By now, you have no doubt heard about the contaminated lettuce that is causing explosive diarrhea all across the country via Cycloporiasis. It has spawned memes about “the parasite” haunting the nation’s grocery stores, restaurants, and general food supply. Like clockwork, economist Emily Oster has taken to The New York Times to insist that yet another public health crisis is actually no big deal, and a scare invented by the fearmongering media:

It’s worth noting that FOX News and other reactionary blowhards at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic also used this same logic to downplay the threat. On the Substack blog Emily Oster calls herself the “CEO” of, Oster has compared media reporting on pediatric COVID-19, which has killed and disabled countless American children, to that of shark attacks. Her latest screed in The New York Times is employing this same tactic of downplaying the significance of any threat to the public’s health.

Why does Oster do this? As an economist who no real medical or scientific credentials, who is paid to write her opinion in the newspaper, Oster is far removed from the consequences of her words. One of the core tenets of modern American economics theory - following in the footsteps of vile racist Milton Friedman - is that government intervention and regulation, in any form, is stifling the economy and a grave trespass against freedom. This includes prohibiting the sale of unpasteurized (or “raw”) milk, which provides zero nutritional benefit and has put numerous children in the hospital, something Emily Oster has said we shouldn’t be concerned with - as exploitative scam artists call themselves “pioneers.”

These cyclospora outbreaks are caused by feces contamination and inhumane working conditions, and a lack of regulation enforcing sufficient sanitation. So no, you shouldn’t be surprised to see an economist influencer defending the conditions which has led to thousands of Americans nearly shitting themselves to death. How else will she get funding from wealthy corporate executives who are united in pursuing a dismantling of government regulations?

I have warned since the very beginning of this second Trump administration that eliminating federal regulatory authority in its entirety, and this would naturally result in compromising our food supply. Unfortunately, this process did not begin in January 2025, as a 2024 listeria outbreak which killed 10 Americans can be directly linked to meddling by the Biden Administration in the wake of a hands-off pandemic response which killed and disabled millions of Americans. From a September 2024 report by Alexander Tin of CBS News:

To be in compliance with food safety regulations, a company has to expense some percentage of their budget. In an economy focused on infinite, often unsustainable growth, eliminating all “unnecessary” expenses becomes a priority. If thousands of Americans have to nearly shit themselves to death, that’s a sacrifice they should be willing to make for the glorious economy. It’s worth noting that ancient pagan societies routinely practiced human sacrifice in the hopes that the Gods would deliver a good harvest.

What Oster is doing on behalf of her wealthy benefactors, including MAGA-aligned billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, is selling the public on accepting a higher threshold of sickness and death from future viral outbreaks caused by climate collapse, and a contaminated food supply caused by reckless deregulation. It also gives RFK Jr. cover from accepting any responsibility for what a major part of his job as the Secretary of Health and Human Services is. Modern American economics theory does not comprehend that one of the essential pillars of a strong economy is the American people knowing that spending their hard-earned dollars at the grocery store won’t poison their children. It haphazardly argues that this relentless pursuit of unsustainable short-term economic growth at all costs will trickle down into prosperity for all, even as America’s disparities grow worse year after year.

These aren’t wise economic insights, nor well-informed public health guidance. It’s the same unrepentant calmmongering rooted in a hands-off, do-nothing approach to public health that Emily Oster has championed for decades, being wrong on everything from Hepatitis B to HIV/AIDS to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome to COVID-19 to raw milk, and now an increasingly contaminated food supply. She has even gone so far as to argue that the precautionary principle of public health is oppressive to women in defense of drinking during pregnancy. As a wealthy and comfortable empty-headed pundit, there is no bottom that will be a line too far for Oster. Emily Oster is a complete fraud; a broken record who should be rambunctiously laughed out of the room whenever she opens her mouth. Shame upon The New York Times and every other media outlet that continues to platform her as a serious, legitimate voice.

Regardless of whatever tired, old Friedman era myths you’ve heard, the market is not going to magically regulate itself. It will justify selling poisoned food on the marketplace if it saves a few bucks, and everyday Americans need to simply shoulder the burden for the wealth and luxury of a few, no matter what form that comes in, even if happens to be explosive diarrhea.

You don’t need to be a bloodless quant to see how absurd this is.

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Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy was published in 2006 by Penguin Books.

Upon hearing the shocking news that RFK Jr., a supposed man of the people, is now reduced to goofing off on his phone on the taxpayer dime, I was reminded of a wonderful book on my to-read list that I needed to finish. Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy is an incredible work that should be required reading for every American. It dispels a number of post-war myths about the Nazi war machine and really puts into perspective just how doomed the Third Reich was from the very beginning.

There’s an incredible number of parallels between Adam Tooze’s history of Hitler’s failed quest to turn Eastern Europe into Germany’s version of Manifest Destiny and the HHS Secretary’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda; another foolish attempt to reshape the world. Both are stalwart believers that the federal government exists to turn public taxpayer dollars into private profits:

You can see similar parallels with the MAHA promise to crush “wokeness” and “DEI” across the board, with the full backing of the state. Vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez has identified the MAHA agenda is little more than a federal handout to anti-vaccine scam artists, wellness grifters, and other crackpots. More importantly, Hitler’s project had support similar to the many “MAHA” doctors like Joseph Marine or Vinay Prasad. One study has found that doctors were first in line to join the Nazi Party:

Most important of all is that both RFK Jr. and the Nazi leadership are notorious, exploitative scam artists. The fact that the Volkswagon automobile brand is still allowed to operate today should be a personal affront to every decent human being:

Not a single American will be made healthier by RFK Jr., either.

Lots of Planes

A great deal of Nazi economic policy came down to making up a bunch of fake numbers and hoping nobody looks too deeply into them, something that both Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and acting CDC/NIH Director “Lockdown” Jay Bhattacharya commit frequently. This is not a wise strategy when you are attempting to conquer all of Europe, or simply hold a serious grown-up job in the federal government:

The truth is that Hitler’s Germany never possessed the industrial capacity to truly conquer Europe, especially caught between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. No matter how long the war was stretched out, the project was doomed to fail from the very beginning. Nobody wanted to lose their spot in Hitler’s cool kids’ club, however, and the absurd fantasies continued:

This vision thankfully never came to pass. The harsh reality is that Hitler, much like RFK Jr., had no clue what he is doing:

Neither RFK Jr. or Jay Bhattacharya or any MAHA sycophant has ever had a coherent view of COVID-19 or other public health matters. They simply wanted to destroy others, all while portraying themselves as the real victim of some sort of grand international conspiracy, be it Jewish or otherwise.

RFK Jr. never had a coherent plan to “Make America Healthy Again,” either. Instead, he engaged in numerous obnoxious social media stunts, which included publishing an edited photo of himself wearing the face tattoo of a convinced rapist. This improved zero Americans’ health.

Hitler also had another problem; a sort of Eldritch horror looming on the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean: the oversized disembodied head of President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, who wielded the power of the state to manufacture an unhealthy number of warplanes for himself and all his friends:

Hitler’s Luftwaffe was producing around 10,000 planes per year at their peak, and simply getting shot down faster than they could be replaced. They also faced a severe shortage of fresh recruits, the same recruitment crisis the United States military is now facing while RFK Jr. is obsessing over the sperm of young boys:

Luckily, those young warriors would have the air cover provided by the amazing engineering feats of the Luftwaffe, such as...

One could reasonably predict that RFK Jr.’s peptides obsession and Pete Hesgeth pumping the troops full of hormones will likely end the very same way.

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Flaming Out for Christmas

Well, that’s okay, even if top Luftwaffe brass are shooting themselves after horrifying defeat after defeat. Because we’ve got the next best thing: horseys!

Somehow, winter jackets did not make the inventory list:

Obviously, it’s their own darn fault for all that feminizing woke soy in their diet! Regardless, it’s important to compare the insistence of MAHA figureheads like Mehmet Oz who insist you have a civic duty to be healthy for the economy’s sake, with the inherent contradictions of the reactionary Reich:

From the domestic terror campaign carried out by ICE, to the work requirements for food stamps, it’s blatantly clear that the MAHA Agenda has been caught up in these same inherent contradictions. A drug-addled, half-dying Hitler insisted that this cruelty would inevitably pay off massive dividends for private industry:

Well, that didn’t quite happen now, did it? However, this is the same “Golden Era” promised by Trump and RFK Jr. - that by crushing the “degenerates” America’s economy will finally be “great again.” Just as Hitler was forced to retreat to the dank shadows of his bunkers, RFK Jr. is now hiding in his smartphone, totally cuckolded by the reality that no, you can’t turn America into a vaccine-free petri dish for pestilence overnight. But hey, he got the woke food DEI out of ice cream and the fries are drowning in beef tallow again!

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The MAHA Legacy

RFK Jr. seriously thought he could walk into the office of HHS Secretary and with no real pushback destroy the pediatric vaccine schedule, guaranteeing that many more American children die of vaccine-preventable causes. That all of America would march in lockstep in service of his narcissistic vision with the full authority of the Trump Administration behind him, is a complete farce and further goes to show how little in touch he is with reality.

Tragically, just like Hitler, RFK Jr. will ultimately be responsible for millions of deaths by the end of his term in office. That responsibility is shared by everyone past and present who enthusiastically went to work under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - which includes University of California San Francisco Professor Vinay Prasad, who is now back on Sensible Medicine attacking anti-depressants, in alignment with the HHS Secretary’s agenda to “Make America Healthy Again” by taking away lifesaving medication.

Both Hitler and RFK Jr. believe in the elimination of “inferiors,” and any enthusiastic participant in the MAHA scam should be forced to wear a permanent mark of shame for the rest of their pitiful, pathetic lives. As it turns out, the anti-vaccine crackpots are right - America is going to need its own Nuremberg trials.

Except it’ll have to be for their “heroes.”

Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy was published in 2006 by Penguin Books.

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Perhaps if you’re some sort of freakin’ commie or terrorist or illegal, you might have missed the news this past weekend that freedom-loving America got her big, beautiful taint locked down on her freakin’ birthday! That’s right! Me and all the pestilence sycophants were hootin’ and hollerin’ to offer up virgin sacrifices for the economy on the National Mall last Saturday night only for the Administration which employs the heroic freedom fighter Lockdown Jay to crash the party due to “inclement weather?!” What are we, a nation of wimpy weenies who love to suffer under tyranny?

If you’ll recall, Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya’s claim to fame was to insist that any sort of government intervention on behalf of the public’s health is a “lockdown” and a violent infringement upon civic liberty!

Whatever happened to “Protect the Vulnerable,” Lockdown Jay? Why are you suddenly silent about this latest grave government assault on personal liberty?! Or was it all just bold talk from a coward hiding behind a keyboard?! Or did you secretly foster a kink for ruining children’s essential experiences just like all the “Covidians” you once raged against?! Tell the American taxpayer the truth!

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Sure, we fired all of the weather scientists who could have predicted such a calamity might happen, based upon random accusations of “woke” and “DEI,” and yes, we put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency someone who gets off on destroying the environment, but how dare you suggest that there are negative consequences for our poor choices?! That’s not what freedom means! Freedom means getting to choose if I die in a raging storm as a result of my willful stupidity, abandoning my wife and children to prove just how manly I am!

My kids choking down the smog and developing lung cancer are proud to sacrifice and pay the price for freedom with their lives!

Was “No More Lockdowns” just a joke, Mr. CDC/NIH Director? Or was it all just a ruse for your real agenda, MALA Man?! Yeah, that’s right! Make America Lockdown Again! That’s what this was all about! Everybody suddenly wanted to hear what this useless health economist had to say in 2020, and now, nobody could care less for your impotent prattling! So now you gotta get big bad Trump to ruin the Fourth of July just so we’re all stuck at home reading yet another one of your useless opinion editorials about what an amazing job you’re doing!

To Make America Great Again, to build the greatest economy mankind has ever seen, we have to smoke up so many dinosaur bones that children start coughing up a storm when they play outside again, damnit! And that means more pandemics like COVID-19! It means more chaotic weather events! We’re gonna have to learn to live, and yes die, with new viruses and more chaotic weather events so that we don’t lose the next Cold War to Lockdown China!

So Lockdown Jay needs to stop hiding behind the podcast microphone and get out there and start speaking to the masses in hurricane force winds!

I thought the whole point of Making America Healthy Again, and obsessing over the sperm of young boys, was so that we could have a big beautiful nation of strong young white men who can handle a few pesky raindrops! Or are these big mouthed ranters nothing more than a bunch of economic girly-men?! Now the whole world is laughing at our cowardice!

Read your Twitter profile photo, Jay Bhattacharya, and practice what you preach: Resign and Condemn the Trump Administration’s July 4th Lockdown now! It’s not like your best buddy Scott Atlas isn’t already calling for the NIH to be abolished and have you fired, or anything! Man up and face the lightning!

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I woke up this morning with bizarre gaps in my memory, and upon consulting one of my concealed off-site cold backups, discovered mountains of writing that suggests the Food & Drug Administration used to employ three individuals by the name of Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, and Tracy Beth Hoeg. Known for spreading dangerous anti-vaccine, pro-pestilence propaganda on behalf of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. My writing then suggests that they would later be employed by the Health and Human Services Secretary, whose meat sack is theorized to be under the control of an off-world extra-intelligent parasite. All three of them were recently ousted or fired from the Food & Drug Administration in recent months.

The Food & Drug Administration has since taken a number of actions to essentially erase any trace of evidence suggesting that these three ever worked at the Food & Drug Administration. Headlines include:

• “Former FDA Cancer Drug Chief Under Consideration to Return”

• “FDA Gives Third Rare-Disease Drug Another Shot, Regenxbio Says”

• “A Dose of Good News at the FDA: The agency gives a Huntington’s disease treatment a new look.”

• “FDA advisory panel endorses Moderna mRNA flu vaccine that was subject of controversy”

• “Memo details Høeg’s role in blocking Tzield approval: Former Acting CDER director overruled career scientists, failed to document evidence supporting her decisions”

• “Truly evil” FDA rejection of gene therapy overturned after Trump official ousted”

Marty Makary has since gone silent after approving flavored nicotine vapes in the misguided hope that this will win over young voters to the Republican Party. Tracy Beth Hoeg, who was already an untrustworthy, morally depraved, and disingenous raving freak prior to joining the Trump Administration, has since been trawling the gutters of conspiracy theorists on social media, insisting that she and her cohorts were the victim of an organized conspiracy by Big Pharma. This is supposed to somehow explain her actions at the Food & Drug Administration, including posing with a huge smile on her face alongside someone exploiting their child’s death to become an anti-vaccine celebrity in the federal agency’s lobby.

Last but not least we have Vinay Prasad, who upon having posted his way into power to become the Food and Drug Administration Center for Biologics Evaluation and Review (CBER) Director, immediately began acting like a petty, erratic tyrant. This led to countless headlines and culminated in Prasad writing an intentionally leaked memo claiming that the COVID-19 vaccines have killed a number of children; an utterly false claim.

Strangely enough, Vinay Prasad is both back at the University of California San Francisco as if this isn’t a very grave act of serious misconduct - a blatant handout to his favorite anti-vaccine scam artists - but he has also returned to Twitter, Youtube, and Substack as if nothing happened and he has learned absolutely nothing. That’s right, Prasad is back to doing the only thing he knows how to do: Attack vaccines and public health in its entirety.

Having made a fool of himself on the national stage, and destroying whatever reputation he might have had amongst credible medical professionals, Prasad is back in his safe space selling quackery from behind seemingly legitimate credentials. After his grave misconduct at the FDA falsely claiming the COVID-19 vaccine killed children, he should be permanently exiled from science and medicine forever.

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Back to the Fake Lab

Vinay Prasad and his ilk are literally incapable to do anything but tear others down, which is precisely why whatever seemingly legitimate criticisms they might make can be casually discarded without a second thought. As regular PAI-heads might recall, Makary, Prasad, and Hoeg were all in the pocket of ex-Enron crook & libertarian billionaire John Arnold. This included funding a vanity “laboratory” in Vinay Prasad’s name: VKPrasadLab.

Now, this lab often produced opinion editorials dressed up as scientific research to attack everything COVID-19 related. Just prior to joining the Trump Administration, Tracy Beth Hoeg and Vinay Prasad wrote one attacking hospital visitation restrictions from the dark days of 2020. Because if you’re dying on a ventilator in an overwhelmed ICU, the first thing you want to be doing is infecting your loved ones so they can die in the hallway of the same disease killing you! Titled: “Lessons from COVID-19 patient visitation restrictions: six considerations to help develop ethical patient visitor policies,” they squeal:

Ah yes, and as we all know, there’s nothing harmful about spreading a virus to a loved one that results in their death. It certainly doesn’t have negative impacts at all! I will skip to the end of this trash and lo and behold, it’s another demand for impossible and unethical randomized control trials - which means we should just let people die horribly from noscomial COVID-19 infections:

This should make it blatantly obvious that Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Hoeg have never treated COVID-19 patients, and instead exploited the pandemic to build a paying social media following.

