Brownstone Journal

By Josh Guetzkow at Brownstone dot org.

Note: this article is a highly condensed version of a chapter written for Fear and Loathing in the Pandemic: Propaganda and Misinformation during Covid-19, edited by Colin Alexander.

Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid-19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity.

Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational. The "critical turn" in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn's account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn's examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power.

Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which "knowledge" reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests.

One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result "epistemic corruption:" a knowledge system that "loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it," because it has been co-opted by interests at odds with its central goals.

Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent.

One lynchpin is "ghost management," in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front-stage "authors." This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility.

Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific "advances" the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage.

Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving-door employment. The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator's budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the ...

By Sharyl Attkisson at Brownstone dot org.

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

In 2021, I reported on my national television program, Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson that the largest Amish community in the US, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had rejected masking, vaccines, isolation, testing, and all the other CDC recommendations for Covid…and apparently fared none the worse for having done so.

The story was of such high interest that even after it aired on TV, it racked up millions more views online.

This attention to the Amish approach and its apparent success obviously didn't please public health officials and industry advocates who were heavily pushing different narratives. They wanted the public to believe that anyone who wasn't socially distancing, staying home, getting vaccinated, shutting down the works, and taking government-favored prescription drugs were putting themselves and others in grave danger.

As the revelations about the Amish made international headlines, there appeared to be a propaganda-driven effort to make it seem as if the Amish actually suffered far worse than everyone else for having failed to follow CDC's advice.

A study was published entitled: "Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic." It appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health on June 11, 2021.

But I noticed serious flaws with the study and decided to challenge it. Among the problems I saw:

1. For their study population, the researchers grouped together a sample of Mennonite and Amish—even though Mennonites typically followed CDC guidelines while the Amish did not.

2. They excluded the largest Amish population in the US in Lancaster, the one that was actually the subject of the news reports.

3. Their study headline was at odds with what their own data showed: even with their skewed sample, the Amish fared no worse than the rest of the US for not having shut down.

After examining the study, I tried to get further information to determine if corrections were warranted. Among other things, I wanted to know:

Who were the peer-reviewers who had signed off on a deeply flawed study?

What did the actual study notes and data show about why the most obvious study sample population was excluded?

What were some of the internal communications before and after publication?

With scientific studies, all the data is supposed to be available for public review and replication for obvious reasons. Studies aren't considered scientifically valid without this kind of transparency. And, in many cases, we actually own the data because our tax money paid for the study—or some of it— or pays the salaries of some of the people involved.

Keep in mind that a study is generally treated as scientifically valid only when it meets: reproducibility (others can obtain the same result from the same data and analysis) and replicability (a separate study with new data yields a consistent result) standards. Obviously, if study funders and authors keep their full data and analyses secret, the standards can't be applied. (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Reproducibility and Replicability in Science, 2019)

Yet with the Amish study, as with other times I've pursued study information, the scientific establishment found a way to claim exemption from the common sense oversight guidelines. Instead of encouraging open examination, those involved in the study treated the details of their work as if they were proprietary secrets, closely held, and guarded like gold in Ft. Knox.

Ultimately, I felt forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests in my effort to get the obviously public information. As usual, the entities holding the information stalled, played games, claimed they couldn't respond for various reasons, and exempted the most important information.

The goal is clearly to try to ...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

Sure, I'm frustrated. After years of litigation, deep audits, and some extreme dedication by the vaccine-injured, we now are in possession of a 1,048-page book that details ghastly and widespread injury from shots people were forced to get. Many died. Many have lifelong suffering. Many have seen their lives, finances, and families shattered.

These are not statistics on a preprint server awaiting the arduous process of slogging through anonymous peer-reviewers. This is not another model that conjures up possible scenarios. This is not some dry dashboard with probabilities and possibilities.

These are the life stories of real people as reported to the CDC through its own vaccine-safety monitoring system called V-safe. These people were not anti-vaxxers; just the opposite. Many were thrilled to step up and do their part.

Authorities said the potions were effective (they were not) and safe. Injuries were "very very rare" and far outweighed by the benefits, which is that you would not get and spread Covid, which was never true. It was a horrible lie.

Tens of millions stepped up. Then came the migraines, screaming pitches in the ears, rashes on the back and neck, welts on legs, crippling pain in the arms, racing heart and volatile blood pressure, blindness in one eye then two, numbness in the face, often followed by a full body decay that no specialist could explain.

