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The Great Game of Let’s Pretend

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER  

Two nights ago was supposed to be a night of reckoning and truth. The intrepid and independent journalist Tucker Carlson was to grill Donald Trump, who skipped the GOP debates because he is already the hands-down frontrunner and doesn’t want anything to do with conventional politics.

Tucker had spent the last three years on Fox correctly denouncing lockdowns, censorship, vaccine mandates, and medical segregation, plus the attacks on American liberty. He certainly knows what’s what. One might have supposed that the issues that tanked the Trump presidency and nearly the whole of American society and liberty would be front and center. Now was the time!

Oddly, none of it came up in his interview with Trump. The interview answered none of our questions about why Trump did what he did, which not only wrecked the American economy but arguably lost him the election. Even if you think the election was stolen, it was only through the mail-in ballots that the Covid controls unleashed. Tucker drilled down into none of this. It was as if 2020 did not happen at all.

The simultaneous GOP debate was even worse. Ron DeSantis started with a bang and spoke about lockdowns but the topic fizzled quickly. Following a flurry of pharma ads – indeed the entire event was funded by FDA-approved drug sales – the moderators briefly asked former vice president Mike Pence if he thought his administration bore any responsibility for learning loss because the Trump administration urged school closures.

Pence – who spent 2020 running cover for Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx – wholly ignored the question and said something else. The topic was never revisited again.

There was not one word said about tech censorship, the millions displaced and harmed by vaccine mandates, the dictatorial reach of the administrative state, the vast flurry of litigation against everything and everybody, the mass loss of trust in government and media, the foundational attack on the Bill of Rights, or the very real threat that it could happen again.

On the same day as the debate, we already saw mask mandates being reimposed. But no one spoke about it.

You surely see what’s going on here. The biggest issues in American life, which everyone experienced with vast tragedy and death all around, and about which everyone knows, are suddenly too sensitive to bring up. It’s something of which multitudes are aware but because all official institutions were involved, all official institutions are quiet about it. As a result, the great reckoning we need for renewal is farther off than ever.

Meanwhile, we’ve got Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., out there on countless public interviews, as a presidential candidate, saying remarkable things like 1) the CIA in 1963 killed his uncle who was president, 2) the intelligence community works with Big Pharma on gain-of-function research to create and cure new killer viruses, 3) they germ-gamed the lockdowns since 2001, 4) the lockdowns of March 2020 was a coup d’etat against representative democracy, 5) right now we have industry-captured Deep-State agencies that are ruling America who have no regard whatsoever for the US Constitution or the idea of freedom.

He says all of this without any shyness and with a great deal with knowledge and detail. He provides the receipts. Indeed, he has written several books on these themes. People listen and think “Oh that’s very interesting” and go hear him speak, without any presumption that he stands any chance to be President despite his wild popularity because, essentially, the fix is in.

Biden has already been selected to get the nomination, which rather demonstrates RFK’s point. Meanwhile, I’ve never once heard any reporter or read any article that challenges him on any of the facts. It’s as if everyone knows that what he is saying is true but we cannot do anything about it anyway. So he is tolerated as a wayward eccentric from a noble lineage but best ignored if we know what’s good for us.

It’s a very strange time in American political history, no doubt. We have one line of thinking sweeping through the population – which is based on mass incredulity and fury – and then another which is a veneer of normalcy that is slathered on top of our anger by all official institutions, which work hard to keep all these topics out of respectable conversations. Meanwhile, the whole of academic, mainstream social media, major mainstream media, and all of government seems to agree that all these obvious topics are too incendiary to be raised in polite company.

So everyone in the top layer of this manufactured consent is glad to play along with this great game of pretend. Meanwhile, people are fully aware now that the intelligence community is deeply involved in areas of life we previously thought were independent. And we suspect this is true even of organizations and publications we once thought were more-or-less trustworthy. How else to explain their silence and/or lies on all the crucial issues of our time?

As regards all the institutions that locked down the population just a few years ago, nothing has changed. Sure, there are a few court decisions extant that said they went too far but those are all being challenged and await appeals to the Supreme Court. But while these grueling processes play themselves out, Google, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the rest of our formerly free social-media platforms are more brutally censorial than ever. YouTube even announced that it will tolerate no content that contradicts the World Health Organization, which only three years ago recommended to the entire world the lockdowns pioneered by the CCP in Wuhan.

