MEDIA RELEASE: Ron St. Pierre Joins The Ocean State Current, New Brand Logo for In The Dugout

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Ron St. Pierre Joins The Ocean State Current
New Executive Producer Role & Anchor of Election 2022 Debates

In The Dugout Logo Contest Winner Announced

Cranston, RI – The Ocean State Current announced today that Ron St. Pierre will join its staff and that it has selected a new brand logo for its In The Dugout video podcast.

The Ocean State Current is Rhode Island’s fastest growing all-digital news and information source. In promoting common sense policies and opinions as the media arm of the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, The Current is quickly becoming the voice of parents and concerned citizens who seek improvement over the Ocean State’s failed status quo.

Along with its flagship video podcast, In The Dugout with Mike Stenhouse, The Current features video, text, and audio posts from citizen journalists and policy experts. An increasing lineup of content and new programming is expected in the near future, as Ron St. Pierre, popular on-air radio personality and former station president and general manager, will serve in the newly created position as Executive Producer for The Current, beginning March 1.

Beginning this week, St. Pierre will be joined by his longtime radio partner, Jen Brien, to co-host In The Dugout shows on Mondays, along with Mike Stenhouse. This special Monday podcast will soon launch a unique “talk video” format.

News & Views to Turn the Tide! The Current features a team of citizen journalists as well as prominent local and national personalities from across the political spectrum, who present a wide range of perspectives and common sense solutions … in text, audio, and video formats.

National contributors include: Stephen Moore, Chief Economist at the Heritage Foundation, Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, Andy Bernstein, Ayn Rand expert and Objectivist, and Hans Von Spakovsky, elections expert at the Heritage Foundation.

In addition to dozens of mom and dad parental-rights advocates, local contributors include: Judge Robert Flanders, former Associate Justice of the RI Supreme Court,  Stephen Laffey, former Cranston mayor and US Senatorial candidate, Anthony Giarrusso, former state Representative from East Greenwich, Tom Ward, founder of The Valley Breeze newspaper, Jen Brien, radio personality, and Tyler Rowley, religion & morality expert.

Election 2022. Ron St. Pierre will also anchor an Election 2022 debate series that will focus on upcoming state and local elections in Rhode Island. Also as part of St. Pierre’s role, The Current will also be developing premium content that will soon be available to monthly subscribers.

The Current also announces today that its new In The Dugout logo (below) was selected from a national logo contest among graphic artists and was the clear selection in a private survey. The new logo portrays both baseball and broadcast themes in a classic style, along with more contemporary elements. Stenhouse was a former Major League Baseball player in the 1980’s with the Boston Red Sox, Minnesota Twins, and Montreal Expos.

The In The Dugout podcasts, which normally air live Monday through Thursday from 4:00-5:00 PM EST, are reminiscent of some of Stenhouse’s favorite baseball memories when he and his teammates would engage in talk about all manner of issues while sitting in the dugout before or after a game. Stenhouse invites all of his guests to join him in donning a cap of their favorite team or organization.

Only on The Current. The Ocean State Current is rapidly becoming the trusted source for issues that are important to Rhode Island families … issues that the corporate media won’t cover or put forth with a false narrative. For those who are tired of the bias of the mainstream media, give The Current a look by browsing regularly at OceanStateCurrent.com

With one of the most technologically advanced websites in the industry, The Current offers text-to-audio translation for posts for easy mobile listening, automatically pulls content from select media partners, features an advanced and easy search capacity, and displays a unique Watch, Read, and Listen layout.

The Scientific Truth About Mask Mandates

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Fourteen Randomized, Controlled Trials of Community Masking, Published 2008 to 2021, Are Uniformly Negative, and Underscore the Punitive, Anti-Scientific Futility of Public Mask Mandates

By Dr. Andrew Bostom

Background

In August of 2021, the State of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Department of Health implemented a school mask mandate which will extend at least into January of 2022. Subsequently, there has been much public debate and outcry about the wisdom and motives behind this heavy-handed policy, including a lawsuit brought by concerned parents.

In a November 2021 Superior Court ruling in the State of Rhode Island, presented with scientific evidence and after hearing testimony from parents, the trial judge found that the prolonged masking of children over the course of a school day caused “irreparable harm” for the children in the state who were forced to wear masks.1

Yet, despite overwhelming research against the , still, by early February of 2022, at the time of this post, Rhode Island’s school mask mandate was still in effect – even as, in recent weeks, Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and Oregon announced they would be ending their mandates.

