The Second Circuit Court of Appeals is about to face those issues head-on, as my legal battle over the conspiracy to force me off Twitter in 2021 continues.

I believe and hope the court will find the answer to both questions is no. (EDIT: ARRGH. OBVIOUSLY, I HOPE AND BELIEVE THE ANSWER TO THE SECOND QUESTION IS YES! WE WILL DO A BETTER JOB IN THIS FRAMING IN OUR BRIEF, I PROMISE!)

—

(Still fighting, with your help.)

Subscribe now

—

When I filed Berenson v Biden in 2023, it included three groups of defendants — the federal government, Andrew M. Slavitt, and two top Pfizer officials, director Dr. Scott Gottlieb and chairman Dr. Albert Bourla (aka the world’s favorite veterinarian).

Last year, Manhattan federal Judge Jessica G.L. Clarke dismissed the lawsuit, setting up our appeal to the Second Circuit, which oversees district courts in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. We filed our appellate brief in February.

In the last few months, James Lawrence and I have whittled down the case, settling with the government and with Slavitt (and other non-Pfizer individual defendants who once worked for the Biden Administration).

This choice paid big dividends.

We have won a crucial admission from the government about its “substantial coercive pressure” to censor me and violate my First Amendment rights. We have also simplified the case, reducing the number of legal battles we must fight (and defense lawyers looking to poke holes in our arguments).

Now only Gottlieb and Bourla remain as defendants.

And they and their legal team are arguing I should not be allowed to hold them accountable for their role in the conspiracy in 2021 to force me off Twitter.1

As private individuals, Gottlieb and Bourla cannot directly violate my First Amendment rights — or the rights of the millions of unvaccinated people who lost the chance to listen to me in 2021 when they helped coerce Twitter to ban me. But a federal law commonly called 1985(3) bars conspiracies to violate civil rights, particularly when those conspiracies involve both government and private conspirators, as this one did.

The law dates to 1871. Both it and the legal decisions it has spawned over the last century are complex, to say the least.

—

(Scott Gottlieb, MD. Too bad I can’t sue him for abuse of hair gel!)

—

As a federal judge in Manhattan wrote in 1993, “The best that can be said of §1985(3) jurisprudence thus far is that it has been marred by fits and starts, plagued by inconsistencies, and left in flux by the Supreme Court.”

Indeed, the Supreme Court has offered only vague limits on what groups can sue under 1985(3) claims, instead setting parameters for groups the statute does not protect. Federal courts have been concerned 1985(3) not become a “general federal tort law” used to settle broad legal disputes.

In practice, this guidance means, as the Third Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2006, “1985(3) defendants must have allegedly conspired against a group that has an identifiable existence independent of the fact that its members are victims of the defendants’ tortious conduct.”

Put another way, the right that’s been violated must exist independently of the group.

In 1993, the Supreme Court found that “women seeking abortions” could not claim their civil rights had been violated under 1985(3) — because the seeking of abortions is what defines the group asking for protection.

Berenson v Gottlieb clearly meets the broad test the Supreme Court has set.

The group for which I’m seeking protection is the Covid unvaccinated; the right at stake is the First Amendment right to speak, which encompasses the right to listen, and which the government has now admitted was violated in my case. The group can be defined independently of the right that was violated, and vice-versa.

The question, then, is not whether I am bringing a theoretically viable 1985(3) claim, but whether the statute covers unvaccinated people at all. In a brief filed last week, Gottlieb and Bourla claim it does not. James Lawrence and I have identified specific flaws in their arguments we will address in our response, but I am not going to tip our hand to those until we file.

At stake in our case is a much broader issue.

Some federal circuits have defined the groups which can sue under 1985(3) very narrowly. The Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, has said only black people can claim its protection.

Other federal appellate courts have defined the statute’s reach much more broadly. As the Third Circuit, which includes Pennsylvania, explained in 1997:

We remain convinced that the scope of section 1985(3) is not fixed as of any given point in time, but must be subject to reinterpretation as times and circumstances require… community prejudices are not static, and from time to time other differences from the community norm may define other groups which need the same protection.

—

(We didn’t suspend the Constitution for this. And we didn’t suspend it for Covid.)

—

And no circuit has interpreted the scope of 1985(3) protection more broadly than the Second Circuit. At various times, its judges have extended its reach to mentally disabled people, women, “street artists,” same-sex couples, Jews, and members of the Falun Gong cult, among others.

In a 2015 decision that found a group of Arab and Muslim men who had been detained after Sept. 11 could sue under 1985(3), the Second Circuit wrote:

If there is one guiding principle to our nation it is the rule of law. It protects the unpopular view, it restrains fear-based responses in times of trouble, and it sanctifies individual liberty regardless of wealth, faith, or color.

Amen.

Under their own precedents, the Second Circuit judges hearing this appeal will have a clear path to extend 1985(3) to people unvaccinated against Covid. The judges themselves may be vaccinated against Covid — in fact, they almost certainly are. They may think the unvaccinated are stupid or foolish.

But that does not mean the unvaccinated don’t have the same First Amendment rights as everyone else, or that the conspiracy to deny them — and me — those rights was legal.

I can only hope the Second Circuit agrees.

—

(To support Unreported Truths, my fight against Pfizer, and all my work)

Subscribe now

—

Also, as you know, the federal government paid $150,000 to settle its part in Berenson v Biden, so the lawsuit is paid off for a while.

But if you want to support this appeal, and (if the Second Circuit backs us) the fight with Gottlieb and Bourla at the district level that will follow, I am happy to have you!

Via GiveSendGo

Via GoFundMe

You can also Venmo me at Alex-Berenson-3

Or send a check to James Lawrence at Envisage Law, PO Box 30099

Raleigh, North Carolina 27622

Donations of all sizes welcome — this is about standing together.

This happens every once in a while. I understand these pitches can be annoying, and I try to limit them.

Yes, this sale! Which expires at midnight!

But I gotta say: free Unreported Truths readers get a good deal. On average, I write several times a week, with nearly all new articles are open to all — without ads. I have resisted ads because I want to keep the equation simple. I work for you.

No ads and no paywalls means I have to ask for your support. It seems like a small price to pay. If these notes really annoy you, you can always delete them. And paid subscribers do get some perks, like archive access and the chance to comment. Those only seem fair. (Founding members will soon get an added bonus.)

So I’m sorry if these notes annoy you. They are how I keep UT strong, support my family, and take on Big Pharma and other miscreants. I do promise I won’t run another sale until the summer — so no more notes like this for a bit. I hope you’ll take advantage of this one.

Which means you should sign up now!

For 20% off!

I know, I know, time for a copy editor! (Time is really the problem, I like to get these pieces out fast.)

Years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck… [and] that luck may well be running out.

—

Sorry, my mistake.

That’s not Zeynep warning about hantavirus.

That’s her warning about bird flu in November 2024.

This is her warning about hantavirus!

Wealthy nations must do everything possible to stop the disease’s spread… [or] the United States and the rest of the world may get an unfortunate shot at a Round 2 of the virus too...

—

(Subscribe — before the virus gets you, or the 20% off sale ends tonight!)

Subscribe now

—

Wait, dang it, wrong again.

That wasn’t hantavirus either! That was Zeynep writing in August 2024 about mpox [nee monkeypox].

Hold on, I know Zeynep has screamed about hantavirus like Chicken Little after an-all night crack binge recently offered careful, measured public health advice.

Ahh, here it is:

There’s no question that another pandemic will strike, but no one knows when or which virus will be the cause…

If we’re lucky, this hantavirus outbreak will peter out… if we are unlucky? It should be unthinkable, but here we are.

—

(Just Zeynep being Zeynep, with apologies to Manny Ramirez)

—

Unthinkable, indeed.

Maybe let’s think about it instead.

To review: people generally are infected with the pulmonary variant of hantavirus after inhaling urine or feces from infected wild mice or rats. Most people do their best to avoid inhaling rat urine, so human hantavirus infections are pretty uncommon.

The first two patients in this outbreak are German birdwatchers who likely contracted it after they visited a landfill in Argentina. They then spread it to several other people aboard a cruise ship, more or less the ideal vector for passing viruses, respiratory or otherwise.

Hantavirus can spread from person-to-person, according to a 2020 New England Journal article that tracked an outbreak in Argentina in winter 2018-2019 which infected 34 people and killed 11. But doing so almost always requires prolonged and close contact with an infected person showing symptoms, often in social settings where people are likely to be talking loudly and with their mouths close together. Even hospital workers caring for patients during the Argentina outbreak faced almost no risk.

And the outbreak in Argentina ended quickly once authorities isolated people with hantavirus and asked their close contacts to quarantine.

In other words, hantavirus is not Covid or the flu. Though it can spread between people, its primary target is its rodent hosts and its mode of transmission zoonotic — from animals to humans. This is very typical for more lethal viruses like hantavirus, which burn through humans too fast to spread quickly.

Nor is hantavirus likely to have changed much since that outbreak; it is generally very slow-mutating.

—

(Faster mutations, delivered!)

—

In only the last two years, Zeynep Tufekci has sounded urgent warnings about three different viruses that collectively kill a couple of hundred people a year worldwide (mostly from hantavirus, mostly in Asia).

By way of comparison, about 150 people die every hour of every day from traffic accidents globally. Nor is there any evidence that hantavirus, mpox, or even bird flu are becoming or will become more dangerous in the wild.

Why? Why do Tufekci and all the other panickers in the legacy media and health bureaucracies keep doing this?

Three possibilities come to mind.

First, health bureaucrats need to stay employed. Your fear is their work.

Second, talking up these threats is a backdoor way to lionize vaccine companies — mRNA companies in particular, which supposedly can produce vaccines against emerging threats very quickly — and thus attack Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Tufekci mocks in her hantavirus piece.

And third, all this nonsense distracts from the fact that the only really serious respiratory virus epidemic in 100 years almost certainly leaked from a lab and would never have happened had virologists not caused it.

—

(The truth. Discounted!)

Subscribe now

One-time donations also welcomed…

—

Here are two predictions that are LEAD-PIPE LOCKS — as the guys advertising to gamblers on late-night sports-talk radio used to scream.

