AI models have repeatedly broken into real commercial and government systems during safety tests during 2026. Cybersecurity researcher Thorsten Holz explains what that means, and why he isn't expecting a robot uprising.
At first she told no one. Not her twin sister. Not her mother. Not even her father the scientist.
Six-year-old Jenna Smith knew better than to pee when she was in the bath. But on that night in 1992, in her family’s home in Iowa City, the water felt so comfortable against her skin that she didn’t want to get out of the tub. It seemed like such a small thing. Who would know?
Seconds later the water around her waist turned reddish pink. Blood? It had to be. Jenna wondered if she’d hurt herself. “I was six years old sitting in a bathtub, watching a few seconds of my world stop making sense,” she would recall years later.
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She kept the blood a secret because she didn’t want to admit that she’d peed in the bath. But when it was still in her urine the next time she used the toilet, she went to her mother. Concerned, her mom called her dad, Richard Smith, and he took Jenna to the emergency room.
Richard was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in the University of Iowa’s school of medicine, a researcher who would become one of the world’s authorities on the genetics of hearing loss. His wife, Lynne Lanning, had worked as both a lawyer and a nurse. They had four young children: twins Jenna and Jessica, who were identical, and two boys, Luke and Rion.
At the ER, doctors ran tests on Jenna, but they couldn’t identify the cause of the blood. In the days that followed the bleeding intensified. At her parents’ urging, Jenna collected samples of her urine in Dixie cups for further testing. The doctors remained stumped, however, and after a while Jenna found the whole thing more annoying than worrisome.
The uncertainty was much harder on her parents. It wasn’t that doctors were misdiagnosing their daughter; they were unable to diagnose her at all. “It was horrible,” Richard said. “Imagine seeing your child and you know something is wrong, and you know the doctors treating her have no clue what to do.” Richard called a pediatric nephrologist he knew in Houston, where the family had lived previously. The nephrologist listed several conditions that could be causing the bleeding and said that, to determine which was to blame, Jenna’s parents should take her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
In July 1992, Richard, Lynne, and Jenna drove nearly 500 miles to get answers. Doctors in Cincinnati diagnosed Jenna with dense deposit disease, a condition in which proteins clog and damage the kidneys, leading to renal failure in many patients. There was no cure.
The hospital couldn’t tell the family much else—no one could. The disease was exceedingly rare, afflicting between one and three people in a million. Back home, Richard and Lynne spent hours inside the University of Iowa’s quiet medical library, poring over papers in search of information about their daughter’s illness. They could find no evidence that anyone was actively studying the condition.
Although many Americans—roughly one in ten—suffer from a rare disease, the experience can be lonely. Friends and relatives don’t understand the unique miseries such illnesses impose on daily life. Few doctors are likely to have encountered them before. And because there aren’t many patients, drug companies usually don’t invest in research for treatments.
Richard and Lynne feared that their daughter’s life might be tragically brief. Sometimes the mention of weddings would sink Lynne into melancholy; she couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie Father of the Bride. Richard agonized over what to do. His training compelled him to seek answers, but he wanted to be Jenna’s father, not the scientist charged with curing her. He kept his research focused on hearing loss. At first, anyway.
Stories of scientific discovery almost always celebrate individual researchers, consigning the contributions of loved ones, communities, and colleagues to footnotes. There are exceptions―the teams that built the first atomic bomb and deciphered the human genome, for instance. Science also has its share of famous families. Marie and Pierre Curie, along with their daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric, won five Nobel Prizes between them for discoveries related to radioactivity. For the most part, however, the history of scientific progress has been mythologized as a succession of brilliant, driven individuals—often men—who chose the lab over the dinner table and competition over collaboration.
Some scientists have embraced the role of maverick. “You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing,” the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman is said to have told a colleague. The decades-long pursuit of a treatment for Jenna’s disease followed a very different path. There was no single hero, no lone scientist seeking glory. The biomedical quest required the efforts of a family and their neighbors in Iowa City, and the work of scientists around the globe. Together they changed an obscure area of medicine.
