Brownstone Journal

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Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

  1. 6 HRS AGO

    Is This Hantavirus a Bioweapon?

    By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org. The WHO, Big Pharma, and the other bad actors behind the Covid catastrophe are at it again. At this writing, they're churning out industrial-strength fear porn regarding an alleged outbreak of Hantavirus infections aboard a small cruise ship, the MV Hondius. If all this gives you flashbacks to the Diamond Princess cruise ship incident from the early days of Covid, you're not alone. But before we all hide in our closets (again) until Moderna and friends save us (again) with another toxic gene-therapy pseudo-vaccine (which of course, they and about a dozen other Big Pharma profiteers have been working on for years), let's take a moment to consider the pathogen in question – Hantavirus. I have seen one case of Hantavirus in my 30-year career in internal medicine. It happened around the year 2000, when I was a young physician with the Indian Health Service on the Navajo Reservation. A Navajo man presented to clinic, initially having been feverish with severe muscle aches for several days. Later he developed progressively worsening shortness of breath, which prompted him to seek our attention. His chest X-ray showed a pattern consistent with diffuse bilateral pulmonary edema – fluid throughout both lungs. It was springtime, and he had been cleaning out a mouse-infested shed several days before, sweeping and vacuuming mouse droppings in the process. I cannot claim that I made the diagnosis. An older, more experienced physician, who had seen one or two similar cases of Hantavirus in the past, recognized the cause. The patient was treated with "supportive care," maintaining his blood pressure with IV fluids and his breathing with supplemental oxygen. He was very sick, but I recall he did not require endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation. (Back in the good old days, we never intubated and ventilated anyone unless it was absolutely necessary.) Eventually the patient made a full recovery. Even today, this case is instructive for several reasons. First, the case reveals the natural reservoir of Hantaviruses. As my trusty old copy of Mandell's Principles and Practices of Infectious Diseases states, "These agents are fundamentally parasites of wild rodents and insectivores." Mandell goes on to state that "each presently recognized [hantavirus] viral species has a single major rodent host species." (Italics my own.) In other words, certain species of rodents and insect-eating mammals (e.g. voles) harbor specific species of Hantavirus. It doesn't just float around in the ether, nor are human beings a reservoir of the virus. They simply aren't. Second, Hantavirus disease is rare in humans. It is rarely spread to humans from its natural rodent hosts. When that does happen, it is usually due to the inhalation by humans of virus-infected droppings or dried urine. Third, before this episode on the cruise ship, human-to-human hantavirus transmission was essentially unheard of. Well, apparently not exactly. According to a report in NPR: "There are like 20 to 30 different species of hantavirus worldwide that can cause human disease, and there is only one [of those] species — the Andes Virus, which is found in Argentina and Chile — that has been implicated in human-to-human transmission," explains Dr. Emily Abdoler, a clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of Michigan. "One of the first clues that emerged is that this ship disembarked from Argentina." Color me skeptical. It's hardly enough that these passengers happened to have visited Argentina, which happens to harbor the one species of hantavirus that happens to have been "implicated in human-to-human transmission" to suddenly determine that a naturally-occurring, contagious Hantavirus strain is circumnavigating the globe aboard cruise ships. As I mentioned previously, Hantavirus is the subject of intense "vaccine" research by over a dozen research groups, including such established bad actors in the field as the US ...

