By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

There is a phrase that no physician wants to hear when walking into an intensive care unit: "Doctor, we don't have it." I have heard variations of that phrase more times than I care to remember. Sometimes it is an antibiotic. Sometimes it is an intravenous medication that we use routinely. Sometimes pharmacy is conserving a drug because supplies are running dangerously low. In perhaps one of the most absurd examples of modern American medicine, sometimes the scarce commodity is not an exotic monoclonal antibody, an experimental cancer therapy, or a complicated biologic agent. It is a simple intravenous fluid.

Think about what that means. We practice medicine in a country capable of replacing heart valves through catheters, sequencing a human genome, performing robotic surgery, supporting failing lungs with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and developing entirely new classes of medications within a few years. Yet I can walk into an American intensive care unit caring for critically ill patients and discover that a basic medicine or fluid I have used for decades is unavailable.

The nurses know the drill, and the pharmacists know it even better. A message comes from pharmacy telling us to conserve a medication, use a different concentration, substitute another antibiotic, change the infusion, or save the remaining bags for patients who absolutely need them. Suddenly, clinical decisions that should be based entirely upon physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, and the needs of the patient acquire another participant at the bedside: the supply chain. What was once perceived as an occasional inconvenience has become something much more serious. It is a warning.

As of June 2026, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists reported 227 active drug shortages in the United States, and nearly half of the new shortages reported during 2026 involved products available from only a single manufacturer.[1] Current shortage lists contain products whose names would be utterly unremarkable to anyone who has practiced hospital medicine: dextrose injections (water with sugar), sodium chloride products, amiodarone, midazolam, morphine, anti-infective agents, and numerous injectable medications that constitute the ordinary machinery of modern inpatient care.[1] These are not luxury items or niche therapeutics. They are the plumbing of medicine.

Drug shortages are frequently discussed as isolated events. A factory experiences a quality problem, a production line shuts down, a raw material becomes scarce, demand unexpectedly increases, or a hurricane damages a manufacturing facility. Each shortage receives its own explanation, and eventually many of them resolve. Looking at these events individually, however, misses the much larger problem: the American pharmaceutical supply chain has been optimized for efficiency, low prices, and lean inventories, but it has not always been optimized for resilience.

Over several decades, pharmaceutical manufacturing steadily migrated outside the United States. According to the FDA, more than half of pharmaceuticals distributed in America are manufactured overseas. As of 2025, approximately 69 percent of generic drug products were manufactured outside the United States. Even more striking, only about 11 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturers were located in the United States, compared with approximately 22 percent in China and 44 percent in India.[2]

This does not mean that Chinese or Indian manufacturers are inherently problematic. Many produce high-quality medicines that American patients depend upon every day, and a resilient pharmaceutical system should unquestionably include global suppliers. The problem is concentration. When the production of an essential drug, its active ingredient, or a critical chemical precursor becomes concentrated among only a handful of manufacturers or geographic regions, economic efficiency can quickly become a stra...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

[Below is an excerpt from the excellent new book, Kill Switch: The History of How Viruses Shaped Humanity and Led to COVID-19, by Richard Burt. We highly recommend it. This portion of Chapter 16 provides an unforgettable explanation of how and why Covid dissidents were so few and far between within academia and industry. Game theory provides the answer. The chapter ends with a robust critique of the Bayh-Dole Act.]

World War II ended when America dropped the atomic bombs named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese died in an instant and of radiation poisoning over the subsequent years. Several American politicians, military brass, and university academics advocated for preemptive war against Russia to prevent it from acquiring nuclear bombs. Francis Matthews, Secretary of the Navy, advocated becoming "aggressors for peace." The mathematician John von Neuman, who was a pioneer in game theory, remarked: "If you say bomb them tomorrow, I say why not bomb them today?"

Once Russia detonated its own nuclear bomb in 1949, America's nuclear monopoly ended. In its place, a nuclear arms race jumped into the stratosphere. Nuclear weapons forever changed warfare in unpredictable ways. Because unorthodox thinking was needed, the US military funded an outside non-military corporation called RAND, an abbreviation for research and development.