They’ve also argued that the term “Long COVID” should be abolished entirely - Vinay Prasad has shared sentiments that those suffering are merely “lying fake disease grifters on social media.” This is a tired revival of old “hysteria” garbage that did nothing but harm and exploit vulnerable patients, disproportionately women. These are not scientific research papers, they are garbage opinion editorials from people with zero relevant credentials or expertise on the matters they’re opining on.

The “VK Prasad Lab” is a propaganda hub, not a scientific laboratory. It’s a stain upon the reputation and credibility of the University of California San Francisco that they still associate with these exploitative and cruel frauds. He should be dismissed and forgotten, preferably ranting out of a cardboard box under a freeway overpass for the rest of his days - and completely forgotten.

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There is a funny thing that happens whenever a reactionary takes an obscenely fascist action, in which liberals will put their hands on their hips and squeal: “What are we, a bunch of stinkin’ commies?!” This is indicative of a grave historical & political illiteracy crisis in America and is exhausting to read when talking about RFK Jr. & the ongoing war on American science & medicine. It also makes the fascist overjoyed: it shows just how easily the liberal mindset can be controlled & manipulated, and the past quarter century has shown how readily liberals will accept the expansion of the state’s capacity to engage in authoritarian measures. From mass surveillance to remote murder, the 2000s is the era of America’s turnkey tyranny.

You will often hear the term “Lysenkoism” when describing Trump and RFK Jr.’s war against American science, but this isn’t quite right. As scientifically minded people, we should strive to use only the most accurate terms. Here is one recent unattributed Bluesky post which illustrates the problem:

“Lysenkoism of the ‘40s caused devastating famines, 15-25 million deaths, lost scientific advancement & brain drain. What an expensive mistake.”

Certainly, absolutely nothing else was happening in the Soviet Union around the 1940s which might have been the root cause of famine. But I digress. The MAHA crusade isn’t merely a “mistake,” but a reactionary campaign with specific goals, much like a certain other campaign being carried out the 1940s.

The Soviet crackpot Lysenko, and his denial of germ theory with regards to managing crop growth, undoubtedly caused serious hardship for the Soviet Union. This is not up for debate, and I am not defending Lysenko or Stalin. However, statements such as the one quoted above are often repeated, and worth interrogating to see if they withstand scrutiny. To quote Chairman Mao:

Flaws in Attribution Calculation

A common meme in American political discourse is to claim that the ideology of communism has claimed 100 million victims globally. There even is or was a sign in the putrid heart of consumer crapitalism, Times Square, which states this. One might dare ask just how does one attribute a death to a specific political or economic ideology. If the same people who made such a claim found that capitalism was responsible for more deaths, would they erect a “Victims of Capitalism” memorial? This would naturally include the brutal famines inflicted by the British Empire, the genocide of Native Americans by the United States, the napalm bombings of Korea and Vietnam, on top of countless other for-profit atrocities.

This “100 million victims” figure comes from a long-debunked Black Book of Communism which proclaims that Nazis and their collaborators, who sought to eradicate the Jewish & Slavic peoples of Europe with a fantasy of the “American Frontier” in their eyes, are somehow “victims” of communism. A pretty great advertisement for Communism: “Only communism can convert fascists…into victims.” This “black book” number also blames communism for the deaths of countless imaginary people that were never ever born; a ridiculous proposition.

When you hear claims of massive numbers attributing so-and-so to tens of millions of deaths, such as claims that the COVID-19 vaccine has killed 17+ million Americans or a dozen children, it’s worth interrogating just how those figures are constructed. Like it or not, but the American public is one of the most propagandized & willfully ignorant nations in the world. We love making up fake statistics & absurd stereotype about other parts & peoples of the world that simply don’t hold water.

If we are to be scientifically minded people rallying against reactionary quackery, then we must apply higher standards to ourselves.

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A Minor Skirmish of the 1940s

The “skeet” quoted above implies that nothing else going on during the 1940s might have been the root cause of the famines the Soviet Union faced. Would you consider it an indictment of capitalism if we calculated the countless deaths attributable to the miasma theory which dominated 1800s Europe? In reviewing Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, he argues that many leading doctors and scientists were naturally driven to embrace the pseudoscience of miasma theory due to the overwhelming stench brought on by the Industrial Revolution. One could argue that the gene theory denial of Lysenkoism could also be linked to the trauma of the Second World War: the untold loss of life combined with an apocalyptic devastation of infrastructure and countryside caused by an enemy who believed in their genetic superiority certainly made bringing in the harvest quite difficult.

The Soviet Union never had an easy go of things: from The Great War to a pandemic to a brutal revolution, the fact that the Soviet Union could even begin to mount an effective defense - against not just Hitler’s Germany, but Imperial Japan - is quite an achievement on its own. The Second World War was an apocalyptic event that took the lives of countless millions, and for the people of the Soviet Union, was a fight for their very survival. Even literal witches got involved:

It’s not absurd to suggest that a peoples subjected to such unspeakable horrors might be primed to embrace gene theory denial, however wrong it might be. In shallow liberal criticisms of communist history, they often handwave away what came before, just as HHS Secretary RFK Jr. has washed his hands of responsibility for the recent explosion of measles. Criticisms of China’s revolution for example, will make no mention of a long history of hardship that left behind a great deal of obstacles: the Opium Wars, Taiping Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, late Qing dynasty decline, warlord era, the invasion of Imperial Japan, a Second World War, and the Chinese Civil War all back-to-back can make founding a government quite difficult!

China is now one of the most dominating influences upon the world while we are undergoing The Century of American Humiliation.

To better describe the pseudoscientific regime of Trump, RFK Jr., and the larger anti-vaccine war on science, we must turn away from mid-20th century Moscow, and instead shift our gaze west towards a bunker in the woods to find the crackpot giving one charismatic German dictator nearly 30 pills a day:

Theo Morell.

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Defining Morellism: A Condensed History

Theo Morell was a major quack of his time, as detailed by Norman Ohler in his excellent book Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Just like RFK Jr., Morell was also reported to be a serial liar who could not stop running his mouth. Couped up in a cramped and stuffy bunker as the one civilian amongst Hitler’s inner circle, Morell was not having a fun time whilst the Third Reich’s conquest of Russia failed.

The key to the Third Reich’s early success was not superior technology, tactics, or fighting spirit, but instead luck and a lot of Pervitin, a form of...you guessed it! Meth. If your army doesn’t need to sleep for three day, you sure can quickly cover quite a lot of ground! This inevitably led to widespread addiction, which the Wehrmacht was forced turned a blind eye to as a result of massive casualties caused by the arrogance of their leaders. An early 1941 attempt to conquer Moscow resulted in tens of 1000s of Wehrmacht casualties due to a lack of winter coats & reliance upon horse & wagon.

Morell’s preferred treatment to breathe life back into an overstressed Hitler shitting himself to death was an absurd concoction Theo designed himself: combining the muscle, adrenal cortex, liver, and pancreas of pigs and other farm animals, this somehow restored the Fuhrer’s health when combined with opioids. (RFK Jr. is presently on a carnivore diet, supplemented by sauerkraut he makes his wife carry in her Chanel handbag) Not at all the idea of a hypermasculine strongman the world was led to believe. Other medications Theo Morell would prescribe his genocidal patient included: a veterinary stimulant, a body-building supplement that was the by-product of uterine blood, a derivative of bulls’ testicles to treat depression, and another supplement made from the prostates of young bulls.

Are you starting to see why “Morellism” is a more appropriate term to describe RFK Jr. and MAHA?

As the state of Hitler’s war effort grew ever more dire, locking himself away in the cramped shadows like an incel, the Fuhrer began to require so many injections that Morell had to place a special order to Berlin for extra needles. The heroic Red Army turning the tide of the war at Stalingrad led to Hitler developing serious heart problems. If only Karl Marx could have lived to see his most devoted workers literally bring a genocidal monster to his knees.

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Morrell and MAHA’s Exploitative Profiteering

While his most important patient was rapidly declining, Morell was busy making himself filthy rich through his connections in the Third Reich. From “Vitamultin” to vitamin & hormone supplements, Theo Morrell was raking in the big bucks. He even took it upon himself to found the world’s first “organotherapeutical factory,” turning all sorts of animal blood, glands, livers, stomachs, spinal cords, testicles, prostates, ovaries, bladders, lungs, and hearts into profitable supplements. Animal livers especially were of great importance to Morrell, believing they raised energy levels, strengthened the immune system, and other absurd nonsense.

Vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez has said that “MAHA” is little more than a federal handout to wellness influencers and scam artists taking advantage of the American public, and Theo Morrell’s financial empire is the blueprint. Even when new medications were banned from being introduced to the market in 1943, Theo Morell exploited his government connections to attain a special exemption. Sadly, he could not find an elixir of youth to reverse the progression of his favorite patient’s condition: losing a World War that he himself started.

After being humiliated at Stalingrad and the Red Army reversing the progression of the war, Hitler’s condition worsens further. Unable to keep food down, Theo Morell begins prescribing his patient the highly addictive Oxycodon, which is synthesized from opium. Juiced to the gills, Hitler was now able to meet with Axis leaders and convince them that victory was near, browbeating them into submission. Suddenly, that anti-drug PSA with the egg & the frying pan makes a lot more sense:

While Hitler’s hopeless crusade continued to rage, Morell multiplied his financial gains by becoming an opium producer. Hitler would quickly become dependent on the needle just to get through rare public appearances. Meth soon became a requirement for those meeting with the drug-addled Fuhrer. Much of the Reich’s leadership became dependent upon cocaine and heroin.

This is the proud “ubermensch” tradition that America’s Health and Human Services Secretary, who has openly admitted to snorting cocaine off of toilet seats and being hooked on heroin, is following in the footsteps of.

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From Übermensch Valhalla to Addict Row

On the historic day that young heroes from America, Canada, and Great Britain stormed the beaches of Normandy, Hitler could be found raving over lunch about how the strongest animals in the world, elephants, abhorred eating meat just as he did. Morell would later inject him with another concoction extracted from animal guts. In the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt, a second doctor would begin administering a “Jewish degeneration drug” to the Fuhrer: cocaine.

Morell, much like the quacks that uphold the tenets of MAHA, was constantly on the defense from skeptics or physicians who actually knew what they were doing. Many became suspicious of his “treatments” and wondered if perhaps Hitler was being taken advantage of, or even poisoned. They would be quickly dismissed, with Morell enjoying his safe space as Hitler’s most trusted dealer.

Both Theo Morrell and the MAHA leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services have fought to circumvent transparency, becoming aggressively defensive at the drop of a hat. Most recently, NIH/CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya squealed “I’m in a political position and you’re not!” at a senior NIH staffer. These childish antics are not the actions of serious medical or scientific professionals.

As Hitler’s World War grew more dire towards the end of 1944, the constant injections grew less and less effective. Years of abusing concoctions derived from animal organs ruined his body’s ability to produce dopamine, and the harder stuff wrecked regular organ function entirely. Outside his fortified bunker, Hitler’s “Master Race” became hooked on meth to cope with the constant humiliation.

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One Last Hit

The problem with having a serious drug addiction whilst leading a nation being invaded on all sides is that it starts to become quite difficult “get your fix.” People start “tweaking.” People start coming up with some really bad ideas, especially in the wake of a traumatic event like being on the losing end of D-Day.

Many are familiar with the dramatic images of the landing boats crashing into the Normandy beachhead, under fire from “Hitler’s Typewriter.” Few recall the Nazis’ “genius” response to this. Strapping a bunch of Hitler Youth kids into tiny 2-man submarines and pumping them full of a mix of cocaine, meth, and opioids so they couldn’t sleep for four days, the plan was to disrupt the Allied supply lines with a horde of these tiny submariners. Forced to defecate in used ration tins, many would drown in their own filth after being shot to pieces by Allied air patrols.

Hitler would become hooked on meth before the start of the final year of his life and the Second World War, alongside his regular regiment of injections derived from parasite-afflicted livers; which would see you imprisoned if you administered such a treatment today. New Year’s Day 1945 would see the feared Luftwaffe, also abusing meth, be soundly humiliated for the final time by not only Allied pilots, but their own anti-aircraft guns - possibly also due to meth abuse. Meanwhile, the factories producing all of these amazing drugs for Hitler and his “Master Race” are being bombed into oblivion.

The command bunker at the heart of a besieged Berlin soon found its drug supply quickly drying up. Hitler starts getting pissy with his dealer, who can no longer provide a quick fix for what ails him. Forced to go cold turkey as a consequence of the World War that he started, Hitler became a pathetic, erratic wreck. Like a fable of ancient myth, sugar was all this supposed titan amongst “lesser races” had left to feel anything.

After running out of meth, Germany’s most powerful drug dealer was quickly fired and ejected from the Fuhrer Funhaus. Theo Morell would attempt to salvage his supplements empire, or what little of it was left in a wartorn hellscape now occupied by multiple superpowers - even going so far to beg for an extension on filing his taxes. He wound up captured & interrogated by the Americans for two straight years.

Over 100,000 Nazis followed their leader.

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The Morrell Revivalism of MAHA

In our modern times, the drug addict turned HHS Secretary RFK Jr. obsesses over young men being healthy to fight in the military; but against whom? America’s long history of violent foreign expeditions after defeating Hitler has resulted in countless humiliations and a mountain of atrocities; estimated to have killed between 20-30 million across 37 nations. RFK Jr.’s heroic fantasy of commanding a legion of healthy young Übermensch will never be realized, ending just the same as Hitler’s.

The reason “Lysenkoism” is the term liberals use to describe the MAHA ideology over the much more accurate “Morellism,” especially when it comes to medical quackery and profiteering, is because we don’t want to take a hard look in the mirror as a nation and admit that we have a great deal in common Hitler’s Germany, and we didn’t get here overnight. Treating the world as a murder playground, slaughtering innocent people on a massive scale, harboring delusional fantasies of masculine superiority over supposed inferiors. This is not the hallmark of a healthy culture.

Much like Hitler’s Germany, we are destroying ourselves in an impossible and unsustainable crusade of explosive dominance whilst our own state of affairs grows progressively worse. By shouting “Lysenkoism!” and making lazy, inaccurate comparisons to communist regimes, we can - much like a drugged-up Fuhrer - unplug from the reality we’ve made for ourselves. A politics of liberal austerity and snarky retorts, as championed by the Democrats’ 2028 favorite Gavin Newsom, will not be enough to repair the damage done and turn the ship around. Going down that path ends with the streets of Manhattan looking like Dresden, 1945.

We must hold ourselves to a higher standard.

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I have found myself in rare disagreement with my friend and fellow COVID Commentator Dr. Jonathan Howard of Science Based Medicine. He suggests in a recent article that the Great Barrington Declaration’s fantasy of which the American public got their marching orders and hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans embraced the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a patriotic smile was impossible, because people would have still chosen to avoid the virus. This is similar to an argument that I myself have made in a previous article and am rebuking upon further study. Jonathan writes in the excellent “The COVID Amnesia Project: Erasing Your Free Will to Preserve the Fantasy of the Optional Pandemic”:

Unfortunately, I now have to disagree. The premise of the Great Barrington Declaration relied upon stripping people of any choice to try and avoid a SARS infection. In the laisses-faire dystopia of the United States, most Americans are required to work a job in order to earn a wage so they may afford the basic necessities of survival. In the GBD’s proposed fantasy of a 2020 where they were in charge, there would be no pandemic relief: No stimulus, no unemployment, no remote schooling, no eviction moratorium. Just “three to six months” of the virus.

The general public would not be allowed to say no to COVID-19, under threat of utility shutoffs, starvation, eviction, and homelessness.

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A Human Sacrifice to the Economic Gods

You have to remember that the prelude to the Great Barrington Declaration was in early 2020 when a British crackpot, Toby “The Era of Vaccines is Over” Rogers, demanded that hundreds of thousands of Brits die of COVID-19 as quickly as possible in order to rapidly end the pandemic. In April 2020, Martin Kulldorff was squealing in Spiked Online that “anti-herders,” those protecting themselves from infection, were just as selfish and dangerous as anti-vaxxers. Working with the Koch-funded think-tank AIER to fine-tune their messaging, the Great Barrington Declaration served as capital’s demand that government use their authority, backed by a monopoly on violence, to force the virus upon the public.

