Science and Pseudo-Science

‘Between a Shot and a Hard Place’: Autism, Vaccines and the Illusion of Certainty

By Dr. Joel ‘Gator’ Warsh | The Defender | June 25, 2025

For years, the public has been told the vaccine-autism question is closed — case dismissed, myth debunked, science settled.

But when you peel back the headlines and actually examine the evidence, a startling truth emerges: We haven’t really studied the question at all. Not thoroughly. Not independently. Not with the urgency or integrity the issue demands.

The most commonly cited research? A handful of studies on the MMR vaccine and thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was largely removed from childhood vaccines over two decades ago. That’s it.

No comprehensive analysis of the full vaccine schedule. No robust long-term comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. No meaningful investigation into the timing, combinations, or cumulative biological impact of dozens of shots now given in infancy and early childhood.

In other words, we haven’t looked. And yet we claim to know.

As a pediatrician with formal training in epidemiology, I approached the research with trust in the system and confidence in the data. But what I encountered while investigating for my book, “Between a Shot and a Hard Place,” left me stunned.

I expected to uncover a vast body of high-quality science — long-term trials, robust safety evaluations, rigorous comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

Instead, I found a shallow pool of studies — many small, some outdated, most narrowly focused on just one vaccine. There was no comprehensive scrutiny of the full schedule, no real curiosity about timing, interactions, or vulnerable populations.

It wasn’t that the science had disproven a link — it’s that the science had barely asked the question. And that silence speaks volumes.

We cannot claim certainty where inquiry has been suppressed. We cannot dismiss parent experiences as coincidences when they follow the same patterns again and again.

And we cannot afford to confuse lack of evidence with evidence of safety. The stakes are too high — and our children deserve better.

The rise in autism, and the refusal to ask why

Autism now affects 1 in 31 children in the U.S., with rates as high as 1 in 12.5 boys in California. The increase in diagnoses isn’t just about better awareness — more children today are deeply affected, with significant developmental and intellectual disabilities.

This is a public health crisis. Yet somehow, asking whether vaccines might play a role is taboo.

Parents see the change firsthand. A baby babbles, smiles, and makes eye contact — then suddenly, after a routine doctor visit, that progress stops. Words disappear. Eye contact fades. Regression sets in.

These stories follow a pattern, and while correlation is not causation, patterns are where science begins. But instead of investigation, we dismiss these parents. Instead of listening, we silence them.

The research we’re missing

I combed through decades of vaccine safety literature. The results were sobering.

There are no long-term, large-scale studies comparing fully vaccinated children to unvaccinated ones using standardized developmental assessments.
No comprehensive evaluation exists of the full CDC vaccine schedule as administered in real life.
Most studies focus narrowly on the MMR vaccine or thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative largely removed from pediatric vaccines two decades ago.

Even the Institute of Medicine acknowledged in a 2013 report that the safety of the full childhood vaccine schedule — especially its timing, spacing, and cumulative exposure— had not been rigorously studied.

If vaccines were a pharmaceutical drug administered in 70 doses before kindergarten, with a suspected link to any chronic disease, we’d demand independent oversight, transparent trials, and long-term tracking.

But because these are vaccines, we declare the science “settled” without proving that it is.

Buried data, ignored whistleblowers

In my research, I came across the 2010 study by Gallagher and Goodman that found a higher autism risk in boys who received the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. It wasn’t widely publicized or followed up.

More disturbing was the 2014 revelation by William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who admitted that his team omitted key data in a pivotal MMR-autism study — data that showed increased risk in African American boys. The study was never corrected.

How can we claim the science is settled if major findings are buried and whistleblowers ignored?

A path forward

The vaccine-autism debate won’t be resolved by censorship or soundbites. It will be resolved by doing the science we’ve avoided for too long.

If we truly care about children’s health — and public trust — then we must stop circling the same studies and start asking better questions. That means:

Funding large, independent, open-label prospective studies comparing fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and unvaccinated children — evaluating real-world vaccine schedules, not just single shots in isolation.
Studying combinations, timing, and aluminum adjuvants using updated toxicology, neurodevelopmental, and immunological tools.
Taking parental reports seriously as part of observational data—treating them not as “anecdotes to dismiss” but as signals to investigate.
Removing all financial conflicts of interest from vaccine safety research and creating full transparency for both data and funding sources.

This isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about restoring balance. We can demand rigorous, independent science without being “anti-vax.” We can protect children and respect parental intuition.

But we can’t do either if we keep denying the blind spots in our current system.

To move forward, we must be honest about what we know — and courageous enough to admit what we don’t. Because when it comes to our children’s long-term neurological health, vague reassurances are not enough.

No, the science is not settled. And it’s time we stopped saying it is.

Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh is a board-certified pediatrician, specializing in integrative and holistic medicine, and the author of “Between a Shot and a Hard Place.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

June 26, 2025 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Did Covid Vaccines Really Save Millions?

By Yaakov Ophir | Brownstone Institute | June 21, 2025

Two years have passed since the official end of the Covid-19 pandemic, yet the topic of vaccination remains highly sensitive in both public and scientific discourse. Attempts to question the legitimacy of the mass vaccination campaign or to raise concerns about potential harms are often met with a moral red line: the widely repeated claim that “Covid-19 vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives.”

Remarkably, this assertion was treated as established fact even during the recent U.S. Senate PSI hearing on May 21, 2025, which focused on vaccine-related adverse outcomes.¹ Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal opened the hearing with the following statement:

“As we talk about the side effects of COVID vaccines, I think we need to be clear about the most important fact. For all Americans, COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives. There is no scientific question about that fact… One study found that 3 million American deaths were averted…in the United States… I would like this study entered into the record.¹

This confident assertion raises a fundamental question: Is there truly solid and conclusive scientific evidence to support the powerful claim that the Covid-19 mass vaccination campaign resulted in a net benefit of millions of lives saved?

Faced with this fundamental question, our research team undertook a structured, step-by-step evaluation of the empirical foundations of the “millions saved” narrative. Building on our prior work,^{2, 3} we critically examined the hypothetical statistical models that produced this extraordinary figure, as well as multiple randomized controlled trials and large-scale observational studies that served as the empirical basis for the vaccine efficacy estimates fed into these models.

We have now uploaded our full-length article with what we believe to be urgently important findings to a preprint server,⁴ in order to allow scientists, physicians, and policymakers to independently evaluate the evidence. Because meaningful scientific discourse requires careful scrutiny of the data, we strongly urge readers not to rely solely on the current brief article, but to engage directly with the full analysis presented in our preprint.⁴

Our goal here is to highlight several central findings that, in our view, demand serious attention, given their direct relevance to one of the most significant public health interventions in modern history: a global, government-backed mass vaccination campaign that, in many countries, was accompanied by mandates and unprecedented restrictions on individual freedoms.

