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By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org. In this skill-testing question, tell me which of these statements is true: 1. The shingles vaccine is 90% effective in preventing shingles. 1. The shingles vaccine prevents shingles in ONE in every 32 people vaccinated. The other 31 people see no benefit. Answer: both are true. Guess which statement dominates the marketing of Shingrix, the most popular shingles vaccine in America? 90% effective. 90% effective. 90% effective. That's the main marketing message coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussing the efficacy of the vaccine. So common is this sort of statistical sleight of hand that the CDC doesn't even seem to see any real problem in how those effects are presented to the public. Because they are so impactful, and are essentially marketing messages, and they need to be deconstructed. We can look to professional health reporters working for the mainstream media to deconstruct these numbers and explain what they all mean, right? Hmm. Not quite. I was in for a surprise when I went to see what the New York Times had to say about this allegedly 90% effective vaccine. Remember, this is a news outlet giving us all the news that's fit to print. Earlier this year the New York Times published a remarkable article describing associations between certain vaccines and aging, headlined: "Vaccines Are Helping Older People More Than We Knew." It starts out boldly: Let's be clear. The primary reason to be vaccinated against shingles is that two shots provide 90 percent protection against a painful, blistering disease that a third of Americans will suffer in their lifetimes, one that can cause lingering nerve pain and other nasty long-term consequences. Let's "be clear" alright. The New York Times reporters and editors are smart people, smart enough to make sure their narrative about the use of vaccines in older people flows in the "right" direction. It's relatively straightforward to produce a plausible bit of vaccine cheerleading when you don't have to actually critically examine the numbers someone hands you. Thus, the story follows a predictable direction honed to please the many drug and vaccine advertisers whose ads are keeping the Times afloat. In this case, the copy follows a standard vaccine-reporting template we've come to expect: It overstates a vaccine's benefits, downplays or ignores its harms, and hammers home the dreadfulness of the disease under the illusion of certainty and medical consensus. As I've discussed in an earlier Brownstone article, the net result of this kind of biased reporting is essentially to broadcast the "Ask your doctor" tagline to the unwashed masses from one of America's biggest pulpits. Walt Whitman the great American poet, could have been speaking of the NY Times when he wrote of sounding his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." We're talking herpes zoster here, commonly known as shingles, and caused by a reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that causes chickenpox. It can be nasty, but not always. It typically involves tingling, burning, itching, or pain along a single nerve pathway, sometimes with a blistering rash which typically heals over in 2 to 4 weeks. There are quite useful and relatively cheap antiviral medications to help speed recovery if taken soon enough. More serious is when shingles develops into long-term nerve pain called postherpetic neuralgia (PHN). Sometimes it gets into your eyes, which can be truly nasty. But thankfully it's rare and most shingles cases clear up on their own within a month. Going through a succinct independent analysis of the randomized trials of the major shingles vaccines provides a unique case study for determining how actual science can become so contorted by professional reporters at the New York Times. So where does the "90% effective" come from? Whenever you see a number this big you know that it is a relative number. Throw it out and start again I alw...

By Jayanta Bhattacharya at Brownstone dot org. The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on April 28, 2026, in Dana Point, California. At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority. For centuries, a small number of ecclesiastical powers had decided such questions as whether the moons of Jupiter move. The scientific revolution placed these questions in the hands of a lot of very smart scientists, including those with telescopes. Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people—directors of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, heads of international agencies like the World Health Organization, and editors of prestigious journals—have the power to say what is true or false in science. But before I go on, I want to make a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health, which I now lead. The history of the NIH is incredible. Almost every modern advance in biomedicine has, at its root, an NIH investment. NIH is, by far, the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, providing 85 percent of funding in every single area of biomedicine. The development of heart attack prevention and treatments came out of the NIH. Almost every cancer advance and cancer treatment came out of the NIH. Because of the NIH, we now have advances in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis that, when I was a medical student in the 1990s, seemed beyond reach. Because of the NIH, we can now treat cystic fibrosis, a terrible disease that used to kill young people in their teens and 20s, allowing those who have it to live full lives. We have not one, but two cures for sickle cell anemia, a disease that primarily affects African-American children. So I am strongly of the view that the NIH is an institution worth saving. It is, however, an institution that has not done its job well in some time. The mission of the NIH is to fund research that improves the health and longevity of the American people. But when we look at life expectancy in the United States since 2010—and this is not the case in most European countries—we find that there has been no improvement despite the huge investments we have made in medical research. (See, for instance, the accompanying graph comparing life expectancy over time in the U.S. and Sweden.) If we continue as we have been, the prospect of our children living shorter, less healthy lives than we do is a real possibility. "Make America Healthy Again" can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people. We have huge chronic disease problems. We can solve them—but we can only solve them if we fix science, which suffers today from three great problems. The first of these problems is the replication crisis. Scientists publish studies today; we hear about their findings on TV, in newspapers, and on podcasts; and we (and even our doctors) take them for granted. But then when other scientists ask the same questions and perform the same experiments, they do not come up with the same results. That means that a lot of the science we (and our doctors) take for granted is not actually true. Are eggs good for us? I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when eggs were considered the next worst thing to poison. I didn't eat an egg until I was 19, and then it was a tasteless egg white omelet, since only the whites of eggs were considered healthy in the 1990s. But today eggs are considered a superfood! There are so many examples like this, and at the root of the confusion is the replication crisis. How do we address this? We begin by recognizing the fact that most ideas hatched by scientists do not work or are not true. That is completely normal in science and always has been. J...

