Brownstone Journal

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

  1. 8H AGO

    You Cannot Beat Nihilism with Nihilism

    By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org. Today, Barcelona is today one of the great tourist destinations of the Western world. Fifty years ago, however, it was a somewhat dusty backwater still smarting from the punishments inflicted on it by the Franco regime (1939-1975) for its citizens' stubborn refusal to abandon their attachment to the Catalan language and culture, and for having served as the nerve center of the defeated Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) eventually won by the Nationalist general. The city's dramatic transformation is rooted in actions taken under the leadership of Mayor Pasqual Maragall in the six or so years leading to the city's hosting of the 1992 Summer Olympics. While the mayor of every Olympic venue promises that the Games will enduringly change his city for the better, this actually occurred in Maragall's Barcelona, especially in the realm of public infrastructure. But unlike many big city mayors, Maragall understood that cities don't emerge into beauty and greatness on the basis of bricks, mortar, and ring roads alone, and that this was especially the case in a place like Barcelona where citizens had been largely stripped of their ability to express themselves in their own linguistic, symbolic, and architectural vernaculars for nearly 40 years. This awareness led Maragall and his collaborators to undertake a vigorous campaign of culture planning, designed on one hand, to remind citizens of their shared, if long-submerged, Catalan cultural heritage, and on the other, to introduce them to emergent symbolic repertoires from foreign cultural systems long obscured by regime censorship. At the center of this effort was the concept of the "legible city." Maragall believed that the language of architecture and place-making were every bit, if not more powerful, than purely textual communication and hence that the shape and character of the spaces we pass through every day exercise a considerable influence on our patterns of thought, our behaviors, and even on concepts of personal and group identity. Implied in this approach is the idea that a well-functioning city must, while never striving to impose a deterministic uniformity, nonetheless be able to transmit to its citizens a palpable sense of community and a spatial grammar that facilitates their ability to recognize themselves as sharing concepts of historical and political reality with those around them. It is an approach that, as the head of Maragall's architectural brain trust Oriol Bohigas made clear in 1999, runs directly counter to Margaret Thatcher's idea of cities and nations as a mere grab bags of self-interested individuals. Is there a risk in this approach? Most certainly. If, for example, the architects of such efforts are not people of balance and restraint, their top-down culture planning can easily devolve into a program of imposed partisan collectivism. And while few leveled this critique at the Barcelona city hall during Maragall's time in office, it has, I think, often been rightly hurled at the many city officials who have positioned themselves as heirs to his legacy during the last two decades. In the final analysis, however, critiques such as these ultimately miss the mark. And that's for a simple reason. No public space is ever free of ideological content imposed, in one degree or another by coercion, by a society's economic and cultural elites. For example, today most of us find the classic New England town green to be an elegant and calming place of beauty within our increasingly frenetic lives. This is not to say, however, that it is free of ideological directives. For example, almost all of them have a church, usually from a Protestant denomination, directly adjacent to them. Many also have memorials to those from the town or immediate area who have fallen in wars undertaken by the United States in the course of its history. While structures such as these do not force anyone to be ...

