Brownstone Journal

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

  1. 4h ago

    When Did Obesity Become a Drug Deficiency? The Epidemic That Became a Diagnosis What Changed Was Almost Everything Then Came the Drugs That Actually Worked What Happens When the Injection Stops? Losing Weight Is Not the Same As Losing Fat The Economics

    By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. Look at almost any photograph of an American crowd taken 60 years ago. It can be a baseball game, a high school graduation, a beach, an airport terminal, a factory floor, or simply people walking down a city street. Something is immediately noticeable to modern eyes, although almost nobody in the photograph would have considered it remarkable: most people are relatively thin. They did not have continuous glucose monitors, smartphone applications that counted calories and macronutrients, wearable devices reminding them to stand, boutique fitness studios, bariatric surgery centers, or medications capable of producing 15 or 20 percent reductions in body weight. They were not necessarily more virtuous than we are, and they certainly did not possess superior genes. They lived in a different metabolic environment. The data backs up what we see in those old photos. In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of American adults were obese. By August 2023, that number had jumped to 40.3 percent, with another 31.7 percent considered overweight and nearly one in ten classified as severely obese.[1] This trend isn't just in the United States. A huge study of over 220 million people from 200 countries found a dramatic global rise in obesity between 1990 and 2022.[2] Our genes haven't changed much in that time. Something else has. We're now at a turning point in medicine. Faced with one of the biggest and fastest changes in human health, we're treating the results as a condition that needs lifelong medication. The newest drugs are very effective, and that's important to recognize. Semaglutide and tirzepatide have led to weight loss that older nonsurgical treatments rarely matched.[3,4] Semaglutide has also reduced the risk of major heart problems in people with overweight or obesity and heart disease who didn't have diabetes.[5] Tirzepatide has greatly improved sleep apnea in people with obesity.[6] These results are significant, and these drugs are much more than cosmetic weight-loss aids. That's why we need to look closely at what's happening now. The problem isn't that these drugs don't work; they clearly do. The real concern is that they might work so well that we stop asking why so many people need them in the first place. We could be seeing a major medical breakthrough, but at the same time, we might be accepting that the effects of an unhealthy environment should just be managed with medication. The real question isn't whether these "GLP-1" drugs are effective. It's whether their success is making us stop looking for the root causes of the obesity epidemic. For decades, obesity was framed largely as an individual failure. The explanation was simple: people ate too much, exercised too little, and lacked the discipline necessary to change. That view was scientifically inadequate and often cruel. Body weight is influenced by genetics, neuroendocrine signaling, appetite regulation, insulin sensitivity, adipocyte biology, medications, sleep, psychological factors, socioeconomic conditions, physical activity, and environmental exposures. Contemporary medicine appropriately recognizes obesity as far more complicated than failure of willpower. Recent international efforts have gone even further, distinguishing excess adiposity from clinical obesity and emphasizing the actual effects of adiposity on organ and tissue function rather than relying exclusively on body mass index.[7] It was important to stop blaming people for obesity. But now, medicine might be swapping one simple explanation for another. Just because obesity is a real biological condition doesn't mean it starts inside each person. A disease can be both real and caused by the environment. For example, asthma from air pollution is still asthma, and lead poisoning is still a real illness even if the cause is environmental. If a whole community gets sick after a change in the water supply, doctors treat the patients, but no one thinks the community...

