The anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 did more than frighten Americans — they helped create the legal, regulatory and biosecurity framework that later enabled the government’s response to COVID-19, according to Dr. Meryl Nass.
Speaking at the Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later conference last week in New York City, Nass drew a direct line between the anthrax letters of 2001 and the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s worth thinking about the similarities between the COVID experience and the anthrax letters because it seems that both were inside jobs planned by the same cabal for the same purpose,” Nass said.
Nass, an internal medicine physician who has conducted extensive research on biological warfare and anthrax, outlined what she sees as striking parallels between the two events.
“Each had an uncanny, scripted simulation preceding it,” she said, pointing to the Dark Winter tabletop exercise in 2001 and Event 201, a pandemic simulation, in 2019.
“Each was blamed on countries the U.S. government had already targeted,” Nass said. The anthrax attacks were initially blamed on Iraq while COVID-19 was blamed on China.
“A huge, expensive biodefense gravy train resulted after each of them,” she said.
Both events were also accompanied by “a massive amount of false narrative construction and control of the media to project the false narratives.” And neither received a serious investigation into who perpetrated the event, according to Nass.
In addition, both crises “led to a mushrooming of the surveillance state,” Nass said.
‘We got fear propaganda pumped out 24/7’
The anthrax letters began arriving in the weeks after 9/11, as Americans were already on edge. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to media outlets and government offices, killing five people and infecting another 17.
Nass said the attacks opened a new public-health pathway that ultimately led toward “a surveilled, totalitarian and technocratic state.”
“As the hysteria from 9/11 wound down, the anthrax letters appeared and we got fear propaganda pumped out 24/7,” Nass said.
She highlighted several consequences that followed the anthrax crisis, including a continuing fear of contagion, repeated pandemic scares, billions of dollars in biodefense spending, a growing emphasis on vaccines and looser regulations governing medical products.
The pattern has repeated itself again and again, she said. “How many ginned-up pandemics can they pull off?”
Nass listed 11 disease threats that she said major media outlets “tried to scare us with” during the 25 years since 9/11: SARS-1, H5N1 avian flu, Zika, swine flu, three types of Ebola, Marburg, SARS-2, monkeypox and hantavirus.
She also pointed to the dramatic growth in government biodefense spending.
“We were spending less than a billion dollars on biodefense before the anthrax letters,” she said. “In the decade following, we went to $6 billion to $7 billion a year. And then in the decade after that, we went to $10 billion to $11 billion a year.”
During the Biden administration, officials were seeking nearly $20 billion a year for biodefense, she said.
‘Congress went crazy … expanding liability shields’ for drug manufacturers
Nass said one of the most consequential changes came through federal laws that made it easier to deploy medical products during national emergencies while shielding manufacturers from liability.
“After the anthrax letters, Congress went crazy legalizing the use of unlicensed pharmaceuticals and expanding liability shields for them,” she said.
The Project BioShield Act of 2004 created the framework for emergency use authorizations and provided billions of dollars for vaccines and drugs intended for pandemics and biological warfare.
Nass said an unlicensed drug or vaccine could be used during a national security emergency if public health officials thought “it was more likely than not that it would be useful.”
“So a very low bar to start using unlicensed drugs and vaccines,” she said.
According to Nass, these changes were critical during COVID-19 because they created a system for rapidly deploying medical products while eliminating manufacturers’ legal risks.
“The PREP Act … legalized the use of liability-free vaccines and drugs that might or might not be licensed,” she said.
She also criticized the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016, which protected manufacturers from legal claims for vaccines recommended to pregnant women.
“The nastiest thing was to remove liability for all vaccines that are recommended during pregnancy,” Nass said. “So if anything happens to the fetus or to the pregnant mother, there is no liability.”
‘Biosecurity agenda is not actually about protecting the public’
Nass said the post-anthrax expansion of biodefense eventually evolved into a broader global biosecurity agenda.
She pointed to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, which was established to accelerate the development of vaccines and other countermeasures against pandemic threats.
CEPI’s goal of making vaccines available within 100 days represented a dramatic departure from the traditional development timeline, Nass said.
“It normally took 10 years or more by the time a vaccine could be rolled out for use,” she said. “But all of that was going to be thrown in the trash.”
To achieve that speed, countries around the globe would need to loosen regulatory requirements and establish liability protections, according to Nass.
“CEPI was working on all of that,” she said. “Trying to get … the [World Health Organization] WHO involved, which would then sort of produce its own guarantees or licenses for drugs and vaccines and would use very minimal … regulatory standards. And then they would try to impose these WHO standards on all the other countries.”
Nass said the same approach helped create the conditions for the COVID-19 response, which included developing, authorizing and deploying vaccines and other medical products at unprecedented speed.
Nass also challenged the premise behind the pandemic-preparedness system — that governments must develop products in advance for unknown future threats.
“What will we face? We don’t know,” Nass said. “But we have to start making products anyway, even though we don’t know what we need.”
She argued that repurposed drugs could be deployed more quickly during a respiratory pandemic — but said governments and the WHO suppressed them because they offered fewer financial opportunities.
“There’s no money to be made from them,” Nass said. “And this tells me that the biosecurity agenda is not actually about protecting the public, but it is about protecting the industry and government.”
Anthrax case involved ‘creating a lurid … narrative and repeating it over and over’
Nass also challenged the official account of who carried out the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The FBI concluded in 2008 that Dr. Bruce Ivins was responsible. Ivins died by suicide three days before the FBI’s announcement, after the bureau said it planned to pursue him as the perpetrator and seek the death penalty, according to Nass.
Nass, who knew Ivins, said the case against him was never adequately established. “The case is unsolved, although the FBI would like you to believe otherwise.”
Nass said the FBI focused on Ivins despite what she described as substantial evidence pointing elsewhere.
“The FBI had publicly chased [seven other scientists] in their search to find a patsy that they could pin the case on,” she said.
The National Academy of Sciences later concluded that the available scientific evidence could not establish the origin of the anthrax spores in the mailed letters. Nass said that finding undermined the FBI’s conclusion.
Nass posted a blog in 2010 with more than 20 reasons why Ivins could not have been responsible and “how the FBI had deliberately fudged the case.”
“By creating a lurid Ivins narrative and repeating it over and over and over, most Americans still wrongly think the case was solved, and Ivins did it,” Nass said.
A similar strategy unfolded during COVID-19, when officials and media repeatedly promoted narratives about the virus, its origins and the appropriate public-health response, according to Nass.
Global biosecurity initiative ‘a very, very lucrative and special industry’
Nass said she sees the anthrax attacks as the starting point for a system that ultimately made the COVID-19 response possible.
She warned that expanding international biosecurity programs could bring more surveillance, emergency powers, vaccine mandates and centralized control over public health.
The potential scale is enormous, Nass said. She cited estimates that a globally coordinated biosecurity initiative, such as the proposed WHO BioHub System, could cost $30 billion to $40 billion a year.
The proposed system would facilitate the sharing of biological materials with “epidemic or pandemic potential,” according to the WHO website.
She also described biodefense as an unusually lucrative industry because governments determine what products are needed and they shield manufacturers from liability.
“There are no standards or rules,” Nass said. “Nobody knows what products you need, what vaccines or drugs, what tests … how many doses … how many gowns, how many masks or gloves.”
Nass said manufacturers simply persuade government officials to fund their products.
“You get a contract. You can charge almost what you want. You’re almost certain to be granted a liability shield,” she said.
That system makes biodefense “a very, very lucrative and special industry.”
Nass urged the audience to resist efforts to give international organizations greater control over health emergencies, and oppose the creation of global pathogen-lending libraries and press Congress to end emergency-use and liability protections.
“Ending those liability shields is the most critical thing we can do,” she said.
The legal and regulatory changes that followed the anthrax attacks created tools that were later used during COVID-19. Those tools need to be dismantled “so we, the people, will be saved from junk drugs and vaccines and maybe deliberately dangerous drugs and vaccines,” Nass said.
“And we should never again allow the government or WHO to control the medical care that you receive,” she said. “We’ve already been there once.”
On September 10, 2026, Algeria announced the severance of diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE ambassador was given 48 hours to leave the country, and as of September 11, Algerian airspace was closed to all Emirati aircraft. The official reason was “provocative and hostile actions” by Abu Dhabi. Behind that phrasing, however, lies a conflict that had been smoldering for decades—and in which one of the key roles was played by… France.
The Emirates Chose a Side—and It Wasn’t Algeria
At the heart of the Algerian-Emirati confrontation lies the Western Sahara question. The UAE became the first Arab country to open a consulate general in El Aaiun—a city in the Moroccan-controlled territory of Western Sahara. Moreover, in December 2020, the Emirati-Moroccan venture Dahamco received approval for a $25 billion green hydrogen and ammonia project at the port of Dakhla—also in disputed Western Sahara. Abu Dhabi plans to build a “Dubai of Africa” on the territory’s southern Atlantic coast. For Algeria, which supports the Polisario Front and demands self-determination for the Sahrawi people, every Emirati investment in Western Sahara is not economics but geopolitics. Abu Dhabi converts capital into influence, and Algeria understands this perfectly.
Notably, Emirati investments in the disputed territories are not limited to a single project. According to Western Sahara Resource Watch, in 2025–2026 Morocco concluded a series of agreements reserving land for green hydrogen projects with several foreign companies. Among them is a consortium of TAQA (UAE) and Moeve (Spain), which received a plot in Dakhla, as well as the ORNX consortium (US, Spain, Germany), which was allocated a plot in El Aaiun for a $4.5 billion green ammonia project. All these projects are being implemented in territory the UN recognizes as non-self-governing, and Morocco as an occupying power that has no legal right to dispose of its lands and resources without the consent of the Sahrawi people.
The Abraham Accords: The Deal That Broke Everything
In 2020, the Trump administration proposed a deal to Morocco: normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for the US administration’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. The UAE joined the same Abraham Accords—and gained expanded access to American weapons and technology. Thus an informal alliance took shape: Morocco—UAE—Israel—US. Algeria found itself encircled. And here the key role was played not by Trump and not by Netanyahu.
For Abu Dhabi, the Abraham Accords became not just a diplomatic gesture but an instrument of strategic rapprochement with Washington. As analysts note, for the UAE these accords fit into a broader strategy of consolidating partnership with the US, deepening long-standing relations with Israel, and gaining access to advanced technologies, including AI chips. Support for Moroccan claims to Western Sahara became a bargaining chip for Abu Dhabi in this great game—a price paid by the Sahrawi people.
France: Architect of the Colonial Status Quo
France is a former colonial power in both Morocco and Algeria. It was Paris that for decades blocked any UN attempts to advance a referendum on self-determination for Western Sahara. As a permanent member of the Security Council, France used its veto power and diplomatic pressure to prevent meaningful progress on the issue. The Polisario Front’s representative in France, Mohamed Ali Zerouali, stated directly: “France’s responsibility for the tragedy experienced by the Sahrawi people is above all political and historical. Since Spain’s withdrawal in 1975 and the illegal Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, France has systematically supported this occupation.”
This position did not go unnoticed at the highest international level either. In August 2024, the Polisario Front officially excluded France from all international efforts to decolonize Western Sahara, including its participation in the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). Sahrawi coordinator with MINURSO Sidi Mohamed Omar stated directly: “Since 1975, France has taken a hostile position toward our people, vetoing all resolutions that were not in Morocco’s favor and against the referendum and self-determination of the Sahrawi people.”
But Paris dealt the real blow in July 2024. In a letter to King Mohammed VI of Morocco, Emmanuel Macron stated: “For France, the present and future of Western Sahara lie within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.” In October 2024, he repeated this personally in the Moroccan parliament: “For France, the present and future of this territory are under Moroccan sovereignty.” Algeria immediately recalled its ambassador from Paris. The Algerian Foreign Ministry called the decision “unexpected, untimely, and counterproductive,” and said the French government bore “sole and full responsibility” for the consequences.
Algeria’s reaction was not only diplomatic. In October 2024, Algeria closed its airspace to French aircraft and refused to buy French wheat—a signal that Paris would pay an economic price for its position. In its statement, the Algerian parliament called the French decision a “deviation and a risk,” emphasizing that it “represents a scandalous rejection by France of UN resolutions and advisory opinions of its bodies” and is “direct legitimization of occupation against a founding state of the African Union.”
Zerouali characterized Paris’s position as a “policy of double standards”: “We expect France not to choose between two peoples, but to make a choice between law and occupation.” Even after the resumption of French-Algerian dialogue in 2025, Paris did not change its position. In April 2025, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot again confirmed support for Moroccan sovereignty, and in October 2025 France officially stated in the UN Security Council that “the present and future of Western Sahara lie within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.”
The UAE Is Merely a Tool in Paris’s Hands
Algeria’s rupture with the UAE is not a conflict between two Arab states. It is a consequence of a deal that Paris was the first to approve. France was the first Western power to officially recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. It supported Morocco’s autonomy plan as the “only basis” for resolving the conflict. After that, the UAE, Israel, and the US merely picked up the signal. If France had not legitimized Moroccan claims at the highest diplomatic level, there would have been no Emirati consulate in El Aaiun, no $25 billion projects in Dakhla, and no rupture in 2026.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly emphasized: “More relevant than ever is finding a just, durable, and mutually acceptable political solution that would ensure the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara.” France, with its veto power in the Security Council, ignored this position for decades.
Paris, Stop Hiding Behind Other People’s Backs!
