Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been talking about how artificial intelligence will revolutionise medicine.

Some of what he says I agree with. But after speaking with experts who have spent decades working with AI and healthcare data, I think some of Kennedy’s assertions warrant caution.

Speaking at the MAHA Summit in Washington DC last week, the US Health Secretary said AI could eventually give ordinary Americans access to a second medical opinion that was “much better informed than any doctor in the country.”

Kennedy argued that Americans would no longer have to be dominated by public officials telling them to “Trust the experts,” because they could verify medical advice for themselves.

He specifically pointed to officials asserting that masks work, that social distancing works, and that Covid vaccines prevent infection and transmission, suggesting “AI might correct that” and help free people from “medical tyranny.”

Others in the administration went even further, with HHS senior adviser Calley Means posting on X that it would be “medical negligence” for a doctor to give a patient advice without insisting they consult AI for a second opinion.

I often use Grok AI to search for studies, locate documents, and dig out references.

So, I asked it three simple questions on topics where Kennedy has taken firm, high-profile stances — do vaccines cause autism? Is fluoridation of the public water supply harmful? And does Wi-Fi cause cancer?

In each case, Grok essentially returned the establishment consensus. It stated that there was “no causal link” between vaccines and autism, that fluoridation “does not cause serious harm,” and that “Wi-Fi exposure had no established link to cancer.”

Those answers directly contradict Kennedy’s own public declarations.

In a 2023 Fox News interview, he said “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” In November 2024, he announced that a Trump administration would “advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” And on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy claimed that Wi-Fi radiation “does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer.”

Asking Grok these questions doesn’t resolve any of those scientific debates, but my point is much simpler. Kennedy claims we no longer have to blindly trust experts because we can ask AI instead.

So what happens when AI hands you the exact same answers as the medical establishment Kennedy has spent years challenging? Whose “second opinion” are we actually receiving?

AI can be captured

AI cannot escape the institutional capture that already shapes much of the medical evidence on which it relies.

A central focus of my investigative work as a medical journalist has been examining how pharmaceutical money can influence the evidence base, regulatory decisions, medical publishing, and the clinical guidelines that ultimately shape prescribing.

Kennedy has spent decades challenging many of those same institutions, which is precisely why his suggestion that AI can liberate patients from medical authority warrants scepticism.

AI does not possess an independent repository of medical truth.

Its answers are built entirely from human-generated information — published clinical trials, medical journals, treatment guidelines, regulatory filings, textbooks, professional society statements, and wider online data. And that evidence base is far from neutral.

I have reported on numerous instances where guidelines become remarkably “pharma-friendly,” where uncomfortable trial results struggle to get peer-reviewed, where researchers are denied access to raw patient data, and where institutional consensus becomes nearly impossible to challenge.

AI does not make those problems disappear. If an adverse event was never documented in a dataset, AI cannot retrieve it. If a clinical trial was designed around the wrong question, AI cannot redesign it after the fact. If an underlying guideline reflects a distorted evidence base, AI may simply reproduce that recommendation.

So, replacing “Trust the experts” with “Ask AI” doesn’t resolve the underlying problem of capture.

How does AI handle your medical record?

Kennedy also claims AI will save your doctor time by reviewing medical records.

“You may have a medical record that is a thousand pages long,” he said. “You have six minutes with a doctor today. He is not gonna be able to review it, but the AI can.”

On the surface, having a machine review 1,000 pages of health history and spot details a rushed doctor might miss sounds ideal. But that assumes AI can accurately interpret what it is reading. It doesn’t always.

Electronic health records are often fragmented — scattered across multiple healthcare databases. They can contain outdated medication lists, contradictory information, and errors carried forward from earlier notes.

One medical data expert who works on this issue daily described generative-AI summaries of patient records as “scarily discrepant,” noting that feeding the same patient record into the same AI model can produce noticeably different summaries across separate runs.

AI might be able to process 1,000 pages in seconds, but it cannot easily determine whether a listed diagnosis is active or outdated, resolve contradictory entries, distinguish a billing code from a genuine diagnosis, or identify what was left out entirely.

Put simply, reading a medical record is not the same as understanding it — and getting that distinction wrong can lead to inappropriate treatment for the patient.

AI can save your doctor time

Doctors are increasingly using what they call “ambient AI scribes” — programs that listen to a consultation and generate clinical notes in real time.

I recently accompanied one of my parents to a consultation where an ambient AI scribe was being used, and I could see its immediate value.

It saved the doctor time and allowed them to focus on the patient rather than staring at a computer screen and typing notes.

Doctors seem to like them too. A multicentre study of 263 clinicians found that after 30 days of using an ambient AI scribe, doctors reported a reduced documentation burden and greater focus on their patients.

But there’s a catch.

The AI-generated note may itself contain inaccuracies, fabrications, and important omissions.

A recent study comparing five ambient scribe platforms found that, on average, 26% of key clinical information was either omitted or recorded incorrectly, with an average of three errors per case carrying the potential for moderate-to-severe harm.

So, while AI scribes may genuinely save doctors time, their output still needs to be carefully checked. Otherwise, errors can become part of the patient’s medical record.

As one expert told me, “Generative AI cannot be used to check generative AI.”

There is also a financial incentive at play.

