The late Michael Crichton wrote a novel in 2004 called State of Fear. It was a techno-thriller in which eco-terrorists plot mass murder to publicize the danger of global warming. While Crichton wrote the book to express his concerns about our climate, the book made a larger point; the media is always looking for a way to keep us in a state of fear.

The latest example of this is the concerns recently expressed about gas stoves. Who knew the gas stove in your kitchen was about to kill you? I grew up in Pennsylvania and my parents had a gas stove for the nearly fifty years they lived in our house. For most of those years we didn’t have any form of exterior ventilation, until a kitchen renovation first introduced us to stove-top ventilation. My parents lived to the ripe old ages of 86 and 89 and none of us ever suffered from lung disease. How did we escape this newly found danger? Maybe if we had known this danger earlier, my parents would still be alive?

Gas stoves have been around a long time and, until now, no one ever suggested they were dangerous unless you turned on the gas and didn’t ignite the burners. In fact, they were often a blessing when winter weather caused power outages, but the gas stoves still provided the means to cook and heat your home. I can remember many times when neighbors came to our house for refuge when their electric stoves and heaters had no power.

Why then, are gas stoves now in the news? Have we discovered something new? Is there some new understanding about gas stoves or is it a change in the political climate, not the real climate?

Kimberley Strassel, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, says, “The reason gas stoves are in the news is simple: There is a coordinated, calculated – and well-funded – strategy to kill them off. It’s the joint enterprise of extremely powerful climate groups, working with Biden administration officials who have publicly stated their aim to eliminate all “combustion appliances” in homes. Only after the GOP called them out did anyone pretend otherwise.”

Much of her information comes from letters sent by the Senate Commerce Committee to Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) commissioners demanding more information. The letters highlight the primary groups behind this campaign to eliminate gas stoves. One is the Climate Imperative Foundation (CIF) which became an overnight green powerhouse and reported more receipts in 2021 than the League of Conservation Voters or the Sierra Club. A board member and funder is Kleiner Perkins billionaire John Doerr, whose climate action plan calls for getting rid of gas cooking. CIF has granted money to the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), which has long advocated “retrofitting” existing homes to be “all electric.”

Another of these groups is Rewiring America, “the leading electrification nonprofit, focused on electrifying our homes, businesses, and communities.” Also New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which last year called on the CPSC to enact a gas stove ban.

What is the purpose of all these groups?

Strassel says, “The stated goal of all these groups is killing gas to “save” the planet. Yet they also know Americans won’t give up their stoves in the name of climate. So, several years ago this cabal hit on the idea of contradicting decades of science and ginning up hokey studies claiming gas stoves present a “health risk.” The twin goals: scare Americans and give government a pretext to ban gas cooking.” (emphasis mine)

As a physician I am not aware of any health hazards of gas stove cooking, apart from unlit burners when the gas is on, or the small risks of air pollution if there is improper ventilation. But necessity is the mother of invention. So, these groups needed to find some health hazards of gas cooking.

To this end, Strassel says climate outfits are masquerading as health experts. One frequently cited study from the Rocky Mountain Institute – claiming to find a link between gas stoves and childhood asthma – was co-authored by two RMI staffers, neither of who has a science degree. Another favorite study by NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity claims gas stoves cause “dangerous levels of indoor air pollution.” This study was written by two lawyers, and for evidence it cites . . . (you guessed it!) the aforementioned RMI study!

There’s more of this pseudo-science. The November edition of the “independent” magazine Consumer Reports was devoted to the “Hidden Health Hazards in Your Home” and explained that its research found an “alarming concern” with levels of nitrogen dioxide from gas stoves. At the end of the report online was an editor’s note: “This project was funded in part with a grant from the Climate Imperative Foundation.” The 2021 CIF tax filings show a $375,000 donation to Consumer Reports specifically for research on gas stoves.

There is certainly support for this initiative with the Biden Administration. The White House last month held an “electrification summit,” which featured a panel on getting gas out of homes. Nearly every guest stated the health harm of gas stoves as accepted fact, and Trisha Miller of the White House’s Climate Policy Office described the need to “eliminate emissions” by getting rid of all “combustion appliances” in houses (including your washer, dryer and furnace). The electrification agenda is being carried out through the Department of Energy’s Better Climate Challenge, which lists Rewiring America and RMI as “allies.”

