By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

Before Covid, I would have described myself as a technological optimist. New technologies almost always arrive amid exaggerated fears. Railways were supposed to cause mental breakdowns, bicycles were thought to make women infertile or insane, and early electricity was blamed for everything from moral decay to physical collapse. Over time, these anxieties faded, societies adapted, and living standards rose. The pattern was familiar enough that artificial intelligence seemed likely to follow it: disruptive, sometimes misused, but ultimately manageable.

The Covid years unsettled that confidence—not because technology failed, but because institutions did.

Across much of the world, governments and expert bodies responded to uncertainty with unprecedented social and biomedical interventions, justified by worst-case models and enforced with remarkable certainty. Competing hypotheses were marginalized rather than debated. Emergency measures hardened into long-term policy. When evidence shifted, admissions of error were rare, and accountability rarer still. The experience exposed a deeper problem than any single policy mistake: modern institutions appear poorly equipped to manage uncertainty without overreach.

That lesson now weighs heavily on debates over artificial intelligence.

The AI Risk Divide

Broadly speaking, concern about advanced AI falls into two camps. One group—associated with thinkers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—argues that sufficiently advanced AI is catastrophically dangerous by default. In their deliberately stark formulation, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the problem is not bad intentions but incentives: competition ensures someone will cut corners, and once a system escapes meaningful control, intentions no longer matter.

A second camp, including figures such as Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, and Max Tegmark, also takes AI risk seriously but is more optimistic that alignment, careful governance, and gradual deployment can keep systems under human control.

Despite their differences, both camps converge on one conclusion: unconstrained AI development is dangerous, and some form of oversight, coordination, or restraint is necessary. Where they diverge is on feasibility and urgency. What is rarely examined, however, is whether the institutions expected to provide that restraint are themselves fit for the role.

Covid suggests reason for doubt.

Covid was not merely a public-health crisis; it was a live experiment in expert-driven governance under uncertainty. Faced with incomplete data, authorities repeatedly chose maximal interventions justified by speculative harms. Dissent was often treated as a moral failing rather than a scientific necessity. Policies were defended not through transparent cost-benefit analysis but through appeals to authority and fear of hypothetical futures.

This pattern matters because it reveals how modern institutions behave when stakes are framed as existential. Incentives shift toward decisiveness, narrative control, and moral certainty. Error correction becomes reputationally costly. Precaution stops being a tool and becomes a doctrine.

The lesson is not that experts are uniquely flawed. It is that institutions reward overconfidence far more reliably than humility, especially when politics, funding, and public fear align. Once extraordinary powers are claimed in the name of safety, they are rarely surrendered willingly.

These are precisely the dynamics now visible in discussions of AI oversight.

The "What if" Machine

A recurring justification for expansive state intervention is the hypothetical bad actor: What if a terrorist builds this? What if a rogue state does that? From that premise flows the argument that governments must act pre-emptively, at scale, and often in secrecy, to prevent catastrophe.

During Covid, similar logic justified sweeping biomedical research agendas, emergency authorizations, and social controls. The reasoning was...

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

The Fifth Big Lie of Vaccinology: Declaring Vaccines Fundamentally "Safe and Effective" as a Class, is a manipulative, unethical propaganda device that must be brought to an end.

Slogans, catch phrases, and advertising jingles comprise an enormous amount of the information that the media sends out to all of us every day. Marketing is largely based on attaching simplistic, positive connotations to whatever product is being sold.

Sometimes manipulative advertising is easily identifiable and seems harmless enough. Depending on your personal preference for fast food, you may either decide that "You rule," or instead choose to make sure "I'm lovin' it." When purchasing an automobile, you can be content just to say "Let's go places," or you can insist on owning "The ultimate driving machine."

However, marketing, news, and yes, government directives frequently overlap – and even merge – to an extent that can be very difficult to detect. If an advertising jingle takes hold firmly enough, it can become conventional wisdom. Sometimes it can even be assumed to be objective fact.

