By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

This is a slightly shortened version of a Feb 26 New York Times article where journalist Katrin Bennhold interviews Dani Blum of the Times' "Well Team" about Ozempic and GLP-1 drugs.

The Fifth Doctor snoops in on the conversation and adds his two cents' worth.

I've known several people who are on Ozempic who lost weight really fast. How exactly do these drugs work?

Dani: …Basically, the drugs mimic naturally occurring hormones that blunt our appetites and leave us feeling fuller, for longer. When people take these drugs, they're just less hungry.

Fifth Doctor: Yes, less hungry, but also potentially more mentally unwell. Mounting reports of anxiety, worsening depression, and thoughts of suicide surround those taking GLP-1s, drugs like Ozempic. While it might be rare that the drugs make you go crazy, the potential troublesome psychiatric effects added to the long list of nasty physical effects makes the treatment intolerable for most patients. These effects are so severe that most patients stop taking the drug and thus a trial of these drugs becomes an expensive failed experiment for most people.

Do people have to stay on them forever to keep the weight off?

Dani: Basically, yes. It's possible, but rare, for people to keep the weight off when they go off these drugs. Even Oprah gained back 20 pounds when she went off them. Doctors I talk to say we should think of these medications like statins — something to be taken long term.

Fifth Doctor: Look, if Oprah can't sustain weight-loss post-Ozempic, what are your chances? Problem is, she probably found out the hard way that the weight comes back but the muscle you've also lost on GLP-1s stays lost, so you may end up in worse shape after you stop the drug than before you started. Also: "What the heck is '"long term?'" At best we have up to 18 months randomized data for current doses of GLP-1s, plus several years of followup from real-world studies, but not decades-long randomized exposure at obesity doses. As for staying on statins "forever," geez, that statement ranks among the dumbest bits of medical advice possible. It would take me a whole article to explain why "statins for life" is a loser's game, so stand by for the Fifth Doctor's advice on that file. But back to these game-changing weight loss drugs.

Do we know yet what the side effects of long-term use might be?

Dani: No, we don't really know a lot about potential long-term side effects yet. We just don't have decades and decades of data. We do know that these medications can have side effects in the short term. Most commonly, these are gastrointestinal issues: nausea, constipation, diarrhea, stomach pain. People can also get fatigued. In rare cases, people can experience more severe problems, like kidney or gallbladder issues, or pancreatitis.

Fifth Doctor: The tip-of-the-iceberg side effects are the ones we know, but like any new, widely-used drug there is that other thorny class of drug effects, the Rumsfeldian "Unknown unknowns" which for GLP-1s, are undoubtedly a minefield. Before you embark on your Ozempic-trip, you have to imagine yourself staring down the barrel of a .44 magnum and Clint Eastwood saying: "Ask yourself, do you feel lucky, punk?"

But at the same time, there seems to be a new study out every week showing GLP-1s help treat various ailments. What's going on there?

Dani: Such a good question. We've seen positive data on how these drugs can help with things like sleep apnea, heart issues and kidney issues…Some think that these drugs can reduce inflammation throughout the body, which could have big benefits. But again, these drugs are pretty new, and there are many open questions.

Fifth Doctor: The caveats are welcome in an ass-covering sort of way, but let's call a spade a spade. Every new study of a new drug is often little more than a marketing opportunity for the companies making them. When the manufacturers control the release of the research, ie: publishing th...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

The United States' withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) is more than a diplomatic rupture. It creates a unique opening to rethink how global health cooperation should actually work.

The real question is not whether countries should cooperate. They must. Humans matter. Health brings economic stability. Pathogens cross borders. Data sharing matters. Standards matter. Scientific collaboration matters.

The question is architectural: how do we cooperate without recreating the institutional incentives that weakened trust in the first place?

The WHO was established as a normative and technical body — to set standards, coordinate information, and support struggling national health systems to achieve self-reliance. It was not designed as a centralized global emergency authority. Not intended to be a perpetual role expander. but to reduce the necessity of its own existence. Yet over time, and especially during Covid-19, the emergency function came to dominate its identity. Pandemic governance, compliance frameworks, and centralized preparedness structures increasingly overshadowed the WHO's original role.

This shift was not merely political. It was structural.

Permanent emergency infrastructures create permanent incentives. Staff, budgets, and institutional relevance depend on the continued salience of crisis. A bureaucracy organized around exceptional events will struggle to declare normality. That is not conspiracy; it is institutional logic.

