By Laura Delano at Brownstone dot org.

[This is chapter two from Laura Delano's Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, 2025). Brownstone Institute is grateful for permission to reprint.]

Not long after that argument about Maine, my parents brought me to my first therapist. Her name was Emma, and they told me that she worked with families and would be helping us. She happened to live half a mile up the street, but the three of us drove to her home office on a weekend morning for our first session. As I stepped inside the waiting room, the force of shame was so heavy on my shoulders that I nearly collapsed in upon myself.

I tightened up to keep from disappearing: shoulders to ears, arms locked, fists and jaw clenched, neck muscles contracted. I sat down and locked my gaze on the carpet until its hard patterns melted into softness. Bewildered by my parents selling me out like this, I was no longer willing to meet their eyes, nor able to.

Emma welcomed us into her office. Her voice had this warm, crackling-embers sound about it - I always think of Judi Dench when I recall her - and I was convinced it was the sound of everything wrong with the world. She had a short mop of white hair, wide hips beneath ankle-length pants, a soft stomach. The sight of her made me want to vomit. The instant her sparkling eyes made contact with mine and she smiled, I hated her.

I carry a faded snapshot of that first session in my mind: My parents, Emma, and I are sitting on chairs in a circle in her cozy office. I'm hunched in my seat, arms crossed tightly over my chest, brow furrowed. To my left, my father is wearing a worn dress shirt tucked into old jeans; he has the body language of someone unselfconscious, relaxed but attentive.

To Dad's left, my mother wears a cashmere sweater, cigarette-cut slacks, and needlepointed slip-on shoes; her arms, like mine, are crossed in front of her; she's taut and tense, mouth closed.

My most valuable artifact from that day is pure emotion, preserved in me, all these years later, like a prehistoric insect in amber: Shame radiating out from my face, despair surging within me. My throat closed, voice powerless. Panic in my chest as I felt all of their eyes home in on me like laser beams, penetrating my insides against my will.

Emma was only pretending to be kind and really wanted to control me, I felt, so I switched instantly into surveillance mode, scanning the room in self-protective sweeps, sure of what my mind was telling me: They're lying when they say this lady is going to help all of us. I know they think I'm the problem, not them.

My conviction would be reinforced in the coming days, when my mother would tell me I was to continue therapy with Emma, only moving ahead, I'd walk up the hill to see her by myself.

Not long after I started therapy, I drank alcohol for the first time. From the garage at a slumber party emerged a warm six-pack, this glistening beacon calling me toward rebellion. I watched the first can as it passed from hand to hand, Yes no yes no, do it, you can't, do it, you can't pinging about in my head. I knew that saying yes would mean the loss of something, but when I took that first sip, there was only an unfamiliar and comforting warmth in my gut.

None of us ever got anywhere close to drunk that year, but that wasn't the point. It was the meaning behind the act that mattered: breaking rules we'd been taught to never break, feeling the solidarity that arose from participating in the very things we were sure we'd never partake in. I'd duped myself by thinking that being good would help me feel worthy, but the night in the mirror had proved me wrong. Where else had I duped myself? What else had I been missing?

The quest to dismantle my moral framework continued through the summer. At mountain biking camp, I abandoned my years-long dream of having my first kiss with Harris Fowler, the boy whose heart-covered initials I'd been decorating binders with since playing on r...

By Cooper Davis at Brownstone dot org.

During a recent family vacation over lobster, I watched my "vote blue no matter who" aunt, herself a paragon of New England liberal sensibilities from a leafy suburb outside Boston, argue with her Fox News-watching, burn-it-all-down brother about recent goings-on at HHS. "Just because Fauci lied about Covid," she said, "doesn't mean all science is fake; there's something worth saving here."

