By Yaffa Shir-Raz at Brownstone dot org.

"I need to ask someone else to take responsibility for the second part of the approvals process, so that I won't have a conflict of interest. I'm also working with Bill Gates and the World Health Organization on the vaccine itself."

This admission of a conflict of interest was made by Prof. Lester Schulman, secretary of the Ministry of Health's polio committee, in March 2023, during an internal discussion about approving the importation into Israel of a new polio vaccine. The vaccine was developed and promoted by the World Health Organization in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and its approval pathway relied on a new emergency authorization mechanism the WHO has developed in recent years: the EUL (Emergency Use Listing).

Although the remark was framed as a technical aside, it was an unusual confession of a conflict of interest by the committee's secretary. Its seriousness is compounded by the fact that it was made only after the committee had already voted by an overwhelming majority to initiate the process of bringing the vaccine to Israel, and after it had already worked vigorously to persuade the Pharmaceutical Division to cooperate.

The quotation does not appear in the official minutes of the meeting that were provided to us. It is heard on an audio recording of the session, one of several recordings passed on to us by a whistleblower. The minutes were provided only following a Freedom of Information request and subsequent litigation.

The episode is serious in its own right. But it goes far beyond a local episode of personal conflict of interest or an administrative failure within Israel's health system. The materials point to something more consequential: the use of an international emergency authorization pathway to shape regulatory decisions inside a sovereign state, advanced through overlapping professional networks, without the organization assuming the legal responsibilities borne by national regulators.

In the United States, recent political debates over withdrawal from the World Health Organization were widely framed as a clash between scientific consensus and institutional criticism. Yet the Israeli case, and the materials in our possession, point to a much larger picture.

This was the first implementation of the EUL mechanism within a country with a functioning Western regulatory system. Israel served here as a regulatory test case: an attempt to determine whether it is possible, in practice, to shape an approval pathway inside a sovereign state without holding formal regulatory authority and without being subject to the judicial and parliamentary oversight that applies to a national regulator. In doing so, it exposes how the organization has been operating in recent years: no longer merely an advisory and coordinating body, but an institution that creates operating frameworks that, in practice, shape approval processes inside sovereign states.

The EUL: An Emergency Mechanism or a De Facto Regulatory Infrastructure?

The World Health Organization was established in 1948 as an intergovernmental body tasked with providing professional assistance and technical guidance, promoting research, collecting knowledge, and developing recommendations for its member states. Article 22 of the WHO Constitution leaves states the right to opt out of its regulations, a clear indication that the organization was not granted regulatory powers such as authorizing drugs and vaccines or supervising their manufacture. These areas remained the exclusive responsibility of states themselves, which also bear legal and public responsibility for the decisions of their national health authorities.

In recent years, the WHO has developed mechanisms that expand its influence beyond recommendations and, in effect, enable it to directly influence regulatory authorization processes within states. The central mechanism is the EUL, an independent WHO emergency procedure that is not par...

By Andrew Lowenthal at Brownstone dot org.

On December 14, two ISIS-affiliated gunmen massacred 15 unarmed civilians at a Hanukkah festival at Bondi Beach, the icon of Australia's breezy way of life. Just three police officers guarded the festival. One of the shooters, Naveed Akram, had come to the attention of the Australian security services in 2019, and yet in 2020, his father, an Indian-born non-citizen, was able to legally purchase multiple firearms. Just weeks before their murder spree, the father and son duo spent nearly a month in the Southern Philippines, a hot spot for Islamic terrorism.

Over the past two years, the centre-left Labor government downplayed a wave of never-before-seen anti-Semitism in the country that included the firebombing of Jewish businesses and a synagogue. Jews, however, sit outside the woke matrix of concern and so were excluded from the usual progressive hyper-policing of every perceived microaggression.

