Brownstone Journal

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

A couple of days ago I was on national TV being asked the usual round of questions about an NFL player who'd apparently developed blood clots. How can a young, fit athlete get a pulmonary embolism (PE)? What are the symptoms? Can you fly with a clot? Could it have been picked up earlier?

All perfectly sensible questions, especially for a young athlete, who faces far more scrutiny than an ordinary patient would. Within the hour, the story was all over TV station websites. . Obviously, he's got the country's attention.

I've spent much of my career answering requests like this type. After doing emergency, pulmonary, and critical care for so long, you'd think you'd know everything about thromboembolic disease by now, and I really don't find anything too surprising in that field anymore. I've seen PE kill patients who were absolutely stable just minutes before. I've also seen patients who were absolutely convinced they had a nasty clot, despite their presentation being very different. Both experiences have shaped how I think about the disease and reinforced that medicine needs the human element, something no machine, test, or algorithm can ever provide: Judgment.

The more I thought about that interview, the more I realized it wasn't really about a footballer or pulmonary embolism. It was an interview about where modern medicine has gone. We have such wonderful diagnostic tools now, and at the same time we have created a situation where doctors are increasingly unwilling to use their own clinical judgment without some form of technological validation.

We can now pick up abnormalities that would have been completely invisible a generation ago, yet we can find ourselves in a position where we're not sure whether that abnormality is of any significance. We're absolutely superb at detecting disease, and we're surprised by how uncertain we can be about when to stop looking.

At one time, a doctor's most important tool was his own mind. That's still true today, though I'm not sure we believe it anymore.

About 180 years ago, Virchow examined the mechanisms of thrombosis and pulmonary arterial obstruction. His 1846 work and the papers collected in 1856 formed the pathological basis of what we now call thromboembolic disease [1,2]. Every medical student has heard of him at some stage, invariably in the context of the classic triad of venous stasis, endothelial injury, and hypercoagulability. The triad as we know it wasn't actually Virchow's. Historians have examined how later interpretations and reassemblies of his original observations produced the concept that now bears his name [3].

The historical detail is of course interesting, but the real issue is the physiology. Clots form because the biological milieu is pro-thrombotic. Flow may be slow. The vascular endothelium may be damaged or activated. The coagulation system may shift to a pro-thrombotic state. All of these can happen in isolation or in combination, and their relative importance varies from patient to patient.

A post op patient who is bedbound is not in the same physiological situation as a young athlete who has had an injury. A patient with active cancer is not in the same situation as a patient who has simply spent several hours sitting on an aircraft. They may all go on to have a venous thromboembolism (VTE), but the circumstances in which it occurs and the risks involved will be very different.

That's why you can't just see a symptom and order a test. You have to understand the patient, the patient's situation, and the biology behind it. A swollen leg could be venous thrombosis, chronic venous insufficiency, a drug effect, trauma, inflammation, or a hundred other things. Shortness of breath could be a pulmonary embolism; it could be cardiac disease, it could be a pulmonary infection, it could be obstructive airways, it could be anemia, or it could be anxiety. The presence of a symptom is the first thing you consider in the diagnostic...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

Before asking how power in global health should be rebalanced, reformers must confront a prior question: have existing policies and practices created a growing dependency on donor countries and international organisations? In many low-resourced countries, earmarked finance, externally selected priorities, imported program designs, a growing non-state and donor-dependent workforce, and donor reporting requirements have weakened the link between national choices and national accountability.

If that dependency has hollowed out or undermined sovereign responsibility, the answer cannot be another layer of international coordination. The architecture must instead return responsibility for health outcomes to those directly invested in population health, particularly national governments. The World Health Organization's (WHO's) mandates, functions, resources, and authority should progressively contract where functions can be performed effectively closer to affected populations, as countries recover the capacity and express accountability to make their own choices (IHRP, 2026a, 2026b).

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Sovereignty here does not mean isolation; it means that international cooperation should support governments that remain politically and financially accountable for decisions made in their name.

