By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

I. Introduction

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) is a relatively recent phenomenon. The term itself was not coined until 1991. It began with the best of intentions - to give frontline doctors the tools from clinical epidemiology to make science-based decisions that would improve patient outcomes. But over the last three decades, EBM has been hijacked by the pharmaceutical industry to serve the interests of shareholders rather than patients.

Today, EBM gives preference to epistemologies that favor corporate interests while instructing doctors to ignore other valid forms of knowledge and their own professional experience. This shift disempowers doctors and reduces patients to objects while concentrating power in the hands of pharmaceutical companies. EBM also leaves doctors ill-equipped to respond to the autism epidemic and unable to produce the sorts of paradigm-shifts that would be necessary to address this crisis.

In this article I will:

provide a brief history of EBM;

explain how evidence hierarchies work;

explore ten general and technical criticisms of EBM and evidence hierarchies;

examine the American Medical Association's 2002, 2008, and 2015 evidence hierarchies;

highlight the corporate takeover of EBM; and

explore the implications of these dynamics for the autism epidemic.

II. History of Evidence-Based Medicine

Medicine faces the same challenges as any other branch of knowledge - deciding what is "true" (or at least "less wrong"). Since its emergence in 1992, EBM has become the dominant paradigm in the philosophy of medicine in the United States and its impact is felt around the world (Upshur, 2003 and 2005; Reilly, 2004; Berwick, 2005; Ioannidis, 2016). Through the use of evidence hierarchies, EBM privileges some forms of evidence over others.

Hanemaayer (2016) provides a helpful genealogy of EBM. Epidemiology - "the branch of medical science that deals with the incidence, distribution, and control of disease in a population" - has been a recognized field for hundreds of years. But clinical epidemiology, defined as "the application of epidemiological principles and methods to problems encountered in clinical medicine" first emerged in the 1960s (Fletcher, Fletcher, and Wagner, 1982).

Feinstein (1967) is credited as the catalyst for the emergence and growth of this new discipline. Feinstein, in his book Clinical Judgment (1967) wrote, "Honest, dedicated clinicians today disagree on the treatment for almost every disease from the common cold to the metastatic cancer.

Our experiments in treatment were acceptable by the standards of the community, but were not reproducible by the standards of science." So Feinstein proposed a method for applying scientific criteria to clinical judgments in clinical situations.

According to Hanemaayer (2016), around the same time, David Sackett was leading the first department of clinical epidemiology at McMaster University in Canada. Sackett was influenced by Feinstein and trained an entire generation of future doctors in clinical epidemiology. In the 1970s, Archibald Cochrane expanded the use of randomized controlled trials to a broader range of medical treatments.

In 1980, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the International Clinical Epidemiology Network (INCLEN), which took the methods and philosophy of clinical epidemiology worldwide. The efforts of INCLEN would later receive the support of the US Agency for International Development, the World Health Organization, and the International Development Research Centre.

Various terms have been used to describe the methods of clinical epidemiology. Eddy (1990) used the term "evidence-based." At about the same time the residency coordinator at McMaster University, Dr. Gordon Guyatt, was referring to this growing discipline as "scientific medicine" but apparently this term never caught on with the residents (Sur and Dahm, 2011). Eventually Guyatt settled on the term "evidence-based medicine" in an article i...

By Debbie Lerman at Brownstone dot org.

In conjunction with EUA (Emergency Use Authorization), the PREP Act is the legislation that enabled - and continues to perpetuate - the rollout and administration of mRNA "countermeasures" against Covid-19.

In this article I will discuss what the PREP Act says, how it was passed, what prominent politicians and legal experts said about it at the time, how it is related to Covid, and why I support efforts (1) calling for the HHS Secretary to immediately repeal the PREP Act emergency declaration for Covid, and (2) calling on legislators to repeal the law entirely.

What the PREP Act Says

The PREP Act is a long and convoluted piece of legislation. You can read the entire thing here:

42 U.S. Code § 247d-6d - Targeted liability protections for pandemic and epidemic products and security countermeasures

This is a summary of the main sections of the law:

(a) Liability Protections

Anyone defined as a "covered person" is immune from legal liability related to the use or administration of anything defined as a "covered countermeasure."

A "covered person" includes (A) "the United States" or (B) any person or "entity" that manufactures, distributes, plans a program for, prescribes, administers, or dispenses a covered countermeasure, or an official, agent, or employee of any of the above.

