Funding the PA is for the benefit of Israel and the EU, not the Palestinians
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | April 15, 2025
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas met with the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, in March. The meeting was replete with the usual hyperbole that still clings to the defunct two-state paradigm, the PA’s reform and funding for this purpose.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that the EU will be funding the PA with a three-year package worth $1.8 billion to support reform. According to European Commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica, “We want them to reform themselves because without reforming, they won’t be strong enough and credible in order to be an interlocutor, not for only for us, but an interlocutor also for Israel.”
The reasoning is warped.
It only spells one thing clearly: the EU wants the PA to be strong enough to act against the Palestinian people and prevent them from being their own interlocutors in a political process that concerns them much more than the PA.
Speaking about the EU funding for the PA, Kallas said, “This will reinforce the PA’s ability to meet the needs of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and prepare it to return to govern Gaza once conditions allow.” No time frames, of course, because the conditions will always depend on Israel. Funding buys time for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, the PA, which has not only neglected the needs of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, but also exacerbated their humanitarian and political neglect as evidenced in Jenin, for example, can rest assured of some more years of EU support. That is, as long as the humanitarian paradigm remains relevant to the illusory state-building funded by Brussels.
From the allocated budget, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) will receive €82 million per year.
The most telling clause in the European Commission’s statement detailing its assistance is found right at the end. “This designation shall not be construed as recognition of a State of Palestine and is without prejudice to the individual positions of the Member States on this issue.”
France’s announcement that it might recognise the State of Palestine by June this year, symbolic as the gesture is, only shows the EC’s urge to detach itself from all possibilities, no matter how remote, of Palestinian independence. Which brings one back to the big question:
Why is the EU really funding the PA’s state-building to prevent the eventual formation of a Palestinian state?
Funding a Palestinian entity for Israeli and EU purposes does not bode well for Palestinians, who are still only spoken of in terms of humanitarian matters. The political purpose is reserved only for Israel’s allies, the PA being one of them, as seen in many instances of its collaboration with the occupation state.
But Western diplomats would do well to recall that one major democratic implementation postponed repeatedly by Abbas – democratic legislative and presidential elections – has not featured once in the EU’s vision of a post-war Gaza, determined as it is to have the PA take over political authority in the enclave and bring Palestinians under different forms of misery. How scared is the EU of having Palestinians being allowed to vote freely and possibly electing alternatives that have nothing to do with the current Fatah-Hamas bipolarisation? Funding the PA indeed serves a purpose; that of destroying Palestinian democracy.
The silencing of scientific curiosity
Medical journals have became enforcers of orthodoxy—retracting genuine hypotheses while protecting proven fraud
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | April 14, 2025
As a scientific writer and researcher, I’ve witnessed the decline of medical journals firsthand. Once forums for open debate and intellectual rigour, they’ve morphed into gatekeepers, more concerned with preserving a narrow orthodoxy than pursuing truth.
My previous work has exposed how journals suppress uncomfortable questions, avoid studies that challenge dominant narratives, and operate under a peer-review system distorted by bias and external influence.
But never have I seen a more absurd example of this decay than the retraction of a hypothesis paper—yes, a hypothesis—authored by Dr. Sabine Hazan in Frontiers in Microbiology.
Her 2022 article hypothesised that ivermectin might mitigate Covid-19 severity by promoting the growth of Bifidobacterium, reducing inflammation via the gut-lung axis.
She cited preliminary observations in 24 hypoxic patients who recovered without hospitalisation after combination therapy including ivermectin.
Dr Sabine Hazan, ProgenaBiome, Ventura, CA
She made no claims of definitive proof. Instead, she proposed a mechanism worth investigating. That’s the point of a scientific hypothesis.
But in May 2023—more than a year after the article was peer-reviewed and published—the journal retracted the paper following a series of complaints on PubPeer, offering only a vague explanation about “scientific soundness.”
Seeking clarity, I contacted both the journal’s editorial office and the editor who handled the paper, Professor Mohammad Alikhani at Hamadan University.
Prof Mohammad Alikhani, Department of Microbiology, Hamadan University
Specifically, I sought an explanation for retracting a ‘hypothesis’, but I did not receive a response.
This silence is damning.
Retraction is a serious step, historically reserved for cases of fraud or clear ethical misconduct. But here, no such claim was made—nor could one be substantiated.
The journal simply erased the paper, offering no transparent justification, no engagement with the scientific process, and no accountability.
In fact, it violated the very guidelines that journals are supposed to follow.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) advises that publications should only be retracted if they contain seriously flawed or fabricated data, or plagiarism that cannot be addressed through a correction.
Hazan’s paper was transparent about its speculative nature. In a January 2023 tweet, Hazan challenged her critics.
“It’s a hypothesis. PROVE ME WRONG,” she wrote.
After all, that’s the essence of science. But the journal’s decision to retract sends a message that even theoretical propositions are now intolerable.
Having tasted blood, Hazan’s critics kept digging. In January 2025, Future Microbiology retracted another of her studies—this one examining ivermectin-based multidrug therapy.
Hazan, her co-author Australian immunologist Dr. Robert L. Clancy, and others strongly disputed the decision after the journal failed to conduct a meaningful investigation into the alleged data integrity issues.
The irony is palpable.
While pundits argued over ivermectin’s efficacy during the pandemic, Hazan was one of the few actually doing the hard work to test its effects—collecting data, proposing mechanisms, engaging with the science. And yet she’s the one being silenced!
Which begs the question – why?
Is there professional jealousy in the microbiome space? Are pharmaceutical companies, threatened by low-cost alternatives like ivermectin, pressuring journals to kill competing narratives?
If so, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should investigate. Suppressing research that could affect investor decisions—by inflating the perceived value of antivirals or vaccines—could amount to securities fraud.
While there’s no definitive evidence, the pattern is hard to ignore: two retractions, no clear misconduct, and a growing campaign to discredit a scientist whose work challenges a profitable status quo.
Whether coordinated or not, the outcome is the same – the erasure of inconvenient data.
The spinelessness of journals in these episodes is unmistakable. Why do they capitulate so readily?
Just follow the money.
Many journals are financially entangled with the pharmaceutical industry—relying on drug ads, sponsorships, and profitable reprint sales. That financial tether distorts editorial independence.
Editors, often underpaid and overstretched, are understandably risk-averse. They fear litigation. They fear social media outrage. They fear becoming the next target.
Pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, don’t hesitate to use legal threats to silence dissent because their pockets are deep—as in the case of Covaxin.
In July 2024, Bharat Biotech International Limited sued 11 authors—six of them students—and the editor of Drug Safety, Nitin Joshi, over a peer-reviewed article questioning the safety of their Covaxin vaccine.
The journal, under legal duress, retracted the paper. The authors were left to fend for themselves.
Journals are supposed to stand on principle. But, increasingly, they serve as enforcers of orthodoxy—vulnerable to financial pressure and online activists.
Let’s be honest, the trolls are part of the strategy. Anonymous complaints, often from individuals with no expertise, are weaponised to trigger retractions and smear reputations.
That’s not peer review. That’s mob rule.
The SEC must take a closer look at this ecosystem. If research is being suppressed to protect corporate revenue or manipulate investor confidence, that’s not just unethical—it’s illegal.
During his presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed this very issue, declaring that journals colluding with pharmaceutical companies might be subject to charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
“We’re gonna… file some racketeering lawsuits if you don’t start telling the truth in your journals,” he warned in 2023. It was provocative, yes—but it struck a chord with those of us watching the machinery of science betray its mission.
Retractions have become so casually executed, they’ve lost all meaning. What was once a mark of serious fraud is now a tool of reputational management.
Today, many papers are retracted not because they’re wrong, but because they’re inconvenient.
How else can one explain the demonstrably fraudulent studies funded by industry that remain published?
Whistleblower Dr. Peter Wilmshurst has spent years trying to get the MIST trial retracted—published in Circulation. It’s riddled with false claims, undeclared conflicts, and unreported adverse events, yet the journal continues to protect it.
This exposes the rot. These decisions have nothing to do with science.
They are political, financial, and reputational tools—used selectively to punish dissent.
There’s a growing list of researchers penalised—not for bad science, but for exploring uncomfortable truths.
Journals must reclaim their role as platforms for robust scientific debate. COPE must enforce its standards, not just cite them. Editors must be held accountable for vague or retaliatory retractions. And if corporate suppression of research is distorting public markets, then the SEC must act.
Because what I’m witnessing isn’t scientific curiosity—it’s narrative control. And the death of curiosity is the death of science itself.
Diana Panchenko: How Zelensky Dismantled Ukraine’s Democracy
Glenn Diesen | April 13, 2025
Diana Panchenko was Ukraine’s “journalist of the year” in 2020 and ranked as the 7th most influential woman in the country. Panchenko has been a critic of both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Zelensky’s destruction of democracy in Ukraine.
Follow Prof. Glenn Diesen:
Substack: https://glenndiesen.substack.com/
The fix is in for new Air Force F-47 — and so is the failure
By Andrew Cockburn | Responsible Statecraft | April 7, 2025
If and when it finally comes to be written decades from now, an honest history of the F-47 “fighter” recently unveiled by President Trump will doubtless have much to say about the heroic lobbying campaign that garnered the $20 billion development contract for Boeing, the corporation that has become a byword for program disasters (see the KC-46 tanker, the Starliner spacecraft, the 737 MAX airliner, not to mention the T-7 trainer.)
Boeing, which is due to face trial in June on well-merited federal charges of criminal fraud, was clearly in line for a bailout. But such succor was by no means inevitable given recent doubts from Air Force officials about proceeding with another manned fighter program at all.
“You’ve never seen anything like this,” said Trump in the March Oval Office ceremony announcing the contract award.
Well, of course we have, most obviously in recent times with the ill-starred F-35. Recall that in 2001 the Pentagon announced that the F-35 program would cost $200 billion and would enter service in 2008. Almost a quarter century later, acquisition costs have doubled, the total program price is nudging $2 trillion, and engineers are still struggling to make the thing work properly.
