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Senators Express Optimism That Trump Will Restore Pro-Life Policies at HHS

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By Family Research Council

Following four years of the Biden administration reversing the pro-life federal policies established during President Donald Trump’s first term, Republican senators are expressing confidence that the incoming Trump administration will put back in place policies that blocked federal funds from going to abortion businesses, allowed pregnancy resource centers to receive federal funds, and stopped the funding of international groups that promote abortion, among other measures.

After Trump nominated former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as his secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last November, concerns arose among numerous GOP lawmakers and pro-life advocacy groups that the former Democrat-turned-Independent presidential nominee would sideline pro-life policies based on his past pro-abortion positions. During his presidential run, Kennedy has called the abortion issue “nuanced and complex” and also said that the state should not “dictate choices that the woman is making” regarding abortion. He has also previously supported (and walked back support for) three-month pro-life protections.

However, Senate Republicans like Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) say they have received personal assurances from Kennedy that he will not pursue pro-abortion policies while in office and will, in fact, enact pro-life ones. Last month, Hawley posted a series of tweets describing his conversation with Kennedy regarding the issue. “He committed to me to reinstate President Trump’s prolife policies at HHS,” Hawley wrote. “That includes reinstating the Mexico City policy & ending taxpayer funding for abortions domestically.”

The senator further noted Kennedy’s promise to have all pro-life deputies at HHS and that he “believes there are far too many abortions in the US and that we cannot be the moral leader of the free world with abortion rates so high.” Hawley also stated that Kennedy promised to reinstate “the bar on Title X funds going to organizations that promote abortion” and to “reinstate conscience protections for healthcare providers.”

During Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.) confirmed that he too met with Kennedy and also received assurances from him that he would pursue pro-life policies within the federal agency.

“We had a very robust discussion,” he explained. “In fact, talking about the importance of protecting the pro-life policies in terms of regulations coming out of HHS, but importantly, restoring any policies that the Biden administration has stripped, and to … work with the secretary of State [to ensure] we are doing all we can within the executive branch to make sure these protections are in place and, frankly, expanded. And he told me that he’ll have seven [deputies in] HHS [that] would be pro-life type of leaders. And I appreciate that honesty and frankness from RFK Jr.”

The news comes amid uncertainty surrounding how pro-life Trump’s second administration will be after the president-elect oversaw watered-down pro-life language inserted into the 2024 Republican Party platform last July, which was entirely revamped and truncated from the previous GOP platform. Trump also repeatedly said on the campaign trail last year that he would leave the abortion issue to the states and that some state pro-life protections are “too tough.” The 45th president’s inconsistent rhetoric on the issue has left pro-life lawmakers and advocates wondering if he would, in fact, use his executive authority to undo the pro-abortion executive orders that President Joe Biden enacted.

Nevertheless, in an op-ed published Monday, Hawley reiterated his optimism that the president-elect will restore the pro-life policies that were reversed under Biden. The senator noted that in addition to restoring the Mexico City Policy, barring abortion businesses from receiving Title X grant money, and restoring federal funding to pregnancy resource centers, Trump’s first-term HHS also “restrict[ed] the use of human fetal tissue obtained from abortions.”

“The Biden administration gutted those rules,” Hawley concluded. “Thankfully, it’s a new day. And President Trump has the power to start protecting life again — immediately. He should use that power boldly to protect those who most need it: the innocent unborn.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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End Of Biden’s Title IX Rule Change Hailed By Arizona Lawmakers

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By Daniel Stefanski

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Arizona Republicans are applauding a recent court decision that helps to protect females.

Late last week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky dealt a significant blow to a Final Rule from the Biden administration on Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The court ruled that “the Final Rule and its corresponding regulations exceed the Department’s authority under Title IX, violate the Constitution, and are the result of arbitrary and capricious agency action.”

According to the press release issued by the Arizona Senate Republicans, this Biden administration rule “required schools to allow boys and men in girls’ and women’s private spaces like restrooms and locker rooms, on their female-only sports teams, and to disregard other sex-based protections created for the safety, security, and well-being of biological females within federal law.”

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In a written statement, Senate President Warren Petersen said, “We are grateful for the conservative attorneys general nationwide who are working tirelessly to protect women and girls from bigger, stronger boys and men, while the radical Left continues to ignore not only science, but common sense. Women and girls are fighting an uphill battle as progressives try to undo the protections created for them, including Arizona’s Save Women’s Sports Act, which the Republican-led Arizona Legislature is currently litigating while Arizona’s own Attorney General refuses to do so.”

Senator Sine Kerr added, “This is a big victory for the women and girls who’ve had athletic and educational opportunities stripped from them at the hands of biological males posing as females, but there is still much more work to be done. While Governor Hobbs vetoed last year the Arizona Women’s Bill of Rights, Senate Republicans have vowed to continue to push legislation that safeguards women and girls on the playing field, in their bathrooms, their locker rooms, and anywhere else carved out specifically for them. Our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and neighbors deserve to feel safe and supported, and it is our duty as elected officials to ensure their protection.”

After receiving the news of the court order, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who led the coalition of attorneys general against the new rule on Title IX, said, “This is a huge win for Tennessee, for common sense, and for women and girls across America. The court’s ruling is yet another repudiation of the Biden administration’s relentless push to impose a radical gender ideology through unconstitutional and illegal rulemaking. Because the Biden rule is vacated altogether, President Trump will be free to take a fresh look at our Title IX regulations when he returns to office.”

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, one of the attorneys general in the coalition also weighed in, saying, “I’m proud to have successfully defended Title IX from the federal government’s power grab that threatened to upend half a century of landmark protections for women and punish States for following their own laws.”

Petersen continues to use his office as the leader of Senate Republicans to help stand in the gap for Arizona in major state and federal legal fights in the absence of Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes. He promises more intervention into legal matters in 2025 as legislative Republicans work toward protecting their state from government overreach and special interests that attempt to take Arizona in radical directions.

*****

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This article was published at AZ Free News and is reproduced with permission.

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Big Pharma Continues to Hide the Truth thumbnail

Big Pharma Continues to Hide the Truth

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By Harvey Risch

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

On Thursday, Joe Rogan and Marvel megastar Josh Brolin traded stories about the preponderance of Covid vaccine injuries among their friends. Brolin even described contracting “a mild case of Bell’s palsy” earlier this year, which Rogan attributed to the vaccine, noting he knew several people who suffered facial paralysis following Covid vaccination.

There is no perfect medicine. The benefits and harms of any treatment must be carefully considered in order to prescribe the safest, most effective course of action for a patient. While the FDA and CDC continue to extol the benefits of the Covid vaccines, they have ignored a growing body of evidence that these products can also be harmful. The code of medical ethics demands a transparent and balanced accounting of their impact on the American people. Only then can we set the best course for healthcare policy and future pandemics.

An honest accounting begins with clinical trials, supposedly “the most rigorous in history.” Pfizer’s own legal arguments suggest otherwise. Responding to a whistleblower lawsuit alleging major deviations from protocol, Pfizer’s lawyers noted that the company’s “Other Transactions Authority” agreement (OTA) with the Pentagon didn’t require clinical trials to comply with FDA regulations because the vaccine was a military prototype for “medical countermeasures.” This agreement allowed Pfizer to “grade its own homework,” so to speak — a point emphasized by DOJ lawyers in a separate filing in Pfizer’s support.

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The FDA intended to keep Pfizer’s data hidden for 75 years, but attorney Aaron Siri’s FOIA lawsuit forced the agency to release them. Naomi Wolf’s DailyClout led 3,250 volunteer experts in analyzing more than 450,000 pages of internal Pfizer documents and uncovered massive harms ignored by the FDA, detailed in The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity.

This effort revealed 1,233 deaths in the first three months of the vaccine rollout, and a litany of injuries: “industrial-scale blood diseases: blood clots, lung clots, leg clots; thrombotic thrombocytopenia, a clotting disease of the blood vessels; vasculitis, dementias, tremors, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, epilepsies.”

These harms are echoed by data from V-safe, a smartphone-based tool created by the CDC. Among 10.1 million registered V-safe users, 7.7 percent reported side effects so serious they were compelled to seek medical care, many more than once.

The main culprit is the Covid spike protein encoded in the vaccine’s mRNA technology. This protein is an antigen, or foreign immunogenic substance, located on the outer coat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, that triggers an immune response. The mRNA in the shots instructs the body’s cells to produce identical spike proteins, inducing the immune system to create antibodies that bind to them, theoretically protecting vaccinated individuals against the virus. Unfortunately, this plan has a fatal flaw: The spike itself is toxic and potentially deadly.

Hundreds of peer-reviewed articles have demonstrated the spike’s potential for harm independent of the rest of the virus. Potential complications include myocarditis, blood clots, neurological injuries, and immune dysfunction. Pfizer’s own pre-market biodistribution studies show that vaccine components leave the injection site in the arm and penetrate every major organ system within hours, where mRNA can linger for weeks, forcing cells to churn out more and more of the toxic spike protein, which can persist for months. There is no way to predict how much spike protein the mRNA injections will produce in any individual, and there is no “off switch.”

According to CDC figures analyzed in Toxic Shot: Facing the Dangers of the COVID “Vaccines,”  from 2021-2023 the US suffered 600,000 excess deaths not associated with Covid. Furthermore, Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveal that two million Americans became newlydisabled, with unusual excesses in historically low-risk groups.