A "covered countermeasure" includes any drug, biological product, or device that is authorized under Emergency Use Authorization or approved through any other legal pathway.

Scope of claims for loss:

The immunity applies to any claim related to death, actual or fear of physical, mental, or emotional injury, illness, disability, or condition; and loss of or damage to property, including business interruption loss.

The immunity applies to any causal relation to any of the above types of loss related to the design, development, clinical testing or investigation, manufacture, labeling, distribution, formulation, packaging, marketing, promotion, sale, purchase, donation, dispensing, prescribing, administration, licensing, or use of a covered countermeasure.

The immunity applies only if a countermeasure was applied or used during the effective period of the emergency declaration for that countermeasure, and was used for the disease, population, and geographic area specified in the declaration.

For manufacturers or distributors, the immunity applies to any population in any geographic area, without regard to the population or area specified in the emergency declaration for the countermeasure.

(b) Declaration by Secretary

The HHS Secretary has the sole discretion to determine that a disease or other health condition or other threat to health constitutes a public health emergency, or that there is a credible risk for a future such emergency and, based on that determination, to make a declaration recommending the manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration, or use of one or more covered countermeasures, thereby activating the legal immunity described in section (a).

In the emergency declaration, which is made by publishing it in the Federal Register, the secretary shall identify - with respect to the use of countermeasures - the category of threat, the period during which the threat is in effect, the population for which it is in effect, and the geographic area for which it is in effect.

The period during which the emergency declaration is effective is flexible, depending on various determinations by the Secretary.

The Secretary can change any aspect of the declaration of emergency without retroactively affecting the immunity granted under the declaration.

The Secretary's decision to issue an emergency declaration for immunity can be based on anything, including the "desirability of encouraging" the design, development, clinical testing or investigation, manufacture, labeling, distribution, formulation, packaging, marketing, promotion, sale, purchase, donation, dispensing, prescribing, administration, or ...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

The Cochrane Collaboration publishes systematic reviews of healthcare interventions. This once magnificent organisation has now reached a point of no return from which it will disappear into oblivion because of excessive bureaucracy, protection of guild and financial interests, inefficiency, incompetence, censorship, and political expediency. This is a great shame because Cochrane was very much needed.

On Sir Iain Chalmers's initiative, we were 77 people who gathered in Oxford in the UK in October 1993 and agreed to start the Cochrane Collaboration. I opened the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen the same month.

We were very enthusiastic and successful. We formulated Cochrane's key principles, which include cooperation, teamwork, open and transparent communication and decision-making, maximising economy of effort, scientific rigour, avoiding conflicts of interest, and being open and responsive to criticism.

However, as I shall illustrate, based on my own experiences and those of close colleagues, it didn't last long before Cochrane abandoned its ideals, and the moral decline worsened over time.

Somatostatin for Bleeding Oesophageal Varices

In 1995, I published a clinical trial report with a meta-analysis of the only three placebo-controlled trials that existed. I analysed the data blindly and did not find any effect. But many hepatologists believed somatostatin worked, and when I submitted a review to the Cochrane Hepato-Biliary Group, and updated it later when more trials had been published, I faced trouble. The peer-reviewers asked me to do 15 subgroup analyses.

It is inappropriate to do this when the overall result is negative; we call it torturing your data till they confess.

Moreover, our review was flawed. It was based on published, industry-sponsored trials, and the biggest trial, which did not find any effect, has never been published. I asked the investigator, Andrew K. Burroughs, to share his data with us but to no avail.

In our most recent update, we had 21 trials (2,588 patients) and concluded that it is doubtful whether saving one-half unit of blood per patient is worthwhile.

Somatostatin is still being used, but I don't think it has any effect. It would be odd if a hormone had important effects on a bleeding that is often fatal.

Of Mites and Men

Some people with asthma are allergic to house dust mites. We showed that none of the many physical and chemical methods that had been tried had any effect and quickly got our review accepted for publication in the BMJ. But the Cochrane Airways Group's editor, Paul Jones, said he needed total certainty that our data extraction was correct. We needed to review all the trials again and to go to the group's office in London to work there while "consulting" the editorial staff, as it was called.

We didn't need help from people who were less qualified than us, and the extra work was a waste of time. It delayed publication of our review considerably, which was likely intended because in the meantime, a large trial achieved public funding amounting to £728,678.