At the same time, the WHO's funding model — heavily dependent on earmarked voluntary contributions — has diffused accountability and encouraged agenda distortion. When financing is fragmented and politically directed, priorities inevitably drift.

Withdrawal alone does not solve these problems. Simply constructing a new institution with the same permanent emergency mandate would reproduce the same incentive distortions under a different name. While permanent disengagement amounts to self-harm.

If reform is to mean anything, it must begin with functional differentiation.

Certain global health functions are inherently multilateral and relatively non-controversial: disease classification, laboratory standards, burden-of-disease measurement, and the efficiencies attained by standardization of disease management across borders. These require legitimacy, transparency, and wide participation — not coercive authority.

Emergency powers are different.

Border closures, lockdown recommendations, stockpile deployment, and compliance monitoring directly affect domestic law, civil liberties, and economic life. These effects, like those of the target disease, vary widely between populations and demand local context. These decisions carry political consequences and must remain anchored in national accountability. Embedding such authority within permanent global bureaucracies risks normalizing emergency governance and weakening democratic oversight.

Preparedness is essential. Permanent centralized command is not.

A more disciplined alternative would rely on event-triggered compacts among willing states. These would activate only when predefined epidemiological thresholds are met. They would be time-limited. They would include automatic sunset clauses and mandatory post-event scientific and fiscal review. They would preserve domestic implementation authority, and work only within the fundamental human rights norms on which modern public health is supposed to be based.

Such a system aligns incentives differently. It allows rapid cooperation without building a standing workforce whose institutional survival depends on crisis continuity. It implements through subsidiarity.

Covid-19 revealed weaknesses not only in the WHO's performance but in the broader architecture of global health security. Expanding permanent emergency authority is unlikely to restore public confidence. Transparency, proportionality, and time-bounded and accountable authority are more likely to ...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

I dedicate this article to all women invited to mammography screening and those who love them because the public has consistently been lied to, for over 40 years. In invitations to screening, women have been told that by detecting cancers early, screening saves lives and leads to less invasive surgery. I shall demonstrate that all three statements are wrong.

Women are still being told these lies, by professional associations, screening advocates, screening researchers, cancer charities, and national boards of health. The American Cancer Society declares in a headline that "Mammography Saves Lives" and claims, with no references, that results from many decades of research clearly show that women who have regular mammograms are less likely to need aggressive treatments like surgery to remove the entire breast (mastectomy).

Screening Does Not Save Lives

In the randomised trials of mammography screening, the risk ratio for overall mortality after 13 years of follow-up was 0.99 (95% confidence interval 0.93 to 1.03) for those trials with adequate randomisation. The estimate happened to be the same for the other trials, some of which were so poorly randomised that the average age in the two compared groups was not the same, which makes an analysis of overall mortality unreliable.

For two of the three adequately randomised trials, those from Canada and the UK, there are follow-up data after 25 and 23 years, respectively. The risk ratio for overall mortality was 1.01 (95% confidence interval 0.98 to 1.03) for all three trials (both with a fixed effect and a random effects model, Comprehensive Meta Analysis Version 3.0). In the table, the year means the year the trial started:

This is a very strong result as it is derived from a total of 25,046 deaths. We can therefore say with great confidence that mammography screening does not save lives.

If we restrict the analysis to the two trials with a very long follow-up, the result is the same, a risk ratio of 1.01 (0.99 to 1.04).

Breast Cancer Mortality Is a Seriously Flawed Outcome

It will surprise most people to learn that we cannot trust what has been reported in the randomised trials about the effect of screening on breast cancer mortality but this is an objective fact.

A minority of the women who died were autopsied, and in several trials, cause of death was not assessed blindly. I have documented that assessment of cause of death was seriously biased. If we include all trials in the analysis, we would expect to see the greatest reduction in breast cancer mortality in those trials that were most effective in lowering the rate of node-positive cancers (cancers that had metastasised) in the screened group.

This was indeed the case, but the regression line was in the wrong place. It predicts that a screening effectiveness of zero (i.e. the rate of node-positive cancers is the same in the screened groups as in the control groups) results in a 16% reduction in breast cancer mortality (95% confidence interval 9% to 23% reduction). This can only happen if there is bias, and further analyses showed that assessment of cause of death and of the number of cancers in advanced stages were both biased in favour of screening.

