Why is America’s paediatric academy still pushing Covid vaccines for children?
The American Academy of Pediatrics has broken ranks with the CDC, issuing its own “evidence-based” immunisation schedule—but whose interests is the AAP really serving?
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | August 19, 2025
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has just urged that all children aged 6 – 23 months receive a Covid-19 vaccine, regardless of prior infection, and extended that recommendation to older children deemed high risk.
Their guidance directly conflicts with the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently withdrew broad recommendations to vaccinate healthy children and pregnant women in favour of “shared clinical decision-making.”
Now, for the first time, the AAP has broken ranks — issuing its own “evidence-based immunization schedule” that places it squarely alongside its biggest corporate donors, the very companies whose products it promotes.
The boycott
The rupture began in June 2025, when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr dismissed the CDC’s old Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced it with a leaner panel.
The AAP, which had held a privileged liaison seat at ACIP for decades, responded by boycotting the meeting.
AAP president Dr Susan Kressly declared, “We won’t lend our name or our expertise to a system that is being politicised at the expense of children’s health,” branding the restructured ACIP “no longer a credible process.”
But credibility cuts both ways. At the June meeting, ACIP member Cody Meissner — himself an establishment veteran — rebuked the boycott.
“I think it’s somewhat childish for them not to appear,” he said. “It is dialogue that leads to the best recommendations for the use of vaccines.”
The AAP’s absence wasn’t about protecting children from politics. It was about rejecting a forum it could no longer control.
Following the money
The AAP insists its funding has no bearing on policy. But the Academy advertises its dependence on the very companies whose products it recommends for children.
On its own website, the Academy thanks its top corporate sponsors: Moderna, Merck, Sanofi and GSK. These companies produce nearly every vaccine on the childhood schedule — and now the AAP is demanding more of their products be given to babies.
Financial filings show corporate contributions make up a substantial slice of the Academy’s revenue. Even its flagship journal, Pediatrics, carries the fingerprints of industry support.
This isn’t independence, it’s entanglement. When an organisation funded by vaccine makers issues recommendations that boost those same companies’ sales, it is impossible to pretend this is solely about children’s health.
Parents have already rejected the shots
The problem for the AAP is that parents have already walked away. CDC data show that among toddlers, the rate is a mere 4.5%.
The public’s verdict could not be clearer: most families do not want these vaccines for their children.
The AAP knows this — yet it presses ahead regardless. Its recommendations are now performative, directed less at parents than at its corporate benefactors.
Kennedy strikes back
Kennedy seized on the contradiction.
Posting a screenshot of the AAP’s donor list, he wrote: “These four companies make virtually every vaccine on the CDC’s recommended childhood vaccine schedule,” after the Academy released its own list of “corporate-friendly vaccine recommendations.”
Kennedy accused the Academy of running a “pay-to-play scheme” on behalf of “Big Pharma benefactors” and demanded full disclosure of conflicts in its leadership and journal.
He warned that recommendations diverging from the CDC’s official list are not protected under the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act. For now, Covid-19 products remain under a separate regime — the PREP Act and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which HHS has extended through to 2029.
Kennedy cast this as a red line for the future: if the AAP keeps inventing its own vaccine schedule, it risks dragging doctors and hospitals into legal jeopardy.
This is no longer about one product but about who dictates the rules of childhood vaccination — government regulators or an industry-backed lobby group.
The deeper problem
This dispute isn’t really about Covid vaccines because parents, even healthcare workers, have already rejected them in overwhelming numbers. It is about who controls the institutions that speak in the name of children’s health.
The AAP claimed it boycotted ACIP in June to resist politicisation. In reality, it walked away from a process no longer stacked with the industry-aligned figures it had long relied on. That was the real affront.
The deeper problem is that the AAP is not a neutral guardian of child health. It is a lobbying arm entangled with corporate sponsors, issuing pronouncements that align with donor interests while ignoring the families it claims to represent.
AAP says it represents 67,000 paediatricians, and by extension America’s children. But its actions tell a different story. It represents the companies that fund it.
Children’s health is jeopardised when those entrusted with protecting it are compromised. The AAP’s latest recommendations are not science-based safeguards. They are corporate advocacy in disguise.
It is not just disappointing — it is harmful.
AAP’s full vaccine schedule [LINK]
Beware Universal Mental Health Screening
By Cooper Davis, Jeffrey Lacasse | Brownstone Institute | August 21, 2025
How would your child score on a common mental health screening?
A mental health professional might view the results and conclude that your child has a mental health problem… that needs to be psychiatrically diagnosed and treated, even medicated.
Will this help your child thrive? Or will it reshape their identity in undesirable ways? Will you be comfortable with your child taking medications that alter their developing brains and could perturb their sexuality? When your child reaches adulthood, will they be able to withdraw from these drugs, or will they despair to find out that their body and brain have adapted to them, making this difficult or maybe even impossible?
For any parent with even minor reservations about our current medical and mental health system, these aren’t theoretical questions. A new public policy has just made them very salient.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed a new law mandating universal mental health screenings for every child in public school. This includes healthy children with no signs of behavioral problems. Parents can theoretically opt out, but they’ll have to do so repeatedly, as the screenings will be given at least once a year from grades 3-12.
Media coverage has been laudatory, expounding on the importance of “getting kids the help and support they deserve.” But do you know what a mental health screen is and how it works? Before sounding the applause, parents need to understand what these screenings are, how they’re used, and what the potential outcomes of their use might be.
The new law does not specify how children will be screened, what questionnaires will be used, or what procedures will be followed when a child’s answers are seen as troubling. But to get a sense of the ground that self-report mental health questionnaires cover, you can screen your kids right now with a commonly used questionnaire:
While this is a self-assessment, the questions are the same whether you’re a parent or teacher filling this out on behalf of a child. Each of the 35 questions can be answered “never,” “sometimes,” or “often.” The scoring is simple:
- 0 = “never”
- 1 = “sometimes”
- 2 = “often”
If the total score is at or above 28, professionals will consider it likely that your child has a mental health problem. The law doesn’t define what happens next. Ideally, there would be a lengthy (and costly) multi-hour clinical assessment for each such child that views these results skeptically, and heavily considers normal developmental issues and transitory problems. In the real-world mental health system, it’s hard to imagine that actually happening.
Unfortunately, the bias of the current system is towards overmedicalization, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment. The implementation of universal screening is likely to worsen these problems.
In the past, some physicians gave annual chest X-rays to smokers. This was a form of universal screening in response to concerns about lung cancer. At first blush, this sounds reasonable. The problem? False-positive results. Studies showed that annual X-rays did not prevent mortality. They did cause anxiety in patients. And incidental findings were common, causing unnecessary biopsies, procedures, and interventions.
Current screening guidelines now target high-risk individuals. This is an example where the medical establishment carefully weighed the risks and benefits of universal screening and concluded that it was not in the interests of patients, and with a well-defined disease in mind, lung cancer.
Mental health diagnosis is not like cancer. It is a fuzzy, subjective enterprise. We don’t have blood tests or brain scans; we have flawed checklists and clinical judgment. And obviously, being improperly identified as having a mental disorder comes with a real cost for the child.
Screening every single child makes it inevitable that some healthy children will be thrust into the mental health pipeline. Even assuming that the questionnaires work reasonably well, a 15% false-positive rate is likely. Combine this false-positive rate with twice-a-year universal screening from grades 3-12, and your child will have 20 separate chances to be wrongly identified as having a mental health problem…at which point the government ostensibly gets involved in the mental health of your child.
It’s easy to imagine the catastrophic results. A child’s mental health screen inaccurately identifies a mental health problem; the busy therapist confirms a diagnosis; there’s eventually a referral to a psychiatrist, who prescribes psychotropic medication. Out of 20 screenings, this only has to happen once to alter your child’s life forever.
I (C.D.) know, because it happened to me.
