Why Did the Government Lie About the COVID Vaccines?

Unpacking Ron Johnson's recent discoveries and what they mean for each of us

Story at a Glance:

•Like many vaccines before it, the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccine was oversold to the public to create the vaccine program.

•As more and more issues emerged with the vaccine, rather than acknowledge them or change course, the government, media and medical press chose to hide all of it to protect the vaccine program.

•Because of this, there has been a profound loss of trust in the medical system never seen before in history, and as extensive polling shows, vaccines have gone from being something almost all of the public blindly supports to something a majority of Americans are skeptical of.

•Senator Johnson, who since 2020 has been relentlessly fighting for COVID transparency and accountability recently obtained records proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the CDC and FDA were aware the COVID vaccines were causing myocarditis and strokes but nonetheless concealed this from the public to continue pushing vaccines.

•This article will present exactly what Johnson uncovered, the extensive polling data which shows the unprecedented loss of trust in the medical system and explore how we can best make use of the unique moment we have arrived at.

The increasing freedom of information enabled by an uncensored media is gradually waking people up to the many harmful things being done to them on a daily basis. That uncomfortable reality is traumatic to come to terms with, which in turn leads many to want to understand why it’s happening.

In my own case, whenever I observe something pernicious, my question is always whether the events were:

• A naturally emergent phenomenon resulting from human nature and the specific circumstances at play — one that likely would have occurred regardless of who was involved.

• A coordinated plot by a group of bad actors (e.g., powerful sociopaths) who deliberately harmed the world for their own benefit.

The essential problem is that in most cases, a strong case can be made for either interpretation, so which one you settle on is typically a product of what your mind is primed to focus on. In my own case, I seriously consider both — I’ve spent decades reading about the people behind the scenes who pull the strings, and I’ve lost count of how many malevolent things I’ve seen enacted in a coordinated, systematic manner over years if not decades. But as time has gone on, I’ve leaned toward the naturally emergent perspective because:

• I keep seeing the same processes play out across so many different spheres.

• In many cases, bad actors don’t directly orchestrate things so much as amplify existing dysfunctional dynamics to move things in their preferred direction.

• Putting all your focus on one bad actor rarely proves productive. Those fights drag out for years and rarely go anywhere (e.g., we are still waiting for Fauci to be brought to justice for COVID), and intensely focusing on a single person just creates a niche for other bad actors to do the same thing. In contrast, focusing on the core dynamics that allow evil to arise provides a much more lasting immunity against it.

For example, all things considered, the COVID-19 health freedom movement has been incredibly successful — accomplishing much more than I ever expected — but it has still fallen short of many of its key goals. Much of this stems from continual fracturing and infighting that has prevented MAHA from presenting a unified front to lobby for systematic policy changes. Partly because of this, RFK Jr. (who is still accomplishing a lot) has been unable to implement many of the most contested MAHA health policies the federal apparatus is doing everything it can to undermine.

As a result, many commentators have convinced their audiences that MAHA’s leadership sold out, while others are convinced the pharmaceutical industry has intentionally planted divisive voices to accelerate fractures — along with a smaller minority who believe pharma is using tools like bots to amplify divisive voices, incentivizing them through internet engagement rather than direct payments.

While I recognize it’s possible there are “controlled opposition” figures in the movement — particularly since both I and associates have periodically seen obvious plants inserted into much smaller movements we worked with — I believe the natural emergence hypothesis (likely amplified by bots and mainstream media) is far more probable because:

• I’ve seen the exact same dynamics in many smaller groups I’ve been involved with — disruptive members trying to defame or “controlled opposition” a leader I knew with certainty was completely committed to the cause. Ultimately, much of this resembles the gossip and reputational violence I dealt with from mean girls in high school, which I was then shocked to encounter again as a medical student and resident at multiple hospitals.

• In any movement, there will always be a spectrum from people deeply committed to the cause to those who join out of convenience or self-interest and are motivated to prioritize themselves over the group. No one is perfect, so even the most committed people, once put under a microscope, have potentially questionable traits. And individuals who have been marginalized their entire lives — who learned they can’t trust people when opposing the system — will be prone to traumatic, overreactive responses that can easily be misinterpreted as sinister.

