By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.
Before Covid, I would have described myself as a technological optimist. New technologies almost always arrive amid exaggerated fears. Railways were supposed to cause mental breakdowns, bicycles were thought to make women infertile or insane, and early electricity was blamed for everything from moral decay to physical collapse. Over time, these anxieties faded, societies adapted, and living standards rose. The pattern was familiar enough that artificial intelligence seemed likely to follow it: disruptive, sometimes misused, but ultimately manageable.
The Covid years unsettled that confidence—not because technology failed, but because institutions did.
Across much of the world, governments and expert bodies responded to uncertainty with unprecedented social and biomedical interventions, justified by worst-case models and enforced with remarkable certainty. Competing hypotheses were marginalized rather than debated. Emergency measures hardened into long-term policy. When evidence shifted, admissions of error were rare, and accountability rarer still. The experience exposed a deeper problem than any single policy mistake: modern institutions appear poorly equipped to manage uncertainty without overreach.
That lesson now weighs heavily on debates over artificial intelligence.
The AI Risk Divide
Broadly speaking, concern about advanced AI falls into two camps. One group—associated with thinkers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—argues that sufficiently advanced AI is catastrophically dangerous by default. In their deliberately stark formulation, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the problem is not bad intentions but incentives: competition ensures someone will cut corners, and once a system escapes meaningful control, intentions no longer matter.
A second camp, including figures such as Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, and Max Tegmark, also takes AI risk seriously but is more optimistic that alignment, careful governance, and gradual deployment can keep systems under human control.
Despite their differences, both camps converge on one conclusion: unconstrained AI development is dangerous, and some form of oversight, coordination, or restraint is necessary. Where they diverge is on feasibility and urgency. What is rarely examined, however, is whether the institutions expected to provide that restraint are themselves fit for the role.
Covid suggests reason for doubt.
Covid was not merely a public-health crisis; it was a live experiment in expert-driven governance under uncertainty. Faced with incomplete data, authorities repeatedly chose maximal interventions justified by speculative harms. Dissent was often treated as a moral failing rather than a scientific necessity. Policies were defended not through transparent cost-benefit analysis but through appeals to authority and fear of hypothetical futures.
This pattern matters because it reveals how modern institutions behave when stakes are framed as existential. Incentives shift toward decisiveness, narrative control, and moral certainty. Error correction becomes reputationally costly. Precaution stops being a tool and becomes a doctrine.
The lesson is not that experts are uniquely flawed. It is that institutions reward overconfidence far more reliably than humility, especially when politics, funding, and public fear align. Once extraordinary powers are claimed in the name of safety, they are rarely surrendered willingly.
These are precisely the dynamics now visible in discussions of AI oversight.
The "What if" Machine
A recurring justification for expansive state intervention is the hypothetical bad actor: What if a terrorist builds this? What if a rogue state does that? From that premise flows the argument that governments must act pre-emptively, at scale, and often in secrecy, to prevent catastrophe.
During Covid, similar logic justified sweeping biomedical research agendas, emergency authorizations, and social controls. The reasoning was...

By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org.
The Fifth Big Lie of Vaccinology: Declaring Vaccines Fundamentally "Safe and Effective" as a Class, is a manipulative, unethical propaganda device that must be brought to an end.
Slogans, catch phrases, and advertising jingles comprise an enormous amount of the information that the media sends out to all of us every day. Marketing is largely based on attaching simplistic, positive connotations to whatever product is being sold.
Sometimes manipulative advertising is easily identifiable and seems harmless enough. Depending on your personal preference for fast food, you may either decide that "You rule," or instead choose to make sure "I'm lovin' it." When purchasing an automobile, you can be content just to say "Let's go places," or you can insist on owning "The ultimate driving machine."
However, marketing, news, and yes, government directives frequently overlap – and even merge – to an extent that can be very difficult to detect. If an advertising jingle takes hold firmly enough, it can become conventional wisdom. Sometimes it can even be assumed to be objective fact.
Generations of Americans grew up accepting as an article of faith that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day." However, this claim was first made – without evidence – in 1917 by a protégé of breakfast cereal magnates named the Kellogg Brothers. While this assertion about the primary importance of breakfast has been challenged in recent years, it still resonates in the minds of many as a basic truth of daily life.
"Safe and Effective:" An Advertising Slogan, Not a Medical Fact
With the rollout of the Covid vaccines, starting in December 2020, patients worldwide were barraged with another baseless (and completely untrue) marketing slogan: that the brand new, warp-speed developed Covid vaccines are "safe and effective." (Should anyone have forgotten the intensity of the marketing blitz, please watch this, this, and – gulp – this to refresh your memory.)
We were told that Covid vaccines are "safe and effective." Period. This advertising slogan was repeated endlessly, despite the fact that it referred to a variety of different products, using multiple different technologies, all produced in extreme haste.
Almost overnight, there were shots by Pfizer/BioNTech (mRNA technology), Moderna (also mRNA), Johnson & Johnson (viral vector technology), AstraZeneca (also viral vector), and Novavax (protein subunit technology).
Didn't matter. We were told that Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."
We were told to take whichever Covid shot might be available. We were told that it didn't matter which vaccine might be offered to you. We were told its mechanism of action didn't matter. We were told you could even "mix and match!" Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."
That advertising jingle persists even today. Never mind that two major Covid vaccines (the Johnson & Johnson and the AstraZeneca products), both previously hailed as "safe and effective," were pulled from the market for, well, killing people. Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."
Never mind that the CDC's own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) catalogued over 38,000 deaths due to the Covid vaccines. Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."
Never mind the drip-drip-drip of media reports describing the waning effectiveness of the Covid shots, an utterly predictable outcome. All that means is that you need another booster shot! Covid vaccines are "safe and effective."
To review: two of the original Covid shots – previously hailed as "safe and effective" – have been pulled from the market because they were unsafe. New, updated versions of the remaining shots are constantly being produced, because previous versions – also previously promoted as safe and effective – are ineffective. Furthermore, their disastrous safety record is reflected in the low public uptake of the newer versions.
Nevertheless, Covid vaccines are still officially "safe and ef...

By Peter St Onge at Brownstone dot org.
Somali daycare powerhouse Quality Learing Center has closed.
If you need to lear your kids you will need a new Somali daycare. Happily, you've got thousands of empty ones to choose from.
The nation is being seized by what Zerohedge calls the Nick Shirley effect as hundreds of citizen journalists fan out exposing what looks like tens of billions — perhaps trillions — of fraud.
What's been found so far focuses on the Somali community, where despite nearly 90% of these model immigrants being on welfare they've managed to set up tens of thousands of apparently fraudulent daycares, autism therapy centers, food for kids programs, and home health companies.

To give a flavor, there's apparently 50,000 Somali healthcare companies — one per 3 adult Somalis in the nation.
Somali-run autism grants in Minnesota now run $399 million — up from $3 million in 2018. Somali child nutrition scams were actually prosecuted for $300 million stolen. After which even more scams sprung up because the city and state turned a blind eye.
So far DOJ estimates $8 billion of Somali fraud in Minnesota alone — roughly a quarter million per Somali household. Meaning the roughly 65,000 Somali adults in Minnesota managed to steal more than the entire GDP of Somalia itself, population 20 million.
Saudi Arabia has oil. China has factories. Somalia has Quality Learing Centers.

