By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org.

The following is the result of joint work with Jaroslav Janosek, Tadeas Frycak, and Robert Straka.

Since the registration trials of the Covid-19 vaccines, there have been no randomized studies to track the efficacy of these vaccines. The virus kept mutating and the convalescent fraction of the population has been growing. Thus, the original efficacy figures reported in the registration trials – dubious to start with – were clearly not valid when the mass vaccination campaign started in early 2021. Moreover, in the meantime we learned that the registration trials tested a different product than the one used in the mass vaccination campaign. This cast further doubt on the advertised 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection.

The Israel 2021 summer wave of infections clearly demonstrated to the whole world that the "vaccines" do not protect against symptomatic infection in any meaningful way. Consequently, the goal posts were moved and the authorities started claiming that the "vaccines" may not protect against infection but they protect against severe course of infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid. However, there were (and there still are) no data from randomized trials to support this causal claim.

This embarrassing gap in evidence was filled by a trove of papers that estimated the effectiveness of the "vaccines" from observational data. Most of these studies claimed the vaccine effectiveness was very high, often close to 100%. Rogue governments all over the world used these studies to force people into vaccination.

Readers of this forum know very well that observational data are loaded with the so-called Healthy Vaccinee Effect. This is a type of indication bias that originates from healthy people having easier access to the vaccine. For example, people on their deathbed are usually not vaccinated, which means that deaths tend to concentrate in the unvaccinated group, making the vaccinated group much "healthier."

At the same time, those frailest individuals who are close to the end of their lives are also those most susceptible to die from/with Covid. Healthy Vaccinee Effect (HVE) thus causes observational studies to vastly overestimate vaccine effectiveness against any endpoint (and vastly overestimate vaccine safety as well). The now legendary paper by Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, and Vinay Prasad showed that the reported 95% effectiveness of Covid vaccines against Covid-related death in Israel in 2021 was entirely due to HVE. In other words, had HVE been removed, the true vaccine effectiveness would have been zero. I still can't figure out how they got this published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

We first noticed HVE in the middle of 2021 when Angelika Bazalova – an investigative journalist – had the brilliant idea to FOIA her way to the records on all-cause mortality of the clients of several health insurance companies in the Czech Republic. Readers (with an AI translator from Czech) can still see our initial confusion as we were reporting the data and proposing possible explanations (one of the articles was titled "The elixir of youth"). After some time, we made sense of all the data and reported it in a paper for the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and in a further paper in a Polish journal.

My original conclusion that "this paper invalidates all estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on observation data" was changed to "In view of the presence of HVE, the baseline difference in the frailty of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in periods without COVID-19 must be taken into account when estimating COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness from observational data." But that is the Newspeak we all had to learn during the past years in order to get anything published in official journals.

Since then, we have been trying to explain HVE to medical professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public. It has been frustrating. Most people think that the v...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

When was the last time your doctor actually examined you? I do not mean when someone checked your blood pressure, copied your medication list, looked at your laboratory results, or listened briefly through a shirt before returning to the computer. I mean examined you. Looked at you. Watched you breathe. Felt your pulse. Looked at your eyes. Examined your neck. Listened carefully to your heart and lungs. Palpated your abdomen. Watched you walk. Noticed the color of your skin, the movement of your hands, the expression on your face, and the thousand other small pieces of information that a human body offers to someone who has learned how to observe it.

For most of the history of medicine, this was not an optional ritual performed before ordering the "real tests." This was medicine. Today, increasingly, it is treated as something quaint, inefficient, or unnecessary.

I have spent most of my professional life taking care of very sick people. Critical care is one of the most technologically intensive areas of medicine ever created. I love technology. I have watched mechanical ventilators breathe for patients who could no longer breathe for themselves. I have used ultrasound, CT imaging, sophisticated hemodynamic monitoring, extracorporeal technologies, molecular diagnostics, and laboratory measurements that physicians a generation before me could only have dreamed about.

I would never want to return to a world without these tools. But after decades at the bedside, I have also learned something that becomes more obvious, not less, with experience: technology is most powerful when it extends the physician's senses. It becomes dangerous when it persuades the physician that those senses are no longer necessary.

