CHD Funds Lawsuit Against CDC Over Program That Forces Pediatricians to Give COVID Vaccines to Kids on Medicaid
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 28, 2025
A California pediatrician is suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over a federal program that requires doctors in her state who treat children enrolled in Medicaid to give those children all of the vaccines recommended by the CDC.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is supporting the lawsuit, filed April 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Santa Ana Division.
Dr. Samara Cardenas lost her medical practice after the CDC Vaccines for Children Program kicked her out of the program because she wouldn’t give COVID-19 vaccines to healthy kids.
California, like most states, requires pediatricians who treat Medicaid patients to be enrolled in the Vaccines for Children Program. The program, in turn, requires doctors to strictly follow the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule.
In late 2023, the Vaccines for Children Program informed Cardenas that her vaccine orders “were being scrutinized” for not including COVID-19 shots. She was later expelled from the program. As a result, she lost her Medicaid contract, forcing her to close her practice.
The Vaccines for Children Program primarily serves low-income populations by providing free vaccines to uninsured or underinsured children and children who are eligible for or enrolled in Medicaid. Medicaid compensates pediatricians for the costs associated with administering the vaccines.
In her first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Cardenas alleges the CDC’s Vaccines for Children Program violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection and due process provisions by subjecting children enrolled in Medicaid to different treatment standards and compelling doctors to act against their professional judgment.
The lawsuit also questions the safety and necessity of administering COVID-19 vaccines to children, the inclusion of COVID-19 shots on the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule and the impartiality of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes vaccine-related recommendations.
In California, 3 in 7 — or about 5 million children — are enrolled in Medicaid. Nationally, about 40% of all kids — or about 29.2 million children ages 0-17 — are covered by Medicaid.
The suit names CDC Acting Director Susan P. Monarez, as the defendant. Monarez is also President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency.
Cardenas ‘followed her conscience and the science’
Attorney Rick Jaffe, who represents Cardenas, said this is “the first federal lawsuit challenging the CDC’s coercive use of the VFC [Vaccines for Children] program to enforce experimental, emergency-authorized COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of Medicaid access.”
Cardenas “followed her conscience and the science,” Jaffe said. “The VFC framework gave her no choice: vaccinate all kids or lose access.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel, said the lawsuit places policies that disproportionately affect Medicaid recipients under scrutiny, as the Vaccines for Children Program’s policy “essentially mandates these experimental shots for a population historically vulnerable to medical experimentation.”
Cardenas is not seeking compensatory damages. Instead, the lawsuit “seeks to compel the CDC to abandon its misguided and scientifically untethered policy, and stop the unnecessary mass vaccination of the nation’s poorest children.”
“We’re asking the court to say the government can’t make scientific compliance a prerequisite to serving poor patients,” Jaffe said.
Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro said that by requiring physicians to administer all vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule, “medical autonomy is abolished” while “low-income children are left with fewer options and less continuity of care.”
Perro said many doctors are reluctant to oppose these policies. “The threat of speaking out is financial ruin and the potential loss of their ability to practice,” Perro said. “This is coercion and harassment.”
‘The unknowns are enough to never let these products anywhere near children’
In October 2022, ACIP, the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, unanimously recommended adding COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old to the CDC childhood schedule.
The complaint alleges that before making that recommendation, the CDC failed “to compile and analyze vaccine injury data.” It also alleges that ACIP is “compromised by conflicts of interest,” as many of its members “have financial or professional ties to vaccine manufacturers or related interests” — for which the CDC has granted conflict-of-interest waivers.
According to the complaint, by not presenting evidence of the vaccine’s clinical benefit, ACIP violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law banning government agency actions that are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”
The lawsuit cites data from the U.S. government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) showing reports of “hundreds of thousands of adverse events” related to the COVID-19 vaccines, including “serious adverse events and deaths.”
As of March 28, VAERS listed 72,924 reports of adverse events in people 18 and younger, including 6,122 serious adverse events and 201 deaths.
Albert Benavides, a VAERS expert and founder of VAERSAware.com, said the true figures are higher, as many VAERS report summaries indicate the victim’s age even if the report officially lists the age as “unknown.” His analysis of reports shows that “there is more than double the amount of dead children” — 556 in total.
According to the complaint, the CDC failed to “reevaluate or rescind its blanket recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination,” and that ACIP is instead doubling down on its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations.
The complaint cites this month’s ACIP meeting, during which the committee considered revising its blanket COVID-19 vaccine recommendation and switching to risk-based recommendations.
ACIP member Dr. Denise Jamieson opposed the proposal, claiming that the “U.S. has a history of not being able to implement such variable recommendations,” which would confuse the public.
“This is not merely arrogance,” the lawsuit states. “It is government-by-committee at its most dangerous — where unelected public health advisors retain extraordinary power to shape national policy.”
Attorney Ray Flores, senior outside counsel for CHD, questioned why the CDC added COVID-19 vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule even though they were not licensed, but only issued under emergency use authorization (EUA).
“It shocks the conscience,” Flores said. “Physicians in California must be free to exercise their best judgment, especially when it comes to administering experimental injections.”
