The Manual Behind the Mandates
An Essay on Paul Offit’s Bad Faith
Lies are Unbekoming | July 14, 2026
In June and October 1998, Paul Offit sat on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and voted twice in favor of Wyeth-Lederle’s RotaShield rotavirus vaccine: on June 25 to recommend it for routine childhood use, and on October 22 to add it to the federal Vaccines for Children Program.¹ Offit’s own rotavirus vaccine, developed at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in partnership with Merck, was under development at the time. On October 22, 1999, exactly a year after his second vote, ACIP rescinded the RotaShield recommendation after CDC identified an elevated rate of intussusception in vaccinated infants. Intussusception is a bowel condition in which one segment of intestine telescopes into another and cuts off its own blood supply; without emergency intervention, it kills. The surveillance data at the point of withdrawal included hospitalizations and infant deaths. Offit abstained from the withdrawal vote.² Seven years later, Merck’s RotaTeq, which Offit co-invented, received ACIP recommendation for the same schedule slot. The patent sale netted him at least six million dollars by his own account, with other public estimates running higher.³
In June 2000, the United States House Committee on Government Reform published Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making. The report named Offit specifically. It concluded that “conflict of interest rules employed by the FDA and the CDC have been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to participate in committee proceedings.”⁴
In March 2015, Basic Books published Offit’s Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine. The book accuses religious parents of moral failure. It calls for the elimination of religious exemption from vaccination law. It endorses criminal prosecution of parents who withhold pharmaceutical products from their children on religious grounds, including, under the Oregon sentencing guidelines Offit presents as a model, terms of up to twenty-five years in prison.⁵
Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He has written five previous books along the same lines, including Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All and Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. His public role for two decades has been to defend the schedule and to condemn parents who decline it. Book after book, he plays the doctor calmly explaining what the parents are getting wrong.
Bad Faith extends the position into religion. It was published five years before COVID. Its recommendations were substantially enacted between 2015 and 2022. Read now, it functions less as ethical inquiry than as a legislative operations manual whose program was executed.
The Method
The book opens with cases designed to overwhelm objection. A Wisconsin pastor performs an exorcism on an eight-year-old boy with autism and asphyxiates him under his own body weight.⁶ An ultra-Orthodox mohel in Brooklyn performs metzitzah b’peh, sucking blood from a circumcision wound with his mouth; eleven infants develop what medicine identifies as neonatal herpes, two die, and two suffer permanent brain damage.⁷ At a Texas ministry associated with televangelist Kenneth Copeland, sixteen people including a four-month-old become ill in what Offit calls a measles outbreak connected to a daycare center on church property.⁸ In Ireland, a Hindu woman named Savita Halappanavar dies after a Catholic hospital refuses to remove her miscarrying fetus while a heartbeat is still detectable; the coroner attributes her death to septicemia.⁹
None of these cases involves ordinary religious exemption from vaccination. What they share, at the level Offit uses them, is that religious belief was present at the scene of a death. What they do not share is the specific practice the book has been marshalled to condemn.
That is the book’s central rhetorical move. It builds a moral gradient from ritual mutilation and life-refusal to any parental decision that rejects a pharmaceutical recommendation on religious grounds. The gradient does not require the cases to be comparable. It requires only that the reader carry the emotional freight of the extreme cases into the ordinary one.
The move is announced on page xiii. Offit writes, in his own voice, that he began the book expecting to arrive where Dawkins and Hitchens arrived, at the conclusion that religion is illogical and potentially harmful, but instead found himself moved by the Old and New Testaments. “The reader will be surprised to learn that the hero of this book isn’t science or medicine or doctors; it’s religion.”¹⁰
The concession does specific work. It reassures the religious reader that the book is not hostile to their tradition, and it disarms the skeptical reader who has watched vaccine industry figures dismiss religious objections as backward. Once both are quieted, the book proceeds to recommendations that religious readers, warned properly, would reject on sight.
Rita Swan is the emotional engine of the book. Offit opens with her and closes with her. To understand what he does with her, it helps to see her before he found her.
She was raised in Christian Science. In 1977, her fifteen-month-old son Matthew died after his parents, following church teaching, refused medical care for what was diagnosed as bacterial meningitis.¹¹ A year after his death, still a Christian Scientist, she went to the medical library at Wayne State University in Detroit. She had heard about another Christian Science child, a boy named Danny, whose meningitis had reportedly resolved without medical treatment; she wanted to understand why God had saved Danny and not Matthew. She read the textbooks. Danny had one kind of meningitis, viral, which typically resolves on its own. Matthew had another, bacterial, which does not. Antibiotics would have saved him. She sat on the floor of the library stacks and read the paragraph over and over. In her own words: “I did not have to be afraid that Matthew had died because we were not right with God. I knew that I wasn’t giving up a magical, supernatural protection or any kind of protection from evil because Christian Science had no power. It hadn’t healed anything.”¹²
That is the moment before Rita Swan became a public figure. She left the church, founded an organization called Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, and dedicated her life to eliminating religious exemption from child abuse and neglect law. Everything after sits downstream of that library floor. What Offit builds on top of it in Bad Faith is a criminal-law regime under which the state prosecutes not only parents like Rita Swan’s former self, but parents who bear no resemblance to Rita Swan’s former self at all.
Swan’s grief is real. Her son died. Her devotion to what she now believes is real. None of that is at issue. What is at issue is the strategic use to which her narrative has been put. Offit takes a mother whose child died in 1977 after her family refused emergency medical treatment for a present, acute illness, and uses her story to justify the elimination, in the 2010s, of the religious right to decline pharmaceutical injection of a healthy child. The two positions are not the same. Nothing in Matthew Swan’s death establishes what the parents of a healthy two-month-old should be permitted to decide about a hepatitis B injection.
The emotional weight travels regardless. That is the point of putting Rita Swan on the first page and the last page of the book.
Once the extreme cases have done their work, the ordinary case follows. Offit writes: “On any given day in America, tens of thousands of children whose parents have chosen not to vaccinate them for religious reasons can be found in daycare centers, schools, playgrounds, and churches across the country.”¹³ The sentence sits between the paragraphs about the Copeland church and the paragraphs about the woman dying at St. Joseph’s in Phoenix. By the time the reader arrives at unvaccinated children in daycare centers, the frame is set. They are on a moral continuum with mohels who kill babies and hospitals that let mothers die.
The frame does specific violence to the categories. A parent who declines a rubella vaccine on religious grounds is not the parent who prays over a bowel-obstructed child until he dies. Collapsing the two into one policy target requires an argument. Offit does not make the argument. He performs the collapse rhetorically and moves on.
Standing Up
Chapter 12 is called “Standing Up.” It is the book’s operations manual.
The model case is Oregon. Between 1999 and 2011, Rita Swan and Oregon prosecutor Terry Gustafson worked to strip religious exemption from Oregon’s criminal code. In 1999, Representative Bruce Starr introduced a bill repealing all religious exemptions to child abuse and neglect statutes. The Christian Science Church lobbied against it. The legislature compromised, repealing five of the exemptions.¹⁴ Twelve years later, after further deaths among children in the Followers of Christ church, Swan and her husband moved from Iowa to Oregon and lived in Salem for four months lobbying for full repeal. This time the Christian Science Church withdrew opposition. Governor Kitzhaber signed the bill. Religious exemption in Oregon was eliminated.¹⁵
Offit reports these events approvingly. He notes that under Oregon’s mandatory sentencing guidelines, parents convicted of religiously motivated child abuse or neglect could face up to twenty-five years in prison.¹⁶ He offers this as a template.
The Schaible case is the chapter’s central prosecution. Herbert and Catherine Schaible, members of the First-Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia, lost their two-year-old son Kent in 2009 after choosing prayer instead of medical care; the coroner ruled the death due to bacterial pneumonia. The Schaibles were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years’ probation, with an order to seek medical care for their remaining seven children. In 2013, while under probation, their seven-month-old son Brandon died of the same condition. The Schaibles were charged with third-degree murder and sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison. Their remaining children were removed to foster care.¹⁷
Offit reports the case as vindication of the prosecutorial approach. What the chapter does not report is the distinction between the Schaible position and the position of the parent who declines a hepatitis B or MMR injection for a healthy child. The Schaibles refused antibiotics for their acutely ill children. The parent refusing MMR is refusing pharmaceutical injection of a well child in the absence of any acute illness. One is refusal of treatment for present illness; the other is refusal of a product administered to a healthy body. Arguing for equivalent prosecution requires arguing for equivalence between the two positions. The chapter does not attempt the argument. It stacks the cases.