Experienced clinicians understand something that is remarkably difficult to teach in a lecture hall or classroom. Sometimes you walk into a room and know immediately that something is wrong. You may not yet know what it is, but you know it before the laboratory does. The patient is breathing differently. His skin looks different. She answers a question a fraction of a second more slowly than she did several hours earlier. Posture, speech, facial expression, respiratory effort, or level of attention changes. None of these observations is magical. They are data, collected by a biological instrument trained through thousands and thousands of encounters: the physician.

When I round in an intensive care unit (ICU), I can learn an enormous amount before touching the computer. I can see whether a patient is fighting the ventilator. I can hear secretions from the doorway. I can see accessory muscles contracting. I can recognize when someone who looked reasonably comfortable earlier suddenly looks exhausted. I can see peripheral perfusion, diaphoresis, agitation, abdominal distension, or a subtle change in mental status. None of this means I should ignore the arterial blood gas, the chest radiograph, the CT scan, or the monitor. Of course I need them. The mistake is believing that because those measurements are more technologically sophisticated, they are necessarily more real than what is happening directly in front of me.

Medicine once began with the patient and proceeded toward testing. Increasingly, it begins with testing and eventually works its way back toward the patient. Abraham Verghese and colleagues have described this inversion of the diagnostic process, in which clinicians may encounter an image or electronic representation of a patient before encountering the patient himself. That change sounds subtle. It is not. Once the CT scan, laboratory panel, consultant note, medication list, and previous diagnoses have entered our minds, we no longer approach the patient without preconceptions. The data have already told us what we are supposed to see.

This is one reason the physical examination should never be reduced to nostalgia. Its value is not that physicians once carried black bags and ...

By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.

During a bombshell Senate hearing last week, CIA officer, Jim Erdman III testified under oath that the CIA's scientific analysts determined that the Covid pandemic started from a lab leak, but their scientific conclusions were hidden from Congress and the American public, in what Erdman called "a coverup."

"Public policy would have been very different had the American public been made aware that a virus from a lab in China was going to serve as the foundation for an Emergency Use Authorization of mRNA products being mandated by the former administration," Erdman said, questioning the validity of the Covid vaccine approval process.

Erdman also indicted Tony Fauci, the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), for inserting himself into the Intelligence Community's (IC) assessment of the Covid origins, on two documented occasions. In both instances, Fauci steered IC discussion toward a natural origin and away from declaring that the pandemic started from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which Fauci had funded via US government grants.

"Dr. Anthony Fauci influenced the IC's analytic process and COVID origin's findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated Subject Matter Experts (SME), public health officials, and scientists. This included the authors of the paper 'The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2' and other public health experts and scientists who have been in his orbit for 20+ years, many of whom have and did receive funding from NIAID, as well as scientists working under IC contract. This contradicts Dr. Fauci's 2024 testimony to Congress, when he answered 'not to my knowledge' when asked if he had briefed any intel agency concerning viral research."

— Testimony of James E. Erdman III before the US Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee

Such explosive charges—a CIA coverup, Fauci's complicity, and the misguided approval of Covid vaccines—should have ignited a media inferno; instead we got a cold frost. No front-page headline from the New York Times, no angry Washington Post editorial, no story of horror from NPR. And frozen silence from Science Magazine, Nature, Scientific American, and The Atlantic. Not even an icy tweet.

Now why is that? The answer is rather obvious.

From the pandemic's beginning these media outlets have promoted the fairy tale that lab accident talk is paranoid conspiracy theory and anyone questioning the efficacy and safety of Covid vaccines is a lunatic who hates science, the laws of physics, and arithmetic taught in kindergarten. Evidence to the contrary, such as a CIA official testifying under oath to the Senate, leaves these writers only two options to preserve both the narrative and their own threadbare journalistic credibility:

1. Knock it down – find someone willing to call newly uncovered facts a "conspiracy theory" and dash out your narrative enforcing news piece.

2. Hard ignore – pretend newly uncovered facts don't exist, keep your powder dry, and pray like hell the public gets distracted by oil prices and foreign conflict.

Erdman was too credible for legacy media to skewer, and his testimony forced them to pick the second option.

A week after he testified, not a single reporter has managed to float a flimsy critique that aims to dent Erdman's story with rumors from unnamed sources that he once brushed up against an intern in the CIA's halls or stole a stapler from the agency's office supply closet. Nothing even from the downtrodden Rolling Stone which only exists because people now on Medicare have faint memories that this corpse of a magazine once published news with a faint regard for accuracy.

Nonetheless, I get up every morning, and after dropping my daughter off at school, sit in a café and scroll though the New York Times and Washington Post, reading as many stories as I can in the hour it takes me to down two cups of coffee. I do this bec...

