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By Jayanta Bhattacharya at Brownstone dot org.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on April 28, 2026, in Dana Point, California.
At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority. For centuries, a small number of ecclesiastical powers had decided such questions as whether the moons of Jupiter move. The scientific revolution placed these questions in the hands of a lot of very smart scientists, including those with telescopes.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people—directors of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, heads of international agencies like the World Health Organization, and editors of prestigious journals—have the power to say what is true or false in science.
But before I go on, I want to make a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health, which I now lead. The history of the NIH is incredible. Almost every modern advance in biomedicine has, at its root, an NIH investment. NIH is, by far, the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, providing 85 percent of funding in every single area of biomedicine. The development of heart attack prevention and treatments came out of the NIH. Almost every cancer advance and cancer treatment came out of the NIH.
Because of the NIH, we now have advances in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis that, when I was a medical student in the 1990s, seemed beyond reach. Because of the NIH, we can now treat cystic fibrosis, a terrible disease that used to kill young people in their teens and 20s, allowing those who have it to live full lives. We have not one, but two cures for sickle cell anemia, a disease that primarily affects African-American children. So I am strongly of the view that the NIH is an institution worth saving. It is, however, an institution that has not done its job well in some time.
The mission of the NIH is to fund research that improves the health and longevity of the American people. But when we look at life expectancy in the United States since 2010—and this is not the case in most European countries—we find that there has been no improvement despite the huge investments we have made in medical research. (See, for instance, the accompanying graph comparing life expectancy over time in the U.S. and Sweden.)
If we continue as we have been, the prospect of our children living shorter, less healthy lives than we do is a real possibility. "Make America Healthy Again" can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people. We have huge chronic disease problems. We can solve them—but we can only solve them if we fix science, which suffers today from three great problems.

The first of these problems is the replication crisis. Scientists publish studies today; we hear about their findings on TV, in newspapers, and on podcasts; and we (and even our doctors) take them for granted. But then when other scientists ask the same questions and perform the same experiments, they do not come up with the same results. That means that a lot of the science we (and our doctors) take for granted is not actually true.
Are eggs good for us? I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when eggs were considered the next worst thing to poison. I didn't eat an egg until I was 19, and then it was a tasteless egg white omelet, since only the whites of eggs were considered healthy in the 1990s. But today eggs are considered a superfood! There are so many examples like this, and at the root of the confusion is the replication crisis.
How do we address this? We begin by recognizing the fact that most ideas hatched by scientists do not work or are not true. That is completely normal in science and always has been. J...

By Steven Kritz at Brownstone dot org.
In recent months, there's been a torrent of document releases that prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the scope of the atrocities committed in the name of the Covid response by the public health establishment. As someone who has been submitting articles to Brownstone Journal covering this subject for more than 3 years (20 have been published), it has been suggested that I once again bring my perspective into the arena regarding these recent revelations. Frankly, I have felt no such calling. Why is that? For me, it's a matter of been there; done that!
The first article I wrote that was published in Brownstone Journal in October 2023, Where is the Office for Human Research Protections? ends by asking whether the expression, "Never again" still has any meaning. Back in January 2024, I had written an article titled, Racism, Anti-Semitism, Genocide, and Eugenics in the COVID Era; and in April 2025, I had written an article titled, Have We Lived through a Public Health Holocaust?. While the titles of the latter two articles speak for themselves, the latest revelations have largely confirmed the historical perspective that I presented both factually and contextually.
In addition, as far back as the winter of 2021-22, I had been blogging on a website for healthcare professionals about the shredding of the Nuremberg Code, a document that primarily focuses on proper informed consent. At the time, I was roundly criticized for having the gall to bring this subject up, as it was viewed as a total non sequitur. However, over the past year, gross violations of the Nuremberg Code have been cited with some regularity, even in mainstream media.
Based on the foregoing, it should be clear where I stand regarding the so-called Covid response. As such, for me to write more on this subject is merely to gild the lily. I see no purpose in doing that. I'll only point out that in reading what others are now writing in response to the recent flood of hard evidence, it appears that more and more people are catching up to where I've been for almost 5 years, although they tend to dance around using the same terminology that I have put out there.
I've reached the point where the only thing I care about is accountability. Without it, these atrocities will keep happening. In fact, plans for a replay are already in place by agencies within the US government, the World Health Organization, and any number of other globalist masters of the universe who have the resources and connections to move on it. They're just waiting for the right set of circumstances to justify implementation.
As guideposts for what that accountability should look like, I'll cite two seminal legal/judicial events: Watergate and the Nazi Doctors' Trial. As a result of the Watergate break-in and cover-up, events that I believe pale in comparison to the Covid atrocities, there were 69 indictments, 48 convictions or guilty pleas, approximately 2 dozen prison sentences served, and a presidential resignation.
The Nazi Doctors' Trial was for medical crimes that might have been more brutal than the Covid atrocities, but were surpassed in sheer numbers by several orders of magnitude. In all, there were 23 indictments and 16 convictions, of which 7 were sentenced to death (all were hung shortly after conviction), and 9 served varying lengths of time in prison.
Anything short of this level of accountability leaves us dangerously exposed. To those who still can't accept the fact that the atrocities rose to this level, I would counter that the unwillingness to face this reality will only embolden the monsters who perpetrated these crimes against humanity to continue on the same path.
If you're looking to the public health system, particularly the physicians, to take back the profession, don't hold your breath! That's because, first, do no harm has been irrevocably changed to, do as you're told! This is the result of the change in the nature of the relationship bet...

By Russ Gonnering at Brownstone dot org.
Christopher Morales' 9/26/2026 post, "AI Has Made an Old Education Problem Harder to Ignore," (written in Minding the Campus, a project of the National Association of Scholars) has touched a nerve with many:
Students can now generate essays, summaries and discussion posts in seconds. The danger is real, but the underlying weakness is older. AI did not create the gap between completing work and mastering knowledge. It made that gap much harder to ignore.
Morales reveals the staggering statistics on the prevalence of remedial courses offered to first-year undergraduates in colleges and universities:
The evidence supports academic under-preparedness was widespread, visible and costly long before AI could write a polished paragraph.
I would suggest that the problem is even more widespread and pernicious and stretches beyond the confines of academia. It is the tension between Competence and Capability in most walks of life, including my own, medicine and healthcare.
To understand the roots of this present-day dynamic, we need to go back a bit…quite a bit…and understand the significant social, political, and economic upheavals in Great Britain in the late 1970s:
Economic stagflation was stifling, with inflation hitting a high of 25%.
Rapid decline in traditional manufacturing and industrial sectors.
Widespread strikes and the Winter of Discontent.
Economic frustration and generational friction.
Increasing violence in Northern Ireland and inability, or lack of interest, of the political parties in addressing the problem.
Breakdown in prior political consensus.
At the time, Great Britain was facing serious societal breakdown in a number of areas. Brian Grant explained how a committed group of diverse individuals spontaneously formed around a belief that imbalance in the core activities of education and training fueled much of the socioeconomic disruption in society.
The watchword of the proposed reforms to deal with this disruption was capability. This group's actions culminated in newspaper declarations taken out in the Times and the Guardian and became known as The Capability Manifesto. This concept had 4 main pillars of change, linked to the following verbs:
To do: move from passive memorization of facts for a test to the successful execution of real projects.
To make: value craftsmanship, engineering, and art as well as pure academic knowledge.
To organize: value teamwork and leadership. The practical value of this was later emphasized in such works as Tribal Leadership by David Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright.
To adapt: understand that problem-solving often has multiple answers and methods of inquiry, depending upon the circumstances.
It is interesting that these concepts (such as the importance of starting point and nonlinear system dynamics) echo those of the nascent Complexity Science being founded at about the same time at The Santa Fe Institute and described in an extremely readable fashion by M. Mitchell Waldrop. The emphasis of verbs rather than nouns in the successful execution of projects is similar to the "Action Learning" concept of Complexity Science described by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon.
The "Move to Capability" in Britain was not a smooth one. There was pushback. In Education for Capability: A Critique, Keith Thompson submitted that the Manifesto was flawed on a number of points:
Capability only implies potential, not actuation.
It forms a caricature of an educated person as only knowing what and not knowing how.
Although the socioeconomic decline is real, there is not significant evidence to assume that the proposed remedies would reverse that descent.
This critique was rebutted by such authors as Mark Grant Ashton in "Educated Man as an Action Man: A Reply to Keith Thompson." Over the years, a spirited discussion ensued: Which is more important, theory or practice? Should we concentrate on basic knowledge or application? This seemed to always consist of a...

By Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone dot org.
On October 14, the Catholic Church observes the anniversary of the martyrdom of Pope Callistus I in A.D. 223 . The Collect for the Mass in his honor prays the following:
O God, who raised up Pope Saint Callistus the First to serve the Church and attend devoutly to Christ's faithful departed, strengthen us, we pray, by his witness to the faith, so that, rescued from the slavery of corruption, we may merit an incorruptible inheritance.
This prayer is an allusion to the fact that, while deacon, Callistus was put in charge of the first cemetery owned by the Church by Pope Zephyrinus. You can still visit the Catacombs of Callistus today, a massive place that holds the bodies of many popes and martyrs in addition to thousands of ordinary Christians.
Two distinct thoughts occurred to me while offering Mass for his feast this year. First, I thought of how November is rapidly approaching.
As I wrote in one of my early pieces for Brownstone:
The month of November begins starkly with a remembrance of those who have gone ahead of us in death. On November 1st we celebrate all of those who are in Heaven by celebrating All Saints. On November 2nd, we pray for those who are being purified in Purgatory as we commemorate All Souls. Every Mass on All Souls Day is a Requiem (i.e. a funeral Mass). Visiting a cemetery is urged, even with the grant of an indulgence for making such a visit from November 1-8. An older priest once recalled that the funeral pall (used to cover a casket or, in the absence of a casket, the catafalque) at his parish growing had the words "Hodie mihi, cras tibi" ("Me today, you tomorrow") embossed on it. The beginning of November then was a powerful reminder of the arrival of a season of "illness and death."
We begin November by remembering the martyrs and confessors who departed this life victorious, and then our thoughts immediately turn to making reparation for Christians who left this world in faith, hope, and charity, but with an imperfect sanctity.
This dual act of remembrance is central to Catholic piety. We remember our heroes and our non-heroes alike, albeit differently. I note with sadness the rapid erosion of the habitus of remembering from our culture completely. We dismiss the idea of heroes in the past at all.
Funerals go unattended and cemeteries go unvisited, if there is even proper burial at all. Lockdowns, effectively making the natural process of grieving illegal, hastened this erosion. Requiem Masses that should have a full Church now have maybe a few dozen, others have only immediate family and a few pious friends in attendance.
This change in practice should be seen as a grave symptom of the loss of civilization itself.
My second thought on the feast of St. Callistus is related to the first. As part of our civilizational collapse and our rejection of acts of remembrance and reparation in toto, we have enabled our malefactors in government and media to completely move on from the damage they inflicted on countless people in the name of "public health" beginning in 2020.
This is why I find Jeffrey Tucker's hours of time spent reading entries from the CDC's V-Safe files on the Covid shots so incredibly poignant and moving.
These were people who believed in the system that provided these shots. They thought that they were doing the right thing, first by getting them and second by reporting the horrifying outcomes of that decision. They imagined that the people in charge cared and that they would follow up.
Instead, like the prophets of Baal who opposed Elijah, they learned that there was "no one answering, no one listening" (1 Kings 18:29).
The heartbreak of listening to even a few of these entries inflicts psychological and spiritual pain. Jeffrey's reading of these for hours resembles a harsh act of spiritual reparation for the evil that was done.
Importantly, it represents a defiance against the enforced forgetfulness sought by those who viewed these repo...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.
In my reconstruction and discussion of Heidegger's remark – in the course of the interview that he granted the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, in 1966 – that 'Only a god can save us,' it was shown that this issued from his conviction, that the 'essence' of modern technology (what he calls 'technicity') functions as a 'framework' within which every question and decision are formulated and made. He calls this 'essence' Gestell ('posure,' Enframing'), the fundamental organising power of which reduces everything in the world to a 'standing-reserve,' which means that its sole purpose is restricted to its usefulness or calculative utility.
So, for example, even human beings are approached as 'resources,' which is made visible in renaming what used to be called 'Personnel Departments' in companies (and other organisations) as 'Human Resources.' Hence, the essence of technology, or Enframing,' brings about the stripping of entities of their intrinsic meaning, transforming them into mere resources for use, instead of allowing them to be what they are – and arguably should be – according to their own being.
Norman Melchert (The Great Conversation. A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 576) provides an apt characterisation of the world under the dominance of the essence of modern technology where he writes:
In the age of enframing, where everything is understood as standing-reserve, there is no 'room' for God. (Or perhaps even God is thought of as 'standing-reserve', a kind of public utility that can be used to gain the satisfaction of one's desires; one often gets this impression from the television evangelists.
The most obvious question that would probably arise for most readers is why Heidegger talks about the essence of technicity or technology, which he names Gestell, instead of simply referring to concrete instances of technology in the guise of technical devices, such as electric drills, saws, and vacuum cleaners, all of which are embodiments of Enframing. The answer has to do with the fact that Heidegger thinks ontologically about technicity, and not ontically.
Ontology being the discipline that addresses questions concerning the distinctive (or essential) being of beings – what makes them into what they are, in contradistinction with other beings or entities – the essence of technicity is what makes technology into what it is distinctively, and technical devices embody this essence paradigmatically. Insofar as an electric drill manifests Enframing as its technological essence, it allows the handyman or -woman, by using it, to draw on the standing reserve of stored electricity in a manner which optimalises its usefulness.
To think about electric drills in relation to other similar or dissimilar tools comparatively as part of a collection of 'technologies' is to focus on them ontically, and no longer ontologically. The following excerpt from Heidegger's 'The question concerning technology' (In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt, Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1977, p. 14-15) clarifies what is at stake by contrasting an older way of benefiting technically from wind and water with its modern technological counterpart:
The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.
In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when ...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.
"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" said Lady Macbeth as she paced in a hallucinatory state, reliving in her subconscious the murders she helped plan. She rubbed her hands as if washing them, to wash away the sin, following up the promise to her son that "a little water clears us of this deed."
The line comes to mind from the latest dump of entries from the diaries of Anthony Fauci that cover the months December 2021 to May 2022. These were the darkest months of the Covid era.
Confidence that the virus was a lab creation was growing. That points directly to Fauci. The lockdowns had given rise to growing population-wide fury. And the shot was not working, not stopping infection or spread while groups reporting deep injury from injection could not be censored fast enough to make them vanish completely, though tech companies certainly tried.
Fauci still held his position at NIAID with certainty that he would keep it under President Biden, whose confidence he enjoyed. He was daily in touch with the people who were actually running the government – aides Ron Klain and Jeff Zients – and coordinated his decisions with them. They trusted him to continue the Covid operation, which they all knew to be a national security issue beyond the control of any political player. Fauci was the front man but an effective one, until he became a liability.
We know from previous entries that Fauci at first hoped the new virus would get lost in the mix of a bad flu season. This was mid-January 2020. The CDC called him out on that. His first scheme failed because a savvy businessman in China spilled the beans by posting the sequence on a pay-to-play website in mid-January.
After pressing a friend and former colleague to use his personal credit card to download the sequence, Fauci launched plan B, which was to deny the lab leak and prepare a nationwide inoculation to make it all go away.
The audacious scheme was to keep population immunity at the lowest levels possible through lockdowns while the shot went through clinical trials and was ready for distribution. Fauci knew for certain that this was the type of virus that would mutate rapidly. His hope was to take the energy out of the pace of mutation by reducing the infection rate as low as possible.
Sadly for him, the new and most powerful variant had appeared just as his shots hit general distribution. Delta disabled their protection that had been formulated for wild type and Alpha. The race was on, as mutations appeared faster than repeated boosters could catch.
The spot would not go away no matter what he did.
The darkest hours open with the appearance of Omicron in December of 2021, the fastest spreading but least virulent strain. He now had a new problem. With Omicron operating as a form of inoculation itself, there was less reason for vaccination than ever, especially given the risk of injury. And yet his goal of 90 percent coverage was nowhere in view, while population opposition to the entire Covidian regime was rising.
Fauci might as well have thrown up his hands, admitted defeat, apologized for putting the country through the biggest trauma of our lifetimes, and ruining the lives of students everywhere, in addition to crushing the dreams of millions of small business owners.
But that is not who he is. He would not and could not accept responsibility for doing this. He ended up demonizing the opposition, scrambling for cover, wrapping himself in ever more layers of fame for protection, and clinging to the lies he told himself as self-justification as his career and legacy were permanently tarnished beyond repair, even as he developed a severe and strange case of germaphobia in a Macbeth-like way.
Two weeks before this tranche begins, Biden had gone on TV to declare the following: "We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they'll soon overwhelm. But there's good news:...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
I have been a doctor for over 40 years. I have cared for patients in their most critical moments, seen families face unexpected diagnoses, and made split-second decisions in intensive care where every second counted. I have witnessed both remarkable recoveries and painful losses. I have taught new doctors, published research, and worked on treatments to help people I might never meet. All this time, I thought I knew what it meant to be a physician.
When Covid began, something shifted in me. It didn't happen all at once or because of one argument with an administrator or a policy. It was a slow realization that grew as I kept caring for sick people. For 715 days straight, I worked without a break, surrounded by very ill patients, tired nurses, worried families, and a disease we were all trying to figure out. I had never faced anything like it before, and I hope I never do again [1].
I always knew that medicine wasn't perfect. Any doctor with enough experience knows our field is full of uncertainty, differing opinions, and treatments that don't always work. I never stopped valuing scientific progress. I am still very grateful for antibiotics, modern surgery, intensive care, and all the discoveries that have turned deadly diseases into manageable ones.
But something deeper changed. I started to notice how medicine could lose touch with the people it's supposed to help. I saw how hospital rules could become strict orders, how disagreeing with colleagues could be seen as disloyalty, and how patients could be reduced to numbers or risks instead of real people with their own stories and worries. What troubled me most was realizing these issues were around even before Covid. The pandemic didn't cause them; it revealed them.
After seeing these problems clearly, I couldn't go back to practicing medicine the way I used to. I still loved being a doctor, maybe even more than before, but I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to listen better, be more honest in my explanations, ask more questions, and help patients understand enough to take part in their own care.
For much of my professional life, I was what most people would consider a conventional academic physician. I trained in established institutions, joined scientific societies, published extensively, and taught generations of students and residents to value evidence-based medicine. I believed in clinical trials, scientific debate, peer review, and the accumulated wisdom of physicians who had come before me. I still believe in all those things. But I've realized that evidence-based medicine is not the same as authority-based medicine. This difference is important because scientific evidence keeps changing, while institutions sometimes act as if their decisions never need to change.
A clinical guideline is just an interpretation of what we know at a certain time. It can be helpful, even life-saving, but it's not set in stone. Guidelines can't predict every patient or situation a doctor might face. They should help guide decisions, not make them for us. Before Covid, I understood these ideas in theory. During the pandemic, I realized how important they really are. I had gotten used to a system where rules, policies, insurance, and recommendations played an increasingly large role in how we made decisions. Some of these changes helped, but others just made it harder for doctors and patients to connect.
I had learned how to work within that system. I knew when to follow the rules and when to trust my own judgment. But I didn't realize how easily that freedom could disappear, or how quickly doctors might be pressured to follow the system instead of thinking for themselves.
During the pandemic, I spent many hours caring for very sick patients. While the public saw news of crowded hospitals, tired healthcare workers, and scary statistics, I saw real people. I saw patients fighting for breath, families seeking comfort, and people whose health co...

