Dr. Gary L. Glum – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary

Lies are Unbekoming | October 17, 2026

On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, wrote to a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The sentence sat in a letter from one of the world’s largest private cancer research centers, concerning an herbal tea an elderly English woman had learned from an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp in the 1890s. The tests were terminated the following year after Sloan-Kettering admitted, in sworn affidavit three years later, that they had prepared the injectable solution improperly from the dried material supplied — freezing and thawing the herb rather than boiling it as Rene had instructed. By the time Calling of an Angel was published in 1988, Rene Caisse had been dead for a decade, having treated thousands of cancer patients across fifty-six years in her Bracebridge, Ontario kitchen, never charging a fee, and refusing every offer — from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations dangling contracts up to $1 million — to release her formula before the medical establishment admitted her remedy had merit.

Dr. Gary Glum was a Los Angeles chiropractor running a thriving practice treating professional athletes, world-class weight lifters, and NFL team members when a friend introduced him to one of Rene’s cured patients in 1985. His prior work included a pain-relief technique contracted by Baptist Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee for its orthopedic pain control unit. He wrote the book after a year of persuading Rene’s friend to release the formula, after reading Rene’s own papers that Mary McPherson had kept in boxes under her bed in Bracebridge, after flying to Cambridge Massachusetts to meet Dr. Charles Brusch — the physician who had treated John F. Kennedy for Addison’s disease and who had worked with Essiac in his own clinic since 1959 — and after his own chronic bronchitis cleared within days of drinking the tea. He wrote as an outsider to oncology, which the summary treats as the position he actually held rather than disguising it.

The book appeared in 1988, in the sixth year after the Canadian government had shut down Resperin Corporation’s trials of Essiac, calling the quality control flawed while admitting the preparation itself was safe. Seven years earlier, the Washington Post had reported that over the previous decade more than 150 experimental cancer drugs had been given to tens of thousands of patients under National Cancer Institute sponsorship, many derived from pesticides, herbicides, and industrial dyes, producing hundreds of deaths and a list of adverse reactions including kidney failure, liver failure, bone marrow destruction, paralysis, coma, and in some cases tumor stimulation. An FDA official told the Post : “Almost all investigational cancer drugs are highly toxic.” Fluorouracil, 5-FU, carried a manufacturer’s warning that therapeutic benefit was unlikely without evidence of toxicity. Against this backdrop sat a non-toxic herbal preparation with six decades of documented clinical results, which no major institution would investigate without first obtaining the formula, and which no major institution would acknowledge after obtaining it. Nixon’s 1971 “War on Cancer” had absorbed billions of dollars by the time Rene died in 1978. The war’s chosen weapons were the ones the Post had described.

Calling of an Angel sits in the terrain canon as a documented record of what happens when a non-toxic remedy that strengthens the body’s own repair processes confronts an industry structured around patentable toxic interventions — the pattern Rene saw plainly, writing in the 1950s that cancer was systemic rather than localized, that surgery and radium attacked symptoms rather than causes, and warning in the same era about pesticides, food additives, and atmospheric nuclear testing years before Rachel Carson and President Kennedy made those warnings mainstream. The full summary unpacks the 1939 Royal Cancer Commission hearings, where 387 of Rene’s patients traveled to testify under oath and only 49 were permitted to speak while 338 were sent home; Dr. Charles Brusch’s own cancer in 1973 and his continued use of Essiac for the thirty years that followed; the eleven-year survival of esophageal cancer patient Patrick McGrail and the step-by-step documented reversal of Ross Nimchick’s stage 3-4 lymphoma with 95% node reduction; and the Catch-22 that held across six decades — Rene would release the formula once the institutions admitted merit, the institutions would admit merit once Rene released the formula, neither side moved, and the herbs grew wild across Ontario the whole time, available from any major herbal distributor in America for under $50.

30 Q&As

Question 1: What did Rene Caisse learn in 1922 from the elderly woman recovering from surgery in Haileybury, Ontario, and how did that encounter alter the trajectory of her life?

Answer: The woman was nearly 80 and bore a badly scarred right breast. She had come from England thirty years earlier to join her husband prospecting in northern Ontario, where she developed a swollen, painful mass that Toronto doctors diagnosed as advanced breast cancer requiring immediate removal. She refused surgery — a friend had recently died from the same operation and she could not afford it anyway. An Ojibwa medicine man at the mining camp told her he could cure her with an herbal tea and showed her how to prepare it. She drank the tea daily, her tumors diminished and disappeared, and she lived more than two decades cancer-free. Rene, then a 33-year-old surgical nurse held in high regard by the physicians she assisted, wrote down the names of the herbs the woman recited.

A year later, Rene was walking in the garden of an elderly retired doctor she knew. He lifted a weed with his cane and said, “Nurse Caisse, if people would use this weed there would be little or no cancer in the world.” He named the plant — the same name the old woman had given as an ingredient of the medicine man’s tea. The convergence settled the matter in Rene’s mind. She would spend the next 56 years brewing the formula in her kitchen, treating thousands of patients without charge, fighting the Canadian government and medical establishment through near-arrests, parliamentary battles, and a national Royal Commission, and never once veering from the conviction formed that day in a hospital room and sealed in that garden.

Question 2: How did Rene first apply the herbal formula to a family member, and what role did her mother’s recovery from inoperable liver cancer play in her commitment to the work?

Answer: About the time Rene opened her clinic in Bracebridge in 1935, her 72-year-old mother was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the liver. Four local doctors said she was too weak for surgery. Rene called in one of Ontario’s top specialists, Dr. Roscoe Graham, who confirmed the diagnosis and reported that the liver was “a nodular mass.” Asked how long her mother had to live, Dr. Graham said a matter of days. One local doctor who disapproved of Rene’s work asked her sarcastically why she did not do something. Rene replied she was certainly going to try. She did not tell her mother the diagnosis. She administered daily injections of Essiac, calling it a tonic prescribed by her doctor.

Her mother completely recovered. She lived to 90 and died quietly after her birthday, in Rene’s words, “without pain, just a tired heart.” Rene said this one case repaid her for all her work — giving her mother eighteen years of life she would not otherwise have had — and made up for a great deal of the persecution she had endured. The case carried additional weight because the attending specialist was no obscure country doctor but one of the province’s leading physicians, and because the diagnosis had been confirmed by four other doctors before Essiac began. It was the kind of case Rene could never fully use in her public campaign, because it was her mother, but it was the case she returned to in her own mind whenever the attacks on her work grew unbearable.

Question 3: What happened when the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare sent two doctors to arrest Rene in 1926, and how did Dr. W.C. Arnold’s reversal shape the pattern that would recur for decades?

Answer: The department dispatched two doctors to Rene’s door carrying official papers authorizing them to arrest her or restrain her from practicing medicine without a license. Rene was badly shaken but explained that she was treating only patients abandoned by their physicians as terminally ill, that she charged nothing, and that she accepted only voluntary contributions. She showed them her reports, her letters from physicians, her records. They listened, decided to back off, and told her they were not going to have her arrested or order her to stop. One of those two doctors was Dr. W.C. Arnold. He left so impressed by what he had seen that he arranged for Rene to conduct experiments on mice at the Christie Street Hospital in Toronto under the supervision of two of the hospital’s physicians. The mice were inoculated with Rous Sarcoma, and Rene kept them alive 52 days — longer than anyone else had been able to.

Arnold went on to become chief physician of the Canadian Pension Board. He corresponded with Rene for the next fifteen years, writing long letters of encouragement, advising her through political battles, helping her round up support, and always pressing her to release the formula to him. The pattern established in that first encounter would recur through every decade of Rene’s working life. Officials arrived to shut her down and left persuaded. A health officer sent to Peterborough with a warrant for malpractice sat down, listened, and returned to his superior to explain the situation instead of arresting her. In 1958, nearly thirty years later, an officer again came to arrest her, heard her out, and told her to stop treating patients rather than take her in. The threats never stopped and the arrests never came, because the people sent to execute them kept finding something they could not reconcile with the task they had been given.

Question 4: What did the 1926 petition signed by eight physicians say, and why did Rene later describe the petition as “the opening gun in the war over Essiac”?

Answer: The petition was signed by R.O. Fisher, R.A. Blye, C.E. Becker, E.F. Hoidge, J.A. McInnis, Chas. H. Hair, A. Moore, and W.F. Williams, with J.N. Robert also attached. These were licensed physicians staking their professional reputations on an endorsement of a nurse without a medical degree who was treating cancer with an herbal tea in her apartment. Rene was, in her own words, “joyful beyond words at this expression of confidence by such outstanding doctors regarding the benefits derived from my treatment.” She was naive enough to believe that her work would now be recognized and advanced through official channels. She assumed that the signatures of eight physicians would open doors rather than close them.

Her joy was short-lived. The petition backfired entirely. The Department of Health and Welfare interpreted the document not as evidence of a promising remedy but as evidence of a nurse practicing medicine, and immediately dispatched the two doctors with authority to arrest her. For the next fifteen years she lived under siege. The pattern the petition inaugurated — supporting physicians speaking up at professional cost, the medical establishment moving to shut her down, Rene narrowly surviving each threat — would repeat continuously. By 1936, a second petition carried nine physician signatures, seven of them new, bringing the total to sixteen licensed physicians who had publicly backed her work. By 1937, forty doctors joined a 17,000-signature petition to the Ontario government. The war the first petition opened would run until her death in 1978 and beyond.

Question 5: How did Rene’s clinical practice work in operational terms — the requirement for a written diagnosis, the no-charge policy, the kitchen brewing, the patient volume at peak?

Answer: Rene accepted only patients who brought a written cancer diagnosis from a licensed physician. The requirement was both legal protection and medical gatekeeping — she would not treat someone who had not been examined and diagnosed by qualified doctors first. In practice this meant most of her patients had already been through surgery, radium, X-ray, or chemotherapy and been declared terminal or inoperable. She charged nothing. She accepted voluntary contributions — fruit, vegetables, eggs from those who had them, nothing from those who did not. One grateful husband who slipped a $50 bill under a book on her shelf was yanked into the house by his collar on his next visit and given a piece of her mind until he reframed it as a donation for the next patient who could not pay. “I never had $100 I could call my own,” she used to laugh with friends.

The brewing was done alone in her kitchen, late into the night. She stayed up half the night cooking Essiac after days spent treating as many as thirty patients at her Toronto apartment, later hundreds a week at the Bracebridge clinic. The scene at peak was described by Homemaker’s magazine as reminiscent of the Shrine of Lourdes — cars parked solidly along the shoulders of Dominion Street, people from all walks of life waiting patiently to enter the red brick British Lion Hotel building, some carried, others helped up the steps, ambulances arriving to double-park while Rene came down to treat stretcher cases. A doctor stood by as she injected scores of patients every day. The administrative apparatus was Rene herself. There were no staff, no fees, no advertising. The system ran on her refusal to stop and the word-of-mouth of patients who credited her with their lives.

Question 6: What did the documented cases of Mrs. DeCarle, Mr. F. Maxwell, and John Tynan establish about what Essiac was producing in patients who had been written off by their physicians?

Answer: Mrs. DeCarle was a 55-year-old woman examined by Dr. J.A. McInnis in late 1928 with a hard, nodular tumor in her upper abdomen and another distinctly palpable mass in the region of the uterus. Two specialists in Brockville had confirmed malignancy and given her several months to live. The case was inoperable. McInnis documented in a two-page single-spaced letter dated March 22, 1929 what happened under Essiac. After ten days of treatment, improvement was observed in both the patient’s general condition and the two tumors. The abdomen became less rigid, appetite returned, pain after eating lessened considerably. By March the tumor in the upper abdomen had reduced by more than two-thirds, the nodular condition had entirely disappeared, the pelvic tumor was scarcely palpable, and Mrs. DeCarle had gained twenty pounds. McInnis concluded the results were “decidedly remarkable” and “conclusive.”

Mr. F. Maxwell had been diagnosed in February 1932 with malignant disease of the pancreas by Dr. J. Masson Smith of Beaverton, who addressed Rene with a curt “Dear Madam” letter. Five weeks later Smith wrote again. He could not have been friendlier. Maxwell had gained seven and a half pounds, his hemoglobin was ninety percent, and he moved with vigor and alertness. Five years later Maxwell himself wrote asking Rene to treat his brother. John Tynan had been diagnosed by four doctors with rectal cancer and given about three weeks to live. The surgeons had opened him up, found they could do nothing, and sent him home to die. Within 24 hours of his first Essiac treatment he felt relief; within four days, a wonderful change. After his first few treatments he could drive himself to the clinic. Four years later he had gained 39 pounds. These were not isolated anecdotes. They were documented in physician letters, pathological reports, and sworn testimony — and the pattern they established repeated across hundreds of cases over the next five decades.

Question 7: What specific offer did Sir Frederick Banting extend to Rene in 1936, why did she refuse it, and what did she tell him about leaving her patients to inject mice?

Answer: Banting was publicly credited as the co-discoverer of insulin and ran his own research facility, the Banting Institute at the University of Toronto. His offer, extended in July 1936 after a meeting arranged by Ontario Minister of Health Dr. Faulkner, was that Rene could work under his supervision in his laboratory, performing tests on animals. “You will not be asked to divulge any secret concerning your treatment,” Banting wrote. All experimental results would be submitted to him for approval before being announced to anyone, including the newspapers or published in medical journals. The catch was that Rene would have to prove the merit of Essiac on lab animals before treating any more human patients. She would give up her clinic for months, possibly years, while she injected mice.

Rene refused. She wrote to Faulkner on August 4, 1936 explaining that her relatives and friends did not approve of her going back to animal research when she had already proven the merit of her treatment on human beings — and that they therefore absolutely refused to help her financially. Since she could not charge her patients, she had no means to carry out what she had not the means to do. She later told reporters: “I felt it was inhuman for them to ask me to give up treating patients while I showed them whether it would work on mice. I’d already done work on mice. There was a big uproar about it because the patients were terrified I would leave them, but many doctors said I should jump at the chance to work with Dr. Banting. I said I’d be willing to, but I’m not going to let people die while I do it. It was an agonizing decision, but I refused his offer.” According to Rene, Banting had told her that what he had seen of Essiac showed more promise than any other cancer treatment he had encountered, and he had been particularly impressed by one case in which a diabetic cancer patient was taken off insulin during Essiac treatment and the diabetes did not worsen — leading him to speculate that Essiac must have stimulated the pancreatic gland into functioning properly.

Question 8: How did the Bracebridge town council come to turn over the British Lion Hotel to Rene in 1935, and what did the scene at her clinic look like at its peak?

Answer: The town of Bracebridge turned the old British Lion Hotel over to Rene for use as a cancer clinic, subsidizing the arrangement partly through municipal funds. Dr. A.F. Bastedo was the physician who persuaded the Bracebridge City Council to make the decision. The red brick building sat on Dominion Street, with the town jail directly across the street — the keeper of which used to joke with Rene that he was saving her a cell. The clinic opened as the political battle over Essiac was starting to heat up, and it transformed the small lumber-and-fur-trapping town into the destination of cancer patients from across North America.

Homemaker’s magazine described the scene in the 1930s as reminiscent of the Shrine of Lourdes. Dominion Street took on an atmosphere of pilgrimage. Cars were parked solidly along the shoulders. People from all walks of life waited patiently to enter the red brick building. Some were carried. Others were pushed gently up the steps while the rest managed on their own. Ambulances shrieked their arrival as they double-parked, and Rene would be seen coming quickly down to treat a stretcher case. Always with a doctor standing by, she injected scores of patients every day. One Bracebridge boarding house ran by the mother of a man Mayor Jim Lang later knew hosted dozens upon dozens of patients at a time, staying two, three, or four months while they took treatments. People came from Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie, the United States, Europe. The village of about 9,300 people became the center of a national controversy that would reach the floor of the Ontario legislature and make headlines all over the continent.

Question 9: What did Dr. Emma Carson of Los Angeles find during her month-long investigation in Bracebridge in 1937, and what did she tell the Ontario government about non-recognition?

Answer: Carson traveled from southern California in the summer of 1937 intending to stay a couple of days to satisfy herself that there was nothing to the story. Her friends who had told her about Rene were reliable people, but she arrived skeptical. She ended up staying almost a month and becoming a close friend of Rene’s. In her first interview with the Huntsville Forester a week after her arrival, she could barely contain her enthusiasm. She was “simply amazed” at what she had found in her brief investigation, and the farther she investigated, the stronger became her conviction that Rene had made a cancer treatment discovery of worldwide importance. She called upon the government to recognize Rene’s work.

Carson’s conclusion to the Ontario Medical Council, delivered through a five-page report later released to the press, was blunt: if in view of what she had seen with her own eyes the council remained indifferent, it would be “a crime against civilization.” She found that the vast majority of Rene’s patients had been brought to her after surgery, radium, X-rays, and emplastrums had failed to help, with the patients pronounced incurable or hopeless. The progress obtainable and the actual results from Essiac treatments, she wrote, and the rapidity of repair, were “absolutely marvelous, and must be seen to be believed.” As she reviewed case histories and interviewed patients, she realized her skepticism had deserted her. She said she would go directly to Premier Hepburn’s office and give him her report. She never changed her mind. She corresponded with Rene for years after returning to Los Angeles, and her report, quoted at length in several newspapers, became one of the central pieces of documentation in the public campaign that followed.

Question 10: How did public support for Rene build between 1935 and 1938 through petitions, and what did the final 55,000-signature petition precede?

Answer: The grassroots pressure built in stages, each petition larger than the last. In late 1935, local residents of the Bracebridge area rounded up thousands of signatures on petitions demanding government backing for Rene’s work, presented to Dr. Faulkner alongside a second physician petition with nine signatures that brought the licensed-doctor endorsement total to sixteen. In 1936, the mayor of Bracebridge, Wilburt Richards, visited Faulkner’s office with a group of prominent citizens and a petition of 2,700 signatures. In March 1937, a deputation went to the government offices in Toronto consisting of local officials, 40 doctors, and 18 of Rene’s patients, carrying a petition that now bore 17,000 signatures. The composition itself was telling — this was no fringe gathering but a cross-section of ministers, mayors, physicians, and recovered patients.

By early 1938, the number had reached 55,000. The petition was presented to the Private Bills Committee of the Ontario legislature as it considered a bill that would authorize Rene to treat cancer patients with Essiac. Fifty of Rene’s former patients watched from the visitor’s gallery. The debate was fierce. One of Rene’s patients stood up and yelled out that three doctors had refused to give her mother a written cancer diagnosis for Rene though they had given it verbally. The gallery erupted in cheers. The Speaker threatened to clear the room. When the vote came there was confusion, a flood of motions, and the chairman recognized a motion that the bill not be reported. A show of hands indicated a narrow margin in favor of rejecting it. Rene’s bill was defeated by three votes. Within days the Kirby Bill passed, creating the Cancer Commission and effectively criminalizing her practice. The 55,000 signatures had come within three legislators of making her the first private citizen in Canadian history to be licensed by statute to practice medicine without the proper credentials.

Question 11: What happened in the Ontario Private Bills Committee in March 1938, and how was Rene’s bill defeated?

Answer: The committee considered a bill that would authorize Rene to treat cancer patients with Essiac. The 55,000-signature petition was presented. Fifty of Rene’s former patients watched from the visitor’s gallery. J. Frank Kelly, the MP from the Bracebridge area and an ardent backer, argued that Rene had been “hounded around the country for years like a criminal” and that even if she had no cure, she could prolong life — just as Sir Frederick Banting could prolong life with insulin without curing diabetes. L.M. Frost asked whether Rene was not already carrying on. Kelly answered that she was, but without fee and without recognition. Rene’s lawyer John Garrick claimed that doctors were refusing to give diagnoses to patients wanting Rene’s treatment and that a cabal had been organized against her. Some MPs shouted “Untrue” and “Shame.” At that, one of Rene’s patients stood up and declared that three doctors had refused to give her mother a written diagnosis though they had given it verbally. The gallery erupted. Speaker David Croll threatened to clear the room.

Dr. M.T. Armstrong, MP from Parry Sound, said he had talked to practically every medical doctor in the legislature and there was not one against her. W.A. Summerville said he had heard from all sorts of people claiming to have been helped. T.F. Stevenson, whose wife had been treated, made an impassioned plea: “Why hold this woman up? You won’t do any harm by passing this bill and it’s inhuman to stop it.” Rene herself spoke, declaring she would submit her formula to any investigating commission on one condition — that the medical profession admit Essiac had merit based on the results she had already obtained. When the time for the vote came, newspaper accounts described confusion, many voices speaking at once, and a flood of motions. The chairman recognized a motion that “the bill be not reported,” and a show of hands indicated a narrow margin in favor of rejecting it. The newspapers reported that Rene’s bill had been defeated by three votes.

Question 12: What was the Kirby Bill, and how did Minister of Health Harold Kirby’s public assurances contradict the law’s actual operation?

Answer: The Kirby Bill passed into law within days of the Private Bills Committee’s defeat of Rene’s bill. It created a Royal Cancer Commission with authority to investigate unorthodox cancer treatments and, after finishing its investigation, to compel Rene to turn over her formula. It effectively criminalized the practice of medicine by anyone treating cancer without proper credentials. Rene immediately announced that because of the Kirby Bill she was closing her clinic. The press and the public flocked to Kirby’s door. Kirby publicly stated that nothing in the Act prevented Rene from carrying on as she had been doing in the past, and that she was in the same position after the bill as before it. He told reporters this directly and put it in writing to Rene’s lawyer.

Rene called it nonsense. Dr. Noble of the College of Physicians and Surgeons had informed her that they were going to demand her formula if she kept the clinic open. She knew the law was the law, and if the government wanted her to open her clinic, they should change the law. The clinic remained closed. The pattern that followed went on for the better part of two years. Rene would close, saying the Kirby Bill made her a criminal. Kirby would publicly deny the law was being enforced and urge her to reopen. Patients would weep, faint, and plead. Mayors would send angry telegrams to Premier Hepburn. Rene would reopen. Someone would then frighten her that Kirby was coming after her, and she would close again. The Bracebridge Gazette editorialized that if a cancer sufferer died while the clinic was closed there would be a veritable roar of bitter condemnation and the target would not be Rene. The Kirby Bill was still the law. The government had publicly promised not to enforce it. Both conditions remained in place simultaneously, which was precisely how the government had designed the arrangement.

Question 13: What was the structure of the 1938-39 Royal Cancer Commission hearings, how many patients came to testify, and how many were permitted to speak?

Answer: Six physicians with expertise in diagnostics, surgery, and radiology were named as members in late August 1938. The chairman was J.G. Gillanders, an Ontario Supreme Court Justice. They were charged with investigating several unorthodox cancer treatments in use in Canada, but the focus was clearly on Rene and Essiac. Preliminary sworn and secret testimony was taken from several patients in Bracebridge in February 1939 by two Commission members with Dr. B.L. Guyatt serving as mediator. The main event was scheduled for early March 1939: public hearings before the full Commission at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. Rene’s supporters mobilized. So many came that Rene had to rent one of the hotel’s ballrooms as a gathering place.

Among those present were 387 former patients from across Canada, prepared to wait their turn to be sworn to oath and tell their stories. The Commission was not interested in hearing from 387 witnesses. Commissioner Valin complained, “She’s got an army of people here.” Ultimately, pleading the pressures of time, the Commission allowed only 49 to testify. The remaining 338 waited in the ballroom and were sent home. The hundreds of pages of transcript from those 49 sworn witnesses are filled with heart-rending testimony — complete recoveries after near-death, partial recoveries when all else had failed, the consistent theme of pain relief within days. George Mahon testified, “She helped me. If it was not for her, I would be buried.” Elizabeth Stewart told how her doctor had sent her home two years earlier to make out her will; now she was milking five cows morning and night, running a boarding house, and doing it all herself. The structure guaranteed that the record would be incomplete — 338 witnesses whose cases were never heard, their testimony never entered, their existence noted only in the ballroom count.

