By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

People are asking about the background to a major effort sponsored by Brownstone Institute and many partnering organizations. It is CovidJustice.org, a proposed Senate resolution on the entire epoch that condemns the bad science and coercion and pledges to do better next time. The petition has already attracted 20K signers in two days.

What gave rise to this idea and what is its purpose?

Two years ago, I was saddled up to the bar at an airport awaiting my departure time. The man sitting next to me asked about my bracelet. I said that it says "I Won't Be Locked Down." He asked why I would wear such a thing.

I explained that just a few years ago, we were locked in our homes. People were sometimes arrested for going out. Business was forcibly shut. Proprietors were fined if they were caught opening their doors or giving haircuts. Indeed, getting a haircut required paying someone under the table and meeting in secret. Skateboard parks were sanded in and basketball hoops boarded up.

That was just the beginning. The CDC announced that rental payments cannot be enforced. Churches on military bases were closed and then closed all over the country. Parking lots of hospitals and medical offices were empty coast to coast, as people missed diagnostics. Schools were shuttered and students were locked in their dorm rooms and policed for parties.

Drones flew overhead looking for too many cars parked in residential homes and pictures were sent to the media which dutifully reported house parties. Weddings and funerals were out of the question.

I stopped there but could have gone on for another hour. I didn't even get to the part wherein millions were forced to take an experimental injection that did not stop infection and ended up hurting and even killing people.

He sat there in silence for a moment and took another sip of beer.

"Yeah. We've not really had a reckoning over all that, haven't we?"

"Nope."

Those words have long haunted me. I don't see how the US or any nation can move forward past this grim period that harmed so many lives. Students were robbed of two years of in-person education. Millions of businesses were wrecked. Congressional authorization of multiple-trillions in spending turned into inflation that ate away 25-30 percent of purchasing power, gutting the value of savings and capital.

This fiasco in the name of public health ended up harming health. People turned to substances to get by and put on 20 pounds from overeating and sloth. Families were shattered in arguments about the shot. Churches struggled to recover. Many civic groups from bowling leagues to garage bands broke up permanently. Countless numbers lost jobs, changed careers, and fled states that heavily enforced lockdowns and shot mandates.

After a few years, the disastrous experiment in human control and messaging just gradually faded away. Media never really said much. Academia was quiet. Public health just hunkered down in silence. Suddenly we were all told to forget about it and think instead about things like partisan politics, AI, Russia-Ukraine, the Iran threat, the culture war, and so on. Just move on, we have been told.

Think about a historical analogy here with the Great War. It was an upheaval without precedent resulting in shattered communities and nations plus death on a mass scale. It was a horror. Fully six years went by before literature started appearing that dealt with the topic. There was Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque, and many others.

In politics, there were some efforts too, like Albert Jay Nock's The Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922), Merchants of Death (1934) by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen ,and many others.

People don't know that A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) was also constructed as an attack on the war. Milne wanted to write a book about the realities of war. His pu...

By Natalya Murakhver at Brownstone dot org.

There is a question that has haunted me since the moment I watched institutions fail children during the pandemic: Who will ask the hard questions if the agencies charged with asking them refuse to?

I have spent the past six years trying to answer that question through film, through advocacy, through lawsuits, through grassroots organizing. Now, Restore Childhood is trying to answer it through science.

Restore Childhood is a small 501(c)(3) nonprofit with no pharmaceutical backers, no government grants, and no institutional patrons with interests to protect. We were founded in the crucible of America's pandemic school closures by parents who watched decisions get made behind closed doors, decisions that cost children years of their lives, while the institutions entrusted with protecting them looked the other way. We documented those failures in 15 DAYS: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures, a feature documentary examining how and why American schools remained shuttered long after the evidence demanded they reopen. It has now been viewed over 1,000,000 times in its brief run on X.

Recently, we did something else. We funded independent, peer-reviewed scientific research. What that research found should trouble every parent in America.

What the FDA Got Wrong — And What Our Team Got Right

Prior to granting full approval of Moderna's mRNA-1273 Covid vaccine on January 31, 2022, the FDA conducted a benefit–risk assessment of the vaccine. That assessment concluded that vaccine benefits outweighed the risks of vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis — even for 18–25-year-old males, the demographic at highest known risk of cardiac injury from the shot.