Richard and Lynne met in 1977, when both were working at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston—she as a nurse, he as a medical intern. He noticed a run in her nylons and was smitten by her smile. She liked his down-to-earth manner and intelligence, his humor and kindness. They were working in the hospital’s burn unit when he asked her out.
The couple married in 1981, and except for two years in England, they remained in Houston until 1990. That December they moved to Iowa City, where Richard had a job waiting for him leading the pediatric otolaryngology division and running a research lab at the University of Iowa’s medical school. They had been there only a year when Jenna got sick.
Richard and Lynne learned that their daughter’s disease was caused by a malfunction in her complement system. Believed to have evolved long before other parts of our immune infrastructure, the complement system sends proteins to battle foreign invaders. Unlike antibodies, these proteins are not tailored to fight a specific virus or bacteria, but they kick into gear faster when a threat is detected. In people with Jenna’s condition, the complement system is like a runaway train: Proteins become overstimulated and then accumulate in the glomeruli, tiny filters the kidneys use to clear waste from blood.
Blood in the urine is one symptom of the disease. Others include swelling, high blood pressure, inflammation, and fatigue. When Jenna was in the first grade, her body struggled to make growth hormones. Her production of red blood cells slowed, and she grew increasingly tired. During rehearsals for The Nutcracker ballet around Christmas 1993, she’d finish her part and then lie down backstage, completely spent.
Doctors put her on a heavy dose of the steroid prednisone and on blood-pressure medication. The prednisone caused her body to retain water. She woke up each morning with her eyes swollen shut, then waited in bed until the swelling receded. She couldn’t fit into her clothes or shoes. She wore flip-flops and roomy jumpers Lynne sewed for her.
As twins, Jenna and Jessica had always been close. They played together, made up songs and dance moves, explored the woods near their home, and enjoyed pranking friends and family members. “She made a lot of things feel not so heavy,” Jenna said of her sister. Still, she sometimes thought that Jessica “got off scot-free” by not having dense deposit disease. Neither girl liked feeling different from the other. (Years later, Jessica would be diagnosed with type-1 diabetes; Jenna would not.)
The changes to Jenna’s appearance meant the girls were no longer identical. Once, according to Lynne, when a boy at school said that Jenna couldn’t be a twin anymore because of how she looked, Jessica slugged him. Lynne recalled sitting in the principal’s office, politely listening to a lecture—this is not the way we resolve things!—but understanding why Jessica had lashed out. Nothing was so frightening to her daughters as the idea that they’d stop being twins.
About half of those afflicted with Jenna’s disease progressed to kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis; it took her less than a year. She made it through the last day of first grade. Then, as other children departed for summer camp, she went to a clinic. While her classmates practiced archery and did arts and crafts, she learned about the catheter doctors would surgically insert in her body. Through that tube, a machine would pump fluid into her abdomen, where her peritoneum—her abdominal lining—would take over the filtering function kidneys usually perform.
She would take the peritoneal dialysis machine home with her and use it every day for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of her life. When a nurse tried to take Lynne aside to show her how to operate it, Jenna stopped her. “I’m the patient,” the seven-year-old insisted. “I’m learning how to run the machine.”
In such moments, Lynne was surprised at the strength she drew from her daughter. She needed it. Her grief could leave her feeling drained. One day she found herself crying into the soil as she gardened.
But Lynne and Richard were determined that sadness would not define their lives. For a long time, they didn’t have a TV in their house—they wanted the family to talk when they were together, and for the children to build forts, learn to sew, be creative. They had painting nights, creating portraits of one another. There were cooking contests, too. Richard and Lynne made sure to spend one-on-one time with each kid. Richard traveled with Luke to Japan, with Rion to the Grand Canyon, with Jessica to Italy, and with Jenna to England. Lynne took trips with the children to Brazil, England, and Guatemala. There were themed birthday celebrations: a James Bond party for Richard, where everyone was armed with Nerf guns, and one for Lynne where Richard dressed as the artist Bob Ross and the guests painted “happy little clouds.” Richard coached the kids’ hockey and soccer teams. He built harps and lyres from scratch, and Lynne played them.