The children whose deaths Offit catalogues are real. Kent and Brandon Schaible are dead; more than eighty children lie in the Followers of Christ cemetery in Oregon; Matthew Swan was fifteen months old when he died in 1977. None of that is at issue here. What is at issue is the argumentative bridge: whether the deaths of children whose parents refused treatment for acute illness license the criminalization of parents who decline pharmaceutical products intended for a healthy body. Offit says yes. The book’s structural task is to make that inferential leap feel intuitive rather than argued.
In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics awarded Rita Swan the President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service. Robert W. Block, then AAP president, presented her with a plaque at the national meeting.¹⁸ The award marks a specific institutional turn. The largest pediatric medical body in the United States awarded its highest honor to a lay activist whose organizational mission is the elimination of religious exemption. Since then, the AAP has campaigned publicly for the removal of non-medical exemptions from state vaccine mandates.
The concession on page xiii is at this point difficult to sustain. The book that opens with “the hero of this book isn’t science or medicine or doctors; it’s religion” also contains, one hundred and eighty pages later, the sentence: “the American public’s instinctive tolerance for religion often exceeds reason.”¹⁹ Both sentences are Offit. Both are Bad Faith. The hero of page xiii and the tolerance-that-exceeds-reason of page 193 are the same subject in the same book. The concession was a hospitality. Chapter 12 is what waits behind it.
Offit’s resolution is to distinguish between religion properly understood, which is charity, and religion improperly performed, which is medical neglect. Charity is what he defends. Anything else is subject to statute. The distinction is convenient. It is also a claim no religious tradition would recognize as an outside authority’s to draw. Offit is not a theologian. He is a pediatrician with a financial stake in vaccine uptake and an institutional platform at the largest children’s hospital in the country. The book adjudicates which religious practices are protected and which are prosecutable. Parents disagree at their statutory peril.
From Print to Statute
Bad Faith was published in March 2015. Three months later, on June 30, 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB277, eliminating both religious and personal-belief exemptions from the state’s school vaccination requirements. California became the third state, after Mississippi and West Virginia, to permit only medical exemption.²⁰ The bill had been introduced in February 2015, roughly the same month Basic Books shipped Offit’s manuscript. Public advocacy for the bill drew heavily on the framing Offit had spent the previous decade establishing. Four years later, in 2019, California passed SB276, restricting the medical exemptions that had replaced the eliminated religious ones. What began as a policy conversation about religious refusal ended as a near-total mandate.
In June 2019, New York eliminated religious exemption by legislative vote. The bill passed in response to what the state described as measles outbreaks in Rockland County and Brooklyn, communities with large Orthodox Jewish populations. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill the same day it passed both chambers.²¹ Maine passed LD 798 in May 2019, eliminating religious and philosophical exemption; the law survived a March 2020 ballot referendum challenge.²² Connecticut eliminated religious exemption in April 2021.²³ Mississippi, which had never permitted religious exemption to school vaccination, was ordered by a federal court in 2023 to allow one under Bosarge v. Edney.²⁴
The COVID-era mandates of 2021 and 2022 extended the framework beyond state school law. Federal contractors, healthcare workers at facilities receiving federal funding, and workers at companies with more than one hundred employees faced injection requirements as conditions of employment. Military personnel faced separate mandates. Religious exemption processes existed on paper. Employers rejected them at scale, and litigation over denied exemptions moved through the federal courts for the next several years.²⁵
Family court applied the framework to custody. In October 2017, Oakland County Judge Karen McDonald sentenced Rebecca Bredow of Ferndale, Michigan to seven days in jail for contempt of court after she refused to vaccinate her nine-year-old son under a court-approved parenting agreement. Her ex-husband was granted temporary custody. Bredow’s son received four vaccinations while she was behind bars. She then lost primary custody permanently. Three months later, in a separate Michigan custody dispute, attorney Aaron Siri deposed Stanley Plotkin, Offit’s mentor and vaccine industry co-strategist. Plotkin had been recruited as expert witness for the father seeking to vaccinate his ten-year-old daughter over the mother’s religious objection. The nine-hour deposition on January 11, 2018 ended with Plotkin recusing himself the following day. The father nevertheless prevailed at trial.²⁶ Similar custody rulings have moved through American family courts since. The framework Offit established in Bad Faith, that religious or personal objection to vaccination is a category on which the state may act against the parent, is the framework these courts now apply.
Under the Siri deposition, Plotkin stated the position openly. Asked whether he believed anyone could have a valid religious objection to vaccination, Plotkin answered no. Asked whether he took issue with religious beliefs, yes. Asked whether he stood by his written statement that “vaccination is always under attack by religious zealots who believe that the will of God includes death and disease,” he answered “I absolutely do.”²⁷ The deposition is the sworn version of what Bad Faith had put in more polished prose three years earlier.
In 2014, forty-eight American states recognized either religious or philosophical exemption to school vaccination. Between 2015 and 2022, four eliminated non-medical exemption: California, New York, Maine, and Connecticut. They joined Mississippi and West Virginia as the states permitting only medical exemption. The injection mandate regime extended in parallel into employment, healthcare, military service, and family law. Whether the reader considers this a public health achievement or a civil liberties collapse, the trajectory is documented. The book’s program was substantially enacted.
The framework has not gone unopposed. Aaron Siri and the firm of Siri & Glimstad have led the litigation counterattack, exposing Stanley Plotkin under deposition in 2018 and pressing federal court challenges to the COVID-era mandates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense has funded much of the legal and public education work. Bosarge v. Edney, the April 2023 federal ruling that ordered Mississippi to allow religious exemption to childhood vaccination, is one visible product of that pushback. In January 2025, West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey issued an executive order directing state health officials to implement a religious exemption process; the resulting conflict between the governor’s office, the state Board of Education, and the state courts is now before the West Virginia Supreme Court. The framework Bad Faith helped establish is now being tested in the same courts that first applied it.
The Document Exists
The record is a public one. In 1998, Paul Offit voted twice at ACIP to add a rotavirus vaccine to the childhood schedule. That vaccine was withdrawn a year later after CDC identified elevated intussusception risk and infant deaths. In 2006, his own rotavirus vaccine was added to the schedule under a subsequent ACIP recommendation. Merck paid him at least six million dollars for the patent, by his own admission, with other public estimates running higher. In 2000, the House Committee on Government Reform named him in a report on conflicts of interest at the CDC. In 2015, he published a book that opens by calling religion “the hero” and closes by endorsing prison terms of up to twenty-five years for parents who cite religion in declining pharmaceutical products for their children.
Between 2015 and 2022, states passed the laws the book recommended. California, New York, Maine, and Connecticut eliminated religious exemption from school vaccination. Federal COVID-era mandates conditioned employment, healthcare, and military service on injection. Family courts began ordering vaccination over parental objection and jailing mothers who refused. In 2014, forty-eight American states recognized non-medical exemption to childhood vaccination. By the end of 2022, forty-four did. Litigation and executive action since have partly reversed the direction of travel, and the story is not settled.
There is a version of this story a defender of the book would tell. In that version, the American vaccine mandate regime built between 2015 and 2022 is a public health triumph, and Bad Faith is the ethical volume that helped make it possible. In that version, Rita Swan on the floor of the Wayne State library reading about her son’s death is the founder of a movement to protect children, and Kent Schaible, Brandon Schaible, and the eighty-plus children in the Followers of Christ cemetery are the reason the state was right to act. That version exists. It is the version Bad Faith itself tells.
The other version is that the author of Bad Faith is a pediatrician who voted rotavirus vaccines onto the CDC schedule while his own rotavirus vaccine was in development at Merck, abstained from the vote to withdraw the failed predecessor after infants died, and sold his own version to Merck for at least six million dollars. In that version, the book that calls religion “the hero” is written by a man the House of Representatives named in a conflict-of-interest report fifteen years earlier, and its policy recommendations, enacted in state after state and then extended into COVID-era employment law, functioned to remove the last legal ground from which parents could decline the products his own industry manufactures. In that version, the mother on the library floor was leveraged into a criminal-law regime she never asked for.