Meet J.Crew-Anon: affluent, educated, professional, skeptical but not nihilistic. They still read the Times and the Journal, but also subscribe to multiple Substacks and are daily imbibers of less "safe" publishers, like Brownstone.org. They triangulate. They parse information with friends and peers, seeing fact-checkers as either dangerous or useless or both. They are more interested in steelmanning the opposition than shouting it down.

Having left one echo chamber - the legacy media consensus - they are wary of entering a new one. They know the dangers of epistemic bubbles, and they prize conversations that test their skepticism rather than simply confirm it. They can be angry, but not anarchic. They have mortgages, careers, kids, PTA meetings - and a deep distrust of institutions that used to feel unshakable.

If this archetype sounds unfamiliar, it may be because your friends and colleagues aren't comfortable enough yet to reveal the depth of their own skepticism. J.Crew-Anon thrives quietly, often hidden in plain sight, surfacing only when the cost of dissent has fallen low enough to make honesty safe.

What J.Crew-Anon represents isn't entirely new. Up until the early 2000s, the United States had a vibrant anticorporate, antiauthoritarian left that acted as a watchdog against pharmaceutical, corporate, and governmental overreach.

Ralph Nader's consumer rights campaigns, feminist health collectives publishing Our Bodies, Ourselves, and ACT UP confronting the FDA and NIH during the AIDS crisis all carried the same distrust of official reassurances, and the same heated insistence that ordinary people could see through corporate spin.

That movement didn't disappear, but it was blunted by the professionalization of NGOs, captured by the Democratic Party's neoliberal consensus, and gradually domesticated into policy shops. But its sensibility never dissipated. What we are seeing now is its reemergence in unexpected form. J.Crew-Anon revives that watchdog instinct, this time distributed across suburbia, podcasts, Substack feeds, and social networks, rather than marches and union halls.

As of 2025, what was previously called the mainstream media is no longer mainstream. A growing swath of ordinary folks - educated, suburban, professional - have quietly lost confidence in legacy information outlets, and the institutions and industries they have long served.

Speaking as executive director of Inner Compass Initiative, I can say that the movement of which we are a part is made up of completely normal, mostly non-ideological people, looking critically at the mental health system and working towards its reform, along with building parallel frameworks of succor and support.

Many of us have learned the hard way that the experts don't always know everything, but there's not a single person among our ranks who feels all credentialed expertise is worthless, or that non-experts are right by default.

Among us are doctors, lawyers, town planners, small business owners, pilots, CEOs and teachers. We are indistinguishable from other broad demographics, such as "people who prefer cats more than dogs" or "people who like spicy food." But now that broad outlook - distrust in legacy authority of all sorts - is spreading.

J.Crew-Anon exists not just because so many narratives once dismissed as "conspiracies" have turned out to be true. The second-order effect is that denial or minimization of these "inconvenient truths" is no longer a prerequisite for being invited to the neighborhood BBQ. Over the last 12-18 months, the so...

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org.

In a recently published study, researchers from the Czech Republic report a rare, national-level analysis of Covid vaccines and all-cause mortality. Anyone with a critical mind should at least read the exemplary summary by Tomas Fürst on Brownstone and carefully study the figure.

Toward the end of the Brownstone article, Fürst writes:

"Yet, in the Mirror of Erised above, you can see that the vaccine may appear to be 80% effective, even against Covid-unrelated deaths! Still, we are not aware of any vaccine effectiveness studies that tried to correct for this huge HVE [healthy vaccinee effect, E.S.]. This means that all claims of Covid vaccine effectiveness since the beginning of the mass vaccination campaign must be revised.

The vaccine's true efficacy against death from Covid may have been zero, or even negative; we simply don't know."

I could not agree more. Repeated model-based claims about millions of saved life-years cannot be reconciled with simple mortality statistics - for example, a contrast of Israel with Sweden in the winter of 2020-2021 or elementary worldwide calculations. Having failed to penetrate the censorship machinery of biomedical journals, I devoted numerous posts to the healthy vaccinee bias and a method to remove it.