What follows is a concise overview of key insights from our structured analysis that, in our view, every health professional, policymaker, and citizen deserves to consider:

The widely cited claim that “millions of lives were saved” by Covid-19 vaccines is based on hypothetical models that rest on a long sequence of assumptions—many of which are either weak, unvalidated, or demonstrably false (see below). As a result, the outputs of these models are of questionable value and cannot be taken as reliable evidence.
A central assumption underlying these models was that Covid-19 vaccines provided strong and durable protection against infection and transmission. Consider the original statement by Dr. Anthony Fauci, then Chief Medical Advisor to the US President: “When you get vaccinated you not only protect your own health… but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community…you become a dead end to the virus” (bold added).⁵ This assumption—serving as the cornerstone of the mass vaccination campaign—turned out to be false. Real-world data quickly revealed that vaccine efficacy against infection was fragile and short-lived, and efficacy against transmission was never directly studied.
Strikingly, despite the collapse of this original narrative (point 2), the vaccination campaign continued under a revised justification: that the vaccines provide lasting protection against severe illness and death, even after their short-term effect against infection diminishes. It is important to recognize that this updated claim hinges on a conceptual separation between these two types of efficacy—a separation that, as we demonstrate repeatedly in our preprint article, was never empirically validated.
In fact, available data suggest that protection against infection and protection against severe illness or death are closely linked, following a similar trajectory of waning over time. The difference lies primarily in timing, with a natural delay between initial infection and the development of severe outcomes.
To directly assess the validity of this supposed distinction between protection against infection and protection against severe illness, we examined the conditional probability of severe illness among individuals who became infected across several key studies. The results were clear: the apparent protection against severe outcomes was most likely a byproduct of the short-term protection against infection. None of the influential studies we analyzed demonstrated independent or durable protection against severe illness or death.
Notably, some studies stopped tracking severe outcomes precisely at the point when vaccine protection would be expected to wane—paralleling the well-documented decline in protection against infection and the typical delay between infection and the onset of severe illness or death mentioned above. This pattern raises serious concerns about potential misrepresentation or selective reporting of research findings.
Finally, the pivotal randomized controlled trial that led to the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the Pfizer vaccine showed no meaningful difference between the vaccine and placebo groups in preventing: (1) flu-like symptoms, (2) severe Covid-19, or (3) all-cause mortality. The only significant difference was observed in a non-clinical outcome—laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 infection—and even this result was based on data from no more than 8.24% of participants, collected in a potentially biased manner, as detailed in our preprint.
Notably, no Covid-19-related deaths were recorded in Pfizer’s pivotal trial. This absence raises serious questions about whether the legal and medical criteria for issuing an emergency use authorization were truly met.
Even more importantly, the six-month follow-up trial by Pfizer reported 15 deaths in the vaccine group (n = 21,720), compared to 14 in the placebo group (n = 21,728). Given the large sample size, this lack of mortality benefit should have served as a critical anchor for any hypothetical model or evidence-based discussion regarding the overall benefit of the vaccine.

These findings seriously challenge the notion that Covid-19 vaccines saved millions of lives. Moreover, our in-depth investigation uncovered a broader range of methodological flaws that cast doubt on the overall reliability of the existing evidence base. These include: (a) followup periods that were exceedingly short and inconsistently applied across groups; (b) implausible efficacy signals appearing almost immediately after vaccination—well before full immunization could have occurred biologically; and (c) heavy reliance on observational data vulnerable to Healthy Vaccinee Bias, differential testing rates, and numerous other confounding factors.

Taken together, these methodological and empirical concerns not only undermine the foundation of the “millions saved” narrative, but also raise a deeper question: If the evidence is so limited and flawed, how did this narrative gain such dominance in scientific and public discourse?

The issue is not whether some degree of vaccine efficacy was observed at specific moments (e.g., see the fascinating example in our preprint of the Bar-On et al. study on the second booster), but rather how such fleeting observations came to shape the broader public narrative. Isolated data points were elevated and decontextualized, while critical considerations—such as (a) waning immunity, (b) the lack of demonstrated mortality benefit, (c) vaccine breakthrough infections leading to hospitalization or death, and (d) an increasingly robust body of evidence on adverse effects—were systematically sidelined (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Illustrating a Selective Focus on a Transiently Favorable Outcome While Ignoring Concerning Data

This narrowing of focus — peering through the keyhole of one transient success — has allowed a fragile claim to solidify into a powerful myth, reinforced by institutional authority, social conformity, and the systematic suppression of dissenting voices (including our own experience of censorship, as detailed in our preprint).

We therefore call on the scientific and medical communities to take a step back, widen the lens, and return to a foundational principle of medicine: every intervention, no matter how promising, must undergo continuous, evidence-based evaluation of both its benefits and its potential harms. To the best of our knowledge, such a balanced and rigorous appraisal has yet to be applied to the Covid-19 vaccines.

Based on the evidence reviewed in our preprint, we conclude that the claim that “Covid-19 vaccines saved millions and millions of lives”¹ is not supported by empirical evidence. While these vaccines were widely promoted as safe and effective, accumulating reports of serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis, and neurological symptoms—have been extensively documented across pharmacovigilance systems and in multiple peer-reviewed studies (e.g., ^6-16), many co-authored by the last author of the current article.

Notably, this biologically active intervention was administered repeatedly in the form of boosters, thereby compounding potential risks—often in populations with near-zero risk of Covid-related mortality, such as children. Taken together with the lack of demonstrable long-term efficacy presented in our preprint,⁴ the available evidence suggests that the risk–benefit balance of the Covid-19 vaccines may, in fact, tilt toward the negative end of this fundamental medical equation.^{17, 18}

References

1. Homeland Security. The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines.

2. Ophir Y, Shir-Raz Y, Zakov S, McCullough PA. The Efficacy of COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters against Severe Illness and Deaths: Scientific Fact or Wishful Myth?. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. 2023;28(1). doi: https://www.jpands.org/vol28no1/ophir.pdf.

3. Ophir Y. The Final Brick in the Vaccine Efficacy Narrative ⋆ Brownstone Institute. 2023.

4. Ophir Y, Shir-Raz Y, Zakov S, McCullough PA. A Step-by-Step Evaluation of the Claim That COVID-19 Vaccines Saved Millions of Lives. Researchgate (preprint). 2025. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12897.42085.

5. NEWS C. Transcript: Dr. Anthony Fauci on “Face the Nation,” May 16, 2021. 2021.

6. Rose J. A Report on the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) of the COVID-1 9 Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) Biologicals. Science, Public Health Policy, and The Law. 2021;2:59–80.

7. Fraiman J, Erviti J, Jones M, et al. Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults. Vaccine. 2022;40(40):5798–5805. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.036.

8. Shir-Raz Y. Breaking: Leaked Video Reveals Serious Side-Effects Related to the Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Covered Up by the Israeli MOH. 2022.

9. Witberg G, Barda N, Hoss S, et al. Myocarditis after Covid-19 Vaccination in a Large Health Care Organization. N Engl J Med. 2021;385(23):2132–2139. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2110737.

10. Chua GT, Kwan MYW, Chui CSL, et al. Epidemiology of Acute Myocarditis/Pericarditis in Hong Kong Adolescents Following Comirnaty Vaccination. Clinical Infectious Diseases. 2021:ciab989. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciab989.

11. Hulscher N, Alexander PE, Amerling R, et al. A Systematic REVIEW of Autopsy findings in deaths after covid-19 vaccination. Forensic Sci Int. 2024:112115. doi: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2024.112115.

12. Oster ME, Shay DK, Su JR, et al. Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021. JAMA. 2022;327(4):331–340. doi: 10.1001/jama.2021.24110.

13. Takada K, Taguchi K, Samura M, et al. SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis: An analysis of the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report database. Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy. 2024.

14. McCullough P, Rogers C, Cosgrove K, et al. Association between COVID-19 Vaccination and Neuropsychiatric Conditions. 2025.

15. McCullough PA, Hulscher N. Risk stratification for future cardiac arrest after COVID-19 vaccination. World J Cardiol. 2025;17(2):103909. doi: 10.4330/wjc.v17.i2.103909.

16. Hulscher N, Hodkinson R, Makis W, McCullough PA. Autopsy findings in cases of fatal COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis. ESC Heart Failure. 2024;n/a. doi: 10.1002/ehf2.14680.

17. Mead MN, Seneff S, Wolfinger R, et al. COVID-19 Modified mRNA “Vaccines”: Lessons Learned from Clinical Trials, Mass Vaccination, and the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Part 1. International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research. 2024;3(2):1112–1178. doi: 10.56098/fdrasy50.

18. Mead MN, Seneff S, Rose J, Wolfinger R, Hulscher N, McCullough PA. COVID-19 Modified mRNA “Vaccines”: Lessons Learned from Clinical Trials, Mass Vaccination, and the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Part 2. International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research. 2024;3(2):1275–1344. doi: 10.56098/w66wjg87.