By Steven Kritz at Brownstone dot org. In recent months, there's been a torrent of document releases that prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the scope of the atrocities committed in the name of the Covid response by the public health establishment. As someone who has been submitting articles to Brownstone Journal covering this subject for more than 3 years (20 have been published), it has been suggested that I once again bring my perspective into the arena regarding these recent revelations. Frankly, I have felt no such calling. Why is that? For me, it's a matter of been there; done that! The first article I wrote that was published in Brownstone Journal in October 2023, Where is the Office for Human Research Protections? ends by asking whether the expression, "Never again" still has any meaning. Back in January 2024, I had written an article titled, Racism, Anti-Semitism, Genocide, and Eugenics in the COVID Era; and in April 2025, I had written an article titled, Have We Lived through a Public Health Holocaust?. While the titles of the latter two articles speak for themselves, the latest revelations have largely confirmed the historical perspective that I presented both factually and contextually. In addition, as far back as the winter of 2021-22, I had been blogging on a website for healthcare professionals about the shredding of the Nuremberg Code, a document that primarily focuses on proper informed consent. At the time, I was roundly criticized for having the gall to bring this subject up, as it was viewed as a total non sequitur. However, over the past year, gross violations of the Nuremberg Code have been cited with some regularity, even in mainstream media. Based on the foregoing, it should be clear where I stand regarding the so-called Covid response. As such, for me to write more on this subject is merely to gild the lily. I see no purpose in doing that. I'll only point out that in reading what others are now writing in response to the recent flood of hard evidence, it appears that more and more people are catching up to where I've been for almost 5 years, although they tend to dance around using the same terminology that I have put out there. I've reached the point where the only thing I care about is accountability. Without it, these atrocities will keep happening. In fact, plans for a replay are already in place by agencies within the US government, the World Health Organization, and any number of other globalist masters of the universe who have the resources and connections to move on it. They're just waiting for the right set of circumstances to justify implementation. As guideposts for what that accountability should look like, I'll cite two seminal legal/judicial events: Watergate and the Nazi Doctors' Trial. As a result of the Watergate break-in and cover-up, events that I believe pale in comparison to the Covid atrocities, there were 69 indictments, 48 convictions or guilty pleas, approximately 2 dozen prison sentences served, and a presidential resignation. The Nazi Doctors' Trial was for medical crimes that might have been more brutal than the Covid atrocities, but were surpassed in sheer numbers by several orders of magnitude. In all, there were 23 indictments and 16 convictions, of which 7 were sentenced to death (all were hung shortly after conviction), and 9 served varying lengths of time in prison. Anything short of this level of accountability leaves us dangerously exposed. To those who still can't accept the fact that the atrocities rose to this level, I would counter that the unwillingness to face this reality will only embolden the monsters who perpetrated these crimes against humanity to continue on the same path. If you're looking to the public health system, particularly the physicians, to take back the profession, don't hold your breath! That's because, first, do no harm has been irrevocably changed to, do as you're told! This is the result of the change in the nature of the relationship bet...

By Russ Gonnering at Brownstone dot org. Christopher Morales' 9/26/2026 post, "AI Has Made an Old Education Problem Harder to Ignore," (written in Minding the Campus, a project of the National Association of Scholars) has touched a nerve with many: Students can now generate essays, summaries and discussion posts in seconds. The danger is real, but the underlying weakness is older. AI did not create the gap between completing work and mastering knowledge. It made that gap much harder to ignore. Morales reveals the staggering statistics on the prevalence of remedial courses offered to first-year undergraduates in colleges and universities: The evidence supports academic under-preparedness was widespread, visible and costly long before AI could write a polished paragraph. I would suggest that the problem is even more widespread and pernicious and stretches beyond the confines of academia. It is the tension between Competence and Capability in most walks of life, including my own, medicine and healthcare. To understand the roots of this present-day dynamic, we need to go back a bit…quite a bit…and understand the significant social, political, and economic upheavals in Great Britain in the late 1970s: Economic stagflation was stifling, with inflation hitting a high of 25%. Rapid decline in traditional manufacturing and industrial sectors. Widespread strikes and the Winter of Discontent. Economic frustration and generational friction. Increasing violence in Northern Ireland and inability, or lack of interest, of the political parties in addressing the problem. Breakdown in prior political consensus. At the time, Great Britain was facing serious societal breakdown in a number of areas. Brian Grant explained how a committed group of diverse individuals spontaneously formed around a belief that imbalance in the core activities of education and training fueled much of the socioeconomic disruption in society. The watchword of the proposed reforms to deal with this disruption was capability. This group's actions culminated in newspaper declarations taken out in the Times and the Guardian and became known as The Capability Manifesto. This concept had 4 main pillars of change, linked to the following verbs: To do: move from passive memorization of facts for a test to the successful execution of real projects. To make: value craftsmanship, engineering, and art as well as pure academic knowledge. To organize: value teamwork and leadership. The practical value of this was later emphasized in such works as Tribal Leadership by David Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright. To adapt: understand that problem-solving often has multiple answers and methods of inquiry, depending upon the circumstances. It is interesting that these concepts (such as the importance of starting point and nonlinear system dynamics) echo those of the nascent Complexity Science being founded at about the same time at The Santa Fe Institute and described in an extremely readable fashion by M. Mitchell Waldrop. The emphasis of verbs rather than nouns in the successful execution of projects is similar to the "Action Learning" concept of Complexity Science described by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon. The "Move to Capability" in Britain was not a smooth one. There was pushback. In Education for Capability: A Critique, Keith Thompson submitted that the Manifesto was flawed on a number of points: Capability only implies potential, not actuation. It forms a caricature of an educated person as only knowing what and not knowing how. Although the socioeconomic decline is real, there is not significant evidence to assume that the proposed remedies would reverse that descent. This critique was rebutted by such authors as Mark Grant Ashton in "Educated Man as an Action Man: A Reply to Keith Thompson." Over the years, a spirited discussion ensued: Which is more important, theory or practice? Should we concentrate on basic knowledge or application? This seemed to always consist of a...

By Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone dot org. On October 14, the Catholic Church observes the anniversary of the martyrdom of Pope Callistus I in A.D. 223 . The Collect for the Mass in his honor prays the following: O God, who raised up Pope Saint Callistus the First to serve the Church and attend devoutly to Christ's faithful departed, strengthen us, we pray, by his witness to the faith, so that, rescued from the slavery of corruption, we may merit an incorruptible inheritance. This prayer is an allusion to the fact that, while deacon, Callistus was put in charge of the first cemetery owned by the Church by Pope Zephyrinus. You can still visit the Catacombs of Callistus today, a massive place that holds the bodies of many popes and martyrs in addition to thousands of ordinary Christians. Two distinct thoughts occurred to me while offering Mass for his feast this year. First, I thought of how November is rapidly approaching. As I wrote in one of my early pieces for Brownstone: The month of November begins starkly with a remembrance of those who have gone ahead of us in death. On November 1st we celebrate all of those who are in Heaven by celebrating All Saints. On November 2nd, we pray for those who are being purified in Purgatory as we commemorate All Souls. Every Mass on All Souls Day is a Requiem (i.e. a funeral Mass). Visiting a cemetery is urged, even with the grant of an indulgence for making such a visit from November 1-8. An older priest once recalled that the funeral pall (used to cover a casket or, in the absence of a casket, the catafalque) at his parish growing had the words "Hodie mihi, cras tibi" ("Me today, you tomorrow") embossed on it. The beginning of November then was a powerful reminder of the arrival of a season of "illness and death." We begin November by remembering the martyrs and confessors who departed this life victorious, and then our thoughts immediately turn to making reparation for Christians who left this world in faith, hope, and charity, but with an imperfect sanctity. This dual act of remembrance is central to Catholic piety. We remember our heroes and our non-heroes alike, albeit differently. I note with sadness the rapid erosion of the habitus of remembering from our culture completely. We dismiss the idea of heroes in the past at all. Funerals go unattended and cemeteries go unvisited, if there is even proper burial at all. Lockdowns, effectively making the natural process of grieving illegal, hastened this erosion. Requiem Masses that should have a full Church now have maybe a few dozen, others have only immediate family and a few pious friends in attendance. This change in practice should be seen as a grave symptom of the loss of civilization itself. My second thought on the feast of St. Callistus is related to the first. As part of our civilizational collapse and our rejection of acts of remembrance and reparation in toto, we have enabled our malefactors in government and media to completely move on from the damage they inflicted on countless people in the name of "public health" beginning in 2020. This is why I find Jeffrey Tucker's hours of time spent reading entries from the CDC's V-Safe files on the Covid shots so incredibly poignant and moving. These were people who believed in the system that provided these shots. They thought that they were doing the right thing, first by getting them and second by reporting the horrifying outcomes of that decision. They imagined that the people in charge cared and that they would follow up. Instead, like the prophets of Baal who opposed Elijah, they learned that there was "no one answering, no one listening" (1 Kings 18:29). The heartbreak of listening to even a few of these entries inflicts psychological and spiritual pain. Jeffrey's reading of these for hours resembles a harsh act of spiritual reparation for the evil that was done. Importantly, it represents a defiance against the enforced forgetfulness sought by those who viewed these repo...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org. In my reconstruction and discussion of Heidegger's remark – in the course of the interview that he granted the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, in 1966 – that 'Only a god can save us,' it was shown that this issued from his conviction, that the 'essence' of modern technology (what he calls 'technicity') functions as a 'framework' within which every question and decision are formulated and made. He calls this 'essence' Gestell ('posure,' Enframing'), the fundamental organising power of which reduces everything in the world to a 'standing-reserve,' which means that its sole purpose is restricted to its usefulness or calculative utility. So, for example, even human beings are approached as 'resources,' which is made visible in renaming what used to be called 'Personnel Departments' in companies (and other organisations) as 'Human Resources.' Hence, the essence of technology, or Enframing,' brings about the stripping of entities of their intrinsic meaning, transforming them into mere resources for use, instead of allowing them to be what they are – and arguably should be – according to their own being. Norman Melchert (The Great Conversation. A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 576) provides an apt characterisation of the world under the dominance of the essence of modern technology where he writes: In the age of enframing, where everything is understood as standing-reserve, there is no 'room' for God. (Or perhaps even God is thought of as 'standing-reserve', a kind of public utility that can be used to gain the satisfaction of one's desires; one often gets this impression from the television evangelists. The most obvious question that would probably arise for most readers is why Heidegger talks about the essence of technicity or technology, which he names Gestell, instead of simply referring to concrete instances of technology in the guise of technical devices, such as electric drills, saws, and vacuum cleaners, all of which are embodiments of Enframing. The answer has to do with the fact that Heidegger thinks ontologically about technicity, and not ontically. Ontology being the discipline that addresses questions concerning the distinctive (or essential) being of beings – what makes them into what they are, in contradistinction with other beings or entities – the essence of technicity is what makes technology into what it is distinctively, and technical devices embody this essence paradigmatically. Insofar as an electric drill manifests Enframing as its technological essence, it allows the handyman or -woman, by using it, to draw on the standing reserve of stored electricity in a manner which optimalises its usefulness. To think about electric drills in relation to other similar or dissimilar tools comparatively as part of a collection of 'technologies' is to focus on them ontically, and no longer ontologically. The following excerpt from Heidegger's 'The question concerning technology' (In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt, Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1977, p. 14-15) clarifies what is at stake by contrasting an older way of benefiting technically from wind and water with its modern technological counterpart: The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it. In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when ...