Question 14: What did May Henderson, Eliza Veitch, Augusta Douglas, and other sworn witnesses testify to under oath before the Commission?

Answer: May Henderson’s testimony was perhaps the most dramatic. After thirty years of chronic ill health, her doctors told her that her whole body was riddled with cancer and that they would have to remove both breasts and most of her insides. She was not up to the torture of that and basically gave up on living. “My eyes just looked like stones, and I simply hadn’t any life in me. I couldn’t walk.” Someone told her about Rene. She dragged herself to a doctor for the required signed diagnosis — he told her it was useless, she would not last long anyway, but he gave her the paper. Right away she noticed a wonderful change. She slept better, ate better, and after about 65 treatments was able to take temporary work. Asked if she regarded herself as cured, she answered: “Well, pretty nearly.” She was still alive and corresponding with Rene nearly forty years later.

Eliza Veitch had been operated on in 1935 for cancer of the bladder. The cancer returned and she gradually went downhill, unable to stand on her feet without terrible pain. She refused further treatment, deciding to die rather than be tortured again. In May 1938 she went to Rene after seeing neighbors cured. For eight treatments she noticed no change, then had a bad reaction that proved to be the turning point. “I owe my life to Miss Caisse. I would have been dead and in my grave months ago.” Augusta Douglas had been diagnosed with cervical cancer in August 1938 and told she needed radium. She refused — “With my boots on.” She was carried to Bracebridge on a mattress in the back of a car, unable to tolerate any jolt. After six weeks flat on her back in bed receiving treatments, then eight weeks of weekly 220-mile round trips, her doctor told her the results were marvelous and worth a million. Clara Thornbury weighed 72 pounds when her husband carried her into the clinic; she later weighed 107 and did her own housework. Annie Bonar was scheduled for arm amputation at 90 pounds; four months later she was back to 150 and her arm was fine. Each story carried the same architecture — written off by physicians, near death, recovery under Essiac, years of continued life.

Question 15: What did the Commission’s December 1939 Interim Report conclude, and what did the contradiction in its final paragraph — dismissing Essiac while still asking for the formula — reveal?

Answer: The report dismissed several diagnoses of cancer as incorrect or produced letters from doctors disavowing their own prior diagnoses. Other cases were ruled cured by previous radium or X-ray treatments — Dr. Richards maintained that even when long periods had elapsed between radium and Rene’s treatments, and even when recurrences had appeared in between, the radium was still working and was responsible for the cure. If the patient died, however, radium had nothing to do with it. “In the 49 cases presented there were only 4 in which the diagnosis was accepted and in which recovery occurred apparently from Miss Caisse’s treatment,” the report stated. But even in those four cases, the Commission later received signed statements calling into question the validity of the cure — in one, a signed statement from the surgeon declaring the growth he had removed was not cancer. The report was tortuously written and designed to deny any credit to Rene. It implied that only 49 people had stepped forward “out of this large practice,” completely ignoring the 338 others sent home from the ballroom.

The contradiction came in the final paragraph. Having dismissed Essiac for once and for all, the Commission wrote: “If, however, Miss Caisse is desirous of having her treatment further investigated, and wishes to submit thereon further evidence, and is prepared to furnish the Commission with the formula of ‘Essiac,’ together with samples thereof, the Commission will be glad to make such investigation.” The commissioners had said repeatedly that they only wanted to investigate remedies that might hold promise. They had better things to do with the Commission’s budget than pursue worthless remedies. Yet in the paragraph after they tried to write off Essiac for all time, there it was again: give us the formula. The contradiction revealed the operation of the whole exercise. The Report’s purpose was never to determine whether Essiac worked. It was to produce an official document discrediting the remedy while continuing to extract the formula from the only person who held it.

Question 16: What was the Catch-22 at the heart of the formula standoff, and what was Rene’s reasoning for refusing offers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations?

Answer: The structure of the standoff never changed across six decades. Rene would release the formula only after the medical and governmental institutions admitted that Essiac had merit as a cancer treatment. The institutions would admit merit only after Rene released the formula so they could study it. Dr. Charles Brusch summarized Sloan-Kettering’s position: “They said to her, ‘You’d better send us more material and the formula.’” Rene’s response was always the same. Admit the merit based on what she had already demonstrated — the physician letters, the case files, the thousands of recovered patients — and the formula would follow. The institutions refused. The remedy sat suspended in the gap.

Rene had two concrete fears. The first was that the medical establishment would exploit Essiac — charge exorbitant prices to make a fortune, place it beyond the means of the poor. The second was that it would be discredited and buried. She saw both possibilities as roughly equally likely and both as outcomes she could not accept. She rejected Ernest H. Ashley’s 1932 contract offer of $20,000 the first year, a $2,000 salary, and $100,000 in operating capital. She rejected the 1937 Buffalo businessmen’s offer of $100,000 the first year, $50,000 annually, 50% of all sums received, and a sweetener of a $1 million “donation.” She rejected Merck’s demand that she turn over the formula so they could make up their minds in their own way in their own time. She rejected Sir Frederick Banting’s offer to work in his lab. She rejected Memorial Sloan-Kettering repeatedly. In hindsight, Glum argues, Rene should have given the formula to anyone, anywhere, at any time, who wanted it for any reason, on the grounds that the more people who had it, the better the chance that truth would out. But the fear that drove her refusal was not paranoia. She had watched the Canadian government and the medical association try to crush her work for forty years. Her fears were calibrated to what she had seen with her own eyes.

Question 17: What did Rene write in April 1940 to Parke Davis about her hemorrhage-stopping preparation, and what does that letter show about her instincts?

Answer: Rene wrote to the general manager of Parke Davis — a huge American pharmaceutical corporation — on April 3, 1940, a few months after Hitler invaded Poland and World War II broke out. She explained that she had a solution she used effectively to stop hemorrhaging and had been using it as long as she had been treating cancer. Someone had pointed out how valuable this would be in wartime for treating soldiers. It would stop any bleeding almost instantly. She had affidavits from many patients to this effect, and Dr. B.L. Guyatt had specifically mentioned it in connection with her treatment. She wondered if the company would be interested, and whether they could suggest any way this could be made available for use in hospitals overseas, first aid stations, and soldiers’ kits. She closed: “I never thought of this as a separate discovery; it was just a part of my treatment of cancer cases, but now I feel that I should make every effort to make this available to all those who need it.”

The letter captures something essential about Rene that gets lost in the long record of her fights over Essiac. During her political battles of the 1930s she had never boasted of, or even claimed, any special hemorrhage-stopping solution. It was just part of her cancer treatment. She had not developed it to patent, to sell, or to leverage. The Second World War began, and her first instinct was that soldiers were going to be bleeding on battlefields and she had something that could help them. She wrote to a major American pharmaceutical corporation offering it. There is no record of what Parke Davis did with the letter. What the letter shows is a woman who, four months after the Cancer Commission had dismissed her life’s work in a tortuously written report, was still looking for ways to be useful. The formula standoff over Essiac was never, for her, about the formula. It was about where the formula would end up. For a preparation she had never fought over, she simply offered it.

Question 18: What did Ralph Daigh and Paul Murphy find when they interviewed the three Bracebridge doctors — Bastedo, Ellis, and Grieg — in 1959, and what pattern emerged across the three conversations?

Answer: Dr. A.F. Bastedo was the physician who had persuaded the Bracebridge City Council in 1935 to turn over the British Lion Hotel to Rene for her clinic. When Daigh and Murphy appeared at his porch on a Sunday morning asking to discuss Rene, Bastedo was extremely uncooperative, even rude. “I will not discuss her in any manner.” When Daigh persisted, Bastedo said, “You will get no help from me or any other doctor, I don’t think.” He turned his back and walked across the street to his garage, apparently to drive off to church. Dr. E.G. Ellis, in his late 70s and still practicing, graciously invited them into his house but became disturbed when they explained their purpose. He answered their questions with extreme economy of words. Asked if he had ever signed a petition for Rene, he denied it. Daigh had the original in his briefcase. Asked if he had ever sent patients to Rene, he denied it. Daigh had the case histories showing he had. Daigh chose not to confront him with either document. Ellis intimated strongly that it was not a good thing for a doctor in Canada to discuss Rene in any way, and that it would be very bad for any doctor who admitted faith in her treatment or admitted sending her patients.

Daigh then asked Ellis three direct questions. Did he think Rene was a charlatan or a fraud? No. Did he think she was only after money? No. If not those, then she must be a psychotic — did he believe that? “No, she is not a psychotic. She is a sincere, well-balanced person.” Then Murphy asked whether Rene’s preparation should be evaluated scientifically and clinically. Ellis paused briefly, then: an emphatic “Yes.” Dr. E.M. Grieg, a bachelor in his late 70s and for many years one of the leading doctors in the community, showed extreme reluctance to discuss Rene at all. He denied knowledge of her activities, denied having ever sent her patients, denied signing a petition — all documented in Daigh’s briefcase. Then he surprisingly admitted that he knew of a case of stomach ulcers Rene had cured, a man he had been patient of. Asked the same three-part question, Grieg too answered: not a charlatan, not after money, not psychotic. She was “a well-intentioned woman, who thought she had a cure.” Should Essiac be investigated by a qualified laboratory? “I think it would be a good thing to test it once and for all.” The pattern across all three was identical: public denial, private admission, no coherent dismissal available, and an underlying truth none of them would speak aloud — that doctors in Canada had been forbidden to discuss Rene Caisse, and the prohibition was being enforced thirty years later.

Question 19: What happened at the Brusch Medical Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts beginning in May 1959, and what did Dr. Charles McClure and Dr. Charles Brusch conclude about Essiac after three months of clinical observation?

Answer: Rene flew to Boston on May 22, 1959 and was given a comfortable apartment in the Commander Hotel in Cambridge, not far from the Brusch Medical Center. Three rooms — waiting room, dispensary, treatment room — were made available for her use. Her treatments were supervised by Dr. Brusch’s director of research, Dr. Charles McClure, who personally maintained the case history files. Dr. Brusch himself was no fringe practitioner. In 1955 he had administered the first polio vaccine in Cambridge. He had treated John F. Kennedy for Addison’s disease; Kennedy laid the cornerstone to Brusch’s medical clinic. His patients included former House Speaker John McCormack. The Brusch Medical Center was one of the largest medical clinics in Massachusetts. Patients treated during Rene’s three months there included Lena Burcell, with metastatic breast cancer in the lung, whose ability to breathe improved markedly within her first treatment; John Cronin, with inoperable right lung cancer, who could climb several flights of stairs without discomfort after seven treatments; Wilbur Dymond, with prostate cancer, whose hardness vanished except for one small nodule; and Russell McCassey, with basal cell carcinoma of the right cheek, whose lesion was healed after seven weeks.

McClure wrote: “After having personally observed Miss Caisse administer her remedy for cancer on known cases of malignancy for about three months, and the results of such administration, I am certain the remedy is efficacious.” The sense of well-being engendered in patients was heartening and easily noticed. The return of strength and will to do, obvious. The relief from pain was possibly the most dramatic change. In cases of cutaneous cancer the evidence of quick healing and regeneration was visible and positive. The final joint report by McClure and Brusch concluded that on mice Essiac had caused a decided recession of the mass and a definite change in cell formation. On patients suffering from pathologically proven cancer, it reduced pain, caused recession in growths, patients gained weight, and showed improvement in general health. “This, after only three months’ tests and the proof Miss Caisse has to show of the many patients she has benefited in the past 25 years, has convinced the doctors at the Brusch Medical Center that Essiac has merit in the treatment of cancer.” The doctors did not say Essiac was a cure. They said it was of benefit, non-toxic, and administered both orally and by intramuscular injection. Dr. Brusch would remain an outspoken advocate for the rest of Rene’s life and beyond.

Question 20: What did Memorial Sloan-Kettering find in its 1959 and 1975 mouse experiments, and why did Rene terminate the agreement in 1976?

Answer: In mid-June 1959, during Rene’s time at the Brusch Medical Center, the first group of mice treated with Essiac was returned to Sloan-Kettering. According to Dr. Brusch’s records, Dr. Philip C. Merker of Sloan-Kettering called to report that Sloan-Kettering was very interested in what it was seeing — namely, a physiological change in the cancer growth characterized as “a tendency of the cancer cells to amalgamate and localize.” Then Sloan-Kettering said it would need the formula to continue any further studies. The familiar Catch-22 closed, and the collaboration ended. Fourteen years later, in 1973, when Rene was 85, she contacted Sloan-Kettering herself and asked whether they wanted to renew the testing. Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president and associate director for administrative and academic affairs, agreed to run tests on mice if she would send material. She sent one of the herbs — the one her earlier Christie Street experiments had identified as responsible for tumor regressions — along with detailed instructions for preparing an injectable solution.

On June 10, 1975, Stock wrote: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac. With these results we will wish to test enough more that I should ask if you can send more material.” The next sentence written by a top Sloan-Kettering official in 1975 — “two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac” — should alone have been enough to warrant serious investigation. Yet the tests then came to a halt the next year. Other results were coming out negative. When Rene received an explanation of how Sloan-Kettering was preparing the injectable solution, she was horrified. They had ignored her instructions. They were not boiling the herb. They were freezing it, then thawing it. She wrote on their explanation in angry scrawl: “All wrong. Rene M. Caisse.” She terminated the agreement. Three years later, in a sworn affidavit in the 1978 Detroit federal class action suit seeking to legalize Essiac importation, Stock admitted: “After our testing was done we were informed that we should have had two preparations for test and also that we made improperly the injection solution from the dried material supplied to us. We were never provided full information about the nature of Essiac.”

Question 21: How did the 1977 Homemaker’s magazine investigation come about, what did its reporters conclude, and what was the executive vice president’s turning-point admission?

Answer: In 1977 the editors of Homemaker’s, a nationally distributed Canadian magazine based in Toronto, heard an awesome story: an 88-year-old nurse from Bracebridge had been successfully treating terminally ill cancer patients for 50 years with her secret herbal formula. By its own account, the magazine assigned a team of very skeptical reporters to investigate. What they discovered over the next six months caused a profound transformation in their attitude. The Summer 1977 issue reported: “Essentially, Rene’s story was true. She had been getting remarkable results against many kinds of cancer with Essiac, and she had been prevented from carrying on treatment unless she revealed the formula.” Until the last moment the staff had real reservations about publishing a story that would give false hope to cancer patients. The knowledge that their decision would possibly cause traffic jams in Bracebridge as the public beat a pathway to an old lady’s door did not help. But the consequences of not publishing were too ghastly to contemplate.

The editor described asking colleagues individually when their skepticism had crumbled. They all had the same answer. Shearer, the magazine’s executive vice president, was the last person queried: “It was the day I realized that if I was told I had cancer, I would visit Rene. It wouldn’t be the only thing I’d do. Hell, I’d try anything — the works, conventional and otherwise — but I’d go see Rene first.” The reporters interviewed Dr. Chester Stock at Sloan-Kettering, Dr. Charles Brusch, former patients who had testified in 1939 — Tony Baziuk, May Henderson at 81 — all still alive and still crediting Essiac. The article caused an immediate sensation in Canadian media. Newspapers picked up the story. Television crews arrived in Bracebridge. Rene’s two phones rang around the clock. She received threats from people demanding the formula and had to accept police protection. The article concluded: “There’s a tragic and shameful irony in the Essiac tale. In the beginning, a simple herbal recipe was freely shared by an Indian who understood that the blessings of the Creator belong to all. In the hands of more sophisticated (and allegedly more ‘civilized’) healers, it was made the focus of an ugly struggle for ownership and power.”

Question 22: What was the Resperin Corporation arrangement in 1977, how much did Rene receive, and what happened when the Canadian government shut down Resperin’s tests in 1982?

Answer: The most significant breakthrough of Rene’s defenses — perhaps in her whole life — was made by Dr. David Fingard, a handsome and well-dressed man of about 70 who could really turn on the charm. Fingard was a vice president of the Resperin Corporation, a Canadian company with interests in the pharmaceutical field. Resperin had physicians on its board of directors, including Dr. Matthew Dymond, who had once been Ontario Minister of Health — the official Rene had complained to about government harassment in the late 1950s. After reading the Homemaker’s article, Fingard met with Rene and did his own research. He came out of it wildly enthusiastic and shared that enthusiasm with her. In the fall of 1977, Rene was persuaded to turn over the formula to Resperin. Her contract granted her $1.00 upon signing and $250 a week for the six months Resperin agreed to conduct tests. She was 89. She believed Resperin was big enough and powerful enough to prove Essiac’s legitimacy. She was tired of battling the medical establishment.

What was initially supposed to be a six-month study dragged on for years. Within months Rene complained publicly: “I think I was able to accomplish more myself.” She charged Resperin with carelessness. In 1982 the Canadian government shut down Resperin’s tests, calling them flawed and accusing Resperin of poor quality control. The director of the Canadian Health and Welfare Department’s bureau of prescription drugs admitted there was no concern about Essiac’s safety — it was safe, all right — but said they could not call it an effective treatment. Patients already using Essiac would be allowed to continue, purely on humanitarian grounds. Future patients who could fight their way through the bureaucracy might also be allowed legal access. Ed Zalesky of Surrey, British Columbia, a cancer patient who had been given six months to two years in 1977 and was still alive and working full-time in 1987, wrote to a newspaper: “That Essiac gives relief from suffering in many cases and prolongs life there is no doubt. Why can’t the people who administer the cancer funds give it a fair trial? It isn’t going to hurt anyone.” Fingard told the press Resperin could sell Essiac as an herbal tea if they made no curative claims. He refused. “We don’t want to sell it as a tea through stores. The only way we want to sell it is as a cure.”

Question 23: How did Dr. Charles Brusch’s own 1973 cancer and his continued use of Essiac shape his willingness to speak publicly, and what did he say about the medical establishment’s silence?

Answer: Brusch mentioned the cancer almost in passing during his meeting with Glum. In 1973 he had cancer. He had three operations. “I had the Essiac, and so I was able to take it and I’m still taking it now. And I had a test done a few months ago, and I’ve been negative.” He was convinced Essiac had played an important role in keeping him free of cancer. The admission transformed what Brusch was willing to say about the remedy. He had treated it for nearly thirty years as a physician observing other people’s recoveries. He now spoke of it as a patient whose life it had helped preserve. In his conversation with Glum he said without hesitation: “I know Essiac has curing potential. It can lessen the condition of the individual, control it, and it can cure it.” As far as Brusch was concerned, after being involved with Essiac since 1959, this was a well-established matter of fact. The cancer establishment ignoring it did not change that fact one bit.

Asked why, after all these years and all these cases, the governments, pharmaceutical corporations, and cancer research institutions had failed to give Essiac the serious research it so obviously deserved, Brusch hesitated for the first time in a ninety-minute talk. His cryptic remarks were an attempt to communicate without directly saying what he believed. “The trouble is… all these centers that have gotten a tremendous amount of grants and done tremendous amounts of work, you don’t seem to see much difference. These other companies, I can’t understand. Sloan-Kettering, they tell you there’s a recession in the growth of the carcinoma and keep wanting medicine, well, there’s some merit to it. You’ve got to wonder. Is it for mercenary acts? A lot of reports have been written about cancer and all and always a hope of getting close to it, but we don’t get anywhere. The medications you can buy now — well, the action of that medication, a lot of it, isn’t good. But they’re making a great penny on it. Why should they go ahead and — I don’t know. It surprises me. A lot of people are getting large sums.” Then he returned to Essiac itself and the enthusiasm returned. “I know: the stuff works. It’s very inexpensive. You can get a gallon of the stuff for about $40. Just try and get radiation and chemotherapy and see what it’ll cost you.”

Question 24: What did Patrick McGrail’s eleven-year survival after esophageal cancer surgery and Ross Nimchick’s documented lymphoma reversal demonstrate in Dr. Brusch’s files?

Answer: Patrick “Sonny” McGrail was operated on at New England Baptist Hospital in February 1975 for esophageal cancer. After the operation he was given radiation. His weight dropped to 109 pounds. He called Brusch: “Will you please see me? I’m going to die. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’m losing weight. I’ve got severe pain. I’ll be dead in two years.” Brusch loaded him up with Essiac, vitamins, and nutrition. McGrail improved steadily, went up to 125 pounds. Years later his surgeon wrote in his hospital report: “Mr. McGrail is doing well and essentially asymptomatic and looks better than he has over the past couple of years. We are delighted with his progress.” In February 1979 McGrail wrote to Brusch himself: “I was just using it one week when I started to improve and put on weight. I went from 109 to 130 pounds in six months, and the pain eased. If Dr. Brusch did not give it to me, I would not be alive today.” Twelve years after his cancer diagnosis — in May 1987 — McGrail wrote: “I am still being treated by Dr. Brusch for my cancer of 11 years and am doing good. When I was operated on, they said I would not live two years. The Essiac worked wonders.” Brusch summarized the case in a single line: “It was the Essiac that does the trick.”

Ross Nimchick’s lymphoma case was even more recent and even more precisely documented. In June 1986 he came down with a cold, loss of voice, and swollen glands with a lump near his left collarbone and in the groin area. By late July, biopsy results confirmed malignant lymphoma, and Dr. Ross staged him as third-to-fourth stage. Beginning September 3 he started vitamins and a food program. Beginning September 12 he began Essiac, two ounces mixed in two ounces of warm water, all water purified by reverse osmosis. By October 2 the sweating had stopped and he felt stronger. In February 1987 his nodes had decreased by about 50%. By March 2, 1987, his white and red blood counts were normal — Dr. Ross had the test re-run, assuming an error, and got the same result. Nodes under his left armpit were gone. Nodes under his right armpit, both groins, and his neck had decreased by about 95%. On May 30, 1987 Nimchick wrote to Brusch: “I remember how tired and weak I used to feel. But today I am strong, full of energy and back to my old self prior to having lymphoma. Your program with Essiac has returned me to 100% health.” The hospital records in Brusch’s file corroborated every step. Both cases carried the architecture Brusch wanted on record: pathological diagnosis documented, timeline documented, outcome documented, verifiable at every point.

Question 25: What was Rene’s theory of how Essiac worked, how did she describe the body’s response to abnormal cells, and what did she believe about cancer as a systemic rather than localized condition?

Answer: Rene described her theory to Ralph Daigh in April 1959 in terms she had refined across decades of clinical observation. “Occasionally nature makes an error in cell construction, and when this cell attempts to fit into the pattern to which it is assigned, it is repelled by the healthy cells with a violence only nature is capable of producing. The natural tendency of the normal cells is to throw out, destroy or consume the unnatural cell, and if the body is strong enough, this fact is accomplished. If, however, the abnormal cell is strong enough to get a foothold in the human body, and the normal cells cannot throw it out or surround it and thus inhibit it, the cells in that particular area go wild and the body destroys itself in that area with a cancerous growth. My remedy, in some way I do not understand and am unable to explain, strengthens the natural defense mechanisms of the body and enables the normal cells to destroy the abnormal cell as nature might expect a strong body to do.” She noted that Essiac also seemed to weaken abnormal cells directly, since she had observed the sloughing off of great masses of diseased tissue from cancer of the breast, rectum, and internal cancers. She was forced to look upon Essiac as a great tonic and giver of strength to the body so that nature was aided in removing abnormalities of growth — stomach ulcers, goiter, hemorrhoids, and cancer.

