Brownstone Journal

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.
For more than two decades, Anthony Fauci kept a private diary. It was discovered by the new administration more than two years after Fauci had resigned. The contents were treated as private. In fact, the diaries were a public record because he wrote them on government computers with the assistance of staff of the National Institutes of Health.
To be sure, Fauci never intended them to be seen in this form. They were notes toward an autobiography. He left a copy behind because of public-records preservation requirements. Once they had been discovered, they went through various channels and finally landed in the offices of Senator Rand Paul, who in 2026 released them in four separate installments.
These documents are brought together here for the first time in a single chronological edition, in three volumes.
Volume I covers 2001 through 2014, the years in which Fauci, as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became the federal government's leading voice on infectious disease. It opens with his own history of the AIDS epidemic and moves through the anthrax attacks of 2001, the creation of PEPFAR under President George W. Bush, the H5N1 bird flu scare and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, including the cases treated in the United States. Throughout are his dealings with presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and the press.
Volume II covers 2015 through 2020. It begins with the aftermath of Ebola and the Zika outbreak and follows the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration. In 2020 the diary becomes a near-daily record of the Covid-19 pandemic: the White House Coronavirus Task Force, his work alongside Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield, and Francis Collins, the fights over shutdowns and treatments, the early questions about Wuhan, his constant media appearances, and the threats that brought him a security detail.
Volume III covers January 2021 through December 17, 2022, shortly before Fauci left government. As Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, he records the vaccine rollout, the Delta and Omicron waves, boosters and mandates, the arrival of Paxlovid, and his clashes with Senator Paul over gain-of-function research and the origins of the virus, along with his view of his critics and his preparations to step down.
Fauci's entries are reproduced as written and uncorrected; material written by others has been omitted. What remains is his own account of his work, his schemes and worries, his excuses and fears, his contacts and psychological state, and the identities of many people around him, recorded as events unfolded.
They are now available for purchase in softcover or digital editions. You can also download them in PDF here and share them widely.

By Leland Lehrman at Brownstone dot org.
Files that were removed from the internet are in the evidence pack.
The scale of the violation is hard to imagine, I know. After the dazed feeling wears off, let's get busy. I also want to thank Dr. Clayton Baker, who was the first to bring my attention to the role of Tom Shimabukuro in covering up vaccine safety signals for over ten years. Incredibly, he is still at the CDC, serving as the deputy director of the Influenza Division in their National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD).
The following research brief benefited from various digital research assistants, and I have not edited the language yet. But the information cannot wait.
Read and share with friends and family. It's not over yet.
The United States began vaccinating against Covid-19 on 14 December 2020. Two CDC programs were designed and paid to catch any harm that clinical trials had missed. VAERS takes reports from doctors, patients and manufacturers. V-safe sends vaccinated people text messages asking how they feel. Here we follow the paper trail of those two systems from the Christmas 2020 rollout into 2022. The bottom line:
The government's "worst case" for amount of Covid vaccine injury reports assumed 1,000 reports a day. For fourteen months it was double that. For some of those months, it was triple.
The document that matters most is a monthly report from the contractor that runs VAERS for the CDC, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). It covers December 2020 and went to the CDC's contracting officer's representative on 16 January 2021, with CDC program staff and an FDA reviewer copied. Its first page carries a chart.
A red line marks 1,000 reports a day, which the government's own planning called the "worst case." The reports crossed that line on 21 December, the winter solstice, in the first week of the rollout. They dipped under it for three days around Christmas. From 26 December they stayed over it. The contractor told the CDC. that it was "unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical inquiries, etc.)" (GDIT report, PDF p. 8). All this while they were telling everyone everything was ok.

And the report numbers did not come back down.
From 4 January 2021 to 31 January 2022, only nine ordinary weekdays dropped under 1,000, and the lowest was 790. In February 2022 the typical weekday finally fell under it. The contract had called 1,000 a day a peak "not expected to reflect sustained activity." It lasted 14 months. The busiest single day was Sunday 22 August 2021, with 14,593 reports, almost all of them carrying a manufacturer's report number (public VAERS data, counted for this brief).

