Scientists accuse Cochrane Reviews of using biased studies to claim HPV vaccine prevents cancer
‘Completely misleading’
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 26, 2026
The prestigious Cochrane Library in November 2025 published two reviews touting the safety and efficacy of the HPV vaccine.
In a press release, Cochrane claimed the reports showed that girls vaccinated before age 16 were 80% less likely to develop cervical cancer, and that there was no evidence the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine caused any serious adverse events.
Cochrane is widely cited as the “gold standard” of systematic reviews. Major news organizations, from NBC News to The BMJ, repeated claims made in the press release.
The BMJ wrote that the researchers wanted to “share high quality data to counter misinformation spread on social media, which has had a massive impact on vaccination rates.”
The two reviews were published together. One assessed evidence from clinical trials, the other examined observational studies.
Co-author Nicholas Henschke declared that based on the reviews, “We now have clear and consistent evidence from around the world that HPV vaccination prevents cervical cancer.”
Co-author Hanna Bergman told Cochrane that the evidence from the clinical trials confirmed that HPV vaccines are “highly effective” and “without any sign of serious safety concerns.”
However, experts who analyzed the reviews in detail told The Defender that based on their analyses of the reviews, they determined that the authors relied on a small number of studies with a high risk of bias for their claim that the HPV vaccine prevented cancer.
The experts said they identified similar patterns when they analyzed other outcomes cited by the researchers.
“We know that the meta-analysis can only be as good as the quality of the studies included in the meta-analysis,” Lucija Tomljenovic, Ph.D., a biochemist, said.
Yet the vast majority of the studies the authors relied on to make their most dramatic conclusions about cancer and cancer-related lesions were at “serious or critical risk of bias,” according to the study authors themselves, she said.
“If this is not a gross misinterpretation of evidence, I don’t know what is,” Tomljenovic said.
A systematic review is a “study of studies,” a high-level research method that reviews, synthesizes and critically appraises the available body of evidence for a given disease or health topic in a standardized and systematic way.
Healthcare policymakers often use them to guide their decision-making.
Researchers use a crucial metric — “risk of bias” — to evaluate the studies and determine whether to include them in a systematic review.
Risk of bias indicates the likelihood that a study contains a systematic error that could cause its results to deviate from the truth, which could lead to an over- or underestimation of the effect of an intervention — in this case, the HPV vaccine.
Authors draw ‘completely misleading’ conclusions based on the evidence with high risk of bias
Although the two Cochrane reviews claimed to find an 80% reduction in cancer rates, the review of clinical trials stated that the studies evaluated “were not of sufficient duration for cancers to develop. Four studies reported on cancer. No cancers were detected.”
The observational review, which evaluated different studies to assess the impact of HPV vaccination on the general population, claimed there was “moderate‐certainty evidence” from 20 studies that HPV vaccination reduces the incidence of cervical cancer.
However, Tomljenovic said that only four of the 20 studies had a moderate risk of bias. The other 16 studies had either serious or critical risk of bias.
Of the four studies with a moderate risk of bias, one did not even include cervical cancer as an endpoint, and the follow-up was only seven years — which is not enough time for cancer to develop. Instead, the studies measured persistent HPV infections, Tomljenovic said.
As a proxy for cancer, many studies examined precancer outcomes, focusing on the reduction in CIN3+ — or cervical squamous intraepithelial neoplasia 3 — which are abnormal cells found on the cervix that may be precancerous and are caused by a high-risk HPV type.
Tomljenovic also found that of the 23 eligible studies included in the meta-analysis investigating CIN3+ lesions, only a single study was overall at moderate risk of bias. The other 22 had serious or critical risk of bias.
On this shaky basis, she said, the authors concluded, “There are now long-term outcome data from different countries and from different study designs that consistently report a reduction in the development of high-grade CIN and cervical cancer in females vaccinated against HPV in early adolescence.”
Tomljenovic called that conclusion “completely misleading.” She said that the authors of the Cochrane reviews themselves judged the vast majority of studies that “consistently” report reduction in cervical cancer and high-grade CIN lesions to be at serious and critical risk of bias.
“The best evidence for reduction from only a handful of studies was at a moderate risk of bias rather than low,” she added.
Lancet study conclusions, cited by Cochrane, are ‘patently absurd’
The Cochrane review of observational studies included the widely cited 2021 study in The Lancet, which investigated the impact of HPV vaccination in England. The Lancet study claimed to offer first direct evidence of prevention of cervical cancer using the Cervarix vaccine — not available in the U.S.
The Lancet study claimed an 87-97% relative reduction in cervical cancer rates and CIN3 lesions in girls vaccinated at ages 12-13 compared to unvaccinated girls.
The authors claimed that vaccination “has almost eliminated cervical cancer and cervical precancer up to age 25,” Tomljenovic said. However, her own analysis of U.K. cervical cancer statistics from Cancer Research UK tells a different story.
Tomljenovic found that data show that since the early 1990s, cervical cancer incidence rates decreased by 25% in females in the U.K., and have remained stable over the last decade.
She found that cervical cancer incidence rates reached their lowest point somewhere between 2004 and 2007 — a year before the HPV vaccine was introduced in the U.K.
“Since then, the incidence rates of cervical cancer have actually slightly increased, not decreased,” Tomljenovic said. “Therefore, these data completely contradict the conclusions of The Lancet study.”
In light of the cervical cancer incidence in the U.K. over time, she said, the claim by the The Lancet study authors that HPV vaccination with high coverage in 12-13-year-old girls has almost eliminated cervical cancer and cervical precancer up to age 25 “is patently absurd.”
Screening, healthy practices prevent cervical cancer, and affect study outcomes
Children’s Health Defense Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski said, “The HPV vaccines are pushed, because they allegedly prevent cancer. Yet, a comprehensive review of the world’s literature on HPV vaccinations concludes an insufficient body of evidence exists.”
Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist and expert in molecular diagnostics who has extensively studied the HPV vaccine, told The Defender that most HPV infections — even high-risk types — are cleared by the immune system. He said cervical cancer is a predictable and preventable disease because it can be identified early through regular pap screenings and treated.
“With proper gynecological care, no woman should have cervical cancer or die of cervical cancer,” Lee said.
According to Lee, the cohort studies assessed in the Cochrane review that reported a reduced risk of cervical cancer following the HPV vaccine were conducted in countries where it is less likely that gynecologists may remind patients to do pap screening follow-ups.
The basic flaw of using observational cohorts to detect efficacy, he said, is that “observational studies are subject to healthy user effect and healthy adherer effect, which may lead to erroneous conclusions,” and create a statistical bias.
That means women who choose to receive a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer are also more likely to seek other preventive services and practice healthy behaviors that affect cervical cancer. This includes exercising more, eating a healthier diet, having fewer sex partners, and avoiding tobacco, excessive alcohol intake and illicit drugs.
“A healthy lifestyle is known to affect the rate of clearance of HPV infections,” Lee added.
Observational studies typically compare these women to women who did not get the vaccine, “which may lead to erroneous conclusions.”
No serious adverse effects?
The Cochrane authors also claimed their findings dispute claims about serious adverse effects “reported on social media.”
However, social media isn’t the only place where serious adverse events, including autoimmune conditions like POTS [postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome] and POI [primary ovarian insufficiency], have been reported.
The vaccine adverse event databases (VAERS and VigiBase) contain reports of serious adverse events. So do numerous case studies and Merck’s own internal data — as revealed in court documents from hundreds of lawsuits filed in state and federal courts against Merck, the maker of the Gardasil HPV vaccine.
Writing in response to the Cochrane findings in a letter to The BMJ, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, ousted founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and founder of the Institute for Scientific Freedom, wrote that his own research group conducted a peer-reviewed systematic review that found “the HPV vaccines increased serious nervous system disorders significantly.”
Gøtzsche said that as an expert witness in a case against Merck, he documented that Merck “had hidden cases of serious neurological harms on Gardasil from the drug regulators.” Gøtzsche published his findings in a recent book.