The Tip of the Iceberg
Unfortunately, Somalis are just the tip of the iceberg.
A new study found half of New York City is on Medicaid — note average family income in New York City is $81,000. Given 40% of New Yorkers are foreign-born, this will be hundreds of thousands getting free care when the rest of us — who pay for it — shell out tens of thousands for insurance.
Meanwhile, a 2023 survey by New York City found foreigners — not foreign-born but actual foreigners — occupy fully 32% of public housing and over 40% of rent-controlled and stabilized units.
California is even worse; the state auditor recently tallied $70 billion in fraud, including $2.5 billion of SNAP fraud and $24 billion in fraud for homelessness.
And that's just the fraud they found.
The Covid Fraud Boom
The Fraud Industrial Complex took off during Covid: The Small Business Administration estimates $64 billion in fraudulent PPP loans — other estimates run to $80 billion.
Given the median PPP loan was $20,000 so that implies 4 million people should be in prison right now.
Toss in the Covid-era Economic Injury loans, where up to $200 billion was stolen. These averaged $100,000, implying another 2 million felons.
So take Minnesota Somalis, multiply by 20 blue states, dozens of nationalities — eight Indian gas stations in Texas, for example, got 32 million in SBA loans. In case you wonder why Indians and not Americans own the 7/11's.
What's Next
Long-standing government estimates of fraud run north of $500 billion a year. Elon thinks it's closer to a trillion and half, which seems right given what's being exposed.
That would be roughly half of income taxes. In fact, it's enough to exempt every American from income tax up to $200,000.
This is leading Americans people to suggest maybe we should stop paying tax until government gets control of the fraud.

The left is responding how you'd expect. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz calls Somali fraud probes "white supremacy." While MSNBC says Trump's making it up cos he's racist.
But Shirley has set off a nationwide movement by citizen journalists to expose fraud. Incentivized by the fact whistleblowers get 15-30% of recoveries — in case you're looking for a side gig.
A hundred million Americans are pissed off. Unless we see a lot of people in handcuffs, we're this close to a taxpayer revolt the IRS couldn't hope to keep up with.
Republished from the author's Substack

By Michael Tomlinson at Brownstone dot org.
Evidence continues to mount indicating that the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic was counterproductive and harmful, yet mainstream opinion continues to proclaim that it was a triumph.
This is based on scientific papers that often manipulate the data or present it selectively.
Exhibit 1: Cohort study of cardiovascular safety of different Covid-19 vaccination doses among 46 million adults in England by Ip et al. The authors conclude that 'the incidence of common arterial thrombotic events (mainly acute myocardial infarction and ischaemic stroke) was generally lower after each vaccine dose, brand and combination' and 'the incidence of common venous thrombotic events (mainly pulmonary embolism and lower limb deep venous thrombosis) was lower after vaccination.'
This seems to be a straightforward outcome, based on a most inclusive sample – the whole population of England. However, Table 2 shows incidence rates of cardiovascular events were substantially higher (nearly double for arterial events) after the first dose of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, compared to no vaccination:

This contradicts the text: 'The incidence of thrombotic and cardiovascular complications was generally lower after each dose of each vaccine brand.' Of course, 'generally' is a weasel word. It means that the incidence of complications after each dose was lower except where it was higher. Incidence rates for the Moderna vaccine were indeed much lower at least in the medium term (up to 26 weeks) but rates for AstraZeneca and Pfizer were much higher.
Incidence rates after the second dose were indeed 'generally' lower in the tables. But Supplementary Table 3 reveals that the definition of 'no vaccination' for Dose 2 in fact means the interval between a first dose and a second dose. The largest increases in incidence rates are for the Pfizer and AstraZeneca Dose 1 vaccination groups, the only cohorts compared with a true vaccination naïve control group.

Returning to Table 2, the vaccinated group and the unvaccinated groups have comparable numbers of events, but the vaccinated groups are calculated with reference to approximately half the number of person years. If we apply the incidence rates to the numbers of people in each group (at the top of Table 1), we can calculate vaccination with the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines brought about in the region of 91,000 additional serious cardiac events (euphemistically described as 'complications') compared to the no vaccination group in a little over one year. On the other hand, the Moderna group experienced over 34,000 fewer events compared with the no vaccination group, leading to an overall balance of around 56,000 additional events. How many of the individuals who had additional heart attacks, strokes, and thromboses subsequently died? The results are shocking, but after further processing we are told they are 'reassuring.'
To obscure the alarming results, the text relies not on the straight incidence rates but on hazard ratios 'adjusting for a wide range of potential confounding factors.'
It is not apparent why any adjustment was necessary. On the one hand, 'There were few differences between subgroups defined by demographic and clinical characteristics,' and on the other hand, 'we addressed potential confounding by adjusting for a wide range of demographic factors and prior diagnoses.' Were there significant differences in demographics or weren't there?
Further on, we are told that 'Subgroup analyses by age group, ethnic group, previous history of the event of interest and sex were conducted' and outcomes 'were generally similar across subgroups.' What were the potentially confounding factors that had to be adjusted for if not these? How could an incidence rate of approximately 1.9 for the Pfizer Dose 1 arterial events be adjusted to a hazard ratio of 0.9?
If an adjustment leads to the reversal of findings of this magnitude, then it must be done transpa...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.
The Washington Post recently published a detailed investigation showing that childhood vaccination rates across the United States are falling sharply, particularly for measles. Fewer counties now meet the 95 percent coverage level commonly associated with herd immunity, and millions of children attend schools in communities below that threshold.
On the basics, it's true that routine childhood measles shots are among the most effective measures for keeping that particular infection at bay. But the Post's analysis fails where it matters most: it cannot explain why trust has collapsed so broadly, so persistently, and so rationally for many ordinary people.
Instead, readers are offered a familiar diagnosis. Distrust of authorities. Political polarization. Misinformation. Backlash against mandates. All of this is curiously detached from responsibility. The article describes the consequences of distrust without confronting its causes.
That omission is not accidental. It reflects a broader unwillingness among elite media and public health institutions to reckon honestly with Covid-era failures. And without that reckoning, efforts to restore vaccine confidence are unlikely to succeed.
This is not an argument against vaccines. It is an argument about credibility.
During the Covid-19 period, public health authorities repeatedly overstated certainty, minimized uncertainty, and treated legitimate scientific disagreement as a threat rather than a feature of good science.
Claims about vaccines preventing infection and transmission were presented as settled fact, not evolving hypotheses. When those claims weakened or collapsed under new evidence, they were revised quietly, without acknowledgment of error.
The same pattern appeared across other policies: masking, school closures, natural immunity, and population-level risk. Positions shifted, sometimes dramatically, but rarely with public explanation. The message conveyed—intentionally or not—was that narrative management mattered more than transparency.
This mattered because trust is cumulative. People do not evaluate each public health recommendation in isolation. They judge institutions based on patterns of behavior over time. When authorities insist they were always right, even when claims visibly change, credibility erodes.
Worse, dissent was often suppressed rather than debated. Scientists and clinicians who questioned prevailing policies—on lockdowns, school closures, or mandates—were frequently labeled as misinformation spreaders rather than engaged on the merits. Government coordination with social media platforms blurred the line between combating falsehoods and policing debate. Once that line is crossed, institutional trust does not merely decline—it inverts.
None of this requires assuming bad faith. Emergencies are hard. Decisions were made under pressure. But good faith does not excuse overstatement, nor does difficulty justify refusing retrospective evaluation.
The result of this approach is now visible in the data the Washington Post reports—but does not explain.
Evidence from Pennsylvania illustrates the point. Montgomery County, a large, affluent, highly educated Philadelphia suburb, has historically had strong vaccination uptake and robust healthcare access. It is not a place easily dismissed as anti-science or anti-medicine.
Yet my physician survey research conducted in the county during and after the pandemic tells a different story. Clinicians reported that while initial Covid vaccine uptake was high in 2021, acceptance declined sharply over time, particularly for boosters. More importantly, many physicians observed a spillover effect: growing hesitancy not only toward Covid vaccines, but toward other vaccines as well.
Patients were not primarily citing technical fears about vaccine safety. They were expressing distrust of public health authorities. They referenced shifting claims, perceived exaggeration, and the absence of acknowle...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.
At the turn of the century, America held unchallengeable sway in the world, its economy the strongest and most dynamic, its military the most powerful, its globe-spanning alliances unrivalled, and its global leadership uncontested. The year 2001 seemed to be the pivot on which everything began heading south, with 9/11 serving as the most potent symbol of the all-round decline of US military power, financial muscle, societal cohesion, and global leadership.
Political gridlock domestically was accompanied by failed interventions abroad. In a parallel development pregnant with profound ramifications for the world's trajectory, China began a rapid ascent up the global power rankings on most dimensions, helped by US-led Western generosity in granting WTO membership, market access, and shift of manufacturing and production chains. The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston describes this first quarter-century of the new millennium as 'an era of folly' for America.
This is the global geopolitical landscape against which the US National Security Strategy (NSS) was published on 5 December, the seventh such document in this century and the most transactional ever. President Donald Trump's more muscular and singular approach to foreign and national security policy was already foreshadowed with his multifront assault on the central pillars of the liberal international order created in the aftermath of the Second World War under US leadership, and with the renaming of the Department of War. The 33-page NSS gives institutional form to his foreign policy.
Sent by the president to Congress, the NSS articulates the administration's national security vision and how the several elements of US power will be used in pursuit of national security goals. It is meant to bring the different elements of his international policies into some sort of a coherent strategic framework, to steer the various branches of the national security apparatus into implementing his priorities, to rally public support behind the administration's goals, to reassure friends and allies, and to deter adversaries.
It marks an explicit repudiation of the worldview of post-Cold War US administrations: 'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over' (p. 12). In his foreword, Trump describes it as 'a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history' and is made 'safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before' (p. ii).
The NSS addresses the world as Trump sees it today, not as it was in 1991. The key sentence for me is:
President Trump's foreign policy is…realistic without being 'realist,' principled without being 'idealistic,' muscular without being 'hawkish,' and restrained without being 'dovish' (p. 8).
The backdrop to this is the denunciation of the elite consensus at the Cold War's end, following which successive administrations:
lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty (p. 2).
NSS 2025 accepts the imperative to prioritise competing regions and goals in a world of limited resources, instead of presenting a comprehensive laundry list of all the good-to-have objectives. It makes the obvious and common-sense point that the principal US strategic interest is the defence of the homeland and its own hemisphere, with special emphasis on preventing extra-hemispheric powers such as China, Russia, and Iran from meddling. But it also reaffirms the need for a 'free and open Indo-Pacific' (p. 19). The region that accounts for almost half the world's GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars and one-third in nominal GDP, is critical to the world's economic development and political stability.
The Logic of Geography
The NSS should put to rest the notion that Trum...