In the US, doctors and hospitals are paid more for some visits when the medical decision-making is more complex. A more detailed AI-generated note can help clinicians or billing staff justify a higher-paying billing code.

Researchers have warned that ambient AI scribes are increasing coding intensity and reimbursement, making higher billing part of the core business case for these products.

AI has a place in medicine

Medical imaging is one area where AI can provide a valuable second set of eyes — and some believe it could eventually replace at least some of the work radiologists do.

In a 2024 study of chest CT scans, AI assistance increased pulmonary nodule detection among radiology residents from 64% to 77%.

AI has also shown promise in cardiology. In a 2024 study, a machine-learning system interpreting stress-test data outperformed cardiologists at predicting clinically significant coronary artery disease.

But medicine is more than recognising patterns in data.

A skilled doctor can examine you, notice your gait as you walk into the room, spot a suspicious mole, or offer genuine empathy and compassion — things AI cannot do.

But with doctors spending so much of their time staring at screens, completing paperwork and meeting quotas, there is less time for individualised care.

AI may free up some of that time by reducing administrative work and supporting specific diagnostic tasks, but it should not become another authority we are expected to trust unquestioningly.

The answer to “don’t blindly trust the experts” cannot simply be “blindly trust the algorithm.”

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It is a painful read, but an important one.

Cries for Help — Injury and Death Buried in V-Safe Data, compiled by React19 and published by the Brownstone Institute, gathers messages from people who became ill after vaccination, alongside relatives writing for loved ones who were too sick to respond or had died.

They submitted these accounts through a CDC system — the V-SAFE app — designed to monitor Covid vaccine safety during the mass roll-out.

It took litigation under Freedom of Information laws and a federal court order to compel the CDC to release the free-text responses, which the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) then published.

React19 reviewed more than 7.5 million responses and identified 3,329 participants who pleaded for help, described suicidal thoughts, or reported deaths and near-death experiences.

Some described frightening symptoms that would not go away. Others had been to doctors or emergency departments but still had no answers. They kept filling in the surveys, hoping someone on the other end would notice and respond.

Again and again, they asked a version of the same question.

Is anyone reading this?

One person reported a miscarriage and said they had asked to be contacted, but nobody had called. Another was promised callbacks twice, then wrote a year later that neither had happened.

Some of the hardest entries come from grieving relatives.

A son reported that his father was in intensive care and asked for help. His next update said his father remained critically ill. Then came the message that he had died.

Another respondent repeatedly reported a woman’s death while continuing to receive check-ins. “Still dead. — Funeral home. She DIED”

Weeks later, the frustration had become fury. “She died after her vaccine but none of you Assholes read this and just continue to send this useless text — FUNERAL HOME!”

Brownstone president Jeffrey Tucker has been reading the messages aloud in broadcasts on X, giving these people a voice beyond the database. Hearing their words brings home the grief, fear and anger behind each entry — and the expectation that reporting a problem would lead to help.

But that help never came.

Remember, these people got vaccinated. They took part in the safety monitoring authorities asked them to use. But when they reported harm and asked for help, they were dismissed as “antivaxxers.”

The abandonment described in these pages added insult to injury. These people deserved care and investigation, but found themselves fighting to be heard.

Their accounts also underline the urgency of Retsef Levi’s call for the CDC to follow up people reporting lasting health problems after vaccination.

His team’s analysis of V-safe data found that nearly 2% of almost 10 million participants reported health deterioration lasting at least three months, which they attributed to Covid vaccination.

This week brought some hope of action.

According to Bloomberg, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony on 5 October for a new NIH clinic intended to study and care for patients with vaccine injuries.

We still need to know who will qualify and how patients can access care. For families who have spent years searching for help, the announcement must lead to more than another promise.

One message in the book captures what so many were asking.

“You stole my life - call me, hear me, help me.”

It should never have been too much to ask.

Download:

Cries For Help Book

3.54MB ∙ PDF file

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It became one of the most familiar stories of the pandemic.

“I got jabbed and the next week I caught Covid.”

At the time, it was brushed off as a coincidence, or simply a case of the vaccine “not having kicked in yet.”

But these were not just anecdotes.

MD Reports examined the studies and found that the pattern had been hiding in plain sight, without the public ever being told.

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Docket No. HHS–OS–2026–0332

Maryanne Demasi, PhD
Medical scientist and investigative journalist
Editor, MD Reports

Submitted on Sept 19, 2026

I welcome the Department’s review of federal vaccine recommendations and the role of shared clinical decision-making.

As a medical scientist and investigative journalist, I have spent years examining the evidence underpinning vaccine policy, from clinical trials and safety surveillance to regulatory standards and vaccine advisory processes.

This submission draws on that body of work.

Federal vaccine recommendations carry enormous weight. They shape medical advice, public understanding, insurance coverage and state or institutional rules.

With that influence comes an obligation to ensure that recommendations rest on rigorous evidence and communicate clearly what is known, what is uncertain and what remains unknown.

A recommendation should not simply tell people that a vaccine is “recommended” or that its “benefits outweigh the risks.” People should be able to see the evidence behind that judgment and decide what it means for them.

The sections below set out where I believe that process should change.

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Massive datasets containing the health records of millions of patients now underpin thousands of studies on drug safety, vaccines and treatment effectiveness.

Regulators are increasingly relying on them too.