Other research studies have identified similar adverse events. This includes a study published in Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics in July 2025. The study, which analyzed reports in the VAERS database related to Gardasil between 2015 and 2024, used multiple statistical signal-detection methods to identify safety signals for the Gardasil vaccine.
The researchers identified signals for certain neurological and autoimmune-related conditions, including POTS, eye movement disorders, autoimmune thyroiditis and posture abnormality — none of which are isted on the vaccine’s label.
U.S. regulators taking a closer look at HPV vaccines?
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month reduced the number of recommended routine childhood vaccines, the agency left the controversial HPV vaccine on the schedule.
However, the CDC now advises a single dose of the HPV vaccine, instead of the previous two-dose regimen. In making the new recommendations, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cited a growing global consensus that one shot is effective at protecting against HPV.
Investigative reporter Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., reported last week that after nearly two decades on the childhood immunization schedule, the HPV vaccine is being subjected to closer scrutiny.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) convened a new workgroup to reexamine the vaccine from the ground up — including its effectiveness, dosing, safety and long-term population impact.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Retsef Levi, a current ACIP member who has repeatedly called for longer safety follow-up and greater transparency about uncertainty in vaccine science, is leading the workgroup, Desmasi wrote.
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.
Vicious
Lies are Unbekoming | January 25, 2026
The waiting room is clean. The receptionist is polite. The forms ask reasonable questions. Nothing in the physical environment suggests danger. The magazines are current. The hand sanitizer dispenser works. Someone has chosen calming colors for the walls.
A pregnant woman sits in a chair designed for her comfort. She has been told to be here. Not ordered—no one orders. Recommended. Strongly recommended. Everyone does this. Her mother did this. Her friends did this. The women in her prenatal group compare notes about their appointments the way they compare notes about nursery furniture. Which provider did you choose? What tests have you had? The questions assume the answers. The answers assume the questions.
She will be offered things today. Offered is the word used. The offers will come with information sheets that list risks and benefits in tabular form. She will sign consent documents. Everything will be voluntary in the legal sense. No one will hold her down. No one will threaten her. She will choose, and her choices will feel like choices, and she will leave feeling she has done the responsible thing.
What she will not feel is the weight of what has been arranged before she arrived. The scheduling software that ensures the appointment is short enough to be profitable. The protocol that determines which tests are “standard” regardless of her individual circumstances. The liability calculations that make defensive intervention safer for the provider than watchful waiting. The training her provider received, which did not include the word “cascade” and did not question the premises. The pharmaceutical representative who visited last month. The professional guidelines written by committees with financial ties to the interventions they recommend. The insurance code that reimburses procedures but not conversations. The architecture of the building itself, which presumes birth is a medical event requiring medical facilities.
None of this is secret. All of it is documented, published, occasionally debated in journals that no one outside the profession reads. The machinery operates in plain sight. It has operated for so long that its operation feels like nature—the way medicine works, the way pregnancy is managed, the way responsible people behave.
She cannot see it because she is inside it. The water she swims in. The air she breathes. The climate of her experience.
For years I used the word “predatory” to describe this system. Predatory captured something true—the targeting, the extraction, the conversion of healthy people into revenue streams. The pharmaceutical company identifying a market. The screening program generating patients. The intervention that creates the need for the next intervention. Predation implies a hunter and prey, a calculation, a strategy.
But predatory is not quite right. A predator needs its prey. A predator pays attention to what it hunts. A predator, in some sense, respects the thing it consumes—respects it enough to study it, track it, understand its patterns. The lion watches the gazelle. The con artist studies the mark.
This system does not watch. It does not study. It processes.
The word that came to me after documenting 123 medical interventions across the arc of pregnancy and birth is different. Starker. Less strategic and more indifferent.
Vicious.
Viciousness is not cruelty, though cruelty may be one of its expressions. Cruelty requires attention. The cruel person watches suffering and derives something from it—pleasure, power, confirmation. Cruelty is a relationship, however deformed.
Viciousness requires no such relationship. A vicious mechanism can operate without anyone watching the effects. A vicious system can grind through populations while everyone involved believes they are helping. The viciousness is in the structure, not the intention. It emerges from the interaction of parts, none of which are vicious in isolation.
The doctor who follows the protocol is not vicious. The protocol is not vicious. The committee that wrote the protocol is not vicious. The pharmaceutical company that funded the research the committee relied on is not vicious—or rather, its viciousness is diffused through so many quarterly earnings reports and shareholder meetings and marketing budgets that no single person experiences themselves as causing harm. The regulator who approved the product is not vicious. The politician who mandated its use is not vicious. The parent who complies is not vicious. The neighbor who judges the parent who doesn’t comply is not vicious.
And yet.
A 13-year-old girl in London, who declined a vaccine, is being pressured about a screening test she is not eligible for. The vaccine was Gardasil, marketed as preventing cervical cancer. The screening is the smear test—cervical screening that begins at age 25 in the UK, designed to detect what the vaccine supposedly prevents. The two programs are presented as separate, but they function as a single apparatus: refuse our prevention and you must submit to our surveillance. I have documented elsewhere, in my essay The HPV Lie: Pap Smears, Gardasil, and a Cancer Caused by Something Else, why the foundational claim—that HPV causes cervical cancer—does not survive scrutiny. But for the purposes of this essay, the truth of the claim matters less than the machinery built on it.
The pressure comes from somewhere. It reaches her through channels—through school, through health messaging, through the questions of peers whose parents made different choices. No single person decided to punish her. No committee met to discuss her case. The system does not know her name.
The pressure is automatic. It is the system maintaining itself, closing gaps, ensuring that even those who refuse one element remain captured by another. The vaccine and the screening are presented as separate programs, but they function as a single apparatus. Refuse the prevention and you will be reminded, persistently, of your need for surveillance.
She is 13. The screening she is being pressured about begins at 25. There is no medical reason for anyone to be discussing it with her. The pressure is not medicine. It is correction. It is the system registering a deviation and applying force to resolve it.
No one in her life who transmits this pressure experiences themselves as being vicious. The teacher who mentions it is concerned. The nurse who brings it up is following guidelines. The friends who ask why she didn’t get the shot are simply curious, or perhaps uncomfortable with difference. Everyone is doing what people do. Everyone is being normal.
The viciousness is in the normal. The viciousness is that “normal” has been constructed, over decades, through thousands of small decisions, each one defensible, none of them examined, until the accumulated weight presses down on a 13-year-old whose only crime was asking questions.
The system is vicious. Say it plainly.
The government that approves the products, mandates their use, shields manufacturers from liability, and funds the campaigns that manufacture consent—the government is vicious.
The society that has been engineered to enforce compliance through social pressure, to treat refusal as deviance, to make the unvaccinated child a problem and the questioning mother a danger—this society is vicious.
But here is where the analysis must be careful. “The system” is an abstraction. “Government” is an abstraction. “Society” is an abstraction. These words make it easy to express outrage while leaving everyone blameless. If the system is vicious, I am not. If government is the problem, I am just a citizen. If society has been engineered, I am merely a victim of the engineering.
This is too easy. It is also untrue.
The system is made of people. Every protocol was written by a person. Every guideline was approved by persons sitting in a room. Every prescription is written by a hand attached to a body that contains a mind capable of doubt. The government is not a machine. It is people who could choose differently and do not. Society is not weather. It is the accumulated choices of everyone who participates in it—which means everyone.
The viciousness is emergent. No one designed the full harm. But the viciousness is also composed. Each component is a human decision. The emergence does not erase the composition. The fact that no one intended the complete picture does not mean no one is responsible for their corner of it.
This is the moral difficulty the essay cannot resolve, because reality does not resolve it. The harm is everyone’s and no one’s. The choices are individual and the outcome is collective. A woman loses her uterus to a surgery she did not need, and the surgeon who performed it was following the standard of care, and the standard of care was set by a committee, and the committee relied on studies, and the studies were funded by companies that profit from the surgery, and the companies are owned by shareholders who never think about uteruses, and the shareholders include pension funds, and the pension funds include the retirement savings of nurses who work in the hospitals where the surgeries are performed.
