Tulsi Gabbard in NH

FYI -

Words with Friends Hacked

What Happened?

On September 12, 2019, Zynga Inc., an online interactive gaming company, announced they’d recently discovered that certain player account information may have been illegally accessed by outside hackers. Although Zynga has not yet addressed the scope, media reports indicate that the hacker claims to have breached the data of more than 200 million players of Zynga games, including Draw Something and Words with Friends accounts on both Android and iOS platforms.  Players who installed and signed up to play Words with Friends before September 3, 2019 may be affected. It has been reported that Words with Friends player data that has potentially been compromised includes: Name Email addresses Login IDs Hashed and salted passwords Phone numbers, where provided Password reset tokens, if one had ever been requested

Facebook IDs, if connected to the social media platform Zynga account IDs Zynga has opened an investigation into the breach and has contacted law enforcement. A press release was sent out here that states some of the details as well as the steps the company is taking to protect these users’ accounts from invalid logins.

September 26, 2019

Infant and Child Mortality in the U.S.—Nothing to Brag About

By the Children’s Health Defense Team

Note: This article primarily focuses on infant mortality; a follow-up article will discuss child and adolescent mortality in greater detail.

The United States spends over $230 billion annually on children’s personal health care, representing about 8.4% of total U.S. health care spending. Spending jumped by 56% between 1996 and 2013—with some of the increase likely covering vaccine program costs that began “dramatically” escalating in the 1990s—but these substantial outlays are not translating into a rosy health picture for American children.

Instead, leading child health indicators seem to be giving new meaning to the phrase “geography is destiny.” International comparisons show that the U.S. has ranked lowest among twenty developed nations for child mortality since the 1990s and currently ranks behind 55 other countries worldwide for infant mortality. The U.S. also lags behind other developed countries in terms of the rate at which infant mortality is declining—in fact, infant mortality due to prematurity or low birthweight began trending upward in the late 1980s. At present, U.S.-born children are 76% more likely to die before their first birthday than infants in other wealthy nations—with 1 out of every 270 American babies dying in their first year of life as of 2015. Thus, from infancy on, young Americans are confronted with the challenge of beating terrible odds.

… more American newborns die the day they are born than in any other developed nation.

Welcome to the world…

Considering deaths that occur on the first day of life, it is sadly noteworthy that more American newborns die the day they are born than in any other developed nation. Globally, 68 other countries have a better standing than the U.S. in terms of newborn deaths.

Many of these tragic deaths are related to the higher percentage of premature births that occur in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. Could this have anything to do with the United States’ non-evidence-based administration of vaccines during pregnancy, and influenza vaccines in particular? Babies born to women who received flu shots during pregnancy are at greater risk of preterm birth as well as low birthweight and fetal death. Internationally, researchers have objected to across-the-board influenza vaccination of pregnant women in the absence of “strong and consistent” randomized clinical trial evidence—and in the U.S., no vaccines have ever been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “specifically for use during pregnancy to protect the infant”—yet the CDC continues to tell pregnant women that flu shots are safe.

Black babies in the U.S. are at particular risk of dying in their first month or year, with a 2.5 to 2.8 times higher risk of mortality compared to white infants. Common causes of excess mortality in black infants include perinatal conditions and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Without even counting the vaccines administered prenatally, American infants receive more vaccines in their first year than infants anywhere in the world. Many of those vaccines are administered in bundles at well-baby visits around two and four months—exactly when nine out of ten SIDS deaths occur.

Running the first-year-of-life vaccine gauntlet