Her view of cancer itself was that it was systemic, not localized. She wrote many times in essays and letters that cancer is spread through the body via the blood stream, and that surgery, radium, or X-rays targeted specifically at the area of a tumor was attacking the symptom and not the cause. A healthy system purified by healthy blood would not sustain a cancerous tumor. In a diseased system, if the tumor was surgically removed or destroyed with radium, the cancer would eventually reappear elsewhere unless the system was cleaned out and purified. Some of the herbs in Essiac acted as blood purifiers — attacking the cause rather than the symptoms. In one essay she wrote: “There are those of us who feel that cancer is more than a local disturbance in some distant organ of the body. This was impressed on me very deeply when, after making the rounds of a cancer ward in one of our best treatment centers, the surgeon in charge said to me: ‘This is not the answer.’” The theory was straightforward, offered without pretension, and framed in the humility of someone who said plainly she did not fully understand the mechanism. The clinical results across six decades were what she asked others to look at.

Question 26: What did the chemotherapy warnings on Fluorouracil and the Washington Post reporting on 150 experimental cancer drugs reveal about the toxicity accepted as normal in conventional treatment?

Answer: One of the commonly administered cancer drugs is Fluorouracil, 5-FU. The manufacturer’s brochure carries this warning: “Precautions: Fluorouracil is a highly toxic drug with a narrow margin of safety. Therefore, patients should be carefully supervised since therapeutic response is unlikely to occur without some evidence of toxicity. Severe hematological toxicity, gastrointestinal hemorrhage and even death may result from the fluorouracil despite meticulous selection of patients and careful adjustment of dosage.” The warning accepts as a working assumption that therapeutic benefit is unlikely without evidence that the drug is poisoning the patient. Death is listed among the possible outcomes “despite meticulous selection of patients and careful adjustment of dosage.” This is a drug approved for widespread clinical use against cancer, labeled by its manufacturer.

The 1981 Washington Post reporting went further. Over the previous decade, more than 150 experimental drugs had been given to tens of thousands of cancer patients under sponsorship of the U.S. Federal Government’s National Cancer Institute. Many of these drugs had come from a list of highly toxic industrial chemicals — pesticides, herbicides, and dyes. The experimental drugs had led to hundreds of deaths and a nightmarish list of serious adverse reactions: kidney failure, liver failure, heart failure, respiratory distress, destruction of bone marrow so the body could no longer make blood, brain damage, paralysis, seizure, coma, visual hallucinations. In some cases the experimental drug actually stimulated tumor growth rather than stopping the cancer. In other tests, the experimental drug itself caused cancer. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration official told the Post : “We knew from the beginning that this caused toxicity in animals. Almost all investigational cancer drugs are highly toxic.” Rene’s response to this landscape was blunt: “Chemotherapy should be a criminal offense,” she told one reporter. The contrast with Essiac stood on the record. Not even her worst enemies ever argued that patients were hurt by drinking the tea. Every investigator who looked at it — including the 1982 Canadian government officials who shut down Resperin — agreed Essiac was safe. The question was whether non-toxicity combined with six decades of clinical results was worth investigating. The answer kept coming back no.

Question 27: What historical precedents exist for plant-derived medicines entering accepted practice — cinchona bark, foxglove, periwinkle, white willow bark — and what does the NOVA documentary statistic about 80% of the human population reveal?

Answer: South American Indians treated fevers, especially malarial fevers, with a tea made from cinchona bark long before science could explain why it worked. Scientists eventually discovered that cinchona bark was nature’s source of quinine, the standard antimalarial for generations. Digitalis, which comes from the leaves of the foxglove plant, became an important heart medication. Since the 1950s doctors have used vincristine, an alkaloid from the periwinkle evergreen plant, in the treatment of childhood leukemia and other cancers. For centuries American Indians treated various aches and pains with an herbal tea made from white willow bark. It must have seemed terribly primitive to the first doctors who heard of it. They were trusting their science; the Indians were trusting nature. Eventually science caught up. Synthesized and refined white willow bark is the basis for what we call aspirin. Science did not discover that vitamin C prevented scurvy — English sailors discovered it without knowing it, taking lemons and limes on long voyages, which is why they came to be called “limeys.” Science did not even discover vitamin C until 1932.

A 1987 NOVA documentary on “The Hidden Power of Plants” aired on the Public Broadcasting System stated: “The history of medicine has been largely the story of plants and the potent chemicals they produce. Around the world, traditional healers, using plant medications, provide health care to eighty percent of the human population — over four billion people.” The same documentary reported that over 25 percent of the drugs prescribed in the United States still contain plant materials as their principal active ingredients. The pattern across every one of these cases is the same. Traditional knowledge identifies a plant that works. The medical establishment dismisses it as primitive folk belief for a period that may run decades or centuries. Eventually science catches up, isolates an active compound, patents it, and markets it. In the case of white willow bark the lag was centuries. In the case of vitamin C the gap between English sailors and the laboratory was more than a hundred years. There is nothing exceptional about Rene’s claim that an herbal tea from an Ojibwa medicine man had medicinal value. The exception, and the scandal, is that this one did not get the laboratory investigation the others eventually received. The medical establishment’s position across the twentieth century was that living proof — testimony of ordinary individuals, even sworn to oath — did not meet the standards of scientific proof. The question Rene’s story poses is why, when living proof arrived accompanied by physician letters, documented case files, parliamentary testimony, and three decades of Dr. Brusch’s clinical records, the laboratory investigation still did not come.

Question 28: What did Rene write in her 1960s pamphlets and essays warning about pesticides, food additives, chemical processing, and nuclear fallout, and how did her warnings compare to Rachel Carson’s later work?

Answer: By the late 1950s, with the same prescience as Rachel Carson who won international fame for her book Silent Spring, Rene was writing in her personal essays warning about agricultural pesticides and food preservatives, about the chemicals being sprayed into the environment. Five years before scientific fear of Strontium 90 in radioactive fallout persuaded President Kennedy to sign the treaty against atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, Rene was writing essays warning of the dangers from nuclear testing. She was ahead of the public conversation on both subjects by half a decade or more, working alone in a small town in northern Ontario, drawing conclusions from what she had seen in forty years of treating cancer patients. Her instinct was that the environment was being poisoned, that food was being poisoned, and that the body — her terrain, though she did not use the word — was increasingly unable to maintain itself under the accumulating load.

In her “I Was Canada’s Cancer Nurse” pamphlet produced in her spare time in the 1960s and 1970s, she railed against poisoned additives, chemical processing of flours and oils and fats, and chemical aging of such foods as cheese. She urged people to take four steps. Do not eat these foods if alternatives are available. Urge governments to take action against these conditions. Read the labels — especially the small print — on everything you buy to eat or drink. Patronize manufacturers who produce foods without added colors and other additives, and who grow foods in soil not contaminated with chemicals, where they do not use poisonous sprays. The guidance would read as current health-food advice today. In the 1960s it was uncommon. What distinguishes her warnings from Carson’s is that Rene had spent four decades watching individual bodies trying to survive the chemical load. She was not writing from the position of a scientist examining ecosystems. She was writing from the position of a cancer nurse who had seen thousands of patients and who had come to believe, by the end of her life, that cancer was a condition of accumulating insult to a body no longer able to clear what was being poured into it. Her essays never reached a mass audience. The warnings sit on the record alongside Carson’s and arrived earlier.

Question 29: What did the anonymous Caisse relative tell Gary Glum about the family’s private knowledge, and what did he mean by saying “she had a cure for cancer… We all knew”?

Answer: The relative was in his eighties, healthy and alert, with a lifetime of experience across several continents. He had refused to let his name be used, refused the tape recorder initially, had been afraid for his family, afraid for his business, afraid of the authorities. For years he had not shared what he knew even with his own friends. Hearing that someone was finally writing a book about Rene was enough to prompt him to talk. He wanted to talk. He drove to Glum’s motel one night and spent two hours reminiscing. He could remember the clinic, remember people waiting there, remember Rene in her nurse’s uniform, very professional and highly regarded. One of his aunts had cancer of the breast — doctors had given up on her, she was carried into the clinic — and she was still alive decades later. The relative himself had taken Essiac on and off all his life as a tonic. He described Rene as always cheery, with a good sense of humor, strong-willed and strong physically — he thought the reason she lasted as long as she did was that she had a goal in life, letting the world know about Essiac so people could get better by it.

Then he said the thing he had been waiting to say. “She had a cure for cancer. She has got a cure for cancer. We all knew. A lot of the family were cured. I think even maybe Valleen has been cured. We knew that she could cure cancer, and I think something that we were always afraid of — every single one of us — was the fact that we knew somebody in the family who could cure cancer and that this cancer cure was going to die with Rene. We weren’t going to be able to be cured someday in the future. Rene was afraid of that, too. She wanted to make sure that the family was looked after. The frustration of having the cure, but not being able to talk about it was terrible. Terrible. What can we do to help her? How can we help?” He felt the Cancer Society was a farce, a money-making scheme that would be an everlasting money-making scheme as long as a cure for cancer was never found. As far as the medical association was concerned, the doctors did not dare breathe a word. He thought the reason Rene finally released the formula to Resperin was because they promised they would actually use it on human beings. He was not sure she had lived long enough to realize that Resperin was not getting very far. “I’ve often wondered, is this formula just going to evaporate? Is nothing going to happen with it? I feel very bad about it, very sad. We need to be able to give to humanity what’s there, what is available right in front of us, and nobody is doing it. The very fact that this thing may die, it’s just making me sick. Just making me sick.”

Question 30: How did Gary Glum come into possession of the formula in 1985-86, what persuaded him of its validity, and why did he choose to release it through a videotape rather than printing it in the book?

Answer: In 1985 Glum was running a thriving chiropractic practice in Los Angeles treating professional athletes, world-class weight lifters, members of NFL teams. He had never heard of Essiac. A friend introduced him to a woman who was striking in how private she was. Small and raw-boned, obviously having lost weight, she gave the impression of great fragility — a balance between life and disappearance from life. As they came to trust each other she began telling him about Rene Caisse and Essiac. She had met Rene years earlier when she had gone to her for cancer treatment. She had been in remission ever since. She regarded it as a miracle. Eventually she admitted Rene had left her a copy of the formula. Glum began gently trying to persuade her to trust him with it. Their conversations stretched over almost a year, interrupted by days or weeks of withdrawal and silence. The break came during one of those periods of hiatus. He got an indistinct message on his answering machine: “Come now.” He flew to the city where she lived. When he arrived at her home there was a soft silence, then she stirred and said, “Well, all in God’s good time.” Her eyes, normally a faded blue, were burning. “Gary, there are things better learned by you only when they happen to you.” She handed him a sheet of paper with a list of herbs typed out and the instructions for brewing the tea.

The first thing he did on returning to Los Angeles was brew a batch for himself. He had been suffering from chronic bronchitis for years. Within two days of taking Essiac the bronchitis disappeared and had not returned. He then tracked down Rene’s closest friend Mary McPherson in Bracebridge, flew to Toronto, drove 170 kilometers through a blizzard, and spent eight hours in her home listening to the full history of Rene’s life. Mary was shocked when he recited the formula over dinner — “How did you get that?” — then confirmed its accuracy and eventually gave him the suitcases of original documents that no one had seen since Rene’s death. The reading of those papers took two weeks and established beyond reasonable doubt that Essiac had helped thousands of patients over sixty years. The decision to release the formula via videotape rather than in the book itself was Mary’s warning and Glum’s own first experience taking shape. Mary told him Rene’s deep fear in releasing the formula was that people would make mistakes and not know they had made them. She could not personally train everyone. If they took written instructions and got them wrong, the whole purpose was defeated. Even Sloan-Kettering had botched the preparation — freezing and thawing instead of boiling. Glum’s own first attempt required a phone call to his friend to walk him through the steps and reassure him he had not made silly mistakes. The videotape, released at $79.95, was his attempt to ensure that anyone brewing the tea would do it the way Rene did it, the same precise measurements, the same instructions at every step, so that the gift from an Ojibwa medicine man to an elderly English woman to a Canadian nurse to a Los Angeles chiropractor would not finally be lost in the kitchens of people who did not know they had got it wrong.

Analogy

Imagine a small-town baker who, by accident of inheritance from an old recipe passed hand to hand across generations, bakes a bread that cures scurvy. People who eat the bread recover. People who do not eat it, do not. The baker charges nothing. She bakes it in her own kitchen late at night, after days spent kneading and shaping loaves for whoever walks through her door with a doctor’s note confirming they have scurvy.

Word spreads. The town’s physicians divide. Some drive their patients to her door. Others petition the government to shut her down for practicing medicine without a license. The government sends two officials to arrest her. They sit in her kitchen, listen to her, examine her records, meet her patients, and leave convinced. They write letters of support instead. The medical establishment demands the recipe before they will consider whether the bread works. The baker says she will give them the recipe once they admit the bread works. The standoff holds for fifty years. During those fifty years the baker continues to bake. Patients continue to recover. Petitions reach fifty-five thousand signatures. A parliamentary committee comes within three votes of granting her the legal right to continue. A royal commission takes testimony from forty-nine sworn witnesses and dismisses the bread while asking in the final paragraph for the recipe. A famous Boston physician brings her to his clinic. His records show the bread works. Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s own mouse tests indicate regressions. The results are published nowhere, acted upon by no one. The baker dies at ninety. Her formula passes to a friend, then to another friend, then to a chiropractor in Los Angeles who releases it to the public.

The bread, in this analogy, is Essiac. The scurvy is cancer. The ingredients, as the elderly retired doctor said to Rene in his garden in 1923 while lifting a weed with his cane: “If people would use this weed there would be little or no cancer in the world.” The baker’s name was Rene Caisse, and the only remarkable thing about the whole story is that it is not an analogy at all.

The One-Minute Elevator Explanation

In 1922 a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse met an elderly woman in a hospital whose breast cancer had been cured thirty years earlier by an Ojibwa medicine man using an herbal tea. The nurse wrote down the names of the herbs. For the next fifty-six years, she brewed that tea in her kitchen and treated thousands of cancer patients — most of them written off as terminally dying by their physicians. She charged nothing. She accepted only voluntary contributions. She required a written diagnosis from a licensed doctor before taking any patient. Hundreds of her patients, under sworn testimony before a Royal Commission in 1939, credited her with saving their lives. Petitions on her behalf reached 55,000 signatures. The Canadian parliament came within three votes of legalizing her practice. A Boston physician — John F. Kennedy’s own doctor — brought her to his clinic in 1959 and remained an outspoken advocate of her treatment until his own cancer was reversed by it in 1973. Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s own mouse tests in 1975 indicated regressions in sarcoma 180. The Canadian government, the National Cancer Institute, and the pharmaceutical corporations all demanded her formula before they would admit her remedy had merit. She refused to give it to them before they admitted the merit. The standoff held for her entire life. She died in 1978 at ninety. The author of this book obtained the formula from her closest friend and released it publicly in 1988. [Elevator dings]

Threads to follow for your own research: the Resperin Corporation’s shuttered 1977-82 Canadian trials and what became of their data; the 1978 federal class action suit in Detroit seeking legal importation of Essiac; the sworn testimony record of the 1939 Royal Cancer Commission hearings; Dr. Charles Brusch’s clinical files from the Brusch Medical Center in Cambridge; the 1977 Homemaker’s magazine investigation; the Washington Post 1981 series on 150 experimental cancer drugs derived from pesticides, herbicides, and dyes.

12-Point Summary

1. The origin was a chance hospital encounter. In 1922, Rene Caisse was a 33-year-old surgical nurse in Haileybury, Ontario, caring for an elderly woman whose scarred right breast turned out to be the record of a healing. The woman had been diagnosed in Toronto thirty years earlier with advanced breast cancer requiring immediate removal, refused the surgery, and been cured by an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp using an herbal tea. She was still cancer-free in her late seventies. Rene wrote down the names of the herbs. A year later, an elderly retired doctor she knew lifted a weed in his garden with his cane and said, “If people would use this weed there would be little or no cancer in the world” — naming the same plant the old woman had named. The convergence settled the matter in Rene’s mind. She would spend the next fifty-six years brewing the tea in her kitchen and treating cancer patients without charge.

2. The clinical practice was ethical, documented, and massive. Rene accepted only patients with a written cancer diagnosis from a licensed physician — most had already been through surgery, radium, or chemotherapy and been pronounced terminal or inoperable. She charged nothing, accepting only voluntary contributions. By the mid-1930s her clinic in the converted British Lion Hotel in Bracebridge was treating hundreds of patients a week. Ambulances double-parked. Boarding houses filled. Patients came from Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie, the United States, Europe. The scene was compared to Lourdes. The record of her six decades of practice included tens of thousands of patients, hundreds of them documented in physician letters, pathological reports, and sworn testimony, with the same architecture repeating case after case: written off as dying, recovered under Essiac, years of continued life.

3. Physicians who looked carefully kept defecting to her side. In 1926, eight physicians signed a petition on her behalf. By 1937, forty doctors were part of a deputation to the Ontario government carrying 17,000 signatures. The pattern across six decades was that doctors sent to arrest her left persuaded, specialists who examined her patients confirmed the recoveries, and investigators who spent time with her — Dr. W.C. Arnold, Dr. J.A. McInnis, Dr. Emma Carson of Los Angeles, Dr. B.L. Guyatt of the University of Toronto, Dr. Charles Brusch of Cambridge Massachusetts, Dr. E. Bruce Hendrick of the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children — stayed persuaded for the rest of their careers. In 1959, three Bracebridge doctors interviewed by magazine editors denied under direct questioning what the editors had documented proof of in their briefcases, and none would call Rene a charlatan, a fraud, after money, or psychotic — leaving no coherent dismissal available while simultaneously making clear it was “not a good thing for a doctor in Canada to discuss Nurse Caisse in any way.”

4. The political battle came within three votes of legalizing her practice. Grassroots petitions escalated across the 1930s: 2,700 signatures, then 14,000, then 17,000, then 55,000. In March 1938, the Ontario Private Bills Committee considered a bill that would have authorized Rene to treat cancer patients legally. The debate was fierce; patients in the gallery erupted; the Speaker threatened to clear the room. The bill was defeated by three votes. Within days the Kirby Bill passed, creating the Royal Cancer Commission and effectively criminalizing her practice. The Minister of Health then publicly denied the law was being enforced against her, launching a two-year cycle of closures, reopenings, denials, and reversals that kept the government’s hands officially clean while leaving the statute on the books.

5. The Royal Cancer Commission was a procedural exercise, not an investigation. In the public hearings held at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto in March 1939, 387 of Rene’s former patients traveled to testify. The Commission permitted only 49 to speak. The remaining 338 were sent home. The transcript of the 49 who did testify records recovery after recovery under oath. The December 1939 Interim Report dismissed the diagnoses as incorrect or credited the recoveries to prior radium treatments — maintaining that radium was still working even when long periods had elapsed and recurrences had appeared in between, but had nothing to do with it if the patient died. The report concluded Essiac had no merit, then in its final paragraph still asked for the formula. The contradiction revealed the purpose of the whole exercise.

6. The formula standoff held for fifty years because both sides had reasons. Rene would release the formula only after the institutions admitted Essiac had merit. The institutions would admit merit only after Rene released the formula. The Catch-22 held across every major player — the Canadian government, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, private corporations offering $100,000 contracts and $1 million donations. Rene’s fear was that the medical establishment would either charge exorbitant prices and bury Essiac beyond the reach of the poor, or discredit it and bury it entirely. She had watched the Canadian government and medical association try to crush her work for forty years. Her fears were calibrated to what she had seen with her own eyes.

7. The non-toxicity made the standoff indefensible on its own terms. Not even Rene’s worst enemies ever argued that patients were hurt by drinking the tea. Every investigator who examined Essiac — including the 1982 Canadian government officials who shut down the Resperin trials — agreed it was safe. By contrast, Fluorouracil, the widely used chemotherapy agent, carried a manufacturer’s warning stating that therapeutic benefit was unlikely without evidence of toxicity, and that death might result despite meticulous administration. The Washington Post reported in 1981 that over the previous decade 150 experimental cancer drugs — many derived from pesticides, herbicides, and industrial dyes — had been given to tens of thousands of patients, producing hundreds of deaths and a nightmarish list of adverse reactions including kidney failure, liver failure, bone marrow destruction, paralysis, coma, and in some cases tumor stimulation. “Almost all investigational cancer drugs are highly toxic,” an FDA official told the Post. Rene’s reaction was blunt: “Chemotherapy should be a criminal offense.”

8. Dr. Charles Brusch’s clinical records established the pattern independently. Brusch was no fringe practitioner. He administered the first polio vaccine in Cambridge in 1955, treated John F. Kennedy for Addison’s disease, and treated former House Speaker John McCormack. The Brusch Medical Center was one of the largest medical clinics in Massachusetts. Rene worked at his clinic for three months in 1959 under the supervision of his director of research Dr. Charles McClure, who documented recoveries in patients including Lena Burcell, John Cronin, Wilbur Dymond, and Russell McCassey. McClure’s conclusion was unambiguous: Essiac was efficacious. Brusch continued to use Essiac in his clinical practice for nearly thirty years, including on patients like Patrick McGrail — esophageal cancer, eleven-year survival — and Ross Nimchick, whose stage 3-4 lymphoma was reversed with 95% node reduction documented step by step in Brusch’s files. Brusch himself had cancer in 1973, treated himself with Essiac, and tested negative years later.

9. Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s own tests indicated regressions and were terminated over preparation errors. In 1959, Sloan-Kettering’s mice treated with Essiac showed what Dr. Philip Merker called a tendency of cancer cells to “amalgamate and localize.” On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock wrote to Rene: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The next year the tests came to a halt. Rene received an explanation of how Sloan-Kettering had been preparing the injectable solution. They had ignored her instructions. They were not boiling the herb — they were freezing and thawing it. She wrote on their explanation in angry scrawl: “All wrong. Rene M. Caisse.” She terminated the agreement. In sworn affidavit in the 1978 Detroit class action suit, Stock later admitted Sloan-Kettering had been “never provided full information about the nature of Essiac” and had prepared the solution improperly from the dried material supplied.

10. The 1977 Homemaker’s investigation broke the story back open. A team of very skeptical reporters was assigned to investigate the eighty-nine-year-old nurse in Bracebridge. Over six months their skepticism dissolved. The executive vice president’s turning point came the day he realized that if told he had cancer, he would try everything — “but I’d go see Rene first.” The article caused an immediate sensation. Dr. David Fingard of the Resperin Corporation persuaded Rene to turn over the formula in late 1977 for $1 on signing and $250 a week for six months of testing. The tests dragged on for years. Rene complained publicly that she had been able to accomplish more by herself. In 1982 the Canadian government shut down the Resperin trials, calling the quality control flawed while admitting Essiac was safe. Patients already taking it would be allowed to continue, “purely on humanitarian grounds.”

11. Rene’s theory and warnings arrived decades before the mainstream caught up. She described cancer as a systemic condition carried through the bloodstream, not a localized one — surgery and radium attacking the symptom and not the cause. She wrote that Essiac strengthened the body’s natural defenses and acted as a blood purifier, enabling the normal cells to destroy abnormal ones. In her 1950s and 1960s essays she warned about agricultural pesticides, food preservatives, chemical processing of flours and oils, chemical aging of foods, and the dangers of atmospheric nuclear testing — the pesticide warnings predating Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by years, the nuclear testing warnings predating President Kennedy’s atmospheric test ban treaty by five years. Her guidance to patients to avoid processed foods and chemical additives, read labels carefully, and support growers who did not use poisonous sprays would read as current health-food advice today. In the 1960s it was uncommon.