This article was co-authored by Yaffa Shir-Raz, Shay Zakov, and Peter A. McCullough.

Dr. Yaakov Ophir is Head of the Mental Health Innovation and Ethics Lab at Ariel University and a member of the Steering Committee for the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) at the University of Cambridge. His research explores digital-age psychopathology, AI and VR screening and interventions, and critical psychiatry. His recent book, ADHD Is Not an Illness and Ritalin Is Not a Cure, challenges the dominant biomedical paradigm in psychiatry. As part of his broader commitment to responsible innovation and scientific integrity, Dr. Ophir critically assesses scientific studies related to mental health and medical practice, with particular attention to ethical concerns and the influence of industrial interests. He is also a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in child and family therapy.

June 21, 2025 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment

COVID Pandemic Interventions, Not the Virus, Drove Spikes in Excess Mortality

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 17, 2025

Deaths during the first “peak” of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from medical and government interventions, not a circulating respiratory virus, Canadian researchers concluded in a paper posted Monday on Preprints.org.

Those interventions resulted in the deaths of primarily elderly and poor people, researchers with the Canadian nonprofit Correlation: Research in the Public Interest said.

Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., and Christian Linard, Ph.D., authors of groundbreaking all-cause mortality research since early in the pandemic, analyzed all-cause mortality data in several locations in the northern hemisphere during the “first” and “summer” pandemic peaks in March-May and June-September 2020.

In their 356-page paper, they analyzed data from much of Europe and key sites in the U.S. at different geographical scales — by states and counties in the U.S., and “national units of territorial statistics” in Europe, which are roughly similar to U.S. counties.

They compared the actual all-cause mortality rates in these places to the predicted all-cause mortality for a contagious pandemic virus as measured by standard epidemiological models. They found that even accounting for flaws in those models, the results were very different than what would have been expected.

They said their findings show “strong evidence” that the patterns of excess mortality can’t be explained by a “novel and virulent virus (SARS-CoV-2) that spreads by person-to-person contact,” as most analysts of early excess mortality spikes have assumed.

They wrote:

“This means that the paradigm that a spreading viral respiratory disease caused the excess mortality during Covid is false. The said paradigm is disproved by empirical observations of high-resolution geotemporal variations of age and frailty adjusted excess mortality … on two continents in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Instead, the excess mortality appears to be entirely iatrogenic and induced by the imposed so-called pandemic response.”

The authors hypothesized that a complex series of lockdown-related policies, which caused major biological stress, dangerous medical treatments applied in a state of panic, and the failure to properly treat pneumonia and respiratory disease drove excess mortality during the early all-cause mortality peaks during the pandemic, as they have also detailed in other research papers.

Adjacent jurisdictions should have had similar excess death rates — but they didn’t

Almost immediately after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, there were large peaks of excess mortality in some jurisdictions and not in others — even when the jurisdictions were adjacent to each other, had high population densities and significant numbers of people moving between them daily.

The researchers found “a high degree of geographic heterogeneity” in excess mortality during the first peak in early 2020, contrary to the standard epidemiological models’ prediction that similar adjacent places would have similar outcomes.

For example, they analyzed Germany’s western border with the Netherlands, France and Belgium. The regions have very similar population density, population profiles and a high degree of traffic moving between them, leading to the assumption that those regions would have similar excess mortality outcomes.

Yet, Germany had almost no excess mortality in the western border regions, while France, Belgium and the Netherlands had high excess mortality.

“The fact that there’s that big difference in mortality on either side of the border suggests that there’s something that is a matter of a policy or a measure that’s responsible for that big difference,” lead author Hickey told The Defender. “The virus would not stop at the border, because people are traveling across. And it’s very contagious, supposedly.”

The researchers also compared cities with similar population profiles, healthcare systems and large airports within countries — such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the U.S. and Milan and Rome in Italy — and found stark differences in excess mortality.

Standard large-scale spatial epidemiological models that account for people traveling to airport hubs around the world and spreading the virus would have predicted a more even spread of the virus in these different locations, Hickey said. That would be true even when accounting for the travel restrictions enacted almost immediately at the start of the pandemic.

However, the mortality data showed that some locations, like New York, had high spikes in excess mortality and others, like San Francisco, did not.

Timing of excess mortality peaks didn’t match expectations

The researchers also found that within countries, the peaks in excess mortality were very different — higher in some places and lower in others — but the peaks occurred at the same time. These findings also contradict the expectations for standard mortality models for COVID-19.

For example, their analysis of several jurisdictions in Italy found a wide variation in the rate of excess death — a 7-fold difference between northwest Italy and central Italy — even though the peaks in excess mortality occurred at the same time throughout the country. This trend was similar for all European countries that had a high excess mortality peak.

That means that instead of the virus spreading out from major urban centers with large airports to rural areas over time, as epidemiological models would predict, urban and rural centers experienced their peaks simultaneously.

Hickey said there are flaws in typical models, which don’t account for a lot of diversity in populations. However, if the models were adjusted to account for all of the regional and population differences found in the real world, the outcome would be more heterogeneity from one place to another. Instead, there was a high degree of synchronicity in the all-cause mortality peaks.

Higher mortality associated with higher poverty rates

The researchers also found major disparities between wealthy places and adjacent poor places, through their analysis of “inter-county disparity.” They examined socioeconomic vulnerability metrics, which include things like per capita income.

One of the greatest disparities was between Manhattan and the Bronx, which border each other. Places with higher poverty and greater numbers of non-white residents, like the Bronx, had much higher mortality than neighboring Manhattan. They found similar disparities in different boroughs of London.

“Exceptionally large F-peaks [first-peak period excess mortality] occurred in areas with large publicly-funded hospitals serving poor or socioeconomically frail communities, in regions where poor neighbourhoods are situated in proximity to wealthy neighbourhoods, such as the case of The Bronx in New York City, and the two of boroughs of Brent and Westminster in London, UK,” they wrote.

Traditional epidemiological models of viral spread predict that people who live in more crowded living conditions when a contagious virus is spreading have higher rates of excess death. However, the excess death data showed a high level of variability. In some places, people in crowded living conditions had high excess mortality and in others, they had low excess mortality.

The researchers also analyzed death by institutional location, comparing hospitals, nursing homes and homes. They found that in places with high excess mortality, a disproportionate number of deaths happened in hospitals. And in places with low excess mortality, a higher share of deaths than normal were happening at home.

Given that the prevailing viral spread paradigm failed to account for the distribution of excess mortality generally, they argue that the higher number of deaths in hospitals in places with higher excess mortality supports the hypothesis that medical interventions were driving the numbers higher.

For example, Hickey said, in the “frenzy of the first months of COVID,” measures like mechanical ventilation were being applied in untested ways. They were used frequently, and sometimes two people were put on the same ventilator. “Anesthesia machines,” which carry greater risks than regular mechanical ventilators, were used.

Hickey said they also argue that the biological stress of pandemic policies that locked people down, isolated them, imposed testing and other measures imposed major stress on large populations.

That stress reduced immune system efficacy and made people more susceptible to developing pneumonia, which then went untreated. This was a major driver of excess mortality in the first peak period.

June 21, 2025 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 | Leave a comment

MenQuadfi Approval and the Pyramid Scheme of Vaccine Safety

This is how the game is played

Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri | June 15, 2025

Recently, FDA shamefully approved Sanofi’s MenQuadfi (a meningococcal vaccine) to be injected into infants 6 weeks to 2 years old based on a trial that compared it to Menveo (another meningococcal vaccine). In the trial, 5.3% of infants receiving MenQuadfi and 3.6% of infants receiving Menveo had a serious adverse reaction (which means something very serious, see the FDA definition). But because these rates were “similar,” this product was deemed “safe” by FDA—because it assumes Menveo is also “safe.”