The RAND Corporation had carte blanche to hire whomever they wanted, to study whatever they wanted, to be independent of the military, and to go outside of the usual military thinking no matter how bizarre. The military needed options. RAND employed individuals

from various fields, including mathematicians who studied game theories on how people settle conflicts. Game theory strives to understand how people solve conflicts to their best interest in different situations. Let us look at some of these situations.

Developed in 1950 by RAND mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher, the theoretical game known as the prisoners' dilemma involves two equal participants who are given a one-time choice to collaborate or defect. In this scenario, the two prisoners have been arrested for a crime and have been kept in solitary confinement with no means of communication. Each prisoner is then interviewed by the authorities in separate rooms regarding who is guilty for the offense. Here are the rules:

If neither prisoner says who did the crime, they both spend one year in jail.

If only one of the prisoners says the other did the crime, the snitch goes free and the other spends four years in jail.

If both prisoners say the other person did the crime, they both spend two years in jail.

In the prisoners' dilemma, when both people collaborate to keep their mouths shut, they receive a far shorter sentence than if both attempted to defect (i.e., snitch on each other). However, most pairs defect, insofar as if the other person snitches and they do not, the one prisoner will go free, while the other will spend four years (i.e., twice as much time) in prison.

According to game theory, the prisoners' dilemma reveals that people determine their course of action compared to the other party,

not on the overall good for both. As the expression goes: "People want to see you do well but not better than them."

An iterative (repetitive) version of the prisoners' dilemma was designed by political scientist Robert Axelrod. He called it "tit for tat." The rules are the same as for prisoners' dilemma, except that (1) you get a positive reward of money (or points) depending on whether you collaborate or defect; and (2) you will have to choose to collaborate or defect multiple times against the same opponent. You must consider what your counterpart will do in the next round based on your prior response. The goal is to win as much money (or points) as possible. Here is an example:

If both individuals collaborate, both get twenty dollars.

...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

HbA1C (Hemoglobin A1C ) of 5.6 or lower

BMI (Body-mass index) under 25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me? I wish our doctors would have spent time learning more about evidence appraisal and how to properly do shared decision-making with their patients because the decision around the treatment of surrogate numbers is very dependent on a person's values and preferences. Cholesterol or blood pressure "management" makes a ton of money...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are three possible reasons:

1. The message was not sufficiently important.

2. The paper was poorly written.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dear Editor,

This short paper addresses immortal time in test-negative studies of the flu vac...

By Forrest Maready at Brownstone dot org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The causative agent in polio is the poliovirus, a small, single-stranded RNA virus belonging to the Enterovirus genus of the Picornaviridae family. There are three serotypes of poliovirus: type 1 (PV1), type 2 (...

By Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone dot org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17/ One last detail.

The wine that sealed the arrangement — two bottles, with a card thanking Morens for his "behind-the-scenes shenanigans" — was named The Prisoner. Its label: Goya's etching of a shackled man.

Sentencing: November 12. I'll be covering every filing.

Follow… pic.twitter.com/MfqY7zJRSt— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) August 18, 2026

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

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

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

Our system of government seems to be overrun by men and women who have destroyed any semblance of human freedom in their hearts in order to obtain and protect their jobs. Little by little their obedience is procured from those malignant actors whom they serve by demandi...

By Filipe Rafaeli at Brownstone dot org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to go straight to Frankito's text, or already carry out the exercise of the "brutally honest man" with you, the reader, but I need to explain a little about this new...

By Mike Fairclough at Brownstone dot org.

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

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

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

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

What follows is an extract from that prologue:

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

Barnhill was remote and on the point of being reclaimed by the elements, until the infusion of life, lives saddened, and from an unlikely source. Jura can be hard to love. Sparsely populated then as now, a place of blanket bog and bare rock. Getting to Barnhill was a matter of two ferries – first to Islay, second to Jura – then 20 miles by motor vehicle until the road dwindled and the last four had to be covered on foot. Food, fuel and the rest had to be carried along with everything else required. "Extremely un-get-atable" is how Orwell described their billet, and he loved it.

