By Yaffa Shir-Raz at Brownstone dot org.

The vote on whether to continue the universal newborn hepatitis B vaccination policy was postponed, but the discussion at ACIP exposed how, for decades, the blanket directive to vaccinate infants immediately after birth rested on assumptions, theoretical models, and partial data rather than on a solid scientific foundation.

"As a father and a scientist, I do not understand how we have the courage to ask parents to vaccinate a healthy newborn at birth when the child's risk is so low and the evidence so thin. I honestly do not know where that courage comes from."

This statement by Prof. Retsef Levi during yesterday's ACIP meeting captured, with his characteristic clarity and directness, the core theme that emerged from the entire session: significant scientific gaps in a universal vaccination policy that has been in place for more than three decades in the United States.

The committee had been scheduled to vote on what seemed like technical questions: whether to eliminate universal newborn vaccination and administer the hepatitis B shot only to infants whose mothers test positive, and whether to replace the current policy, which does not allow for full informed consent, with a shared decision-making model between parents and physicians regarding vaccination later in infancy.

The meeting ended without a vote. It was postponed once again to refine the language of the recommendations. Yet what surfaced during the session may have been even more important than the vote itself: for the first time, the ACIP's scientific staff presented, openly and systematically, the profound gap between the institutional narrative and the evidence base, or rather the lack of one, that underpinned an expansive policy for 30 years. They detailed how a major, far-reaching public health directive had been constructed on assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and partial datasets, absent rigorous foundational research.

Did the Birth Dose Reduce Hepatitis B Infection? The Data Say Otherwise

One of the central narratives used to justify the universal newborn hepatitis B vaccination policy was simple and compelling: the birth dose dramatically reduced hepatitis B transmission in the United States.

This narrative appeared repeatedly in CDC documents, official presentations, and public health communications.

But yesterday, perhaps for the first time so explicitly, data were presented that undermine this narrative at its core.

The sharpest and most substantial decline in hepatitis B incidence occurred between 1990 and 2007 among adults aged 20 to 49, not among infants.

Among infants and young children, case rates were extremely low to begin with, making it difficult to attribute any decline to the vaccine.

Many countries without a birth dose show similar or even lower incidence rates than the United States.

The populations that contributed most to the decline were high-risk adults, including people who inject drugs and individuals exposed via blood.

The downward trend began before the universal birth dose was introduced in 1991.

What Did Contribute to the Decline?

Several factors were presented as far more significant than the birth dose:

1. Prenatal screening and targeted intervention: When a pregnant woman is identified as hepatitis B-positive, targeted prophylaxis almost completely prevents neonatal transmission. This mechanism is evidence-based and far more effective than universal newborn vaccination.

2. Behavioral change among high-risk groups: Increased public health campaigns, risk-reduction programs, and broader access to treatment significantly reduced primary sources of transmission.

3. Improved blood screening protocols.

4. Vaccination later in childhood or adolescence: Most individuals were vaccinated in early childhood or adolescence, not at birth. These doses are far more relevant for reducing adult infection risk, since immunity from a birth dose wanes precisely at the ages when exposure risk increases.

...

By Josh Stevenson at Brownstone dot org.

[This article was coauthored with Emily Evans, a Managing Director in charge of health policy research at Hedgeye Risk Management.]

Their record isn't just spotty; it is downright awful. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 was designed to prevent "patient dumping" by hospitals of emergent patients without insurance.

The unintended consequences of that law are hotly debated. What is not in controversy is the hospital lobby's insistence that the law drives up their operating costs. That argument has done decades of service to protectionist policies that limit competition and protect prices.

Then there is the Affordable Care Act. It was a compromise between advocates of "universal health care" and the "Third Way" or "New Democrats" who viewed big business not as an obstacle to their ambitions but a facilitator. The latter group was successful beyond their wildest dreams. The former is still trying.

In the wake of an unprecedented government shutdown, Congress is taking up another attempt to make the American health care system behave. Unfortunately for the American people, they seem completely flummoxed by the problem. With apologies to James Carville, "It's the prices, stupid."

A simple question of "How much will this cost?" is met with howls from the mandarins of a system who believe there is something so unique, so special about the sale of health care services that we must all support its protection from market realities.

Concepts like "adverse selection" may be foreign to your average American but it and others seem to overrule all other considerations like the impact of health insurance premiums on take-home pay. The economic realities of America's households have been ignored to protect margins at health insurance carriers with the full-throated support of Congress.

