BY JOEL SALATIN

View original article at Brownstone.org.

People are emailing right and left about this proposed Executive Order from President Trump giving farmers and ranchers the right to process their animals on their own properties for their consumption. Duh, that is already legal.

What is NOT legal is doing this and SELLING the meat. Be assured that this whole thing has been conceived as an olive branch after the 300,000 metric ton below-market (subsidized?) tariff-free import of ground beef product (what’s with the “product?”) for 90 days, coinciding with the midterm elections.

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It’s not just about red tape. It’s about rights. Secretary Rollins doesn’t seem to understand this either.

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It appears Trump has alienated almost every person who thinks and has set up the Republican Party for a shellacking this November. The below-market import of ground beef product created a firestorm among Trump’s base–rural Americans, and this idea to ease restrictions on processing is just the latest in a string of finger-in-the-wind reactions to hold onto political equity.

I have news for him: he’s shot his political equity by doing the opposite of nearly everything he campaigned on. Remember the Bush “Read my lips, no new taxes?”

Secretary of Ag. Brooke Rollins responded with her checklist to implement the executive order, which may come out soon.

Here is my interpretation:

1. Waiving red tape in processing. If Tyson wants to build a new processing plant, they can get it done easier and quicker than ever.

2. Expanding ranchers’ ability to sell across state lines. Under state inspection, a steak in Virginia can’t be sold in Maryland–but state inspection must be “equal to” federal, so this is no big deal.

3. Rescinding outdated guidance. Replacing paperwork with digital work.

4. Adding technology for faster safety data. Resurrection of mandatory Radio Frequency Identification tracking on all livestock. Now is the opportunity to push it through.

5. Growing real support for small processors (funding and deregulation). Grant programs so more pseudo-entrepreneurs who love to write grants and fill out federal paperwork can bilk taxpayers out of more money to open plants run by people who don’t know squat and go bankrupt in five years.
   It’s happened over and over already; we don’t need money; we need freedom. All grant programs attract people who like to write grants instead of rolling up their sleeves and doing things. Sorry for the rant.

6. Fighting consolidation so small processors can compete. Make it easier to transfer title from small processors to large ones, giving the appearance of preserving small outfits, but actually further concentrating ownership in the Big Four.

7. Expanding truth in labeling. Make it more difficult to put “grass finished” on a label, or saying anything that tries to differentiate it from vaccinated, hormone-added, chemical-laden, toxic industrial fare.

Here is what everyone must understand: Brooke Rollins will not invite me to the room where this Executive Order is written. In that room will be at least one representative from each of the Big Four beef processors. They will use this moment to further protect their interests and increase their stranglehold on the beef industry.

This whole drama is not about freedom; it is about a president and political party that has completely lost its bearings and is gasping for something that will give it breath.

Why can’t they just say “We’re going full force to pass Congressman Thomas Massie’s PRIME Act?” It’s already written. It already has 60 bipartisan sponsors. It’s easy. But no, Trump hates Massie with a passion and therefore will bungle this by making it complicated, subjective, and easy to overturn in two years. Who would invest in a processing facility on the strength of an Executive Order that can be reversed in two years? Only a dimwit who writes grants. Sheesh.

Are you happy about the ground beef product import dump?

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BY JEFFREY TUCKER

View original article at Brownstone.org.

The latest Fauci-focused document tranche released by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) contains a surprising nugget buried as part of a CIA report. On May 7, 2020, CIA Chief Operating Officer Andy Makridis led a briefing with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner then a board member of Pfizer. He also served on the CIA’s External Advisory Board. The agency produced its own summary of the meeting.

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Deep in the report we find the following:

In text:

On “herd immunity” Dr. Gottlieb discounts the 2 major studies from Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties showing high seroprevalence. He believes nationally, the seroprevalence is about 20-25% which is insufficient for herd immunity at the R₀ (BRR) value of 3.

Let us review the implications.

The Santa Clara study from April 2020 by Jay Bhattacharya found a 2.8% seroprevalence level. It was far higher than the existing estimates. He was denounced and hounded for daring to say what we know now: the infection fatality rate was very low and prevalence was very high. The implication: we would get through this with no great disruption necessary.

The attacks on the study were brutal but he was just doing science at a time when few others were making sense. Even BuzzFeed, a reliable venue for deep-state actors, slammed Jay and insinuated corruption.

Now, in this new release, we find Gottlieb telling the CIA that the virus spread is far higher than most anyone believed at the time. If the R-naught is 3, that means every one person would infect three more, which, according to the math, would mean a herd immunity level of 67 percent. At that rate of spread and resulting immunity, pandemic conditions would turn endemic in a matter of weeks, certainly by the end of summer if not sooner, all else equal.

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But that is not what Gottlieb was saying in public. On April 17, 2020, he tweeted that the rate nationally was 5% while positing that Santa Clara was an outlying “hot spot.”

Then three and a half months later, on CBS News, Gottlieb opined that the seroprevalence rate was only 8% nationally.

Why the massive difference between what he was telling the CIA privately so early in the pandemic versus what he was saying publicly at the same time and continued to say even after the summer months?

There are three possible answers:

1. Scott Gottlieb was woefully misinformed, misspoke, or had no idea what he was talking about.

2. The CIA copied down his words incorrectly.

3. He lied to prolong suffering from lockdowns as long as possible in hopes of profitably testing a new vaccine platform.

Let us now theorize.

The Fauci diaries strongly suggest that an entire class of scientists, pundits, and officials were united in a grand scheme to delay seroprevalence for as long as possible to 1) create a need for the injections by preserving immunological naiveté of the population, and 2) slow down mutations that would inevitably make the shots inefficacious to whatever new mutation would appear by the time of release.

This was likely the whole point of “Flatten the curve” and “Slow the spread.” It was to delay the solution and prolong the pain. It certainly wasn’t for the health of the population. Just the opposite.

That’s a dark conclusion from reading them but it remains the best explanation for why officials enacted brutal lockdowns that wrecked businesses, closed schools, isolated vast swaths of the population, violated religious liberty, and ended freedom of association. Labor participation rates have never fully recovered and continue to fall. Disability rates keep hitting new highs.

This new piece of evidence darkens the picture even more. It suggests that Gottlieb and the CIA believed from the first week of May 2020 that the virus spread was very high, the fatality rate quite low, and the march toward herd immunity was happening far faster than anyone knew.

This is what they said privately, not what they said publicly. In private, they could have been receiving reports from South Dakota that population antibody levels were reaching 20-25% in May following a large outbreak in April. They may have had other reports that said the same and hence Gottlieb’s blunt statement to the CIA.

This report had been held as a classified document for more than six years until Senator Paul released it on August 29, 2026. Before then, it had remained a speculation that the CIA had withheld information in order to prolong the pandemic and prepare the population for an experimental injection while keeping everyone locked.

Recall that it was Gottlieb who first counseled the Trump administration to lock down as hard as possible, presumably on March 14, 2020, when Jared Kushner first called him on the phone.

When we called Gottlieb, he was grateful that we were preparing guidelines. “They should go a little bit further than you are comfortable with,” he said. “When you feel like you are doing more than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”

Seven weeks later, the same man reported to the CIA in private that we were well on the way toward herd immunity with 20-25% seroprevalence level despite hard lockdowns. The experiment in slowing the spread had already failed. They could not say that publicly because there was money to be made, many institutions and states were experiencing a windfall from stimulus, and a new platform technology needed to be tested on the population.

Among the vast evidence that has come out, and despite its seeming technicalities, this surely ranks among the top data points revealing the fullness of the sadistic state. Many more actors were involved other than pharma and public health – big business liked shutting down small ones, online retailers liked receiving stimulus payments, digital companies appreciated developing new censorship tools, politicians liked spending money, and big banks appreciated the infusion of funds.

What this reveals about the ruling class generally speaking is difficult to contemplate.

2026

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

If you have time, please watch our interview with virologist Richard K. Burt, formerly of Northwestern University. He tells of his personal history of knowing with near certainty that the Covid virus was manufactured. It had all the signs and the contracts that made it possible were all public. He knew from January 2020. He tried to alert the media. Silence followed.

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Dr. Burt provides the clearest explanation we’ve yet seen, which he also lays out in a new book.

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The implications of this entire scenario are profound. We have a bioweapons industry that has been hacking the microbial kingdom. The major media, ruled by revenue streams from pharmaceutical companies that benefit from this, know not to say anything about it and pretend it doesn’t exist. The profession of virology and epidemiology is also captured into silence.

Realizing the scale of this creates a genuine shift in one’s understanding. Good people have done their best to put an end to these dangerous experiments but it is unclear whether and to what extent they have had success.

This is an extremely serious matter. The word existential is overused but it literally applies in this case. Meanwhile, the pharma industry stands ready with more injections, more potions, more pills, more costly and patented therapies.

We can see how this is all unfolding as a political split. Some people within the Trump administration want to put an end to this madness. They face an uphill battle.

Because Brownstone has been and remains at the forefront of these issues, we truly need your support right now. Please join us. The cause of freedom and health needs your commitment today. Our low amount of spending on development means that what you contribute goes to programs that matter.

The Brownstone Show is thriving. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest with Patrick Newman. The episodes are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise. Stay tuned for live-streamed shows with Jeffrey Tucker on X, starting with the first one on September 3rd.

Go to the Brownstone Show.

Polyface videos are coming. We have Joel Salatin’s keynote and Jeffrey Tucker’s keynote available for viewing now, and Robert Malone’s talk as well.

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.

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

• September 10, 2026 — Brownstone Utah Supper Club: Ryan Cole — Get tickets

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Here is some content since our last email.

The Fairy Tales of Empire By Toby Rogers. The violence and exploitation that used to be directed from the First World outward to the periphery in the Third World is now directed inward toward enslaving the middle class in the US and Europe via iatrogenic illness.

September 9th Is International Falsely Accused Day By Wendy McElroy. Lies and mistakes in the application of justice harm men, women, and children who deserve to grow up in a just society. On September 9, celebrate the better future offered by International Falsely Accused Day.

More Access. More Choice. Less Cost. By Margaret Hampton. Secretary Kennedy is right to question the cost and power of the American Medical Association’s Current Procedural Terminology monopoly. But eliminating CPT would solve the wrong problem—and could create a much larger one.

Saving Lives Should Not Require Permission By Joseph Varon. Will we repeat actions simply because the correct institution has ordered them? The Humane Societies asked whether the apparently dead could be resuscitated. Our question is now more unsettling: can medicine recover its courage before its conscience is gone?

Pfizer and the CIA Privately Cited High Population Immunity in May 2020, Unclassified Document Reveals By Jeffrey Tucker. The latest Fauci-focused document tranche released by Senator Rand Paul contains a surprising nugget buried as part of a CIA report. On May 7, 2020, CIA Chief Operating Officer Andy Makridis led a briefing with Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

Human Rights in the Post-Pandemic Era By Michael Tomlinson. Any decision to override the fundamental rights of populations should be resisted and at a minimum must be robust and defensible. It should not rest on the basis of opinion, especially opinion that can be controverted.

A Nothing Burger By Joel Salatin. People are emailing right and left about this proposed Executive Order from President Trump giving farmers and ranchers the right to process their animals on their own properties for their consumption. Duh, that is already legal.

Beware of Starship Captains Who Bear Gift Cards By Sofia Karstens. Next time you see one of those scammy Medicare ads, write to your elected officials and demand that brokers present all options to the seniors that they serve and abide by the same fiduciary standard as if they were recommending financial investments.

The Herd Immunity Fallacy By Jennifer Smith. Even under idealized assumptions of highly effective or “sterilizing” immunity, maintaining herd immunity in practice is complicated by continual population turnover, global migration, and the ease of international travel, all of which allow for repeated reintroduction of pathogens into communities.

Does the Flu Vaccine Prevent Death? By Eyal Shahar. My letter is concerned with the effect of the flu vaccine on flu-related death. That’s the ultimate endpoint of interest for vaccine effectiveness (VE) research, yet it is not captured in most studies that employ the test-negative design.

America’s Drug Shortage Is a National Security Crisis By Joseph Varon. A nation that cannot supply its hospitals with essential medicines is not merely experiencing an inconvenient drug shortage. It has discovered a strategic vulnerability, and the next time that vulnerability is exposed may be precisely when we can least afford it.

Game Theory and the Push to Go Along By Brownstone Institute. The final kill switch is transparent noncoerced consent. Instead of taking “a share of the loot” from the drug-DOPE game, we need our universities, the National Institutes of Health, and our medical system to enshrine the principle of non-coerced consent.

Four Forms of Numericide By Alan Cassels. Four targets — blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, four ways to medicalize you, four ways to apply a disease-mongered label to you, and four avenues for you to start living under a dark cloud.

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BY FORREST MAREADY

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Abstract

The prevailing understanding of poliovirus pathogenesis posits that the virus, following intestinal infection, gains access to the central nervous system (CNS) through viremia and subsequent crossing of the blood-brain barrier (BBB). However, this model fails to adequately explain several key epidemiological and clinical features of the historical polio epidemic, including the localized nature of paralysis, the disproportionate involvement of the lower limbs, the increased susceptibility of young children, and the striking predilection for anterior (motor) neuronal damage while simultaneously sparing posterior (sensory) spinal cord structures.

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We propose an alternative, multi-hit hypothesis in which environmental factors, particularly exposure to neurotoxic pesticides such as lead arsenate and DDT—coupled with anatomical factors, such as the proximity of spinal cord and intestines in children—play a critical role in increasing susceptibility to paralytic polio. In this model, pesticide-induced disruption of the intestinal barrier allows poliovirus to enter the intestinal lymphatic system, bypassing the need for systemic dissemination and BBB crossing.

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The virus is then transported through lymphatic vessels to areas near the spinal cord, where it can directly infect motor neurons or undergo retrograde axonal transport from nerve endings. This localized access, coupled with potential pesticide-induced neurotoxicity, viral replication, and immune dysregulation, may contribute to the development of paralytic disease, selectively targeting anterior horn motor neurons near the base of the spinal cord.

The data presented in this overview indicates the need for research that considers multi-causal factors when it comes to understanding the history and effects of this illness. We propose that it is of the utmost importance to explore the role of environmental toxins in the development of paralysis, and to consider alternative avenues for intervention and prevention beyond poliovirus eradication alone.

Background

Poliomyelitis, more commonly known as polio, is an enteroviral infection caused by the poliovirus which sometimes causes inflammation within the grey matter of the spinal cord, a condition which can lead to muscle weakness, paralysis, and in extreme cases, death. Without proper muscle function, the limbs of affected patients can wither and become deformed, leading to severe handicap. If paralysis reaches the muscles that control respiration, unassisted breathing becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Most commonly occurring in children, the condition appears in medical literature throughout history, albeit sporadically. In the late 1800s, polio began appearing in what was called “epidemic form.” Rather than isolated cases, numerous groups of children began exhibiting signs of polio—the first formal documentation of which is said to have occurred in Rutland, Vermont in 1894, although that outbreak was preceded by a smaller, lesser-known cluster of 26 cases in Boston in 1893. Over the next few decades, epidemic polio spread around the country, initially constrained to rural areas but eventually making its way into urban locations—the 1916 outbreak in New York City considered the most dramatic.

Epidemic polio experienced a second wave shortly after World War Two, a dramatic event culminating with the successful introduction of the inactivated Salk polio vaccine in 1955 and the attenuated Sabin polio vaccine in 1961. By the late 1950s, the paralysis of polio seemed to be on the wane. The number of children affected began to decline and parents slowly began to lose their fear of summertime swimming in pools and watering holes—a common activity associated with the onset of the dreaded disease.

Traditional Polio Etiology

The causative agent in polio is the poliovirus, a small, single-stranded RNA virus belonging to the Enterovirus genus of the Picornaviridae family. There are three serotypes of poliovirus: type 1 (PV1), type 2 (PV2), and type 3 (PV3), each of which can cause paralytic polio.

Poliovirus transmission occurs mainly through fecal-oral transmission.⁵ The virus is shed in the fecal matter of infected individuals and inadvertently ingested through contaminated water or food. Although less common, poliovirus can apparently be transmitted through direct contact or even the respiratory droplets of infected individuals.

After entering the body through the mouth, the virus begins replicating in the intestinal tract. During this phase the patient may experience mild flu-like symptoms or even nothing at all. From here, the virus may spread to regional lymph nodes and on to the blood stream. For most individuals, the immune system can stop the spread of infection at this point, and no significant harm occurs. In some individuals (less than 1%), the poliovirus infection is able to reach the Central Nervous System (CNS), apparently passing through the blood-brain barrier, infecting and destroying motor neurons—cells for which the poliovirus has a particular affinity. The most common area of attack is the lower segment on the anterior side of the spinal cord, an area which, if damaged, causes weakness and paralysis in the legs.

The proclivity for polio to damage this particular area of the CNS was so common, it was used as a basis for one of its original names, “Acute Poliomyelitis of the Anterior Horn.” The tendency for paralytic polio to strike children was also frequent enough to shape another common moniker for the disease, “Infantile Paralysis,” a name still in use when vaccines were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. If the infection progresses from the bottom of the spinal cord, it can ascend, affecting the muscles which control the abdomen, the lungs, arms, and finally the brain stem itself—a scenario in which death would almost be certain.

Additional Polio Etiologies

There are two other recognized methods of infection besides the poliovirus viremia just explained: provocation polio and bulbar polio associated with tonsillectomies. Poliovirus is well-adapted to replication and destruction within neuronal tissue, areas the human immune system is typically capable of protecting. In certain cases, this protection is bypassed, leading to the paralysis of polio.

With provocation polio, an offending microbe residing on the skin is inadvertently pressed through the dermis and into nervous tissue, where replication readily occurs.⁴⁶ Although it’s most often documented as the result of an improperly sanitized injection site, anything which might introduce microbes into nervous tissue can cause it—even something as seemingly unrelated as a bee sting.

Bulbar polio, so-called due to its involvement with the brainstem, is a traumatic polio infection that can rapidly cause death. Because the brainstem is in such close proximity to the tonsils, it is suspected that the tissue injury of tonsillectomies, where enteroviruses like poliovirus may be flourishing, can provide a direct route from outside the body directly into nervous tissue leading to the brainstem, a crucial component used for controlling the rate and depth of respiration. Although rare, bulbar polio is nearly always fatal.

In either provocation or bulbar polio, the location of the initial neuronal assault is known. With provocation polio, it happens at the injection site and travels along neuronal pathways, sometimes reaching the spinal cord itself. In cases of bulbar polio associated with tonsillectomies, they begin at the site of the surgical procedure and make a short journey to the medulla oblongata.

Limitations of the Traditional Polio Pathogenesis Model

The traditional explanation for the paralysis of polio has major problems, gaps in its explanation which have thus far been left unanswered. Chief among those riddles is the tendency for the paralysis of polio to start in the legs of affected children—more specifically the nerves that control movement in their legs, rather than the nerves that enable feeling. The front (anterior) half of the spinal cord controls the muscles of the legs, while the back (posterior) half of the spinal cord handles sensory information such as touch, temperature, pain, vibration, and proprioception. Why paralytic polio so frequently targets the anterior, and not the posterior, spinal cord remains a mystery.

The Gradient Paradox

A hallmark component of the paralytic polio epidemics of the 1900s was children displaying weakness or paralysis in their legs. It was extremely rare to see such weakness or paralysis begin anywhere else. Even more rare was the fact that their onset was nearly always muscle weakness or paralysis and almost never involving anything sensory-related.

This points to a very particular, peculiar location within a child’s CNS—the front half of the bottom of the spinal cord, an area about the size of a United States one cent coin and the origin of nearly all paralytic polio cases. Traditional polio etiology suggests a blood-borne infection can sometimes break through the blood-brain barrier and infect the central nervous system.

