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‘Tough Thing to Defend’: FDA Holds Heated Debate on ‘Untested, Unapproved’ Fluoride Supplements for Kids

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 24, 2025

The decision whether or not to prescribe unapproved fluoride supplements to children needs to be based on data — “It can’t be done with opinion,” Dr. George Tidmarsh said Wednesday during a public meeting held by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to solicit public input on safety concerns associated with the supplements.

Tidmarsh was tapped this week to lead the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which regulates over-the-counter and prescription drugs.

In May, the FDA moved to ban fluoride supplements after a systematic review of recent science by top government scientists, published in January in JAMA Pediatrics, reported that early fluoride exposure was linked to a decrease in children’s IQ scores.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Tidmarsh said:

“That’s a huge issue. Everybody should be concerned about that. What this is saying is that the fluoride in water was causing a cognitive decrease in the younger children. And the randomized studies say that there is no benefit. So that’s a tough thing to defend.”

“Our job here is to use evidence,” he added, citing the recently updated Cochrane Review on fluoride, which found that water fluoridation offered little to no protection against cavities in children.

Although the FDA never approved fluoride supplements, which come in tablets and lozenges, doctors have for decades routinely prescribed them to children — including babies as young as 6 months old — to prevent cavities.

Research has shown for more than two decades that any benefit to teeth from fluoride comes from topical applications — like toothpaste — not from ingesting the drug.

The supplements are known to cause dental fluorosis, a tooth discoloration that is a marker of fluoride overexposure. Overwhelming evidence now shows that ingesting fluoride is linked to lower IQ in children, neurobehavioral issues and thyroid problems.

Fluoride advocates say safety studies exist, but don’t cite them

Wednesday’s day-long meeting, facilitated by the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, turned contentious at times, as researchers presented evidence of fluoride’s risks to children’s health and debated whether to pull the supplements from the market.

Eighteen speakers argued for and against the supplements, including top researchers on fluoride’s toxic effects. Speakers included Kyla Taylor, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health and an author on the National Toxicology Program’s recent report and JAMA study showing that fluoride exposure for pregnant mothers and infants is linked to lowered IQ among children.

Christine Till, Ph.D., a professor from York University in Toronto and author of a highly cited 2019 study that reported similar findings, shared research on fluoride’s damaging effects on the thyroid.

Commenters also included pro-fluoride lobbyists and advocates, such as Dr. David Krol, with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Dr. Scott Tomar, with the American Dental Association (ADA).

In his opening remarks, Tidmarsh warned about the need for data in response to presentations by supplement advocates, including Dr. James Bekker, a pediatric dentist and a member of the Utah Dental Association.

Bekker said, “We’ve got to have a balance. We’ve got to have a situation where the right amount of fluoride is present during development. As we look at ways in today’s world of achieving that balance, supplements play a very important role.”

“When we don’t have fluoride, there are certain things that happen that are very disturbing,” Bekker added. “We have an increase in tooth decay, and we have an increase in the use of emergency services to receive care for dental emergencies.”

However, Tidmarsh called out Bekker, comparing the lack of evidence in his presentation with the presentation by Dr. Bill Osmunson, a dentist associated with the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), who pointed out that no randomized controlled studies had ever been conducted on the supplements.

Bekker countered that he didn’t want to overwhelm people with information. “That data is very available. It’s important to understand that,” he said, citing no specific studies.

‘Just take them off the market’

The move to ban the supplements comes on the heels of a federal court decision last September that water fluoridation at current U.S. levels poses an “unreasonable risk” of reduced IQ in children and that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must take regulatory action to address that risk.

Since then, more than 60 communities and two states — Utah and Florida — have voted to stop adding fluoride to their water. The EPA is appealing the decision.

Water fluoridation has been practiced in the U.S. for decades, long advocated by lobbying organizations like the ADA. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to celebrate it as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.

As water fluoridation comes under threat, fluoridation advocates have taken up the cause of defending the untested, unapproved supplements.

“Honestly, it’s ridiculous that we are even having this discussion — the supplements have never been tested, they have never been approved, and we know that early fluoride exposure can harm children,” Dr. Griffin Cole, conference chairman of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, told The Defender after the meeting. “Just take them off the market.”

Cole, who presented data on fluoride’s neurotoxicity, said these debates had become tiresome because fluoride advocates repeat the mantra that it is “safe and effective,” and are unresponsive to evidence of fluoride’s harm.

“I can understand why most people who aren’t informed in fluoride science would simply succumb to business as usual,” he said.

Advocates call supplements ‘safe and effective’ despite no safety testing

Dr. Charlotte Lewis, a pediatrician and one of the panelists who defended supplements, was slated to comment on the content of the presentations about fluoride’s risks. Instead, she argued that systemic absorption of fluoride is paramount.

“I want to make sure you understand that when we drink fluoridated water, we are allowing ourselves both a topical and a systemic source of fluoride. And both of these are important.” She said systemic ingestion is particularly important for young children.

Lewis said researchers arguing there is little to no benefit to swallowing fluoride are “biased.”

“What we’ve seen today is people cherry-picking studies and making conclusions without presenting us with the complete data that we need,” she added.

Those observations followed Taylor’s presentation, in which she explained that the National Toxicology Program and the JAMA publication presented an analysis of every available study, and they made all of their data publicly available.

Cole responded to Lewis, quoting her own Pediatrics in Review paper, in which she concluded the disadvantages of supplements were “substantial,” the benefits of fluoride were primarily topical and not systemic, that fluoride supplements cause more dental fluorosis and that their routine use is inconsistent with the way fluoride works — which is topically.

Michael Connett, lead attorney for plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the EPA, also read from Lewis’ paper during the meeting:

“The preponderance of strong research evidence supports the relative advantages of fluoride toothpaste over fluoride supplements, and this led Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union to recommend against regular use of fluoride supplements in favor of promoting fluoride toothpaste use in young children. The United States should do the same.

“FDA should ban these unapproved drugs from the market.”

Faced with her own research conclusion, Lewis conceded, “I personally think there’s a lot of disadvantages to supplements,” and said she would like to see the U.S. move to a model that promotes fluoride toothpaste.

Several public commenters raised concerns about the health impacts of fluoride. Then representatives from the ADA, American Academy of Pediatrics, other professional medical organizations, several dentists and dental hygienists submitted comments to the FDA advocating for the supplements to remain available.

They stated that the tablets have been proven “safe and effective.” None commented on the fact that they have never been studied.

Fluoride supplements carry ‘more risk than benefit,’ study says

The FDA facilitator referred to fluoride supplements by their official classification, “orally ingestible unapproved prescription drug products containing fluoride,” underscoring the fact that the drugs have never been subjected to an FDA approval process to determine if the benefits outweigh the risks.