But Menveo was licensed based on a trial in which Menactra (among other vaccines) was used as a control; and Menactra was licensed based on a trial in which Menomune was used as a control; and Menomune was not licensed based on a proper placebo-controlled trial either. In fact—and this is mind-twisting—the package insert for Menomune lists the clinical trial for Menactra (in which Menomune itself was used as the control) as the basis for its safety. I couldn’t even dream of making this stuff up.

This provides a good example of the vaccine safety pyramid scheme: Menomune was licensed without a proper placebo-controlled trial and was then used as the control to license Menactra; Menactra is then used as the control to license Menveo; and then Menveo is used as the control to license MenQuadfi. And then we get a trial with 5.3% and 3.6% of infants suffering serious adverse reactions and FDA grants licensure.

What makes this even more troubling is that because FDA officials must know these numbers are highly concerning, they have Sanofi conduct a case-by-case review of each serious adverse event. If FDA were confident the control was safe, it would just rely on a statistical comparison between the vaccine being evaluated and the control. But since FDA officials must know Menveo’s safety is unknown (because it was licensed in a trial with a defective control), they ask Sanofi (the company seeking to get approval and profit from this product) to explain away each serious adverse event. And the Sanofi-paid researchers do exactly that in their write-ups to FDA about each serious adverse event.

And when FDA gets these write-ups explaining away each serious adverse event as “unrelated” to MenQuadfi, what does FDA do? The FDA officials reviewing them dutifully agree. What else would they do? Admit that Menveo, used as the control, and which they licensed based on nonsense data, has been harming children? That it is causing 3.6% of children—or even a fraction of that—to have a serious adverse event? If FDA officials do that, the house of cards would start to collapse. It would become clear Menveo wasn’t properly licensed (which it wasn’t), and that Menactra wasn’t properly licensed (which it wasn’t), and the same for Menomune.

FDA’s conflict and bias are dangerous. Letting Sanofi decide if its own product caused harm is beyond dangerous. This entire pyramid scheme, without a valid baseline of safety permitting a statistical comparison, requires injecting a new layer of biased assumptions with each additional licensure.

At this point, the safety of these products is based on dogma and assumptions. FDA has its reputation and any remaining trust to lose—and pharma its billions in profits—if they actually evaluated these products using a true safety comparator. It would reveal the true safety profile of these products (which the reliable data shows will likely be terrifying). Of course, the children whose injuries could be averted by conducting actual safety trials would benefit, but they are not really part of the equation.

References:

MenQuadfi Package Insert

Menveo Package Insert

Menactra Package Insert

Menomune Package Insert

Serious Adverse Event FDA Definition

June 21, 2025 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | FDA, United States | Leave a comment

Public Ridicule Hyped Summer Heat Headlines… Meteorologists Losing Credibility

Sensationalist weathermen in Germany losing credibility, get mocked and ridiculed.

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | June 18, 2025

Meteorologists are discovering that if they want to get attention from the media and more clicks and and likes (short term), then all they have to do is announce fictional heatwaves that weather models routinely hallucinate 10-14 days out. “Temperatures could soar to 40°C!”

German online Weltwoche reports on this phenomenon with a recent article titled: “The “heatwave” to be followed by the “red hot wave”: the climate alarmists are taking themselves to the point of absurdity and losing all credibility.”

In an attempt to sensationalize hot summer weather to convey climate urgency and panic, some German meteorologists have been bombarding their viewers with alarming headlines, like: “This summer threatens to shatter all weather records!”

These climate alarmists have been fixated on regular weather extremes and using dramatic imagery of storms, droughts, and collapsing Swiss mountains to sway public opinion – while totally ignoring the lack of statistical evidence for an increase in such phenomena.

Weltwoche, reports, however, that the increasingly shrill weather rhetoric is backfiring, leading to greater mistrust among a growing number of skeptics who use social media platforms like X to mock and ridicule the sensationalized claims.

Thanks to social media, Weltwoche concludes that the era of media monopolies on truth is over: “But the shriller the battle cries of the climate alarmists, the less credible they become.”

June 21, 2025 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Germany | Leave a comment

Legacy media has a meltdown after RFK Jr fires the CDC’s vaccine panel

By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | June 10, 2025

Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired every single member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—the influential group of experts that decides which vaccines are added to the childhood schedule.

Today, he set fire to the media’s hysterical reaction.

Within 24 hours, legacy outlets and public health institutions lost their collective minds. Former CDC directors, industry-funded doctors, and conflicted public health groups lined up to denounce Kennedy’s move as reckless, anti-scientific, even deadly.

“This is a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe,” said former CDC director Dr Tom Frieden.

“Unilaterally removing the entire panel of experts is reckless,” said paediatrician Dr Tina Tan to The New York Times.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said it was “deeply troubled and alarmed.” It claimed the move would “stoke distrust in lifesaving vaccines”—this from the same organisation that has spent decades pushing the childhood vaccine schedule while taking money from the very companies that profit from it.

Others framed it as a political purge, a blow to science, or a “coup” that would bring back measles and polio.

But within hours, Kennedy hit back—and this time, he wasn’t the outsider being easily dismissed. He was the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he came armed with evidence, receipts, and a brutal takedown of the media’s favourite falsehoods.

In a searing post on X, Kennedy explained the decision.

He said the clean sweep was necessary because ACIP had demonstrated its “stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children.”

And despite the media’s insistence otherwise, Kennedy argued that no routine injected childhood vaccine on the CDC’s schedule had ever been approved based on a placebo-controlled trial using an inert substance.

CNN had tried to prove him wrong last week—claiming it had found “257 placebo-controlled studies” of vaccines on the schedule.

Kennedy dismantled it in forensic detail.

“CNN is wrong,” he wrote. “No routine injected vaccine on CDC’s schedule was licensed for children based on a placebo-controlled trial. That is not conjecture. It is a fact based on FDA’s clinical trial data.”

Then came the body blows.

He pointed out that most of the 257 studies used active substances like aluminium, antibiotics, or other vaccines—not inert placebos.

He linked directly to FDA definitions of “placebo” and to official clinical trial records. Of the few studies that may have used saline controls, none were relied on by the FDA to license a single routine vaccine for American children.

Some studied products that were never approved in the US. Some occurred after licensure. Others involved discontinued vaccines. “CNN’s list ironically proves the lack of adequate safety trials,” Kennedy wrote in a stinging rebuke.

The post was devastating.

It was a clinical takedown of an industry riddled with deception—and it landed—because this time, Kennedy wasn’t being filtered through a hostile press.

He was speaking directly to the public, as a government official, with all the links to back it up. And the media couldn’t handle it.

Predictably, the media rolled out the same tired “experts” to recycle the same tired script—Paul Offit quotes, panic about “undermining trust,” warnings that children would die.

But Kennedy turned the whole thing inside out.

“We’ve gone from three routine injections by age one in 1986 to 25 in 2025,” he wrote. “And not one of them was licensed using a placebo-controlled trial.”

He said it plainly for the cameras: “That is just malpractice. So the people who are in charge of that are now gone.”

For years, the press had written Kennedy off as an anti-vaxxer and moved on. Now, they’ve thrown everything at him—and he threw it right back. Only now, he has the authority, data, and reach.

Kennedy told his followers he’d be announcing replacements in the coming days—no “ideological anti-vaxxers” just “highly credentialed physicians and scientists” committed to evidence, objectivity, and common sense.

Legacy media may still control the headlines, but they can no longer suppress the debate.

And perhaps that’s what really has them rattled.

They’re not defending science. They’re defending a regime of experts who signed off on decades of vaccine approvals without ever insisting on rigorous, inert-placebo safety trials.

When Kennedy calls them out, their only defence is to scream “danger!”—and hope no one checks the fine print.

Yesterday, he fired the gatekeepers. Today, he exposed the game.

June 11, 2025 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | ACIP, CDC, CNN, New York Times, United States | Leave a comment

US makes sweeping changes to key vaccine group

RT | June 10, 2025

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has dismissed all the members of a key advisory panel that has helped shape national vaccination policy for decades. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Monday that the move was necessary to reestablish public trust and address longstanding concerns over conflicts of interest.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was created within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the mid-1960s. In an op-ed published on Monday in the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy claimed that the panel has “a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science.”