Generations of Americans grew up accepting as an article of faith that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day." However, this claim was first made – without evidence – in 1917 by a protégé of breakfast cereal magnates named the Kellogg Brothers. While this assertion about the primary importance of breakfast has been challenged in recent years, it still resonates in the minds of many as a basic truth of daily life.

"Safe and Effective:" An Advertising Slogan, Not a Medical Fact

With the rollout of the Covid vaccines, starting in December 2020, patients worldwide were barraged with another baseless (and completely untrue) marketing slogan: that the brand new, warp-speed developed Covid vaccines are "safe and effective." (Should anyone have forgotten the intensity of the marketing blitz, please watch this, this, and – gulp – this to refresh your memory.)

We were told that Covid vaccines are "safe and effective." Period. This advertising slogan was repeated endlessly, despite the fact that it referred to a variety of different products, using multiple different technologies, all produced in extreme haste.

Almost overnight, there were shots by Pfizer/BioNTech (mRNA technology), Moderna (also mRNA), Johnson & Johnson (viral vector technology), AstraZeneca (also viral vector), and Novavax (protein subunit technology).

Didn't matter. We were told that Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."

We were told to take whichever Covid shot might be available. We were told that it didn't matter which vaccine might be offered to you. We were told its mechanism of action didn't matter. We were told you could even "mix and match!" Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."

That advertising jingle persists even today. Never mind that two major Covid vaccines (the Johnson & Johnson and the AstraZeneca products), both previously hailed as "safe and effective," were pulled from the market for, well, killing people. Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."

Never mind that the CDC's own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) catalogued over 38,000 deaths due to the Covid vaccines. Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."

Never mind the drip-drip-drip of media reports describing the waning effectiveness of the Covid shots, an utterly predictable outcome. All that means is that you need another booster shot! Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."

To review: two of the original Covid shots – previously hailed as "safe and effective" – have been pulled from the market because they were unsafe. New, updated versions of the remaining shots are constantly being produced, because previous versions – also previously promoted as safe and effective – are ineffective. Furthermore, their disastrous safety record is reflected in the low public uptake of the newer versions.

Nevertheless, Covid vaccines are still officially "safe and ef...

By Peter St Onge at Brownstone dot org.

Somali daycare powerhouse Quality Learing Center has closed.

If you need to lear your kids you will need a new Somali daycare. Happily, you've got thousands of empty ones to choose from.

The nation is being seized by what Zerohedge calls the Nick Shirley effect as hundreds of citizen journalists fan out exposing what looks like tens of billions — perhaps trillions — of fraud.

What's been found so far focuses on the Somali community, where despite nearly 90% of these model immigrants being on welfare they've managed to set up tens of thousands of apparently fraudulent daycares, autism therapy centers, food for kids programs, and home health companies.

To give a flavor, there's apparently 50,000 Somali healthcare companies — one per 3 adult Somalis in the nation.

Somali-run autism grants in Minnesota now run $399 million — up from $3 million in 2018. Somali child nutrition scams were actually prosecuted for $300 million stolen. After which even more scams sprung up because the city and state turned a blind eye.

So far DOJ estimates $8 billion of Somali fraud in Minnesota alone — roughly a quarter million per Somali household. Meaning the roughly 65,000 Somali adults in Minnesota managed to steal more than the entire GDP of Somalia itself, population 20 million.

Saudi Arabia has oil. China has factories. Somalia has Quality Learing Centers.

The Tip of the Iceberg

Unfortunately, Somalis are just the tip of the iceberg.

A new study found half of New York City is on Medicaid — note average family income in New York City is $81,000. Given 40% of New Yorkers are foreign-born, this will be hundreds of thousands getting free care when the rest of us — who pay for it — shell out tens of thousands for insurance.

