Category: Mike Magee

Teledoc Medication Abortions Under Attack

Oct 2, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

For those prepared to take a deep breath and relax in the aftermath of the MAGA induced assault on the First Amendment that whipsawed Disney leadership last week as they abandoned and then rescued Jimmy Kimmel, be advised reproductive health access is at the top of the list when it comes to MAGA campaigns to “restrict liberties.”

Consider the ongoing campaign to federally restrict telemedicine enabled medication abortion.

A few facts:

Medication abortion is a process that involves taking two medications (mifepristone and misoprostol) at specific intervals over one to three days. It is approved for use up to the first 70 days of a pregnancy and costs on average about $500.
As defined by Yale Medicine, “Mifepristone is a medication that blocks progesterone activity in a female’s body. Progesterone is a critical hormone for supporting an early pregnancy. The second medication, misoprostol, causes contractions and expels the pregnancy tissue. It typically takes 12 to 24 hours to pass the tissue.”
The overall number of abortions have risen since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. There were 1.1 million US abortions in 2023, that is 88,000 per month compared to 80,000 the year before.
Medication abortions account for 2/3 of all abortions in the US. At least 1 in 4 of these last year involved telemedicine provision by mail order including to citizens from states with highly restrictive abortion laws.
Success rate in terminating pregnancy is 99.6%. Major complications occur in .4% of cases and mortality is nearly non-existent.
Anti-abortion advocates are currently focused on obstructing legal access to abortion pills.

Immediately following the Dobbs decision, 12 states banned abortion and 4 states imposed a 6-week gestational limit on access to abortion. Nine of these states now explicitly ban telehealth enabled medication abortion. Countering these measures, eight states where abortion remains legal have passed “shield laws” that protect health professionals from prosecution by other states for engaging in telehealth support of patients seeking self-care within states where abortion is illegal. By latest count, 1 in 7 telehealth assisted medication abortions involved practitioners from shield states.

President Trump’s campaign pledge to reinstate the dormant 1873 Comstock Act to cripple telehealth efforts in support of medication abortion has gone nowhere. In a similar vein, flawed science studies engineered by anti-abortion advocates attempting to challenge FDA clearances for safety and self management of the drugs involved have been exposed as unscientific, deceptive and biased. Multiple state suits, for and against imposing additional FDA hurdles to access in the absence of demonstrable medical benefit or risk mitigation are piling up in the courts. And Louisiana recently took a different tact, reclassifying misoprostol a “controlled substance” and inviting provider countersuits.

As Cornell legal experts remind us, the freedom of expression and the right to freedom of speech may be exercised “in direct (words) or a symbolic (actions) way.” When first written, and adopted as the first of the original 10 entries in the Bill of Rights in 1791, the First Amendment said: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Nowadays, the provision applies to the entire federal government and is reinforced by the Due Process Claus of the 14th Amendment which protects citizens from state government interference as well.

For better or worse, the actions leading up to the Dobbs decision were led, funded, organized and executed primarily by religious groups, primarily Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians, joining ranks on the issue five decades ago. Those very religions legitimacy and independence has long been protected by the First Amendment.

A simple listing of the opening salvo of our Bill of Rights reveals a complex tangle of protections that define not only our primary rights as citizens, but also our power and legitimacy as a healthy representative democracy.

What’s included? According to legal experts, our 1st Amendment “protects the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference. It prohibits any laws that establish a national religion, impede the free exercise of religion, abridge the freedom of speech, infringe upon the freedom of the press, interfere with the right to peaceably assemble, or prohibit people from petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.”

Religious leaders remain deeply divided. Opposing reproductive choice while protecting the religious freedom assured by the very same 1st Amendment is a difficult needle to thread. Consider the comment of Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, on June 24, 2022, the day of the Dobbs decision: “I recognize there are people on both sides of the question in the Catholic Church. What we are finding though is that when people become more aware of what the church is doing to assist women in difficult pregnancies … hearts and minds begin to change.”