The text of the system promised a callback. No one called back. Suffering people were left to languish alone, screaming into the void for help. None ever came. The CDC – on the receiving end of a tsunami of human suffering – tried to keep their stories quiet. They only released them once forced by a federal judge.

There were groups on social media at the time where the injured and surviving populations could gather and speak. Social media companies censored the groups and removed them. The Biden White House called true stories of vaccine injury "malinformation" because they would increase hesitancy.

They were forced to suffer alone, unable to walk to get groceries, bankrupted by medical bills, too blinded to see the TV, hearts racing at a pace that prevents sleep and causes months of deep sleep deprivation.

Now, at last, these people – friends, neighbors, family members, fellow citizens – have been given voice. This book alone chronicles a scandal for the ages. A good society would have maximum focus on revealing the truth, finding the culprits, figuring out how and why they lied, and seeking justice so nothing like this would ever happen again.

Remember that these shots were supposed to be the way out. Governments at all levels had tortured society for nearly a year with shutdowns, insane protocols, the destruction of millions of businesses, the denial of education to children, the stopping of travel, the banning of holiday celebrations, and cruel masking that could never stop a respiratory infection.

After all this came the magic shots, made by companies that had been given a liability waiver for any harm done. Many resisted taking them. The government wasn't having it. The Biden administration forced every company with more than 100 employees to impose them on their workers, again, without liability. The courts had to intervene to block that but preserved the mandates on the military, government, and health-care workers.

Five cities were segregated by vaccine status. In Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, and New Orleans, no one without proof of vaccination was allowed into a bar, restaurant, theater, or library. The churches were spared the mandate but many imposed segregation in any case.

When the first round of shots failed – the virus mutated – the manufacturers released a booster. Then another. And another. With each round, the injuries grew and spread, and so did the death. Excess deaths rose following the shots that were supposed to save us from Covid. They did the opposite, taking down sports stars,...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

Travelling to the US never fails to put me in touch with a part of American culture that I find particularly fascinating, but disturbing. Drugs. Drugs and more Drugs. I'm talking about the in-your-face, 24/7, marketing of the newest, most expensive pharmaceuticals on the planet.

All in the name of health, of course.

You might argue, but so what? Every other consumer product gets advertised in the US—almost everywhere, to everyone, perhaps except tobacco. And lots of those things are bad for you too, such as junk food, alcohol, and gambling.

However, drugs are different, and I often find myself experiencing a kind of vertigo as I stare, enthralled, at all the incessant drug advertising from screens everywhere I look—in airports, hotel lounges, restaurants, or bars.

The plotlines are predictable. A slick 60 seconds and we see the fate of worried people suffering some sort of condition "ask their doctor" about Drug X, and soon the new prescription is magically transforming their lives. They turn into bliss and smiles as they romp their way through meadows of wildflowers while, sotto voce, we catch strange murmurs of liver failure and premature death.

I find myself absorbed in the ads as if they are cultural artifacts of a strange race. Most of the Americans I know seem to be pretty healthy people, but any newcomer confronting all the US screens for the first time might conclude one thing: "Man, these people must be really sick."

They are sick, but not in the way of being physically sick. Sick as in showing all the adverse effects of living in a polluted information ecosystem where toxic levels of drug propaganda drift through the airwaves as freely as exhaust engulfs a freeway.

Americans are so immersed in the smog of commercially-sponsored drug information that they might forget they used to live in a world where serious criticisms of drug industry products or behaviour were routinely reported on mainstream TV. Those halcyon days are over.

The Land of the Free means drugmakers can, with near impunity, push their expensive products for Crohn's disease, Colitis, or psoriasis—serious obesity, schizophrenia, and major depression with the most outlandish of claims wrapped up in crafty but misleading narratives. Drugs get advertised, and the stuff between the ads (ie: the programming, the sitcoms, and the news) won't touch the subject with a ten-foot pole lest they upset the money chain. Meanwhile, everyone thinks this is normal? Wow.

Not everyone. Earlier this summer, the consumer group US Public Citizen put out a petition urging the FDA to ban Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. They listed the usual reasons why DTCA is so toxic to consumers: Emotional manipulation, misleading benefit and risk information, inappropriate prescribing and overdiagnosis, the erosion of the patient-physician relationship, the promotion of low-value medications, and overall economic harm. Amen to all that.

