August 6, 2021
Medical insanity, as described by an MD

By Matt Bettag, MD

When did the world become insane? What is the reason for it? Big Brother? Depopulation? Or people in love with control? I don't know and it's driving me nuts. But I've decided I'm tired of complaining about it to my friends and family and I'm willing to put my name on the line. If the woke culture wants to ruin me for speaking the truth, I guess I might as well just get it over with now.

I have been a physician for 24 years, a practicing ENT for 19 years. I have never before seen the medical establishment just stop thinking. Insanity is the new rule, and common sense cannot even be discussed.

From the beginning, 15 days to flatten the curve, I was shocked. We had never done this before, but perhaps this virus was really bad, so I gave the government the benefit of the doubt.

Then came Fauci. He initially said social distancing didn't work, and masks were largely ineffective. But by late March, he pronounced both masking and social distancing necessary. Weird...red flag. But what really hit me was that he went on to say people should use Tinder and Grindr at their own discretion. What? How do you socially distance that? So now I am alarmed.

I started researching the utility of masks. There were very good articles I found — one out of a respiratory center in Chicago, and another a good dental review. I bookmarked both of them. Less than a month later, the dental website was down, replaced by a text saying basically that their information is now irrelevant because of COVID. The Chicago article also had a disclaimer that previously wasn't there saying people shouldn't use their article politically. What? Don't use a scientifically-derived article to make a scientifically based decision on the utility of masks? What the hell is going on?

Next comes PCR. Let's conveniently jack up the cycles to 40+, resulting in a 90–97% false-positive rate, then let's start testing all elective surgery, asymptomatic exposures, and hospitalized patients. In addition, we will reimburse hospitals greatly for COVID admissions and ICU visits. Oxygen doesn't work; go home until you get worse. Oh, and bring your family and friends with you; they'll need testing.

Steroids were advised against early on, which makes no sense because they do decrease inflammation and in ENT have been used widely for viral illness. Next, we find a few weeks later the secret drug to treat COVID: steroids. What?

HCQ, not safe. Has been used for decades worldwide with a great safety profile, but not anymore, because orange man bad. Mention it, and you are a lunatic. The same went for any other proven therapeutic, such as ivermectin and vitamin D.

Vaccines? I wouldn't trust anything the president made. That was Kamala Harris back in the fall. Now if you don't get vaccinated, you don't care about other people, and you wanna watch people die. Oh, and by the way, we should vaccinate everyone, including those who previously had COVID, pregnant women, and small children.

What about VAERS? That's the open record report system that the CDC has made almost unnavigable. It's slowly crept up and showed up to 12,000 deaths coincident with the vaccine. Then dropped to 6,000, only to come back up to 10,000 and now back to 12,000. Just a little glitch from our trustworthy government. There are reports that the numbers could be ten times or more as high, and perhaps the CDC is misclassifying deaths to hide them. But let's trust the government; they've been so good thus far.

Now the latest, the delta variant, is surging because of the unvaccinated. Ignore the data from other countries that have very high vaccine rates but high spiking cases, and ignore the data from other countries that have low vaccine rates and almost no COVID. As a matter of fact, let's not even look at Sweden, which essentially didn't do lockdowns or masking, has a low vaccination rate, and has almost zero COVID.

I have never lived in a world like this, where open medical dialogue is completely suppressed and there is only one party line. I thought the left was always talking about how we shouldn't bully people, and we need to have "dialogue." Well...let's start. The media and the government need to do their job and start opening dialogue to the other side. If we are crazy, it will come out. If we are right, and the data show that to be the fact, then a large apology is warranted.

President Joe Biden announced plans Thursday to push auto sales to be 50 percent electric by 2030 with new regulations, as part of the administration’s effort to promote cleaner energy.

“There [is] a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen,” Biden said at the White House. “A future of the automobile industry that is electric. Battery electric, plug-in, hybrid electric, fuel cell electric, it’s electric and there’s no turning back.”

That future however, may also feature swelling American reliance on one of its greatest overseas adversaries: China.

Less than five percent of all new cars on the U.S. market were purely electric vehicles and less than four percent were plug-in hybrids as of June, according to the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory. Not only will the government-manufactured shift to up that number by 12 times require massive state subsidies for a slow-growing industry, as Biden promised, but it will exacerbate American dependence on Chinese mineral production to make the car batteries needed.

According to the New York Times, China makes “70 to 80 percent of the world’s battery chemicals, battery anodes and battery cells,” and dominates the market for electric motor magnets.