    5 min

  2. 1D AGO

    Divided by Contagion: Health as Sovereign Responsibility

    By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org. On 25 May 2025, after three years of negotiation under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pandemic Agreement was adopted. In reality, the vote was a provisional outcome of an incomplete treaty which postponed decisions on a number of contentious articles, including the required financing, sharing of intellectual property and biological samples, and transfer of manufacturing know-how and pharmaceutical products on concessional terms, to follow-up negotiations. The objective of the treaty 'is to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics' and, to this end, its provisions will 'apply both during and between pandemics.' Parties also committed to developing a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing System (PABS), in the form of an annex to the pandemic treaty, through negotiations in order to promote rapid and timely sharing of materials and sequence information on pathogens with pandemic potential. In return, as part of benefit sharing, participating manufacturers would commit to donating a percentage of their real-time production of safe, high-quality, and effective vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for the pathogen causing the pandemic emergency. An additional share of the products would also be made available to the WHO 'at affordable prices.' The treaty cannot be opened for signature until after the PABS has been negotiated and adopted. It will enter into force 30 days after 60 countries have ratified the treaty. A party may withdraw from the treaty at any time after two years from membership by giving a one-year notice. The beleaguered WHO hosted a total of six rounds of oftentimes acrimonious negotiations on the plan to run the global infrastructure for future pandemics. The original timeline had set a negotiated PABS to be adopted by the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the WHO, at its annual session in May this year. Instead, on 1 May the WHO conceded that even the resumed sixth session of the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on the WHO Pandemic Agreement had failed to bridge the differences. Accordingly, the Health Assembly will be asked to extend the mandate of the IGWG so it can present an agreed PABS system for adoption in May 2027. The next IGWG negotiating session is scheduled for 6–17 July. The Risk of Institutionalising WHO Governance Deficits The text currently under negotiation risks institutionalising the governance failures that defined the Covid-19 response rather than correcting them. It concentrates authority in the WHO without adequate accountability to member states, locks in emergency-mode assumptions about future health, and risks overriding the sovereign responsibility of national governments to determine health policy for their own populations. It would entrench existing inequities while burdening developing countries with unrealistic financial and compliance demands. It is therefore a bad deal for low- and middle-income countries, which make up the majority of the world's population. To be clear, the talks are not failing because countries disagree—that is to be expected in any serious negotiation. They are failing because dissent on the parameters of a contested framework is being managed and deflected, rather than engaged and accommodated. The process appears designed to produce agreement using the language of creative ambiguity. When an agreement becomes a proxy for institutional success that masks substantive disagreement over purpose and pathways, the goal has shifted from 'getting it right' to simply 'getting it done.' Rather than prompting a fundamental rethink, these concerns are being absorbed into incremental adjustments—tweaks to language, minor concessions on access or vague commitments to future flexibility. The concerns raised by Global South delegations reflect real structural tensions in the global health system between public and private goods, donors and recipients, and centralised control and nat...

    18 min

  3. 2D AGO

    The Ozempic Paradox

    By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org. Here's a good current example of medical irony: the same week that our drug regulator, Health Canada, approved the first generic version of semaglutide—the active ingredient in weight-loss drug Ozempic—a major medical journal published findings highlighting the medication's troubling connection to eating disorders. The timing couldn't be more paradoxical: just as this powerful appetite suppressant becomes more accessible and affordable to millions of Canadians, we're learning more about its potential to trigger dangerous psychological relationships with food. What we do know, as the New England Journal of Medicine reminded us, is that these drugs come with a range of troubling side effects, which you can discover if you have the fortitude to unwrap the numbing medicalese they use to describe them. The NEJM article describes the link to eating disorders as well as a range of other troubling effects including "nutrient deficiencies, electrolyte abnormalities, orthostatic hypotension, osteopenia, sarcopenia, thinning hair, and other signs of malnutrition." Then the last spike, unlikely to deliver any discomfort is that "the effects of long-term use are still largely unknown." Amen to that. This same week, two different generic drug companies, one from India and one from Canada, were given licenses to sell generic semaglutide. This has been called a "long-awaited moment for diabetes and weight management treatment," yet let's not break out the champagne yet. We Canadians are going to be the canaries in the coal mine on this, as we're the first G-7 country to approve the generic version of Ozempic. Up until now it has mostly been sticker shock preventing a lot of people from jumping on the Ozempic bandwagon, but when that barrier is gone? Open the floodgates. The Canadian media was all over this exciting new development, delivering fulsome praise for the arrival of the cheap stuff which will massively increase the size of the GLP-1 market in Canada. The generic version (which is currently only approved for type-2 diabetes) will probably enter the market at 75% the price of the brand name, but as more and more companies start producing generics, the price could fall as far as a quarter of its current price. I imagine citizens of the United States have no sympathy for Canadians as the price of our Ozempic is already about one-fifth what it currently is in the US. When the generics hit the market we might be paying about one-tenth of what Americans are paying. Expanding the use of this class of drugs to countless patients previously priced out of treatment might be cheered as a major public health victory, but the triumph is shadowed by emerging evidence about semaglutide's darker psychological effects. As the New England Journal of Medicine reported, recent studies and clinical reports have documented concerning patterns: Some patients develop restrictive eating behaviors, obsessively monitor their food, and in some cases, develop full-blown eating disorders. The very mechanism that makes these drugs effective—dramatically suppressing appetite and slowing gastric emptying—can apparently trigger psychological responses that mirror anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders. With one in eight US adults — or approximately 33 million people — reportedly having taken GLP-1 drugs, this proportion translates to more than 420,000 people who could develop a related eating disorder with long-term use. About 3% of Canadians are currently prescribed GLP-1 medications (including semaglutide/Ozempic, liraglutide, tirzepatide, etc.) equating to potentially tens of thousands of cases of eating disorders. The irony runs deeper than mere timing. Semaglutide medications like Ozempic were originally developed for type 2 diabetes but weight loss soon emerged as the most beneficial (and profitable) side effect. As these drugs gained popularity for cosmetic weight loss—often prescribed off-label to people without ...