I was caught up in a similar diagnostic dragnet in 1991, when my teacher read about Ritalin in Time magazine and began “identifying” students she believed might have the condition, which at the time was known as “ADD” (the “H”, for hyperactivity, came later). My parents chose not to medicate me, but did send me to a psychologist and a pediatric psychiatrist. From them, I learned that my constant chair-tipping, foot-tapping, wiggling, and inability to tolerate boredom — the very traits that drove me to act out in class and leave little space between impulse and action — weren’t just part of me, but symptoms of a medical condition. It was presented as both permanently part of my nature and “acceptable,” yet somehow also extrinsic to me and framed primarily as a “deficit.” (At that time, ADD was not as widely viewed as a full disability as it is today.)
At 17, when I was legally able to decide for myself — though I now view the “informed” part as questionable — I chose to begin drug treatment. Even without the drugs, however, the diagnosis had already shaped my sense of self: diminishing my agency, reinforcing a feeling of abnormality, and feeding the belief that my more organized, conscientious, and inconspicuous peers possessed something essential that I never would. You can hear a fuller account in The Atlantic’s Scripts podcast series (“The Mandala Effect,” Episode 2, on YouTube).
My experience is just one example of how a single screening can lock a child into a lifelong diagnostic identity — and once that process starts, there are few real off-ramps. Surely no one in favor of this law wants that scenario to come true for any child.
But with 1.4 million schoolchildren in Illinois, we’re talking about dealing with the results of up to 28 million separate mental health screenings in the decade after implementation. Will the mental health professionals dealing with this deluge approach the medicalization of your child’s supposed problems carefully, gingerly, sensitively? A 2004 study found that screening 1,000 children for ADHD using the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM criteria would result in 370 false positives. And it’s common for children to be prescribed psychotropic medication at their first consultation with their physician or psychiatrist.
A comprehensive, in-depth psychological assessment for each child might help reduce false positives — but it would also mean spending 3-6 hours assessing each child, which represents a high burden in terms of both time and money. School districts in Illinois already report that a lack of time, expertise, and financial resources presents challenges to implementing universal mental health screening. The law passed anyway.
It’s hard to argue that attempts to identify and measure human misery, suffering, and emotional pain are a bad thing, etc.—especially when the goal is “getting people the help they need.” It sounds right. But the kids who will be screened every year in Illinois? They have many kinds of problems: social, relational, environmental, academic, psychological, and physical problems. Children today have issues navigating a modern life dominated by endless screens, scrolling, and even more endless data.
And also, they have some problems that you’re supposed to have—problems that have been a critical part of growing up since the dawn of time.
Our culture is currently debating the medicalization of human problems, the credibility of medicine, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, and the ethics of imposing medical authority as state policy. Covid lockdowns were a prime example of this, and, similar to universal mental health screening, they were imposed without consideration of the unintended consequences.
Mandatory Covid vaccinations also led many Americans to rethink the role of government in their bodily autonomy, and to consider how arbitrary social policy could be when it claimed to be for the greater good (e.g., insisting that those with immunity to Covid must still get vaccinated). For those who have grown skeptical of medical authority, universal mental health screening will likely be viewed as another overextension of the government into the lives (and minds) of their children. Children aged 12-17 can already receive psychotherapy in Illinois without parental consent; universal screening offers a new on-ramp to this process.
The new Illinois law seems almost tone deaf, out of step with the lessons learned from Covid. This critique is cultural, social, and ethical in nature. But universal mental health screening is supposedly based on science. The new Illinois law does not give details; it just authorizes universal screening as if it is an unmitigated good. The devil (and the science, or lack thereof) will be in these details – how the policy is implemented. Assuming that the rationale for universal screening is scientific, we present critically important questions that should be addressed as procedures are developed:
- What is the evidence that universal mental health screening improves real-world outcomes for children? Is there evidence that it could cause harm? The scientific rationale for the program needs to be stated clearly, citing compelling data, and explicitly addressing the measures taken to avoid harm.
- Given that Illinois has already implemented universal mental health screening in some school districts, what were the outcomes for the children? After testing positive for a mental health condition, how many were further assessed, and how much time was spent on each child? How many ended up in psychotherapy or on medication? Usually, a pilot program tests the effectiveness of an intervention, and it is only adopted on a wide scale if it is shown to be effective and not harmful – where is that data?
- How many children a year does Illinois expect to inaccurately identify as having a mental health problem (e.g., how many false positives)? How many children will make it from 3rd to 12th grade without ever screening positive? What measures will address the known issue of false-positive results in universal screening? Do Illinois public schools have the time, money, and expertise to carefully assess each child who screens positive for multiple hours to ensure that they do not overdiagnose and overtreat Illinois children? If universal screening results in a surge of children who ultimately end up on psychiatric medication, how will the public know? Implementing this program without addressing these issues ignores the potential harm of universal screening.
- How will Illinois taxpayers know if this program is a success? What metrics will be tracked? The easy out is to focus on the implementation of the program, and if a high proportion of children are screened, call it a success, never mind the details or outcomes. But using the screening of children as a measure of success for a universal screening program is tautology; data must be collected that demonstrates that the program helps children measurably and does not harm them.
There are good reasons to object to the new Illinois program based on general principles. If the issues above go unaddressed, or if sufficient resources are not provided to allow careful and precise identification of children in distress, it has the potential to be a disaster.
Cooper Davis is an advocate, speaker, and writer. He is the Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative (ICI), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that advocates for mental health system reform and helps people make informed choices about psychiatric diagnoses, drugs, and drug withdrawal.
ILLINOIS TO FORCE MENTAL EXAMS ON KIDS
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | August 21, 2025
A shocking new Illinois law will force public schools to conduct annual mental health checks on students from 3rd through 12th grade. Jefferey exposes the hidden risks and potential harm this invasive mandate could bring to children.
Your Spouse Started Antidepressants and Became a Stranger
The hidden crisis and why it happens
By Dr. Roger McFillin | Radically Genuine | August 7, 2025
“I don’t know who this person is anymore,” James told me, his voice cracking as he described his wife of fifteen years. “She started Zoloft eight months ago for some mild anxiety about work. Now she’s rewritten our entire history together. According to her new narrative, I’ve been emotionally abusive for years. She’s filed for divorce, moved in with some guy she met at a yoga retreat, and told our kids that daddy was never really there for them.”
He paused, searching for words. “The strangest part? She seems completely unbothered by destroying our family. It’s like she’s watching it happen from outside her own body.”
Welcome to the SSRI marriage apocalypse: a phenomenon so widespread that entire online communities have formed to support its casualties. Spouses gathering in digital refugee camps, comparing notes about partners who transformed into unrecognizable strangers after starting antidepressants. The stories are eerily similar: personality changes, moral compass spinning wildly, empathy evaporating, sexual connection obliterated, and a strange, detached willingness to torch everything they once held sacred.
But here’s what makes my blood boil: The mental health establishment celebrates these relationship demolitions as therapeutic breakthroughs. “The medication lifted their mood enough to finally leave that toxic relationship!” they’ll proclaim, completely ignoring that the “toxicity” might be a drug-induced fabrication. This is my fundamental criticism of the therapy industry: therapists attach to their client’s inner world as if it’s absolute fact, unquestionable truth.
Even without SSRIs, people alter reality and create stories to cope with pain. But add psychiatric drugs to the mix, and you’ve got modern therapists providing unfettered validation to chemically distorted narratives, rarely approaching cases with empirical scrutiny. They jump right on the victim mindset, and in many cases, actively create it. “Yes, you were trapped in an abusive marriage!” they’ll affirm to someone whose brain chemistry has been so altered they couldn’t recognize genuine love if it slapped them in the face.
The Spell-Binding Effect
Dr. Peter Breggin, Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health who’s spent decades exposing the dark underbelly of his own profession, called it “medication spellbinding”: the insidious way psychiatric drugs prevent users from recognizing their own drug-induced dysfunction. (I’m actually traveling to Dr. Breggin’s home next week to interview him, and you can bet your ass I’ll be drilling deep into this spell-binding phenomenon.) It’s not just that SSRIs change you; they rob you of the ability to perceive that you’ve been changed. You become a stranger to yourself while believing you’re finally seeing clearly.
“Lisa” sat across from me six months after stopping Lexapro, tears streaming down her face. “I feel like I’m waking up from a nightmare I created. I had an affair. I told my husband of twenty years that I’d never really loved him. I was prepared to walk away from my children without a second thought. Now I look back and think, ‘Who was that person?’ But at the time, it all made perfect sense. I felt nothing. No guilt, no remorse, no connection to my old life. It was like living in emotional Novocain.”
