By Christopher Dreisbach at Brownstone dot org.

"Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom."

– Clifford Stoll

"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom."

– E.O. Wilson

The FDA's newly unveiled Adverse Event Monitoring System (AEMS) illustrates the truth of Stoll and Wilson's observations with uncomfortable clarity. While the agency is celebrating its consolidated, real-time dashboard as a modernization milestone, what the public needs is not just more data, but more action.

Since the nationwide rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines, federal health officials have repeatedly downplayed concerns about severe adverse events as "one in a million." Time and again, they reassured the public that if any true safety signals existed, their own monitoring systems, chiefly VAERS, would detect them. Yet when the vaccine-injured pointed to those very same VAERS statistics, often far above established signal thresholds, their concerns were abruptly dismissed because VAERS was deemed "unreliable." This paradox has defined the experience of injured individuals for the past five years: the system is reliable when officials need reassurance, but unreliable when the data raises uncomfortable questions.

Against that backdrop, the FDA now touts AEMS as a unified, intuitive platform that will draw vaccine, drug, and device reports into one place. Superficially, this represents a stark departure from the current Kafkaesque status quo of scattered databases and fragmented reporting pathways. But the fundamental problem has never been just fragmentation on the front end. It has been silence on the back end.

The bottleneck is not data collection alone. It is the absence of meaningful followup, verification, adjudication, and transparent signal evaluation. AEMS may streamline reporting, but if submitted reports simply become entries in a prettier database, then nothing essential has changed. The historic weakness of federal safety surveillance has been that individuals filing legitimate adverse-event reports almost never receive substantive followup, despite clinicians assuming that reporting triggers some form of investigation. In reality, most reports vanish into digital purgatory.

Dr. Danice Hertz's experience illustrates this failure unmistakably. After suffering a significant vaccine injury, she filed 11 separate reports over nearly three years. Only after relentless persistence did anyone at the CDC finally request her medical records. Her story is not an anomaly; it is a representative case. And it reinforces the truth that streamlining the filing cabinet does nothing for the people whose reports are gathering dust inside it.

The FDA's rollout materials emphasize aesthetics, modernization, real-time updating, and user-friendly design. But public trust was never lost because of an outdated interface. It was lost because the agencies responsible for analyzing these reports have shown little interest in turning raw data into answers. A unified dashboard does not resolve the primary underlying issues: unexplained signals, lack of investigation, vague thresholds for action, inconsistent coding decisions, and a culture that treats the vaccine-injured as statistical irritants rather than people seeking answers.

Fixing the front end without fixing the back end is not reform. It is rebranding.

Patients who experience adverse events do not want the illusion of improvement. They want a system that works. For AEMS to represent genuine progress rather than modernized theater, three principles must guide its rollout:

Transparency. The FDA must publicly disclose its algorithms, coding decisions, adjudication protocols, and thresholds for triggering deeper reviews. Without transparent criteria, the risk is that data filtering becomes a political exercise rather than a scientific one.

Accountability. A report submitted should not be the end of the story. There must be clear, tr...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

Vanity can make people do stupid things. Want to look better in a bathing suit? Great goal, now with a small potential wrinkle: the treatment your doctor prescribes might be so good you won't see your fat anymore, because that treatment made you go blind.

This latest dispatch from the world of pharmaceutical safety comes from that drug class that is a gift that keeps on giving, the blockbuster weight-loss drugs known as GLP-1's. Branded as Ozempic, Wegovy, or the pill version Rybelsus, these drugs continue to be hailed as modern miracles, loved by Oprah and other "influencers."

They are the darlings of Tech billionaires whose love affair with "innovative" cosmetic pharmacology has created some of the most costly and otherworldly disfigurements on the planet.

You gotta be careful talking about these drugs because almost everyone you know, and their cousin, has been experimenting with them. Slagging Ozempic these days has been likened to a modern form of fat-shaming which is a line even an unwoke person like myself would never cross.

Anyways, the drugs promise to shrink your waistline, rein in your appetite, and possibly extend your life. We hope. But now here's a new twist in the plot. According to a recent study published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, people taking Wegovy may face a five-fold greater risk of a condition charmingly known as NAION for non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy. The European Medicines Agency released a warning last year about this risk, known in plainer English as an "eye stroke."

Consider the optic nerve as the cable connecting your eyeball to the brain's projection room. Now imagine that cable suddenly losing blood flow. The lights flicker. The film stops. Curtains down.