By Yaffa Shir-Raz at Brownstone dot org.

On February 28, 2021, Israel's Ministry of Health alerted health authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to an emerging cardiac safety signal following the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.

The warning came just over two months after Israel had launched one of the fastest vaccination campaigns in the world, placing the country at the forefront of the global rollout.

That day, the Ministry informed the European Medicines Agency that it was investigating a "safety signal of myocarditis/peri-myocarditis in the younger population (16–30 years old)" and had already received reports of around 40 cases. A CDC internal tasking memo from the same day recorded that Israel was seeing "a large number of reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people," and was seeking contacts at the CDC and FDA to discuss the issue. The message was marked "Importance: High."

Three days later, Dr. Roee Singer, Deputy Director of Epidemiology at Israel's Ministry of Health, wrote directly to the CDC: "We are seeing a large number of myocarditis and pericarditis cases in young individuals soon after Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. We would like to discuss the issue with a relevant expert at CDC."

It was, in every sense, a "Houston, we have a problem" moment.

The alarm had been sounded. But what, exactly, had Israeli health officials seen that prompted it? And when, and how, was that warning communicated to physicians and the public?

Our newly published study in EXCLI Journal discloses and analyzes an internal Israeli Ministry of Health pharmacovigilance dataset that had never been made public. The dataset was provided to us by a whistleblower whose identity we are protecting. The file itself was titled, in Hebrew, "Reports of Hospitalizations and Deaths to Pfizer," and contains detailed case-level reports documented by the Ministry of Health during the vaccination campaign.

The record was not reconstructed years later, after vaccine-associated myocarditis had become an established safety concern. It was being built in real time as the signal emerged.

The dataset provided to us comprised eight cumulative versions, all sharing an original creation date of March 25, 2021. The record was updated repeatedly for more than a year as new cases were added and existing reports were revised with additional clinical information. The final version extends through May 9, 2022.

Already on March 25, just over three weeks after Israel first sounded the international alarm, the record contained 157 hospitalization reports and 46 death reports. Sixty-five of the hospitalization reports involved myocarditis or pericarditis.

By the final version of the dataset, myocarditis or pericarditis appeared in 250 of 531 hospitalization reports, nearly half. Among patients under 30, it appeared in 151 of 211 reports, more than 70%.

The dataset has no population denominator, so it cannot tell us how frequently these events occurred among vaccinated people, and the reports themselves cannot establish causality. However, these were not simply reports sitting in a passive reporting system.

They documented serious events involving hospitalizations and deaths, with detailed clinical information compiled into an internal Ministry of Health record, updated over time, and reported to Pfizer for assessment. Their inclusion in this record and transmission to Pfizer indicate that the cases were considered sufficiently temporally or clinically relevant to vaccination to warrant pharmacovigilance documentation and assessment, even though causality had not been established. The Ministry itself had already identified and reported a cardiac safety signal, and the reports continued to accumulate after that warning was issued.

We analyzed the reported events, reconstructed the communication timeline, and examined when and how the signal was communicated to health professionals and the public. To enable independent examination and reproduction of our analyses, we publishe...

By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

On April 29, 2020 as the College was beginning its discussion of whether it should reopen for in-person classes in the fall of that same year, I submitted the following post to the Faculty Listserv.

I thought some of you might be interested in yesterday's statistics from the CDC regarding total Covid fatalities for various age tranches of the US population to date.

The 15-24 age cohort—which presumably includes most of our students— and is made up of 42,970,800 individuals has seen 33 Covid deaths.

So, based on these numbers, the chances of someone in this age group dying from Covid are, if my feeble arithmetic skills are accurate, is:

0.00007679%

In the 25-34 group there have been:

233 deaths out of a cohort of 45,697,774 people

In the 35-44 group there have been:

599 deaths out of a cohort of 41,277,888 people

In the 45-54 group there have been:

1,649 deaths out of a cohort of 41,631,699 people

In the 55-64 group there have been:

3,970 deaths out of a cohort of 42,272,636 people

So, when we take all the numbers of people between 15 and 64 in the US, which presumably includes almost all those who might find themselves working in and around a college campus, we get:

6,484 deaths out of a total number of 213,850,797 people

So again, if my feeble math skills are correct, then the following is the current death rate from Covid for all people from 15-64

0.003%

The figures here were taken last evening from this page.