All that time the public heard something else. Eighteen days after that Sunday, on 9 September 2021, President Joe Biden went on television.
"What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We've made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The vaccine has FDA approval. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing." (Biden, 9 September 2021)
He called the speech "a new plan to require more Americans to be vaccinated, to combat those blocking public health." The plan required vaccination of 17 million health care workers in facilities that take Medicare and Medicaid, all executive-branch federal employees and federal contractors, and, through a Labor Department rule, vaccination or weekly testing for every employer with 100 or more employees, over 80 million workers. The word he used for the vaccines was "safe."
In VAERS, the month of the speech brought 47,172 reports, 953 of them reporting a death and 4,897 a hospitalization. It was not the worst month. April 2021 had brought 103,637 Covid-19 reports, 1,486 reporting a death and 6,800 a hospitalization, the worst month of the year on every count, more...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.
In my day, being young was dominated by three basics: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
Boy, that world has changed.
Seems like our kids aren't having much sex these days.
Drugs? Yes, mostly of the prescribed type.
And rock 'n' roll? Well, not much anymore, as the listening tastes of today's youth center on hip-hop and AI-enhanced electronic pop that hardly passes for music nowadays.
But it is the lack of sex that seems to be most concerning.
Apparently, the fact that young people aren't having much sex today is being captured in surveys from around the world. This is proving to be worrisome not simply as a cultural artifact, but because the lack of sex is resulting in plunging birth rates, causing fertility in nearly every OECD country to drop to historic lows. The lack of sex is not only shrinking populations, but also causing huge demographic changes as countries turn older. What exactly is going on?
Those who study the sexual habits of young people generally point to three key reasons: There's the unaffordability of housing, which makes younger people live at home longer (not exactly conducive to lots of sex). There's the lack of booze—the social lubricant that used to be a precursor to most intimacy—and apparently kids aren't as drinking much today as we used to. Then there's the third one: youth mental health issues, which are exacerbated by too much screen time, isolation, and loneliness.
Seems like kids aren't dating much these days, at least not in person. Probably spending so much time with your face buried in your phone will leave you less interested and less competent in successfully hooking up with a real person you would otherwise want to shag.
I would add a fourth reason, and one that is slowly gaining attention in medical circles. Several commonly prescribed drugs, particularly antidepressants, are causing sexual dysfunction in youth. The most surprising aspect of this is that sometimes the sexual dysfunction is permanent and continues after the person stops taking the drug, a phenomenon well enough documented to have its own name, PSSD (Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction).
SSRI antidepressants, such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, among others, as well as drugs for acne (isotretinoin) and baldness (finasteride) are at the top of the list of treatments capable of causing serious and sometimes long-term sexual dysfunction, described as numb genitalia, inability to orgasm, emotional blunting, and so on.
The proportion of our youth taking antidepressants—despite warnings against using these drugs in young people—grew enormously during and after Covid. The medical journal Pediatrics reported that in the US monthly antidepressant dispensing rates to ages 12–25 increased 66.3% from January 2016 to December 2022 (from ~2,576 to ~4,285 per 100,000 people). The number of individuals in this age group with more than one dispensed antidepressant rose 46.1%. More recent data from the CDC shows that about 19.3% of adults in the US currently "take medication for their mental health," which would mostly be SSRI antidepressants.
All of this poses the question: Is the rate of SSRI prescribing affecting sexual activity across a broad spectrum of people in America today?
It was 23 years ago (2003) that the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK issued its first warning that SSRIs increased suicide and self-harm risks in young people, even though they knew of this problem for a long time. The US FDA followed with its own black box warning in 2004, later extended through age 24. The UK's 2003 warning was likewise limited to young people, until this month.
Fast forward to now, the MHRA issued warnings this month about suicidal thoughts and behaviours associated with SSRIs in patients of all ages—not just those under 25—as covered by the US black box warning—as well as warnings about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction.
Shockingly, the US FDA has yet to require a specific warning ...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
A couple of days ago I was on national TV being asked the usual round of questions about an NFL player who'd apparently developed blood clots. How can a young, fit athlete get a pulmonary embolism (PE)? What are the symptoms? Can you fly with a clot? Could it have been picked up earlier?
All perfectly sensible questions, especially for a young athlete, who faces far more scrutiny than an ordinary patient would. Within the hour, the story was all over TV station websites. . Obviously, he's got the country's attention.
I've spent much of my career answering requests like this type. After doing emergency, pulmonary, and critical care for so long, you'd think you'd know everything about thromboembolic disease by now, and I really don't find anything too surprising in that field anymore. I've seen PE kill patients who were absolutely stable just minutes before. I've also seen patients who were absolutely convinced they had a nasty clot, despite their presentation being very different. Both experiences have shaped how I think about the disease and reinforced that medicine needs the human element, something no machine, test, or algorithm can ever provide: Judgment.
The more I thought about that interview, the more I realized it wasn't really about a footballer or pulmonary embolism. It was an interview about where modern medicine has gone. We have such wonderful diagnostic tools now, and at the same time we have created a situation where doctors are increasingly unwilling to use their own clinical judgment without some form of technological validation.
We can now pick up abnormalities that would have been completely invisible a generation ago, yet we can find ourselves in a position where we're not sure whether that abnormality is of any significance. We're absolutely superb at detecting disease, and we're surprised by how uncertain we can be about when to stop looking.
At one time, a doctor's most important tool was his own mind. That's still true today, though I'm not sure we believe it anymore.
About 180 years ago, Virchow examined the mechanisms of thrombosis and pulmonary arterial obstruction. His 1846 work and the papers collected in 1856 formed the pathological basis of what we now call thromboembolic disease [1,2]. Every medical student has heard of him at some stage, invariably in the context of the classic triad of venous stasis, endothelial injury, and hypercoagulability. The triad as we know it wasn't actually Virchow's. Historians have examined how later interpretations and reassemblies of his original observations produced the concept that now bears his name [3].
The historical detail is of course interesting, but the real issue is the physiology. Clots form because the biological milieu is pro-thrombotic. Flow may be slow. The vascular endothelium may be damaged or activated. The coagulation system may shift to a pro-thrombotic state. All of these can happen in isolation or in combination, and their relative importance varies from patient to patient.
A post op patient who is bedbound is not in the same physiological situation as a young athlete who has had an injury. A patient with active cancer is not in the same situation as a patient who has simply spent several hours sitting on an aircraft. They may all go on to have a venous thromboembolism (VTE), but the circumstances in which it occurs and the risks involved will be very different.
That's why you can't just see a symptom and order a test. You have to understand the patient, the patient's situation, and the biology behind it. A swollen leg could be venous thrombosis, chronic venous insufficiency, a drug effect, trauma, inflammation, or a hundred other things. Shortness of breath could be a pulmonary embolism; it could be cardiac disease, it could be a pulmonary infection, it could be obstructive airways, it could be anemia, or it could be anxiety. The presence of a symptom is the first thing you consider in the diagnostic...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.
Before asking how power in global health should be rebalanced, reformers must confront a prior question: have existing policies and practices created a growing dependency on donor countries and international organisations? In many low-resourced countries, earmarked finance, externally selected priorities, imported program designs, a growing non-state and donor-dependent workforce, and donor reporting requirements have weakened the link between national choices and national accountability.
If that dependency has hollowed out or undermined sovereign responsibility, the answer cannot be another layer of international coordination. The architecture must instead return responsibility for health outcomes to those directly invested in population health, particularly national governments. The World Health Organization's (WHO's) mandates, functions, resources, and authority should progressively contract where functions can be performed effectively closer to affected populations, as countries recover the capacity and express accountability to make their own choices (IHRP, 2026a, 2026b).

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Sovereignty here does not mean isolation; it means that international cooperation should support governments that remain politically and financially accountable for decisions made in their name.
Recent proposals for reforming pandemic governance begin from a familiar diagnosis. The global health system is fragmented, public trust has deteriorated, poorer countries exercise too little influence, and inequality magnifies the damage caused by outbreaks (Lal et al., 2026; Cullinan, 2026). Much of this is true. Yet the remedies advanced in a new Nature Health commentary and in the draft United Nations Political Declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR) do not follow from that diagnosis. They largely reaffirm the institutions, financing models, and biomedical priorities that drove the loss of trust in the first place (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026).
The contradiction is stark. Global health leaders condemn inequality while supporting a preparedness architecture that can transfer scarce public resources from low- and middle-income countries towards international organisations, development-finance intermediaries, consultants, surveillance contractors, universities, and pharmaceutical manufacturers concentrated in wealthier states.
They call for power to be 'rebalanced,' but offer few realistic and enforceable means by which powerful institutions would surrender authority rather than serve their own interests (Lal et al., 2026). They conflate access to centrally selected commodities with health equity—the equivalent opportunity to live a healthy and fulfilling life (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026). Above all, they avoid the transparency regarding evidence and error that restoring trust requires. Trust was lost for a reason. Repeating the policies underlying that loss will not restore it.
The WHO does not ordinarily possess formal power to order national lockdowns, vaccination mandates, or other domestic measures. Its practical influence is nonetheless considerable. Emergency declarations, technical standards, model laws, procurement arrangements, donor conditions, and reputational pressure can narrow the choices available to governments, particularly those dependent on external finance and expertise. The relevant sovereignty question is therefore not whether the WHO can legally command a state, but whether the surrounding institutional system makes departure from its preferred policies politically or financially bearable.
Lal and colleagues' Nature Health commentary, 'Reforming global health for an age of mistrust, fragmentation and overlapping crises,' identifies three desired transformations: rebalancing power, reinforcing systems, and restoring trust. It recognises that the Lusa...