The supplements were launched in the 1940s and later effectively grandfathered into the regulatory process. They never underwent the testing for safety and effectiveness typically required by FDA-regulated drugs, and the agency never granted them formal approval.

Before 1938, sodium fluoride had never been used in dentistry. Instead, it was commonly used as a roach and rodent poison. In 2016, FAN filed a citizens’ petition demanding the removal “of unapproved, unsafe, unnecessary, and ineffective sodium fluoride-containing” supplements from the market.

The petition cited a letter the FDA sent to Kirkman Labs, a fluoride supplement manufacturer, informing the company that it couldn’t sell its products because they were new, unapproved drugs not generally recognized as “safe and effective” to prevent dental decay.

The agency concluded that fluoride tablets didn’t meet the “generally recognized as safe” classification.

During public comments on Wednesday, Jay Sanders, FAN education & outreach director, cited a review in the Journal of Public Health Dentistry that found fluoride supplements “when ingested for a preeruptive effect by infants and young children in the United States, carry more risk than benefit.”

Sanders also noted that the CDC and the National Resource Council have both concluded that fluoride predominantly works topically, not systemically.

“A non-FDA approved drug with poor efficacy and with the potential to permanently damage the brain and disrupt the endocrine system should not be dispensed to children in the United States,” he said.

Tidmarsh underscored that understanding the risk-benefit analysis was key. “We’re not talking about taking a drug off the market that was already FDA-approved. In that context, we need to make sure there is a rigorous analysis.”

He added that makers of these drugs could always do real safety and efficacy testing on the products and submit them to the FDA for approval. “If we decide to take sodium fluoride supplements off the market, there’s nothing that would prevent a group from doing the rigorous studies and bringing it back to the FDA.”

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.

July 27, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

FLAWED STUDY CLAIMS ALUMINUM IN VACCINES IS SAFE

The HighWire | July 24, 2025

As industry voices scramble to defend aluminum in childhood vaccines, a new Danish study is held up as “proof” of safety, until you look closer. Exclusions, flawed comparisons, and the lack of U.S. relevance raise serious questions. Is the science settled, or just carefully curated?

July 27, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Calls for journal to retract Danish study after corrected data show link between aluminum in vaccines and autism

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 24, 2025

The authors of a recent Danish study widely reported on by mainstream media claimed they found no link between the aluminum in vaccines and autism.

However, corrected data added after the study’s original July 15 publication date show the authors got it wrong — in fact, the data in the study of 1.2 million children clearly indicate a link between aluminum in vaccines and autism, according to scientists with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) who reviewed the study and the corrected data.

On July 17, the Annals of Internal Medicine, which published the Danish study, added a disclaimer stating that it “included an incorrect version of the Supplementary Material at the time of initial publication.”

The updated materials are available with the link to the study at “Correction: Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood.”

CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski broke the news of the buried autism link on Monday’s episode of “Good Morning, CHD.” Today, Jablonowski told The Defender :

“According to the corrected data, nearly 10 (9.7) of every 10,000 children who were vaccinated with a higher dose of aluminum (compared to a moderate dose) developed a neurodevelopmental disorder — mostly autism — between ages 2 and 5.”

On Monday, The Defender reached out to lead author Anders Hviid, a professor and department head of epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut, for comment on the allegation that the corrected data show a link between increased aluminum exposure and autism. In response, we received an automated email from Hviid stating that he was “out-of-office for the summer,” until Aug. 11.

The study’s corresponding author, Niklas Worm Andersson, M.D, Ph.D., an epidemiology researcher at the Statens Serum Institut, did not respond to a request for comment.

On July 14 — a day before the study was published and three days before the journal issued a correction — Hviid told numerous media outlets that the study showed aluminum in vaccines does not cause autism.

As of press time today, the authors of the study had not revised their findings to concur with the corrected materials that contradict the findings they shared with media outlets.

NBC News, which reported on the uncorrected version of the study on July 14, criticized U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for saying during a 2024 “Joe Rogan Experience” interview that the aluminum in vaccines is “extremely neurotoxic.”

Last month, Kennedy appointed new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee. Last month, during the first meeting of the new members, they voted to remove thimerosal, a preservative that contains mercury, from vaccines. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it formalized the recommendation.

Reuters reported that Kennedy also considered asking the committee to examine vaccines that contain aluminum, but to date, the CDC has not announced any new recommendations related to aluminum.

Danish researchers ‘completely obfuscated what they really found’

According to the authors of the Danish study:

“This nationwide cohort study did not find evidence supporting an increased risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders associated with early childhood exposure to aluminum-adsorbed vaccines.”

However, after reviewing the corrected data, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, told The Defender the authors “completely obfuscated what they really found — a statistically significant relationship between aluminum exposure and autism.”

The buried link appears on Figure 11 (page 19) of the corrected supplemental materials.

The original version showed that children who received a large dose of aluminum were not at greater risk of getting a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, including autism, than kids who received a small or moderate dose.

Yet the corrected version showed that kids who received a large dose had a statistically significantly higher risk of being diagnosed with autism or other “pervasive” developmental disorders compared to those who received a moderate dose of aluminum.

Jablonowski said he and Hooker determined that the results were statistically significant — meaning they couldn’t be attributed to chance — by looking at the confidence intervals for each statistic.

A confidence interval “shows the range of values you expect the true estimate to fall between if you redo the study many times.”

The corrected figure also showed that children who received a large dose of aluminum had a statistically significantly higher risk of Asperger’s syndrome compared to kids who received a small dose of aluminum. However, kids in the large-dose group weren’t at a higher risk of any other neurodevelopmental issues compared to kids who received a small dose.

The low-dose group included roughly only 42,000 children. That could make it difficult to detect a statistical signal, Jablonowski explained.

“It’s not surprising that we see a strong signal among the groups that had more participants but not among the group that had fewer participants,” he said.

The moderate-dose group consisted of about 700,000 children, while there were about 460,000 children in the large-dose group.

How did authors make autism link disappear from original figure?

The original version of the study reported 2,961 fewer diagnoses of neurodevelopmental outcomes than the corrected version.

It appears the study authors “deleted the sicker kids,” Jablonowski said. “Or at least, just their diagnoses.”

The study also included allergy and autoimmune diagnoses, but none of those statistics were missing. Only the number of neurodevelopmental diagnoses differed between the original results and the corrected ones.

That suggests the authors didn’t make a random mistake, but intentionally fudged the number, Jablonowski said.

In hope of shedding light on what happened to the missing data, Jablonowski emailed the journal’s editors on July 18, asking them to publicize the comments between themselves and the anonymous scientists who peer-reviewed the study.

The inconsistencies in the study are specifically in “the figures in the main manuscript and the figures in the supplemental material,” Jablonowski wrote to the journal. “I believe the nature of those inconsistencies may be understood by examining the reviewer comments and subsequent exchanges.”