    10 min

  2. 1D AGO

    El Tonto Por Cristo: A Movie Review

    By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org. As the AI winter draws near, we must refuse to let any chance slip by to awaken our numbed senses. That means staying alert, at every moment, to welcome any sign. And a true labor of love is always one of those gifts that life, sometimes, brings when you are ready to receive them. That's what a strange, luminous film projected at the Kennedy Center did for me a few days ago. Directed by David Josh Jordan, the movie is entitled El Tonto Por Cristo, which means "The Fool for Christ." What signs are we seeking? C.S. Lewis, I think, captured it best in his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a parable about the birth of artificial intelligence and the technocratic order that paves its way. In the story, the protagonist Mark, an ambitious academic, is drawn into an elite institute called N.I.C.E., whose demonic aims are cloaked in the language of "objectivity," a preparation for the arrival of superior beings. As part of his initiation, Mark is confined to a room deliberately ill-proportioned, "not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike," hung with paintings that at first seem ordinary, yet on closer inspection reveal "unaccountable details" that make each one "look like something seen in delirium:" an odd tilt of a foot, a strange grouping of fingers, too many beetles beneath the table at the Last Supper, a strange figure between Christ and the Lazarus. Doesn't this remind you of some AI-generated images? Instead of breaking him, the room has the opposite effect. Against its sour crookedness there rises, Lewis writes, "some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight." A sense of something else, "the Normal," that is "solid, massive, with a shape of its own," something "you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with." Mark is "not yet thinking in moral categories, yet he is having his first deeply moral experience: he is choosing a side." We live inside that same crooked room. The world around us is bent, and the question is always the same: where is the Normal to be found? El Tonto Por Cristo answers that question with quiet, stubborn grace. In the short introduction before the screening, Jordan described how the film came to be. Scrolling through the internet in search of a movie that might weave together Orthodox Christianity and the wild, strange beauty of Texas in the tradition of Bergman, Dreyer, and Tarkovsky, he was stopped by his wife: "Why don't you just make it?" So he did, with an investment of $36,000. The film unfolds in an Orthodox monastery on the Texas coast. At its center is Father John, the one-eyed, divinely illumined abbot of a ragged band of misfit monks seeking sanctity in this improbable place. Every character is drawn from the lives of real Orthodox saints, those wild, desert fathers who have always been Christianity's most compelling witnesses. For two hours and fifteen minutes we are drawn into the intimate, ordinary-yet-radiant rhythm of their days. The film never spells out what brought these men together, but it is unmistakable: each carries the scars of deep pain, each was an outcast before the monastery became home. What it does show, with extraordinary patience, is how the monotony of monastic life and the fire of spiritual intensity are not opposites, but the same reality seen from different angles, how Heaven and Earth dwell together in the same small room. The title points to the heart of the matter: the holy fool, a figure central to Orthodox tradition and to Dostoevsky, among other Slavic artists. As Jonathan Pageau explains, the holy fool exposes the limits of our tidy order. He turns everything upside down so that we might see the way out. The Holy Fool inverts the script until the Normal becomes visible again. El Tonto Por Cristo performs this inversion with rare subtlety. The opening eight-minute take alone is a threshold: we stand at the monastery door with Father John, his back to us, facing a man in a briefcase and Texas tie,...

    6 min

  3. 2D AGO

    Goodbye and Good Riddance to the Endangerment Finding

    By David Stockman at Brownstone dot org. Trump's cancellation of the so-called "endangerment finding" with respect to CO2 made by the Obama White House back in 2009 is so profoundly important as to make up for a legion of Trump's spending, borrowing, easy money, and tariffing sins. Among countless others. The entire notion that fossil-fuel-based industrial civilization threatens to boil the planet alive is sheer crackpottery. Actually, as we reprise below, the geologic and climatic history of the planet so clearly refutes the Climate Crisis nonsense as to point to an even more malefic force at work than just an egregious policy mistake. In fact, the entire Climate Crisis Hoax was a deliberately Manufactured Lie, which emanated from the permanent political class and career nomenklatura domiciled in Washington, the UN, London, and Brussels. Their purpose was transparent: Namely, the propagation of an entire gestalt centered on an existential threat to the very life of the planet, thereby implicating sweeping emergency expansion of state power to override and supplant the very rudiments and rhythms of our fossil-fuel-based industrial society and the free market-rooted lifestyles and prosperity it enables. Stated more bluntly, the Climate Change Hoax was the most blatant grab for state power in human history to date (possibly exceeded only by the Covid-era attempt to control the microbial kingdom). And, now, perhaps with no more intentionality than that of the proverbial blind squirrel which stumbles upon an acorn, Trump has struck decisively at the entire prosperity-endangering predicate of this great lie. Not only will the cantilevered green energy regulatory and subsidy structure predicated on the Obama endangerment finding now rapidly fall by the wayside, but the whole absurd religion of mankind's alleged sinful stewardship of the planet will be up for honest refutation for the first time in three decades. Perhaps it will take a year or two, or even a decade or more, but the phony "science" and risible economics on which the climate scam was based will now unravel into a heap of discredited propaganda and modern-day witchcraftery. With some luck and leadership from now emboldened dissenters in government, industry, science, and the public conversation alike, we may even benefit from a "never again" syndrome in our national politics capable of keeping the statists at bay for at least a few decades longer. Perforce, therefore, the foundation myths of the Climate Crisis scam needs to be eviscerated limb-for-limb in order to document that the entire story was and is bogus. The truth is, the equipoise of the planet is not remotely in danger from burning fossil fuels or other human endeavors that make modern life more pleasant and tolerable. In the first place, there never has been planetary equipoise! What there's been is 4.5 billion years of wildly oscillating and often violent geologic evolution and climate disequilibrium owing to manifold natural causes including: Plate tectonics which have sometimes violently impacted climate systems, especially the assembly and breakup of Pangaea between 300 million and 175 million years ago and the continuous drift of the present day continents thereafter. Periodic asteroid bombardments. The 100,000-year cycles of the earth's orbital eccentricity (it gets colder when it's at maximum elongation). The 41,000-year cycles of the earth tilt on its axis, which oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and thereby impacts the level of solar intake. The wobble or precession of the earth's rotation which impacts climate over the course of its 26,000-year cycles. The recent 150,000-year glaciation and inter-glacial warming cycles. The 1,500-year sunspot cycles, where earth temperatures fall materially during solar minimums like the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, which occurred at the extreme of the LIA when sunspot activity virtually ceased. The natural climate change now underway is therefore the pro...