The reader can pick the version. Both start from the same documents. The book calls itself an inquiry into religious belief. The record of what it did calls it something else. Everything is documented: Chapter 12 in the book, Offit’s financial history in the 2000 House committee report, the Schaible convictions in Pennsylvania court records, the state exemption repeals in state statute, the Plotkin deposition in sworn testimony. The elements exist for anyone to verify.
The document exists and says what it says.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine there is a kid at school named Paul who sells cookies at lunch. He has been selling them for a long time and he is rich now.
One day Paul writes a big book. In the book he says that any kid who doesn’t buy his cookies at lunch is being mean, and that the teachers should send those kids to the principal, and that the principal should punish their parents.
The teachers read Paul’s book. Some of them agree. Soon there is a new rule at school: if you don’t buy Paul’s cookies at lunch, you get sent to the principal’s office.
But some kids have real reasons for not buying cookies. Some are allergic. Some don’t have any money. Some of their families believe cookies are wrong. Some kids just don’t want cookies today. The rule doesn’t care. If you don’t buy them, you are in trouble.
Meanwhile, Paul is still selling cookies. He is still getting rich. He never mentioned in his book that he was the one selling them.
That is the story of Bad Faith. Paul Offit is a doctor who made millions of dollars from a vaccine he invented. He wrote a book saying that religious parents who don’t want vaccines for their children should go to prison. Between 2015 and 2022, several American states passed laws matching what his book said. The vaccines his industry sells are now required in more places than they used to be. The parents who don’t want them have fewer places left to say no.
Paul’s book called religion “the hero.” It wasn’t.
References
¹ Offit’s ACIP tenure (October 1998 to June 2003) and the specific rotavirus votes (June 25, 1998; October 22, 1998; October 22, 1999) are documented in United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making, Majority Staff Report, June 15, 2000 (Section V, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Exhibits 38-41 pertaining to Dr. Offit specifically). See also Handley, J.B., How to End the Autism Epidemic (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), Chapter 4, “The Reward Is Never Financial”; and Olmsted, Dan, and Mark Blaxill, “Voting Himself Rich,” Age of Autism, December 2009.
² Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Withdrawal of Rotavirus Vaccine Recommendation,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 48(43), November 5, 1999. RotaShield post-licensure surveillance findings, including hospitalizations for intussusception and deaths, are documented in CDC MMWR reports from October and November 1999. Offit’s abstention from the withdrawal vote is reported by Olmsted and Blaxill, op. cit., and by Handley, op. cit.
³ Handley, op. cit., quoting Offit’s own email correspondence acknowledging the six-million-dollar figure, and noting that “other public estimates have been far higher.” Handley’s citation is to Offit-David Brown correspondence, August 18, 2009.
⁴ United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making, June 15, 2000. Available via the Children’s Health Defense archive at childrenshealthdefense.org.
⁵ Offit, Paul A., Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (Basic Books, 2015). ISBN 978-0-465-04061-2. Endorsement of Oregon’s mandatory sentencing appears in Chapter 12.
⁶ Bad Faith, Introduction, pp. ix-x. Terrance Cottrell Jr., killed August 22, 2003.
⁷ Bad Faith, Introduction, p. xi. See also New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, “Notes from the Field: Neonatal Herpes Simplex Virus Infection Following Jewish Ritual Circumcisions,” MMWR 61, 2012.
⁸ Bad Faith, Introduction, pp. xi-xii. The Tarrant County outbreak, August 2013, was traced to Eagle Mountain International Church.
⁹ Bad Faith, Chapter 6, “Dialogue of the Deaf,” pp. 82-85. Halappanavar died October 28, 2012, at University Hospital Galway.
¹⁰ Bad Faith, Introduction, p. xiii.
¹¹ Bad Faith, Chapter 1, “The Very Worst Thing,” pp. 1-18. Matthew Swan died July 1977.
¹² Bad Faith, Chapter 12, “Standing Up,” pp. 177-178. Rita Swan’s account of the Wayne State University medical library and her decision to leave Christian Science.
¹³ Bad Faith, Introduction, p. xii.
¹⁴ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, pp. 184-186. The 1999 Oregon legislative fight and Bruce Starr’s HB 2494.
¹⁵ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, pp. 186-187. Oregon House Bill 2721 (2011).
¹⁶ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, p. 186.
¹⁷ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, pp. 187-191. See also Commonwealth v. Schaible, Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia County. Herbert and Catherine Schaible entered no-contest pleas to third-degree murder on November 14, 2013, and were sentenced February 19, 2014.
¹⁸ Bad Faith, Epilogue, p. 195. American Academy of Pediatrics announcement of the 2012 President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service.
¹⁹ Bad Faith, Chapter 12, p. 193. The full sentence in context reads: “the American public’s instinctive tolerance for religion often exceeds reason—in this case, resulting in a misguided respect for a belief that violates one of the most fundamental teachings of all religions: protecting the vulnerable.”
²⁰ California Senate Bill 277 (Pan/Allen), signed by Governor Jerry Brown on June 30, 2015. Codified at California Health and Safety Code § 120325. California Senate Bill 276 (Pan), restricting medical exemptions, was signed September 9, 2019.
²¹ New York Senate Bill S2994A / Assembly Bill A2371A, signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo on June 13, 2019, repealing New York Public Health Law § 2164(9).
²² Maine LD 798, signed by Governor Janet Mills, May 24, 2019. Upheld in a March 3, 2020 statewide referendum by a vote of 73 to 27 percent.
²³ Connecticut House Bill 6423, signed by Governor Ned Lamont on April 28, 2021, repealing the state’s religious exemption to school vaccination requirements.
²⁴ Bosarge v. Edney, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, 2023, ordering the state to allow religious exemption to childhood vaccination requirements.
²⁵ Federal COVID-19 vaccination mandate litigation includes NFIB v. OSHA, 595 U.S. 109 (January 13, 2022) (staying the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard for large employers); Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. 87 (January 13, 2022) (allowing the CMS healthcare worker mandate to take effect); and numerous federal cases involving denied religious exemption accommodations.
²⁶ Rebecca Bredow’s jailing and custody loss are documented in contemporaneous news reports from October 2017 (Oakland County Circuit Court, Judge Karen McDonald presiding; Detroit Free Press, CBS News, Washington Post reporting). The separate Michigan custody case in which Stanley Plotkin was deposed by Aaron Siri (January 11, 2018) is described in Handley, J.B., How to End the Autism Epidemic, Chapter 4. The deposition ran approximately nine hours.
²⁷ Deposition of Stanley Plotkin, taken by Aaron Siri, January 11, 2018. Transcript publicly available via the Informed Consent Action Network. The exchange on religious objection to vaccination appears at approximately pp. 42-46 of the deposition.
Ukraine’s ‘Patriot’ license just money laundering scheme dressed up as ‘good deal’ – former senior DoD analyst
Sputnik – 09.07.2026
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says the production of Patriot missile interceptors in Ukraine would constitute another sign of unacceptable encroachment by NATO. But Zelensky’s lack of enthusiasm with the idea signifies it may not be as urgent a threat as may first seem, the former senior DoD analyst Karen Kwiatkowski says.
“He would rather have finished interceptors or cash, anything else requires hard work and stability and time – none of which are available to him or the Ukrainian government,” Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.
“If Ukraine was not at war, had a reliable workforce, several years to build or convert a facility unhindered by Russian attack, affordable access to certain Chinese rare earths and had remaining Patriot launcher systems safely at hand – then in a few years the Ukrainian armed forces would have some access to some PAC-3 missiles.”
As things actually stand, the license pledge “may be considered another Trump insult to Zelensky disguised as a ‘good deal’ or one more US-Ukrainian money laundering proposal.”
Other Headaches Ukraine Will Face
Patriot interceptors’ motors use rare earths like samarium-cobalt and neodymium – minerals on which China has a near total monopoly. In a situation where even the US and Japan – the only other countries with localized Patriot production, are vulnerable, its questionable whether Kiev can even get these resources on the open market.
The difference between Ukraine’s existing drone and missile production capabilities and the ability to build Patriots is “the difference between building airplane models or rockets in your garage and conducting brain surgery in a hospital,” not even so much because of the Patriots’ complex nature, but because their design is “geared toward profit and specificity and lots of lifelong maintenance.”
Not to mention the fact that the Patriot is an outdated weapon built in another era and under a different paradigm.
“Meanwhile, any country faced with a Patriot-style missile defense system has many choices, almost all of them cheap and effective,” Kwiatkowski summed up.
