Brownstone Institute
Kid Lab Rats
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
” (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.” “
Mommy, can I be a Covid lab rat?”
That is a request most parents will never hear and it is a request that very few parents would ever want to hear.
But, unlike the more typical “Can I have a pony?” request, letting your child be a Covid shot test subject is a request that can actually be granted around the nation.
Right now, for example, Pfizer/BioNTech is running an ongoing clinical trial to test the effectiveness of its shots (the shot is not a vaccine as it does not prevent catching the virus or transmitting the virus as typical vaccines do) on kids.
Pfizer has been running radio and other ads looking for test subjects; this is how they describe the study on their “Enrolling Children 6 to 23 months old for a COVID-19 Vaccine Study” website:
This study will help us learn how well our updated COVID-19 vaccine works in babies and toddlers who have not been previously vaccinated and see if the number of recommended doses can potentially be reduced for children under the age of 5. The study vaccine has been authorized by the United States Food and Drug Administration for children at least 6 months of age. It is designed to protect against the newer COVID-19 variant called XBB.1.5.
The company is also running similar trials for older kids and, of course, adults.
Clinical trials for drugs and procedures involving children are not inherently wrong and they are conducted safely around the world almost daily.
But this Covid trial stands out for a number of reasons.
First, the trial only involves kids who have never had a Covid shot before. The likelihood that a parent who has declined to get the shot for their kids in the first place will say “We chose not to get the shots for our kids, but feel free to experiment on them with the stuff we previously declined” is minimal.
In other words, if a parent didn’t feed their kid aluminum foil-flavored ice cream before it is highly unlikely they would feed their kid an experimental version of aluminum foil-flavored ice cream, even if you paid them (the trial comes with certain compensation enticements – Pfizer did not respond to a request for exactly what they are in this trial, though industry averages would indicate the pay would be between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars).
Second, there is the matter of “informed consent.” A trial subject must give permission freely, be told of any risks, and understand the entire situation. Clearly, nine-month-olds cannot do that.
It is perfectly legal for parents to give their “informed consent,” but here we get into the third problem: the risk/benefit question.
For example, during the pandemic (early 2020 to May 2023) there were 41 Covid deaths in California of kids under five. That number does not differentiate between “died with Covid” or “died from Covid;” that is a debate that continues to rage across the country and shall be put aside for the time being.
Every death of a child is a tragedy and this article is not intended to lessen that fact. However, children in general were not at all likely to get, let alone die from, Covid during the pandemic.
During the pandemic, there were about (rolling average) 2.4 million (about 6% of the total population) under-fives in California and there were about 385,000 cases of Covid reported in that age group.
Currently, about 3.2% of California’s under-fives have had the latest shot. That’s on par with the national average. What is interesting is that of the 70,817 kids who have received the shot in the state, 41,224 live in the Bay Area. In other words, the Bay Area has 20% of the state’s population, but 57% of the state’s “vaccinated” toddlers and babies. But do not ever think that politics has had nothing to do with Covid protocols.
During the pandemic, the overall likelihood of a child dying from/with Covid was about 1 in 60,000; for those over 75 – about 6.5% of the population or 2.7 million – there were about 51,000 with/from Covid deaths, or about 1 in 50.
The risk, clearly, is extremely different depending upon age and general state of health.
With a relative risk of being harmed by Covid, the risks of the Covid shot itself must be considered carefully – note: no kid in the study will get a placebo for comparison purposes.
The Covid shots, in the general population, did have significant side-effects and did cause a number of deaths. While these numbers are not broken out by age, in the same time period there were 640 deaths and 89,000 “adverse effects” experienced (much much more than just a sore arm) by Californians.
Also during the same time period, all other vaccines combined caused 66 people to die and 14,000 to have a reportable “adverse effect.” (Note – the numbers are taken from the CDC’s “vaccine adverse event reporting system,” a tool it stood by as an early warning device for decades…that is, until the Covid problem numbers got too high.)
That puts the general odds of something bad happening to a person after they get a Covid shot at about 1 in a 1,000 and some studies have shown it to be 1 in 800. In other words, the risk from the shot appears to outweigh the risk of Covid itself by a factor of 60 times.
Citing the uncertainty of benefit, it should also be noted that the European Union has not cleared the shot at all (with minor exceptions) for the under-fives and were hesitant in allowing them for the under 18s.
Clearly, the risk outweighs the reward, as it were, and it is unclear – because Pfizer did not answer any request for information/comment (see questions below) – if parents are given those figures when making the decision to enroll their kid in an experimental drug program.
Adults calculate risk and reward constantly – from “Can I make that light before it turns red?” to “Should I tease that lion?” But a seven-month old is simply not capable of doing so and while certain clinical trials do hold out serious hope and are important for society at large, a trial such as this for such a limited reward – kids very very very rarely get, let alone suffer seriously, from Covid – seems dubious.
In other words, if you wanted to test a new malaria drug you would not do so on Santa’s elves at the North Pole because there are no mosquitoes there to infect anyone.
According to the Belmont Report, which set baseline standards for human-involved clinical trials in the late 1970s (it was a government reaction to the horror of the CDC’s own “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) one of the three core standards for justifying clinical trial testing is “beneficence.”
In other words, there is an obligation to protect persons from harm by maximizing anticipated benefits and minimizing possible risk and harm.
That risk/benefit calculation obviously changes in regard to other far more common childhood maladies, making participation in those studies potentially far more “beneficent.”
But in the case of Covid, the question is how are maximal, as it were, are the anticipated benefits?
Very very minimal and that is the problem, said Dr. Clayton Baker, former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
“Given the real and well-established risks of harm (including myocarditis and death), and given the functionally zero potential for benefit (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.”
Come to think of it, maybe just get the kid the pony instead.
Here’s a link to an on-going kids Covid study with a handy map so you can find a location near you (mostly Bay Area): A Study to Learn About Variant-Adapted COVID-19 RNA Vaccine Candidate(s) in Healthy Children
For clinical trials in general, you can look here for one that you might be interested in taking part in:
For clinical trials just about Covid, you can look here:
As noted above, here are the questions Pfizer did not reply to:
-Exactly how is informed consent handled? I assume a parent/guardian can provide said consent?
-Do (or have) you run trials with previously vaccinated children?
-What child/youth trials have been run in the past and what have been their results?
-What is the compensation amount?
-Have any previous trials shown conclusively that the vaccine ameliorates Covid severity in children?
-When and in what manner did the FDA approve this trial?
-When do you expect to conclude the trial?
-Is this trial aimed at testing a “booster” shot or to cover a new variant?
-Has any child in any trial conducted had a significant and serious reaction requiring hospitalization and/or led to death?
-It appears one of the points of the study is to figure out how to cut the number of doses as well as check effectiveness. Is that correct?
-How many children – nationwide and in California specifically – have signed up for/been through the trial so far?
-What are the differences between trials involving children and those involving adults?
-Will Pfizer conduct trials each time it comes out with new variant vaccine shot?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
The Most Devastating Report So Far
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Brownstone Institute
The Revolution of 2024: A Rare Victory for Anti-Establishment Fury
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
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