If this were true, we would expect to find more neurological damage in areas of the CNS with the highest blood perfusion—with a gradual falloff into other areas with less robust blood supply. This would indicate the cerebral cortex, the brainstem, and possibly areas with less robust protection from the blood-brain barrier (circumventricular organs) as the most common source of polio-related injury. Instead, as historical records indicate, these are some of the most uncommonly affected regions. The paradox is there is very little gradient or falloff of affected areas but rather a focus on children’s legs.

The lower spinal cord is not exceptionally well-perfused compared to other CNS regions yet consistently appears to be the primary target of neuronal infection.^, If breaching the BBB is a necessary step in the assault of polio, there is little known about the front half of the bottom of the spinal cord that could create such a unique vulnerability. Although the anterior side of the spinal cord does apparently require more blood flow than the posterior, it is thought that the Cervical Region (C1-C8) has some of the highest metabolic demand, something which would lead one to suspect that if increased blood flow is associated with the onset of paralysis, the neck, shoulders, and arms might be a more frequent source of attack.

Hematologically speaking, there is nothing peculiar about the penny-sized section of the lower spinal cord that would make it appear especially vulnerable. Yet, the traditional explanation of polio requires it. In that model, a system-wide blood-borne infection must somehow target the front half of the bottom of the spinal cord—almost never the back—ignoring nearly all other neuronal cells of the body along the way, a question never answered satisfactorily. The fact that severe intestinal distension from constipation can also selectively produce leg paralysis via local effects on lower spinal nerve roots further underscores a possible link and its relation to the anatomy of the spinal cord.

If we are to adequately explain the etiology of paralytic polio, we must be able to at least answer one question: If a system-wide blood-borne polio infection is the source of paralysis, how and why does it often target such a specific area of the spinal cord? All other questions would seem secondary to this initial inquiry.

Questioning Paralytic Polio via Viremia

If the peculiarity of this localization wasn’t significant enough of a problem with traditional polio etiology, another related issue compounds the situation: Like most enteroviruses, poliovirus doesn’t replicate within the blood very well—if at all. Compared to neuronal and intestinal epithelial cells, where the CD155 poliovirus receptor is plentiful, the blood offers very little in terms for favorable replication.^18,20

For that reason, most poliovirus infections begin and end within the intestine. Virus particles may be found in the blood, but certainly not at the level one might expect if such a virus—clearly out of its element—were to exist in numbers sufficient to breach the layers of protection guarding the central nervous system. Traditional polio etiology supposes the primary route of infection occurs through the blood, something clearly at odds with the hematogenous scarcity common with enteroviral—particularly poliovirus—infections.

Crossing the Blood-Brain Barrier

Complicating the blood-borne route of CNS infection is the presence of a nearly impenetrable blood-brain barrier. This highly selective, semi-permeable membrane is designed to prevent most everything from reaching the nervous system, an obstruction so reliable it presents one of the most significant challenges in developing pharmaceutical treatments for neurological disorders.

The blood-brain barrier offers several layers of protection that would likely prevent any poliovirus particles from ever getting through, no matter their numbers. Poliovirus is approximately 8,500,000 Daltons in diameter, vastly exceeding the barrier’s cutoff of ~400-500 Daltons. This size difference, coupled with tight endothelial junctions, would likely preclude any poliovirus from breaching the barrier. Certain molecules can pass through the blood-brain barriers’ lipid bilayer, passively diffusing across due to their solubility—something the poliovirus, with its protein capsid, is unable to accomplish. Furthermore, the blood-brain barrier has no dedicated transport system for viruses, lacking the CD155 receptors poliovirus would need to even enter the outer, blood-facing side of endothelial cells.¹²

While poliovirus is generally understood to exhibit poor replication in blood and limited direct interaction with the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a few experimental studies suggest that, under specific conditions, the virus may be capable of traversing the BBB. One study published in The Journal of Immunology demonstrated that Transferrin Receptor 1 (TfR1) may facilitate poliovirus entry across the BBB, implying a receptor-mediated pathway for CNS invasion.¹²

Another Journal of Clinical Investigation study using an in vitro model of brain microvascular endothelial cells (a proxy for the BBB) found that poliovirus can enter these cells via caveolar endocytosis, initiated through interaction with its receptor CD155.¹³ Moreover, a study in Virology reported that poliovirus could reach the CNS from the bloodstream at a relatively high efficiency, even in the absence of its canonical receptor, suggesting alternative or receptor-independent routes of entry.

These findings, while compelling, are limited largely to experimental or in vitro settings and do not reflect a consistent or dominant route of neuro-invasion in natural infection, where alternative pathways such as retrograde axonal transport via peripheral nerves (discussed below) may be more robustly supported. Even if they demonstrate poliovirus can cross the BBB, they offer no explanation for why the lower anterior spinal cord would then be targeted.

Multiple Viruses All Rose in Virulence?

One final puzzle piece worth a quick discussion—if a rise in paralytic polio can be ascribed to increased virulence, as is sometimes suggested, we must acknowledge it as peculiar that several other microbes appear to have also gained such virulence around that same time. As scientists began to unravel the nature of paralysis in the 1900s, they were struck by the number of different viruses and bacteria capable of paralyzing the nervous system if conditions were right. Coxsackie viruses, first discovered in the late 1940s, were known to be able to cause the same paralysis as polio. The 1950s witnessed the discovery of echoviruses, while the 1960s and 1970s brought us enterovirus D68 and E71, all capable of destroying neuronal tissue.

More troubling was a 1958 Michigan study analyzing specimens from 1,060 patients diagnosed with poliomyelitis. Of the 869 patients with fecal samples, only 34% showed evidence of poliovirus infection. Other enteroviruses, particularly echoviruses and Coxsackie viruses, were identified in many cases and actually caused more instances of non-paralytic poliomyelitis and aseptic meningitis than poliovirus itself. Clinically, these infections were indistinguishable from true polio. This misdiagnosis phenomenon, combined with the presence of multiple immunological types of poliovirus in the epidemic, explains to scientists’ frustration with the apparent limitations of the injected Salk vaccine’s effectiveness.

In reality, within the laboratories of scientists attempting to develop an effective polio vaccine, there seemed to be a remarkable lack of virulence in poliovirus. After discovering Old World monkeys were the only animals—besides humans—capable of being infected by poliovirus, they struggled to infect even them, their inability to reliably paralyze test creatures so frustrating that they spent years attempting to purposefully increase the virulence of the microbe, work that could be considered the earliest “gain-of-function” research. Somewhat paradoxically, this research led to viruses which occasionally exhibited increased neurotropism but decreased enterotropism, a feature which made studying the natural route of intestinal infection even more difficult.

Disambiguating Polio

Because there were many different microbes capable of paralyzing in this way, accurate diagnosis was nearly impossible for much of the polio story. Diagnostic criteria at the time varied widely and mainly involved clinical observations: fever, a runny nose, and muscle stiffness or pain. Laboratory diagnosis was nearly non-existent beyond a spinal tap which simply checked for an elevated white blood cell count.²³ Together, these were thought to be conclusive evidence of a poliovirus infection, something we now know to be inadequate. Paralysis may have certainly occurred, but as to specifically which offending microbe may have caused it was impossible to determine.

With numerous microbes capable of paralyzing—and explicit diagnosis of poliovirus nearly impossible in the 1950s and beyond—it is difficult to explain how so many different organisms could simultaneously experience the same genetic shift or adaption held to be responsible for the rise in epidemic polio in the 1900s. So difficult in fact, an environmental factor appears much more likely—something which has little to do with microbial virulence at all, but instead, something which changed in the world around them.

Environmental Factors in Polio

Before discussing what environmental factors may have caused the rise in epidemic polio, it should be helpful to rule out several commonly mentioned ones. Recall that childhood paralysis was something that had existed for a very long time, albeit extremely uncommon—so rare most doctors hadn’t even heard of it well into the 1900s. Something occurred in the late 1800s that changed this, something that turned what were once isolated cases every decade or so into annual epidemics occurring every summer with hundreds, even thousands, of children affected.

The most commonly cited explanation for this change is improved sanitation and hygiene. This hypothesis supposes that infants, still protected by maternal antibodies through breastmilk, weren’t as frequently exposed to poliovirus under this protection were instead later exposed, once maternal immunity had waned. There are several issues with this line of thinking, principal among them the fact infants were the ones most often affected—the reason polio was called “Infantile Paralysis” for decades. This hypothesis suggests infants were protected due to lack of exposure when the very name of the illness suggests that infants were the ones most vulnerable.

Additionally, if there was a decline in infant exposure to dangerous pathogens due to an increase in sanitation and hygiene, we should have seen similar epidemic patterns emerge for other illnesses during the same period, not just poliovirus. The fact that poliovirus (and other enteroviruses with similar neurotropism) seemed uniquely affected points to more specific factors.

The localized nature of the original epidemics (New England) suggests something else was afoot. While it’s possible that the people of the American Northeast enacted improvements to their sanitation well before the rest of the country did, it’s hard to miss the geographical specificity of early outbreaks, particularly their rural nature. Cities and towns, areas where cleanliness certainly had room for improvement, might have seemed poised for polio epidemics but appeared miraculously unaffected early on. Meanwhile, rural parts of the Northeast—which experienced heavy pesticide spraying in attempts to combat the destruction of gypsy and codling moths—seemed to be the geography most affected.

Given that polio spreads primarily through the fecal-oral route, the sanitation hypothesis contains another fundamental contradiction: it suggests improved hygiene protected infants yet somehow increased exposure for older children. This makes little sense when we consider that swimming in pools and natural water bodies—activities almost exclusively enjoyed by children old enough to swim—was identified as the primary transmission vector during summer outbreaks. Infants, who rarely if ever participated in these aquatic activities, would have neither benefited from improved pool sanitation nor experienced delayed exposure through this route. This inconsistency suggests that the changing pattern of polio infection must have been driven by factors beyond general sanitation improvements.

A related hypothesis suggests that the increased use of baby formula may have played a role in the rise of paralytic polio. If more infants were indeed lacking the protection of maternal antibodies, this would appear plausible. Upon closer inspection, this line of thinking has problems. A decrease in maternal immunological support should have surfaced as a rise in a variety of illnesses, not just polio. Not to mention the fact that early on, formula use was more popular amongst urban, wealthier families, a demographic largely unaffected by the early rural outbreaks. Given suspicions of the day, infant formula was a concept so novel that it would have immediately jumped to the fore as a likely culprit for polio—the rarity of both formula and illness so extreme that their possible relationship would have immediately been suspected.²⁵

Summary

The traditional explanation for polio’s paralytic effects has significant flaws, notably the puzzling tendency for paralysis to consistently begin in the leg muscles (lower anterior spinal cord) despite this area not being exceptionally blood-perfused compared to other CNS regions. This “gradient paradox” contradicts what we would expect from a blood-borne infection, which should affect highly-perfused areas like the cerebral cortex first.

Further complicating the traditional model, poliovirus replicates poorly in blood and cannot easily cross the blood-brain barrier due to its large size and the barrier’s protective mechanisms. Additionally, the simultaneous rise in virulence across multiple enteroviruses during the same historical period suggests environmental factors, rather than viral evolution alone, may have played a significant role in the emergence of epidemic polio.

The Role of Pesticides and Environmental Toxins

Arsenical Pesticides and Poliomyelitis: A Historical Medical Precedent

Dr. E.C. Seguin’s 1882 paper “Myelitis Following Acute Arsenical Poisoning” provides decisive evidence that arsenical compounds like Paris Green (an agricultural pesticide containing copper acetoarsenite) directly caused conditions clinically indistinguishable from poliomyelitis.²⁶ Rather than being a controversial theory, this relationship was established through extensive clinical observation and experimentation dating back centuries.²⁵

Dr. Seguin documents that medical literature from as early as the 13th century recognized paralysis following arsenical poisoning, with consistent observations from prominent physicians like P. Abano, Forestus (1560-70), and Hahnemann (1786).²⁵ This historical record demonstrates the neurotoxic effects of arsenic were well-understood long before the modern conception of poliomyelitis as exclusively a viral disease. The paper meticulously documents the characteristic progression of arsenical paralysis, typically beginning in the lower extremities before potentially spreading to upper limbs—matching the classic presentation of poliomyelitis.²⁵ Dr. N.A. Popov’s animal experiments revealed that arsenic could cause “distinct lesions of the spinal cord, of the type known as acute central myelitis, or acute poliomyelitis” within hours of ingestion.²⁷

These findings were confirmed through both animal studies and human case observations, establishing that paralysis originated centrally in the spinal cord rather than peripherally. Furthermore, scientific evidence revealed identical pathological changes in the spinal cord between arsenical poisoning victims and those diagnosed with poliomyelitis, particularly the characteristic damage to anterior horn cells (motor neurons) that defines poliomyelitis.²⁵

The paper presents three detailed case studies of patients poisoned by Paris Green, all displaying the progression from initial gastric symptoms to subsequent paralysis of the lower extremities with accompanying sensory disturbances. Case 1 showed paralysis below the knees with marked muscle atrophy after ingesting Paris Green. Case 2, a 16-year-old girl, developed stiffness in her legs one week after ingesting the poison, progressing to partial paralysis requiring assistance to walk. Case 3 developed “nearly complete paralysis” of both legs and forearms after taking Paris Green, with symptoms persisting for months. In all cases, the patients exhibited electrical reaction patterns in their affected muscles identical to those seen in poliomyelitis patients, which physicians of the time recognized as diagnostic confirmation.²⁵

Dr. Seguin’s conclusions explicitly state that “Arsenical paralysis is the expression of a myelitis” and that “This myelitis approximates the type known as poliomyelitis.” The paper emphasizes arsenical poisoning causes a form of central myelitis with “special involvement of the anterior gray matter”—precisely the pathology that defines poliomyelitis.²⁵ The symptoms from arsenical exposure were so similar to infectious poliomyelitis, physicians considered them variations of the same pathological process. This wasn’t merely correlation; physicians documented the consistent development of paralysis “within a week after the ingestion of the poison,” providing a clear temporal relationship between exposure and illness supporting causation rather than coincidence.

Dr. Seguin and his contemporaries established—without controversy—that chemicals like Paris Green produced paralytic conditions clinically and pathologically identical to poliomyelitis. This body of evidence suggests that at least some portion of what was later classified as “polio epidemics” may have been the result of environmental poisoning rather than viral infection alone.²⁵ The fact that mainstream medicine eventually shifted to an exclusively viral theory of poliomyelitis, despite this well-documented alternative etiology, represents a significant divergence from earlier medical understanding.

New Pesticides Arrive

Lead Arsenate (1890s-1950s)

Lead arsenate was first used commercially in Massachusetts in the 1890s to combat gypsy moth infestations. It quickly became America’s most widely used pesticide due to its effectiveness and adhesive properties that prevented it from being easily washed off. By the early 1900s, it was the standard treatment for fruit orchards, particularly apple trees, with heavy applications throughout the Northeast and later across the country.²⁶ Despite growing health concerns by the 1920s, usage continued until the 1950s, with residues persisting in soils for decades after application ceased.²⁶

DDT (1940s-1970s):

DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) emerged during World War II as a revolutionary insecticide. Initially celebrated for controlling typhus and malaria among troops and civilian populations, it transitioned to agricultural and domestic use after the war. By the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, DDT was applied widely across American farms, forests, and suburban neighborhoods. Public health campaigns frequently featured DDT spraying in public spaces, including beaches and swimming pools. However, growing concerns about environmental persistence and wildlife impacts, particularly following Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), led to its ban in the United States in 1972, though it continued to be used internationally.

The transition period (late 1940s to early 1950s) when both chemicals were in simultaneous use is particularly noteworthy in environmental health history.

The Appearance of Epidemic Polio

The emergence of officially recognized polio epidemics in the United States appears to coincide with the introduction of these specific pesticides, beginning with lead arsenate in the late 19th century. In 1893, Boston experienced what was then the largest recorded polio outbreak in America, with 26 cases occurring less than a year after the invention and introduction of lead arsenate in 1892,² as aggressive spraying campaigns began in Medford, just six miles away, to combat the devastation of gypsy moths.

The scientific understanding of polio at that time was still developing, with physicians often confusing arsenic poisoning symptoms with what they classified as poliomyelitis. Medical texts of the period described “arsenical paralysis” with symptoms strikingly similar to polio: lower extremity paralysis and muscle atrophy, with frequent mention of sensory disturbances including burning pains and tingling in extremities yet to be distinguished as something unrelated to the viral phenomenon.²⁵ Even Dr. James Putnam, who documented the Boston outbreak, had previously written about arsenic-induced paralysis. This suggests that at least some early polio cases may have actually been direct neurotoxic effects of lead arsenate exposure, misdiagnosed due to the limited understanding of both the disease and environmental toxins.

Following World War II, the United States witnessed an unprecedented surge in polio cases that corresponded with the widespread civilian adoption of DDT. In 1945, approximately 13,000 polio cases were reported nationwide; by the end of summer 1946, this figure had nearly doubled. This dramatic increase coincided with DDT’s introduction into everyday American life—sprayed directly on children at pools and picnics, incorporated into household products, and even applied as aerial fog over entire communities. The chemical was so thoroughly embedded in post-war American life that advertisements proudly proclaimed DDT as a selling point for products ranging from sprays and powders to wallpaper and paint specifically marketed for nurseries.

Ironically, some of the earliest civilian DDT applications were intended to prevent polio by eliminating flies, suspected as possible vectors for the virus. However, trial applications in places like Hidalgo, Texas demonstrated that while DDT effectively eliminated insect populations, polio outbreaks continued or even intensified during spraying campaigns. By 1947, at least one physician in New York had begun documenting a “new illness” with symptoms remarkably similar to polio, suggesting a connection to DDT exposure. Despite this, the dominant medical paradigm remained focused on the viral theory, even as planes designated as “Flying Flit Guns of the Skies” paradoxically sprayed more DDT over communities experiencing outbreaks in attempts to stop the spread.

The historical concurrence of the introduction of neurotoxic pesticides and subsequent polio epidemics raises profound questions about environmental factors in the emergence of this disease. While the poliovirus was undoubtedly present and responsible for many cases, these historical documents suggest chemical exposures may have played a significant role—either by directly causing polio-like symptoms through neurotoxicity, by weakening immune systems and increasing viral susceptibility, or by creating environmental conditions favorable to viral transmission.

This historical perspective invites a more nuanced understanding of the disease’s etiology, where environmental toxins and infectious agents may interact in complex ways that pure viral theories alone cannot explain. The dramatic decline in polio following vaccine introduction may have masked the simultaneous reduction in widespread neurotoxic pesticide exposure as environmental regulations tightened in subsequent decades.

Distinguishing Classic Poliomyelitis from Arsenical Poisoning

The evolution of poliomyelitis cases throughout the 20th century reveals important distinctions from the earlier documented cases of arsenical poisoning. While Dr. Seguin’s 1882 paper clearly established that arsenical compounds like Paris Green could produce poliomyelitis-like symptoms, later polio epidemics exhibited symptom profiles that suggest a hybrid pathological process. As alluded to earlier, classic poliomyelitis cases that became predominant during major epidemics typically presented more often with motor neuron involvement and lacked many of the sensory disturbances characteristic of arsenical poisoning.

A key distinction between arsenical poisoning and classic viral poliomyelitis lies in their neuroanatomical patterns of damage. Arsenical poisoning, as documented by Seguin and his contemporaries, typically affected both sensory and motor pathways—involving both the anterior horn (motor neurons) and posterior horn (sensory neurons) of the spinal cord.²⁵ This dual involvement manifested in the distinctive “pins and needles” sensations, burning pains, tactile numbness, and temperature sensitivities reported in arsenical poisoning cases.

By contrast, classic poliomyelitis predominantly targeted the anterior horn cells while largely sparing the posterior sensory structures, resulting in purely motor symptoms without any significant sensory disturbance. This selective targeting of motor neurons produced the hallmark flaccid paralysis—without accompanying sensory complaints—that would later become the recognized signature of epidemic poliomyelitis.

