Health
Trump names leading COVID skeptic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as head of the NIH

From LifeSiteNews
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, leading COVID critic and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, said he will ‘reform American scientific institutions’ to ‘make America healthy again’ after being nominated as NIH director by Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has nominated prominent lockdown critic and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
On November 26, Trump released a statement expressing his excitement that “Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.”
Bhattacharya was one of the earliest and most notable critics of the draconian COVID response by most governments around the world. In October 2020 he co-authored The Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized the harmful lockdown policies. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University in California and the director of Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
READ: Stanford prof: COVID lockdowns are ‘biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made’
“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease. Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!” Trump’s statement said.
“I am honored and humbled by President @realDonaldTrump’s nomination of me to be the next @NIH director,” Bhattacharya wrote on X. “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!”
Designated United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) RFK Jr. and tech mogul Elon Musk both congratulated Bhattacharya on his nomination on X.
The NIH is an important agency under the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), responsible for biomedical and public health research.
While not opposing the COVID shots outright, the Stanford professor and designated director of the NIH did call for an end to all policies “that discriminate[d] against the unvaccinated” in 2022.
With Bhattacharya, Trump has nominated another well-known critic of the draconian COVID regulations to his health policy team. RFK Jr. has been picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, with a particular focus on chronic illnesses and nutrition. The president-elect picked pro-life vaccine skeptic David Weldon to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dr. Marty Makary, a skeptic of widespread lockdowns and pediatric COVID shots, to head the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, he also nominated pro-vaccine Dr. Janette Neishewat to the position of Surgeon General.
COVID-19
FDA requires new warning on mRNA COVID shots due to heart damage in young men

From LifeSiteNews
Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID shots must now include warnings that they cause ‘extremely high risk’ of heart inflammation and irreversible damage in males up to age 24.
The Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it will now require updated safety warnings on mRNA COVID-19 shots to include the “extremely high risk” of myocarditis/pericarditis and the likelihood of long-term, irreversible heart damage for teen boys and young men up to age 24.
The required safety updates apply to Comirnaty, the mRNA COVID shot manufactured by Pfizer Inc., and Spikevax, the mRNA COVID shot manufactured ModernaTX, Inc.
According to a press release, the FDA now requires each of those manufacturers to update the warning about the risks of myocarditis and pericarditis to include information about:
- the estimated unadjusted incidence of myocarditis and/or pericarditis following administration of the 2023-2024 Formula of mRNA COVID-19 shots and
- the results of a study that collected information on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cardiac MRI) in people who developed myocarditis after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 injection.
The FDA has also required the manufacturers to describe the new safety information in the adverse reactions section of the prescribing information and in the information for recipients and caregivers.
Additionally, the fact sheets for healthcare providers and for recipients and caregivers for Moderna COVID-19 shot and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot, which are authorized for emergency use in individuals 6 months through 11 years of age, have also been updated to include the new safety information in alignment with the Comirnaty and Spikevax prescribing information and information for recipients and caregivers.
In a video published on social media, Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, explained the alarming reasons for the warning updates.
While heart problems arose in approximately 8 out of 1 million persons ages 6 months to 64 years following reception of the cited shots, that number more than triples to 27 per million for males ages 12 to 24.
Prasad noted that multiple studies have arrived at similar findings.
Brownstone Institute
Net Zero: The Mystery of the Falling Fertility

From the Brownstone Institute
By
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.

So, by the end of 2023, the following two points were clear:
- 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.
- 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 2 reveals several interesting patterns that I list here in order of importance:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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