What it all adds up to is a polluted environment in which careful and appropriate pharmaceutical use doesn't happen. Americans are paying the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, yet also have the most profligate use of those drugs.

The pollution of the airwaves by Pharma propaganda is precisely the reason every other country in the world (except tiny New Zealand) bans Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA). The rest of the civilized world looked at DTCA, recognized it as a predatory assault on public health, and banned it decades ago.

Probably the biggest harm of DTCA is how it completely undermines the clinical firewall between doctors and patients. By bombarding television viewers with slick, emotion-heavy commercials, drug manufacturers bypass the doctor's intellect and go straight for the patient's anxiety. When a terrified or hopeful consumer marches into a clinic demanding a specific brand-name drug featured during halftime at a football game, the doctor-patient rela...

By Ed Dowd at Brownstone dot org.

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Over the last several years I have been posting nonstop on X about the same nightmares we've been living through…the Covid psyop, the experimental mRNA shots, the mandates that destroyed lives, the injuries, the excess deaths, and the relentless propaganda machine that tried to silence anyone who noticed the bodies piling up. I have watched it all in real time: the fear porn, the goalpost moving, the "safe and effective" lies repeated like gospel while real-world data told a different story.

Now we have fresh, documented revelations that should have blown the lid off of everything. Instead? Crickets from the media and, more disappointingly, from the current administration that promised accountability.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) dropped another devastating report and hearing in late April 2026: "Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals." Internal records show FDA officials knew their VAERS monitoring was inadequate to say least. They had better data-mining tools ready to flag clear safety signals: cardiac deaths, strokes, pulmonary issues, Bell's palsy but they chose not to use them. Why? To avoid "vaccine hesitancy."

This was not screw-up territory. It was deliberate. Vaccine-injured people sat across from Peter Marks and other top FDA brass begging for acknowledgment. They got stonewalled. Johnson rightly calls this one of the biggest scandals in his decades in public service. Then in early June he held another hearing exposing potential cancer links to the mRNA shots and the systematic suppression of critical studies. Same playbook: inconvenient science gets buried or attacked.

Around the same time, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of her final moves as DNI, declassified documents laying out Fauci's role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan, the lab-leak cover-up, the intelligence manipulation, and the retaliation against truth-tellers. Millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into risky biolabs, followed by the full narrative-control machine kicking in to blame nature instead of the obvious.

These are not anonymous X threads. This is a sitting Senator with subpoena power and the former Director of National Intelligence dropping official records.

So where is the firestorm? Where are the front-page exposés, the prime-time specials, the demands for real hearings and prosecutions? In 1976 the swine flu vaccine was pulled after 25 deaths and 500 cases of Guillain Barre Syndrome. In the Covid shot era we have approximately 39,000 deaths reported to VAERS following the shot. Apparently lives got cheaper over the last 50 years. The legacy media has mostly ignored it, downplayed it, or run the usual "right-wing conspiracy" dismissals. Paid to lie…and crickets on recent FDA Covid vax revelations. Their complicity is not an understatement; rather, it was essential to the entire psyop.

Even more frustrating is the relative silence from the current Trump administration. After years of vowing to expose the lies and drain the swamp on the pandemic response, these revelations land and…not much follow-through. No aggressive push for accountability. No sustained public reckoning for the officials who covered up safety signals or manipulated the origins story. That silence hits hard. Additionally the vaccines are still on the market and this administration is now complicit. What an epic failure!

A lot of us did not need Johnson's reports or Gabbard's declassifications to see the fraud. Back in 2022 and 2023, my team at Phinance Technologies was already digging into the data and uncovering the real narrative through our Humanity Projects. We analyzed excess deaths, disability surges, absence rates, and the human and economic costs of mass inoculations when almost no one else wanted to touch it. Check out the full body of work here: Humanity Projects

What we found through cold, hard numbers lined up with what the bodies on the g...

By Chase Englund at Brownstone dot org.

Pennsylvanians have already seen what expansive public-health authority can look like.

During the Covid era, schools were closed, businesses were divided into "essential" and "nonessential," and major decisions affecting ordinary families were made through administrative orders with limited public input. In December 2021, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state's school masking order, holding that the Department of Health had exceeded the authority granted to it under existing law.