Thus, succeeding chapters of the F-47’s history will likely have to cover the galloping cost overruns, unfulfilled technological promises, ever-lengthening schedule shortfalls, and ultimate production cancellation when only a portion of the force had been built.
There seems little risk in predicting the F-47 — “a beautiful number,” said the 47th president — will follow the same dollar-strewn path. As Trump truthfully remarked, “we can’t tell you the price.” And don’t imagine that, if the development phase reveals that the program can’t fulfill any or most of its projected requirements, the Air Force will call it a day and kill the program. The official Air Force press release accompanying the announcement states: “This phase will produce a small number of test aircraft for evaluation. The contract also includes competitively priced options for low-rate initial production.”
In other words, the fix is in. “Low rate initial production” means that subcontracts will be spread across the political landscape, ensuring the creation of an unstoppable lobby preventing any future effort to strangle this boondoggle in its cradle.
For confirmation, look only at the F-35, 1,000 or so copies of which were cranked out before Lockheed got the go-ahead for full-scale production. In confident anticipation that nothing will interrupt the production cycle, Boeing has invested a reported $2 billion in expanding production facilities at its St. Louis, Missouri, plant, where production of the F-15EX (a costly version of the venerable F-15, originally gold-plated to sell to the Qataris) is due to end this year.
Extolling the plane’s advertised virtues, Trump singled out its presumed invisibility to radar. “America’s enemies will never see it coming,” he said.
Stealth has indeed been the holy grail of aerospace development ever since the days when Jimmy Carter sought to kill the B-1 bomber program in favor of the F-117 stealth bomber. (We did of course end up buying both.) Claims for this technology appeared to be justified when Lockheed’s F-117 diminutive bomber was advertised as having effortlessly penetrated Iraqi air defenses undetected on the first night of the 1991 Gulf War.
Only later did a GAO report reveal that in fact the planes had required the protection of a fleet of electronic warfare planes, and they missed most of their assigned targets, and furthermore failed to destroy Saddam’s air-defense network as claimed.
In the 1999 Kosovo war, the Serbs managed to knock down one F-117 and severely damage another using clever tactics and a modified ancient Soviet SAM missile system. Nowadays both the Chinese and Russians claim to have developed technologies to detect stealth intruders — there are even claims that the Chinese system could passively employ signals from Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellite array!
Nevertheless, the F-47 designers have clearly prioritized stealth, despite the fact that obligatory features, such as carrying all bombs and missiles internally, enlarge the fuselage. Hence the large nose-on profile, apparent even in the uninformative images so far released. This militates against aerodynamic performance and maneuverability, unfortunate deficiencies for a fighter.
Such carping aside, the most notable feature of the F-47 program is that it will purportedly not fly alone, but be accompanied by unmanned Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or drones, “as many as you want,” according to Trump. The Air Force plans to buy 1,000 of them, at around $30 million a pop.
Under the overall direction of the F-47 pilot, they will in theory at least be able to engage enemy planes, attack targets on the ground, or perform reconnaissance. Two contractors, General Atomics and Anduril, are already competing for the initial CCA contract and have been displaying mockups of their candidates at trade shows since last year while hurling insults at each other via social media and the trade press.
“Anduril is the Theranos of defense,” jibed General Atomics spokesman Mark Brinkley during the Air Force Association jamboree in Washington D.C. last September, referencing the infamous Palo Alto startup that fraudulently claimed to perform comprehensive medical diagnostics from a single drop of blood. Both contestants are supposed to put prototypes in the air this summer.
Pentagon insiders are not impressed either with the concept or at least progress to date. One veteran observer of technologically ambitious programs suggested to me that the Air Force staff officers supervising the CCA program may be easy prey for the contractors.
“They’re not nearly skeptical enough about General Atomics or Anduril. I don’t see any of the skepticism they should be exhibiting for pouring out this kind of money,” the observer said.
Hopefully, these glib enthusiasts will be mulling the problems associated with the software required to enable an F-47 “quarterback” pilot to oversee the operations of the wingmen drones. After all, their peers in the F-35 program are still struggling with “Technology Refresh-3,” the latest (failing) effort to make the plane’s software work adequately. Mulling other inevitable problems facing an F-47 in combat, such as surviving enemy efforts “to find you, track you, and kill you” before getting into position to deploy the unmanned aircraft with their missile loads
“I don’t know why we’re doing it, I don’t get it,” the observer concluded.
Last December, then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall suggested that the Air Force might not be able to afford a next-generation fighter as well as the collaborative drone, in addition to a next-generation refueling tanker, and that “we have to get somewhat creative…to meet the threat.” As it turned out, no creativity at all was required, as the history books will most assuredly record.
How Big Pharma Weaves Its Web
By Kim Witczak | Brownstone Institute | April 5, 2025
Inever set out to be an advocate. I wasn’t a doctor, scientist, or policy expert. I was just a regular person who, like so many, blindly trusted that our healthcare system was designed to protect us.
But life has a way of pulling us into the arena when we least expect it.
After the tragic and unexpected loss of my husband Woody to the antidepressant Zoloft he was prescribed for insomnia, I was thrust into a world I never imagined—one where medicine wasn’t solely about healing, but deeply entangled in a system that prioritizes profit over safety, buries harms, and keeps the public in the dark.
For over two decades, I’ve had a front-row seat to how this system truly operates—not the illusion of rigorous oversight we see in medical journals or glossy pharmaceutical ads, but the reality of how industry influence is woven into every stage.
I’ve met with regulators, testified before the FDA and Congress, filed a wrongful death and failure-to-warn lawsuit against Pfizer, and earned a seat on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee as a consumer representative.
I’ve also spoken at and participated in global conferences like Selling Sickness, Too Much Medicine, and the Harms in Medicine meeting in Erice, Italy—where some of the world’s leading experts acknowledge what few in mainstream medicine dare to say:
Our healthcare system isn’t about health—it’s about business.
And in this business, harm isn’t an accident. It’s built into the system.
The more I uncovered, the more I realized:
We aren’t just patients. We are customers.
And we are all trapped in Big Pharma’s spiderweb of influence.
The Spiderweb of Influence
The more I learned, the more I saw just how deeply embedded the pharmaceutical industry is—not just in drug development and marketing but in every corner of our healthcare system.
That’s why I created the Big Pharma Spider Web of Influence—to visually map out how the system is designed not to prioritize health but to sell sickness while minimizing, downplaying, or outright hiding harms.
From clinical trial design to regulatory approval, from direct-to-consumer advertising to medical education, from controlling medical journals to silencing dissenting voices, the industry has built an intricate and self-reinforcing web—one that traps doctors, patients, and even regulators in a cycle of pharmaceutical dependence.
How the Web Works
- Clinical trials are often designed, funded, and controlled by the very companies that stand to profit. They manipulate data to exaggerate benefits and obscure risks, ensuring that negative results are buried, spun, or never published at all.
- Regulatory agencies like the FDA are deeply entangled with the industry they’re supposed to oversee. More than 50% of the FDA’s budget comes from industry-paid user fees, and a revolving door ensures that many key decision-makers come from—and later return to—pharmaceutical companies.
- Medical journals depend on pharmaceutical funding through advertising, reprint sales, and industry-sponsored studies—severely limiting independent scrutiny of drug safety. Many studies are ghostwritten or crafted by paid “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) who serve as pharma’s trusted messengers.
- Doctors receive education through industry-funded programs, learning “best practices” based on treatment guidelines crafted by the very system that profits from overprescription.
- Patient advocacy groups, once independent grassroots organizations, have been co-opted by industry money, ensuring that the loudest voices often serve pharma’s interests rather than patients’ needs. I call them “astroturf” patient groups—they look like real grassroots organizations, but they’re anything but.
- Screenings and guidelines continuously expand the definitions of disease, turning more people into lifelong customers.
This isn’t about one bad actor or isolated corruption—it’s a systemic issue. The entire structure is designed to push more drugs onto the market, medicalize normal human experiences, and only acknowledge harm when it becomes too big to ignore.
It’s a brilliant business model—but a catastrophic public health strategy.
“To Sell to Everyone:” The Business Model of Medicine
If this sounds like a conspiracy, consider the bold admission made by Henry Gadsden, former CEO of Merck, in a 1976 interview with Fortune Magazine:
“The problem we have had is limiting the potential of drugs to sick people. We could be more like Wrigley’s Gum…it has long been my dream to make drugs for healthy people. To sell to everyone.”
– Former Merck CEO Henry Gadsden
Let that sink in.
This wasn’t about curing disease—it was about expanding markets. Gadsden’s vision wasn’t just to treat illness, but to medicalize everyday life—creating a cradle-to-grave model where every person, healthy or sick, became a customer for life. Just like selling a variety of gum—something for everyone. Juicy Fruit, Big Red, Doublemint, Spearmint, and so on.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Today, we live in a system where:
- Everyday emotions—sadness, worry, shyness—are rebranded as medical conditions requiring treatment.
- Preventive medicine often means lifelong prescriptions, not lifestyle changes.
- Drugs are marketed to the “worried well”, turning normal human experiences into diagnoses.
This isn’t just theory—it’s well documented. In Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels expose how pharmaceutical companies create diseases, expand diagnostic criteria, and convince the public that normal life experiences require medical intervention.
The goal?
Make medication the default—not the last resort.
Harms Are Always an Afterthought
Harms from medication are not rare, nor are they unexpected.
But in this system, they are treated as acceptable collateral damage—something to be dealt with only after the damage is done, after lives are lost or forever changed.
I’ve sat in FDA Advisory Committee meetings, reviewing new drug applications, and have seen firsthand how safety concerns are often dismissed in favor of “innovation” or “unmet medical need.”
I’ve heard industry representatives and advisory committee members argue that safety signals can be addressed post-market, meaning after a drug is already in circulation and causing harm or a required REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program upon approval.