By Josh Guetzkow at Brownstone dot org.
Note: this article is a highly condensed version of a chapter written for Fear and Loathing in the Pandemic: Propaganda and Misinformation during Covid-19, edited by Colin Alexander.
Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid-19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity.
Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational. The "critical turn" in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn's account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn's examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power.
Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which "knowledge" reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests.
One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result "epistemic corruption:" a knowledge system that "loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it," because it has been co-opted by interests at odds with its central goals.
Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent.
One lynchpin is "ghost management," in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front-stage "authors." This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility.
Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific "advances" the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage.
Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving-door employment. The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator's budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the ...

By Sharyl Attkisson at Brownstone dot org.
A study falsely implied the Amish suffered more deaths because they eschewed public health guidance. But correcting the record proved nearly impossible.
In 2021, I reported on my national television program, Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson that the largest Amish community in the US, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had rejected masking, vaccines, isolation, testing, and all the other CDC recommendations for Covid…and apparently fared none the worse for having done so.
The story was of such high interest that even after it aired on TV, it racked up millions more views online.
This attention to the Amish approach and its apparent success obviously didn't please public health officials and industry advocates who were heavily pushing different narratives. They wanted the public to believe that anyone who wasn't socially distancing, staying home, getting vaccinated, shutting down the works, and taking government-favored prescription drugs were putting themselves and others in grave danger.
As the revelations about the Amish made international headlines, there appeared to be a propaganda-driven effort to make it seem as if the Amish actually suffered far worse than everyone else for having failed to follow CDC's advice.
A study was published entitled: "Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic." It appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health on June 11, 2021.
But I noticed serious flaws with the study and decided to challenge it. Among the problems I saw:
1. For their study population, the researchers grouped together a sample of Mennonite and Amish—even though Mennonites typically followed CDC guidelines while the Amish did not.
2. They excluded the largest Amish population in the US in Lancaster, the one that was actually the subject of the news reports.
3. Their study headline was at odds with what their own data showed: even with their skewed sample, the Amish fared no worse than the rest of the US for not having shut down.
After examining the study, I tried to get further information to determine if corrections were warranted. Among other things, I wanted to know:
Who were the peer-reviewers who had signed off on a deeply flawed study?
What did the actual study notes and data show about why the most obvious study sample population was excluded?
What were some of the internal communications before and after publication?
With scientific studies, all the data is supposed to be available for public review and replication for obvious reasons. Studies aren't considered scientifically valid without this kind of transparency. And, in many cases, we actually own the data because our tax money paid for the study—or some of it— or pays the salaries of some of the people involved.
Keep in mind that a study is generally treated as scientifically valid only when it meets: reproducibility (others can obtain the same result from the same data and analysis) and replicability (a separate study with new data yields a consistent result) standards. Obviously, if study funders and authors keep their full data and analyses secret, the standards can't be applied. (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Reproducibility and Replicability in Science, 2019)
Yet with the Amish study, as with other times I've pursued study information, the scientific establishment found a way to claim exemption from the common sense oversight guidelines. Instead of encouraging open examination, those involved in the study treated the details of their work as if they were proprietary secrets, closely held, and guarded like gold in Ft. Knox.
Ultimately, I felt forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests in my effort to get the obviously public information. As usual, the entities holding the information stalled, played games, claimed they couldn't respond for various reasons, and exempted the most important information.
The goal is clearly to try to ...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.
Sure, I'm frustrated. After years of litigation, deep audits, and some extreme dedication by the vaccine-injured, we now are in possession of a 1,048-page book that details ghastly and widespread injury from shots people were forced to get. Many died. Many have lifelong suffering. Many have seen their lives, finances, and families shattered.
These are not statistics on a preprint server awaiting the arduous process of slogging through anonymous peer-reviewers. This is not another model that conjures up possible scenarios. This is not some dry dashboard with probabilities and possibilities.
These are the life stories of real people as reported to the CDC through its own vaccine-safety monitoring system called V-safe. These people were not anti-vaxxers; just the opposite. Many were thrilled to step up and do their part.
Authorities said the potions were effective (they were not) and safe. Injuries were "very very rare" and far outweighed by the benefits, which is that you would not get and spread Covid, which was never true. It was a horrible lie.
Tens of millions stepped up. Then came the migraines, screaming pitches in the ears, rashes on the back and neck, welts on legs, crippling pain in the arms, racing heart and volatile blood pressure, blindness in one eye then two, numbness in the face, often followed by a full body decay that no specialist could explain.
The text of the system promised a callback. No one called back. Suffering people were left to languish alone, screaming into the void for help. None ever came. The CDC – on the receiving end of a tsunami of human suffering – tried to keep their stories quiet. They only released them once forced by a federal judge.
There were groups on social media at the time where the injured and surviving populations could gather and speak. Social media companies censored the groups and removed them. The Biden White House called true stories of vaccine injury "malinformation" because they would increase hesitancy.
They were forced to suffer alone, unable to walk to get groceries, bankrupted by medical bills, too blinded to see the TV, hearts racing at a pace that prevents sleep and causes months of deep sleep deprivation.
Now, at last, these people – friends, neighbors, family members, fellow citizens – have been given voice. This book alone chronicles a scandal for the ages. A good society would have maximum focus on revealing the truth, finding the culprits, figuring out how and why they lied, and seeking justice so nothing like this would ever happen again.
Remember that these shots were supposed to be the way out. Governments at all levels had tortured society for nearly a year with shutdowns, insane protocols, the destruction of millions of businesses, the denial of education to children, the stopping of travel, the banning of holiday celebrations, and cruel masking that could never stop a respiratory infection.
After all this came the magic shots, made by companies that had been given a liability waiver for any harm done. Many resisted taking them. The government wasn't having it. The Biden administration forced every company with more than 100 employees to impose them on their workers, again, without liability. The courts had to intervene to block that but preserved the mandates on the military, government, and health-care workers.
Five cities were segregated by vaccine status. In Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, and New Orleans, no one without proof of vaccination was allowed into a bar, restaurant, theater, or library. The churches were spared the mandate but many imposed segregation in any case.
When the first round of shots failed – the virus mutated – the manufacturers released a booster. Then another. And another. With each round, the injuries grew and spread, and so did the death. Excess deaths rose following the shots that were supposed to save us from Covid. They did the opposite, taking down sports stars,...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.
Travelling to the US never fails to put me in touch with a part of American culture that I find particularly fascinating, but disturbing. Drugs. Drugs and more Drugs. I'm talking about the in-your-face, 24/7, marketing of the newest, most expensive pharmaceuticals on the planet.
All in the name of health, of course.
You might argue, but so what? Every other consumer product gets advertised in the US—almost everywhere, to everyone, perhaps except tobacco. And lots of those things are bad for you too, such as junk food, alcohol, and gambling.
However, drugs are different, and I often find myself experiencing a kind of vertigo as I stare, enthralled, at all the incessant drug advertising from screens everywhere I look—in airports, hotel lounges, restaurants, or bars.
The plotlines are predictable. A slick 60 seconds and we see the fate of worried people suffering some sort of condition "ask their doctor" about Drug X, and soon the new prescription is magically transforming their lives. They turn into bliss and smiles as they romp their way through meadows of wildflowers while, sotto voce, we catch strange murmurs of liver failure and premature death.
I find myself absorbed in the ads as if they are cultural artifacts of a strange race. Most of the Americans I know seem to be pretty healthy people, but any newcomer confronting all the US screens for the first time might conclude one thing: "Man, these people must be really sick."
They are sick, but not in the way of being physically sick. Sick as in showing all the adverse effects of living in a polluted information ecosystem where toxic levels of drug propaganda drift through the airwaves as freely as exhaust engulfs a freeway.
Americans are so immersed in the smog of commercially-sponsored drug information that they might forget they used to live in a world where serious criticisms of drug industry products or behaviour were routinely reported on mainstream TV. Those halcyon days are over.
The Land of the Free means drugmakers can, with near impunity, push their expensive products for Crohn's disease, Colitis, or psoriasis—serious obesity, schizophrenia, and major depression with the most outlandish of claims wrapped up in crafty but misleading narratives. Drugs get advertised, and the stuff between the ads (ie: the programming, the sitcoms, and the news) won't touch the subject with a ten-foot pole lest they upset the money chain. Meanwhile, everyone thinks this is normal? Wow.
Not everyone. Earlier this summer, the consumer group US Public Citizen put out a petition urging the FDA to ban Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. They listed the usual reasons why DTCA is so toxic to consumers: Emotional manipulation, misleading benefit and risk information, inappropriate prescribing and overdiagnosis, the erosion of the patient-physician relationship, the promotion of low-value medications, and overall economic harm. Amen to all that.
What it all adds up to is a polluted environment in which careful and appropriate pharmaceutical use doesn't happen. Americans are paying the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, yet also have the most profligate use of those drugs.
The pollution of the airwaves by Pharma propaganda is precisely the reason every other country in the world (except tiny New Zealand) bans Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA). The rest of the civilized world looked at DTCA, recognized it as a predatory assault on public health, and banned it decades ago.
Probably the biggest harm of DTCA is how it completely undermines the clinical firewall between doctors and patients. By bombarding television viewers with slick, emotion-heavy commercials, drug manufacturers bypass the doctor's intellect and go straight for the patient's anxiety. When a terrified or hopeful consumer marches into a clinic demanding a specific brand-name drug featured during halftime at a football game, the doctor-patient rela...

By Ed Dowd at Brownstone dot org.
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Over the last several years I have been posting nonstop on X about the same nightmares we've been living through…the Covid psyop, the experimental mRNA shots, the mandates that destroyed lives, the injuries, the excess deaths, and the relentless propaganda machine that tried to silence anyone who noticed the bodies piling up. I have watched it all in real time: the fear porn, the goalpost moving, the "safe and effective" lies repeated like gospel while real-world data told a different story.
Now we have fresh, documented revelations that should have blown the lid off of everything. Instead? Crickets from the media and, more disappointingly, from the current administration that promised accountability.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) dropped another devastating report and hearing in late April 2026: "Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals." Internal records show FDA officials knew their VAERS monitoring was inadequate to say least. They had better data-mining tools ready to flag clear safety signals: cardiac deaths, strokes, pulmonary issues, Bell's palsy but they chose not to use them. Why? To avoid "vaccine hesitancy."
This was not screw-up territory. It was deliberate. Vaccine-injured people sat across from Peter Marks and other top FDA brass begging for acknowledgment. They got stonewalled. Johnson rightly calls this one of the biggest scandals in his decades in public service. Then in early June he held another hearing exposing potential cancer links to the mRNA shots and the systematic suppression of critical studies. Same playbook: inconvenient science gets buried or attacked.
Around the same time, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of her final moves as DNI, declassified documents laying out Fauci's role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan, the lab-leak cover-up, the intelligence manipulation, and the retaliation against truth-tellers. Millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into risky biolabs, followed by the full narrative-control machine kicking in to blame nature instead of the obvious.
These are not anonymous X threads. This is a sitting Senator with subpoena power and the former Director of National Intelligence dropping official records.
So where is the firestorm? Where are the front-page exposés, the prime-time specials, the demands for real hearings and prosecutions? In 1976 the swine flu vaccine was pulled after 25 deaths and 500 cases of Guillain Barre Syndrome. In the Covid shot era we have approximately 39,000 deaths reported to VAERS following the shot. Apparently lives got cheaper over the last 50 years. The legacy media has mostly ignored it, downplayed it, or run the usual "right-wing conspiracy" dismissals. Paid to lie…and crickets on recent FDA Covid vax revelations. Their complicity is not an understatement; rather, it was essential to the entire psyop.
Even more frustrating is the relative silence from the current Trump administration. After years of vowing to expose the lies and drain the swamp on the pandemic response, these revelations land and…not much follow-through. No aggressive push for accountability. No sustained public reckoning for the officials who covered up safety signals or manipulated the origins story. That silence hits hard. Additionally the vaccines are still on the market and this administration is now complicit. What an epic failure!
A lot of us did not need Johnson's reports or Gabbard's declassifications to see the fraud. Back in 2022 and 2023, my team at Phinance Technologies was already digging into the data and uncovering the real narrative through our Humanity Projects. We analyzed excess deaths, disability surges, absence rates, and the human and economic costs of mass inoculations when almost no one else wanted to touch it. Check out the full body of work here: Humanity Projects
What we found through cold, hard numbers lined up with what the bodies on the g...

By Chase Englund at Brownstone dot org.
Pennsylvanians have already seen what expansive public-health authority can look like.
During the Covid era, schools were closed, businesses were divided into "essential" and "nonessential," and major decisions affecting ordinary families were made through administrative orders with limited public input. In December 2021, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state's school masking order, holding that the Department of Health had exceeded the authority granted to it under existing law.
The Court noted that if the Department wanted broader authority, it could amend its regulations.
This summer, it tried.
Buried inside an arcane 502-page rewrite of Pennsylvania's communicable-disease regulations was an amendment adding the words "prevention, containment or mitigation" to a section of the code that had been central to the masking dispute. The Department itself acknowledged that the 2021 court decision had "influenced" the proposed change.
In plain English, the Department proposed to write broader disease-control authority into the regulations after the state Supreme Court said the old language did not provide it.
That alone was enough to attract attention.
This wasn't even the most controversial aspect of the proposal.
The package would have more than doubled the list of conditions that doctors and laboratories must report, mandated additional prenatal testing, lowered the fever threshold for excluding children from school or child care, required vaccine doses to be entered into a government registry, and expanded public-health powers affecting homes, schools, and businesses.
The rule was designed to implement by bureaucratic fiat the very same sort of oppressive Covid-style health measures that have been thoroughly debunked by available scientific evidence and have been overwhelmingly rejected by voters at the polls.
Then came perhaps the most remarkable part.
The Department's economic analysis estimated that the proposal would cost the private sector zero dollars.
Not approximately zero. Not a small amount. Zero.
Pennsylvania law requires agencies proposing regulations to estimate the costs imposed on those who must comply. Yet in multiple places the Department acknowledged that the proposal would require additional resources, increase absences, or cause families to miss work and school. Each time, the explanation was essentially the same: because the Department lacked sufficient data to quantify the cost, it would estimate no overall fiscal impact.
That is not serious economic analysis, and alas, it is the type that agencies repeatedly produce when there is no one watching. Because few organizations have the economic data and expertise to dispute them, such improprieties are rarely challenged.
Liberty requires constant vigilance, and the Pennsylvania Small Enterprise Foundation worked together with the Pennsylvania Family Institute to produce the analysis the Department said it could not.
The results were astounding.
Using the Department's own counts of doctors, laboratories, schools and child-care providers, along with public health data and federal wage statistics, we estimated that the proposal would impose over $100 million in annual costs.
Most of that burden would not have fallen on hospitals or large corporations.
It would have fallen on families.
Lowering the fever threshold and expanding the circumstances under which children could be sent home from school or child care means more parents missing work. We estimated that lost wages from those absences alone could exceed $70 million annually.
The Department did not count them.
Asked whether it had considered any of the methods available under Pennsylvania law to reduce burdens on small businesses, the Department answered "not considered" five times. The Department said it "lacked data" on how many small businesses it regulated, even though the Census Bureau publishes such figures on an annual basis.
This is exactly why...

By Meryl Nass at Brownstone dot org.
What we've heard about so far today — and will continue to hear about — is not a collection of separate problems. It's all one problem: the deep state of the world is trying to consolidate the entire world into a one-world government and has developed many different mechanisms of control to achieve that end. A major part of that initiative is to cause all our institutions to fail us.
What you've heard about the fundamental problems in education, healthcare, agriculture, government regulation, the news media, censorship, and propaganda is all part of that same agenda, in my view.
And the idea of "Earth System Governance" has become an academic discipline, albeit hidden from most people.