In the last few days, my own phone has blown up with people terrified of a new lockdown. They worry about leaving the country for fear of new travel restrictions. They worry about new vaccine mandates for their kids in school. They are thinking of moving to Florida and away from the big cities on the coasts where crime worsens by the day and skyscrapers are still mostly empty because workers won’t come back. And the #1 song in the world wails about the cruelty of this new world and how it is sending people to an early death.

Who would have imagined that a collapse on this level would happen in plain sight and everyone would see it and yet the entirety of the culture planners would in effect impose a fatwa on anyone who speaks about it?

Certainly I never imagined this scenario. Our whole lives we’ve sung about the “land of the free and the home of the brave” but here we are unfree and not brave. Because of facial-recognition technology, we cannot even hit the streets anymore. That was the real point of the post-January 6 crackdown: to serve as a lesson that if we resist in person, we will be recognized and dealt with severely.

The silence about the truth is utterly deafening. It’s not just that we aren’t getting answers to our questions; we aren’t even getting questions outside a handful of venues including this one.

Meanwhile, the highest hopes for saving the country from ruin are being placed in the hands of the very chief executive under whom all this began. And why? Because people believe that he was tricked and betrayed into greenlighting this wreckage even though he has never actually said anything like this. It’s the only hope people have. It’s a thin hope indeed.

When I first read Orwell’s 1984, it seemed like a dark and implausible fantasy and warning. I never imagined that it was really a reductio ad absurdum of a reality that he saw unfolding before him in the rising totalitarianism of his time. It turns out that he was a prophet of just how corrupt a highly politicized society with overweening bureaucracy can be in practice when careerism trumps courage and the cash nexus spreads the coercive mindset throughout all the commanding heights of the social order.

We are finding out now. The soundtrack of the end times is not Mahler or Wagner. It is gaming music with dance numbers on TikTok, with darkly distant echoes of a simple country singer in Virginia decrying the rich men north of Richmond.

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  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Net Zero: The Mystery of the Falling Fertility

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Tomas FurstTomas Fürst  

If you want to argue that a mysterious factor X is responsible for the drop in fertility, you will have to explain (1) why the factor affected only the vaccinated, and (2) why it started affecting them at about the time of vaccination.

In January 2022, the number of children born in the Czech Republic suddenly decreased by about 10%. By the end of 2022, it had become clear that this was a signal: All the monthly numbers of newborns were mysteriously low.

In April 2023, I wrote a piece for a Czech investigative platform InFakta and suggested that this unexpected phenomenon might be connected to the aggressive vaccination campaign that had started approximately 9 months before the drop in natality. Denik N – a Czech equivalent of the New York Times – immediately came forward with a “devastating takedown” of my article, labeled me a liar and claimed that the pattern can be explained by demographics: There were fewer women in the population and they were getting older.

To compare fertility across countries (and time), the so-called Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is used. Roughly speaking, it is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime. TFR is independent of the number of women and of their age structure. Figure 1 below shows the evolution of TFR in several European countries between 2001 and 2023. I selected countries that experienced a similar drop in TFR in 2022 as the Czech Republic.

Figure 1. The evolution of Total Fertility Rate in selected European countries between 2000 and 2023. The data corresponding to a particular year are plotted at the end of the column representing that year.

So, by the end of 2023, the following two points were clear:

  1. The drop in natality in the Czech Republic in 2022 could not be explained by demographic factors. Total fertility rate – which is independent of the number of women and their age structure – dropped sharply in 2022 and has been decreasing ever since. The data for 2024 show that the Czech TFR has decreased further to 1.37.
  1. Many other European countries experienced the same dramatic and unexpected decrease in fertility that started at the beginning of 2022. I have selected some of them for Figure 1 but there are more: The Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. On the other hand, there are some countries that do not show a sudden drop in TFR, but rather a steady decline over a longer period (e.g. Belgium, France, UK, Greece, or Italy). Notable exceptions are Bulgaria, Spain, and Portugal where fertility has increased (albeit from very low numbers). The Human Fertility Project database has all the numbers.

This data pattern is so amazing and unexpected that even the mainstream media in Europe cannot avoid the problem completely. From time to time, talking heads with many academic titles appear and push one of the politically correct narratives: It’s Putin! (Spoiler alert: The war started in February 2022; however, children not born in 2022 were not conceived in 2021). It’s the inflation caused by Putin! (Sorry, that was even later). It’s the demographics! (Nope, see above, TFR is independent of the demographics).