Well, not exactly. A March, 2025 Pew Survey of Catholics nationwide revealed that 6 in 10 Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

It is ironic that, in attempting to usurp women’s rights to their own reproductive freedoms, that some religious leaders continue to attack the country’s foundational 1st Amendment that has assured the continued existence of their sponsoring organizations.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.

Where “Little Flowers” Bloom – Two by Two

Aug 8, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

What are the chances that citizens of New York, the largest city in the nation, would vote in a majority to oppose a formerly corrupt politician with a party machine behind him, and instead favor a little known candidate – the son of immigrant parents with “swarthy skin and belligerent independence,” from a suspect minority and religious heritage, who actively mixed music and politics, who seemed to come out of nowhere but be everywhere at once, and was ultra focused on “efficiency and honesty in municipal government?”

And what if that had occurred not once, but twice in the last century?

Certainly by now, the name Zohran Mamdani is already ringing in your ears. More on him in a moment. But let’s first travel back a century to introduce another candidate for mayor whose life and career presaged the modern day version.

His name was Fiorello La Guardia, and his remains were laid to rest on September 21, 1947 in Woodland Cemetery, a short distance from his home at 5020 Woodbridge Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He died at age 64 from pancreatic cancer.

“The Little Flower” (a nickname that derived from his first name Fiore – Italian for flower) described his stature (5 foot 2 inches) but not necessarily his personality. The New York Times obituary described him “as much a part (of New York) as any of its public buildings” and “a little firebrand.”

By any measure, he was one of New York’s own, earning the morning of his death in 1947 the Fire Department’s 5-5-5-5 signal, a traditional bell code used to honor firefighters who have died in the line of duty.

An Italian immigrant, his father was raised a Catholic in Foggia, Italy, and his mother (from Trieste on the Italian/Croatian border) was Jewish. Fiorello was born on the East Side of Manhattan on December 11, 1882, two years after his parents’ marriage in Italy. His father was a skilled musician and became the bandmaster for the U.S. Army. As a result, Fiorello was raised on multiple Army bases, and graduated from high school in Prescott, Arizona, a stone’s throw from Fort Whipple. Along the way, the father taught the son to play the banjo, cornet, and trumpet, and taught his sister, Gemma, to play violin, mandolin, and piano.

Skilled in languages (Yiddish, German, French, Italian), by the age of 20 Fiorello was employed by the US Consulate in Europe, and on return to the U.S. served as an interpreter on Ellis Island. Within a few years, he managed a Law Degree from NYU in 1910, and in 1914, at age 32 ran for U.S. Congress as a Republican, losing to the Tammany Hall’s Democratic candidate. Two years later, he won the seat even though Republicans initially supported another candidate. By 2018, he was re-elected but this time with Democratic support and declaring himself a “socialist.”

By 1933, Tammany Hall and its leader, NYC Mayor Jimmy Walker, were out, clearing the way for Fiorello. He ran with the support of a complex coalition of German American Republicans, Democratic reformers, Socialists, middle-class Jews, and Italians who in the past had aligned with Tammany Hall.

He came into the Mayor’s office in 1934 good to go. He had promised work relief for the unemployed, merit-based civil service, efficiency over corruption, and a focus on infrastructure including expanded housing, transportation and parks. Robert Moses was the head of his Parks department, a post he held until 1960. His vocal support during the election for FDR paid off handsomely. Fully 20% of the entire national Civil Works Administration (CPA) budget was allocated by FDR to New York City. In return, he delivered his Labor Party’s (which he helped organize) support to FDR in his Presidential elections in 1936, 1940 and 1944.

One of his main achievements was the maintenance of the Office of Price Administration which placed limits on pricing of food, rents, and other necessities. By the time he stepped down on December 31, 1945, “Tammany Hall had been reduced to a shadow.”