  2. 1d ago

    The Lancet Jumps the Shark

    By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org. SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL The Lancet's latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence. Titled "Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective," it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives. Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years. What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it. It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language. The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant. The review describes mRNA vaccines as a "transformative advance" characterised by "rapid clearance," "lack of genomic integration," and a "favourable safety profile." It concludes that the accumulated evidence "affirms" the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable. Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail. Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn't. The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles "remain largely localised to the injection site" with "limited distribution" to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days. But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of "rapid clearance" and "short-lived antigen expression" — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant. Only last year, members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people. When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review. Residual DNA is treated similarly. The authors state that residual DNA is "routinely quantified," that regulatory standards require less than 10 nanograms per dose, and that independent analyses have confirmed commercial vaccines comply with those limits. This creates the impression that the matter has been properly examined when, in reality, the review bypasses the central scientific questions. Were the analytical methods capable of measuring DNA encapsulated within lipid nanoparticles? Were all relevant plasmid sequences — including SV40 regulatory elements — fully characterised? Was genomic integration ever adequately investigated? I have previously reported that regulators relied on a qPCR assay targeting only a small section of the plasmid — an approach independent scientists argue was never designed to detect the contamination now under debate. Rather than examining those methodological criticisms, the review proceeds as though the matter has already been settled. The review briefly acknowledges another emerging issue — that N1-methylpseudouridine can produce ribosomal frameshifting and off-target proteins — but quickly reassures readers that no adverse outcomes have yet been l...

  3. 2d ago

    Caretakers or Conquerers?

    By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org. When President Trump's Republican acolytes primaried long-time US Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) and defeated him in the most expensive Congressional primary race in history (about $30 million) in May, pundits offered their assumptions and agendas. The Trumpites said he wasn't nice playing their ball game (I'm being diplomatic) and therefore deserved to be sidelined. They couldn't abide a rogue Republican, even if he did vote with the president 92 percent of the time. Opposing the war in Iran was over the top. Massie matched the Trumpites dollar for dollar in the campaign because as heir to the Ron Paul movement, he has many friends beyond his rural Congressional district. They supported him in this toe-to-toe duel, grateful for a champion who dared to question mainstream narratives. These narratives, as it turns out, are many and his district has supported him on maverick positions in the past. He opposed virtually everything Dr. Anthony Fauci said. He opposed lockdowns. He opposed mandatory mRNA jabs. He opposed the inflationary Covid relief bill. All of this was tolerated and applauded by the majority of his constituents. But daring to question obliterating the Persians (Iran) without constitutionally-mandated Congressional approval was too much and his country boys and girls turned him out. Why was the anti-war position intolerable? For the answer, I'll go back 30 years when organic farming was in its infancy. As a nonchemical farmer, I was in the vanguard of this movement and privy to the early arguments pitting compost against chemicals. As a country boy farmer myself, I have many friends and relatives in the chemicals-will-save-us camp. As the arguments between the compost-vs-chemical camps became more defined, I noticed a profound philosophical difference. As with most altercations, it takes awhile for the two sides to get to the nub of their disagreement. Over time, ancillary things give way to the core issue. In the compost-vs-chemical debate, the core issue was nurturing versus conquering. The chemical folks argued that they needed to conquer the weeds, weather, and worms. My compost-loving group diametrically opposed the Conquistador approach and argued that the goal was nurturing, promoting plant diversity, appreciating weather limitations, and loving earthworms. The difference in approach moved me to develop a five-minute theatrical gig titled "Organic Farmers are Sissies." I riffed on this masculine, macho mentality to conquer with chemicals rather than coming alongside natural patterns as a masseuse. It generated a lot of laughs in the organic farming community while pinpointing the nub of the philosophical difference. "Men want to feel pig iron under their thighs. They want to come into the house smelling like diesel and grease so their wives can swoon 'what a man.' It's just not manly to come in and explain to your beloved 'I've made the cows happy. That's just not manly." This was all part of my act. What made it funny was the truth underlying it. What does that have to do with Massie's rejection? I believe the American country-boy mystique is wrapped up in conquering things. Trump enjoys overwhelming support in rural America. Country folks like to fight. Hatfields and McCoys. President Obama and his wife Michelle planted a White House garden – nonchemical, by the way; fertilized with compost. President Trump hosts fighting on the lawn. Pointing this out does not mean I like Obama more than Trump; the lesson here is that what people do manifests how they think. The American historical mystique is that our nation conquered the wilderness, subduing the Native Americans, and carved abundance out of scarcity. This permeates the rural mind. Those of us who view nature as boss and try to work within it win without conquering; we win by complementing. Attend any nonchemical agriculture conference and the operative phrase is "Work with." At conventional chemical agricultur...