Where does blame land? Everywhere and nowhere. This is not an evasion. This is a description of how the viciousness actually works. It is distributed so thoroughly that it becomes atmospheric. It becomes the milieu. It becomes the climate that everyone moves through and no one feels responsible for, because the mechanisms of responsibility have been dissolved in the general weather.
Ivan Illich saw this decades ago. He described how institutions reshape the milieu—the environment people move through—until alternatives become unthinkable. A radical monopoly, he called it. Not a monopoly that corners a market, but a monopoly that disables people from doing things on their own. When hospitals “draft all those who are in critical condition,” he wrote, “they impose on society a new form of dying.” The institution does not merely provide a service. It reshapes reality so that the service becomes necessary.
This is what has happened with birth. With childhood. With the female body across its entire reproductive arc. The medical system has not merely offered services. It has reshaped the milieu so that moving through pregnancy without those services becomes an act of deviance. The services are not chosen from a range of options. They are the water in which choice occurs.
A woman who declines the standard interventions is not making a different choice within a shared framework. She is refusing the framework itself. This is why she is treated not as someone with different preferences but as someone who is failing—failing to be responsible, failing to care for her baby, failing to be the kind of mother the system has defined as acceptable.
The viciousness is in that definition. The system defines acceptable, and acceptable means compliant, and compliant means captured.
I documented 123 interventions across six phases of the reproductive timeline. Pre-conception capture. Pregnancy surveillance. Labor interventions. Immediate newborn procedures. Infant pathologizing. Ongoing medical capture. Each intervention has its own literature, its own justification, its own defenders. Each one, examined in isolation, can be made to seem reasonable—or at least not obviously harmful.
The viciousness becomes visible only when you see the whole arc.
A woman begins birth control at 16. The pill alters her hormonal environment for a decade or more. She stops the pill to conceive. She has difficulty conceiving—perhaps because years of synthetic hormones have disrupted her natural cycles, perhaps for other reasons. She seeks fertility treatment. The treatment works. She is pregnant.
Now she is in the system.
She receives prenatal testing that identifies risks, some real, most statistical. The risk identification generates anxiety. The anxiety generates more testing. The testing generates findings. The findings generate interventions. She is induced before her body was ready because a measurement crossed a threshold. The induction is long and painful because her body was not ready. She receives an epidural because the pain is unbearable. The epidural slows labor. She receives Pitocin to accelerate it. The baby shows distress. She receives a cesarean.
The cesarean is recorded as necessary. It was necessary—given everything that preceded it. Each step created the conditions for the next. The cascade operated exactly as designed.
Her baby is taken to the warmer for evaluation. Eye drops are administered. Vitamin K is injected. Hepatitis B vaccine is given—for a disease transmitted through sex and IV drug use, to a newborn who will do neither. The baby is observed in the nursery. Feeding is scheduled rather than on-demand. Supplementation is suggested because the baby lost weight—as all babies lose weight in the first days, a fact that would resolve with continued nursing but which becomes a problem requiring intervention.
She goes home with a baby she is not sure she knows how to feed, a body she is not sure she recognizes, a mind clouded with hormonal disruption and sleep deprivation and the particular loneliness of having been processed rather than supported.
She returns for postpartum visits. She is screened for depression. She may receive medication. The medication helps, or seems to. She continues it. She is now a psychiatric patient as well as a surgical patient. Her records follow her. Her risk profile follows her. The next pregnancy, if there is one, will be managed with reference to this one.
At no point was she mistreated in any way she could name. Everyone was professional. Everyone followed protocols. Everyone was trying to help.
The viciousness was in the protocols. The viciousness was in the accumulation. The viciousness was in the fact that no one—not one person across dozens of encounters—ever said: you could do none of this. You could wait. You could trust your body. You could go home.
No one said it because no one could say it. The milieu does not permit those words. A provider who speaks them risks liability, peer censure, loss of hospital privileges. The words are not forbidden. They are simply outside the weather. They are not rain or sun or wind. They do not exist in the climate the system has made.
Anyone who asks questions is doing something dangerous. They are noticing the weather. Asking why the sky is this particular color, why the wind blows this particular direction, why everyone walks leaning at this particular angle.
Most people never ask. The weather is just the weather. You dress for it. You complain about it. You do not inquire into its origins. You do not ask who made it, because weather is not made. Weather simply is.
But this weather was made. Every element of it was chosen. The clinical guidelines were written by people who could have written different ones. The regulatory approvals were granted by people who could have demanded different evidence. The liability structures were established by legislatures that could have established different ones. The insurance codes were set by committees that could have set different ones. The training curricula were designed by faculties that could have designed different ones.
Each choice was made by humans. Each human could have chosen otherwise. That none of them did—that the choices accumulated into a system that now operates with the indifference of weather—does not change the fact that the choices were made.
Anyone who asks questions threatens to make the choices visible. This is why they are pressured. Not because anyone decides to pressure them, but because the system cannot tolerate the visibility of its own construction. The weather must remain weather. The moment it becomes choices, it becomes contestable. The moment it becomes contestable, it can be refused.
If you have read this far, you are no longer fully inside the weather.
This is not a comfortable position. It is easier not to see. It is easier to move through the waiting room, sign the forms, accept the offers, go home feeling responsible. The system is designed for this ease. It has made compliance comfortable and refusal exhausting. The path of least resistance leads directly into the machinery.
Seeing the machinery does not stop it. One person’s recognition changes nothing about the protocols, the guidelines, the insurance codes, the training curricula. The 123 interventions will continue to be applied to the women who come after, regardless of what any individual understands.
But recognition changes what is possible.
A woman who sees the cascade can make different choices within it—can refuse this test, delay that intervention, ask questions that disrupt the automatic sequencing. She cannot escape the milieu, but she can move through it differently. She can refuse to be weather.
More importantly, she can speak. She can tell other women what she saw. She can name the viciousness, which is the first step toward refusing to participate in it. The system maintains itself partly through silence—through the assumption that everyone experiences the same thing and no one objects. Each voice that breaks the silence makes the next voice easier.
This is modest. It is not a revolution. It will not dismantle the system or defund the institutions or rewrite the guidelines. But the system depends on billions of small compliances, and each small refusal is a friction. Enough friction, accumulated over enough time, and the machinery begins to slow. Begins to be noticed. Begins to require justification rather than assuming it.
The girl in London who asked questions did something her grandmother could not do for her. She refused to accept the weather as weather. She noticed that she was being pressured and asked why. The pressure will continue—systems do not stop because one person notices them. But she has seen something that cannot be unseen.
This is what recognition makes possible: not escape, but awareness. Not freedom from the milieu, but movement within it that is no longer automatic. The end of innocence is not the same as the end of the system. But it is the end of participation without knowledge. It is the beginning of refusal.
The system is vicious. The viciousness is made of choices. The choices can be seen. Once seen, they can be refused.
One refusal at a time. One woman at a time. One conversation at a time.
The weather was made. It can be unmade. Not quickly. Not easily. Not by any individual alone. But the alternative is to keep swimming without noticing the water, keep breathing without noticing the air, keep walking at the angle the wind requires and calling it freedom.
The 13-year-old noticed. That is where it begins.
Book: Medicalized Motherhood: From First Pill to Permanent Patient
Available as a free download. 123 interventions documented across six phases—from pre-conception capture through postpartum surveillance. Includes practical tools: birth plan template, provider interview questions, quick reference card, and a new chapter on interrupting the cascade. Download it, share it with someone facing their first prenatal appointment, their induction date, their cesarean recommendation. The cascade works because women don’t see it coming. This book makes it visible.
NEW FAUCI EMAILS EXPOSE ATTACK ON NATURAL IMMUNITY
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | January 22, 2026
Newly revealed emails show Dr. Anthony Fauci privately acknowledged that natural immunity may provide stronger protection than COVID vaccination, even as he publicly dismissed it during the mandate period. As Senator Rand Paul calls for criminal referrals, the larger issue is whether the DOJ will pursue Fauci—or protect the COVID-era establishment instead.
