Download for Free: ‘Forbidden Facts,’ Gavin de Becker’s New Book About Childhood Vaccines
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 12, 2025
The link between vaccines and autism has been “debunked, debunked, debunked,” said New York Times bestselling author Gavin de Becker, in an interview with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland on “Good Morning CHD.”
However, that “debunking” relied on a private organization and a behind-the-scenes meeting where the conclusion was set before the discussion began. De Becker told viewers:
“Out of that closed-door meeting and closed-mind meeting comes one of the most significant damages done to the American public, which is the cessation of … any full-hearted and authentic government-funded research into vaccines and brain damage.”
The transcripts of those Simpsonwood meetings were leaked, giving outsiders an inside look into how scientific concerns and evidence were suppressed, de Becker said.
In his new book, “Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression about Brain Damage from Childhood Vaccines,” de Becker details how private organizations and public health agencies have buried negative information and touted false claims to propagate the lie that vaccines are unquestionably “safe and effective.”
CHD is offering the book as a free download.
“Forbidden Facts,” aimed at a broad audience that may be reluctant to question vaccine orthodoxy, addresses a heartbreaking topic, but also manages to weave in some humor.
“What’s such an amazing facet of this book about something very tragic, about brain injury to children, is that you’ve actually made it funny,” Holland said. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
De Becker detailed his key findings in the interview with Holland.
The link between vaccines and autism was “debunked” by the Institute of Medicine — now known as the National Academy of Medicine, he said.
The private organization also “debunked” the dangers of Agent Orange, the link between baby powder and cancer, the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, the dangers of silicone breast implants and the dangers of the anthrax vaccines.
But all of those claims were later revealed to be wrong.
“If you can accept that they do it once, then hopefully you can accept that they do it in other areas, and be … skeptical,” de Becker said.
Public health agencies altered definitions of key terms
The book also explains how agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confuse public health issues by changing the definitions of key terms.
For example, a vaccine used to be defined as “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease,” de Becker said.
Today, it is defined as “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune system against diseases.” That means vaccines no longer have to protect people from a disease, he said.
A similar change was made to the word “pandemic.” It used to mean an outbreak that killed large numbers of people, but now it just means the appearance of a new virus to which people don’t have prior immunity.
“That terminology of what we used to think a vaccine meant, and what we used to think a pandemic meant, both of those died of COVID in 2020 and 2021,” de Becker said.
A similar move had been made with autism, as the definition has expanded to include people who don’t suffer from severe disability, according to de Becker. This benefits the pharmaceutical companies, he said. They can claim there is a disorder, with no clear definition, that is definitely not linked to vaccines — which also are not, which also have no clear definition.
“I encourage people to use the term ‘brain damage,’ because that, we know, is caused by vaccines,” he said.
No evidence childhood vaccines saved more than 150 million lives
Over the last year, scientific papers, studies and reports have confirmed that vaccines saved over 150 million lives, de Becker said.
However, all of the reports rely on the same flawed data — published in The Lancet — from a modeling study conducted by Imperial College London, which has produced many incorrect modeling studies, according to de Becker.
The modeling study doesn’t account for any vaccine injuries, de Becker said:
“Words that never appear inside that 7,000-word report …: adverse event, side effect, injury, harm, reaction, autism, myocarditis, brain damage, seizure, blood clot, neurological, simian virus 40, autoimmune, heart, heart failure, cardiac arrest, sudden death, stroke, fatality, convulsions. You get the idea.”
That manipulation is pervasive among vaccine manufacturers, vaccine supporters and much of the medical community, Holland said:
“This is why we talk about gaslighting. [Vaccines are] lifesaving, but if you’re injured or if you die — which they acknowledge can happen, but it’s ‘so rare’ — it’s completely ignored in the numbers, in the narrative. It’s not something that’s acceptable in polite conversation.”
The studies touting vaccine successes also fail to address questions such as why people vaccinated against tetanus have the same, very low tetanus death rate as those who aren’t vaccinated against it, de Becker said.
And the numbers are similar for other diseases among healthy people, he added.
When you look at the claim that vaccines saved more than 150 million lives, you have to believe one of two things, de Becker said:
“One is that 154 million lives saved is a headline-grabbing claim bought and paid for and amplified by biased stakeholders in order to affirm and encourage and expand mass vaccination. In other words, the claim is propaganda and promotion, not science.
“Or the other alternative is that the number is perfectly accurate and verifiable, discovered by an unbiased, unconflicted group of geniuses.”
Drug industry uses ‘threats, intimidation’ against people who question them
De Becker, a criminologist, said he believes the pharmaceutical industry is violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, or RICO.
Industry insiders “use bribery, all variety of deceit, threats, intimidation to do damage to the reputation of people who question the orthodoxy that they’ve created,” he said.
It isn’t surprising, as most product launches involve some element of conspiracy, de Becker said:
“They’re going to discredit or harm their competitive products. They’re often going to overvalue and exaggerate the value and benefit of the product they’re rolling out, and they’re not doing it alone. That is a conspiracy. And conspiracies happen every day, all day. There is nothing dark or special about it.”
So the question that remains is: Who can you trust?
“And I say, ‘trust yourself,’” de Becker said, adding that people should look into the recommended vaccines, become informed and make their own decisions.
Just by reading his book, people will know more about how vaccine harms were “debunked” than most doctors, he said.
Watch the interview here.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
THE “661 TRIALS” LIE: WHAT AARON SIRI REVEALED IN CONGRESS
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | September 11, 2025
Del sits down with ICAN’s lead attorney, Aaron Siri, Esq., for a hard-hitting conversation following his explosive Senate testimony. Siri takes aim at the false narrative of “661 placebo-controlled vaccine trials,” dismantling it point by point. He also exposes the buried Henry Ford study featured in the upcoming documentary “An Inconvenient Study,” and opens up about his powerful new book, “Vaccines. Amen.” Together, they make the case for why true transparency in vaccine science can no longer be delayed.
The Oklahoma City Bombing: A Lesson in Government Lawlessness
By William L. Anderson • Ludwig von Mises Institute • August 14, 2025
[Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Margaret Roberts. (Bombardier Books, 2025; 399 pp.)]