Because of all this, my fear from the start was that the same fractures I’d seen everywhere else would appear in the COVID-19 health freedom movement. My goal has been to serve as a positive counterweight: promoting people with integrity who I felt were doing good work, working to create a standard others would be incentivized to replicate (e.g., factual, clear positions strongly supported by evidence), advocating for unity and compassion, and — when it was necessary to speak out, regardless of my frustration — attacking ideas rather than people.

The Nature of Government

In virtually every era, a large portion of the population concludes their government is evil, and in many cases, political schools emerge arguing that government itself, rather than who specifically occupies it, is inherently evil.

I personally consider this a dynamic subject. Strong arguments exist for the “evil” perspective: bad leaders routinely emerge who poison entire governmental systems, and governments frequently adopt the same tyrannical behaviors. But at the same time, my own experience interacting with government workers is that while there are some manipulative sociopaths in the hierarchy, many members of government genuinely want to do the right thing and try hard to do it.

My essential conclusion has been that the nature of government’s role (being responsible for solving problems, having only imperfect solutions available, and then having to force the population into accepting policies with downsides many don’t want) inevitably leads to increasing overreach. This is compounded by the fact that humans never want to admit they or their institutions are wrong, so there is always a tendency to double down on bad policies rather than admit fault and correct them.

This problem gets worse as governments grow. Larger and larger factions emerge that prioritize their own interests over the populace. And humans have a finite number of people they can be present to and hold real empathy toward, so once officials become responsible for thousands or millions of distant people, those they serve transform from being people into intellectual constructs. At that point, it becomes possible to mentally rationalize enacting abhorrent policies upon them that you would never inflict on your neighbor.

Since the sociopathic minority of society will always be drawn to positions of power, and then be favored for ascending the hierarchy, because they will do far more ruthless things to get ahead, I believe one of the best solutions humanity has developed for governance is the American Constitution’s emphasis on absolute individual rights and a system of checks and balances, where different parties are forced to compete against each other and hence not stray too far from policies the public can stomach, as otherwise they lose power to another group.

Governments and Vaccines

Much in the same way people act the same way in every era, governments do as well, and as such, if you can observe how a previous situation similar to the one at hand was handled, you can reasonably predict what will happen in the present.

In the case of vaccines, ever since the first ones in the days of smallpox, a very similar pattern has repeatedly emerged:

1. Governments will enthusiastically embrace an imperfect or rushed vaccine to address a public health issue or crisis.
2. The unproven vaccine will initially be met with great fanfare and promise.
3. The vaccine will have safety and efficacy issues which make the public resistant to it.
4. The government (and often medical profession) will gaslight the public by trying to cover up those objections and continue holding to the rosy picture they initially promised despite having extensive evidence the vaccine actually has serious safety issues (or does not work).
5. The public will grow increasingly opposed to the vaccines.
6. The government will eventually begin blaming the failures of the vaccine on not enough people vaccinating (or boosting) and institute a series of increasingly aggressive mandates.
7. If the vaccine is harmful enough, public protest will eventually shift the government and overturn the mandates. If this happens, the incident will then be erased from public memory and very few will ever realize there was a serious issue with some of the previous vaccines.

So, starting with smallpox, a key goal with this newsletter has been to show how again and again that happens in the hope we can break this dysfunctional cycle.

Note: presently I believe the government’s irrational obsession with vaccines results from the fact mass distributing vaccines and forcing people to take them is something that governments (wishing to exercise their power) can easily do, whereas addressing the actual causes of disease is much more challenging with a top-down approach (especially if powerful interests are poisoning the population for profit). Alternatively, a good case can be made that a malignant religion has formed around vaccines and infected large segments of the professional and ruling class.

Because of all of this, when the COVID vaccines came out, especially given that the marketing and propaganda push for them was much more aggressive than anything I’d seen in my lifetime I assumed:

•The benefits of the vaccines were being overstated, the harms understated, and there was likely significant fraud in the clinical trials that produced the “95% effective” claim (much of which was apparent if you read Pfizer’s December 2020 clinical trial report with a careful eye and was later proven by numerous trial whistleblowers).

•Serious issues with the vaccine, particularly long-term autoimmune, fertility and cancer ones would emerge (as leaked regulatory documents in December 2020 showed Pfizer was exempted for testing for these despite them being the greatest concerns with the vaccine), but by the time these issues were partially acknowledged, it would be too late to do anything.