After we had agreed on the version to be published, Jones secretly changed our abstract. Our conclusion, that the interventions "seem to be ineffective and cannot be recommended," was changed into, "There is not enough evidence to show …," which suggests that if we could have included the large UK trial, we might have shown an effect.

However, we had shown, with narrow confidence intervals, that we could not have missed a worthwhile effect. In our most recent update, there is still no trace of an effect, and the large UK trial made no difference. With my statistical background, I knew this would be the case.

We complained about the editorial misconduct, but some years later, Jones secretly changed our abstract again.

Even today, allergy "experts" and authorities recommend treatments they must know cannot work. The reduction in allergens is far too small to be effective, and ...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

When a major study appears in JAMA Psychiatry - a high-profile journal that shapes headlines and clinical decisions - its findings carry weight.

So when Kalfas and colleagues released what they billed as the most comprehensive analysis of antidepressant withdrawal to date, it drew immediate attention.

The study concluded that symptoms were generally "mild," short-lived, and possibly amplified by nocebo effects - positioning itself as the last word on the subject.

The authors mobilised a rapid media campaign to shape the public narrative, with the Science Media Centre issuing expert commentary to "reassure both patients and prescribers" that most withdrawal symptoms were "not clinically significant."

But for grassroots advocates who've spent years exposing the realities of withdrawal, the study felt like a gut punch. They argue it presents a dangerously misleading picture - one that could entrench outdated practices and delay long-overdue reform.

"The idea that withdrawal is rare or mild is a manufactured consensus based on industry-aligned data," said Morgan Stewart of the advocacy group Antidepressant Coalition for Education. "This is a misleading analysis of antidepressant withdrawal."

A Flawed Foundation

Kalfas et al. conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis - methods widely regarded as the gold standard in evidence-based medicine. It examined 50 studies involving more than 17,000 patients.

But these reviews are only as reliable as the data they include. If the underlying studies are biased or poorly designed, the result is what critics call "Garbage in, garbage out."

That's exactly what happened here.

Most antidepressant trials last just a few weeks or months, even though many people take these drugs for years. In the US, for example, half of all antidepressant users have been on them for more than five years. Short-term trials are of little relevance to this population.

Worse, many trials enrolled patients already taking antidepressants - then abruptly withdrew them before randomisation. As a result, those assigned to placebo experienced withdrawal symptoms that blurred the difference between treatment and control groups, artificially minimising the harms.

This sleight of hand isn't new. It exploits a structural weakness of placebo-controlled trials, which are ill-equipped to capture the real-world challenges of stopping antidepressants.

Kalfas et al. found that people who stopped antidepressants reported, on average, only one more symptom than those who stayed on treatment or placebo. But the study didn't assess symptom severity and followed patients for just two weeks.

That's not long enough. Many patients report that symptoms don't emerge until after that timeframe, so the study simply fails to reflect what happens in real life.

To make matters worse, most of the included trials were industry-funded and commonly used medications such as paroxetine, or escitalopram, which is known for causing severe withdrawals.

What Patients Experience - And Why Doctors Misinterpret It

In 2024, Danish physician Peter Gøtzsche and I conducted our own systematic review, published in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine. We examined interventions used to help patients taper off antidepressants.

We found success rates ranging from 9% to 80%, with a median of just 50%. Many participants described their symptoms as "severe."

Crucially, our meta-regression showed that longer tapering durations significantly increased the chances of success.

Yet doctors often mistake withdrawal symptoms - like anxiety, insomnia, dizziness, or low mood - for relapse. Patients are told their depression has returned, and the drug is reinstated.

In reality, these symptoms are often physiological responses to withdrawal. But too often, patients are gaslit by a system that refuses to acknowledge the problem.

https://blog.maryannedemasi.com/p/quitting-antidepressants-can-be-tricky

Laura Delano's ...

By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

(Editor's note: This is yet another look at autism causation studies. We're in such a strange moment. The stakes could not be higher, and yet, as I explain below, the available studies are flawed and unlikely to get better. I don't believe that the presence of a few reformers inside the administration changes this calculus much at all. I think we are much better taking matters into our own hands.)

The paradox of autism causation studies is that we already know beyond a reasonable doubt what's causing autism, but mainstream science will never "know" in the conventional way because of economic and political factors surrounding the autism epidemic.