By Michael Hurley at Brownstone dot org.
During Lent in 2022, Michael Hurley published a shorter version of the following essay in American Thinker, lamenting the betrayal of the faithful during the Covid pandemic. After four years, the silence of the bishops continues.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent for Catholics around the world. On this day, priests smear ashes on millions of foreheads while uttering some version of the words, "Remember, man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return." Perhaps this year the ritual should be reversed, with the faithful lining up to administer ashes to priests and bishops until their white surplices are covered with an unmistakable reminder of their own mortality.
Everywhere today there are hopeful signs that the political revolution traveling under the guise of Covid-19 may be faltering, but the shockwaves it sent through the Church are still reverberating and slowly widening, two years after the fact. The opening salvos of this revolution still echo in these five words:
The bishops closed the churches.
Let that sentence wash over you, slowly, and you may begin to grasp its enduring significance. Never before in human history, through centuries of war and famine and disease, has there been a worldwide closure of the Church that Christ founded to conquer death over-wait for it-the fear of death.
To understand the scope of the damage that has been done to the Church, let's begin with a thought experiment. Assume you are given the power to save the soul of one person from an eternity in Hell, but to do so, you must make martyrs and saints of every man, woman, and child now living on the face of the earth. How would you choose? If you could be assured that every life lost would rise to glory in Heaven, would you calculate the value of saving one person from Hell to exceed the value of all the days and years of life lost to the billions whose earthly lives would be cut short? Would billions and billions of days of life on earth, and all the joy and wonder and happiness they would surely contain, be worth one soul lost to an eternity in Hell?
To some, this will seem a preposterous question, because none of us can fathom eternity and many of us no longer believe in Hell. But the Church does-or at least it did until around March 2020. It was then that the Church made the wrong decision: that prolonging our lives by a few days or years (a goal that lockdowns spectacularly failed to accomplish) was worth the souls that would be lost and the long-term damage to the faith that would result from denying millions of people the sacraments as they watched their shepherds flee in a time of widespread fear.
The idea that the bishops had "no choice" but to close the churches because the government "made them" do so is pretty weak sauce. The Roman Empire banned the practice of Christianity upon pain of death for the first four centuries of the Church's history. All but one of the twelve apostles-the original bishops-were martyred for their stubborn resistance to Jewish and Roman demands that they "close the churches."
Had our bishops decided to bring communion to the chronically ill and frail elderly but invite the overwhelming majority of parishioners for whom Covid posed scant mortal danger to celebrate mass publicly, does anyone seriously believe that the same governments that kept garden centers and liquor stores open and allowed BLM protests would have resisted a united front of bishops with 1.4 billion of the world's Catholics behind them? Instead, frightened bishops in America and Europe offered not a fig leaf of resistance and, in the UK, even quietly urged the government to "compel" them to close their doors.
Christ is "the good shepherd." (John 10:11) Every bishop, standing in persona Christi, carries a shepherd's crozier as a symbol of his duty to his flock. In the Gospel of John, we learn the difference between a good shepherd and a bad one: "He who is a hireling a...

By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org.
If you haven't heard about this recent news uncovered by Nick Shirley and David, you need to. You can watch the full video documentary by clicking on the photo below. It's been watched by more than 38 million people which is dwarfed by the amount of capital from American taxpayers being fraudulently taken by fake businesses - like day care centers - "run" by Somali people. This isn't racist - it's fact.