On the morning of April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children at a day care center in the building, and injuring hundreds more. As the FBI website tells readers, a single ex-soldier named Timothy McVeigh acted alone, being motivated by anti-government sentiment that came in the aftermath of the Waco massacre two years earlier.
The FBI version, of course, is the official version and the one repeated in history books and in the New York Times. McVeigh was aided by Terry Nichols, who helped him build a large fertilizer bomb that they placed in a rented Ryder truck that was destroyed in the explosion. Michael Fortier gave McVeigh some logistic help, but no one else was involved, just the “lone wolf” McVeigh and a couple of friends.
Using the organization’s vast investigative resources, the FBI quickly solved the case in the style of a Dick Wolf production. McVeigh had already been arrested when an alert policeman 90 miles away from Oklahoma City saw his getaway car had no license plate, so the FBI was able to get their man in custody. The original investigation also had McVeigh accompanied by a man called John Doe #2 when he rented the Ryder truck in Kansas, but soon afterward, the FBI insisted there had been no JD2, that he was a figment of the imaginations of everyone who said they saw him with McVeigh.
We know the rest of the story. McVeigh was convicted in federal court and executed at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2001. Nichols was convicted both in federal court and Oklahoma state court, but juries deadlocked on the death penalty, so he is serving a life sentence at the fed’s so-called supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Fortier, who provided valuable information to the FBI, pleaded to lesser charges and served a short prison sentence before he and his wife were whisked away in the government’s witness protection program. Case closed.
The FBI’s narrative was useful on two fronts. First, the organization was able to regain prestige after the disaster at Waco by supposedly solving this horrendous crime quickly. Second, by being able to frame the bombing as the result of anti-government rhetoric that had spread following Waco and the 1992 FBI killings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, the Bill Clinton administration, the Democratic Party, and their allies in the legacy media were able to use the bombing to claim that Republicans and other critics of the administration were responsible for the mayhem.
But what if the FBI’s narrative is untrue and that several people were involved in the bombing, some of whom being either government informers or FBI agents who infiltrated right-wing paramilitary groups? Furthermore, what if federal agents lied about the existence of the so-called John Doe #2, and what if they lied about many other things tied to the bombing and subsequent investigation?
Margaret Roberts—the former news director of “America’s Most Wanted” and a celebrated journalist—has published a new book, Blowback, which successfully challenges the FBI and establishment media narratives about the case. Through interviews with people involved in the case and working with citizen journalists that didn’t buy the official line, Roberts has successfully presented alternative storylines that, frankly, are much more believable than what the FBI has given us, and presents her case in a book that is logical and easy to follow—no mean feat, given just how complicated the story really is.
Blowback involves two related events. The first, of course, is the Oklahoma City bombing. The second is the murder of Kenneth Trentadue in his cell at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center August 21, 1995—a death the FBI to this day insists was a suicide. Thanks to a dogged investigation by Kenneth’s brother, Jesse—a former collegiate track star and respected attorney living in Salt Lake City—the FBI’s narratives on Kenneth’s death and the Oklahoma City bombing were exposed as lies, although that investigation came at great cost to Jesse.
(I have corresponded with Jesse Trentadue for many years and was familiar with his investigation, but until I read Blowback, I had not realized just how extensive that investigation has been.)
In the FBI’s account of the bombing, the agency claims:
The bombing was quickly solved, but the investigation turned out to be one of the most exhaustive in FBI history.
No stone was left unturned to make sure every clue was found and all the culprits identified.
The first statement is partially untrue and the second is an outright falsehood. Not only did the FBI refuse to follow leads provided by eyewitness testimony, but the agency threatened law-abiding citizens with prison when their own investigations began to prove that the FBI was lying. Unfortunately, because federal prosecutors, federal judges, and FBI agents have worked together to rig the outcomes, most of the principals in the Oklahoma City bombing will never have to worry about being brought to justice.
As pointed out earlier, the book deals both with the bombing and the Trentadue murder and then ties them together. We begin with the Trentadue case.
Kenneth Trentadue—a military veteran who in earlier years robbed banks to help pay for a drug habit—was picked up near the Mexican border in August 1995, on a parole violation and sent to Oklahoma City. In calls to his wife and family, Trentadue seemed hopeful and told them he would be released soon. However, on August 21, officials called the family to tell them that Kenneth had hanged himself in his cell, and that the prison officials wanted to cremate his body.
Kenneth’s mother and brother, Jesse, insisted on the feds shipping the body to them so they could have a proper burial. When the body was examined at the funeral home in Southern California, however, they were shocked. Roberts writes:
…Kenneth’s wife, mother, and sister had the staff remove heavy makeup applied by the prison to Kenneth’s body. Underneath, they discovered bruises, his cracked skull, possible stun gun burns, and an incision indicating that someone had cut Kenneth’s throat. (p. 12)
None of this made sense at first to the Trentadues. Kenneth was scheduled to be released soon and his calls to family members had been upbeat. Furthermore, the sheer logistics of how he could have hung himself with the bedsheet defied laws of physics. Furthermore, why did he have injuries and an incision in his neck, and why (as they found out later) was his jail cell splattered in blood?
Only later—thanks to a tip from journalist J.D. Cash of the McCurtain Daily Gazette in Idabel, Oklahoma—were they led to a possible explanation. Kenneth was seen as a near-dead ringer for the elusive JD2 right down to a tattoo that matched what the other alleged bomber had on his forearm. Had FBI investigators believed he was the second bomber, they certainly would have tried to get that information out of him through an “enhanced” interrogation at Oklahoma City. Instead, they allegedly killed him and then staged a fake suicide.
Whatever happened, Jesse Trentadue found that the FBI stonewalled him, and then FBI agents even met with federal prosecutors and other US Department of Justice officials to see if they could bring criminal charges of “obstruction of justice” against him, with one of those officials being then Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, who was in charge of the cover up of Kenneth Trentadue’s murder that was called the “Trentadue Mission” by the Department of Justice, and later would serve as President Barack Obama’s US Attorney General. The DOJ under Janet Reno would not only ignore (and then harass) Trentadue; it also gave similar treatment to Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who had seen the photos of Kenneth’s body and was demanding answers.