Congress Aims to Give Israel Leverage Over America
By Harrison Berger | The American Conservative | July 5, 2026
Amid record-high public hostility toward Israel and the wars taxpayers are financing on its behalf, the Israel lobby has mobilized to pass a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2027 which includes language designed to sustain the years long wealth transfer from Americans to Israelis and cement that relationship in ways that would be less transparent and more difficult to challenge through democratic processes.
At the same time, a coalition led by outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has launched a counteroffensive to block a separate track of funding for Israel’s wars, targeting the transfer of $3.3 billion to Israel embedded within the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2027, which is also up for vote this summer.
The first bill—the NDAA—was highlighted by The American Conservative earlier this month. It includes language within its Section 224 (since renumbered Section 219 in the House) that would direct the Pentagon to identify Israeli-origin technologies “for potential integration into United States systems and programs of record” and to build “United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry.” Section 219, if enacted, “would be unprecedented,” Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute told TAC. “No other foreign country has an executive agent in the Pentagon to integrate our military industrial complex with theirs.”
Along with merging Israeli and American weapons technology and data, Section 219 would shift funding for Israeli weaponry from Congress to the Pentagon’s murky procurement system.
“This so clearly seems to be an attempt to shield money from cratering public opinion,” Sheline said. She noted that “Americans do not want to fund a country engaged in genocide and which led us into the Iran War,” adding that, rather than representing public opinion and cutting off Israel’s funding, Congress has moved to conceal it.
Such a merger carries inherent national security risks. The presence of foreign components in U.S. systems raises the threat those systems’ integrity will be compromised, a danger heightened in this case by Israel’s demonstrated capability and willingness to weaponize supply chains, as exhibited in their 2024 attack that involved the detonation of thousands of pagers which had been engineered into remote-controlled bombs. Joe Kent, the former director of the National Center for Counterterrorism, argues similarly that “the dangers of allowing any other nation to access our sensitive military technologies are obvious, including the fact that back doors and spyware can be installed that will most certainly be used by the Israelis to influence U.S. policy.”
But Section 219 of the NDAA would hinder American national security in much more immediate ways, principally by reducing the leverage Washington currently maintains to influence Israeli behavior in the region. “At present,” Sheline explains, “Israel is dependent on U.S. weapons and components, particularly their air force.” That U.S. support has enabled the Israelis to perpetrate a genocide in Gaza, ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon, and launch two wars against Iran, with Israel’s defense minister recently threatening a third.
“The U.S. could at present use leverage to change that Israeli behavior,” Sheline says. But by merging U.S. and Israeli weapons development, “this legislation would reverse it so that the [Israelis] could do that to us.”
Despite the various threats to American national security posed by the provision, section 219 this week moved closer to its expected final passage, with the House Rules Committee on Monday rejecting a bipartisan amendment introduced by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) that would have stripped the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” from the NDAA.
Massie’s efforts to stop a separate track for Israel funding attached to the State Department’s spending bill may be more successful. His other amendment—which seeks to eliminate $3.3 billion in annual funding for Israel tied to a 10-year, $38 billion MoU—has reportedly provoked panic among House Democrats, who face pressure from constituents with record-low views of Israel.
Punchbowl News reported that House Democrats “expressed alarm” in a closed meeting and were “begging for leadership guidance” on how to vote while Axios reported on Wednesday that Democrats “fear intense backlash from their base if they oppose” Massie’s amendment to halt Israel funding. Democrats who continue to support wealth transfers from the American tax base to Israelis are aware that doing so comes with the heightened risk of being unseated for it, with the recent ouster of Israel First Democrats Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) serving as a warning to any Democrats who continue to defy the will of the Democratic Party base.
The Massie amendment to cut off funds for Israeli offensive weaponry “may end up being the last time these sorts of votes are meaningful,” says Sheline. “If we proceed with defense industrial integration (Section 219), congress won’t be able to vote on it again.”
Harrison Berger is a correspondent at The American Conservative. He has contributed to Drop Site News, The Nation, and Responsible Statecraft. Previously, he was a researcher and producer for System Update with Glenn Greenwald. His work focuses on civil liberties and U.S. foreign policy. He studied Political Science and Russian Studies at Union College (NY).
‘Unprecedented corruption,’ crypto ventures help Trump net $2.2bn in profits since return to office
The Cradle | July 3, 2026
US President Donald Trump’s income last year soared to more than $2.2 billion, largely due to cryptocurrency holdings and related ventures he himself was able to regulate, according to financial disclosure forms released on 3 July.
In contrast, during his first term in office, the president’s income was primarily derived from his real estate businesses, including hotels, golf courses, and other properties, such as Mar-a-Lago. In 2024, before returning to the White House, he reported making over $600 million.
Last week, Trump claimed his skyrocketing wealth was due to the stock market’s rise. “You know why I’m profiting, because the stock market’s going up,” he told reporters last week.
However, the president’s financial disclosures indicate most of his new wealth has resulted from cryptocurrency and related ventures, which he has helped enable by relaxing rules on crypto markets.
In 2024, Trump launched crypto company World Liberty Financial. A UAE state-linked firm acquired a 49 percent stake in the company for $500 million, shortly before his inauguration as president.
The acquisition provided a substantial early windfall for the Trump family, allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to flow into Trump-controlled entities. Just months later, the US president approved the export of tightly guarded AI chips to the UAE, suggesting a connection between the two deals and a conflict of interest.
Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency coin issued by World Liberty Financial and promoted by Trump to his supporters has crashed in value by around 85 percent since its launch.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Trump made $1 billion on various crypto deals while his supporters lost vast amounts.
Days before returning to the White House, he launched his memecoin, $TRUMP, which reached a market value of nearly $15 billion before plunging 97 percent to about $400 million.
Roughly two-thirds of investors in the president’s memecoin have lost money, WSJ added.
“Since he retook office, he’s making over a billion dollars a year off of crypto, while at the same time his administration is writing the rules of the road for how crypto will be regulated,” Lee Reiners, a Duke University lecturer, told the Washington Post.
“Not only is this an unprecedented level of self-dealing and self-enrichment, the scale is really hard to wrap your head around.”
“It’s corruption on a scale that, to be honest, has few rivals in world history,” said Norm Eisen, who served as ethics advisor to former US president Barack Obama. “That’s because you never had the combination of a president willing to fully monetize the Oval Office combined with a world full of countries and other special interests who are willing to fork over vast sums.”
Trump or people close to him have also reportedly profited from massive, highly suspicious trading spikes in oil futures and stock indexes that occurred just minutes before the president issued major, market-moving announcements on social media regarding the US war on Iran.
Economists, lawmakers, and market analysts have raised concerns about potential insider trading, data leaks, and market manipulation coming from the White House.
A banal collection of nonentities and grifters
Ashes of Pompeii | June 30, 2026
Across the European Union, governance has increasingly devolved into an exercise in moral posturing. When virtue signalling becomes the primary policy guide, pragmatic statecraft is abandoned. The result is a continent plagued by strategic blunders, driven by an elite class that prioritizes appearing righteous over being effective.
At the heart of this dysfunction is the Brussels bubble, an insulated ecosystem entirely disconnected from the real world. The leaders populating this space generally lack practical experience, possessing only the specific skill set required to navigate internal party machinations. Consequently, they have consistently failed upwards. Ursula von der Leyen stands as the ultimate archetype of this phenomenon. After an, at best, mediocre career in German politics, culminated by a totally unsuccessful term as Minister of Defence, she was elevated to the head of the European Commission through backroom political horse trading rather than visionary leadership. This general lack of democratic accountability is fuelled by a profound sense of hubris and an entitlement to lead the globe. Apparently the natural order of things places Europe as the world’s moral, economic (and even military LOL) leader. Diversity and Identity Politics may rule in Brussels politics, where quotas are more important than merits, but in foreign policy Europe seems to think it has a God-given mandate to rule the world. Virtue signalling has entirely replaced serious political discourse as the main political language, ensuring that only the most ideologically compliant rise to the top.
This environment breeds rampant careerism, where the ultimate goal is securing a prestigious post through absolute subservience to the EU elite and the United States. Loyalty to Washington is routinely rewarded over national interest, as seen in the appointments of Annalena Baerbock to the United Nations and Mark Rutte to NATO. Alongside this sycophancy comes institutional corruption. The Pfizer scandal perfectly encapsulates this rot, with Von der Leyen at the center of the scandal. But the intense scrutiny she should be facing is glaring for its absence. When leaders operate with such opacity and prioritize personal or political advancement over transparency, the entire administrative apparatus rots from the inside.