12. The formula is now public and the standoff is over. For sixty years the formal argument against investigating Essiac was that no scientific study could proceed without the formula. In 1985-86, Rene’s closest friend released the formula to Dr. Gary Glum, who had been introduced to Essiac by another of Rene’s cured patients and whose own chronic bronchitis cleared within days of taking the tea. Glum released the formula publicly in 1988 through a videotape rather than printing it in the book — Mary McPherson had warned him that Rene’s deep fear in releasing the formula was that people would make mistakes without knowing it, and Sloan-Kettering had already demonstrated that preparation errors could invalidate the entire exercise. The institutions that for six decades had refused to study Essiac on the grounds that they did not have the formula no longer have that argument available to them. What they do with the formula now, as always, is up to them.

The Golden Nugget

Rene Caisse offered to give her formula to any investigating commission, publicly, from the beginning of her working life — on one condition. The medical profession first had to admit that Essiac had merit, based on the results she had already demonstrated across hundreds of documented cases. Her offer was declined again and again across six decades by every institution asked. The Royal Cancer Commission in 1939 dismissed the remedy and then asked for the formula in the final paragraph of the same report. Memorial Sloan-Kettering demanded the formula before further study, received only the one herb Rene identified as responsible for regressions, saw regressions in two experiments in 1975, prepared the next batch wrong by freezing instead of boiling, and declared the results inconsistent. The pattern never varied. The institutions wanted the formula without conceding the record. Rene wanted the record acknowledged before parting with the formula.

What makes this the golden nugget is not the standoff itself but what it reveals about the real argument. If the medical establishment had wanted to investigate Essiac, the formula was never the obstacle. The herbs grew wild across Ontario. The ingredients were available from any major herbal distributor in America for under $50. Rene told the Canadian parliament in 1938 she would submit the formula to any investigating commission that would first admit her clinical results had merit. The commission would not admit the clinical results had merit. The gap between those two positions — not the chemistry of the herbs, not the mechanism of action, not the double-blind trials that were never run — is where Essiac died institutionally. It died not because anyone could show it did not work, but because the institutions whose job was to find out could not bring themselves to say, before the fact, that something a Canadian nurse without a medical degree had discovered in 1922 might deserve investigation on its own merits. The formula was never the point. The admission was the point. And the admission was never granted.

How to Explain It to a 6-Year-Old

A long time ago, a kind nurse named Rene was taking care of an old lady in a hospital. The old lady had a strange mark on her chest. Rene asked her what happened. The old lady said that many years before, doctors told her she was very sick and would die soon. But a man from an old village taught her to make a special tea from plants that grow in the forest. She drank the tea. She got better. She was still alive and feeling fine, all those years later.

Rene wrote down the names of the plants. She decided she would make the tea too, and give it to people who were very sick. She stayed up late at night in her kitchen making it. She never asked for money. If somebody brought her eggs or vegetables as a thank you, she said that was enough. For more than fifty years, people from all over came to her little town to ask for her tea. Many of them had been told by doctors that they were going to die. Many of them got better.

But something strange happened. The important doctors in the big cities got upset. They said Rene was not allowed to help sick people because she was not a doctor. They came to her door and told her to stop. Thousands and thousands of people wrote their names on a list asking the government to let Rene keep helping sick people. One time, the government almost said yes. But at the last minute they said no.

The important doctors kept asking Rene for the recipe for her tea. Rene said she would give them the recipe if they promised to tell everyone the tea really worked. The doctors said they would only say the tea worked if she gave them the recipe first. Nobody would move. The sick people kept coming to Rene’s door, and Rene kept making the tea. The old lady who first told her about the plants had been right. The plants did help people. But the important doctors never said so out loud.

Rene lived to be ninety years old. After she died, her best friend gave the recipe to a man who put it in a book, so now anybody who wants it can have it. The important doctors still have not said whether the tea works. But the plants are still growing in the forest, where they have been growing all along.

The Recipe

The book itself does not print the formula. Glum released it separately on videotape in 1988 at $79.95, with the stated reason that written instructions had led even Sloan-Kettering to prepare the herb wrong. The four-herb recipe below is the one Glum released and that circulated publicly through his own materials in the years that followed. Rene made this tea in her kitchen for fifty-six years. It is the exact arrangement of plants that eight physicians petitioned the Canadian government to legalise in 1926, that 55,000 Ontarians signed petitions to protect in 1938, and that Dr. Charles Brusch administered to his own body after his 1973 cancer diagnosis — continuing to take it successfully for the fifteen years between then and this book’s publication.

Dry herb mixture

• 6½ cups cut burdock root (Arctium lappa)
• 16 ounces (1 pound) powdered sheep sorrel herb including roots (Rumex acetosella)
• 4 ounces powdered slippery elm bark (Ulmus fulva)
• 1 ounce powdered Turkish rhubarb root (Rheum palmatum)

Combine the dry herbs thoroughly. Store in a sealed dark glass jar away from light and heat.

Brewing

1. Bring 2 gallons (32 cups) of distilled or spring water to a rolling boil in a stainless steel pot with a tight-fitting lid. Never use aluminium.
2. Add 1 cup of the dry herb mixture to the boiling water. Stir. Replace the lid.
3. Continue boiling hard for 10 minutes with the lid on.
4. Turn off the heat. Scrape down the sides of the pot. Leave the pot covered and undisturbed for 10 to 12 hours (overnight) so the herbs settle to the bottom.
5. Reheat the brew to steaming but do not boil again. Strain through a fine mesh into sterilised dark glass bottles. Seal.
6. Store sealed bottles in the refrigerator. Shake lightly before each use.

Dose

One to two fluid ounces daily, taken on an empty stomach — either first thing in the morning or at bedtime, at least two hours after the last meal. Mix with an equal part of hot water. Sip slowly.

An opened bottle keeps roughly two weeks refrigerated. Discard any batch that develops mould or off-smell.

The herbs grow wild across Ontario, as Rene used to say, in quantities sufficient to supply the world. All four are available from any serious herbal supplier for a small fraction of the cost of a single chemotherapy infusion. What anyone does with that fact, as Rene told the Canadian parliament in 1938 and as Glum repeated in 1988, is a matter for each person to decide for themselves.

By Aaron Siri | October 16, 2026

GAVI, a vaccine alliance that includes the WHO, health agencies, pharma, and the Gates foundation, recently posted that studies reflect that giving multiple vaccines to a baby does not risk increased side effects and chronic disease.

Ironically, the studies it cites do not support that vaccines do not cause increased risk of side effects and chronic disease. Anyone who actually reads what is cited would conclude as much and may very well decide to no longer trust GAVI, the medical establishment it represents, or the products it promotes. That is called “thinking” or “informed consent”—which these same organizations would then label as “vaccine hesitancy” or “anti-vax.”

Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback

Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026

Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.

By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.

What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.

Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed.

Honest about argyria. Honest about what silver cannot do. Honest about the dependency trap.

That is why the book has ten appendices. 295 pages, thirteen chapters, ten appendices. The practical use chapters are grounded in a reference apparatus — a Pre-1938 Condition Index with two hundred and forty entries, an Argyria File, resources, commercial products, modern case accounts, cleansing responses, children and vulnerable populations. The whole picture, in one place.

The seed idea, and the person who planted it

The frame that lets this book say what silver is actually doing came from Robert Becker. Becker was the orthopaedic surgeon at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse and the Syracuse VA whose electrical regeneration research in the 1960s and 70s named something no one else was willing to name at the time: silver is not just an antimicrobial. It is a bioelectric agent. His silver-electrode experiments regrew tissue in animals that mainstream medicine said was non-regenerable. His book The Body Electric (1985) is the full account.

Becker is the frame that lets Colloidal Silver explain what silver is actually doing — not just “killing bacteria,” but acting on the bioelectric field the pharmaceutical model has no vocabulary for. His regeneration research was systematically defunded through the 1980s because an element on the periodic table has no business plan. Chapter 6 of this book rebuilds the Becker framework from the primary research he published before the funding stopped.

The debt is foundational, and belongs at the top of the post.

What the book shows

Part One: The Disappearance. What silver did in Western medicine for a century before 1938, and how it vanished. The surgical wound-care tradition and the pre-antibiotic clinical record. The Lancet and BMJ as the primary archive. The Flexner Report of 1910, funded by Carnegie and Rockefeller, which restructured American medical education around the pharmaceutical model and killed silver’s institutional base inside a generation. The Streetlight Effect — why the questions silver could answer stopped being asked once the funding model changed. The first section is the recovered history, put together in one place for the first time.

Part Two: What Silver Is and What It Isn’t. Why the germ theory story fails as a complete account of infection. The terrain paradigm as the actual working frame of pre-1938 medicine, before Pasteur-only orthodoxy was institutionalised. What silver actually does at the cellular level — Becker’s bioelectric framework in full — and what the pharmaceutical model has to keep denying for the current therapeutic approach to continue to work.

Part Three: Practical Use. Three parallel chapters: silver and water, silver on the body, silver inside the body. Preparation. Dosing. What distinguishes clinically useful colloidal silver from the commercial product that gets sold as a tonic. What forms work for what conditions. The practical heart of the book.

Part Four: The Honest Account. Argyria and the historical silver compounds — the condition that gets used to end every conversation about silver, correctly identified so it stops ending the conversation. When antibiotics have failed and silver is the one tool still working. What silver cannot do. The place of silver in a terrain approach — not as a replacement for anything, not as a cure-all, as one tool returned to the shelf, with its evidence intact.

What is at the back

Ten appendices. Home Production of Colloidal Silver — equipment, concentration, safety. Dosing and Administration. The Pre-1938 Condition Index, two hundred and forty entries from the primary literature, condition by condition, source by source. The Argyria File — every documented case the research could identify and the circumstances that produced it. Resources and Further Reading. Commercial Products. Modern Case Accounts. Silver in the Broader Landscape of Recovered Remedies. Understanding Cleansing Responses. Children, Pregnancy, and Vulnerable Populations.

Full back-of-book index. Everything cross-referenced.

Who this book is for

If you have been reading me on Substack for a while and you have been waiting for the one book on silver that holds the pre-1938 record, the Becker framework, and the practical use together, this is that book.

If you are new, start here. You do not need to have read anything else to follow it.

If someone you love is still working through chronic infection, long-course antibiotic damage, or the dependency trap of pharmaceutical-only medicine, this is the one volume I would send.

Colloidal Silver: The Silver That Medicine Dropped

The companion piece: No Autoimmunity

If Colloidal Silver traces how one of the pre-1938 tools was dropped, No Autoimmunity takes apart the diagnostic category that was invented to explain what medicine has done to the body in the years since.

The current chronic-illness landscape — type 1 diabetes, juvenile arthritis, pediatric multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, atopic dermatitis, food anaphylaxis — is routinely labelled “autoimmune.” The word places the fault inside the patient. The body is said to have malfunctioned, failed to tell self from non-self, started attacking itself.

The body did not do any of that. The body responded to what has been injected past every barrier it has to filter foreign material. The mechanism was named more than a hundred years ago, confirmed experimentally through the twentieth century, and relabelled only when the original vocabulary stopped suiting the business model. No Autoimmunity is the full account.

Readers who want the pre-1938 pharmacopoeia restored, tool by tool, should read Colloidal Silver. Readers who want the “autoimmune” label dismantled should read No Autoimmunity. The two sit together on the shelf, and the pair reinforces.

No Autoimmunity

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 5, 2026

Employees of Georgia’s largest healthcare system have until Nov. 1 to get the flu vaccine or an approved exemption, or they will be suspended without pay. If suspended employees don’t submit proof of vaccination by 4 p.m. Nov. 15, they will be fired.

According to the Emory Healthcare website, the vaccine mandate applies to all employees, including contractors and remote workers.

Employees suspended for missing the first deadline, Nov. 1, 11:59 p.m., will not be allowed to use their paid time off.

COVID-19 shots are not mandated, but employees are “encouraged to engage in shared decision-making with their provider” on whether or not to get the vaccine.

A spokesperson for the healthcare system said the requirement is intended to protect patients and staff and to encourage everyone to get vaccinated.

Dr. Sherika Newman of Doctor in the Family, a physician-led patient advocacy and health consulting service in Atlanta, told CBS News that flu vaccine requirements are common in healthcare.

“Asking health care providers or people who interact with patients to take the flu vaccine early every year is what we always mandate so that we are protecting ourselves from spreading viruses to vulnerable populations,” Newman said.

She said everyone should get vaccinated, not just healthcare workers, although only healthcare workers will lose their jobs if they don’t get the vaccine.

Cleveland Clinic: 2024-2025 flu shot increased risk of getting the flu

Flu vaccine effectiveness can vary, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which cites studies since 2009-10 showing effectiveness between 19% and 60%. The major factors influencing vaccine effectiveness are a person’s age and health and how well the vaccines match the circulating virus strains.

According to a Cleveland Clinic study published last year, people who received a flu vaccine formulated for the 2024-25 flu season had a 27% higher risk of getting the flu than those who didn’t get the vaccine.

It wasn’t the first study to find that flu vaccines could actually increase the risk of becoming ill.

A 2023 study co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged that “viruses replicating in the respiratory mucosal environment continue to present a particular challenge for developing effective vaccines with strong protection.”

“The flu shot has never really prevented transmission of the flu and in some years (i.e., last year) the efficacy of preventing the flu is actually negative,” said Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense. “Flu would blow through a vaccinated population with nearly the same ease as it would an unvaccinated population.”

A 2012 peer-reviewed study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases showed that children who received the flu vaccine were at significantly increased risk of contracting non-flu respiratory virus infections.

Moderna’s mRNA flu shot added to the mix this year

According to the CDC’s FluView vaccination chart, as of Sept. 26, flu cases were at “minimal” levels across almost all 50 U.S. states, including Georgia.

Flu season typically begins in October and ends in May, with highest transmission rates in December and February.

The CDC recommends flu shots for people age 6 months and older, assuming they have no medical conditions that make vaccination risky.

Flu shot formulations differ each year based on information about which strains may circulate that year. The formulations aren’t tested for safety or efficacy before they’re distributed to the public.

In March, vaccine advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended trivalent vaccines to protect against two influenza A and one influenza B viruses.

In the past, most flu vaccines were made from a flu virus grown in eggs, and then inactivated and made into a vaccine. Or, they were made from recombinant protein vaccines, which have pieces of the flu pathogen that the immune system learns to recognize and fight.

This year, Moderna’s controversial mRNA flu shot, mFLUSIVA, approved in June, is also available for people age 50 and over.

Number of healthcare workers getting flu, COVID vaccines declining 

Manufacturers say they will produce up to 135 million doses of flu vaccine for the U.S. market this flu season.

In recent years, many healthcare workers have been resisting flu shot mandates and declining the shot.

For example, record numbers of frontline health workers in the U.K. refused the flu vaccine in 2024-25.

Rates of U.S. healthcare workers who take the COVID-19 and flu shots have also been declining in recent years.

Numbers are lowest among health professionals who work in nursing homes. In the 2024-25 flu season, only about 42% of those workers got the shot, compared with about 81% of workers in acute care hospitals.

---

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

Ten head-to-head clinical trials — pulled from the GreenMedInfo archive — in which honey, turmeric, saffron, ginger and a handful of other kitchen staples matched or outperformed prescription medications. Each one links to the full research write-up.

By Sayer Ji | October 4, 2026

For nearly two decades, GreenMedInfo has done one thing most health publishers never bother with: we go into the National Library of Medicine and pull out the studies where researchers put a natural substance directly against a drug — same condition, same patients, same scoring — and then publish what they found.

Those studies exist. There are thousands of them. They just don’t get press releases, because nobody holds a patent on honey.

Below are ten of the most striking. Every one is a human trial. Every one is indexed in our database. And every one links to the long-form article where you can read the methodology, the numbers and the citations for yourself.

A word before we start: this is research information, not medical advice. Several of these trials are small. Some are single studies that have not been replicated. I have flagged which ones have the strongest designs. Read them, bring them to your practitioner, and decide for yourself. That is the entire point of having the archive.

1. Honey + Coffee vs. Prednisolone — Persistent Cough

 

The trial: Randomized, double-blind, 97 adults with post-infectious cough lasting more than three weeks. One group got a paste of honey and instant coffee every eight hours. One got the steroid prednisolone. One got guaifenesin (the active ingredient in Mucinex). Primary Care Respiratory Journal, 2013.

The result: Cough scores in the honey-coffee group fell from 2.9 to 0.2 — a 93% reduction. Prednisolone managed 3.0 to 2.4, about 20%. Guaifenesin did essentially nothing. The study authors’ own conclusion: “Honey plus coffee was found to be the most effective treatment modality.”

A kitchen remedy outperformed a corticosteroid by a factor of roughly fourteen — with none of the steroid’s immune-suppressing, bone-thinning, blood-sugar-wrecking side effects.

→ Read the full article: A Spoonful of Honey and Coffee Did What Prednisone Couldn’t

2. Curcumin vs. Metformin — Stopping Prediabetes Cold

 

The trial: Randomized controlled trial in Thailand, published in the American Diabetes Association’s own journal, Diabetes Care, 2012. Prediabetic patients took either a curcumin extract (from turmeric) or placebo for nine months.

The result: Zero patients in the curcumin group progressed to type 2 diabetes. In the placebo group, 16.4% did. Curcumin also improved beta-cell function and reduced insulin resistance, with only minor side effects reported.

For context: metformin, the front-line drug given to high-risk patients, reduced progression to diabetes by just 31% over three years in the landmark Diabetes Prevention Program. No pharmaceutical has ever come close to a 100% prevention rate.

→ Read the full article: 100% Diabetes Prevention Achieved Naturally

3. Berberine vs. Metformin — Type 2 Diabetes

 

The trial: 36 adults with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, three months, berberine versus metformin head-to-head. Metabolism, 2008.

The result: Berberine — a bitter alkaloid from goldenseal, barberry and Oregon grape — matched metformin on A1c, fasting glucose and post-meal glucose. Then it pulled ahead on lipids: by week 13, triglycerides and total cholesterol were significantly lower in the berberine group. In a second arm, 48 poorly-controlled diabetics on berberine saw A1c drop from 8.1% to 7.3% and fasting insulin fall 28%.

A later meta-analysis of 37 studies and 3,048 patients found berberine did not increase adverse events or the risk of hypoglycemia. Metformin, by contrast, carries a black-box risk of lactic acidosis.

→ Read the full article: Berberine Outshines Metformin for Diabetes

4. Saffron vs. Prozac and Lexapro — Depression, OCD, Postpartum Depression

The trials: Six separate head-to-head studies. In a 2016 double-blind trial, 30 mg/day of saffron matched 40 mg of fluoxetine for postpartum depression over six weeks. A 60-patient, 8-week trial found saffron equal to fluoxetine for OCD, with “many fewer” adverse effects. Additional trials found no difference against 60 mg fluoxetine for major depression and panic disorder.

The standout: A 2020 study of 54 patients found 15 mg of saffron produced significantly greater reductions in Hamilton Depression scores — and higher response and remission rates — than 10 mg of escitalopram (Lexapro).

A 2025 meta-analysis of eight RCTs confirmed it: saffron is as effective as SSRIs for depression, with fewer adverse events. The spice in your paella is running even with — and sometimes ahead of — the most prescribed class of psychiatric drugs on earth.

→ Read the full article: 6 Studies on Saffron Put Prozac to Shame

5. Honey vs. Dextromethorphan — Children’s Nighttime Cough

The trial: Children with upper respiratory infections were given buckwheat honey, honey-flavored dextromethorphan (the “DM” in Robitussin DM, Mucinex DM, Vicks Formula 44), or nothing before bed. Parents rated cough frequency, severity and sleep quality. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 2007.

The result: Honey scored best on every measure. Parents rated cough frequency 1.89 points better after honey, 1.39 after DM, and 0.92 with nothing. The quietly damning finding: dextromethorphan was not statistically better than no treatment on any outcome.

Even the CDC now advises honey for cough in anyone over one year old. The multi-billion-dollar cough syrup aisle has still not gotten the memo.

→ Read the full article: 5 Reasons Honey Should Be in Your Medicine Chest · Study abstract

6. Turmeric vs. Ibuprofen and Naproxen — Knee Osteoarthritis

 

The trials: A Thai study gave 367 knee osteoarthritis patients either 1,500 mg/day of turmeric extract or 1,200 mg/day of ibuprofen for four weeks. Separately, a 2022 double-blind RCT in Phytotherapy Research gave 60 patients either 500 mg naproxen twice daily or a capsule of turmeric extract, gingerols and piperine twice daily for a month.

The result: Turmeric matched ibuprofen for pain relief and function, with 96–97% patient satisfaction in both groups — but fewer gastrointestinal side effects. The turmeric-ginger-pepper formula relieved pain and inflammation on par with naproxen, with patients rating it equal or better on tolerability, and no adverse effects.

NSAIDs are linked to thousands of GI-bleed deaths a year. Turmeric has a 4,000-year safety record and over 900 documented health benefits in our database.

→ Read the full article: Spice-Based Relief for Aching Joints Beats Dangerous NSAID

7. Ginger vs. Mefenamic Acid and Ibuprofen — Menstrual Pain

 

The trials: 122 women with moderate-to-severe dysmenorrhea took either 250 mg of ginger every six hours or the NSAID mefenamic acid every eight hours, across two menstrual cycles. An earlier trial of 150 women compared 250 mg ginger four times daily against both mefenamic acid and ibuprofen for three days.

The result: Ginger reduced pain “significantly and equally” to the drug in the first trial — roughly half the women in each group went from moderate/severe to mild. In the second, the authors concluded flatly that ginger is as effective as the drugs.

The difference is what comes with it: NSAIDs raise the risk of ulcers, bleeding and cardiovascular events. Ginger raises the risk of nothing in particular.

→ Read the full article: Herbal Research Update for Women’s Health · Eight Unexpected Health Benefits of Ginger

8. Echinacea + Elderberry vs. Tamiflu — Influenza

 

The trial: Double-blind comparison of an Echinacea purpurea and elderberry blend against oseltamivir (Tamiflu), the world’s best-selling flu drug. Current Therapeutic Research, 2015.

The result: By day five, the herbal blend was already slightly ahead. By day ten, 90.1% of the herb group had recovered versus 84.8% on Tamiflu — with fewer complications and fewer side effects. Elderberry alone has repeatedly been shown to cut flu recovery from 7–8 days to 2–3.

Governments stockpiled billions of dollars of Tamiflu. A Cochrane review later found it shortened flu symptoms by about half a day. Elderberry costs twelve dollars.

→ Read the full article: What You Need to Know to Crush the Cold & Flu

9. Licorice (DGL) vs. Tagamet — Peptic Ulcers

 

The trial: Deglycyrrhizinated licorice (DGL) at 760 mg three times daily versus cimetidine (Tagamet), the first blockbuster acid-blocker, for peptic ulcer healing and relapse.

The result: DGL achieved 91% ulcer healing with an 8.2% relapse rate, versus 12.9% relapse with Tagamet. In the same research roundup, 3,000 mg/day of turmeric achieved 72% ulcer healing at eight weeks — comparable to omeprazole (Prilosec).

Acid-blockers are now linked to dementia, kidney disease, fractures and nutrient malabsorption with long-term use. Licorice root has been treating stomachs since Hippocrates.

→ Read the full article: The Mind Thieves — How 6 Common Medications Are Stealing Our Humanity

10. Colostrum vs. the Flu Shot — Influenza Prevention

 

The trial: Head-to-head comparison of oral colostrum against flu vaccination in both healthy adults and high-risk cardiovascular patients over two months. Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis, 2007.

