Starting in January 2021, people who followed guidance and media exhortations got the Covid shot. Thousands of them – eventually millions – came down sick as having been poisoned. Splitting headaches, rashes then boils, piercing ringing in the ears, heart palpitations, memory loss, new tumors, and sudden death.

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One might have expected a national freak-out and an immediate halt to the shots. At any other time in modern history, that’s what would have happened. Instead, there was silence. The victims believed they were alone. When groups popped up on Facebook, the company deleted them and banned the accounts.

The same thing happened at Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and everywhere. People who publicly reported injury were deemed guilty of spreading “malinformation,” defined as true information that might have increased vaccine hesitancy. Mainstream media played along. Even now, they are silent on the topic.

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Some plaintiffs began to organize. The companies that made the shots, mostly Pfizer and Moderna, hid behind a liability shield. There was no suing them. Instead, the litigants tried to get information from the FDA and CDC. They balked and refused FOIA requests. Finally judges had to intervene to force them to cough it up.

Six years later, we now have access to tens of millions of pages, too much for anyone to fully examine. But at least we have some clarity about what actually happened: the biggest mass injury episode in history. Even now, people are largely unaware. It seems implausible that something like this would have happened in total silence.

Documentaries are being produced and several organizations are trying to cut through the silence. Brownstone’s effort here is mighty: our new book is Cries for Help. It’s all one needs to silence the critics and convince the skeptics. The book is nothing short of horrifying because it consists of 1,048 pages of messages from the injured to the CDC. The CDC tried to bury this. Now anyone can read.

Everyone should know about this, at least to own a copy to hand to anyone who is still claiming that public health did the right thing. In these pages we find the scandal of our age, shocking and brutal truths that make one doubt everything coming from these companies and the agencies that cover for them.

We’ve sent some copies to people in government. But we cannot do this alone. We might suggest that you send some to all your representatives in government. The power of the text in between these covers is that it is undeniably true and flies in the face of any common moral sense. In other words, no humane person can possibly defend what happened once they are confronted with the truth.

On other matters, our annual conference and gala, this year in Chattanooga, sold out completely and much earlier than we expected. You can sign up for the waiting list.

We are coming up to year-end fundraising. Please consider putting Brownstone on your list of worthy charities. Our existence and growth is funded entirely by our readers. We cannot count on legacy foundations – they never gave us permission to exist in the first place – nor will we ever accept government money. We eschew normal strategies in fundraising like digital trickery and expensive development offices. Instead, we simply trust that our readers back the work we do.

Tune in to episodes of the Brownstone Show, including the latest episode with Aaron Siri. The episodes are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise. Go to the Brownstone Show. You can also find our recent livestream episodes on X with Cries for Help, readings from released v-safe data.

We now have all of the videos from Polyface available for viewing. You can see the entire playlist here: YouTube Playlist.

We have out now a template for all nations of the world to leave the World Health Organization. The Right to Health Sovereignty is now available at Amazon. So is the technical report of this Brownstone-backed team. The coverage of this has been global. These two reports amount to heat-seeking missiles aimed right at the WHO.

See all our books, especially the latest Brownstone publication Cries for Help, Parts I and II.

These are the sorts of topics we talk about at Brownstone Supper Clubs, now coast-to-coast. Pick one and go!

• October 27, 2026 — Brownstone Manhattan Supper Club: Natalya Murakhver — Get tickets

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Here is some content since our last email.

When Vaccine Injury Research Becomes Political, Patients Disappear By React19. For the first time in a long time, Dr Bhattacharya is working to get politics out of the way of good science. The protocol, its implementation, the quality of the science, and the transparency of its findings all deserve scrutiny.

Statistical Bamboozlement with Shingles Vaccines By Alan Cassels. It’s straightforward to produce a plausible bit of vaccine cheerleading when you don’t have to actually critically examine the numbers someone hands you. Thus, the story follows a predictable direction honed to please the advertisers whose ads are keeping the Times afloat.

Launching a Second Scientific Revolution By Jay Bhattacharya. We can solve the nation’s health problems if we establish gold standard science. I mean science that is replicable, at the bleeding edge, and supports scientists with promising ideas wherever they are. Achieving these goals will amount to launching a second scientific revolution.

Accountability Is All That Matters Now By Steven Kritz. 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!

Competence and Capability in the Age of AI By Russ Gonnering. When dealing with the Complex Domain, the predictability horizon of actions is exceedingly short and frequent monitoring is crucial and adaptability to the reality is a necessity. This is where medicine failed during Covid.

Remember the Suffering, Remember the Dead By Reverend John F. Naugle. 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.

The Vaccinated Human Body By Bert Olivier. Given the signs that a more devastating kind of technology than the kind he was familiar with is in the process of asserting itself, it seems safe to say that Heidegger would have reiterated his remark: ‘Only a god can save us.’

Anthony Fauci’s Darkest Hours By Jeffrey Tucker. And where are we today? Fauci will talk with no one, no reporters, not even on background. His last public appearance consisted of 110 invocations of his right to remain silent under the 5th Amendment.

I’ve Rediscovered Why I Became a Doctor By Joseph Varon. I can remember, every time someone sits across from me, that the most important person in the room is not the physician. I did not abandon medicine during Covid. I rediscovered the reason I became a doctor in the first place.

The Epistemic Corruption of Biomedical Science By Josh Guetzkow. Recovering trust requires separating commercial and regulatory functions, enforceable trial transparency, and protection for dissent. Without such changes, calls to “trust the science” risk becoming little more than invitations to submit to one of the most powerful propaganda systems yet devised.

How a Flawed Covid Study Tried—and Failed—to Discredit the Amish By Sharyl Attkisson. I reported on my national television program 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 Shot and the Lie By Jeffrey Tucker. This book should end the debate forever. I dare any man of good conscience to pick it up, turn to a single page, and be just fine with what you read. These people were being poisoned, screaming in pain, crying for help.

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BY REACT19

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Article by Brianne Dressen.

The study has not yet launched, eligibility requirements are still being developed, and no one should mistake an announcement for proof that the research will deliver the answers patients need. And let’s be honest about the intention; while I write this as a representative of over 40,000 Covid vaccine-injured Americans, the NIH’s mission is not to push any agenda. For the first time in a long time, Dr Bhattacharya is working to get politics out of the way of good science. The protocol, its implementation, the quality of the science, and the transparency of its findings all deserve scrutiny.

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But scrutiny should begin with an accurate understanding of what has actually been announced.

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Recent mainstream reporting has included claims that NIH staff do not actually want to conduct this research. At the same time, the agency’s own published description of the center and its intended work is in complete contrast with this reporting. The public should be able to examine the primary source, ask legitimate questions, and distinguish between documented facts, political interpretations, and mainstream news slants.

That distinction matters because the stakes extend far beyond a single institution or administration.

I know firsthand what the NIH can mean for a patient who has spent months fighting to be recognized. When I was evaluated at the NIH and diagnosed with post-vaccine neuropathy, they provided treatment that I attribute with saving my life. But what happened next was just as consequential. A follow-up call from the NIH team to my home physicians changed everything. I no longer had to spend so much of my limited energy fighting to prove that something was wrong.

Barriers with doctors quickly changed to doctor-patient collaboration for my future care. That is the potential of an institution like the NIH: not only to advance scientific understanding, but to give patients the clinical credibility, direction, and support that can fundamentally change the course of their care.

For people living with serious symptoms, research is not an abstract policy debate. It is an opportunity to understand biological mechanisms that may have gone unexamined, identify risk factors that could help clinicians recognize similar cases, and explore treatment approaches that may improve lives. It is also an opportunity to establish what the evidence does not support. Good science must be willing to reach either conclusion.

Patients considering participation should have access to clear information about eligibility, procedures, potential risks, and limitations so they can make their own informed decisions. Those who do not participate must not be forgotten. The knowledge gained should ultimately help improve recognition and care beyond the initial group of research participants.

There is a broader problem in how this subject is covered in the media. Vaccine injury often receives widespread attention only when it becomes entangled in political conflict. The resulting coverage can become a referendum on public figures, institutions, or competing political narratives. Meanwhile, the patients whose experiences prompted years of advocacy are left explaining, once again, that their lives are not talking points.

Journalists should examine the research and follow the evidence wherever it leads. They should speak with affected patients, researchers, and clinicians. They should report setbacks and failures alongside progress. And they should distinguish between legitimate concerns about a program and unsupported claims about its intentions.

The same standard should apply to public institutions. A research announcement is only the beginning. Patients deserve follow-through, transparent communication, credible findings, and continued attention when the headlines fade. They deserve institutions willing to investigate difficult questions without prejudging the answers.

For years, patients have asked to be taken seriously enough to be studied. That request should never have depended on which political figures were willing to champion it.

We can acknowledge that this research effort is a beginning without declaring it a success before the science has been done. We can welcome an opportunity for answers while continuing to ask hard questions. And we can insist that the needs of patients remain more important than the political narratives surrounding them.

The true measure of this effort will not be the attention generated by its announcement. It will be the quality of the research, the honesty of the findings, and whether the knowledge gained ultimately helps people who have waited far too long for answers.

Let the science proceed. Let the questions be asked. Let the answers follow.

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Darwall starts with Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky: elites decide what counts as risk. Environmentalism borrowed civil-rights moral absolutism after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; power co-opted the movement and capitulated. The book’s clash is geopolitical. A planetary-catastrophe vision requires the whole world to act. China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and much of Africa will carbonize first. Subscribe to the green vision and you neither cool the planet nor keep the reflexes to treat a rival as a rival — you get a climate G-2 instead.

He dates the “age of error” after the 2006 St. Petersburg G8 energy-security principles, a document Western archives memory-holed. Japan has been the most climate-skeptical G7 nation since Kyoto. Politics led the science. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ran dozens of climate pieces before COVID and few on lab-leak risk — including a 2012 paper putting a major leak-driven pandemic at roughly once every 12.8 years, most likely SARS. After the outbreak, Charles, Boris Johnson, and the Pope reached for nature and climate; the pandemic agreement names climate, not labs.

They turn to Fauci and Morens’s 2020 Cell paper on spillover and reconstructing society; EU net zero as a legal lock; Britain’s record residential electricity prices and first real fight over the 2008 Climate Change Act; and the cost of welding science to government — censorship, lost trust, and virologists protecting gain-of-function work rather than the public. Fauci left with a pardon. Tedros expects the U.S. back in the WHO.

Key Topics Covered:

• Ice-age scares, climate as tribal religion, and expert cartels after COVID

• Douglas, Wildavsky, Silent Spring, and how elites define risk

• Why the Global South will not join Western decarbonization

• China, a climate G-2, and lost geopolitical antibodies

• Japan’s distance from the G7 consensus and the 2006 G8 document

• Politics leading IPCC science; lab-leak papers the “concerned” never wrote

• Zoonosis, climate, and the Fauci–Morens reconstruction of society

• Why EU net zero is nearly impossible to repeal

• UK power prices, the Climate Change Act, and a first real debate

• Censorship, lost trust, and science as doctrine

• Gain-of-function culture vs. post-1945 physics

• Fauci’s pardon, no China reckoning, and the WHO waiting out Trump

Rupert Darwall is a Cambridge-trained economist and historian and author of the climate-and-power trilogy from Encounter Books.

Jeffrey Tucker ties the green expert regime to the COVID expert regime — same structure, different catastrophe.

Essential viewing for anyone who watched “follow the science” in 2020 and now sees the same governing codependence aimed at energy, industry, and dissent.

👉 Subscribe to The Brownstone Show for more fearless conversations on liberty, ideas, and cultural renewal.

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X/Twitter: @jeffreyatucker

Rupert Darwall: Author of The Age of Global Warming, Green Tyranny, and The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing (Encounter Books)
X/Twitter: @RupertDarwall

Drop a comment: If elites get to choose which risks are “real,” what does that do to science — and to a country’s ability to recognize an actual enemy?

BY JEFFREY TUCKER

View original article at Brownstone.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 bookthat 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.

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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.

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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, influencers, musicians, and many other public figures. Those were the ones we saw. There were millions we did not see.

When we released Cries for Help, a free version online plus two volumes plus a Kindle and audio version, I set out to read the entire book in a series of videos. After 10 hours of reading, I could feel something was going wrong in my mind and heart. I had to stop. It was too painful.

In any case, I had every confidence that this release would rock the news. I quickly shared the full file with my network of media contacts. This would hit the headlines, I thought. There would finally be a reckoning. Whatever debates stemming from conflicting reports and uncertainties would be over.

Maybe even the shots would be pulled. After all, in this form, the pain, injury, and death would be undeniable. There is just no way that the FDA and CDC could continue to back these after all this data. As for babies, don’t even go there. It’s wicked even to think of such a practice.

Where are we today?

Not a single major media venue has covered our book or its contents, all words straight from victims as reported directly to the CDC. Not one word of coverage. Not one think tank of the old legacy establishment has mentioned the book. Not one. No professional society has bothered to reach out or otherwise amplify this content. Not one.

There has been near total silence. The only mentions have come from our partner organizations, underfunded and very much on the outside: IMA, ICAN, CHD, HFDC, React19, Feds for Freedom, and some Substackers and X accounts. Otherwise, it’s been crickets.

As for the CDC, the site has been updated to broaden the recommendations, even denying (despite mountains of evidence) that there is any fertility risk.

At this point in the debate, we need an open discussion about the role of the lie in a society such as ours. We experienced the closest thing to totalitarianism in our lifetimes from 2020-2023 (if it actually ended). I took a moment to examine what F.A. Hayek had to say about this in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom.

The famous chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top” speaks about the inevitable failure of totalitarian plans to materialize as promised. In this case, the totalitarian schemes for jabbing the entire population did not achieve their goal. They did not stop the spread. They did not prevent infection. They were not safe. They left millions injured and countless lives extinguished in the womb.

What, according to Hayek, happens now? He says that the people who hatched the plans have to choose between admitting failure and rejecting common morality. They choose to lie and press on. Those who are very good at lying advance and gain a foothold on power. The system needs the lie to survive. So it becomes entrenched and spreads from institution to institution.

“Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things,” writes Hayek. “The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because that is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.”

Since the late 19th century, a firm nation of utilitarianism has taken hold of vaccinology. A maximum number must be injected in order that herd immunity be obtained, even if it comes at some cost in the form of injury and death. It’s a calculation we must make, never mind that the Covid shots in particular were never sterilizing, never useful in stopping transmission, never broad or lasting even under the best scenario.

Still, the raw ethics of utilitarianism is still invoked here. Individual rights have to go, and the truth has to go too, else the collective goal of maximal vaccine uptake be compromised. Nothing about this philosophy fits with any notion of freedom as we hold it in the West.

This book should end the debate forever. I dare any man of good conscience to pick it up, turn to a single page, and be just fine with what you read. These people were being poisoned, screaming in pain, crying for help, begging for truth, aching spiritually from deep betrayal at the hands of the leaders of industry and government. The promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was stomped dead in the name of science.

And yet here we are, shots still on the market, still highly recommended by our own government agencies, the makers of them still protected from all liability, the companies and schools still imposing them on people avoiding all legal consequences. This is our world today as we swim and drown in the lie.

What is to be done? We do all we can do. We tell the truth. Help us get the word out.

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BY ALAN CASSELS

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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 petitionurging 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.

DTCA and the Doctor-Patient Relationship

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 relationship is fundamentally hijacked. Your physician stops being a healer weighing evidence and becomes a drive-thru cashier being pressured to hand over the order.

Drug ads are veritable master classes in how to exaggerate the severity of a condition, extoll the benefits of a product, downplay the harms, and plant the “Ask Your Doctor” message. And thus, the drug ad drives a wedge into a relationship that should be about healing, and not about dealing.

The plain fact is this: prescription drugs are not breakfast cereals. You cannot walk into a pharmacy, grab a box of third-generation immunosuppressants off the shelf, and toss them into your shopping cart alongside the peanut butter. By law, prescription medications require a “learned intermediary”— a physician who has spent a decade in medical training to weigh complex evidence, harms, benefits, and alternatives.

Many patients might believe that their own doctor can ignore the marketing pressures of the drug industry, yet they’d be mostly wrong. Drug information or “continuing medical education” swallowed by our physicians is even more toxic because it’s usually wrapped in gifts along with the imprimatur of peer-reviewed publications. Fact is, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, most doctors are not as “learned” as we’d like. This has to do with a well-studied cognitive bias where doctors generally believe they are too smart to be influenced by marketing.