American Academy of Pediatrics Hit With Federal RICO Lawsuit for Vaccine Safety Fraud
By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH | Focal Points | January 21, 2026
For decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been treated like an untouchable authority on child health — the gold standard that parents, doctors, schools, and lawmakers were told to trust without question. But today, that image collapses. Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and multiple plaintiffs just filed a federal lawsuit alleging the AAP spent decades running a racketeering operation that sold parents false safety assurances about the childhood vaccine schedule.
This isn’t another “vaccine debate” lawsuit. It’s a RICO fraud case—the same legal weapon used against organized crime and the tobacco industry. The allegation is blunt and devastating: the AAP allegedly manufactured false certainty around vaccine schedule safety, shut down legitimate scientific scrutiny, and promoted sweeping assurances that were never validated through rigorous real-world safety testing—while operating within a system shaped by vaccine-manufacturer funding and financial incentives tied to high pediatric vaccination rates.
One of the most explosive points in the complaint is what it forces into the open. The cumulative childhood schedule has never been safety-tested the way any reasonable parent would assume it has. The lawsuit points to Institute of Medicine findings from 2002 and 2013 calling for more research and acknowledging the lack of proper vaccinated vs. unvaccinated comparisons. Yet the AAP continued portraying the schedule as thoroughly tested and unquestionably safe, shaping pediatric care nationwide through repetition, authority, and pressure—not proof.
The complaint also describes what parents have learned the hard way. This system doesn’t merely recommend vaccines. It demands compliance. Physicians who questioned the schedule or deviated from AAP protocols were professionally targeted, disciplined, and financially crushed. The message was clear: follow the script, or lose your career.
The lawsuit further argues that the AAP’s public reassurances were built on “theoretical” talking points that became institutional doctrine, including the infamous claim that infants could tolerate an extreme number of vaccines at once. According to the plaintiffs, this wasn’t evidence—it was marketing disguised as medical authority, repeated in clinics to silence questions and keep the assembly line moving.
Then there’s the part that makes it all make sense: money. The complaint highlights conflicts of interest and financial entanglements with vaccine manufacturers and aligned institutions. The AAP presents itself as independent and science-first, while operating in a world of corporate sponsorships, incentives, and industry relationships that would be unacceptable in any genuinely transparent public health organization.
This is why the lawsuit matters. It’s not about a single product. It challenges the entire protection racket that has propped up the pediatric vaccine industry for decades. AAP’s model has relied on one rule: the schedule is safe because we say it’s safe—and anyone who demands real proof gets smeared, censored, or destroyed.
The lawsuit seeks financial damages for the families and physicians harmed, demands disclosure of the lack of comprehensive safety testing behind the cumulative schedule, and aims to stop the AAP from making blanket, unqualified claims that the schedule is “safe and effective” as if that question has already been settled.
If this case advances, discovery alone could expose what the public has been denied for decades—and that would be a historic victory for medical transparency, informed consent, and accountability in pediatrics. For years, parents were told to “trust the experts,” while legitimate safety questions were mocked, censored, or punished. Now those questions are headed to the one place the system can’t silence them with talking points: federal court.
Summary
- CHD and multiple plaintiffs filed a federal RICO lawsuit against the AAP, accusing the organization of long-term fraud and racketeering tied to vaccine safety claims.
- The lawsuit alleges the AAP violated RICO by engaging in a sustained pattern of deceptive safety messaging about the CDC childhood vaccine schedule, while operating within a financial ecosystem tied to vaccine-manufacturer funding and incentive-driven pediatric vaccination practices.
- The lawsuit alleges the AAP repeatedly promoted false certainty that the childhood vaccine schedule is thoroughly tested and safe.
- The complaint highlights the absence of proper vaccinated vs. unvaccinated comparisons for cumulative schedule safety, referencing IOM reports calling for more research.
- Plaintiffs argue the AAP relied on theoretical reassurance (not real-world schedule safety trials) to shut down scrutiny and concerns.
- The suit includes physicians claiming they suffered professional and economic harm for deviating from AAP vaccine orthodoxy or questioning safety claims.
- It also includes families alleging severe injury or death following routine vaccination and describes how medical judgment was allegedly overridden by rigid AAP-driven standards.
- The complaint raises concerns about conflicts of interest, alleging financial ties and aligned incentives undermined the credibility of AAP’s public safety assurances.
- The lawsuit seeks financial damages, mandatory disclosure about safety-testing gaps, and to stop the AAP from making unqualified vaccine safety claims.
Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation
Medicalized Motherhood (2026)
Unbekoming | January 15, 2026
A healthy woman downloads a fertility app before she’s even trying to conceive. The algorithm tells her she’s “irregular,” suggests she might have a problem, builds a referral pathway to a fertility clinic directly into the interface. She arrives at pregnancy already a patient—monitored, tested, supplemented, optimized. Forty weeks later, she’s induced for passing an arbitrary due date, monitored continuously, confined to bed, augmented with synthetic hormones, numbed with an epidural, and delivered by cesarean for “failure to progress.” Her newborn is immediately clamped, separated, injected, tested, and supplemented with formula. A year later, her baby has a diagnosis for falling below the 10th percentile on a growth chart. Five years later, she’s still in the system—annual screenings, ongoing surveillance, carrying diagnoses that originated in pregnancy. She entered healthy. She never exits.
Medicalized Motherhood: From First Pill to Permanent Patient documents 123 medical interventions that operate through a single logic: each one creates conditions requiring the next. The induction requires monitoring. The monitoring requires confinement. The confinement slows labor. The slowed labor requires drugs. The drugs intensify pain. The pain requires anesthesia. The anesthesia impairs pushing. The impaired pushing requires surgery. This isn’t system failure—it’s the system functioning exactly as designed, converting healthy women into lifelong patients while generating revenue at every step. The book maps this cascade across six phases: pre-conception capture, pregnancy surveillance, labor management, immediate newborn intervention, infant pathologizing, and postpartum capture. No other single resource traces how a fertility tracking app connects to a cesarean scar connects to a “failure to thrive” diagnosis connects to permanent patient status.
The book is written for women entering this system, not researchers studying it. Every intervention is documented with evidence—Cochrane reviews, clinical studies, manufacturer warnings, professional guidelines—but translated into direct language that can be read during pregnancy, shared with partners, used in conversations with providers. The goal is informed participation, not reflexive refusal. Genuine emergencies exist; some women need cesareans; some babies need intervention. What doesn’t need to happen is the routine application of 123 interventions to healthy women and babies who would do better without them. The cascade can be interrupted. The questions that create space—What happens if we wait? What are the alternatives? Is this required or recommended?—are simple to ask and difficult for the system to dismiss.
This is my first book, and I’m proud of it. I think it offers something that didn’t exist before: the complete map, from first pill to permanent patient, written for the women who need it most. I’m offering it free to reach those women—but 226 pages is a commitment not everyone can make. So I’ve given it the Unbekoming summary treatment: comprehensive Q&A, the key arguments distilled, and a deep dive audio file available to everyone, not just paid subscribers. Consider this your entry point. If the summary resonates, the full book goes deeper into each of the 123 interventions with the evidence behind them. If a woman entering the system reads this and asks one question she wouldn’t have asked otherwise, the book did its job.
Medicalized Motherhood: From First Pill to Permanent Patient
Medicalized Motherhood Edition 1
2MB ∙ PDF file
Disruptive science (part two)
By Dr Malclom Kendrick | January 17, 2026
My son tends to dismiss the idea of watching any film from before about say, the year 1990. Terrible special effects, he informs me, and just too old. As for anything in black and white … no, just, no. Why watch old stuff, it’s rubbish. The fool.
In science there also seems to be a tendency to think that things are constantly moving forward, building on what has gone before. Old research and ideas, become obsolete, and fade from memory. There is no need to look back. We can learn little, or nothing, from things we did a hundred or more years ago.
True? Let me take you back to a land that seems far away and long, long ago. A place where the sun was used as a powerful ‘medicine’. Patients with tuberculosis (TB), or those with non-healing wounds, or mental illness, and many other things. They were wheeled into solariums to make the most of the sun’s rays. Many hospitals had great big windows to let in sunlight.