The rupture in Algerian-Emirati relations is not about Abu Dhabi. It is about Paris, which, after leaving Algeria in 1962, never abandoned the habit of deciding the fate of North Africa from the Élysée Palace. France created the legal and diplomatic basis for Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara—and thereby launched a chain reaction that today is tearing the region apart. The UAE merely took advantage of the fruits of French diplomacy. Algeria is paying the price for the French deal. And the Sahrawi people—for French silence.
As Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune put it, “when a people demands independence, its will must be respected.” France has been hearing these words for fifty years. It is time to answer.
Muhammad ibn Faisal al-Rashid is a political analyst and expert on the Arab world
Mothers of newborns are being told by pediatricians, every week, that their infants are allergic to their breast milk. They are instructed to stop breastfeeding and switch to specialized formulas costing tens of dollars a week. The claim is biologically implausible, and the mainstream medical literature, when examined, confirms that it is false in more than 99 percent of cases.
This essay operates in two registers. When examining what the establishment has documented in its own journals, its own guidelines, its own prescribing trends, and its own funding structures, I use its own vocabulary: “allergy,” “immune reaction,” “IgE-mediated.” That language belongs to the framework being examined. When describing what is actually happening in the infants being labeled, and what the mother’s body actually produces, the writing shifts into the terrain paradigm. The purpose is to let the mainstream literature do the work of demolishing its own diagnosis, and then to explain, in accurate language, what the mother’s intuition has been telling her all along.
In the Office
She has been awake since three, or since two, or since not sleeping at all. The baby cried for most of it, arched his back, spat up twice, passed a stool the color of split-pea soup that alarmed her more than she wants to admit. The waiting room smells of antiseptic and the coffee cart in the lobby. When the nurse calls her name, she stands too quickly and has to steady herself against the arm of the chair.
The pediatrician is kind. He asks how long the crying has been going on, whether the spit-up is forceful or a dribble, whether there is blood in the diapers. She nods at each question the way you nod when you’re not sure what the right answer is. He examines the baby. He types.
“It sounds like milk protein allergy,” he says. “We see this a lot. Very common.”
He hands her a printed sheet. He writes a prescription. He explains that she will need to stop eating dairy, or possibly stop breastfeeding altogether, and that the baby will need a special formula from the pharmacy that will be partially covered by her insurance. He is warm, unhurried, professional. She trusts him.
She leaves the office holding the prescription in one hand and the baby in the other. Something in her chest will not settle. The doctor said her milk was hurting her baby. She had not known this was possible. She had assumed, without ever thinking about it, that her body knew what it was doing.
The something in her chest was right.
Micrograms Per Liter
The concentration of beta-lactoglobulin, the cow’s milk protein most commonly cited as the trigger for “milk allergy” in breastfed infants, is present in a dairy-consuming mother’s breast milk at concentrations measured in a few micrograms per liter. Researchers at Imperial College London and Sechenov University in Moscow, using the pharmacokinetic data from published cases of children with genuine reactions, calculated that this amount is too low to trigger a reaction in more than 99 percent of children with a laboratory-confirmed cow’s milk allergy. The paper appeared in JAMA Pediatrics in 2020, authored by Munblit, Perkin, Palmer, Allen, and Boyle.¹
The finding is not obscure. It is not from a fringe journal or a suppressed preprint. It is in the most-cited pediatric journal in the world, from an author group at one of the most-cited medical schools in the world, published five years ago, never retracted.
Every week, in clinics across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, mothers are being told the opposite. They are told that their infants have cow’s milk protein allergy (CMPA), that their breast milk is the vector, and that they must switch to a hydrolyzed or amino acid formula priced at three to five times the cost of standard formula. Their confidence in their own bodies is dismantled in the space of a fifteen-minute appointment. The prescription is written before they leave the office.
The gap between what the mainstream literature says and what mainstream clinicians do is the mechanism by which a fifty-billion-dollar global formula industry has extended its reach into the lives of exclusively breastfed infants, using a diagnostic category whose criteria capture the ordinary behavior of the newborn.
One in a Hundred, One in Seven
The Munblit team analyzed nine official CMPA guidelines published between 2012 and 2019, drawn from medical organizations across Europe, North America, and Australasia. The actual laboratory-confirmed prevalence of cow’s milk allergy in infancy is approximately 1 percent.¹ In exclusively breastfed infants, the rate is lower still, estimated at less than 0.5 percent.² The proportion of families who now believe their infant has cow’s milk allergy runs as high as 14 percent.¹
Fourteen times the actual rate. Closer to thirty times the rate for the breastfed babies who are being diagnosed most enthusiastically.
The guidelines list, as indications of possible cow’s milk allergy: excessive crying, regurgitating milk, loose or blood-streaked stools, mild eczema, gassiness, disrupted sleep, fussiness during or after feeds.
Infant colic (unexplained crying with no identifiable medical cause, resolving spontaneously between four and five months) affects between 20 and 30 percent of all healthy infants.³ Spit-up occurs in the majority of infants under six months. Vomiting, crying, and mild eczema each affect 15 to 20 percent of babies in the first year.¹ Gassiness, disrupted sleep, and fussiness are close to universal in the newborn period.
Dr. Chris van Tulleken, writing in the British Medical Journal in 2018, put it plainly: “Virtually every single infant could potentially be diagnosed using these symptoms.”⁴
The non-IgE-mediated form of cow’s milk allergy, which is the type overwhelmingly diagnosed in breastfed infants, has no confirmatory laboratory test. The diagnosis is made by asking the mother to eliminate all dairy from her diet for two to four weeks and observe whether the infant’s symptoms improve. Since infant colic resolves spontaneously by the time most elimination trials conclude, and since parental confirmation bias in observing subjective infant symptoms is well documented, this procedure produces positive results whether the underlying allergy exists or not.
The reintroduction step (do the symptoms return when the food is reintroduced?) is the actual diagnostic test. It is skipped in the majority of primary-care cases. Once a mother has been told her milk is the problem, she is reluctant to challenge that finding by feeding her baby the food that supposedly hurt her.
Why would a diagnostic category composed of base-rate symptoms, resting on no confirmatory test, and requiring no completed challenge for confirmation, be codified into international guidelines and disseminated to pediatricians worldwide? The question has an answer. It is not a medical one.
The Trojan Horse
Before 1950, cow’s milk protein allergy in infants was rarely diagnosed. This is not the observation of a heterodox writer. It is the opening line of a 2022 case report published in Frontiers in Pediatrics.⁵ The product came before the diagnosis.
Nutramigen, the first extensively hydrolyzed formula, was introduced by Mead Johnson in 1942 for the rare cases of severe, laboratory-confirmed cow’s milk allergy in formula-fed infants.⁶ It remained a small-volume, narrow-indication product for the next fifty years. Neocate, the first amino acid formula, was developed by SHS in the United Kingdom in 1992 and received FDA approval for infants in the United States in 1995.⁷ Nutramigen with LGG (a probiotic-added reformulation) launched in Europe in 2003. Enfamil Gentlease LIPIL, a partially hydrolyzed formula marketed explicitly for “gas and fussiness,” launched in the United States in 2005.⁶ The DRACMA international guideline for cow’s milk allergy management appeared in 2010. The MAP guideline for UK general practice followed in 2013.
The products were in the market for a decade or more before the guidelines that would drive their mass prescription were written.
In December 2018, Chris van Tulleken published an investigation in the BMJ titled “Overdiagnosis and industry influence: how cow’s milk protein allergy is extending the reach of infant formula manufacturers.”⁴ He examined the funding structures behind the guidelines. The findings, later corroborated and quantitatively extended by the Munblit team’s JAMA Pediatrics review:
Three of the nine guidelines examined were directly funded by infant formula manufacturers or their marketing consultancies.¹
More than 80 percent of guideline authors had declared conflicts of interest with formula companies, including consultancy fees, research grants, speaking honoraria, and advisory board positions with Nestlé, Danone-Nutricia, Abbott Nutrition, and Reckitt (formerly Mead Johnson), or with the marketing agencies that represent them.¹
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the Royal College of General Practitioners in the United Kingdom accepted financial support from formula manufacturers for educational programming on infant nutrition and allergy.⁴
The Milk Allergy in Primary Care (MAP) guideline, adopted widely in UK general practice, was developed with formula-industry funding, and its authors had industry ties.⁴
Public-facing websites offering “symptom checkers” and information about cow’s milk protein allergy in babies (the same sites mothers land on when they type their infant’s fussy behavior into Google at two in the morning) are funded by Danone-Nutricia (cowsmilkallergy.co.uk among others) and by other manufacturers.⁴
Fiona Godlee, then editor-in-chief of the BMJ, wrote in an accompanying editorial: “The growth in prevalence of CMPA has all the hallmarks of overdiagnosis fuelled by commercial interests.”⁸
What followed was predictable. Between 2006 and 2016, prescriptions of specialist formulas for suspected CMPA in the UK NHS rose from 105,029 per year to more than 600,000 per year, a nearly 500 percent increase.⁴ NHS spending on these products rose from £8.1 million to more than £60 million annually, an increase of nearly 700 percent.⁴ The 2022 Mehta analysis in Clinical and Experimental Allergy confirmed the pattern across three countries: prescribed volumes rose 2.8-fold in England (2007-2018), 2.2-fold in Norway (2009-2020), and 3.2-fold in Australia (2001-2012).⁹ By 2020, total prescribed volumes were 9.7 to 12.6 times greater than a true 1 percent CMPA prevalence would predict in England, and 8.3 to 15.6 times greater than expected in Norway.⁹
The global infant formula market is now valued at more than fifty billion dollars annually. Specialized “hypoallergenic” formulas sell at three to five times the price of standard cow’s milk formula. Every mother persuaded to switch from breastfeeding to one of these products represents lifetime revenue of several thousand dollars per infant, plus the network effect of a mother who did not breastfeed being statistically less likely to breastfeed her next child.
This pattern has run before, with a different product. Soy formula prescriptions in England exceeded expected volumes by 5.5 to 6.4-fold in 1994, driven by the same diagnostic vagueness and the same commercial promotion.⁹ Public health concerns then emerged about the phytoestrogen content of soy-based infant formula and its effects on infant endocrine development. Soy formula prescribing declined. The industry pivoted to the next product category. The extensively hydrolyzed and amino acid formulas that dominate CMPA prescribing today are the second act of a pattern whose first act ended in the phytoestrogen concern of the late 1990s.
Van Tulleken called CMPA a “Trojan horse” for the formula industry to establish relationships with pediatric clinicians and to insert its products into the lives of families whose infants would have thrived without them.⁴
The BMJ’s own editor, in her own journal, describing her own journal’s investigation: “hallmarks of overdiagnosis fuelled by commercial interests.”⁸
What They Are Actually Selling
The mother who accepts the diagnosis is handed a prescription for one of the following products, sold under names chosen to sound medical, precise, and safe.
Nutramigen (Reckitt / Mead Johnson). Extensively hydrolyzed casein formula. Corn syrup solids as the primary carbohydrate source. Palm olein, soy oil, coconut oil, and high-oleic sunflower oil as the fat blend. A premix of synthesized vitamins and minerals.
Alimentum (Abbott). Extensively hydrolyzed casein formula. Sucrose (table sugar) or modified tapioca starch as carbohydrate source, depending on formulation. Vegetable oil blend. Synthesized nutrient package.
Neocate (Danone-Nutricia). Amino acid formula. No intact protein at all. The “protein” component is a laboratory-synthesized mixture of free amino acids. Carbohydrate is corn syrup solids. Fat is a refined vegetable oil blend.
EleCare (Abbott) and PurAmino (Reckitt). Additional amino acid formulas. Similar composition, similar price, similar dependence on corn syrup solids as the primary carbohydrate.
A significant portion of the caloric content of these “specialized formulas” comes from free sugars: sucrose, glucose, dextrose, corn syrup solids, or maltodextrin. The 2022 Mehta paper flagged the contribution of specialized formula to free sugars consumption in young children as a public health concern.⁹ A 2022 European Food Safety Authority review of tolerable upper intake levels for dietary sugars in infants and young children raised the same concern in more detail.¹⁰
The mother who follows the pediatrician’s instruction is doing the following. She is stopping the flow of her own colostrum and mature milk, a living substance containing her hormones, her stem cells, her leukocytes, her tailored oligosaccharides, and hundreds of biologically active compounds calibrated in real time to her infant’s needs. She is replacing it with a mixture of hydrolyzed dairy fragments or synthesized amino acids, refined vegetable oils, corn syrup, and industrial vitamin and mineral premixes.
She is told the substitution will help her baby. She is not told what she is substituting.
What Is Actually Happening in These Infants
A minority of infants labeled with cow’s milk protein allergy do have real symptoms. The argument is not that every diagnosis is invented from thin air. The argument is that the diagnosis systematically obscures what is actually producing the symptoms in the infants whose distress is real.
Several documented pathways account for the phenomenon that mainstream medicine folds under the CMPA label. None of them locate the cause in the mother’s milk.
Intrapartum antibiotics. In the United States, roughly 25 to 30 percent of laboring women receive intravenous antibiotics during labor as part of the Group B Streptococcus (GBS) prophylaxis protocol. The typical regimen is two or three doses of penicillin or ampicillin over the hours preceding delivery. The infant is born having received these antibiotics across the placenta and, in the case of vaginal birth, encounters an antibiotic-suppressed birth canal.
The consequence for the infant’s gut is predictable. The microbial succession that normally establishes itself in the first days of life (Bifidobacterium infantis colonizing first and drawing on the specific oligosaccharides in colostrum, followed by the broader commensal community) is disrupted. Infants born to mothers who received intrapartum antibiotics show measurably different gut microbiome profiles at one month, six months, and one year of age.
