By Jordi Pigem at Brownstone dot org.

"We are going to have fun," writes Jeffrey Epstein on December 7, 2009. This phrase is his reply to an email by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Science Advisor (and Scientific Advisor to Bill Gates), Boris Nikolic, who is making a list of "raising stars," many of them scientists, that they "should visit together."

By then, everyone must have known that Epstein was a notorious, convicted sex offender. He had been released from jail only a few months before, on July 22. He had been under investigation since 2005: federal officials had identified three dozen girls whom Epstein had allegedly sexually abused (after a controversial plea deal agreed by the US Department of Justice, he was only convicted of two crimes). Why would a high ranking official of Gates' Foundation want to organize meetings between Epstein and prominent scientists? If it was about money, surely they could find better-looking investors. What, eventually, were they "going to have fun" with?

One of the revelations of the latest batch of Epstein files is his strong interest in viruses, vaccines, pandemics, and mRNA. Two months after getting out of jail, he is writing about viruses, infectious diseases, and something he calls "My BIG idea."

Or, for instance, in January 2010, he was discussing mRNA and codons.

The latest batch documents of the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, released on January 30, consists of over 3 million pages, with many names redacted. A helpful simulation of Epstein's inbox has been created, fully searchable and giving access to the contents of over 7,000 emails. With keywords and patience the original documents can then be located on the DOJ website.

The trio Epstein-Nikolic-Gates also features prominently in a long agreement letter sent by Epstein to Gates. According to this 2013 document, Gates "specifically requested" Epstein to "personally serve as the representative" of Nikolic in negotiations over the termination of his work with Gates. The first section of this six-page letter states: "Mr. Gates acknowledges that Mr. Epstein has an existing collegial relationship with Mr. Gates in which Mr. Epstein received confidential and/or proprietary information from Mr. Gates." An analysis of its contents and wider implications can be found in a detailed article by Sayer Ji on Epstein, Gates, and "Pandemics as a Business Model."

In March 2017, two and a half years before Event 201, three years before Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO, an email thread involving Gates and bgC3 (Bill Gates Catalyst 3, now Gates Ventures) speaks of "pandemic simulation."

A number of emails in the Epstein files speak of pandemic preparedness. One of them, from March 2015, explicitly invites to discuss "how to officially involve the WHO" for the sake of "co-branding" (it looks like the "product" to "co-brand" is a pandemic).

In 2017, an email from Boris Nikolic addressed to both Epstein and Gates (four years after the agreement letter about Epstein mediating the rupture between Nikolic and Gates) mentions "pandemic" as a key area for a Donor Advised Fund.

Nikolic was later named as executor in Epstein's will, signed two days before his death, officially by suicide, in August 2019. (As I'm writing this, a friend points out to me that according to Fortnite Tracker, a player with Epstein's username, littlestjeff1, was still playing, from Israel, in 2024…)

Epstein was a node in a large network of darkness, and the release of the files may be a threshold into it. In a video interview included in the release, Epstein tells Steve Bannon that he is only "tier-one," "the lowest level" of sexual predator. As researcher Whitney Webb has stated in conversation with James Corbett:

Jeffrey Epstein was as much a financial criminal as a sex criminal. There's a very particular reason why mainstream media only wants to talk about his sex crimes between 2000 and 2006. Jeffrey Epstein was also not an anomaly in th...

By Christine Black at Brownstone dot org.

"In November of 2020 I remember sitting on the trunk of my car, parked on the top level of the parking deck because it was one of the only places with no campus police surveilling us, and thinking what if…I jumped off? That's how bad it was. But then I thought that my mom would be so sad. That kept me from the ledge," said 25-year-old Houston Reese, who attended Biola University in Los Angeles County, California from 2019 – 2023, a county he said had one of the hardest lockdowns in the country during the Covid period.

"I was heavily depressed with what was taken from us, with the restrictions and with not being able to be with friends," he said. He feels like one of the lucky students, though, because outcomes for him could have been much worse.