    6 min

  4. 3D AGO

    Hantavirus: Stop the Spread Is Back

    By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org. Hollywood loves a good sequel and so does politics and pharmaceutical development. Since Covid, there have been several attempted disease scares – Mpox, Swine flu, Bird flu, Chikungunya, Measles – but nothing has really caught the attention of audiences like the new Hantavirus frenzy. Today's evidence comes from DRUDGE REPORT: global effort to stop the spread. Is "flatten the curve" next? Let's remember how this began last year, with of course, a hantavirus death in the family of one of America's most beloved Hollywood actors. It was Betsy Arakawa, Gene Hackman's wife, who died February 12, 2025, from apparent hantavirus infection from rodents in the home. Terrifying image. At that point, no regular person had ever heard of such a disease. There is a reason. It's rare and human-to-human spread is nearly unknown. Strange that it would hit the wife of the appropriately named Gene Hackman (get it?), leading man of the prescient 1998 movie Enemy of the State. Next up we have a reprise of the Plague Ship motif. Like the Diamond Princess, it is a cruise ship, the MV Hondius operated by Oceanwide Expeditions with 147 passengers, departing from Argentina and now anchored off Cape Verde, West Africa. It was headed to the Canary Islands when three people died, two with lab-confirmed hantavirus. No port would allow the ship to dock. With the assistance of rescue boats, the dead have been carefully removed by workers in hazmats and masks. A flight attendant who came in contact with a dead body is now hospitalized and in rough condition, suggesting that even coming close to a person with hantavirus is risky stuff. No one can figure out how this is even possible. So mysterious, so unusual, so terrifying, just like the movie Contagion. This fits with the theory of Drs. Fauci and Morens that we need not worry about lab-created pathogens when animal-to-human spillover is becoming more common. This is why, they wrote in August 2020, that we must commence to "rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues." Ready to opine for the press is the World Health Organization's Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, she of Stanford University pedigree, now widely quoted as the go-to authority. You might remember Dr. Kerkhove from the original cast of the Covid production. It was she who wrote the WHO's report to the world following the February 2020 junket to Wuhan. (We know this from the metadata of the report, which she failed to cleanse in the rush to publication.) "Achieving China's exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures," she wrote of the CCP's extreme lockdowns, "has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities." Many close observers credit Kerkhove's report with inspiring the worldwide lockdown of all nations but four in the following weeks. She still works at the WHO. Hardly anyone remembers any of this. There is no mechanism in place for her to be held to account for her role. There is no known cure but a vaccine is in development by Moderna based on the mRNA platform. As a result, Moderna's stock, down dramatically from its highs, is now starting to recover. It is now up 100 percent year over year. The buy signal is strong with this one. Looking back at the Covid prequel, there was always a flaw in the coronavirus caper, namely its short period of latency, roughly that of a cold or flu. You are infectious for a few days without symptoms while you pass it on. A genuine disease panic needs a longer period of latency. You need to be infected for weeks while spreading it far and wide. Why is this? Because every infectious disease confronts the lo...

