Two years ago, Texas Children’s Hospital (“TCH”) publicly announced that it would no longer use drugs and hormones and mutilating surgery to “transform” kids into broken simulacrums of the opposite sex. Dr. Eithan Haim, a surgeon, exposed that as a lie. Now, via some serious FBI intimidation, Dr. Haim finds himself facing four felony charges that could lead to ten years in prison. Reviewing the regulations he is alleged to have violated, though, indicates that this is Stasi-like terrorism, not justice.
In a pre-regulatory age, people were arrested for obvious crimes: murder, rape, robbery, assault, etc. Now, though, the federal government has something around 188,000 pages of regulations.
In the USSR, Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s mass murdering and raping head of the secret police, would have been envious. After all, he’s the person who boasted, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” to explain how he used the illusion of a criminal justice system to destroy Stalin’s enemies.
Image: Dr. Eithan Haim. YouTube screen grab (cropped).
In Biden’s America, the DOJ and its military branch, the FBI, are now Beria’s tactics. If you are an enemy of the Biden administration, someone in the DOJ will find a crime that you’ve committed, and the FBI will come after you.
The latest victim of this trend is Dr. Haim. In 2023, a year after TCH’s no-more-transgender-stuff promise, Dr. Haim anonymously gave Christopher Rufo documents showing that TCH was continuing to provide so-called “transgender” treatment to children, including implanting puberty blockers.
The documents reveal nothing about the patients’ identities:
For my own part, I can confirm that nothing in the information provided to me identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted.
Presumably, then, the documents showed only the patients' ages to prove that they were children and the procedures performed on them. Nevertheless, Dr. Haim found three heavily armed FBI agents at his door telling him he’s being charged with four felonies:
Apparently, all the charges are tied to Dr. Haim’s having allegedly violated privacy regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. That being the case, it’s time for a little HIPAA primer.
HIPAA was primarily intended to protect people with preexisting or chronic conditions from losing their insurance when they switched jobs. However, the AIDS lobby saw HIPAA as an opportunity to address a longstanding concern, which was the stigma attached to people being treated for HIV/AIDS.
In the 1980s, when AIDS first emerged as a deadly contagious disease, those infected feared getting treatment lest they find themselves socially shunned, homeless, and jobless. By keeping diagnosis and treatment secret, they could receive medical care without fearing economic and other consequences.
Thus, you can see why the LGB lobby (long before the “TQ” and “+” were added) would push for HIPAA’s privacy protections. Showing how tightly tied the privacy protections are to the LGBTQ+ lobby, HHS’s Office for Civil Rights enforces these rules.
Congress, however, never specified what the privacy protections would be. Instead, it mandated that if it couldn’t agree after receiving recommendations from HHS, then HHS could just make the regulations—and that’s what happened.
The key point in the regulations is to protect “individually identifiable health information.” However, HHS recognized that some things are more important than an individual’s privacy rights. Thus,
The Secretary’s 1997 recommendations recognized the importance of balancing the privacy rights of individuals and the amount of control they have over the use and disclosure of their health information, with the need to permit health information to be used not just for routine health care activities (e.g., treatment and payment) but also for other purposes related to health care that are in the public interest (e.g., oversight, research, law enforcement, public health and safety). (Emphasis added.)
Certainly, concern about mutilating children would seem to fall within the “public health and safety” category. Impliedly, even patient identification can be revealed if public health and safety are at issue.
However, as Christopher Rufo says, Dr. Haim didn’t release the all-important “individually identifiable health information.” Instead, he apparently released only the patients’ ages to prove they were children and the treatments performed to prove that TCH was mutilating them. The question is whether those ages are the problem.
According to 45 CFR §164.514, there are 18 specific patient identifiers that must be removed when disclosing healthcare information. The only identifier that seems to apply here is subsection (C):
All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to an individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, date of death; and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older...
The writing is gibberishy but, as best as I can tell, you’re not allowed to include birth dates for anyone or actual ages for those 90 or older. If Dr. Haim included children’s birthdates rather than their ages, this is what they’ll have tagged him on—and for this, he faces up to ten years in prison. But of course, to the extent Dr. Haim was blowing the whistle on a public health issue, and the children’s ages are centrally relevant to the matter, that should be a defense.
On the available facts, this is yet another outrageous example of the Biden administration’s politically motivated lawfare. When Trump returns to office, he had better bring the actual law to bear on the people carrying out these abuses, or this will never end.
You can donate to Dr. Haim’s legal fund here, as I did.