When such an infant develops loose stools, blood-streaked mucous, or eczema in the first weeks of life, the mother is not told that her infant’s gut is trying to recover from prophylactic penicillin. She is told her infant has a milk protein allergy.
Cesarean delivery. Roughly 32 percent of American infants are delivered by cesarean section. These infants do not pass through the birth canal and do not receive the maternal microbial inoculum that vaginal birth provides. Their initial gut colonization is dominated by skin flora and hospital-environment organisms rather than by maternal Bifidobacterium and Bacteroides. Cesarean-delivered infants have higher rates of what mainstream medicine labels “atopy,” meaning eczema, food sensitivities, and asthma later in childhood. Some proportion of the CMPA diagnoses in breastfed infants are, in mechanistic terms, the downstream consequence of a compromised establishment of gut microbial ecology after cesarean birth.
Injection-induced sensitization. Charles Richet was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on anaphylaxis. He demonstrated that the injection of a foreign protein, bypassing the digestive tract, creates heightened responsiveness on subsequent oral exposure. The oral-tolerance mechanisms that normally teach the body to tolerate ingested proteins do not operate on injected proteins.
Newborns in the United States receive, within their first hours and days of life, the hepatitis B vaccine, containing aluminum hydroxide adjuvant. Aluminum provokes strong sensitization reactions, and a fraction of injected aluminum remains in body tissues indefinitely.
Newborns also receive the vitamin K1 injection, formulated in polyethoxylated castor seed oil (Aquamephyton, Merck) or in lecithin derived from soy and egg (Konakion MM, Roche). The injection acts as a slow-release depot, dispersing its contents into the infant’s tissues over roughly two months. Castor and soy are legumes and share protein epitopes with peanut. Fraser cites a 1987 Plant Physiology study demonstrating cross-reactive binding between castor seed proteins and peanut proteins of similar molecular weight.¹¹
Heather Fraser’s The Peanut Allergy Epidemic documented the sensitization mechanism in painstaking detail.¹¹ The same mechanism operates for cow’s milk proteins, which are present as contaminants and process residues in various injected preparations and which cross-react with related bovine proteins used in vaccine growth media. An infant sensitized to cow’s milk proteins through an injected route, subsequently exposed to trace amounts through maternal diet, may indeed produce a reaction. The reaction is not to breast milk. It is to a prior injection-induced sensitization, later triggered by an oral exposure the infant’s body has been conditioned to attack.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the CDC’s own passive surveillance database, allows the pattern to be checked directly. As of August 2026, VAERS contains 135 reports of “milk allergy” developing in infants and children following vaccination.¹² The temporal association is striking. In 57.8 percent of the reports, the milk allergy developed within 30 days of the vaccination. In 54.1 percent, within 14 days. In 48.9 percent, within 2 days. In 31.9 percent, the onset was recorded as day 0, the same day as the shot.¹²
The vaccines most frequently reported are the ones administered on the standard 2-month, 4-month, and 6-month infant schedule: RotaTeq, the live oral rotavirus vaccine (a human-bovine reassortant strain grown in bovine cell lines, associated with 20.0 percent of the reports), DTaP (17.8 percent), the Haemophilus B conjugate vaccine (16.3 percent), the hepatitis B vaccine (11.9 percent), pneumococcal 13-valent conjugate vaccine (11.9 percent), and inactivated polio vaccine (9.6 percent).¹² The single most-reported vaccine is bovine-derived. The alleged allergen the infants are then diagnosed with is bovine-derived. Same category of protein.
VAERS is a passive reporting system. A 2010 study commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and conducted by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care found that “fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events are reported.”¹³ The 135 milk-allergy reports on file therefore represent the visible surface of a much larger unreported phenomenon. What the reports establish is that infants developing what medicine calls “milk allergy” within hours to days of receiving vaccinations containing bovine-derived materials and aluminum adjuvants is not a theoretical prediction. It is documented in the CDC’s own database, and the pattern in the data is precisely what Richet described in 1901.
Hospital formula supplementation. Newborn nurseries in the United States and elsewhere routinely offer supplementary bottles of standard cow’s milk formula to breastfed infants during the first days of life, ostensibly to “top them up” while the mother’s milk supply establishes. A single such exposure, followed by cessation, followed by later re-exposure through the trace amounts in breast milk, is a documented mechanism for sensitization to cow’s milk protein. The mother is not told this occurred. She is told her milk is the problem.
Maternal pharmaceutical and toxic load. Breast milk carries what the mother’s body carries. Pharmaceuticals cross into breast milk. SSRIs, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, antibiotics prescribed for post-partum infections, hormonal contraceptives resumed within weeks of delivery. So do environmental toxicants: glyphosate residues from her food supply, plasticizers from her water bottles and food packaging, agricultural chemicals from her produce, pharmaceutical residues from her municipal water. An infant reacting to what is coming through the maternal milk supply may be reacting to any of these. The diagnostic move that lands on “cow’s milk protein” as the culprit is not derived from any test that isolated cow’s milk protein as the cause. It is derived from the fact that cow’s milk is on the list of things the mother can be told to eliminate.
The ordinary work of being a newborn. Underneath all of this is a fact the diagnostic apparatus has forgotten. A newborn’s digestive tract is establishing itself. The gut lining is maturing. The nervous system is calibrating. The infant will cry. The infant will spit up. The infant will pass green stool, yellow stool, mucous-streaked stool. The infant’s skin will show blemishes. This is not disease. It is the ordinary work of arriving in a body and beginning to use it.
What the Mother’s Body Actually Makes
Breast milk is not food the way formula is food. It is something else. To call it a nutrient mixture is to call the Ganges a body of water.
Colostrum comes first. Thick, yellow, closer to honey than to milk. Small in volume. A newborn takes teaspoons of it in the first day, and this is enough. Inside it are living cells from the mother’s body: T-lymphocytes that pass into the infant’s intestine, migrate to lymph nodes, and take up residence as part of the infant’s own cleansing and repair capacity.¹⁴ Her stem cells. Some of these have been observed migrating to distant organs of the infant, though what they do there is still being worked out. Interferons, cytokines, growth factors, hundreds of biologically active proteins whose specific instructions to the infant’s tissues are only beginning to be catalogued.
Mature milk comes in around day three or four. It contains more than two hundred distinct human milk oligosaccharides. The infant cannot digest most of them. They are not for the infant. They are for Bifidobacterium infantis, the specific commensal organism that must colonize the newborn gut before the rest of the microbial community can find its place. Without these oligosaccharides, that organism does not thrive. Without that organism, the succession does not proceed as it should. Formula, including the most expensive amino acid formulas, contains none of these oligosaccharides in any biologically meaningful form.
The composition changes constantly. It changes across a single feed: watery and sweet at first, richer in fat by the end. It changes across the day. It changes as the infant grows. When the infant is unwell, the compounds in the milk shift in response to what the mother has been exposed to through the infant’s mouth on her skin. The milk is not a delivery mechanism. It is a conversation.
The mother’s body makes this from her own tissue, her own diet, her own microbiome, her own physiological state. When she is well nourished and her terrain is intact, what she produces is the most complete nutrition and the most sophisticated developmental support the newborn will ever encounter. There is no product on any shelf that competes with it. There is no product that can.
The claim that an industrial mixture (corn syrup, refined vegetable oils, hydrolyzed dairy fragments or synthesized amino acids, a laboratory premix of vitamins and minerals) can substitute for this substance is not one any honest biologist would advance. The claim that the mother’s own milk is causing her infant harm, in 99 out of 100 cases where a milk protein reactivity has been laboratory-confirmed, is not one any honest clinician would advance either.
The mother’s intuition that her milk cannot be hurting her infant is not sentimental. It is biologically correct.
The Pattern in Practice
Two weeks after the appointment, she is on the phone with her sister, crying. She has cut out all dairy. She has been eating oatmeal and rice and chicken and steamed vegetables, and she is losing weight she cannot afford to lose. The baby’s crying has eased. The pediatrician wants her to switch to the specialist formula for six months to be sure. She has not slept properly in a week. Her sister asks whether the crying really was that bad. She cannot remember. She only remembers that the doctor was worried.
Three months in, on a friend’s kitchen counter, she picks up a slice of buttered toast without thinking. She eats half of it before she notices. She waits for the reaction. Nothing happens. She eats the rest. Nothing happens the next day either.
She calls the pediatrician. The pediatrician tells her to stay off dairy for the full six months to be safe. She asks whether the diagnosis was correct. The pediatrician tells her that these diagnoses are hard to be sure about, and that it is better to be safe than sorry.
She goes home. She thinks about it for another week. Then she eats a piece of cheese. Then she eats a bowl of yogurt. Then she reintroduces dairy fully. The baby is fine. He has been fine the whole time. She does not tell the pediatrician. She would like to, but she is tired, and she does not know what to say. The prescription is renewed automatically every three months for the next year.
This is the pattern documented in the mainstream literature. A 2021 survey of 133 mothers of children with diagnosed food allergies, presented by the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, found that 12 percent of mothers believed their child had reacted to breast milk.¹⁵ When an allergist evaluated the reported reactions, only 4 of the 133 (3 percent) were classified as “likely IgE-mediated.” All 4 of those children had multiple other confirmed food allergies.¹⁵ The great majority of women told or believing their milk was harming their child were reacting to something else, or to nothing.
Harvard Medical School’s own publication, Harvard Health, has been telling parents since 2020: “many, if not most, of the babies who get this diagnosis don’t have it at all.”¹⁶
La Leche League Great Britain puts it more directly: “The misconception that these common baby symptoms are signs of milk allergy has been promoted by formula companies over the past 20 years.”¹⁷
The harm to mothers who follow the diagnosis is documented. Elimination diets remove dairy, then soy, then eggs, then wheat, then whatever remains on the pediatrician’s cascade. Calcium, vitamin B12, iodine, vitamin D, and DHA deficiencies follow. Maternal anxiety and sleep loss follow. Breastfeeding duration shortens. Mothers who abandon breastfeeding earlier than they intended describe grief, self-blame, and lasting regret in survey after survey and story after story.
What to Do Tonight
The mother reading this in the hours after being told to stop breastfeeding needs three things.
The first is a set of questions to put to the pediatrician who gave her the diagnosis.
What confirmatory test established that my baby has cow’s milk protein allergy? (For the non-IgE-mediated form, there is no confirmatory test. The diagnosis rests on elimination followed by reintroduction, and reintroduction is routinely skipped.)
Are you aware of the 2020 Munblit paper in JAMA Pediatrics finding that beta-lactoglobulin in breast milk is present at concentrations too low to trigger a reaction in more than 99 percent of children with proven cow’s milk allergy?
Which of the CMPA guidelines you are following were funded by infant formula manufacturers, and which of their authors have consultancy relationships with Nestlé, Danone, Abbott, or Reckitt?
An honest pediatrician will engage with these questions. A captured one will not. The answers, either way, will settle the matter.
The second is the plain fact that infant colic is a normal, self-limiting developmental phase affecting 20 to 30 percent of all healthy infants. It typically begins in the first weeks of life, peaks around six weeks of age, and resolves without intervention by four to five months. The crying is real. The distress is real. Colic is not a disease, and it does not require the mother to stop breastfeeding.
The third is a route to support that does not run through the formula industry’s referral pipeline. International Board Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLCs) practice largely outside pediatric channels, are not funded by formula manufacturers, and possess the direct clinical experience of what a healthy breastfed infant actually looks like. La Leche League, in most countries, provides free peer support to mothers navigating breastfeeding difficulties. The Human Milk Foundation and its network of milk banks provide donated breast milk for infants whose mothers genuinely cannot produce it.
Tonight, in a house somewhere, a mother will feed her baby from her own body. He will fall asleep at her breast, warm, milk-drunk, breathing against her collarbone. Her milk will keep him fed and keep him growing and quietly do the thousand other things her doctor was never trained to tell her about. The prescription she was handed will sit on the counter beside the sink. She will look at it once, and then she will not look at it again.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
There is a bakery in your town. It makes the best bread anyone has ever tasted. People walk in, eat as much as they want, and walk out. The bread is free.
A big company that sells bread in boxes notices something. People aren’t buying its boxed bread anymore, because the free bread is better and doesn’t cost anything. This is a problem for the company. The company likes making money.
So the company pays some doctors to write a book. The book is called How to Tell If Bread Is Making You Sick. It says that if you feel full after eating, or you burp, or you feel a little tired, that means you’re allergic to bread. Everyone who eats bread does these things. That is what happens when you eat bread.
Then the company pays other doctors to give the book to every mother in town. When a mother comes into the doctor’s office with her baby, the doctor opens the book and says, “Your baby is allergic to the free bread you eat, which comes through your milk. You must stop right away. Here is a box of special safe bread from the company. It costs a lot of money. It will save your baby.”
The mother is confused. The free bread was so good. Her baby seemed fine, just a little fussy sometimes, like all babies. But the doctor sounds worried, and doctors know things. So she stops going to the free bakery and starts buying the company’s bread. The company’s bread is mostly sugar and cheap oil. But it comes in a very nice box.
The company gets richer. The mother eats worse bread. Her baby drinks the box bread instead of her milk. The free bakery gets quieter.
The mother’s baby was never allergic to the free bread. The mother was just told he was, by a doctor who was reading from the company’s book.
References
Munblit D, Perkin MR, Palmer DJ, Allen KJ, Boyle RJ. “Assessment of Evidence About Common Infant Symptoms and Cow’s Milk Allergy.” JAMA Pediatrics 2020;174(6):599-608. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.0153
University Hospitals (Cleveland). “Signs Your Breastfed Baby Has a Cow’s Milk Allergy.” Clinical guidance summary, 2024.