    28 min

  4. 3D AGO

    Autistic Barbie

    By Sinead Murphy at Brownstone dot org. Mattel has launched Autistic Barbie. Because children with autism should be visible, including to themselves. 'Every child deserves to see themselves in Barbie.' So goes Mattel's blurb. It is a theme of our times: being visible, seeing ourselves, coming-out into the light. Launched in the domain of what is called 'sexuality,' it is now a general possibility with multiple pathways. And everything gives way before it. There can be no objection to coming out. It can only add to the supply of what is good. It is a lie, destructive of health and happiness. Out is truth, and promoting of health and happiness. But while we busy ourselves with one or other modes of coming out, we overlook the usefulness of coming out, not to us who do it but to those who seek to manage us who do it. Because coming out implies a number of useful effects. First. Coming out implies that there is something in, something that shrinks from the world, something there – not discerned by the senses or the sciences but divined by new-style experts appointed by fiat for the task. These experts – psychologists, educationalists, therapists of various kinds – describe for us our modern soul, our 'identity.' In doing so, they arrogate to themselves a power to invent characters for people that are allegedly defining but that do not necessarily manifest themselves at all. There is something there, though there is no sign of it. The more there is no sign of it, the more there it may be said to be. Second. Coming out implies that there is an essential in-ness, an essential invisibility, about what is there. This can denigrate any or all visible evidence of a situation or condition – its possible causes as well as its symptoms – as inessential or beside the point, not linked to what is there with any necessity. Third. Coming out implies that strategies that elicit what is there are neutral in themselves and acceptable in their outcomes, for they merely uncover a truth and uncovering a truth can only be true. Fourth. Coming out implies that in whatever mode what is there ventures forth, with whatever attributes it roams abroad, it cannot be offensive or destructive but only healthy and right. The power to dismiss existing evidence of a condition is matched by the power to promote manufactured evidence of a condition. As a device for the insertion and normalization of any number of effects, the conceit of coming out could not be more useful. And Autistic Barbie is a case perfectly in point. Autism in its true form comprises exclusion from the conditions for involvement in human life, as I have argued in What Autism Is and What Autism Is Not. The US CDC reports that 1 in 31 American children now receives a diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder by the age of 8, an almost four-fold increase since the beginning of the century. This epidemic of autism points to the poisoning of children on a scale heretofore unknown. And social and political strategies to address autism typically exacerbate its destructiveness, amplifying the most anti-human characteristics of autism under the aegis of its inclusion. But laundering autism through the rigmarole of coming out neutralizes what is a crime against humanity – more than neutralizes the crime, it actually washes it in a kind of virtue. First. As what must come out, autism is framed as something there, where its there-ness is prised away from the many ways in which autism is painfully evident to the senses and to the sciences, and made the province of pronouncements by experts in the fields of education, psychology, and various therapies. Autism is thereby grafted onto the modern soul, with all the specialness, the truth, that that involves, transformed from a physical and social harm from which our children suffer to a divergent form of identity from which our society can only benefit. In this regard, that Mattel's first autism-themed doll is Barbie and not Ken is significant. Autism is a co...