But by the time post-market safety issues are acknowledged, it’s often too late.
We’ve seen this play out over and over:
- Opioids—marketed as “non-addictive” and pushed aggressively onto patients, leading to an epidemic of addiction and death.
- SSRIs and antidepressants—long linked to increased risks of suicide and violence, particularly in young people, yet downplayed or dismissed for decades. Other hidden harms include withdrawal syndromes and Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), conditions that many patients were never warned about.
- Antipsychotics—widely prescribed for off-label use, leading to severe metabolic and neurological side effects.
- Covid-19 vaccines—an experimental mRNA platform rushed to market, mandated, and imposed on society despite limited long-term safety data and growing concerns over harms.
Every time, the pattern is the same:
The industry sells the benefits while downplaying the risks—until those risks become too big to ignore.
By then, the drug is a blockbuster, billions have been made, and the system moves on to the next new “breakthrough.”
More Than Degrees: The Truth of Lived Experience
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in this fight is that real-world experience matters just as much as credentials.
Over the years, I’ve been invited to speak at medical schools, PhD programs, and universities, thanks to brave academics willing to challenge the narrative. I share my journey as an accidental advocate—someone who didn’t have a medical degree but discovered America’s broken drug system the hard way.
But let’s be honest—the medical world is driven by credentials. Or, as I like to say, the alphabet soup.
At conferences, attendees wear name tags listing their titles—MD, PhD, JD, MPH. It’s a quick way to size someone up, to assess credibility before even speaking. And I’ve seen it happen: people glance at my name tag, see no impressive letters after my name, and walk right by.
Years ago, I was speaking at the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference and noticed my badge read: Kim Witczak, BA.
I was horrified. Was that really necessary? Did my name tag need to remind everyone that I only had a BA?
Later, I was telling the story to a doctor friend, and he laughed.
“Next time, tell them BA stands for Bad Ass.”
And he was right.
Because real expertise doesn’t always come from an advanced degree—it comes from lived experience, from asking the right questions, from refusing to accept the status quo.
The Counterargument: But Don’t We Need Experts?
Of course, some will argue that only experts with MDs and PhDs should be trusted to shape healthcare policy.
But that assumes that the system they operate in is free from bias, conflicts of interest, or financial incentives.
The reality is that many of those with the most letters after their names are also the ones benefiting from pharma funding—whether through consulting fees, research grants, or advisory roles.
Meanwhile, patients and their families—the ones living with the consequences—are too often ignored.
That needs to change.
Asking Better Questions: Reclaiming Our Power
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s this: no one is coming to save us. The institutions meant to protect us are too entangled in the web to act with true independence.
My late husband, Woody, used to say: “Follow the money.” And when you do, the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Pharmaceutical profits—not patient well-being—drive the system. That’s why the only way to create real change is through awareness, transparency, and fundamentally shifting how we think about medicine and health.
That starts with asking better questions:
- Who funded this research?
- Does this person or institution have financial ties, intellectual bias, or self-interest that could impact their recommendations?
- Who benefits from this treatment?
- What aren’t we being told?
- What are the long-term consequences of this drug or intervention?
- Are there safer, non-drug alternatives being ignored because they aren’t profitable?
But asking the right questions isn’t enough.
We have to stop outsourcing our health to a system built on financial incentives and guided by corporate interests.
We must demand full transparency, challenge the status quo, and recognize that sometimes the best medicine isn’t a pill but a deeper understanding of what our bodies truly need.
Because once you see the web, you can’t unsee it.
And once you recognize how deeply medicine has been shaped by profit, you’ll realize the most important question isn’t just “What can I take?”—it’s “Who benefits if I do?”
Final Thoughts: Tearing Down the Web
I never wanted to be in this fight, but once you see the web, you can’t unsee it. That’s why I continue to speak out, to challenge the system, and to push for real accountability.
Because the stakes aren’t theoretical. They’re deeply personal.
For me, this fight began over two decades ago with Woody. But for countless others, it begins the moment they or someone they love is caught in the web—trusting a system that was never truly designed to protect them.
It’s time to tear down the web.
And it starts with seeing it for what it really is.
HHS Ousts Peter Marks, Sending Vaccine Stocks Tumbling and Biopharma Lamenting Loss of ‘Ally’ at FDA
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 31, 2025
Pharma stocks tumbled today after Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the agency within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responsible for authorizing vaccines, resigned under pressure from his new boss, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy,” an HHS official said in a statement.
Shares of Moderna, BioNTech, Novavax and Pfizer declined 11%, 7%, 6% and 2%, respectively, on the news, Fast Company reported. STAT News reported that Marks’ departure “is a worst-case scenario realized” for investors and “a biopharma industry that saw him as an ally.”
“Given Dr. Marks’ influence on the development of biologics and uncertainty as to who will replace him and how his legacy might continue, his departure will create a significant near-term overhang,” William Blair analyst Matt Phipps told Reuters.
The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry lobbying group, said it was “deeply concerned” Marks’ resignation would “broadly impact the development of new, transformative therapies to fight diseases for the American people.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the reaction to Marks’ departure on the part of the markets and the pharmaceutical industry is indicative of the influence Big Pharma had over the FDA. He said:
“Marks gave an over $100 billion gift to Pfizer and Moderna via the woefully undertested and outright dangerous COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. So, yes, for the short term, I would imagine that some investors would not like his departure from the FDA.
“Marks’ departure also signals a shift from ‘sick care’ and ‘customers for life’ where, unfortunately, Pharma invests now, to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ where everyone benefits from ending chronic disease in the U.S.”
John Gilmore, executive director of the Autism Action Network, welcomed Marks’ departure. “The American people are well-served by Marks’ resignation.” Gilmore cited the “institutional failure” of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) “to use the highest standards for evaluating the safety and efficacy of products that are injected in almost all American children.”
Marks has led the FDA’s CBER since 2012 and “played a key role,” The Wall Street Journal reported, in Operation Warp Speed in 2020, leading to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines.
In his resignation letter, Marks wrote: “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Marks’ ‘support of immunizations conflicted with Kennedy’s skepticism’
According to the Journal, an HHS official gave Marks a choice between resigning or being fired. His resignation is effective April 5. Marks wanted to remain in his position, but “his support of immunizations conflicted with Kennedy’s skepticism.”
“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety. and security,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter.
Marks said he was “willing to work to address” Kennedy’s concerns on vaccine safety, including through a series of public meetings, but that these proposals were rejected. He also accused Kennedy of spreading “misinformation and lies” during the “ongoing multistate measles outbreak.”
But in a post on X, Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, said that while Marks “claimed he wanted to stop misinformation,” he “refused all offers to meet with the ‘misinformation spreaders’ to settle the question on just who is spreading the misinformation.”
While Marks claimed he was willing to address questions on vaccine safety, he also wrote, “Efforts currently being advanced by some on the adverse health effects of vaccination are concerning.”
One day before Marks’ resignation, Kennedy announced the creation of a new sub-agency under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to focus on vaccine injuries — part of a broader restructuring of public health agencies, including the FDA.
In February, Kennedy promised that under his watch, HHS and CDC would develop a better system for tracking vaccine injuries.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that unnamed sources within the CDC said the agency was planning to study the possible link between vaccines and autism. The story triggered negative mainstream news reports claiming the study isn’t needed.
Last week, The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reported that HHS had tapped researcher David Geier — a researcher and expert on the connections between toxic exposures and autism — to lead a study of possible links between vaccines and autism. The Post and other media outlets used the opportunity to attack Geier and the need for such a study.
Marks’ resignation also came as the FDA is considering a petition a group of scientists submitted earlier this year, calling upon the FDA to suspend or withdraw the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Marks ‘became a cheerleader for the jab’
Writing on Substack, investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., said it’s “evident there was a significant clash over vaccine safety” that led to Marks’ resignation. She said Marks’ departure “may be an opportunity for the FDA to refocus on its mission of protecting public health rather than rubber-stamping new vaccine approvals.”
Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher agreed. “Those who believe vaccine safety must not be questioned do not belong in our regulatory agencies. When it comes to injectable products, safety is more important than blind faith in vaccine ideology.”
According to The New York Times, while Marks “was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic,” he was criticized “for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.”
The Times cited Marks’ role in pressuring two FDA scientists to approve full licensure of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, leading to the researchers’ resignation. Pfizer’s vaccine was fully licensed in August 2021 — one day later, the Biden administration mandated COVID-19 vaccination for military service members.
The rushed licensure of the Pfizer vaccine was the topic of a congressional hearing last year in which Marks testified. In a post on X Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) wrote, “Instead of verifying safety and efficacy of the shots, Marks swept things under the rug and became a cheerleader for the jab.”
“In order to get the vaccines to people in need when thousands of people were dying, we actually allowed the safety to be authorized with just two months of median follow-up, rather than the normal six to 12. But we were confident that that would capture adverse events,” Marks testified at last year’s hearing.
‘It was clear that he did not want to know about our injuries’
While Marks was actively engaged in the licensure of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, he “remained steadfast” in dismissing concerns about injuries related to the COVID-19 vaccines as “misinformation,” Demasi wrote.
In 2023, The BMJ wrote that “more than once” during FDA meetings, Marks “expressed confusion about why it would matter to doctors whether or not regulators acknowledged that a condition might be related to the vaccine.”
Documents CHD obtained last year through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that Marks was aware of COVID-19 vaccine injuries in early 2021 when several vaccine injury victims emailed him for help. Marks blew off scheduled meetings with them.
According to TrialSite News, even though Marks was aware of the growing number of COVID-19 vaccine injuries, “vaccine injury became a political hot potato under the Biden administration,” leading Marks to abandon the vaccine-injured.
Brianne Dressen, co-founder of React19, an advocacy group for the vaccine-injured, sustained serious injuries after participating in a clinical trial for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 and later sought meetings with Marks but was rebuffed.