However, just a few weeks after the Czech study was published, I finally published a peer-reviewed paper on the (corrected) effectiveness of a Covid vaccine. The road to publication was not easy. Even medRxiv refused to post a preprint on the basis of a ridiculous excuse. ("It is not a clinical research article with new data.")

Using published data from Qatar, I was able to remove two key biases, one of which was the healthy vaccinee effect. The other bias, formally called immortal time, arose from excluding early events in the vaccinated, a common practice of vaccine effectiveness studies. Unfortunately, it is too technical to explain here. Removing that bias reduced estimates of effectiveness by a lot - sometimes from over 95 percent to less than 50 percent - and suggested early negative effectiveness.

As I explained in a book (chapter 37), the healthy vaccinee bias cannot be removed by an exact method, so we have two options: to accept the bias or to try to remove it by an imperfect method. In my paper, I justified and applied three correction factors to estimates of vaccine effectiveness. It is called sensitivity analysis.

Under every correction, the effectiveness against a severe outcome of two early variants was negative in the first month and near zero, at best, by the time full immunity was reached. The original paper reported 100% effectiveness…

Immortal time and healthy vaccinee are not the only biases in observational studies of Covid vaccines. At least two more should be mentioned:

Vaccinated people were less likely to be tested for Covid than their unvaccinated counterparts, and therefore, they were less likely to be classified as cases of severe Covid and Covid deaths. In the taxonomy of biases, it is called information bias. We have unquestionable evidence that the bias was operating in Israel - "The Pfizer laboratory" - during the first vaccination campaign. This bias has probably affected studies from many countries.

Another source of bias was the timing of the vaccination campaigns, which often coincided with a Covid wave. As a result, the time-at-risk in an unvaccinated status was concentrated at the time of rising infection rates, whereas the time-at-risk in vaccinated status was concentrated at the phase of the decline. It is called confounding by time trends in the risk of the outcome. A few studies tried to prevent this bias by matching on calendar time; many did not.

A perfect storm of biases was operating at that time, and, as Fürst writes, "The true value of the vaccine effectiveness can only be derived from prospective randomized studies."

I am wondering whether we will ever see them.

Will the FDA continue to authorize new ...

By Laura Delano at Brownstone dot org.

[This is chapter one from Laura Delano's Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, 2025). Brownstone Institute is grateful for permission to reprint.]

It happened in front of the mirror as I brushed my teeth one Thursday evening. The year was 1996, and I was thirteen. Outside, the trees were thick and verdant, still weeks away from morphing into the polychromatic splendor of fall. Eighth grade had just begun, which meant goodbye to summer sports camps, mornings at the country club pool, beach days under the Maine sun.

I was now faced with the upcoming season of national squash tournaments, schoolwork, and my new responsibilities as incoming middle school president, which included standing with our headmistress each Friday morning to lead assembly. My bones buzzed with this unfamiliar social power I possessed: elected leader, role model, student of character. I wasn't sure which feeling to trust in my gut, the thrill or the terror.

There I stood at the sink: thin arms, broad shoulders, lean, muscular legs covered with picked scabs and their purple consequences. My dirty-blond hair, chopped close to my chin, was flattened on my head from spending the evening in a baseball hat. I was aswim in my favorite T-shirt, the one that said "Hockey Is Life: The Rest Is Just Details." Over my underwear, I wore my favorite pair of boys' polka-dot boxer shorts.

What happened next as I watched myself in the mirror that night still feels close enough to describe like it's happening now: The edges of my vision start to blur. My arms become gangly foreign objects that seem to have sealed themselves to my shoulder sockets. My eyes lock straight ahead against my will, taking me down a narrowing pastel tunnel that morphs to gray and then black. All that's left is my visage in the glass.

I stare, leaning closer over the sink, riveted by the sight of my face, my eyes. This face, these eyes. That girl's face and her eyes. A stranger now in front of me, someone I don't recognize.

Who is she?