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director James Redfield said in the summer of 2020 that far more teens and young people were dying of suicide and drug overdoses than from Covid. Doctors and epidemiologists who authored and published the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 advised against school closings, calling them a "grave injustice;" advocated for protection of very old and sick people; and advised that young and healthy people should continue normal life because they were at little risk from the virus. Since then, many scientists have agreed that panic, fear, and severe restrictions in young people's lives during the Covid period were mistakes and caused grave harms. Many others have remained silent.

And yet, recommendations against lockdowns for college students did not curtail mandates and restrictive policies that harmed them. College offers young people a time to question authorities, to explore new ideas, to have adventures with friends while socializing and bonding. Classical liberal arts education embraces the ideals of sharpening students' critical and creative thinking; provoking them to examine divergent perspectives; and teaching them to strengthen their oral and written arguments. Yet, during the Covid period, colleges and universities all over the country followed government and bureaucratic mandates while discouraging and even punishing students' critical thinking and questioning.

When Houston returned to school in fall of 2020, it felt like a ghost town to him with students working on classes online from their rooms. Students were forced to wear masks outside, he said, as campus police surveilled them. On the first offense, they were fined, and on the second, they were sent home, "as 19-year-olds," he said incredulously. He described regularly carrying snacks while walking outside, so he could remove the mandated face mask and breathe freely. Late one night, he visited outside with his cousin whom he hadn't seen in a long time. They sat about 15 feet apart, talking. A campus police officer approached to force them to apply the mask. They said they were eating.

"You're not eating consistently enough," the guard said. "Put the mask on."

Police banging on dorm room doors when college friends gathered; secret tip lines college administrators provided for turning in non-compliant fellow students; administrators barring students from leaving campus for months; teacher firings; student expulsions; shaming and bullying the non-compliant – Covid-era college students shared stories like these.

Face Masks While Cross-Country Running; Required Covid Shots

A cross-country runner, Houston described being made to wear the mask while running outside in LA County, but as soon as the team ran the two miles into Orange County, the rules changed.

"Coach would turn around and tell us we could take the masks off," he said. At the end of the 2020 school year, Houston, a Political Science major, dropped running, failed two classes, and almost lost his scholarship. He left campus for a while. Upon his return, vaccine mandates rolled out.

"I didn't feel the vaccine was necessary for me as a 20-year-old with a 34 resting ...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

Recent studies reveal a striking statistic: over the last decade, approximately 30% of primary care physicians have either retired or switched to non-clinical roles, leaving a notable gap in patient care. Something subtle has been happening in American medicine, and it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. There have been no emergency declarations, no ribbon-cutting ceremonies, no breaking news alerts. No one has announced it officially. But if you pay attention—if you walk into clinics that once buzzed with conversation, if you notice how long it takes now to get an appointment, if you see how often a familiar nameplate disappears from a door—you begin to feel it.

The waiting rooms are quieter. Not calmer. Not healthier. Just quieter in a method that feels wrong. The type of quiet that doesn't signal relief, but absence. In one waiting room, a single flapping magazine page, picked up by a draft, was the only sound in an air thick with anticipation—a sensory cue that underscored the void left by dwindling doctor visits.

This isn't because people have stopped getting sick. Quite the opposite. Chronic disease has become a defining feature of modern life. Emergency departments are overflowing. Hospital beds turn over at a relentless pace. The acuity is higher, the complexity deeper, the margins thinner. And yet, in office after office—primary care clinics, specialty practices, community hospitals—something fundamental is missing.

In the midst of this absence, consider the story of Claire, a patient who had been under the attentive care of Dr. Smith for over a decade. Claire's health journey was one he understood deeply, knowing her medical history, family concerns, and even anticipating her questions before she voiced them. When Dr. Smith quietly left his practice, Claire found herself navigating a system where each new doctor barely skimmed her files, struggling to understand her complexities in short appointments. This disruption left her feeling unanchored, her continuity of care severed.