This is your brain on SSRIs: chemically castrated not just sexually but emotionally, morally, spiritually. The same serotonergic manipulation that’s supposed to lift your mood also severs the invisible threads connecting you to everything that matters. But you won’t realize it’s happening because the drug disables your ability to recognize its own effects.
The psychiatric establishment has convinced millions that flooding the brain with serotonin is as benign as taking vitamin C. They’ve never bothered to mention that serotonin doesn’t just regulate mood; it shapes moral reasoning, empathy, pair bonding, sexual response, and the entire constellation of neurochemical processes that make us capable of authentic human connection.
This is why I have profound concerns about prescribing these drugs during critical developmental periods. When you chemically alter serotonin in a developing adolescent brain, you’re not just tweaking mood; you’re potentially rewiring their capacity for intimacy, identity formation, and even sexual orientation. The explosion of gender dysphoria cases perfectly paralleling the mass prescribing of SSRIs to teenagers? That’s not a coincidence worth ignoring. That’s a red flag the size of Texas that nobody wants to acknowledge because it threatens both Big Pharma profits and progressive orthodoxy.
When “Treatment” Becomes Home-Wrecking
Here’s what the hundreds of stories flooding my inbox and online communities reveal: SSRIs create a spectrum of personality destruction, and we’re essentially playing Russian roulette with human consciousness. The response varies wildly because we’re experimenting with pharmaceutical compounds that fundamentally alter human nature itself.
For some, there’s an almost immediate activation syndrome (conveniently buried in the clinical trial data). Within days or weeks, they experience impulsivity that would make a teenager blush. Reckless spending, sexual promiscuity, acting without any consideration of consequences. One woman described it perfectly: “It was like someone disconnected the brake pedal in my brain. I was all accelerator, no caution.” Affairs happen in this state. Life-destroying decisions get made. Families implode while the person feels euphoric about the destruction.
For others, it’s the slow slide into emotional death. The detachment creeps in gradually: first, colors seem less vibrant. Music loses its emotional pull. Then comes the relationship anesthesia. “I just don’t feel anything for him anymore,” becomes the refrain, as if discussing a roommate rather than a life partner. The sexual dysfunction arrives not just as decreased libido but complete genital numbness, the physical capacity for intimate bonding chemically severed. But instead of recognizing this as drug-induced castration, it gets reframed: “I guess I was never really attracted to them.”
The empathy erosion is perhaps the most chilling. The person who once cried at commercials now watches their partner’s pain with scientific detachment. Children become logistical problems to solve. Love transforms into a word they remember but can’t feel. It’s not cruelty; it’s worse. It’s the presence of absence where humanity used to live.
The therapy industrial complex, thoroughly indoctrinated in the chemical imbalance mythology, validates every drug-distorted thought. Your couples therapist, who hasn’t bothered to research SSRIs beyond pharmaceutical marketing materials, encourages your drugged spouse to “trust their feelings” and “honor their truth,” never once considering that their feelings are chemically manufactured and their truth is pharmaceutical fiction.
Post SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD)
Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD) is the dirty secret of psychiatry that could bring down the entire house of cards if people truly understood its implications. We’re not talking about temporary side effects here. We’re talking about permanent sexual castration that persists, even after stopping the drugs.
But PSSD isn’t just about sex. It’s about the complete severing of the embodied experience of human connection. The neurochemical pathways that create sexual arousal are the same ones involved in emotional bonding, passionate engagement with life, and the felt sense of love itself. When SSRIs nuke these systems, they don’t just steal orgasms; they steal the capacity for embodied intimacy altogether.
And now we have hard scientific evidence for what these communities have been screaming into the void. A 2019 study published in Translational Psychiatry by Rütgen and colleagues finally confirmed what Big Pharma has desperately tried to suppress: SSRIs don’t improve empathy in depression; they systematically destroy it.
The researchers found that after just three months of antidepressant treatment, patients showed significant decreases in both emotional empathy and brain activity in regions crucial for empathic responding. The more their depression “improved,” the less they could feel others’ pain. They literally measured the chemical assassination of human compassion.
But here’s what nobody wants to admit: the pharmaceutical industry measures “improvement” in depression by how much less you feel. Can’t cry at your mother’s funeral? Success! Don’t feel devastated when your child is hurting? Treatment is working! Unable to empathize with your spouse’s pain? Congratulations, your depression is in remission! They’ve redefined mental health as emotional lobotomy and convinced us to celebrate our numbness as recovery.
Think about what this means for marriages: Your depressed spouse starts SSRIs, and within months they’re neurologically incapable of feeling your emotional pain. The researchers called this a “protective function,” but let’s call it what it really is: chemically-induced sociopathy. The study showed decreased connectivity between brain regions responsible for emotional and cognitive empathy. Translation: the drug literally disconnects the wiring that allows us to feel for each other.
The Anti-Human Agenda
Let’s call this what it is: an anti-human movement masquerading as mental health care. When you create drugs that systematically disable the neurochemical foundations of human bonding, empathy, and moral reasoning, you’re not treating illness; you’re engineering the dissolution of the social fabric itself.
But SSRIs are just one weapon in a much larger war against human flourishing. Look around: We’re poisoning masculinity as “toxic,” redefining female hormonal cycles as psychiatric disorders, and severing our children from nature itself, replacing dirt, sunlight, and real play with screens and synthetic environments. We’re feeding them processed poison disguised as food, then wondering why their bodies and minds rebel. We’re replacing human connection with digital interfaces, substituting virtual “friends” for real relationships, and celebrating isolation as “self-care.” Every institution that once fostered genuine human bonds (family, community, spiritual fellowship) is under systematic attack.
The gender confusion epidemic perfectly paralleling mass SSRI prescribing to adolescents? The explosion of young people who suddenly can’t recognize their own bodies, can’t connect to their biological reality? When you chemically sever a developing mind from its capacity to feel authentic connection to self and others, is it any wonder they become strangers in their own skin?
This anti-human agenda operates through multiple vectors: Seed oils inflaming our brains, endocrine disruptors scrambling our hormones, screens hijacking our attention, pornography replacing intimacy, and yes, psychiatric drugs severing our souls. Each element reinforces the others, creating a perfect storm of disconnection. The SSRIs ensure you won’t feel the horror of what’s being done to you. They’re the anesthesia for the operation that’s removing our humanity.
Every marriage destroyed by SSRI-induced apathy, every parent who stops feeling love for their children, every affair justified by chemically-induced emotional numbness: these aren’t unfortunate side effects. They’re features, not bugs, of a system designed to atomize human connection and create perpetual patients.
The online communities tracking this phenomenon aren’t conspiracy theorists or anti-medication extremists. They’re regular people sharing strikingly similar stories: My spouse started antidepressants and became someone else. They lost the ability to feel love. They rewrote our history. They destroyed our family with cold efficiency. And when they finally stopped the drugs (if they stopped) they woke up horrified at what they’d done.
One woman in these forums wrote something that haunts me: “The drug didn’t just steal my husband. It stole the person he was during our children’s most formative years. Even though he’s himself again now, off the drugs, our kids don’t know who he really is. They only know the emotionally absent stranger who lived in our house for three years.”
The Revolution We Need
The psychiatric establishment won’t save us from this; they created it. The therapists validating drug-distorted realities won’t help; they’re complicit. The only solution is brutal honesty about what these drugs actually do to human consciousness and connection.
If you’re on SSRIs and your marriage is falling apart, consider this: Maybe it’s not your marriage that’s broken. Maybe it’s your capacity to feel it.
If your partner started antidepressants and became a stranger, you’re not imagining it. You’re witnessing a chemically-induced personality transplant.
If you’re a therapist reading this and getting defensive, ask yourself: How many marriages have you helped validate into destruction because you couldn’t question the sacred cow of psychiatric medication?
We need to stop pretending that chemically altering the foundation of human emotion and connection is neutral. We need to stop acting like SSRIs are precision instruments when they’re actually neurochemical sledgehammers. We need to acknowledge that when you interfere with serotonin, you’re not just adjusting mood; you’re rewiring the capacity for love itself.