Meanwhile, a 2023 survey by New York City found foreigners — not foreign-born but actual foreigners — occupy fully 32% of public housing and over 40% of rent-controlled and stabilized units.

California is even worse; the state auditor recently tallied $70 billion in fraud, including $2.5 billion of SNAP fraud and $24 billion in fraud for homelessness.

And that's just the fraud they found.

The Covid Fraud Boom

The Fraud Industrial Complex took off during Covid: The Small Business Administration estimates $64 billion in fraudulent PPP loans — other estimates run to $80 billion.

Given the median PPP loan was $20,000 so that implies 4 million people should be in prison right now.

Toss in the Covid-era Economic Injury loans, where up to $200 billion was stolen. These averaged $100,000, implying another 2 million felons.

So take Minnesota Somalis, multiply by 20 blue states, dozens of nationalities — eight Indian gas stations in Texas, for example, got 32 million in SBA loans. In case you wonder why Indians and not Americans own the 7/11's.

What's Next

Long-standing government estimates of fraud run north of $500 billion a year. Elon thinks it's closer to a trillion and half, which seems right given what's being exposed.

That would be roughly half of income taxes. In fact, it's enough to exempt every American from income tax up to $200,000.

This is leading Americans people to suggest maybe we should stop paying tax until government gets control of the fraud.

The left is responding how you'd expect. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz calls Somali fraud probes "white supremacy." While MSNBC says Trump's making it up cos he's racist.

But Shirley has set off a nationwide movement by citizen journalists to expose fraud. Incentivized by the fact whistleblowers get 15-30% of recoveries — in case you're looking for a side gig.

A hundred million Americans are pissed off. Unless we see a lot of people in handcuffs, we're this close to a taxpayer revolt the IRS couldn't hope to keep up with.

Republished from the author's Substack

By Michael Tomlinson at Brownstone dot org.

Evidence continues to mount indicating that the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic was counterproductive and harmful, yet mainstream opinion continues to proclaim that it was a triumph.

This is based on scientific papers that often manipulate the data or present it selectively.

Exhibit 1: Cohort study of cardiovascular safety of different Covid-19 vaccination doses among 46 million adults in England by Ip et al. The authors conclude that 'the incidence of common arterial thrombotic events (mainly acute myocardial infarction and ischaemic stroke) was generally lower after each vaccine dose, brand and combination' and 'the incidence of common venous thrombotic events (mainly pulmonary embolism and lower limb deep venous thrombosis) was lower after vaccination.'

This seems to be a straightforward outcome, based on a most inclusive sample – the whole population of England. However, Table 2 shows incidence rates of cardiovascular events were substantially higher (nearly double for arterial events) after the first dose of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, compared to no vaccination:

This contradicts the text: 'The incidence of thrombotic and cardiovascular complications was generally lower after each dose of each vaccine brand.' Of course, 'generally' is a weasel word. It means that the incidence of complications after each dose was lower except where it was higher. Incidence rates for the Moderna vaccine were indeed much lower at least in the medium term (up to 26 weeks) but rates for AstraZeneca and Pfizer were much higher.

Incidence rates after the second dose were indeed 'generally' lower in the tables. But Supplementary Table 3 reveals that the definition of 'no vaccination' for Dose 2 in fact means the interval between a first dose and a second dose. The largest increases in incidence rates are for the Pfizer and AstraZeneca Dose 1 vaccination groups, the only cohorts compared with a true vaccination naïve control group.

Returning to Table 2, the vaccinated group and the unvaccinated groups have comparable numbers of events, but the vaccinated groups are calculated with reference to approximately half the number of person years. If we apply the incidence rates to the numbers of people in each group (at the top of Table 1), we can calculate vaccination with the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines brought about in the region of 91,000 additional serious cardiac events (euphemistically described as 'complications') compared to the no vaccination group in a little over one year. On the other hand, the Moderna group experienced over 34,000 fewer events compared with the no vaccination group, leading to an overall balance of around 56,000 additional events. How many of the individuals who had additional heart attacks, strokes, and thromboses subsequently died? The results are shocking, but after further processing we are told they are 'reassuring.'