The doctors are not leaving in protest or anger. There are no picket lines. No manifestos. They are leaving the way exhausted people leave anything that has stopped making sense to them. Quietly. Without ceremony. One retirement notice at a time. One closed practice. One final day seeing patients, followed by a decision not to return. Sometimes the only sign is a piece of paper taped to a glass door: Practice closed. Thank you for your trust.

Civilizations don't usually collapse in dramatic fashion. They don't fall all at once. They erode. Slowly. Quietly. Function by function. And often, the earliest warnings aren't explosions or shortages, but absences—things that used to be there, reliably, and suddenly aren't.

When insects vanished from windshields, people noticed long before scientists quantified it. Such silence itself seemed unsettling. It seemed like a signal, even before anyone could explain what it meant. Medicine is experiencing its own version of that silence now.

For generations, the physician occupied a unique place in the social structure. Doctors were not merely service providers. They were witnesses. They saw people at their most vulnerable and followed them over years, sometimes decades. They remembered histories that didn't fit neatly into charts. They understood families, patterns, tendencies, and fears. They were often the only professionals who saw the full arc of a human life—from birth to decline—up close and without abstraction.

That role did not disappear because it lost value; it was simply replaced. It disappeared because it became unsustainable.

Over time, medicine was reorganized around efficiency, standardization, and scale. Each change made sense in isolation. Each was defensible. But together, they produced a system that no longer trusted the very people it depended on. Physicians were gradually transformed from professionals exercising judgment into operators e...

By Aaron Day at Brownstone dot org.

The original vision for Bitcoin was simple: peer-to-peer digital cash, free from banks and government. However, the document argues that this vision was deliberately "hijacked," as Bitcoin is now pushed as "digital gold," a scarce asset for Wall Street, with slow and expensive transactions for everyday use.

This shift began with the 2015-2017 Block Size Fight, where a group won the argument to keep transaction blocks small, making the main network costly. The promoted "fix," the Lightning Network, is a faster system but relies on middlemen (hubs), fundamentally changing it from true P2P cash.

The funding for this change is linked to Jeffrey Epstein. After the Bitcoin Foundation collapsed, his money flowed through MIT's Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) to pay the core developers who favored the small-block path. Epstein also invested in Blockstream, a company started by those same developers.

Brock Pierce is identified as a key connector. He co-founded Tether, brokered Epstein's Coinbase investment, and had an extensive relationship with him. Tether then played a crucial role in inflating Bitcoin's price; a study suggests new, unbacked Tether, minted after price drops, accounted for roughly 50% of the 2017 bull run. The CFTC later fined Tether $41 million for lying about its reserves.

The control network continues with Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald. Despite lying about cutting ties with Epstein, Cantor now manages Tether's massive $130+ billion US Treasury reserves. Lutnick's ally, Bo Hines, pushed the industry-friendly GENIUS Act while serving as a White House crypto advisor, only to immediately quit and become CEO of USAT, Tether's US subsidiary.

The document views this as a coordinated "conquest," with laws like the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, cementing insider control and preparing the ground for a tracked, programmable digital dollar. The author calls for immediate action to shut down these initiatives and support real alternatives like privacy coins.

Bitcoin was supposed to be simple: digital money you could send to anyone, anywhere, without a bank or government getting in the way. When Satoshi Nakamoto released the idea in 2008, it was described as peer-to-peer electronic cash, like handing someone cash in person, but over the internet. No middleman. No permission needed. Privacy protected. Freedom built in.

That sounded perfect to me. I live in New Hampshire, part of the Free State Project, where people are working every day to shrink government and expand personal liberty. Bitcoin felt like the financial side of that same fight: sound money that could not be printed endlessly or frozen on a whim.

Today, though, Bitcoin is sold as digital gold, something you buy and hold, not something you spend on coffee. Transactions are slow and expensive on the main network. Most everyday use happens on side systems that add layers of control. The whole story changed from cash for the people to scarce asset for Wall Street. That did not happen by accident.

