By Brooke Miller at Brownstone dot org.

As stewards of the land and providers of our nation's food supply, farmers and ranchers carry a profound moral obligation - to produce the safest, healthiest, and most nutritious food on the planet. It is not just our livelihood; it is our responsibility to future generations.

That is why I am writing today with deep concern regarding the Pesticide Liability Protection Act currently under consideration in Congress. If enacted, this legislation could cause irreparable harm - not just to the health of farmers and ranchers who work directly with these chemicals, but to the broader public who unknowingly consume their residues.

The Dangerous Path of Corporate Immunity

This bill threatens to open the floodgates for a new wave of pesticides and herbicides engineered by agrochemical giants - products that may be even more toxic than those currently on the market. By shielding these corporations from legal accountability, it removes their last remaining incentive to ensure their chemicals are safe.

We have seen this story before. In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, granting pharmaceutical companies immunity from liability for vaccine-related injuries. The consequences were swift and staggering: a surge in new products, rushed to market without proper safeguards, and a dramatic rise in chronic health conditions in children and adults alike. It was a public health turning point, and not for the better.

The parallels to our current situation are striking. Consider the case of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Bayer (which acquired Monsanto in 2018) has faced more than 177,000 lawsuits involving the weedkiller and set aside $16 billion to settle cases. Over $11 billion has been paid out in Roundup lawsuit settlements, with individual jury awards reaching as high as $2.1 billion in recent cases.

These staggering financial settlements reflect the real human cost of inadequate chemical safety oversight. Even more alarming is the widespread exposure we're seeing in our most vulnerable population: children. About 87 percent of 650 children tested had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine, according to CDC analysis.

Research shows that children exhibit higher levels of glyphosate in biofluids than adults, and recent studies indicate that higher levels of glyphosate residue in urine in childhood and adolescence were associated with higher risk of liver inflammation and metabolic disorders in young adulthood.

To repeat that same mistake with our nation's food supply would be unconscionable.

Why the Pesticide Liability Protection Act Is Unconstitutional

The Pesticide Liability Protection Act fundamentally violates several core Constitutional principles that form the bedrock of American jurisprudence:

Due Process Violations (5th and 14th Amendments): The Act deprives citizens of their fundamental right to seek redress in courts for injuries caused by defective or dangerous products. This violates substantive due process by eliminating a basic property right - the right to compensation for harm - without adequate justification or alternative remedies.

Equal Protection Concerns: The legislation creates an arbitrary distinction between victims of chemical company negligence and all other tort victims. There is no rational basis for why those harmed by pesticides should have fewer legal rights than those harmed by other dangerous products.

Separation of Powers: By preemptively shielding an entire industry from judicial review, Congress unconstitutionally interferes with the judiciary's role in adjudicating disputes and determining liability. This represents legislative overreach into the judicial branch's constitutional domain.

Takings Clause Violations: The Act effectively takes private property - the right to legal recourse - without just compensation, violating the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause.

The Supreme Court has consistently held that access to co...

By Trish Dennis at Brownstone dot org.

In April 2023, the Irish Times published a quietly devastating article under the headline:

The doctor who questioned Ireland's Covid policy and lost his job: 'We destroyed young people's lives for what?'

This article told the story of Dr. Martin Feeley, a man who had already lived an extraordinary life before becoming a reluctant public dissenter during one of the most charged periods in Irish history.

A vascular surgeon by training, Martin Feeley was also an Olympian, representing Ireland in rowing at the 1976 Summer Games. Born in Lecarrow, County Roscommon in 1950, he qualified from UCD in medicine and later became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

In 1985, he earned a Master's in surgery, and by 2015, he had been appointed Group Clinical Director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, one of the most senior medical administrative roles in Ireland's Health Service Executive (HSE.)

By any measure, Dr. Martin Feeley was an exceptional person, not just accomplished, but genuinely liked and respected by his colleagues, patients, friends, and everyone who knew him through the Irish rowing community. He was known and loved not just for his clinical expertise, but also for his warmth, integrity, intelligence and humour.

Those who worked alongside him described a kind, principled man, generous with his time, supportive of younger colleagues, and unwilling to play politics with the truth.

A sample few of the many heartfelt tributes left in the Condolence Book on RIP.ie following Dr. Feeley's death in December 2023, read:

"I had the privilege to work with Mr Feeley in AMNCH and that made all the difference to me. He exemplified integrity, empathy and good sense. Authentic, kind and encouraging, a Colossus amongst men and medics. And always brilliantly funny."