The families destroyed by SSRIs aren’t collateral damage; they’re casualties of an undeclared chemical war on human connection. And until we’re willing to name this war and fight back, the casualties will keep mounting, one numbed-out divorce at a time.
Your depression might be real. Your anxiety might be valid. Hell, in this toxic wasteland of a culture we’ve created, feeling depressed and anxious might be the only sane response. But look at how we’ve been programmed to address these legitimate feelings: Rush to the doctor. Get the diagnosis. Take the pill. Never once questioning whether numbing the pain is the same as healing it.
We’ve been brainwashed to believe that feeling less is the same as feeling better, that chemical numbness equals mental health. But is addressing your struggle this way worth sacrificing your capacity to love and be loved? Is it worth becoming a stranger to yourself and everyone who matters to you? Is a life without authentic emotional connection really better than a life with difficult emotions?
This more than a medical question. It’s a spiritual one. And the answer might just save your marriage and your soul.
RESIST
The Creation of New ICD-10 Codes for Post-Covid Vaccine Syndrome
By Christopher Dreisbach | Brownstone Institute | August 15, 2025
“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.” ― Steve Jobs
Definitions matter. In almost any context, problems left undefined inevitably remain problems left unsolved.
For this reason, healthcare professionals worldwide rely upon the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10), a standardized system used to categorize and code diseases, symptoms, and health conditions. In the United States, ICD-10 codes serve as the foundation for medical records, insurance billing, epidemiological research, and public health policy. Without specific ICD-10 codes, severe conditions may remain invisible in the healthcare data ecosystem—making it harder to track, study, or provide adequate care.
This is precisely the challenge facing thousands of Americans suffering from persistent severe adverse events after receiving a Covid vaccine—a condition recently defined as Post-Covid Vaccine Syndrome (PCVS). As one of those individuals, I know all too well how debilitating and life-altering this condition can be. Our symptoms include exercise intolerance, excessive fatigue, brain fog, insomnia, and dizziness. They develop shortly after vaccination, within a day or two, can become more severe in the days that follow, and persist over time.
At present, there are no dedicated ICD-10 codes for PCVS. This absence has significant consequences for patients, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers alike.
Visibility in the Healthcare System
One of the primary functions of ICD-10 codes is to make a condition visible within the healthcare system. Without specific codes, PCVS is at best recorded under vague categories like “unspecified adverse effect of vaccine” or “other specified postvaccination complication.” Leery of contradicting the safe and effective narrative, many providers simply utilize codes for general symptoms such as “fatigue” or “paresthesia.” As a result, PCVS is effectively lost in a sea of unrelated data.
Dedicated codes would allow providers to document PCVS in a standardized way, ensuring it is recognized in patient records, insurance claims, and national health databases. This visibility is crucial for legitimizing PCVS in the eyes of both a conflicted medical community and a polarized public.
Facilitating Research and Data Collection
Medical research thrives on accurate, reliable data. Without discrete ICD-10 codes, it is extremely difficult to track how many of us are affected by PCVS, what our symptoms are, how long they last, and what treatments are effective.
Currently, researchers who want to study PCVS must sift through miscellaneous adverse event codes, searching for possible cases—a process that is slow, imprecise, and prone to undercounting. Specific codes would enable more precise epidemiological studies, making it easier to identify risk factors, compare outcomes, and develop evidence-based treatment guidelines.
Improving Public Health Response and Policy
Public health agencies use ICD-10 coding data to monitor trends, allocate resources, and shape policy decisions. The lack of codes for PCVS means that policymakers are operating without a complete picture of vaccine safety profiles and long-term outcomes.
By establishing dedicated codes, health officials could more accurately assess the frequency and severity of PCVS, helping them balance the benefits and risks of vaccination programs and design better safety monitoring systems in the future. This transparency would strengthen public confidence in vaccination campaigns by demonstrating that potential adverse events are being taken seriously and tracked systematically.
Reducing Stigma and Improving Clinical Recognition
Those of us suffering from PCVS often face intense skepticism, with our symptoms crudely dismissed as unrelated or psychosomatic. The absence of recognized diagnostic codes can inadvertently reinforce this stigma, making it harder for those suffering with PCVS to be taken seriously.
Specific ICD-10 codes would send a clear signal to clinicians that PCVS is a legitimate medical condition worthy of investigation, empathy, and appropriate care.
Ethical and Societal Responsibility
Healthcare systems have an ethical duty to acknowledge and address all medical conditions – especially those that may be rare or controversial. Creating specific ICD-10 codes for PCVS would demonstrate a commitment to transparency, patient welfare, and scientific inquiry.
This step would not undermine legitimate vaccination efforts; rather, it would enhance them by showing the public that adverse events are being tracked rigorously and addressed proactively. Public health trust depends not only on promoting the benefits of a medical intervention but also on an honest acknowledgment of its risks, however small.
Aligning with the Approach to Long Covid
The World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have already recognized the need for specific ICD-10 codes for post-acute sequelae of Covid, commonly known as Long Covid. These codes have helped researchers and clinicians better identify, study, and manage that condition.
The same logic applies to PCVS. Both prolonged conditions involve complex overlapping symptoms following an acute event (infection or vaccination) and require long-term monitoring.
For that reason, React19, a science-based 501(c) non-profit organization dedicated solely to supporting those suffering from long-term Covid vaccine adverse events, has submitted a formal proposal to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics to create ICD-10 codes for PCVS mirroring those for Long Covid.
PCVS Patients Deserve Action, not Argument
“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” ― Ayn Rand
While opinions differ greatly to what extent – by all credible accounts the Covid vaccines simply did not perform as public health officials assured the American public they would. As to efficacy, they failed to stop transmission and infection. As to safety, in addition to the emergence of PCVS, the CDC has conceded that myocarditis and pericarditis are “linked to certain types of COVID-19 vaccinations.” And of course, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was pulled entirely from the market after multiple cases of fatal blood clotting after vaccinations.
Yale Medical School professor of cardiology Dr. Harlan Krumholtz well summarized, “It’s clear that some individuals are experiencing significant challenges after vaccination. Our responsibility as scientists and clinicians is to listen to their experiences, rigorously investigate the underlying causes, and seek ways to help.” Creating distinct ICD-10 codes for PCVS mirroring those currently utilized to identify Long Covid would be the logical first step to provide this much needed support.
Failure to create specific ICD-10 codes for PCVS would be to ignore the agonizing reality of the syndrome, leaving the sick and suffering to face the grim consequences of inaction – left adrift in a medical system unwilling to acknowledge our existence and desperate need for treatment. We must expect more of our public health agencies – those debilitated by PCVS deserve no less.
Christopher Dreisbach
Prior to his own life altering vaccine injury, Chris primarily practiced criminal defense throughout central Pennsylvania. His client base ranged from individuals facing minor offenses such as driving under the influence to those charged with serious offenses including homicide. In addition to his private clients, Chris served as court-appointed counsel representing incarcerated individuals under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act. In 2009, he was recognized as Advocate of the Year for his work on behalf of victims of violent crime. He is now Legal Affairs Director of React19, a science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from longterm Covid-19 vaccine adverse events globally.
UK Met Office Flirts With Conspiracy Theory as it Slams Critics of Its ‘Junk’ Temperature Measuring Sites
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | August 6, 2025
The UK Met Office has lurched into conspiracy theory territory in a desperate attempt to rescue scientific credibility in its Net Zero-weaponised ‘junk’ temperature measuring network. In a recent public pronouncement, it claimed: “The efforts of a small number of people to undermine the integrity of Met Office observations by obscuring or misrepresenting facts is an attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world’s changing climate.” The astonishing outburst relates of course to the recent revelations of the Daily Sceptic and a number of citizen sleuths. In March 2024, the Daily Sceptic disclosed that nearly 80% of all UK measuring sites are so poorly located they have massive temperature ‘uncertainties’. Meanwhile, Ray Sanders and Dr Eric Huxter have provided convincing proof of the lamentable state of the unnatural heat-ravaged network and its tendency to produce elevated temperatures and short-term heat spikes.
Narrative-obsessed mainstream media has been on its best behaviour and kept quiet about the growing scandal, but the shocking state of the Met Office recording operation, and its continued use to raise climate alarm, is widely discussed on social online media.