The result: Healthy adults on colostrum alone averaged 0.33 flu episodes versus 1.1 in the vaccinated-only group — roughly three times more protective. Among the high-risk cardiac patients, the colostrum group had zero hospital admissions; the vaccinated group had multiple hospitalizations and one death. Flu-related costs in the colostrum group were about 30% of the vaccinated group’s. No significant side effects were reported.

Vitamin D, for the record, cut influenza A risk by 59% in children at 1,200 IU/day in a separate RCT. Neither appears in a single public health campaign.

→ Read the full article: Colostrum 3x More Effective Than Flu Vaccines

Honorable Mentions: When “Doing Something Else” Beat the Drug

Not every alternative comes in a capsule. From our long-running piece on non-pill interventions that outperformed pharmaceuticals in head-to-head trials:

• Sudarshan Kriya yoga breathing beat the antidepressant imipramine for depression (Journal of Affective Disorders, 2000).
• Acupuncture beat flunarizine for migraine prevention, with superior tolerability.
• Abdominal aromatherapy massage beat Tylenol for menstrual pain.
• Hypnosis matched Valium for anxiety during embryo transfer, with fewer side effects.
• Blue and red light therapy beat 5% benzoyl peroxide for acne, with no side effects.
• An elemental diet matched high-dose steroids for Crohn’s disease in children — and was superior for supporting their growth.

→ Read the full list: 11 Things Better than Drugs or Supplements for Healing

Why You Have Never Heard Most of This

Every study above is published in a peer-reviewed journal and sits in the National Library of Medicine. None of it is hidden. It is simply unfindable — buried in a haystack of tens of millions of papers, with no one paid to surface it, and, since 2021, no longer even filterable under PubMed’s complementary-and-alternative-medicine category, which was quietly removed.

That is why GreenMedInfo exists. We have spent seventeen years indexing this research — 1.4 million studies and counting, hand-mapped to over 16,000 substances, conditions and mechanisms — and keeping it free to search. In 2020 they tried to take it offline. It’s still here. It’s still yours.

If any of this was new to you, that is the whole problem — and the whole reason to search the archive, share this piece, and bring one of these studies to your next doctor’s appointment.

By Jill Erzen | The Defender | October 2, 2026

Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., an epidemiologist and sports physician, said her decision to follow the data during the COVID-19 pandemic came at a steep professional price.

Her research challenged policies on school closures, masking and COVID-19 vaccines. She said the fallout included losing her position at the University of California, Davis, being dropped from an NPR interview and being fired from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Høeg said her experience exposed the unwillingness of universities, media and public health institutions to adapt when research conflicted with their accepted narratives.

In an interview this week with investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker on The DisInformation Chronicle, Høeg said institutions too often treated the accepted narrative as settled and then dismissed or attacked people who questioned it.

That approach did more than distort the public discussion about COVID-19, Høeg said. It also created a scientific and institutional culture that could affect how other medical questions are handled long after the pandemic.

For Høeg, the solution is simple: Scientists should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

“It’s a core belief of mine that you have to be objective when you’re doing scientific studies,” she said. “Otherwise, you just shouldn’t do them. It’s pointless if you’re not willing to be objective.”

‘I … didn’t realize the jeopardy that I was putting myself in’

During the pandemic, Høeg published 30 to 40 papers on COVID-19 transmission, masking, youth sports, vaccine risk-benefit, pregnancy, long COVID, visitor restrictions and testing.

Some of her research challenged widely accepted claims.

One study found little evidence of COVID-19 transmission among children in Wisconsin schools, which was consistent with data from Europe. Another examined myocarditis risk in boys after their second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine dose and found the risks outweighed the benefits in boys who didn’t have underlying health conditions.

Høeg said she didn’t initially understand the professional risks she was taking by challenging the prevailing narrative.

“There was sort of a hesitancy to do this sort of research because I think people were afraid for their careers,” she said. “I actually was blessed with having recently moved from Denmark and didn’t realize the jeopardy that I was putting myself in by doing these sorts of studies.”

At the time, Høeg was conducting research at the University of California, Davis.

She said the university received calls, including from Nature magazine, complaining about her studies on pandemic policies. Eventually, the university asked her not to use her affiliation with the school.

Høeg said the university refused to renew her voluntary position in 2022, after the European Journal of Clinical Investigation published her study on myocarditis risks in boys who received the COVID-19 vaccine.

NPR also dropped an interview with Høeg for “All Things Considered” after she raised concerns about masking children during outdoor sports.

In a pre-interview discussion with NPR, she told the outlet, “We don’t have evidence that these masks work to prevent transmission. … Bottom line is, we shouldn’t be doing these unproven things to children that are harmful.”

Soon after, NPR told Høeg she was no longer needed for the interview.

“It does say a lot about our universities and institutions because it’s like they had been brainwashed to an extent to believe what the media was saying rather than actually look at the data,” Høeg said.

‘They repeated the same wording … even when the data didn’t back it up’

In 2022, Høeg and her colleagues conducted a follow-up analysis of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study on school mask mandates.

Høeg said their analysis used a larger dataset and a longer time period and reached the opposite conclusion about the relationship between mask mandates and COVID-19 transmission among children.

The team’s submission to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) was rejected. Høeg said reviewers described the submission as “rife with polemics.”

“Well, maybe it’s polarizing if you disagree with it,” Høeg said.

The rejection unearthed an underlying problem at the CDC, according to Høeg.

“They have a scientific agenda,” she said. “And so as soon as you have a scientific agenda, science has been thrown out the window. Science doesn’t have an agenda other than to find the truth.”

A 2024 analysis by Høeg and colleagues examined 77 mask studies published in the MMWR beginning in 2020. According to Høeg, 75% of the studies said masks were effective, while only 14% reported statistically significant results and none were randomized studies.

One finding especially stood out to her: She said 5% of the studies found masks were connected to higher infection rates, yet “they still concluded that masks worked.”

“They repeated the same wording over and over again in each of the studies, that ‘masks are necessary to decrease the spread’ and ‘masks are critical in controlling the case rates of COVID-19,’” she said. “They use the same sort of wording even when the data didn’t back it up at all.”

‘Why are we demonizing people for looking into this?’

Those concerns followed Høeg into the FDA in late 2025 when she was named acting director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER).

A leaked memo from then-FDA official Dr. Vinay Prasad said career staff had linked at least 10 child deaths to the COVID-19 vaccine between 2021 and 2024.

Høeg said she reviewed the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports and found that investigations involving medical records and autopsies had already been conducted.

“My question at the time was … why are these not being made public?” Høeg told Thacker.

Høeg said news leaked that she would present information about the deaths and their possible association with COVID-19 vaccines. She said the media response focused on portraying her as an “anti-vaxxer” rather than asking why the deaths had been investigated but not publicly disclosed.

“If we have these sorts of deaths happening in children due to medical products of any kind, why are we sitting on them for years?” she asked. “That’s the take-home I want people to have from this.”

She also questioned why people who investigate potential safety problems are attacked for trying to expose the dangers.

“Why are we demonizing people for looking into this? … Isn’t that what the public wants?” she asked.

‘The deep state really is a thing’

In May, just days after FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned, Høeg said she arrived at work to find media reports claiming she had resigned — something she said she knew nothing about.

FDA lawyers later asked her to resign, but she refused to sign the letter. She was subsequently locked out of the agency’s systems and escorted from the building.

Høeg said she never received a performance-based explanation for her termination. She also said the person identified as the author of her termination memo later denied writing or seeing it.

According to Høeg, agency lawyers told her the order came from “way above their pay grade.”

The experience changed how she viewed other departures from the agency. “It opened my eyes to the fact that maybe a number of the people who I thought had resigned really had not resigned,” she said.

“The deep state really is a thing,” she added.

‘Women who want to get pregnant … should be told about these risks’

For Høeg, the concerns she encountered during the COVID-19 era are not limited to COVID-19.

In 2025, she helped organize an FDA panel examining potential risks associated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, during pregnancy.

The American Psychiatric Association criticized the panel for what it called “misinterpretation and unbalanced viewpoints.” Høeg said the media also portrayed any discussion of potential risks as “misinformation about SSRI use” and a signal that depression wasn’t being taken seriously.

According to Høeg, the panel discussed risks already addressed in FDA labeling and scientific research, including miscarriage, premature birth, postpartum hemorrhage, congenital heart defects and neonatal adaptation syndrome.

“This should not be controversial that women who want to get pregnant and who are pregnant should be told about these risks,” she said.

She also warned about the lack of ongoing monitoring of drug safety.

“The FDA is not actively investigating the safety of these products in pregnancy or at all after the initial trials are done,” she said.

Høeg said the discussion should not be interpreted as an argument against treating depression. “I don’t think that any of this should be synonymous with not taking depression seriously,” she said. “That’s just nonsense.”

‘There’s just no reporting on this. … People have died taking this drug’

Høeg also discussed Tavneos, the Amgen-manufactured brand name for avacopan, a drug approved to treat a type of blood-vessel inflammation.

While at CDER, Høeg said she raised concerns that the pivotal clinical trial used to approve the drug had included manipulated data.

According to Høeg, at least eight deaths had been attributed to the drug because of liver injury.

The New England Journal of Medicine later retracted the paper detailing the trial, and European regulators withdrew the drug’s authorization. While the FDA has proposed withdrawing Tavneos’ approval, it remains available in the U.S.

Yet, the media barely covered it.

“There’s just no reporting on this,” Høeg said. “People have died taking this drug. … We asked for them to withdraw it from the market, and the media is just totally silent.”

Thacker: ‘There was no real learning in the end. … If anything, we became dumber’

Høeg said it is troubling that some of the most disputed COVID-19 policies are still treated as settled questions.

“How is this still part of our collective conversation that people … are still saying school closures were necessary and mask mandates were necessary?” she asked.

Thacker said the failure to learn from those policies could have consequences during the next pandemic. People who developed a “false sense of safety from masks” during COVID-19 could mistakenly assume masks will protect them from a more dangerous virus in the future, he said.

Thacker also questioned whether the country understands anything about the COVID-19 vaccines. “There was no real learning in the end. … If anything, we became dumber,” he said.

Høeg said the problem stems from the widespread failure to reconsider policies when the evidence changed.

“Once the government decided this is what we have to do, they just kept digging in, even though the data didn’t support it,” she said.

“This is why I keep doing these interviews, because it’s important for people to know the truth.”

Watch Høeg on ‘The DisInformation Chronicle’ podcast here:

---

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 2, 2026

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Thursday sued Pfizer and its CEO, Albert Bourla, alleging that the drugmaker misled the public by marketing its COVID-19 vaccine as safe and effective while not disclosing the vaccine’s potential risks to pregnant women, children and teenagers.

The 49-page lawsuit alleges Pfizer violated Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act by deceptively marketing its vaccine to the public in turn for making billions of dollars in profit.

According to the complaint, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine marketing campaign focused on two principal themes: that the shot “posed no material safety risks” and that “mass vaccination was necessary to stop the transmission of COVID-19” — even though Pfizer never tested the vaccine’s ability to stop the virus from spreading.

Pfizer possessed extensive evidence that its vaccine caused serious adverse events — including 1,223 reported deaths following vaccination as of February 2021 and 52 miscarriages among vaccinated pregnant women. However, the company assured the public the vaccine was safe.

“Today we sued Pfizer for deceptively marketing the products as safe — making billions — while pregnant women were miscarrying their babies and teenagers were having heart attacks,” Uthmeier said in a statement.

Florida AG says state has track record of success with similar lawsuits

In a statement, Pfizer said the allegations are baseless, and that the “representations made by Pfizer about its COVID-19 vaccine have been accurate and science-based” and that it “stands behind the safety and efficacy” of the product.

But Forrest B. Saunders, communications director for Uthmeier’s office, told The Defender “the complaint and comments by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier speak for themselves.”

Saunders said Florida has a track record of success with such lawsuits, having “recovered millions for Floridians through consumer protection efforts.”

Naomi Wolf, CEO of Daily Clout and author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity,” helped release documents in 2023 and 2024 revealing serious adverse events among pregnant women and irreversible harms to reproductive health. She called the lawsuit “a glimmer of potential justice long overdue.”

Florida resident Haley Schwartz, who was seriously injured following her COVID-19 vaccination in 2021, also welcomed the suit. She said injuries caused by the vaccine “have received inadequate attention” for years.

“Finally seeing these issues examined through a formal legal process feels significant and creates an important opportunity for greater scrutiny, transparency, and accountability regarding what was communicated to the public,” Schwartz said.

The lawsuit seeks civil penalties of $10,000 for each violation of the state’s consumer protection law — and $15,000 for each violation involving an elderly or disabled person.

Florida seeks to force Pfizer to return some of its profits and is asking for a permanent injunction against further deceptive practices.

Pfizer’s deceptive marketing sought to ‘ensure windfall profits’

According to the complaint, Pfizer engaged in a deceptive and “wide-ranging marketing campaign” to “drive consumer demand” for its COVID-19 vaccine, overcome widespread public skepticism and “ensure windfall profits.”

“This emphasis on the purported safety of the vaccine directly responded to widespread public concerns about a pharmaceutical product that had been developed on an unusually accelerated timeline, with uniquely limited testing and oversight, and employing novel mRNA technology,” the complaint states.

Pfizer’s campaign included public statements by Bourla claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was safe. The complaint cites a January 2023 interview in which Bourla claimed that Pfizer had not detected “a single [safety] signal” linked to the vaccine.

The complaint suggests public skepticism was warranted:

“Pfizer knew that data showed its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to myocarditis and pericarditis among minors; had reason to believe its COVID-19 vaccine would cause adverse events for pregnant women and their unborn babies in the first trimester, including miscarriage [and] thousands of reports of other adverse events including stroke and even death, especially among the elderly.”

By Feb. 28, 2021, Pfizer’s internal adverse event database already contained 158,893 adverse event reports and reports of 1,223 deaths linked to its COVID-19 shot, according to the complaint.

Pfizer by then also “possessed reports for 458 pregnant women exposed to its COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy” — over half of whom sustained at least one adverse event. Of 52 miscarriages, most occurred during the first trimester, “many within days of vaccination.”

Pfizer ended its COVID-19 vaccine trial involving pregnant women early, due to low participation, particularly among women in the early stages of pregnancy. But the drugmaker didn’t disclose “material facts already in its possession showing the risks associated with its COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy.”

Pfizer official admitted vaccine not tested for stopping transmission

Pfizer promoted its COVID-19 vaccine as a means of “protecting … loved ones” through a “wide-ranging marketing campaign” which suggested that the vaccine would stop the spread of COVID-19, the suit alleges.

But Janine Small, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, said the vaccine was not tested on stopping the virus, according to a 2021 statement cited in the lawsuit.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the “assurances of safety the company gave required knowledge Pfizer simply did not have.”

He cited a February 2021 Pfizer “nonclinical overview” document listing an extensive range of safety studies Pfizer did not conduct.

“Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may actually have been the least-studied approved product it has made this century,” Jablonowski said.

The lawsuit alleges that Pfizer’s misleading marketing claims translated into a financial windfall for Pfizer and Bourla. Between 2020 and 2023, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine revenue exceeded $80 billion, and Bourla received nearly $102 million in compensation.

Legal liability shield may not protect Pfizer in Florida lawsuit

COVID-19 countermeasures, including vaccines, are protected by a legal liability shield under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) of 2005.

Attorney Ray Flores, CHD’s senior outside counsel, said these protections may not extend to state-level consumer protection cases.

“All states have consumer protection statutes that normally would allow individual consumers to bring suit for fraudulent practices. Under the PREP Act, however, only states have the potential for successful suits,” Flores said.

Kansas and Texas have active lawsuits against Pfizer in the 10th and 5th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals, respectively. The suits make similar claims to Florida’s — namely, that Pfizer violated state consumer protection laws by marketing its COVID-19 vaccine as safe and effective.

“All three cases are remarkably similar, as they are brought under parens patriae,” a legal principle that allows states to file lawsuits to protect state residents, Flores said.

However, he said Florida’s lawsuit may face obstacles, as Pfizer may seek to move the case from state to federal court “to invoke PREP Act protection” — similar to what the company did in the Kansas and Texas lawsuits.

Flores said other states may be waiting on the sidelines for the outcomes of the Texas and Kansas cases.

“I wish more attorneys general would take such legal action,” Flores said. “There was a rumor back in 2024 that Utah, Mississippi and Louisiana were also suing Pfizer. It sounded good, and got lots of press, but it was never true.”

Flores also said he would like to see state attorneys general pressure U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “flex his muscles” by ending the PREP Act’s liability shield for COVID-19 vaccines.

Bourla defended the liability shield for vaccine makers in an interview last year.

---

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

Lies are Unbekoming | October 2, 2026

The genes the field promised were never there.

The genetic story of disease is a cover story.

The twenty-first century runs on it. Paediatric clinics. Cancer centres. Forensic laboratories. Family-planning counsel. It is used to explain illness, to assign blame, to foreclose questions. It protects the industries whose products and practices are what actually caused the harm.

It isn’t true.

In 2010, Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson looked at over seven hundred genome-wide association studies covering some eighty common diseases. The genes the field had promised were not there. The field invented a term, “missing heritability”, to explain the absence, and has quietly worked to bury the finding ever since.

The Genetic Deception is a book about what Latham and Wilson found. What the field did with it. And what the public was told instead.

---

The Genetic Deception

How a Failed Science Conceals the Real Causes of Disease

Second Edition, revised and expanded. 406 pages, paperback.

Across nineteen chapters and six appendices, the book works through the conditions where the genetic framework collapses on inspection. Cystic fibrosis, where the environmental trigger is omitted. Down’s syndrome, where the toxic exposures are known but not acknowledged. Dravet syndrome, where vaccine injury is renamed as inherited fate. BRCA. FH. Alpha-1. The forensic DNA story the public has never been told.

Long-form interviews with Jamie Andrews and Leon Karmameleon of the Telestai Network. Close engagement with the work of Dr Thomas Cowan, Elizabeth Nickson, and Latham and Wilson. A resource library at the back. An appendix on what to say when the doctor says “it’s genetic.”

What the book exposes is a procedure. A procedure for converting environmental injury, pharmaceutical damage, and industrial poisoning into inherited destiny. The procedure works on the patient. It works on the doctor. It works because most people who encounter it have never been shown what it conceals.

New in the Second Edition:

Three chapters not in the digital edition. The first is a long treatment of cystic fibrosis, the textbook example of a single-gene disease and the case that falls apart hardest on inspection. The second catalogues ten of the conditions currently labelled “genetic” and shows, one by one, what the label forecloses. The third asks where family resemblance actually comes from if not from genes, and what the Human Genome Project’s failure means for the question.

Expanded appendices, including an expanded vocabulary for the terms the framework uses to protect itself. New Notes and Sources across nine chapters, cited to the primary literature rather than to the field’s own summaries.

A full back-of-book index covering the people, institutions, conditions, and concepts named in the book, cross-referenced so the paperback works as a reference and not just a read-through. Any term the reader has seen in a clinic or in a news article — missing heritability, Dravet, CFTR, BRCA — can be looked up and traced to every place the book addresses it.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Genetics: The Ultimate Cover Story
3. Genetics Was Built on Bad Chemistry
4. The Fifth Wall: Genetics as the Final Fortress of Medical Extraction
5. Fool’s Gold Standard: The Unvalidated Science of DNA
6. Interview with Jamie Andrews
7. Interview with Leon Karmameleon (Telestai Network)
8. Your Genetic Heart Disease Isn’t Genetic
9. The Great DNA Data Deficit
10. The DNA Paradox: How Unseen Molecules Became Unquestioned Facts
11. How to Create a Genetic Condition
12. What is Cystic Fibrosis?
13. Down’s Syndrome: Environmental Poisoning Disguised as Genetic Fate
14. The Genetic Alibi: How Wayne Bennett’s Family Tragedy Exposes the Dravet Syndrome Cover Story
15. The Great Extinction Lie: How Genetics and Environmental Fraud are Destroying Rural Populations
16. The Emperor’s New Genes
17. The DNA Myth: What the Peer-Reviewed Literature Actually Shows About Forensic and Paternity Testing
18. The Ten “Genetic” Diseases That Aren’t Genetic
19. Heredity Without Genes

Appendix 1: The Vocabulary of Genetic Deception

Appendix 2: What to Say When the Doctor Says “It’s Genetic”

Appendix 3: The Four Real Causes

Appendix 4: The Conditions Currently Labelled “Genetic”

Appendix 5: The Eugenics Continuity

Appendix 6: The Curated Resource Library

Index

Who this book is for:

The reader who has watched a diagnosis arrive in their family and sensed that the explanation did not fit. The reader who wants to know what the research actually says instead of what the press release claims. The reader who is ready to ask what happened to the person before they were handed the gene.

The digital only first edition went out in May. The paperback — Second Edition, revised and expanded — is now live.

→ Order the paperback on Lulu

How Sesame Street, CNN, and federal health officials turned a children’s vaccine campaign into a one-way lesson in trust.

By Sayer Ji | September 30, 2026

How a $240 million messaging machine put a three-year-old puppet to work selling an mRNA shot to parents of infants — and what the government has quietly admitted since.

On June 28, 2022, Sesame Street posted a 60-second video to its YouTube channel titled “Elmo Gets the COVID-19 Vaccine | PSA.”

It’s a well-made piece of persuasion. Elmo, who has been three and a half years old since 1984, shows off his “super duper” bandage. There “was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Then his father, Louie, looks into the camera and speaks to every hesitant parent in America:

“I had a lot of questions about Elmo getting the COVID vaccine. Was it safe? Was it the right decision?”

Eleven seconds later, the doubt has been resolved for you:

“I learned that Elmo getting vaccinated is the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy and enjoying the things they love.”

A hug follows. Then an announcer: “It’s okay to have questions about COVID vaccines for your kids.”

That’s the move worth studying. The ad takes the parent’s instinct to ask questions, gives it to a beloved puppet, and answers it before the parent has a chance to. It presents doubt so it can close it down.

This was not a whimsical one-off from a children’s television workshop. It was one output of what its own organizers called the largest communications program in our nation’s history, built with federal public-health agencies, a major medical trade association, and tens of millions of corporate dollars.

Four years later, Pfizer-BioNTech’s product is no longer authorized for children ages six months through four years. Federal guidance and product labeling have also narrowed which pediatric uses are on-label, a shift sharply at odds with the PSA’s broad, categorical reassurance. Nobody made a puppet video about that.

This is the story of who built the campaign, what it cost, and what came after.

Part I: Who Was Behind It

Sesame Workshop’s own press release is candid about who was in the room. The PSA was released “in collaboration with the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative’s COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative,” and it was “produced in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).”

Five institutions. Each one deserves a name and a face.

Sesame Workshop

The nonprofit behind Sesame Street produced and released the spot. Its campaign lead was Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, Senior Vice President of US Social Impact. Its president at the time, Sherrie Westin, was named CEO in July 2024.

The clearest statement of what Sesame thought it was offering came from its own chief marketing officer. Launching an earlier round of vaccine PSAs, Samantha Maltin, EVP and CMO, said the goal was to:

“… harness the power of Sesame Workshop and the reach of the Ad Council…”

Harness the power. The asset being put to use was fifty years of trust that parents and children have placed in these characters.

The Ad Council

The Ad Council turns corporate media budgets into “public service” messaging. Its president and CEO, Lisa Sherman, was the campaign’s public face. On the Elmo spot:

“It’s important that parents feel informed and confident about what the COVID-19 vaccines mean for their families, and we are proud to work with our partners, medical experts – and of course Elmo – to spread that message.”