This phenomenon has been well-studied and there’s even a term for it: the “illusion of invulnerability.” This is when doctors acknowledge that pharmaceutical marketing and gifts influence the prescribing habits of other doctors, yet believe that they themselves are immune to that same psychological manipulation.

We know that drug marketing is bad for consumers, but just this week we found some serious proof around how bad it is for our doctors. A Cochrane review published this week looked at 93 studies—most from the US but also from France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and found that the more exposure physicians have to the drug marketers, the worse their prescribing is. We’ve known this for decades, yet the grift continues and the poor doctor-patient relationship is bombarded with DTCA on one side, and by the inducements and gifts provided by pharmaceutical companies.

There is a very good reason that Robert F Kennedy, Jr., the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, has wanted to ban drug advertising. He knows that the medications are being flogged by the most highly paid marketers on earth whose job it is to create these brazen vignettes of triumph to get you to “Ask your doctor.”

The way I see it, if a drug company is telling you to “Ask your Doctor!” you can be sure the company’s people have already seen your doctor and he or she is fully aware of the drug in question. Any drug that is advertised to patients directly is also going to have a substantial marketing campaign targeting the doctors because they’re the ones who are writing the prescriptions.

If you consider the body of the most highly advertised drugs these days you might be led to think there certainly must be an epidemic of psoriasis, Crohn’s disease, or ulcerative colitis in the United States. Maybe that is explained by high-grade hawking of Skyrizi, Tremfya, and Rinvoq, three drugs which have the biggest direct-to-consumer television ad spending across the entire US pharmaceutical industry, (according to Forbes) each spending more than $350 million a year.

The reality is that these companies are vying hard for a slice of the pie, and their incredibly high profit margins (due to patents) and the malleability of consumers make these new drugs worthy of advertising, even if the diseases in question affect very few people. For example, psoriasis only affects about 3% of the US adult population, and Crohn’s disease or Colitis about 1%. Together nearly $1 billion a year is spent flogging products that might only affect 10 million out of a national population of 340 million people.

Getting rid of DTCA in the US is a big ask, and doing so probably requires some reworking of the US Constitution. Secretary Kennedy has already felt the pushback, not just from the drug companies, but from the media outlets that depend on drug advertising.

If ever there was a reason why Americans should rethink the wisdom of the First Amendment, it is in how it is applied to drug companies. Sure, we all want to have freedom of speech, freedom of the press, of religion, and of peaceable assembly, but can anyone say the drug companies are using their freedoms of expression responsibly?

A Case Study in DTCA

Let’s end with what I think is the poster child of modern pharmaceutical hubris and marketing wizardry, and a teachable lesson why we should seriously restrict DTCA in the US: Veozah (fezolinetant).

During Super Bowl LVIII in February 2024, the maker of this new drug, Astellas Pharma dropped a small fortune to air a glossy, 60-second commercial titled “Fewer Hot Flashes, More Not Flashes.” The target? Menopause—a completely normal, universal biological transition that the pharmaceutical complex has been trying to rebrand as a deficiency disease for over half a century. The commercial promised women a revolutionary, non-hormonal fix for vasomotor symptoms. It was upbeat, empowering, and utterly seductive.

Fast forward seven months, to September 2024.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an urgent safety warning: Veozah can cause severe, potentially life-threatening liver injury and liver failure. The FDA mandated new blood testing protocols before and during treatment because patients were ending up with signs of serious liver damage.

Think about the sheer, unadulterated madness of this sequence.

A pharmaceutical company uses the biggest, most expensive advertising platform on planet Earth to sell an expensive, brand-new pill for a normal life transition to millions of healthy women. Seven months later, the regulatory body is forced to admit that this heavily hyped, premium-priced drug can literally wreck your liver.

This is the toxic life cycle of DTCA in a nutshell: hype the symptom, brand the condition, air the Super Bowl ad, collect the billions, and wait for the safety warnings to roll in after the real-world guinea pigs start getting hurt.

If there were an international award for the most psychologically manipulative, disease-mongering phrase ever foisted upon the public, “Ask your doctor if [Drug X] is right for you” would win by a landslide.

It sounds so innocent, doesn’t it? A gentle nudge encouraging patients to take charge of their health. Not quite. It is a multi-billion-dollar marketing trick designed to erode your agency, medicalize the ordinary discomforts of being human, and turn you into an unpaid sales representative for Big Pharma.

Nobody spends $7 million airing a Super Bowl commercial for a generic, off-patent $5 diuretic that actually saves lives. DTCA exists exclusively to pump up the sales of ultra-expensive, newly patented drugs that need to recoup their marketing budgets before their patents expire.

It is time to end this absurd experiment once and for all. Prescription drugs should be evaluated on hard clinical evidence by independent professionals, not sold like soft drinks to a captive, frightened audience. “Ask your doctor” shouldn’t be a tagline on television—it should be a private conversation free from the polluting influence of Super Bowl commercials.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

The documentary You Can See Everything opened over the weekend. It is about Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos, and how it grew to a $9B valuation by 2014 without a reliable product. It was a vibe-based company, one that Wall Street wanted to exist: a compelling female founder, Ivy dropout, a digital innovation to disrupt the establishment, all at a time of zero interest rates and a desperate hunt for high returns.

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To what extent is she personally culpable, or was she merely scapegoated by an angry mob of investors? The film does not fully answer that question, even if it leaves one with a sense of confusion as to why she languishes in federal prison.

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In the backdrop of all of this is the biggest medical fraud in modern history. The Covid lockdowns wrecked every nation that tried them – have a look at France today – and the shots that followed created carnage that is still not openly discussed in any mainstream media. Our pair of books called Cries for Help document thousands of injuries and deaths for which no one is being held to account.

And these products are still on the market. Until last week, the Covid shots were still being pushed by the CDC on pregnant women even if we have mountains of data on elevated miscarriage rates. It’s mind-boggling that this happened and is still happening.

The loss of trust is pervasive and well earned. Brownstone’s poll last spring documented supermajority support for medical freedom: no mandates, no lies, no coercion, no more corruption. You are not alone, even if the mainstream media, reliant on pharma funding, reports none of it.

We are coming up to year-end fundraising. Please consider putting Brownstone on your list of worthy charities. Our existence and growth is funded entirely by our readers. We cannot count on legacy foundations – they never gave us permission to exist in the first place – nor will we ever accept government money. We eschew normal strategies in fundraising like digital trickery and expensive development offices. Instead, we simply trust that our readers back the work we do.

Tune in to episodes of the Brownstone Show, including the latest episode with Brianne Dressen of REACT19. The episodes are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise. Go to the Brownstone Show. You can also find our recent livestream episodes on X with Cries for Help, readings from released V-safe data.

We now have all of the videos from Polyface available for viewing. You can see the entire playlist here: YouTube Playlist.

We have out now a template for all nations of the world to leave the World Health Organization. The Right to Health Sovereignty is now available at Amazon. So is the technical report of this Brownstone-backed team. The coverage of this has been global. These two reports amount to heat-seeking missiles aimed right at the WHO.

See all our books, especially the latest Brownstone publication Cries for Help, Parts I and II.

These are the sorts of topics we talk about at Brownstone Supper Clubs, now coast-to-coast. Pick one and go!

• October 19, 2026 — Brownstone Phoenix Supper Club: Dr. Joe Varon — Get tickets

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Here is some content since our last email.

The Vaccinated Human Body By Bert Olivier. Given the signs that a more devastating kind of technology than the kind he was familiar with is in the process of asserting itself, it seems safe to say that Heidegger would have reiterated his remark: ‘Only a god can save us.’

Anthony Fauci’s Darkest Hours By Jeffrey Tucker. And where are we today? Fauci will talk with no one, no reporters, not even on background. His last public appearance consisted of 110 invocations of his right to remain silent under the 5th Amendment.

I’ve Rediscovered Why I Became a Doctor By Joseph Varon. I can remember, every time someone sits across from me, that the most important person in the room is not the physician. I did not abandon medicine during Covid. I rediscovered the reason I became a doctor in the first place.

The Epistemic Corruption of Biomedical Science By Josh Guetzkow. Recovering trust requires separating commercial and regulatory functions, enforceable trial transparency, and protection for dissent. Without such changes, calls to “trust the science” risk becoming little more than invitations to submit to one of the most powerful propaganda systems yet devised.

How a Flawed Covid Study Tried—and Failed—to Discredit the Amish By Sharyl Attkisson. I reported on my national television program 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 Shot and the Lie By Jeffrey Tucker. This book should end the debate forever. I dare any man of good conscience to pick it up, turn to a single page, and be just fine with what you read. These people were being poisoned, screaming in pain, crying for help.

“Ask Your Doctor:” The Media’s Most Dangerous Tagline By Alan Cassels. Prescription drugs should be evaluated on clinical evidence by independent professionals. “Ask your doctor” shouldn’t be a tagline on television—it should be a private conversation free from the polluting influence of Super Bowl commercials.

The Covid Reckoning That Never Came By Ed Dowd. I am not forgetting. And from what I see every day, millions are not either. As time rolls forward and the cognitive dissonance of those who took the vaccine wears off…our numbers will continue to grow.

A Comeuppance for Pennsylvania’s Health Bureaucrats By Chase Englund. The time to oppose such thinking, armed with the evidence, is long overdue. The Pennsylvania Small Enterprise Foundation was proud to stand with the citizens of the Commonwealth to sink this overreach.

Deep State of the World By Meryl Nass. 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. Part of that initiative is to cause our institutions to fail.

Vaccine Injury: A Glimpse of the Scale By Elizabeth Mumper. The proposed NIH framework includes objectives particularly relevant to this discussion and offers unique opportunities for collaboration with us. Today is the day for NIH to take our concerns seriously and develop strategies and policies to help this generation of children.

When Did Obesity Become a Drug Deficiency? By Joseph Varon. The tragedy of the GLP-1 era will not be that these drugs failed. The tragedy will be if they succeed so spectacularly that an entire generation of physicians stops asking why we needed them in the first place.

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BY SHARYL ATTKISSON

View original article at Brownstone.org.

A study falsely implied the Amish suffered more deaths because they eschewed public health guidance. But correcting the record proved nearly impossible.

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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.

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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 make the requester give up his pursuit and, if that doesn’t work, they take days, weeks, months, even years beyond what the law supposedly allows, to hand over what little information they decide to let go of.

When I struck out getting vital information regarding the Amish study, I pursued the journal publisher and outlined my questions. It took a year of prodding, but on Aug. 21, 2024, I finally received a notice from the publisher that it was issuing numerous corrections to the study because of my challenges.

Here is the fairly lengthy correction note dated Aug. 23, 2024.

In this article, the authors have adjusted some language, labeling, and notations in the Abstract, Table 1, Fig. 1, Table 2, and Table 3 for additional clarity of the presented data.

In the Abstract, the sentence “Our results indicate the Amish/Mennonite excess death rates are similar to the national trends in the USA.” has been changed to “Our results indicate that the timing of the onset and decline of spikes of excess death rates among the Amish/Mennonites are similar to waves of COVID-19 reported in the United States more broadly.”

In Table 1: The caption has been changed to “Amish and Mennonite excess death (panel A) and average age of death (panel B) by month and year.”

Within the table, panel labeling has been adjusted to reflect this as “Panel A: Excess death” and “Panel B: Average age of death”. A note has been added under the table that reads “Note: *Data come from obituaries published in The Budget from 2015 to 2020.”

In Table 2: The caption has been changed to “Amish and Mennonite overall (panel A) and Ohio (panel B) mortality sex ratio by month and year.”

Within the table, panel labeling has been adjusted to reflect this as “Panel A: Overall” and “Panel B: Ohio”. A note has been added under the table that reads “Note: *Data come from obituaries published in The Budget from 2015 to 2020.”

In Table 3: The caption has been changed to “Ohio Amish and Mennonite excess death (panel A) and average age of death (panel B) by month and year.”

Within the table, panel labeling has been adjusted to reflect this as “Panel A: Excess death” and “Panel B: Average age of death.”

A note has been added under the table that reads “Note: *Data come from obituaries published in The Budget from 2015 to 2020.”

In Fig. 1, “Number of deaths by month and year” caption has been changed to read “Number of Amish and Mennonite deaths by month and year from The Budget obituaries for 2015–2020.”

Unfortunately, the wording of the corrections didn’t do much to fix the real problems I identified, and the misleading headline remains in place to this day.

In the end, that study supported my reporting on the Amish approach to Covid: it implied the rest of us could have avoided experimental vaccines that have serious side effects; and circumvented costly shutdowns that devastated the economy, travel, businesses, mental health, and education at the expense of trillions of US tax dollars. None of this information actually made it into the published paper.

This is an instructive example of some of the flaws with the system that produces “peer-reviewed, public studies.” The “tell” is the fact that all concerned seem to work against transparency (which legitimate, well-designed studies should welcome), and treat the public as if they have no right to know whether their tax dollars are being properly spent.

Below is my June 7, 2023 records request to West Virginia University, where the lead author of the Amish study was employed. They played games and belatedly turned over limited material that was not helpful to the transparency sought. I also include my original letter of concern to the journal dated June 17, 2023, the journal’s Aug. 21, 2023 response initiating an investigation and the Aug. 21, 2024 email acknowledging corrections. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which was involved in funding the study, claimed important exemptions to my Freedom of Information Act request. (See my June 12, 2023 request and the NSF email below dated June 16, 2023).

From: Sharyl Attkisson
Subject: FOI Request
Date: June 7, 2023 at 11:06:26 AM EDT
To: foia@mail.wvu.edu

To Whom It May Concern:

This is to request a records search within the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

The date range is Sept. 1, 2021-present.

The request is for the following records:

All communications, including but not limited, to emails and notes referring or related to the project or projects funded under from the National Science Foundation, grant number 2048683.

All communications, including but not limited to, emails and notes referring or related to the project eventually titled “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (published June 11, 2021 in the Journal of Religion and Heath).

All notes, data, datasets, drafts and analyses related to the project eventually titled “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (published June 11, 2021 in the Journal of Religion and Heath) and authored by Rachel Stein, Katie Corcoran, Corey Collier Annette Mackay and Sara Guthrie.

All notes, data, datasets, drafts and analyses related to the “correction” or erratum eventually added to the project “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic” on Feb. 17, 2022 which reads: “This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, grant number 2048683, the International Research Network for the Study of Science & Belief in Society (IRN Grant SFSRG01/114), and the West Virginia University Humanities Center.”

All communications, including but not limited to, emails and notes referring to or related to Covid-19 or coronavirus in the Amish and/or Mennonite communities.

All communications, including but not limited to, emails and notes referring to or related to the topic of natural immunity or herd immunity in the Amish.

All communications, including but not limited to, emails and notes referring to or related to media reports about the topic of natural immunity or herd immunity in the Amish including, but not limited to “Amish Covid” on the television program or YouTube channel under the organization “Full Measure.”

All communications, including but not limited to, emails and notes referring to or related to Sharyl Attkisson (whether spelled correctly or not).

The email accounts and names that should be searched include, but are not limited to:

Rachel E. Stein, Katie E. Corcoran, Corey J. Colyer, Annette M. Mackay, and Sara K. Guthrie

Other terms that should be searched for, individually, include, but are not limited to:

The International Research Network for the Study of Science & Belief in Society

IRN Grant SFSRG01/114

The West Virginia Humanities Council

West Virginia University Research Corporation

Journal of Religion and Health

Please send the responsive records to this email address.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Thank you,

Sharyl Attkisson

June 12, 2023

From: Sharyl Attkisson
Subject: NSF 1-Amish FOIA Request
Date: June 12, 2023 at 5:39:06 PM EDT
To: foia@nsf.gov

This FOIA request is for the following records:

All communications, including but not limited, to emails and notes referring or related to the project or projects funded under from the National Science Foundation, grant number 2048683.

All communications, including but not limited to, emails and notes referring or relating to the project eventually titled “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (published June 11, 2021 in the Journal of Religion and Heath).

All notes, data, datasets, drafts and analyses related to the project eventually titled “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (published June 11, 2021 in the Journal of Religion and Heath) and authored by Rachel Stein, Katie Corcoran, Corey Collier Annette Mackay and Sara Guthrie.

While I am willing to discuss paying necessary fees, as a news reporter who intends to use this information in one or more news reports of public interest, I am asking for a fee exemption.

I am requesting expedited processing, as I need the requested information to use in one or more news reports on topics that are of high public interest since there is an ongoing global discussion to learn and apply the best ways to save lives and respond to pandemics such as Covid-19. Covid-19 impacted the health and lives of billions of people, and there is evolving information that must be sorted through regarding this study (among thousands).