Systematic reviews that include all the trials, also the poorly randomised ones, have reported that mammography screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 16-19%. As this estimate is of the same size as the bias in the regression analysis, this suggests that screening does not lower breast cancer mortality.

Another reason why breast cancer mortality is a flawed outcome is that screening leads to overdiagnosis, which is the detection of cancers and precursors to cancer (carcinoma in situ), which would not have come to the attention of the woman in her remaining lifetime and therefore would not have become a problem without screening. Since it is not possible to distinguish between harmless cancers and dangerous ones, they are all t...

By Yaffa Shir-Raz at Brownstone dot org.

[The third author of this article is David Shuldman.]

Two hundred and seventy-one. That is the number of serious cardiovascular events reported among adolescents in Israel's national surveillance system in just a few weeks during mid-2021.

This is the core finding of our study, published this week in the International Journal of Cardiovascular Research & Innovation. Our analysis examined a dataset of 294,877 adverse event reports submitted by healthcare professionals within Clalit Health Services, Israel's largest health organization, during the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. These reports were formally transferred to the Ministry of Health. In May 2024, the Israeli State Comptroller revealed that approximately 279,300 of those reports had not been processed by the Ministry. The dataset we analyzed consists of those very reports.

When we examined the file, the clustering was immediately visible. The structured fields alone revealed hundreds of cardiovascular cases. After applying deliberately conservative deduplication rules and excluding potential duplicate entries, 271 unique reports of cardiovascular events remained among adolescents aged 12 to 16. Nearly all occurred within a narrow window of just a few weeks, coinciding with the expansion of vaccine eligibility to this age group. Even under restrictive assumptions, this amounts to a minimum observed rate of approximately one cardiovascular event per 939 vaccinated adolescents.

In response to the Comptroller's findings, the Ministry dismissed the dataset as flawed, citing missing fields and duplicate entries. The Head of Public Health Services publicly described the report as "garbage." Yet the structure of the data allows straightforward filtering and analysis. Even with its limitations, the clustering is evident and required immediate examination.

This leaves only two possible conclusions. Either the reports reflected real clinical events, meaning a disproportionately large and temporally concentrated safety signal was present in the national system while the vaccination campaign for children was being expanded. Or, if the Ministry is correct and the file is indeed "garbage," then the monitoring system itself was not functioning as publicly presented. If so, authorities were flying blind, promoting a product as "safe" while the very mechanism meant to monitor that safety was fundamentally broken.

Hidden in Plain Sight

The full picture that emerges from the file is presented below.

To ensure our findings rested on the most solid ground, we applied a deliberately conservative analytical strategy. We counted only unique reports in which key variables – sex, birth year, or dose number – were distinct. If there was any doubt about duplication or reliability, we excluded the report.

Despite this conservative approach, we identified 277 unique cardiovascular cases among minors, including acute cardiovascular injury, myocarditis, and pericarditis. The timing is impossible to ignore: 271 of these cases (98%) occurred among adolescents aged 12-16 within a narrow window of just a few weeks, temporally coinciding with the expansion of vaccine eligibility to this age group.

This pattern stands in direct contradiction to the risk profile presented to the public at the time. Official health authorities repeatedly described cardiac risks as "rare," "mild," and largely confined to young males following the second dose. The distribution observed in the dataset shows something different: cases were recorded across both sexes, across doses, and within a concentrated calendar window that coincided with the adolescent rollout.

The sheer scale of these reports is even more alarming when you look at the numbers. Approximately 254,000 Clalit-insured adolescents received at least one dose during that period. To derive a minimum risk estimate, we again leaned on the most restrictive assumptions possible, treating the 271 cases as the absolute total and i...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

In recent years, I have observed a concerning trend in clinical practice. Patients often present not at the beginning of their diagnostic journey, but after undergoing multiple procedures. Many have already experienced numerous tests, interventions, injections, ablations, endoscopies, and even surgeries, frequently within a brief timeframe and sometimes without a clearly defined, stepwise rationale.

In many of these cases, I find myself asking a simple but uncomfortable question: Why was all of this done?

Procedures are essential and life-saving. Interventional medicine has markedly improved outcomes in cardiology, oncology, critical care, trauma, and other specialties. With decades of experience in resuscitation medicine, I fully support decisive intervention when clinically indicated. However, the prevailing challenge is not under-treatment, but the normalization of reflexive intervention. Medicine has shifted from a discipline rooted in thoughtful clinical reasoning to one increasingly driven by algorithmic escalation, often to the detriment of patients.