    6 min

  5. 3D AGO

    Cruising Toward Enslavement

    By Steven Goldsmith at Brownstone dot org. Recently, I rented a 2026 Toyota RAV4 hybrid. A more spacious car than I needed but perfect for those who fantasize helming a yacht from a captain's chair along intercostal waterways; and for those who require the instrumentation of their dashboards to be only slightly more complex than consoles in 747 cockpits. As for me, I prefer my 2004 Toyota Corolla, termed by its regular mechanic as "the tank" because of its durability and seeming indestructibility. Besides a burned-out clutch it has never needed major repairs. (In their design of that model, Toyota forgot the memo about planned obsolescence.) I require from my Corolla only that it goes where I point it and stops on command. The rest I can figure out. So imagine my alarm after I slid into the rental and started the engine. The large dashboard screen above the radio lit up and announced Toyota Audio Multimedia Services with functions for Roadside Assistance, Destination Assist, Cloud Navigation, Intelligent Assist, Driver Support, Proactive Driving Assist, Lane Change Assist, Traffic Jam Assist, and Dynamic Radar Cruise Control. As I shifted into Reverse to back out of my spot, a pinging startled me. The screen flashed to an aerial view of my car's position in a space bounded by colored lines (a "Driver Assist" feature that I appreciated as otherwise I wouldn't have known where my car was or that I was actually in it). "CHECK SURROUNDINGS FOR SAFETY" the screen commanded. Pondering that novel idea I exited the lot onto a country road. I drove maybe two hundred feet before a fresh set of images on the screen drew my glance. With my touch of ADHD I couldn't resist. Instantly, a message flashed on the dashboard directly in front of me: "DRIVER INATTENTION DETECTED. LOOK FORWARD." I spewed a few bad words at my omniscient nanny. (Fortunately, my cell phone was off so Siri couldn't hear me. Or maybe she could and was too embarrassed to comment. Who knows these days?) To compound the insult, when I approached an intersection the electronic nursemaid finger-wagged, "CAUTION: CROSSING TRAFFIC DETECTED." And I don't know how I could have arrived at my destination in one piece if it hadn't continued to flash for the duration of my journey the official speed limit for my route even though road signs were perfectly visible. Not to mention, thank God, that it alerted me throughout with a luminescent "D" that the gearshift was in Drive as opposed to Reverse, Neutral, or Park, the only four gears available. Once, when I parked briefly to study a street map, "VEHICLE WILL TURN OFF IF PARKED FOR 1 HOUR. PERFORM AUTO OFF?" followed with a YES and a NO button in case I couldn't recognize a question when I saw one or was unaware of the binary choices for my reply. You may laugh at this idiocy. I did at first. Then I reflected upon its implications. Starting in 2027, by federal law all new cars in the US must contain such functions plus a kill switch that stops the car if the driver shows signs of impairment like sudden swerving or the appearance of fatigue, intoxication, or inattention. Accordingly, my RAV4 rental represented a vanguard of the new smart cars designed to do one thing, and one thing only. It is not to make us safer. How does a chip that stops your car in the middle of a highway do that? A dashboard screen that distracts the driver with enough bling to make a neon-lit Times Square billboard blush—how does that make us safer? Safety is not the agenda; it rarely is anymore. No, the purpose is to seduce us into surrendering our agency, our autonomy. This anecdote coalesces with other contemporary phenomena that prompt us to jettison self-governance because of convenience, time savings, submission to authority, laziness, and/or fear: reliance on electronics to tell us where to go (GPS), what to think (AI, Siri, Alexa), how to count (calculators), how we function (wearables). We need only to lift a finger—literally—to have our smartphone...