Simple questions were posed all along the way: Where are the children? Where is all the money going?
Why did not one Somali who they interviewed have any clue what their own businesses were doing? And why were they so aggressive?
Defensive much?
In this article, I would like to focus on the meeting that took place at the end of the video. I am pretty sure it was the legislative update that took place on December 19, 2025 at the State Capitol in Minnesota. If you click on the meeting link and go to the webpage, you'll see that the first paragraph states the following:
The last few weeks have been difficult for our community in Minneapolis and around Minnesota, which has been targeted by the hateful rhetoric from Donald Trump and lawless action by his federal agents [ICE]. To be clear, slandering our Somali and Latino neighbors and violating the constitutional rights of Minnesotans as a pretense for ICE's cruel and violent enforcement actions is not about public safety. It is intended to cause fear, chaos, and division.
From where I stand as a non-conflicted objective observer with very little knowledge of Minnesota House Representatives, the above language is very inflammatory, and quite polarizing. Having watched the interaction between Nick and David and the Somali people that they tried to interview, and the knife attack on David by Somali men, I dare say that beyond inflammatory, it is pure "disinformation".
According to Nick, at this meeting, Republican members had clearly demonstrated ongoing fraud in Minnesota with data and charts as visual aids, and also who was profiting from this fraud. A paper trail - if you will - was shown to the committee members. As Nick notes, the Democrat representatives "looked into the abyss" as the data was delivered, while one in particular, Minnesota House of Representatives' Emma Greenman, defended the allegations of fraud by declaring that fraud is a non-partisan issue, and that declarations (with proof) of fraud is "not building trust."
Her official committee assignments include being Co-Vice Chair for Workforce, Labor, and Economic Development Finance and Policy, Public Safety Finance and Policy, Elections Finance and Government Operations and last but not least Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy. She is a lawyer with a B.A. in political science and an M.P.A. in "public administration."
If you look into Emma's official Minnesota House of Representatives statements from February 14th, 2025, It is clear from the text that she is very anti-Trump herself. The first heading is as follows:
"Protecting Minnesota from the Trump Administration's Harmful and Unconstitutional Actions".
She therein refers to "the daily barrage of unprecedented overreach by President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and his billionaire cabinet [that] is designed to wear Americans down and undermine our faith in democratic institutions and the rule of law".
The rule of law, eh? So what about fraud? Does fraud not involve intentional deception to gain a benefit, typically financial, prosecutable by the government under both state and federal laws?
She also refers to MAGA as an "extreme" "agenda" in the Legislative Update: from February 14, 2025.
With this agreement, we prevented the House Republicans from throwing out the votes of 21,980 Shakopee voters in service of their extreme MAGA agenda.
I want to thank every one of you who spoke up against the MAGA Republican power grab in Minnesota, and is standing up for democracy and the rule of law every d...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.
In January 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that was immediately hailed as the final verdict on vitamin D: it doesn't work. The study, known as the VITAL trial, was large, well-funded, and led by respected researchers from Harvard. Its conclusion-that vitamin D supplementation did not reduce the risk of invasive cancer or major cardiovascular events-rapidly diffused across headlines, textbooks, and clinical guidelines.
But the VITAL study didn't fail because vitamin D failed. It failed because it was never designed to test the right question. This article walks through the anatomy of that failure, why it matters, and what we must fix if we are to take prevention seriously in modern medicine.
The Trial That Didn't
On the surface, VITAL looked impeccable: over 25,000 participants, randomized and placebo-controlled, testing 2000 IU of vitamin D3 daily for a median of 5.3 years. The primary endpoints were the incidence of any invasive cancer and a composite of major cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes).
But there is a foundational problem: most participants weren't vitamin D deficient to begin with. Only 12.7% had levels below 20 ng/mL, the threshold generally associated with increased risk. The mean baseline level was 30.8 ng/mL-already at or near sufficiency. It's the equivalent of testing whether insulin helps people who don't have diabetes.
Further eroding the study's contrast, participants in the placebo arm were allowed to take up to 800 IU/day of vitamin D on their own. By year 5, more than 10% of the placebo group was exceeding that limit. The intervention, in effect, became a test of high-dose vitamin D versus medium-dose vitamin D, not against a true control.
Add to that the decision to use broad, bundled endpoints like "any invasive cancer" or "major cardiovascular events" without regard to mechanisms, latency, or stage-specific progression, and the trial becomes a precision instrument for finding nothing.
The Important Real Signal They Missed
The one glimmer of benefit appeared in cancer mortality. While incidence rates were similar between groups, the vitamin D arm showed a lower rate of cancer deaths. This effect emerged only after two years of follow-up and became statistically significant once early deaths were excluded. Even more telling, among participants whose cause of death could be adjudicated with medical records (rather than death certificate codes), the benefit was stronger.
This suggests a biologically plausible mechanism: vitamin D may not prevent cancer from starting, but it may slow its progression or reduce metastasis. That theory aligns with preclinical models showing vitamin D's role in cellular differentiation, immune modulation, and suppression of angiogenesis.
And yet, VITAL buried this signal. The paper acknowledged a significant violation of the proportional hazards assumption in cancer mortality, a red flag that time-to-event models were inappropriate. Instead of adjusting with valid statistical models for non-proportional hazards, the authors sliced the data post hoc to generate a story and dismissed the result as exploratory. Meanwhile, they mentioned in passing that fewer advanced or metastatic cancers occurred in the vitamin D group-but offered no data.
How Design Choices Shape Public Understanding
The public interpretation of VITAL has been simple and sweeping: vitamin D doesn't help. That perception has reshaped policy, funding, and clinical guidance. Combined with errant policy based on acknowledged errors, It is dangerous and a risk to public health.
But what the trial actually tested was much narrower: Does high-dose vitamin D provide additional benefit in a mostly vitamin D-sufficient, highly compliant, aging American cohort already permitted to take moderate doses on their own? And does it do so within 5 years?
Given those conditions, the null result was foreordain...

By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org.
(For the purposes of this essay, we will focus on fatal outcomes of multiple simultaneous injections, although nonfatal harms from this practice are also real and even more common.)
The Fourth Big Lie of Vaccinology - declaring multiple simultaneous injections to be safe - is a reckless and sometimes deadly false assumption that has no legitimate scientific basis.
The simultaneous administration of multiple different vaccines, especially in children, is now standard practice in the United States. It has intensified over the past couple of decades, as additional shots have been added to the bloated CDC vaccination schedules. However, this practice has never been properly investigated, nor demonstrated to be safe.
This Big Lie has been imposed onto everyday pediatric practice to allow the excessive pediatric vaccine schedule to be administered in an expedient manner for both doctors and parents.
After all, if a family adheres to the current CDC recommended pediatric vaccine schedule, a child will receive well over 70 total doses of 23 different vaccines by age 18. Who would bring their child to the pediatrician more than 70 times in eighteen years to get one shot at a time?
Spacing out shots would be the prudent approach for those choosing to vaccinate, given the complete lack of safety data regarding giving multiple shots at once, and the clear evidence of potential harm. However, it would be highly impractical.
Furthermore, it would reveal to all involved the preposterous excess of the current CDC pediatric vaccine schedule. Why on Earth does a healthy child need to be injected an average of 4 or 5 times per year between birth and their 18th birthday? Dragging one's child to the pediatrician that often would draw public attention the following facts:
unvaccinated or minimally vaccinated minority populations such as the Amish thrive, with much lower rates of autism, ADHD, and other disorders
children in the 1980s and 1990s received only a fraction of the shots on today's schedule, and they were significantly healthier than today's children
multiple other developed nations recommend only a fraction of the shots on the CDC schedule, while boasting superior pediatric and general health outcomes
But if the "experts" simply declare it "safe" to administer multiple shots at once and group those shots together in large salvos of multiple vaccinations, the whole operation becomes more feasible (not to mention less obviously excessive) for pediatricians and parents alike.
Never mind the cumulative toxicity or drug-drug interactions the children face. "Kids are resilient," remember?
The Deadly Ritual of the "Catch-Up Visit"
With 70-plus doses recommended before age 18, every so often some poor urchin is bound to fall behind with his vaccinations. But fear not. The concept of a "catch-up visit" is well established in pediatrics. In this practice, a child who is behind the official schedule is brought in to be injected with the vaccines he has not yet received, whatever the combination may be.
Vaccine zealots have heartily endorsed the "catch-up visit" for decades.
In 2002, vaccinologist Dr. Paul Offit notoriously claimed that children possess "the theoretical capacity to respond to about 10,000 vaccines at any one time." An article in the American Academy of Pediatrics' flagship journal Pediatrics, with Offit as lead author, endorsed the notion.
In 2023, the World Health Organization, in cooperation with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, GAVI, and promoted by Chelsea Clinton, started "The Big Catch Up," a worldwide program to provide the wonders of multiple simultaneous vaccinations to children worldwide.
What clinical studies have been performed verifying the safety and effectiveness of this hyper-aggressive approach? None. There are reasons for the lack of clinical studies supporting multiple simultaneous vaccinations.
The first reason, of course, is that v...