The Procedural Cascade

There is a phenomenon in modern healthcare that is rarely discussed openly: the procedural cascade. A patient presents with symptoms of back pain, reflux, mild arrhythmia, knee discomfort, and fatigue. An imaging study is ordered early. An incidental finding appears. The incidental finding triggers a referral. The referral triggers a diagnostic procedure. The diagnostic procedure reveals a "borderline" abnormality. The borderline abnormality leads to intervention.

Each step in this process may appear justified when considered in isolation. The MRI revealed a finding. The specialist aimed to avoid missing a diagnosis. The procedure was technically indicated.

However, when we examine the entire sequence, it often becomes apparent that no one paused to assess whether the patient was improving, deteriorating, or genuinely required intervention. Each step in this cascade carries risk: infection, bleeding, anesthesia complications, nerve injury, medication side effects, psychological distress, financial strain, and, in some cases, permanent harm.

In the intensive care unit, clinicians are trained to evaluate the risk–benefit balance of every intervention. Each line placed, medication administered, or procedure performed must be justified by its potential benefits relative to its risks. Outside of critical care, however, this discipline of restraint often diminishes.

When "More" Becomes the Default

Modern healthcare systems reward activity. Activity generates revenue. Procedures are reimbursed at higher rates than conversations. Interventions are billable. Observation is not.

This is not a moral critique of individual physicians. Most enter the profession with a genuine desire to help. However, clinicians function within systems that shape behavior. When compensation models prioritize procedural throughput, hospital systems depend on service-line revenue, and time constraints limit nuanced discussion, the pressure to act intensifies. In many clinical environments, the most challenging decision is not which action to take, but whether to refrain from intervention.

Defensive medicine also contributes significantly. Fear of litigation often compels physicians to order additional tests. This approach is understandable, as it is generally easier to defend action than inaction in legal settings. However, defensive ordering introduces its own risks, including radiation exposure, false positives, unnecessary biopsies, and further invasive procedures.

It is essential to ask: when a procedure is performed, is it primarily driven by patient-centered benefit, or by systemic pressures unrelated to the individual patient?

The Training Question

Another concerning possibility is a decline in the art of clinical judgment. The older generation of physicians was trained in an era when diagnostic imaging was limited, and laboratory test...

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org.

In my epidemiology coursework, many years ago, I was taught that the smallpox vaccine had eradicated that dreadful disease. It was common knowledge, so I did not question the claim.

They did not tell me about favorable time trends in the natural course of other infectious diseases for which there was no vaccine, nor about the correlation of those trends with improved living conditions, sanitation, personal hygiene, and nutrition. The unexplained transition from the severe form of smallpox (variola major) to the mild form (variola minor) in the Western world was not mentioned. All the credit was given to the smallpox vaccine.

Of course, no randomized trial of that vaccine was ever conducted. There was, however, a natural experiment in Yugoslavia in 1972—a short-lived outbreak of smallpox with a total of 175 infected people and 35 deaths. Besides a vaccination campaign, there are interesting parallels to the Covid story, so it is worthwhile to re-examine that outbreak.

My primary sources were a document published by the WHO in November 1972 and a paper published 50 years later. Another recent paper also provided a historical review of the population of Kosovo, where almost three-quarters of the cases have occurred. As expected, all three papers and others attribute the end of the smallpox outbreak in Yugoslavia to the public health response, which included contact tracing, quarantines, lockdowns, and mass vaccination. Was that indeed the case?

The Course of the Outbreak

The epidemic graph (below) was taken from the WHO document. I added the blue curve. The index case, a villager from Kosovo, was identified in February and was probably infected during a trip to Mecca. Reportedly, he was vaccinated in his youth and received the obligatory vaccine against smallpox before his trip "without a control of vaccination success."

The WHO document refers to "three generations" of the outbreak based on presumed chains of infection, or what they imagined as three waves: two small and one large in between. In fact, we observe a classical, single epidemic curve that peaked on March 23. (Allowing for some randomness in the date of a few cases should eliminate any doubt about the underlying bell-shaped distribution.)

The timeline of the outbreak and the public health response are summarized in the table. It was about four weeks between the detection of the first cases and the last cases.

Of 175 cases, 124 (71%) were Kosovo residents. They are highlighted in the graph below. The wave pattern is evident both within and outside Kosovo.