The secretary cited reports from a House committee in 2000 and the HHS inspector general in 2009 that detailed financial connections between ACIP members and pharmaceutical companies. He said his decision to replace all 17 current members was driven by the need for a “clean slate.”

“The problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt. Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it,” Kennedy wrote. “The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.”

ACIP members are appointed to four-year terms, and eight of the most recent appointments were made in the final days of the administration of Joe Biden.

”It was very intentional,” a former senior HHS official told STAT News. “It was our goal to fill every vacancy on every [federal advisory committee] the department has, with particular focus on ones like ACIP where maintenance of our scientific expertise was critical.”

Mandy Cohen, who served as the CDC director under Biden, told NBC News the move “spreads confusion and casts doubt on transparent public health processes that protect Americans.” Richard Besser, who was acting CDC director under Barack Obama, said it “should erase any remaining doubt that he intends to impose his personal anti-vaccine agenda on the American people.”

Kennedy has long criticized aspects of US vaccine programs, arguing they are too closely aligned with industry interests and fail to prioritize public health. His detractors frequently label him an “anti-vaxxer.”

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy pledged that his decisions would be science-driven. In his WSJ piece, he warned against attributing the American public’s “crisis of trust” solely to “misinformation or anti-science attitudes.”

June 10, 2025 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | ACIP, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

APPROVE NOW, STUDY LATER: IS THIS SAFE?

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | June 5, 2025

As alarming new data reveals a spike in sudden heart attacks and strokes, the FDA has greenlit Moderna’s latest mRNA COVID shot—no placebo trials, no independent long-term safety data, and post-market studies delayed until 2029 and 2034. Once again, speed trumps caution. Is safety giving way to speed again, or are post-marketing placebo trials a step in the right direction?

June 9, 2025 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Leave a comment

FDA branded ‘shameful’ over infant meningococcal vaccine approval

By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | June 8, 2025

“It’s shameful,” said attorney Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad LLP, criticising the FDA’s decision to expand use of the meningococcal vaccine MenQuadfi to infants as young as six weeks.

Previously licensed for children over two, the vaccine is now approved for babies aged 6 weeks to 23 months, based on trials in which infants received up to four doses.

Siri, who has represented families affected by vaccine injury, says the move reflects a broader pattern of weak oversight—where flawed trial designs and circular assumptions are used to justify approvals despite serious safety concerns.

Serious adverse events in infants

According to the FDA’s own summary, 5.3% of infants who received MenQuadfi in clinical trials experienced at least one serious adverse event (SAE)—defined as any medical occurrence resulting in death, hospitalisation or disability.

That figure reflects SAEs reported from the first dose through six months after the final dose.

That’s roughly one in every 20 children.

In the comparator group, 3.6% of infants who received Menveo also experienced a serious adverse event during the same period.

Instead of raising concern, the FDA took comfort in the similarity.

The agency concluded that because the rates of serious reactions were “comparable,” the expanded use of the vaccine in infants could be considered safe.

But that logic, Siri argues, is dangerously circular. “Because these rates were ‘similar,’ this product was deemed ‘safe’ by FDA because it assumes Menveo is ‘safe.’”

In the end, Sanofi, the company selling MenQuadfi, chalked up only two cases as possibly related to vaccine—both febrile seizures after the 4^th dose, given in combination with MMR, varicella, and PCV13 at 12 months of age.

A placebo problem

The issue, Siri says, lies in the chain of assumptions.

Menveo wasn’t tested against a true saline placebo. It was compared to Menactra—another meningococcal vaccine. Menactra, in turn, was tested against Menomune.

But Menomune—now discontinued—was never tested against a placebo either.

The final twist?

In a bizarre loop of regulatory logic, the package insert for Menomune cites the clinical trial for Menactra—where Menomune was the comparator—as part of its own safety justification.

“I couldn’t even dream of making this stuff up,” Siri said.

What emerges is a kind of regulatory ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail—where each new product is built on the presumed safety of the last, and none are ever measured against a neutral baseline.

The vaccine safety pyramid

“This provides a good example of the vaccine safety pyramid scheme,” said Siri.

“Menomune was licensed without a proper placebo-controlled trial and was then used as the control to license Menactra; Menactra is then used as the control to license Menveo; and then Menveo is used as the control to license MenQuadfi,” he added.

Each step is built on the presumed safety of the one before it—but without any solid foundation. No inert comparator. Just a chain of assumptions.

“Hence, we get a trial with 5.3% and 3.6% of infants suffering serious adverse reactions and no one bats an eye—they grant licensure,” Siri said.

How did the FDA allow this?

Under current FDA guidelines, vaccine manufacturers are not required to use a placebo—an inert substance such as a saline injection—in pre-licensure trials. Instead, “active comparators” such as other vaccines are commonly used.

This practice speeds up approval, especially when companies argue the control group must be “protected” from the disease being targeted.

But critics say it undermines transparency and obscures harms.

If both the test vaccine and the comparator cause adverse events, the trial may appear to show no safety signal—even if the absolute rate of harm is high.

In this case, the FDA accepted the MenQuadfi trial design without requiring a true placebo group—despite the high rate of reported serious events.

Who pays the price?

Since MenQuadfi is already on the CDC schedule for older children, the pharma companies profiting from this product already have liability protection under U.S. vaccine injury laws.

“FDA and pharma have nothing to lose here,” Siri said.

“We, as taxpayers, will pay for all of the harms suffered and, worst of all, the children who are injected and harmed and their families will really pay for the harms,” he added.

It’s not the first time critics have accused the FDA of playing fast and loose with vaccine safety data, especially in the wake of Covid-19.

But this case, Siri argues, is a textbook example of how safety assessments are gamed when it comes to childhood vaccine.

Restoring integrity in vaccine testing

At the heart of Siri’s warning is a plea for scientific integrity.

Without true placebo-controlled trials, he argues, there’s no meaningful way to detect harms—just one untested product being measured against another.

“This isn’t science. It’s a shell game,” he said.

As MenQuadfi rolls out to younger babies, public health officials will no doubt emphasise its potential to prevent a rare but deadly disease.

But advocates like Siri want parents and legislators to understand what’s beneath the product label—not just a vaccine, but a regulatory system that is collapsing under the weight of its own shortcuts.

June 8, 2025 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | FDA, United States | Leave a comment

NIH Shuts Down Research Center Founded by Fauci, as DOJ Scrutinizes Key Researchers

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 5, 2025

Officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan to shut down a research center established by Dr. Anthony Fauci that issued grants to embattled researchers who promoted the “zoonotic origin” theory that COVID-19 emerged from wildlife, The Disinformation Chronicle reported today.

Fauci established the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) in 2020 to conduct “investigations into how and where viruses and other pathogens emerge from wildlife and spill over to cause disease in people.”

According to The Disinformation Chronicle, when CREID launched, it issued 11 grants worth $17 million, with an additional $82 million in expected funding over five years. It’s unclear how much of the money has already been spent.

Two CREID grantees have been the focus of intense scrutiny: Peter Daszak, Ph.D., of the EcoHealth Alliance and Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., of Scripps Research Institute. Both played key roles in publicly promoting the theory that SARS-CoV-2, which led to the COVID-19 pandemic, originated in wildlife.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched “initial inquiries” into one of the CREID grants Anderson received. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suspended all government funding for EcoHealth Alliance.

The Disinformation Chronicle quoted an NIH spokesperson, who confirmed the agency has terminated all outstanding CREID grants.

“Strengthening overall health through proactive disease prevention offers a more resilient foundation for responding to future health threats — beyond reliance on vaccines or treatments for yet-unknown pathogens,” the spokesperson said.