First, this hantavirus outbreak will burn out quickly, with a death toll in the double digits at most. (I’d say single, but I want to be conservative.)

Second, Zeynep will be back in 2027 or 2028, 2029 at the latest, to warn her faithful sheep audience at the New York Times about pigeon flu or funkypox or Sars-Cov-6 or whatever.

Why wouldn’t she? Being wrong doesn’t matter.

Fear is her business. And business is good.

He’s now working for The Free Press. Last night, he took a look at the facts of Berenson v Biden and became the first mainstream journalist to explain the case, and why my settlement with Department of Justice on Monday matters so much.

Does this piece mean the legacy media will finally admit the truth about the way White House and Pfizer conspired to silence me in 2021?

Probably not. But if anything can move the needle, this will.

—

(To celebrate the settlement, 20 percent subscription sale back in effect through midnight only. Get the chance to comment, and full archive access!)

Subscribe now

—

The piece is here — well worth your time.

The Free Press

Two Drinks with . . . Alex Berenson

“When I went to bed last Thursday night,” Alex Berenson told me, “I was sure we didn’t have a deal. The government offered money, but they weren’t willing to admit what they had done. And I wasn’t going to agree to a settlement without that acknowledgment. But the next morning,” he added, “my lawyer texted me with the news that they had agreed to the language. So we made the deal…

Read more

11 days ago · 88 likes · 61 comments · Joe Nocera

Today, the mRNA fanatics nonpartisan fact-checkers at NewsGuard, the umm, Global Leader in Information Reliability, struck back by finding massive holes in my piece!

They tried to, anyway. Lolcatz, as the kids say.1

The following exchange speaks for itself, so I’ll just present it without comment (aside from two figures I added in brackets).

—

(Fact-checking the fact-checkers, with your help)

Subscribe now

—

Good afternoon Mr. Berenson,

This is John Gregory, health editor at the news organization NewsGuard.

I had a question about your May 7 article about Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine trial. You said that the vaccine trial showed "a comically bad risk-benefit ratio" based on Table S4 in the trial's appendix, from which you calculated that, " the mRNA jab caused severe after-injection side effects such as vomiting or a 102- to 104-degree fever in an extra 1 out of 18 people. In other words, Moderna’s own data show that about 270 people will suffer severe vaccine side effects from its shot to stop a single flu hospitalization."

Your calculation of that "1 in 18" severe side effect rate appears to have been based on dividing 192 reported events in that chart by 3,015 -- which is the number of solicited adverse reactions reported among mRNA-1010 recipients in the trial. However, the mRNA-1010 cohort in the trial included 20,350 trial participants.

We spoke to outside experts and they said the correct calculation would then be severe side effects were reported in 1 out of every 106 vaccine recipients, not 1 in 18.

Moreover, your article does not appear to explain that the "grade 3" events are distinct from "serious," or "grade 4" adverse events that would be considered life-threatening. As defined by the FDA and explained by the Association of Health Care Journalists, grade 3 events are "severe, something that substantially interferes with daily activities and prevents you from being able to do normal activities, such as going to work or school. Severe adverse events might include a fever of 102ºF-104ºF, frequent vomiting that requires rehydration or pain that requires pain relievers. Importantly, however, grade 3 does not require someone to go to the hospital."

As outside experts told us, Grade 3 events would generally not be the basis for a risk/benefit analysis on preventing symptomatic flu.

We want to make sure we're not missing some caveats here, so here are my questions:

1) Could you explain why you calculated the rate of side effects based only on Table S4, and not by including all 20,350 people in the mRNA-1010 cohort?

2) Is there a reason why your article did not explain the difference between grade 3 and grade 4 adverse events?

—

My answer:

1: The solicited events are calculated out of that 3,000-person subset, the other trial participants [17,000 additional participants in each arm] are not asked. The 6.4 percent figure [192 out of 3,000] is correct. If your experts are not able to understand this, they are not very good experts. Maybe ask them again.

2: Grade 5 is death. Grade 4 is life-threatening and requiring hospitalization. Grade 3 is generally requiring medical attention - a call to the doctor, a trip to the ER, but not life-threatening.

For most people, Grade 3 events are likely to be more severe than an average case of the flu, and the average person in the trial was more than twice as likely to have them after getting the Moderna shot as have ANY type of flu after NOT getting the shot (6.4% vs 2.8% flu incidence for standard shot recipients).

I’m sorry mRNA respiratory virus shots are a failed biotechnology. I’m even sorrier people like you are burning the last embers of your credibility trying to defend them.

—

(See, the NewsGuard logo has a fingerprint, so you know they’re telling the truth!)

—

Sigh.

The only question now: will John Gregory take his ball and go home, or write something that isn’t even half-true (figure maybe 15%) to salve his pride?

I’m guessing the latter. “Fact-checkers” gonna “fact-check,” and the man’s gotta eat.

We’ll find out.

—

Funny story, NewsGuard was co-founded by Publicis Groupe, the world’s largest advertising agency — which works for Pfizer, among many other Big Pharma companies.

Me? I work for you.

Support Unreported Truths with a subscription.

Subscribe now

Or consider a one-time donation!

—

Thursday’s article:

I almost didn’t take the deal.

Last week, I went to a dinner honoring Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health. As you likely know, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the health bureaucracy wanted to destroy Jay in 2020 for the crime of being honest about Covid. Now he runs the $50 billion federal agency that tried to silence him.

Meanwhile, James Lawrence, my lawyer, was talking to the Justice Department about settling Berenson v Biden, my lawsuit over the 2021 conspiracy between Biden administration and Pfizer officials to force me off Twitter. We had already given ground by agreeing we did not need a consent decree binding the government in the future.1 The money on the table ($150,000) was enough to represent a meaningful settlement and fund the case for a while as we pursued the Pfizer defendants, but not life-changing.

But James insisted the government admit in any settlement what the Biden administration had done — not merely “inducing” or jawboning Twitter to ban my account, but effectively coercing the company against the wishes of its top executives by joining the power of the White House with Pfizer against me.

—

(Standing against power. With your help.)

Subscribe now

—

One would think President Trump’s Justice Department would happily make that admission about the Biden administration. But with the White House under fire for its own skirmishes with the media, the federal lawyers didn’t seem interested.

Free speech is great, until you’re the one who has to put up with all those annoying journalists and questions.

On Thursday night, Jay — a serious scientist and a good guy — repeatedly mentioned the censorship I had faced to the crowd. And as I walked out of dinner, I thought to myself: Jay is right. I WAS CENSORED.

And yet.

For years, the mainstream media has engaged in what can only be called gaslighting by refusing to report on this case, even as James and I have steadily unearthed documents showing how senior Biden administration and Pfizer officials worked together to silence me.

This process began in 2022 with the initial discovery I won from Twitter after successfully suing in Berenson v Twitter, continued with access to “Twitter Files” in 2023 and Elon Musk’s personal intervention in 2024 to push X to search its files more thoroughly, and even included information Congressional investigators dug up. We have so much evidence now sometimes I have to reread it to make sure I get all the details right.

The problem has never been the facts.

The problem has been — well, twofold.

First, the law. It is hard to win damages suits against the federal government. This fact might seem counterintuitive, with federal judges issuing injunctions against the Trump administration seemingly hourly.

But those are injunctions, they are meant to stop ongoing policies. They are not really applicable to my case. The Biden administration is gone (and even before it was gone, Musk had taken over Twitter and largely ended its censorship policies).

I don’t need an injunction. I need compensation for harm already done to me, the loss of my key platform at the key moment in the fight over mRNA jabs and free choice, the summer of 2021, as millions of people were reading my Twitter posts.

Believe it or not, those damages are not available under current laws for the core violation of my First Amendment rights. Only the Supreme Court or Congress can change that reality. Neither seems to want to do so.

—

But the media blackout was and is its own problem.

The evidence we’ve found — the Slack chats, the emails, the memorialized conversations — proves what happened.

Imagine if hard evidence showed top Trump administration and ExxonMobil officials working together to force social media companies to ban a journalist writing about climate change. The story would be a national scandal. If the journalist sued, the legacy media would cover every twist and turn.

But what happened to me doesn’t make my old colleagues at the New York Times proud. The fact a Democratic administration conspired with a hugely profitable company to silence an independent journalist isn’t a great look.

The legacy’s response has simply been to ignore it. And so for years now, James and I have fought this legal battle — against the United States government and one of the world’s largest companies, against some of the most highly paid lawyers in the United States — alone.

Sometimes even I found myself questioning, did White House and Pfizer officials really try to censor me in secret? Though I know they did.

—

(Though not quite alone. You’ve all been part of this fight too. And it is not over.)

Subscribe now

—

I knew last week if I didn’t settle with the government, we would likely be stuck next year asking the Supreme Court to make new law by extending my rights to sue for money damages. Could we win? Of course we could based on the facts. But we would face long odds.

Still, after hearing Jay last week, I realized something: I was not settling unless the government admitted what the Biden Administration had done. Not just because the admission will help the remaining part of the suit against Pfizer.

Because someone had to be willing to tell the truth about what happened in 2021 or I would go down swinging. They’d admit reality, or we would take our chances.

I got home late, too late to call James and tell him what I’d decided.

Instead, amazingly, I woke up Friday to a text from James telling me the Justice Department had accepted the language he’d proposed.

Whew.

—

—

Disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.

Yeah, it sure was disfavored.

The fight isn’t over, of course.

I am still pursuing Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb and chairman Albert Bourla for their role in the conspiracy.

But no matter what, the federal government has now officially admitted its role forcing Twitter to ban me in 2021. Whether or not the mainstream media ever reports the truth of my case, that admission can never go away.

Again, this would not have happened without you. Not just your financial support, but all the emails and comments encouraging the fight. I cannot thank you enough.

Many of you offered congratulations after I reported the settlement — even Elon Musk, who responded to an email I had sent him thanking him for his help with the most Elon of responses, the single word “Cool.”

That was the second-most awesome thing that happened yesterday.

The most awesome came last night. When my phone lit up with a call from Jay.

Who said, simply, “You did it, man.”

No.

We did it.

—

To make a one-time donation, click here!

—

(Yesterday’s piece)

Hello Berenson v (Albert) Bourla.