Let's start with the first half of that sentence:

I. We Already Know

Eyewitness testimony is foundational to our criminal justice system and is relied upon by judges and juries every day to administer justice. In Neil v. Biggers (1972), the US Supreme Court outlined five factors for evaluating reliability of eyewitness testimony: opportunity to view, degree of attention, accuracy of description, level of certainty, and time between crime and identification. That testimony can then be corroborated by documentary evidence and additional witnesses.

Parental testimony about autistic regression is at the highest end of the range in every case. Parents are with the child 24/7, the degree of attention could not possibly be higher, the parents know more details about the child's life than anyone, they are certain about what they saw, and they generally know right away when something is wrong. In a sane society, the following testimony would be sufficient:

Your honor, my baby was perfectly healthy and meeting all of his developmental milestones. We went to a child "well baby" visit, my child got 4 shots. Over the next several days my child was with me 24 hours a day. He had a high fever, seizures, vomited, and screamed at a high pitch. We went to the emergency room, they ran a bunch of tests, but they couldn't help us. Since then the child no longer speaks, makes eye contact, or has any social skills. The child now has a diagnosis of autism.

The judge and jury can verify any of these facts by examining before and after video; reviewing medical records; and interviewing other family members, caregivers, etc. These are relatively straightforward cases. A child was developing normally, but they experienced an acute toxic exposure at a child "well baby" visit, and the child regressed. This happens in up to 88% of autism cases.

When this testimony is then repeated tens of thousands of times by moms across the country, it's clear that we are in the midst of a major crisis.

However, we live in a society where our economy is based on enslaving children through chronic illness to enrich the ruling class. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act combined with the wrongly decided Omnibus Autism Proceedings and the wrongly decided Supreme Court decision in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC turned off the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury for the vaccine-injured.

Wide swaths of society have been brainwashed by carrots (the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry and the soon to be trillion dollar autism industry), sticks (exile, banishment, and blacklisting for anyone who questions the narrative), and the most expensive and sustained propaganda campaign in history, to think that this is normal and okay.

Unfortunately, trying to achieve justice in connection with vaccine injury in the US means going up against the medical mafia that runs all aspects of society - the courts, the political system, the regulatory system, the media, the medical system, the scientific system, Wall Street, academia, etc. And they tilt the playing field and the evidentiary standards to protect their interests.

However, as free, sovereign, and sane people we need not accept the edicts of an insane society. We can simply acknowledge that "I saw with my own eyes what happened" is sufficient ...

By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.

In an exclusive interview with The DisInformation Chronicle, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya explains his latest policy to control monopoly science publishers now raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, while sometimes playing partisan politics and pushing fake narratives.

The NIH announced yesterday that they will soon cap the "article processing fees" that publishers can charge NIH-funded researchers to make their studies public and available to American taxpayers.

NIH funds much of the planet's biomedical science, but this research has remained locked up by pricey science journals that charge Americans expensive fees to read the results of the very studies they funded. The publishers of Science Magazine, for example, demand $30 to read a single study.

However, this changed recently when Dr. Bhattacharya demanded that journals make NIH-funded studies public as soon as they publish them. However, taxpayers are still on the hook, paying the "open access fee" that journals charge scientists.

In the case of the esteemed Nature Magazine, this means a $12,600 fee. Of course, scientists don't have thousands of dollars lying around for publishing fees, so NIH-funded researchers simply charge that cost back to the American taxpayer as part of their NIH grants. In effect, taxpayers get charged twice: first when they fund an NIH grant for a university professor, and second when they pay that professor's publishing fee to a science journal.

And this money quickly adds up.

The six largest science publishers charge researchers $1.8 billion in publishing fees every year, with American taxpayers soaking up a large portion of that money. NIH's latest policy will control these costs in the future, ensuring more NIH money goes to scientists and their research.

Dr. Bhattacharya spoke with me about the exorbitant costs researchers pay these monopoly publishers to get their studies out in the public, as well as the blatant games publishers play to promote partisan agendas that corrupt public discourse.

"You would expect that the top science journals in the world would have news organs that respected the truth," Bhattacharya says. "But unfortunately, both Nature and Science have science writers who report propaganda and often rumors."

We also discuss a corrupt study Nature Medicine published called "Proximal Origin" that the Department of Justice is now looking into, as well as prejudicial and unprofessional statements Science Magazine editor Holden Thorp made during the pandemic. Thorp's response appears at the interview's end.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

THACKER: You guys recently released, or you sped up this requirement that all NIH-funded research must be made public when published. Why were we ever allowing journals to keep public-funded studies locked up as proprietary research?