Instead of hanging on the prospect of another disastrous policy effort, the White House and Congress should fully deploy the most powerful tool available to contain costs. Health care price transparency is bipartisan - its statutory authority rests with the Affordable Care Act, ironically. Both Trump administrations and the Biden White House have made incremental progress on providing guidance and implementing enforcement.

Thus far. What the transparency data tells us is that health insurance for the young and the healthy is mostly a tax. At one Alabama hospital the discounted cash price for a screening mammogram is $148.33. According to their disclosure the hospital is paid anywhere from $67.55 to $385.28 by insurers.

For the privilege of paying $500 to $1,000 per month in health insurance premiums, an insured woman in Alabama saves $80.78 negotiated by her insurance company.

Mammograms are generally excluded from cost sharing. A knee arthroscopy is not. That same woman in Alabama could pay a cash price of $1,651.33 or have her insurance company negotiate $3,075.26. If Miss Alabama has met her deductible, she will pay 20% of the negotiated rate. If she has not, she will pay the full cost of the negotiated rate, not the cash price.

When wages are growing, health insurance premium increases are less of a concern. That was the case from 2017 until 2022. Add the economy-wide inflation the US experienced from 2022 until just recently and you get what you got, a cost-of-living crisis. Health insurance for the young and the healthy becomes a nice-to-have instead of a got-to-have.

The most economically sound response to the current environment is for the young and the healthy to purchase health insurance with the highest deductible with which they feel comfortable and pay cash for everything else.

The Affordable Care Act's employer mandate makes such rational behavior nearly impossible. Anecdotally, it appears some hospitals actually prohibit cash payment for their services!

There will be no shortage of economists and policy apparatchiks offering advice on risk pools and pre-existing conditions an...

By Jason Locasale at Brownstone dot org.

I became a scientist because I was drawn to difficult questions. As a child, I searched for patterns and tried to uncover the deeper logic behind everyday phenomena. That instinct carried me into chemistry and physics, then into a PhD at MIT, where I worked at the intersection of biophysics, engineering, computation, and early AI.

Biology pulled me in because it was full of unresolved problems. It offered a way to answer questions that touched human health in a meaningful way.

When I entered biomedical research at Harvard, I believed science operated on a simple principle: knowledge mattered. I built a research program around metabolism - how nutrients and the environment shape health, cancer, and chronic disease.

My lab developed technologies capable of measuring hundreds of molecules simultaneously, revealing how cells allocate nutrients and make decisions and shaping research directions in many fields.

Over nearly 20 years I published over 200 papers, becoming one of the world's most highly cited scholars, received teaching awards, collaborated across disciplines, contributed to biotechnology, and advised the National Institutes of Health.

I also assumed - naively - that scientific accomplishment offered a degree of protection. If you did good work, if you advanced understanding, institutions would support you. There were early warning signs: jealousy from senior colleagues when my research outpaced theirs; the creeping politicization of academia; hiring and leadership decisions that elevated people for their symbolic value or personal relationships rather than their expertise. But I did what most scientists do: I focused on the work and ignored the noise.

It took far too long to understand how misplaced that belief was. My awakening came through something ordinary: an authorship dispute between two members of my lab at Duke's medical school, where I was a tenured professor. These disagreements happen in every lab and are typically resolved with a straightforward conversation. But this dispute unfolded when universities were reframing their missions around social-justice narratives about power imbalances, recasting accomplished scientists as oppressors and others as oppressed.

What should have been a simple mentoring moment instead became the pretext for a sprawling administrative intervention - something the university could present as vigilance, morality, or progress.

The process quickly detached from reality. Administrators launched what they called a culture review, claiming they needed to assess whether I was aligned with Duke's values. In practice, investigators interrogated people for hours, attempting to elicit any negative phrasing that could be stitched into a narrative.

I was banned from campus, prohibited from discussing my research or what was happening to me, and placed under legal and financial scrutiny. My grants were reassigned to senior administrators who had long been jealous of my accomplishments.

After a couple months of interviews, audits, and surveillance, the investigation concluded with no findings of misconduct. But the damage had already been done. Years of work were disrupted, the careers of my trainees derailed, and student protests about my treatment ignored - even as other forms of activism were eagerly embraced. Eventually I was pressured to sign a compact containing conditions and monitoring requirements that would have made any serious research impossible.

