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By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. Recent studies reveal a striking statistic: over the last decade, approximately 30% of primary care physicians have either retired or switched to non-clinical roles, leaving a notable gap in patient care. Something subtle has been happening in American medicine, and it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. There have been no emergency declarations, no ribbon-cutting ceremonies, no breaking news alerts. No one has announced it officially. But if you pay attention—if you walk into clinics that once buzzed with conversation, if you notice how long it takes now to get an appointment, if you see how often a familiar nameplate disappears from a door—you begin to feel it. The waiting rooms are quieter. Not calmer. Not healthier. Just quieter in a method that feels wrong. The type of quiet that doesn't signal relief, but absence. In one waiting room, a single flapping magazine page, picked up by a draft, was the only sound in an air thick with anticipation—a sensory cue that underscored the void left by dwindling doctor visits. This isn't because people have stopped getting sick. Quite the opposite. Chronic disease has become a defining feature of modern life. Emergency departments are overflowing. Hospital beds turn over at a relentless pace. The acuity is higher, the complexity deeper, the margins thinner. And yet, in office after office—primary care clinics, specialty practices, community hospitals—something fundamental is missing. In the midst of this absence, consider the story of Claire, a patient who had been under the attentive care of Dr. Smith for over a decade. Claire's health journey was one he understood deeply, knowing her medical history, family concerns, and even anticipating her questions before she voiced them. When Dr. Smith quietly left his practice, Claire found herself navigating a system where each new doctor barely skimmed her files, struggling to understand her complexities in short appointments. This disruption left her feeling unanchored, her continuity of care severed. The doctors are not leaving in protest or anger. There are no picket lines. No manifestos. They are leaving the way exhausted people leave anything that has stopped making sense to them. Quietly. Without ceremony. One retirement notice at a time. One closed practice. One final day seeing patients, followed by a decision not to return. Sometimes the only sign is a piece of paper taped to a glass door: Practice closed. Thank you for your trust. Civilizations don't usually collapse in dramatic fashion. They don't fall all at once. They erode. Slowly. Quietly. Function by function. And often, the earliest warnings aren't explosions or shortages, but absences—things that used to be there, reliably, and suddenly aren't. When insects vanished from windshields, people noticed long before scientists quantified it. Such silence itself seemed unsettling. It seemed like a signal, even before anyone could explain what it meant. Medicine is experiencing its own version of that silence now. For generations, the physician occupied a unique place in the social structure. Doctors were not merely service providers. They were witnesses. They saw people at their most vulnerable and followed them over years, sometimes decades. They remembered histories that didn't fit neatly into charts. They understood families, patterns, tendencies, and fears. They were often the only professionals who saw the full arc of a human life—from birth to decline—up close and without abstraction. That role did not disappear because it lost value; it was simply replaced. It disappeared because it became unsustainable. Over time, medicine was reorganized around efficiency, standardization, and scale. Each change made sense in isolation. Each was defensible. But together, they produced a system that no longer trusted the very people it depended on. Physicians were gradually transformed from professionals exercising judgment into operators e...

By Aaron Day at Brownstone dot org. The original vision for Bitcoin was simple: peer-to-peer digital cash, free from banks and government. However, the document argues that this vision was deliberately "hijacked," as Bitcoin is now pushed as "digital gold," a scarce asset for Wall Street, with slow and expensive transactions for everyday use. This shift began with the 2015-2017 Block Size Fight, where a group won the argument to keep transaction blocks small, making the main network costly. The promoted "fix," the Lightning Network, is a faster system but relies on middlemen (hubs), fundamentally changing it from true P2P cash. The funding for this change is linked to Jeffrey Epstein. After the Bitcoin Foundation collapsed, his money flowed through MIT's Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) to pay the core developers who favored the small-block path. Epstein also invested in Blockstream, a company started by those same developers. Brock Pierce is identified as a key connector. He co-founded Tether, brokered Epstein's Coinbase investment, and had an extensive relationship with him. Tether then played a crucial role in inflating Bitcoin's price; a study suggests new, unbacked Tether, minted after price drops, accounted for roughly 50% of the 2017 bull run. The CFTC later fined Tether $41 million for lying about its reserves. The control network continues with Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald. Despite lying about cutting ties with Epstein, Cantor now manages Tether's massive $130+ billion US Treasury reserves. Lutnick's ally, Bo Hines, pushed the industry-friendly GENIUS Act while serving as a White House crypto advisor, only to immediately quit and become CEO of USAT, Tether's US subsidiary. The document views this as a coordinated "conquest," with laws like the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, cementing insider control and preparing the ground for a tracked, programmable digital dollar. The author calls for immediate action to shut down these initiatives and support real alternatives like privacy coins. Bitcoin was supposed to be simple: digital money you could send to anyone, anywhere, without a bank or government getting in the way. When Satoshi Nakamoto released the idea in 2008, it was described as peer-to-peer electronic cash, like handing someone cash in person, but over the internet. No middleman. No permission needed. Privacy protected. Freedom built in. That sounded perfect to me. I live in New Hampshire, part of the Free State Project, where people are working every day to shrink government and expand personal liberty. Bitcoin felt like the financial side of that same fight: sound money that could not be printed endlessly or frozen on a whim. Today, though, Bitcoin is sold as digital gold, something you buy and hold, not something you spend on coffee. Transactions are slow and expensive on the main network. Most everyday use happens on side systems that add layers of control. The whole story changed from cash for the people to scarce asset for Wall Street. That did not happen by accident. It was hijacked. The people behind it used money, connections, and influence to steer Bitcoin away from its original purpose. Key evidence comes from the Jeffrey Epstein court files, government investigations, academic research, and public records. The names that keep showing up are Brock Pierce, Epstein himself, and later Howard Lutnick. Their fingerprints are all over the shift, and the tools now being built on top of it, like the GENIUS Act (signed into law in July 2025), the CLARITY Act (passed the House in 2025 and advancing), and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve (established by executive order in March 2025). Here is what happened. The Fight Over Bitcoin's Size Early on, everyone agreed that Bitcoin needed to handle more transactions as it grew. The simple fix was to make each block of transactions bigger, so more payments could fit every ten minutes. Some developers pushed hard for that. Other...