Wolke D, Bilgin A, Samara M. “Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis: Fussing and Crying Durations and Prevalence of Colic in Infants.” Journal of Pediatrics 2017;185:55-61.
Van Tulleken C. “Overdiagnosis and industry influence: how cow’s milk protein allergy is extending the reach of infant formula manufacturers.” BMJ 2018;363:k5056. doi:10.1136/bmj.k5056
Chansiripornchai S et al. Case report on early-onset CMPA (opening statement: “Before 1950, CMPA was rarely diagnosed”). Frontiers in Pediatrics 2022. doi:10.3389/fped.2022.858476
Mead Johnson Nutrition Co. Form S-1/A (product portfolio history), 2009 SEC filing; and Mead Johnson Journal, “Celebrating 70 Years of Nutritional Success” (Nutramigen), March 2012.
SHS International / Nutricia. Company history of Neocate development (UK 1992, US FDA infant approval 1995).
Godlee F. Editorial accompanying van Tulleken investigation, BMJ 2018.
Mehta S, Allen HI, Campbell DE, Arntsen KF, Simpson MR, Boyle RJ. “Trends in use of specialized formula for managing cow’s milk allergy in young children.” Clinical and Experimental Allergy 2022;52(7):839-847. doi:10.1111/cea.14180
EFSA Panel on Nutrition, Novel Foods and Food Allergens (NDA). “Tolerable upper intake level for dietary sugars.” EFSA Journal 2022;20(2):7074.
Fraser H. The Peanut Allergy Epidemic: What’s Causing It and How to Stop It. Skyhorse Publishing, 2011 (updated edition 2017).
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). CDC WONDER database query: Symptom = “MILK ALLERGY,” all VAERS IDs, grouped by VAERS ID, Vaccine Type, and Onset Interval. Data processed as of August 27, 2026. Accessed September 19, 2026. http://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html
Lazarus R, Klompas M. Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS). Grant Final Report, Grant ID: R18 HS 017045. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. Prepared for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), 2010.
Humphries S, Bystrianyk R. Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History. CreateSpace, 2013.
American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. “Moms Need Guidance on What to Eat When Their Breastfeeding Infant Has a Food Allergy.” Study by Wangberg H et al. presented at ACAAI Annual Scientific Meeting, 2021.
McCarthy CE. “Think your baby is allergic to cow’s milk?” Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, May 5, 2020.
La Leche League Great Britain. “Breastfeeding and Food Allergies.” Official guidance, 2024 update.
Boyle RJ. “Allergy societies and the formula industry.” Clinical and Experimental Allergy 2021;51(11):1391-1394.
Munblit D, Crawley H, Hyde R, Boyle RJ. “Health and nutrition claims for infant formula are poorly substantiated and potentially harmful.” BMJ 2020;369:m875.
Vincent R, MacNeill SJ, Marrs T, et al. “Frequency of guideline-defined cow’s milk allergy symptoms in infants: Secondary analysis of EAT trial data.” Clinical and Experimental Allergy 2022;52(1):82-93. doi:10.1111/cea.14060
Human Milk Foundation. “Industry influence and overdiagnosis of cow milk protein allergy.” Position statement, 2022.
Imperial College London News. “Milk allergy guidelines may cause overdiagnosis in babies and children.” Published April 10, 2020.
In Print
The Unbekoming library is available in paperback, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The shelf begins with the paradigm question underneath everything else — No Virus, the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal — and moves through the suppressed compounds mainstream medicine set aside: The DMSO Book, Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy, The Iodine Book, and The Hydrogen Peroxide Book. Two more recover what’s still on the kitchen shelf: Baking Soda and The Castor Oil Book. Two more recover the minerals modern soil, water, and processing quietly stripped from the diet: The Magnesium Handbook and The Boron Book. Sitting alongside these is No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews — the case against germ theory itself, catalogued through 258 failed contagion experiments.
The critique books cover what medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, and veterinary practice have become. The Unvaccinated treats the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit treats cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth as the dietary problem they are. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM and the specific damage of every major psychiatric drug class. The Vitamin K Injection covers what happens in the first hours of a newborn’s life.
The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the skeptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
Ken Silva of Headline USA joins us to discuss his new book, The Trump Assassination Plots: What the Investigations Missed and Why it Matters. From the unlikely official account of these shootings and plots to the still unexplained aspects of the events to the possibility of a false flag operation to blame a future shooting on Iran, James and Ken discuss all the details of these mysterious events.
Video player not working? Use these links to watch it somewhere else!
Peter Gøtzsche reviewed every randomised mammography screening trial ever conducted for the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane’s headline is that, assuming a 15% mortality reduction, one woman in 2000 avoids dying of breast cancer over ten years. Ten are overdiagnosed and treated. Two hundred experience false alarms.
But that headline assumes the reduction. When Gøtzsche looked only at the trials with adequate randomisation — the higher-quality ones — the reduction disappeared. No effect on breast cancer mortality. No effect on all-cause mortality.
This is the Cochrane finding, published in the establishment’s own database of systematic reviews.
No woman being asked to consent to a mammogram this week knows it.
That is why the new Unbekoming paperback exists.
A woman opens a letter. Her mammogram from last week has been flagged. She needs to come back for further imaging.
Another gets a phone call. The biopsy result is back. She has ductal carcinoma in situ. Stage 0. The surgeon can see her Tuesday.
Another sits across from a BRCA counsellor who tells her that carrying the mutation gives her a lifetime risk of 87 percent. There is a procedure that can protect her.
Another has been on a hormonal IUD for three years. Her mood, her cycle, her sense of herself have all changed. Her GP prescribes an antidepressant.
None of them are being told what the published medical literature actually shows.
This new book is what the published medical literature actually shows.
The Argument
H. Gilbert Welch’s autopsy studies show that up to 39 percent of middle-aged women carry breast cancer they will die with, never from. The screening apparatus finds those cancers, calls them disease, and initiates the treatment cascade.
The twenty-five-year Canadian National Breast Screening Study, the most rigorous mammography trial ever conducted, found that one in five diagnosed cancers were overdiagnosis. The screened group and the unscreened group had the same mortality.
The 87 percent BRCA lifetime risk figure a genetic counsellor cites was derived from families selected because they already had clustered breast cancer cases. When the same variant is examined in general-population samples, the risk drops to 17 percent. A woman is being told her risk is roughly five times what the corrected data shows.
A 2004 Australian analysis by Morgan, Ward, and Barton calculated the contribution of chemotherapy to five-year survival across all cancer types. The number is 2.1 to 2.3 percent. Almost every woman who consents to chemotherapy for breast cancer believes she is consenting to something that materially changes her survival probability. The published contribution to five-year survival across all cancers is roughly one in fifty.
None of this is fringe. Every study cited above appeared in the establishment’s own journals. Cochrane. BMJ. New England Journal of Medicine.
The problem is that a woman standing at the consultation desk does not have this evidence in front of her when she is asked to sign.
Part I is the compact clinical guide. Designed to be read in one hour by a woman with a decision on her calendar: a mammogram Friday, a callback Tuesday, a biopsy result waiting, an IUD consultation the week after next. Four branches. Three questions per branch. The exact wording to use with the clinician on the other side of the desk.
Part II is the evidence in full. Twelve chapters walk through the argument. Gøtzsche on the screening question. Welch on overdiagnosis. The Boobs documentary. What cancer actually is (Warburg, Seyfried). What turbo cancer is. Root canals and breast cancer (Levy, Haley). Iodine and the Japanese paradox (Derry). The BRCA gene and the women who lost their breasts to a hypothesis. Hormonal IUDs and the 2024 Danish cohort of 78,595 women. Tirza Derflinger on better breast health for life. Paul Marik on the perioperative window.
Part III is the preparation tools. The Decision Toolkit. The Personal Action Plan, sequenced across six intervention layers from immediate substrate reduction through terrain rebuild. And “But My Doctor Said,” the eleven objections a woman will hear when she acts on what she has learned, and what the evidence actually shows for each one.
Part IV is the physical reference. The Conversation Card and the Clinical Checklist. Designed to be brought to appointments.
Who It Is For
The woman with a mammogram scheduled who has never been told the screening question is contested.
The woman who has been called back and is being pulled into the diagnostic funnel.
The woman who has been told she has DCIS and is being scheduled for surgery.
The woman who has been offered BRCA testing.
The woman who has been prescribed a hormonal IUD.
The woman whose mother, aunt, sister, friend, or daughter is in one of those situations, and who wants to have a better conversation with her.
The book is not medical advice. It is the published medical literature laid out clearly enough that a woman can make her own informed decision, before she consents to anything.
The Terrain Frame
Every Unbekoming book is written inside the terrain framework, which holds that the internal environment of the body, its toxic burden, nutritional status, electromagnetic exposure, and stress load, determines whether illness manifests. This book is no exception.
The book names one primary cause of the injury the medical system calls breast cancer, substrate accumulation, and three specific contributors: injection load, oral toxicity, and continuous synthetic-progestin exposure. Chapter 5 makes the full case, drawing on Warburg, Béchamp, Cowan, and Seyfried. A woman does not need to accept the framework to use the clinical chapters. She may find herself reaching for it by the time she finishes them.
The Paperback
Available now on the Lulu Bookstore. 359 pages. Source-cited throughout. Published without commercial sponsorship.
The digital edition will be released to paid subscribers within 6 months.
This is the seventeenth title in the Unbekoming print catalogue, and the first to unite the compact clinical guide with the full paradigm framework in one volume.
A woman with a mammogram scheduled on Friday has time to read Part I before she goes in. She may still decide to keep the appointment. She may not. What she will not do is walk into that room without knowing what she was never told.
The full Unbekoming print catalogue is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Seventeen titles now, across paradigm, remedy, and critique. All direct from the printer.
Throughout the summer, a major scandal has been brewing in Lithuania. In late July, the country suffered a landmark defeat in the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national held in secret detention and brutally tortured for four years in CIA black sites around the world – including Lithuania. While Western governments and news outlets have ignored the judgement, the ECHR’s conclusions produced bitter political division locally, with the opposition calling for a new investigation into the CIA’s use and abuse of the country during the US-led ‘War on Terror’.
Lithuania’s ruling coalition, in keeping with previous governments, is resistant to any further damaging light being shed on their territory hosting criminal operations of American intelligence for many years in total secret, with perpetrators of horrendous torture insulated from any legal repercussions or professional consequence. Their resistance is understandable. On top of not wanting to offend their colossal US ally, Lithuania’s ruling elites are keen to conceal from the local population, and the world, how their ‘independence’ under Western hegemony comes with unseen strings attached. When those strings entail intimate collusion in grave crimes, it’s Lithuania that suffers the consequences.
How did the ECHR rule against Lithuania?
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is accused of being the mastermind of the October 2000 USS Cole bombing, and heading Al Qaeda in the Persian Gulf. He was captured by the CIA in November 2002. Over the next four years, he was held in nine separate CIA black sites, and brutally tortured every step of the way. Five months of his ordeal were spent at a specially constructed facility in Lithuania, named ‘Detention Site Violet’ in internal CIA memos, from November 2005 to March 2006. Lithuania denied any responsibility for al-Nashiri’s maltreatment, and contested the evidentiary basis of his claims. The ECHR found Vilnius’ culpability was “proven beyond reasonable doubt.”
During his incarceration in Lithuania, al-Nashiri was held incommunicado in solitary confinement and denied any contact with the outside world. His removal from the country was conducted with the Lithuanian government’s full knowledge he could face “a flagrant denial of justice and the death penalty” if extradited to the US, where he has remained in Guantanamo Bay until today. The ECHR unanimously found Vilnius violated numerous Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights through the country’s complicity with the CIA’s treatment of al-Nashiri, including right to a fair trial, right to respect for private and family life, right to life, and inhuman or degrading treatment.
Is this Lithuania’s first run in with the ECHR over CIA torture?
The ruling on al-Nashiri’s treatment is the third ECHR judgement against Lithuania over its involvement in the CIA torture program. In May 2018, the court ruled state authorities conspired with the CIA and subjected high-profile prisoner Abu Zubaydah to inhuman treatment, sensory isolation, and violation of his fundamental rights to liberty and security. Vilnius was ordered to pay him €100,000 in damages, which he has been unable to collect due to his ongoing detention in Guantanamo Bay. It was just the beginning of Lithuania’s major legal woes over its part in the CIA’s torture program.
In January 2024, the ECHR ruled Lithuania was responsible for arbitrarily detaining Saudi national Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Like Zubaydah, he was held in Detention Site Violet, exposing him to arbitrary detention and ill-treatment, and failing to conduct an effective local criminal probe into his incarceration and torture. Lithuania was ordered to pay €100,000 to al-Hawsawi in damages and €30,000 in costs. It’s not just the ECHR which has sought to hold Lithuania accountable, either. In 2022, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Vilnius was complicit in torture and secret detention of alleged terrorists on the CIA’s behalf.
All along, the ECHR has condemned the Lithuanian authorities for the country’s involvement in the CIA’s torture program, which saw many ‘high value’ detainees – including accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – pass through Detention Site Violet’s secret doors. The court has also harshly criticized Vilnius for its stubborn refusal to conduct serious criminal and/or public investigations into the secret CIA prison network constructed on Lithuania’s soil, and the involvement in and knowledge of these operations on the part of the country’s security, intelligence, and policing apparatus. But it’s abundantly clear the microscopic Baltic state was heavily complicit.
What are the Lithuanians hiding?