•Rather than admit these issues, the government would cover them up, and at most would make a few token admissions of vaccine harm to make the public believe the core products were safe (e.g., after the FDA briefly paused the non-mRNA vaccine because it was linked to six cases of a very rare blood clot, many doctors were convinced vaccine safety monitoring was excessively strict and hence that the government not acknowledging any safety issues with the mRNA vaccines proved none existed).

•A series of increasingly aggressive policies would be taken to get as many people as possible to vaccinate, with a more aggressive approach being taken once the maximum uptake from the previous approach had been reached (as more extreme mandates could only be enacted once a sufficient portion of the population was vaccinated). This is essentially why they went from a scarcity model to increasingly sleazy financial incentives to soft mandates to hard mandates (e.g., being fired if you didn’t vaccinate).

Nonetheless, I was still astounded at how high the injury rate was once the vaccine came out (every day I had multiple patients who came in for reactions to the vaccine) and within a month, I had people I knew from around the country contacting me to ask if the vaccine could cause heart attacks, blood clots or strokes (as this had just happened to someone they knew). Given this, I was a bit surprised the government still committed to completely covering it up (as the scale of it was beyond what the government could cover up, so committing to doing so would be guaranteed to break public’s trust in the government).

Nonetheless, they did, and to this day still continue to lie.

Did the Government Lie?

One of the major reasons why pernicious gossip and reputational violence often sticks is because when people do not fully understand a situation, they will default to filling in the blanks by assuming they know someone else’s intentions and then using that assumption to explain everything which has happened. Sometimes those assumptions are correct, but in many other cases they are not (e.g., some of the caricatures I’ve seen made of people in this movement I know quite well have almost nothing to do with who these people actually are).

In law, a much higher standard applies: in civil defamation cases involving public figures or matters of public concern, it is quite difficult to hold someone liable unless there is strong evidence that they knew their statement was false at the time or acted with reckless disregard for the truth (which must be shown by clear and convincing evidence, which often requires near ironclad proof of the speaker’s state of mind). Likewise, for criminal perjury, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person knowingly and willfully made a false statement under oath about a material matter (rather than just being careless or not knowing their statement was false).

Remarkably however, we have gradually met that (nearly impossible) standard with the COVID vaccines. For example, Anthony Fauci, to dispel the notion COVID-19 leaked from a lab (which he funded), at the start of the pandemic repeatedly cited an expert paper that stated COVID-19 could have only emerged naturally. Documents provided by the House Oversight Committee subsequently revealed Fauci pushed for that study, was heavily involved in its drafting, and that he worked with the NIH director to quash “lab leak rumors” once the initial paper failed to. Likewise, documents and Slack leaks showed that the authors of the paper seriously doubted the natural origin hypothesis they published.^1,2,3

Note: while it is not possible to read minds, my experience has been that “past actions are the best predictor of future behavior,” so much in the same way governments or societies tend to repeatedly act the same way, if an individual has a history of acting in a specific dishonest or unscrupulous manner (e.g., Fauci always lies), you can reasonably assume they will continue to do so, and I cannot count how many times this has saved me (e.g., if someone I just met did something sketchy out of the blue, I immediately distanced myself from them and in a few cases, learned of them subsequently harming someone else when they were alone together in private or financially in some type of business arrangement).

With the COVID vaccines, while the focus was typically on the figurehead Anthony Fauci, when I went through everything, the issues kept on coming back to Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s center for biologics (which oversees the vaccine division).

Briefly:
•Within the FDA Peter Marks continually pushed for expediting COVID vaccine approvals (that were necessary for White House political goals), even as the FDA’s top vaccine experts (who strongly supported vaccination) said the timeline was too fast and too many corners were being cut—eventually resulting in Marks pushing them out and the approvals occurring.

•Throughout the COVID vaccine process, Marks insisted the vaccines were rigorously tested, no corners were being cut, and there was no evidence the vaccines had any safety issues.

•In private, he continually met with vaccine injured patients over vaccine safety concerns but would always find some type of way to deflect the validity of the evidence presented (e.g., refuse to discuss it, say the FDA needed more time to conduct an analysis to find a signal, blame the injuries on something else) and most importantly, despite many requests, would never define what would constitute acceptable proof of vaccine harm.

•As he stonewalled the vaccine injured patients he continually insisted he cared about them and was deeply empathetic for their suffering (a common manipulative tactic dishonest people use). Remarkably, as he was doing this, he attended a vaccine conference where he publicly stated “It’s crazy that they don’t get how great vaccines are…I am past trying to argue with people who think that vaccines are not safe.”

