International
Euthanasia advocates use deception to affect public’s perception of assisted suicide
From LifeSiteNews
Politicians claim that moral opposition to assisted suicide (or suicide in general) and euthanasia is religiously motivated and then make the leap to insisting that this means such opposition should be ignored.
Euthanasia activists are currently doing what they do best: the bait and switch.
As the debate heats up in the U.K., all of the familiar tactics are on display. First, of course, there is the relentless lying. Despite the case study of Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium – and despite disability activists, judges, palliative physicians, and the secretaries of health and justice warning that no “safeguards” will hold – U.K. euthanasia activists are insisting that this time everything will be different.
The response to these critiques has been predictable but infuriating. Euthanasia activists insist that all of this is about religion – that those nasty Christians are, once again, seeking to impose their suffering-based theology on the country. (This despite the fact that even Ann Furedi, who heads up the U.K.’s second largest abortion provider, opposes the proposed assisted suicide law.) One good microcosmic example of this tactic comes from UK writer Julie Street, who posted to X (formerly Twitter):
Just walked out of Mass bloody fuming – our priest used the homily to read a letter from the Catholic bishops telling people to oppose the Assisted Dying Bill then handed out cards with our local MP’s details on to lobby them. Religion has no place in politics or women’s rights.
There is much to say in response, of course. Why is Street so surprised to discover that her Catholic priest and bishops are, in fact, Catholic? Is she ignorant of the religion that she at least appears to practice? How airtight does one’s mind have to be not to see assisted suicide and euthanasia as religious issues? Indeed, “euthanasia” is Greek for “good death” – the theological premises are baked right into the term. Or does Street think that religious people should shut their mouths in the political arena and voluntarily disenfranchise themselves as the fates of the weak are decided?
Is Street also ignorant of the fact that it was largely due to the Catholic Church’s public opposition that Adolf Hitler moved the Nazi’s euthanasia operation underground? (We now know, of course, that the Nazis only claimed to have disbanded the T-4 program.) I thought progressives wanted a Church that stood up for the weak, vulnerable, and dispossessed – and who qualifies more than the sick, elderly, and those with disabilities? Christians are accused of not being loving enough, and then rebuked when they stand up for the victims the political class deems expendable – first the unborn, now those on the other end of life’s spectrum.
But there’s more to this tactic than grating ignorance. Progressives like to play both sides of the fence. Take abortion, for example. Politicians like to claim that it is a religious issue, and that thus they cannot legislate against it due to the fact that we live in pluralistic societies. Many religious leaders are quite happy to follow this logic, claiming that since abortion is a political issue, it cannot be discussed in church. And all the while, the countless corpses of the aborted unborn pile up in the No Man’s Land between.
The assisted suicide debate is unfolding along similar lines. Politicians claim that moral opposition to assisted suicide (or suicide in general) and euthanasia is religiously motivated and then make the leap to insisting that this means such opposition should be ignored. Meanwhile, because politicians are debating the issue, folks like Street can claim that because this is now a political issue, priests and pastors should keep their traps shut. See what they did there? It’s a neat trick, and despite how farcical and illogical it is, it seems to work with maddening regularity.
In fact, the priest Julie Street had the good fortune to hear was standing in the tradition of the clergy who stood up against Adolf Hitler and his eugenicist gang – and fighting the same evil being advanced under many of the same premises, to boot. She should be grateful. If she can’t manage that, she should at least be better educated.
Europe calls it transparency, but it looks a lot like teaching the internet who’s allowed to speak.
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When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”
They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.
The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.
It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.
The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.
None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.
Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.
The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.
The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.
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However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.
The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.
Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.
Under the new X rules, everyone is on a level playing field.
Government officials and agencies now sport gray badges, symbols of credibility that can’t be purchased. These are the state’s chosen voices, publicly marked as incorruptible. To the EU, that should be a safeguard.
The second and third violations show how “transparency” doubles as a surveillance mechanism. X was fined for limiting access to advertising data and for restricting researchers from scraping platform content. Regulators called that obstruction. Musk called it refusing to feed the censorship machine.
The EU’s preferred researchers aren’t neutral archivists. Many have been documented coordinating with governments, NGOs, and “fact-checking” networks that flagged political content for takedown during previous election cycles.
They call it “fighting disinformation.” Critics call it outsourcing censorship pressure to academics.
Under the DSA, these same groups now have the legal right to demand data from platforms like X to study “systemic risks,” a phrase broad enough to include whatever speech bureaucrats find undesirable this month.
The result is a permanent state of observation where every algorithmic change, viral post, or trending topic becomes a potential regulatory case.