The journal editors have not responded.

‘Glaring signs’ Danish authors ‘didn’t practice good science’

The authors have not released the study’s raw data, citing Danish privacy law.

This frustrates independent scientists like Jablonowski, who said having access only to the data that the authors statistically adjusted makes it difficult to accurately critique the study, and impossible to replicate it.

Andersson did not respond when The Defender asked if the authors could share a de-identified version of the data that wouldn’t violate privacy law.

Jablonowski said:

“So if the raw data can’t be shared and Andersson is not going to reveal their unadjusted data, the appraisal of this paper is solely based on trust that the authors are practicing good science in good faith and they do not need to be scrutinized.”

But there are “glaring signs that the authors didn’t practice good science,” he said.

There were other inconsistencies between the original and corrected supplemental material. For instance, the corrected version shows different results in multiple places when tracking the prevalence of Asperger’s syndrome among kids.

The authors may have been more inclined to produce results that favored vaccination, given that they work at the Statens Serum Institut, a government agency responsible for procuring and supplying vaccines for the national vaccination.

Hviid reported funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which is directly linked to the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk.

“The researchers are integrally involved in pushing vaccines and sweeping vaccine safety under the rug.”

Original study also riddled with flaws, critics say

Even before the corrected materials were added to the study, Hooker and Jablonowski noted a host of flaws.

For instance, the authors failed to mention there were increased risks of certain diseases for kids vaccinated with aluminum-containing vaccines, compared with kids who received no aluminum-containing vaccines.

Before Hviid went on summer break, he told The Defender in an email that his team didn’t include a control group of unvaccinated children who had no aluminum exposure because differences between unvaccinated and vaccinated children likely would have biased the results.

Instead, the team opted to compare groups of vaccinated children who were exposed to different amounts of aluminum, Hviid said.

Yet the study reported results for 15,237 children who were either unvaccinated or vaccinated only with a shot that contains no aluminum, such as the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. The MMR vaccine used in Denmark has no aluminum, according to the authors.

That creates a cohort of children unvaccinated with an aluminum-containing shot, Jablonowski said.

Hooker and Jablonowski compared the outcomes of children who didn’t receive an aluminum-containing vaccine with the outcomes of children who received aluminum-containing vaccines.

“Kids who received an aluminum-containing vaccine were 26% more likely to have atopic dermatitis” than kids who were unvaccinated or only got the MMR shot, Jablonowski said. Those kids were “50% more likely to have allergic rhinoconjunctivitis — and these are really strong, statistically significant signals.”

Jablonowski said the study authors might criticize the analysis he and Hooker conducted for failing to consider possible confounding factors.

“I’d be happy to redo the analysis and account for possible confounding factors, but I’d need the authors to release sufficiently detailed data,” Jablonowski said.

Calls grow for journal to retract study

The findings in the corrected study still maintain the authors’ claim that aluminum-containing vaccinations are not associated with all 50 of the negative health outcomes they analyzed. In fact, their analysis claims protection against 12 categories of disease, including autism.

“These findings are not just counterintuitive — they are biologically absurd,” James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., wrote on Substack. “No plausible mechanism exists by which aluminum salts could prevent neurodevelopmental delay.”

Lyons-Weiler is the founder of IPAK-EDU, an adult online institution of higher learning run by the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.

Lyons-Weiler and other critics are calling for the study’s retraction. He told The Defender the study’s “fatal methodological flaws … violate the principles of valid causal inference.”

Guillemette Crépeaux, Ph.D., associate professor at École Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort, told The Defender that the Annals of Internal Medicine should never have accepted the study — especially with its incorrect supplementary data. “Retraction should be the bare minimum,” she said.

Guillemette said she and her colleagues are writing a rebuttal to the study. They plan to submit it for publication later this summer.

Chris Exley, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminum exposure, told The Defender, “There is no question in my mind that the authors of this study used the data available to them to come to an afore determined conclusion.”

In 2020, Crépeaux and Exley co-authored an article in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology that called for “independent, rigorous and honest science” on aluminum in vaccines.

Exley said the authors of the Danish study should make the data they used available for independent scrutiny. He said:

“I understand that they have already refused such requests and the compliant journal publishing the study is not prepared to press them on this issue. Surprise, surprise.

“Hviid and his band of conspirators are only interested in pedaling nonsense and nonscience to what they and others … believe is a gullible public. I think we have news for them. The times are changing, at long last.”

Related articles in The Defender

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.

July 27, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Climate Change Is Reducing, Not Increasing Food Costs, Mainstream Media

By Linnea Lueken | ClimateRealism | July 23, 2025

A flurry of mainstream media reports, from Bloomberg, The Guardian, Financial Times, and CNN, among other outlets, claim that climate change is causing rising food prices “worldwide,” based on a single new study. This is false. Bad weather has always impacted crop production, and there is no actual evidence that extreme weather is increasing. Globalization of media coverage is simply making it easier to hear about bad weather elsewhere in the world, meanwhile crop production and yields globally continue to set records – a fact the same media outlets largely ignore.

Focusing on the coverage by Bloomberg, in an article titled “How Climate Change Is Raising Your Grocery Bill,” Bloomberg writers report on a study from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the European Central Bank, which claims price jumps in certain food products are due to “extreme weather they say is linked to climate change.”

Bloomberg claims that consumers around the world “say they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.” If true at all, this is almost certainly the effect of media coverage like Bloomberg’s insisting that climate change is responsible, instead of observational evidence of crop production.

It is worth noting that the study uses the term “unprecedented” eight times in the mere four pages of content. To justify their use of the term unprecedented to describe global weather events in the last few years they reference ERA5 surface temperature data going back to 1940, and the standardized precipitation index from CRU going back to 1901. The reason why this is non-scientific and misleading will become clear when we go over the weather events they claim were so “unprecedented.”

Bloomberg discussed a few of the weather events mentioned in the study linking them to increases in the price for specific crops. They first highlighted increases in lettuce and vegetable prices in the United States, driven by droughts in California and Arizona, the former of which Bloomberg claims saw the “driest three-year period ever recorded.” Also mentioned was hurricane Ian. The problem, of course, is that California’s drought was anything but unprecedented. As discussed in the post “Mega-droughts and Mega-floods in the West All Occurred Well Before ‘climate change’ Was Blamed for Every Weather Event,”  historical data and proxies show that California has experienced far more widespread and severe periods of drought in the past, some of which lasted as long as two hundred years.

In Asia, Bloomberg says a heatwave impacted South Korean cabbage production. While UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data indicate that cabbage production has been slowly declining after a massive spike in the 1970s, yields have remained stable or increased since 2000. This suggests that economic considerations or political decisions made about the relative benefits of growing cabbage versus other crops that could be grown, or uses the land could be put too, rather than climate, are responsible for changes in production.