Please send the responsive records to this email address. For your information, the mailing address is 220 Spanish Marsh Drive, St. Augustine, Florida 32095

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Thank you,

Sharyl Attkisson

June 17, 2023

Journal of Religion and Health

Dear Editors:

Thank you for the opportunity to raise queries regarding “Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic” published June 11, 2021 by authors Rachel E. Stein, Katie E. Corcoran, Corey J. Colyer, Annette M. Mackay & Sara K. Guthrie.

As you know, author Rachel Stein has declined to answer some important questions arising from this publication, which itself creates a barrier to a thorough scientific understanding of the research. Here are the issues that I hope can be addressed:

The study’s title and conclusions may be misleading in that they seem clearly intended to imply there was a unique spike in deaths among religious communities that shunned Covid-19 vaccinations, masking, isolation, and other CDC-recommended practices. For example, one passage from the publication states: “The large number of excess deaths among the Amish and Mennonite community is concerning.”

However, details of the study do not support this implication. The study finds that the excess death rate in the two Closed Religious Communities that were examined in one state mirrored that of the general population. One passage from the publication states, “Our results indicate the Amish/Mennonite excess death rates are similar to the national trends in the USA.”

The study blended data from two very different populations to form a conclusion that may not apply to them individually. When I asked author Stein why the study combined Amish and Mennonite deaths, she replied that “We did not analyze Amish and Mennonite deaths separately. The data didn’t allow for subgroup analysis.”

This is a critical and potentially fatal flaw with the study.

Amish and Mennonite are distinct religious communities with significantly different practices. Author Stein, who lists herself as an expert in “Old Order Amish,” would likely understand this. Specifically, Mennonites are more likely than Amish to live lives closer to those of ordinary Americans and follow recommended public health practices. By way of example, almost all the residents living at two Mennonite Home Communities in Lancaster, Pennsylvania followed CDC protocols including wearing masks, isolating, social distancing, and getting vaccinated for Covid-19. According to managers of the Mennonite facilities: “Numerous vaccine clinics have been held at [Mennonite Home] and [Woodcrest Villa] resulting in almost all residents being vaccinated against COVID-19 infection.”

Likewise, Ohio Mennonite homes promoted Covid vaccinations, are still promoting Covid-19 vaccine boosters for residents, and were masking as recently as January of this year. Therefore, the study scientists incorrectly included a population, undisclosed or unknown in size, that followed CDC practices (Mennonite) to form a conclusion about a population that rejected CDC practices (Amish).

The study failed to include and report on the largest population of Amish in the US. The decision to analyze only the state of Ohio is puzzling since Ohio does not have the largest Amish population in the US: Pennsylvania does—by a significant margin. Larger datasets may yield more accurate results. At the very least, the reasons behind the choice to skip over the largest Amish population should have been clearly addressed in the study.

The focus on Ohio introduces a potential bias into the findings. When I asked author Stein why Pennsylvania was excluded from the study, she indicated she and her colleagues chose Ohio because there was a disproportionately high number of Amish and Mennonite obituaries in Ohio compared to other states, including Pennsylvania. In effect, this could inadvertently result in presenting the worst case scenario for Closed Religious Communities (CRCs).

According to Stein, Ohio is “home to approximately 23% of the US Amish population, but contributing 56% of the total obituaries published in the Budget” and “Pennsylvania was not represented to the same degree as Ohio in the data.”

The researchers needed to explain whether and how they excluded the possibility that the Pennsylvania death rate among CRCs was significantly lower than that in Ohio. If the authors could not reasonably estimate what proportion of actual deaths in each state was published in the Budget (the publication they used as their source for obituaries) then it seems they did not have the information available to be able to make meaningful death rate comparisons.

The primary graph in the study, Figure 1, did not compare like groups. While it is not clearly labelled, Figure 1, if I understand correctly, apparently compares a national average of deaths over time…to Ohio State Amish and Mennonite deaths in 2020. A more logical and instructive comparison would have been to measure Ohio’s deaths over time to Ohio Amish and Mennonite deaths in 2020 or the national average over time to the national Amish and Mennonite figure in 2020.

If the study is accurate as is, it buries important scientific findings. While the study leaves the impression there is special concern about Covid spreading worse or being more lethal in the Mennonite and Amish communities due to their supposed failure to follow public health guidelines, the study notes that the Mennonite/Amish death rate actually mirrored the general US death rate. If true, then stated another way, the Amish-Mennonite communities had no worse outcome for having avoided devastating economic and school shutdowns, masking, isolation, vaccination, and all of the spending on these measures. This is a finding of significant importance; yet the researchers seem not to notice.

A second important finding that the researchers seemed to overlook was that if their study is accurate, it means the widely-accepted principle of natural immunity (as being more effective than Covid-19 vaccination) was uniquely turned on its head with the CRC community. This would be an important conclusion, indeed.

The study content does not match the description submitted for the grant.The publicly-published grant proposal does not indicate the study will focus narrowly on only Ohio (to the exclusion of the largest Amish population). The study does not appear to examine “misinformation and specific practices” within CRCs, as promised in the proposal. It also doesn’t seem to address “social distancing and isolation content” or “COVID-19-related official instructions..gathered and tracked over time.”

Additionally, “county health district data” over time was not published. When inquired as to whether there was a revision of the envisioned project, Stein told me that those “other aspects of the project” address these things. However, there seems to be nothing in the public grant description that describes this study on excess death rates (absent a misinformation or specific practices context).

In conclusion, there seem to be several outstanding questions. What would the Ohio 2020 CRC death trend look like compared to Ohio-only deaths 2015-2019 (rather than to a national 2015-2019 average)? To what degree does inclusion of the Mennonite population skew the results? What would the results look like if only the Amish were studied? What would the comparison look like if Pennsylvania and other states were included in the analysis? What proportion of the Ohio Mennonite population followed CDC-recommended practices (if unknowable— then it seems to me the study has little ability to inform the question at hand). And, most important of all, why were the most significant takeaways of international interest seemingly ignored including that the researchers found no evidence that the Amish suffered more harm for not having shut down schools, businesses and church; for not isolating, masking or social distancing; for not Covid testing and vaccinating; and for not having spent a great deal of public funds on various measures.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sharyl Attkisson

On Jun 16, 2023, at 8:37 AM, Evans, Sandra <xxxxxx@nsf.gov> wrote:

Dear Ms. Attkisson,

NSF does not release reviewer names; accordingly, redactions will be made to protect the personal privacy of the reviewers under Exemption (b)(6) of the FOIA. The relevant NSF Privacy Act System of Record Notices further explain that reviewer names will not be released:

NSF-12 Fellowships and Other Awards, NSF-50 Principal Investigator Proposal and Associated Records, NSF-51 Reviewer Proposal File and Associated Records, and NSF-54 Reviewer Fellowships and Other Awards File and Associated Records

Courts have also upheld NSF’s withholding of reviewers’ names under FOIA Exemption (b)(6). See, e.g., Amiri v. NSF, No. 1:20-CV-02006 (TNM), 2021 WL 4438910, at *13 (D.D.C. Sept. 28, 2021) (NSF properly invoked FOIA Exemption (b)(6) to withhold the names of reviewers, in light of their substantial privacy interests and the foreseeable risk of professional harm to them).

NSF will grant your request for expedited processing, but understand we do have a small staff of 2 processors. As of June 16, 2023, we will consider your request perfected and proceed with processing your request.

Sincerely,

Sandra Evans
NSF FOIA/PA Officer
National Science Foundation
Office of the General Counsel
2415 Eisenhower Avenue, Suite W 18200
Alexandria, VA 22314

August 21, 2024

Stein, R.E., Corcoran, K.E., Colyer, C.J. et al. Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic. J Relig Health 60, 3230–3244 (2021).

Dear Ms. Attkisson,

We are contacting you as you expressed concerns regarding the article detailed above.

Thank you again for providing a detailed overview of your specific concerns about this paper.

All of your claims have been thoroughly assessed by multiple members of the editorial team. Your case has also been considered in detail by our in-house Research Integrity Group. All processes were carried out in line with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. Thank you for your patience as we completed this process.

Following this detailed investigation, we found that the publication could have been more clear about what data was being shown in some of the included tables, and that one sentence in the abstract could potentially cause some confusion about the conclusions being presented. In view of this, we have corrected the publication. The published correction details the specific changes made to the original article in order to provide some additional clarity to readers.

We thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

With best wishes,

Kimberly Poss
(she/her/hers)
Associate Publisher | Behavior and Health Sciences Journals

From: Kimberly Poss <xxxxxxxxxxxxx@springer.com>

Subject: Your Query: Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Date: August 21, 2024 at 2:26:38 PM EDT

To: Sharyl Attkisson

Stein, R.E., Corcoran, K.E., Colyer, C.J. et al. Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic. J Relig Health 60, 3230–3244 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-021-01307-5

Dear Ms. Attkisson,

We are contacting you as you expressed concerns regarding the article detailed above.

Thank you again for providing a detailed overview of your specific concerns about this paper.

All of your claims have been thoroughly assessed by multiple members of the editorial team. Your case has also been considered in detail by our in-house Research Integrity Group. All processes were carried out in line with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. Thank you for your patience as we completed this process.

Following this detailed investigation, we found that the publication could have been more clear about what data was being shown in some of the included tables, and that one sentence in the abstract could potentially cause some confusion about the conclusions being presented. In view of this, we have corrected the publication. The published correction details the specific changes made to the original article in order to provide some additional clarity to readers.

We thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

With best wishes,

Kimberly Poss
she/her/hers)

Associate Publisher | Behavior and Health Sciences Journals

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• An introvert forced into public life by institutions that would not listen

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden is a Stanford-trained otolaryngologist in private practice in Houston, founder of Americans for Health Freedom, and a Senior Fellow with the Independent Medical Alliance.

Jeffrey Tucker connects her case to the broader destruction of medical ethics, free speech, and constitutional limits during COVID. This is essential viewing for anyone who still thinks the doctor-patient relationship survived 2020–2022 intact — or who wonders why a Nobel-era antiparasitic is still called horse paste in 2026.

BY JOSH GUETZKOW

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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The Blind Spot of Science Studies

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.

Epistemic Corruption, Propaganda and Institutional Capture

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.

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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 fact, and report results selectively – practices that would be flagged as manipulative in non-commercial research.

Peer-reviewers, the supposed guardians of scientific quality, are themselves deeply entangled with industry. A recent JAMA study found almost sixty percent of peer-reviewers for leading medical journals received payments from drug and device manufacturers, totaling US$1.06 billion between 2020 and 2022. Journals scrutinize authors’ conflicts of interest but rarely reviewers’, opening an opaque channel for industry influence over what gets published and how rigorously it is vetted.

Industry ties shape findings too: in research on mercury and autism, 86 percent of industry-affiliated studies found no association, compared with 21 percent of unaffiliated studies. Medical journals depend on advertising revenue and the prestige of industry-sponsored research; the Lancet’s editor Richard Horton conceded they had “devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” When conflicts of interest pervade gatekeeping institutions, the appearance of neutral science becomes the very medium through which propaganda operates.

The results are well documented: routinely concealed harms; repeated convictions meeting official definitions of organized crime; and whole narratives – from the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression to the benefits of Tamiflu – that proved false or radically overstated.^,,,Selective publication does much of the work: of 36 antidepressant trials the FDA judged negative, only 8 percent were published as negative and 31 percent were spun as positive, so 94 percent of published trials appeared positive, against 51 percent in the FDA’s full data. More broadly, diseases are redefined to expand markets, mild symptoms pathologized, and drugs of minimal efficacy marketed as breakthroughs.

Covid‑19 Vaccines: Manufacturing Consensus under Emergency Conditions

Vaccination is framed simultaneously as a medical intervention, a moral duty, and a pillar of national security, making vaccine science especially susceptible to epistemic corruption and propagandistic deployment. Its history includes ethically questionable experimentation on vulnerable populations, retracted vaccine-safety papers, and harmful products such as Dengvaxia in the Philippines. Yet mainstream narratives present vaccination as an unquestionable success story, with adverse events deemed vanishingly rare and methodological critiques dismissed as fringe or conspiratorial.

Doctors and scientists who question vaccine safety or policy face defamatory labeling, deplatforming, grant denials, and strategic retractions, so the apparent consensus may be, in significant part, an artifact of censorship and self‑censorship. During the Covid‑19 vaccine rollout, corrupted epistemic structures and manipulative communication reinforced one another in an integrated propaganda system.

Regulatory capture at warp speed. Development timelines of ten or more years were compressed to about ten months under the sci-fi inspired slogan “Operation Warp Speed,” led in the US by a military general and a retired pharma executive. Although mRNA vaccines fit the definition of gene therapy medicinal products, a loophole exempted them from the additional testing such products require. Regulators, governments, and most journalists ignored whistleblowers with serious concerns. Regulators approved major production changes without rechecking safety or efficacy, and relaxed purity standards to allow approval.

The upscaled process has since been shown to introduce DNA contamination far above regulatory limits – in tests the regulators neglected to perform themselves. And while the vaccines were still labeled “investigational” when most people received them, emergency authorization was represented as settled science.

Trials built to impress. Pfizer trial data show an average follow-up of just 97 days before placebo recipients were unblinded and offered the vaccine – effectively ending the trial after about three months. There were too few hospitalizations or deaths to show efficacy against severe outcomes, and the absolute risk reduction for PCR-confirmed illness was under 1.5 percentage points, while headlines painted a distorted picture by trumpeting a relative risk reduction of 95 percent. Later analyses highlighted protocol deviations and opaque handling of suspected adverse events – unsurprising when trials are funded, analyzed, and written up by the sponsors themselves.

Harms hidden in plain sight. There is evidence of cover-ups of debilitating adverse events among trial participants. Pfizer participants Augusto Roux and 12‑year‑old Maddie de Garay suffered severe reactions; Pfizer effectively denied causality, dismissed their symptoms as psychological and downplayed their reactions in trial reports. AstraZeneca participant Brianne Dressen’s injuries were omitted from the published trial report.

A re-analysis of the original trial data found an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated. The CDC waited 16 months – long after most people had received multiple doses – to first analyze its adverse event reports, which revealed hundreds of alarming signals that remain publicly unacknowledged. With over 4,500 published papers now documenting adverse events following vaccination, the continued refrain of “safe and effective” is best understood as propaganda.

Folk devils and fear. Public messaging descended into moral panic, with the unvaccinated cast as a “folk devil.” German officials spoke of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and portrayed them as conspiracy-minded, dirty, or lacking competence. Across 21 countries, antipathy towards the unvaccinated was more than double that towards the next most vilified group, migrants from the Middle East. UK campaigns branded legitimate uncertainty as “myth or misinformation,” and some rhetoric equated anti-mandate groups with “domestic terrorists.”^,Fear appeals, a classic propaganda tactic, dominated. Meanwhile, social media groups of people with severe adverse events were deleted or censored, and doctors raising legitimate concerns were silenced.

Silencing the experts. When my colleagues and I interviewed prominent scientists and doctors who disagreed with the establishment position on Covid‑19, they reported not only social media censorship but dismissals, loss of honors and positions, coordinated attacks on their credibility, and unprecedented publication barriers and retractions. Later revelations of a massive government-led effort to censor online information about vaccine safety – even correct information – validated their experiences. These experts, along with people reporting vaccine injuries, were universally vilified in the mainstream media.

Conclusion

In large sectors of contemporary biomedicine, science functions less as open, critical inquiry than as a hybrid of research and marketing serving profit-making interests. Normative pressure keeps most scientists from breaking ranks, and a culture that offers little preparation for illness and death leaves frightened patients all the more willing to defer. If one needs to be able to identify propaganda before analyzing it, the Covid‑19 vaccination campaign showed how blind people are to the propaganda permeating biomedical science – even people who are normally suspicious of monied interests.

Recovering trust requires separating commercial and regulatory functions, enforceable trial transparency, strict conflict-of-interest rules, and real protection for dissent. Without such changes, calls to “trust the science” risk becoming little more than invitations to submit to one of the most elaborate and powerful propaganda systems yet devised.

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BY JOEL SALATIN

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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 agriculture symposiums, presentations view nature as an enemy, something to “Work against.”

For the record, pre-European North America teemed with abundance, arguably producing more plant and animal life than it does today. It contained more than double the hydration, both above and below ground. It was not a place of scarcity. But this is not the mentality of chemical-industrial agriculture.