This moral posturing yields disastrous foreign policy, most notably regarding Ukraine. The fundamental question is not what the EU can do to help Ukraine win, but why it is even meddling at all. If the EU and the UK had not meddled in the peace negotiations of March and April 2022, the war would have ended then and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Furthermore, Ukraine would have secured far better territorial and political conditions than it is likely to achieve in any postwar settlement today. The early peace talks were derailed by Western interference, turning a potential diplomatic resolution into a grinding war of attrition. Instead of pursuing a pragmatic peace, European leaders chose to signal moral superiority, prolonging a devastating conflict. We can debate whether this was to satisfy their ideological vanity or out of simple subservience to Washington.
Domestic policies suffer equally. Driven by the moral imperative of green virtue signalling, European leaders prematurely dismantled reliable energy infrastructure, triggering severe economic crises. Meanwhile, the current trade dispute with China exposes profound intellectual dishonesty. The EU labels China’s success in manufacturing and exports as “overcapacity”. Yet, one must ask if Germany had overcapacity during all those decades where it maintained a highly successful export led economy. They refuse to acknowledge their own loss of competitiveness, choosing instead to penalize Beijing for outperforming them in the global market. By weaponizing trade terminology to mask their own industrial decline, Brussels prioritizes ideological protectionism over economic reality.
It must be noted that the United Kingdom suffers from most of these same ailments. London’s political class is equally plagued by careerism, a disconnected bubble, and a reliance on virtue signalling over practical governance. Ultimately, whether in Brussels or London, the shift toward governance by moral posturing has been catastrophic. When leaders are unelected, subservient to foreign powers, and selected for ideological purity and party loyalty, rather than competence, the nation suffers. Europe has traded statecraft for virtue signalling, leaving itself strategically vulnerable and economically weak.
Future historians will look back on today’s leaders and wonder just how could such a banal collection of nonentities and grifters rise to become in the “elite” of the once powerful Europe.
The Starmer legacy the establishment media won’t tell you: Celebrity sex crimes, imprisoning Assange and torture terror
Before Downing Street, Starmer built his reputation at the CPS – where some of Britain’s ugliest scandals were buried, delayed, or erased
RT | June 26, 2026
As Keir Starmer prepares to leave the UK’s highest office after less than two years, the media has lined up to explain why he failed to deliver on the enormous hype he received as opposition leader, and during his initial months in office. A repeated trope has been that Starmer was a “decent man,” but simply not cut out for mainstream politics. However, his record of concealing the UK establishment’s repulsive crimes – be that serial child sex abuse or spy agency torture – shows him to be anything but decent.
What was the reality of Starmer’s CPS role?
Starmer’s spell as director of public prosecutions for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has been fundamental to his mythology since before he became Labour leader. It was during this time, according to The Guardian, that “Starmer transformed his reputation from that of a radical lawyer to that of a moderate and cautious administrator.” Missing from this account is any reference to how the CPS under his leadership covered up the crimes of notorious celebrity pedophile Jimmy Savile, while he was still alive.
In February 2022, Boris Johnson got in serious hot water after he accused Starmer in parliament of “prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile,” as CPS chief. Condemnation from the media and UK politicians was universal. Johnson’s personal policy chief, who’d worked for him for 14 years, resigned in protest over the then-Prime Minister’s supposedly libelous statements. Such was the backlash, as pressure grew so severe, that Johnson retracted his comments in a matter of three days.
It was an extraordinarily rare example of the UK establishment moving in unanimous lockstep, to defend a single mainstream politician accused of wrongdoing. The episode was made all the more shocking by Johnson’s statement being literally true. Starmer was CPS chief when the Service made the indefensible decision to not prosecute Savile, and many aspects of that strangely downplayed and ignored scandal implicate the failed prime minister personally.
What did an inquiry say about CPS treatment of Jimmy Savile?
An internal CPS inquiry into the Savile affair was commissioned by Starmer in 2012, after it was revealed in the wake of Savile’s death that police had failed to press charges against him despite numerous witnesses credibly accusing the UK’s “national treasure” of sexually abusing and raping them when they were young girls. The inquiry found a CPS “reviewing lawyer” told investigating officers early on he “would not be inclined to prosecute these cases because they were ‘relatively minor’.”
The CPS lawyer also didn’t ask the police basic questions about the case. The inquiry report found his attitude troubling. “I would hope that any prosecutor would regard a sexual assault as being in and of itself serious,” the author stated. They found instead that “these particular assaults were far from trivial,” and “represented a course of conduct against vulnerable women and girls” by Savile, over many years. Consequently, the investigator had “reservations about the way in which the prosecutor reached his decision.”
Instead of refusing to pursue the case, the CPS had a duty “to ‘build’ a prosecution,” which its lawyers failed to fulfil. The allegations against Savile were plainly “serious and credible.” The inquiry found that “had police and prosecutors taken a different approach, a prosecution might have been possible.” These conclusions are all the more damning when you consider that all CPS files held on Savile were shredded in October 2010.
Despite these grave criticisms, the investigator concluded, “I have seen nothing to suggest that the decisions not to prosecute were consciously influenced by any improper motive on the part of either police or prosecutors.” Which might be true, if only because all CPS files on Savile were destroyed. The report was therefore “dependent on material provided by the police to show what documents were seen by the reviewing lawyer and the advice which was given.”
The Service allegedly had “no record at all” of the case, which the inquiry claimed was due to CPS records on Savile being “automatically deleted” after a decision to take no action was made, in line with internal policies. However, the Service’s publicly accessible guidelines on “disposal” of evidence clearly state documents on cases where “no proceedings have taken place or where the case was discontinued before trial” must be kept for five years.
What role did Starmer play in Julian Assange’s persecution?
The Savile deletions were not the only example of suspiciously poor CPS recordkeeping under Starmer’s watch. In 2017, it was revealed the Service deleted sensitive email exchanges about Julian Assange with Swedish prosecutors three years earlier – potentially illegally, as a criminal case was ongoing. The communications occurred from 2010 until the WikiLeaks founder sought refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in June 2012, where he remained for almost seven years, under constant threat of CIA assassination. In 2019 British police forcibly removed him and sent him to Belmarsh, a high-security prison, where we was kept in almost total solitary confinement for five years.
The emails were deleted by a CPS lawyer who had personally advised Swedish police not to visit London and interview Assange as he had requested, on the grounds that he feared extradition to the US from Sweden. “In my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK,” they wrote in January 2011. This sentence was redacted in emails released under Freedom of Information by the CPS, but not in files provided by Swedish authorities.
Sweden dropped its investigation into Assange in May 2017. Only later was it revealed that the case could have been closed much earlier, were it not for direct CPS intervention. Beyond advising Swedish police not to interview Assange in London, a Service lawyer repeatedly sought to dissuade them from dropping their investigation outright. In August 2012, they wrote to their Swedish counterparts, “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”
In October 2013, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny wrote to the CPS that due to the passage of time, and lack of evidence against Assange, “we have found us to be obliged to lift the detention order… and to withdraw the European arrest warrant.” Three days later, Ny emailed a clearly affronted CPS, apologizing over the “[bad] surprise” of moving to drop charges against Assange. “I hope I didn’t ruin your weekend,” she added.
“All we can do is wait and see and perhaps be eternally grateful neither of us have to share a room in the embassy with him over Christmas!” the CPS lawyer responded.
Starmer’s personal role in all this has never been adequately clarified, but he visited Washington, DC in 2011, 2012 and 2013 while he was in effective charge of the Assange case, meeting with senior US officials. True to form, all records of Starmer’s trips were quickly destroyed, contrary to CPS protocol.
How did Starmer cover for MI5/MI6 torture?
After 9/11, the CIA launched a global torture program, identifying terror suspects, abducting them and sending them to black sites all over Europe and the Middle East, before torturing bogus confessions out of them to justify the War on Terror. MI5 and MI6 were not only centrally involved in the program; the two agencies ran an autonomous joint operation using “partner” agencies in the Global South to do the torturing itself.
