From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Placebo trials are critical for determining a new drug’s safety and identifying side effects, but vaccines have been exempt from the requirement for such safety testing until now.

All new vaccines will be required to undergo placebo-controlled safety trials by the order of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a break with longstanding establishment policy and triggering protests from mainstream media outlets.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said that, according to the new policy, such safety trials for all “new vaccines” will be required for licensure, a “radical departure from past practices.”

Placebo trials allow researchers to identify adverse side effects from a drug, clarifying that symptoms are not due to other factors such as the disease the drug seeks to protect against. For this reason, placebo trials are “critical for determining the safety profile of the new drug,” as BioPharma Services has noted.

“Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” HHS said in a statement.

“HHS is now building surveillance systems that will accurately measure vaccine risks as well as benefits — because real science demands both transparency and accountability,” an HHS spokesperson told The Washington Post.

For years, Kennedy has criticized the fact that vaccines have been exempted from a placebo trial requirement in place for other medicines.

“A lot of the injuries that come from medication are autoimmune injuries and allergic injuries and neurodevelopmental injuries that have long diagnostic horizons or long incubation periods, so you can do the study and you will not see the injury for five years,” Kennedy said in a 2021 interview.

Last year, during a NewsNation Town Hall he highlighted the fact that not one of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated for U.S. children “has ever been subject to a pre-licensing, placebo-controlled trial.”

At the time, the host insisted that this was “not true.” Now that the mainstream media and medical establishment cannot dispute that this has been the case, outlets such as NPR and the BBC are criticizing placebo safety testing trials by claiming that this will allegedly limit access to vaccines and undermine confidence in them – as if access to vaccines takes precedence over whether they have been shown to be safe.

The Washington Post quoted Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, who accused the HHS of “Claiming vaccines have risks the data doesn’t show” and of “trying to overstate vaccine risks,” seemingly unaware of the absurdity of her criticism. If there is a lack of data for vaccine risks, it could be because there haven’t been placebo trials to produce such data.

Kennedy recently told Daily Wire host Michael Knowles that “everything is going to change” regarding the development of vaccines, for which much of the public has concern.

He pledged to “fix” the Centers for Disease Control’s current flawed VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) online mechanism, which Kennedy noted vastly underreports vaccine adverse events.

Pointing out that vaccines are “the only product that’s exempt” from pre-licensing safety testing, Kennedy noted that the protocol has instead been to document injuries “afterward.”

However, “they have a system that doesn’t capture them. In fact, CDC’s own study of its own system said it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries,” Kennedy said. “It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.”

“Why have we gone for 39 years and nobody’s fixed it?” he wondered, promising, “We’re gonna fix it.”

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

Gender ideology so entrenched, surgical mutilation is no longer considered fringe

If you’d like a glimpse of what 10 years of progressive rule has done to Canada in a single sentence, I submit to you this April 24 headline: “Ontario must pay for surgery to give trans resident both penis and vagina: appeal court.”

Imagine reading a headline like that in, say, 2010. You’d wonder what country you were living in — that is, if you weren’t trying to figure out what you just read. But in Canada in 2025, this stuff isn’t fringe. It’s establishment.

The Ontario Court of Appeal, the province’s top court, issued a ruling this week stating that the province must pay for a “penile-sparing vaginoplasty” for a resident who identifies as transgender but does not identify “exclusively” as either male or female and thus would like to possess both a penis and a vagina.

According to the Post, “a three-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal confirmed a lower court’s ruling that the novel phallus-preserving surgery qualifies as an insured service under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.” In case you’re tempted to write this off as an aberration at the hands of a handful of activist judges, this ruling is the third unanimous decision in favor of the “patient,” identified in court records as “K.S.”

“K.S. is pleased with the Court of Appeal’s decision, which is now the third unanimous ruling confirming that her gender affirming surgery is covered under Ontario’s Health Insurance Act and its regulation,” K.S.’s lawyer, John McIntyre, told the Post. K.S., as it turns out, identifies as neither male nor female … but uses female pronouns:

The legal battle between K.S., whose sex at birth was male, dates to 2022, when the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) refused her request to pay for the cost of surgery at a Texas clinic to construct a vagina while sparing the penis, a procedure this is not available in Ontario, or anywhere else in Canada. K.S. uses female pronouns but does not identify as either fully female or fully male.

Previously, saner generations would have no idea how to interpret the preceding paragraph, but gender ideology has made fools of us all. OHIP attempted to argue that “because the vaginoplasty would not be accompanied by a penectomy, the procedure isn’t one specifically listed in OHIP’s Schedule of Benefits and therefore shouldn’t be publicly funded” and also that the surgery is “experimental” in Ontario and thus can’t be covered.

But K.S., who has a male member but would also like a neo-vagina, appealed to the Health Services Appeal and Review Board, which overturned OHIP’s decision. OHIP appealed to the Divisional Court but lost; the latest appeal, heard November 26, was also rejected because a “penectomy,” the removal of the penis, was “neither recommended by K.S.’s health professionals nor desired by K.S.,” according to the court’s decision.

I wonder if the judges thought that they’d be ruling on whether a man who identifies as neither a man or a woman was entitled to obtain a vagina while retaining his penis when they were going to law school.

The court stated that K.S., who is in his early 30s, “has experienced significant gender dysphoria since her teenage years, as well as physical, mental and economic hardships to transition her gender expression to align with her gender identity.” Of course, K.S. isn’t “transgender,” per se — because he doesn’t identify as the opposite sex, even though he uses the pronouns of the opposite sex. He wants to be … both, somehow. And he wants the taxpayer to pay for it.

As the Post reported:

K.S.’s doctor submitted a request to OHIP for prior funding approval for the surgical creation of a vaginal cavity and external vulva. The request made it clear that K.S. wasn’t seeking a penectomy. In a letter accompanying the request, her doctor said that because K.S. is “not completely on the ‘feminine’ end of the spectrum” it was important for her to have a vagina while maintaining her penis, adding that the Crane Center for Transgender Surgery in Austin, Tx.,” has an excellent reputation” for gender-affirming surgery, “and especially with these more complicated procedures.”

The surgeries, depending on which are performed, range in cost “from US $10,000 to $70,000.” The court also ordered Ontario to pay K.S. $23,250 after dismissing OHIP’s appeal; the province has until June 23 to seek leave to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.