Only two days after the Journal of the Academy of Public Health‘s official launch, Science Magazinecriticised it in a news item. A scientist I had recommended as a member of our Academy wrote to me that the fact that Science feared our new journal suggested that we were on the right track.
Indeed. Science scored an own goal by illustrating so clearly what is wrong with the legacy media and traditional scientific journals. It started out with denigrating remarks about the journal being the brainchild of President Donald Trump’s pick to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff “who became known for his opposition to lockdowns, child vaccination, and other public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its editorial board also includes Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty [wrongly spelled as Martin] Makary, who also opposed vaccine mandates.”
Why did Science mention that Trump picked Jay and Marty? This is irrelevant for any scientific judgments about these people. And what was wrong with their positions during the pandemic? Nothing.
Sweden did not lock down and yet had one of the lowest mortalities in the world. To vaccinate children against Covid-19 down to 6 months of age as in the US is highly likely harmful, and we have not recommended this in Europe. Many people, me included, have argued against vaccine mandates and it was never a requirement in Denmark to become vaccinated against Covid-19. Such mandates are ethically and scientifically indefensible and can increase vaccine hesitancy for vaccines in general.
Science’s denigration continued: “The journal, which has already published eight articles on topics including COVID-19 vaccine trials and mask mandates, eschews several aspects of traditional publishing. It lacks a subscription paywall.”
“Lacks” a paywall? This is a negative statement, although it is positive not to have a paywall like Science has. And mask mandates? There is no need to mandate whole populations to dress as bank robbers given masking’s tenuous – and potentially nonexistent – benefits on a population level.
Since only members of the Academy of Public Health can submit articles, Science is worried that the journal will be used “to sow doubt about scientific consensus on matters such as vaccine efficacy and safety.”
Scientific consensus is rare, and even when it exists, it has often been proven wrong by later research. Science is the opposite of consensus. The status quo should be challenged, and free scientific debate – that so many traditional journals have suppressed – moves science forward. There are many good reasons why some top scientists have abandoned publishing in top scientific journals, and they include censorship, and financial and other conflicts of interest among anonymous peer reviewers, editors, and journal owners.
All my life, I have produced numerous scientific results that went against the so-called scientific consensus, and when my opponents had no valid counterarguments, they called me controversial. I realised that this denigrating term always meant that my results threatened financial or other conflicts of interest, not least guild interests. When my statistician and I demonstrated in 1999 that mammography screening might do more harm than good, which I have confirmed many times ever since, a journalist wrote that there is nothing that hurts like the truth about healthcare.
It is not enough for Science to cast doubt about our new journal by referring to Trump: “JAPH is a nonprofit subsidiary of the Real Clear Foundation, itself a donor-financed nonprofit that has attracted support from major funders of conservative causes, according to The New York Times. Kulldorff and many other members of the 21-person editorial board have attracted criticism for their views and research during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Ah well, I am one of these 21 people and I know many of the others. We are anything but conservative. We try to keep an open mind and are not easily fooled by fraudsters. In 2023, I explained that the origin of Covid-19 is the biggest coverup in medical history. And on 31 January 2025, I tweeted: “The CIA said Saturday that it’s more likely a lab leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people. They are very slow at the CIA. I have known this for five years and have written a lot about it incl a whole book.”
Science lamented that Jay, Martin, and Sunetra Gupta, also an editorial board member, authored the Great Barrington Declaration that opposed lockdowns. But yet again, they were right and Science and most other journals were wrong.
Science said that Jay and John Ioannidis, the most cited medical scientist, and another board member, “drew fire in 2020 for a study that claimed SARS-CoV-2 had infected far more people than currently thought, and was therefore far less dangerous than assumed.” This was totally misleading. Jay has explained how they were exposed to inappropriate attacks and censorship from Stanford where they worked. Their initial results, that the infection fatality rate was only 0.2%, were reproduced in other studies.
They first published their results as a preprint, in April 2020. If their results had been accepted at the time, instead of being roundly condemned, also in the media, the draconian lockdowns could have been avoided, as they showed that the virus spread very rapidly.
Science and the Covid-19 Pandemic
Since Science criticised us so heavily for our Covid research and views, even though we were correct, we should look at what Science’s own role has been. It claimed that the Covid-19 vaccines are 100% effective against severe disease, which wasn’t even correct when Science made the claim because we knew that respiratory viruses mutate fast.
I wrote in my book, The Chinese Virus, that Beijing’s useful idiots included Science, which was overly friendly with Peter Daszak – whose EcoHealth Alliance channelled an NIH grant to Wuhan to fund the highly dangerous gain-of-function research, which he denied.
In February 2020, Sciencereported that scientists “strongly condemn” rumours and conspiracy theories about the origin of the pandemic. If you have no arguments, you raise your voice. This sentence does not belong in a scientific journal but in a tabloid, and it cannot be a conspiracy theory to suggest that the virus escaped from a lab and was likely manufactured there. In the same article, Daszak said that “We’re in the midst of the social media misinformation age,” but forgot to say he was the main driver of it.