Today, the Trump Administration and I settled the federal government’s role in Berenson v Biden, my lawsuit against Biden Administration and Pfizer officials for violating my Constitutional rights and forcing Twitter to ban me in summer 2021.

After three hard-fought years, this settlement marks a massive win in my fight to hold the government and Pfizer accountable for their conspiracy to silence me. I could not have done it without your support. (Or Elon Musk’s.)

The agreement includes a six-figure payment and a statement “the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantial coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.”

James Lawrence, my (very able) lawyer, and I believe this settlement marks the first time any individual American has received a cash payment to resolve a lawsuit over government coercion of social media companies.

More importantly, the government’s admission may prove crucial as my suit moves ahead against its remaining defendants, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb and chairman Dr. Albert Bourla.

I am pleased the Trump administration recognized the Biden White House’s violations of my rights and chose to settle with me despite my recent criticism of Trump. At least in my case, the White House is practicing what it preaches on the First Amendment. A thank-you is in order.

—

(I will never, never, NEVER stop fighting for the First Amendment and the truth. Join me.)

Subscribe now

—

The battle is won. But the war is not over.

While the settlement releases the government from the case, it leaves us open to pursue Bourla and Gottlieb for their role in the conspiracy. That conspiracy was not just against me, but against all unvaccinated people who were reading and listening to me as the Biden Administration prepared to force mRNA jabs on healthy adults.

And we are pushing ahead, by asking the federal Second Circuit of Appeals in New York City to find Covid unvaccinated people deserve the same First Amendment protections as a group as many other disfavored groups do.

—

(Scott Gottlieb does his Scott Gottlieb thing. Yes, he was talking about me. Somehow he forgot to mention in this email that he was getting paid by company that sold about $100 billion in mRNA jabs. Oops!

Todd O’Boyle was Twitter’s top White House lobbyist in 2021. You can smell the swamp fumes from here. Or maybe that’s just Gottlieb’s hair oil.)

—

The settlement came on the eve of the government’s deadline to file a response to our appeal, after Judge Jessica G.L. Clarke dismissed our lawsuit last fall.

Our complaint contained ample evidence Gottlieb worked with Biden administration officials to force Twitter to ban me in 2021, even as Twitter’s most senior executives questioned if I had done anything to violate the platform’s terms of service. Bourla contacted top officials at the same time, including a White House meeting with Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff.

In fact, it was Gottlieb’s direct appeal to Twitter’s White House lobbyist over my famous Aug. 28, 2021 “It doesn’t stop infection” tweet that led directly to my ban.

In general, private companies and individuals cannot directly violate First Amendment rights. But a federal law known as 1985(3) gives plaintiffs the right to sue in federal courts over conspiracies that keep them from “having and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States.”

Federal courts have generally construed 1985(3) narrowly. But the conspiracy between Gottlieb, Bourla, and the federal government in 2021 is clearly the type of behavior for which the statute creates liability.

—

(I hope so much that one day I’ll get to see Pfizer and Scott Gottlieb try to defend banning me over this tweet to a jury. Even a New York jury.)

—

The question James Lawrence and I will ask the Second Circuit to answer is not whether federal or state governments may require vaccinations. It is whether unvaccinated people have the same rights to speak to each other as people who are vaccinated.1 And the government’s acknowledgement in its settlement that it did in fact violate those First Amendment rights makes my case stronger.

If we win at the Second Circuit, our lawsuit will be alive back in front of Judge Clarke. And we will get the discovery about the communications between the White House and Pfizer in summer 2021 I have been fighting to see for three years.

If we lose at the Second Circuit, we’ll go to the Supreme Court and try there.

Three years in, the fight has only begun.

But today is a good day. A very, very good day. The mainstream media might even have to take notice (though I’m not counting on it).

—

(And any day is a good day to subscribe! Catch up on the paywalled history of Berenson v BidenBourla)

Subscribe now

—

Note: that six-figure settlement should cover us through the Second Circuit appeal.

But hopefully we will soon be back before Judge Clarke, fighting Pfizer for depositions, discovery, and the chance to get to a jury.

And over the last four years, beginning with Berenson v Twitter, I’ve realized many of you give because you want to stand with me in this fight.

If that’s how you feel, you can still donate:

Via GiveSendGo

Via GoFundMe

You can also Venmo me at Alex-Berenson-3

Or send a check to James Lawrence at Envisage Law, PO Box 30099
Raleigh, North Carolina 27622

Donations of all sizes welcome — this is about standing together.

Please. If you missed it last year, this piece will let you judge Jong-Fast’s “forgiveness” for yourself. It’s no accident she was a hardcore lockdowner and mRNA fanatic, they are (nearly) all like this. Of course the Times let her pimp her 2025 memoir again.

Hope you and your mom are having a great day!

—

(The piece - below - isn’t archived, so you don’t have to subscribe to read it, but I hope you will!)

Subscribe now

—

Lenz is a wannabe journalist who got fired in 2020 by the Cedar Rapids Gazette for being too far left and overly political. (In 2020! From a newspaper!)

She parlayed her firing into a successful Substack (over 50,000 subscribers) and a bestselling 2024 memoir whining about the awfulness of her ex-husband.

Actual title of the Substack: “Men Yell At Me.” Actual title of the book: “This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life.” I am not making this up. I couldn’t make this up.

Lenz lives in Iowa and constantly complains about its politics, but for whatever reason won’t move to Seattle or Minneapolis or Brooklyn. You know every single one of her views, and I mean every single one:

Trans surgeries on kids? Great, God’s gift to the universe, absolutely not a socially constructed mutilation fad.

Covid vaccines? God’s other gift to the universe.

Climate change? Bad.

Women? Good.

Men? Bad.

Christianity? Bad, basically.

Christian men? Bad X bad equals bad squared.

Muslim men? Umm… erm… pass.

Donald Trump? So bad. The worst. Except maybe for her ex-husband. No, probably even worse.

Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Sample Lyz Lenz headline: “Liberal women should not marry Republican men.” (So many answers to that one, but I will restrain myself. I think you have the picture: Lyz Lenz thinks about men a lot more than they think about her.)

—

(Reading woke newsletters, so you don’t have to. It’s not a subscription, it’s danger pay!)

Subscribe now

Or consider a one-time donation! (Someone donated $1000 a few days ago… I couldn’t believe it either. Thank you, sir!)

—

Somehow I wound up on the “Men Yell At Me” mailing list years ago. Not sure how.

I stuck with it (unpaid, of course), in part because Lenz can sometimes be funny in a biting way. But mostly because I think information silos are dangerous — dangerous for companies, dangerous for intelligence agencies, dangerous for minds. I’ve never spoken to her or met her, though.1

Anyway, every Friday, Lenz has a feature called “Dingus of the Week,” where she makes fun of some (conservative) person she doesn’t like — Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Megyn Kelly.

Today’s “Dingus” was Steven Roth, a New York real estate developer who has pushed back on Zohran Mamdani for his attacks on wealthy New Yorkers.

Fine. Lenz doesn’t like Roth. So be it.

She thinks he’s rich (he is)… and doesn’t pay enough in taxes (sure, we can have that debate)… and, umm, maybe should be executed (say what?).

See for yourself:

Steven Roth, you absolute greedy fuck…

You are in Mar-a-Lago, taking bets on which Iranian kindergarten the president is going to bomb next.

But sure, tell me more about your moral outrage.

Did it hurt your widdle feelings when we said you should pay some taxes, sir? Would you prefer we said, “Eat the rich?”

*Guillotine noises intensify.*

—

An animated graphic of a guillotine followed.

—

(Funny stuff from Lyz Lenz)

—

Less than two weeks ago, President Trump faced his third assassination attempt in less than two years.

Eight months ago, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Just over a year ago, Brian Thompson — the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare — was gunned down on a Manhattan street.

And last month, Hasan Piker, a 34-year-old streamer highly popular on the left, justified Thompson’s murder in a New York Times opinion discussion headlined called “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?”:

And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder… because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.

—

(More than ever the world needs sane, independent voices. Support mine.)

Subscribe now

—

Lyz Lenz isn’t Hasan Piker.

In a way that makes her and her attitude more dangerous.

Piker knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s built a national audience by being outrageous, by pretending that Cuba is a socialist wonderland. He wants to rile conservatives the same way the alt-right wants to “own the libs.”

Lenz is a third-tier comedienne/journalist/author/whiner from Iowa. She’s not quite a nobody, but she’s hardly a household name. She’s just saying what she thinks: rich people are evil. Joking about chopping off their heads is cool.

I’m all in favor of free speech. Lenz and Piker are legally allowed to say whatever they want, short of “true threats,” and I’m not going to pretend to mistake an animated guillotine for a true threat.

But these jokes and dogwhistles and rhetorical incitements to violence on the left are getting more and more dangerous. As the last two years prove.

Steven Roth is richer than Lyz Lenz. Worse, he’s a man.

But he doesn’t deserve to die for those sins.

Or does he, Lyz?

They are awful. Not that you would know from the legacy media’s coverage, or Moderna’s press release promising “potential approvals expected to begin in 2026.”

The trial showed severe side effects from the mRNA shot dwarfed whatever protection against flu it may offer.

Compared to a standard flu shot, the mRNA jab prevented about 1 hospitalization in every 5,000 people who received it.1 But compared to the standard shot, the mRNA jab caused severe after-injection side effects such as vomiting or a 102- to 104-degree fever in an extra 1 out of 18 people.

In other words, Moderna’s own data show that about 270 people will suffer severe vaccine side effects from its shot to stop a single flu hospitalization. In what world does that risk ratio make sense?2

The trial also showed that more people who received the mRNA shot died from all causes in the next six months than those who got the standard jab.

The difference was small, and Moderna claimed none of the deaths were related to the shot. But the trial marks yet another case of a big clinical trial where volunteers who received an mRNA shot died more often than those who didn’t. That’s certainly not evidence mRNA is safe as a vaccine for widespread use in healthy adults or kids.

—

(Support my work finding and reporting the data you don’t see anywhere else. For pennies a day.)