"A decent man, a great teacher, much respected."

A patient shares:

"Thank you Mr. Feeley for saving my life in 2013. Fly high with the Lord. RIP."

What stands out in the many tributes is how deeply admired he was, not just for his medical expertise, but for his warmth, kindness and humour and the deep impression he left on those who worked with him. Again and again, the tributes spoke of his decency and integrity.

And yet, when it really mattered, during a period in Irish life when decency and integrity were needed most, it was precisely those qualities that cost Dr. Feeley his job.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Feeley raised a profoundly important question, one that has aged far better than the policies it challenged: Was the State's response proportionate to the actual risk faced by the population, particularly children and young adults?

Dr. Feeley did not deny the virus or downplay the risks. He simply raised a measured, evidence-based concern, which was that the restrictions being imposed were doing real and lasting harm. Drawing on clinical experience and moral clarity, he warned of the damage being done, especially to children and young people, through shuttered schools and colleges, cancelled sports, and the loss of everyday human connection.

He believed that those at low risk could, in time, build natural immunity, helping to reduce the danger to the most vulnerable.

His critique wasn't vague or emotional. It was specific, well-informed, and in hindsight, remarkably prescient. Among the key points he raised:

Restrictions should have focused on those most at risk, not applied as blanket rules to everyone. Healthy younger people, he argued, could have built immunity more safely, helping society reopen sooner and more fairly.

He condemned the government's communication strategy, especially the daily case counts, calling them a form of "deliberate, unforgivable terrorising of the population."

His concerns were later echoed by others, including former HSE infection control chief Professor Martin Cormican who suggested that Dr. Feeley wasn't alone in his thinking, just in his willingness to say it out loud.

He e...

By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

Sometimes it is necessary to push a moral philosophy to the extreme before its flaws become clear to all. And then once that happens, it gets much easier to recognize and reject less extreme examples that grow from the same root. At other times, true believers in a flawed moral philosophy will voluntarily advocate for an extreme example without being pushed, and in doing so, inadvertently reveal the absurdity of their proposition.

Plato wrote of Socrates' use of the logical reasoning method of reducing a philosophical assertion he opposed to the point of absurdity, giving rise to the debating method known as an apagogical argument. This involves attempting to establish a claim by showing that following the logic of a proposition or argument would lead to absurdity or contradiction.

The focus of this essay is the philosophical position that, in the case of public health, it is acceptable to mandate that members of society accept a medical treatment without granting personal informed consent, justified as necessary to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. I argue that the proposition that the majority or the State has the right to impose a medical procedure on the minority is both flawed and repugnant to an ethical society.

The self-evident recent embodiment of this flawed and repugnant logic is the mandated "emergency-use authorized" experimental gene therapy products marketed as Covid vaccines. But, as any parent of a school-aged child or hospital-based health care worker can attest, mandates to accept medical procedures (ergo, "vaccination") without full informed consent are ubiquitous.

These mandates were and are a form of coercion and compulsion. Moreover, the use of government-sponsored propaganda to cause people to accept a medical procedure typically involves coercion, compulsion, and enticement, and governments used all of these during the Covid-19 crisis to "overcome vaccine hesitancy"- defined as unwillingness to accept injection with an emergency use authorized experimental medical product whose side effects include cardiac damage and death.

The next step in the logical progression with this thinking involves the development and deployment of medical "vaccine" products that surreptitiously spread within the general population by infecting or otherwise immunizing non-consenting individuals once the product is introduced into the population.

In the historical case of live attenuated polio vaccine, this was accomplished with knowledge and quiet endorsement by public health officials without informed consent by most others, as the "live" vaccine strain is shed in the feces of the vaccinated and typically infects family members and other close associates.

In the current case, the intentional failure of the FDA and other regulatory bodies to require "shedding" studies for either the Covid mRNA or self-replicating RNA vaccines suggests that a willful neglect to provide even the most superficial informed consent continues to be a feature of Western nation "public health" leadership.

Bioethics, Medical Mandates, and Nazi Physicians

The use or imposition of coercion, enticement, and compulsion by an individual, group, or government to cause a person to accept a medical procedure has long been considered fundamentally unethical. This philosophical position was reinforced as a core principle of civilized society during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi physicians.