At least Hatch and Trentadue were able to create enough noise to have the DOJ go through the motions of an investigation of Kenneth’s death, but ultimately Holder made sure that there would be no indictment—and no US Senate investigation of the affair. Despite the physical impossibility that Kenneth managed to hang himself in a “suicide proof” cell after inflicting extensive physical trauma on himself, including slashing his own throat, the Holder directed grand jury conclusion was suicide.
(The Trentadue family later won a civil lawsuit in 2001 against the DOJ regarding Kenneth’s death, but the DOJ already has declared it never will pay a judgment to the family no matter what the courts have ruled.)
As Jesse investigated his brother’s death, he joined with others such as Cash to look closely into the FBI’s account of the Oklahoma City bombing and found that the government’s narrative was untrue. While the government and the legacy media insisted that their Timothy McVeigh “lone wolf” account was correct, Jesse and others found that the Clinton White House had been running a shadowy operation named PATCON (for “Patriot Conspiracy) to infiltrate the groups tied to the Christian Identity movement. Their investigation into PATCON would ultimately lead them to the Oklahoma City bombing itself.
Begun by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1991, PATCON supposedly was created to protect Americans from right-wing violence. However, PATCON soon would take on the characteristics of the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program of the 1960s and 70s to deal with threats from violent left-wing groups like the Weathermen, as well as the domestic spying programs against alleged Muslim extremists after the 9/11 attacks. As writers like James Bovard have noted, these infiltration programs have taken on a life of their own as those tied to the FBI would seek to enhance their importance by plotting many violent events that the programs allegedly were supposed to prevent.
Far from the Oklahoma City bombing being the work of the amateurish McVeigh and Nichols, Roberts describes in Blowback how she and others were able to trace McVeigh and his associates to the FBI-infiltrated groups that would provide support to him while he drifted into places like Elohim City in Oklahoma—a gathering place for disaffected people who had come to believe the US Government was corrupt and needed to be overthrown. In fact, as Roberts and others have documented, several FBI and ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) informants warned their handlers of the bombing plot or something similar, yet the feds did not act.
Not surprisingly, it seems that the FBI almost welcomed such attacks, as they legitimized the original purpose of PATCON and other programs. Writing about FBI informant John Matthews—who himself had contact with people who allegedly knew about the plans for the bombing—Roberts says:
As he [Matthews] and Jesse talked, Matthews revealed his disillusionment about PATCON. “It seems like the FBI was more interested in inciting violence than preventing it,” Matthews said. He had signed on believing his mission was to monitor the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups on the far-right fringe. However, Matthews came to believe that inciting violence was the fundamental mission of PATCON. (p. 322)
Roberts—following the lead of Trentadue and others—has raised an important question: If the Oklahoma City bombing was not a “lone wolf” operation but rather was tied to shadowy figures, including embedded FBI agents and confidential informers, was it simply a case of a plot that got out of hand? Were people on the inside supposed to put the brakes on the whole operation, but something went wrong?
These questions are not easily answered, and Roberts does not take the conspiratorial plunge to claim that Oklahoma City was somehow a neatly-packaged FBI inside operation. Indeed, there is no way to prove such an allegation and Roberts, Trentadue, and others who have investigated the bombing have not taken that step into the abyss.
However, one can truthfully say that no person benefitted more from the Oklahoma City bombing than President Clinton. Just five months before, he and the Democratic Party had suffered huge setbacks as the Republicans had captured the US House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years and took the Senate, as voters were driven in part by anger at well-publicized abuses by the federal government and especially the Clinton White House.
By tying the bombing to any criticism of the federal government and of Clinton himself, the president was able to channel public anger about the blast toward conservative government critics in general and elected Republicans in particular, and Clinton and the Democrats were able to reverse some of their political losses the next year, as voters returned Clinton to the White House. As the San Francisco Examiner reported:
…under the heading “How to use extremism as issue against Republicans,” [Clinton adviser Dick] Morris told Clinton that “direct accusations” of extremism wouldn’t work because the Republicans were not, in fact, extremists. Rather, Morris recommended what he called the “ricochet theory.” Clinton would “stimulate national concern over extremism and terror,” and then, “when issue is at top of national agenda, suspicion naturally gravitates to Republicans.”
James Bovard also wrote that, following the bombing, his books on government spending and abuses of citizens were interpreted as welcoming things like Oklahoma City, including a hostile review of Freedom in Chains by the Los Angeles Times, with the reviewer declaring:
In Bovard’s defensive and disingenuous discussion of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, he reveals that he is aware of the possible consequences of his words.
Blowback will not be reviewed in publications like The New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of (Each Other’s) Books (or if they are reviewed in those publications, the reviews will be hostile), but it is a book that one should read if only to rediscover the hard truth that government agents at all levels will lie and probably get away with it. While one imagines that the usual suspects will dismiss this book as a collection of falsehoods and wild conspiracies, the truth is that Roberts has managed to chronicle not only a sorry chapter in the modern history of US governance, but also has highlighted the fact that there are still heroic citizens among us doing their duty even when those charged with protecting citizens and enforcing the rule of law refuse to do so.
DR. PAUL THOMAS VS. THE CDC
CDC Hit With Lawsuit Over Failure to Test Cumulative Effect of 72-Dose Childhood Vaccine Schedule
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 18, 2025
Two doctors who lost their medical licenses because they questioned the CDC’s vaccine recommendations for children are suing the agency for failing to test the cumulative effect of the 72-dose schedule on children’s health.
Drs. Paul Thomas and Kenneth P. Stoller and Stand for Health Freedom filed the lawsuit last week in federal court, alleging the lack of safety testing violates federal law and children’s constitutional rights.
The lawsuit names Susan Monarez, Ph.D., in her official capacity as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Attorney Rick Jaffe, who represents the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit “goes to the heart of the CDC’s childhood immunization program — a 72-plus dose medical intervention schedule that has never been tested.”
According to the complaint, the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule “is only based on an evaluation of short-term individual vaccine risks,” as the CDC “has never studied the combined effects and the accumulating dangers of administering all of the vaccines.”
The lawsuit states:
“The facts establish a continuing public health outrage hiding in plain sight: America administers more vaccines than any nation on earth while producing the sickest children in the developed world. Yet CDC demands proof of harm while refusing to conduct the studies that could provide it.”