To obscure the alarming results, the text relies not on the straight incidence rates but on hazard ratios 'adjusting for a wide range of potential confounding factors.'

It is not apparent why any adjustment was necessary. On the one hand, 'There were few differences between subgroups defined by demographic and clinical characteristics,' and on the other hand, 'we addressed potential confounding by adjusting for a wide range of demographic factors and prior diagnoses.' Were there significant differences in demographics or weren't there?

Further on, we are told that 'Subgroup analyses by age group, ethnic group, previous history of the event of interest and sex were conducted' and outcomes 'were generally similar across subgroups.' What were the potentially confounding factors that had to be adjusted for if not these? How could an incidence rate of approximately 1.9 for the Pfizer Dose 1 arterial events be adjusted to a hazard ratio of 0.9?

If an adjustment leads to the reversal of findings of this magnitude, then it must be done transpa...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

The Washington Post recently published a detailed investigation showing that childhood vaccination rates across the United States are falling sharply, particularly for measles. Fewer counties now meet the 95 percent coverage level commonly associated with herd immunity, and millions of children attend schools in communities below that threshold.

On the basics, it's true that routine childhood measles shots are among the most effective measures for keeping that particular infection at bay. But the Post's analysis fails where it matters most: it cannot explain why trust has collapsed so broadly, so persistently, and so rationally for many ordinary people.

Instead, readers are offered a familiar diagnosis. Distrust of authorities. Political polarization. Misinformation. Backlash against mandates. All of this is curiously detached from responsibility. The article describes the consequences of distrust without confronting its causes.

That omission is not accidental. It reflects a broader unwillingness among elite media and public health institutions to reckon honestly with Covid-era failures. And without that reckoning, efforts to restore vaccine confidence are unlikely to succeed.

This is not an argument against vaccines. It is an argument about credibility.

During the Covid-19 period, public health authorities repeatedly overstated certainty, minimized uncertainty, and treated legitimate scientific disagreement as a threat rather than a feature of good science.

Claims about vaccines preventing infection and transmission were presented as settled fact, not evolving hypotheses. When those claims weakened or collapsed under new evidence, they were revised quietly, without acknowledgment of error.

The same pattern appeared across other policies: masking, school closures, natural immunity, and population-level risk. Positions shifted, sometimes dramatically, but rarely with public explanation. The message conveyed—intentionally or not—was that narrative management mattered more than transparency.

This mattered because trust is cumulative. People do not evaluate each public health recommendation in isolation. They judge institutions based on patterns of behavior over time. When authorities insist they were always right, even when claims visibly change, credibility erodes.

Worse, dissent was often suppressed rather than debated. Scientists and clinicians who questioned prevailing policies—on lockdowns, school closures, or mandates—were frequently labeled as misinformation spreaders rather than engaged on the merits. Government coordination with social media platforms blurred the line between combating falsehoods and policing debate. Once that line is crossed, institutional trust does not merely decline—it inverts.

None of this requires assuming bad faith. Emergencies are hard. Decisions were made under pressure. But good faith does not excuse overstatement, nor does difficulty justify refusing retrospective evaluation.

The result of this approach is now visible in the data the Washington Post reports—but does not explain.

Evidence from Pennsylvania illustrates the point. Montgomery County, a large, affluent, highly educated Philadelphia suburb, has historically had strong vaccination uptake and robust healthcare access. It is not a place easily dismissed as anti-science or anti-medicine.

Yet my physician survey research conducted in the county during and after the pandemic tells a different story. Clinicians reported that while initial Covid vaccine uptake was high in 2021, acceptance declined sharply over time, particularly for boosters. More importantly, many physicians observed a spillover effect: growing hesitancy not only toward Covid vaccines, but toward other vaccines as well.