Andersen received a CREID grant after co-authoring zoonotic origin paper

In March 2020, Andersen co-authored “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine. The paper — widely known as the “Proximal Origin” paper — concluded that COVID-19 had a zoonotic origin. It became one of that year’s most-cited papers, accessed over 6 million times.

Government officials, including Fauci, and mainstream media outlets later cited the paper as part of efforts to discredit proponents of the theory that COVID-19 originated in and escaped from a lab.

The Trump administration is investigating whether the authors and publisher of “Proximal Origin” allowed Fauci and other key public health officials to influence the paper’s conclusions in exchange for funding — a possible quid pro quo.

According to The Disinformation Chronicle, two months after “Proximal Origin” was published, Andersen received a CREID grant.

In testimony to Congress in July 2023, Andersen said, “There is no connection between the grant and the conclusions we reached about the origin of the pandemic.” Later that month, The Intercept published documents showing that Andersen “knew that was false.”

Andersen and other virologists were initially skeptical about dismissing the lab-leak theory. But emails and documents revealed through a congressional investigation and some media outlets revealed that, under pressure from Fauci and other public health officials, Andersen endorsed the zoonotic theory in “Proximal Origin.”

During a Feb. 1, 2020, email and call between Fauci and several virologists, including Andersen, the participants expressed concern that COVID-19 might have been manipulated instead of originating in nature.

Transcripts revealed by The Nation in July 2023 showed that, in a February 2020 Slack thread, Andersen wrote to other virologists that “the main issue is that accidental release is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory.”

And on April 16, 2020, Andersen sent a Slack message to his “Proximal Origin” co-authors, stating, “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved. We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).”

Andersen may have misled intelligence agencies on COVID’s origins

Andersen privately questioned the true origins of COVID-19. However, in March 2020 — one week after “Proximal Origin” was published — he participated in a U.S. Department of State briefing with other non-government scientists, where he dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

According to The Disinformation Chronicle, the briefing led the State Department to issue a report concluding there was no evidence that COVID-19 was developed in a lab. In 2023, Andersen testified during a sworn congressional deposition that he also briefed the CIA and FBI regarding COVID-19’s origins.

The DOJ is now likely to examine Andersen’s role in misleading U.S. intelligence agencies, The Disinformation Chronicle reported, quoting a State Department official, who said, “I don’t see how this not a criminal misleading and counterintelligence matter. This is way beyond the threshold needed for a grand jury.”

In April, the Trump administration launched a new version of the government’s official COVID-19 website, presenting evidence that COVID-19 emerged due to a leak at the Wuhan lab. The CIA, FBI, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Congress and other intelligence agencies have endorsed this theory.

Daszak has also been under scrutiny for possible improprieties involving his research. According to The Disinformation Chronicle, Daszak was found to have undisclosed ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — including issuing a subaward to a researcher at that laboratory, Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., widely known as the “Bat Lady.”

In issuing its decision to bar Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance from receiving further federal funds, HHS cited the organization’s lack of response “to NIH’s multiple safety-related requests” relating to research performed at the Wuhan lab.

Journalist Paul D. Thacker, a former U.S. Senate investigator and publisher of The Disinformation Chronicle, said that congressional investigations involving Andersen and others have been problematic.

“The congressional investigations into these matters were not well managed. A lot of people are still shocked at how little got done,” Thacker said.

Last month, the NIH introduced a new policy prohibiting NIH grantees from outsourcing parts of their research to foreign entities through subawards.

Facing investigation, is Andersen looking to flee the U.S.?

Andersen, a Danish citizen, is now looking to leave the U.S. “as the noose continues to tighten,” The Disinformation Chronicle reported. He is said to be considering a position at the University of Oslo in Norway.

Sigrid Bratlie, a molecular biologist and senior adviser at Norway’s Langsikt Policy Centre, told The Disinformation Chronicle that “there is an ongoing effort from a group of scientists at the University of Oslo to recruit Andersen, and that this might be finalized in the near future.”

In October 2024, Andersen delivered a lecture at the University of Oslo on the “facts and the fiction” of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that critiques of his research were political attacks spread by conspiracy theorists.

The Norwegian Society for Immunology, which sponsored the lecture, later issued an apology. According to The Disinformation Chronicle, the apology stated, “In retrospect, unfortunately, it seems the purpose of his lecture was just as much about stopping the free debate in Norway on this topic.”

Thacker said that Andersen’s possible move to Norway is part of a broader trend where many scientists are expressing public dissent at the Trump administration’s policies.

“The majority of scientists I see complaining are all entrenched in liberal politics. Pretty much every one of them has a large account on [social media platform] Bluesky where allied reporters hang out to find quotes,” Thacker said.

June 8, 2025 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, NIH, United States | Leave a comment

Science Under Attack

The myths and realities

By John Ridgway | Cimate Scepticism | June 3, 2025

During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, Peter J. Hotez, professor of paediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote a Scientific American opinion piece that spoke of an emerging threat that he believed should concern us all:

Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats.

He paints a picture of a political right-wing engaging in a disinformation campaign, and of an interference with an otherwise scientifically sound programme – actions that he maintained would result in many dying unnecessarily:

Despite my best efforts to sound the alarm and call it out, the antiscience disinformation created mass havoc in the red states. During the summer of 2020, COVID-19 accelerated in states of the South as governors prematurely lifted restrictions to create a second and unnecessary wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Given his strong views, and the bellicose manner in which he chose to express them, it is not surprising that Hotez recently teamed up with Professor Michael Mann to write of the triple threat of global warming, a “cadence of pandemic threats” and, most importantly:

… a well-organized, financed, politically motivated, and steadily globalizing campaign of disinformation and attacks against mainstream science that makes it extremely difficult to mount an effective global response to the climate and pandemic threats.

Of course, Hotez and Mann are not alone in promoting this narrative of a burgeoning threat to humanity. For example, in a recent PNAS article, Phillipp-Muller et al wrote:

From vaccination refusal to climate change denial, antiscience views are threatening humanity.

So confident are the authors in the reality of the phenomenon that they dedicate the whole paper to analysing causes and suggesting countermeasures:

Building on various emerging data and models that have explored the psychology of being antiscience, we specify four core bases of key principles driving antiscience attitudes. These principles are grounded in decades of research on attitudes, persuasion, social influence, social identity, and information processing. They apply across diverse domains of antiscience phenomena… Politics triggers or amplifies many principles across all four bases, making it a particularly potent force in antiscience attitudes.

But what exactly is antiscience? Is it well-organized? Does it primarily emanate from the right-wing? And is it an attitude that represents an existential threat to humanity on a par with nuclear war?

The authors of the PNAS paper seem to have no doubts regarding the basis for antiscience — it’s simply a case of pathological psychology:

Distinct clusters of basic mental processes can explain when and why people ignore, trivialize, deny, reject, or even hate scientific information—a variety of responses that might collectively be labeled as “being antiscience”.

Once one starts out with such a premise, it becomes remarkably easy to formulate ‘frameworks’ and ‘models’ to give the whole thing a scientific veneer. And since science is upheld as the epitome of the rational venture, any resistance to scientific findings can be readily dismissed as a retreat from reason.

Indeed, in their book, Science and the Retreat from Reason, John Gillot and Manjit Kumar present a thoughtful treatise explaining why, despite the obvious benefits of the scientific method and its resulting successes, society has nevertheless grown wary of the technocratic future that it offers. Yet nowhere within its 250 pages does the book use the term ‘antiscience’, or speak of it as a phenomenon resulting from politically inspired disinformation. Furthermore, perhaps because it was written back in 1995, it doesn’t see the retreat from reason as an existential threat requiring ‘new infrastructures’ to ‘mount a counteroffensive’. Instead, a lack of faith in science is seen as stemming from a post-war disillusionment. Basically, science had gained the reputation of being the handmaiden of a belligerent military, and it became very difficult to maintain high levels of trust in a sector of society that delivered the threat of atomic annihilation. Furthermore, developments such as genetically modified food and the various attempts to control and exploit the environment did little to endear those who buy in to the idea of a purity of nature. As such, it was the liberal left-wing that led the movement against science in its practical realities. The idea that antiscientific attitudes are the reserve of the right wing is a relatively modern invention.