It was hijacked.

The people behind it used money, connections, and influence to steer Bitcoin away from its original purpose. Key evidence comes from the Jeffrey Epstein court files, government investigations, academic research, and public records. The names that keep showing up are Brock Pierce, Epstein himself, and later Howard Lutnick. Their fingerprints are all over the shift, and the tools now being built on top of it, like the GENIUS Act (signed into law in July 2025), the CLARITY Act (passed the House in 2025 and advancing), and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve (established by executive order in March 2025).

Here is what happened.

The Fight Over Bitcoin's Size

Early on, everyone agreed that Bitcoin needed to handle more transactions as it grew. The simple fix was to make each block of transactions bigger, so more payments could fit every ten minutes.

Some developers pushed hard for that. Other...

By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org.

Last year, the general election in the Czech Republic was won by Andrej Babis, a distinctly Czech version of Donald Trump. And things started to happen. During the confirmation hearing of the government, Babis – in his inimitable mixture of Czecho-Slovak dialect – said that the whole Covid response under his previous government was a mistake, that he was cheated by the "so-called" experts and that the "wonderful" vaccines provided by the European Union proved not so wonderful after all.

Shortly after this revelation, Jindrich Rajchl – a lawyer and a member of Parliament for a smaller government party – organized a conference under the title "Three years from Covid." The large room of the Chamber was completely full with the public. I was invited to do what I have been doing for the past five years: Talk about data. This is what I said (in italics, I have added some explanation for the American readers).

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank Jindřich for organizing this seminar, thank you for the invitation, and thank the other panelists for their courage and perseverance.

Today—or rather already with Wednesday's comment by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš that we should have taken the Swedish path—the third period of our Covid match begins. The first period consisted of a global loss of sanity itself. I called the second period the Great Covid Silence, when many players fervently hoped that how they played in the first period would be forgotten. The last period will—so I firmly hope—consist of catharsis and lessons learned. Let us hope no overtime will be needed.

During the Covid loss of sanity, all the key pillars of Western societies failed.

The executive branch failed, arbitrarily, absurdly, and counterproductively restricting people's fundamental rights and freedoms.

The legislative branch failed, passively watching and repeatedly issuing blank cheques to the executive in the form of recurring states of emergency.

The judicial branch failed, which (with the exception of one panel of the Supreme Administrative Court) refused to defend natural law and instead—like in previous totalitarian regimes—retreated into servile legal formalism.

The media failed in an unexpected and repulsive way, led by the public-service media, which instead of truthfully informing the public and scrutinizing those in power, lied on political order.

Physicians failed, who instead of treating the sick either shut down their practices or served the pharmaceutical–industrial complex as its sales department.

And, as so many times in the past, at the head of the march toward new slavery marched state-funded scientists, who on political order dressed Covidism into the shroud of Science.

Covid arrived in the 21st century, which many claim will be the century of data. If it showed anything, however, it is that our ability to collect data far exceeds our ability to work with it meaningfully. And because working with data has brought me (somewhat involuntarily) into the ranks of Covid dissenters, I want to tell you several fascinating Covid stories that are written in the data but have not been fully appreciated yet.

Mathematical Modelling Is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

A large part of the Covid repression here and abroad was based on predictive modelling. Before the vote on extending the state of emergency, the Institute of Health Information and Statistics (UZIS) presented MPs with this prediction (slide 16). This slide contains many interesting stories that need to be explored in more detail.

The figure is in Czech, sorry for that. The horizontal axis shows time in months from July 2020 to April 2021. The vertical axis shows the number of new cases of Covid per day (i.e., positive PCR tests) in the Czech Republic. Yellow dots represent real data and the red curve is the "prediction" of the Ministry of Health model. The "prediction" was made around the time of the black arrow. The blue text says "t...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

A large outbreak of hysteria occurred in the media over the past week, regarding a small Nipah virus outbreak in eastern India. 'Hysteria' is the correct word in terms of proportionality. It is not, unfortunately, the right word in terms of intent. Ten years ago this episode of Nipah virus disease would barely have rated a mention internationally, and certainly not stimulated airport screening and travel warnings – there have been many larger outbreaks of Nipah virus than this one, which did not.