Recent proposals for reforming pandemic governance begin from a familiar diagnosis. The global health system is fragmented, public trust has deteriorated, poorer countries exercise too little influence, and inequality magnifies the damage caused by outbreaks (Lal et al., 2026; Cullinan, 2026). Much of this is true. Yet the remedies advanced in a new Nature Health commentary and in the draft United Nations Political Declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR) do not follow from that diagnosis. They largely reaffirm the institutions, financing models, and biomedical priorities that drove the loss of trust in the first place (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026).

The contradiction is stark. Global health leaders condemn inequality while supporting a preparedness architecture that can transfer scarce public resources from low- and middle-income countries towards international organisations, development-finance intermediaries, consultants, surveillance contractors, universities, and pharmaceutical manufacturers concentrated in wealthier states.

They call for power to be 'rebalanced,' but offer few realistic and enforceable means by which powerful institutions would surrender authority rather than serve their own interests (Lal et al., 2026). They conflate access to centrally selected commodities with health equity—the equivalent opportunity to live a healthy and fulfilling life (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026). Above all, they avoid the transparency regarding evidence and error that restoring trust requires. Trust was lost for a reason. Repeating the policies underlying that loss will not restore it.

The WHO does not ordinarily possess formal power to order national lockdowns, vaccination mandates, or other domestic measures. Its practical influence is nonetheless considerable. Emergency declarations, technical standards, model laws, procurement arrangements, donor conditions, and reputational pressure can narrow the choices available to governments, particularly those dependent on external finance and expertise. The relevant sovereignty question is therefore not whether the WHO can legally command a state, but whether the surrounding institutional system makes departure from its preferred policies politically or financially bearable.

Lal and colleagues' Nature Health commentary, 'Reforming global health for an age of mistrust, fragmentation and overlapping crises,' identifies three desired transformations: rebalancing power, reinforcing systems, and restoring trust. It recognises that the Lusa...

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

I once met the surgeon general. He offered me a cigarette.

–Rodney Dangerfield

Whenever I suspect that my beloved profession has finally reached rock bottom in its utter subservience to the vaccine-industrial complex, I stand corrected by the report of some new-world-record, bathyspheric descent into depravity that some new group of physicians has managed to achieve.

Independent journalist Jon Fleetwood reports that some of the largest and best-known pediatric hospitals in the United States are vaccinating thousands of children while under anesthesia for surgical procedures.

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Children's Hospital of Philadelphia – widely and unironically known as "CHOP" – has reportedly instituted a program called "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize." It involves administering flu shots to children while they are anesthetized in the operating room. Reportedly, over 2,000 children have been vaccinated for influenza while under anesthesia for surgery at CHOP. Furthermore, those responsible at CHOP are reportedly considering adding mRNA-based Covid-19 and RSV shots to the mix.

Fleetwood reports that another major American pediatric center, Children's Hospital of Colorado (less graphically abbreviated as "CHCO") has even outperformed CHOP in this outrage, having reportedly vaccinated over 18,000 children while under anesthesia for surgery.

Two pediatric anesthesiologists, Caroline A. Pasquariello of CHOP and Kim M. Strupp of CHCO, even published a "how to" article for replication of this program in the American Academy of Pediatrics' AAP News.

Both clinically and ethically, "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize" constitutes gross medical malpractice. Clinically, it adds entirely unnecessary and avoidable risks to the surgical care of children. Ethically, it commits numerous violations that once again demonstrate the moral degeneracy of the entire vaccine enterprise, and of the pediatric establishment, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which seemingly serves the vaccine-industrial complex exclusively, and at the expense of our children.

Surgery and anesthesia are both inherently dangerous. The threats of airway compromise, cardiovascular failure, adverse reactions to anesthesia, infections, hemorrhage, and other complications are well known to every anesthesiologist, scrub nurse, and surgeon. Such concerns keep the good ones awake at night.