    10 min

  5. 4D AGO

    The Great Harris Coulter

    By Dana Ullman at Brownstone dot org. Harris Coulter has written an academic and fascinating four-volume set of books on the history of Western Medicine, brought back into print by Brownstone Institute: Volume I: The Patterns Emerge: Hippocrates to Paracelsus Volume II: Progress and Regress: J.B. Van Helmont to Claude Bernard Volume III: Science and Ethics in American Medicine: 1800-1914 Volume IV, Part One: Twentieth-Century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era Volume IV, Part Two: Twentieth-Century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era Each volume is important to those who wish to understand the roots of modern medicine and to learn how and why many "unorthodox" practices did not gain general acceptance in the health care system. The four books are of particular importance to those involved in holistic approaches to health because Coulter traces the history of the holistic (AKA "empirical") practices that are often ignored or criticized unfairly in most medical history texts. Ultimately, books on history are written by the "victors;" that is, by the dominant political or medical paradigm, and such books give an inadequately accurate view of true history. The books written by Dr. Coulter are therefore a refreshing and even compelling review of medical history. Coulter's books show that what we call "scientific medicine" today isn't really scientific but "reductionistic;" that is, these conventional medical treatments tend to provide short-term a highly limited assessment of health benefits from treatment, often ignoring the fact that such treatments provided only short-term benefits while creating many side effects that later led to chronic and deeper diseases. The four volumes are scholarly written and are thoroughly footnoted with references to thousands of original writings. Volume I describes the era from Hippocrates (400 B.C.) to Paracelsus (1600). Volume II discusses medicine in Europe from 1600 to 1850. Volume III covers medicine in America from 1800 to 1914. Volume IV covers Twentieth-century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era (this volume is itself separated into two volumes, Part I and Part II). The title, Divided Legacy, refers to the two predominant schools of thought or traditions that have dominated Western medical history (college courses in "philosophy" typically describe these two dominant schools of thought, and Coulter's books describe how these two different philosophies manifest in medical thought and practice). Although the two schools were not formalized with every practitioner aligning him/herself with one or the other school, Coulter's analysis shows convincing evidence how some of the best physicians and healers believed and practiced mainly in one or the other tradition. One school was known as the Rationalist school, while the other was the Empirical school. The Rationalist school sought to understand health, disease, and the treatment of disease in an analytical fashion; It sought causes of disease and methods of treatment in a systematic and rational manner. It focused on the anatomical and biochemical nature of the human being as ways to understand the parts of the organism and how to make them function properly. The Empirical school of thought held different assumptions about the ways of acquiring knowledge on health, disease, and the treatment of disease. It did not look for nor seek to understand the causes of disease. It sought and developed ways that worked whether or not the practitioner understood at first why the methods worked. Although Empirical practitioners usually had theories on how and why their methods worked, they recognized that their theories were always secondary to the fact that the method worked. Over long periods of time and through close observations, empirical practitioners developed their own time-tested and systematic health practices that were not based on an analytical understanding of cause and effect. The Rationalist school, of which modern medicine is the latest develo...