All of this, in turn, is summarized in much more detail here:

Note: recently Marks left the agency and took up a lucrative executive position for a pharmaceutical company, following in the footsteps of many before him (e.g., FDA directors from Trump’s first term received lucrative positions at Pfizer and Moderna, while the CDC director who pushed Merck’s Gardasil through and buried its tsunami of injuries got a similar compensation from Merck).

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI)

The PSI is one of Congress’s most powerful investigative bodies, possessing broad authority to investigate government operations, waste, fraud, and a wide range of other matters, and it can issue subpoenas for documents and records — including certain federal materials — that are often difficult or impossible for other committees or private parties to obtain.

By great luck, Senator Ron Johnson (who has been the first Senator in history to extensively advocate for vaccine injured patients) after serving for 14 years on the PSI’s parent committee, was selected to become chair of the PSI in January 2025.

As Johnson had continually fought for COVID transparency since November 2020 (routinely holding hearings on early treatment and sending more than 70 oversight letters to the FDA, CDC, and HHS), once he assumed PSI chairmanship, he began directly subpoenaing the agencies and (as they could no longer legally ignore him) and gradually collected documentation that eventually met the threshold needed to show that these agencies, indeed, lied (a lot) about COVID-19 vaccine safety.

On May 21, 2025, the PSI released a 55-page report (based on more than 2,400 pages of subpoenaed HHS records) and held its first hearing on the topic where they showed on:

• February 28, 2021 — The Israeli Ministry of Health notified CDC officials of “a large number of reports” of myocarditis, “particularly in young people,” following the Pfizer vaccine.

• Mid-April 2021 — CDC officials internally discussed a “safety signal” for myocarditis linked to mRNA vaccines based on Israeli and U.S. Department of Defense data, but did not immediately issue a public warning.

• May 17–27, 2021 — CDC and FDA officials explicitly acknowledged a myocarditis/pericarditis signal (especially in males ages 16–17 and 18–24), including internal confirmation that VAERS was signaling the issue in those age groups. They drafted a formal Health Alert Network (HAN) message but ultimately decided against issuing it. Instead, they posted milder “clinical considerations” on the CDC website (which Marks still tried to block). White House talking points distributed to top officials (including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci) downplayed the risk, and CDC shared draft HAN updates with Pfizer and Moderna representatives before informing the public.

Note: in 2022, Aaron Siri was also about to FOIA the CDC’s V-Safe data and show that they were covering up the harm demonstrated in that dataset (which is somewhat ironic, as V-safe was made to address the short comings of VAERS and provide the required monitoring for the expedited COVID-19 vaccines—but was dismissed once it showed inconvenient data).

Then, after proving the FDA and CDC knew the vaccine was causing myocarditis but instead went to great lengths to cover it up (killing many Americans), on March 23, 2026, Johnson released nearly 2,000 pages of records and a detailed letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. showing they also knew that the (“clot shot”) was causing strokes. Specifically:

• Shortly after the FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 bivalent booster on August 31, 2022, the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) began detecting a statistically significant safety signal for ischemic stroke among individuals age 65 and older as early as November 27, 2022. This signal persisted across multiple weekly analyses in December 2022 and January 2023.

• Despite the repeated detection of the signal in VSD and supporting findings in VAERS (including dozens of reported ischemic stroke cases and several associated deaths), FDA and CDC officials did not issue a formal HAN warning or recommend any changes in vaccination guidance for this high-risk age group.

• Instead, internal records reveal that officials continued to emphasize the push for booster uptake among seniors while quietly launching multiple investigations, including a contractor-led “Stroke Project” to review cases. Draft communications plans in early January 2023—which appeared to include edits from the Biden White House—softened the description of the signal (changing language from “moderately elevated” to “slightly elevated”).

• On January 13, 2023, the agencies posted a brief informal notice on the FDA website acknowledging the signal but explicitly stating “no change is recommended in COVID-19 vaccination practice.” Even as VAERS reports of ischemic stroke climbed (reaching 226 cases by early February 2023) and empirical Bayesian data mining analyses in February and March 2023 also flagged a statistically significant signal, the agencies maintained their public recommendations.

• Evaluations of the signal, including follow-up VSD studies, continued into 2024 and at least through September 2025, yet booster guidance for adults 65 and older remained unchanged.