Releasing the vaccines under EUA meant they were subject to less testing than a licensed vaccine, said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for CHD. “The unknowns are enough to never let these products anywhere near children. There are heavy compromises made when you skip the already insufficient regulatory steps with an emergency use authorization.”
‘Can the government tell a doctor what she must inject in order to treat the poor?’
In 2022, Sweden and Denmark stopped recommending COVID-19 shots for children. In 2023, the U.K. ended its COVID-19 booster program for healthy people ages 50 and younger. That year, the World Health Organization said healthy children and teens should be considered low priority for COVID-19 vaccines.
Several recent studies have also called the practice of vaccinating healthy children for COVID-19 into question.
A December 2024 study published in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society found that children under 5 who received the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines were more likely to become infected with COVID-19 than unvaccinated children with natural immunity.
A May 2024 preprint observational study of 1.7 million U.K. children and teenagers found myopericarditis only in the group that received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and that the vaccine provided only 14 to 15 weeks of protection against infection.
Pfizer documents publicized last year showed that the company quietly studied myocarditis in children a month before its COVID-19 vaccine received an EUA for children ages 5-11.
A peer-reviewed study published earlier this month in Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, found that young adults who received a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine exhibited spike protein production a year or more after vaccination — significantly longer than the spike protein was expected to remain in the body.
Jaffe said the lawsuit “isn’t about vaccine skepticism. It’s about professional freedom, patient-level nuance, and constitutional limits on administrative coercion.”
“Can the government tell a doctor what she must inject in order to treat the poor? That’s what this case asks. And the answer should be ‘no.’”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
The False Claims of WHO’s Pandemic Agreement
By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | April 28, 2025
One way to determine whether a suggestion is worth following is to look at the evidence presented to support it. If the evidence makes sense and smells real, then perhaps the program you are asked to sign up for is worthy of consideration.
However, if the whole scheme is sold on fallacies that a child could poke a stick through, and its chief proponents cannot possibly believe their own rhetoric, then only a fool would go much further. This is obvious – you don’t buy a used car on a salesman’s insistence that there is no other way to get from your kitchen to your bathroom.
Delegates at the coming World Health Assembly in Geneva are faced with such a choice. In this case, the car salesman is the World Health Organization (WHO), an organization still commanding considerable global respect based on a legacy of sane and solid work some decades ago.
It also benefits from a persistent misunderstanding that large international organizations would not intentionally lie (they increasingly do, as noted below). The delegates will be voting on the recently completed text of the Pandemic Agreement, part of a broad effort to extract large profits and salaries from an intrinsic human fear of rare causes of death. Fear and confusion distract human minds from rational behavior.
WHO Likes a Good Story?
The Pandemic Agreement, and the international pandemic agenda it is intended to support, are based on a series of demonstrably false claims:
- There is evidence of a rising risk of severe naturally occurring pandemics due to a rapid (exponential) increase in infectious disease outbreaks
- A massive return on financial investment is expected from diverting large resources to prepare for, prevent, or combat these
- The Covid-19 outbreak was probably of natural origin, and serves as an example of unavoidable health and financial costs we will incur again if we don’t act now.
If any of these were false, then the basis on which the WHO and its backers have argued for the Pandemic Agreement is fundamentally flawed. And all of them can be shown to be false. However, influential people and organizations want pandemics to be the main focus of public health. The WHO supports this because it is paid to.
The private sector invested heavily in vaccines, and a few countries with large vaccine and biotech industries now direct most of the WHO’s work through specified funding. The WHO is obligated to deliver what these interests direct it to.
The WHO was once independent and able to concentrate on health priorities – back when they prioritized the main drivers of sickness and premature mortality and gained the reputation they now trade from. In today’s corporatized public health, population-based approaches have lost value, and the aspirations of the World Economic Forum hold more sway than those dying before sixty.
Success in the health commodities business is about enlarging markets, not reducing the need for intervention. The WHO and its reputation are useful tools to sanitize this. Colonialism, as ever, needs to appear altruistic.
Truth Is Less Compelling Than Fiction
So, to address these fallacies. Infectious disease mortality has steadily declined over the past century despite a minor Covid blip that took us back just a decade. This blip includes the virus, but also the avoidable imposition of poverty, unemployment, reduced healthcare access, and other factors that the WHO had previously warned against, but recently actively promoted.
To get around this reality of decreasing mortality, the WHO uses a hypothetical disease (Disease X), a placeholder for something that has not happened since the Spanish flu in the pre-antibiotic era. The huge Medieval pandemics such as the Black Death were mostly bacterial in origin, as were probably most Spanish flu deaths. With antibiotics, sewers, and better food, we now live longer and don’t expect such mortality events, but the WHO uses this threat regardless.
Thus, the WHO has been reduced to misrepresenting fragile evidence (e.g. ignoring technology developments that can explain rising reports of outbreaks) and opinion pieces by sponsored panels in order to support the narrative of rapidly rising pandemic risk. Even Covid-19 is getting harder to use. If, as appears most likely, it was an inevitable result of laboratory manipulation, then it no longer even serves as an outlier. The WHO’s pandemic agenda is squarely targeted at natural outbreaks; hence the need for “Disease X”.