The advertising issue completes the loop. Brussels says it wants ad libraries to be fully searchable so users can see who’s paying for what. It gives regulators and activists a live feed of messaging, ready for pressure campaigns.
The DSA doesn’t delete ads; it just makes it easier for someone else to demand they be deleted.
That’s how this form of censorship works: not through bans, but through endless exposure to scrutiny until platforms remove the risk voluntarily.
The Commission insists, again and again, that the fine has “nothing to do with content.”
That may be true on a direct level, but the rules shape content all the same. When governments decide who counts as authentic, who qualifies as a researcher, and how visibility gets distributed, speech control doesn’t need to be explicit. It’s baked into the system.
Brussels calls it user protection. Musk calls it punishment for disobedience. This particular DSA fine isn’t about what you can say, it’s about who’s allowed to be heard saying it.
TikTok escaped similar scrutiny by promising to comply. X didn’t, and that’s the difference. The EU prefers companies that surrender before the hearing. When they don’t, “transparency” becomes the pretext for a financial hammer.
The €120 million fine is small by tech standards, but symbolically it’s huge.
It tells every platform that “noncompliance” means questioning the structure of speech the EU has already defined as safe.
In the official language of Brussels, this is a regulation. But it’s managed discourse, control through design, moderation through paperwork, censorship through transparency.
And the louder they insist it isn’t, the clearer it becomes that it is.
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“While I question whether any baby should receive a vaccine against a rare disease in infancy, I am pleased that this is now a matter for parents and their healthcare practitioner to decide — not a state mandate based on a federal pharma-backed recommendation.”
Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have voted to end a decades-long recommendation that all infants born in the U.S. receive the hepatitis B vaccine (Hep B) within 12-24 hours of birth.
Instead, for babies born to mothers who test negative for hepatitis B, the committee recommends that families determine whether to give their child the Hep B shot at birth through individual decision-making with their physician.
For infants who don’t get the birth dose, the committee recommends the initial dose of the vaccine not be administered until infants are at least 2 months old.
Three of the 11 committee members — Dr. Raymond Pollack, Dr. Cody Meissner and Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln — opposed the recommendation. The remaining eight members supported it.
Andrew Johnson from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services assured the committee that the language change will not affect Medicaid or insurance coverage of the vaccine.
For mothers whose hepatitis B status is unknown or who test positive, the birth dose recommendation remains in place.
Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland, a long-time critic of the universal birth dose policy, welcomed the committee’s vote to “end the ill-considered universal recommendation for the Hep B birth vaccine dose.”
Holland added:
“The science behind that universal recommendation was a sham, based on thoroughly inadequate clinical trials. Hundreds of babies unquestionably died because of it. While I question whether any baby should receive a vaccine against a rare disease in infancy, I am pleased that this is now a matter for parents and their healthcare practitioner to decide — not a state mandate based on a federal pharma-backed recommendation.
“And while the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] debate on this issue was tedious and rancorous at times, it is an extremely positive change that actual debate about childhood vaccines is occurring in government venues with impact. This is the transparency that Secretary Kennedy promised.”
Dr. Monique Yohanan, senior fellow for health policy at Independent Women, told The Defender there was never “a good science-based reason to have a universal vaccination that 99% of babies born in the United States are not at any risk,” and that the vote was “good news for babies.”
She added that she hoped it would “provide an opportunity to actually have outreach to the moms who are positive for hepatitis B, women who are immigrants, women who are IV drug users.” She said the previous policy was “performative compassion. And these are really underserved women who we ignored the outreach that they needed.”
The committee also voted 6-4 with one abstention that after the initial Hep B shot, parents should consult with healthcare providers to consider whether their child should have a serology test, which would show whether they had antibodies considered sufficient to protect them against the disease.
The committee voted to update the CDC Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program funding to match ACIP’s recommendations. Several committee members, including Meissner and Hibbeln, abstained from voting on the VFC resolution, protesting that they didn’t understand the implications of the vote — reflecting some of the disagreement that pervaded the two-day meeting.
The votes on the Hep B vaccine were originally scheduled for the September meeting, but were deferred to allow the CDC work group to put together more data to inform the committee’s decision.
Sunday’s vote was postponed from Saturday so members could have more time to review the language of the proposal.
Like flying in a plane that wasn’t safety tested?
The decision to postpone followed a contentious day-long meeting on Thursday, during which some members of the committee and liaisons from professional associations argued there was no need to change the recommendation, because there was no “evidence of harm” from the vaccine.