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" said Lady Macbeth as she paced in a hallucinatory state, reliving in her subconscious the murders she helped plan. She rubbed her hands as if washing them, to wash away the sin, following up the promise to her son that "a little water clears us of this deed." The line comes to mind from the latest dump of entries from the diaries of Anthony Fauci that cover the months December 2021 to May 2022. These were the darkest months of the Covid era. Confidence that the virus was a lab creation was growing. That points directly to Fauci. The lockdowns had given rise to growing population-wide fury. And the shot was not working, not stopping infection or spread while groups reporting deep injury from injection could not be censored fast enough to make them vanish completely, though tech companies certainly tried. Fauci still held his position at NIAID with certainty that he would keep it under President Biden, whose confidence he enjoyed. He was daily in touch with the people who were actually running the government – aides Ron Klain and Jeff Zients – and coordinated his decisions with them. They trusted him to continue the Covid operation, which they all knew to be a national security issue beyond the control of any political player. Fauci was the front man but an effective one, until he became a liability. We know from previous entries that Fauci at first hoped the new virus would get lost in the mix of a bad flu season. This was mid-January 2020. The CDC called him out on that. His first scheme failed because a savvy businessman in China spilled the beans by posting the sequence on a pay-to-play website in mid-January. After pressing a friend and former colleague to use his personal credit card to download the sequence, Fauci launched plan B, which was to deny the lab leak and prepare a nationwide inoculation to make it all go away. The audacious scheme was to keep population immunity at the lowest levels possible through lockdowns while the shot went through clinical trials and was ready for distribution. Fauci knew for certain that this was the type of virus that would mutate rapidly. His hope was to take the energy out of the pace of mutation by reducing the infection rate as low as possible. Sadly for him, the new and most powerful variant had appeared just as his shots hit general distribution. Delta disabled their protection that had been formulated for wild type and Alpha. The race was on, as mutations appeared faster than repeated boosters could catch. The spot would not go away no matter what he did. The darkest hours open with the appearance of Omicron in December of 2021, the fastest spreading but least virulent strain. He now had a new problem. With Omicron operating as a form of inoculation itself, there was less reason for vaccination than ever, especially given the risk of injury. And yet his goal of 90 percent coverage was nowhere in view, while population opposition to the entire Covidian regime was rising. Fauci might as well have thrown up his hands, admitted defeat, apologized for putting the country through the biggest trauma of our lifetimes, and ruining the lives of students everywhere, in addition to crushing the dreams of millions of small business owners. But that is not who he is. He would not and could not accept responsibility for doing this. He ended up demonizing the opposition, scrambling for cover, wrapping himself in ever more layers of fame for protection, and clinging to the lies he told himself as self-justification as his career and legacy were permanently tarnished beyond repair, even as he developed a severe and strange case of germaphobia in a Macbeth-like way. Two weeks before this tranche begins, Biden had gone on TV to declare the following: "We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they'll soon overwhelm. But there's good news:...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. I have been a doctor for over 40 years. I have cared for patients in their most critical moments, seen families face unexpected diagnoses, and made split-second decisions in intensive care where every second counted. I have witnessed both remarkable recoveries and painful losses. I have taught new doctors, published research, and worked on treatments to help people I might never meet. All this time, I thought I knew what it meant to be a physician. When Covid began, something shifted in me. It didn't happen all at once or because of one argument with an administrator or a policy. It was a slow realization that grew as I kept caring for sick people. For 715 days straight, I worked without a break, surrounded by very ill patients, tired nurses, worried families, and a disease we were all trying to figure out. I had never faced anything like it before, and I hope I never do again [1]. I always knew that medicine wasn't perfect. Any doctor with enough experience knows our field is full of uncertainty, differing opinions, and treatments that don't always work. I never stopped valuing scientific progress. I am still very grateful for antibiotics, modern surgery, intensive care, and all the discoveries that have turned deadly diseases into manageable ones. But something deeper changed. I started to notice how medicine could lose touch with the people it's supposed to help. I saw how hospital rules could become strict orders, how disagreeing with colleagues could be seen as disloyalty, and how patients could be reduced to numbers or risks instead of real people with their own stories and worries. What troubled me most was realizing these issues were around even before Covid. The pandemic didn't cause them; it revealed them. After seeing these problems clearly, I couldn't go back to practicing medicine the way I used to. I still loved being a doctor, maybe even more than before, but I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to listen better, be more honest in my explanations, ask more questions, and help patients understand enough to take part in their own care. For much of my professional life, I was what most people would consider a conventional academic physician. I trained in established institutions, joined scientific societies, published extensively, and taught generations of students and residents to value evidence-based medicine. I believed in clinical trials, scientific debate, peer review, and the accumulated wisdom of physicians who had come before me. I still believe in all those things. But I've realized that evidence-based medicine is not the same as authority-based medicine. This difference is important because scientific evidence keeps changing, while institutions sometimes act as if their decisions never need to change. A clinical guideline is just an interpretation of what we know at a certain time. It can be helpful, even life-saving, but it's not set in stone. Guidelines can't predict every patient or situation a doctor might face. They should help guide decisions, not make them for us. Before Covid, I understood these ideas in theory. During the pandemic, I realized how important they really are. I had gotten used to a system where rules, policies, insurance, and recommendations played an increasingly large role in how we made decisions. Some of these changes helped, but others just made it harder for doctors and patients to connect. I had learned how to work within that system. I knew when to follow the rules and when to trust my own judgment. But I didn't realize how easily that freedom could disappear, or how quickly doctors might be pressured to follow the system instead of thinking for themselves. During the pandemic, I spent many hours caring for very sick patients. While the public saw news of crowded hospitals, tired healthcare workers, and scary statistics, I saw real people. I saw patients fighting for breath, families seeking comfort, and people whose health co...

By Josh Guetzkow at Brownstone dot org. Note: this article is a highly condensed version of a chapter written for Fear and Loathing in the Pandemic: Propaganda and Misinformation during Covid-19, edited by Colin Alexander. Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid-19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity. Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational. The "critical turn" in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn's account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn's examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power. Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which "knowledge" reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests. One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result "epistemic corruption:" a knowledge system that "loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it," because it has been co-opted by interests at odds with its central goals. Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent. One lynchpin is "ghost management," in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front-stage "authors." This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility. Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific "advances" the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage. Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving-door employment. The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator's budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the ...

By Sharyl Attkisson at Brownstone dot org. A study falsely implied the Amish suffered more deaths because they eschewed public health guidance. But correcting the record proved nearly impossible. In 2021, I reported on my national television program, Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson that the largest Amish community in the US, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had rejected masking, vaccines, isolation, testing, and all the other CDC recommendations for Covid…and apparently fared none the worse for having done so. The story was of such high interest that even after it aired on TV, it racked up millions more views online. This attention to the Amish approach and its apparent success obviously didn't please public health officials and industry advocates who were heavily pushing different narratives. They wanted the public to believe that anyone who wasn't socially distancing, staying home, getting vaccinated, shutting down the works, and taking government-favored prescription drugs were putting themselves and others in grave danger. As the revelations about the Amish made international headlines, there appeared to be a propaganda-driven effort to make it seem as if the Amish actually suffered far worse than everyone else for having failed to follow CDC's advice. A study was published entitled: "Closed but Not Protected: Excess Deaths Among the Amish and Mennonites During the COVID-19 Pandemic." It appeared in the Journal of Religion and Health on June 11, 2021. But I noticed serious flaws with the study and decided to challenge it. Among the problems I saw: 1. For their study population, the researchers grouped together a sample of Mennonite and Amish—even though Mennonites typically followed CDC guidelines while the Amish did not. 2. They excluded the largest Amish population in the US in Lancaster, the one that was actually the subject of the news reports. 3. Their study headline was at odds with what their own data showed: even with their skewed sample, the Amish fared no worse than the rest of the US for not having shut down. After examining the study, I tried to get further information to determine if corrections were warranted. Among other things, I wanted to know: Who were the peer-reviewers who had signed off on a deeply flawed study? What did the actual study notes and data show about why the most obvious study sample population was excluded? What were some of the internal communications before and after publication? With scientific studies, all the data is supposed to be available for public review and replication for obvious reasons. Studies aren't considered scientifically valid without this kind of transparency. And, in many cases, we actually own the data because our tax money paid for the study—or some of it— or pays the salaries of some of the people involved. Keep in mind that a study is generally treated as scientifically valid only when it meets: reproducibility (others can obtain the same result from the same data and analysis) and replicability (a separate study with new data yields a consistent result) standards. Obviously, if study funders and authors keep their full data and analyses secret, the standards can't be applied. (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Reproducibility and Replicability in Science, 2019) Yet with the Amish study, as with other times I've pursued study information, the scientific establishment found a way to claim exemption from the common sense oversight guidelines. Instead of encouraging open examination, those involved in the study treated the details of their work as if they were proprietary secrets, closely held, and guarded like gold in Ft. Knox. Ultimately, I felt forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests in my effort to get the obviously public information. As usual, the entities holding the information stalled, played games, claimed they couldn't respond for various reasons, and exempted the most important information. The goal is clearly to try to ...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. Sure, I'm frustrated. After years of litigation, deep audits, and some extreme dedication by the vaccine-injured, we now are in possession of a 1,048-page book that details ghastly and widespread injury from shots people were forced to get. Many died. Many have lifelong suffering. Many have seen their lives, finances, and families shattered. These are not statistics on a preprint server awaiting the arduous process of slogging through anonymous peer-reviewers. This is not another model that conjures up possible scenarios. This is not some dry dashboard with probabilities and possibilities. These are the life stories of real people as reported to the CDC through its own vaccine-safety monitoring system called V-safe. These people were not anti-vaxxers; just the opposite. Many were thrilled to step up and do their part. Authorities said the potions were effective (they were not) and safe. Injuries were "very very rare" and far outweighed by the benefits, which is that you would not get and spread Covid, which was never true. It was a horrible lie. Tens of millions stepped up. Then came the migraines, screaming pitches in the ears, rashes on the back and neck, welts on legs, crippling pain in the arms, racing heart and volatile blood pressure, blindness in one eye then two, numbness in the face, often followed by a full body decay that no specialist could explain. The text of the system promised a callback. No one called back. Suffering people were left to languish alone, screaming into the void for help. None ever came. The CDC – on the receiving end of a tsunami of human suffering – tried to keep their stories quiet. They only released them once forced by a federal judge. There were groups on social media at the time where the injured and surviving populations could gather and speak. Social media companies censored the groups and removed them. The Biden White House called true stories of vaccine injury "malinformation" because they would increase hesitancy. They were forced to suffer alone, unable to walk to get groceries, bankrupted by medical bills, too blinded to see the TV, hearts racing at a pace that prevents sleep and causes months of deep sleep deprivation. Now, at last, these people – friends, neighbors, family members, fellow citizens – have been given voice. This book alone chronicles a scandal for the ages. A good society would have maximum focus on revealing the truth, finding the culprits, figuring out how and why they lied, and seeking justice so nothing like this would ever happen again. Remember that these shots were supposed to be the way out. Governments at all levels had tortured society for nearly a year with shutdowns, insane protocols, the destruction of millions of businesses, the denial of education to children, the stopping of travel, the banning of holiday celebrations, and cruel masking that could never stop a respiratory infection. After all this came the magic shots, made by companies that had been given a liability waiver for any harm done. Many resisted taking them. The government wasn't having it. The Biden administration forced every company with more than 100 employees to impose them on their workers, again, without liability. The courts had to intervene to block that but preserved the mandates on the military, government, and health-care workers. Five cities were segregated by vaccine status. In Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, and New Orleans, no one without proof of vaccination was allowed into a bar, restaurant, theater, or library. The churches were spared the mandate but many imposed segregation in any case. When the first round of shots failed – the virus mutated – the manufacturers released a booster. Then another. And another. With each round, the injuries grew and spread, and so did the death. Excess deaths rose following the shots that were supposed to save us from Covid. They did the opposite, taking down sports stars,...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org. Travelling to the US never fails to put me in touch with a part of American culture that I find particularly fascinating, but disturbing. Drugs. Drugs and more Drugs. I'm talking about the in-your-face, 24/7, marketing of the newest, most expensive pharmaceuticals on the planet. All in the name of health, of course. You might argue, but so what? Every other consumer product gets advertised in the US—almost everywhere, to everyone, perhaps except tobacco. And lots of those things are bad for you too, such as junk food, alcohol, and gambling. However, drugs are different, and I often find myself experiencing a kind of vertigo as I stare, enthralled, at all the incessant drug advertising from screens everywhere I look—in airports, hotel lounges, restaurants, or bars. The plotlines are predictable. A slick 60 seconds and we see the fate of worried people suffering some sort of condition "ask their doctor" about Drug X, and soon the new prescription is magically transforming their lives. They turn into bliss and smiles as they romp their way through meadows of wildflowers while, sotto voce, we catch strange murmurs of liver failure and premature death. I find myself absorbed in the ads as if they are cultural artifacts of a strange race. Most of the Americans I know seem to be pretty healthy people, but any newcomer confronting all the US screens for the first time might conclude one thing: "Man, these people must be really sick." They are sick, but not in the way of being physically sick. Sick as in showing all the adverse effects of living in a polluted information ecosystem where toxic levels of drug propaganda drift through the airwaves as freely as exhaust engulfs a freeway. Americans are so immersed in the smog of commercially-sponsored drug information that they might forget they used to live in a world where serious criticisms of drug industry products or behaviour were routinely reported on mainstream TV. Those halcyon days are over. The Land of the Free means drugmakers can, with near impunity, push their expensive products for Crohn's disease, Colitis, or psoriasis—serious obesity, schizophrenia, and major depression with the most outlandish of claims wrapped up in crafty but misleading narratives. Drugs get advertised, and the stuff between the ads (ie: the programming, the sitcoms, and the news) won't touch the subject with a ten-foot pole lest they upset the money chain. Meanwhile, everyone thinks this is normal? Wow. Not everyone. Earlier this summer, the consumer group US Public Citizen put out a petition urging the FDA to ban Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. They listed the usual reasons why DTCA is so toxic to consumers: Emotional manipulation, misleading benefit and risk information, inappropriate prescribing and overdiagnosis, the erosion of the patient-physician relationship, the promotion of low-value medications, and overall economic harm. Amen to all that. What it all adds up to is a polluted environment in which careful and appropriate pharmaceutical use doesn't happen. Americans are paying the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, yet also have the most profligate use of those drugs. The pollution of the airwaves by Pharma propaganda is precisely the reason every other country in the world (except tiny New Zealand) bans Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA). The rest of the civilized world looked at DTCA, recognized it as a predatory assault on public health, and banned it decades ago. Probably the biggest harm of DTCA is how it completely undermines the clinical firewall between doctors and patients. By bombarding television viewers with slick, emotion-heavy commercials, drug manufacturers bypass the doctor's intellect and go straight for the patient's anxiety. When a terrified or hopeful consumer marches into a clinic demanding a specific brand-name drug featured during halftime at a football game, the doctor-patient rela...

By Ed Dowd at Brownstone dot org. SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL Over the last several years I have been posting nonstop on X about the same nightmares we've been living through…the Covid psyop, the experimental mRNA shots, the mandates that destroyed lives, the injuries, the excess deaths, and the relentless propaganda machine that tried to silence anyone who noticed the bodies piling up. I have watched it all in real time: the fear porn, the goalpost moving, the "safe and effective" lies repeated like gospel while real-world data told a different story. Now we have fresh, documented revelations that should have blown the lid off of everything. Instead? Crickets from the media and, more disappointingly, from the current administration that promised accountability. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) dropped another devastating report and hearing in late April 2026: "Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals." Internal records show FDA officials knew their VAERS monitoring was inadequate to say least. They had better data-mining tools ready to flag clear safety signals: cardiac deaths, strokes, pulmonary issues, Bell's palsy but they chose not to use them. Why? To avoid "vaccine hesitancy." This was not screw-up territory. It was deliberate. Vaccine-injured people sat across from Peter Marks and other top FDA brass begging for acknowledgment. They got stonewalled. Johnson rightly calls this one of the biggest scandals in his decades in public service. Then in early June he held another hearing exposing potential cancer links to the mRNA shots and the systematic suppression of critical studies. Same playbook: inconvenient science gets buried or attacked. Around the same time, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of her final moves as DNI, declassified documents laying out Fauci's role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan, the lab-leak cover-up, the intelligence manipulation, and the retaliation against truth-tellers. Millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into risky biolabs, followed by the full narrative-control machine kicking in to blame nature instead of the obvious. These are not anonymous X threads. This is a sitting Senator with subpoena power and the former Director of National Intelligence dropping official records. So where is the firestorm? Where are the front-page exposés, the prime-time specials, the demands for real hearings and prosecutions? In 1976 the swine flu vaccine was pulled after 25 deaths and 500 cases of Guillain Barre Syndrome. In the Covid shot era we have approximately 39,000 deaths reported to VAERS following the shot. Apparently lives got cheaper over the last 50 years. The legacy media has mostly ignored it, downplayed it, or run the usual "right-wing conspiracy" dismissals. Paid to lie…and crickets on recent FDA Covid vax revelations. Their complicity is not an understatement; rather, it was essential to the entire psyop. Even more frustrating is the relative silence from the current Trump administration. After years of vowing to expose the lies and drain the swamp on the pandemic response, these revelations land and…not much follow-through. No aggressive push for accountability. No sustained public reckoning for the officials who covered up safety signals or manipulated the origins story. That silence hits hard. Additionally the vaccines are still on the market and this administration is now complicit. What an epic failure! A lot of us did not need Johnson's reports or Gabbard's declassifications to see the fraud. Back in 2022 and 2023, my team at Phinance Technologies was already digging into the data and uncovering the real narrative through our Humanity Projects. We analyzed excess deaths, disability surges, absence rates, and the human and economic costs of mass inoculations when almost no one else wanted to touch it. Check out the full body of work here: Humanity Projects What we found through cold, hard numbers lined up with what the bodies on the g...

By Chase Englund at Brownstone dot org. Pennsylvanians have already seen what expansive public-health authority can look like. During the Covid era, schools were closed, businesses were divided into "essential" and "nonessential," and major decisions affecting ordinary families were made through administrative orders with limited public input. In December 2021, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state's school masking order, holding that the Department of Health had exceeded the authority granted to it under existing law. The Court noted that if the Department wanted broader authority, it could amend its regulations. This summer, it tried. Buried inside an arcane 502-page rewrite of Pennsylvania's communicable-disease regulations was an amendment adding the words "prevention, containment or mitigation" to a section of the code that had been central to the masking dispute. The Department itself acknowledged that the 2021 court decision had "influenced" the proposed change. In plain English, the Department proposed to write broader disease-control authority into the regulations after the state Supreme Court said the old language did not provide it. That alone was enough to attract attention. This wasn't even the most controversial aspect of the proposal. The package would have more than doubled the list of conditions that doctors and laboratories must report, mandated additional prenatal testing, lowered the fever threshold for excluding children from school or child care, required vaccine doses to be entered into a government registry, and expanded public-health powers affecting homes, schools, and businesses. The rule was designed to implement by bureaucratic fiat the very same sort of oppressive Covid-style health measures that have been thoroughly debunked by available scientific evidence and have been overwhelmingly rejected by voters at the polls. Then came perhaps the most remarkable part. The Department's economic analysis estimated that the proposal would cost the private sector zero dollars. Not approximately zero. Not a small amount. Zero. Pennsylvania law requires agencies proposing regulations to estimate the costs imposed on those who must comply. Yet in multiple places the Department acknowledged that the proposal would require additional resources, increase absences, or cause families to miss work and school. Each time, the explanation was essentially the same: because the Department lacked sufficient data to quantify the cost, it would estimate no overall fiscal impact. That is not serious economic analysis, and alas, it is the type that agencies repeatedly produce when there is no one watching. Because few organizations have the economic data and expertise to dispute them, such improprieties are rarely challenged. Liberty requires constant vigilance, and the Pennsylvania Small Enterprise Foundation worked together with the Pennsylvania Family Institute to produce the analysis the Department said it could not. The results were astounding. Using the Department's own counts of doctors, laboratories, schools and child-care providers, along with public health data and federal wage statistics, we estimated that the proposal would impose over $100 million in annual costs. Most of that burden would not have fallen on hospitals or large corporations. It would have fallen on families. Lowering the fever threshold and expanding the circumstances under which children could be sent home from school or child care means more parents missing work. We estimated that lost wages from those absences alone could exceed $70 million annually. The Department did not count them. Asked whether it had considered any of the methods available under Pennsylvania law to reduce burdens on small businesses, the Department answered "not considered" five times. The Department said it "lacked data" on how many small businesses it regulated, even though the Census Bureau publishes such figures on an annual basis. This is exactly why...

By Meryl Nass at Brownstone dot org. What we've heard about so far today — and will continue to hear about — is not a collection of separate problems. It's all one problem: the deep state of the world is trying to consolidate the entire world into a one-world government and has developed many different mechanisms of control to achieve that end. A major part of that initiative is to cause all our institutions to fail us. What you've heard about the fundamental problems in education, healthcare, agriculture, government regulation, the news media, censorship, and propaganda is all part of that same agenda, in my view. And the idea of "Earth System Governance" has become an academic discipline, albeit hidden from most people. This agenda came out to the world around 1970 when the Club of Rome published its report, titled Limits to Growth. The first goal was to create the narrative that climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion posed an existential threat to humanity, in order to frighten the public into funding and complying with a new set of priorities. The second goal was to use international organizations like the UN and WHO to slowly siphon power from individual countries under the guise of environmental protection. The UN has over 30 agencies prepared to step in and impose regulations and taxation on international industries such as shipping, which is actually being done now. The UN even wants to create its own system of law. Other new multilateral organizations have also been formed to provide "governance" for the rest of us: At the same time, non-governmental authorities were established in the US to siphon power away from state, county, and local governments. One mechanism for doing this was through 'planning.' States passed laws requiring municipalities to create detailed, long-range plans for their towns. Because most towns did not have the expertise or personnel to do so, they frequently adopted boilerplate plans provided by state agencies or consultants that just happened to be congruent with policies desired by the deep state. Councils of Government (COGs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are a form of non-democratic authority that are taking over functions from duly elected state and local governments, funded by grants from state and federal governments. This project has been expanding in power and funding since the 1960s. It involves creating new organizations with appointed members for which there is no direct citizen oversight. Here is how these organizations describe themselves. Please read it. The European Union has used a similar strategy of gradually expanding its authority to obtain powers that previously belonged to the nation states. First, a reasonable environmental law gets passed. But over time, the reach of the initial law is expanded, to eventually encroach on property rights and cost citizens significantly more than was initially anticipated. Natura 2000 was based on the EU's 1979 Birds Directive to simply protect wild bird species. But over time it has required nations to designate minimum areas of biodiversity within their territory and protect and restore them, even though the lands may be privately owned. These protected lands now comprise 18% of total land area within the E.U. The goal is to expand that to 30% of total land by 2030, and to 50% eventually. In the 1990s pandemics and biological warfare were added to this agenda to provide additional important mechanisms, especially vaccinations, for the deep state's goals of centralizing power, controlling populations, and creating a technocratic governance system. I've been watching how the US government and the world have dealt with these issues for many years. For a long time, I wondered why influenza and biological warfare were so closely conjoined in funding and in how the government handled them — two things that seemed very different to me. I now understand that there has been an effort to dem...