For two thousand years, the paradigm of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) ruled medicine. Disease resulted from an imbalance, which might be corrected by methods such as blood-letting or purging. Galen’s model of human anatomy, based on Hippocratic theory, became the point of reference for all medical theory and practice for the next 1,300 years (https://tinyurl.com/y66mkwdj).
Galen’s monopoly was challenged, in the 1600s, by one of the most important discoveries of the scientific revolution: William Harvey’s elucidation of the circulation of the blood (https://tinyurl.com/yccv6wm2).
Harvey’s approach, based on experimentation and the accumulation of evidence, became standard practice in science thereafter—although members of the London College of Physicians balked for decades at the idea of overturning Galen’s long-established theories. The method led to many more disruptive ideas, such as the germ theory of disease.
We now imagine ourselves to live in the era of scientific and “evidence-based” medicine. But are we really locked into a different, authoritarian paradigm with science as window-dressing?
What was once a spirited exploration of the nature of reality by iconoclastic Renaissance men has been debased into “a careerist parlour game for oversocialized nerds,” writes John Carter. In the statistical pettifoggery brought to attention by epidemiologist John Ioannidis in his book Why Most Published Biomedical Research Is Wrong, papers were drawing conclusions from such low levels of statistical significance that even a couple more datapoints can invert the results. This can create headlines of “Vitamin E Causes Cancer” or “Vitamin E Cures Cancer,” both of which papers may have gotten someone a job or a grant (tinyurl.com/2s3teyzk).
The federal government has a near monopoly on grant funding. Sabine Hossenfelder writes: “Academia has become a latifundium planted with overbred genetically engineered monocrops, dependent on ever-increasing industrial inputs in the form of chemical fertilizer (federal research funding) and herbicides (campus speech controls), producing high-calorie/low-nutrient yields (******** papers) from its mineral-stripped soil (diversity hire faculty and diversity admit student bodies)” (ibid.).
Peer review is supposed to prevent malinvestment of the public treasury in lunatic ideas and to serve as an error-correction system. It has utterly failed to achieve its nominal purpose. But we no longer have public debates: “the science is settled.” Additionally, in medicine there are pervasive conflicts of interest with immensely profitable private industries.
There have been amazing strides in certain areas, such as imaging, chemical diagnostics, medical devices, and surgical techniques. Yet there is a stultifying paradigm lock on population medicine—that just happens to benefit Big Pharma. This has the stated goal of preventing or eliminating disease and keeping people healthy. Much of primary care practice is devoted to vaccines or treatment of risk factors by normalizing “the numbers” (blood pressure, blood glucose, BMI, and lipids). Sick people are referred to specialists, with increasingly long waits. Distressing symptoms that don’t fit a guideline (or might be a vaccine or drug adverse effect) may be written off as “anxiety” or “functional” illness.
“Sickness Care” vs. “Wellness Care”
A “sickness care system” or “sickness insurance” is often criticized, especially by “universal healthcare” advocates. But the idea that “they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick” (Matthew 9:12) is a loser for Big Pharma. A sick person who is cured need not return. A person whose risk factors are being “managed” must be checked regularly. And what more profitable product than annual injections of the whole population? Compliance measures for both patients and “providers” can be required entries in the electronic health record.
Galen is replaced by credentialed Experts, and rebalancing humors in the ill is replaced by efforts to permanently alter the immune system in the vaccinated, or to block key metabolic steps as with statin drugs or neurotransmitters with SSRIs.
“Insufficient Evidence”
An unprecedented atrocity during the COVID pandemic was to block the treatment of sick patients with safe, long-used repurposed drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, citing “insufficient evidence,” while subjecting them to non-treatment, lethal hospital protocols, or new drugs like remdesivir and Paxlovid, despite evidence of harm.
The time-honored approach to discovering new treatments by repurposing existing drugs has evolved from a serendipitous and random practice to a rigorous method grounded in bioinformatics. This improved paradigm can provide safe, effective, and cost-effective treatments for a variety of serious diseases. While previously endorsed enthusiastically by mainstream academia and regulators, it inexplicably lost their support during the COVID-19 pandemic (https://tinyurl.com/38jddcz5). The NY Times hails the idea of repurposed drugs—as long as you are treating a rare disease and not COVID (tinyurl.com/yc28xejd).
The scientific paradigm has been corrupted and has become as rigid and authoritarian as the four humors. Like Galen, it is vigorously defended by professional societies. Worse, instead of healing the sick, its purpose is to empower the ruling elite.
Is MAGA Winning?