Advocates for changing the recommendation pointed to a near-complete lack of safety data — small clinical trials for the vaccines tracked infants for a week or less after the shot and little follow-up research on autoimmune and neurological disorders.
Big differences of opinion persisted at Sunday’s meeting.
ACIP member Retsef Levi, Ph.D., said that for parents whose children were at extremely low risk, the decision to give them the vaccine was analogous to flying in a plane — they wouldn’t get in a plane that hadn’t been safety tested, why should they give their child a vaccine that hadn’t been safety tested.
Meissner disagreed, saying, “We know vaccines are safe. There is no question that the COVID vaccine recommendations were dishonest, disingenuous, but the hepatitis B vaccine is very well established.”
In opening remarks, Dr. Robert Malone — who chaired the meeting because the newly named committee chairperson, Dr. Kirk Milhoun, is traveling — said “the credibility of the ACIP rests not on speed, but on rigor.”
Commenting on the heated discussions during Thursday’s meeting, Milhoun said that scientific debates are necessarily contentious.
“If they are not contentious, if they are not approached with rigor, then we end up with bad decisions. We end up with bad science. We must actively engage in responsible debate concerning contentious issues. We must boldly address change, risk new ideas, and conflicting hypotheses, which is the proper nature of evidence-based science.”
Dr. Jason Goldman, a liaison to the ACIP for the American College of Physicians, attacked opposing viewpoints as unscientific. Goldman said the Hep B vaccine discussion was “an unnecessary solution looking for a problem.”
‘If adults won’t go for the shots, then give them to babies’
The Hep B vaccine has been universally recommended for infants since 1991. The first shot is currently given within 24 hours after birth to prevent infection with hepatitis B from mothers who carry the disease — less than 0.5% of mothers.
Mothers can be tested in the hospital to determine whether they have the disease, and current tests have a 100% accuracy rate, according to FDA ex officio ACIP participant Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D.
However, a 1991 New York Times article posted on Substack yesterday by Dr. Meryl Nass showed that when the universal shot was rolled out, the goal was not to prevent maternal transmission — the goal was to prevent adult cases, at a time when adult cases were deemed a national crisis. However, adults commonly didn’t get the shot.
“If adults won’t go for the shots, then give them to babies,” the article said.
Following Thursday’s meeting, legacy media attacked the committee and the CDC’s presenters and highlighted charges of misinformation by liaison members. Liaisons are nonvoting members from professional medical organizations who can offer their opinions and advice to the committee.
Representatives from some of those groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Medical Association, were disinvited in August from participation in the workgroups due to conflicts of interest.
Since then, the AAP has boycotted the ACIP meetings
At the start of today’s meeting, Meissner castigated AAP for this move. He said he was concerned that by not participating, they would be seen as being more focused on making a political statement than attending to the health of children.
He said that pediatricians should be part of the discussions. “Refusal to participate in the ACIP meetings does not appear to be in the best interest of children.”
Immediately following today’s vote, the Times quoted “experts” from some of the staunchest advocates for all vaccines on the childhood schedule, such as the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, Michael Osterholm, Ph.D., saying that the vote shows federal health authorities can no longer be trusted.
Osterholm, a member of the COVID-19 Advisory Board under the Biden administration, is one of the key players in the “Vaccine Integrity Project,” funded by iAlumbra, a nonprofit founded by Walmart heiress and philanthropist Christy Walton. The project plans to make its own vaccine recommendations.
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Vaccine recommendations ‘should not be treated as mandates’
During the day-and-a-half-long discussion about the Hep B vaccine, several committee members, including Dr. Evelyn Griffin, raised concerns that the birth recommendation posed challenges for informed consent, because mothers who had just delivered babies were not in a position to calmly evaluate risks and benefits.
Others, including Levi, argued that the vaccine requirements for children to attend school effectively functioned as mandates.
Liaison members universally disagreed that the recommendations were mandates and argued that ACIP recommendations were really only recommendations, and parents could do what they wanted.
CDC ex officio member, Dr. Adam Langer, who was opposed to changing the recommendation, said that the recommendations had come to function as mandates, but that was not the intention. He proposed the committee make a formal statement that “all vaccine recommendations are recommendations. They should not be treated as mandates.”
He added that mandates put in place by state and local jurisdictions were “problematic.”
“We have a lot of challenges with our culture and our traditions in this country, with telling people what they must and must not do. But that’s not what we’re saying here. We’re saying that at the population level, in the majority of cases, this is what the sign shows is the best practice.”
He said providers should always make the best decision for the individual patient they are working with. “That’s the reason why you’ve been entrusted with a license to practice medicine.”
Watch the ACIP meeting here:
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