No one on the Listserv challenged my statistics. However, a number did try to reframe this seemingly straightforward matter. One stated by saying that lethality was the wrong measure to be talking about as there are other damages from exposure.

However, this person provided no facts or even anecdotes to back up the claim.

Another told us about a friend who is a nurse in New York who said lots of people were dying there. Again, however, no statistics were adduced.

Finally, another said lethality in the general population was not the right measure as we should be talking about deaths among the infected. When I responded that since we don't know who is infected, we cannot determine that number and thus this was the best we could do, no response was forthcoming.

Later that same day, I sent the following note to the Listserv in response to a colleague who, after referencing the statistics from the Diamond Princess and the Santa Clara study, and admitting that the levels of infections and fatalities were quite low in that ship of mostly senior citizens but concluded, without providing any evidence, that this meant that the testing must be faulty. In other words, he just somehow knew—media conditioning is indeed a powerful thing—that the virus had to be much more lethal than the Diamond Princess and Santa Clara studies had shown it to be. Here is my response.

Dear XXX

Fine. But you can't have it both ways. Either, as has been suggested, we are all in danger because the virus has not spread and will eventually get to everybody and we thus need to be vigilant for the coming wave of sickness is produced.

Or as the cruise ship numbers—derived from what which is I presume is a pretty ideal venue for infection— demonstrate, and the Santa Clara study you mention also shows, that infection does not necessarily spread as rapidly or as extensively as once thought.

So, which assumption are we working with?

In the end, given the heavy reliance on differing, but as yet unproven assumptions regarding the extent and rate of spread of the disease in the absence of testing, the most stable indicator would appear to be deaths caused over time.

On another note, both Spain and Italy are generally viewed as being considerably ahead of the US in terms of the development of the epidemic and well ahead of the US in deaths per million.

Or to use ZZZZ's metaphor, they are in March or April or June of the car driving accident season.

And yet, in their death numbers by age group, in their tendencies in the ...

By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

"The PREP Act and COVID-19, Part 2: The PREP Act Declaration for COVID-19 Countermeasures Updated January 3, 2025" can be found here.

This Congressional Research Service document explains how the federal government granted sweeping legal immunity to pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and others involved in Covid-19 responses.

This Congressional Research Service document details how the federal government granted unprecedented legal immunity to pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and others involved in Covid-19 countermeasures through the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act. Beginning in February 2020, the Secretary of Health and Human Services declared that Covid-19 warranted sweeping liability protections, meaning that if someone was injured or died from a Covid-19 vaccine, treatment, or related product, they generally cannot sue for damages in court.

The only exception is for "willful misconduct" causing death or serious injury—an extremely high legal standard that is very difficult to prove. Instead of accessing the traditional court system, injured individuals must seek compensation through a government program that has historically been difficult to navigate and provides limited relief.

The scope of these immunity protections expanded dramatically over time, with at least 12amendments issued during both the Trump and Biden administrations. What began as emergency protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments eventually encompassed routine childhood vaccines, seasonal flu shots, respiratory protective equipment, and even telehealth consultations conducted across state lines. These declarations also represented significant federal overreach into state authority by explicitly preempting state licensing laws and allowing pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, students, and providers with expired licenses to administer vaccines and medications in ways that state laws wouldn't normally permit. States effectively lost control over regulating medical practice within their own borders, all in the name of expanding the "pool" of vaccine administrators.

Perhaps most concerning from a conservative perspective is that these immunity protections continue well beyond the end of the public health emergency. While the federal Covid-19 emergency declaration terminated in May 2023, the liability shields for manufacturers and providers remain in effect through December 31, 2029—more than six years later. This arrangement prioritized rapid deployment and corporate interests in enabling medical products to be rushed to market while being shielded from normal liability standards.

Broad Immunity from Lawsuits: Starting in February 2020, the Secretary of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act to shield manufacturers, distributors, and administrators of Covid-19 countermeasures from virtually all legal liability. If you were injured by a Covid-19 vaccine or treatment, you generally cannot sue for damages in court.

Limited Recourse for Victims: The only exception is for "willful misconduct" causing death or serious injury—an extremely high bar to meet. Instead of courts, injured individuals must seek compensation through a government program (CICP) that historically has been difficult to access and provides limited compensation.

