MORE FEARS FOR THE NEW YEAR.

• Author: Singleton, Marilyn M.
• Position: MEDICINE & HEALTH

Do not panic over COVID; as for other things... well.... BY NOW, Dr. Anthony Fauci's COVID "fearspeak" has become background noise. Yes, the new Omicron variant has made its way around the world. However, reports from South Africa as well as other studies show that Omicron's illness is milder than Delta. Even Fauci-friendly public health physicians have cautioned that there is "absolutely no reason to panic."

In 2022, however, we should panic because opioid overdoses took the lives of 100,000 fellow Americans from April 2020 to April 2021--an increase of 28% from the same period the year before. The statistic is appalling but not surprising given the COVID lock-downs coupled with millions of doses of fentanyl and other illicit drugs flooding across a porous border.

We should panic because one in 10 Americans has diabetes, while one in three has prediabetes. Moreover, 89% of the diabetics are overweight. Just over 73% of the U.S. population is overweight and 425% are obese. Worse yet, obesity among adults age 18 to 25 increased from 6.2% to 32.7% over the last 40 years. Instead of Dr. Fauci and Pres. Joe Biden telling us we have to relinquish our individual choices when it comes to the increasingly ineffective COVID vaccines, they should emphasize the effect of obesity on COVID outcomes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 78% of the overweight or obese individuals hospitalized because of the pandemic either needed a ventilator or died from COVID-19.

We should fear the loss of scientific medical practice, where, to avoid being stressed out, patients are demanding informed consent to be weighed in the doctor's office. Yet, informed consent is not required for experimental mRNA vaccines.

We should fear the blatant abuse of power by our public servants in the name of public health. We should be afraid when our top health bureaucrat, the Health and Human Services secretary, declares, "It is absolutely the government's business" to know people's vaccination status.

We should panic when elected representatives jump on the medical privacy-be-damned bandwagon. The House of Representatives handily approved the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act, which would establish yet another government database. This one is an "immunization information system" that can share every vaccine dose not only with other governmental entities, but private ones as well.

We should panic knowing that pharmaceutical companies spent...