Prior to a vaccine ever being available, an infection with the new SARS-CoV-2 virus that was overwhelming hospitals and killing so many Americans in rapid fashion in early 2020 would become an innate requirement of earning a wage or getting an education. Employers and school administrators would be empowered and encouraged to bar workers, teachers, and students from masking, and even demand them to show up to work sick. Everyday Americans would be forced bring the virus home to their family, or their child would bring the virus home from school. If one became disabled by Long COVID and was now too sick to work, they would be fired and immediately replaced. With no way to earn a wage, and no welfare benefits, you would soon fall into poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair.

As a part of “normal life” during these times, people who needed hospital care because of car accidents, heart attacks, etc. would die, as a result of hospitals being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Mass graves dug by prisoners, and overwhelmed morgues would become an everyday fixture of American life. While all of this chaos unfolded, officials would - just like Hamburg’s Chief Medical Officer during a deadly 1893 outbreak of cholera which killed thousands - insist there is simply nothing that can be done to prevent COVID-19 deaths, or worse yet, suggest that it’s the dead’s own fault for not being “metabolically healthy.” Government officials would fabricate statistics, and mercenary academics would misrepresent them to mislead the public that everything was actually going just fine.

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The Dictatorship of the Workplace

The reason much of this would happen if the GBD authors got their way in 2020, is because it did happen, except it was under the Biden Administration. When teachers and students in Chicago walked out in protest over the dire state of COVID-19 in schools, Ashish Jha branded them as “irrational” on a podcast with Emily Oster before joining the Biden Administration. One single Black mother in Chicago, who tried to isolate her and her son from the virus until the authorities got involved, died soon after because her son brought SARS-CoV-2 home from school. Hundreds of thousands of children have played a role in the death of a primary caregiver after bringing COVID-19 home from class.

Rochelle Walensky’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced the COVID-19 isolation guidelines from 10 days to 5 in response to a letter from the CEO of Delta Airlines in December 2021, further empowering employers to force infectious workers back to the workplace to spread SARS-CoV-2 around their community, before later reducing it to zero days. In March 2022, when the CDC rolled out its new “Community Levels” guidance system that artificially raised the threshold for the CDC to even recommend masking, based upon hospital bed capacity, employers were further empowered to bar their workers from masking. As one anecdotal example from earlier in the pandemic, a grocery worker was forced by his boss to downgrade from an N95 respirator to an inadequate patterned cloth mask, out of some misguided fear that the mere sight of an N95 would somehow scare customers off. I have heard from multiple people with qualified, excellent resumes being turned down for jobs because they still wear a respirator: that taking COVID-19 precautions essentially renders you unemployable.

Workers who became too disabled by Long COVID to work were quickly fired from their jobs, and there is no welfare or benefits to support them - with still no treatment or cure, contrary to a Boston Globe article that Final COVID Czar Ashish Jha wrote soon after leaving the White House, telling Americans to “forget” COVID-19 and “live with the virus.” There are multiple tragedies of people disabled by SARS-CoV-2 having taken their own lives which are too quickly forgotten as part of the COVID-19 Amnesia Project. They often had no choice after our society forced the virus upon them and then stripped them of access to the basic essentials for survival.

To top it all off, in 2023 the California Supreme Court at the behest of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ruled in the case of Kuciemba vs. Victory Woodworks, when a woman was hospitalized and nearly died on a ventilator in 2020 because her husband’s employer violated California’s public health orders at the time. The court ruled that even though the plaintiff’s claim was correct and tangible harm was done, they decided to take this opportunity to legislate from the bench and throw their case out, fearing some hypothetical doomsday scenario in which a flood of lawsuits destroyed the American economy. The precedent had been established that your employer has no liability should you or a loved one be killed or disabled by a viral outbreak caused in an unsafe workplace.

The Biden Administration, having specifically promised OSHA workplace safety guidelines for COVID in their 2020 campaign that never materialized, said nothing. Workers were brutally crushed, time and time again, while Biden paraded as some sort of hero. He himself claimed that he “ended the pandemic,” even bragging about forcing American workers through “wave after wave of COVID” that killed and disabled many.

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Just What Did This Achieve?

The Great Barrington Declaration authors cheered when tens of millions of American children, many of them unvaccinated, became very sick, hospitalized, disabled, and even died of COVID-19. The American Institute for Economic Research and their billionaire masters got what they wanted from the Biden Administration, and what did the Democrat Party get in return?

They did everything in their power to make it 2019 again: Nobody’s wearing masks anymore, and Donald Trump’s the President again. Mission Accomplished!

Having done their job, the Democrats were quickly cast aside into a shallow ditch and rendered irrelevant, making pathetic displays of impotency and cowardice. Not a single Democrat pointed out Jay Bhattacharya’s many errors regarding COVID-19 during his confirmation hearing for NIH Director, to the celebration of rabid anti-vaccine cranks on Twitter, squealing “we’re winning!” Now many have vocally subscribed to the COVID Amnesia Project, with leading Democrats and liberal influencers such as Rep. Auchincloss, Pete Buttigieg, Ashish Jha, and Scott Galloway saying that schools should have been fully in-person in 2020.

This is the bi-partisan consensus that will be guiding us through the next pandemic, made more frequent as a side-effect of climate collapse. Get ready for a bloodbath.

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In many workplaces across America that pay substandard wages, you will find no shortage of signage scolding the “wagies” to stay off of their cellphones during work hours. In this new era of the Department of Health and Human Services under RFK Jr., goofing off on your phone all day, when you do manage to bother to show up to work, seems to be a requirement of senior leadership roles. As reported by The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg on June 7th:

Well, well, well. It was not so long ago that journalist Liz Highleyman suggested that we could “work with” RFK Jr. on “good policies”:

It turns out he’s not working at all, he’s just goofing off on his phone! Let us also not forget either the deluge of propaganda The New York Times has produced legitimizing this anti-vaccine scam artist in the past. From the ancient past of September 18th, 2024 by Emily Baumgaertner:

The New York Times causally omits that part of RFK Jr.’s opposition involved marching with German (!) neo-Nazis. I guess The New York Times, having previously praised Adolf Hitler, doesn’t think that’s so bad. Having already gotten the blood of dozens of American children on his hands, The New York Times pretended that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. somehow has a genuine concern for the health of America’s kids:

Or perhaps, Little Miss “Paper of Record,” these were all simply bad-faith attacks from a social media obsessed provocateur who, upon being given real power and responsibility, simply goofs off on their phone all day while autistic children are pumped full of ketamine and injected with of stem cells by exploitative quacks. Similar behavior among other members of RFK Jr.’s goon squad has also been reported.

Before being ousted from the Food & Drug Administration, former Commissioner Marty Makary produced an endless stream of social media videos whilst his agency fellow into chaos and disarray. Before being ousted twice in a year, it’s rumored that Vinay Prasad would neglect patients to goof off on Twitter while at UCSF Medicine. Jay Bhattacharya, as NIH Director and Acting CDC Director, has neglected his responsivities to appear on countless podcasts and smear his face across Twitter. HHS’ Martin Kulldorff is generating AI-generated slop for official presentations.

This should come as no surprise; spewing harmful disinformation and cheap insults on social media is how these people became public figures & plucked to serve in the second Trump Administration. Yet, liberals such as Ashish Jha called these social media trolls “reasonable,” Leanna Wen called them “surprisingly strong,” and Princeton’s Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee have championed Bhattacharya with a completely fictionalized retelling of his actions around the COVID-19 pandemic.

So why are we still waiting for these 5,000 word apologies from the liberal-minded, COVID-minimizing MAHA fluffers acknowledging that they have proven to be terrible judges of character? Where is the acknowledgement that those of us who correctly connected all of the terrible and often harmful garbage they said about COVID-19 was proof that they would fail in leading these critical federal agencies? Simply because you also supported repeatedly infecting unvaccinated children with COVID-19 doesn’t mean that these cranks were acting in good faith.

Our media outlets have done the American public a grave disservice, especially in the opinion editorial writers they chose to let ramble on endlessly about COVID-19. While RFK Jr. is goofing off on his phone, Leana Wen is still writing that we should just give up on kids winding up hospitalized because their parents fell for a “raw milk” scam, instead of advocating for Democrats to legislate these harmful scam artists out of business.

Now if Democrats wanted to be really clever, they would introduce legislation to protect employees’ rights to goof on their phone in the workplace. If it’s good enough for the Trump Administration, it’s good enough for the rest of America! Make America Goof Again! Or even better, how about a new federal regulation that the leaders of public health agencies are restricted to social media free flip phones?

In truth, and this is a major part of the thesis of my upcoming book, political pundits embraced dangerous medical disinformation they read on Twitter, then repeated it to the public in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Policymakers, including the Biden Administration, read these garbage opinion-editorials and made terrible decisions that harmed countless American lives. Did it save the Democrats in 2024? No? Is RFK Jr. not pissing his pants about accurate reporting of how he’s doing a terrible job? Also no!

Perhaps it’s time to recalibrate our thinking.

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Taking a massive step out of my comfort zone today, here is a bold proposal informed by many of the mistakes made in our collective response to COVID-19. We clearly need a new model for organizing & quantifying the validity of opinions, especially those generated in the onset of a pandemic crisis. Thus, I am proposing a D.S.A. model (no relation to the Democratic Socialists of America) for pandemic information management. It stands for Doctors, Scientists, and Academics - in that order. Where we gravely went wrong with COVID-19 is that often times, “A” cut to the front of the line and created massive problems for the rest of us when the media treated their supposed insights as valuable.

The earliest most obvious example of this (of which there are many) is Stanford’s John Ioannidis. While hospital ICUs in New York City were being wildly overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, John sat comfortably in his university office and proclaimed non-pharmaceutical interventions to be, loosely paraphrasing, akin to an elephant attempting to avoid a housecat and being so stricken with fear that they inadvertently jump off a cliff. He tortured datasets to proclaim that Americans were merely dying with COVID-19, not from it. This obscene myth would tragically become a mainstream liberal talking point in the winter of 2021.

Another fantastic example is Brown University’s Emily Oster, an unqualified economist who peddled all sorts of obscene myths about COVID-19 and children. When medical research was published contradicting her claims, she attacked the research instead of admitting error. Pediatric Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children, overtaking asthma. Oster has offered no apology while raking in millions, leaving a colossal mess for everyone else to deal with.

Stage One: Doctors

In the onset of a pandemic, doctors who see their hospitals overwhelmed with new patients showing similar systems are the first in line to generate an understanding of how this new disease functions and the threat it poses to the public. This obviously means that the media is wasting its time interviewing cranks like radiologist Scott Atlas, or the Brookings Institute’s (a conservative think-tank) Leana Wen, who hadn’t practiced medicine in years. The media has done the public such a massive disservice in serving up misleading, minimizing narratives to sabotage decision making.

What has actually happened is that the media is prioritizing doctors that are readily available for interview or comment, which is why you’d see Leana Wen, Monica Gandhi, or other wannabe celebrities exploiting the pandemic to raise their profile, even if they had nothing to do with actually treating COVID-19 patients. This drowns out the legitimate information the public is entitled to and allows misleading fictional narratives to be elevated into the mainstream. It’s irresponsible and much of journalism owes the public an apology.

Stage Two: Scientists

One of the greatest mistakes of the early days of the COVID-19 response comes from the willful ignorance of how Arabian Numerals function. For SARS-CoV-2 to exist, that implies the existence of a SARS-CoV-1. A decade prior to 2020, we already had published research showing that a significant percentage of people infected with SARS-CoV-1 developed serious long-term health complications, which completely invalidates any proposal of “herd immunity via mass infection.” Instead, tens of millions of Americans got to learn this sad reality the hard way.

Following doctors, scientific researchers with relevant expertise, experience, and credentials are the next important pillar of informing and shaping a pandemic response. This excludes “political scientists” Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee of Princeton, who are forced to resort to outright lying when defending the fraudulent & unethical COVID-19 seroprevalence sham that economist Jay Bhattacharya concocted on behalf of an airline CEO. This excludes economists like Emily Oster, who committed data fraud on behalf of reactionary billionaires like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg.

We need scientific research to uncover the impact of the virus, its potential for harm, how to best prevent and mitigate those harms - and develop new tools to fight this virus. Instead, fraudulent propaganda masquerading as science was deployed to mislead the public into embracing the virus, killing and disabling many. Political pundits such as David Leonhardt of The New York Times was especially notorious for peddling unscientific disinformation to millions of readers, and never admitted his many errors. It should be worrying that he was personally endorsed by Biden, according to a Politico article.

Upon building a body of evidence and concrete understanding, we can move forward with a more ethical and scientific approach to developing pandemic policy.

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Stage Three: Academics

From the very beginning of the pandemic, academics who have the luxury of sitting in a comfortable university office behind a keyboard, torturing abstract data sets in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, decided that cutting to the front of this line was somehow constructive behavior. Having no real knowledge of the virus and its potential for harm, they insisted that there was nothing more to learn that might inform policymaking decisions. Economists, sociologists, and other “soft science” academics were willing to gamble with the health and lives of strangers. This torrent of garbage has never stopped.

We see this now in 2026, most recently an article in Wired Magazine titled “The Painful Truth About Long Covid”, in which a male religious studies professor tries to revive tired old medical myths around “hysteria” when it comes to Long COVID, an often-debilitating condition that disproportionately impacts women. Suggesting that harmful pseudoscientific scams such as “brain retraining” are the “way forward for Long COVID treatment - if only you were allowed to talk about it,” religious studies professor Alan Levinovitz completely discards a mountain of hard scientific evidence around the tangible impacts of COVID-19 on the brain.

It’s worth noting than Levinovitz has a new book coming out called Demons By Another Name, about…psychogenic illness, which Long COVID is absolutely not. Exploiting the crisis of Long COVID to sell his book, this is yet another tragic tale of a man who has no idea what he’s talking about it masquerading as an authority to make a quick buck. Everyone defending Levinovitz should be ashamed for treating this blatantly unethical profiteering as worth entertaining.

Sorry WIRED’s editorial staff, but I doubt the former Joe Rogan Experience guest & author of “Slaying the Chinese Jabberwock” has much to offer the millions of Americans still suffering without a real treatment or cure.

Closing Thoughts

We’ve had far too many willfully ignorant diatribes published in major outlets desperately trying to write off Long COVID as merely some form of mental illness, and it won’t be the last. The purpose of these articles is to stigmatize those suffering, absolve the ruling class of responsibility, and pretend that COVID-19 doesn’t remain an ongoing threat. If someone you know if suffering from Long COVID and isn’t getting better, it’s because there’s something wrong with them as a person and they simply don’t want to get better! It’s journalistic malpractice for Wired to have published this, but it’s also a grim reminder that American news media primarily operates as propaganda on behalf of the wealthy and powerful.

The work on SARS-CoV-2 and Long COVID’s impact on the brain has already been done by plenty of experienced, credentialed scientists, and the role of journalism is to not censor their work by instead giving the spotlight to a bunch of cranks who are in fact running the risk of actually harming those suffering. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown major flaws in our news media, and the importance of supporting independent journalism (such as the PAI, subscribe today!) that takes their responsibility seriously. We need a major refresh of how we assign value to supposed claims that upon critical review fail to be supported by hard evidence.

We don’t have to keep repeating the same mistakes.

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Hello, all! I recently announced that I am writing my first book, a history of the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 response. My inspiration for doing so is the horror I have felt recently in watching the rising tide of vile propaganda attempting to rewrite recent events to suit a fantastical, absurd narrative to cover for a horrific political agenda that cost many lives.

As a premium feature, I thought I would journal my experiences in writing such a challenging and painful history. If you would like to follow this journey, please take out a paid subscription to the Pandemic Accountability Index. I promise to give regular updates, and to humor you with all of the trials and tribulations of undertaking such a project.

Thank you so much for your continued support. Without it, such an undertaking could not be possible.

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There is an excellent podcast by the name of Some Dare Call It Conspiracy, hosted by Brent Lee and Neil Sanders, who did an extensive four-part deep dive into the saga of Twitter troll David Cartland, a former British GP (general practitioner, aka standard medical doctor) who completely immolated his professional career out of dedication to his social media fan club of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. The whole series is worth a listen, but I wanted to compare and contrast Cartland’s well-documented downfall in the United Kingdom with another medical professional who was also publicly humiliated in the news recently: Vinay Prasad, an oncologist who calls the University of California San Francisco home.

David Cartland was once a well-respected and upstanding member of his community of Cornwall, a village in the South of England, where he proudly served as a medical professional. Prior to 2020, UCSF’s Vinay Prasad was considered a rising star in medicine, and his book Ending Medical Reversals was held in high regard. While unscientific misinformation & disinformation has been a feature of numerous pandemics of the past, COVID-19 was the first pandemic in which social media was readily available to amplify destructive garbage like never before.