Scope Expanded Repeatedly: The Trump and Biden administrations amended this declaration at least 12 times, continually broadening who and what received immunity. This eventually covered not just Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, but routine childhood vaccines, influenza shots, protective equipment, and even telehealth consultations across state lines.

Federal Overreach on State Authority: The declarations explicitly preempted state licensing laws, allowing pharmacists and others to administer vaccines and medications in ways that state law wouldn't normally permit. States lost control over who could practice medicine within their b...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

When the FDA licensed Moderna's new mRNA flu vaccine last week, legacy media coverage focused almost exclusively on efficacy.

The pivotal trial reported that the vaccine was "26.6% more effective" than a conventional flu vaccine at preventing protocol-defined influenza-like illness.

What received far less scrutiny was a much more serious problem in the trial data published in The New England Journal of Medicine—much of it relegated to an appendix behind a paywall.

An analysis of that appendix alongside the FDA's own briefing document exposes clear regulatory malfeasance.

A statistically significant safety signal from the pivotal trial was systematically diluted until it disappeared from the official story.

Moderna's pivotal Phase 3 trial (P304) enrolled roughly 40,000 adults aged 50 and older, randomised 1:1 to either the company's mRNA-1010 vaccine or a traditional trivalent flu vaccine.

This study evaluated an "optimised" version of Moderna's vaccine after earlier versions produced disappointing efficacy results.

Even with this updated formulation, the headline "26.6% relative efficacy" figure was misleading. In absolute terms, the vaccine reduced the risk of illness by just 0.8%.

Most concerning, however, were the serious adverse event (SAE) data.

The six-month data show that 449 participants in the mRNA group experienced at least one SAE, compared with 389 in the conventional group—an excess of 60 people.

So, while the pivotal trial showed there were 4 fewer influenza hospitalisations in the mRNA group, 60 additional people experienced an SAE.

SAEs are not mild events—they are usually severe enough to require hospitalisation, threaten life, cause significant disability, or result in death.

The imbalance of SAEs in Moderna's pivotal trial was statistically significant—meaning it was unlikely to be a random fluke.

Yet in the briefing documents presented to the FDA's advisory committee, VRBPAC, the agency characterised SAEs as "balanced."

So how did the FDA make the SAE imbalance disappear?

The short answer is that the FDA used pooled data that obscured the safety signal.

Specifically, the agency relied on Moderna's own "Integrated Safety Summary," which combined data from four separate Phase III trials (P301, P302, P303 and P304), involving nearly 72,000 participants.

Once the pivotal trial P304 was combined with the other trials, the SAE rate became 3.1% in the mRNA group versus 2.9% in the comparator group—allowing the FDA to state that the rates were "balanced."

Pooling data across clinical trials is common when regulators are looking for rare events. But the four trials Moderna pooled were very different in many aspects.

They tested different mRNA vaccine formulations against different flu vaccines—standard-dose and high-dose, quadrivalent and trivalent—across different age groups and countries, with follow-up ranging from six months to a year.

When these disparate trials were combined into a single analysis, the safety signal that stood out in the large pivotal trial was diluted.

The FDA accepted the approach—despite being aware of the problem.

In an appendix to its own briefing document, the FDA acknowledged that differences between the trials could produce safety variations "not fully captured by pooled analyses"—but proceeded anyway.

Table 6 of the FDA's own review makes the switch even clearer (see below).

For the first 28 days after vaccination, when serious adverse events were still balanced between the groups, the agency reported safety results from the pivotal P304 trial alone (purple box).

But as more SAEs accumulated over the following months, a statistically significant imbalance emerged.

Instead of reporting those longer-term results from P304 in the same way, the FDA switched to Moderna's pooled analysis (red box), where the signal was diluted enough for the agency to continue describing the rates as "balanced."

The pooled analysis also obscured a concerning ...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

I like to add a mildly amusing quote from Mark Twain at the end of my conference lectures, when I post a slide showing a few photos of my book covers: "Be careful of reading health books," Twain once famously warned, "you may die of a misprint."

If Mr. Twain were around today, he might agree with an update of his warning for our modern pharmaceutical era: "Be careful of taking federally recommended, multi-billion-dollar stockpiled antivirals. You may die of the treatment."

After 30 years of wading through the cherry blossoms of Victoria and the murky swamps of pharmaceutical policy, raging on about the medicalization of ordinary life, it's rare for me to have an "I told you so" moment.