Wild birds cause avian influenza. Those pesky mallards should be shot. In contrast, nonchemical, pastured livestock farmers like me dare to suggest we raise chickens in a habitat that makes them happy, rather than crammed in 20,000-bird fecal particulate Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). How about we honor the pigness of the pig rather than trying to eliminate the stress gene so we can further disrespect and abuse pigs but they will no longer care?

As we return to the political climate and Massie, then, I suggest that his extremely rural voters, at their core, came to view him as a sissy because he dared to question obliterating an ancient civilization. The desire to fight, to “teach them a lesson they won’t forget,” grows abundantly in the hillbilly breast.

The narrative that unless you maintain 350 military bases around the world to meddle in everyone else’s garden, to point out their weeds, to smack them in the head if they plant something different – unless you walk around with your fists curled you’re a sissy, was an assumption Massie could not overcome. The notion that a nation should hoe its own garden categorizes me as a sissy, a wimp, a pushover.

And that, my friends, country folks can’t abide. To be sure, if a neighbor comes in and tramps through my garden, I’ll fight to defend it from abuse. But to change the Department of Defense to the Department of War is a terrible, bullyish idea. Big-talking, swaggering, swashbucklers are energized and enthusiastic about a good brawl. I’m energized by happy cows and tomatoes, earthworm procreation, and proliferating pollinators. That makes me a sissy, and I wear the moniker proudly.

What do I fight for? I fight for the right to sell raw milk to a neighbor without asking a bureaucrat’s permission. I fight for the right to not have glyphosate contaminating my drinking water. I fight for the right to attend school without vaccination. I fight for the right to own my land rather than being a renter through property tax extortion.

Americans, we have a lot of noble things to fight for. My country colleagues can get their thrills from watching tomatoes grow in a garden, pigs dancing in a silvopasture, and worms copulating through compost. Massie dared to demand adherence to the Constitution. Asking for a more studied, strategic debate appeared timid and weak rather than what it really was: working within the constitutional system. It was the difference between patient compost and impatient chemicals. It was the difference between “Working with” and “Working against.”

I must end the column here because my compost is calling for some sissy nurturing.

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BY MARYANNE DEMASI

View original article at Brownstone.org.

The Lancet’s latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence.

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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.

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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 linked to the phenomenon.

This is technically correct — there are no large-scale studies that have specifically investigated whether these off-target proteins contribute to vaccine-related injuries. But the absence of evidence is interpreted as evidence of absence.

The same pattern appears in the discussion of vaccine safety.

The authors state that adverse events have been “rigorously monitored” through passive and active surveillance systems.

But those same surveillance systems have frequently been dismissed by many of the same academics whenever independent researchers identified potential safety signals.

The review also ignores the regulatory controversies that unfolded last year after internal FDA investigations identified child deaths caused by Covid-19 vaccination.

Former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary publicly acknowledged those deaths, and internal disagreements over the agency’s handling became the subject of Congressional scrutiny.

The authors recognise myocarditis as a vaccine-associated adverse event and acknowledge that some patients continue to experience symptoms or imaging abnormalities more than twelve months later. But the discussion ends almost as soon as it begins.

There is no consideration of what persistent myocardial injury might mean over decades of follow-up, particularly in younger people, nor any serious examination of whether repeated boosting altered the overall risk-benefit balance in low-risk populations.

Instead, the review quickly returns to the familiar conclusion that the risk from SARS-CoV-2 infection outweighs the risk from vaccination.

On the topic of transmission, the review acknowledges that mRNA vaccines do not induce sterilising immunity and that household studies show only modest reductions in transmission.

But there is no meaningful reflection on the extraordinary public messaging that vaccination would protect others and stop transmission — the claim that became one of the principal justifications for vaccine mandates.

The authors also briefly discuss the shift towards IgG4 antibodies following repeated mRNA vaccination before concluding that the clinical significance remains “uncertain.” That is true, but only because the issue remains under-investigated.

Researchers continue to examine whether repeated exposure to the same antigen influences immune responses through mechanisms such as immune imprinting and antibody subclass switching. These are not settled questions.

The authors’ conflict-of-interest disclosures are also difficult to ignore.

Collectively, they disclose advisory roles, consultancy work, research funding, and other professional relationships with Pfizer, Moderna, GSK, Sanofi, Novavax, CEPI, the Gates Foundation, and other organisations that have played central roles in developing, funding, and promoting the mRNA platform.

When authors maintain ties to organisations with a stake in that field, readers are entitled to ask whether the evidence has been weighed impartially.

That question becomes even more important in the authors’ discussion of public trust. They attribute declining confidence primarily to misinformation, politicisation, and the amplification of perceived risk.

But there is little acknowledgement of the damage caused by overconfident public messaging, coercive mandates, delayed acknowledgement of genuine adverse events, resistance to sharing underlying data, or the repeated dismissal of legitimate scientific questions.

Trust is not rebuilt by telling the public they misunderstood the science. It is rebuilt by acknowledging where the evidence was uncertain, where regulators got things wrong, and where important questions remain unanswered.

In my view, one of the world’s most influential medical journals has published a review that is largely performative. It raises controversial questions only long enough to defuse them with reassuring conclusions.

At best, it reads like marketing. At worst, it’s propaganda.

And because it carries the imprimatur of the Lancet, many readers will mistake it for scientific consensus.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

We are less than a month away from the big Brownstone Institute event of the year. We hope you can join us for enlightenment, fellowship, thoughtful reflection, elegance, and tremendous amounts of fun. Here is where you can meet many of the top leaders in the health freedom movement and the best writers and researchers working today.

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Brownstone Institute is the research institute that was not supposed to exist. No one gave us permission. We saw a vast community out there of top thinkers and passionate citizens who wanted their rights and liberties back after the Covid calamity and we dedicated ourselves to rebuilding. The resources gradually arrived – not from old foundations or government but from regular people who had faith.

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And here we are five years later with 4,500 articles, hundreds of videos, two dozen books, many ongoing fellowships, and a network of supper clubs coast-to-coast. It’s become the infrastructure of resistance and rebuilding, a voice that daily says: we will not comply physically or intellectually.

The annual conference and gala, this year in Chattanooga, TN, November 6-7, is the opportunity to celebrate and plan the future.

This past week, we put on vivid display the power of having an intelligent, non-bureaucratic, fast-moving organization in these times. The huge manuscript called Cries of Pain Buried in V-safe Data has been turned into a two-volume work available on Amazon. We did this in less than a week. You can buy the hard copy, Kindle, or download the full audio.

We are coming up to year-end fundraising. Please consider putting Brownstone on your list of worthy charities. Our existence and growth is funded entirely by our readers. We cannot count on legacy foundations – they never gave us permission to exist in the first place – nor will we ever accept government money. We eschew normal strategies in fundraising like digital trickery and expensive development offices. Instead, we simply trust that our readers back the work we do.

Tune in to episodes of the Brownstone Show.. The episodes are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise. Go to the Brownstone Show. You can also find our recent livestream episodes on X with “Cries for Help,” readings from released V-safe data.

We now have all of the videos from Polyface available for viewing. You can see the entire playlist here: YouTube Playlist.

We have out now a template for all nations of the world to leave the World Health Organization. The Right to Health Sovereignty is now available at Amazon. So is the technical report of this Brownstone-backed team. The coverage of this has been global. These two reports amount to heat-seeking missiles aimed right at the WHO.

See all our books, especially the latest Brownstone publication by Thomas Harrington, Staying Human in a Soul-Shredding Age.

These are the sorts of topics we talk about at Brownstone Supper Clubs, now coast-to-coast. Pick one and go!

• October 12, 2026 — Brownstone Austin Supper Club: Travis McCormick — Get tickets

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Here is some content since our last email.

The Covid Reckoning That Never Came By Ed Dowd. I am not forgetting. And from what I see every day, millions are not either. As time rolls forward and the cognitive dissonance of those who took the vaccine wears off…our numbers will continue to grow.

A Comeuppance for Pennsylvania’s Health Bureaucrats By Chase Englund. The time to oppose such thinking, armed with the evidence, is long overdue. The Pennsylvania Small Enterprise Foundation was proud to stand with the citizens of the Commonwealth to sink this overreach.

Deep State of the World By Meryl Nass. 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. Part of that initiative is to cause our institutions to fail.

Vaccine Injury: A Glimpse of the Scale By Elizabeth Mumper. The proposed NIH framework includes objectives particularly relevant to this discussion and offers unique opportunities for collaboration with us. Today is the day for NIH to take our concerns seriously and develop strategies and policies to help this generation of children.

When Did Obesity Become a Drug Deficiency? By Joseph Varon. The tragedy of the GLP-1 era will not be that these drugs failed. The tragedy will be if they succeed so spectacularly that an entire generation of physicians stops asking why we needed them in the first place.

The Lancet Jumps the Shark By Maryanne Demasi. The Lancet’s latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence. It delivers a confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate.

Caretakers or Conquerors? By Joel Salatin. Americans, we have noble things to fight for. My country colleagues can get their thrills from watching tomatoes grow in a garden, pigs dancing in a silvopasture, and worms copulating through compost. Massie dared to demand adherence to the Constitution.

New Clarity on the Creation of the Virus/Vaccine By Jim Haslam. U.S. Marine Major Joseph Murphy exposed 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.

Retraction of SIDS Paper Based on VAERS Analysis Five Years after Publication By Jessica Rose. 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.

Childhood Vaccine Schedules Across Countries By David Gortler. Trump appointees at the CDC, NIH, and FDA now have the chance to provide Americans with answers and be transparent. We finally have the opportunity to study and learn about the risks and benefits of the childhood vaccine schedule.

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BY JOSEPH VARON

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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.

The Epidemic That Became a Diagnosis

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 suddenly developed a genetic problem.

We should be just as curious about obesity. When a condition becomes much more common in just a few generations, our first question should be: what has changed in our environment, habits, or society to cause this? Instead, the focus is quickly shifting to which drug can best fight it. We changed the world around us, saw people’s bodies change in response, and now we’re treating those changes as the main problem.

There is another change that occurred alongside the biological one: our culture gradually changed its definition of what was normal. I have written about this before, using the transformation of Victoria’s Secret as one highly visible example. The famously thin “Angels” who once defined the brand were eventually replaced by models representing a much broader range of body sizes, part of a larger and understandable effort to move away from unrealistic beauty standards and the humiliation of people because of their weight.[8] There was much about that change that was humane and necessary. No person should be shamed, ridiculed, or assigned less dignity because of body size.

But compassion and normalization are not the same thing. As obesity became progressively more common, society did more than become more accepting of people with obesity; it also became increasingly reluctant to acknowledge obesity itself as abnormal. The distinction matters because one can respect every human body while still recognizing that excess adiposity carries important medical consequences.

In a remarkably short period, we changed the food environment, changed the physical environment, watched the population become heavier, and then changed the cultural image of what a normal body looked like. Now we are entering the next stage of that progression: pharmacologically treating the metabolic consequences.

What Changed Was Almost Everything

Today, people live in a very different world than past generations. Food is everywhere, all the time. Much of it is designed to be convenient, tasty, long-lasting, quick to eat, and easy to buy again. Foods that once took time to prepare can now be eaten in seconds. Drinks can add a lot of calories without making us feel full. Portion sizes have grown, people move less, jobs are more sedentary, transportation often means less walking, and entertainment usually means sitting. No single food or habit explains obesity, but the environment that shapes our eating and activity has changed a lot.

A key experiment by Hall and his team at the National Institutes of Health showed this clearly. In a controlled study, people ate either ultra-processed or unprocessed diets, matched for calories, nutrients, sugar, salt, and fiber. They could eat as much or as little as they wanted. On an ultra-processed diet, people ate about 500 more calories a day and gained weight. On the unprocessed diet, they lost weight.[9] No one told them to eat more or took away their willpower. Just changing the food environment changed how much they ate.

Physical activity has also dropped a lot. A large study of over 5 million people found that not getting enough exercise became more common worldwide from 2000 to 2022, and by 2022, almost a third of adults weren’t active enough.[10] Sleep is important too, even though it’s often overlooked. Research shows that not getting enough sleep raises the risk of obesity.[11] All these factors, along with stress, income, medications, food access, work hours, city design, and more, combine in ways that can’t be fixed by simply telling people to eat less and move more.

Scientists are also looking at environmental chemicals that might affect metabolism and hormones. The idea of “obesogens” is still new and shouldn’t be seen as the only reason for the obesity epidemic. Still, studies suggest that some environmental exposures could affect how our bodies store fat, use energy, or regulate appetite in ways that make weight gain more likely.[12] The right approach is to keep studying these possibilities, especially since the rise in obesity is so widespread.

The most defensible conclusion is therefore also the least sensational: obesity probably does not have one cause. Food changed. Physical activity changed. Sleep changed. Work changed. Transportation changed. Stress changed. Medications changed. Chemical exposures changed. Marketing changed. Portion sizes changed. The economics of food changed. The built environment changed. Human beings then responded biologically to those changes.

The mystery is not that metabolism responded to a dramatically altered environment. The mystery is why medicine became so comfortable treating that response without demonstrating comparable urgency about the environment that produced it.

Then Came the Drugs That Actually Worked

Obesity medicine has a long and sometimes uncomfortable pharmacological history. Earlier drugs frequently produced modest weight loss, troublesome adverse effects, or both. Several were eventually withdrawn because their risks became unacceptable. Against that background, modern incretin-based therapies represented a genuine therapeutic breakthrough. In the STEP 1 trial, adults with overweight or obesity who received once-weekly semaglutide 2.4 mg lost an average of 14.9 percent of their baseline body weight over 68 weeks, compared with 2.4 percent among those receiving placebo, with both groups receiving lifestyle intervention.[3] For nonsurgical obesity treatment, this was an extraordinary result.

Tirzepatide moved the numbers even further. In SURMOUNT-1, 2,539 adults with obesity or overweight and at least one weight-related complication, but without diabetes, were randomized to tirzepatide or placebo. At 72 weeks, average weight reductions were 15.0 percent, 19.5 percent, and 20.9 percent with the 5 mg, 10 mg, and 15 mg doses, respectively, compared with 3.1 percent with placebo.[4] Weight reductions exceeding 20 percent begin to approach territory historically associated with bariatric procedures rather than medication. For patients who have struggled unsuccessfully with obesity for years, it is easy to understand why these drugs can feel revolutionary.

More importantly, the story extends beyond the scale. In SELECT, more than 17,000 adults with preexisting cardiovascular disease and overweight or obesity, but without diabetes, were randomized to semaglutide or placebo. Major cardiovascular events occurred in 6.5 percent of patients receiving semaglutide and 8.0 percent receiving placebo, corresponding to a hazard ratio of 0.80.[5] Subsequent analysis also demonstrated a lower incidence of a prespecified composite kidney endpoint among patients receiving semaglutide.[13] Tirzepatide has produced substantial reductions in apnea-hypopnea index among patients with obesity and moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea.[6] These findings make it impossible to dismiss the GLP-1 era as mere pharmaceutical vanity medicine.

Physicians should welcome effective therapies. A patient with severe obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, sleep apnea, impaired mobility, or other obesity-related complications should not be denied a beneficial treatment because society has failed to solve the larger causes of obesity. We treat the patient who exists today, not the healthier society we wish existed. The mistake would be turning that entirely reasonable clinical principle into permission to stop asking the larger question.

What Happens When the Injection Stops?

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of GLP-1 therapy appears when treatment ends. In the STEP 1 extension, participants who discontinued semaglutide regained approximately two-thirds of their previous weight loss during the following year, while many cardiometabolic improvements moved back toward baseline.[14] SURMOUNT-4 demonstrated a similar phenomenon with tirzepatide. After an initial 36-week period during which participants lost an average of 20.9 percent of their body weight, those randomized to discontinue tirzepatide and receive placebo regained substantial weight, whereas those who continued therapy maintained and further increased their weight reduction.[15]

The conventional interpretation is straightforward: obesity is a chronic relapsing disease, and chronic diseases frequently require chronic treatment. This argument has considerable logic. Blood pressure often rises when antihypertensive medications are stopped. LDL cholesterol generally rises after discontinuation of lipid-lowering therapy. Nobody claims that the recurrence of hypertension proves that antihypertensive drugs failed.