By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org. Last year, the general election in the Czech Republic was won by Andrej Babis, a distinctly Czech version of Donald Trump. And things started to happen. During the confirmation hearing of the government, Babis – in his inimitable mixture of Czecho-Slovak dialect – said that the whole Covid response under his previous government was a mistake, that he was cheated by the "so-called" experts and that the "wonderful" vaccines provided by the European Union proved not so wonderful after all. Shortly after this revelation, Jindrich Rajchl – a lawyer and a member of Parliament for a smaller government party – organized a conference under the title "Three years from Covid." The large room of the Chamber was completely full with the public. I was invited to do what I have been doing for the past five years: Talk about data. This is what I said (in italics, I have added some explanation for the American readers). Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank Jindřich for organizing this seminar, thank you for the invitation, and thank the other panelists for their courage and perseverance. Today—or rather already with Wednesday's comment by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš that we should have taken the Swedish path—the third period of our Covid match begins. The first period consisted of a global loss of sanity itself. I called the second period the Great Covid Silence, when many players fervently hoped that how they played in the first period would be forgotten. The last period will—so I firmly hope—consist of catharsis and lessons learned. Let us hope no overtime will be needed. During the Covid loss of sanity, all the key pillars of Western societies failed. The executive branch failed, arbitrarily, absurdly, and counterproductively restricting people's fundamental rights and freedoms. The legislative branch failed, passively watching and repeatedly issuing blank cheques to the executive in the form of recurring states of emergency. The judicial branch failed, which (with the exception of one panel of the Supreme Administrative Court) refused to defend natural law and instead—like in previous totalitarian regimes—retreated into servile legal formalism. The media failed in an unexpected and repulsive way, led by the public-service media, which instead of truthfully informing the public and scrutinizing those in power, lied on political order. Physicians failed, who instead of treating the sick either shut down their practices or served the pharmaceutical–industrial complex as its sales department. And, as so many times in the past, at the head of the march toward new slavery marched state-funded scientists, who on political order dressed Covidism into the shroud of Science. Covid arrived in the 21st century, which many claim will be the century of data. If it showed anything, however, it is that our ability to collect data far exceeds our ability to work with it meaningfully. And because working with data has brought me (somewhat involuntarily) into the ranks of Covid dissenters, I want to tell you several fascinating Covid stories that are written in the data but have not been fully appreciated yet. Mathematical Modelling Is a Weapon of Mass Destruction A large part of the Covid repression here and abroad was based on predictive modelling. Before the vote on extending the state of emergency, the Institute of Health Information and Statistics (UZIS) presented MPs with this prediction (slide 16). This slide contains many interesting stories that need to be explored in more detail. The figure is in Czech, sorry for that. The horizontal axis shows time in months from July 2020 to April 2021. The vertical axis shows the number of new cases of Covid per day (i.e., positive PCR tests) in the Czech Republic. Yellow dots represent real data and the red curve is the "prediction" of the Ministry of Health model. The "prediction" was made around the time of the black arrow. The blue text says "t...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org. A large outbreak of hysteria occurred in the media over the past week, regarding a small Nipah virus outbreak in eastern India. 'Hysteria' is the correct word in terms of proportionality. It is not, unfortunately, the right word in terms of intent. Ten years ago this episode of Nipah virus disease would barely have rated a mention internationally, and certainly not stimulated airport screening and travel warnings – there have been many larger outbreaks of Nipah virus than this one, which did not. The change over recent years is not that people have lost their minds. It relates to the adoption of the fear-panic-profit model that has entrenched itself in international public health. Tens of billions in annual funding are on the table, and they depend – with the thousands of salaries and exorbitant Pharma profits tied to the pandemic industry – on the maintenance of a constant sense of imminent threat. The World Health Organization reports two cases from this Nipah outbreak, which is less than usual. As is common, they involve health service personnel who are often infected by the virus before the diagnosis is clear in the patients they care for. Nipah virus infection historically has a high mortality rate among those infected, and each death is a tragedy, especially in those who are infected through caring for others. The deliberate hysteria and fear-mongering these cases are being used to promote will kill lots more, because it diverts resources from programs aimed at far worse health problems. But using small recurrent outbreaks to promote fear is a business case that is too attractive to too many. This Nipah outbreak is simply its latest iteration. What Is Nipah Virus Disease? An outbreak of encephalitis (brain inflammation) occurred in a semi-rural area of Malaysia in 1998. It was quite severe, with almost half of the early cases dying. Initially assumed to be an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis (a more common mosquito-borne disease), it was noted that early cases were associated with illness in nearby pigs. The initial outbreak was on a farm where pigs and an orchard were in close proximity. Unusual characteristics noted in this 1998 outbreak raised questions as to whether this was a new disease. There is an unofficial back story regarding what happened next, including a vial of blood from an infected case carried through customs and ending up at the CDC in the United States. With the help of (what were then) new techniques for distinguishing genetic sequences, it was established that a previously undetected virus was involved. This outbreak became the first recorded outbreak of Nipah virus, named after Sungai Nipah (the Nipah river) in peninsular Malaysia. The virus is now known to be endemic in various bat species that range across much of Asia and Africa. In the case of the Malaysian outbreak, it spread from fruit bats attracted to an orchard, to the pigs that were kept alongside the fruit trees they fed on, to the humans who looked after the pigs. This remains one of the worst recorded outbreaks in history, with 105 deaths from 265 recorded cases by May 1999. Malaysia took various steps after this, initially killing a lot of pigs, but also changing farming practices. There has not been an outbreak recorded there since. Why New Viruses Are Not Necessarily New Since the Malaysian episode, recurrent outbreaks have been recorded, particularly in the Northeast and Southwest of the Indian subcontinent. These have been small outbreaks, less than 110 deaths in the worst, with well under 1,000 people recorded ever dying from Nipah virus globally. However, it is important to realize that this number will not reflect true Nipah virus mortality. The difference between now and the years before 1998 is almost certainly not that a new virus has emerged, but that we have simply developed the means to detect it. We simply could not distinguish Nipah virus outbreaks from other causes of encephalit...