A team of independent researchers — mathematician Paul S. Bourdon, PhD, our own board member Ram Duriseti, MD, PhD, mathematician H. Christian Gromoll, PhD, immunologist Dyana K. Dalton, PhD, epidemiologist Allison E. Krug, MPH, and bioethicist Kevin Bardosh, PhD — set out to reanalyze that assessment. Their peer-reviewed study, published February 10, 2026 in the journal Vaccines, reaches a starkly different conclusion.

When you account for what the FDA failed to account for, the math changes. Vaccine risks outweighed benefits for the general population of 18–25-year-old males relative to hospitalizations: those caused by vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis exceeded the hospitalizations prevented via vaccination — by between 8% and 52%, with the team's most likely scenario showing a 38% excess.

Three Things the FDA Ignored

First, prior Covid infection. By October 1, 2022, the CDC estimated that more than half of 18–49-year-olds had already been infected. The author team estimated (using CDC data) that by January 1, 2022 that approximately 70% of 18–25-year-old males had experienced a Covid infection. Prior infection confers meaningful protection — protection that substantially reduces the benefit of vaccination. The FDA's model treated the entire population as if every unvaccinated young man were encountering the virus for the first time, dramatically inflating the hospitalizations that vaccination could prevent.

Second, age and sex stratification. The FDA assumed Covid hospitalization rates were uniform across all males aged 18 to 45 — contradicting the CDC's own modeling, which shows men 30–49 are hospitalized at roughly twice the rate of men 18–29. Lumping these groups together overstated the hospitalization risk facing young men, inflating the apparent benefit of vaccination for precisely the group most endangered by cardiac risks.

Third, incidental hospitalizations. By January 2022, the CDC director had publicly acknowledged that up to 40% of patients hospitalized with a Covid-positive test were there for something else entirely. The FDA's hospitalization counts did not meaningfully account for this.

On the risk side, multiple independent data sources — from Ontario, England, and the United States — sugge...

By Charlotte Kuperwasser at Brownstone dot org.

I want to begin with a reminder that often gets lost in public discussions: the Covid mRNA vaccines are genuinely novel medical products.

Prior to the emergency authorizations in 2020, mRNA vaccine technology had never been deployed at scale in humans. Only two clinical trials, one from Pfizer-BioNTech and one from Moderna, had ever tested this platform in people. Altogether, roughly 37,000 individuals had ever received an mRNA vaccine in the history of medicine (not including the earlier experience with rabies, CMV, and cancer vaccines limited to much smaller early-phase studies). That is not a criticism; it is simply a statement of fact. But it does mean that the long-term safety profile of these products was, and remains, incompletely understood.

What follows is familiar to nearly all molecular biologists. It is complicated but I try to simplify it given the stakes. It's important to clearly lay out the molecular framework for everyone because how these vaccines are made directly determines what is inside the vial. And what is inside the vial, once injected, will travel throughout the body and activate a cascade of events that can lead to long-term health implications.

In Vitro Transcription Is Not Just a Manufacturing Detail

Modified mRNA vaccines are produced using a process called in vitro transcription (IVT). IVT is the method used to synthesize the modified mRNA that ultimately becomes the active ingredient in the vaccine.

This is not a trivial technicality. IVT fundamentally shapes the molecular composition of the final product.

Scientists at BioNTech, including those directly involved in developing the Pfizer vaccine, have published a detailed review1 describing how IVT reactions generate not only the intended full-length mRNA, but also a range of byproducts and impurities, how these are typically removed, and what their biological consequences may be if they persist. These manufacturing directions along with the byproducts they create were also described in detail by Moderna in their patents (US10,653,712 B2 and US10,077,439 B2). But more importantly, this molecular biology was well established long before Covid. None of this is speculative.

The Starting Material: DNA Templates

At its core, an IVT reaction begins with double-stranded DNA that encodes the desired protein. In this case, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

The spike-encoding sequence used in mRNA vaccines is genetically modified to improve stability and cellular tolerance, including two amino-acid substitutions that make it distinct from the viral spike. That modification is intentional.

The DNA template itself can take different forms. During Pfizer's early clinical trials, PCR-generated DNA fragments were used. However, the commercial manufacturing process relied on DNA derived from plasmids. This matters because plasmids contain additional regulatory sequences. In Pfizer's case, these include elements such as SV40 promoter and ori sequences, which raise concerns if they were to enter human cells.

Once this DNA template is added to the IVT reaction, along with RNA polymerase and other components, it is transcribed into mRNA (Figure 1).

