see the emergency sign at a hospital, and that’s [when] I knew I’d arrived. The first thing I noticed at the time — this was in Khan Younis — Nasser Hospital and European Gaza Hospital were the only hospitals left in the Gaza Strip, fully functioning hospitals at that point in time.

Khan Younis was still a city, an intact city, but there’s battles going on. So when I exited the car, I could hear the 24-hour buzzing of drones, and it was quite loud, 24 hours, it never went away. I never saw the drones myself because they’re high up, but it’s Israeli drones: There’s either spy drones or there’s a quadcopter, which is the weaponized drone that can fire missiles and gunfire. And so they’re humming around. The other thing that I heard was bombs. And like a “boom” of bombs, basically every hour, every two or three hours; there was like bombs that would shake everything up. So that’s the first images I had.

But the other images I had was like a mass refugee camp. So basically at that point in time, two months ago, about 20,000 people had sought refuge both in the hospital and outside the hospital. And these weren’t tents. They’re still not tents. They’re makeshift shelters with bed sheets or plastic bag sheets. The ones outside sleep on the floor. They’re lucky [if] they get a carpet or a mat. There was one bathroom at the time for about 200 people that they have to share. And inside, the hallways of the hospital were also made into shelters. There was hardly any room to walk, and there’s children running around everywhere. It’s important to remember all these people were not homeless. They all had homes that were destroyed. They’re all displaced people that took shelter in the hospital.

“What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine.”

So that’s the kind of mass chaos that I encountered initially, and then I was told that every time there’s a bomb, give it about 15 minutes and the mass casualties come. That was the other thing that at the time shocked me: What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine. I saw scenes that were horrific that I’d never witnessed before and I never want to see again. You have a mother walking in holding her 8, 9-year-old, skinny — because they’re all starving — boy who’s dead, he’s cold and dead and [the mother is] screaming, asking for someone to check his pulse and everybody’s busy in the mass chaos. So that was kind of my initial welcoming scene when I entered Khan Younis the first time.

JS: You’ve just come out now from your second medical mission. You were in Gaza for 10 days. Describe the scenes that you witnessed this time in Gaza, but also specifically in the hospital.

YK: Well, I must admit the first time I went there it was partially getting used to what’s going on, seeing the mass casualties, seeing the hospital, meeting the doctors and the nurses and health care workers, getting familiarized with the surroundings, and also doing the operations. This time, I was over all that introduction.

It was quite demoralizing. You’ve gotta be on the ground to see how bad it is. In two months, things were not only the same in a bad way, but they’re much, much worse because now, two months later, Khan Younis has literally been destroyed as a city. It was an active, hustling, bustling city. The Nasser Hospital, as you know, it’s destroyed now. It’s basically a death zone. And there’s decomposing bodies in the hospital now. It’s been evacuated. And I will add one thing: As a health care worker, I know fully well that to build a major, fully functioning hospital takes years to perfect and build and process, right? So it’s a sheer tragedy that it’s destroyed in mere hours, so it’s really unfortunate.

So now [at European Gaza Hospital] instead of 20,000 people, there’s about 35,000 people seeking shelter in a hospital that’s already beyond capacity. And so now, both outside and inside, there’s a mass of people. There’s no place to move now in the hallways. The sterility of the hospital has significantly decreased. The European Gaza Hospital, all you have to do is go online and look at their pictures before. It was a beautiful, gorgeous hospital. Well-built, well-run, good quality control — and now it’s reduced to a place that is a mess. It’s a mess. There’s people cooking inside the hospital hallways, there’s the bathrooms, there’s people mixed in with the people who are sick, with major orthopedic injuries, post op. There’s no beds. So sometimes people go and just sleep in their little makeshift shelters. And so infection is, if you can imagine, infection is rampant. So if you don’t die the first time or if your leg or arm is not amputated the first time, it is for sure with infection. So then they have to amputate it to save your life. So it’s much, much worse.

“They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.”

The other thing I noticed was now, more so than even before, the health care workers and nurses and the doctors, they’re just burnt out. I mean, they’re just spent. They’ve witnessed so much in almost six months now. They’ve seen so much on a regular, hourly, daily basis. When I operate [at a hospital in Canada], typically speaking, I’ve got a few mostly elective lists, elective kind of not urgent problems that you gotta fix. And then there’s some trauma, or something that comes in that’s a bit more urgent once in a while, right? That’s my usual list. But [Palestinian medical workers], they are working on a daily basis on the most horrific, explosive trauma that you’ve ever seen. They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.

The thing I try to emphasize to people is that it’s not only the actual medical trauma, it’s the other trauma associated with it in that these patients come in, if you’ve been involved in an explosive injury, and you come in injured, guaranteed you’ve lost loved ones. Guaranteed. So you’ve either lost a father, a mother, a child, all your children, all your family, your uncle, aunt, grandparents, your house, whatever. You’ve lost something. So every patient that comes in, not only is severely injured, is dealing with this trauma.

I had one girl who basically lost all her siblings, 8-year-old beautiful girl, lost her siblings. She came in for a leg fracture, was under the rubble for 12 hours. And her mother died, all her siblings gone. And all her family [were] gone, her aunts and uncles. As you know, it’s a generational killing, like slaughter. Generations. There’s about 2,000 families that have been erased now completely, are gone. Nonexistent. So it’s generational trauma or death or slaughter, and so her father was out burying his wife and his killed children while she was by herself getting her leg fracture repaired. And while she was under there for 12 hours, this 8-year-old girl, next to her was her grandmother and her aunt, dead, lying next to her for 12 hours.

I saw this one guy who had his face split open, and he was under the bubble for eight days. I don’t know how he survived, and they were able to get him out. He lost both his eyes, but they were able to put his face back together again, and he survived. So, they’re dealing with this, all this.

So two months ago it was bad, and two months later, it’s even worse. I could see, actually feel the burnout [among Palestinian medical workers], but they’re superhuman. They keep on going when the rest of us will lose our crap, the rest of us lose it. But they keep on going because it’s their steadfastness and it’s their faith. And they still consider their mere survival as their resistance. You know, they will survive the Israeli bombing no matter what because that’s their form of resistance. No matter what they tried, no matter how much they try to kill them, basically is their attitude.

JS: Dr. Khan, as I’m listening to you, I’m also recalling over these past five-plus months all of the episodes where Israeli forces have attacked or laid siege to hospitals and other medical facilities in Gaza. And I’m specifically thinking of the medical staff at Nasser Hospital, which was raided on February 15 by Israeli forces, and scores of medical personnel were snatched, taken prisoner by the Israelis. And the BBC recently did an exposé documenting what I think can clearly be called the torture of these medical workers, including holding them for prolonged periods in stress positions, dousing them with cold water, using muzzled dogs to menace them, blindfolding them, and leaving them in isolation.

And I’m thinking of the testimony you’re offering about the steadfastness of the doctors and then imagining after months and months of just amputating limbs from children, sometimes without any anesthesia, then having this occupation force come in; snatch doctors, nurses, other medical workers; and then subject them to torture under interrogation aimed at getting them to confess that somehow Hamas is using their hospital as a Pentagon, basically, to plot attacks against the Israeli occupation forces. What kinds of stories did you hear from Palestinian colleagues about these types of raids and actions by the Israelis against medical facilities, doctors, nurses, et cetera?

YK: This has been a systematic, intentional attack on the health care system. The bizarre thing of all of this is that the Israeli politicians have not hidden it. They have said open statements about creating epidemics. There’s been tons of open statements about what they intend to do. So you can’t even make this stuff up. It’s bizarre how they have openly said this, right? But having said that, I think over 450 health care workers have been killed — doctors, nurses, paramedics, over 450 — when they’re not supposed to be a target, right? They’re protected by international law. Doctors have been kidnapped, specific doctors who are of unique specialties have been targeted and killed.

Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen. A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon. That’s it, just a medical professional. The assistant director of the hospital was basically declothed and beat up in front of all the other hospital workers just to kind of insult and degrade him because he’s their boss. And they’re beating him up and kicking him and swearing at him, and everybody witnessed this, and they did it purposely in front of his workers. So, it’s a further dehumanization of a human being. These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore. For me, as a surgeon, it’s really heartbreaking for me to see that. As a surgeon, we have people’s lives in our hands and we heal. And then to see them mentally reduced to nothing is hard to take. Yeah. It’s hard to stomach.

JS: I wanted to ask you about an op-ed that a colleague of yours wrote. It was an American doctor, Irfan Galaria, who penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on February 16 after returning from Gaza, and I believe that doctor was at the European Gaza Hospital and described a scene and I’ll just read from their experience at the hospital:

“I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”

This should be shocking to the soul of everyone who hears those words from an American doctor describing children between the ages of 5 to 8, arriving in that emergency room with, according to the doctor, single sniper shots to the head. Talk about the kinds of injuries or fatalities that you witnessed during your time there.

YK: Yeah. I know Irfan, and he’s a really good guy and he saw a lot there and I spoke to him when he got back. I myself did not see, when I was there, what he described. But definitely the doctor spoke about it for sure, and it was well known that that indeed was happening on the ground. We hear reports from the West Bank as well, where 12-year-olds or 13-year-olds are shot for nothing really, for no reason at all, just for the sake of being shot. So, it’s not something which is far-fetched, and it is going on.

What I saw — I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere. It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value. So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual.

Dr. Khan performed surgeries to remove eyes of multiple children wounded in Israeli strikes, calling the injuries “the Gaza shrapnel face.”

Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out. So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes. And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.

And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. And the thing is that the emergency does not have room, so they’re all over the floor. So you have these massive trauma, and [the patients] are on the floor. And sometimes they get forgotten in the mass chaos.

There was a 2-year-old baby who came in from a fresh bombing. He lost his aunt and his sibling, and his mother was in the OR being amputated. And she was actually a U.N. worker, by the way, a Palestinian U.N. worker. So he was just forgotten on the floor somewhere with major, major head trauma. Fortunately, after about two hours, they found him. And, because he had no — I mean, his mother wasn’t there, his father wasn’t there, there’s no family there — and fortunately, they found him. And they took him up to neurosurgery, but I don’t know what happened to him because that was on my last day that I was leaving. So I remember that very well. So it was just injuries that you have never seen before and the degree to it was amazing.

UNICEF said in December — and this was a low number — that there was over 1,000 children that had either double amputation or single amputation. This is only in December. It’s a very conservative estimate. Some people have said about 5,000 children. This is in January. So if you look at two months later, it must be 7,000, 8,000 now, either double amputees or single amputee, like arm, leg, both legs, both arms, mostly children. The thing is that in any normal amputation, in a normal circumstance, a child who gets amputated goes through about eight or nine operations until they’re adults, to revise the stump and fix the stump. Who is going to do that now? Not only have they lost their supports, their entire family structure, they don’t have the family structure or the infrastructure to do that because it’s all been destroyed.

JS: Were you just in one hospital, or did you go to multiple hospitals?

YK: No, so I stayed in European. The first time I was going to go to Nasser, but it got too dangerous and I think the fear was that the Israelis would just close off the road and then I’d be stuck in Nasser Hospital, so I didn’t go, but I went to European. And now there’s only one hospital, really, left, which is the European Hospital. One fully functional hospital exactly. They have these clinics across the city — I mean, they call them hospitals sometimes, like the Indonesian field hospital, things like that, but they really aren’t fully functioning hospitals. They’re clinics that have one or two services that kind of are more than just a clinic, but they’re mostly just clinics. So there’s really only one fully functioning hospital now, which is the European hospital, and therefore the impending invasion of Rafah is quite worrisome for me.

JS: At the European Hospital, are there sufficient supplies to manage the influx of patients? You’re describing an apocalyptic scene, particularly with these amputations among children. Are there adequate supplies to handle the demand in that hospital where you were?

YK: Definitely two months ago there weren’t. On my last day when I was leaving, they ran out of morphine, and morphine is needed in a lot of orthopedic and major trauma. You need morphine for pain control. So they ran out of morphine, and they ran out of a lot of the antibiotics as well, about two months ago. Now, two months later, supplies have come in. So they do have supplies that are running out pretty fast and they do run out. So, they’re coming in, but their equipment is rusted, new equipment is harder to come in, because anything that’s dual purpose, for example, the Israelis stop from coming.

So a lot of medical equipment is not coming in, unfortunately, and as a result a lot of equipment is rusted and it’s old, and it needs to be replaced, but these Palestinian doctors are very innovative and they’re geniuses, all of them are. What they’re going through, what they’ve done is amazing. I mean, hats off to them for sure. But yeah, it’s a mess. I mean, even the ORs are a mess. They’re a disorganized mess. People are frustrated. There’s a lot of frustrations, and I don’t blame them.

JS: Talk about the conversations you were having with Palestinian colleagues. You described a bit of this, but you are coming from Canada. You had colleagues that also came from the United States, and you’re going for these 10-day periods or so. I know there are some doctors that have stayed longer, but relatively short periods of time. And we all have to remember the Palestinian doctors and nurses and medical workers that are there, they’re simultaneously doing their job and many of them have lost their families, their spouses, their children, their grandchildren. This is their reality. They don’t leave. And I’m wondering as a medical professional from Canada, what that’s like to talk then to your Palestinian colleagues and what impression it has left on your heart?

YK: It’s left a huge impression, Jeremy, especially this time. This time I felt the emotional burden more than I did the last time. But, you know, I’ll tell you one thing. I know we talk about the death and the disease and all that, but one thing that we also need to more talk about — and this relates to how they’re doing is the death of their culture and their civilization, which is a genocide or plausible — that’s part of the definition of a genocide, is it not? Every single playground, hangout place, café, restaurant, 500-year-old ancient mosque, 500-year-old ancient church, destroyed. There’s schools destroyed, there’s stadiums, sports facilities destroyed, their hospitals destroyed, their cinemas destroyed, museums destroyed, archives, where they kept their archives, erased, destroyed, burnt, their homes, 80 percent of homes, are all gone now. And even though the homes are empty, they do not need to be destroyed. They’ve been TikToked on for the whole world to see. The Israeli forces have TikToked this and have shown destruction of these homes, of these beautiful people, and then dedicated destruction to their spouses or their children or whatever.

We’ve seen all this. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all out there that we’ve seen. So they’ve witnessed all this. What the Israeli forces have also done is that once they’ve come in, they’ve depaved the roads. Even in Khan Younis, many of the roads have been depaved. So there’s no roads left. So they’ve seen a complete destruction of their culture and their civilization and their lives, a complete erasure of their culture. And so that by itself is a tremendous tragedy. If we all look at ourselves and see if that happens to us, how would we feel?

So in the backdrop, despite that, they remain hopeful. They really do. There are some that have lost hope and want to get out. There’s a lot of patients that come in, and they may have like a dry eye, and they want a referral to be referred out, like a medical referral, because that’s one way to get out. But first of all, even people with serious medical conditions are not getting out so easily, but they’re all trying to leave just to save their lives, but they all say that they want to leave and come back. They all want to come back, right? Because there’s something magical about the land. Palestinians have been there for thousands and thousands of years, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians. They have a very strong connection to their land, and they don’t want to leave. They’d rather die than leave, but at this point in time, they want to leave, be safe. So that’s their philosophy. In the end, I think what holds them together is their faith. They have faith in God. They have faith in justice. God’s justice. They have no faith in humanity’s justice at all. And I don’t blame them. We have really abandoned them. Not us, as in the average person who’s been protesting and advocating for them. But at an elitist or governmental level. They’re encouraged and touched by everybody in the world who has fought for them and advocated for them. They know this, and they are touched by this. But at the other hand, they don’t know what to do. There’s no certainty. So they don’t know how to plan for the future because they don’t know whether there’ll be a Rafah invasion.

“Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence.”

I was on the ground, I toured the refugee camps, I went around Rafah, I saw, and if there’s an Israeli invasion, I can’t emphasize enough how catastrophic it’s going to be. It’ll be mass killing, mass destruction, because all these figures come in, 50 dead, 100 wounded. But what people don’t realize is, being wounded is a death sentence. Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence. And the wounded often will lose everybody, like all family members, so they have no supports, especially children, have nobody left to take care of them, not even aunts and uncles. It will be catastrophic. I don’t know what to say to the world to stop an impending invasion. You’ve got to rein this prime minister of Israel in. You got to do something to stop this stupid invasion that he still wants to do, because it’ll be catastrophic.

JS: I was just thinking back to your description of having to remove eyes from children or adults who’ve been hit with shrapnel. I think any of us who’ve ever had an operation or surgery, or we’ve helped a loved one that went into surgery, knows that the path to recovery is often a long one where you have to have physical therapy, you have to come to terms with a body part that you’ve lost and are going to have to live your life without. What’s your understanding of what happens to the patients you operated on who now are entering a reality where they no longer can see? They don’t have eyes, or children that no longer have a leg. What happens to those people after the acute situation is dealt with, that the surgery happens, the amputation happens, the eyes are removed?

YK: Well, Jeremy, that’s what keeps me up at night, and that’s what bears on me a lot. The overall simple answer is, I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is because they’re living in tents and structures. Many of them have lost their family and support, especially children have lost their family and support. Even adults.

I had one young man, about 25 years old, he lost one eye that I took out myself. He spent about five, six, or seven years, basically spent thousands and thousands of dollars in IVF treatment because he got married young and they wanted to have a child and they couldn’t have one. So he spent years on IVF treatment and finally had a baby that was 3 months old. And there was a missile attack by Israel at his home. He lost his entire family, including his baby and his wife and his parents and family. He’s by himself, single guy. I took his one eye out, and he has nobody in this world. He just kind of walks around the tent structures, just kind of walking around with no home and trying to sleep wherever he can.

There’s tons of children like this as well. So what happens to them? I don’t know. What’s going to happen to the double amputee child who has no home, no parents and no uncles and aunts or grandparents left, no siblings left either? What’s going to happen to them? Then there’s some kids who have an older sibling that’s 11 years old and they’re like 5 years old. I saw one girl who lost an arm and the only living relative she has is an 11- or 12-year old sibling who’s taking care of her. So I don’t know what’s going to happen because in the current infrastructure, there is no infrastructure, there is no care for these stumps. Many of them are getting infected, these stumps are, after they’ve been amputated — and where are they discharged to? Usually when they’re discharged, because the hospital is trying to discharge them to make room for more people to come in, they’re discharged out to the shelters or tents. That’s where they’re discharged. It’s not like they’re discharged home where there’s proper care.

I will emphasize this, Jeremy, that Palestinians were in an open-air concentration camp for decades. This is not new. It was a struggle, but they were still able to make their life. And because they couldn’t go anywhere, because they’re restricted by Israel and by Egypt on the other side, they couldn’t go anywhere, they put everything into their homes. So their homes were their castles, were their life, were their center of their life and their universe, and they really took a lot of care and attention to their homes. And so now all these people who are homeless, their homes are gone. So, it’s a tremendous effect, and they’re living in tents, and I can only imagine what they must go through. Only a year ago, life was normal so to speak, even though you’re in a concentration camp, but life was still normal. It was their normal, right? And they’re living and they make the best of things. They’re very grateful and gracious people, and steadfast people, and they make the best of every scenario, and they did make the best of even being in a concentration camp. They made the best of it. But now it’s heartbreaking.

JS: I’m thinking of this too, and like anyone who’s a parent, imagine that terror when you lose your kid, you’re at a theme park or you’re out somewhere. And all of a sudden, you can’t see your child and all the thoughts that go through your head and then imagine your child alone in the world, completely alone. And, by the way, they’ve lost their sight. Or they’re a double amputee. I haven’t been to Gaza and seen what you’ve seen, but I have these thoughts all the time, and I think everyone who really has internalized this as a human catastrophe that was preventable, that didn’t need to happen, you think about those children and what does it mean to be alone in this world as a child? But then on top of it, to be alone in this world and it’s hell on earth. It’s bombs. It’s everyone trying to survive. It’s starvation. It’s famine. It’s people fighting over the morsels of food that get dropped from the sky along with the bombs. And as I listen to you, it just punctuates how unconscionable this is to the core of humanity, how unconscionable it is. What is your message to the world right now?

YK: Well, Gaza is basically a man-made hell on earth right now, is what it is, and I think that it’s never too late. If the Israeli invasion of Rafah occurs, it’ll be catastrophic. We have to do all that we can to stop that from happening, put all the pressure we can on our politicians, on the powers that be, to stop this from happening because the health care and the human toll will be unimaginable. The fact is that it’s been 75 years of occupation. In the end, out of all of this death and destruction that’s happened, they need to have their independence, and they need to have their independent state so that they can live their lives with dignity and freedom.

And I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve been to 45 different countries, and Palestinians are among the best people that I’ve ever met in my entire life. They’re the most generous, gracious, kind-hearted, intelligent, and wise people that I’ve ever met. And so they’re worth fighting for. I think it’s an issue of humanity. I will side on the side of humanity anytime. And they are worth fighting for. So I want us all to continue the fight and continue advocating for them until this war stops and they are free.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jeremy Scahill.