By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org. We are approaching the fifth anniversary of the trial that set the stage for the vaccination of billions by an experimental product — the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine (BNT162b2). There is no other scientific paper that affected so many within a few months of its publication. Was it a well-designed trial? In many respects, it was not. But was it at least trustworthy as far as the main results are concerned? It is uncertain, and I am not alone in the camp of skeptics. Over the years, I have read various critiques, ranging from testimonies about poor conduct to questionable inference. For those who are unfamiliar with the design, here is the essence. About 40,000 people were randomized to receive two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, 21 days apart, or two doses of a placebo. Descriptive statistics show well-balanced characteristics in the two arms of the study, with about 20,000 people in each. Participants reported symptoms between the first injection and the end of the follow-up. If they reported at least one of 10 Covid-like symptoms, a PCR test was conducted. If positive, the participant was classified as a Covid case on the date of the first reported symptom. The main results are shown below. Notice that we get the correct results from the count of events alone because the denominator (time at risk) was almost identical in the two arms. For example, (1–2/21)x100=90.5%. My two cents on the results. I will focus first on a narrow window — eight days in the follow-up time — shortly after the second dose. I call that period The Eight Days of Miracles because what happened at that time was miraculous. Vaccine effectiveness has dramatically increased in the blink of an eye: from 50% to 90%. Too good to be true? If we accept that the Pfizer vaccine was highly effective in preventing symptomatic infection, we don't need more than one week of follow-up after dose 2. Does it matter whether a risk is cut by 90% or by 95%? Not really. Of course, that's if we trust that estimate of 90% effectiveness. In those eight days, there were 19 more cases in placebo recipients than in vaccine recipients. All that it takes to change the effectiveness back to 50% is to find 10 more cases or so in about 20,000 recipients of the second dose. Do we have any plausible reason to assume that cases were missed in the vaccine arm of the trial (undercounting) in The Eight Days of Miracles? We surely do. Misattributing Covid Symptoms to Side Effects As we all know, side effects were common, and they were much more common after the second dose than after the first. The table below shows the frequency of three symptoms that were also considered as Covid symptoms in the definition of a case. We cannot add the percentages because a participant could have reported multiple symptoms. Nonetheless, with almost 20,000 people in the vaccine arm, these percentages translate to thousands of people whose symptoms were attributed to side effects of the second dose ("reactogenicity"). For example, over 2,000 vaccine recipients reported fever after the second dose. Was Covid ruled out by a PCR test in every case? No, it was not. That's what we find in the protocol (section 8.13). "During the 7 days following each vaccination, potential COVID-19 symptoms that overlap with specific events (ie, fever, chills, new or increased muscle pain, diarrhea, vomiting) should not trigger a potential COVID-19 illness visit unless, in the investigator's opinion, the clinical picture is more indicative of a possible COVID-19 illness than vaccine reactogenicity." (my italics) In other words, a PCR test is left to the discretion of the investigator, with a clear guideline: it is a priori assumed not to be Covid. Indeed, of thousands of participants who reported such symptoms in those seven days, only a few hundred were tested and classified as "suspected but unconfirmed Covid." All others were not tested. How do we know how many were tested? There is an FDA ...

By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org. I woke up the other morning to the next step in the retraction attempt on our seminal paper published in Autoimmunity entitled: Quantification of residual plasmid DNA and SV40 promoter-enhancer sequences in Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna modRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Ontario, Canada. Here's the ongoing timeline: September 6, 2025 We published online. For those of you unaware, within just over a week of publishing our paper, we received an email notification from the publisher of the journal that our paper was "under investigation" prompted by "pubpeer commenter" Kevin Patrick under the pseudonym Actinopolyspora biskrensis. You can read about that here. September 17th, 2025 The first email came: Patrick falsified a claim by misquoting another peer-reviewed article published by Klinman et al. Yes, you read that right. This is where we're at. We have been under incessant attack since we published. Let me be clear: WE'VE ALREADY BEEN THROUGH PEER REVIEW, AND PASSED ONTO FULL PUBLICATION. And this was after many desk rejections with many other journals. We've addressed countless issues raised and responded more than adequately to all of them, either with benchwork or references. October 22nd, 2025 The next email came: Best wishes. November 20, 2025 And then the email from a Retraction Watch journalist came: This email had an attached pdf where the undisclosed whiner/author uses ad hominems and regurgitates false claims. It is interesting to me that the name of the attached pdf is Letter_to_the_Editor_VACCINE, as opposed to the perhaps expected Letter_to_the_Editor_AUTOIMMUNITY. Seems like this might in reference to a previously written (perhaps carbon-copied) letter to the editor. This email from Kincaid claims that the reviewer is also the person who forwarded a letter to the editor with the "same critiques." Who is this person who believes they have the authority to question a published article that's been through peer review and to opinionate "further editorial action?" And is this really one of our reviewers? From a glove-face-slapping point of view – this is an insult to us as authors, to the journal, the editor, and all the peer-reviewers who spent long hours to make this article scientifically sound, even the one who seems hellbent on getting our paper retracted, if this is the case. "Attention-seeking?" "Anti-vaccine"? "Exploit their positions?" "Misinformation?" "Pseudo-journals?" Well, that last word has a particular individual's name all over it and I imagine that he is referring to James Lyons-Weiler's journal Science, Public Health Policy and the Law and/or the Independent Medical Alliance's Journal of Independent Medicine. Most likely, the former. AHEM. The author's name is in the pdf sent to us. I have a very serious question now regarding the email. Question: How is it possible that this journalist got his hands on the peer reviews for our paper? Did one of our reviewers indeed pass his review onto Retraction Watch and write a letter to the editor to prompt retraction of our paper once it got through peer review? We are not privy to seeing these as they are confidential so as to prevent reviewer name disclosure. Confidentiality, however, depends on a chain of human and technical safeguards, and that chain appears to have been broken if what Kincaid wrote is true: …we have obtained peer reviews of the manuscript you submitted and the revised version which recommend against publishing your paper due to issues with the Qubit data. This is a serious ethical breach and/or a civil wrong (breach of contract, copyright infringement, breach of confidence) and once again, I have to ask why, after we've been through peer review, does some anonymized individual – who doesn't have to state COIs or even their name! who according to Kincaid was one of our reviewers – have the power to a) incite an investigation into a published paper and b) access confidential documents and use them to ...