While the desired output of IVT is the intended full-length mRNA product, the actual output is more complex. These include various byproducts in the form of (1) various RNA species including double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), (2) DNA attached to RNA (RNA–DNA hybrids), and (3) the free DNA from the original template (Figure 2).

The formation of these byproducts is well-documented and unavoidable and is why downstream purification is absolutely essential for safety.

Purification Has Known Limitations

After manufacturing there are two purification steps needed to first remove the DNA and then the remove the RNA byproducts (Figure 3):

To remove the DNA, an enzyme is added to the reaction mixture called DNase I, which is commonly used to degrade contaminating DNA. While DNase I is e...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

Over the past few years, quiet but extraordinary warnings have emerged from the US Treasury Department. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reports that illicit e-cigarettes are being used as part of trade-based money-laundering schemes linked to fentanyl trafficking. Illegal vaping products are no longer just a regulatory nuisance or a youth-use talking point. They have become a financial instrument in the cartel economy.

The finding matters because it exposes a reality many policymakers have spent years denying—prohibition does not eliminate markets, it reorganizes them. And when demand persists, prohibition reliably hands control to the most ruthless and well-organized suppliers.

We are now watching that process unfold in real time in the US vaping market. And let's be clear where the blame lies: The CDC's Office on Smoking and Health and the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products have deliberately obscured relative risk and forced nicotine markets underground, where criminal supply now thrives beyond any meaningful oversight.

From Regulation to Underground Supply

Vaping emerged as a harm-reduction alternative for smokers. In the UK and New Zealand and other countries that allowed regulated products to compete openly with cigarettes, smoking rates declined rapidly.

In the United States, by contrast, legal vaping has been squeezed by a combination of bans, frozen approvals, and enforcement-first regulation. The result is not a smaller market. It is a market that has largely gone underground.

By the government's own admissions, only a small fraction of vaping products currently sold in the US are formally authorized. In practical terms, this means that most adults who vape are buying products that exist outside the legal framework, often without realizing it. In many local markets—especially convenience stores that I've personally investigated—illegal disposable vapes appear to make up the majority of sales.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a parallel national supply chain.

What enforcement is actually finding

Recent enforcement actions give a sense of scale. Federal agencies have seized hundreds of thousands—and in some cases millions—of illegal vaping devices in single operations. Entire warehouses have been cleared of products that were never approved and were often deliberately mislabeled to evade customs scrutiny.

Authorities have acknowledged that thousands of distinct unauthorized vaping products are circulating in the US market. Most are manufactured overseas and enter the country through misdeclared shipping, freight forwarding, or informal cross-border routes. Once inside, distribution frequently overlaps with existing smuggling corridors linked to Mexico—routes long used for narcotics, weapons, and cash.

In several cases, vape shops raided by law enforcement turned out to be fronts for broader criminal activity, including drug distribution and money laundering. This is what happens when a consumer market is forced into the shadows: it is absorbed into criminal infrastructure that already knows how to move goods and money at scale.

Why Prohibition Fails—Every Time

None of this is surprising. Prohibition has a long and well-documented track record.

When governments criminalize supply while demand persists, they do not create safer markets. They create markets optimized for secrecy, intimidation, and profit maximization. Compliance-oriented firms exit. Criminal organizations enter. Oversight disappears.

This is not a failure of enforcement. It is the economic logic of prohibition.

Alcohol prohibition produced bootleg liquor, poisonings, and organized crime. The war on drugs professionalized trafficking and entrenched violent networks. High-tax cigarette regimes fueled smuggling and counterfeiting. Illicit vaping follows the same pattern, only faster.

The Danger of Illicit Products

One deeply uncomfortable consequence of this policy choice is now becoming harder to ignore: ...

By Naomi Wolf at Brownstone dot org.

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It's snowing.

Outside the big picture windows of the flat where we stay when we come to Brooklyn, a gentle snow falls.

It gusts in the bare tree branches that reach up to the grey-yellow sky. The trees shake back and forth in the wind.

The snow-laden branches stand between us and what are the usually chaotic backyards of the row of dilapidated late 19th century townhouses across from us. The backyards, and their everyday detritus, have receded under the snowfall, to reconfigure into a vague elegance.

Plastic chairs and rotting wooden picnic tables have been buried under a thick blanket of white. There is about a foot and a half of snow resting across the roofs of the townhouses, gentling their outdated television antennas and their crooked skylights.

Everything looks like frosting on a wedding cake.