What happened to me was not unique. Variations of the same pattern were unfolding on campuses across the country. Colleagues told me to ignore it, to keep my head down and focus on my work. But opportunities disappeared; whispers filled the void where facts should have been; and I was quietly blacklisted from positions elsewhere. It became clear that something deeper had been happening inside biomedical academia for years: scientific merit and truth had lost their institutional value.

Universiti...

By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

I. Junk Science Clinical Trials as the Basis for FDA Licensure of Hepatitis B Vaccines in the U.S.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will discuss hepatitis B vaccines at their meeting on December 4 and 5. In this article I will lay out the case for removing hepatitis B vaccines from the CDC childhood schedule altogether.

As the Informed Consent Action Network has demonstrated, the hepatitis B vaccines Recombivax and Engerix - injected into the vast majority of American children at birth, one month, and six months of age - never should have been licensed by the FDA in the first place.

The clinical trials for Recombivax and Engerix:

did not include a proper saline placebo control group;

were too small to detect uncommon adverse events; and

were too short to detect the majority of harms (the Recombivax trials monitored safety for just five days, the Engerix trials monitored solicited adverse events for just four days).

II. Hepatitis B Vaccines Are Associated with Autism

The real world data that are available on the safety of hepatitis B vaccines are horrifying. When autism rates in the US exploded in the 1990s, the CDC looked into the possible role of vaccines. They assigned one of their senior scientists, Thomas Verstraeten, at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, to do the analysis. At the time, hepatitis B vaccines had mercury (thimerosal) in them. Dr. Verstraeten found that children in the highest exposure group had an 11.35x increased relative risk of autism.

Then, because the CDC works for the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Verstraeten did four additional rounds of data manipulation, that were not scientifically warranted, to try to make the signal go away. We have Dr. Verstraeten's emails and the five different rounds of analysis because SafeMinds did a FOIA request to get all of Dr. Verstraeten's communication about the study (see SafeMinds Powerpoint presentation here). The corrupted data were used in the final published paper and the original findings were covered up.

The CDC had this information in 1999 and has lied about it for 26 years (which I mentioned in my recent Senate testimony). In 2001, Dr. Verstraeten was scheduled to present his findings to the Institute of Medicine but he quit on the morning of the presentation to go work for vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline in Belgium (see Evidence of Harm).

Mercury was eventually taken out of hepatitis B vaccines; however aluminum adjuvants remain. CDC/ACIP subsequently added several more aluminum containing vaccines to the childhood schedule. What we see in the autism prevalence data after the removal of mercury, together with the increase in total aluminum in the schedule, is that autism rates keep rising (owing to the increased aluminum) but the proportion of severe autism cases as a percentage of the total declined somewhat (owing to the removal of thimerosal which is even more toxic than aluminum).

III. Hepatitis B Vaccines Have Killed an Astonishing Number of Children in the US

I asked the warrior mamas at OpenVAERS (who are doing the work that the CDC should be doing) to calculate the total number of deaths from hepatitis B vaccines from 1990 to the present. The results that came back show that hepatitis B vaccines are a crime against humanity.

Hepatitis B is a component in many combination vaccines including Twinrix, Pediarix, and Vaxelis. When one looks at VAERS reports in the US for all vaccines containing a hepatitis B component there are 1,320 deaths in children age 5 and younger and 82,980 total reports of harm across all ages.

Just looking at Recombivax and Engerix, US reports, in children age 5 and younger, there are 620 deaths and 15,110 total injuries. There are 52,281 total reports of injury in the US across all ages for Recombivax and Engerix.

Remember that VAERS reports are a significant undercount of harms. The Lazarus and Klompas study for HHS in 2011 estimated that VAERS undercounts ...

By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org.

Everyone talks about this place [Washington DC] being a dadgum swamp. It's not a swamp. A swamp is something cool, God created. It filters water, animal life flourishes around it. This is a sewer. It's created by man. And it needs to stop.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN)

Sincerity is, by far, the most dangerous quality in Washington.

Tucker Carlson

On Friday, November 21, 2025, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she will resign from Congress in January. Her resignation statement is an important document that will have political influence in the near term and historical importance in the long term. Given the perilous state of our country at present, a detailed reading of Greene's statement is extremely valuable.

A resignation from Congress, in itself, is neither noteworthy or unusual. Members of Congress resign with some frequency. According to the website FiveThirtyEight, 615 members of Congress resigned or were removed from office between 1901 and 2018, for a wide variety of reasons.