The change over recent years is not that people have lost their minds. It relates to the adoption of the fear-panic-profit model that has entrenched itself in international public health. Tens of billions in annual funding are on the table, and they depend – with the thousands of salaries and exorbitant Pharma profits tied to the pandemic industry – on the maintenance of a constant sense of imminent threat.

The World Health Organization reports two cases from this Nipah outbreak, which is less than usual. As is common, they involve health service personnel who are often infected by the virus before the diagnosis is clear in the patients they care for. Nipah virus infection historically has a high mortality rate among those infected, and each death is a tragedy, especially in those who are infected through caring for others. The deliberate hysteria and fear-mongering these cases are being used to promote will kill lots more, because it diverts resources from programs aimed at far worse health problems. But using small recurrent outbreaks to promote fear is a business case that is too attractive to too many. This Nipah outbreak is simply its latest iteration.

What Is Nipah Virus Disease?

An outbreak of encephalitis (brain inflammation) occurred in a semi-rural area of Malaysia in 1998. It was quite severe, with almost half of the early cases dying. Initially assumed to be an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis (a more common mosquito-borne disease), it was noted that early cases were associated with illness in nearby pigs. The initial outbreak was on a farm where pigs and an orchard were in close proximity.

Unusual characteristics noted in this 1998 outbreak raised questions as to whether this was a new disease. There is an unofficial back story regarding what happened next, including a vial of blood from an infected case carried through customs and ending up at the CDC in the United States. With the help of (what were then) new techniques for distinguishing genetic sequences, it was established that a previously undetected virus was involved.

This outbreak became the first recorded outbreak of Nipah virus, named after Sungai Nipah (the Nipah river) in peninsular Malaysia. The virus is now known to be endemic in various bat species that range across much of Asia and Africa. In the case of the Malaysian outbreak, it spread from fruit bats attracted to an orchard, to the pigs that were kept alongside the fruit trees they fed on, to the humans who looked after the pigs. This remains one of the worst recorded outbreaks in history, with 105 deaths from 265 recorded cases by May 1999. Malaysia took various steps after this, initially killing a lot of pigs, but also changing farming practices. There has not been an outbreak recorded there since.

Why New Viruses Are Not Necessarily New

Since the Malaysian episode, recurrent outbreaks have been recorded, particularly in the Northeast and Southwest of the Indian subcontinent. These have been small outbreaks, less than 110 deaths in the worst, with well under 1,000 people recorded ever dying from Nipah virus globally. However, it is important to realize that this number will not reflect true Nipah virus mortality. The difference between now and the years before 1998 is almost certainly not that a new virus has emerged, but that we have simply developed the means to detect it. We simply could not distinguish Nipah virus outbreaks from other causes of encephalit...

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org.

We are approaching the fifth anniversary of the trial that set the stage for the vaccination of billions by an experimental product — the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine (BNT162b2). There is no other scientific paper that affected so many within a few months of its publication.

Was it a well-designed trial? In many respects, it was not. But was it at least trustworthy as far as the main results are concerned? It is uncertain, and I am not alone in the camp of skeptics. Over the years, I have read various critiques, ranging from testimonies about poor conduct to questionable inference.

For those who are unfamiliar with the design, here is the essence. About 40,000 people were randomized to receive two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, 21 days apart, or two doses of a placebo. Descriptive statistics show well-balanced characteristics in the two arms of the study, with about 20,000 people in each. Participants reported symptoms between the first injection and the end of the follow-up. If they reported at least one of 10 Covid-like symptoms, a PCR test was conducted. If positive, the participant was classified as a Covid case on the date of the first reported symptom.

The main results are shown below.