Patients were not primarily citing technical fears about vaccine safety. They were expressing distrust of public health authorities. They referenced shifting claims, perceived exaggeration, and the absence of acknowle...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

At the turn of the century, America held unchallengeable sway in the world, its economy the strongest and most dynamic, its military the most powerful, its globe-spanning alliances unrivalled, and its global leadership uncontested. The year 2001 seemed to be the pivot on which everything began heading south, with 9/11 serving as the most potent symbol of the all-round decline of US military power, financial muscle, societal cohesion, and global leadership.

Political gridlock domestically was accompanied by failed interventions abroad. In a parallel development pregnant with profound ramifications for the world's trajectory, China began a rapid ascent up the global power rankings on most dimensions, helped by US-led Western generosity in granting WTO membership, market access, and shift of manufacturing and production chains. The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston describes this first quarter-century of the new millennium as 'an era of folly' for America.

This is the global geopolitical landscape against which the US National Security Strategy (NSS) was published on 5 December, the seventh such document in this century and the most transactional ever. President Donald Trump's more muscular and singular approach to foreign and national security policy was already foreshadowed with his multifront assault on the central pillars of the liberal international order created in the aftermath of the Second World War under US leadership, and with the renaming of the Department of War. The 33-page NSS gives institutional form to his foreign policy.

Sent by the president to Congress, the NSS articulates the administration's national security vision and how the several elements of US power will be used in pursuit of national security goals. It is meant to bring the different elements of his international policies into some sort of a coherent strategic framework, to steer the various branches of the national security apparatus into implementing his priorities, to rally public support behind the administration's goals, to reassure friends and allies, and to deter adversaries.

It marks an explicit repudiation of the worldview of post-Cold War US administrations: 'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over' (p. 12). In his foreword, Trump describes it as 'a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history' and is made 'safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before' (p. ii).

The NSS addresses the world as Trump sees it today, not as it was in 1991. The key sentence for me is:

President Trump's foreign policy is…realistic without being 'realist,' principled without being 'idealistic,' muscular without being 'hawkish,' and restrained without being 'dovish' (p. 8).

The backdrop to this is the denunciation of the elite consensus at the Cold War's end, following which successive administrations:

lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty (p. 2).

NSS 2025 accepts the imperative to prioritise competing regions and goals in a world of limited resources, instead of presenting a comprehensive laundry list of all the good-to-have objectives. It makes the obvious and common-sense point that the principal US strategic interest is the defence of the homeland and its own hemisphere, with special emphasis on preventing extra-hemispheric powers such as China, Russia, and Iran from meddling. But it also reaffirms the need for a 'free and open Indo-Pacific' (p. 19). The region that accounts for almost half the world's GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars and one-third in nominal GDP, is critical to the world's economic development and political stability.

The Logic of Geography

The NSS should put to rest the notion that Trum...

By Michael Hurley at Brownstone dot org.

During Lent in 2022, Michael Hurley published a shorter version of the following essay in American Thinker, lamenting the betrayal of the faithful during the Covid pandemic. After four years, the silence of the bishops continues.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent for Catholics around the world. On this day, priests smear ashes on millions of foreheads while uttering some version of the words, "Remember, man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return." Perhaps this year the ritual should be reversed, with the faithful lining up to administer ashes to priests and bishops until their white surplices are covered with an unmistakable reminder of their own mortality.

Everywhere today there are hopeful signs that the political revolution traveling under the guise of Covid-19 may be faltering, but the shockwaves it sent through the Church are still reverberating and slowly widening, two years after the fact. The opening salvos of this revolution still echo in these five words:

The bishops closed the churches.

Let that sentence wash over you, slowly, and you may begin to grasp its enduring significance. Never before in human history, through centuries of war and famine and disease, has there been a worldwide closure of the Church that Christ founded to conquer death over—wait for it—the fear of death.