The WHO (and the World Bank) follow a similar approach in inflating financial Return on Investment (ROI). If you received an email promoting over 300 to 700 times return on a proposed investment, some may be impressed but sensible people would suspect something amiss. But this is what the Group of Twenty (G20) secretariat told its members in 2022 for return on investment on the WHO’s pandemic preparedness proposals.
The WHO and the World Bank provided the graphic below to the same G20 meeting to support such astronomical predictions. It is essentially subterfuge; a fantasy to mislead readers such as politicians who are too busy, and trusting, to dig deeper. As these agencies are intended to serve countries rather than fool them, this sort of behavior, which is recurrent, should call into question their very existence.

Figure 1 from Analysis of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (PPR) architecture, financing needs, gaps and mechanisms, prepared by WHO and the World Bank for the G20, March 2022. Lower chart modified by REPPARE, University of Leeds.
A virus like SARS-CoV-2 (causing Covid-19) that mostly targets the sick elderly with an overall infectious mortality rate of about 0.15% will not cost $9 trillion unless panicked or greedy people choose to close down the world’s supply lines, implement mass unemployment, and then print money for multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages. In contrast, diseases that regularly kill more and much younger people, like tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, cost far more than $22 billion a year in contrast.
A 2021 Lancet article put tuberculosis losses alone at $580 billion/year in 2018. Malaria kills over 600,000 children annually, and HIV/AIDS results in similar numbers of deaths. These deaths of current and future productive workers, leaving orphaned children, cost countries. Once, they were the WHO’s main priority.
Trading on a Fading Reputation
In selling the package, the WHO seems to have abandoned any attempt at meaningful dialogue. They still justify the surveillance-lockdown-mass vaccinate model by the logic-free claim that over 14 million lives were saved by Covid vaccines in 2021 (so we all have to do that again). The WHO recorded a little over 3 million Covid-related deaths in the first (vaccine-free) year of the pandemic. For the 14 million ‘saved’ to be correct, another 17 million would somehow have been due to die in year two, despite most people having gained immunity and many of the most susceptible having already succumbed.
Such childish claims are meant to shock and confuse rather than educate. People are paid to model such numbers to create narratives, and others are paid to spin them on the WHO websites and elsewhere. An industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars depends on such messaging. Scientific integrity cannot survive in an organization paid to be a mouthpiece.
As an alternative, the WHO could advocate for investment in areas that promoted longevity in wealthy countries – sanitation, better diet and living conditions, and access to basic, good medical care.
This was once the WHO’s priority because it not only greatly reduces mortality from rare pandemic events (most Covid deaths were in people already very unwell), but it also reduces mortality from the big endemic killers such as malaria, tuberculosis, common childhood infections, and many chronic non-communicable diseases. It is, unequivocally, the main reason why mortality from major childhood infectious diseases like measles and Whooping cough plummeted long before mass vaccinations were introduced.
If we concentrated on strategies that improve general health and resilience, rather than the financial health of the pandemic industrial complex, we could then confidently decide not to wreck the lives of our children and elderly if a pandemic did arise.
Very few people would be at high risk. We could all expect to live longer and healthier lives. The WHO has elected to leave this path, instill mass and unfounded fear, and support a very different paradigm. While the Pandemic Agreement is not essential to it, it is an important part of diverting further funds to this agenda and cementing this corporatist approach into place.
The United States has done well by stepping out of this mess, but continues to push many of the same fallacies and was instrumental in sowing the mess we now reap. While a few other governments are questioning, it is hard for any politicians to stand with truth when a sponsored media stands squarely elsewhere.
Society is once more enslaving itself, at the behest of an entitled few, facilitated by international agencies that were set up specifically to guard against this. At the coming World Health Assembly, the pandemic fairytale will almost certainly prevail.
The hope is that a well-deserved erosion of trust will eventually catch up with the global health industry and too few countries will ratify this treaty for it ever to come into force. To fix the underlying problem though and derail the pandemic industry train, we will need to rethink the whole approach to cooperation in international health.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
European Union To Use Digital Services Act to Crack Down on Online Vaccine “Misinformation”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 28, 2025
The European Union has begun wielding the controversial censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), to intensify its crackdown on what it labels “misinformation” about immunization efforts. Framing the campaign as necessary for safeguarding democracy, the European Commission pointed to the European Democracy Action Plan and a reinforced Code of Conduct on Disinformation as foundational measures. According to the Commission, these initiatives, aligned with the DSA, create a “strong framework” to regulate content across major online platforms and search engines.
Citing a sharp rise in measles cases across Europe, the Commission has drawn renewed attention to immunization programs. A health spokesperson, speaking to Vaccines Today, warned, “The Commission is very concerned by the spike in reported measles cases in Europe – particularly as the number doubled in 2024 compared to 2023.” The spokesperson noted that the institution is actively cooperating with national health authorities and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) to manage the outbreaks.