More recently, the government, whose primary role is security, decided its highest priority was micromanaging the Internet browsing habits of everyday people via its teen social media ban. In reality, these efforts amounted to a mass surveillance program that now forces adult users to ID themselves to access a huge swathe of the internet. If only the government had paid the same level of attention to real safety as it did to eSafety it might have stopped kids being shot and killed while playing at the beach.

We saw the depth of the government's distraction towards micro-management in the Australian Twitter Files, where the "Social Cohesion Division" of the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) tasked itself with policing jokes about the government's Covid response. The DHA is responsible for national security and oversees Australia's intelligence agency, ASIO.

Staff at the "Extremism Insights and Communication" program couldn't even spell, let alone keep their eyes on the ball. Are we surprised DHA's sloppy work has led us to this tragedy?

Rather than focus on the kind of extremism that can get you shot, the "Social Cohesion Division" felt much of its time would be well-spent reporting jokes, like the one below, to Twitter:

As reported by the Australian, between 2017 and 2022, DHA made "13,636 referrals to digital platforms to review content against their own terms of service." 9000 were terrorism-related, and 4,213 were listed as "Covid-19 related." Meaning DHA spent fully one-third of its time monitoring jokes and criticism of the government's Covid policies (including people who didn't even live in or have any relationship to Australia), compared to tracking potential and actual terrorists.

I remarked multiple times in interviews, including on Sky News in May of 2023, that DHA's hyper-monitoring of Covid dissent was off-mission and was in fact putting Australians at risk from real threats.

To cover for their incompetence, the government is now proposing a host of laws to restrict speech, protest, and gun ownership (Australia already has some of the world's strictest gun laws). While there are some loopholes that I support (such as banning non-citizens from owning guns), the vast majority of these proposals are a distraction. The government spoke out of both sides of its mouth on anti-Semitism and refused to deal with the bad actors because they didn't want to alienate their voter base. The kumbaya migration and multiculturalism policies of both parties have also proven a failure, and it seems our intelligence services can't conduct basic police work.

Woke culture also has much to answer for. Journalist Mark Mordue put it well earlier this week: "We have lost sight of its dangers as aspirations for tolerance become a Trojan horse for parasitic and destructive ideologies. The ostensibly good and ideal is being used to advance the cancerous in our culture."

The Albanese government is now in a deep crisis. The Prime Minister is reviled by the Jewish community and by increasingly larger sections...

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org.

Contrary to prevailing explanations, biostatistics is not just the technical application of statistics to biomedical data. It is the judicious use of statistics that takes into account background biomedical knowledge. Otherwise, why not call, for example, statistics of demographic data "demostatistics" and statistics of economic data "econostatistics?"

In this post, I connect background knowledge on the mechanism of protection against a respiratory virus with estimates of vaccine effectiveness. I show how that knowledge (biology) can identify incoherent estimates (statistics). In the epilogue, I suggest a scientifically justified (and politically safe) course of action by the FDA.

Mechanisms of Protection

Protection against a respiratory virus can take place at the epithelium of the upper respiratory tract, the initial site of the infection, or in the blood, when the first line of defense has failed. The former is called mucosal immunity, and it takes two forms: innate immunity ("general") and adaptive immunity (against specific antigens). The latter is primarily attributed to neutralizing secretory IgA antibodies in the fluid that covers the nasal epithelium. We can think about those antibodies as frontline soldiers.

If you read articles on the mRNA vaccines, you find peculiar contradicting perspectives on their mechanism of protection. On the one hand, authors try to claim some mucosal immunity following intramuscular injection, which reads like a desperate search for mechanisms. On the other hand, the same authors emphasize the need for mucosal vaccines (nasal sprays) to prevent infection. So, do injected mRNA vaccines offer mucosal immunity or not?

Probably not. The path from vaccine-induced systemic immune response to immunological reaction in respiratory epithelial cells is tentative and weak at best. For sure it is not the primary mode of protection against Covid (or flu). Keep this paragraph in mind when we compare later estimates of vaccine effectiveness against infection (mucosal immunity) vis-à-vis symptoms if infected (systemic immunity).