The 2026 American Diabetes Association Standards of Care therefore recommend continuing obesity pharmacotherapy beyond achievement of weight-loss goals when indicated for chronic therapy, noting that discontinuation often results in recurrent weight gain and reemergence of cardiometabolic risk factors.[16] The World Health Organization likewise now states that GLP-1 therapies may be used as long-term treatment for adults living with obesity. However, its recommendation is conditional and recognizes the need for comprehensive behavioral and lifestyle intervention.[17]

Yet, obesity differs from many chronic diseases in one important respect: its prevalence changed dramatically within a remarkably short historical period. That should make us cautious about letting “chronic disease” end the discussion. If the environment continually pushes human metabolism toward excess adiposity, and a drug successfully counteracts that pressure only while it is administered, lifelong pharmacotherapy may be entirely appropriate for some patients. But it should simultaneously intensify our interest in the pressure itself. Otherwise, we risk defining successful medicine as the indefinite pharmacological adaptation of human beings to an unhealthy environment.

Losing Weight Is Not the Same As Losing Fat

Another part of this conversation deserves more attention, particularly as these medications expand into older populations. Large reductions in body weight do not consist exclusively of adipose tissue. During weight loss, some lean tissue is generally lost as well, regardless of whether weight reduction occurs through caloric restriction, surgery, or pharmacotherapy. The relevant question is not whether lean mass changes, but how much is lost, in whom, and what the functional consequences may be.

A DXA substudy of SURMOUNT-1 found that participants receiving tirzepatide experienced a 21.3 percent reduction in body weight, accompanied by a 33.9 percent reduction in fat mass and a 10.9 percent reduction in lean mass. Approximately three-quarters of the lost weight was fat, and one-quarter was lean mass.[18] That is a far more nuanced finding than the popular claim that GLP-1 drugs “destroy muscle.”

They do not. Body composition generally improves because more fat than lean tissue is lost proportionally. Nevertheless, lean tissue is biologically important, and its loss should not be treated as irrelevant simply because the scale is moving in the desired direction.

This is especially important in older patients, in whom sarcopenia, frailty, falls, osteoporosis, and loss of functional independence already represent major clinical concerns. Skeletal muscle is not decorative tissue. It is central to glucose disposal, mobility, balance, strength, metabolic reserve, and resilience during acute illness.

A 35-year-old with severe obesity losing some lean mass during substantial fat reduction is not clinically equivalent to a frail 78-year-old doing the same. Responsible obesity medicine therefore cannot consist simply of prescribing an injection and celebrating weight loss. Nutrition, adequate protein intake, resistance exercise, physical function, and muscle preservation should become integral parts of treatment. The goal is not to make patients lighter. The goal is to make them healthier.

The Economics of Treating the Consequence

This discussion has an uncomfortable economic dimension that does not require conspiracy theories or accusations of bad faith. Modern health care is exceptionally effective at creating financial structures around treatment. A pharmaceutical product can be researched, patented, manufactured, marketed, prescribed, reimbursed, monitored, and administered repeatedly. Hospitals can build programs around it. Insurers can establish coverage criteria for it. Physicians can prescribe it. Investors can calculate its market. Patients can measure its effects. The entire structure of modern medicine understands how to assign economic value to an intervention.

Prevention is different. No comparable recurring revenue stream is generated when a child grows up eating mostly minimally processed food, sleeping adequately, walking and exercising regularly, maintaining muscle, and never developing metabolic disease. No blockbuster pharmaceutical product is called adequate sleep, no patent exists on resistance exercise, and no quarterly earnings call celebrates the number of patients who never became sick. That does not mean pharmaceutical companies created the obesity epidemic. It means that our economic system has far more powerful mechanisms for rewarding treatment than for rewarding the absence of disease.

The result can emerge without anyone designing it. Industry develops products that generate returns. Physicians work within reimbursement systems built around identifiable diagnoses and interventions. Insurers reimburse treatments meeting defined criteria. Hospitals organize programs around services they can deliver and bill. Patients understandably prefer interventions that produce meaningful results, particularly after years of unsuccessful attempts at weight loss.

Each participant can behave rationally, yet the system can drift toward a remarkable destination: we construct an environment that promotes metabolic dysfunction and then build an increasingly sophisticated medical economy around helping people survive it.

Now the Government Is Buying In

This discussion became even more consequential in 2026. Beginning July 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge, a demonstration program providing eligible Medicare Part D beneficiaries access to certain GLP-1 drugs with a $50 copayment. The program is scheduled to continue through December 31, 2027.[19] Whatever one thinks about the policy, it represents an important transition. GLP-1 therapy for obesity is no longer simply a matter between an individual patient, physician, insurer, and manufacturer. The federal government is now directly participating in expanded access.

For many patients, this may be excellent news. Obesity disproportionately affects populations that often have the least access to effective treatment, and cost has been a substantial barrier to modern obesity pharmacotherapy. If these medications reduce cardiovascular events, diabetes, kidney disease, sleep apnea, disability, and other obesity-related complications, expanding access may ultimately prove both humane and economically rational. Those outcomes should be studied carefully, not presumed.

But public financing also creates a public obligation to ask what we are buying. Are we purchasing durable reductions in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, disability, and mortality? Are we reducing total health-care expenditure over time? Are patients becoming stronger and metabolically healthier, or simply lighter? What happens after five, ten, or twenty years of treatment? What proportion of patients remain on therapy? What happens to those who discontinue it? What are the nutritional and functional consequences in older adults? And perhaps most importantly, how much are we simultaneously investing in understanding and modifying the conditions that made treatment necessary?

Those questions are not arguments against coverage. They are precisely the questions that should accompany responsible coverage.

Medicine Must Be Able to Hold Two Ideas at Once

Public debates increasingly demand that we choose teams. Either GLP-1 drugs are miracle therapies that should be celebrated without reservation, or they are dangerous pharmaceutical shortcuts that should be rejected in favor of diet and exercise. Both positions are intellectually unsatisfying. Medicine should be able to hold two ideas simultaneously, particularly when both are supported by evidence.

The first is that GLP-1-based therapies represent a major medical advance. They produce substantial weight loss, improve important metabolic parameters, and have demonstrated benefits extending to cardiovascular outcomes, kidney outcomes, and obstructive sleep apnea in appropriately selected populations. [5,6,13] For many patients, they may prevent disease, restore mobility, improve quality of life, and possibly extend survival. Patients who benefit from them should not be ashamed for using them any more than a patient with hypertension should be shamed for taking an antihypertensive medication.

Second, a civilization in which enormous numbers of people may require lifelong pharmacological manipulation of appetite and metabolism to maintain health should be intensely curious about how that situation arose. Calling obesity a chronic disease does not relieve us of that responsibility. If anything, the scale of the disease makes the responsibility greater.

We should therefore reject the false choice between treating obesity and preventing it. Physicians must treat the patient standing in front of them with the best tools available today. Scientists and public health institutions must also investigate why so many patients present with the same problem.

Government should evaluate whether policies affecting food, cities, schools, physical activity, sleep, and environmental exposures promote metabolic health or undermine it. Medicine should study not merely how efficiently we can produce weight loss, but whether we can preserve muscle, metabolic health, function, and independence while doing so.

The Question Our Grandchildren May Ask

Medical history is filled with treatments that became so familiar that physicians stopped asking the questions that originally justified them. Sometimes the treatments were eventually shown to be wrong. Sometimes they were useful but applied too broadly. And sometimes the treatment worked exactly as intended while distracting medicine from a more fundamental cause of disease. The GLP-1 revolution may ultimately belong to an entirely different category: therapies that are genuinely transformative and beneficial, but whose very effectiveness risks concealing the magnitude of the societal failure that made them necessary.

Imagine medicine 20 or 30 years from now. The drugs will almost certainly be better. Oral formulations, combinations of incretin and other metabolic pathways, agents that better preserve lean mass, and therapies we cannot yet imagine may make obesity increasingly controllable. Perhaps cardiovascular disease and diabetes will decline dramatically as a result. That would be a genuine triumph of medical science.

But imagine another possibility as well. Suppose half of the adult population requires continuous pharmacological intervention to maintain metabolic health while children continue entering the same environment that produced the epidemic.

Suppose we become extraordinarily proficient at altering the individual’s biology while leaving the biology-disrupting environment essentially untouched. Would we call that prevention? Would we call it health? Or would we have become very good at treating the consequences of something we never dared to confront?

Those are not reasons to take an effective drug away from a patient who needs it. They are reasons to refuse the complacency that can accompany therapeutic success. The physician’s responsibility is to treat disease. Medicine’s responsibility is larger. It must also remain curious about why disease occurs, particularly when its prevalence changes before our eyes.

The great irony of the GLP-1 era may therefore be that the medications are not the problem at all. They may be among the best tools we have ever developed for treating obesity. The real problem will arise if their success convinces us that the epidemic itself has been solved. A weekly injection can change appetite, body weight, glucose metabolism, cardiovascular risk, and perhaps the trajectory of an individual patient’s life. What it cannot do is explain why a condition that affected a relatively small minority of Americans 60 years ago now affects roughly four in ten adults.

We should use these medications when they improve our patients’ lives. We should study them rigorously, monitor their long-term consequences, make access rational and equitable, and resist both their demonization and their indiscriminate use. But every prescription should coexist with a much larger scientific question, one that medicine should have been asking with far greater urgency for decades: what did we change that made so many people sick?

The tragedy of the GLP-1 era will not be that these drugs failed. The tragedy will be if they succeed so spectacularly that an entire generation of physicians stops asking why we needed them in the first place.

References

1. Fryar CD, Afful J, Saif NT. Prevalence of overweight, obesity, and severe obesity among adults age 20 and older: United States, 1960-1962 through August 2021-August 2023. NCHS Health E-Stat. Hyattsville (MD): National Center for Health Statistics; 2026.

2. NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Worldwide trends in underweight and obesity from 1990 to 2022: a pooled analysis of 3663 population-representative studies with 222 million children, adolescents, and adults. Lancet. 2024;403(10431):1027-1050. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(23)02750-2.

3. Wilding JPH, Batterham RL, Calanna S, et al. Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Adults with Overweight or Obesity. N Engl J Med. 2021;384(11):989-1002. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2032183.

4. Jastreboff AM, Aronne LJ, Ahmad NN, et al. Tirzepatide Once Weekly for the Treatment of Obesity. N Engl J Med. 2022;387(3):205-216. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2206038.

5. Lincoff AM, Brown-Frandsen K, Colhoun HM, et al. Semaglutide and Cardiovascular Outcomes in Obesity Without Diabetes. N Engl J Med. 2023;389(24):2221-2232. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2307563.

6. Malhotra A, Grunstein RR, Fietze I, et al. Tirzepatide for the Treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Obesity. N Engl J Med. 2024;391(13):1193-1205. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2404881.

7. Rubino F, Cummings DE, Eckel RH, et al. Definition and diagnostic criteria of clinical obesity. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol. 2025;13(3):221-262. doi:10.1016/S2213-8587(24)00316-4.

8. Varon J. The Comfortable Collapse: How America Learned to Pretend Obesity Is Normal. Brownstone Institute. 2025 Oct 21.

9. Hall KD, Ayuketah A, Brychta R, et al. Ultra-processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: an Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake. Cell Metab. 2019;30(1):67-77.e3. doi:10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008.

10. Strain T, Flaxman S, Guthold R, et al. National, regional, and global trends in insufficient physical activity among adults from 2000 to 2022: a pooled analysis of 507 population-based surveys with 5.7 million participants. Lancet Glob Health. 2024;12(8):e1232-e1243. doi:10.1016/S2214-109X(24)00150-5.

11. Wu Y, Zhai L, Zhang D. Sleep duration and obesity among adults: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. Sleep Med. 2014;15(12):1456-1462. doi:10.1016/j.sleep.2014.07.018.

12. Heindel JJ, Lustig RH, Howard S, Corkey BE. Obesogens: a unifying theory for the global rise in obesity. Int J Obes (Lond). 2024;48(4):449-460. doi:10.1038/s41366-024-01460-3.

13. Colhoun HM, Lingvay I, Brown PM, et al. Long-term kidney outcomes of semaglutide in obesity and cardiovascular disease in the SELECT trial. Nat Med. 2024;30(7):2058-2066. doi:10.1038/s41591-024-03015-5.

14. Wilding JPH, Batterham RL, Davies M, et al. Weight regain and cardiometabolic effects after withdrawal of semaglutide: the STEP 1 trial extension. Diabetes Obes Metab. 2022;24(8):1553-1564. doi:10.1111/dom.14725.

15. Aronne LJ, Sattar N, Horn DB, et al. Continued Treatment With Tirzepatide for Maintenance of Weight Reduction in Adults with Obesity: the SURMOUNT-4 Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2024;331(1):38-48. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.24945.

16. American Diabetes Association Professional Practice Committee. 8. Obesity and Weight Management for the Prevention and Treatment of Diabetes: Standards of Care in Diabetes-2026. Diabetes Care. 2026;49(Suppl 1). doi:10.2337/dc26-S008.

17. Celletti F, Farrar J, De Regil LM. World Health Organization Guideline on the Use and Indications of Glucagon-Like peptide-1 Therapies for the Treatment of Obesity in Adults. JAMA.2026;335(5):434-438. doi:10.1001/jama.2025.24288.

18. Look M, Dunn JP, Kushner RF, et al. Body composition changes during weight reduction with tirzepatide in the SURMOUNT-1 study of adults with obesity or overweight. Diabetes Obes Metab. 2025;27(5):2720-2729. doi:10.1111/dom.16275.

19. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Medicare GLP-1 Bridge. Baltimore (MD): Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; 2026.

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BY JOSEPH VARON

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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’s Graveyard of Good Ideas

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, its advocates must answer the question: why should it be adopted? After widespread adoption, the burden shifts, and skeptics must instead prove why it should be abandoned. Practice becomes habit, habit becomes a standard, and the standard eventually acquires moral and institutional authority.

The physician who follows prevailing practice appears responsible even when evidence is incomplete, while the physician who questions it may appear reckless. That asymmetry helps explain why medical practices can persist even after their scientific foundations begin to weaken.

When More Treatment Meant Better Treatment

Few episodes demonstrate the seductive logic of aggressive treatment better than the history of breast cancer surgery. For much of the 20th century, the Halsted radical mastectomy represented the dominant surgical approach to breast cancer. The procedure removed the breast, pectoral muscles, and extensive regional lymphatic tissue. Within the prevailing model of cancer biology, the reasoning seemed compelling: if cancer spread progressively outward from a primary tumor, then removing more tissue should provide better local control and therefore better survival.

The surgery was impressive anatomically, but it was very hard on patients. Women often ended up with severe disfigurement, loss of function, swelling, pain, and emotional trauma. The real question was not whether the radical mastectomy removed more tissue (it clearly did) but whether taking out more tissue actually led to better results for patients.

Randomized trials eventually challenged the assumption. The National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project B-04 trial compared radical mastectomy with less extensive approaches, and at 25 years of follow-up investigators found no significant survival advantage from the radical procedure in the populations studied [3]. The NSABP B-06 trial subsequently demonstrated that breast-conserving surgery followed by irradiation could provide long-term survival comparable to mastectomy for appropriately selected women with invasive breast cancer [4]. Long-term findings from the Milan trial similarly demonstrated that breast-conserving surgery could achieve survival comparable to radical mastectomy in women with small breast cancers [5].

This lesson applies to much more than breast cancer. Medicine has often mixed up doing more with doing better. We still fall into this trap. More tests can lead to false alarms and unnecessary findings. More drugs can cause side effects and bad interactions. Pushing for stricter targets can create new problems. More invasive procedures can harm patients without helping them live longer or better. Medicine has limits, and sometimes the smartest move is to recognize that more treatment is not always better.

When the Monitor Improved and the Patient Died

Perhaps the clearest modern example of an intervention successfully correcting a physiological abnormality while worsening the outcome comes from cardiology. Physicians recognized that premature ventricular depolarizations after myocardial infarction were associated with an increased risk of sudden cardiac death. The reasoning that followed appeared almost irresistible. If ventricular ectopy identified patients at greater risk, and antiarrhythmic drugs could suppress ventricular ectopy, then suppressing those arrhythmias should reduce mortality.

The drugs performed their intended physiological function extremely well. Encainide and flecainide suppressed ventricular ectopy, and the electrocardiographic abnormality improved. Unfortunately, the patients did not. The Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST) demonstrated that patients receiving encainide or flecainide experienced substantially more arrhythmic deaths and nonfatal cardiac arrests than patients receiving placebo, despite successful suppression of the arrhythmias physicians were trying to eliminate [6]. Subsequent reporting confirmed the excess mortality associated with these drugs in this population [7].

CAST should remain required reading for physicians because it exposes one of medicine’s most persistent intellectual traps: confusing a surrogate endpoint with a patient-centered outcome. The association between ventricular ectopy and mortality was real, and the ability of the drugs to suppress that ectopy was also real. The problem was the assumption connecting those two observations. Suppressing the marker did not eliminate the underlying risk; instead, it introduced a new lethal risk. The monitor looked better while the patient became more likely to die.