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These trends coincided with mass Covid vaccination, including an unaccountable 59 percent surge in deaths among Americans ages 15-44 in the third quarter of 2021 compared to 2019. Crucially Covid contributed only part of this excess mortality: in that quarter the US suffered around 201,000 excess deaths, with Covid officially accounting for 123,000, leaving 78,000 excess deaths — 39 percent of the total — still unexplained.

Similar figures from abroad underscore a tragic loss of life among healthy people at minimal serious risk from the virus.

It could get worse. No carcinogenicity studies were performed on the injections prior to their launch, thus long-term cancer risks are essentially unknown. The spike protein also appears prone to prion-like misfolding, raising the specter of potential neurodegenerative disorders.

Medical ethics demand a balanced approach to every intervention, weighing potential benefits against potential harms. However, in the case of the Covid vaccines, federal agencies have chosen only to proclaim benefits. By surfacing data that bear upon both the positive and negative impacts of the Covid vaccines, and evaluating the pandemic performance of CDC, FDA, and other health agencies, the new administration can restore confidence and integrity in medicine and public health.

*****

This article was published by The Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Harvey Risch, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a physician and a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine.

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Heritage Foundation Launches Ad Supporting Former Dem RFK Jr. for HHS Secretary thumbnail

Heritage Foundation Launches Ad Supporting Former Dem RFK Jr. for HHS Secretary

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By The Daily Signal

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Heritage Foundation on Monday launched an advertisement campaign supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to direct the Department of Health and Human Services.

WATCH: The Heritage Foundation RFK Jr. Ad

The ad, first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, touts Kennedy as “fearless,” and promotes his policy agenda to make America healthier and combat the chronic disease crisis. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and former Democratic presidential candidate with deep party roots, launched an independent presidential bid in 2023 before bowing out of the race to endorse now-President-elect Donald Trump in August 2024.

“One word to describe Bobby Kennedy: fearless,” the video’s narrator says. “He was when he took on big corporations and big government. Now, he is ready to work with President Trump to take on special interests, reform a broken system, and make America healthy again.”

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President-elect Donald Trump selected Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services on Nov. 14, stating that Kennedy “will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services signals a bold step toward restoring trust, accountability, and integrity in our nation’s public health agencies,” Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “His commitment to ending corruption and addressing chronic disease resonates with millions of Americans who question why Big Pharma continues to grow richer while the health of Americans deteriorates. His vision to depoliticize science and medicine, paired with his dedication to protecting individual freedoms, lays the groundwork for a stronger, healthier future—but achieving this will require taking on entrenched interests. RFK Jr. has the backbone to see it through.”

The Heritage Foundation’s latest ad is a part of a wider $1 million campaign launched in November that “advocates for prompt confirmation” of Trump’s second-term cabinet picks and “educates the American people about the confirmation process.” The think tank recently released separate ads promoting some of Trump’s other cabinet picks, including Pete Hegseth, defense secretary nominee, and Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI.

The president-elect and Kennedy have pledged to Make America Healthy Again by enacting sweeping measures to overhaul the country’s food system, remove conflicts of interest from federal regulators and tackle the rising issue of obesity in adults. Kennedy’s pledge to make America healthier coincides a dramatic 24-year drop in the public’s perception of the U.S. healthcare system.

Kennedy also vowed to tackle the chronic disease crisis that has plagued Americans and driven up health-related costs. The U.S. spent more per capita on health care in 2022 than any other similar country, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. In 2023, total health care spending reached $4.9 trillion, which is roughly $14,570 per person.

The prospective HHS secretary has also been a critic of the COVID-19 vaccines, and has said he would investigate any potential links between the childhood vaccine schedule and autism. He has also called for the U.S. to reduce the high levels of fluoride in drinking water, calling the mineral a “dangerous neurotoxin” and an “industrial waste.”

While Trump’s decision to nominate the former independent presidential candidate for a key cabinet position has drawn criticism from some corporate media outlets and left-leaning healthcare organizations, supporters have advocated in favor of Kennedy’s MAHA agenda and have pledged to help secure his confirmation as HHS secretary.

Ahead of Trump announcing the HHS selection, Kennedy told NPR in a November interview that the president-elect had given him “instructions” to remove “corruption and the conflicts” from regulatory agencies and “end the chronic disease epidemic.”

“President Trump has given me three instructions,” Kennedy told NPR in November. “He wants the corruption and the conflicts out of the regulatory agencies. He wants to return the agencies to the gold standard empirically based, evidence-based science and medicine that they were once famous for. And he wants to end the chronic disease epidemic with measurable impacts on a diminishment of chronic disease within two years.”

Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

Ireland Owens

Ireland Owens is a contributor at the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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RFK, Vaccines, and the FDA

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By Raymond J. March

As President-elect Trump prepares to return to the White House this January, many continue to question his choices for key cabinet positions. Perhaps his most controversial appointment so far is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (commonly referred to as RFK) as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. And a recent vaccine-related controversy is not helping. 

Before Christmas, The New York Times released a story detailing that Aaron Siri, a vaccine injury attorney and a member of RFK’s legal team, petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in 2022 to revoke its approval of the Polio Vaccine, which is still being reviewed. Since the story broke, RFK has distanced himself from Siri and insists he is “all for” the polio vaccine. His spokesperson also released a statement indicating, “Mr. Kennedy believes the Polio Vaccine should be available to the public and thoroughly and properly studied.”

Not everyone is convinced. Congressman and polio survivor Steve Cohen believes “his position on vaccines disqualifies him for consideration as a Secretary of Health and Human Services.” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (also a polio survivor) denounced efforts to “undermine public confidence in proven cures” and urged RFK to “steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

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His associations with Siri aside, RFK has been an outspoken skeptic about vaccines—questioning their benefits and emphasizing their alleged harms. As the incoming HHS Secretary, he will have considerable influence over the FDA. President-elect Trump previously stated he would let RFK “go wild” on health policy, and he’s reaffirmed his support since. 

While RFK’s skepticism of vaccines and future influence over the FDA causes many to panic, he primarily emphasizes “transparency” in the vaccine development and approval process. Many politicians and the FDA’s vaccine chief agree. To that end, let us review the historical role the FDA played in regulating vaccines.

Although the modern FDA began in 1962, the agency did not regulate vaccines until 1972. By then, the US already had vaccines for smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella. All these vaccines were grandfathered in and are currently part of the standard vaccine schedule—meaning the FDA played a modest role in approving and regulating them. 

Since 1972, the FDA has only approved seven vaccines that appear on the vaccine schedule: Hib, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, varicella, pneumococcal, influenza, and rotavirus. Some of these play a relatively minor role in public health. Only 27 states require children to get the Hepatitis A vaccine before starting school. Rarely serious or fatal, varicella, also called chickenpox, was considered mild enough that parents with infected children commonly hosted “chickenpox parties” to expose others purposefully. Influenza vaccines (flu shots) do not follow the standard FDA review process because they are annually updated. Despite being FDA approved, the rotavirus vaccine was taken off the market in 1999 due to rare but serious side effects. Another rotavirus vaccine was approved in 2006 and 2008. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA issued emergency use authorizations for three COVID-19 vaccines. However, under Operation Warp Speed, each vaccine underwent an accelerated approval process, significantly truncating the usual FDA review process for new vaccines. Eventually, these vaccines received full FDA approval without undergoing the entire process. 

However, the US also produced a pandemic-related vaccine in record time before the modern FDA existed. As I previously wrote in The Beacon: 

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From 1957-1958, the 1958 influenza (often referred to as the Asian Flu) spread through the United States, infecting 20 million individuals and causing 116,000 deaths. At this time, the FDA held significantly less regulatory authority and did not regulate vaccines.

Similar to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, medical scientists developed a vaccine for the 1958 influenza before the virus reached the United States. Without the FDA prolonging approval, cooperation between public health agencies and private vaccine developers distributed 60 million doses of the vaccine during the first two months of the pandemic.

Consequently, hospitals were not overwhelmed and there was “no serious disruption of community life” during the 1957-1958 pandemic. As an article written at the time in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted, quick development, approval, and distribution of the vaccine “made it possible for a nation to organize in advance of an oncoming epidemic for the first time in history.”

RFK has the potential to dramatically change vaccine policy. To do that, he will need to influence the FDA strongly and unprecedentedly. Unfortunately, I do not think many concerned citizens understand how involved (or uninvolved) the FDA has been in vaccination policy. This article is my attempt to promote transparency.

*****

This article was published by The Beacon, a publication of the Independent Institute, and is reproduced with permission.

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Critically Thinking about the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Federal Healthcare

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By John Droz, Jr.

Arguably, for the first time in modern U.S. history, the federal government is:

  1. open to making radical changes in government agencies,
  2. has the right political perspective, and
  3. is receptive to citizen inputs.

Yes, there are always reasons to be skeptical — but the upside is so great that we should assume the best, and offer assistance. For those who are incurably cynical and say no, then you are foregoing your future rights to complain!

I’m polling my Critical Thinking Substack readers as to their best ideas regarding the Department of Health and Human Services (FDA, CDC, etc.), Department of Education, Department of Energy, EPA, and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). [I have a connection with RFKjr, but if you have any good relations with the upper echelon of any of the other Departments, please email me.]

Let’s say that this is the scenario:

a) we are given five (5) minutes for a face-to-face meeting with the Secretary of each of these Departments, and 

b) we are asked to limit our suggestions to three (3) items. Due to these rules, we need filter out many ideas so that we are left with just three (3) succinct, important, doable recommendations.

Since we’re starting off a New Year, I’ll dedicate upcoming commentaries to each of the above-mentioned Departments, one at a time. In each commentary, I’ll propose MY suggested three (3) recommendations for a specific Department, and then Critically Thinking readers can constructively weigh in with support or any improvements on what I’ve proposed…

Then we’ll try to get each end product to each Department’s Secretary.

To get the ball rolling, I’ve drafted up three (3) recommendations for DHHS (RFK Jr.). Feel free to suggest edits of mine, or better ideas, in the Comments, below…

Bobby should formally adopt the slogan: “Real Science, not political science,” or something akin to that.

That should be the umbrella of his campaign to reform US health policies: he wants to root out the political science that has infested many US healthcare agencies. It’s important to specifically spell this out as most citizens are technically challenged and are not aware that this is what is transpiring.

IMO, this is the core health issue, as Big Pharma and other self-serving parties are aggressively pushing political science. As a result, the FDA, CDC, AMA, etc., have completely lost touch with their mission statements, statutory obligations, etc.

For example, the FDA’s use of Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) of Paxlovid and formal Approval of Remdesivir is simply putrid. On the other hand, the FDA’s resistance to such therapies as Ivermectin (e.g., here) is criminally incompetent.

See the unique side-by-side comparison I put together of these two options, plus every other major pre- and post-COVID treatment. To my knowledge, no one else in the country has published this type of analysis. This powerful (but easy to understand) table quite clearly exposes which COVID-19 treatment options are Real Science and which are political science.

The FDA’s drug, etc. Approval process (particularly EUAs), needs to be radically upgraded.

The objective would be to change Approvals/EUAs so that they are genuinely Science-based — not due to politics. Tackling this critically important part of the FDA’s incompetence would be a wise and powerful strategy, as fixing the FDA’s therapy Approval process would have enormous ramifications across the rest of the FDA and the medical establishment in general. This would profoundly benefit American citizens.

Since the objective here is to cut to the chase, I wrote out a two-page summary of major changes that the FDA should be mandated to make, regarding their awarding of any medical product an EUA or the more formal Approval.

Since Bobby will have some power over the FDA, these very specific — and scientifically justified — reforms should be able to be mandated on the FDA. Accomplishing these would be among the most significant US medical changes over the last 50 years…

The public needs to be re-educated about the extreme importance of maintaining good health.

Prevention is a hundred times better than experimenting with ailment cures. This includes basics, like: balanced nutrition, proactive care (e.g., exercise, good sleep, etc.), and maintaining a strong immune system. These are low-cost, mostly simple efforts that almost every American would benefit from fairly quickly.

Note: the fact that Fauci, Birx, et al stunningly didn’t say a word about any of these regarding COVID-19, is proof positive of their estrangement from real Science.

Yes, I am fully aware that there are a multitude of other healthcare related issues — and several of them are significant. The question is, if you only had five minutes to speak to RFK Jr., and were limited to your three (3) best recommendations, what would they be?

©2025 All rights reserved.

Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:

I am now offering incentives for you to sign up new subscribers!

I also consider reader submissions on Critical Thinking on my topics of interest.

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

Alternatives To Biden’s Presidential Medal Of Freedom Awards thumbnail

Alternatives To Biden’s Presidential Medal Of Freedom Awards

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By Mark Wallace

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Those following the news these days will note that President Joe Biden has been generously doling out Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards to some of the major heroes of the so-called Progressive Left.  Among the recipients are Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton and George Soros.  Also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Biden is Cecile Richards, a past president of Planned Parenthood.

More appropriate awards for these individuals are as follows:

For Liz Cheney, 30 pieces of silver.  (For those unfamiliar with the Bible, consult Matthew 26:14-16).  Regrettably, the rope Judas Iscariot used to hang himself is no longer available. 

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For Hillary Clinton:  A broomstick, a black pointed hat and a DVD of the movie Rosemary’s Baby.

For George Soros:  Three consecutive life sentences in a federal prison.

For Cecile Richards, the Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann Award for Extinguishing Innocent Human Life.

More seriously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (established by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 prior to his assassination) has been awarded to individuals who are distinguished in their field, be it athletics, religion, music, architecture, science, journalism and an entire host of other disciplines. The award can be given posthumously and is not restricted to U.S. citizens.  Past United States Presidents have generally refrained from using the award to make a political statement or to intentionally antagonize large sectors of the U.S. population.

Thus, the awards have been given to Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mother Teresa, architect Mies Van Der Rohe, James Watson (discoverer of DNA), and Edward R. Murrow (TV journalist).  Awards have also been bestowed on U.S. Senators, past U.S. Presidents and other distinguished public servants.

Joe Biden, when he took office as President following inauguration, made a point that he was going to be a great unifier for the United States.  This was one of his first Big Lies as President.  Throughout his tenure, he frequently went out of his way to antagonize large portions of the U.S. population — primarily conservatives, Republicans and MAGA supporters.  He sicced the Justice Department on parents attending Board of Education meetings and on pro-life activists praying at abortion clinics.  The Presidential Freedom Medal awards are yet another instance Biden’s “in your face” taunting of millions of Americans.  

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So let’s review the four awards described above. Liz Cheney served a mere three terms in the House of Representatives.  She authored no distinguished legislation.  Her main “achievement” is betraying the Republican Party of which she purported to be a member.  Giving the award to her would be as if George Washington gave a presidential medal of freedom to Benedict Arnold.

Hillary Clinton’s “achievements” are (1) jeopardizing national security by routing tens of thousands of government-related emails through a personal router in her private residence, and (2) failing to take appropriate steps to defend Americans in the Benghazi Affair, who ended up paying for her negligence with their lives.  Additionally, she has characterized millions of Americans as “deplorables” and has fostered an atmosphere of hatred toward those on the Right.  

Soros earned vast sums of money by shorting the British pound.  It’s a good guess that he’s roundly hated by those across the pond in Great Britain.  He then used this money with the objective of destroying the West, particularly the United States.  One of his latest campaigns is to finance left-wing prosecutors who decline to prosecute the criminals who are ruining our cities.

Cecile Richards is a past president of Planned Parenthood, an organization dedicated to extinguishing the lives of millions of unborn babies in their numerous Death Camps across the nation that masquerade as abortion clinics.  One can imagine Satan as grinning widely as Biden bestowed the award on her.   

*****

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot award to George Soros

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Powerful Explosive Video Exposé on The Trial of Ottawa Police Detective Helen Grus thumbnail

Powerful Explosive Video Exposé on The Trial of Ottawa Police Detective Helen Grus

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By Vlad Tepes Blog

We focus on the Helen Grus hearings because it is one of the clearest and most accurately recorded examples of how a once civilized process of determining truth in order to set the correct outcome based on rule of law and Western values has become a dialectical process of ritual destruction of anyone who’s work or statements threaten state narratives.

The case against Helen Grus was in fact dialectical from day 1. The charge in a Republic style nation would never have been made, because no crime was committed, or even breach of procedure. The process itself violated a large number of fundamentals in terms of how an objective process to find facts takes place.

Illegal means were used by the state and state enforcers to gather incriminating evidence, which was not found in any case.

This is an important issue, and speaks to the nature of the machinery of state as it is today, as opposed to how it was, or was designed to be. Please watch this video below, and check out the detailed description at RAIR.

The RAIR link also has a link to the history of these hearings for those who want more detail.

WATCH: Powerful Explosive Video on The Trial of Ottawa Police Detective Helen Grus

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with video posted by   is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Musk Completely Derails UK Political Establishment, Accuses PM’s Party Of Covering Up Muslim Rape Gangs thumbnail

Musk Completely Derails UK Political Establishment, Accuses PM’s Party Of Covering Up Muslim Rape Gangs

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By The Daily Caller

Elon Musk ignited a political firestorm in Britain after accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer of complicity in the “rape of Britain” Friday, reanimating a years-old debate over organized child sexual exploitation by predominately Muslim Pakistani men.

Musk has ravaged Starmer and other U.K. officials in a barrage of tweets over the past week, primarily accusing Starmer of inadequately prosecuting rape gangs during his tenure as director of public prosecutions (DPP) from 2008 to 2013. The SpaceX founder also attacked Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, who he said “deserves to be in prison,” for blocking a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation by gangs in Oldham, a northern England town.

“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk wrote. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”

Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years.

Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2025

The recent flurry of attacks mark the world’s richest man’s latest incursion into international political affairs, with Musk now focusing in particular on the United Kingdom’s decades-long struggle to curb the proliferation of “grooming gangs” primarily comprised of Pakistani-descended men who mainly target native Briton girls for sexual exploitation, The Telegraph reported in an analysis of the persistent issue.

The most infamous cases involving these gangs occurred in northern England towns like Oldham, Telford and Rotherham — the severity of which has been whitewashed for fear of accusations of Islamophobia, according to The Telegraph.

“To protect ‘community relations’, the British state has gone to immense lengths to cover it up,” he wrote. “Reports have been blocked and deliberately kept out of the public eye. Any connection with ethnicity, immigration, or Islam was downplayed … the evidence that British Pakistani men were over-represented among the perpetrators was spiked to avoid uncomfortable truths.”

Musk Starmer and the Labour government with operating a two-tiered justice system, suggesting in a meme Thursday that the prime minister prosecutes “rape and violent crime” with leniency while instead focusing on policing online speech. He also said the Labour Party “opposes a national inquiry on the mass rape of little girls in Britain for one reason only: It will show that they were complicit.”

Two Tier Keir

No justice for severe, violent crimes, but prison for social media posts pic.twitter.com/QcK4o74Yla

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 2, 2025

The prime minister defended his prosecutorial record as DPP in a press conference Monday, saying he “brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang in this particular case” and “changed the whole prosecution approach.” While largely avoiding mentioning Musk by name, Starmer also condemned the spread of what he called “lies and misinformation” from detractors who are “interested in themselves” rather than the victims.

Starmer also defended Phillips in the press conference, insisting she has done “a thousand times more than they’ve even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career.” Phillips blocked a Tory-led motion Thursday to hold a public inquiry into the historic sexual abuse in Oldham because it was for “Oldham council alone” to decide whether one was necessary, according to The Telegraph.

Musk’s attacks are not limited to the Labour Party alone, however. The Tesla CEO also called for Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit and the leader of the Reform Party, to be replaced as party leader because he “doesn’t have what it takes.”

The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 5, 2025

The comments come hours after Farage referred to Musk as a “friend” in an interview with the BBC’s “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg” program.

“Well, this is a surprise!” Farage wrote in response to Musk. “Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree. My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I will never sell out my principles.”

Well, this is a surprise! Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree.

My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles. https://t.co/V7iccN6usS

— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) January 5, 2025

The rift between Farage and Musk seems to stem from Farage’s longstanding attempt to distance his political movement from Tommy Robinson, a longtime British anti-immigration activist currently imprisoned for contempt of court after “repeating false claims against a Syrian refugee,” according to the BBC.

Musk has repeatedly called for Robinson’s release and characterized his imprisonment as politically motivated, while Farage cited UKIP’s “obsess[ion] with Islam and Tommy Robinson” in a letter published in The Telegraph announcing his departure from the party in 2018 after 25 years.

Musk has also recently commented on political affairs in Germany, writing that “AfD is the only hope” for the country on Dec. 21, 2024.

The United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office told the Daily Caller News Foundation it had “nothing further to add to the PM’s words earlier today.”

AUTHOR

Thomas English

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Musk says Farage should be replaced as leader of Reform. Was it over Tommy Robinson or Farage’s views

This Country Is Cracking Down On Social Media Speech — And It’s Not China Or Russia

RELATED VIDEO: UNITED KINGDOM: It is not ‘far right’ to stand up for victims of mass rape!

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Medical Doctor: ‘Pandemic preparedness’ industry ‘like arsonists running the fire department’ thumbnail

Medical Doctor: ‘Pandemic preparedness’ industry ‘like arsonists running the fire department’

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By Leo Hohmann

Biden created another layer of federal bureaucracy when he created the permanent Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. Will Trump abolish this freedom-killing monster? Don’t bank on it. 

I reported back in July 2023 that the Biden administration had created a permanent Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. This encapsulates everything that is wrong with our government at both the federal and state levels.

Today, I came across an excellent article at the Brownstone Institute that I’d like to share because it speaks to the indignity of the growing industry known as “pandemic preparedness.” Yes, it has become an industry and that should send chills down the spines of every freedom-loving American.

The article at Brownstone warrants our attention because it is authored by a physician with the rare courage to stand up and state the obvious about what’s going on in our country right now. Forced masking, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, social media censorship are all coming back. They’re all on the table as options our overlords claim to have the authority to implement at any time under the guise of protecting us from a pandemic.

Last time it was Covid, a disease pre-engineered in government laboratories. Now it’s the bird flu, a disease that’s been around for as long as there’s been birds.

And why, when we’ve already been through this tragedy and seen through all of the lies, is it coming back around again, like a bad dream that keeps repeating itself?

I’ll tell you why. Because the globalist elites who ran the first psychological operation, many of them tied in with the military and intelligence agencies, know from experience that they can get away with it. We, a once-free people, now allow ourselves to be ruled over like slaves serving their masters, when in fact if we still had a viable republic the government officials would be serving us, not the other way around. They would fear us. We wouldn’t fear them.

At the end of the day, this globalist agenda is a dehumanizing agenda. For slaves to be fully subdued, they must be submissive to their masters, even when the orders given are completely nonsensical and ludicrous. They say it. We do it. No questions asked.

At this point, if they do it again, we don’t even need to ask questions. We simply say no. We will not comply.

Anyone who still can’t see this reality, and refuses to resist, is at this point just as much a part of the problem as the government overlords and their lying media hacks who oppress us. Please read and share the article below by Dr. Clayton Baker.

By Dr. Clayton J. Baker, M.D., at Brownstone Institute

In December 31, 2024, the world received a year-end parting gift from the good folks at NIAID, Anthony Fauci’s old fiefdom at the National Institutes of Health. NIAID – the same unaccountable and secretive agency that Fauci used to fund the gain-of-function research of Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill and the Bat Lady in Wuhan that resulted in Covid – has a new director, one Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo.

Marrazzo and another NIAID colleague, Dr. Michael G. Ison, wrote a year-end editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine that accompanies a research paper on recent H5N1 Bird flu cases in the United States, as well as a case report of a lone case of severe illness associated with Bird flu in British Columbia.

Marrazzo and Ison summarize the findings of the research paper and case report as follows:

Investigators now report in the Journal a series of human cases from the United States and Canada. The former series involves 46 case patients with generally mild, self-limited infection with [Influenza type] A(H5N1): 20 with exposure to poultry, 25 with exposure to dairy cows, and 1 with undefined exposure.…Most case patients presented with conjunctivitis, almost half with fever, and a minority with mild respiratory symptoms, and all recovered. The only hospitalization occurred in the case patient with undefined exposure, although hospitalization was not for respiratory illness.

They elaborate on the single case of serious illness:

In Canada, a 13-year-old girl with mild asthma and obesity presented with conjunctivitis and fever and had progression to respiratory failure…After treatment that included oseltamivir, amantadine, and baloxavir, she recovered.

In other words:

  • Over an eight-month period, from March to October 2024, 46 cases of human bird flu occurred in the United States, a country of 336 million people.
  • There were zero deaths.
  • 45 out of 46 infected persons had known exposure to animals.
  • The majority of the cases consisted of conjunctivitis (commonly known as “pink eye”).
  • Only one US patient was hospitalized, but this was not due to pneumonia – the principal life-threatening complication of influenza – and the patient recovered.
  • One severe case was identified in Canada, a country of 40 million people, in an asthmatic, morbidly obese girl. She was treated successfully with respiratory support and existing antiviral medications, and she recovered.

Does this sound to you like a public health emergency worthy of the legacy media’s recent exhumation of discredited Covid-era fear-mongers like Dr. Leana Wen and Dr. Deborah “Scarf Lady” Birx? Does it justify their hair-on-fire pronouncements on cable news shows everywhere, pushing for indiscriminate PCR testing of animals and emergency authorization of more mRNA vaccines for humans?

Does this sound to you like justification to continue to kill and destroy (pro tip: “cull” means kill and destroy) millions upon millions of farm animals, when most animals who contract Bird flu survive, recover, and develop immunity?

Does this sound to you like justification for another Emergency Use Authorization of another mRNA vaccine?

No? Me neither.

But wait, there’s more.

In their editorial, NIAID experts Marrazzo and Ison fail to mention the following:

  • There have been zero cases of human-to-human transmission of this virus.
  • The current circulating clade of the virus has been determined by independent researchers to very likely have originated at a US Government gain-of-function laboratory, namely the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, GA.
  • Multiple bioweapons laboratories, including the Yoshihiro Kawaoka lab at the University of Wisconsin, and the Ron Fouchier lab in the Netherlands (both of which have been affiliated with NIAID and with work done at SEPRL) have been doing gain-of-function research on Bird flu for many years, including experiments so outrageously dangerous that their work prompted President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful ban of gain-of-function research in 2014.
  • In 2019, NIAID reapproved and resumed funding Kawaoka and Fouchier’s dangerous work at increasing human transmissibility of Bird flu – the very same gain-of-function research that had prompted Obama’s ban.
  • According to its package insert, Audenz, the current Bird flu vaccine, was associated with death in 1 out of every 200 recipients, compared to 1 in 1,000 placebo recipients.
  • According to openthebooks.com, and as reported in the New York Post, NIH scientists received royalties totaling $325 million from pharmaceutical companies and foreign entities over more than a decade.

So, what are our friends at NIAID’s recommendations?

For one, they stress the “urgent need for vigilant surveillance of emerging mutations and assessment of the threat of human-to-human transmission.”

Are they advocating for the willy-nilly testing of entire livestock herds, as promoted by Birx, which is sure to create a preponderance of false positives?

Are they calling for the continued mass killing and destruction of millions upon millions of farm animals, whenever a fraction of the animals test positive for the virus?

Instead of PCR-swabbing every cow, chicken, and farm worker on Earth, how about we stop creating new mutant variants of H5N1 in the labs, since that’s where the current problem originated? How about we stop funding such utter madness with our tax dollars, funneled through corrupt government agencies like NIAID?

After all, you don’t save Tokyo by creating Godzilla.

But Marrazzo and Ison make no mention of this common-sense, sane approach.
Instead, they also stress the need for more – you guessed it – vaccines. They write:

we must continue to pursue development and testing of medical countermeasures…Studies have shown the safety and immunogenicity of A(H5N1) vaccines…studies are ongoing to develop messenger RNA–based A(H5N1) vaccines and other novel vaccines that can provide protection against a broad range of influenza viruses, including A(H5N1).”

Aside from attesting to the “safety” of a product where 1 in 200 users die, the use of the word “countermeasures” is extremely telling. It is a military term, not a medical one. We have already seen this game played with Covid. The gain-of-function lab research is done to produce a lab-manipulated, weaponized version of a virus, a version that is transmissible among and toxic to humans – in other words, a bioweapon. The vaccine is the countermeasure to the bioweapon. The vaccine is the intellectual property of those who created the bioweapon, and it is worth a fortune once the weapon has been unleashed. It is as simple as that.

“Pandemic preparedness” is a gigantic, deadly protection racket. I have described it in the past as arsonists running the fire department. That is precisely what happened with Covid, and that is what is being attempted with H5N1 Bird flu.

Moving forward to a new administration that has expressed a commitment to rooting out corruption in the pharmaceutical/medical/public health realm, improving the health of citizens, and restoring trustworthiness in medicine, I recommend the following steps to combat the H5N1 Bird flu, and to end the “pandemic preparedness” racket that threatens to hold the world hostage again and again, as it did during Covid.

  • Immediately end and outlaw all gain-of-function and other bioweapons research in and funded by the United States, and apply all possible diplomatic pressure to eradicate it from the Earth.
  • Eliminate all special protections from liability for vaccines, including the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and the PREP Act.
  • Refocus Infectious Disease research on new therapeutics, rather than power-seeking and profit-driven vaccine development.
  • Completely reform the National Institutes of Health, and close the incorrigibly corrupt NIAID altogether.

The fear pornographers must be discredited. We must make realistic and sensible decisions about our food supply.

We must learn the lessons of Covid, and live in knowledge rather than in fear.

Read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

Please visit Leo’s Newsletter substack.

WARNING: Bill Gates unleashes plan for new series of gene-based injections that will target Africa thumbnail

WARNING: Bill Gates unleashes plan for new series of gene-based injections that will target Africa

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By Leo Hohmann

The Global depopulation agenda moves forward. 

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is rolling out a plan to use Africans as guinea pigs for an expanded series of new genetically altering mRNA injections.

He calls them vaccines but we know they are not vaccines, at least not in the traditional meaning of the word. U.S. courts have even ruled that mRNA serums don’t qualify as vaccines.

The Covid vaccines, the first to use this technology, have been an unmitigated disaster.

But that hasn’t stopped Gates from pushing more of these gene-based jabs on the world.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a $40 million initiative to support the production of messenger mRNA vaccines in Africa.

Gates’ foundation claims this investment will address what it refers to as “vaccine inequities” exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During that pandemic, African nations were often the last to receive Covid jabs. It worked to their benefit as fewer Africans died of Covid, per capita than Westerners.

Yet, the power of money never ceases and so Gates presses on in his efforts to vaccinate the world against every disease imaginable. And Africa will be ground zero for the plan.

Gates and his foundation hope to expand the testing of the mRNA injections on Africans before they are rolled out globally.

The funding will aid several manufacturers, including Senegal’s Pasteur Institute, in developing mRNA injections for the people of Africa.

Bill Gates emphasized the potential of mRNA technology to combat diseases like Rift Valley fever and tuberculosis while building Africa’s capacity for vaccine development.

Of course, no one is raising the question of why sub-Saharan African populations generally fared better than European, American, and Asian populations during the Covid pandemic. If the vaccines had worked, it should have been the opposite, because it was the African nations that were far less vaccinated with the Covid injection that the populations in North America and Europe.

The bottom line is this: The more one can stay away from Bill Gates and his toxic mRNA jabs, the better their chances of living a healthy and normal life.

Gates is driven by profit and by his insatiable desire to depopulate the world. Only a government that truly hates its own people would unleash on them Bill Gates and his poisonous death jabs.

©2025 . All rights reserved.

Please visit Leo’s Newsletter substack.

Here’s the List of 158 Democrats Who Voted To Keep Convicted Sex Offender Illegals In America thumbnail

Here’s the List of 158 Democrats Who Voted To Keep Convicted Sex Offender Illegals In America

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By The Geller Report

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Below is the list of the Democrats by state who voted to to keep illegals who are convicted sex offenders in America.

The Democrats hate you.

What does the Democrat party stand for? Rape, pedophilia, illegal immigration, jihad, Hamas, high taxation, racism, voter fraud — every evil thing.

List of 158 Democrats Who Voted To Keep Convicted Sex Offender Illegals In America

Alabama:

  • Terri Sewell

California:

  • Pete Aguilar
  • Ami Bera
  • Julia Brownley
  • Salud Carbajal
  • Tony Cárdenas
  • Judy Chu
  • Jim Costa
  • Mark DeSaulnier
  • John Garamendi
  • Robert Garcia
  • Sylvia Garcia
  • Jimmy Gomez
  • Jared Huffman
  • Ro Khanna
  • Sydney Kamlager-Dove
  • Barbara Lee
  • Ted Lieu
  • Zoe Lofgren
  • Doris Matsui
  • Kevin Mullin
  • Grace Napolitano
  • Nancy Pelosi
  • Katie Porter
  • Linda Sánchez
  • Adam Schiff
  • Brad Sherman
  • Norma Torres
  • Mike Thompson
  • Maxine Waters

Colorado:

  • Jason Crow
  • Diana DeGette
  • Brittany Pettersen
  • Joe Neguse

Connecticut:

  • Rosa DeLauro
  • John Larson
  • James Himes

0 0 The Geller Report 2025-01-06 15:12:10Here’s the List of 158 Democrats Who Voted To Keep Convicted Sex Offender Illegals In America

Voters Overwhelmingly Say Schools Should Not Keep Student Gender Transitions Hidden thumbnail

Voters Overwhelmingly Say Schools Should Not Keep Student Gender Transitions Hidden

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By Brendan Clarey

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe schools should hide a student’s gender change at school from parents, according to a recent poll of over 2,200 likely voters.

The issue of parental notification regarding a student’s gender transition has been hotly contested in recent years, especially in California, where the state has sided against school districts that have passed policies to let parents know students are using different names or pronouns.

The Center Square’s Voter Voice Poll, conducted by Noble Predictive Insights, surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 1,000 Democrats, 1,000 Republicans, and almost 200 true independents.

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The poll shows that almost three-quarters, 71%, of likely voters said a teacher should notify parents if their students say they want to go by a different gender.

Kate Guenther, Franklin News Foundation

David Byler, chief of research at Noble Predictive Insights, told The Center Square that the poll’s findings are “robust.”

“Pollsters have asked this in a lot of different ways in a lot of different states with a lot of different response options, and this is a durable finding,” Byler said. “If a student changes how they identify in terms of their gender at school, parents should know. That’s what the electorate thinks.”

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“The electorate thinks parents have the right to know if something as major as a gender identity change is happening at school,” Byler said. “They want to be involved in their children’s lives and the rest of the public thinks they should be involved in their children’s lives.” 

Byler said the poll’s findings were consistent across identity characteristics.

“In terms of demographics, you’ll notice that when you get numbers these lopsided, you don’t get many individual demographics that really disagree, it’s everybody basically agreeing to one extent or another.”

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Kate Guenther, Franklin News Foundation

Eighty-six percent of Republicans said they supported parental notification of a student’s gender change, while 8% said parents shouldn’t get to know; 68% of true independents said teachers should have to tell parents, and 17% said they should not.

A majority of Democrats, 55%, said they supported parents knowing about such changes, with 28% of party voters opposed. The only demographic with higher opposition was 18-34-year-olds, 34% of whom said teachers should not tell.

“It’s only the far part of the progressive wing that would say no here,” Byler said. “And everybody else is saying if kids change their identity or their pronouns, that the parents have to know.”

Byler said Republicans are using [used] their advantage on the issue with voters approaching the November election.

“There’s a lot of messaging around trans issues,” Byler said. “If you look at the ads the candidates are running, you see that Republicans are running towards all the issues related to trans students in schools and Democrats high-tailing it away from those issues or publicly moderating or denouncing the far-left’s stances. It’s polls like these that explain why.”

“Public opinion is on the conservative side of this issue when it comes to how to handle the specifics of how trans issues play out in schools,” Byler said.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

‘People Will Be Outraged’: MAHA Advocates Tell Senators To Think Twice Before Opposing RFK Jr.’s Nomination thumbnail

‘People Will Be Outraged’: MAHA Advocates Tell Senators To Think Twice Before Opposing RFK Jr.’s Nomination

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By The Daily Caller

Supporters of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda have a message for senators who may be entertaining the idea of tanking Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination: opposition won’t go unnoticed among the American public.

Though Kennedy’s nomination to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary is drawing fierce resistance from the medical establishment and corporate media, the former independent presidential candidate has a legion of supporters willing to go to the mat to secure his confirmation. MAHA advocates believe that Kennedy is uniquely positioned to help the president-elect usher in a “golden age in health” during the next four years.

MAHA advocates are also prepared to scrutinize senators who oppose Kennedy for any ties to Big Pharma and other corporate interests, according to interviews conducted by the Daily Caller News Foundation with several prominent Kennedy supporters.

“It would be outrageous for Republican or Democratic senators to vote no against RFK Jr.,” Zen Honeycutt, founding executive director of the medical freedom and health advocacy nonprofit, Moms Across America, told the DCNF in an interview. “It would be a huge step back in the wrong direction and people will be outraged.”

“It will be a clear sign that those senators [who vote no] are putting the special interests of Big Pharma before the health of the American people,” Honeycutt added. “What Kennedy is asking for is to have safer food and vaccines. How can you be against that?”

Republican Senators MUST confirm @RobertKennedyJr

The MAHA agenda was a big part of the Trump campaign. Americans voted for it.

There’s a mandate for it. Senators have no business opposing it on policy grounds. pic.twitter.com/5Og1C3GfC0

— steve hilton (@SteveHiltonx) December 19, 2024

Heading Into January With Notable GOP Allies

Kennedy met with more than a dozen GOP senators on Capitol Hill in December during which the life-long Democrat appeared to win the support of several social conservatives, including Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, by committing to uphold pro-life Health and Human Services (HHS) policies that Trump pushed during his first term.

Senate Republicans also appear to be embracing many of the food and health policy issues raised by MAHA advocates as a considerable number of the GOP conference rallies behind Kennedy’s nomination.

On Dec. 19, Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall announced the creation of the Senate MAHA Caucus, which promises to “work with RFK Jr. to be the legislative force that ensures the key pillars of MAHA are executed.”

We need transparency with our vaccines and health care. We need to fix our food safety standards. We need to Make America Healthy Again.

I’m proud to join @RogerMarshallMD, @SenLummis, and @SenRickScott in the MAHA Caucus. https://t.co/MgcYP8mv8F

— Coach Tommy Tuberville (@SenTuberville) December 19, 2024

Republican Sens. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming are founding members of the Senate MAHA caucus.

No GOP senator has yet to oppose Kennedy’s nomination, but Republicans seen as more willing to cross Trump, including Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are noncommittal.

‘Trying Desperately To Derail’ Kennedy

Long experiencing contempt from corporate media over their advocacy, MAHA advocates are tuning out outlets’ coverage of Kennedy’s nomination and hoping that senators are as well.

“They have not been reporting accurately on vaccine safety or on the pesticides in our food. They’ve been putting their ad dollars — from Big Pharma to Big Ag — before the health and safety of Americans,” Honeycutt told the DCNF. “We see through that. Mainstream media does not tell us hardly anything that is truthful.”

McConnell issued a veiled threat to Kennedy to distance himself from efforts to probe the safety of vaccines following the release of a misleading New York Times exposé on Dec. 13 alleging that Aaron Siri, one of Kennedy’s lawyers, asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an independent agency under the HHS, to “revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.”

“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous. Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts,” McConnell, a polio survivor, said in a statement on Dec. 14.

But the New York Times’ story was “categorically false,” according to Siri, because his petition only sought to have the FDA conduct another clinical trial of one of the six polio vaccines licensed in the United States to ensure its safety when administered to children, Siri told Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson during an interview in December.

“Even if this petition was granted, there is not a single child or adult in America that would not have had access to a polio vaccine,” Siri told Carlson. “That is what makes the New York Times headlines absolutely false. They knew it was false. They intended for the country to be deceived because they’re trying desperately to derail Mr. Kennedy’s nomination.”

MAHA advocates believe that Kennedy’s prior statements advocating for subjecting vaccines to further scientific study is a position most Americans would support.

Bottom line: I’m not going to take anyone’s vaccines away from them. I just want to be sure every American knows the safety profile, the risk profile, and the efficacy of each vaccine. That’s it. pic.twitter.com/JD8eyenO5H

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 15, 2024

“Bobby Kennedy has said one thing consistently, which is pharmaceutical products should be subjected to science,” Calley Means, a prominent MAHA advocate and co-author of the best-selling book, Good Energy, told the DCNF. “The president’s directive is to figure out why kids are getting sick, why kids are getting autism. And that includes resetting research to answering that question.”

“I don’t think any American disagrees with the idea that pharmaceutical products should be continually studied,” Means added.

‘There Will Be A Huge Backlash’

Refusing to confirm Kennedy could be seen as senators turning their backs on the millions of Americans who support the MAHA agenda and helped send Trump back to the White House to enact the food and health policies that Kennedy’s campaign helped push into the limelight, according to several Kennedy supporters.

“If RFK Jr. does not get Senate approval, I think there will be a huge backlash,” Valerie Smith, a metabolic health coach and Kennedy supporter, told the DCNF in an interview. “The millions of votes that went to Trump getting re-elected are the same people that are going to be very vocal if RFK Jr. doesn’t get in there [HHS].”

GOP senators voting no on Kennedy’s confirmation could also be viewed as alienating the nontraditional Republican constituencies, such as MAHA advocates, that Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was able to successfully court and bring into the party’s fold.

“I believe moms are a major part of why Trump won and a major reason for that is because he had the wisdom to bring on Kennedy,” Honeycutt told the DCNF. “The fact that Trump used the words pesticides, autism, chronic illness and cancer on a presidential platform — that moment was historic.”

“Finally, somebody has heard us, and we don’t care which party they come from,” Honeycutt added. “Our kids with autism, with autoimmune issues, with asthma, with allergies — finally, they have a champion and somebody that’s standing up and speaking up for us.”

But MAHA advocates are aware that the reason Kennedy may appeal to so many Americans — his independence from and history of taking corporate interests — is exactly why he may face hurdles along the way to his Senate confirmation, several Kennedy supporters told the DCNF.

“He’s a threat to this massive amount of profit that’s gone unregulated up until now,” Smith told the DCNF. “He’s coming up against some very powerful lobbyists and massive amounts of money. I just hope and pray he can overcome them.”

“He isn’t captured by any industry or corporation, so he’s free to do what’s right by the American people, not what’s in the best interest of corporations,” Courtney Swan, an integrative nutritionist and host of the health and wellness podcast, Realfoodology, told the DCNF.

‘Bipartisan Issue Of Our Time’

MAHA advocates are holding out hope that Democratic lawmakers, already embracing parts of Kennedy’s agenda, will also support the prospective HHS secretary’s confirmation.

“Making America Healthy [Again] is the bipartisan issue of our time, Means told the DCNF. “If you closed your eyes at a Trump-RFK rally, you wouldn’t know which party you were listening to.”

“Transparency, medical freedom, getting conflicts out of science — these are bipartisan issues that President Trump has led on, and it’s encouraging that leading Democrats have expressed support for the MAHA agenda,” Means added. “I’m optimistic they’ll support the unimpeachable bipartisan agenda that Bobby has espoused.”

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who have all complimented parts of Kennedy’s policy agenda, have left open the possibility they could vote in favor of Kennedy’s confirmation to lead HHS.

“I think what he is saying about the food industry is exactly correct,” Sanders said told CBS News during an interview on Dec. 5 during which he also expressed concern about Kennedy’s positions on water fluoridation and vaccines. “You have a food industry concerned about their profits, couldn’t care less about the health of the American people. I think they have to be taken on.”

A mutual understanding that the nation’s food supply is contributing to making Americans sicker could bring Republicans and Democrats together, according to several MAHA advocates.

“Americans have never been sicker, and they are sick and tired of being lied to and gaslit by the food industry and medical system,” Swan, who applauded Sanders’ commentary on the food industry, told the DCNF in a statement. “We are in this mess because we have allowed industry to take control of the narrative.”

“This needs to end and RFK Jr. is the only politician openly talking about wanting to change it,” Swan added. “We have a once in a lifetime opportunity for real change and for people to do the right thing.”

Senators across the political spectrum should take note of MAHA’s and Kennedy’s political ascendancy, Honeycutt told the DCNF.

“The most important issue before us today is health,” Honeycutt said. “Moms have been driving that issue for a very long time and we’re overjoyed that this new administration has heard us and is making health a primary issue.”

“We don’t care what party someone is from,” Honeycutt added. “If they are putting health first, they will have our support. And we want senators to remember that come election time.”

AUTHOR

Adam Pack

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

RFK Jr. Senate Hearings May Further Erode Trust In The Corporate Media

Whoopi Goldberg Says RFK Jr Is Fat Shaming People By Encouraging Healthy Diets And Exercise

RFK Jr. Wants Fluoride Out Of Water — And It’s Not Nearly As Crazy As His Detractors Claim

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

GENDER INDOCTRINATION: 16 States That Force Transgender Lessons on Kids thumbnail

GENDER INDOCTRINATION: 16 States That Force Transgender Lessons on Kids

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By Tyler O’Neil

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

It’s easy to grow desensitized to the threat of gender ideology in schools. It seems every day there is a fresh new outrage about kindergarteners getting indoctrinated into “trans joy” and school clinics offering transgender “medicine” for minors.

President-elect Donald Trump’s historic reelection victory represented a loud rebuke to the transgender movement—after all, one of his most effective ads slammed Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presidential nominee, as being “for they/them,” while Trump is “for you.” But this noxious ideology still has a stranglehold in many institutions, backed up in some cases by official state policy.

In fact, no fewer than 16 U.S. states have curriculum standards that force teachers’ hands on the issue, according to an important new report from The Heritage Foundation.

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The report, “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy,” highlights the state-level education standards and frameworks of 16 states that encourage gender ideology, which the report defines as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”

This ideology rejects biology and tradition, promoting vague notions of identity that often rely on rigid sex stereotypes that feminists have rejected for decades.

Jay Richards, director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and Daniel Buck, senior visiting fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, analyzed the state-level education frameworks of all 50 states.

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Richards and Buck asked whether the frameworks “encourage a distinction between sex or sex organs, and gender, the latter of which is undefined or treated as a social construct?” The analysts also asked whether the policies promote the notion that sex is merely “assigned at birth” and whether they use terms such as “cisgender,” “transgender,” and “nonbinary.”

These tell-tale signs reveal the promotion of gender ideology, which not only contradicts basic biology and tradition but also poses a real danger to impressionable children.

By telling little boys that they may really be girls, schools prime them for experimental medical interventions that leave kids stunted, scarred, and infertile. The fact that medical societies endorse these interventions—despite the lack of evidence that they improve children’s lives and in the face of evidence that they carry severe side effects such as the risk of cancer in teens—is a scandal of epic proportions.

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Even simply teaching children that “gender identity” may be different from biological sex carries the risk of setting kids on a destructive path. These lessons are rightly controversial, and parents should be able to remove their children from any such indoctrination.

Below is a list of states and the specific state policy requiring each to teach gender ideology.

*****

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JK Rowling: ‘There are no trans kids’ and ‘no child is born in the wrong body’

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By Jihad Watch

JK Rowling is back in the news over her continuing opposition to the far-left trans agenda. This time, she posted on X:

Rowling also praised an article by Kara Dansky — a “feminist fighting for the sex-based rights of women and girls.”

Dansky makes the compelling argument:

In order to justify the enshrinement of “gender identity” in the law, its proponents need for it to be real; if it’s real, it’s also innate; if it’s innate, kids must have it. Ergo, there are “trans kids.”

The truth is that youngsters often go through an identity crisis as they grow into adolescence and adulthood. But agenda-driven leftist ideologues have hijacked this natural process. By creating a whole new category under the DEI banner, these kids are coerced by trans activists and are made to feel exceptional and accepted. In the immediate, they may feel better as part of a community, but in the long run, they end up with much bigger problems, since they were too young to make such a decision in the first place.

Rowling has stood admirably as a determined leader against the radical trans agenda, in the face of substantial antagonism, as LGBTQ++ activists try to bully their opponents into surrender — which Rowling has shown no sign of doing.

“JK Rowling says there are ‘no trans kids’ and says NO child is born in the wrong body in response to online critic who accused her of ‘hateful focus,’” by Noor Qurasi, Daily Mail, December 29, 2024:

JK Rowling has come under fire again after stating there are ‘no trans kids’ and people cannot be born in the wrong body.

Rowling has been the focus of controversy over the last few years for her views on women’s rights and transgender issues.

And in a post shared to X – formerly Twitter – the Harry Potter author appeared to go a step further, suggesting transgender children do not exist.

She was responding to a critic who accused her of ‘hateful focus on trans kids’.

But Rowling hit back: ‘There are no trans kids. No child is “born in the wrong body”. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.’

The post elicited an array of strong comments, most supportive of the 59-year-old.

One person said ‘J.K. Is a hero’ while another added ‘as far as I’m concerned, you ARE using your immense power for good’.…

AUTHOR

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Spies Who Hate Us thumbnail

The Spies Who Hate Us

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By Jeffrey Tucker

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration.

And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning.

More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period. It was the agency that worked through third parties and packet-switching networking to take down your Facebook group. It worked through all kinds of intermediaries to keep a lid on Twitter. It managed LinkedIn, Instagram, and most of the other mainstream platforms in a way that made you feel like your opinions were too crazy to see the light of day.

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The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing.

What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period – doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on – was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA’s mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing.

It gets crazier. CISA documented that it deprecated the study of Jay Bhattacharya from May 2020 that showed that Covid was far more widespread and less dangerous than the CDC was claiming, thus driving down the Infection Fatality Rate within the range of a bad flu. This was at a time when it was widely assumed to be the black death. CISA weighed in to say that the study was faulty and tore down posts about it.

The granularity of their work is shocking, naming Epoch Times, Unz.org, and a whole series of websites as disinformation, often with a crazy spin that identified them with Russian propaganda, white supremacy, terrorist activity, or some such. Reading through the document conjures up memories of Lenin and Stalin smearing the Kulaks or Hitler on the Jews. Everything that is contrary to government claims becomes foreign infiltration or insurrectionist or otherwise seditious. 

It’s a very strange world these people inhabit. Over time, of course, the agency ended up demonizing much authentic science plus a majority of public opinion. And yet they stayed at it, fully convinced of the rightness of their cause and the justness of their methods. It seems never to have occurred to this agency that we have a First Amendment that is part of our laws. It never enters the discussion at all.

AFL summarizes the document as follows.

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  • CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex to inform its censorship of alleged foreign disinformation narratives regarding COVID-19.
  • Unelected bureaucrats at CISA weaponized the homeland security apparatus, including FEMA, to monitor COVID-19 speech dissenting from “expert” medical guidance, including President Trump’s comments about taking Hydroxychloroquine in 2020. Many of these “false” narratives later turned out to be true, calling into question the government’s ability to identify “misinformation,” regardless of its authority to do so.
  • To determine what was “foreign disinformation,” CISA relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex’s usual suspects (Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory) — even those discredited for erroneously attributing domestic content to foreign sources (Alliance for Securing Democracy). CISA even relied on foreign government authorities (EU vs. Disinfo) and foreign government-linked groups (CCDH, GDI) that advocated for the demonetization and deplatforming of individual Americans to monitor and target constitutionally protected speech by American citizens.

For years, this story of censorship has unfolded in shocking ways. This document among tens of thousands of pages is surely among the most incriminating. And discussing it is apparently still taboo because the Subcommittee report on Covid never once mentions CISA. Why might that be?

In the strange world of D.C., CISA might be considered untouchable because it was staffed out of the National Security Agency which itself is a spinoff of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thus does its activities generally fall under the category of classified. And its many functioning assets in the civilian sector are legally bound to keep their relationships and connections private.

Thank goodness at least one judge believed otherwise and forced the agency to cough it up.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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Questioning Vaccines Shouldn’t Be Verboten thumbnail

Questioning Vaccines Shouldn’t Be Verboten

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By The Daily Signal

In the Harry Potter series, the villain, Lord Voldemort, is known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” There’s a similar sentiment whenever someone expresses a heterodox opinion on vaccines.

The long knives are already out for Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While there are valid concerns among pro-life activists, the most prominent objection is Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., labeled Kennedy a “denier of science.” Kennedy has pushed “the scientifically discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism,” The New York Times wrote.

Donald Trump isn’t backing down. In a recent NBC interview, Kristen Welker asked Trump whether childhood vaccines should be eliminated.

“If they’re dangerous for the children,” he replied. He continued, “Take a look at autism. Go back 25 years. Autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000. And now it’s close to one out of 100.”

After Welker asserted that studies show no link between vaccines and autism, Trump responded, “I mean, something is going on. I don’t know if it’s vaccines. Maybe it’s chlorine in the water, right?” He concluded, “We have to find out.”

On another subject, this answer would sound like a dodge. All Trump said is that children shouldn’t be exposed to dangerous things and that he wants to know what’s causing autism. But because he’s talking about vaccines, it’s a jarring comment.

Look at the disdain America’s Chicken Little elites and the propaganda press heap on anyone who dares to question vaccine orthodoxy. That ranges from NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers to moms who don’t follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination schedule. But that’s a mistake.

For one, this reaction suggests the supposed experts have something to hide. They don’t want to bury their opponents with studies showing how they’re right. They want to shame them into silence or destroy their professional lives.

This is the same tactic the Left uses against those who believe in intelligent design or question global warming alarmism. But ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy, not a sign of a strong intellectual argument.

The next problem is that stifling discussion limits nuance and new discoveries. Doctors once recommended older adults take a daily dose of baby aspirin to ward off cardiovascular disease. In 2022, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force reversed course for adults without heart disease. They concluded the risk of bleeding was greater than the number of heart attacks prevented. Even beneficial drugs have trade-offs.

These kinds of discussions should be had about vaccines. A century ago, whooping cough killed 6,000 children a year. As the name implies, whooping cough is spread through the air. It’s especially deadly for babies. Thanks to vaccines, there were only around 3,000 cases of whooping cough in the U.S. in 2022. That’s a medical miracle.

In contrast, Hepatitis B is spread primarily by sexual contact or dirty needles. That’s much less of a threat to newborns than an airborne virus. Yet, the CDC recommends infants receive the Hepatitis B vaccine at birth, 1 month, and 6 months. The CDC also recommends 6-month-olds get the COVID-19 vaccine. Healthy children have a vanishingly small risk of dying from COVID-19. The COVID-19 vaccine, however, has been linked to heart problems, especially in young males.

Perhaps there are trade-offs to the CDC now recommending some infants receive more than 20 vaccines by the time they’re 6 months old. Just like with baby aspirin, that topic shouldn’t be off limits to continued study and debate.

Finally, doing something different may lead to answers on autism, which Trump correctly notes has exploded. If the supposed experts can’t figure out why it’s growing so rapidly, then it’s time to investigate possible answers the “experts” previously dismissed.