The incubation period of smallpox was at least one week long and might have been as long as two weeks. Here is what the WHO document states on the topic, based on the presumed date of contact with an infected person.

"For 88% of the patients, the incubation period ranged from 9 to 13 days. These observations are in accord with those described in the literature." Shifting the graph of cases (displayed by date of symptom onset) to the left by 9 days, we get an approximate graph by date of infection. The arrows indicate three milestones.

The graph shows that the number of infections peaked and declined before any public health intervention.

Note that a shift of the symptom-based graph by 9 days is conservative. The mean incubation period in the outbreak was 11 days, placing March 16—the date of the first interventions—well within the tail of the infection-based wave. Moreover, no intervention has an instantaneous effect on the risk of infection.

In summary, it was a self-limited epidemic wave, mainly concentrated in the Kosovo population whose unique characteristics will be described later. Most likely, the panic-triggered official response added close to nothing and caused collateral damage.

The Public Health Response

A series of quotes from various publications should give an idea of the measures that were taken in Yugoslavia:

"On 16 March, when virological examination con...

By Leslie Manookian at Brownstone dot org.

The right of individuals to make their own health care decisions is a topic of intense public concern. Proponents of medical freedom argue that no government, business, or other institution can override a person's ultimate authority over what medicines or vaccines they choose to take.

The health freedom movement more generally encompasses the related issues of clean air and water, over-prescription of drugs to children, pesticide use, dangerous food additives, legal immunities granted for vaccine manufacturers, and the right of doctors to speak freely about their opinions without fear of censure or loss of livelihood.

Despite the timeliness of these topics, and the passionate opinions held on them, most major media outlets, polling groups, and political strategists would have us believe that support for medical freedom is very low. On top of that claim, they insist these priorities are "bad politics" that would endanger a candidate in a close race if embraced.

To justify these claims, they point to opinion polls commissioned by established political groups that are not nearly as unhappy with the status quo as the average American is. In this way, polls are used less as a way to capture public opinion than as a tool to shape the policy landscape.

We've been subjected to several of these lately. What we've lacked is an objective poll that addresses the curiosities everyone has, with plain questions that get to the root of the controversies over health and medical issues.

Health Freedom Defense Fund and Brownstone Institute initiated such a poll to find out. This February 26-27, 2026 poll, conducted by Zogby Strategies, has documented remarkable supermajorities in favor of medical and health freedom, with numbers on objective questions exceeding 80 percent.

Polled were 1,000 registered voters with 93.6% definitely or very likely to vote. The party breakdown is 37% Republican, 36% Democrat, 27% Independent. Party breakdown shows broad support. The margin of error for overall results is +/- 3.2 percentage points.

Such supermajorities are rare in polling outcomes. Polling documents embedded below.

Strongest areas of agreement (broad majority support):

Right to refuse medical treatment generally: 87.9% agree (58.8% strongly).

Right to make one's own medical choices as a basic human right protected by law: 87.2% agree (59.5% strongly).

Doctors should discuss vaccine concerns openly without fear of medical board backlash: 88.1% agree (64.5% strongly — one of the highest "strongly agree" levels in the survey).

Health insurance should cover chosen treatments, including holistic/alternative options: 76.1% agree (43.6% strongly).

Right to refuse vaccines for adults: 80.4% agree (50.5% strongly).

Personal medical/vaccine decisions should never lead to employment denial: 70.6% agree (47.3% strongly).

Parents' right to refuse vaccines for children/dependents: 65.7% agree — still a clear majority, but softer than adult refusal (37.4% strongly agree vs. 50.5% for adults).

On matters of school vaccine mandates, results show majorities:

Parents should be able to opt children out of school vaccine mandates: 54.5% agree (31.0% strongly). Among parents with children under 17, the agreement was 66.7%, with 42.8% strongly agreeing. To put this staggering result in context, other polls in recent years have concluded that more than 70% of the public support school vaccine mandates.

College students should not have been expelled for refusing Covid-19 vaccine: 65.4% agree (44.4% strongly).

On matters related to the Covid-19 Era, the poll documents a strong majority opposed measures in retrospect:

Covid lockdowns/restrictions caused excessive damage to American society: 61.9% agree (35.0% strongly) vs. 32.0% disagree.

On other matters related to medical freedom:

Childhood vaccine schedule expansion likely contributed to rise in chronic diseases (among other factors): 48.3% agree vs. 38.2% disagree + 13.6% undec...