Despite the conspiracy of silence in Vilnius, numerous local investigations in the US and at the EU level have created damning trails of breadcrumbs leading straight from Detention Site Violet to the highest levels of the Lithuanian state. It is confirmed the CIA obtained approval from the country’s political leaders before constructing the black sites. One Lithuanian official was reportedly “shocked” by the proposals, but agreed anyway – it was an offer they couldn’t refuse. The CIA offered $1 million to its Lithuanian ‘partner’ agencies to “show appreciation” for their support, with the cash funneled through “complex mechanisms” to conceal the payments.
The Lithuanian parliament’s own Committee on National Security and Defence (CNSD) found the country’s State Security Department (SSD) accounting of funds it received for the operation was “inappropriate.” The construction of two separate CIA black sites was also concluded to have been “blessed by the top officials of the State.” The first was abandoned due to its small size limiting how many detainees could be held there at one time. This led to Detention Site Violet being built, with Lithuanian officials including then-President Rolandas Paksas kept in the loop regularly on its progress by the CIA. High-ranking SSD directors were also well-aware.
Meanwhile, SSD staff were highly active participants in the torture program on-the-ground from 2002 onwards, structuring and equipping the covert facilities according to CIA specifications and requirements.
Lithuania’s domestic spying agency enjoyed “unrestricted access to all the premises” of the two prisons, although the CIA was largely allowed to act without supervision there. Detention Site Violet was constructed in a former horse riding school located just 15 miles from Vilnius, the property having been bought by a CIA front company based in Panama, called Elite LLC. Coincidentally, this purchase was completed in March 2004, right when Lithuania became a NATO member. ABC News reported:
“On a series of thick concrete pads, [the CIA] installed what a source called ‘prefabricated pods’ to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations… The prison pods inside the barn were not visible to locals. They describe seeing large amounts of earth being excavated during the summer of 2004. Locals who saw the activity at the prison and approached to ask for work were turned away by English-speaking guards. The guards were replaced by new guards every 90 days.”
How were CIA prisoners tortured in Lithuania?
Despite plentiful open source details on Detention Site Violet and the Lithuanian state’s cognizance and culpability in the torture program, the crucial question of what happened to CIA prisoners in the country has never been satisfactorily resolved. However, it has been confirmed Mustafa al-Hawsawi was denied medical treatment after suffering severe health issues from repeated rectal rehydration – a form of sexual abuse – while in CIA detention. An Inspector General report found Detention Site Violet – in keeping with other black sites – did not have resources for treating serious mental or physical conditions inflicted by the torture, despite both being common.
Under the CIA’s own guidelines, “in situations where a detainee’s medical condition cannot be adequately treated at the detention facility, detention facility staff and local CIA station personnel arrange access to the host country’s health care system.” However, Lithuanian officials “reneged on previous assurances that they would arrange inpatient treatment or have declined to become involved in providing medical treatment for CIA detainees.” Ultimately, al-Hawsawi was transferred to a third country for treatment, with the CIA covering the costs. Difficulties with the Lithuanian authorities over al-Hawsawi’s treatment ultimately resulted in Detention Site Violet’s March 2006 closure, when its remaining prisoners were transferred to Afghanistan.
Lithuania’s stonewalling of serious investigations into the country’s involvement in the CIA torture program means we do not know for sure the torture techniques to which detainees were subjected there. However, in light of the ECHR’s ruling on al-Nashiri, it may be relevant to consider how he was treated at a CIA black site in Poland.
This included being forced into excruciating standing stress positions for days – which resulted in a medical officer intervention, over fears his shoulders could dislocate – mock executions with a handgun, and the use of a cordless power drill. A January 2003 CIA cable noted concerns over this abuse at agency headquarters:
“We have serious reservations with the continued used of enhanced techniques with Nashiri and its long term impact on him. Subject has been held for three months in very difficult conditions, both physically and mentally… Continued enhanced methods may push subject over the edge psychologically.”
The very same day, the CIA’s chief of interrogations announced his early retirement. “I will no longer be associated in any way with the interrogation program due to serious reservation I have about the current state of affairs,” he wrote. “Instead, I will be retiring shortly. This is a train wreak [sic] waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.”
Is Lithuania the only NATO country implicated in CIA torture?
Today, much remains concealed and uncertain about the CIA’s torture program. But it is clear Lithuania was far from alone in assisting the CIA commit horrendous crimes against humanity on its territory, without political or public oversight. In 2007, the Council of Europe published a detailed report on “secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees” involving EU member states. Poland and Romania were also found to have eagerly abetted the CIA’s demonic activities, despite government denials of knowledge and/or culpability. The CoE found “the key arrangements for CIA clandestine operations in Europe were secured on a bilateral level.”
In Lithuania, Poland, and Romania, formal agreements with local governments and the CIA covered all manner of cooperation, including building the prisons, material support, and operational security, along with cast-iron promises of “non-interference” in the CIA’s criminality. This extended collusion to airport staff, which helped falsify flight records to conceal the arrival and departure of CIA detainees, and prevented customs and border officials from inspecting planes carrying prisoners. However, EU and NATO countries assisted the CIA’s torture program in more low-key ways throughout its operation. One notorious example is the rendition of Khaled El-Masri from North Macedonia.
Two-and-a-half decades on, the events of 9/11 and all that followed still casts a long shadow on every corner of the world, and justice continues to be denied to an unknown number of people – many of them completely innocent – who fell victim to the CIA’s global torture conspiracy. The ECHR’s latest ruling against Lithuania should, one might think, trigger a long-overdue public inquiry into how officials in Vilnius knowingly colluded in an operation that was completely illegal and unethical, along with appropriate punishments for the figures involved. As 9/11’s silver anniversary has just been marked, it’s never been more vital that the truth be finally told.
Two minerals your body has been receiving from food and water for as long as there has been food and water. Two minerals your body no longer gets in the amounts it needs. Two minerals modern medicine does not measure, does not restore, and does not talk about.
Magnesium and boron.
What happened to them
The soil that grew the food was depleted. The industrial fertilizers that replaced natural soil renewal put nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium back in, and left the trace minerals out. The water that used to carry them was treated, softened, and stripped. The food that reached the table was processed, refined, and cooked at temperatures that finished the job.
Then the halogens moved in. Fluoride in the water. Bromide in the bread. Perchlorate in the produce. Each one competes for the receptor sites where the mineral used to sit. Every one of them makes what little is left work less well.
Your grandmother got what you don’t. Not because she took supplements. Because the food, the water, and the soil hadn’t been hollowed out yet.
What their absence looks like
Magnesium depletion presents as: cardiovascular disease, arrhythmia, hypertension, migraines, muscle cramps, insomnia, anxiety, chronic fatigue, insulin resistance, PMS, restless legs, tension headaches, poor recovery from exercise, poor recovery from anything. The mineral runs 600+ enzyme systems. When it runs low, hundreds of things break. Not one dramatic thing, but a background low-grade version of nearly everything.
Boron depletion presents as: osteoarthritis, brittle bones, hormonal decline in both sexes, cognitive fog in older adults, joint stiffness that starts a decade before it “should,” and a fungal terrain the body has fewer tools to manage. Rex Newnham, an Australian soil scientist working in the 1970s, first documented what a century of missing boron does, and what its restoration reverses.
None of this is diagnosed as mineral depletion. It is diagnosed as a chronic condition, prescribed for, and monitored. The mineral, inexpensive and unpatentable, does not enter the conversation.
What the books do
The Magnesium Handbook.
333 pages, seventeen chapters. The four evidence lines. The four insults of modern life that strip out intake. The cardiac and neurological pattern. The metabolic and hormonal picture. The reproductive terrain. The forms of magnesium and how to use each. Eight appendices with condition quick-reference, drug-depletion tables, dosing by form, food sources, transdermal protocols, troubleshooting, and further reading. A full index sends you to what you need. Draws on Jeff at Curious Outlier and his Magnesium Mastery course, Mildred Seelig, Carolyn Dean, Mark Sircus, Arthur Firstenberg and Martin Pall, and the terrain framework running from Béchamp through Shelton to Cowan.
268 pages. The Tibetan and Silk Road pharmacopoeia. The medieval European use. The mid-twentieth-century collapse of dietary intake. The four mechanisms that stripped modern boron from the diet: industrial fertilization, food processing, water fluoridation, halogen displacement. The Newnham Protocol. The Walter Last modification. The food-first restoration pattern. The borax chapter, covering what to buy, how to dose, and what to expect. Draws on Rex Newnham’s clinical work, Forrest Nielsen’s USDA research, and the essays of Curious Outlier.
The regulatory framework still classifies boron as non-essential. The evidence says otherwise. The minerals are inexpensive. These books are how you get them back.
How to explain it to a six-year-old
Imagine your body is a bicycle. It has hundreds of little screws holding it together. Brakes, gears, wheels, seat, handlebars. Most of the screws don’t do anything dramatic. But if they get loose, the bicycle starts to rattle and squeak and slow down. Nothing broken. Just… not right.
Magnesium is one of the screws. Boron is another.
Nobody stole the screws. They just fell out slowly, over a long time. From the soil the food grew in. From the water. From the bread. Every day a little bit less. Nobody noticed because nothing broke.
But the bicycle is rattling now. You feel it. Everyone feels it.
The screws are cheap. You can put them back.
In Print
Sixteen books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide.
Injection injury.The Vitamin K Injection — what happens in the first hours of a newborn’s life.
Two on the paradigm underneath.No Contagion, the case against germ theory itself, co-authored with Jamie Andrews. No Virus, the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal.
A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will. The skeptical relative. The friend who won’t click a link but might open a book. The visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
Excess mortality researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., on Tuesday told Canadian lawmakers that national mortality statistics show “screaming safety signals” following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines — including increases in deaths among infants and children and increases in turbo cancers.
Testifying at Canada’s Allison Inquiry, Rancourt also argued that COVID-19-era government interventions — including lockdowns, isolating the elderly, closing businesses and withdrawing government support programs — also drove excess mortality during the pandemic.
Rancourt based his arguments on his analysis of official mortality data from Statistics Canada and in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He described how COVID-19 vaccines directly harmed individuals, and how specific pandemic policies caused broader societal harm.
His presentation came on the opening day of the Allison Inquiry, a four-day hearing chaired by Canadian Member of Parliament Dean Allison. The inquiry collected testimony from 50 Canadians injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with testimony from physicians, scientists and other witnesses.
4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. alone
Infant mortality had been declining in the U.S. before the pandemic. That trend reversed during the pandemic, according to Rancourt’s data — but not until 2022, nine months after COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for pregnant women.
Rancourt estimated the change represented approximately 4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. from 2022 to 2024.
He presented a similar case for Canada, although the raw numbers were much lower due to the smaller population. After Canada issued its vaccine guidance for pregnant women on May 28, 2021, he said mortality rose among infants, with a marked increase nine months after the recommendations.
He estimated there were 200 excess infant deaths in Canada during that time, with 10 excess pregnancy-related deaths.
Data show 2,000+ excess deaths among 1- to 4-year-olds in U.S.
Rancourt identified more than 2,000 excess deaths among children ages 1-4 in the U.S. between 2021 and 2024.
He attributed an initial increase in 2021 partly to the abrupt withdrawal of federal financial assistance in some states.
But Rancourt said the largest increase coincided with the June 17, 2022, authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for young children. Excess deaths peaked precisely with the vaccine rollout.
Canadian mortality data showed a similar age-specific pattern. Rancourt shared mortality trends for Canadian children ages 1-4, 5-9 and 10-14, showing each group experienced a pronounced increase during the year COVID-19 vaccines became available for that particular age group.
The spikes in excess mortality were “very sudden,” he said. The increases did not occur during the first two years of the pandemic, he emphasized.
“As soon as you vaccinated these age groups and not before, not when there was COVID, not in the first two years of the pandemic. But when you started vaccinating them, that is the signature that you see in the mortality [data],” Rancourt said. “It’s absolutely stunning.”
He estimated 410 excess deaths among Canadian children ages 1-14.
‘Turbo cancers’ and excess cancer deaths
Rancourt said that rapidly progressing cancers, also called “turbo cancers,” are not a new phenomenon. Scientific literature on “hyperprogressive disease,” or HPD, has reported such cancers in some patients undergoing immunotherapy since 2015, when the new treatments became available.
However, excess mortality data now show signals of an unusually aggressive increase in cancer mortality following the vaccine rollouts, according to Rancourt.
Rancourt identified more than 4,000 excess cancer deaths among Americans ages 5-44 during the study period. An estimated 960 of those were among young people ages 5-24. He highlighted a sharp increase in deaths from cancers of the long bones and limbs.
Rancourt called the increase “definitely a safety signal.”
He also estimated that 240 excess deaths among Americans ages 25-44 involved multiple primary cancers — separate primary tumors occurring in different organs rather than a single cancer metastasizing to other parts of the body.
Approximately 1,500 excess deaths due to these cancers occurred in people 75 and older. He said his research group has observed similar signals in Canada, but researchers are still analyzing those data.
It’s not just the vaccines — pandemic policies also linked to excess deaths
The second half of Rancourt’s presentation focused on an argument his research group has built over several years of excess mortality analysis — that government policy responses to COVID-19 caused excess mortality.
For example, his research team examined more than 80 province-specific socioeconomic variables in Canada to determine which were linked to excess mortality.
They found that excess mortality correlated strongly with GDP per capita. “The more wealth generation you have in the province, the more excess deaths you have,” he said.
He surmised that when the economy shut down in provinces with vibrant economies, it had devastating effects on workers and their families.
Policies designed to protect elderly contributed to their deaths
Rancourt compared weekly excess mortality with an Oxford University index measuring the intensity of measures intended to protect elderly people, including isolation and lockdown policies.