By Meryl Nass at Brownstone dot org. Some people wonder why I look at the New York Times. It's because I want to see what narratives the "newspaper of record" is pushing. I read an article about ten years ago by an ex-NYT editor, who said that at the beginning of the year, the editors were given a list of the themes to be followed that year. I think he was making clear that they were told which narratives they were intended to push. Below, I critique an "Opinion Piece" by a journalist who knows nothing about the subject of pandemic countermeasures, except that it is his job to pan whatever the current administration is doing, especially if it will save taxpayers money and reduce the risks of Gain-of-Function research. Let's look at the NYT author first, best known for exaggerating the effects of global warming. No science background. But he did beat up RFK in an August 13 opinion piece—well, that probably trumps a PhD in the subject matter at the NYT. His book and article on climate change are described as terrifying. And he attempts to terrify us with his straw man argument today. (FYI, a straw man argument misrepresents what the opposer actually said, and argues against the misrepresentation.) And then: You and I read the article. Is that what it actually said? Let me remind you what it really said: We must stop wasting money on the traditional playbook. We do not need to find and create new pathogens that could cause future outbreaks. Rather, we must improve our understanding of the pathogens that we know cause disease in humans now, without speculating about hypothetical risks. We should develop better prevention and treatment strategies for these existing pathogens. We should learn from recent example: a metabolically healthy population, physically active and eating nutritious food, will cope far better in the face of a novel pathogen than a population facing a severe chronic-disease crisis. Sweden, without lockdown or school closures, was the best in the world at protecting human life during the Covid pandemic. It had the lowest level of age-adjusted, all-cause excess deaths in the world between March 2020 and December 2024. Sweden succeeded in part because its people are relatively metabolically healthy. By contrast, the U.S. chronic-disease crisis all but guaranteed that Americans would have one of the highest mortality rates in the world. Ultimately, public health agencies encouraging people to take whatever steps they can to improve their health will have a dramatic effect during the next pandemic. Whether simply by stopping smoking, controlling hypertension or diabetes, or getting up and walking more, anything that makes the population healthier will prepare us better for the next pandemic. Then he emotes that promoting healthy behaviors is magical thinking: This narrative constructor is now making war on healthier lifestyles. Imagine how many of those who died from HIV/AIDS might have been spared if they had used condoms, or possibly avoided poppers and other drugs (which is what Professor Peter Duesberg postulated as the contributing cause). Next, after admitting that lifestyle diseases like obesity and diabetes did in fact increase mortality from Covid significantly, Wallace-Wells somehow twists that into an attack on good health. The guy is phenomenal at being illogical. It just gets wilder. Either he is a dummkopf, or he was told the story he had to write, and he just had to produce the verbiage to go along with the theme: Are we really prepared to embrace a D.I.Y. public health libertarianism in the wake of a respiratory pandemic that taught us — or should have — that whenever we share air, we share disease? [Even outdoors? Then why aren't we all diseased, all the time?—Nass] To a distressing degree, the answer appears to be yes — not just in the fiercest MAHA circles but among the population at large, as a poll shows. In the next sentence, poor Wallace-Wells stops making any sense at all. Where was h...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org. At a recent Brownstone Institute event, I spoke on a panel about the importance of judging public health interventions by their real-world impact — by whether they genuinely help people live longer and healthier lives. I had just written about mammography screening, and how decades of research show that while it detects more breast cancers, it doesn't reduce overall deaths. During the discussion, someone raised the issue about prostate cancer screening and the PSA test. It was a fair question — because the parallels with routine mammography are striking. Both programs rest on the same seductive logic: find cancer early, treat it, and save lives. It sounds so obvious, doesn't it? But the latest data on prostate-cancer screening — 23 years of it — suggest that this promise, too, has failed the most important test: overall mortality. When the Numbers Don't Match the Promise The European randomised screening study began in 1993 and enrolled more than 160,000 men aged 55 to 69. Half were invited to have regular PSA blood tests; the others were not. After 23 years of follow-up, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the results are just in. Predictably, screening led to about 30% more prostate cancers being diagnosed. However, most were low-risk tumours that never would have caused harm. Men who were screened had a 13% lower risk of dying from prostate cancer than those who weren't screened. But that difference, while sounding impressive, shrinks dramatically when translated into absolute numbers: 1.4% versus 1.6%, an absolute reduction of 0.2% (see graph). That means you'd have to screen about 500 men to prevent one death from prostate cancer — the other 499 see no benefit. But here's the key point — the overall death rates were identical in both groups (see graph below). Despite finding more prostate cancers, men who were screened did not live longer — they simply had a higher chance of being labelled "cancer patients." The study found that while screening can modestly reduce prostate cancer deaths, it comes at the cost of significant overdiagnosis and overtreatment. The reality for most men is that once a PSA test is positive, it's almost impossible not to act. At the Brownstone event, I described it like a conveyor belt: once you're on it, it's difficult to get off. An elevated PSA often sets in motion a chain of medical interventions that men may not need. The Harms We Don't Count A positive test often triggers a chain reaction — MRIs, biopsies, surgery, radiation — and often with lifelong consequences. Men who undergo unnecessary treatment can be left impotent, incontinent, or chronically anxious. Most elevated PSAs are false positives, and even when biopsies reveal no cancer, the process itself carries risk — including infections that can require hospitalisation — and often leads to repeat testing and repeat biopsies. The psychological toll — months of fear between tests, the dread of results, the pressure to "do something" can be harmful. A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine of nearly a quarter-million US veterans found that even men with limited life expectancy — too old or frail to benefit — were being treated aggressively for prostate cancer. The authors urged doctors to "avoid definitive treatment of men with limited life expectancy to prevent unnecessary toxic effects." It's a roundabout way of saying what should be obvious — we're hurting people we can't help. It's often argued that today's tests and treatments have improved, and while that may be true in some cases, the fundamental problem remains. The Pressure to Participate Every October brings Breast Cancer Awareness Month, urging women to get mammograms "for peace of mind." Every November brings Movember, encouraging men to grow moustaches to raise funds and promote prostate cancer screening in the name of "men's health." The intentions are good. But these campaigns often create social press...