Australia also saw high lettuce costs due to flooding in the eastern part of the country in recent years, but the year Bloomberg and the study highlight, 2022, was not unprecedented as they implied. In fact, 2022 was only the sixth “wettest” year on available Australian rainfall records, the wettest year on record was in 1950.

Figure 1: Australian rainfall records, chart from Jennifer Marohasy

Bloomberg goes on to explain how the study allegedly “found that heat, drought and floods were occurring at an increased intensity and frequency,” which is at odds with available data and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th assessment report, which though it claims an increase in extreme heat has been detected, finds no emergence of increased flooding or drought in the current historical period.

In short, Bloomberg, and the other mainstream media outlets hyping the BSC report, failed to do any fact checking, failed to examine crop trends, and illegitimately linked individual weather events to long-term climate change, despite such events being common in history and there being no discernable trend in an increase in such events amid the slight warming that has occurred in recent years. To be clear, weather is not climate and, despite what unscientific attribution studies claim, no specific weather event can be tied to long-term climate change.

In short, none of the weather events Bloomberg referred to as unprecedented were in fact unique or even rare historically.

Concerning the crops, BSC and the media focuses on the most, lettuce and cabbage, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that between 1993 and 2023 (the most recent 30-year period of climate change for which we have available data):

  • Lettuce (and chicory – the FAO combines them) production grew approximately 112 percent;
  • Lettuce and chicory yields increased by about 4 percent;
  • Cabbage production expanded by nearly 75 percent;
  • And cabbage yield grew by more than 37 percent. (see the graph below)

Bloomberg does briefly concede that other factors, like El Niño, a totally natural phenomenon, played a role in weather in 2023 and 2024, impacting certain crops. The outlet also begrudgingly admits that “food price shocks typically turn out to be short-term in nature, because high prices incentivize more production, which brings prices back down,” though they try to say that coffee and cattle are exceptions to this rule. Although Bloomberg reports that coffee futures are high, there is no evidence that climate change is actually damaging global coffee production, as explained in Climate Realism posts here, here, and here.

Bloomberg ends with a warning from the study authors, claiming that “slashing greenhouse gas emissions and containing global warming will be key to reducing food price inflation risks,” but this ignores another key aspect of food costs. They are also impacted by the cost to produce food, like when governments increase the price farmers pay for fossil fuel derived pesticides and fertilizers or try to restrict their use. Fossil fuel derived chemicals increase yields with less labor and using much less land. Take a look at Sri Lanka for a good example of what happens when climate action is prioritized over food production.

Never before has it been so easy for the media to report on various weather disasters and crop failures globally, and this certainly has an impact on peoples’ perceptions as well as the ability for studies to try to draw connections that aren’t really backed by data. This Bloomberg piece is nothing more than climate fearmongering; taking disconnected crop shortages from around the world from localized weather events and trying to blame them on climate change, when the truth is that there have always been crops failing somewhere in the world at any given time.

July 27, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

WEATHER CONTROL: WHAT’S REAL?

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | July 17, 2025

Geoengineering researcher Jim Lee joins guest host Jefferey Jaxen to unpack the real-world science behind weather modification. From cloud seeding to large-scale atmospheric interventions, Lee makes it clear: this is no longer science fiction. He also discusses his recent interview with controversial cloud seeding tech CEO Augustus Doricko, who addresses claims tying his company to the catastrophic Texas floods.

July 19, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | Leave a comment

Study Claiming No Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism Riddled with Flaws, Critics Say

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender  | July 17, 2025

Mainstream media widely promoted a new study by Danish researchers that found no link between aluminum in vaccines and 50 negative health outcomes, including autism, asthma and autoimmune disorders.

However, critics told The Defender the study used flawed methodology and “statistical tricks” that muddied the findings.

The authors published their report on July 15 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. On July 14, even before the study went live, mainstream and health industry media, including NBC News and STAT News, publicly announced the results.

Chris Exley, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminum exposure, and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said that in order to determine if aluminum exposure is linked to health conditions, the researchers should have compared children with no aluminum exposure to children with aluminum exposure.

But that’s not what the Danish scientists did. Instead, they compared children who received vaccines containing aluminum to children who received vaccines with slightly less aluminum.

Not only that, but there was only a one-milligram difference between the amount of aluminum in the vaccine doses received by the children in one of the groups compared to those in another group. Comparing children with similar aluminum levels rather than comparing children with low levels of aluminum to children with high levels of the metal further muddled the findings, Hooker said.

The researchers examined national vaccination records of about 1.2 million children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018 and tracked the rates of 50 chronic health conditions.

Using statistical analyses, the authors concluded there was no link between aluminum content in vaccines and increased risk of developing autism, autoimmune diseases, asthma or allergic conditions, including food allergies and hay fever.

Anders Hviid, a professor and department head of epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut and lead study author, told MedPage Today, the results “provide robust evidence supporting the safety of childhood vaccines.”

“This is evidence that parents, clinicians, and public health officials need to make the best choices for the health of our children,” Hviid said.

In a press release, Hviid called the results “reassuring” and said large studies like his are important in “an era marked by widespread misinformation about vaccines.”

According to Hviid, the aluminum in vaccines is in the form of aluminum salts, “which is not the same as elemental aluminum which is a metal.” He told NBC News, “It’s really important for parents to understand that we are not injecting metal into children.”

Hviid justified the choice not to include a control group of children with no aluminum exposure by saying there are “very few” children who are “completely unvaccinated.”

The study came out just weeks after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. considered asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee to review vaccines containing aluminum ingredients, according to Reuters.

Aluminum-containing adjuvants are used in many vaccines to create a stronger immune response in the person receiving the shot, according to the CDC. Vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants include DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis), hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), HPV and pneumococcal.

Kennedy previously suggested that aluminum may be partially responsible for the rise in allergies among U.S. kids, according to The New York Times.

J.B. Handley, author of “How to End the Autism Epidemic,” said aluminum in vaccines may trigger autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders by activating the immune system in a way that alters the developing brain of a fetus or child.

This happens because the aluminum in vaccines travels easily to the brain. There, it can cause inflammation in vulnerable people by triggering the production of a key cytokine — interleukin 6 or IL-6 — a protein that affects the immune system. Elevated IL-6 has been linked to autism.

Is aluminum industry running scared?

The new Danish study affirms that aluminum is safe — a convenient narrative for the aluminum industry and one that has come under greater scrutiny since Kennedy became head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“I spent forty years of academic research on aluminium and I never really believed that I would see the day when the aluminium industry was running scared,” Exley wrote on Substack about the media response to the Danish study. “This is what is happening now.”