By David Stockman at Brownstone dot org.
A few months after the horrendous slaughter of World War I had been unleashed by the "guns of August 1914," soldiers along the Western Front famously broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, song, and even exchange of gifts.
For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell. As Will Griggs once described it,
A sudden cold snap had left the battlefield frozen, which was actually a relief for troops wallowing in sodden mire. Along the Front, troops extracted themselves from their trenches and dugouts, approaching each other warily, and then eagerly, across No Man's Land. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, as were gifts scavenged from care packages sent from home. German souvenirs that ordinarily would have been obtained only through bloodshed - such as spiked pickelhaube helmets, or Gott mit uns belt buckles - were bartered for similar British trinkets. Carols were sung in German, English, and French. A few photographs were taken of British and German officers standing alongside each other, unarmed, in No Man's Land.

The truth is, there was no good reason for the Great War. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances, and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century until the end of the Cold War in 1991 and disappearance of the Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.
The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time, however. And for the same reasons.
So those reasons and culprits need to be named once again-just as historians can readily name the culprits from 111 years ago.
The latter include the German general staff's plan for a lightning mobilization and strike on the Western Front called the Schlieffen Plan; the incompetence and intrigue in the court at St. Petersburg; the lifelong obsession of Austrian chief of staff Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf with the conquest of Serbia; French President Raymond Poincare's anti-German irredentism owing to the 1871 loss of his home province, Alsace-Lorraine; and the bloodthirsty cabal around Winston Churchill, who forced England into an unnecessary war, among countless others.
Since these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all that metastasized thereafter, it might do well to name the institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.
Imperial Washington-The New Global Menace
There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington-not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, or the rubble of what remains of the Donbas. Imperial Washington has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991.
At that crucial inflection point, Bush the Elder should have declared "mission accomplished" and parachuted into the great Ramstein air base in Germany to begin the demobilization of America's vast war machine.
So doing, he could have slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $300 billion (2015 $); demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement, and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; reduced the United States' standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world-disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.
Unfortunately, George H. W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision, or even middling intelligence.
To the contrary, he was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.
The Cochrane Collaboration publishes systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare interventions. I was one of the founders but was expelled 25 years later, in September 2018, becoming the only person ever to be expelled.
Cochrane's actions were widely condemned in top journals, e.g. in Science, Nature, the Lancet, and in the BMJ whose Editor-in-Chief wrote that Cochrane should be committed to holding industry and academia to account, and that my expulsion reflected "a deep seated difference of opinion about how close to industry is too close."
The world's most cited medical researcher, Professor John Ioannidis from Stanford, published a scathing criticism of Cochrane's "character assassination" of me, wondering if Cochrane had silenced "a giant with major positive contributions to evidence-based medicine" because it had been hijacked.
I published two books about the affair and a book review noted: "This book carefully recounts this dark period in medical science where a once trusted institution carried out one of the worst show trials ever conducted in academia. The CEO and his collaborators went about their task in a manner that mirrors how the drug industry operates."
Cochrane's downfall started in 2012, when British journalist Mark Wilson became the CEO. To the dismay of the Cochrane pioneers, he directed the prestigious Cochrane Titanic towards the iceberg that would sink us all, in the same way as he seems to have destroyed also his former workplace, Panos in London.
I tried to prevent this and was elected to the Governing Board in January 2017 with the most votes, even though I was the only one of the 11 candidates who criticised the leadership in my election statement.
When I became a threat to Wilson, he plotted my demise. He was in total control of the Governing Board, and in a Kafkaesque process, he and the board's two co-chairs, Martin Burton and Marguerite Koster, broke all the essential rules for charities and for Cochrane and lied to defend their actions. Burton, who, like so many others, was afraid of Wilson, who was his boss, was the executioner.
Wilson's plot involved that Burton should compile a report to a lawyer hired by Cochrane, a so-called Counsel, about my alleged wrongdoings during my 25 years with Cochrane, and that the board should use Counsel's report to expel me.
But there was a problem. Counsel's report exonerated me. He saw no reason to discipline me, which is remarkable because Burton, in his report to Counsel, had lied blatantly. He even called it an "allegation" that several board members witnessed that Wilson totally lost his temper during a board meeting and became physically aggressive toward a board member.
The Secret Show Trial
I was given only 5 minutes to defend myself before I was asked to leave the board room. I was therefore unable to correct misunderstandings and falsehoods raised against me during the rest of the day.
However, I had ensured, according to our rules, that the meeting - which was planned to be top secret and unrecorded - was recorded, and a board member gave me a copy of his recordings, even though Wilson had asked everyone to delete them. They revealed that Burton and Koster had lied maliciously to convince the board to expel me.
Burton talked about long-term disruptive, outrageous, and wrong behaviour, failure to abide by the rules and behave collaboratively, and breaches of the Collaboration Agreement, all of which were untrue. He also hinted that I had harassed Cochrane staff sexually: "To carry on the Me-Too analogy…" and claimed that my "allegations," which were proven facts, about his own and Wilson's mismanagement of Cochrane had been demonstrated to be wrong.
Burton used "evidence" he had planted himself, - letters of complaint about me that curiously all arrived just after I had submitted my report to Counsel documenting Burton's maladministration of Cochrane and how he and a previous co-chair, Lisa Bero, had...

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org.
Dear Editor:
In an ideal world of uncensored Covid science, I would have submitted this letter through the online submission website. However, my experience in 2021 and 2022 and more recently has taught me that there was zero chance that you would have published this text.It has been over four years since the following letter to the editor was published in your journal, but I discovered it only last month. I think there is no expiration date for the search for the truth, and I hope you agree.

Relying on data from 280 nursing homes across 21 states, the authors concluded: "These findings show the real-world effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines in reducing the incidence of asymptomatic and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections in a vulnerable nursing home population."
That is far from the truth.
First, they did not report a single estimate of effect, such as a risk (probability) ratio. That the authors conclude "real-world effectiveness" without showing any estimate is astonishing. It is also astonishing that peer-reviewers or the editorial board have allowed that to happen.
Second, in every nursing home an unvaccinated resident was followed at least three weeks longer than a fully vaccinated resident, so their risk (probability) of infection was higher. Time at risk was neither reported nor considered.
Third, a key risk ratio I will shortly compute from the data is confounded by time trends in the background risk of an infection.
Fourth, comparing the risk ratio of infection (mucosal immunity) with the risk ratio of symptoms if infected (systemic immunity), we observe implausible results.
Lastly, a rudimentary correction suggests near-zero effectiveness of two doses of an mRNA vaccine in this population.
To set the record straight, I offer a peer review of the study and show several risk ratios.
The first dose of an mRNA vaccine was administered on December 18, 2020. Follow-up of nursing home residents who received two doses began at least 21 days later, on January 8, and lasted till March 31. The timeline is shown in the figure along with the epidemic curve.