By Bruce Pardy at Brownstone dot org.

Last week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a referendum for October 19. It will ask Albertans a slate of policy and constitutional questions. Independence, she said the next day, will be added to the ballot if the requisite number of signatures is met in the petition drive, which is likely. Albertans will get their chance to say if they want to leave Canada. But Canadian federalists can relax. The Alberta premier is one of them. The referendum is the fix to defeat Alberta independence. It will undermine the separatist cause and split the independence vote.

Smith's referendum will ask whether the province should exercise more control over immigration, social programs, and voter identification. And whether Alberta should pursue constitutional amendments. Give provinces the power to appoint judges to superior courts? Abolish the unelected Senate? Grant provinces the right to opt out of federal programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction without losing federal funding? Give provincial laws priority over federal ones when they conflict?

These referendum questions lead nowhere. Alberta already has constitutional authority over the policy questions. It could exercise more control in these areas tomorrow if it wanted. There is no realistic prospect of amending the Canadian constitution on controversial matters. Smith and her advisors must know that.

Smith has repeatedly said that her mandate is a sovereign Alberta inside a united Canada. But many of her fellow Albertans are fed up. They perceive that their province has long received a raw deal in Confederation. They tire of Ottawa throwing obstacles in the way of their primary industries. They resent having their wealth taxed and sent elsewhere around the country. A growing number of Albertans are determined to leave Canada. Recent polls peg it at about one in three.

But even among restless Albertans, there's a moderate middle. They are unhappy with the status quo but have not yet resolved to ditch the country. Smith's referendum will give them a third way. Choose constitutional and policy reforms to create a fairer deal.

It's a chimera, of course. In 2021, 62 percent of Albertans voted in favor of removing equalization from the constitution. "Equalization" means that the federal government will collect more taxes from wealthy provinces and spend it on poorer ones. Alberta is Canada's wealthiest province per capita, and the main source of equalization funds. Its equalization referendum produced no change. The rest of the country ignored it. Alberta will not get more constitutional powers, whatever the voters say about Smith's referendum questions. No constitutional amendments are coming. But many voters will not realize that when they mark their ballots.

Smith's referendum will undermine the prospect for independence in another way too. An independence referendum requires a "clear question." That's what the Supreme Court of Canada said in its 1998 reference case about Quebec. It makes sense. Voters should understand, beyond a shadow of doubt, what they are voting on and what is at stake. But the Court did not say exactly what a "clear question" consists of.

The proposed independence question is clear. "Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?" But a clear question becomes muddy when combined with other questions. If voters support independence but also other constitutional changes, what do they mean? Which should be pursued first? Which is the last resort? What if voters support independence but also support Alberta having the right to opt out of federal programs while retaining federal funding? Both of those things cannot happen. One requires that Alberta be a province, and the other requires that it not be. Any referendum result that requires interpretation is not clear.

The federal Clarity Act legislatures the requirement for a clear question, but it does not give...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[I wrote the following essay for a book celebrating the 100th birthday of Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). He was a dear friend and I'm proud to be part of this thrilling book, which will appear later in print. For now you can download it: Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press, 2026)]

My introduction to Murray Rothbard came when I was 20 and sitting in the office of my political philosophy teacher. The professor had on his shelf a two-volume blue book called Man, Economy, and State (1962). The title was so stark that I asked about it. He warned me not to read it because the author is an anarchist. Fascinating. I excused myself and hurried to the library to get the book. It consumed my evenings for weeks.

Far from being an anarchist rant, it was a detailed defense of classic economics as it existed before John Maynard Keynes, alongside insights from Ludwig von Mises and some innovative theories concerning monopoly, utility, and other matters. It was sweeping, a real treatise on economic theory for which I had become intellectually desperate.

I learned later that this book was commissioned as a commentary on Mises's own book Human Action (1949) but took on a life of its own. Reading it from the first page to the last was the beginning of a journey that would consume my entire career.

Having only known him from these early works, I had this vision of Rothbard as a towering, all-knowing, and probably terrifying intellectual force. I was beside myself with nerves when I met him some three years later (1985 or so). I was astounded to meet a short man with a huge smile who seemed to find humor in everything. Though we had never met, he greeted me like an old friend.

From then on, I treated him as a friend, and we remained close for the next ten years before his death in 1995. The phone calls were nearly daily, and the letters back and forth frequent. He remains my muse to this day. (Ironically, my time knowing him overlaps almost exactly with Hans-Hermann Hoppe's ten years with Murray over the same time period.)