Subscribe now

—

Of course, that’s now the legacy media reported the results of the trial, which the New England Journal of Medicine published Wednesday. NBC News wrote:

Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine more effective than standard shot in late-stage trial… An mRNA-based flu shot could make a huge difference in flu prevention…

Side effects such as fatigue, headache and arm pain were more common in the mRNA group, but were mild and short-lived. People often have similar reactions after getting a traditional flu shot.

Technically, NBC did not lie: mRNA could make a huge difference in flu prevention, in the same way that I could win a Pulitzer Prize for this article. Anything’s possible, right?

And, yes, the standard flu shot also sometimes has side effects, and they are sometimes severe — in about 1 percent of patients, compared to 6.4 percent who receive Moderna’s mRNA shot. (In the same way, a person who makes $100,000 and someone else who makes $640,000 could both be described accurately as having an “above-average” income.)

But portraying the trial’s results as a success is dishonest to the point of absurdity. It’s what one would expect from a Moderna press release, not a supposedly independent news organization.

—

(The real news from the trial is in blue, everything else is a detail.)

—

Yet the trial has already succeeded as far as Moderna and Big Pharma are concerned.

Two months ago, Dr. Vinay Prasad was forced to resign as the chief medical officer of the Food and Drug Administration, largely because of pressure from Moderna — and Blackstone, the giant private equity company that has invested $750 million into Moderna’s mRNA flu shot.

Prasad had refused even to accept Moderna’s FDA application for its shot, opening himself to criticism as being biased against the company. He said Moderna should have tested its shot against a more effective, higher-dose version of the older flu jab, not the standard dose jab it used for comparison.

The newly published results show Prasad would have been better off accepting Moderna’s filing — and rejecting it on the basis that its side effect profile is so bad that it is not approvable for sale.

—

(Battling for the truth with every story — even when the odds are long.)

Subscribe now

—

Now, though, Moderna and Blackstone — whose chief executive Stephen A. Schwarzman gave $5 million to President Trump’s political action committee last fall and attended the White House state dinner for King Charles last week — have beaten Prasad and shown FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary their power.

Will Makary be willing to risk his job to stop this shot?

We will find out later this year.

But history suggests the odds are long.

Not for a state-of-the-art neonatal unit, or a Level III trauma center. The United States now spends over $2 million every year for an average hospital bed — $1.6 trillion in all.

That’s one key reason the American medical system has fewer beds per capita than many other rich countries. We just cannot afford more beds.

Why do American hospitals cost so much? Heavy administrative spending, patient lawsuits, relentless marketing and advertising, high labor costs, regular investment in new imaging systems (sometimes necessary, sometimes not), construction of shiny new buildings to chase elective surgery patients, and, oh yeah, seven- and eight-figure executive salaries — which have recently exploded.

Pick your poison. One factor does not play much of a role, however.

Charity care.

—

Instead of an ER trip, try a discounted Unreported Truths subscription! Way safer.

But the sale ends at midnight (I may have mentioned this once or twice)!

—

Even before Obamacare extended insurance to many poorer patients (at an incredible cost, a cost the system is only now beginning to recognize), many hospitals provided little or no charitable care.

A 2022 study found that 60 percent of hospitals devoted less than 2 percent of their operating expenses to free or discounted care to eligible patients. About 40 percent devoted 1 percent or less. Even hospitals run by religious orders often skimp on charity care and pursue indigent patients for bills they have no way of paying, as a 2024 investigation found.

Yet the vast majority of hospitals hold themselves out as “nonprofits,” quasi-charitable institutions that want nothing more than to serve their local communities.

In reality, they’re about as nonprofit as OpenAI turned out to be.

As a Washington Post opinion piece argued Monday, nonprofit hospitals may actually do less for their local communities than their for-profit competitors:

[Economists] found that because nonprofit hospitals cannot distribute profits to shareholders, they accumulate excess tax-free cash — and spend it on themselves. Their facility-wide general and administrative wage expenses run 26 percent higher than comparable for-profit hospitals. Their managers use the surplus to pursue what the researchers bluntly call “empire-building through capital expansion.”

This dynamic has played out all over the United States, as academic medical centers like the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, or UPMC (which has grown out of the University of Pittsburgh) use their surplus capital (and branding advantage as “nonprofits”) to become regional empires.

Mayo now has nearly 60,000 90,000 [note: I used an outdated figure, my mistake] employees. The Cleveland Clinic has 83,000. UPMC dwarfs both; it is the largest non-governmental employer in Pennsylvania, with more than 100,000 workers.

—

(UPMC’s employee and revenue growth since 2005. Too bad life expectancy hasn’t followed.)

—

These regional monopolies drive up costs for insurers and patients.

No health insurance company in western Pennsylvania can avoid contracting with UPMC, just as none in northeast Ohio can avoid the Cleveland Clinic. (Having essentially exhausted western Pennsylvania, UPMC is now expanding into Ohio, setting up a potential clash of the titans with the Cleveland Clinic.)

It should go without saying that monopoly providers aren’t just expensive, they are rarely overly responsive to their customers — aka patients, in this case. And patients are already at a massive disadvantage inside hospitals, for all the obvious reasons. Don’t like the local Walmart? Adios, Target’s a couple miles over. No one is walking out of a hospital the day before (or after) an open-heart surgery.

So what to do?

At a minimum, antitrust regulators need to look at these local monopolies the same way they would judge other monopolies, and consider forcing divestitures.

A hospital business dominated by 10 to 20 big national companies and real competition in local and regional markets would be far better than the current set up of regional monopolies — whether those companies were for- or nonprofit.

Another possibility: federal and state windfall profits taxes on executive pay at nonprofit hospitals. The taxes could be graduated, starting at $1 million and rising. High executive pay is fine, when it is set by the market and paid by shareholder-owned companies that must also pay taxes. Nonprofit hospitals benefit from huge direct and indirect government and public subsidies. If they want to pay their executives like business tycoons, they should drop the fiction they’re nonprofit.

—

If you enjoy stories like this — at 20 percent off — you know what to do! (If you don’t, I’m talking about subscribing)

—

Forcing nonprofits to give more charity care is another alternative, though in the age of Obamacare it’s not entirely clear how that process would work.

An even more radical suggestion: state and federal governments could tax these “nonprofits” on their retained surpluses.

Of course, the nonprofit hospital industry will fight any and all of these changes. And it is a formidable force. It has enormous political power in Washington and even more at the state and local level. In declining second- and third-tier cities across the Northeast and Midwest that have grown to depend on healthcare as a steady employer, hospitals are a critical source of prestige and financial power.

But something has to change.

The current fiction works wonderfully for these “nonprofit” hospitals, especially those that have leveraged into regional chains, and the executives who run them.

Everyone else pays the price.

But.

But. Nothing is free, especially not independence. Substack is hotly competitive, open to anyone and everyone. And working without a boss means working without a net. Making my own decisions means making my own mistakes.

—

Know what’s not a mistake? Signing up for Unreported Truths at 20 percent off!

The sale ends tonight and it won’t be back for a while. Don’t miss it!

—

That reality hit me again last night as I saw a federal judge had dismissed Matt Taibbi’s ill-considered defamation lawsuit over a dumb book called Owned that accuses him of being in Elon Musk’s pocket.

Taibbi, who publishes Racket News, is a tough journalist and a witty stylist. In September 2025, he wrote the only serious piece about Berenson v Biden. In February, I cheered his effort to expand by hiring new reporters and an editor.

I understand why Owned frustrated him. I’d be furious if someone claimed I was in Elon’s pocket. But the suit was a mistake. The book clearly did not reach the high standards for defamation that public figures like Taibbi must meet. Taibbi’s expansion effort has also gone south. The editor he hired, Emily Kopp, has left.1

These are the perils of running your own shop as an independent, eat-what-you-kill writer. Matt will be fine, but the last few weeks can’t have been fun.

—

Yet the game is worth the candle.

Especially for me. Some other Substacks, including Matt’s, have larger audiences than Unreported Truths. But I don’t know if anyone else has an audience more willing to let him follow stories wherever they lead.

I’m not always right, but I am committed to giving you the truth as best I can. I have told you again and again that I will not let my perceptions of what you what want me to write bias my work — that I will not fall victim to audience capture. A few of you have walked away. Far more have agreed. Some of you say explicitly you read Unreported Truths not just in spite of but because you know you won’t always agree.

In an era of deeply siloed audiences, that is the greatest gift a writer could have.

Now the ask.

The spring sale has gone great.

It’s a solid deal, too. With the 20 percent discount, you can sign up for an annual subscription for $56 — less than $5 a month, less than the original cost of Unreported Truths in 2021, even though inflation is up 25 percent since then.

I hope you join me in this work. You’ll get full archive access, the chance to comment, and no paywalls ever. But most of all you will support skeptical, independent journalism, wherever it takes me.

—

But the sale ends at midnight.

Sign up now!

—

(It’s now or never. Well, a few months, anyway.)

—

Three last business tidbits.

If you would rather make a one-time donation rather than subscribing, please do! You can do so here. (You won’t get the full benefits of subscribing, though.)

If you are a monthly subscriber and want to switch to an annual plan at the discount, let me know. I’ll figure that out.

Finally, if you went long oil back in January and want to splurge, consider a founding membership. Last summer founding members got “UTFM” T-shirts. This summer a new, even cooler bit of a swag is on the way. It’s a surprise, but trust me, you’ll like it.

One final chance to subscribe — for 20 percent off!

Never the twain shall meet.

Last week, the Washington Post pretended Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health had hidden a study showing how awesomely awesome mRNA Covid boosters are. In reality, anyone with a basic understanding of statistics and medicine could see the study wasn’t worth the pixels it was printed on.

Now the New York Times is baying the Food and Drug Administration is sitting on studies proving the mRNA Covid jabs are safer than a parachutist jumping from the bottom bunk onto a padded floor, a well-done steak, Dr. Albert Bourla’s pay package at Pfizer, insert your own analogy here…

To wit, the Times just ran this headline: F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe

To which I offer my own headline: Make It Stop

—

Making it stop, with your help - for 20 percent off!

But only through tomorrow, so sign up now!

—

Here’s the study at the center of the Times article, as described by Times propagandist for public health bureaucrats completely unbiased reporter Christina Jewell:

The study reviewed the records of about 7.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who got the vaccine. The researchers focused on the period of about 21 days after they got the vaccine and compared it to the next 20 days. They were looking to see if there were more health problems in the period right after vaccination.