The clinical progression also differed significantly. Arsenical poisoning invariably began with acute gastrointestinal symptoms directly following exposure—severe vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain that preceded neurological manifestations. These initial symptoms reflected the direct toxic effects of arsenic on the digestive system.²⁵

In contrast, classic poliomyelitis typically began with a mild febrile illness resembling a common viral infection, sometimes with mild gastrointestinal symptoms, followed by an apparent recovery before the onset of paralysis. This biphasic pattern suggested a different pathophysiological process: initial viral replication followed by neuronal invasion, rather than direct chemical toxicity. Additionally, arsenical cases exhibited more widespread systemic effects including cutaneous manifestations, cardiovascular impacts, and hepatic dysfunction not typically seen in pure poliomyelitis.

The epidemiological patterns also diverged significantly. Arsenical poisoning cases occurred sporadically, showing no preference for seasons or demographic groups beyond occupational exposure risk. Classic poliomyelitis, however, demonstrated distinct seasonal patterns (peaking in summer months), affected specific age groups, and showed person-to-person transmission patterns consistent with an infectious etiology.

These distinctions suggest that while arsenical pesticides likely contributed to some historical cases diagnosed as “poliomyelitis,” the major 20th-century epidemics represented a different phenomenon. The most plausible explanation is that epidemic poliomyelitis resulted from a combination of factors: (1) a genuine enterovirus infection targeting motor neurons, (2) possible environmental cofactors like pesticides that may have increased susceptibility or severity through immune modulation or blood-brain barrier disruption, and (3) evolving diagnostic classifications that grouped similar clinical presentations under a single disease label.

Rethinking the Paralysis of Polio

We now explore how specific environmental insults may have facilitated the poliovirus’s unusual access to the central nervous system. In particular, we examine how pesticide-induced disruption of the intestinal barrier compromised lymphatic and immune function, non-hematogenous viral dissemination routes, childhood anatomical features, and neuronal sensitization may converge to enable poliovirus to bypass the blood-brain barrier and cause anterior horn damage.

Pesticide Exposure and Intestinal Barrier Dysfunction

Environmental toxins have long been known to impair epithelial integrity, particularly in the gut, where they can weaken one of the body’s most critical defenses against microbial invasion.³⁴ Organochlorine pesticides such as DDT and organophosphates like chlorpyrifos have been shown in multiple studies to disrupt tight junction proteins such as claudin, occludin, and ZO-1, all of which are essential for maintaining the mucosal barrier that lines the intestinal tract.³⁵

In rodent models, chronic low-dose exposure to chlorpyrifos has led to a measurable thinning of the intestinal wall, reductions in junctional protein expression, and an increase in mucosal inflammation.³³ These changes correlate with a rise in systemic markers of microbial translocation, suggesting that bacteria and viruses which would otherwise remain sequestered within the gut lumen are then able to cross into systemic or deeper tissue areas.³³

More significantly, these disruptions occur at doses considered environmentally relevant, implying that widespread agricultural spraying could have plausibly created such physiological conditions in rural populations—particularly children, whose intestinal barriers were not yet fully mature. Infants naturally exhibit increased gut permeability as part of early immune development, with maternal antibodies helping to fill in the gaps until the child’s own defenses are fully established. Superimposing chemical damage onto this already-permissive state could create a perfect storm for enteric viruses to breach the intestinal wall.

Compounding this barrier dysfunction is the emerging evidence that pesticides also cause dysbiosis—a disruption of the gut microbiota that regulate mucosal immunity and barrier repair. Microbial diversity, known to support epithelial regeneration and mucosal immunity, is often diminished following exposure to chlorinated hydrocarbons and heavy metals. Dysbiotic states promote low-grade intestinal inflammation, delay healing, and increase the production of inflammatory cytokines that can further disrupt tight junctions.³⁴ In the context of enteroviral infection, this means poliovirus has a greater chance of escaping the confines of the gut and encountering nerve terminals or lymphatic pathways previously inaccessible.

Impaired Lymphatic Clearance and Immune Regulation by Toxins

Beyond the epithelial lining, the intestinal immune system relies heavily on gut-associated lymphoid tissues and mesenteric lymph nodes to act as sentinels. These structures filter pathogens and generate local immune responses aimed at preventing deeper tissue invasion. However, chronic exposure to immunotoxic agents like lead, arsenic, and DDT has been shown to blunt these functions. Studies in humans and animals exposed to arsenic show a consistent suppression of T-cell proliferation, disrupted cytokine signaling, and decreased antibody production. Similar findings were observed with DDT, particularly in malnourished rodents where even modest exposure suppressed both humoral and cell-mediated responses.

Such immune suppression means that even when poliovirus breaches the gut wall, the body’s secondary defense mechanisms may be too weak or disorganized to contain the threat. Instead of being rapidly neutralized in mesenteric lymph nodes, viral particles might survive, replicate, and spill into adjacent tissues.

The architecture of the lymphatic system further complicates this picture. Intestinal lymph drains into the cisterna chyli, a small but vital lymphatic reservoir located anterior to the upper lumbar vertebrae—precisely where the spinal cord terminates in young children. In infants and toddlers, the spinal cord ends lower in the vertebral column (at L2–L3) than in adults, placing it closer to the cisterna chyli and surrounding lymphatic drainage.^, If the gut barrier is leaky and the immune containment is compromised, poliovirus particles could accumulate in the lymphatic system near the spinal cord. In cases of toxin-induced lymphadenopathy or fibrosis, where normal drainage is impaired, viral concentration in these areas could become quite high, increasing the likelihood of neural entry.

Furthermore, toxins have been implicated in disrupting lymphatic endothelial function itself, leading to inflammation, impaired drainage, and nodal hypertrophy—all factors that could facilitate the persistence or redirection of viral traffic.^,, In combination with immune suppression, this creates a condition where poliovirus may bypass its usual containment and gain localized access to the central nervous system without needing to establish a systemic viremia.

To complicate matters, the immune system of infants and toddlers is inherently immature. Their T-cell repertoire is still expanding, mucosal IgA production is limited, and reliance on maternal antibodies begins to wane after birth. In this context, even mild impairments in gut integrity or immune signaling in children—whether due to pesticides or malnutrition—could drastically increase the likelihood of viral persistence and neuro-invasion.

Non-Hematogenous Pathways of Enterovirus Neuroinvasion

For decades, it was assumed that poliovirus reached the central nervous system exclusively via the bloodstream, crossing the blood-brain barrier at sites of increased permeability. However, extensive animal research has demonstrated that poliovirus is capable of using peripheral nerves to reach the spinal cord directly, in a manner analogous to rabies virus.^, In transgenic mice expressing the human poliovirus receptor (CD155), direct intramuscular inoculation with poliovirus leads to a predictable pattern of motor neuron infection along the nerve pathway that innervates the injection site. Severing the corresponding peripheral nerve abolishes CNS infection on that side, proving that the virus was transported via axons rather than the bloodstream.⁴⁴

Retrograde axonal transport is a highly efficient cellular mechanism that allows peripheral nerves to carry signaling molecules—and, unfortunately, pathogens—back to the cell body. Poliovirus exploits this mechanism to travel from the periphery to the anterior horn of the spinal cord. Notably, poliovirus particles have been visualized inside axons, traveling along microtubules toward the neuronal soma.⁴⁵ This process is especially pronounced in motor neurons, which are naturally predisposed to support fast retrograde transport.

This mechanism explains several clinical features of poliomyelitis, including provocation poliomyelitis, in which children who receive injections or experience muscle trauma develop paralysis in the affected limb of the injection site. This localized onset is inconsistent with hematogenous spread but entirely compatible with neural transport.⁴⁹ Furthermore, the phenomenon of bulbar poliomyelitis following tonsillectomy can also be understood this way: surgical injury exposes glossopharyngeal and vagal nerve endings to enteroviruses, which then travel a short distance to the medulla oblongata (bypassing the need for prolonged viremia through blood or cerebrospinal fluid routes).

Given that the gastrointestinal tract is heavily innervated by both autonomic and sensory nerves—including the vagus nerve, pelvic splanchnic, and sympathetic chain—enteric viruses escaping the gut wall could readily infect nearby nerve terminals and begin a similar journey to the spinal cord.^, Pesticide-induced epithelial damage or inflammation may increase viral uptake by these nerves. Additionally, nerve injury, whether mechanical or chemical, is known to enhance expression of poliovirus receptors and upregulate axonal transport machinery, potentially accelerating CNS invasion.

Anatomical Susceptibility in Early Childhood

In early childhood, the unique anatomical configuration of the spinal cord, lymphatic drainage, and gut-nerve interface may help explain why children were disproportionately affected by paralytic polio. At birth, the spinal cord extends much further down the vertebral column than in adulthood, often terminating near the L3 vertebra. As a child grows, the vertebral column lengthens faster than the spinal cord, which by adulthood ends at L1–L2.

This means that in young children, the lower spinal cord is in much closer physical proximity to retroperitoneal structures like the intestines and cisterna chyli. The anterior horn of the lumbosacral spinal cord—which controls lower limb movement and is the most commonly affected region in polio—is anatomically adjacent to intestinal and lymphatic tissues vulnerable to toxin exposure. If poliovirus exits the gut through a disrupted barrier and bypasses lymph node filtration, it could easily reach local ganglia or spinal nerve roots innervating the area—in young children. The short anatomical distance between viral breach and CNS target could account for the observed leg-centric paralysis.

Clinical observations provide direct support for the functional significance of this anatomical proximity. Severe constipation with massive fecal impaction has been documented to precipitate cauda equina syndrome, resulting in lower-limb weakness, sensory deficits, and paralysis—precisely targeting the legs—while sparing the upper extremities and respiratory muscles. In a reported case of a young patient, constipation and fecal impaction caused cauda equina syndrome with lower-extremity neurological deficits after other spinal pathologies were excluded.

This demonstrates that local intestinal distension or pressure can directly influence the neural structures supplying the lower limbs due to their close spatial relationship in the lower abdomen and pelvis. In young children, where the spinal cord terminates even lower (near L2–L3), this vulnerability is further amplified, offering a mechanistic parallel for how intestinal disruption—whether through mechanical distension, inflammation, toxin exposure, lymphatic leakage, or viral invasion—could preferentially affect the anterior horn cells controlling leg movement.

While severe fecal impaction leading to cauda equina syndrome and lower-limb paralysis has been documented in children (e.g., a 12-year-old boy in whom massive constipation caused CES after exclusion of other spinal pathology), such direct causation appears rarer in adults, where CES is more commonly due to degenerative or traumatic causes. This age-specific pattern further highlights the phenomenon of this unique anatomical vulnerability in early childhood, where the lower termination of the spinal cord brings lumbosacral motor neurons into closer proximity with intestinal structures.

Environmental Toxicants and Neuronal Vulnerability

Finally, and perhaps most insidiously, environmental toxins may act directly on the target tissue of poliovirus: the motor neurons of the anterior spinal cord. Arsenic, lead, and certain pesticides have well-documented neurotoxic profiles, including the ability to induce motor neuropathy and axonal degeneration.^,43 Autopsy studies and clinical reports from the early 20th century document cases of arsenical paralysis that mimic poliomyelitis in both anatomical distribution and histopathology. These chemicals can impair mitochondrial function, induce oxidative stress, disrupt ion channel homeostasis, and degrade axonal transport—all of which weaken the motor neuron’s ability to resist infection.

There is also evidence that neurotoxic stress increases the expression of adhesion molecules and viral receptors on neural membranes. Inflammatory signaling in the nervous system—induced by chemical exposure—may lead to upregulation of CD155, the poliovirus receptor, on motor neurons and glial cells.⁴⁹ Neurons under stress also exhibit increased retrograde transport rates, potentially speeding the delivery of any virus that reaches peripheral nerve endings.⁴⁹

As mentioned earlier, animal models exposed to organophosphate pesticides exhibit hindlimb paralysis and spinal cord damage that is indistinguishable from early-stage poliomyelitis.²⁵This suggests not only that these chemicals can mimic polio’s effects but that they may also serve as cofactors in viral pathogenesis. A neuron already struggling with metabolic injury may be unable to mount the kind of intrinsic antiviral response necessary to repel infection. In this sense, pesticide exposure renders motor neurons both more permissive and more vulnerable.

Physical Exertion and the Facilitation of Viral Spread

In addition to chemical and anatomical predispositions, one of the most frequently reported behavioral risk factors during the height of polio epidemics was extreme physical exertion. Historical accounts and public health posters from the 1940s and 1950s urged parents to keep children from becoming “overtired” or “overexerted” during the summer months, especially during known periods of poliovirus circulation.^, The advice was not anecdotal—it was rooted in a growing body of clinical observations suggesting that extreme muscular activity could increase the risk of developing paralytic polio.⁴⁶

This association finds scientific support in provocation polio. In such cases, injury to muscle tissue, either through injections, trauma, or intense physical activity, appears to facilitate the uptake and retrograde transport of poliovirus along motor neurons. Studies in transgenic mouse models demonstrate that muscle injury accelerates poliovirus’s journey along peripheral nerves into the spinal cord, likely by increasing viral replication at the site of injury and stimulating axonal transport.⁴⁹

Beyond direct nerve invasion, strenuous physical activity has also been shown to compromise the intestinal barrier. Exercise-induced splanchnic hypoperfusion—where blood flow is diverted from the gut to the muscles—can impair epithelial integrity and result in increased intestinal permeability. In patients with inflammatory bowel disease, high-intensity exercise has been shown to exacerbate mucosal inflammation and increase translocation of microbial products across the gut lining. In a child whose gut is already inflamed due to pesticide exposure or viral replication, additional physical stress may trigger dispersion of virus particles beyond the gut and into peripheral lymphatics or nerve terminals.

Furthermore, muscle damage from exertion may induce local inflammatory responses that upregulate CD155 receptor expression, the very molecule poliovirus uses to gain entry into neurons. Injury-related inflammation also enhances axonal transport capacity as part of the cellular repair response, potentially allowing viral particles to move more quickly toward the spinal cord.⁴⁹ In this way, the mechanical action of physical activity acts not merely as a stressor but as a facilitator of neural viral access, especially in young, active children exposed to pesticides.

In summary, historical advice warning against overexertion during polio season may have seemed ill-informed but in reality, reflected an empirical understanding of the phenomenon. The combined effect of intestinal disturbance, systemic inflammation, and mechanically induced nerve recruitment provides another important layer in the multifactorial susceptibility to poliovirus paralysis.

Conclusion

If the hypothesis outlined in this paper is correct, it would resolve one of the most enduring puzzles in virology: why, beginning in the early-to-mid 20th century, several unrelated viruses—including echoviruses, Coxsackie viruses, enterovirus D68, and enterovirus 71—began producing remarkably similar neurological outcomes in children. These paralytic syndromes, often clinically indistinguishable from poliomyelitis, emerged with increasing frequency and geographic spread, perplexing researchers who previously believed poliovirus to be a uniquely neurotropic pathogen.

As early as 1960, this phenomenon was publicly discussed during the 120th annual meeting of the Illinois State Medical Society, where it was noted with some concern that numerous enteroviruses were now capable of causing polio-like paralysis in children.⁶⁰ If the true mechanism of CNS entry involves shared anatomical and toxicological vulnerabilities rather than viral mutation or tropism alone, it stands to reason that any enterovirus present in the gut under the right conditions could access the spinal cord in the same way—via lymphatic leakage, nerve invasion, or local inflammation. This explanation dissolves the anomaly and further supports the multifactorial model proposed here.

Taken together, these six mechanisms—pesticide-induced intestinal barrier dysfunction, lymphatic impairment, neural transport, anatomical susceptibility in children, direct neuronal sensitization, and mechanical facilitation through physical exertion—form a comprehensive challenge to the traditional viremia-based model of poliovirus pathogenesis. The evidence suggests that paralysis does not arise primarily through a hematogenous route that culminates in a breach of the blood-brain barrier. Instead, it appears far more likely that poliovirus gains access to the central nervous system through local invasion of nerve endings in or near the gut, made vulnerable by environmental toxins and sometimes amplified by intense physical activity.

The consistent targeting of the anterior horn of the lower spinal cord—despite its modest blood perfusion and relative anatomical insulation—further undermines the plausibility of systemic dissemination via the bloodstream. Instead, the pattern of injury is more compatible with direct neuronal access and retrograde transport, especially in the unique anatomical context of early childhood—a short journey that mirrors the abbreviated approach of provocation and bulbar polio. Likewise, the immune and epithelial disruptions wrought by pesticides and other toxins lower the thresholds necessary for viral escape, propagation, and neural entry.

This model not only better aligns with historical and experimental observations but also calls for a reconsideration of the exclusive focus on viral eradication as a means of ending paralytic polio (and other offending enteroviruses). Understanding how environmental factors prime the body for severe outcomes may yield novel strategies for prevention, including those that address chemical exposures and dietary resilience. In doing so, we may gain a more complete understanding of poliomyelitis—and open the door to rethinking other neurological diseases once thought to be purely viral in origin.

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20. Racaniello VR. One hundred years of poliovirus pathogenesis. Virology. 2006;344(1):9-16. doi:10.1016/j.virol.2005.09.015.

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26. Levenstein, Harvey. “‘Best for Babies’ or ‘Preventable Infanticide’? The Controversy over Artificial Feeding of Infants in America, 1880–1920.” Journal of American History 70, no. 1 (June 1983): 75–94.

27. Popow, N. “Ueber die Veränderungen im Rückenmarke nach Vergiftung mit Arsen, Blei und Quecksilber.” Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medicin 93 (1883): 351–66.

28. Tollestrup K, Daling JR, Allard J. Mortality in a cohort of orchard workers exposed to lead arsenate pesticide spray. Arch Environ Health. 1995;50(3):221–229.

29. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. DDT – A Brief History and Status. 2024. Available from: https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-brief-history-and-status

30. Spear RN. The Great Gypsy Moth War: A History of the First Campaign in Massachusetts to Eradicate the Gypsy Moth, 1890–1901. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; 2005.

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33. M. S. Biskind, “DDT Poisoning and the Elusive ‘Virus X’: A New Cause for Gastro-Enteritis,” American Journal of Digestive Diseases 16: 79 (1949).

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36. Lima C, Falcão MAP, Rosa JG, et al. Pesticides and their impairing effects on epithelial barrier integrity, dysbiosis, disruption of AhR signaling and development of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. Int J Mol Sci. 2022;23(20):12402.

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45. Miyamura K, Horie H, Yoshikawa T, et al. Poliovirus spreads from muscle to the central nervous system by neural pathways. J Infect Dis. 1992 Oct;166(4):747-752. doi:10.1093/infdis/166.4.747.

46. Ohka S, Matsuda N, Tohyama K, et al. Receptor-dependent and -independent axonal retrograde transport of poliovirus in motor neurons. J Virol. 2009 May;83(10):4995-5004. doi:10.1128/JVI.02225-08.

47. Ren R, Racaniello VR. Poliovirus spreads from muscle to the central nervous system by neural pathways. J Infect Dis. 1992;166(4):747–752.

48. Ohka S, Yang WX, Terada E, Iwasaki K, Nomoto A. Retrograde transport of intact poliovirus through the axon via the fast transport system. Virology. 1998;250(1):67–75.

49. Gromeier M, Wimmer E. Mechanism of injury-provoked poliomyelitis. J Virol. 1998;72(6):5056–5060.

50. Wang Y, Smith DR, Ye L, et al. Viral spread to enteric neurons links genital HSV-1 infection to toxic megacolon. Cell Host Microbe. 2016;19(5):566-578. doi:10.1016/j.chom.2016.03.005.

51. Wang Y, Wang C, Wang H, et al. The mechanisms of nerve injury caused by viral infection in the gastrointestinal tract. Virol J. 2023;20(1):1-10. doi:10.1186/s12985-023-02004-5.

52. Lancaster KZ, Pfeiffer JK. Limited trafficking of a neurotropic virus through inefficient retrograde axonal transport and the type I interferon response. PLoS Pathog. 2010;6(3):e1000791.