For a brief moment, I'm curious.

And then: terror grabs my ankles, shooting up my legs, through my gut, up the sides of my throat to the back of my skull. I disintegrate into a million pieces, floating, fuzzy, disembodied in space, feet gone, nothing locking me to the earth, no legs, no arms, no belly, nothing: I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.

There is only the tunnel through the dark to this stranger. Her brow is furrowed, her mouth agape, those blue eyes wide open with black bullets at their centers.

Why is she staring at me? I blink to see if this unfamiliar girl will go away, but she doesn't.

Eventually I notice that when I move my hand, she moves hers. When I turn my chin to the left, to the right, she goes right, then left. Somehow, I'm not sure how, I can see that we're connected. I struggle to make sense of what this means, to differentiate what's real from what isn't: Okay, this glass is a mirror, this girl is my reflection, she is me, I am her. But something feels fundamentally different.

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? The question loops on repeat until the words become meaningless sounds.

I am no longer the girl who loved to play board games against herself, or the one who created stacks of index cards on which she'd write facts about her favorite animals that she'd obsessively study until memorized. The one who swelled with pride each time she beat a boy on the tennis court, and who trained several times a week to get herself a top ten national squash ranking.

The girl who looked forward to her afternoon ritual of grabbing a hunk of Cheddar cheese and a hard pretzel after practice before sitting down to do homework while listening to Billy Joel. I had no idea who that girl was anymore. All I knew was that she was someone else.

I left the bathroom in a daze, passing walls decorated with framed Christmas card photos of my two younger sisters and me in color coordination; a black-and-whi...

By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

When persecuting his domestic political opponents, Mussolini frequently did so in what by today's dictatorial standards was a surprising, genteel manner. He would send them to live in remote villages far from their homes, often in the poverty-stricken center and south of Italy.

There, while constrained by daily check-ins with the police, and a mostly enforced ban on leaving the village, they were - depending on the humors of the local podestà - often otherwise free to live their lives, receive family visits, and in some cases, bring along their wives and young children to share in the experience.

One such confinee, as such people were called, was the Turin-born physician, painter, political activist, and writer Carlo Levi, who in 1935 was sent to the village of Aliano in the province of Matera, part of a larger historic region of Lucania, known for extreme poverty during its long history of violent resistance to Bourbon and, after 1860, when the Italian government attempted to impose their control on the territory.

Nine years later, as German troops roamed the streets of a suddenly post-Mussolini Florence looking to detain and torture political dissidents much like him, a hiding Levi produced a lightly fictionalized account of his time in Aliano. Eighty years after its publication, that book, Christ Stopped in Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli), is still widely viewed as a classic work of contemporary Italian and European literature.

In addition to its often stunningly beautiful prose, the key to its success lies, in my view, in the way that Levi flips the script on the assumptions underlying the authoritarian social order forged by Mussolini in the years after his 1922 March on Rome.

The great majority of the confinees in Mussolini's Italy were, like Levi, products of the country's industrialized and presumptively more sophisticated urban north. In exiling them to the "savage" south away, in the case of the intellectuals from their cafés and galleries, and in the case of the union leaders and labor agitators, from their workers' clubs and meetings, Mussolini sought to psychologically break them.

He was saying to them in effect, "Think you have a better idea of how to run the country? Great, go see how that works out with the illiterate and violent peasants of the mezzogiorno."

Levi, however, subverted the plan by deploying one of the weapons that ruling authoritarians most fear: empathy. While never resorting to condescension, nor denying his own identity and social extraction, he simply regarded his new neighbors with an equanimous and loving gaze, viewing them on their terms, and in the light of the historical and geographical realities that had shaped their destinies.

He had been sent to one of the poorest places in Europe, one where, as the title of the book suggests, not even the basic ideas and values of Western culture had supposedly ever penetrated, and he found not the expected deplorables, but imperfect people like those up north shaped, however, by a different and quite rationally coherent set of civilizational imperatives.