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org. There are two possible ways history will treat the Covid era. The establishment preference is for a story of a killer pathogen that leapt from the animal kingdom into humans to create a deadly pandemic that was fixed by an innovative vaccine. This is the preferred line in shrunken form, one already told in countless books and articles. This is how regime historians – cowards who stood by and watched while people were treated like lab rats – want to tell the story. The real version of events is far more complicated. It is a story of dangerous scientific experiments mixed with misleading propaganda, mass psychosis, and outright lies, and given forward motion by profiteering pharmaceutical companies, censorial media, government grift, opportunistic bureaucrats, and agency malfeasance. It is also a story of great heroes who stood up and said no. Who will tell the real story in a way that can cut through the static? Many documentaries already exist to get the truth out, but much more is needed. What we need is a narrative, a metaphorical telling, a quasi-historical fiction that puts all the absurdity on display in a slightly changed framework. Ideally, this story would exist in its most compelling form as a satirical film. The master of this genre is literary critic, author, and screenwriter Walter Kirn, a living treasure of cultural commentary. He was educated at Princeton University and Oxford University, he achieved literary success with novels such as Thumbsucker (1999), adapted into a 2005 film, and Up in the Air (2001), which was adapted into a 2009 film nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture. His 2014 memoir Blood Will Out chronicles a decade-long friendship with Christian Gerhartsreiter, an impostor who posed as Clark Rockefeller and was later convicted of murder. A former contributing editor at Time, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, and Spy, Kirn has critiqued meritocratic illusions and institutional media in works like Lost in the Meritocracy (2009) and as co-host of the podcast America This Week with Matt Taibbi. Kirn has also written the screenplay to the film we need. It is called The Rash. It tells the story of an emergent health problem that captures the public mind with contagious fear and loathing. This rash – real, imagined, or created – is viewed as a financial opportunity by dominant institutions on the cultural landscape. Among them is a pharmaceutical company with an off-the-shelf product called Zenvidia that seems to address the rash by making people forget all about it (with major side effects). Hilarity ensues as a Stanford public-health professor speaks out against the mania. In preparation for writing, Kirn spent many hours with NIH head Jay Bhattacharya and studied all the details of the Covid period. He has written a masterful allegory with a message of resistance. There is one major and inevitable problem with this project: funding. Investors are terrified of the topic and Hollywood elites don't even want it made. That said, the project already has a top production company lined up along with some notable talent to make a first-rate film. Brownstone Institute is well-positioned to be a fiscal sponsor of this effort. As a non-profit, the film exists squarely within the purview of our mission. This is why Brownstone is stepping up to help with raising the necessary capital to see this project to fruition. If you are interested in major gifts toward this effort, let us know by writing to our president. Here are some assets by way of promotion. Hello, world. Something to show you. A teaser trailer for The Rash, a script I wrote this year for Onset Creative & Nicole Shanahan. The feature film is now in the financing phase. Interested investors may contact me by X DM for more info. Enjoy. I think you'll get the picture. pic.twitter.com/6UyV4orW1n— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) September 1, 2025 Older interview with Kirn from Booknotes:

By Mollie Engelhart at Brownstone dot org. America loves to debate socialism. We argue about universal healthcare, guaranteed income, student loan forgiveness, and government dependency. We pride ourselves on our rugged independence and belief in free markets. We warn that socialism destroys innovation, freedom, and personal responsibility. But here's the uncomfortable truth most Americans never stop to consider: the most centrally planned, government-dependent, subsidy-driven system in the United States isn't medicine, housing, or energy—it's food. Our food system is not a free market. It is not capitalism in any recognizable form. It is a government-engineered economy propped up by taxpayer dollars at every stage, directed by regulation, shaped by corporate interests, and leaving both consumers and farmers dependent, unhealthy, and without real alternatives. Each year, more than $40 billion of taxpayer money is used to subsidize commodity crops like corn, soy, wheat, and cotton. Crop insurance—also paid for largely by the public—is essentially another subsidy, and without it, most large commodity farms wouldn't survive. But the subsidies don't stop at growing. Once harvested, those subsidized crops become corn syrup, seed oils, stabilizers, livestock feed, artificial ingredients, ultraprocessed food additives, and ethanol—fuel grown on prime farmland and heavily subsidized again under the banner of environmental benefit. Then the same Farm Bill that subsidizes growing and processing also subsidizes purchasing those foods through SNAP benefits. And when the predictable metabolic outcomes emerge—obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, autoimmune disorders—the government subsidizes the healthcare required to manage the consequences. So the loop looks like this: we subsidize growing the ingredients. We subsidize the industry turning those ingredients into processed food. We subsidize the public buying those products. And then we subsidize the medical care required to treat the disease that food causes. That isn't a food economy. It is a taxpayer-funded dependency system. People like to imagine that subsidies make farming cushy. Nothing could be further from reality. Even with subsidies, 85 percent of US farmers work a second job just to stay on their land and feed their families. They are subsidizing the food system with unpaid labor simply to