The government has decided curing Alzheimer’s Disease isn’t worth the expense. That’s the inevitable conclusion one must reach when weighing the evidence.

I’ve written on this subject before. In a post called Biden Opposing Alzheimer’s Progress, I discussed the report by The Wall Street Journal editorial board that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) took the unprecedented step last year of limiting coverage of novel Alzheimer’s drugs. Normally, if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves a drug, Medicare pays for it. But CMS said it wasn’t convinced that a new class of Alzheimer’s drugs is “reasonable and necessary” for seniors.

In that post, I mentioned two new drugs for Alzheimer’s treatment that have been approved by the FDA, but CMS refuses to pay for – Aduhelm and Leqembi. Both have been shown to remove amyloid plaques from the brain, believed to be the cause of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Neurologists posit that removing amyloid could slow progression. A high-dose of Aduhelm removed 71% of plaque buildup. Patients in one trial who received the highest dose also showed 25% to 28% less decline in memory and problem-solving. A second trial showed unclear benefits in part because patients were on the highest dose for less time. FDA, to its credit, showed regulatory flexibility and approved the drug through its accelerated approval pathway based on amyloid clearance.

But Progressives howled about the price at $56,000 per year. But when the manufacturer, Biogen, lowered the price by half, CMS still refused to allow Medicare patients to receive the drug. Then, in January, a new drug named Leqembi was approved by the FDA that showed even more promise in effective treatment. Once again, CMS refused to cover the drug. In response, 20 Senators, including Democrats Gary Peters and Amy Klobuchar, plus 74 House Members including 38 Democrats have joined the fight. The House Members said in a letter to CMS that “access to disease-modifying therapy for Alzheimer’s disease will be extremely limited, nearly nonexistent,” resulting in “irreversible disease progression” and “added burdens for patient caregivers.” But CMS was still unmoved, even though evaluating the safety and efficacy of new drugs is not their role – that’s the role of the FDA.

Joe Grogan, writing for The Wall Street Journal, tells us now we have a third new promising drug that is experiencing the same CMS pushback. The drug is manufactured by Eli Lilly and is called Donanemab. It represents the strongest showing against Alzheimer’s to date. Yet CMS is denying seniors and their families access to these new treatments, and rebuffing innovators who have produced the biggest breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s in two decades.

This issue has bipartisan support – Alzheimer’s Disease is no respecter of political ideology. Democratic and Republican lawmakers hammered CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure on the policy before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health last week. The same day, 26 attorneys general from red and blue states sent Ms. Brooks-LaSure and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra a letter urging them to expand access. Both groups highlighted the administration’s conflicting policy on the matter, noting that the Department of Veterans Affairs granted coverage for Eisai and Biogen’s treatment in February.

The authors say, “In many ways, we are today with Alzheimer’s where we were with cancer 40 years ago. When President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act of 1971, the five-year survival rate was below 50%. After decades of investment, supported by policies rewarding incremental innovation, the rate is approaching 70%. It is nearly 100% for breast, prostate and other cancers caught in the early stages. Similar progress is possible for Alzheimer’s—and the first step is getting FDA-approved treatments out of CED.”

This is not surprising to those who understand the mindset of socialized medicine advocates like the Biden Administration. In all socialized medicine systems, rationing of healthcare according to the value of the individual to society is a mainstay of policy. One can only conclude that seniors are not deemed important enough to justify the expense in this administration.

I’m sure you’ll be glad to know the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the end to the Covid-19 emergency, signaling that one of the deadliest and economically devastating pandemics in modern history is over. By the reactions of most people to wearing masks, personal distancing, and travel in crowded buses and airplanes, this is not really news.

The WHO lost much of its credibility a long time ago at the beginning of this pandemic when they first reassured us there was nothing to worry about, then changed their minds when it was obvious we were experiencing a pandemic. They also aligned themselves with the notoriously untrustworthy Chinese government to reassure us the virus didn’t come from a lab leak in Wuhan. That theory has been widely debunked by now.

This WHO declaration doesn’t really change much, but it does mark a long-awaited milestone, signaling the pandemic is reaching a new stage after more than three years of tragedy and deprivation. Betsy McKay and Brianna Abbott, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tell us more than 6.9 million people have died globally, according to the WHO. In the U.S. alone, the death toll is more than 1.1 million, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and many others have lingering health problems after infection.

Although these numbers have been highly criticized due to the fact that hospitals routinely report Covid deaths in patients who died of other causes, but tested positive for Covid, that’s still a lot of deaths. Covid-19 was the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2022 behind heart disease, Cancer, and unintentional injuries including overdoses, according to the CDC. It was the third leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021.