The Court noted that if the Department wanted broader authority, it could amend its regulations.

This summer, it tried.

Buried inside an arcane 502-page rewrite of Pennsylvania's communicable-disease regulations was an amendment adding the words "prevention, containment or mitigation" to a section of the code that had been central to the masking dispute. The Department itself acknowledged that the 2021 court decision had "influenced" the proposed change.

In plain English, the Department proposed to write broader disease-control authority into the regulations after the state Supreme Court said the old language did not provide it.

That alone was enough to attract attention.

This wasn't even the most controversial aspect of the proposal.

The package would have more than doubled the list of conditions that doctors and laboratories must report, mandated additional prenatal testing, lowered the fever threshold for excluding children from school or child care, required vaccine doses to be entered into a government registry, and expanded public-health powers affecting homes, schools, and businesses.

The rule was designed to implement by bureaucratic fiat the very same sort of oppressive Covid-style health measures that have been thoroughly debunked by available scientific evidence and have been overwhelmingly rejected by voters at the polls.

Then came perhaps the most remarkable part.

The Department's economic analysis estimated that the proposal would cost the private sector zero dollars.

Not approximately zero. Not a small amount. Zero.

Pennsylvania law requires agencies proposing regulations to estimate the costs imposed on those who must comply. Yet in multiple places the Department acknowledged that the proposal would require additional resources, increase absences, or cause families to miss work and school. Each time, the explanation was essentially the same: because the Department lacked sufficient data to quantify the cost, it would estimate no overall fiscal impact.

That is not serious economic analysis, and alas, it is the type that agencies repeatedly produce when there is no one watching. Because few organizations have the economic data and expertise to dispute them, such improprieties are rarely challenged.

Liberty requires constant vigilance, and the Pennsylvania Small Enterprise Foundation worked together with the Pennsylvania Family Institute to produce the analysis the Department said it could not.

The results were astounding.

Using the Department's own counts of doctors, laboratories, schools and child-care providers, along with public health data and federal wage statistics, we estimated that the proposal would impose over $100 million in annual costs.

Most of that burden would not have fallen on hospitals or large corporations.

It would have fallen on families.

Lowering the fever threshold and expanding the circumstances under which children could be sent home from school or child care means more parents missing work. We estimated that lost wages from those absences alone could exceed $70 million annually.

The Department did not count them.

Asked whether it had considered any of the methods available under Pennsylvania law to reduce burdens on small businesses, the Department answered "not considered" five times. The Department said it "lacked data" on how many small businesses it regulated, even though the Census Bureau publishes such figures on an annual basis.

This is exactly why...

By Meryl Nass at Brownstone dot org.

What we've heard about so far today — and will continue to hear about — is not a collection of separate problems. It's all one problem: the deep state of the world is trying to consolidate the entire world into a one-world government and has developed many different mechanisms of control to achieve that end. A major part of that initiative is to cause all our institutions to fail us.

What you've heard about the fundamental problems in education, healthcare, agriculture, government regulation, the news media, censorship, and propaganda is all part of that same agenda, in my view.

And the idea of "Earth System Governance" has become an academic discipline, albeit hidden from most people.

This agenda came out to the world around 1970 when the Club of Rome published its report, titled Limits to Growth.

The first goal was to create the narrative that climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion posed an existential threat to humanity, in order to frighten the public into funding and complying with a new set of priorities.

The second goal was to use international organizations like the UN and WHO to slowly siphon power from individual countries under the guise of environmental protection. The UN has over 30 agencies prepared to step in and impose regulations and taxation on international industries such as shipping, which is actually being done now. The UN even wants to create its own system of law.

Other new multilateral organizations have also been formed to provide "governance" for the rest of us:

At the same time, non-governmental authorities were established in the US to siphon power away from state, county, and local governments. One mechanism for doing this was through 'planning.' States passed laws requiring municipalities to create detailed, long-range plans for their towns. Because most towns did not have the expertise or personnel to do so, they frequently adopted boilerplate plans provided by state agencies or consultants that just happened to be congruent with policies desired by the deep state.

Councils of Government (COGs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are a form of non-democratic authority that are taking over functions from duly elected state and local governments, funded by grants from state and federal governments. This project has been expanding in power and funding since the 1960s. It involves creating new organizations with appointed members for which there is no direct citizen oversight.