Eight decades later, an independent minded, gifted politician, also occasionally self-defined a “socialist” bucked his own political establishment and soundly defeated the modern version of a Democratic Tammany candidate, Andrew Cuomo, surprising many, but not all political pundits. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

China Goes “Democratic” on Artificial General Intelligence

Jul 25, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

Last week, following a visit to the White House, Jensen Huang instigated a wholesale reversal of policy from Trump who was blocking Nvidia sales of its H20 chip to China. What did Jensen say?

We can only guess of course. But he likely shared the results of a proprietary report from noted AI researchers at Digital Science that suggested an immediate policy course correction was critical. Beyond the fact that over 50% of all AI researchers are currently based in China, their study documented that “In 2000, China-based scholars produced just 671 AI papers, but in 2024 their 23,695 AI-related publications topped the combined output of the United States (6378), the United Kingdom (2747), and the European Union (10,055).”

David Hook, CEO of Digital Science was declarative in the opening of the report, stating “U.S. influence in AI research is declining, with China now dominating.”

China now supports about 30,000 AI researchers compared to only 10,000 in the US. And that number is shrinking thanks to US tariff and visa shenanigans, and overt attacks by the administration on our premier academic institutions.

Economics professors David Autor (MIT) and Gordon Hanson (Harvard), known for “their research into how globalization, and especially the rise of China, reshaped the American labor market,” famously described the elements of “China Shock 1.0.” in 2013. It was “a singular process—China’s late-1970s transition from Maoist central planning to a market economy, which rapidly moved the country’s labor and capital from collective rural farms to capitalist urban factories.”

As a result, a quarter of all US manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1999 and 2007. Today China’s manufacturing work force tops 100 million, dwarfing the US manufacturing job count of 13 million. Those numbers peaked a decade ago when China’s supply of low cost labor peaked. But these days China is clearly looking forward while this administration and its advisers are being left behind in the rear view mirror.

Welcome to “China Shock 2.0” wrote Autor and Hanson in a recent New York Times editorial. But this time, their leaders are focusing on “key technologies of the 21st century…(and it) will last for as long as China has the resources, patience and discipline to compete fiercely.”

The highly respected Australian Strategic Policy Institute, funded by their Defense Department, has been tracking the volume of published innovative technology research in the US and China for over a quarter century. They see this as a measure of experts opinion where the greatest innovations are originating. In 2007, we led China in the prior four years in 60 of 64 “frontier technologies.”

Two decades later, the table has flipped, with China well ahead of the US in 57 of 64 categories measured.

Watching Where and How You’re Walking

Jul 18, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January, 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “We have made a thing …that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world…We have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.”

Eight decades later, those words reverberate, and we once again are at a seminal crossroads. This past week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was everywhere, a remarkably skilled communicator celebrating the fact that his company was now the first publicly traded company to exceed a $4 trillion valuation.

As he explained, “We’ve essentially created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. the last time there was an industry like this, it was a power generation industry…Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence…you can use it to discover new drugs, to accelerate diagnosis of disease…everybody’s jobs will be different going forward.”

Jensen, as I observed him perform on that morning show, seemed just a bit overwhelmed, awed, and perhaps even slightly frightened by the pace of recent change. “We reinvented computing for the first time since the 60’s, since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture… its able to accelerate applications from computer graphics to physics simulations for science to digital biology to artificial intelligence. . . . in the last year, the technology has advanced incredibly fast. . . AI is now able to reason, it’s able to think… Before it was able to understand, it was able to generate content, but now it can reason, it can do research, it can learn about the latest information before it answers a question.”

Of course, this is hardly the first time technology has triggered flashing ethical warning lights. I recently summarized the case of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). The US has the largest number of closed circuit cameras at 15.28 per capita, in the world. On average, every American is caught on a closed circuit camera 238 times a week, but experts say that’s nothing compared to where our “surveillance” society will be in a few years.

The field of FRT is on fire.