53. Van Schoor A, Bosman MC, Bosenberg AT, du Toit DF. Descriptive study of the differences in the level of the conus medullaris in infants, children, and adolescents. Clin Anat. 2015;28(3):349-355. doi:10.1002/ca.22408.

54. Lawrentschuk, N. and Nguyen, H. (2005), CAUDA EQUINA SYNDROME SECONDARY TO CONSTIPATION: AN UNCOMMON OCCURRENCE. ANZ Journal of Surgery, 75: 498-500. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1445-2197.2005.03404.x

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59. Bilski J, Brzozowski B, Mazur-Bialy A, Sliwowski Z, Brzozowski T. The role of physical exercise in inflammatory bowel disease. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:429031. [1] Ratner H, et al. The Present Status of Polio Vaccines. Transcript of panel discussion at the 120th Annual Meeting of the Illinois State Medical Society; 1960. (p. 4).

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• Why COVID exposed a generation that did not understand viruses or human–microbe coexistence

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• January 2020 approach to a major corporate network — and the non-response

• Vaccines as a historic kill switch versus engineering brand-new human pathogens

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BY ALAN CASSELS

View original article at Brownstone.org.

A recent article in the New York Times on the increasing rates of heart disease in young women (Why Are More Young Women Developing Heart Disease?) was amusingly frivolous and about as fact-free as an article about health advice can be.

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The key thrust of the article is that any woman who wants to preserve and improve her health should become informed of her “numbers.” Which is to say, she should know her blood pressure, cholesterol, BMI, and hemoglobin A1C (a measure of average blood glucose levels) which are claimed to be “important for assessing risk.”

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The Times quotes Dr Priya Freaney, director of the Women’s Heart Care program at Northwestern Medicine: “Knowing your numbers is your most powerful tool,” [she said] “And it’s never too early to start.”

What numbers are we talking about? Well, apparently doctors recommend “all adults strive for these levels:”

• BP (Blood Pressure) under 120 mm Hg / 80 mm Hg

• LDL (Low-density lipoprotein) under 100 mg/dL

• HbA1C (Hemoglobin A1C ) of 5.6 or lower

• BMI (Body-mass index) under 25

Now the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI, threatening to strike you down in your healthy middle age unless you submit to the testing, treating (ie: medications and lifestyle changes), and a retesting paradigm which can lead many to become obsessed by the numbers.

By the way, these four measures have one thing in common: They are typically treated with a prescribing pen that has been carefully guided in your doctor’s expert hands by the helpful people in the pharmaceutical industry. Just saying…

Let’s approach these four with a bit of basic epidemiology, examining the wisdom of telling people of “average risk” to aim for these targets. Obviously, people with pre-existing conditions or those with inherently much higher or multiple risks (such as levels that are in the red flashing light category) involve a different calculus.

But for the sake of evaluating the drive to push people toward these health targets, what do the highest quality studies ultimately say about the value in chasing these numeric targets in healthy people?

Numericide Number One: Blood Pressure at 120/80

I will always remember that old quip from an aging physician: “High blood pressure is better than no blood pressure at all.” But the question one should ask is this: If you lower your blood pressure does it lead to a reduction in your chance of a cardiovascular event or dying?

First off, despite what many guidelines and health care providers say about knowing your numbers, what they should have said was know your cardiovascular risk numbers (your percentage chance of having a heart attack or stroke over the next 10-30 years) not your numbers of cholesterol, blood pressure, or glucose numbers. Those are what we call ‘surrogate markers’ and the only reason to lower these numbers is to possibly reduce your risk of heart attacks and stroke. It’s not that these surrogate numbers are useless — rather they are the wrong numbers to worry about. Their only use is to help us give a more accurate ballpark assessment of your cardiovascular risk.

For starters, the target of 120 is not an evidence-based but an “expert-recommended” target, and in case you wondered, having a blood pressure of 130/80 or 140/90 is not the death sentence that your doctor might warn you about. Your blood pressure often jumps all over the map and how and when you measure it can significantly impact that number. It climbs as we get older, naturally. Like grey hair and wrinkles. Chasing this number is one of the biggest uses of a doctor’s time and causes considerable (and frequently unnecessary) worry in patients.

Me? I wish our doctors would have spent time learning more about evidence appraisal and how to properly do shared decision-making with their patients because the decision around the treatment of surrogate numbers is very dependent on a person’s values and preferences. Cholesterol or blood pressure “management” makes a ton of money for the pharmaceutical industry and seems like a good use of our doctors’ time, but often causes a lot of harm in a large part of the otherwise healthy patient population.

The magical “120” comes from the SPRINT trial, a particularly odious piece of work that tortured the data until it showed some benefit of a BP <120 comparted to divergent targets such as <140 in a high-risk population. What most physicians aren’t going to learn is that any apparent benefit evaporated once intensive treatment stopped.

The SPRINT team was behind the 2017 guidelines recommending the 120/80 BP target, but you need to know these guidelines have been discredited for good reason. For instance, the process to produce them was riven with documented conflicts of interest. Again, Big Pharma’s interests are more than well-represented on the guideline production team and their participation automatically broadens the category of people who should take their drug. No — surely that can’t be true? It is true, and to quote a refrain from the movie Airplane, stop calling me Shirley.

The AAFP, American Association of Family Practice— the largest primary care organization in the US — refused to endorse that target. Why? Because, in their words, there were “no significant benefit for all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, myocardial infarction, or renal events.” Let me translate: People don’t live longer or better because you guilt-tripped and drug-equipped them into getting their blood pressure down to 120/80.

There’s also another reason and that has to do with how unsafe it can be to push people’s blood pressure to ridiculously low targets. Not only does this drive people crazy (because many of them have to take two or three or four medications to lower their BP numbers) but it can also lead to falls, fractures, kidney injury, and so on, especially in older adults.

One study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that taking antihypertensive medications was associated with an increased risk of serious fall injuries. SPRINT itself showed nearly double the rate of serious adverse events possibly or definitely related to the antihypertensive drugs.

Like any two-edged sword, drugs to lower your blood pressure can also cause injury to you in ways you haven’t yet foreseen and which could make your life miserable.

Numericide’s Number Two: Low-Density Lipoprotein, or LDL, under 100 mg/dL

This is one of the most aggressively, and irrationally pursued targets: LDL cholesterol. I went back into the data to ask this question: Is there any substantive evidence that an otherwise healthy person with an LDL under 100 mg/dL lives any longer than a person who has an LDL above 100mg/dl?

Basically, should healthy people (what we call ‘primary prevention’) who don’t have a history of a heart attack or heart disease be pushed to get their LDL from, say, 120 to 80 mg/dL? Will this make them live longer?

Sorry to be the bad news bear here, but in a nutshell: No.

The evidence is weak and the absolute benefit is very small. When I mean very small, it’s way smaller than most people expect.

The most comprehensive recent review was published in JAMA in 2022. It was huge, pooling 18 trials of statins for primary prevention including over 85,000 people. The rate of all-cause mortality was statistically significant yet the absolute difference between those who drove their cholesterol that low and those who didn’t was a meagre 0.35%.

The NNT (number needed to treat to prevent one death) was 286.

Another way to say this is that your chance of a normal healthy person dying if they take a statin to drive their LDL below the 100mg/dl target is almost one in 300. Others have strongly contested this number, saying that driving cholesterol down to those levels makes absolutely no difference to the length and quality of a person’s life.

What about older people? You’re in for a surprise here—because in the elderly the situation reverses. A study published in the BMJ in 2016 identified LDL-related studies in the elderly. It found that in a total of over 68,000 elderly people, there was an “inverse association between all-cause mortality and LDL.” Translation: older people with higher LDL levels lived longer! This makes it even more egregious that much of the population taking cholesterol-lowering drugs are over 65 and in the category where they actually need higher cholesterol to stay healthy.

And then there are the harms of cholesterol lowering drugs, like statins which we know cause muscle weakening, elevated liver enzymes, and diabetes, effects that are consistent across many studies.

Doctors know this from real life experience: most patients (up to 75%) stop taking their statins within 2 years — whether it’s from the adverse effects, the costs or the hassle.

Numericide’s Number Three: HbA1C (Hemoglobin A1C ) of 5.6 or Lower

The crazy low levels at which they tell people to drive their HbA1C down to make me bonkers. What is most nutty is that this nefarious hunt for “prediabetes” which is the granddaddy of all disease-mongering tactics is sold under the logic of ”Why wait until you have full blown diabetes when you can find the ‘pre’ signs early?”

To be clear, the 5.6% is not a treatment target — it’s the “prediabetes diagnostic threshold.” In the ever-reductive world of diabetes “normal” keeps shifting. “Normal” is now considered below 5.7%, prediabetes is 5.7–6.4%, and diabetes is diagnosed at ≥6.5%.

The actual treatment target for most adults with diabetes is <7.0%, a level that sadly labels tens of millions of healthy people as diseased. If you have an HbA1C slightly over 7 and your doctor is pushing a metformin prescription at you, it’s time to push back!

Here’s the core point: the evidence does not support that driving HbA1C to 6.5% or lower extends life. The best available data from two big studies — the ACCORD trial and a meta-analysis from the BMJ — show two very surprising things: either no mortality benefit or actual harm from intensive glucose control.

Just to repeat: You do not live longer if you drive your HbA1C into the basement.

Furthermore, there is the opposite thing that could harm you, hypoglycemia — which is often caused by aggressive drug treatment is, in itself, a potent killer.

Just remember that these thresholds are always changed in a uni-directional way, always made lower to expand the pool of patients who allegedly need to be on drugs. This is a process that takes place under the well-documented influence of pharma money, research, and experts, expanding the market for diabetes drugs at each step.

The major push to label people as “prediabetic” — a condition that, incidentally the WHO says shouldn’t be medicalized — is flat-out, brazen disease-mongering.

Having said that, extremely high blood sugar (HbA1C consistently above 9–10%) can cause real harm — kidney failure, blindness, neuropathy, infections. The point isn’t that glucose doesn’t matter at all; it’s that the marginal benefit of pushing from 7.0 to 6.5% or lower does not save lives, and the harm, both in terms of money, medical busy-ness of checking and rechecking your blood sugars, and the harms of the drugs are all real and quantifiable.

Eating a higher quality diet and getting sufficient exercise is the foundation for anyone worried about their blood sugars. Those who are told they have “pre-diabetes” should ignore that advice and refuse to be pasted with a sticky label that causes harm.

Numericide’s Number Four: BMI under 25

Body Mass Index (BMI) is a measure of body weight relative to height, often used to screen whether someone may be underweight, at a healthy weight, overweight, or obese. We need to screen because overweight people live shorter lives, right?

Not necessarily.

We are told that the aim for everyone, concerning this fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, BMI, is 25. Not only is this absurdly low, but it is essentially meaningless as a measure of health on its own. Anyone with any good musculature whatsoever is going to have a BMI over 25. Why is that? Because muscle weighs more than fat.

It comes down to where the weight sits. A muscular person with BMI of 30 has a different risk profile than a guy with a BMI of 30 who is sedentary with a big beer gut — but the BMI treats them identically.

Where did this “25” come from?

The BMI 25 cutoff comes from a 1995 WHO technical report establishing four categories of body weight (underweight, normal, overweight, obese) and was loosely based on actuarial life insurance data. This threshold was not derived from outcome-based evidence and a BMI of 25 was not linked to any mortality inflection point.

What about someone who has, say, a BMI of 30. Should they get that lower?

The claim that someone at BMI of 30 has a meaningfully shorter life expectancy than someone at BMI of 25 is not supported by the best available observational evidence.

The largest and most influential meta-analysis on this question was published in JAMA in 2013 and it pooled 97 studies with over 2.88 million participants and more than 270,000 deaths. The findings were mind-blowing: Being overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality than normal weight. In fact, what is called “Grade 1 obesity” (BMI ~30) showed no significant increase in mortality. Only at BMI ≥35 did mortality clearly rise.

Let me translate: Being “kind of chubby” which would describe almost everyone my age, (mid-60s) is not the death sentence they say it is.

In other words, pushing people to have lower and lower BMIs has very little to do with their overall health.

As I have written before, the enthusiasm for high-priced weight loss drugs (see my past articles on GLP-1 drugs here, here, or here) is skewing medicine in a decidedly dark way. The financial machinery behind the current obesity treatment paradigm is putting whole generations of people on drugs that will deliver almost no meaningful impact on the length or quality of their lives. And the conflicted interests in obesity research and advocacy is documented to a degree that makes the cholesterol and blood pressure guideline conflicts look modest by comparison.

So there we have it, four targets — blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI —the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, four ways to medicalize you, four ways to apply a disease-mongered label to you, and four avenues for you to start living under a dark cloud.

I say, reject all that.

Is “knowing your numbers” a powerful tool, as the experts suggest?

I guess it is, only if you want to fast-track yourself to being a patient. If your doctor is interested in your opinion and subscribes to the school known as “shared decision-making” then let your opinions be known.

At the end of the day don’t let anyone make you feel like you’re living under a dark cloud of impending doom because your numbers are slightly higher than what the experts recommend.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

Brownstone Institute just finished up an absolutely spectacular weekend at Polyface Farm in Virginia. Thrilling speeches, interviews, social time, and the best chicken and pork on the planet, the experience was a blast for everyone. Many of our supper club hosts were in attendance and more clubs are on the way.

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If you could not make this event, consider joining us at our annual conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, November 6-7, 2026! This is your tribe, and while the Internet is essential, there’s nothing in this world to compare with an in-person meeting. Here you meet the top thinkers and voices in our world plus make new friends for life. Register now.

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The times are good because the momentum is tilting in the right direction. You surely saw what happened in Pennsylvania. Governor Josh Shapiro held a press conference about two people who died from measles. It was a cudgel for political use against the Amish who have started to vote. The information was false, as confirmed by the coroner and the public health commissioner. Shapiro miscalculated badly and is now letting press calls go to voice mail.

This fear-mongering is designed to manipulate the public and cozy up to the pharmaceutical industry. But we’ve seen how this playbook works and now we have whole armies of people to investigate and call out the frauds. We know how the scam works and won’t be bamboozled again.

Much is changing right now. History will record our times as the death of one paradigm and the birth of the new. From the rule by phony experts to the new birth of freedom itself: this is the trajectory and the plan.

Brownstone truly needs your support right now. We invite your support. The cause of freedom itself – deeply rooted in the culture as such – needs your commitment today. Our low amount of spending on development means that what you contribute goes to programs that matter.

The Brownstone Show is thriving. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest with Patrick Newman. The episodes are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise.

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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.

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Here is some content since our last email.

The Herd Immunity Fallacy By Jennifer Smith. Even under idealized assumptions of highly effective or “sterilizing” immunity, maintaining herd immunity in practice is complicated by continual population turnover, global migration, and the ease of international travel, all of which allow for repeated reintroduction of pathogens into communities.

Does the Flu Vaccine Prevent Death? By Eyal Shahar. My letter is concerned with the effect of the flu vaccine on flu-related death. That’s the ultimate endpoint of interest for vaccine effectiveness (VE) research, yet it is not captured in most studies that employ the test-negative design.

America’s Drug Shortage Is a National Security Crisis By Joseph Varon. A nation that cannot supply its hospitals with essential medicines is not merely experiencing an inconvenient drug shortage. It has discovered a strategic vulnerability, and the next time that vulnerability is exposed may be precisely when we can least afford it.

Game Theory and the Push to Go Along By Brownstone Institute. The final kill switch is transparent noncoerced consent. Instead of taking “a share of the loot” from the drug-DOPE game, we need our universities, the National Institutes of Health, and our medical system to enshrine the principle of non-coerced consent.

Four Forms of Numericide By Alan Cassels. Four targets — blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, four ways to medicalize you, four ways to apply a disease-mongered label to you, and four avenues for you to start living under a dark cloud.

WHO’s High-Price Pandemic Plan By David Bell and Ramesh Thakur. The Leeds authors call for transparency and honesty in assessing global health priorities, and in paying for them. The Australian government has a choice to be constructive on behalf of its taxpayers and require better, or through blind acquiescence remain the problem.

Was My Paper on Flu Vaccine Studies a “Hot Potato” for Editors? By Eyal Shahar. Over the years, authors have shared a similar analytical strategy: Early respiratory events were considered differently from later respiratory events (on the assumption that no effect is expected until immunity is built up). “Early” has typically been within two weeks post-vaccination.

Rethinking Polio By Forrest Maready. The prevailing understanding of poliovirus pathogenesis posits that the virus, following intestinal infection, gains access to the central nervous system through viremia and subsequent crossing of the blood-brain barrier. However, this model fails to explain several features of the historical polio epidemic.

David Morens and the Problem of Obedience By Reverend John F. Naugle. We are all obedient to someone. When in the service of evil, obedience destroys freedom. When in the service of good, obedience perfects freedom. Ultimately the fight is between free servants of the truth and those who are slaves to lies.

What Would a Brutally Honest Man Look Like? By Filipe Rafaeli. Among pre-exposure, when you take it to prevent contagion, or post-exposure, when you take it after having contact with an infected person to try to avoid the disease, there are 18 studies. And all of the prophylaxis studies are positive.

George Orwell’s Warning to Britain By Mike Fairclough. Great Britain, where I live, once prided itself on eccentricity, irreverence, and the right to say unpopular things. Today, people living in my country have been arrested over social media posts and other digital communications.

What Did Fauci Mean by “Game On?” By Jeffrey Tucker. Working with military intelligence and pharmaceutical companies, Fauci and his colleagues eventually hatched an audacious plan to delay natural immunity for ten months as they awaited both the election and the viable release of the injectable product called a vaccine.

Staying Human: Introduction By Thomas Harrington. I plan to spend my remaining days rooting around in the humus of the daily in the hope of coming to better recognize and embrace its abundant stores of beauty, connection, loyalty, and love. Care to traipse along with me?

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BY DAVID BELL & RAMESH THAKUR

View original article at Brownstone.org.

The recent release of Anthony Fauci’s diaries, followed by his refusal to answer questions in an appearance before a US Senate committee by invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination 111 times, highlighted a stark divide in how the Covid pandemic was handled by public health authorities. This is as true of Australia as of the US.

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Repeatedly, against certainty expressed in public to justify official statements on the origins of the virus and on lockdown, mask, and vaccine policies, their private contemporaneous conversations confirm that even the top scientists were making decisions based on scientific uncertainty.

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Consequently, one of the key legacies of the public-private gap is growing distrust of official claims. That scepticism should extend to the future pandemic agenda. We rely on the World Health Organisation to coordinate among countries to prevent scourges such as pandemics reaching our shores, or at least mitigate their effects. In doing so, we must defer to an army of international bureaucrats who work in such institutions. A deference that relies on trust.

Their salaries and careers depend on convincing us to part with more of our money to support their work. Yet, according to a new article on international pandemic financing in the Cambridge journal Health Economics, Policy and Law, the WHO and World Bank rely on dubious assumptions to calculate the return on investment case on which all major international efforts to mitigate future pandemics rely.

This should alarm governments. Mitigation is worth investing in, as pandemics will occur from time to time. But the article shows that current investments will have an overall detrimental effect on global health. Most starkly, it suggests a deep rot in the quality of institutions we rely on as stewards of this commonly accepted global good.

The WHO and World Bank report, produced at the request of the G20 in 2022, proposes an annual $31.1 billion budget for pandemic preparedness and prevention, about $10.5 billion of which would come through foreign aid (including Australia). About $26 billion would come from low and middle-income countries already struggling with economic issues including burgeoning Covid debt. For context, the entire WHO budget for 2024-25 was just $3.8 billion a year.

The point of the WHO and World Bank’s argument is that if we spend such resources on preparing for pandemics, we will reap orders of magnitude greater return on investment down the road, more than a thousandfold in some wealthy countries – a bargain difficult to refuse if true.

