Health
South Korean president declares low birth rate a ‘national emergency,’ plans new ministry to address it

From LifeSiteNews
President Yoon Suk Yeol announced that he would ask for the parliament’s support to establish a new Ministry of Low Birth Rate Counter Planning after the country reached a new low with an average number of babies per woman of 0.72 in 2023.
South Korea’s president has declared the country’s low birth rate a “national emergency” and announced a new government ministry to address the problem.
In a televised press conference on May 9, President Yoon Suk Yeol said, “We will mobilize all of the nation’s capabilities to overcome the low birth rate, which can be considered a national emergency.”
He announced he would ask for the parliament’s support to establish a new “Ministry of Low Birth Rate Counter Planning.”
South Korea has had the lowest fertility rate in the world for years, and the average number of babies per woman dropped to a new low of 0.72 in 2023, down from 0.78 the previous year.
Despite the government’s efforts to increase the birth rate by spending over $200 billion on initiatives meant to encourage larger families, including infertility treatment, cash subsidies, and childcare services, the country’s birth rate declined for the fourth year in a row in 2023.
A Korean Construction corporation made headlines this year for offering employees $75,000 for each baby they have. “If Korea’s birth rate remains low, the country will face extinction,” Lee Joong-keun, chairman of the Booyoung Group, warned.
READ: New ‘Birthgap’ film shows how explosion in childlessness is driving population collapse
According to YouTuber Stephan Park, who grew up in South Korea and runs the YouTube channel Asian Boss, Korean men face the additional problem of being expected to own a house when they marry, which is very difficult under the country’s current economic conditions.
“There are all the societal pressures that if you get married, guys are the ones that are supposed to buy the house, to have the house ready, which is impossible to have if you are a 30-year-old guy … with the average house prices you’ll never be able to afford one in your lifetime,” Park explained.
“So that’s the most common thing we hear: ‘I cannot afford to get married,’” he added.
According to some projections, South Korea’s and multiple other Western and Asian populations are expected to be cut in half by the year 2100 if the current trends continue.
COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
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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