Trump supporters are pleased about many initiatives the Administration has taken, and certainly favor making America healthy again. But it is important not to strain at gnats and swallow camels—or to ignore the big elephant of COVID policies. Actions needed to repair damages, to uncover the causes, and to insure against a repetition with “Disease X” include:
· Respect and honor physicians who followed the Oath of Hippocrates and treated patients to the best of their knowledge and judgment. Many paid an extremely heavy price, including loss of livelihood and credentials. Why are they not being sought for advisory positions in government?
- Identify and hold accountable officials in government who used their positions to suppress the use of repurposed drugs.
- Penalize persons who violated the law requiring informed consent before administering or mandating a product with an Emergency Use Authorization.
- Compensate those who were fired for exercising their rights.
- Cut off funding to censors of so-called “misinformation” that simply disagreed with officials.
- Publicize contracts government agencies executed to purchase excessive supplies of vaccine or government-approved remedies such as remdesivir, or to promote them, and guard against future crony contracts.
- Assure follow-up on adverse events reported for vaccines, and improve and modernize VAERS and other reporting systems.
- Investigate any CMS incentives for deadly hospital protocols, refusal to permit use of potentially life-saving drugs, or distorted reporting of COVID diagnoses, and end such practices.
- End government privileges to specialty boards that revoked certifications for opposing COVID policies.
Historical Precedent: the Heliocentric Theory
Galileo’s famous battle was not just that of a brave heretic defying the backwards religious bigotry of the Catholic church, but has common elements with today’s struggle. He was up against the renowned academics of the day, and they had a complex model of planetary motions based on past observations. Today, we have massive data and epidemiologic models used to predict COVID catastrophe and climate models predicting runaway warming. The ancients had no computers, but Ptolemy’s model did work in predicting planetary motions, better than Galileo’s, which assumed circular rather than elliptical orbits. Learned men had every reason to reject Galileo. His theory, backed by observations from a novel, crude, and suspect device (the telescope) violated accepted (though false) physical principles.
A Galileo operating in similar fashion today would be treated like a crank, Carter writes (op. cit.), because “the peer review system lays (sic.) like a soggy smothering blanket across the whole of every field, extinguishing the creative fire.”
“If the Trump administration can, it must start the dismantling of the modern university as it is starting from its Achilles heel: ending its monopoly over professional credentialing and finding appropriate alternatives.”
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, https://tinyurl.com/4nw49uyw
ACTION OF THE MONTH
Save the dates of September 11-13, 2025 for the 82nd Annual Meeting of AAPS. Consider donating to bring students to our meeting at https://aapsonline.org/scholarships.
Terminated Grants
Universities are loudly lamenting termination of grants and slashing the “overhead” portion that goes to the institution rather than to the researcher. “The weeks ahead may be the greatest test the US scientific community has ever faced,” writes editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp (Science 2/28/25).
An official list of terminated grants (tinyurl.com/ycx3yhf5) is supposed to be updated weekly. The majority are for wasteful ideological nonsense, but a few are for typical medical research projects of general interest. Many of those are at Columbia University, which may be targeted because of student riots.
Research Priorities
To find the cause of an increase in chronic or developmental diseases, one should look at environmental factors of quantitative significance, with a biologically plausible mechanism, that began around the same time as the increase in the disease. Examples fulfilling those criteria:
- RFK, Jr.’s, proposed study of neurodevelopment disorders such as autism possibly related to childhood vaccines;
- Autoimmune conditions and COVID-19 mRNA injections (Mary Talley Bowden, M.D., reports extremely high levels of anti-spike protein antibodies in patients with post-vaccination symptoms, https://tinyurl.com/4yy9xtzr);
- Other possible adverse reactions to COVID shots included in the “negative evidence” series of guest editorials at jpands.org;
- Potential lab leaks of pathogenic organisms;
- Impaired cognitive function, mental illness, and risky behavior after legalization of marijuana (https://tinyurl.com/2kujba47);
- Mass shootings possibly associated with use of psychoactive drugs (https://www.jpands.org/vol14no1/kauffman.pdf).
Exposures to tiny quantities of “forever chemicals” (https://tinyurl.com/4dz4z7fs) or “endocrine disruptors” (https://tinyurl.com/4c298w9a) present for many decades, and other such topics that find “statistical significance” through data dredging (see p 1 and https://tinyurl.com/m4nkutbh), must not be allowed to divert MAHA from questioning the central Establishment vaccine paradigm and the stranglehold of the pharmaceutical-academic-medical-industrial complex.
Perennial concerns like diet and exercise are not offensive to either right- or left-wing constituencies. But the evidence on what is the best diet or best exercise regimen is quite poor, and these are areas in which individualized advice is necessary. The over-riding concern must be the millions who were or could be harmed by mass vaccination campaigns.