“China controls the cards in the battery supply chain,” Vivas Kumar, the former Tesla manager of battery materials, told the paper in February.

Meanwhile, the Unites States lags behind when it comes to even mining its own minerals such as lithium and cobalt, let alone processing them at home. While both are more common components of electric cars, the Chinese also remain dominant in the extraction and refinement of the 17 rare earth minerals, some of which are in the batteries too.

“The Middle East has oil, and China has rare earth,” said former Chinese Communist Party Leader Deng Xiaoping in 1992, as Beijing ramped up production to play the long game — which is now bearing fruit. Since then, China has outpaced the United States as the world’s largest producer of rare minerals, raising production by 500 percent, according to the Wyoming Mining Association.

“The [electric vehicle] industry can’t exist without China, and there is no plan to displace China as the supplier of these minerals,” former Trump administration EPA transition team member and founder of “JunkScience” Steve Milloy told The Federalist, adding that Biden’s latest initiative orders more dependency on Chinese imports.

Milloy is skeptical the electric vehicle industry will even take off with a 50 percent share of the car market altogether. He argues their high price and inefficiency will lead consumers to embrace their use far more slowly than the 2030 timeline suggests, if not reject them entirely.

The Biden administration is not blind to the dominance of Chinese mining. At his electric vehicle announcement Thursday, the president acknowledged the United States was in competition with China and its stranglehold on the world’s battery supply.

“Right now, China’s leading the race,” Biden said. The electric car market has also grown far more and far faster in China than in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center.

“And here’s the deal,” the president continued, “our national labs in America, our universities, our automakers, led in the development of this technology. We lead in developing this technology, and there’s no reason why we can’t reclaim that leadership and lead again.”

Biden said nothing about mining however, as the administration fills with radical environmental leftists who aim to lock up natural resources on federal land. The dramatic increase in battery demand that would accompany making 50 percent of new cars electric is a big win for Beijing.

The United States could reclaim its mineral dominance if it tapped into its own vast riches, unreachable by the cascade of burdensome regulation standing in the way of development. The short 6-minute video from Kite & Key Media sums up the entire debacle below:



Even if the lower 48 are kept off limits, Alaskan minerals could be mined to erase American dependence on Chinese supply, with lawmakers in the Republican state welcoming development.

“Experts predict a nearly 500 percent increase in mineral demand created by the push to decarbonize the world. Alaska is the place to find a responsible way to meet this demand,” wrote Alaskan Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy in the Wall Street Journal three months ago. “No major mining accident has occurred in Alaska, yet the U.S. continues to sources its minerals from the Congo, South Africa and China while Washington regulators deny permits to projects on state of Alaska lands designed for mining.”

China, meanwhile, has made no secret of its plans to exploit American dependence on its mineral operations. The Wall Street Journal reported on a 2019 Beijing-funded report on rare-earth policy, which wrote, “China will not rule out using rare earth exports as leverage to deal with” a U.S.-China trade war.

With other nations, China already has weaponized its supply-chain power. In 2010, the country blocked rare-earth mineral exports to Japan, a developed but resource-poor country which relied heavily on the Chinese products.

Federalist Senior Contributor Helen Raleigh, an author and expert on Chinese affairs, chronicled the Japanese response, in which the government sought to diversify its source of minerals and drive innovation to encourage entrepreneurs to find substitute material.

In an interview, Raleigh emphasized that, while China is the world’s supplier of rare-earth minerals, it is not home to the most reserves, and the United States could find alternative production with an open look inward at its own supply which is mined far more cleanly and safely.

“Chinese dominance is in production and processing, not the world’s largest deposits,” Raleigh said.

While the Biden administration began to take steps in April to secure domestic supply for rare-earth minerals, Raleigh said the plans so far lacked “teeth” because “they focus on short-term optics,” such as initiatives to make 50 percent of the U.S. auto fleet electric within 10 years.

“We shouldn’t be so short-sighted,” Raleigh said, considering the Chinese plotted their dominance in the mineral arena decades ago.

In May, Reuters reported Biden was looking to Brazil, Canada, and Australia as potential sources for rare-earth minerals, as opposed to expanding America’s own mines to tap into its own reserves with its own labor.

Milloy said the issue with that proposal, aside from generating jobs abroad which could be available at home, is that neither country is a known host to resources as vast as those in the United States.

“We can’t just demand that Australia, Canada, [and] Brazil produce these for us,” Milloy said.