By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org.
I once met the surgeon general. He offered me a cigarette.
–Rodney Dangerfield
Whenever I suspect that my beloved profession has finally reached rock bottom in its utter subservience to the vaccine-industrial complex, I stand corrected by the report of some new-world-record, bathyspheric descent into depravity that some new group of physicians has managed to achieve.
Independent journalist Jon Fleetwood reports that some of the largest and best-known pediatric hospitals in the United States are vaccinating thousands of children while under anesthesia for surgical procedures.

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Children's Hospital of Philadelphia – widely and unironically known as "CHOP" – has reportedly instituted a program called "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize." It involves administering flu shots to children while they are anesthetized in the operating room. Reportedly, over 2,000 children have been vaccinated for influenza while under anesthesia for surgery at CHOP. Furthermore, those responsible at CHOP are reportedly considering adding mRNA-based Covid-19 and RSV shots to the mix.
Fleetwood reports that another major American pediatric center, Children's Hospital of Colorado (less graphically abbreviated as "CHCO") has even outperformed CHOP in this outrage, having reportedly vaccinated over 18,000 children while under anesthesia for surgery.
Two pediatric anesthesiologists, Caroline A. Pasquariello of CHOP and Kim M. Strupp of CHCO, even published a "how to" article for replication of this program in the American Academy of Pediatrics' AAP News.
Both clinically and ethically, "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize" constitutes gross medical malpractice. Clinically, it adds entirely unnecessary and avoidable risks to the surgical care of children. Ethically, it commits numerous violations that once again demonstrate the moral degeneracy of the entire vaccine enterprise, and of the pediatric establishment, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which seemingly serves the vaccine-industrial complex exclusively, and at the expense of our children.
Surgery and anesthesia are both inherently dangerous. The threats of airway compromise, cardiovascular failure, adverse reactions to anesthesia, infections, hemorrhage, and other complications are well known to every anesthesiologist, scrub nurse, and surgeon. Such concerns keep the good ones awake at night.
This is why, under proper practice, every effort is made in the perioperative period (the time immediately before, during, and after surgery) to minimize risk to the patient. This is why they shave and sterilize your skin before making the incision, why they don't let you eat after midnight the night before, why they ask you so many questions preoperatively (including about allergies), and why they monitor your vital signs so closely. That is why they postpone the surgery if you arrive with a fever on the day of the procedure.
The last thing any competent and caring surgeon, scrub nurse, or anesthesiologist wants during surgery is a wild card in play. Any unnecessary risk factor that can cause harm to the patient or create confusion during the perioperative period is forbidden.
Unless, apparently, it's a vaccine, and you're an anesthesiologist at CHOP or CHCO.
How can vaccinating a child in the operating room cause harm perioperatively? Let us count the ways.
Postoperative fevers are a universally acknowledged problem in surgery. They can signal a dangerous infection, internal bleeding, a drug or anesthesia reaction, and more. They often require extensive evaluation to identify and treat the cause, and can extend hospital stays significantly. The workup alone for a postoperative fever can be expensive, invasive, and harmful in itself.
Vaccines frequently cause fevers, especially in children. According to one study, 8-10% of children receivi...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.
The month was January 2021, only a few weeks into the mass rollout of the injection called a vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had outsourced its collection of data from the VAERS system – designed to monitor vaccine safety – to General Dynamics Information Technology. GDIT wrote the CDC a memo dated January 15.
"The number of incoming COVID-19 reports has significantly exceeded the estimated maximum of 1,000 reports per day," the memo to the CDC said. "As a result, GDIT is unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical inquiries, etc.). GDIT has reache [sic.] out to the Pogram [sic.] office and OAS for guidance and support."

Indeed, the floods of reports were many times the "worst-case scenario" that General Dynamics had anticipated, so it admitted that it could no longer process them.
The five-alarm fire should have been obvious. At that very instant, if not long before, the shots should have been pulled. Banned immediately for all groups. Apologies should have been offered. Industry executives should have been put on trial because later document releases proved that they knew the dangers. Victims should have been compensated from industry profits, with payouts in the many tens of billions.
After all, this is how dangerous pharmaceutical products had been treated in the past, after only a few reports. But in this case, it was different. Everything that had happened since March 2020 had led to this moment; all the closures, the stay-at-home orders, the smashed small businesses, the supply-chain breakages, the multiple trillions in spending and money creation, the capacity restrictions, and the censorship.
Without an effective and safe shot, all of this would have been a waste. There would have been civilization-wide fury. Neither the politicians, nor bureaucrats, nor media, nor industry, could risk that.
Plus by law, the companies that made the shots and the institutions that started forcing them on people bore no liability for harms. This was due to the special status called Emergency Use Authorization, enabled by the PREP Act, that even bypassed normal testing standards at the FDA.
The agency receiving this alarming communication was the CDC. The CDC has a newsletter. It's called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
On February 19, 2021, now two months into the shot release, and hundreds of thousands of VAERS reports pouring in, so many that they could not process them, the MMWR released its first report on the shots.

The primary author was Julianne M. Gee, an epidemiologist in the CDC's Immunization Safety Office, part of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease). She still works there today. The senior author is Tom Shimabukuro, currently deputy director of the Influenza Division in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
In this report, they wrote a conclusion from having examined 6,994 reports: "Monitoring, conducted as part of the U.S. vaccination program, indicates reassuring safety profiles for COVID-19 vaccines."
The trouble is that at that point, there were already 107,000 reports, so her report only examined 6 percent of the total on that date. General Dynamics had already told the CDC that they could not process beyond their "worst-case scenario" of 1,000 reports per day. VAERS analyses depend on reports being processed—coded, reviewed for seriousness, and made available for statistical screening and clinical follow-up. When intake substantially exceeds processing capacity, the analyzed dataset lags the raw reports.
They knew this. They lied anyway.
The CDC's Gee continued: "The initial postauthorization safety profiles of the two COVID-19 vaccines in current use did not indicate evidence of unexpected serious adverse events. These data provide reassurance and helpful information regarding what health care providers and vaccine recipients might...

