Brownstone Journal

Brownstone Institute

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

  1. 3 HR AGO

    How Dissent Was Silenced

    By Sonia Elijah at Brownstone dot org. When the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, what I call 3/11, it unleashed not just a health response but a coordinated global reset. What began as "two weeks to flatten the curve" metastasized into the most sweeping peacetime curtailment of civil liberties in modern history: lockdowns, mandates, behavioral manipulation, censorship, and the rise of digital authoritarianism. This excerpt from Chapter 16 of my new book 3/11 Viral Takeover lays bare how the Covid response became the pretext for normalizing government-directed censorship, throttling legitimate scientific debate, and entrenching state power over public discourse. After 3/11, governments did not merely request moderation, they demanded it. Backed by explicit threats of regulatory consequences. In the United States, the declassified "Twitter files" released between 2022 and 2023, along with the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, later known as Murthy v. Missouri, revealed a sustained multi-agency campaign of coercion that went far beyond polite suggestions. Shortly after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022, he released internal documents, known as the "Twitter files" to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, Alex Berenson, and Paul D. Thacker, exposing how federal agencies routinely flagged content for removal or suppression. The files showed White House officials, including former Press Secretary Jen Psaki, directly pressuring Twitter to censor true posts about vaccine side effects, natural immunity, and lockdown harms. Government agencies, including the DHS, CDC, FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), used specialized reporting mechanisms, such as Facebook's "Content Request System," to flag social media content for potential throttling, suppression, or removal, often under the umbrella of countering "mis-, dis-, and malinformation." The files demonstrated that platforms complied not out of independent policy, but out of fear of antitrust action, Section 230 reform, or other regulatory retaliation. The most consequential legal challenge was Missouri v. Biden, mentioned earlier. It was filed in May 2022 by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, alleging that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies to suppress protected speech. The case expanded to include private plaintiffs, including Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, co-authors and advocates of the Great Barrington Declaration. Key revelations from discovery showed White House officials repeatedly berating Facebook and Twitter executives for not doing enough to censor vaccine-related content. Emails revealed direct pressure: "We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period." In July 2021, President Biden publicly accused platforms like Facebook of "killing people" by allowing vaccine misinformation to spread. White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield followed up by saying platforms "should be held accountable" and that the administration was "reviewing" Section 230 protections, which shield platforms from liability for user content. This dynamic was laid bare even more starkly during Congressional testimony on the Twitter files and government weaponization. In the March 9, 2023 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified on the Twitter files revelations. Taibbi described the government's role as creating a "censorship-industrial complex," while Shellenberger detailed how federal agencies pressured platforms to suppress Covid-related dissent, including accurate information on vaccine side effects and origins. Shellenberger stated: "The Twitter Files show the government was dir...