Natural immunity, acquired through previous infection, works differently from injected vaccines. The first line of defense — mucosal immunity — is ready to fight off the offender after a previous encounter with the same or a similar offender. Protection against infection, rather than symptoms if infected, is the dominant mechanism. That also seems to make sense, teleologically.

Two Helpful Equations

The key endpoint in vaccine effectiveness studies has often been symptomatic infection. What is being estimated, however, is the effect on having symptoms through infection (vaccine infection symptoms). And that effect, if measured by a risk ratio (RR), can be decomposed into two components of the causal path: the effect on getting infected (mucosal immunity) times the effect on having symptoms if infected (systemic immunity).

Similarly, the effect on asymptomatic infection can be decomposed into two components: the effect on getting infected times the effect on not having symptoms if infected.

In previous posts, I developed two equations that allow us to compute the risk ratio of having symptoms, if infected, from the "risk" (probability) ratio of remaining asymptomatic. Both equations rely on the proportion of infections in placebo recipients that are asymptomatic. I call this proportion "p" with a subscript 0.

If the vaccine does not prevent infection, namely RR (infection)=1, it can be shown that we get equation 1.

If the vaccine does prevent infection, namely RR (infection) < 1, we get equation 2. In addition to p, we use the ratio RR (asymptomatic infection)/RR (symptomatic infection), which I call "k."

These simple equations allow us to check the results from vaccine effectiveness studies whenever we have data on the effect on asymptomatic infection. We can decompose the effect on symptomatic infection into its two components — mucosal...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

For months, a quiet battle has been unfolding inside the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

It began with an analysis of child deaths after Covid vaccination, followed by strategic leaks to major media outlets, and has now erupted into the open with a memo from the regulator's own vaccine chief.

In September, it was reported that FDA officials had privately investigated 25 paediatric deaths following Covid vaccination — the first systematic review of such cases since the rollout began.

The findings were meant to be presented to the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). But the presentation never came. The meeting passed without a word. Something had happened behind closed doors.

Now we know what.

On 13 November 2025, STAT published an extraordinary insider account describing a tense internal meeting in which FDA scientist Dr Tracy Beth Høeg presented evidence of young people who had died after Covid vaccination.

According to STAT, her findings triggered pushback from career FDA regulators who feared the implications of acknowledging fatal cases.

Now, comes the explosive memo from FDA vaccine chief Dr Vinay Prasad, confirming — for the first time — that US regulators have formally attributed at least 10 of these children's deaths to Covid vaccination.

Prasad called it "a profound revelation" with far-reaching implications for American vaccine policy, adding that the true number is "certainly an underestimate."

Here, I'll take you through the memo, the leaks, the internal rebellion at FDA, and what this means — not just for Covid vaccines, but for all vaccine approvals going forward.

This story marks a turning point in US vaccine regulation.

The Story That Divided the Regulator

In early September, insiders at the FDA and CDC quietly told the New York Times and the Washington Post that the agency had begun investigating child deaths reported to VAERS.

My reporting confirmed that Dr Tracy Beth Høeg, a senior adviser within the FDA's vaccine division, had led the review — contacting families, gathering medical records, and obtaining autopsy findings.

It was the first case-by-case evaluation of paediatric deaths conducted since the vaccines were authorised.

The review identified twenty-five children whose deaths occurred following vaccination. Those findings were expected to be presented to ACIP on 18–19 September. Instead, without explanation, the discussion disappeared from the agenda.

Even FDA Commissioner Dr Marty Makary had hinted at the findings on CNN, saying, "We've been looking into the VAERS database self-reports, [and] there have been children that have died from the Covid vaccine."

He described an "intense" investigation involving doctors, autopsies, and family interviews. Yet ACIP heard nothing.

Had the FDA reversed course — or had internal forces blocked disclosure?

STAT's reporting offered the first real clues.