This agenda came out to the world around 1970 when the Club of Rome published its report, titled Limits to Growth.
The first goal was to create the narrative that climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion posed an existential threat to humanity, in order to frighten the public into funding and complying with a new set of priorities.
The second goal was to use international organizations like the UN and WHO to slowly siphon power from individual countries under the guise of environmental protection. The UN has over 30 agencies prepared to step in and impose regulations and taxation on international industries such as shipping, which is actually being done now. The UN even wants to create its own system of law.


Other new multilateral organizations have also been formed to provide "governance" for the rest of us:

At the same time, non-governmental authorities were established in the US to siphon power away from state, county, and local governments. One mechanism for doing this was through 'planning.' States passed laws requiring municipalities to create detailed, long-range plans for their towns. Because most towns did not have the expertise or personnel to do so, they frequently adopted boilerplate plans provided by state agencies or consultants that just happened to be congruent with policies desired by the deep state.
Councils of Government (COGs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are a form of non-democratic authority that are taking over functions from duly elected state and local governments, funded by grants from state and federal governments. This project has been expanding in power and funding since the 1960s. It involves creating new organizations with appointed members for which there is no direct citizen oversight.
Here is how these organizations describe themselves. Please read it.


The European Union has used a similar strategy of gradually expanding its authority to obtain powers that previously belonged to the nation states. First, a reasonable environmental law gets passed. But over time, the reach of the initial law is expanded, to eventually encroach on property rights and cost citizens significantly more than was initially anticipated.
Natura 2000 was based on the EU's 1979 Birds Directive to simply protect wild bird species. But over time it has required nations to designate minimum areas of biodiversity within their territory and protect and restore them, even though the lands may be privately owned. These protected lands now comprise 18% of total land area within the E.U. The goal is to expand that to 30% of total land by 2030, and to 50% eventually.


In the 1990s pandemics and biological warfare were added to this agenda to provide additional important mechanisms, especially vaccinations, for the deep state's goals of centralizing power, controlling populations, and creating a technocratic governance system. I've been watching how the US government and the world have dealt with these issues for many years. For a long time, I wondered why influenza and biological warfare were so closely conjoined in funding and in how the government handled them — two things that seemed very different to me.
I now understand that there has been an effort to dem...

By Elizabeth Mumper at Brownstone dot org.
[Delivered at National Institutes of Health at special event at which the vaccine injured spoke first.]
I have heard these stories a thousand times. I am a board-certified pediatrician with 46 years of clinical experience. I've practiced in group and solo settings, served as Director of Pediatric Education for a residency program, and received numerous awards for child-health initiatives. My solo practice had 3,500 general pediatric patients. I spent five years as Medical Director of the Autism Research Institute.
By caring for and consulting on more than 600 children with autism from 5 countries and 20 states, and hundreds of children with complex chronic illnesses, I have a unique clinical perspective to share, which mirrors what these families shared today.
My concerns about vaccine safety began in 1999 after my patient experienced a severe and irreversible reaction following a vaccine I gave. Despite exhaustive efforts to identify another cause, I could not. The trajectory of my career changed. I left a secure academic position I loved and opened a solo practice dedicated to children whose medical needs were not being met.
During my career I learned an extraordinary amount from parents who are usually perceptive observers of their children's health. At ARI we partnered with families to identify medical problems that were overlooked. Their insights guided our research and these actions should guide our actions today. Families directed us to treat gastrointestinal dysfunction, immune dysregulation, and impairments in detoxification pathways. Collaborations with international scientists helped identify mitochondrial dysfunction, methylation abnormalities, cerebral folate deficiency, and prolonged cell danger responses.
Most pediatricians do not know about these issues. Addressing these problems often resulted in measurable improvements in autism symptoms. Some children initially diagnosed with moderate to severe autism entered kindergarten no longer meeting criteria for autism because their medical problems were treated. Other severely affected children treated as toddlers have gone on to college without knowing they once carried an autism diagnosis.
My concerns about vaccine safety extend far beyond the narrow question of whether vaccines cause autism. Autism and complex chronic illnesses are profoundly heterogeneous. In my experience, antecedents, mediators, and triggers vary widely among children. Vaccines contribute to oxidative or mitochondrial stress in all children. In some kids; they amplify pre-existing vulnerabilities. For others, early-life factors—such as C-section birth, antibiotics, or prematurity — create antecedent conditions that interact with later vaccines and precede neurodevelopmental regression.
In 2005, I gave grand rounds at the university where I had been chief resident. Simply raising the possibility that the accelerated vaccine schedule might contribute to rising autism prevalence resulted in my adjunct faculty appointment not being renewed. At the time, I used a modified schedule that reduced aluminum exposure while remaining fully compliant with Virginia's school requirements.
In 2006, I met with AAP leadership to discuss vaccine safety concerns – which were dismissed. Despite no research funding from government or pharma, I published a dozen studies in my spare time. One 17-year project examined whether autism risk could be reduced by applying insights learned from families. After seven years, my autism prevalence was 1 in 297—at a time when the national rate was worse than 1 in 50. I submitted the findings to the AAP in 2013, expecting interest in a six-fold reduction in such a serious public health problem. I received no response.
My clinical observations—confirmed by independent data mining—was that children who got more vaccines were more likely to develop chronic illnesses. In my practice, under-vaccinated children had lower rates of chronic dise...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
Look at almost any photograph of an American crowd taken 60 years ago. It can be a baseball game, a high school graduation, a beach, an airport terminal, a factory floor, or simply people walking down a city street. Something is immediately noticeable to modern eyes, although almost nobody in the photograph would have considered it remarkable: most people are relatively thin.
They did not have continuous glucose monitors, smartphone applications that counted calories and macronutrients, wearable devices reminding them to stand, boutique fitness studios, bariatric surgery centers, or medications capable of producing 15 or 20 percent reductions in body weight. They were not necessarily more virtuous than we are, and they certainly did not possess superior genes. They lived in a different metabolic environment.
The data backs up what we see in those old photos. In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of American adults were obese. By August 2023, that number had jumped to 40.3 percent, with another 31.7 percent considered overweight and nearly one in ten classified as severely obese.[1] This trend isn't just in the United States. A huge study of over 220 million people from 200 countries found a dramatic global rise in obesity between 1990 and 2022.[2] Our genes haven't changed much in that time. Something else has.
We're now at a turning point in medicine. Faced with one of the biggest and fastest changes in human health, we're treating the results as a condition that needs lifelong medication. The newest drugs are very effective, and that's important to recognize. Semaglutide and tirzepatide have led to weight loss that older nonsurgical treatments rarely matched.[3,4] Semaglutide has also reduced the risk of major heart problems in people with overweight or obesity and heart disease who didn't have diabetes.[5] Tirzepatide has greatly improved sleep apnea in people with obesity.[6] These results are significant, and these drugs are much more than cosmetic weight-loss aids.
That's why we need to look closely at what's happening now. The problem isn't that these drugs don't work; they clearly do. The real concern is that they might work so well that we stop asking why so many people need them in the first place. We could be seeing a major medical breakthrough, but at the same time, we might be accepting that the effects of an unhealthy environment should just be managed with medication. The real question isn't whether these "GLP-1" drugs are effective. It's whether their success is making us stop looking for the root causes of the obesity epidemic.
For decades, obesity was framed largely as an individual failure. The explanation was simple: people ate too much, exercised too little, and lacked the discipline necessary to change. That view was scientifically inadequate and often cruel. Body weight is influenced by genetics, neuroendocrine signaling, appetite regulation, insulin sensitivity, adipocyte biology, medications, sleep, psychological factors, socioeconomic conditions, physical activity, and environmental exposures. Contemporary medicine appropriately recognizes obesity as far more complicated than failure of willpower.
Recent international efforts have gone even further, distinguishing excess adiposity from clinical obesity and emphasizing the actual effects of adiposity on organ and tissue function rather than relying exclusively on body mass index.[7]
It was important to stop blaming people for obesity. But now, medicine might be swapping one simple explanation for another. Just because obesity is a real biological condition doesn't mean it starts inside each person. A disease can be both real and caused by the environment. For example, asthma from air pollution is still asthma, and lead poisoning is still a real illness even if the cause is environmental. If a whole community gets sick after a change in the water supply, doctors treat the patients, but no one thinks the community...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.
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The Lancet's latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence.
Titled "Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective," it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives.
Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years.

What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it.
It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language.
The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant.
The review describes mRNA vaccines as a "transformative advance" characterised by "rapid clearance," "lack of genomic integration," and a "favourable safety profile." It concludes that the accumulated evidence "affirms" the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable.
Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail.
Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn't.
The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles "remain largely localised to the injection site" with "limited distribution" to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days.
But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of "rapid clearance" and "short-lived antigen expression" — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant.
Only last year, members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people.
When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review.
Residual DNA is treated similarly.
The authors state that residual DNA is "routinely quantified," that regulatory standards require less than 10 nanograms per dose, and that independent analyses have confirmed commercial vaccines comply with those limits.
This creates the impression that the matter has been properly examined when, in reality, the review bypasses the central scientific questions.
Were the analytical methods capable of measuring DNA encapsulated within lipid nanoparticles? Were all relevant plasmid sequences — including SV40 regulatory elements — fully characterised? Was genomic integration ever adequately investigated?
I have previously reported that regulators relied on a qPCR assay targeting only a small section of the plasmid — an approach independent scientists argue was never designed to detect the contamination now under debate.
Rather than examining those methodological criticisms, the review proceeds as though the matter has already been settled.
The review briefly acknowledges another emerging issue — that N1-methylpseudouridine can produce ribosomal frameshifting and off-target proteins — but quickly reassures readers that no adverse outcomes have yet been l...

By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org.
When President Trump's Republican acolytes primaried long-time US Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) and defeated him in the most expensive Congressional primary race in history (about $30 million) in May, pundits offered their assumptions and agendas.
The Trumpites said he wasn't nice playing their ball game (I'm being diplomatic) and therefore deserved to be sidelined. They couldn't abide a rogue Republican, even if he did vote with the president 92 percent of the time. Opposing the war in Iran was over the top.
Massie matched the Trumpites dollar for dollar in the campaign because as heir to the Ron Paul movement, he has many friends beyond his rural Congressional district. They supported him in this toe-to-toe duel, grateful for a champion who dared to question mainstream narratives.
These narratives, as it turns out, are many and his district has supported him on maverick positions in the past. He opposed virtually everything Dr. Anthony Fauci said. He opposed lockdowns. He opposed mandatory mRNA jabs. He opposed the inflationary Covid relief bill. All of this was tolerated and applauded by the majority of his constituents.
But daring to question obliterating the Persians (Iran) without constitutionally-mandated Congressional approval was too much and his country boys and girls turned him out. Why was the anti-war position intolerable?
For the answer, I'll go back 30 years when organic farming was in its infancy. As a nonchemical farmer, I was in the vanguard of this movement and privy to the early arguments pitting compost against chemicals. As a country boy farmer myself, I have many friends and relatives in the chemicals-will-save-us camp.
As the arguments between the compost-vs-chemical camps became more defined, I noticed a profound philosophical difference. As with most altercations, it takes awhile for the two sides to get to the nub of their disagreement. Over time, ancillary things give way to the core issue.
In the compost-vs-chemical debate, the core issue was nurturing versus conquering. The chemical folks argued that they needed to conquer the weeds, weather, and worms. My compost-loving group diametrically opposed the Conquistador approach and argued that the goal was nurturing, promoting plant diversity, appreciating weather limitations, and loving earthworms.
The difference in approach moved me to develop a five-minute theatrical gig titled "Organic Farmers are Sissies." I riffed on this masculine, macho mentality to conquer with chemicals rather than coming alongside natural patterns as a masseuse. It generated a lot of laughs in the organic farming community while pinpointing the nub of the philosophical difference.
"Men want to feel pig iron under their thighs. They want to come into the house smelling like diesel and grease so their wives can swoon 'what a man.' It's just not manly to come in and explain to your beloved 'I've made the cows happy. That's just not manly." This was all part of my act.
What made it funny was the truth underlying it. What does that have to do with Massie's rejection? I believe the American country-boy mystique is wrapped up in conquering things. Trump enjoys overwhelming support in rural America. Country folks like to fight. Hatfields and McCoys.
President Obama and his wife Michelle planted a White House garden – nonchemical, by the way; fertilized with compost. President Trump hosts fighting on the lawn. Pointing this out does not mean I like Obama more than Trump; the lesson here is that what people do manifests how they think.
The American historical mystique is that our nation conquered the wilderness, subduing the Native Americans, and carved abundance out of scarcity. This permeates the rural mind. Those of us who view nature as boss and try to work within it win without conquering; we win by complementing. Attend any nonchemical agriculture conference and the operative phrase is "Work with." At conventional chemical agricultur...

By Jim Haslam at Brownstone dot org.
Disclaimer: If COVID-19 were linked to animal vaccine research, it would be an unintended consequence, but the creation and cover-up were deliberate.
Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance of its citizens. Daniel Ellsberg exposed government lies. US Marine Major Joseph Murphy exposed something larger: the biodefense blueprint behind a pandemic that killed millions. Snowden's leak sparked a worldwide debate about privacy. Murphy's leak — the DARPA DEFUSE proposal — should have sparked a global reckoning about the real origins of SARS-CoV-2.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) serves as a venture capital arm of the world's largest bureaucracy: the Department of Defense. It funds high-risk academic research to protect US troops from future threats.
One team proposed modifying bat coronaviruses to spread more effectively—not among humans, but mammalian bats. Testing would occur in Wuhan, where the right bat colonies existed. This was not a fringe idea. It was a biodefense concept encouraged by DARPA under the first Trump administration.
Taken together, the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, plus FOIA documents, emails, and peer-reviewed papers, support Murphy's hypothesis: SARS-CoV-2 was created in US labs but tested in Wuhan, where it accidentally leaked. This theory has since been debated in the scientific literature, including Nature.

The U.S. intelligence community did not miss this. It moved the unclassified 2018 DARPA project, advertised on Twitter, into a classified 2021 folder.
The very agencies that claimed to be searching for answers had the facts all along, stored in a top-secret folder. They knew that Peter Daszak (EcoHealth), Zhengli Shi (WIV), Linfa Wang (Duke), and Ralph Baric (UNC) had proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and testing them on Chinese bats in Wuhan.

Snowden took on the NSA. His leaks revealed that US intelligence treated global pandemics as surveillance targets, explicitly searching for "SARS in China." Murphy confronted something far more entrenched: what he called the "biodefense oligarchy," a network spanning DARPA, intelligence agencies, academia, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
One node of that system was already in Wuhan. A NIAID-linked contractor, Danielle Anderson, was stationed at the maximum-security BSL4 lab. She previously told Bloomberg she worked on Ebola, but her name appears alongside Baric's in the classified DEFUSE files.
Her Duke supervisor, Linfa Wang, resigned on January 10, 2020—the same day the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Wang identified Baric as its author.
After Zhengli Shi published the closest known bat sample, RaTG13, she told the New York Times that "my" lab was not involved in gain-of-function research and that "I" did nothing wrong, so "I" had nothing to fear.
Privately, Baric warned UNC colleagues that Shi could be "arrested" for releasing the embargoed sequence. RaTG13 highlighted what made SARS-CoV-2 unique: the furin cleavage site (PRRAR), which Baric would "introduce" in DEFUSE documents.
YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (RaTG13)
YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (SARS2)
RaTG13 mattered not because it was closest, but because it exposed what Baric proposed to add. Notice the PRRAR insertion, which Baric referenced in 2019. He would even "provide" his novel genomes to Wang and Shi "for immune boosting of bats."

During World War II, Wuhan was occupied by the Japanese. In 1944, the US firebombed Wuhan, dropping 500 tons of incendiaries and killing 20,000 civilians. Seventy-five years later, the US would return to Wuhan, but not with bombs, with bat vaccines.
The city was rebuilt into a modern research hub. During the debate over the Wuhan wet market, one question lingered: why Wuhan? In 2017, DARPA's program manager Jim Gimlett told Daszak he wanted to vaccinate Chinese bats aga...

By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org.
Few individuals can relate as personally as I do to the experience of having peer-reviewed research retracted after it revealed potential safety signals in the VAERS database.
Neil Miller recently had his peer-reviewed published work "removed" from the journal Toxicology Reports. It has been published for 5 years: since June 2021.
Five years! What's that now? The smell of a Pubpeer rat? Could be.
The title of the paper is Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature, and you can find the abstract on PubMed.

The reason for the "removal" was that there were claimed "serious methodological flaws" according to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. What were these methodological flaws, you ask? Well according to the excuse written on the journal's site where the paper was once readable, these "flaws" revolved around the inability to "infer correlation" – NOT CAUSATION – between vaccination and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Hold the horses, now. This is not a viable reason to claim a methodological flaw. I'm going to do what has been done to me for years – just for using VAERS to demonstrate safety signal emergence – by quoting the VAERS website to call BS on this claim.

Two points stick out:
1. VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event
2. The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted as evidence of a causal association between a vaccine and an adverse event.
Fair enough. Both of these points (one written in bold!) indicate an inability to use VAERS data alone to prove causality. We know that already. This is why we use the PRR, Bayesian analyses and/or the Bradford Hill Criteria for causality as follow-up to verify not only safety signals, but causal relationships between a particular vaccine and a particular adverse event. And if FDA employee Ana Szarfman hadn't been brushed aside like dandruff, we would have also had a Regression-Adjusted GPS Algorithm in our hands that incidentally, revealed much more in terms of adverse events as safety signals than the PRR alone.
If you read the removal reason carefully, you'll have noticed that they removed Neil's paper on the basis that he cannot use VAERS data to draw a correlation between a safety signal (for SIDS) and vaccines. This does not align with what HHS dictate that you cannot use VAERS for. Correlations are very easy to demonstrate using very simple statistics like regression analyses, and can certainly be demonstrated with VAERS data. A strong correlation (whether from simple linear regression, Pearson's r, or more advanced models) can show that two variables move together. It's true that it says nothing about whether one actually causes the other, whether a third variable is driving both, or whether the relationship is spurious, but, this is not the point. Once a correlation is demonstrated, it is necessary to follow up to prove or disprove causation using the above-mentioned techniques as per proper pharmacovigilance.
So I would claim that the reasons for the removal were not valid.
It bears repeating that my own paper with Kevin McKernan and David Speicher published in Autoimmunity is also on the investigation cutting block for unjustified reasons – likely because of the same perpetrators. I'm lookin' at you, Pubpeer.