RFK may end up being wrong about a lot, but he’s right on this. Raising questions about vaccines shouldn’t be verboten.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

AUTHOR

Victor Joecks

Victor Joecks is a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Victor on X: @VictorJoecks.

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Absolute vs Relative Risk: An Exceptionally Important Medical Statistic thumbnail

Absolute vs Relative Risk: An Exceptionally Important Medical Statistic

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By John Droz, Jr.

In my last commentary, one of several key things I am recommending that RFK Jr. fix in the FDA, is how they portray effectiveness (of drugs, vaccines, etc.) to the public. Currently, the effectiveness that is almost exclusively shown is relative risk. I am advocating that absolute risk be shown. I cited two important examples where others have (so far unsuccessfully) made a case for the same thing:

Example 1: This position is stated in an important FDA advisory publication. A key conclusion (see page 60) is that the public is: “unduly influenced when risk information is presented using a relative risk approach; this can result in suboptimal decisions. Thus, an absolute risk format should be used.”

Example 2: The CONSORT 2010 Statement —Updated Guidelines for Reporting Parallel Group Randomized Trials states: “… presentation of both absolute and relative effect sizes is recommended…”

Since statistics is over most people’s heads, several readers asked me to explain the difference. OK, here goes…

I’ll use COVID-19 vaccines as a telling example. I put together three tables (below) based on two studies: here and here. (If you’d like further elaboration, here is an MD’s good discussion about those two studies.)

The first table shows the relative effectiveness of several popular COVID-19 vaccines.

Now most people would say that these are good numbers — and the ones above 90% are VERY good. That’s exactly what the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies want us to think… Now let’s fill out the next column: absolute risk…

Whoa! The absolute numbers are radically different — and MUCH less! What does this mean in the real world? A third variable might be the easiest to understand: how many people need to be treated (injected) to prevent ONE case of COVID-19?

This is called NNT (Number Needed to Treat = 1/ARR). Here is a study that delves into the merit of using NNT. This table shows what NNT is for the same COVID-19 injections

NOTE: The exact numbers here may be slightly different due to several variables, and are not important. What is significant is to see the extraordinary differences between Relative and Absolute Risk Reductions.

Let’s look at a real-world example… If citizens realized that roughly one hundred people had to be injected before ONE case of COVID-19 was prevented, would very many people have said:

“I’m willing to risk the known potentially serious side-effects of these injections, plus accept the fact that zero long-term studies have been completed, in the hopes that I’ll hit the jackpot and be the lucky one in 100± people who is prevented from getting COVID-19”?

The answer to that is why the FDA (and pharmaceutical companies) emphasize the Relative effectiveness number.

Some very smart people said let’s take the NNT data one step further — and add the treatment cost to it! In other words, if two treatments have the same NNT, but one costs 10 times the other, shouldn’t we factor that in? Look at this fabulous COVID-19 table.

Compare two COVID-19 early oral treatment competitors: Ivermectin and Paxlovid. To get the same end result (save one life from COVID-19) we can spend $26 for Ivermectin or $206,705 for Paxlovid… Note also that cost and impacts of side-effects are not taken into account here. The side-effects for taking Ivermectin are very low, while the potential side-effects for Paxlovid are relatively high. In other words, the cost difference between Ivermectin and Paxlovid is likely MUCH more that what is shown in this table!

My recommendation to RFK Jr. is that (as a minimum) BOTH Relative and Absolute numbers should be prominently displayed, as well as NNT. This is not some academic matter, as it has GREAT bearing on assuring that Americans are able to make an informed consent when they agree to an injection or to take a drug. Without the facts, we are severely handicapped in being a critical thinker.

PS — Here is an excellent two minute video that explains the difference between Absolute and Relative Risk reduction…

PPS — Just like here, there are more detailed explanations for each of the other 15± recommendations I made for RFK Jr. re: the FDA and its EUA and Approval processes. Also just like here, the other recommendations make good medical and scientific sense.

Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:

I am now offering incentives for you to sign up new subscribers!

I also consider reader submissions on Critical Thinking on my topics of interest.

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

Critically Thinking about the FDA: Particularly its Emergency Use Authorization and Approval processes thumbnail

Critically Thinking about the FDA: Particularly its Emergency Use Authorization and Approval processes

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By John Droz, Jr.

The U.S. healthcare system is woefully inadequate from several perspectives. A silver lining of the COVID-19 fiasco is that it exposed several of these systemic failures. To make this discussion somewhat digestible, I will focus on the FDA, and its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and Approval processes.

The root problem with both of these, is that although the FDA is pretending to the public that these processes are based on genuine Science, both have become corrupted by political science. They get away with this ruse as 99% of the public are not scientists, and the FDA bureaucracy has purposefully obfuscated what’s transpiring with misleading terminology (like risk, efficacy, and safety). Additionally, to promote political agendas, the FDA changes important definitions, has an unhealthy relationship with parties they are supposed to be regulating, and has abandoned key elements of its mission statement and statutory obligations.

With the goal of getting back on track (i.e., being more scientific), the FDA needs a major overhaul of the EUA and Approval processes, particularly for:

a) Vaccines [especially when a reasonable therapeutic is available], and

b) Therapeutics [e.g., remdesivir and molnupiravir should not have received EUAs].

Here are my recommendations:

1 — The FDA needs to thoroughly revamp its concept and communication of efficacy, e.g.:

a) A requirement that all RCTs (and subsequently the FDA) publicize Absolute Risk — preferably, exclusively. (See here and here.)

Note 1: This is consistent with an important FDA advisory publication. A key conclusion (see page 60) is that the public is: “unduly influenced when risk information is presented using a relative risk approach; this can result in suboptimal decisions. Thus, an absolute risk format should be used.”

Note 2: The CONSORT 2010 Statement —Updated Guidelines for Reporting Parallel Group Randomized Trials states: “… presentation of both absolute and relative effect sizes is recommended…”

b) The FDA should define a new term (e.g., net effectiveness). It will not only include Absolute Risk but also give some weight to other serious medical considerations like lethality, contagiousness, and side effects.

c) A minimum net effectiveness should be required (e.g., 50%) to be granted an EUA.

d) If after an EUA is granted, subsequent scientific studies indicate that the net effectiveness appears to have gone below the minimum required, then the FDA will promptly have a formal public hearing of their EUA. If the conclusion of the hearing is that there is a reasonable likelihood that the net effectiveness now appears to be below the minimum required, the FDA should immediately revoke their EUA.

e) The FDA must be prohibited from granting an EUA based on a subset of any RCT results (e.g., like here).

f) The FDA’s Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers include a warning statement like:

“This EUA was granted after a very limited scientific assessment of this product for this medical condition. As a result, the FDA has a low confidence level regarding the efficacy or long-term safety of this product for this condition.”

g) The FDA’s Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers include a warning statement that this is an experimental EUA product, so it is not appropriate for it to be mandated.

h) The FDA should prohibit any EUA recipient from advertising that their product is “safe and effective,” as neither has been scientifically adequately determined.

2— Considering that the majority of US adults have at least one chronic disease, as a minimum the FDA needs to meaningfully address this reality by the following:

a) A requirement that RCTs must include a representative sample of chronic illness subjects in both testing and placebo groups for products seeking EUA or Approvals.

b) In ALL cases where the above was not done, the FDA’s Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers must specifically include a warning statement (necessary for informed consent) that testing was inadequately done on subjects who had a wide variety of other chronic ailments, so the consequences to recipients with those conditions are unknown, and may worsen (including death) when taking this EUA product.

3 — The FDA should be obligated to promptly develop and publicize regulations for Informed Consent regarding the public’s taking of EUAs. These should be comparable to the FDA’s informed consent conditions for clinical trial subjects (which includes many pages of conditions and caveats: see here). EUA product recipients should effectively be considered to be clinical trial subjects.

4 — Regarding off-label use (particularly in an emergency), the FDA should:

a) Allow medical practitioners to prescribe an off-label therapeutic for any condition when the medical practitioner believes that there is reasonable scientific evidence of efficacy. (Note: The FDA’s website states that this is already the case, but the COVID-19 situation — e.g., with IVM and HCQ — indicates otherwise.)

b) Be prohibited from identifying an off-label therapeutic as not acceptable for a medical practitioner to prescribe for a condition, where the medical practitioner determines that there is reasonable scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness. (This misleading FDA webpageconvolutes self-medicating and/or humans using veterinary products [never advisable], with a medical practitioner prescribing IVM.)

c) Establish an EUA procedure for repurposed (esp. non-patented) pharmaceuticals, where they temporarily receive the FDA’s conditional blessing, while more comprehensive scientific testing is conducted. Not doing this would appear to be contrary to this statutory directive.

d) Have sizable funds specifically allocated and available to quickly pay for independent RCT testing of off-label options that have reasonable scientific evidence of their effectiveness and safety for a repurposed medical use. (See 21 USC Chapter 9, Subchapter V: §355g. Utilizing real-world evidence.)

e) Have a Consumer Advocate who does nothing but promote non-patented, re-purposed drugs to the FDA for review (especially in an emergency).

Yes, there are other concerns with the FDA, but if these changes could be properly made, they would be revolutionary. If you have any suggested improvements to this list, please post them below in the Comments. I will be passing them on to RFK Jr.

©2024 All rights reserved.

Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:

I am now offering incentives for you to sign up new subscribers!

I also consider reader submissions on Critical Thinking on my topics of interest.

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

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