To understand the scope of the damage that has been done to the Church, let's begin with a thought experiment. Assume you are given the power to save the soul of one person from an eternity in Hell, but to do so, you must make martyrs and saints of every man, woman, and child now living on the face of the earth. How would you choose? If you could be assured that every life lost would rise to glory in Heaven, would you calculate the value of saving one person from Hell to exceed the value of all the days and years of life lost to the billions whose earthly lives would be cut short? Would billions and billions of days of life on earth, and all the joy and wonder and happiness they would surely contain, be worth one soul lost to an eternity in Hell?

To some, this will seem a preposterous question, because none of us can fathom eternity and many of us no longer believe in Hell. But the Church does—or at least it did until around March 2020. It was then that the Church made the wrong decision: that prolonging our lives by a few days or years (a goal that lockdowns spectacularly failed to accomplish) was worth the souls that would be lost and the long-term damage to the faith that would result from denying millions of people the sacraments as they watched their shepherds flee in a time of widespread fear.

The idea that the bishops had "no choice" but to close the churches because the government "made them" do so is pretty weak sauce. The Roman Empire banned the practice of Christianity upon pain of death for the first four centuries of the Church's history. All but one of the twelve apostles—the original bishops—were martyred for their stubborn resistance to Jewish and Roman demands that they "close the churches."

Had our bishops decided to bring communion to the chronically ill and frail elderly but invite the overwhelming majority of parishioners for whom Covid posed scant mortal danger to celebrate mass publicly, does anyone seriously believe that the same governments that kept garden centers and liquor stores open and allowed BLM protests would have resisted a united front of bishops with 1.4 billion of the world's Catholics behind them? Instead, frightened bishops in America and Europe offered not a fig leaf of resistance and, in the UK, even quietly urged the government to "compel" them to close their doors.

Christ is "the good shepherd." (John 10:11) Every bishop, standing in persona Christi, carries a shepherd's crozier as a symbol of his duty to his flock. In the Gospel of John, we learn the difference between a good shepherd and a bad one: "He who is a hireling a...

By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org.

If you haven't heard about this recent news uncovered by Nick Shirley and David, you need to. You can watch the full video documentary by clicking on the photo below. It's been watched by more than 38 million people which is dwarfed by the amount of capital from American taxpayers being fraudulently taken by fake businesses - like day care centers - "run" by Somali people. This isn't racist - it's fact.

Simple questions were posed all along the way: Where are the children? Where is all the money going?

Why did not one Somali who they interviewed have any clue what their own businesses were doing? And why were they so aggressive?

Defensive much?

In this article, I would like to focus on the meeting that took place at the end of the video. I am pretty sure it was the legislative update that took place on December 19, 2025 at the State Capitol in Minnesota. If you click on the meeting link and go to the webpage, you'll see that the first paragraph states the following:

The last few weeks have been difficult for our community in Minneapolis and around Minnesota, which has been targeted by the hateful rhetoric from Donald Trump and lawless action by his federal agents [ICE]. To be clear, slandering our Somali and Latino neighbors and violating the constitutional rights of Minnesotans as a pretense for ICE's cruel and violent enforcement actions is not about public safety. It is intended to cause fear, chaos, and division.

From where I stand as a non-conflicted objective observer with very little knowledge of Minnesota House Representatives, the above language is very inflammatory, and quite polarizing. Having watched the interaction between Nick and David and the Somali people that they tried to interview, and the knife attack on David by Somali men, I dare say that beyond inflammatory, it is pure "disinformation".

According to Nick, at this meeting, Republican members had clearly demonstrated ongoing fraud in Minnesota with data and charts as visual aids, and also who was profiting from this fraud. A paper trail - if you will - was shown to the committee members. As Nick notes, the Democrat representatives "looked into the abyss" as the data was delivered, while one in particular, Minnesota House of Representatives' Emma Greenman, defended the allegations of fraud by declaring that fraud is a non-partisan issue, and that declarations (with proof) of fraud is "not building trust."