Modern medicine produces huge amounts of data. We track blood pressure, oxygen, blood sugar, kidney function, cholesterol, inflammation, heart function, tumor size, lung capacity, bone density, and many other numbers. These measurements have changed medicine, but they can also make us focus on numbers instead of people. A test result can show risk without causing it. An abnormal value might be linked to bad outcomes, but fixing the number does not always help the patient. In the end, the patient—not the lab result or scan—matters most.

A Lesson from the Intensive Care Unit

Critical care provides another striking example. Hyperglycemia is common during severe illness and has repeatedly been associated with adverse outcomes. An influential randomized trial published in 2001 reported reduced morbidity and mortality among surgical intensive care patients treated with intensive insulin therapy [8]. The biological reasoning was attractive: hyperglycemia was associated with poor outcomes, insulin lowered glucose, and maintaining near-normal glucose seemed more physiological than allowing substantial hyperglycemia.

The findings had an enormous influence. Intensive care units created new protocols, nurses adjusted insulin doses, and blood sugar was checked often. Tight blood sugar control became a key part of ICU care in many hospitals. This pattern was familiar: an observation led to a theory, a study supported it, and soon the idea became standard practice. Then, in 2009, the NICE-SUGAR trial, which randomized more than 6,000 critically ill adults, found that intensive glucose control increased 90-day mortality and substantially increased severe hypoglycemia [9]. Once again, medicine confronted the difference between correcting an abnormal physiological value and improving the patient.

For someone like me, who has cared for critically ill patients for decades, this lesson is especially important. The body’s responses during shock, infection, trauma, breathing failure, and organ problems are extremely complex. Some changes are harmful, some may help, and some are good in one situation but bad in another. In the ICU, it is tempting to try to fix every abnormal number because so much can be measured and changed. But people are not machines, and not every value needs to be pushed back to normal.

This does not mean that understanding the body is unimportant or that studies answer every question. It means that theory, experience, and research all need to challenge each other. Focusing only on how the body works can mislead us, and using study results without thinking about real patients can also go wrong. Good medicine happens in the space between these approaches.

When Common Sense Was Wrong

Some practices persist not because of sophisticated biological theories but because they simply seem like common sense. Prolonged bed rest after myocardial infarction was one such practice. If the heart had been injured, minimizing physical exertion seemed prudent. Patients recovering from acute coronary events were therefore historically confined to bed for extended periods, sometimes for weeks.

The approach had intuitive appeal but carried high physiological costs. Immobilization promotes deconditioning, venous stasis, loss of muscle mass, orthostatic intolerance, pulmonary complications, and psychological dependence. By the middle of the 20th century, physicians including Samuel Levine and Bernard Lown challenged prolonged immobilization and advocated earlier chair rest and mobilization after coronary thrombosis [10]. Modern cardiac care eventually moved dramatically away from the assumption that prolonged inactivity was inherently protective.

This lesson is not always obvious. Harmful medicine is not always about doing too much. Sometimes, the mistake is holding back too much instead of giving an unnecessary drug or surgery. Medicine can overdo things with treatments, but also by keeping patients in bed, monitoring too much, making too many rules, running too many tests, or treating normal behavior as illness. The common thread is not aggression but certainty without sufficient proof.

When Established Medicine Reverses Itself

Medicine’s ability to reverse course is one of its greatest strengths, but medical reversal also reveals an uncomfortable reality. Practices can become widely established before definitive evidence demonstrates that they are ineffective or harmful. Prasad and colleagues examined a decade of publications in a major medical journal and identified 146 examples in which new evidence contradicted established medical practices [11]. Such studies cannot determine the exact frequency of reversal across all of medicine because the denominator depends heavily on how practices are selected and defined, but the underlying phenomenon is indisputable.

Medical practices are often reversed for several reasons. Early studies may be small, observational, or limited to specific patient groups. Sometimes, doctors focus on test results instead of real outcomes. Treatments can catch on because they seem logical, and excitement can spread faster than solid evidence. Once a practice is common, jobs, hospital rules, insurance payments, performance measures, and patient expectations can all depend on it. At that point, stopping the practice is often harder than starting it was.

A careful review of studies on established medical practices shows that reversals happen in modern medicine too, not just with old or rare treatments [12]. The key point is not that doctors should doubt everything. Total distrust is just as unreasonable as blind faith. The real lesson is that calling something the “standard of care” does not mean it cannot be wrong.

A Brief Lesson from Covid-19

Covid-19 showed how medicine and public health must sometimes act with great uncertainty. A new virus was spreading quickly, hospitals were overwhelmed, and choices had to be made before solid evidence was available. It made sense to be cautious. But it is worth looking at how quickly some temporary recommendations started to seem more certain than the evidence really allowed.

Physical distancing illustrates the problem. A major 2020 systematic review examining SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV supported physical distancing and suggested that greater distance could provide greater protection, but the evidence was entirely observational, with no randomized trials, and the authors acknowledged important limitations [13]. The familiar six-foot rule nevertheless became a remarkably precise rule in public life. Later evidence emphasizing aerosol and airborne transmission indicated that risk could not be reduced to a fixed radius around each person; particularly indoors, ventilation, exposure duration, crowding, and vocalization were also critically important [14].

The same need for nuance applied to masks. Randomized evidence was more complicated than either side of the subsequent political debate often acknowledged. The DANMASK-19 trial did not demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in infection among people advised to wear surgical masks in the studied setting, although its confidence intervals did not exclude benefit and the trial was not designed primarily to evaluate source control [15].

A cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh found that an intervention promoting community masking produced a modest reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence, with the clearest benefit associated with surgical masks [16]. A later Cochrane review found substantial uncertainty and methodological limitations across randomized studies of physical interventions for respiratory viruses [17].

The point is not that distancing or masks never help reduce spread. The point is that emergency measures should clearly show the uncertainty behind them. A precaution is not a proven law of biology. It should have been normal to ask whether six feet was better than three, whether outdoor masking made sense, whether cloth and surgical masks were the same, or whether mandates were worth their costs. Science gets stronger, not weaker, when new evidence questions temporary recommendations.

When Guidelines Become Commandments

Clinical guidelines are among modern medicine’s great achievements. No physician can independently evaluate every paper relevant to every disease, and well-constructed guidelines synthesize enormous bodies of knowledge into practical recommendations. Used appropriately, they improve care and reduce unnecessary variation. The problem begins when a guideline stops guiding and starts commanding.

This change usually happens slowly. First, someone notices something and forms a theory. Studies support the theory, then professional groups make recommendations. Hospitals turn these into protocols, electronic records turn protocols into checklists and alerts, insurers tie payments to following the rules, and administrators use them to measure performance.

In the end, a conclusion based on limited evidence can start to feel like a hospital law. Clinicians begin asking, “What does the protocol require?” rather than “What does this patient need?” Those questions frequently produce the same answer, but not always. Guidelines describe populations, whereas physicians treat individuals. Age, comorbidities, competing risks, unusual physiology, prior treatment, patient preference, and goals of care can make a generally appropriate recommendation inappropriate for a particular person.

The original formulation of evidence-based medicine explicitly integrated the best available external evidence with individual clinical expertise [18]. Evidence-based medicine was never intended to eliminate judgment. Yet bureaucratic healthcare systems can turn evidence-based medicine into compliance-based medicine, where adherence to a metric matters more than understanding why the metric exists.

After many years caring for very sick patients, I have found that the hardest cases are often those that do not fit the textbook. The patient with sepsis does not always follow the algorithm. An older patient with several chronic illnesses cannot be treated as if each disease is separate. Real medicine starts when the guidelines are not enough.

The Modern Bloodletting Problem

Doctors in the past used tools like lancets, leeches, mercury, and major surgeries. Today, we have computerized checklists, advanced scans, lab markers, genetic testing, artificial intelligence, complex models, and endless clinical guidelines. Our tools are much more powerful, but better technology does not change human nature. In fact, technology can sometimes spread mistakes faster than ever before.

If one doctor uses a questionable treatment, only that doctor’s patients are affected. But if questionable treatment is built into a national care pathway, it can affect millions. If a recommendation is added to electronic records, it can show up in hundreds of hospitals at once. Standardization is very helpful when the standard is right. But if the standard is wrong, mistakes spread quickly.

This is not a criticism of technology, guidelines, public health, research, or evidence-based medicine. It is a warning against abandoning critical thinking. Skepticism is not bad for science; careful questioning is one of its most important tools. Every recommendation should be open to change when new evidence appears, and every doctor should keep enough independence to ask if what they are doing is truly helping the patient.

The Cost of Doing Something

Medicine rewards action. Patients understandably seek physicians because they want help, and physicians are trained to identify problems and intervene. Hospitals are organized around interventions, and healthcare reimbursement has historically rewarded procedures, tests, visits, and treatments more readily than thoughtful restraint. There is also enormous emotional pressure to act when a patient is deteriorating.

Critical care physicians like me understand this impulse particularly well. We intubate, ventilate, dialyze, cardiovert, resuscitate, infuse, drain, monitor, and support failing organs. These interventions save lives every day. During my career, I have watched patients survive diseases and degrees of organ failure that would have been uniformly fatal only decades earlier. Anyone who uses the history of medical error to argue that modern medicine does not work has learned precisely the wrong lesson from that history.

Still, experience shows that every treatment has a cost. Breathing machines can save lives but also damage lungs. Central lines allow lifesaving treatments but can cause infections, clots, and other problems. Blood thinners prevent clots but increase bleeding risk. Antibiotics cure infections but can cause side effects, promote resistance, and disrupt the microbiome. Sedatives help patients tolerate breathing tubes but can lead to confusion and weakness. Scans can find treatable problems but also lead to more tests, procedures, worry, and expense.

So, the real question in medicine is not just whether we can do something, but whether doing it will actually help the patient. This seems obvious in writing, but history shows it is much harder to remember in real-life care.

What Will Physicians Say about Us?

Imagine a physician in 2076 studying medicine as practiced in 2026. Which of our treatments will seem primitive? Which operations will appear unnecessarily aggressive? Which drugs will seem astonishingly overprescribed? Which laboratory targets will appear arbitrary? Which screening programs will be judged to have generated more procedures than meaningful benefit? Which diagnostic categories will have disappeared because we understand disease biology completely differently?

We do not know the answers, and that is exactly why asking the question is important. Admitting uncertainty is not a weakness. It shows discipline and thoughtfulness. History teaches us to be wary when someone claims that all the big questions are settled, because progress often comes from reopening those questions.

This does not mean that all knowledge is temporary or that every medical recommendation should be doubted equally. Modern medicine has many treatments with strong proof behind them. Antibiotics cure bacterial infections. Insulin saves lives in type 1 diabetes. Restoring blood flow saves heart muscle. Vaccines have prevented huge numbers of infections. Trauma surgery saves people who are bleeding, and cancer treatments now cure some cancers that used to be fatal. The lesson is not to lose confidence in medicine, but to stay humble about what is truly proven and what is just likely, traditional, popular, or convenient.

Humility As a Clinical Skill

People often call humility a virtue or a personality trait. In medicine, it should be seen as a skill. Humility shapes how doctors read evidence, listen to patients, react to surprises, rethink diagnoses, and change treatments when they realize they were wrong. A doctor who cannot admit the chance of being wrong can become dangerous.

The best doctors I have known combined decisiveness with humility. They could act quickly when a patient was in danger, but also change their minds just as quickly when new facts came in. They knew that changing your mind because of new evidence is not a weakness. This is what science is about. On the other hand, when certainty becomes part of a doctor’s identity, any challenge to a treatment can feel like a personal attack.

Medical training should teach this lesson clearly. Students spend years learning huge amounts of information, often as if every answer is final because tests demand it. But real patients do not always fit the textbook. They live in the gray areas between chapters, studies, guidelines, and their own biology. Learning to handle uncertainty without freezing up may be one of the most important skills a doctor can learn.

Back to Mount Vernon

George Washington died late on December 14, 1799, with doctors around him who tried hard to save his life. They used the treatments they had and followed what they believed about disease at the time. Their intentions were good; they were confident, and their methods were accepted by their peers. Looking back, we can see how their treatments may have made his condition even worse.

It is tempting to think that modern medicine could no longer make mistakes of this kind. We know much more about disease, our science is stronger, and our treatments would seem miraculous to Washington’s doctors. But technology has advanced faster than human nature. We are still influenced by authority, trends, clever theories, stories, test results, money, workplace pressure, and the comfort of agreeing with others. They believed they were practicing good medicine, just as we do.

The lesson is not to look down on Washington’s physicians. Instead, we should recognize ourselves in them and preserve the capacity to question even our most comfortable assumptions. We should embrace treatments supported by strong evidence, use guidelines intelligently, employ technology enthusiastically when it improves outcomes, and act decisively when a patient’s life depends upon intervention. At the same time, we must remain willing to observe, reconsider, revise, and occasionally admit that what everyone knows to be true may not be true after all.

Right now, there is almost certainly a treatment being used just because everyone assumes it works, a lab result being fixed because everyone thinks abnormal means bad, a drug being continued because stopping it seems risky, or a protocol being followed because it feels uncomfortable to question it. We do not know which of these future doctors will find surprising. That is exactly why humility matters.

Washington’s doctors truly wanted to save him. They were trained, experienced, and sure that doing something was better than doing nothing. Now, more than 200 years later, we know that good intentions, common practice, and logical theories are not enough. In the end, medicine must always ask the hardest question: are we really helping the patient? Sometimes, the answer changes over time. When it does, doctors must be ready to change too, because history shows that the line between helping and harming can be much thinner than we think.

References

1. Mackowiak PA. George Washington’s recurrent health problems and fatal infection re-examined. Clin Infect Dis. 2021;72(10):1850-1853.

2. Tilles G, Wallach D. Le traitement de la syphilis par le mercure: une histoire thérapeutique exemplaire [in French]. Hist Sci Med. 1996;30(4):501-510.

3. Fisher B, Jeong JH, Anderson S, Bryant J, Fisher ER, Wolmark N. Twenty-five-year follow-up of a randomized trial comparing radical mastectomy, total mastectomy, and total mastectomy followed by irradiation. N Engl J Med. 2002;347(8):567-575.

4. Fisher B, Anderson S, Bryant J, Margolese RG, Deutsch M, Fisher ER, et al. Twenty-year follow-up of a randomized trial comparing total mastectomy, lumpectomy, and lumpectomy plus irradiation for invasive breast cancer. N Engl J Med. 2002;347(16):1233-1241.

5. Veronesi U, Cascinelli N, Mariani L, Greco M, Saccozzi R, Luini A, et al. Twenty-year follow-up of a randomized study comparing breast-conserving surgery with radical mastectomy for early breast cancer. N Engl J Med. 2002;347(16):1227-1232.

6. Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST) Investigators. Preliminary report: effect of encainide and flecainide on mortality in a randomized trial of arrhythmia suppression after myocardial infarction. N Engl J Med. 1989;321(6):406-412.

7. Echt DS, Liebson PR, Mitchell LB, Peters RW, Obias-Manno D, Barker AH, et al. Mortality and morbidity in patients receiving encainide, flecainide, or placebo: the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial. N Engl J Med. 1991;324(12):781-788.

8. Van den Berghe G, Wouters P, Weekers F, Verwaest C, Bruyninckx F, Schetz M, et al. Intensive insulin therapy in critically ill patients. N Engl J Med. 2001;345(19):1359-1367.

9. NICE-SUGAR Study Investigators. Intensive versus conventional glucose control in critically ill patients. N Engl J Med. 2009;360(13):1283-1297.

10. Levine SA, Lown B. “Armchair” treatment of acute coronary thrombosis. JAMA. 1952;148(16):1365-1369.

11. Prasad V, Vandross A, Toomey C, Cheung M, Rho J, Quinn S, et al. A decade of reversal: an analysis of 146 contradicted medical practices. Mayo Clin Proc. 2013;88(8):790-798.

12. Herrera-Perez D, Haslam A, Crain T, Gill J, Livingston C, Kaestner V, et al. A comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in three medical journals reveals 396 medical reversals. eLife. 2019;8:e45183.

13. Chu DK, Akl EA, Duda S, Solo K, Yaacoub S, Schünemann HJ, et al. Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet. 2020;395(10242):1973-1987.

14. Duval D, Palmer JC, Tudge I, Pearce-Smith N, O’Connell E, Bennett A, et al. Long distance airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2: rapid systematic review. BMJ. 2022;377:e068743.