BHATTACHARYA: It never made sense for the government to be paying for research that wasn't available to the public. My predecessor at the NIH, Monica Bertagnolli, instituted a program that…The NIH put a requirement on their funded researchers to only publish in journals that allowed the public access to the articles for free. For reasons I will never understand, that policy was seen as controversial.

Primarily, I think, because the journal industry is a big business. In fact, it's almost a monopoly power. Those interests had a big role in creating controversy over something that should have been obvious. Americans should have the right to read the articles that their taxpayer dollars fund.

This policy by Bertagnolli was going to go into effect in December, and what I did is I sped up the timeline to the beginning of July. We finally have a rational system where if the taxpayers pay for research it is available to American taxpayers for free, immediately upon publication.

THACKER: So what is this newest policy doing?

BHATTACHARYA: What I've se...

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

An unjust law is no law at all.

St. Augustine

If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.

Thomas Jefferson

Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

When the originator of natural law theory, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the greatest American Transcendentalist philosopher, and the patron saint of the American civil rights movement all stand in full agreement on a particular question of justice, the United States Department of Justice ought to pay heed.

When the case at issue is a signal act of conscience, courage, and protection of one's fellow human beings, done in defiance of the greatest state-sponsored act of tyranny in modern history, the United States Department of Justice must either act appropriately or permanently besmirch itself.

Enter Dr. Kirk Moore and US Attorney General Pam Bondi.

From May 2021 through September 2022, during the Covid vaccine rollouts and the peak of Covid vaccine hysteria and coercion, Dr. Moore, a plastic surgeon practicing in Utah, issued false Covid-19 vaccination cards to patients who wished to avoid the shots, disposed of Covid-19 vaccines, and at parents' request, gave saline shots to some children in lieu of actual Covid-19 vaccines.

In January 2023, Dr. Moore was charged by the US Department of Justice, then run by Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland, with offenses that could have totaled 35 years in prison.

What crimes was Dr. Moore accused of that would justify such long imprisonment? Was he killing his patients with deadly, barely tested vaccines?

No, Kirk Moore was charged with much more heinous acts, like "Conspiracy to defraud the United States" (for allegedly issuing fake Covid vaccination cards), "Conspiracy to Convert, Sell, Convey, and Dispose of Government Property," (for allegedly disposing of Covid-19 vaccines), and "Conversion, Sale, Conveyance and Disposal of Government Property and Aiding and Abetting"

(for allegedly disposing of the vaccines and issuing saline injections instead).

Essentially, Moore was charged with "defrauding" the US government and destroying US government property. None of the charges accused him of harming or intending to inflict harm on his fellow citizens.

Since then, multiple changes in United States Government policy, and multiple case law decisions have demonstrated that the coercive vaccine-pushing policies of that time, to which Dr. Moore gave his patients an alternative, were indeed unconstitutional and unjust. For example, US military members who were dismissed for refusing the Covid shots have been reinstated with back pay, and as early as 2022, the Supreme Court ruled against OSHA for overreach regarding its vaccine mandates.

Numerous other lawsuits against abusive and coercive Covid vaccine policies have since succeeded, including this partial list:

Navy SEALs 1-26 v. Biden (2022)

Medical Professionals for Informed Consent v. Bassett (2023)

BART Employees Lawsuit (2024)

NorthShore University Health System Class-Action Settlement (2022)

Simply put, Moore was being prosecuted for defying state-sponsored tyranny, which has since been acknowledged by the courts, and even by the State itself. He took action to protect his patients from the US Government while it committed medically unethical, frankly unconstitutional, and, as it turned out, harmful and deadly acts against its own citizens. He did it for the benefit of his patients and at great personal risk.

The case against Moore and his co-defendants attracted national attention, which rose to a fever pitch at Moore's recent trial. This happened in part because of its connection to the tyranny of the Covid vaccine rollout and "vaccine card" era, but also because of recently growing distrust surrounding the questionable m...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

Rachael Bedard's New York Magazine article, "Why Calling RFK Jr. 'Anti-Science' Misses the Point," is one of the most conceptually sophisticated treatments to appear in legacy media regarding the Kennedy-era shift in public health governance. We commend the author for recognizing what many political and media figures have either denied or dismissed: that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. does not reject science, but demands it - fully, correctly, and transparently practiced.