Strassel concludes: “Only after Bloomberg exposed some of this did the ensuing public furor cause the CPSC and White House to run for cover. But make no mistake: A ban is the plan. Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at the summit that “if we are going to get to net zero emissions by 2050,” we’ll need electric “cars and buses and home heating and cooking.” The left won’t stop until it has dictated what you drive, where you live, and how you cook.”

I have long been suspicious of the official statistics on Covid deaths in the United States. Now it appears there were good reasons to be suspicious.

Leslie Bienen and Margery Smelkinson, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tells us public-health experts are finally coming clean by acknowledging what has long been obvious: America is overcounting hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19. The reasons for this come down to money – hospital reimbursements from third-party insurers, especially the government.

Hospital patients are now routinely tested for Covid on admission, regardless of their admitting diagnosis, then counted as “Covid hospitalizations” even if they’re asymptomatic. Leana Wen writes in a Washington Post column, when patients die Covid is often listed on their death certificates even if it played no part in killing them. Government programs created incentives to overestimate Covid’s toll, and poor data make it difficult to pinpoint who’s still at risk and how effective boosters are.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states a positive Covid test is enough to identify a “Covid hospitalization.” We have long since seen how the CDC gets its marching orders from this White House and acts according to their political agenda.  While increasing the number of Covid deaths artificially may seem counterintuitive to the interests of the White House, it does make it easier to continue their declared Covid emergency, which furthers their political agenda in other ways such as keeping more people eligible for Medicaid regardless of their financial means.

A few states and hospital systems have taken it on themselves to analyze their hospitalization data more thoroughly. Massachusetts requires hospitals to report how many of their Covid-positive patients have received dexamethasone, a standard treatment for Covid-induced lung inflammation. Using this method, the proportion of Covid-positive patients hospitalized for their Covid symptoms is only around 30%, though it fluctuates.

The UC San Francisco hospital system is using remdesivir, a Covid-19 antiviral drug, as a similar proxy. This results in higher numbers than using dexamethasone, since remdesivir is given to patients with milder symptoms. UCSF doesn’t report detailed data publicly, but hospitalizations “from Covid” are typically less than half of Covid-positive patients. The CDC, however, ignores these efforts to discern which hospitalizations were actually caused by Covid when it reports its data.

The CDC Data Tracker also uses state-generated data in reporting hundreds of daily Covid deaths. Many states report a “Covid death” anytime the decedent had a positive PCR test in the last two months before dying. Some are using death certificates, which may be more reliable, but even death certificates can be problematic because government policies create incentives to overcount.

Here’s how: Under the federal public-health emergency, which just began its fourth year, hospitals get a 20% bonus for treating Medicare patients diagnosed with Covid-19. That amounts to about a $35,000 average additional payment for each Covid patient. That may have made some sense at the beginning of the pandemic, when hospitals were swamped with seriously ill patients, subjected to arduous protocols and losing money from canceled elective surgery. But it is long since irrational under current circumstances.

As a doctor, I can tell you it makes no sense to test a patient for Covid who is in otherwise good health about to undergo an elective orthopedic procedure. But what hospital wouldn’t gladly accept the extra $35,000 if the patient just happens to test positive for Covid? It only makes sense to test those patients admitted with respiratory illness for whom a Covid-19 diagnosis would impact their treatment.

Another incentive to overcount comes from the American Rescue Plan of 2021, that large Covid relief bill passed by Congress in the early days of the Biden Administration. It authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay Covid-19 death benefits for funeral services, cremation, caskets, travel and a host of other expenses. The benefit is worth as much as $9,000 a person or $35,000 a family if multiple members die. By the end of 2022, FEMA had paid out nearly $2.9 billion in Covid-19 death expenses.

Many physicians report being pressured by hospitals and families to list Covid-19 on the death certificate, even when it had nothing to do with the death of the deceased. “Just try and leave Covid off the death certificate of a person who was asymptomatic positive and died in a car accident,” said one infectious disease doctor. “Just try.” These doctors were unwilling to be quoted by name for fear of reprisals from the hospitals they work for who are falsifying the death certificates.