Unvaccinated residents "were present at their facility on the day of the first vaccination clinic" (i.e., at the time of the first dose, if administered by February 15) and were not vaccinated by March 31. Therefore, in every facility, the follow-up time of unvaccinated residents was three weeks longer if the second dose was the Pfizer vaccine and four weeks longer if it was Moderna.
Moreover, follow-up of unvaccinated residents in some nursing homes started between December 18 and January 8. Not only was it earlier, but that was a period of high risk of infection just before the peak of the winter wave (see figure). All two-dose recipients were spared that early, high-risk exposure time. This bias-confounding by time trends in the background risk-has operated in other "real-world" studies from that time.
The bias is worse if the follow-up is delayed until 14 days after the second dose (to allow full immunity). In this case, follow-up of recipients of two doses began on January 22, ten days after the peak.
Using data from Table 1 in the letter, I computed three risk ratios (RR). In every facility, day 0 for the unvaccinated was 3-4 weeks earlier than day 0 for two-dose recipients.

The key number is the risk ratio of symptomatic infection. It is 0.1 (90% vaccine effectiveness). Surprisingly, the mRNA vaccines seem to have offered fragile residents of nursing homes with a weakened immune response almost the same level of protection that was reported for younger, healthy populations. Remarkable if true, or difficult to believe.
The risk ratio of symptomatic infection, which I questioned, is the product of two risk ratios: the risk ratio of infection (0.19) times the risk ratio of symptoms if infected (0.52).
The first estimate is unquestionably implausible. Upper respiratory infection is primarily prevented by secretory IgA antibodies on ...

By Joaquim Couto at Brownstone dot org.
There was a time when debates about determinism and free will belonged to philosophy departments and late-night dorm room conversations. They were enjoyable precisely because they seemed harmless. Whatever the answer, life went on. Courts judged, doctors decided, teachers taught, and politicians were still-at least nominally-held responsible for their actions. That era is over.
Artificial intelligence has transformed what once appeared to be an abstract philosophical question into a concrete issue of governance, power, and accountability. Determinism is no longer merely a theory about how the universe works. It is becoming an operating principle for modern institutions. And that changes everything.
AI systems are deterministic by construction. They operate through statistical inference, optimization, and probability. Even when their outputs surprise us, they remain bound by mathematical constraints. Nothing in these systems resembles judgment, interpretation, or understanding in the human sense.
AI does not deliberate.
It does not reflect.
It does not bear responsibility for outcomes.
Yet increasingly, its outputs are treated not as tools, but as decisions. This is the quiet revolution of our time.
The appeal is obvious. Institutions have always struggled with human variability. People are inconsistent, emotional, slow, and sometimes disobedient. Bureaucracies prefer predictability, and algorithms promise exactly that: standardized decisions at scale, immune to fatigue and dissent.
In healthcare, algorithms promise more efficient triage. In finance, better risk assessment. In education, objective evaluation. In public policy, "evidence-based" governance. In content moderation, neutrality. Who could object to systems that claim to remove bias and optimize outcomes? But beneath this promise lies a fundamental confusion.
Prediction is not judgment.
Optimization is not wisdom.
Consistency is not legitimacy.
Human decision-making has never been purely computational. It is interpretive by nature. People weigh context, meaning, consequence, and moral intuition. They draw on memory, experience, and a sense-however imperfect-of responsibility for what follows. This is precisely what institutions find inconvenient.
Human judgment introduces friction. It requires explanation. It exposes decision-makers to blame. Deterministic systems, by contrast, offer something far more attractive: decisions without decision-makers.
When an algorithm denies a loan, flags a citizen, deprioritizes a patient, or suppresses speech, no one appears responsible. The system did it. The data spoke. The model decided.
Determinism becomes a bureaucratic alibi.
Technology has always shaped institutions, but until recently it mostly extended human agency. Calculators assisted reasoning. Spreadsheets clarified trade-offs. Even early software left humans visibly in control. AI changes that relationship.
Systems designed to predict are now positioned to decide. Probabilities harden into policies. Risk scores become verdicts. Recommendations quietly turn into mandates. Once embedded, these systems are difficult to challenge. After all, who argues with "The science?"
This is why the old philosophical debate has become urgent.
Classical determinism was a claim about causality: given enough information, the future could be predicted. Today, determinism is turning into a governance philosophy. If outcomes can be predicted well enough, institutions ask, why allow discretion at all?
Non-determinism is often caricatured as chaos. But properly understood, it is neither randomness nor irrationality. It is the space where interpretation occurs, where values are weighed, and where responsibility attaches to a person rather than a process.
Remove that space, and decision-making does not become more rational. It becomes unaccountable.
The real danger of AI is not runaway intelligence or sentient machines. It is the slow erosion of human re...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.
Argentina's government has become increasingly skeptical of the World Health Organization, reflecting a wider reconsideration of international health institutions in the aftermath of Covid-19. Although Argentina has not formally withdrawn, it has expressed dissatisfaction with the WHO's performance, its growing reliance on donor-funded agendas, and its push for expanded treaty authority.
This reassessment coincides with the even more consequential reality that the United States has initiated its withdrawal from the WHO. It is the first time since the Soviet Union rejoined the WHO in the 1950s that a major funder, in this case its most influential member, has stepped away.
The US departure changes the strategic environment in which Argentina must act. Washington's decision was driven by concerns that the WHO mishandled the pandemic, promoted extreme and damaging restrictions, tolerated poor scientific practice, and allowed private philanthropies and advocacy networks to shape policy. The United States may seek reentry if future negotiations produce meaningful reform, and it may rejoin under a future administration, but for the foreseeable future the WHO will operate without its principal sponsor. This shift presents Argentina with new risks and new opportunities.
Argentina could leave immediately, but doing so now would limit its influence. Remaining as a conditional participant offers a more effective path. Conditional engagement means Argentina stays within the WHO while making clear that its membership depends on substantial changes in governance, transparency, and scientific integrity. This approach preserves access to certain technical networks, avoids needless diplomatic friction, and allows Argentina to align its stance with that of the United States during a period of global institutional realignment. Just as importantly, it leaves withdrawal as an option if the WHO remains unresponsive.
The case for this strategy rests on well-documented failures. During Covid-19, the WHO endorsed restrictive measures that imposed severe economic and health and social costs, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It resisted acknowledging successful alternative strategies, notably in Sweden and Tanzania, and later revised its historical guidance in ways that shielded institutional authority rather than enabling honest evaluation. In tobacco control and other areas, the WHO has become increasingly shaped by donor priorities that do not reflect the interests of sovereign nations.
The well-intentioned initiatives to limit the harms from smoking have led to unintended and perverse consequences that the organization has been reticent in acknowledging. The proposed expansion of the International Health Regulations and the Pandemic Agreement-negotiated with limited transparency-would grant the organization unprecedented influence over national emergency responses. These dynamics undermine trust and justify Argentina's insistence on reform.
Conditional engagement allows Argentina to use its membership to demand these reforms. It can press for transparency in donor funding, scientific pluralism in decision-making, strict limits on the WHO's authority during emergencies, and priority attention and resources to the most lethal infectious diseases in the LMICs. It can refuse to implement WHO recommendations unless they pass independent national review. With the United States now outside the WHO, Argentina becomes one of the few reform-minded voices still at the table, giving it a degree of influence it would not have from the outside. Should meaningful reforms fail to materialize, Argentina can still withdraw later-and that withdrawal would carry more weight because it followed a period of principled engagement.
At the same time, Argentina should deepen bilateral and regional cooperation, especially with the United States, which is building alternative health partnerships to replace WHO me...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.
Among the many incredible revelations over the past five years is the extent of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. Through advertising, they have been able to shape media content. That in turn has affected digital content companies, which responded from 2020 onward by taking down posts that questioned the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines.
They have captured universities and medical journals with donations and other forms of financial control. Finally, they are far more decisive in driving the agenda of governments than we ever knew. Just for example, we found out in 2023 that the NIH shared thousands of patents with pharma, with a market value approaching $1-2 billion. This was all made possible by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which was pushed as a form of privatization but only ended up entrenching the worst corporatist corruptions.
The hold over governments was cemented with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which granted a liability shield to the makers of products that appear on the childhood schedule. The injured are simply not permitted to fight it out in civilian courts. No other industry enjoys such sweeping indemnification under the law.
Pharma today arguably competes with the military munitions industry in its hold over power. No other industry in human history has managed to close the economies of 194 countries to force most of the world's population to wait for its inoculation. Such power makes the East India Company, against which the American founders revolted, look like a corner grocery by comparison.
There is ample talk about how much pharma has suffered since its vaunted product flopped. But let's not be naive. Their power is still ubiquitously on display in every sector of society. The fight at the state level for over-the-counter therapeutics - and for medical freedom for the citizenry - reveals the scope of the challenges ahead. The reformers that now head agencies in Washington are fighting daily through a thicket of influence that goes back many decades.
Just how far in the past does this power extend? The first federal effort to push vaccination - however primitive and dangerous - was from President James Madison. "The Act to Encourage Vaccination" of 1813 required that smallpox vaccines be given away for free and properly delivered to anyone who requests them. As injury and death piled up, and amidst cries of profiteering and corruption, Congress acted decisively in 1822 to repeal the act.
The turning point in public opinion was what came to be known as the Tarboro Tragedy. The most reputed vaccinologist in the country and the official guardian of the vaccine, Dr. James Smith, had accidentally sent material containing live smallpox virus instead of cowpox vaccine to a physician in Tarboro, North Carolina. This caused a local smallpox outbreak, infecting around 60 people and resulting in approximately 10 deaths. This error damaged public and Congressional trust in the federal program's ability to safely handle and distribute vaccine matter.
The great promise of vaccination, which seemed to raise the possibility of the scientific eradication of deadly disease under the guidance of elite healers, had fallen into disrepute.
Even so, when the Civil War broke out in 1861, there was a push to get all soldiers vaccinated to stop deadly smallpox outbreaks. With that came a slew of injuries and deaths. Historian Terry Reimer writes:
"Unfavorable results from vaccination, or spurious vaccinations, were all too common. Even pure vaccine, obtained from official Army dispensaries, sometimes caused complications. Sometimes, faulty preservation of the crusts could have compromised their effectiveness. As is the case even with modern vaccines today, occasionally, the vaccine did not take, failing to produce the major reaction at the vaccination site that was expected. In other cases, the site of the vaccination became overly sore and swollen, and...