Notice that we get the correct results from the count of events alone because the denominator (time at risk) was almost identical in the two arms. For example, (1–2/21)x100=90.5%.

My two cents on the results.

I will focus first on a narrow window — eight days in the follow-up time — shortly after the second dose. I call that period The Eight Days of Miracles because what happened at that time was miraculous. Vaccine effectiveness has dramatically increased in the blink of an eye: from 50% to 90%. Too good to be true?

If we accept that the Pfizer vaccine was highly effective in preventing symptomatic infection, we don't need more than one week of follow-up after dose 2. Does it matter whether a risk is cut by 90% or by 95%? Not really. Of course, that's if we trust that estimate of 90% effectiveness.

In those eight days, there were 19 more cases in placebo recipients than in vaccine recipients. All that it takes to change the effectiveness back to 50% is to find 10 more cases or so in about 20,000 recipients of the second dose. Do we have any plausible reason to assume that cases were missed in the vaccine arm of the trial (undercounting) in The Eight Days of Miracles?

We surely do.

Misattributing Covid Symptoms to Side Effects

As we all know, side effects were common, and they were much more common after the second dose than after the first. The table below shows the frequency of three symptoms that were also considered as Covid symptoms in the definition of a case.

We cannot add the percentages because a participant could have reported multiple symptoms. Nonetheless, with almost 20,000 people in the vaccine arm, these percentages translate to thousands of people whose symptoms were attributed to side effects of the second dose ("reactogenicity"). For example, over 2,000 vaccine recipients reported fever after the second dose.

Was Covid ruled out by a PCR test in every case?

No, it was not.

That's what we find in the protocol (section 8.13).

"During the 7 days following each vaccination, potential COVID-19 symptoms that overlap with specific events (ie, fever, chills, new or increased muscle pain, diarrhea, vomiting) should not trigger a potential COVID-19 illness visit unless, in the investigator's opinion, the clinical picture is more indicative of a possible COVID-19 illness than vaccine reactogenicity." (my italics)

In other words, a PCR test is left to the discretion of the investigator, with a clear guideline: it is a priori assumed not to be Covid. Indeed, of thousands of participants who reported such symptoms in those seven days, only a few hundred were tested and classified as "suspected but unconfirmed Covid." All others were not tested.

How do we know how many were tested?

There is an FDA ...

By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org.

I woke up the other morning to the next step in the retraction attempt on our seminal paper published in Autoimmunity entitled: Quantification of residual plasmid DNA and SV40 promoter-enhancer sequences in Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna modRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Ontario, Canada.

Here's the ongoing timeline:

September 6, 2025

We published online.

For those of you unaware, within just over a week of publishing our paper, we received an email notification from the publisher of the journal that our paper was "under investigation" prompted by "pubpeer commenter" Kevin Patrick under the pseudonym Actinopolyspora biskrensis. You can read about that here.

September 17th, 2025

The first email came:

Patrick falsified a claim by misquoting another peer-reviewed article published by Klinman et al. Yes, you read that right. This is where we're at.

We have been under incessant attack since we published. Let me be clear: WE'VE ALREADY BEEN THROUGH PEER REVIEW, AND PASSED ONTO FULL PUBLICATION. And this was after many desk rejections with many other journals. We've addressed countless issues raised and responded more than adequately to all of them, either with benchwork or references.

October 22nd, 2025

The next email came:

Best wishes.

November 20, 2025

And then the email from a Retraction Watch journalist came:

This email had an attached pdf where the undisclosed whiner/author uses ad hominems and regurgitates false claims. It is interesting to me that the name of the attached pdf is Letter_to_the_Editor_VACCINE, as opposed to the perhaps expected Letter_to_the_Editor_AUTOIMMUNITY. Seems like this might in reference to a previously written (perhaps carbon-copied) letter to the editor.

This email from Kincaid claims that the reviewer is also the person who forwarded a letter to the editor with the "same critiques." Who is this person who believes they have the authority to question a published article that's been through peer review and to opinionate "further editorial action?"