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | August 21, 2025
Dr. Paul Thomas, author of Vax Facts, opens up about his controversial “vaxxed vs. unvaxxed” study, which showed healthier outcomes in unvaccinated children. After publishing the data, his license was suspended — but he continues to speak out, now suing the CDC over its untested vaccine schedule. He warns that pediatricians have become blind enforcers of pharma policy, while parents are waking up to the harms.
‘Between a Shot and a Hard Place’: Autism, Vaccines and the Illusion of Certainty
By Dr. Joel ‘Gator’ Warsh | The Defender | June 25, 2025
For years, the public has been told the vaccine-autism question is closed — case dismissed, myth debunked, science settled.
But when you peel back the headlines and actually examine the evidence, a startling truth emerges: We haven’t really studied the question at all. Not thoroughly. Not independently. Not with the urgency or integrity the issue demands.
The most commonly cited research? A handful of studies on the MMR vaccine and thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was largely removed from childhood vaccines over two decades ago. That’s it.
No comprehensive analysis of the full vaccine schedule. No robust long-term comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. No meaningful investigation into the timing, combinations, or cumulative biological impact of dozens of shots now given in infancy and early childhood.
In other words, we haven’t looked. And yet we claim to know.
As a pediatrician with formal training in epidemiology, I approached the research with trust in the system and confidence in the data. But what I encountered while investigating for my book, “Between a Shot and a Hard Place,” left me stunned.
I expected to uncover a vast body of high-quality science — long-term trials, robust safety evaluations, rigorous comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
Instead, I found a shallow pool of studies — many small, some outdated, most narrowly focused on just one vaccine. There was no comprehensive scrutiny of the full schedule, no real curiosity about timing, interactions, or vulnerable populations.
It wasn’t that the science had disproven a link — it’s that the science had barely asked the question. And that silence speaks volumes.
We cannot claim certainty where inquiry has been suppressed. We cannot dismiss parent experiences as coincidences when they follow the same patterns again and again.
And we cannot afford to confuse lack of evidence with evidence of safety. The stakes are too high — and our children deserve better.
The rise in autism, and the refusal to ask why
Autism now affects 1 in 31 children in the U.S., with rates as high as 1 in 12.5 boys in California. The increase in diagnoses isn’t just about better awareness — more children today are deeply affected, with significant developmental and intellectual disabilities.
This is a public health crisis. Yet somehow, asking whether vaccines might play a role is taboo.
Parents see the change firsthand. A baby babbles, smiles, and makes eye contact — then suddenly, after a routine doctor visit, that progress stops. Words disappear. Eye contact fades. Regression sets in.
These stories follow a pattern, and while correlation is not causation, patterns are where science begins. But instead of investigation, we dismiss these parents. Instead of listening, we silence them.
The research we’re missing
I combed through decades of vaccine safety literature. The results were sobering.
- There are no long-term, large-scale studies comparing fully vaccinated children to unvaccinated ones using standardized developmental assessments.
- No comprehensive evaluation exists of the full CDC vaccine schedule as administered in real life.
- Most studies focus narrowly on the MMR vaccine or thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative largely removed from pediatric vaccines two decades ago.
Even the Institute of Medicine acknowledged in a 2013 report that the safety of the full childhood vaccine schedule — especially its timing, spacing, and cumulative exposure— had not been rigorously studied.
If vaccines were a pharmaceutical drug administered in 70 doses before kindergarten, with a suspected link to any chronic disease, we’d demand independent oversight, transparent trials, and long-term tracking.
But because these are vaccines, we declare the science “settled” without proving that it is.
Buried data, ignored whistleblowers
In my research, I came across the 2010 study by Gallagher and Goodman that found a higher autism risk in boys who received the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. It wasn’t widely publicized or followed up.
More disturbing was the 2014 revelation by William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who admitted that his team omitted key data in a pivotal MMR-autism study — data that showed increased risk in African American boys. The study was never corrected.
How can we claim the science is settled if major findings are buried and whistleblowers ignored?
A path forward
The vaccine-autism debate won’t be resolved by censorship or soundbites. It will be resolved by doing the science we’ve avoided for too long.
If we truly care about children’s health — and public trust — then we must stop circling the same studies and start asking better questions. That means:
- Funding large, independent, open-label prospective studies comparing fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and unvaccinated children — evaluating real-world vaccine schedules, not just single shots in isolation.
- Studying combinations, timing, and aluminum adjuvants using updated toxicology, neurodevelopmental, and immunological tools.
- Taking parental reports seriously as part of observational data—treating them not as “anecdotes to dismiss” but as signals to investigate.
- Removing all financial conflicts of interest from vaccine safety research and creating full transparency for both data and funding sources.
This isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about restoring balance. We can demand rigorous, independent science without being “anti-vax.” We can protect children and respect parental intuition.
But we can’t do either if we keep denying the blind spots in our current system.
To move forward, we must be honest about what we know — and courageous enough to admit what we don’t. Because when it comes to our children’s long-term neurological health, vague reassurances are not enough.
No, the science is not settled. And it’s time we stopped saying it is.
Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh is a board-certified pediatrician, specializing in integrative and holistic medicine, and the author of “Between a Shot and a Hard Place.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Canada’s New Border Law Hides a Surveillance Time Bomb
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | June 6, 2025
Canada’s new Strong Border Act tabled as Bill C-2, is being framed by the federal government as a step toward strengthening border security. But hidden within its lengthy legislative text is a familiar and troubling push for expanded surveillance powers, this time without the need for court authorization.
Nestled deep in the bill are provisions that grant law enforcement sweeping new authority to demand subscriber data from service providers, bypassing the oversight mechanisms long seen as essential to protecting Canadians’ privacy.
The bill revives the “lawful access” agenda, one that law enforcement agencies have been pursuing since the late 1990s. These digital access provisions are not new, but their inclusion in a border-focused bill appears to be a calculated effort to quietly reintroduce them under a different guise. Despite being repeatedly rebuffed by public opposition, parliamentary committees, and Canada’s highest court, the drive to erode digital privacy protections continues.