  4. 3d ago

    New Clarity on the Creation of the Virus/Vaccine The 2018 Blueprint January 10, 2020: An Honorable Resignation Why Wuhan Made Sense The Genome Matched the Proposal Murphy's Conclusion Following the Money From North Carolina to Montana Designed to Spread

    By Jim Haslam at Brownstone dot org. Disclaimer: If COVID-19 were linked to animal vaccine research, it would be an unintended consequence, but the creation and cover-up were deliberate. Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance of its citizens. Daniel Ellsberg exposed government lies. US Marine Major Joseph Murphy exposed something larger: the biodefense blueprint behind a pandemic that killed millions. Snowden's leak sparked a worldwide debate about privacy. Murphy's leak — the DARPA DEFUSE proposal — should have sparked a global reckoning about the real origins of SARS-CoV-2. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) serves as a venture capital arm of the world's largest bureaucracy: the Department of Defense. It funds high-risk academic research to protect US troops from future threats. One team proposed modifying bat coronaviruses to spread more effectively—not among humans, but mammalian bats. Testing would occur in Wuhan, where the right bat colonies existed. This was not a fringe idea. It was a biodefense concept encouraged by DARPA under the first Trump administration. Taken together, the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, plus FOIA documents, emails, and peer-reviewed papers, support Murphy's hypothesis: SARS-CoV-2 was created in US labs but tested in Wuhan, where it accidentally leaked. This theory has since been debated in the scientific literature, including Nature. The U.S. intelligence community did not miss this. It moved the unclassified 2018 DARPA project, advertised on Twitter, into a classified 2021 folder. The very agencies that claimed to be searching for answers had the facts all along, stored in a top-secret folder. They knew that Peter Daszak (EcoHealth), Zhengli Shi (WIV), Linfa Wang (Duke), and Ralph Baric (UNC) had proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and testing them on Chinese bats in Wuhan. Snowden took on the NSA. His leaks revealed that US intelligence treated global pandemics as surveillance targets, explicitly searching for "SARS in China." Murphy confronted something far more entrenched: what he called the "biodefense oligarchy," a network spanning DARPA, intelligence agencies, academia, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). One node of that system was already in Wuhan. A NIAID-linked contractor, Danielle Anderson, was stationed at the maximum-security BSL4 lab. She previously told Bloomberg she worked on Ebola, but her name appears alongside Baric's in the classified DEFUSE files. Her Duke supervisor, Linfa Wang, resigned on January 10, 2020—the same day the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Wang identified Baric as its author. After Zhengli Shi published the closest known bat sample, RaTG13, she told the New York Times that "my" lab was not involved in gain-of-function research and that "I" did nothing wrong, so "I" had nothing to fear. Privately, Baric warned UNC colleagues that Shi could be "arrested" for releasing the embargoed sequence. RaTG13 highlighted what made SARS-CoV-2 unique: the furin cleavage site (PRRAR), which Baric would "introduce" in DEFUSE documents. YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (RaTG13) YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (SARS2) RaTG13 mattered not because it was closest, but because it exposed what Baric proposed to add. Notice the PRRAR insertion, which Baric referenced in 2019. He would even "provide" his novel genomes to Wang and Shi "for immune boosting of bats." During World War II, Wuhan was occupied by the Japanese. In 1944, the US firebombed Wuhan, dropping 500 tons of incendiaries and killing 20,000 civilians. Seventy-five years later, the US would return to Wuhan, but not with bombs, with bat vaccines. The city was rebuilt into a modern research hub. During the debate over the Wuhan wet market, one question lingered: why Wuhan? In 2017, DARPA's program manager Jim Gimlett told Daszak he wanted to vaccinate Chinese bats aga...