She also named the urgency: this was “an important decision many need to make in advance of the upcoming school season.”

COVID Collaborative

The COVID Collaborative is a bipartisan assembly of former officials, and it convened the vaccine education initiative with the Ad Council. Its CEO is John Bridgeland, former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Its president is Gary Edson, and its co-chairs are former Idaho Gov. and Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R) and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D). The Collaborative is a project of UNITE, chaired by Tim Shriver.

The CDC

The CDC was a named production partner, and it wasn’t a passive one. According to the campaign’s organizers, the CDC provided scientific guidance on all aspects of the campaign, and its brand appeared on select creative assets.

The American Academy of Pediatrics

The AAP, the pediatricians’ professional association, was the other named production partner. Its president in 2022 was Dr. Moira Szilagyi. Looking back later, she said: “Somewhere what got lost in our country, I think, was what a miracle these vaccines were.”

Keep the AAP in mind. It comes back in Part IV.

Part II: Follow the Money

The Elmo spot was built on a large funding structure, and its size helps explain how thoroughly this message saturated American media.

The corporate fund. On November 23, 2020, before any vaccine was authorized, the Ad Council announced a $50 million fund for the COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative, created with the COVID Collaborative. By February 2021 it had exceeded that goal.

The COVID Collaborative reports more than $52 million raised. The leading contributors it names are Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Cisco, CVS Health, Facebook, General Motors, Google and YouTube, the Humana Foundation, NBCUniversal/Comcast, Salesforce, Verizon, Walgreens, and Walmart.

Two of those names stand out. CVS Health and Walgreens both gave the shots the campaign was promoting in their own pharmacies.

The donated media. The money was only the seed. By October 26, 2021, the initiative had surpassed its goal of $240 million in donated media and related publicity. Donors of airtime and ad inventory included Disney (ABC, ESPN, Hulu), FOX, NBCUniversal and Telemundo, ViacomCBS, WarnerMedia, Facebook and Instagram, Google and YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and The Weather Channel.

Several of the same platforms that donated airtime and advertising inventory to the vaccine-education campaign were simultaneously under public and private pressure to enforce COVID-19 misinformation rules against specifically identified individuals, including people named in CCDH’s ‘Disinformation Dozen’ report. YouTube later [restored] my channels and stated that, after review, they did not violate its Community Guidelines.

The taxpayer layer. Alongside the private effort, HHS ran its own $265 million COVID public-education campaign starting in summer 2020. That included a $250 million NIH award to the Fors Marsh Group, which created the “We Can Do This” brand, all paid for through a $300 million interagency agreement drawing on CDC’s CARES Act funds. Under its “Vaccinate with Confidence” framework, the CDC funded more than 200 partners. Across the March 2021–December 2022 rollout, it funded 110 primary and 1,051 subrecipient partners at the national, state, and community level.

A note on accuracy. I have not found documentation that Pfizer or Moderna directly paid for the Elmo spot, and the campaign materials don’t list them as partners. Pfizer does appear as a Sesame Workshop donor in later years, in the $100,000–$249,999 band of its 2024 impact report. That’s worth knowing, but it’s a separate fact. The documented structure is damning on its own: corporate money, federal science guidance, and a medical trade association, all speaking through a puppet.

Part III: It Wasn’t One Ad

The Elmo spot was the youngest-audience edge of a sustained effort to put Sesame Street characters to work for vaccine messaging.

• November 2021: CNN and Sesame Street co-produced a family town hall, “The ABCs of COVID Vaccines.” That same month, Big Bird delivered his own pro-vaccine message to young viewers, which drew public criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz.
• June 2022: Elmo’s PSA, released days after the FDA’s emergency authorization for children as young as six months.
• Later: Sesame Workshop, the Ad Council, COVID Collaborative, and CDC launched a further series of PSAs with Elmo, Louie and other Muppets, “created in close partnership with the CDC.”

The criticism started right away. Cruz accused Sesame Street of having Elmo “aggressively advocate” for shots in young children and noted that the spot cited no scientific evidence. The comedian Russell Brand put it more sharply:

“When it starts getting into complex territory that involves the power of the state, the influence of pharmaceutical companies, the impact of coronavirus on young children — these are not issues I want resolved by members of Elmo’s family.”

The critics were dismissed as cranks at the time. Here is what the government has said since.

---

Part IV: The Walk-Back Nobody Advertised

There was no $240 million campaign for any of what follows. No Muppets and no hug at the end. It came out as label changes, regulatory memos, and footnotes in clinical guidance.

The cardiac warning got stronger

On June 25, 2025, the FDA required and approved expanded warnings about myocarditis and pericarditis on Pfizer’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax. The new label estimates about 8 cases per million doses in people aged 6 months through 64 years, and about 27 per million in males aged 12 through 24, in the week after vaccination.

The most important sentence isn’t about frequency, though. It’s about what happened to the hearts afterward:

“… at a median follow-up of approximately 5 months post-vaccination, persistence of abnormal cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) findings that are a marker for myocardial injury was common. The clinical and prognostic significance of these CMR findings is not known.”

Read it twice. Five months out, markers of heart-muscle injury were “common,” and the agency says their long-term significance is “not known.” This isn’t a critic’s claim. It comes from an FDA-funded, FDA-co-authored study, and it’s now printed on the label.

The spot told parents “there was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Nobody in the ad said “unknown long-term cardiac significance.”

The authorization for the youngest children was pulled

On August 27, 2025, Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine was no longer authorized for children under 5. CDC’s current clinical guidance puts it plainly: “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is no longer authorized in the United States for children ages 6 months–4 years.”

That is the age group the Elmo spot was released to reach. It went out days after emergency authorization opened the shots to children as young as six months. Four years later, one of the two products it promoted to parents of those children can’t legally be given to them.

Healthy children are now “off-label”

The broad “everyone six months and older” recommendation is gone. In May 2025, HHS dropped the routine recommendation for healthy children, and the CDC moved to what it calls shared clinical decision-making.

CDC’s current guidance, updated September 23, 2026, limits Moderna’s approval for the youngest children to those with “at least one condition that places them at increased risk for severe COVID-19.” Then it states the conclusion outright:

“Vaccination of children 5-11 years of age with any product other than Spikevax or Comirnaty and vaccination of children in this age group without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”

“Vaccination of persons 12-64 years of age without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”

In 2022, the message was that vaccinating Elmo was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.” In 2026, the CDC’s own wording is that giving the shot to a healthy child is off-label.

The deaths question

On November 28, 2025, Dr. Vinay Prasad, then director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, sent staff a memo headed “Deaths in children due to COVID-19 vaccines and CBER’s path forward.” He wrote that career staff “have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” based on an initial review of 96 child deaths reported to VAERS between 2021 and 2024.

The FDA’s formal analysis, made public in May 2026, came back more cautious. Of the 96 reports reviewed, none were classified as “certain.” Five were classified “possible” and two “probable,” mostly involving myocarditis, with an average age of 13. The agency stressed that these classifications don’t prove causation.

Media coverage framed that result as a debunking. Set the headline aside, though. The FDA’s own conservative review, using WHO causality criteria, still found seven child deaths it could not rule out as vaccine-related, and it called two of them probable.

And yet, still being promoted

This is where the irony stops being subtle.

Visit the FDA’s parent-facing page today, Vaccines for Children – A Guide for Parents and Caregivers. The COVID-19 vaccine is still listed alongside measles and polio among “the most commonly administered vaccines.” And parents are still told:

“Getting a COVID-19 vaccine is the best way to prevent COVID-19, including the potential consequences of hospitalization and death.”

That’s Louie’s line almost word for word, four years later, from the same agency whose label now carries the cardiac warning, whose authorization for under-5s was pulled, and whose own reviewers flagged seven child deaths.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, a production partner on the Elmo spot, hasn’t backed off either. As of September 2026, the AAP recommends COVID-19 vaccination for “all infants and children ages 6 months through 23 months,” and for “anyone ages 2 to 18 who isn’t at risk but whose parents or guardian wants them to get a shot.”

So we have two different postures at once. The regulator has narrowed approval, expanded the warning, and reclassified healthy-child use as off-label. The professional association that helped make the puppet ad still recommends the shot for every baby. And the FDA’s own parent guide still uses the 2022 talking points.

Part V: What They’ll Say — and Why It Doesn’t Save Them

Serious readers deserve the strongest counterargument, so here it is.

CDC’s guidance cites a retrospective cohort of more than 4 million people aged 16–25 from 2020 to 2025. It found myocarditis incidence of 0.05% after COVID illness versus 0.005% after vaccination. In other words, the infection carries a higher myocarditis risk than the shot.

That’s a legitimate data point and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t answer the question this piece is asking, for three reasons.

First, the comparison is an average over a population of teenagers and young adults. It says nothing about a healthy toddler with near-zero risk of severe disease. That’s the child this campaign targeted, and the child for whom the CDC now calls the shot off-label.

Second, it doesn’t address the finding printed on the label: persistent markers of heart-muscle injury at five months, of “not known” significance. The open letter discussed below says there are “no studies demonstrating prevention of hospitalization or death” in children. If that’s right, an unknown cardiac risk is being weighed against a benefit that was never shown.

Third, and most importantly, the argument here doesn’t depend on any contested injury number. It depends on an asymmetry. When the product was being promoted, it got a puppet, $50 million, a quarter-billion in donated airtime, the CDC’s logo, and the pediatricians’ endorsement. When the regulator narrowed the product, it got a label revision and a footnote. The public was sold a certainty the evidence never supported, and was never told when that certainty was withdrawn.

That isn’t public health communication. It’s a marketing campaign that never issued a correction.

Part VI: The Petition — Why I Signed

Earlier this month, 168 physicians, scientists, researchers, lawmakers, and health-freedom advocates, representing more than 63 million followers, sent an open letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump demanding removal of the mRNA platform. The effort was coordinated by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden. The signatories include Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louisiana Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Sean Troxclair, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Tucker Carlson, and others.

I’m one of them, and I want to explain why.

The letter’s first demand is to “ban mRNA/gene therapy-derived technologies for all vaccines.” That includes the products still being given to children. Its other demands are to end the PREP Act declaration and its “ironclad liability shield for manufacturers and administrators,” ask Congress to repeal the PREP Act, ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, end the incentive structures that push providers toward medical coercion, and end conflicts of interest at the CDC, FDA, NIH, and NIAID.

On children specifically, the letter makes the point this whole piece has been building toward:

“Parental choice is not realistic when parents are not getting informed consent on the true risks of these products.”

It also takes on the “shared clinical decision-making” framework directly:

“By treating the decision to inject a child with mRNA as a ‘shared decision,’ while treating routine injections as the default, a dangerous legal precedent is being set that assigns powers to the federal government that have historically belonged solely to parents.”

According to the letter, more than 50 million Americans received mRNA COVID shots this year, including about 7 million children, and HHS has awarded $1.24 billion in contracts to Pfizer for future mRNA shots, “including for children.”

The Elmo spot is exactly why that line about informed consent matters. You can’t give informed consent to a hug from a puppet. A one-minute ad that turns a parent’s hesitation into a script and then answers it in eleven seconds isn’t informing anyone. It’s persuasion aimed at the people least able to push back: parents who trust Sesame Street and children who love Elmo.

The letter isn’t the only pressure. Children’s Health Defense’s citizen petition, asking the FDA to revoke the Pfizer and Moderna licenses, has been pending since December 8, 2025 and has drawn more than 104,000 public comments in support. On September 25, the Independent Medical Alliance called on the CDC to immediately withdraw its “off-label” recommendation for healthy infants, children, and adults.

HHS’s response to the open letter, through press secretary Emily Hilliard, was that Secretary Kennedy “believes mRNA products warrant heightened scientific scrutiny,” and that HHS had “wound down investments in mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory viruses because the technology does not effectively protect against infection from rapidly mutating viruses such as COVID-19 and flu.”

Think about that sentence next to the Elmo spot. The federal health department now says the technology “does not effectively protect against infection” from COVID. In 2022, a puppet told America it was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.”

Heightened scrutiny isn’t enough. A product that federal officials now concede doesn’t reliably prevent infection, that carries a cardiac warning with unknown long-term significance, whose own regulator calls it off-label for healthy children, and whose makers are protected from liability should not be given to children at all.

Conclusion: The Correction That Never Aired

Every institution in the Elmo spot is still operating. Sesame Workshop is still making children’s programming. The Ad Council is still running “public service” campaigns. The CDC’s logo is still on its creative. The AAP still recommends the shot for every infant. The FDA’s parent guide still repeats Louie’s line.

None of them has produced a PSA that says: We told you this was the best way to protect your baby. Since then the label has been changed to warn about heart injury. The authorization for the youngest children was withdrawn. The government now calls this use off-label for healthy kids. We’re sorry we used Elmo to tell you otherwise.

That’s the one-minute spot this country is owed. Until it airs, the original belongs where I’ve put it: in the Hall of Fame of the Covid-era Mockingbird Media, as a case study in what happens when institutions that are supposed to earn a parent’s trust decide to manufacture it instead.

Watch it again. Listen for the moment Louie asks, “Was it safe?”

It was a good question. It still is. They just never let him wait for the answer.

By Thomas J Shepstone | Energy Security and Freedom | September 24, 2026

A little over a year ago, a study titled “Warming Accelerates Global Drought Severity” was published in Nature, a climate-consumed journal that has lost all credibility among serious folks. The authors included multiple academics from the University of Oxford in the UK, an elitist institution if there ever was one.

The abstract of the study said this (emphasis and paragraphing added):

Drought is one of the most common and complex natural hazards affecting the environment, economies and populations globally. However, there are significant uncertainties in global drought trends, and a limited understanding of the extent to which a key driver, atmospheric evaporative demand (AED), impacts the recent evolution of the magnitude, frequency, duration and areal extent of droughts.

Here, by developing an ensemble of high-resolution global drought datasets for 1901–2022, we find an increasing trend in drought severity worldwide. Our findings suggest that AED has increased drought severity by an average of 40% globally.

Not only are typically dry regions becoming drier, but also wet areas are experiencing drying trends.

During the past 5 years (2018–2022), the areas in drought have expanded by 74% on average compared with 1981–2017, with AED contributing to 58% of this increase. The year 2022 was record-breaking, with 30% of the global land area affected by moderate and extreme droughts, 42% of which was attributed to increased AED. Our findings indicate that AED has an increasingly important role in driving severe droughts and that this tendency will likely continue under future warming scenarios.

The study also produced numerous headlines in popular media such as these:

• The New York Times (4 June 2025): “Higher Temperatures and a Thirsty World.”
• The Guardian (3 July 2025): “Weatherwatch: how ‘thirstier’ atmosphere is making droughts more severe.”
• ScienceAlert : “Our Atmosphere’s Growing Thirst Is a Hidden Cause of Worsening Droughts.”
  Lead author Solomon Gebrechorkos wrote that atmospheric thirst caused ~40%
• Earth.com :
  • “How a thirsty atmosphere is making global droughts much worse.”
  • Later follow-up: “Earth has become a planet where the air is always thirsty, and that’s quickly drying out the land.”
• Oxford / UC Santa Barbara / Cardiff University press releases (widely picked up): “Earth’s growing thirst is making droughts worse, even where it rains” and “The atmosphere’s growing thirst is making droughts worse, even where it rains.”
  These used the same 40% figure and an “invisible sponge” metaphor.
• Climate Central (October 2025): “Warmer, Thirstier Air Worsens Drought.”

Now, the whole thing has been retracted. Here’s that story, translated from the German publication Science Files:

Drought Catastrophe Cancelled: The Next Climate Change Junk Paper Has Been Retracted
By Michael Klein
September 16, 2026

Because the climate is changing, the atmosphere drinks more [perhaps out of frustration]; because the atmosphere drinks more, it becomes drier on Earth…

Most of the authors from the not fully named “author pack” make their living at the University of Oxford, and they all announced the apocalypse by drying out in 2025:

Since 1981, they calculated, droughts on Earth have become more severe and more intense;

• An increased “thirst” of the atmosphere made droughts from 2018 to 2022 40% more severe than in the 37 years before that.
• Comparing the two periods: 5 years since 2018 versus 37 years since 1981, the area affected by drought has become 74% larger, 58% of that due to an increased “thirst of the atmosphere.”
• Since 2022, 30% of the Earth’s land surface has been affected by moderate to extreme drought;
• With further climate change, all of this will become much worse.

These are the results that Gebrechorkos and his co-authors spread via the mainstream media, and these are the results that are all wrong.

The authors miscalculated, mixed up data, weighted them incorrectly, compared apples at the equator with dry ice in the Arctic. The comparison periods on which all the results that made it into the media are based are incorrectly coded, so data were assigned incorrectly…

The fact that the junk study has been withdrawn does not change the fact that the articles in the mainstream media, such as the one from ZEIT that we presented above, are still there, have not been provided with any correction, and even if they had been provided with a correction, it would remain largely without effect, because contributions like that of Gebrechorkos et al. (2025) are, in my view, only written in order to be distributed by the media and to hype up the climate apocalypse.

This is not a claim made off the cuff, but one that can be demonstrated from the original contribution by Gebrechorkos et al. (2025), a contribution that was designed in such a way that the “dryness” of the Earth and its soils estimated at the end — a largely arbitrary value, the result of an absurd calculation — is maximized.

This is why the entire climate movement is collapsing. It’s all built on hype by those with special interests in perpetuating a grift, in this case, a pursuit of academic praise and, no doubt, research money put up by other grifters.

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 22, 2026

The Arctic sea ice should have melted away years ago, according to the “experts”.

In 2007, for instance, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told us that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. In December that year, Jay Zwally of NASA agreed, giving the ice till 2012.

A year later, Professor David Barber went one step further, saying the ice would all be gone that very summer. Then we had Al Gore confidently predicting it would all disappear by 2016.

For sheer persistence in getting it wrong, however, first prize must go to Professor Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge:

· In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice free by 2015/16

· In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020

· In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice free that summer (though curiously he now defined “ice free” as less than 1 million square kilometers!)

Strangely, all these “experts” have been pretty quiet lately. Little wonder, because Arctic sea ice extent is just as large now as it was when all of those fatuous claims were made.

To be fair, they were only talking about summer sea ice. Even they were not daft enough to think that there would be no ice in winter either.

As is always the case in mid-September, the sea ice has just provisionally hit its minimum extent for the year, at 4.574 million sq km. Much of it is still over a meter thick.

https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/data-and-image-archive

There was a decline in ice cover during the 1990s and early 2000s, which led to the fears expressed above. However, real Arctic experts have known for years that the Arctic climate is cyclical.

For instance, the Arctic underwent a warming phase in the 1920s and 30s. According to a US Weather Bureau report in 2022:

There followed a much colder period in the 1960s and 70s, when sea ice extent grew substantially, a time known as the Sea Ice Years in Iceland with half the island surrounded by ice.. As a result, attempts at grain growing in Iceland, which had been resumed in the warmer decades of this century after a lapse of some hundreds of years, were abandoned.

With the advent of full satellite coverage, official data for sea ice became available in 1979, the very time when the ice was at its fullest extent.

On a longer time scale, of course, scientists know that sea ice has been far less extensive for most of the last 10,000 years.

But where global warming is concerned, real science goes out the window!

Dr. John Campbell | November 25, 2025

A Pilot, Randomised, Placebo-Controlled, Double-Blind Trial of a Single Oral Dose of Ivermectin for Post-Exposure Prophylaxis of SARS-CoV-2

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4923/17/9/1205

People who took one small oral dose of ivermectin after exposure, took longer to test positive and had more time alive and free of symptoms.

Multiple reports from in vitro infectious models document Ivermectin’s antiviral properties

Click to access cells-09-02100.pdf

Ivermectin has broad-spectrum antiviral activity.

Randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled

Single oral dose of Ivermectin as prophylaxis for SARS-CoV-2

Trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a single oral low dose of Ivermectin

Ability to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection?

Ability to reduce symptoms if infection did occur?

Methods

Asymptomatic community-dwelling adults

Enrolled within 72 h of close contact with a case of SARS-CoV-2.

Single oral 200 µg/kg dose of Ivermectin or placebo.

65Kg woman given 13mg

80Kg man given 16mg

The primary outcome

Conversion to a positive PCR or RAT test within 14 days of close contact.

Secondary outcomes

(for those who tested positive)

Days alive free of symptoms in the 14 and 28 days following ivermectin

Days from close contact until a positive PCR or RAT

Results

N = 536 (86 met inclusion criteria and were randomised)

68 adhered and were included in the analysis.

Ivermectin arm

11/36 tested positive

Placebo arm

11/32 tested positive

So, ivermectin did not prevent people testing positive

Days from close contact until a positive PCR or RAT

Increased by 2.3 days in ivermectin group.

P = 0.033

So, ivermectin lengthened the incubation period

Viral load needed to precipitate clinical disease took longer to develop – indicating an antiviral effect.

Infection may have been prevented from primary contact, – indicating an antiviral effect.

Days alive free of symptoms

Increased by 2.5 days in ivermectin group.

P = 0.036

So ivermectin delayed onset of symptoms in people who tested positive

(Longer asymptomatic period)

Controlling included

Age, prior SARS-CoV-2 infection, body mass index, hypertension, lung disease

Conclusions

We did not demonstrate that a single oral low dose of Ivermectin administered to asymptomatic adults within 72 h of close contact with a case of
SARS-CoV-2 prevents conversion to a positive PCR or RAT.

(may have done with a larger sample size)

Amongst those who did convert to a positive PCR or RAT

Ivermectin significantly lengthened the time from close contact to conversion

Ivermectin increased the number of days alive free of symptoms

More details

Initiation of this trial in late 2021

Discovery in 1975

Massively used around the world

Nobel Prize in 2015

Very low incidence of serious adverse side effects

No instance of resistance reported in over 25 years.

Ivermectin can bind to and inhibit the nuclear transport roles of the host importin α (IMPα) protein, which is known to mediate the nuclear import of various viral proteins and key host factors.

Other quite distinct antiviral actions of Ivermectin have been proposed.

High (therapeutic) concentrations collect in the lungs, stable for more than 30 days in cattle.

Trial was based on the strong clinical retrospective association of statistically significantly lower mortality in patients who received oral Ivermectin (200 μg/kg) compared with usual care.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…

Ivermectin patients 15% mortality

Controls, 25.2% mortality

In subjects with severe pulmonary disease

Ivermectin patients, mortality 38.8%
Controls, 80.7% mortality

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 27, 2026

Daily temperature records are meaningless in terms of climate and weather. But they are of immense propaganda value.

So, step forward Marco Petagna, Media Advisor & Senior Operational Meteorologist at the UK Met Office:

https://x.com/Petagna/status/2103367986975273082

Followed later in the day by the ITV weatherman:

The Met Office confirmed 27.0C at Frittenden:

But how do we know what the previous daily record was? Indeed, how does the Met Office?

Are we supposed to take them on trust? If so, that trust is misplaced.

An article in the Times 15 years ago, following a warm spell of weather, reminded readers that it had been much hotter in September 1895! Their archived news reports revealed that temperatures had reached 30.6C (87.1F) on both 25th and 27th of September in Strathfield Turgis, Hampshire.

When challenged about this on X, Marco Petagna replied that Strathfield Turgis was “not on our internal records for some reason”.

How convenient!!!!

In fact, the weather during that last week in September 1895 was exceptionally hot for days on end, much hotter than the 27.0C at Frittenden. The highest readings for the month were variously set on dates between the 24th and 29th at different locations:

Strathfield Turgis was no fluke or outlier.