    14 min
  2. 10 HR AGO

    A Free Speech Victory, Sort of

    By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org. On Tuesday, attorneys announced a "Consent Decree," which will put an end to the years-long litigation in Murthy v. Missouri (previously called Missouri v. Biden), which focused on government-induced social media censorship. While its proponents herald the settlement agreement as a victory for free speech, the details suggest that Leviathan has not lost this civilizational struggle. Its concessions are decorative, and the text implicitly suggests that the practices will largely continue. The "victory" for free speech in this case is that the remaining defendants – the CDC, CISA, and the Surgeon General – agree not to "threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment…unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content" that contains "protected free speech." That is akin to a civilian signing an agreement not to steal his neighbor's car; it "prohibits" something that is already illegal under black-letter First Amendment law. Free speech advocates, however, cannot even celebrate that as a "victory." The agreement not to bludgeon social media companies into imposing state censorship only lasts "for a period of 10 years," per the terms of the agreement. After that, the agreement implies that CISA can return to its practice of "switchboarding," which dictated which posts should be banned from social media. Further, the "restriction" only applies to three government agencies; the settlement does not apply to similar assaults from any other government group (including DHS, the CIA, the FBI, or the White House). Moreover, the only people who can enforce the terms are the five remaining plaintiffs, as the agreement is "enforceable only by the Parties." If government warhawks coerce platforms to ban critics of the Iran War, this "Decree" will have no effect. The supposed triumphs lack substance. The government agencies agree that "modern technology does not alter the Government's obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment" and that "misinformation" labels do not render speech constitutionally unprotected. Excellent. But that is nothing more than a repetition of well-established law. Unfortunately, this was the predictable endpoint of the litigation following the Supreme Court's dereliction of duty in June 2024, when it concocted procedural excuses to evade the controversy of the indisputable evidence of the Biden White House's censorship apparatus. The history of the Action reveals that the Supreme Court forfeited a generational opportunity to protect American free speech. July 2023: The District Court Unravels the Censorship Hegemon On July 4, 2023, District Court Judge Terry Doughty granted a preliminary injunction barring large swaths of the US government from colluding with social media companies to censor "content containing protected free speech." He described the allegations, if true, as "arguably [] the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history." The order included a 155-page memorandum recounting the Biden administration's wide-ranging assaults on free expression. Provided it survives future digital purges, historians will one day look to it as a guide to the authoritarian madness that overtook the republic under the guise of "public health." The vast conspiracy spanned nearly every federal entity, including the White House, the Department of Justice, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Intelligence Community. That was the high-water mark of this case's victory for freedom. The Regime Fights Back The regime would not let an injunction usurp its power. Censorship had been integral to its governing strategy since 2020's crackdown on Covid dissidents and the later election campaign, as Joe Biden anointed Antony Blinken Secretary of State in return for him arranging for the CIA to thwart the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Once in office, the Biden administration had unprecedented censorship aspirations, inclu...

    9 min
  3. 1 DAY AGO

    Energy Lockdown: The Drumbeat Begins

    By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org. You recall how the Covid lockdowns began. It was a soft and slow drumbeat that began in late January 2020, with growing amounts of panic and a faster tempo, increasing for several weeks. The US President and the UK Prime Minister resisted extreme reactions. Most governments did and so did most public health authorities. The drum pounding became earsplitting in late February. Faced with an incredible barrage, finally Boris Johnson and Donald Trump gave in. They got out in front of the problem and lowered the boom: stay home, essential/unessential, no flights, no parties, stop your consumerist ways. Just sit alone and be sad. Both came to regret this choice but, by then, others were in charge. The experts and institutions were everywhere, seizing the moment. The CCP, WHO, CDC, Imperial College London, Fauci, Birx, CNN/NYT/MSNBC, and on it went, everyone telling us the same thing daily. Those who asked questions were shouted down, shamed, throttled, cancelled, deleted. It felt like we were surrounded on all sides by lies and liars, marionettes and mushbrains, sycophants and spooks. Six years later and nearly to the day, this new attempted lockdown seems to be going the same way, not concerning infectious disease but energy use. Isn't it remarkable how the officially recommended methods of managing these completely different realms bear so much in common? They both come down to restricting your liberty, rationing your consumption, redirecting your attention, and shouting down critics. The Iran War kicked off the price spike but it was uncanny how a machinery was so quickly put in place to instruct everyone of what to do. The panic about how to respond is intensifying. The crisis is without precedent, they say. We have to try new approaches, dramatic ones. Suddenly, this institution called the International Energy Agency holds new prominence in world media. Founded in 1974, it's an NGO associated with OPEC. It has no hard but only soft power – like the World Health Organization, with whom the IEA shares a similarly authoritative branding. There is a new Fauci too. The head of the IEA is highly decorated and universally praised Dr. Fatih Birol. Though he has never worked in industry, any more than Fauci had seen patients in decades, Dr. Birol is said to be the world's top expert and works closely with China on its supposed "energy transition." Indeed, sporting an honorary doctorate from Imperial College London, he has been a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering since 2013. Concerning the release of new energy reserves, Birol is nonplussed: "supply-side measures alone cannot fully offset the scale of the disruption." Remarkable isn't it? New script, same play, new actors for the same roles, overlapping protocols, nearly identical tempo of acceleration and dynamic of acoustics in the media. Around the world, countries are imposing price caps, consumption rationing, indoor temperature controls, and shorter work weeks as a prelude to full-on stay home orders. They haven't come to the US yet but they are spreading in Europe and the UK, as people panic about prices. Clearly, they say, we need to flatten the curve once again. Temporarily. Just until we get the problem under control. We just need to buy time. After all, we've never dealt with anything like this. Clearly the long-term solution, they say, is a full switch to "renewables" but that cannot happen all at once. Inspired by the manner in which governments were able to control communication and people during the Covid crisis, the IEA advises the following: 1. Work from home where possible. We'll be back to languishing at home and consuming entertainment through laptops. IEA comments: "Displaces oil use from commuting, particularly where jobs are suitable for remote work." 2. Reduce highway speed limits by at least 10 km/h ( 6-7 miles per hour), which is really nothing more than a method of creating annoyance. The IEA says "lo...