A Mutual Abandonment of Science

David Cartland and Vinay Prasad were staunch critics of masking and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, with both making wholly inappropriate comparisons to Nazi Germany. Cartland would be marched out of the hospital where he worked and kicked to the curb, while UCSF turned a blind eye to Prasad calling his employers stupid for implementing a hospital mask mandate and rallying his social media followers to agitate (literally using the word “resist” in the title of one Youtube video) against measures to prevent patients from dying of a hospital-acquired virus.

David Cartland and Vinay Prasad both grew a following from fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine, especially in children and pregnant women, while downplaying the threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, calling it a “cold” on multiple occasions; a basic myth that Some Dare Call It A Conspiracy’s Neil Sanders, who to my knowledge is not a medical professional, explains quite simply: that the symptoms of COVID-19 similar to a flu or cold have less to do with the disease and are in fact resulting from the immune system fighting the virus. Becoming hooked by what SDCIAC calls “lovebombing” by anti-vax conspiracy theorists on social media, Cartland and Prasad both abandoned science to impress jerks on the Internet.

Cartland would then allow himself to be bamboozled into the ridiculous belief that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow make you magnetic, which is utterly hilarious on its face. Stateside, Vinay Prasad would endorse the utter nonsense pseudoscience of “immunity debt,” suggesting that children were now constantly ill in 2022 not because of the new SARS virus they were being repeatedly infected with, but because of remote schooling and masks from 2020. Both abandoned a professional commitment to medical science in order to lend the legitimacy of their credentials to absurdity.

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Harassment of Medical Colleagues

David Cartland & Vinay Prasad also lost all respect amongst many of their professional colleagues in medicine, with neither refusing to acknowledge their basic, basic errors when corrected. What would eventually see Cartland stripped of his medical license, however - rendering the years of his life dedicated to med school a complete waste - was the same sort of vile vulgarity that Vinay Prasad regularly engaged in, egging on their respective fanclubs of abusive trolls. To quote the description from the Some Dare Call it Conspiracy podcast:

It’s hard to argue that Vinay Prasad has not engaged in similar behavior across social media platforms such as Twitter, Substack, & Youtube. Prasad has frequently attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, blaming him for the pandemic - as an example, he tweeted: “To me it’s obvious that the reason Fauci supported lockdown & school closure was a misguided attempt to atone for the fact that he funded the work that led to the pandemic. No one acts more irrationally than the guilty. The house subcommittee has damning evidence.” In reality, no such “damning evidence” was presented, and does not exist. Fauci has faced numerous threats upon his life as a result of such conspiracy theories that Prasad, a UCSF faculty member, endorses.

In another tweet, Vinay Prasad attempted to pin the blame for the murder of a healthcare CEO on popular comedian and medical professional “Dr. Glaucomflecken,” stating “Glaucomflecken is not actually a student of health policy. He doesn’t understand insurance. Denying coverage does not increase their profits. That idea may have gotten someone murdered. Sad”

As another devastating example of unprofessional misconduct, Vinay Prasad peddled the conspiracy theory that remote schooling in 2020 caused an uptick in suicides & the sexual abuse of children and attempted to pin the blame on Dr. Peter Hotez, who has also been targeted with harassment and threats upon his life. In his tribunal, David Cartland was found to repeatedly insinuate that a professional colleague was a pedophile and was forced to pay significant financial penalties as well as issue multiple public apologies after repeating the behavior. Not a single member of his social media fanclub could save him from what happened next.

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A “Hero” on the Internet, a Scourge in Reality

Having an extended meltdown in the public eye, Cartland seemed to face significant pushback in his local community, resulting in him calling his fellow Cornwallers “a bunch of inbreds.” This did him no favors and ended with him being thrown out of his local church and publicly scolded in the local Facebook group. But wait, it gets worse for “The Honest Doctor!” - a moniker Cartland assigned himself as part of his current “Health Coach” grift.

Sacrificing his medical career upon the altar of a delusional martyrdom complex fueled by social media, Cartland returned to his passion of soccer, becoming a referee. This would not last in the wake of losing his medical license. After admitting to producing fraudulent vaccine exemption letters for travel, David Cartland found himself on the UK’s Disclosure and Barring Service’s Children’s Barred List, forbidding him from employment that involves working with children & vulnerable adults. The local football association then suspended him from refereeing immediately after being notified of Cartland’s prestigious new membership. Taking to social media, Cartland cried that he had “committed no crime” and was the true victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thanks to award-winning journalism from the same village full of “inbreds,” in Cartland’s words, David had effectively rendered himself unemployable. A self-proclaimed “family man” who can no longer provide for his wife and children, reduced to begging his anti-vaccine fanclub for help after giving them everything he had - with nothing to show for it but an Amazon.com bestselling author ranking in the... 9000s. For someone who regularly engaged in homophobia on social media, Cartland had proven himself to be quite un-masculine & weak in the end.

For once, accountability had finally caught up with an anti-vaccine grifter.

The Cowardice of American Medicine

Across the Atlantic Ocean, such antics would be rewarded by one of America’s leading medical schools: the University of California San Francisco, in a saga that the PAI has covered for years. In 2025, it would see Vinay Prasad elevated to the Food & Drug Administration, where he was ousted twice in less than a year of proving that his enthusiasm lied with impressing his anti-vaccine fans on Twitter, instead of a dedication to upholding any sort of professional or scientific standards.

Most notably, Vinay Prasad produced an intentionally leaked memo in which he claimed that the Food & Drug Administration had and would soon present “evidence” in which the COVID-19 vaccines killed at least 10 children. There was no evidence - this was merely a federal handout to anti-vaccine grifters on social media, like Prasad’s Twitter BFF & deranged misogynist Alex Berenson. Even Benjamin Mazer of The Atlantic, who has never resisted the opportunity to lend credibility to anti-vaccine myths such as “immunity debt,” treated Prasad’s e-mail rant as credible. The actual report found no evidence of such claims, with Mazer and The Atlantic failing to issue a public apology and redaction of the article. Prasad engaged in an incredibly serious act of misconduct that is on the level of Andrew Wakefield, who violated young children in the production of fraudulent “evidence” suggesting the MMR vaccine causes autism.

Wakefield lost his medical license before running away to the United States to play the victim. Prasad on the other hand, after engaging in numerous instances of serious misconduct which required bringing in an outside firm, was allowed to return to the University of California San Francisco and Sensible Medicine as if nothing had ever happened. What UCSF is teaching the future doctors and scientists of America is that the best way to advance your career is to be a reactionary and abusive social media troll, no matter who gets hurt in the process.

StopAntiVaxPropaganda Substack

Creating Misinformation About Total Childhood Vaccine Doses

Anti-vaccine influencers have long inflated the total number of vaccine doses children get to make it seem like they get too many immunizations. What’s different now? That misinformation is coming from the FDA and CDC…

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2 months ago · 20 likes · 1 comment · vaxopedia.org

Vinay Prasad’s co-author on numerous opinion editorials masquerading as scientific literature, Tracy Beth Hoeg, was also kicked out of the Food & Drug Administration and immediately ran to anti-vaccine slopagandist Maryanne Demasci to insist that they were victims of a conspiracy by Big Pharma. This is precisely the same claim made by Andrew Wakefield. Whereas British medical authorities correctly understood cranks like David Cartland to be a threat to patient health and safety, UCSF and California’s Medical Board has instead established a standard in which such behavior is encouraged, and clearly a role model for students to follow in the footsteps of.

This cannot stand. While California Democrats are presently humiliating themselves by rallying behind the former Health & Human Services Secretary who couldn’t be bothered as tens of millions of Americans were disabled by COVID-19, the state’s medical institutions are helping to drag the nation further into an anti-intellectual reactionary spiral into utter irrelevancy. There is no justifiable reason for why the United Kingdom can have the decency to drop the hammer on obnoxious quacks, while the United States allows such pestilence sycophants to prosper unimpeded.

In closing, it’s worth restating that the podcast Some Dare Call it a Conspiracy and their four-part deep dive into the saga of David Cartland, hosted by Brent Lee and Neil Sanders, is a must-listen for anyone with concerns about the intersection of social media and medical quackery. It’s clear that America’s universities & other institutions have much to learn from our friends across the ocean, if we are to ever reverse course.

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California has had the misfortune of having some truly awful governors, such as Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, and the vatborn nightmare that is Gavin Newsom - an early frontrunner for the Democrat Party’s Presidential Nomination in 2028, with the full backing of Roblox shareholder Nancy Pelosi. This year, the state’s Democrats are holding a primary election, and Xavier Becerra is a major contender with a SuperPAC that has all sorts of “interesting” donors. They include the following:

• California Association of Realtors

• Pacific Gas & Electric Company

• McDonalds

• Chevron

• AirBNB

• Uber

• Meta (aka Facebook)

Y’know, just a smorgasbord of all the worst jerkwads making California (and America as a whole) all the more miserable of a place to live in. It’s not like these companies are throwing this money around in support of Becerra’s campaign out of the goodness of their heart, or some genuine belief that he’s the best choice for millions of working Californians. No, in fact, it’s a reflection of the same mentality that guided the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 pandemic response: that the whims and demands of corporate America come first - no matter who gets hurt as a result. If elected governor, the needs of working Californians will not be a concern to Becerra.

Instead, Xavier’s priority will be answering to every whim of the corporations that have worked to make much of the state unlivable and render its major cities into dystopian theme parks for the wealthy. Many not in the know are backing him as the “most qualified” candidate. Being overshadowed by the ongoing horror show led by the brain-worm from space currently operating the cerebral controls of the current Seceretary of Health and Human Services, many seem to forget that Becerra was the previous HHS Secretary under the Biden Administration. So just what did HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra do when it came to the national crisis of COVID-19?

Secretary of HHS: Heh…Heh…Schwoopsie!

Claimed That Only “Severity” Matters: As the pediatric COVID-19 death toll doubled from just over 500 to over a thousand before Christmas 2021, Xavier Becerra told CNN that when it came to the Omicron variant “It’s not about cases. It’s about severity,” an unscientific meme that was laundered into the mainstream. Millions of Americans would go on to become disabled by “mild” cases of COVID-19 (not being hospitalized or dying) that winter, and tens of millions more in the years that followed. Trying to suggest that the Biden Administration’s failed vaccine-only strategy hadn’t played a part in schools and workplaces being overwhelmed with COVID-19, and hundreds of children dying in just a matter of months, Becerra was more than happy to absolve himself of responsibility for what was unfolding.

Schools drowning in unmitigated outbreaks, with classrooms full of coughing and vomiting children, ceased to be able to educate kids. Becerra simply shrugged his shoulders while the virus burned through tens of millions of children, largely unvaccinated. This is the mentality he will bring to the governorship of California:

• Prematurely Declared the Pandemic Over: On September 19th, 2022 just after Biden declared the pandemic “over” at the Detroit Auto Show because nobody was wearing masks, HHS Secretary Becerra chose not to correct the President’s false statement, but instead played good little soldier, stating, “The President is correct.” Hundreds of thousands of American would die and millions would be disabled by COVID-19 between when this statement was made and the humiliating 2024 Presidential election. Oh, dear. How embarrassing.

• Oversaw Nation’s Largest Medicaid Disenrollment: With the ending of the Public Health Emergency in May 2023, states begin the rapid mass disenrollment of tens of millions of Americans who were receiving expanded Medicaid coverage. Politico reports that many of these Americans lost Medicaid coverage due to a software glitch caused by a third-party contractor, DeVoit, which received a $340 million dollar taxpayer-funded contract. In a total lack of response, Becerra writes a pathetic letter to states suggesting that they merely “space out” these mass disenrollments. This is the sort of cowardly deference to private corporations that you can expect from a Governor Becerra. This same mentality led to child poverty doubling under the Biden Administration.

• Said Dying of COVID-19 Was Yer Own Dang Fault: On June 6th, 2023 Becerra declares that “The people who are still dying of COVID are unvaccinated or undervaccinated...If you’re dying of COVID today, you didn’t take precautions.” While anti-vaccine disinformation certainly did kill hundreds of thousands, that’s not the sole cause of these deaths. Since 2021, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (which falls under the HHS umbrella) quietly began tracking COVID-19 deaths by vaccination status, only making the data public in April 2022.

  
  Well…between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of Februrary 2022, over 99,500 vaccinated Americans died after doing everything right, according to Becerra’s HHS: They got vaccinated, they took off their masks, got really sick with COVID-19, and died. When the first 100,000 Americans died of COVID-19, The New York Times printed all of their names on the front page and called it “An Incalculable Loss.” Popular podcasts such as This Week in Virology wrote off these deaths as irrelevant and not worth preventing, while smug liberals twisted their spines into a pretzel whining about the “base rate fallacy,” completely ignoring the fact that these are the very tangible casualties that resulted from abandoning masking another other non-pharmaceutical interventions in a deathmarch towards a fantasy of “normalcy.” For Becerra to outright lie to the American people about the cause of many of these deaths, blaming them for their own demise because they listened to his HHS, is utterly obscene and disqualifying.
  

• Made a Mockery of Long COVID: On July 31st, 2023 speaking with WHEC, HHS Secretary Becerra feigned ignorance about Long COVID, which we had known about since 2020 and has disabled millions of Americans since, stating: “If I get 10 people I get 10 answers of what Long COVID really is.” Instead of employing the precautionary principle of public health and advising greater precaution to prevent the COVID-19 infections which lead to Long COVID, Becerra stood idly by as millions more developed the condition. It is now the leading chronic illness in children, overtaking asthma.
  
  On September 20th 2023, claiming that “treatment of Long COVID is a major focus for HHS,” HHS awarded a pathetically miniscule $45 million to Long COVID clinics, with no approved treatment or cure available to this day. As governor of California, you can expect more pitiful token gestures that do little to actually address the problems everyday Californians are facing. Just like California’s most beloved hero, Awh-nooooooold!

• Feigned Helplessness in the Face of Internet Trolls: After his failed leadership contributed to a humiliating defeat in the 2024 election, The Washington Post gave Xavier Becerra an opportunity to reflect upon his tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Feigning powerlessness, Xavier Becerra whined that “I can’t go toe-to-toe with social media,” as if anti-vaccine disinformation was the sole cause of which hundreds of thousands of Americans died of COVID-19 and millions became disabled. Becerra whines that, as the head of a multi-billion dollar agency with seemingly infinite resources at his disposal, he was simply helpless. Seriously?
  
  You can’t think of a single thing the entirety of the Department of Health and Human Services could have done in response to a rising tide of anti-vaccine disinformation? What did the U.S. Government do after crushing the fascist powers, Mr. Becerra? They made movies!

  We do know what Becerra did, which was to insist that the people who died of COVID-19 were responsible for their own demise. While anti-vaccine disinformation is certainly responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths, for the leader of the Department of Health & Human Services to throw his arms in the air & shrug truly shows how little he cared, and how little he will care about everyday Californians as Governor. This is not acceptable leadership, especially with everything that has happened since Trump took office - California needs a leader that will stand up on their behalf, not quivering on his hands and knees for the approval of corporate oligarchs like a trained circus animal.
  

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Final Verdict

Xavier Becerra already had his chance to prove himself as a trusted leader in a national crisis, and completely blew it: As Secretary of Health and Human Services in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Becerra sat idly by as hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed by COVID-19 - many of them having done everything right according to his HHS - and millions more Americans disabled by COVID-19, of which he never took seriously. He wants to be just like his hero, Gavin:

California is a state in the midst of numerous crises from affordability to homelessness, to climate collapse and wildfires. When faced with a crisis, Becerra revealed the true nature of his character as a leader: He absolved himself of responsibility, deferred to the whims of corporate interests, and allowed the crisis of COVID-19 to grow exponentially worse under his tenure. If this is the best the Democrat Party has to offer the American people, then it might as well disband.

The absolute gall of Xavier Becerra to have completely failed in a major leadership role during a crisis, only to turn around & decide he’s entitled to become Governor of California, is absolutely revolting. Electing Becerra as governor of California would merely reward such behavior, and in exchange, you would get an empty suit that acts as nothing more than a middleman for the actual leaders of California: reactionary billionaire creeps that see you as nothing more than uppity disposable serfs.

What a waste of a legacy.

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It’s been some years since starting the PAI. Looking back, the reason for starting the Pandemic Accountability Index was twofold:

1) To produce a digestible periodical for the public which compiles and shares the latest scientific research on the impacts of COVID-19, something which has been left almost entirely out of pandemic policy debates and endless opinion editorials. There has to be a sweet spot between highlighting single studies and dumping hundreds of thousands of studies that no single person can read & understand.