“Despite online speculation,” said the Met Office, “much of which demonstrates a clear misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the facts, Met Office weather stations are subject to stringent national and international guidelines.” The Met Office team is said to carry out hundreds of site inspections a year. “A rigorous quality assurance system, including a long-standing and well-honed site inspection methodology, ensures that data produced at our sites are as accurate as they can be,” it observed. Ray Sanders recently discovered that 103 sites providing long-term data did not actually exist and measurements were being invented/estimated from “well-correlated related neighbouring sites”. Alas, subsequent efforts to discover the identity of these vital well-correlated inputs drew a blank with Freedom of Information requests denied as “vexatious” and not in the public interest.
The ‘uncertainties’ mandated by the World Meteorological Organisation mean 48.7% of the network, based in junk Class 4, is subject to errors up to 2°C, while an almost unbelievable 29.2% in super-junk Class 5 could be out by up to 5°C. One-minute heat spikes, such as that behind the 40.3°C all-time UK record at RAF Coningsby at a time of nearby Typhoon jet activity, are common. Despite international guidance, the Met Office insists on using 60-second data recorded by recently installed sensitive electronic devices to declare individual records and higher average daily totals. Dr Huxter’s recent work indicated that daily ‘extremes’ declared throughout last May were on average 0.8°C higher than the two recordings made at the before and after hour mark. At Kew Gardens, the Met Office claimed a national May Day record high of 29.3°C at 2.59pm, but this was a massive 2.6°C higher than the 2pm recording and 0.76°C above the 3pm reading.
Like many self-important and unaccountable bureaucracies, the Met Office has a marked tendency towards supercilious arrogance. “We understand that the data from thousands of independent global weather stations (over the last seven decades) which shows a warming trend may be an uncomfortable reality for some.” Nobody, of course, denies the world is in a warming phase and that humans may have contributed by using hydrocarbons. This arrogance is a silly red herring. The Met Office has a basic temperature network that has grown from a largely amateur base in response to the needs of specific groups such as the military. It was never designed to provide an ambient, uncorrupted air temperature of the UK, let alone be utilised to help provide a global figure. It was good enough for the rough-and-ready purposes for which it was designed, but it is unable to show, as the Met Office claimed, that 2023 across the UK was 0.06°C cooler than the record year of 2022. The Met Office is simply pulling the public’s chain if it thinks it can claim recordings accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade using its current crappy nationwide network.
The science journalist Matt Ridley recently laid his finger on what has gone wrong at the Met Office. It has been ”embarrassingly duped by activists”. It believes that most of the recent warming has been caused by humans, even though the evidence for this statement arises mainly from simplistic climate models. Net Zero has died in the United States and sceptical voices are increasingly being heard. Decades of politicised settled science are being replaced with a broader wish to understand how the atmosphere works. The role of natural variation is being discussed and the ‘greening’ benefits of higher temperatures and carbon dioxide are being considered. The idea of a ‘settled’ anthropogenic climate opinion is starting to look rather dated. The scare/scam was useful for promoting the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy, but that fantasy is rapidly falling apart as hydrocarbon reality sets in.
Stuffed with activists, the Met Office continues on its deranged course of political Net Zero fear-mongering, turning weather maps purple in summer and issuing constant weather warnings to the amusement of grown adults. The only “uncomfortable reality” is that suffered by the Met Office with its inability to counter the charge that it is using junk statistics to claim that warming is higher than it actually is.
mRNA: GROUND ZERO FOR CANCER CRISIS?
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | August 7, 2025
As HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulls the plug on $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts and U.S. COVID shot uptake plummets to historic lows, a more alarming crisis is taking shape—a potential pandemic of cancer. Could the very technology once hailed as revolutionary now be triggering a silent epidemic? Explore the emerging science uncovering how mRNA vaccines may be reactivating dormant cancer cells and disrupting immune surveillance. This is a wake-up call the world can’t afford to ignore.
Danish Researcher Responds to RFK Jr.’s Call to Retract ‘Deeply Flawed’ Aluminum Study
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 5, 2025
The lead author of a controversial Danish study on aluminum in vaccines responded this week to a call by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the study to be retracted.
In an op-ed published Aug. 1 in Trial Site News, Kennedy outlined at least 10 “fatal deficiencies.” According to the Danish researchers, their study showed no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism — a finding that Kennedy and others rejected.
Kennedy wrote:
“The slavish, pharma-funded mainstream media, ever eager to defend industry orthodoxies, have triumphantly hailed this study as proof of aluminum’s safety without even a cursory examination of the study’s fatal deficiencies or the financial conflicts of its authors.
“But a closer look reveals a study so deeply flawed it functions not as science but as a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Anders Hviid, a professor and department head of epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut (SSI) and the study’s lead author, responded to Kennedy’s criticism in his own op-ed, also published in Trial Site News.
Hviid included a bullet-point list of the methodological issues Kennedy raised, but without refuting any of them.
“Despite the veneer of professional courtesy,” said James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., “Anders Hviid’s response fails to address any of the core methodological flaws … What Hviid offers the public is not a defense, but a performance. The press should not mistake posturing for scientific rebuttal.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker agreed. “Hviid offers no scientific arguments whatsoever against Secretary Kennedy’s observations.” Chris Exley, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminum exposure, said Hviid’s response had “no science” in it.
Hviid ‘categorically’ denies any deceit
Hviid claimed that “none of the critiques put forward by the Secretary is substantive. … I categorically deny that any deceit is involved as implied by the Secretary.”
But other critics of the study argued that many of Kennedy’s concerns are not only “substantive,” but are also shared by other independent scientists.
For instance, Kennedy pointed out — as did scientists with CHD in a July 28 press release — that data from the corrected version of the study’s supplemental materials showed that children who received a large dose of aluminum from vaccines had a statistically significantly higher risk of being diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder, including autism, compared to those who received a moderate dose of aluminum.
“Yet the authors,” Kennedy wrote, “gloss over these harms to children by claiming they ‘did not find evidence’ for an increased risk.”
On July 17, the Annals of Internal Medicine, which originally published the Danish study on July 15, issued a correction, stating that the journal “included an incorrect version of the Supplementary Material at the time of initial publication.”
The updated materials are available here with the link to the study.
Hviid didn’t explain why he believes the corrected supplemental material data do not contradict the study’s conclusion. Instead, he repeated the claim that the study “does not provide support for the hypothesis that aluminum used as adjuvants in vaccines are associated with increased risks of early childhood health conditions.”
“Just because Dr. Hviid makes a statement about something doesn’t mean that it is true,” Hooker said. “Frankly, his paper shows the exact opposite — a strong, statistically significant relationship between aluminum adjuvant exposure and autism spectrum disorders.”
Hviid also didn’t refute Kennedy’s claim that the study authors had biased the data when they made statistical adjustments for the number of times a child visited the doctor.
According to Kennedy:
“The authors inappropriately treated general practitioner visits before age two as a confounder, without assessing whether these GP visits reflected early aluminum-related illness or were predictive of later diagnoses.
“This introduced ‘collider bias’ — a distortion that can suppress real associations even to the extent of making aluminum appear protective. It’s like studying whether smoking causes lung cancer while adjusting for coughing or for yellowed fingers — symptoms associated with smoking.”
Lyons-Weiler had pointed out the same methodological problem in a lengthy Substack post published July 15.
Both Kennedy and Lyons-Weiler also pointed out that the Danish study lacked a control group of kids unexposed to aluminum.
They also criticized the study authors for excluding children who were diagnosed with certain preexisting conditions by age two, including respiratory conditions, congenital rubella syndrome, primary immune deficiency, and heart or liver failure, and for excluding children who died by age two.
According to Kennedy, “The exclusion included all children who died before age two, those diagnosed early with respiratory conditions, and an astonishing 34,547 children — 2.8% of the study population — whose vaccination records showed the highest aluminum exposure levels.”
In other words, the study “systematically omits the very cases most plausibly linked to early-life neurotoxicity,” Lyons-Weiler said. “You cannot detect harm in infants if you erase harmed infants from the dataset.”