N.B. Aaron Siri has written a great summary regarding unjustified targeting of published papers for retraction as well, that includes Neil's paper and ours.
The claim in the case of Neil's paper is that his answers to their investigational questions were not good enough for them to keep it published. His answers were likely more than satisfactory, but my point herein is that it doesn't matter. The decision was likely already made ahead of time.
Why else would a paper published for 5 years go to the cutting block so suddenly?
And unfortunately, even though our answers (me, Kevin, and David's) to th...

By David Gortler, Pharm. D at Brownstone dot org.
There is a wide disparity across the globe when it comes to childhood vaccination policies. American kids receive up to 75 vaccines; twice as many as kids in other countries. That is why if Dr. Heidi Overton is confirmed as the next director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one of her top priorities should be helping to drive President Trump's mandate to study the safety and comparative outcomes current vaccine schedule to that of other countries.
High on her list of priorities will surely be the two executive orders President Trump signed this year to promote the health of American children, especially since there doesn't appear to be any movement on either.
He issued Executive Order 14407 on May 29, 2026, directing the federal government to realign US childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer nations. Section 3 of the order directs HHS, through the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, to present plans within 90 days to assess timing and sequencing, as well as "improve vaccine safety monitoring, transparency, and research."
Next, on August 10, the president signed Executive Order 14420 to reduce immunization recommendations from 17–18 diseases down to 11, spacing out shots across more doctor visits, and splitting the combined MMR vaccine into three separate injections.
The president is fulfilling his commitment to vaccination study and reform, but it doesn't appear that anyone is listening. Ninety days have passed and the task force, chaired by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, just recently resurrected in August 2025 after 27 years dormant, still hasn't shared the names of anyone (other than the always present HHS heads) who have been appointed to take charge of designing the study, along with statistical plans, according to a rudimentary internet search.
To date, there has not been any publicly proposed draft study design, outline, list of experts needed, proposed safety endpoints, request for public comment, or even a single primary or secondary safety or efficacy study objective shared.
The Task Force does not owe Congress a report until 2027.
The inaction on this priority is concerning because the president has good reason to scrutinize the current vaccine schedule. A cursory review of international vaccine standards reveals that no two countries are quite the same when it comes to the number of vaccines or recommendations versus mandates.
For example, by age 18, a child in the United States will receive roughly 30 to 75 total vaccine doses depending on the state. All 50 states mandate a robust set of childhood vaccines. On top of CDC requirements, some states follow American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines and recommend even more.
Various peer countries have a mixture of mandated or recommended schedules when it comes to their childhood schedules. For example, Denmark recommends 30 to 38 vaccines. Bulgaria recommends 56 to 61. France and Italy mandate most of their vaccines in kids. Norway, Sweden, and Spain mandate none.
Here is a breakdown of the various countries I looked up:
United Kingdom:
19 injections, 44 different vaccines by age 14
Australia (NSW):
As many as 26 total vaccines by the age of 10, with recommendations varying for aboriginal versus the European populations.
China:
Up to age 7, there are 26-29 total vaccines, depending on if the live versus inactivated strains are used. There are no vaccine mandates in China, and there are "no punishments associated with noncompliance."
Yes, you read that correctly.
After Chinese citizens contended that the mandate violated the principles of "informed consent and voluntariness" the government withdrew its Covid mandates after just one day. And Chinese children aren't mandated to take any other vaccines either.
Despite the fact that China is a one-party authoritarian government run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, Chinese citizens face less pressure to obey vaccine mandates. Y...

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org.
Each year the CDC publishes an estimate of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the previous flu season. Recently, the NIH director criticized the test-negative design from which the estimates are derived. He was right. The basic premise of the design is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, restricting the sample to people who sought medical care might reduce confounding by healthcare-seeking behavior; on the other hand, that restriction might add another type of bias — colliding bias — which is not as widely appreciated. The net bias remains unknown.

This, however, is not the only shortcoming of test-negative case-control studies of the flu vaccine. In this post, I will expose the shaky results of a large study of the flu vaccine in 2022–2023, when the vaccine was well-matched to the dominant strain. The study was based on the VISION Vaccine Effectiveness Network, one of several networks that collaborate with the CDC. Below are the published results.

The risk of infection always varies during the flu season. It was high in October through December 2022 and low in January through March 2023 (Figure).

Given a changing risk of infection, a valid comparison of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated requires similar distributions of the two populations over time. This is not the case because vaccination is associated with calendar time (rollout).
[The authors show the vaccination status at the time of seeking care, but most people got vaccinated by the end of December, and the percentage of vaccinated people stabilized in January at about 45% of the encounters.]
As shown below (Table), the share of the vaccinated population in October through December (47%), a period of high background risk, was lower than the comparable share in the unvaccinated population (61%). Of course, the complementary shares in January through March, a period of low risk, were reversed: 53% versus 39%.

In technical terms, vaccinated people accumulated more exposure time when the background risk of infection was low (53%), and unvaccinated people accumulated more exposure time when the background risk was high (61%). Moreover, since the authors excluded events that happened within two weeks of vaccination, those who were vaccinated in the second half of December 2022 contributed events only in January 2023, a time of lower risk. I will return to this analytical decision in the next section.
It is simple to grasp the bias (left table below) if we consider an extreme example where no one was injected in the first period and everyone was injected a saline solution at the beginning of the second period (right table). If we compare the rate of infection in the "vaccinated" to the rate in the "unvaccinated," the saline injection would appear effective…

This bias was explained in the context of the Covid vaccines during the pandemic and was demonstrated in a study from Ontario, Canada. As far as I know, it was not appreciated in the context of the flu vaccine, where the rollout typically follows the rising wave and is completed around the winter peak.
Confounding by time trends in the background risk can be avoided in a cohort design with matching an unvaccinated person to a vaccinated person on the vaccination date (and terminating the observation when the former is vaccinated, if they are).
As I mentioned above, the authors excluded some events. They write:
"Events among patients with documented vaccination <14 days before the index date were excluded. Index date was defined as the earlier of the associated influenza test or the ED/UC visit or admission date."
The exclusion of early events in the vaccinated is a well-known source of bias, leading to an inverse association with vaccination and adding a bias component to an estimated effect. Both the name — immortal time bias — and the mechanism are too technical to explain here.
Recently, I showed how immortal time bias operated in a study of a Covid vaccine in Qatar. ...

By React19 at Brownstone dot org.
React19 reviewed free-text entries submitted to the CDC's V-safe vaccine safety monitoring program to document reports in which participants asked for help, described suicidal thoughts, reported that they were dying or nearly died, or reported a death, and to document what participants said about the response they received.
CDC V-safe free-text survey responses were produced under FOIA request 24-01322 and published by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) at icandecide.org/v-safe-data. The CDC released the data in twelve interim and final tranches. This audit uses ICAN's updated files, which add the survey type, response ID, and response date to each entry. All twelve tranches: the 1st through 12th, were released from December 14, 2020 to December 31, 2022. These contain 7,554,929 responses from 3,489,888 unique participants.
Each entry was searched for words and phrases indicating a plea for help or contact, suicidal thoughts, dying, or death. Death, suicidal, and dying entries were reviewed individually; cries for help were filtered by rule. Because V-safe check-ins are tied to vaccine doses, entries were treated as post-vaccination reports unless the writer named another cause. Entries attributing illness to Covid-19 infection were excluded. All entries from each identified participant are grouped under their V-safe user ID, in date order, across tranches.
Conclusion: 3,329 participants met the criteria and submitted 14,430 related entries. About 1 in every 1,048 participants in the tranches wrote a plea for help, or reported a death. Many wrote in repeatedly. Several reported that promised callbacks never came, and some asked directly whether anyone was reading their reports.
V-safe was built to hear from people after vaccination, and these participants used it for that purpose. In their own words, 3,329 people reported serious harm, suicidal thoughts, near-death events, or the death of someone they loved. Many kept writing for weeks or months. Their entries describe promised callbacks that never came, pleas for help with no reply, and repeated questions about whether anyone was reading at all. This audit cannot determine what the CDC did with these reports. It can document what participants experienced: a system that asked them to report and, as they describe it, did not respond.

There are limitations. Entries are self-reported; this audit does not assess whether the vaccine caused any reported event. Counts are a floor: participants who described serious events without using the search terms are not included. The CDC's redactions appear as (b)(6). Names, phone numbers, and email addresses the CDC left unredacted have been replaced with [name], [phone], and [email].
How to read this report. Each block is one participant: the header shows the V-safe user ID and number of entries. Entries in bold with a red date matched the search; the rest are the same participant's other entries. The companion spreadsheet lists the CDC response ID and tranche for every entry. The Top Cries for Help list follows on the next page, then the 30 notable cases and the full audit entries.
React19 exists so that people injured after vaccination are heard, believed, and cared for. These entries show why that work matters. They also show where the public health system's own tools fell short of it.
Typeset book for downloading and distributing widely. No copyright restrictions.
You can purchase a physical copy, a Kindle edition, or the audio at Amazon.

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.
If you've spent five minutes paying attention to medical news, you've undoubtedly seen the headlines: "People who take statins have 30% fewer heart attacks!" or "Breast cancer screening makes women live longer!" or "Menopausal Hormone therapy lowers Alzheimer's risk."
These all sound wonderful, don't they? Just swallow a daily pill, or submit to regular screening, and you'll join the ranks of the immortal. Were only life so simple.
Yet before you rush off to demand a prescription, let me introduce you to one of the sneakiest, most persistent mirages from the world of medical research, which we call the "Healthy User Bias."
Readers of Brownstone were recently introduced to this concept related to the Covid vaccines in an article entitled "A Hall of Mirrors of the Healthy Vaccinee Effect," which demonstrated that those who were vaccinated were not the same as those who weren't. Very frail people and those close to death were less likely to get vaccinated, which is understandable, and so those who didn't get the jab died at a higher rate than those that did. Simple, right?
Understanding this single concept may not, overnight, elevate your medical BS detector from "gullible consumer" to "battle-tested skeptic," but to be fair, it might help.
What is the Healthy User Bias? It's embarrassingly simple. In observational studies—where researchers merely watch what people do in the real world rather than running an experiment—the people who voluntarily take preventive drugs or pop daily supplements are fundamentally different from those who don't. No surprise there, right?
On average, "healthy users" are wealthier, better educated, and more health-obsessed. They are seriously more obedient when it comes to vaccines (including the Covid vaccine). These sorts of people want to do the best they can within their powers, which includes things that involve some friction: they eat organic kale, jog at dawn, wear seatbelts, don't smoke, and visit their doctors regularly. They love tests of all kinds.
A 2006 meta-analysis quantified the healthy user effect (which they called the healthy adherer effect) across 21 studies. What they found is mind-blowing in its implications. It found that those who religiously took their prescribed pills (which we call 'good adherence'), even if it was a placebo, showed a 44% reduction in mortality (which was identical to adherence to proven beneficial therapy). All this shows is that the obedient, healthy people are more likely to do what most physicians want: they take their medication as ordered by their doctors.
When researchers observe people over ten years and notice they have fewer heart attacks and fewer strokes the light goes on. Hey, they might live longer! This is where pharmaceutical cheerleaders jump up and down, declaring: "Look! It was our pill!"
No. Sorry, it most likely wasn't the pill. It was the person who took the pill. It was the fact that the patient was already doing 27 zillion other things to stay healthy. Maybe they had a gene that said: don't do stuff to excess that are known to be bad for you (ie: smoking, drinking, committing violent crimes, extreme sports, being grossly overweight, being a couch potato, etc)
The pill was just along for the ride. Observational research routinely mistakes a healthy lifestyle for pharmaceutical magic.
By now you're saying, Okay Mr. Alansmartypants, gimme some examples.
This is a complex, decades long story but likely the biggest medical reversal in modern history: Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescribed for women who lived long enough to savour the nasty symptoms of menopause.
For decades, observational studies swore that HRT was a fountain-of-youth elixir for menopausal women, claiming a 50% reduction in heart attacks. The recommendations to get every woman of a 'certain age' on hormones were ubiquitous. Doctors prescribed it to millions of women around the world, convinced they were doing God's work in prot...

By Lucio Saverio Eastman at Brownstone dot org.
In-group or out-group. Clean or unclean. With us or against us. The post-pandemic world seems dominated by themes of a society corrupted by political hatreds, born of hostile emotions constantly on the hunt for targets.
Remember the masked and the unmasked, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, the essential workers and the nonessential? This wasn't just a national issue. It burrowed deep into our personal lives and into our own hometowns.
I moved from Utah to the small New England town of Peterborough, NH 20 years ago to begin a new life, a new job, and to discover new ideas and perspectives. It was a return to "home" in a way. My ancestry settled near here (Temple, Alstead, Amherst, Effingham) after my 8th great-grandfather sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on the ship Confidence and landed at the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638.
I chose Peterborough for its abundance of art, music, friendship, activities, and a real sense of being welcomed by neighbors and locals. Even the local politics seemed fairly tame. Granted, there were always a few hotheaded barflies, but their curmudgeonly personas were easy to ignore and chalk up to loneliness or general grumpiness. There are many wonderful people here who I call friends and consider very neighborly to this day.
When Covid hit in March of 2020, my perspective was yanked completely out of focus. The ugliness that surfaced when power and fear combined revealed how thin the veneer of neighborliness had always been. This was a hard contrast to the ice storm of December 2008 that wiped out power for weeks. In that scenario, people stepped up and really made a difference by helping those in actual need. But with Covid, everything was very different. Dark and full of nervous suspicion.
It's ironic that the town that inspired Grover's Corners, the setting of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and America's shorthand for small-town decency, set about casting out its own. Some people became the missionaries of compliance, then guardians of virtue, then something far worse…true believers in the righteousness of exclusion.
It seems so odd for me to say now, but for nearly 15 years I really thought Peterborough was, as its motto (much sighed over by local English teachers) states, "a good town to live in."
Skip forward 6 years and it seems that the same suspicious Covid-era paranoia permeates a class of individuals in town who constantly test in-group loyalty and out-group hatred. I can't help but recognize the vein of tribalism or purity politics running through the community. There's a pathos, a highly emotional connection to "my truth" within the collective that has a deep psychological drive toward this behavior. It's the same pathos that drove the Covid response.
It's not just a Peterborough problem either. Drive an hour southwest to Greenfield, MA and you'll find Last Ditch, a small lesbian bar that has been requiring KN-95 masks "or better" since it opened. As reported in the Boston Globe, the bar is drowning in debt and the owner made masks optional one night per week. For that, her own community accused her of eugenics and "a mass disabling event." One commenter even hoped the bar would get firebombed. The collective does not care that she is one of them. It never did. That's the point.
Barbara Oakley and her co-editors collected research on this pattern in Pathological Altruism. In chapter 16, "Genocide: From Pathological Altruism to Pathological Obedience," Augustine Brannigan shows how easily people enter what Stanley Milgram called an agentic state. They follow the orders of authority or of their in-group loyally. The scale is obviously different here; the mechanism isn't. Such obedience, Brannigan writes,
"…suggests not a failure of socialization (the usual control approach) but that they are/were oversocialized. Pathological obedience appears to be based on the development of a mentality that reflects long-term patterns of affiliation th...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
On December 12, 1799, George Washington returned to Mount Vernon after several hours on horseback in snow, hail, and freezing rain. The next day he developed a sore throat and hoarseness, and in the early morning of December 14 he awoke struggling to breathe and swallow. Doctors were called, and what happened next is now one of the most talked-about medical cases in American history.
Washington did not lack medical care. In fact, he received a lot of attention from three skilled physicians, who used the treatments they thought best for someone as sick as he was, such as repeated bloodletting and other methods meant to reduce inflammation and restore balance. Late that night, Washington died.
Even now, more than 200 years later, we are not sure exactly what disease killed Washington. Some experts have suggested acute bacterial epiglottitis, severe pharyngitis, peritonsillar infection, or other causes of upper-airway blockage [1]. What is clear is that Washington lost a large amount of blood, by most estimates about 80 ounces, through repeated bloodletting while he was already very sick. His doctors did not mean to harm him. They thought removing blood would control the inflammation, but it made him worse. Their actions followed a long-standing medical tradition, supported by accepted theories, experience, and the authority of many generations of doctors.
It is easy to look back at this story and feel superior because of our modern knowledge. Today, we understand things like oxygen delivery, blood volume, shock, infections, airway care, IV fluids, antibiotics, and advanced life support. Washington's doctors did not have this knowledge. But calling them primitive misses the real point. They were trained doctors using the best knowledge they had to try to save their patient. The real question is not why doctors in 1799 believed bloodletting would help. Instead, we should ask which treatments we use today with the same confidence that future doctors might find hard to believe.
Medicine has always operated between what we know and what we do not. Patients get sick now, but clear scientific answers can take years or even decades to find. Doctors have to watch, guess, treat, and adjust as they go. This process has led to some of our greatest achievements. Anesthesia made surgery possible. Antibiotics turned deadly infections into treatable ones. Insulin changed the outlook for type 1 diabetes. Intensive care, organ transplants, dialysis, cancer treatments, and heart procedures now save people who would not have survived in the past. Admitting mistakes in medicine does not mean ignoring the real progress made.
But history also shows many treatments once thought to be good medicine that are now known to be harmful. Bloodletting is the most famous example because it now seems clearly wrong. For centuries, it fit into the accepted theory that illness came from an imbalance of bodily fluids, so removing blood was supposed to help. Some patients got better after bloodletting simply because many illnesses get better on their own, and these cases made the practice seem effective. When patients died, doctors often blamed the severity of the illness, not the treatment. Without proper studies, doctors' experiences kept confirming what they already believed.
Mercury provides another sobering example. Mercury compounds were used for centuries to treat syphilis and other diseases despite their substantial toxicity. Records show that mercury was used in many ways, including ointments, pills, injections, and even fumes [2]. Patients often suffered from too much saliva, mouth sores, lost teeth, nerve damage, and other serious problems. Still, some of these side effects were seen as proof that the treatment was working.
The use of mercury lasted so long not because doctors were unintelligent, but because accepted theories, tradition, authority, and stories from practice all supported it. When a practice is new,...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.
[This is the foreword to Joe Salatin's magisterial work Food Emancipation, newly published]
Agronomy – a word no longer in much use – was at the core of the American experience from long before its Founding period through the early Progressive Era. We once had hands-on experience with the land and were shaped by everything about farm life. It's how we fed our families, neighbors, and communities. Today, we import most food, process it into edible chunks with a forever shelf life, shop at the superstore, chow down at restaurants, click to get food delivered, and grab takeout.
As incredible as it seems, many people today haven't thought at all about food production, any more than driving gives us consciousness of car factories or wearing clothes makes us aware of cotton fields and robotic looms. When asked, people just assume food as we know it comes from some factory out there somewhere and who cares anyway?
A laptop-class friend recently wrote, very innocently but with an air of intellectual arrogance, "How awful it would be if we still had to know how to farm!" My mind drifted back immediately to a few farm experiences I had as a kid, and the renewal of that experience recently at Joel Salatin's Polyface farm. Thank goodness someone remembers how to farm.
The reason is that an entire way of life – a way toward health, well-being, and happiness – has been stolen from us. Not neglected, not outcompeted, but literally forced out of existence. This happened not by market forces as such, not by some impersonal mind of history, but by a labyrinth of regulations, mandates, taxes, controls, subsidies, and monopoly-creating controls, all conspiring to keep the way of life of our ancestors from returning.