Everything looks like an old-fashioned Christmas card; the kind — are you my age or older? — that they used to have in the mid-1960s, that had silver glitter glued to the white snow, that came off a bit on your fingers.

The snow layering the roofs and balconies and railings makes Brooklyn look like the archetypal German or Swiss village on Christmas cards, nestled in wintry softness, as seen far below Santa's descending sleigh.

This blizzard — or "blizzard;" it seems to me better described as a "snowfall" — has been heralded by legacy media now for a couple of days.

The language about it has been histrionic. It is a "bomb cyclone!" It is "SEVERE WEATHER" that requires an "ALERT!" A red rectangle on the weather sites, surround those scary words.

You can't travel. But it's not just that you are being advised not to travel, as a sovereign person, as in the past. There are "TRAVEL BANS."

CNN warns, "Blizzard Travel Bans Remain in Effect as Five States Have Over 2 Feet of Snow."

The headlines' freakout conceals the fact that this snowfall is within the range of normal, for the Northeastern United States. While CNN has found that this is the biggest snowfall on record for one city — Providence, Rhode Island — you have to click through several links and read carefully to find out that the last time it snowed THIS MUCH in New York City was…five years ago.

And this storm has dropped the MOST snow in NYC since that one in…2021.

The New York Post headline calls this storm's snowfall "HISTORIC" — though the fine print shows that the last such storm was in…2016.

Same with Philadelphia. This is Philadelphia's snowiest winter since…2018.

So basically — if you read carefully and critically — you realize that the snow is falling well within, again, the range of what is normal for winter in the Northeast.

In 1947, the snow measured over 26 inches in Central Park:

Today at JFK Airport, in contrast, the snow is about 15 inches deep.

In 1888, 21 inches of snow fell in 24 hours; eventually snow in that snowstorm accumulated to snowbanks almost five feet high.

1888:

1888:

1888:

In spite of the fact that receiving up to two feet of snow in winter in New York City is entirely normal, the headlines drumming up hysteria have prepared the way for what is unfolding right now via City Hall, and via our still-new-on-the-job Marxist-Islamist Mayor, Zohran K Mamdani.

A pure Marxist-islamist rights takeover; a trial run.

In a press conference on Sunday February 22, 2026, Mayor Mamdani showed a range of sombre city administrators arrayed behind him, all of them wearing sad faces and holding their hands clasped in front of them.

I note the flimsy branded sweatshirts and windbreakers, both zipped and unzipped, and the almost theatrically glum faces of Mamdani's "crisis team."

I feel that this entire iconography is part of the Theatre of Humiliation to which Mamdani is deliberately subjecting our city, just as the Biden era's women's-luggage-stealing advisors, its obese health commissioners, its staffers with their publicly broadcast fetishes involving dog masks and leashes, and its pics of sex somehow ...

By David Thunder at Brownstone dot org.

The Republican majority of the US House Judiciary Committee has just published a voluminous "interim staff report" (February 3rd), presenting documentary evidence of far-reaching digital censorship conducted by online platforms under the supervision of the European Commission. The report, entitled "The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe's Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet…", makes for sobering reading, corroborating the worst fears of critics of the Digital Services Act (DSA). It is worth underlining that the censorship regime enabled by DSA should be of concern not only to Europeans, but also to non-Europeans, since their practical effect, given the technical challenges and economic costs of instituting region-specific moderation regimes, is to restrict speech across the globe and not only in Europe.

The DSA Paved the Way for Arbitrary Censorship

In this blog, I warned on September 5th 2023, shortly after the Digital Services Act (DSA) was applied to "very large online platforms" (VLOPs), that "the net effect of the act would be to apply an almost irresistible pressure on social media platforms to play the "counter-disinformation" game in a way that would pass muster with the Commission's auditors, and thus avoid getting hit with hefty fines." And so, according to this report, it has come to pass.

We do not need to read the House Judiciary Committee's interim report to understand that the wording of the Digital Services Act creates enormous discretionary power on the part of the European Commission in overseeing platforms' content moderation policies. For the Act places online platforms under onerous "due diligence obligations" to "mitigate" vaguely defined "systemic risks," including risks related to "disinformation" and impacts on "civic discourse" and electoral processes.