Study not intentionally designed to find no link, author says
Hviid offered no scientific rebuttal to Kennedy’s specific criticisms, but he did push back against Kennedy’s insinuation that the study had been designed to find no link between aluminum in vaccines and negative health conditions, including autism and asthma.
Hviid said he and his co-authors chose their study design in an attempt to replicate a 2023 study led by Dr. Matthew Daley that found a link between aluminum in vaccines and asthma in young children.
Seeking to replicate Daley’s study doesn’t exonerate Hviid and his co-authors from the claim that their study was ill-designed, Exley said.
When Daley’s study first came out, Exley said in a Substack post that it had so many flaws that it wouldn’t have survived “peer review at any reputable journal operating independent peer review.”
Exley wrote:
“Not a single reputable and independent researcher on aluminium toxicity in humans is cited in this paper. If any of the world’s leading researchers on aluminium had been sent this manuscript to review they would have rejected it on multiple standpoints.”
Hviid also criticized Kennedy for calling on the authors to ask the Danish government to let them release the raw data so scientists around the world could replicate their work. He said that as a lawyer, Kennedy should know that’s impossible.
“Accredited Danish researchers and their international collaborators” can access the data, Hviid said.
He also rejected Kennedy’s suggestion that Hviid’s financial ties may have influenced the study. Hviid acknowledged he has received grants from the Novo Nordisk Foundation — which is linked to the pharmaceutical industry — but said the grants were “unrelated” to the aluminum study.
Hviid clarified that SSI, where he and two of his co-authors work, is not a “company,” as Kennedy claimed, but an “institute.” Hviid acknowledged that SSI historically produced vaccines but said it sold its vaccine manufacturing capacities to AJ Vaccines in 2017.
Hooker said:
“The fact that SSI held the vaccine manufacturing capabilities up until 2017 and sold those capabilities shows that it is profiting off of vaccine sales regardless of whether the funds are reinvested in research or used to reward vaccine developers directly. This is a conflict of interest.”
More than a dozen researchers post critical comments
Kennedy is far from alone in voicing concerns about the Danish researchers’ aluminum study.
Over a dozen researchers, including Exley and CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski, have posted comments on the study’s webpage that detail specific methodological flaws they say undermine the study’s conclusions.
The study authors responded to comments posted in the first few days after the study’s publication on July 15, but haven’t responded to comments posted after July 21.
In his op-ed, Hviid said he and his co-authors will respond to the latter comments “in the coming weeks.”
Hviid and his co-authors have already responded to Exley’s comment, which he posted on July 15. But Exley said that, similar to Hviid’s op-ed, the authors’ online response had “little science” in it.
Exley said he tried to post a follow-up comment about the authors’ lack of scientific response and the questions that their response left unanswered. However, he was informed by the Annals of Internal Medicine, which published the study, that the journal does not allow follow-up comments, he said.
Exley shared with The Defender some of the questions he wanted to ask in a follow-up comment, including:
“How many infants are in their database that have never received an aluminium-containing vaccine? Why is this number insufficient for any comparative purpose? What are the confounding factors that make it impossible to compare populations of infants that have not received an aluminium-adjuvanted vaccine with those that have? Are the authors wholly unaware that the data relating to the aluminium content of vaccines are completely unreliable, one might even say random?”
Exley and colleagues in 2021 published a study showing that among 13 aluminum-containing vaccines given to babies, only three contained the amount of aluminum specified by the vaccine manufacturer.
Related articles in The Defender
- ‘Deceitful Propaganda Stunt’: RFK Jr. Breaks Down Danish Study on Autism and Aluminum in Vaccines
- Danish Researchers Remain Mum on Corrected Data Showing Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism
- Calls Grow for Journal to Retract Danish Study After Corrected Data Show Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism
- Study Claiming No Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism Riddled with Flaws, Critics Say
- 4 Things the New York Times Got Wrong About Aluminum in Vaccines
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
The Price of Speaking Truth
Dr. Martin Feeley and the cost of courage
By Trish Dennis | July 31, 2025
In April 2023, The Irish Times published a quietly devastating article under the headline:
This article told the story of Dr. Martin Feeley, a man who had already lived an extraordinary life before becoming a reluctant public dissenter during one of the most charged periods in Irish history.
A vascular surgeon by training, Martin Feeley was also an Olympian, representing Ireland in rowing at the 1976 Summer Games. Born in Lecarrow, County Roscommon in 1950, he qualified from UCD in medicine and later became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In 1985, he earned a Master’s in surgery, and by 2015, he had been appointed Group Clinical Director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, one of the most senior medical administrative roles in Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE.)
By any measure, Dr. Martin Feeley was an exceptional person, not just accomplished, but genuinely liked and respected by his colleagues, patients, friends and everyone who knew him through the Irish rowing community. He was known and loved not just for his clinical expertise, but also for his warmth, integrity, intelligence and humour. Those who worked alongside him described a kind, principled man, generous with his time, supportive of younger colleagues, and unwilling to play politics with the truth.
A sample few of the many heartfelt tributes left in the Condolence Book on RIP.ie following Dr. Feeley’s death in December 2023, read:
“I had the privilege to work with Mr Feeley in AMNCH and that made all the difference to me. He exemplified integrity, empathy and good sense. Authentic, kind and encouraging, a Colossus amongst men and medics. And always brilliantly funny.”
“A decent man, a great teacher, much respected.”
A patient shares:
“Thank you Mr. Feeley for saving my life in 2013. Fly high with the Lord. RIP.”
What stands out in the many tributes is how deeply admired he was, not just for his medical expertise, but for his warmth, kindness and humour and the deep impression he left on those who worked with him. Again and again, the tributes spoke of his decency and integrity.
And yet, when it really mattered, during a period in Irish life when decency and integrity were needed most, it was precisely those qualities that cost Dr. Feeley his job.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Feeley raised a profoundly important question, one that has aged far better than the policies it challenged: Was the State’s response proportionate to the actual risk faced by the population, particularly children and young adults?
Dr. Feeley did not deny the virus or downplay the risks. He simply raised a measured, evidence-based concern, which was that the restrictions being imposed were doing real and lasting harm. Drawing on clinical experience and moral clarity, he warned of the damage being done, especially to children and young people, through shuttered schools and colleges, cancelled sports, and the loss of everyday human connection. He believed that those at low risk could, in time, build natural immunity, helping to reduce the danger to the most vulnerable.
His critique wasn’t vague or emotional. It was specific, well-informed, and in hindsight, remarkably prescient. Among the key points he raised:
- Restrictions should have focused on those most at risk, not applied as blanket rules to everyone. Healthy younger people, he argued, could have built immunity more safely, helping society reopen sooner and more fairly.
- He condemned the government’s communication strategy, especially the daily case counts, calling them a form of “deliberate, unforgivable terrorising of the population.”
- His concerns were later echoed by others, including former HSE infection control chief Professor Martin Cormican who suggested that Dr. Feeley wasn’t alone in his thinking, just in his willingness to say it out loud.
- He examined ICU projections and found they didn’t match the alarmist tone of official briefings. On the ground, he was seeing only a handful of Covid patients in intensive care, far fewer than the public had been led to expect.
- He urged staff to keep perspective, pointing out that statistically, a healthy person under 65 was more likely to be injured cycling than to die of Covid.
- He objected to the new definition of a “case”, expanded to include any positive test result, even in people with no symptoms, a shift that he believed inflated fear and distorted the public understanding of risk.
And Dr. Feeley never backed down. If anything, he felt that the passing of time only confirmed the accuracy and necessity of what he said.
From the very early days of the pandemic, Dr. Feeley spoke with a compassion and honesty that few public health figures dared to match. In an article written in October 2020 for The Irish Times, written as Ireland entered a second lockdown, he captured the human cost in a single, unforgettable sentence:
“Life is not a video game which we can freeze-frame and restart when a vaccine arrives. All living is being suspended, but unfortunately all lifetime is passing, even for those with six months or a year to live, with or without Covid-19.”
This line “Life is not a video game which we can freeze-frame and restart when a vaccine arrives” gets to the heart of the problem with lockdown thinking. Real life cannot be paused. Time moves forward inevitably, especially for those who are elderly, ill, or nearing the end of life.