As Israel continues its relentless assault on Gaza, causing mass famine, injury and death, we get an update on the malnutrition and mental health crises in Gaza from Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, a pulmonary and critical care doctor and the medical director of the humanitarian aid group MedGlobal. She is recently back from a two-week volunteer trip to Gaza, where she says these crises are growing so rapidly “that even if aid was increased tomorrow, we would still be in a severe situation where the amount of food would not be enough in the immediate term.” It is a “horrific experience for all involved,” she concludes.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Iranian government "bears responsibility" for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.

The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police."

It said the mission found the "physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death.... On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”

Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran's so-called "morality police" for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.

Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.

The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law."

"Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.

The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of "crimes against humanity."

“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.

“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.

The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.

“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.

Amini's death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran's clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.

The UN report said "violations and crimes" under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include "extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.

“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity," the report said.

The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.

The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council's mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini's death.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

We speak with an American doctor just back from Gaza about the “unimaginable scale” of its humanitarian crisis. Irfan Galaria, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, recently wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times describing Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilians as “annihilation.” Dr. Galaria, who has worked in conflict zones around the world, says he and his team witnessed “a collateral humanitarian crisis of an unimaginable scale,” involving the “deliberate attempt” to both target civilians with military assault and to deprive them of aid. “I thought I was going to be prepared, but I was not prepared for what I saw,” he says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israeli troops stormed Nasser Hospital, the largest hospital in southern Gaza, on Thursday after days of besieging the complex, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have been taking shelter among hundreds of wounded. Israeli forces reportedly demolished the southern wall of the hospital before storming inside. Troops also targeted ambulances, tents of the displaced, and bulldozed mass graves inside the hospital. The assault came hours after Israeli forces bombed a wing of the hospital, killing one patient and wounding several others. Democracy Now! reached Dr. Khaled Alserr, one of the last remaining surgeons inside Nasser Hospital, shortly before the Israeli raid as he described desperate conditions inside. “The situation here is getting worse every time and every minute,” Alserr said, describing sniper, drone and tank attacks on the hospital.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Israel continues to threaten to invade Rafah, where over a million Palestinians have sought refuge, we speak to a surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. “What I saw in Khan Younis were the most horrific scenes in my entire life,” says Canadian ophthalmologist Dr. Yasser Khan. He describes the dire conditions of injured civilians in Gaza, the majority of whom are children. “The genocidal intent of Israeli politicians, the Israeli army, is really clear. What is really bizarre is that they haven’t hid it,” says Khan. “The killing machine that Israel has unleashed on the healthcare system, I think, is unprecedented. … If the bombings are not going to get you, then disease will surely get you.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We speak with Dr. Tariq Haddad, a Palestinian American leader who refused to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week in protest of the Biden administration’s ongoing support of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Instead, the doctor wrote a 12-page letter to Blinken admonishing the latter for his role in the deaths of nearly 100 of his family members. “I wanted him to see me and see Palestinians as human beings, not as some part of a political game,” says Haddad. He shares stories of some of his lost loved ones and condemns U.S. political and military partnership with Israel. “I just kept looking for evidence that our government actually cares about the lives of my family, and I saw none.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We get an update on conditions in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis area, where displaced Palestinians who fled there to seek refuge are reporting heavy aerial and tank fire as Israel intensifies its ground offensive around two main hospitals there. Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an emergency room physician who spent three weeks volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. “I thought, 'This can't be real.’ This is not something that I would expect in 2024,” says Ahmad, who worked alongside doctors who have been volunteering without pay for months as waves of Gazans, including their own families, seek help and safety at the remaining hospitals. “They assume that the hospital can be a sanctuary, and time and time again that has been proven incorrect in Gaza.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

CHISINAU -- Moldova has paused a recruitment effort to funnel construction workers to Israel, alleging that Israelis have put Moldovans in "high-risk conflict zones," withheld passports, and committed other abuses while plugging gaps in their workforce brought on by the current war in the Gaza Strip.

The Labor Ministry confirmed to RFE/RL's Moldovan Service this week that Chisinau had "temporarily postponed" the latest round of recruitment under the bilateral agreement following the accusations by Moldovan citizens, but said it could resume once Israel confirmed the practices were stopped and "security and respect" for Moldovan nationals were ensured.

Israel has faced an acute labor squeeze since hundreds of thousands of reservists and other Israelis were called up to fight and thousands of Palestinians were denied access to jobs in Israel after gunmen from the EU- and U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas carried out a massive cross-border attack that killed just over 1,100 people, most of them Israeli civilians, on October 7.

"As a result of the deterioration of the security situation in the state of Israel, workers from the Republic of Moldova were employed to work in high-risk conflict zones, some citizens had their passports withheld by employers, complaints were registered about the confiscation of workers' luggage, as well as Israeli authorities carried out activities of direct recruitment of Moldovan workers, on the territory of the Republic of Moldova, which is contrary to the provisions of the agreement," the ministry said in a January 17 response to an RFE/RL access-to-information request.

The ministry did not accuse the Israeli state of perpetrating the abuses. It said Moldovan officials have reported the "violations" to Israel and asked it to put a stop to them and "ensure the security and respect of the rights of workers coming from the Republic of Moldova," one of Europe's poorest countries with a population of some 3.4 million.

The Moldovan Embassy in Tel Aviv said some 13,000 Moldovans were in Israel before the current war broke out. Many work at construction sites or provide care for the elderly, inside or outside the auspices of the recruitment agreement.

Israeli authorities did not immediately respond to RFE/RL's request for comment on the Labor Ministry's accusations.

Since the war erupted in early October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has sought to extend worker visas and attract more foreign labor from around the world, including by raising its quota on foreign construction workers by roughly half, to 65,000 individuals.

It appealed publicly for 1,200 new Moldovan workers for the construction sector, including blacksmiths, painters, and carpenters.

Speaking in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, the director of the Foreign Workers Administration, Inbal Mashash, named Moldova, along with Thailand and Sri Lanka, as countries where Israeli hopes were highest for more guest workers.

The bilateral Moldovan-Israeli agreement on temporary employment in "certain sectors" including construction in Israel was signed in 2012 and has been amended on multiple occasions, including in December.

In addition to setting up training and procedures to regulate and steer labor flows, it imposes restrictions that include a ban on Israeli companies recruiting on Moldovan territory.

In its decade-long existence, some 17,000 Moldovans have worked in Israel under the auspices of the agreement through 28 rounds of recruitment. At the last available official count, in 2022, there were about 4,000 participating Moldovans.

"The [29th] recruitment round will resume once the above-mentioned irregularities are eliminated and we receive confirmation from the Israeli side of the necessary measures being taken to ensure security and respect for the rights of employed [Moldovan] citizens on the territory of the state of Israel," the Moldovan Labor Ministry said.

From the early days of the current war, Moldovans have spoken out about family concerns and the pressures to pack up and leave Israel, but most appear to have stayed.

As rumors spread of pressure on Moldovan construction workers to stay in Israel after a January 5 pause announcement, Labor Minister Alexei Buzu confirmed there were problems but focused on the accusation that Israeli firms were improperly recruiting Moldovans outside the program or for repeat stints.

A failure to comply with some provisions brings "a risk that other commitments will be ignored [or] will not be delivered at the time or according to the expectations described in the agreement," he said.

Buzu stopped short of leveling some of the most serious accusations involving Moldovan workers being sent to work in 'high-risk conflict zones" or having their passports or belongings taken from them.

Reuters has reported that the worker shortage is costing Israel's construction sector around $37 million per day.

Moldova's National Employment Agency (ANOFM) is responsible for implementing the Israeli-Moldovan recruitment agreement. The Labor Ministry said the agency had already lined up construction recruits and scheduled professional exams for the end of December before the postponement.

The ministry said a similar agreement on the home-caregiver sector between Moldova and Israel -- the subject of negotiations in December -- had “not yet been signed."

The Hamas-led surprise attack on October 7 sparked a massive response from Israel including devastating aerial bombardments and a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, which was home to 2.3 million Palestinians before the latest fighting displaced most of them.

The Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza say 24,700 people have been killed in the subsequent fighting and 62,000 more injured.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Pouring out of this small HRG office – with only ten to twelve staff – were petitions to the FDA, lawsuits, reports, books, monthly newsletters, and Congressional testimonies. Sid’s medical school lectures and presentations at conferences, which informed generations of medical professionals and consumers, were all based on consistent scientific accuracy and motivated by an incorruptible moral compass.

His moral compass – directed toward advancing health and safety – provided the “emotional intelligence” that infused a sense of daily urgency to HRG’s mass of evidence.

Sid developed several distinct but related roles to becoming what I call the Doctors’ Doctor. He mobilized public opinion and recruited allies to stress the prevention of death, injury, and disease as the highest calling of the medical profession. Prevention is not profitable compared to the fees generated for diagnosis and treatment. That is why he refused to let market determinants become an excuse for physicians and hospitals to escape ethical norms.

Prevention for Sid meant forcing the FDA to take off the market over two dozen dangerous or ineffective drugs, in addition to several harmful medical devices. Prevention meant watchdogging the FDA to enforce drug safety and efficacy laws and stop the “pay or die” drug companies from continuing to sell fatality-producing drugs like Pfizer’s Vioxx. It took thousands of fatalities and many tort lawsuits before that killer was banned. Always alert, Sid early on blew the whistle on the Opioid company’s aggressive and deceptive advertising inducing fatal overdoses to many tens of thousands of Americans annually.

The second pathway that Sid plowed deeply was accountability for the drug companies and the medical societies, starting with the American Medical Association (AMA), the State Departments of Public Health, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and, of course, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To say he and HRG were watchdogs is to understate. They were guard dogs and don’t think the regulators and bureaucrats in these organizations weren’t looking over their shoulders in making decisions wondering if and when HRG would pounce.

The third focus of Sid’s work was to petition for effective regulation, such as banning dangerous drugs, or demanding more information from the regulated industries to be made public, or insisting on warning labels such as those on aspirin bottles regarding a potentially fatal condition if young children are given this pain-relief medicine for flu or chickenpox. Result – physicians did their job and child fatalities plummeted.

An FDA official, Robert Young, told the Washington Post in 1985: “When [Health Research Group] files a petition, it’s looked at very carefully.”

Sid Wolfe was a master communicator which helped him get network news coverage often and draw large ratings for his many presentations on the Phil Donahue Show with its ten million viewers. He was the “go-to” person for reporters covering major revelations of corporate greed and conflicts of interest in the medical industrial complex.

He was a fierce advocate of single-payer or full Medicare for all, without the present loopholes and corporatist takeovers, such as Medicare (Dis)advantage. It was fun watching Sid debate and demolish so precisely corporate spokespeople bold enough to take him on.

In his best, deliberately inexpensive, best-selling book “Worst Pills, Best Pills: A Consumer’s Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness,” Sid reached millions of people with specific, usable information about many of the prescription and over-the-counter drugs. People can look up drugs they are prescribed or taking by brand and generic names. The drugs are labeled “Do Not Use,” “Do Not Use Until Five Years After Release,” “Last Choice Drug,” and “Limited Use.”

Each time a new edition of the book was published, Phil Donahue would invite Sid to be a guest. The studio and broadcast audiences were intently focused on Phil’s questions and Sid’s advice because the information presented was so personally important. The medicines were all approved by the FDA but some had bad side effects, such as gastrointestinal bleeding or dizziness, while others for the same ailment would not. Thus, the title “Worst Pills, Best Pills.” Sid and HRG also developed an updated database for such medicines so that subscribers (only $15 a year, go to worstpills.org) could access 24/7 this possibly critical knowledge. That is just one of Sid’s many enduring legacies!

Sid had another side to him known mostly only to some thousands of people. Whether known or not known, they or their relatives would call Sid, when injured or sick, for preliminary advice or referral to a competent internist or specialist. All free of course. Sprain your ankle? “Call Sid.” A respiratory ailment getting worse? “Call Sid.” He would be careful not to cross the line beyond what he was told and what he could suggest. Beyond that, you could be assured that any referral by Sid would be to someone reliably skilled and attentive.

Sid also demonstrated that public health advocacy could take from 50 to 60 hours a week but still allow for a balanced life. He was the father of four daughters, took annual vacations with his wife Suzanne, participated in a local book club, and played the piano beautifully. Mozart was his hero. As winner of the MacArthur “genius” award, he enjoyed the annual meetings with the other MacArthur awardees.

He counted close allies as part of his family for whom he would cook dinners. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, spoke for many when he described Sid as a “towering public health leader…and a great friend.”

If meaning in Life is to be found in widening the space for justice between the horror of it all and the trivia of it all, Dr. Sidney Wolfe showed how that could be achieved. Now he belongs to the ages.

The post Sidney Wolfe: The Doctors’ Doctor for Prevention and Accountability appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Columbia University professor Andrew J. Nathan, who had Gao’s legal power of attorney and managed some of her affairs, confirmed her death on Dec. 10 to the Associated Press.

In recent decades, official accounts of China's AIDS epidemic have typically blamed sex between men as the biggest driver of transmission of the virus.

But Gao repeatedly and consistently spoke out about the large numbers of people who were getting infected through blood transfusions and donor schemes, and was targeted for harassment – including a prolonged period under house arrest.

In rural Henan in the 1990s, donors were just as much at risk as hospital patients, as blood-selling clinics in poverty-stricken rural areas would inject them with untreated plasma after each paid-for donation, leaving entire villages with the disease, along with a growing number of AIDS orphans.

Residents of Henan's infamous "AIDS villages" said Gao would be remembered as a staunch advocate for their cause, which also sparked public demonstrations and campaigns for compensation. 

"I just learned that Dr. Gao Yaojie passed away in the United States," a person with AIDS from Henan's Wenlou village who gave only the surname Liu for fear of reprisals told Radio Free Asia.

"She did so much for people living with HIV in Henan," she said. "Everyone is so sad that she passed away."

Under house arrest

Gao refused to remain silent after the ruling Communist Party claimed to have cracked down on blood-selling, shuttering all government-run clinics that engaged in the practice, saying that it had merely been forced underground.

She was placed under house arrest and cut off from all communication with the outside world. She said at the time: "Living was worse than death for me because I was under so much pressure."

Another AIDS patient who gave only the surname Xie said Gao was a hero to people in Henan's AIDS villages, because her outspokenness eventually paid off – at least in some ways.

"When she was in Henan, she fought for us to get treatment, despite pressure from the government, and they finally agreed to provide free treatment for people infected with HIV," Xie said. "That was all Dr. Gao's doing."

A friend of Gao who gave only the surname Chang for fear of reprisals said Gao had forced the Henan authorities to change their approach to rampant HIV infection in the province.

"She cared so much about people living with HIV, and she really persevered," Chang said. "She cared about their rights and interests, and how they were being infringed, especially in public health. She was under a lot of pressure [for that from the authorities]."

‘The nation’s conscience’

In later life, Gao focused on helping and highlighting the plight of the AIDS orphans, healthy children whose parents had both died of AIDS contracted through blood-selling.

An activist who declined to be named said Gao had played a very important role in suppressing the AIDS epidemic in China.

"She was amazing – the nation's conscience," they said, declining to be named for fear of official reprisals.

Gao made her first trip to the United States in March 2007 to receive the Global Leadership Award, Women Changing Our World by the Vital Voices Global Partnership.

She spoke then of having written two books based on her work with AIDS patients and their families in impoverished rural areas where blood-selling was rife; those selling blood were usually infected with HIV when receiving untreated plasma infusions at clinics after selling their blood.

No publisher in China would publish the books, then titled "10 Years in AIDS Prevention" and "AIDS Orphans," and those who had accepted it lost their jobs.

So Gao self-published "The Prevention of AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases" and distributed 300,000 copies under her own steam, using a US$20,000 Jonathan Mann Award – named for the AIDS expert and campaigner who died on Swissair Flight 111 in 1998.

In 2001, she was awarded the Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights and named by Time Magazine as its Asian Heroine the year after. The following year, she was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service in Manila, Philippines, but was denied permission to leave China to receive either of the two awards in person.

And in September 2007, the New York Academy of Sciences awarded her the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award.

After moving to the United States, Gao struggled through years of ill-health to publish her 2008 autobiography, "The Soul of Gao Yaojie," published by Ming Pao Publications Limited (Hong Kong). An English version, "The Soul of Gao Yaojie: A Memoir,” followed in November 2011.

On Feb. 7, 2015, Gao received the 2014 Liu Binyan Conscience Award for writers, at an award ceremony held at her New York apartment attended by fellow writers and judges.

But Gao also complained that her later years were overshadowed by medical fraudsters wanting to use her name and reputation to peddle quack AIDS remedies.

End-of-life statement

In November 2016, Gao issued an "end-of-life" statement, and spoke to RFA's Mandarin Service about her experiences as an exile in New York.

"My name is Gao Yaojie. I hereby solemnly declare that when I die, I would like my body to be cremated, not buried in a grave," she said. "I would like my ashes to be scattered in the Yellow River as soon as possible after my death, with no ceremony of any kind."

"Through this declaration, I want to let friends around the world know that I do not want the achievements of my lifetime or my death to be used by others to achieve fame," she said.

"I have been in the United States for eight years now, but I still don't speak the language," she said. "I can't tell what kind of a person a white person or any other ethnicity is, but I can tell you that I have been visited by a lot of Chinese people, many of whom lied to me."

"That's why I don't want a tomb, because I am worried that these lying people will try to make money out of it," she said. "That's why I can't stay in America. I want to float eastwards down the Yellow River, and basically disappear from this world."

In a 2009 interview with RFA Mandarin, Gao said China is on the "wrong path" because power struggles among the leadership are expressed as convulsive and violent political movements.

She said this had irreparably damaged the moral and ethical capacity of its citizens.

"Nobody has any internal moral compass to tell them what is right and what is wrong," Gao said. "There are so many examples of this you would never get done talking about them. For example, fake medical doctors in China is one example that leaps out.

"Things started to go wrong for China in the 1950s and 1960s. You didn't have this sort of thing before that. The most egregious example was that of the Cultural Revolution," she said. "That's when people learned how to operate in cliques ... and now these cliques are even operating overseas."

Yet Gao was "not alone" in her later years in New York, according to rights activist He Peirong.

"In later life, Gao Yaojie had people taking care of her," He said. "Chinese students studying in New York would take turns caring for her and looking out for her."

"She wasn't lonely at all," she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

We get an update from one of the few hospitals still operating in southern Gaza from Ahmed Moghrabi, a doctor at Nasser Hospital, who describes horrific conditions. “I’ve developed [a] psychological disorder,” says Moghrabi, who himself is barely surviving on little food and clean water. “Please stop this genocide against us. Stop this war. Please, please, I beg you.” We also speak with Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room medical doctor shot by the Israeli military in Gaza in 2018, about the arrests, killings and torture of his fellow medical workers by the Israeli military, and the enormous risk of disease as a consequence of the lack of essential aid and supplies available in the region. He predicts tens of thousands of deaths from starvation, dehydration and infectious disease will soon hit Gaza as Israel’s assault continues in the coming weeks.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We speak with two physicians who knew Dr. Hammam Alloh, a Palestinian nephrologist at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who was killed Saturday in an Israeli airstrike. They recall him as a “committed physician, wonderful father” and “beacon of light.” He had refused to heed Israeli directives to evacuate in order to continue providing care to his patients. “He spent a decade learning how to serve his people,” says Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan with Doctors Without Borders. “He wanted his children to be able to see a day when they had a free, just, durable, free life in Palestine, without occupation,” says Dr. Ben Thomson, a fellow nephrologist who worked with Dr. Alloh.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Israeli tanks and other ground forces enter Gaza, we speak with a doctor in the besieged territory. Dr. Hammam Alloh is working at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the area, and says tens of thousands of people have sought shelter to escape Israel’s heavy bombardment. He describes making harrowing decisions with rapidly dwindling supplies, such as not resuscitating a patient who went into cardiac arrest because of a lack of ventilators. He also remains steadfast in staying at the hospital, despite Israeli demands to evacuate south. “You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so I think only about my life and not my patients?” he says. “This is not the reason why I became a doctor.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Medical workers in Gaza are racing to treat survivors of a massive explosion Tuesday at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, where displaced people were sheltering from Israel’s unrelenting attacks when, Palestinian officials say, an Israeli airstrike hit the compound, killing hundreds of people. Israel denied responsibility, blaming a failed rocket launch by militants for the blast. Israeli strikes had already damaged the hospital once before, and have killed medical workers and struck other medical facilities since it started bombing Gaza in retaliation for a deadly Hamas raid into Israel on October 7. “As a physician, I’m afraid if I now leave and go to work, my hospital is going to be hit, as well,” says Dr. Hammam Alloh, an internal medicine and nephrology specialist at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, which is the largest hospital in Gaza. He describes how “almost 40,000” people are seeking refuge outside of hospital buildings in Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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An alleged serial rapist was arrested last month with help from evidence saved by a Baltimore County doctor nearly half a century ago. ProPublica highlighted this rare trove of hospital microscope slides in its Cold Justice series and inspired a new Maryland law to protect the evidence.