While much could be said about this, I just want to highlight one of the least appreciated tragedies of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out. Dementia is caused by poor circulation to the brain, inflammation, and brain cells being shocked into a state of partial death (discussed in detail here)—all of which the COVID vaccines excel at causing. Because of this, I have come across so many cases of a relative in a nursing home showing signs of a stroke after a vaccine and then rapidly progressing into a fatal dementia (which the facility wrote off as “it just being Alzheimer’s”) and seen far more cases of accelerated cognitive impairment in all adult age brackets (which extensive data supports and we’ve all found to be one of the most common symptom of COVID vaccine injuries). This makes it particularly pernicious this side effect was known to disproportionately affect the elderly, as they are both the most vulnerable to it, and often the least able to advocate for themselves.

Note: proving something later causes cancer is much more difficult than showing it rapidly causes a heart attack or stroke (and also much less politically viable due to the outrage that will be generated by large swathes of the population being worried they are going to die from a cancer those they trusted gave them). Because of this, I am not sure how long it will take for the cancer link to the COVID vaccines to ever be acknowledged (or if it will even ever happen), which is tremendously unfortunate given the magnitude of this problem.

Loss of Trust

One of the key things I still do not understand about the COVID-19 vaccine program was why they continued to aggressively mandate the vaccine even as widespread opposition was emerging to the vaccine due to clear issue with both its safety and efficacy. As such, what could be gained (moderate increases in COVID-19 vaccine sales) would be counteracted by a far more costly widespread loss of trust in the medical system. Since a massive investment had been made over decades to create that trust (as it drives medical sales), it hence did not make sense the entire industry (which prioritized profit over everything else) would kill their golden goose to give Pfizer a sales bump.
Note: I hence believe the continued push for the vaccine either reflected a widespread inability of people in power to adapt and follow a new approach once the current one they’d committed to made no sense, or that some type of much larger benefit than inflating a few years of vaccine sales existed for injecting the entire population (e.g., to somehow alter the entire population, to eliminate a control group and hence the widespread evidence of vaccine injury, or to open up massive mRNA gene therapy markets in the future). Ultimately however, while I have many theories, I have no way to know why this policy was followed.

Because of this, we indeed saw a massive loss of trust in the medical system, health authorities, hospitals, doctors and vaccines on a completely different scale from anything I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Initially, the media was able to hide this, but gradually, individuals such as Charlie Kirk and independent polling were able to expose how the public actually felt and just how many people had been harmed by these products:

Note: this event coincided with virtually every health authority around the world concealing their data indicating widespread harm from the vaccines and medical journals in lockstep refusing to publish and anything indicating vaccine harm.

Vaccine Polling

Following this polls began emerging which demonstrated how much concerned the public was about the COVID vaccines:

•Steve Kirsch and the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation hired polling firms to directly survey the public. In 2022, of those vaccinated:

•In 2023, Professor Mark Skidmore hired Dynata to survey 2,840 respondents and found 15% of vaccinated had a vaccine injury (13% of which were severe), and 22% knew someone with a severe vaccine injury. His taboo paper was retracted, and he was subject to an ethics investigation that eventually cleared him.

•In 2024, a Kirsch-commissioned poll found 12.5–20.3% of vaccinated respondents were injured, with two-thirds categorizing their injury as “serious” or “very serious.” Despite reporting higher injury rates, Democrat respondents were far more likely to believe the vaccine was safe and effective (83.62%) than Republicans (44.49%) or Independents (51.81%).

As no one wanted to touch this issue, only one polling organization (Rasmussen Reports) independently investigated this. For American adults, they found:

• July 2021: 32% believed public health officials were lying about vaccine safety.

• December 2022: 34% of vaccinated reported minor side effects; 7% reported major side effects.

• January 2023: 49% believed vaccine side effects have likely caused a significant number of unexplained deaths; 28% personally knew someone whose death may have been caused by the vaccine.

• January 2023: 57% wanted Congress to investigate how the CDC handled assessing vaccine safety.

• March 2023: 11% believed a member of their household died from COVID-19, while 10% believed a member of their household died from a side effect of the vaccine.

• September 2023: 47% did not believe the vaccines were safe and 34% did not believe they were effective. Democrats were less likely to believe the vaccines were unsafe (14% D vs. 51% R) or ineffective (17% D vs. 57% R).

• November 2023: 24% personally knew someone they believed died from a COVID vaccine; 69% of those would likely join a class action lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies.