Inside the FDA: The Meeting That Changed Everything

STAT described a confidential gathering of FDA vaccine scientists in which Høeg presented slides listing roughly two dozen deaths of young people following vaccination.

One slide reportedly read: "Timing fits. Diagnosis fits. No better explanation found. Sufficient information provided."

According to STAT, some career regulators reacted with "quiet horror" — not at the deaths themselves, but at the policy implications of acknowledging them.

The article portrayed Høeg as pushing to bring the findings to ACIP and to amend vaccine labels for younger males, while longtime staff resisted, describing the evidence as "thin" and worrying about restricting vaccine access.

STAT reported that "no career regulator would stand by the decision," and Høeg backed away from presenting the cases to ACIP.

It was a rare glimpse of a regulator divided against itself: career staff trying to contain the findings, and FDA leadership apparently trying to surface them.

Nothing more was said publicly — until Prasad's...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

General health checks, called annual physicals in the United States, are sold to the public under false pretenses with claims that aren't true.

This also applies to targeted health checks, and mammography screening is a good example. Women have been told for 40 years in invitations to screening that by detecting breast cancers early, screening saves lives and leads to less invasive surgery. The truth is that breast screening detects cancers very late, it doesn't save lives, and more women lose a breast.

Mammography screening is harmful and general health checks are also harmful. Like breast screening, they detect many things that should not have been treated because they are either insignificant or will disappear again. In contrast to cars, our body has a remarkable capacity for self-healing.

Our Review of General Health Checks

Health checks can result in large bills for no gain just like car checks can. I never send my car to the annual car check, which has saved me an enormous amount of money. I only see a mechanic when there is something wrong with my car or for simple issues such as changing oil. I have the same relationship with my doctor.

Once, when I was on holiday on Maui, I passed a booth where people could have their blood pressure checked. Just for the fun of it, I stretched my arm out. "What is your usual blood pressure," a woman asked. "I have no idea," I replied, which made her laugh in disbelief. I was 58 years old and fit, and the few times in my life that someone had taken my blood pressure during a hospital admission, it had been low, so why should I bother about that? I couldn't help provoking her a little and therefore told her I had no idea either of what my cholesterol was. At that point, she asked me which country I came from!

In Denmark, the doctors were sceptical towards general health checks, but in 2007, the Danish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry convinced the politicians to introduce them, even though an industry spokesperson admitted that their goal was to sell more drugs.

Nothing happened, however. But in 2011, our new government wanted to introduce general health checks. I asked to have a meeting with the Minister of Health, Astrid Krag, because our review of the randomised trials, which we had just completed but not yet published, had found no effect on mortality. I brought a colleague to the meeting who had just finished a large trial in Denmark, which had also failed to find an effect.

We told Krag that health checks are probably harmful, leading to more diagnoses, more drugs, and psychological problems because people are told they are less healthy than they think. She aborted her plans on the spot and said it was the first time the new government had broken a pre-election promise in an evidence-based manner.

We had included 14 trials in adults unselected for diseases or risk factors. We published our review in 2012 and updated it in 2019. There was no reduction in total mortality (risk ratio 1.00), cardiovascular mortality (risk ratio 1.05), or cancer mortality (risk ratio 1.01), and with 21,535 deaths, our results were very convincing.

There were no benefits either for clinical events, hospital admissions, or other measures of morbidity, but there were harms. More people got a disease label and more became treated with antihypertensive drugs. We concluded cautiously that general health checks are unlikely to be beneficial, but in fact they are harmful.

We had also studied 56 Danish websites selling health checks and found that 17 of the 21 most-used tests were unjustified or there was evidence against using them for screening purposes. None of the websites mentioned any harms of health checks and they presented a median of only one of the 15 information items recommended by the WHO and the Danish Board of Health when screening healthy people. Thus, there was no informed consent.

Our review saved billions of crowns for Danish taxpayers...