Exley said he suspects the aluminum industry influenced the Danish researchers. Hviid pushed back on the claim, telling The Defender he and his co-authors have no financial ties to the aluminum industry.

The study’s authors are employed by the Statens Serum Institut, which has a long history of developing vaccines, Hooker said. “The researchers are integrally involved in pushing vaccines and sweeping vaccine safety under the rug.”

Researchers excluded kids most likely to show early signs of aluminum-related injury

Failing to have a control group with no aluminum exposure was one of several criticisms leveled at the Danish study.

James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., wrote a lengthy Substack post detailing numerous methodological problems. He is president and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, an advocacy group that supports accuracy and integrity in science.

Lyons-Weiler said the study’s authors adjusted for children having aluminum-related chronic illness before 24 months, which meant they removed the kids most likely to show early signs of aluminum-related injury.

He explained how this was a “statistical trick”:

“Imagine studying the association between smoking and lung disease, adjusting for having nicotine-stained fingers, carrying a lighter, or frequency of coughing in the 24 months before lung cancer diagnosis.

“What you are doing, in effect, is mathematically erasing the very signal you are supposed to be detecting.”

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist, noted that over 34,000 children were excluded from the study because they received more than three of any one of the aluminum-containing vaccines before their second birthday. The study described this as an “implausible number of childhood vaccines.”

“Was this a documentation error or a medical error?” Jablonowski asked. “The group had the opportunity to investigate the health of these children and chose not to.”

Recommendations for aluminum-containing vaccines are higher in the U.S. than in Denmark. Before a child turns 2 years old, the U.S. Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule calls for four doses of DTaP, four doses of pneumococcal, three or four doses of Hib, three doses of hepatitis B and one dose of hepatitis A. Other vaccines that don’t contain aluminum are also recommended.

Researchers stopped following kids’ diagnoses at age 5

Hooker cited another flaw in the study: the authors tracked chronic disease diagnoses in children only from ages 2-5. It’s possible some of the kids were older than age 5 when they were diagnosed with a health condition, but by then, researchers were no longer tracking them.

“This is much too young for developmental and autoimmune diagnoses and will cause everything to move to the null hypothesis,” he said.

For example, the number of autistic kids in the study was only about 1 in 500, “which we know is much too low,” Hooker said. Denmark’s autism rate is over four times that amount, according to data from World Population Review.

Additionally, the researchers did nothing to ensure that the kids in the study were exposed to the amounts of aluminum that the authors assumed, based on the kids’ vaccination records.

“There were no biomarkers, no aluminum levels measured in serum, hair or tissue,” Lyons-Weiler told The Defender.

Prior research links aluminum to neurotoxicity, asthma

The results of the new Danish study stand in contrast to the findings of other researchers on aluminum’s negative health impacts, according to Lyons-Weiler.

“The literature contains multiple lines of evidence implicating aluminum adjuvants in neurotoxicity, immune dysregulation and developmental injury,” he said. “The consistency of these findings — across model systems, exposure levels and endpoints — demands attention, not erasure.”

In 2023, a federally funded U.S. study found a 36% higher risk of persistent asthma in children who received three or more milligrams of vaccine-related aluminum than kids who got less than three, but the study’s authors were careful not to suggest a causal relationship.

Exley said he hopes Kennedy will commission independent research that will provide “unequivocal” evidence on aluminum’s role in infant mortality and ill health.

Lyons-Weiler added, “The public deserves studies that test hypotheses honestly, not ones built to produce desired headlines.”

Related articles in The Defender

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.

July 19, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Kathryn Porter On The Spanish Blackouts

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | July 17, 2025

Kathryn Porter has a detailed analysis of the concise but informative report produced by Red Eléctrica de España (“REE”), the Spanish Transmission System Operator on the Spanish blackouts.

It’s way beyond my pay grade, but it can be neatly summed up by this comment from Kathryn:

The Iberian grid was already in a weakened state, owing to insufficient synchronous generation and excessive reliance on inverter-based renewables. The system failed to withstand a fault that originated with a single solar inverter. This was not an unavoidable technical event – it was the result of systemic underestimation of voltage control risks, poor compliance enforcement, and REE’s failure to schedule or deploy sufficient dynamic voltage support.

This blackout would not have occurred in a conventional, high-synchronous grid. The rush to decarbonise the power system without adequate attention to resilience and enforcement has created an atmosphere of complacency. That complacency – shared by policymakers, regulators, and parts of the renewables industry – led directly to a system-wide collapse that cost eleven lives.

I have seen many media reports which have tried to deflect from the role of intermittent renewable energy in the disaster. They have usually highlighted various failings by grid operators and lack of “investment” in the grid.

But such reports miss the point. It is only because of the inherent instability of wind and solar power that all of these investments and safety measures become necessary.

Maybe in a perfect world the Spanish grid would have worked as intended, and there would have been no blackouts.

But we don’t live in a perfect world.

July 18, 2025 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Europe Faces Backlash Over Climate Speech Crackdown Suggestions

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | July 17, 2025

Tensions over how climate change is discussed, and who gets to control that conversation, are escalating across Europe.

At the European Parliament’s environment committee this week, the European Commission defended its campaign against “climate disinformation,” facing down strong opposition from lawmakers who fear the erosion of free expression.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Labour donor and green energy tycoon Dale Vince added fuel to the fire by publicly calling for criminal penalties against climate skeptics.

Opening the committee session in Brussels, Commission official Emil Andersen attempted to draw a line between belief and verifiable fact: “As citizens of a free society, we are each entitled to our own opinions but not entitled to our own facts.” That assertion quickly ran into fierce resistance, with several parliamentarians warning of state overreach cloaked in scientific authority.

Anja Arndt of Germany’s AfD challenged the prevailing climate consensus and accused the EU of weaponizing disinformation policy. “A front-on attack on freedom of expression, freedom of science, and the truth,” she declared. Her colleague Marc Jongen warned that if the European Commission took it upon itself to decide what constitutes truth, then “we’re on the road to a totalitarian system.”

Those concerns found parallels in the UK. Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity and a major Labour Party financier, stated that climate skepticism should not only be rebutted but also punished. Writing on X, he said, “I’d make climate denial a criminal offence myself – given the incredible harm that it will cause, even by slowing down progress to net zero.” Rather than promoting dialogue or transparency, Vince called for punitive action against dissenting opinions.

His comments came shortly after Energy Secretary Ed Miliband lashed out at both the Conservatives and Reform UK for resisting rapid decarbonization. “Future generations” would hold them accountable, he said in an interview with The Times.

While many agree on aspects of environmental responsibility, calls to outlaw disagreement threaten to undermine core democratic values. Branding opposing views as dangerous, rather than countering them with argument and evidence, risks transforming public discourse into a one-sided echo chamber.