Here is how these organizations describe themselves. Please read it.

The European Union has used a similar strategy of gradually expanding its authority to obtain powers that previously belonged to the nation states. First, a reasonable environmental law gets passed. But over time, the reach of the initial law is expanded, to eventually encroach on property rights and cost citizens significantly more than was initially anticipated.

Natura 2000 was based on the EU's 1979 Birds Directive to simply protect wild bird species. But over time it has required nations to designate minimum areas of biodiversity within their territory and protect and restore them, even though the lands may be privately owned. These protected lands now comprise 18% of total land area within the E.U. The goal is to expand that to 30% of total land by 2030, and to 50% eventually.

In the 1990s pandemics and biological warfare were added to this agenda to provide additional important mechanisms, especially vaccinations, for the deep state's goals of centralizing power, controlling populations, and creating a technocratic governance system. I've been watching how the US government and the world have dealt with these issues for many years. For a long time, I wondered why influenza and biological warfare were so closely conjoined in funding and in how the government handled them — two things that seemed very different to me.

I now understand that there has been an effort to dem...

By Elizabeth Mumper at Brownstone dot org.

[Delivered at National Institutes of Health at special event at which the vaccine injured spoke first.]

I have heard these stories a thousand times. I am a board-certified pediatrician with 46 years of clinical experience. I've practiced in group and solo settings, served as Director of Pediatric Education for a residency program, and received numerous awards for child-health initiatives. My solo practice had 3,500 general pediatric patients. I spent five years as Medical Director of the Autism Research Institute.

By caring for and consulting on more than 600 children with autism from 5 countries and 20 states, and hundreds of children with complex chronic illnesses, I have a unique clinical perspective to share, which mirrors what these families shared today.

My concerns about vaccine safety began in 1999 after my patient experienced a severe and irreversible reaction following a vaccine I gave. Despite exhaustive efforts to identify another cause, I could not. The trajectory of my career changed. I left a secure academic position I loved and opened a solo practice dedicated to children whose medical needs were not being met.

During my career I learned an extraordinary amount from parents who are usually perceptive observers of their children's health. At ARI we partnered with families to identify medical problems that were overlooked. Their insights guided our research and these actions should guide our actions today. Families directed us to treat gastrointestinal dysfunction, immune dysregulation, and impairments in detoxification pathways. Collaborations with international scientists helped identify mitochondrial dysfunction, methylation abnormalities, cerebral folate deficiency, and prolonged cell danger responses.

Most pediatricians do not know about these issues. Addressing these problems often resulted in measurable improvements in autism symptoms. Some children initially diagnosed with moderate to severe autism entered kindergarten no longer meeting criteria for autism because their medical problems were treated. Other severely affected children treated as toddlers have gone on to college without knowing they once carried an autism diagnosis.

My concerns about vaccine safety extend far beyond the narrow question of whether vaccines cause autism. Autism and complex chronic illnesses are profoundly heterogeneous. In my experience, antecedents, mediators, and triggers vary widely among children. Vaccines contribute to oxidative or mitochondrial stress in all children. In some kids; they amplify pre-existing vulnerabilities. For others, early-life factors—such as C-section birth, antibiotics, or prematurity — create antecedent conditions that interact with later vaccines and precede neurodevelopmental regression.

In 2005, I gave grand rounds at the university where I had been chief resident. Simply raising the possibility that the accelerated vaccine schedule might contribute to rising autism prevalence resulted in my adjunct faculty appointment not being renewed. At the time, I used a modified schedule that reduced aluminum exposure while remaining fully compliant with Virginia's school requirements.

In 2006, I met with AAP leadership to discuss vaccine safety concerns – which were dismissed. Despite no research funding from government or pharma, I published a dozen studies in my spare time. One 17-year project examined whether autism risk could be reduced by applying insights learned from families. After seven years, my autism prevalence was 1 in 297—at a time when the national rate was worse than 1 in 50. I submitted the findings to the AAP in 2013, expecting interest in a six-fold reduction in such a serious public health problem. I received no response.

My clinical observations—confirmed by independent data mining—was that children who got more vaccines were more likely to develop chronic illnesses. In my practice, under-vaccinated children had lower rates of chronic dise...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

Look at almost any photograph of an American crowd taken 60 years ago. It can be a baseball game, a high school graduation, a beach, an airport terminal, a factory floor, or simply people walking down a city street. Something is immediately noticeable to modern eyes, although almost nobody in the photograph would have considered it remarkable: most people are relatively thin.

