Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 was about the mindset shift - recognizing that the way to lower health care costs is to need less health care, and that your mind is the most powerful healing tool you own. Part 2 is what to do when something’s actually wrong and a white coat isn’t your first call. Part 3 is about when you genuinely need conventional care, and how to get it without a hospital system bankrupting you or making things worse.

When last I last left you, I was making the case that the best way to lower health care costs in the U.S. is living like a human, and the health that follows. Real food, real sleep, real sunlight, real movement, real people in your life. When we can pull this off, a shocking number of problems simply never show up asking to be “fixed.” But given that you’re operating inside a human body living in a toxic world, sooner or later, something is going to break anyway.

This article is about what to consider when you know something’s wrong. It’s real, it hurts, and every instinct you’ve had installed since childhood is coaching you to just go to the doctor.

If you’re reading this, you already know that the system conditions us to outsource our healing to authorities and experts in white coats, to rely on the conventional doctors and hospitals covered by our insurance plans.

You also already know this system, and the “authority” and “expertise” we pay it to provide us, has presided over the last century of medicine, coincidentally the same period during which we have become the sickest, fattest, saddest, most anxious, most infertile population in human history. We are facing extinction-level chronic illness rates.

The solution to these problems won’t be found in the health care system that’s failed to prevent or reverse them at best, and that profits from and contributes to them at worst.

Of course, if you have a bullet in your belly, or a bone sticking out, a heart that’s stopped beating, or some other serious mechanical problem, there is no place you’d rather be than an American emergency department. But if it’s not an emergency, there may be alternative approaches outside the system worth consideration.

As I described in Part 1 with my own aches and pains, and my encroaching vision issues, that means breaking the habit of getting on the orthopedic surgery superhighway, avoiding diagnostic imaging (aka hex-casting), and not assuming that certain symptoms (like vision loss) are just inevitable with aging.

There are alternative pathways.

There are practitioners like homeopaths, classical osteopaths, traditional naturopaths, acupuncturists and holistic-minded chiropractors. There are also conventionally trained practitioners who have chosen treatment strategies that are outside the mainstream, like the neuro-optometry clinic I described in Part I, the formerly-licensed MDs who now practice at the New Biology Clinic, or integrative oncology centers who use many more tools than traditional poison/cut/burn cancer protocols.

But I’m here to confirm just one more thing you likely already know - when you step beyond the white coat, it’s the wild, wild west. I mean that as both a warning and an encouragement. There are healers doing things that will genuinely blow your mind. There are also people who will happily separate you from thousands of dollars while accomplishing nothing. And there is no directory, no referral system, no friendly gatekeeper to sort them for you.

The gatekeeper is YOU. (Which, if Part 1 landed at all, is obviously exactly how it should be.)

Six Questions Before You Hand Anyone Your Body (or Your Wallet)

Every practitioner on earth - licensed or not, ancient tradition or invented last year - is situated somewhere on a continuum, or several. Knowing where you want to be on each continuum is half the battle.

Let’s go through the process I go through when evaluating a practitioner I might want to engage with.

1. Who’s in charge here?

The white coat system operates on submission. You’re the child. They’re the adults. They have all the power and all the expertise, they make all the decisions, and if you disobey, you get shamed (and sometimes punished) for it. That’s one end of the authority continuum. We won’t go that far.

The other end is full agency: the practitioner contributes structure and guidance, but you run your own healing. This may be too much agency for many beginners.

But neither end is inherently wrong. If you’re fresh out of the conventional system, the expert-authority model may be what makes you feel safe - and feeling safe is itself therapeutic (I wrote about your brain’s bootleg pharmacy here). You’ll migrate along the continuum over time. Everyone does, but figure out where you are on the spectrum and what type of help you are looking for - today - before you go searching.

2. What is their license actually worth?

Something you might not have thought about is that a licensed practitioner’s actual client is the state.

The state has total power over that practitioner’s livelihood, so he’s going to be careful, and you will get a bit more governmental groupthink out of the licensed ones - not because they are evil, but because they’re humans with kids and mortgages of their own. In exchange, you get some degree of accountability (as in, a licensure board to complain to) and a much better shot at insurance coverage. That’s the trade off. There’s no right answer, just know what you’re buying.

Beyond licensure, there are certifications (which are of course a mixed bag - though I confess a soft spot for practitioners who never stop taking courses) and then there’s experience. Some of the best healers out there have no letters after their name at all. They got good the old-fashioned way: by doing it, over and over, on real humans who left a trail of glowing testimonials.

3. What do they think a symptom IS - and what are they measuring?

This divides the entire healing world. Camp one: symptoms are pathology, something has gone wrong, and the job is to make it stop. Camp two: symptoms are adaptations - your body doing something right in response to a toxin or a threat - and the symptom is the visible part of that response.

Notice: are they chasing your lab values, your waistline, or the radical metric of whether you actually feel good and function well? Some practitioners won’t rest until your bloodwork is beautiful even if you feel fine. Others take the view that if you’re thriving, we’re not going hunting for reasons you shouldn’t be. There are merits to both. Just know which one you’re hiring, and which one you need. (I’ve had my own “I don’t care what the root cause is, I need to function tomorrow” moments. I’m not judging you.)

4. How do they know what they know?

Holistic practitioners aren’t anti-science.

Many of them just value ways of knowing beyond randomized controlled trials. Things like observation of nature, thousands of years of accumulated clinical pattern-matching, and intuition. Meanwhile, the trial-and-evidence crowd will tell you exactly what the latest study did and didn’t show (although often they fail to notice the garbage study design). This can be genuinely valuable, right up until you remember who funds most of the trials and how negative trials don’t get published in the journals.

As a practitioner, I try to consider it all. But everyone has a bias here, including your humble correspondent. Ask about theirs. You need to know.

5. How rigid is their framework?

An acupuncturist operates inside Traditional Chinese Medicine, a gorgeous, ancient, meticulously mapped system. She is not going to give you stretching exercises or prescription meds, because that’s not her framework. An energy healer may not notice that your elbow hurts because the bone is fractured, because fractures aren’t in her framework. Just like the functional medical doctor is going to lab you into oblivion and might miss the childhood trauma at the root of your autoimmunity.

The single most practical thing I can tell you is to understand what each practitioner sells, and don’t go trying to buy eggs at the hardware store. The hardware store sells hardware. It will not notify you that it’s out scope. It will simply keep speaking with authority. Knowing the boundaries of someone’s framework is your job, not theirs.

6. Is the healing done TO you, or BY you?

Some modalities are receptive. You lie there and you receive - bodywork, sound, frequency, prayer, laying on of hands. Others are active (eg, nobody can do your breathwork for you).

They both matter.

In fact, receiving matters more than our do-it-yourself culture wants to admit because a lot of what turns your symptoms on in the first place is running on subconscious processes, things like fight-or-flight programs responding to threats you’re barely aware of. Your conscious mind can’t switch off what it can’t see. Receptive modalities can rattle loose what your conscious mind can’t yet reach.

My strong recommendation is to pair one active modality with one receptive one. Because it’s very possible that the combination outperforms either alone.

And now, finally, the who’s-who, from most familiar (feels like a doctor’s office, only better) to the most woo (you’re running the show).

The descriptions of practitioner types in the Field Guide below are stereotypes, lovingly deployed. Individual practitioners vary wildly, which is why you’ll be doing homework on every single one.

Next: The Field Guide.

Everything above this line was deconstructing how to think. Everything below is about knowing who to call.

In The Field Guide I outline the entire landscape from functional MDs and classical osteopaths (sorcerers, I’m not kidding) to homeopaths, naturopaths, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic practitioners, herbalists, craniosacral therapists, energy workers, formerly licensed physicians, and the full-woo frontier.

Plus, how this works with insurance (and how it doesn’t) as well as a few cheap back doors and my field-tested rules for not getting fleeced. Paid subscribers get the full download.

(If you’re not joining us for this next part, no hard feelings - I’ll see you next week for Part 3: what to do when you genuinely need conventional care, maybe even a hospital, without letting the Soviet-style hellscape known as your local hospital bankrupt you.)

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Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Everyone from the White House to your HR department is trying to figure out how to lower health care costs. They’re mostly asking the wrong question. The real answer isn’t about financing mechanisms or which insurance company gets the contract. The way to lower health care costs is to need less health care. Part 1 is about the mindset shift that makes that possible. Part 2 is about what to do when something’s actually wrong - and the system isn’t your first call. Part 3 is about when you genuinely need a hospital, and how to choose one that won’t bankrupt you or make things worse.

It had been the hardest “leg day” with my trainer I’d ever done.

I was proud of myself.

But later that day, the inside of my knee started hurting badly. It was brutal. I couldn’t even bend my knee without sharp pain, even touching it hurt. Knees, it turns out, are load-bearing. Inconvenient. I figured resting and elevating would help. But when it didn’t, of course, I started researching. The symptoms matched the signs of a meniscus tear, and my chiropractor later confirmed he suspected the same.

The usual treatment for this injury is meniscus repair surgery - where the doctor “shaves” the frayed ends of the torn meniscus. But I remembered how often, when surgery for various ailments was put to the most rigorous standard of a randomized controlled trial using “sham surgery” in the control group, outcomes from the placebo effect were often equally effective.

A few weeks later, the 10-year follow up report from the FIDELITY study of long-term outcomes from meniscus repair (the “shaving” procedure) surgery compared to sham surgery controls, would come out in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrating that the treatment was no better and probably worse than the sham surgery, both in the short and long term outcomes of interest. At this point, I hadn’t seen that study. I’d only seen enough similar ones to know that my mind was the most powerful healing tool and that it should at least be tried before heading into surgery.

Because of this, I didn’t even want to get an MRI to confirm my diagnosis.

Many MRI studies have shown that “abnormalities” appear in asymptomatic people so frequently that MRIs are not particularly useful in determining the cause of symptoms. However, MRIs are extremely useful at making you think the abnormality is the cause of your symptoms and getting you to pursue high-revenue surgical and other treatments.

In other words, an MRI finding can serve as a “hex” that makes you blame your symptom on some structural defect or injury or degeneration and assume that only an expensive white coat can “fix” it. This is disempowering thinking in the extreme, and unsupported in many cases by the evidence.

I didn’t want my mind polluted with the notion that my body couldn’t heal itself before I’d given it a chance.

So I rejected the hex.

I went regularly to a chiropractor and an acupuncturist for a few weeks. Their manipulations brought good circulation and energy to the location, followed by symptom relief - often temporary or slow. But after about two months, I was 95% better. Four months later, I could barely feel anything there at all.

My mind is frigging amazing. So is yours.

The Real Answer to the Cost Crisis

Health care costs are eating our economy.

It’s a multi-trillion dollar industry that is nearly a fifth of the GDP. Every business, every state Medicaid director, every family at the kitchen table - we’re all sucking wind from the gut punch of health care bills.

Our solutions are generally in the same genre: financing.

Who pays? How do we shift costs to someone else? Which middlemen can we cut out? These are legitimate questions and I’ve spent most of my career on them (including my current day job as a CEO building ethical health plans for employers). But admittedly, they’re deck chairs.

The ship is sinking because Americans are sicker than we’ve ever been - and getting sicker by the day with chronic disease driving roughly 90 percent of our health care spending. You can’t finance your way out of a demand problem. We can shuffle who writes the check, but when the demand keeps rising, the supply will get more and more expensive.

But what if some fraction of us just needed less care?

The benefits might even go beyond saving the country money. Real agency would invigorate the Don’t-Tread-On-Me American spirit. And it wouldn’t take everyone - a minority could make a huge difference. That kind of shift starts in our mind before it takes effect on our body and our wallet.

So, Back to My Aches and Pains

I’m now dealing with a similar situation with a hip/groin muscle pain.

My hip feels like it constantly needs stretching and that starts to hurt when I’m walking a while. If I don’t rest, it becomes debilitating pretty quickly. I did some acupuncture. But then I discovered something much more effective. Something that sounds so unhinged, I’m slightly embarrassed to type it. If I stop focusing on the pain in the area and instead imagine what it would be like to be completely free from pain, and repeat a certain mantra, I can turn the pain immediately off.

The mantra alone isn’t the trick - it’s choosing to feel the feelings I’d feel if the mantra were true. The mantra is: “my muscles and joints are as limber, flexible and fluid as a child’s.” This isn’t just repeating something I don’t believe. It’s choosing to imagine what it would be like - what it would feel like - if it were really true. When I do this, the pain - literally instantly - disappears. This lets me walk further than I could before, and meanwhile work on the actual root cause - core weakness - by strengthening everything around the area.

I know how this sounds. I’m a health policy type, not a crystal-waving shaman. And yet. I’m not saying this will work in all cases, just that it has been extremely helpful for me.

The Vision Thing

Another thing your mind does - it sees.

My vision was disability-grade for the first part of my life until I got LASIK in both eyes in my 30s. Fifteen years of perfect vision followed and I was super spoiled. Then a few years ago, the nearsightedness started developing again and getting a little worse over time. I refused to give in to this, and I would only wear glasses when it was essential in certain situations.

I also noticed that my vision wasn’t uniformly the same all the time. Better in the sun. Better outside, full stop. Better off screens. Some days, perfect at sunrise; some days, terrible. This was data that challenged the programming I’d absorbed since childhood: stronger prescription every year, nothing you can do, just keep buying new glasses like a good little patient.

I learned about the Bates Method, a series of exercises that helps improve your vision.

And I discovered an alternative, out-of-the-system neuro-optometrist who has put the Bates Method on steroids and, through intensive and consistent exercises that challenge and exhaust my eyes, is beating back the creeping myopia monster that would otherwise be coming for my vision. The philosophy behind the program is that it’s your brain that sees, not your eyeballs. Your eyes are merely the receivers of the signal, it’s your brain that organizes that signal. With practice, your brain can do a better job. Vision happens in the brain and the mind can train it.

I’m beginning to suspect we’re all Jedis in waiting.

I don’t share all these stories to engage in medical exhibitionism or to present myself as some sort of guru who doesn’t understand the agonizing symptoms you’re having. Sometimes the symptoms are so bad that you need some mechanical or pharmaceutical relief while you’re working on your Jedi mind tricks.

This is a work in progress for me too.

I rolled an ankle recently and was in such agonizing pain that I popped two Advils along with my homeopathic Arnica remedy. That ankle healed overnight - literally - and I won’t pretend it was all Arnica and not the Advil. (I have documented at length how dependent I was on Advil in my excruciating pre-menopausal years.)

Now, I’m not suggesting that you should meditate your way out of cancer or Alzheimer’s. Once you’re down the road of a serious illness, it can be difficult or impossible to overcome the system’s programming and take on an illness in a radical way, outside the system.

For most people, the time to swim isn’t when you’re drowning.

The fact is, many of us are deeply committed to dependence on the health care system, despite the evidence that it has failed to reverse the diseases that are actually killing most of us. Most people hit the urgent care or the doctor with every complaint, small or large, and do exactly what that doctor says, take every pill he prescribes, and undergo every procedure he orders. That’s what I did for most of my life.

But what we don’t often stop and consider is that this instant symptom suppression system robs us of the opportunity to let our bodies finish what they’re trying to do - more complete healing. Almost all medical systems older than a few hundred years - such as Ayurvedic, Traditional Chinese and homeopathic frameworks teach insistently that when we suppress symptoms, they burrow down into a deeper organ system than they started, creating more significant illness. Eczema turns into asthma, which turns into an autoimmune condition and similar patterns.

It’s also how we got to a state where half the population are medicated just to get through the day. One in four of us are on three drugs or more. And about a seventh of us are on five or more, according to the CDC. Even more heartbreaking is the impact on children - almost a third of school-aged kids now have a chronic illness.

We spend more on our failing “health care” system than any country in the history of humanity. A report put out by a Johns Hopkins research team (full disclosure, I’m also a co-author) revealed that almost half - HALF - of taxpayer money goes to health care programs.

Now some of us genuinely believe the system is the only thing keeping us alive - a drug cocktail, a surgery, a procedure that’s holding something catastrophic at bay. Those people are not my primary audience here. And they may well be right.

Maybe the drugs, radiation, surgeries, stents, amputations, dialysis and organ transplants really and truly have saved their lives, once the health conditions requiring those responses were well established in the body. Many of them may have a good case to make.

Then there’s another set of people who wrongly credit medical treatments for saving their lives, but their bodies are healing in spite of the system’s interventions. And their minds are just as powerful as all human minds are, which means that their bodies might be responding to all this intervention, in part, because of that belief. (I wrote about that phenomenon here.)

I’m not interested in taking medical treatment away from anyone, nor am I trying to talk people out of what they think is (and what might actually be) critically important medical intervention. No. Instead, the more appropriate time for a radical mindset shift is before the system programming and all its interventions have their clutches too deeply into us. Before we’re totally dependent, either by virtue of reality or perception (or both).

We don’t need everyone’s buy-in to save America from health care insolvency.

If even 10 or 20 percent of Americans chose to opt out of the system whenever possible (like for non-urgent, non-life or limb threatening situations), that might be enough to change the fiscal and clinical trajectory our country is on.

What do I mean by “opt out of the system?”

There’s a continuum of system involvement.

First, let’s stipulate that when you have a life-threatening emergency, you should seek emergency stabilization, of course. But on the other end of the continuum, for most health conditions that arise, you can seek methods for healing outside the system. And in between, there’s the harm reduction approach, where you use the system when necessary - but the least harmful version possible.

Here’s the playbook in three parts:

1. Prevent illness by living like a human. We have species-specific requirements for food, hydration, sleep, movement, sunlight, contact with nature, tribal connection and spiritual practice. In this way we can minimize the health problems that arise in the first place.

2. Treat non-emergency health problems outside the conventional system, whenever possible (we will cover alternative options in Part 2 of this series).

3. When you truly need conventional medical care for non-emergencies, get it anywhere but a hospital system (more on that in Part 3 of this series).

Step One: Live Like a Human

A lot of our health problems arise because we don’t want to invest time, money and energy into our health. We live in a quick-fix, outsourced-authority, comfort-forward culture where if something bad happens in our life, we want some expert to turn it around as quickly and painlessly as possible.

That means that we a) “medicate” our problems away - so we don’t have to feel unpleasant feelings or think unpleasant thoughts. We do this with food, booze, sex, and escapist entertainment such as social media, TV, video games, porn. When the results of this stress suppression come for us, we b) medicate the problems created by our previous “medicating” our problems - we want a pill, a surgery, a life-hack.

But we already know that things that matter the most and that are the most valuable in life require major investments of time, energy and money.

Most of us have already bowed to this reality.

We worked our asses off in school or by paying dues on the job to get to a place where we can reliably pay our bills and achieve financial security. That security is worth the sacrifices we made and continue to make.

Another example is parenting. Having children, while it starts in a pretty fun way, will absolutely destroy you in ways you couldn’t have predicted. And most of us would do it again without blinking, because there is no greater value than children, their success and opportunities and the joy of grandchildren. Also, the bragging rights.

Many of us place a high premium on eternal life too - as well we should - after all, it’s a hell of a lot longer than our earthly life, pun intended. Many of us sacrifice mightily throughout life to pursue spiritual growth and fulfillment - through our time, money, and self-denial.

So why do we think that something as valuable as our health should require less? Part of the answer is that we’ve been gaslit by the white coat religious cult that they are the priests and they are the experts and they have the magical elixirs and that no one else on earth has any wisdom, expertise, or authority over your health except them. This is dangerous voodoo that will get you an early death.

First of all, no doctor cares about you even a fraction of how much you care about yourself.

Second, as we’ve documented extensively in this space, many doctors do a lot of quackery.

• “Don’t worry about that myocarditis, sleeves up, mate.”

• “Just take hormonal birth control for twenty years and that endometriosis definitely won’t ruin your fertility.”

• “Eggs are definitely bad for you.”

• “Don’t give your toddler peanut butter or he’ll get peanut allergies.”

• “Fetal monitoring definitely is associated with better birth outcomes.”

• “This surgery is definitely better than placebo effect.”

And on and on with many other lies, damn lies and other statistics.

And God forbid you end up in a hospital, where very little improves and you’re lucky to escape better off than you came in, if you escape at all. People often ask me, having been lobbied by all the health care special interests during my time in government, who the biggest Bond villains are in health care. It’s the so-called “nonprofit” hospital systems, not even close.

Third, the business model is aligned against our own priorities.

Most doctors and all hospitals are paid only when sick people show up for a visit. While I’m not saying that your doctor is out to get you, the entire health care industry does better when you’re sick, you’re sick for life, and they charge you high prices to do stuff. But you want to be healthy, to get better quickly when you’re sick, and to pay less. So these sets of values are mutually exclusive - only one can win.

The good news is - you have WAY more power than you think to avoid some of the most common illnesses that steal your quality of life.

As I mentioned earlier, we have species-specific requirements for food (real, not fake, found in nature, un-poisoned), hydration (un-poisoned), sleep (7-9 hrs), movement (way more than you are now), sunlight (in abundance starting in the morning, without glass between you), contact with nature (frequent), tribal connection (daily) and spiritual practice (consistent).

These are not optional. They aren’t “wellness tips.” They are the operating requirements of the human animal. Neglect them long enough and you will get sick. Stay sick long enough and you will die early. The medical system will be delighted to help you do both, at great expense to you and your estate.

The MAHA movement, including its policy agenda, is largely focused on this. To be honest, if this were all we all ever focused on, I would still call that a major win.

I’m a work in progress here, so don’t feel judged. I still drink Diet Coke too much - though regular readers will be proud that I no longer keep it in the house. Getting to sleep on time is still a struggle some nights. And well, I like Nutella, Ben and Jerry’s, and pizza way more than I feel comfortable admitting.

But since changing my mindset to take radical agency over my own health, many things have changed in my life. My biggest win has been figuring out how to stay disciplined with workouts - a lifelong struggle until my late 40s. And we now only bring organic food into our house, so our toxic exposure has been dramatically reduced.

You will have your own struggles and your own wins. But the mindset is everything here. Recognizing just how much of our health is in our control and choosing to guard that health as one of life’s greatest duties will change more than just your health - it’ll change your life.

Nota bene: there are so many conflicting and contradictory messages out there about food, hydration, movement, etc, that when you start to try to take control, you will be confused and won’t know exactly which philosophy to adopt. All I can say is to just start with what resonates and makes sense to you. As you experiment and are moving forward, it’s ok if your approach shifts over time - expect it, even.