15. Bundgaard H, Bundgaard JS, Raaschou-Pedersen DET, von Buchwald C, Todsen T, Norsk JB, et al. Effectiveness of adding a mask recommendation to other public health measures to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection in Danish mask wearers: a randomized controlled trial. Ann Intern Med. 2021;174(3):335-343.

16. Abaluck J, Kwong LH, Styczynski A, Haque A, Kabir MA, Bates-Jefferys E, et al. Impact of community masking on COVID-19: a cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh. Science. 2022;375(6577):eabi9069.

17. Jefferson T, Dooley L, Ferroni E, Al-Ansary LA, van Driel ML, Bawazeer GA, et al. Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2023;1(1):CD006207.

18. Sackett DL, Rosenberg WMC, Gray JAM, Haynes RB, Richardson WS. Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. BMJ. 1996;312(7023):71-72.

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BY LUCIO EASTMAN

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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 2008that 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 that inculcate a suppression of self-control in which executive function cedes its autonomy to external sources of direction.”

The dominant political machine within this local culture treats every disagreement as unbelief, and every loss as someone else’s crime, while rejecting their own allies for thought crimes or worse: entertaining the opposition’s platform or positions.

Consider Jonah Wheeler, a local Democratic member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives from Peterborough, and one of the youngest state legislators in the country.

His “crime” is that he decided to research claims about sex and gender policy and found them lacking in evidentiary support. He voted for HB 148 (allowing facilities to separate by biological sex), HB 377 (banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors), and HB 712 (limiting most gender-affirming surgeries for minors).

For this, he became the out-group: a pariah. A write-in challenger materialized overnight for the recent primary. Jonah survived by 19 votes in a recount. Nineteen votes between a career of service and excommunication.

Apparently, some people who voted for Jonah cannot fathom that someone who worked the Bernie Sanders campaign, who interned with Rights & Democracy, who organized around education justice, and earned a John Lewis Youth Leadership Award—someone who sponsored bills on school funding and environmental protection and later start times—might actually look at evidence and conclude something different than the accepted narrative.

My distant cousin, Max Eastman, recognized this kind of behavior in his personal witnessing of the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, wherein he recorded a massive political movement projecting the wishes and moral will of the party onto the world instead of testing claims against evidence. It’s the assumption that the world has intentions and that history or morality is on your side. The same kind of “animistic thinking” that envelops our current news cycle.

“The crime of Socrates was deeper than disobedience to the laws of the state. It was disobedience to the laws of animistic thinking.”
~Max Eastman

Eastman knew the price firsthand. Once a celebrated voice of the American left, he looked honestly at what he’d seen in Russia and changed his mind. “When I came home from Europe in 1927 most of my old political friends refused to speak to me on the street,” he wrote. “I was a traitor, a renegade, a pariah, a veritable untouchable, so far as the communists were concerned.”

Jonah Wheeler committed the same unforgivable sin. The machine cannot tolerate cogs that develop self-awareness. This is the very same machine that ran throughout the Covid years. Having built the technical infrastructure for the Great Barrington Declaration, I recognize the pattern of excommunication intimately.

And the irony compounds further now that some of those same people who made Covid a regulatory and collective nightmare, and who now seek to unseat Jonah, also serve on an inclusion board in town.

The hypocrisy couldn’t be more naked.

Those who screamed furious condemnations of “Grandma killer!” and “Plague rat!” now craft sensitivity guidelines and safe-space policies. They lecture on the violence of marginalization while the memory still burns of how they treated the unvaccinated, the mask-hesitant, and the ones who asked too many questions.

I think people are beginning to wake up to this behavior coming from those who consider themselves the adults in the room. I know I am very grateful for the friends and neighbors who question these dark motives and personas. But I think there are many out there who still believe that they are doing the right thing.

If you find yourself shifting in your seat, wondering whether this might apply to you, regardless of where you call “home”…good. That discomfort is the beginning of honesty. However, memory is selective, and righteousness has a way of editing its own archives. So let me make a simple request.

Grab a mirror. Stare long and hard into it. No, really…keep gazing. Keep gazing until you see the machine reflected back at you, until you recognize the same reflex that cast out the questioning neighbor in 2020 is the same one now trying to primary a John Lewis Award winner over biology. The target changes. The mechanism doesn’t.

And Our Town keeps running, shedding cogs, wondering why the engine sounds wonky.

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BY ALAN CASSELS

View original article at Brownstone.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.”

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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.”

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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.

The Kale-Eating, 6 AM Jogger Effect, and the Placebo Effect

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.

The Hormone Replacement Disaster: A Cautionary Tale

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 protecting women’s hearts. But they were wrong.

Why were observational studies of HRT so wildly wrong? Healthy user bias.

Throughout the 80s and 90s studies on over 100,000 nurses allegedly showed that postmenopausal women who utilized HRT had a significantly lower risk of developing coronary heart disease compared to women who did not use hormone therapy. Because the study was large and followed women over a long period, these results were highly influential, convincing many in the medical community that HRT not only managed menopausal symptoms but also provided a protective, preventative benefit against cardiovascular disease. They claimed that HRT was a lifesaver.

Problem was, the women taking HRT in the 1980s and 90s were wealthier, exercised more, and had better healthcare access than women who didn’t. That was the entirety of the effect.

Thankfully for all of us, the US government funded the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI)—a massive Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT)—and that’s when the truth exploded. An RCT doesn’t just watch people; it flips a coin and randomly assigns half the women to take HRT and the other half to take a dummy pill (placebo). Randomization completely destroys healthy user bias because both groups end up with equal numbers of joggers, smokers, and couch potatoes.

The WHI trial results were staggering: HRT didn’t prevent heart attacks at all. In fact, it increased the risk of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and breast cancer. The “miracle drug” was actually harming women, and the observational “healthy user” illusion had blinded medicine for a generation.

Statins in Healthy People: The Mirage Continues

We see the exact same trick played today with cholesterol-lowering statin drugs in healthy people (“primary prevention”). Observational studies endlessly brag about how statin users do better but when independent groups—like the Therapeutics Initiative at the University of British Columbia—analyzed only randomized trials comparing statins to placebos in healthy people, the magic vanished. In fact, those same researchers found that statin users were less likely to be involved in motor vehicle accidents, an absurd conclusion that completely threw the statin hypothesis under the bus.

The RCT evidence proves that for otherwise healthy people with no history of heart disease, taking a daily statin provides no proven net health benefit—it does not reduce your overall chance of dying or ending up in the hospital. Yet millions of healthy adults swallow them daily because observational fluff and statistical sleight-of-hand convinced their doctors that a biomarker on a lab report equals staying alive longer.

The Bottom Line: Demand the Coin Flip

Observational studies are a superb playground for pharmaceutical public relations. They are fine for generating hypotheses, but useless for proving that a drug actually works.

Just last month a story in the New York Times claimed that Hormone Therapy reduced the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. To their credit they also added that it was observational research and comes with these sort of selection biases, such as healthy user bias. A NY Times headline is certainly good for the manufacturers of Alzheimer’s drugs, even if the research behind it was an observational study riddled with healthy user bias.

What’s the takeaway here? When a drug company or headline-hungry journalist tells you a certain long-term drug therapy will prevent disease, never let “healthy user” observational noise influence your decision. Always ask the million-dollar question: “Where is the randomized, placebo-controlled trial?”

A fairly done, randomized comparison strips away the healthy user illusion and tells you whether a drug is actually helping you—or just taking credit for your lifestyle while exposing you to unearned harms.

Until you see reliable RCT evidence, keep your sneakers on, eat your veggies, and treat observational drug claims with a strong and healthy dose of skepticism.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

Late last week, Brownstone Institute released a remarkable document. It grew out of a system called V-safe, started by the CDC, built by Oracle, and deployed in December 2020 to underscore how much the government really cared for our health. It would monitor vaccine safety in real time, person by person, and call to help people who experienced adverse events. The purpose of the system was actually to shore up confidence, and pretty much nothing else.

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More than 10 million people readily signed up to help the CDC in its monitoring efforts. These were the eager beavers who wanted the shot and were happy to help show how safe it was. They were contacted by the bot the next day, the next, the next week, and so on, up to a year. The form they received depended on the responses they gave.

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It was run by machines, not people. No one was reading, though people did not know this. The CDC did not want to release any of it but finally coughed up the check box results. They held onto the really grim stuff: the free text boxes that people filled out. Those had to be obtained by a FOIA issued by the Informed Consent Action Network, finally forced on the CDC by a federal judge.

These responses fell to an organization we support, React19, which assembled them into a document which we then typeset into a 1,048-page book. Warning: it makes for very difficult reading. These are real people, not just statistics. The suffering in these pages is tough to take.

We have used our media access to X to embark upon a full reading of the book live on air. It is taking time. Now 3 two-hours sessions in, with tens of thousands of views, we are only at page 127. This job is going to take weeks. It’s hard reading, dark night of the soul. But the content is uniquely powerful in a way that nothing else truly is.

We hear that the CDC is now panicked about this book and reading.

Good.

We are coming up to year-end fundraising. Please consider putting Brownstone in your list of worthy charities. Our existence and growth is funded entirely by our readers. We cannot count on legacy foundations – they never gave us permission to exist in the first place – nor will we ever accept government money. We eschew normal strategies in fundraising like digital trickery and expensive development offices. Instead, we simply trust that our readers back the work we do.

Tune in to other episodes of the Brownstone Show, including the latest with Rupert Darwall. The episodes are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise. Go to the Brownstone Show. You can also find our recent livestream episodes on X with “Cries for Help”, readings from released V-Safe data.

We now have all of the videos from Polyface available for viewing. You can see the entire playlist here: YouTube Playlist. And by the way, our follows on all platforms just hit new records. Our high website traffic is in the 0.01% of all sites.

We have out now a template for all nations of the world to leave the World Health Organization. The Right to Health Sovereignty is now available at Amazon. So is the technical report of this Brownstone-backed team. The coverage of this has been global. These two reports amount to heat-seeking missiles aimed right at the WHO.

See all our books, especially the latest Brownstone publication by Thomas Harrington, Staying Human in a Soul-Shredding Age.

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Here is some content since our last email.

New Clarity on the Creation of the Virus/Vaccine By Jim Haslam. U.S. Marine Major Joseph Murphy exposed 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.

Retraction of SIDS Paper Based on VAERS Analysis Five Years after Publication By Jessica Rose. 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.

Childhood Vaccine Schedules Across Countries By David Gortler. Trump appointees at the CDC, NIH, and FDA now have the chance to provide Americans with answers and be transparent. We finally have the opportunity to study and learn about the risks and benefits of the childhood vaccine schedule.

We Cannot Trust the CDC Estimates of Flu Vaccine Effectiveness By Eyal Shahar. 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.

Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe Data By React19. 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.

Why Observational Studies Lie to You By Alan Cassels. A fairly done, randomized comparison strips away the healthy user illusion and tells you whether a drug is actually helping you—or just taking credit for your lifestyle while exposing you to unearned harms.

Our Town Is Every Town By Lucio Eastman. It’s ironic that the town that inspired Grover’s Corners, 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.

The Treatment Was Worse Than the Disease By Joseph Varon. Washington’s doctors truly wanted to save him. They were trained, experienced, and sure that doing something was better than doing nothing. Now, more than 200 years later, we know that good intentions, common practice, and logical theories are not enough.

The Why of Food Emancipation By Jeffrey Tucker. Anyone can pontificate in peer-reviewed venues. To show how it is done is another matter. Salatin’s farm is an inspiration that would make even Jefferson blush. He and his farm are national treasures, and this book can be added to his legacy.

Never Trust Uncle Sam on Drugs By James Bovard. Generations of politicians and bureaucrats scorned the scientific evidence on marijuana to score “tough on crime” points. More than ten million Americans were arrested for marijuana to help prop up Washington’s campaign to demonize weed and anyone who touched it.

Time to Retire Slurs By Alan Cassels. Science—and society—benefit when people can ask questions without fearing character assassination. Real inquiry demands curiosity and courage. We need a much higher willingness to tolerate ambiguity, withstand criticism, and focus on the idea, not the person.

The Commodified Self and the Designed Collapse of Generation Z By Renaud Beauchard. Valentin has shown what a culture does to its young when it translates every sorrow into a diagnosis and every duty into a trauma. The rest is transmission: the slow work of teaching the next child that she is not a brand.

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BY REACT19

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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.

V-Safe Audit Cries For Help React19

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BY PAUL THACKER

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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.

Leveraging Investments

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 companies through an FNIH grant, were in frequent contact with the alcohol industry while designing a study that seemed predetermined to find alcohol’s benefits but not potential harms, such as cancer. The NIH also declined money in 2018 from drugmakers to support a proposed $400 million research program to discover opioid alternatives and addiction treatments. Like the alcohol funds, that drugmaker money would have also been routed through the FNIH.

Major Grants to Government

In 2003, the Gates Foundation donated $200 million to the FNIH to fund NIH scientific programs, an unprecedented sum. Rice University researchers warned in 2008 that this Gates cash was shifting the NIH’s scientific priorities, even though the money was cycled through the FNIH. While FNIH manages and administers Gates money, they said, the Gates Foundation’s scientific board ultimately “oversees and selects the projects to be funded” at the NIH

After Gates gave an NIH lecture in 2013, NIH documents show that the agency began hosting Gates-NIH Workshops, eventually synchronizing federal research programs with Gates, to include coordinating grant funding and science policies across 10 NIH programs.

“Bill Gates, along with the NIH, the Wellcome Trust, it was this cartel,” the whistleblower, a former NIH official who requested anonymity, told RCI. “This is a globalist movement. And that’s something that I don’t think the public knows.”

The Gates Foundation held its second annual meeting with the NIH in July 2105, with both sides proposing new areas of teamwork, and later agreeing to cooperate on funding and research policies for global health. One area of overlap was the West African Ebola outbreaks. To align the Gates Foundation’s Ebola research with the federal agency, Gates routed money through the FNIH so that NIH employees could hire the McKinsey consulting firm.

According to the NIH’s summary of the 2015 workshop, McKinsey’s study of the Ebola field found 20 therapeutics, eight diagnostics, and eight different vaccines, concluding that the Merck and GSK vaccines were the most advanced.

At no point in the several dozen emails and documents provided to RCI did NIH officials appear to raise any concerns about conflicts of interest regarding their work with Gates, nor the hiring of McKinsey to shape federal research and development policies. McKinsey is a global consulting firm whose clients include dozens of foreign governments and some of the world’s largest corporations.

House Democrats released an April 2022 investigation that documented McKinsey’s conflicts of interest during the opioid epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans, finding that McKinsey provided consulting advice to both Purdue Pharma and the Food and Drug Administration from 2008 to 2019. In one example, the report surfaced emails with McKinsey employees congratulating themselves for influencing a 2018 speech on opioid safety by then-FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

When Congress brought McKinsey managing partner Bob Sternfels before cameras during a 2022 public hearing, he alleged that his firm did not have a conflict of interestwhen it gave simultaneous advice to both OxyContin’s manufacturer and the government agency that regulated OxyContin. Two years later, McKinsey paid a $650 million fine to resolve a criminal and civil investigation into the firm’s consulting work with Purdue Pharma.

“The NIH and BMGF have had a long history of interaction, particularly with respect to vaccines and drugs,” reads the NIH summary of the 2015 Gates-NIH meeting.

A longtime NIH official said that the agency’s leadership initially held Gates at arm’s length, but eventually gave in. “They were very suspicious at first,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “But they got caught up in, ‘Wow, he’s the richest man in the world!”

The NIH official added, “What I saw, which really, I think, extends until this day, is a complete merging of NIH and Gates. And I’ve never seen that written anywhere. I don’t think people realize this incredible symbiotic relationship.”

Bill Gates Is Coming!

Bill Gates added a bit of splendor to the Gates-NIH workshop series when he made his first personal appearance at the April 2016 meeting. As part of the meticulous planning for the event, NIH Director Francis Collins held a 45-minute teleconference10 days prior to hash out the meeting’s details with Trevor Mundel, a former pharmaceutical executive in charge of global health at the Gates Foundation.

According to a list of key “milestones and accomplishments” sent at the time to Collins, the Gates Foundation was by then firmly entwined within the NIH ecosystem to include dual workshops, joint clinical trials, combined research policies, and collaborative funding efforts. For example, NIH staff and Gates employees worked together on clinical trials for TB treatment in Africa. Both Gates and NIH employees also began a joint study for TB with support from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

The night before the meeting, the NIH held a reception and a catered dinner, paid by the FNIH, for almost two dozen Gates executives at the Cloisters Mansion, a historic, stone castle in rural Maryland, where actor Will Smith married actress Jada Pinkett.