Thus, the “v” word keeps creeping back into people’s minds and the Web’s Wild West is ripe with speculation. We decided not to speculate but to wrestle some more data from the Czech government. For many months, we were trying to acquire the number of newborns in each month, broken down by age and vaccination status of the mother. The post-socialist health-care system of our country is a double-edged sword: On one hand, the state collects much more data about citizens than an American would believe. On the other hand, we have an equivalent of the FOIA, and we are not afraid to use it. After many months of fruitless correspondence with the authorities, we turned to Jitka Chalankova – a Czech Ron Johnson in skirts – who finally managed to obtain an invaluable data sheet.

To my knowledge, the datasheet (now publicly available with an English translation here) is the only officially released dataset containing a breakdown of newborns by the Covid-19 vaccination status of the mother. We requested much more detailed data, but this is all we got. The data contains the number of births per month between January 2021 and December 2023 given by women (aged 18-39) who were vaccinated, i.e., had received at least one Covid vaccine dose by the date of delivery, and by women who were unvaccinated, i.e., had not received any dose of any Covid vaccine by the date of delivery.

Furthermore, the numbers of births per month by women vaccinated by one or more doses during pregnancy were provided. This enabled us to estimate the number of women who were vaccinated before conception. Then, we used open data on the Czech population structure by age, and open data on Covid vaccination by day, sex, and age.

Combining these three datasets, we were able to estimate the rates of successful conceptions (i.e., conceptions that led to births nine months later) by preconception vaccination status of the mother. Those interested in the technical details of the procedure may read Methods in the newly released paper. It is worth mentioning that the paper had been rejected without review in six high-ranking scientific journals. In Figure 2, we reprint the main finding of our analysis.

Figure 2A. Histogram showing the percentage of women in the Czech Republic aged 18–39 years who were vaccinated with at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the respective month. Figure 2B. Estimates of the number of successful conceptions (SCs) per 1,000 women aged 18–39 years according to their pre-conception Covid vaccination status. The blue-shaded areas in Figure 1B show the intervals between the lower and upper estimates of the true SC rates for women vaccinated (dark blue) and unvaccinated (light blue) before conception.

Figure 2 reveals several interesting patterns that I list here in order of importance:

  1. Vaccinated women conceived about a third fewer children than would be expected from their share of the population. Unvaccinated women conceived at about the same rate as all women before the pandemic. Thus, a strong association between Covid vaccination status and successful conceptions has been established.
  2. In the second half of 2021, there was a peak in the rate of conceptions of the unvaccinated (and a corresponding trough in the vaccinated). This points to rather intelligent behavior of Czech women, who – contrary to the official advice – probably avoided vaccination if they wanted to get pregnant. This concentrated the pregnancies in the unvaccinated group and produced the peak.
  3. In the first half of 2021, there was significant uncertainty in the estimates of the conception rates. The lower estimate of the conception rate in the vaccinated was produced by assuming that all women vaccinated (by at least one dose) during pregnancy were unvaccinated before conception. This was almost certainly true in the first half of 2021 because the vaccines were not available prior to 2021. The upper estimate was produced by assuming that all women vaccinated (by at least one dose) during pregnancy also received at least one dose before conception. This was probably closer to the truth in the second part of 2021. Thus, we think that the true conception rates for the vaccinated start close to the lower bound in early 2021 and end close to the upper bound in early 2022. Once again, we would like to be much more precise, but we have to work with what we have got.

Now that the association between Covid-19 vaccination and lower rates of conception has been established, the one important question looms: Is this association causal? In other words, did the Covid-19 vaccines really prevent women from getting pregnant?

The guardians of the official narrative brush off our findings and say that the difference is easily explained by confounding: The vaccinated tend to be older, more educated, city-dwelling, more climate change aware…you name it. That all may well be true, but in early 2022, the TFR of the whole population dropped sharply and has been decreasing ever since.

So, something must have happened in the spring of 2021. Had the population of women just spontaneously separated into two groups – rednecks who wanted kids and didn’t want the jab, and city slickers who didn’t want kids and wanted the jab – the fertility rate of the unvaccinated would indeed be much higher than that of the vaccinated. In that respect, such a selection bias could explain the observed pattern. However, had this been true, the total TFR of the whole population would have remained constant.