The Commission argues that low vaccination rates, described as “sub-optimal” coverage, are enabling the spread of diseases like measles, which can otherwise be prevented through “safe and efficient vaccination.” Efforts are reportedly underway to support national governments in strengthening immunization programs and ensuring a steady vaccine supply across the EU while cracking down on critical online speech.
Public distrust in health authorities and vaccination campaigns is being framed as the root cause of falling immunization rates. EU officials are quick to blame what they term “misinformation” and “disinformation,” suggesting that any narrative diverging from official positions is inherently dangerous.
The Commission emphasized, “Protecting Europe from the harmful effects of disinformation, information manipulation, and interference is a high priority for the Commission,” making clear its commitment to aggressively policing speech under the guise of public health.
Meanwhile, the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic and intelligence apparatus, has ramped up its monitoring and analysis of information flows. Working hand-in-hand with member states and international organizations, it now targets so-called disinformation across an expanding array of policy areas, raising serious concerns about political overreach.
Alongside its censorship push, the Commission continues to roll out a series of public relations campaigns intended to shepherd citizens toward preferred viewpoints. Initiatives like United in Protection promote vaccination using “reliable, evidence-based information,” though what qualifies as “reliable” is determined solely by authorities. The EU has also created the European Vaccination Information Portal and collaborated with bodies such as the ECDC and European Medicines Agency (EMA) to saturate public discourse with officially approved messages.
Vaccination advocacy has been woven deeply into EU policy frameworks. Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and the EU4Health Program are now tied to vaccine promotion, with projects like Overcoming Obstacles to Vaccination aiming to remove barriers to vaccine access, all while dismissing legitimate public hesitations as obstacles to be overcome rather than concerns to be addressed.
FDA Says ‘Meat Glue’ Used in Many Processed Foods Is ‘Safe.’ Scientists Have Another Theory.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 25, 2025
Gluten and genetics may not be the only culprits behind skyrocketing cases of celiac disease and related inflammatory digestive autoimmune conditions. Scientists now believe the “meat glue” widely used in processed foods from chicken nuggets to veggie burgers may also play a role.
Recent research shows that an enzyme called microbial transglutaminase induces celiac disease and related inflammatory digestive diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis, writer Linda Bonvie reported on her Substack, Badditives.
Also known as “food glue,” transglutaminase is an enzyme widely used as a food additive to help foods stick together and look more appealing.
Meat glue is “beneficial for the food industry,” researchers Dr. Aaron Lerner and Torsten Matthias, Ph.D., said in one of several research papers they’ve published on the topic. But apparently, it’s not so good for public health.
Meat glue, Bonvie wrote:
“is the darling of Big Food for lots of reasons: it can glue together scraps of fish, chicken and meat into whole-looking cuts (often called ‘Frankenmeats’); extend the shelf life of processed foods (even pasta); improve ‘texture,’ especially in low-salt, low-fat products; make bread and pastries (particularly gluten-free ones) rise better, and, as one manufacturer puts it, allow for use of things that would ordinarily be tossed out — unappetizing leftovers and scraps of food that would ‘otherwise be considered waste ingredients, creating an added-value product.’”
According to Lerner and Matthias, meat glue can change the nature of gluten and make the immune system more reactive to them, which can cause conditions like “intestinal junction leakage” and set the stage for a variety of health issues.
Japanese ‘meat glue’ maker uses propaganda strategies developed for MSG
Japanese global food company Ajinomoto is one of the major producers of transglutaminase, Bonvie reported. The company also makes MSG and uses the same methods from “its long-running propaganda campaign claiming that MSG is a safe ingredient” to promote its meat glue.
The company advertises both ingredients as “found in food naturally” and promotes them as considered safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Transglutaminase is found naturally in the body, but the natural form has a completely different structure from the microbial transglutaminase additive the company makes and adds to food.
Despite years of research showing the link between transglutaminase and celiac and other digestive disorders, the FDA considers all uses of the enzyme to be Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS), Bonvie reported.
The GRAS classification has been widely condemned by food industry watchdog organizations, who say it allows Big Food to add new ingredients to the food supply with almost no federal oversight, according to Consumer Reports.
Companies seeking to have their product granted GRAS status simply submit paperwork, and the status is granted, Bonvie wrote. Ajinomoto has been doing that for over 20 years with its transglutaminase.
Ajinmoto first got the FDA to recognize the product as GRAS in 1998 for use in seafood. The following year, the company expanded the use to hard and soft cheeses, yogurt, and vegetable proteins and meat substitutes.
In 2000, the company notified the FDA it would expand the use to “pasta, bread, pastries, ready-to-eat cereal, pizza dough, and ‘grain mixtures.’” By 2002, it told the FDA it would be using it for “food in general.”
The FDA didn’t object to any of these uses.
The FDA didn’t object — even though Ajinomoto submitted the results of a 30-day toxicity study of the food glue in beagles. Dogs in the study experienced serious side effects — a pituitary gland cyst, lung discoloration and more — but the company said all the effects were unrelated to its transglutaminase.
Bonvie wrote:
“Why they bothered to include a study that shows that their product causes harm to the animals studied can only be understood if you know how Ajinomoto operates. Having done a study, they can later refer to the study that they did as though it proved that their product was ‘safe,’ knowing that no one will challenge them.