Worse, on February 8, House and Senate committees in the Rhode Island General Assembly advanced legislation that would allow school mask mandates to be remain in place through the end of March by extending the Governor’s emergency executive powers.

Back in August, the State cited vague guidance by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the basis for imposing this mandate, yet history and the most credible studies do not support a policy of universal masking within designated communities.

Between 2008-2020, thirteen negative randomized controlled trials (the gold-standard for studies of medical interventions) on masking were published.2-5 These studies conducted among ~18,000 persons, worldwide, all indicated that masking does not reduce community respiratory virus transmission.

Conversely, the most prominent study that the CDC cited to support its call for the continued masking of children aged 2 and older in school, was not a randomized, controlled trial, had serious design flaws, and may have included factitious data.6

Gold Standard Studies

In our era, randomized, controlled trials have shown, uniformly that face masks are not effective against respiratory virus outbreaks, or epidemics. But with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and increasing political pressure, suddenly studies appeared claiming the opposite. In reality, none of these studies were of the gold standard caliber; instead a mixture of confounded observational data, unrealistic modelling and laboratory results, and possible fraud.

Taking a look at more credible ‘gold standard’ designs, ten negative studies, focusing primarily on influenza, 2008 to 2016, were “meta-analyzed” [their data “pooled”], confirming the individual negative results.3 Independently validating these pooled findings are the results from a single large randomized controlled trial of masking among another cohort of Hajj pilgrims whose enrollment [n=6338] equaled the sum enrollment of all the 10 studies in the May, 2020 “meta-analysis.” Published online in mid-October, 2020, this “cluster randomized” (i.e., by tent) controlled trial confirmed mask usage did not reduce the incidence of clinically defined, or laboratory-confirmed respiratory viral infections, primarily influenza and/or rhinovirus. Indeed, there was a suggestion masking increased laboratory-confirmed infections by 40%, although this trend was not “statistically significant.”4

Subsequently, Danish investigators published the results during mid-November, 2020 of a randomized, controlled study conducted in 4862 persons which found that masking did not reduce SARS-CoV-2 (covid-19) infection rates to a statistically significant, or clinically relevant extent.  Covid-19 infections (detected by laboratory testing or hospital diagnosis) occurred among 1.8% of those assigned masks, versus 2.1% in control participants. Moreover, a secondary analysis including only participants who reported wearing face masks “exactly as instructed,” revealed a further narrowing of this non-significant, clinically meaningless infection rate “difference” to 0.1%, i.e., 2.0% in mask wearers versus 2.1% in controls.5

Finally, a vast (n=342,000) Bangladesh randomized trial of community masking, reported 8/31/21 as preprint, found cloth masks did not prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections. Odd, contradictory findings were described regarding surgical masks: they conferred a minimal, clinically irrelevant overall absolute risk reduction of 0.09%, which was somehow selectively limited only to those over 50 years old.7 However, a re-analysis of the raw data using appropriate statistical methods, found no evidence of benefit of paper masks either, in any subgroup.8

In aggregate from 2008 through August 2021, these fourteen negative randomized controlled trials of community masking for the prevention of respiratory viral infections, including SARS-CoV-2,2-5,7,8 underscore the punitive, anti-scientific fecklessness of public mask mandates

Dr. Andrew Bostom, an adjunct scholar to the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity is an academic internist, clinical trialist, and epidemiologist. Dr, Bostom was academic faculty for 24-years at Brown University Medical School, and remains affiliated with the Brown University Center For Primary Care and Prevention of Kent-Memorial Hospital.

References

1) https://www.abc6.com/content/uploads/2021/11/h/b/PC-2021-5915-decision-mask-mandate.pdf

2) “Surgical Mask to Prevent Influenza Transmission in Households: A Cluster Randomized Trial.”