  5. 4d ago

    Retraction of SIDS Paper Based on VAERS Analysis Five Years after Publication References

    By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org. Few individuals can relate as personally as I do to the experience of having peer-reviewed research retracted after it revealed potential safety signals in the VAERS database. Neil Miller recently had his peer-reviewed published work "removed" from the journal Toxicology Reports. It has been published for 5 years: since June 2021. Five years! What's that now? The smell of a Pubpeer rat? Could be. The title of the paper is Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature, and you can find the abstract on PubMed. The reason for the "removal" was that there were claimed "serious methodological flaws" according to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. What were these methodological flaws, you ask? Well according to the excuse written on the journal's site where the paper was once readable, these "flaws" revolved around the inability to "infer correlation" – NOT CAUSATION – between vaccination and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Hold the horses, now. This is not a viable reason to claim a methodological flaw. I'm going to do what has been done to me for years – just for using VAERS to demonstrate safety signal emergence – by quoting the VAERS website to call BS on this claim. Two points stick out: 1. VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event 2. The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted as evidence of a causal association between a vaccine and an adverse event. Fair enough. Both of these points (one written in bold!) indicate an inability to use VAERS data alone to prove causality. We know that already. This is why we use the PRR, Bayesian analyses and/or the Bradford Hill Criteria for causality as follow-up to verify not only safety signals, but causal relationships between a particular vaccine and a particular adverse event. And if FDA employee Ana Szarfman hadn't been brushed aside like dandruff, we would have also had a Regression-Adjusted GPS Algorithm in our hands that incidentally, revealed much more in terms of adverse events as safety signals than the PRR alone. If you read the removal reason carefully, you'll have noticed that they removed Neil's paper on the basis that he cannot use VAERS data to draw a correlation between a safety signal (for SIDS) and vaccines. This does not align with what HHS dictate that you cannot use VAERS for. Correlations are very easy to demonstrate using very simple statistics like regression analyses, and can certainly be demonstrated with VAERS data. A strong correlation (whether from simple linear regression, Pearson's r, or more advanced models) can show that two variables move together. It's true that it says nothing about whether one actually causes the other, whether a third variable is driving both, or whether the relationship is spurious, but, this is not the point. Once a correlation is demonstrated, it is necessary to follow up to prove or disprove causation using the above-mentioned techniques as per proper pharmacovigilance. So I would claim that the reasons for the removal were not valid. It bears repeating that my own paper with Kevin McKernan and David Speicher published in Autoimmunity is also on the investigation cutting block for unjustified reasons – likely because of the same perpetrators. I'm lookin' at you, Pubpeer. N.B. Aaron Siri has written a great summary regarding unjustified targeting of published papers for retraction as well, that includes Neil's paper and ours. The claim in the case of Neil's paper is that his answers to their investigational questions were not good enough for them to keep it published. His answers were likely more than satisfactory, but my point herein is that it doesn't matter. The decision was likely already made ahead of time. Why else would a paper published for 5 years go to the cutting block so suddenly? And unfortunately, even though our answers (me, Kevin, and David's) to th...

  6. 5d ago

    Childhood Vaccine Schedules Across Countries Comparing Childhood Vaccination Schedules to Peer Countries Separate MMR Shots: Japan Got a "Yes"…Will Trump Get a "No?" Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines HHS Delays Needed Vaccines Studies for Over a