    12 min

  6. 5D AGO

    Closing the Deal: The Misinforming of the G20 on Pandemics

    By REPPARE at Brownstone dot org. The G20's High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on pandemic preparedness convened through 2025 to provide a report entitled Closing the Deal: Financing our Security Against Pandemic Threats to the November G20 Leaders' Summit in South Africa. The report was as a follow-up to the HLIP's 2022 report on A Global Deal for our Pandemic Age where the panel outlined their financial estimates for pandemic preparedness and response (PPPR). In the face of funding cuts for development assistance for health (DAH), the 2025 report was intended to reiterate the necessity of its financial request and to increase the pressure on all countries to allocate more public money to save humanity from the scourge of pandemics. As noted by the HLIP: "pandemic risks continue to rise – fuelled by our connected world, zoonotic spillover, humanitarian crises, and the increasing likelihood of both accidental and deliberate threats. Outbreaks emerge ever more frequently…" (HLIP, p. 9). Indeed, it would seem a good cause, but a recent report from REPPARE at the University of Leeds finds quite the opposite. The problem with the statement, as we summarize in the report and here, is simply that it is disconnected from the world in which the G20 operates. Policy, at least good policy, must be based on reality. The Risk of Pandemics A "connected world" indeed allows certain pathogens to spread more quickly, but with no real difference in expected outcome. New variants of influenza and other respiratory viruses have routinely spread across the world for well over a century – not necessarily a new problem. Global integration also ensures that these viruses avoid landing upon large populations with complete lack of immunity. In other words, the catastrophes of measles and smallpox in the time of colonization of the Americas, Australia, or the Pacific Islands will not recur, at least not due to natural outbreaks. Put simply, the big killers of the past will remain in the past. We have good yellow fever vaccines, smallpox is eradicated, we know how to avoid cholera, and antibiotics address bubonic plague and typhus as they would have also prevented most Spanish flu deaths. None of this is seriously challenged, with the greatest risk of reemergence due to either a major lack of access to known measures or from anti-microbial resistant strains driven largely by the inappropriate use of medicines. Will a new pathogen arise from natural spillover to cause a sudden, catastrophic global outbreak? SARs-CoV-2, the worst in a hundred years, was mainly a threat to the unwell elderly, and its origins look increasingly uncertain. Will they arise from a laboratory? Perhaps, but that is another story with a very different prevention strategy. A strategy completely ignored in the 2022 HLIP report on financing PPPR and with just a brief mention in its latest 2025 report (perhaps a weak, but newfound acceptance of laboratory escape risks). These days we 'see' outbreaks like MERS, SARS, avian flu, Nipah virus, and Zika because we can detect them. Before 1980, we simply did not have the major methods to do this – namely, PCR tests, genetic sequencing, point of care antigen, and serology tests. However, this oversight is almost undoubtedly the main basis for a rapid (or "exponential") increase in reported outbreaks (particularly in the mid-1980s after the invention of PCR) that drives the international pandemic agenda. It explains why this increase first happened in industrialised countries and only later in those that were technologically less developed. Not just the G20's high level panel, but reports from the World Health Organization and the World Bank ignore this reality in order to improve their chances of getting funding for PPPR from countries. It is also possible to produce frightening estimates of the average number of people dying from pandemics each year – such as 2.5 million (twice total tuberculosis deaths). A US-based company, Ginkgo Biow...

    12 min

  7. 6D AGO

    Is the MAHA Movement Building a Genuine Counter-Elite?

    By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org. As the entire world is having a temper tantrum over the most recent Epstein case revelations about our discredited elites – obsessing over the power networks, the private jets, the bank accounts in the Virgin Islands, the French ministers, the European royalty, the foreign intelligence agencies, etc. – I'm having an entirely different epiphany. And, strangely, a flicker of hope. The rot on display is hard to take your eyes away from, but I find myself thinking more about what might rise in its place. I'm not talking about another faction of whip-crackers wearing better suits or pushing slicker slogans, but a quieter bunch, who appear to have the capacity to generate moral assent to a new political formula. That new elite prototype has started to take shape inside the MAHA movement. It might not yet be a fully formed counter-elite, but it certainly looks like a promising kind of one. I cannot say it enough: MAHA's foundational event is the Covid crisis. For many people, it represents the most frightening moment of our existence. What happened between 2020 and 2022 was not merely a policy disagreement or a partisan shouting match. It was the moment when the state, legacy media, Big Tech, pharmaceutical giants, and a large segment of the professional class all eagerly agreed that the normal rules no longer applied, that they could do virtually anything they wanted to people's bodies, force any injection into children's arms, arbitrarily decide who would be allowed to earn a living, and that these acts were not merely permissible but morally required. The violation was so deep that it felt physical. That visceral reaction many of us felt – and continue to feel – was the ultimate offense to what George Orwell called common decency, by which he meant the basic virtues of ordinary people, as opposed to ideologues or men of power. The closest Orwell came to a definition appeared in his 1944 review essay Raffles and Miss Blandish, where he contrasted two literary works, E.W. Hornung's Raffles series and James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Raffles, the gentleman burglar (a kind of British Arsène Lupin), operates by an unspoken code defined by the very simple injunction that "certain things are 'not done,'" and the idea of doing them scarcely arises. Devoid of religious belief or a formal ethical system, he follows certain rules semi-instinctively. To give but one example: Raffles will not abuse hospitality, meaning that he may commit burglary in a house he is invited to, but never against the host. He never commits murder, avoids violence, is "chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women," and is intensely patriotic (dispatching to the Queen, in one telling moment, a gold cup stolen from the British museum on the day of the Diamond Jubilee). His code is one of social form rather than absolute right or wrong. By contrast, James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Orwell has noted, flatters the reader's "power instinct," offering escape not into action but into cruelty and sexual perversion. It is a novel where the thrill lies in domination. Orwell saw the fork in the road right there. One path preserves a world where wonder is possible. The other, obsessed with certainty, leads straight to the managerial class we spend our days despising – not because they are powerful, but because they are indecent. They don't merely want to govern; they want you to thank them while they humiliate you. They demand that you internalize your shame while they play with your body and with your children's minds. They regulate your speech, your sleep, your very immune system, and integrate the results of their experiments on you as data into their dashboards and compliance metrics. That indecency has been the real fuel behind the populist insurgency which crystallized into political dividends around 2015. The anger was legitimate. The sense of betrayal was deep. But most of the m...