“Such claims have great propaganda value.”
Animal rights organization PETA has condemned Ajinomoto’s practice of conducting “horrific tests on dogs.”
Researchers warned that transglutaminase often goes unlabeled in processed foods. Anjinmoto says that it is a “processing aid” rather than an ingredient in most foods that use the product and is therefore exempted from labeling requirements in Europe and the U.S.
The product is also listed as an allowed enzyme in organic food and farming on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances.”
Worse, it is often used in gluten-free bakery products to improve their appearance, even though it causes a reaction in people suffering from celiac disease.
Bonvie said the only way to completely avoid the enzyme is to avoid processed foods altogether.
Given how challenging that can be for most people, she provides a list of foods to avoid, including: low-fat and low-salt dairy products and dairy substitutes, formed meat products like chicken nuggets, expensive cuts of meat sold cheaply, sushi from unreliable sources and farmed fish products, veggie burgers, and cheaply produced pasta.
Leading microbial transglutaminase researcher Lerner told Bonvie he thought the FDA should reconsider its classification of the enzyme as GRAS.
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.
COVID VACCINE INJURIES CONFIRMED BY NEW DATA
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | April 24, 2025
Del and Jefferey reveal newly uncovered CDC data tying COVID-19 vaccines to neurological, cardiac, and autoimmune injuries, including brain inflammation and heart complications. As evidence mounts, the failure of health officials to warn the public threatens to shatter what little trust remains.
The Russians Are Coming!
By Hans Vogel | April 24, 2025
Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, European elites are shouting once again that the Russians are coming. Why would they bother invading European NATO states when everything that makes life possible in Europe is collapsing?
“The Russians can be here at any moment! The Russians have a huge army, ready to invade. We need to be prepared to fight and resist them, because if we don’t, they will destroy our country and kill our families!” That is what our lieutenant used to tell us in the 1970s during military service. I was then stationed somewhere between Bremen and Hamburg in the North German plains. Both cities had been flattened during the Second World War. Not by the Russians, but mostly by the English, our NATO ally. Yet we were constantly being reminded by the officers, noncoms and military and state propaganda that the Russians would do exactly the same and worse. The Russians, always the Russians! At that very moment, the Americans, our NATO bosses, were still busy destroying Vietnam, but that seemed to bother nobody.
“If the Russians are truly so superior as you say they are, why aren’t they here yet?” I asked the Lieutenant.
One day we were taken to the nearby exercise grounds to learn how to deal with a nuclear attack. We heard an explosion and saw a convincing mushroom cloud in the distance. “That is a tactical nuclear bomb,” we were told as we were instructed to put on an olive-drab handkerchief as a face mask so as not to breath “radioactive particles.” Then we were given little brushes to take the “radioactive dust” off our battle dresses. I asked the officers if this would not bring more of those particles into the air we were breathing. Nope, it was protocol, was the answer. At any rate, I thought this entire procedure was so amateurish as to be absolutely ridiculous. Then and there I stopped believing in the existence of nuclear bombs. Why would the Russians use tactical nuclear bombs if they wanted to conquer and occupy Western Europe, as was being claimed? Wouldn’t they make the conquered territory uninhabitable for themselves?
The “Russians” (which then was used to indicate the inhabitants of the Soviet Union) were always depicted in the darkest hues (which in those days still was considered unfavorable, even by the politically correct), and with idiotic exaggeration. So much so that, in a dialectical reaction, many of us soldiers were inclined to think those Russians were actually really nice guys. Such can be the unexpected result of fanatical propaganda, when the narrative is just too one-sided and unrealistic. It will eventually produce the opposite of what the authorities and their presstitutes want.
Most soldiers could not care less. The propaganda would enter through one ear, only to leave right away through the other. Each night, they would enjoy their beers, brag about their girlfriends and watch a movie in the 2,000 seat barracks theater. Those movies came basically in two varieties: documentaries on African wildlife, with giraffes and lions parading across the screen, and third-rate action movies from Israel, in which grinning zionist fighters would engage in bloody massacres of Arabs. It was the worst imaginable pornography of violence.
In the end, the Russians never showed up. Nor did they ever plan to come and visit us. A few years later between 1989 and 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. To the surprise of many, however, NATO was not dissolved. Quite the contrary: many new states were welcomed as NATO members. Yet the Russian “danger” was no longer there. As the remnants of the Soviet Union were cannibalized by Western capitalist raiders and looters, it was obvious there was no longer any Russian threat.
For a brief period, Western elites had a hard time identifying other imaginary dangers with which to keep the citizens subdued. Still during the “Cold War” they came up with acid rain, but it did not quite do the trick. The anthropogenic climate change narrative needed further elaboration. In 1992 the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change laid the groundwork for this, strengthened by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, promoted worldwide was a small step for Al Gore, but a big step for the Climate mafia. Clamors by the UN and NGOs demanding sacrifices from the public in order to “save the planet” were becoming ever more obnoxious.