The authors say, “The pandemic has shattered an illusion that humanity has control over its environment. It has wrought significant, often wrenching changes in science, politics and international relations, as well as lessons for global public-health systems. Researchers and public-health officials established global disease surveillance capabilities during the past three years that can be used for future disease monitoring, including wastewater surveillance and genome sequencing.”

That’s the good news. But the bad news is the public has lost trust in public-health officials who promised results with masks, lockdowns of businesses and schools, and vaccines that would prevent illness. When all these promises proved false, the credibility of these officials plummeted. Governments and medical providers are less equipped in many ways to fight disease threats than they were before the pandemic. The next pandemic could be worse.

“The public’s trust in data and in science and vaccines has taken a hit, and it’s been very polarized,” said Dr. Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It raises the risk of what happens when there’s another pandemic.”

While the pandemic may be over, Covid continues to make its mark. More than 17,000 deaths were reported globally in the past month, according to the WHO. There were about 1,050 reported in the U.S. in the week ending in April 26^th. Most of those who are dying are elderly or have conditions that weaken their immune systems.

The U.S. ended its Covid-19 national emergency in April and its public-health emergency will be lifted May 11. That means full insurance coverage for Covid-19 tests won’t be mandatory in many cases and the CDC won’t have the power to collect some test and vaccination data. It also means those who have been kept on Medicaid despite being financially ineligible will lose their coverage. People can get free vaccines and treatments until the government stockpile runs out.

It must be the weather; or the time of the year; or perhaps it’s the clang of the gong when reality sets in. Whatever the explanation, it seems everyone is anxious to rewrite history.

The reason for this directly relates to the Republicans re-gaining control of the House of Representatives and the subpoena power that gives them. First, it was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the well-known architect of our Covid pandemic disaster when it came to lockdowns of businesses and schools in a failed attempt to prevent the spread of the virus. We still got the virus, but our economy crashed and our children lost at least a year of education. Fauci, in an attempt to pre-empt his appearance before the House granted an interview to The New York Times in which he rewrites history. I covered this in my last post, Fauci Rewriting History.

Now it’s Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the face of the teachers unions, who is also attempting to rearrange reality. The Wall Street Journal editorial board tells us, “Much still needs to be learned about the long-term health effects of Covid-19, but we already know one of the clear long-term political effects: memory loss. That’s the only way to explain why long-time advocates of pandemic lockdowns are now denying they ever supported the school and economic shutdowns that did so much harm to so many.”

As evidence to back up their statement, they point to Weingarten’s appearance last week before the House of Representatives: “Leading the amnesia parade is Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president who attempted to erase two years of Covid history in testimony last week to the House of Representatives that was, literally, unbelievable.”

Weingarten had the audacity to say, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools. We know that young people learn and connect best in person, so opening schools safely, – even during a pandemic -guided our actions, which I will describe in detail.” But the promised details were not forthcoming. She omitted her description in July, 2020 of the Trump Administration’s push to reopen schools for in-person learning that autumn as “this reckless, this callous, this cruel!” That summer she also endorsed teacher “safety strikes” if unions deemed local reopening protocols to be inadequate. Hundreds of private and charter schools did open that fall without the surge of illness that Ms. Weingarten claimed to fear.

She also failed to mention that local union affiliates were the most aggressive opponents of school reopening throughout 2021 and even into 2022. “We are practically begging the Chicago Teachers Union to come to the table so we can get a deal done,” Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in February 2021.

In Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis ordered schools to reopen in autumn 2020, the Florida Education Association sued the state to keep them closed. The schools nevertheless reopened – much to the benefit of students who learn far better in person according to all the evidence. There are many more examples that could be quoted, but you get the idea. For Ms. Weingarten to somehow claim that unions tried hard to reopen schools is simply an attempt to rewrite their shameful history.

The WSJ editors say, “Ms. Weingarten and others are trying to rewrite history because they realize now, far too late, that their lockdowns are unpopular. The public can see the damage in lost learning and livelihoods. The lockdown lobbyists want everyone to forget it all happened, but it’s important for democratic accountability that they don’t get away with it.”

The operative phrase here is “lockdowns are unpopular.” The teachers unions aren’t shamed by the atrocious learning scores as a result of their actions; they aren’t shamed by the tragic consequences of their deeds for the lives of millions of children. They’re only concerned because the unpopularity of their actions may impact their ability to attract more members and more government spending to line their coffers.

Note: For more on Randi Weingarten, go to The New York Times magazine article entitled “The Most Dangerous Person in the World is Randi Weingarten.”