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013998

3) “Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures” https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article

4) “Facemask against viral respiratory infections among Hajj pilgrims: A challenging cluster randomized trial” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7553311/pdf/pone.0240287.pdf

5) “Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers”

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M20-6817

6) ““The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wearing Masks in School” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/mask-guidelines-cdc-walensky/621035/

7) “The Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh”

https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf

8) “A note on sampling biases in the Bangladesh mask trial.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01296

 

 

 

 

 

 

Center’s Chairman Files Federal Lawsuit to Overturn State of RI Ban on Caring for His Patients

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Dr. Skoly Files Federal Lawsuit
Complaint alleges that the State’s actions barring him from caring for his patients are unconstitutional, irrational, arbitrary, and vindictive

Cranston, RI – Dr. Stephen Skoly and his legal team today filed a lawsuit in federal court against defendants Governor Daniel McKee and Nicole Alexander-Scott, the outgoing Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH), seeking an order to enjoin the State from barring him from caring for his patients as well as a restraining order that would immediately restore his right to continue his practice.

Dr. Skoly, Chairman of the RI Center for Freedom of Prosperity and a highly respected oral and maxillofacial surgeon who regularly provided service to those institutionalized by the State, was ordered by RIDOH on October 1, 2021 to cease providing his critical surgical care to patients, after his request for a medical exemption for the Covid-19 vaccine was denied.

The official complaint was prepared by attorney Brian Rosner, Senior Litigation Counsel for the nationally renowned and Washington, DC based New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) and was filed today in the United States District Court for Rhode Island by local attorney Gregory Piccirilli.

“After four months of being forced out of work, I still held out some hope that all mandates might come to an end in mid February. But now, with Rhode Island’s Speaker of the House and Senate President openly planning with Governor McKee to extend his executive orders and unilateral powers for at least another two months … I am left with no choice but to file this lawsuit,” exclaimed Skoly, who for 18 months of the pandemic safely cared for his patients.

At a special breaking news event, Rosner and Skoly will address the public and the media live today at 4:00 PM virtually on The Ocean State Current in a hybrid press-conference/interview format, hosted by the Center’s CEO, Mike Stenhouse.

The 34-page complaint puts forth two primary arguments for the Court to consider:

First, the complaint claims that Dr. Skoly’s “equal protection” and “due process” rights were violated, under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that no State shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In Dr. Skoly’s case, the State of Rhode Island has awarded hundreds of related exemptions to various healthcare professionals, while simultaneously denying Dr. Skoly equal consideration and failing to provide the legal due process that he is entitled to.

Second, the complaint cites that it was an “irrational and arbitrary move” for RIDOH to deny Dr. Skoly’s valid request for a medical exemption. The complaint not only documents Dr. Skoly’s naturally acquired immunity and antibody testing, but also his personal medical history of suffering from Bell’s Palsy facial paralysis, a condition that has scientifically been demonstrated to be associated with the Covid-19 vaccine … and where at least fifteen such cases have been reported in Rhode Island. Risking re-activation of such paralysis in order to continue his medical practice is repeatedly cited in the complaint as an irrational demand by the State of Rhode Island, which has caused “hardship and suffering to hundreds of Rhode Islanders” who are denied care by Dr. Skoly.

In advancing its “equal protection” argument, the complaint discusses how N95 masking has essentially been designated by the State as an acceptable alternative to vaccination. Dr. Skoly, who has agreed to comply with required testing and masking protocols, presents no more risk to patients than the hundreds and thousands of other healthcare workers, vaccinated or not, infected or not, who are currently allowed to care for patients under those same protocols. The complaint continues that the State, in allowing masked and “infected” workers to retain their livelihoods, while barring (infection-free) Dr. Skoly from practicing his profession, is guilty of an “arbitrary and capricious distinction” that “denies Dr. Skoly the equal protection of the law” .. an “action that has the appearance of being vindictive.”

Sources have informed the Center that RIDOH staff have privately admitted that Dr. Skoly was being made an example of, in part, because of his association with “that conservative organization” … as Chairman of our RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity.

Supporting Dr. Skoly’s position, and included in the filing, are over a dozen affidavits from local medical professionals, including statements from multiple national experts on Bell’s Palsy and Covid-19, as well as citation of recent findings from the CDC and updated policies from other countries.

Also, to date, about 4000 emails have been delivered to state officials via an online petition whereby concerned citizens and can #StandWithDocSkoly . The petition, plus related documentation and links can be found on the Center’s website at RIFreedom.org/DocSkoly.