The Act in itself leaves considerable room for interpretation regarding how the European Commission and its auditors will assess "systemic risks" like disinformation, threats to "civic discourse," and hate speech, and how they will evaluate the adequacy of service providers' mitigation efforts. This ambiguity gives enforcers of the Act broad discretion to interpret it as they see fit. The Commission has investigative and enforcement powers under the DSA, including the ability to impose fines of up to 6% of a platform's global annual turnover for non-compliance.

The 160-page report makes a compelling case that the Digital Services Act is effectively the culmination of a decade-long campaign to give the European Commission ever-greater power over the content moderation policies of online platforms. The many twists and turns of this campaign, which includes earlier "voluntary" Codes of Conduct coordinated by EU institutions, are outlined in the report.

Here, I propose to focus exclusively on what the report presents as some of the bitter fruits of the Digital Services Act, namely the censorship actions conducted under its oversight mechanisms. The report focuses overwhelmingly on interactions between the EU Commission and TikTok, and assuming the supporting documents can be authenticated, it gives us a disturbing glimpse of a deeply entrenched censorship regime that is completely opaque to the average citizen. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no telling what else might be uncovered if an investigator got access to similar evidence on other platforms such as Meta, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

How DSA Oversight Works in Practice

The mechanisms of control by EU officials over platform moderation policies, as outlined in the report, share a common pattern: the European Commission itself, or national regulators designated under the DSA (known as "Digital Services Coordinators" in each Member State), query platforms about their "risk mitigation" measures concerning a particular issue (e.g. vaccines, electoral disinformation, hate speech, or the war in Ukraine), either in written communicati...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

Everywhere one looks today you see signs of the opposition between 'conservatives' and so-called 'liberals.' Sometimes conservatives are designated 'far-right,' and liberals 'left-wing.' Both terms appear to be self-explanatory, unless one keeps in mind that concepts do evolve historically. The term, 'amateur,' for example, used to have a very positive or affirmative meaning, namely someone who does something (like painting, or playing the piano) well, because they love doing it ('amateur' derives from the Latin for 'love'), but today its meaning is pejorative, contrasting with the term, 'professional,' which means more or less what 'amateur' used to mean; namely, that it applies to someone who excels at what they do.

Similarly, the term, 'liberal' has arguably undergone a semantic shift in recent times – one that places it at a considerable remove from its original historical meaning. I have in mind the noun, with reference to a person; not the adjective, which means broadly 'being open to new, non-traditional ideas,' and 'supporting social and political change.' The Britannica Dictionary suggests that the noun means 'a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change.' What did it mean when the concept of 'liberal' first made its appearance?

It made its first appearance in the 14th century, when the term was employed as early as 1375 to describe the 'liberal arts' – a course of education intended for free-born individuals in medieval universities. Around that time, 'liberal' derived from the Latin liber, which meant 'free,' and denoted intellectual pursuits befitting a free person, as opposed to someone who rendered servile or mechanical labour.

Accordingly, its etymological roots show that 'liberal' originally conveyed ideas of freedom, nobility, and generosity. The 18-century Enlightenmentsignalleda turning point, when 'liberal' began to assume its modern, affirmative connotations of support for individual rights, tolerance, and freedom from prejudice.

In the late 19th century agreement largely appeared among liberals that political governmental power has the capacity to promote as well as protect the liberty of individuals. Accordingly, modern liberalism views the main obligation of government as consisting in the removal of obstacles preventing individuals from living freely and from actualising their full potential. There has been disagreement among liberals on the question, whether government should promote individual freedom rather than merely protect it. Today, however, events of particularly the last six years have made it difficult, if not impossible, to discern these characteristics in what, or who, presents itself – disingenuously, as it turns out – as 'liberalism' and 'liberal,' as I shall show below.

First one should note that, what one might call the paradox of liberalism is clearly stated by Kenneth Minogue in Britannica online. He writes that it is the:

…political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best 'a necessary evil.' Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual's life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against the individual. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.

Given the disruptive events that have rocked the world since Covid in 2020 – but arguably since the 2008 financial crisis – the problem, as stated by Minogue, above, has been complexified beyond recognition, where 'comple...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

The Cochrane Collaboration is a grassroots organisation founded in 1993. It publishes systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and was highly successful until British journalist Mark Wilson became CEO in 2012. A major medical journal expressed concern that someone with no health care experience was leading one of the foremost organisations dedicated to ensuring good clinical decisions. Wilson made the organisation highly ineffective and bureaucratic, and his actions harmed Cochrane's mission about ensuring high scientific standards.