This is why, under proper practice, every effort is made in the perioperative period (the time immediately before, during, and after surgery) to minimize risk to the patient. This is why they shave and sterilize your skin before making the incision, why they don't let you eat after midnight the night before, why they ask you so many questions preoperatively (including about allergies), and why they monitor your vital signs so closely. That is why they postpone the surgery if you arrive with a fever on the day of the procedure.

The last thing any competent and caring surgeon, scrub nurse, or anesthesiologist wants during surgery is a wild card in play. Any unnecessary risk factor that can cause harm to the patient or create confusion during the perioperative period is forbidden.

Unless, apparently, it's a vaccine, and you're an anesthesiologist at CHOP or CHCO.

How can vaccinating a child in the operating room cause harm perioperatively? Let us count the ways.

Postoperative fevers are a universally acknowledged problem in surgery. They can signal a dangerous infection, internal bleeding, a drug or anesthesia reaction, and more. They often require extensive evaluation to identify and treat the cause, and can extend hospital stays significantly. The workup alone for a postoperative fever can be expensive, invasive, and harmful in itself.

Vaccines frequently cause fevers, especially in children. According to one study, 8-10% of children receivi...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The month was January 2021, only a few weeks into the mass rollout of the injection called a vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had outsourced its collection of data from the VAERS system – designed to monitor vaccine safety – to General Dynamics Information Technology. GDIT wrote the CDC a memo dated January 15.

"The number of incoming COVID-19 reports has significantly exceeded the estimated maximum of 1,000 reports per day," the memo to the CDC said. "As a result, GDIT is unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical inquiries, etc.). GDIT has reache [sic.] out to the Pogram [sic.] office and OAS for guidance and support."

Indeed, the floods of reports were many times the "worst-case scenario" that General Dynamics had anticipated, so it admitted that it could no longer process them.

The five-alarm fire should have been obvious. At that very instant, if not long before, the shots should have been pulled. Banned immediately for all groups. Apologies should have been offered. Industry executives should have been put on trial because later document releases proved that they knew the dangers. Victims should have been compensated from industry profits, with payouts in the many tens of billions.

After all, this is how dangerous pharmaceutical products had been treated in the past, after only a few reports. But in this case, it was different. Everything that had happened since March 2020 had led to this moment; all the closures, the stay-at-home orders, the smashed small businesses, the supply-chain breakages, the multiple trillions in spending and money creation, the capacity restrictions, and the censorship.

Without an effective and safe shot, all of this would have been a waste. There would have been civilization-wide fury. Neither the politicians, nor bureaucrats, nor media, nor industry, could risk that.

Plus by law, the companies that made the shots and the institutions that started forcing them on people bore no liability for harms. This was due to the special status called Emergency Use Authorization, enabled by the PREP Act, that even bypassed normal testing standards at the FDA.

The agency receiving this alarming communication was the CDC. The CDC has a newsletter. It's called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

On February 19, 2021, now two months into the shot release, and hundreds of thousands of VAERS reports pouring in, so many that they could not process them, the MMWR released its first report on the shots.

The primary author was Julianne M. Gee, an epidemiologist in the CDC's Immunization Safety Office, part of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease). She still works there today. The senior author is Tom Shimabukuro, currently deputy director of the Influenza Division in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

In this report, they wrote a conclusion from having examined 6,994 reports: "Monitoring, conducted as part of the U.S. vaccination program, indicates reassuring safety profiles for COVID-19 vaccines."

The trouble is that at that point, there were already 107,000 reports, so her report only examined 6 percent of the total on that date. General Dynamics had already told the CDC that they could not process beyond their "worst-case scenario" of 1,000 reports per day. VAERS analyses depend on reports being processed—coded, reviewed for seriousness, and made available for statistical screening and clinical follow-up. When intake substantially exceeds processing capacity, the analyzed dataset lags the raw reports.

They knew this. They lied anyway.