Food Emancipation
Joel Salatin Buy on Amazon
How and why this happened, and what to do about it right now, is the subject of this marvelous book by the farmer-philosopher Joel Salatin. It is revealing, thrilling, and destined to become a classic. It is a powerful manifesto on the production of food, a subject about which most people remain deeply confused, with real costs to health, liberty, and prosperity. It's gripping and wise, fun and serious, detailed and passionate, scientific and packed with stories, just the right combination to cause a true disruption in understanding, policy, and practice.
You can grasp the essence in the fast-paced opening chapter, but don't stop there. The rest brims with profound insights, biography, history, and granular detail that will reshape how you see agriculture, government, big business, health, and technology.
A few years ago, I was among the confused in thinking there were no real food issues that needed addressing, much less solving. The Covid era, with its seemingly endless layers of duplicity and propaganda, shattered many of my assumptions. I was ready to question everything.
What if our lords and masters have done to food production what they have done to medicine and public health? Study a bit and one's worst fears are thus realized. The same class of people who managed the pandemic response have been managing our food supply for many decades.
Today, I'm fully aligned with Salatin's vision, and I'm proud to call him my teacher. This book will likely challenge your own preconceptions just as radically.
At its heart, Salatin calls for food emancipation: dismantling over a century of heavy regulation and cartelization that has throttled small farmers and traditional wisdom. What we face is not benign oversight but a destructive alliance between Big Government and Big Agribusiness, one that suppresses competition, diminishes quality, tramples on property rights and the right to trade, and robs consumers of knowledge and choice.
If Salatin's agenda prevails, we won't just save existing small farms; we could spark thousands and millions of new ones, many right in our neighborhoods or on our own land. They would feed nations in healthier, more trad...

By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org.
As the Covid-19 pandemic struck this nation, many Americans were stunned to see top federal health officials brazenly lie to buttress their own power. Bureaucrats and politicians unleashed themselves by shrouding how the feds bankrolled the creation of the pathogen, sanctifying a pseudo-miracle cure vaccine that was concocted almost overnight, and denying the vast collateral damage from effectively placing hundreds of millions of citizens under house arrest.
But there were precedents for all those crimes and follies in the federal war on drugs that began more than a century ago. That crusade established the right of federal officials to define reality and to scourge anyone who tried to reveal that federal Drug Czars were dangerous hucksters.
Federal contortions on marijuana are Exhibit A for why Americans should never trust Uncle Sam on drugs. For more than 50 years, the federal government shamelessly pretended that marijuana had no recognized medical use.
Last December 18, President Trump signed an executive order entitled, "Increasing Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research." Trump ordered the Attorney General and the Drug Enforcement Administration to speed up rule-making to finally enable far more medical research on the benefits of marijuana. On April 23, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that henceforth all "FDA-approved marijuana-derived products" and "State-licensed medical marijuana products" are shifted from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, a far less restrictive federal regulatory regime.
But the long history of federal persecution of marijuana users, researchers, and growers vivified the folly of trusting federal intervention to protect Americans' health.
During the 1920s, the US Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to grow cannabis to boost their sagging incomes (hemp was used for such things as paper and rope). Marijuana also grew in popularity during the 1920s as a result of Prohibition, which inflated the price of alcohol by curtailing its availability.
During the Great Depression, Mexican immigrants surged into the United States searching for work and brought marijuana with them. Hostility toward the immigrants led to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively criminalized the possession of marijuana and, according to Yale professor David Musto, "mostly put a lot of jazz bands in jail."
Harvard Professor of Psychiatry Lester Grinspoon notes, "Between 1839 and 1900, more than a hundred articles on the therapeutic uses of marijuana appeared in scientific journals. As late as 1937, extract of cannabis was still a legitimate medicine marketed by drug companies." The American Medical Association testified at hearings that year urging that marijuana not be effectively banned. Unfortunately, Congress — bowing to the exhortations of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — proclaimed in 1937 that marijuana had no medical value. Congress effectively prohibited any use of marijuana for ailing Americans. But simply because a majority of Congressmen say something doesn't make it true.
In 1972, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) petitioned the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to reclassify marijuana and recognize its medical uses. The director of the agency refused to consider the petition. NORML took the case to a federal appeals court, which issued a ruling that admonished the agency for rejecting the petition without "a reflective consideration and analysis."
In 1975, NORML sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (the successor agency to the Bureau) to force the agency to evaluate the evidence on whether Americans should have access to marijuana strictly for medicinal purposes. The DEA held a hearing, and a DEA administrative law judge found some merit in some of NORML's positions. But the chief of the DEA overturned those aspects of the judge's decision.
In 1977, a federal court of appeals criticized the DEA's fina...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.
My Uncle Don had a different name for everyone.
I had no idea where he came up with all these labels. They were often colourful, and clearly he thought they were funny. Except nobody was really laughing.
To him, someone from South Asia was a Paki, an aboriginal person was, obviously, an Indian; a guy from Ukraine was a Bohunk; a Frenchman, a Frog. Germans were Krauts, and a Gook was someone from Southeast Asia, a name, no doubt, planted in his head from a racist epithet thrown at the Vietnamese. You get the picture.
But looking back—this was the 1970's we're talking here—I don't think there was hate behind the labels he gave those from other countries, or those of other religions or other customs. It was mostly his way of making distinctions, as if a person's race, country of origin, or belief was everything you needed to know about that person. Slurs like these took the whole person and reduced him or her to a simple, memorable epithet. Easy. And. Efficient.
The 1970's were a time when people also used words, even in polite company, like "homos," or "kikes" referring to gay men and Jewish people. Slurs casually hurled at entire groups of people allowed you to put them in a box, to classify them, set them apart with a label that curtailed further thought. Many times these labels would be flung without understanding that the person who was the subject of the label might feel lesser, or unworthy of respect. I don't think my Uncle Don was a racist, but looking back now, he sure sounded like one. If he was told his slurs were in poor taste, he'd probably throw up his hands and say, "Look, I'm no racist, but a dark guy is probably from Pakistan so he's a Paki," or something equally clueless.
Uncle Don, like many working-class men of his generation, made caricatures of people based on their race or nationality or religion. He was an industrial plumber and lived in Winnipeg, a melting pot of a city where ribbons of steel converged in vast railroad yards and the trains dumped immigrants from all corners of the earth into the centre of Canada's heartland. There were Scots and Irishmen, Slavs, Asians, Blacks, and numerous pockets of Canada's indigenous people.
Hearing the use of the term "anti-vaxxer" today gives me the same gut reaction I had when listening to Don wax on about people who were visibly different from him. "Anti-vaxx", while in vogue today and uttered without any form of introspection or understanding, is clearly a term of laziness, a mostly defensive maneuver to shield a person from having to engage with another's ideas. In short, the term is a quick way to mark that person as morally deficient, selfish, and contemptible.
Scorning "anti-vaxxers" has become a way to signal one's inherent righteousness and correctness, telling the world in a single word that there are those of us who care about others and untrustworthy people who don't. In a nutshell, the word says: "Imagine how dumb you have to be to seriously question the safety or usefulness of injectable pharmaceutical products that are the most innovative health technology in the history of humankind?" How dumb indeed.
As a straight, white guy, I don't think anyone has ever hurled a slur at me. Until Covid.
The first time someone called me an "anti-vaxxer" was in 2021, after the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine was approved. This was before the Pfizer trial was published and everyone in my office at the University rushed to get their shots. I waited.
I knew the likelihood of me, a healthy 58-year-old guy, developing complications and dying from Covid were miniscule. I was on record for seriously questioning previous government policies around the influenza vaccine which—because I read the company's own studies—I determined were next to useless, and coercive to healthcare workers. I believed in the precautionary principle, and Covid didn't scare me one bit. When asked by a colleague about why I was not yet vaccinated, I told him, "I'm...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org.
Since Covid, the "mental health crisis" has gone from background music to a deafening noise. It is said to touch every part of society, but none more than Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2013. The French figures give the scale: compared with the previous decade, psychiatric hospitalizations in 2021–2022 rose 106 percent among 20-to-24-year-olds, 163 percent among 15-to-19-year-olds, and a staggering 246 percent among children aged 10 to 14. Researchers spent a decade arguing over datasets.
Parents look for a single culprit they can blame or a device they can confiscate. Having exhausted the managerial and therapeutic answers of more awareness, more services, more medication, and more self-expression they offer for every modern sorrow, institutions are now itching for the stick of social networks age verification, or for AI fear porn. Two excellent books written by two Generation Z authors and published this year refuse the usual explanations and their lazy remedies. They do not deny the disastrous effects of smartphones, lockdowns, or ubiquitous pornography. They insist that these were oil poured on a well-established fire.
Freya India's GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything is the report from inside girlhood. Pierre Valentin's The Malaise of Generation Z, alas not yet available in English, broadens the perspective to the entire Zoomer generation, taking Christopher Lasch as a guide. Read together, they describe one event: the transfer of the inner life from families, churches, trades, and ordinary adult authority to a tutelary, market-therapeutic complex specialized in the production of a fundamentally dependent and weak self. In other words, the "mental health crisis" is not happening by default, but by design.
India and Valentin's books are not interchangeable. Born in 1999, India is a British woman who was given a smartphone at eleven and later logged off to think…and to live. Her popular Substack is essential reading on what it feels like for girls to grow up as content.
GIRLS® is personal without being a memoir and researched without being bland journalism. Born in 1998, Valentin is a French political essayist. His subject goes well beyond what screens do to boys or girls. It is a whole age group, from early adolescence to the edge of thirty, whose shared experience is no longer a war, an economic crisis, musical tastes, or a common work, but a psychiatric curve. Specialists agree that this generation is more depressed, more anxious, more fragile, and more unhappy than those that preceded it. But they completely miss the mark on what that fact means.
India's title is the argument. Girls have been remade into GIRLS®. They are ornaments under filters, objects on dating apps, brands under management, lives packaged for an audience and priced by public rating. Her book is not another self-righteous and exasperating sermon taken from the register of luxury stoicism about "too much Instagram," like Jonathan Haidt's lazy conclusion in The Anxious Generation.
In that book, Haidt, who is atheist, pleads for mass transnational prohibitions, particularly age verification, and, as Pierre Valentin ironically points out, ends with a utilitarian eulogy of religion! It is a minutely detailed account of how a web of industries exploited the oldest vulnerabilities of girlhood by turning them into a commodity and marketing them as empowerment. Beauty, psychiatry, pornography, dating, and tech all pull attention inward, toward appearance, feeling, and appetite. In an almost burlesque version of Mandeville's bee fable, it is vanity turned into liberation.
GIRLS® moves through six stations. Filtered focuses on girls' anxieties over their faces and bodies, revised by apps that began with very few filters and became a permanent and unforgiving tribunal. Diagnosed is the conversion of ordinary unhappiness into a portable identity, complete with language, community, and a produ...

By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.
Bill Gates has long been one of the most admired people in the world, especially since he stepped down from his role running Microsoft to devote himself and much of his fortune to philanthropy. That reputation has been tarnished recently, however, by revelations of the billionaire's close relation with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and exposés on his own fraught relationships with women.
On the eve of Gates' private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country's health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.
At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates' efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.
The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates's extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, "What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?"
Emails and internal plans, for example, show that the NIH – the world's largest funder of biomedical research – gave the Gates Foundation first billing for the joint workshops and meetings held on federal property.

The Gates Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The NIH also declined to comment.
Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation tries to grow its endowment through investments. Some of these efforts, especially its stake in vaccine companies, blur the lines between profit-seeking and the foundation's mission to develop and deliver vaccines around the world. This symbiotic relationship between capitalism and charity also benefits Gates, whose power and position hinge in large part on the size of his foundation's assets. Before the pandemic, The Nation magazine reported that the Gates Foundation had a $40 million stake in CureVac – this was not a grant but an investment. CureVac was one of many companies the nonprofit bought stock in that were working on COVID vaccines and therapeutics.
Around that same period, the Gates Foundation announced that it had begun to "leverage a portion of its $2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund" to advance the nonprofit's COVID work. The Gates Foundation also turned a $55 million investmentin Pfizer's COVID vaccine partner, BioNTech, into over $550 million when it sold stock a couple of years later after the vaccine hit the market.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000 with an initial endowment of $20 billion and a primary focus on reducing global health disparities. Rather than working exclusively through non-governmental agencies, the Gates Foundation began contributing to the NIH through the agency's own nonprofit, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Congress created the FNIH in 1990 as a firewall between NIH officials and outside donors seeking to influence federal research.
That firewall is not ironclad. In 2018, for example, NIH officials, funded by beer and liquor ...

By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.
A few summers ago I gave consideration to moving to Florida or Texas. This was 2021 when it felt like there was a collective madness in my hometown of New York City. If you remember that moment, you remember the destinations where people like me were fleeing. I was looking into places like Florida and Texas. The so-called free states, the escape hatches (not my framing but more of a public consciousness in a particular demographic that I had seemed to become a part of). I compiled spreadsheets about neighborhoods, school lists, and initiated other projects you do when you're about to uproot your family.
And somewhere in that diligence I came across a company called Oxitec. They breed genetically modified mosquitoes. In May 2020, the EPA approved an experimental release permit. The two states cleared for field testing were Florida and Texas.
I'll share what happened next in the spirit of transparency, even if it makes me look a little ridiculous in retrospect. I sat there and thought: the two states I'm considering as my escape are the two states approved for experimental GMO insect release. And then I wondered: are the escape hatches just honeypots to round up the dissidents?
And then I thought: who and what have I become? I mean that's insane, right? Does a reasonable person wonder if Bill Gates personally zoned his retirement? I remember actually feeling embarrassed, alone in my own head. I'd spent two decades in tech. I didn't know it at the time but I played my own tiny role in helping build some of the surveillance plumbing I now write about. I am not a man who is easily spooked by an internet meme. And here I was, pattern-matching my way out of a real estate decision as if the ticks had lobbyists.
For a variety of reasons we left NYC but stayed in the state. Partly logistics, but also because by 2021 I'd talked myself into the conclusion that whatever was happening was global, and if that was true, fleeing somewhere wasn't really an escape. Some places might have had longer runways than others, but I wasn't going to live as a man on the run. My wife and I decided it was better for us to optimize for quality of life, and we ultimately decided to stay in New York in a more rural setting. I'm not going to suggest that decision was vindicated, because it wasn't, not cleanly anyway (though we're mostly a happy family).
In the years since, however, I kept running into pieces of that mosquito story that I couldn't quite make myself stop assembling.
This past week Marty Bent posted something that made me revisit a lot of my research from that era.
Two professors at a medical school in Michigan published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Bioethics. Their argument is that it is "morally obligatory" to genetically engineer ticks to spread a disease that makes humans violently allergic to red meat.
My first reaction was the natural one, in my opinion. It had to be an Onion or Babylon Bee headline someone laundered through a fake citation. People don't really write ideas like this down, do they? They certainly don't get them reviewed by their peers.
So I checked and it turned out to be real. Bioethics, volume 39, issue 8, pages 772 through 781. Published online July 2025. It's indexed in PubMed. You can pull it up on Wiley right now. The authors are Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth, both at Western Michigan University's Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine. The paper is called "Beneficial Bloodsucking."
The author's actual argument – and remember this is not satire – is that alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the tick-borne red meat allergy, is a "moral bioenhancer." Their logic: if eating meat is morally wrong, and the allergy makes you stop eating meat (because it will now kill you), then the allergy makes you a better person. From there they build what they call the Convergence Argument, which in plain English means "multiple different ethical frameworks all happen to point at the same conclus...