Years ago I read a fascinating book on this called ‘The healing sun’ which looked at how the sun was used to treat many illnesses. Often with impressive results. It certainly awakened my interest in the area. And, because I have an obsessive interest in heart disease, I focussed on nitric oxide (NO), which is synthesised when the skin is exposed to the sun. [This is not the only way NO is created in the body, but it is important].
Nitric oxide is a molecule that is now understood to be critical for cardiovascular health, although it was not known to have any role a hundred years ago. Until recently it was not known to exist inside the body. in fact, the idea that such a highly reactive compound could have a positive role to play was considered bonkers. Super-reactive – and damaging.
I would like to point out that sunlight does many more things than create nitric oxide and, of course, vitamin D. Mostly good. With so many potential benefits why did the era of ‘solar treatment’ fade into darkness? I think it is almost entirely due to the arrival of antibiotics. A whole bunch of terrible infections, which killed so many millions became treatable – virtually overnight. Sunlight was no longer required, or so it appeared. We had a new solution. Faster, and more effective.
And then came the slow, but inexorable, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. The sun began to be viewed as dangerous. From ‘healing sun’ to ‘bringer of death’. Has this been a good move? In my opinion, absolutely not. Let me show you a graph from a long-term study done in Sweden. It looks at probability of death, in three groups.
- Those who avoid sun exposure.
- Those with moderate sun exposure.
- Those who actively sought out the sun1.
Over a twenty-year time period, those who actively sought the sun were ten per cent less likely to die – of anything, than those who avoided it. This was an absolute, not a relative risk.
On the basis of this study, sunlight would be considered a miracle drug. Everyone in the world urged to take it, every day, without fail. The pharmaceutical company with a patent for any such medicine would become rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. You would never hear the last of it.
I make this somewhat bold statement because there is no medication, nothing else at all, that comes close to this level of overall health benefit, and life extension. Nothing … at all. Stopping smoking would be almost as good, providing about eight to ten years of added life. But that is not really the same thing.
That paper was published ten years ago. A more recent one, from 2020, had pretty much exactly the same thing to say about sunlight. The title says it all, really:
‘Insufficient Sun Exposure Has Become a Real Public Health Problem.’
‘This article aims to alert the medical community and public health authorities to accumulating evidence on health benefits from sun exposure, which suggests that insufficient sun exposure is a significant public health problem.
Studies in the past decade indicate that insufficient sun exposure may be responsible for 340,000 deaths in the United States and 480,000 deaths in Europe per year, and an increased incidence of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, asthma, type 1 diabetes and myopia.’ 2
Eight hundred and twenty thousand deaths a year … seems a lot. Their figures, not mine.
My own view is that the big bright thing up in the sky … Well, it has been shining down on all life forms – all of them on land at least – for five hundred million years – give or take. And for most of our existence, humans have spent the majority of daylight hours outside. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, it is probably not a great idea to avoid the ‘giver of life’, as I now like to call it. We may be missing out on something, or several somethings, which are rather important.
Over the years, there have been many studies demonstrating that sun exposure is really important for our health and wellbeing. But none of them had the slightest effect … on anything. Instead, we are increasingly told to cower away in terror. In Australia, land of ‘slip slap and slop’, they are now creating massive sunshades around schools, so that children who dare to go outside and play will be protected from the sun at all times. Hoorah. Good job.
My previous blog was about disruptive science. An area where there has been a drastic contraction over the last fifty years. Why? Well, one of the main reasons is that disruptive science seems to have little, to no, effect. ‘My mind is made up, do not confuse me with the facts.’ Why bother going against the mainstream view when it achieves the square root of bugger all.
The mainstream view in this area is that sun exposure causes skin cancer. Which means that any discussion on potential benefit is shut down immediately. Yes, there is some robust research to show that fair skinned people, living in hot and sunny lands, are more likely to develop skin cancer.
However, the evidence that there is an increased risk from malignant melanoma is far from clear. There are many different forms of skin ‘cancer(s)’, and most are very easily spotted and easily treatable, and removed. Whilst unpleasant, most of these are not remotely life threatening.
Australia has been banging the ‘anti-sun’ drum for decades. To great effect?
- In 1982, 596 people died of malignant melanoma.
- In 2023 1,527 people died of malignant melanoma
That represents a 2.6-fold increase. In case you were wondering.
The population of Australia went up by 1.8-fold during the same time period. Although I am informed by Google AI that ‘The age-standardised mortality rate for malignant melanoma in Australia has generally remained stable or decreased over the last twenty years.’ You think?
I think 2.6 is a bigger number than 1.8. Thirty per-cent bigger. Yes, I know you can play statistical games to create ‘age-standardized’ rates, whereby 1.8 becomes a larger number than 2.6. ‘Bibbity bobbity boo.’ Or. ‘War is peace, freedom is slavery…etc.’
Leaving such, reality distorting statistical manipulation aside, there are many other diseases that you can die of including, let me think: breast cancer, colorectal cancer, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, asthma, type 1 diabetes …etc.
If you protect against one thing, but in so doing, increase the risk of many others, you have just done significantly far more harm than good. To look at just one of the other potential forms of death that sun exposure could protect us from – colorectal cancer:
Gorham et al examined five studies on association of serum 25(OH)D (vitamin D) and colorectal cancer risk. A meta-analysis indicated a 104% higher risk associated with serum 25(OH)D <30 nmol/L compared to >82 nmol/. 3
- Malignant melanoma kills around two thousand five hundred people a year in the UK.
- Colorectal cancer kills around seventeen thousand people a year in the UK.
This ratio of around one, to eight, is pretty much the same in most other countries. So, dear reader, which of these forms of cancer should you be more interested in preventing?
Simple sum here – assuming ‘best/worst case’ scenarios in either direction:
- Malignant melanoma kills 2,500 per year. If avoiding the sun prevented this completely, we could save 2,500 lives.
- Colorectal cancer (CRC) kills 17,500 per year. If avoiding the sun increases the risk of death by 104%, we have caused 18,200 excess deaths.
Would the figures change as dramatically as this? Almost certainly not, nowhere near. My figures represent a thought experiment. However, here is what Google AI informs me about colo-rectal cancer:
‘There’s a significant and concerning rise in bowel cancer among young people in the UK, with rates in those under 50 increasing by around 50% since the mid-1990s.’ This is a trend seen around the world. As for Australia. ‘Yes, there’s a significant and concerning rise in bowel cancer among young Australians (under 50), with Australia having the world’s highest rates for this age group.’
Highest rates of CRC in the country where sun exposure is dreaded more than any other? Has anyone even suggested sun exposure, or the lack of it, may play a role? Nope, complete and utter silence on the matter. Can’t even be mentioned, it seems.
Moving on from bowel cancer, I feel the need to make the point that the most significant impact on dying, if you avoid the sun, appears to be on heart disease. This kills 175,000 people each year in the UK. Reduce that number by one and half per-cent you will have saved as many lives as can possibly die of malignant melanoma. Logic, where art though?
How can the concern about one disease trump all others so completely? Primarily, I believe, it is because dermatologists have managed to gain dominance in the world of sun exposure, with their very simple message. ‘Sunshine damages the skin and causes skin cancer, and so it must be avoided at all costs.’
Focussing on one thing to the exclusion of all else is a cognitive bias known as the focusing effect/illusion. For a dermatologist malignant melanoma is their number one issue/disease. Any suggestion that the sun may be good for us is ruthlessly stomped on. ‘Your ideas are killing people’ is the normal line of attack – believe me, I know this line of attack well.
And the public have been convinced. And the medical profession has become convinced – as has almost everyone in the entire world. Try telling the average person that sun exposure is extremely good for you, and they look at you as if you were mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
I don’t find this type of concrete, straight line, focussed thinking, strange anymore. Over the years I have stumbled across many areas of medicine where bad ideas have taken hold, and simply cannot be shifted. Indeed, they only seem to strengthen under attack.