And it’s not only the old people who lost something. For young people too, there are moments in life, rites of passage, milestones, celebrations, that happen once and cannot be relived or recreated. Birthdays, graduations, first jobs, leaving school, falling in love, saying goodbye. These are not things you can reschedule. That time was taken from our young people, and it can never be given back.
Dr. Feeley’s point was that by trying to preserve life at all costs, we ended up suspending the very things that made life worth living, human connection, care, life experiences and milestones. When he said “all life time is passing even for those with six months or a year to live”, it was a stark reminder that waiting for a vaccine wasn’t just a pause for some, it was a loss they would never get back. It challenged the technocratic idea that society could be put on hold without consequence, and called for a more humane, proportionate approach, one that saw people not as data points but as human beings living in real time.
And yet, for speaking so clearly and ethically, he was punished.
In September 2020, Dr. Feeley was forced to resign from his role as Clinical Director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group under pressure from the HSE following a series of media interviews. In that April 2023 article from The Irish Times, Dr. Feeley is quoted as saying that “within days” of airing his objections to the restrictions he was removed from his position. He specifically stated:
“I was forced to resign as opposed to just walking away.”
He attributed responsibility for his exit to the former HSE Chief Executive Paul Reid, although Reid denied involvement.
He was further quoted in that article of having said about his decision to speak publicly against the lockdowns from inside the HSE:
“The only stupid thing I did,” he said, “was to say what I thought. I should have kept my mouth shut.”
Those words should shame us. Because they don’t just reflect one man’s bitter experience, they reflect a sick and dishonest culture. A culture that punished integrity and rewarded compliance and where the cost of speaking truth was professional exile. In Dr. Feeley’s case, the silence of Irish medicine was not only deafening, it was shamefully complicit.
Following Dr. Feeley’s death in 2023, tributes poured in across social media. Colleagues, former patients, independent politicians, and members of the public remembered him not just as a brilliant surgeon, but as a man of deep principle and uncommon courage. Independent TD Michael McNamara called him “a doctor unafraid to question the consensus.” Another tribute read: “If only we had more men like him in this country. We lost a good one. RIP Dr Feeley.” One especially searing comment captured the public mood: “This poor man was shunned… by the HSE… for challenging the ‘science’ that caused untold damage… RIP.”
These aren’t just empty or generic eulogies, they’re heartfelt tributes from people who understood and valued what he stood for.
At this stage in the game, five years on from that bleak chapter, I shouldn’t be surprised by the Irish establishment’s failure to learn anything meaningful from all of this, and yet somehow I still am. Despite everything we’ve seen and lived through, I remain both astonished and disheartened by how little reflection or change seems to have taken place.
Not only has the Irish state failed to reckon with the silencing of Dr Martin Feeley and others like him, it now appears poised to reward the chief architect of the very policies they dared to question. Dr Tony Holohan, who served as chair of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) during the pandemic and was widely seen as the public face of Ireland’s Covid response, is now reportedly being considered for the highest office in the land, the Irish Presidency.
Often described as Ireland’s answer to Dr Anthony Fauci, Dr. Holohan became synonymous with the government’s lockdown policies. Under Dr. Holohan’s watch, Ireland implemented one of the strictest lockdown regimes in the EU, including the longest closure of public venues across Europe. On a global level, Ireland had the fourth most stringent lockdown in the world, behind only Cuba, Eritrea and Honduras.
Whether or not this presidential bid ultimately materialises, the very suggestion that Dr. Holohan could be a contender for the most prestigious office in the state, is a striking example of the Irish establishment doubling down on steroids. Rather than reassess, Ireland appears intent on enshrining its mistakes.
To elevate Dr. Holohan now is to consecrate a version of history in which men like Dr. Feeley were cast as dangerous and disposable, and those who imposed sweeping harms on the Irish population are hailed as statesmen. It sends a chilling message that in Ireland, telling the truth as you see it, even from a place of expertise, ethics, and professional integrity is punishable. That the architect of Ireland’s extreme lockdowns, a man who dictated when we could hug our loved ones, is now being considered for the Irish presidency is not only shocking but morally obscene.
In fact, were he still with us today, Dr Martin Feely is exactly the sort of person the Irish people should have elected as their President, being someone who truly stood for the people of Ireland. He did his utmost, against all odds, to advocate for their rights and to stand firm against the harms he knew were being inflicted upon them.
Dr. Feeley’s voice may be silent now, but what he stood for must continue to be heard. He spoke with reason, compassion and integrity in a time of hysteria and institutional cowardice. He recognised the true human cost, not just in lives lost, but in lives unravelling, in relationships strained or severed, in connections broken, and in communities turning on themselves.
Dr Feely understood that this harm was not abstract but deeply personal and that it fell heaviest on those least equipped to bear it, those children and young people whose milestones were stolen, the elderly who were isolated and forgotten, and the already marginalised who were pushed further to the edges of society.
To honour him now is to face what we did, not in blame, but in truth. We must reject the whitewashing of history that elevates bureaucrats and silences decent and honest people. We have to ensure that in any future crisis, conscience will not be a sackable offence.
We lost Dr. Feely too soon, and with him, a voice the Irish people sorely needed. I would have loved the chance to meet him, shake his hand, and thank him for speaking up for all of us, for humanity, and for decency. I wish I could have told him that in person. Still, I write it now in the hope that someone, somewhere might read about this remarkable man and find courage and inspiration in his example.
Martin, may you rest in peace. You were one of the good ones. You stood for what was right when it mattered most. We remember you with gratitude, respect and love.
HHS Cancels mRNA Vaccine Development – ‘poses more risk than benefit’ says RFK Jr
By Jefferey Jaxen | August 5, 2025
A stunning announcement from HHS Secretary RFK Jr. has set the media ablaze.
“After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risk than benefits than these respiratory viruses.”
The official HHS press release states:
“BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”
The announcement wipes out nearly $500 million worth of Covid mRNA vaccine development projects, “we’re moving beyond the limitations of mRNA and investing in better solutions” stated Kennedy in the HHS press release.
Kennedy’s announcement comes after months of outside pressure to wind down the Covid mRNA vaccine platform in the U.S.
In May 2025, RFK Jr. removed COVID-19 vaccines from the list of routine immunizations for healthy pregnant women and children.
HHS and America now have pressing work at hand to undue the damage of the rushed and forced mRNA vaccine platform.
World-leading cancer researcher Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong recently stated in an interview: “This non-infectious pandemic of cancer is sadly upon us” referring to how both the virus and the vaccine can awaken sleeping cancer cells in the body. A topic mainstream science is just now, after years of alternative researchers and journalists banging the drum, beginning to admit and study. The new study in the journal Nature chronicles how it is actually the immune system’s response to the lab created gain-of-function bioweapon (and the mRNA shot as we have pointed out) that down-regulates and allows for accelerated cancer progression.
Kennedy has signaled over the last month that he is now taking aim at the broken vaccine injury compensation in the United States.
America, and other countries that align with our mission, must now develop a Manhattan Project-level effort to reverse the many harms brought about by the lab-constructed virus and the shot we were falsely told would save us from it.
EPA Finally Proposes To Rescind The Endangerment Finding
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | July 29, 2025
It’s been a long time coming. But today the EPA, through its Administrator Lee Zeldin, finally began the formal process of rescinding the so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF). The EF is the 2009 regulatory action by which the Obama-era EPA purported to determine that CO2 and other greenhouse gases constitute a “danger to human health and welfare.” That Finding then formed the basis for all subsequent federal greenhouse gas regulations, including efforts of Obama and Biden regulators to force the closure of all power plants running on coal and natural gas, and to mandate increased vehicle mileage to levels that no internal combustion engine could meet.
EPA initiated the rescission process today by means of an announcement in a speech by Zeldin, who appeared at an event in Indianapolis, and also through this document, titled “Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards.” The document looks to be about a couple of hundred pages long, although it’s hard to know exactly, because the pages aren’t numbered.