But this is not what happened. For some reason, the TFR of the whole population jumped down in January 2022 and has been decreasing ever since. And we have just shown that, for some reason, this decrease in fertility affected only the vaccinated. So, if you want to argue that a mysterious factor X is responsible for the drop in fertility, you will have to explain (1) why the factor affected only the vaccinated, and (2) why it started affecting them at about the time of vaccination. That is a tall order. Mr. Occam and I both think that X = the vaccine is the simplest explanation.

What really puzzles me is the continuation of the trend. If the vaccines really prevented conception, shouldn’t the effect have been transient? It’s been more than three years since the mass vaccination event, but fertility rates still keep falling. If this trend continues for another five years, we may as well stop arguing about pensions, defense spending, healthcare reform, and education – because we are done. 

We are in the middle of what may be the biggest fertility crisis in the history of mankind. The reason for the collapse in fertility is not known. The governments of many European countries have the data that would unlock the mystery. Yet, it seems that no one wants to know.


Author

Tomas Furst

Tomas Fürst teaches applied mathematics at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His background is in mathematical modelling and Data Science. He is a co-founder of the Association of Microbiologists, Immunologists, and Statisticians (SMIS) which has been providing the Czech public with data-based and honest information about the coronavirus epidemic. He is also a co-founder of a “samizdat” journal dZurnal which focuses on uncovering scientific misconduct in Czech Science.

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Brownstone Institute

FDA Exposed: Hundreds of Drugs Approved without Proof They Work

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Maryanne Demasi

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved hundreds of drugs without proof that they work—and in some cases, despite evidence that they cause harm.

That’s the finding of a blistering two-year investigation by medical journalists Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownleepublished by The Lever.

Reviewing more than 400 drug approvals between 2013 and 2022, the authors found the agency repeatedly ignored its own scientific standards.

One expert put it bluntly—the FDA’s threshold for evidence “can’t go any lower because it’s already in the dirt.”

A System Built on Weak Evidence

The findings were damning—73% of drugs approved by the FDA during the study period failed to meet all four basic criteria for demonstrating “substantial evidence” of effectiveness.

Those four criteria—presence of a control group, replication in two well-conducted trials, blinding of participants and investigators, and the use of clinical endpoints like symptom relief or extended survival—are supposed to be the bedrock of drug evaluation.

Yet only 28% of drugs met all four criteria—40 drugs met none.

These aren’t obscure technicalities—they are the most basic safeguards to protect patients from ineffective or dangerous treatments.

But under political and industry pressure, the FDA has increasingly abandoned them in favour of speed and so-called “regulatory flexibility.”

Since the early 1990s, the agency has relied heavily on expedited pathways that fast-track drugs to market.

In theory, this balances urgency with scientific rigour. In practice, it has flipped the process. Companies can now get drugs approved before proving that they work, with the promise of follow-up trials later.

But, as Lenzer and Brownlee revealed, “Nearly half of the required follow-up studies are never completed—and those that are often fail to show the drugs work, even while they remain on the market.”

“This represents a seismic shift in FDA regulation that has been quietly accomplished with virtually no awareness by doctors or the public,” they added.

More than half the approvals examined relied on preliminary data—not solid evidence that patients lived longer, felt better, or functioned more effectively.

And even when follow-up studies are conducted, many rely on the same flawed surrogate measures rather than hard clinical outcomes.

The result: a regulatory system where the FDA no longer acts as a gatekeeper—but as a passive observer.

Cancer Drugs: High Stakes, Low Standards

Nowhere is this failure more visible than in oncology.

Only 3 out of 123 cancer drugs approved between 2013 and 2022 met all four of the FDA’s basic scientific standards.

Most—81%—were approved based on surrogate endpoints like tumour shrinkage, without any evidence that they improved survival or quality of life.

Take Copiktra, for example—a drug approved in 2018 for blood cancers. The FDA gave it the green light based on improved “progression-free survival,” a measure of how long a tumour stays stable.

But a review of post-marketing data showed that patients taking Copiktra died 11 months earlier than those on a comparator drug.

It took six years after those studies showed the drug reduced patients’ survival for the FDA to warn the public that Copiktra should not be used as a first- or second-line treatment for certain types of leukaemia and lymphoma, citing “an increased risk of treatment-related mortality.”