The article from Leeds University shows that the financial arguments are based on smoke and mirrors. They rely on assumptions on the quality-adjusted life years lost to pandemics as against the big three global infectious diseases of HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria; on the share of global funds to be devoted to pandemics in comparison to the other three per life saved in each case; and on the benefits to be gained from investments in vaccines and other pharmaceutical products instead of in the more basic determinants of health resilience in the population such as nutrition, sanitation, water, and hygiene. These are the factors, along with antibiotics and gains in medical advances, that have reduced the mortality toll from pandemics since the Spanish flu of 1918.

Furthermore, the WHO and World Bank also discount the adjustments made to human behaviour to mitigate health risks as they become obvious, collateral costs of the pandemic response measures, and the likely benefits of investing in those measures.

This matters because our government has signed on to the amended International Health Regulations, is expecting to sign the proposed WHO Pandemic Agreement, and looks set to sign a UN political agreement this September advocating for yet more money for the authors and beneficiaries of the growing pandemic industry. They are promising a lot of money based on the WHO’s costings.

It matters because most Australians assumed that we could trust international institutions and that they valued rigour rather than engage in false accounting and subterfuge.

Unfortunately, incentives without accountability are a poor basis for health governance. It matters because funds to finance the pharmaceutical corporations, research institutions, and bureaucrats who stand to benefit from the pandemic agenda will have to be diverted from programs that work. International funding for the big endemic diseases and basic priorities such as nutrition is already falling, while the pandemic agenda expands. The Leeds authors call for simple transparency and honesty in assessing global health priorities, and in paying for them. Not a big ask. The Australian government has a choice to be constructive on behalf of its taxpayers and require better, or through blind acquiescence remain part of the problem.

Republished from The Australian

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BY EYAL SHAHAR

View original article at Brownstone.org.

I think the answer is “yes,” but here is the story for you to judge.

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Each year the CDC publishes estimates of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the previous season. Reported by several networks, these estimates are based on a research design that is called a test-negative case-control study.

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Over the years, the various authors have shared a similar analytical strategy: Early respiratory events were considered differently from later respiratory events (on the assumption that no effect is expected until immunity is built up). “Early” has typically been within two weeks post-vaccination.

Several months ago, I realized that this special handling of early events is a source of bias called “immortal time.” To expose the bias, I used causal diagrams, formally called “directed acyclic graphs (DAGs).” DAGs were introduced in landmark publications from the 1990s and are widely recognized in epidemiology as a methodological tool.

I wrote a short paper with a scary title: “Immortal time bias in test-negative studies of the flu vaccine.” I illustrated the bias by two simple DAGs that encoded the analytical approaches as described in those CDC-associated studies. The paper may be summarized in three bullet points:

• Immortal time is an overlooked bias in test-negative, case-control studies of the flu vaccine.

• The causal structure corresponds to misclassification bias or selection bias, depending on how early events were handled.

• The bias can be avoided by considering all events and estimating built-up vaccine effectiveness by consecutive post-vaccination days.

I submitted the paper sequentially to three respected epidemiology journals. Surprisingly, the editor-in-chief of each journal rejected the paper within one week using boilerplate text. It was not sent for peer review. Why?

There are three possible reasons:

1. The message was not sufficiently important.

2. The paper was poorly written.

3. Soliciting peer review was not needed. The editor decided that the bias did not exist.

I can quickly eliminate the first reason. Exposing entrenched bias in studies of the annual flu vaccine is of utmost importance. I didn’t need to compete with any “more important” papers.

Was it poorly written? I have published many scientific papers and two books. I am not a newcomer to epidemiology and even served as an associate editor for one of the three journals. So, that was not the reason.

We are left with the third reason. Three editors (possibly more in-house) decided that my analysis was obviously wrong. They did not need any external peer review. Was that the case indeed? How likely is it that three editors have reached a unanimous, independent verdict on my analysis without soliciting peer reviews?

I could have written a whole page on my expertise in the domains of causal diagrams and biases, but here is a short version of my record. I suggested a new taxonomy of biases based on DAGs and identified new types of bias. I authored about 20 DAG-related publications, including a book chapter. (Some of my articles were cited in the paper.) For sure, my methodological analysis was not “obviously wrong.” More likely, it was obviously correct.

So, why was my paper rejected without peer review? May I speculate?

This paper has a startling message that discredits the CDC. All those studies about the effectiveness of the annual flu vaccine contained a mistaken analytical decision. The reported estimates are biased. Had my paper been published, it might have been picked up by some reporters. You can imagine the headlines.

The editors were dealing with a hot potato. They did not want to take the risk that peer-reviewers would endorse the paper, which would force them to publish it. An upfront rejection was a safe way out.

I tried once more. In my fourth submission to an epidemiology journal, I included the following cover letter:

“Dear Editor,

This short paper addresses immortal time in test-negative studies of the flu vaccine. Here, two common approaches to handling early post-vaccination events are encoded by causal diagrams to identify and classify a source of bias. At the end, I explained how the bias may be avoided.

To my knowledge, the message is novel and relevant to future studies that employ the test-negative design to estimate vaccine effectiveness. Therefore, I believe that the paper deserves peer review.”

This time it took a little longer to get a response. Perhaps the editors were busy, or they contemplated how to handle the “hot potato.” No surprise was in store, however. About three weeks later, a boilerplate message landed in my inbox. Two paragraphs are pasted below:

“Your manuscript has been reviewed by two members of the editorial board. I am sorry to inform you that its priority rating was not sufficiently high to warrant our accepting it for publication…The judgment about priority is made in view of the many other papers we receive and our space limitations. Thus, even informative papers have to be rejected on occasion. This preliminary review is done on all papers so that authors can receive a quick decision if it is going to be negative. Thus we have no reviewers’ comments to forward to you.”

Then, they graciously added:

“Other reasons why we are rejecting your manuscript include: After an initial editorial assessment, we have decided not to send the paper for external peer review. Although the topic is of interest, the manuscript does not align closely enough with the journal format.“

So, which do you think it was: a priority rating, alignment with the journal format, or a hot potato?

I gave up and posted the paper as a preprint. It is now in the public domain, but not very many will read it. It was not certified “peer-reviewed.” And the CDC will continue to report annual estimates of vaccine effectiveness from studies that contain that bias (not the only one, by the way.)

However, every editor who rejected my paper and every author of the CDC papers on the flu vaccine will get the preprint in their inbox. I will also try to reach editorial board members and others. If someone thinks that my analysis is faulty, perhaps they will respond. Otherwise, I expect my inbox to remain free of replies. Good enough for me. Less so for public health.

We still have freedom of scientific dissent, albeit with some exceptions.

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BY MIKE FAIRCLOUGH

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Great Britain, where I live, once prided itself on eccentricity, irreverence, and the right to say unpopular things. Today, people living in my country have been arrested over social media posts and other digital communications. Some have been imprisoned. Online censorship has become more sophisticated, surveillance technology continues to advance, and cancel culture has taught millions of people that expressing the wrong opinion can carry severe consequences. As a result, people are self-censoring out of fear of reprisals.

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Books have a particular role to play here. They give people permission to explore ideas away from the noise and intimidation of social media. A reader can encounter something privately, consider it, question it, disagree with it, return to it, and perhaps find the confidence to openly express an opinion they had previously been afraid to voice.

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This is why my publishing house, Free Speech Press, is launching with a reprint of George Orwell’s 1984.

For this special edition, I asked the British writer and broadcaster Neil Oliver to write a new prologue. Neil travelled back, intellectually and geographically, to the circumstances in which Orwell created his final novel.

What follows is an extract from that prologue:

George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984. Like the setting sun, he had travelled into the west: to Jura, the Deer Island in the Inner Hebrides off Scotland’s west coast. George Orwell was his nom de plume – Eric Arthur Blair is on the stone over his clay in the churchyard of All Saints’ Church in Sutton Courtenay, in Oxfordshire – and 1984 would be his swan song. As well as dying (he did not know it then) he was grieving the loss of his wife. It was with his sister Avril then, that he arrived at the lonely farmhouse of Barnhill in the north of the island in May of 1946. Eileen Orwell had died the year before, during a hysterectomy, and the couple’s son Richard joined father and aunt, along with housekeeper Susan Watson later that summer.

Barnhill was remote and on the point of being reclaimed by the elements, until the infusion of life, lives saddened, and from an unlikely source. Jura can be hard to love. Sparsely populated then as now, a place of blanket bog and bare rock. Getting to Barnhill was a matter of two ferries – first to Islay, second to Jura – then 20 miles by motor vehicle until the road dwindled and the last four had to be covered on foot. Food, fuel and the rest had to be carried along with everything else required. “Extremely un-get-atable” is how Orwell described their billet, and he loved it. He was middle-class – a literary type, obviously – and while he had written about the travails of the workers – including the degraded and degrading lives of coal miners and their families in Lancashire and Yorkshire in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) – and had put in time in self-inflicted poverty as a Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – by 1946 he still hankered after the hardship of other men’s lives, and the possibilities of a life lived far from the madding crowd.

If it sounds as though I am being unkind, it is not my intention. 1984 was a book I was given to read at school and along with many I have had reasons to think about George Orwell over and over in the years since. Most recently, when it has seemed for all the world as though his last novel is received and used less as dire warning of totalitarianism and more a must have How To handbook for would-be dictators everywhere, I have learned to see the author as nothing less than a seer.

That he was drawn to the Deer Island for the writing of it says to me that his last months and years were ordained for a vision, or a dreary dream the telling of which was nothing less than a calling, or perhaps a penance. It is Highland tradition that deer, the Red Deer, are portents of death. When the deer come down out of the hills and walk the streets of human habitations, their fleur-de-lis hooves clipping through the quiet dark, it is deep sadness they are foretelling. Dying of Tuberculosis still undiagnosed, though it had him coughing red blood while he wrote and wrote within the white walls of Barnhill, he and the world around him were also grieving all that had been lost in the World War just past. It was a shell-shocked world, and Orwell no stranger to its ways. Homage to Catalonia (1938) had been the product of his time fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and there he had been shot through the throat by a sniper, the wounding leaving him with a voice rendered faint.

Made gaunt anyway by war’s privations, broken hearted, during that harsh cradling on Jura he saw the future as clear as any Highlander gifted or cursed with the Second Sight. The future he saw was populated by citizens denied hope, made hopeless. Everything shaped to grind souls to lifeless matter. Tasteless food, ill-made and ill-fitting clothes. War everywhere and forever, pointlessly consuming whatever the proles made in soul-sapping factories. No privacy. Big Brother watching over all. The world of 1984 is as familiar to my generation as a half-remembered dream and yet for so many of us the last handful of years have had us sense its version of reality not as a dream but as an inevitability. Big Brother is made real in the apparatus of panopticon surveillance and those we are expected to call leaders foment war after war.

(the prologue continues in the book)

More than 75 years after Orwell wrote 1984, his vocabulary remains part of our political language: Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, Newspeak, and the memory hole. The technologies have changed beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, while his central questions about power, surveillance, language, and the control of information have acquired an uncomfortable new relevance.

Orwell gave my countrymen and women a warning. Neil Oliver’s prologue reminds us how clearly that warning was sounded, and how much closer some of its themes now feel. The question is what we do with it. Do we continue to retreat into silence, with careful language and whispered conversations, or will independent thinkers in Britain recover the courage to stand up and speak openly again?

You can purchase this edition here.

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BY FILIPE RAFAELI

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Diogenes was one of the most iconic philosophers of ancient Greece. He roamed the streets of Athens in broad daylight carrying a lit lantern. When asked why he was performing such an unusual scene, Diogenes would reply that he was looking for an honest man. He never found one.

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More than two thousand years later, Diogenes’ questioning remains just as valid and relevant as much of the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers. Recently, I was reminded of him when I came across an analysis by a columnist in one of Brazil’s largest newspapers. This analysis, which addresses the effectiveness of ivermectin during the pandemic, resurfaced when the pandemic returned to the headlines following the revelations from Anthony Fauci’s diary—the czar of the US government’s Covid-19 response.

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In fact, given the accumulation of evidence since the very beginning of the Covid-19 drama, along with the facts that have been laid out and the proven lies that have slowly come to light, I began to wonder what a truly honest person would say today about this period in history. In this article, I propose to carry out this exercise. But first, let’s delve a little into the context.

Drugs for Covid-19

In theory, I wouldn’t even need to introduce the subject much. Any human being who lived through the pandemic and at least skimmed the news knows that the proposals for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin against Covid came to nothing. They started out as scientific possibilities, as hopes. But they were quickly dismissed by the authorities. After that, those who talked about the subject were treated as “conspiracy theorists.” Those who continued to insist later became the subject of studies on health disinformation or political extremism.

The situation was so serious that even doctors—even after regulatory agencies like the WHO strongly recommended against it—continued prescribing it for Covid-19 to their patients. Some were fined, others lost their licenses to practice medicine. At this point, after everything had been so thoroughly clarified, the subject shifted to a different level: it ceased to be science and became fodder for comedians.

When a subject becomes fodder for comedians, that is the pinnacle of a society’s consolidated knowledge. It means you can no longer have a serious conversation with the few stragglers still repeating such nonsense. All that’s left to do is make jokes. One example is the Brazilian comedian and influencer Maria Bopp, who has over 1 million followers on Instagram. She produced a samba. The lyrics talk about people who deny science, such as those who believe the Earth is flat. This is just one example among several comedy sketches, political cartoons, and jokes.

The same thing happened in the US. Forbes ran a story about those who used humor to combat the disinformation surrounding ivermectin as a solution for Covid-19. Television comedians took aim at both medications. The overall tone was one of mockery.

Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine

Before I talk about the text by columnist Frankito (Franklin Weise), who defines himself as a data analyst, in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, where he addresses ivermectin, let me talk a bit about chloroquine and its slightly younger, yet septuagenarian, sister, hydroxychloroquine.

We are in 2026. Today, we open the University of Oxford website. On the site, we find a published news piece: “Hydroxychloroquine provides moderate COVID-19 prevention, large clinical trial shows.” In other words, the subject was the butt of jokes, synonymous with crazy people across all media, yet it is reported as effective on the website of the university that, in any serious ranking, is placed among the first, second, or third in teaching quality and scientific output. Oxford, depending on the year, rivals Harvard and MIT in the rankings.

I wanted to go straight to Frankito’s text, or already carry out the exercise of the “brutally honest man” with you, the reader, but I need to explain a little about this news on the Oxford website. It is necessary. The contrast between the subject being a mockery and then reading this news from the university that represents the world bastion of science and rationality is, you will agree, immense.

It only became news on the Oxford website because HCQ against Covid reached the highest level of scientific evidence a drug can attain. In addition to their clinical trial, the “gold standard,” on the use of hydroxychloroquine in pre-exposure prophylaxis, Oxford conducted a meta-analysis, bringing together all previous studies on the use of the drug in this context, also a “gold standard.” Pre-exposure prophylaxis is when you take the medication before coming into contact with the virus, to reduce or eliminate your chances of contracting it.

Precisely because it is the highest level of evidence, Oxford put its foot down and reported in the news piece that it is effective, leaving no room for doubt. For reference, 91% of standard cardiology treatments do not possess this highest level of evidence (meta-analysis of multiple RCTs – randomized controlled trials). In other words, HCQ against Covid belongs to the select group of the most thoroughly proven drugs in existence. Furthermore, the study wasn’t just published. Oxford published the study and issued a news piece on its website, giving the institution’s unequivocal endorsement. People cannot try to move the goalposts with the idiotic argument that it’s “not an Oxford study, but a study by Oxford researchers.”

The meta-analysis showed 20% efficacy. But even so, some questions remain. Why did it take over two years to publish the results? Yes, the study sat in a drawer for two years. Why the rush during a pandemic? The second question is: why, in the middle of the study, did they change the endpoint to seroconversion? The vaccine studies did not use this. They all used the PCR test. Seroconversion only measures whether the body produced antibodies, not whether the person actually got sick. Could it be that, by changing the endpoint, the result becomes, as explicitly stated in the headline, “moderate?”

Yes, that’s exactly it. The Oxford study found a 57% reduction in symptomatic Covid-19 cases. Before I continue with the article, let me shock people a little with a statement: if this had been used, the world would not have needed to shut down, and Covid would have been contained as early as 2020. The pandemic would have been a “non-event,” instead of being the greatest trauma the world has experienced since World War II, in addition to the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in human history. Well, but hydroxychloroquine is cheap, off-patent. On the other hand, no one would have made billions in profits.

To close the HCQ subject, this Oxford study is on prophylaxis. In this use, we have the highest possible level of scientific evidence. It cannot get any higher. In early treatment, which is when you start taking the medication shortly after presenting Covid symptoms, we currently have 38 studies. Among them, 17 measure mortality reduction. And among these 17, all of them, absolutely all of them, unanimously, show a reduction in mortality, with an average of 76% reduction in deaths. In other words, in early treatment, it is not the highest level, but it is a good level, which few medications possess.

A quick extra note: if any “expert” in science shows up to say that observational treatment studies do not prove efficacy, just drop this Cochrane review in their lap, which explains that there are no substantial differences in results between “gold standard” and observational studies when the outcome is high. Watch your “expert” go silent.

And well, why, after all, did I talk about hydroxychloroquine here, in this text, which deals with Frankito’s attack on ivermectin? Firstly, for the contrast. And the second thing is that Frankito chose to talk about ivermectin, precisely the choice that allows him to avoid the hydroxychloroquine issue. Imagine him confronted like this: “Who knows more, you or Oxford?”

Ivermectin and Itajaí

Frankito published the following column in Estadão: “The false miracle of ivermectin against covid and the IBGE Census.” In this article, he proposes to analyze the study on the use of ivermectin in pre-exposure prophylaxis, conducted in Itajaí, on the coast of Santa Catarina, in the south of Brazil.

Let’s delve a little into the details. Ivermectin was distributed for free to the population at various health centers in the city of Itajaí. Part of the population went to get it, another part did not. It was recorded who went to get it. From there, it was possible to track three distinct outcomes: risk of infection, reduction in hospitalizations among those who took it, and reduction in deaths among those who took it. All based on what was recorded in the city’s health system.

Frankito argues that the comparison of infection reduction between those who took ivermectin and those who did not was compromised because the last demographic census was outdated, from 2010, and the total population figure was based on an IBGE projection, involving births and deaths. And when a new census was conducted in 2023, the city had far more inhabitants than the projection. The criticism is valid in this respect.

However, the study has two other outcomes beyond the risk of infection: the reduction in hospitalizations and the reduction in deaths among those who took it. And in these two cases, a different type of matching was used. In this case, not estimated by IBGE data, but rather matching by comorbidities. It is called “PSM – propensity score matching.”

This method worked to reduce confounding factors across the entire population. But I will be honest here. PSM tries to reduce them, but does not eliminate them. There are various types of observational studies. And a population-based observational study, like this one from Itajaí, is a low level of evidence. If there were only, exclusively, the Itajaí study on Covid prophylaxis with ivermectin, no one could definitively conclude on efficacy. We would have a suggestion, a path, something to pay attention to.

Furthermore, all population-based observational studies have several limitations. After all, in these studies, one works with retrospective data. In other words, you distribute it to a bunch of people, time passes, and then you collect the data as best as possible and report it in a study.

But let’s get to the heart of the matter. Today, August 2026, there are 106 studies with clinical results on ivermectin in Covid. And among pre-exposure, when you take it to prevent contagion, or post-exposure, when you take it after having contact with an infected person to try to avoid the disease, there are 18 studies. And absolutely all of the prophylaxis studies are positive. Every single one.

This is the complete table with the full list. In the leftmost column, the name of the lead researcher. Some have the endpoint of infection, others of hospitalization reduction, others of mortality reduction. In the rightmost column, there is a vertical line. It represents the null effect. All the “squares” are to the left of this vertical line. All of them, therefore, indicating efficacy.

The interesting detail. Five of the 18 prophylaxis studies are “gold standard.” These are the ones with the acronym (RCT) in parentheses next to the lead researcher’s name.