According to FiveThirtyEight's research, the most likely reason for leaving Congress mid-term is appointment or election to another government position. Changes in pension laws caused a large but temporary spike in the 1970s. Leaving for lucrative private sector jobs has recently become more common, and sex scandal-based resignations have increased as well in recent years. However, "three percent of departures stem from unique circumstances that don't fit into any other category."

Marjorie Taylor Greene's stated reasons for her resignation do not just defy categorization. Her statement also describes in detail for ordinary Americans the Sewer that is Washington, DC: a place of pervasive corruption and endless lies, psychological operations, blackmail, death threats, and assassinations.

It describes how the Sewer appears to have bogged down and affected its great adversary, President Donald Trump. It hints at a path forward for individual Americans and for the nation as a whole. It does so from the point of view of a person who has learned these lessons the hard way - by descending into the Sewer herself, enduring it as long as she could, and getting out to tell the tale.

For her troubles, Greene has suffered derision and innuendo from all sides, ranging from Bush family acolyte and never-Trumper David Frum to Trump TV apologist Scott Jennings. Her own explanation is disregarded by these critics. But if flak indicates being over the target, then Greene must be on to something.

A Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations

Greene begins her statement by describing Washington, DC's utter contempt for the average American. She describes elections as a recurrent uniparty psyop where "Americans are used by the political-industrial complex of both political parties, election cycle after election cycle, in order to elect whichever side can convince Americans to hate the other side more."

She recites a litany of offenses by the Federal Government against its own citizens. While Greene is no Thomas Jefferson as a writer, her list echoes the Declaration of Independence:

…nothing ever gets better for the common American man or woman. The debt goes higher.

Corporate and global interests remain Washington's sweethearts. American jobs continue to be replaced, whether it's by illegal labor or legal labor by visas, or just shipped overseas. Small businesses continue to be swallowed by big corporations.

Americans' hard-earned tax dollars always fund foreign wars, foreign aid, and foreign interests. And the spending power of the dollar continues to decline. The average American family can no longer survive on a single breadwinner's income, as both parents have to work in order to simply survive.

In other words, Greene describes:

Unsustainable, ever-increasing national debt.

Corporate capture of Government.

Globalist infiltration of Government.

Mass-scale job replacement.

Economic outsourcing.

Destruction ...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

People familiar with respiratory viruses know it is impossible to lock out such viruses by locking down the society. Yet, in virtually all countries, the politicians panicked to such an extent that, two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I dubbed it the COVID-19 panic.

The lockdowns were foolish and illogical. Denmark closed its borders with Germany and Sweden when we had more coronavirus than they had. Golf was forbidden, which led to the absurdity that you were allowed to walk on the fairways if you didn't look like a golfer. Tennis courts were closed, although gatherings of four people were not forbidden. Even outdoor running clubs closed. Life as we knew it stopped, on government orders.

There were early warnings but they were not heeded. After India introduced a lockdown three months into the pandemic, migrant labourers feared that hunger would kill them before the coronavirus did. Ten months into the pandemic, the World Bank estimated that it had caused an increase of about 100 million people living in extreme poverty, and poverty kills.

The pandemic saw a new breed of people who had become experts overnight but knew very little about the issues. They constantly appeared on TV with sinister messages about the need for lockdowns and many other interventions, including dressing whole populations as bank robbers with face masks, although they don't work.

Curiously, governments all over the world preferred to listen to the false gurus rather than to the real experts. I think it was because they supported the official narratives, ideas and dogma, which were flimsily created on the spot by politicians eager to be seen as powerful people who didn't sit on their hands but did something.

The pseudo experts were also loved by the media. I wrote in a newspaper that after a year with the same Danish "expert" on TV, Allan Randrup Thomsen, a laboratory researcher, who was always worried and uttered trifles virtually every day about the pandemic anyone could have said, I needed a new remote control because I had used the mute button so much that it had stopped working. When I asked a TV journalist why they always interviewed Thomsen, he said it was because Thomsen was well prepared as he read what some journalists had written!

Only Sweden had a real expert the politicians listened to and respected, even after a public outrage when mortality figures became rather high in early 2020 compared with the other Nordic countries, which was because Sweden had failed to protect the elderly in the beginning. State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell stood his ground and advised that Sweden should not change its policy, which was to keep the society open and not mandate face masks, which were rarely seen in Sweden.