(If you want help sorting through the noise, that’s what I’m here for!)

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Nobody’s coming to save us from Washington, DC. There’s no revolution to be found in your insurance card or your doctor’s office.

The real revolution is the moment you stop assuming your body is broken and start asking what it’s trying to tell you. The future of American health care system depends less on what that system does next than on what each of us does tomorrow morning.

FDA has just tipped its hand on peptides, and the hand is a losing one for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who depend on naturally-occurring, non-patentable peptides to relieve pain, heal injury, speed recovery, and generally improve health.

The agency just released a briefing memo laying out its intention NOT to allow peptides to be authorized for sale by pharmacy compounders.

Despite the fact that there’s a critical meeting of the FDA’s Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC) on July 23-24, and despite the fact that relevant evidence for that meeting isn’t due to be submitted by either proponents or opponents of peptides until July 9th, the FDA has pre-determined its decision.

Now, to be clear, FDA is not bound to take the advice of the committee.

Even if every health-optimized peptide enthusiast bikes, swims, or sprints to the meeting from across the country and storms the meeting in barefoot shoes and organic boxer shorts.

But it’s pretty defiant that the FDA didn’t even pretend to consider public input on the question before telling the world that they fully intend to deny Americans access to these peptides.

Sadly, it’s unusual for the agency to change its mind once they’ve committed pen to paper like this.

Even though they’re about to receive the data from three US-based randomized controlled trials showing flawless safety data on American study subjects. Even though the president’s pet pollster has made it abundantly clear that approving peptides polls at above 60% among Republicans, Democrats and Independents, especially among middle-aged women - a critically needed demographic.

Peptides Rv Survey Memo 6 29 2026

1.12MB ∙ PDF file

Download

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Even though ground zero for peptide use and manufacture is in Texas, where Republican Senate candidate is in the race of his life and could use the help.

Nonetheless, I’m told by multiple sources that White House staffer Heidi Overton MD, a health advisor on the Domestic Policy Council, gave the green light to FDA on this position. Public release of the agency position - pushed by Pharma-friendly deep staters at the FDA - came as a shock to the (slightly) more MAHA-sensitive FDA political leadership.

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This seems like yet another gift to Big Pharma, who doesn’t want competition from compounding pharmacies creating useful products, based on natural substances, and selling them directly to consumers outside the insurance system.

Perhaps one explanation is that PhRMA - the industry’s powerhouse lobbying group - is apparently on the hunt for a new top lobbyist. Rumors are swirling that half the brain trust of the top health officials in the administration have applied for the $8 million a year job. Interviews start next week. Guess we’ll all have to sweat out the MAHA betrayals until the horse race is over. Sigh.

Right now - as in, at the very moment of publication - a group of economists and pharma-friendly policy types are sitting down to lunch, bankrolled by Pfizer (I was told privately), in Washington, D.C. to discuss a draft Executive Order (EO) that would hand the pharmaceutical industry everything it has ever wanted and then some.

I was invited to this lunch.

I sent my deepest regrets. I’m writing this instead.

The event is hosted by Unleash Prosperity Now, the think tank founded by Steve Forbes. The featured guests are Steve Moore (former presidential economic advisor) and Tomas Philipson (former Acting Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, and apparently the academic health economist behind this draft EO).

Now you might be wondering why any of us should care what a roomful of think-tankers, Pharma bros and ex-Trump advisors say to each other over lunch on Pfizer’s dime.

The very real concern is that these aren’t cranks shouting into the void. The powerful people who show up in rooms like this are serious players with strong ties to senior officials at the White House, at HHS, and the president himself.

And those ties aren’t just hypothetical. A draft cooked up by outsiders becomes real policy when someone on the inside thinks it has merit, picks it up and runs with it. One day it’s being passed around a salon luncheon. The next, it’s got the president’s signature on it.

I know, because I have my own version of that story. It’s how price transparency came to be. Pointing out this method isn’t a knock on anyone. It’s how good policy gets made, too. The difference is what’s getting pushed. That one was a populist issue, despised by industry interests, that polled at 90 percent with voters. This one is a wish list for Big Pharma and Well-Connected Biotech. Paid for by Pfizer.

It’s billed as “an intimate salon luncheon” to discuss “the extraordinary economic promise of curing cancer” and “modernizing the FDA so that regulatory pathways keep pace with today’s scientific realities.” Who could be against curing cancer or keeping up with science? I know this language.

I’ve spoken this language. I know the free-marketeering policy that it is code for - which I very often have agreed with over the past couple decades in conservative policymaking. But the Shakespearean flaw of laissez-faire economics is its knee-jerk defense of private industry interests in health care - even when, as in the case of the past decade or so, that industry has become increasingly indefensible.

So I read what’s actually being proposed. Then I read it again, because I couldn’t believe my eyes.

And then I wrote 34 ranting comments in the margins.

The metadata of the draft EO lists Tomas as its author, which of course doesn’t mean he doesn’t have other collaborators. I worked alongside Tomas in the first Trump White House. He’s committed, credentialed, and about as laissez-faire as they come - a University of Chicago health economist who made his bones arguing for policies just like those in the draft EO - less and less FDA as the key to more and more Pharma products.

The draft EO was attached to the invitation to this lunch as the actual subject matter to be discussed. It has a name: Advancing Cost-Cutting Treatments and Diagnostics for Old-Age Populations through “Operation Warp Speed 2.0.”

(Paid subscribers can read it for yourselves here.)

Where to Even Begin

Before we get into the substance, the name alone will doom this proposal with public opinion.

The president gets booed at his own rallies, by his most diehard supporters, when he brings up Operation Warp Speed. There is no constituency in the United States - not Republican, not Democrat, not MAHA, not libertarian, not the guy who got the shot or the guy who didn’t - who is enthusiastic about resurrecting that program. Operation Warp Speed and all it delivered to the world is one of the most politically radioactive policy episodes of the last decade, and whoever suggested that branding either doesn’t read the news or wants the president’s polling to crater.

But the name is obviously just the first of many tone-deaf self-owns in this document. Let’s go section by section.

The Founding Myth

The EO’s opening premise is that medical innovation is the key to controlling the federal debt. If we just cure cancer and Alzheimer’s, the argument goes, we won’t have to cut Medicare - we’ll have a healthier population that doesn’t need as much of it.

This sounds good. And if we actually cured Alzheimer’s, cancer, and the other diseases consuming Medicare’s budget, it would be true. But pharmaceutical innovation and disease elimination are not the same thing.

We have had unfathomable medical innovation over the past century. More drugs, more devices, more diagnostics, more interventions than any previous civilization could have imagined. And what do we have to show for it on a population level? We are chronically sicker, fatter, more mentally ill, and more infertile than any previous generation in human history. The extinction-level chronic disease crisis that is actually bankrupting Medicare is not a failure of pharmaceutical innovation. It is the predictable outcome of dehumanized, unbiological lives - of industrial poisons masquerading as food, sedentary routines disconnected from nature, epidemic sleep deprivation, chemical exposures, and severed social bonds.

Medical innovation is not the answer to these problems. It is, at best, an increasingly expensive way to manage their consequences while the causes go unaddressed. Even if you concede that some drugs are keeping people with significant disease alive a little longer - which may be true - that would only perversely drive costs up, as these expensive new therapies generally manage or extend decline during the most expensive end-of-life years, but don’t cure.

And the dirty little secret is that “innovation” has become the industry’s word for obscene launch prices.

When a drug company insists that a new therapy deserves a $400,000 annual price tag, they justify it by saying - there was R&D involved, there were trials, there was a regulatory process. What they are not telling you is how much of that R&D was publicly funded, how taxpayers will be footing the bill for these products used by Medicare beneficiaries, and yet, how completely the profit is privatized once the product hits the market.

If the past is any preview of the future, there is no universe in which this dynamic controls the federal debt. It accelerates it.

The EO describes Operation Warp Speed (v.1.0) as an inspiration. I’d like to offer some alternative framings:

The tens of thousands of deaths attributed to the vaccines. The epidemic of myocarditis in young people. More than a million adverse events reported to government surveillance systems called V-safe and VAERS. The Pfizer trial in which there were more deaths in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group - and we approved the product anyway, because Warp Speed. The systematic delegitimization of existing treatments that might have helped people but were made of molecules too old to be profitable.

I’m not interested in re-litigating the entire COVID response here (though you can read more of my thoughts on it elsewhere). But if the lesson your team drew from that experience is “let’s do that again, but for cancer,” you’ve spent too much time in the faculty lounge.

The Structure - Who’s Running This Thing?

The EO would establish an Operation Warp Speed (OWS) 2.0 Steering Committee to be headed by Secretary Kennedy and his key agency heads.

Secretary Kennedy.

You know, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Who literally wrote a book trashing OWS 1.0.

The Steering Committee gets better. It also explicitly includes pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, among others, who would direct and oversee the OWS activities.

In other words, the regulated entities would sit on the committee telling the regulators what to do.

This isn’t a new idea. It is, in fact, the defining feature of regulatory capture - the thing that RFK Jr. has spent decades fighting, the thing that MAHA exists to dismantle, the thing that former Commissioner Marty Makary named as a foundational problem when he walked into the FDA, long before he was shown the door.

The EO summons another agency to the Steering Committee: BARDA, aka the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. You know, the shadowy, Pentagon-adjacent slush fund dressed up in public health clothing where sole-source contracts, guaranteed taxpayer pre-payment for unproven technologies, and relationships of unusual coziness with favored companies have determined who gets billions and who doesn’t.

What could possibly go wrong?

But the Operation Warp Speed (OWS) 2.0 Steering Committee isn’t the only committee this EO would establish.

The New “Advisory Committee on Expanding the FDA Mandate Beyond All Recognition”

Ok, that’s not really the name.

The EO would also create a permanent FDA Advisory Committee on Economic Innovation and Impact - a body of health economists, regulatory experts, industry representatives, biomedical entrepreneurs, and (for cover) patient advocates. The committee would be tasked with evaluating the economic consequences of FDA regulatory decisions and would require the FDA to respond in writing to any finding it declines to adopt.

Let me translate this: instead of asking whether a drug meets the scientific standard for approval, FDA would be pressured to ask whether enforcing that standard might hurt the industry’s (or anyone else’s) economic interests.

FDA’s statutory mandate from Congress is to protect the public from dangerous and ineffective products. Full stop. It is not to goose the GDP or pom-pom American biomedical competitiveness. It is not to weigh the complex economic ripple effects of its safety determinations. It is not to answer to industry representatives who are unhappy that their products didn’t get approved fast enough or that their garbage data were uncompelling.

The idea that an agency entirely organized around making scientific determinations about medical products has the institutional competence to accurately model all the downstream economic consequences of its licensure decisions is, charitably, delusional. No government agency could pull off such a sweeping set of mandates. And more to the point: we shouldn’t want it to try.

Picture the committee - stacked with regulated companies and their pals, now empowered to demand that their regulators consider the economic harm to their companies as part of the drug approval process. FDA’s independence has been in question for quite a while - in the last year, it’s been on life support. This would render it a complete fiction.

The draft EO reassures us that the committee members would be subject to “standard federal conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements.” But this is a joke - the committee is conflicted by design. The purpose of putting industry on the committee is to have industry’s interest overtly represented and to bully the FDA scientists with it.

Also worth imagining: this committee gets inherited by a future administration with completely different politics. Imagine President AOC, who decides that a drug’s anticipated launch price is itself grounds for withholding licensure. Because, economic impact. You’ve just built them the playbook - congratulations.

The Regulatory “Modernization” (Read: Weak-sauce Safety Trials)

Under the advice and oversight of all these committees, the draft EO would require:

• Creating fast-track pathways that cut development and approval costs by at least 50% while “maintaining standards of safety and efficacy.” You can’t cut the cost and time of safety evaluation by half and then claim you haven’t touched the standards. Sufficient follow-up time to detect safety signals IS the standard.

• Approving drugs that show “favorable safety with limited efficacy data” and then “further confirm safety and efficacy” later, by collecting more data after approval. But of course, shorter timelines make it less likely that we’ll know anything at all about safety, not more. This is the same trade the industry always wants: weaken and shorten pre-licensure requirements in exchange for post-licensure promises. Once a drug is on the market and a manufacturer blows off its post-market obligations, FDA is quite hamstrung in terms of what it can do without incurring the wrath of lawsuits and patient revolt. I don’t want to have to “further confirm” safety after licensure. I want safety fully confirmed before licensure. That used to be the whole point.

• Establishing a quota: prioritize approval of at least three breakthrough therapeutics by June 2028. This is not how regulatory science is supposed to work. If products meet the statutory standard, they get approved. If they don’t, they don’t. Setting an approval quota in advance is just explicit pressure on regulators to cut corners to meet the number. If you don’t believe me, ask Drs. Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, Tracy Beth Høeg, and every other FDA scientist who has faced industry pressure to lower their standards.

• Streamlining biomarker validation and surrogate endpoints for drug approvals. In other words, use change in some lab result as the outcome studied in the trial instead of, you know, actual improvement in health or mortality. I will be generous here: there are some biomarkers that are genuinely well-validated and useful as surrogate outcomes. But the track record on aggressive use of surrogates to speed approvals is not inspiring. Too many drugs approved this way improved the surrogate but were later discovered to have no impact on the clinical outcome (or to make it worse). Oncology drugs approved on progression-free survival that never demonstrated improved overall survival. The Aduhelm debacle for Alzheimer’s. The emerging scientific consensus - supported by decades of hard experience - is moving toward more rigor on surrogate validation, not less. This EO proposes to move in the opposite direction, and it does so, not because the science supports it, but because it lowers costs for drug makers.

Taxpayers as Insurance Policy and Piggy Bank

The EO directs NIH, BARDA, and the VA to use their contracting authority to “support late-stage trials and secure early access to promising candidates.”

If you don’t speak pharma gibberish, that means: transfer the financial risk of pharmaceutical R&D from private companies - who will capture all the profit - onto taxpayers, who will capture none of it. The companies bear the upside. The American public bears the downside. These frameworks have historically generated sole-source contracts, sweetheart deals for politically favored manufacturers, and guaranteed government pre-payment for unproven products.

As with so much else in this EO, we need less of this type of corruption, not more.

The Coverage Mandate

Buried in the coverage provisions is this: “CMS shall ensure that Medicare beneficiaries can access OWS 2.0-designated products within 30 days of FDA authorization.”

A drug gets FDA authorization under the accelerated approval pathway - meaning it has shown “favorable” safety (whatever that means) with limited efficacy data, remember - and within 30 days, Medicare must cover it. Before the “evidence development phase” tells us whether it actually works or has been followed long enough to be deemed safe.

This is guaranteed procurement by one of the planet’s largest single-payer systems, for under-scrutinized products at obscene launch prices, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury, with a 30-day clock that ensures there’s no time or leverage for the government to ask the hard questions or negotiate reasonable terms and conditions.

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans - especially Republican economists - argued that coverage mandates drive up the cost of health care.

And… Brace Yourself

Attention, MAHA: the draft EO calls for “ a rolling review process with clear timelines… similar to the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) framework.”

I admit, I froze in horror and wrote “OMG” in the margins before I calmed down and read this part more carefully. Charitably, I think the EUA reference is really just about how the reviews of potential new products are scheduled (on a rolling basis to make the process more real-time and supposedly more efficient). I don’t think the EO is intending to use the EUA reference as a dog-whistle for a liability protection racket for industry here. But talk about tone-deaf! Between the OWS branding and the EUA shout-out, my MAHA moms are going to be calling their homeopaths for an acute PTSD remedy.

A Word for Our Friends Inside the Administration

I’m told that some people from HHS attended this Pfizer lunch. I hope it’s not true, or if it is true, that they’re using it as an opportunity to laugh this draft EO out of the room.

I have to believe that the few MAHA faithful who remain in the administration after the industry-instigated purge of the past year - Secretary Kennedy, NIH and CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya, and White House health advisor Calley Means - have not seen this document. These are people who have staked their careers and reputations on the proposition that the pharmaceutical-regulatory complex has been captured, that safety standards have been compromised by industry pressure, that the government has been de-risking pharma’s business model on the public’s dime, and that we need to fight all of that with everything we have.

This executive order is the enemy they’ve been fighting. It’s what they came to Washington to stop.

You can’t simultaneously lead a Make America Healthy Again movement and then go sign an executive order that puts pharmaceutical companies in charge of a new Operation Warp Speed designed to weaken safety and efficacy standards, mandate Medicare coverage of under-scrutinized drugs, and claim it’s all in the service of “lower costs” (LOL).

Those things can ‘t coexist, and the political base that elected this president knows it.

The Actual Answer

The draft EO closes with gestures toward lifestyle modification and AI tools for “personalized preventive guidance.”

It’s an afterthought.

The industry interests at the “intimate salon luncheon” going on right now will likely deflect attention from the four leading risk factors for preventable chronic disease - garbage food, physical inactivity, tobacco use, and excessive booze. These account for more than half of all preventable disease deaths in the United States across cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes combined.

Folks, none of us suffers from an inborn pharmaceutical deficiency. What we suffer from is: not living like humans, for the past few generations.

Addressing these factors is hard. Much harder than turning a blind eye to unconvincing trial data and slapping an approval stamp on Pharma’s latest blockbuster. It requires taking on the food industry, the chemical industry, the seed oil lobby, the pharmaceutical companies that profit from managing the consequences of these diseases instead of preventing them. It requires telling Americans stuff that none of us wants to hear (You’re fat! Get off Diet Coke!). It requires regulators committed to protecting the public from misaligned industry interests rather than protecting industry from the public - public scrutiny, accountability and legal liability.

The cheapest disease to treat is the one that never develops in the first place. The biggest ROI is in prevention and lifestyle-mediated disease reversal, not weak-sauce symptom mitigation to manage and extend decline.

Nobody’s fooled by the pretense that this draft EO is about lowering costs for seniors and taxpayers. Throwing billions more at Pharma and transferring the R&D risk of drug development from them to us lowers nobody’s costs but Pharma’s.

The truth is that this policy is just craven regulatory capture and we have to make sure it never makes contact with the business end of President Trump’s pen.

Read more

The grace period is over. Enforcement begins now.

If that sounds obvious, it’s worth remembering that healthcare price transparency almost never happened at all.

There was a time when the idea that patients should know what medical care costs before receiving it was considered anti-capitalist, controversial, politically dangerous, and economically suspect.

I know because I was there. Here’s how it all went down.

(This story was originally published November 24, 2025)

Inside the White House War Over Ending Secret Health Care Prices

The first-hand play-by-play of how price transparency almost died in the cradle.

Price transparency is working. Not how most people expected. Better actually.

But I’ll have much more to say about that soon.

In the meantime, let me explain how it all kicked off with this price transparency business.

Back in the day, there were only a few supporters for ending secret health care prices inside the first Trump administration.

And I mean a VERY few (like count-on-one-hand few).

My first boss in the White House, and his boss, the president, were all in on price transparency.

They knew it was a bipartisan, 90 percent polling issue (that’s what we call #winning in politics). It also happened to be the right policy for reasons I’ll get to below. But, as it happens, my first boss abandoned me to become a fancy ambassador to… somewhere. Wherever. Not in the White House, having my back.

His successor, unfortunately, insisted that I convince a group of naysayers from various quarters within the building and from other agencies.

That group included a handful of free-marketeer bros with PhDs in economics, who looked pretty askance at this non-PhD, non-economist, must-be-a-lib chick. I had already earned their scorn the prior year by hand-wringing about the mid-term politics of trying to burn down the ACA.

We met weekly to discuss the academic literature about whether or not health care was the unicorn industry that would disprove the normally ironclad rule of economics: price competition lowers prices.

It felt silly — like trying to convince physicists that gravity is a thing.

Nevertheless, apparently this was controversial and the meetings dragged on, with the clock ticking loudly on the president’s term (little did we know just how short the window would be, with COVID-apalooza about to eat all other policy agendas).

I realized that something had to give, because I was outnumbered and the policy was stalling out.

Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had written a memo about why a price transparency Executive Order was crazy-talk.

Since my supportive boss left, the policy was on life support.

There was also this one study that kept coming up in the journal club and of course, in the hostile media, such as the Pharma-shilling Wall Street Journal. It was a study of the Danish cement industry — yes, Danish cement — that showed that when the government forced price transparency into the industry, prices for cement actually went up.

My allies on the Senate committee that oversees public health were so annoyed by the repeated and desperate citing of the stupid Danish cement canard that they had t-shirts made and sent one over to me, their sister in eye-rolling.

Given the aforementioned New, Less-Supportive Boss (NLSB), I knew my time was not much longer in the White House and things had to get rolling on this Executive Order. Despite the navel-gazing journal club and the WSJ industry shillery, I already knew the president loved the policy, and decided to make an end-run to get it into the State of the Union speech.

My thinking was that his word would be final and would put an end to the palace intrigue.

I managed to get a few paragraphs inserted into the draft a few days before the speech, announcing the policy, and arranged for an amazing guest to be acknowledged during the speech.

Her name was Wanda Brooks.

Wanda was a nursing home employee whose surprise $8,000 ER bill at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Va, had become a case study in predatory hospital billing. Wanda’s story was brought to my attention by Dr. Marty Makary (then Johns Hopkins surgeon and policy researcher and 2nd Trump term FDA Commissioner, now, regrettably, former Commissioner).

Unfortunately, the next draft of the speech that I saw had stripped all the price transparency stuff out — likely the work of the NLSB and the aforementioned economist caucus (I’m guessing, anyway).

Game on.

At that point, I put out the bat-signal for Cynthia Fisher.

Side-note about Cynthia Fisher, the zillionaire owner of Boston Beer Company, health care CEO, and fearless transparency advocate. Cynthia was the one who actually got me to take price transparency off the To-Do-At-Some-Point list and onto the Do-Right-Now list. Knowing how hard it was to get frenzied, over-scheduled staff to take a meeting, she played hard-ball. She brought my former boss, the incomparable Senator Tom Coburn, MD, then-retired but still feisty, to the party, knowing there was no way I’d be able to say no to him. When I worked for him, we had bickered like an old married couple, but the mutual affection and loyalty was unbreakable.

I spent the first half of the meeting doing what all staff always do in every meeting - I mentally rehearsed how I’d say no to the ask. The perennial problem of having way too much on our plate means we almost always say no to even the best ideas.

Then, halfway through the meeting, some switch inside my head flipped, and I said to myself: “You know this is the right thing to do. Why don’t you stop saying no and figure out how to get to a yes?”

And we were off to the races. Cynthia was and is a force of nature.

Cross her and she will bombard your email, your constituents, and the billboards in your Congressional district with compelling pro-transparency advertising, replete with Hollywood A-listers and heartbreaking stories from patients done dirty by surprise medical bills.

She never gave up — to this day — and she often seemed to have the president on speed-dial. She was FAFO before FAFO was a thing, and always with a winsome smile.

After HHS sent their price-transparency-is-stupid memo over to the White House, Cynthia found herself invited to an intimate dinner for business leaders with the president. When her turn to speak came up, she went all in on ending secret health care prices. The president, as we knew he would, loved it and told his team to get it done. Gladly! (What an amazing idea!)

So that’s why, months later, when I saw that my detailed take-down of secret health care prices and my call-out to Wanda had been stripped from the speech draft, I pulled out all the stops — Cynthia was my first call. I knew that her rolodex was more powerful than mine.

For my own part, I ran around the West Wing, cozying up to the more politically savvy types who understood the populist appeal of ending secret health care prices, like Kellyanne Conway and Mercedes Schlapp.

The speechwriters were holed up with the president, inaccessible to my harassment. So I pleaded with Derek Lyons, who wielded incredible power as Staff Secretary, possibly the littlest-known, most powerful role in the White House. The Staff Secretary’s office controls the flow of paper (including speeches) in the building and synthesizes all the edits everyone makes to that paper before it goes to the president or the public.

If Derek was persuaded, he could put his thumb on the scale in the draft.

Meanwhile, the New, Less Supportive Boss kept walking by these offices I was in (the building is much smaller than most people realize). He would do a double-take as he saw me, probably wondering what I was up to.

I waved and pretended to be casually chit-chatting.

There was no callout to Wanda and no fiery diatribe about the Health Care Swamp — but it was enough.

I knew that ONE sentence by the president of the United States would be powerful enough to move mountains, and would put an end to (at least the overt) internal opposition to price transparency going forward.

Not for nothing, a grateful nation should truly honor Cynthia for her heroic efforts, along with Dr. Marty Makary.

Marty’s book, The Price We Pay, is a classic for anyone learning the basics of health insurance and its actual impact on real people, the perverse incentives it creates and potential hacks of the corrupt system.

I sent all the naysaying political appointees around the government a copy of the book, which laid out — in the plainest English — the problems in our current insurance system — the so-called “free market” that Republicans thought existed, but didn’t.

A lot of their attitudes softened toward price transparency and the rest of the president’s populist health agenda after that.

As I had predicted, the president’s speech mention was the jet fuel the policy needed.

I eventually left the White House later that year, and to their everlasting credit, the colleagues I left behind, including the previous naysayers, were the ones who pulled price transparency over the finish line.

Policy, like politics, is a team sport.

We did it.

You’re welcome, America.

Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a two-part series interrogating the foundational evidence behind modern virology. If you haven’t read Part 1 on viral isolation, start there. It matters for everything that follows.

Last week we established that virologists have never actually isolated a virus - they’ve just assumed the particles they see in electron micrographs are viruses and moved on.

But there’s supposed to be a safety net. Genetic sequencing.

If you can read the blueprint - the actual DNA or RNA - surely that proves what you’re looking at is real, right?

It doesn’t.

Every time there’s a new virus announced, The Authorities quickly rush to “sequence the viral genome.” After all, if the premise here is that viruses are just made out of DNA or RNA and some proteins, then it makes sense that we should be able to identify them by reading their genetic sequence - a string of nucleotides represented by A’s, G’s, C’s, and T’s (or U’s in the case of RNA).

If you weren’t impressed with the viral culture “isolation” process described last week, you might be looking for some reassurance that, at least once we have that centrifuged pellet of stuff of a certain size/density, and we’re seeing things in the electron microscope that we’re told is a virus, we can fill in some of the scientific uncertainty with genomic sequencing.

Well, brace yourself.

I wish I had better news, but the sequencing process trying to make sense of the genetic alphabet soup isn’t reassuring.

How We Got “Viral Genomes”

In 1981, a scientist named David Baltimore (who would later become famous for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with viral sequencing and everything to do with one of science’s messiest misconduct scandals), took the poliovirus, or at least the contaminated mixture of dead cells, exosomes, and genetic debris that he was calling the poliovirus, extracted fragments of genetic material, and assembled them into a computer model. The computer took all the fragments and guessed about how they might fit together if they were all one long chain. Then, Baltimore published his conclusion that the poliovirus genome was 7,440 nucleotides long.

He never proved that this sequence came from a single virus particle. He never isolated a pure virus. He just made his best guess from a contaminated mixture. And that guess became the reference genome for poliovirus.

And so in 2002, when Cello, Paul, and Wimmer reconstructed something capable of damaging cells and killing rodents using Baltimore’s published genome sequence, mail-ordered DNA, human cervical cancer cells and other cell culture sludge, many took it as confirmation that the sequence he’d found was indeed the virus. Never mind that they injected the brains of mice with this toxic cell culture sludge and genetic material we discussed in detail last week (except instead of using monkey kidney cells they used human cervical cancer cells, which I’m sure are super non-toxic and create no immune response). Also never mind that there were no control mice who received brain injections of the same sludge, but without the genetic material assumed to be the virus (whereby it might have been demonstrated that the sludge-injected controls didn’t die and therefore the only difference between the live control mice and the dead mice was the presence of the so-called virus).

Other viruses like influenza and measles followed the same process. Then, when new versions of coronavirus, like the 2002 SARS-CoV and the 2020 SARS-CoV2 virus appeared, they just used the original coronavirus reference genome, and kept building on that one.

The Game of Telephone That Never Ends

Imagine Susie is on a crappy cell phone connection with Jenny. Susie whispers a message, and the connection is cutting in and out. Based on the fragments Jenny hears, she guesses that Susie said, “THE QUICK BROWN FOX.” Jenny isn’t sure she guessed right, but she emails Betty that message. She also calls Betty - with her same crappy connection. Betty hears, “BRAVO, QUITE THE SOX.” But since Betty has the email from Jenny too, she throws out the letters that don’t match the email (the reference genome) and fills in the remaining gaps to be THE QUICK BROWN FOX. She definitely didn’t hear that message, but instead tortures what she did hear to match what she thought she should have heard. Got it?

If Jenny’s original guess about Susie’s message is wrong, everyone downstream is copying her mistake.

This goes on ad infinitum, every time someone tries to sequence the virus in what they think is the viral isolate (actually a pellet from the centrifuge of the part of the cell culture sludge that has particles all the same size and density). You can imagine with computer models and now AI, that this becomes quite algorithmic, but also, less and less tied to actual reality, as the mistakes build on themselves over and over again, in the pursuit of “consensus” with the reference genome.

That’s exactly what happened with viral genomes. Jenny (like Baltimore in 1981) made a guess from confusing material. Everyone since has just been confirming that guess by using it as a reference.

Why We Can’t Just Sequence What We See in the Electron Microscope

Now, you might be wondering, why do we have to use computer models - if we can visualize the squiggly line or spiky sphere that we’re calling a virus (because it definitely isn’t cellular debris) using the electron microscope? Why can’t we just grab that particular thing that we’re looking at and sequence its genetic material directly?

Unfortunately, this isn’t possible - the particle we see in the microscope is too tiny for our current technology to sequence. Think of it like analyzing a single grain of sand. You can see it under a microscope - it looks like quartz. But to know its exact chemical composition, you need at least a tablespoon of it to run experiments on. One grain contains too little material.

So instead, you:

1. Collect millions of grains of sand (hoping they’re all like the one you saw)

2. Throw in some debris from other sources - dirt, contamination, debris

3. Blend it all together into a pile

4. Use a reference sample of “quartz” to filter out anything that doesn’t have what looks like parts of the reference, i.e. what “shouldn’t be there”

5. Analyze what’s left over

6. Announce: “That grain is quartz!”

But you never proved the original grain was quartz. You just proved that, in a contaminated pile, you can separate something that looks like parts of your reference.

This is exactly what happens with virus sequencing:

1. Culture millions of particles from toxic sludge that are centrifuged into layers of same-sized particles.

2. Put the sludge into an electron microscope and identify a particle that you’ve decided is a virus.

3. Grab all the genetic material (fragments of fetal cow, monkey kidneys, infected sample) in one of the layers, throw the rest away.

4. Sequence the fragments in the mixture, regardless of their origin and throw the sequences into computer software.

5. In a computer model, disregard any sequences that don’t match a fragment of the reference genome for whatever virus you think you have.

6. Assemble the remaining fragments into a computer-generated long chain.

7. Announce: “Virus genome sequenced!”

You never proved those sequences came from the particle you saw in the electron micrograph. You just proved that filtering out fragments in a conglomerated mixture that do not match a reference genome produces some sequences similar to that reference.

To prove that this is just algorithmic voodoo, researchers actually studied individual cells that were supposedly “infected” with a bunch of particles of the same virus. Turns out their genomes were all different from each other. So they concluded that the reference genomes are actually more like averages of the sequences of all the genetic material sloshing around in the pellets of cell culture sludge.

When scientists announce “virus genome sequenced,” what they actually mean is:

“We took genetic material from a sick person mixed with cell culture debris. We compared it to a reference genome that was itself created from contaminated material decades ago. We kept the fragments that matched part of the reference. We discarded everything else as “contamination.” A computer assembled the fragments. We got a sequence similar to our reference.”

They call it a match to a known virus (or, if it’s not quite similar enough to a reference genome, then a “novel” virus). It’s really just a replication of a guess that was never independently verified.

The confidence with which viral genomes are presented - as definitive proof of viral existence - doesn’t match the fact that every single one ultimately rests on a foundation that was built from contaminated material, using methods that were never validated with proper controls.

And the one time researchers looked closely at what was actually in infected cells? They found a mixture of genetic material, not a single clean genome.

Which is exactly what you’d expect if the whole thing was based on a guess that nobody ever checked.

So all this doesn’t bode well for those PCR tests that told us we had COVID or not, does it?

Remember when you had to get a COVID PCR test or an antibody test (more on that in a bit) to see if you could come to work or get cleared for a surgery? PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. It’s a copy machine for genetic material.

Here’s the process: You get the brain swab with the long-ass Q-tip. That swab contains a bunch of sludge - your human cells, bacterial DNA, skin cells from your spouse that you just inhaled, whatever little fragments of those four letters in the DNA alphabet might be present. The lab extracts this mixture and puts it in a machine that repeatedly copies genetic sequences. Each cycle, the amount of target sequence ideally doubles. If there’s a lot of a certain genetic sequence, then the machine can detect it after 15-20 cycles. But if you can’t detect it after 30 or 40 cycles, it’s deemed to not be there.

Even if it is detected after many cycles, it may just be trace amounts that don’t really represent actual infection. Nonetheless, when the machine does detect these sequences matching what scientists think a coronavirus looks like - based on the voodoo reference genome we just described above - the lab still confidently reports: “Positive for COVID-19.” The problem is, we use that positive result to claim “You are infected with a virus.” These are not the same.

The test measured one thing: the presence of genetic sequences matching part of a reference.

The test did NOT measure:

• Whether those sequences came from a living virus, dead virus fragments or any other material

• Whether you actually have what we call a “viral infection”

• Whether you’re sick or completely asymptomatic

• Whether you’re contagious or non-contagious

• Whether this genetic material will harm you

• Whether you need treatment of any sort

• Anything meaningful about your health

A positive PCR test could mean any of those things. Or none of them. The test can’t tell.

Even using virology’s own terms and assumptions, you could test positive and be:

• Recovering from infection (no longer contagious, genetic debris still detectable)

• Asymptomatic but carrying live virus

• Asymptomatic with only dead virus fragments

• Not-exposed at all but your sample was contaminated in the lab or during the swab process

The test doesn’t distinguish between these scenarios.

For decades, PCR was used in labs for research - to find and copy specific genetic sequences. It worked great for that purpose, and everyone working in The Science™ understood its limitations. Then it got repurposed as a diagnostic test - to tell you if you’re “infected.” As in, do you have a disease or don’t you? But PCR doesn’t do that. It tells you: “We found genetic sequences matching our (voodoo) reference.” Those are completely different statements - one is about your health status and the other is about the alphabet that found its way into your nose.

We took a tool designed to detect genetic material and used it to make claims about infection, disease, contagiousness, and the need for quarantine or medical intervention. And then The Authorities used PCR-positive counts as “case numbers,” and the mistake gets exponentiated into decisions about population-wide lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

But wait, what about antibody testing?

Remember how we were taught in science class that people develop antibodies after they’ve been infected with a virus, and that these antibodies create “natural immunity” (that was so ignored by The Authorities)?

It turns out that the evidence that virus-specific antibodies develop in response to a given virus is based on the same cell culture “isolate” that everything else in virology is based on. So if you inject cell culture sludge that you’re calling a virus into people, how do you know exactly which proteins that you later find in their blood are the actual antibodies that their bodies created in response to this virus?

And even if you do know that, how do you know the antibodies are to the actual virus that they’ll supposedly encounter in the wild as a purified virion particle they ingest somehow? Well, it turns out that all the testing to confirm this requires “isolating” the virus, and pulling viral proteins out of the isolate, and then doing another procedure to see if some patient proteins (antibodies) bind the viral proteins, using what’s called an ELISA, a Western blot or flow cytometry.

But remember, our “isolate” (cell culture sludge pellet) hasn’t been proven to actually isolate a virus, so how do we know that the proteins we’re extracting out of it and calling “viral proteins” are in fact viral proteins? And how do we know that any proteins (antibodies) in patient blood that bind to those viral proteins are doing so because they were created after exposure to the virus in the body?

I’m not going to go down the full antibody rabbit trail - this article is about viruses, not antibodies, but hopefully you can see that these mysteries are related and that the same types of foundational experimental gaps may characterize both fields of inquiry.

Summary of Founding Myths

What virology treats as “settled science” has never been nailed down with the rigor other sciences take for granted. Physics doesn’t accept a theory because the model is elegant - it demands measurement, independent replication, and a result that holds when someone hostile tries to break it.

Virology runs on “science” that is much softer.

Every claim starts with the same toxic soup: monkey kidney cells, fetal bovine serum (cow blood), antibiotics, a culture stressed until something dies. Whatever is being claimed came from that origin.

“Isolation” in virology never means isolation from nothing. It means a particle spun out of a broth nobody fully accounts for, then a genome stitched together by software guessing how the fragments fit. It’s a model.

Nobody who claims to have seen all of the things that viruses supposedly are and do has ever confirmed it using a scientific method that avoids this house of cards.

Nobody has confirmed that little strands of genes wrapped in proteins that we call viruses aren’t just cellular debris caught by the electron microscope. Nobody has cleanly separated antibodies against the supposed virus from antibodies against the sludge - and we know the sludge alone, cow blood and all, provokes them.

Nobody has proven that the cell chaos and death (cytopathic effect) is caused by anything other than stress, toxic antibiotic exposure and starvation rather than a killer virus.

And nobody has actually sequenced genetic material after physically isolating pure viral particles, without algorithmic modeling of course. And so on.

Think about how you first ever heard the word “virus.” How did you learn what viruses are? For me it was in the context of a doctor’s office. Is the snot the right color? If not, it’s a virus. Does it respond to antibiotics? If not, it’s a virus. If you don’t know where it came from, it’s probably that you just picked up a virus.

In other words, the common knowledge about viruses is really just a catch-all incantation for when we don’t have a better answer. It’s the modern equivalent of assuming that the sound of thunder must be Thor riding wildly in the sky on his chariot.

Epilogue: But What About Contagion?

The first question arising when we realize the virus paradigm may not be as evidence-based as we’ve been led to believe is “but what about how people get sick when they’re around people with measles, chickenpox, influenza? What about the spread of HIV, or the common cold?”

In fact, during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, researchers conducted an experiment most people have never heard of: they exposed healthy Navy volunteers to every imaginable transmission route from sick patients - coughing directly in their faces, blood transfusions, and injected mucus. Nothing took. Not one volunteer got sick. If contagion via viral particles is how disease spreads, this experiment should have worked to infect healthy people exposed to sick people. It didn’t.

So the question of how to explain what appears to be contagion - people getting sick together or in quick succession after contact with each other - is an important one.

Women’s menstrual cycles sometimes seem to sync up when they spend time together. Obviously, nobody thinks all the cancers that people living in Nagasaki in 1945 got were due to a “virus.” Or the many afflictions faced by the people of East Palestine, Ohio, after the train derailment caused a toxic chemical spill. The hyper-spread of gender dysphoria among teen girls in the past five years has not been postulated as a “virus” (well maybe a mind virus). Pheromones that biochemically signal attraction or other messages between animals like humans, or frequencies and resonance associated with the 6-foot electromagnetic field around the human body and its core - the heart - offer some interesting avenues to explore. In other words - people in close proximity to each other can experience similar symptoms at the same time or in quick succession for a bunch of possible reasons that don’t have to be viral contagion.

The question of apparent contagion is an important one for science to explore. I don’t know the answer - and neither do virologists. The lack of a certain answer does not mean that the viral paradigm must therefore be right. It just means that we’ve believed in Thor so long that we haven’t done the hard work of understanding exactly where the sound of thunder comes from. (Let’s explore that in a future post!)

In the meantime, one of the best questions you can ask yourself or your doctor or The Authorities is, “how do you know that the fundamental concepts you’re assuming were already proven long ago actually were?”

As I’ve mentioned before, I was gaslit in public health school about the safety profile of vaccines and the adequacy of the clinical trial design that led to the FDA licensure of these products. A lot of dogma was communicated the way all dogma is - it’s just spoken about by authority figures as if it’s a given truth, over and over until you’ve forgotten that you never asked for details.

Most Christians don’t do deep dives on apologetics exploring the philosophical proofs for God, for Jesus, the Resurrection, subsequent miracles, and so forth - but they can take comfort in the fact that some of the smartest and savviest Christians over 2,000 years have in fact kicked the tires on those fundamental questions and arrived at logical and satisfying answers. In the case of the viral paradigm, the tire-kicking hasn’t actually been done. Even the most expert virologists have been relying on an evidence base that is riddled with illogical leaps and circular reasoning.

It’s dangerous, of course, to recognize and call out that virology’s founding myths are built on shaky ground. And likely to get you branded a heretic and kicked out of the science club.

But that’s ok.

I’m more interested in reality than consensus. If that’s you too, then welcome - you’ve found a home here.

Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series interrogating the foundational evidence behind modern virology. Part 1 covers how viruses are reportedly isolated. Part 2 covers genome sequencing, PCR testing, and viral antibody science, built on the same foundation.

I was a second class citizen in my public health school’s department of Epidemiology.

Harvard was ground zero for chronic illness research, best known for the Framingham Heart Study and the Nurses Health Study. All the cool kids were on the chronic disease epidemiology track. I wanted to study infectious disease instead. That’s why Johns Hopkins had actually been my first choice. I had signed the papers, submitted the deposit, and found an apartment in Baltimore a few months before the semester started.

But then, a funny thing happened.

I got a notice that Harvard was offering me a full ride - free tuition. Stick with me, this isn’t the humble brag it sounds like. One does not turn down free degrees from the Kremlin on the Charles, boring chronic disease specialty or not. So I got out of my lease in Baltimore, and re-directed to Boston.

A week after I got there, the financial aid office told me there’d been a mistake. A doctoral student with my same last name was the intended recipient of the money. They were bound to keep their word for my first year, but the rest of my degree would be paid by student loan (i.e. me).

God has a funny sense of humor.

Clearly, it was meant to be. It’s where I met former FDA Commissioner, Marty Makary, as I wrote about a couple weeks ago. It’s where I met the tropical health professor who recommended me for a job in South Sudan, where I realized overseas work wasn’t for me.

I had discovered epidemiology (which, before COVID, most people couldn’t pronounce, much less define) because I hated lab work.

I was pre-med in undergrad, loved studying human biology, but detested the pipettes and petri dishes in lab work. I preferred the methods of social science - statistics, graphs, p-values and regressions. It wasn’t until I was reading The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, which was published the year I graduated from college, about an Ebola outbreak in a lab facility in Reston, VA (practically my hometown), that I ever heard the word “epidemiology.” Turns out, it combines the content of medicine with the methods of social science - a great fit. Individual patients, phooey - we treat populations!

Maybe it’s because my first introduction to public health and epidemiology was with Ebola in the Preston book, but infectious disease always seemed WAY sexier than chronic disease. Chronic disease involves the tedious and disappointing slog of changing people’s lifestyles and long-held habits, yuck!

Infectious disease - now that’s an adventure.

You get to run around in space suits, tell everybody what to do, quarantine towns, and use little hand-written tic-tac-toe crosstab charts to figure out what caused the outbreak (PS it’s always the potato salad at the church supper, at least in all the case studies).

And like legendary Dr. John Snow (no, not the Game of Thrones hottie) did when he shut down the contaminated London well responsible for spreading cholera, we infectious disease epidemiologists always had some magical intervention that would save a zillion lives and our names would live in glory evermore.

Unlike the Harvard chronic illness people, who kept getting things wrong when it came to the causes of heart disease, whether saturated fat was bad or good, and who failed year after year to get people to change their diets, exercise more, and quit smoking, while the population got sicker, fatter, more infertile and more expensive with our extinction-level chronic illness rates, infectious disease epidemiologists were able to actually, you know, end diseases, and save people. Fast. That was my take, anyway.

Now, even among the infectious disease crowd, there were the cool kids and the not-so-cool kids.

The real weirdos were the experts in rickettsial diseases or chlamydia. Then you had the middling workhorses, serious scientists focused on things that killed a gazillion people every year - respiratory disease, tuberculosis, diarrhea, malaria. But the coolest kids in school were the virus hunters. So, naturally, that’s what I wanted to be - hunting down strange new concoctions like hantavirus, Lassa fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, you get the point. If it involves bleeding out of the eyes, I was all in.

The most pathetic virologists were those, like Dr. Fauci, who studied viruses that supposedly caused cancer or other chronic illness. I mean, the whole point of being a virus hunter was to avoid the complicated humanity of chronic illness - what a career face-plant!

Not sure if I was an adrenaline junkie or what (my later career in politics suggests as much), but I was high on the idea of being on a CDC rapid response team jetting around the globe to save people with the power of my mind or some other Dr. Snow-ish intervention.

An example was when I interned with the Carter Center on their guinea worm eradication program in South Sudan. Guinea worm is a parasite that grows into a multi-foot-long worm that slowly emerges, a little bit more each day, from the body over weeks. There is no treatment except to wrap the part of the worm that has already emerged around a little stick and then twist the stick every day a little more to try to expedite the emergence. Sometimes it comes out of nipples. Sometimes out of eyes. Usually though, less exotically, out of feet.

It burns like hell, and so people would run to the nearest water source and put their foot in the water, releasing all the parasite babies into the water, which people drink back into their system and the cycle continues. So the brilliant, Dr. Snow-ish intervention? Put a cloth filter over everyone’s water jug. Filters out the parasite babies, problem solved, disease eliminated from everywhere it was successfully implemented community-wide.

Do you see the appeal? It’s all so simple.

When we had the 101 classes in the infectious disease track, we studied the different bugs - bacteria, parasites, viruses. In the virus section, we learned what a virus was - a self-replicating piece of genetic code (DNA or RNA) and some proteins thrown in for good measure, which can enter through a cell membrane, hijack the gene-replication apparatus of the cell, replicate itself, bust open the cell membrane and travel to other cells and do the same thing. Viruses can be transmitted by bodily fluids, on objects like door handles, or in the air. There are no really great antiviral treatments that directly kill viruses the way antibiotics kill bacteria, so prevention is the best strategy. That’s it, that’s the 101. Or at least, that’s what I was taught.

You might be surprised to learn what we did NOT learn.

Namely: how these viruses were discovered, isolated, observed, cultured, and experimented upon. In other words, everything that we were taught about what viruses are and what they do was taught as a given. It wasn’t explained how The Science^TM had proven all these facts. That should have been in the 101, but it wasn’t.

I only figured that out later. A lot later. Like a few years ago later. After an entire career built around on-the-ground programs, and later, policy design and program oversight of government agencies in charge of controlling viruses such as hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, HPV, and yes, coronaviruses.

This article series is my attempt to shorten that cycle for you, so you don’t fall into the traps I did.

(Many of you already know this, even better than I do, and I’m grateful for the groundbreaking work and courage of those who have been bringing this information to light.)

This is going to be the 101 I wish someone had given me back in public health school. Because it probably would have changed a lot about what I did next.

So where did we come up with this whole virus idea in the first place?

Bacteria and parasites are living/swimming organisms that we can see under basic light microscopes. So they were understood better at the beginning of the 20th century. The problem for The Science^TM at that time was that there were some illnesses where they couldn’t find any bacteria or parasites present. So they hypothesized there might be something else. Maybe a teeny tiny other thing that didn’t yet have a name. Maybe virus?

So they started taking sludge from sick samples (sap from sick plants, snot from sick people, etc) and pushing them through filters to try to filter out the bigger bacteria/parasites and see if what got through the filter still seemed to cause illness in previously healthy organisms. The problem? The mode of transmitting to healthy samples was pretty damaging in and of itself. There was mechanical injury in the transfer. Also, there weren’t always controls (healthy samples receiving the same toxic sludge EXCEPT the sick organism’s fluid), and when there were, often the controls would experience some or all of the same symptoms as the “infected” samples.

These experiments never disproved the virus theory outright (though some came close). But neither did they prove it. They only demonstrated that something was making the healthy samples sick after “inoculating” them with the sick organism’s fluid. But even that wasn’t entirely clear. The problem is that, in many experiments during the first half of the 20th century, including pivotal ones by John Enders, and Bech and von Magnus, the controls got sick too.

In the Spanish flu pandemic around 1917, researchers tried everything to make healthy volunteers sick by having sick people coughing on, shaking hands with, spraying lung gook in the faces of, transfusing the blood into, and injecting sputum into the volunteers - to no avail. Weirdly, mainstream virology and news reports often selectively leave these confusing facts out and students are never taught it.

In any case, something other than identifiable bacteria or parasites can make healthy organisms sick in some experiments, but the something isn’t always identified well. In the case of the virus experiments, it could be the toxic crap in the base exposure of both the “inoculated” and the controls, and not something specific to the sick organism. The facts on this vary by the details of each experiment, which we’ll discuss further below.

The early researchers acknowledged that they didn’t know what this smaller “agent” or “exposure” was, but they called it “virus,” the latin root of which simply means toxin or toxic fluid. Quite a big distance between that and the specific, self-replicating DNA/RNA+protein definition that we are taught today.

So How are Viruses Isolated?

Virology has not advanced much more than the seminal “isolation” experiments by John Enders and Bech and von Magnus in the 1950s.

Here are the steps that we still use today:

• A sample is collected from a sick person - typically a nasal swab, blood, or throat washing. This material contains everything present in that person’s body at that site: dead cells, cellular debris, bacteria, fungi, exosomes, proteins, and whatever else is there. It is not purified or filtered at this stage.

• Antimicrobials - typically penicillin, streptomycin, and often amphotericin B - are added to the sample in large doses to kill bacteria and fungi. These antibiotics and antifungals are themselves cytotoxic (especially to kidney cells), meaning they are toxic to cells at the concentrations used.

• The sample is now added to a cell culture - usually a line of monkey kidney cells (Vero cells are the current standard, derived from African green monkey kidneys), grown in an artificial nutrient medium. These cells are already stressed by definition: they have been removed from their natural environment, grown on plastic, fed an artificial mixture of nutrients, and kept alive under conditions nothing like those inside a living body.

• The nutrient medium (the food for the cells) is fetal bovine serum (FBS) or in layman’s terms - fetal cow blood. FBS is harvested by stabbing a live cow fetus in the heart with a large-bore needle, after the mother is slaughtered (you can imagine the stress/cortisol/hormone profile of the living fetus at that point). FBS is used because it contains a complex mixture of growth factors, hormones, and proteins that keep the cells alive in their artificial environment. Without it, the monkey kidney cells would automatically begin to die. FBS is not a defined, standardized substance - its composition varies batch to batch and contains unknown quantities of baby cow proteins, lipids, growth factors, and critically, cow genetic material and any contaminants in the blood of the baby cow.

• At the same time that the sick sample (the snot, blood or other fluid from the sick person) is added to this cell culture being kept alive in a very artificial environment by fetal cow blood, the researchers simultaneously attempt to take away as much of the fetal cow blood as they can. This is because it’s thought that the FBS interferes with the virus’ ability to penetrate the monkey kidney cells. The problem is that the hour or two without food intensely stresses those cells, which were already on the verge of death. They begin to show signs of breaking apart and deterioration that is later attributed to the virus. So at that most important moment - when the supposedly virus-infected patient sample is introduced to the cells, they are already freaking out.

• After about 1-2 hours of absolute starvation, a little bit of FBS is added back - but between 10-20% of the amount it was before it was initially withdrawn. So now the cells have just spent 1-2 hours in total starvation, and then they’re given enough food to merely be mostly starving.

• When the cells show the predictable and inevitable signs of chaos and death, this is called cytopathic effect (CPE), and is attributed solely to the presence of the virus. I’m not kidding.

• But just because the virus is presumed to be present in the sludge doesn’t mean that it’s been isolated, that is, separated or purified out of the sludge.

• So then they take the sludge of dead and dying, poisoned (with antimicrobials), starved and environmentally stressed cells, and they throw it in a centrifuge. This separates out all the different ingredients in the sludge into layers of pellets based on size/density. But there can be tons of different things in the pellets containing similarly-sized particles.

• Then they take a certain pellet - the one that is the size that the virologists already “know” is the size of the virus they’re trying to isolate (see how circular that is?) - and they throw it under an electron microscope (because a regular light microscope can’t see stuff as small as a virus is alleged to be).

• When they identify some debris or other particle that seems to be present in some high quantity, they call it the virus. And the first guy to characterize some particular shape gets the right to name the virus and the disease that supposedly is caused by it in the patient from whom the snot, blood or whatever was taken. Then that shape becomes the “standard” way of identifying that virus later, so that when virologists are isolating viruses that they already “know” about, then they just look for the particles that match the shape that some researcher once called the virus. The squiggly snake is Ebola, the spiked ball is coronavirus (if the spikes are numerous), or influenza (fewer spikes), or HIV (same size but slightly fewer spikes) - get it? They’re TOTALLY different, for realz.

• The tricky thing here of course is that the debris from dying cells, such as exosomes, as well as artifacts that are known to appear in electron microscope visualizations are also similar-looking.

So, you might be saying to yourself: “Self, I have questions about this process.”

Yeah, you wouldn’t be the only one.

In fact, a few years ago, the German virologist Stefan Lanka decided to call bullshit on this process, and he made a public promise to pay 100,000 Euros to anyone who could provide scientific evidence that measles is caused by a virus, specifically by publishing a single paper that:

• Proved the existence of a measles virus

• Showed its diameter

• Showed its genetic information (more on that next week)

• Showed that it caused measles.

A German physician named David Bardens submitted six papers collectively purporting to satisfy the criteria. Lanka wasn’t convinced and he didn’t pay. Bardens sued.

A lower court found for Dr. Bardens and ordered Lanka to pay up. But Lanka appealed. And at the appeal, the court commissioned expert testimony from an independent virologist who largely supported Lanka’s criticism of the “isolation” methodology. Lanka prevailed.

The court held there had been no definitive proof presented.

Mainstream reports didn’t correct their earlier headlines about Lanka having lost and been disgraced. Of course they didn’t.

Meanwhile, Lanka conducted his own experiments to replicate the Enders isolation procedure - but this time without any “viral” sample from a sick patient. He worked with a contract laboratory to perform the procedure described above exactly, but without the supposed virus present. His published paper reported the same finding as Bech and von Magnus - the same cytopathic effect occurred in the uninfected monkey kidney cells - which supports the idea that it’s the toxic sludge, starvation, stress and environment that is killing the cells, not a virus.

Final thoughts with that in mind.

I spent an entire career working to control epidemics caused by viruses, those tiny microbes I was never taught to question, and without a foundational understanding of how viruses are actually proven to exist: a centrifuged slurry of snot, monkey kidneys, antimicrobials, fetal cow blood, and a cell starvation protocol enshrined as gospel.

Followed by seventy years of The Science ™ stacked on top of this weird theory, with nobody asking what actually proves the foundation.

I’m not saying viruses don’t exist.

I’m saying I don’t know what we’ve isolated (if anything) - and neither does anyone who learned what I learned, the way I learned it, if they’re being honest about it. I’m embarrassed for my profession and every virologist who spends their days doing this sludge-technique over and over again and calling it “isolation.”

So that’s the viral isolation problem. But isolation is only the first of many questions.

Next week we go down the genome sequencing rabbit hole. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t get better.

Note to paid subscribers: there are many physicians, scientists and other experts whose work has schooled me on this subject in recent years. If you’d like a technical deep-dive to check my homework on this, I recommend the short book by Dr. Mark Bailey - just DM me and I’ll send you the public link to the free version of his book, Farewell to Virology.

In April 2020, you couldn’t go to church, but you could go to Walmart. (Apparently viruses travel 6 feet in some places, but not others.)

Then the FDA approved a vaccine label for a product that wasn’t even available, while extending emergency authorization for the one being injected into arms. Humm.

None of it made any sense, and I found myself asking the same question on repeat - Why?

The answer wasn’t complicated, but it was one I hadn’t been trained to see. I had to figure things out on my own like so many others.

The people best positioned to see what was actually happening were the ones who were never inside the status quo framework to begin with. People like who’d been in the game for decades.

I sat down with him last week to talk about what happens when regulators stop protecting the public and start protecting the industry - and why the people running circles around establishment thinkers during COVID were the ones we’ve all been told to ignore.

Watch Katy on RSB Show Here

*****Fair warning: this one isn’t about your health (well, it’s about the health of the Republic, so perhaps that counts…). Jason and I worked together in the U.S. Senate, and what happened last week was too unhinged to leave unremarked. More health and health policy next week - PROMISE! - Katy*****

Last week’s collective freakout over the recently announced Anti-Weaponization Fund illustrates how divorced from reality partisan politics has become in the DC bubble.

As professionals who spent most of our careers advising legislators and leading oversight investigations in the U.S. Senate, it was bizarre and perplexing to watch this unhinged, uninformed bipartisan hysteria drive GOP leadership to send everyone home rather than quell the Republican bed-wetting and beat back the Democrat nonsense.

This is the biggest fracas over nothing that we’ve seen in a long time, and that’s saying something. If you’re interested in understanding what actually happened, here’s an explainer.

First, some context Congress would rather you forget

When it comes to enforcing immigration law, Congress has refused to fund certain segments of the federal government (ICE and Border Patrol). Those agencies have thus been living off a surplus from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill, affectionately called the Big Beauty, rather than their normal annual appropriations.

When it comes to funding the Justice Department’s ability to settle any legal claim for any amount of money, Congress long ago put that on autopilot, using what’s called a “permanent, indefinite appropriation”- in other words, an unending supply of blank checks. It started like most government programs do, as something a little less crazy.

The Judgment Fund, as originally designed in 1956, was meant to allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pay damages of less than $100,000 when ordered by a court - without having to seek budget authority from Congress each time. So, at first, it was an unending supply of blank checks – but only up to $100,000 each. Makes sense, right? Why require an act of Congress every time a court orders the government to pay damages to a citizen it has wronged?

But in 1961, Congress amended the law to let DOJ use the Judgment Fund for more than just paying judgments. It granted authority to also pay for settlement agreements in pending, or even potential legal cases. The $100,000 cap still applied, though. It didn’t get really bonkers until 1977, when Congress eliminated the cap altogether – unlimited bonanza!

Administrations of both parties have tapped the Judgment Fund routinely since then, mostly for legitimate purposes to avoid or cut short costly litigation and remedy government wrongdoing (there’s been plenty to remedy).

The Fund was the logical necessity of a regulatory state run amok - extending its tentacles further into our daily lives every year, with the brute force, incompetence, and injustice that too often accompanies government action. Naturally, there would be citizen victims - those whose lives, livelihoods, and reputations were damaged by government malfeasance. When they understandably sought redress by suing the federal government, of course it’s DOJ serving as the government’s lawyers. As such, DOJ had to decide whether to settle the case by paying damages or go to court, where the government could lose, or be subject to, shall we say, an awkward discovery process.

However necessary the authority to settle cases may be, without any guardrails or upper limits other than the “good judgment” of government bureaucrats pressured by politically-appointed leadership, it will also naturally become subject to abuse and controversy without oversight.

Enter: The 1776 Fund™

Fast-forward to last week. The Senate got its knickers in a twist and fled town over an “unprecedented slush fund” - supposedly created by settling the case President Trump filed against the IRS for illegally leaking his tax returns along with the confidential returns of thousands of other citizens’ to ProPublica and The New York Times.

Unprecedented, they said - except it was Congress itself that created the mother of all slush funds.

Through the Judgment Fund (and the removal of the cap), Congress is to blame for giving DOJ unlimited spending authority in the first place - long before anyone had ever heard of the Trump-IRS settlement.

On the surface, the terms of the settlement require a formal apology and authorize the creation of an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” at DOJ. No dollar amount is specified in the agreement, but DOJ later announced it was carving out $1.776 billion (get it?) from the Judgment Fund to pay claims of damages from the abuse of government power to target political enemies through lawfare and weaponization. The 1776 Fund™ does have a better ring to it than “Anti-Weaponization,” so that’s what we’ll call it.

But don’t be fooled, this is all smoke and mirrors. The Judgment Fund itself has no cap. It’s a permanent appropriation - meaning it’s automatically funded, no annual Congressional funding vote required. So this isn’t some brand-new “slush fund.” It’s simply DOJ using the already-unlimited blank check authority Congress surrendered half a century ago. It’s the same unlimited money with a different label on part of it.

In other words, this is nothing more than a marketing tactic.

The 1776 Fund™ is just a public invitation for victims of political weaponization to sue (or threaten to sue) and settle with the Federal government. The announcement was nothing more than a DOJ press release.

To punctuate the earlier point: DOJ already had all the statutory authority it needed to remedy what the settlement calls “misuse of government power for improper political, personal, or ideological reasons” without carving out a special sub-account in the Judgment Fund. And if there were ever a misuse of government power for ideological reasons, illegally stealing and leaking thousands of Americans’ tax returns in an effort to embarrass the most prominent of those Americans, Donald Trump, certainly qualifies.

The Biden DOJ let the supposed lone criminal leaker, Charles Littlejohn, off with a slap on the wrist, allowing him to plead guilty to just a single count of unauthorized disclosure of tax returns, even though he admitted to stealing and leaking thousands of them. Isn’t that convenient? No messy trial that might risk exposure of more senior government bureaucratic negligence or complicity. And no remedy for the victims.

Whatever damages you think might be appropriate in this or similar cases, nearly 50 years before the Trump-IRS “settlement,” Congress had already removed monetary limits on DOJ’s settlement authority. The $1.776 billion number makes for cute marketing, but wasn’t actually specified in the settlement agreement itself and, of course, DOJ could have carved out any amount imaginable from the literally infinite pot of money Congress authorized.

The only brake on the process under current law is that settlement payouts from the Fund must only be for controversies that could have been litigated and could have resulted in a payable judgment. Since The 1776 Fund™ is simply a logo slapped on a portion of the Judgment Fund, that means it is also subject to these minimal requirements needed to tap the Judgment Fund - it’s not like DOJ can just start handing out checks like Oprah handing out cars to her audience.

Nevertheless, this is far from the first time that use of the Judgment Fund has seemed dubious to outside observers, though the real innovators here were Presidents Obama and Biden.

For example, in 2010 the DOJ Civil Rights Division tapped the Judgment Fund for $680 million to settle a single class-action discrimination lawsuit broadly alleging bias in farm loan programs from 1981–1999. The Obama administration set aside that pot of money to compensate victims, but when no more victims could be found, it still had more than $300 million to play with. So, rather than returning the money to the Treasury, it sent the leftover funds to politically aligned nonprofits that had filed no claims. Critics said the total funds far exceeded the real “litigation value” of any potential claims, but were distributed anyway.

Also brought to you by The Judgment Fund, Peter Strzok ($1.2 million), Lisa Page ($800,000), and Andrew McCabe ($700,000+), 3 senior FBI officials publicly exposed for chicanery that included leaking to the press and trying to impact the 2016 election. They later filed claims alleging violation of their privacy and wrongful termination, which the Biden DOJ settled and paid.

So, nothing about the current controversy is new or unprecedented. Unfortunately, neither side has enough incentive, self-awareness, or understanding to tell you the truth: this whole brouhaha is a nothing-burger.

Democrats howl that The 1776 Fund™ means there is a massive new pile of your money that the Trump administration has stolen through a corrupt, illegal and unconstitutional bargain in order to reward violent January 6^th insurgents - the game of “Demagogue It” that regular readers will recognize.

Because the legacy media can still amplify that message often and loudly, some weak-kneed or shockingly uninformed GOP Senators may even believe it’s true. And, no doubt some hard core MAGA-faithful will want to brag that it’s a brilliant 4-D chess move Trump invented to own the libs so hard you’ll be tired of winning.

It’s neither.

Far from a new or unique form of cronyism-by-settlement, it’s just DOJ announcing an intent to keep using those blank checks Congress handed out to settle whatever claims it wants to pay. According to the announcement, the Acting Attorney General will delegate this pre-existing authority to five other people who will sort through the merits of each case. But that delegation could have occurred before the Trump-IRS “settlement” and relies on zero new authority from that agreement.

One of us (Foster) has direct experience with DOJ’s statutory authority to pay damages to remedy political weaponization, having founded a nonprofit representing whistleblower clients who settled claims during both the Biden and Trump administrations. That organization, Empower Oversight, has negotiated settlements for clients, including non-political career government employees with personal beliefs across the political spectrum - including Democrats, Republicans and Independents. These clients were targeted for their beliefs or for objecting to the targeting of others. Most of their ordeals began after they sought religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate or after they made legally protected whistleblower disclosures about politics improperly affecting law enforcement decisions.

Even though these settlements occurred quite publicly between June 2024 and August 2025, House Judiciary Democrats waited until just before The 1776 Fund™ announcement to suddenly “launch an investigation” into rumors about it, lying about Empower Oversight’s clients as well as complaining about other settlements entered before the announcement, including with former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.

Ironically, that illustrates our point.

Settlements already can and do happen routinely with the blank checks Congress handed over 50 years ago. The 1776 Fund™ doesn’t change that. Controversial settlements have occurred before and will continue to occur under administrations of both parties unless and until Congress amends its permanent and indefinite appropriation to the Judgment Fund to restore some limits on how it can be used.

Which brings us back to what happened last week

Instead of looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for what it has done, Congress freaked out and the Senate left town - another episode in the Senate’s ongoing insistence on doing nothing. By “insistence,” we mean an obsessive, compulsive, pathological, and scandalous commitment to doing nothing.

For those of you fortunate enough to live outside the Beltway and its psychosis, let’s bring you up to speed as to where things stand procedurally.

Congress was on track to appropriate funding for ICE and CBP, as well as some Secret Service security beef-ups. (It’s not like anyone has tried to kill the president, right?) Also included were some DOJ-related immigration court and counterterrorism efforts - all as part of a “skinny” reconciliation package. Regular readers will recall previous posts complaining that a “skinny” bill was a grotesque waste of an opportunity to address the affordability crisis prioritized by voters, such as with health care reform or other issues like housing and energy costs.

Reconciliation is a type of bill, designed to be part of the budget process, that allows for certain fiscal measures to be moved in the Senate under privilege, with only 51 votes rather than the usual process that requires 60 votes to end debate and move to final vote (aka the “filibuster”). The majority party of either stripe will frequently use reconciliation to get through legislation that doesn’t have bipartisan support, such as Obamacare, or the “Big Beauty.”

But of course, Congress is so dysfunctional these days that even their most basic job - funding the various departments of the executive branch - has turned into a hyper-partisan affair. The shutdown showdown earlier this year was eventually overcome (well into the fiscal year to which the funding was supposed to apply, sigh), except for one unresolved dispute: ICE and CBP.

Democrats have refused to fund these agencies and pay those federal workers, in order to spite the president over his deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents to enforce the law. In case you’ve forgotten Schoolhouse Rock, those laws are passed by Congress.

In any case, now that we are already nine months into the fiscal year in question, the Congress finally had a plan to fund the agencies. The reconciliation bill was on track for a vote in the Senate, imminently. And then the DOJ made its seemingly unrelated announcement about the Trump-IRS “settlement” and The 1776 Fund™.

Cue the Senate’s nuclear meltdown

If you read the legacy press, you’ll hear melodramatic accounts of Republican freakout in closed session with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, summoned to explain this crime against humanity.

Apparently, Republican Senators are so aggrieved about this policy that Majority Leader Thune has suspended consideration of the reconciliation bill funding ICE and CBP and sent his colleagues home for the week.

What, you might ask, does The 1776 Fund™, whatever its merits, have to do with paying the salaries of ICE agents and CBP officers who risk their lives to enforce the laws passed by Congress?

Nothing. Sort of.

We say “sort of” because Democrats are using the opportunity of the reconciliation bill as a moving vehicle to amend it to exclude anyone with a claim related to January 6th from eligibility for any settlements. Some weak-kneed Republicans could help the Democrats to derail the entire funding bill over this political sideshow. This is the vote that some Republicans are so afraid of that they fled the city just to avoid it.

Why are they so afraid?

The political dilemma is supposedly that Republicans who vote no would be painted as supportive of “violent J6 insurrectionists”- not a good look in some swingier states. Republicans who vote yes would be bucking the president, and could be painted as weak on fighting the Democrats’ lawfare - politically risky in redder states, where voters were rightly (in our view) alarmed by the Biden administration’s unprecedented use of DOJ to persecute Biden’s political enemies while protecting his family and political allies.

On the one hand, it is understandable that Senators might be annoyed at the White House for putting them in that position by announcing The 1776 Fund™ just prior to the vote.

On the other hand, life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” We all have to pay taxes (except Hunter Biden, apparently), and most Americans expect their Senators to take a tough vote once in a while, especially if it’s necessary to keep paying those in law enforcement who risk everything to keep us safe. On this one, you can count us in this latter camp.

But that’s actually not why this whole kerfuffle is legislative and political malpractice.

We are, of course, cognizant of the stereotype of crusty Senate veterans sneering down our noses at the “kids today” making a mockery of the very important work we once loved. But last week, we asked each other, “wait, are we the only ones who see the obvious?”

As we’ve explained, the 1776 Fund™ is just a White House branding exercise on a power Congress handed over decades ago.

So, why is Congress shocked? The Judgment Fund is their program - their decision, supported by all of them for decades. And why are some GOP Senators so afraid of the Democrats’ and their media allies’ dishonest framing that they ran away rather than stand and fight back with facts?

Aggrieved Senators would argue (and ARE arguing) that DOJ didn’t have to wave the blood-red J6 flag in front of Democrats right before the reconciliation bill was up for a vote, taunting them into filing amendments that would prohibit their J6 boogeymen from getting access to the Judgment Fund through the newly announced carve-out fund.

But the talking points and strategies to beat back such an amendment are not that hard.

No matter your views on J6, certain core, neutral principles remain the same. The Judgment Fund was established precisely to compensate people who were harmed by government overreach. Someone has to decide whether to litigate or settle each individual claim on the merits, and Congress cannot do that. That is an Executive Branch function. Congress can, however, write into law basic guardrails to govern the process, and maybe it should. But is a budget reconciliation bill the proper way to do that? Or should there be committee hearings, study, and deliberation on exactly how to write thoughtful rules that place reasonable limits on how DOJ exercises this authority?

This is precisely the sort of talking point that should resonate with the Susan Collinses and the Thom Tillises of the world and which they could adopt in this case, to justify opposing a Democrat amendment aimed at killing what’s really an immigration spending bill.

The Byrd rule in the Senate reconciliation process requires amendments to be primarily fiscal in effect rather than policy-oriented. Serious reform of the Judgment Fund might be a good idea, but that’s definitively a policy-oriented legislative task, not just a funding measure. But if a Democrat amendment miraculously survived the Byrd rule (or the 60-vote point of order to waive such a rule), then two can play this game.

Republicans could force Democrats to vote against some of their own sacred cows.

This happens all the time as a tactic to get the original amendment withdrawn. GOP Senators could file a separate amendment similar to the Democrat one being contemplated to prohibit certain people from receiving settlement payments.

For example, GOP amendments could describe categories designed to block settlements for a long parade of partisans who might line-up for payouts from a future Democrat Attorney General - including such supposed “victims” as Hunter Biden, James Comey, Dr. Tony Fauci and his deputy David Morens, John Brennan, John Kerry (remember those retaliatory Logan Act violations?), and Federal Reserve Governor (and alleged mortgage fraudster) Lisa Cook.

Categories could include foreign pro-Hamas activists targeting Jewish students, officials in sanctuary cities who defy federal law, and activists who obstructed, violently resisted, or threatened ICE agents conducting lawful enforcement operations.

Any number of amendments could be drafted to illustrate the folly of placing politically targeted limits on the government’s ability to settle legal claims. We’re old enough to remember when, instead of crying and refusing to take painful votes, some in the GOP Senate (including Senate legends we worked for like Tom Coburn and Chuck Grassley) would fight back.

You want to politicize the Judgment Fund? Game on.

Let’s show you how ugly that could get. Then maybe cooler heads will prevail, and we can talk later about serious Judgment Fund reform that reasonable people on both sides could support, such as monetary caps and enhanced oversight.

In other words, there is no cause for hysterics, shutting down the Senate floor, burning down the budget process, or blocking funding for immigration enforcement and security beef-ups over this big fat nothing-burger.

Memo to the Senate: stop the madness and get back to work.

Paid subscribers get access to the actual document we’re putting in the hands of congressional staffers right now. It gets a little technical - statutory frameworks, certification requirements, the works. If you want to understand why the Congressional freakout is unwarranted as a legal matter, it’s all in there.

• Congressional staffers or members of Congress interested in this document, DM us with your government email and we’ll send it to you for free.

• Paid subscribers who want a copy, comment below or send a DM to and we’ll send it over.

Would love to hear what you think! Please leave your thoughts below.

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That’s actually the business model. I know because I spent two decades trying to fix it. Worst of all I had to sit on the sidelines and watch it completely fail my sister.

Ray Kober had me on The Broken Healthcare Podcast to discuss what’s happening. Here’s what came up:

→ How a Mormon-turned-Catholic-turned-actual-nun ends up running health policy in the Trump White House (yes, real convent, two years).

→ How I watched my betters negotiate with warlords in South Sudan in my twenties, and why that turned out to be excellent training for negotiating with PBMs in my forties.

→ Why the fight is no longer Republicans vs. Democrats, but actually the healthcare swamp vs. the rest of us, and how for the first time in my career, the swamp is starting to lose.

→ Why the free market hasn’t failed in American healthcare. It’s actually never been tried.

→ The new federal law that just put every middleman in the country on personal notice, and why nobody in Washington is talking about it yet.

→ My sister’s hospital that did everything “by protocol” and nothing that actually helped her. And the day I decided I was never going to be a patient in this country again.

If you’ve already figured out that something is very wrong with our health system, please listen in.

You’re not crazy. You’re just early.

My group of grad-school pals, forged in the decrepit (but cheap!) Harvard medical campus dorm in the mid-1990s had a running joke about our friend Marty. Whenever someone noticed he wasn’t with us, we’d surmise that, while we were goofing off or decompressing, he was cranking out another peer-reviewed research paper.

We marveled at how he somehow found countless hours the rest of us couldn’t, cozying up to the faculty’s brightest lights and figuring out a research question aligned with their interests. He knew no journal would publish a study authored only by a student, so he would network with these researchers, learn from them, and collaborate on an interesting project. The rest of us were just trying to figure out logistic regression or the Krebs cycle, and we good-naturedly ribbed him for being an over-achiever that was making us all look bad.

By the late 1990s, Marty and I were in our first post-graduate jobs - both having landed at Georgetown University in DC - he was in his surgical residency, I was on the research faculty. We were so poor in those days, and I could always count on Marty to let me know where we could score free food at some Pharma-funded reception on campus. Probably the last time either of us benefited from Pharma influence-peddling.

Over the years, our careers were different but we ran in the same church circles in the city and stayed friends as our professional paths overlapped more and more. He wrote his first book, Unaccountable, about his ridiculous experiences during residency, which placed him squarely at odds with the broken status quo of Big Hospital’s underbelly. That book, published in 2012, was eventually adapted to become the TV show, The Resident (with Manish Dayal playing the Marty-type character).

Continuing in that vein of calling out corrupt systems, Marty’s research interests at Johns Hopkins started to intersect more with my professional interests as well. By then, he had settled down as a pancreatic surgeon and public health professor, and I had left full-time epidemiology for the Senate staff. His work involved developing the patient safety checklist in the OR (so you don’t operate on the wrong knee or leave a surgical instrument in the patient’s belly - yup, that happens). He had a knack for attracting the smartest people to work with him on his research, like health care quality guru Christi Walsh, CRNP, the most prolific health financing expert Dr. Ge Bai, PhD, and applied health quality business leader Dr. Will Bruhn, MD.

It was Marty who first turned me on to the absolute degeneracy of the Health Care Swamp. While I was still spouting Republican talking points about how we have to protect the “free market” in health care (editor’s note: health care is neither free nor a market), he was exposing just how failed and distorted that market was. He was publishing on how doctors in different specialties were reimbursed for the volume of their procedures, not the quality of their care, at great cost and risk to patients. He and his team convened groups of expert physicians in every specialty and facilitated their development of a new type of quality metric, asking them to agree on the most indefensible types of overtreatment in their specialty and then using Medicare data to provide every doctor in that specialty his or her rate of that overtreatment. This idea morphed into his team’s creation of a powerful set of “appropriateness” measures that are now used across the country (including in my business helping employers steer their workers to high quality care).

Around this same time, Marty co-wrote a book, Mama Maggie, about his Aunt Maggie Gobran, the Egyptian Coptic Christian humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize nominee known as Cairo’s Mother Teresa. I suspect that her example of unconditional love for the forgotten children of the Cairo garbage slums helped form Marty’s acute sense of justice. There is often a sort of simmering anger just under the surface when he talks about those who would exploit the weak. Indeed, vulnerable populations became the focus of much of his research, and a theme he wrote about in his books.

Fast-forward to 2018 or so, I was working in the Trump White House and joined Marty and his colleagues at a courthouse in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I was alarmed to discover that, every other Friday of the month, the courtroom docket was reserved exclusively for lawsuits being brought by the local academic medical center, tax-exempt Mary Washington Health, against their own patients who couldn’t afford to pay their medical bills. On this day, like all such Fridays, Marty and his team would stand at the door and intercept the defendants as they filed in. These were working class people, often showing up in their job uniform, embarrassed, not knowing what to expect but grim-faced with the recognition that they were in deep trouble.

Marty offered to serve each one as a medical expert on their case, reviewing their bills and offering to testify on their behalf - if, as was almost always the case, the bill was unfair or predatory, riddled with upcoding, inappropriate care, and other contradictions. The team included a local lawyer, the young whipper-snapper Joey Kirchgessner, who would argue the case until the hospital cried uncle. They helped a lot of people every time they were there. I was so proud of Marty and felt honored to be with the team that day.

Not too long after that, Marty was finishing up his next book, The Price We Pay, about the predatory practices of the health care industry that exploit the poor and sick in our country.

This problem had my full attention, because I was drafting an executive order on ending secret health care prices. So naturally, it was Marty I called to kick the tires on ideas and help me think through the issue. Later, when the draft order was circulated around the White House and HHS, and was facing internal resistance, I sent Marty’s book to about a dozen key officials and insisted (begged) forcefully that they read it. I might have been imagining it, but their objections seemed to take a less strident tone as they read story after story of ways that the ordinary incentives created by the health care system produced extraordinary harm for everyday people.

When I left government, I looked around at the apocalyptic health care system and despaired at the idea of having anything to do with the corrupt industries fleecing the American people. Most people with my resume end up shilling for this or that special interest from Big Pharma to Big Hospital, helping them lobby to keep the taxpayer gravy train rolling. I just couldn’t do it.

It was Marty who told me about a remarkable organization called Health Rosetta, a growing tribe of insurgent, honest benefits advisors helping employers fire the big carriers and PBMs and build re-humanized health plans. These advisors - whose business model was differentiated on radical transparency and independence from the usual conflicts of interest that ruined the rest of the industry - were the only bright light that I could see in the health care landscape. They took me under their wing, and the most generous among them mentored me as I built my business on Health Rosetta principles.

Marty and I occasionally edited each other’s writing or speeches, and collaborated on academic papers here and there. When I was invited to give a keynote somewhere, he mercilessly mocked my slides: “nobody wants to read your bulleted notes to yourself on a slide. Use pictures only.” My speechifying has improved significantly since.

When he was nominated for FDA Commissioner, I gave him a warning as serious as a heart attack: “You’d better get right with God, buddy, because you’ll be taking on the most demonic, most powerful industry on earth.”

I meant it.

I reminded him that my friend and colleague Daniel Best, the first-term HHS official in charge of developing the president’s plan to lower drug prices - a plan that the pharmaceutical industry despised - mysteriously fell to his death off a balcony. It was ruled a suicide. He had a wife and young kids and no apparent sign of depression. There was shell-shocked chatter about how none of us had seen it coming, but maybe that’s because it hadn’t been coming. Everyone around me seemed to accept the approved narrative, for reasons I never understood.

Although the forces allied against reform of FDA-regulated industries are first and foremost spiritual - early in the process, Marty faced more earthly obstacles. As he tried to assemble a team during the presidential transition period and during the pre-confirmation process, he struggled with how the personnel vetting system made it next to impossible to recruit qualified people who didn’t have demonstrated Republican or Trumpian bona fides - even though many people who make their careers outside of politics do so successfully only by keeping their political loyalties on the down-low.

There is another structural flaw in staffing up to execute the MAHA agenda:

• There are the MAHA experts - activists, scientists, researchers and practitioners who have been toiling in the MAHA vineyard of the Lord for decades.

• And there are skilled and experienced government operators, who know how to drive an agenda through the deep state bureaucracy, industry opposition, Congressional bed-wetting and White House political hackery.

These two circles on the Venn diagram do not overlap.

The president learned the hard way in his first term the importance of having loyal people in office, who can beat back the deep state and drive his agenda. So it’s understandable that the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) - the White House unit responsible for vetting and recruiting the 4,000 or so political appointees placed throughout the administration to serve at the president’s pleasure - would prioritize MAGA or at least traditional Republican street cred over almost anything else.

But traditional Republicans often didn’t have any sort of MAHA street creds. And to make matters worse, the hiring process at the beginning of the second term strangely excluded many first-term Trump appointees - loyal soldiers who had stayed through COVID, through the election chaos, through January 6th, and turned the lights off on Jan 20th, 2021. I can’t tell you how many friends and former colleagues who wanted to return (I liked my life too much to join them!) - experienced operatives and MAHA friendly, absolutely loyal to the president - who found themselves on some blacklist for some reason. Many of them were never hired. Some only found their way in after heroic efforts, many months after the Inauguration. I don’t know about other agencies, but I do know that this problem was especially acute at HHS, and as a result, there has been a massive vacuum in the department’s policy operation - lacking the skilled policy experts to drive the MAHA agenda, surrounding the agency heads like the Secretary, Marty and NIH Director Dr Jay. Bhattacharya.

Almost every advisor or deputy Marty wanted was rejected by this political machine. Worse, lawyers at HHS schemed and undermined him from the beginning. They, as well as the pharmaceutical industry and a particular social media influencer who can get the president’s attention (and who I suspect was paid by a certain drug company), went after his most trusted deputy, the incomparable Dr. Vinay Prasad MD. Dr. Prasad was widely respected for being a take-no-prisoners expert on how most studies utterly fail to answer the questions they intend to, and how medical practice guidelines can go deeply off the rails as a result. Of course, when he started bringing this much-needed bullshit-meter to the FDA, they naturally ran him out of town.

Other deputies and trusted aides that Marty appointed were under attack from the get-go. His counsel Hillary Perkins was accused of being inadequately pro-life (this was defamatory) and run out after two days on the job. Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD, an epidemiologist who saw the truth during COVID and said so, was criticized most of her tenure until being fired in a perp-walk kinda way last week, with no reason given.

The job is hard enough when the administration has your back, but when they’re never satisfied with you or your people, it makes it very difficult to persevere in doing good. I will also note that this administration has a particularly obnoxious pattern of putting tons of effort and agony into getting people through Senate confirmation, and then driving out these Senate confirmed people within a year. There is something that feels inappropriate about this waste of Senate time (that the Senate could be using to fix health care), though of course, they’re perfectly good at wasting their own time:

That said, to be honest, no matter how many competent staffers, no matter who is president, the Commissioner job is impossible for anyone. Even if a Commissioner were totally committed to rubber-stamping industry wish-lists and pom-pomming the status quo, that too would create massive headwinds from a variety of anti-status-quo quarters (though not as powerful). Those headwinds obviously become Category-5 for someone who wants to actually drive reform.

Nobody who comes into this job has ever run anything as life-or-death important, complex, politically charged, and many-mastered as the FDA. The agency regulates a fifth of the economy, including, as I mentioned above, some of the most powerful industries on earth: Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Tobacco. Pharma alone employs almost three lobbyists per member of Congress, and believe me, those lobbyists make life a living hell for any Commissioner.

A CEO who runs in elite, business-leader circles, recently recounted for me a conversation with two pharma and biotech executives, a couple months ago. They were bragging that “our cabal is planning to eliminate Makary. We have a plan and we will replace him, Bobby (Secretary Kennedy), and their deputies with our people.”

It’s clear the plan is executing on schedule.

Just peruse the almost dozen op-eds in the Wall Street Journal since last Fall, haranguing Marty for not approving a drug by Replimune that has unreliable data coming out of its flawed trials - you can see the strategy at work (three independent scientific teams at the FDA recommended against approval. Marty defended the scientists). Scan the political trade press daily and you’ll see chatter about the constant whining from the industry to the White House office established to placate aggrieved donors. Or the disgruntled former FDA employees serving as sources for every media hit, even though what they perceived as draconian DOGE layoffs happened before Marty took office. The rare-disease patient groups, being told by Pharma about how the FDA is delaying their new wonder-drug that could cure Huntington’s disease (even though the actual study methodology was at best controversial), ginned up anti-FDA grievance on social media and to the White House office established to placate aggrieved stakeholder groups (yes, there’s a relationship-babysitter WH office for everything).

Now, if you ask some insiders - even some of the non-corrupt ones - the story that you might hear is that Marty was partly to blame for his own downfall. All I can say is that when someone pushes the envelope and doesn’t trust the people who have presided over the status quo, they often look like the problem instead of the solution.

I wasn’t in the meetings. I couldn’t have witnessed anything that took place at FDA, HHS or at the White House between Marty and anyone else. So I can’t know the exact facts.

But I have checked in with Marty pretty regularly during his year and a half journey, and over that time, watched him go from sounding enthusiastic and hopeful during the pre-confirmation process to frustrated and disappointed by government corruption. The let-down has been palpable over not being able to fully reverse the agency capture and put the public back in public health.

I know that people who know us both are saying I only see the best side of Marty. That’s true - I do. But I’ve loved him like a brother since we were both bright-eyed kids and it has pained me to watch the dream for Making America Healthy Again that we both shared for so long cut brutally short.

Still, FDA under Marty’s leadership managed to eek out important reforms that we can all celebrate. Here are some of my favorites:

• Took the black box warning off of menopausal hormone therapy

• Removed artificial dyes from food

• Flipped the Food Pyramid to promote real food rather than processed crap at the base of the old pyramid.

• Cracked down on misleading Big Pharma advertising

• Reduced cruel animal testing

• Implemented surprise inspections of manufacturing facilities (rather than pre-announced, pre-warned and therefore useless scheduled inspections)

• First real-time clinical trial where regulators watch data signals in the cloud rather than waiting years for researchers to report results

• Made drug rejection letters public

No matter how you hear Marty’s record characterized, who likes him or who hates him, never forget this: the industries that FDA regulates are not your friends.

They do not profit from you being healthy. They have long, scandalous histories of knowingly peddling deadly products, rather than coming clean for the sake of patient safety. They have paid tens of billions in enforcement penalties for fraud, cover-ups and other violations. They will spend and are spending more money than God to thwart FDA’s scrutiny and oversight and any effort to reform their ways.

As their market share and bottom lines have grown to almost $2 trillion over the past century, FDA has presided over the American people becoming sicker, fatter, sadder, more infertile, more addicted - but more medicated - than we’ve ever been in our country’s history. The agency’s long decades of regulatory capture have contributed to our extinction-level chronic disease crisis.

The FDA exists to protect the American public from the depravity and corruption of the regulated industries, not to protect them from public scrutiny or accountability, or to cheerlead their products.

That’s why we have to continue to demand that the FDA take your side over corporations - everyday and always. Leaders who try to do this will get painted by the industry and its allies as radicals, cowboys and assholes. It’s a kamakazi suicide mission that you’d have to be crazy even to consider. But what choice do we have but to keep trying to recruit them and support them in office?

None of us is perfect, and no one has ever been truly prepared to take on this mother-of-all-jobs as FDA Commissioner. But win or lose, my brother-in-arms Marty has always been on your side.

I know he’ll continue to fight for you in his future endeavors.

PS: It’s muh-CARE-ee, not MACK-uh-ree or muh-KAH-ree. You’re welcome.

Specifically we discuss:

• Why I asked Tony Fauci and Francis Collins back in 2017 to take a meeting with Bobby Kennedy off-campus - and why I sent him an apology email five years later (then wrote about it.)

• Why public health doesn’t focus on “do no harm” - but rather, “cause no epidemics.”

• Why the “evangelist physician” is the most dangerous person in medicine - the lobotomy doctors, the pain management evangelists who handed us the opioid crisis, Public Health and their six feet distancing and cloth masks. All literally evangelizing.

• Why Big Pharma’s interests align with us being patients for life.

• Why “live like a human” (sleep like one, eat like one, pray like one, raise children like one) is one prescription we all need to write ourselves.

• And because Dr. Drew is Dr. Drew, we landed on Sigmund Freud. Specifically: the difference between serious mental illness and ordinary misery. Some of what we’re medicating now is ordinary misery. Ordinary misery is what makes us human. It can often tighten family bonds, deepen our relationship to God, or drive us to make a difference.

Take a listen!

I once had a colleague on a Senator’s staff with whom I shared a daily ritual.

Almost every afternoon, one of us would appear in the other’s doorway with the same expression that addicts probably recognize in each other instantly: you wanna go?

And off we’d march, through the marble hallways or circling the Capitol grounds, coffee in his hand, Diet Coke in mine, to enjoy what can only be described as an emotional cigarette break.

We complained.

About do-nothing staffers. Cowardly senators. Misguided activist groups. Reporters too lazy to figure out facts. Agency bureaucrats subverting oversight. Consultants whose messaging lost elections, and Congressional leadership whose corruption made good faith negotiations impossible.

We were very smart, you see. Everyone else was the problem.

At the time, I didn’t recognize these walks for what they were. I thought we were “processing.” I thought we were blowing off steam. But really, we were getting high.

Blame feels fantastic. Especially combined with genuine human connection - blaming loves company.

Politics runs on this fuel.

In Washington, one of my favorite exercises during policy debates was a game I called “demagogue it.” We would sit around asking: how will the other side distort this policy? How will they twist our motives? What’s the most emotionally devastating version of this argument?

And whenever I wanted to kill a bill, I would take a provision from it and imagine the absolutely most extreme and craven use of that authority and write a talking point accusing the bill author of having only that intention all along.

This works to win arguments and elections because the human brain is built for victim stories.

We instinctively organize the world into heroes, villains, and innocents. The problem is that once you start seeing yourself primarily as the innocent victim in the story of your life, you’ve already surrendered your ability to be the hero.

At some point, I realized something disturbing about those afternoon complaint walks.

The stories my colleague and I told each other were changing me.

People would frustrate me during the day, and then during our walk I’d construct a whole psychological profile for them. They weren’t just misguided; they were corrupt. They weren’t just difficult; they were malicious. They weren’t just limited; they were fundamentally defective people standing in the way of progress, success, justice, truth, or whatever noble thing I imagined myself pursuing at the moment.

This “othering” made it harder to collaborate, to connect, to feed the higher part of my soul or the other’s soul. Which robbed me of the kind of happiness that outlasts the victories or defeats of a given moment.

Every explanation for why my life or work was difficult rested on someone else’s failures.

If only they weren’t incompetent.
If only they weren’t corrupt.
If only they listened to me.
If only they changed.

I was assigning myself too much power and too little power at the same time. Too much power because I assumed I possessed the wisdom to fix everything - if only everyone listened. But far more important - this mindset gave me too little power because I was outsourcing my own effectiveness, peace, and happiness to the vagaries of other people that I couldn’t control.

This all sounds very silly and petty in the context of politics, where it’s obvious that I wasn’t actually a victim of anybody or anything. The more serious question is what to do with actual victimization.

Because real evil exists. Real injustice exists. People genuinely betray, abuse, neglect, exploit, humiliate, and wound each other, intentionally and unintentionally.

Think about children, for example, who suffer traumatic abuse and are removed from their homes. Then they might spend years suffering further inside systems supposedly designed to protect them. By the time the time they enter actual safety at some point, they could have a thousand legitimate reasons to rage at the world.

And some of that rage is necessary.

One of the cruelest effects of childhood trauma is that children often assume everything was their fault. To heal, they have to learn the truth - they were the victims, not the instigators. But there is a danger waiting on the other side of that awakening.

Once someone puts on the victim identity, it can be very difficult to take off. It becomes a convenient explanation for everything: why trust is risky, why discipline is cruel, why relationships fail, why self-control is unrealistic, or why self-destruction is inevitable. Why selfishness is your right, and sacrifice is for suckers.

Victimhood moves from being not just about what we experienced, but rather, who we are - the organizing principle of our entire identity.

And once that happens, every challenge we face gets re-framed as persecution. Obstacles are personal affronts rather than problems to solve. Failure is someone else’s fault.

This is one of the reasons I think our culture is becoming psychologically fragile in ways that no amount of material abundance can fix. We are teaching people to interpret suffering almost exclusively through the lens of blame. Social media is largely fueled by this mentality - take a gander at your favorite feed - you’ll notice that most of what’s viral is victim mindset:

Who caused this?
Who’s responsible?
Who should pay?

Now, those questions matter sometimes, of course; civilization requires accountability and justice. But there is another question that, in terms of our own individual story, matters so much more:

What now?

The secret to all power, all happiness, purpose and achievement is in the question: now that these things have happened, what do I do next?

There’s a concept in The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - a deceptively simple, but radical book - that I found particularly powerful. The authors distinguish between those who view life as happening “to me” and those who trust that life is happening “for me.”

At first glance, that sounds absurdly simplistic. Offensive, even.

Was abuse “for” someone?
Was betrayal “for” someone?
Was death “for” someone?

No. Not in the simplistic Hallmark-card sense that people sometimes mean when they say “everything happens for a reason.”

It’s obviously a theological matter, but we Catholics do not hold that God delights in suffering, that tragedy is inherently good or that death is always a gift.

But I do know that I know that I know this to be true: once something has happened, the only thing that makes any difference at all is what you do next.

That’s the difference between continuing in defeat and helplessness or becoming great. Nobody who wallows in the past, ruminates on the wrongs of others, or the devastating circumstances of the present has a future that is strong, bold, brave, heroic.

Don’t you want to be the one who overcame instead of the one who was ruined? The only person who can make that choice for you is you. Because nobody dictates what you do next, regardless of any circumstance, except you.

That’s true even in the darkest prisons, where control over others is the rule.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writing about the Soviet gulags, and Viktor Frankl, writing after Auschwitz, arrived at the same subversive conclusion: there is a dimension of human freedom no regime can fully extinguish. Frankl called it “the last of the human freedoms” - the ability to choose your own attitude in any given set of circumstances. Solzhenitsyn observed that, even in prison, where every external liberty had been stripped away, some men became spiritually smaller while others became larger.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest also imprisoned at Auschwitz, volunteered to die in place of another prisoner at the same camp. In a place engineered to reduce human beings to terrified animals, witnesses described him leading prayers and comforting other condemned prisoners as they starved to death together.

These men weren’t saintly, inspirational and heroic because they changed their circumstances. Their circumstances remained hellish. Their stories are still retold and inspiring today because they understood that, even when all powers and freedoms seem to be stripped, we still have one left: the meaning we make of our suffering. The name we have for ourselves - “victim,” “victor,” or anything in between - is entirely and profoundly up to us.

Most of us don’t have such a hard task in front of us - not even traumatized foster children or most other innocents you can imagine. Our task - and theirs - is usually much more mundane: to look at today - the day in front of us - and take 100 percent responsibility for what we do with it and how we respond to what comes of it. To recognize that everything about what this day means in the story of our life is 100 percent ours to determine. Even if we’re fired today. Even if someone hurts someone we love today. Even if we’re given a diagnosis today.

I used to objectify all the other drivers on the road as out to kill me, hinder me, wrong me, or otherwise try my patience. I looked at the cars as my enemies, obstacles to where I was trying to go. In other words, every time I got on the road, I was deep in victim mindset. If I was on a wide-open country road, with the windows down and the sun on my face, singing at the top of my lungs, I was happy and content. Anything that deviated from that utopia, I interpreted as a grievous injustice and infringement on my God-given dignity and I reveled in feeling offended.

After learning the “to-me” v. “for-me” framework, I decided to adopt the mindset that everyone on the road was there for me.

I started repeating a mantra: “everyone deserves acceptance.” Your mantra might be different - that was just the one that helped me. It changed my relationship with driving from one of frustration to one of embrace. If I was held up, I had more time for podcasts, audiobooks, prayer, or singing the Indigo Girls at the top of my lungs like I did in high school. I found that I started welcoming traffic or slower speed limits because I got more “me time” in this mindset. Traffic, delays, distance - they were no longer happening to me, they were happening for me.

My work building health plans for employers tests this “new Katy” every day: firing insurance carriers, PBMs, and quarterbacking a million vendors, daily fire-drills, vendor mishaps, client concerns, and a fifth of the economy trying to burn down my business model. A few years ago, I was operating on the sleep deprivation and low-grade fight-or-flight that the victim mindset bathes in. I told myself that this is why I was successful - the only way - I was the only consultant that cared this much and so that’s why clients should hire me.

When I intentionally renounced the victim mindset, I started recognizing that everyone was doing their best in an imperfect business. I recognized that the real value I delivered for my clients wasn’t perfection but rather, sophisticated problem-solving built on trust - a commitment that the problem can and will be solved, that solutions will appear. That the work our team performs is wrapped in love for our client’s workforce like we love our own family. And that I couldn’t control everything that happened to our clients, but by changing my own mindset, I could relax emotionally - knowing that whatever came at our team every day, we would face it with best-in-class commitment, collaboration, and service. Victory doesn’t always look like the bumper sticker I’d like it to be, but I see more and more of it every day.

One mindset creates anxiety and paralysis. The other creates agency and purpose. Which one feels like where you’d like to live?

That doesn’t mean the second mindset hurts less. In fact, it often hurts more initially, because it forces you to relinquish one of the ego’s favorite narcotics: righteous helplessness.

Victimhood is seductive because it relieves us of responsibility. If my failures are someone else’s fault, then I no longer have to confront my own fear, laziness, cowardice, bitterness, pride, impulsiveness, or lack of discipline.

I can remain exactly where I am forever and call it justice or fate.

But there is no real power there. There is only permanent dependence on the repentance, apology, punishment, or transformation of other people. And if your peace depends on that, you are handing other people the keys to your nervous system.

When bad stuff is happening, there’s no way out but through. Nothing will change what happened, whether just now or long ago. The only choice we have is what we do next. If we blame someone for why we can’t do this or that next, then the only result is that we’ve disempowered ourselves. There’s no winner there. You haven’t won the argument. You haven’t been vindicated. You haven’t gotten back at them. You’ve only hamstrung yourself. You’ve only let the people who hurt you yesterday continue to ruin your today and your tomorrow.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that the secret to life is largely a head game.

The victim mindset is low vibration (the same frequency as shame and fear) and I choose not to waste time there anymore - it doesn’t serve me or anyone else.

That’s why the victim mindset is so spiritually corrosive. There’s nothing remotely inspirational about it - especially to yourself. It’s a salve to the bruised ego, but at the price of actual change.

Even when your grievances are legitimate - especially when they are - building your identity around them guarantees that the people who harmed you continue their power over your life long after the original injury occurred.

Meanwhile, life is moving on.

Your children are growing closer or more distant.
Your marriage is either deepening or eroding.
Your gifts are being developed or buried.
Your body is aging.
Your time is running out.

People who choose radical agency, who focus only on their own responsibility and their own contribution in every situation, their own next step, no matter what came before, are fabulously dangerous and subversive.

Those who believe they can alchemize suffering into wisdom or purpose become invincible. Ungovernable. Mastered, yes, but only by themselves, to serve their own goals and highest ends.

Where are you falling into a victim mindset?

If I do my own inventory, it’s probably social media and body image. When you identify your traps, you’re already halfway there. Start naming the people and circumstances who are to blame for those areas of your life. Then, take a few long, deep breaths, close your eyes, and ask yourself:

“Recognizing who and what my ego wants to blame, nonetheless, what do I do next?”

Your highest self will whisper the answer.

Be brave!!

We recently observed World Homeopathy Awareness Week.

What the bleep is homeopathy, you ask? Good question.

It’s a wild, wonderful world of medicine that you’ve probably heard of, but never quite known what it is.

But before we get into what it is, let’s set the stage a bit.

Conventional medicine is based on the premise that our bodies respond best to biochemical inputs - drugs, food, mechanical intervention like surgery.

But you already know that there’s more to the story than that.

Conventional medicine sometimes admits it too - MRIs are based on identifying resonance patterns using big magnets on the body, for example.

Women’s menstrual cycles seem to sync up in ways that science hasn’t figured out.

Tuning forks interact with each other - strike one and an un-struck fork across the room will start to vibrate. Move the fork into the 6-foot energy field that surrounds a human, and the sound will actually change.

Water is one of the most responsive substances on earth to resonance and frequency. Play a tone next to water, and then examine it microscopically - the molecules have arranged themselves into amazing patterns.

One of the most radical sciences being conducted today is the work of water researcher (and whisperer) Veda Austin.

She places petri dishes with thin layers of water on top of photographs or paper with words on them, or plays music for them, or even directs thoughts at them. And then she throws the petri dishes in the freezer “with the peas and carrots,” as she puts it. The water flash-freezes into designs that actually reflect - sometimes in creative and wild ways - the influence that was given. Sometimes the frozen design mimics the picture it was in contact with. Sometimes it answers a question. It’s wild. And thousands of people have been taught Veda’s technique and are replicating it around the world.

What does all this have to do with homeopathy?

To many people, the word “homeopathic” is simply a synonym for “holistic” or “natural” or “alternative,” as in - pursuing homeopathic care instead of or in addition to taking prescription drugs or getting surgery.

But homeopathy has a very specific meaning relating to a very specific scientific framework.

Homeopathy is the science of how the frequency, resonance, and energy of a thing interact with water, how the water takes on that energetic footprint and carries it into our bodies to address symptoms or conditions that are also caused by the thing.

More than two centuries ago, a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann (n. 1755) had grown increasingly unimpressed with the bloodletting and mercury poisoning that his profession called “treatment.” (Raise your hand if you can relate.) He began paying the bills by translating medical texts.

He was translating a book by William Cullen about cinchona bark (the source of quinine) and its usefulness for malaria. Cullen speculated its effectiveness was due to its bitterness and tonic effects on the stomach. Hahnemann didn’t buy it and decided to perform an experiment.

He took cinchona bark himself as a tincture - not in the form it was used as a medicine, but in high doses heated in alcohol the way tinctures are made. After a few days, he developed symptoms that were a lot like malaria: fever, chills, weakness, palpitations, throbbing headache. The symptoms came on in waves - similar to the cyclical waves of a malaria episode.

His imagination was sparked.

Hahnemann’s hypothesis was that “like cures like.” He speculated that substances that cause certain symptoms in large doses in healthy people are actually nature’s perfect remedy (in very small doses) for healing those symptoms in sick people.

He went on a frenzied bender to “prove” a bunch of remedies - systematically dosing himself and other healthy volunteers with every substance he could find. The volunteers would dose themselves with a form of the substance - powders, infusions (like tea), extracts and tinctures - and record exactly which symptoms developed. These detailed “symptom profiles” included not only physical ailments of the body, but emotional, psychological, and personality changes.

Once the symptom profile was developed, Hahnemann and his disciples started treating patients with similar profiles. The problem was that the patients’ symptoms often temporarily intensified. He took that to mean that the remedy was working, but too aggressively.

So he began diluting the substances in water and alcohol. He wasn’t trying to make the medicine weaker; he was trying to make it gentler. But he discovered something amazing - the medicines actually worked more effectively and more quickly - the more diluted they became, but without any of the harsher effects.

Each dilution was accompanied by vigorously shaking the container, or striking it, so as to get the substance’s essence into the water. Over time, this process rendered less and less of the measurable substance and more of the frequency or resonance of the substance in the water.

Hahnemann called this process “potentiation” - the idea that a substance’s energy or essence became more powerful the more it was diluted.

Carrying these liquid remedies had some practical distribution problems. The liquids were hard to dose properly, and each remedy had a bunch of different dilutions to be used based on the specifics of the patient’s case. Since each remedy had such a unique symptom profile, and there were hundreds of remedies, Hahnemann realized that carrying around a bunch of liquid jars didn’t make sense. They could easily degrade or break, and it just wasn’t practical.

So he took the technique that was commonly used to deliver medicine at the time - sugar pills doused in a liquid medicine - and he used them for his own remedies.

He doused each pellet with the diluted remedy and, voila, he had little vials of dozens of doses that were much easier to schlep around.

The pellets were also much easier for the patients to take. They could put a few under the tongue until they dissolved, or crush them in a glass of water and drink a few sips.

Babies and toddlers, and even pets and livestock, could get the doses in their water or crushed over their food. Even crops riddled with pests or fungus could be treated by crushing the pellets into the water sprayed on them.

The name of Hahnemann’s framework was Greek for “similar” (homoios) and “suffering” (pathos) - based on the “like cures like” foundation. His disciples grew as the remedies’ undeniable success became more and more recognized. He published his first paper in 1796, and homeopathy spread to the elites of Europe at first, much preferred by patients to the brutal techniques of conventional medicine of their day (and our day too). Hahnemann eventually moved to Paris and gained broad acclaim in the early 19th century.

In the U.S., homeopathy was widely adopted during the same period, with the American Institute of Homeopathy - one of the first medical societies - founded in 1844. By the late 1800s, there were more than 20 homeopathic medical schools, over 100 homeopathic hospitals, and thousands of homeopathic practitioners.

Embraced by European royal families and the wealthiest American families, homeopathy enjoyed legitimacy and scientific credibility and, in many areas, the use of homeopathic medicine rivaled or even exceeded conventional medicine. Homeopaths were reported to have lowered mortality rates during outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever and typhus.

In other words, homeopathy wasn’t fringe, and it wasn’t “woo.” It was mainstream - a parallel medical system.

Until, of course, the same villain that went after naturopathy - the medicine of using natural methods (such as nutrition and herbs) to restore health - turned its sights on homeopathy: Big Oil.

The Rockefellers and Carnegies got together to fund medicines derived from petroleum byproducts, in league with Big Chemical, led by Bayer. Bayer was gearing up to marry the conglomerate that manufactured the gas for the Holocaust’s slaughter, but they also led the way at turning petroleum-based products into standardized “medicines” that could be patented.

(When I say “patent,” you say “profit.” Patent! PROFIT!)

Many of these medicines were merely snake oil, and a good number of people were used to the more affordable homeopathic remedies and herbal naturopathic remedies, but nature can’t be patented as easily. So the Bigs put out the Flexner Report in 1910, which got wide acclaim for trashing all the medical schools where the curricula and treatments being taught weren’t “standardized” according to pharmaceutical and biomedical laboratory-grade standards endorsed by the Carnegie Foundation and funded by the Rockefellers.

They also funded what was then a small organization called the American Medical Association, and helped it grow and discredit all types of medical doctors and schools that didn’t follow the pharmaceutical model.

Within a few decades, most of the homeopathic and naturopathic medical schools had closed. Medical licensure boards emerged in states, using their power to discredit and muzzle these practitioners in favor of their white-coated, pharmaceutical-prescribing version of medicine that we all know so well today.

And yet. Even as homeopathy was pushed out of medical schools and hospitals, it never disappeared from law.

In 1938, the FDA’s founding legislation explicitly recognized the U.S. Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia - giving homeopathic remedies formal recognition in the U.S. regulatory system that still exists today.

(This is thanks to Senator Royal Copeland, a homeopathic physician, who fought to protect homeopathy from the pharma mafia. Wish he were still around today).

Around the world, homeopathy is the second largest medical system after conventional medicine. Countries such as India formally recognize homeopathy, and there are hundreds of homeopathic medical schools there and hundreds of thousands of practitioners. In the UK, homeopathy has been used by the royal family for generations, and it is still respected there, as well as in France and Germany.

If homeopathy were as irrelevant as its critics claim, it wouldn’t have survived for more than 200 years, spread across continents and embedded itself in national health care systems.

Homeopathy isn’t fringe - it’s global, and in some countries, it’s just called medicine.

So How Does It Work?

Typically, homeopathy is not looking to suppress symptoms. It views symptoms as your body’s effort to do something important. Fever is the body’s attempt to speed something up - metabolism, circulation, immune activity - and to restructure water molecules in your system. Inflammation is designed to create a watery environment - since healing often occurs in fluid environments - to summon the body’s tools of healing to the scene of the crime, and also to create an internal cast that cushions the injured tissue while it recovers. Pain protects that cast - by keeping you from moving it while it’s doing its job of healing.

Homeopaths will tell you that their job is to help your body move through that healing process, including any symptoms with more ease and speed than it otherwise would.

The remedies interact with what Hahnemann called the “vital force” - the dynamic intelligence that animates the body and coordinates its response to stress, injury, degradation, and threats. In today’s modern assault on all things human - our indoor, fluorescent-lit existence, low-grade (or not-so-low-grade) fight-or-flight, poisoned food and water, and disconnection from the sun, from the earth, from God and from our tribe - our vital force is often anemic at best.

Homeopathic remedies are designed to engage the vital force by exposing it to the energy or resonance of some unexpected substance that stirs it up and recruits it back into action of healing and maintaining homeostasis - the perfect balance of health.

Testimonies abound of patients struggling with infertility, autism, eczema, snake bites, sprained ankles - and every other possible malady that nature contrives - being improved or mitigated under the influence of a homeopathic regimen. (NOTE: this is not medical advice, and the wonderful thing about homeopathy is that it doesn’t interfere with conventional medical care that you can obviously and many times should obviously seek as well).

The wild thing is that when a homeopath is called to the scene, very often, the remedy chosen first heals things that the body/soul/vital force actually considers more important than the symptoms that are annoying the patient.

My own story is similar - I engaged a homeopath to help with some minor but persistent symptoms, and it turned into a months-long series of remedies that unlocked massive healing of my wounded femininity (which I’ve written about quite a bit here and here), before ever getting around to the symptoms that started the process. My body-mind intelligence knew that was a far bigger priority, and it was right.

So Naturally, The FDA is Trying to Cancel Homeopathy

As I described above, homeopathy has technically been recognized in U.S. law since 1938, but in recent years, that protection has started to erode.

In 1988, FDA laid out a framework whereby it recognized homeopathic remedies as drugs that technically should go through the regular drug process (involving expensive safety and effectiveness trials and extensive FDA review and oversight), BUT that the agency would choose to exercise its enforcement discretion instead, and embrace a posture of non-enforcement. The guidance stated that the remedies could avoid enforcement if certain criteria were met - namely that they were listed in the U.S. Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia, they weren’t mislabeled, contaminated, and didn’t claim to heal serious conditions if sold over-the-counter.

This wasn’t perfect, but it was a reasonable stand-off. But then the Obama FDA, starting in 2015, held hearings about whether homeopathic remedies were “safe,” had sufficient “evidence,” and were labeled properly. By December of 2017, the Trump FDA - right under my nose as the White House policy lead for FDA - replaced the 1988 framework with a new regime.

I note for the record that I did not receive this guidance in draft form as part of a formal review process, and I damned well should have for such a significant policy change. More deep state shenanigans.

In any case, the 2017 draft guidance declared the remedies unapproved drugs, with a priority to go after and shut down those remedies that were targeted for serious conditions (like cancer), vulnerable populations like the elderly or infants (the ones most likely to benefit). In other words - the priority was the remedies that are most likely to interrupt Big Pharma’s profit drivers: blockbuster cancer drugs and the Medicare patient pool.

FDA finalized this guidance and withdrew the 1988 “safe harbor” policy in 2019 - after I had left the White House.

Advocacy groups like Americans for Homeopathy Choice argue that this new framework isn’t outright criminalization, but more of a slow squeeze. Because once you declare homeopathic remedies to be unapproved drugs requiring approval, then you’re forcing billion-dollar clinical trials for remedies that can’t be patented and barely make a profit.

I would argue that homeopathic remedies are still legal, ever since 1938. But now the FDA is going to decide if they’re “risky” and come after the ones they feel like coming after.

But let me point out the absolute farce:

There is no active ingredient left in most homeopathic remedies.

(Remember the dilution, and the shaking, and the dilution some more, and then more shaking, on and on until there’s only the “essence” of the thing and not the actual thing left in the water?)

So how can water with no active ingredient, dropped onto a sugar pill, be dangerous?

It can’t. This is why homeopathy is so safe for use. Pregnant women can use homeopathy. Newborn babies. People taking a bunch of prescription meds - water and sugar don’t interact with other drugs.

This has been the basis of FDA’s whining about labeling - they argue that any claim that there’s actually a substance in there is a lie. And that any claim that it treats a disease is therefore also a lie. Because it’s sugar and water.

So they can hardly then complain that these products are somehow “risky” at the same time.

FDA needs to pick a side - either these products have some active ingredient in them with a risk profile, which requires safety studies, or they don’t, which requires caution about marketing claims. But you can’t demand BOTH safety studies to prove the effectiveness of some active ingredient AND caution about marketing claims because there’s no active ingredient.

The truth is, at most potencies that are used, such as 12C, 30C or 100C, the dilution is past what’s known as Avogadro’s number, 6 x 10²³, which is the threshold dilution of a substance after which there is considered to be unmeasurable/untraceable substance left. For lower-level potencies such as 1X (where the substance is 1/10th of the liquid) or perhaps even 10X (where it’s 1 part per ten billion), I might understand a risk-based approach. But most homeopaths are using the C remedies or even greater dilutions, and the over-the-counter, first-aid type remedies are almost always those levels. So maybe FDA just needs to wake up and put the kibosh on the deep state.

If you’ve made it this far, you might see that homeopathy is not what most people think it is. And you might be asking yourself: why have I never heard any of this before?

Because once you start to understand how homeopathy works - and even more importantly, how to use it - it’s glaringly obvious how incomplete our current model of health really is.

And more than that, you step into a completely different relationship with your body, your health, and your family’s care. One that is less dependent, less reactive, and far more intuitive and self-directed.

Behind this paywall, I’m going to show you what that looks like in practice - how to find a homeopath, what happens in a session, how remedies are chosen, what the course of treatment generally involves, and how to begin using homeopathy yourself for first aid and everyday situations. I’ll also walk you through how to get involved in protecting access to this kind of care, starting with supporting Americans for Homeopathy Choice.

Nobody is coming to save your health.

Paid subscribers get the play-by-play for how to incorporate the hidden treasure of homeopathy into your life, and use it to take back your health - and your family’s - from the people who were never going to fix it for you.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.

When Should I Use Homeopathy?

Read more

It was 2017. We had hauled the CEOs of a bunch of pharmaceutical companies into the Oval Office so that President Trump could berate them about their drug prices. (Always a good time.)

Somehow, the word “vaccine” came up in the conversation. When that happens in the president’s presence, then, now, last month, and probably next week, like clockwork, he always starts telling the same story. A woman who worked for him at the Trump Organization back in the day. Her two-year-old son, who was “perfect, beautiful, magnificent, flawless.” Then he got a shot and he was “just gone. Gone. Never the same. Beautiful boy. Then, just gone.”

The CEOs all shrank back and turned the response to this story over to their colleague Ken Frazier, then-CEO of Merck, a prominent vaccine manufacturer. I don’t remember what he said. I’m sure it was the usual safe-and-effective incantation.

The president had an instinct. I had the credentials. What I didn’t have was an answer.

But it brought me back to 2002.

The autism moms, like other groups of moms did every day, were lobbying me to do something to help their children. I was a staffer on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees CDC. It was my job to recommend, when it came to public health, which bills to write, which bills to move, which bills to kill, which issues to conduct oversight on and which agencies to subpoena.

Each mom told the same story of a vaccination, and the subsequent regression of their children into the signs of autism. They wanted the CDC to rigorously study the safety of vaccines and assess the relationship of vaccination to the subsequent diagnosis of autism.

I was torn.

I was a Harvard-trained infectious disease epidemiologist. I believed, religiously, that vaccines were the gold standard of public health interventions.

Not because I had been shown the evidence for their effectiveness and safety in public health school, by examining the seminal clinical trials demonstrating as much (I hadn’t). But because I had been trained in the orthodoxy of public health, where it was assumed that someone had studied this and it had been demonstrated at some point - so now we could all focus on more pressing matters, like how to get vaccines in more kids’ arms around the world. I had spent my early career gallivanting overseas, controlling infectious disease from guinea worm in South Sudan to HIV/AIDS in Russian drug users and inner city DC prostitutes. I was the hero in the story I told myself.

But also, I am a woman. And I deeply revere the intuition and wisdom of mothers. And it was not my nature, when a bunch of moms tell me about an observed fact pattern in their children’s lives, to disbelieve or dismiss them.

So I did what any young, naive staffer in her first job on the Hill would do: I called the CDC.

They gave me some bland pablum about debunked studies and how “correlation doesn’t equal causation” and what-not. I was left with a weird disquiet and wasn’t sure what to do. But I knew my boss, the committee’s Ranking Republican, would be loath to wade into such a hornet’s nest. Not to mention that the committee’s chairman, (ironically) Ted Kennedy - whose party controlled the Senate - would try to thwart us at every turn - and we were already in enough battles with him.

Besides, Rep. Dan Burton and Rep. Dave Weldon, MD, were already holding hearings over on the House side - if something came of those, I could maybe interest my boss then. So I went on to the next meeting and the next ask from the next group of moms of kids with the next condition.

Fast forward fifteen years and several other Senate staff jobs. It was 2017, and I was now President Trump’s lead health advisor on the Domestic Policy Council, and we were all still trying to find the bathrooms in the White House.

I was now far more experienced and savvy a staffer, and utterly untrusting of federal agencies - especially the CDC. But I still believed with all my heart that vaccines were life-saving, critically-needed interventions to protect children, and that they worked best when uptake and the subsequent herd immunity was high.

I was told that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, an acquaintance of candidate Trump, had gotten him to commit to establishing a Vaccine Safety Commission once he was in office. Mr. Kennedy was now calling and wanted to get the promised commission going.

It was my job to make this problem go away.

I was all in.

We couldn’t have a meeting, an event, or a commission that communicated to the world that vaccines were anything less than the Greatest Public Health Victory we all believed them to be (can I get an “amen?”). So I called up NIH leaders Francis Collins and Tony Fauci and asked them to go ahead and take the meeting, but off-site somewhere, far from the White House and the public view.

That meeting, which took place at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, has become somewhat notorious in MAHA lore.

Mr. Kennedy, as well as Del Bigtree and Aaron Siri with the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), met with The Authorities about The Science. All of them have spoken publicly about that meeting, where Dr. Fauci assured them of the mountains of studies demonstrating vaccine safety. Reportedly, when asked to produce them, he rifled through his papers as if they were just at the tip of his fingertips. When he couldn’t find them, he promised to deliver the studies later. Which never happened. ICAN filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to get them.

HHS settled the lawsuit with a stunning admission - on the record - that no such studies existed.

But I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that I had done my job and saved children.

For the next few years, I worked on a variety of policies I was really proud of (ending secret health care prices, lowering drug prices, combatting opioid addiction) and others that didn’t go quite as well (the doomed repeal-and-replace-Obamacare misadventure). The demands of working in the White House are brutal. While many of my colleagues had become like family, my real family could no longer pick me out of a line-up.

By mid-2019, my stress level had peaked. For many reasons, it was time to move on. My younger sister, a 39-year-old mother of two, was dying of colorectal cancer, and I spent the next five months taking care of her, thinking a lot of deep thoughts about the limits and the hubris of medicine.

When COVID landed on our shores a few months later, there was certainly some FOMO.

Global respiratory disease popping off, and I just left the White House?

I published an op-ed in March of that year, expressing relief that my friend and former colleague, Deborah Birx, had just been appointed the head of the White House COVID response. In the summer and Fall of 2020, I helped the Trump re-elect campaign by doing media interviews defending the administration’s COVID efforts.

I put on a happy face for the cameras, but as the year wore on, the unscientific demands from The Authorities were causing cognitive dissonance.

Masking mania made no sense in light of the size of a viral particle. Masks worn loosely, re-used, touched with unsterile hands all day, and forced onto children were a crime against epidemiology. And yet, The Authorities like Birx and Fauci, who I knew would know better, were still pretending.

Lockdowns were being implemented in ridiculous and scientifically unjustifiable ways. Churches - no. Mom-and-Pop restaurants - no. Gyms - no. Walmart - yes. There seemed to be no effort to explain the totalitarian disconnect that was being imposed from on high.

I had moved to Loudoun County, Virginia shortly after my sister passed away, in order to be close to her two young boys. We wanted to make friends in our new community, and the only people daring to gather were the patriots and dissidents involved in the Loudoun County Parents’ Resistance™, fighting the school closures and other policy malpractice. That put me in touch with the hodge-podge of nontraditional allies that the COVID era united: Catholic homeschoolers and hippie homesteaders. Medical freedom activists and election integrity watchdogs.

We loved the meetups with these unafraid humans, one of whom was a mom of a vaccine-injured child who ran our state’s medical freedom group.

She persuaded me to watch the documentary Vaxxed.

The movie narrated the tale of CDC’s early 2000s vaccine/autism research - the kind those autism moms had demanded, not knowing that the CDC had already done it but was hiding the results.

It documented the U.S. House hearings by Reps. Weldon and Burton, trying to uncover the truth, and the later whistleblower, William Thompson, who confirmed all the moms’ worst fears. It was a searing indictment of my own paralysis during these events decades ago.

Here is the text I sent that same friend as the credits rolled, along with the tears down my cheeks:

Still, because I was an epidemiologist, people in my circle would come to me for answers about The Science, including potential prevention and treatment for COVID.

I became the Underground Railroad in our community for hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, nebulized steroids, and other countermeasures frowned on by The Authorities. Whenever someone in our social circle would fall desperately ill, I would help them get medicines from the semi-secret network of doctors, bravely providing these lifelines by telemedicine across the country.

Wanting more knowledge and credentials to help people, I enrolled in a degree program to become a naturopathic doctor.

I watched in disgust and confusion as the new administration doubled down on crazy, with so many in federal and state governments seeming to throw basic rules of microbiology and epidemiology out the door.

And then, something happened in late summer of 2021 - a set of legal contortions between Big Pharma and the FDA that started to make everything painfully clear.

I was familiar with a public health law called the PREP Act that passed when I had worked in the Senate. It provided liability protection for manufacturers, doctors, and even employers during a declared public health emergency, provided that certain criteria were met. One of those criteria, when it came to drugs or other emergency countermeasures, was that the law’s legal immunity only applied to products with either FDA licensure or Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

The government had a number of problems brought on by aspects of the PREP Act and the law establishing the EUA process:

Problem #1: To get an EUA for a product, there have to be no other “approved, adequate and available” therapies. And there seemed to be quite a few: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, for starters. Since it was going to take a while to get FDA licensure for the product that was going in all those arms under the EUA, the EUA had to be protected.

That would only be possible if cheap, generic, widely used, safe and FDA-licensed hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (or anything else) were intentionally not recognized as effective therapeutics for COVID.

These therapies had to be suppressed and delegitimized by The Authorities as ineffective or dangerous as treatments for COVID, or else the coming vaccines - new, experimental products with limited safety trials conducted at “warp speed” - would be subject to crippling lawsuits if they injured anyone. Given that they would likely be distributed to the entire population en masse, it was a statistical certainty that someone would be injured.

This represented a massive problem for manufacturers. And that meant it was a massive problem for The Authorities, because Pfizer was threatening not to sell their product in any country that didn’t immunize them.

This EUA problem would go away once the vaccine was licensed by the FDA. But the required clinical trials weren’t done yet. Also, they weren’t coming out so great: of the 29 deaths in the clinical trial leading to licensure, 15 were in the vaccinated group, one more than in the unvaccinated group.

Problem #2: Only FDA-licensed products can be mandated or added to the childhood schedule, not EUA products. (And the Biden Administration was plotting nationwide mandates, because, of course they were.)

Problem #3: The FDA license for the Pfizer vaccine would not apply to the whole population because the clinical trials that would form the basis of that approval didn’t include important sub-groups, like pregnant women and children under 16. So the EUA would still be needed to immunize Pfizer against lawsuits arising from injuries to those groups until the FDA-approved product could be added to the children’s schedule (which required more data from kids) - after which nobody could sue Pfizer ever again over the vaccine.

What happened in August of 2021 was a diabolical solution to both problems 2 and 3:

• The FDA approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine - a legal artifact because this product label wasn’t actually being used in the U.S..

• Simultaneously, the FDA extended the EUA on Pfizer partner BioNTech’s vaccine, which was the vaccine label being used widely.

In doing so, both problems were solved.

The EUA on the product being used (including for kids aged 12-15 yr) remained protected by the PREP Act liability shield. And the identical product label not being used anywhere in the U.S. by anyone received FDA approval so that it could be mandated by the feds for all employers nationwide.

No news outlet reported what had happened.

They all announced that the vaccine everyone was getting in their arms had received FDA approval, which wasn’t true. Nationwide mandates were announced two weeks later.

That was it. It was clear that there were dark, powerful forces at work behind the public health enterprise and I no longer wanted any part of it.

I had started listening to Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s podcast. Having thwarted his efforts, years prior, in the White House, I was now ironically mesmerized by how rational he (all of a sudden) seemed.

When Mr. Kennedy’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, was released in Fall of 2021, I devoured it.

Kennedy’s meticulously-sourced description of how The Authorities had been planning for a global coronavirus pandemic - just a few months before it actually happened - was chilling.

But even closer to home was the detailed accounting of Fauci’s funding of ghoulish, invasive and debilitating HIV/AIDS experiments on often very ill foster children across the country. I had invested a good portion of my career in combating HIV/AIDS, both at home and abroad, and the book exposed how that career had been aligned with the monsters that tortured helpless innocents to bring the first of Big Pharma’s AIDS drugs to the market. I had made my bones in the Senate demanding the federal government prioritize the delivery of medicines (and not just condoms) to AIDS victims all over the world.

I had cried tears of joy and vindication when that agenda was realized in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, where he unveiled his commitment to funding billions of dollars in antiretroviral treatments.

Now I was seeing evidence that these treatments were developed on the broken bodies of forgotten children, who were powerless to fight the unholy alliance of Big Pharma and Big Science.

If untrue, the claims in Kennedy’s book were so utterly defamatory that they should have spurred a parade of lawsuits. To my knowledge, no such lawsuits have ever been filed.

This cascade of eye-opening episodes eventually forced me to confront a painful reality: my 2017 take on Mr. Kennedy and his Vaccine Safety Commission had been a massive mistake.

What if there had been a Vaccine Safety Commission already in place during Operation Warp Speed? During the consideration of federal mandates by the Biden team? Adding COVID vaccines to the childhood schedule? What if Mr. Kennedy had been given regular access to President Trump in the first term?

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that a commission - any commission - would have had some immediate or obvious influence on vaccine policy. I know better than most how slowly government works. And no doubt Team Biden would have either immediately shut down the commission or replaced the commissioners with card-carrying members of the consensus class.

Still, as I listened to Mr. Kennedy speak out about his experience with the first Trump administration, I understood that at the very least, the vaccine safety conversation that is going mainstream today could have gotten a major head start.

So in January of 2022, I wrote Mr. Kennedy a contrite email confessing my sins, probably hoping for some sort of absolution. He was gracious, and he looped in his colleague Lyn Redwood from Children’s Health Defense. When we spoke shortly thereafter, she slyly asked me what I planned to do to atone for my sins - how I would contribute to the movement. I had no answers at that time. I was still totally disoriented.

The nationwide COVID vaccine mandate that had been announced in the Fall took effect in January (though, thankfully, was stymied in part by a number of lawsuits). Regardless, I would not comply. I never wore a mask again. No one in my family would get another vaccine. And I would never blindly trust a white coat (or many of the products they peddle) ever again. They’re not malicious (most of them anyway), but their education was just as flawed as mine.

Once I was “radicalized,” I started questioning many of the public health shibboleths. I discovered the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Wise Traditions dietary principles prioritizing all the naughty things like saturated fat and raw milk. I embraced the long-suppressed medical frameworks of homeopathy and German New Medicine. I started helping women birth at home, outside the medical system.

It was all quite heretical.

Most importantly, I realized that no one from Washington and no white coat is coming to save my health or anyone else’s.

I became my own primary care provider. You can too.

I still work on making health care less predatory and corrupt. I help employers fire insurance companies and rehumanize the health plans for their workforce. I provide all kinds of “friendly” advice to Congress and the current Trump team, even (especially?) when they don’t ask. And now that I’m a staffer for nobody and answer to no one, I am uncensored and unafraid, writing in my own voice about all of this right here.

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So thank you to the autism moms who got under my skin decades ago, even though I didn’t quite know what to do about them.

Thank you to Reps. Burton and Weldon and their staff (who conducted investigations of the CDC autism data).

Thank you to Andy Wakefield (the much-maligned “debunked” study author) and William Thompson (the CDC whistleblower).

Thank you to that friend who urged me to watch Vaxxed, and to Del Bigtree, who made the film.

And thank you most of all, Secretary Kennedy.

When he ran for president, I was nervous. If the Democrats nominated him, I was anxious that President Trump could lose to him. So it was a great relief when the Democrats blew their chance at victory by running him out of their party. And when those pyrotechnic fireworks popped off on the Turning Point USA stage, framing Kennedy and Trump and the birth of MAHA, I knew that a generational opportunity was upon us.

And yet, even now, I can’t quite shake the image that started all of this.

A line of mothers, sitting across from me in a Senate office in 2002, asking for something so simple: Please look. Please study. Please don’t dismiss what we are seeing in our children.

I trusted The Authorities instead. I told myself there would be time later, that someone else was handling it, that The Science must already be settled.

It’s a strange thing to realize that my biggest failures weren’t the fights I lost - but the ones I didn’t start. And that, in some of the stories I’ve been telling myself about my career, I was the villain and not the hero.

So this is where I am now: I don’t outsource my judgment anymore. I don’t confuse authority with truth. And I don’t ignore mothers, even when the consensus has lost all curiosity.

If that makes me a heretic - consider this my excommunication from the public health cult.

My son hasn’t forgiven me for school.

He’s 22 and he still brings it up.

And this wasn’t public school. It was the best school money could buy.

I was working in the White House. Our values mattered, and so I hunted down the most faith-based, boy-centric school I could find. All boys. All male teachers. Sports in the middle of the day. Kids hanging off tree branches instead of chained to desks. I walked in and thought: this is a boy’s paradise.

He hated it. Intensely.

It wasn’t the school I picked. It was school itself.

I sat down with Casey Harper at The Washington Stand’s Outstanding podcast to talk about this - about why our boys are cratering (5x lonelier than men their age a generation ago, 70% of overdose deaths, falling behind in every educational metric we can measure), and what I wish I’d understood before I made the choices I made for my son.

We get into:

• Why I’m not sure I believe in school for boys anymore

• How we medicalized normal boy behavior of risk-taking, stick-wielding, wall-bouncing and called it a disorder

• The “chickified” culture (thanks, Rush) and now we can’t tell the difference between a boy who wants to climb a tree and a boy who needs Adderall

• Why the same fire that drives a 9-year-old to beat dents into an oak is the fire that makes a 19-year-old willing to die for his country (and what happens when we extinguish it)

• And the question I’m wrestling with live on the air: what would it actually take to homeschool my grandkids while running my businesses?

I don’t have the answers.

(I keep telling people this. They keep asking me anyway.)

I’m a Gen X mom with a son who won’t let me forget the choices I made. I’m also a naturopath who’s spent years watching the “health” system manufacture sickness in adults, and I can see how we are doing something similar to our boys in real time.

Nobody at HHS is coming to save your son. Nobody at his school is either.

His teachers are lovely women. They don’t love him.

Read the article. Watch the full conversation.

Share it with the dad getting pressured into signing his 5-year-old up for kindergarten. Send it to the mom who just filled an ADHD script and feels weird about it. Forward it to the grandparent who still thinks daycare is progress.

We’re going to have to raise this generation ourselves.

Radically. Creatively. Generationally.

Hey Everyone!

I’m trying something new today.

is a coach, educator, and author who has spent years thinking about what it takes to raise a son in a culture that has largely forgotten how. He is also generous, thoughtful, and willing to answer hard questions head-on, which is why I sent him seven of them.

You may not agree with every line and, of course, that’s okay. Given the disastrous breakdown in family structure, and the screen-ification, pornification and weed-ification of our environment, there are no easy answers for how to navigate this kind of soul-crushing, vitality-draining, degenerate culture.

One area we didn’t touch on was the impact of economic factors - mass immigration that competes for our sons’ jobs, the flight of manufacturing to Mexico and China forcing those without college degrees into waiting tables instead of high-paying union jobs, and inflation that makes buying a car or home much more difficult than it was for we GenXers.

My husband was born in Italy and he speaks often about how European adult children often live with their parents indefinitely because there is no affordable housing or fair-paying jobs, and interest rates keep everyone in real estate their family has owned for generations. Are we turning into Europe? There are still affordable cities in the U.S., but an economy that forces children to leave their hometowns and never return, permanently severing young parents from the family structures that make economic survival and children’s flourishing easier is not quite the American Dream as advertised. And is it only getting worse as AI’s devastation is only starting to transform the job market?

Or maybe this is all just sophisticated excuse-making, with my maternal empathy undermining the hero’s journey for my son and everyone’s son. Unclear. But the need for the father’s voice to push the bird out of the nest and learn to fly has never been more urgent.

What I love about this piece is that Travis said “yes” to a real conversation, and that is exactly the kind of exchange AllBetter is down for.

Read it. Consider it. Argue with it. These are the dialogues we can’t afford to stop having.

But first - a note from Travis:

I recently had the opportunity to work with . While most people who seek to tap into my expertise throw softballs, Katy did not. She fired questions at me like Nolan Ryan fastballs: precise, relentless, and impossible to dodge. I had to think, dig deep, and work harder than usual to respond.

I loved every second of it.

Her insight and creativity are extraordinary. While I asked questions that required reflection, she responded with a beautiful, experiential art form that revealed her depth and perspective. You can check out that article here. She has a rare ability to challenge while inspiring, to push you without making you defensive, and to make even the most difficult conversation feel electrifying.

As part of our effort to understand the world we are trying to improve, here are her questions and my answers. This is the kind of work that truly matters.

Enjoy,

Travis

The Interview:

1. Is it too late for a family that is in the classic masculinity death spiral - they’re letting their early-20s son live in their basement while he works a minimum wage job he doesn’t like and doesn’t respect himself, and he smokes weed and plays video games - is it too late for them to turn things around and there’s no other option but to just kick him out? If the answer is yes, are there situations where the answer changes (trauma history, mental illness, suicidality)?

Short answer is yes. It is too late for parents to have a marked impact on a young man if he’s already at that stage. The most formative time has certainly passed. There is good news, thankfully. Massive and meaningful changes are still possible. The difference is that a young man is going to have to choose to make changes on his own.

Though the active parental influence has largely gone away, the passive and lasting influence remains. The teaching of right and wrong, the boundaries, the structure, the worldview, they’re all still in there. This is the time when he must go out into the world and try his own version of life (maybe that’s what you taught him, maybe he wants to try his own deal) and see if his worldview works. He will make mistakes. The more rebellious among us will make LOTS of mistakes. This is good! Those mistakes are how we learn the right and wrong of the world. The structure of our culture. The boundaries of life.

Men are built genetically to conserve their energy for battle. This is why men are so good at ‘vegging out.’ If things are easy, men will want to enjoy that, since battle can pop up at a moment’s notice. This being the case, forcing the lethargic young male to leave the nest and make his own way is the only answer here. Unless your long-term plan is to have him at home indefinitely, he’s got to go. It’s better if it’s his idea, but it’s necessary either way. (note #3 below) He must undertake the hero’s journey, for better or for worse. To some extent, you’re hindering that by providing comfort. And that’s regardless of underlying factors.

2. There seems to be a resurgence of young conservative families arguing for keeping their sons in the home in young adulthood rather than the tough-love, kick them out, sink or swim approach we all used to take. Do you think that’s wise, dangerous, a countercultural cope, or excuse-making?

I rarely give my opinion on topics like this, but here I agree wholeheartedly with the research. Parents are keeping their sons at home, and the reason is not the sons. It is the parents.

Modern parenting has swung so far toward comfort that it has lost its balance. Everything is softened, cushioned, and extended. The kind of firm, fair fathering that once pushed young men toward independence has faded so much it is almost unrecognizable. In many cases, parents are choosing what feels easier emotionally instead of what actually prepares their children for reality.

Because yes, independence is hard. Work is hard. The world will knock you down. But that is not new. The same parents enabling this situation did not grow up living indefinitely in their own parents’ basements. So what changed?

At some point, good parenting requires discomfort. When there is nothing pulling young people forward, there has to be something pushing them out. That tension between challenge and opportunity is what drives growth.

You can run toward something, or you can run away from something. Historically, young people have done both. They move toward opportunity and away from stagnation. When neither force exists, they stay exactly where they are.

That is not a failure of the child alone. It is a failure to launch, and the launchpad matters. Tough love is your savior here. He won’t like it, but you don’t need his permission to want your home back. He will thank you when he has his own family.

3. Given that fatherlessness is so epidemic now, what do you recommend to the single mom with sons to help them get “fathered” and mitigate the damage? The answer used to be Boy Scouts, but…

Go back to the Hero’s Journey and look at step four. A boy does not become a man on his own. He is shaped by men who demand something from him. It starts with his father. That is the standard setter. Later, the world reinforces it through other men or institutions like the military, police, or fire service. They do not coddle him. They correct him.

That is where alignment happens. When his actions match his values, he becomes dangerous in the right way. Focused. Disciplined. Reliable. When they do not, he turns into a contradiction. All talk, no spine. He knows what is right and still avoids it. That kind of man stays stuck, blaming everything except the gap between what he says and what he does.

Now remove the father.

You do not get the same outcome. You get confusion. You get delay. You get a young man who has never been forced to carry weight, never been checked hard enough to grow. The data backs it, but you do not even need the data. You can see it. Direction drops. Discipline drops. Accountability disappears.

This is where people get uncomfortable, so they lie about it.

A single mother cannot replicate a father. Not with love. Not with effort. Not with sacrifice. Those are not the same thing as pressure, example, and authority from a man who has already walked the path. When that is missing, something critical is missing. That gap does not magically fill itself.

And yes, choices matter. Removing a father from the home is not a neutral act. It is a decision with predictable consequences. Pretending otherwise is not compassion. It is denial.

If the damage is already done, then the only option is to patch the hole with whatever structure you can find:

· Male coaches who demand discipline

· Male teachers who do not lower standards

· Male clergy who hold the line

· Male neighbors who correct behavior

· Uncles who step in and stay consistent

· Older brothers who force accountability

These are substitutes, not solutions. They can help, but they cannot fully replace what was supposed to be there from the beginning.

And let’s be honest about one more thing. Mom’s new boyfriend is not the answer. It is instability. It teaches confusion, not discipline. It creates more problems than it solves. And the statistics on Sexual Assault from a step parent are staggering.

None of this is complicated. Hard truth rarely is. If you remove structure, you get chaos. If you remove accountability, you get drift. If you remove the father, you make the path harder and the odds worse.

You can ignore that. A lot of people do. Reality does not care.

4. What is the most powerful thing a mother can do or say to her son at age 10? 15? 20?

At ten years old, a boy needs a few simple things. I love you. You are safe. I believe in you. That is the foundation. To some extent, this is the best mothering for the duration of his life.

After that, words start to matter less. What he watches matters more.

How his mother treats his father becomes one of the most important lessons he will ever absorb. Not what she says about respect, but what she shows him every day. Boys do not learn relationships from lectures. They learn from patterns.

By the time he reaches high school, the concrete is hardening. At that point, his father becomes the primary model for masculinity. Not theory. Not slogans. Behavior. Discipline. Restraint. Responsibility. Whether the father is perfect or not does not matter. The example is still being taken in.

And the mother is still teaching, whether she realizes it or not.

Because how she treats the father becomes the blueprint. That is what her son will recognize as normal. That is what he will tolerate. That is what he will expect from a woman later in life.

Respect shown becomes respect expected. Disrespect shown becomes disrespect accepted. You do not get to opt out of that lesson. It is happening whether anyone acknowledges it or not.

5. What are your thoughts on the decline of sperm count worldwide, reportedly half what it was in 1970 and dropping by one percent a year? Causes? Solutions?

I have read the work of Dr. Anthony G. Jay, and none of this is coming out of nowhere. Hormonal imbalance is part of it. A culture that centers everything around comfort and approval is part of it. Plastic plays a role. Hormonal birth control in the water supply is a factor. Sedentary habits and garbage diets are part of it. Fatherlessness is the biggest part of it.

And here is the reality people do not want to admit. None of these exist in isolation. They stack. They reinforce each other. Weak inputs create weaker outputs, and then people act surprised by the result.

You do not get strong, disciplined, grounded men out of an environment that avoids hardship, rejects structure, and replaces standards with excuses. That is the bad news.

The good news is even simpler, and it is why there are no real excuses left. Every single one of these factors is, to a large extent, controllable. You can fix what you eat. You can move your body. You can reject passive consumption and build something instead. You can seek out discipline, even if it was never given to you. You can find male mentors, even if your father was ejected from your life.

None of that is easy. That is the point. The environment may be working against you, but it is not absolute. At some point, it comes down to a decision. Stay shaped by it or start pushing back against it.

6. I recently wrote an article on the effects of school on young men. Do you think boys should go to school? If so, what kind? If not, how should they learn whatever you think is minimally necessary?

I’ve written lots of articles on this myself, as you know. My degrees and much of my adult life are rooted in education. I am not guessing about this. I have seen it up close as a teacher, coach, school board member, and mentor.

There are school structures that engage boys, challenge them, and actually produce results. Not just for boys, but for girls too. The difference is they demand something. They build discipline, ownership, and competence instead of managing behavior and calling it success.

Look at what Apogee Schools is doing. Look at Matt Beaudreau. He is proving, in real time, that boys respond when expectations are high and excuses are not tolerated. I’m proud to know this guy. He’s crushing it, and public education is ignoring him right into their own obsolescence.

So this is not a mystery. It is a choice.

Public education, as it stands, is outdated and heavily tilted toward compliance over challenge. It rewards passivity, punishes risk, and then wonders why boys check out. Call it what it is. It is a system that has been softened to the point where many boys do not recognize themselves in it.

And when boys disengage, people blame the boys instead of the structure that failed to reach them. At some point, that excuse falls apart.

There are models that work. There are people doing it right. The only difference is they are willing to step outside a system that refuses to adapt.

And for the young man who did not get the fathering he needed, this matters even more. Because now he is not just learning academics. He is trying to build a foundation that should have been laid years earlier.

That is a harder road. But it is still a road. The question is whether he is placed in an environment that demands he walk it, or one that quietly lets him sit still.

When it comes to what a man actually needs, hoping he “figures it out” in a culture that avoids discipline and rejects structure is not a plan. That is neglect. Boys are no longer guaranteed the guidance they once had. Habits, standards, and real-world skills are no longer absorbed by osmosis.

That is why I wrote my second book in 2022, Ideal Man: Reviving Masculinity. It is a direct, comprehensive guide of time-tested habits every young man should pursue. Clear expectations. Real standards. Practices that build competence, discipline, and self-respect.

This is not optional. The young men who embrace it will separate themselves from the drift of entitlement and passivity. Those who ignore it will continue to struggle in a world that rewards readiness, not excuses.

7. What is the role of spirituality on the development of men? Is the answer different if the question is religion instead of spirituality? Is there a danger of feminization of faith on the souls of men?

No man can reach his potential without something larger to serve. It is built into him. Purpose beyond self is what shapes action, discipline, and endurance. Without it, strength becomes aimless and drive becomes frustration.

There is a clear difference between faith and religion, and that distinction matters. My own experience in this area may be unusual, but I own it. It has shaped me, and I am proud of it. I even recorded on this solo some time ago, exploring that tension.

Spirituality is personal, but its effect is universal. When a man aligns his actions with something greater than himself, everything else (habits, choices, resilience, etc.) falls into place. Without it, all the skills and discipline in the world remain partial, unfocused, and incomplete.

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Final thoughts

Thoughtful discussion is how communities actually think. Travis showed up, answered every question without flinching, and gave us something real to work with.

Thank you, Travis, for the generosity of a full-throated answer.

Now it’s your turn. Tell me where he’s right. Tell me where he’s wrong. Tell me what I missed. Tell me what you think of this format. The comments are open.

Thanks for reading,

Katy

Health policy stars in DC do not grow up dreaming about ERISA and the House Ed & Workforce committee. They dream about Ways & Means, or Senate Finance. So that’s where they go. Because, for decades, that’s where the health care fights happen.

And that’s why we end up fighting forever over the 20 million people in the ACA exchanges while 160 million Americans on employer-sponsored plans get fleeced by PBMs, carriers, Big Pharma and fake-charity hospitals - and nobody in this town lifts a finger for them.

Then, when a new administration shows up and needs political appointees, they go to the committees where the staffers are, and stack HHS with people who have never done serious policy work for employer-sponsored market.

Nick Solheim at American Moment had me on the Moment of Truth podcast this week and we went through all of it.

• How I watched us try to do Repeal and Replace in 2017 with a Congress that hadn’t written a replace bill (and then watched the Frankenstein that came out of that process die in the Senate - and thank God it did).

• Why price transparency actually got done (the internal fight with our own libertarian wing was brutal).

• Why insurance is now more expensive than paying cash most of the time.

• Why every time Bobby Kennedy or Marty Makary tries to do the job we hired them for, our own side lets them get torched — when what we should be doing is laying our bodies on the train tracks for them, the way the other team does for their own.

Also, the apology email I wrote to Bobby Kennedy after I helped run him out of the first Trump White House. He was gracious. I self-flagellated. You can tell I’m Catholic.

Give it a listen. Let me know what you think.

We interrupt our more poetic topics on femininity and radical agency in healing, or our more technical paywalled pieces on health care mechanics, to bring you this rant on the epic fecklessness of the Republican Congress.

You can usually count on Congress to do exactly nothing. But the nothing that is on the table for the next few months is nothing short of political malpractice.

As I’ve described elsewhere, the reconciliation process is how a party, when it controls both chambers of Congress, can enact policies with only 51 votes - rather than having to overcome the filibuster in the Senate with 60 votes. Given that Republicans may lose the House (and Senate) in November, the president may insist on a productive lame duck session after the elections to get whatever pieces of his agenda through before the more hostile Congress starts in January.

There is another option of course. Congressional leadership could try to, you know, not lose the elections.

That would require passing legislation that reflects the urgent priorities of the voters, like the affordability of health care, housing, and fuel.

Doing hard stuff because the people are counting on them is not exactly politicians’ strength, to be sure, but it’s not impossible, especially with the reconciliation process allowing for simple majority votes without a filibuster.

But if things continue as they are, your elected “representatives” have crafted a political suicide pact guaranteed to generate maximum voter fury - right before the election.

A reconciliation bill is apparently being planned - GREAT!

It’s going to have nothing but middle fingers to voters in it - wait, what?

Senate Majority Leader Thune has signaled that he doesn’t want to do health care or any of the other affordability issues like energy or housing that matter to the American people. Instead, he wants to just fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including ICE and Border Patrol, which have been subject to a shutdown showdown that has defunded these functions and the federal workers that carry them out for months.

This would be the most colossal stupidity I have ever heard in my 25-year policy career, and that is truly saying something.

To carry out this epic face-plant, I have it on good authority that he has instructed Budget Committee chairman Senator Lindsey Graham to leave all committees out of the reconciliation bill that his committee is drafting except the one committee with jurisdiction over DHS. This would make it impossible for provisions on health care, housing, or energy to be included in reconciliation.

Apparently Thune and others in leadership are shaking in their boots about Minority Leader Schumer offering some amendment restoring Medicaid funding that was cut in the One Big Beautiful Bill last year (like kicking the illegals, millionaires and Somali fraudsters off the program). Because of that, they think that a “skinny” reconciliation bill will preclude painful amendment votes forced by Democrats. That’s because those amendments would be ruled out of order for reason of not being germane to the bill. The bigger the bill, the more you can amend it.

But this is crazy talk.

Of course, Schumer and anyone else can simply offer their amendment, it’ll get ruled non-germane and subject to a point of order, and then the amendment sponsor will call for a vote to waive the point of order. If they get 60 votes needed to waive, their amendment will still pass. If they don’t, they still get the campaign ads of Republicans voting against the measure. Thune knows this. He knows, because Republicans will also offer non-germane amendments and call for the waive-the-point-of-order vote to make Dems vote on stuff for campaign ads too.

So this can’t be the real reason to have a “skinny” bill with nothing in it for the voters.

And why even bother doing reconciliation, which takes weeks of “vote-a-ramas” with unlimited amendments on the floor, if you’re not doing anything useful? Most parties that control both chambers can’t wait to use the reconciliation process to swing for the fences - get as much of their agenda done as possible without having to face a Senate filibuster. That’s what the One Big Beauty was all about last year - when Republicans delivered Americans significant tax relief.

What’s more, using reconciliation to only fund DHS appropriations is catastrophically stupid because it will remind the voters that Congress didn’t do its most basic job - pay the guys keeping the bombs off planes and the narcoterrorists from crossing the border. While Congress has been cashing its own inflated paychecks, the guys in uniforms who have to hide their faces to keep their families from being assaulted are taking loans out to get through the week. But hey, let them eat cake.

What makes this even more inane, if that were possible, is that DHS funding doesn’t require reconciliation. It is already “paid for” by being included in the budget baseline. That means that Republicans are including measures that don’t need to be in reconciliation because they’re not costing or saving money. And instead, they’re leaving provisions out of reconciliation that do save money that could be used to address urgent voter concerns.

For example, the tariffs have brought in a ton of money to the Treasury - between $300-400 billion. But it’s off-budget money because the tariffs were enacted administratively rather than legislatively. The budget score-keepers initially allowed the tariffs to count on-budget, but when the Supreme Court struck them down a few months ago, that giant pile of cash went “off-budget” again. This means that they’re not in the baseline and if you “authorize” - codify - them in a reconciliation bill, you can count their revenue as new, and use it to pay for a bunch of other priorities that cost money, like health care reform, tougher health care price transparency rules, or banning Blackrock from buying up all the housing in your town.

Some might argue that these reforms wouldn’t pass the “Byrd rule” - a rule that applies solely to the reconciliation process that requires all provisions to be primarily fiscal rather than simply policy changes. But you can draft all these reforms in ways that create fiscal impact. After all - the point is to make life more affordable for Americans, so of course the impact will be primarily fiscal. Health care reform redistributes tax subsidies. Banning Blackrock housing-grabs or Chinese farmland-grabs changes the economics of the housing or agriculture industries, including mortgage rates, mortgage tax deductions, and other financial impacts.

What’s more, let’s say you fail on the Byrd rule. Big deal - all that means is that you need 60 votes to waive the Byrd rule. There are lots of policies that should be bipartisan. And if not, at least force the Democrats to vote for Blackrock and secret medical prices and higher fuel costs.

There are two other health care related policies that, if included in reconciliation, would create savings that could be directed toward affordability measures.

1. Site neutrality policy that ends the ever-growing problem of hospitals charging you extra for stuff you’re getting done in an outpatient, non-hospital setting just because the hospital system slapped its logo on the outside of the building.

2. Tackle the hospitals using AI to automatically (and often fraudulently) inflate billing codes so Medicare (and everyone else) pays more.

If these policies were put into a reconciliation bill, Republicans would have about $70-400 billion over 10 years (depending on how far you go). Along with hundreds of billions more in tariff revenue, that could be used to pay for policies that make everyday life more affordable for Americans.

So, what they should actually do with all this money?

School Choice for Health Care: the president’s policy announcement of last Fall was that he wanted to take money from Big Insurance Companies and give it to the people. I consider this like vouchers for education - where parents get the amount that the government would have spent on their kid in public school and are allowed instead to use it for private school or homeschooling.

If we monetize what the government and employers are already spending on health care and put it in individual accounts instead and expand the ability of people to make their own coverage or cash-pay choices, it would be like school choice for health care.

To break it down:

1. Put every dollar that the government is currently giving to Big Insurance on behalf of patients and put it into the patient’s own tax-advantaged health savings account instead. This would be budget neutral because the government’s already spending it: ACA subsidies, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid Managed Care, etc.

2. Allow employers to put every dollar they currently spend on their workers’ health coverage into the worker’s own health savings account instead. This is also budget neutral because all this spending is currently tax-free today.

3. Medical freedom for how HSA funds are used, meaning that the money doesn’t have to be used solely for the limited tools of allopathic medicine: drugs or cutting. These funds could also be used for health promotion, disease prevention, nutrition, and fitness, including spending on regeneratively farmed food for metabolic disorder prevention, red light therapy for arthritis, removal of mercury fillings by biological dentists, removal of microplastics from your brain (now that the STOMP initiative has been announced by the Trump administration to try to develop such techniques), water filters in your house, and other MAHA initiatives. You could even clarify that HSAs can’t be used on inpatient hospital stays that involve serving ultra-processed food to patients.

4. Ending secret health care prices, such as with the bipartisan Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, so that doctors and hospitals can no longer hide their prices through weaponized complexity and billing bureaucracy. There is no free market without transparent price information.

5. Ending anticompetitive contracts between network carriers and hospitals that prevent you, me, your employer, or your union from getting a better deal with a doctor or hospital and cutting the network out.

As I’ve described elsewhere, these measures would unleash a much more competitive insurance market that would offer more affordable premiums for coverage, as well as a cash-pay market that would dramatically drive down prices for care through significant expansion of the consumer base for cash prices. To facilitate that cash-pay at scale, you’d also need to require cash prices to be posted and accepted by providers, regardless of coverage status, and that the cash price must be equal to or lower than the lowest negotiated contract rate with a carrier. This is fair because an all-in, upfront cash price eliminates the billing bureaucracy and delayed reimbursement so it’s far less costly for a provider than sending post hoc claims pursuant to a network contract. That’s how you drive prices down for everyone.

So what is the real reason why Congress is sticking it to the American people with their “skinny reconciliation?”

The only reason I can think of? The White House is weak.

It pains me to say it, but the White House policy shop should be running this show, and it appears that they’re not involved.

Congress is always lazy. Republican leaders always claim they can’t whip enough votes for a consensus package, especially with tight margins in their razor-thin majority.

In a normal administration, when the president goes public with a sweeping health policy agenda like he did last Fall - his team would develop the plan and then hold a gun to Congress’ head and make them negotiate something resembling it and pass it into law. That didn’t happen. I have many theories about why, but suffice it to say that the fruit of this inaction is likely to be catastrophic electoral losses.

Without the White House’s boot on Congress’ neck forcing them to swing for the fences on reconciliation, Republicans will always choose to do nothing rather than something big or hard.

Democrats do not suffer from this affliction - they always go balls-to-the-wall when they get the reins of power - which I suspect we’re about to see in technicolor, starting in January, if our current “leaders” don’t change course, stat.