RCT clinical trials are the highest level of scientific evidence for clinical trials. In other words, if you remove all the observational studies and leave only the randomized ones, they all remain positive.

Extra note on ivermectin: this list above is of prophylaxis studies. In the total sum of studies, even when considering only RCT “gold standard” studies, ivermectin is also very effective in outpatient treatment, with a 55% risk reduction. Furthermore, it is effective when treatment is started in already hospitalized patients, with a 29% risk reduction.

The rhetorical trick

Do you see Frankito’s trick? First, it was the choice of which of the drugs that became a joke to attack. He chose ivermectin. After all, after Oxford, it becomes difficult to keep the joke going with HCQ. Next, among the ivermectin studies, he chose the easiest endpoint to attack from the lowest-evidence study, the one from Itajaí. All of this crowned with a pretense that the other 17 studies do not exist, including five “gold standard” ones.

In the headline, we read: “False miracle of ivermectin,” in bold letters. All of this, on the cover of one of Brazil’s largest newspapers.

The Spirit of the Times

In German, there is a very interesting word. It is called “zeitgeist,” which in translation would be “spirit of the times” or “spirit of an era.” The concept of Zeitgeist helps us understand why so many ordinary people, in a given period of time within a certain historical or social context, behave in a certain way without necessarily considering themselves irrational.

The pandemic was a historical period and had its own “zeitgeist.” But before exemplifying the pandemic’s “spirit of the times,” let me explain this social concept with another recent historical period. The year was 2015 or 2016. Brazil was experiencing political upheaval with large protests in the streets. Everything culminated in a parliamentary coup against elected President Dilma Rousseff. I positioned myself, on social media, against the impeachment. In a presidential system, impeachments are traumatic fractures in democracy. There were two years of government left, and nothing led by deputies like Eduardo Cunha, who was soon arrested, could result in anything good.

One day, a few weeks before the impeachment, I was at a musical event. A person I had known since I was a teenager, but with whom I had no close ties for decades, felt morally authorized to come up to me and start insulting and yelling at me for my stance against the impeachment. It nearly came to punches and kicks. Also, during that same historical period, I went to lunch at a restaurant owned by a friend who identifies with the political right. This friend, the restaurant owner, told a man what my political position was. This guy, whom I had never seen in my life, got up, came to my table, and felt entitled to start yelling at me.

That is what happens when the spirit of an era grants moral permission for people to abandon certain rules of coexistence and thought. And this also happened during Covid-19.

During the pandemic, when anyone tried to draw attention to the emerging evidence on ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, a huge portion of the population felt morally authorized to laugh at whoever touched on the subject, interrupt people’s speech, insult them, or treat them as crazy.

The Zeitgeist does not determine what each individual thinks. It determines, to some extent, what a society considers permissible to think, say, and do. As a reflection, the general thinking went something like this: “This subject is ridiculous. These people are denialists.” And therefore, “I am authorized to treat them as ridiculous.” The Zeitgeist does not need to convince a society that a certain person is wrong. It just needs to convince it that that person does not deserve to be heard and that this is the smartest thing to do.

During the pandemic, I lost many friends to such behavior, even with my curiosity to watch up close how normal people reacted to this Zeitgeist. For months, when I tried to explain data from emerging studies, their characteristics, both of treatments and vaccines, these people thought they could interrupt, raise their voices, and treat with mockery. For months I remained patient, waiting to see when these people’s emotions would return to normal so we could have productive dialogues, but for many, it lasted beyond what was bearable.

The frightening part is that these were not necessarily stupid people. They were people embedded in an environment that said, “It is not necessary to investigate this.” In the pandemic’s Zeitgeist, society created an environment in which people did not want to, and felt they did not need to, know about the possibilities of studies and where the evidence was pointing.

And even more frightening is that this happened even to specialists. Let me tell a story. I have a friend, a physician, PhD, cardiovascular surgeon, a high-level medical professor. He decided to follow detail by detail the studies that came out, with a critical eye. His mother is also a physician, PhD, medical professor. He tried to show his mother the studies and data that came out so they could discuss what was worthwhile and what was not.

The mother began to treat her son with mockery and as if he were crazy. “So explain to me what is wrong with my interpretation,” he asked her, he told me. The mother interrupted him. “If you explain to me why my interpretation is wrong, I will change my mind,” he insisted. There was no dialogue. There was mockery and moral accusations. “We were trained exactly to get into the details,” he insisted. Their relationship was strained for over two years. Can you imagine the weight of that?

She felt morally authorized to treat her son that way. And today, there it is, as a contrast, reported that hydroxychloroquine is effective, at the highest level of scientific evidence, at the university that is the reference for critical thinking and the cradle of science.

Imagining a brutally honest man

Now imagine a brutally honest man reflecting on his own participation in this Zeitgeist. Not necessarily Frankito. Anyone who has done this—like so many journalists, PhDs, or influencers who made it their life’s mission to steer people away from hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin using whatever rhetorical means possible:

“I went along with it and made jokes about it. I called everyone flat-Earthers, science deniers, just because there wasn’t maximum evidence yet. But there was always evidence for HCQ and IVM. It was worth looking into. Now we have the highest level of evidence, even from Oxford. I should have understood that the path was leading there, but I didn’t. I was incompetent. I put all my effort into steering people away from valid treatments when it was worthwhile.

I didn’t just make a mistake. I enjoyed being authorized to treat others like idiots. I enjoyed being in a society that created a collective permission for certain people to be treated as morally illegitimate.

And I don’t know how many people died because of my opinions. But I know I had no right to speak with the certainty with which I spoke.

And because of my position, many, many people listened to me. I lost relatives to Covid-19 while treatments were always available. Friends lost their parents.

Only one thing remains for me to do: I promise never to give an opinion on anything again. Nothing that matters. Never again. My wrong bets cost too dearly. From now on, I will only express an opinion if I want pepperoni or margherita pizza.

My opinions, delivered with an air of absolute certainty, while mocking and helping to defame those who were saving lives, led who knows how many people to cemeteries. I contributed to that.

I am going to visit, one by one, the graves of friends’ parents, of relatives, who could be alive right now.”

It’s impossible to be honest

It is impossible for a human being to be so brutally honest. To do so is to erase oneself as a person. It is to sink into deep sorrow. It is an emotional collapse. What remains for them is to keep deceiving themselves, cherry-picking endpoints from the weakest studies, claiming victory, pretending that the monumental body of evidence does not exist, pretending that Oxford did not report what it reported. Others, who took similar positions of mockery and moral righteousness—a stance that crumbles when confronted with the data and facts—also find utility in texts like these: they find the same comfort of self-preservation.

Diogenes, among those who presumed to opine with the airs of sages and analysts during the pandemic, positioning themselves as “defenders of science,” but merely reproducing the lobbying of large corporations and steering people away from valid treatments—Diogenes would point his lantern and find empty faces.

Two thousand years later, nothing has changed. However, the question today is probably a different one: what happens to a society when no one can admit they were wrong anymore?

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BY REVEREND JOHN F. NAUGLE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Recently the Church celebrated the feast of St. Maximillan Kolbe, a conventual Franciscan who was held as a political prisoner at Auschwitz by the Nazis until he offered his own life in exchange for that of a husband and father.

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For his feast, those who celebrated the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours read an excerpt from one of his letters. In this letter he treats the subject of obedience:

God, who is all-knowing and all-wise, knows best what we should do to increase his glory. Through his representatives on earth he continually reveals his will to us; thus it is obedience and obedience alone that is the sure sign to us of the divine will. A superior may, it is true, make a mistake; but it is impossible for us to be mistaken in obeying a superior’s command. The only exception to this rule is the case of a superior commanding something that in even the slightest way would contravene God’s law. Such a superior would not be conveying God’s will.

For contemporary men of either modern or postmodern liberalism, this understanding of obedience is almost inconceivable. Having bought into the idea of radical individualism, the turning over of one’s will to a superior is dismissed as somehow against the dignity of the person.

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Note, however, how carefully the ecclesiastical counsel of obedience is circumscribed within the context of religion. Obedience is given only voluntarily through an act of the will. It is always restrained by God’s law; the obligation to obey never violates faith or morals. Finally, it is understood that such obedience is simply a higher level of freedom, freedom from the selfish desire of money, power, or pleasure. Such obedience is ordered to perfection of character.

This stands in contrast to the type of obedience we see demanded in a criminal organization such as the mob. Obedience is procured through force or fear. It is proven precisely through the commission of crimes against man’s law and God’s law. It leads to abject slavery to one’s superiors, with the payoff being access to money, power, and pleasure. Such a structure of obedience is a diabolical counterfeit of the real thing.

This contrast came to mind as David Morens, a former top NIAID senior advisor to Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud by destroying federal records. This was a man who lived under a regime of ruthless obedience. He knew that what he was doing was wrong, but he owed fealty to his co-conspirators. Even worse, the reward for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans” was merely two bottles of wine. It is both sad and ironic that the wine was “The Prisoner.”

It appears that, in an era which rejects religious obedience as a useless medieval artifact, we are left only with the dark counterfeit of it in our halls of government.

Consider the iron grip Nancy Pelosi had and Hakeem Jeffries now has over Democrats in the House; any abbot would be envious of such perfect compliance. Consider how, despite popular sentiment against war, Congress refuses to assert any responsibility for our ongoing military quagmire.

Consider how governors in 2020 were clearly taking orders from unnamed people to implement lockdowns and masking. Finally, consider how countless individuals in the administrative state obviously work for the pharmaceutical industry and not the taxpayers who pay their salary.

Our system of government seems to be overrun by men and women who have destroyed any semblance of human freedom in their hearts in order to obtain and protect their jobs. Little by little their obedience is procured from those malignant actors whom they serve by demanding acts which violate their consciences until their consciences are dead and their characters are destroyed.

Let the sad character of David Morens serve as warning to both elected officials and administrative hires alike. There is nothing to be gained in the long run by being blindly obedient. In the end, it is the whistleblowers and the martyrs who are authentically free.

Elsewhere in St. Maxamillian’s letter, he laments that “[i]t is sad for us to see in our own time that indifferentism in its many forms is spreading like an epidemic not only among the laity but also among religious.” As we know, this indifferentism is what fed the rise of tyranny in Germany in the 1930s. It also fed lockdowns and mandates in recent years. It obstructs the reforms which are desperately needed today.

In the end, we are all obedient to someone. When in the service of evil, obedience destroys freedom. When in the service of good, obedience perfects freedom. Ultimately the fight is between free servants of the truth and those who are slaves to lies, and the fight for truth is always worth whatever it may cost us.

Just ask Maximillian Kolbe, priest and martyr.

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BY DANIEL NUCCIO

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Remember that time a few years back when the government completely reshaped day-to-day life and restricted our basic rights to protect us from a disease that wasn’t that dangerous? Remember how our leaders forced us to comply with a suite of safety protocols that seemed mostly symbolic at best and a test of compliance at worst? Well, it’s happening again but not in the way you’d expect.

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No, this time the threat is not some plague of medieval proportions. It’s not a new strain of super-Covid. It’s not Ebola or Disease-X. It’s not monkeypox or hantavirus. It’s not even explosive diarrhea from dirty lettuce. No, this time the threat is social media and the open internet.

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That’s right. In case you haven’t heard, social media is causing a mental health crisis amongst young people. Porn and the potential for children to interact with adult strangers online probably isn’t great either. And therefore in order to protect our nation’s youth we all need to accept that the government has no choice but to reshape day-to-day life in the digital world.

A Brief History of Another Scientific Consensus

To give some background, starting roughly around 2012 depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality began to increase among minors. These trends coincided with the growing ubiquity of smartphones and social media. Subsequently, many parents, teachers, psychologists, and activists went on to suggest a link. Moreover, these claims were said to be supported by a growing number of scientific studies showing associations between social media use and measures of declining mental health.

When discussed in popular books such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, these societal trends and supporting studies often are portrayed as undeniable evidence of a mental health epidemic caused by social media. When discussed in the media and by politicians, there can be a sense that this is a consensus position among experts overwhelmingly supported by “The Science.”

Consequently, legislators across the country are rushing to demonstrate how seriously they take this and related issues by restricting access to certain digital corridors to those able and willing to convince a computer algorithm that they are in fact an adult – or by at least requiring everyone to jump through a couple additional government-mandated hoops just to get online.

Protecting Children by Requiring ID

Although many pieces of legislation have been proposed, and in some cases enacted into law, the most comprehensive and probably most threatening at the moment is the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act).

The KIDS Act, which recently passed in the House (and which I wrote about in more detail for The Washington Examiner), has been sent to the Senate. What happens next is unclear. But if it were to become law, it would require certain types of websites and digital technologies to provide distinct user experiences based on whether a user is an adult or a minor (or in some cases an adult, teen, or child).

On paper, this is intended to protect minors from age-inappropriate content (e.g., pornography and cigarette ads), questionable practices on the part of social media companies (e.g., location sharing with third parties, personalized ads, and design features that encourage compulsive use), and online interactions with adult strangers and deceptive AIs. It also is meant to give parents greater control of their children’s social media accounts and online lives.

In practice, however, the KIDS Act would require covered sites and technologies verify or at least estimate the ages of visitors or users through an array of mechanisms that at best legitimize current data collection practices by Big Tech (e.g., age estimation based on one’s online activity) and at worst mandate even more invasive ones that can be used to verify a user’s real-world identity (e.g., presentation of a government ID or submission to a biometric face scan).

A similar effort has been proposed by the Senate. At the state level, places such as California, Texas, and Utah have their own age-gating legislation. Additionally, California and Illinois are pushing requirements that at least some operating systems collect age-bracket information on users to relay to websites as a means to ensure age-appropriate user experiences.

Also, the Senate is considering the SCREEN Act, which is intended to prevent minors from viewing sexually explicit material online, seemingly by imposing more invasive age-gating protocols on anyone attempting to access such content. However, according to some analyses, the SCREEN Act may not only cover porn sites but also major streaming services and social media platforms. Furthermore, the SCREEN Act would require covered sites to crack down on people using VPNs to protect their privacy by circumnavigating compliance with age-gating requirements.

Despite some differences in the precise rationale and specific mechanisms imposed by these different pieces of legislation, the end result is always the same: an internet that is a little less free.

Second-Tier Status for Those Who Refuse to Comply

As highlighted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), one of America’s leading defenders of free speech, age-gating measures have the potential to eliminate the ability of people to speak anonymously on social media sites, as well as “suppress the consumption of lawful speech (by minors)” and put “all manner of censorial burdens on the rights of both minors and adults.”

To go a step further, given that many age-gating measures can double as identity verification measures (e.g., the upload of one’s government ID, a biometric scan, etc.), this raises questions about whether online activities requiring submission to at least more stringent mechanisms should be treated with the same caution as a text, email, tweet, or nude selfie. In other words, should you always operate under the assumption that your age-gated activities could be linked back to you and made public? If so, should you proceed to alter your behavior, speech, and content consumption on the other side of an age-gate accordingly? What kind of chilling effects will these kinds of requirements ultimately have?

Granted, it may feel like we don’t have much privacy left in the digital world (or the physical one for that matter thanks to companies like Flock), but maintaining an anonymous social media account isn’t completely impossible and you can still try to hide your browsing history by using privacy-friendly search engines and a VPN. Age-gating efforts, however, make such attempts considerably harder, if not futile.

Furthermore, although social media is filled with all sorts of frivolous crap and people can behave in all sorts of puerile ways on these sites, for better or worse, there is truth to the cliché that social media sites have become our public squares. Facebook and X now serve as major news outlets for many people, as well as places of community engagement and political activism. Hence, a person’s inability or unwillingness to comply with social media age-gating efforts effectively limits their participation in modern society and civic life.

In some places, this second-class status is cemented even further by age-gating mandates that gate much more than just social media. Texas’s 2025 App Store Accountability Act, for example, not only requires app stores verify the age of individuals attempting to download social media apps but also those trying to download library, news, book, banking, fitness, and weather apps.

Additionally, once such measures take wide enough effect, requirements to submit to a face scan or to upload a copy of one’s government ID will likely come to be perceived as a normal part of day-to-day digital life, allowing companies to impose such requirements even more broadly than legally required, further excluding from normal life those who cannot or will not comply.

Moreover, even if you believe concerns about online privacy and anonymity are overblown, it is worth noting that additional data collection ultimately increases opportunities for data to be exposed through the kind of leaks and hacks that seem unavoidable for any entity collecting vast amounts of data. In recent years AT&T, Comcast, the background check company National Public Data, and TeaOnHer, an app women use to vet potential partners, all have been reported to have experienced data breaches. So have companies used by Discord, TikTok, and X for identity verification.

Making matters worse, even if you think these are acceptable trade-offs for the protection and safety of children, the reality is that these efforts will likely protect as many children as requirements for cloth masks in their classrooms.

Little Actual Protection for Minors

Like many of the ineffective public health measures imposed during Covid to protect us from a disease that wasn’t that dangerous, most age-gating measures are going to prove equally useless at protecting children’s mental health and broader well-being. Plus, like the threat of Covid to the physical health of everyone, the threat of social media to the psychological health of minors is largely exaggerated.

As I wrote in my Washington Examiner article, most age-gating efforts will inevitably fail to keep children away from purportedly dangerous or inappropriate online sites and content.

Even when children are banned from having their own social media accounts (or accessing social media at all), many children still use parental accounts with parental permission. Other parents allow their kids to maintain “illegal” accounts (or at least look the other way). Realistically, even if age-gating mandates were put in place, such assistance and indifference inevitably would continue.

Also, many families share computers and tablets, meaning that device-level age-gating mechanisms like the OS-level bracketing schemes of California and Illinois would have little impact on the online activities of children outside of families in which the children strictly use their own designated devices or in which shared devices are kept in child-mode. Furthermore, many older children can gain access to a parental credit card (an acceptable enough adult credential in some circumstances) just by asking to borrow it, while other kids beyond a certain age are more than comfortable snatching a parental ID after hours.

The truth is that despite what age-gating proponents might claim, in practice, any age-gating mechanism short of requiring a live-selfie coupled with an ID just to open a browser (or at least access specified sites) is really a half-measure that will be undermined by a combination of parental indifference and teenage ingenuity. Any age-gating requirement that falls short of that level of stringency, at best, is the act of a politician attempting to signal that they take concerns about social media seriously enough to do something for the sake of doing something. At worst, such half-measures are meant to ease us into the more stringent ones.

In either case they won’t do much to protect young people from social media (or the broader internet). Once more, though, this isn’t simply because all but the most draconian age-gating regimes are destined to fail, but also because social media isn’t quite the scourge to children’s mental health that it’s made out to be.

Social Media Harms to Childhood Mental Health: Disputed, Poorly-Supported, Exaggerated

Despite the presentation that “The Science” is settled and the experts agree that social media is responsible for some massive mental health epidemic among young people, there is actually a fair amount of disagreement among mental health professionals and researchers on the matter.

Some share Jonathan Haidt’s general stance, as put forth in The Anxious Generation, while highlighting how social media may be especially harmful to certain subpopulations of young people such as those with existing learning disabilities or mental health problems. Others argue a lot of the research in this area is comprised of observations of trends in ecological datasets around which people later develop unsupported narratives.

Moreover, academic reviews and meta-analyses of relevant research raise questions about the quality of the work in this area. Commonly, such assessments conclude that the bulk of the studies in this area are of low quality, often yield weak or inconsistent results, and collectively fail to find clear links between digital technology use and clinically relevant measures of mental health or broader metrics of well-being.

Specifically, such assessments show that concepts like mental health, well-being, and social media use are defined and measured inconsistently between studies. Sometimes mental health is defined using clinically relevant measures; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes well-being is used as a catch-all term referring not just to mental or physical health but any number of social, cognitive, developmental, emotional, or academic measures. Sometimes distinct terms such as digital technology use, social media use, and problematic social media use are used interchangeably, leading to confusion about what researchers are even examining.

