Medicine’s New Priorities: Flu Shots During Surgery and Climate Rules in the OR

Making the rounds of shock on social media has been this year’s advertising from CHOP’s (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) “Close Your Eyes, We’ll Immunize!” Program.

Active since 2023 across CHOP campuses for patients under general anesthesia or sedation, medical teams administer vaccines to children after induction – the transition phase where a patient is taken from a fully awake state to a state of deep unconsciousness (general anesthesia) so that surgery or a medical procedure can begin.

Children’s Hospital Colorado, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, and Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center (Northern California) are the other outliers, along with CHOP, to run this risky experiment.

Call it the bandwagon effect, groupthink, anti-intellectualism, or even mob rule; the momentum of dangerous behavior stamped into medical policy and procedure is a flashing warning light that medicine is losing its way.

Madhava Setty, MD, is a board-certified anesthesiologist with 24 years of clinical experience who had this to say about CHOP’s protocol:

“Every single medication we administer during an operation can potentially trigger untoward or allergic responses. When this occurs our primary responsibility is to stabilize the patient. Our secondary responsibility is to identify the offending agent. There is absolutely no justification of introducing another agent, in this case a flu vaccine, which carries a risk of harm and contributes nothing to the success of the operation.”

It’s really as simple as that.

The false industry vaccine ‘safe and effective’ talking point wrongfully swayed the public in several instances, yet it should never have found a home rewriting a delicate, highly specialized medical procedure on children no less – a formal subspecialty of anesthesiology.

It’s not just the modern vaccine dogma that is reshaping medicine into a dangerous religion. The climate change narrative sold for decades using fear and questionable ‘settled science’ has also influenced medicine for the worse.

Again, we see anesthesiologists being the weakest link; yet instead of a few hospitals experimenting on children, the American Society of Anesthesiologists itself went all in.

In their Reduce Carbon Footprint from Inhaled Anesthesia guidance document, the society recommends “the lowest possible fresh gas flow should be selected when using inhaled anesthetics” to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

Patient safety takes a procedural back seat to fighting the ‘settled science’ of climate change in the most extreme circumstance – mid-surgery.

What happens if your anesthesiologists fight climate change too hard at the expense of lowballing your gas flow pre-surgery?

If the dose of anesthesia is too low, the main risks are inadequate pain control, patient movement or awareness during the procedure, and (in some cases) psychological distress afterward.

All in a day’s work to save the earth from a theoretical scientific idea that experts have now backed away from their worst-case-scenario predictions.

Medicine’s scorecard begins to look dismal when you add pediatric gender medicine (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries for minors) into the mix of unscientific and potentially dangerous practices.

Systematic reviews have found the evidence base weak and low-quality for the often claimed mental-health benefits, with significant known risks (impaired bone density, infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, potential cardiovascular and cognitive effects).

Social and political influences have added complexity as a cottage industry of hospitals and clinics has built up around the practice to prioritize affirmation and short-term relief over long-term evidence of benefit for developing bodies.

HHS’s August report titled Wolves in White Costs tagged $120 million in total billed charges for gender-related services to minors since 2019.

This covered more than 5,500 surgical procedures and 8,500 courses of hormones or puberty blockers, with more than 225 hospitals and health systems participating.

What we’d like to think medicine is and the reality of the practice are two different things. Swayed often by politics and echo chambers, its ‘do no harm’ policies and procedures are up for grabs on a nebulous, sliding scale whose momentum changes with the times – not the science.