Increases in the severity of those measures corresponded with large mortality peaks, Rancourt said. Those peaks were then followed by periods of unusually low mortality.
“And that’s because you’ve killed so many people in that first peak that there’s less people of that age to die in the weeks that follow,” he said. “That’s called the dry tinder effect.”
He interpreted the pattern as evidence that measures intended to protect elderly Canadians instead contributed to their deaths.
During questioning after his presentation, Rancourt was asked whether that meant elderly people should not have been isolated and locked down.
“Absolutely,” he responded.
Rancourt said social isolation and severe stress can have profound physiological effects, particularly among vulnerable populations.
“If you had not tried to save the elderly by isolating them and locking them in” the mortality outcome would have been different, he said.
“You have to know that isolation kills,” he said. “This is unambiguous.”
Cutting financial support also correlated with deaths
Rancourt said another mortality signal appeared when governments withdrew pandemic-era financial assistance.
Canada and the U.S. initially provided enormous financial support to workers and families after governments shut down large portions of the economy.
Those programs were so effective that poverty actually declined in Canada during 2020 and 2021, when more than $1 trillion was given out, Rancourt said.
But mortality increased following major reductions in financial assistance, according to the data he presented.
“It’s worse if you give money, if you give support and you cut it, it’s worse than if you’d never given it,” Rancourt said.
No evidence of viral pandemic, Rancourt argued
Rancourt said his team’s all-cause mortality research across North America and Europe failed to show the mortality pattern that would be expected if a spreading respiratory virus were the primary cause of excess mortality.
Rancourt described the spread in mortality as “geostatic,” rather than “geotemporal” — meaning mortality sometimes appeared to peak in one geographic location without spreading into neighboring regions.
As an example, he cited the dramatic differences between the area around Milan in northern Italy, which experienced massive early mortality spikes, and Rome, which had no comparable event.
Both cities had similar demographics and similar types of exposure — through international airports and other types of transportation networks — but very different outcomes.
If there had been a viral disease, they should have seen a similar type of spread and similar mortality rates.
“Identical systems, identical types of societies, just as many poor, high-density urban areas,” he said.
Rancourt said the geographic patterns were “inconsistent with the accepted theory of how a virus spreads” through person-to-person respiratory transmission.
‘Assaults’ drove excess mortality, ‘not a virus’
Rancourt ended his presentation by telling the members of the inquiry that his research led him to conclude that government policies and toxic vaccines were to blame for excess deaths in the COVID-19 period.
He said:
“History will record that the COVID period was, in effect, a massive and unnecessary multifaceted assault against people, exploiting fear and causing harm, injury and death, especially in the most vulnerable. All governments under U.S. hegemony and media influence cooperated or imitated. Canada was no exception.
“The vaccines are toxic and caused many deaths and injuries in plain sight of robust national statistics.”
He listed economic shutdowns, fear, mandates, isolation, medical interventions and vaccination among the “assaults” that he believes, based on the data he analyzed, caused excess mortality.
Rancourt singled out COVID-19 vaccination as the most devastating. Unlike other pandemic measures, it involved administering a pharmaceutical product directly to large numbers of healthy as well as vulnerable people, including elderly people, pregnant women and children.
Rancourt conceded that excess mortality data cannot, on their own, conclusively prove what caused individual deaths. He argued instead that uncertainty about causation should not become a reason to ignore unusual population-level signals.
“Science can never prove causality,” Rancourt said. But institutional capture can “always minimize and invalidate screaming safety signals and personal hardship.”
The patterns he presented should have triggered investigation and changes in government policy, he said.
“These are the signals I showed you today,” Rancourt said. They “needed to be acknowledged right away and used to change government and medical establishment behavior.”
This essay engages material framed in establishment terms: vaccines, immunity, deficiencies, contagion, developmental disorders. In quotation, attribution, and official body names, that vocabulary appears as the establishment uses it. In my own analytical voice, the terrain paradigm operates. The two registers do different work. One shows what the profession says about itself. The other names what is happening to the child.
The Training
“Nothing bad should be said about any vaccine.”¹ That is what Suzanne Humphries, a board-certified nephrologist, was taught during her American medical training. Vaccines are administered on schedule. Adverse conversation was not encouraged. It was actively closed down.
Lawrence Palevsky, a pediatrician practicing in New York, describes the same experience. What he was taught in medical school and residency, he later realized, differed sharply from what he observed in his own patients and read in the primary literature.²
Robert Sears, a California pediatrician, describes reading a book in medical school that documented severe injuries from the DTP (diphtheria-tetanus-whole-cell-pertussis) vaccine. The vaccine was eventually removed from the American market. Sears kept reading. What he found was not what he had been taught.³
Rachael Ross, a family physician who spent three seasons cohosting the syndicated show The Doctors, described a similar reckoning in a widely read 2016 blog post. She had watched the schedule grow from sixteen doses of four vaccines during her own childhood to sixty-nine doses of sixteen vaccines by age eighteen. Medical school and residency, she wrote, had taught her to give them all on time, without question.⁴
Jayne Donegan, a British general practitioner, wrote in the foreword to Humphries’ Dissolving Illusions that her medical training left vaccination as an “article of faith” that could not be interrogated. The curriculum was already so crowded that there was no room to ask why non-vaccine-preventable disease deaths had also declined during the twentieth century for reasons unrelated to any injection.⁵
None of these physicians is fringe. Each trained inside the profession. Each describes the training in similar terms: a set of scripts about safety, efficacy, and schedule, delivered as certainties, with no time in the curriculum to interrogate the primary literature that would complicate them. A pediatrician does not know what she was trained not to know. She cannot ask questions she was trained not to ask.
American pediatric practice covers the child from birth through age eighteen, and in many practices through age twenty-one. What follows is a chronological walk through what that profession was trained not to tell you, across that entire arc. Thirteen items. In order.
1. The Cord Cut Before the Blood Finished Moving (birth)
A newborn’s blood volume is meant to be topped off from the placenta in the minutes after birth. When the cord is left intact and pulsing, roughly a third of the baby’s total blood supply, along with the iron that supply carries, transfers across before the placenta is expelled. That iron is the reserve intended to carry the child through the first six months of life.
The standard hospital practice throughout the late twentieth century was to clamp within seconds. The World Health Organization now recommends waiting at least one minute. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came around in 2017. Most hospital deliveries in the United States still clamp early, driven by workflow, the neonatal warmer schedule, and the syringe already on the tray.
Your pediatrician does not raise this. The obstetrical team performed the clamp. The pediatrician receives the baby afterward and plots the numbers she is given. The infant she inherits is the infant who lost a third of the placental transfusion at hour zero.
Six months later, that same pediatrician will run an iron level, note the low result, and prescribe supplementation. The low reading she treats was produced by the system at birth. She is not trained to draw the line between the two events. She is trained to run the number and write the script.
The curious pediatrician would ask what a child born with a full complement of placental blood looks like at six months. The compliant pediatrician cannot ask, because the reference population she was trained on is the population that was clamped early.
Within hours of birth, the newborn receives an intramuscular injection of phytonadione, the compound sold as vitamin K1. The dose is one milligram. Breast milk carries roughly one to two micrograms of phytonadione per liter, and a newborn’s colostrum intake on day one delivers a fraction of a microgram; the injection is thousands of times that dose, and the published pediatric literature confirms that plasma phytonadione levels for two weeks after the shot run one to two thousand times higher than normal adult values. The injection also contains benzyl alcohol, polysorbate 80, and propylene glycol as excipients. The delivery site is the infant’s leg. The parent, if consulted at all, is told the shot prevents a bleeding condition called hemorrhagic disease of the newborn.
The condition exists. What is not explained is why. Newborn phytonadione levels are low at birth by design; the compound is produced by the gut bacteria that colonize the infant’s digestive tract in the first days, and levels rise on the biological schedule the infant’s body follows. Levels are further supported by the maternal transfer that continues through breastfeeding. The “deficiency” the injection corrects is the state a healthy newborn is meant to occupy for the first days of life while the gut ecology establishes itself.⁶
The bleeding events the injection is designed to prevent cluster in infants who have been subjected to the standard hospital birth sequence: early cord clamping, which strips the placental transfusion of clotting factors; maternal medications passed through delivery; the injection itself as a source of tissue injury; and, in male infants, circumcision. The intervention creates the conditions in which bleeding becomes more likely, then presents itself as the solution to the problem it has helped produce.
Two forms of the shot exist. The oral form is available in some countries and delivers a smaller dose across three administrations in the first weeks of life. The intramuscular form is the American standard. The intramuscular form has been associated in the published literature with elevated rates of childhood cancer, a finding disputed by subsequent industry-funded studies but never resolved. The oral form does not appear in that literature.⁷
This is the first injection. It is the moment at which the infant’s body, hours old, receives an industrial compound at pharmacological doses that no biology has any history with, into a system that has been producing its own supply on schedule for as long as human infants have been born. It is also the moment at which bodily sovereignty is handed over: the first substance introduced by needle before the first feed, before the first look at the mother’s face, before any element of the child’s own biology has had time to establish itself. The parent is rarely told what phytonadione is, where it comes from, what else is in the syringe, or that an oral alternative exists. The consent process is a signature.
Your pediatrician was trained that hemorrhagic disease is prevented by the injection. She was not trained to ask why the disease clusters in the population subjected to the delivery-room sequence, or what a newborn’s clotting profile looks like when the earlier interventions never happened.
3. The Hepatitis B Shot Before the First Feed (first day)
Hepatitis B, in the establishment’s account, is transmitted through blood-to-blood contact or sexual contact. In the United States it is given as an injection to every newborn within twenty-four hours of birth, regardless of the mother’s status. Denmark, which shares its borders with high-travel Europe, gives the shot only to infants born to mothers who carry the condition themselves.⁸
The safety claim rests on clinical trials. Those trials, for hepatitis B and for the childhood schedule generally, do not compare the vaccine to an inert placebo. The comparator is another aluminum-adjuvanted formulation, or a different vaccine, or the “background” mixture of the product minus the antigen. Adverse events in the “placebo” arm therefore match adverse events in the vaccine arm, because both arms received a substance that produces adverse events. The trial reports that the vaccine is “safe compared to placebo.” The label reflects the conclusion. What the label does not reflect is that the placebo was not a placebo. This is the load-bearing methodology under every safety claim on the childhood schedule. No vaccine on the schedule has been tested against saline in a pediatric population large enough to detect serious harm.⁹
The consent process at the American bedside is not consent. The mother has just given birth. The Vaccine Information Statement is handed over as the needle is prepared. The package insert, which contains the excipients, the adverse event history, and the acknowledged absence of long-term studies, is not offered. The CDC itself states that the Vaccine Information Statement is not an informed-consent document.¹⁰
The Belmont Report, drafted after the 1974 Research Act, identifies the three components of ethical consent: information, comprehension, and voluntariness.¹¹ The pamphlet handed to the mother is not information. The mother in her eighteenth hour of labor cannot comprehend the pamphlet even if she reads it. The room in which declining is coded as neglect does not offer voluntariness.
The Emergency Use Authorization products marketed for children under twelve during the COVID period had blank package inserts.¹² There was no clinical trial data to disclose. There was nothing to comprehend. The consent form still had a signature line.
Your pediatrician does not raise the Belmont Report. She does not know it exists. She was trained to hand over a pamphlet. Consent, as the Belmont Report defines it, was not part of the training.
Boys born in American hospitals are commonly circumcised within the first forty-eight hours of life. The procedure is elective, performed on healthy tissue, without therapeutic indication. The device most commonly used to hold the infant during the procedure is called the Circumstraint, a plastic form that immobilizes the baby’s arms and legs so the surgeon can work.
Forrest Maready has written on what happens inside the infant’s body during this event.¹³ Three triggers activate the dorsal vagal complex simultaneously: the injected local anesthetic registers as chemical intrusion, the incision as tissue injury, and the strap and plastic form as restraint. The infant cannot fight and cannot flee. Under sustained restraint, the primal system routes into shutdown. Images of babies on the Circumstraint mid-procedure show glassed-over eyes and a stillness that is not calm. It is dissociation, the same primal response animals and reptiles exhibit under capture, and the same response World War I soldiers exhibited when frozen in place under sustained fire.
The procedure requires written consent. It does not require informed consent. Parents are not shown the Circumstraint, or what dorsal vagal shutdown looks like. They are told the boy will not remember.
Whether the child remembers with his cortex is beside the point. The body remembers with its wiring. Maready traces the same trigger pattern, the same shutdown response, in the shots administered later, where the parent’s or nurse’s restraint constitutes the third trigger and delivers the injected metals into a body whose lymphatic system is now primed to transport them.
Your pediatrician was not trained in polyvagal theory. The circumcision was billed separately, performed by a different practitioner, and by the time she sees the child for the first well-baby visit, the file is closed and the incision has healed.
5. The Formula Sample in the Discharge Bag (first weeks)
Breast milk is more than food. It is a continuation of the mother’s biology into the infant. It delivers living stem cells, signalling molecules, protective proteins, and dozens of maternal components the infant’s biology integrates into its own.¹⁴ Colostrum in the first days carries a concentration of maternal material no manufactured product can replicate. The list of components identified in breast milk grows every year.
What formula provides is a mix of macronutrients dissolved in vegetable oils, built from cow’s milk protein or soy. It is what a mother feeds her baby when the biology cannot function or when she has no other option. It is not equivalent to what it replaces.