keep feeding the country. I once watched a dairy farmer who had just won the lottery. When asked what he planned to do with the money, he shrugged and said, "I'll keep farming until it runs out." He wasn't joking—he was describing reality. Ask a farmer where they see themselves in five years and many go silent. Some get emotional. Some laugh because it's safer than crying. I know that feeling: the pit in your stomach, the exhaustion, the prayer for a path forward. What we have is not capitalism. It is a hybrid of state control and corporate power—uncomfortably close to agricultural indentured servitude for the very people who feed the country. And the regulations farmers face are not about safety—they are about control. To legally sell raw milk in Texas, I need a raw milk permit, a government-approved facility, a mop sink, a floor sink, a dishwashing sink, a handwashing sink, an employee restroom, specific ceiling materials, and multiple pages of compliance requirements. In Idaho, to legally sell raw milk, you need a business license. Same country. Same product. Same cows. In California, raw milk regulations are so extreme that only one company in the entire state can meet them. When I lived in Ventura County and asked about applying for a dairy permit—not even raw milk, just a legal dairy—the official told me, "There isn't a single dairy left in this county. The regulations are too much. We don't recommend you apply." The department responsible for food production was actively discouraging food production. Some people say, "Regulations should protect health, not eliminate competition."...

By Charlotte Kuperwasser at Brownstone dot org. After witnessing, and continuing to witness, the reaction to emerging information about the early cancer signal related to Covid-19 vaccination or infection, I recalled the historical timelines of other early cancer signals. What became immediately clear is that this moment is not unique. For more than a century, society has repeatedly failed to act on early warnings linking environmental, occupational, pharmaceutical, and consumer exposures to cancer. These failures have often been framed as the inevitable cost of scientific uncertainty. But that explanation no longer holds. Today, we are not limited by analytic tools, epidemiology, or biology. In the modern era, the dominant causes of delay are no longer scientific. They are structural, regulatory, economic, and epistemic (relating to knowledge). And the cost of those delays is increasingly visible in the form of rising early-onset cancers, hormone-sensitive malignancies, exposure-associated cancers, and chronic disease patterns that no longer fit classical models of carcinogenesis. And most recently, in the case of Covid-19 vaccinations, reports of unusually rapid tumor progression. A Century-Long Pattern We Refuse to Learn from If we look honestly at the history between cancer signal to acceptance and prevention, a striking pattern emerges. Before the 1950s, long delays between exposure signals and public health action were often unavoidable. The scientific infrastructure simply didn't exist. Chimney soot took more than 60 years to be accepted as carcinogenic, and over 150 years to understand mechanistically, because there was no exposure science, no molecular biology, and no population-level analytic framework. Oncogenic viruses faced decades of resistance because the idea that infections could cause cancer violated prevailing dogma. Helicobacter pylori infection languished for nearly a century under the assumption that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, not bacteria. These delays were tragic, but they reflected real scientific constraints. After the 1950s, however, those constraints largely disappeared. Cancer registries expanded. Epidemiology matured. Exposure assessment improved. Molecular tools exploded. Yet delays persisted, and in many cases, lengthened. It took ~40 yrs to accept the cigarettes signal and ~60-80 years until regulatory action. Risk was evident decades before meaningful regulation, delayed by industry interference, data distortion, and journal gatekeeping. Asbestos also took ~55-60yrs to accept signal and ~70-80 yrs until regulatory action. Acceptance and regulation lagged despite overwhelming evidence, slowed by economic and political pressure. The synthetic estrogen DES took ~33 yrs to accept signal, and while regulatory reform was immediate, it was not removed from the market and even after clear signals of harm, clinical inertia delayed action. Other environmental exposures (DDT, PCBs, BPA, PFAS, glyphosate) each followed the same arc: early signals, prolonged controversy, regulatory paralysis, maybe eventual acknowledgment long after widespread exposure. (DTT took ~30–40 yrs, PCBs ~30-40yrs, PFAS: >60yrs, glyphosate: >30 yrs and still ongoing). In all these cases, the delays were not failures of detection; they were failures of response. The Mechanism Trap A new bottleneck has quietly taken hold in modern science: mechanism has become a prerequisite for concern and action. Today, strong exposure–outcome signals are often dismissed unless accompanied by a fully articulated causal pathway. This has several consequences. NIH funding overwhelmingly favors hypothesis-driven mechanistic work over signal confirmation. Independent replication of early epidemiologic signals is rare and underfunded. Observations that don't align with dominant paradigms (non-genotoxic mechanisms, mixtures, immune modulation, developmental timing) stall indefinitely. And so now, we have created a paradox: we demand mechan...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. In medicine, silence can be more alarming than noise. For example, a patient who abruptly stops voicing discomfort or a monitor that ceases activity may signal system failure rather than resolution. Ecology presents a similar scenario, and currently, the silence is deeply concerning. Insects are disappearing across vast regions globally. This is not a modest decline or a simple geographic shift, but a rapid vanishing of beetles, butterflies, moths, flies, mosquitoes, bees, and entire functional groups. This phenomenon is not speculative or anecdotal; it is among the most consistently documented biological trends of the past 50 years and remains insufficiently addressed. For context, the total biomass of lost insects is comparable to the combined weight of all commercial aircraft worldwide, representing a profound ecological and economic loss. For decades, insects were treated as background noise—annoyances at best, pests at worst. Their abundance was assumed, their resilience taken for granted. We designed agricultural systems, urban environments, chemical interventions, and technological solutions on the unspoken assumption that insects would always be there. They were too numerous to fail. This assumption has proven incorrect. The Data Are Not Subtle One of the most widely cited early warnings came from a long-term German entomological study that tracked flying insect biomass across protected areas over nearly three decades. The result shocked even the investigators: a decline of more than 75% in total flying insect biomass between 1989 and 2016.