Inside the European Parliament, skepticism about the Commission’s disinformation push was not confined to the political fringes. Sander Smit of the centre-right European People’s Party expressed concern that Commission-backed “fact-checking” could suppress debate, especially during elections. He argued that this approach might render “a certain type of discussion” impossible.

Others in the chamber took the opposite view. Members of liberal and social democratic groups insisted that denying climate science was not an acceptable position in democratic debate. Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy of the Renew group maintained that accepting climate science was based on evidence, while rejecting it was “precisely” ideological. He urged lawmakers to maintain integrity in public discourse and to form a coalition against climate denial. He also asked the Commission to formally refute what he described as the AfD’s “nonsense,” though no assurance was given.

July 18, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Connecticut Passes Law Mandating Water Fluoridation at Existing Levels in Move to Preempt Federal Changes

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 16, 2025

Connecticut Gov. Ted Lamont on Tuesday signed legislation requiring public water systems to continue fluoridating drinking water at the levels currently recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In the press release, Lamont said current recommended levels of water fluoridation have been proven to be “safe and effective for many decades.”

The new law will ensure that “this public health standard continues in Connecticut regardless of whatever political decisions are made at the federal level,” Lamont said.

Previous state law mandated that water be fluoridated at levels recommended by HHS. Currently, the agency recommends 0.7 milligrams per liter, but it may reexamine that recommendation.

The law mandates that the amount of fluoride that must be added to the state’s water supply remains at the HHS-recommended level of 0.7 milligrams per liter.

Pro-fluoridation lobbyists, including the American Dental Association (ADA) and state dental associations, celebrated the news. The ADA said it was pleased that Connecticut “has taken a proactive approach to protecting community water fluoridation.”

The Fluoride Action Network (FAN), which educates the public about the dangers of fluoridation, criticized the move. “Change is hard,” it posted on X. “Connecticut has stubbornly fossilized current fluoridation levels into law.”

In a press release, Lamont’s office cited outdated statistics claiming water fluoridation reduces cavities by 25%. It also quoted Connecticut senators, the state’s public health commissioner, and several dental organizations who affirmed the importance and safety of fluoridation. It didn’t cite any evidence to back those claims.

A growing body of research showing fluoride’s toxic effects, particularly for pregnant women and children, gained national attention when a federal judge in September 2024 ruled against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a landmark lawsuit brought by the FAN, Mothers Against Fluoridation, Food & Water Watch and others.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled that water fluoridation at current levels of 0.7 milligrams per liter posed an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health and must be regulated.

Chen’s 80-page decision outlined the scientific evidence that fluoride exposure is linked to reduced IQ in children.

The decision to fluoridate water is usually made by local governments. However, fluoridation infrastructure typically has state funding, and a handful of states require fluoridation, usually for communities of a certain size.

Trump administration gives mixed signals on water fluoridation

Since the September federal court ruling, more than 60 communities, towns and states — including Florida, the third most populous state — have voted to stop adding fluoride to their water systems.

Water fluoridation has been practiced in the U.S. since the 1940s. At the time of the lawsuit ruling, 200 million Americans were drinking water treated with fluoride.

Water fluoridation hasn’t always been a partisan issue. In the early 2010s, Democratic cities such as Portland, Oregon, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, voted to end water fluoridation over concerns about the chemical’s toxic effects.

However, the issue became more politicized in November 2024, after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime fluoride critic, said the incoming Trump administration would advise local water systems to stop fluoridating water. Kennedy was confirmed as HHS secretary in February.

Since then, Democratic politicians and the mainstream press have vocally supported water fluoridation and attacked critics — including even CNN and Washington Post health commentator Dr. Leana Wen.

However, the Trump administration has given mixed signals on its approach to water fluoridation.

In April, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to “expeditiously review” new science on the possible health risks of water fluoridation. Also that month, Kennedy said he planned to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending water fluoridation nationally.

However, that recommendation has not happened.

Instead, last week, Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs in the landmark fluoride lawsuit, announced on X that the EPA plans to appeal Chen’s decision ordering the agency to address the risks of water fluoridation.

The agency is expected to file its appeal later this week.

In 2015, President Barack Obama’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy officially lowered the recommended dosage for water fluoridation from 0.7-1.2 milligrams per liter to 0.7 milligrams per liter after considering “adverse health effects” along with alleged benefits.

The original draft version of Murthy’s revised water fluoridation recommendations included a summary of research on fluoride’s impact on IQ and other neurological issues, with a statement saying further research was needed on the topic. Those statements were not present in Murthy’s final draft.

Related articles in The Defender

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.

July 16, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Trump’s DOJ Says EPA Will Appeal Landmark Fluoride Ruling

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 14, 2025

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to appeal a decision last year by a federal court ordering the agency to address the risks of water fluoridation, according to Michael Connett, lead attorney for plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“Rather than use the court’s decision as an opportunity to finally end water fluoridation (as most of Europe has already done), the EPA will spend its time legally challenging the court’s order,” Connett wrote in a post on X.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade organization representing the chemical industry, and the American Fluoridation Society, a fluoridation advocacy organization that touts its work undermining local efforts to oppose water fluoridation, filed motions seeking to submit amicus briefs supporting the EPA appeal, he said.

Connett told The Defender that the American Dental Association also plans to file a brief.

The EPA said it will file the appeal on July 18, after which the case will go to a three-judge panel in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The appeals court will receive briefs from both sides, along with any amicus briefs, and hear oral arguments before issuing its decision.

The Fluoride Action Network (FAN), one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the EPA, said on X that the appeal was “a very disappointing move by EPA.” “A few months ago, @epaleezeldin went on a public speaking tour with @SecKennedy to address why fluoride needs to come OUT of the water. Now the EPA will appeal to keep fluoride IN drinking water.”

Connett noted that the decision to appeal came from the solicitor general at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), who reports to Pam Bondi and the White House, not by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has vocally opposed water fluoridation, but lacks the authority to end it.

“Only the EPA has this power, and it has decided, for now, to forego its historic opportunity (as provided by the court’s decision) to exercise it,” Connett said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes recommendations from the U.S. Public Health Service on whether communities should add fluoride to their drinking water and at what levels. However, the EPA sets the maximum levels allowed in water under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The current maximum allowable levels of fluoride in drinking water are 4.0 milligrams per liter (mg/L), which is many orders of magnitude higher than the currently recommended dosage of 0.7 mg/L.

Even the lower recommended dosage has demonstrated a risk to children’s health in numerous studies, and according to the federal ruling that the EPA plans to challenge.

EPA continues to treat fluoride as a ‘protected pollutant’

In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen issued the historic decision in the lawsuit against the EPA, ruling that water fluoridation at current U.S. levels poses an “unreasonable risk” of reduced IQ in children and that the EPA must take regulatory action to address that risk.