And is this really one of our reviewers?

From a glove-face-slapping point of view – this is an insult to us as authors, to the journal, the editor, and all the peer-reviewers who spent long hours to make this article scientifically sound, even the one who seems hellbent on getting our paper retracted, if this is the case.

"Attention-seeking?" "Anti-vaccine"? "Exploit their positions?" "Misinformation?" "Pseudo-journals?" Well, that last word has a particular individual's name all over it and I imagine that he is referring to James Lyons-Weiler's journal Science, Public Health Policy and the Law and/or the Independent Medical Alliance's Journal of Independent Medicine. Most likely, the former.

AHEM. The author's name is in the pdf sent to us.

I have a very serious question now regarding the email.

Question: How is it possible that this journalist got his hands on the peer reviews for our paper? Did one of our reviewers indeed pass his review onto Retraction Watch and write a letter to the editor to prompt retraction of our paper once it got through peer review? We are not privy to seeing these as they are confidential so as to prevent reviewer name disclosure. Confidentiality, however, depends on a chain of human and technical safeguards, and that chain appears to have been broken if what Kincaid wrote is true:

…we have obtained peer reviews of the manuscript you submitted and the revised version which recommend against publishing your paper due to issues with the Qubit data.

This is a serious ethical breach and/or a civil wrong (breach of contract, copyright infringement, breach of confidence) and once again, I have to ask why, after we've been through peer review, does some anonymized individual – who doesn't have to state COIs or even their name! who according to Kincaid was one of our reviewers – have the power to a) incite an investigation into a published paper and b) access confidential documents and use them to ...

By Meryl Nass at Brownstone dot org.

Some people wonder why I look at the New York Times. It's because I want to see what narratives the "newspaper of record" is pushing. I read an article about ten years ago by an ex-NYT editor, who said that at the beginning of the year, the editors were given a list of the themes to be followed that year. I think he was making clear that they were told which narratives they were intended to push.

Below, I critique an "Opinion Piece" by a journalist who knows nothing about the subject of pandemic countermeasures, except that it is his job to pan whatever the current administration is doing, especially if it will save taxpayers money and reduce the risks of Gain-of-Function research.

Let's look at the NYT author first, best known for exaggerating the effects of global warming. No science background. But he did beat up RFK in an August 13 opinion piece—well, that probably trumps a PhD in the subject matter at the NYT.

His book and article on climate change are described as terrifying. And he attempts to terrify us with his straw man argument today. (FYI, a straw man argument misrepresents what the opposer actually said, and argues against the misrepresentation.)

And then:

You and I read the article. Is that what it actually said? Let me remind you what it really said:

We must stop wasting money on the traditional playbook. We do not need to find and create new pathogens that could cause future outbreaks. Rather, we must improve our understanding of the pathogens that we know cause disease in humans now, without speculating about hypothetical risks. We should develop better prevention and treatment strategies for these existing pathogens.

We should learn from recent example: a metabolically healthy population, physically active and eating nutritious food, will cope far better in the face of a novel pathogen than a population facing a severe chronic-disease crisis.

Sweden, without lockdown or school closures, was the best in the world at protecting human life during the Covid pandemic. It had the lowest level of age-adjusted, all-cause excess deaths in the world between March 2020 and December 2024. Sweden succeeded in part because its people are relatively metabolically healthy. By contrast, the U.S. chronic-disease crisis all but guaranteed that Americans would have one of the highest mortality rates in the world.

Ultimately, public health agencies encouraging people to take whatever steps they can to improve their health will have a dramatic effect during the next pandemic. Whether simply by stopping smoking, controlling hypertension or diabetes, or getting up and walking more, anything that makes the population healthier will prepare us better for the next pandemic.

Then he emotes that promoting healthy behaviors is magical thinking:

This narrative constructor is now making war on healthier lifestyles. Imagine how many of those who died from HIV/AIDS might have been spared if they had used condoms, or possibly avoided poppers and other drugs (which is what Professor Peter Duesberg postulated as the contributing cause).