    By David Gortler, Pharm. D at Brownstone dot org. There is a wide disparity across the globe when it comes to childhood vaccination policies. American kids receive up to 75 vaccines; twice as many as kids in other countries. That is why if Dr. Heidi Overton is confirmed as the next director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one of her top priorities should be helping to drive President Trump's mandate to study the safety and comparative outcomes current vaccine schedule to that of other countries. High on her list of priorities will surely be the two executive orders President Trump signed this year to promote the health of American children, especially since there doesn't appear to be any movement on either. He issued Executive Order 14407 on May 29, 2026, directing the federal government to realign US childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer nations. Section 3 of the order directs HHS, through the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, to present plans within 90 days to assess timing and sequencing, as well as "improve vaccine safety monitoring, transparency, and research." Next, on August 10, the president signed Executive Order 14420 to reduce immunization recommendations from 17–18 diseases down to 11, spacing out shots across more doctor visits, and splitting the combined MMR vaccine into three separate injections. The president is fulfilling his commitment to vaccination study and reform, but it doesn't appear that anyone is listening. Ninety days have passed and the task force, chaired by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, just recently resurrected in August 2025 after 27 years dormant, still hasn't shared the names of anyone (other than the always present HHS heads) who have been appointed to take charge of designing the study, along with statistical plans, according to a rudimentary internet search. To date, there has not been any publicly proposed draft study design, outline, list of experts needed, proposed safety endpoints, request for public comment, or even a single primary or secondary safety or efficacy study objective shared. The Task Force does not owe Congress a report until 2027. The inaction on this priority is concerning because the president has good reason to scrutinize the current vaccine schedule. A cursory review of international vaccine standards reveals that no two countries are quite the same when it comes to the number of vaccines or recommendations versus mandates. For example, by age 18, a child in the United States will receive roughly 30 to 75 total vaccine doses depending on the state. All 50 states mandate a robust set of childhood vaccines. On top of CDC requirements, some states follow American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines and recommend even more. Various peer countries have a mixture of mandated or recommended schedules when it comes to their childhood schedules. For example, Denmark recommends 30 to 38 vaccines. Bulgaria recommends 56 to 61. France and Italy mandate most of their vaccines in kids. Norway, Sweden, and Spain mandate none. Here is a breakdown of the various countries I looked up: United Kingdom: 19 injections, 44 different vaccines by age 14 Australia (NSW): As many as 26 total vaccines by the age of 10, with recommendations varying for aboriginal versus the European populations. China: Up to age 7, there are 26-29 total vaccines, depending on if the live versus inactivated strains are used. There are no vaccine mandates in China, and there are "no punishments associated with noncompliance." Yes, you read that correctly. After Chinese citizens contended that the mandate violated the principles of "informed consent and voluntariness" the government withdrew its Covid mandates after just one day. And Chinese children aren't mandated to take any other vaccines either. Despite the fact that China is a one-party authoritarian government run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, Chinese citizens face less pressure to obey vaccine mandates. Y...

  7. 6d ago

    We Cannot Trust the CDC Estimates of Flu Vaccine Effectiveness Confounding by the Background Risk of Infection Immortal Time Bias The Healthy Vaccinee Bias Higher Effectiveness in the Elderly? The Outcome of Hospitalized Flu Patients Epilogue

    By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org. Each year the CDC publishes an estimate of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the previous flu season. Recently, the NIH director criticized the test-negative design from which the estimates are derived. He was right. The basic premise of the design is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, restricting the sample to people who sought medical care might reduce confounding by healthcare-seeking behavior; on the other hand, that restriction might add another type of bias — colliding bias — which is not as widely appreciated. The net bias remains unknown. This, however, is not the only shortcoming of test-negative case-control studies of the flu vaccine. In this post, I will expose the shaky results of a large study of the flu vaccine in 2022–2023, when the vaccine was well-matched to the dominant strain. The study was based on the VISION Vaccine Effectiveness Network, one of several networks that collaborate with the CDC. Below are the published results. The risk of infection always varies during the flu season. It was high in October through December 2022 and low in January through March 2023 (Figure). Given a changing risk of infection, a valid comparison of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated requires similar distributions of the two populations over time. This is not the case because vaccination is associated with calendar time (rollout). [The authors show the vaccination status at the time of seeking care, but most people got vaccinated by the end of December, and the percentage of vaccinated people stabilized in January at about 45% of the encounters.] As shown below (Table), the share of the vaccinated population in October through December (47%), a period of high background risk, was lower than the comparable share in the unvaccinated population (61%). Of course, the complementary shares in January through March, a period of low risk, were reversed: 53% versus 39%. In technical terms, vaccinated people accumulated more exposure time when the background risk of infection was low (53%), and unvaccinated people accumulated more exposure time when the background risk was high (61%). Moreover, since the authors excluded events that happened within two weeks of vaccination, those who were vaccinated in the second half of December 2022 contributed events only in January 2023, a time of lower risk. I will return to this analytical decision in the next section. It is simple to grasp the bias (left table below) if we consider an extreme example where no one was injected in the first period and everyone was injected a saline solution at the beginning of the second period (right table). If we compare the rate of infection in the "vaccinated" to the rate in the "unvaccinated," the saline injection would appear effective… This bias was explained in the context of the Covid vaccines during the pandemic and was demonstrated in a study from Ontario, Canada. As far as I know, it was not appreciated in the context of the flu vaccine, where the rollout typically follows the rising wave and is completed around the winter peak. Confounding by time trends in the background risk can be avoided in a cohort design with matching an unvaccinated person to a vaccinated person on the vaccination date (and terminating the observation when the former is vaccinated, if they are). As I mentioned above, the authors excluded some events. They write: "Events among patients with documented vaccination The exclusion of early events in the vaccinated is a well-known source of bias, leading to an inverse association with vaccination and adding a bias component to an estimated effect. Both the name — immortal time bias — and the mechanism are too technical to explain here. Recently, I showed how immortal time bias operated in a study of a Covid vaccine in Qatar. ...