“Constant emails and calls with Marks … sent while I was in constant pain, literally begging for help, begging for them to help others, begging for a lifeline. A lifeline that never ever came,” Dressen said.
Dr. Danice Hertz, a retired gastroenterologist from California injured by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, also communicated with Marks but said he “brushed off anyone who contacted him regarding vaccine side effects.”
“He systematically refused to hear our pleas for acknowledgment and help,” Hertz said. “This is why the medical community is unaware of these injuries and cannot help us. One would think that the FDA would want to know about serious adverse reactions to the novel COVID vaccines. I can say from first-hand experience that they don’t … It was clear that he did not want to know about our injuries.”
Dressen said it “didn’t matter what we said or how we said it, COVID vaccine injuries were not a priority at the FDA. Didn’t matter if it was safety signals for MIS-V, dysautonomia, neuropathy, tinnitus or reports of suicides. It was never enough. We begged, we pleaded, we pushed as hard as we could, and came up with nothing.”
According to Demasi, Marks instead “blurred the line between regulation and promotion” by participating in FDA videos promoting the COVID-19 vaccines and by authorizing COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for children without sufficient testing.
“Without randomized data regarding clinical outcomes, he repeatedly approved COVID boosters for kids as young as 6 months,” Dr. Vinay Prasad, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on Substack, calling these “some of the biggest regulatory errors in the 21st century.”
Demasi said Marks “repeatedly pointed to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as proof of rigorous safety monitoring, yet failed to improve its efficiency.”
During last year’s congressional hearing, Marks claimed that numerous false reports of vaccine injuries are submitted to VAERS, a government-run database. However, he acknowledged, “We probably have not done a good enough job of communicating sometimes the actual numbers of deaths versus what’s in VAERS.”
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.
New Info on How the Feds Helped Censor a Bombshell
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 2, 2025
The US House Judiciary Committee has released internal chat logs, that show the FBI moved into cover-up mode the very day the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, on October 14, 2020.
The logs, first reported about by journalists Michael Shellenberger and Catherine Herridge, reveal that the FBI employees were immediately instructed “not to discuss the Biden matter,” while an intelligence analyst who, during a call with Twitter, accidentally confirmed that the story, i.e., the laptop, was real, was placed under a “gag order.”
The reason the analyst, who was with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, was able to so quickly confirm the reporting was based on credible information was the fact the FBI had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop several months earlier.
Big Tech platforms – notably Twitter and Facebook – then started censoring the article, branding it falsely “Russian disinformation.” By maintaining the “no comment” policy instead of confirming that the laptop was real and under investigation, the FBI was in effect tacitly promoting the false narrative about foreign interference.
These moves originated from the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was shut down earlier this year for its activities related to censorship through pressure on social platforms.
The laptop scandal was unfolding during a crucial time in the 2020 campaign and represents one of the most egregious publicly known examples of political censorship of free speech and media orchestrated by government agencies.
The chat logs that have now been published reveal that one of the FBI staff involved in the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was Bradley Benavides.
Only weeks prior, Benavides featured in another controversy: that time in what appeared to be a smear campaign against Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, who were allegedly “advancing Russian disinformation.”
At the time, the senators just so happened to be investigating Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments.
A letter the Judiciary Committee sent Benavides in June 2023, shows that he had by that time gone through the Big Tech-Big Government “revolving door” – and was senior risk manager at Amazon.
Trump’s Foreign Aid Suspension Unnerves Washington, not Recipients. Part 1
By Simon Chege Ndiritu – New Eastern Outlook – April 2, 2025
On January 20th, 2025, Donald Trump paused US foreign assistance for 90 days. This move was followed by the suspension of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), through which most US foreign assistance was channeled.
The ‘Donor’ Protesting
Surprisingly, the recipients ignored this suspension, leaving Washington to protest it, which shows that parties in Washington have been the chief beneficiaries of this aid. Meanwhile, some in the recipient countries do not perceive the suspended assistance as worth bemoaning but replacing and moving on. While Trump has repeatedly accused other countries of ripping off the US through aid, using the term ‘development assistance’ to refer to this money that is never used to build roads, bridges, power plants, or buildings is quite ironic. It shows that ‘development’ means something else to Washington. According to USAID’s localization report released in 2023, over 90% of its money went to its international partners in and around Washington.
Therefore, only 10% reaches targeted communities, and some end up funding opium production and pedophile-run children’s orphanages, among others. The US and Western Europe frame Africa as surviving on aid, which is only a colonial ploy. In response to Trump’s suspension, some Kenyans recognized that America’s foreign aid helps Washington and that the US is an unreliable partner. Surprisingly, Kenyan media coverage recognizes the need to move on from Washington’s posturing and find sustainable funding sources.
Trump’s Cutting Funds for Contractors in Washington
Some Kenyans have been baffled by Trump’s suspension of aid, noting how it gave Washington unsolicited influence. For instance, an opinion sent to Kenya’s Daily Nation after Trump’s suspension revealed that the sender was baffled by the White House, since the aid gave the US soft power and influence. The opinion email proceeded to suggest that Trump’s America is cash-strapped due to its senseless tariff war with China. Noteworthy, the US received funds from Europeans before passing the bulk of it to Washington-based contractors, emphasizing the importance of this aid to America. It has been an open secret that Western aid helps the donors and not the recipients. Trump’s move will adversely affect American businesses, even as noted by an FP article from May 2022, which revealed that foreign aid was funding a bubble in Washington.
Therefore, his suspension runs against his America First Policy; this drastic move must be informed by a more significant concern for the US empire, such as China. An article authored by Nicholas Okumu, a Kenyan orthopedic surgeon for the Star Newspaper, steered clear of Trump’s actions, and their motivations and focused on how Kenya should respond. Okumu observed that American aid has always been a tool for political leverage and economic self-interest, insisting that Kenya should seek sustainable ways of funding its projects instead of relying on Washington’s unpredictable and ineffective assistance. US aid only yields minimal tangible benefits for Africans, as it is fashioned to prioritize American commercial interests, for instance, by awarding contracts to US firms and undermining industries in recipient countries.
US Aid’s Vicious Cycle
Issuing the US development assistance, including the part disbursed through USAID, starts by leading the audience into a tunnel vision of how the country is planning an extensive (supposedly) altruistic program to alleviate pressing challenges in poor countries. At this stage, audiences are not informed that Washington created the challenge or wants to enrich its contractors without addressing the problem. For instance, details that Washington’s Pentagon had bombed Al-Shifa pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Sudan in 1998, hence preventing millions from accessing health supplies, are hidden. The aid ends with money being spent in Washington and nothing being achieved for recipient communities, even while a justification for an enormous investment is created. Washington does not care if people access medical supplies, but whether its contractors can benefit from purporting to supply them.
A good example may include the repeated cycle of USAID’s Global Health Supply Chain Cycle. The first cycle, conceived in 2015 and worth $9.5 billion, ended without substantial results and was used in 2024 to justify a new one worth $17 billion. In the beginning, Washington’s media machine told audiences how USAID planned the Global Health Supply Program, which was designed to solve the problem of lifesaving health supplies being inaccessible to poor countries. The empty hype in this endeavor may have been detected in the statement that the project was supposed to “shake up global health contracting,” meaning the primary interest was not to alleviate supply problems but to award a massive contract to the main contractor, Chemonics International.
The project’s value of $9.5 billion had been dispensed three years later and was spent on fraud and inefficiencies. After 2017, the main contractor received a deadline extension and an additional $2 billion without delivering substantial results. An investigative report found that Chemonics International’s procurement reviewers had made up figures to report that 80% of the contracts had been delivered. Thirty-nine people had been indicted with fraud, but the main contractor escaped with a slap on the wrist by paying only $3.1 million to the justice department. Therefore, Washington’s aid benefited a contractor who used a façade of delivering aid to other countries. To attest to the failure of the first project cycle, which started in 2015, USAID launched a similar $17 billion project, dubbed NextGen, by signing contracts for delivering ‘lifesaving supplies around the globe.’ It is Ironic for anyone to think that Washington, which bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998 and a trauma hospital in Afghanistan in 2015, really cares whether people can access medical suppliers. Noteworthy, most countries are unable to produce medical supplies because America’s big Pharma monopolizes them through patents.
Going Forward
USAID has always been tied to procuring from the US, making recipient countries fail to develop industries that can organically respond to local challenges. For instance, American laws mandate that food aid be purchased from American farmers and delivered using American-flagged vessels, which means farmers in the recipient countries lose business. Similarly, other industries that receive aid from the US can also collapse, which limits Africans’ development. The deleterious effects of the US aid programs can explain the donors’ insistence on issuing them out, meaning that Africans should not view Trump’s suspension of aid as a tragedy. Instead, it is an opportunity for reflection on how American aid should be replaced, since it is ineffective and unreliable. The US will permanently halt its aid when it does not stand to gain. Therefore, African governments must seek ways to finance their projects without relying on Western aid.
How Bernie Sanders and the Democrats Made Elon Musk the Richest Man in the World
By Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute | April 1, 2025
Just before Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) started their ongoing series of rallies against Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, Sanders stopped by Face the Nation on CBS and hilariously exclaimed in feigned outrage:
“We’re looking at a rapid growth of oligarchy. We’re looking at a rapid growth of authoritarianism. And I fear that we’re looking at a rapid growth of kleptocracy as well. And I’m going to do everything I can to work with my supporters all over this country to stand up and fight back to make sure we have an economy that works for everybody, not just Elon Musk.”
All I could do is laugh, as Bernie Sanders specifically and the other Democrats generally are the ones who made the economy work so well for Elon Musk.
The $465 million Energy Department loan under President Barack Obama that saved Tesla from bankruptcy in 2010 emerged from the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which was adopted because Bernie Sanders and all the Democrats in the Senate voted for it (except Debbie Stabenow and a half-dozen conservative Republicans). Further, Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (which all the Senate Democrats voted for, including Bernie Sanders) included the $7500/EV subsidy that put $1.5 billion in Elon’s wallet. Nearly all Republicans voted against it.