Sweden was a lone star in the darkness. I think it was the only country that didn't panic and did the right things, and it had the lowest excess mortality in the whole western world during the pandemic (excess mortality is the increase in all-cause mortality during the pandemic compared with prepandemic levels).

The Panickers

The most harmful panickers were researchers from the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at the Imperial College London. The modelling exercises of Neil Ferguson and his team played a preeminent role in shutting down most of the world in early 2020, a couple of months into the pandemic. A year later, historian Phillip Magness wrote that the exaggerated forecasts of this modelling team "may well constitute one of the greatest scientific failures in modern human history."

I agree, and 2020 became the most surreal and shocking year in my whole professional life. The Danish Board of Health claimed it was documented that face masks were effective, which wasn't true, and our government decided to kill all our 17 million mink only because a mutation had been found that might make future vaccines less effective, which was also wrong. In Denmark, we have four pigs for every...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

Now Is the Time to Act

A free society has what kind of government?

The classic American answer: one bound down by law, checked by courts and juries of ordinary citizens, and answerable to the people through their elected representatives. That vision used to be America's great gift to mankind. We called it freedom.

What almost no one imagined is what we have now: a government that recognizes no limits to its power, run by an axis of corporate power and unaccountable bureaucrats lodged in 444 federal agencies that no election can touch.

The Covid years ripped the mask off. Thanks to Brownstone Institute, millions finally saw the beast clearly.

Locked in our homes. Forbidden to worship or throw a birthday party. Children barred from the schools we paid for. Millions of small businesses crushed - while the connected got richer. All to force an industrial injection on the world.

The fallout: shattered health, broken spirits, and a frantic new push for an AI-driven surveillance state that grows more powerful by the hour. Daily, the studies appear proving how policies of this period wrecked the lives of children, the elderly, and the working classes - everyone not in power.

DONATE NOW

Even today the regime's house organs - led by the New York Times and amplified by all official media - mock anyone who still dares to doubt the official story.

They are still banging the drums for lockdowns. This is daily!

The realities of the last five years are even now hard to fathom. As with many nightmares, the desire today is simply to shake it off as an aberration.

We cannot sweep it under the rug. Remember that 194 countries in the world followed the same path. These same countries forcibly injected their populations with a potion that did not control the disease and instead inflicted vast pain and death.

One of these countries, the United Kingdom, just released a report promising more of the same next time, much sooner. Anthony Fauci has reemerged again, avoiding jail and instead promising another pandemic.

Friends, our beloved country is in trouble. So is the rest of the world.

We've seen the beast. What are we going to do about it?

Early on in the crisis, Brownstone Institute was founded with a serious plan to push back. With a small staff and budget, Brownstone has:

Published more than 3,000 fearless articles in our journal that have reached millions per month the world over;

Supported many of the best scientists, journalists, economists, and other intellectuals who were cancelled by their institutions but have emerged as great leaders;

Created and supported a community of expert dissidents who are pushing back on despotism and the emerging technocracy;

Established a nationwide network of supper clubs to bring people together even as authorities warned against it;

Inspired new sister organizations in Europe and all over the US;

Hosted retreats of top thinkers to share ideas for understanding and the next steps;

Printed and promoted 20 books that deal with the core of current issues;

Supported the best research working groups on medical issues, economics, censorship, the law, and other topics.

Profoundly affected public life to the point that Brownstone has been targeted for destruction by mainstream corporate media (it's not working).

Take that, New York Times!

DONATE NOW

In other words, Brownstone Institute has established itself and its voice as the credible venue in these new times, thanks only to your faith in this work and your financial support.

Today, we are asking for your help again, as an investment in the kind of country and world that protects freedom and individual rights against all attacks and under any excuse.

You are the only reason this work is possible. Your commitment extends from a strong belief that change is possible and happens only through pushback on elite depredations and a new vision for freedom.

Sure enough, not everyone is happy. Powerful interests are plotting t...

By Bret Swanson at Brownstone dot org.

The experts have not been quick to assess, let alone apologize for, their performance during Covid. I took note, therefore, when two elite institutions that led the pandemic response co-hosted a retrospective event on Thursday, November 6.

Johns Hopkins University is home to a world-renowned medical center and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. The American Enterprise Institute is one of Washington, D.C.'s oldest and largest public policy think tanks. Both helped shape pandemic policy and perception from its earliest days.