This overcounting of deaths from Covid not only raises the costs of Covid for third-party payers, but falsely raise the fear of the public. The authors summarize: “These programs create a vicious circle. The overstatement provides a justification to continue the state of emergency, which keeps the perverse incentives going. With effective vaccines and treatments widely available, and an infection fatality rate on par with flu, it’s past time to recognize that Covid is no longer an emergency requiring special policies.”

(Dr. Bienen is a veterinarian who conducts research on zoonotic diseases and public-health policy. Ms. Smelkinson is an infectious-disease scientist whose research has focused on influenza and SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).

Have you had your bivalent Covid booster yet? My wife and I have, but will it give us better protection from Covid infection?

To hear it from the Biden Administration, the answer is unequivocally yes. To emphasize the importance of getting the new booster, the Health and Human Services Department is running radio ads warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. To avoid this scenario, they recommend you get the new booster.

Allysia Finley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says this is deceptive advertising. But she says we shouldn’t be surprised that the public health establishment is praising the new vaccine boosters. Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data to support their safety or efficacy.

No one is surprised that a new bivalent vaccine was developed to help stay ahead of the ever-changing virus variants. We do the same thing every year with the influenza vaccines. The idea of updating mRNA Covid shots every season originally held great promise. One advantage of this new mRNA technology is that manufacturers can tweak the genetic sequence and rapidly produce new vaccines targeting new variants. The new bivalent vaccines were targeted for the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants, as well as the original Wuhan strain.

But Finley reports three scientific problems have arisen.

• First, the virus is evolving much faster than the vaccines can be updated.
• Second, vaccines have hard-wired our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralize the new variants specifically targeted by the new boosters.
• Third, antibodies rapidly wane after a few months; although cellular immunity lasts much longer.

Two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine recently showed that bivalent boosters increase neutralizing antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, but not significantly more than the original boosters. In one study, antibody levels after the bivalent boosters were 11 times as high against the Wuhan variant as the BA.5 variant. The authors opine that immune imprinting “may pose a greater challenge than is currently appreciated for inducing robust immunity against SARS-CoV-2 variants.” This isn’t unique to Covid or mRNA vaccines, though boosters may amplify the effect. Whenever you are first exposed to a virus, such as children with the flu, your future response is affected.

All this is not alarming, though it does contradict November press releases from Pfizer and Moderna asserting that their bivalent vaccines produced a response to the BA.4 and BA.5 variants four to six times that of the original boosters. In hindsight, these claims were misleading as these recent studies reveal. Neither vaccine maker conducted a randomized trial. They tested the original boosters last winter, long before the BA.5 surge and four to six months after trial participants had received their third shots. The bivalents, by contrast, were tested after BA.5 began to surge, nine to eleven months after recipients had received their third shots.

What is alarming is that this shows us once again that our public-health officials are more interested in promoting conformity to their recommendations than they are in giving us scientifically tested information. Finley says the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the vaccine makers in June to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5, then rushed in late August to authorize the bivalents before clinical data were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the bivalents for all adults without any evidence that they were effective – or even needed.

The CDC actually published a study in November, (long after they promoted the bivalent vaccines) which estimates the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave – their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to near zero. Another CDC study in December reported that seniors who received bivalents were less likely to be hospitalized than the unvaccinated, and 73% less likely than those who had received two or more doses of the original vaccine. But neither study controlled for important confounding factors – such as the small minority who got bivalents were probably also more likely than those who hadn’t to follow other Covid precautions or seek treatments such as Paxlovid.

We have learned from the release of emails from the White House that they used their director of digital media, Rob Flaherty, to promote the White House public-health policy agenda by intimidating social media companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Google (YouTube). (see White House Censorship) It is not a stretch of the imagination to believe the same pressure was put upon the FDA and CDC to promote these bivalent vaccines before there was clinical evidence of their safety and effectiveness.

Am I sorry I got the bivalent vaccine? No, but I am sorry our public-health officials are determined to push the White House public-health policy agenda, regardless of whether or not it is scientifically based and clinically proven to be safe and effective.