    14 min

  8. FEB 12

    The Problem with America First Global Health

    By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org. The US government is now committing tens of billions of dollars to global health through a growing web of bilateral agreements branded as the "America First Global Health Strategy." These deals are pitched as a way to protect Americans from infectious disease threats by strengthening surveillance and outbreak response overseas. As of early 2026, the State Department reports that 16 bilateral global health memoranda of understanding have already been signed representing more than $11 billion in US commitments, with officials signaling that dozens more agreements are planned—a scale that makes the absence of a clearly articulated strategy increasingly hard to justify. To understand what is happening, and why it persists even as US health care at home remains deeply dysfunctional, it helps to separate two questions that are usually blurred together: what this strategy actually is, and why the United States continues to pursue it. Start with the "what." The America First Global Health Strategy is an operating model that emerged after the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization and needed a way to remain active internationally without WHO governance. Instead of working primarily through multilateral institutions, the US is now signing five-year bilateral health memoranda with dozens of low- and middle-income countries, overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa. These agreements bundle longstanding programs on HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and surveillance into large government-to-government compacts, often involving hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars. In substance, this is continuity more than rupture; what has changed is the structure. NGOs and multilateral intermediaries are being sidelined. Funding is routed more directly to partner governments. Co-investment and "self-reliance" are emphasized rhetorically. And the whole enterprise is framed as national self-protection: stopping outbreaks abroad before they reach American shores. As an administrative response to WHO withdrawal, this makes sense. The United States still wants access to disease intelligence, laboratory capacity, and early warning signals. It still wants influence over procurement markets and health ministries in strategically important countries. Bilateral agreements are the simplest way to preserve those channels without returning to Geneva. What is missing is strategy in the proper sense of the word. There is no public prioritization of threats. No explanation of which pathogens matter most to Americans. No ranking of countries by risk rather than need. No serious comparison between overseas spending and alternative investments in domestic surveillance, ports-of-entry screening, or health system resilience. Instead, almost any global health expenditure can be justified after the fact as "protecting Americans." That brings us to the "why." Why does Washington keep expanding global health spending when US health care at home is such a mess? The first answer is political economy. Fixing US health care means confronting powerful domestic interests: hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical pricing, state licensing regimes, professional guilds, and entitlement politics. Every lever is contested. Every reform produces visible losers. Global health spending, by contrast, sits largely outside domestic distributional fights. It is appropriated quietly, administered bureaucratically, and justified as either humanitarian or security spending. Politically, it is easier money. Second, US global health programs function as foreign policy tools as much as health interventions. For decades, HIV/AIDS and malaria funding has anchored diplomatic relationships, sustained US presence in fragile states, and shaped procurement and regulatory norms. That logic did not disappear when the US left the WHO. It simply moved into bilateral form. Health MOUs now serve as instruments of influence in regions where Washington does not wa...

    6 min
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4.7
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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
    49
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Brownstone Journal

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