By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org.
President Trump loves protectionism but he gives Americans the same "protection" that the wolf gave to the lamb. On January 20, the Food and Drug Administration and Customs and Border Protection will effectively ban almost all personal prescription imports, bushwhacking millions of Americans who rely on Canadian pharmacies.
Trump often brags that the US has the world's lowest drug prices. He also brags that he has lowered drug prices by 500% so he starts out with a helluva cloud over his credibility.
In reality, prescription drug prices in the US are roughly triple the cost in other affluent nations. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found the highest rate ever of Americans worried about affording prescription drugs – six out of ten adults. Almost half said they had not filled prescriptions, skipped doses, or took other steps to curtail their costs.
The Washington Post reported the case of 76-year-old Linda Klonsky suffering from meibomian gland dysfunction. She previously paid $250 for three months of eye drops shipped from Canada to her Silver Spring, Maryland home. But restrictions on drug imports this summer sent the price of her drugs up almost ninefold. Klonsky lamented: "I'm being squeezed between the American drug company and Trump's tariffs."
I'm in the crosshairs of this trade battle. Eight years ago, I was diagnosed with glaucoma. With daily eye drops and regular ophthalmologist visits, my vision has remained fairly stable. I've tried numerous prescription eye drops but Lumigan is the only effective one that doesn't give me butt-kicking headaches. Lumigan costs ten times more in the US than in Canada.
I found a trustworthy Canadian online pharmacy that delivers Lumigan for barely a third of the US price. That is typical of the savings pocketed by Americans purchasing from licensed Canadian pharmacies, according to the Campaign for Personal Prescription Importation.
Six years ago, when he was running for re-election, Trump touted a plan to permit state governments to "go to Canada and buy your drugs for a fraction of the price" in the US. Secretary of Health and Human Services Department Alex Azar certified that permitting states to import Canadian drugs "poses no additional risk to the public's health and safety and will result in a significant reduction in the cost of covered products to the American consumer." But that program was stillborn in large part due to opposition from US pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Federal policies have created many perverse incentives on pharmaceutical pricing. Prior to turning 65, I could use various discounts and rebates to get Lumigan in the US much cheaper than the full retail price. However, once a person becomes eligible for Medicare, no discounts or rebates are permitted. Medicare turbocharges drug price inflation while often providing only an illusion of a safety net for recipients. I had good reasons for vigorously opposing the creation of Medicare drug subsidies in 2004 – to no avail.
I am effectively subsidizing Medicare by buying Canadian. Medicare now covers the cost of any recipient's prescription drug expenditure above $2,100 per year. If I bought Lumigan at the full US price of $265 each month, my annual cost would be $3,180 and Medicare would pay $1,080. Medicare Part D plans I have used did not offer decent discounts on Lumigan. Thanks to my Canadian escape valve, Medicare pays zero for my Lumigan regardless of the extortionate price at CVS.
I have scant other prescription costs, and I can save a thousand dollars a year by buying Lumigan abroad without coverage from Medicare. The vast majority of Americans who order prescription drugs from Canada are over 65 and are paying out-of-pocket, providing windfall savings for Medicare. But practically nobody in Washington has given a damn about saving tax dollars since the Reagan era.
Big Pharma lobbyists warn that permitting Americans to directly import the drugs they need is ...

By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org.
In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today's politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens' lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.
Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class. Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage.
The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of "rent-a-mobs" of political protestors.
Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become "a muscular arm of foreign governments' lobbying in Washington," the New York Times reported in 2015. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatari government, would devote itself to "reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones."
After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government's image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll — the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. The Times noted in 2015 that "since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations."
Washington think tanks proliferated at the same time that federal policies became more hare-brained. Some think tanks are little more than "cash machines for power" for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: "It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it." May's think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations.
The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in many cases, ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power. A president or prominent politician knows he can recite bosh and a bevy of commentators will race to praise his courage and vision. For instance, in a 2016 email to Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chief John Podesta, Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, assured him that she was a "loyal soldier" and that "I would do whatever Hillary [Clinton] needs always." The Washington definition of "independent thinker" is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions.
Some think tanks have been fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff's other machinations won him admission to federal prison.
Newt Gingrich's boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from healthcare corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich's presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and spee...

By React19 at Brownstone dot org.
Article by Brianne Dressen.
For years, people experiencing serious health problems due to Covid vaccination have asked for something fundamental: rigorous scientific investigation into what happened to them, why it happened, and what might help.
Many have spent years seeking answers through a fragmented healthcare system, encountering clinicians unfamiliar with their symptoms, struggling to access appropriate evaluation, and trying to find researchers willing to investigate their conditions.
Now, the National Institutes of Health has announced a dedicated research effort intended to investigate health problems following vaccination and infection. The October 5 opening of the new Vaccinology and Immunology Center represents a meaningful development in a process that patients have long urged federal institutions to undertake.
Yet once again, much of the public conversation risks becoming about politics rather than the people who need this research.
On October 19, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and NIAID Acting Director John H. Powers III publicly outlined the center's objectives. These include examining symptoms and potential biological mechanisms, identifying risk factors, exploring treatment options, and using research findings to inform vaccine safety. NIH anticipates enrolling several hundred participants initially and expects to launch the study before the end of 2026, once the protocol is finalized, IRB approved, etc.
The study has not yet launched, eligibility requirements are still being developed, and no one should mistake an announcement for proof that the research will deliver the answers patients need. And let's be honest about the intention; while I write this as a representative of over 40,000 Covid vaccine-injured Americans, the NIH's mission is not to push any agenda. For the first time in a long time, Dr Bhattacharya is working to get politics out of the way of good science. The protocol, its implementation, the quality of the science, and the transparency of its findings all deserve scrutiny.
But scrutiny should begin with an accurate understanding of what has actually been announced.
Recent mainstream reporting has included claims that NIH staff do not actually want to conduct this research. At the same time, the agency's own published description of the center and its intended work is in complete contrast with this reporting. The public should be able to examine the primary source, ask legitimate questions, and distinguish between documented facts, political interpretations, and mainstream news slants.
That distinction matters because the stakes extend far beyond a single institution or administration.
I know firsthand what the NIH can mean for a patient who has spent months fighting to be recognized. When I was evaluated at the NIH and diagnosed with post-vaccine neuropathy, they provided treatment that I attribute with saving my life. But what happened next was just as consequential. A follow-up call from the NIH team to my home physicians changed everything. I no longer had to spend so much of my limited energy fighting to prove that something was wrong.
Barriers with doctors quickly changed to doctor-patient collaboration for my future care. That is the potential of an institution like the NIH: not only to advance scientific understanding, but to give patients the clinical credibility, direction, and support that can fundamentally change the course of their care.
For people living with serious symptoms, research is not an abstract policy debate. It is an opportunity to understand biological mechanisms that may have gone unexamined, identify risk factors that could help clinicians recognize similar cases, and explore treatment approaches that may improve lives. It is also an opportunity to establish what the evidence does not support. Good science must be willing to reach either conclusion.
Patients considering participation should have access to clear information about ...