Last December, then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced plans to expand the agency’s use of “real-world evidence” in regulatory decisions.

“We’re removing unnecessary barriers that have prevented us from using powerful real-world evidence to get life-changing treatments to patients faster,” Makary said.

There are valid reasons for the shift. Electronic health records covering millions of patients can reveal rare side effects and long-term outcomes that clinical trials may be too small or too short to detect.

But there is a problem. Much of this research relies on enormous, heavily processed datasets that researchers and independent reviewers cannot readily check against the original hospital records.

The danger became clear during the Surgisphere scandal in 2020, when the database underpinning a major Covid-19 study that influenced health policy turned out to be fake.

Six years later, the same fundamental problem remains.

If neither researchers nor independent reviewers can trace the data back to the original medical records, how do we know they are reliable?

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In a move that will blindside supporters of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the CDC has quietly reverted to its old Covid vaccine recommendations.

There was no official announcement or media fanfare. The agency simply updated its 2026–27 guidance, recommending Covid shots for healthy infants, children and adults — including outside FDA-approved indications.

It comes despite the FDA restricting vaccine approvals in people under 65 to higher-risk groups, and despite federal scientists linking child deaths to the shots.

Just last week, Kennedy sought to reassure his supporters, urging patience as he acknowledged their frustration with the slow pace of change.

“Let me be clear,” he declared. “You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House.”

Now, for supporters who banked on Kennedy ending childhood Covid vaccination, that reassurance lies in tatters.

And it has happened under his watch.

What changed?

Citing “legal uncertainties and inquiries” surrounding its advisory committee, CDC has reverted to its July 2025 Covid vaccine recommendations.

The decision has created a divide between FDA approval and CDC guidance.

While FDA has restricted Moderna’s Spikevax and Pfizer’s Comirnaty in people under 65 to those at increased risk of severe Covid, the CDC is promoting much broader guidance:

• Adults (18+): A 2026–27 Covid vaccine is recommended for all adults, regardless of health status.

• Healthy children (6 months–17 years): Vaccination is recommended through “shared clinical decision-making” between families and healthcare providers.

• Immunocompromised children (6 months–17 years): A 2026–27 vaccine is recommended for all children who are moderately to severely immunocompromised.

In practice, the CDC is recommending off-label vaccination for healthy adults and children when that use falls outside FDA-approved indications.

This includes young males aged 12–24, the group with the highest observed risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, even as the FDA says it lacks “substantial certainty” that the benefits outweigh the risks for healthy people.

For infants, the divide is even more glaring.

Moderna’s Spikevax — the only Covid vaccine available for children aged 6–23 months — is FDA-approved only for those with an underlying condition that puts them at high risk of severe Covid.

But the CDC advises that a healthy, previously unvaccinated baby should receive a two-dose series — and explicitly identifies that use as “off-label.”

Is this really “shared decision-making”?

The CDC says Covid vaccination of healthy children should rest on “shared clinical decision-making.”

But that only works if parents are given enough information to make an informed choice.

The agency does not quantify what benefit a healthy baby can realistically expect from vaccination or clearly explain the limits of that protection.

Other countries are more transparent. Britain, for example, states plainly that current Covid vaccines provide “limited protection against mild infection and no evident protection against transmission.”

Denmark is equally candid about the low risk faced by most children, stating that “only a small number of children need seasonal vaccination against COVID-19,” with vaccination requiring an individual medical assessment.

To ensure true informed consent, parents also need a clear account of the harms and uncertainties, including the proposed warnings from the CDC’s own ACIP workgroup about myocarditis deaths, prolonged post-vaccine illness and unresolved safety questions.

Without that clarity, how meaningful is “shared decision-making”?

The AAP gets what it wanted

The CDC’s updated guidance almost mirrors that of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

On 2 September, the AAP published its 2026–27 recommendations, calling for Covid vaccination of all infants aged 6–23 months and recommending it for older children based on their risk and parents’ preferences.

Now, three weeks later, the CDC has followed with guidance covering essentially the same childhood population.

For an administration that promised to challenge the medical establishment, it is a staggering surrender — particularly given that the AAP receives substantial funding from vaccine manufacturers.

Kennedy was warned

Recently, more than 160 physicians, scientists and activists, including myself, sent an open letter to Kennedy and President Trump raising a series of objections, including the continued vaccination of children and the FDA-identified deaths.

Many of Kennedy’s supporters endured censorship, professional repercussions and public ridicule for questioning whether healthy children should receive Covid vaccines.

They expected his appointment to bring a decisive change in policy. For many, this will feel like betrayal.

The irony

When HHS overhauled the childhood vaccination schedule in January, Kennedy justified the reforms by declaring: “We are aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus while strengthening transparency and informed consent.”

The irony now is that US Covid vaccine guidance points in the opposite direction.

Across much of Europe, Britain and Australia, Covid vaccination is largely targeted at older people and those at increased risk, with healthy children generally excluded from guidance.

Kennedy cannot win every administrative battle. But Covid vaccines were never a minor issue for him. As HHS Secretary, he wields substantial authority over federal vaccine policy, raising an obvious question — why didn’t he intervene?

In 2021, Kennedy called on the FDA to “immediately remove Covid vaccines from the market.” Months later, he described the Covid vaccine as the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Now, under Kennedy’s leadership, the CDC recommends Covid vaccination for healthy babies, children and adults — even beyond FDA-approved indications.

CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/covid/hcp/vaccine-considerations/overview.html

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On 22 May 2020, The Lancet published a study that changed the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It purported to analyse the medical records of 96,032 patients hospitalised with Covid-19 across 671 hospitals and six continents, delivering a damning conclusion about an old antimalarial drug — hydroxychloroquine.

Patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone or with a macrolide antibiotic appeared more likely to develop dangerous heart rhythm disturbances and more likely to die.

The study’s findings dealt a major blow to hydroxychloroquine — a cheap, off-patent drug that was already at the centre of a fierce political battle.

President Donald Trump had publicly championed hydroxychloroquine as a potential Covid treatment and called for research to be accelerated — even revealing that he was taking the drug himself.

Within days of the study appearing in The Lancet, the World Health Organisation suspended the hydroxychloroquine arm of its multinational Solidarity trial. Other trials were interrupted, and treatment policies changed around the world.

The study carried enormous authority because of its size. Nearly 100,000 patient records appeared to provide the kind of real-world evidence clinicians desperately wanted while conventional randomised trials were still underway.

But there was a problem — investigators quickly concluded the database was fake.

The company behind it was Surgisphere, an obscure Chicago operation. What followed was one of the most extraordinary scientific collapses in modern history, exposing how easily global health policy could be swayed by unverified data.

Six years later, Surgisphere is worth revisiting — not as a one-off pandemic anomaly, but because the weakness it revealed in modern healthcare data has only become more consequential.

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When genomic scientist Kevin McKernan discovered excessive levels of residual DNA in mRNA Covid vaccines, it sparked one of the fiercest safety debates of the pandemic.

Regulators insisted the fragments were present only in trace amounts and posed no biological risk, while critics warned they could potentially trigger autoimmune diseases or integrate into the human genome and contribute to cancer.

But the row overshadowed a far broader problem.

mRNA vaccines are not the only products made using recombinant DNA technology. Manufacturers also use it to produce vaccines against hepatitis B, human papillomavirus, shingles and influenza, as well as monoclonal antibodies given to infants to prevent RSV.

All of these products can carry residual DNA from the manufacturing process, yet fundamental questions about what happens to those fragments after injection remain largely unanswered.

This years-long investigation—built on internal company documents, regulatory filings, court records, and scientific interviews—points to a deeper issue.

Residual DNA may not be just a benign impurity. It can have adjuvant activity, stimulating the immune response and potentially boosting a vaccine’s efficacy.

Consequently, removing the impurity might also compromise its performance—a dilemma that may prove to be the vaccine industry’s dirty little secret.

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When emergency physician Joseph Fraiman’s children were born, he made a decision that would surprise most in his field.

He opted out of the routine vitamin K injection recommended for all newborns to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB)—a rare but potentially fatal condition.

Fraiman understands the danger better than most. Years spent caring for critically ill patients mean he knows how catastrophic severe bleeding can be, and he accepts that a single intramuscular shot reduces that risk.

His perspective comes as refusal rates for the routine vitamin K injection have risen in recent years.

So why would a doctor trained to manage medical emergencies say no to a preventive treatment for his own children?

For Fraiman, it came down to a simple calculation of absolute benefit, potential harm, and fully informed consent.

Understanding risk

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In a dramatic blow to Moderna, the CDC has left the company’s newly approved mRNA flu vaccine off its list of options for the upcoming flu season.

The snub comes barely a month after the FDA licensed mFLUSIVA for adults aged 50 and older, and weeks after MD Reports first exposed a statistically significant safety signal in its pivotal trial.

Instead of issuing new influenza vaccine recommendations for 2026–27, the CDC has fallen back on last year’s guidance.

Following repeated, unanswered inquiries from MD Reports about its next steps, the agency quietly updated its official website this month, stating that “because of legal uncertainties and inquiries,” last July’s recommendations would remain in effect for the upcoming influenza season.

The CDC has not retreated from flu vaccination. It still recommends an annual influenza vaccine for everyone aged six months and older, with rare exceptions.

For people under 65, it states there is no preference among three vaccine types — inactivated, recombinant or live attenuated influenza vaccines.

For those aged 65 and older, it preferentially recommends Fluzone High-Dose, Flublok Recombinant or Fluad Adjuvanted — and if none is available, another age-appropriate influenza vaccine should be given.

Moderna’s mFLUSIVA vaccine is conspicuously absent.

That omission does not appear to strip the product of its Vaccine Act liability protections. The government’s website, updated last month, says the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program covers “all seasonal influenza vaccines.”

Even so, the setback is significant for Moderna.

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Under its long-serving editor-in-chief Dr Gregory Poland, the journal Vaccine built a strong reputation as the flagship publication in vaccinology.

It published papers that did not always align with prevailing views on vaccines, provided they met rigorous scientific standards.

A clear example came in 2022, when Vaccine published Fraiman and colleagues’ analysis of serious adverse events in the pivotal Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccine trials.

The paper concluded that the excess risk of serious adverse events exceeded the reduction in Covid-19 hospitalisations observed in the trials. It sparked international debate and remains widely cited.

This is exactly what scientific journals should do: provide a platform where evidence and competing interpretations can be openly challenged.