By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org.
Ralph Baric's 2007 paper stands as a foundational reference in synthetic viral genomics, demonstrating how a SARS-like coronavirus could be de novo assembled from published sequence data alone. Framed as a risk assessment for synthetic biology in the context of biodefense, the paper provides a detailed technical roadmap for constructing infectious chimeric coronaviruses using seamless reverse-genetics techniques. This work exemplifies dual-use (civilian and military) research of concern: the very same tools developed for pandemic preparedness and biodefense can be readily applied to engineer viruses with enhanced pathogenicity, transmissibility, or immune evasion.
With the unexpected discovery of SV40 promoter-enhancer-origin sequences in the Pfizer Covid-19 mRNA injectable products, it becomes apparent how biodefense can become bioterrorism very quickly. These powerful mammalian regulatory elements, retained from a standard pcDNA3.1-type production plasmid, were never intended for human administration. Their detection in commercial vials links a synthetic biology framework directly to the manufacturing process of the "countermeasures" themselves – turning a theoretical dual-use discussion into a concrete, real-world example of how synthetic tools and legacy genetic elements entered hundreds of millions of people under the banner of biodefense.
Ralph S. Baric's 2006 paper entitled: "Synthetic Viral Genomics: Risks and Benefits for Science and Society" reviews how synthetic genomics and reverse genetics has transformed virology, both for good and ill. It details the Baltimore classification of viruses and explains established reverse-genetics techniques from infectious cDNA clones and bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) vectors for large DNA viruses, to seamless assembly methods (ie: "No See'm" sites using type IIS restriction enzymes) for RNA viruses like coronaviruses.
These tools have already enabled resurrection of extinct pathogens (ie: 1918 influenza) and construction of chimeric viruses, allowing precise manipulation of virulence, transmissibility, host range, and immune evasion genes. Baric catalogs select agents across virus families, noting which are synthesizable from published sequences, and highlights barriers like sequence accuracy, genome stability in bacteria, and technical expertise – barriers he predicted would erode rapidly as DNA synthesis became cheaper and more accessible.
If you read the paper, you will have seen that it provides a detailed, practical framework for de novo synthesis and reverse genetics of SARS-CoV specifically, including seamless full-genome assembly, in vitro transcription to RNA, and recovery of infectious virus. The paper repeatedly notes that synthetic genomics allows reconstruction of viruses like SARS-CoV from sequence data alone, without needing the natural virus, and discusses how this could be used for both 'legitimate' research (vaccines, pathogenesis studies) and misuse.
In addition, the methods Baric outlines in the paper are directly applicable to SARS-CoV-2 (also ~30 kb), which is even more clearly laid out in Peter Daszak's DEFUSE proposal: a collaborative how-to guide for "defusing bat-borne coronaviruses" (Figure 1). Post 2019 implementations have used yeast recombination, Gibson assembly, or similar seamless techniques, but the core principles (synthetic DNA fragments full-length cDNA RNA transcripts infectious virus) are the same. As mentioned, Baric's lab and collaborators had already demonstrated this for the original SARS-CoV in 2003.

The paper is eerily prescient in terms of laying out the infrastructure for both "pandemic preparedness" and "dual-use" procedures. Synthetic approaches enabled rapid response: once a new pathogen's sequence is known, genes or full genomes can be synthesized for diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics, without waiting for natural isolates. This paradigm was used during SARS-CoV-2. We are all...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.
(Original publication date: 5/30/2026.)
We are to believe, according to some public health voices and media, that the Ebola outbreak in Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a threat to us all. This is a bit of a pattern, and it is a story full of obvious flaws.
Hot on the heels of COVID-19, in which humans may have fiddled with a virus and then used the Nature Medicine journal to pretend otherwise, we have endured one existential threat after another. Mpox, avian flu, Marburg virus and Hantavirus between them have not totalled 1,000 deaths together over the entire period. Mpox is perhaps the worst, with about 500 deaths across two separate "public health emergencies of international concern", mostly due to malnutrition in, once again, DRC. But DRC loses 70,000 children to malaria every year, so Mpox was really our problem rather than theirs.
The narrative of polycrisis foisted on an ever-more sceptical public has wrecked the integrity of international public health. Under its current model, global health priorities are largely determined by a few very wealthy individuals with limited public health understanding, or corporations with direct vested interests in certain outcomes. Public health journals are financially beholden to these, as are mainstream media, and can only reflect the hype.
The story is all about the necessity for more money to enable experts to rescue both ourselves and the people of affected regions. Highly paid consultants and pharmaceuticals from Western corporations become essential to save populations apparently helpless without our urgent largesse. This is historically ridiculous, it is ignorant, it is stupid and the note by Villa and co-authors of the Ituri Collective explains why in very clear and coherent terms.
Ebola virus was first identified 50 years ago in DRC, and since then has caused intermittent outbreaks, mostly small. It has presumably done this throughout human history, which means hundreds of thousands of years in this area. The largest, in 2014, was in West Africa and killed about 11,000 people over a year. Spread by close and direct contact with body fluids from a sick person, it kills about 30% of presenting cases with a severe febrile illness and systemic bleeding ('haemorrhagic fever'). Illness is therefore relatively obvious, as commonly is the path of transmission.
Ebola virus presence has been detected at low frequency in many animal species in Central and West Africa. Its main animal host, if it has one, is not clear, but evidence is found in bats, rodents, non-human primates, pigs and species such as the small duiker antelope. And, of course, occasionally in humans. Transmission from animals to humans is called a 'spillover' of a pathogen or disease, and it happens a lot. Influenza is a common example, as are brucellosis and Hantavirus. What matters is whether it then establishes transmission between humans, and that depends on many factors.
Critically for understanding the current hype: why did transmission become established in Ituri province in DRC to cause the current outbreak?
Viall and colleagues explain the reasons why this outbreak could be sustained, as summarised below. Unfortunately, the media have ignored these factors in most reporting. But they are common to many such occurrences in African populations.
Ituri is a province in North East DRC with a population of about seven million people. It has several ethnic groups, a lot of gold mining and a lot of poverty. There have been major armed insurgencies for several years, including two main factions – one (the Allied Democratic Forces) affiliated with the Islamic State terrorist group. Active military responses come from the DRC armed forces and, in the past, those of neighbouring Uganda. Atrocities against the civilians trying to survive within this context are common, and there are several large camps of people displaced from their homes by the armed groups. Groups...

By Sofia Karstens at Brownstone dot org.
Do you remember the fairy godmother Merryweather in Sleeping Beauty? She's the one who, when the evil queen curses the newborn Aurora to prick her finger on a spindle and die on her sixteenth birthday, can't undo the curse…but she can soften it. So she uses her own gift to change the ending: not death, but a deep, enchanted sleep.
There is a whole lot of seemingly coordinated (dare I call it) panic right now around AI. I've written extensively about the legitimate, existential dangers we do need to address in technology. But my spidey sense tells me this current fever pitch isn't that.
For one thing: why now? I'm certainly not the only person who's been writing about these issues for years or believes we've already crossed that threshold. So why the sudden, synchronized urgency? Why is someone like Bill Gates – after literally decades as AI's most prominent optimist – suddenly publishing a 6,000-word essay warning that we've "passed AI's danger thresholds," calling for new national and international regulatory bodies? What's in it for him, now, after all this time?
A psyop is never just one thing. It's a wilderness of mirrors. A single mirror shows you one reflection you can identify and correct for. A wilderness of them means every angle you check reflects another angle, with no clean vantage point outside the hall to verify against, which is functionally what a multi-actor convergence produces, even without any one person orchestrating it. You don't need an overlord director standing behind the glass for the hall of mirrors to work. And that's the unsettling part: a single coordinated psyop presumably has an off switch, in principle, if you ever find the operator.
A wilderness of independently-incentivized mirrors doesn't. There's no one thread to pull. You'd have to defund the labs' marketing incentive, restructure the regulatory capture dynamics, fix the media business model, and drain the political utility out of "AI-as-boogeyman" – separately, all at once – for the reflection to actually stop. It isn't one thing. It's five or six things (usually at least), each independently profitable or useful to a different party, all predictably, reliably, producing the same noise.
The convergence looks a little something like:
Genuine researcher concern, unevenly calibrated by a public conversation where the public-facing volume of the concern exceeds its actual epistemic certainty.
Commercial incentive: "This is so capable it could go wrong" is also, uncomfortably, a marketing claim.
Regulatory capture dynamics, probably the spear tip: heavy compliance regimes burden small competitors while incumbents absorb them easily, and some of the loudest voices demanding regulation run the largest labs.
Media incentive: fear and novelty both outperform nuance for engagement, full stop, independent of subject matter. This would be true of AI coverage even if none of the other factors existed.
And political utility: AI fear has become a genuinely useful rhetorical tool across very different political projects…It serves centralized-control arguments, deregulatory "beat China" urgency, and culture-war anxieties about job loss or loss of control all at once, depending on who's using it. Much of this predates AI entirely and would've attached to some other target if AI hadn't come along.
None of these require a coordinating hand talking to the other four. They just currently point the same direction, for reasons specific to each actor's own incentives. It's a hat rack: real, separate, true things, all easy to hang on the same peg, creating the appearance of a unified campaign without requiring one to actually exist.
There's a mainstream body of scholarship describing this mechanism. Gregory Dickinson, in his Harvard Journal on Legislation article "Law Proofing the Future," writes in the section "Big Tech and Regulatory Capture:" "the very platforms and app makers whose companies make prompt calls for reg...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org.
Wendell Berry died on August 31 at his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. For more than half a century he farmed with horses, wrote in pencil, adamantly refused to purchase a computer, and insisted that the health of a person cannot be separated from the health of a place. That faithfulness to a place is the part of his thought that the health freedom movement most needs now.
Health, Berry never tired of saying, comes from the same root as whole, heal, and holy. To be healthy is to be whole. Health as wholeness is not a decree from the medical apparatus. It is membership to a community: belonging to other people and to a particular piece of earth. "I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health," he wrote, "and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms."
That sentence should hang over every discussion of medical liberty. The movement for health freedom has rightly fought for informed consent, against coercive public-health machinery, against the reduction of the body to a set of data to be mined by the Biosecurity State. Those fights are essential, but they are not sufficient.
A person who has successfully kept the State out of his bloodstream can still be unwell if the soil from which comes the food that feeds him is dead, if the water he drinks is polluted, if his neighborhood is atomized, and if the food system that feeds him is a chain of distant, chemicalized abstractions. Autonomy without membership to the kind of community Berry wrote about all his life is not worthy of a fight.
Berry made the connection explicit in an essay entitled "The Body and the Earth," collected in The Unsettling of America and later in The Art of the Commonplace. Our bodies, he wrote, "are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures." It is therefore unsurprising that we treat our bodies as we treat the land.
When we treat land as an extractive resource, as something to be mined, specialized, chemically altered, and abandoned, we treat the body the same way: as a machine whose parts can be isolated, optimized, and replaced by specialists who have no interest in nutrition, agriculture, or the wholesomeness of mind and spirit. "It is therefore absurd," he wrote, "to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists." A doctor uninterested in the health of soil is as absurd, continued Berry, as a farmer uninterested in the health of people.
In this view, healing is not a procedure performed on an isolated organism. "Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation." The feast is local. It requires a place that is intimately known, cared for with affection, and kept whole enough to keep giving. Love of place is not a shmaltzy slogan. It is the condition of knowledge and of care. You cannot properly care for what you do not love, and you cannot love what you refuse to know in its particularity.
This is the lesson the health freedom movement must take from Berry without abandoning its core commitments. Medical freedom is a necessary defense against the Machine, but it is of little use if we don't know where our food comes from, who grows it and how, what a neighborhood looks like when the soil is alive, or what care looks like when it is not outsourced to distant systems that treat both land and body as inputs.
Berry's answer was never a set of slick policies. It was faithfulness to a place and to the kind of labor that the love of a place requires. Berry left his native Kentucky to study at Stanford and teach in New York City, but he returned to Henry County, farmed it, wrote about it, and refused the careerist mobility that treats every locality as interchangeable.
The ...

By Daniel Nuccio at Brownstone dot org.
Knowing what's in your food or whether what you're about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There's no reason why the government should make it harder. But that's exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels.
Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders.
In technical terms, FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. More practically, people with IBS might want to be careful around most standard dairy items, honey, several cereals and artificial sweeteners, and a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and spices.
When consumed, these items can lead to luminal distension by causing increased amounts of water to enter the gastrointestinal tract and increased gas production by bacteria living in the colon. In some individuals with IBS and other functional gut disorders, this may trigger or exacerbate certain symptoms of their condition (e.g., intense pain and changes in intestinal motility), possibly through neurons in the gut responding abnormally to these physiological responses to FODMAP consumption.
Hence, some patients with these conditions choose to limit their FODMAP intake or are encouraged to do so by their health care provider. Some go on strict low-FODMAP diets long term. Others temporarily do so for two to eight weeks then work to reintroduce specific FODMAP-containing foods into their diet to determine what they can tolerate. Broadly speaking, a lot of patients with relevant conditions find that the diet helps alleviate their symptoms.
Low-FODMAP diets though are generally considered sort of bland. They also tend to require a certain amount of time and education to be effective. Looking at a table of high- and low-FODMAP foods to make decisions about what to eat may not require an advanced degree in nutrition, but it is not difficult to imagine how having to break out such a table to evaluate every item you consider purchasing at the grocery store could become rather burdensome, especially if you're new to the diet.
Fortunately, there are organizations and companies out there to help. Monash University, for example, has labs that both study the effectiveness of low-FODMAP diets and test food items for FODMAP content. Monash also offers several resources to help those on low-FODMAP diets make informed meal choices and works with companies that wish to offer low-FODMAP food options. If a company wants to submit a product to Monash for evaluation and Monash determines the item is low in FODMAP content, the company can then use a trademarked label to convey this information to consumers.
However, as one US company learned, even if one of the world's leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn't exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States.
In 2018, Ketan Vakil, after dealing with his own digestive issues involving FODMAPs, saw an opening in the market to cater to customers on low-FODMAP diets by offering diet-compatible broths and spice blends that could safely add some flavor to this notoriously bland diet. Hence, he founded Gourmend Foods, and, after getting a chicken broth and some spice blends low-FODMAP certified by Monash, Vakil and Gourmend proceeded to sell those items online and in retail using Monash's trademarked label.
However, in 2022 when Vakil expanded Gourmend's product line with a low-FODMAP beef broth, he learned from the USDA while going through a pre-approval process for the beef broth's label that it would be illegal for him to in...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.
An email arrived from a reader that posed a serious problem, a general one of which I was only vaguely aware. It deals with an issue deeply intimate to all family life. It affects the crucial cultural matter of the prolongation of legacy and human life itself.
Her niece is expecting a baby. The child is due in three weeks, which means that it will be around for Thanksgiving holidays. Instead of treating this as a glorious opportunity for the extended family to marvel with delight over new life, hearts lifted all around, the mother is treating family as nothing more than walking and talking disease vectors.
On the advice of her pediatrician, she is banning anyone from getting near the baby unless they have fully four shots: D-Tap, Covid, flu, and RSV. This is because the baby cannot be vaccinated with D-Tap for two months. The entire family is being told this and people are trying to figure out what to do.
Some will refuse and be relegated to Zoom contact. Some will be masked and gloved. Others will go along and risk injury to themselves for absolutely no reason.
The practice is called cocooning. It makes no sense at all. Cocooning is different from nest building, which is a normal sense of wanting time to bond and learn and care. This is different. It is a pharmacological innovation that implies that the basic immune system is deeply flawed without the injection of industrial products and therefore a newborn can only be around other maximally injected people.
The Covid and flu shots are known to register negative efficacy. None of these shots can prevent transmission, an indisputable fact. Moreover, every pharmaceutical carries risks. Four at once carries more risk than one.
In effect, the new mother is exercising soft power, blackmailing her family by denying joy to them unless they give money to the shotmakers. Think of it as an informal vaccine passport imposed by cautious new moms who have no idea they are being manipulated by powerful industrial interests.
I was shocked by this email but apparently this is very common. It's a policy. Incredibly, the CDC itself recommends this: "A baby's family members and caregivers should be up to date on their vaccinations to help form a circle of disease protection around the baby."

If you believe that, I've got a closet full of potions to sell you.
It's a wonder humanity has survived so long without such exhortations! It's "social distancing" applied to pediatrics, without the same evidence in support, which is to say none.
A maker of one D-Tap shot is GlaxoSmithKline. Ten years ago, they put out an advertising campaign for their shot called Boostrix. It featured a wolf holding a baby. The campaign was called Big Bad Cough. The message was that no young mother should let anyone without Boostrix near her newborn child.

A class-action lawsuit was launched on grounds that the potion does not actually protect against spread. The company settled the lawsuit. Disbursements are now going out to people who took the shot under the advertising campaign's influence.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit had claimed "physical and emotional injury, the injection creating in their bodies a defective immunity to pertussis that will last the remainder of their lives, receiving a painful injection of various substances into their bodies that they would not have received otherwise, expending time and resources to seek out and obtain Boostrix, paying, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, for Boostrix, and after GSK led them to fear that without Boostrix they were in danger of spreading pertussis, receiving the product has actually rendered them more likely to spread pertussis and hence only increased the fear created by GSK."
The courts did not ultimately rule. The company settled to prevent that for good reason. The jabbed accepted the payout rather than take the challenge all the way.
We've only begun to discuss the complete fraudulence of the entire co...