The two organizations have been collaborating for the past year, and they framed their first event on November 6 around the book In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, a critique of lockdowns written by two Princeton political scientists, Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo.

Given their vocal insistence on maximal Covid impositions, Hopkins and AEI deserve credit for finally highlighting an opposing view.

Let's recall how central the two organizations were in the early days, and even before. In October of 2019, Hopkins had, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum, co-hosted Event 201, a tabletop pandemic planning exercise. Participants from the CIA, the Chinese CDC, and various public relations firms discussed how they would manage a future novel coronavirus outbreak, focusing especially on how to combat "misinformation" and shape public behavior. Just two months later, Covid hit.

Then, in the spring of 2020, AEI fellow and former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb co-authored with Johns Hopkins infectious disease specialists a major lockdown blueprint. Gottlieb was a key Republican demanding lockdowns. Meanwhile, millions of people were hitting refresh on Johns Hopkins' Internet dashboard map, which counted Covid "cases" and helped drive panic across the globe.

There are still giant holes in AEI and Hopkins' understanding - especially on the Covid vaccines - and I'll address those in the second half of this article. But first, the good stuff.

The Good

"A wartime mentality took hold," Frances Lee explained at the November 6 event. The message was, "'We all have to pull together, we've chosen a strategy.' We didn't get a servicing of the necessary questions."

"Educated elite institutions," Macedo followed, "were pushing a point of view that seemed to be worth questioning, and was to a remarkable extent not questioned adequately."

"There's not enough dissent in public health," Macedo charged. They suffer from "tunnel vision and groupthink," Lee followed up.

Macedo briefly criticized social media censorship, noting that "Not a single law school conference that we know of has been held to discuss the First Amendment issues with regard to speech."

The authors emphasized a central defect of Covid policy interventions - the failure to weigh not just supposed benefits but also costs. Science advisors and policymakers simply denied any potential trade-offs.

Macedo and Lee found that lockdowns radically departed from pre-pandemic recommendations and were not effective in slowing virus spread or reducing mortality. Benefits were elusive. Lockdowns did, however, impose gigantic economic and social costs.

AEI's Roger Piekle, Jr., seemed to approve of some "shadow science advice" efforts, such as the Great Barrington Declaration, though he didn't elaborate.

Macedo and Lee especially condemned extended school closures, noting that most European schools had reopened in spring 2020, to no harmful effect. The US media was loath to report this fact, Macedo highlighted.

I myself had advised former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who in the spring of 2020 was president of Purdue University. He wanted to open the campus in the fall of 2020 and asked for empirical support. We assembled the data showing young people were at near-zero risk, which he relied on in May 2020 to courageously announce, first among all major US colleges, t...

By Steven Kritz at Brownstone dot org.

With the reorganized and restaffed agencies of the Dept of Health and Human Services (DHHS) firmly in place, and the release of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, now's a good time to look at the state of play with regard to all things Covid, and the public health establishment, in general, in the United States.

Almost two years ago, I had written in Brownstone Journal that the entire country (including healthcare providers) could be placed into one of three scenarios regarding the Covid response:

Scenario 1: We handled the pandemic as best we could, given the information we had at the time. The results were less than desired due to the nature of the virus.

Scenario 2: Things didn't go well because the mitigation modalities put in place (lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and multiple mRNA jabs) were not sufficiently followed and/or enforced. Of note, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry findings are most consistent with this scenario.

Scenario 3: Everything that was done was wrong, and was known to be wrong (and contrary to more than a century of public health policy and practice) when implemented. However, due to geopolitical, economic, and power considerations, it was done anyway.

Back then, I placed the percentage of the population that supported each scenario at 75%, 5%, and 20%, respectively. Sadly, despite overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that Scenario 3 is correct, and DHHS now has the expertise in place to move this evidence forward, as of today, the percentages have not budged from two years ago.

While in my mind, it is way past time that the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, the Empire (consisting of the medical-pharmaceutical-government complex) continues to strike back with as much ferocity as ever, and appears to still be holding court. The Empire has been strengthened by the fact that healthcare providers, particularly physicians, are now overwhelmingly employees of the health systems establishment (an unstated, but key outcome goal of the Affordable Care Act), and with the loss of autonomy (and concurrent loss of their souls), healthcare providers' state of denial reigns supreme.