The problems mounted, and in April 2021, Wilson suddenly left his job, a week before Cochrane's largest funder, the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) in the UK, announced a major budget cut. The funder criticised the poor scientific quality of Cochrane reviews, "a point raised by people in the Collaboration to ensure that garbage does not go into the reviews; otherwise, your reviews will be garbage." Only four months later, the NIHR declared that the funding would stop in March 2023. When that happened, Cochrane was in big disarray, but the huge bureaucracy and the poor scientific standard continued nonetheless.

Wilson left abruptly "after eight years of outstanding service," as Cochrane leaders called his destruction of the organisation. Cochrane's Editor-in-Chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, became acting CEO for a month until MBA Judith Brodie took over as interim CEO for a year.

In July 2022, Catherine Spencer became CEO. The "full bio" on Cochrane's homepage does not reveal her education, and I couldn't find that out, as there are, for example, a historian and a rugby player with the same name.

When Spencer left in March 2025, Soares-Weiser became acting CEO. Six months later, she became the CEO, and the chair of the Cochrane Governing Board, Susan Phillips, said that she "has the vision, experience and passion to lead Cochrane to a bright new future."

I shall give my reasons why I don't think the Cochrane Titanic with Soares-Weiser as captain has a "bright new future" but is more likely to sink, which some people predicted would happen when I, one of the founding fathers, was expelled in 2018 because I had become a threat to Wilson's firm grip on power. I had been elected to the Governing Board because I wanted to save Cochrane from him.

I shall discuss 11 cases that stem from my personal experiences and those of Tom Jefferson, one of my previous employees, starting in 2015 when Soares-Weiser became Deputy Editor-in-Chief and got a substantial say about the standard of Cochrane reviews (she became Editor-in-Chief in 2019). But first, I shall describe a stunning affair in 2013.

2013, Cochrane Review of Influenza Vaccines

After Tom Jefferson had not found any effect of influenza vaccines on mortality in elderly people, a group of researchers "rearranged" the data "after invitation from Cochrane" and reported that the vaccines reduced deaths – an amazing statistical stunt considering that the risk ratio was 1.02 and only four people died. This misconduct foreboded later events.

2015, Cochrane Review of Chlorpromazine for Schizophrenia

I submitted a comment to the Cochrane Library about this review. The authors included Soares-Weiser who is a psychiatrist. They mentioned in the abstract, without any reservation, that akathisia didn't occur more often on drug than on placebo, and that the largest trial even found significantly less akathisia in the active group than in the placebo group. I noted that, "Since we know that antipsychotics cause akathisia and that placebo cannot cause akathisia, this result speaks volumes about how flawed trials in schizophrenia generally are. What was seen in the placebo group were cold turkey symptoms caused by withdrawal of the antipsychotics the patients had received before randomisation."

Cochrane replied that akathisia symptoms "are well recognised to also occur in people who have never been on medication....

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

We keep hearing whispers that the Trump administration wants to get the spotlight off pharmaceuticals and vaccines ahead of the midterms. Instead, the focus should be on cleaning up the food as the path to great American health. The messaging around food polls better, they say, whereas the pressure on vaccine makers and culling of the childhood schedule is a political loser. So they say.

We'll get to whether this is true (evidence is weak or non-existent) but first a comment on campaigning by polling. The Trump movement has defied the polls constantly for ten years, choosing populist instincts instead as campaign thematics. That has worked. How many times must conventional polling fail before the political class gets the message that they should not determine messaging?

In any case, let's look at the evidence we have.

Gallup has measured confidence in industry for a quarter of a century. During this time, the status of the pharmaceutical industry has only fallen. Now it rates second-to-last of 25 industries right above government itself.

In 2020, 34 percent of those polled had negative or somewhat negative views. That is now 58 percent, with only 28 percent expressing some confidence. That's rock-bottom.

A Gallup poll from 2022 reveals scant support for Covid vaccine mandates in schools, with only 13 percent of Republicans favoring them in elementary schools and only 18 percent for them in college. In general, more than 80 percent of Republicans oppose such mandates, which is exactly the reverse of Democrats, though this poll was four years ago and that has likely changed too. Independents are split.

Back in 1992, the public overwhelmingly supported vaccination requirements in general: 80% for and only 17% against. Those numbers are on the verge of crossing, according to Gallup. Even with a vaguely worded question clearly biased toward positive answers, 45% now say government should stay completely out, while only 51% support vaccination requirements.