Meanwhile in 2001 after the demolition of three WTC towers in New York City, the US government and its vassals asserted that Arabic and Islamic terrorism were so absolutely terrifying that henceforth all airline passengers worldwide were to be subjected to ridiculous and humiliating security checks. Mind you, it was decided not just to check Arabs or muslims (that would be discrimination!), but ALL passengers, including babies and small children.
Anthropogenic climate change soon replaced the terrorism scare and became the core of official scare mongering. Nevertheless, all those “climate scientists” agreeing that climate change was caused by human activity and trying to convince us that the weather gods needed to be pacified by all sorts of sacrifices, somehow did not convince most of us. The speech that Greta Thunberg gave in the UN in July 2019 was the best speech to the UN General Assembly ever given by a 16-year old autistic girl, but it failed as it did not bring about the expected universal clamor for sacrifices to the weather gods.
Right then, at the end of 2019 the Great Covid Show was launched. Without doubt this was the most successful fear campaign ever, benefiting from the vast reservoir of knowledge gleaned from the MK Ultra program. Billions of people, believing the official narrative and naively trusting their governments and the assembled presstitutes, duly took the “vaccinations” that were pushed in all corners of the planet.
As the Great Covid Show proceeded, which was actually a US Deep State and WHO-sponsored holocaust in entire nations that were turned into “extermination camps,” Vladimir Putin launched the Special Military Operation against the Ukraine. Since this was a US neo-colony (just like Cuba was from 1902 to 1959), howls of indignant protest were heard all over the West. Western state media and presstitutes duly enhanced and increased the volume of the howling and wailing to deafening levels.
“You can’t just invade another country!” a friend of mine with whom I studied history told me. “Sure you can,” I answered, “that is what NATO did in Yugoslavia, and the US in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. That is what Turkey did in Cyprus in 1980, Morocco in 1975 invading the Sahara. And what about Israel always invading and harassing its neighbors since 1948? That was all fine and dandy. Why would Russia not be allowed to invade the Ukraine?” My friend could not see the logic, but reluctantly shut up, since he had no arguments.
Now that the Ukraine, together with its Western overlords, is facing final defeat, the old myth of an imminent Russian invasion has been dusted off. Putin is the “New Hitler” of the moment while Russia is allegedly the reincarnation of the former Soviet Union.
NATO’s hermaphrodite-in-chief, cabinet ministers of NATO member states, an entire armchair army of “experts” and all the state media and presstitutes in the West are repeating constantly that the Russians are coming and that we must all prepare for a war that will come inevitably. They are all repeating what our Lieutenant used to say during the Cold War: “The Russians can be here at any moment! The Russians have a huge army, ready to invade. We need to be prepared to fight and resist them, because if we don’t, they will destroy our country and kill our families!”
Yeah, right!
FIGHT OVER FLUORIDE HEATING UP IN FLORIDA
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | April 17, 2025
The national conversation around fluoride in drinking water has shifted and Florida is currently the hotbed of this effort. Hear how the EPA is actively reviewing the recent studies on the dangers of fluoride and the legal changes moving forward on state and federal levels.
EU state’s PM issues Covid vaccine warning
RT | April 23, 2025
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has called for an immediate halt to government purchases of Covid-19 vaccines, citing a recent report that found mRNA jabs contain extremely high levels of DNA and substances that were not disclosed by the manufacturer.
Bratislava initially considered outright banning the vaccines when a commission led by Peter Kotlar, an orthopedic doctor and member of the ruling Slovak National Party, published a report in October claiming that the mRNA jabs alter human DNA, have been inadequately tested, and therefore should not be administered until they are proven safe.
Kotlar has also described the Covid-19 pandemic as an “act of bioterrorism” and a “fabricated operation,” and has accused vaccine manufacturers Moderna and Pfizer of turning vaccinated people into “genetically modified organisms.”
His report, however, was met with significant pushback from opposition parties, as well as former Slovak Health Minister Zuzana Dolinkova, who cast doubt on Kotlar’s qualifications with regard to the subject. She subsequently resigned from her position that same month, citing government backing for an anti-vaxxer and insufficient prioritization of health care.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Fico published a video in which he stated that ignoring the findings of the Kotlar-led commission on the quality of the Covid-19 vaccines would be “extremely irresponsible.”
Fico noted that in March, he instructed the Health Ministry to establish a working group to address the findings of the expert report submitted by Kotlar, but acknowledged that this may not produce results quickly enough.
The prime minister said he would try to resolve the issue in “a reasonable timeframe” and propose during an upcoming government meeting that apart from the working group, the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV) would also be asked to conduct a quantitative analysis of the presence of DNA and other substances in the vaccines.
Fico also suggested that the government should inform the population about the “serious findings” regarding the jabs. “Although Covid-19 vaccination rates are extremely low, people deserve such a warning,” he said.
The prime minister went on to propose that Slovakia suspend the purchase of additional vaccines from the unspecified manufacturer, which it is obligated to do under a contract signed by the former government in 2023.
Bratislava is still expected to procure nearly 300,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines in 2025 and 2026, which is estimated to cost around $6.6 million, Fico said, stressing that “until the results of the additional quantitative analysis are delivered, the government should not procure further vaccines from this manufacturer or pay for them.”