Vision gone.

This is the pharmaceutical version of "Oops, didn't see that coming."

As usual in the world of drug safety warnings, this blindness risk is described as rare, which I hope you will allow me the indulgence to translate. It means: "Don't worry your pretty little head about going blind, just remember bathing suit season is coming."

Apparently it affects about one in 10,000 users. While that might seem 'small,' it is a similar order of magnitude as the risk of a middle-aged healthy man like me, dying from Covid in 2020; a magnitude of risk so small yet so wildly exaggerated, that it caused massive paroxysms of regulatory safetyism which essentially shut down our societies.

Here no individual looking at these data will even blink an eye at a 1 in 10,000 risk of going blind but when you multiply that by the millions of people on the GLP-1 bandwagon, that's thousands more blind people than before. The real risk could be higher, 10, possibly 100 times higher but we won't really know until the experiment runs its course.

On this file regulators are quick to reassure us that the "benefit-risk profile remains favorable," a cliché so bland it has pretty much lost its meaning among researchers like me who actually pay attention to these things. When the manufacturers face the bad news they turn up their noses like someone reacting to a fart in an elevator, and go back to emphasizing the positives: fewer heart attacks, better blood sugar control, great weight control. It's all rainbows and roses. Nothing to smell here. Sure hope they're right.

Still, there's something darkly comic about the situation. Millions of people are sprinting toward these injections hoping to see a thinner version of themselves in the mirror…while a small but real number might end up not seeing much of anything at all.

This irony practically writes itself.

The study suggests the higher dose used in Wegovy, compared with Ozempic, might be the culprit. Faster weight loss, stronger effect, higher risk. In other words, when it comes to these drugs, sprinting faster towards a more ideal weight may literally blind you.

The lesson I'd leave to consumers after having spent 30 years sifting through the un...

By Jennifer Sey at Brownstone dot org.

Six years ago, on March 16, 2020, the world as I knew it slammed shut. In deep blue San Francisco, where I'd lived for three decades, panic hung in the air like fog rolling off the bay.

If you dared go outside, passersby on the sidewalk shrieked if you came within a few feet. If you went to the beach maskless with your 3-year-old – as I did – a woman might approach and spit at you that she wouldn't care when your children died because you were a murderer.

We lost our humanity as terror took hold.

Those braving the outdoors thought themselves brave warriors in a battle that would almost certainly take their lives. San Francisco – and arguably the world – became a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The only people outside were drug addicts in exploding tent cities and DoorDash food delivery workers.

Everything closed — schools, businesses, playgrounds. Officials promised it was just for two weeks to "flatten the curve." But I knew better. I'd been ranting about it on social media even before the lockdowns hit, warning that once the government seized such power, they wouldn't relinquish it easily. What followed was a nightmare of authoritarian overreach that upended my life and scarred an entire generation.

From day one, I resisted. As a mother of four and a senior executive at a major corporation where I'd worked for over 20 years, I couldn't stand by while children were treated as vectors of disease rather than human beings with rights. I simply didn't care about the cost to me personally for speaking up.

I pushed back online, building a following of like-minded dissenters who saw the madness unfolding. I attended virtual school board meetings that dragged on for nine hours, only to watch masked officials at home alone obsess over renaming schools – the names deemed "racist" – while ignoring the real crisis: the buildings themselves remained shuttered, trapping kids at home in isolation.

I appeared on local news as a "concerned public school mom" and led rallies for which the fliers were removed by Facebook as soon as they went up. In short, I pleaded then demanded that we reopen schools. For this, I paid dearly.

The consequences were swift and severe. Friends I'd known since college — 30 years of shared history — abandoned me, save for one. I remain estranged from some family members for five years now, all because I dared to say that even poor kids deserve an education.

My life became unrecognizable.

In the end, I fled San Francisco so my own children could attend school. In the Bay Area, private institutions reopened in the fall of 2020, their affluent students resuming sports and classes, while public schools stayed closed for a full year longer. And they remained disrupted – masking, distancing, periodic closures – for another year after that.

The most vulnerable children — those from low-income families, without resources for pods or tutors, often with very young children home alone to navigate online "school" — suffered the most. Learning loss mounted, developmental delays set in, and the emotional toll was catastrophic.

The message sent to these kids was that they don't matter, their education doesn't matter. And when school resumed in late 2021, chronic absenteeism skyrocketed and remains a serious problem to this day, 50% higher than pre-Covid levels.