We should be particularly struck by the trends in answers to the following absurdly biased question: "How important is it that parents get their children vaccinated?" The easy answer is it is important. Pollsters know that you would only construct such a question if you are going for an overwhelmingly positive answer.

To say it is not important is to mark yourself as a radical with a sudden burden of proof to show the science. It's almost like asking if apple pie is American. And yet even here, we see dramatic declines in the numbers.

This poll reveals a notable intensity on the subject.

Republican parents are far less likely than Democratic parents to have high confidence in childhood vaccine effectiveness (45% vs. 71%), safety testing (29% vs. 63%), and the vaccine schedule (27% vs. 58%), according to Pew. We are starting to see change even on the MMR vaccine that one might expect to be nearly noncontroversial with the public at large. Republicans in particular are less willing to endorse even this one. Meanwhile, a pharma-biased Annenberg poll shows "statistically significant erosion in support" for common vaccines based on concerns over safety.

The results of a Fabrizio poll from February 2026 have not been made publicly available. But a memo released from Tony Lyons of MAHA Action reports even more salient facts. A plurality of all voters believe that families should be given a choice over vaccination.

Also, the same poll shows overwhelming opposition to the liability shield that currently protects vaccine makers. Removing these protections from pharma is overwhelmingly popular among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

The same poll asked "Are you concerned about any negative health impacts from any required or optional vaccines?" A strong majority of Republicans (67%) said yes. This figure rose to 79% when filtered for strong supporters of President Trump.

In sum, we live in times of grave doubt about pharma, vacc...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

Imagine a world where hospitals brim with cutting-edge technology, yet the surrounding community's health deteriorates. Despite the availability of advanced tools to manage human life, societies are seeing spiraling rates of illness, loneliness, and anxiety, with resilience on the decline. This alarming paradox highlights a troubling contradiction that has become increasingly apparent in the face of significant progress.

While medicine has achieved greater precision, it has become less personal.

Public health systems are increasingly centralized, yet often lack a humane approach. Institutions claim to protect, but frequently contribute to harm. These challenges stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the human person, rather than operational shortcomings alone. The root cause lies in the degradation of moral ecology, understood as the network of moral, social, and communal factors shaping human well-being. Failure to integrate these elements perpetuates systemic failures in health and society.

The central premise is that human flourishing is ecological in nature. It depends not only on physical health or material needs, but also on moral, social, and communal factors that, when disrupted, produce tangible consequences. Such disruptions affect individuals, families, and communities at multiple levels. For example, in the small town of Meadowville, the closure of gathering spaces and decline of community events led to increased chronic health issues and greater isolation. This decline in morale and resilience illustrates the profound interconnection between health and social environments.

Science can describe the resulting damage, whereas theology provides explanations for its underlying inevitability. This essay facilitates a dialogue between two disciplines that are more recently considered in isolation. Medicine observes breakdowns that quantitative data alone cannot fully explain. Theology identifies foundational principles that science cannot measure, but often corroborates. Collectively, these perspectives demonstrate that when moral ecology deteriorates, technical expertise is insufficient to restore what has been lost.

Humans Are Social Before They Are Statistical

"Man is a political animal. A man who lives alone is either a Beast or a God."

Aristotle, Politics

Contemporary medicine now acknowledges a principle recognized by earlier societies: social connection is essential for health, not merely advantageous.

Extensive and consistent data now demonstrate that social isolation is associated with increased all-cause mortality, with an impact comparable to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day or suffering from obesity. Loneliness is correlated with elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, immune dysfunction, depression, cognitive decline, and metabolic illness. These effects are substantial and are observed across various age groups, disease states, and socioeconomic strata.

However, quantitative data alone do not capture what clinicians observe daily: the human body perceives isolation as a threat rather than a neutral condition.

Prolonged social disconnection activates stress systems intended for emergencies. Persistent activation disrupts hormones, weakens immunity, and increases inflammation, accelerating disease. Over time, this stress raises blood pressure, impairs blood sugar control, disrupts sleep, worsens mood, and slows healing.

Clinicians observe that patients lacking stable relationships experience poorer outcomes, whereas those with support from family, faith groups, or local communities demonstrate improved recovery and greater resilience. Community involvement mitigates stress in ways that medical intervention alone cannot accomplish. Proven community buffering factors include regular participation in community activities, having a network of supportive peers, and engaging in volunteer work that fosters a sense of belonging and purpose. Practices such as communa...