When a book moves me deeply, I often seek to visit the places portrayed in its pages. I recently had the good fortune of spending an afternoon rambling around the streets of Aliano, visiting houses where Levi lived during his confinement, sitting in the small square where he listened to Fascist harangues with his fellow villagers, and gazing out on the stark and steep clay mountainsides he rendered so beautifully in his paintings and by way of words in the book.

I finished up with a visit to the graveyard located on a hill above the main part of the town, where he would seek relief from the summer heat by lying down in half-dug graves and would request to be buried upon his death in 1975.

As I moved toward the gates of this cemetery in this still forgotten and still quite poor corner of Europe, filled according to most available statistical measure...

By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org.

Almost one-third of government schools nationwide are now surveilling the mental health of students. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a bill to bring "universal mental health screening" to two million Illinois students as part of his Children's Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. But this rescue effort will ravage many students and is a warning shot to parents across the nation.

Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Shrier warned that the new Illinois law will mean "tens of thousands of Illinois kids get shoved into the mental health funnel and convinced they are sick. Many or most will be false positives."

If politicians want to help kids, they must recognize how government schools systematically undermine students' mental health.

The Covid school lockdowns nuked the mental health of millions of young Americans. A 2024 JAMA Original Investigation found that between 2018 and 2021, young people saw an almost 300% increase in the number of hospital emergency visits for eating disorders and suicidal ideation. Suicide attempts increased 250% during that time. Depression and anxiety skyrocketed among youth from the start of the pandemic, but politicians and policymakers ignored the mental carnage that Covid policies inflicted.

A 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that 44% of high school students said they "persistently felt sad or hopeless in the past year." Females were almost twice as likely to be depressed, with 57% "persistently felt sad and hopeless" versus 31% of male students. School shutdowns dismally failed to thwart the spread of Covid. After schools reopened, students were hassled to comply with idiotic mask mandates that did nothing except multiply anxiety.

Schools are subverting students' mental health by endlessly hectoring them to doubt or despise their own bodies. These school antics reached epidemic level even before the start of the Covid pandemic. In 2019, the state of Maryland issued regulations to promote "viewing each student's" "gender identity and expression" as "valuable." Government officials and political appointees arrogated to themselves the prerogative to redefine gender in the state of Maryland.

Montgomery County, the largest school system in the state, announced that it would choose books for the curriculum "through an 'LGBTQ+ Lens' and ask whether books 'reinforced or disrupted' 'stereotypes,' 'cisnormativity,' and 'power hierarchies,'" according to a brief filed at the Supreme Court by parents who successfully challenged the school system.

That brief also noted that "teachers are told to frame disagreement with [pro-LGBTQ] ideas as 'hurtful,' and to counter with examples of 'men who paint their nails' or 'wear dresses.'" The goal is to instill in children "a new perspective not easily contravened by their parents," as the county school board admitted.

The indoctrination produced a 582% increase in the number of kids self-identifying as "non-binary" in Montgomery County schools. "Disrupting children's thinking" has been so successful that almost half of the students identified themselves as non-binary. But non-binary kids are far more likely to suffer mental illness. One survey found that more than half of transgender and non-binary youth considered committing suicide in 2022.

That has not stopped other school systems from openly or covertly campaigning to sway children to repent or revolt from how they were born.

Schools have bludgeoned kids with "Chicken Little - The Sky is Falling!" environmental propaganda for decades.

The result, according to the American Psychological Association, is that 58% of American youth are "very or extremely worried about climate change" and 43% said "climate change impacted their mental health." Harvard Medical Magazine reports that for many young people, "worry over threats of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, and other symptoms."

Schoo...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

[Book review of How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccine by Dr. Peter Gøtzsche (Skyhorse, 2025)]

Over 30 years of studying and writing about drug policy, and documenting the fascinating machinations of regulators, drug companies, medical experts, and corporate spokespeople, I have often found myself staring into the dark hole of epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. Basically, when we say we "know" something, what does that even mean?