Next, after admitting that lifestyle diseases like obesity and diabetes did in fact increase mortality from Covid significantly, Wallace-Wells somehow twists that into an attack on good health. The guy is phenomenal at being illogical.

It just gets wilder. Either he is a dummkopf, or he was told the story he had to write, and he just had to produce the verbiage to go along with the theme:

Are we really prepared to embrace a D.I.Y. public health libertarianism in the wake of a respiratory pandemic that taught us — or should have — that whenever we share air, we share disease?

[Even outdoors? Then why aren't we all diseased, all the time?—Nass]

To a distressing degree, the answer appears to be yes — not just in the fiercest MAHA circles but among the population at large, as a poll shows.

In the next sentence, poor Wallace-Wells stops making any sense at all. Where was h...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

At a recent Brownstone Institute event, I spoke on a panel about the importance of judging public health interventions by their real-world impact — by whether they genuinely help people live longer and healthier lives.

I had just written about mammography screening, and how decades of research show that while it detects more breast cancers, it doesn't reduce overall deaths.

During the discussion, someone raised the issue about prostate cancer screening and the PSA test.

It was a fair question — because the parallels with routine mammography are striking. Both programs rest on the same seductive logic: find cancer early, treat it, and save lives. It sounds so obvious, doesn't it?

But the latest data on prostate-cancer screening — 23 years of it — suggest that this promise, too, has failed the most important test: overall mortality.

When the Numbers Don't Match the Promise

The European randomised screening study began in 1993 and enrolled more than 160,000 men aged 55 to 69. Half were invited to have regular PSA blood tests; the others were not.

After 23 years of follow-up, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the results are just in.

Predictably, screening led to about 30% more prostate cancers being diagnosed. However, most were low-risk tumours that never would have caused harm.

Men who were screened had a 13% lower risk of dying from prostate cancer than those who weren't screened.

But that difference, while sounding impressive, shrinks dramatically when translated into absolute numbers: 1.4% versus 1.6%, an absolute reduction of 0.2% (see graph).

That means you'd have to screen about 500 men to prevent one death from prostate cancer — the other 499 see no benefit.

But here's the key point — the overall death rates were identical in both groups (see graph below).

Despite finding more prostate cancers, men who were screened did not live longer — they simply had a higher chance of being labelled "cancer patients."

The study found that while screening can modestly reduce prostate cancer deaths, it comes at the cost of significant overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

The reality for most men is that once a PSA test is positive, it's almost impossible not to act.

At the Brownstone event, I described it like a conveyor belt: once you're on it, it's difficult to get off. An elevated PSA often sets in motion a chain of medical interventions that men may not need.

The Harms We Don't Count

A positive test often triggers a chain reaction — MRIs, biopsies, surgery, radiation — and often with lifelong consequences.

Men who undergo unnecessary treatment can be left impotent, incontinent, or chronically anxious.

Most elevated PSAs are false positives, and even when biopsies reveal no cancer, the process itself carries risk — including infections that can require hospitalisation — and often leads to repeat testing and repeat biopsies.

The psychological toll — months of fear between tests, the dread of results, the pressure to "do something" can be harmful.

A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine of nearly a quarter-million US veterans found that even men with limited life expectancy — too old or frail to benefit — were being treated aggressively for prostate cancer.

The authors urged doctors to "avoid definitive treatment of men with limited life expectancy to prevent unnecessary toxic effects."

It's a roundabout way of saying what should be obvious — we're hurting people we can't help.

It's often argued that today's tests and treatments have improved, and while that may be true in some cases, the fundamental problem remains.

The Pressure to Participate

Every October brings Breast Cancer Awareness Month, urging women to get mammograms "for peace of mind."

Every November brings Movember, encouraging men to grow moustaches to raise funds and promote prostate cancer screening in the name of "men's health."

The intentions are good. But these campaigns often create social press...