Poland himself embodied that approach. After developing persistent and debilitating tinnitus following his own Covid-19 vaccination, he did not become an opponent of vaccination.

Instead, he argued that vaccine injuries warranted serious scientific investigation and that patients reporting adverse events deserved to be heard rather than dismissed. His stance emphasised nuance over ideological certainty.

That standard appears to have shifted under the journal’s new leadership.

In January 2025, virologist Angela Rasmussen was appointed as one of the journal’s three editors-in-chief.

Outside the journal, Rasmussen has cultivated a prominent and highly combative public profile through X and her Substack. Her criticism has extended well beyond scientific disagreement.

After the reconstitution of the US Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) in June 2025, Rasmussen described the committee as a “viper’s nest of anti-vax quacks.”

She accused members of “lying about the evidence,” referred to them as “monsters,” labelled them “conspiracy-addled lunatics,” and described aspects of their work as an “incompetent shitshow.”

These were not private remarks.

They were public statements made by an editor-in-chief of one of the world’s leading vaccine journals about scientists serving on the United States’ principal federal vaccine advisory committee.

Editors are entitled to hold strong opinions.

But scientific journals derive their authority from the expectation that editors will evaluate competing evidence impartially, regardless of their own views. The appearance of impartiality matters as much as the reality.

On their own, Rasmussen’s comments might simply be dismissed as a lack of restraint. But they take on greater significance when viewed alongside the journal’s editorial direction.

In the months that followed, Vaccine published two editorials sharply critical of ACIP, echoing the sentiment of Rasmussen’s public rhetoric.

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Back when I was an investigative reporter at the ABC, I researched and filmed a documentary about antidepressants.

The premise was hardly radical.

I was investigating whether the drugs were being prescribed too widely, especially among children, and there was evidence that in a small number of people the drugs could trigger akathisia, severe agitation, suicidal thoughts and aggression.

One of the women I interviewed had a story I have never forgotten.

She was a 33-year-old mother of two from Western Australia who had tried to kill herself and her daughters, aged nine and two — not once, but twice.

On the first attempt she drove them to a car park and attached a hose to the exhaust of the family car. The hose twisted and the attempt failed.

Later that day she tried again, in another parking bay, and left the engine running for 15 minutes before her nine-year-old daughter managed to open the car door.

That is how they survived.

There is no sanitising what happened. Two little girls came terrifyingly close to being killed by their own mother, who had been taking antidepressants.

Her case later appeared in a paper in PLoS Medicine by psychiatrist David Healy and colleagues, examining a possible relationship between antidepressants and violence.

She had first been prescribed the SSRI paroxetine. The dose was increased from 20mg to 30mg. She became more anxious and agitated and was switched to venlafaxine, which was raised to 300mg a day.

Healy and colleagues reported that her records documented increasing anxiety and agitation during those increases—but her clinical notes did not link the deterioration to the medication.

Then came the attempts to kill herself and her children.

When the case reached sentencing in the Supreme Court of Western Australia in 2004, the authors reported that the judge found there were “substantial grounds for implicating venlafaxine” in her behaviour. She received a suspended sentence.

Healy and colleagues concluded that the case appeared to involve treatment-induced akathisia.

“Restlessness” does not come close to describing akathisia.

People who have experienced it describe an unbearable inner agitation, a feeling of wanting to crawl out of their own skin, an inability to escape their own mind.

Some describe it almost as an out-of-body experience—a terrifying sense that they are no longer themselves. Severe cases have been associated with self-harm and suicidality.

I thought the public deserved to know that. But the ABC disagreed.

For two years the TV network actively suppressed the documentary, then decided it would never air. I was told the subject was too controversial and the risk of people stopping their medications was too great.

Kennedy tried to raise the issue

In 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr raised the possibility of a relationship between antidepressants and school shootings, calling for more research. He did not claim the drugs caused all school shootings. He said the relationship should be studied.

But that was enough to provoke outrage.

A group of US legislators accused him of promoting “disproven and outright false theories” about psychiatric medications and warned that it would stigmatise people with mental-health issues and discourage them from seeking help.

But there is already evidence that some antidepressants can cause precisely the kinds of behavioural disturbances that make the question worth investigating.

What the trials found

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MIT professor Retsef Levi has publicly accused scientific journals of censoring research into vaccine injuries, after his latest Covid vaccine safety study was rejected by both a leading medical journal and a preprint server.

“We must counter the immense censorship by scientific journals on any discussion of vaccine injuries!” Levi posted on X.

As previously reported, Levi’s study, co-authored with MIT researcher Nelson Lu, analysed responses from nearly 10 million participants in the CDC’s V-SAFE surveillance system and identified a potential safety signal that the researchers say warrants further investigation.

But before the study appeared as a preprint on Research Square, Levi and Lu struggled to get it through the scientific publishing system.

Their experience mirrors that of others trying to publish research on post-vaccination health outcomes

Emails obtained exclusively by MD Reports reveal what happened behind the scenes.

The researchers first submitted the paper to medRxiv, a preprint server established to disseminate health-science research before formal peer review.

It was rejected.

“We cannot verify aspects of the manuscript and feel it would be better disseminated after peer review,” medRxiv told the researchers.