By Adam Garrie at Brownstone dot org.

Background

For decades, the fight for full health freedom—as defined by a system in which full informed consent replaces the legislative reality and culture of vaccine mandates—has been an arduous one. However, there are important parallels between the fight for health freedom and the success that advocates of a constitutionalist view of the Second Amendment (2A) have achieved over the last 25 years. By learning from the success of 2A advocates, supporters of health freedom can change the culture, change the law, and change legal precedent, all in favor of health freedom.

Weaponized Emotion

The early 1990s represented the nadir of a constitutional view of 2A in terms of public opinion. This was largely due to the popularity of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (commonly referred to as the Brady Bill). The legislation, signed by President Clinton in 1993, established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

The passage of the Brady Bill represented a perfect storm in which public sentiment was shaped by emotion rather than information. The bill was named for former White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was paralyzed during the assassination attempt on President Reagan.

In 1991, Reagan offered his support for the bill in what represented a major blow to many Republican supporters of a constitutional view of the Second Amendment. By the time President Clinton signed the bill, it had major bipartisan support. But then came the data.

Data Changes the Narrative

The popularity of firearm restrictions in the wake of the Brady Bill becoming law was a wake-up call to 2A constitutionalists. It demonstrated that straightforward constitutional arguments were insufficient to move public opinion when people were bombarded with a bipartisan blitz of emotion-driven propaganda about safety. It did not matter that arguments for safety were not backed by data; what mattered was that emotions tied to fear were more compelling than recitations of constitutional norms.

This is when 2A advocates got smart and began a long, data-driven campaign to restore constitutional rights.

The first major study to expose the flawed logic behind gun control laws came in 1997. Conducted by John Lott and David Mustard, the study was eventually turned into the best-selling book, More Guns, Less Crime. Using data from all US counties over 15 years, Lott argued that states with "shall-issue" (easy-to-obtain) concealed carry permits saw significant decreases in violent crimes like murder, rape, and aggravated assault.

In 2003, the CDC analyzed 51 different studies on measures like background checks and weapon bans. Ultimately, the CDC task force concluded there was "insufficient evidence" to prove these laws reduced violent crime.

Further studies indicated that states with relatively unrestricted firearm ownership laws had fewer instances of violent crime than states with highly restrictive laws.

These and other studies began to shift public opinion. This led to louder demands from citizens for a return to strict constitutionalism regarding firearm ownership, and it also helped pro-2A groups fundraise for judicial challenges to gun control laws.

Public Opinion Shifts

The popularity of gun control measures peaked in 1993 and has trended downward ever since. Even small spikes in gun control popularity following major school shootings have not impacted this overall trend. Crucially, recent school shootings have been even less impactful regarding outliers.

While support for a constitutionalist approach to 2A remains far stronger among Republicans and conservatives than among Democrats and liberals, this too is changing in a positive direction for constitutionalists.

A 2022 University of Chicago NORC study found that 29% of Democrats or Democrat-leaning individuals had a gun at home in 2022, up from a record low of 22% in 2010. This was followed by a poll from NBC News in November 2023, which found ...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

There are moments in public health when the path forward is unusually clear, when the evidence aligns with behavior, when risks are well understood, and when policy has a genuine opportunity to reduce harm at scale. This should be one of those moments.

Non-combustible nicotine products—vapes, heated tobacco, and especially nicotine pouches—are widely understood to be far less harmful than smoking, a point I and many others have covered repeatedly, and one that no longer sits at the frontier of scientific debate. At the same time, the political panic that once drove restrictive policy has subsided, with youth vaping falling sharply from its peak.

The most recent data show that around 5.2 percent of youth report e-cigarette use in the past 30 days, down dramatically from prior highs, and importantly only a subset of that group are frequent users, those using on 20 or more days in a month, the category most closely associated with dependence.