Of course, none of this should be used as a reason to question the potency and integrity of the scientific method. However, I sincerely doubt that this is why anyone would come to ‘ignore, trivialize, deny, reject, or even hate scientific information’. It isn’t the scientific mind that some people distrust – it is the scientific community. It is the recognition that science is a social enterprise and, as such, is not immune to the problems that can emerge when humans interact and compete. Seen in this light, antiscience is not a pathology of thinking but the label invented by those who are comfortable with such issues in order to stigmatize those who are not.

It is easy to see where the comfortable position would come from. Scientists do know about phenomena such as groupthink. They are well aware that the structuring of academia is such that scientific enquiry is marshalled both by sources of funding and by influential figureheads (not to mention a growing tendency for prosocial censorship). And yet they can look around them and see a broadly uncorrupted society of individuals who are personally motivated only by the desire to understand how the world works and how best to further the interests of humanity. They are ideally placed to understand just how much effort has gone into validating a particular finding, and so must find it highly frustrating to see vociferous and vehement rejection emanating from those who enjoy no such advantage. When the challenge has a political foundation, their disquiet is bound to be all the more profound. They are the scientists and practitioners of the scientific method, so this challenge is, by definition, antiscientific to them. And if you have an ego like Michael Mann’s, combined as it is with a victim complex, you are going to imagine you are surrounded by an orc army.

There are certainly plenty of science communicators on the internet who are only too willing and eager to defend the comfortable position and to cruelly mock the ‘antiscientist’. See, for example, some of the output from Professor David James Farina, aka Professor Dave. As is often the case, he specialises in debunking easy targets such as Flat Earthers and proponents of Intelligent Design, but along with that comes a regrettably condescending and arrogantly dismissive attitude towards anyone who isn’t fully on board with the idea that only credentialed scientists are qualified to criticise other scientists. But this isn’t a debate that is going to be settled by lampooning your local crackpot. The issues are far too nuanced for that.

For example, let us return to the Covid-19 pandemic and reflect upon its use as an example of an explosion of the antiscience movement. There was indeed no shortage of opinion expressed on subjects such as the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the importance of masks, lockdown strategies, mobile phone masts, etc. Some of the advice given wasn’t particularly well thought through and there was no shortage of downright conspiracy and pseudoscience in the air. But throughout it all, politicians were anxious to maintain the mantra that they were only following the science, no matter how many twists and turns that entailed. The reality, however, was that there was never any single science but a plurality of sciences offering different perspectives. As Dr Elisabeth Paul et al point out:

“Anti-science” accusations are common in medicine and public health, sometimes to discredit scientists who hold opposing views. However, there is no such thing as “one science”. Epistemology recognizes that any “science” is sociologically embedded, and therefore contextual and intersubjective.

The paper illustrates the point by tracing the history of claims made on behalf of the various vaccines employed, pointing out many inconsistencies and contradictions in the various narratives as the crisis unfolded. The paper finishes with some very wise words:

Rather than uncritically continuing to perpetuate the “follow the science” vs “anti-science” dichotomy, let us all look in the mirror and reflect what really constitutes science. If nothing else, this involves the curiosity of deliberating the multiple perspectives arising from the different lenses of inquiry. Being open-minded and critical does not immediately equate to being “anti-science”, as some medical and political thought leaders want us to believe.

The message given is that scientists are themselves very often to blame for the lack of trust they encounter within the public, and this is basically due to them adopting an overly dogmatic attitude:

To regain public trust in science, it is high time scientists acknowledge the limitations of their methods and of their results, and to provide decision-makers, populations and healthcare providers with appropriate tools to judge how to best apply particular research results to individuals and communities.

None of this is to accuse scientists of corruption or of engaging in a hoax. They are simply dealing with complexities that have to be honestly portrayed as such. As Dr Paul et al put it:

Here, understanding the dynamics of how knowledge is socially constructed and used is crucial. This is because health interventions, and what is determined to be science, can often be captured by combinations of favoured scientific practice, pathway-dependency, vested interests, politics, louder voices, or, regarding our immediate concern, by ideational hegemonies that prohibit wider dialogic knowledge production.

Very often, by being defensive about this, scientists become their own worst enemies. Too often, sceptics are accused of failing to understand the scientific method, but the reality is that they usually understand it all too well. They are just not that convinced that it is all that relevant when evaluating a scientist’s latest earnest statement.

There is a certain hubris to be detected within those who speak of existential threats from an organised antiscience movement, since it implies that there are those with dark motives who fear the spotlight of scientific truth being shone in their direction. No doubt there is much that is irrational in modern discourse and we would all do well to take whatever benefit there is to be had from listening to the scientific voice (that is why the Trump administration’s DOGE purge is so worrying). However, that is a long way from uncritically accepting all that has been said in the interests of ‘following the science’. I’m sure that those on both sides of the debate would argue that being legitimately open-minded and critical is not being ‘antiscience’. Unfortunately, however, we are still a long way from agreeing upon what constitutes legitimacy, and this is as true for the climate change debate as it is for any.

June 8, 2025 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment

Their babies died suddenly in their sleep. They now face felony charges for not placing infants on their backs

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 6, 2025

Parents of two different babies are being charged with felonies in Pennsylvania after police say their babies died because the parents placed them in unsafe sleeping positions, SpotlightPA reported.

In both cases, police allege that the parents failed to follow guidance, including handouts given to them at doctor’s visits, stating that babies should be put to sleep on their backs.

Gina and David Strause of Lebanon County are accused of putting their 3-month-old infant son, Gavin, to sleep on his stomach and allowing him to sleep with stuffed animals in the crib.

They are charged with involuntary manslaughter, recklessly endangering another person, and endangering the welfare of children.

Natalee Rasmus of Luzerne County is accused of putting her 1-month-old daughter, Avaya Jade Rasmus-Alberto, to sleep on her stomach on a boppy pillow, often used for nursing. She is charged with third-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of children.

Rasmus was a 17-year-old mother when her daughter died in 2022. Court records show that she continues to be held at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility with bail set at $25,000 pending resolution of her case.

In both cases, autopsies concluded the babies died of accidental death from asphyxiation. Law enforcement argued in both cases that parents should have known that putting the babies to sleep on their stomachs was unsafe, because they had received paperwork at wellness visits informing them of safe sleeping practices.

They pointed to signed acknowledgements in the babies’ medical records that were created as part of a 2010 state law to educate parents about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

The law requires hospitals, birthing centers and medical providers to give parents educational materials from the national Safe to Sleep campaign, and ask them to certify that they received them.

Signing the statement is voluntary. The statement doesn’t indicate that parents can be charged with a criminal offense if they don’t follow the campaign advice.

Advocates from national organizations that educate parents about safe sleep practices found the charges shocking. Nancy Maruyama, the executive director of Sudden Infant Death Services of Illinois told Spotlight PA, “To charge them criminally is a crime, because they have already suffered the worst loss.”

Alison Jacobson, executive director of First Candle, a nonprofit that also educates parents about safe sleep practices, told Pennlive, “There is no law against placing a baby on his or her stomach to sleep. How they can charge this family with involuntary manslaughter is completely baffling to me.”

Researcher Neil Z. Miller, an expert on SIDS and the Safe to Sleep campaign, told The Defender, “Parents of a sleeping baby who dies in the middle of the night should never be charged with murder. That’s just cruel.”

Miller, author of “Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective?” added:

“Should parents be obligated to follow every ‘recommendation’ made by their doctor or the Safe to Sleep campaign? Would we as a society prefer that doctors raise our babies instead of the parents? Have other possible causes of death been considered, such as vaccinations? As a society, we can, and must, do much better.”

Does placing infants on their backs make a difference?