In this case, the evidence was collected from five women who visited the Greater Baltimore Medical Center for rape exams between 1978 and 1986. All said a man had violated them after breaking into their first-floor apartments in complexes within the same mile radius. Police at the time had not yet started saving standardized rape kits. But a prescient doctor, Rudiger Breitenecker, anticipated that one day, science might advance enough to make use of the specimens.

Most of the evidence collected by Breitenecker between 1975 and 1997 sat untouched for decades, until a new generation of cops recognized its value and slowly began to test it. By 2022, Baltimore County police knew four of the cases shared the same perpetrator’s DNA. (Initial testing didn’t yield a profile from the fifth, according to prosecutors.) But the suspect’s identity was still a mystery.

Enter Detective M. Lane, one of two detectives in the relatively new Special Victims Unit cold case division, who decided to read all of the police reports connected to those slides and link them to other cases. (Lane uses only her first initial on court documents.) She found a reported attack that wasn’t one of the four DNA-linked cases, but which happened just a short walk away from a rape connected to DNA evidence, and just two months later.

The report contained an almost unbelievable lead: A woman attacked on Dec. 3, 1978, told police that the suspect told her his first and middle names: James William. He wore a bracelet with “Jim” on it and said that day was his 26th birthday.

This June, Lane plugged those clues into a police database and found James William Shipe Sr., a man who had been arrested and charged for a separate attempted rape in 1979. Prosecutors at the time had dropped the case; Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger said it is unclear why. The victim in this later case also reported that her attacker was wearing a bracelet with “Jim” on it.

Lane had Shipe’s fingerprints from that case compared to the one pulled from the 1978 crime scene. They matched. Shipe had arrest reports for charges often associated with rapists: trespass and Peeping Tom, for which he served probation.

The detective had enough information to request a warrant for Shipe’s DNA. The 70-year-old was living with his wife less than 10 miles away from the scenes of the five attacks.

On July 22, Lane got the results: Shipe’s DNA matched those on the doctor’s rape evidence slides, according to court and police reports. Police had now linked Shipe to five cases by DNA or fingerprints.

Shipe was arrested 10 days later and is now in jail, facing charges in three of the five rape cases; the two other women who were assaulted have since died, and prosecutors are not pursuing charges in those.

ProPublica tried to reach Shipe, who is in a Baltimore County jail awaiting his next court hearing, but could not get through to him by phone. Reached by phone at her home, Cynthia Shipe said her husband has not yet been assigned a public defender.

She said the charges against her husband are “totally bogus” and she believes that he is innocent. She said she did not know about the DNA evidence, but that she’s known him for 37 years and that he’s a “wonderful man” who just sent her a dozen red roses for her birthday and that he “doesn’t have a violent bone in his body.”

Cynthia Shipe said her husband was a trucker until three years ago, when he had to retire due to heart problems, and she worries about his health now. She said he has not been given the proper medication in jail and she’s seen his health deteriorate.

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender said they could not comment on the case at this time.

“I am a new person, I feel totally different,” said Linda Shinault, who reported a rape to police in September 1986. She said someone broke into her apartment, severed her phone cord and was waiting for her in the bathroom after she got out of the shower. She said the attack and not knowing who did it had put a “heaviness” on her. When she got a call from a detective nearly 37 years later telling her a suspect had been arrested, she said was screaming into the phone, she was so happy. She then told everyone she knew. She considers the doctor’s saving of evidence to be a “miracle.”

“I feel the doctor is looking over us,” she said. Breitenecker passed away in September 2021. Linda said she wanted to tell her story to help other survivors and questioned why law enforcement was waiting “even another week” to test more evidence if there might be more victims whose cases could be solved.

For the Street family, the answer came too late. Dennis Street said his late wife Patricia would have appreciated the answer.

“I'm glad the guy was caught,” Street said. “And I know my wife would be happy, too, after all these years. Thank God for DNA testing. But I don’t know what took so long.”

Patricia Street reported a rape in September 1978 that police say is the earliest case linked to Shipe by DNA so far. She died in 2021 after two decades of health complications.

Baltimore County police say they are continuing to process cold case evidence and investigate whether more cases are tied to Shipe.

Most of the rapists who have been caught with the historic hospital DNA have been found to have a long list of other criminal charges on their records, such as other rapes, theft, burglary and murders. Shipe does not have such charges on his record, according to the Maryland Judiciary online records.

ProPublica helped solve the 1983 murder of Alicia Carter, a 21-year-old college student, by studying perpetrator patterns. Alphonso W. Hill’s DNA has matched 11 hospital slide cases so far, including DNA from the assault of a Goucher student in the same location where Carter’s body was found. After ProPublica’s investigation and police inquiry, he confessed in 2021 to raping and murdering her.

As these cases show, finding suspects who have eluded police for decades often requires more than DNA tests. “You can have all the computers, all the DNA, all these things that you want, but it still takes good old-fashioned police work,” said Shellenberger.

Shipe’s is the first arrest from the new effort to test the hospital slide cases, announced by Baltimore County officials in October 2019. Police have been delayed in part due to a backlog inside their forensics lab.

Like many other agencies, the Baltimore County police face significant staffing shortages. The department has only two dedicated cold case detectives in its Special Victims Unit, though that is more than a previous cold case effort in the first decade of the century, which had no dedicated detectives.

The unit often gets pushed down the priority list for testing even though rape cases notoriously involve serial perpetrators.

As of January 2023, police had about 1,300 hospital slide cases. At the rate of testing so far, it could take another couple of decades to finish processing them.

However, police have made a recent move that should help expedite testing. The remaining evidence, still at the hospital, is moving to police headquarters where it will be logged and sent for testing at a private lab. They are skipping a pre-screening step in their own lab and shipping the slides directly to a private DNA testing company. A police spokesperson wrote to ProPublica that "The Department looks forward to receiving all available evidence and is doing everything possible to expedite the analysis and investigation of these important cases."

Part of that is driven by a new state law passed earlier this year in response to issues raised by ProPublica’s investigation. The law classifies the hospital slides as official rape evidence and requires the police department to count them among its rape kit backlog and retain the slides for at least 75 years after they were collected.

Baltimore County police have released Shipe’s mugshots and are encouraging anyone with information on additional crimes to reach out at 410-307-2020.

Survivors who would prefer to speak with the department’s victim advocate may call 443-345-7587 or email aharkins@turnaroundinc.org.

Survivors can find additional resources at Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault and TurnAround, Inc.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Catherine Rentz.

On August 14, a group of unidentified men carrying guns, knives, and sticks attacked journalists who were reporting on the aftermath of clashes between younger members of the Opu Nembe community and their leaders, according to the journalists, who spoke with CPJ, and news reports.

The men assaulted and robbed one journalist and stole equipment from two others. Two of the journalists were injured while fleeing the scene, they told CPJ.

“Authorities in Nigeria must identify all members of the group who recently attacked journalists working in Bayelsa state and hold them to account,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator in Durban, South Africa. “Police should conduct a swift and transparent investigation to send a clear message to all Nigerians that protecting the press is a priority.”

The journalists at the scene included reporter Joseph Kunde and camera operator Miebi Binafiai with the privately owned Television Continental news broadcaster; reporter Awe Baratuapere and camera operator Ayebakuro Rhodes Egein with the government-owned Nigerian Television Authority; reporter Iniyekenime Doctor Bruce, with the privately owned Africa Independent Television broadcaster; and Folaranmi Femi, a correspondent for The Sun newspaper.

Those journalists told CPJ that the police provided them with a security escort to the area, but then left because of another assignment. The journalists had nearly finished their work when dozens of young men appeared, fired guns into the air, and attacked them.

Femi and Kunde said they ran back to the police base to alert the officers. Police returned to the village about 20 minutes later and used tear gas and shot in the air to disperse the crowd.

Before police arrived, Binafiai told CPJ, attackers pointed an AK-47 rifle at him and stripped him of his shirt and pants, which they used to tie his hands and legs. The men then kicked and punched him until the officers arrived and chased them away. Binafiai said he lost a tooth in the attack, for which he received medical treatment, and the attackers also stole his camera, a mobile phone worth 170,000 naira ($220), two microphones, and 7,000 naira (US$9) in cash.

Bruce told CPJ that she fell down while running away and pretended to be unconscious, but the attackers stole her mobile phone and camera as she lay on the ground. She said that the Nigeria Union of Journalists later recovered her camera, but it was broken.

Baratuapere said he lost his tripod while running from the attackers and sustained a small cut near his right knee.

Egein told CPJ that he fell over as he was running to seek sanctuary in a nearby house, and broke his ankle and hurt his knee. A woman followed him inside the house and threatened to hand him over to the attackers unless he gave her all his money and belongings. Egein said he gave her his mobile phone, iPad, earbuds, 5,000 naira (US$6) in cash, and his ATM card, which she later used to withdraw 77,000 naira (US$100).

Egein said the woman hid him for a while and then introduced him to two men who escorted him to the next village, where he stayed until the following morning.

The other five journalists said police took them to the station, where they filed a complaint and waited until about midnight for officers to safely escort them out of the area.

Bayelsa state police spokesperson Butswat Asinim told CPJ on August 28 that investigations were ongoing to recover the stolen items and identify the perpetrators.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Police and soldiers arrested Dr. Mya Than, who ran the Tet Nay Lin Ophthalmology Clinic in the city, along with his wife Myint Myat Khaing, an associate professor at Mandalay University’s department of distance education and their son Yan Naung Tun, 

Myint Myat Khaing was a member of the CMD, a popular strike movement that at its peak brought the administrative machinery of the military regime to a halt.

A Mandalay resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity for safety reasons, said the clinic was sealed off on Thursday morning.

Another local, who also declined to be named, said the junta is rounding up pro-democracy activists in the city.

“Teachers who opened a private school in Maha Aung Myay township were arrested the day before. The school was also sealed off,” they said.

“Arrests for allegedly supporting People Defense Forces have become frequent these days in Mandalay.”  

The junta has released no statements on the arrests and their Mandalay region spokesperson Thein Htay did not answer RFA’s phone calls.

Pro-junta Telegram messaging group channels posted photographs of the three along with pictures of police and soldiers at their condominium. 

Comments on the channels included death threats towards anyone supporting anti-junta People’s Defense Forces and the National Unity Government, a shadow government formed by members of the civilian administration ousted in the 2021 coup.

One CDM doctor who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisals told RFA the regime is targeting hospitals and clinics to try to put CDM health staff out of work.

Last week, the junta ordered the closure of Mandalay’s largest private hospital for three months starting this Friday. They said the Mingalar Private Hospital in Maha Aung Myay township allowed two CDM doctors to work there.

In May, authorities revoked the business licenses of three private hospitals, accused of allowing CDM health staff to work there.

And last December, CDM professor Dr. Win Khaing, from Mandalay Medical University, was arrested while working at the Palace Private Hospital in Chanayethazan township.

Some 853 doctors and other health workers have been arrested nationwide since the military seized power in Feb. 2021, according to the CDM Medical Network.

It added 557 CDM doctors have had their medical licenses revoked for one year since the start of last year.

However, it said more than 45,000 health workers continue to participate in the non-violent CDM.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

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Cheryl Lee Carr clutched her phone, willing it to ring. The last time she’d answered it, a hospital surgeon told her he didn’t know if he could save her mother’s leg, let alone her life. But he would try to stop the hemorrhaging from her major leg artery, punctured by a doctor at a nearby clinic.

Carr had spent that morning in February 2020 at the Lehigh Valley Vascular Institute in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, waiting as her 82-year-old mother underwent what was supposed to be a simple procedure to clear plaque from her arteries. More than four hours in, Carr knew something was wrong. She pushed past the front desk to find her dazed mother in a recovery room, two clinic employees holding a bloody compress over a leg that had turned deep purple.

“Where’s the doctor?” Carr recalled yelling. “Call 911 right now!”

Now, as Carr braced for news about her mother’s fate, her thoughts turned to the clinic’s doctor who, she recalled, was nowhere to be seen as his patient bled. Carr pulled up a search engine and typed in his name: James McGuckin.

A deluge of results poured in.

What the hell? she seethed as she scrolled. Why is he still practicing?

For more than a decade, the Pennsylvania doctor and his national empire of vascular clinics had been scrutinized by agencies at every level — state medical boards, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice — for conducting experimental or unnecessary procedures on patients, putting their lives and limbs at risk.

He’d been disciplined by medical boards in over a dozen states, lost privileges in multiple hospitals and settled federal allegations of fraud, admitting that his company had performed procedures without any documented need. Pennsylvania had tried to shut his clinics down. Just a few months ago, federal attorneys announced a case against him, claiming he put “profits over the health and safety of his patients” when performing invasive artery procedures, regardless of symptoms or need.

And yet, after all of that, McGuckin is still seeing patients today, still adding to the nearly $50 million he has earned in the past decade in federal insurance reimbursements.

Medical boards are supposed to ensure doctors are not endangering their patients. State health inspectors are supposed to make sure facilities are meeting minimum standards of care. And the federal government is supposed to make sure that doctors are not swindling the nation’s largest insurance program, Medicare, by exploiting vulnerable elderly patients.

But the ability of McGuckin to continue practicing, despite scrutiny from each of these regulators, highlights troubling gaps in the public safety net, ProPublica found. Those charged with identifying and stopping problem physicians are often slow-moving, blind to holes in their oversight and frequently unable — and at times unwilling — to stop doctors from practicing, even in cases of egregious harm or brazen fraud. Punishments are often nominal or easy to avoid, especially for well-resourced doctors like McGuckin.

One area that has become perilous for patients is vascular medicine. ProPublica recently uncovered a pattern of excessive and unnecessary vascular treatments in outpatient facilities. Medicare reimburses generously for these invasive treatments, which include using stents and balloons to widen arteries, and spiraling blades or lasers to clear plaque from blocked vessels, in a procedure called an atherectomy. Though they can be done safely outside of hospitals, they carry risks of complications that include clots, bleeding, limb loss and even death.

Over the past decade, federal investigators have accused more than a dozen physicians or companies in the vascular space of performing unnecessary procedures or making false claims. Some have continued to treat patients and profit from government insurance even after settling misconduct claims, only to be accused of committing similar behavior a few years — and millions of dollars — later.

At 61, with eyes that matched his bluish scrubs, McGuckin earned the trust of his patients, many of whom came to him for help with leg pain or circulation problems; several told ProPublica he appeared knowledgeable, caring and charming. One of the perks of going to see him was a limousine service that ferried them to and from appointments, they said.

Several of his patients faced complications after invasive vascular procedures — two lost their legs and several nearly lost their lives, according to interviews and medical and legal records. “The things that have happened to me have been a disaster,” Maria Rohena, 69, said in Spanish as she wept. Her leg was amputated five days after a procedure in McGuckin’s clinic in July 2021, according to medical records.

McGuckin’s attorney David Heim described him as a “very good, skilled surgeon who has helped thousands of patients,” many of them at higher risk. “Any effort to portray Dr. McGuckin as some ‘greedy’ or ‘bad’ doctor would be completely false and defamatory,” he said. Heim did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about specific patients, citing privacy. McGuckin’s attorneys said that he has never been found personally liable for fraud and that the government’s most recent allegations are “provably wrong.”

Carr could not anticipate, as she waited for the call that winter day, just how bleak it would get. “My mother would never have gone under the knife with that guy if I had known anything about him,” she said.

From an early point in his career, McGuckin wanted to be calling the shots.

After completing his medical degree in 1987 from Philadelphia’s Hahnemann University School of Medicine, now Drexel University College of Medicine, he earned his board certification in radiology, eventually publishing articles in academic journals and participating in several professional societies, including the American Board of Radiology, the Society of Interventional Radiology and the Pennsylvania Medical Society.

While working in hospitals, he felt he was just “a small cog” in the system, he said in an interview. So, in 2002, a few years after completing his medical training in Philadelphia, he opened his first private practice office.

Before long, he would open a chain of facilities, Vascular Access Centers, that would reach a dozen states under his leadership, and thousands of patients.

“Here, the physician gets to be the pitcher or quarterback,” he said in the interview, of running an office. “We call the plays, set the schedule, drive the tempo. … There is never a question of accountability or the primacy of the customer.”

But there were soon questions of accountability and appropriate care.

Around 2010, McGuckin started offering a controversial procedure: an invasive, experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis, which involved deploying balloons and stents in veins across the body to improve blood flow. The treatment, which lacked substantial evidence that it improved patient symptoms, was rejected by the medical establishment, and the use of devices for the treatment was unapproved by the FDA. Only about 30 doctors performed it, often charging thousands of dollars to do so.

Angioplasty: A compact balloon is inserted into a blood vessel and inflated to flatten plaque against its walls.

Stent: A metal mesh tube is implanted into a narrowed blood vessel to hold open its walls.

Atherectomy: A catheter, often capped with a blade or laser, is inserted into a blood vessel and removes plaque off its walls.

McGuckin became a leading evangelist for the treatment, conducting hundreds of the risky procedures on patients, including a South Carolina woman who, in May 2012, nearly died after a stent dislodged and traveled to her heart. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which wrote about the case, reported that the patient sued McGuckin in 2015 and the case was confidentially resolved two years later.

In July 2012, FDA inspectors showed up at one of his facilities and cited him for multiple violations, which are spelled out in an April 2013 letter. They included enrolling patients in unapproved clinical research; failing to screen for abnormal kidney function, which could have subjected patients to renal failure; and not reporting serious adverse events.

Despite evidence that such treatments put patients in grave danger, none of the medical boards in the more than a dozen states in which he was licensed to practice took action for more than a year. Some boards took four years.

State medical boards serve as the first line of defense against unscrupulous physicians. Typically composed of doctors and laypeople working part time, boards regulate who can practice medicine and investigate complaints of poor care.

But they are not set up for aggressive or speedy detective work. Take the board in McGuckin’s home state of Pennsylvania, which oversaw more than 75,000 health care workers as of 2021; it had a budget of roughly $1.2 million to investigate misconduct that year, or about $290 per case opened.

For this reason, boards don’t typically seek out investigations; they wait for patients, staff or other doctors to formally complain. They are slow to act and notoriously lax with their sanctions, aware that bold actions may provoke a costly and time-consuming appeals process.

Washington was the first state to sanction McGuckin, in November 2015, after a lengthy investigation that began four years earlier. It charged him with “unprofessional conduct” for performing more than 200 procedures, fined him $17,500, made him return the money patients paid out of pocket and ordered him to stop the treatments.

It also required him to pass an ethics course by writing an essay, which evaluators found unacceptable, saying McGuckin didn’t “demonstrate a capacity to think ethically about why he is being held to account.” McGuckin filed a second draft, which was also unsatisfactory. He only passed the course with help from a one-on-one tutor.

The Washington Medical Quality Assurance Commission, which oversees doctors in the state, also made him sign a consent decree, admitting that the invasive procedures were inappropriate. Years later, during a lengthy bankruptcy lawsuit involving his chain, he would testify that he signed it because he felt he had to but didn’t feel he was guilty of the misconduct.

“It is clear to the Court that McGuckin is willing to sign documents, like the Consent Decree, even if he does not believe that his statements are true,” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ashely M. Chan, in Philadelphia, would say in 2020. “The Court finds that McGuckin is not truthful and cannot be relied upon for anything that he says.”

By 2017, 15 other state medical boards had followed Washington in citing McGuckin for the MS treatments. Most of the sanctions, however, constituted minimal fines, often less than what McGuckin could bill for a single two-hour vascular procedure.

Pennsylvania, for instance, charged him $10,000 in 2016. That year, he took in almost $4 million in federal reimbursements alone.

In a letter shared with ProPublica, McGuckin’s attorney George Bochetto said the doctor “was not disciplined because he performed a so-called ‘unproven and risky procedure,’ but rather was ensnared in a complicated administrative bureaucracy.”

While he lost hospital privileges across four facilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, no medical board limited his ability to practice.

All the while, federal agents were investigating McGuckin for an entirely different set of allegations.

While states regulate medical facilities and doctors, the Department of Justice attempts to protect the nation’s largest insurance systems, like Medicare, from fraud. Its investigations are often instigated by whistleblowers, whose inside testimony is crucial to uncovering details of wrongdoing.

Dr. Michael Levine, a seasoned nephrologist with an expertise in hemodialysis vascular access, started working for McGuckin in 2009 at multiple New Jersey clinics that were part of Vascular Access Centers.

“At first, there was no red flag,” Levine told ProPublica. The clinics mostly treated patients with renal disease whose vessels occasionally needed treatment related to their dialysis lines. But Levine said he quickly learned that patients were being put into treatment loops where they were regularly booked for unneeded tests and procedures. “They were having the patients come back every three months, which to me is corruption,” he said.

While the procedures were relatively low risk, each time a doctor puts a foreign device in a patient’s body, it carries a chance of complication. Levine said he was therefore shocked when McGuckin pushed him to do more procedures without a clear clinical need.

McGuckin ordered each dialysis patient to be “squirted with dye,” Levine said in court records, implying that all patients should be subjected to an X-ray test to fish for blood clots or narrowed vessels to treat, regardless of whether their primary doctor ordered it.