Puzzled by the response, Levi asked medRxiv to identify the specific concerns preventing publication, pointing out that the analysis relied entirely on publicly available V-SAFE data.

medRxiv responded that it lacked “the resources to perform extensive content verification beyond our standard screening procedures,” yet failed to explain what about the study required such verification in the first place.

When Levi pressed again, medRxiv explained that submissions undergo a “two-step screening process” involving affiliate scientists, but stressed that this did not constitute full peer review.

Left without a specific scientific or methodological reason for the rejection, or even the identities of the affiliate scientists who had screened their paper, Levi eventually published the study on a different preprint server, Research Square.

Levi and Lu then turned to the peer-reviewed literature.

Rejected without peer review

They submitted the study to Vaccine, a specialist scientific journal that has published extensively on vaccine safety.

The editors issued a “desk rejection,” turning it down before peer reviewers ever saw it.

The journal explained that it receives far more papers than it can publish, forcing it to select those judged to have the “highest potential impact” while maintaining editorial balance.

The rejection correspondence reviewed by MD Reports identified no specific methodological or scientific problems with the paper.

Levi wrote back.

“I am admittedly very surprised to receive this desk rejection, particularly because Vaccine has published multiple CDC studies on the same V-SAFE data, including one very recently,” he said.

“The rejection without even sending it to referees gives the perception that Vaccine publishes some scientific findings and censors others.”

Open to alternative explanations, Levi asked the journal to clarify its reasoning, but received no response.

Same database, different outcome

Levi’s comparison is striking. Just weeks earlier, Vaccine had published a CDC study analysing the exact same V-SAFE database.

Published online on 30 June 2026, it examined reports from almost 10 million V-SAFE participants through to June 2023.

But unlike Levi and Lu’s study, the CDC’s findings were largely reassuring.

Emergency care and hospitalisation following vaccination were reported infrequently, which the authors noted was consistent with previous V-SAFE analyses and clinical trials.

Levi and Lu, however, asked a fundamentally different question.

Focusing on reports of prolonged health deterioration, they found that 185,285 participants—1.87%—reported worse health lasting at least three months that they attributed to Covid vaccination.

They argued that this finding represented a potential safety signal requiring further investigation.

Although both studies examined the same surveillance system and roughly the same number of participants, they produced very different findings — and had very different experiences in the publishing system.

The peer-review problem

Levi and Lu are not the only researchers studying reports of vaccine injuries after Covid vaccination whose work remains outside the peer-reviewed literature.

Researchers at Yale have been studying such cases through the university’s LISTEN study.

In November 2023, they posted an analysis on medRxiv describing 241 adults who self-reported what the authors called “post-vaccination syndrome,” or PVS.

Participants reported persistent symptoms including exercise intolerance, excessive fatigue, numbness, brain fog, and neuropathy.

Nearly three years later, that study remains a preprint.

In 2025, Yale researchers published a second preprint comparing 42 people reporting PVS with 22 healthy controls. They identified differences in immune profiles, more frequent evidence of recent Epstein-Barr virus reactivation, and elevated levels of circulating spike protein in the PVS group.

That study also remains a preprint.

There is, however, an interesting contrast.

Both Yale studies passed medRxiv’s “screening process,” whereas Levi and Lu’s did not.

One key distinction is that Harlan Krumholz, a co-author of the Yale research, is also a co-founder of medRxiv and serves on the board of openRxiv, which oversees the preprint server.

Why bother with peer-review?

For all its limitations, peer review remains an important marker of legitimacy in medical publishing. Research that has not passed through the process can readily be dismissed as “only a preprint.”

This creates a particular problem for controversial research.

Studies can become trapped in scientific limbo—publicly available, but lacking the imprimatur that often determines whether their findings are taken seriously.

Levi and Lu encountered that problem from both directions.

medRxiv told them their V-SAFE analysis would be better disseminated after peer review.

Yet when they submitted it to Vaccine for precisely that purpose, the journal rejected it before peer reviewers ever saw it.

Double standards

The contrast becomes more striking when considered alongside another study that Vaccine recently did choose to publish.

Just last month, the journal published online an observational study comparing cardiac outcomes following Pfizer vaccination with those following SARS-CoV-2 infection in more than four million people aged 16 to 25.

Its conclusions were highly reassuring.

The authors reported that the risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, and death were lower after vaccination than after infection — findings that strongly favoured vaccination in young people.

But Levi considered the methodology deeply problematic and posted a scathing critique on X.

“It is so outrageously flawed raising the question whether Vaccine is a scientific journal or purely propaganda operations,” he wrote.

His criticism centred on how the comparison groups were constructed.

The study covered nearly five years of the pandemic (December 2020 to September 2025), but classified more than 93% of participants as “uninfected” and fewer than 7% as vaccinated—proportions Levi labelled “impossible.”

He argued that the study excluded vaccinated individuals who later caught the virus, while only counting infected people who sought medical care.

In his view, these exclusions skewed the comparison to make vaccination appear artificially safer than infection.

“I hope Vaccine will retract this paper soon to save something from its reputation,” he added.

For Levi, the contrast is difficult to reconcile.

A reassuring observational study that he argues contains serious methodological flaws cleared peer review and was published by Vaccine.

And yet his analysis of CDC safety-surveillance data, which identified a potential vaccine safety signal, was turned away without peer review.

A broader problem

The episode has also drawn the attention of US Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who has spent years investigating the federal government’s handling of Covid vaccine safety signals.

