Courageous Discourse
Europe Had 127,350 Cases of Measles in 2024

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
US Mainstream Media Maintains Myopic Focus on Less than 1000 Cases
As the measles story in the US continues to unfold with reporting of a few cases here and there come in through mainstream media, I wondered about measles in Europe.
The WHO casually reported that the Europe Region had 127,350 cases in 2024.
According to an analysis by WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 127 350 measles cases were reported in the European Region for 2024, double the number of cases reported for 2023 and the highest number since 1997.
Children under 5 accounted for more than 40% of reported cases in the Region – comprising 53 countries in Europe and central Asia. More than half of the reported cases required hospitalization. A total of 38 deaths have been reported, based on preliminary data received as of 6 March 2025.
Measles cases in the Region have generally been declining since 1997, when some 216 000 were reported, reaching a low of 4440 cases in 2016. However, a resurgence was seen in 2018 and 2019 – with 89 000 and 106 000 cases reported for the 2 years respectively. Following a backsliding in immunization coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic, cases rose significantly again in 2023 and 2024. Vaccination rates in many countries are yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, increasing the risk of outbreaks.
Many regions in Europe have lower rates of measles vaccination than the goal of 95%.
Less than 80% of eligible children in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Romania were vaccinated with MCV1 in 2023 – far below the 95% coverage rate required to retain herd immunity. In both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro the coverage rate for MCV1 has remained below 70% and 50% respectively for the past 5 or more years. Romania reported the highest number of cases in the Region for 2024, with 30 692 cases, followed by Kazakhstan with 28 147 cases.
The WHO Report does not mention adjudication of hospitalizations or deaths. Presumably hospitalization of healthy kids is routine for contagion control. So if measles is so common and presumably well-handled by Europe, why is it such a big deal in the United States? Don’t look for Sanjay Gupta or Anderson Cooper to tell you that a similar size region and population handles >100K cases per year without much fanfare.
Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
President, McCullough Foundation
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Courageous Discourse
Europe Turns Totalitarian

In case anyone doubted what Vice President J.D. Vance said in Munich back in February, I can confirm that everything he said was correct—but I can also add that it was only a scrape on the surface.
Europe is going downhill. A wave of anti-democratic, anti-freedom laws, policies, and campaigns are rewriting the landscape of the continent where democracy and freedom were born.
This is nothing new per se—the Europeans not only invented the institutions of modern, Western civilization, but they also created Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism. It also ignited two World Wars in the last century. On the upside, its political leaders spent a good long time after 1945 trying to stamp out all forms of totalitarianism—and yet here we go again:
A 16-year-old was recently removed from her high school by police in Germany. Her crime? Reposting a pro-AfD video on TikTok involving the Smurfs (the populist-right wing party’s color is blue). A woman in the United Kingdom was detined for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic; the land of George Orwell has someone arrested for a literal thought crime.
It gets worse:
An Austrian woman was arrested for calling Muhammad, who married a nine-year-old girl, a paedophile. Another woman, this time in Germany, was fined €80,000 [$87,190] for making a Nazi salute. Again in Germany, an AfD politician was arrested and fined for claiming that migrants commit more gang rapes than German citizens do (the court did not dispute her facts, but said they incited hatred).
On February 3, a court in Stockholm, Sweden, sentenced a man for so-called “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. The court applied the Swedish “hate speech” laws, make it a crime to criticize any ethnic or national group—except for ethnic Swedes. You can de facto get sentenced for blasphemy against Islam, but not against Christianity.
Most of the attacks on individual freedom are taking place within the borders of the European Union. The Orwellian Digital Services Act from a few years ago, and by ominous rulings by the Court of “Justice” of the European Union, show that the crackdown on citizens’ freedom is not a spur of the moment. However, as Britain is demonstrating with its efforts to lead the anti-freedom crusade. leaving the EU is no guarantee that a country will protect even the most basic rights of its citizens.
The totalitarian ambitions of Europe’s political leadership are not limited to free speech. Back in January,
Thierry Breton, the European Union’s former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview … that the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) bowed to EU pressure. It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu.
In other words, Bretton—who has also been referred to as the EU’s special “censorship czar” for his role in advancing encroachments on free speech—openly admits that the EU interfered with the domestic affairs of a member state to have an election result nullified. Why? Because the EU’s top brass did not like the outcome of the election.
The annulment of the election result was ordered by Romania’s supreme court, which—it might be worth mentioning—is a mixture of judges and politicians. It based its decision on allegations of “foreign interference” where foreign, of course, refers to Russia.
To date not a shred of evidence has been presented in support of the supreme court’s ruling.
After Thierry Breton admitted to the EU’s active, foreign interference in the Romanian election, he threatened that the EU would do the same to Germany if the national conservative party Alternative fur Deutschland, AfD, got too many votes.
Along the same line of contempt for conservatives and for the integrity of democratic elections, the EU has waged an administrative, judicial, and increasingly fiscal war on Hungary. For the past 15 years, the Fidesz party has governed Hungary based on a consistent but in not way radical conservative platform.
Given the unending hostility toward Hungary, you might think that the country’s prime minister Victor Orban has been restraining free speech and rigging or annulling elections. He has done none of that: all his government is ”guilty” of is promoting traditional families, protecting children from the LGBTetc movement, enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, keeping taxes moderate, and encouraging foreign direct investment.
The result is a safe, economically thriving, socially cohesive, and family friendly country, right there in the heart of Europe. The Hungarian election system—the integrity of which has been proven time and time again—is an intriguing combination of proportionate and simple-majority representation. Voters get not one, but two votes to cast, one for each part of the system.
Four elections in a row, the Hungarian people have elected conservatives who prioritize Hungary and the needs of the Hungarian people. For this, they have received repeated showers of scorn from Brussels, including a barrage of accusations that Hungary is a semi-totalitarian state.
The implication, of course, is that Hungary does not have free elections, and yet every single election since at least 2010 has been meticulously scrutinized by foreign election observers. Not a single one of them has come up with any evidence of interference or wrongdoing by the government.
This is unsurprising, but it is also a point that leads us directly back to what former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said about the Romanian and German elections. In the view of the European Union, the democratic nature of an election is not determined by the form under which the election takes place. It has nothing to do with the secrecy of the ballot, the equal right of every citizen to vote, or the government’s respect for the election outcome. The democratic nature of an election is determined entirely by what opinions the winning parties hold.
If those opinions are conservative, the election was undemocratic.
The European Union has now reached the point where it actively tries to prohibit election outcomes that it ideologically disagrees with. This means that elections where the EU engages in foreign interference—as Breton explained happened in Romania—are about as democratic as elections in Russia.
Add the growing crackdown on free speech, and the comparison to Russia becomes even more compelling. Throw into the mix the blatantly political prosecution of Marine Le Pen in France, which has eerie similarities to the prosecutions of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny—and the difference between the European Union and the Russian Federation boils down to a matter of time.
Courageous Discourse
March 2020 Intel Brief to PM Johnson: “COVID-19 WAS ENGINEERED IN WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY”