McGuckin also allegedly told Levine to treat patients’ vessels with inflatable balloons and implant stents without a medical need. “Bang ’em all,” McGuckin allegedly told him, according to legal filings.

When Levine refused to go along with this practice, he said he was fired. Shortly after, in 2012, he filed a whistleblower lawsuit, which spurred a federal investigation.

“It’s not an issue of competency,” he told ProPublica. “It’s the issue of using his skills for his own self benefit and seeing his patients not as human beings, but as sources of income.”

David Stebbins, who was the administrator director of the centers from 2006 through 2018, said he also witnessed McGuckin’s drive to increase profits with unnecessary procedures. “McGuckin exerted pressure on all of the MDs working for him to increase procedural ‘acuity,’” he told ProPublica in an email. After more than a decade of working for McGuckin, when Stebbins questioned whether the clinics were possibly violating state regulations, he said he, too, was let go.

“McGuckin is an arrogant Charlatan who expects his senior staff to do whatever they’re told, or they may find themselves looking for work,” said Stebbins, who filed a separate whistleblower complaint in 2020, which is ongoing. “Under incredible pressure, they comply.” Attorneys for McGuckin did not respond to Stebbins' allegations.

Despite allegations that patients might be at risk of unnecessary, invasive procedures, it still took six years for the Justice Department to settle the claims initiated by Levine.

In October 2018, Vascular Access Centers signed a settlement with the federal government, agreeing to a $3.8 million fine. As part of the agreement, the company had to admit that it regularly scheduled, performed and billed for procedures without any evidence of need.

But as is the case with many federal settlements involving doctors, they are rarely held personally liable, or they can just pay steep fines to get out of trouble.

While McGuckin signed the company’s agreement with the federal government, as the company’s general partner and manager of each of its clinics, he was not held personally responsible for its misconduct. No physicians were specifically called out in the federal settlement; McGuckin’s attorney said the government chose not to pursue a case against him because there was no evidence implicating his physician services.

But McGuckin’s business partner claimed in the bankruptcy case that McGuckin had negotiated with the government and agreed to the terms of the burdensome settlement in exchange for securing his own personal release.

At his clinics across Pennsylvania that were not affiliated with the embattled chain, McGuckin could still continue to treat patients unchecked.

Other doctors have gotten a similar deal.

Take Dr. Feng Qin, a vascular surgeon in New York.

In 2015, he settled allegations of fraud, admitting that he had routinely performed unnecessary procedures on end-stage renal disease patients. He paid a $150,000 fine but was able to continue practicing.

Even after the settlement, Qin performed unnecessary procedures, according to federal legal filings. “The monitoring by the feds, I know how to play Medicare’s asses now,” he told his billing assistant in 2015, according to a later whistleblower complaint.

Three years later, the Justice Department indicted and arrested Qin for fraud, after which he agreed to another settlement, paying $800,000. Lawyers for Qin, who left the country after the settlement, did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

Though Qin was temporarily excluded from federal health care programs, other doctors have continued to receive government payments even after multiple settlements.

Consider Dr. Mubashar Choudry, a cardiologist in Maryland. He was never found guilty of patient harm, but his medical practices have twice been scrutinized by the Justice Department for alleged misconduct.

In 2014, his medical group agreed to pay about $1.9 million to settle allegations that it was involved in an overbilling scheme. Then in 2020, Choudry and his practices settled allegations of kickbacks with the federal government, paying $750,000. In both cases, neither Choudry nor the companies were required to admit liability.

Kirk Ogrosky, Choudry’s attorney, said such arrangements are typical, and his client settled to “avoid the cost and uncertainty of litigation.” His attorney emphasized that Choudry’s settlement was not about the quality of patient care.

Choudry has not been limited from practicing or accessing federal payment programs. In 2021, the most recent year of public Medicare data, Choudry earned $1.5 million in federal reimbursements.

The settlement against McGuckin’s clinics also didn’t prevent him from continuing to bill Medicare.

Between 2019 and 2021, the most recent years of federal payment data available, McGuckin made more than $17 million.

While medical boards oversee doctors, state health departments regulate medical facilities, which can include clinics like McGuckin’s. Their investigations, too, are largely driven by complaints and rarely result in major consequences.

So it was remarkable that, in 2019, Pennsylvania’s Health Department decided to take on McGuckin after officials read about his company’s federal settlement in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

At the time, he owned four clinics in the state that weren’t affiliated with the chain.

The department reviewed their license applications and found that the clinics had “failed to fully, completely, and accurately” disclose pertinent details about the federal scrutiny involving McGuckin and his other company. In January 2019, the department issued rare orders for four of his private clinics, revoking their licenses and cutting off their ability to operate.

McGuckin appealed the orders and his lawyer argued that a shutdown would expose his clinics’ patients to “irreparable harm” without their care. His lawyer also noted that the department had based the order on the assessment that McGuckin was “not a responsible person,” instead of relying on claims of patient harm or complaints. His lawyer also said that because McGuckin was not held personally liable in the settlement, he had been exonerated from its “salacious” allegations.

Garrison Gladfelter, who oversees surgical centers for the state, told McGuckin’s attorney in letters that, pending the appeal, McGuckin’s facilities could continue to operate on one condition: that he not personally perform procedures or provide training to the medical staff.

In response, McGuckin sued Gladfelter as well as the state’s health secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine, alleging that his clinics’ licenses were unlawfully revoked and their attempt to ban him from working at his own practices infringed on his “constitutional right to practice medicine.”

The lawsuit continued for eight months, and in October 2019, it was dismissed with an acknowledgment that the issues between McGuckin and the state had “been settled.”

The details of this settlement were kept secret. There’s no public evidence of why McGuckin’s facilities were allowed to continue to operate, with him performing procedures. The Health Department told ProPublica that, after the confidential settlement, it increased oversight at two of McGuckin’s facilities.

But against the tide of litigation, the Health Department largely backed off, and like the state medical boards and the Justice Department before it, it allowed McGuckin to continue to practice.

And so he did, for almost four years.

All the while, federal authorities had more information indicating his patients were at risk.

Two months after the federal settlement, in December 2018, yet another whistleblower filed a complaint: Dr. Aaron Shiloh, who was employed by McGuckin in his private practice in Pennsylvania. In a letter, McGuckin’s attorney Bochetto called him “disgruntled.” Shiloh’s attorney pushed back, requesting further details, but McGuckin’s attorneys did not respond to ProPublica’s request for more information.

His claims would lead attorneys from the Justice Department to conclude that from 2016 through 2019, McGuckin performed more than 500 medically unnecessary or insufficiently documented procedures, which allowed him to earn at least $6.5 million in Medicare reimbursement. They also found that McGuckin performed several invasive procedures on many patients, regardless of their symptoms, putting “profits over the health and safety of his patients.”

The procedures are intended for patients with peripheral artery disease, a condition that afflicts 6.5 million Americans over the age of 40. According to the federal government, McGuckin not only performed procedures on patients with only “moderate” leg pain, against the widely accepted standards of care, he also performed procedures on patients who were disabled and and unlikely candidates for such interventions.

He performed procedures for leg pain in a patient who was paralyzed on one side of her body and did not walk at all, according to the complaint. On another patient, the government said, he conducted “unnecessary below-the-knee procedures in the small portion of what remained of a patient’s already amputated leg.” One patient told the federal government, according to legal filings, that he felt like McGuckin “was just experimenting on him.”

Earl Toler of Long Pond, Pennsylvania, told ProPublica he also felt part of an experiment. He sought treatment at 74 after experiencing weakness in his leg when walking. Over about a year, Toler underwent 10 vascular procedures, according to later legal filings. His condition progressively worsened until his left leg grew swollen and mottled and one of his toes turned dark blue.

To save his life, in November 2018, doctors at a local hospital needed to amputate his leg above the knee. During a malpractice lawsuit against McGuckin and other doctors at his clinic, medical experts who testified on Toler’s behalf claimed the doctors had deviated from the accepted standards of care, particularly in not referring Toler to a vascular surgeon for more advanced treatment, which they alleged eventually led to his limb loss. In legal filings, McGuckin denied the allegations. The lawsuit went to trial last year, and the jury sided with McGuckin and his doctors, clearing them of any wrongdoing.

Despite the verdict, Toler, an excavation contractor by trade who can largely no longer work after his amputation, still holds them responsible for his condition. And when he read over the allegations of the current Justice Department lawsuit, he was floored. “It’s a pattern,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t the only one.”

Two and half years after Toler’s amputation, Rohena, a churchgoing grandmother from the Allentown area, blacked out and had a heart attack in McGuckin’s recovery room, according to medical records. The clinic called an ambulance to take her to the nearest hospital, where medical staff found a main artery had been nicked, causing extensive blood loss. Rohena was treated for five days before her leg was amputated.

A lawsuit has been initiated, according to her attorney Frank Mangiaracina. “Maria is stuck living in a nursing home, and she doesn’t have her leg or life anymore,” he said.

According to clinic medical records, Rohena had undergone four treatments with McGuckin in two months.

A ProPublica analysis of federal payment data from 2017 through 2021 found that McGuckin ranks among the 5% of doctors who perform the most atherectomy procedures like the one Carr’s mother, Toler and Rohena underwent before facing complications.

Recent research has shown that a substantial number of doctors who treat peripheral arterial disease are quickly resorting to device interventions in the earliest stages against best practices. Doctors have used scare tactics to convince patients to get these painful and risky procedures; McGuckin, for instance, allegedly told patients the interventions were necessary to “save their leg” or “stop the chop.” But patients in early stages of vascular disease have less than a 2% risk of amputation after five years, researchers have found. That risk could surge up to 5% or even 10% with aggressive interventions.

McGuckin’s attorneys argued the federal allegations are “baseless” and “irreparably tarnish” his reputation. “McGuckin did not violate any medical standards of care in treating his patients,” his attorneys wrote in legal filings. “The Government’s medical necessity claims amount to nothing more than a ‘scientific disagreement.’”

Justice Department investigations into whistleblower claims are kept secret until prosecutors are ready to file a lawsuit. They did so in May 2023. Despite McGuckin’s arguments that it should be dismissed, it is ongoing.

According to the Health Department, McGuckin has closed or relinquished ownership of his clinics across Pennsylvania in the past few years. When ProPublica called the Lehigh Valley Vascular Institute in July to inquire whether he was still practicing, the receptionist said he was taking appointments.

A few weeks ago, Carr pored over the details of the new federal case. It brought her to tears.

Though that phone call back in 2020 brought good news — the hospital surgeon managed to save her mother’s life and leg — the aftershocks took a lasting toll.

While recovering at the hospital, her mother, Elaine Micelli, struggled to use her left arm, and one side of her face drooped. Carr suspected her mother had developed a neurological issue. “She asked me to go down the hall and get her a box of tissues from her closet — she thought she was at home,” she said.

An assessment at the hospital revealed she had suffered strokes, medical records show, likely due to the low blood pressure, which she had when she was admitted.

Before her visit to McGuckin, the 82-year-old still mowed her 2 1/2 acre lawn in the summer and cleared snow with her blower in the winter. She volunteered for the crime watch at the local fire department and, every week, called bingo numbers at the senior center.

Now, she lives in a nursing home and requires 24-hour care. She no longer walks, requires assistance to eat and wears diapers. She cannot speak fluidly or remember key moments of her past. “He destroyed my mom’s life,” Carr said of McGuckin. “She’s penniless and paralyzed … just waiting to die.”

Shortly after her mother’s injury, Carr said she filed a formal complaint about McGuckin with both the state’s Medicare office and its medical board.

Three years on, she said, she has not received a response.

Do You Have Experience With Peripheral Artery Disease? Have You Had a Procedure on Your Leg? Tell Us About It.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Annie Waldman.

It isn’t every day that a doctor will follow up with a patient and check how he or she is doing all the way to their very doorstep in Papua New Guinea.

For one family from Eboa village in Mekeo LLG, Kairuku in Central Province, their weekend was filled with a pleasant surprise as a team of doctors paid a visit to their little warrior named Taylor.

Three-month-old baby boy Taylor is a miracle, said Dr Liu Zhenqui, who is deputy captain of the 12th China Medical Team and also an associate professor of paediatrics at the Port Moresby General Hospital (PMGH).

• READ MORE: Other PNG health reports

Little Taylor’s story is one filled with love of a mother, support of a family, and little Taylor’s determination and resilience to live. Taylor was born with a severe respiratory failure which posed a significant threat to his life.

“We learned from the video that just a few months ago newborn Taylor faced a severe respiratory failure, posing a significant threat to his life,” Dr Liu said.

“However, through the combined efforts of the China Medical Team and the SCN at PMGH, we employed cutting-edge techniques called ventilation and advanced medical care to save Taylor’s precious life.

“Taylor’s journey to recovery can only be described as a miracle.

“From the day he came under our care, we knew that every second was crucial.

“Our dedicated healthcare professionals worked tirelessly day and night, leaving no effort spared to provide Taylor with the best possible care,” he added.

Dr Liu said that the “love and dedication poured into his treatment” not only saved his life but also strengthened the bond between the medical team and the local community”.

It was also an honour to have Sister Kuman, the head nurse of Special Care Nursery at PMGH, with the team, he said.

Since they had missed out on how Taylor’s life began at the hospital, his relatives all gathered around a laptop to watch the video and were deeply moved and amazed by his determination and resilience.

“Today, witnessing Taylor’s radiant smile and remarkable progress fills our hearts with immense joy, serving as compelling evidence of the boundless potential in every newborn.

“He stands as a living example, proving that with the right medical care, love, and support, even the tiniest of lives can overcome challenges and flourish,” Dr Liu said.

In fact, Dr Liu was a retained member of the China Medical Team — he had been due to return to China in July last year.

However, he made the decision to stay because of witnessing a mother’s sorrow.

“One day in early last year, a full-term baby was diagnosed with asphyxia and meconium aspiration syndrome, precisely the same diagnosis as Taylor.

“Unfortunately, due to severe respiratory failure, the child passed away.

“The mother, overwhelmed with grief, fainted upon seeing her baby’s lifeless body.

“From that moment on, ‘I made a silent vow in my heart to do something to change this situation,'” Dr Liu said.

Grace Auka Salmang is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

It isn’t every day that a doctor will follow up with a patient and check how he or she is doing all the way to their very doorstep in Papua New Guinea.

For one family from Eboa village in Mekeo LLG, Kairuku in Central Province, their weekend was filled with a pleasant surprise as a team of doctors paid a visit to their little warrior named Taylor.

Three-month-old baby boy Taylor is a miracle, said Dr Liu Zhenqui, who is deputy captain of the 12th China Medical Team and also an associate professor of paediatrics at the Port Moresby General Hospital (PMGH).

• READ MORE: Other PNG health reports

Little Taylor’s story is one filled with love of a mother, support of a family, and little Taylor’s determination and resilience to live. Taylor was born with a severe respiratory failure which posed a significant threat to his life.

“We learned from the video that just a few months ago newborn Taylor faced a severe respiratory failure, posing a significant threat to his life,” Dr Liu said.

“However, through the combined efforts of the China Medical Team and the SCN at PMGH, we employed cutting-edge techniques called ventilation and advanced medical care to save Taylor’s precious life.

“Taylor’s journey to recovery can only be described as a miracle.

“From the day he came under our care, we knew that every second was crucial.

“Our dedicated healthcare professionals worked tirelessly day and night, leaving no effort spared to provide Taylor with the best possible care,” he added.

Dr Liu said that the “love and dedication poured into his treatment” not only saved his life but also strengthened the bond between the medical team and the local community”.

It was also an honour to have Sister Kuman, the head nurse of Special Care Nursery at PMGH, with the team, he said.

Since they had missed out on how Taylor’s life began at the hospital, his relatives all gathered around a laptop to watch the video and were deeply moved and amazed by his determination and resilience.

“Today, witnessing Taylor’s radiant smile and remarkable progress fills our hearts with immense joy, serving as compelling evidence of the boundless potential in every newborn.

“He stands as a living example, proving that with the right medical care, love, and support, even the tiniest of lives can overcome challenges and flourish,” Dr Liu said.

In fact, Dr Liu was a retained member of the China Medical Team — he had been due to return to China in July last year.

However, he made the decision to stay because of witnessing a mother’s sorrow.

“One day in early last year, a full-term baby was diagnosed with asphyxia and meconium aspiration syndrome, precisely the same diagnosis as Taylor.

“Unfortunately, due to severe respiratory failure, the child passed away.

“The mother, overwhelmed with grief, fainted upon seeing her baby’s lifeless body.

“From that moment on, ‘I made a silent vow in my heart to do something to change this situation,'” Dr Liu said.

Grace Auka Salmang is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The local identified the five women as Dr. Ci Ci Lia and nurses Henny Zivalem, KhupSian Lun, San Hniang Sung and Van Niang Mawi, all ethnic Chin.

“They were arrested at midnight [Sunday] and informed they would be questioned,” said the resident who declined to be named for security reasons.

“Many soldiers came to the hospital at the time of the arrest.”

Agape Hospital is a privately-run medical facility, set up by the Presbyterian Church in Myanmar, which said it wanted to provide basic healthcare to a state with insufficient facilities.

The doctor and four nurses all joined Myanmar’s civil disobedience movement soon after the military seized power in a February 2021 coup, the local told RFA although they said the junta had not given a reason for the arrest.

The five are being held at the local police station in Hakha township and have been allowed to see their families.

Other residents told RFA troops arrested at least 15 people in Hakha township on Sunday evening when they checked lists of visitors staying overnight.

Sunday’s raid follows a similar one on April 2 when troops arrested two doctors and a staff member at Agape Hospital.

Locals say the three were freed in exchange for the release of junta officials who had been detained by the Chin People’s Defense Force in Hakha, suggesting the latest arrests may also be part of a planned prisoner exchange. RFA has not been able to confirm this independently.

The Chin People’s Defense Force confirmed Sunday’s arrest of the five medical workers but did not comment on any possible prisoner swap.

RFA called Chin state’s junta spokesman and social affairs minister Thant Zin Wednesday, seeking comment on the latest arrests, but the calls went unanswered.

Last week the junta revoked the business licenses of three private hospitals in Myanmar’s central Mandalay region.

Palace, City and Kant Kaw hospitals had already been told to stop accepting patients because they were using staff belonging to the civil disobedience movement.

According to Myanmar’s parallel National Unity Government, the junta has attacked hospitals and clinics 188 times since the coup.

They damaged 59 ambulances and seized 49 more, the NUG’s Ministry of Health said, adding that 71 medical workers were killed and 836 arrested in the past 27 months.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

From Island girl to an airline pilot seems like the Disney fantasy Moana yet nothing could further from the truth when it comes to Silva McLeod who turned fantasy into reality with heartbreak along the way.

Born in the small Tongan village of Vava’u in the days when we watched and marvelled as jets few overhead, Mcleod never dreamed one day that she would be there in the sky flying jet planes to all manner of destinations.

In her recently released memoir,  Island Girl to Airline Pilot: A Story of Love, Sacrifice and Taking Flight, she tells her story.

The book details when and where she meets her Australian husband Ken who went to Tonga to work in building a hospital. She was working as a waitress in a bar when she first met him.

However, unlike other Palagi (white men) visiting the islands and making promises they never intended to keep, Ken — according to her autobiography that initially reads like a Mills & Boon novel — was a perfect gentleman as he slowly courted her.

“At first, it wasn’t the done thing to do… Unfortunately, the picture we have that white men come in — it’s not a very nice picture, but that’s how it was — they impregnate the Tongan girl and then nick off, and mum and dad, nan and pa will have to clean up the mess,” she writes.

“So, this is quite rare, a young handsome Pālagi came to our island, and we found a common attraction to each other. My family feared the worst … so it wasn’t very well received in the beginning.

Language ‘huge barrier’
“Language was a huge barrier at the beginning, because my family couldn’t speak a word of English and Ken couldn’t speak a word of Tongan.

“So how could Ken make a conversation that might help my family accept the situation? But it didn’t take long.”

Ken eventually whisked her away to Melbourne in 1980, and while her dreams were put on the backburner while the couple raised a family.

She did ultimately realise her dream to become Tonga and possibly the Pacific female airline pilot, beginning as a flying instructor, then flying for Royal Tonga Airlines, Australian Flying Doctor Service and eventually Virgin International Airlines.

And, at the time of doing this interview, she was waiting to hear about her health results to find out whether she could keep flying.

Becoming a pilot “was never really a dream, because I could never envision reaching it or getting there,” Mcleod  says.

“It was more like a fantasy because it was never going to happen.

Both ways to the beach
“Growing up in Vava’u, in a tiny little island of Pangaimotu, 200 people live there: you walk one way you reach the beach; you turn around 180 degrees you reach the beach.

“So, to dream of eventually becoming an airline pilot one day, or even just flying an aeroplane was unreachable — so I kept it as a fantasy.

“I can just visualise myself as a child running outside every time I hear a sound of an aircraft and I was there [looking] at the sky until the aircraft disappeared.

“The curiosity in me … was getting a little bit too much, running away with the thought of ‘oh wow, how clever is that, imagine the people that are flying that machine… wouldn’t it be amazing to operate such a machine, because it defies gravity?

