David Vance SubstackRead More
Let’s talk about Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he would like to see the state pay for IVF.
As an alternative, Trump has suggested that his government could mandate that insurance companies pay for IVF.
What is going on here is that some Western governments have a very angry middle class who are noticing that they are finding it difficult to reproduce.
My followers might be able to think of some reasons why that might be so.
But that is for another day.
The issue we face in this article is that the problem with Trump’s grand idea is that we have been here before.
We have just seen the dangers of large numbers of people thinking there is a public health crisis and demanding that the government throw lots of money at it and give people an off the peg cure.
How did that work out with the Covid jab, Mr Trump?
What I am pointing out is that Trump’s IVF push risks turning into a replay of his vaccine mistake.
Just like vaccines, fertility treatment does not have any equivalent of manufacturer liability.
If the child develops sickness at any age, it is almost impossible to make out whether this is attributable in part or in whole to the medical intervention of fertility treatment.
Even if something like that could be definitively said, the fertility clinic could say: Your gametes were defective.
It is your poor gametes that are at fault, not the intervention.
Can you see how this works?
Fertility treatment is a licence to print money.
There is no comeback for damage.
If you think I am scaremongering, have a read of this Daily Mail headline:
‘NHS spends £120m a year dealing with problems linked to private IVF clinics, including treatment of sick and premature babies’
This story presents the findings of Dr Gulam Bahadur, a senior consultant fertility specialist at Homerton University Hospital in the UK.
Dr Bahadur said: ‘The people operating these clinics are taking the profits and paying anything for the mess they are making.’
He added: ‘No other industry is allowed to keep its profits and pass on costs to the national budget this way.’
The writer of that story continues
‘The landmark study also found that IVF treatment may not be as effective as we have been led to believe.
‘Because of the way IVF is performed, it is more likely to lead to problematic pregnancies and births.’
Trump has singled out IVF as if IVF were some sort of off the peg treatment for fertility problems.
The problem is if you listen to Dr Bahadur or IVF pioneer Professor Robert Winston, they are far more concerned with poor diagnoses and the – some might say – deliberate failure to make patients aware of low cost, low risk alternatives to IVF.
The public may have lost some of their appetite for vaccines, but most members of the public think fertility treatment equals high-cost IVF.
And if they cannot afford it, most would be happy for the state or an insurance company to pay for it.
This simply turns the whole process into a money-spinning venture.
I advise any interested readers to go and read books and interviews by IVF pioneer Robert Winston to get more detail, but these are some of the arguments he puts forward.
Why do the clinics not focus on nuanced diagnosis?
Why is there not more use of keyhole surgery to determine what the cause of the fertility problem is?
Why not use fallopian tube surgery more often?
Why not use low cost, low risk IUI, which simply means injecting sperm?
Why not research how to preserve the eggs in the ovaries into older age rather than have women take the high-risk route of using dangerous drugs to extract the eggs for dangerous freezing?
Why does there appear to be such over-use of ICSI, the high-risk IVF method that involves injecting a sperm directly into an egg?
Those are the sorts of detailed arguments Winston makes.
Let us leave Professor Winston for a moment and return to Dr Bahadur who points out the levels of sickness in neonatal units and how he wonders whether a significant part of this might be attributable to unnecessarily risky fertility treatment.
And that brings us to the topic of Lucy Letby.
The topic of sickness and death in neonatal units is very hot right now owing to the case of Lucy Letby.
The official line in the UK is that Lucy Letby is a convicted mass murderer.
However, there is momentum questioning the safety of her conviction.
A lot of this momentum is coming from outside the UK.
It appears there may have been some reluctance on the part of some people to go on the witness stand and defend Lucy Letby for fear of being crushed by the British Establishment.
Can you imagine!
Perish the thought!
My followers know what I think about the Lucy Letby conviction because I told you in 2023 what I thought of it.
What I want to ask is when we see these incidents of high numbers of neonatal deaths in various parts of the world, are any of these in any way linked to the endless rise and rise of children being conceived by way of IVF?
Let me quote from the Daily Mail in relation to the Lucy Letby case.
The boys were the result of several rounds of IVF, with the family resigning themselves to the fact they may never have children.
‘Lucy was aware of our journey and deliberately caused significant harm and cruelty to our boys,’ she said.
‘No children in the world were more wanted than them.’
Their son now has complex learning difficulties, which they believe is a direct result of his being poisoned with insulin.
It is a deeply upsetting story.
I understand those two children, one dead and one still alive, were not the only IVF children involved in the Letby case.
At this point, let me make myself crystal clear.
I am not attributing any injuries or deaths in the Letby case to IVF treatment.
What I am asking is that now that we have an increasing spotlight on clusters of deaths in neonatal units in various parts of the world, can we please not shy away from asking how much focus the authorities place on collecting data in relation to fertility treatment?
We have at least one very concerned consultant in the Homerton hospital who points the finger at fertility treatment for causing serious problems on those wards.
Just how out of control is the fertility industry?
It seems the IVF Pied Piper has a queue of customers that does nothing but grow and grow.
Might we then expect the problems described in the Homerton hospital study to grow and grow?
And would the IVF bigwigs ever admit to such problems?
Or might it be easier to find another fall guy?
Whatever the case, a perhaps misinformed public seem to want more and more IVF.
And politicians, like Donald Trump, feel they have to respond to public anxiety.
Yes, population is rising in some places – but that is down to mass immigration.
There are a lot of voters concerned that they or their family members seem to be having fertility issues.
We all want to be the person who can help in a medical crisis.
So while Donald Trump may have the very best of intentions, he needs to make sure that he is not, once again, being led up the garden path by the medical industrial complex.
So, please, Mr Trump, thanks for the concern.
But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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