If one were to ask me, "How trustworthy or complete is our knowledge base underpinning the effects of prescription drugs or vaccines?" you might find my answer impertinent:

"If you want the real truth about drugs, don't ask doctors - ask lawyers."

Which is to say, the medical world is only able to deliver us so much truth; to go deeper where true knowledge lies, you have to employ law and philosophy, in an arena where you can ask real questions and question answers.

The world of clinical trials and medical regulators can put on a good show, even though many of us can see through the performative regulation and performative ghost-managed "science" designed to reassure investors and bamboozle doctors while utterly failing to provide information that's meaningful to patients. Rarely does the medical system slip off its armour of hubris to seek out true epistemological gold. If you think you already have the real truth, why would you search for any further?

In many examples over the last few decades, I have noticed that the rigour of the courtroom remains one of the best tools we have to scrutinize the validity and reliability of clinical evidence, understand its limits, and challenge the authority of experts and regulators. Establishing knowledge about drug effects is not a popularity contest.

Most of us would agree that information on the likelihood of expected drug effects should be assessed by the cleanest, most unbiased, and rigorous studies humans can devise.

Epistemology reminds us that scientific knowledge is provisional and fallible. In the context of drugs, it means acknowledging that what we believe to be true - such as a drug's level of safety or efficacy - may change with new evidence or reinterpretation of existing data. This humility is vital to prevent dogmatic adherence to outdated or incomplete information. Sadly, it often takes a courtroom, high stakes, and tons of money to get under the layers of performative 'science.'

Those thoughts came to mind after reading a new book by the Danish physician and researcher, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, a giant among skeptics whom I've nicknamed the Dauntless Dane. He's a fearless, relentless truth-seeker whose penetrating blue eyes seem to look straight into your soul when he speaks.

He's frequently accused of being arrogant and unrelenting, but one thing is clear: He's never one to back down from a fight, and he's usually on the right side. Not one to shy away from difficult truths and bow to industry (and legal) pressure, his intellectual heft has been aimed at tackling important public health questions, such as the value of mammography, or evaluating the harms of psychiatric drugs.

Over a decade ago, I became aware of his work in mammography and interviewed him for my book, Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease. I interacted with him frequently when researching and writing a book on the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization he was fundamental in creating, and by whose hand he was tarnished and thrown to the dogs. (that saga is thoroughly covered in several of his recent books).

I have seen the Dauntless Dane many times take a battering in the ring and can attest that beneath his formidable exterior is a mind of relentless clarity and dedication to truth.

His newest book, How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccines (Skyhorse, 2025), stands as a fierce indictment of...

By Bruce W. Davidson at Brownstone dot org.

With over 30,000 reader reviews on Amazon, Michael Crichton's bestselling sci-fi novel Jurassic Park (first published in 1990) has become a cultural sensation, spawning a series of successful movies, one of which is in cinemas in Japan as I write. Yet despite this dino-disaster movie popularity, most people have failed to heed the warning Crichton makes clear in many of his novels about the terrible dangers of modern technology - especially biotechnology and genetic engineering.

As Jurassic Park's Ian Malcolm puts it, "genetic power is far more potent than atomic power" and potentially even more destructive. That destructive power manifested itself on a global scale during the Covid disaster, precipitated both by an apparently bioengineered pathogen and the genetically engineered injection widely promoted to combat it.

For a long time, Crichton's novels and films depicted catastrophes caused by technology going berserk and beyond the control of its human creators. For instance, in his 1973 movie Westworld, Crichton's story depicted an interactive amusement park replicating an American Old West town, with humanoid robots. To the consternation of the programmers, the robots eventually escape their control and commit brutal murders of many customers in the park.