By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org.
The following is the result of joint work with Jaroslav Janosek, Tadeas Frycak, and Robert Straka.
Since the registration trials of the Covid-19 vaccines, there have been no randomized studies to track the efficacy of these vaccines. The virus kept mutating and the convalescent fraction of the population has been growing. Thus, the original efficacy figures reported in the registration trials – dubious to start with – were clearly not valid when the mass vaccination campaign started in early 2021. Moreover, in the meantime we learned that the registration trials tested a different product than the one used in the mass vaccination campaign. This cast further doubt on the advertised 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection.
The Israel 2021 summer wave of infections clearly demonstrated to the whole world that the "vaccines" do not protect against symptomatic infection in any meaningful way. Consequently, the goal posts were moved and the authorities started claiming that the "vaccines" may not protect against infection but they protect against severe course of infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid. However, there were (and there still are) no data from randomized trials to support this causal claim.
This embarrassing gap in evidence was filled by a trove of papers that estimated the effectiveness of the "vaccines" from observational data. Most of these studies claimed the vaccine effectiveness was very high, often close to 100%. Rogue governments all over the world used these studies to force people into vaccination.
Readers of this forum know very well that observational data are loaded with the so-called Healthy Vaccinee Effect. This is a type of indication bias that originates from healthy people having easier access to the vaccine. For example, people on their deathbed are usually not vaccinated, which means that deaths tend to concentrate in the unvaccinated group, making the vaccinated group much "healthier."
At the same time, those frailest individuals who are close to the end of their lives are also those most susceptible to die from/with Covid. Healthy Vaccinee Effect (HVE) thus causes observational studies to vastly overestimate vaccine effectiveness against any endpoint (and vastly overestimate vaccine safety as well). The now legendary paper by Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, and Vinay Prasad showed that the reported 95% effectiveness of Covid vaccines against Covid-related death in Israel in 2021 was entirely due to HVE. In other words, had HVE been removed, the true vaccine effectiveness would have been zero. I still can't figure out how they got this published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
We first noticed HVE in the middle of 2021 when Angelika Bazalova – an investigative journalist – had the brilliant idea to FOIA her way to the records on all-cause mortality of the clients of several health insurance companies in the Czech Republic. Readers (with an AI translator from Czech) can still see our initial confusion as we were reporting the data and proposing possible explanations (one of the articles was titled "The elixir of youth"). After some time, we made sense of all the data and reported it in a paper for the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and in a further paper in a Polish journal.
My original conclusion that "this paper invalidates all estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on observation data" was changed to "In view of the presence of HVE, the baseline difference in the frailty of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in periods without COVID-19 must be taken into account when estimating COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness from observational data." But that is the Newspeak we all had to learn during the past years in order to get anything published in official journals.
Since then, we have been trying to explain HVE to medical professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public. It has been frustrating. Most people think that the v...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
When was the last time your doctor actually examined you? I do not mean when someone checked your blood pressure, copied your medication list, looked at your laboratory results, or listened briefly through a shirt before returning to the computer. I mean examined you. Looked at you. Watched you breathe. Felt your pulse. Looked at your eyes. Examined your neck. Listened carefully to your heart and lungs. Palpated your abdomen. Watched you walk. Noticed the color of your skin, the movement of your hands, the expression on your face, and the thousand other small pieces of information that a human body offers to someone who has learned how to observe it.
For most of the history of medicine, this was not an optional ritual performed before ordering the "real tests." This was medicine. Today, increasingly, it is treated as something quaint, inefficient, or unnecessary.
I have spent most of my professional life taking care of very sick people. Critical care is one of the most technologically intensive areas of medicine ever created. I love technology. I have watched mechanical ventilators breathe for patients who could no longer breathe for themselves. I have used ultrasound, CT imaging, sophisticated hemodynamic monitoring, extracorporeal technologies, molecular diagnostics, and laboratory measurements that physicians a generation before me could only have dreamed about.
I would never want to return to a world without these tools. But after decades at the bedside, I have also learned something that becomes more obvious, not less, with experience: technology is most powerful when it extends the physician's senses. It becomes dangerous when it persuades the physician that those senses are no longer necessary.
Experienced clinicians understand something that is remarkably difficult to teach in a lecture hall or classroom. Sometimes you walk into a room and know immediately that something is wrong. You may not yet know what it is, but you know it before the laboratory does. The patient is breathing differently. His skin looks different. She answers a question a fraction of a second more slowly than she did several hours earlier. Posture, speech, facial expression, respiratory effort, or level of attention changes. None of these observations is magical. They are data, collected by a biological instrument trained through thousands and thousands of encounters: the physician.
When I round in an intensive care unit (ICU), I can learn an enormous amount before touching the computer. I can see whether a patient is fighting the ventilator. I can hear secretions from the doorway. I can see accessory muscles contracting. I can recognize when someone who looked reasonably comfortable earlier suddenly looks exhausted. I can see peripheral perfusion, diaphoresis, agitation, abdominal distension, or a subtle change in mental status. None of this means I should ignore the arterial blood gas, the chest radiograph, the CT scan, or the monitor. Of course I need them. The mistake is believing that because those measurements are more technologically sophisticated, they are necessarily more real than what is happening directly in front of me.
Medicine once began with the patient and proceeded toward testing. Increasingly, it begins with testing and eventually works its way back toward the patient. Abraham Verghese and colleagues have described this inversion of the diagnostic process, in which clinicians may encounter an image or electronic representation of a patient before encountering the patient himself. That change sounds subtle. It is not. Once the CT scan, laboratory panel, consultant note, medication list, and previous diagnoses have entered our minds, we no longer approach the patient without preconceptions. The data have already told us what we are supposed to see.
This is one reason the physical examination should never be reduced to nostalgia. Its value is not that physicians once carried black bags and ...

By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.
During a bombshell Senate hearing last week, CIA officer, Jim Erdman III testified under oath that the CIA's scientific analysts determined that the Covid pandemic started from a lab leak, but their scientific conclusions were hidden from Congress and the American public, in what Erdman called "a coverup."
"Public policy would have been very different had the American public been made aware that a virus from a lab in China was going to serve as the foundation for an Emergency Use Authorization of mRNA products being mandated by the former administration," Erdman said, questioning the validity of the Covid vaccine approval process.
Erdman also indicted Tony Fauci, the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), for inserting himself into the Intelligence Community's (IC) assessment of the Covid origins, on two documented occasions. In both instances, Fauci steered IC discussion toward a natural origin and away from declaring that the pandemic started from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which Fauci had funded via US government grants.
"Dr. Anthony Fauci influenced the IC's analytic process and COVID origin's findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated Subject Matter Experts (SME), public health officials, and scientists. This included the authors of the paper 'The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2' and other public health experts and scientists who have been in his orbit for 20+ years, many of whom have and did receive funding from NIAID, as well as scientists working under IC contract. This contradicts Dr. Fauci's 2024 testimony to Congress, when he answered 'not to my knowledge' when asked if he had briefed any intel agency concerning viral research."
— Testimony of James E. Erdman III before the US Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee
Such explosive charges—a CIA coverup, Fauci's complicity, and the misguided approval of Covid vaccines—should have ignited a media inferno; instead we got a cold frost. No front-page headline from the New York Times, no angry Washington Post editorial, no story of horror from NPR. And frozen silence from Science Magazine, Nature, Scientific American, and The Atlantic. Not even an icy tweet.
Now why is that? The answer is rather obvious.
From the pandemic's beginning these media outlets have promoted the fairy tale that lab accident talk is paranoid conspiracy theory and anyone questioning the efficacy and safety of Covid vaccines is a lunatic who hates science, the laws of physics, and arithmetic taught in kindergarten. Evidence to the contrary, such as a CIA official testifying under oath to the Senate, leaves these writers only two options to preserve both the narrative and their own threadbare journalistic credibility:
1. Knock it down – find someone willing to call newly uncovered facts a "conspiracy theory" and dash out your narrative enforcing news piece.
2. Hard ignore – pretend newly uncovered facts don't exist, keep your powder dry, and pray like hell the public gets distracted by oil prices and foreign conflict.
Erdman was too credible for legacy media to skewer, and his testimony forced them to pick the second option.
A week after he testified, not a single reporter has managed to float a flimsy critique that aims to dent Erdman's story with rumors from unnamed sources that he once brushed up against an intern in the CIA's halls or stole a stapler from the agency's office supply closet. Nothing even from the downtrodden Rolling Stone which only exists because people now on Medicare have faint memories that this corpse of a magazine once published news with a faint regard for accuracy.
Nonetheless, I get up every morning, and after dropping my daughter off at school, sit in a café and scroll though the New York Times and Washington Post, reading as many stories as I can in the hour it takes me to down two cups of coffee. I do this bec...

By Yaffa Shir-Raz at Brownstone dot org.
On February 28, 2021, Israel's Ministry of Health alerted health authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to an emerging cardiac safety signal following the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
The warning came just over two months after Israel had launched one of the fastest vaccination campaigns in the world, placing the country at the forefront of the global rollout.
That day, the Ministry informed the European Medicines Agency that it was investigating a "safety signal of myocarditis/peri-myocarditis in the younger population (16–30 years old)" and had already received reports of around 40 cases. A CDC internal tasking memo from the same day recorded that Israel was seeing "a large number of reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people," and was seeking contacts at the CDC and FDA to discuss the issue. The message was marked "Importance: High."
Three days later, Dr. Roee Singer, Deputy Director of Epidemiology at Israel's Ministry of Health, wrote directly to the CDC: "We are seeing a large number of myocarditis and pericarditis cases in young individuals soon after Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. We would like to discuss the issue with a relevant expert at CDC."

It was, in every sense, a "Houston, we have a problem" moment.
The alarm had been sounded. But what, exactly, had Israeli health officials seen that prompted it? And when, and how, was that warning communicated to physicians and the public?
Our newly published study in EXCLI Journal discloses and analyzes an internal Israeli Ministry of Health pharmacovigilance dataset that had never been made public. The dataset was provided to us by a whistleblower whose identity we are protecting. The file itself was titled, in Hebrew, "Reports of Hospitalizations and Deaths to Pfizer," and contains detailed case-level reports documented by the Ministry of Health during the vaccination campaign.
The record was not reconstructed years later, after vaccine-associated myocarditis had become an established safety concern. It was being built in real time as the signal emerged.
The dataset provided to us comprised eight cumulative versions, all sharing an original creation date of March 25, 2021. The record was updated repeatedly for more than a year as new cases were added and existing reports were revised with additional clinical information. The final version extends through May 9, 2022.
Already on March 25, just over three weeks after Israel first sounded the international alarm, the record contained 157 hospitalization reports and 46 death reports. Sixty-five of the hospitalization reports involved myocarditis or pericarditis.
By the final version of the dataset, myocarditis or pericarditis appeared in 250 of 531 hospitalization reports, nearly half. Among patients under 30, it appeared in 151 of 211 reports, more than 70%.
The dataset has no population denominator, so it cannot tell us how frequently these events occurred among vaccinated people, and the reports themselves cannot establish causality. However, these were not simply reports sitting in a passive reporting system.
They documented serious events involving hospitalizations and deaths, with detailed clinical information compiled into an internal Ministry of Health record, updated over time, and reported to Pfizer for assessment. Their inclusion in this record and transmission to Pfizer indicate that the cases were considered sufficiently temporally or clinically relevant to vaccination to warrant pharmacovigilance documentation and assessment, even though causality had not been established. The Ministry itself had already identified and reported a cardiac safety signal, and the reports continued to accumulate after that warning was issued.
We analyzed the reported events, reconstructed the communication timeline, and examined when and how the signal was communicated to health professionals and the public. To enable independent examination and reproduction of our analyses, we publishe...

By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.
On April 29, 2020 as the College was beginning its discussion of whether it should reopen for in-person classes in the fall of that same year, I submitted the following post to the Faculty Listserv.
I thought some of you might be interested in yesterday's statistics from the CDC regarding total Covid fatalities for various age tranches of the US population to date.
The 15-24 age cohort—which presumably includes most of our students— and is made up of 42,970,800 individuals has seen 33 Covid deaths.
So, based on these numbers, the chances of someone in this age group dying from Covid are, if my feeble arithmetic skills are accurate, is:
0.00007679%
In the 25-34 group there have been:
233 deaths out of a cohort of 45,697,774 people
In the 35-44 group there have been:
599 deaths out of a cohort of 41,277,888 people
In the 45-54 group there have been:
1,649 deaths out of a cohort of 41,631,699 people
In the 55-64 group there have been:
3,970 deaths out of a cohort of 42,272,636 people
So, when we take all the numbers of people between 15 and 64 in the US, which presumably includes almost all those who might find themselves working in and around a college campus, we get:
6,484 deaths out of a total number of 213,850,797 people
So again, if my feeble math skills are correct, then the following is the current death rate from Covid for all people from 15-64
0.003%
The figures here were taken last evening from this page.
No one on the Listserv challenged my statistics. However, a number did try to reframe this seemingly straightforward matter. One stated by saying that lethality was the wrong measure to be talking about as there are other damages from exposure.
However, this person provided no facts or even anecdotes to back up the claim.
Another told us about a friend who is a nurse in New York who said lots of people were dying there. Again, however, no statistics were adduced.
Finally, another said lethality in the general population was not the right measure as we should be talking about deaths among the infected. When I responded that since we don't know who is infected, we cannot determine that number and thus this was the best we could do, no response was forthcoming.
Later that same day, I sent the following note to the Listserv in response to a colleague who, after referencing the statistics from the Diamond Princess and the Santa Clara study, and admitting that the levels of infections and fatalities were quite low in that ship of mostly senior citizens but concluded, without providing any evidence, that this meant that the testing must be faulty. In other words, he just somehow knew—media conditioning is indeed a powerful thing—that the virus had to be much more lethal than the Diamond Princess and Santa Clara studies had shown it to be. Here is my response.
Dear XXX
Fine. But you can't have it both ways. Either, as has been suggested, we are all in danger because the virus has not spread and will eventually get to everybody and we thus need to be vigilant for the coming wave of sickness is produced.
Or as the cruise ship numbers—derived from what which is I presume is a pretty ideal venue for infection— demonstrate, and the Santa Clara study you mention also shows, that infection does not necessarily spread as rapidly or as extensively as once thought.
So, which assumption are we working with?
In the end, given the heavy reliance on differing, but as yet unproven assumptions regarding the extent and rate of spread of the disease in the absence of testing, the most stable indicator would appear to be deaths caused over time.
On another note, both Spain and Italy are generally viewed as being considerably ahead of the US in terms of the development of the epidemic and well ahead of the US in deaths per million.
Or to use ZZZZ's metaphor, they are in March or April or June of the car driving accident season.
And yet, in their death numbers by age group, in their tendencies in the ...

By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.
"The PREP Act and COVID-19, Part 2: The PREP Act Declaration for COVID-19 Countermeasures Updated January 3, 2025" can be found here.
This Congressional Research Service document explains how the federal government granted sweeping legal immunity to pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and others involved in Covid-19 responses.
This Congressional Research Service document details how the federal government granted unprecedented legal immunity to pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and others involved in Covid-19 countermeasures through the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act. Beginning in February 2020, the Secretary of Health and Human Services declared that Covid-19 warranted sweeping liability protections, meaning that if someone was injured or died from a Covid-19 vaccine, treatment, or related product, they generally cannot sue for damages in court.
The only exception is for "willful misconduct" causing death or serious injury—an extremely high legal standard that is very difficult to prove. Instead of accessing the traditional court system, injured individuals must seek compensation through a government program that has historically been difficult to navigate and provides limited relief.
The scope of these immunity protections expanded dramatically over time, with at least 12amendments issued during both the Trump and Biden administrations. What began as emergency protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments eventually encompassed routine childhood vaccines, seasonal flu shots, respiratory protective equipment, and even telehealth consultations conducted across state lines. These declarations also represented significant federal overreach into state authority by explicitly preempting state licensing laws and allowing pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, students, and providers with expired licenses to administer vaccines and medications in ways that state laws wouldn't normally permit. States effectively lost control over regulating medical practice within their own borders, all in the name of expanding the "pool" of vaccine administrators.
Perhaps most concerning from a conservative perspective is that these immunity protections continue well beyond the end of the public health emergency. While the federal Covid-19 emergency declaration terminated in May 2023, the liability shields for manufacturers and providers remain in effect through December 31, 2029—more than six years later. This arrangement prioritized rapid deployment and corporate interests in enabling medical products to be rushed to market while being shielded from normal liability standards.
Broad Immunity from Lawsuits: Starting in February 2020, the Secretary of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act to shield manufacturers, distributors, and administrators of Covid-19 countermeasures from virtually all legal liability. If you were injured by a Covid-19 vaccine or treatment, you generally cannot sue for damages in court.
Limited Recourse for Victims: The only exception is for "willful misconduct" causing death or serious injury—an extremely high bar to meet. Instead of courts, injured individuals must seek compensation through a government program (CICP) that historically has been difficult to access and provides limited compensation.
Scope Expanded Repeatedly: The Trump and Biden administrations amended this declaration at least 12 times, continually broadening who and what received immunity. This eventually covered not just Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, but routine childhood vaccines, influenza shots, protective equipment, and even telehealth consultations across state lines.
Federal Overreach on State Authority: The declarations explicitly preempted state licensing laws, allowing pharmacists and others to administer vaccines and medications in ways that state law wouldn't normally permit. States lost control over who could practice medicine within their b...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.
When the FDA licensed Moderna's new mRNA flu vaccine last week, legacy media coverage focused almost exclusively on efficacy.
The pivotal trial reported that the vaccine was "26.6% more effective" than a conventional flu vaccine at preventing protocol-defined influenza-like illness.
What received far less scrutiny was a much more serious problem in the trial data published in The New England Journal of Medicine—much of it relegated to an appendix behind a paywall.
An analysis of that appendix alongside the FDA's own briefing document exposes clear regulatory malfeasance.
A statistically significant safety signal from the pivotal trial was systematically diluted until it disappeared from the official story.
Moderna's pivotal Phase 3 trial (P304) enrolled roughly 40,000 adults aged 50 and older, randomised 1:1 to either the company's mRNA-1010 vaccine or a traditional trivalent flu vaccine.
This study evaluated an "optimised" version of Moderna's vaccine after earlier versions produced disappointing efficacy results.
Even with this updated formulation, the headline "26.6% relative efficacy" figure was misleading. In absolute terms, the vaccine reduced the risk of illness by just 0.8%.
Most concerning, however, were the serious adverse event (SAE) data.
The six-month data show that 449 participants in the mRNA group experienced at least one SAE, compared with 389 in the conventional group—an excess of 60 people.
So, while the pivotal trial showed there were 4 fewer influenza hospitalisations in the mRNA group, 60 additional people experienced an SAE.
SAEs are not mild events—they are usually severe enough to require hospitalisation, threaten life, cause significant disability, or result in death.
The imbalance of SAEs in Moderna's pivotal trial was statistically significant—meaning it was unlikely to be a random fluke.