Long time readers here will know that I have been an active participant in efforts, beginning when President Trump first took office in 2017, to get the EF rescinded. Immediately after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, co-counsel Harry MacDougald and I filed a Petition to EPA, on behalf of the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC), seeking the rescission. Here is a post I wrote in April 2017, describing the initiation of the petition process, and also linking to our Petition. But during Trump’s first term, despite the critical importance of the EF in supporting all of the burdensome “climate” regulations, EPA never undertook the rescission process. We continued to press the point, filing some seven supplements to our Petition during the four years of Trump’s first term. For example, here is a post from July 2017 announcing the first of the Supplements to our Petition, based on new research at the time.
Ultimately our Petition was denied in 2022 by the Biden EPA. We then appealed that denial to the DC Circuit, where our appeal was denied in 2023, and to the U.S. Supreme Court, where certiorari was denied in 2024.
Well, the proposal in today’s document will reverse the denial of our Petition. I can’t give you a page cite, but this quote is from the page of the EPA document that contains footnote 15:
If finalized, this action would also rescind denial[] of petitions for reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding in 2022 . . . entitled “Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act; Final Action on Petitions,” 87 FR 25412 (Apr. 29, 2022). . . .
Vindication!
As to the grounds for the prospective rescission, EPA appears ready to take on both the legal and scientific bases of the EF. As to the legal analysis, the following quote comes from the page preceding footnote 42:
Section IV.A of this preamble describes our primary proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding by concluding that CAA section 202(a) does not authorize the EPA to prescribe standards for GHG emissions based on global climate change concerns or to issue standalone findings that do not apply the statutory standard for regulation as a cohesive whole. If finalized, this proposal would require rescinding the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations because we lacked statutory authority to issue them in the first instance. . . . Next, we propose that the Nation’s response to global climate change concerns generally, and specifically whether that response should include regulating GHG emissions from new motor vehicles and engines, is an economically and politically significant issue that triggers the major questions doctrine under UARG and West Virginia, and that Congress did not clearly authorize the EPA to decide it by empowering the Administrator to “prescribe … standards” under CAA section 202(a). Throughout this section, we propose that the Endangerment Finding relied on various forms of Chevron deference to depart from the best reading of the statute and exceeded the EPA’s authority in several fundamental respects, any one of which would independently require rescission to conform to the best reading of the law.
On the subject of “climate science,” the following quote comes from the document’s pre-amble:
[T]he Administrator has serious concerns that many of the scientific underpinnings of the Endangerment Finding are materially weaker than previously believed and contradicted by empirical data, peer-reviewed studies, and scientific developments since 2009.
Then, on the page with footnote 87 there begins a lengthy section titled “Climate Science Discussion.” The gist of this entire section is that the alarmists have not proved their claims. There are lengthy paragraphs reviewing data on all the major “extreme weather” claims, and citing work showing no increasing or accelerating trends in things like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, sea level and the like. Here is a paragraph that reiterates a theme of our Petition, namely that the amount of human caused global warming cannot be separated from what may be caused by natural factors:
The Administrator is also troubled by the Endangerment Finding’s seemingly inconsistent treatment of the nature and extent of the role human action with respect to climate change. The Endangerment Finding attributes the entirety of adverse impacts from climate change to increased GHG concentrations, and it attributes virtually the entirety of increased GHG concentrations to anthropogenic emissions from all sources. But the causal role of anthropogenic emissions is not the exclusive source of these phenomena, and any projections and conclusions bearing on the issue should be appropriately discounted to reflect additional factors. Moreover, recent data and analyses suggest that attributing adverse impacts from climate change to anthropogenic emissions in a reliable manner is more difficult than previously believed and demand additional analysis of the role of natural factors and other anthropogenic factors such as urbanization and localized population growth (2025 CWG Draft Report at 14-22, 82-92).
The process here will likely take until around the end of this year for EPA to formally enact the rescission. And then the legal battles begin — first to the DC Circuit, and then to the Supreme Court. The big question: Can the administration get this process to the Supreme Court in time to avoid a reversal of this whole regulatory effort by a Democratic administration that could be elected in 2028? I would think that if the Supremes have upheld this effort of Trump’s EPA before January 2029, it will be very difficult for a subsequent administration to reverse. On the other hand, if the status as of January 2029 is that the DC Circuit has struck down EPA’s rescission and the matter is pending in the Supreme Court, it would be much easier to attempt a reversal. But the ongoing failure of “net zero” energy transition plans in places like New York, California, Germany and the UK may make reversal a dead letter anyway.
I want to offer my thanks and gratitude to the small band of independent thinkers who have fought this lonely battle all these years, in the face of the billions of dollars at the hands of the climate industrial juggernaut. For particular mention: the members of CHECC (including its moving force, James Wallace); my co-counsel Harry MacDougald; the few think tanks that have taken on this issue, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who filed a Petition for rescission of the EF along with ours) and the Heartland Institute; the CO2 Coalition, including its Chair Will Happer and Executive Director Greg Wrightstone; CFACT; the Global Warming Policy Foundation (I serve on its Board); and Anthony Watts and Charles Rotter at Watts Up With That. I’m sure that there are a few that I have forgotten. Congratulations to all!
American Academy of Pediatrics Goes To War Against Religious Exemptions, Parental Rights
By Jefferey Jaxen | July 29, 2025
The ability to practice ones sincere religious beliefs is woven into the very fabric of America and its founding ethos yet the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a membership organization focusing on pediatricians, just declared war on this bedrock right.
Besides being morally objectionable, the concept is just plain unpopular in modern America. By 2023 only six U.S. states officially denied parents religious exemptions to vaccination for their children via laws that were enacted in the face of massive opposition from the public.
Since then, two of the states (Mississippi and West Virginia) have seen their religious denial laws overturned by court wins from the Informed Consent Action Network’s legal team in which judges deemed such laws to violate the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, public pushback saw Hawaii as the latest state to defeat a bill that would have removed its religious exemption option.
AAP’s new policy paper has stepped in with an attempt to stop the momentum of religious freedom in the medical and public health spaces – an idea whose time has come.
“The AAP recommends that all states, territories, and the District of Columbia eliminate all nonmedical exemptions from immunizations as a condition of school attendance.
With a flowery mission to ‘attain optimal physical, mental, and social health and well-being for all infants, children, adolescents and young adults,’ AAP fashions itself more as a continuous pipeline for industry products through overreaching, anti-science edicts.
The AAP recently floated a lawsuit against HHS Secretary Kennedy for his recommendation to remove pregnant women and healthy children from the Covid vaccine schedule.
Lets take a look at some of AAP’s greatest hits over the last 5 years.
In 2019, Washington D.C.’s B23-0171 (later named D.C. Law 23-193) sought to add a new section into the existing regulations that would allow a minor child to consent to receive a vaccine. The bill, and its hearing, signaled a new high-water mark towards the removal of parents from some of their children’s most important medical decisions – and AAP was there.
During the public hearing before it was signed into law, pediatrician Dr. Helene Felman, representing Washington D.C.’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), stated:
“As a pediatrician, I like the legislation as it stands because it offers the opportunity to capture those young adults who can make informed decisions at technically any age.”
Any age…
An ICAN legal victory halting D.C.’s overreach saw a D.C. district judge issue a preliminary injunction against the act in favor of parents who brought suit. The parents filed complaints and were able to demonstrate that the act likely violates federal law.
Next up AAP was on the wrong side of the push, against clear scientific evidence, to medically transition children. As Norway, Sweden, Denmark, U.K. and other countries officially backed off the practice. A 2025 review by HHS of the evidence and best practices found significant risks associated with gender dysphoria treatments.
One of the authors of the paper stated simply:
“… No reliable research indicates that these treatments are beneficial to minors’ mental health.”
In 2023, AAP reaffirmed its stance in a policy paper arguing for youth to have open access to gender-affirming health care fully funded by health insurance.
And finally, the AAP worked to influence public policy by advocating for new injectable weight loss drugs for children.
“Children struggling with obesity should be evaluated and treated early and aggressively, including with medications for kids as young as 12 and surgery for those as young as 13, according to new guidelines released Monday.”
The newly discovered harms of such drugs are unfolding on a weekly basis but that didn’t seem to matter to the AAP.
As an industry mouthpiece who see children as a profit margin and pipeline demographic for drugs and shots, AAP is unmatched in its corporate ‘advocacy.’
The organization appears to have chosen another losing battle siding against religious freedom in the United States of America and with it a further loss of relevancy for the organization.
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