I ended up resigning from my high-powered job in 2022.

That same day, I began work on a documentary to capture the human cost of these policies. I found a directing partner – Andrew James – who, like me, is driving the making of this film out of sheer belief and passion to tell this story so that it never happens again. Once an insider in the documentary world – an alumni of the Sundance Institute – Andrew also got himself ousted from polite society for his dissenting ways and we have made this film completely outside the system, with no access to the typical funding sources.

GENERATION COVID has been a labor of love, funded largely by ...

By Leslie Manookian at Brownstone dot org.

The New York Times recently ran an article about efforts to pass medical freedom legislation in states across the nation. The article mischaracterized not only what health freedom advocates like myself seek, but also portrayed medical freedom as unpopular with the electorate. The article, and the fake polls it cited, was one of the reasons that my organization, Health Freedom Defense Fund, and Brownstone Institute collaborated to commission our own poll – an honest, objective survey which revealed staggering supermajority support for medical freedom, informed consent, transparency, and accountability.

On February 15, the New York Times published an article that was filled with misrepresentations. The article portrays those asking for legislative changes to enshrine individual control over personal health choices as dangerous, and politically unsupported by the public. Unfortunately, the article relied on off-question polling, third-party insults (activists are "drunk with power"), and a stunning lack of context to drive these points home.

The model medical freedom legislation we are sharing applies to all mandates and coercive medical care for all people, not just vaccine mandates for children. It is stunning that the article does not mention Covid-19 excesses and abuses at all. Only five years ago, the American public was facing unprecedented employer mandates for workers, soldiers, teachers, and college students to either take the mRNA vaccine or be fired or expelled. This was on the heels of a year of mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, capricious school closures, and online censorship of dissenting opinion. How can the Times ignore this important context in terms of the public's skeptical relationship with both medical and non-pharmaceutical health mandates?

To support the claim that the public is not interested in having full control over our medical choices, the author refers to polling data throughout. In the poll cited as showing the political danger of making any changes to the current vaccine paradigm, the pollsters only asked Congressional swing district voters (not voters overall) about a hypothetical candidate "eliminating recommendations" from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The poll did not ask about potential state-level changes that protect each individual's or guardian's full control over personal health decisions or that actual mandates do exist in many states. If it had, the results would surely have been different.

Furthermore, the article cites the same poll, in which most swing district voters think the benefits of vaccinating for certain diseases outweigh the risks (though in fact, half of the injections inquired about had less than half of respondents say benefits "definitely" outweigh the risks, a fact the Times omits). The salient question would simply be whether the public thinks a state government has the right to use coercion (threats of lost work, schooling, etc.) to push a pharmaceutical product or medical procedure on anyone, adult or child.

As for the 9% deficit in support for vaccine policy cited in the article from a Jan 19th Wall Street Journal poll, that is a similar deficit that the incumbent party has on healthcare, inflation, tariffs, and the economy overall. More importantly, the Times ignores far more rigorous survey data on the question at hand and the marked deficit of trust in vaccine mandates following the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

By the end of the Covid-19 debacle, less than 40% of parents and soon-to-be-parents in polling planned to follow the required vaccination schedule and recommended seasonal shots. The rest were either planning to delay, refuse some, or all of the shots, or were undecided. This is a clear signal that mandates were headed for public opposition.

In terms of due diligence, this article also quotes an activist who has publicly stated ties with pharmaceutical companies, a fact that should have bee...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

For the first time since the pandemic began, a federal vaccine advisory body in the United States has acknowledged a major blind spot in the country's vaccine safety system.

A leaked report prepared for the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) finds that many people with long-term illness after Covid-19 vaccination have gone largely unrecognised by the medical system meant to monitor vaccine safety.

The document was written by the Covid-19 vaccine workgroup advising ACIP, chaired by MIT professor Retsef Levi.

The workgroup writes that reforms are "fundamental and necessary to regain public trust in vaccination programs that have moral and bioethical obligations for solidarity, justice and equity."

The document, obtained exclusively by MD Reports, arrives amid political sensitivities surrounding the issue. ACIP's scheduled February meeting was abruptly cancelled without a public explanation.

A senior CDC researcher familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested the report may have been politically delicate.

"Obviously there were some politics involved when the February ACIP meeting was postponed," the researcher told MD Reports. "But I think the workgroup itself generally supported the document."