¹ These were not industrial zones or pesticide-saturated fields. They were nature preserves. However, many regions like Africa and large parts of Asia still lack comprehensive, long-term insect monitoring, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of global insect declines. Subsequent studies confirmed that this was not an anomaly. A global review published in Biological Conservation concluded that approximately 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction, with declines accelerating in recent decades.² Longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, North America, and East Asia tell the same story with local variation but consistent direction.³-⁶ The loss is not limited to rare or specialized species. Common insects—the ones that once filled the air—are disappearing fastest. Entomologists now openly discuss "functional extinction," a state in which species technically still exist but no longer play their ecological roles in meaningful numbers.⁷ The significance of this issue is often underestimated. Insects Are Not Optional Insects occupy a central role in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. They pollinate plants, recycle nutrients, regulate microbial populations, control pest species, and serve as the primary food source for numerous birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish. Rather than being peripheral, insects form the structural foundation of these systems. The loss of these foundational species could result in the disappearance of familiar foods such as coffee, chocolate, apples, and almonds, directly impacting daily nutrition. Approximately three-quarters of global crop species rely at least partially on animal pollination, predominantly by insects. The economic value of insect pollination alone is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. But focusing on economics understates the issue. Without insects, food systems collapse not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. Nutrient diversity declines. Resilience vanishes. Dependency on industrial inputs increases. A study published in PLoS One found that the decline in insect pollinators could lead to a reduction in the concentrations of key vitamins such as vitamin A and folate worldwide, amounting to a 40% decrease in nutrient density in certain crops. Ecological systems tend to fail abruptly rather than gradually once critical thresh...

By David Thunder at Brownstone dot org. The UK government has pledged to introduce a digital ID system for all UK citizens and legal residents by the end of the current Parliament (so no later than 2029). The integration of digital ID into government services, though already under way, has hitherto been largely voluntary. However, it is becoming steadily less optional, as the government has said it will now be required as a precondition for work in the UK, and a version of it (GOV.UK One Login) is already being imposed unilaterally upon company directors throughout the UK. Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones has suggested in a recent interview (19/11) that digital ID is completely optional and will simply make government services more accessible and convenient. But this is a rather disingenuous sales pitch. On the one hand, Starmer himself insists that digital ID will be required as a precondition to work legally in the UK; on the other hand, like any new technology, there will be a transition period, but voluntariness is unlikely to last forever. Evidently, the government will not immediately require everyone to use a digital ID in their interactions with government agencies. But as digital ID becomes more normalised, it will likely become as compulsory as holding a passport for international travel. Can you really imagine a modern government allowing "hold-outs" to stay in the physical world while digital ID systems become the norm? Providing citizens with an easy way to seamlessly verify their identity when they access government services may seem like the "efficient" thing to do. However, this apparent efficiency comes at a high price, exposing citizens to significant risks of government overreach, surveillance, and system failures. The old "clunky" system, in which there was bureaucratic redundancy and replication and in which physical ID cards had to be shown to access discrete government services made it more difficult for the government to comprehensively monitor and control a citizen's choices in real time, and meant a single point of failure in the system did not necessarily compromise all of a citizen's important data, or disable citizens' ability to access public services. The problem with universal digital ID overseen by the State is not that a dystopian State will be born overnight, or that all our data will be stolen the day after the scheme is initiated, but that the architecture of authoritarian control will be set in motion, and the potential repercussions of serious data breaches and system failures will be significantly enlarged. According to a House of Common Research Briefing, government statements suggest that "there will be no centralised digital ID database." But as the same briefing points out, civil rights group Big Brother Watch stresses that "even decentralised systems can behave like centralised ones if identifiers link data across platforms." The creation of a digital ID system for accessing a wide range of public services clearly poses grave risks of abuse, given the evident conflict of interest of governments who both oversee the architecture of a digital ID system, and have incentives to extend their control over citizens' lives. Unlike a traditional physical ID system, in which there is a local gatekeeper who opens the gate to a service based on limited information – typically, a service-specific database – a digital ID system could, in some future iteration, permit a remote gatekeeper to use an AI algorithm to analyze a citizen's data and history (unlocked by their ID) and ration their access to a service to induce compliance with the government's preferred policies. This scenario becomes even more plausible given the momentum behind centralised digital currencies, which could offer governments direct leverage over citizens' income and spending choices. Do such scenarios seem far-fetched? If the digital ID system is controlled, overseen, and effectively programmed by centr...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org. O is for Obesity…. Back in the days, we saw a fat lady sing, Her song rich and lovely, our hearts would soon ring. And with her size so big, we silently mocked her, But we never thought once she should just see a doctor. But that has all changed. It's obesity not fat, A medical label wearing a medical hat. Dieting and exercise, everyone agrees, Ain't the modern way to tackle "chronic" disease. She's caught a new tune, she's no easy cynic, And she gets the right needle from the right clinic. The fat melts away, that drug is quite clever. As long as she takes it forever and ever. Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Sick Hustle Dispatch. I'm Alan Cassels, drug policy researcher, author of four books, student, and scholar of the world of medical hype. I have spent 30 years as an independent drug policy researcher, critiquing aggressive pharma marketing and disease-mongering. I believe we are all subject to the sharp end of the pharmaceutical industry's profitable con of transforming everyday aches, normal aging, social ills, and common fears into lifelong pill-swallowing customers. And in much of my writing this is what I hope to expose. Back in 2005, with Australian journalist Ray Moynihan our book Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients laid bare the playbook: drug companies, with their legions of PR flacks, paid experts, funded patient groups, and compliant media, systematically widen the boundaries of illness to expand their markets. High cholesterol? Shyness? Mild bone thinning? Restlessness? All rebranded as chronic, widespread conditions, burnished with a patina of respectable medical terminology and paving the way for a lifelong diet of pills. That's the way the model works. You see, cures are passée. Cures kill markets. Getting the population properly hooked on a pharmaceutical treatment for a 'chronic' condition is where the serious money is. Our core insight was simple and grim: it's far easier—and infinitely more profitable—to convince healthy people that they're sick than to develop genuine cures for the truly ill. Twenty years later, the hustle is bigger, slicker, and more dangerous than ever. Watching that hustle unfold with weight loss drugs feels weirdly ominous, like watching a slow-moving train wreck you can't peel your eyes off of. You know there'll be carnage and bodies, vast fortunes won and lost, and humanity left just a little bit poorer. We have often documented the pharmaceutical industry's proven ability to create enormously lucrative markets overnight, by inventing and selling diseases. Now watch as all that ingenuity and energy gets pointed at one of the biggest problems bewitching humanity: human fatness. Redefining the Disease The most central issue stems from the very definition of disease. By way of poignant parable, in the mid-1990s the drug industry and their surrogates had managed to bamboozle the medical world that pain was the "Fifth vital sign," a card trick that opened the door to the widespread use of opioids (like Oxycontin). This redefinition of pain treatment—through industry-funded textbooks, and lectures—meant our doctors were soon writing routine prescriptions for some of the most addictive substances on earth for everything from simple arthritis or back pain to tooth extractions. This was similar to how the companies inserted themselves into medical societies and treatment panels, redefining levels at which doctors should treat high blood pressure, blood sugars, or high cholesterol, (lowering them and widely expanding the numbers of citizens treated). Now, makers of one of the most lucrative drug classes in history are using their weapons-grade propaganda to go after the big kahuna, obesity. Just switch the goal posts, redefine the label, and then supply the treatment. It's easy when you have more money than God. This sleight-of-hand, which firmly places blame on your "genes" ins...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. Modern medicine is often portrayed as the culmination of rational progress. We refer to evidence-based care, standardized pathways, and algorithm-driven decisions as if they represent the highest achievement of scientific advancement. However, a recent meta-analysis of over 150 studies found that while 80% of protocols improve specific outcomes, only 45% lead to long-term health benefits. This discrepancy underscores the complexity of protocol effectiveness. The prevailing assumption is that protocols exist and persist solely because they are effective and have demonstrated their value. This assumption is fundamentally flawed. In practice, many of the most strictly enforced protocols in modern medicine persist not due to their impact on meaningful patient outcomes, but because they are deeply embedded within institutional narratives that resist change. This phenomenon is particularly evident in resuscitation medicine, where the continued reliance on epinephrine during cardiac arrest exemplifies a significant intellectual shortcoming. Nevertheless, some studies indicate that epinephrine may increase the return of spontaneous circulation, highlighting the complex and often contradictory nature of the available evidence. To understand the origins of this situation, we must return—not metaphorically, but explicitly—to the work of George Washington Crile. Crile as the Origin Point—and the Warning We Ignored George Crile was not a product of algorithmic medicine. He was a physiologist, an experimentalist, and—most importantly—a skeptic of accepted practice. A single question drove his life's work: why do patients in shock die, and what actually reverses that process? Crile's interest in shock was born not from theory, but from direct clinical failure. As a young physician, he watched a close friend die from hemorrhagic shock following amputation. The clinical signs—cold, clammy skin, tachycardia, hypotension, dilated pupils—imprinted themselves on him. What disturbed Crile most was not the death itself, but the inadequacy of the treatments offered. Rather than accept this as inevitable, Crile questioned the prevailing dogma. He studied vasomotor tone, cardiac output, blood pressure, and perfusion at a time when such concepts were poorly understood. He demonstrated that many accepted treatments for shock were not merely ineffective but actively harmful. He challenged senior colleagues, dismantled widely held beliefs, and endured professional skepticism as a result. Crile was, in every sense, an intellectual insurgent. Adrenaline: Discovery without Finality Crile's experiments with adrenal extracts, known today as adrenaline (epinephrine), were part of his broader physiological inquiry. He observed that adrenaline reliably increased blood pressure and coronary perfusion in animal models. He tested multiple agents and concluded that only adrenaline and volume expansion produced consistent hemodynamic effects. However, not all his contemporaries shared his enthusiasm for adrenaline. Dr. John Smith, a notable peer at the time, questioned the universality and long-term effectiveness of these findings in clinical settings, advocating for a more cautious, evidence-based approach. Crile induced cardiac arrest in a dog weighing approximately 10 kilograms and administered adrenaline in 1906, and the heart resumed beating. This experiment has since been mythologized, but its original context matters. Crile did not present adrenaline as a cure or claim that it was universal. He did not argue that restoring a pulse equaled restoring life. He emphasized timing, physiology, circulation, and trained execution. His descriptions of resuscitation included arterial cannulation, saline infusion to ensure coronary delivery, synchronized chest pressure, and rapid intervention. This approach was not protocol-driven medicine. It was medicine grounded in critical thinking. How Hypothesis Became Doctrine The failure ca...