At the time of the ruling, more than 200 million Americans were drinking water treated with fluoride at the “optimal” level of 0.7 mg/L.

Chen ruled that a preponderance of scientific evidence showed this level of fluoride exposure may damage human health, particularly that of pregnant mothers and young children.

Environmental and consumer advocacy organizations, including FAN, Moms Against Fluoridation and Food & Water Watch, along with individual parents and children, filed the lawsuit against the EPA in 2017 under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) after the EPA denied their citizens’ petition to reexamine water fluoridation.

During the trial that followed, Chen reviewed existing regulations, regulatory frameworks and current science on fluoride’s risks to children and pregnant women presented through peer-reviewed papers and experts on both sides.

The case dragged on for seven years, after numerous delays by the EPA, and attempts by HHS officials to block the release of the key piece of evidence in the case, a government report on fluoride’s toxicity.

Chen’s 80-page ruling, issued seven months after closing arguments in February 2024, offered a careful and detailed articulation of the EPA’s review process for hazardous chemicals and summarized the extensive scientific data on fluoride’s toxicity.

Chen concluded that the risk to health at current levels of exposure demanded a regulatory response by the agency.

Evidence against fluoride keeps piling up

Since the end of the trial, the body of scientific evidence showing fluoride’s adverse impacts on children’s health has grown. Scientists at the National Toxicology Program in January published a meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics linking fluoridated water and IQ loss in children.

The program also published a monograph in August 2024 that found a link between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children.

In May 2024, a study in JAMA Open Network found children born to Los Angeles mothers exposed during pregnancy to fluoridated drinking water were more likely to have neurobehavioural problems.

FAN’s executive director, Stuart Cooper, said the group has long sought to end the “unnecessary life-long and life-altering brain impairment in children specifically due to artificial fluoridation schemes” and the many other side effects to people’s liver, kidneys, thyroid and bones.

For nine years, he said, the EPA has been working against them. “From day one of our interactions with them, they’ve treated fluoridation chemicals as a protected pollutant, likely due to the government’s role in promoting their use and guaranteeing their ‘safety’ for over 80 years.”

Cooper added:

“While the science is clear and the lower court’s ruling was very strong and comprehensive, it’s not necessarily a surprise that the appeal has occurred. Our case is precedent-setting. We were the first to sue the EPA under TSCA. I suspect that corporate polluters who have learned how to manage and influence the EPA to their benefit don’t want citizens groups to use TSCA to force the EPA to regulate harmful chemicals.”

Another plaintiff in the lawsuit, Moms Against Fluoridation, told The Defender it was“deeply disappointed” that the EPA plans to appeal the ruling.

“The science is clear, and our lawsuit’s findings are undeniable: fluoridation is a toxic legacy that must end, like asbestos, DDT, and lead,” it said. “The agency’s plan to appeal only underscores their prioritization of industry interests over the well-being of our children and vulnerable populations. Moms Against Fluoridation will not back down — we will continue to fight tirelessly for the health and safety of all Americans.”

60+ towns and counties and two states vote to end fluoridation

Since the federal ruling last year, more than 60 U.S. towns, counties and two states — Utah and Florida — have voted to stop fluoridating their water, according to FAN.

During that time, there has been an ongoing campaign by the American Dental Association, the American Fluoridation Society and mainstream media to discredit the court’s ruling.

Typically, they assert that water fluoridation is an important, safe and effective way to prevent tooth decay — and that without it, rates of cavities will soar, costing billions. They cite a study published by researchers funded by pro-fluoridation groups.

Yet, overwhelming scientific research shows that fluoride’s benefits to teeth are topical, not the result of ingesting fluoride, and a 2024 Cochrane Review found adding fluoride to drinking water provides very limited dental benefits, especially compared with 50 years ago.

Most media reports also highlight the fact that fluoride is a “naturally occurring mineral.” However, they don’t mention that the fluoride added to water supplies is not.

The fluoride most commonly added to U.S. drinking water supplies is hydrofluorosilicic acid, the byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production. Chemical companies sell the byproduct to local water departments across the country.

Communities that have recently ended fluoridation have found themselves saddled with a chemical that they must dispose of as hazardous waste, per EPA regulations — an expensive and time-consuming process.

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.

July 14, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Net Zero: The Mystery of the Falling Fertility

By Tomas Furst | Brownstone Institute | July 8, 2025

In January 2022, the number of children born in the Czech Republic suddenly decreased by about 10%. By the end of 2022, it had become clear that this was a signal: All the monthly numbers of newborns were mysteriously low.

In April 2023, I wrote a piece for a Czech investigative platform InFakta and suggested that this unexpected phenomenon might be connected to the aggressive vaccination campaign that had started approximately 9 months before the drop in natality. Denik N – a Czech equivalent of the New York Times – immediately came forward with a “devastating takedown” of my article, labeled me a liar and claimed that the pattern can be explained by demographics: There were fewer women in the population and they were getting older.

To compare fertility across countries (and time), the so-called Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is used. Roughly speaking, it is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime. TFR is independent of the number of women and of their age structure. Figure 1 below shows the evolution of TFR in several European countries between 2001 and 2023. I selected countries that experienced a similar drop in TFR in 2022 as the Czech Republic.

Figure 1. The evolution of Total Fertility Rate in selected European countries between 2000 and 2023. The data corresponding to a particular year are plotted at the end of the column representing that year.

So, by the end of 2023, the following two points were clear:

  1. The drop in natality in the Czech Republic in 2022 could not be explained by demographic factors. Total fertility rate – which is independent of the number of women and their age structure – dropped sharply in 2022 and has been decreasing ever since. The data for 2024 show that the Czech TFR has decreased further to 1.37.
  1. Many other European countries experienced the same dramatic and unexpected decrease in fertility that started at the beginning of 2022. I have selected some of them for Figure 1 but there are more: The Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. On the other hand, there are some countries that do not show a sudden drop in TFR, but rather a steady decline over a longer period (e.g. Belgium, France, UK, Greece, or Italy). Notable exceptions are Bulgaria, Spain, and Portugal where fertility has increased (albeit from very low numbers). The Human Fertility Project database has all the numbers.

This data pattern is so amazing and unexpected that even the mainstream media in Europe cannot avoid the problem completely. From time to time, talking heads with many academic titles appear and push one of the politically correct narratives: It’s Putin! (Spoiler alert: The war started in February 2022; however, children not born in 2022 were not conceived in 2021). It’s the inflation caused by Putin! (Sorry, that was even later). It’s the demographics! (Nope, see above, TFR is independent of the demographics).