Nicotine pouch use among youth is lower still, at roughly 1.7 percent. Much of what remains appears to be occasional or experimental rather than habitual. These are not crisis numbers, and they matter because they directly undercut the primary justification for continued regulatory paralysis.

One might expect regulators to respond accordingly, adjusting policy to reflect both the risk gradient and the changed behavioral landscape, but that has not happened. Instead, the system has stalled, quietly but decisively, with approvals for new products slowing to a near standstill.

At the center of that paralysis sits Marty Makary, head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and increasingly the explanation for inaction appears not to lie in scientific uncertainty or bureaucratic complexity, but in his simple unwillingness to move.

According to several informed sources, there is now a clear split within the administration, with parts of the FDA Center for Tobacco Products and broader White House advisers recognizing that harm reduction is both scientifically grounded and politically manageable.

Notably, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is described as supportive of this shift, particularly in relation to nicotine pouches. Kennedy is reported to use nicotine pouches himself and to view them as a practical, low-risk alternative for adults, which in policy terms should make them the least controversial category, given that they involve no combustion, no smoke, and no tobacco leaf. In almost any rational regulatory framework, these products would be the easiest to authorize.

Yet they are not being authorized, and the reason, according to sources, is that Makary has become the effective blockade, with approvals held up despite falling youth use and despite data generated within his own government pointing in a consistent direction. This is less a disagreement over interpretation than a refusal to act on available evidence, and the explanation offered by those familiar with the situation is not primarily scientific, but personal, tied to concerns about legacy.

Makary is said to be focused on avoiding reputational risk, particularly given uncertainty about the length of his tenure, with the concern that authorizing new nicotine products could, if later criticized, define his time at the FDA. Blocking approvals, by contrast, carries no immediate cost, and in that calculation inaction becomes the safer choice for the individual making the decision, even if it is the costlier choice for public health.

The consequences are neither subtle nor hypothetical, because when regulators refuse to authorize products that consumers want, markets do not disappear. They adapt. The United States already has a large illicit vape market, with unauthorized products widely available through informal channels, often without quality control or oversight. By refusing to authorize legal alternatives, policymakers are not preventing access, they are shifting it into less regulated spaces.

This dynam...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

In an age like the present, which is choking on the virtually exclusive valorisation of technology, what (and how) should students be taught, or putting it differently, what should they learn? Just consider the proliferating crises affecting the entire world population – the ongoing war in Ukraine, the fluctuating Iran war and its broadening ripple effect on energy prices (which is already affecting, not only availability of oil and petrol, but food supplies as well), and the social and political strife connected with 'illegal immigrants' in the US, Britain, and Europe, to mention only some – then it seems a daunting task to answer this question.

There are many – too many – intellectual sources, contemporary as well as throughout the history of the world, from which I could draw to answer it in a very provisional manner, so I'll have to be selective, but here goes. My perspective is mainly Western.

From the ancient Greek thinker, Plato – who had assimilated the insights of his predecessors, from Thales through Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and others to Heraclitus and Parmenides, and, of course, his teacher, Socrates, who claimed that he had learned from a woman named Diotima – we learned that Being and Becoming are the two poles constituting the tension field in which things appear in the material world of the senses and of particular things, on the one hand, and the intelligible world of the universal Forms, on the other.

Aristotle, Plato's Macedonian pupil (who taught Alexander, destined to become The Great), argued that the universal Forms are not outside of particular things, but their intelligible part instead. Together, they comprise what he called an entelechy. Moreover, Aristotle gave us an encompassing conceptualisation of causality as a sort of 'fourfold' (a concept that later returns in Martin Heidegger's philosophy, denoting the touchstone for a truly human mode of living), which is far richer and more fecund in explanatory terms than its modern reduction to only one of these. The four Aristotelian causes are the material, formal, working, and final causes, respectively.

A tree, for instance, has a material embodiment, or matter (the trunk, branches, leaves, and so on). It also has an intelligible form – not its shape, but its comprehensible essence, and a working cause, which accounts for its change, or growth. Its final cause, or telos, is perhaps the most important, insofar as it explains why the tree develops in the way that it does.