Bedard rightly frames Kennedy's approach as a response to the erosion of public trust in the institutions of science, not in the scientific method itself. She perceptively highlights the failure of conventional "fact-based" rebuttals to regain credibility in a post-expert culture - where legacy appeals to consensus, peer authority, and institutional prestige no longer carry self-justifying weight.

In acknowledging that science has become entangled with political and moral judgment, Bedard departs from the caricature of Kennedy as a reactionary or a conspiracist. For that, we thank her.

But her analysis ultimately lands just short of the mark - not because it is overly critical, but because it remains overly charitable to the very system Kennedy is working to reform.

Plural Rationalities Do Not Equal Plural Subjectivities

Bedard's invocation of "plural rationalities" is meant to contextualize Kennedy's appeal in a world where competing frameworks of meaning now coexist. But she mistakenly equates this with an embrace of multiple subjectivities - a kind of epistemological détente where facts must yield to feelings, and public discourse is governed by the soft consensus of "lived experience." This is a category error.

What Kennedy and the MAHA Institute are restoring is not the validation of all viewpoints, but the reinstatement of evidentiary integrity as the shared terrain upon which disagreements can legitimately occur. The alternative to technocratic fiat is not epistemic relativism - it is the application of rigorous standards in the service of informed public deliberation, not behind closed doors but in view of the people science purports to serve.

Consent Is Not the Mess - Coercion Is

The article also omits a crucial piece of ethical context. Bedard implies that public health has become messy because science and values are now entangled, and "plural rationalities" make consensus unachievable. But the mess was not created by competing value systems. It was created by those who sought to eliminate value choice altogether - by imposing recommendations without full disclosure of uncertainty, conflict, or alternatives.

Risk assessment in the face of uncertainty is always messy; forcing a choice with partial information withheld to manipulate the perception of risk is a coercive tactic that is not allowed by the rules and laws governing informed consent, designed to protect individual rights from the chaos of mass rule.

Free, prior, and informed consent is not a source of chaos - it is a stabilizing precondition for legitimacy. The chaos arises only when consent is bypassed, truncated, or replaced with coercion - often justified by appeals to a "greater good" that was never defined, measured, or properly debated.

It was precisely the abandonment of consent and the institutional panic that followed that forced public health agencies to rely on lower standards of evidence, selective publication, and in some cases, overt fraud to maintain behavioral compliance.

Had the public been informed honestly - about the limitations of the Covid vaccine trials, the failure to protect against transmission, the structural problems in the VAERS and VSD surveillance systems, or the mechanistic plausibility of immune suppression, and serious adverse events - many still would have consented. But they would have consented freely. That freedom, not plural subjectivities, is what Kennedy insists upon. And it is what the public now demands.

The ...

By Lucia Sinatra at Brownstone dot org.

It was nerve wracking, to say the least; having a high school student who had gotten into his dream college in mid-December 2020 but was uncertain if he could attend the following fall due to Covid-19 vaccine mandates. Those harrowing days and nights we spent focusing on little else as we scoured college websites to eventually find what we pretty much expected would come to pass.

It started in April of 2021 when Rutgers University and then Harvard University announced their students would be required to take Covid-19 vaccines prior to enrollment. In these early days, I remember thinking that surely, they will reveal some scientific data showing these vaccines could prevent transmission and severe illness or death to justify the mandates, but alas, the wait was in vain.

Living up to their cult behavior reputation, by the summer of 2021, over 1,000 colleges announced the exact same fear-fueled narrative and implemented some of the world's most oppressive mandate policies. By August, millions of college students would be mandated to take primary series Covid-19 vaccines prior to enrollment, many without enough notice to get their deposits back, transfer colleges, or even file for an exemption.

The directive was clear: take these novel medical treatments with zero scientific evidence to show you need them, or don't bother showing up.

The best and brightest minds in academia never demanded to see the scientific data to justify their colleges' strict mandate policies and never demanded the reasoning behind their administrations summoning a 100% compliance rate, but instead elevated the propaganda in lockstep fashion.

To this day, it is astounding to think of what transpired and that so few questioned the lack of supporting science either because they were aghast to consider that our federal government was responsible for perpetrating the greatest crime against humanity the world has ever seen, or just because it was easier to comply and convince others to do the same.

Some of us could see the writing on the wall. We knew colleges and universities were going to take this global pandemic opportunity to manipulate and control their vulnerable and young healthy adult populations into compliance, and that is exactly what they did. I kept hoping I was wrong, and once more data was released, these institutions would reverse course, but I was wrong then, and I still am now.