Historically, the core of modern medical ethics has been that individuals have personal autonomy and sovereignty over their own bodies, must freely consent to accept a medical procedure, and must receive a complete disclosure of potential risks and benefits before granting personal consent. This fundamental ethical truth is not negotiable, nor is it context-dependent.

There is no ethical codicil that this logic no longer applies if and when a medical emergency has been declared, or else individuals, groups, or governm...

By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.

The heart monitor flatlines. The family weeps. The doctors wait exactly 75 seconds - then restart the procedure. In the world of organ transplants, "dead enough" has become a moving target.

The New York Times just reported something most people aren't ready to hear: in the rush to expand organ transplants, procurement teams have sometimes started too early. Not after death - before it was fully established.

This isn't just investigative journalism anymore - it's official. In July, the US Department of Health and Human Services released the results of a federal investigation into the transplant system. Their words, not mine: "Hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying," declared HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The federal report found that at least 28 patients may not have been dead when organ removal began.

This is happening under a protocol called donation after circulatory death (DCD). It's fundamentally different from the more established practice of donation after brain death, where patients have irreversibly lost all brain function and are kept on machines only to maintain their organs. DCD patients still have some brain activity - they're dying, but not yet dead. Doctors determine they're near death and won't recover, but that's a medical judgment call, not biological certainty.

DCD used to be rare. Now it accounts for a huge and growing share of transplants. Every day, 13 people perish waiting for organs that never come. That urgency is real, and it explains why the system feels pressure to expand every possible avenue for donation. But saving lives by potentially taking them prematurely isn't salvation - it's a different kind of death sentence.

This is not a debate about whether transplants save lives - they do. It's about something more fundamental: the line between life and death being treated as a flexible scheduling variable.

The Sacred Threshold

Death has always been humanity's most profound mystery - the ultimate divide between being and non-being, consciousness and void. Modern medicine promised precision: neurological death, cardiac arrest, clinical criteria that could mark the exact moment when a person becomes a body.

But when death becomes a protocol instead of an ontological reality, something essential is lost. As philosopher Ivan Illich argued, when a culture medicalizes every boundary - birth, death, even meaning - it loses its ability to navigate those distinctions without institutional permission.

We're talking about the moment a human being ceases to exist as a conscious entity and becomes, in the system's calculus, a collection of harvestable parts.

The problem runs deeper than protocols.

As bioethicist Charles Camosy observes, contemporary medicine finds itself in "an intellectually embarrassing place: medics and others who haven't thought these matters through and have virtually no training in serious philosophy/theology are making up their moral anthropology as they go to achieve the desired organ outcome." When institutions start optimizing fundamental principles, they lose any coherent framework for understanding what they're actually doing.

When Reflexes Become "Meaningless"

If the definition of "dead enough" becomes negotiable, we've already lost the plot. The donor designation on your driver's license represents more than medical consent - it's a spiritual contract about what happens to the vessel that carried your consciousness through life.

One patient pulled his knees to his chest while being prepped for organ removal, only to have medical staff dismiss it as "meaningless reflexes." In Alabama, Misty Hawkins was wheeled into surgery after being declared dead, but when surgeons made their first incision, they found her heart moving, her chest rising and falling with "gasping respirations." They were slicing into her while she was alive.

Meaningless to whom? In that gesture...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

On July 15, the FDA convened a two-hour expert panel to review its longstanding guidance on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopause.

At first glance, it appeared to be a genuine opportunity to revisit the legacy of the landmark Women's Health Initiative (WHI), engage with clinical experts, and improve public messaging around hormone treatment.

But beneath the surface, the event raised uncomfortable questions. There was no dissent. The risks of HRT were downplayed, and women were left with the impression that they were jeopardising their health by not taking it.

What unfolded was a lineup of pro-HRT advocates, many with industry ties, in what often felt more like a public relations campaign than a balanced scientific discussion.

Selling the Benefits

FDA Commissioner Dr Marty Makary opened the session with several bold claims.

Hormone therapy, he asserted, could reduce cognitive decline by up to 64%, cut bone fractures by 50%, and lower the risk of heart disease - the leading cause of death in women - by 25%.

"Better than a statin," he said.

Makary went further, claiming there was no other medication in the history of modern medicine that could improve women's health on a population level more than HRT "if started within 10 years of the onset of menopause."

He lamented that too many women remained unaware of newer data reanalysing the WHI and suggested that outdated fears had left them suffering in silence.