“The fantasy was right from a young age, but it wasn’t a dream because I didn’t think that I’d get there.”

Mcleod’s world while growing up was limited, she says: “like wanting to reach for a piece of coconut but finding your arms are bound”.

At the time growing up in the 1970s in Vava’u, television and  newspapers weren’t easily accessible, so glimpses of the lives and places outside of the immediate community were limited, she says.

‘I can’t get out’
“It felt like, ‘I can’t get out’. It’s the same right across the Pacific Islands, it’s not just Tonga.

“We have such a rich culture and living in it … it’s just part of you and something I will treasure and value for the rest of my life.

“But then on the other hand, it’s restrictive because there’s nothing else to do.

“You go to school and then after that there was no university, there was no job. What could  you  do on an island? You couldn’t see a future.

“We are bound by culture, we bind by family, we bind by religion. It’s like you are free but you are bound to something.

“That’s just the way it is, and that’s just the island life, and you just grow up understanding it and it’s part of you.”

Now, with internet connectivity many Pasifika children view a more open world, she says.

Done her family duty
Settling in Melbourne and raising two daughters who are happily married with their own kids, she has done her family duty.

Then in a conversation with Ken, Mcleod spoke of her dream of becoming a pilot. However, instead of laughing, her husband told her that she could do it.

“Yes you have to be good at mathematics to be pilot and it takes hard work so no fantasy is ever easy,” she said.

Not long after, Ken became sick with cancer, and underwent chemotherapy. Mcleod focused on his recovery until her husband asked her about what it would take to get her started. He bought her a birthday present of vouchers for an introductory flight, and the rest is history.

Six years later, she earned her air transport pilot’s licence and became  the first Tongan woman to qualify as a pilot, and later a flight instructor.

The work brought Mcleod satisfaction, though she frequently faced both racism and sexism along the way, such as callers would say they wanted to speak to “Mr McLeod”.

Sexism, racism and misogynism, she has experienced it all, but as she said, “my book isn’t about that, I just wanted to tell my story through my eyes”.

An eye on Boeing 777s
As a pilot, Mcleod was “quite happy just flying 737s all around” but  followed with interest as Boeing 777s were developed and introduced, with automated fly-by-wire technology.

“I was based in New Zealand for nearly 12 months — loved my time there. That was on the 737s, so I did all of the domestic routes in New Zealand as well as all the South Pacific islands.

“At first I was based in Christchurch, then when moved Auckland a group of us pilots pooled our allowance and took an apartment at Auckland’s viaduct and we just loved it there, Ken came along and joined us,” she said.

Mcleod then  began working for the Virgin stable  and was trained to pilot 777s there — another thing ticked off her bucket list.

When she joined Royal Tongan Airlines and became  the first pilot  to speak fluent Tongan to the largely Tongan passengers over the intercom, it gave her such pride.

Defining her life
Mcleod underlines her story that flying aeroplanes does not define her life. Her journey, family, cultural identity and partnership with Ken determined her life.

Alas Ken died recently from cancer as the covid-19 pandemic swept through the world, and McLeod says that  until the end they remained both close and committed to breaking down barriers of skin colour and culture.

“I was a wife first, a mother, a grandmother, a carer, and I just call myself a worker … whatever field you have it’s no different. I just wanted to tell my story,” she says.

“And if my story inspires young Pacific women to be who they want to be, then so be it, but that was not my ambition. I just wanted to tell my story,” she says heading out the door to a nearby golf course.

•  Island Girl to Airline Pilot: A Story of Love, Sacrifice and Taking Flight, by Silva Mcleod. Melbourne: Exisle Publishing. ISBN: 9781922539618
  

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Sri Krishnamurthi.

More than a thousand students rallied at the Tennessee state Capitol Thursday to demand gun control, just days after a mass shooting at a Nashville Christian elementary school where three adults and three 9-year-olds were killed. Republicans hold a supermajority in Tennessee’s Legislature and have loosened gun restrictions. We speak with Dr. Katrina Green, an emergency physician in Nashville who has lost patients to gun violence and joined in Thursday’s protest. “People are angry, and that’s part of the reason I went down there, as well,” says Green. “Tennessee has become a state where it just seems like they want everybody to have a gun, no matter what.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Jiang, a former professor of surgery at the People's Liberation Army General Hospital, died of illness in the Chinese capital at 3.39 p.m. local time on March 11, at the age of 87, people close to his family told Radio Free Asia.

Officials put heavy pressure on his family to take a "low-key approach" to his funeral, denying them a cremation slot at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, where high-ranking officials and political figures are usually laid to rest, they said.

"No [public] funeral ceremony will be allowed; only relatives may take part," a directive sent to Jiang's family last week said, adding: "There will be no floral tributes allowed from the general public, and no media interviews given."

The private funeral will take place instead in a purpose-built room in the west wing of the People's Liberation Army General Hospital on Wednesday, a person close to the matter told Radio Free Asia.

"All floral tributes and elegiac verses are to be handed over to Jiang's widow Hua Zhongwei before March 14, then passed onto the hospital authorities for review," the person cited the directive as saying.

"The eulogy has already been written," they said.

Called for reappraisal of Tiananmen Square

In 1989, Jiang was a surgeon in active service at the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Hospital in Beijing, also known as the PLA 301 Hospital, where he took part in the rescue and treatment of the injured during the massacre, which began on the night of June 3.

Jiang later shot to fame in 2003 as the doctor who blew the whistle on a massive cover-up by Chinese health authorities of the extent of the SARS outbreak that year.

On Feb. 24, 2004, he threw the full weight of his fame behind renewed calls for an official reappraisal of the Tiananmen Square protests as a "patriotic movement," risking a happy and peaceful retirement to do so, according to his family.

"He kept calling for a reappraisal of the official verdict on the 1989 student movement, which he thought was a huge mistake on the part of the Chinese Communist Party," the person close to Jiang's family said.

"The authorities put restrictions on his freedom many times over the last 20 years ... although he was still allowed to talk to the media until 2019," they said.

House arrest

Jiang was placed under house arrest soon after his letter to Xi and subsequent interviews with the Hong Kong media, and held incommunicado, with no phone contact with the outside world, the person said.

"Even his son wasn't allowed to contact him for a whole month, and this really affected Dr. Jiang, and his mood," they said. "Later in life, he suffered from Alzheimer's and ... wasn't even allowed to go out of the hospital for a doctor's appointment ... they lived in the living quarters of the 301 Hospital."

"Recently, he was admitted to the high-ranking ward of the 301 Hospital after contracting pneumonia," the person said. "Dr. Jiang died very suddenly – he had never had pneumonia before that, and I'm guessing it was due to COVID-19."

China has seen a huge wave of COVID-19 infections since it lifted its draconian zero-COVID policies in December 2022, following nationwide protests at the end of November. The World Health Organization warned in late January that the number of related deaths was likely far higher than those being reported, in the absence of mass compulsory testing.

Healthcare workers across China have also told Radio Free Asia that they are seeing large numbers of people seriously ill after being reinfected with the Omicron variant of COVID-19, citing the damage wreaked by COVID-19 on the immune system.

‘Noble character’

Zhang Xianling, a co-founder of the Tiananmen Mothers group representing the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, said she thought Jiang was a "noble" person, though she had never met him.

"Everyone knows about what he did," Zhang said. "After he blew the whistle, the government took measures, so [his whistleblowing] was tantamount to saving people's lives right across the country."

"Later, he also spoke out about June 4, 1989, on two or three occasions," she said. "For a member of the Communist Party to stand up for justice and speak out for the people like he did shows him to be a person of very noble character."

Zhou Fengsuo, a former student leader in the 1989 protest movement and now executive director of the U.S.-based Human Rights in China, said Jiang was one of the few Chinese doctors to testify in public to the number of deaths and injuries he saw after the People's Liberation Army put down the peaceful protests with machine guns and tanks.

"There were more than 40 hospitals that received patients during the June 4 massacre, which means that nearly 1,000 doctors would have been involved," Zhou said. "We know the names of some of them."

"But only Jiang Yanyong was brave enough to testify in public, to abandon all claim to status and reputation by doing so, because he would definitely run afoul of the Chinese Communist Party," he said.

"He followed his own conscience and stuck to the truth, which naturally meant he had widespread support," Zhou said.

Letter to Xi

In his 2019 letter to Xi, Jiang said he had seen 89 patients with gunshot wounds in the emergency room of the 301 Hospital in the space of two hours, seven of whom died, a passage that Zhou cited as particularly courageous.

Public memorials and discussion of the events of June 1989 are still largely banned in mainland China, with activists who seek to commemorate the bloodshed often detained, with veteran dissidents placed under police surveillance or detention ahead of each anniversary.

In 2004, Jiang won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service, named for the former president of the Philippines.

"As the virus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome swept unacknowledged into Beijing, he broke China’s habit of silence and forced the truth of SARS into the open," the award website says of Jiang.

"For his bold act, Jiang enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity and was lauded as 'China’s pride,'" it said.

"The ... board of trustees recognizes his brave stand for truth in China, spurring life-saving measures to confront and contain the deadly threat of SARS," the award website said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Amelia Loi and Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

The Massachusetts Democrat has in recent months called on federal agencies including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stop using such surveillance mechanisms to identify people who may have committed crimes, warning the TSA last month that a recent federal study found "Asian and African-American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men by facial recognition technology."

The use of facial recognition stands "in the way of progress and perpetuate[s] injustice," said Markey in a statement.

"The year is 2023, but we are living through 1984. The continued proliferation of surveillance tools like facial recognition technologies in our society is deeply disturbing," said Markey. "Biometric data collection poses serious risks of privacy invasion and discrimination, and Americans know they should not have to forgo personal privacy for safety."

In addition to imposing a strict ban on the use of facial recognition and biometric technologies by federal entities, said Markey, the legislation would:

• Condition federal grant funding to state and local entities, including law enforcement, on those entities enacting their own moratoria on the use of facial recognition and biometric technology;
• Prohibit the use of federal dollars for biometric surveillance systems;
• Prohibit the use of information collected via biometric technology in violation of the law in any judicial proceedings;
• Provide a private right of action for individuals whose biometric data is used in violation of the act and allow for enforcement by state attorneys general; and
• Allow states and localities to enact their own laws regarding the use of facial recognition and biometric technologies.

In Maryland, Alonzo Sawyer was recently arrested near Baltimore for assaulting a bus driver and stealing their phone, despite the fact that he was home at the time of the attack and his wife confirmed his alibi. An intelligence agency used facial recognition technology to match Sawyer to CCTV footage from the bus.

Sawyer was just the latest Black American man to be arrested after being misidentified using facial recognition technology.

Those wrongful arrests are "why I have long called on government to halt the deployment of facial recognition technology," said Jayapal. "This legislation will not only preserve civil liberties but aggressively fight back against injustice by stopping federal entities from irresponsibly using facial recognition and biometric surveillance tools."

"Facial recognition has continued to harm vulnerable communities and erode our privacy, making this legislation more important than ever," said Caitlin Seeley George, campaigns and managing director for digital rights group Fight for the Future, which supports an outright ban on law enforcement use of the technology. "We cannot afford to wait any longer to put this invasive technology in check, and any lawmaker who claims to care about privacy and justice must prove it by supporting this legislation."

As they introduced the bill, Markey and Jayapal were joined by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders(I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren(D-Mass.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Reps. Ayanna Pressley(D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib(D-Mich.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Jamaal Bowman(D-N.Y.), and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

As Common Dreamsreported Tuesday, a lawsuit filed by the ACLU unveiled a "major investment" by the FBI in the development of facial recognition software.

"This sweeping government surveillance software is a nightmare for our privacy rights," said the ACLU Tuesday. "Lawmakers need to close the door on government abuse of this technology now, before it's too late."

The newly reintroduced legislation demonstrates that "Markey understands Congress should not be using federal funds to underwrite the use of technologies that threaten our most sacred civil rights and civil liberties," said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel for the organization. "The ACLU applauds Sen. Markey's leadership on this issue and thanks all the members of Congress who join him in safeguarding our freedoms against the prying eyes of unchecked government surveillance."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

A video clip of a doctor sexually violating a patient is widely circulating on social media with the claim that a pregnant woman was raped by a doctor named Islam Muhammad in the operation theatre of a hospital.

Sharing this clip on Twitter, user Sumit Kumar Sondhi wrote in Hindi, “Doctor Islam Mohammad, who raped unconscious pregnant women in the operation room.” (Archive.)

Another Twitter user Shivani Yaduvanshi also shared the clip with the same captions. (Archive.)

Other Twitter users who have shared the videos include @ManavPatel123, @SurajMi50567890, @maxchandan16 and many more.

Fact Check

We broke down the video into key-frames and performed a Google reverse image search. This took us to a tweet by The Rio Times from July 2022. As per this tweet, the man in the video is Brazilian doctor/anesthesiologist  Giovanni Quintella Bezerra, who was caught on camera orally raping a woman during a C-section.

The tweet also says that the doctor was later placed under arrest. Alt News has not embedded the tweet as the video provided on the platform was not blurred.

We performed an additional keyword search using the words “Doctor Giovanni Quintella Bezerra”. This took us to a detailed report by Daily Mail.

As per this report, Giovanni Quintella Bezerra, 32, had qualified as an anaesthetist in April 2022, three months before his video went viral. It says that some of Bezerra’s colleagues grew suspicion of him after it was noticed that he sedated C-section patients so heavily that they were barely conscious. After this, during a surgery in which Bezerra was involved, nurses placed a mobile phone in a cabinet and recorded him. It was seen that as surgeons operated on the patient, Bezerra strategically positioned himself near the head of the patient and raped her. Because of a surgical curtain, the other doctors could not see him in the act.

The report says that five other patients came forward after the incident was widely reported in the media. A local media outlet called ‘Globo‘ reported that the same doctor was previously accused of misdiagnosing a patient after which the patient was put in a 23-day coma.

In November 2022, CNN Brasil reported that a bail request for Giovanni Quintella Bezerra was rejected by the local courts. A detailed report about Bezerra’s arrest was also published by CNN, with additional information about the risks of high doses of sedatives.

So, it can be confirmed that the video is from Brazil and the individual arrested is Giovanni Quintella Bezerra.

To sum it up, a video in which a doctor can be seen sexually violating a patient was shared with a false claim that the doctor’s name was Islam Muhammad.

The post Viral video: Doctor sexually assaulting patient is Giovanni Quintella Bezerra from Brazil, not ‘Islam Mohammad’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

This story discusses sexual assault.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

At 19 years old and about to be married, Stephanie Mateer went to an OB-GYN within walking distance of her student housing near Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

She wanted to start using birth control, and she was looking for guidance about having sex for the first time on her 2008 wedding night.

Mateer was shocked, she said, when Dr. David Broadbent reached under her gown to grab and squeeze her breasts, started a vaginal exam without warning, then followed it with an extremely painful examination of her rectum.

She felt disgusted and violated, but doubt also creeped in. She told herself she must have misinterpreted his actions, or that she should have known that he would do a rectal exam. Raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she said she was taught to defer to men in leadership.

“I viewed him as being a man in authority,” Mateer said. “He’s a doctor.”

It was years, Mateer said, before she learned that her experience was in a sharp contrast to the conduct called for in professional standards, including that doctors use only their fingertips during a breast exam and communicate clearly what they are doing in advance, to gain the consent of their patient. Eventually, she gave her experience another name: sexual assault.

Utah judges, however, have called it health care.

And that legal distinction means Utahns like Mateer who decide to sue a health care provider for alleged sexual abuse are treated more harshly by the court system than plaintiffs who say they were harmed in other settings.

The chance to go to civil court for damages is an important option for survivors, experts say. While a criminal conviction can provide a sense of justice, winning a lawsuit can help victims pay for the therapy and additional support they need to heal after trauma.

Mateer laid out her allegations in a lawsuit that she and 93 other women filed against Broadbent last year. But they quickly learned they would be treated differently than other sexual assault survivors.

Filing their case, which alleged the Utah County doctor sexually assaulted them over the span of his 47-year career, was an empowering moment, Mateer said. But a judge threw out the lawsuit without even considering the merits, determining that because their alleged assailant is a doctor, the case must be governed by medical malpractice rules rather than those that apply to cases of sexual assault.

Under Utah’s rules of medical malpractice, claims made by victims who allege a health care worker sexually assaulted them are literally worth less than lawsuits brought by someone who was assaulted in other settings — even if a jury rules in their favor, a judge is required to limit how much money they receive. And they must meet a shorter filing deadline.

“It’s just crazy that a doctor can sexually assault women and then be protected by the white coat,” Mateer said. “It’s just a really scary precedent to be calling sexual assault ‘health care.’”

Because of the judge’s ruling that leaves them with a shorter window in which to file, some of Broadbent’s accusers stand to lose their chance to sue. Others were already past that deadline but had hoped to take advantage of an exception that allows a plaintiff to sue if they can prove that the person who harmed them had covered up the wrongdoing and if they discovered they had been hurt within the previous year.

As a group, the women are appealing the ruling to the Utah Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear the case. This decision will set a precedent for future sexual assault victims in Utah.

Broadbent’s attorney, Chris Nelson, declined an interview request but wrote in an email: “We believe that the allegations against Dr. Broadbent are without merit and will present our case in court. Given that this is an active legal matter, we will not be sharing any details outside the courtroom.”

States have varying legal definitions of medical malpractice, but it’s generally described as treatment that falls short of accepted standards of care. That includes mistakes, like a surgeon leaving a piece of gauze inside a patient.

Utah is among the states with the broadest definition of medical malpractice, covering any acts “arising” out of health care. The Utah Supreme Court has ruled that a teenage boy was receiving health care when he was allowed to climb a steep, snow-dusted rock outcrop as part of wilderness therapy. When he broke his leg, he could only sue for medical malpractice, so the case faced shorter filing deadlines and lower monetary caps. Similarly, the court has ruled that a boy harmed by another child while in foster care was also bound by medical malpractice law.

Despite these state Supreme Court rulings, Utah legislators have so far not moved to narrow the wording of the malpractice act.

The lawsuit against Broadbent — and the questions it raises about the broadness of Utah’s medical malpractice laws — comes during a national reckoning with how sexual assault survivors are treated by the law. Legislators in several states have been rewriting laws to give sexual assault victims more time to sue their attackers, in response to the growing cultural understanding of the impact of trauma and the barriers to reporting. Even in Utah, those who were sexually abused as children now have no deadline to file suits against their abusers.

That isn’t true for sexual abuse in a medical setting, where cases must be filed within two years of the assault.

These higher hurdles should not exist in Utah, said state Sen. Mike McKell, a Utah County Republican who works as a personal injury attorney. He is trying to change state law to ensure that sexual assault lawsuits do not fall under Utah’s Health Care Malpractice Act, a law designed to cover negligence and poor care, not necessarily deliberate actions like an assault.

“Sexual assault, to me, is not medical care. Period,” he said. “It’s sad that we need to clarify that sexual assault is not medical care. But trying to tie sexual assault to a medical malpractice [filing deadline] — it’s just wrong.”

Mateer had gone to Broadbent in 2008 for a premarital exam, a uniquely Utah visit often scheduled by young women who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Leaders of the faith, which is predominant in Utah, focus on chastity when speaking to young, unmarried people about sex, and public schools have typically focused on abstinence-based sex education. So for some, these visits are the first place they learn about sexual health.

Young women who get premarital exams are typically given a birth control prescription, but the appointments can also include care that’s less common for healthy women in other states — like doctors giving them vaginal dilators to stretch their tissue before their wedding night.

That’s what Mateer was expecting when she visited Broadbent’s office. The OB-GYN had been practicing for decades in his Provo clinic nestled between student housing apartments across the street from Brigham Young University, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

So Mateer was “just totally taken aback,” she said, by the painful examination and by Broadbent snapping off his gloves after the exam and saying, “Your husband is a lucky man.”

She repeated that remark in her legal filing, along with the doctor’s advice for her: If she bled during intercourse, “just do what the Boy Scouts do and apply pressure.”

“The whole thing was like I’m some object for my husband to enjoy and let him do whatever he wants,” Mateer said. “It was just very violating and not a great way to start my sexual relationship with my new husband, with these ideas in mind.”

Mateer thought back to that visit over the years, particularly when she went to other OB-GYNs for health care. Her subsequent doctors, she said, never performed a rectal exam and always explained to her what they were doing and how it would feel, and asked for her consent.

She thought about Broadbent again in 2017, as the #MeToo movement gained momentum, and looked him up online. Mateer found reviews from other women who described Broadbent doing rough examinations without warning that left them feeling the same way she had years before.

Then in December 2021, she spoke out on “Mormon Stories,” a podcast where people who have left or have questioned their Latter-day Saint faith share their life stories. In the episode, she described the painful way he examined her, how it left her feeling traumatized and her discovery of the reviews that echoed her experience.

“He’s on University Avenue, in Provo, giving these exams to who knows how many naive Mormon 18-year-old, 19-year-old girls who are getting married. … They are naive and they don’t know what to expect,” she said on the podcast. “His name is Dr. David Broadbent.”