When these activities became public, with legal actions mounting against the state by victims of the torture program and their families, UK police launched an investigation. Vast quantities of incriminating evidence were collected. However, Starmer as CPS chief consistently vetoed bringing offenders, including senior spy agency directors, to trial despite overwhelming cases against them. First, in 2010 he ruled there was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute an MI5 officer who participated in the torture in Pakistan of a UK citizen in 2002.
Police investigations into MI5 and MI6 for torture continued. However, in January 2012 Starmer again decided not to prosecute anyone from these agencies for their role in their unlawful treatment. The next April, Starmer attended the boozy going away party of MI5 chief Jonathan Evans, the first CPS official to ever attend such an event. Evans was a counter-terror veteran who’d served as MI5 director general since 2007, and would’ve been criminally liable if the CPS had decided to prosecute MI5.
Police investigations into the torture scandal weren’t finished though. Documents seized from Libyan security service offices, abandoned in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s October 2011 fall, were a treasure trove. This included faxes sent in March 2004 by then-MI6 counter-terror chief Mark Allen to Libyan spies, regarding a terror suspect kidnapped along with his wife in an MI6 operation. The suspect spent six years being tortured in Libyan prisons at the agency’s direction, with MI6 providing his interrogators questions to ask.
Overall, 28,000 pages of evidence on Allen’s involvement in torture were collected by police. In 2014 however, Starmer yet again decided this was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute the MI6 counter-terror chief, and the case was dropped. In return for a lifetime of serving the establishment, and assisting directly in the commission of serious criminality – if only by signing off on coverups and politicized prosecutions of dissidents – Starmer was rewarded with an empty seat in the UK’s highest office, for only two years.
Which Country Is the Big Loser from the Ramadan War?
By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | June 23, 2026
While the US certainly suffered some reputational damage and significant economic costs from its unprovoked attack on Iran, the United Arab Emirates may really be the big loser. Let’s focus on Dubai.
Think of Dubai as the World’s most expensive adult theme park that has no emergency exit. For decades, Dubai sold itself to the world as what would happen if Las Vegas and Disney World had a child together, raised it on sovereign wealth, and sent it to finishing school in Monaco. The result was a city of genuinely staggering audacity — an indoor ski slope in the desert, a hotel shaped like a sail that awards itself seven stars because five simply wasn’t enough, palm-shaped islands visible from space that are slowly sinking back into the sea from which they were so expensively extracted. It was, by any measure, the greatest theme park ever built for people who found actual theme parks insufficiently gilded and too puritanical.
The supposed genius of the Dubai proposition was always its geographical logic: i.e., it sits at the crossroads of global trade, pumps enough oil to build the infrastructure, and then gradually replace the oil revenue with everything else — tourism, finance, real estate, the inscrutable business of being a place where very wealthy people park very large amounts of money while asking no inconvenient questions. Oh, did I mention money laundering and hookers?
The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, named after the ruler of Abu Dhabi because Dubai ran out of money halfway through construction and needed a bailout, stands as perhaps the most honest monument in human history: a gleaming advertisement for ambition funded by someone else. The formula worked brilliantly as long as one variable held constant: the Strait of Hormuz remained open. The US and Israeli attack on Iran turned this assumption inside out.
Disney World works because it controls its environment entirely. Inside the berm, reality is suspended. Outside the berm, Florida continues to be Florida, which, as I can testify, is its own form of unreality but in a less curated direction. Dubai’s version of the berm was always the strait — twenty-one miles of water that kept the global economy flowing through the neighborhood and made Dubai’s position as the region’s entrepôt, logistics hub, financial center, and luxury destination not merely plausible but geometrically inevitable.
When Iran mined the strait in March 2026, Dubai discovered that its berm had a gap in it roughly twenty-one miles wide.
The cruise ships left first — or rather, they tried to. Six of them were trapped inside the Gulf like very large, very expensive rubber ducks in a bathtub whose drain had been plugged by a theocracy. Fifteen thousand passengers discovered that the all-inclusive package they had purchased did not, in the fine print, include Iranian mine-clearance operations as an amenity. The ships eventually got out during a brief window in April when Iran and the US simultaneously claimed the strait was open, which gave the ships a brief opening to make a run to safety. The passengers disembarked elsewhere and appear to have decided that the Arabian Gulf cruise experience had delivered sufficient excitement for one lifetime.
Las Vegas, Dubai’s other spiritual progenitor, is built on the foundational promise that geography is irrelevant — that a city in the middle of a desert can become the center of the world through sheer force of neon and human appetite. Dubai took this lesson and applied it at sovereign scale. If Las Vegas could conjure a city from nothing in Nevada, Dubai could conjure a global financial center from nothing in a desert on the edge of a historically significant but economically peripheral body of water.
The difference is that Las Vegas sits in the middle of a continent. Its supply chains are inconvenienced by traffic on I-15, not Iranian frigates. When something goes wrong in Nevada, the problem is human-scale. When something goes wrong in the Strait of Hormuz, the problem is civilizational-scale, which is a somewhat different category of operational risk.
Dubai’s ports — Jebel Ali, the largest in the Middle East — discovered that being the region’s premier logistics hub is an extraordinary competitive advantage right up until the moment the region becomes inaccessible. The container ships stopped coming. The tankers that hadn’t already been stranded inside the Gulf diverted around Africa, adding two weeks to their journeys and entirely bypassing the hub that had been so carefully constructed to serve them. The cargo kept moving; it simply moved around Dubai rather than through it, in the manner of a river that encounters a spectacular dam and quietly reroutes rather than admiring the engineering.
What Dubai is experiencing is the particular agony of a city built for maximum throughput discovering that throughput has somewhere else to be. The restaurants remain excellent. The hotel pools remain temperature-controlled to a degree that can only be described as a philosophical statement about the relationship between mankind and climate. The brunches — Dubai’s most characteristically Dubai institution, a Friday afternoon event that begins at noon, ends somewhere around consciousness, and costs roughly what a semester of community college costs in Ohio — continue to be held, though with fewer attendees from the European finance sector, which is dealing with its own energy crisis and has temporarily reduced its appetite for unlimited wagyu and proximity to other people’s wealth.
The real estate market, which has spent twenty years as a reliable indicator of how much money the world needs to quietly relocate, is experiencing what agents describe as a period of recalibration and what everyone else describes as a crash. Property values in Dubai are denominated in confidence as much as dirhams, and confidence requires that the fundamental premise of Dubai — the crossroads theory, the inevitability of the location — remains legible. A crossroads from which one of the roads has been temporarily mined is a different proposition.
But the Hormuz crisis has stripped away, at least temporarily, the comfortable fiction that Dubai’s position was natural rather than constructed, inevitable rather than contingent. Las Vegas exists because Americans wanted somewhere to gamble without legal consequence. Disney World exists because Walt Disney wanted to control the parking. Dubai exists because the global economy needed a node at a specific geographic location, and someone had the audacity and the capital to build one there.
All three are, at their core, exercises in the proposition that if you build it extravagantly enough, they will come. Two of them don’t have to worry about what happens if someone mines the entrance.
But there also is a dark side to the UAE in general and Dubai in particular — it is a center for money laundering and foreign intelligence activities. A friend, who is a business/energy consultant in the Persian Gulf summarizes the situation as follows:
The UAE now operates as a Zionist/Israeli-linked Gulf security platform with annex-like and fledgling-colony characteristics. Zionist/Israeli and Israel-linked security, cyber, surveillance, defense, and intelligence-adjacent systems have permeated core state capability to the point of effective strategic control over key security and technology layers.
That penetration creates strategic exposure across the UAE military establishment, internal-security architecture, technology stack, logistics system, financial channels, and monetary confidence base.
The money-flow thesis has also changed. Dubai and the broader UAE have long served as high-liquidity routing environments for offshore capital, sanctions-sensitive money, criminal syndicate proceeds, and illicit flows connected to Africa, gold, real estate, trade, luxury assets, and corporate structuring. The war-risk and security-integration shock has damaged that flow. Capital that depends on opacity, stability, and uninterrupted confidence becomes unstable when the host jurisdiction is visibly embedded in a conflict architecture.
The state is assessed as structurally aligned with the US-Israel security architecture and operationally dependent on Israel-linked security and technology capabilities. The exposure is not merely diplomatic. The UAE security apparatus, technology apparatus, military establishment, cyber-defense layer, and monetary confidence system are assessed as deeply permeated by Zionist/Israeli and Israel-linked systems, vendors, intelligence-adjacent relationships, and defense cooperation. Money flows that used the UAE for opacity, liquidity, asset conversion, gold, corporate layering, luxury consumption, trade routing, and real-estate placement are now exposed to war-risk repricing, sanctions scrutiny, intelligence attention, and capital-flight pressure.