    6 min

  6. 4D AGO

    The Pandemic Agreement Fails Again

    By David Bell at Brownstone dot org. Finalization of the much-heralded Pandemic Agreement, the flagship of the World Health Organization's pandemic agenda, has just been postponed again after another failure to resolve disagreements. Despite heavy pressure from the WHO and European Union in yet another meeting, in Geneva, Switzerland, a large bloc of African states are refusing to sign on to what they consider a clear colonialist agenda. Which of course it is, aimed at putting Covid-era wealth transfers on a more permanent footing. The WHO, for reasons explained below, is doing what it is paid to do. Major financial sponsors of the WHO have much to gain from getting this Agreement through. It has fallen on African leaders, attuned to the model of rich countries and their corporations imposing rules designed for wealth extraction, to protect the rest of us from the farce that the current public health approach to pandemics has become. The fact that the agency tasked with building capacity and promoting sustainability of low-income health systems is instead doing the opposite now needs to become the center issue of this whole shabby episode. It is time for the international public health community to face itself and decide on which side, people or profit, it should stand. The Modern Basis of Multilateral Health Cooperation There are obvious reasons for countries to cooperate in matters of health, as there are for neighbors on a suburban street. Mutual interest in facing common threats where action by neighboring States, or access to their resources, helps protect your own. Moral reasons based on the generally accepted 'good' of helping neighbors when they are in difficulty or lack resources through no fault of their own. Or because a stable and more prosperous neighborhood (world) is good for business, and a sick one may not be. Cooperation is not submission, and few self-respecting people would opt for that. Mutual interests and morality all dissolve fairly quickly when cooperation becomes coercion, and the interests of the most powerful player then become the goal. Health is well-defined in the WHO's constitution as physical, mental, and social well-being. Accordingly, it rests on economics and social capital and is degraded by poverty and inequality. Neither aspect of well-being – mental, social, or physical – is supported by forced compliance or slavery. The basis of modern medical ethics hinges on Hippocrates' assertions on physician conduct from around 400BC, commonly summarized as to do good rather than harm and respect a patient's privacy (confidentiality). As a counter to fascism since the Second World War, we added voluntary informed consent (i.e. absence of coercion). This means the final decision in any aspect of medical care or intervention must rest with the individual concerned. These basic medical ethics rest on the concept that all people are equal and their individual sovereignty (i.e. bodily autonomy) is inviolable. Accordingly, it is obviously unethical to force a person to be injected or undergo some other procedure just because someone else wants them to, or for a third person's benefit. Unethical, that is, outside a medico-fascist or similarly authoritarian approach that post-World War Two human rights law was supposed to suppress. There were very good reasons why we stopped all that, even if it makes the streets look cleaner and we are assured it is for a "greater good." As the Hippocratic Oath and voluntary informed consent govern clinical medical practice, public health is consequently subject to the same requirements at a community, national, and global level. Populations are the sum of individuals, each as noted being imbued with equal rights and intrinsic sovereignty. Therefore, decisions made at a regional or global level can only be made by agencies over which those individuals, as a collective, exert control. This is the basis of the UN charter – sovereign States – the best means we have of exp...

    11 min

  7. 5D AGO

    Synformation: Epistemic Capture Meets AI

    By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org. Definitions (Because the Meaning of Words Matters) Misinformation = information (deemed false at the time of distribution) that differs from the official State-approved narrative, but not intentionally deployed for political purposes. Disinformation = information (deemed false at the time of distribution) differing from the official State-approved narrative, distributed to advance a political agenda. Malinformation = information which may be true or false, but which causes those persons receiving the information to distrust the State. Synformation = Synthetic information and realities fabricated by creating false knowledge and associated synthetic "truth" matrices using large language model-based "artificial intelligence" computational tools. Epistemology = Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge, encompassing its nature, origin, and limits. It investigates what it means to know something, how knowledge is acquired through sources like perception, reason, memory, and testimony, and what distinguishes justified belief from mere opinion. Central concepts in epistemology include belief, truth, justification, and evidence, with the traditional definition of knowledge often being understood as justified true belief. Epistemic Capture = As articulated by Dr. Toby Rogers in his Senate testimony and writings: "In the social sciences, there's this term called epistemic capture, which is when the entire knowledge production process becomes captured by one industry (Big Pharma). And that's what's happened with science and medicine." He elaborated that this capture means "the pharmaceutical industry has captured every step in the knowledge production process in science and medicine. Big Pharma controls what is studied, how it is researched, and what qualifies as evidence." Truthiness = Something has truthiness when it feels true, sounds true, or ought to be true based on emotion, intuition, belief, or ideological preference — regardless of evidence, logic, or objective verification. It prioritizes subjective conviction ("I feel it in my gut") over empirical reality ("the evidence shows…"). "Truthiness is the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true. It's what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. It's truth that comes from the gut, not from books." Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report (October 17, 2005) Introduction and Context In my role as Co-chairperson and member of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, I have been participating in a training course regarding the GRADE methodology for public health decision-making. The acronym stands for Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation, and this methodology is intended to provide a structured, transparent framework to evaluate the quality (certainty) of evidence and the strength of recommendations derived from that evidence. The intent of this method is to create an unbiased tool for evidence-based policy decision-making in public health and clinical medicine. The development of this complicated system was managed by an international working group starting in 2000, and their work product has now been adopted by the WHO, CDC/ACIP, Cochrane Collaboration, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the UK, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) and many others including various medical specialty guilds here in the US. It may come as a surprise to many insiders that, although historically endorsed by the CDC ACIP, the GRADE system is not universally accepted (internationally). The European Medicines Agency (EMA) does not use the GRADE system for its decision-making processes, such as evaluating medicines for marketing authorization or developing scientific guidelines. The EMA primarily assesses the quality, safety, and efficacy of medicines through its scientific committees (e.g., Committee for Medicinal Products ...