I have been banging on about saturated fat for decades. The evidence that saturated fat is bad for you has always been weak, to non-existent, to totally contradictory. Yet, and yet, the idea continues to hold sway over most of the population. With little sign that it is losing its grip. One day, perhaps, I can dream.
Salt … if there is any good evidence on this, it suggests that salt is good for you. But the idea that salt is harmful is also immovable, and unchanging. Evidence that it reduces life expectancy, there is none. And I mean … none.
So, what does it take to change thinking. If I knew how to sweep aside wrong ideas, I would have managed it by now. Disruptive science? Disruptive evidence? It is actually out there, but no-one pays much attention to it. In general, it is first mocked, then attacked, then dismissed.
Somehow, somehow, we have to think in different ways. I was going to say better ways, but that sounds a little on the elitest side. ‘I think better than you.’ When it comes to sunshine, it really isn’t difficult to change the thinking, is it?
I cannot find any evidence, anywhere, that it is anything other than extremely good for us. Ergo, hiding away from the sun is bad for us. One of the worst things we can possibly do, and it is also one of the easiest, and most pleasurable things, to rectify. Go out and sunbathe. [Yes, of course, I have to add, but do not burn. As if everyone in the world is a complete idiot that cannot understand even the simplest idea.]
But, but, but … instead, we have all been – made to be – terrified of skin cancer. A condition which kills very few people each year. It seems impossible to move the thinking beyond this barrier … bonkers. And very harmful indeed.
In my next blog on disruptive science, I will look again at sunshine, from a different perspective, including the question. Does it actually increase the risk of malignant melanoma?
1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/
2: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/14/5014 3: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379706004983
Congratulations On Your Diagnosis
A welcome letter
By Dr. Roger McFillin | Radically Genuine | January 12, 2026
Dear Valued Patient,
Welcome.
We’re so pleased you found us. Or rather, that we found you, though you may not remember exactly how it happened. Perhaps you mentioned sadness that lasted more than two weeks. Perhaps you admitted to worry. Perhaps a teacher noticed your child had too much energy, or not enough, or the wrong kind at the wrong time. No matter. You’re here now. That’s what counts.
First, let us assure you: this is not your fault. You have a condition. A real, medical condition, confirmed by a checklist, validated by a billing code, and now officially part of your permanent record. You’re not weak. You’re not broken. You’re sick. Doesn’t that feel better already?
We know you may have once believed that your suffering had meaning. That grief was love’s receipt. That anxiety was wisdom trying to speak. That your child’s wildness was life itself looking for room to move. We’ve heard all of this before. We’ve noted it in your file. It falls under “Resistance to Treatment” and “Poor Insight,” both of which, interestingly, are also symptoms. But here’s what science has discovered: feelings that persist are symptoms. Experiences that disrupt are disorders. And the body’s ancient signaling system, the one that kept your ancestors alive long enough to produce you? A chemical error. Fortunately, we now have chemicals to fix the chemicals. You’re welcome.
What You’ve Gained
As a member of our industry, you now have access to:
- A name for what’s wrong with you (selected from our current catalog)
- Medications clinically proven to reduce the intensity of being alive
- A support team who will monitor your progress toward feeling less
- Periodic check-ins to adjust dosage based on how much of yourself remains
You may notice some changes. Colors may seem less vivid. Music may stop reaching you the way it once did. Orgasms may become a memory you’re not sure you’re remembering correctly. These are signs the treatment is working. Please do not confuse returning aliveness for wellness. That feeling you had before, the one that brought you here, that was the disease.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long will I need treatment? Most patients require lifelong management. Think of it like insulin, except for your soul.
What if I feel worse? This is common. It means we haven’t found the right combination yet. Stay the course. There are many options. We can always add more.
What if I want to stop? We’d ask you to examine that impulse carefully. The desire to feel your feelings again is often a sign of relapse. Your brain has been corrected. Going back now would be like choosing disease.
Can I ever be cured? We don’t use that word. But with compliance, you can achieve something even better: symptom management with minimal breakthrough emotion.
Share Your Journey
Now that you have a diagnosis, it’s time to tell the world.
Post it. Pin it to your bio. Add it to your Instagram highlights. Change your Twitter handle. You are no longer just a person with a name. You are a person with a condition, and conditions deserve visibility.
Use the hashtags. Join the communities. Find your tribe. You’ll discover thousands of others just like you, sharing their medication selfies, their symptom lists, their before-and-after stories. You will be seen. You will be validated. Strangers will leave heart emojis beneath your pain. Isn’t that what healing looks like?
Don’t be shy. Vulnerability is currency now. The more you share, the more you belong. And if anyone questions your diagnosis, remember: that’s stigma. Block them. They are part of the problem.
Your disorder is your story. Your story is your brand. Your brand is your identity. And your identity, as we’ve discussed, is permanent.
So go ahead. Tell everyone. We’ll be here when you get back.
A Note on Gratitude
You’re lucky, you know. In another era, you might have been told to sit with it. To feel your way through. To let grief crack you open. To treat your anxiety as a messenger rather than a malfunction. You might have been surrounded by people instead of professionals. You might have been asked what happened to you rather than what’s wrong with you.
But you live now. And we have built an entire world to catch you. Billboards. Commercials. Sponsored content. Quizzes that always confirm what you already suspected. Doctors with ten minutes and a prescription pad. Pharmacies on every corner. A pipeline so smooth you’ll barely notice you’re inside it.
We’ve made it so easy. Your insurance covers it. Your employer encourages it. Your friends will understand. And someday, when you’re sitting in a room, feeling very little, wondering if something got lost along the way, you can comfort yourself with this: at least you weren’t difficult.
Welcome to the industry.
We’re so glad you’re ours.
Warmly,
The Psychiatric Industry
P.S. If this letter has stirred any strong feelings, please contact your provider immediately.
Lessons Learned from Thirty Years CT Heart Scans and Coronary Calcium Scores: The Role of Vitamin D
William Davis , MD | January 8, 2026
My 30+ years of involvement with CT heart scans and coronary calcium scores has yielded many important lessons on how to halt, then reverse, the accumulation of coronary atherosclerotic plaque and thereby risk for heart attack, need for heart procedures, and sudden cardiac death.
Here, I discuss the crucial importance of vitamin D and how, by addressing this issue, it was the first time I saw actual reductions in coronary calcium scores.
*Disclaimer:* The information presented in my books, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other content is for informational and educational purposes only. The content I share should not be interpreted as medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your personal physician or qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your diet, medication, lifestyle, or healthcare regimen. Your individual health needs should be evaluated by a professional who is familiar with your unique medical history.
My new book is Super Body: A 3-Week Program to Harness the New Science of Body Composition and Restore Your Youthful Contours Available on Amazon and other bookstores: https://www.amazon.com/SUPER-Body-Com…
If you are new to my microbiome discussions, see my Super Gut book that includes recipes for L. reuteri and SIBO Yogurts: https://www.amazon.com/Super-Gut-Four…
Also see my Revised & Expanded Wheat Belly book that contains the entire Wheat Belly program, all updated with new information, more recipes, more success stories. Available on Amazon and other bookstores: https://www.amazon.com/Wheat-Belly-Re…
span class=”yt-core-attributed-string yt-core-attributed-string–white-space-pre-wrap” dir=”auto”>About Dr. Davis:
Dr. Davis practiced conventional cardiology for 25 years but became discouraged with the predatory and exploitative practices of modern healthcare. He now devotes his efforts to helping people regain magnificent health without doctors or hospitals with results that are SUPERIOR to that obtained through conventional healthcare. His Wheat Belly books have sold 4 million copies in 40 countries.
We draw from the health information of the world, collaborate, share experiences, collect data, and show how to apply new health tools to achieve levels of health that you may have thought unattainable. We do all this at a time when conventional healthcare costs have become crippling.