Many studies also fail to take into account questions regarding whether the type of content with which young people engage on social media, their motivations for using social media, or the manner in which they engage with social media have separate effects on measured outcomes. Another commonly cited problem is that studies frequently rely on unreliable self-report measures of social media use and generally fail to control for things like participants trying to respond to survey questions in a socially desirable manner or guessing study hypotheses and responding to questions in ways they think might “help” the researcher.

Similarly, academic reviews of research on social media addiction have found the same problems. Lack of standard conceptual and operational definitions. Inconsistencies in the measures used to quantify variables of interest. Over-reliance on self-report measures.

The biggest issue in the social media addiction literature, though, is that there is no widely agreed upon definition for social media addiction or the related concept of problematic social media use.

At first glance defining social media addiction may seem straightforward. But then one remembers “addiction” is a meaningful clinical term. It has a clinical definition. In fact, it was actually this clinical definition on which researchers and clinicians initially tried to model concepts for different forms of technology addiction. The intent was to conceptualize these purported technological addictions as something analogous to addictions to chemical substances with motivations of mood regulation, symptoms of preoccupation, tolerance, and withdrawal, and ultimately dire consequences for one’s personal relationships and ability to lead a normal life. In practice, though, researchers quickly abandoned more rigid conceptualizations and now lack a standard definition.

Likewise, attempts to define and measure problematic social media use have not gone much better. Conceptually, problematic social media use is supposed to imply some element of a preoccupation with one’s social media activities, an inability to stop them, and real conflicts in one’s life because of them. Yet, in practice, even when researchers claim (or at least imply) they are measuring problematic social media use in a way that captures these ill effects, they often actually end up simply measuring time spent on social media in ways that don’t.

Social Media’s Horrible, But Symbolic Safety and Digital Dystopia Are Worse

To be clear, nothing presented here necessarily is meant to defend the social media companies or encourage social media use among young people. Even if it’s not leading to a mental health epidemic, it still may not be great for basic human social dynamics or the development of good social skills. Even if it’s not addictive in a clinically relevant sense, that doesn’t mean the social media companies haven’t tried to make their products addictive or load them with design features that at least attempt to encourage compulsive use. It’s definitely not meant to defend questionable practices on the part of social media companies like location sharing with third parties and the analysis of personal data for the delivery of personalized ads. And it doesn’t mean everything online is age-appropriate for every person under 18.

However, if politicians are going to claim that social media is responsible for a public health crisis and use this as a pretext for requiring everyone, at minimum, to symbolically sacrifice a little bit of liberty, and perhaps ultimately accept the elimination of any possibility of online anonymity, it would be nice if there was stronger evidence to support the initial claim.

Furthermore, if such evidence is lacking, the scenario playing out does start to seem eerily familiar. In fact, it starts to become reminiscent of that time a few years back when we were required to symbolically wear a cloth mask to enter a restaurant and were left wondering whether the rollout of something else was just around the corner.

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Drawing on the newly released documents, Tucker reconstructs Fauci’s dual-track strategy: an initial “Plan A” to frame the emerging pathogen as a severe flu season, followed by the decisive “Game On” pivot on January 26, 2020, the day the first U.S. case was announced in Seattle.

From that moment, an audacious cover-up plan unfolded—suppressing the lab-leak hypothesis, orchestrating a WHO junket to Wuhan, generating maximal fear to secure emergency-use authorization for unproven mRNA technology, attacking seroprevalence studies that revealed widespread prior immunity, censoring natural-immunity and early-treatment discussions, and converting potential culpability for gain-of-function research into the public image of the savior who delivered the shot.

Key Topics Covered:

• October 2019 Military Games in Wuhan and early knowledge of a lab-related pathogen

• January 3 diary entry and the launch of Plan A: warn of a catastrophic flu season

• January 10 publication of the viral sequence and immediate Moderna collaboration with Barney Graham

• CDC push-back against the flu narrative and the unraveling of Plan A

• January 26 “Game On!!!” entry after the first U.S. case—the decisive shift to Plan B

• Five-part cover-up: Proximal Origin paper, WHO China trip arranged via Trump-to-Xi request, fear generation for EUA, suppression of natural immunity, and censorship of critics

• Santa Clara seroprevalence study by Jay Bhattacharya and the ferocious media smear campaign

• Why an mRNA shot against a rapidly mutating respiratory virus was never going to work—and why Fauci knew it

• nSuppression of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other traditional therapeutics

• Boosters as the endless patch for a failed product

• Complete absence of sympathy in the diaries for lockdown victims or the vaccine-injured

• The broader constellation of military intelligence, Big Tech, pharma, and media capture

Jeffrey Tucker provides the clearest chronological map yet of how private knowledge of a lab origin, institutional self-protection, and the desperate need for a technological “cure” produced the most disruptive public-health regime in modern history. The diaries, read against the surrounding evidence, make the previously chaotic timeline suddenly coherent.

This is essential viewing for anyone seeking a coherent, document-based explanation of why businesses, churches, and schools were closed, why natural immunity was denied, why early treatments were banned, and why an experimental platform was forced on the world.

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

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Read the full article: “What Did Fauci Mean by ‘Game On’?” at https://brownstone.org/articles/what-did-fauci-mean-by-game-on/

Drop a comment: Which part of the “Game On” timeline most changed how you understand the COVID era?

BY CHARLES KRBLICH

View original article at Brownstone.org.

The revelations of the last two weeks bring to mind the very first two weeks, six years ago today. The truths now laid bare are a song that once meant something to us — music that helped us move past heartbreak, yet whose melody now recalls thoughts and feelings long buried. Soft and inescapable, a profound melancholy returns.

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I have often wondered what psychological mechanism marked the difference between those people who complied with any absurdity and those who never did.

Today, Homer’s myth of heroism, The Odyssey, plays in the theaters. Meanwhile playing on the televisions is another version of the Narcissus myth, this time pleading the Fifth.

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To quickly recap of The Myth of Narcissus, Narcissus is an exceptionally handsome young man — whom everyone fell in love with — and Echo, a mountain nymph, eventually came under his enchantment and fell in love with him too. Echo was unfortunately cursed: She was only able to repeat the last words spoken by someone else. She could only echo Narcissus’s words and was cruelly rejected by him. She eventually wasted away until nothing remained of her but her voice — an “echo.”

Narcissus on the other hand was punished by the goddess of retribution, Nemesis. She led him to a clear pool of water where Narcissus saw his own reflection and fell in love with it. He was unable to leave the pool, and refusing food, slowly wasted away from unrequited love for his own image. When he died, a flower sprung up — the Narcissus or Daffodil.

Today, the word narcissism is used to describe a wide range of applications, but the origin myth remains the same — a man who cannot move past his own perceived importance, his lover who can only echo his words, and their shared ruin — both undone by unrequited love.

I have always been struck by what I considered an anomaly of history; at the very least a strange coincidence of circumstance that crosses time and culture.

Why, for instance, does Nicolae Ceaușescu’s wife Elena exclaim, “Shame on you. I brought you up as a mother. I raised you,” to the soldiers binding her hands and preparing to execute her? One of the soldiers allegedly replied to the Romanian dictator’s wife that she was no mother, since she had killed their mothers. She died incapable of understanding how her actions led to her outcome.

Why, for instance, does Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security (head of the East German Stasi) exclaim to parliament after the Wall fell, “I love…I love all people.” He later spent his final years in a modest East Berlin flat, widely despised, politically irrelevant, and incapable of understanding how his actions led to his outcome.

Of course, there are other examples, Lavrentiy Beria, Pierre Laval, Julius Streicher, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Augusto Pinochet, etc. All of these people once wielded near-absolute power over their countrymen, yet they were all doomed — unable to move past their own perceived importance — and either executed or reduced to living ordinary lives, publicly hated, with immense legal vulnerability, and the permanent loss of status.

There is a new applicant to these ignominious ranks — Anthony Fauci.

The revelations of his professional journal — diary — show a persistent pattern of both self-absorption and sidelining of scientific signals. Dominated by an exhaustive cataloging of his rising fame, they contain comparatively little scientific substance yet they reveal a growing and persistent awareness from 2020 onward that the shots would not perform as expected, and they document that knowledge which directly contradicted the coercive policies he was publicly advocating.

Of course, the ending of his story begins with an unprecedented, preemptive, blanket, ten-year pardon, followed by a Congressional hearing in which he pleaded the Fifth one hundred and eleven times, and refused to look at his victims.

I found myself reflecting during Fauci’s hearing what it is I might have done if I were in his situation.

My wife made the argument, and she may be right, that my libertarian bent would have me respond with the Fifth Amendment in the same way that Fauci did, but I continued to come back to the thought that if I truly believed my actions were justified — especially given the protections of the pardon, the limited consequences a contempt or perjury charge would have, and the advanced age of 85 — I would have defiantly stood by my actions, by selectively answering the questions always standing by how correct I thought my actions were.

After all, the numbers are enormous. In 2025, the JAMA Health Forum put out a study giving a main estimate that 2.5 million deaths were averted globally by the vaccination campaign. That study stated that 15 million life-years were saved. The sensitivity ranges for both estimates were 1.4 million – 4 million and 7 million to 24 million respectively. 90% of the benefit in the study was attributed to people aged 60 and over.

Then there are the studies related to the lives saved by lockdown measures. The early Imperial College London model indicated that 3.1 million deaths would be saved by locking down. Despite the obvious flaws of that model, later empirical studies focusing on the spring of 2020 by Herby, Jonung, and Hanke put a lower end to the estimate stating that roughly 6,000 – 23,000 lives were saved by lockdown measures in Europe, and 4,000 – 16,000 were saved in the US.

If I truly believed I saved somewhere between a conservative estimate of 4,000 lives and a very liberal estimate of 4 million, why would I feel any regret at all when being asked to look at the victims of my lockdowns and coercive vaccination strategies? After all, there was a common Covid-era phrase: If it saves just one life, it’s worth it. In other words, I should feel justified to look into any lockdown victim’s eyes and tell them to their face that my policies saved at least one life, so even though all of these other terrible and ancillary things happened to them, they were all ultimately worthwhile.

In the words of Georges Danton — an architect of the French Revolution — who later found himself defiantly climbing the guillotine’s steps saying, “My turn now!” before exclaiming his last words to the executioner:

Tu montreras ma tête au peuple ; elle en vaut la peine.

—Georges Danton

(Show my head to the people. It is well worth seeing.)

Of course, that all contradicts the reality revealed in Fauci’s own professional journal. The journal records both his self-absorption and the lies he was telling the public. The enormous figures of projected lives saved ultimately prove hollow. Rather than stand by his claims and actions, the avoidance of accountability becomes his goal.

Which brings me back to my original question — what psychological mechanism marked the difference between those people who complied with any absurdity and those who never did?

I do not have an answer, but I strongly think that it is the power of not only self-reflection, but also the ability to project oneself into another’s situation — called cognitive perspective-taking.

In other words, when one looks at the pool reflecting one’s image back at them, they can see not only themselves, but also what they would be if they were the ones demanding their friends wear masks, vaccinate, or avoid them entirely. They can look at those reflections of themselves and fully understand what that means to them and then proceed accordingly.

In the Narcissus myth, Echo on the other hand significantly lacked the power of self-expression and independent agency. The myth takes it to the extreme that she can no longer speak in her own words, but rather only repeat the last words spoken by someone else:

Stay Home, save lives.

Follow the science.

If it saves one life, it’s worth it.

We’re all in this together.

Echo’s curse was more than only being able to repeat the last words said to her; it was the complete loss of autonomous identity. Meanwhile, she is still a conscious being, and she retains her emotional capabilities of love, grief, and anger. Coupled with the erasure of her power to give original form to her inner life, her voice becomes purely reactive.

The loss of Echo’s original voice is the tragedy of the story. It’s an idea maybe captured better by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes) :

“Their fate may not cause these people suffering. It is not an impulse to charity that has upset me like this…What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these people, of Mozart murdered.”

So the song currently playing brings back memories of heartbreak and terror that arose from the restrictions of March 2020. The vindication many may feel will be both fleeting and ephemeral. The rare bit of joy about being definitively proven correct is balanced by the immense and profound sadness of how terrible the lockdown era was.

Interestingly, the story as of this week even includes a bouquet of flowers. Just like the myth, what appear to be yellow chrysanthemums, were delivered to Fauci’s doorstep. While in the US, the bright color is often associated with joy and optimism, an old Victorian era meaning could sometimes signify slighted or neglected love, just like Echo was slighted in the myth.

Though not daffodils this time, yellow chrysanthemums are commonly called mums.

Fitting, I suppose, because mum’s the word.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

This past week, President Trump issued a sensible executive order on the childhood vaccine schedule, one that shaves off unnecessary injections and plays it safer by spacing out and unbundling shot mixtures. He had to issue an order because a federal judge has intervened in the normal way such changes are made.

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You would think that he had demanded an end to doorstep pizza delivery. The press went wild with anger and dragged multiple appointees on prime time to chide them and blame them for every case of measles. The way the mainstream media fronts for Big Pharma, even when it makes zero sense, is embarrassingly obvious.

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But it gets worse. The corruption of the industry is a rabbit hole so deep that it seems to have no bottom. There were the Fauci Diaries, a veritable true confession of astonishing depravity and likely criminality. That was followed up by the release of phone texts that show Fauci dismissing evidence of miscarriage risk in real time. Now we have another email tranche of agency heads pleading with Fauci to stop the madness.

You don’t need a detective badge to solve this mystery. This industry is so powerful that no amount of evidence of harm could stop the campaign for maximum jabs in arms. How can you test a new technology on the public unless you can drive up acceptance rates to 80 percent and higher? As we’ve often said, we are the rats and they are the lab technicians.

The growing skepticism toward Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Government, Big Media, and all associated with this gang is not partisan anymore. What used to be a concern of the New Left is now denounced as an obsession of the New Right, as if any of this makes any sense. What they will not admit is that regular people from all walks of life have joined the struggle to end this industrial hegemony and its drive for biological colonialism.

Meanwhile, Brownstone Institute has played a critical role in breaking through the media censorship on all these topics. This past week, our own writers and fellows have been driving the debate over the sketchy science behind the FDA approval of an mRNA shot for the flu. You could say that there will be no demand, but will people be injected without their knowledge?

There’s never been a better time to return to fundamentals. This is why Brownstone Institute is headed to one of our nation’s greatest regenerative farms. Late registration is now closed for our Polyface Retreat. If you would like to be added to our waiting list, please contact us at operations@brownstone.org.

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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.

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Here is some content since our last email.

What’s Happening with the MMR Vaccine? By James Lyons-Weiler. CDC Principal Deputy Director Ralph  Abraham argued that “framing measles as an American policy failure is inaccurate and misleading,” asserting that resources including vaccines and therapeutics have been surging nationwide and that the current measles situation reflects broader global trends.

Who Owns the Pandemic Record? By Colleen Aldous and Eleftherios Gkioulekas. The narratives of the pandemic travelled across borders. Accountability cannot be allowed to vanish between them. The record belongs to the people who bore the consequences—and they should not have to wait for another country to tell them what happened.

‘Climate Emergency’ Scepticism in Eight Charts By Ramesh Thakur. The notion that we are already doomed promotes a culture of hopelessness and despair best epitomised by Greta Thunberg’s anguished cry: ‘How dare you?‘ In turn this instils despair in many youth and encourages demonisation of dissent from the orthodoxy.

What Did Heidegger Mean by ‘Only a God Can Save Us?’ By Bert Olivier. Technology was, visibly and audially, a force that was bringing about a metamorphosis on a grand scale. Needless to say, today we are witnessing another technological metamorphosis, arguably even more far-reaching than the one that Heidegger perceived with concern.

Mandatory Testosterone Screening Is a Tactical Retreat from Medical Reason By Alan Cassels. Servicemen and women deserve better than to be used as a captive market for a “high-tech snake oil scam.” True tactical advantage comes from ensuring that the safety of our troops is never sacrificed for a bureaucrat’s misguided “High-T” fantasy.

Deep Capture By Sofia Karstens. With total command over media and law enforcement, it is possible to rewrite the collective memory of an entire population if you have one generation in which to accomplish it.

RFK Jr Humiliates CNN’s Dana Bash By Ian Miller. Bash had current Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on her show Sunday. She then took that opportunity to misrepresent how poorly she, CNN, and legacy media performed their jobs during the pandemic.

Anthony Fauci and the Collapse of Scientific Authority By Jason Locasale. Anthony Fauci is now facing intense scrutiny. Many outside academia describe this as his fall from grace, while universities and medical institutions continue to celebrate him as a heroic public servant and scientific authority.

Smart Enough to Be Wrong By Lucio Saverio Eastman. Brownstone Institute has reminded so many of us what collegiality is all about. It’s not about scorekeeping, one-upmanship, or purity tests. It’s about dialogue, connection, and the ability to consider other ideas without cancelling the other person.

Pandemic Reflection Pool By Charles Krblich. The truths now laid bare are a song that once meant something to us — music that helped us move past heartbreak, yet whose melody now recalls thoughts and feelings long buried. Soft and inescapable, a profound melancholy returns.

A Public Health Epidemic to Restrict Digital Rights By Daniel Nuccio. If politicians are going to claim that social media is responsible for a public health crisis and use this as a pretext for requiring everyone to symbolically sacrifice liberty, it would be nice if there was stronger evidence to support the claim.

The Vanishing Art of Presence By Joseph Varon. When historians look back at this era of medicine, I hope they will be able to say that physicians had the wisdom to preserve the one innovation that never needed improving: the simple act of one human caring for another.

Anatomy of Total Failure By Harvey Risch. The institutional response was a failure. And still, Fauci and the rest maintain that they know how to do their job. That is the message of Fauci’s hearing. An incompetent bureaucracy, granted power by the state, with little accountability for their actions.

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• Recent document releases (Fauci diaries, Ron Johnson texts) filling in the COVID-era timeline

• Naomi Wolf’s May 2021 tweet on menstrual symptoms and immediate deplatforming

• Missouri v. Biden evidence of coordinated censorship targeting her warnings

• Pfizer documents: 1.82% miscarriage rate, ovarian damage, sperm count declines

• Crowdsourcing 3,500+ experts via Daily Clout to analyze 450,000 pages the FDA tried to hide for 75 years

• Early AIER fellowship and the formation of resistance during lockdowns

• Capture of legacy media (left and right) and the failure of mainstream journalism

• The Bodies of Others as a classic account of the era

• Intellectual courage, belief in truth/humanity, and why some refused to go along

• The great awakening: declining institutional trust, regenerative living, and questioning everything

Dr. Naomi Wolf brings decades of work on women’s health, liberty, and totalitarianism, along with the firsthand experience of being canceled for accurate early warnings.

Jeffrey Tucker connects her story to the broader fight for transparency, the formation of parallel institutions, and the ongoing reckoning with the COVID era’s human cost. This is essential viewing for anyone seeking the primary timeline of reproductive harm signals, the machinery of censorship, and the personal and cultural consequences of speaking truth when it was forbidden.

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Naomi Wolf: Author of The Bodies of Others | Co-founder of Daily Clout Website: dailyclout.io X/Twitter: @naomirwolf

Drop a comment: What part of Naomi Wolf’s early warnings or the Pfizer document findings most needs wider attention today?

BY JASON LOCASALE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Anthony Fauci is now facing intense scrutiny. His diaries, emails, and testimony have raised fundamental questions about what he knew, what he told the public, and how he exercised authority during the pandemic. Many outside academia describe this as his fall from grace, while universities and medical institutions continue to celebrate him as a heroic public servant and scientific authority.

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That contradiction is the starting point for this essay. Fauci matters not only because of his individual conduct, but because he exposes the institutions that produced, empowered, and continue to protect him.

The pandemic did not create the dysfunction inside biomedical science. It placed a magnifying glass over institutions that had been decaying for decades. Grant politics, unfounded hype, administrative expansion, scientific gerontocracy, institutional self-protection, and the punishment of dissent were already pervasive. Fauci enabled the public to watch those forces operate through one person on television every day.