A repeated refrain in my writings is that "disease mongering"—the fine art of widening disease definitions to turn healthy people into patients—is alive and well. This activity turns many of us "worried well" into lifelong paying customers of the pharmaceutical industry, all on the basis of drugs we are often told are to "prevent" a bad outcome.

Before Covid, if there was ever a poster child for the grand social experiment in trying to prevent disease (ie: doing something medically to prevent future illness) it is the drug oseltamivir, better known as Tamiflu.

Come with me and let's travel back a little in time.

In 2009, during the H1N1 swine flu panic, I was among a few vocal health policy critics remarking that public health officials were strangely and repeatedly invoking the terrifying spectre of the 1918 Spanish flu. Why? We had no idea what was going on, but in hindsight the game being played was quite clear: Evoking the worst infectious outbreak in living memory was pretty much a corporate-backed push to justify the stockpiling of an antiviral known as Tamiflu (generic name: oseltamivir).

The company in question is Roche, who manufactured Tamiflu under license from Gilead Sciences, which, to refresh your memory, had to pay over $3 billion to resolve allegations involving health care fraud and the failure to report safety data related to a bunch of drugs. But I digress.

Thanks to GSK's clever medical propaganda, er, I mean "education" campaigns, governments around the world—including our own—spent oodles of billions of our tax dollars to stockpile this particular drug. Why? Because Roche, the drug's manufacturer, assured us that it would prevent flu complications, reduce hospitalizations, and stop transmission. Those are the bad things we hoped Tamiflu would help us avoid.

The global gastronomic appetite for Tamiflu came with a bit of heartburn: the manufacturer hid the data which supported its approval and licensing. Not only hid it, but kept it under lock and key so no one could see it.

A guy who I would consider a friend and comrade-in-arms (we both served in peacekeeping missions while in uniform) is Dr. Tom Jefferson, the Cochrane Collaboration's indefatigable "flu guy." Tom spent five years fighting Roche to get access to the full Clinical Study Reports, documents which were essential to understand how Tamiflu performed against a placebo, in whom, and to what effect.

After five years of embarrassing pharma draftdodgery GSK was finally required to cough up the tens of thousands of pages of raw data and the truth struck like a hammer blow: When this came to light in 2014, Tamiflu not only didn't prevent complications, or stop viral transmission, its modest ability to shave about half a day off flu symptoms was outweighed by serious side effects like psychiatric events, vomiting, and other complications.

Back then, I wrote and lectured about this. I told anyone who would listen that the world had been bamboozled by laundered clinical trials and a public relations machine selling an antiviral that barely worked. I felt the world owed a debt of gratitude to Tom Jefferson, who had the intestinal fortitude to go after one of the biggest drug companies in the world.

But alas, there was pushback again...

By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

Good afternoon! I want to thank Jeffrey Tucker for creating a sanctuary for dissident scholars during the most troubling era in American history. I cannot imagine what the last five years would have been like without the courageous leadership of Brownstone Institute.

And I want to thank Joel Salatin for hosting us at his beautiful farm where he is creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

The argument that I want to make over the next twenty minutes goes something like this…For the last 500 years our economy has been based on conquest and domination. It started with the conquest of the New World by Europeans, who had gunpowder, horses, and hardened steel. The indigenous did not, horrors ensued. Europeans took their gold, land, and labor. And this has continued in various forms for five centuries.

Yes, some of the economic growth since the 1800s has been driven by innovation. But it was built on a foundation of ill-gotten wealth that created the leisure time and the early capital that funded creativity — and then industrialization often led to new waves of exploitation. We'll talk about each of these different eras in a moment.

The current crisis that we're in stems from the fact that eventually there were no new lands left to conquer — so the ruling class decided to exploit all of us in the developed world via vaccine injury. So the violence and exploitation that used to be directed from the First World outward to the periphery in the Third World is now directed inward toward enslaving the middle class in the US and Europe via iatrogenic illness. Jeffrey coined the phrase "biological colonialism" to describe this moment and I think that's exactly right.

But what's striking to me about all of this is that every time the ruling class figures out a new way to exploit people, it requires a Fairy Tale in order to justify the exploitation — to launder it and make it okay. In every era there has been the actual mode of production — usually based on exploiting other people and taking their stuff — and the official story which glosses over the exploitation and says that it's justified or maybe even sanctified.

And the immediate question is why? Why would Empire need a Fairy Tale to justify its actions?