The study looked at 14 health outcomes potentially caused by the vaccine… [and] found a concern with [only] one outcome, anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction affecting about 1 in a million people, from the Pfizer vaccine.

Sounds reasonable, right?

Wrong.

This type of study is called a “self-controlled case series” design. Under some circumstances, and particularly for longer periods when a facet of the variable one is attempting to measure does not confound the outcome, it can be reasonable.

In this case, though, comparing adverse events in the three weeks immediately after vaccination to the three weeks after that produces a bias hugely in favor of vaccine safety. Why?

Because people are unlikely to get vaccinated if they aren't feeling well. They will wait.

—

(Dr. Albert Bourla, chairman of Pfizer. Yeah, I’m still suing him. More on that soon.)

—

Thus the days immediately following vaccination are likely to see a DROP in serious side effects, whatever the impact of the shots may be. Jabs have to have very serious problems to overcome that inherent bias in their favor and show safety signals in this kind of design.

The people talking to Christina Jewett certainly know that inherent flaw makes the study basically useless. Does she? I don’t know. I’d like to believe she does and is choosing to ignore that inconvenient fact because poking at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is just too much fun.

In reality, she probably has no idea.

—

Which is why I’m here, with your help!

Did I mention the 20 percent off? Maybe once or twice? Only through tomorrow, though!

—

The fact that the legacy media and health bureaucrats inside the federal government are still carrying water for mRNAs Covid jabs, should astonish all of us. There is no reasonable case for anyone, even adults over 75, to continue taking these.

1: They don’t work.

2: Covid is extremely mild at this point.

3: We have no idea what the short- or long-term side effects of annual or biannual mRNA injections might be.

Yet — five years on — the mRNA fanatics still won’t quit. They simply cannot admit the truth, no matter how much damage they do to their credibility.

Credibility loss. Maybe we should add that to the list of mRNA side effects.

In February, Katy Talento — a “recovering epidemiologist” who served as a White House health policy advisor from 2017 to 2019 — wrote a remarkable Substack attacking American hospitals.

Talento drew on her personal experiences seeing family members suffer to illustrate her broader concerns. The headline gives a subtle hint where she stands:

Hospitals are Soviet-style Hellscapes Unfit for Humans

Despite her anger, Talento is no fool. The reality of her views is more nuanced. As she explains near the end of the piece:

When you have a bullet in your belly, a third-degree burn… [or] a heart attack, an American ER is just the place. When one of those patients doesn’t make it, you want their organs transplanted into someone who might be waiting in the OR down the hall...

The life-saving, acute services that are valuable are not profitable. They cannot be made profitable. They require an expensive crew of high-skill labor, cutting edge technology, the most expensive forms of ground and air transport, with 24/7/365 access for a catchment area that does not produce enough of these needs each year to recoup costs.

—

Help recoup the costs of the truth!

20 percent off Unreported Truths subscriptions for one more day!

—

To pay for that emergency care, we have moved more routine and profitable surgeries and procedures to hospitals, Talento argues. She makes the case doing so has had terrible consequences financially and medically.

Saving trauma or heart attack or stroke patients with minutes to live requires strict chains of command. But Talento argues outpatient centers or even at-home nursing services serve patients far better for routine care:

But that [hospital] culture of top-down authoritarianism loses all appropriateness and perspective when the stakes are routine, such as elective surgeries, cancer palliation, birthing babies. Nonetheless, the culture created for the trauma context infuses the entire complex so overwhelmingly as to inhibit or reverse healing and health rather than protect it.

—

Talento is not an MD.

And I suspect many of the physicians who read Unreported Truths object to her characterization of “cancer palliation” or particularly “birthing babies” as routine. Midwives and doulas are fine, until they aren’t. Even in the early 20th century, English women had a risk of death in childbirth estimated at between 1 in 200 and 1 in 100. Today, the rate is about 1 in 10,000.

Nonetheless, Talento’s description of her daughter’s third labor and delivery is fascinating. The family’s (seemingly reasonable) requests for (moderate) autonomy ran smack into the hospital’s rigid (and no doubt liability- as well as financially-driven) obstetric protocols.

By the end, the new mother and nurses were so sideways the nurses called Child Protective Services on her. This is the medical equivalent of flight attendants deplaning and arresting a passenger who waits a few seconds too long to turn off a phone, a legal but very nasty abuse of authority.

—

(The beginning of the process is a lot more fun.)

—

Talento’s views are well worth considering, so I asked her if I could republish the portion of the piece about her granddaughter’s birth.

She graciously agreed, and even answered a couple of follow-up questions about what happened with CPS. (The whole article is available here, at her “AllBetter” Substack, and worth your time.)

Again, one does not have to agree with all of Talento’s take to understand how viscerally angry her family became at a system that insisted on treating a medically uncomplicated childbirth as a high-risk procedure — and along the way made the experience uncomfortable and exhausting.

Here it is, republished unedited:

—

Last year, my daughter was due with her third baby.

She’d been induced with her first two babies, and so when her water broke naturally, she panicked. What does one do, when labor starts on its own, dear God in heaven?!

We showed up at the hospital about an hour later at 3 cm [Note: a three-centimeter cervical dilation, or early labor] - the same dilation she’d been days before at her last prenatal visit. The right thing to do? Send her home to labor naturally until things got real. That’s what they used to do, decades ago. But then babies might accidentally, you know, come out without the hospital cash register dinging in the background.

So, instead, they strap her in. First the IVs. Why can’t she feed and hydrate herself? She’s completely healthy. Oh right, because the c-section rate is so disgracefully high in this country that they starve laboring women for hours and hours on the not-so-off chance that they end up in surgery.

Then the fetal monitor which, despite our ability to land on the moon, is completely beyond our powers to keep in place on a big belly. Constant interruptions because the stupid monitor strap has moved.

Why do you need to monitor? This is a low-risk, no-drama situation.

“It’s protocol.”

What is the evidence of fetal monitoring improving outcomes rather than hastening the imposition of dangerous interventions?

Blank stare. “It’s protocol.”

What if she refuses?

“She can’t. It’s protocol.”

No really, what if she refuses?

“She can’t deliver here.”

So she can just walk out of here?

“Well, we’d have to call CPS.”

Ah yes, the CPS card.

—

And so, like clockwork, the cascade of interventions began. First, of course, since she wasn’t actually in active labor (remember the 3 cm?), she was just sitting there for a few hours while nothing happened. Taking up a bed. Unacceptable.

Time for “augmentation.” That’s when they jack you up with pitocin - a synthetic counterfeit of the natural hormone oxytocin that is responsible for regulating uterine contractions to correspond with the rest of the hormonal symphony present in physiological birth (which no L&D doctor or nurse has ever actually observed).

Pitocin, unlike oxytocin, doesn’t wax and wane with the needs of the bodies involved, and instead just asserts itself aggressively and immediately. Unnatural, shocking, and unbearable contractions start within 30-60 minutes. Not the natural kind that gradually grow and build on each other, productively moving the baby when the rest of the body is ready.

My daughter was no exception. And so of course, the epidural.

The vast majority (like 80-90 percent) of women given pitocin end up with an epidural - almost 25-50 percent more than those not given pitocin.

Epidurals stop or slow the contractions. And often the baby’s heart rate. Failure to progress. Fetal distress. So then, emergency c-section. See how this works?

—

I’m sure it has nothing to do with how the hospital makes more money if they can move women through the process in 12 hours, ending with a (dangerous, expensive) invasive surgery, and on to the next lady. Rather than sitting with a mother’s labor for the 48-72 hours it might naturally take under the oxytocin-suppressing hospital conditions.

Every mammal on earth retreats to dark, enclosed, solitude to birth their young.

That is the optimal environment of safety that signals their hormonal symphony to get to work. Any bright light, interruption or the slightest stress (caused by observation of others, noises in the woods, etc) causes cortisol to spike. Cortisol shuts off oxytocin. Uterine contractions slow or stop until the animal is safe again.

So you can imagine the cortisol/oxytocin impact of bright, fluorescent lighting, beeping, constant interruptions, monitoring, observation, and an entire culture built around fear-mongering this process as a medical, life-threatening emergency.

No wonder we have the highest, most disgraceful, most scandalous c-section rate of any nation on earth. Babies don’t come out easily under these conditions.

In my daughter’s case, that wasn’t going to happen. That’s why I was there.

Even still, after my granddaughter was born without a c-section, the shenanigans continued.

Mom and baby were moved up to a different unit at 1:00 am, naturally exhausted and wanting to just snuggle and sleep.

The new nurse comes in with a clipboard and insists on explaining how we need to keep track on this complex chart of the timing and amount of each poop and pee drop, each feeding, for how long, on which boob, and we have to make sure there’s no feeding the baby within an hour of the three-hour glucose heel-prick, and on and on.

—

—

The nurse was actually surprised and butt-hurt when we told her, politely, to buzz off.

We will not be doing your chart-tracking. We will not be following your instructions. Leave us alone until morning.

They did not comply. That night was so miserable for my daughter, with the beeping and lighting and constant interruptions, she got no rest. In the morning, she had decided that it was neither good for her nor her daughter to spend another night there. Even though the hospital revenue model “protocol” demanded two nights.

Thank goodness I had warned her about the CPS card before they played it, or she might have buckled in shock. But she was prepared, and I was never so proud as when she stood her ground. We left that afternoon.

They did call CPS. Because, of course they did.

My daughter swatted that away later, but the totalitarianism of mindless and often dangerous hospital rituals knows no bounds.

—

—

The childbirth section of Talento’s piece ended there, but when I emailed her I asked about the Child Protective Services call:

They REALLY called CPS? What did they claim? What was the excuse to call? And what happened next? Did CPS show up at your daughter's house, or just wave off the complaint? Was there an actual investigation?

Here was her answer, which strikes me as the ugliest and most indefensible part of the entire episode:

And yes, they REALLY called CPS. They claimed that she left AMA [Note: against medical advice]. They insisted on two days stay because they claimed the baby’s sugars were too low at one test right after birth, even though every time they tested her subsequently (every couple hours), the sugars seemed to be above the threshold...