By Eric Hussey at Brownstone dot org.
In the theatrical musical version of Peter Pan, Peter leads the Neverland children in a song about (not) growing up. Toward the end of the song, Peter and the kids sing "We won't grow up! We will never grow a day! And if someone tries to make us…we will simply run away."
That strikes me as not wildly different from the attitudes of many Americans about "health care." Although, it's not about "health care" as such, it's about billing: who will pay for doctor visits, hospital visits, and medications. I suffered through a local professional association meeting not long ago and had to listen to a state senator talk about how his foremost goal legislatively is to assure "access" to "health care" for all in the State of Washington. He also let slip that Washington State is the "most highly leveraged" state in the Union for "health care." Then he went on to bemoan that the State of Washington doesn't have its own printing press to make money like the federal government does.
If you will allow me to do what some might call a "pirate translation" of the above, let me suggest that Washington State - I usually call it The People's Republic of Washington State - borrows more money per capita than any other state in the Union, from a federal government $37+ trillion in debt, to pay for doctor visits, hospital visits, and medications for whoever asks. The state bureaucracy to oversee this is paid for by ever-increasing taxes on the state population.
"Access" is not the correct word. Payment is the correct word. Well, actually, freedom from payment is the correct term.
Sometimes I hear a soon-to-become-former patient of mine - occasionally an already-former patient of mine - tell me how they hate it, but they can't come to see me any more since I don't take their insurance. No, that's incorrect. I assure you, you can come see me. But, because your insurance is a big pain in the neck for a single-doctor office like mine, I will not do the paperwork and take the discounts that they require to get any pay for my work. In fact, I will be happy to see you in my office. But, you will need to tell us how you will be paying for the visit.
To add some perspective to that, my independent one-doctor office has one-and-one-half full time people primarily billing insurance companies. Although three or four companies are involved, the majority of people in the State of Washington have some form of insurance through the State via one of those companies. That is, people who would never admit to this openly or even to themselves, are essentially on welfare with the State of Washington borrowing, keeping their insurance payments lower than they should be.
Which brings me back to Peter Pan.
I don't have any particularly embarrassing instances to share, but I have some vague recollections of my mother saying "Grow up!" after an errant behavior of mine. A great deal of growing up means you are taking responsibility for yourself and your actions. Does that include paying your way? If you are paying your way, you need to know how much something costs. When you are on welfare, that becomes irrelevant.
Ben Carson famously suggested his remedy for the "health care crisis" in 2013 at the National Prayer Breakfast. It took 43 seconds to deliver:
"We've already started down the path to solving one of the other big problems, health care. We need to have good health care for everybody. It's the most important thing that a person can have. Money means nothing. Titles mean nothing when you don't have your health. But we've got to figure out efficient ways to do it. We spend a lot of money on health care, twice as much per capita as anybody else in the world, and yet not very efficient. What can we do?
Here's my solution: When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account [HSA] to which money can be contributed, pre-tax, from the time you are born to the time you die. When y...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
Introduction
In the past, medical judgment was underpinned by three fundamental pillars: honest observation, open debate, and the humility to acknowledge our limitations in knowledge. While these principles still thrive in the day-to-day interactions within clinics and ICU corridors, they have been increasingly overshadowed online by a chaotic environment that often prioritizes sensationalism over substance.
Social media has radically transformed not only the means of communication but also the very fabric of our daily lives. It has reshaped how we think, how we evaluate information, and whom we choose to trust. Instead of fostering informed dialogue, it has turned medical science into a contentious battleground where opinions clash and algorithms amplify the most extreme and polarizing voices, often sidelining more measured perspectives. Yet, amid the cacophony, there are invaluable elements that have emerged. Like medicine itself, social media encompasses a spectrum of experiences: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Good: Knowledge Finally Reached Everyone
James Madison eloquently asserted that a free society must arm itself with the power that knowledge provides. Social media has, in many ways, fulfilled this imperative, democratizing information in unprecedented ways.
Patients with rare diseases, who once felt isolated in their suffering, can now connect with one another through forums and support groups. They share personal experiences, collaborate on finding solutions, and gain insights faster than many traditional healthcare institutions can publish. On a global scale, physicians are able to consult with one another, sharing clinical patterns and treatment responses in real time, facilitating discussions that transcend geographical boundaries-something no medical journal could match in terms of speed.
During public health crises, the speed of information sharing on social media became even more critical. Frontline doctors were able to alert their colleagues around the world, share early observations about disease patterns, and identify trends long before official guidelines could catch up. This rapid exchange of information became a lifeline for both patients and clinicians, providing critical support and empowering individuals in ways that were previously inconceivable. This aspect of social media, fostering connection and knowledge sharing, is something we must strive to uphold and protect.
The Bad: Expertise Collapsed Under the Weight of Noise
George Washington recognized that truth prevails only when individuals are willing to work diligently to uncover it. Unfortunately, this principle has been undermined in the social media landscape, which now rewards speed, outrage, and unfounded certainty. These attributes are fundamentally incompatible with the rigorous, evidence-based approaches that underpin the practice of medicine.
In an era where every voice can be amplified, the lines separating informed medical professionals from those devoid of scientific understanding have blurred significantly. Individuals lacking formal training can present themselves as experts, and the public often struggles to make informed distinctions. Confidence can resemble knowledge, and performance can be mistaken for credibility.
This phenomenon has created a chilling effect, even on qualified clinicians who may hesitate to express their viewpoints openly. They do so not because they lack evidence or expertise, but because they fear retribution from a vocal online mob. A single misinterpreted statement can lead to harassment, damage to professional reputations, or even formal complaints. In a climate where dissenting voices are often silenced, many choose to remain silent-believing it safer than risking honesty. Such dynamics are detrimental to the field of medicine, where healthy scientific discourse and a willingness to engage in constructive disagreement are essential for progress.
The Ugly: C...