Health science students are still being coerced to take Covid-19 vaccines either prior to enrollment in their institutional program or prior to the start of their practical training at hospitals and clinical partner programs. In fact, they are the only college students still being coerced to take Covid-19 vaccines, and most of the time, it feels as though there is no end in sight.

When President Trump signed Executive Order 14214, he promised to end federal funding to colleges that still mandate Covid-19 vaccines. However, that has not happened yet, and who knows if it ever will? For example, the majority of health science degrees in our country are conferred by colleges and universities, and health science students at some institutions are still required to take Covid-19 vaccines. Why haven't these institutions been defunded in accordance with EO 14214?

To be clear, it is not new that health science students have different vaccination requirements than students who are not health care majors. However, regarding Covid-19 vaccines in particular, the faculty and staff who teach these students at the college program or at the hospital or clinical facility where they are required to complete practicums are often no longer required to take these vaccines.

In sum, we have a number of institutions that have yet to be defunded as promised by President Trump, and we have students at those institutions who are subject to unjustifiable disparate treatment. So, what gives?

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea other than these colleges hav...

By Trish Dennis at Brownstone dot org.

The fog of the Covid era is lifting, and what remains is stark. Only after the storm does the damage reveal itself in full. I reflect not just on what happened, but how it happened, how an entire population was brought to heel, how critical thought was sidelined, and how something so obviously destructive was sold as public health.

Above all, I see how pernicious the role of the mainstream media truly was. They didn't merely echo the government line; they shaped it, sanctified it, and sold it. Without their complicity, none of it could have taken hold. This wasn't journalistic fatigue. It was a wholesale abdication of duty.

The BBC, Sky, ITV, and Channel 4 weren't passive observers. They were willing handmaidens in a choreographed deception, a closed loop of narrative control, where dissent was excluded and fear was amplified. They sang from the same hymn sheet and made sure we did too.

What struck me most wasn't just the silence, but the spineless conformity of some of its most celebrated voices. Take Emily Maitlis, James O'Brien, and Andrew Neil as a sample few, journalists who pride themselves on speaking truth to power, figures who relish reputations for fearless interrogation, so long as it's fashionable or safe.

But when it mattered most, they fell into line. They didn't just stick to the script; they actively helped to enforce it. Not only did they fail to question, but they also ridiculed and suppressed those who did. They raised no serious challenge to lockdown strategy, offered no real scrutiny of vaccine mandates, said nothing of the needless isolation deaths or the masking of children, and embraced coercive behavioural science tactics without a murmur. They had the platform, but not the backbone.

Emily Maitlis, for example, was rightly lauded for her takedown of Prince Andrew in a poised and incisive interview that became a cultural event and was later adapted as a Netflix film. But where was that bravery when civil liberties were suspended, children were denied education, and the elderly were left to die alone? It's easy to be brave when the villain is already cast. It's harder to expose lies in a narrative you're helping to sell.

I'll admit, I was slow to see it. I've always been cynical about politicians, and I fully expect them to exploit power. But I still clung to the idea that the media was meant to be the firebreak, the safeguard between state and people, the institution that says, "Hold on," not "How high?" Instead, they cheered from the sidelines and asked for more.

In the end, they weren't journalists but obedient actors in a state-sanctioned drama, sticking to the script, staying within the lines, and cashing the cheques. They weren't brave or bold. They were craven, supine, and loyal to the lie.

That alone would be shameful. But they didn't stop at silence. They, and a media class that should have known better, actively colluded in the suppression, censorship, and smearing of dissenting voices, scientists, doctors, parents, and citizens who dared to question the dogma or suggest less destructive paths. These people deserved airtime, debate, and discussion. Instead, they were vilified.

And figures like Maitlis, O'Brien, Neil, and many of their colleagues, weren't just bystanders to that vilification. They were part of the machine that drove it.

When journalism was most needed, the mainstream journalists didn't just fail in their duty; they sided with power against the people. They didn't defend humanity; they helped to break it. The cost of that betrayal is still being counted in broken trust, broken lives, and a fractured society.

So I pose this question: What is the point of the mainstream media? Because when the stakes were highest, in our hour of need, it served only the interests of power, and not the people. This discredited institution, as I see it now, is an empty husk, echoing with hypocrisy and driven by nothing but profit. Whatever integrity it once c...