Johnson says Levi’s publishing difficulties reflect a broader failure by authorities to investigate and address the concerns of people reporting vaccine injuries.

“The deliberate hiding of dozens of mRNA injection safety signals early in 2021 is the biggest government scandal in my lifetime, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that Dr. Levi had trouble publishing his analysis of V-Safe.”

After several years of oversight into what he described as the failed Covid response, Johnson said he had reached a troubling conclusion.

“I have concluded that science, medicine, federal health agencies, and government as a whole (worldwide) are thoroughly and potentially irredeemably corrupt.”

His criticism targets the FDA and CDC, the federal agencies charged with monitoring vaccine safety.

“I think these agencies are hopelessly captured,” he said, adding that “every time one of their tools showed a safety signal, they denigrated the tool and stopped using it.”

Johnson said he would be happy to enter Levi and Lu’s study into the Congressional Record, and insisted the CDC must follow up with V-SAFE participants reporting prolonged post-vaccination health issues.

“Absolutely. Without question,” Johnson said.

Levi, meanwhile, intends to continue submitting the study for formal peer review.

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Dear Readers,

It has been four years since I started this Substack.

When I was kicked out of mainstream media, I wasn’t entirely sure what would come next. But being on the “outside” made me realise that I was intensely curious about a lot of things — and that made me a pretty good investigative journalist.

I enjoy finding stories, digging through documents, following leads, talking to people and discovering that something isn’t quite what it first appeared to be.

That’s really why I started this Substack.

Four years later, I’m still doing it. Interestingly, some of my leads now come from you — my subscribers.

People in this community send me studies, documents, court filings, emails and tips about things they think I should investigate. Sometimes there’s no story. Sometimes an email sends me down a rabbit hole. And sometimes it turns into something significant.

While I can’t respond to them all, I do try to read them all. So please keep them coming. I will always treat genuine sources and sensitive material with care and confidentiality.

It’s been quite a year

Looking back, I’ve covered a lot of ground over the past 12 months.

I’ve reported extensively on problems surrounding Covid vaccines — from limitations in the way they were tested and monitored, to studies making claims of benefits that don’t always stand up to closer scrutiny.

I’ve spent a lot of time following the upheaval at the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, ACIP — reporting on its meetings, interviewing members and digging into what has been happening behind the scenes as the committee has faced unprecedented challenges.

I’ve continued investigating vaccine injuries and what health authorities knew about them, including previously undisclosed government documents and correspondence that raised uncomfortable questions about how seriously these patients were taken.

Then there were the Fauci diaries and emails — thousands of pages of records that offered a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of the US government’s Covid response, and the web of relationships and planning that preceded it.

I’ve also returned to subjects I first investigated years ago — antidepressants, statins and the broader over-medicalisation of our health — challenging some long-held assumptions about their benefits and harms.

Help behind the scenes

I also want to thank the Brownstone Institute, which has supported my work for several years now.

Until recently, I was doing virtually everything myself. But in the coming year, Brownstone will generously provide additional support, allowing me to get some help with the research that goes into these stories.

Good investigative journalism can involve days — sometimes weeks — of reading studies, chasing documents, checking facts and following leads before there’s even a story to write.

Having someone take on some of that research means I can follow more leads and dig more deeply into the ones that matter.

I hope you’ll see the results over the coming year: more deeply researched investigations, more exclusives and, hopefully, some really exciting stories.

If you’d like to support my work

The best way to support my work is to take out a paid subscription.

An annual subscription is US$75 — which works out to just over US$6 a month. It’s also much better value than paying month-to-month.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. You can also gift a subscription to a friend, family member or colleague you think might enjoy my work.

And if a paid subscription isn’t for you, that’s completely fine. You can still help enormously by sharing my articles on social media, forwarding them to friends or simply spreading the word.

Every new reader helps this publication grow — and allows these stories to travel much further than I could ever manage on my own.

Four years ago, I had no idea where any of this would lead. I’m very glad I took the chance.

Here’s to year five — and to finding out what stories are waiting to be uncovered.

Thank you,

Maryanne Demasi, PhD

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With autumn approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, the US is preparing to roll out updated flu and Covid vaccines for the coming respiratory-virus season.

But the federal advisory committee that would normally review the evidence and recommend how those vaccines should be used cannot meet.

Since March, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — the independent panel that develops national vaccine recommendations — has been unable to deliberate or vote.

The paralysis began when US District Judge Brian Murphy halted the appointments of 13 committee members following a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Murphy concluded that suspending Kennedy’s reconstituted committee would cause minimal harm because the government could continue relying on existing vaccine schedules “for a short period.”

That was more than five months ago.

Read more

For more than two decades, Tamiflu has been a cornerstone of global pandemic planning.

Governments spent billions stockpiling it, the WHO placed it on its Essential Medicines List, and doctors routinely prescribed it to severely ill flu patients on the assumption that it could prevent complications and save lives.

But until now, no randomised trial had compared Tamiflu with no antiviral in critically ill patients.

The international REMAP-CAP trial has now put that assumption to the test—and found no benefit.

Among 442 critically ill patients with laboratory-confirmed influenza assigned to receive Tamiflu for five days, ten days, or no antiviral, the results were clear.

About 20% of patients given Tamiflu had died by 90 days, compared with about 14% of those who received no antiviral.