NSF terminates hundreds of “misinformation”-related grants, impacting research tied to online speech flagging
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 23, 2025
A large wave of funding cancellations from the National Science Foundation (NSF) has abruptly derailed hundreds of research projects, many of which were focused on so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
Late Friday, researchers across the country received emails notifying them that their grants, fellowships, or awards had been rescinded; an action that stunned many in the academic community and ignited conversations about the role of the government in regulating research into online speech.
Among those impacted was Kate Starbird, a prominent figure in the “disinformation” research sphere and former Director of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
The Center, which collaborated with initiatives like the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project, both known for coordinating content reporting to social media platforms, had ties to federal agencies and private moderation efforts.
Starbird expressed dismay over the NSF’s move, calling it “disruptive and disheartening,” and pointed to a wider rollback in efforts to police digital content, citing reduced platform transparency and the shrinking of “fact-checking” operations.
Grants that were cut included studies like one probing how to correct “false beliefs” and another testing intervention strategies for online misinformation. These projects, once backed by taxpayer dollars, were part of a growing field that often overlaps with content moderation and speech policing; a fact acknowledged by even Nieman Lab, which admitted such research helps journalists “flag false information.”
The timing of the cancellations raised eyebrows. The NSF’s action followed a report highlighting how the Trump administration was reevaluating $1.4 billion in federal funding tied to misinformation research. That investigation noted NSF’s involvement in these programs but did not indicate the impending revocations.
The NSF stated on its website that the grants were being terminated because they “are not aligned with NSF’s priorities,” naming projects centered on diversity, equity, inclusion, and misinformation among those affected.
A published FAQ further clarified the agency’s new direction, referencing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump. It emphasized that NSF would no longer support efforts aimed at combating “misinformation” or similar topics if such work could be weaponized to suppress constitutionally protected speech or promote preferred narratives.
Some researchers, like Boston University’s Gianluca Stringhini, found multiple projects abruptly defunded. Stringhini, who had been exploring AI tools to offer users additional context about social media content; a method akin to the soft content warnings platforms deployed during the pandemic—was left unsure about the full scope of consequences for his lab.
Foundational to many early studies in this space, the NSF had long played a key role in launching initiatives that shaped how digital discourse was studied and potentially influenced. According to Starbird, about 90% of her early research was NSF-funded. She cited the agency’s vital support in forging cross-institutional collaborations and developing infrastructure for examining information integrity and technological design.
The mass termination of these grants signals a pivotal shift in the federal government’s stance on funding initiatives that blur the lines between research and regulation of public speech. What some see as necessary oversight to prevent narrative enforcement, others view as a dismantling of essential tools used to navigate complex digital environments. Either way, the message from Washington is clear: using federal dollars to police speech, even under the guise of scientific inquiry, is no longer a priority.
Unshrunk: Laura Delano’s breakaway from psychiatry
The powerful story of a psychiatric survivor turning pain into purpose

By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | April 21, 2025
Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance is more than a memoir of Laura Delano’s journey through pain, survival, and recovery. It is a fearless, forensic examination of a psychiatric system that too often harms those it is meant to help.
Instead of merely recounting her own harrowing experience, Delano exposes an industry that, despite its claims of scientific rigour, frequently silences, dismisses, and pathologises those in distress.
What emerges is not just a personal reckoning, but a scathing indictment of modern psychiatry and a call for urgent reform.
As someone who has spent years reporting on the scientific shortcomings of psychiatric drugs—the flimsy trials, the regulatory capture, the financial conflicts—I’ve documented many of the system’s failures.
But I could never portray them with the visceral clarity of someone who’s lived it. Delano gives a voice to the silenced, puts flesh on the statistics, and brings coherence to the chaos so many feel when trapped inside the ‘prison’ of psychiatry.
Last September, I had the opportunity to meet Laura in Connecticut after she reached out in response to some of my investigative reporting.
In person, she was warm, grounded, and intelligent. She and her husband, Cooper Davis, radiated a quiet but unmistakable sense of hard-won purpose. It was clear they hadn’t merely survived the system—they were now working to help others navigate it, through the nonprofit Laura founded: Inner Compass Initiative.
Delano’s descent into psychiatry began at the tender age of 13. She describes a moment standing in front of a mirror, repeating to herself, “I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.”
Instead of seeing this as a young girl’s profound cry for help, psychiatry interpreted it as a pathological symptom—one that demanded medication.
From there, her life became a procession of diagnostic labels and prescriptions. She was rapidly swept into a whirlwind of psychiatric disorders—depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder—each new label reinforcing the falsehood that she was fundamentally broken.
This, I believe, strikes at the heart of psychiatry’s core failure: it strips suffering of context and meaning, and replace it with abstract diagnostic codes.
Alongside the diagnoses came the inevitable avalanche of drugs: Seroquel, Zyprexa, Risperdal, Abilify, Depakote, lithium, Klonopin, Ativan, Ambien, Celexa, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin—the list goes on. But instead of healing her, psychiatry hijacked her identity.