    26 min

  8. 6D AGO

    ACIP Attacked for Urging 'Shared Decision-Making'

    By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org. SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL Former CDC director Tom Frieden and colleagues recently published a JAMA opinion piece condemning the CDC vaccine advisory committee's endorsement of "shared decision-making" for future Covid-19 boosters. They argued the shift was an ethical lapse — even an "abdication of responsibility" — particularly for older adults. But what the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) proposed was nothing radical. It was the same patient-centred model that should be used across modern medicine. Which is why the establishment's reaction is so revealing: the moment the subject is "vaccination," even the most basic principles of transparency and informed consent are treated as optional — or worse, as threats. What ACIP Is Actually Proposing In September, ACIP recommended that Covid-19 shots should no longer be a blanket policy but instead be decided through shared decision-making. For older adults and those with underlying conditions, this meant discussing risks, benefits, and uncertainties with their doctors — and making a personalised choice. This should be standard practice in nearly every other clinical scenario — prostate cancer screening, hormone therapy, antidepressant use in pregnancy, or cardiac surgery. But vaccines have been placed on a pedestal. Questioning, hesitating, or individualising the decision has been treated as heresy. The unspoken rule is that both doctors and patients must "trust the science," even when the science is evolving, and individual circumstances differ. In that climate, ACIP's recommendation wasn't received as a return to ethical practice. It was seen as a direct challenge to a decades-old orthodoxy built on the idea that vaccine decisions are too sacred to be personalised. The Claim That "Ambiguity Does Not Exist" Frieden and colleagues insist that for older adults, the benefit–risk calculus is so clear that "ambiguity does not exist," making individualised conversations not just unnecessary but potentially harmful. They also warn that leaving such decisions to clinicians and patients creates a "vacuum" that other professional groups will rush to fill. To defend the claim that there is no ambiguity in the benefit of Covid boosters for older adults, they rely heavily on observational data, including a 2025 Veterans study of 160,000 people reporting modest reductions in hospitalisation and death among boosted recipients. But like all observational research, the data have serious limitations. The cohort was anything but uniform: different infection histories, different numbers of prior doses, and a high burden of chronic illness that elevates baseline risk regardless of vaccination. "Real-world" data can offer insights, but it also carries real-world flaws — and it is not a sound basis for shutting down clinical dialogue. A Shaky Analogy The authors go further, suggesting that the benefits of Covid boosters for older adults are as absolute as vitamin K prophylaxis for newborns. But equating a one-off, decades-validated intervention with repeated dosing of a novel mRNA platform in a highly variable adult population is scientifically and ethically indefensible. Vitamin K is predictable, durable, and biologically straightforward. Covid boosters operate in a shifting landscape: an evolved virus, continually updated formulations, divergent exposure histories, and dramatically reduced baseline risk. The analogy works only if vaccines are treated as uniquely simple interventions — when in reality they involve far more complexity, uncertainty, and individual variation. Why Conversation Is Not "Abdication" At the heart of the authors' critique is the claim that ACIP "abdicates responsibility" by letting doctors and patients decide. But that is the very purpose of medicine: to move away from paternalism and toward transparent presentation of evidence — a process that strengthens, not weakens, the relationship between doctor and patien...

    9 min
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About

Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

Information

  • Creator
    Brownstone Institute
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    50
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Brownstone Journal

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