Brownstone Institute
The Experts Still Pushing Coerced Jabs
Medical ethics is about protecting society from medical malfeasance and the self-interest of the humans whom we trust to manage health. It is therefore disturbing when prominent people, in a prominent journal, tear up the concept of medical ethics and human rights norms. It is worse when they ignore broad swathes of evidence, and misrepresent their own sources to do so.
On July 8th 2022, The Lancet published a ‘Viewpoint’ article online: “Effectiveness of vaccination mandates in improving uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in the USA.” The article, which acknowledges the controversial nature of vaccine mandates, primarily concludes that coercing people to take a medical product, and reducing options for refusal, increases product uptake.
It further concludes that the best way to implement such mandates is for employers and educational institutions to threaten job security and the right to education.
The use of coercion goes against the established ethics and morals of Public Health, and could be argued to be anti-health. In this case, the article justifies it by stating that “the current evidence regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in adults is sufficient to support mandates.” However, it offers scant evidence to back this assertion, and ignores all evidenceto the contrary. They apparently consider the ability to work and support a family, or gain formal education, as something that is to be granted or taken away, not a human right.
The Lancet was once a credible journal with a rigorous policy of peer review. However, in this article it appears to have dropped its former standards, promoting medical fascism (coercion, threat and division to achieve compliance with authority) without insisting on a rigorous evidence base to justify such an approach. This suggests an attempt to normalize such approaches in mainstream public health.
Past experience has shown us where fascism behind a façade of public health can lead. The sterilization campaigns aimed at coloured and low-income populations of the US Eugenicist era, and the extensions of similar programs under Nazism in 1930s and 1940s Europe, relied heavily on the normalization of such approaches.
Leading public health voices from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and other institutions championed a public health approach of sanitizing populations rather than environments, encouraging the idea of a tiered society where health ‘experts’ determine the rights and medical management of those deemed less worthy.
Avoiding the discomfort of evidence
The authors of this Lancet paper, ranging from academics and medical consultants to the daughter of a prominent politician, attempt to rewrite human rights in medicine as if precedent never existed. Their argument for coercion in mass vaccination recognizes that ‘vaccine mandates,’ whether issued by governments, employers or schools, all involve a loss of rights. No serious attempt is made to provide a medical justification for mass vaccination with a non-transmission-blocking vaccine.
The paper focuses on the premise that coercion, commonly considered a form of force, makes humans do things they would not otherwise do. Banning fellow humans from making their own health choices on pain of loss of normal participation in society has an impact on increasing vaccine uptake. This is hardly a revelation to any thinking human, but clearly important enough to justify publication in The Lancet.
The article links to evidence of vaccine mandates used for state school entry that show higher compliance when the right of religious and personal belief exemption is removed, or where onerous requirements for exemptions are put in place. Leaving ethical questions aside, the obvious lack of similarity between the authors’ predicate childhood vaccinations that block transmission and COVID-19 vaccines that have minimal impact on transmission, and may even promote it, is ignored. The one mandated adult vaccine predicate referenced in the article, the influenza vaccine, provides only a 2.5% reduction in pneumonia ‘when the (mandated) vaccine was well matched to circulating strains’ in the reference quoted.
When raising the sacking of non-vaccinated workers, the authors seem comfortable with the approach but coy in admitting its consequences. Their admission that “a few large US employers have terminated hundreds of workers for non-compliance references an article in Money magazine which actually paints a bleaker picture, characterizing it as a ‘great resignation.’
The authors will also have been aware of mass layoffs by large employers such as New York City (over 9,000 sacked or placed on leave), the US Department of Defense (DoD, which sacked 3,400), Kaiser Permanente (laid off 2,200), and the tens of thousands of staff lost from the UK care-home sector . Extrapolated across countries and society to actually provide credible data may have been too uncomfortable for the authors and Lancet editors.
High efficacy and safety are an obvious (though on their own, insufficient) prerequisite for any mandated product. This entire area of safety is dealt with by stating; “The current evidence on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in adults is sufficient to support mandates,” supported by a single study comparing vaccinated individuals 1-3 weeks and 3-6 weeks post-vaccination, revealing low levels of myocardial infarction, appendicitis and stroke.
The claim that “widespread administration in adults has quickly generated a large evidence base supporting the vaccines’ safety, including evidence from active surveillance studies” suggests that both the authors and The Lancet are unaware of the VAERS and Eudravigilance databases set up for exactly this purpose. No mention is made of growing data on myocarditis, menstrual irregularities, or the excess all-cause mortality and severe outcomes in vaccinated groups in the Pfizer randomised control trials on which the FDA emergency registration was based. Were The Lancet’s reviewers unaware of these sources?
The sole reference to vaccine efficacy discusses COVID-19 ventilated patient outcomes, It ignores the period to 14 days post-previous dose that Pfizer acknowledges can be associated with immune suppression. Fenton et al. have noted that classing a vaccinated person as unvaccinated in the first 14 days post-injection has profound impacts on vaccine effectiveness data.
Ignoring the awkwardness of reality
Post-infection immunity in the unvaccinated is a threat to arguments for mandates. The authors disingenuously state that “evidence suggests that the immunity produced by natural infection varies by individual, and that people with previous infection benefit from vaccination. New variants further undercut the case for adequacy of previous infection.
Two references are used here: one from a study in Qatar and the other a study from Kentucky. The Qatar study finds that “the protection of previous infection against hospitalization or death caused by reinfection appeared to be robust, regardless of variant,” whilst the Kentucky study found Covid reinfection was reduced by vaccination over a 2-month period in the months soon after vaccination, prior to the waning and then reversal of this protection as demonstrated in studies of longer duration elsewhere.
The vast breadth of evidence on relative effectiveness of post-infection immunity is ignored. Either the authors failed to read their references and are unaware of waning and of the vast literature on post-infection immunity, or they do not consider demonstration of efficacy important for coerced medical treatments.
In a previous era, or in a previously credible medical journal, an argument for coercion to support a medical procedure would have required very high standards of evidence of efficacy and safety. It is arguing for the abrogation of fundamental principles such as informed consent that are at the core of modern medical ethics. Failure to address well-known contrary data should prevent an article from even reaching the peer-review stage.
Degrading public health degrades society
We are left with a paper stating that coercion is a good path to increase compliance for a product that does not reduce community infection risk, and has potentially serious side effects. Ignoring both of these aspects of COVID-19 vaccines is a poor approach to justifying mass vaccination. The sole nod to any human rights concern – “Some objectors argue mandates represent undue encroachment on individual liberty” – is an interesting way to characterize removal of the right to income, education and the ability to socialize with others.
Although all these rights are recognized under the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, the authors and The Lancetconsider them insufficiently serious to dwell upon.
Public health has been down this road before. We have seen the path society takes when basic public health principles are subverted to achieve an aim that some perceive as ‘good.’ We have also seen how most health professionals will comply, however horrific the actions involved. There is no reason to believe that this round of medical fascism will end differently.
We rely on medical journals such as The Lancet to apply at least the same standards to the purveyors of such doctrines as they do to others and demand a rational and honest evidence base. Anything less would raise legitimate questions as to the role the journal is taking in promoting these doctrines, and their place in a free, evidence-based and rights-respecting society.
This piece written in cooperation with Domini Gordon who coordinates the Open Science program for PANDA.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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