Emails show that the NIH continued scrambling that night to lock down the arrival of other attendees, which included Obama officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf.

To provide Bill Gates a luxury experience, NIH staff prepared Collins – a Nobel Prize-winning scientist – a minute-by-minute itinerary for the arrival of Gates and his retinue the following morning. NIH police were ordered to greet Bill at the facility’s entrance and then escort the billionaire’s three-vehicle convoy the final half mile to one of the main research centers, where the Director lingered in waiting. Such deference to power, said a senior Trump official when reading the Collins itinerary over the phone, is normally reserved for the president, first lady, or visiting dignitaries of state.

“Dr. Collins will meet Bill Gates after he exits the car and steps inside of the building,” the itinerary read. After posing for a photo, Collins was bidden to escort the billionaire into the main auditorium and welcome the audience for Gates.

The agenda shows Collins and Gates Foundation’s Trevor Mundel gave a joint introduction before stepping aside for Bill Gates’s opening speech. Moderated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who would later lead the U.S. medical response to COVID, the first panel included a mix of NIH and Gates executives discussing microbial outbreaks and public-private partnerships to develop pandemic-preventive vaccines.

Collins then moderated a panel on “Research on Engineered Gene Drives and Vector-Borne Disease Control: Status and Next Direction.” Gene drive technology involves inserting specific genetic traits to spread rapidly throughout a population. Gates has long been a fan of gene drives to control mosquitoes, but the technology is highly controversial as it could also drive species to extinction and irrevocably alter ecosystems. The NIH’s scientific program to control mosquitoes with genetic technology was apparently started with seed money from Gates in 2003.

Beginning in 2012, a Bill Gates-funded nonprofit called Target Malaria began a gene drive technology study to eradicate malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in Burkina Faso. Last August, Burkina Faso’s government suspended Target Malaria’s project over safety concerns and worries about the excessive influence of Bill Gates on the country’s sovereignty.

Gates only stayed the morning of the 2016 meeting and left before lunch. “Bill Gates is escorted, by Dr. Collins, out of the building through the same hallway he entered,” reads Collins’ itinerary. “NIH Police escort Mr. Gates and staff to the exit gate.”

The meeting ended with a wrap-up and review of next steps, led by Collins and a Gates executive.

Later that year, the FNIH honored the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Pfizer with an award for supporting the NIH’s mission. Gates was recognized for $413 million dollars in donations and Pfizer for $73 million. In a press release announcing the honor, the NIH said, “Their gifts created cornerstone programs and paved the way for our partnerships with literally hundreds of other organizations dedicated to driving biomedical research worldwide.”

The FNIH continues to maintain close ties to pharmaceutical interests, a major NIH funder. The current CEO, Julie Gerberding, came to the FNIH during the COVID pandemic, having previously served as President of Merck Vaccines.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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BY RENAUD BEAUCHARD

View original article at Brownstone.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.

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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.

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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.

The Brand Called Girlhood

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 product line to transform mental health into a market worth billions of dollars with influencers, therapy apps such as Better Help, and medication companies all profiting from girls’ pain.

Documented is the description of a life lived under the dual yoke of social status and popularity and how young girls of Freya India’s generation became “the most documented generation in history.” Disconnectedand Detached are the social and erotic aftermath: simulated friendship, simulated sex, a generation loud about self-love and body positivity that is also driving demand for eating-disorder clinics and cosmetic procedures. “Empowered,” in quotation marks, is the slogan that closes the trap. A girl who is told that the future is female, that she can be anything, that her feelings are sacred, discovers that she is anxious, risk-averse, and afraid of the future. The industries that congratulated her will happily treat her fears.

The strength of India’s argument is that she will not flatter her generation and will not sneer at it. She knows what her generation has lost. She knows that the old anxieties of looks, status, friendship, and romantic love did not begin with a feed. What started with Facetune and Snapchat’s Lenses, however, was the intensification of these anxieties to a point that no character can bear, and their capture by firms that profit from the impossibility of ever being whole. Coming of age was always hard, but it was nothing like growing up in an algorithmic marketplace that made interior life the last frontier of what can be harvested and turned into a business model. Some of her descriptions of that form of existence are deeply moving:

“My generation never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never got to experience a first kiss or hold hands with a boy before watching Pornhub. We never knew flirting before it became sending Instagram DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it meant keeping up Snapstreaks and using each other like props to look popular online.

And freedom—we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily, to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear they would be posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while, without the pressure of read receipts and active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.”

Three essential things have been lost for her generation:

(1) a sense of belonging, of rootedness, of community lived as something bigger than ourselves;

(2) a sense of moral guidance. In the past, she writes, “guidance came from families, communities, religious leaders, shared values, and cultural traditions. Much of that has now fallen away. Now it feels as if the world is moving too fast for wisdom, and so adults have largely stepped back[…] And when adults stepped back, companies stepped in.”

And (3) ourselves. Relentless commodification, she writes, leads to “confusion about who we are, what we want, and what would make us happy – a confusion corporations are waiting to exploit […] The things we have lost are the things that make us human.”

The Program Succeeded

Valentin starts from the same wreckage and refuses the medical monopoly on its meaning. He is careful to avoid a triple methodological error: the adult “youngism” that glorifies whatever comes from the young; the wholesale adult critique that is merely the inverse of that piety; and the young’s own youngism, which mistakes youth for a bearer of revealed truth.

His generation, he writes, suffers from “a crisis of meaning […], which originates in the fact that we have renounced defining ourselves as a collectivity with a common project to view ourselves as an aggregate of individuals that nothing binds together, except maybe interest.”

In other words, he continues, “the mental health crisis is not an accident within a process; it is the consequence of the full application of our anthropological choices. The program succeeded, and the youth is failing.”

If the crisis were only psychiatric, the explosion of therapists, awareness campaigns, diagnostic categories and prescriptions would by now have bent the curve. Far from it. One of the sharp breaks in the data falls in the first half of the 2010s, the same years in which young Americans began agreeing in large numbers that life often seems meaningless. For reference, Snapchat launched in 2011, TikTok in 2016, and Discord in 2015.

For sure, phones mattered in this drama. Covid too. But Valentin argues that these shocks aggravated dynamics already at work: an individualism degraded to a solipsism that dissolves the bonds that once held a person together, a future that no longer invites projection, an ideological militancy that isolates its own believers, and a therapeutic culture that treats ordinary moral life as a clinical problem. All this, he insists, feeds a culture of survivalism, where “everyday life patterns itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity,” as Christopher Lasch wrote.

That last point is where Lasch precisely enters, and where India and Valentin’s arguments merge into one.

Three Parties of the Psyche

Valentin’s ingenious move is to build his argument on Lasch’s attempt to redefine the political landscape through the psychoanalytical categories of the superego, the rational self, and the ego ideal. In The Minimal Self, Lasch argued that the old left-right map no longer accurately described the country’s deep sources of disagreement. Instead, he distinguished three parties that were organizing themselves around the three psychoanalytical concepts describing the human psyche.

The party of the superego sees the modern disorder as the result of a collapse of inhibitions and internalized authority. Its remedy is the recovery of limits, of taboos, of a conscience able to refuse impulse. Though it can overlap with the contemporary right, this party should not be confused with it. Many conservatives, whom I would call paleo-liberals, have a very poor understanding of the superego; they want the freedom of the consumer and, when that freedom produces chaos, they have no qualms about reaching for the coercion of the state.

The party of the ego, the rational self, sees the problem as insufficient adjustment. Its remedy is a stronger coping apparatus: therapy as training in competence, the well-managed individual who treats feeling as a risk to be optimized. This matches quite clearly the technocratic ethos and the promethean technological impulse.

The party of the ego ideal, which Lasch called the party of Narcissus, sees the problem as repression. Its remedy is liberation from the forbidding parent and identification with idealized images of boundless self-realization. Historically, this was the gospel of the cultural left and the Neo-Freudian revolt against guilt. In practice it did not produce freedom. It produced a punitive gap between the grandiose image of what the self should be and the depleted self that actually must reside in this world.

Generation Z, argues Valentin, was raised after the party of a human and mature superego had already lost the contest, or more accurately abdicated, inside a culture that fused the other two parties into a single machine. The therapeutic rational self and the commodified ego ideal now operate together to cement a weak personality, which Lasch called the minimal self, characterized by an unhealthy obsession with one’s psychic comfort. Obviously, Lasch died in 1994, i.e. three years before the first cohort of Gen Z, so this evolution predated Gen Z, but that is when the process reached a stage near completion.

In this arrangement, writes Valentin, the rational self is not the old liberal ego of delayed gratification and empirical testing. It is the app-mediated self that tracks mood, diagnoses itself from a carousel of labels, performs for an audience, and treats other people as bacteriological risks. Following Lasch, Valentin describes the therapeutic paradigm with aching accuracy.

It sacralizes the patient’s feeling. It treats moral judgment as violence. It discredits authority as such. It frees the person of the burden of responsibility while exercising a very punitive paternalism it will not name. It is especially powerful in the Anglo-Protestant countries where 19^th century Protestant liberal religion made it a more fertile ground, explaining why the therapeutic culture that translates civic life into “mental health” has gone the furthest in the US. But it is catching up fast in zombie Catholic cultures like France and the rise of therapeutic morality is probably one of the deepest trends of the Americanization of European society.

India shows the commercial face of the same ego. Therapy is no longer a rare and costly conversation. It is a subscription, a chatbot, a same-day prescription, a content genre. Diagnosis is not the beginning of a difficult inquiry into a life. It is a brand affiliation. The girl in her chapter Diagnosed and the patient in the waiting room are the same figure seen from two angles: she is a person invited to experience her soul as a condition requiring management.

Products and the Womb

The ego ideal has undergone parallel degradation. In a healthy formation, it is demanding and humanizing. It is the internalized image of a parent, a teacher, a saint, a king, a mentor: someone the young person can identify with and view as a protector and a model. What India documents is a fluctuating role model which can be purchased by the hour. Filters, routines, “that girl” aesthetics, the sexual script downloaded from pornography, the political persona that must never be impure: these are not models of adulthood. They are a recipe for the worst kind of restlessness, one of a self that can never be content, bombarded with contradictory injunctions by electronic signals.

Valentin’s harsher formula is that the implicit ideal of his generation is the oceanic contentment of life in the womb. Gen Z’s survivalist imagination is fashioned by the metaphor of the cocoon, the den, the delivery app, the climate-controlled interior, with the outside perceived as contamination. These are not merely lifestyle facts. They are a regression of the ego ideal into the womb, from becoming this kind of adult to never having to be born into friction.

The counterpart of the womb experience is a paranoid exterior, a neo-Hobbesian sense that the street, the workplace, the unvetted other, and the unscripted future are threats to be managed rather than a world to be entered. India watches girls becoming products. Valentin watches a generation refusing to be born.

Shame without a Law

Meanwhile, the superego did not disappear. It morphed into something archaic, distant, and blindly punitive. As Lasch wrote, in a quote partly reproduced in Valentin’s book, the modern man who faces the world without fathers “imagines a remote, vindictive father and comes to see the world as starkly divided between power and impotence […] Psychologically, he remains in important ways a child, surrounded by authorities with whom he does not identify and whose authority he does not regard as legitimate. Their only importance to him is that they represent raw superior force which is capable of thwarting his wishes.”

“If he bows to these authorities,” continues Lasch, “it is only because he fears retribution.” Finally, he concludes, “he may harbor dreams of revenge, the most prevalent form of which, perhaps, is the fantasy of a general uprising of the young.”

In this landscape, shame is no longer the voice that says you have offended a law you can name. It is the voice that says you have failed the brand. That is why a culture of extreme private permission produces extreme public moral terrorism, on a scale that only the State can carry out. Here again, Valentin quotes Lasch: “The only alternative to the superego […] is the super-state.”

The Victorian father is gone. In his place are a much more punitive feed that never sleeps and a strange predilection among Gen Z to call for the mediation of the State every time their psychic comfort is disturbed. This can take several unhealthy forms, such as a widespread recourse to denunciation, and the rise of what Valentin calls “cocomplotisme,” which can be translated as cocoonspirationism, or the tendency to believe in wild conspiracies as a means of survival in a society unintelligible to young men and women.

In a chapter entitled “Ideological Activism and Malaise,” Valentin analyzes the deep correlation between ideological radicalization, particularly on the far left, and the rise of mental troubles. The reason political ideology rushes into all corners of existence is that thicker languages have receded. Valentin notes the spiritual restlessness of the same young people who fill the clinics. Those who practice a religion are, on average, better protected, not because piety is a wellness hack but because gratitude and obligation pull a person out of the mirror.

However, when the Christian matrix thins, politics and medicine rush in to fill the old offices of sin, grace, and community. And they are no substitute for them. Grand explanations that make the person feel irrelevant or historically superfluous in a drama in which they play no part tend to push the young toward alienating ideologies. Borderline cultish groups that police speech supply belonging at the price of reality. India’s female online world is the intimate version of the same substitution: it mistakes trauma for content, reputation management for morals, politics for a home.

Transmission

Held together, these two books defy polite discussions and become subversive. The crisis is not solved by chemical compounds and better access to the same paradigm that helped produce it. It is not solved by a more inclusive feed or by teaching girls to love the brand. It is not solved by explaining every private failure as the work of a System and every private wound as a trauma that exempts. Those are the remedies of the fused parties of the rational self and the ego ideal. They have had a long run, but the curves are not bending.

What, then, would it mean to take Lasch’s third neglected agency seriously again, without turning the attempt into a dumb incantation for the return of order? That’s what India and Valentin attempt to articulate, humbly and often in a very moving way.

It would mean admitting that love without authority does not make a conscience, nor, for that matter, does authority without love lead anywhere. India’s generation was often parented by adults proud of their suspicion of religion, custom, and the right to forbid. Valentin’s generation inherited a family recoded as a private association of equals for affective flourishing. The family in the form of an “autarkic bunker” for sentiments can be somewhat tender, but as Lasch wrote in his 1977 book, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, it is poorly equipped to transmit a world…and very susceptible to being invaded by experts. A child can be endlessly validated and still remain uninitiated. The phone then does what a weak adult world no longer does: it provides the gaze, the rule, the ideal, and the punishment, without an ounce of humanity.

Meeting that challenge seriously would also mean admitting that freedom without form is not a gift to the young. Both Valentin and India lean on the paradox of choice. Beyond a threshold, options cease to emancipate and begin to exhaust. India’s girls can theoretically be anything and therefore cannot bear the risk of being something. The sex recession beside ubiquitous pornography, the terror of motherhood beside a cult of autonomy, the inability to imagine a future except as climate or war or collapse: these are not signs of a generation in need of ever more permission. They are signs of a generation that was denied the dignifying constraint of true adults.

It would mean treating transmission as a political problem in the old sense: the handing on of practices that make the self whole. This would in passing validate the most important issue raised by the New Left: that the personal is, indeed, political. A generation sealed in the womb will not be lectured into the street. It will need work that is not a personal brand, worship that is not a vibe, friendship that involves more than a follow click, and, above all, adults willing to be disliked. India’s closing instinct points this way.

India does not offer a five-point plan. She points toward community that is not an audience and toward faith in something that cannot be monetized or, taken from one of her recent articles on the commodification of Christianity, that is not “another thing to do on my phone.” That will sound hollow to paleo-liberal boomers who think you can solve anything with tepid policies and legislation such as age verification or TikTok’s restructuring. These issues are deeply personal, and you can’t legislate the interior life or treat it with policy papers. It requires the reconstruction of forms of life that corporations and the clinic have replaced and rendered strange. That task is going to require a lot more than an army of overeducated policy wonks.

A generation was taught to experience itself as a product, a patient, and a profile. The way out is not a kinder product, a more affirming patienthood, or a more authentic profile. It is the recovery of a soul and a body that are not for sale, and of the unfashionable agencies, including the superego as something other than the mere incantation of a lost order or utilitarian calls for the comeback of Christian faith. Freya India has shown what the market did to girls when it was given the mirror.

Valentin has shown what a culture does to its young when it translates every sorrow into a diagnosis and every duty into a trauma. The rest is transmission: the slow, unprofitable work of teaching the next child that she is not a brand, that he is not a case, and that the world outside the womb, though it will not flatter them, is, alas, the only place where one can lead a human life. And who knows, maybe even a good one.

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