And Musk’s Tesla gains more than $1 billion dollars annually from carbon tax credits passed by Democrats in California in the first decade of the century and which was expanded by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (which Sanders and all Democrats passed on a party-line vote in the Senate, and AOC and her Democratic colleagues voted for in the House).
The Washington Post reported on February 26 that Musk received some $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits in the past two decades, most from the federal government funded by Democrats (and some from Democrat-run California), often with strong Republican opposition. And most of these subsidies were realized during President Biden’s term.
Sanders complains constantly about Musk being a billionaire, but you don’t have to be a math major to understand that it’s a just smidge easier to become a billionaire when the government hands you $38 billion. Of course, Sanders and his touring sidekick Ocasio-Cortez work for a government that takes in $5,485 billion from people for almost nothing and somehow still runs a deficit of $1,781 billions every year. So maybe they don’t have the competency to pull that kind of math off.
Sanders and AOC seem to think it was the Republicans who fought for all those green energy subsidies and carbon swap programs. They seem to think the Republicans wanted to keep money flowing to NASA because of the GOP’s fond memories of JFK sending astronauts to the moon, and did not work to end the wasteful agency. But in reality it was Democrats who kept funding flowing to NASA, resulting in Space X scoring huge multi-billion federal space contracts.
If truth in advertising laws were being enforced, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s nationwide “Rally Against Oligarchy” would instead be labeled “Rally Against the Oligarchy We’re Building.”
I don’t think Elon Musk is a Nazi; I think he’s a highly talented tax dollar harvester. But if he is a Nazi, he is the Democrats’ Nazi. Democrats made him the richest man in the world and saved his businesses from bankruptcy with massive government subsidies championed by the Democrats. They need to own this, because they can’t deny it.
Instead, many of the same Democrats who voted for the politicians who made Musk the richest man in the world now think that a massive pogrom against Musk is a successful strategy to resist Trump’s policies and oppose “fascism.” Uh huh.
Nothing says “I’m opposing fascism” like spray-painting a swastika on a Tesla owned by a Jewish dude. Three quarters of all the swastikas being publicly painted across the world today are being painted by Democrats in America on Teslas, and the other quarter are being painted by the remnants of the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade that has been absorbed into the Ukrainian National Army, a group the Democrats back to the hilt with your tax dollars.
The world’s swastikas being painted these days are being scrawled or funded by the Democratic Party within a rounding error of 100% of the global total. For the first time in many years I went over to the Stormfront.org webpage (a page run by open neo-Nazis) and found them positively bitchy with suppressed jealousy about how Democrats have managed to spread their message so much further than the Mädelschaft of goobers who run that website.
Meanwhile, the captive media fact-checkers acknowledge, “At least 10 Tesla dealerships, charging stations and facilities have been hit by vandals,” along with the vandalization of hundreds of cars of [private] Tesla owners, but simultaneously claim there’s “no evidence of coordinated vandalism.” It’s got to sting when Democrats can pull off a slow-motion, global Krystallnacht against Tesla when the Schutzstaffel-wannabes have been so unsuccessful for so many decades. Meanwhile, Democrats get wild cheers from The Daily Show audience for their ongoing swastika pogrom.
I predict Stormfront’s next published story will be a worried report about the global shortage of swastikas, accompanied by a request for the Democrats to refund a quota of some of the swastikas back so American neo-Nazis can stop swastika rationing.
There’s a reason Elon Musk’s companies faced twenty different investigations by multiple government agencies under the Biden administration and most of those investigations just went away once Trump took office, and it wasn’t because of Elon’s criminal conduct. It was the criminal conduct of Washington and its lawfare. That’s part of the plan, too.
Elon backed the “wrong” party, according to the Democrats. They villainize Musk and the Koch brothers but not Bill Gates, John Kerry, and George Soros. Their vilification of billionaires is notably and risibly selective.
The latter are their bread-and-butter while the former fund their opposition. Washington politics long ago ceased to be an ideological battle, succumbing fully to a team sport.
We’re on a Highlander course for political parties in America: There can be only one.
In at least one sense, we’re already there; Trump and his cabinet are all 2004 Democrats, with a Kennedy in charge of the world’s largest welfare agency and no mandate to cut even a dime of welfare spending. That’s what the “conservative” Republican Party has become. America has a uniparty, and the media wants to make us choose either the Party of Caesar or the Party of Pompey, but both are on the same path to centralization of power in Washington.
How To Claim Your Specialty Suffers From “Climate Change”
And get government money for your pain
By William M Briggs | March 26, 2025
I’ve told you innumerable times that scientists are good at finding evidence which supports their fancies, and just as lousy, or lousier because of their egos, than others when finding evidence which kills their darlings. As you know, the rage in grant-funded academia is “climate change”. Because of the evidence-finding powers of scientists and the great flow of your money, as I’ve shown many, many (many) times, scientists have “discovered” every evil thing is caused by “climate change”. Today the evil thing is lung disease.
The peer-reviewed NIH-grant-funded paper is “Global warming risks dehydrating and inflaming human airways” by Edwards and others in Nature Communications Earth & Environment. Abstract opens with these two contradictory sentences:
Global warming increases water evaporation rates from planetary ecosystems. Here, we show that evaporation rates encountered during human breathing in dehydrating atmospheres promote airway inflammation and potentially exacerbate lung diseases.
Global warming—a refreshing use of the old term, instead of the ill-defined “climate change”—is supposed to increase, not decrease, water vapor content of the atmosphere. Which would make the air wetter, not drier. Here is the old, pre-Trump nervous EPA on this:
Water vapor is another greenhouse gas and plays a key role in climate feedbacks because of its heat-trapping ability. Warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air. Therefore, as greenhouse gas concentrations increase and global temperatures rise, the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere also increases, further amplifying the warming effect.7
Indeed, water vapor, i.e. humidity, at the surface was expected to increase, even in dry and semi-arid areas. Take, for example, the peer-reviewed paper “Increase in Tropospheric Water Vapor Amplifies Global Warming and Climate Change” by Patel and somebody with a name too long to retype. They say “Most regions show positive trends in the annual mean tropospheric water vapor,” etc. The troposphere is where you and I breathe, dear reader.
Yet, others say there hasn’t been any change in moisture. Here’s an article by NCAR (I spent a summer there in the late 1990s, working on climate model skill) with the laconic title “Climate change isn’t producing expected increase in atmospheric moisture over dry regions“.
The laws of thermodynamics dictate that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, but new research has found that atmospheric moisture has not increased as expected over arid and semi-arid regions of the world as the climate has warmed.
The findings are particularly puzzling because climate models have been predicting that the atmosphere will become more moist, even over dry regions. If the atmosphere is drier than anticipated, arid and semi-arid regions may be even more vulnerable to future wildfires and extreme heat than projected.
So one science authority says the air you breathe is growing wetter, and one says it isn’t. Nobody says it’s decreasing. Best I could find was one source saying there was a “weakened” increase. Which is still an increase. There seems to be more agreement that the moisture in the stratosphere, where nobody breathes (unaided), has decreased a bit.
How, then, did our authors get the dry air they needed? By simulating it. I kid you not. “The numerical simulations for urban/rural VPD are carried out using the Community Earth System Model (CESM) version 2.1.” And so on.
After blowing some words explaining how people breathe, and then harassing some poor mice by forcing them to breath extra-dry air to prove their point, Edwards and his pals write “Together with climate model simulations, these findings suggest that most of the United States will be at elevated risk of airway inflammation by the latter half of this century.”
Suggest. Suggest. Suggest.
You paid for this.
Now I am sure they are right, or right enough, about how dry air can cause airway irritation. The vivid red color of the inflamed trachea they use as an illustration is impressive. They even give us some math, and who doesn’t love a few good old-fashioned equations? Airway irritation is their specialty, and I would not want to take the glory from them over how throats crave moisture.
But they don’t know squat about the climate. Though they must have known their careers would be enhanced if they could tie their specialty to “climate change”, which they have been told to believe is bad, and therefore do believe.
A mere tying together of “climate change” and throats is not sufficient, though. If they wrote a paper that said “Climate change will improve breathing”, because moisture will increase, they’d be hounded from their offices. Maybe have some lunatic nitwit activists smearing paint on their cars or FOIAing their emails, which they’d probably have to turn over, given their work was government (i.e. you) funded: “A portion of this research was funded at UNC by NIH grants R01HL125280, P01HL164320, and P30DK065988.”
What makes it worse, is that if it’s true that dry areas are worse for man, then we should see a nice signal in actual data. Here, I don’t know what I don’t know, so I can’t say for sure chronic lower respiratory disease is related. I can say, given CDC’s tracking of mortality rates of it by state, that the death rates-humidity signal is far from clear. Hawaii, which is humid, has the smallest rate. Oklahoma, also humid, has the highest. Nevada and Arizona, both dry, are in the middle.
Pneumonitis, which is lung inflammation, doesn’t seem to be big enough to track, so I couldn’t find much on the geographic distribution of it. One paper in Japan said moister areas, not drier, are more common. Maybe there are better diseases to look for than pneumonitis.
Well, that’s not my job. It was the authors’. They owed us actual observations that show how people out in the world, and not mice hooked to tubes, are affected by drier and wetter air. Instead, they stuffed what they knew (which I don’t question) about lungs and what they hoped was true about the climate into models, ran the models, forgot that all models only say what they’re told to say, then declared the models showed them their worst fears were realized.
This is how it works. This is how your money is blown. This is why government funding of science has to end.