He was middle-class – a literary type, obviously – and while he had written about the travails of the workers – including the degraded and degrading lives of coal miners and their families in Lancashire and Yorkshire in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) – and had put in time in self-inflicted poverty as a Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – by 1946 he still hankered after the hardship of other men's lives, and the possibilities of a life lived far from the madding crowd.

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

That he was drawn to the Deer Island for the writing of it says to me that his last months and years were ordained for a vision, or a dreary dream the telling of which was nothing less than a calling, or perhaps a penance. It is Highland tradition that deer, the Red Deer, are portents of death. When the deer come down out of the hills and walk the streets of human habitations, their fleur-de-lis hoov...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The release of the Fauci diaries has filled in some missing pieces. They help elucidate how the years of hell unfolded in Fauci's own mind. Working with military intelligence and pharmaceutical companies, Fauci and his colleagues eventually hatched an audacious plan to delay natural immunity for a full ten months as they awaited both the November election and the viable release of the injectable product called a vaccine – all in the hope that it would be given credit for fixing the problem they created in the first place.

This scheme, however, was Fauci's personal Plan B.

Plan A is revealed in the diaries. It was to bury the existence and spread of the virus in question within a broader fabric of a bad flu season. This might have worked too. With the overwhelming fatality threat falling nearly entirely on the aged and infirm, the deaths from Covid in particular could have been overlooked completely. This was his preferred outcome, or, rather, the best that he could come up with given the panic of the first weeks of January 2020.

The problems all began much earlier. Whenever the lab leak occurred, it had become apparent to military intelligence following the Military Olympics of October 18-27, 2019, held in Wuhan. In this high-profile event, 9,308 athletes from 109 countries competed in 329 events in 27 sports. It is highly likely that Covid was already known to be there, judging by how strict the Chinese authorities were in managing exposure.

We have testimony from US participants that they came back with an unusual flu that US military authorities were keen to keep quiet with extended quarantines of the sick.

Fauci was surely kept apprised of this through intelligence channels. He knew that he had a problem on his hands. It was only a matter of waiting to see whether news of this leak would go public.

For him, the bad news arrived on January 3, 2020 when the diary entry reads:

"Also 44 unusual cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China over the past couple of days. Etiology still unknown. Said to be a "viral pneumonia''of unknown etiology. Flu ruled out. Cases linked to a seafood market. No human-to-human transmission documented at this time."

Just above that, however, we see the origins of Plan A. January 2 and 3 we find the first mention of a bad flu year. It was his first attempted cover story.

"Did TV interview with Cox TV this year's influenza situation. Interviewed by Samantha Manning." And: "Jan. 3, 2020 – Influenza is heavy in the media. Did an interview with Elizabeth Cohen of CNN for her Blog. Also, did a live radio interview with John Catsimatidis for his 'Cats Roundtable' from NYC."

His flu-themed Plan A continued and stepped up over the coming days. Keep in mind that the China situation was not yet public. He knew, but the public was not alert to it. There was still a chance that it could be kept under wraps.

Jan. 7, 2020: "Did TV interview with Canadian TV (CTV) on the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China. Did interview (print) with HealthDay on the influenza season."

Jan. 10, 2020 (Friday): "Influenza is hot and heavy. Vaccine match is OK for H1N1, but not so good for B and H3N2. Did WUSA local TV on flu as well as interview with Elizabeth Cohen of CNN that went on her blog with multiple references to our conversation."

That same day, Fauci writes in bold print, alarmed and now newly aware that his scheme might not work:

"Chinese publish sequence of the virus on public data base."

Now, it is the weekend. Fauci reports the following: "Barney Graham ordered the constructs using credit cards," meaning he bought the sequence.

Who is Barney Graham? He is the professor of microbiology at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, home of the CDC. He is formerly the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center (VRC), part of Fauci's NIAID. Graham is holder of 38 patents related to immunization, in particular US10960070B2, "Prefusion coronavirus spike proteins and their use" granted in ...