Obviously, for a human being this schema is more complex, although easily comprehensible. We have bodies (material cause), a formal, intelligible essence which makes us what we are, as distinct from other things, a working cause which explains changes in the course of our growth, and a final cause or human telos, which instantiates that towards which we 'grow' or what we strive for, both as a species and as individuals. For every individual the telos or final cause is different; some work towards the ideal writer they want to become, others strive for excellence in cooking, or singing, and so on. In this sense, our future(s) is a crucial factor for understanding what we do at present.

From the above it is already apparent that learning in what Bernard Stiegler calls a 'transindividual' manner – where knowledge is transferred from one individual to another, or others – always involves an incremental complexification. In this way, Plato, for instance, synthesised the accumulated knowledge of his predecessors, and Aristotle took this process further, giving us a synthesis that was even more comprehensive than Plato's.

Furthermore, while Plato was more mathematically oriented than Aristotle – as shown in his 'creation myth' (recounted in his dialogue, the Timaeus), where numbers, and not only Forms, are posited as essential mediators between God and individual things – Aristotle did justice to the empirical world of experience through observation.

H...

By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

Leave the cocooning to the caterpillars.

"Cocooning" is a CDC-endorsed public health term used to describe the push to vaccinate grandparents (and other close family/caregivers) before visiting newborns. This promoted practice stems from public health efforts to protect vulnerable infants from serious infections, particularly whooping cough (pertussis), influenza, and, to a lesser extent, Covid-19 and RSV.

Current guidelines (e.g., CDC as of 2025) de-emphasize cocooning as a primary strategy due to implementation challenges (low uptake, incomplete "cocoons") and limited evidence supporting standalone effectiveness. Maternal Tdap vaccination during pregnancy is now prioritized for direct antibody transfer to the infant. Cocooning is still suggested supplementally for close contacts but is "no longer widely recommended" as the main approach.

Many new parents enforce this privately, often requiring proof of vaccination for visits in the first 2-3 months. This has led to a promoted "#NoVaxNoVisit" trend on social media and parenting forums, where families delay or restrict access if relatives refuse. Compliance is high in supportive families, but resistance occurs (e.g., due to vaccine hesitancy or perceived overreach).

Although cocooning was the only strategy available to protect infants at the time it was recommended, there is now general agreement that the method is costly, is plagued with implementation challenges, and has uncertain effectiveness. Vaccination during pregnancy has been shown to be safe and effective at preventing infant disease in the early months of life and is being adopted by an increasing number of countries as the primary pertussis prevention strategy for young infants. Given the ongoing resurgence of pertussis in the United States, efforts should focus on increasing awareness and implementation of Tdap vaccination during pregnancy to prevent disease in infants too young to be vaccinated themselves.

An Assessment of the Cocooning Strategy for Preventing Infant Pertussis—United States, 2011

Clin Infect Dis. 2016 Dec 1;63(Suppl 4):S221–S226.

Core Recommendation regarding the "Cocooning" Strategy: Health authorities like the CDC, American Academy of Pediatrics, and similar organizations promote "cocooning," where adults in regular contact with a newborn are recommended to get vaccinated to create a protective barrier. This began in the mid-2000s amid pertussis outbreaks, as infants under 2-6 months are too young for their own vaccines and face high risks of hospitalization or death from these diseases.

The promoted cocooning recommendations include the following:

Tdap vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria, acellular pertussis): Strongly recommended for grandparents and caregivers if not received in the last 5-10 years (protection wanes over time). Administer at least 2 weeks before contact to build immunity. Pertussis is the primary focus, as it can be fatal in newborns.

Influenza (flu) vaccine: Annual shot recommended for anyone around the baby, especially during flu season, as infants under 6 months can't get it themselves.

Covid-19 vaccine/boosters: Advised to be up-to-date, though less universally mandated than Tdap/flu.