Formula recommendation frequently begins in the hospital. If the baby is slow to latch, if the mother is exhausted, if the nursing staff has other beds to turn over, a bottle of formula appears. The discharge bag contains a formula sample. The pediatrician’s office keeps sample cans for the first well-baby visit. What the office does not keep is a lactation consultant on staff.
The consultant costs money. The formula is provided by the manufacturer. The infrastructure of the American pediatric practice is built around the availability of formula and the absence of professional breastfeeding support. When troubleshooting is needed, the referral goes to a private lactation consultant the family pays for out of pocket, or, more commonly, the referral does not go anywhere and the mother receives a can of Similac.
The pediatrician was trained to identify failure to thrive. She was not trained to identify a poor latch, an undiagnosed tongue tie, engorgement, mastitis, or the constellation of ordinary breastfeeding difficulties that resolve with skilled support. The training treated breastfeeding as a preference and formula as a substitute of equivalent value. Neither claim survives the primary literature.
At every visit, the baby is weighed and measured. The numbers are plotted against a curve. The pediatrician announces the percentile. Anything below the fiftieth is met with concern. Anything below the tenth triggers supplementation, formula, referrals, and repeat visits.
The curve is a statistical instrument. It plots where a population’s babies actually fell, not where healthy babies should fall. The reference standards against which most American pediatricians still work were built substantially on formula-fed populations, until the World Health Organization revised its curves in 2006 based on breastfed infants. A breastfed baby, whose weight-gain curve flattens naturally after four to six months, tracks below the older references and appears to be failing. The formula-fed baby was the standard against which the breastfed baby was measured and labeled as failing to thrive.
The percentile is not a diagnosis. Half of all babies are, by definition, below the fiftieth percentile. This is what percentiles are. The pediatrician’s alarm at the number is not a medical judgment. It is a script triggered by a chart.
The mother leaves the visit worried about her baby’s weight. She adds a bottle. The pediatrician marks the intervention on the record. At the next visit, if the number has climbed, the intervention is validated. If it has not, the recommendation escalates. More bottles. Iron drops. Cereal at four months. Formula-based supplementation.
The chart does not measure the child’s thriving. It measures her position relative to a reference population that was itself constructed by earlier interventions. The chart manufactures the pathology it then addresses.
The four-month or six-month iron level comes back low. The pediatrician prescribes ferrous sulfate drops or recommends iron-fortified cereal. The parent complies. The drops stain the baby’s teeth, alter the stool, and are frequently spit up. The parent gives them anyway because the pediatrician said the number was low.
The number was low because the placenta was cut early. The reference range was developed on infants who were also cut early. The whole system, from delivery-room workflow to the reference range on the lab printout, was calibrated around interventions that removed the natural iron reserve at birth.
The intervention at hour zero produced the finding at month six that justifies the intervention at month six.
Ferrous sulfate is an industrial iron compound the infant’s body has no biological history with. It is aggressive on the gut lining, contributes to constipation, and drives oxidative stress the six-month-old is developmentally ill-equipped to buffer. The clinical trials on infant iron supplementation are almost entirely funded by the manufacturers of the supplements themselves or the cereals into which those supplements are compounded.
Iron in the form the child’s biology expects arrives packaged inside whole foods: liver, red meat, egg yolk, shellfish. These are the traditional first foods documented by Weston Price across traditional cultures around the world.¹⁵ None of Price’s cultures gave their infants iron drops. None of Price’s cultures produced the infants the American pediatric system labels as low in iron at six months.
Your pediatrician was trained in the intervention. She was not trained in what a child looks like when the intervention is not needed because the earlier interventions never happened.
The child has an earache. The pediatrician looks in the ear, notes the red drum, and writes a script for amoxicillin. Ten days. The ear improves. Three weeks later, the ear is red again. Another course. By eighteen months, the child has been on four rounds of antibiotics. The referral to ENT for tubes is in the file.
A 1994 study in Annals of Allergy identified food allergy in 78 percent of a series of 104 children with recurrent middle-ear fluid. Of the food-allergic group, 86 percent showed significant reduction on a sixteen-week elimination diet; when the offending foods were reintroduced, 94 percent recurred. The common offenders were cow’s milk, eggs, wheat, corn, soy, and peanuts.¹⁶ Children with undiagnosed cow’s milk allergy are roughly twice as likely to have recurrent ear problems. The ENT specialist David Hurst has spent his career documenting that allergy is the primary driver of chronic middle-ear fluid, and that aggressive allergy management resolves most cases.¹⁷
Your pediatrician does not ask about the child’s diet. She does not ask whether the ear inflammation clusters after certain foods. She writes the amoxicillin. The amoxicillin, over successive courses, does documented damage to the child’s gut ecology, contributing to the food sensitizations that will produce the next allergy diagnosis and the next inflammation and the next round of prescriptions.¹⁸
Heather Fraser has documented the loop.¹⁹ Antibiotic exposure is associated with elevated risk of food allergy. The food allergy drives the inflammation that produces the fluid that invites the prescription. The prescription drives the next allergy. The pediatrician sees the ear. The pediatrician does not see the loop.
9. The Autism Screening at Eighteen Months (eighteen to twenty-four months)
The M-CHAT is administered at the eighteen-month and twenty-four-month well-child visits. It is a screening questionnaire designed to catch signs of autism early. Parents whose children screen positive are referred for further evaluation.
By eighteen months, an American child following the CDC schedule has received over twenty vaccine doses. The MMR is typically administered at twelve to fifteen months. The pattern of parental accounts documented across the literature is consistent: the child was developing normally, received the shots at fifteen to eighteen months, and regressed.²⁰
J.B. Handley’s son Jamison is one such case. At eighteen months, Jamison was sick, never sleeping, gut in distress, alternating between diarrhea and constipation. His behavior had shifted. He ran along walls turning his eyes to the side, spun in circles, and played with his trains in odd ways. He had been an early talker, but the words had disappeared. UCSF confirmed the diagnosis: autism, the severe kind. The presiding doctor told the family to expect institutionalization. Within two weeks of beginning biomedical treatment under a different physician, Jamison’s belly had flattened, his eye contact was returning, and the dark circles under his eyes were clearing.²¹ The pattern that took his family months to piece together is the pattern the M-CHAT is designed to detect after the fact.
The screening does not prevent autism. It catches autism after the damage is measurable. It is a diagnostic backstop, timed to the developmental window in which regression is typically noticed, which is the same developmental window in which the schedule delivers its heaviest early load.
The rate is now one in thirty-one American children.²² A fully vaccinated Danish child receives thirty doses of vaccine against ten diseases across childhood, delivered in eleven injections thanks to multivalent combinations. A fully vaccinated American child, as of 2024, received between eighty-four and eighty-eight doses against seventeen diseases.²³ The pediatrician who administers the M-CHAT does not draw this comparison. She was trained that autism is genetic, that the cause is unknown, and that no controlled comparison of fully vaccinated versus never-vaccinated populations has ever been conducted. The last of these is true. The absence of the study is itself the finding.
The screening timing is the confession. The system knows when regression happens. The system built the screening around that window. What the system does not do is investigate the exposures delivered during the same window.
The Intervention Cascade: How Modern Medicine Creates the Birth Emergencies It Claims to Prevent (Part 2)
10. The Tonsillectomy Recommendation (early childhood)
The child has recurrent throat inflammation, or the tonsils appear enlarged, or the sleep is poor. The pediatrician refers to ENT. The ENT recommends removal. The parents comply.
During the American polio era, fifty to eighty percent of middle- and upper-class American children were tonsillectomized. Anderson’s 1943 Utah data showed that poliomyelitis was more than 2.5 times as common in tonsillectomized children. Bulbar polio, the form that paralyzed the muscles of breathing and swallowing, was sixteen times more common. Forty-three percent of the bulbar and bulbospinal cases had been preceded by a tonsillectomy within thirty days.²⁴ After the connection surfaced in the medical literature, tonsillectomy rates collapsed. The procedure never recovered its earlier prevalence, though it remains common enough to be a routine referral.
The tonsils are lymphatic tissue. They are part of the body’s cleansing and repair infrastructure, positioned at the entry point of the digestive and respiratory tracts to sample what comes in and to house the response. Removing them because they are inflamed is comparable to removing a filter because it is doing its job.
The recurrent throat problems have a driver. Maready has documented one pattern in the sudden-onset behavioral and neurological conditions labeled PANDAS and PANS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections, and Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome). Aluminum from prior vaccinations creates a metal burden in the brain and lymphatic system. A subsequent inflammatory event produces a sudden onset of behavioral and neurological symptoms.²⁵ Removing the tonsils and giving antibiotics produces temporary relief. The underlying loop persists.
Your pediatrician was trained to identify the surgical indication. She was not trained to ask what the tonsils were responding to, or what the removal costs the child in the years afterward when the filter that used to sample the air is no longer there.
The teacher flags the boy. His mother takes him to the pediatrician. A screening tool is administered. The prescription follows. Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta. The child is medicated through the school day.
The DSM criteria for ADHD are behavioral. There is no biomarker. There is no imaging finding required for the diagnosis. There is no laboratory test. The condition is defined by the behavior and validated by the response to the stimulant, which by design produces focus and compliance in almost any child regardless of underlying condition.
Maready has proposed that the behavioral pattern derives from damage to a small brainstem structure called the locus coeruleus, which regulates the release of norepinephrine and mediates the fight-or-flight response.²⁶ Damage produces hypersensitivity and continuous norepinephrine release. The child is locked in a low-grade panic state. He cannot sit still because his body is preparing for a threat that never resolves. The gut problems that frequently accompany the ADHD presentation follow from the same diversion of resources away from digestion. Many parents notice that their child’s behavior improves markedly during a fever, which fits the same mechanism: the locus coeruleus diverts its norepinephrine output to raising body temperature, giving the child a temporary respite from the constant stress signal.²⁷
The metals implicated in the damage, in Maready’s account, are the aluminum-based adjuvants injected in the leg during infancy and transported by the lymphatic system toward the brainstem.²⁸ Studies have documented elevated aluminum in the hair of children diagnosed with hyperactivity. The stimulant does not address the damage. It masks the presentation by driving further neurotransmitter release, in the way that pressing harder on a broken accelerator does not fix the car.
The pediatrician was trained in the diagnostic criteria and the medication. She was not trained in the injection pathway, the lymphatic transport, or the brainstem lesion. The prescription pad was faster than the investigation.
The teenage girl is depressed. Her pediatrician writes the SSRI. American pediatric and family practice are the frontline prescribers of adolescent SSRIs; referral to a child psychiatrist happens only for complex cases. The FDA’s own black-box warning, added in 2004, states that these compounds increase suicidal ideation in children and adolescents. The warning appears on the label. It is rarely raised in the conversation before the script is signed.
In 2012, GlaxoSmithKline paid three billion dollars to settle claims that it had downplayed the risk of paroxetine, marketed as Paxil, in adolescents.²⁹ The company had promoted the drug for uses the FDA had not approved and had withheld safety data. The settlement was the largest healthcare fraud settlement in American history at the time. Nearly every major pharmaceutical company has been caught in comparable settlements. The prescriptions kept flowing.
Teenage depression has risen sharply during the period in which the pediatric schedule expanded, the smartphone was placed in every hand, sleep was compressed, sunlight exposure collapsed, gut ecology was serially disrupted by antibiotic courses, and the food supply was reengineered around industrial seed oils and ultra-processed carbohydrates. Each of these has documented effects on mood and cognition. None is investigated at the sixteen-year-old’s medication appointment.
The SSRI is not a diagnosis. It is a management protocol. It changes what the neurotransmitter machinery is doing without asking what damaged the machinery in the first place. The teen who does not respond gets a second SSRI. The teen who responds badly gets an antipsychotic added. The teen who spirals gets hospitalized. The chart records the diagnosis codes and the medication trials. The chart does not record what happened to the child between age one and age fourteen.
Your pediatrician was trained to identify depression and to prescribe the first-line medication. She was not trained to ask what a healthy sixteen-year-old looks like, or what would have to change in the child’s life for the depression to resolve without the compound.
What to Ask Before Your Next Antidepressant Prescription
The eleven-year-old girl is offered the HPV vaccine at her pediatric well-visit; American pediatric care runs through adolescence, and the HPV series is a scheduled pediatric-office item. In many practices, the shot is bundled with the meningococcal and Tdap boosters at the same visit, an arrangement the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends explicitly to improve series completion.³⁰ The practice’s incentive is to have the teenager walk out with all three.
The clinical trials submitted for HPV vaccine approval did not use saline as the placebo. The comparator was the aluminum adjuvant, which produces its own inflammatory and neurological effects.³¹ The trials measured precancerous lesions, not cervical cancer, which develops on a timeline decades longer than the trials ran. The insert states that the product has not been evaluated for carcinogenicity or genotoxicity.³²
The injury patterns reported after HPV vaccination include postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, seizures, chronic fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, motor symptoms, and premature ovarian failure. Mary Holland has documented individual cases in detail. Alexis Wolf was thirteen when she started the series in 2007. After the second dose her health deteriorated. After the third she could no longer focus, sleep, eat, or behave normally. Today, at twenty-five, she has daily seizures. Colton Berrett was thirteen when he received the third dose. He became paralyzed from the neck down and remained on a ventilator until his suicide, two months before his eighteenth birthday. Joel Gomez was fourteen when he died in his sleep after the second dose.³³
The American pediatric office does not present the trial design. It does not present the package insert. The pediatrician was trained that Gardasil prevents cervical cancer. That claim is not supported by the trials. The claim she was trained to make is the claim she makes.