The “What COVID-19 Does to the Body” series, followed by the “Answered” series of guides on how COVID-19 impacts different parts of the body, have hopefully helped shine a light on the gaps in people’s knowledge.

2) The horror of watching the advertising playbook being used to sell a deadly and disabling virus is too much to bear. The general public needs a hard look at many of the “experts” who have dominated discussions around COVID-19, making countless basic errors that you don’t need a medical or scientific background to point out. The Profiles the Pandemic Accountability Index has assembled should help better inform the public on whom is trustworthy, if and when another public health crisis happens.

Here are a few of the best and most informative articles the Pandemic Accountability Index has produced:

RESEARCH

• What Do We Know About Long COVID?

• Is COVID-19 Harmful to Children?

• Can COVID-19 Be Prevented?

• Does COVID-19 Harm the Brain?

• Does COVID-19 Impact the Immune System?

PROFILES

• Emily Oster, Brown University Economist

• “Covidians” & Cults: Jay Bhattacharya’s Immature Fantasies

• Leana Wen, Brookings Institute & Washington Post

• Nick Coatsworth, Former Australia Deputy Chief Health Officer

• Ashish Jha, Final COVID Czar

• Vinay Prasad, UCSF (Ousted from the FDA)

• Monica Gandhi, UCSF Professor of Medicine

• Anders Tegnell, Former Swedish State Epidemiologist

• Zeynep Tufekci of the New York Times

• Francois Balloux, University College of London

REVIEWS

• Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years by Richard J. Evans

• The Doctor Who Fooled the World by Brian Deer

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

• The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

COMMENTARY

• RFK Jr. Fanboys Owe You An Apology

• HHS Just Admitted They Screwed Up Massively

• Vox’s Kelsey Piper Is Indefensibly Ignorant About COVID-19

• COVID-19 & The 2024 Election

• What You Can Learn From Kevin Bass

If this is your first time visiting the Pandemic Accountability Index, I hope this guide was helpful. If you’re a recent subscriber and haven’t dug through the archives, I hope you appreciate this look at some of the classics! If you’ve been a longtime subscriber, thank you so much for your support!

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Been busy with birthday-related shenanigans, and I unfortunately missed some critical news. Thanks everyone for the well-wishes. Now back to regular programming!

Marty “There is no Long COVID, there is only Long Anxiety” Makary, endorsed by liberal public health influencers like Ashish Jha and Leana Wen, resigned from the role of FDA Commissioner via text message. What finally brought this about was his resistance to re-legalizing fruit flavored vapes, which he approved as his final act. According to reporting by Politico, his insistence on bringing back Vinay Prasad was also a significant contributor to Makary’s fall from grace. It’s darkly funny for Makary to pretend he ever cared about the health of children, considering how and why he was selected to serve as FDA Commissioner:

Marty Makary was rewarded with the role of FDA Commissioner solely because of his COVID-19 disinformation, especially when it came to children. Actively downplaying the virus at every term and its potential for serious harm, Makary & his handpicked goons Vinay Prasad & Tracy Beth Hoeg would even go on to mock the people disabled by his favorite SARS virus, claiming they merely had “Long Anxiety” on FOX News. Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children, with no treatment or cure. Makary has contributed a great deal more harm to the health of America’s children than flavored vapes ever could, as Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children. Oh my:

Makary has no shame in his many failings.

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Vinay Prasad, Hanta-Thought Police Officer

Hantavirus has been in the news a great deal as of late. There’s a great deal of confusion going around, and it’s hard to know what to think and who to trust; this is part of why I started the Pandemic Accountability Index: to produce a public resource of accurate and reliable information about pandemics. The International Hantavirus Society put out a statement that the risk of a pandemic is relatively low, so that’s reassuring. Hot off the heels of a historically humiliating tenure as the Food & Drug Administration’s Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Review, Vinay Prasad is back to his old embarrassing self on Substack, screeching and howling that he knows better! Frankly, he thinks it’s illegal that you’re thinking at all about hantavirus! The media is out to get you! You can only trust Prasad!

Even worse, Senator Ron Johnson forced the Food & Drug Administration to release the report Vinay Prasad claimed in an intentionally leaked e-mail rant that the COVID-19 vaccines killed children. The FDA found, in fact, that the vaccines killed zero children. So why should anyone give a damn what Prasad has to say about anything in medicine or science? This should be grounds for Prasad losing his medical license, being terminated from UCSF & publicly condemned, and forced to write a 5,000-word apology to his paying Substack subscribers.

How embarrassing for the University of California San Francisco and Sensible Medicine to welcome Prasad back with open arms after making an ass of himself on the public stage, only to immediately revert to spreading medical disinformation on social media. In his new Hantavirus rant, the oncologist gets basic facts wrong and completely misses the forest for the trees. Prasad has a profit motive to engage in this chicanery and will never admit error, making him anything but “Sensible.” It goes to show that Prasad’s priority is promoting himself, and he sees the constant stream of negative headlines from his tenure at the FDA as an asset, not an indictment.

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Tracy’s Gone, and I’ve Waited So Long

As I was first drafting this, former PAI celebrity Tracy Beth Hoeg was fired from the Food & Drug Administration, as the short-lived Director of the Centers for Drug Evaluation and Research. Good riddance. This is not a reasonable person. This is a mercenary academic who, just like Kevin Bass and Allison Krug before her, is being disposed of after serving her purpose to sabotage the COVID-19 pandemic response.

With Makary, Prasad, and Hoeg all gone from the FDA - lacking any actual experience and solely being rewarded for spreading harmful disinformation about COVID-19 - it is now undeniable that depraved social media trolls are not qualified to run federal agencies. They saw Andrew Wakefield as a template to follow, and now that they are all shamefully ousted from the Trump Administration, their anti-vaccine Twitter fans are now claiming that they’re just like Wakefield - victims of a Big Pharma conspiracy!

This is true, but not in the way they think. Wakefield exploited children to produce fraudulent data and promote himself. After becoming persona-non-grata in Britain, he fled to the United States and promoted himself as a hero standing up for children’s health to cash in. There was no number of sick and suffering, dead and disabled children that was too much for Makary, Prasad, and Hoeg when it came to exploiting COVID-19. That is all they should be known as: Wakefielders.

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Congratulations! Your PODCAST JAY Has Evolved into LOCKDOWN JAY!

The wildly inappropriate dual director of both the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, economist Jay “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya, has evolved into “Lockdown Jay.” Travelers on a cruise ship which recently saw a horrific outbreak of hantavirus are being placed under strict quarantine in government facilities against their will! What the Jay Bhattacharya of 2020 would have claimed is that this is a gross violation of their civil liberties, and that they should be encouraged to spread the virus for “herd immunity,” is a measure he is now personally signing off on. That’s because he always knew that lockdowns work:

Jay Bhattacharya has quietly admitted that the Great Barrington Declaration, in all its bluster, was a complete farce. After seeing what happened to his buddies screwing up at the FDA, Podcast Jay did an Individual Risk Assessment, followed by a Cost-Benefit Analysis, and realized he couldn’t risk his lucrative podcasting career. I would even go so far as to guess that Trump’s White House pressured him to take extreme measures before the Midterm elections.

In good news, a high school near the NIH campus has disinvited Podcast Jay from giving a commencement address. This is a necessary first step in dismissing the pestilence cheerleader from polite society and hats off to the parents for speaking up. Now if only universities & mainstream media outlets could also stop bringing this quack on as a legitimacy voice worth hearing, we could start making progress!

Odds are this latest Hantavirus outbreak will fizzle out on its own. If and when that happens, we cannot let cranks and pundits alike insist that this is proof that Jay Bhattacharya was right about COVID-19. In reality he got everything wrong because his priority was building his personal brand, no matter how many Americans he got killed and disabled in the process.

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In closing, I would like to quietly announce that I am writing a book. It is a history of the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 response. More details to come soon. Your subscriptions & donations are what make this work possible, and I greatly appreciate your ongoing support. Please consider upgrading your subscription or making a one-time donation today:

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The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic, and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks by Steven Johnson was originally published in 2006 by Penguin Books and can be found wherever books are sold.

In our next installment of book reviews, looking at the history & politics of public health through the lens of COVID-19, we return again to cholera & the 19th Century. Taking a step back from Richard J. Evans’ Death in Hamburg, set in the 1892 German port city, we now cross the English Channel and several decades to mid-century London, the heart of the British Empire. As we step off our vessel, with Johnson’s The Ghost Map in hand as our guide, your nose will quickly be overwhelmed with quite the most unpleasant horror.

What might the brutally subjugated subjects of the British Empire think, had they known that the imperial core was drowning & dying in a sea of their own shit?

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A Chronic Case of Main Character Syndrome

Your mind suddenly might flash forward to a familiar scene. In the fall of 2020, when three unqualified academics, on behalf of a Koch-funded conservative think-tank, promised the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in a mere 3-6 months via the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans, including children, with a new SARS virus. They clinked champagne glasses while publishing a useless online petition known as the Great Barrington Declaration. Many prestigious thinkers, such as “Dr. Fart” and “Prof. Fullof Schitt” bravely signed the GBD.

While Bhattacharya and Kulldorff continue to whine that the GBD was censored and debate was silenced, this is a blatant rewriting of history that many liberals have fallen for. In response to the GBD, several thousand actual doctors, scientists, and public health experts published a response, known as “The John Snow Memorandum,” named after the hero of The Ghost Map and founding father of epidemiology. Pointing out the GBD’s many errors and recklessly unethical propositions, including how many infections would lead to disability. People who have been studying pandemics and public health long before 2020 soundly rejected the absurd demands of blatantly corrupt amateurs to gamble with the lives and health of millions.

In response to these criticisms, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff responded with childish insults and namecalling, calling their professional colleagues “discredited,” “Covidians,” and “Faucists.” Instead of acknowledging her many errors, erotic fiction author Sunetra Gupta would demand “herd immunity through constant reinfection.” All the while insisting that they were the real John Snow of the modern era.

Bhattacharya insists that John Snow “favored focused protection,” “was a proponent of focused production,” and insists that were he alive in the fall of 2020, Snow would have been a GBD signatory.

Reviewing Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map and the real history of John Snow in mid-19th century London, let’s see if such a claim holds feces-contaminated water.

Manure & Misinformation

In a less revolting scene, the population explosion that came with industrialization provided London with all sorts of new challenges. Packing two million souls on top of one another like sardines requires all sorts of infrastructure the city lacked in the 1850s, most notably an adequate waste disposal system. Late at night, you might hear the occasional explosion, as an underground scavenger & his gas-burning lantern stumble into a dense cloud of methane, emerging from the massive colonies of feces lingering just beneath our feet.

Much as how SARS-CoV-2 transmitted from person to person via shared air, the bacteria which causes cholera (Vibrio cholerae bacterium) was able to bounce about like a pinball through the population, using human bodies as bumpers. (Much like how SARS-CoV-2 spreads through shared air!) As one infected person’s explosive diarrhea would find its way into the same source of water that others drank from, and the bacteria easily found new hosts to infect. Thousands upon thousands would die agonizing, humiliating deaths.

The overwhelming stench of the city, drowning in feces dumped in cellars & waterways, triggered a sort of primitive response that made miasma theory - the idea that foul-smelling air is the cause of all disease - the dominating theory of the day. Desperate for a cure, the public turned to their own version of the anti-intellectual cesspool we all enjoy called Twitter: the local newspaper. As exploitative cranks such as Mary Talley Bowden are shilling ivermectin as a miracle cure for hantavirus, Victorian London had an entire industry of quackery and little actual medicine:

Keep in mind, however, that there are those among us working to return our society to those harrowing times. As Dr. David Gorskon writes for Science Based Medicine, there are forces plotting (neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker, Reason Magazine, etc.) to abolish the Food & Drug Administration in its entirety, so that exploitative quacks can kill kids by selling poison as “miracle tonics” once again.

There are some lines in Steven Johnson’s writing from 2006 that are darkly hilarious two decades later:

Oh Steven of 2006, you sweet summer child. Such an innocent babe, little did ye know what horrors await. Johnson’s predictions would be dead wrong, as the real world is not like the melodramas 24 or Spooks: the looming threat wasn’t some Hollywood racial stereotype clutching a vial with a skull & crossbones on it, but instead, credentialed saboteurs who found a profit motive in selling a SARS virus to the public.

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Send for the Snow, Man!

When Jay Bhattacharya likes to pretend that he is the modern-day John Snow, it’s worth comparing how the two conducted themselves when it came to the major challenges of their time. Jay Bhattacharya was an unknown conservative academic who never attained a medical license before producing a wildly unethical & fraudulent seroprevalence study on COVID-19. On the other hand, John Snow was a standout in his field & a local celebrity before deciding to take on not just cholera, but the dominating theory of miasma:

Now, this is quite confusing. Shouldn’t Snow be bent over a typewriter, smashing out short-form insults? Why isn’t he spending all his time appearing on the local radio, babbling nonsense into a microphone? As we all know now in 2026, the smartest scientists are those who talk the most, casually tossing around cheap insults. Doing actual work is for chumps!

How could Bhattacharya possibly confuse himself with someone clearly his opposite in every way? Whereas Jay had the patronage of racist billionaires to support his efforts, John Snow lacked such bountiful resources. The establishment miasmatists, as wrong as they were, struggled to overcome their primal instincts:

Industry was poisoning the drinking water of London, and miasma theory was what industry supported. Industry supported the mass infection of an unvaccinated population with SARS-CoV-2, and industry bankrolled propaganda such as Jay Bhattacharya’s GBD, Emily Oster’s data fraud, and The COVID Collaborative. The truth is, industry rejects public health in its entirety, because public health requires regulations and government invention:

Again, another darkly hilarious line to read in 2026.

Much easier to insist that the public simply accept widespread pestilence. Instead of simply acknowledging their error and adjusting their views accordingly, the entrenched miasmatists of London had their own “Great Barrington Declaration” moment. Their genius strategy was to collect all of the human waste festering across the city in private cesspools, and... deposit it into the Thames river. The very same Thames that provided much of the city’s…drinking water?

Mirroring when Jay Bhattacharya led Florida’s pandemic response, this boneheaded thinking would kill thousands upon thousands of people, including children. The resistance to John Snow’s “theory as a waterborne agent that had to be ingested to do harm,” just like the resistance to the reality that COVID-19 is preventable & capable of significant harm to all, was killing a massive number of people. Jay Bhattacharya’s insistence that John Snow would have been a GBD signatory is nothing but a narcissistic delusion.

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The Pump Handle That Changed the World

When Jay Bhattacharya claims that John Snow was a “proponent of focused protection,” he is referring to a series of events which led to the famous moment of the Broad Street water pump handle being removed. Snow had worked and struggled for years to prove that the drinking water supply was contaminated & ultimately responsible for cholera deaths, and it wasn’t until he presented his findings to the local Board of Governors that he had real success. In the Amazon.com blurb for Bhattacharya’s upcoming book titled “The Great Barrington Declaration,” he misrepresents his online petition as casting “a ray of hope for billions of people who were living under lockdown & mask mandates.” Let us compare this to Snow’s reality:

What Johnson leaves out is that wealthy industrialists also opposed the move. While Snow would tragically pass away of a stroke at 45, this would set off a chain of events that would massively shift the landscape of London, and the entirety of urban planning, forever. The term “focused protection” is not used once in Snow’s writing, nor the entire scholarship of credible public health literature. Whereas Bhattacharya championed widespread outbreaks of disease, Snow actively fought against them:

Bhattacharya would have you believe that Snow only sought to protect those vulnerable to cholera. While critical thinking is clearly quite painful for Bhattacharya, it’s pretty easy to say that... everyone is vulnerable to cholera. So naturally, we must focus on protecting the entire population. Bhattacharya’s rewriting of history intentionally excludes what came next, and the ramifications for the entire world.

Just look at how these deranged ZeroCholera radicals have completely corrupted our society! We need to learn to live with cholera, the overwhelming stench of human feces in the air, and thousands dying week after week! This is a violation of my freedom to deposit my filth where I please! Children need cholera to build their immune systems! Think of all the taxpayer money wasted that could have gone to building awesome battleships!

Hopefully, this finally puts to bed this absurd fantasy that Jay Bhattacharya has any sort of credibility or expertise - a delusion endlessly repeated in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other leading journalism outlets. He should be shunned from academia due to his established record of dishonesty and misrepresenting facts to suit a politicized agenda on behalf of wealthy interests, but more importantly, the sheer incompetence on all topics medical and scientific. Bhattacharya is the modern day equivalent of Dr. Johann Caspar Theodor Kraus, Hamburg’s Chief Medical Officer, who in 1893 got thousands killed by insisting nothing could be done to prevent cholera outbreaks.