In 2020, researchers sent a modelling study to Science arguing that herd immunity would be achieved earlier than the usual estimates of an infection rate of 60-80% of the population. Science admitted that the paper was rejected for political reasons: “Given the implications for public health, it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk.” Science was concerned that opponents of lockdown would use the paper to undermine the policy. The lead author said she might leave the field because every paper she had written on this issue had been rejected with the claim that it was not useful or new.
In November 2021, Science published an almost 5,000-word article about Daszak that told nothing new. A reporter had spent seven hours with Daszak to put a nice gloss on him. A photo of Daszak appeared on Science’s front page with the title of the article: Prophet in purgatory: Peter Daszak is fighting accusations that his work on the pandemic prevention helped spark Covid-19.
Science published this when the death toll was about 6 million and depicted Daszak as a hero who works on preventing pandemics when it is extremely likely that he and “the bat lady,” Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, created one, which he had covered up for in two years.
Science didn’t care much about conflicts of interest either. When NIH’s David Morens praised Daszak, they didn’t tell the readers that he was Daszak’s funder, colleague, and co-author. Science mentioned that Freedom of Information Act requests by the US Right to Know and others had uncovered inconvenient truths, but it used Angela Rasmussen to dismiss this as “weaponized FOIA requests.” She was the one who, in Nature Medicine, called it a worldwide conspiracy when people discussed a possible lab leak. It is still the case that there is not a thread of good evidence that the virus has a natural origin but a lot that tells us it was produced in a laboratory in Wuhan.
Wait and See
In the Science article, Kulldorff said that people had a right to be worried about what might happen and added that our journal should be judged on its output a year or more from now, once it’s more established. I agree. I am very enthusiastic about the journal. And this is not because I cannot publish in traditional journals. I am the only Dane who has over 100 publications in “the big five” (BMJ, the Lancet, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine).
Disclosures, Funding & Conflicts of Interest
None.
Affiliations:
Peter C Gøtzsche, Professor emeritus, Institute for Scientific Freedom, Copenhagen, DK
Dr Humphries is a conventionally educated medical doctor who was a participant in conventional hospital systems from 1989 until 2011 as an internist and nephrologist. She left her conventional hospital position in good standing, of her own volition in 2011. Since then, she’s been furthering her research into the medical literature on vaccines, immunity, history, and functional medicine. She is the author of “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History.”
Renowned French physician, microbiologist, and infectious disease expert Didier Raoult, M.D., sits down with Del to revisit the injustices of the COVID-19 pandemic. As one of the most controversial figures of the pandemic, Raoult was among the first to advocate for a cheap, repurposed drug that he claimed showed promise in treating COVID. But what followed was a storm of censorship, scientific suppression, and personal attacks.
In this explosive interview, Raoult reveals what really happened, the global forces that worked to discredit his findings, and why the scientific community turned against him. Plus, hear his startling position on the origins of COVID-19, including his unexpected take on the Chinese lab leak theory.
Many political jurisdictions claim to be on a path to eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide from their energy systems. Notable examples include California and New York in the U.S., and the UK and Germany in Europe. The Biden administration during its term in office even claimed to have set the entire U.S. onto a path toward what they called “net zero.” But so far none of these places has gotten anywhere near the goal. Indeed, as of today, many hundreds of billions of dollars into the effort, not one of them has even issued a detailed engineering plan of how this is supposed to be accomplished.
For reasons expressed in some dozens of posts on this blog, with the exception of a vast expansion of nuclear energy, I don’t believe that this “net zero” thing can actually be done, at least without entirely impoverishing the people. However, I’m completely willing to be proved wrong. For many years, I have been calling for a Demonstration Project to prove whether or not an economically-developed community is capable of achieving zero carbon emissions, or anything close to that (example here from 2022). Surely, if the entire U.S. can be expected to accomplish “net zero” in response to a government command, then it should be simple to build a working “net zero” Demonstration Project for a small town of, say, a few tens of thousands of people.
I’ve even proposed the perfect place as my candidate to be the guinea pig for the “net zero” demonstration: Ithaca, New York. After all, Ithaca is the most exquisitely climate virtuous place in what is already a deep blue state. It is home to two thoroughly left-wing academic institutions (Cornell University and Ithaca College), with their thousands of radical left-wing climate activist faculty and students. These people should leap at the chance to show the rest of the world how this “net zero” thing can be done. Also, the population (approximately 50,000) is in about the right range for a net zero demonstration project. (Note that the 50,000 is the combined population of the City of Ithaca and Town of Ithaca. Yes, for reasons known only to the geniuses of New York State local governance, Ithaca consists of two independent adjoining municipalities, a City and a Town, sharing the same name.). If “net zero” doesn’t work in a small place like this, the loss of investment could be large, but not catastrophic.
And in fact, when it comes to talking the talk, Ithaca would appear to be at the forefront of the green energy transition. Back in June 2019, the Ithaca City Common Council unanimously adopted what they called the “Ithaca Green New Deal.” A few months later, in March 2020, the Ithaca Town Council, also unanimously, adopted their own “Green New Deal Resolution.” Although there are differences, the Town’s Resolution incorporated much of the language of the City’s Resolution word-for-word. Not to be caught standing still, the next year, 2021, the City of Ithaca went a step further and announced that it would electrify all of its 6000 buildings. They didn’t actually use the words “demonstration project,” but clearly the key elements were now in place. Should we check in on how it’s going?