    9 min
  4. 1 DAY AGO

    Federal Judge Blocks Kennedy's Vaccine Reforms

    By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org. On 16 March, federal judge Brian Murphy blocked the US government from making sweeping changes to the US childhood immunisation schedule, "in a blow to Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr's agenda," as the BBC expressed it. The American Academy of Pediatrics and other large medical groups had sued, saying Kennedy's changes violated federal law. The BBC calls them respected medical groups, which they are not, as illustrated by the hepatitis B vaccine controversy. On 5 December 2025, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ended the recommendation that all newborns in the United States receive a hepatitis B shot at birth. The birth dose was recommended only if the mother had tested positive for the virus or if her infection status was unknown. The change was very rational, and, as in Western Europe, where only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose, it would seem difficult to argue against it. But the media did and failed us badly. Two days after the vote, I downloaded news stories from 14 major media outlets, and they were all very negative. The media gave organisations undue prominence without ever considering if they were impartial. They urged people to look to "independent recommendations," e.g. from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for "science-based advice." I argued that it was advice based on money. The Academy would continue to support the birth dose of the vaccine but all the journalists forgot to say that it receives many millions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies. Judge Murphy also suspended Kennedy's appointments to ACIP. The BBC argued that many of the panel members were vaccine sceptics and noted that "Kennedy was a longtime antivaccine activist before joining President Donald Trump's administration." This is so typical of irresponsible journalists. They never investigate if Kennedy's reforms are prudent and evidence-based but use ad hominem arguments to kill them. It is so low and does not further a rational healthcare; it impedes it. I have described in detail how the coverage of Kennedy's vaccine reforms in the BMJ, a major medical journal, amounts to character assassination. It is just mind-blowing that a medical journal would do this in a consecutive sample of 33 articles. It is also false that Kennedy's new vaccine panel at the CDC are vaccine sceptics. I know several of them personally and they are highly qualified researchers who do not have the financial conflicts of interest that the old panel had, which I found was corrupt. They rubber-stamped any proposal that came forward, no matter how idiotic it was. A spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services said the agency "looks forward to this judge's decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing." The medical groups that brought the lawsuit lauded the decision, including the American Medical Association, the largest US professional organisation for doctors, which called it "an important step toward protecting the health of Americans, particularly children." Follow the money is the best advice I can give to anyone with an interest in healthcare and in the US, virtually everything has to do with money. The American Medical Association is heavily corrupted by industry money. Why on earth could it be a problem that Kennedy reduced the huge number of recommended vaccines in the US so that the vaccine schedule became similar to the one we have in my country, Denmark, and in many other European countries? As I have demonstrated, the reduced US childhood vaccination schedule was systematically denigrated in the media although it was a rational and evidence-based decision. It is possible that there are some technicalities, "procedural requirements," that need to be addressed. Judge Murphy pointed these o...

    5 min
  5. 2 DAYS AGO

    Did Ralph Baric at UNC Create SARS-CoV-2?