The CDC's Gee continued: "The initial postauthorization safety profiles of the two COVID-19 vaccines in current use did not indicate evidence of unexpected serious adverse events. These data provide reassurance and helpful information regarding what health care providers and vaccine recipients might...

By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org.

President Trump loves protectionism but he gives Americans the same "protection" that the wolf gave to the lamb. On January 20, the Food and Drug Administration and Customs and Border Protection will effectively ban almost all personal prescription imports, bushwhacking millions of Americans who rely on Canadian pharmacies.

Trump often brags that the US has the world's lowest drug prices. He also brags that he has lowered drug prices by 500% so he starts out with a helluva cloud over his credibility.

In reality, prescription drug prices in the US are roughly triple the cost in other affluent nations. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found the highest rate ever of Americans worried about affording prescription drugs – six out of ten adults. Almost half said they had not filled prescriptions, skipped doses, or took other steps to curtail their costs.

The Washington Post reported the case of 76-year-old Linda Klonsky suffering from meibomian gland dysfunction. She previously paid $250 for three months of eye drops shipped from Canada to her Silver Spring, Maryland home. But restrictions on drug imports this summer sent the price of her drugs up almost ninefold. Klonsky lamented: "I'm being squeezed between the American drug company and Trump's tariffs."

I'm in the crosshairs of this trade battle. Eight years ago, I was diagnosed with glaucoma. With daily eye drops and regular ophthalmologist visits, my vision has remained fairly stable. I've tried numerous prescription eye drops but Lumigan is the only effective one that doesn't give me butt-kicking headaches. Lumigan costs ten times more in the US than in Canada.

I found a trustworthy Canadian online pharmacy that delivers Lumigan for barely a third of the US price. That is typical of the savings pocketed by Americans purchasing from licensed Canadian pharmacies, according to the Campaign for Personal Prescription Importation.

Six years ago, when he was running for re-election, Trump touted a plan to permit state governments to "go to Canada and buy your drugs for a fraction of the price" in the US. Secretary of Health and Human Services Department Alex Azar certified that permitting states to import Canadian drugs "poses no additional risk to the public's health and safety and will result in a significant reduction in the cost of covered products to the American consumer." But that program was stillborn in large part due to opposition from US pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Federal policies have created many perverse incentives on pharmaceutical pricing. Prior to turning 65, I could use various discounts and rebates to get Lumigan in the US much cheaper than the full retail price. However, once a person becomes eligible for Medicare, no discounts or rebates are permitted. Medicare turbocharges drug price inflation while often providing only an illusion of a safety net for recipients. I had good reasons for vigorously opposing the creation of Medicare drug subsidies in 2004 – to no avail.

I am effectively subsidizing Medicare by buying Canadian. Medicare now covers the cost of any recipient's prescription drug expenditure above $2,100 per year. If I bought Lumigan at the full US price of $265 each month, my annual cost would be $3,180 and Medicare would pay $1,080. Medicare Part D plans I have used did not offer decent discounts on Lumigan. Thanks to my Canadian escape valve, Medicare pays zero for my Lumigan regardless of the extortionate price at CVS.

I have scant other prescription costs, and I can save a thousand dollars a year by buying Lumigan abroad without coverage from Medicare. The vast majority of Americans who order prescription drugs from Canada are over 65 and are paying out-of-pocket, providing windfall savings for Medicare. But practically nobody in Washington has given a damn about saving tax dollars since the Reagan era.

Big Pharma lobbyists warn that permitting Americans to directly import the drugs they need is ...

By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org.

In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today's politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens' lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.

Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class. Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage.

The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of "rent-a-mobs" of political protestors.

Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become "a muscular arm of foreign governments' lobbying in Washington," the New York Times reported in 2015. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatari government, would devote itself to "reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones."

After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government's image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll — the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. The Times noted in 2015 that "since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations."

Washington think tanks proliferated at the same time that federal policies became more hare-brained. Some think tanks are little more than "cash machines for power" for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: "It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it." May's think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations.

The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in many cases, ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power. A president or prominent politician knows he can recite bosh and a bevy of commentators will race to praise his courage and vision. For instance, in a 2016 email to Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chief John Podesta, Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, assured him that she was a "loyal soldier" and that "I would do whatever Hillary [Clinton] needs always." The Washington definition of "independent thinker" is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions.

Some think tanks have been fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff's other machinations won him admission to federal prison.

Newt Gingrich's boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from healthcare corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich's presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and spee...

By React19 at Brownstone dot org.

Article by Brianne Dressen.

For years, people experiencing serious health problems due to Covid vaccination have asked for something fundamental: rigorous scientific investigation into what happened to them, why it happened, and what might help.

Many have spent years seeking answers through a fragmented healthcare system, encountering clinicians unfamiliar with their symptoms, struggling to access appropriate evaluation, and trying to find researchers willing to investigate their conditions.

Now, the National Institutes of Health has announced a dedicated research effort intended to investigate health problems following vaccination and infection. The October 5 opening of the new Vaccinology and Immunology Center represents a meaningful development in a process that patients have long urged federal institutions to undertake.

Yet once again, much of the public conversation risks becoming about politics rather than the people who need this research.

On October 19, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and NIAID Acting Director John H. Powers III publicly outlined the center's objectives. These include examining symptoms and potential biological mechanisms, identifying risk factors, exploring treatment options, and using research findings to inform vaccine safety. NIH anticipates enrolling several hundred participants initially and expects to launch the study before the end of 2026, once the protocol is finalized, IRB approved, etc.

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The study has not yet launched, eligibility requirements are still being developed, and no one should mistake an announcement for proof that the research will deliver the answers patients need. And let's be honest about the intention; while I write this as a representative of over 40,000 Covid vaccine-injured Americans, the NIH's mission is not to push any agenda. For the first time in a long time, Dr Bhattacharya is working to get politics out of the way of good science. The protocol, its implementation, the quality of the science, and the transparency of its findings all deserve scrutiny.

But scrutiny should begin with an accurate understanding of what has actually been announced.

Recent mainstream reporting has included claims that NIH staff do not actually want to conduct this research. At the same time, the agency's own published description of the center and its intended work is in complete contrast with this reporting. The public should be able to examine the primary source, ask legitimate questions, and distinguish between documented facts, political interpretations, and mainstream news slants.

That distinction matters because the stakes extend far beyond a single institution or administration.

I know firsthand what the NIH can mean for a patient who has spent months fighting to be recognized. When I was evaluated at the NIH and diagnosed with post-vaccine neuropathy, they provided treatment that I attribute with saving my life. But what happened next was just as consequential. A follow-up call from the NIH team to my home physicians changed everything. I no longer had to spend so much of my limited energy fighting to prove that something was wrong.

Barriers with doctors quickly changed to doctor-patient collaboration for my future care. That is the potential of an institution like the NIH: not only to advance scientific understanding, but to give patients the clinical credibility, direction, and support that can fundamentally change the course of their care.

For people living with serious symptoms, research is not an abstract policy debate. It is an opportunity to understand biological mechanisms that may have gone unexamined, identify risk factors that could help clinicians recognize similar cases, and explore treatment approaches that may improve lives. It is also an opportunity to establish what the evidence does not support. Good science must be willing to reach either c...

By Daniel Nuccio at Brownstone dot org.

If you currently live in the United States, I regret to inform you that you no longer live in a free country. You are no longer a free person. Actually, you haven't been for quite some time.

This may sound harsh with this being the year America celebrated her big Two-Five-Oh. But think about it. Think back to the last time you drove from your home to the grocery store. How many automatic license plate readers did you pass along the way? How many apps logged your route? What information did your car collect about you and anyone who may have accompanied you?

When you finally arrived at the store, surely there were cameras, but were they simply there to help catch and deter shoplifters — maybe help police investigate a more serious crime on the off chance one were to occur? Or were those cameras serving other purposes? Was the grocery store implementing facial recognition to deliver you targeted ads when you checked out? Did those cameras automatically link to some local real-time crime center, enabling law enforcement to track you from one location to the next, even if you traveled on foot?

Although your routine trip to pick up eggs and milk may not have been recorded for posterity by all of these technologies, it was by no means a private affair. Nor was your most recent trip to church, a political rally, a protest, or your doctor's office. And this doesn't even touch any of the many items in your home that have come to serve as data collection devices.

Now, reflect on this for a moment, then ask yourself: "How much of this did I really consent to?"

Yes, you chose to drive a car. You chose to have a cell phone. You chose to buy food. But did you choose to have countless government and corporate bodies monitor your every move? Do you really feel like you consented to an arrangement in which any entity with the financial and technological means to record and analyze every detail of your life, from the trivially mundane to the deeply intimate, holds the right to do so? If not, how much do you feel you could demand that they stop?

To return to the initial assertion, if the government and an endless number of corporations can treat the details of your life as some natural resource to be mined, assessed, and sold, and you have no meaningful way to opt out, can you really say you're a free person? I mean, no, you're not a slave or a prisoner. But you're not exactly free either.

There's no great analogy, but, at best, maybe you're like a wild animal, chipped by some field ethologists, looking to study your natural behavior, or a teenager, whose parents gave you a fair amount of freedom after school and on weekends but insist you have the family tracking app turned on. At worst, maybe you're more like a citizen of some alternate version of the erstwhile DDR if the Stasi were a little more hands-off and had way better tech. But again, you're not exactly free.

For over a decade, most Americans have sort of accepted this way of life, albeit perhaps in less bleak terms, thinking of it as inevitable or a natural consequence of modern life. Many even learned to bleat the slogans of those that have declared the intimate details of their lives, company property, and public domain: No one has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public. No one's forcing you to carry a cell phone. The Fourth Amendment protects you from government surveillance, but not corporate surveillance. You don't actually want the government telling private companies how they can do business, do you? You've already given up so much of your privacy to Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, what does it matter if the government wants to collect some of your data too? If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?

Over time, these justifications of our subservient place in the surveillance state and the Big Data economy have even assumed an air of common wisdom that preemptively silences objection and mea...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

In this skill-testing question, tell me which of these statements is true:

1. The shingles vaccine is 90% effective in preventing shingles.

2. The shingles vaccine prevents shingles in ONE in every 32 people vaccinated. The other 31 people see no benefit.

1.

Answer: both are true.

Guess which statement dominates the marketing of Shingrix, the most popular shingles vaccine in America?

90% effective. 90% effective. 90% effective.

That's the main marketing message coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussing the efficacy of the vaccine. So common is this sort of statistical sleight of hand that the CDC doesn't even seem to see any real problem in how those effects are presented to the public. Because they are so impactful, and are essentially marketing messages, and they need to be deconstructed.

We can look to professional health reporters working for the mainstream media to deconstruct these numbers and explain what they all mean, right?

Hmm. Not quite.

I was in for a surprise when I went to see what the New York Times had to say about this allegedly 90% effective vaccine. Remember, this is a news outlet giving us all the news that's fit to print.

Earlier this year the New York Times published a remarkable article describing associations between certain vaccines and aging, headlined: "Vaccines Are Helping Older People More Than We Knew." It starts out boldly:

Let's be clear. The primary reason to be vaccinated against shingles is that two shots provide 90 percent protection against a painful, blistering disease that a third of Americans will suffer in their lifetimes, one that can cause lingering nerve pain and other nasty long-term consequences.

Let's "be clear" alright.

The New York Times reporters and editors are smart people, smart enough to make sure their narrative about the use of vaccines in older people flows in the "right" direction. It's relatively straightforward to produce a plausible bit of vaccine cheerleading when you don't have to actually critically examine the numbers someone hands you. Thus, the story follows a predictable direction honed to please the many drug and vaccine advertisers whose ads are keeping the Times afloat.