In addition to the Wheat Belly, Undoctored, and Super Gut books, find more of Dr. Davis’ conversations at: Dr. Davis Infinite Health http://www.DrDavisInfiniteHealth.com
The 15 Most Devastating Truths About the PSA Screening Disaster
Lies are Unbekoming | October 26, 2025
The prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test has screened 30 million American men annually for over three decades. The man who discovered PSA in 1970, Richard Ablin, now calls mass screening “a public health disaster.” Two landmark 2012 studies found no survival benefit from radical surgery compared to watchful waiting. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force concluded PSA screening does more harm than good. Yet the $3 billion annual industry continues largely unabated.
These revelations emerge from three insider accounts: Ablin’s The Great Prostate Hoax, urologist Anthony Horan’s The Rise and Fall of the Prostate Cancer Scam, and oncologist Mark Scholz’s Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. Together they document how a test meant to monitor existing cancer patients became a screening juggernaut that has left millions of men incontinent, impotent, or dead from unnecessary treatment.
The numbers are staggering. Since 1987, when PSA screening exploded nationwide, over one million American men have undergone radical prostatectomies. Studies show 40 to 50 men must be diagnosed and treated to prevent one death from prostate cancer. The other 39 to 49 men receive no benefit but face permanent side effects. Medicare and the Veterans Administration fund most of this treatment, pouring billions into a system that prominent urologists privately acknowledge has failed.
What follows are the most damaging truths about how PSA screening became entrenched despite overwhelming evidence of harm, why it persists against scientific consensus, and what this reveals about American medicine’s inability to abandon lucrative practices even when they damage patients.
1. The Test’s Creator Calls It a “Public Health Disaster”
Richard Ablin discovered prostate-specific antigen in 1970 while researching cryosurgery’s effects on prostate tissue. He never intended PSA as a screening test for healthy men. The test cannot distinguish between the cancers that kill and those that remain harmless. Ablin has spent decades publicly denouncing mass screening, including a 2010 New York Times op-ed titled “The Great Prostate Mistake.”
Ablin compares PSA screening’s specificity to “a coin toss” – hardly the precision expected from a medical test that determines whether men undergo surgery or radiation. He testified before Congress, published papers, and gave countless lectures warning against screening’s misuse. The medical establishment ignored him. In his book, he writes that watching his discovery become “a hugely expensive public health disaster” has been “painful.” The man who found PSA receives angry emails from men whose lives were destroyed by unnecessary treatment triggered by elevated PSA levels.
2. 75% of Men with Elevated PSA Don’t Have Cancer
A PSA level above 4.0 triggers the treatment cascade, yet three-quarters of these men have no cancer. Infections, enlarged prostates, bicycle riding, and recent ejaculation all elevate PSA. The test measures inflammation as readily as malignancy. This 75% false positive rate means millions undergo invasive biopsies needlessly.
The Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial found that 15% of men with PSA under 4.0 – the “normal” range – actually had prostate cancer, including aggressive forms. Meanwhile, only 25% with elevated PSA had cancer at all. No blood test with such poor specificity would gain approval today. Yet once PSA became standard practice, removing it from clinical use proved impossible despite its fundamental unreliability.
3. The $3 Billion Annual PSA Gold Rush
PSA screening generates at least $3 billion annually, with Medicare and the Veterans Administration covering most costs. Each abnormal PSA triggers a cascade: repeat tests, biopsies, imaging, surgery or radiation, plus years of follow-up. A single radical prostatectomy bills $15,000 to $30,000. Radiation therapy can exceed $50,000. These procedures require expensive equipment, specialized facilities, and teams of providers.
Hospital systems depend on this revenue stream. Urology practices built business models around screening and treatment. Medical device companies profit from surgical robots, radiation equipment, and biopsy tools. This economic ecosystem resists evidence showing most treatment is unnecessary. When the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended against routine screening in 2012, medical associations mobilized massive lobbying efforts to preserve the status quo. Money, not medicine, drives the screening machine.
4. 30 Million Tests, 1 Million Unnecessary Biopsies Per Year
Annual PSA screening of 30 million American men triggers approximately one million prostate biopsies. Since most elevated PSAs are false positives, at least 750,000 of these biopsies find no cancer. Each biopsy involves 12 to 18 needle cores punched through the rectal wall into the prostate. Serious infections requiring hospitalization occur in 1-4% of cases. Sepsis can be fatal.
Even negative biopsies don’t end the cascade. Urologists often recommend repeat biopsies for persistently elevated PSA, subjecting men to multiple rounds of needles, infection risk, and anxiety. Some undergo four, five, even six biopsies chasing ghost cancers that either don’t exist or would never threaten their lives. The psychological toll – months of fear between tests, the dread of results, the pressure to “do something” – devastates men and families. This suffering serves no medical purpose for the vast majority subjected to it.
5. The “Arbitrary” 4.0 Cutoff That Changed Everything
The PSA threshold of 4.0 ng/mL that triggers intervention was, according to New York Times reporting, chosen “just sort of arbitrarily.” William Catalona’s influential 1991 New England Journal of Medicine article established this cutoff without reporting false positive rates – a basic requirement for screening tests. The entire world adopted this number uncritically.
No scientific process determined that 4.0 represented a meaningful boundary between health and disease. The number could have been 3.0 or 5.0 or 6.5. Each choice would have swept millions more or fewer men into the treatment vortex. This arbitrary threshold, selected without rigorous validation, has determined the fate of millions. Men with 4.1 undergo biopsies while those with 3.9 are deemed safe, though this 0.2 difference has no biological significance. A random number became medical dogma, and challenging it meant confronting an entire industry built on its foundation.
6. 2,600 Post-Surgery Deaths at the 1992 Peak
Radical prostatectomy deaths peaked at 2,600 in 1992, five years after PSA screening exploded nationally. These men died from surgical complications – bleeding, infections, blood clots, anesthesia reactions. They underwent surgery for cancers that, in most cases, would never have threatened their lives. The operation killed them before their cancer could.
Anthony Horan documents how radical surgery was “revived without new evidence” in the 1980s after being largely abandoned. The combination of PSA screening and renewed surgical enthusiasm created a perfect storm. Thousands died on operating tables for a disease that grows so slowly most men die with it, not from it. These deaths represent only immediate surgical mortality – not the men who died months later from complications, or whose lives were shortened by surgical trauma. Each death was preventable had screening not detected their harmless cancers.
7. Radical Surgery Shows No Survival Benefit Over Watchful Waiting
Two randomized controlled trials reported in 2012 found no difference in cancer-specific mortality between radical surgery and watchful waiting. The Prostate Cancer Intervention Versus Observation Trial (PIVOT) followed 731 men for up to 15 years. The Scandinavian trial tracked men for over 20 years. Both reached the same conclusion: surgery doesn’t save lives compared to monitoring.
These studies destroyed the rationale for early detection. If removing the entire prostate doesn’t extend life compared to doing nothing, then finding cancer early serves no purpose except to subject men to treatment side effects. The medical establishment largely ignored these findings. Surgery rates declined modestly but remained far higher than evidence justified. Mark Scholz writes that these studies should have “removed the rationale for early diagnosis with PSA” entirely. Instead, the industry adapted its messaging while continuing essentially unchanged.
8. The FDA Approval Based on 3.8% Detection Rate
The FDA approved PSA for screening in 1994 based primarily on a study showing it could detect 3.8% more cancers than digital rectal examination. This marginal improvement became justification for testing millions annually. The agency relied heavily on this single statistic while downplaying false positive rates and overdiagnosis risks.
Alexander Baumgarten, one of FDA’s own expert advisers, warned officials: “Like Pontius Pilate, you cannot wash the guilt off your hands.” Susan Alpert, who directed FDA’s Office of Device Evaluation during approval, later acknowledged the decision’s problems. The agency never required studies showing screening actually saved lives or improved quality of life. This regulatory failure, approving a test based on detection rates rather than patient outcomes, enabled the disaster that followed. The FDA has never revisited its decision despite overwhelming evidence of harm.
9. Prostate Cancer Grows So Slowly Most Men Die WITH It, Not FROM It
Autopsy studies reveal that 30% of men in their 40s and 70% in their 70s have prostate cancer cells. Most never knew and were never affected. The cancer’s typical growth rate means decades pass between initial cellular changes and potential lethality. A 65-year-old diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer has less than 3% chance of dying from it within 15 years if left untreated.