Her official committee assignments include being Co-Vice Chair for Workforce, Labor, and Economic Development Finance and Policy, Public Safety Finance and Policy, Elections Finance and Government Operations and last but not least Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy. She is a lawyer with a B.A. in political science and an M.P.A. in "public administration."

If you look into Emma's official Minnesota House of Representatives statements from February 14th, 2025, It is clear from the text that she is very anti-Trump herself. The first heading is as follows:

"Protecting Minnesota from the Trump Administration's Harmful and Unconstitutional Actions".

She therein refers to "the daily barrage of unprecedented overreach by President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and his billionaire cabinet [that] is designed to wear Americans down and undermine our faith in democratic institutions and the rule of law".

The rule of law, eh? So what about fraud? Does fraud not involve intentional deception to gain a benefit, typically financial, prosecutable by the government under both state and federal laws?

She also refers to MAGA as an "extreme" "agenda" in the Legislative Update: from February 14, 2025.

With this agreement, we prevented the House Republicans from throwing out the votes of 21,980 Shakopee voters in service of their extreme MAGA agenda.

I want to thank every one of you who spoke up against the MAGA Republican power grab in Minnesota, and is standing up for democracy and the rule of law every d...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

In January 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that was immediately hailed as the final verdict on vitamin D: it doesn't work. The study, known as the VITAL trial, was large, well-funded, and led by respected researchers from Harvard. Its conclusion-that vitamin D supplementation did not reduce the risk of invasive cancer or major cardiovascular events-rapidly diffused across headlines, textbooks, and clinical guidelines.

But the VITAL study didn't fail because vitamin D failed. It failed because it was never designed to test the right question. This article walks through the anatomy of that failure, why it matters, and what we must fix if we are to take prevention seriously in modern medicine.

The Trial That Didn't

On the surface, VITAL looked impeccable: over 25,000 participants, randomized and placebo-controlled, testing 2000 IU of vitamin D3 daily for a median of 5.3 years. The primary endpoints were the incidence of any invasive cancer and a composite of major cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes).

But there is a foundational problem: most participants weren't vitamin D deficient to begin with. Only 12.7% had levels below 20 ng/mL, the threshold generally associated with increased risk. The mean baseline level was 30.8 ng/mL-already at or near sufficiency. It's the equivalent of testing whether insulin helps people who don't have diabetes.

Further eroding the study's contrast, participants in the placebo arm were allowed to take up to 800 IU/day of vitamin D on their own. By year 5, more than 10% of the placebo group was exceeding that limit. The intervention, in effect, became a test of high-dose vitamin D versus medium-dose vitamin D, not against a true control.

Add to that the decision to use broad, bundled endpoints like "any invasive cancer" or "major cardiovascular events" without regard to mechanisms, latency, or stage-specific progression, and the trial becomes a precision instrument for finding nothing.

The Important Real Signal They Missed

The one glimmer of benefit appeared in cancer mortality. While incidence rates were similar between groups, the vitamin D arm showed a lower rate of cancer deaths. This effect emerged only after two years of follow-up and became statistically significant once early deaths were excluded. Even more telling, among participants whose cause of death could be adjudicated with medical records (rather than death certificate codes), the benefit was stronger.

This suggests a biologically plausible mechanism: vitamin D may not prevent cancer from starting, but it may slow its progression or reduce metastasis. That theory aligns with preclinical models showing vitamin D's role in cellular differentiation, immune modulation, and suppression of angiogenesis.

And yet, VITAL buried this signal. The paper acknowledged a significant violation of the proportional hazards assumption in cancer mortality, a red flag that time-to-event models were inappropriate. Instead of adjusting with valid statistical models for non-proportional hazards, the authors sliced the data post hoc to generate a story and dismissed the result as exploratory. Meanwhile, they mentioned in passing that fewer advanced or metastatic cancers occurred in the vitamin D group-but offered no data.