Even I was stunned by the sheer volume and velocity at which she was prescribed drugs. What struck me most was the absence of curiosity from clinicians who should have known better – who never paused to consider whether the treatment itself might be causing harm.
The title Unshrunk captures this journey perfectly. It’s a nod to the profession of “shrinks” while also reclaiming one’s identity—undoing the diminishment that comes from being reduced to diagnoses and drug regimens.
“This book—these pages, this story, my story—is a record that has been unshrunk,” she writes.
Throughout, Delano explains how the system instilled in her the deepening belief that something was fundamentally wrong with her—a belief reinforced at every turn by diagnoses and medications. Her story lays bare a broader truth: psychiatry has a tendency to medicalise ordinary human suffering and pathologise natural responses to life’s challenges.
I know first-hand how taboo it remains to critique psychiatry. Years ago, while producing a two-part documentary series on antidepressants for ABC TV, I spent over a year interviewing patients, researchers, and whistleblowers. We sought to expose the overstated benefits and hidden harms of psychiatric drugs.
But just before broadcast, the series was pulled. Executives feared that telling the truth might prompt people to stop taking their medication. It was a sobering reminder of how tightly controlled this conversation remains—and why voices like Delano’s are so vital.
Predictably, Unshrunk has drawn criticism from legacy media outlets like The Washington Post, which characterised it as a “treatise against psychiatric medications” and lumped it into a “highly predictable” anti-psychiatry genre.
But this knee-jerk framing only highlights how resistant our culture has become to honest, nuanced conversations about mental health.
To be clear, Delano is not “anti-psychiatry” or “anti-medication.” She has explicitly acknowledged that some people find psychiatric drugs helpful. But she also knows many have not been helped—in fact, many have been harmed. Their stories matter too. And that’s exactly what Unshrunk offers – a voice to those erased from the dominant narrative.
This intolerance of dissent is reflected in politics too. When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently questioned the safety of psychiatric drugs, Senator Tina Smith accused him of spreading “misinformation” that could discourage people from seeking treatment. But Kennedy wasn’t opposing treatment—he was calling for transparency, informed consent, and scientific accountability. As Delano’s memoir makes painfully clear, those are precisely the conversations we should be having.
Delano writes candidly about how psychiatry eroded her sense of self—how she became a “good” patient, internalising every label and obeying every directive.
“I took all of this as objective fact; who was I to question any of it?” she writes.
One especially crucial chapter confronts the now-debunked “chemical imbalance” myth—the idea that depression is caused by a deficiency in serotonin. Delano references the 2022 review in Molecular Psychiatry by Moncrieff et al., which found no convincing evidence to support the serotonin-deficiency theory.
She reflects on how the drugs impaired her capacity to think critically: “For nearly half my life, I’d been under the influence of drugs that had impaired the parts of my brain needed to process, comprehend, retain, and recall information.”
The darkest chapter in Unshrunk—and the one I found most difficult to read—is her suicide attempt. Delano recounts the moment with unflinching honesty. It hit me like a gut punch. But it’s that refusal to sanitise her pain that gives this memoir its extraordinary emotional weight.
And yet, Unshrunk is not without hope. Delano eventually emerges from the depths of despair, scarred but intact, with a renewed sense of purpose.
The pivotal moment came when Delano read Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic, a book that poses a confronting question: why, after decades of soaring psychiatric drug use, are rates of mental illness and disability still climbing?
Drawing on long-term research, Whitaker argues that while psychiatric drugs may offer short-term relief for some, they often lead to worse outcomes over time—and that, on balance, they may be causing more harm than good at a societal level.
The realisation hit Delano like a bolt of lightning: “Holy shit. It’s the fucking meds,” she writes. She wasn’t “treatment-resistant”—the treatment itself had become the source of her suffering, a case of iatrogenic injury.
Delano’s journey to withdraw from psychiatric drugs, however, is another ordeal. At first, she assumes a quick detox will bring quick relief—but she is disastrously wrong.
“The logic seemed simple at the time,” she writes. “I had no idea that I had it backward—that the fastest way to get off and stay off psychiatric drugs successfully… is to taper down slowly. And by ‘slowly’ I don’t mean over a few weeks or months. I mean potentially over years.”
It’s a lesson that remains dangerously absent from much of mainstream psychiatric care, where withdrawal symptoms are routinely mistaken for relapse.
“Coming off psychiatric drugs had been the hardest thing I’d ever done,” she recalls.
At its core, Unshrunk is about reclaiming bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice,” Delano writes—underscoring the way psychiatry frequently undermines consent and personal agency. The harm didn’t just come from the drugs, but from being denied fully informed consent regarding her treatment.
Ultimately, Delano’s message is both sobering and empowering: true healing begins when people are treated not as “broken brains,” but as whole human beings.
“I decided to live beyond labels and categorical boxes,” she writes, “and to reject the dominant role that the American mental health industry has come to play in shaping the way we make sense of what it means to be human.”
Unshrunk is a brave, unsparing account of Delano’s escape from a broken system. At times tormenting, sometimes funny, always courageous—it’s one hell of an emotional rollercoaster.
If you want to understand the lived experience behind psychiatry’s failures, this book is essential reading.