Thus, the “v” word keeps creeping back into people’s minds and the Web’s Wild West is ripe with speculation. We decided not to speculate but to wrestle some more data from the Czech government. For many months, we were trying to acquire the number of newborns in each month, broken down by age and vaccination status of the mother. The post-socialist health-care system of our country is a double-edged sword: On one hand, the state collects much more data about citizens than an American would believe. On the other hand, we have an equivalent of the FOIA, and we are not afraid to use it. After many months of fruitless correspondence with the authorities, we turned to Jitka Chalankova – a Czech Ron Johnson in skirts – who finally managed to obtain an invaluable data sheet.

To my knowledge, the datasheet (now publicly available with an English translation here) is the only officially released dataset containing a breakdown of newborns by the Covid-19 vaccination status of the mother. We requested much more detailed data, but this is all we got. The data contains the number of births per month between January 2021 and December 2023 given by women (aged 18-39) who were vaccinated, i.e., had received at least one Covid vaccine dose by the date of delivery, and by women who were unvaccinated, i.e., had not received any dose of any Covid vaccine by the date of delivery.

Furthermore, the numbers of births per month by women vaccinated by one or more doses during pregnancy were provided. This enabled us to estimate the number of women who were vaccinated before conception. Then, we used open data on the Czech population structure by age, and open data on Covid vaccination by day, sex, and age.

Combining these three datasets, we were able to estimate the rates of successful conceptions (i.e., conceptions that led to births nine months later) by preconception vaccination status of the mother. Those interested in the technical details of the procedure may read Methods in the newly released paper. It is worth mentioning that the paper had been rejected without review in six high-ranking scientific journals. In Figure 2, we reprint the main finding of our analysis.

Figure 2A. Histogram showing the percentage of women in the Czech Republic aged 18–39 years who were vaccinated with at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the respective month. Figure 2B. Estimates of the number of successful conceptions (SCs) per 1,000 women aged 18–39 years according to their pre-conception Covid vaccination status. The blue-shaded areas in Figure 1B show the intervals between the lower and upper estimates of the true SC rates for women vaccinated (dark blue) and unvaccinated (light blue) before conception.

Figure 2 reveals several interesting patterns that I list here in order of importance:

  1. Vaccinated women conceived about a third fewer children than would be expected from their share of the population. Unvaccinated women conceived at about the same rate as all women before the pandemic. Thus, a strong association between Covid vaccination status and successful conceptions has been established.
  2. In the second half of 2021, there was a peak in the rate of conceptions of the unvaccinated (and a corresponding trough in the vaccinated). This points to rather intelligent behavior of Czech women, who – contrary to the official advice – probably avoided vaccination if they wanted to get pregnant. This concentrated the pregnancies in the unvaccinated group and produced the peak.
  3. In the first half of 2021, there was significant uncertainty in the estimates of the conception rates. The lower estimate of the conception rate in the vaccinated was produced by assuming that all women vaccinated (by at least one dose) during pregnancy were unvaccinated before conception. This was almost certainly true in the first half of 2021 because the vaccines were not available prior to 2021. The upper estimate was produced by assuming that all women vaccinated (by at least one dose) during pregnancy also received at least one dose before conception. This was probably closer to the truth in the second part of 2021. Thus, we think that the true conception rates for the vaccinated start close to the lower bound in early 2021 and end close to the upper bound in early 2022. Once again, we would like to be much more precise, but we have to work with what we have got.

Now that the association between Covid-19 vaccination and lower rates of conception has been established, the one important question looms: Is this association causal? In other words, did the Covid-19 vaccines really prevent women from getting pregnant?

The guardians of the official narrative brush off our findings and say that the difference is easily explained by confounding: The vaccinated tend to be older, more educated, city-dwelling, more climate change aware…you name it. That all may well be true, but in early 2022, the TFR of the whole population dropped sharply and has been decreasing ever since.

So, something must have happened in the spring of 2021. Had the population of women just spontaneously separated into two groups – rednecks who wanted kids and didn’t want the jab, and city slickers who didn’t want kids and wanted the jab – the fertility rate of the unvaccinated would indeed be much higher than that of the vaccinated. In that respect, such a selection bias could explain the observed pattern. However, had this been true, the total TFR of the whole population would have remained constant.

But this is not what happened. For some reason, the TFR of the whole population jumped down in January 2022 and has been decreasing ever since. And we have just shown that, for some reason, this decrease in fertility affected only the vaccinated. So, if you want to argue that a mysterious factor X is responsible for the drop in fertility, you will have to explain (1) why the factor affected only the vaccinated, and (2) why it started affecting them at about the time of vaccination. That is a tall order. Mr. Occam and I both think that X = the vaccine is the simplest explanation.

What really puzzles me is the continuation of the trend. If the vaccines really prevented conception, shouldn’t the effect have been transient? It’s been more than three years since the mass vaccination event, but fertility rates still keep falling. If this trend continues for another five years, we may as well stop arguing about pensions, defense spending, healthcare reform, and education – because we are done.

We are in the middle of what may be the biggest fertility crisis in the history of mankind. The reason for the collapse in fertility is not known. The governments of many European countries have the data that would unlock the mystery. Yet, it seems that no one wants to know.

July 9, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

UN Launches Task Force to Combat Global “Disinformation” Threat

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | July 8, 2025

The United Nations has unveiled its first Global Risk Report, placing what it terms “mis- and disinformation” among the most serious threats facing the world.

Tucked into the report is the announcement of a new task force, formed to address how unauthorized narratives might disrupt the UN’s ability to carry out its programs, particularly its centerpiece initiative, the 2030 Agenda.

Rather than encouraging open discourse or transparency, the organization has taken a route that centers on managing what information gets seen and heard.

While the language used suggests a concern for public welfare, the actual emphasis lies on shielding the UN’s agenda from interference.

According to the report, survey respondents that included member states, NGOs, private companies, and other groups overwhelmingly called for joint government action and multistakeholder coalitions to deal with the highlighted risks.

Yet there is no clear endorsement of more open communication or free expression. The dominant solution appears to be top-down control over public narratives.

This newly established task force has a single focus. Its job is to assess how so-called mis- and disinformation affect the UN’s ability to deliver on its goals.

The report does not describe how this benefits the public or strengthens democratic values. Instead, the team’s mission is about insulating UN operations from disruption, particularly as they pertain to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The SDGs, which make up the foundation of the 2030 Agenda, touch nearly every aspect of governance and development, from climate to education to healthcare.

This is not the UN’s first attempt to regulate the global conversation. In 2023, it issued the Voluntary Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms.

While promoted as a guide to promote factual accuracy, the document outlines an expansive system of content filtering and narrative enforcement. It encourages a wide range of actors, including governments, tech firms, news organizations, and advertisers, to work together in silencing content.

Among its recommendations are stricter algorithmic control, refusal to advertise next to flagged content, and large-scale fact-checking programs. Training and capacity-building are suggested not to foster critical thinking but to reinforce a shared understanding of what constitutes unacceptable speech.

July 8, 2025 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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