A number of sites up and down the country exceeded 27.0C/80.6F, on the 24th, 25th, 237th and 28th:

Note that North Foreland recorded 81F on the 25th, the day under discussion.

These are just a small selection of stations, used in the Met Office Monthly Summaries. There will be hundreds of other sites, such as Strathfield, and given the prolonged nature of the heatwave in 1895 and its widespread geographical coverage, it seems inevitable that many other sites topped 81F that day.

Petagna’s comment about “internal records” is revealing. It indicates that the Met Office has simply binned any temperature data it deems to be “too high”.

As one commenter wisecracked:

In the meantime, it is clear that we cannot trust any daily record claims made by the Met Office.

Now you know why outbreaks still regularly occur in highly vaccinated populations

Informed with Aaron Siri | September 24, 2026

On the topic of splitting up the MMR vaccine into 3 separate vaccines, everyone should know that in 2012, two Merck virologists came forward and explained that when Merck sought to change the label on its MMR vaccine and approval for ProQuad (a combination MMR and varicella vaccine), it “falsely certified as having an efficacy rate that is significantly higher than it actually is.” (See Complaint ¶ 1.)

As detailed in the whistleblower lawsuit, Merck obtained a license for its mumps vaccine in 1967. (Comp. ¶ 16.) In the late 1990s, to obtain approval for ProQuad and change the label on its MMR vaccine, Merck needed to reconfirm its claims of efficacy for its mumps vaccine made thirty years prior. (Comp. ¶ 22.) Two of Merck’s virologists working on testing the efficacy of the mumps vaccine revealed that after Merck could not demonstrate a 95% efficacy for its mumps vaccine, the results were simply fraudulently falsified to achieve this result. (Comp. ¶¶ 15-131.)

As explained by the virologists, Merck took blood samples pre-vaccinated with the mumps vaccine and then exposed them to the mumps virus. (Comp. ¶¶ 25-28.) Suspecting a test against a live strain of mumps would not yield a 95% efficacy, Merck tried to improperly obtain this rate using an attenuated strain of the mumps virus. (Comp. ¶¶ 29-30.) When that would not achieve 95% efficacy, Merck tried different virus dilutions, different staining procedures, and even more liberal counting techniques. (Comp. ¶¶ 31-32.) The Merck lab even improperly added animal antibodies to the blood samples and still could not achieve a 95% efficacy rate. (Comp. ¶¶ 33-39.)

When it was clear that even improper testing techniques could not produce the desired result, the test reports were simply falsified. (Comp. ¶¶ 40-51.) According to the Merck virologists, to document the desired efficacy rate, Merck destroyed result sheets and falsified various documents. (Id.) The Merck virologists claim this fraud was done with the direct authority and approval of Merck’s senior management. (Comp. ¶¶ 52-58.)

Now you know.

This may explain why outbreaks of mumps still regularly occur in highly vaccinated populations. See, e.g.:

• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6529a2.htm(317 cases; 89% had received at least 2 MMR doses);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6729a1.htm(281 cases; high two-dose coverage among university-affiliated cases, with community spread);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6614a4.htm(301 student cases; all patients with complications had received at least 2 doses);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6647a5.htm(42 cases; all patients had ≥2 documented MMR doses; campus two-dose coverage exceeded 99%);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6148a2.htm(29 cases; 76% had received the recommended 2 dose);
• https://cdc.gov/mumps/outbreaks/index.html(CDC: “experts aren’t sure why vaccinated people still get mumps…).Complaint: https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Merck-Compl.pdf

By Clare Craig, Ros Jones & Mark Stronge | Health Advisory & Recovery Team | September 20, 2026

The change in the law to enable this came as an amendment, SI2024/1162, to the Bread and Flour Regulations 1998. As a Statutory Instrument, there was no parliamentary debate.  There was no full scientific Impact Assessment; just a de minimis financial assessment by DEFRA and limited DHSC input. The stated aim is to increase blood folate levels in pregnant women in order to reduce the risk of neural tube defects (NTDs).  The Government estimates a reduction of about 200 Neural Tube Defect (NTD)-affected pregnancies annually, approximately 20% of UK cases.  Most of these would have ended in a termination of pregnancy or a neonatal death but a small number of births of children with spina bifida may be avoided.

No proper assessment of the harms of folic acid has been carried out, yet it is proposed to give it to every man, woman and child in this country indefinitely, rather than just giving supplements for a few months to those women wishing to take them. Most notably there are several groups of people whom the NHS currently advises to avoid folic acid medication. This includes patients with cancer, Vitamin B12 deficiency and cardiac stent procedures (patients on haemodialysis were also included in the list until recently). Analysis of long term outcomes from 10 randomised trials has shown a worrying 23% increase in cancers, 24% for prostate cancer.

What is not at all clear, is how people will avoid folic acid once it is in virtually all flour.

The UK Government presents folic acid fortification as a settled, cost-free public health win. 

Every one of its load-bearing claims collapses under examination. 

First, “folic acid is a B vitamin.” This is the foundational deception. Folic acid is not a vitamin at all. It is a synthetic, oxidized compound that does not occur in nature. The actual vitamin is folate, found in leafy greens and liver. Folic acid must be converted in the body, and a large share of the population converts it poorly due to common MTHFR gene variants. The result is unmetabolized folic acid circulating in the blood, which has been linked to masking vitamin B12 deficiency and to accelerated growth of existing pre-cancerous lesions. Calling it “a B vitamin” is the rhetorical move that makes the whole policy sound harmless.

Second, “it helps prevent neural tube defects.” The honest version is that high-dose supplementation in women with a previous affected pregnancy showed benefit in a 1991 trial. What the government has done is extrapolate that clinical result to low-dose, population-wide dosing through bread. Those are not the same intervention, and the “200 cases prevented” figure is a model output, not a measurement.

Third, and this is the killing blow, the only large randomised trial in otherwise healthy women, the Hungarian trial by Czeizel and Dudás, found that every category of fetal death was higher in the folic acid group. Total fetal deaths were 374 (13.4%) against 304 (11.4%) in the control arm, an excess of 70 deaths that was statistically significant. In that same trial, the number of neural tube defects prevented was six. That is roughly nine to twelve dead babies for every defect apparently prevented. The mechanism was named by the trial’s own principal investigator in a 1997 Lancet paper: terathanasia, the death of the malformed. Folic acid may reduce the count of babies born with neural tube defects not by curing them, but by killing the affected embryos before birth.

Fourth, the government knows this and has chosen to redefine the dead babies as a benefit. When asked directly in Parliament, the Department of Health answered that folic acid extended the viability of early conceptuses, so the excess miscarriages were really evidence of extra life-creation. No evidence was supplied for this. The data refute it, because if early losses were merely being promoted upward, chemical pregnancies should have fallen. They rose alongside every other category.

Fifth, the surveillance data cannot detect the harm. The US monitoring system only records fetal deaths at 20 weeks or later, while the excess deaths in the trial were overwhelmingly first-trimester miscarriages and chemical pregnancies. The harm signal is structurally invisible to the system used to claim success.

Sixth, the “200 babies” figure is inflated. Even on the government’s own final assessment, the operative effect is around 31 fewer live births a year, of which about 28 would be children living with disability. The rest of the “200” is mostly terminations avoided and a notional quality-of-life valuation. The economic case values a life-year at £70,000, more than double what the NHS uses for medicines.

Seventh, the decline in neural tube defects happened before folic acid existed. Spina bifida fell 82 percent between 1972 and 1991 in England and Wales. The recommendation to take folic acid arrived in 1992, after almost all of that decline had already occurred. Folic acid is being credited with a fall it could not have caused, and after 1992 the rate of decline actually slowed.

Eighth, the safety question for everyone else, which the campaign suppresses entirely. The NHS itself lists categories of people told to avoid folic acid, and most of them have no idea that mandatory fortification means avoiding flour entirely. These include people with cancer, people with B12 deficiency, people with stents, and people with kidney disease.

Ninth, take cancer. Lifetime cancer risk in the UK is around one in two, so you are mandating a synthetic compound linked to driving pre-cancerous growth for a population, half of whom will at some point be cancer patients or survivors. Unmetabolized folic acid has been associated with accelerated growth of existing pre-cancerous lesions, particularly in the colon. For anyone with active cancer or a history of colorectal adenomas, folic acid is not benign. It is fuel.

Tenth, then B12. Folic acid masks vitamin B12 deficiency, allowing neurological damage to progress invisibly while blood markers look normal. The elderly are the classic at-risk group, and they are also heavy bread consumers. The policy doses the exact population most vulnerable to hidden B12 deficiency.

Eleventh, stents and cardiovascular disease. People with coronary stents and certain vascular conditions are among those advised against folic acid, with some trials showing worse cardiovascular outcomes, including restenosis concerns, in people with existing heart disease. Those patients cannot avoid the exposure without abandoning a staple food.

Twelfth, then kidney disease. Folic acid metabolism and accumulation are altered in renal impairment, and patients with kidney disease are routinely told to be cautious. Again, no exemption, no alternative, no consent.

Thirteenth, beyond the NHS list, there is the prostate cancer signal, with some research suggesting a doubling of prostate cancer risk in men, and concerns about immune response in women. None of this was given a value in the government’s assessment. The final assessment named potential harms to others but then did not quantify them.

Fourteenth, like men, infants and children are a group that cannot benefit. For children, the duration of mandatory folic acid ingestion will effectively last a lifetime. Yet the dosage per kilogram is far higher for children, when existing fortification of breakfast cereals is added to the new mandatory fortification of flour and hence bread.

Finally, the “nearly half of pregnancies are unplanned” argument is a confession disguised as a justification. Because some women do not know they are pregnant early on, the answer is to medicate every man, woman, child, and elderly person in the country through the bread supply. The number needed to treat is roughly 440 women to prevent one neural tube defect. The number needed to harm is one in 50 women suffering a lost pregnancy. The harm is about nine times more likely than the benefit. Where are the safety studies for a whole population?

The structure of the policy is the scandal. Tens of millions of people will be exposed every year with zero possibility of benefit. Only a small subgroup, women in early pregnancy, is the nominal target. For everyone else, the benefit is exactly nothing, and any risk at all is pure downside. The people this is unsafe for are not a rare corner case. They are half the population over a lifetime, concentrated precisely in the groups that eat the most bread.

This UK government policy is built on a misrepresented trial, an inflated model, the reclassification of fetal deaths as a public health victory, and the forced medication of the entire population, including the very groups for whom folic acid is contraindicated, with no risk-benefit assessment and no consent. From December 2026 it becomes compulsory.

A letter has been sent to the minister last month and a very inadequate response received, here. Letters have also been sent to all medically qualified MPs and peers, with as yet one reply.

Sign the parliamentary petition to stop folic acid being added to flour. We need a complete stop to all fortification. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/769589 

Also, if any readers do have one of the NHS listed medical contradictions, do write to your MP and get them to ask questions.

To find all the recent HART articles on Folic acid go to https://www.hartgroup.org/category/folic-acid/

An Essay on What the Fifteen-Minute Consultation Leaves Out

Lies are Unbekoming | September 10, 2026

What follows is twelve documented findings compressed into one sitting. It is written for the reader who has been prescribed one of these drugs, or is caring for someone who has, and who wants to know what the fifteen-minute consultation did not include. Every claim is drawn from the profession’s own literature, its own regulatory filings, its own package inserts, or the admissions of its own senior figures. Where an item is developed at greater length elsewhere in this series, that is noted. The purpose here is not depth on any single item. It is the cumulative weight of the twelve landing together.

Opening

Three percent of the 4,041 patients enrolled in the STAR*D trial remitted, stayed well, and remained in the study through the one-year follow-up.¹

The trial was announced with a cumulative remission figure of 67 percent.² When Ed Pigott and colleagues spent more than five years reanalyzing the data with fidelity to the original protocol, they found the 3 percent figure. When journalists put the 3 percent number to Maurizio Fava, one of the lead investigators, he acknowledged it was accurate. The investigators knew.³

The paper has not been retracted. It is still cited in psychiatric textbooks. The American Journal of Psychiatry ignored a petition signed by more than 1,800 people asking for retraction. The New York Times, repeatedly notified of the fraud, published the 70 percent figure again in a 2024 article praising the drugs.⁴

STAR*D was the largest depression trial ever conducted. It was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. It was designed by the profession’s most senior researchers. What it proved, when honestly analyzed, was that the drugs did not work.

That fact has been available for over a decade. It has not reached the patients being handed the prescriptions.

The evidence throughout is drawn primarily from Peter Gøtzsche, Robert Whitaker, Peter Breggin, Gary Greenberg, David Healy, and Joanna Moncrieff. What the twelve items share is that none of them are contested at the level of documentation. They are contested only at the level of what the profession chooses to tell patients.

---

What They Told You Was True

The prescription is written on the basis of a mechanism, a diagnosis, and a trial. Each has failed on its own terms.

1. The chemical imbalance was never demonstrated

The theory that depression results from a deficiency of serotonin was never established in the scientific literature. Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues published a comprehensive umbrella review of the serotonin theory in 2022 and found no consistent evidence for its central claims.⁵ The theory was abandoned by serious researchers decades earlier. It continued to appear in direct-to-consumer advertising and patient education materials because it served a function. It explained why the pill was necessary and why the patient would need to keep taking it.

Steven Hyman, director of NIMH from 1996 to 2001, later observed that “the gold standard was the DSM criteria. It struck me as a fool’s errand to try to develop a biomarker for a fictive category.”⁶ The chemical imbalance was the mechanism proposed for a disease no one could measure, in a category no one could validate.

Chemical Imbalance: The Collapse of a Medical Myth

2. The DSM has no biological markers

After four decades and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research, not one disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has a confirmed biological test. Not depression. Not schizophrenia. Not bipolar disorder. Not ADHD. Not anxiety. Not any of the more than three hundred conditions the manual lists.

Robins and Guze proposed a five-step validation process in 1970: clinical description, laboratory studies, exclusion criteria, follow-up studies, family studies.⁷ The five steps were meant to establish, over time, which alleged disorders were real diseases and which were figments. Four decades later, Darrel Regier, who chaired the DSM-5 task force, told Psychiatric News that “validity tests have not lived up to the expectations of Robins and Guze.”⁸ Kenneth Kendler, the field’s leading nosologist, wrote that the diagnostic categories in use had been “heavily influenced by expert opinion” and were “fuzzy constructs that shift when viewed in different ways.”⁹

Thomas Insel, director of NIMH from 2002 to 2015, put it most directly in a 2005 address to the American Psychiatric Association: “The DSM-IV has 100 percent reliability and zero percent validity.”¹⁰ Reliability means clinicians using the same manual will arrive at the same diagnosis. Validity means the diagnosis corresponds to a real thing. Insel was telling the assembled profession that its manual sorted patients consistently into categories that did not exist.

The APA response was to convene committees to plan the DSM-5. The committees did not find biological markers. They could not have. The categories were not built to have biological markers. They were built from clinical description alone. The manual reifies its own criteria.

The consequence for the patient is direct. When the doctor says “you have major depressive disorder,” the patient hears a diagnosis in the sense that a diabetes diagnosis is a diagnosis: a measurable biological state with a known mechanism. What the patient has actually received is a checklist tally. Five of nine symptoms present for two weeks. That is the whole test. There is no blood work, no scan, no biomarker. The diagnostic bible of American psychiatry sits on the shelf as an artifact of expert agreement, not a description of nature.

Manufacturing Madness: The DSM as Instrument of Social Control

3. STAR*D was manipulated

The opening figures bear structural repetition: 3 percent versus 67 percent, admitted by the lead investigator, still not retracted, still cited. Ed Pigott’s reanalysis was published in BMJ Open in 2023.¹¹ The investigators, when confronted, doubled down on the fraud in the American Journal of Psychiatry rather than correct it.¹² The owner of the journal, the American Psychiatric Association, did nothing.

Peter Gøtzsche has documented the specific manipulations. The “remission” threshold was set so low that a patient scoring 7 on the Hamilton depression scale, including endorsement of “feels like life is not worth living,” was counted as symptom-free.¹³ Patients who exited the study were assumed to have remitted at the same rate as those who stayed, a statistical fiction that inflated the numbers by an order of magnitude. Eleven prespecified outcomes were never reported. Suicidal ideation was reported at 0.7 percent in one paper and ten times that in others by the same authors.

The trial that was supposed to establish the effectiveness of antidepressants in real-world practice established the opposite. The profession’s response was to continue citing the announced figure.

Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? (2024)

---

What Happens on the Drug

The prescription arrives with the phrase “you may notice some side effects.” The phrase does the work of concealment. Three effects, in particular, are not warned about with the seriousness they warrant.

4. Akathisia carries documented suicide risk

Akathisia is a state of extreme inner restlessness produced by antidepressants, antipsychotics, and antiemetics. The Greek term means inability to sit still. The patient may pace, fidget, wring hands, or endlessly walk. The condition may also present without visible motor symptoms, as unbearable internal agitation the observer cannot see.¹⁴

In 1990, Martin Teicher and colleagues at Harvard published five cases of patients who developed intense suicidal preoccupations on fluoxetine, all associated with akathisia, all resolving when the drug was stopped and returning when it was restarted.¹⁵ Rothschild and Locke published the rechallenge study in 1991: three patients who had made serious suicide attempts on fluoxetine, all rechallenged under controlled conditions, all developing akathisia and becoming suicidal again. One patient said in retrospect: “I tried to kill myself because of these anxiety symptoms. It was not so much the depression.”¹⁶

A study of psychiatric inpatients found that 79 percent of those who had attempted suicide were experiencing akathisia at the time.¹⁷ Another found that half of all fights on a psychiatric ward were akathisia-related. Haloperidol at moderate to high doses made half the patients markedly more aggressive, sometimes to the point of wanting to kill their psychiatrists.

The FDA’s 2004 black-box warning on antidepressants describes what Breggin has called the stimulant syndrome: anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia, hypomania, mania.¹⁸ The label warns that these can occur in nonpsychiatric patients, meaning the drug produces the syndrome by itself, not by unmasking a preexisting condition.

Gøtzsche’s team examined manufacturer trial data and found akathisia miscoded as “hyperkinesia” in Zoloft trials. In paroxetine trials they found not a single case of akathisia recorded, which is statistically impossible given the drug class.¹⁹ The miscoding was systematic.

The FDA-approved label for Zyprexa describes akathisia as “extreme inner anxiety and restlessness.” At least one psychiatric textbook labeled it “agitated depression,” folding the drug’s most dangerous effect back into the diagnosis it was prescribed to treat. The patient who reports the akathisia is told the underlying illness has worsened. The dose is increased.

Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs (2022)

5. Benzodiazepine dependence begins at prescribed doses

The FDA-approved label for Xanax states that withdrawal symptoms, including seizures, have been reported after only brief therapy at doses within the recommended range for treating anxiety.²⁰ In the eight-week trials used for FDA approval, patients were worse off at eight weeks than before starting the drug. Between 7 and 29 percent of patients could not withdraw after only six to eight weeks of exposure.²¹

If you are currently taking a benzodiazepine, do not stop it abruptly. Abrupt cessation can produce seizures. Item 12 addresses what safe withdrawal actually requires.

Heather Ashton, the British psychiatrist who ran a benzodiazepine withdrawal clinic at the University of Newcastle for decades, documented that long-term users often required a year or more to taper.²² Some experience withdrawal symptoms lasting years after cessation. Cognitive impairment, depression, and anxiety worse than the original condition are common outcomes of long-term use.²³ Gøtzsche, who has decades of clinical pharmacology experience, has noted that patients report benzodiazepine withdrawal as often worse than heroin. Heroin abstinence symptoms resolve within days. Benzo withdrawal can persist for years.

Anxiety Uncovered: The Truth About Benzodiazepines and Real Solutions

6. ADHD stimulants produce the symptoms they treat on withdrawal

The DSM has a category for stimulant withdrawal, which lists depression, anxiety, irritability, sleep problems, fatigue, and agitation as the withdrawal syndrome after “several days or longer” of use. Rebound hyperactivity, talkativeness, and inattention are documented after a single dose in a placebo-controlled NIMH study of normal children ages 6 to 12.²⁴ Ten of fourteen children in that study showed marked behavioral rebound; three developed euphoria.

If a child is currently taking a stimulant, do not stop it abruptly. Rebound and withdrawal effects are commonly mistaken for a worsening of the original condition. Item 12 addresses safe withdrawal.

The teacher observes the child on Monday morning after a weekend off the drug, notices the child is more scattered and irritable than usual, and concludes the child needs the medication. The child is in withdrawal. The dose is increased. Peter Breggin’s observation from the early 1990s stands unchanged three decades later: if the child continues on Ritalin because they continue to have problems focusing, the disorder may be the drug’s effect.²⁵ Drug-induced inattention becomes the reason to continue and increase the drug.

The Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD, the largest NIMH-funded stimulant trial, tracked children through eight years of follow-up. By three years, the medicated children showed no advantage over the non-medicated on any measure. They were, however, 2 cm shorter and 2.7 kg lighter than their unmedicated peers, a growth suppression the FDA eventually required on the label.²⁶

The Arithmetic Pill: ADHD, ADD, and the Evidence

---

What Happens to Your Brain

The drugs act on the brain and the brain responds. What the brain does under sustained chemical assault is documented in the profession’s own imaging studies.

7. Antipsychotics shrink brain tissue on MRI

Nancy Andreasen, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry from 1993 to 2005, began a longitudinal MRI study of over 500 first-episode schizophrenia patients in 1989. In 2003, she reported that frontal lobe white matter volume decreased progressively over the years of treatment.²⁷ In 2011, her team published in Archives of General Psychiatry the finding that antipsychotic exposure was directly associated with volume loss.²⁸ In a 2008 interview with the New York Times, Andreasen stated it plainly: “The more drugs you’ve been given, the more brain tissue you lose.”²⁹

Fusar-Poli and colleagues confirmed the pattern in a 2013 meta-analysis of longitudinal MRI studies.³⁰ The 2009 Navari and Dazzan review reported that both older and newer antipsychotics produce gross changes in brain volume in selected regions.³¹ In monkey studies, haloperidol and olanzapine produced substantial reductions in both grey and white matter, and reduced glial cell numbers.³²

Andreasen’s original interpretation was that the shrinkage reflected the disease. The follow-up data forced her to concede the drug was the cause.

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010)

8. Tardive dyskinesia is permanent

Tardive dyskinesia is a drug-induced movement disorder produced by antipsychotics. It can affect any voluntary muscle: face, tongue, neck, torso, extremities, diaphragm, vocal cords. The condition presents as involuntary jerky movements, slower writhing movements, painful spasms, or restlessness the patient cannot control. The mechanism is understood. Antipsychotics block dopamine receptors in a brain region called the basal ganglia. Over time the brain compensates by growing more of those receptors. When the drug dose is reduced, or when the extra receptors eventually outnumber the block, the excess drives the involuntary movements.

The prevalence is not marginal. DSM-IV-TR sets the annual incidence at 3 to 5 percent per year in young adults and 25 to 30 percent per year in older patients.³³ These are cumulative rates. A young adult after three years of exposure has a 9 to 15 percent risk. An older patient after three years has a 75 to 90 percent risk. Prevalence in outpatient clinics runs above 40 percent. In long-term facilities, above 50 percent.³⁴ There is no established treatment. Most cases are permanent.

The condition often extends beyond motor symptoms. Gualtieri and Barnhill observed that “in virtually every clinical survey that has addressed the question, it is found that TD patients, compared to non-TD patients, have more in the way of dementia.”³⁵ Breggin has called this tardive dementia. Tardive akathisia and tardive psychosis have also been documented, representing further permanent damage to the higher brain function of patients whose brains were supposed to be helped.