By Daniel Nuccio at Brownstone dot org.
If you currently live in the United States, I regret to inform you that you no longer live in a free country. You are no longer a free person. Actually, you haven't been for quite some time.
This may sound harsh with this being the year America celebrated her big Two-Five-Oh. But think about it. Think back to the last time you drove from your home to the grocery store. How many automatic license plate readers did you pass along the way? How many apps logged your route? What information did your car collect about you and anyone who may have accompanied you?
When you finally arrived at the store, surely there were cameras, but were they simply there to help catch and deter shoplifters — maybe help police investigate a more serious crime on the off chance one were to occur? Or were those cameras serving other purposes? Was the grocery store implementing facial recognition to deliver you targeted ads when you checked out? Did those cameras automatically link to some local real-time crime center, enabling law enforcement to track you from one location to the next, even if you traveled on foot?
Although your routine trip to pick up eggs and milk may not have been recorded for posterity by all of these technologies, it was by no means a private affair. Nor was your most recent trip to church, a political rally, a protest, or your doctor's office. And this doesn't even touch any of the many items in your home that have come to serve as data collection devices.
Now, reflect on this for a moment, then ask yourself: "How much of this did I really consent to?"
Yes, you chose to drive a car. You chose to have a cell phone. You chose to buy food. But did you choose to have countless government and corporate bodies monitor your every move? Do you really feel like you consented to an arrangement in which any entity with the financial and technological means to record and analyze every detail of your life, from the trivially mundane to the deeply intimate, holds the right to do so? If not, how much do you feel you could demand that they stop?
To return to the initial assertion, if the government and an endless number of corporations can treat the details of your life as some natural resource to be mined, assessed, and sold, and you have no meaningful way to opt out, can you really say you're a free person? I mean, no, you're not a slave or a prisoner. But you're not exactly free either.
There's no great analogy, but, at best, maybe you're like a wild animal, chipped by some field ethologists, looking to study your natural behavior, or a teenager, whose parents gave you a fair amount of freedom after school and on weekends but insist you have the family tracking app turned on. At worst, maybe you're more like a citizen of some alternate version of the erstwhile DDR if the Stasi were a little more hands-off and had way better tech. But again, you're not exactly free.
For over a decade, most Americans have sort of accepted this way of life, albeit perhaps in less bleak terms, thinking of it as inevitable or a natural consequence of modern life. Many even learned to bleat the slogans of those that have declared the intimate details of their lives, company property, and public domain: No one has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public. No one's forcing you to carry a cell phone. The Fourth Amendment protects you from government surveillance, but not corporate surveillance. You don't actually want the government telling private companies how they can do business, do you? You've already given up so much of your privacy to Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, what does it matter if the government wants to collect some of your data too? If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?
Over time, these justifications of our subservient place in the surveillance state and the Big Data economy have even assumed an air of common wisdom that preemptively silences objection and mea...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.
In this skill-testing question, tell me which of these statements is true:
1. The shingles vaccine is 90% effective in preventing shingles.
1. The shingles vaccine prevents shingles in ONE in every 32 people vaccinated. The other 31 people see no benefit.
Answer: both are true.
Guess which statement dominates the marketing of Shingrix, the most popular shingles vaccine in America?
90% effective. 90% effective. 90% effective.
That's the main marketing message coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussing the efficacy of the vaccine. So common is this sort of statistical sleight of hand that the CDC doesn't even seem to see any real problem in how those effects are presented to the public. Because they are so impactful, and are essentially marketing messages, and they need to be deconstructed.
We can look to professional health reporters working for the mainstream media to deconstruct these numbers and explain what they all mean, right?
Hmm. Not quite.
I was in for a surprise when I went to see what the New York Times had to say about this allegedly 90% effective vaccine. Remember, this is a news outlet giving us all the news that's fit to print.
Earlier this year the New York Times published a remarkable article describing associations between certain vaccines and aging, headlined: "Vaccines Are Helping Older People More Than We Knew." It starts out boldly:
Let's be clear. The primary reason to be vaccinated against shingles is that two shots provide 90 percent protection against a painful, blistering disease that a third of Americans will suffer in their lifetimes, one that can cause lingering nerve pain and other nasty long-term consequences.
Let's "be clear" alright.
The New York Times reporters and editors are smart people, smart enough to make sure their narrative about the use of vaccines in older people flows in the "right" direction. It's relatively straightforward to produce a plausible bit of vaccine cheerleading when you don't have to actually critically examine the numbers someone hands you. Thus, the story follows a predictable direction honed to please the many drug and vaccine advertisers whose ads are keeping the Times afloat.
In this case, the copy follows a standard vaccine-reporting template we've come to expect: It overstates a vaccine's benefits, downplays or ignores its harms, and hammers home the dreadfulness of the disease under the illusion of certainty and medical consensus. As I've discussed in an earlier Brownstone article, the net result of this kind of biased reporting is essentially to broadcast the "Ask your doctor" tagline to the unwashed masses from one of America's biggest pulpits.
Walt Whitman the great American poet, could have been speaking of the NY Times when he wrote of sounding his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
We're talking herpes zoster here, commonly known as shingles, and caused by a reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that causes chickenpox.
It can be nasty, but not always. It typically involves tingling, burning, itching, or pain along a single nerve pathway, sometimes with a blistering rash which typically heals over in 2 to 4 weeks. There are quite useful and relatively cheap antiviral medications to help speed recovery if taken soon enough. More serious is when shingles develops into long-term nerve pain called postherpetic neuralgia (PHN). Sometimes it gets into your eyes, which can be truly nasty. But thankfully it's rare and most shingles cases clear up on their own within a month.
Going through a succinct independent analysis of the randomized trials of the major shingles vaccines provides a unique case study for determining how actual science can become so contorted by professional reporters at the New York Times.
So where does the "90% effective" come from?
Whenever you see a number this big you know that it is a relative number. Throw it out and start again I alw...