After the podcast aired, Mateer was flooded with messages from women who heard the episode and reached out to tell her that Broadbent had harmed them, too.

Mateer and three other women decided to sue the OB-GYN, and in the following weeks and months, 90 additional women joined the lawsuit they filed in Provo. Many of the women allege Broadbent inappropriately touched their breasts, vaginas and rectums, hurting them, without warning or explanation. Some said he used his bare hand — instead of using a speculum or gloves — during exams. One alleged that she saw he had an erection while he was touching her.

Broadbent’s actions were not medically necessary, the women allege, and were instead “performed for no other reason than his own sexual gratification.”

The lawsuit also named as defendants two hospitals where Broadbent had delivered babies and where some of the women allege they were assaulted. The suit accused hospital administrators of knowing about Broadbent’s inappropriate behavior and doing nothing about it.

After he was sued, the OB-GYN quickly lost his privileges at the hospitals where he worked. Broadbent, now 75, has also voluntarily put his medical license in Utah on hold while police investigate 29 reports of sexual assault made against him.

Prosecutors are still considering whether to criminally prosecute Broadbent. Provo police forwarded more than a dozen reports to the Utah County attorney’s office in November, which are still being reviewed by a local prosecutor.

A spokesperson for Intermountain Health, the nonprofit health system that owns Utah Valley Hospital, where some of the women in the suit were treated, did not respond to specific questions. The spokesperson emphasized in an email that Broadbent was an “independent physician” who was not employed by Utah Valley Hospital, adding that most of the alleged incidents took place at Broadbent’s medical office.

A representative for MountainStar Healthcare, another hospital chain named as a defendant, denied knowledge of any allegations of inappropriate conduct reported to its hospital and also emphasized that Broadbent worked independently, not as an employee.

“Our position since this lawsuit was filed has been that we were inappropriately named in this suit,” said Brittany Glas, the communications director for MountainStar.

For the women who sued Broadbent, their case boiled down to a key question: Were the sexual assaults they say they experienced part of their health care? There was a lot hanging on the answer.

If their case was considered medical malpractice, they would be limited in how much money they could receive in damages for their pain and suffering. If a jury awarded them millions of dollars, a judge would be required by law to cut that down to $450,000. There’s no cap on these monetary awards for victims sexually assaulted in other settings.

They would also be required to go before a panel, which includes a doctor, a lawyer and a community member, that decides whether their claims have merit. This step, aimed at resolving disputes out of court, does not block anyone from suing afterward. But it does add cost and delay, and for sexual assault victims who’ve gone through this step, it has been another time they were required to describe their experiences and hope they were believed.

The shorter, two-year filing deadline for medical malpractice cases can also be a particular challenge for those who have been sexually abused because research shows that it’s common to delay reporting such assaults.

Nationwide, these kinds of malpractice reforms were adopted in the 1970s amid concerns — largely driven by insurance companies — that the cost of health care was rising because of frivolous lawsuits and “runaway juries” doling out multimillion-dollar payouts.

Restricting the size of malpractice awards and imposing other limits, many argued, were effective ways to balance compensating injured patients with protecting everyone’s access to health care.

State laws are generally silent on whether sexual assault lawsuits should be covered by malpractice laws, leaving courts to grapple with that question and leading to different conclusions across the country. The Tribune and ProPublica identified at least six cases in which state appellate judges sharply distinguished between assault and health care in considering whether malpractice laws should apply to sexual assault-related cases.

An appellate court in Wisconsin, for example, ruled in 1993 that a physician having an erection and groping a patient was a purposeful harm, not medical malpractice.

Florida’s law is similar to Utah’s, defining allegations “arising” out of medical care as malpractice. While an earlier ruling did treat sexual assault in a health care setting as medical malpractice, appellate rulings in the last decade have moved away from that interpretation. In 2005, an appellate court affirmed a lower-court ruling that when a dentist “stopped providing dental treatment to the victim and began sexually assaulting her, his professional services ended.”

Similarly, a federal judge in Iowa in 1995 weighed in on the meaning of “arising” out of health care: “Rape is not patient care activity,” he wrote.

But Utah’s malpractice law is so broad that judges have been interpreting it as covering any act performed by a health care provider during medical care. The law was passed in 1976 and is popular with doctors and other health care providers, who have lobbied to keep it in place — and who use it to get lawsuits dismissed.

One precedent-setting case in Utah shows the law’s power to safeguard health care providers and was an important test of how Utah defines medical malpractice. Jacob Scott sued WinGate Wilderness Therapy after the teen broke his leg in 2015 when a hiking guide from the center allowed him to climb up and down a steep outcrop in Utah’s red rock desert.

His parents are both lawyers, and after they found that Utah had a four-year deadline for filing a personal injury lawsuit, court records said, they decided to prioritize “getting Jacob better” for the first two years after the accident. But when Scott’s suit was filed, WinGate argued it was too late — based on the shorter, two-year deadline for medical malpractice claims.

Scott’s attorneys scoffed. “Interacting with nature,” his attorneys argued, “is not health care even under the broadest interpretation of … the Utah Health Care Malpractice Act.”

A judge disagreed and threw out Scott’s case. The Utah Supreme Court unanimously upheld that ruling in 2021.

“We agree with Wingate,” the justices wrote, “that it was acting as a ‘health care provider’ and providing ‘health care’ when Jacob was hiking and rock climbing.”

Last summer, the women who had sued Broadbent and the two hospitals watched online as lawyers debated whether the abuse they allegedly suffered was health care.

At the hearing, attorneys for Broadbent and the hospitals argued that the women should have pursued a medical malpractice case, which required them to first notify Broadbent and the hospitals that they wanted to sue. They also argued to Judge Robert Lunnen that the case couldn’t move forward because the women hadn’t gone before a pre-litigation panel.

Attorneys for Broadbent and the hospitals argued, one after the other, that the painful and traumatic exams the women described arose out of health care treatments.

“Accepting the allegations of the complaint as true — as we must for purposes of this proceeding — we have to assume that [Broadbent] did something that was medically unnecessary, medically inappropriate,” argued David Jordan, a lawyer for Intermountain Health.

“But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s an act performed to a patient, during the patient’s treatment,” he said. “Because that’s what the patient is doing in the doctor’s office. They’re there for treatment.”

The attorney team for the women pushed back. Terry Rooney argued that if Broadbent’s actions fell under medical malpractice laws, many women would be knocked out of the case because of the age of their claims, and those who remained would be limited in the amount of money in damages they could receive.

“That’s really what this is about,” he argued. “And so it’s troubling — quite frankly it’s shocking to me — that we’re debating heavily the question of whether sexual abuse is health care.”

The judge mulled the issue for months. Lunnen wrote in a September ruling that if the allegations were true, Broadbent’s treatment of his patients was “insensitive, disrespectful and degrading.”

But Utah law is clear, he said. Malpractice law covers any act or treatment performed by any health care provider during the patient’s medical care. The women had all been seeking health care, Lunnen wrote, and Broadbent was providing that when the alleged assaults happened.

Their lawsuit was dismissed.

Brooke, another plaintiff who alleges Broadbent groped her, remembers feeling sick on the June day she watched the attorneys arguing. She asked to be identified by only her first name for this story.

She alleges Broadbent violated her in December 2008 while she was hospitalized after experiencing complications with her first pregnancy.

The nearest hospital to her rural town didn’t have a special unit to take care of premature babies, and her doctors feared she might need to deliver her son six weeks early. So Brooke had been rushed by ambulance over a mountain pass in a snowstorm to Utah Valley Hospital.

Brooke and her husband were terrified, she said, when they arrived at the Provo hospital. Broadbent happened to be the doctor on call. With Brooke’s husband and brother-in-law in the room, Broadbent examined her late that evening, she said, listening to her chest with a stethoscope.

The doctor then suddenly grabbed her breasts, she recalled — his movements causing her hospital gown to fall to expose her chest. She recounted this experience in her lawsuit, saying it was nothing like the breast exams she has had since.

“It was really traumatizing,” she said. “I was mortified. My husband and brother-in-law — we just didn’t say anything about it because it was so uncomfortable.”

Brooke voiced concerns to the nurse manager, and she was assigned a new doctor.

She gave birth to a healthy baby a little more than a month later, at the hospital near her home.

Hearing the judge’s ruling 14 years later, Brooke felt the decision revealed how Utah’s laws are broken.

“I was frustrated,” she said, “and I felt defeated. … I thought justice is not on our side with this.”

If the Utah Supreme Court rules that these alleged sexual assaults should legally be considered health care, the women will likely refile their claims as a medical malpractice lawsuit, said their attorney, Adam Sorensen. But it would be a challenge to keep all 94 women in the case, he said, due to the shorter filing window. Only two women in the lawsuit allege that they were harmed within the last two years.

The legal team for the women would have to convince a judge that their claims should still be allowed because they only recently discovered they were harmed. But based on previous rulings, Sorensen believes the women will have a better chance to win that argument if the civil suit remained a sexual assault case.

Regardless of what happens in their legal case, the decision by Brooke and the other women to come forward could help change state law for victims who come after them.

Last week, McKell, the state senator, introduced legislation to clarify that civil lawsuits alleging sexual assault by a health care worker do not fall under Utah’s Health Care Malpractice Act.

“I don’t think it’s a close call. Sexual assault is not medical care,” he said. “I know we’ve got some bizarre rulings that have come down through our courts in Utah.”

Both an association of Utah trial lawyers and the Utah Medical Association, which lobbies on behalf of the state’s physicians, support this reform.

“We support the fact that sexual assault should not be part of health care medical malpractice,” said Michelle McOmber, the CEO for the Utah Medical Association. “Sexual assault should be sexual assault, regardless of where it happens or who’s doing it. Sexual assault should be in that category, which is separate from actual health care. Because it’s not health care.”

MountainStar doesn’t have a position on the bill, Glas said. “If the laws were to change via new legislation and/or interpretation by the courts, we would abide by and comply with those new laws.”

But lawmakers are running out of time. With only a week and a half left in Utah’s legislative session, state senate and house leaders have so far prioritized passing new laws banning gender-affirming health care for transgender youths and creating a controversial school voucher program that will provide taxpayer funds for students to attend private school.

Utah lawmakers were also expected to consider a dramatic change for other sexual assault victims: a bill that would remove filing deadlines for civil lawsuits brought by people abused as adults. But that bill stalled before it could even be debated.

Brooke had been eager to share her story, she said, in hopes it would help the first four women who’d come forward bolster their lawsuit against Broadbent. She later joined the case as a plaintiff. She read in their lawsuit about one woman who complained about him to the same hospital seven years before she did, and about another woman who said Broadbent similarly molested her two days after Brooke had expressed her own concern.

“That bothered me so much,” she said. “It didn’t have to happen to all these women.”

Brooke doubts she’ll get vindication in a courtroom. Justice for her, she suspects, won’t come in the form of a legal ruling or a settlement against the doctor she says hurt her years ago.

Instead, she said, “maybe justice looks like changing the laws for future women.”

Help ProPublica and The Salt Lake Tribune Investigate Sexual Assault in Utah

If you need to report or discuss a sexual assault in Utah, you can call the Rape and Sexual Assault Crisis Line at 801-736-4356. Those who live outside of Utah can reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune.

The death toll in Turkey and Syria has passed 19,300 and continues to rise following Monday’s devastating earthquakes. Many survivors are without shelter, heat, food, water or medical care, and the first United Nations aid only reached northwest Syria three days after the quakes. Rescue efforts in Syria have been further complicated by damage and displacement from 12 years of war and harsh sanctions. Prior to the earthquake, the U.N. estimated over 14 million people inside Syria needed humanitarian assistance and that more than 12 million struggled to find enough food, including half a million Syrian children who are chronically malnourished. Syrian doctor Houssam al-Nahhas says humanitarian workers and healthcare providers working in the region urgently need support from the rest of the world. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are still under rubble,” says al-Nahhas. He is Middle East and North Africa researcher at Physicians for Human Rights and a former emergency trauma physician in Aleppo.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist, died on Feb. 7, 2020, from contracting the virus shortly after warning his colleagues about the COVID virus.

He was silenced by Chinese authorities for spreading rumors when the outbreak began. 

Three years later, many people regard him as a symbol for freedom of speech in China.

“This is a really important event because it’s not really just for him,” said Viola, a recent graduate of New York University who requested not to reveal her last name.

“It’s also for a lot of the people who passed away in the past three years because of the evil COVID-19 policy that the CCP government forced on its people,” she said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

In the months after the outbreak, President Xi Jinping enacted a strict zero-COVID policy and ordered lockdowns in many cities across the country. 

Authorities lifted the restrictions in December after protests around the country in late November dubbed the “white paper” movement because of the blank white papers that protesters held up to show their dissatisfaction with the lockdowns as well as limits on freedom of speech.

Viola explained that authorities couldn’t ban protesters from holding up blank sheets of paper, and yet they also became a symbol of self-expression and resistance against the government.

“That’s kind of the whole image of the revolution,” she said. “It means we don’t even have to display what’s on our paper. We just have to hold it up and you will know exactly what we’re saying.”

‘Collective trauma’

Viola had never experienced political demonstrations growing up in mainland China and found it comforting to join a community where her voice could be heard. 

“It’s really special to be able to come here and … talk about these issues and to understand that this has been a collective trauma,” said Viola.

Zhou Fengsuo, president of Humanitarian China, said the white paper movement was the largest demonstrations in China since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. 

“This was definitely the first time that I’m seeing such a deep, profound change in the young people,” said Zhou. “They are awakening to their true identity. They have transformed themselves through protesting, through calling for freedom in China.”

Zhou said he was hopeful for the younger generation, that they might bring change.

He quoted one of Dr. Li’s final utterances: “A healthy society cannot have only one voice.”

“As the pandemic is ending globally, we must remember what happened,” Zhou said. “Because there is no freedom in China, the whole world has paid a deep price for it.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lauren Kim of RFA.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Georgina Budd.

Dr. Simone Gold, a convicted U.S. Capitol insurrectionist and the founder of the vaccine disinformation group America’s Frontline Doctors, has offered to help Elon Musk assemble a team of doctors to fact-check medical information on Twitter.

“If you would like to put together a group of honest, brilliant, courageous doctors to ‘fact check,’ then I would be glad to assist you,” wrote Gold in a December 5 letter to Musk that she shared with her 587,000 Twitter followers and over 1 million email subscribers. “Medicine will not advance unless unbiased scientists are able to resist special interest groups and the media.”

Gold is the ringleader of a network of right-wing health-care providers that have made millions selling so-called alternatives to vaccines, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which have been repeatedly discredited as treatments for Covid. Gold has referred to Covid-19 vaccines as “experimental biological agents.” She’s also currently in a legal fight with AFLDS and its board chair who are suing her, alleging extravagant spending and that she lives rent-free in a $3.6 million house bought with AFLDS charity funds.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Micah Lee.

Tudahun Nurehmet, also known by the surname Mahmud, was the former chief of the Achatagh Hospital in Uchturpan (in Chinese, Wushi) county, Aksu (Akesu) prefecture. 

In 2013, he was sentenced for treating a person Chinese authorities identified as a terrorist who was wounded during a clash in Aksu's Aykol (Ayikule) township in August of that year.

On that day, a brawl between Muslim Uyghurs and police broke out during a security check of a mosque on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr Islamic festival marks the end of the month-long dawn-to-sunset fasting of Ramadan. 

During the altercation, police fired at unarmed people, killing three Uyghurs and wounding 20 others, RFA reported. Those who were wounded  either were taken to the hospital or left the area and sought treatment on their own, according to a policeman who was at the scene.

It was at one of these hospitals that Tudahun apparently treated one of the wounded, fulfilling his role as a doctor – which later got him arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison because the patient was identified as a terrorist. 

Kidney disease in prison

Tudahun was released to his family because of his deteriorating health and died of kidney complications on Sept. 18, according to a person named “Nurxenim Uyghur” who posts information about the deaths of Uyghurs in Xinjiang on Facebook.

A police officer in the town of Achatagh said Tudahun served his sentence in Urumqi’s No. 6 prison, though he did not have information about the physician’s death.

A village policeman from Achatagh said Tudahun, the father of two children, was released one year ago and had a severe kidney problem and could not walk. He was healthy before his arrest and died due to a kidney disease that developed during his prison time, the police officer said.

A second village police officer from the area told RFA that Tudahun was accused of protecting “a crime suspect” because he treated that person’s wound, but he could not provide the suspect’s name or the place where he received medical care.

“They did not tell us whom he treated,” he said. “It was due to an incident that took place on Eid day.“

Tudahun “was taken away on the third day of Eid,” the village policeman said. “I don’t know if the wounded people came to the hospital or if he went to treat them. I heard he treated ‘the terrorists’ and was therefore accused of aiding them.”

A village Communist Party secretary in Achatagh said Tudahun was sentenced to eight years for removing a bullet from the foot of a wounded suspect involved in the “August 8th incident” in Aksu, referring to the deadly clashes.

“He was arrested because he hid the situation of a person who got shot, and he treated him,” he said.

But he said Tudahun was a very skilled physician who treated patients from other towns and villages.

The party secretary said Tudahun treated the suspect on the day the incident occurred, and when the suspect was arrested on the second day, he exposed Tudahun, and police subsequently arrested the doctor. 

“He was taken from his home,” the secretary said.

As for the suspect, he left after receiving medical treatment and was later arrested at another location. 

Another death after release

In a similar case of an Uyghur individual dying after being released from prison, 27-year-old Alimjan Abdureshit from the town of Toqquzaq (Tuokezhake) in Kashgar (Kashi) prefecture, died on Oct. 2, about 40 days after his release from a prison or an internment camp, according to the same the Facebook page of “Nurxenim Uyghur.”

He was detained for five years for participating in “illegal religious activities.”

A staffer at a neighborhood committee in Kashgar Yengisheher (Shule) county told RFA that police took away the body of Abdurishit, who died from a combination of illness and starvation during a recent coronavirus lockdown there.

RFA reported earlier that authorities in Xinjiang have been collecting the bodies of deceased Uyghurs, many of whom died of starvation or lack of medical treatment during lockdowns, without informing their relatives whether their corpses would be handled according to Islamic burial rituals.

Abdureshit lived in downtown Toqquzaq when police took the former school security guard to the internment camp in 2017, said an expatriate from the county who has knowledge of the situation.

A neighborhood committee staffer in Kashgar Yengisheher said authorities took Abdurishit away to receive so-called “education” while he was working at a middle school. 

Abdureshit was healthy before his detainment, he said, though he did not know if the young man had been ill when he was released or if he died because of starvation during the lockdown.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Reported in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

On September 19th, Atlanta became one of the latest municipalities to pass a resolution endorsing national universal health coverage. This important local action is aspirational in its urging of the United States Congress to pass the Medicare for All Act of 2021 - 2022 (H.R. 1976). However, the need for the affordable insurance this legislation would provide for every American is huge and pressing.

Corporations are about profits. We need a national single payer health insurance program. It is time to join the growing wave of support for passage of the Medicare for All Act of 2021.

Luckily, the momentum behind Medicare for All is growing as Americans increasingly see that access to adequate, affordable, and equitable healthcare is an urgent need. The passage of this resolution comes just weeks after the Georgia State Democratic Convention adopted a similar resolution in support of an improved Medicare for All national health insurance program. Since 2018, over 100 cities and counties across the country have passed resolutions in support of Medicare for All. Last October, the American Public Health Association issued a policy statement declaring that healthcare is a human right and calling for the adoption of a single-payer health system to provide universal coverage in the best, most efficient, and equitable way.

Here is why national universal health coverage is so important to me. I am a private practice physician, a mother, and a cancer survivor. As a physician, I spend countless hours fighting with insurance companies to help my patients get the care they need. I watch them struggle to pay their medical bills. And I see the negative outcomes when they decline recommended treatments because they simply cannot afford to pay. As a physician who trained and worked in private and public healthcare systems for twenty years, I regularly see the encroachment of health management corporations into medical decision-making. As a private practice physician and a small business owner with a pre-existing health condition, I struggle to find appropriate health coverage for myself and my family. 

From each vantage point—as a patient, a provider, and a small business owner—I see everyday how for-profit corporations fail to provide adequate access and coverage for vital health care services. I had to do something different. So I joined Physicians for a National Health Program and began advocating for change. 

On September 27th, the same day that I addressed the Atlanta City Council's Community Development/Human Services Committee and thanked them for passing the resolution in support of Medicare for All, I attended a rally on the steps of Grady Hospital, Atlanta's largest public hospital. Doctors were gathered there to protest Governor Brian Kemp's disastrous and stubborn refusal to expand Medicaid in Georgia, a policy that prevents access to care, results in negative health outcomes, and exacerbates a concerning trend of rural hospital closures. Georgia is one of only twelve states that has not expanded Medicaid, a provision in the Affordable Care Act that extends Medicaid coverage to almost all adults earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Georgia also ranks 41st in healthcare access and 43rd in healthcare outcomes. 

The action taken by Atlanta City Council in passing a resolution endorsing Medicare for All comes at a critical time when Atlanta is experiencing a monumental casualty due to the failed policy of the Georgia's Governor and its state legislature—the closure of a large city hospital.