However, these destructive robots are simply artificial technological simulations. The mayhem in Crichton's tales gets even worse when the natural world is involved. In Crichton's view, the world of nature is far more complicated and uncontrollable, making the destructive consequences of human attempts at manipulation all but inevitable.

Crichton declares his stance about this explicitly in his introduction to the 2002 novel Prey, which is about biology-based nanotechnology. He explains, "The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do," which therefore is a "powerful argument for caution."

Continuing in that vein, he makes an astonishing prediction: "Sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self-replicating entities into the environment."

Gain-of-function viral bioengineering and self-replicating mRNA vaccines delivered by lipid nanoparticles have now made this forecast a reality.

Crichton's theme is not the usual sci-fi disaster trope about the human race misusing scientific advances for war or other evil ends. His point is that both highly complex technological systems and the biological world are inherently uncontrollable and tend toward chaotic breakdown, regardless of our attempts to keep them under control.

Crichton drives this point home in a number of ways. Many chapters in Jurassic Park are titled "Control" as a way to make his theme explicit. The people sitting in control centers on the dinosaur island only have an illusion of control, which disappears when the computer fails or unexpected things happen.

The entrepreneur who planned and runs the island, John Hammond, keeps reassuring people around him that there is "absolutely no problem on the island." In response, the mathematician Malcolm (obviously speaking for Crichton) calls Hammond a "great fool" for his overconfidence and calls the island "an accident waiting to happen." In one of his spontaneous mini-lectures, Malcolm debunks "the grand vision of science…the dream of total control."

Another problem looming large in the story is that of human ignorance about nature. Even the dinosaur experts do not really know much about them. Their knowledge is limited, based on skeletal remains and speculation. For example, the dinosaurs turn out to be much faster than expected, so the devices used to control them are too slow.

In addition, the paleo...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

On 23 August 2025, award-winning science journalist Robert Whitaker, founder of the evidence-based Mad in America website, published a very important article:

"Not even the unborn are safe from psychiatric harm: Medical organizations and the media dismiss the large body of research telling of fetal harm from exposure to antidepressants during pregnancy."

I summarize here Bob's detailed article, adding my own thoughts and explanations about the issues.

On July 21, the FDA convened a panel on antidepressants in pregnancy, with a focus on possible harms to the fetus from exposure to the drugs.

The panelists' brief presentations, and their plea for informed consent, did not sit well with medical organizations. They issued statements denouncing the panel as biased and misinformed; declared that the evidence showed that SSRIs and SNRIs are effective and safe treatments for prenatal depression; and claimed that the real concern was untreated depression. Major media echoed uncritically this flawed and erroneous expert consensus in their reporting on the panel.

The professional organizations betrayed the public's right to know. They were putting their guild interests - protecting their prescribing practices and belief in the efficacy and lack of harms of antidepressants - ahead of their duty to provide an honest basis for informed consent. As detailed below, they misled the media, and the media in turn misled the public, in both cases very seriously so.

One of the panelists, Michael Levin, concluded that since serotonin is important for embryonic development, "manipulating its use by cells with SSRIs is very, very likely to cause certain kinds of defects."

Animal experiments have proved him right. Fetal exposure to SSRIs leads to altered brain development, numerous risks to fetal health, and deficits in behavior after birth. At birth, fetal SSRI exposure in rodents is associated with low birth weight, persistent pulmonary hypertension, increased risk of cardiomyopathy, and increased postnatal mortality.

After birth, such exposure is associated with delayed motor development, reduced pain sensitivity, disrupted juvenile play, fear of new things, and a higher vulnerability of affective disorders (such as anhedonia-like behavior). These behaviors are regarded as signs of anxiety and depression in animals.

With the animal studies showing also an increased risk for miscarriage, pre-term birth, and congenital malformations, the first wave of studies in humans focused on these concerns, in addition to low birth weight and persistent pulmonary hypertension. This research produced an abundance of findings that the risk of such adverse events is elevated with fetal exposure to SSRIs in comparison to healthy controls.