AAPS Calendar
Sep 11-13, 2025. 82nd Annual Meeting, northern Virginia
FinCEN Reporting Requirement Dropped
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is issuing an interim final rule that removes the requirement for U.S. companies and U.S. persons to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to FinCEN under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). FinCEN revises the definition of “reporting company” to mean only those entities that are formed under the law of a foreign country and that have registered to do business in any U.S. State or Tribal jurisdiction by the filing of a document with a secretary of state or similar office (https://tinyurl.com/3xmnnemt).
Thus, our members do not need to report. We have not dropped our lawsuit challenging constitutionality.
Ask your members of Congress to support legislation that would make sure future administrations cannot easily reinstate the FinCEN BOI requirements: https://aaps.pub/stopboi.
Executive Powers
As DOGE discovers “each new nest of feral feds,” writes Dr. Ted Noel, that information is handed to Trump’s department heads, and these heads then terminate their paychecks and privileges. Almost immediately, however, some federal court judge then issues an order demanding that Trump reinstate them.
Current Supreme Court precedent creates some restrictions on whom and how the President can fire. The upshot is that America has a permanent, protected class of bureaucrats. In practical fact, they are not answerable to anyone. However, the Constitution is the highest law in the land, and laws such as the Civil Service Act directly contradict Article II, § 1, which gives all executive branch power to the President.
Western law, Noel states, is derived in large measure from Jewish legal principles., of which the most important may be kal vachomer, “light and heavy.” This principle says that if something is forbidden (or allowed) in a minor situation, it is also forbidden (or allowed) in a more weighty situation. The reverse also applies. These principles matter a great deal when considering the efforts leftist judges are making to prevent President Trump from carrying out his election mandate to govern under the Constitution.
Myers v. United States (1926) clarified that the President has the freedom to fire any official he nominated and the Senate confirmed. In short, it says that the President’s power to appoint also includes the unfettered power to remove. Since the President can terminate at will the service of the highest-level officers in his Cabinet, lower-level firings logically fall under the principle of kal vachomer: In short, he has plenary hiring and firing authority throughout the Executive branch. Ultimately the Supreme Court is going to have to return to Constitutional order (https://tinyurl.com/83y754be).
AAPS Files Amicus on ACA HIV Mandate
AAPS filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, which challenges the “preventive care” mandate of the Affordable Care Act. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force dictated the items that insurers must cover and employers fund. AAPS argues that “requiring subsidies for free access to medication interferes with the healthy market forces that drive down retail prices for every good and service. In addition, co-pays and insurance deductibles are essential in medical care to deter overuse and waste. The mandate at issue here for completely free use by employees of costly medication, without any copay or insurance deductible, is both unconstitutional and economically harmful” (tinyurl.com/3z5atfap).
In particular, “the administrative mandate in this case forces millions of ACA-covered businesses to pay tens of thousands of dollars annually, to benefit merely one or a few employees, for medication to reduce the risk of HIV while engaging in a lifestyle prone to it.” If the authority of the Task Force is upheld, it could act in the future without political accountability to impose mandates such as no-cost abortifacient mifepristone or “transgender”-related care nationwide. Thus, a wealthy and political powerful faction supported by billion-dollar lobbying in Washington, D.C., could impose cultural change on the whole nation by issuing one-size-fits-all administrative mandates.
“As held in Dobbs, states should have leeway to go in their own direction on cultural and moral issues,” the brief concludes.
Fund-Withholding Powers
The Left is outraged by Trump withholding funds from Columbia University, but righteous progressive lobbying and Sen. Ted Kennedy created the source of the authority.
“Fund-withholding provisions were included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a means of discouraging racial segregation in Southern schools,” writes George Liebmann, President of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar. “Latitudinarian judges extended the prohibition of discrimination to include creation of so-called ‘hostile environments,’ the telling of off-color jokes, criticism of particular women or racial minorities, and other matters which in a free society are regulated by manners, not laws.”
In the 1984 case of Grove City College v. Bell, the Supreme Court held that the Act did not justify the withholding of funds from entire institutions, but only from the portions alleged to be discriminating. In 1987, Congress, urged on by Sen. Edward Kennedy, enacted the so-called Civil Rights Restoration Act, which allowed all of an institution’s federal funds to be withheld, including loans made available to students.
Reagan vetoed the law, but the Democratic Congress overrode the veto, not imagining how the power could be wielded in ways they did not approve.
Such power allows the federal government to strangle institutions that don’t fall in line with its vision of social order, eroding their functional autonomy (tinyurl.com/4xnavh2d).
Tip of the Month. Many rural hospitals are in need of physicians, in Iowa and elsewhere. The war on doctors by sham peer review, investigations, administrative headaches, declining reimbursements, and maintenance of certification requirements has caused many excellent physicians to retire early or change fields. A shortage of residency programs, which may be deliberately intended to replace physicians with less-trained assistants, has left many medical school graduates unable to practice medicine. Up to 20% of graduates fail to match into a residency on Match Day, for which results were released on Mar 21 this year. Federal legislation to address the shortage of residency positions failed to gain support last year. For physicians who are willing to move, there are many locum tenens opportunities in underserved areas.