Clean Air activists fighting for the infrastructure upgrades to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 could certainly learn a thing or two from John Snow’s tale. “Infection is inevitable” is still the dominating philosophy of our day in 2026 when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, not because of some mystical properties of the virus, but simply because industry’s capture of our politics has organized society into embracing widespread disease, disability, and death.

The liberalism that sought to mediate conflicts between labor and capital, which understood the necessity of state interventions such as constructing a citywide sewer system or improving air quality in schools and workplaces, is long gone.

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Closing Thoughts

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, originally published in 2006, is darkly hilarious in how prescient it is. Little did Steven know just how right he would be:

An airport paperback and clearly a product of the time, Johnson feared terrorism much more than zoonotic evolution. He does dedicate a great deal of real-estate to warning about H5N1, aka bird flu, something which has been in the news recently and remains a looming threat. What Johnson failed to predict, tragically, is how a coalition of wealthy interests, reactionary politicians, and mercenary academics would collude to discipline the public into simply accepting a markedly higher threshold of preventable disease, disability, and death. Twenty years later, one of The Ghost Map’s final lines does not age well:

Ha…ha…ha. Very funny, Steven. Got any more clever jokes?

According to the infamously radical leftist zine The Economist, the global death toll for COVID-19 is over 35 million. Sorry Steven, but we completely and utterly failed. No small part of it thanks to jackasses who saw a global crisis & sought to exploit it as a brand building opportunity. Just as Jay Bhattacharya sought to rewrite the history of John Snow, we are currently drowning in efforts to rewrite the history of COVID-19.

John Snow & Jay Bhattacharya both dealt with a great deal of shit in their lifetimes - except Jay’s problem is that it comes from whenever he opens his mouth.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic, and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks by Steven Johnson was originally published in 2006 by Penguin Books and can be found wherever books are sold.

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Well, here’s a dark twist for the history of the pandemic: America’s most prominent anti-vaccine crusader for pestilence just admitted before Congress that his son has been “devastated” by Long COVID. This is quite awkward, considering that many of his handpicked MAHA goons, like Marty Makary, deny that the condition even exists. Much of his fan club insists that the vaccine, not the SARS virus, is responsible.

At no point did the HHS Secretary take a hard look in the mirror and admit that his years of demonizing vaccines and public health, including marching with neo-Nazis alongside a child abuser, might have contributed to his son developing this condition.

The sad reality is that layered mitigations, including vaccine boosters & N95 respirators, would have greatly reduced the probability of RFK Jr.’s son, and millions of other Americans, from developing Long COVID. We had some idea that such a condition was a risk from the original SARS-CoV-1 virus, and we knew in 2020 that young unvaccinated Americans were developing MIS-C and even organ damage. We still have no cure or treatment for Long COVID.

Sadly, this is yet another tragic example of how the young have, time and time again, had their health and futures sacrificed in service of the fantasies of the old throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Swedeaboo Fantasy

Years ago, we covered the Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who rejected hard science to instead take pandemic policy guidance from an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist social media troll by the name of “FatEmperor.” Deciding that the best way to manage a new SARS virus was to infect millions of Swedes before a vaccine was available, Tegnell’s disastrous response caused widespread disruption & significantly more death when compared to similar countries. A few years later, a Swedish insurance company found that a third of young adults were struggling with cognitive impairment. Just recently, another study from Sweden saw that those with Long COVID were struggling in the workplace with declining health.

Did Anders Tegnell apologize for failing his fellow Swedes? Nope! He paraded himself around the world like he was some sort of heroic freedom fighter. He even came to Stanford to speak at a quack-ridden “Pandemic Policy” conference with an audience free of Stanford students but chock full of old white conservatives. You can even buy his book or give him a bunch of money to have him speak at your event. The facts don’t matter. You are supposed to celebrate Tegnell as some sort of hero for getting millions of his countrymen disabled.

These young Swedes didn’t get much of a choice in being served up as human sacrifice for an ignorant old man’s fantasy. Many American-based disinformation artists now hold up a totally fictionalized account of Tegnell’s failures as some sort of model we must follow should another pandemic arrive. This can only end in disaster.

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From Denial to Horror

Back here in America, some grimly cracked jokes about COVID-19 in 2020, calling it the “Boomer Remover.” However, we also spent the first year of the pandemic watching younger people develop serious long-term complications instead of “natural immunity,” as Ed Yong’s reporting from June of that year shows. Those who championed mass infection of the unvaccinated refused to acknowledge or even outright denied that this was a potential risk factor, most notably the elder academics behind the Great Barrington Declaration. In fact, GBD author Jay Bhattacharya recently whined that he was the true victim of the pandemic, claiming he lost 30 pounds because his useless online petition was criticized. His co-author Martin Kulldorff demanded in April 2020 (!) that young people have a civic duty embrace a brand-new virus that was killing so many.

After electing a new President (with a history of getting thousands of young Americans killed & disabled) as some sort of pandemic savior, much of the American public became more receptive to misleading propaganda. Had the public been warned that a former deli owner with zero medical or scientific credentials would be appointed COVID Czar, or that the pledged pandemic response plan would be immediately tossed for junk like “Doordash and Wallgreens are teaming up to deliver Paxlovid to underprivileged communities,” they might have been more cautious.

Instead, the public found themselves bombarded endless torrent of minimizing propaganda encouraging the abandonment of most mitigations & the embrace of mass reinfection. The pediatric death toll doubled in a matter of months the back half of 2021, and countless children found themselves developing all sorts of serious long-term health issues. Students developed cognitive impairment, young athletes were forced to abandon their dreams due to chronic fatigue, singers found their vocal chords damaged & other horrors. Pandemic pundits wrote this off as “immunity debt.”

Not an ounce of acknowledgement of this was made by the geriatric plagiarist who previously insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that Theranos was the laboratory of the future. Instead, he gleefully slashed pandemic relief in a gleeful victory lap over a mountain of suffering. The young had their health and futures sacrificed for the delusional narcissistic fantasies of the old.

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Closing Thoughts

We shouldn’t have to see a constant stream of news reports of how children and young people have had their lives upended by a virus they were promised was harmless to them, while cantankerous old men act like immature brats on social media. Let’s not stop with COVID-19. Look towards the accelerating climate collapse: If the young people of today truly understood not just what the old and powerful have done to them, but were willing to do to them, they would burn down the nursing homes with us inside.

America has let itself be dragged into a reactionary spiral of anti-intellectualism, in which impotent mythology is valued over scientific fact. If we are to ever escape from this whirlpool towards eldritch horrors, we must first reset our priorities.

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With Vinay Prasad set to return to the University of California San Francisco (Psst...sign and share this petition!) after being ousted twice from the Food & Drug Administration in less than a year, having facilitated zero of his much-demanded randomized control trials, it’s worth revisiting the true purpose of “Evidence-Based Medicine” arguments in debates over pandemic policy. As part of what Dr. Jonathan Howard calls the “COVID Amnesia Project,” it seems that much of pandemic punditry has truly learned the wrong lessons. Let’s set the record straight.

One of the worst side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been how academics love to take to social media to demand impossible or wildly unethical randomized control trials, especially in the onset or midst of a crisis. Professing a commitment to “Evidence-Based Medicine,” academics such as Vinay Prasad (UCSF) and Carl Heneghan (Oxford) attacked PPE such as N95 respirators by claiming there was “no evidence” to support their use. They insisted that all forms of face coverings are wholly ineffective in protecting oneself from infection with COVID-19, even going so far to compare the practice to bloodletting.

I’ve said this a million times before, but these accusations imply a major conspiracy: that 3M, Armburst, BNX, and other PPE manufacturers are engaged in a global conspiracy of fraud. It implies that entire scientific fields of engineering and aerosol dynamics are pseudoscience, and just as Hamburg’s chief medical officer insisted about cholera in 1892, nothing can be done to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses. Insisting that their ignorance is the center of all scientific understanding, “Evidence-Based Medicine” zealotry is little more than weaponized stupidity deployed to sabotage public health.

What you will notice is how “Evidence-Based Medicine” zealots refuse to demand Randomized Control Trials to support the use of other medical interventions for other threats to the public’s health. Here in New York City, we just had a major fire in which several firefighters were tragically injured. Using the same logic and arguments used to demand RCTs for COVID-19 interventions, let’s apply Evidence-Based Medicine zealotry to evaluating other forms of Personal Protective Equipment!

Does Firefighting PPE Actually Prevent Burns?

Across America, we regularly see horrible fires that can cause property damage, horrible burns, and even asphyxiation. When fire prevention fails, (of which there are ZERO RCTs evaluating their effectiveness!) firefighters are our last line of defense. Leaping out of heavy trucks covered in bulky turnout coats and often donning a respirator, their hindered movement can mean the difference between life and death for your loved ones in harm’s way. As the recent calamity in Queens reinforces, we have no good evidence that supports the effectiveness of firefighter PPE.

America’s firefighters are plagued by a culture of safetyism, in which incredibly muscular men in the peak of physical health are terrified by the same heat working class chefs face without complaint or protective equipment. Every day in America, children put their hand on a hot stove and make a full recovery, yet grown adult men are living in fear. Obviously, the solution is to generate better evidence over the true effectiveness of PPE solutions for firefighting.

Thus, I am bravely demanding on social media that we enroll 100 fire departments across America in a randomized control trial. Half of them will be allowed to wear full firefighting gear to respond to calls, while the other 50 will be restricted to white cotton t-shirts and blue jeans as part of the control group. Only through applying the rigorous standards of Evidence-Based Medicine can we truly evaluate whether or not heavy jackets are effective in preventing burns, or respirators from preventing smoke inhalation. Otherwise, we are wasting precious taxpayer dollars and risking American lives to enforce a safety-ism culture of unproven interventions.

Critics of such a proposal are obviously mentally unwell & willing to put American lives at risk by mandating ineffective PPE which is not supported by evidence. Burns and smoke inhalation are generally mild and resolve upon their own. Why are we still refusing to learn the most important lessons from the benefits of normalizing repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections across the population? Only “Evidence-Based Medicine” can guide us out of poor-decision making in a crisis.

Why Do This?

The purpose of this exercise isn’t to demand that some of the bravest among us needlessly risk their lives in order to generate data points in an Excel spreadsheet for “EBM” zealots to torture. These supposed champions of “Gold-Standard Evidence-Based Medicine” were so vocal about attacking mitigations against COVID-19 yet never applied these standards to other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Taking advantage of an ignorant and irresponsible media, their goal was purely to promote themselves by sabotaging the pandemic response with reckless disinformation.

These mercenary academics, bankrolled by wealthy interests, have sought to poison the waters in building a fraudulent consensus that the government does not have the obligation, or even the right, to intervene during a public health crisis. That industry is allowed to dictate what degree of public health the citizenry is entitled to, if any at all. This is a phenomenon that has been repeated throughout numerous public health crises dating back centuries. Let us not forget that the precursor to the Great Barrington Declaration, Toby “The Era of Vaccines is Over” Rogers insisted in the early months of the pandemic that hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen should have embraced dying of COVID-19 as human sacrifice for “the economy.”

Just as the separation of church and state is a requirement for civic democracy, we also require a separation between industry and public health. Letting the wealthy dictate public health policy has time and time again been a disaster ending in needless death and suffering. Only when universities root out corruption & condemn unethical misconduct, journalists stop legitimizing bad faith propaganda into the mainstream, and when politicians are willing to stand and fight for working families will this necessary change be realized.

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Prior to 2020, the vast majority of Americans didn’t think too much about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of our most essential federal agencies. As part of its day-to-day operations, the CDC operates as a sort of publishing house, producing data and statistics on a rapid basis. This information about the biggest threats to Americans’ health is deployed to assist doctors, nurses, and other health professionals in their day-to-day duties in something called the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). This essential resource has long been a target of MAHA grifters, as we’ll soon cover.

On October 10th, 2025 the New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported via Bluesky:

“Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Dozens of ‘disease detectives,’ high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed.”

These are essential staff whose work is incredibly important in safeguarding the American public’s health. Half a year later, we see where this intentional sabotage has led. Playing Calvinball with public health, the parasocial menace Jay Bhattacharya has taken a break from neglecting his duties as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to play pretend as the temporary Director of the CDC. Even after the legal constraints around Shameless Jay’s temporary appointment as CDC Director expired, he has been allowed to remain as a “shadow” CDC Director. This somehow involved recording even more podcasts on the taxpayer’s dime.

One of the few times he did bother to show up to work at the CDC is when he found yet another opportunity to censor science.

Unqualified Economist Faceplants…Again?!

Left in the hot seat, evidence that contradicted Jay Bhattacharya’s feelings slid across his desk after passing scientific review. Like clockwork, it was further proven that COVID-19 vaccines worked, reducing the likelihood of hospitalizations by half. Contrast this with the growing mountain of evidence that no benefit is conferred by repeated COVID-19 infections in pursuit of “natural immunity;” the basis of Bhattacharya’s entire pro-pestilence worldview. So just what is the nation’s smartest scientific mind, completely untainted by “ideology” (just after speaking at yet another white nationalist hate rally) supposed to do?

After years of making the evidence-free claim that he was the victim of censorship, dismissed by the Supreme Court, the dual NIH & CDC Director doubled down on his petty reign of censorship and blocked the study from publication in the CDC MMWR. This is a completely unprecedented abuse of authority he technically shouldn’t even have. When it became widely known that Bhattacharya had yet again engaged in censorship, the unqualified social media narcisscist took to his official Twitter account “NIHDirector_Jay” (seperate from “DrJBhattacharya,” where he blocks American doctors, scientists, and taxpayers to crack wise with trolls who regularly engage in harassment) to proclaim on April 22nd:

“There were no peer reviews. MMWR is not currently a peer reviewed journal. But we are working on changing that.”

This is a rather curious statement. I asked multiple doctors and scientists for input, who all responded with some version of the iconic Psyduck stare of confusion. According to Bluesky user “Shep/Polly,”

“I’m an author on several papers published in MMWR as well as other journals and this is a bald faced lie. The peer review process for an article submitted to MMWR is rigorous”

It should be a scandal that this shadow CDC Director is blocking publications of studies he personally doesn’t like after claiming he was “getting ideology out of science” and seeks to remake the NIH as “the research arm of MAHA.” Especially when he has zero relevant qualifications or experience to make such a decision, overriding those who do. In a softball interview with a fellow economist who struggles with basic arithmetic and champions repeatedly infecting unvaccinated children with SARS-CoV-2, Emily Oster, he exploited the safe space to ramble on about “test-negative design.” Oster, a bought-and-paid-for MAHA cheerleader, pretended he knew what he was talking about:

Now, you might be asking yourself: Why screw around with the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report?

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Peer Review is for Economic Girly-Men! All of the Med Journals are Woooke!

MAHA “Doctors” have long hated actual medical research and the rigorous standards of the world’s leading scientific journals. Tweeting and podcasting is a lot easier than actual science, it turns out. These social media provocateurs insisted that their fact-free proclamations were more credible than mountains of peer-reviewed evidence. Jay Bhattacharya branded doctors and scientists as heretical “Covidians,” Martin Kulldorff proclaimed that the signees of the John Snow Memorandum, a consensus response to their useless online petition, were “disgraced,” and Vinay Prasad frequently made baseless accusations that his professional colleagues researching Long COVID were grifting fraudsters & that all the leading journals are “woke.”

Over the years, these pro-COVID “scientists” circumvented relevant peer review in a number of ways to mislead the public. Publishing in open-access journals without peer review, sharing pre-prints that had not been peer reviewed, publishing in journals totally irrelevant or unequipped for the subject matter of said paper, etc. were all tactics to exploit their social media audiences while avoiding rigorous scrutiny from peers with relevant credentials or experience. Imagine if a MMA fighter refused to compete against anyone over the age of 12, and then bragged that he was undefeated. Would you seriously consider them to be one of the world’s top fighters?

Disinformation artists then decided to start their own journal, brazenly called the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” in Februrary 2025. (Misinformation Doctors Start a Misinformation Journal to Spread Misinformation - Dr. Jonathan Howard for Science-Based Medicine) Claiming to value “peer-review,” the rules insisted that only members of “the Academy of Public Health” can submit manuscripts, but the editor cannot reject these submissions no matter how negative the peer reviews are. The editor also has the power to decide who peer reviews said submissions. In other words, here’s a bunch of social media brats playing at starting their own propaganda mill. Needless to say, it was yet another quickly-forgotten astroturf grift.

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The War on the CDC MMWR

Since the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, pro-infection quacks have demonized the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and targeted the CDC’s Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report specifically. Instead of making meaningful lifesaving contributions of their own, these charlatans profited by lazily tearing down others. Knowing that their pseudoscience could not withstand the rigorous standards of peer review, these social media trolls promoted themselves by attacking the credibility of one of the nation’s most respected public health publications. This served as little more than sensationalist “infotainment” to their anti-vaccine fanboys.