A fair number of studies tell of how in utero exposure to SSRIs alters brain development in humans and lead to other harms. For example, a study by Kaiser Permanente of Northern California of 82,170 pregnant women showed that if the depression was treated with counseling, the risk of a pre-term delivery was reduced by 18%, whereas treatment with an antidepressant increased it by 31%. In both cases, there was a dose-response relationship.

Another harm is the neonatal abstinence syndrome, which is common, e.g. it occurred in 30% of 60 newborns exposed to SSRIs in utero. Researchers have published an extensive list of abstinence symptoms, which includes jitteriness, poor muscle tone, weak cry, abnormal crying, respiratory distress, seizure, abnormal behavior, sleep abnormalities, poor feeding, vomiting, uncoordinated sucking, and lethargy.

In a study using the World Health Organization's database for adverse drug effects, researchers classified 84% of the reported abstinence symptoms as serious.

The Doubt Industry at Work

The rodent studies, which were not confounded, clearly showed how fetal exposure to SSRIs regularly leads to maladaptive adult rodents. Correspondingly, in comparison wit...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

When Demetre Daskalakis resigned as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, his letter to leadership carried a tone of finality and moral conviction. "Enough is enough," he declared, explaining that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s leadership had made it impossible for him to continue.

The letter has been praised as principled, but when read closely it is less a defense of science than a portrait of the very rhetorical habits that drove the public away from CDC in the first place: appeals to authority, catastrophic predictions, ad hominem attacks, and factual distortions.

Consider his charge that he can no longer serve in an environment that "treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health."

This is a false dichotomy. It frames the choice as binary: either one accepts CDC's "scientific reality," or one is accused of designing policies to harm. Yet the last five years have shown what most Americans already know: what CDC has called "science" has often been neither transparent nor replicable, but political judgment dressed in a white coat.

He accuses the new HHS of narrative enforcement, when, in reality, CDC has become infamous for the same partly on his watch. Lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates were not the inevitable products of neutral science - they were policy choices, frequently contradicted by the very data the CDC refused to release. Kennedy did not cause that collapse of trust. Power overreach and failed policy did.

Still, Daskalakis appeals to institutional sanctity: "unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC." But the claim that CDC represents "gold standard science" rings hollow.

The agency's failures are well documented: contaminated Covid tests that delayed early detection, failure to use standard qRT-PCR to control for false positives, shifting guidance on masks that left the public whiplashed, withheld vaccine safety data buried in VAERS and VSD, and FOIA evasions that stonewalled independent scrutiny. To describe this record as "gold standard science" is an appeal to authority wholly unsupported by the evidence.

The catastrophism in his letter is striking but rings hollow. He warns that Kennedy's policies will "bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer." He's pretending that Kennedy has said he wants no vaccines for anyone. This is a combined fallacy: false dichotomy and slippery slope. Questioning the safety of excipients, the timing, number, or necessity of vaccines does not condemn the country to Darwinian misery.

In fact, mortality from infectious diseases like measles, pertussis, and diphtheria had already declined long before mass vaccination, thanks to sanitation, nutrition, and reduced exposure to livestock reservoirs. The fact of loss of protection due to waning immunity is not found in his resignation.

Balanced debate about risks and benefits does not mean "returning to the dark ages." It means practicing science as it should be - open, skeptical, and transparent and will full accountability on scientific claims.

At points, the rhetoric becomes openly hostile. ACIP members are dismissed as "people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor," and Kennedy himself is cast as an "authoritarian leader." These are ad hominem attacks, not arguments. They dismiss individuals rather than engage with data or reasoning.

I've worked with Secretary Kennedy long enough to know him as a sensitive, thoughtful, non-reactionary, considerate leader. He is so considerate it can at times nearly irk his underlings who would like to see him come to decisions faster. But that's because they have already made up their minds. Kennedy works arbitrarily and uses contrarianism -...