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Biomedical institutions did not create one Fauci. They created thousands. The pandemic spotlight simply made one of them famous.

What the Diaries Reveal

Fauci’s diaries offer an unusually revealing account of how he understood his role during the pandemic. Written as notes toward a future autobiography, they show what he considered important enough to preserve about those years.

The diaries undermine the mythology of a reluctant scientist who was unexpectedly thrust into politics and celebrity. They reveal a bureaucratic celebrity preoccupied with attention, status, prominent relationships, media appearances, reputation, and his place in history.

His interest in how he was portrayed, whom he met, who praised him, and how his public image was developing consumes far more attention than any serious engagement with the emerging science of Covid-19 and the pandemic. The office shrine, the concern with his portrait, the meticulous record of his fame, and the diary itself as material for an autobiography all expose the same fixation.

Those self-curated notes reveal his priorities. Science is less as an intellectual pursuit than as the credential supporting the public performance.

The related emails and documents complete the picture. Fauci sought award nominations from influential friends, while funding, prestige, appointments, and recognition circulated through the same professional networks. These relationships were then presented publicly as independent acknowledgments of merit.

One of the most important revelations was the distance between private uncertainty and public certainty. Fauci and those around him privately considered possibilities that they publicly dismissed. The authors of the Proximal Origin paper privately assigned a laboratory origin a substantial probability, then helped present that possibility to the public as impossible.

The same pattern appeared in pronouncements about masking, vaccine transmission, and other major pandemic questions. The issue is not hindsight. The issue is presenting uncertain claims as settled truth while privately recognizing that the evidence was unresolved.

Authority Substituted for Scientific Judgment

Fauci projected an image of authority, and that was sufficient. His title, confidence, and media presence substituted for careful engagement with the evidence.

Masking, for example, involved questions of aerosol physics, fluid mechanics, particle size, droplet formation, airflow, filtration, leakage, and fit. These are concrete scientific and engineering questions. Yet Fauci showed no interest in working through them before making definitive public pronouncements.

He approached scientific disagreement more like a party in an adversarial legal proceeding than a scientist. Once an institutional position had been adopted, contrary evidence became an obstacle and dissenting scientists became opponents to defeat. The objective shifted from determining what was true to defending the position and preserving authority.

This is the opposite of a scientific temperament. A good scientist is skeptical, including of his own conclusions. He is comfortable acknowledging uncertainty and may spend days thinking privately through a problem. He does not need a camera, a slogan, or the appearance of omniscience.

Fauci illustrates the difference between projecting authority and possessing a scientific mind.

Scientific Credentialism

Fauci majored in classics before earning an MD during an era when medical education provided little formal preparation for scientific research. His degree was a clinical credential, not a research degree.

He entered laboratory research when molecular immunology was not yet a developed science and when academic physicians could obtain laboratory directorships early in their careers. He then became an NIH administrator at a relatively young age.

The issue is not that he began his career before modern technologies existed. Every older scientist did. The relevant question is whether an aging scientist continues learning, adapting, and making discoveries as the field develops.

The best scientists remain intellectually active later in life because they master new technologies and continue challenging themselves. Many others establish their careers by being in the right place at the right time, then coast for another 20 or 30 years through networks that make adaptation unnecessary.

By the time the pandemic arrived, Fauci had spent decades as a bureaucrat, far removed from conducting frontline science himself. Nothing in that history made him a universal authority on masking, vaccine transmission, population epidemiology, viral evolution, or every other field on which he pronounced.

His real expertise was navigating institutions, consolidating authority, cultivating relationships, and projecting the image of a scientist to the public.

The Scientific Gerontocracy

Fauci’s career fits a broader historical pattern created by universities and their research systems funded by NIH.

When the NIH budget doubled around the turn of the century, universities expanded their biomedical operations. Medical schools hired large numbers of soft-money professors whose salaries and laboratories depended on external grants. Scientists who had attached their names to important genes or disease pathways during the previous era suddenly gained access to enormous new funding streams.

They built large laboratories, accumulated grants, generated indirect-cost revenue, and developed influence throughout NIH study sections, journals, professional societies, and university administrations. Money created authority, and authority attracted more money.

Many of these people later became department chairs, deans, institute directors, and even university presidents. A few continued doing important science, but most did not adapt as new technologies transformed biology. Their scientific contributions declined while their institutional influence continued growing.

The result was an academic aristocracy whose power survived long after the circumstances that created it disappeared. Seniority came to be treated as wisdom, incumbency as excellence, and grant accumulation as scientific achievement.

Fauci was the most visible member of this gerontocracy. Before the public knew his name, he had already spent nearly 40 years controlling a major NIH institute, and there are countless others. The transformation of NIAID into a roughly $6 billion organization is not a self-validating accomplishment. Budget growth does not prove scientific success.

A serious evaluation must examine the priorities entrenched, the dissent discouraged, the opportunities lost, and the consequences of allowing one person to control an institute for nearly four decades. It must also ask what was not studied. Basic questions about how sleep, diet, exercise, metabolism, stress, sunlight, and other environmental factors shape immunity received far less attention than the preferred institutional agenda, which, for example, was heavily focused on HIV.

The pandemic did not suddenly turn Fauci into a problem. It exposed the culture over which he had already presided for decades.

Scientific Celebrity as a Product

The public sees a handful of scientific celebrities. Insiders know that universities manufacture them by the thousands.

Every major institution has its local circuit of people whose identities revolve around image, status, proximity to power, and the belief that they are important celebrities. They perform the role of scientific authority even when they have shown little interest in science for years, if ever. Some convert the arrangement into wealth. Others are paid in prestige and deference.

These people are not scientists who reluctantly became administrators. They are administrators who use science as a credential. They become skilled at cultivating superficial impressions, repeating approved narratives, and moving through bureaucratic hierarchies. Their institutional rise is then treated as evidence of scientific judgment.

Fauci was the A-list version of this phenomenon. His media charm allowed him to become nationally famous, but his underlying career was familiar. He differed from thousands of university and NIH administrators mainly because he had a camera crew.

Favor-Trading as Independent Recognition

Fauci’s documented relationships with influential figures at Duke illustrate how the establishment reproduces itself.

Fauci reached out to his friend at Duke for award nominations. Duke receives hundreds of millions of dollars in NIH funding. Organizations then rank Duke according to how much NIH money it attracts. Those rankings are presented as evidence of excellence, and Duke administrators are considered for senior positions within NIH.

Funding, nominations, endorsements, appointments, awards, and prestige circulate through the same small network. Each transaction is then presented as an independent recognition of merit.

This does not require a cinematic conspiracy with a mastermind issuing secret instructions. Aligned incentives, expectations of reciprocity, career dependence, and institutional self-preservation are sufficient. The network coordinates itself because everyone understands which relationships must be protected.

For every example preserved clearly in an email, thousands of similar arrangements remain embedded in study sections, professional societies, journal boards, university committees, philanthropic organizations, and government agencies.

Anyone who challenges the arrangement risks being marginalized or blacklisted. Those who participate are promoted as respected scientific leaders.

Narrative Management Replaces Truth

Universities, NIH, journals, scientific societies, medical organizations, biotech, pharma, venture capital, and science media form a self-reinforcing network. Each organization looks to the others for validation. A prestigious paper creates enthusiasm. Academics repeat the narrative. Investors interpret that consensus as reduced risk. Companies raise capital. Advisors and board members reinforce the story. Pharma later treats the institutional excitement as evidence that the underlying biology is sound.

Everyone benefits from optimism until the science fails. Then the network moves on to the next target without confronting why the previous consensus was wrong.

The same institutional structure rewards grant volume over insight, compliance over skepticism, and institutional pedigree over independent judgment. Peer review is not a neutral mechanism floating above these incentives. It is embedded within them.

Fauci made this process visible. Information was accepted or discarded according to whether it advanced the preferred narrative, protected institutional authority, or preserved reputation. Contrary evidence was not evaluated neutrally. It was treated as a political and professional threat.

Labels such as conspiracy theory became tools for dismissing plausible evidence without answering it. Institutional authority was used to define what could be discussed, and then the resulting silence was offered as proof of consensus.

The Mythology Survives Inside Academia

Many outside academia say Fauci has fallen from grace, that his legacy is destroyed, and that his reputation has collapsed. Nothing could be further from the truth inside academic medicine and biomedical research.

Within universities, medical societies, and the organizations controlling credentials and prestige, Fauci remains a celebrity and hero. He continues to receive invitations, prestigious platforms, awards, and public praise. Major universities still present him as one of the nation’s most important public-health leaders.

This persistence is not accidental. The managerial class sees Fauci as the embodiment of itself. His career validates the qualities that it rewards: institutional longevity, bureaucratic influence, narrative discipline, media skill, prestigious relationships, and the ability to present authority as expertise.

Fauci is not merely protected by that class. He is its idealized self-portrait.

These institutions can maintain their own universe of facts because their revenue streams continue regardless of their performance. Taxpayers, donors, tuition, hospital income, grants, and endowment returns allow them to survive without admitting error. There is no effective mechanism of accountability.

The ship is not sinking because the public discovers misconduct. The ship can take on water indefinitely because someone else keeps paying to repair it.

Fauci-Like Behavior Across Biomedicine

The same pattern extends far beyond pandemic policy.

Medical textbooks, including the one Fauci coauthored, often present provisional biological models as indisputable fact. Textbook certainty is a working hypothesis with the uncertainty edited out.

The longevity field exhibits similar behavior. Researchers declare that their preferred gene, protein, or pathway is the master determinant of aging. They organize funding around the claim, publish a clean narrative, raise capital, and begin a media tour. Enormous biological uncertainty is converted into public certainty because certainty attracts prestige and investment.

Serious scientists who acknowledge what remains unknown are drowned out by people willing to sell a simple story. The longevity cure is always one mouse study, one funding round, and one Fauci-style media tour away.

The underlying problem is not confined to one personality or political faction. Biomedical institutions reward the performance of certainty more than the pursuit of truth.

Why Fauci Remains Important

I keep returning to Fauci not because I claim expertise in every aspect of the pandemic. I do not.

I return to him because he gave the public a rare view of how scientific authority is manufactured and protected. Most people never see the senior administrators, grantmakers, journal editors, society leaders, and local scientific celebrities who shape permissible narratives inside biomedicine. Fauci placed their methods on television.

His diaries and records offer a watershed opportunity. The lesson should not end with deciding whether one man lied, exercised bad judgment, or deserves punishment. The more important question is why the institutions surrounding him showed so little interest in determining the truth and remain so committed to protecting his mythology.

Scientific integrity cannot be partisan. Every person should demand honesty and accountability from institutions that claim the authority of science.

Public-health messaging must be honest before it is clear. Real leaders explain uncertainty, earn trust, and rally the public toward sound action. Manufactured certainty is not leadership. Clarity without honesty is propaganda.

What Reform Requires

The administrative machinery cannot investigate or reform itself. Its leaders know how to convert criticism into committees, reports, mission statements, listening sessions, and carefully worded promises while leaving the underlying structure untouched.

Reform requires enforceable transparency, external oversight, public accountability, and meaningful consequences for failure. Funding must move away from administrative empires and toward scientists capable of producing important knowledge.

The NIH-centered, large-institution model should face competition from smaller, independent research institutes with lower overhead, clearer missions, and greater accountability. Philanthropy should stop enlarging university endowments and begin building alternative institutions for science, education, and career development.

Scientific leadership should not become a throne occupied for decades. Older scientists should be judged by whether they continue learning, adapting, and contributing, not by the authority accumulated from work performed 30 years earlier.

Dissent must be treated as part of science rather than a threat to institutional reputation. Uncertainty must be communicated rather than edited out. Scientific merit must be separated from grant volume, celebrity, political alignment, and bureaucratic skill.

Fauci is not the entire problem. He is just its clearest illustration. He placed the biomedical establishment under a spotlight.

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• The Fauci diaries as an inadvertently transparent first-draft autobiography

• Private emails vs. public statements (natural immunity, early treatments, masks)

• Fauci’s centralization of power through media and celebrity despite no official “czar” role

• Motivation: covering tracks on lab leak and gain-of-function research

• Ignored hypotheses on children’s low risk and cross-reactive immunity

• RNA virus mutation rates — why sterilizing vaccines were never going to work, and Fauci knew

• Walensky’s push to admit no transmission stop and Fauci’s resistance

• The first booster as a political decision against FDA advice; resignations of top virologists

• Suppressed signals on cancers and the Oncotarget paper takedown

• Legacy media’s dismissal of the documents and the tipping point of information flow

• A call for those inside the system to come forward with the truth

Dr. Jessica Rose brings rigorous primary-source analysis, computational biology expertise, and relentless documentation of the biology of the shots.

Jeffrey Tucker connects the revelations to the larger story of centralized power, institutional failure, and the long fight for transparency and reckoning.

This is essential viewing for anyone seeking the unfiltered documentary record behind the COVID response, the private admissions that contradict the public narrative, and the ongoing scientific and moral accounting still underway.

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

Follow Jeffrey Tucker & Brownstone Institute:
Website: brownstone.org X/Twitter: @jeffreytucker

Dr. Jessica Rose: Brownstone Fellow | Microbiologist, Computational Biologist & Immunologist

Substack: jessicar.substack.com
X/Twitter: @JesslovesMJK
Drop a comment: What revelation from the Fauci diaries or emails surprised you most?

BY WENDY MCELROY

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Forbes calls it “the $20 billion question.” Should women’s health be approached on the basis of women’s clear biological differences from men—for example, by obstetricians and gynecologists—or on the far broader basis of assuming that biology informs every aspect of women’s health, and they should be addressed separately across the board? Should the federal government address health care at all?

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The question was pushed forward on July 15 when the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, along with the Society for Women’s Health Research and the Women First Research Coalition announced a massive new program: the National Strategy to Close the Women’s Health Gap.

This is a proposed federal advocacy framework that calls for Congress to invest $20 billion over 10 years in women’s health. It states amorphous goals such as funding research, workforce, and public awareness through “strategies like campaigns, partnerships and workshops.” The stated purpose is “to transform women’s health research, care, and outcomes.”

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Federalizing Women’s Health Care

Federalization leads medicine down a very bad path toward bureaucracy and away from competitive markets, which are the best hope to deliver quality at reasonable cost. Remember Covid? Remember President Ronald Reagan’s famous comment, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’?” Bureaucrats helped us good and hard with Covid; now they want to help with women’s health. They make no pretense of ‘helping’ men good and hard, of course.

To men, the program offers a medical segregation that is as medically unfair as it would be to medically segregate blacks along racial lines. Clearly, medical differences between women and men sometimes require totally different hands-on care; but medical differences, like breast cancer rates, is not what is being discussed. Political and economic power is under discussion. Spending billions on “strategies like campaigns, partnerships, and workshops” is such a vague agenda that it does not break down according to genitalia. Yet, this redistribution of dollars from one category of taxpayers to another is being suggested.

The two words used most often to justify medically privileging one sex over the other are “understudied” and “underserved;” that is, women are said to have been ignored by the medical establishment for decades, and they must now be privileged in order to catch up to men. Is this true?

Strong indicators say ‘no.’ Men’s health researcher James L. Nuzzo conducted a study entitled “NIH Funding of Men’s and Women’s Health Research, 1988-2022.” The data was drawn from the US National Institutes for Health (NIH), which is currently the primary federal agency responsible for biomedical and public health research. (Nuzzo includes charts to provide easy visuals that are linked to original data.)

Other of Nuzzo’s findings from NIH research include:

Averaged across all years from 1998 to 2019, 81% of the NIH’s research budget has been invested in research that is not sex-specific. Of NIH funding that has been allocated to sex-specific research, significantly more funds have been allocated to women’s than men’s health. Between 1998 and 2019, 10% to 16% of the NIH’s research budget was invested in women’s health, whereas 4.5% to 7.5% was invested in men’s health. Averaged across all years from 1998 to 2019, 13% of the NIH’s research budget was invested in women’s health, whereas 6% was invested in men’s health.

The free market adds its own confirmation of women’s better health; life insurance rates trend higher for men than for women, and insurance companies are not prone to cutting humanitarian price breaks. Life expectancy is a key reason for this. In 2023, female life expectancy in the US was 81.1 years compared to males at 75.8 years—a difference of 5.3 years. This is called the morbidity-mortality or gender paradox in medicine; women report higher rates of chronic illness or disability and, yet, they live longer than men. The longevity gap continues even when circumstantial factors, such as war, are eliminated. It is driven by significantly higher rates of preventable disease or health conditions, including coronary problems, substance overdoses, a higher suicide rate, as well as a tendency to delay routine medical care.

Slighting Men’s Health

And, yet, health care workers are being asked to slight those who are dying earlier from preventable causes as opposed to women. It is inexcusable for the medical establishment to adopt a policy of discriminating against taxpayers because they are black or white, male or female. And, yet, my husband is more likely to be dismissed by doctors or die from lack of treatment than I am.

These sort of discrepancies were not mentioned at the July 15 announcement. In fact, and considering the huge ‘ask’ that was made, very few specifics were provided. Most of the language of the National Strategy to Close the Women’s Health Gap is vague and bureaucratic, with specifics left to the amounts of funding being requested. For example, $7 billion is slated for “research and innovation across federal agencies that ‘will unlock new scientific discoveries to inform our understanding of sex differences and women’s health’ through strategies like establishing a national Women’s Health Centers of Excellence that would speed up the implementation of research into clinical practice.” In short, a new national bureaucracy.

Elsewhere, the plan explains “$4 billion [will go] into data and evidence infrastructure, which would go toward establishing a private partnership for women’s midlife health data and a public workshop on women’s health research data.”

Imprecision Favors Bureaucracy

The lack of precise plans or accountability serves several purposes, none of them good. It masks the incredible amount of money that would be directed into women’s health as opposed to men’s. It allows mountains of tax dollars to get lost in the bureaucracy. It makes administrators, experts, and activists powerful. When billions of dollars are spent, some individuals have immense incentives to be as nebulous as possible. And it seems easy to do. These are tax dollars—money that many people view as free money to be wasted and poorly untracked.

No wonder clear explanations of health care expenditures are difficult to come by. For example, the academic paper “Gender Disparity in the Funding of Diseases by the U.S. National Institutes of Health” from Sage Journals self-describes its own program as, “We normalize funding level to disease burden, as measured by the Disability Adjusted Life Year, and we specifically consider diseases for which both disease burden and funding level are provided. We apply a power-law regression analysis to model funding commensurate with disease burden.” Medical language surrounding ‘gender’ usually seems designed to obfuscate. I hasten to add that the preceding quotation was not selected as the worst example available, or even an atypical one.

Vagueness also allows objectionable policies to fly in under the radar. The new proposed program describes itself as comprehensive but public information about it is so scant that it is difficult to assess. But some of what is published should cause alarm. Part of “Public Awareness and Education,” for instance, would be to combat social media on so-called unproven health claims and predatory medical misinformation. Often, this is code for censorship.

The National Strategy to Close the Women’s Health Gap has hit Capitol Hill and, although lawmakers are reviewing it, no date has been set for it to go before Congress. No one knows what will happen, if anything. The proposal could be chop-shopped with sections of it receiving approval. Or the drive behind the entire plan could succeed. Whatever happens, people should educate themselves and others about a major change that could be imposed on American medicine.

Health care needs to be privatized as quickly as possible so that individuals can control their own bodies rather than depend upon bureaucrats or experts who act in their own self-interest. This change will not happen any time soon, however, because few areas of life are as tightly tied up with red tape as health care. It is difficult to get even basic antibiotics without jumping through hoops. But demanding fairness in this area is a matter of life and death—perhaps your life or your death–and men may soon have a harder time getting quality treatment.

I celebrate attention given to women’s health, although it should be private, not governmental. But I’m not willing to have my husband’s life be taken less seriously than my own.

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