Yet in the briefing documents presented to the FDA's advisory committee, VRBPAC, the agency characterised SAEs as "balanced."

So how did the FDA make the SAE imbalance disappear?
The short answer is that the FDA used pooled data that obscured the safety signal.
Specifically, the agency relied on Moderna's own "Integrated Safety Summary," which combined data from four separate Phase III trials (P301, P302, P303 and P304), involving nearly 72,000 participants.
Once the pivotal trial P304 was combined with the other trials, the SAE rate became 3.1% in the mRNA group versus 2.9% in the comparator group—allowing the FDA to state that the rates were "balanced."
Pooling data across clinical trials is common when regulators are looking for rare events. But the four trials Moderna pooled were very different in many aspects.
They tested different mRNA vaccine formulations against different flu vaccines—standard-dose and high-dose, quadrivalent and trivalent—across different age groups and countries, with follow-up ranging from six months to a year.
When these disparate trials were combined into a single analysis, the safety signal that stood out in the large pivotal trial was diluted.
The FDA accepted the approach—despite being aware of the problem.
In an appendix to its own briefing document, the FDA acknowledged that differences between the trials could produce safety variations "not fully captured by pooled analyses"—but proceeded anyway.

Table 6 of the FDA's own review makes the switch even clearer (see below).
For the first 28 days after vaccination, when serious adverse events were still balanced between the groups, the agency reported safety results from the pivotal P304 trial alone (purple box).
But as more SAEs accumulated over the following months, a statistically significant imbalance emerged.
Instead of reporting those longer-term results from P304 in the same way, the FDA switched to Moderna's pooled analysis (red box), where the signal was diluted enough for the agency to continue describing the rates as "balanced."

The pooled analysis also obscured a concerning ...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.
I like to add a mildly amusing quote from Mark Twain at the end of my conference lectures, when I post a slide showing a few photos of my book covers: "Be careful of reading health books," Twain once famously warned, "you may die of a misprint."
If Mr. Twain were around today, he might agree with an update of his warning for our modern pharmaceutical era: "Be careful of taking federally recommended, multi-billion-dollar stockpiled antivirals. You may die of the treatment."
After 30 years of wading through the cherry blossoms of Victoria and the murky swamps of pharmaceutical policy, raging on about the medicalization of ordinary life, it's rare for me to have an "I told you so" moment.
A repeated refrain in my writings is that "disease mongering"—the fine art of widening disease definitions to turn healthy people into patients—is alive and well. This activity turns many of us "worried well" into lifelong paying customers of the pharmaceutical industry, all on the basis of drugs we are often told are to "prevent" a bad outcome.
Before Covid, if there was ever a poster child for the grand social experiment in trying to prevent disease (ie: doing something medically to prevent future illness) it is the drug oseltamivir, better known as Tamiflu.
Come with me and let's travel back a little in time.
In 2009, during the H1N1 swine flu panic, I was among a few vocal health policy critics remarking that public health officials were strangely and repeatedly invoking the terrifying spectre of the 1918 Spanish flu. Why? We had no idea what was going on, but in hindsight the game being played was quite clear: Evoking the worst infectious outbreak in living memory was pretty much a corporate-backed push to justify the stockpiling of an antiviral known as Tamiflu (generic name: oseltamivir).
The company in question is Roche, who manufactured Tamiflu under license from Gilead Sciences, which, to refresh your memory, had to pay over $3 billion to resolve allegations involving health care fraud and the failure to report safety data related to a bunch of drugs. But I digress.
Thanks to GSK's clever medical propaganda, er, I mean "education" campaigns, governments around the world—including our own—spent oodles of billions of our tax dollars to stockpile this particular drug. Why? Because Roche, the drug's manufacturer, assured us that it would prevent flu complications, reduce hospitalizations, and stop transmission. Those are the bad things we hoped Tamiflu would help us avoid.
The global gastronomic appetite for Tamiflu came with a bit of heartburn: the manufacturer hid the data which supported its approval and licensing. Not only hid it, but kept it under lock and key so no one could see it.
A guy who I would consider a friend and comrade-in-arms (we both served in peacekeeping missions while in uniform) is Dr. Tom Jefferson, the Cochrane Collaboration's indefatigable "flu guy." Tom spent five years fighting Roche to get access to the full Clinical Study Reports, documents which were essential to understand how Tamiflu performed against a placebo, in whom, and to what effect.
After five years of embarrassing pharma draftdodgery GSK was finally required to cough up the tens of thousands of pages of raw data and the truth struck like a hammer blow: When this came to light in 2014, Tamiflu not only didn't prevent complications, or stop viral transmission, its modest ability to shave about half a day off flu symptoms was outweighed by serious side effects like psychiatric events, vomiting, and other complications.
Back then, I wrote and lectured about this. I told anyone who would listen that the world had been bamboozled by laundered clinical trials and a public relations machine selling an antiviral that barely worked. I felt the world owed a debt of gratitude to Tom Jefferson, who had the intestinal fortitude to go after one of the biggest drug companies in the world.
But alas, there was pushback again...

By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.
Good afternoon! I want to thank Jeffrey Tucker for creating a sanctuary for dissident scholars during the most troubling era in American history. I cannot imagine what the last five years would have been like without the courageous leadership of Brownstone Institute.
And I want to thank Joel Salatin for hosting us at his beautiful farm where he is creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
The argument that I want to make over the next twenty minutes goes something like this…For the last 500 years our economy has been based on conquest and domination. It started with the conquest of the New World by Europeans, who had gunpowder, horses, and hardened steel. The indigenous did not, horrors ensued. Europeans took their gold, land, and labor. And this has continued in various forms for five centuries.
Yes, some of the economic growth since the 1800s has been driven by innovation. But it was built on a foundation of ill-gotten wealth that created the leisure time and the early capital that funded creativity — and then industrialization often led to new waves of exploitation. We'll talk about each of these different eras in a moment.
The current crisis that we're in stems from the fact that eventually there were no new lands left to conquer — so the ruling class decided to exploit all of us in the developed world via vaccine injury. So the violence and exploitation that used to be directed from the First World outward to the periphery in the Third World is now directed inward toward enslaving the middle class in the US and Europe via iatrogenic illness. Jeffrey coined the phrase "biological colonialism" to describe this moment and I think that's exactly right.
But what's striking to me about all of this is that every time the ruling class figures out a new way to exploit people, it requires a Fairy Tale in order to justify the exploitation — to launder it and make it okay. In every era there has been the actual mode of production — usually based on exploiting other people and taking their stuff — and the official story which glosses over the exploitation and says that it's justified or maybe even sanctified.
And the immediate question is why? Why would Empire need a Fairy Tale to justify its actions?
For that, we turn to the great evolutionary biologist Frans de Waal who discovered that even primates have an innate sense of empathy and fairness. It seems to be the result of a long evolutionary process. Chimpanzees reconcile with each other after a fight, care for the dying elderly, and share food with those who have none. These animals display a sort of rudimentary kindness, even when there is nothing in it for themselves, or even when it costs them something (time, reputation, energy).
De Waal is arguing against what he calls "Veneer theory" which is the view that human morality is only a thin cultural layer over a fundamentally selfish, amoral animal nature. De Waal believed that morality isn't a surface layer at all but grows out of deep, evolved social emotions (empathy, reciprocity, fairness) that we share with other primates.
Primates aren't always benevolent of course. They go to war and kill each other and often behave in ways that are brutal. They are bivalent like us — they have both prosocial and violent tendencies and it's not always clear which one will win.
My point being, if Empire is going to take the gold, labor, and lives of another civilization, it needs to find a way to turn off our fundamental sense of empathy and it does that through official narratives that I'm calling Fairy Tales. I believe that if we can unmask these Fairy Tales and show the world as it really is, we can begin to address the current crisis.
In the 1400s, innovations in shipbuilding and navigation enabled the Portuguese to begin sailing down the coast of Africa. Along the way they conducted raids and returned home with Africans whom they auctioned off as slaves. Portugal was a deepl...

By Wendy McElroy at Brownstone dot org.
On October 13, 2023, 15-year-old Owen Poirier was on a school bus with four other students, two girls and two boys, all of whom engaged in what was described as "talking, taking photos and…harmless albeit chaotic play." Several hours later, one of the girls accused Poirier of touching her crotch—a claim which the surveillance camera did not seem to corroborate. Without allowing Poirier to defend himself or call his parents, the school interviewed the boy and suspended him; some accounts say the authorities expelled him.
"I didn't do this," he told his parents. Facing a criminal investigation, however, the distraught Poirier committed suicide. According to one news report, "After Poirier's death, the school's superintendent wrote in an email that the educational institute 'unequivocally' did not find evidence of sexual assault, the Poirier family argued in court filings."
Owen Poirier's story is typical in several ways. The accuser, usually female, is automatically believed even without real evidence. A cursory 'investigation' provides little if any due process to the accused. The consequences to the accused are life shattering. His family is devastated and will not recover.
International Falsely Accused Day (IFAD) is an annual day of awareness that spotlights the devastating impact of false accusations on those accused, even if they are ultimately exonerated. People often lose their children, their jobs, their reputations, and can be driven to suicide. The desolation is especially absolute in accusations of child, sexual, or domestic abuse. And it hits men especially hard because they are usually the ones accused.
Our victim-obsessed society turns a blind eye toward this particular type of suffering, perhaps because the majority of victims are male. We want to believe the 'victim,' but the victim is often predefined as female. It takes Herculean efforts for the profound pain of those falsely accused to be acknowledged on the same level as the pain of sexually abused women.
Former teacher Lyn Crabtree launched IFAD—then called National False Accusation Day—in the UK in 2020 after her life and her husband's were destroyed by allegations that later proved unfounded. They were dragged out of bed in the early hours by a police raid and arrested repeatedly thereafter; their reputations and careers were gutted. No official record indicates that the police or the press ever issued an apology or retraction when the Crabtrees were exonerated. What remains public are the accusations.
September 9 was chosen as International Falsely Accused Day as a way to honor former schoolteacher and BBC broadcaster Simon Warr, who made headlines in 2012 after being accused of indecent sexual behavior toward three former male students; the 9 is his birthday. The charges were so flimsy and contradictory that the jury in Warr's trial returned a unanimous non-guilty verdict after a few minutes of consideration.
By this time, however, Warr had spent two years "on police bail;" that is, Warr was released from custody but he remained under active police investigation, with his behavior restricted. Once vindicated, he became an ardent activist on behalf of other falsely accused. The title of one of his articles captures Warr's message: "The falsely accused can never get their lives back. False accusers are handsomely compensated but their victims get nothing." The compensation received by accusers includes attention, sympathy, revenge, and monetary reparations.
On September 8-9, 2023, IFAD went international. Global demonstrations occurred in the UK, the US, and 13 other nations. The event now encompasses more than 20 nations and a coalition of activist groups, including the Falsely Accused Network in the UK and the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance based in the US. It has grown without government funding and with little media support—a true grassroots movement in response to an ignored global wrong.
...

By Margaret Hampton at Brownstone dot org.
Secretary Kennedy is right to question the cost and power of the American Medical Association's Current Procedural Terminology monopoly. But eliminating CPT would solve the wrong problem—and could create a much larger one.
CPT is deeply embedded in American healthcare. It is the common language used to describe conventional medical services, process claims, and move enormous volumes of information through the insurance system. Whatever one thinks of the AMA's role in controlling it, CPT has become critical infrastructure. Replacing it outright would be expensive, disruptive, and unnecessary.
The better answer is competition.
HHS does not need to tear down the existing coding system. It can preserve CPT while recognizing a complementary code set that fills the gaps CPT does not—and was never designed to—cover. That single change would end the practical monopoly over reimbursable care, open the claims system to a broader licensed healthcare workforce, and allow policymakers to measure whether those additional choices actually reduce costs.
Keep CPT. Fill the gaps. Open access. Measure the results.
America spent approximately $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, or $15,474 for every person in the country. That is the number reform should be organized around.
For decades, the dominant strategy for controlling healthcare spending has been to squeeze payment within the existing system: lower reimbursement, tighter networks, more utilization review, fewer covered services. Yet the underlying cost problem remains. At the same time, physicians and hospitals face increasing administrative pressure, workforce shortages, and shrinking capacity.
There is another way to think about cost. Sometimes more access to lower-cost care can mean less spending overall.
Consider a patient with hypertension, chronic pain, anxiety, or another condition that can worsen gradually before producing an expensive crisis. Earlier access to lower-cost services—whether behavioral care, acupuncture, nutrition support, physical therapy, massage therapy, or another legally authorized intervention—may help manage symptoms and risk before the patient reaches an emergency department, hospital bed, or more intensive treatment pathway.
The point is not to assume that every alternative service works for every patient. The point is to create a system capable of finding out.
Guardrails against overuse are appropriate. So is outcome measurement. But excluding care from reimbursement before it can generate claims data creates a circular problem: the system says there is not enough evidence because it does not collect the data, and it does not collect the data because the service is not coded and reimbursed.
Millions of licensed healthcare professionals already provide care outside the physician model: advanced practice nurses, chiropractors, acupuncturists, naturopathic doctors where licensed, behavioral health professionals, midwives, nutrition professionals, massage therapists and bodyworkers, physical and occupational therapists, pharmacists, and others operating within state-defined scopes of practice.
These practitioners do not replace physicians. They give patients additional doors into the healthcare system and can allow physicians, emergency departments, and hospitals to concentrate on the patients who require higher levels of medical care.
But much of this work remains difficult or impossible to identify accurately in the conventional claims stream. Without an appropriate code, there is often no practical route to reimbursement. Without reimbursement, there is little or no claims data. Without claims data, lower-cost approaches remain largely invisible to the people deciding what insurance should cover.
That is the central policy failure.
Coding identifies the service. Reimbursement brings the service into the claims system. Claims data then makes comparison possible—against CPT-coded care, HCPCS Level II services, hospi...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
When did saving a life start to feel like breaking the rules? When did the doctor at the bedside become less trusted than the people making decisions from far away, such as administrators, regulators, or distant experts who have never met the patient? And how did a profession built on judgment, uncertainty, and moral responsibility end up rewarding people for just following orders?
These aren't just abstract questions. They decide who can act when someone is dying, and who gets blamed if the official plan fails.
Amsterdam, 1767. A body is pulled from a city canal. The victim is still, not breathing, and shows no clear sign of life. Most people assume the person is dead. But a small group of citizens and doctors started to ask a new question: What if this person only looks dead? What if death is sometimes a process that can be stopped? And if there is even a small chance of life, do we have a duty to try to help?
This idea led to the first Humane Society, a group focused on rescuing and reviving people who seemed to have drowned. In fourteen months, they reported saving nineteen people. By 1793, they said they had rescued 990 lives over twenty-five years.[1] These numbers might not meet the standards of a modern clinical trial, but the idea behind them changed medicine: apparent death did not always have to be the end.
The idea spread fast. Humane Societies popped up in cities like Venice, Milan, Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Glasgow. These weren't just private clubs or government agencies. They were groups of volunteers (doctors, clergy, apothecaries, soldiers, boatmen, scientists, philanthropists, and regular people), working together to save lives. Historians now call them a transnational movement that shared medical knowledge across borders.[2]
Something very similar to what Brownstone Institute is today. Before there were international health organizations or emergency medical systems, these societies compared notes, shared tips, gave out rewards for rescues, and encouraged everyone to help. Their guiding idea was simple, even if it sounds bold today: if a life is at risk, the person who can help has the responsibility to act.
In London, the movement took on a special character. In 1774, doctors William Hawes and Thomas Cogan met with 32 friends at the Chapter Coffee House in St. Paul's Churchyard to start what would become the Royal Humane Society. Hawes had already been paying boatmen out of his own pocket to bring drowning victims in quickly so resuscitation could be tried.
This was not a government project or a plan from professional managers. It was simply a group of people deciding that giving up was not good enough. Someone pulled from the water might look dead, and experts might say there was no hope. Still, there could be a chance for life, and someone should try to save it.[1]
Their methods were a mix of smart ideas, wild guesses, and desperate attempts. Victims were warmed, rubbed, shaken, bled, made to vomit, given mouth-to-mouth breaths, and exposed to heat and electricity. Believe it or not, tobacco smoke was even blown into the rectum using special devices, some kept in barbershops and other public places.
That might sound almost comical now, but there's a real lesson here. The same people who helped make artificial ventilation a real medical practice also believed a tobacco enema could save a life. They were brave, but sometimes wrong. That's not a knock on science. It's how science actually works. Medicine moves forward when people try things, see what happens, learn from mistakes, and aren't afraid to change course. It doesn't move forward just because a committee says all the uncertainty is gone.
The Humane Societies became places where different medical ideas competed. The Dutch supported mouth-to-mouth ventilation, but many leading British doctors looked down on it. William Hunter called it something done by...