The CPS people called my daughter within 24 hours of her leaving the hospital and wanted to come over RIGHT NOW. My daughter was at our house, and so she couldn’t do that. So they went back and forth a few times and my daughter agreed to meet the lady at a Chick-fil-A.

She wanted to know what happened at the hospital and why my daughter thought she could leave after 24 hours. She wanted to know if she had an appointment with a pediatrician scheduled (which the hospital had asked probably 10 times and wanted to know the pediatrician’s name).

When they met, the lady insisted on seeing her other two children, who were at daycare. My daughter told her to pound sand because there was no complaint or investigation about them. Eventually, the lady reluctantly admitted she’d close the investigation.

What was so horrific about this is that my daughter was adopted at age 12, after she’d been in the foster care system for 5 years and was horribly abused there, had begged CPS to move her and protect her siblings too, but they had investigated and put her back in the same home. So CPS was no laughing matter to her.

But she managed to handle it with grace.

—

—

So a happy ending. Of sorts.

Again, what is so striking is that Talento’s daughter had a generally uncomplicated birth and a healthy baby, yet the experience was miserable for all concerned.

The reason, of course, is that Talento had the inside knowledge to understand the hidden (and not-so-hidden) financial incentives driving many of the hospital’s protocols — and the confidence to help her daughter push against them.

Both sides wanted a healthy mother and child. But the hospital preferred a speedy, highly medicalized (and not coincidentally more profitable) birth. The nurses refused to accept any challenge to their authority.

The result was a slow-motion disaster, even though nothing actually went wrong.

—

Subscribe to Unreported Truths for all the truth fit to email - at 20 percent off!

But don’t wait, the sale ends tomorrow!

—

All this for $5 trillion a year, $1.6 trillion on hospitals alone.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that at the moment the American medical-industrial complex is the worst of all possible worlds.

—

Again, thanks to Katy for allowing me to excerpt the article. The whole piece is here:

AllBetter

Hospitals are Soviet-style Hellscapes Unfit for Humans

Everything that happened to my dying sister in that hospital was legal, standard, and indefensible…

Read more

3 months ago · 29 likes · 41 comments · Katy Talento ND ScM

When I saw the nytimes.com headline, I clicked though expecting another article blaming insurance companies.

Nope. Instead, the opinion piece — from a Yale professor — focused on hospital costs:

We are directing our anger at the part of the system that is most visible and frustrating (insurers’ restrictions on care) while ignoring the part of the health system that is most responsible for high costs and economic pain: hospital prices…

Since 2000, prices at hospitals have grown faster than prices in virtually any other sector of the economy. They have grown three times as fast as inflation and twice as fast as prescription drugs and doctor visits.

Yep. Insurance companies deserve plenty of blame, but hospital costs, including gold-plated new buildings, now threaten to bankrupt the entire system.

—

Know what won’t bankrupt the system? Unreported Truths!

Take advantage of the 20 percent off subscription sale before it expires!

—

The problem is only getting worse, as hospitals suck up a ever-larger share of overall medical spending. As the Kaiser Family Foundation pointed out in February, between 2022 and 2024 alone, spending on hospitals rose another $277 billion and reached $1.6 trillion, almost $5,000 for every American.

—

(Raking in the green.)

SOURCE

—

This explosion in costs has not come because the United States has opened more hospitals or more hospital beds.

On a per capita basis, the United States has roughly half as many hospital beds as in 1980. (That decline is one reason health bureaucrats panicked about hospital overrun during Covid. The system can handle normal patient volumes, but it has little slack for emergencies.)

Instead, hospitals simply charge far more than they once did for surgeries, outpatient or same-day procedures, imaging, and emergency room visits. Prices have risen much faster than inflation for decades.

The article pins the problem on hospital mergers, which give local hospital systems increasing market power over insurance companies and private payors:

Since 2000, there have been more than 1,300 hospital mergers among the nation’s approximately 5,000 hospitals. When hospitals that were once competitors merge, prices go up, often by double-digit percentages, with no measurable improvement in patient outcomes… 21 percent of hospitals are effectively monopolies — they have no competitor within a 30-minute drive — and an additional 24 percent face only one competitor.

—

Mergers have surely given hospitals more pricing control, driving up costs.

But they are not the only issue. After all, Medicare accounts for $500 billion in hospital inpatient spending (again, these figures seem cartoonishly large, but they are correct). Yet hospitals constantly complain they lose money on Medicare patients (though that claim is hotly debated).

And hospitals do not run at huge profit margins overall.

In 2025, HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit hospital company, reported profits of $6.8 billion on revenues of $76 billion — a decent but hardly stunning margin of 9 percent. In other words, this flood of extra spending is producing only a trickle of additional income to hospital bottom lines.

Meanwhile, hospitals that serve poorer, sicker communities and offer fewer high-profit elective procedures struggle to get by.

As an executive at a hospital in a poor part of a major city has pointed out to me, his hospital is in an entirely different business than the big academic centers and chains, which spend billions of dollars a year on branding and can charge private insurers much higher rates than his facility can.

In other words, though hospitals are charging monopoly (and possibly Monopoly (TM) prices), they are not making monopoly profits.

—

(This was inevitable)

—

So what’s going on?

What’s going on is that hospital expenses are also exploding.

Those rising costs are due in part to costly branding and building sprees (which are their own kind of branding) in the never-ending medical-industrial arms race. They are due in part to the multi-million dollar salaries that both for-profit and “nonprofit” hospitals are paying to more and more of their executives.

But they are also due to the costly bureaucratic and health information software requirements that the federal government imposes and Obamacare has worsened, as well as the costs of fighting lawsuits and managing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

A 2021 paper estimated hospitals spent $250 billion on administrative costs alone. That figure is likely closer to $400 billion now — nearly as much as the United States spends on prescription drugs (which are themselves a massive rathole, but one problem at a time).

Ever more complex government-imposed bureaucracies and rules have made hospitals too expensive to function if they are unable to charge quasi-monopoly prices. (The HCA Healthcare annual report runs 326 pages, including 12 pages simply to explain different revenue sources.)

But we need hospitals, so to solve the problem we have allowed them to become quasi-monopolies. The system still functions, at crushing expense.

The left’s answer is yet more government involvement and financial backstopping — and, apparently, to shoot insurance company executives. The mainstream Republican Party has no answer at all.

—

The subscription sale ends Wednesday! Support Unreported Truths and get full access to the archives — for 20 percent off!

Click here to sign up!

—

Fixing these problems will require hard choices, ones we so far have been unwilling even to consider seriously. As the Times wrote:

Perhaps more than anything else, what makes hospital prices so hard to confront is that the relationship we have with our health care providers is very different from the transactional relationship we have with our insurers… vulnerability, fear and gratitude make it difficult to hold doctors and hospitals to the kind of scrutiny that we apply to other powerful institutions. We lean on hospitals when our children are born, when our parents get sick and when we approach life’s end. That kind of reliance requires trust.

Unfortunately, hospitals have proven for decades that — though the individual doctors and nurses who work in them may be good, caring people — as institutions they cannot be trusted, the more so because their finances are so opaque, their executives so richly compensated, and the power relationship between them and their “customers,” aka patients, so unbalanced.

What comes next?

I don’t know.

But I am glad to see the Times highlighting the problem.

—

(Another angle on out-of-control hospital spending, from last year)

—

Last week, at the Hillsdale College symposium, someone came up to me and said, “I’ve been reading you for years, I appreciate your work, and I finally decided I had to support it.”

Thank you!

—

Subscribe now - for 20% off!

—

No one has to support UT. But without you, I could not spend my time researching and writing the stories that matter to me, and to you. I might be a writer - I don’t know what else to do with myself - but I would not be an independent journalist. Your subscriptions make this work possible.

Subscribers get benefits, too. As you know, I use paywalls only rarely. But as a subscriber, you will never have to worry about one. You will also get full access to the archives (well over 1000 articles) and the chance to join the discussion and comment on posts.

—

(And it’s all on sale!)

—

For the next three days, you can do all that for 20 percent off the usual price! I haven’t run one of these discounts in a while, so if you’ve been waiting to subscribe, this is your chance.

I hope you’ll take it.

—

But the offer expires May 6, so act soon!

Joking aside, the level of feedback on pieces like yesterday’s about knee surgery shows how many physicians read UT. If I get medical details wrong, I hear about them.

In this case, I didn’t. The article correctly explained how Finnish surgeons had tested the long-term effects of surgery on tears of the meniscus, the knee cartilage that separates the shin and thigh bones. In a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, they found the surgery, which is common in the United States, was useless and possibly slightly harmful.

However. (There’s always a however, which is why medicine is an art, not a science.)

Some physicians argued the negative findings on surgeries for damage caused by age-related degeneration cannot be generalized to tears from acute injuries in younger people. Those tears have a better prognosis post-surgery, they wrote.1

—

(Keep the conversation going. For pennies a day.)

Subscribe now

—

The feedback also showed, yet again, that for medicine in general and surgery in particular, the N of 1 is what matters most.

In other words, people who felt their pain clear up following a successful meniscal operation thought the article was idiotic — and told me so.

Those who had more pain afterwards called it brilliant — and said they wished they had read it before agreeing to the surgery.

(As I explained yesterday, the study showed most people will have less pain from meniscal tears over time, whether or not they have surgery. That’s a key reason why judging the success of the procedure is difficult and why many people may be satisfied with it even if it doesn’t seem to work in clinical trials.)

—

If patients are shaped by their own experiences, so are surgeons.

The reason is not just that they are paid to operate. It is that, like almost all of us, they will tend to remember the operations that went well and resulted in happy patients and forget or explain away the ones that didn’t. They may not even know about those failures; a patient who has a total knee replacement five years after meniscal surgery may well choose a new orthopedist.

These are skilled and well-trained professionals and I hope they do not view these words as an insult. I do not mean them to be. Cutting open another human being is not for the faint of heart. I would hope anyone operating on me is confident to the edge of being overconfident.

But that’s why it’s so critical to run blinded clinical trials where long-term outcomes are measured free from the bias of the surgeon who conducted the operation.

—

(Measure twice, cut once. Maybe measure three times?