  8. Sep 30

    Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe Data

    By React19 at Brownstone dot org. React19 reviewed free-text entries submitted to the CDC's V-safe vaccine safety monitoring program to document reports in which participants asked for help, described suicidal thoughts, reported that they were dying or nearly died, or reported a death, and to document what participants said about the response they received. CDC V-safe free-text survey responses were produced under FOIA request 24-01322 and published by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) at icandecide.org/v-safe-data. The CDC released the data in twelve interim and final tranches. This audit uses ICAN's updated files, which add the survey type, response ID, and response date to each entry. All twelve tranches: the 1st through 12th, were released from December 14, 2020 to December 31, 2022. These contain 7,554,929 responses from 3,489,888 unique participants. Each entry was searched for words and phrases indicating a plea for help or contact, suicidal thoughts, dying, or death. Death, suicidal, and dying entries were reviewed individually; cries for help were filtered by rule. Because V-safe check-ins are tied to vaccine doses, entries were treated as post-vaccination reports unless the writer named another cause. Entries attributing illness to Covid-19 infection were excluded. All entries from each identified participant are grouped under their V-safe user ID, in date order, across tranches. Conclusion: 3,329 participants met the criteria and submitted 14,430 related entries. About 1 in every 1,048 participants in the tranches wrote a plea for help, or reported a death. Many wrote in repeatedly. Several reported that promised callbacks never came, and some asked directly whether anyone was reading their reports. V-safe was built to hear from people after vaccination, and these participants used it for that purpose. In their own words, 3,329 people reported serious harm, suicidal thoughts, near-death events, or the death of someone they loved. Many kept writing for weeks or months. Their entries describe promised callbacks that never came, pleas for help with no reply, and repeated questions about whether anyone was reading at all. This audit cannot determine what the CDC did with these reports. It can document what participants experienced: a system that asked them to report and, as they describe it, did not respond. There are limitations. Entries are self-reported; this audit does not assess whether the vaccine caused any reported event. Counts are a floor: participants who described serious events without using the search terms are not included. The CDC's redactions appear as (b)(6). Names, phone numbers, and email addresses the CDC left unredacted have been replaced with [name], [phone], and [email]. How to read this report. Each block is one participant: the header shows the V-safe user ID and number of entries. Entries in bold with a red date matched the search; the rest are the same participant's other entries. The companion spreadsheet lists the CDC response ID and tranche for every entry. The Top Cries for Help list follows on the next page, then the 30 notable cases and the full audit entries. React19 exists so that people injured after vaccination are heard, believed, and cared for. These entries show why that work matters. They also show where the public health system's own tools fell short of it. Typeset book for downloading and distributing widely. No copyright restrictions.

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About

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

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  • Creator
    Brownstone Institute
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Brownstone Journal

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