Six months ago, I had provided evidence of this entrenchment by citing three Commentary articles from the same issue of the American Journal of Medicine (AKA: The Green Journal), which has been an important resource for internists for almost 80 years. It indicated that Scenario 1 was still controlling the agenda more than five years after the start of the pandemic.

In the December 2025 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, there are three more Commentary articles (1, 2, 3) that track in exactly the same direction. In each case, there is recognition that there are significant problems with the healthcare delivery system in this country and globally.

However, there appears to be absolutely no self-awareness that the problem is staring right back at them in the mirror. This has occurred, despite the fact that DHHS has been in the spotlight much more frequently during the past six months, although the pace of information release has been frustratingly slow.

Frankly, I can relate to the tendency towards denial. For decades, I resisted the notion that there could be any link between vaccines and autism. I justified my resistance on the fact that I had been taught (and firmly believed) that no vaccine was released for public consumption before it had been studied for 5 to 10 years in order to reveal potential longer term issues. It turns out that this dogma is actually dog-doo!

Given the violation of every tenet of good patient care that we saw during the Covid response, to not extrapolate these same types of violations to other aspects of patient care is naïve and dangerously foolish. Maybe it partially explains the fact that life expectancy in this country over the past 10-12 years has been flat-to-down, and the prospects going forward are not looking good. This should not be surprising, given that the de...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

Over the last November weekend of 2025, a memo circulated throughout the Federal Food and Drug Administration that might well trigger the entire unraveling of the US vaccine program with a focus on the mandated Covid shot in particular. The author is Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was a moderate critic during the Covid but has become ferocious since his appointment as the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research of the FDA.

Of this memo, ACIP member and scientist Robert Malone has written: "I am stunned, gobsmacked by his letter below. The significance and importance of this letter in the context of US and global vaccine policy cannot be overestimated. This is a revolution, the likes of which I never expected to see in my lifetime."

It is reprinted in full below.

Dear Team CBER,

I am writing to report that OBPV (The Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance) career staff have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination. These deaths are related to vaccination (likely/probable/possible attribution made by staff). That number is certainly an underestimate due to underreporting, and inherent bias in attribution. This safety signal has far reaching implications for Americans, the US pandemic response, and the agency itself, which I wish to discuss here. I also want to address some frequent objections.

Prior to joining the US FDA, the FDA Commissioner closely followed reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis. Unlike the COVID virus, which has a steep age gradient- being at least 1000 times more likely to kill an 80 year old than an 8 year old- myocarditis appeared to have the opposite pattern. Young, healthy boys and men- those least likely to experience bad covid outcomes- bore the greatest risk. The risk was as high as ~200-330 per million doses given in the highest risk demographic groups. Notably, the US FDA and CDC were not the first to recognize the safety signal- instead the Israelis were- and worse in May of 2021, then CDC director Rochelle Walensky stated, "We have not seen a signal and we've actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we've given," Many felt this statement was dishonest and manipulative.

The Commissioner, senior advisor Tracy Beth Hoeg MD PhD, myself and colleagues demonstrated that COVID-19 boosters, and the accompanying mandates by colleges, were on balance harmful to young men in a widely discussed, peer reviewed paper in 2022. Like many academic physicians, we felt the FDA and CDC abdicated their duty to the American people. These agencies did not quickly attempt mitigation strategies such as spacing doses apart, lowering doses, omitting doses among those with prior COVID-19.

Worse, the FDA delayed acknowledgement of the safety signal until after it could extend marketing authorization to younger boys 12-15. This is described by the Commissioner and I in JAMA. Had the acknowledgement come early, these younger boys, who likely did not require COVID-19 vaccination, may have chosen to avoid the products.

In the summer of 2025, Dr. Hoeg began investigating VAERS reports of children who had died after administration of the COVID-19 vaccine. By late summer, she had concluded that there were in fact deaths- a fact this agency had never publicly admitted.

Dr. Hoeg organized a small meeting to discuss these deaths with (Office of Vaccines Research and Review) OVRR and OBPV stakeholders. The slides she presented, emails she sent, and distorted firsthand reports was shared with media outlets. The general narrative was that OVRR staff disagreed with Dr. Hoeg's assessment that the deaths were due to vaccine receipt. Some staff present who leaked portrayed the incident as Dr. Hoeg attempting to create a false fear regarding vaccines.

I then asked OBPV to perform a detailed analysis of deaths voluntarily reported to the VAERS system- in full interest of balance. Causality is eas...