They did not have continuous glucose monitors, smartphone applications that counted calories and macronutrients, wearable devices reminding them to stand, boutique fitness studios, bariatric surgery centers, or medications capable of producing 15 or 20 percent reductions in body weight. They were not necessarily more virtuous than we are, and they certainly did not possess superior genes. They lived in a different metabolic environment.

The data backs up what we see in those old photos. In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of American adults were obese. By August 2023, that number had jumped to 40.3 percent, with another 31.7 percent considered overweight and nearly one in ten classified as severely obese.[1] This trend isn't just in the United States. A huge study of over 220 million people from 200 countries found a dramatic global rise in obesity between 1990 and 2022.[2] Our genes haven't changed much in that time. Something else has.

We're now at a turning point in medicine. Faced with one of the biggest and fastest changes in human health, we're treating the results as a condition that needs lifelong medication. The newest drugs are very effective, and that's important to recognize. Semaglutide and tirzepatide have led to weight loss that older nonsurgical treatments rarely matched.[3,4] Semaglutide has also reduced the risk of major heart problems in people with overweight or obesity and heart disease who didn't have diabetes.[5] Tirzepatide has greatly improved sleep apnea in people with obesity.[6] These results are significant, and these drugs are much more than cosmetic weight-loss aids.

That's why we need to look closely at what's happening now. The problem isn't that these drugs don't work; they clearly do. The real concern is that they might work so well that we stop asking why so many people need them in the first place. We could be seeing a major medical breakthrough, but at the same time, we might be accepting that the effects of an unhealthy environment should just be managed with medication. The real question isn't whether these "GLP-1" drugs are effective. It's whether their success is making us stop looking for the root causes of the obesity epidemic.

For decades, obesity was framed largely as an individual failure. The explanation was simple: people ate too much, exercised too little, and lacked the discipline necessary to change. That view was scientifically inadequate and often cruel. Body weight is influenced by genetics, neuroendocrine signaling, appetite regulation, insulin sensitivity, adipocyte biology, medications, sleep, psychological factors, socioeconomic conditions, physical activity, and environmental exposures. Contemporary medicine appropriately recognizes obesity as far more complicated than failure of willpower.

Recent international efforts have gone even further, distinguishing excess adiposity from clinical obesity and emphasizing the actual effects of adiposity on organ and tissue function rather than relying exclusively on body mass index.[7]

It was important to stop blaming people for obesity. But now, medicine might be swapping one simple explanation for another. Just because obesity is a real biological condition doesn't mean it starts inside each person. A disease can be both real and caused by the environment. For example, asthma from air pollution is still asthma, and lead poisoning is still a real illness even if the cause is environmental. If a whole community gets sick after a change in the water supply, doctors treat the patients, but no one thinks the community...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

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

Titled "Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective," it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives.

Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years.

What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it.

It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language.

The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant.

The review describes mRNA vaccines as a "transformative advance" characterised by "rapid clearance," "lack of genomic integration," and a "favourable safety profile." It concludes that the accumulated evidence "affirms" the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable.

Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail.

Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn't.

The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles "remain largely localised to the injection site" with "limited distribution" to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days.

But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of "rapid clearance" and "short-lived antigen expression" — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant.

Only last year, members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people.

When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review.

Residual DNA is treated similarly.

The authors state that residual DNA is "routinely quantified," that regulatory standards require less than 10 nanograms per dose, and that independent analyses have confirmed commercial vaccines comply with those limits.

This creates the impression that the matter has been properly examined when, in reality, the review bypasses the central scientific questions.

Were the analytical methods capable of measuring DNA encapsulated within lipid nanoparticles? Were all relevant plasmid sequences — including SV40 regulatory elements — fully characterised? Was genomic integration ever adequately investigated?

I have previously reported that regulators relied on a qPCR assay targeting only a small section of the plasmid — an approach independent scientists argue was never designed to detect the contamination now under debate.

Rather than examining those methodological criticisms, the review proceeds as though the matter has already been settled.

The review briefly acknowledges another emerging issue — that N1-methylpseudouridine can produce ribosomal frameshifting and off-target proteins — but quickly reassures readers that no adverse outcomes have yet been l...