Far from being a dogmatic preacher of deductive truths—he came across this way in his earlier theoretical writings—the man I knew was liberally minded, radical and curious enough to entertain a huge range of ideas, broadly tolerant of a diversity of opinion, and endlessly and creatively curious. He was an absolute joy in any social framework, like a light that illuminated the entire room. To say something that sent him into uproarious laughter was a deeply satisfying achievement. And as Hoppe and others have pointed out, he had a singular genius, unlike any other I have encountered.

Rothbard was a voracious speed reader, inspired by his unquenchable desire to know. I once dropped him off at a university bookstore to search for a parking place. Finding none, I was back at the front entrance in 20 or so minutes. I found him on a bench reading, sitting next to a stack of books. Getting in my car, he sat down in the passenger seat and was speaking excitedly about what he had found. Stopping at a light he showed me some passages, and I was astounded to see a third of the book already marked up. He had done this already with several books. I simply could not believe my eyes. He read books the way others eat fast food.

He was often on deadline with my various projects. Once the fax machine came along—he loved it once he figured out how it worked—he would send in impressive works in under an hour. I can imagine his typing ferociously to get his ideas on paper. His mind worked far faster than any technology could record his thoughts. He always had long papers already composed in his head, complete with citations, and the only limit was finding the time to type.

As for his social interactions, he had this way of extracting knowledge and information from every source. If he knew you to be an expert on mathematics or ...

By Nick Thompson at Brownstone dot org.

You read the labels. You check the ingredients. You avoid seed oils, limit sugar, and side-eye anything with a barcode longer than a haiku. You subscribe to Substacks that dissect institutional capture. You understand, probably better than most, that "the science" can be quietly purchased by the people it is supposed to regulate.

So let me ask you a question that might sting.

What did you feed your dog this morning?

If the answer is a brown pellet from a bag, you are running the same ultraprocessed food experiment on your dog that you have spent the last few years learning to reject for yourself and your family. And you are doing it for entirely understandable reasons, because the same machinery of institutional capture, industry-funded research, and reassuring pseudo-scientific language that once told you margarine was healthier than butter has been quietly operating in veterinary medicine for decades.

I am a practising veterinary surgeon in the UK. I have spent over 30 years in clinical practice, and I am the founding president of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I also lecture on canine nutrition at the University of Glasgow and around the world. I was in Florida last year and San Diego the year before. I am writing a book on ultraprocessed food for dogs, because someone needs to say plainly what the pet food industry would rather you never thought about: your dog has been subjected to the most sustained ultraprocessed feeding experiment in mammalian history, and almost nobody noticed.

The Cleverest Marketing You Never Saw

Here is how it works, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has followed the corruption of nutritional science in human medicine.

The major pet food corporations do not merely sell food. They fund the university departments in the UK and the US where veterinary nutritional science is researched. They endow professorships. They provide free student packs and educational materials to veterinary schools. They sponsor the conferences where vets gather for continuing professional development. They supply the textbooks. They fund the bursaries. They stock the waiting room shelves and put posters on the surgery walls.

They do this so quietly and so comprehensively that most vets do not even realise they have been swimming in industry-sponsored water since the first day of vet school.

The result is predictable. Almost all large-scale nutrition studies published over the past 50 years have been conducted on extruded, grain-based diets produced by the very companies that funded the research. That research became what vets are taught.

Raw and fresh diets, by contrast, have received almost no industry funding, which means almost no large-scale trials. Vets are then honestly told there is "no evidence" for raw, because nobody with money has paid for that evidence to exist.

It is rather like sponsoring every study on buses and then declaring there is "no evidence" that bicycles work.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association's Global Nutrition Committee now explicitly warns that most pet nutrition studies are industry-funded and says conflicts of interest should always be declared. RCVS Knowledge, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK, which runs the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Network, notes that funding source is one of the strongest predictors of outcome in nutrition trials. JAVMA News has run pieces on corporate influence in veterinary education.

This is in the official documents. It is no longer fringe grumbling.

What Is Actually in the Bag

Commercial kibble is manufactured through a process called extrusion: ingredients are forced through a barrel at extreme temperatures and pressures, then puffed, dried, and coated with fats and flavour enhancers to make the result palatable. The process is industrial and efficient, producing a product with a shelf life measured in months or years.

It also does things to food that would alarm you if you thou...