For that, we turn to the great evolutionary biologist Frans de Waal who discovered that even primates have an innate sense of empathy and fairness. It seems to be the result of a long evolutionary process. Chimpanzees reconcile with each other after a fight, care for the dying elderly, and share food with those who have none. These animals display a sort of rudimentary kindness, even when there is nothing in it for themselves, or even when it costs them something (time, reputation, energy).

De Waal is arguing against what he calls "Veneer theory" which is the view that human morality is only a thin cultural layer over a fundamentally selfish, amoral animal nature. De Waal believed that morality isn't a surface layer at all but grows out of deep, evolved social emotions (empathy, reciprocity, fairness) that we share with other primates.

Primates aren't always benevolent of course. They go to war and kill each other and often behave in ways that are brutal. They are bivalent like us — they have both prosocial and violent tendencies and it's not always clear which one will win.

My point being, if Empire is going to take the gold, labor, and lives of another civilization, it needs to find a way to turn off our fundamental sense of empathy and it does that through official narratives that I'm calling Fairy Tales. I believe that if we can unmask these Fairy Tales and show the world as it really is, we can begin to address the current crisis.

In the 1400s, innovations in shipbuilding and navigation enabled the Portuguese to begin sailing down the coast of Africa. Along the way they conducted raids and returned home with Africans whom they auctioned off as slaves. Portugal was a deepl...

By Wendy McElroy at Brownstone dot org.

On October 13, 2023, 15-year-old Owen Poirier was on a school bus with four other students, two girls and two boys, all of whom engaged in what was described as "talking, taking photos and…harmless albeit chaotic play." Several hours later, one of the girls accused Poirier of touching her crotch—a claim which the surveillance camera did not seem to corroborate. Without allowing Poirier to defend himself or call his parents, the school interviewed the boy and suspended him; some accounts say the authorities expelled him.

"I didn't do this," he told his parents. Facing a criminal investigation, however, the distraught Poirier committed suicide. According to one news report, "After Poirier's death, the school's superintendent wrote in an email that the educational institute 'unequivocally' did not find evidence of sexual assault, the Poirier family argued in court filings."

Owen Poirier's story is typical in several ways. The accuser, usually female, is automatically believed even without real evidence. A cursory 'investigation' provides little if any due process to the accused. The consequences to the accused are life shattering. His family is devastated and will not recover.

International Falsely Accused Day (IFAD) is an annual day of awareness that spotlights the devastating impact of false accusations on those accused, even if they are ultimately exonerated. People often lose their children, their jobs, their reputations, and can be driven to suicide. The desolation is especially absolute in accusations of child, sexual, or domestic abuse. And it hits men especially hard because they are usually the ones accused.

Our victim-obsessed society turns a blind eye toward this particular type of suffering, perhaps because the majority of victims are male. We want to believe the 'victim,' but the victim is often predefined as female. It takes Herculean efforts for the profound pain of those falsely accused to be acknowledged on the same level as the pain of sexually abused women.

Former teacher Lyn Crabtree launched IFAD—then called National False Accusation Day—in the UK in 2020 after her life and her husband's were destroyed by allegations that later proved unfounded. They were dragged out of bed in the early hours by a police raid and arrested repeatedly thereafter; their reputations and careers were gutted. No official record indicates that the police or the press ever issued an apology or retraction when the Crabtrees were exonerated. What remains public are the accusations.

September 9 was chosen as International Falsely Accused Day as a way to honor former schoolteacher and BBC broadcaster Simon Warr, who made headlines in 2012 after being accused of indecent sexual behavior toward three former male students; the 9 is his birthday. The charges were so flimsy and contradictory that the jury in Warr's trial returned a unanimous non-guilty verdict after a few minutes of consideration.

By this time, however, Warr had spent two years "on police bail;" that is, Warr was released from custody but he remained under active police investigation, with his behavior restricted. Once vindicated, he became an ardent activist on behalf of other falsely accused. The title of one of his articles captures Warr's message: "The falsely accused can never get their lives back. False accusers are handsomely compensated but their victims get nothing." The compensation received by accusers includes attention, sympathy, revenge, and monetary reparations.

On September 8-9, 2023, IFAD went international. Global demonstrations occurred in the UK, the US, and 13 other nations. The event now encompasses more than 20 nations and a coalition of activist groups, including the Falsely Accused Network in the UK and the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance based in the US. It has grown without government funding and with little media support—a true grassroots movement in response to an ignored global wrong.

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