• January 2024: 53% believe vaccine side effects have likely caused a significant number of unexplained deaths and 24% personally knew someone whose death may have been caused by COVID-19 vaccines.

• September 2024: 55% believe vaccine side effects have likely caused a significant number of unexplained deaths—including 30% who say it’s very likely.

• November 2025: 26% reported minor side effects; 10% reported major side effects; 46% believe vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.

In short, the data shows you aren’t crazy—the majority of people are seeing exactly the same thing you are. One of the best data compilations I’ve seen that puts this into perspective was a March 2023 estimate Ed Dowd produced from available data sources. This deliberately conservative estimate showed:

This shift, in turn, was also reflected in public attitudes about the medical industry:

• A JAMA survey of 443,455 American adults found trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially in every sociodemographic group, from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024.

• A recurring Gallup Poll found trust in the pharmaceutical industry has greatly declined:

In parallel, support for vaccine mandates significantly decreased due to the COVID response:

In November 2025, Pew found this loss of trust was much more common in Republican voters:

A parallel Pew poll found only 57% had high confidence in childhood vaccine effectiveness (45% R vs. 71% D), 44% were confident in their safety testing (29% R vs. 63% D), and only 41% fully trusted the CDC vaccine schedule (27% R vs. 58% D).²⁰ Similar results were found by a KFF tracking poll:

Along with one this year:

Note: this 2026 poll also found a loss of trust in the MMR, COVID, and Flu vaccines.

Finally, to prepare for the midterms, MAHA allies commissioned three polls which all (in accordance with the previous polls) found a supermajority of voters support health and medical freedom.

Here’s what the first, from John Zogby Strategies, found about vaccines:

The second, of 1,000 likely voters by Rosetta Stone, found similar results:

This poll found support for the MAHA agenda (59.1%) was higher than for MAGA (45.8%) or America First (54.4%), but approval of what Trump and Kennedy are actually doing on children’s health is much lower (44.1%).

This indicates that MAHA is the party’s strongest midterm issue but what’s being done isn’t being effectively communicated, or that RFK’s base feels disappointed he hasn’t accomplished more on vaccines.

Finally, a February 2026 poll from FLA found MAHA was the most effective issue to flip someone’s vote—a key bloc chose the generic Democrat by 5:1, but once given a Republican focused on removing toxins from food and reducing overmedicating children, chose the Republican nearly 2:1. Candidates championing reducing the vaccine schedule also became much more favorable to voters:

Additionally, that poll showed the majority of voters have significant concerns over the current vaccine program.

The key thread all these polls share is that their results are completely unprecedented. That is essentially why after I saw how massive the results of the first few were, I was certain this would be an issue that would transform our society and that regardless of what the talking heads said, no degree of propaganda would be able to cover it up.

Rebuilding Trust

During RFK’s Senate hearings (along with those of his appointees), one of the few points Senators from both parties agreed upon was that there has been a massive loss of trust by the public in science and medicine and that this is catastrophic for the entire society (which is a valid point). However, their solutions differed:

On the Democrat end, their primary concern was to ensure the nominee attested to fully believing in vaccines, and at times explicitly stated the solution to this loss of trust was to have RFK emphatically endorse vaccines so that his followers would as well.

In contrast, RFK and many of his Republican supporters stated the only way trust could be regained in the Federal Health Authorities was with radical transparency so the public could trust the claims made on the basis of what the data actually showed rather than blindly believing in an expert (e.g., despite going to great lengths to obtain it, we were forbidden from getting the government’s vaccine safety data and instead just told to trust their analyses the COVID vaccines were “safe).

I never forgot this exchange, as I was quite surprised RFK’s opposition could be so out of touch with the current political climate that they would believe RFK suddenly pushing vaccines would make the public regain trust in vaccines and science. Nonetheless, they’ve continued to repeat their old tactics (e.g., censorship, lobbying, media spearheaded public relations campaigns) and hope that the COVID-19 vaccine problem will just “go away.”

Instead, the loss of trust continues to accelerate. For example, this week:

•Politico released an article titled: “More Americans doubt vaccine safety than trust it, POLITICO Poll finds—Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s views are commonplace across the land.”

As Jeffrey Tucker noted, the poll used biased pro-vaccine language — meaning these remarkable results actually undersell American opposition to vaccines."