Every day, Richard left for work at 5 a.m., while the children were still in bed. He returned around six at night. The family joked that they could hear him coming from half a mile away in his rust-bucket Isuzu Trooper with the bad muffler and a hole in the passenger footwell. When he wasn’t seeing patients or in surgery, Richard was in the lab. On Saturdays, Luke would go there with him. Sometimes the other kids joined. They liked to refill the communal candy jars and visit the mice used in experiments.
It seemed a wonder to the lab’s staff that Richard squeezed so much into a day. When they began using email to communicate, they received messages from him time-stamped three or four in the morning. “Why don’t you sleep sometime?” a colleague replied once. Indeed, Richard slept little. At night his mind kept running through the mysteries of his daughter’s disease.
Richard had read that it took 10,000 hours—the equivalent of working full-time for about five years—to achieve expertise in a subject. He believed it. In 1995, he began flying to conferences about kidney disease, where he talked to the few doctors who cared for patients like Jenna. Medicine was getting no closer to finding a treatment.
That year the owner of a ranch where Richard and Lynne’s children took riding lessons offered to host a fundraiser for kidney disease research. The family organized Dressage in the Heartland, which featured riding events, fiddle music, and bowls of chili. After raising upwards of $10,000 for the National Kidney Foundation, they held the event again the following year. There are hundreds of kidney ailments, however, and the foundation didn’t allow the money the family raised to be earmarked for the research of dense deposit disease. (The foundation said it now allows monetary gifts to be dedicated to specific conditions.)
Richard and Lynne ran into more disappointment during a visit to the University of Minnesota in early 1997. A specialist they consulted was blunt. “Nobody is looking at this disease,” he told them. “And barring something unforeseen, nothing will be done in the next twenty years.”
It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Iowa City. In the car, Lynne brought up what the doctor had said. Maybe they would have to be that unforeseen something.
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-19shots 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.
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 Diseasesshowed 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 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.
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.
The Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute said the trio of scientists had been selected for their "discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics."
The Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute said the trio of scientists had been selected for their "discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics."
Physicists have been asking an awkward question for decades. If the universe is built from invisible fields, why has each one ended up in the state we find it in, and not in some other? A team at the University of Portsmouth, working with colleagues at Syracuse University and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, […]
Around 5,000 years ago, when writing was in its infancy and Egypt had just been united under a single king, the first pharaohs picked a patch of desert at Abydos, in Upper Egypt (the southern part of the country, upriver on the Nile), as their final resting place. The spot is called Umm el-Qaab, Arabic […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Long ago, the patch of sky that would become our galactic neighbourhood looked nothing like a galaxy. It was a collection of thousands of smaller galaxies. Some were turning out stars at a frantic pace, others held nothing but gas, and others were littered with dead stars and black holes. That is the picture drawn […]
Proposed dates for the arrival of the first humans in the Americas span more than 100,000 years. At one end sits Cerutti, a site in California that Holen and colleagues dated to about 130,000 years ago in a 2017 study in Nature. At the other is Swan Point, in Alaska, at around 14,200 years old: […]
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.
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 Naturemagazine, 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?’
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.
“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:
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-19vaccine 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.”
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
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.”
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
Introduction
Genetics: The Ultimate Cover Story
Genetics Was Built on Bad Chemistry
The Fifth Wall: Genetics as the Final Fortress of Medical Extraction
Fool’s Gold Standard: The Unvalidated Science of DNA
Interview with Jamie Andrews
Interview with Leon Karmameleon (Telestai Network)
Your Genetic Heart Disease Isn’t Genetic
The Great DNA Data Deficit
The DNA Paradox: How Unseen Molecules Became Unquestioned Facts
How to Create a Genetic Condition
What is Cystic Fibrosis?
Down’s Syndrome: Environmental Poisoning Disguised as Genetic Fate
The Genetic Alibi: How Wayne Bennett’s Family Tragedy Exposes the Dravet Syndrome Cover Story
The Great Extinction Lie: How Genetics and Environmental Fraud are Destroying Rural Populations
The Emperor’s New Genes
The DNA Myth: What the Peer-Reviewed Literature Actually Shows About Forensic and Paternity Testing
The Ten “Genetic” Diseases That Aren’t Genetic
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 reconstructed face of a man who lived over 8,000 years ago was unveiled yesterday in Zhengzhou, the administrative center of Henan Province in central China, shedding light on the region’s prehistoric inhabitants. The sculpture was created based on human remains discovered during excavations at the Jiahu archaeological site in Henan. The reconstruction combined physical […]
A blacksmith, a groom, a soldier, a slave: the faces and stories of these and other inhabitants of an ancient Roman city in modern-day Hungary have been brought back to life with astonishing accuracy in a new exhibition in Budapest, the Associated Press reported in July (as cited by BTA). The exhibition, which runs until […]
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
“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
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.