    By Jim Haslam at Brownstone dot org. Disclaimer: If Covid-19 were linked to animal vaccine research, it would be an unintended consequence, though the institutional response was anything but accidental. The new revelation that America's top coronavirus scientist, Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC), worked with the intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the Covid-19 pandemic significantly raises the likelihood that Baric is the creator of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the evidence for and against this hypothesis remains incomplete because the US government is engaged in an ongoing coverup of key information. Regardless of the government's willingness to be forthcoming, Baric himself could shed copious light on a matter of major public and scientific importance by making available his lab materials from the period leading up to the pandemic. There is strong evidence backing the following key points: 1. Baric's lab had the technical ability (reverse genetics systems, chimeric spike protein, infectious clone production) to build viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. 2. The 2018 DEFUSE proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), led by Baric, explicitly outlined laboratory manipulations capable of producing a SARS-CoV-2–like virus. 3. Although DARPA declined to fund DEFUSE, most team members later received similar funding through other grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 4. US intelligence agencies (including CIA and ODNI) consulted Baric and other experts from 2015 onwards and even ran pandemic war games (e.g., Event 201, Crimson Contagion) just before the pandemic. The CIA now assesses, albeit with low confidence, that a lab-related incident in China is more likely than a purely natural origin. 5. This new assessment is consistent with the "lab-leak" hypothesis that Baric created the virus and "provided" it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for experiments on "wild-caught" Chinese bats. 6. Early in the pandemic, Baric omitted the furin cleavage site in his intelligence briefing. He later testified that he had seen it, and the idea of inserting such a site "was clearly mine." 7. SARS-CoV-2 remains the only known SARS-like (sarbecovirus) with such a furin cleavage site (FCS), which significantly enhances infectivity and transmissibility. One of us (Haslam) has set forth the most detailed and likely hypothesis regarding the origin of the pandemic, in the book COVID-19: Mystery Solved: It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it's not Chinese junk (2024). No information has come to light that challenges or refutes the following sequence of events, as hypothesized in the book: Baric's lab in North Carolina created a chimeric SARS-like virus (SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate progenitor called HKU3-Smix) using DEFUSE-style methods. The proposed novel virus (HKU3-Smix) differed from SARS-CoV-1 by 25%; SARS-CoV-2's spike differed by 24.7%. Baric later testified, "We were within the range." Baric used Egyptian fruit bats as a surrogate at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana (a high-containment NIH facility that conducts DARPA research). His biotechnology was designed to be portable in a small tube and usable under BSL-2 conditions. The constructed virus was then sent to WIV for further experiments, likely at a Chinese bat colony (Rhinolophus sinicus) near the BSL-4 facility. The virus infected a lab worker, probably asymptomatically, and spread (initially undetected) in Wuhan from the WIV, triggering the pandemic. Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) have emerged as a non-natural reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2, and were referenced in DARPA DEFUSE. Over the past year, we have debated this lab-leak hypothesis with the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO). That debate became public with their recent Nature paper. We reminded SAGO that they have not identified a progenitor virus with 99% genome similarity, nor have th...