Correspondence
Medicare Cuts. The House Republican stopgap spending package did not contain an expected bipartisan provision that would reverse cuts to doctors’ pay in Medicare. As many House GOP doctors argued, the reductions are based on a formula that doesn’t account for rising costs of care. This gives more incentive for physicians to start looking at the option of opting out.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Eden, N.Y.
Rotten Egg of Government-funded Science. Way back in the Pleistocene, when people would give seminars on campus, the atmosphere was combative. This behavior is not exactly forbidden now, but it is rare in practice. If you’re going to speak in a negative tone, it had better be in service to the Consensus, and against whatever newfangled crank idea that dare not be countenanced. The way science came to be funded almost wholly by government explains the change. It will be tough to purge DIE, because all ideologies die hard. But cutting off their life blood is easy. Just stop paying them. If we want to bring back the confrontational, and fecund, mode of science, we have to ensure there are sides to take, and not just one. Government money has to stop. I know this is a near impossibility. Yet if you judge science by New Things Learned That Aren’t ********, the old way was not only superior, it was in an entirely different class apart.
William M. Briggs, Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/4dhz348n
The Role of the University. Today we are seeing the Platonic Oligarchy, expert armies, the administrative state, and the rise of the oligarchs in a democratic republic just like it happened in Europe from the time of Bismarck. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour describes the university as the “whore of Babylon”: a “secular, corrupting institution…, wielding immense cultural, intellectual, and economic power while simultaneously fostering in its womb radical ideologies that destabilize traditional social structures and promise to give birth to our destruction” (tinyurl.com/4nw49uyw).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
What CDC Must Do. The CDC has earned the wrath of millions for its misguided policies. It has made basic statistical errors. To restore trust, it must issue a comprehensive apology to the American people for recommending community masking, vaccine mandates, vaccinating and boosting individuals who recently had COVID, etc. Anyone at CDC who formulated or touched these policies without opposing them is now fired or assigned to field posts in Alaska to look for bird flu.
Vinay Prasad, M.D., M.P.H., https://tinyurl.com/ykzpupxa
Regulatory Data on Comirnaty™. The UK’s Commission on Human Medicines (CHM) had compiled 36 questions for the manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccine BNT162b2. Minutes of the meetings did not disclose the answers. A FOI request brought the answer that disclosure of relevant correspondence with Pfizer/BioNTech might harm the reputation of the Agency and “disincentivise [manufacturers] from seeking UK authorisation for highly beneficial new medicines.” The regulatory agency released little information regarding the biodistribution, action, metabolism, and excretion of Comirnaty or its constituents.
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, tinyurl.com/na7fu9m5
Pharma v. Health. There are four fundamental conflicts at the core of the iatrogenocide problem. (1) Actual innovation in medicine is extremely difficult. The human genome was first mapped 35 years ago, and yet this has not revolutionized medicine as once promised. Any investment in bioscience research comes with 100% risk because one never knows whether a particular strategy will produce beneficial outcomes. (2) Under normal circumstances, the market of unhealthy people is really, really, small. (3) Thus, the ideal drug—from standpoint of pharmaceutical profits—is one that causes harm. (4) If one actually cares about health, finding new uses for existing drugs that are no longer protected by patents is BY FAR the best use of research time and money. Research into nutrition and non-pharmaceutical interventions also produces infinitely better outcomes for the public than biochemical research. Any proposed reforms of HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC, etc. must confront the legal and incentive structures that are causing the iatrogenocide.
Toby Rogers, https://tinyurl.com/yc6jvrf2
Fraud in COVID Vaccine Clinical Trials. Whistleblower Brook Jackson filed the largest ever qui tam lawsuit under the False Claims Act against Ventavia Research Group, U.S.A., Pfizer, and Icon (https://tinyurl.com/bdfp4xpm). In September 2020, her job was to oversee the conduct of Pfizer’s Phase 3 Covid-19 mRNA “vaccine” trial at several locations in Texas. She witnessed investigators glossing over informed consent, fabricating and falsifying data, failing to test ill patients, failing to keep clinicians blinded, and failing to report adverse events. She reported her concerns to the FDA, and within hours, she was fired.
The complaint alleges that “Defendants’ fraudulent scheme caused DoD to pay billions that it would not have paid had it known that the safety and efficacy of the vaccine at issue was not properly proven.” If she wins, she will bankrupt Pfizer. If not, public health policies will continue to protect research fraud.
Mary Talley Bowden, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/ypezf6bt