In early September, Wellstar Health Systems, which owns and operates the Atlanta Medical Center (AMC), announced that the hospital will be closing its doors on November 1. AMC is one of two hospitals that the city of Atlanta relies on to care for the uninsured and most economically disadvantaged residents of Fulton and Dekalb Counties. Besides Grady, AMC is also the only other Level 1 trauma center in the city, providing treatment for the most severely injured. In the shadow of the impending crisis of AMC's closure, doctors from Grady addressed the public about the importance of expanding Medicaid in Georgia, a move that would insure hundreds of thousands of Georgians who live in poverty, bring revenue to the hospitals who serve them, and potentially avert more disastrous hospital closures. In the past ten years, eight rural hospitals in Georgia have closed, with deadly consequences. Now similar impacts will be felt on a large city scale within a ten-minute walk of City Hall and a short drive from the state Capitol.  

Expanding Medicaid in Georgia is one part of the solution to our healthcare dilemma. But it is not enough. We must guarantee adequate and equitable health coverage for all Americans regardless of their socioeconomic status, their zip code, or whether or not they are employed. 

The Atlanta City Council, in passing a resolution in support of Medicare for All, inspires those in other cities and counties to take similar stands for affordable healthcare. Such actions amplify the voices of Americans who lack health insurance or are dissatisfied with their health care coverage. A recent AP-NORC pollshowed that 56% of Americans are dissatisfied with America's healthcare system and only 10% of respondents said that our health care is handled well or very well. 

Perhaps the radical idea was thinking that corporations could be relied upon to provide reasonable coverage at a reasonable cost for the majority of Americans. As it turns out, that is simply not what corporations are about. Corporations are about profits. We need a national single payer health insurance program. It is time to join the growing wave of support for passage of the Medicare for All Act of 2021.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Dr. Belinda McIntosh.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Darcey Edkins.

Ho Hoang Anh collided with a seven-seater military carrier driven by Maj. Hoang Van Minh of the 937th regiment, 370th division, as she went to pick up a permit for her final exam.

The crash threw Ho from her scooter, smashing her head into an electricity pole and she died on the way to hospital.

Security camera video from the scent showed the army people carrier turning right into a slope and colliding with the scooter.

Video of the crash went viral on social media with many blaming the army officer for the girl’s death.

More than two weeks after the June 28 accident the girl’s father released the blood alcohol test results he received from the police. They showed her alcohol level was 0.79 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood.

Despite the low alcohol level, many people on social media said the release of the test result was an attempt to exonerate the army officer by implying that drink was to blame.

Doctor and social activist Dinh Duc Long said the alcohol concentration was too low to affect Ho’s driving ability.

“According to Decree No. 100/2019/ND-CP of the Government, the administrative fine level starts to apply to road users when having an alcohol concentration in blood of 50 milligrams to 100 milliliters,” he said.

“Thus, the Scientific Council of Ninh Thuan Provincial General Hospital should publicly conclude that the blood alcohol concentration of the victim is normal according to the standards of the Ministry of Health.”

A local paper quoted Bui Van Ky, deputy director of the Ninh Thuan Department of Health, as saying that according to Decision 320 of the Ministry of Health, blood/alcohol levels less than 50.23 milligrams per100 milliliters are considered to have no alcohol content.

He also said foods such as fruit, yogurt or carbonated soft drinks can also cause small amounts of alcohol to be present in the blood.

"It is necessary to conduct experiments at the scene to conclude who violated the road traffic law causing death,” Dr Long told RFA, adding that not everyone who is drunk causes traffic accidents.

Lawyer Nguyen Kha Thanh said it was more important to discover whether the girl was observing traffic regulations than to test her blood for alcohol.

“Even if the female student had a high blood alcohol concentration, if she followed the law and did not encroach on the road, the person who collided with her would still be responsible for the accident,” he said

Ho’s father was enraged on hearing the blood alcohol results. He immediately filed a complaint asking for a review of claims his daughter’s drinking caused the crash, and spoke with many newspapers to make the point that alcohol was not to blame.

After receiving Ho Hoang Hung’s petition the People's Committee of Ninh Thuan province asked the provincial police to carry out an urgent investigation to verify the blood/alcohol test result.

The military criminal investigation agency issued a notice on July 25, asking for witnesses to the accident.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

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A dozen years ago, a Santa Monica, California, pain doctor named Gerald M. Sacks emerged as one of the pharmaceutical industry’s top paid speakers — anointed to extol the virtues of a variety of drugs, even though several experts in pain medicine said they’d never heard of him.

His drug company haul had occurred largely under the radar until 2010, when ProPublica started digging into what the firms were paying physicians to deliver talks and consult on their pills. That’s when we consolidated the payments from seven companies, most of which had been forced by government settlements to make them public, in a database we called Dollars for Docs.

Sacks turned out to be a big winner, and we wrote about how little in his resume explained why. He was even a focus of an op-ed we wrote in the Los Angeles Times about how patients are often unaware of the relationships their doctors have with drug companies.

Nevertheless, companies continued to pay Sacks large sums. From 2015 to 2021, he received more than $2 million from companies to speak and consult on their behalf, including spending on travel and meals, federal data shows.

But last month — 12 years since we first wrote about him — Sacks’ puzzling role as one of the drugmakers’ chosen pain doctors took a different turn: Federal prosecutors allege he’d been paid to prescribe.

Sacks agreed to pay more than $270,000 to resolve allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that he’d accepted kickbacks from drug companies Purdue Pharma and DepoMed to prescribe their products. Purdue is the maker of OxyContin and pleaded guilty in 2020 to, among other things, conspiring to provide kickbacks to doctors. The Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits doctors from prescribing drugs in exchange for speaking or consulting payments from drug manufacturers.

From 2015 to 2018, Purdue paid Sacks more than $70,000 for speaking and consulting. DepoMed, which changed its name to Assertio Therapeutics in 2018, paid him more than $285,000 for speaking and consulting from 2015 to 2018, according to the federal government’s Open Payments database. Neither Assertio nor its predecessor, DepoMed, has been accused by the government of wrongdoing.

Sacks writes a few thousand prescriptions a year, including refills, to patients in the federal Medicare program. Among the tally in years past were hundreds of prescriptions for the drugs for which the government accused him of taking kickbacks.

Sacks denied wrongdoing in the settlement and did not return phone calls seeking comment. Neither Purdue Pharma nor Assertio returned emails seeking comment.

“Physicians are prohibited from accepting kickbacks designed to influence their decision making,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael D. Granston said in a news release. “Adherence to this prohibition is especially crucial with regard to dangerous drugs like opioids.”

The allegations against Sacks relate to his prescribing of the drugs Butrans, Hysingla and OxyContin, made by Purdue, to patients on Medicare between December 2010 and October 2021. They also cite his prescribing of the drugs Gralise, Lazanda and Nucynta, made by DepoMed, to Medicare beneficiaries in 2016.

Experts say the evidence is now overwhelming that there is a strong association between drug company payments and doctor prescribing. This link is worrisome, they say, because doctors should prescribe medications solely based on what’s best for the patient, not because they receive money from the company that makes a drug. Some prescription drugs may be more expensive or have greater side effects than cheaper or generic alternatives.

Today, the federal government collects information on payments from all drug and device makers in its Open Payments database. Researchers say such payments show that patients and regulators need to be on guard.

In a research article last month in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the authors note it’s not just one study that found a troubling link between drug company cash and what doctors prescribe. “Every published, peer-reviewed study that has evaluated the association between payments and prescribing using a causal inference framework has found evidence that receipt of industry payments increases physicians’ prescribing,” they wrote. They call on a variety of parties, including doctors, the drug industry and regulators, to take action to reduce these conflicts.

Dr. Aaron Mitchell, one of the authors and an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said the ever-growing list of research findings upends the presumption that payments to physicians, particularly small ones like meals, don’t influence doctors’ prescribing.

“The legal interpretation of a kickback has long been that industry payments and other transfers of value to physicians are OK as long as they don’t influence prescribing,” he said. “We now have overwhelming data that such payments do influence prescribing. In light of that we need to seriously reexamine the status quo.”

Mitchell suggested that regulators, like the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, review their guidance related to industry payments and “be clear to everyone that these are going to be under increased scrutiny and increased risk of prosecution than they have in the past.”

The OIG’s Office of Counsel said in a statement that it “has long expressed concerns over the practice of pharmaceutical manufacturers providing anything of value to physicians in a position to make or influence referrals to manufacturers’ products.” The office issued a special fraud alert in 2020 that discussed the risks of speaker program payments to physicians and other practitioners by drug and medical device companies.

“OIG has pursued, and will continue to pursue, abusive financial relationships between pharmaceutical manufacturers and physicians,” the statement said.

In 2021, the most recent year for which there is publicly available data on payments to doctors, drug companies paid Sacks more than $84,000.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Charles Ornstein.

Late last month, New Zealand Health Minister Andrew Little stated what most who work in health already know.

Healthcare is all about people – the people being cared for and the people doing the caring.

Population growth, ageing and a pandemic mean there is no shortage of those needing care, but in New Zealand and globally, there is a chronic shortage of healthcare workers.

• READ MORE: Nurses are leaving the profession, and replacing them won’t be easy
• A burnt-out health workforce impacts patient care

Little stopped short of calling it a crisis, but researchers and international agencies alike agree with a survey of New Zealand doctors that the health workforce is in crisis.

In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) projected a global shortage of 18 million healthcare workers by 2030. That was before the covid-19 pandemic. Between 80,000 and 180,000 healthcare workers have died globally during the pandemic’s first 16 months, according to the WHO’s conservative estimate.

“Public statements from political leaders that there is ‘no crisis’ in the health system have seemed increasingly out of step with doctors’ experience over the past year” https://t.co/dXMhA38XIO

— Emma Espiner (@emmawehipeihana) July 11, 2022

Add to this the impact the pandemic has had on the mental health of frontline health staff, including reports of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and a healthcare workforce seven times more likely to have severe covid and now carrying the burden of long covid.

It’s clear healthcare is no longer the attractive sector it once was.

A highly mobile workforce and a global shortage
Like the cost-of-living crisis, the health workforce shortage is not unique to Aotearoa New Zealand.

This year’s budget included NZ$76 million for medical training and primary care specialists, but doctors who started training this year will not be specialists until 2034.

Meanwhile, Labour’s solution is to undertake an international recruitment drive. It is hailing New Zealand as one of the easiest places in the world for healthcare workers to come to. But are our newly opened borders attractive enough?

Overseas recruitment drive for nurses gains ‘good response’ https://t.co/RZrM4fW67L

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) July 13, 2022

In my health economics lectures I often use an anecdote about the Indian doctor who gets a job in the UK (colonial ties and a multicultural society), the British doctor who moves to Canada (less administration and more family friendly hours), the Canadian doctor who moves to the United States (specialists have much higher earning potential), and the US doctor who undertakes missionary work in India.

This highlights two issues: the health workforce is highly mobile and employment isn’t always about money. Aotearoa New Zealand is competing in a global health workforce market, and minister Little recently acknowledged the health sector as “fiercely competitive”.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon for New Zealand.

The health workforce in New Zealand has one of the largest shares of migrant workers, with 42 percent of doctors and almost 30 percent of nurses foreign-born (second only to Israel and Ireland, respectively). This is much higher than the aggregate estimates showing one in six doctors practicing in OECD countries studied overseas.

The OECD estimates the number of foreign-born doctors and nurses in OECD countries has increased by 20 percent, twice the growth rate of the overall increase across the workforce. This is what is most concerning.

The health workforce is not equally distributed. Migration of workers from low- and middle-income countries to high-income countries like Aotearoa New Zealand is a real threat to achieving universal health coverage and sustainable development goals.

New Zealand needs to be mindful that promoting our open borders is not at the expense of under-performing health systems with much greater need.

Losing healthcare workers to Australia
Outflow is also a problem in New Zealand, with New Zealand-trained doctors and nurses crossing the Tasman every year. Add to this the international recruits leaving New Zealand for Australia and there most definitely is a health workforce crisis.

As our nearest neighbour, Australia is aggressively recruiting staff. And like pavlova and Phar Lap they are happy to claim what is ours as theirs. An easier route to citizenship and voting rights will make Australia even more desirable.

How can New Zealand compete in this market? Minister Little refers to encouraging New Zealanders to return home, including lifting their pay. Research shows it’s not all about income. Location and professional development opportunities are important factors when choosing career moves.

The healthcare reforms helped tempt me back to New Zealand after 22 years away. Perhaps working in a system which has equity as its focus may encourage those who are clinically trained to return as well.

There is considerable research to inform policies around retention and recruitment. The New Zealand Ministry of Health may wish to look to the UK, which was historically dependent on EU health and care workers and now has a health workforce depleted by both Brexit and the pandemic.

In the recent LSE-Lancet Commission on the future of the NHS, British scholars argued a sustainable workforce needed integrated approaches to be developed alongside reforms to education and training that reflect changes in roles and the skill mix, and more multidisciplinary working.

The LSE-Lancet Commission authors flagged the need for better workforce planning. New Zealand’s approach to workforce forecasting has also been criticised previously.

Planning aside, a possible solution worthy of discussion is the required skill mix of the workforce, particularly with technological advancements and changing health needs. For example, the introduction of non-medical prescribers has improved job satisfaction, released clinical time and increased patient access.

New Zealand’s once-in-a-generation health reforms offer a logical time to undertake workforce reforms. We need to learn from our own historical mistakes and avoid disconnecting the workforce from the policy reforms.

If minister Little and the ministry are to solve this, he will first need to admit there is a health workforce crisis.

Aotearoa New Zealand is unfortunately not alone in its quest to adequately staff healthcare, but the transformation of the health sector to create a more equitable, accessible, cohesive and people-centred system means New Zealand is uniquely placed to put those people who deliver care at the centre.

Dr Paula Lorgelly is professor of health economics, University of Auckland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Late last month, New Zealand Health Minister Andrew Little stated what most who work in health already know.

Healthcare is all about people – the people being cared for and the people doing the caring.

Population growth, ageing and a pandemic mean there is no shortage of those needing care, but in New Zealand and globally, there is a chronic shortage of healthcare workers.

• READ MORE: Nurses are leaving the profession, and replacing them won’t be easy
• A burnt-out health workforce impacts patient care

Little stopped short of calling it a crisis, but researchers and international agencies alike agree with a survey of New Zealand doctors that the health workforce is in crisis.

In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) projected a global shortage of 18 million healthcare workers by 2030. That was before the covid-19 pandemic. Between 80,000 and 180,000 healthcare workers have died globally during the pandemic’s first 16 months, according to the WHO’s conservative estimate.

“Public statements from political leaders that there is ‘no crisis’ in the health system have seemed increasingly out of step with doctors’ experience over the past year” https://t.co/dXMhA38XIO

— Emma Espiner (@emmawehipeihana) July 11, 2022

Add to this the impact the pandemic has had on the mental health of frontline health staff, including reports of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and a healthcare workforce seven times more likely to have severe covid and now carrying the burden of long covid.

It’s clear healthcare is no longer the attractive sector it once was.

A highly mobile workforce and a global shortage
Like the cost-of-living crisis, the health workforce shortage is not unique to Aotearoa New Zealand.

This year’s budget included NZ$76 million for medical training and primary care specialists, but doctors who started training this year will not be specialists until 2034.

Meanwhile, Labour’s solution is to undertake an international recruitment drive. It is hailing New Zealand as one of the easiest places in the world for healthcare workers to come to. But are our newly opened borders attractive enough?

Overseas recruitment drive for nurses gains ‘good response’ https://t.co/RZrM4fW67L

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) July 13, 2022

In my health economics lectures I often use an anecdote about the Indian doctor who gets a job in the UK (colonial ties and a multicultural society), the British doctor who moves to Canada (less administration and more family friendly hours), the Canadian doctor who moves to the United States (specialists have much higher earning potential), and the US doctor who undertakes missionary work in India.

This highlights two issues: the health workforce is highly mobile and employment isn’t always about money. Aotearoa New Zealand is competing in a global health workforce market, and minister Little recently acknowledged the health sector as “fiercely competitive”.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon for New Zealand.

The health workforce in New Zealand has one of the largest shares of migrant workers, with 42 percent of doctors and almost 30 percent of nurses foreign-born (second only to Israel and Ireland, respectively). This is much higher than the aggregate estimates showing one in six doctors practicing in OECD countries studied overseas.

The OECD estimates the number of foreign-born doctors and nurses in OECD countries has increased by 20 percent, twice the growth rate of the overall increase across the workforce. This is what is most concerning.

The health workforce is not equally distributed. Migration of workers from low- and middle-income countries to high-income countries like Aotearoa New Zealand is a real threat to achieving universal health coverage and sustainable development goals.

New Zealand needs to be mindful that promoting our open borders is not at the expense of under-performing health systems with much greater need.

Losing healthcare workers to Australia
Outflow is also a problem in New Zealand, with New Zealand-trained doctors and nurses crossing the Tasman every year. Add to this the international recruits leaving New Zealand for Australia and there most definitely is a health workforce crisis.

As our nearest neighbour, Australia is aggressively recruiting staff. And like pavlova and Phar Lap they are happy to claim what is ours as theirs. An easier route to citizenship and voting rights will make Australia even more desirable.

How can New Zealand compete in this market? Minister Little refers to encouraging New Zealanders to return home, including lifting their pay. Research shows it’s not all about income. Location and professional development opportunities are important factors when choosing career moves.

The healthcare reforms helped tempt me back to New Zealand after 22 years away. Perhaps working in a system which has equity as its focus may encourage those who are clinically trained to return as well.

There is considerable research to inform policies around retention and recruitment. The New Zealand Ministry of Health may wish to look to the UK, which was historically dependent on EU health and care workers and now has a health workforce depleted by both Brexit and the pandemic.

In the recent LSE-Lancet Commission on the future of the NHS, British scholars argued a sustainable workforce needed integrated approaches to be developed alongside reforms to education and training that reflect changes in roles and the skill mix, and more multidisciplinary working.

The LSE-Lancet Commission authors flagged the need for better workforce planning. New Zealand’s approach to workforce forecasting has also been criticised previously.

Planning aside, a possible solution worthy of discussion is the required skill mix of the workforce, particularly with technological advancements and changing health needs. For example, the introduction of non-medical prescribers has improved job satisfaction, released clinical time and increased patient access.

New Zealand’s once-in-a-generation health reforms offer a logical time to undertake workforce reforms. We need to learn from our own historical mistakes and avoid disconnecting the workforce from the policy reforms.

If minister Little and the ministry are to solve this, he will first need to admit there is a health workforce crisis.

Aotearoa New Zealand is unfortunately not alone in its quest to adequately staff healthcare, but the transformation of the health sector to create a more equitable, accessible, cohesive and people-centred system means New Zealand is uniquely placed to put those people who deliver care at the centre.

Dr Paula Lorgelly is professor of health economics, University of Auckland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Indiana's Republican attorney general sparked widespread outrage on Wednesday night by launching an investigation into a doctor in his state who recently provided legal abortion care to a child rape victim from Ohio.

"They're either actively trying to get her killed, or just don't give a damn that they're putting her in danger."

"A 10-year-old girl was [raped] in Ohio and because of their anti-abortion law was sent to Indiana to be treated. Now that Indiana doctor is being investigated and faces criminal penalties. This is actually happening in America," tweeted Pennsylvania state Rep. Peter Schweyer (D-22).

Sharing a clip of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announcing the probe on Fox News' "Jesse Watters Primetime" late Wednesday, former Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner said that "this is sick."

The show—which was among the media outlets and public figures initially casting doubt on the child's story—put up a photo of Dr. Caitlin Bernard, who treated the girl, while Rokita explained the investigation.

"They're either actively trying to get her killed, or just don't give a damn that they're putting her in danger," Washington Post columnist Radley Balko declared of airing the doctor's photo.

That sentiment was echoed by others, such as Dr. Prasad Jallepalli of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who said that sharing the image of Bernard was "unconscionable."

Bernard tweeted Wednesday night that "my heart breaks for all survivors of sexual assault and abuse. I am so sad that our country is failing them when they need us most. Doctors must be able to give people the medical care they need, when and where they need it."

Dr. Daniel Grossman, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, thanked Bernard for her "dedication to patients and survivors," and called her "a light and an example to us all in this dark moment."

Rokita, meanwhile, described Bernard as "an abortion activist acting as a doctor with a history of failing to report" before pledging that "we're gonna fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure if she failed to report."

In a statement Thursday—after again highlighting that the man accused of rape is believed to be undocumented—Rokita said that the probe focuses on whether Bernard, a mandated reporter, reported the abuse and abortion, along with any potential violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA).

Author Jessica Valenti warned that other abortion providers could be similarly targeted.

"Conservatives are going to do this with any abortion provider—but especially those who make 'pro-lifers' look bad by shining a light on the most horrific cases," she said. "What they're doing right now is issuing a warning: Don't raise the alarm on raped 10-year-olds and don't help those who need it. Because if you do, we'll ruin your life."