By Jayanta Bhattacharya at Brownstone dot org.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on April 28, 2026, in Dana Point, California.
At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority. For centuries, a small number of ecclesiastical powers had decided such questions as whether the moons of Jupiter move. The scientific revolution placed these questions in the hands of a lot of very smart scientists, including those with telescopes.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people—directors of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, heads of international agencies like the World Health Organization, and editors of prestigious journals—have the power to say what is true or false in science.
But before I go on, I want to make a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health, which I now lead. The history of the NIH is incredible. Almost every modern advance in biomedicine has, at its root, an NIH investment. NIH is, by far, the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, providing 85 percent of funding in every single area of biomedicine. The development of heart attack prevention and treatments came out of the NIH. Almost every cancer advance and cancer treatment came out of the NIH.
Because of the NIH, we now have advances in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis that, when I was a medical student in the 1990s, seemed beyond reach. Because of the NIH, we can now treat cystic fibrosis, a terrible disease that used to kill young people in their teens and 20s, allowing those who have it to live full lives. We have not one, but two cures for sickle cell anemia, a disease that primarily affects African-American children. So I am strongly of the view that the NIH is an institution worth saving. It is, however, an institution that has not done its job well in some time.
The mission of the NIH is to fund research that improves the health and longevity of the American people. But when we look at life expectancy in the United States since 2010—and this is not the case in most European countries—we find that there has been no improvement despite the huge investments we have made in medical research. (See, for instance, the accompanying graph comparing life expectancy over time in the U.S. and Sweden.)
If we continue as we have been, the prospect of our children living shorter, less healthy lives than we do is a real possibility. "Make America Healthy Again" can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people. We have huge chronic disease problems. We can solve them—but we can only solve them if we fix science, which suffers today from three great problems.

The first of these problems is the replication crisis. Scientists publish studies today; we hear about their findings on TV, in newspapers, and on podcasts; and we (and even our doctors) take them for granted. But then when other scientists ask the same questions and perform the same experiments, they do not come up with the same results. That means that a lot of the science we (and our doctors) take for granted is not actually true.
Are eggs good for us? I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when eggs were considered the next worst thing to poison. I didn't eat an egg until I was 19, and then it was a tasteless egg white omelet, since only the whites of eggs were considered healthy in the 1990s. But today eggs are considered a superfood! There are so many examples like this, and at the root of the confusion is the replication crisis.
How do we address this? We begin by recognizing the fact that most ideas hatched by scientists do not work or are not true. That is completely normal in science and always has been. J...

By Steven Kritz at Brownstone dot org.
In recent months, there's been a torrent of document releases that prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the scope of the atrocities committed in the name of the Covid response by the public health establishment. As someone who has been submitting articles to Brownstone Journal covering this subject for more than 3 years (20 have been published), it has been suggested that I once again bring my perspective into the arena regarding these recent revelations. Frankly, I have felt no such calling. Why is that? For me, it's a matter of been there; done that!
The first article I wrote that was published in Brownstone Journal in October 2023, Where is the Office for Human Research Protections? ends by asking whether the expression, "Never again" still has any meaning. Back in January 2024, I had written an article titled, Racism, Anti-Semitism, Genocide, and Eugenics in the COVID Era; and in April 2025, I had written an article titled, Have We Lived through a Public Health Holocaust?. While the titles of the latter two articles speak for themselves, the latest revelations have largely confirmed the historical perspective that I presented both factually and contextually.
In addition, as far back as the winter of 2021-22, I had been blogging on a website for healthcare professionals about the shredding of the Nuremberg Code, a document that primarily focuses on proper informed consent. At the time, I was roundly criticized for having the gall to bring this subject up, as it was viewed as a total non sequitur. However, over the past year, gross violations of the Nuremberg Code have been cited with some regularity, even in mainstream media.
Based on the foregoing, it should be clear where I stand regarding the so-called Covid response. As such, for me to write more on this subject is merely to gild the lily. I see no purpose in doing that. I'll only point out that in reading what others are now writing in response to the recent flood of hard evidence, it appears that more and more people are catching up to where I've been for almost 5 years, although they tend to dance around using the same terminology that I have put out there.
I've reached the point where the only thing I care about is accountability. Without it, these atrocities will keep happening. In fact, plans for a replay are already in place by agencies within the US government, the World Health Organization, and any number of other globalist masters of the universe who have the resources and connections to move on it. They're just waiting for the right set of circumstances to justify implementation.
As guideposts for what that accountability should look like, I'll cite two seminal legal/judicial events: Watergate and the Nazi Doctors' Trial. As a result of the Watergate break-in and cover-up, events that I believe pale in comparison to the Covid atrocities, there were 69 indictments, 48 convictions or guilty pleas, approximately 2 dozen prison sentences served, and a presidential resignation.
The Nazi Doctors' Trial was for medical crimes that might have been more brutal than the Covid atrocities, but were surpassed in sheer numbers by several orders of magnitude. In all, there were 23 indictments and 16 convictions, of which 7 were sentenced to death (all were hung shortly after conviction), and 9 served varying lengths of time in prison.
Anything short of this level of accountability leaves us dangerously exposed. To those who still can't accept the fact that the atrocities rose to this level, I would counter that the unwillingness to face this reality will only embolden the monsters who perpetrated these crimes against humanity to continue on the same path.
If you're looking to the public health system, particularly the physicians, to take back the profession, don't hold your breath! That's because, first, do no harm has been irrevocably changed to, do as you're told! This is the result of the change in the nature of the relationship bet...

By Russ Gonnering at Brownstone dot org.
Christopher Morales' 9/26/2026 post, "AI Has Made an Old Education Problem Harder to Ignore," (written in Minding the Campus, a project of the National Association of Scholars) has touched a nerve with many:
Students can now generate essays, summaries and discussion posts in seconds. The danger is real, but the underlying weakness is older. AI did not create the gap between completing work and mastering knowledge. It made that gap much harder to ignore.
Morales reveals the staggering statistics on the prevalence of remedial courses offered to first-year undergraduates in colleges and universities:
The evidence supports academic under-preparedness was widespread, visible and costly long before AI could write a polished paragraph.
I would suggest that the problem is even more widespread and pernicious and stretches beyond the confines of academia. It is the tension between Competence and Capability in most walks of life, including my own, medicine and healthcare.
To understand the roots of this present-day dynamic, we need to go back a bit…quite a bit…and understand the significant social, political, and economic upheavals in Great Britain in the late 1970s:
Economic stagflation was stifling, with inflation hitting a high of 25%.
Rapid decline in traditional manufacturing and industrial sectors.
Widespread strikes and the Winter of Discontent.
Economic frustration and generational friction.
Increasing violence in Northern Ireland and inability, or lack of interest, of the political parties in addressing the problem.
Breakdown in prior political consensus.
At the time, Great Britain was facing serious societal breakdown in a number of areas. Brian Grant explained how a committed group of diverse individuals spontaneously formed around a belief that imbalance in the core activities of education and training fueled much of the socioeconomic disruption in society.
The watchword of the proposed reforms to deal with this disruption was capability. This group's actions culminated in newspaper declarations taken out in the Times and the Guardian and became known as The Capability Manifesto. This concept had 4 main pillars of change, linked to the following verbs:
To do: move from passive memorization of facts for a test to the successful execution of real projects.
To make: value craftsmanship, engineering, and art as well as pure academic knowledge.
To organize: value teamwork and leadership. The practical value of this was later emphasized in such works as Tribal Leadership by David Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright.
To adapt: understand that problem-solving often has multiple answers and methods of inquiry, depending upon the circumstances.
It is interesting that these concepts (such as the importance of starting point and nonlinear system dynamics) echo those of the nascent Complexity Science being founded at about the same time at The Santa Fe Institute and described in an extremely readable fashion by M. Mitchell Waldrop. The emphasis of verbs rather than nouns in the successful execution of projects is similar to the "Action Learning" concept of Complexity Science described by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon.
The "Move to Capability" in Britain was not a smooth one. There was pushback. In Education for Capability: A Critique, Keith Thompson submitted that the Manifesto was flawed on a number of points:
Capability only implies potential, not actuation.
It forms a caricature of an educated person as only knowing what and not knowing how.
Although the socioeconomic decline is real, there is not significant evidence to assume that the proposed remedies would reverse that descent.
This critique was rebutted by such authors as Mark Grant Ashton in "Educated Man as an Action Man: A Reply to Keith Thompson." Over the years, a spirited discussion ensued: Which is more important, theory or practice? Should we concentrate on basic knowledge or application? This seemed to always consist of a...

By Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone dot org.
On October 14, the Catholic Church observes the anniversary of the martyrdom of Pope Callistus I in A.D. 223 . The Collect for the Mass in his honor prays the following:
O God, who raised up Pope Saint Callistus the First to serve the Church and attend devoutly to Christ's faithful departed, strengthen us, we pray, by his witness to the faith, so that, rescued from the slavery of corruption, we may merit an incorruptible inheritance.
This prayer is an allusion to the fact that, while deacon, Callistus was put in charge of the first cemetery owned by the Church by Pope Zephyrinus. You can still visit the Catacombs of Callistus today, a massive place that holds the bodies of many popes and martyrs in addition to thousands of ordinary Christians.
Two distinct thoughts occurred to me while offering Mass for his feast this year. First, I thought of how November is rapidly approaching.
As I wrote in one of my early pieces for Brownstone:
The month of November begins starkly with a remembrance of those who have gone ahead of us in death. On November 1st we celebrate all of those who are in Heaven by celebrating All Saints. On November 2nd, we pray for those who are being purified in Purgatory as we commemorate All Souls. Every Mass on All Souls Day is a Requiem (i.e. a funeral Mass). Visiting a cemetery is urged, even with the grant of an indulgence for making such a visit from November 1-8. An older priest once recalled that the funeral pall (used to cover a casket or, in the absence of a casket, the catafalque) at his parish growing had the words "Hodie mihi, cras tibi" ("Me today, you tomorrow") embossed on it. The beginning of November then was a powerful reminder of the arrival of a season of "illness and death."
We begin November by remembering the martyrs and confessors who departed this life victorious, and then our thoughts immediately turn to making reparation for Christians who left this world in faith, hope, and charity, but with an imperfect sanctity.
This dual act of remembrance is central to Catholic piety. We remember our heroes and our non-heroes alike, albeit differently. I note with sadness the rapid erosion of the habitus of remembering from our culture completely. We dismiss the idea of heroes in the past at all.
Funerals go unattended and cemeteries go unvisited, if there is even proper burial at all. Lockdowns, effectively making the natural process of grieving illegal, hastened this erosion. Requiem Masses that should have a full Church now have maybe a few dozen, others have only immediate family and a few pious friends in attendance.
This change in practice should be seen as a grave symptom of the loss of civilization itself.
My second thought on the feast of St. Callistus is related to the first. As part of our civilizational collapse and our rejection of acts of remembrance and reparation in toto, we have enabled our malefactors in government and media to completely move on from the damage they inflicted on countless people in the name of "public health" beginning in 2020.
This is why I find Jeffrey Tucker's hours of time spent reading entries from the CDC's V-Safe files on the Covid shots so incredibly poignant and moving.
These were people who believed in the system that provided these shots. They thought that they were doing the right thing, first by getting them and second by reporting the horrifying outcomes of that decision. They imagined that the people in charge cared and that they would follow up.
Instead, like the prophets of Baal who opposed Elijah, they learned that there was "no one answering, no one listening" (1 Kings 18:29).
The heartbreak of listening to even a few of these entries inflicts psychological and spiritual pain. Jeffrey's reading of these for hours resembles a harsh act of spiritual reparation for the evil that was done.
Importantly, it represents a defiance against the enforced forgetfulness sought by those who viewed these repo...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.
In my reconstruction and discussion of Heidegger's remark – in the course of the interview that he granted the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, in 1966 – that 'Only a god can save us,' it was shown that this issued from his conviction, that the 'essence' of modern technology (what he calls 'technicity') functions as a 'framework' within which every question and decision are formulated and made. He calls this 'essence' Gestell ('posure,' Enframing'), the fundamental organising power of which reduces everything in the world to a 'standing-reserve,' which means that its sole purpose is restricted to its usefulness or calculative utility.
So, for example, even human beings are approached as 'resources,' which is made visible in renaming what used to be called 'Personnel Departments' in companies (and other organisations) as 'Human Resources.' Hence, the essence of technology, or Enframing,' brings about the stripping of entities of their intrinsic meaning, transforming them into mere resources for use, instead of allowing them to be what they are – and arguably should be – according to their own being.
Norman Melchert (The Great Conversation. A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 576) provides an apt characterisation of the world under the dominance of the essence of modern technology where he writes:
In the age of enframing, where everything is understood as standing-reserve, there is no 'room' for God. (Or perhaps even God is thought of as 'standing-reserve', a kind of public utility that can be used to gain the satisfaction of one's desires; one often gets this impression from the television evangelists.
The most obvious question that would probably arise for most readers is why Heidegger talks about the essence of technicity or technology, which he names Gestell, instead of simply referring to concrete instances of technology in the guise of technical devices, such as electric drills, saws, and vacuum cleaners, all of which are embodiments of Enframing. The answer has to do with the fact that Heidegger thinks ontologically about technicity, and not ontically.
Ontology being the discipline that addresses questions concerning the distinctive (or essential) being of beings – what makes them into what they are, in contradistinction with other beings or entities – the essence of technicity is what makes technology into what it is distinctively, and technical devices embody this essence paradigmatically. Insofar as an electric drill manifests Enframing as its technological essence, it allows the handyman or -woman, by using it, to draw on the standing reserve of stored electricity in a manner which optimalises its usefulness.
To think about electric drills in relation to other similar or dissimilar tools comparatively as part of a collection of 'technologies' is to focus on them ontically, and no longer ontologically. The following excerpt from Heidegger's 'The question concerning technology' (In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt, Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1977, p. 14-15) clarifies what is at stake by contrasting an older way of benefiting technically from wind and water with its modern technological counterpart:
The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.
In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when ...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.
"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" said Lady Macbeth as she paced in a hallucinatory state, reliving in her subconscious the murders she helped plan. She rubbed her hands as if washing them, to wash away the sin, following up the promise to her son that "a little water clears us of this deed."
The line comes to mind from the latest dump of entries from the diaries of Anthony Fauci that cover the months December 2021 to May 2022. These were the darkest months of the Covid era.
Confidence that the virus was a lab creation was growing. That points directly to Fauci. The lockdowns had given rise to growing population-wide fury. And the shot was not working, not stopping infection or spread while groups reporting deep injury from injection could not be censored fast enough to make them vanish completely, though tech companies certainly tried.