    21 min
  6. 3 DAYS AGO

    When Judges Go Rogue

    By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox at Brownstone dot org. Though I am an attorney in practice for almost thirty years now, I have always said that not all issues can be resolved in a court of law. I say this not because I lack confidence in our judicial system, but because not all issues are subject to the decision of a court. In other words, judges can't have a say in everything! This is the premise behind our stalwart foundational doctrine of Separation-of-Powers where each of our three, co-equal branches of government have their own sphere of influence and power, and each is to stay out of the others' lanes. To the point, some issues are policy issues, not legal issues. And so, just as the Executive Branch (the president and his cabinet) cannot adjudicate a dispute between you and your neighbor, nor can a judge nullify an agency's lawfully permissible actions just because the judge doesn't like what the agency head has done. Furthermore, there is a hierarchy to our judicial system in the United States, and in the federal court arena, the "District Courts" are the lowest on the totem pole. Everyone in the legal world knows this. Attorneys, court personnel, legal scholars, and unquestionably, above all others, the judges know this. However, there is a new phenomenon growing in our country which can be categorized as nothing short of lawlessness. There is a class of judges who feel so emboldened, they believe they have the authority to bestow upon themselves a supernatural power to trump the Constitution and "go it their own way," so to speak. These rogue judges are a clear and present danger to our society, for they ignore our 250-year-old rules, and instead write their own playbook. To borrow a term from the Left (which is rather ironic considering these cagey judges were almost all appointed by Democrat presidents), these judges are "a threat to democracy!" In response to this growing brazen disregard for law and order, our highest court in the land decided it had to step in and set the record straight. Like naughty children who refuse to obey their parents, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) gave the rogue judges a stern reprimand that left no room for interpretation. To be exact, in June of last year, SCOTUS issued a decision that made it crystal clear that federal District Court judges (i.e. the lowest level court in the federal judiciary system) are limited in their reach. More specifically, inTrump v. Casa, SCOTUS ruled that these district court-level judges can only issue injunctions that are binding on the specific parties in that case. I analyzed this decision in more detail in an NTD interview shortly after the decision was released last summer. The bottom line is, these low courts (of which there are almost 100 in our country) cannot issue decisions that affect the entire country. That power lies only with SCOTUS. As it should. Remember folks, our Constitution only establishes the Supreme Court. All other courts are subservient thereto, and therefore must be obsequiously submissive by their very definition. And yet, I got a phone call on March 16th from a colleague (though not a fellow attorney), who was clearly agitated, and I could probably say close to irate by the end of the call. He barely greeted me when I picked up the phone, and he dove right in with, "Did you hear about this stupid *ss judge in Massachusetts who just threw out Kennedy's ACIP panel and invalidated their changes to the childhood vaccine schedule?! What the hell is going on?! He can't do that! Can he?!" I hadn't yet heard about the decision, so I immediately thought to myself, this colleague's got it wrong…There's absolutely no way a judge in Massachusetts can toss out the HHS Secretary's appointees to ACIP and undo the work they've done. As my colleague was huffing and puffing about it, I remained very calm, which confused him. "Why aren't you upset about this?" he asked me. So I told him with great confidence that I was sure he got the sto...

    16 min
  7. 4 DAYS AGO

    The Turning Point in Our Lives

    By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. [What follows is the foreword to 3/11 Viral Takeover: On March 11, 2020, a Pandemic was Declared and Our World Changed Forever by Sonia Elijah, newly published and available on Amazon.] The Covid period was a turning point in our lives. We saw how the system that rules us truly operates and that of which it is capable. We experienced the apotheosis of the corporatist planning state, as close to dystopian-level totalitarianism as we ever knew. We observed how the media, tech, elected and unelected government, and the medical industry all work together when the stakes are high. And we observed and experienced just how completely controlling this cartel can be once it is unleashed on the entire population. All the sloganeering – buy some time, slow the spread, flatten the curve, we are all in this together, socially distance, be careful, mask up, get the jab, ban disinformation and malinformation, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and a thousand other cliches – turned over time into a tissue of lies. They all point to the same nefarious scheme, to weaponize public trust in a way that results in the consumption of a mislabeled product based on a gene-invading technology that had never before been deployed. Even now, typing those words and trying to mentally grasp all that we went through still shocks me, even if I have written probably thousands of articles and two books on the topic. In so many ways, the Covid period feels like a war complete with the legendary fog and long period of recovery. The response to the pathogen left large parts of the world in shambles: illiteracy, substance abuse, tech addiction, health crisis, broken supply chains, bankrupted businesses, discredited medical elites, indebted governments running the presses full time, flat wages despite stimulus payments once corrected for the inevitable inflation, and the building of a surveillance state that began with disease tracking and mutated into the ambition of a digital system of vaccine passports. In each nation, there were malefactors. But what's more remarkable is how similar the policies were in nearly every country on earth, thanks to the World Health Organization's messaging. I have attended post-apocalyptic briefings in several countries and I'm struck by how nearly every country adopted the same cockamamie protocols, from sanitizer dousing to forced masking to business closures to vaccine mandates. The outlying nations can be named on one hand and include unpredictables such as Tanzania, Nicaragua, and Sweden. The topic absolutely requires a book-length treatment. Even then, there is no way to cover the entire calamity. What's more, such a book bears a huge burden of documentation in several areas of policy, science, and history. This is because the deck still remains stacked against anyone who would dare question that not all that transpired was the best they could do with the information they had. How many times have we heard that? How many commissions have concluded with this same claim and even promise to do more earlier the next time? Even as of this writing, there have been precious few admissions of wrongdoing, much less apologies. The medical journals and major media have just moved on as if none of this matters. Which brings us to this masterful treatise by science journalist Sonia Elijah. She has been, from the very beginning, an essential source of reporting and truth-telling on the Covid calamity, writing from the point of view of a British journalist who followed every detail, day by day and hour by hour. She is the master of her topic. The book is five years in the writing and includes a level of documentation that will amaze you. This piety toward facts is backed by a fiery passion that is entirely appropriate to her subject. The result is a book for the ages, one that will end the whitewashing that is taking place right now. Indeed, the appearance of 3/11: Viral Takeover becomes on its ...