Valenti was far from alone in using the case to issue a broader warning about the dangers to pregnant people and providers in the United States after the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade.

"A 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio was denied an abortion. Let that sink in for a second. Instead of helping this little girl, the GOP wants to force her to have her attacker's child. THIS is the world the GOP wants to create and why we must make our voices heard NOW to stop them," said Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Colo.).

MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Wednesday highlighted that "this child who had been raped had to flee across state lines like she was the criminal," and said: "Let's be clear-eyed about what the anti-abortion Republican Party wants. They want a world in which that child would be forced to carry her rapist's baby."

The child's story was first reported by the Indianapolis Star on July 1 and quickly gained national attention. Even U.S. President Joe Biden noted the assault and abortion during a July 8 speech, urging the audience to "just imagine being that little girl" and saying that " I can't think of anything as much more extreme" than forcing her to give birth to a rapist's child.

As journalist Judd Legum detailed for his newsletter Popular Information on Thursday, while reproductive rights advocates this month have framed the case as just one example of what lies ahead, some reporters, Republican elected officials, and right-wing pundits questioned whether any of it had actually happened—until a suspect was arrested this week.

The Columbus Dispatch was the first to report that "Gerson Fuentes, 27, whose last known address was an apartment on Columbus' Northwest Side, was arrested Tuesday after police say he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions. He's since been charged with rape, a felony of the first degree in Ohio."

Bethany Bruner of the Dispatch tweeted Wednesday afternoon that "I was the ONLY reporter in the courtroom this morning as the man accused of raping a 10-year-old girl, impregnating her, leading to an abortion in Indiana, was arraigned."

As Politico outlined Thursday:

The clean-up followed shortly after the news of the arrest. Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan deleted a tweet in which he had called the story "another lie." The Wall Street Journal editorial page had to walk back on an editorial titled "An Abortion Story Too Good To Confirm" that called the case a "fanciful" tale. And [Ohio Republican Attorney General Dave Yost], who originally cast doubt on the story, tweeted on Wednesday that his "heart aches" for the child and that he was grateful for the arrest—not acknowledging his previous skepticism.

Critics have also slammed Glenn Kessler's fact-check of the girl's story for the Post, with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) calling it "horrifying" and Legum saying that he "repackaged right-wing conspiracies (an abortion provider invented a 10-year-old rape victim) in a veneer of respectability."

Laura Hazard Owen, editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab, warned Wednesday that in the post-Roe world, "unimaginable abortion stories will become more common," and American journalism is not ready.

"Countless abortion stories will never be told at all. It won't be because they're lies. It will be because telling them is too risky, because patients and doctors and staffers and volunteers will face arrest for coming forward," she wrote. "The facts will live on in the shadows. The women and children's real lives will continue. Even if their stories seem 'too good' to be true. Even if you wish they weren't."

The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), by texting "START" to 88788, or through chat at thehotline.org. The National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or through chat at rainn.org. Both offer 24/7, free, and confidential support.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Dr. David Baum, an obstetrician based in Highland Park, Illinois who was attending the Fourth of July parade there on Monday, ended up helping to treat injuries he called "unspeakable" after a gunman killed at least six people and injured 26 others.

The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Crimo III, allegedly used a legally purchased "high-powered rifle," according to the New York Times, in the attack at the Chicago suburb's annual July 4th celebration.

The gunfire caused "wartime injuries," Baum told CNN's "New Day."

"The people who were killed were killed instantly," the doctor said. "The people who were gone were blown up by that gunfire."

Baum noted that he's seen numerous major wounds as a physician, but said "the power of this gun" caused an "evisceration injury" as well as "an unspeakable head injury" in another victim.

"What I saw was just families' lives forever changed because... somebody who shouldn't have had access to a high-powered rifle got up on a rooftop and decided to do what he wanted to do."

The doctor spoke openly about the need for strict regulations to keep people from accessing the type of gun allegedly used by Crimo and other gunmen in recent shootings like the one that killed 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas in May.

"The horror of what I saw was that this community will never, ever be the same," said Baum. "What I saw was just families' lives forever changed because they were walking down with their kids on their scooters and somebody who shouldn't have had access to a high-powered rifle got up on a rooftop and decided to do what he wanted to do."

He added that he does not understand why Americans can obtain "a weapon that is meant for war." The injuries he saw "are what are seen in victims of war, not victims at a parade," Baum said.

The shooting in Uvalde in May prompted calls from medical professionals and gun control advocates for the release of photos of the injuries caused by AR-15s—the gun used in Uvalde and in a number of other mass shootings in recent years—and similar weapons.

"The problem with this country is the failure to recognize that every week you all are going to a different community with a different Uvalde," Baum told CNN's Jon Berman. "What happened in Texas is horrific. What happened here is horrific."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lou Ferreira.

As activists across the U.S. are mobilizing to defend reproductive rights, we speak to the Dutch physician Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who has dedicated her life to circumventing anti-abortion laws, including providing abortions on ships in international waters and sending abortions pills around the world. She also discusses navigating censorship on social media platforms, telemedicine, the future of contraception and more. “This is not the moment anymore to stay within the law,” says Dr. Gomperts, referring to the end of Roe v. Wade. “This is the moment to make sure that women have access to safe abortions despite the law, because this is such an unjust law that is creating so much social inequality and that will affect, really, the most poor women in the country.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As the leaked opinion showing the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade sparks protests across the United States, we speak to an abortion doctor and a reproductive rights activist facing deportation about what is next. “We will keep fighting for us to have abortions that are safe, legal and accessible to everyone, no matter where you are, no matter where you’re coming from and no matter what your income,” says community organizer Alejandra Pablos, noting the decision could have particularly disastrous effects on already vulnerable undocumented immigrants and border communities in Arizona. “People should be able to access abortion care as part of the general healthcare that a pregnant person or any other person would seek,” says gynecologist Dr. DeShawn Taylor about how criminalizing abortion affects medical professionals in the field, especially her clinic Desert Star Family Planning, one of the only abortion clinics in Arizona.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Wearing glasses or getting a runny nose is enough to qualify for a mask exemption under current New Zealand’s Ministry of Health criteria — and a doctor says its time for tougher rules.

Hearing aids, hayfever or a tendency to get dry eyes are also reasons to request the legally binding card that says you do not need to wear a mask when normally required to under covid-19 rules.

Some doctors say the reasons are far too loose, with people simply needing to tick just one of the symptoms on the ministry’s website list to get an exemption card sent to them.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘I want masks to be legitimate and used and trusted’ — Medicine specialist Dr Gary Payinda
• ‘It’s very clear that masks work and it’s very clear you can get sufficient fresh air through them’ – Covid-19 modeller Dr Dion O’Neale
• Facemask exemption criteria

Northland medicine specialist Dr Gary Payinda said the card was a great idea for people who had legitimate reasons for not wearing a mask.

But the current list of criteria was so wide it was absurd — almost everyone in the country would qualify, he said.

“If we’ve made it so easy that literally anyone can click a box and say I have a ‘condition’ … we really have to ask is it still a public health measure.”

With so many other measures relaxed, masks were one of the last lines of defence against the virus, and so everyone who could wear one, should be, he said.

Compromising public health measures
He told RNZ Morning Report that compromising one of the most effective public health measures was not doing the community a good service.

“We want the right people to be protected by this law and we want masks to still be a meaningful way of reducing the burden of covid in the community.”

“If we make an exemption process so easy to get that it’s meaningless, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

“I want masks to be legitimate and used and trusted, and that won’t be the case if anyone can literally tick the box and say, ‘face coverings give me a runny nose’ and that’s enough to get a mask exemption.”

The criteria have come under scrutiny as the government changes the process for getting a mask exemption card.

Until now, cards were issued by the Disabled Persons Assembly but the new ones are issued by the Ministry of Health and have legal standing.

They are intended for people to show to shops or other businesses so they do not have to explain potentially sensitive reasons why they may have an exemption.

The ministry said it had tried to make the process for applying for a card uncomplicated to avoid marginalising vulnerable communities.

Small minority misuses system
The vast majority of New Zealanders had shown they wanted to do the right thing to protect their communities and only a small minority had tried to misuse the system, it said.

A spokesperson indicated the criteria may be changed as the new card comes into effect but was not able to respond with more details before RNZ’s deadline.

Existing cards, issued with the current criteria, can still be used when the new ones come into effect.

The Disabled Persons Assembly welcomed the new card system, telling Midday Report the old system had been causing distress for some in the disabled community.

Prudence Walker said people had not been believed, refused service or had the police called on them.

She hoped the new card would improve things.

Dr Payinda said there were many good reasons — because of both physical and mental health — that people could not wear masks and he supported them doing that but the current list was open to abuse.

Current criteria wideranging
The current criteria for requesting a card according to the Ministry of Health website include having the following conditions if they make wearing a mask difficult: asthma; sensitive skin or a skin condition like eczema; wearing hearing aids; getting migraines, having glasses, dry eyes or contact lenses; hay fever; difficulty breathing; dizziness, headaches, nausea or tiredness; a runny nose from wearing a face covering; a physical or mental illness, condition or disability.

Needing to communicate with someone who is deaf or hard of hearing is also one of the criteria.

Covid-19 modeller Dr Dion O’Neale said attempting to force those who were adamantly opposed to masks to wear one wouldn’t be effective.

“If they want to be difficult about it they’ll manage to tick the box and say I’m wearing it, and wear it badly.”

Most people did want to protect themselves and those around them, so it was important to keep the messaging clear on how masks work and when to wear them, he told Morning Report.

“It’s physics. The mask, if it’s well fitted, it’s going to be filtering out small particles. If those particles are viruses you’re not going to be infected by them, or if you’re breathing in a much smaller number of those particles you’re going to have a much lower exposure dose, so your infection risk is much lower.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Queens, New York Women Sue Celebrity Doctor for Serial Sexual Abuse appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

BEIJING — A Chinese doctor who got in trouble with authorities in the communist country for sounding an early warning about the coronavirus outbreak died Friday after coming down with the illness.

The Wuhan Central Hospital said on its social media account that Dr. Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, was “unfortunately infected during the fight against the pneumonia epidemic of the new coronavirus infection.”

“We deeply regret and mourn this,” it added.

Li was reprimanded by local police for “spreading rumors” about the illness in late December, according to news reports. The outbreak, centered in Wuhan, has now infected over 28,200 people globally and killed more than 560, triggering travel restrictions and quarantines around the world and a crisis inside the country of 1.4 billion.

The World Health Organization tweeted: “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Dr Li Wenliang. We all need to celebrate work that he did” on the virus.

Within a half-hour of announcing earlier Friday that Li was in critical condition, the hospital received nearly 500,000 comments on its social media post, many of them from people hoping Li would pull through. One wrote: “We are not going to bed. We are here waiting for a miracle.”

Li was among a number of medical professionals in Wuhan who tried to warn colleagues and others when the government did not, The New York Times reported earlier this week. It said that after the mystery illness had stricken seven patients at a hospital, Li said of them in an online chat group Dec. 30: “Quarantined in the emergency department.”

Another participant in the chat responded by wondering, “Is SARS coming again?” — a reference to the 2002-03 viral outbreak that killed hundreds, the newspaper said.

Wuhan health officials summoned Li in the middle of the night to explain why he shared the information, and police later forced him to sign a statement admitting to “illegal behavior,” the Times said.

“If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier,” Li said in an interview in the Times via text messages, “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.”

In other developments in the outbreak:

Youngest Patient

A newborn in China became the youngest known person infected with the virus.

The baby was born Saturday in Wuhan and confirmed positive just 36 hours after birth, authorities said. But precisely how the child became infected was unclear.

“The baby was immediately separated from the mother after the birth and has been under artificial feeding. There was no close contact with the parents, yet it was diagnosed with the disease,” Zeng Lingkong, director of neonatal diseases at Wuhan Children’s Hospital, told Chinese TV.

Zeng said other infected mothers have given birth to babies who tested negative, so it is not yet known if the virus can be transmitted in the womb.

More Hospital Beds

China finished building a second new hospital Thursday to isolate and treat patients — a 1,500-bed center in Wuhan. Earlier this week, another rapidly constructed, 1,000-bed hospital in Wuhan with prefabricated wards and isolation rooms began taking patients.

Authorities also moved people with milder symptoms into makeshift hospitals at sports arenas, exhibition halls and other public spaces.

All together, more than 50 million people are under virtual quarantine in hard-hit Hubei province in an unprecedented — and unproven — bid to bring the outbreak under control.

In Hong Kong, hospital workers demanding a shutdown of the territory’s border with mainland China were on strike for a fourth day. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam announced a 14-day quarantine of all travelers entering the city from the mainland starting Saturday, but the government has refused to seal the border entirely.

Quarantined Cruise Ships

Two docked cruise ships with thousands of passengers and crew members remained under 14-day quarantines in Hong Kong and Japan.

Ten passengers confirmed to have the virus were escorted off the Diamond Princess at the port of Yokohama near Tokyo, after 10 others were taken off the previous day. About 3,700 people were confined aboard the ship.

“It’s going to be like a floating prison,” passenger David Abel lamented on Facebook. He had set out on a 50th wedding anniversary luxury cruise but found himself in his cabin, eating a “lettuce sandwich with some chicken inside.”

More than 3,600 people on the other quarantined ship, the World Dream, underwent screening after eight passengers were diagnosed with the virus.

NEW DRUG

Testing of a new antiviral drug was set to begin on a group of patients Thursday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The drug, Remdesivir, is made by U.S. biotech company Gilead Sciences.

Antivirals and other drugs can reduce the severity of an illness, but “so far, no antivirals have been proven effective” against the new virus, said Thanarak Plipat, deputy director-general of Thailand’s Disease Control Department in the Health Ministry. He said there are a lot of unknowns, “but we have a lot of hope as well.”

More Fallout

From Europe to Australia and the U.S., universities that host Chinese students or have study-abroad programs are scrambling to assess the risks, and some are canceling opportunities and prohibiting student travel.

Central banks in the Philippines and Thailand have cut their interest rates to fend off economic damage from the outbreak in China, the world’s second-biggest economy, with 1.4 billion people. China is a major source of tourists in Asia, and corporations around the world depend on its factories to supply products and its consumers to buy them.

The organizers of the Tokyo Olympics again sought to allay fears that the 2020 Games could be postponed or canceled because of the crisis.

Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Elaine Kurtenbach in Bangkok contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Salon.

“What the f**k are you doing to people?” the slyly grinning Gwyneth Paltrow asks in the trailer for her new Netflix series, “The Goop Lab.” I’ve been asking myself the same about her for years now. I finally think I get it, though. Goop is a monster of our own making.

When Goop launched in 2008, it was a chatty newsletter, another little bon bon of thoughts and ideas for your inbox in the peak era of Daily Candy. Over time, it evolved into something else — a friendly, unapologetically new agey powerhouse lifestyle brand and a true pioneer in the field of “wellness” and “self-care,” as defined by rich, thin, blonde women.

Paltrow’s transformation from sun-dappled, Oscar-winning, pop star-marrying, Hollywood royalty to bestselling cookbook author to person whom a disturbing number of women trust for health advice has been a long time in coming. As a colleague observed recently, “It’s like she’s now assumed her final form.” I can think of few other entrepreneur/stars who so adroitly straddle her line of self-awareness and cluelessness. Goop’s own history of itself proudly notes the moment in 2013 when “Star Magazine calls GP the most hated celebrity the same week People names her most beautiful” and ends with the fanciful future date of its “first anti-gravity colonic.” “I am who I am,” Paltrow said in 2009. “I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.” That’s a statement that’s almost admirable in a weird way, but in another way makes you want to burn everything down.

Paltrow doesn’t really expect her acolytes to be $25,000 a year types either, though she has her share of low tax bracket rubberneckers, to be sure. I am admittedly one of them. A mere month ago, I was enthusing right here about a Goop approved dental floss. The brand appeals to the pipe dream that with just the colon cleanse, you too could get your metaphoric and literal sh*t serenely, vibrantly together.

Because I have my own unique health story, I am sometimes invited to talk to bigshots from hospitals and healthcare organizations about patient engagement. Most of them are great and sincerely trying to make an often needlessly complex, traumatizing experience better. And some of them just want someone to tell them how to get their patients to obligingly do what they tell them to do. The idea that the system is what’s flawed and in need of modification doesn’t really seem to enter their minds. And this, I think, is how we wind up with such alarmingly terrible alternatives.

Why are people using commercial genetic testing kits — regardless of very serious implications for their personal privacy and that of their families — instead of coming to see their doctors? Maybe because when you buy a genetic testing kit, you’re a consumer, not a patient? Which designation offers the appearance of more agency and control, and which sound painful and invasive? Why are parents falling for dangerous flat-out lies about vaccines and putting their children at serious health risk? Sure, it’s in part because gullibility and narcissism are a potent cocktail for many. But also, the routinized, impersonal nature of plenty of pediatric practices can be scary, especially to nervous new parents. Not every doctor does a great job of balancing clear science with basic empathy.

And then there’s just the overall crap way that patients — women in particular — are treated by the healthcare system. Their symptoms are brushed off, their pain minimized. It’s a system far crueler to women of color and the underinsured. But I don’t know a single female without at least one enraging anecdote. There’s the hospital that insisted a friend’s screaming young daughter keep getting up and walking around, after failing to note she had five broken ribs after an accident. There’s the gynecologist who delayed, then botched another friend’s surgery, a mistake that ultimately killed her. Another gynecologist, another friend, and a diagnosis based on longstanding and quite wrong information about female anatomy and sexual function that nearly killed her too.

I’d add the male doctor who sighed, when I came to the hospital after a miscarriage in my early 30s, “You yuppies think you have all the time in the world.” Or how I go for my therapy on a dark, cinderblock-lined floor that looks like a set from a horror movie that takes place in a prison. Last night, I was out with a friend who remarked how her schizophrenic sister, who lives in Europe, would likely not have been able to be hospitalized, nor have a job to return to, if she lived here in the U.S. This very morning, I met with my GP about a health concern and had to repeatedly ask him to explain the arcane medical terms he was blithely tossing around to refer to my body and my problem. I think of these things, and I begin to understand how women with more leverage in the world would be eager to explore friendlier-looking alternative options for their care, however crackpot they may be. Which brings me to that notorious candle.

I have no inclination to steam my vagina or put a jade egg in it or engage it any other Goopy nonsense. Nor do I concur with Gwyneth Paltrow that calling a $75 candle “This Smells Like My Vagina” is “a little bit punk rock,” no matter how many mosh pits redolent with the scent of genitals I may have flung myself around in back in the day.

But I do understand that women’s bodies and their aromas and their excretions are a subject of terror and disgust, not just in the big dumb general population but in the supposedly safe and protected one of medicine as well. I spent two years in an otherwise excellent clinical trial where I was asked weekly about my bowels and never once about my periods. Last fall, I had to have an invasive procedure, and the person doing my intake never once looked up from the forms in front of her, as if mortified on my behalf.

A brand worth a reported $250 million doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not hard to see how someone — a woman — exhausted by a cold and impersonal system that treats her precious, amazing body as distasteful would be drawn to an apparently relatable yoga mom who also wants to chat about sheet pan dinners and eyelash curlers. Who offers the illusion of empowered emancipation. It’s not hard to see why opening up your chakras sounds more appealing than some once a day pill that’s constantly being peddled on Hulu.

Plenty of Goop’s sketchy, commerce-driven claims have been roundly debunked in recent years. In 2018, the company was ordered to pay $145,000 after claims regarding those infamous vaginal wellness eggs, as well as an “Inner Judge Flower Essence Blend” for depression, were found to be “unsubstantiated.” The company was also called out by NASA itself after it claimed its “Body Vibes” stickers were “made with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut’s vitals during wear.” A NASA spokesman said in 2017, “Not only is the whole premise like snake oil, the logic doesn’t even hold up.”

And yet, on “The Goop Lab,” a “body worker and chiropractor” says he can “influence how energy is moving so that your body can heal faster” and shares his hypothesis that “If you just change the frequency of vibration of the body itself, it changes how the cells regrow.” In another episode, Dr. Valter Longo, while warning of the serious dangers of calorie restriction, also notes that it “prevents completely diabetes and cuts cancer and cardiovascular disease in half.” Studies of controlled, well-monitored fasting are indeed exciting, but they are still often based on small groups and other variables, and nowhere near as decisively all encompassing as Longo casually suggests.

When you consider how emotional, divisive, and deeply high stakes the issues like insurance, pharmaceutical regulation, and the opioid epidemic have become – especially this election year – it’s not difficult to see the how how critical the conversation around our care has become. There’s a reason patients have lost faith in modern medicine. It’s easy to laugh off, or more likely shudder, at Paltrow’s “Goop Lab” promise of “optimization of self.” But know that this juggernaut exists because of the failures of so many other systems. “This series is designed to entertain and inform, not provide medical advice,” the show warns at the top of each episode. But in a world where patients where considered people and medical advice could also be entertaining and informative, we wouldn’t be suckers for a Goop Lab at all.

“The Goop Lab” is currently streaming on Netflix.