On March 17th, 2023 Vinay Prasad squealed, “Latest CDC MMWR study on LongCovid in kids is trash,” while sharing sentiments that those suffering are actually “lying fake disease grifters.” The FDA’s current CDER Director Tracy Beth Hoeg, an unqualified sports physician who used her own child as a prop to attack the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine, proclaimed on Twitter on June 1st, 2023 that: “Next week I’m returning to DC to testify before congress about systemic problems within the CDC, their process for developing public health guidelines, errors made & the scientific integrity of MMWR,” before crowdsourcing “thoughts, ideas & reciepts” from her devoted anti-vaccine fanclub. On July 12th, 2023 Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Hoeg again attacked the CDC with a preprint (so, not peer-reviewed!) titled “Characteristics and quality of studies pertaining to masks published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” shared by Tracy with another snarky tweet:

“Is CDCMMWR a reliable journal for informing health policy? In a new paper Alyson Haslam [Vinay Prasad] & I analyze 77 MMWR reports pertaining to masks. Our results were concerning. >75% concluded masks were effective w/only 30% testing masks. 0 were [Randomized Control Trials]”

Needless to say, anti-vaccine trolls such as Benjamin Ryan lept upon this non-peer-reviewed pre-print as confirmation of their conclusions. As it turns out, none of these creeps ever cared about peer review and never will. On November 15th, 2024 Vinay Prasad declared: “MMWR is less a journal, and more a propaganda newsletter.” Having spent most of the pandemic doing little more than producing a propaganda newsletter on Substack, this is quite ironic.

CDC MMWR’s MAHA Review

When Jay Bhattacharya insists that he will be introducing “peer review” to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, what he actually means is that he will be tossing federal handouts to his favorite anti-vaccine cranks in order to form a MAHA review board for the CDC MMWR. Bhattacharya’s pathetically embarassing record of research output dating back to 2020, as well as the pitifully disgraceful studies he’s endorsed, show that he is woefully unfit for the task. Factual science will be censored, sensationalist anti-vaccine trash will granted undue legitimacy, and America’s healthcare workers will no longer be able to rely upon one of their most critical resources. We’ve already seen this with the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it’s clear that the long-term goal is to convert the CDC MMWR into an onramp of legitmacy for those who could only be published in the “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” previously.

While much of the nation’s energy is focused on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his constant obscene blabbering, his underlings are corrupting the essential functions of our federal public health agencies. As many breathe a sigh of relief that Trump is nominating a shockingly qualified & reasonable candidate to serve as CDC Director, she will be inheriting a compromised institution and given little leeway to right the ship. Should a crisis emerge under her tenure, she’s set up to be the obvious fall person. It’s a brutally unfair position to be in.

Imagine yourself in Jay Bhattacharya’s position: you’re the laughing stock of the entire world of medicine, science, and public health. Large parts of MAHA, your once loyal followers, are mad that their fantasies of the mRNA vaccines being banned and public executions of doctors & scientists were never realized. You’ve wasted your entire life to become a pathetically impotent old man who has zero talents beyond babbling on social media, desperately clinging on to relevancy. How else are you supposed to leave your mark on the world?

Final Verdict

The war on the CDC MMWR is yet another sad pathetic attempt to rewrite the rules for incoherent incompetents, sloppily written by pitiful manchildren.

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In the wake of Vinay Prasad’s dramatic ousting from the role of the Food & Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research Director, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has shown an inability to learn an important lesson from the ordeal: You simply cannot put unqualified, inexperienced social media posters in charge of essential federal departments. Makary is looking to replace Prasad with Houman David Hemmati, a regular guest on FOX News. Walker Bragman over at Important Context wrote a great article, of which I’m following up with a stack of damning, incredibly disqualifying quotations.

Houmann is seemingly incapable of independent critical thought. Whenever it comes to COVID-19, he can be found on FOX News simply repeating whatever conservative anti-vax memes he reads on Twitter. This is deeply embarrassing, while making him an obviously perfect pick for Marty Makary’s FDA.

Unless stated otherwise, these quotes come directly from Houman’s Twitter account, “houmanhemmati.”

2021

October 6th, 2021: Hemmati got in early on the propaganda grift to sabotage the pandemic response by spreading disinformation and minimizing the virus. Appearing for the “Global COVID Summit,” Houmann Hemmati declares that “risk analysis does not support vaccinating children.” In August of this year, around 500 pediatric COVID-19 deaths were recorded. This number would double to over 1,000 before Christmas 2021. As hundreds of children, overwhelmingly unvaccinated were dying, Hemmati was telling parents that these deaths weren’t worth trying to prevent. This sort of incredibly unethical garbage establishes that Hemmati has no business in any sort of role at the Food & Drug Administration, especially as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research.

In a just world, Hoummati would be forced to go door to door to the parents of these dead children and tell them just why it’s so great they died of a vaccine-preventable cause. Instead, he’s a coward who hides behind the safety of a keyboard.

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2022

January 10th, 2022: During the worst months for pediatric COVID-19 deaths recorded, with record numbers of children hospitalized for COVID-19 and shoots shutting down as a result of unmitigated outbreaks, goes onto FOX News to demand that all mitigations to protect children are abandoned:

March 30th, 2022:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died of COVID-19 after Hemmati made this claim. Referring to lifesaving vaccines as merely “pharmaceutical products” is an intentional and irresponsible choice to mislead the public. Over a million Americans died in pursuit of this mythical “natural immunity,” with millions more struggling through the ongoing emergency of having become disabled by SARS-CoV-2. This is conservative grievance politics in a nutshell: Whenever society is faced with a real-world problem, such as say, climate collapse, the conservative mind rushes to childish and pitiful denial.

April 25th, 2022: Sharing a LA Times editorial titled “California’s schools don’t need a vaccine mandate - at least, not right now” Houmann declares,

Reactionary mythologists love to abuse the phrase “common sense” to present their uninformed fictions as fact. I have tragic news for Houmann: Repeated COVID-19 infections have rendered millions of previously “healthy kids” into a state of rather unhealthy disability and chronic illness. The thousands of American children who died of COVID-19 were overwhelmingly unvaccinated, meaning that their deaths were preventable. We as adults failed them. Writing off these preventable tragedies as merely “unhealthy” children not worth protecting is morally depraved and unbecoming of a medical professional.

May 10th, 2022:

This is the tired old binary fallacy that has been debunked time and time again. As a licensed medical professional, Hemmati has a professional obligation to be up-to-date on the latest medical research, especially about a widespread SARS virus. It’s obvious that he will prioritize junk he reads on Twitter over hard science at the Food & Drug Administration. Even if “case counts are meaningless,” widespread unchecked pestilence is simply not the hallmark of a healthy society.

July 22nd, 2022:

The “Urgency of Normal,” for those who don’t recall, was a pop-up astroturf of credentialed medical professionals such as Monica Gandhi and Scott Balsitis (a major fan of white nationalist Christopher Rufo), that argued that COVID-19 was harmless to children, and that non-pharmaceutical interventions were destroying a whole generation of kids. As part of their “advocacy toolkit,” they frequently got basic facts about SARS-CoV-2 wrong. They claimed that they simply cared about children’s mental health, and their advocacy suddenly stopped when they got what they wanted: schools becoming hotbeds for COVID-19 outbreaks. Pediatric suicide rates climbing, mass shootings, ICE committing a domestic terror campaign, etc. though? - Urgency of Normal is suddenly nowhere to be found. Hemmati’s dishonesty shows how he will be an irrational, politically motivated hack just like his predecessor Vinay Prasad.

August 2nd, 2022:

This is not how N95 respirators work. Houmann, not an engineer, is simply repeating a tired old meme he read on Twitter. The leadership of our federal public health agencies must be held to a higher standard than simply regurgitating anti-intellectual slop from the gutters of social media. There are plenty of competent, talented civil servants at the FDA who shouldn’t have to be constantly sabotaged by willfully incompetent leadership.

October 13th, 2022: Houman Hemmati appears on the libertarian crackpot outlet podcast The Atlas Society, presenting himself as a “longtime outspoken critic of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, and medical censorship:”

It is a truly pathetic softball “interview” in which he frequently spreads the same tired old anti-vaccine myths you’ve heard a hundred times before.

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2023

Februrary 14th, 2023: Hemmati faking concern that PPE is strangling kids, he squeals:

This is darkly cruel because COVID-19 has not left children alone, willful understanding about the effectiveness of PPE and PPE mandates aside. A lot of children have died or developed very serious health issues as a result of infection with SARS-CoV-2, and as a medical professional, Houmann has a responsibility beyond putting his fingers in his ears and turning a blind eye to sick and suffering kids. If he’s unable to accept tangible reality, then he will make poor decisions at the Food & Drug Administration.

March 12th, 2023: Houman threatens violent revolution if any form of public health measures, no matter how necessary, are ever re-introduced:

Donald Trump was President in 2020 when these measures were first introduced. If Hemmati joins the FDA, he will share in the responsibility should another pandemic begin under the second Trump Administration, including all of the deaths that result.

March 14th, 2023: Referring to a now-infamous and long debunked “Cochrane Review of Masks” by two Evidence-Based Medicine zealots out of the United Kingdom by the names of Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, Hemmati refuses to acknowledge the paper’s basic errors:

The paper is inconclusive, neither proving a positive or a negative - only for Jefferson to run to an anti-vaccine Substack and intentionally obfuscate this fact. They conflate airborne and droplet transmission of viruses, as well as pretending that a blue surgical mask and a 3M 1080+ N95 respirator are somehow the same thing. Basic, basic errors as a result of treating their ignorance as the definitive article; a trait Hemmati clearly shares. If you are endorsing obviously junk research you clearly haven’t read, you have no business working at the Food & Drug Administration.

March 20th, 2023: Much like his Twitter buddies Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, Hemmati squeals that Long COVID is all fake and no big deal:

We knew long-term health complications was a possible result of infection with a SARS virus, long before 2020, for a significant percentage of the infected. It is now 2026, and the mountain of evidence for Long COVID is undeniable. Hemmati was never close to right, and his inability to simply admit error disqualifies him from science and medicine entirely, much less running CBER.

May 20th, 2023: After getting everything from he wanted from the Biden Administration with the total abandonment of children to repeated COVID-19 infections, Hemmati went on FOX News to smugly take a victory lap:

In it, he attempts to rewrite history and pretend that doing nothing would have been much more preferable, claiming “the consequences of COVID lockdowns will last for decades.”

July 30th, 2023: Replying to the former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, Houmann yet again shows his poor critical thinking skills in an extensive rant:

This argument simply does not work when it comes to socially transmitted diseases such as COVID-19, in which someone can be asymptomatic but infectious. 99% of the Americans who died or was disabled by COVID-19 was infected by someone else, often people who “didn’t WANT to be protected.” This was also the arguments people made against drunk-driving laws:

Even the fairy godmother of libertarianism, Ayn Rand, understood that government had an obligation to intervene in preventing the spread of a deadly and disabling virus.

This is simply yet another tired rehashing of anti-vaccine memes debunked years prior. The “From/With COVID-19” meme saying that COVID-19 deaths aren’t real is really a revival of the centuries-old miasma myth, that COVID-19 has fourth-dimensional quantum mechanics which render it omnipresent yet totally a harmless and benign friend. It also serves to confuse the public about the mechanics of death reporting, which is incredibly basic, basic stuff.

This is, of course, preposterous. No matter what hard evidence you show to Hemmati, he’ll simply put his fingers in his eyes and whine “nuh-uh.” This rank dishonesty is childish and unprofessional. As one expects from your standard Twitter troll.

June 4th, 2023: Replying to a former jeans executive and contributor to the “Brownstone Institute,” a propaganda outlet helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, Houman writes:

Just the year before, it was reported that hundreds of thousands of children lost a parent to COVID-19; many because they brought the virus home from school. Had Houmann been in charge in 2020, that number would be much higher - and he’d write those off as just “a few lives” anyways. You can show Houmann every study, every news clip of the many children suffering from Long COVID, and he simply doesn’t care. He never cared - he is lying to you, centering himself as the judge of what is real or not. Houmann irresponsibly abuses social media, cultivating a safe space from the facts that contradict his feelings. Sadly, this makes him a perfect “culture fit” for the Trump Administration.

June 5th, 2023:

This is a lot of words to say: “freakin’ hysterial broads,” as if we’ve learned nothing about medical misogyny and post-viral illness since the 1800s. Maybe we just need a federal law mandating that male physicians have to take a class (or two or three?) on just how to not treat female patients like garbage?

June 8th, 2023:

These sorts of childish japes and jabs are simply unprofessional and disqualifying. It’s just plain simple: If you don’t want the responsibility, don’t take the job. The sad reality, not to downplay over a million deaths, is that the primary threat to Americans has been developing disability or chronic illness caused by a virus that didn’t kill them. As FDA CBER Director, it’s apparent that Hemmati will handle serious challenges (not the fake ones he gets from Twitter) by simply denying they exist.

June 17th, 2023: As failed med student Kevin Bass turned out to be a massive creep who confused the professional politeness of nurses with flirtation, Houmann decided to try and take the little dweeb under his wing. Inadvertantly, Hemmati’s words would be prophetic:

Bass was expelled soon after. Odds are, this will also be an accurate summary of Hemmati’s tenure at the FDA.

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2024

June 06th, 2024: In a truly pathetic extended rant, Houman manages to get every aspect of not just pediatric COVID-19, but basic morality, dead wrong:

It’s okay the kids die of COVID-19 because of other problems? Check. Parents should be allowed to let their kids die of vaccine-preventable causes? Check. Putting Long COVID in air quotes? Check. Pediatricians are too stupid to diagnose their young patients dying of COVID-19? Check. Even after everything we’ve learned about how COVID-19 harms pediatric health and development, with Long COVID overtaking asthma to become the leading chronic illness in kids, Hemmati doubles down on babbling tired old anti-vaccine Twitter memes. This is truly embarrassing.

August 13th, 2024:

Hemmati got what he wanted. Schools now shut down regularly across America due to infectious disease outbreaks instead. Chronic absenteeism is up. Young people share memes such as “the lion does not confirm himself with his brain fog and/or chronic fatigue.” This is the “normal” that Hemmati considered so urgent.

Nobody was thrilled about remote schooling, an imperfect piecemeal that was understaffed, underresourced, and essentially designed to fail. This happened as a result of dozens of educators dying of COVID-19 in New York City in Spring 2020, who could then educate zero kids as a consequence of...dying. Hemmati apparently finds himself entitled to the deaths of teachers so he can pretend nothing was wrong.

December 05th, 2024:

For ah...what, exactly? Being publicly criticized for getting basic facts wrong and refusing to ever admit error? That we as Americans collectively failed in performing a fantasy, sort of like stage actors in a theater production, in which they’re the heroes who - in their words, not mine - gave a “ray of hope” to imagined “billions” for clinking champagne as bodies piled in the streets?

Should public health policy be dictated by online petitions written by delusional narcissists and bankrolled by crooked billionaires? Clearly, the frequent FOX News guest believes this to be the case.

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2026

January 14th, 2026:

Well, ah...that certainly didn’t happen and was obviously never going to happen. Whoopsie!

Final Verdict

If Houmann David Hemmati is confirmed as the replacement for Vinay Prasad as FDA CBER Director, he will likely follow a very similar path as his predecessor. Reporters will have a field day of writing up the constant melodrama, rank incompetence, and inevitably Hemmati’s dismissal. Much like Prasad, Hemmati treats his ignorance as the anchor the rest of the world should center itself around. Entertaining their anti-vaccine Twitter fans is their priority in life.

Here is an outrageous thought: selecting a biotech entrepreneur to regulate the biotech industry is a poor decision. I am forced to agree with one of the hosts of The Cancer Letter podcast, that perhaps the best candidates for these sorts of roles lack a social media presence. While I would certainly like to be pleasantly surprised and proven wrong, I believe the most likely outcome is, as a loyal MAHA soldier, Hemmati’s arrogant ignorance leads to a preventable tragedy such as Americans dying from complications resulting from deregulated peptides.

My sympathies to the people at the FDA trying their darndest to do a decent job and keep the ship afloat. Whatever disagreements, you don’t deserve this crap. If Hemmati was a decent man, he would take a hard look in the mirror, delete his Twitter account, and quietly retire from the public sphere. He’s got enough blood on his hands.