The condition is frequently masked by the drug that caused it. Increasing the dose suppresses the visible movements while the underlying damage progresses. Reducing the dose brings the movements out, which the prescriber may interpret as evidence that the patient still needs the medication. The patient’s brain, already damaged, is offered more of what damaged it.

The neurological literature has documented tardive dyskinesia for over five decades. It is required disclosure on antipsychotic labels. It is not routinely disclosed at the point of prescription.

Toxic Psychiatry

9. ECT causes documented brain damage

Electroconvulsive therapy applies electrical current to the head sufficient to produce a grand mal seizure. In modern practice, the patient is anesthetized and given a muscle relaxant to prevent the visible convulsion. The electrical dose is often increased to compensate for the seizure threshold raised by the anesthesia. Multiple treatments are given, typically 8 to 16 per course, sometimes more.

Autopsy studies dating to the 1940s documented brain necrosis in patients who died following ECT.³⁶ Animal studies documented brain damage. The brain’s response to ECT is an acute organic brain syndrome, medically indistinguishable from severe head injury. In neurological terms, multiple continuous seizures without full recovery of consciousness constitute status epilepticus, a medical emergency defined by its risk of permanent brain damage.

The memory loss is documented in every serious study that has looked for it. Larry Squire and Pamela Slater reported an average of 27 months of retrograde amnesia surrounding treatment.³⁷ Freeman and Kendell, using face-to-face interviews conducted by the treating doctors themselves (a design that biased strongly against reporting), found that 74 percent of patients reported memory impairment and 30 percent said their memory function was permanently affected.³⁸ Squire and Slater’s own longer follow-up found that 55 percent of patients felt they had not regained normal memory function over the years.

Gøtzsche summarizes the current literature: with strict definitions of memory loss, 29 to 55 percent of patients are affected. With looser criteria, 51 to 79 percent.³⁹ Death rates from ECT, according to a systematic review by John Read and colleagues, run at approximately 1 per 1,000 treatment courses, ten times higher than the American Psychiatric Association’s stated figure.⁴⁰

The efficacy evidence is thinner than the harms evidence. The 1985 NIMH Consensus Conference on ECT accepted the finding that no controlled study showed benefit beyond four weeks. The four-week window corresponds to the acute organic brain syndrome, during which severe brain dysfunction produces the euphoria or apathy interpreted as improvement.⁴¹ Once the brain begins to recover, the depression returns. If the patient is given more ECT, the brain damage accumulates. If the patient is not given more ECT, the profession points to the returning depression as evidence the disease was chronic.

The APA’s 1990 task force report on ECT omitted essentially the entire literature documenting memory loss and brain damage.⁴² The literature it omitted included the work of Squire, Slater, Janis, Friedberg, Breggin, and even the APA’s own previous 1978 report, which contained more information on memory loss than the 1990 update. In psychiatry, science sometimes runs backward.

What Happens When You Try to Leave

At some point the patient decides they no longer want to be on the drug. The system was not built to help them leave.

10. SSRI discontinuation can last years

The FDA-approved labels describe “discontinuation syndrome.” Patients and doctors alike were told the symptoms would last a few weeks and resolve. The systematic review by Davies and Read, published in 2019, established that this was false. Withdrawal symptoms are more common than reported, more severe than reported, and last far longer than reported. In one survey of 580 patients, 16 percent reported withdrawal symptoms lasting over three years.⁴³

If you are currently taking an SSRI or SNRI, do not stop it abruptly. Withdrawal reactions can include severe agitation, akathisia, suicidal ideation, and violence. Item 12 addresses the resources for safe tapering.

The Dutch tapering-strip program run by Peter Groot and Jim van Os has documented the shape of the problem. Of 895 patients on antidepressants, 62 percent had previously tried to withdraw without success. Using hyperbolic dose-reduction strips, 71 percent were able to withdraw within a median of 56 days.⁴⁴ Venlafaxine required 90 percent of patients to start at the lowest available dose and taper over three months. Some patients required more than six months. Dutch insurers refused to reimburse extended tapering because “there is no evidence in the literature” for its necessity, a circular defense against the very treatment the literature was documenting.

The withdrawal is routinely misinterpreted as return of the underlying illness. The patient is told they were unwise to stop and needs to remain on the drug indefinitely. Breggin’s term for this pattern is medication spellbinding. The drug produces effects the patient attributes to the disease.

11. Long-term outcomes are worse with the drugs than without them

The 1997 British study of a large inner-city primary care facility followed 95 never-medicated depressed patients and 53 drug-treated ones. Symptom reduction at six months: 62 percent for the never-medicated, 33 percent for the drug-treated.⁴⁵ A World Health Organization study of 640 depressed patients found that medicated patients had worse general health and were more likely to still be mentally ill at one year.⁴⁶ A Canadian five-year study of 9,508 depressed patients: 19 weeks of depression per year for the medicated, 11 for the unmedicated.⁴⁷ An NIMH study of 547 patients: medicated patients were three times more likely to lose their principal social role and nearly seven times more likely to become incapacitated at six years.⁴⁸

Rif El-Mallakh reported that 40 percent of patients on antidepressants end up in a chronically depressed “treatment resistant” state.⁴⁹ Giovanni Fava documented that drug changes induced by antidepressants “may propel the illness to a more malignant and treatment unresponsive course.”⁵⁰

The pattern extends to antipsychotics. Martin Harrow’s 15-year follow-up of first-episode psychosis patients found that those not on antipsychotics had significantly better outcomes and were far more likely to be in recovery.⁵¹ Lex Wunderink’s 7-year Dutch trial randomized first-episode psychosis patients to maintenance antipsychotics or dose reduction and discontinuation. The reduction group had double the recovery rate.⁵² Bockoven had documented in 1975 that rehospitalization rates rose after the introduction of antipsychotics and that medicated patients were more socially dependent than those treated in the pre-drug era.⁵³

The pattern is consistent across drug classes and across decades. Longer exposure produces worse outcomes. The drugs sensitize the brain and convert episodic distress into chronic dysfunction. The profession’s response has been to rewrite the natural history of the conditions to match the drug-damaged outcomes. The 1999 American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry declared that older studies showing depression was self-limiting had been “disproved.” Depression became “a highly recurrent and pernicious disorder.”⁵⁴ The drugs had made it so.

12. Tapering protocols do not exist in most medical schools

The prescriber who put the patient on the drug is typically not trained in how to help them come off it. Withdrawal is not covered in the standard psychiatric curriculum. The tapering approach with the strongest evidence base is hyperbolic dose reduction, developed by Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff and published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2019.⁵⁵ The approach requires micro-dose reductions of a few percent at a time, made possible by liquid formulations or compounded tapering strips. Standard tablets do not come in the small doses required.

Peter Gøtzsche’s team spent two years trying to publish a Cochrane review protocol on antidepressant withdrawal support. The Cochrane depression group, chaired by Rachel Churchill, raised objections through 12,044 words of feedback across 86 numbered points, then rejected the protocol.⁵⁶ Cochrane refused to publish a review on how to help patients safely withdraw from a class of drugs prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Gøtzsche’s PhD student Anders Sørensen mentored 30 consecutive patients through withdrawal in his unpaid spare time and documented the results, because it was the only way to do the work.

The insurance system compounds the problem. Dutch national health insurance refuses to reimburse extended tapering on the grounds of insufficient evidence, though the evidence exists and the insurers know it does. American insurers do not cover compounded formulations. The tapering strips developed at the Amsterdam pharmacy (taperingstrip.org) are available to prescribers in any country, but the patient must find a prescriber willing to order them, which many will not.

The knowledge exists. The Ashton Manual for benzodiazepine withdrawal has been public since 2002.⁵⁷ The Horowitz-Moncrieff hyperbolic tapering literature is in peer-reviewed journals. Mad in America hosts a withdrawal community with thousands of patients’ documented experiences. Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal was published in 2013.

None of it is on the psychiatric residency reading list. The doctor who wrote the prescription is, in most cases, not the doctor who can help the patient stop taking it. The patient is on their own.

What This Does Not Mean

The most common defense of the current prescribing paradigm is that the drugs help some patients, and that essays like this one endanger those patients by encouraging them to stop.

Some patients do report subjective benefit on these drugs. That is not disputed. What is not established is that this benefit exceeds placebo by a clinically meaningful margin, or that it survives the long-term outcomes documented in Item 11.

The safety caveats throughout this essay, and the resources listed below, exist precisely because abrupt cessation is dangerous. Nothing here recommends abrupt cessation. What is recommended is informed choice, which requires the twelve findings to be visible before the prescription is written or renewed. A patient who wishes to continue after seeing the twelve findings has made a different decision from a patient who was never shown them.

Resources

For patients currently on psychiatric drugs who wish to withdraw, resources exist outside the mainstream medical system. The Ashton Manual (benzo.org.uk/manual/) remains the standard reference for benzodiazepine tapering. The Horowitz-Moncrieff papers on hyperbolic tapering in Lancet Psychiatry (2019) provide the scientific basis for SSRI withdrawal. Mad in America (madinamerica.com) hosts an active community of patients who have withdrawn or are withdrawing. The Amsterdam tapering strip program (taperingstrip.org) makes hyperbolic dose reduction physically possible for antidepressants that do not come in the required small doses. Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (2013) provides detailed clinical protocols. None of the above require permission from the prescribing physician. All require time and typically a support person. None should be attempted abruptly.

Closing

The twelve findings above are documented. They are not concealed by conspiracy. They sit in FDA labels, peer-reviewed journals, systematic reviews, and the admissions of senior figures within the profession. What conceals them is training.

Psychiatric residency does not require reading Whitaker or Breggin or Gøtzsche. It does not require examining the primary trial data on the drugs the resident will spend a career prescribing. It requires reading the textbooks the profession publishes about itself, the same textbooks that praised electroconvulsive therapy while omitting the memory-loss literature and that continue to cite the STAR*D 67 percent figure. The continuing medical education the practicing psychiatrist attends is funded largely by the pharmaceutical industry, whose interest in the twelve findings is that they should not surface. The drug representatives who visit the office once a month are the primary source of pharmacological information for many prescribers.

The doctor across from the patient in the fifteen-minute consultation is often not withholding information out of malice. The doctor does not have it. What was left out of the training reproduces itself in every consultation the doctor conducts for the rest of the career.

The training explains the local silence. It does not explain how the whole enterprise reached the point where twelve findings of this severity could accumulate without institutional response. That answer comes from someone who ran the enterprise.

Thomas Insel directed the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 to 2015. He controlled the American federal research budget for psychiatry for thirteen years. He was, in that period, the single most powerful figure in American psychiatric science.

Reflecting on his tenure after leaving the position, he made the following observation, widely reported and repeated in the years since:

I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders. And when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs, I think $20 billion, I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.⁵⁸

Twenty billion dollars over thirteen years, and the head of the enterprise said it moved nothing on suicide, hospitalization, or recovery.

That is not the assessment of a critic. That is the man who ran the enterprise, describing the enterprise, from inside it. Insel went on to write a book defending psychiatric drugs, so the admission cannot be attributed to conversion or apostasy. He continues to believe in the paradigm. He just concedes it produced nothing.

The twelve items above sit inside that enterprise. What the psychiatrist was trained not to tell the patient is what the man who ran it for thirteen years, on his own accounting, could not deny.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine a garage that has been fixing cars for many years. Every car that leaves the garage has a bumper sticker that says FIXED.

One day someone counts. Out of every hundred cars leaving the garage, only three actually work. Ninety-seven do not.

The garage keeps operating. The mechanics keep putting on the FIXED stickers. The owner keeps telling everyone the garage fixes seven cars out of every ten.

When someone points out that the real number is three out of a hundred, the owner says yes, he knows the real number is three. He does not correct the seven-out-of-ten claim. He does not put up a new sign. He keeps the stickers.

The people bringing in their cars do not know about the three. They see the FIXED sticker and they drive off. Some of the cars catch fire on the highway. Some of the brakes fail. Some of the cars will not start again once they are turned off.

When people bring the broken cars back, the garage says the problem is not with the fix. The problem is with the car.

That is the garage. The cars are patients. The stickers are prescriptions. The garage is a whole profession.

References

1. Pigott HE, Kim T, Xu C, Kirsch I, Amsterdam J. What are the treatment remission, response and extent of improvement rates after up to four trials of antidepressant therapies in real-world depressed patients? A reanalysis of the STAR*D study’s patient-level data with fidelity to the original research protocol. BMJ Open 2023;13:e063095.
2. Trivedi MH, Rush AJ, Wisniewski SR, et al. Evaluation of outcomes with citalopram for depression using measurement-based care in STAR*D: implications for clinical practice. American Journal of Psychiatry 2006;163:28-40.
3. Whitaker R. The STAR*D scandal: a new paper sums it all up. Mad in America 2010; August 27.
4. Whitaker R. The New York Times is now engulfed in the STAR*D scandal. Mad in America 2024; April 27.
5. Moncrieff J, Cooper RE, Stockmann T, Amendola S, Hengartner MP, Horowitz MA. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry 2022;28:3243-3256.
6. Hyman S, quoted in Greenberg G. The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. New York: Blue Rider Press; 2013.
7. Robins E, Guze SB. Establishment of diagnostic validity in psychiatric illness: its application to schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry 1970;126:983-987.
8. Regier D, quoted in Time for a change? Psychiatric News 2009; August 21.
9. Kendler KS. An historical framework for psychiatric nosology. Psychological Medicine 2009;39:1935-1941.
10. Insel T, address to the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, 2005, quoted in Greenberg G. Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. Simon & Schuster; 2010.
11. Pigott HE, et al. BMJ Open 2023;13:e063095. See reference 1.
12. Whitaker R. After MIA calls for retraction of STAR*D article, study authors double down on the fraud. Mad in America 2023; December 6.
13. Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024.
14. Gøtzsche PC. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. LH Press; 2022.
15. Teicher MH, Glod C, Cole JO. Emergence of intense suicidal preoccupations during fluoxetine treatment. American Journal of Psychiatry 1990;147:207-210.
16. Rothschild AJ, Locke CA. Reexposure to fluoxetine after serious suicide attempts by three patients: the role of akathisia. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 1991;52:491-493.
17. Van Putten T. The many faces of akathisia. Comprehensive Psychiatry 1975;16:43-47.
18. Breggin PR. Talking Back to Prozac (updated edition). Springer; 2014.
19. Gøtzsche PC. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. LH Press; 2022.
20. FDA-approved product information, Xanax XR (alprazolam), 2011.
21. Breggin PR. Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients, and Their Families. Springer; 2013.
22. Ashton H. Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle; 2002. Available at benzo.org.uk/manual/
23. Barker MJ, Greenwood KM, Jackson M, Crowe SF. Cognitive effects of long-term benzodiazepine use: a meta-analysis. CNS Drugs 2004;18:37-48.
24. Rapoport JL, Buchsbaum MS, Weingartner H, Zahn TP, Ludlow C, Mikkelsen EJ. Dextroamphetamine: cognitive and behavioral effects in normal prepubertal boys. Science 1978;199:560-563.
25. Breggin PR. Toxic Psychiatry. St. Martin’s Press; 1991.
26. Swanson JM, Elliott GR, Greenhill LL, et al. Effects of stimulant medication on growth rates across 3 years in the MTA follow-up. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 2007;46:1015-1027.
27. Ho BC, Andreasen NC, Nopoulos P, et al. Progressive structural brain abnormalities and their relationship to clinical outcome: a longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging study early in schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry 2003;60:585-594.
28. Ho BC, Andreasen NC, Ziebell S, et al. Long-term antipsychotic treatment and brain volumes: a longitudinal study of first-episode schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry 2011;68:128-137.
29. Dreifus C. Using imaging to look at changes in the brain. New York Times 2008; September 16.
30. Fusar-Poli P, Smieskova R, Kempton MJ, et al. Progressive brain changes in schizophrenia related to antipsychotic treatment? A meta-analysis of longitudinal MRI studies. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 2013;37:1680-1691.
31. Navari S, Dazzan P. Do antipsychotic drugs affect brain structure? A systematic and critical review of MRI findings. Psychological Medicine 2009;39:1763-1777.
32. Konopaske GT, Dorph-Petersen KA, Sweet RA, et al. Effect of chronic antipsychotic exposure on astrocyte and oligodendrocyte numbers in macaque monkeys. Biological Psychiatry 2008;63:759-765.
33. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington DC: APA; 2000, p. 803.
34. Breggin PR. Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, 2nd edition. Springer; 2008.
35. Gualtieri CT, Barnhill LJ. Tardive dyskinesia in special populations. In: Wolf ME, Mosnaim AD, eds. Tardive Dyskinesia: Biological Mechanisms and Clinical Aspects. American Psychiatric Press; 1988.
36. Summarized in Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024. Historical citations include Alpers BJ (1946) and subsequent European autopsy series.
37. Squire LR, Slater PC. Electroconvulsive therapy and complaints of memory dysfunction: a prospective three-year follow-up study. British Journal of Psychiatry 1983;142:1-8.
38. Freeman CP, Kendell RE. ECT: patients’ experiences and attitudes. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1986;462:341-352.
39. Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024.
40. Read J, Cunliffe S, Jauhar S, McLoughlin DM. Should we stop using electroconvulsive therapy? BMJ 2019;364:k5233.
41. NIMH Consensus Development Conference. Electroconvulsive therapy. JAMA 1985;254:2103-2108.
42. American Psychiatric Association. The Practice of Electroconvulsive Therapy: Recommendations for Treatment, Training, and Privileging. APA; 1990.
43. Davies J, Read J. A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: are guidelines evidence-based? Addictive Behaviors 2019;97:111-121.
44. Groot PC, van Os J. How user knowledge of psychotropic drug withdrawal resulted in the development of person-specific tapering medication. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology 2020;10:2045125320932452.
45. Ronalds C, Creed F, Stone K, Webb S, Tomenson B. Outcome of anxiety and depressive disorders in primary care. British Journal of Psychiatry 1997;171:427-433.
46. Goldberg D, Privett M, Ustun B, Simon G, Linden M. The effects of detection and treatment on the outcome of major depression in primary care: a naturalistic study in 15 cities. British Journal of General Practice 1998;48:1840-1844.
47. Patten SB. The impact of antidepressant treatment on population health: synthesis of data from two national data sources in Canada. Population Health Metrics 2004;2:9.
48. Coryell W, Endicott J, Winokur G, et al. Characteristics and significance of untreated major depressive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 1995;152:1124-1129.
49. El-Mallakh RS, Gao Y, Roberts RJ. Tardive dysphoria: the role of long-term antidepressant use in inducing chronic depression. Medical Hypotheses 2011;76:769-773.
50. Fava GA. Do antidepressant and antianxiety drugs increase chronicity in affective disorders? Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 1994;61:125-131.
51. Harrow M, Jobe TH. Factors involved in outcome and recovery in schizophrenia patients not on antipsychotic medications: a 15-year multifollow-up study. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 2007;195:406-414.
52. Wunderink L, Nieboer RM, Wiersma D, Sytema S, Nienhuis FJ. Recovery in remitted first-episode psychosis at 7 years of follow-up of an early dose reduction/discontinuation or maintenance treatment strategy. JAMA Psychiatry 2013;70:913-920.
53. Bockoven JS, Solomon HC. Comparison of two five-year follow-up studies: 1947 to 1952 and 1967 to 1972. American Journal of Psychiatry 1975;132:796-801.
54. Hales RE, Yudofsky SC, eds. American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry. American Psychiatric Publishing; 1999.
55. Horowitz MA, Taylor D. Tapering of SSRI treatment to mitigate withdrawal symptoms. Lancet Psychiatry 2019;6:538-546.
56. Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024, chapter on Cochrane.
57. Ashton H. Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle; 2002.
58. Insel T, quoted in Rogers A. Star neuroscientist Tom Insel leaves the Google-spawned Verily for … a startup? Wired 2017; May 11. See also Whitaker R’s coverage in Mad in America, and Levine B. How to explain top psychiatrists’ “Dr. Strangelove exuberance” unchecked by reality. Mad in America 2025; June 6.

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | September 24, 2026

Fresh off testifying at Canada’s Allison Inquiry, physicist Denis Rancourt joins Del to examine mortality and cancer data among 5- to 24-year-olds—and what could be behind their striking, lockstep rise.

Lies are Unbekoming | September 24, 2026

The label for Humira, once the best-selling drug in the world, lists its risks in plain print. One of them, in the label’s own words, is new “autoimmune” disease.

A drug prescribed for a condition labelled autoimmune carries a warning that it can cause a condition labelled autoimmune. That contradiction sits in every box, on a folded paper almost nobody reads.

My new book starts there.

No Autoimmunity: The Body Doesn’t Attack Itself

For seventy years, “your body is attacking itself, and we don’t know why” has ended the conversation for people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s, Type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s and psoriasis. More than eighty conditions now carry the autoimmune label. The diagnosis comes with a prescription for life. It almost never comes with a question about cause.

This book asks the question and answers it from the framework’s own records: its drug labels, its journals, its regulatory filings, and its own experiments.

What’s inside

Humira: The Cover Story. A drug that once earned more than twenty billion dollars a year, whose own label warns of lymphoma and new conditions labelled autoimmune. Stop taking it and the symptoms usually return, so the prescription never ends.

The Autoimmune Label. In 1956 researchers produced thyroid disease in rabbits by injecting thyroid tissue with a powerful adjuvant. A category defined by “unknown cause” has since grown to more than eighty conditions.

The Three Deceptions. The “immune system” as an army, antibodies as soldiers, autoimmunity as the army turning on itself. Each idea props up the others.

Richet’s Erased Nobel. The 1913 Nobel Prize for showing that injected foreign proteins sensitise the body. Medicine kept the prize and filed the warning under “allergy.”

The Nervous System. The 1976 swine flu campaign and the paralysis cases that followed. Hal Huggins removed mercury fillings from MS patients, documented their improvement, and lost his licence.

The Endocrine System. Fluoride and bromide crowding out iodine, and a lifelong thyroid pill that ensures nobody learns whether the gland could recover.

Connective Tissue. Evelyn Hess’s catalog of more than seventy medications that produce lupus and related disease, which usually clears once the drug is stopped. The book’s central proof, from the framework’s own literature.

The GI Tract. Celiac disease went from one child in five thousand in 1950 to about one person in a hundred today. The chapter covers what changed in the food.

Skin and Blood. Psoriasis appears where skin is injured, and the drugs sold for psoriasis are documented to cause it.

The Documented Reversals. Drugs withdrawn, mercury removed, implants taken out, diets changed. Once the injury is gone, the body mends.

What Made the Reversal Possible. Remove the harm, restore what the body needs, give it time, and protect what still works.

How to Think About the Diagnosis You Were Given. Written directly to the reader holding a diagnosis, with the exposure history to build and the questions to ask.

Where to Go from Here. A reading list and the kinds of practitioners worth finding.

Every chapter closes with How to Explain It to a 6 Year Old, a plain-language section you can read aloud to a child or hand to a relative who will never read a medical paper. The book also includes a glossary, a bibliography of more than 100 sources and a full index.

Who this book is for

If you or someone you love has been handed one of these diagnoses, read this before accepting that the answer is a lifetime prescription. If you’re a practitioner, or someone who simply wants to check the record, the full documentary trail is here, referenced source by source.

288 pages, paperback.

Order No Autoimmunity

---

The shelf

No Autoimmunity joins the rest of the Unbekoming catalogue at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming.