By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

Definitions (Because the Meaning of Words Matters)

Misinformation = information (deemed false at the time of distribution) that differs from the official State-approved narrative, but not intentionally deployed for political purposes.

Disinformation = information (deemed false at the time of distribution) differing from the official State-approved narrative, distributed to advance a political agenda.

Malinformation = information which may be true or false, but which causes those persons receiving the information to distrust the State.

Synformation = Synthetic information and realities fabricated by creating false knowledge and associated synthetic "truth" matrices using large language model-based "artificial intelligence" computational tools.

Epistemology = Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge, encompassing its nature, origin, and limits. It investigates what it means to know something, how knowledge is acquired through sources like perception, reason, memory, and testimony, and what distinguishes justified belief from mere opinion. Central concepts in epistemology include belief, truth, justification, and evidence, with the traditional definition of knowledge often being understood as justified true belief.

Epistemic Capture = As articulated by Dr. Toby Rogers in his Senate testimony and writings: "In the social sciences, there's this term called epistemic capture, which is when the entire knowledge production process becomes captured by one industry (Big Pharma). And that's what's happened with science and medicine." He elaborated that this capture means "the pharmaceutical industry has captured every step in the knowledge production process in science and medicine. Big Pharma controls what is studied, how it is researched, and what qualifies as evidence."

Truthiness = Something has truthiness when it feels true, sounds true, or ought to be true based on emotion, intuition, belief, or ideological preference — regardless of evidence, logic, or objective verification. It prioritizes subjective conviction ("I feel it in my gut") over empirical reality ("the evidence shows…").

"Truthiness is the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true. It's what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. It's truth that comes from the gut, not from books."

Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report (October 17, 2005)

Introduction and Context

In my role as Co-chairperson and member of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, I have been participating in a training course regarding the GRADE methodology for public health decision-making. The acronym stands for Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation, and this methodology is intended to provide a structured, transparent framework to evaluate the quality (certainty) of evidence and the strength of recommendations derived from that evidence.

The intent of this method is to create an unbiased tool for evidence-based policy decision-making in public health and clinical medicine. The development of this complicated system was managed by an international working group starting in 2000, and their work product has now been adopted by the WHO, CDC/ACIP, Cochrane Collaboration, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the UK, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) and many others including various medical specialty guilds here in the US.

It may come as a surprise to many insiders that, although historically endorsed by the CDC ACIP, the GRADE system is not universally accepted (internationally). The European Medicines Agency (EMA) does not use the GRADE system for its decision-making processes, such as evaluating medicines for marketing authorization or developing scientific guidelines. The EMA primarily assesses the quality, safety, and efficacy of medicines through its scientific committees (e.g., Committee for Medicinal Products ...