Fauci still held his position at NIAID with certainty that he would keep it under President Biden, whose confidence he enjoyed. He was daily in touch with the people who were actually running the government – aides Ron Klain and Jeff Zients – and coordinated his decisions with them. They trusted him to continue the Covid operation, which they all knew to be a national security issue beyond the control of any political player. Fauci was the front man but an effective one, until he became a liability.
We know from previous entries that Fauci at first hoped the new virus would get lost in the mix of a bad flu season. This was mid-January 2020. The CDC called him out on that. His first scheme failed because a savvy businessman in China spilled the beans by posting the sequence on a pay-to-play website in mid-January.
After pressing a friend and former colleague to use his personal credit card to download the sequence, Fauci launched plan B, which was to deny the lab leak and prepare a nationwide inoculation to make it all go away.
The audacious scheme was to keep population immunity at the lowest levels possible through lockdowns while the shot went through clinical trials and was ready for distribution. Fauci knew for certain that this was the type of virus that would mutate rapidly. His hope was to take the energy out of the pace of mutation by reducing the infection rate as low as possible.
Sadly for him, the new and most powerful variant had appeared just as his shots hit general distribution. Delta disabled their protection that had been formulated for wild type and Alpha. The race was on, as mutations appeared faster than repeated boosters could catch.
The spot would not go away no matter what he did.
The darkest hours open with the appearance of Omicron in December of 2021, the fastest spreading but least virulent strain. He now had a new problem. With Omicron operating as a form of inoculation itself, there was less reason for vaccination than ever, especially given the risk of injury. And yet his goal of 90 percent coverage was nowhere in view, while population opposition to the entire Covidian regime was rising.
Fauci might as well have thrown up his hands, admitted defeat, apologized for putting the country through the biggest trauma of our lifetimes, and ruining the lives of students everywhere, in addition to crushing the dreams of millions of small business owners.
But that is not who he is. He would not and could not accept responsibility for doing this. He ended up demonizing the opposition, scrambling for cover, wrapping himself in ever more layers of fame for protection, and clinging to the lies he told himself as self-justification as his career and legacy were permanently tarnished beyond repair, even as he developed a severe and strange case of germaphobia in a Macbeth-like way.
Two weeks before this tranche begins, Biden had gone on TV to declare the following: "We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they'll soon overwhelm. But there's good news:...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.
I have been a doctor for over 40 years. I have cared for patients in their most critical moments, seen families face unexpected diagnoses, and made split-second decisions in intensive care where every second counted. I have witnessed both remarkable recoveries and painful losses. I have taught new doctors, published research, and worked on treatments to help people I might never meet. All this time, I thought I knew what it meant to be a physician.
When Covid began, something shifted in me. It didn't happen all at once or because of one argument with an administrator or a policy. It was a slow realization that grew as I kept caring for sick people. For 715 days straight, I worked without a break, surrounded by very ill patients, tired nurses, worried families, and a disease we were all trying to figure out. I had never faced anything like it before, and I hope I never do again [1].
I always knew that medicine wasn't perfect. Any doctor with enough experience knows our field is full of uncertainty, differing opinions, and treatments that don't always work. I never stopped valuing scientific progress. I am still very grateful for antibiotics, modern surgery, intensive care, and all the discoveries that have turned deadly diseases into manageable ones.
But something deeper changed. I started to notice how medicine could lose touch with the people it's supposed to help. I saw how hospital rules could become strict orders, how disagreeing with colleagues could be seen as disloyalty, and how patients could be reduced to numbers or risks instead of real people with their own stories and worries. What troubled me most was realizing these issues were around even before Covid. The pandemic didn't cause them; it revealed them.
After seeing these problems clearly, I couldn't go back to practicing medicine the way I used to. I still loved being a doctor, maybe even more than before, but I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to listen better, be more honest in my explanations, ask more questions, and help patients understand enough to take part in their own care.
For much of my professional life, I was what most people would consider a conventional academic physician. I trained in established institutions, joined scientific societies, published extensively, and taught generations of students and residents to value evidence-based medicine. I believed in clinical trials, scientific debate, peer review, and the accumulated wisdom of physicians who had come before me. I still believe in all those things. But I've realized that evidence-based medicine is not the same as authority-based medicine. This difference is important because scientific evidence keeps changing, while institutions sometimes act as if their decisions never need to change.
A clinical guideline is just an interpretation of what we know at a certain time. It can be helpful, even life-saving, but it's not set in stone. Guidelines can't predict every patient or situation a doctor might face. They should help guide decisions, not make them for us. Before Covid, I understood these ideas in theory. During the pandemic, I realized how important they really are. I had gotten used to a system where rules, policies, insurance, and recommendations played an increasingly large role in how we made decisions. Some of these changes helped, but others just made it harder for doctors and patients to connect.
I had learned how to work within that system. I knew when to follow the rules and when to trust my own judgment. But I didn't realize how easily that freedom could disappear, or how quickly doctors might be pressured to follow the system instead of thinking for themselves.
During the pandemic, I spent many hours caring for very sick patients. While the public saw news of crowded hospitals, tired healthcare workers, and scary statistics, I saw real people. I saw patients fighting for breath, families seeking comfort, and people whose health co...

By Josh Guetzkow at Brownstone dot org.
Note: this article is a highly condensed version of a chapter written for Fear and Loathing in the Pandemic: Propaganda and Misinformation during Covid-19, edited by Colin Alexander.
Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid-19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity.
Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational. The "critical turn" in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn's account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn's examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power.
Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which "knowledge" reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests.
One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result "epistemic corruption:" a knowledge system that "loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it," because it has been co-opted by interests at odds with its central goals.
Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent.
One lynchpin is "ghost management," in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front-stage "authors." This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility.
Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific "advances" the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage.
Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving-door employment. The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator's budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the ...