    4 min
  8. 5 DAYS AGO

    They Acknowledge the Byproducts. Where Are the Data?

    By Charlotte Kuperwasser at Brownstone dot org. Pursuant to the order issued on March 16 in American Academy of Pediatrics et al. v. Kennedy et al., No. 1:25-cv-11916 (D. Mass.), the ACIP meeting previously scheduled for March 18-19 has been stayed until further notice. In light of this notice, I want to outline what should have been addressed at this meeting and what still demands attention: DNA contaminants and byproducts in the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines were introduced as a technological breakthrough. They were rapidly developed, widely deployed, and presented as rigorously evaluated. But years into their global use, a basic scientific question still remains unresolved: What is the biological fate of the DNA byproducts known to be present in these vaccines? This is not a speculative concern. The manufacturers acknowledge that their production process generates DNA byproducts in their publications and patents. Independent and regulatory laboratories have confirmed their presence in vaccine vials. And yet despite this, the FDA and the manufacturers have not publicly provided data addressing the fate, persistence, or appropriate safety thresholds for DNA encapsulated in LNPs present in mRNA vaccines. The manufacturers state that they provide data to the FDA in accordance with existing guidance. This combination— acknowledgment, confirmation, and absence of data—should give pause. Pfizer and Moderna have been clear in their own scientific literature describing the manufacturing process used to produce mRNA vaccines. The process of in-vitro transcription generates nucleic-acid byproducts in the form of residual DNA fragments, double-stranded RNA, and RNA:DNA hybrid molecules. Pfizer and Moderna also acknowledge that these byproducts are not expected to be completely removed during purification. Further, both companies have described how such nucleic-acid structures can interact with innate immune sensing pathways if present inside cells. None of this is controversial. It is very well-established molecular and cellular biology, and it is the manufacturers' own description of their technology. In other words, the existence of these byproducts, and their potential biological relevance, is not in dispute, although based on the media and public narrative, you might think otherwise. Multiple laboratories, including both independent researchers and government-affiliated labs in Germany (PEI) and Australia (TGA), have directly analyzed vaccine vials. Their findings are consistent. DNA fragments are present in all tested vaccine lots and the fragments vary in size, with some extending into the kilobase range. Sequencing reveals DNA derived from across the original DNA template, including Spike-encoding sequences, and regulatory elements such as the SV40 promoter (in the Pfizer construct). More importantly, several analyses have reported that DNA corresponding to the spike sequence appears at substantially higher levels than plasmid backbone. This matters, because most routine testing focuses on backbone markers potentially underrepresenting other DNA species that may be more abundant. And this means that the DNA being measured may not fully reflect the total amount of DNA that is present. Given these findings, one might reasonably expect the FDA and the manufacturers to have performed comprehensive studies measuring how much spike-sequence DNA is present in finished vaccine products. One might expect data collected on whether RNA:DNA hybrid byproducts are being systematically measured, or what happens to LNP-encapsulated DNA fragments after they are delivered into cells. It would be expected that data exists related to whether the DNA persists in tissues, or whether it interacts with or integrates in the human genome. And one should reasonably expect that safety thresholds and guidance specific for lipid nanoparticle delivery of DNA would have been established prior to, or at least immediately following the vaccine rollout...

    7 min

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

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