So guess whose uncle is a weekly visitor to the UAE carrying bags of cash? If you guessed Volodimir Zelensky you are correct. Zelensky’s uncle, according to my source, deposits the money in local banks. The money is then used to purchase property that it then subsequently sold. The proceeds from that sale are then sent to banks in Israel… All cleaned up. From there, some of the money makes its way back to members of the US Congress as a way of thanking them for their support of Ukraine.
Will the UAE return to its previous garish glory? Perhaps. One immediate consequence of the US/Israeli attack on Iran is that much of the big money stored in the UAE banks decided that Singapore was more secure, which produced a significant capital flight from Dubai. The de facto expulsion of the US from the Persian Gulf, coupled with Chinese and Russian initiatives to create a new security architecture in the Gulf, is causing the Emiratis to reassess their past relationships. It is not clear what path they will choose to follow going forward, but the UAE emirs did send a delegation to Tehran on June 9. Is Dubai considering a future without wealthy foreigners with an appetite for alcohol and prostitutes? Maybe.
Israeli Intel Whistleblower: Israel Ended Clinton Iran Deal With Epstein Blackmail
By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | June 22, 2026
The former Israeli intelligence official turned whistleblower, Ari Ben-Menashe made some explosive claims to journalist Afshin Rattansi in the latest episode of his Going Underground TV Show, alleging that then president Bill Clinton made a deal with then Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, but then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a known close associate of Jeffery Epstein, used blackmail about Clinton’s known connection with Jeffery Epstein and his trafficking operation of underage girls, to end the deal.
Ben-Menashe alleges that in 2000 Bill Clinton “met President Khatami in Mirabel Airport north of Montreal and they worked out the deal between them”.
Ben-Menashe noted that “on March 17, 2000, Madeleine Albright made a speech at the American Iranian Council apologizing to the Iranian people for America overthrowing an elected government in 1952 in Iran and bringing the Shah back”
Indeed, on March 17, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a speech apologizing for the overthrow of Iran’s popular elected president Mohammed Massadegh in 1953, saying:
In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Massadegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.
Moreover, during the next quarter century, the United States and the West gave sustained backing to the Shah’s regime. Although it did much to develop the country economically, the Shah’s government also brutally repressed political dissent.
As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations. Even in more recent years, aspects of U.S. policy towards Iraq, during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted, especially in light our subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein.
This certainly suggested that the Clinton administration was trying to reset the U.S. and Iranian relationship, acknowledging Iran’s long list of legitimate grievances against the United States.
But according to Ari Ben-Menashe, the deal never went through because Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak “sabotaged” the deal using Epstein blackmail.
Ben-Menashe said, “But Ehud Barak and company sabotaged that deal by using Epstein and company against Mr. Clinton”.
Because Clinton had already gone through the Monica Lewinsky scandal, this was enough for him to abandon diplomacy, according to Ben-Menashe.
Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine Gets Unanimous Thumbs-Up Despite Risks, Low Efficacy
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 18, 2026
A federal advisory committee today unanimously voted to endorse Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine — just months after rejecting the company’s application on the basis that Moderna had not performed an “adequate and well-controlled” clinical trial.
The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which reviews scientific data on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and other therapeutics on behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), voted 9-0 in dual votes to recommend approval of the vaccine for the 50-64 and 65-plus age groups.
Today’s votes took place after several hours of presentations based on the findings of Moderna’s Phase 4 clinical trial data for its mRNA-1010 vaccine. The trial compared the efficacy of mRNA-1010 to that of a conventional, non-mRNA flu vaccine.
Daniel O’Connor, founder and CEO of TrialSite News, told The Defender today’s favorable votes “may reflect the committee’s view that the benefit-risk profile is acceptable.” However, the vote “does not erase the fundamental concerns surrounding this application.”
“Significant questions remain about comparator selection, study design and whether the reported efficacy advantage represents a clinically meaningful improvement for patients or simply a statistical advantage within the framework of the trial,” O’Connor said.
According to an FDA briefing document prepared in advance of today’s meeting, “no major deficiencies were identified” with the vaccine for adults 50 and over. Citing the clinical trial data, the document states that the mRNA-1010 vaccine had a 26.6% relative efficacy rate in adults 50 and over, with similar rates for adults 65 and up.
The mRNA-1010 vaccine also showed a higher immune response than Sanofi’s Fluzone vaccine, the document noted. According to Fierce Biotech, these results met all of the FDA’s “pre-specified criteria for success” and bolstered Moderna’s application for approval.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, said today’s vote shifts mRNA-1010 safety monitoring to after licensure.
“VRBPAC meetings proceed to the beat of the rubber stamp. The unanimous vote guarantees a lot of really good questions of harm will have to be answered in the post-marketing period, when that harm manifests in the population,” Jablonowski said.
Moderna seeks traditional approval for the mRNA-1010 vaccine for the 50-64 age group and accelerated approval for the 65-plus age group.
Fierce Biotech reported that the FDA uses VRBPAC meetings to “seek outside counsel on tough or high-profile regulatory decisions.”
The FDA will make an approval decision on mRNA-1010 by Aug. 5 — and while the agency is not bound to VRBPAC’s votes, it “often follows the opinions” of its advisory committees.
Moderna’s stock was up over 4% in trading immediately after the vote, and up 3.50% at the close of market.
mRNA vaccine had higher rate of adverse events than conventional flu shot
According to MedPage Today, all current flu vaccines are “manufactured using egg-based, cell-culture based, or recombinant production technologies” — a production process that could result in “egg-adaptive mutations” and which makes it slow to reformulate vaccines when they don’t match currently circulating flu strains.
In their briefing document, FDA scientists suggested that “high-volume manufacturing” of a flu vaccine “capable of rapid strain reformulation is … needed.”
However, the briefing document did identify some concerns with mRNA-1010. FDA scientists noted the higher rate of solicited adverse events among clinical trial participants who received mRNA-1010 — and the higher number of unspecified deaths and serious adverse events related to anemia or urinary tract infections.
The document also noted that “efficacy in immunocompromised individuals and very frail older adults has not been established” — which is “significant because these populations face the highest absolute risk of severe influenza-related complications and may respond differently to mRNA-based vaccine platforms.”
Several experts told The Defender that Moderna’s mRNA-1010 vaccine poses risks. “Throughout the study, solicited adverse events are almost, and in some cases more than, double that of the comparator,” Jablonowski said.
The briefing document acknowledged a higher rate of solicited adverse reactions for mRNA-1010 vaccine recipients than among the conventional flu vaccine recipients. According to the Association of Health Care Journalists, solicited adverse events are “those that the trial investigators specifically ask participants about because they are either expected or likely based on known reactions to other vaccines.”
Unsolicited (unexpected) adverse events, serious adverse events, adverse events of special interest and deaths “were balanced between treatment groups,” and “no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis were identified within 42 days postvaccination,” the document states.
Immunologist and biochemist Jessica Rose, Ph.D., said this period is too small to detect long-term risks. “There is no way to know what the long-term adverse events will encompass,” she said.
Dr. Angus Dalgleish, professor emeritus of oncology at City St. George’s, University of London, said, “There is no need for any specific flu vaccine.” He cited the high number of serious adverse events related to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
“The case for mRNA gene therapies for any infectious disease can never be approved with current technology, given the totally unacceptable serious side effect risks,” Dalgleish said.
Rose agreed. She said that since mRNA-1010 is based on the same “flawed” platform as the COVID-19 shots, she anticipates “exactly the same problems as for the COVID shots, as per the millions of reported adverse events to pharmacovigilance databases.”
FDA glosses over safety concerns
These concerns are similar to those expressed when Moderna first filed its application for licensure in December 2025 and which contributed to the FDA declining to review the company’s application in February.
In a “refusal-to-file” letter signed by Dr. Vinay Prasad, then-director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccines, the agency cited Moderna’s failure to perform an “adequate and well-controlled” clinical trial and its failure to use the “best-available standard of care” during the trial process.
In February, STAT reported that Prasad overruled senior FDA vaccine reviewers, who were ready to review Moderna’s application. However, Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told STAT at the time that the claim was “categorically false.”