This legislative maneuver follows years of setbacks for warrantless access advocates. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled decisively in R. v. Spencer that Canadians have a legitimate expectation of privacy when it comes to subscriber information. The Court stressed that identifying individuals based on their Internet activity could easily expose sensitive personal behavior and that police demands for such information constituted a search requiring proper legal authorization.
According to Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, law enforcement has continued to seek ways around those constraints. Past efforts to legislate access without judicial oversight have either failed to pass or been dropped due to public backlash.
A 2010 bill mandating the disclosure of customer details, including IP addresses and device identifiers, without a warrant was abandoned.
In 2014, a new bill was introduced, ostensibly to tackle “cyberbullying.” In practice, it reintroduced many of the same provisions that had been defeated under earlier proposals. While dressed in the language of protecting youth online, its underlying purpose was once again to broaden law enforcement access to digital subscriber data with limited oversight.
The Supreme Court’s Spencer ruling remained a major obstacle, reaffirming the privacy rights of Canadians. Then, in 2023, the Bykovets decision extended those protections further, affirming that IP addresses also warrant constitutional safeguards. The Court noted that if digital privacy is to mean anything in the modern age, then these basic digital identifiers must be protected under Section 8 of the Charter.
Despite this legal precedent, Bill C-2 is attempting to carve out a new space for surveillance. Among its more concerning features is a clause that would allow authorities to issue “information demands” to service providers without needing judicial approval. These demands would compel companies to confirm whether they provide services to specific users, whether they hold transmission data related to those accounts, and where the services are or were provided, both inside and outside Canada.
The threshold for triggering such a demand is alarmingly low. Law enforcement must merely suspect that a crime has occurred or may occur and that the requested information could aid an investigation. The demand doesn’t require disclosing the actual data, but it functions as a roadmap to it, alerting police to which providers hold what kind of information and where it might be found. Such indirect searches effectively sidestep the very privacy protections the courts have upheld.
Notably, none of these measures relate directly to border enforcement. Their presence in a border bill serves a strategic purpose: to avoid the scrutiny that such provisions would attract if introduced through standalone legislation. This tactic, often seen in omnibus bills or unrelated amendments, allows controversial policies to advance quietly under the cover of more palatable reforms.
Professor Geist has a full in-depth look at the history of such laws here.
‘There Is Overwhelming Evidence to Call for a Moratorium on mRNA COVID Jabs’: New MAHA Chief Medical Advisor
By Jon Fleetwood | May 15, 2025
British cardiologist and author Dr. Aseem Malhotra, the newly appointed Chief Medical Advisor to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, says there is “overwhelming evidence” to ban the COVID-19 mRNA shots.
Dr. Malhotra is a former U.K. government and long-time ally of MAHA leaders like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) and NIH head Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
He’s campaigned for taxes on sugary drinks, worked to lower the amount of Brits taking statins unnecessarily, and worked with government leaders to remove ultraprocessed foods from hospitals and schools, per The Daily Mail.
Though Malhotra is not formally employed by the federal government, he will serve as a leading voice of the movement and work closely with grassroots groups to advance its policy agenda.
In a Wednesday Twitter/X post, the British best-selling author (@DrAseemMalhotra) left no question where he stands on the COVID jab.
“It’s what you’ve been waiting for,” he wrote. “There is OVERWHELMING evidence to call for a moratorium on the mRNA covid jabs & help the vaccine injured. Let it rip.”
On the same day, MAHA Action, an organization founded by former Team Kennedy leadership, announced Malhotra’s appointment:
We are honored to announce that Dr. Aseem Malhotra has joined MAHA as our Chief Medical Advisor.
Dr. Malhotra is an NHS-trained Consultant Cardiologist and an internationally renowned authority in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of heart disease.
He has served as Honorary Council Member at Stanford’s Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic and Visiting Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine. As Founding President of the Public Health Collaboration and a founding member of Action on Sugar, Dr. Malhotra has led national efforts to curb sugar intake and champion low-carb diets for type 2 diabetes.
He is the bestselling author of The Pioppi Diet, The 21 Day Immunity Plan, and A Statin-Free Life, and played a key advisory role for the UK government on the link between obesity and COVID-19. His publications have garnered an Altmetric score exceeding 10,000, one of the highest worldwide for a clinical doctor.
We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Malhotra to the MAHA team and look forward to the invaluable expertise and passion he brings to our mission of Making America Healthy Again.
Malhotra told Daily Mail, “It’s very clear to me that perhaps this is the most important issue that has galvanized MAHA and helped elect President Trump,” he said, referring to criticism of mRNA COVID injections.
“There is a pandemic of the vaccine injured. We can’t make America healthy again if we don’t address this.”
The doctor believes there are “hundreds of thousands” of vaccine injuries and wants states to pass legislation halting use of the drugs because they have shown “more harm than good and never should have been rolled out in the first place.”
CDC data show 38,541 deaths have been linked to the COVID jab since 2020, but if fewer than 1% of adverse events are reported—as a 2010 HHS-funded Harvard analysis suggests—the real number could exceed 3.8 million, compared to just 7,109 deaths that got propoxyphene pulled after nearly 30 years on the market.
Malhotra recently told Fox News that he began to doubt the safety of the COVID shot after his father died after suffering cardiac arrest.
Now leading America’s most unapologetic health freedom initiative, Malhotra is making one thing crystal clear: the COVID shot crisis isn’t over—it’s just finally being confronted.
The High Human Cost of Syria Sanctions
By Rick Sterling | Dissident Voice | May 17, 2025
On May 13, U.S. President Trump announced he is ordering the removal of sanctions on Syria.
Some of the U.S. sanctions can be quickly terminated because they were issued by Executive Order. Other sanctions, including the extremely damaging 2019 “Caesar” sanctions, were imposed by Congressional legislation and may require Congressional action to terminate.
The Syrian people are joyous at the prospect of the end of their country’s economic nightmare. In 2010, before the conflict began, Syria was a middle-income country with free education, free healthcare, and no national debt. It was largely self-sufficient in energy and food. After fourteen years of war, occupation, and strangulating Western sanctions, the U.N. reports that “nine out of ten Syrians live in poverty and face food insecurity”.
Why Syria Was Targeted
In 2007, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Wesley Clark, publicly revealed that Washington neo-cons had a hit list of seven countries to be overthrown in the wake of 9-11. The list included Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iran.
The list is essentially the same as that identified by Benjamin Netanyahu in his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network. The premise of this book is that Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements are “terrorist,” and any nation that supports them should be overthrown. He targets Iran, Libya, Syria, and Sudan for supporting Palestinian rights and says. “Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust.”
In 2007, Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi visited Syria and tried to persuade Assad to end Syria’s support of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements. When Assad would not comply with US and Israeli wishes, Syria was marked for regime change. The Netanyahu and neo-conservative hit list had somehow been adopted by the Western foreign policy establishment. This was confirmed by the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. In a 2013 interview he says, “I went to England almost two years before the start of hostilities (2011). I met British officials, some of whom are friends of mine. They confessed, while trying to persuade me, that preparations for something were underway in Syria. This was in England, not the US. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, conceived, and planned for the purpose of overthrowing the Syrian government because … this regime has an anti-Israeli stance.”
Hybrid Warfare against Syria
The overthrow of the Syrian government was not easy. It involved massive funding from seven countries (USA, UK, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE). In the early years, the CIA budget alone was $1 billion per year. The campaign included military, diplomatic, media/information and economic warfare.
The regime change operation began in March 2011. While part of the population was hostile to the Assad dynasty, the majority supported the government and a secular Syria. The opposition came largely from sectarian jihadist elements, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Hundreds of factions and cells were supplied and funded by a host of countries, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the U.S., and the UK. Thousands of foreigners were recruited and provided access to Syria.
The political and media war on the Assad government was intense. Historian Stephen Kinzer wrote, “Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press.”
Accusations that the Assad government used chemical weapons against civilians were widely broadcast in the West. They were used to justify Western bombing attacks on Syria. Acclaimed U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh uncovered evidence that the chemical weapons attacks were by the opposition, aided by Turkey, NOT by the Assad government. He had to go abroad to have the explosive article published.
The dubious chemical weapons accusations and US driven political corruption of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are now exposed in a February 2025 book by one of the technical professionals from the OPCW. The book is titled The Syria Scam: An insider look into Chemical Weapons, Geopolitics and the Fog of War.
By the end of 2018, the Syrian army had largely defeated the diverse jihadists. However, instead of conquering or expelling the opposition, Syria allowed them to have a safe haven in Idlib province on the border with Turkey. With Turkey, Iran and Russia seeking to find a solution through the Astana Accords, the conflict was frozen, and the jihadists were allowed to regain strength. Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) became the de facto leader of the opposition factions and the government of Idlib.
The Frozen Conflict
In 2019, the U.S. turned the screws on Syria and escalated attacks on Lebanon. The extreme Caesar sanctions did what they were intended to do. They crushed the Syrian currency and economy, made it impossible to rebuild, and impoverished the vast majority of Syrians. The spreading poverty and inability to counteract it led to widespread demoralization and dissatisfaction. With consummate cynicism, the “Caesar” sanctions were named the “Caesar Civilian Protection Act”.
Meanwhile, in the HTS safe haven of Idlib province on the Turkish border to the north, conditions were very different. Although HTS was designated a terrorist organization in the U.S. and the West, they were helped economically. The HTS fighters were trained and supplied with modern military weaponry, including drones, sophisticated communications equipment, etc.. Very recently, when people from Damascus traveled to Idlib, they were shocked to find new highways, Wi-Fi widely available, and electricity 24 hours a day. Teacher salaries are ten times higher in Idlib than in Damascus.
The Fall of Damascus
With a demoralized population and Syrian army, the Assad government fell in a few weeks, and HTS, led by Ahmad Al Sharaa, took power on 8 December 2024. The new leader of Syria has been greeted and endorsed by the Gulf monarchies and Western countries that paid for and promoted the overthrow in Syria: the UK, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and of course, Turkey.
Since the change, there have been numerous sectarian massacres of Alawites and Christians along the coast.
There have been attacks on Druze in Damascus. To date, there have been no punishments for the massacres of civilians. A nun reports, “there is no security” in Damascus or elsewhere in Syria.
Meanwhile, Israel has invaded and occupied all of the Golan and parts of southern Syria. They have built military bases in Quneitra and other strategic locations. Israel has carried out a bombing blitzkrieg, destroying all known Syrian ammunition depots. Israel can now fly over any part of Syria at will.
Instead of condemning the Israeli violation of Syrian land and airspace, Ahmad al Sharaa has criticized Iran and Hezbollah. In recent weeks, the new Syrian regime has arrested Palestinian leaders and closed their offices in Damascus. The normalization of relations with the Zionist state has begun.
Lifting Sanctions on Syria
Of course, the sanctions on Syria should be lifted. They never should have been imposed.
U.S. sanctions, known officially as “unilateral coercive measures”, are condemned by the vast majority of world nations. Over 70% of the world’ nations say that US sanctions are “contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the UN and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States.”
Without exaggeration, the West and their allies sponsored terrorism in Syria through Al Qaeda and other fanatical violent terrorist groups. They destroyed a once prosperous and independent nation. With a diverse Syrian population ruled by a sectarian leadership prone to violence, there may be more dark days ahead. While Israel, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies are pleased with the removal of the Assad government, a very heavy price has been paid by the majority of Syrians. And the cost is ongoing.
The Deep State Goes Viral: Foreword
By Jeffrey A Tucker | Brownstone Institute | May 12, 2025
The following is Jeffrey Tucker’s Foreword introduction to Debbie Lerman’s new book, The Deep State Goes Viral: Pandemic Planning and the Covid Coup.
It was about a month into lockdowns, April 2020, and my phone rang with an unusual number. I picked up and the caller identified himself as Rajeev Venkayya, a name I knew from my writings on the 2005 pandemic scare. Now the head of a vaccine company, he once served as Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense, and claimed to be the inventor of pandemic planning.
Venkayya was a primary author of “A National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” as issued by the George W. Bush administration in 2005. It was the first document that mapped out a nascent version of lockdowns, designed for global deployment. “A flu pandemic would have global consequences,” said Bush, “so no nation can afford to ignore this threat, and every nation has responsibilities to detect and stop its spread.”
It was always a strange document because it stood in constant contradiction to public health orthodoxies dating back decades and even a century. With it, there were two alternative paths in place in the event of a new virus: the normal path that everyone is taught in medical school (therapeutics for the sick, caution with social disturbances, calm and reason, quarantines only in extreme cases) and a biosecurity path that invoked totalitarian measures.
Those two paths existed side-by-side for a decade and a half before the lockdowns.
Now I found myself speaking with the guy who claims credit for having mapped out the biosecurity approach, which contradicted all public health wisdom and experience. His plan was finally being implemented. Not too many voices dissented, partially due to fear but also due to censorship, which was already very tight. He told me to stop objecting to the lockdowns because they have everything under control.
I asked a basic question. Let’s say we all hunker down, hide under the sofa, eschew physical meetings with family and friends, stop all gatherings of all kinds, and keep businesses and schools closed. What, I asked, happens to the virus itself? Does it jump in a hole in the ground or head to Mars for fear of another press conference by Andrew Cuomo or Anthony Fauci?
After some fallacy-filled banter about the R-naught, I could tell he was getting exasperated with me, and finally, with some hesitation, he told me the plan. There would be a vaccine. I balked and said that no vaccine can sterilize against a fast-mutating respiratory pathogen with a zoonotic reservoir. Even if such a thing did appear, it would take 10 years of trials and testing before it was safe to release to the general population. Are we going to stay locked down for a decade?
“It will come much faster,” he said. “You watch. You will be surprised.”
Hanging up, I recall dismissing him as a crank, a has-been with nothing better to do than call up poor writers and bug them.
I had entirely misread the meaning, simply because I was not prepared to understand the sheer depth and vastness of the operation now in play. All that was taking place struck me as obviously destructive and fundamentally flawed but rooted in a kind of intellectual error: a loss of understanding of virology basics.
Around the same time, the New York Times posted without fanfare a new document called PanCAP-A: Pandemic Crisis Action Plan – Adapted. It was Venkayya’s plan, only intensified, as released on March 13, 2020, three days before President Trump’s press conference announcing the lockdowns. I read through it, reposted it, but had no idea what it meant. I hoped someone could come along to explain it, interpret it, and tease out its implications, all in the interest of getting to the bottom of the who, what, and why of this fundamental attack on civilization itself.
That person did come along. She is Debbie Lerman, intrepid author of this wonderful book that so beautifully presents the best thoughts on all the questions that had eluded me. She took the document apart and discovered a fundamental truth therein. The rule-making authority for the pandemic response was not vested in public-health agencies but the National Security Council.
This was stated as plain as day in the document; I had somehow missed that. This was not public health. It was national security. The antidote under development with the label vaccine was really a military countermeasure. In other words, this was Venkayya’s plan times ten, and the idea was precisely to override all tradition and public health concerns and replace them with national security measures.
Realizing this fundamentally changes the structure of the story of the last five years. This is not a story of a world that mysteriously forgot about natural immunity and made some intellectual error in thinking that governments could shut down economies and turn them back on again, scaring a pathogen back to where it came from. What we experienced in a very real sense was quasi-martial law, a deep-state coup not only on a national but on an international level.
These are terrifying thoughts and hardly anyone is prepared to discuss them, which is why Lerman’s book is so crucial. In terms of public debate about what happened to us, we are barely at the beginning. There is now a willingness to admit that the lockdowns did more overall harm than good. Even the legacy media has started venturing out to grant permission for such thoughts. But the role of the pharmaceuticals in driving the policy and the role of the national-security state in backing this grand industrial project is still taboo.
In 21st-century journalism and advocacy designed to influence the public mind, the overwhelming concern of all writers and institutions is professional survival. That means fitting into an approved ethos or paradigm regardless of the facts. This is why Lerman’s thesis is not debated; it is hardly spoken of at all in polite society. That said, my work at Brownstone Institute has put me in close contact with many thinkers in high places. This much I can say: what Lerman has written in this book is not disputed but admitted in private.
Strange isn’t it? We saw during the Covid years how professional aspiration incentivized silence even in the face of egregious violations of human rights, including mandatory school closures that robbed children of education, followed by face-covering requirements and forced injections for the whole population. The near-silence was deafening even if anyone with a brain and a conscience knew that all of this was wrong. Not even the excuse that “We didn’t know” works anymore because we did know.
This same dynamic of social and cultural control is fully in operation now that we are through that stage and onto another one, which is precisely why Lerman’s findings have not yet made their way to polite society, to say nothing of mainstream media. Will we get there? Maybe. This book can help; at least it is now available for everyone brave enough to confront the facts. You will find herein the most well-documented and coherent presentation of answers to the core questions (what, how, why) that all of us have been asking since this hell was first visited upon us.
Unshrunk: Laura Delano’s breakaway from psychiatry
The powerful story of a psychiatric survivor turning pain into purpose
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | April 21, 2025
Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance is more than a memoir of Laura Delano’s journey through pain, survival, and recovery. It is a fearless, forensic examination of a psychiatric system that too often harms those it is meant to help.
Instead of merely recounting her own harrowing experience, Delano exposes an industry that, despite its claims of scientific rigour, frequently silences, dismisses, and pathologises those in distress.
What emerges is not just a personal reckoning, but a scathing indictment of modern psychiatry and a call for urgent reform.
As someone who has spent years reporting on the scientific shortcomings of psychiatric drugs—the flimsy trials, the regulatory capture, the financial conflicts—I’ve documented many of the system’s failures.
But I could never portray them with the visceral clarity of someone who’s lived it. Delano gives a voice to the silenced, puts flesh on the statistics, and brings coherence to the chaos so many feel when trapped inside the ‘prison’ of psychiatry.
Last September, I had the opportunity to meet Laura in Connecticut after she reached out in response to some of my investigative reporting.
In person, she was warm, grounded, and intelligent. She and her husband, Cooper Davis, radiated a quiet but unmistakable sense of hard-won purpose. It was clear they hadn’t merely survived the system—they were now working to help others navigate it, through the nonprofit Laura founded: Inner Compass Initiative.
Delano’s descent into psychiatry began at the tender age of 13. She describes a moment standing in front of a mirror, repeating to herself, “I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.”
Instead of seeing this as a young girl’s profound cry for help, psychiatry interpreted it as a pathological symptom—one that demanded medication.
From there, her life became a procession of diagnostic labels and prescriptions. She was rapidly swept into a whirlwind of psychiatric disorders—depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder—each new label reinforcing the falsehood that she was fundamentally broken.
This, I believe, strikes at the heart of psychiatry’s core failure: it strips suffering of context and meaning, and replace it with abstract diagnostic codes.
Alongside the diagnoses came the inevitable avalanche of drugs: Seroquel, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Abilify, Depakote, lithium, Klonopin, Ativan, Ambien, Celexa, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin—the list goes on. But instead of healing her, psychiatry hijacked her identity.
Even I was stunned by the sheer volume and velocity at which she was prescribed drugs. What struck me most was the absence of curiosity from clinicians who should have known better – who never paused to consider whether the treatment itself might be causing harm.
The title Unshrunk captures this journey perfectly. It’s a nod to the profession of “shrinks” while also reclaiming one’s identity—undoing the diminishment that comes from being reduced to diagnoses and drug regimens.
“This book—these pages, this story, my story—is a record that has been unshrunk,” she writes.
Throughout, Delano explains how the system instilled in her the deepening belief that something was fundamentally wrong with her—a belief reinforced at every turn by diagnoses and medications. Her story lays bare a broader truth: psychiatry has a tendency to medicalise ordinary human suffering and pathologise natural responses to life’s challenges.
I know first-hand how taboo it remains to critique psychiatry. Years ago, while producing a two-part documentary series on antidepressants for ABC TV, I spent over a year interviewing patients, researchers, and whistleblowers. We sought to expose the overstated benefits and hidden harms of psychiatric drugs.
But just before broadcast, the series was pulled. Executives feared that telling the truth might prompt people to stop taking their medication. It was a sobering reminder of how tightly controlled this conversation remains—and why voices like Delano’s are so vital.
Predictably, Unshrunk has drawn criticism from legacy media outlets like The Washington Post, which characterised it as a “treatise against psychiatric medications” and lumped it into a “highly predictable” anti-psychiatry genre.
But this knee-jerk framing only highlights how resistant our culture has become to honest, nuanced conversations about mental health.
To be clear, Delano is not “anti-psychiatry” or “anti-medication.” She has explicitly acknowledged that some people find psychiatric drugs helpful. But she also knows many have not been helped—in fact, many have been harmed. Their stories matter too. And that’s exactly what Unshrunk offers – a voice to those erased from the dominant narrative.
This intolerance of dissent is reflected in politics too. When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently questioned the safety of psychiatric drugs, Senator Tina Smith accused him of spreading “misinformation” that could discourage people from seeking treatment. But Kennedy wasn’t opposing treatment—he was calling for transparency, informed consent, and scientific accountability. As Delano’s memoir makes painfully clear, those are precisely the conversations we should be having.
Delano writes candidly about how psychiatry eroded her sense of self—how she became a “good” patient, internalising every label and obeying every directive.
“I took all of this as objective fact; who was I to question any of it?” she writes.
One especially crucial chapter confronts the now-debunked “chemical imbalance” myth—the idea that depression is caused by a deficiency in serotonin. Delano references the 2022 review in Molecular Psychiatry by Moncrieff et al., which found no convincing evidence to support the serotonin-deficiency theory.
She reflects on how the drugs impaired her capacity to think critically: “For nearly half my life, I’d been under the influence of drugs that had impaired the parts of my brain needed to process, comprehend, retain, and recall information.”
The darkest chapter in Unshrunk—and the one I found most difficult to read—is her suicide attempt. Delano recounts the moment with unflinching honesty. It hit me like a gut punch. But it’s that refusal to sanitise her pain that gives this memoir its extraordinary emotional weight.
And yet, Unshrunk is not without hope. Delano eventually emerges from the depths of despair, scarred but intact, with a renewed sense of purpose.
The pivotal moment came when Delano read Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic, a book that poses a confronting question: why, after decades of soaring psychiatric drug use, are rates of mental illness and disability still climbing?
Drawing on long-term research, Whitaker argues that while psychiatric drugs may offer short-term relief for some, they often lead to worse outcomes over time—and that, on balance, they may be causing more harm than good at a societal level.
The realisation hit Delano like a bolt of lightning: “Holy shit. It’s the fucking meds,” she writes. She wasn’t “treatment-resistant”—the treatment itself had become the source of her suffering, a case of iatrogenic injury.
Delano’s journey to withdraw from psychiatric drugs, however, is another ordeal. At first, she assumes a quick detox will bring quick relief—but she is disastrously wrong.
“The logic seemed simple at the time,” she writes. “I had no idea that I had it backward—that the fastest way to get off and stay off psychiatric drugs successfully… is to taper down slowly. And by ‘slowly’ I don’t mean over a few weeks or months. I mean potentially over years.”
It’s a lesson that remains dangerously absent from much of mainstream psychiatric care, where withdrawal symptoms are routinely mistaken for relapse.
“Coming off psychiatric drugs had been the hardest thing I’d ever done,” she recalls.
At its core, Unshrunk is about reclaiming bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice,” Delano writes—underscoring the way psychiatry frequently undermines consent and personal agency. The harm didn’t just come from the drugs, but from being denied fully informed consent regarding her treatment.
Ultimately, Delano’s message is both sobering and empowering: true healing begins when people are treated not as “broken brains,” but as whole human beings.
“I decided to live beyond labels and categorical boxes,” she writes, “and to reject the dominant role that the American mental health industry has come to play in shaping the way we make sense of what it means to be human.”
Unshrunk is a brave, unsparing account of Delano’s escape from a broken system. At times tormenting, sometimes funny, always courageous—it’s one hell of an emotional rollercoaster.
If you want to understand the lived experience behind psychiatry’s failures, this book is essential reading.
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Truth, History and Integrity
By Gilad Atzmon | March 13, 2010
… As devastating as it may be, at a certain moment in time, a horrible chapter was given an exceptionally meta-historical status. Its ‘factuality’ was sealed by draconian laws and its reasoning was secured by social and political settings. The Holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. … Read full article
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