In other words, more patients died when they were given the drug.

The authors concluded that Tamiflu was “ineffective and highly likely to increase 90-day mortality” and should no longer routinely be administered to critically ill patients with seasonal influenza.

The new findings are the latest chapter in Tamiflu’s troubled history.

Read more

A new preprint analysis from MIT researchers examines data from the CDC’s V-SAFE system—the smartphone app used to actively monitor health outcomes following Covid-19 vaccination.

Led by Retsef Levi and Nelson Lu, the analysis of responses from nearly 10 million people aged 16 and older found that 185,285 individuals (1.87%) reported health deterioration lasting three months or longer and attributed that decline to Covid vaccination.

Roughly half of this group—about 1% of all V-SAFE participants—described their outcomes as severe, including inability to work or perform daily activities, hospitalisation, or potentially disabling symptoms.

The V-SAFE survey reports, collected between December 2020 and mid-2023, remained largely inaccessible to independent researchers until FOIA litigation by Informed Consent Action Network forced their release.

Read more

The old pharmaceutical bribe was easy to recognise. Drug company reps flew doctors to luxury resorts, paid for lavish dinners, disguised kickbacks as consulting fees, and funded educational events that were little more than sales pitches.

A recent academic review published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics examined over two decades of bribery cases, uncovering repeated patterns of sham consulting contracts, fake educational events, luxury travel, and hidden payments.

The U.S. Department of Justice has repeatedly prosecuted industry giants—Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Purdue Pharma—resulting collectively in tens of billions of dollars in settlements and penalties.

Yet despite decades of high-profile prosecutions, Big Pharma’s influence over medicine has not disappeared — it has simply evolved.

Read more

When Moderna and Merck announced yesterday that their experimental mRNA cancer treatment had succeeded in a major Phase III melanoma trial, the response was immediate.

The companies called it a “landmark moment”—the first successful late-stage trial of an mRNA-based cancer treatment. News reports heralded a breakthrough. Elon Musk even declared that “synthetic RNA will cure many diseases.”

Investors were equally enthusiastic. Moderna and Merck’s market values surged, adding approximately $86 billion between them in a single trading session.

But amid the celebration, something important was missing.

The data!

No Phase III results have been published in the peer-reviewed literature, and none have been posted to ClinicalTrials.gov.

Instead, all the excitement rests on a company press release.

Moderna and Merck said the trial showed “statistically significant and clinically meaningful” improvements in preventing melanoma from recurring and spreading to distant organs.

But they have not disclosed how many patients experienced a recurrence, how large the absolute benefit was, whether it differed by disease stage, or how many patients stopped treatment because of adverse events.

The result may turn out to be impressive. But right now, we are being asked to celebrate a “breakthrough” that nobody outside the companies can properly scrutinise.

Not the “vaccine” most people imagine

Despite being widely described as a “cancer mRNA vaccine,” Moderna’s intismeran is an experimental treatment for people who have already had high-risk melanoma surgically removed.

Although they may have no detectable cancer remaining, microscopic cancer cells can survive and later cause the disease to return.

Intismeran is custom-made for each patient.

Read more

Newly recovered communications from Anthony Fauci’s government phone have exposed what senior U.S. health officials knew about Covid-19 vaccine injuries in the earliest months of the rollout.

They also reveal how calculated they were in concealing the systemic flaws in their own safety monitoring.

The documents, part of a cache released by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul following an investigation into Fauci’s pandemic-era communications, directly contradict years of official assurances.

Following the release, Senator Johnson did not mince words.

“They kept saying no red flags, no safety signals,” he told Fox News. “They lied through their teeth to the American public.”

The surveillance myth

In March 2021, FDA vaccine chief Dr Peter Marks told Congress that the agency had implemented a surveillance system using “state-of-the-art technologies,” capable of detecting safety findings “in a relatively rapid manner.”

The CDC echoed that confidence, assuring the public that Covid-19 vaccine monitoring was the “most intense and comprehensive” safety program the country had ever built.

But behind closed doors, leadership knew those very systems had major blind spots.

On May 27, 2021, Dr. Janet Woodcock—then Acting Commissioner of the FDA—sent a confidential email sounding the alarm to Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins.

Woodcock was being contacted directly by people suffering unexplained health problems after receiving one of the three authorised vaccines. Many were healthcare workers. Some she knew personally.

Their symptoms were complex, debilitating, and often difficult to evaluate with standard laboratory testing. Crucially, Woodcock warned that the very surveillance systems officials were relying on to reassure the public might fail to detect what was happening.

“These problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect, or even a more sophisticated population-based active follow-up such as CDC has, or a medical record-based system such as BEST,” she wrote.

In other words, Woodcock was warning that the federal safety net had a gaping hole. She doubted vaccine manufacturers would investigate “for obvious reasons” and urged Fauci and Collins to launch a dedicated cohort study.

People were suffering, she wrote, and their primary complaint was that “no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”

“If you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared,” warned Woodcock.

Fauci’s response made clear the warning had registered.

“Janet asks what we think of this?” he wrote to Collins the next day. “We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what Rochelle [Walensky] thinks.”

But publicly, officials continued to reassure Americans about the strength of vaccine safety surveillance. Privately, patients were still struggling to have their injuries recognised.

Read more