Elmiron: Ineffective, Dangerous—And Still on the Market

Another striking case is Elmiron, approved in 1996 for interstitial cystitis—a painful bladder condition.

The FDA authorized it based on “close to zero data,” on the condition that the company conduct a follow-up study to determine whether it actually worked.

That study wasn’t completed for 18 years—and when it was, it showed Elmiron was no better than placebo.

In the meantime, hundreds of patients suffered vision loss or blindness. Others were hospitalized with colitis. Some died.

Yet Elmiron is still on the market today. Doctors continue to prescribe it.

“Hundreds of thousands of patients have been exposed to the drug, and the American Urological Association lists it as the only FDA-approved medication for interstitial cystitis,” Lenzer and Brownlee reported.

“Dangling Approvals” and Regulatory Paralysis

The FDA even has a term—”dangling approvals”—for drugs that remain on the market despite failed or missing follow-up trials.

One notorious case is Avastin, approved in 2008 for metastatic breast cancer.

It was fast-tracked, again, based on ‘progression-free survival.’ But after five clinical trials showed no improvement in overall survival—and raised serious safety concerns—the FDA moved to revoke its approval for metastatic breast cancer.

The backlash was intense.

Drug companies and patient advocacy groups launched a campaign to keep Avastin on the market. FDA staff received violent threats. Police were posted outside the agency’s building.

The fallout was so severe that for more than two decades afterwards, the FDA did not initiate another involuntary drug withdrawal in the face of industry opposition.

Billions Wasted, Thousands Harmed

Between 2018 and 2021, US taxpayers—through Medicare and Medicaid—paid $18 billion for drugs approved under the condition that follow-up studies would be conducted. Many never were.

The cost in lives is even higher.

A 2015 study found that 86% of cancer drugs approved between 2008 and 2012 based on surrogate outcomes showed no evidence that they helped patients live longer.

An estimated 128,000 Americans die each year from the effects of properly prescribed medications—excluding opioid overdoses. That’s more than all deaths from illegal drugs combined.

A 2024 analysis by Danish physician Peter Gøtzsche found that adverse effects from prescription medicines now rank among the top three causes of death globally.

Doctors Misled by the Drug Labels

Despite the scale of the problem, most patients—and most doctors—have no idea.

A 2016 survey published in JAMA asked practising physicians a simple question—what does FDA approval actually mean?

Only 6% got it right.

The rest assumed that it meant the drug had shown clear, clinically meaningful benefits—such as helping patients live longer or feel better—and that the data was statistically sound.

But the FDA requires none of that.

Drugs can be approved based on a single small study, a surrogate endpoint, or marginal statistical findings. Labels are often based on limited data, yet many doctors take them at face value.

Harvard researcher Aaron Kesselheim, who led the survey, said the results were “disappointing, but not entirely surprising,” noting that few doctors are taught about how the FDA’s regulatory process actually works.

Instead, physicians often rely on labels, marketing, or assumptions—believing that if the FDA has authorized a drug, it must be both safe and effective.

But as The Lever investigation shows, that is not a safe assumption.

And without that knowledge, even well-meaning physicians may prescribe drugs that do little good—and cause real harm.

Who Is the FDA Working for?

In interviews with more than 100 experts, patients, and former regulators, Lenzer and Brownlee found widespread concern that the FDA has lost its way.

Many pointed to the agency’s dependence on industry money. A BMJ investigation in 2022 found that user fees now fund two-thirds of the FDA’s drug review budget—raising serious questions about independence.

Yale physician and regulatory expert Reshma Ramachandran said the system is in urgent need of reform.

“We need an agency that’s independent from the industry it regulates and that uses high-quality science to assess the safety and efficacy of new drugs,” she told The Lever. “Without that, we might as well go back to the days of snake oil and patent medicines.”

For now, patients remain unwitting participants in a vast, unspoken experiment—taking drugs that may never have been properly tested, trusting a regulator that too often fails to protect them.

And as Lenzer and Brownlee conclude, that trust is increasingly misplaced.

Republished from the author’s Substack

 

Author

Maryanne Demasi, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is an investigative medical reporter with a PhD in rheumatology, who writes for online media and top tiered medical journals. For over a decade, she produced TV documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and has worked as a speechwriter and political advisor for the South Australian Science Minister.

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