By Russ Gonnering at Brownstone dot org.
What is the relationship between education, knowledge, and wisdom? This is not a trivial question, and the ramifications are far from obvious. Our lives may literally depend on it.
Let me illustrate the problem. On 12/5/2025, a Joint Statement from numerous medical organizations was released, highly critical of the recent recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on modification of universal administration of the Hepatitis B vaccine to every newborn. The wording of the statement is telling:
"We are deeply alarmed by the actions taken this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The apparent goal of this meeting was to sow doubt in vaccines rather than advance sound vaccine policy, and we will all pay a price for that.
"This is a significant departure from the historic role ACIP has played in shaping vaccine policy in the United States. Previously, we could expect science to drive decisions, experts to debate evidence, and consensus to lead to shared, clear recommendations. That is not the case with the current committee, and this change puts Americans' health at risk. (emphasis added)
This is like the statement from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases from June 27, 2025, regarding the current makeup of the ACIP:
Deviation from the long-standing evidence-based process that has historically guided ACIP deliberations undermines transparency and trust, risks legitimizing misinformation, and is harmful to public health. A process that includes input from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) experts, working groups, and trusted scientific and medical organizations, has been critical to ensuring rigorous, transparent, evidence-based recommendations that the public and healthcare professionals can trust. Voting on critical policy recommendations without due process that includes a thorough, balanced, and vetted review of available data by qualified experts invalidates the results and leads to confusion and distrust of recommendations.
On 12/14/2025 Politico published a piece entitled This vaccine adviser to RFK Jr. has some choice words for his critics. It reviewed the firestorm of criticism being leveled at the current members of the ACIP of the CDC as well as the response from Retsef Levi, including:
I think we've adopted an extremely medicalized view of health. Our system is very centralized and coercive. Too many public-health policies assume that a small group at the top should make decisions for everyone and enforce them instead of putting the individual at the center and empowering people, with the support of doctors and others, to take ownership of their health.
Some ACIP members and presenters are criticized as not appropriate for the ACIP because they are not physicians or "experts." My view is quite different, and I agree with Professor Levi. They are terrific choices, not despite not being physician "experts," but because of it! And I will back this up with clear evidence.
The problem has to do with entrained thinking in both leaders and experts. When both are combined in decision-makers, so is the danger as explained by David Snowden and Mary Boone in A Leaders Framework for Decision Making:
…leaders are susceptible to entrained thinking,a conditioned response that occurs when people are blinded to new ways of thinking by the perspectives they acquired through past experience, training, and success…
Entrained thinking is a danger in complicated contexts, too, but it is the experts (rather than the leaders) who are prone to it, and they tend to dominate the domain. When this problem occurs, innovative suggestions by nonexperts may be overlooked or dismissed, resulting in lost opportunities. The experts have, after all, invested in building their knowledge, and they are unlikely to tolerate controversi...

By Daniel Nuccio at Brownstone dot org.
Earlier this month, after roughly a 20-year wait, audiences finally had the opportunity to see Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.
Initially released in 2003 and 2004, Kill Bill: Volumes 1 and 2 comprised Tarantino's then long-awaited fourth film, originally envisioned by the auteur as a single work but later split by producer Harvey Weinstein to avoid either releasing a movie with an over four-hour run-time that might deter the casual moviegoer or a greatly pared version that would severely compromise Tarantino's vision.
Hence, Volume 1 introduced viewers to "The Bride," a young, female, assassin, beaten, gunned down, and left for dead on the day of her wedding (or, more accurately, wedding rehearsal) by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the team of trained killers led by the titular Bill, The Bride's former lover and father to her unborn child.
In Volume 1 we see The Bride awaken from a coma after several years and win a knife fight against one of her former co-workers. Yet, the bulk of the volume focuses on The Bride's acquisition of a legendary Hattori Hanzō sword and the series of stylized battles she must overcome before facing O-Ren Ishii, a former teammate who has ascended to the head of the Tokyo yakuza.
Slower and more methodical, Volume 2 better develops the remaining characters, further exploring their backstories and relationships with one another while gradually building towards The Bride's final confrontation with Bill, which manages to both subvert and exceed expectations.
Although both volumes can be viewed as individual masterpieces, for Millennial cinephiles a single film called Kill Bill came to be viewed as something like the original theatrical release of George Lucas' Star Wars. Unlike the four-hour cut of David Lynch's Blue Velvet or the lost pie fight scene from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, it was known to still exist. Tarantino had screened it in 2006 at Cannes and again for a special showing in 2011. He just wasn't releasing it for general audiences.
Then finally on December 5, 2025, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, quietly hit theaters, taking the number six spot for its opening weekend - something pretty impressive for a largely unadvertised four hour and thirty-five minute remix of a pair of films from more than 20 years ago.
When I learned of its release by chance while checking the movie listings for my local AMC, I promptly cleared an evening to ensure I could experience Kill Bill as intended. And, I am glad I did.
On whatever level, the experience is different watching the film as a single whole in a single sitting as opposed to watching it as two separate films months apart. Moreover, it was also a reminder of what movies used to be - and still could be.
Every scene is expertly crafted. Every shot is perfectly framed. Every color is carefully chosen. Every line of dialogue, no matter how seemingly insignificant, reveals something about the characters and their relationships with one another. The construction of the narrative is a masterclass in storytelling.
Moreover, after more than twenty years, watching The Bride embark on her globe-trotting, blood-soaked quest for revenge was just as captivating as it ever was. Watching her battle through O-Ren Ishii's henchmen at the House of Blue Leaves was no less exciting. Watching her training under the mystical Pai Mei pay off as she punches her way out of her grave was no less triumphant. Watching her final confrontation with Bill was no less suspenseful.
Yet, throughout the film, I could not help but be troubled by a couple of nagging thoughts no matter how much I tried to cast them aside.
They Just Don't Make Them Like They Used to
The first nagging thought, to which I already alluded, was that movies really have changed since 2004, undoubtedly for the worst. It seems strange thinking about Kill Bill in 2025 the way people did about Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather in ...