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Tomorrow on April 23rd, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are holding a “Fireside Chat” about “Enhancing the Integrity of the Social and Behavioral Sciences,” “featuring top policymakers and advocates for change.” One of the most prestigious institutions for science and medicine in America has invited two of the most unscientific voices of the past several years: Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster. Not to point out their total lack of credibility caused by their constant errors & inability to admit them. Not to denounce weaponized quackery to advance a reactionary agenda. Instead, the NASEM is lending its credibility to the ongoing campaign to rewrite & obfuscate the history of COVID-19 as a submissive surrender to the narcissistic delusions of Donald Trump and RFK Jr.

Now the PAI has spent years covering both of these laptop class academics and their constant errors in the past, which can be contrasted with a growing mountain of evidence showing the harms of COVID-19 - a reality that both have denied; especially for children. We’ve also covered that both made quite a pretty penny spewing propaganda on behalf of lecherous conservative billionaires such as vampire Peter Thiel and cape-wearing neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker, just the same with Big Tobacco and oil companies. It’s a tired old playbook that we’ve seen time and time again, and yet… those whose job it is to know better keep falling for it.

The National Academies of Sciences hosting Oster & Jay for a “fireside chat,” alluding to images of President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking directly to Americans through a Great Depression and a Second World War. Sorry, but making bank while falsely assuring parents that SARS-CoV-2 is harmless to kids isn’t half as heroic. Just because an anti-vaccine quack and his cronies have infested the Department of Health and Human Services, doesn’t mean that widely respected and prestigious organizations need to pretend that they’re worth platforming, much less be endorsed as “top policymakers and advocates for change.”

Should sports debate shows be bringing on 8-year-old Little Leaguers to critique the batting technique of the New York Yankees? Not doing so is censorship, y’know!

What’s even more offensive is that the National Academies of Sciences could have taken this opportunity to platform the scientists who have done critical research on the impacts of COVID-19, such as Putrino Lab. They could have platformed the doctors who are treating the millions of Americans disabled by COVID-19, including many children. They could have even been bold and platformed the engineers whose knowledge of how to prevent the transmission of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 was soundly rejected by Oster and Bhattacharya! Instead, we get useless economists. Why shouldn’t we call this out for what it is? Censorship. Censorship of real science, engineering, and medicine in order to waste the spotlight on incompetent fraudsters blabbering nonsense to obfuscate the facts.

Why doesn’t the National Academies of Sciences just cut out the middlemen entirely, and bring on the billionaires directly to decree just what scientific facts the public are allowed to believe in?

An Alternative 2020

Let us briefly imagine a very different timeline.

The day after the online petition that was the Great Barrington Declaration was published, the administrations of Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford Universities put out a joint statement condemning the GBD and terminating the professorships of Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta for unethical misconduct, exploiting the credibility of their respective institutions to sabotage the COVID-19 response. Brown University kicks Emily Oster to the curb for data fraud on behalf of lecherous billionaires. The University of California San Francisco sends Monica Gandhi packing for mocking those taking the pandemic seriously and later gives Vinay Prasad the boot for claiming that public health mandates are a gateway drug to fascism.

Together, these universities put their foot down and declare that the wealthy cannot buy science, and that gross incompetence during a crisis will not be tolerated. Would conservatives whine about censorship? That’s what they always do, so who cares?

Let’s take this fantasy another step further and start imagining an alternative timeline in which journalists at The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other outlets honestly report the truth: crooked billionaires are attempting to sabotage the pandemic response, putting American lives at risk. Massive front-page exposes on how propaganda outlets such as Collateral Global and the Brownstone Institutes are muddying the waters, misleading the public with the help of credentialed yet crooked academics. Truth be told, most people don’t want the “Metaverse” dork or a cape-wearing neo-Confederate influencing decisions about the health of their children in the midst of a crisis. Yet, that’s what these institutions Americans should be able to trust helped make possible!

With all of the shamelessly unproductive distractions dumped in the garbage, we could start to have an actual policy debate about how to best save lives & safeguard the public’s health in the onset of the disaster. Instead, we’ve had to waste so many years & lives having to relitigate basic facts and argue against the absolute laziest, bad-faith attacks. The academy is supposed to be a great filter for discarding frivolous nonsense, and instead, the National Academies are helping to legitimize a regressive, anti-intellectual decline that celebrates widespread, unchecked pestilence.

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A Harsh Proposal

Here’s a hotly controversial policy proposal nobody will like: The universities which choose to fail to enforce professional standards amongst their faculty - in which unqualified academics misrepresented themselves as experts on all-things COVID-19, often lashing out with childish & vulgar insults, showing a total disregard for the consequences of their influence - should be brought under strict federal oversight. The wealthy shouldn’t be able to buy their desired policy agendas (such as hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths) by buying the credibility of the academy and laundering this influence through our leading media outlets. If you won’t show respect for the public by keeping your own house clean, then maybe the government needs to come in and do it for you.

Most academics, doctors, and scientists in America are perfectly reasonable people. Unfortunately, they found themselves demonized and vilified as part of a massive anti-vaccine propaganda campaign that found itself legitimized in more mainstream media outlets, and the administration of their institutions that is supposed to have their backs cowardly stayed silent. We should be able trust the academy to separate fact from fiction, unthinking they would ever defer to the whims of wealthy jerks. This isn’t about censoring free speech, but instead defending free speech, by ensuring that factual information used to inform serious policy debates aren’t drowned out by a well-funded torrent of absurd nonsense.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine could have put on an incredible panel on how Bhattacharya and Oster should have been laughed out of the room in 2020. They could have hosted people with relevant qualifications about how to best minimize the negative impacts of COVID-19 in 2020. Instead, they’re putting on another useless fact-free podcast rewriting history.

If America is to survive through the many challenges, we face (fun side-effect of climate collapse: more pandemics like COVID-19!) we have to make a major shift in our politics, economics, and culture.

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As America teeters on the edge of a devastating recession, I have done my best to stimulate the economy…by shopping for the most expensive toilet paper I could possibly find. Lepers and germs, the search will finally soon be over. Over at the webz0ne which shares a name with the rainforest we’re presently destroying, “MAHA Books” is selling an upcoming premium designer toiletry product which can be found quietly hiding away under:

It’s called “The Great Barrington Declaration: Documents, Defenses, and Disputations,” (GBD) edited by HHS senior staffer and ex-Harvard academic Martin Kulldorff & the shadow director for the Centers of Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) as well as the National Institutes of Health director, Jay “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya. Preorders are being sold for $50.00, and the “Brownstone Institute,” an anti-vaccine propaganda outlet helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, is featured prominently on the cover. The creep who wants to take your teenage daughter out of high school to give her a Hooters uniform and a pack of Virginia Slims is currently pitching another useless online petition:

About the Authors

In the “About the Author” section on Amazon, it lists Jay Bhattacharya as a “physician, epidemiologist and health economist.” Jay never did a residency and never bothered to a attain a medical license - instead writing conservative policy after graduating. As a “health economist,” playing God with other people’s lives by torturing data in an Excel spreadsheet, his previous claim to fame was arguing that health insurance was subsidizing obesity. As NIH Director and now shadow CDC Director, Jay has done little more than censor scientists and record dozens of podcasts with wellness grifters, anti-vaccine quacks, and white nationalists.

Martin Kulldorff’s section fails to mention his time as a member of Harvard faculty, after he was terminated for insisting that the COVID-19 which hospitalized & nearly killed him somehow granted him lifelong immunity, rendering a vaccine unnecessary. It lists his time on RFK Jr.’s fraudulent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which was shut down by a federal judge after Kulldorff proved he couldn’t even run a simple meeting, whining that “we are rookies.” Prior to the GBD, Kulldorff wrote in Spring 2020 for The Spectator that those protecting themselves from COVID-19 (well before a vaccine as available) are “anti-herders” who should be considered just as vile and nefarious as any anti-vaxxer. Kulldorff now works directly for an anti-vaccine scam artist as the “Chief Science Officer for the Office of the Assistance Secretary for Planning and Evaluation” at the Department of Health and Human Services; an ironic title to be held by a completely unscientific crank.

What’s truly amazing is how these two federal employees have all this free time to write a whole book, after over a year of constant headlines showing nothing but constant failure and gross incompetence on their parts. Perhaps making childish posts to social media is not relevant experience needed to run critical federal agencies! Perhaps Congress should be looking into this!

If you don’t remember, the GBD was a useless online petition by a trio of laptop class academics exploiting their credentials to lend credibility to a conservative billionaire pitch that the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans can magically end a pandemic. As countless Americans were killed and disabled by a new SARS virus in 2020, these three clinked champagne glasses thinking they had accomplished something meaningful. While children who suffered “mild” cases of this new disease developed MIS-C in their hearts and brains in 2020, these academics championed the virus as the best protection for children.

I will now explain how every sentence of this triple-D dogcrap excuse for a “book” is wrong - by going line-by-line through the Amazon description, as someone with an advertising background, focusing on just how the GBD lies to the public. Bolded emphasis is mine.

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Paragraph 01: What’s a Lockdown?

Compare and contrast the actual science above to this blurb from the GBD book:

COVID-19 is a vascular, multi-system disease caused by the airborne virus SARS-CoV-2, which is often inhaled via the lungs. Already, these laptop class academics are hard at work misleading you into believing that they know what they are talking about with multi-syllable scientific terms. As someone who has been organizing and compiling research on the impacts of COVID-19 for years, you would be a willful idiot to mispresent SARS-CoV-2 as a “mild” respiratory virus that goes in one lung and out the other, like the flu and common cold. Men generally do not develop erective dysfunction from the flu, for starters. Effective non-pharmaceutical interventions to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses have existed for decades prior to 2020, a fact that the GBD authors refuse to acknowledge.

Secondly, do you truly think that the Waltons of Wal-Mart, one of the funders of the GBD, gives a flying frak about small businesses? Do you know what dead people can’t do, on account of dying from COVID-19? Spend money at small businesses! Get real.

Credible?! Ha! This is a blatant, boldfaced lie, verified by a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court. As Walker Bragman has reported for Important Context, GBD writer Jay Bhattacharya has been humiliated by the courts time and time again. From FOX News to Substack to Youtube to the NIH & CDC, nobody would be misled into believing that Martin Kulldorf & Jay Bhattacharya’s speech has ever been censored. The Great Barrington Declaration was heard and soundly rejected, a fact they have never been able to accept as it contradicts their narcissistic delusions.

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Paragraph 02: A Completely Fraudulent Rewriting of History

This is an exceptionally offensive statement in just how false it is. The “pharmaceutical products” in question are the vaccines that have saved millions of lives, and became widely available just months after the GBD. No pandemic has ever been ended via the mass infection of the unvaccinated. These are basic, basic facts. Secondly, the conservative think-tank AEIR did not facilitate “an educational seminar,” but a deeply embarrassing display of incompetence. They seem to want us to forget that they filmed the proceedings:

The laptop-class academics giving this “educational seminar on the basics of public health” could certainly use some remedial classes on why it’s wildly inappropriate to demand the deaths of strangers.

This is, again, a total lie. The GBD was prepared well in advance and not censored, it was soundly rejected by the overwhelming majority of scientists and doctors as wildly unethical, utterly useless, and willfully ignorant about the harms presented by SARS-CoV-2. Astroturfed by wealthy interests, the GBD gained traction with conspiracy theorists on social media, whose grip on reality is already rather poor. While doctors treated patients and scientists developed lifesaving vaccines, these academics insisted that spreading falsehoods on social media was the truly heroic act.

This is another shameless rewriting of history. The list of signees for a useless online petition was retracted from public viewing because it was overwhelmingly fake names such as “Doctor Fart.” If the GBD was truly such a genius idea, then why do the authors have to constantly lie about it?

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Paragraph 03: Delusional Narcissism

The GBD proposed mandating infection with a deadly and disabling virus for hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans as government policy, demonizing those who refused to go along with this unproven gamble as “anti-herders” and “Covidians.” No, seriously! Read for yourself:

Secondly, if 97 scientists hold one position, and 3 take an opposing view, that is still a scientific consensus. We do not drop everything, shun the 97, and focus all of our attention on entertaining the ramblings of three unqualified crackpots. Conservative billionaires do not get to decide what is scientific fact or not.

The “ray of hope for billions” was Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to lifesaving vaccines that would become widely available just months after the GBD’s publication. The GBD authors are engaging in a form of “Stolen Valor,” the worst crime one can commit in the eyes of conservative Americans. Call me controversial, but I don’t believe that our federal public health institutions should serve as an adult daycare for the wildly insecure as a result of unhealthy social media habits.

This narcissistic hallucination of the downtrodden and oppressed taking to the streets waving banners portraying Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta as noble heroes to the workers of the world is deeply, deeply pathetic. Engaging in a form of “code-switching,” Bhattacharya would go on left-wing media platforms with Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore, and others to lie about how he was the one who truly cared about working people. In reality, he wanted them to embrace death and disability with a smile on their face, as if we were back in the 1300s…

Really? Let’s check the tape, buckos.

The GBD was criticized by the overwhelming majority of public health scientists, because it got basic facts wrong, wildly underestimated COVID-19’s potential for serious harm and was “little more” than demanding the preventable, needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Secondly, the authors of the GBD were invited to meet the White House to meet with Trump, who was President in 2020; another fact they casually omit. Claiming that the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people with a new SARS virus is merely “traditional public health wisdom” is yet another obscene lie.

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Paragraph 04: Safe Spaces and Fake Debates

Nah, uh…no it doesn’t. If the actual book is anything like this blurb, in which every sentence is a bold-faced lie, then it is an absurdist fantasy novel in which the authors hallucinate a power fantasy in which their useless online petition somehow saved the world. Secondly, as I’m sure my friends at Science Based Medicine would agree, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration shied away from honest debate - especially with their professional colleagues in public health. Hiding in the safe spaces of conservative podcasts, FOX News, and one-sided opinion editorials, the authors of the GBD refused to engage with criticisms of their many, many errors. Instead, they tossed out childish insults like “Covidians,” and continued to make even more absurd demands such as “maintaining herd immunity through constant reinfection.” This is not how actual scientists conduct themselves:

Anyone can run their mouth for free. In fact, toddlers do it on a daily basis! This is not a meaningful or worthwhile “experience” worth writing about. The experience of the millions of Americans disabled by a virus the GBD authors insisted was harmless to them is censored. The thousands of parents who had to bury a child thanks to the virus these armchair academics sold as better than a vaccine are censored from appearing in these pages. The GBD’s support from lecherous white nationalist billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeffrey Tucker are also censored, just as David Zweig downplayed his association when speaking as a “Local Luminary” with his neighbors in the liberal enclave of Hudson-on-Hastings.

Literally every sentence of this upcoming book is guaranteed to be a lie in some form or another. It’s a mark of shame upon the authors and the universities which previously employed them as faculty. It should be met with nothing but ridicule and mockery as an embarrassing farce, as if COVID-19 itself employed a public relations firm.

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Final Verdict

If I ran around Central Park jabbing a .357 magnum revolver into people’s faces and demanding the deaths of strangers at random, the NYPD would show up and slap the cuffs on me. If I did so with fancy academic credentials by my name and the backing of conservative billionaires, seemingly liberal-minded opinion editorial writers in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other outlets would fall over themselves to insist my demands were worth taking seriously. This latest attempt to rewrite history by Fartin’ Martin & Smilin’ Jay, who insist that their feelings overrule scientific fact, is both predictable and repulsive.

The original inspiration for the GBD, Toby “The Era of Vaccines is Over” Rogers from the United Kingdom, demanded hundreds of thousands of Brits embrace COVID-19 and the grave in April 2020 as a necessary sacrifice for “the economy.” Conservative billionaires and corporate media astroturfed these credentialed academics to lend credibility to these demands and sabotage public health efforts. Doctors in overwhelmed ICUs weren’t crying out begging for privileged academics in comfortable university offices to write an online petition to get even more patients on ventilators. Vaccine scientists weren’t hard at work in a lab blinded by dollar signs in their eyes, gleefully celebrating all the profit opportunities a new SARS virus provided.

While Amazon may not have any quality control standards, it’s blatantly obvious that “The Great Barrington Declaration: Documents, Defenses, and Disputations” does not belong in “Pathology,” “Internal Medicine,” or anywhere near “Medicine.” It is a nakedly unscientific piece of propaganda in which the authors, on behalf of conservative billionaires, demand widespread death and devastation in a failed bid for “herd immunity.” After the proposed “three to six months” of infecting hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans resulted in nothing but a mountain of dead and disabled, the authors would smugly shrug their shoulders and pat themselves on the back, declaring victory.

The GBD was nothing more than a demand that everyone be as useless and impotent as themselves. Thankfully, we’re no longer trapped in the 14th century. Perhaps these federally funded laptop class academics should get with the times instead of wasting our tax dollars to produce elaborate fanfiction.

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