Other vaccines (e.g., MMR for measles, pneumococcal, shingles, RSV if eligible for older adults) are often suggested for broader protection.

Rationale and Evidence (The World According to GROK)

Newborns have underdeveloped immune systems, making them highly susceptible. Studies show parents/siblings are the most common infection sources, but grandparents and other visitors contribute significantly. Cocooning, combined with maternal vaccination during pregnancy, reduces infant pertussis risk substantially (e.g., one study estimated 64-77% effectiveness when both parents are vaccinated postpartum). Health sites (CDC, March of Dimes, Cleveland Clinic) and pediatricians routinely advise this, framing it as equivalent to basic precautions like handwashing.

...

By Meryl Nass at Brownstone dot org.

Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion —a few months before Monsanto lost its first liability case for causing non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was not a close observer of the case, but the win seemed to hinge on documents obtained during discovery that revealed Monsanto knew a great deal about the injuries its product caused but deliberately hid those findings.

Once there was a win—and the jury awarded the plaintiff with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma hundreds of millions, later reduced—the bandwagon effect began, with other lawyers seeking plaintiffs to sue Monsanto. Eventually over 100,000 plaintiffs were suing Monsanto/Bayer for cancers related to glyphosate, the so-called active ingredient in Roundup. There are other ingredients that are probably toxic too, but they were not at issue. Most plaintiffs were homeowners. Bayer then removed glyphosate from Roundup, producing a new formulation for homeowners.

Still, there were more and more cases and more and more wins in state courts due to Monsanto/Bayer's failure to warn of a cancer risk. Then Monsanto settled about 50,000 of the cases.

The settlements and the big losses have cost Bayer $10 billion so far.

Not only did Bayer pay out a King's ransom, but its stock price tanked. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Bayer, a German company, hired a Texan, Bill Anderson, as CEO to come to its aid. CEO Anderson's career hinged on stanching Bayer's bleed. He initiated a very expensive series of legal and political strategies in the hopes that one would be successful. He also formed a new agricultural industry lobby group with a huge advertising budget.

CEO Anderson got the Bayer board to agree to setting aside around $17 billion for this problem. With $10 billion already spent (the same figure reported 5 months ago) that left him with about $7.6 billion to deal with the 67,000 pending cases and to end the litigation for good.

I discussed the six different tracks Anderson pursued to make this problem go away in this piece. One of those tracks was getting Congress to pass a bill rider that would provide a liability shield by forbidding the EPA from making label changes unless a tedious, years-long process had been undertaken.

The bill rider got a lot of pushback from my readers and many other constitutents during July-September 2025, when it passed the EPA's Appropriations committee on a voice vote, thereby shielding individual members from having to own up to their vote. Apparently it was not going to go through the whole House easily (lots of political capital would have been expended by every member voting for it) and so far, the bill that included the pesticide rider has not been brought to a House vote. There was no companion bill in the Senate, another clue that Congressmembers did not want their fingerprints on this obvious giveaway to Big Pesticide and Bayer at the expense of citizens.

The five other tracks included:

This request to the Supreme Court to rule on the issue, which failed to gain a Supreme Court hearing in 2022, was filed again early last April.

Bills in about 20 state legislatures that would end state causes of action for pesticide injuries, which passed in GA and ND, failed in TN and many other states, and have not been decided in other states.

Threats by Bayer to take glyphosate off the market, which would allegedly harm the agriculture industry, even though there are generic versions of glyphosate available, and allegedly raise food prices drastically. This track was accompanied by a big publicity campaign.

Assertions by Bayer that it was developing 5 newer pesticides and would simply replace glyphosate with something better (and potentially more dangerous). If it kept swapping out pesticides as their harms became known, it could avoid having label warnings placed on them.

Bayer hinted it could spin off part of the company, leaving all the liability in an underfunded spinoff that would not be able to pay claims.

Reme...