Also: if you notice your Uber driver leafing through a catalog for these scapels… find a new Uber driver!)

—

Anyway, time to let a couple of surgeons speak for themselves.

Comments presented as written, without editing, except for length.

Edward L.:

Hi Alex. I was surprised to see you wade into my specialty, orthopedic surgery. While your latest writing had some good points, it is really incomplete. When we speak of the meniscus, there are really 2 types of tears - traumatic, and degenerative. Traumatic, of course, occurs when there is an injury. We often see what we call mechanical symptoms - pain, catching, locking. These injuries tend to be a younger group of patients who do respond well to surgery.

Degenerative tears occur in an older group, often secondary to arthritis. Due to the concurrent arthritis, knee arthroscopy does not fix the underlying problem, and is not indicated. The Danish study follows degenerative tears. Back in the old days, you would hear of surgery to “clean the knee out”. Most of us have not been performing surgery on these types of tears for years, since original studies have come out against surgery for this type of tear.

Most of the scopes performed today are for the traumatic types of tear (thought I am sure there are still some colleagues who scope degenerative tears). In short, this is not really news to most of us - “nothing to see here”, other than to confuse the public…

As an aside, there is good evidence that meniscus repair (suturing the meniscus) does work well (in the traumatic group) and many new techniques have been brought forward to this end.

—

Hi Alex, first of all there is a difference between meniscal repair and meniscectomy or partial meniscal resection. Secondly, it’s been well known for some time that middle-aged and older patients with these tears often do not need surgery. This should not negate the need in a younger population.

The data on the relative uselessness of meniscectomy in knees which already have degenerative arthritis is already well known and many of us put it into practice.

Your friendly orthopedic surgeon,

Todd G.

—

(A not entirely relevant picture of knees. And knee-high boots.)

—

Now the patients.

Thomas B:

Nonsense.

I had both my knees done to repair the meniscuses like 10 years ago and haven’t had an issue since.
—

Richard M:

Utter nonsense. [Editorial note, yes, this came in just after the “nonsense” comment. People feel strongly about successful surgeries!]

Maybe for people who have no activity I could buy that the meniscus could heal similar to a broken bone. But not if you are active on it. I played sports as a hobby. I could not have continued without the surgery. I also would have less pain today as I have aged if I did not return and beat my knees up…

Less wear and tear leads to less pain as you age. I would bet as you read details of the study, the groups are not representative of active people.2

—

But not everyone was so positive.

Rachel A:

This is unbelievably relevant at my desk…to the point that when I saw the subject-line I assumed this had to be some sort of ad similar to what happens when my kids say they need something and later my phone has ads for it!

Anyway, my mom had meniscus repair surgery in November. She’s 70-ish and healthy. Non-smoker. Regular build. And no prior injury to attribute to the issue. Degenerative.

She has never been pain-free post-surgery and even reported pain at her surgical follow-ups. She finished physical therapy and followed all of the usual do’s and don’ts. She finally got her surgeon to agree to another MRI [magnetic resonance imaging], to examine the knee’s anatomy and appointment this week. She has a meniscal tear.

She will elect to have another surgery because “Medicare will pay for it.” I cringed when she said it, but it’s true. But why does she need another surgery in the first place? She did nothing to injure or re-injure. The first was never successful.

And now is she heading down the inevitable path to knee replacement?

Time will tell. I’m interested to read the full study you reference.

—

Not ready to subscribe? A donation works too, without the recurring charge!

—

Bill B:

100% truth- I had a torn meniscus and they were adamant to get surgery- it will only get worse. I refused and started walking more and doing yoga. Four years later and my knee is 100% healed.

I had a buddy get the surgery and he’s had two more since the first and now needs a knee replacement. Thanks for sharing.

—

No, thanks to all of you for speaking up.

More on this and the costs and benefits of other surgeries and procedures coming soon.

In 2007, doctors in Finland decided to test if a common knee surgery actually helped patients, by running a clinical trial on the surgery like those used to test medicines.

Over the next few years, they randomly split 146 patients into two groups. Seventy received the real surgery, in which surgeons remove torn tissue in the meniscus, the cartilage between the shin and thigh bones. The other 76 had a realistic-looking (and sounding) fake surgery — but the meniscus remained untouched.

Torn meniscal tissue can cause pain and loss of mobility. It’s reasonable to expect removing the torn cartilage might help. Orthopedists perform partial meniscectomies 850,000 times a year in the United States, at a cost of almost $10 billion.

It’s reasonable. But it’s wrong.

—

(Support Unreported Truths. The knee you save may be your own.)

Subscribe now

—

The Finnish physicians have tracked the patients ever since and repeatedly reported their findings. They did so again this week in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, the top American medical journal.

Their findings are unequivocal.

After a decade of follow-up, the patients who had the sham surgery had less pain and more knee function than those who had the real procedure.

Notably, both groups improved compared to their initial baseline. But the patients who had not had the surgery recovered even more. The results prove, yet again, the maxim by the 17th-century French satirist Molière that “the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”

Another concern: eight of the 70 patients who had the real procedure eventually had a total knee replacement, compared to three of the 76 who did not. The difference did not reach statistical significance, meaning it could have been due to chance, but it is not comforting.

—

(Ouchie! At least they don’t do it like this anymore…)

—

The orthopedists summed up their findings:

We found no evidence of benefit from the procedure, with a suggestion of worse outcomes after arthroscopic partial meniscectomy than after sham surgery… these findings arouse concern with regard to the use of arthroscopic partial meniscectomy for degenerative meniscal tear in middle-aged and older adults.

Instead of surgery, the findings suggest patients would likely be better off with physical therapy, taking over-the-counter painkillers as needed, and waiting — in other words, staying patient and accepting that small tears are the cost of aging.

But staying patient and accepting aging is not the American way.

And with $10 billion a year on the line (give or take), surgeons and hospitals are almost certain to keep offering what feels like an answer.

Even if we now know it isn’t.

—

Like Unreported Truths? Try a one-time donation - $10 billion not required!

I am here to talk about cannabis – where the science and the politics of the drug stand today, and how they have changed since 2019, when I wrote Tell Your Children, about the psychiatric dangers of cannabis and THC, the chemical responsible for its high.

But before I discuss what scientists sometimes call the “wacky tobacky” (okay, not scientists, but some of you out there – I’m not naming any names), I want to thank Hillsdale, Matt Bell, Doug Jeffrey, and Dr. Arnn [Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale] for inviting me to this beautiful hotel.

For not forgetting me.

—

(You have not forgotten me either. Together we push for truth.)

Subscribe now

—

What I’m about to say for the next few minutes may seem a bit off-topic, but I promise it connects to the issue at hand.

During Covid, my anti-lockdown and pro-school opening views made me a darling of many on the right. To a lesser extent, so did my concerns about the mRNA Covid vaccines and vaccine mandates.

I am a lifelong political independent, though I have no doubt grown more conservative with age. As the old joke goes, if you’re 20 and conservative, you have no heart. If you’re 70 and liberal, you have no brain. (Though I suspect many Hillsdale students would disagree.)

Either way, I pride myself on trying to evaluate questions on their own merit, rather than falling into the trap of picking one side and believing everything it says and does is right. Just because Hunter Biden is a world-class sleaze does not mean the Trump family should try to profit from a private Trump-branded cryptocurrency, much less explicitly offer a chance to meet President Trump as a way to pump it.

I have always considered myself not an ideologue, but a journalist first and foremost – a journalist with an edge and a point of view, but a journalist who follows the facts where they lead. I was that kind of journalist 20 years ago when I worked at The New York Times, I was that kind of journalist when I wrote Tell Your Children, I was that kind of journalist during Covid, and I am that kind of journalist today.

In fact, I was proud to have the chance to spend a week as a journalism scholar-in-residence at Hillsdale’s campus in Michigan in the fall of 2021. At a time when my views about the mRNA Covid shots were considered so toxic even Twitter had banned me, Hillsdale stood by me.

Almost five years later, liberals and conservatives have forgotten Covid – and the mRNAs and vaccine mandates too. The amnesia is regrettable but understandable. A lot of people, even some on the right, would rather forget their cowardice, how quickly they sacrificed schools and parks and civil liberties for themselves and their children for fears that turned out overblown.

Plus the restrictions are long gone, leaving nothing to argue about. Because the epidemic did so little lasting damage, it’s easy to pretend the panic didn’t happen either.

So 2021’s civil-liberties-focused anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine-mandate coalition on the right has disintegrated.

—

Meanwhile, any chance Republicans might move on from Donald Trump after the disgrace of January 6^th ended when Democrats engaged in what can only be called “lawfare” against him in 2023. Prosecutors in my home state of New York aimed to bankrupt Trump for the crime of taking out loans he repaid in full and imprison him for the crime of winning the 2016 presidential election.

Those risible efforts backfired completely, rallying Republicans around Trump by making clear Democrats would do anything to stop him. Today the right’s leading voices are either so completely in the tank for President Trump they will not entertain even reasonable criticism about him and his policies – or making fortunes selling conspiracies.

I don’t fit in either camp. So lot of the people who wanted to platform me and talk to me in 2021 have moved on.

So be it.

No one has to open his audience to me, just as I do not have to open Unreported Truths – my Substack – to anyone else. But I am grateful to those people on the right who genuinely believe in independent thought, free speech, and the search for truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable. Hillsdale embodies that philosophy as deeply as any institution I have seen.

That is why I would gladly take an invitation to speak from Hillsdale not just at a Ritz-Carlton but a Motel 6 – though I have a feeling the crowd might be a bit smaller there.

Thanks, Dr. Arnn.

—

(Larry P. Arnn, the (surprisingly hilarious) president of Hillsdale College)

—

Whew.

I promised you a few minutes ago I would link the bigger political issues I raised to the question of where cannabis stands today. Some of you can probably already see where I am going.

Last week, President Trump officially “rescheduled” cannabis, sharply reducing the Drug Enforcement Administration’s restrictions on it. Technically, he moved cannabis from Schedule 1, the most restrictive DEA category, for drugs that have no approved medical uses, to Schedule 3, for drugs that do have uses as medicine but also carry some risks.