The researcher added that they "wholeheartedly support" the policy document, noting that it is "long overdue to acknowledge and treat the vaccine-injured."

The report has not yet been publicly released and is expected to be discussed at ACIP's upcoming meeting on March 18–19. Levi declined to comment.

The system's blind spot

The report focuses on what it calls Post-Acute Covid-19 Vaccination Syndrome, or PACVS.

The term refers to symptoms that persist for at least 12 weeks after vaccination and cannot be explained by another medical condition.

Patients with PACVS often present with complex, multi-system illness. Symptoms may involve the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the endocrine system, and the autonomic nervous system.

The clinical picture varies widely. Some people develop severe fatigue, cognitive impairment, neuropathy, or dysautonomia.

Others experience chest pain, immune disturbances, or endocrine problems. Symptoms often fluctuate and evolve over time, making early diagnosis difficult.

Clinical features frequently overlap with long Covid — including fatigue, cognitive impairment, dysautonomia, neuropathy, chest pain, and immune disturbances.

Yet many patients fall into a diagnostic no-man's-land, particularly in the early stages of illness.

Some eventually meet criteria for recognised conditions such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), small fibre neuropathy, or ME/CFS.

But even then, the path to recognition can take years.

The workgroup argues that these difficulties do not necessarily reflect the absence of disease. Instead, they reflect the limits of the systems used to detect and classify illness.

The surveillance gap

A major problem identified in the report is the limitations of existing surveillance systems.

The United States has multiple systems designed to detect vaccine injuries, but most were built to capture acute reactions — events that occur within days or weeks of vaccination.

Persistent, evolving illness does not fit easily into those frameworks.

In practice, vaccine injuries are mainly tracked through broad diagnostic codes and passive reporting systems such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

These systems depend heavily on clinicians recognising a problem and reporting it.

But when symptoms develop gradually, involve multiple organs, or resemble other conditions, they are far harder to classify.

The report notes that there is currently no specific diagnostic code for chronic post-vaccination illness. There are also no standard diagnostic guidelines and no coordinated system for long-term follow-up.

The result is a fragmented landscape.

Doctors struggle to d...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

The sound I remember most from the early days of Covid-19 is not the alarms. It was the silence between them. Intensive care units became Covid wards. Monitors glowed in dark rooms while ventilators pushed air into failing lungs. Nurses, shrouded in protective gear, moved quietly. Families were absent—barred from being with loved ones in their final hours.

One night at 3 am, I stood by a patient whose oxygen levels were steadily falling. Outside the room, another patient crashed. Down the hall, a third awaited intubation. For months, this was every night. For 715 consecutive days, I worked in that environment without taking a single day off. In moments like that, medicine becomes very simple. There are no politics in an ICU at 3 am. There is only a physician and a patient, and the responsibility to do everything possible to keep that patient alive.

That philosophy has guided physicians for generations. It is the foundation of clinical medicine: when a patient is dying, you explore every reasonable option that might help.

Yet during Covid, something extraordinary happened. What made the shift so jarring was not simply the presence of disagreement. Physicians have always disagreed. In fact, disagreement is the normal language of medicine. Grand rounds exist for that reason. Journal clubs exist for that reason. The entire structure of scientific publication—from peer review to replication—exists because medicine advances through argument, not obedience. During the pandemic, however, the culture of medicine changed almost overnight. Instead of asking whether a treatment might work, institutions began asking whether discussing that treatment might create the wrong public message. The priority quietly shifted from discovery to control.

Scientific debate faded. Physicians who questioned policies or explored treatments were treated as threats rather than colleagues. Instead of debate, there was enforcement.

Hospitals warned physicians to stay quiet. Medical boards hinted at disciplinary action. Social media platforms censored discussion of therapies that doctors around the world were actively studying. Media outlets portrayed dissenting physicians as reckless or dangerous. What had once been normal scientific discourse was suddenly labeled misinformation.

To physicians trained in earlier decades, this shift was deeply unsettling. Medicine has always lived with uncertainty. Treatments begin as hypotheses and evolve through observation and debate. During the AIDS crisis, clinicians tried multiple strategies before effective therapies emerged. The same was true for sepsis, trauma care, and organ transplantation. No one expected immediate unanimity. Yet during Covid, uncertainty itself became suspect. If a physician acknowledged that evidence was incomplete—or that clinical experience suggested alternative approaches—those statements were sometimes interpreted as challenges to authority rather than contributions to knowledge.

For those of us working inside the ICU, the shift was startling. Medicine had always thrived on disagreement. Physicians argued over treatment strategies, debated emerging evidence, and learned from one another's experiences. The process was messy, sometimes loud, and occasionally uncomfortable—but it was also the engine of medical progress. During Covid, that process was replaced by something else entirely: the expectation of unanimity. I experienced this transformation firsthand.

During the pandemic, I spoke publicly about what I was seeing inside the ICU—what treatments appeared to help, what policies seemed ineffective, and why physicians needed the freedom to treat patients according to their clinical judgment.

Those comments triggered a reaction that made clear how medical freedom—a core value of our profession—had come under threat. Professional attacks followed, and colleagues were pressured to distance themselves. Invitations disappeared. Media narratives were constr...

By Paula Yockel at Brownstone dot org.

In recent weeks, a major pipeline erupted in Maryland spilling over 243 million gallons of sewage into the Potomac River that flows along the southern border of Washington, D.C. You couldn't have missed this news because it was reported everywhere: NPR, NBC, the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

Even the British Guardian ran several stories, reporting that the sewage spill caused a rift between Maryland's Governor and President Trump over who bears blame.

A disaster declaration was approved.

But each year, as our primary means of sewage disposal, millions of tons of toxic sewage sludge, labeled as "biosolids," are spread as agricultural fertilizer across our nation's farmland, where rural Americans call home. I know this because my family lived it, and it made us very sick. We had to leave our home to save our health.

The unthinkable illnesses my family suffered motivated me to seek independent facts. After all, we had authorities at every level telling us that this practice was safe, but our experience told us otherwise.

What we uncovered in our testing and research—including the statistically significant increased relative risk of disease in a community where sludge is used on farmland—left us no option but to take action.

I founded the nonprofit Mission503, to not only raise awareness of this practice, but to end it, and lead the way to real solutions.

As Americans are aligning on concerns regarding toxic chemical exposure, including PFAS from sludge practices, it's timely to share some of our key findings. But first, let's level set on three quick things about our nation's sewage disposal practices.

Number one. Sewage sludge is the solid material that remains after liquid is separated from wastewater that enters the nation's sewer plants. It's typically the consistency of thick brownie batter. While the facilities are designed to treat and discharge the liquid effluent into our natural waters, like rivers, streams, and lakes, the cleaner the liquid, the more concentrated the toxins and pathogens are in the solids. Although sludge is considered "treated" and is often digested to reduce its volume, the more than 17,000 sewer plants in the US are neither engineered for, nor mechanically capable of, safely disposing or destroying sewage solids.

Number two. Consider what flows into city sewers—then imagine it concentrated. Sludge isn't just flushed toilets (though human waste is chemically and biologically hazardous); it is the condensed residual of everything entering the sewer system: industrial and manufacturing discharge, institutional and medical waste, mortuary and slaughter operation drains, residential waste, street drains, fuels, narcotics, poisons, parasites and pathogens, microplastics, toxic chemicals—including PFAS "forever chemicals"—and so much more.

Number three. Yes, we have a US federal rule, 40 CFR Part 503, that promotes using municipal sewage sludge as fertilizer on agricultural land—where food is grown, beef and dairy cattle graze, among rural communities across the nation. For sludge to qualify for land application (the term for spreading sludge on farmland), the rule regulates only nine metals and a fecal indicator. All other pollutants are ignored. Even mercury, lead, and arsenic are allowed at certain levels, meaning these toxic metals can legally be present in sludge.

We've utilized this practice for decades and have successfully kept it off the American people's radar. Sludge is rebranded as "biosolids," promoted as "beneficial reuse," and misleadingly described as "organic," while farmers are not informed of its contents. Medical practitioners and researchers are largely unaware of it as well, complicating diagnosis and treatment for families who suffer illness from it. That, alone, is a topic for another day.

Proponents of the rule—those whose budgets generally benefit from it and are contractually bound to deploy it—often refer to sludge practices a...

By Gabrielle Bauer at Brownstone dot org.

Consider the below statements. Do any of them resonate? Make you angry? Do some not even merit a response?

Any group differences in outcomes can be traced to systemic racism.

If systemic racism exists at all, it works against so-called privileged groups.

Abortion is murder, period.

The sanctity of human life is a made-up concept.

Jews have a biblical right to Israel.

Hitler was right about a few things.

Masculinity is inherently toxic.

If women ran the world, we would still be living in grass huts.

The colonialists need to give back the land they stole.

Indigenous people need to get over the fact that they were conquered.

Providing sex is an obligation within a marriage.

Any sexual coercion constitutes rape.

I can't tell you exactly how I would respond to a dude who defended Hitler, but I know what I wouldn't do: stalk him on social media, contact his employer to try to get him fired, or lobby my government representative to help criminalize such talk.

Does this make me a free speech absolutist? Not quite. Like Robert Jensen, a professor emeritus at the University of Austin and prolific blogger, I suspect that most people who call themselves free speech absolutists don't actually mean it. They wouldn't countenance speech like "Let's go kill a few Germans this morning. Here, have a gun." Instead, they're prepared to "impose a high standard in evaluating any restriction on speech," Jensen writes. "In complex cases where there are conflicts concerning competing values, [they] will default to the most expansive space possible for speech."

In other words, they're free speech maximalists. A more contemporary and nuanced variant of absolutism, the maximalist position grants special status to free speech and puts the burden of proof on those who wish to curtail it. While accepting some restrictions in time, place, and manner, free speech maximalism defaults to freedom of content. It aligns with the litmus test developed by US Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, which holds that government should limit its regulation of speech to speech that dovetails with lawless action. Let's go kill a few Germans? Not kosher. The only good German is a dead one? Fair game.

Some pundits view this position as misguided. A 2025 Dispatch article titled "Is Free Speech Too Sacred?" laments America's descent into an era of "free speech supramaximalism," in which "not only must speech prevail over other regulation, but nearly everything is sooner or later described and defended as speech."

A New Statesman essay about Elon Musk, written a few months before he acquired Twitter (now X), decries Musk's "maximalist conception of free speech usually adopted by teenage boys and libertarian men in their early 20s, before they realise its limitations and grow out of it." The implication: free speech maximalism is an unserious pitstop on the way to more mature thinking. Only testosterone-soaked young men, drunk on their first taste of freedom, would spend more than a minute on such a naïve view.

This 69-year-old woman disagrees. I grew into my passion for free speech during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the pressure to conform in both word and deed reached an intensity I had never witnessed before. Any concerns about the labyrinthine lockdown rules elicited retorts like "moral degenerate" or "mouth-breathing Trumptard." (Ask me how I know.)

Unexpectedly jolted into awareness of free speech principles, I began reading John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre and writing essays about freedom of expression in the Covid era. One thing led to another, and in 2025 the newly minted Free Speech Union of Canada found a spot for me on its organizing committee. What most of us in the group shared, along with age spots and facial wrinkles, was a maximalist position on free speech. Perhaps we're all immature. Or maybe we've lived long enough to understand exactly what we lose when free speech goes A...

By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org.

President Donald Trump's executive order of Feb. 18 invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to ensure US glyphosate production and availability is neither necessary nor helpful. HHS Secretary and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) founder Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s endorsement of the order has created a firestorm in that health-interested base.

On Feb. 22, Kennedy conducted triage explanations to his base with this statement:

"Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals." He went on to post that "if these inputs disappeared overnight, crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms even beyond what we are witnessing today. The consequences would be disastrous."

Kennedy then described the many weed control alternatives that are being developed. All of us farmers in the nonchemical community already use many of these innovative alternatives: lasers, AI-driven wipes, steam nozzles, cover crop crimping, and soil balancing. The grain farmers I patronize for our chicken and pig feeds do not use glyphosate or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We pay a slight premium, but these farmers have great yields and are certainly not going out of business like many more conventional operations.

This showdown has been a long time developing. On Apr. 14, 2025, The Wall Street Journal's Patrick Thomas reported that "Bayer said it could stop producing the world's most popular weed killer unless it gets court protection against lawsuits blaming the herbicide for causing cancer." Bayer and friends tried to slip in liability protection in an appropriations bill earlier this year, but the effort failed.

With thousands of lawsuits, many of them winning, still scheduled for court hearings, and its multibillion-dollar war chest to fight them and/or settle them impacting profits, Bayer, manufacturer of the popular Roundup brand, is desperate to shed this liability. Most of the time, things like this executive order happen after long-term wrangling and cogitating behind the curtain, and I suspect that is the case now.

At the risk of irritating my MAHA friends, I take umbrage with this whole sordid affair because glyphosate is a deadly poison, is not needed, and certainly does not jeopardize American security. Its use is primarily on genetically modified corn and soybeans. But consider that nearly half of America's corn production goes to ethanol fuel; it has nothing to do with food.

What about soybeans? Half of them are exported and not even used in America. Roughly 40 percent of glyphosate is made by Bayer in the United States, Belgium, and Argentina, which are all friendlies. If we eliminated half the corn and half the soybeans because they aren't needed for food, we'd only need half the glyphosate, which is nearly all manufactured either domestically or in friendly nations.

That's giving the benefit of the doubt to the inherent need for glyphosate, which is a dubious argument. It's like demanding special concessions for cocaine because some addicts have an inherent need for cocaine. While they may be addicted, arguing that funding and fueling their continued addiction is necessary for their survival is dubious at best and erroneous at worst.

The real national security breach is that we have thousands of farmers producing unnecessary corn and soybeans and a federal government determined to keep them in business.

Herbivores don't need grain; they were not built to eat grain any more than children were built to eat candy bars. If we drop the exports and drop the fuel, America's need for corn and soybeans is only 30 percent of current production, which can easily be met by the glyphosate produced domestically and in friendly nations. The point is none of the scaremongering and none of the math adds up or makes sense.

Something else is going on here, and it has nothing to do with national defense. It has to do with offering a sh...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

If the keening of pessimists is to be believed, this paper is written in the midst of the darkling dusk of an authoritarian age. Studies of the fate of democracy around the world—the countries that can be classified as democratic according to various criteria and the expansion and contraction in their numbers over time—has become a mini cottage industry in the academic and think tank worlds.

In theory, setbacks and curtailments can come from either or both conservative and liberal sides of the ideological political divide, often reflecting their differences in how best to reconcile the tension between the liberal and democratic components of the aggregative concept of 'liberal democracy.' Majoritarian excesses can ride roughshod over the liberal protections for individuals against the state and society as collective entities, while unbalanced liberal emphases can ignore majority policy preferences.

This was seen in the clash between the individual-centric civil libertarians and the collective focus of public health during the Covid years. Political polarisation in the age of falling confidence in the mainstream media and the amplifying potential of social media has exacerbated the pathologies of shifting perceptions of the other side as not merely people with a different point of view but as immoral and a threat to the system.

As the world's most populous democracy by far, more than four times bigger than the US as the second most populous albeit the world's most important democracy, India occupies a place of special significance in the global comparison of the measures of democracy and their rise and fall over time. Not too many would have rated its prospects highly against the apparently unfavourable correlates of poverty and illiteracy at independence in 1947, yet it has survived as a recognisably functioning democracy. Conversely, the UK, known as the mother of parliamentary democracy with Westminster as the mother parliament, seems to be backsliding on its democratic credentials. Concerns about the health of democracy in both India and the UK exist alongside worries about its status in several other countries.

I. Measuring the Health of Democracy

My interest in democracy has spanned my entire professional life. My very first academic article, exactly fifty years ago, was on 'The Fate of India's Parliamentary Democracy' (Pacific Affairs, Summer 1976). This was a reaction to the declaration of an emergency by Prime Minister (PM) Indira Gandhi in 1975. It was followed by the more reflective 'Liberalism, Democracy and Development: Philosophical Dilemmas in Third World Politics' (Political Studies (September 1982). As someone who grew up in India; voted as a national in elections in Australia, Canada and New Zealand; with advanced degrees in political science; lived for periods of my life in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US; and participated in discussions on the topic with real-world examples with colleagues in the United Nations, I have a particular appreciation of the role of electoral systems in mediating popular voting preferences into political outcomes.

When I last looked at the democracy ratings five years ago, the Economist Intelligence Unit classified India as a 'flawed' democracy; Freedom House called it only 'partly free,' and the Gothenburg-based V-Dem described it as an 'electoral autocracy.' That's quite a dishonourable trifecta from three reputable international democracy ratings agencies. The disparate indexes have their individual flaws and strengths, but they do provide a latitudinal snapshot of almost all countries at any given time, permit a longitudinal analysis of trendlines in any given country, and are a useful externally validated prop for civil-society advocates in countries of concern that are trying to improve standards of governance within the framework of inclusive democratic citizenship.

That said, as a cross-country comparison, any classifica...