•A Elon Musk Tweet Elon Musk shared on this topic garnered 60 million views:

•Children’s Health Defense unearthed an April panel which showed the vaccine industry is recognizing the new reality too.

During the hour-long conversation, Clinton and the panelists criticized the growing number of parents and teens who are starting to question the safety of vaccines. They blamed the trend on increased access to what they characterized as online “misinformation” — and on organizations like Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

“What’s different today … is that people have access to a lot more information,” said Dr. Margot Savoy, chief medical officer of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “The part that makes me nervous is that, more and more, we’re getting into this odd space where people are feeling a little more polarized.”

Conclusion

For most of my life, vaccines have been a “90-10” issue, in that most people I met unquestionably supported them and it was only if they directly knew someone seriously injured by one that they doubted their safety. This makes sense, as the arguments against them are so strong, there really isn’t a way to defend how they are currently used, and as such, the only option is to prohibit the debate entirely and have everyone who hears questioning of them assume there can’t be any rational basis to criticisms of vaccines since pretty much everyone believes in them.

Now however, due to the excessive greed we witnessed during COVID-19 and the incredible luck that the right people appeared in the right place at the right time (Senator Johnson is just one of many), that paradigm has been shattered, and people who doubt vaccines are the majority.

This is ultimately very important for three reasons:

•First, the media and lobbyists have widely circulated a biased poll claiming eight times as many voters strongly support vaccines as question them (effectively making it a "90-10" issue) and that voters are overwhelmingly opposed to changing the vaccine schedule. This in turn was used to convince the Trump administration to make Trump and RFK back off from discussing vaccines until after the midterms—even though the coalition which elected him in 2024 supported safety reforms on vaccines and every other poll which has been conducted shows there is widespread support for vaccine safety reforms.

•Second, because the public is now open to the idea vaccines aren’t completely safe, there is a huge window for conversations to be had on this topic (e.g., it’s mind blowing to me that whenever I bring the vaccine topic up now, regardless of where I am in the country, rather than facing a hostile audience I have to very carefully convince, people will immediately voice their support of my position or that they know they were lied to about the COVID vaccines). As such, the window now exists through simple (compassionate) conversations to shift the public consciousness on the vaccine issue, and hopefully do so to the point regardless of which bad actor assumes power, it simply will not be possible to mandate these products.

•Third, every movement that creates social change goes through distinct phases. Initially, when the movement represents only a tiny minority, forward momentum often only occurs from relentless (and often very antagonistic) individuals who shock people and break the gates open for a wider conversation. However, once you become a mainstream viewpoint, creating a wider permanent shift requires presenting a levelheaded, credible, unified front. We have now reached that point, and our strategy needs to adapt accordingly.

I honestly never thought that this point would come, and from having witnessed decades of vaccine injuries be swept under the rug regardless of what we did, this new reality is still a bit surreal for me. For the first time in history, not only we have clear and unambiguous proof our government lied to us to protect the vaccine program, but also a public which is highly receptive to knowing that.

So many people before us have fought for more than 200 years to bring us to the point we are now, and we owe it to them to finish what they started and prevent this cycle from continuing. As I discussed at the start of this article, I've spent a long time considering whether the harms we face stem from coordinated sociopathy or naturally emergent dynamics — and the answer matters enormously right now, because it determines what "finishing" actually looks like. If this is purely a sociopathy problem, the solution is to punish the specific bad actors and move on — but history shows that just creates a niche for the next ones to do the same thing, which is exactly why this cycle has repeated for over two centuries with completely different people each time. If instead this is a structural problem that sociopaths exploit and amplify but do not create, then the real solution is what we are now finally in a position to build: a public conscious enough and a system transparent enough that the dynamic itself cannot repeat, regardless of who holds power.

That, in short, is why I keep giving my full effort to this newsletter despite all the energy and time it takes, as for my whole life I wished something could be done to fix this dysfunctional paradigm, so now that the window is there, I know in my heart I need to do all that I can (and hopefully be able to sustain it until 2028 and the end of RFK’s tenure). I know many of you are too, and I sincerely thank you both for supporting me in my role (which makes what I do possible), and for what each of you is doing in your own community to move things forward.

Lastly as a quick update on the DMSO neurology article; it is essentially done, but I decided not to release it until next weekend so I could ensure it’s quality was where I wanted it to be when it was released (due to how impactful the information in it is). DMSO has incredible utility in neurology, and I want to do all I can to help it see the light of day so all those who can benefit from it do.

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