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.
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.
From the Covid-era Mockingbird Media Hall of Fame: Targeting Kids with Covid Jabs using Sesame Street Characters
June 2022. Elmo, “age 3½,” shows off his bandage. His dad Louie tells parents of kids as young as six months: “I had a lot of questions… Was it safe? Was it the… pic.twitter.com/rbEbCdEno2
Six out of nine of the most popular AI chatbots routinely exposed user input to third parties, new European research reveals.
Multiple chatbots disclosed sensitive user data to advertising companies through trackers – a piece of code used to identify and target users on the web with customised advertisements, which are widely used across the web.
And tech companies may have been able to link conversation summaries with personal identifiers, allowing users to be targeted based on their conversations with AI.
The researchers aimed to establish the connection between existing tracking technologies and AI advertising. “We basically connected the dots, and wanted to test whether and how AI bots integrate tracking and advertising services,” said Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, who led the study.
Vallina-Rodriguez is part of a group of researchers who investigated the use of ad trackers in the most popular AI providers with colleagues at Imdea Networks, a public research institute in Madrid.
Their findings warn of “tensions” between tech company practices and obligations to users under privacy laws.
Sensitive user-data shared
“We already knew that tracking is pervasive, even without AI. But now you have the most super-invasive phenomena on the internet, which is AI,” said Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, a policy adviser at digital rights group Edri.
Users often share information about their health, psychological state, finances, and other intimate matters in AI prompts. The study shows how users who asked AI questions about such matters could have sensitive details summarised in a chat title shared with third parties.
“Now, big tech has access to much more intimate information which users tell AI. It’s crazy, the details are so intimate. My friends ask AI bots about relationships, or they use ‘doctor AI’,” said Domínguez de Olazábal.
GDPR rules require companies to make clear how users’ data is harvested, but researchers question “ambiguous expressions” used to explain the role of trackers in T&Cs.
And the ePrivacy directive requires users to consent to cookies unless they are “strictly necessary”, but researchers found that even when users rejected non-essential cookies, AI bots Perplexity, DeepSeek, Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude still connected to Google Ads.
All of the top nine most popular chatbots were found to integrate at least one third-party advertising or tracking service.
Consent and transparency ‘shortcomings’
A preview of the study, released in May, prompted the Spanish privacy watchdog AEPD to request for the European Data Protection Committee (EPDC) to share preliminary findings with European counterparts “for knowledge and assessment”.
The final paper, titled ‘Prompt like a Butterfly, Sting like a Tracker’, has been accepted for publication at an academic forum in Delft next year.
Findings “highlight tensions between current practices and obligations under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive, exposing broader shortcomings in consent, access control, and transparency mechanisms,” the paper reads.
It reveals that Grok, operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI, exposed public links to conversations by default, allowing trackers to routinely access whole conversations, with TikTok also processing screenshots of Grok conversations.
Meanwhile, Mistral, France’s flagship AI firm, did not offer users a choice to reject non-essential cookies.
But offering such a choice might soon be redundant anyway. “The tracking industry is moving towards paradigms called cookie-less and identity-based tracking. So they are circumventing anti-tracking capabilities,” Vallina-Rodriguez told EUobserver.
One way, or another …
Some suggest that using browsers with anti-tracker technologies can help users avoid surveillance.
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Around 30 million years ago, a heavily built animal prowled the area that is now Vallbona de les Monges, in Lleida province (Catalonia, northeastern Spain). It had a long head, prominent cheekbones and formidable jaws lined with large, sharp teeth. Paleontologists call it the hell pig. The nickname misleads. Its kinship with modern pigs is […]
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