The short answer: It’s a complete joke.
First, let’s take note of some of the official goals. From the City of Ithaca Green New Deal resolution:
RESOLVED, That the City of Ithaca adopts a goal to meet the electricity needs of City government operations with 100% renewable electricity by 2025. . . . RESOLVED, That the City of Ithaca hereby adopts a goal of achieving a carbon neutral city by 2030. . . . RESOLVED, That the City of Ithaca endorses the following actions to achieve these goals: Create a climate action plan (CAP) in 2020 to provide details on how to achieve the Ithaca Green New Deal, and update the CAP regularly. . . .
In 2021, the small city of Ithaca announced it would electrify all of its 6,000 buildings.
And how exactly was Ithaca going to electrify 6000 buildings within a few short years?
[Ithaca planned to achieve building electrification] with the help of one key partner: a technology company called BlocPower, whose then-CEO Donnel Baird said the company would make the mass electrification process fast and affordable. “There’s a lot of expensive engineering and financial and workforce development costs,” Baird told Ithaca’s common council in 2021, after it approved the mass electrification plan. “Our job is to remove all of that friction.”
OK, those were the goals. Now for the progress toward achieving them. If you go to the website of the City of Ithaca today, everything seems great:
Ithaca is leading the world. On June 5th, 2019, the City of Ithaca Common Council unanimously adopted the Ithaca Green New Deal resolution, a government-led commitment to community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 that focuses on addressing historical inequities, economic inequality, and social justice. Two years after the resolution was signed, Ithaca established itself as a world-leader in climate mitigation planning and continues to pave the path forward as a blueprint for other cities across the U.S. and the globe.
But how about some actual facts on the ground. Let’s start with that building electrification thing. From that same January 25 WSKG piece:
[I]n recent months, BlocPower has quietly deserted its electrification and workforce training programs in Ithaca and several other cities, according to municipal leaders and organizations that worked with BlocPower. . . . In Ithaca, BlocPower ended its collaboration with the city after completing the electrification of only 10 buildings, according to Ithaca’s current sustainability director, Rebecca Evans. Last November, the company furloughed its Ithaca staff members and ended all partnerships in the city, Evans said.
6000 buildings, 10, whatever. Here is a picture from WSKG of “sustainability director” Rebecca Evans:
So, Ms. Evans, how about the big Climate Action Plan by which Ithaca will instruct the ignorant world how to get to carbon neutrality? Here’s another piece from WSKG, this one from several months ago (October 2024) reporting on recent revisions to the Plan. Excerpt:
The [Green New Deal] resolution . . . charged city staff with creating a formal climate action plan that would outline how the city would achieve those goals. Ithaca’s sustainability director, Rebecca Evans, wrote in a post on LinkedIn last month that she recently decided to scrap the version of that plan she had been working on. The decision, she said in an interview with WSKG, does not change the goals of the Green New Deal, but instead reframes the city’s approach of how it will achieve its commitments. Evans said that rather than prioritizing reducing emissions, the new plan will prioritize helping residents adapt to living in a warming world, while also working towards the city’s emissions-reduction goals. That could include providing residents with better access to social services, like housing and job training, and improving the city’s emergency response and electricity reliability.
Got it — They’ve given up on reducing emissions. And how about the City’s promise to get 100% of its own electricity from renewable sources by 2025? Are they really doing that right now? I can’t find a recent report, but there’s this from back in December 2011:
Beginning in January [2012], the City of Ithaca will purchase 100% of its electricity consumption from renewable sources. Under a new agreement with Integrys Energy Services of New York, Inc., Ithaca will purchase Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) certified by Green-e Energy for all of its electricity.
Aha! It’s the magic of “Renewable Energy Certificates.” Apparently, those make it possible to get your electricity from wind turbines and solar panels on completely calm nights. If you are willing to believe it. Al Gore would be proud.
In short, everything about Ithaca’s Green New Deal is either a scam, or has been quietly abandoned, or both.
Here in New York City we have our own building electrification mandate called “Local Law 97” that is said to require some 50,000 buildings to convert to electric heat and cooking by 2030. Does anybody really think we can make any more progress toward such a goal than Ithaca?
A child who died in a Texas hospital after developing pneumonia following a measles infection died as a result of “medical error” — including failure to administer the correct antibiotic in time, according to a medical expert who reviewed the child’s medical records.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) obtained the medical records from the family of the 6-year-old girl. The parents said they wanted people to know what happened to their daughter so it wouldn’t happen to other children.
The parents obtained the records from Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock where their child died on Feb. 26.
The parents told Dr. Ben Edwards, who successfully treated their other children for measles, that they didn’t want to use the information uncovered in the medical records to inflame the situation. However, they did want to get the word out about the mistake if it could prevent it from happening to other children.
Dr. Pierre Kory, who has extensive experience in pulmonary and critical care medicine, analyzed the records. He said today in an interview on CHD.TV, “I’ve done medical case reviews from malpractice lawyers for a good part of my career, and this case was tragic.”
According to Kory’s analysis of the records, the girl died from a secondary bacterial pneumonia that had “little to do with measles.”
He added, “When I say it has little to do with measles, secondary bacterial pneumonias can happen after any viral infection.”
Kory said the girl “died of a medical error — and that error was a completely inappropriate antibiotic” for treating the kind of pneumonia she had.
The records showed that the girl was initially admitted to the emergency room (ER) for “secondary bacterial pneumonia,” Kory told The Defender. At that time, her measles rash was already fading.
She was not administered the correct antibiotic for treating her secondary bacterial pneumonia until roughly two and a half days later. By that time, she had declined so severely that doctors had already placed her on a mechanical ventilator, Kory said.
Also, it appears there was a delay of more than nine hours from the time when the correct antibiotic was finally ordered and the time it was given, Kory said. “Less than 24 hours later, she died — and she died rather catastrophically … suddenly her blood pressure crashed and she arrested.”
Kory broke down in more precise medical terms what appears to have happened.
When the girl was admitted to the ER, the staff made a general diagnosis that she had a secondary bacterial pneumonia. “She was clearly being admitted from the community so it was implied that it was a community-acquired pneumonia,” Kory said, referring to how the girl didn’t get the pneumonia from being in a hospital or healthcare facility.
They were “absolutely correct” about that, Kory said.
But what they initially gave her for that diagnosis was incorrect, he said.
Generally, doctors put patients on two antibiotics “to cover all the possibilities” of what specific kind of bacterial pneumonia the patient may have.
Kory said:
“It’s in every guideline — infectious disease, pulmonary — every guideline in the country tells you that for a hospitalized child or adult who gets admitted to the hospital, you put them on two antibiotics.
“One is from a category called beta-lactams, which is like penicillin, cephalosporins. And they [the hospital] got that part correct. They put her on something called ceftriaxone, which was excellent.
“But you always need to pair it with an antibiotic from a different category, which is called a macrolide or a quinolone.”
They didn’t do that part, Kory said. “They didn’t put her on the most common, which is azithromycin.”
Instead, they put her on vancomycin, an antibiotic used for very drug-resistant organisms like MRSA.
According to the Mayo Clinic, MRSA — short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — is an infection caused by a staph bacteria that’s “become resistant to many of the antibiotics used to treat ordinary staph infections.” Most MRSA infections occur in hospitals or healthcare settings, like nursing homes or dialysis centers.
Giving vancomycin to the girl was an inappropriate choice, according to Kory.
He said:
“There’s no reason to think that this child would come in with MRSA from the community, from a Mennonite community. She’s not coming from a facility where a lot of antibiotics are used. So it’s a grievous error and it’s an error which led to her death.”
Hospital didn’t change course of treatment for over two days
The records show that the hospital didn’t adjust the girl’s antibiotics until a test came back showing that she had a type of bacterial pneumonia called “mycoplasma pneumonia.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, mycoplasma is a single form of bacteria that causes an infection that can occur in different parts of the body, such as the respiratory, urinary or genital tracts.
“The tragedy is that mycoplasma is an extremely common — what we call community-acquired — organism,” Kory said. Azithromycin is very effective against mycoplasma, he said.
The hospital staff finally ordered it for her upon seeing her test results. But they should have ordered it much sooner, given that her bacterial pneumonia was community-acquired, Kory said.
Kory said it wasn’t proper doctoring to let her decline for days without adjusting the treatment they were giving her. “You almost have three full days of a seriously declining medical status with no real changes to her treatment plan.”
He added:
“If I’m taking care of someone, and I’m rounding on them every day and I see that today they’re doing a little bit worse than yesterday. And then the next day they’re doing a little bit worse than the day before, I’m going to review exactly what I’m doing and say, ‘What am I missing? What am I missing? What else can I do?’
“And that didn’t happen until a test showed up on a computer. And that’s just not doctoring.”
By this time, the child was in the intensive care unit. “And from my review of the records,” Kory continued, “the antibiotic was ordered at 11:00 p.m., or approximately 11:00 p.m., and as far as I can tell, it was not administered until 9:00 a.m. the next morning.”
“So not only did you have several days delay of decline without the appropriate antibiotic,” he said, “but then when they realized that they were missing the appropriate antibiotic, it took them, as far as I can tell, 10 hours to administer it.”
By the time the girl received the correct antibiotic, she was already on a ventilator.
Father ‘simply wants the truth out’ so the public can talk about measles vs. vaccine risks
Edwards and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker also reviewed the medical records. They concurred with Kory’s analysis.
Edwards said, “As Dr. Kory’s pointed out, unfortunately this was a big mistake, a tragic mistake — and I agree — a fatal mistake.”
However, Edwards said the girl’s father— who gave CHD permission to report on the medical records — didn’t intend “to inflame the situation or cause more division and more just hot rhetoric.”
Edwards told a brief story to illustrate how divisive the media coverage of the West Texas measles outbreak has been.
The day the girl died, Edwards was in the middle of an interview with a reporter. “I remember that reporter grabbing his phone as the alert just came from the news announcing the ‘first measles death.’”
Edwards said there was “almost a giddiness” in the reporter’s response to the news.
“It was disgusting, actually,” he said. “I want people to know Peter [the father] doesn’t want this information to be used on the other side in the same almost giddiness kind of way of, ‘Aha, we got you.’”
The girl’s father “simply wants the truth to be told so that other kids who potentially could go down the same path as his daughter won’t have to.”
The parents aren’t sharing the information “to give one side more ammunition” in the ongoing public debate around measles.
The father told Edwards, “I love my neighbor — and my neighbor’s my enemy. My neighbor’s the one who hurt me. My neighbor’s the one who offends me.”
Edwards said he wants the public to understand the father’s reason for letting the medical records go public so that “we can maybe come to the table on this.”
Edwards added:
“There’s potential risk — complications and death — from MMR [the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine]. We need to have that conversation at the table, both sides in a truthful, honest manner for the sake of these children.
U.S. taxpayers picked up the tab for about $6.2 billion worth of research, development and distribution of GLP-1s, the new class of blockbuster weight-loss drugs, according to an investigation by The Lever.
Taxpayers fund the research. Pharma reaps massive profits. And Americans pay up to 11 times more for the drugs than people in other countries. The marked-up prices are inflating insurance premiums and risk bankrupting the country’s healthcare system, according to The Lever.
Researchers at Bentley University shared data with The Lever showing that between 1980 and 2024, the federal government spent $6.2 billion on the discovery and development of GLP-1 molecules, plus research on how to use those molecules to treat diabetes, obesity and other health conditions.
“You have to know a lot to develop a drug and to apply it in people,” Dr. Fred Ledley, professor of Natural and Applied Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, told The Lever. “What we call a ‘mature body of knowledge’ is not cheap.” Ledley provided the spending data to The Lever.
That research laid the foundation for the development of Ozempic and triggered a wave of similar drugs that spawned a massive market.
Media tout ‘miracle cures’ but weight-loss drugs linked to serious side effects
The media has focused less attention on the serious side effects of these drugs, which range from vomiting, diarrhea, and nausea to pancreatitis, stomach paralysis, kidney disease, thyroid cancer and sudden vision loss.
As of May 2024, more than 15 million people — 1 in 8 adults — were taking GLP-1 drugs, which generated more than $50 billion for the drugmakers in 2024 alone, reportedly leading to drug shortages.
At the time, Novo Nordisk said that at least 25,000 people in the U.S. were starting its drug Wegovy each week, according to CNN.
“In 2022 alone, the federal health insurance plan Medicare spent $5.7 billion on this class of drugs, 10 times what it spent in 2018.”
Big price tags spawn market for alternatives
A month’s supply of GLP-1 drugs in the U.S costs over $1,000, leading many people to seek alternative versions of the drugs made by compounding pharmacies, which mix the drugs themselves.
Drug compounding companies, like the direct-to-consumer telehealth companies Hims & Hers, Noom, Ro, 23andMe, and WeightWatchers, are also raking in major profits from selling compounded versions of the drugs.
Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned against compounded versions, even though it allows compounding companies to make the drugs during shortages of the brand-name versions.
The agency doesn’t monitor the compounded drugs for safety, efficacy or quality, according to CNN.
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are pushing the compounding pharmacies to stop making the drugs, according to NPR.
Last year’s shortage of the GLP-1s ended in February, so compounding is no longer permitted, but The Lever said it is uncertain whether the secondary market will be shut down.
Price of GLP-1s driving up healthcare costs and more
Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched an investigation into the “outrageously high prices” GLP-1 drug manufacturers charge.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid — which pays for the drugs when used for indications other than weight loss by people in those programs — has spent years promoting weight-loss drugs.
A 2023 study by Ledley and colleagues highlighted the crucial role of U.S. government funding in drug development, showing that the National Institutes of Health contributed $187 billion to research that led to almost all drugs approved in the U.S. between 2010 and 2019.
The research focuses on “basic science,” according to The Lever, such as identifying proteins or genes linked to a disease or studying how GLP-1s might work.
Despite U.S. taxpayers’ funding for the research, Ozempic costs about $1,000 per month in the U.S., compared to $147 in Canada, $103 in Germany, $93 in the U.K. and $83 in France.
Wegovy is listed in the U.S. for more than $1,300 per month, compared to $186 in Denmark, $137 in Germany and $92 in the U.K.
The high cost of the drugs in the U.S. is driving up healthcare costs overall.
The Lever reported:
“This year, private health plan costs are expected to rise by 8 percent — the highest increase in 15 years apart from 2021, during the global COVID-19 pandemic — thanks in part to the rising cost of prescription medications. GLP-1 drugs are ‘a major driver of higher prescription drug costs,’ according to recent reports by the benefits consulting firm Segal.
“A Senate report from last May also found that if half of all Medicare and Medicaid patients with obesity took Wegovy and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, it could cost the federal health care system $166 billion per year — nearly as much as what Medicare and Medicaid spent on all retail prescription drugs in 2022.”
Those higher costs affect the broader economy. Con Edison, the largest electricity provider in New York City, announced a likely rate hike, citing a 12% increase in employee benefit costs due to the rising costs and use of GLP-1 drugs.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will no longer fund research on “vaccine hesitancy” and strategies for increasing vaccine uptake, The Washington Post reported Monday.
According to Science, the NIH sent notices canceling or reducing grants to the affected researchers, stating:
“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focus on gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment.”
NIH will terminate at least 33 vaccine hesitancy grants, Science reported. Nine other grants will be modified or reduced.
The terminations came after NIH, on behalf of interim director Matthew Memoli, asked each of its institutes to develop a list of ongoing and future vaccine hesitancy grants.
Science reported that the agency is considering taking similar action for research related to mRNA products.
Of the terminated grants, 14 were funded by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases — the agency formerly led by Dr. Anthony Fauci — and focused on vaccines for COVID-19, chickenpox, mpox (formerly monkeypox), HPV and a hypothetical gonorrhea vaccine.
“The project appeared on the list because one of its aims ‘is to evaluate health care worker’s [sic] and potential patient’s attitudes towards acceptance of a gonorrhea vaccine if one is developed,’” Science reported.
Other canceled grants targeted modeling of disease outbreaks or “promoting vaccine uptake among racial minority groups or understanding why some parents are reluctant to accept childhood and adolescent vaccines.”
NIH did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Grants targeted ‘vaccine-hesitant’ minority and conservative communities
The Defender previously reported on multiple taxpayer-funded grants, including some awarded by the NIH, that funded research on decreasing vaccine hesitancy and increasing HPV vaccine uptake.
The Defender obtained the grant information through a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in 2023 and 2024
One set of documents, obtained in 2023, revealed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a $4.7 million grant to a scientist — and paid consultant for Merck — to conduct research on how to increase teen uptake of the HPV vaccine. Merck manufactures Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine available in the U.S.
In 2024, the grant’s principal investigator, Noel Brewer, Ph.D., a psychologist and professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine recommendations.
FOIA documents Children’s Health Defense (CHD) received in 2024 revealed that HHS issued $4 million to fund the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to “inoculate” social media users against HPV vaccine “misinformation” posted on social media.
Other documents CHD received in 2023 revealed that HHS granted $600,000 for research on how to increase HPV vaccine uptake among Black teens, and that NIH granted $519,399 for a four-year study on a smartphone tool to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents whose parents are “vaccine-hesitant.”
The NIH also funded such studies overseas. FOIA documents CHD received in 2024 showed that NIH awarded $340,000 to test psychological tactics aimed at persuading South African fifth-graders and parents to accept the HPV vaccine.
In 2023, documents showed that the CDC had issued hundreds of millions of dollars in grants since 2021 for the development of “culturally tailored” pro-vaccine materials and for the training of “influential messengers” to promote COVID-19 and flu vaccines to communities of color in each U.S. state.
The CDC also funded “Chair Care,” a New Mexico program that trained and paid hairstylists as “trusted messengers” that would target the state’s Hispanic, Black, Native American and conservative populations, who were shown to have the lowest vaccine uptake and highest “vaccine hesitancy.”
‘Vaccine hesitancy’ research targeted personal choice not to vaccinate
“There’s no such thing as ‘vaccine hesitancy,’” Rogers said. “The term itself is completely Orwellian. It was likely coined by an expensive Big Pharma PR firm. The purpose of the term is to cast aspersions on parents who do proper research on the risks of medical interventions,” Rogers said.
According to Rogers, studies like those being discontinued were likely backed by pharmaceutical companies to ascertain how to increase vaccine demand.
“Studies on so-called ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and ‘overcoming vaccine hesitancy’ are thinly disguised marketing studies on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry,” Rogers said. “Big Pharma makes plenty of money. American taxpayers should not be paying for marketing studies on behalf of one of the most vile industries on Earth.”
Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher said it is inappropriate for the NIH to allocate resources to study people’s personal health choices.
“The purpose of studying vaccine hesitancy is to find ways to increase vaccine uptake in individuals that have made the personal choice to not vaccinate with a particular product,” Hulscher said. “The federal government should simply respect their choice and not waste valuable resources and taxpayer money on trying to change their minds.”
Internal medicine physician Dr. Clayton J. Baker said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to address “vaccine hesitancy” resulted in gimmicks intended to increase uptake of the COVID-19 shots — and punish those who declined vaccination.
“During COVID, we had health officials combating ‘vaccine hesitancy’ with bribes of lottery tickets, donuts, even free beer, and meting out punishments such as being fired from one’s job. Medical practice surrounding vaccines descended to a disgracefully unethical state during COVID,” Baker said.
mRNA research grants next on NIH’s chopping block?
Citing an internal NIH memo sent March 6, Science reported that Memoli “has requested information on NIH’s investment in mRNA vaccines research,” including ongoing or planned grants and contracts, and collaborations with outside partners.
NIH institutes and programs were asked to respond by this week.
Hulscher drew parallels between mRNA research and “vaccine hesitancy” research.
“Vaccine hesitancy will remain high as a result of the federal government authorizing and mandating experimental modified mRNA injections that are suspected to have killed, injured or permanently disabled over a million Americans. The longer this disaster remains unacknowledged, the harder it will be to regain the trust of Americans,” Hulscher said.
According to the Post, it is “unclear” whether HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “had a role, directly or indirectly, in the move to cancel these grants.”
HHS oversees federal health agencies, including NIH and the CDC.
Scientists and doctors quoted by the Post expressed concern over the NIH’s planned cuts of “vaccine hesitancy” research.
Manoj Sharma, Ph.D., a professor of social and behavioral health at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who received a previous CDC grant for vaccine hesitancy research, told the Post, “There is an urgent need to enhance vaccine acceptance behavior, especially due to the potential resurgence of measles and COVID-19 still looming.”
But for Baker, “This statement exemplifies the real goal of these studies, which is not to study behaviors, but to drive behaviors in a predetermined direction.” He added:
“‘Vaccine hesitancy’ grants do not fund scientific inquiry so much as psychological manipulation programs. They reject freedom of choice in favor of a predetermined behavior. It is a form of coercion. Coercion, be it subtle or obvious, is the opposite of informed consent.
“Informed consent is absolutely central to the ethical practice of medicine. NIH should not fund research that undermines the ethical practice of medicine.”
Hulscher suggested that NIH resources previously earmarked for “vaccine hesitancy” studies “should be allocated to proper safety testing of the entire childhood vaccine schedule, where there are currently no products licensed based on long-term placebo-controlled trials.”
Other experts suggested that these resources could be used to rectify harms related to the promotion — or mandate — of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic.
“The money saved from cancelling these studies should instead be paid to independent researchers who are documenting the experiences of the millions of Americans injured by vaccines,” Rogers said.
“The grant money would be better used to produce a historical document of the abuses of informed consent during COVID, than to continue these psychological manipulation programs disguised as scientific inquiry,” Baker said.
BY DONALD C. KIRKMAN Scripps Howard Staff Writer WASHINGTON: A group of scientists say there are disturbing signs that the world’s average temperature has started to decline and that the Earth may face another catastrophic ice age in hundreds or thousands of years.
In a report soon to be released, the scientists say evidence is accumulating that the world has experienced unusually warm temperatures for the last 10,000 years and soon will revert to a colder, more hostile climate that man will find difficult to cope with.
The report is based on the findings of 46 geologists, climatologists and paleontologists who met last year at Brown University, Providence, R.I., to review recent studies of fossils, rock layers, sea sediments and biology.
Almost unanimously, these scientists agreed the world definitely will have another ice age similar to the one that ended 20,000 years ago when vast ice sheets covered large stretches of North America, Europe and Asia.
The only question, they believe is exactly when the new ice age will begin—or whether it already has begun.
“There already are signs the Earth is cooling in a cycle similar to those that heralded earlier great glaciations,” the report says. “And while it may take several centuries before any major global effects are felt and several thousand years before ice sheets reform, preliminary signs are already apparent.”
With the warm age ending, the scientists say the world logically can expect a colder, drier climate to crowd man southwards and reduce the world’s cultivatable land resources. Ice sheets once again could reach as far south as Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago in about 20,000 years.
“In the future, the report says, vast areas of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia increasingly will be affected by dryness of rainfall with its associated scourges—drought, soil erosion and starvation.”
To cope with this harsh, cooler world, man will have to call upon all his ingenuity and resourcefulness.”
During the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, the media briefly latched on to a study which apparently blamed climate change for making the blazes more likely to occur and also more intense. But is that really what the study says? Let’s take a look.
Dr Peter Ridd has been researching the Great Barrier Reef since 1984, has invented a range of advanced scientific instrumentation, and written over 100 scientific publications.
Since being fired by James Cook University for raising concerns about science quality assurance issues, Peter Ridd receives no payment for any of the work he does.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed it plans to study the possible link between vaccines and autism, after Reuters reported on the plan late Friday, citing two sources inside the agency.
In response to the Reuters story, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided an identical statement:
“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening. The American people expect high quality research and transparency and that is what CDC is delivering.”
The revelation came days after President Donald Trump, in an address to Congress, referred to the rising rate of autism in the U.S. Trump, citing CDC data showing that 1 in 36 U.S. children have autism, said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is well suited to lead efforts to study the increase.
“There’s something wrong,” Trump said. “So, we’re going to find out what it is, and there’s nobody better than Bobby [Kennedy] and all of the people that are working with you.”
According to The Washington Post, Trump administration officials asked the CDC to perform the study. Newsweek reported that it is “unclear” whether Kennedy is involved in the new study. However, HHS oversees federal health agencies, including the CDC.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) senior research scientist, applauded “the CDC’s newfound curiosity in vaccines and autism.” He said the U.S. “passed an inflection point” in the 1990s, where autism “went from being a rare disease to a more common one” that has been “increasing exponentially ever since.”
“When is an appropriate time to conduct a large study on vaccines and autism? Apparently, two generations later,” Jablonowski said.
Sayer Ji, chairman and co-founder of the Global Wellness Forum, called the news a “pivotal moment, not just in the scientific exploration of vaccine safety, but in the broader issue of public trust in our institutions.”
Ji said the CDC’s plan for a large-scale study “is an implicit admission that prior investigations may have been insufficient, biased or incomplete.” He said the new study “could represent a breakthrough moment” in “resolving this critical health question” and “restoring faith in the integrity of scientific inquiry itself.”
“The cumulative effect of giving multiple vaccines at once as well as over a short period of months has not been studied as a potential contributing factor to autism,” Parks said. “Vaccines have the potential to alter a child’s immune system in ways that are unexpected.”
Parks referred to studies performed in 1970 and 1987 that found autism rates of 0.7 and 3.3 children per 10,000, respectively. “If autism were as prevalent then as it is now, we should have a large number of older autistic adults, which we do not,” Parks said.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for CHD, suggested the CDC study should use an unvaccinated control group. Hooker cited his experience performing research using data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink, noting that the database already contains data on unvaccinated children.
A 2021 study co-authored by Hooker found that vaccinated children were significantly more likely than unvaccinated children to be diagnosed with autism.
Ji said any CDC study examining a possible vaccine-autism link should reflect Kennedy’s recent calls for “gold-standard science.”
He said:
“It must be a true gold-standard study. The methodology must be rigorous, transparent and independent, with no industry or government interference. It should be a prospective, controlled, long-term study comparing fully unvaccinated and vaccinated populations.”
Hooker said the CDC has previously not made data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink available to the public, even though it is taxpayer-funded.
“We’ve never had access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink. We’ve never had access to such a gold-standard database, and that thing takes $50 million worth of tax dollars to maintain every year. It should be open to the public,” Hooker said.
Ji said many past vaccine safety studies were flawed due to a lack of transparency.
“Historically, vaccine safety studies have been marred by selective reporting, data manipulation and redacted findings. Kennedy has long advocated for open access to government data, and if this study follows through on that promise, it would be a seismic shift toward accountability,” Ji said.
Rise in autism cannot simply be attributed to ‘better diagnosis’
Reuters attributed the rise in autism rates to “more widespread screening and the inclusion of a broader range of behaviors to describe the condition.”
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., said such claims are “pure disinformation.”
“No rigorous study has shown that these factors are responsible,” Lyons-Weiler said.
“These criteria cannot explain the 7% increase in autism following the removal of vaccine exemptions from California, which has 1 in 22, the highest rate among all states,” Lyons-Weiler said.
Ji said that prior studies claiming to debunk the vaccine-autism link should be called into question, noting that many such studies “suffer from conflicts of interest, flawed methodologies and a lack of truly unvaccinated control groups.”
According to Hooker, many previous studies were flawed because they focused only on a limited number of vaccines and vaccine components.
“The CDC and most of the open peer-reviewed literature focuses on one vaccine and one vaccine component, the MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine and thimerosal” — a mercury-based preservative used in some vaccines. A 2013 study found a link between thimerosal exposure and the risk of an autism diagnosis.
Recent independently performed studies have indicated a connection between vaccines and autism.
Reuters quoted Dr. Wilbur Chen, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and former member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, who suggested the CDC’s new study could fuel vaccine hesitancy.
“It sends the signal that there is something there that is worth investigating, so that means there must be something going on between vaccines and autism,” Chen said.
But other experts suggest that such statements conceal concerns that vaccines may not be as safe as frequently claimed.
“Americans and those who receive our vaccines overseas should be able to have confidence that American products, especially biologics that are injected into children, meet the highest safety standards,” Parks said. “By addressing parent concerns, the CDC can help to reestablish trust in its guidelines.”
“If the vaccines are safe, transparency should increase confidence, not the opposite,” Ji said. “If vaccines are as safe as claimed, then the data should confirm that and bolster confidence. The fear of ‘hesitancy’ suggests a deeper concern that the results may contradict the official narrative.”
Hooker said the new CDC study is representative of a “new era of openness” and will “encourage greater faith in our institutions and their recommendations regardless of where they fall.”
We’ve all seen or heard the stories about measles “outbreaks” in the media recently. What’s really going on? Are our children at risk? Download — for free — “The Measles Book: Thirty-Five Secrets the Government and the Media Aren’t Telling You about Measles and the Measles Vaccine.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) released “The Measles Book: Thirty-Five Secrets the Government and the Media Aren’t Telling You about Measles and the Measles Vaccine” in 2021.
“The Measles Book” presents reliable medical information from the most credible sources available. It is intended to help you make an informed choice about vaccinating your child.
The main focus is measles. However, many of the issues are relevant to other childhood vaccines. Within the book’s pages, the reader will discover 35 secrets being kept from the general public about childhood vaccines, especially the measles vaccine.
Some of those secrets include:
Vaccines are not safe for every child, and the government and pharmaceutical companies have known this for years.
Some children will get injured or die from vaccines, and the government and pharmaceutical companies know this, too.
Pharmaceutical companies have developed an incredible way to make money from vaccines — and not be held accountable.
When a child is injured or killed by a vaccine, the pharmaceutical company does not pay for the damage it caused — we do!
The information in “The Measles Book” is vital for parents who want to know how to make informed decisions for their children.
BY WHITNEY WEBB | UNLIMITED HANGOUT | JUNE 10, 2022
This short excerpt from Whitney Webb’s upcoming book “One Nation Under Blackmail” examines an obscure media profile of Leslie Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein’s mentor, from the 1980s that contains disconcerting revelations about Wexner’s personality and his inner world. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 