How Design Choices Shape Public Understanding

The public interpretation of VITAL has been simple and sweeping: vitamin D doesn't help. That perception has reshaped policy, funding, and clinical guidance. Combined with errant policy based on acknowledged errors, It is dangerous and a risk to public health.

But what the trial actually tested was much narrower: Does high-dose vitamin D provide additional benefit in a mostly vitamin D-sufficient, highly compliant, aging American cohort already permitted to take moderate doses on their own? And does it do so within 5 years?

Given those conditions, the null result was foreordain...

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

(For the purposes of this essay, we will focus on fatal outcomes of multiple simultaneous injections, although nonfatal harms from this practice are also real and even more common.)

The Fourth Big Lie of Vaccinology - declaring multiple simultaneous injections to be safe - is a reckless and sometimes deadly false assumption that has no legitimate scientific basis.

The simultaneous administration of multiple different vaccines, especially in children, is now standard practice in the United States. It has intensified over the past couple of decades, as additional shots have been added to the bloated CDC vaccination schedules. However, this practice has never been properly investigated, nor demonstrated to be safe.

This Big Lie has been imposed onto everyday pediatric practice to allow the excessive pediatric vaccine schedule to be administered in an expedient manner for both doctors and parents.

After all, if a family adheres to the current CDC recommended pediatric vaccine schedule, a child will receive well over 70 total doses of 23 different vaccines by age 18. Who would bring their child to the pediatrician more than 70 times in eighteen years to get one shot at a time?

Spacing out shots would be the prudent approach for those choosing to vaccinate, given the complete lack of safety data regarding giving multiple shots at once, and the clear evidence of potential harm. However, it would be highly impractical.

Furthermore, it would reveal to all involved the preposterous excess of the current CDC pediatric vaccine schedule. Why on Earth does a healthy child need to be injected an average of 4 or 5 times per year between birth and their 18th birthday? Dragging one's child to the pediatrician that often would draw public attention the following facts:

unvaccinated or minimally vaccinated minority populations such as the Amish thrive, with much lower rates of autism, ADHD, and other disorders

children in the 1980s and 1990s received only a fraction of the shots on today's schedule, and they were significantly healthier than today's children

multiple other developed nations recommend only a fraction of the shots on the CDC schedule, while boasting superior pediatric and general health outcomes

But if the "experts" simply declare it "safe" to administer multiple shots at once and group those shots together in large salvos of multiple vaccinations, the whole operation becomes more feasible (not to mention less obviously excessive) for pediatricians and parents alike.

Never mind the cumulative toxicity or drug-drug interactions the children face. "Kids are resilient," remember?

The Deadly Ritual of the "Catch-Up Visit"

With 70-plus doses recommended before age 18, every so often some poor urchin is bound to fall behind with his vaccinations. But fear not. The concept of a "catch-up visit" is well established in pediatrics. In this practice, a child who is behind the official schedule is brought in to be injected with the vaccines he has not yet received, whatever the combination may be.

Vaccine zealots have heartily endorsed the "catch-up visit" for decades.

In 2002, vaccinologist Dr. Paul Offit notoriously claimed that children possess "the theoretical capacity to respond to about 10,000 vaccines at any one time." An article in the American Academy of Pediatrics' flagship journal Pediatrics, with Offit as lead author, endorsed the notion.

In 2023, the World Health Organization, in cooperation with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, GAVI, and promoted by Chelsea Clinton, started "The Big Catch Up," a worldwide program to provide the wonders of multiple simultaneous vaccinations to children worldwide.

What clinical studies have been performed verifying the safety and effectiveness of this hyper-aggressive approach? None. There are reasons for the lack of clinical studies supporting multiple simultaneous vaccinations.

The first reason, of course, is that v...