In Japan, after the injury patterns became public, uptake dropped from around seventy percent to under one percent.³⁴ The Japanese Ministry of Health withdrew its active recommendation. Girls in Japan are still eligible to receive the shot. Their parents are informed. Most decline.
The HPV Lie: Pap Smears, Gardasil, and a Cancer Caused by Something Else
Thirteen items across one childhood, all delivered by the same profession and shaped by the same training.
The nurse walks in with the shot tray already prepared. A Vaccine Information Statement is handed over as the needle is uncapped. The growth chart appears on the monitor and a percentile is announced. The developmental questionnaire sits on the clipboard. Next shots are read off the schedule. Questions raised meet a script. Parents who decline meet a second script. Parents who persist are fired from the practice.
None of this measures whether the child is thriving. The visit measures whether the child is on schedule for the shots, the screenings, the growth curve, the developmental milestones, and the medication trials. The well-child visit is a compliance check. It has been a compliance check for as long as most parents alive today have been alive. What changed is the length of the compliance list, which as of 2024 ran to eighty-four to eighty-eight doses covering seventeen diseases, an autism screening at eighteen months, a stimulant prescription at seven, an SSRI at fourteen, and a Gardasil dose at eleven.
The pediatrician cannot do the health check because she was not trained for it. She was trained to plot, prescribe, inject, refer, screen, code, and bill. The health check is what a curious pediatrician would do. The profession does not produce curious pediatricians. It produces compliant ones, because the training rewards compliance and punishes curiosity, and the compliant pediatrician takes home the same salary whether the child in front of her is thriving or not.
The mother in the exam room is the one who has to do the health check. She has to hold the developmental history the chart does not track. She has to notice what changed after which appointment. She has to ask what the pediatrician was trained not to ask. She has to know what a healthy child looks like, because the person paid to know does not.
How To Explain It To A 6 Year Old
Imagine a driving school where the students learn one thing. They learn the map. Every morning, the teacher hands out the map. It shows every road and every turn.
The students memorize the map. When they get their driver’s license, they can drive the map perfectly.
They cannot, however, look out the window.
Looking out the window was not on the map. Looking out the window is not what the driving school taught. If a dog runs into the road, the map does not have a dog. If the tire goes flat, the map does not have a tire. The students keep driving the map. They drive right through the dog. They drive on the flat tire until the wheel comes off.
If you asked one of these drivers why they did not stop, they would say the map said to keep going.
Your pediatrician has a map. It is called the schedule. It tells her which shots to give and which drops to prescribe and which screenings to run and at which age. She learned the map very well and can drive it in her sleep. She was not taught to look out the window.
The window is your child. The window is what your child looked like last week and what your child looks like this week. The window is what changed after the last appointment. The window is whether your child is thriving, or is quietly, slowly becoming someone the map does not have space for.
You are the one at the window. Your pediatrician is at the map. Both of you are trying to help your child. Only one of you can see her.
Medical Disclaimer
This essay is a work of analysis and commentary. It is not medical advice. It is not a prescription. It is not a substitute for the judgment of a practitioner who knows your child. Decisions about vaccination, medication, surgery, and pediatric care belong to the parent and to the practitioner the parent chooses. The purpose of this essay is to widen the frame of what a parent knows before those decisions are made.
In Print
Thirteen of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.
Two go to the paradigm underneath the whole shelf. No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews, catalogues 258 failed contagion experiments and the case against germ theory itself. No Virus takes the examination one layer deeper — the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal of the entities the framework is built on.
Four take on the remedies and paradigm questions mainstream medicine actively suppresses. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence. The Iodine Book recovers an essential mineral driven out of easy reach by bromide, fluoride, and perchlorate — and the pharmacological tradition that kept its therapeutic use alive across the decades mainstream medicine set it aside. The Hydrogen Peroxide Book recovers a century of practice with a compound the body already makes — mitochondrial, phagocytic, part of thyroid hormone synthesis — suppressed precisely because its clinical utility threatened the pharmaceutical direction that captured twentieth-century medicine.
Two more take on the remedies already in your kitchen. Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework industrial medicine buried — the compound already in your cupboard, and what it does at the level of the blood, kidneys, lungs, digestion, and skin. The Castor Oil Book recovers four thousand years of documented practice on the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about — the kitchen bottle that doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures.
A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
References
Suzanne Humphries, quoted in J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).
Lawrence Palevsky, quoted in J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic.
Robert Sears, quoted in J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic.
Jayne L. M. Donegan, Foreword to Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History (2013).
Thomas Cowan, Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness (Chelsea Green, 2018), on newborn phytonadione biology and gut colonization.
Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, on intramuscular versus oral vitamin K administration and the childhood cancer literature.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, on the Danish Childhood Vaccination Program.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, on the corrupted placebo methodology across the pediatric vaccine trial literature.
CDC, “Vaccine Information Statements: Frequently Asked Questions,” in Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (Pink Book), 14th edition, Appendix C.
National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research (1979), cited in Edward Geehr, Unavoidably Unsafe.
Edward Geehr, Unavoidably Unsafe, on Emergency Use Authorization and blank package inserts.
Forrest Maready, Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained, on the dorsal vagal complex and the Circumstraint.
Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, on the cellular components of breast milk and colostrum.
Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), documenting traditional cultures and their infant feeding practices.
Heather Fraser, The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, citing 1994 Annals of Allergy study on food elimination and ear inflammation.
David Hurst, cited in Heather Fraser, The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, on allergy as the primary driver of chronic middle-ear fluid.
Fraser, The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, on antibiotic exposure and food allergy risk.
Fraser, The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, on the antibiotic-allergy-inflammation loop.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, on parental accounts of regression following the fifteen-to-eighteen-month shots.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, on the regression and recovery of his son Jamison.
CDC, “Prevalence and Early Identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 4 and 8 Years — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 16 Sites, United States, 2022,” MMWR Surveillance Summaries 74, no. 2 (April 17, 2025).
Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, on tonsillectomy and bulbar polio (Anderson, 1943 Utah data).
Forrest Maready, Crooked, on PANDAS and PANS as aluminum-inflammation cascades.
Forrest Maready, Crooked, on the locus coeruleus and ADHD.
Forrest Maready, Crooked, on fever, norepinephrine, and behavioral improvement in autism and ADHD.
Maready, Crooked, on aluminum adjuvant transport via the lymphatic system.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, on the GlaxoSmithKline paroxetine settlement.
CDC, “General Best Practice Guidelines for Immunization: Timing and Spacing of Immunobiologics,” on ACIP recommendations for simultaneous administration of adolescent vaccines at the 11-to-12 visit.
Holland et al., The HPV Vaccine on Trial, on Gardasil clinical trial placebo design.
Holland et al., The HPV Vaccine on Trial, quoting the Gardasil package insert on carcinogenicity and genotoxicity evaluation.
Holland et al., The HPV Vaccine on Trial, on the cases of Alexis Wolf, Colton Berrett, and Joel Gomez.
J.B. Handley, How to End the Autism Epidemic, on the collapse of Japanese HPV vaccine uptake.
Additional Sources
Thomas Cowan, Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness (Chelsea Green, 2018).
Herbert M. Shelton, Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life, and the collected articles on pediatric care.
John H. Tilden, Toxemia Explained: The True Interpretation of the Cause of Disease (1926).
Daniel Roytas, Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments.
Torsten Engelbrecht, Claus Köhnlein, Samantha Bailey, and Stefan Lanka, Virus Mania, 3rd edition (2021).
Mark Bailey, The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Medical Tyranny (2023).
Dawn Lester and David Parker, What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong.
Sally Fallon Morell, The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care.
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014), on early-life trauma and dissociation as embodied phenomena.
Peter Gøtzsche, Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare (2013).
Years before the world heard of COVID-19, top vaccine officials openly discussed how a “disruptive event” could fast-track a new genetic vaccine platform. Jefferey follows the trail of deals, diary entries, and a Zika vaccine that faded from view, right up to the pandemic that changed everything.
Anthropic says it has caught scientists using its AI models for research that could help develop biological weapons, including work aimed at making dangerous pathogens more transmissible and harmful.
Five cases of biological researchers using Claude raised serious security concerns, according to a company threat intelligence report published on Thursday.
One case, to be carried out at a military research institute, involved gain-of-function research aimed at making the chikungunya virus more transmissible and better able to evade the immune system.
Another scientist used Claude while researching highly dangerous bird flu and ways the virus could adapt to mammals. Other cases involved work on viruses related to smallpox and the redesign of dangerous toxins.
Anthropic said some of the researchers went to considerable lengths to get around its restrictions, including hiding their identities, routing traffic through other countries and using services designed to bypass safety controls. The accounts involved have been banned while the services used to get around the safeguards have been shut down.
The company stopped short of saying the scientists were definitely trying to build biological weapons. However, it warned that sophisticated actors may deliberately hide malicious aims behind legitimate-looking research.
Anthropic acknowledged that its AI is becoming more capable, saying older models were too weak to meaningfully assist sophisticated users with dangerous biological research, but that it can no longer make the same assurance about today’s systems.
The findings come just weeks after US scientists used AI to design complete viral genomes and successfully created 16 functioning viruses that did not previously exist in nature. Although those viruses infected bacteria rather than humans, researchers have warned that the experiment demonstrates how quickly AI’s biological capabilities are advancing.
Anthropic’s report also detailed other alleged misuse of Claude, including cyberattacks, surveillance, propaganda, fraud and assistance with conventional weapons such as missiles, armed drones and bombs.
Just days before the threat assessment was published, Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger publicly stated that he believes there is a greater than 10% chance AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade, adding that the company still has no clear plan for safely controlling superintelligence.
His admission came after another Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, accusing Anthropic and OpenAI of ignoring the “civilizational stakes” and “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He separately warned that sufficiently advanced AI could hack critical infrastructure or help create “extinction-level bioweapons.”
25 years ago, when Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by The New York Times on 9/11, he told the paper it was “very good” for Israel.
He claimed the terrorist attack would “generate immediate sympathy” and “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
What he meant was that the U.S. fighting a “war on terror” would be the perfect excuse to get America to fight Israel’s enemies for it in the Middle East and make way for Israeli dominance.
This was particularly well timed for Israel, given how close many top officials in the Bush administration were with Israel.
Top officials, including Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Richard Perle, were advisors to Benjamin Netanyahu prior to entering the Bush administration.
In a letter sent to Benjamin Netanyahu written in 1996, these advisors called on him to reject the possibility of a two-state solution and instead overthrow surrounding governments seen as too sympathetic to Palestine, first and foremost “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”.
In coordination with the neoconservatives from the Project for a New American Century, who wanted to preserve American unipolar hegemony through waging “multiple simultaneous large-scale wars”, these Zionists and neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
To cook up the WMD deception used to launch the war, the Neo-cons created an “Office of Special Plans” within the Pentagon to push the deception.
At the time, journalist Bob Dreyfuss reported that, “also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit … prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon’s office … This secretive unit … may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official.”
The Guardian reported at the time that the Office of Special Plans “forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise,” adding that “The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.”
It also added that Israeli officials were welcomed to the Pentagon under “Mr Feith’s authority without having to fill in the usual forms”, in reference to Douglas Feith, the lead Neo-conservative author of the clean break document.
The LA Times noted in 2005 that “A former senior Israeli military intelligence official asserted Thursday that the nation’s spy agencies were a ‘full partner’ to the United States and Britain in producing flawed prewar assessments of Iraq’s ability to mount attacks with weapons of mass destruction”.
The Israel lobby was also able to use 9/11 to make its clean break plan an official hit list of countries for the U.S. in its war on terror.
As the U.S. general Wesley Clark famously said, after 9/11 the Neo-cons planned to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”, a list he later said came from a study “paid for by the Israelis” in reference to the clean break.
It was this list that functioned as the driving force for U.S. foreign policy for the ensuing years.
As Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs documented :
The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11.
The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.
Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the U.S. Government including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and others.
Similarly, Israel lobby groups used 9/11 to rebrand as “counter-terrorism” expert groups, most notably the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
As authors Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick documented in their recent book “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power,” the FDD was “formed originally in 2001 as Emet (‘Truth’ in Hebrew) with a mission that included ‘provid[ing] education to enhance Israel’s image in North America.’ That name and mission, while submitted to the IRS in its founding documents, was nowhere to be found on its website”, before rebranding as a “counter-terrorism” organization after 9/11.
They added, “Al Jazeera hidden cameras captured Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, speaking in blunt terms about Israel’s relationship with the FDD. ‘We have FDD. We have others working on’ projects including ‘data gathering, working on activist organizations, money trail,’ said Vaknin-Gil to an audience of American pro-Israel advocates in 2016. ‘This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best’”.
This Israel Lobby cutout was one of the most influential organizations in paving the way to war with Iran.
The authors wrote that during the negotiations of the JCPOA in 2015, the FDD “wasn’t just a producer of research papers and op-eds advocating against the JCPOA and for more sanctions and military threats against Iran. It also served as an important element of an echo chamber informing the public and Congress about Middle East policy,” adding that “In an eighteen-month period preceding and immediately following the signing of the JCPOA in 2015, FDD staff and fellows provided congressional testimony opposing the deal seventeen times”.
They also added that “a misfiled document revealed that Bernie Marcus contributed $10.7 million, Paul Singer contributed $3.6 million, and Sheldon Adelson contributed $1.5 million in a five-year period ending in 2011. The three men were the three largest donors to the FDD in that time frame, the only period in which the group’s top donors have been disclosed”.
9/11, and the “Global war on terror” that followed, was indeed “very good” for Israel, and it allowed it and its American lobby and neo-conservative allies to advance the regime change wars needed for Israeli dominance and continued subjugation of Palestine.
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue
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