By John Leake
Briefing from former head of SIS and other top security analysts stated unequivocally that pandemic originated at WIV, refuted fraudulent “Proximal Origins” paper by Andersen et al.
Fellow Substack author Michael Schellenberger just shared an intelligence briefing dated 27 March 2020 from Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of British intelligence, and other ranking security analysts to Prime Minister Johnson. The following is a reproduction of the first page.
In other words, Sir Richard and his team expressly told Prime Minister Boris Johnson on March 27, 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 came out of the WIV.
Note that the authors state that the Nature Medicine paper published by Andersen et al. (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”) is incorrect and that:
the scale and nature of its errors and its prime source (Zhou et al) raise important further non-virological questions, including of geo-strategic and domestic security, that can be addressed separately in slower time.
We judge therefore, that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is conducting information operation to embed the natural causation narrative, and, by misdirection, and to conceal the true origin and responsibility.
We know from Andersen et al.’s private e-mail correspondence with Anthony Fauci in late February 2020 that they knew that SARS-CoV-2 was not of natural origin.
This raises an extremely pressing question: Were Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry, and Anthony Fauci working for the PRC?
Sir Richard Dearlove and his colleagues raise this suspicion, because they must have known that Andersen et al. weren’t simply hoodwinked by Chinese virologists Zhou et al.
We know that Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Professor Ralph Baric were collaborating with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID was supporting their research as well.
Setting aside questions about the legality of their research, shouldn’t all of these people be arrested and tried for the fraudulent concealment of information of vital public interest?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to conceal from the British public the reality disclosed in this memo. Does British law make him immune from liability for concealing this matter of vital public interest from the British people? Note that Johnson also took decisive action to sabotage peace talks between Ukraine and Russian in Turkey in March 2022.
Should the British people trust Johnson’s representations about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia—representations that have been endorsed by his successor, Keir Starmer? For all the British people know, Johnson received security briefings about this conflict that contradict what he has told them about the war.
Then there’s the abominable mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain that characterized everyone who pointed out the obvious indications of the lab origin as “conspiracy theorists.”
The New York Times just published an ass-covering Opinion titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives”—as though the Times editors someone managed to remain ignorant about the mountain of evidence of this until now.
The disclosure of this British intelligence memo comes on the heels of almost identical disclosures about the German government of Angela Merkel. As investigative journalist Michael Nevradakis just reported in the CHD Defender:
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, determined with 80%-95% certainty in 2020 that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic originated with a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — but successive governments kept the information “under lock and key,” according to a German investigative report.
The report, published jointly on Wednesday by Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung, was the result of an 18-month investigation.
The investigation found that in 2020, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel commissioned a BND operation code-named “Project Saaremaa” that targeted Chinese agencies and research institutions.
When the BND’s investigation concluded that a Wuhan lab leak was the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Merkel government prohibited the spy agency from releasing its results to the public.
When Mr. Nevradakis asked me what I thought about the German disclosure, I told him the following:
The revelation that German intelligence knew that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab, and was not of natural origin, is no surprise, given the vast amount of evidence that the pathogen was not zoonotic. It’s also not surprising that the Merkel government decided to conceal the spy agency’s findings.
The BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) has long worked very closely with the CIA, and the Merkel government consistently complied with Washington’s directives. Concealment of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with the German government’s concealment of Paul Ehrlich Institute’s assessments about many elements of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For over three years, Dr. Peter McCullough and I have expressed our conviction that the cover-up of the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the greatest organized crime in history. The latest revelations about the BND and the Merkel government confirm our long held suspicions.
For a full copy of the March 27, 2020 Security Briefing to Prime Minister Johnson, click HERE.
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