In response to Moderna’s claim that mRNA-1010 had a 26.6% higher relative efficacy rate than the existing Fluzone vaccine, former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova wrote on Substack that this is significantly lower than the 95% relative efficacy claimed for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during Phase 3 clinical trials.
Jablonowski told The Defender in February that the mRNA-1010 clinical trial data show that mRNA recipients had a 329% higher chance of sustaining a serious adverse event and a 278% higher chance of experiencing an unsolicited adverse event — referring to a condition that was not expected or previously known.
However, the FDA’s briefing document found that mRNA-1010’s safety profile was “acceptable for the intended population” and that there was no causal relationship between the vaccine and the unspecified deaths and cases of anemia and urinary tract infections identified during the clinical trial.
The document said these adverse events are “unlikely to represent a vaccine safety signal” and that the risk of rare adverse events should be tracked through post-licensure monitoring.
But according to Jablonowski, conventional flu vaccines have shown they have negative efficacy — placing the vaccinated at higher risk of flu than the unvaccinated. He said this makes any comparison between the candidate mRNA vaccine and existing vaccines invalid.
“If the current flu vaccines have negative efficacy, a placebo would be more efficacious. … In the 2024-2025 season, the Cleveland Clinic found a negative 27% efficacy,” Jablonowski said.
‘They’re promoting the platform’
The FDA’s decision to decline review of Moderna’s application led to an uproar within the pharmaceutical and public health spheres. Within two weeks, the FDA accepted the company’s application for licensure of mRNA-1010. Leadership shake-ups at the FDA soon followed.
Last month, Dr. Marty Makary resigned his FDA commissioner post, following rumors that he would be fired. In April, Dr. Vinay Prasad resigned from the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) — for the second time in less than a year. The FDA then fired Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., the agency’s top drug regulator and a staunch advocate for vaccine safety.
Some experts suggested that political pressure — and corporate lobbying — contributed to the FDA’s about-face.
Blackstone, a New York-based investment firm, is the world’s largest alternative assets manager, with a portfolio exceeding $1 trillion. In 2024, the company launched an ongoing, $750 million investment in Moderna, explicitly to support the development of its mRNA flu shot.
Aside from its financial might, Blackstone is also closely connected to the Republican Party and the Trump administration, through significant donations from its executives and employees and through its ties with prominent lobbying firms linked to Republicans — and Big Pharma.
In turn, Blackstone’s CEO and co-founder, Stephen A. Schwarzman, has close ties to President Donald Trump and his administration, while members of Blackstone’s Life Sciences division have ties with several vaccine makers, including Pfizer.
In a post on X, Max Bayer, a science reporter with Endpoints News, noted that today’s meeting included the participation of a non-voting pharmaceutical industry representative and that “no waivers were issued for conflicts of interest.”
Bayer also noted that unlike the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the agency on vaccine recommendations and which U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revamped before a federal court froze those changes, VRBPAC’s membership remains “pretty much intact.”
According to a February study, 557 clinical trials of mRNA therapeutic products are in progress, 507 of which involve vaccines, with Pfizer and Moderna leading the way in what analysts project will be a rapidly growing — and lucrative — market for mRNA products in the coming years.
Rose suggested that these moves signal a desire on the part of the FDA to continue promoting mRNA vaccine technology.
“They’re promoting the platform,” Rose said. “People who acknowledge risk who oppose using an unsafe and ineffective platform are a problem for the industry players aligned with pushing this technology forward.”
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.
CDC Awards Pfizer $1.24 Billion for COVID Vaccines for Kids and Adults
By Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW | The Defender | June 12, 2026
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recent decision to award Pfizer $1.24 billion for COVID-19 vaccines has renewed debate over the government’s continued investment in mRNA technology.
The contracts, awarded on June 1, include about $735.7 million for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines and nearly $505.3 million for adult doses for fiscal year 2026-2027.
Critics say the funding reflects a continued commitment to vaccines associated with high rates of serious injuries and deaths, and a lack of adequate safety testing and monitoring.
Public health experts argue the investment is necessary to protect vulnerable populations and prepare for future outbreaks.
The latest contracts come as mRNA technology expands beyond COVID-19.
A recent review in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics found that mRNA-based therapeutics were identified in more than 550 registered clinical trials. The authors reported that more than 90% of the projects involved mRNA vaccines and that most products remain in early-stage testing before broader adoption.
‘Unnecessary and often harmful injections’
The procurement of monetary resources signals that federal officials intend to continue investing heavily in mRNA technology despite declining public demand and ongoing controversy over vaccine safety monitoring, critics say.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, told The Defender there was “no scientific justification” or “market demand” for the latest mRNA vaccine funding.
“This raises a serious question concerning how these captured agencies really work,” Tucker said. “We are talking about vast amounts of tax dollars flowing to support unnecessary and often harmful injections.”
“This is $1.24 billion for what is essentially a cold in minor children,” said Children’s Health Defense Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.
Daniel O’Connor, publisher of TrialSite News, which covers global biomedical and clinical research, told The Defender Americans “better start asking the hard questions.”
“If demand is falling, safety questions remain contested and many reporting vaccine injuries say they’ve been left behind, why is Washington committing another $1.24 billion to vaccine procurement instead of first providing a transparent accounting of need, benefit, risk, and responsibility?”
‘COVID-19 has not disappeared’
Public health experts disagreed, saying their support of vaccinations is supporting the prevention of future pandemics.
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, told The Defender that the monetary installments will help stave off another public health crisis because “COVID-19 has not disappeared.”
“While the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, the virus continues to cause significant illness, hospitalizations and deaths each year,” she said. “This investment reflects the reality that vaccines remain one of our most effective tools for preventing severe disease, particularly among those at highest risk. Maintaining access to updated vaccines is an important part of ensuring the country remains prepared for future COVID-19 surges.”
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said the contracts will ensure “continuing availability of safe and effective COVID vaccines through the next two years.”
“COVID vaccines have repeatedly been demonstrated to provide protection against the most severe manifestations of COVID infection: hospitalization, intensive care unit admission and death,” Schaffner said. “This is particularly applicable to those persons at increased risk of becoming seriously ill: persons age 65 and older, anyone with a chronic medical condition, persons who are immunocompromised and persons who are pregnant.”
However, some studies suggest claims that the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives are based on flawed models and incorrect calculations.
Legality of funding in question
The contracts also raise questions about federal vaccine spending.
Under the CDC’s Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program, the federal government agrees to buy and provide free vaccines through negotiated contracts for eligible children.
Current CDC price schedules list Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines at roughly $69 to $91 per dose, depending on the formula, while Moderna doses range from about $78 to $83.
Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer and expert in mRNA vaccines, however, questioned the legal authority to use federal funding for the Pfizer contracts because the purchase wasn’t approved by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
“Use of VFC funds requires ACIP authorization,” he said. “But there is no ACIP.”
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an injunction blocking many of the recent ACIP appointments made under U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The injunction stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) against Kennedy and the U.S, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The AAP accused Kennedy of violating procedures when he fired previous ACIP members and replaced them.
The ruling effectively paralysed ACIP and cast doubt on the legitimacy of its membership structure.
Requests for comment from ACIP went unanswered.
‘We are a long way from reckoning’
The CDC has maintained that authorized COVID-19 vaccines underwent extensive safety review and that the benefits outweigh known risks.
However, during a Capitol Hill meeting this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) referred to reported COVID-19 vaccine injuries as the “biggest government scandal in my lifetime.”
“What about all the injection-injured?” he said. “Until this government and this administration acknowledge those injuries, acknowledge the harm caused by these injections, and I would say federal health agencies also acknowledge the harm done by childhood vaccines, we are a long way from reckoning.”
In April, Johnson released a report revealing that Biden-era health officials rejected a state-of-the-art statistical tool for detecting COVID-19 vaccine safety signals — and instead deliberately continued using a broken method because they didn’t want to “feed in to [sic] anti-vaccination rhetoric.”
During an April 29 hearing, Johnson revealed that a longtime U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical officer, Ana Szarfman, M.D., Ph.D., repeatedly warned colleagues that the agency’s approach to safety monitoring could miss serious safety signals due to a problem known as “masking.” Masking occurs when other vaccines obscure risks tied to a specific product.
Johnson said FDA officials brushed aside Szarfman’s warnings.
The CDC, HHS and Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the contracts.
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.
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From the Archives
A short history of British torture
ICC | December 2005
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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