At the moment, the order only applies to cannabis consumed “medically,” rather than recreationally, but the White House plans to reschedule recreational cannabis as well. It has announced DEA hearings to do so, beginning on June 29.

I think this decision is wrong for many reasons. Cannabis advocates frequently object that cannabis should not be a “Schedule 1” drug. After all, cannabis is not nearly as dangerous or addictive as many other Schedule 1 drugs, such as heroin.

They’re right that cannabis is not as dangerous as heroin. No one would seriously claim it is. But the DEA’s scheduling rules aren’t just about a drug’s dangers. They are about whether drugs have any accepted medical use. Cannabis does not. It is not medicine. The most basic reason is the most obvious. We do not smoke medicines.

More broadly, it’s important to understand what medicines are – and are not. Medical drugs consist of chemical compounds or biological proteins given in doses that can be measured and tested for their ability to produce specific biological effects and treat specific diseases or conditions.

Take 10 milligrams of Lipitor – atorvastatin – daily to lower your cholesterol. Come to a clinic for an infusion of Keytruda – a monoclonal antibody – to help your immune system fight cancer. Or receive fentanyl in the hospital after surgery to control your pain. That’s why fentanyl, for all its harms, is classified as a Schedule 2 drug by the DEA, not a Schedule 1.

Unlike cannabis, it has an accepted medical use.

Researching, developing and testing medical drugs this way is complex and expensive. But it tells us just how well they work, and how and why. Then physicians can prescribe them with confidence. That’s how we make medicines.

One can pretend there are shortcuts around this process. There are not. “Holistic medicine” or “Eastern medicine” sound nice. Sometimes they make people feel better. But that’s usually because diseases, even fatal diseases, progress in stops and starts and because the placebo effect can be very powerful. Making drugs that work better than placebo is stunningly difficult.

If “Eastern medicine” actually worked, China would not be investing trillions of dollars to recreate the American biomedical research and drug discovery complex.

—

(Not always successfully)

—

I am harping on this point because I believe it is crucial you understand cannabis is not a medicinal drug. To go back to the simplest possible explanation: we do not light medicines on fire and inhale them.

Even though smoked cannabis flower is not a medicine, it is theoretically possible THC or other individual chemical compounds in the plant could be used medicinally. Over the last 30 years, scientists and drug companies have tested THC over and over for almost every imaginable illness or condition. But when it is subject to the kind of rigorous testing that makes a chemical a medicine, THC has nearly always failed to demonstrate its value.

The list of FDA-approved uses for cannabis-derived chemicals is the same now as it was in 2019, when I wrote Tell Your Children. THC is approved for nausea associated with cancer. CBD, a chemical in cannabis that does not get users high, is approved for the treatment of epileptic seizures in children. And… well… that’s it. That’s the whole list.

Cannabis is not medicine. It’s a recreational intoxicant.

The disease it treats is called not being high.

—

It’s a long speech. Take a break to make a one-time donation!

—

As you’ve no doubt figured out, I don’t favor cannabis legalization.

But if we are going to legalize cannabis and THC, we should do on the basis they are appropriate recreational drugs for adults to use, despite their dangers. In focusing on the wildly exaggerated medical benefits of cannabis to justify rescheduling, President Trump has gone in the other direction. His decision will only worsen the dangerous pretense of the medicinal value of cannabis.

At the same time, it will pump the profits of an industry that has spent two years donating heavily to Trump – again encouraging the perception and belief this White House is at least as more money-hungry and beholden to donors as previous administrations. (Are you starting to see why no one invites me anywhere anymore?)

President Trump’s decision to reduce restrictions on cannabis is particularly ironic because it comes at a moment when state-level cannabis legalization has demonstrably failed to have any of the positive impacts its backers have promised voters for 20 years.

Cannabis advocates said legalization would put the illicit industry out of business and generate massive tax revenues. Nope. The legal industry has had a very hard time competing with the illicit market, particularly in high-tax, high-regulation states like California. Tax revenues have fallen far short of expectations and are actually declining in many states. Only yesterday a Bay Area newspaper wrote of “California’s failing cannabis industry.”

Advocates said legalization would make cannabis more like alcohol, a drug many people use casually and infrequently at parties or social gatherings. That happy prediction has not really come true either. Casual use has risen only marginally. Instead, by sharply lowering the price while increasing the potency and availability of cannabis, as well as making it available in odorless and easy to use THC vapes and THC-infused beverages, legalization has sharply increased consumption by people who already use the drug.

Almost 20 million people now use cannabis daily, more than the number who drink alcohol every day. Many take advantage of vapes to use covertly at work or school. Instead of a large number of casual users, legalization has created a relatively small but vocal minority of very heavy users – addicts by another name.

—

Backers said legalization would not impact road safety and might even help it, on the theory that driving high is safer than driving drunk. But fatal car crashes have jumped in the United States over the last decade, as have the number of crashes where the active metabolite of THC was found in the blood of driver. In one recent study in Ohio on drivers who died in crashes between 2019 and 2024, over 40 percent had THC in their blood, a level even the study’s author called “surprising.”

Similarly, advocates said legalization would not hurt health and might even help it, because cannabis is less physically dangerous than alcohol and does not kill users through acute overdose. But cannabis and THC – particularly when they are consumed daily and in high doses – have turned out to have serious health risks of their own, particularly for heart attacks and stroke, the leading cause of death in the United States.

A major study presented last year at the American College of Cardiology annual conference found cannabis users under age 50 were over six times as likely to suffer a heart attack as non-users. This risk rises both for smoked cannabis and for THC used in other ways, implying it is separate from the risks of smoking.

Another unexpected and serious danger is severe cannabis-induced vomiting, which doctors call cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS. Heavy THC consumption seems to rewire the brains of some users to make them more nauseous when they use.

Cannabis has also proven far more addictive than legalizers promised. Cannabis withdrawal does not produce the same acute physical effects as alcohol withdrawal by heavy users. But both scientific and anecdotal evidence now suggest cannabis is at least as addictive as alcohol physiologically, with as many as 30 percent of users meeting criteria for addiction. As the government of Canada now warns, “Continued, frequent and heavy cannabis use can cause physical dependency and addiction.”

—

(As well as the consumption of barely edible hamburgers)

—

Last but certainly not least, evidence for a link between cannabis and severe mental illness continues to grow.

At this point, no one disputes cannabis and THC regularly cause transient episodes of paranoia and psychosis – that is, hallucinations, delusions, and detachment from reality. In fact, in its current high-strength form, cannabis essentially functions as a mild hallucinogen for many users.

But scientists are also finding and reporting new evidence that cannabis can not just worsen but actually cause the lifelong psychotic disorder known as schizophrenia. Risks are particularly high for those who start in their early or mid-teens and use heavily. I made this connection in Tell Your Children in 2019, drawing on scientific and epidemiological evidence from all over the world. The book infuriated the cannabis industry, which claimed I was alarmist, had overstated the evidence, or just didn’t understand the science behind it. But I was simply telling the truth, a truth cannabis advocates wanted to shout down because they feared it might hurt support for legalization.

In the seven years since Tell Your Children, the evidence has only strengthened. Two of the most disturbing studies are among the most recent. Both come from our neighbor to the north, the country I sometimes like to call America’s Hat (TM) – Canada, which fully legalized cannabis for recreational use in 2018, after allowing widespread “medical” use since 2001.

The first study was published just over a year ago by researchers who examined a massive healthcare database in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. After examining health records of almost 14 million teens and adults, the researchers found schizophrenia associated with heavy cannabis use rose from under 4 percent of cases before Canada legalized cannabis to over 10 percent after legalization – and almost 20 percent among men aged 19-24.

The second came out this February. It covered over 12 million Canadians and showed that rates of psychotic disorders had risen 60 percent in Canadian teens and young adults from 1997 to 2023, while remaining stable among older Canadians.

Together, the two studies provide powerful evidence that cannabis use does indeed cause schizophrenia and that its harmful effects can now be seen on a population-wide level.

Fortunately, schizophrenia, which usually develops in the late teens or early to mid-20s, is relatively rare. Researchers estimate its baseline level is about 1 in 150 people worldwide. So even if teen cannabis use results in a sharply increased risk, a relatively small number of young people are likely to suffer its consequences. Still, the risk is real, and schizophrenia is such a devastating disease –for its sufferers and their families – that we should do everything we can to prevent it.

—

(You’re almost done! But my work is only beginning.)

Subscribe now

—

I would argue (and I have) that risk alone should be enough to keep cannabis illegal.

Again, though, at a minimum, if we are going to legalize, we should do so on the basis cannabis is a recreational drug for adults – like alcohol. We should not pretend it has medicinal value, particularly for psychiatric conditions like anxiety disorders and depression. Most of all, we should not pretend it is appropriate for teenagers.

Yet many states have set the legal age for medicinal marijuana use at 18.

—

(Yep, this actually happened.)

—

In February, The New York Times published a stunning editorial headlined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem.”

The Times wrote:

This editorial board has long supported marijuana legalization… [and] predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use.

It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong.

Oops.

When even the New York Times admits you’re right, you’re right.

But if I have won the argument scientifically and medically, I have lost it culturally and politically. Decades of stories from the Times and other mainstream media outlets about the virtues of cannabis and cannabis legalization did their job too well. Support for full legalization has fallen slightly in the last couple of years as its downsides become more apparent, particularly to the parents of teens and young adults who are using heavily. But legalization still commands over 60 percent support among American voters, and even more among young people.

Now President Trump has done what Joe Biden and Barack Obama would not, and moved to put a federal stamp of approval on cannabis. Rescheduling is not full legalization, but it is a powerful step in that direction, which is why the stocks of cannabis companies jumped sharply after the President announced his initial plans in December.

President Trump has many larger concerns than the legal status of cannabis. I understand his decision to reschedule from a political point of view. But I wish he had held the line. It is more than a little ironic that a teetotaling Republican who will soon be the oldest President in the history of the United States will go down as the man who set the stage for the full legalization of cannabis on the federal level.

But that’s where we are.

And, please, don’t get me started on psychedelics.

—

Yep, that was it. You’re done. Celebrate with a one-time donation!

—

Thanks again to Hillsdale and Dr. Arnn for giving me the chance to speak.

I’m happy to take questions.