USAID and the Architecture of Perception
By Joshua Stylman | February 16, 2025
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has long portrayed itself as America’s humanitarian aid organization, delivering assistance to developing nations. With an annual budget of nearly $40 billion and operations in over 100 countries, it represents one of the largest foreign aid institutions in the world. But recent disclosures reveal its true nature as something far more systematic: an architect of global consciousness. Consider: Reuters, one of the world’s most trusted news sources, received USAID funding for ‘Large Scale Social Deception’ and ‘Social Engineering Defence.’ While there’s debate about the exact scope of these programs, the implications are staggering: a division of one of the world’s most relied-upon sources for objective reporting was paid by a US government agency for systemic reality construction. This funding goes beyond traditional media support, representing a deliberate infrastructure for discourse framing that fundamentally challenges the concept of ‘objective’ reporting.
But it goes deeper. In what reads like a Michael Crichton plot come to life, the recent USAID revelations show a staggering reach of narrative control. Take Internews Network, a USAID-financed NGO that has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive network, ‘working with’ 4,291 media outlets. In just one year, they produced 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and ‘trained’ over 9,000 journalists. This isn’t just funding – it’s a systematic infrastructure of consciousness manipulation.
The revelations show USAID funding both the Wuhan Lab’s gain-of-function research and the media outlets that would shape the story around what emerged from it. Backing organizations that would fabricate impeachment evidence. Funding both the election systems that facilitate outcomes and the fact-checkers that determine which discussions about those outcomes are permitted. But these disclosures point to something far more significant than mere corruption.
These revelations didn’t emerge from nowhere – they come from government grant disclosures, FOIA requests, and official records that aren’t even hidden, just ignored. As my old friend Mark Schiffer noted the other day, ‘The most important truths today cannot be debated – they must be felt as totalities.’ The pattern, once seen, cannot be unseen. Some may question DOGE’s methods or the rapid pace of these disclosures, and those constitutional concerns deserve serious discussion. But that’s a separate conversation from what these documents reveal. The revelations themselves – documented in official records and grant disclosures – are undeniable and should shock anyone who values truth. The means of exposure matter far less than what’s being exposed: one of the largest narrative control operations in history.
No domain is untouched – markets, tech, culture, health, and obviously, media – and you’ll find the same design. Intelligence agencies are deeply embedded in each domain because shaping how we perceive reality is more powerful than controlling reality itself
Just as fiat currency replaced real value with declared value, we now see the same pattern everywhere: fiat science replaces inquiry with predetermined conclusions, fiat culture replaces organic development with curated influence, fiat history replaces lived experience with manufactured narratives. We live in an era of fiat everything – where reality itself is declared, not discovered.. And just as they create artificial scarcity in monetary systems, they manufacture false choices everywhere else – presenting us with artificial binaries that obscure the true complexity of our world. As Schiffer wrote elsewhere, reality no longer requires consensus, only coherence. But there’s a crucial distinction: real coherence emerges naturally across multiple domains, reflecting deeper truths that cannot be fabricated. The coherence imposed by perception management isn’t truth – it’s a controlled discourse engineered for consistency, not discovery. The USAID receipts now provide concrete evidence of how this manufactured coherence is built: a scripted reality where the appearance of logic is more important than actual substance.
This isn’t just pattern matching – it’s pattern prediction. Just as algorithms learn to recognize and anticipate behavioral patterns, those who understand this system’s architecture can see its next moves before they’re made. The question isn’t whether something is “true” or “false” – it’s understanding how information flows shape consciousness itself.
To understand how deep this goes, let’s examine their methodology. As Dr. Sherri Tenpenny and others have meticulously documented through FOIA requests and government grant disclosures, the pattern emerges through two primary vectors of control:
Information Control:
- $34 million to Politico (which as Tenpenny notes, struggled to make payroll without this funding)
- Extensive payments to New York Times
- Direct funding to BBC Media Action
- $4.5 million to Kazakhstan to combat “disinformation”
Health and Development:
- $84 million to Clinton Foundation health initiatives
- $100 million for AIDS treatment in Ukraine
- Funding for contraceptive programs in developing nations
Cultural Programming:
- $20 million to Sesame Street in Iraq
- $68 million to World Economic Forum
- $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala
- Global cultural initiatives (millions spread across LGBTQ programs in Serbia, DEI projects in Ireland, transgender arts in Colombia and Peru, and tourism promotion in Egypt)
What emerges is not just a list of expenditures, but a blueprint for global reality architecture: From Kazakhstan to Ireland, from Serbia to Peru, from Vietnam to Egypt – there isn’t a corner of the world untouched by this system. This isn’t merely a distribution of resources, but a strategic infrastructure of global influence. Each allocation—whether to media outlets, health initiatives, or cultural programs – represents a carefully placed node in a network designed to shape perception across multiple domains. First, control the flow of information through media funding. Then, establish legitimacy through health and development programs. Finally, reshape social structures through cultural programming. The end goal isn’t just to influence what people think, but to determine the boundaries of what can be thought – and to do so on a planetary scale.
For those who’ve been studying the architecture of censorship, like Mike Benz has been documenting for years, none of this comes as a surprise. It’s perfect symmetry: we knew about the censorship. Now we’re seeing the receipts. One hand feeds them talking points, the other hand feeds them our taxpayer dollars. This isn’t speculation; it’s documented fact. Even Wikipedia’s own funding database contains over 45,000 reports tied to USAID – many detailing corruption, media influence, and financial manipulation. The evidence has always been there, but it was ignored, dismissed, or buried under the very fact-checking apparatus USAID funds. These weren’t crackpot theories; they were warnings. And now, we finally have the receipts.
And it doesn’t stop at controlling information. USAID isn’t just shaping media portrayals – it’s funding the systems that enforce them. Last week, Benz broke a bombshell: USAID gives twice as much money ($27 million) to the fiscal sponsor of the group controlling Soros-funded prosecutors than Soros himself gives ($14 million). This isn’t about one billionaire’s influence – it’s about state-backed enforcement of scripted accounts. The same network that dictates what you can think is dictating who prosecutes crime, what laws are enforced, and who faces consequences.
USAID’s influence isn’t just about funding media control—it extends to direct political interference. It didn’t just send aid to Brazil – it funded censorship, backed left-wing activists, and helped rig the 2022 election against Bolsonaro.
Benz revealed that the agency waged a “holy war of censorship,” systematically suppressing Bolsonaro supporters online while bolstering opposition voices. Millions flowed to NGOs pushing leftist framing, including the Felipe Neto Institute, which received U.S. funding while Bolsonaro allies were deplatformed. USAID also bankrolled Amazon-based activist groups, financed media campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion, and funneled money into Brazilian organizations that pushed for stricter internet regulations.
This wasn’t aid—it was election interference disguised as democracy promotion. USAID used American tax dollars to decide Brazil’s future, and it likely deployed similar tactics in many other countries—all under the guise of humanitarian assistance.
And it’s not just abroad. While USAID’s defenders claim it’s a tool for charity and development in poor nations, the evidence suggests something much more insidious. It’s a $40 billion driver of regime change overseas – and now, evidence points to its involvement in regime change efforts at home. Alongside the CIA, USAID appears to have played a role in the 2019 impeachment of Trump – an illegal effort to overturn a U.S. election using the same tools of perception sculpting and political engineering it deploys abroad.
Left vs right, vaxxed vs unvaxxed, Russia vs Ukraine, believer vs skeptic (on any topic) – these false dichotomies serve to fragment our understanding while reality itself is far more nuanced and multidimensional. Each manufactured crisis spawns not just reactions, but reactions to those reactions, creating endless layers of derivative meaning built on artificial foundations.
The real power isn’t in manufacturing individual facts, but in creating systems where false facts become self-reinforcing. When a fact-checker cites another fact-checker who cites a “trusted source” that’s funded by the same entities funding the fact-checkers, the pattern becomes clear. The truth isn’t in any individual claim – it’s in recognizing how the claims work together to create a closed system of artificial reality.
Take the mRNA vaccine debate for example: The pattern manifests before the explanation – people passionately debate efficacy without realizing the entire framework was constructed. First, they fund the research. Then they fund the media to shape the narrative. Even skeptics often fall into their trap, arguing about effectiveness rates while accepting their basic premise. The moment you debate ‘vaccine efficacy,’ you’ve already lost – you’re using their framework to discuss what is, in reality, an experimental gene therapy. By accepting their terminology, their metrics, their framing of the discussion itself, you’re playing in their constructed reality. Each layer of control is designed not just to influence opinions, but to preemptively structure how those opinions can be formed.
Like learning to spot a staged photo or hearing a false note in music, developing a reliable bullshit detector requires pattern recognition. Once you start seeing how narratives are constructed – how language is weaponized, how frameworks are built – it changes the lens with which you view the whole world. The same intelligence agencies embedding themselves in every domain that shapes our understanding aren’t just controlling information flow – they’re programming how we process that information itself.
The recursive theater plays out in real time. When USAID announced funding cuts, BBC News rushed to amplify humanitarian concerns with dramatic headlines about HIV patients and endangered lives. What they didn’t mention in their reporting? USAID is their top funder, bankrolling BBC Media Action with millions in direct payments. Watch how the system protects itself: the largest recipient of USAID media funding creates emotional propaganda about USAID’s importance while obfuscating their financial relationship in their reporting.
This institutional self-defense illustrates a crucial pattern: organizations funded for reality construction protect themselves through layers of misdirection. When presented with evidence, the fact-checking apparatus funded by these same systems springs into action. They’ll tell you that these payments were for standard “subscriptions,” that programs promoting gender ideology are really just about “equality and rights.” But when USAID awards $2 million to Asociación Lambda in Guatemala for “gender-affirming health care” – which can include surgeries, hormone therapy, and counseling – those same defenders conveniently omit the details, blurring the line between advocacy and direct intervention. The very organizations funded for social architecture are the ones telling you there is no social architecture. It’s akin to asking the arsonist to investigate the fire.
Like characters in a grand production, I watch old friends still trusting in institutions like the New York Times. Even this exposition becomes a potential node in the system – the very act of revealing the mechanics of control might itself be anticipated, another layer of the recursive theater. In my earlier work on technocracy, I explored how our digital world has evolved far beyond Truman Burbank’s physical dome. His world had visible walls, cameras, and scripted encounters – a constructed reality he could theoretically escape by reaching its edges. Our prison is more sophisticated: no walls, no visible limits, just algorithmic containment that shapes thought itself. Truman only had to sail far enough to find the truth. But how do you sail beyond the boundaries of perception when the ocean itself is programmed?
Sure, USAID has done some good work—but so did Al Capone with his soup kitchens. Just as the infamous gangster’s charity work made him untouchable in his community, USAID’s aid programs create a veneer of benevolence that makes questioning their larger agenda politically impossible. Philanthropic window dressing has long been a tool for power players to shield themselves from scrutiny. Consider Jimmy Savile: a celebrated philanthropist whose charity work granted him access to hospitals and vulnerable children while he committed unspeakable crimes in plain sight. His carefully cultivated image made him beyond reproach for decades, just as institutional benevolence now serves as a protective layer for global influence operations. The true function of organizations like USAID isn’t just aid—it’s social architecture, mind shaping, and the laundering of taxpayer dollars through an intricate web of NGOs and foundations.
This layered deception is self-reinforcing – each level of manufactured reality is protected by another level of institutional authority. These institutions don’t just dictate stories; they shape the infrastructure through which narratives are disseminated. For what it’s worth, I believe most tools themselves are neutral. The same digital systems that enable mass surveillance could empower individual sovereignty. The same networks that centralize control could facilitate decentralized cooperation. The question isn’t the technology itself, but whether it’s deployed to concentrate or distribute power.
This understanding didn’t come from nowhere. Those who first sensed this artificiality were dismissed as conspiracy theorists. We noticed the coordination across outlets, the strange synchronicity of messaging, the way certain stories were amplified while others disappeared. Now we have the sales receipts showing exactly how that manipulation was funded and orchestrated.
I know this journey of discovery intimately. When I started understanding the dangers of mRNA technology, I went all in. I connected with the incredibly talented filmmaker Jennifer Sharp and helped with Anecdotals, her film about vaccine injuries. I was ready to tether my whole identity to this cause. But then I started zooming out. I began seeing how COVID might have been a financial crime designed to usher in central bank digital currency. The deeper I looked, the more I realized these weren’t isolated deceptions – it was part of a larger system of control. The very fabric of what I thought was real began to dissolve.
What disturbed me most was seeing how deeply programming relies on mimicry. Humans are imitative creatures by nature – it’s how we learn, how we build culture. But this natural tendency has been weaponized. I’d present friends with peer-reviewed studies, documented evidence, historical connections – only to watch them respond with verbatim talking points from corporate media. It wasn’t that they disagreed – it was that they weren’t even processing the information. They were pattern-matching against pre-approved chronicles, outsourcing their thinking to “trusted experts” who were themselves caught in the same web of manufactured perception. I realized then: none of us knows anything for certain – we’re all just mimicking what we’ve been programmed to believe is authoritative knowledge.
The challenge isn’t just seeing through any single deception – it’s understanding how these systems work together in complex, non-linear ways. When we fixate on individual threads, we miss the larger pattern. Like pulling a thread on a sweater and watching it unravel, eventually you realize there was no sweater in the first place – just an intricately woven illusion. Just as a hologram contains the whole image in each fragment, every piece of this system reflects the larger blueprint for reality construction.
Consider the $34 million to Politico – this isn’t just a funding stream, but a holographic reveal of the entire system. It’s not merely that Politico received money; it’s that this single transaction contains the entire blueprint of perception management. The payment itself is a microcosm: struggling media outlet, government funding, narrative control – each element reflects the whole. This recursive system protects itself through layers of self-validation. When critics point out media bias, fact-checkers funded by the same system declare it ‘debunked.’ When researchers question official accounts, journals funded by the same interests reject their work. Even the language of resistance – ‘speaking truth to power,’ ‘fighting disinformation,’ ‘protecting democracy’ – has been co-opted and weaponized by the very system it was meant to challenge.
The COVID story epitomizes this systemic manipulation. What began as a public health crisis transformed into a global experiment in narrative control – demonstrating how rapidly populations could be reshaped through coordinated messaging, institutional authority, and weaponized fear. The pandemic wasn’t just about a virus; it was a proof of concept for how comprehensively human cognition could be engineered – a single node revealing the true scope and ambition of discourse manipulation.
Think about the cycle: American taxpayers unknowingly funded the crisis itself – then paid again to be deceived about it. They paid for the development of gain-of-function research, then paid again for the messaging that would convince them to accept masks, lockdowns, and experimental interventions. The system is so confident in its psychological control that it doesn’t even bother hiding the evidence anymore.
As I’ve documented in my Engineering Reality series, this framework for consciousness management runs far deeper than most can imagine. USAID’s revelations aren’t isolated incidents—they’re glimpses into a vast system of social design that has been in operation for decades. When the same agency funding your fact-checkers is openly paying for ‘social deception,’ when your trusted news sources are receiving direct payments for ‘social architecture,’ the very framework of what we consider ‘real’ begins to crumble.
We’re not just watching events unfold – we’re watching reactions to artificial events, then reactions to those reactions, creating an infinite regression of derivative meaning. People form passionate positions about issues that were constructed, then others define themselves in opposition to those positions. Each layer of reaction fuels the next phase of steered consensus. What we’re witnessing isn’t just the spread of manufactured realities, but the architecture of cultural and geopolitical trends themselves. Artificial trends spawn authentic reactions, which generate counter-reactions, until we’ve built entire societies responding to carefully orchestrated theater. The social engineers aren’t just steering individual beliefs – they’re reshaping the very foundations of how humans make sense of the world.
These revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone paying attention to the depth and depravity of the corruption knows that this is only the beginning. As more information emerges, the illusion of neutrality, of benevolence, of institutions acting in the public interest, will crumble. No one who truly engages with this information is walking away with renewed faith in the system. The shift is only happening in one direction – some faster than others, but none in reverse. The real question is: what happens when a critical mass reaches the point where their foundational understanding of the world collapses? When they realize that the records shaping their perception were never organic, but manufactured? Some will refuse to look, choosing comfort over confrontation. But for those willing to face it, this is not just about corruption – it’s about the very nature of the reality they thought they inhabited.
The implications are staggering not just for individual awareness, but for our very ability to function as a republic. How can citizens make informed decisions when reality itself has been splintered into competing manufactured tales? When people discover that their most deeply held beliefs were shaped, that their passionate causes were scripted, that even their cultural interests and tastes were curated, that their opposition to certain systems was anticipated and designed – what remains of authentic human experience?
What’s coming will force a choice: either retreat into comfortable denial, dismissing mounting evidence as “right-wing conspiracy theories,” or face the shattering realization that the world we thought we inhabited never actually existed. My research over the past few years points to far more nefarious activities yet to be revealed – operations so heinous that many will simply refuse to process them.
As I wrote about in “The Second Matrix,” there’s always the risk of falling into another layer of controlled awakening. But the greater risk lies in thinking too small, in anchoring ourselves to any single thread of understanding. The USAID revelations aren’t just about exposing one agency’s role in shaping reality – they’re about recognizing how our very thought patterns have been colonized by recursive layers of artificial reality.
This is the true crisis of our time: not just the manipulation of reality, but the fragmentation of human consciousness itself. When people grasp that their beliefs, causes, and even their resistance were shaped within this system, they are forced to confront the deeper question: What does it mean to reclaim one’s own mind?
But here’s what they don’t want you to realize: seeing through these systems is profoundly liberating. When you understand how reality is constructed, you’re no longer bound by its artificial constraints. This isn’t just about exposing deception – it’s about freeing consciousness itself from manufactured limitations.
The jig may be up on USAID’s reality architecture operation. But the deeper challenge lies in reconstructing meaning in a world where the very fabric of reality has been woven from artificial threads. The choice we face isn’t just between comfortable illusion and uncomfortable truth. The old system demanded validation before belief. The new reality requires something else entirely: the ability to recognize patterns before they’re officially confirmed, to feel coherence across multiple domains, to step outside the crafted game completely. This isn’t about choosing sides in their manufactured binaries – it’s about seeing the pattern architecture itself.
What does this liberation look like in practice? It’s catching the pattern of a manufactured crisis before it’s fully deployed. It’s recognizing how seemingly unrelated events – a banking collapse, a health emergency, a social movement – are actually nodes in the same network of control. It’s understanding that true sovereignty isn’t about having all the answers, but about developing the capacity to sense the web of deception before it solidifies into apparent reality. Because the ultimate power isn’t in knowing every answer – it’s in realizing when the question itself has been designed to trap you inside the manufactured paradigm.
As we develop this pattern recognition capacity – this ability to see through algorithmic manipulation – what it means to be human is itself evolving. As these systems of ideological infrastructure crumble, our task isn’t just to preserve individual awakening but to protect and nurture the most conscious elements of humanity. The ultimate liberation isn’t just seeing through the deception – it’s maintaining our essential humanity in a world of tightly controlled perception.
As these systems of reality sculpting crumble, we have an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover what’s real – not through their manufactured frameworks, but through our own direct experience of truth. What’s authentic isn’t always what’s organic – in a mediated world, authenticity means conscious choice rather than unconscious reaction. It means understanding how our minds are shaped while maintaining our capacity for genuine connection, creative expression, and direct experience. The most human elements – love, creativity, intuition, genuine discovery – become more precious precisely because they defy algorithmic control. These are the last frontiers of human freedom—the unpredictable, unquantifiable forces that cannot be reduced to data points or behavioral models.
The ultimate battle isn’t just for truth – it’s for the human spirit itself. A system that can engineer perception can engineer submission. But there’s a beautiful irony here: the very act of recognizing these systems of reality construction is itself an expression of authentic consciousness – a choice that proves they haven’t conquered human perception completely. Free will cannot be engineered precisely because the capacity to see through engineered reality remains ours. In the end, their greatest fear isn’t that we’ll reject their manufactured world – it’s that we’ll remember how to see beyond it.
Is the FDA salvageable?
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | March 26, 2025
Dr Marty Makary—now confirmed as FDA Commissioner—inherits an agency that routinely approves drugs with questionable benefits.
At Makary’s confirmation hearing on March 6th, senators repeatedly hailed the FDA as the “gold standard” of drug regulation—a phrase meant to reassure the public that approved drugs are significantly effective.
But this claim is an illusion.
In 2013, Jonathan J. Darrow, a Harvard legal scholar and expert in drug regulation, published a scathing analysis in the Washington and Lee Law Review, exposing the reality behind this phrase.
Darrow’s paper, Pharmaceutical Efficacy: The Illusory Legal Standard, meticulously details how the FDA’s approval process does not require drugs to be meaningfully effective—only that they show some effect, no matter how trivial.
Since then, the problem has only worsened.
Makary has spent years criticising medical waste and corporate influence in healthcare. But now, as the new FDA Commissioner, can he reform an institution this compromised?
The “gold standard” that fails the public
The phrase “gold standard” suggests uncompromising scientific scrutiny. However, under U.S. law, there is no specific level of efficacy required for a new drug to be approved.
The FDA’s legal framework, Title 21 of the U.S. Code, demands only “substantial evidence” of benefit, without defining what “substantial” actually means.
Darrow explains: “The standard is almost entirely illusory because it leaves to the drug sponsor the ability to specify any non-zero level of efficacy.”
This ambiguity explains why many widely prescribed drugs offer only marginal benefits.
Consider antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft. Research indicates that the majority of patient improvement could be due to the placebo effect, not the drug itself.
Yet, because these medications show statistical improvement in clinical trials, they meet the FDA’s approval threshold and are marketed as transformative treatments.
Darrow reported in 2021 that most newly approved drugs (69%-98%) fail to provide substantial benefits over existing therapies.
Cherry-picking evidence
Another critical flaw in determining drug efficacy is selective trial reporting. Drug companies conduct numerous clinical trials, but the FDA only requires two successful trials for approval—regardless of how many have failed.
This means a company could run 10 trials, discard eight that show no benefit, and submit the two positive ones. This practice is precisely how some SSRI antidepressants were approved.
In a major exposé, researcher Irving Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain unpublished clinical trial data on six widely prescribed antidepressants.
FDA approval had been granted based on twelve trials (two per drug). Yet, a FOIA request uncovered 47 trials—many of which showed no meaningful difference between the drug and a placebo.
The registration of trials on public registries like ClinicalTrials.gov was intended to improve transparency, but enforcement remains weak. Many trials that should have been disclosed are not, and financial penalties for non-compliance are rarely enforced.
The result? A regulatory loophole that allows ineffective drugs to be marketed as evidence-based solutions.
Misleading people with statistical tricks
Beyond cherry-picking trials, statistics can be manipulated to make drugs seem more effective than they are. One common tactic is presenting relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction.
Take statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to millions. Clinical trials often claim statins reduce heart attack risk by 30%. However, this figure refers to relative risk—not absolute risk.
In reality, the absolute risk reduction is often less than 2%. This means that out of 100 people taking statins, 98 see no benefit at all. Yet, because the effect meets “statistical significance,” statins are approved and aggressively marketed as essential for heart disease prevention.
Another example is the diabetes drug saxagliptin (Onglyza), approved by the FDA in 2009. Marketed as a breakthrough for blood sugar control, later studies showed the absolute reduction of HbA1c—a key measure of blood sugar—was negligible (0.4% to 0.9%).
Worse, in 2013, a large-scale trial revealed a possible increased risk of heart failure. Yet, the drug remains on the market, illustrating how weak efficacy standards allow ineffective (or even harmful) drugs to persist.
The cost of an ineffective system
Weak efficacy standards don’t just mislead patients—they can also lead to financial strain. This issue is particularly egregious in oncology.
New cancer drugs routinely cost over $100,000 per year, yet many extend life by only weeks or months, if any. Families may drain their savings, hoping for a meaningful survival benefit, only to later learn that the drug offered little more than a statistical blip.
In 2016, the FDA granted accelerated approval to olaratumab, which was hailed as a breakthrough for soft tissue sarcoma. However, it was withdrawn in 2019 after further research failed to show any survival benefit.
The FDA had granted approval based on early-stage trials that created the illusion of efficacy.
This isn’t just a regulatory failure—it’s a moral one.
Why we need clearer drug labelling
Darrow argues that drug labelling is a major part of the problem. “There’s no requirement for pharmaceutical companies to offer any scale of benefit, in a manner that patients can understand,” he wrote.
“Knowing how well a drug might perform relative to an alternative—through clearly presented data—allows doctors and patients to decide whether it’s worth [it].”
He draws a parallel with sunscreen labelling. “A consumer easily understands that SPF30 will give greater protection than SPF10. So why don’t we have better drug labelling?”
Alternatively, he has suggested that drug labels could adopt a similar approach to food labels, “with data presented in columns that show key information and allow for side-by-side comparison.”
Or, the labelling for sleeping pills could “indicate the number of minutes it took those who had used them in clinical trials to fall asleep compared with a placebo.”
The lack of transparency only benefits the pharmaceutical industry from increased drug sales.
Can Makary fix the FDA?
Marty Makary has been a relentless critic of medical waste, unnecessary treatments, and corporate influence in healthcare. However, reforming an agency so deeply entrenched in industry influence is an extraordinary challenge.
Drug companies pay billions in user fees to the FDA, and in return, they influence regulatory decisions. Laws governing drug approval have remained largely unchanged for decades, ensuring that the FDA prioritises speed over scientific rigour and drug safety.
The FDA continues to approve drugs with minimal benefit, it allows companies to cherry-pick positive trials while ignoring negative ones and misleads doctors into believing that weak drugs are more effective than they are.
The public assumes that FDA approval means a drug is significantly effective.
It does not.
If Makary is serious about reform, he must push Congress for sweeping legislative changes to dismantle the pharmaceutical industry’s stranglehold on drug regulation.
The FDA was created to protect the public—not to serve as a rubber stamp for Big Pharma. Right now, the FDA is failing in its mission.
The question is no longer whether the FDA is the “gold standard” of drug regulation. It’s whether the agency is salvageable at all.
Featured Video
Stanislav Krapivnik: Massive Escalation – Attack on Putin’s Residence
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
China and India have ‘low intellectual potential’ – top Zelensky aide
RT | September 13, 2023
The people leading India and China lack the ability to predict the long-term consequences of their policies, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed.
Mikhail Podoliak pointed to what he called “the problem of the modern world,” singling out India and China, in an interview with Ukrainian media on Tuesday.
“The problem with these countries is that they do not analyze the consequences of their own moves. These countries, unfortunately, have low intellectual potential,” he said.
Podoliak suggested that even though India has a lunar exploration program, it “does not mean that this nation understands what the modern world precisely is.”
The dismissive remarks were in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s refusal to support Kiev in its conflict with Moscow. Podoliak complained that India, China and Türkiye were “profiting” from the war by maintaining trade with Russia.
“Technically, it is in their national interests,” he acknowledged, before presenting his view of what would benefit China in the long-run.
“China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he claimed. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Rod on How Intelligence, Politics, an… papasha408 on Trump Says Hamas Will Be Given… papasha408 on Is Israel About to Return to G… Bill Francis on NSW Premier Admits New “Securi… Richard Ong on Israeli forces arrest writer a… Bill Francis on How reporting facts can now la… loongtip on Europe’s Panic Economy: Frozen… Gemma on Israel’s diamond industr… Bill Francis on Victoria Moves to Force Online… papasha408 on The Empire of Lies: How the BB… loongtip on US Weighs Port Restrictions on… Bill Francis on Chris Minns Defends NSW “Hate…
Aletho News- As Israel bans aid orgs in Gaza, notorious mercenary firm seeks “Targeter”
- The Bari Weiss Playbook: How a Zionist Operative Conquered American Media
- How Intelligence, Politics, and Foreign Interests Shaped America’s Religious Movements
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
- The new German totalitarianism
- Stanislav Krapivnik: Massive Escalation – Attack on Putin’s Residence
- Gaza races to preserve what remains of its 5,000-year-old archaeological legacy
- Dayton At 30: US Betrayal Old And New
- UNRWA head slams ‘outrageous’ Israeli law to cut water, energy to agency’s facilities
- Trump Says Hamas Will Be Given a ‘Short Period of Time’ to Disarm
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza health officials report outbreaks of water-borne illnesses, flu – Not a ceasefire Day 82
- TCN Warns – “ISRAEL FIRST: U.S. May Attack Iran Again”
- Hamas calls on Israel to allow impartial investigation into 7 October attacks
- Indiegogo Withholds $51K In Donations From MintPress in Financial Censorship Crackdown
- Gaza races to preserve what remains of its 5,000-year-old archaeological legacy
- Gaza health official says miscarriages surge as births fall by 40%
- Leahy Law Requires Ban on Aid to Israeli Police Unit for Killing Two Palestinians Who Surrendered
- Israel blocks entry of eye drops for blind people in Gaza
- I did not understand I grew up in a concentration camp until I left Gaza
- One excavator, 10,000 bodies, a sea of rubble: inside Gaza’s effort to retrieve and bury its dead
- No Tricks Zone
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
- New Study Finds A Higher Rate Of Global Warming From 1899-1940 Than From 1983-2024
- Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue Warns “Germany Won’t Make It” If Winter Turns Severe
- Merry Christmas Everybody!
- Two More New Studies Show The Southern Ocean And Antarctica Were Warmer In The 1970s
- Der Spiegel Caught Making Up Reports About Conservative America (Again)
- New Study: 8000 Years Ago Relative Sea Level Was 30 Meters Higher Than Today Across East Antarctica
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
Aletho News 