"We've failed them," he said.

From the outset, Makary set the tone. The WHI had, in his view, cast a dark shadow, discouraging doctors from prescribing HRT and leaving women confused or untreated.

Speaker after speaker echoed this sentiment. The WHI was described as a catastrophic misstep that had misled millions - "the day the music died," as one expert put it.

Panelists portrayed the study as a rupture in women's health education. They argued the WHI had studied the "wrong women" - too old, too far past menopause, unrepresentative of those typically seeking relief - and used the "wrong type of oestrogen."

Its findings, they said, were overstated, misleading, and plain wrong.

The result?

Millions of women flushing their HRT down the toilet.

Some panellists made extraordinary claims. One doctor said a patient on testosterone therapy had experienced improved mathematical abilities, and described another who was able to recall a foreign language learned in childhood.

Oestrogen was described in near-miraculous terms - preserving bone density, boosting cognition, enhancing mood and sexual function, staving off ageing, and protecting the heart.

Declining levels of oestrogen were framed as a medical emergency. One that, if left untreated, would rob women of vitality, resilience, and longevity.

Several speakers advocated for starting HRT "at least 10 years" before menopause - even in women without hot flushes, mood changes, or sleep disturbances.

What Was Missing?

Absent from this enthusiasm was meaningful engagement with the potential harms. The WHI, published in 2002, remains one of the most rigorous, publicly funded randomised trials ever conducted on hormone therapy.

Involving more than 160,000 postmenopausal women, it was funded by the National Institutes of Health to examine whether hormone therapy could prevent chronic disease.

At the time, it linked oestrogen-progestin therapy to increased risks of breast cancer, stroke, and cardiovascular events.

These findings weren't outliers.

The Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study (HERS), published several years earlier, also found that hormone therapy failed to reduce cardiovascular events - and increased the risk in the first year of use.

Then came the UK's Million Women Study - a prospective cohort involving more than a million participants - which found that combined oestrogen-progestin therapy significantly increased the risk of breast cancer.

Despite their size and scientific weight, these studies were scarcely menti...

By Yaakov Ophir at Brownstone dot org.

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published a sharp and comprehensive critique of the recent study by Andersson et al., which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The study made headlines for claiming that aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines administered in early childhood are not associated with increased risks of autoimmune, allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

Kennedy did not mince words. He described the study as "so deeply flawed it functions not as science but as a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry." Among the many questionable features he identified, one stood out to me in particular. Kennedy wrote:

"These sleights of hand magnify the potential for allowing the authors to reach their absurd suggestion that higher aluminum exposure is somehow protective against asthma, allergies, and neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism."

This sentence stopped me in my tracks because I had noticed the exact same thing. While Kennedy voiced this concern from the standpoint of public health advocacy, I approached the same issue from an academic and data-driven perspective. What I found not only aligns with his observation but adds further empirical grounding to it. In fact, this very point was at the heart of a formal comment I submitted to the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The authors of the study responded - but, in my view, did not adequately address the core contradiction. In this short article, I lay out the full story, supported by the data, to show why this implausible pattern of protective effects cannot be ignored.

A Pattern Too Good to Be True

In their central figure (see the screenshot below), Andersson et al. report hazard ratios for 34 different health outcomes, comparing children with different levels of aluminum exposure through vaccination. At first glance, the figure seems balanced and comprehensive. But a closer look reveals a startling trend: 25 of the 34 estimates (73.5%) leaned in the same direction - suggesting that more aluminum exposure was associated with lower risk.

And not merely by random chance: over half of these "protective" associations were statistically significant (with 95% confidence intervals excluding 1.0). Strikingly, children who received higher doses of aluminum appeared to have lower risks of developing conditions such as food allergies, autism, and ADHD.

This pattern is implausible on its face unless aluminum is a miracle drug no one told us about. Even under the null hypothesis that aluminum has no effect, such a one-sided distribution of significant inverse findings would be highly unlikely. But beyond statistical expectations, the results also contradict epidemiological reality.

Ignoring the Direction of History

Although Andersson et al. briefly acknowledge the possibility of residual confounding (i.e., hidden variables not accounted for in the analysis), they fail to confront this strange and highly asymmetric pattern of their results. Instead, they suggest that rising diagnosis rates over time may have inflated risk estimates for children born later, who also happened to receive more aluminum due to changes in the vaccine schedule.

But this explanation only deepens the puzzle! If diagnoses have indeed increased over time, as they rightly note, then we would expect later birth cohorts (with higher aluminum exposure) to show higher observed rates of neurodevelopmental and allergic conditions, even if aluminum had no effect at all. The direction of bias should have skewed the results toward risk, not protection.

Take ADHD, a diagnosis I've studied and questioned extensively, as a telling case. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), ADHD prevalence was estimated at around 3% in 1980 and rose to 7.2% by 2022 (in the latest edition of the manual). In fact, these figures are considered conservative; many studies have reported strik...

By David Marks at Brownstone dot org.

The level of compensation doctors receive from Medicare is currently under renewed scrutiny; these standards are mirrored by health insurers. The quantity of reimbursement weighted to specialists is likely to shift towards primary care physicians. Reconfiguration of doctors' fees is overdue, although they are determined by a secretive American Medical Association committee.

Analysis and debate about the ongoing healthcare crisis emphasize misdirected funding rather than considering how to revitalize the ethics of medicine. The Hippocratic Oath clarifies the priorities essential for the mindset of a physician. Despite its primary warning, first, do no harm, damage done to patients is rampant. Resolution of this tragic dynamic appears insoluble.

When decisions are made by any medical organization with financial interests, the primary impetus of the Oath is lost; the AMA's control over payment schedules reinforces and exemplifies a corrupt institutional flaw. The harm done by the business of medicine needs to be evaluated and controlled.

The seemingly intractable conflict of interest undermining medical care is directly tied to a profit-oriented model in mitigating human suffering. Dispensing treatments with earnings in mind is a form of profitable planned obsolescence and ultimately a methodology that degrades patient autonomy and vitality.

Although there is often consensus among critics of the healthcare system about its numerous faults, approaching the central issue of profiting from illness is virtually avoided.

In an attempt to broach the topic of money and medicine, the AMA's Journal of Ethics presents a self-justifying analysis. The following excerpt exposes how this inherently conflicted view of healthcare depends on the illness of the nation.

Stripped to its core, medicine is a service industry, the product of which is health care. As such, the practice of medicine, not unlike the provision of any other service, is deserving of professional remuneration. Viewed in this light, medicine and money are sensibly interrelated and by extension indivisible. Less clarity exists, however, about the question of whether medicine should be a conduit to wealth accumulation. (emphasis added)

The industry couldn't be clearer about its relationship to money. The giant leap from fair compensation to wealth accumulation is easily appraised and confirmed; a swelling of profits is directly tied to the surge in chronic illness.

The degradation of individual and societal health spirals downward while the most powerful controllers of the medical and pharmaceutical industries thrive. The healthcare system is fatally compromised by its financial standards and practices. As long as poor health is monetized, the crisis will remain unresolved.

The largest and most important economic sector of the United States ignores the admonition, do no harm. Reversal of this travesty is dependent on challenging an infrastructure that denies the importance of caring without injury. Procedures and treatments are rewarded while preventative and curative methodologies remain undervalued.

Ongoing disasters in healthcare are uncontrolled, including iatrogenic disorders, unnecessary surgeries, prescription drug abuse, and vaccine failures and injuries. This exploitation is virtually ignored. Merciless mayhem is tolerated and marginalized, obscured by the deeply flawed, unethical profitability of medicine. Ultimately, there is a single disastrous outcome: disease is treated rather than cured.

Price fixing, violating antitrust statutes, financing promotional bonuses, and suppressing competitive views about how to mitigate illness and dysfunction are inherently repressive strategies of the medical industry. This dynamic is enhanced and supported by the modus operandi of the pharmaceutical giants. To retain control of an enterprise whose boundless assets are provided by the sick and dying, the profession does not tolerate internal d...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

American healthcare is currently providing us with an excellent lesson in what capitalism looks like in the absence of a moral framework. The biggest losers are America's children.

The Union Profiting from Childhood Sickness

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the major professional association of North American pediatricians, has overseen the rising rates of chronic illness and medicating of American children over recent decades.

With 67,000 members in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, AAP distinguished itself during Covid-19 for its strident insistence that children's faces should be covered and they should be injected with modified RNA vaccines, despite knowing from early 2020 that severe Covid-19 was very rare in healthy children.

Funded by sources including Moderna, Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Eli Lilly, and other pharmaceutical companies, the AAP's members are the cornerstone of the rapidly increasing pediatric pharma market in North America - by far greater than any other region. As a professional organization dedicated to ensuring income for its members, the AAP is like any similar professional association or union and acts in this manner.

The loss of trust in the medical profession since 2020 is fortunately removing the misconception that AAP-like medical societies were primarily altruistic, dedicated to the welfare of others rather than their members.

The recent publication of AAP priorities, developed by its membership, should reinforce this loss of trust and so, despite its unusual callousness of approach, serve ultimately to strengthen public health by exposing more clearly the motivations of those profiting from rising illness.

Setting Priorities to Ensure Long-Term Profit

The AAP's first stated priority is to remove parents from any authority when it comes to decisions on whether to inject their children with various substances produced commercially by its sponsors. While this should be ridiculous, it has some chance of succeeding as the ultimate beneficiaries, apart from pediatricians, are the same pharmaceutical manufacturers who heavily sponsor the election campaigns of most members of the US Congress.

Of relevance, promoting or abetting chronic disease in children ensures almost certain chronic disease through adulthood. The AAP is therefore helping to set up lifelong pharmaceutical consumers. Pharma companies are purely for-profit entities, and this is exactly what their CEOs and executives are charged by their shareholders with promoting. The AAP is simply acting as a very willing enabler.

The AAP considers that bodily autonomy is subservient to State-imposed requirements and that the post-World War II human rights of non-coercion and informed consent are subservient to the opinion of someone receiving money to perform an injection. Its approach coincides with the pre-War technocracy movement or medical fascism (in which a declared 'expert' decides on imposing healthcare measures rather than the patient themselves choosing it).

However, before discussing bodily autonomy and coerced medicine further, it is worth commenting on the priority list of the AAP overall, as it is fascinating, coming from a group that insists publicly on prioritizing the health of children.

Firstly, what is not there. Among the ten priorities of the AAP of which the elimination of parental rights or religious or cultural exemptions over vaccination of children is the highest, there is not a single mention of what are perhaps the three most prominent issues facing children today, and widely discussed publicly; increasing obesity and the epidemic of autism that the CDC heralds as of extraordinary proportions.

While the AAP notes this problem elsewhere, it concentrates on identification and management rather than cause identification. Nowhere among its ten priorities is there any expression of interest in identifying and addressing the causes of rising chronic illness. The closest is a mention...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

The national conversation on vaccine injury and accountability has returned - this time from within the halls of power. On July 28, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a blistering rebuke of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), calling it a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption.

His statement follows decades of criticism from researchers, patient advocates, and injured families who have watched the program drift further from its original mission: to compensate those injured by vaccines swiftly and fairly, in exchange for protecting manufacturers from lawsuits.

But now, the call is coming from inside the building - and so are the corroborating accounts. I speak from personal experience.

A System Designed to Protect Industry, Not People

Established in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the VICP was sold to the public as a compromise. Vaccine makers would be shielded from product liability lawsuits, but a special court would hear injury claims and disburse funds from a trust financed by a 75-cent surcharge on every dose.

The result was a legal anomaly: a taxpayer-funded compensation system adjudicated by government attorneys and so-called Special Masters, immune from civil discovery, unbound by the rules of evidence, and utterly inaccessible to traditional tort remedies.

It is, in every material sense, a system rigged against the injured.

More than 12,000 petitioners have received compensation totaling over $5.4 billion, but this figure hides more than it reveals. The average payout may hover around $450,000, but cases can drag on for years. Worse, over half of all claims are denied - often without genuine examination of mechanistic plausibility or patient history.

And contrary to public assumption, most of these awards are not for injured children, but for adults - many of them harmed by influenza vaccines and other products routinely administered to working-age populations. This pattern directly undercuts the common refrain that VICP is merely a safeguard for pediatric vaccination. It is not. It is a backdoor bailout system for manufacturers - deliberately kept quiet, procedurally opaque, and inaccessible to public scrutiny.

My Departure: Bribery, Aluminum, and the End of Trust

I left my role in the VICP process after a Special Master attempted to bribe me.

During sworn expert work on behalf of a petitioner, I had prepared testimony linking aluminum adjuvants to autoimmune conditions via well-established immunological pathways, including molecular mimicry, the use of aluminum hydroxide to induce autoimmunity reliability and reproducibility in animals, and chronic inflammatory cascades. The science is robust - rooted in animal models, systems biology, and translational studies.

Instead of rebutting the data, the Special Master took another path: off the record and improper. The plaintiff was informed that the VICP had already determined that aluminum was not a problem (a violation of the rule of not citing precedent), and they were told - explicitly - that unless I softened or removed my statements on aluminum's causal role in the development of post-vaccination autoimmune disease, the Special Master was not likely to want to compensate me for further testimony.

It was implied that my future participation in the program and reputation within the Court system would be accommodated.

My response was to put the attempted bribe on the record in my next expert statement, withdraw all of my invoices in protest, and to depart the program.

That recording is in the possession of the plaintiff, multiple attorneys, and me. Its contents will, when considered by the AG office, obliterate any illusion that the VICP operates under the rules of ethics or law. The incident does not stand alone. It is the tip of a very large iceberg - one built on procedural fraud, scientific suppression, and judicial strong-arming.

Secretary Kenned...

By Randall Bock at Brownstone dot org.

On the recommendation of Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone.org, I saw Eddington at a local 'indie' theater. Eddington is the first film (of those I've seen) that truly dares to portray the dystopia of masking and lockdowns - not as backdrop, but as the original fracture in the civil body, the point where civilization begins to unspool.

At the risk of making Dr. Fauci's ego (unwarrantedly) even larger, his is the"unseen hand" of Eddington: "deus ex machina"- but inverted: initial harbinger of ill; no ultimate salvation.

At the center is Sheriff Joe Cross, a quiet man of decency (a man of the cross?) trying to hold a fraying town together. He resists mandates that make no sense - masking outdoors in a rural county with no cases - issued not by reasoned authority, but remotely via gubernatorial diktat. Sheriff Cross stands for sanity, for context, for community - but that isn't enough in a 2020 gone wild.

Before the events' dramatic crucible, he's not an ideologue; rather, simply trying to keep the peace- but peace is both unkept and unkempt under the mass absurdities of Covid mandates for the masses, which turn neighbor against neighbor, empowering the petty tyrannies of petty bureaucrats. Then, a force majeure in George Floyd- (copycat) riots implodes hierarchical-, and explodes physical- edifices.

The BLM industrial grievance complex - funded by some diabolus ex machina - complete with jets, glossy placards, and revolutionary theater's fiery props and pops - malingers and foments. Outside slogans flood this town (a thousand miles from the fallen fentanyl felon's misfortune). Struggle sessions begin.

Kids recite Maoist self-flagellatory oaths of racist antiracism (sic). A Black officer, a lifelong member of the community, is suddenly forced to "choose a side." It's cultural imperialism by proxy.

Cross's own home is barren. He and his wife are childless, adrift. She's emotionally shuttered, trapped in a private trauma that's never fully revealed - some implication of abuse or false memory, murky and unresolved, the kind of victimhood that now confers status in a culture drunk on grievance. Rather than heal, she retreats - falling into the orbit of a sleazy televangelist whose blend of charisma, manipulation, and "spiritual warfare" offers her a false exit.

She runs off with him, vanishing mid-film, ultimately (and found out only on video-feed) pregnant.

Cross doesn't rage (at first…but wait). Smartphones play an omnipresently oracular role - and her face is on his: a sign of love. He simply absorbs her physical absence much as he did her emotional one - another wound, another insult.

But then the film pivots. Joe Cross, man of principle, [hugely provoked] breaks. His humbling, embarrassment, and grief turn to fixation: not of saving the town, but avenging personal betrayals suffered. He compromises himself; covers up; manipulates. He begins to lose what he once stood for, and in doing so, he fractures his own department. [While editing, the ironic realization occurs: Cross is 'doppelgänging' up on Dr.

Fauci, who did much the same, only magnified worldwide.] The sheriff's office - once the last functioning pillar of local authority - becomes a house divided.

Eddington doesn't give us clean villains or heroes; but something worse: a world where good men are corrupted not by ambition, but by exhaustion, betrayal, and the slow evaporation of meaning. Joe Cross doesn't sell out per se {et tu, Fauci}, but he does become the kind of man he once had tried to stop.

In its final act - without giving too much away - the film descends into a chaotic, hellish unraveling. Violence erupts. Messaging overtakes meaning. Competing outside factions, each claiming moral supremacy, tear the town apart. Cross is pursued, hunted, undone. And no one - not even the man I chatted with after the film - could quite explain what he had just seen. But that's the point.

This isn't just about Eddington. It's about all of ...