The handouts shared with new Pennsylvania parents are based on the National Institutes of Health “Safe to Sleep” campaign, which institutionalized a program initiated by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 1992 to inform parents to put children to sleep on their backs rather than on their stomachs.

The campaign is based on the premise that babies who sleep on their backs or sides are less likely to die in their sleep. Until that time, it was common for babies to sleep on their stomachs.

The program was launched in the wake of a rising number of SIDS deaths — and growing concern among some parents that the deaths were linked to vaccination.

In a 2021 article in the peer-reviewed journal Toxicology Reports, vaccine researcher Neil Z. Miller provides a history of the SIDS diagnosis, noting that the rise of SIDS coincided with the first mass immunization campaigns.

Between 1992, when the Safe to Sleep program launched, and 2001, SIDS deaths reportedly declined a whopping 55% — a number touted in articles celebrating the program, making it appear that babies sleeping on their stomachs was the cause of SIDS, not vaccines.

However, at the same time deaths from SIDS decreased, the rate of mortality from “suffocation in bed,” “suffocation other,” “unknown and unspecified causes,” and “intent unknown” all increased significantly.

Why? The classification system had changed. SIDS deaths were being reclassified by medical certifiers, usually coroners, as one of the other similar categories, not SIDS.

Research published in the journal Pediatrics, the AAP’s flagship journal, concluded that deaths previously certified as SIDs were simply being certified as other non-SIDS causes, such as suffocation — but the deaths were still essentially SIDS deaths.

That change in classification accounted for more than 90% of the drop in SIDS rates.

The Pediatrics paper showed no decline in overall postneonatal mortality after the Safe to Sleep campaign was launched, despite the program’s — and the AAP’s — claims to the contrary.

Others verified the Pediatrics paper’s findings, and the trend continued, as reported by multiple studies in top journals. Miller reported that, for example, “From 1999 through 2015, the U.S. SIDS rate declined 35.8% while infant deaths due to accidental suffocation increased 183.8%.”

Research shows that almost 80% of SIDS deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) happen within seven days of vaccination.

Theories linking vaccines to SIDS suggest that, in some cases, underdeveloped liver enzyme pathways may make it harder for some infants to process toxic ingredients in vaccines. Others argue that other, multiple, complex factors can make some infants vulnerable to toxic ingredients in vaccines.

Baby Gavin was ‘a dream come true’

On April 30, Gina and David Strause were charged with involuntary manslaughter, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years, and other lesser charges in the death of their son Gavin.

According to the police report, Gina found her son unresponsive, cold and blue in his crib when she woke up to feed him on the morning of May 8, 2024. She immediately called 911 and performed CPR until the police arrived.

The baby was pronounced dead at the hospital. The autopsy report found the cause of death to be “complications of asphyxia.”

Police said they observed loose items in the crib, “such as blankets and stuffed animals.”

Gina said that after feeding her baby at about 11:30 the night before he died, she placed him in his crib on his belly, because he was a “belly sleeper,” and covered him with a blanket. She said that she had received the recommendation that he should sleep on his back, but that he preferred to sleep on his stomach.

In an interview with Pennlive, Gina said that she typically put Gavin to sleep on his back, but he had gotten into the daily habit of rolling onto his belly.

Davis Stause told police that when he left for work at 5:30 am, he checked on Gavin, who was sleeping on his stomach and moving around a little bit. David said he “patted his butt” to put him back to sleep.

The police reported that they also obtained medical records from birth through death that showed that on the discharge paperwork that the parents received information about safe sleep practices, which included putting the baby on its back, having it sleep in the same room as the parents, and keeping the crib clear of bumper pads and stuffed animals.

They said this paperwork explained how parents could create a safe sleeping environment for their babies to reduce the risk of SIDS.

Baby Gavin also went to the pediatrician for well-child visits on Feb. 7 and 14, March 5 and April 9, a month before he died.

Gina told Pennlive that Gavin, who was born when she was almost 40, was “a dream come true.” She had taken 10 weeks of maternity leave and largely worked at home to spend as much time with him as possible. She said that after she gave birth, she was “overwhelmed” and didn’t remember receiving any paperwork or instructions about sleep.

Gina also said that at the hospital, police treated her and her husband with immediate suspicion, separating and questioning them. They were not allowed to see their baby again before he was taken by the coroner’s office.

The parents created a GoFundMe page, where they shared a copy of the police report, to help cover their legal costs, because they said they do not qualify for a public defender.

The Defender attempted to contact the parents to inquire about the baby’s overall health, if he had any medical conditions, was born prematurely or had recently received any vaccines, but the parents did not respond by deadline.

The district attorney’s office also did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Tragic accident with no criminal intent to harm or kill the baby’

The forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy for Natalee Rasmus’ baby listed the cause of death as accidental. According to the report, the baby died from asphyxiation, the Times Leader reported.

Rasmus discovered her baby had died on the morning of Oct. 23, 2022, when she picked her up to get her ready for a doctor’s appointment.

Pennsylvania State Police in December charged Rasmus, alleging that she placed her baby face down to sleep against the recommendations of medical personnel and prenatal classes at Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center.

At a preliminary hearing on the case in February, a state trooper testified that Rasmus ignored safe sleeping practices because she had placed her baby face down in her bassinet with a Boppy pillow, which has a tag warning, “Do not use for sleeping.”

The trooper, Caroline Rayeski, also testified that a search of Rasmus’ cellphone found that she had searched the internet to see whether it was ok to allow newborns to sleep on their stomachs. The trooper also seized literature from the prenatal classes stating it is “recommended” to put newborns to sleep on their backs.

“Yeah, she wouldn’t sleep, she’ll just scream, so she has to be like propped up,” Rasmus told the investigating officer, according to Spotlight PA, which reported the story.

Assistant attorneys argued in a preliminary hearing that she disregarded safe sleeping practices, and a judge forwarded the criminal case to county court.

Rasmus is being represented by public defenders Joseph Yeager and Melissa Ann Sulima, who told the Times Leader the baby’s death was “a tragic accident with no criminal intent to harm or kill the baby.”

Yeager said the prenatal literature referring to newborn sleep positions are “recommendations,” not mandates.

“As the death certificate says, it was an accident. Clearly, there was no malice in this accidental death,” said Yeager, who also said the case should be dismissed.

Rasmus’ most serious charge, third-degree murder, is a homicide that involves killing someone without intent to kill, but with reckless disregard for human life. In Pennsylvania, it can carry a prison sentence of up to 40 years.

Court documents indicate that Rasmus remains in jail with a $25,000 bail, pending the outcome of her case. Neither the district attorney nor Rasmus’ attorneys responded to The Defender’s request for comment.

How common is it to bring criminal charges against parents in infant deaths?

Attorney Daniel Nevins told SpotlightPA said it is extremely rare for parents to be criminally charged when infants die after sleeping on their stomachs, and that the burden of proof on the prosecutors will be high.

In 2014, Virginia resident Candice Christa Semidey, age 25, was charged with murder after she swaddled her baby and put it to sleep on its stomach, The Washington Post reported. In that case, police similarly did not think that she intended for the baby to die.

She pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and child neglect. She was ordered to serve three years of probation to avoid the five-year prison term she was sentenced to.

Some charges have also been brought against parents in deaths of infants sleeping with Boppy pillows. There have also been several cases of parents charged for sleeping in the same bed as their child.

The Defender recently reported on three SIDS deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination. Police are still investigating the parents of 18-month-old twins who died together a week after receiving three vaccines. Authorities have not yet charged the parents, but initially said they were investigating the deaths as homicides.

Blessings Myrical Jean Simmons, age 6 months, received six routine vaccines at a well-baby visit on Jan. 13. The next morning, her parents found the baby dead in her bassinet. The autopsy SIDS as the infant’s cause of death, and no charges were filed against the parents.

June 7, 2025 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | United States | Leave a comment

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By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017

A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.

The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue

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