In this case, the copy follows a standard vaccine-reporting template we've come to expect: It overstates a vaccine's benefits, downplays or ignores its harms, and hammers home the dreadfulness of the disease under the illusion of certainty and medical consensus. As I've discussed in an earlier Brownstone article, the net result of this kind of biased reporting is essentially to broadcast the "Ask your doctor" tagline to the unwashed masses from one of America's biggest pulpits.

Walt Whitman the great American poet, could have been speaking of the NY Times when he wrote of sounding his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

We're talking herpes zoster here, commonly known as shingles, and caused by a reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that causes chickenpox.

It can be nasty, but not always. It typically involves tingling, burning, itching, or pain along a single nerve pathway, sometimes with a blistering rash which typically heals over in 2 to 4 weeks. There are quite useful and relatively cheap antiviral medications to help speed recovery if taken soon enough. More serious is when shingles develops into long-term nerve pain called postherpetic neuralgia (PHN). Sometimes it gets into your eyes, which can be truly nasty. But thankfully it's rare and most shingles cases clear up on their own within a month.

Going through a succinct independent analysis of the randomized trials of the major shingles vaccines provides a unique case study for determining how actual science can become so contorted by professional reporters at the New York Times.

So where does the "90% effective" come from?

Whenever you see a number this big you know that it is a relative number. Throw it out and start again I ...

By Jayanta Bhattacharya at Brownstone dot org.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on April 28, 2026, in Dana Point, California.

At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority. For centuries, a small number of ecclesiastical powers had decided such questions as whether the moons of Jupiter move. The scientific revolution placed these questions in the hands of a lot of very smart scientists, including those with telescopes.

Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people—directors of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, heads of international agencies like the World Health Organization, and editors of prestigious journals—have the power to say what is true or false in science.

But before I go on, I want to make a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health, which I now lead. The history of the NIH is incredible. Almost every modern advance in biomedicine has, at its root, an NIH investment. NIH is, by far, the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, providing 85 percent of funding in every single area of biomedicine. The development of heart attack prevention and treatments came out of the NIH. Almost every cancer advance and cancer treatment came out of the NIH.

Because of the NIH, we now have advances in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis that, when I was a medical student in the 1990s, seemed beyond reach. Because of the NIH, we can now treat cystic fibrosis, a terrible disease that used to kill young people in their teens and 20s, allowing those who have it to live full lives. We have not one, but two cures for sickle cell anemia, a disease that primarily affects African-American children. So I am strongly of the view that the NIH is an institution worth saving. It is, however, an institution that has not done its job well in some time.

The mission of the NIH is to fund research that improves the health and longevity of the American people. But when we look at life expectancy in the United States since 2010—and this is not the case in most European countries—we find that there has been no improvement despite the huge investments we have made in medical research. (See, for instance, the accompanying graph comparing life expectancy over time in the U.S. and Sweden.)

If we continue as we have been, the prospect of our children living shorter, less healthy lives than we do is a real possibility. "Make America Healthy Again" can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people. We have huge chronic disease problems. We can solve them—but we can only solve them if we fix science, which suffers today from three great problems.

The first of these problems is the replication crisis. Scientists publish studies today; we hear about their findings on TV, in newspapers, and on podcasts; and we (and even our doctors) take them for granted. But then when other scientists ask the same questions and perform the same experiments, they do not come up with the same results. That means that a lot of the science we (and our doctors) take for granted is not actually true.

Are eggs good for us? I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when eggs were considered the next worst thing to poison. I didn't eat an egg until I was 19, and then it was a tasteless egg white omelet, since only the whites of eggs were considered healthy in the 1990s. But today eggs are considered a superfood! There are so many examples like this, and at the root of the confusion is the replication crisis.

How do we address this? We begin by recognizing the fact that most ideas hatched by scientists do not work or are not true. That is completely normal in science and always has been. J...