Men diagnosed at 75 almost certainly will die of something else first – heart disease, stroke, other cancers. Yet screening doesn’t discriminate by age or life expectancy. Elderly men in nursing homes receive PSA tests and undergo biopsies. Some receive radiation or surgery in their 80s for cancers that could never outlive them. This fundamental biological reality – that most prostate cancers are clinically insignificant – undermines screening’s entire premise. Finding these cancers serves only to transform healthy men into cancer patients unnecessarily.
10. The Biopsy Train: 18-Gauge Needles and Serious Infections
Modern prostate biopsy involves 12 to 18 hollow-bore needles, each 18-gauge in diameter, fired through the rectal wall. The needles extract tissue cores while potentially spreading bacteria from the bowel into the prostate and bloodstream. Fluoroquinolone-resistant bacteria have made infections increasingly dangerous. Some men develop sepsis requiring intensive care.
Richard Ablin receives emails from men describing their biopsy experiences as “spinning out of control,” having “panic attacks,” and living in a “nightmare.” The procedure’s violence – needles punching through tissue, the sound of the spring-loaded gun, blood in urine and semen for weeks – traumatizes men regardless of results. Those with negative biopsies face pressure to repeat the procedure if PSA remains elevated. Some endure annual biopsies for years, each carrying infection risk, each failing to find cancer that likely isn’t there or doesn’t matter. The biopsy itself becomes a recurring assault that serves no medical purpose.
11. Incontinence and Impotence: The “Acceptable” Side Effects
Radical prostatectomy leaves 20-30% of men with permanent urinary incontinence requiring pads or diapers. Erectile dysfunction affects 60-80%, depending on age and surgical technique. These rates come from centers of excellence; community hospitals report worse outcomes. Surgeons routinely minimize these risks, calling them “acceptable” trade-offs for cancer treatment.
For men whose cancers would never have threatened them – the majority who undergo surgery – these side effects represent pure harm. They lose sexual function and bladder control to treat a disease that required no treatment. Their marriages suffer. Depression is common. Some become recluses, afraid to leave home without knowing bathroom locations. The medical profession’s casual acceptance of these devastating outcomes reflects a stunning disregard for quality of life. No other medical specialty would tolerate routinely destroying normal function to treat non-threatening conditions.
12. PSA Isn’t Even Prostate-Specific
Despite its name, prostate-specific antigen isn’t specific to the prostate. Breast tissue produces PSA – it’s a normal component of breast milk. Salivary glands make it. Some lymphomas produce PSA. Women have measurable PSA levels. This basic biological fact undermines the test’s fundamental premise.
Anthony Horan notes he personally reported PSA production in B-cell lymphomas. The protein’s presence throughout the body means elevated levels can reflect numerous non-prostatic processes. Yet the medical establishment treats PSA as if it were a precise prostate cancer marker. This scientific sloppiness – naming and using a test based on false assumptions about specificity – exemplifies the intellectual bankruptcy underlying mass screening. If PSA were discovered today with current knowledge, it would never be approved for screening healthy men.
13. The Veterans Administration’s Role in the Screening Epidemic
The Veterans Administration extensively promoted and funded PSA screening, making it routine for millions of veterans. The VA’s electronic medical records prompted doctors to order PSA tests, created quality metrics based on screening rates, and facilitated the treatment cascade. Veterans, trusting their government healthcare, underwent screening at higher rates than the general population.
The VA spent billions on screening, biopsies, and treatment. Veterans suffered disproportionately from overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Many underwent surgery or radiation at VA hospitals with limited experience in these procedures, likely experiencing higher complication rates. The government that sent these men to war later subjected them to medical harm through systematic overscreening. Only after the 2012 USPSTF recommendation did the VA begin moderating its approach, too late for hundreds of thousands of veterans already harmed.
14. Why Urologists Can’t Stop Screening Despite the Evidence
Urologists understand the evidence against screening yet continue promoting it. Professional self-interest explains this cognitive dissonance. Prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment represent major revenue sources for urology practices. Academic urologists depend on prostate cancer research grants. Professional status derives from surgical volume and technical expertise in procedures that shouldn’t be performed.
Mark Scholz describes the “surgeon personality” that sees every problem as requiring surgical solution. Urologists train for years to perform radical prostatectomies. Abandoning these procedures means acknowledging that much of their training and practice caused unnecessary harm. The psychological and economic barriers to accepting screening’s failure prove insurmountable. Even urologists who privately acknowledge the problem continue participating in the system. Professional conferences feature token debates about screening while exhibit halls showcase million-dollar surgical robots. The specialty cannot reform itself when its economic survival depends on perpetuating harm.
15. Active Surveillance Works for 99% of Low-Risk Cases
Multiple studies demonstrate that active surveillance – monitoring without immediate treatment – works for virtually all low-risk prostate cancers. Memorial Sloan Kettering reported that fewer than 1% of men on surveillance die from prostate cancer over 15 years. Johns Hopkins found similar results. These men avoid treatment side effects while maintaining the option to treat if their cancer progresses.
Despite this evidence, most men with low-risk disease still receive immediate treatment. Doctors present surveillance as “doing nothing” rather than an active management strategy. Patients fear leaving cancer untreated, not understanding their cancer’s indolent nature. The medical system’s financial incentives favor treatment over monitoring. Each patient choosing surveillance represents lost revenue. This proven alternative that could spare hundreds of thousands from unnecessary treatment remains underutilized because it threatens the economic foundation of prostate cancer care.
Conclusion
The PSA screening disaster exposes American medicine’s darkest impulses: the primacy of profit over patient welfare, the persistence of harmful practices despite overwhelming evidence, and the medical establishment’s inability to acknowledge error. Thirty years of mass screening has transformed millions of healthy men into cancer patients unnecessarily, subjecting them to treatments that left many incontinent, impotent, or dead.
The men who exposed this scandal from within – Richard Ablin who discovered PSA, Anthony Horan who practiced urology during screening’s rise, Mark Scholz who treats screening’s victims – deserve recognition for their courage in challenging their profession’s orthodoxy. Their accounts reveal not isolated mistakes but systematic failure: arbitrary thresholds adopted without validation, regulatory approval based on minimal evidence, and an entire medical specialty economically dependent on perpetuating harm. Until American medicine can abandon lucrative practices that damage patients, the PSA disaster will repeat in other forms, with other tests, harming other victims who trusted their doctors to first do no harm.
References
Ablin, Richard J., with Ronald Piana. The Great Prostate Hoax: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Horan, Anthony H. The Rise and Fall of the Prostate Cancer Scam. 3rd ed. Broomfield, CO: On the Write Path Publishing, 2019.
Scholz, Mark, and Ralph H. Blum. Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: An Essential Guide to Managing Prostate Cancer for Patients and Their Families. Revised ed. New York: Other Press, 2021.
FLU FEAR VS. FLU FACTS
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | January 8, 2026
Alarmist media coverage and public health messaging have branded this season’s flu a so-called “super flu,” but surveillance data from both the U.K. and the U.S. tell a more measured story. While reports of influenza-like illness (ILI) have risen—as they typically do during winter—rates of laboratory-confirmed influenza remain within normal seasonal levels. The distinction is often blurred in headlines, with ILI frequently conflated with confirmed flu infections. Even public health officials acknowledge these limitations, along with the well-documented constraints of flu vaccine effectiveness, raising questions about whether the current narrative reflects the data.
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From the Archives
The United States and Human Trafficking
By Vladimir Danilov – New Eastern Outlook – 11.10.2020
In the beginning of October, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order about imposing sanctions on countries that, in Washington’s opinion, “do not put forth sufficient efforts to combat human trafficking”. The list of countries put together by Washington specifically includes Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and the DPRK. In addition, US representatives in the IMF and multilateral banks have been ordered to vote against certain projects in which funds will be provided to Russia, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Syria, and several other countries. … continue
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