Brownstone Journal

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org. Wendell Berry died on August 31 at his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. For more than half a century he farmed with horses, wrote in pencil, adamantly refused to purchase a computer, and insisted that the health of a person cannot be separated from the health of a place. That faithfulness to a place is the part of his thought that the health freedom movement most needs now. Health, Berry never tired of saying, comes from the same root as whole, heal, and holy. To be healthy is to be whole. Health as wholeness is not a decree from the medical apparatus. It is membership to a community: belonging to other people and to a particular piece of earth. "I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health," he wrote, "and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms." That sentence should hang over every discussion of medical liberty. The movement for health freedom has rightly fought for informed consent, against coercive public-health machinery, against the reduction of the body to a set of data to be mined by the Biosecurity State. Those fights are essential, but they are not sufficient. A person who has successfully kept the State out of his bloodstream can still be unwell if the soil from which comes the food that feeds him is dead, if the water he drinks is polluted, if his neighborhood is atomized, and if the food system that feeds him is a chain of distant, chemicalized abstractions. Autonomy without membership to the kind of community Berry wrote about all his life is not worthy of a fight. Berry made the connection explicit in an essay entitled "The Body and the Earth," collected in The Unsettling of America and later in The Art of the Commonplace. Our bodies, he wrote, "are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures." It is therefore unsurprising that we treat our bodies as we treat the land. When we treat land as an extractive resource, as something to be mined, specialized, chemically altered, and abandoned, we treat the body the same way: as a machine whose parts can be isolated, optimized, and replaced by specialists who have no interest in nutrition, agriculture, or the wholesomeness of mind and spirit. "It is therefore absurd," he wrote, "to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists." A doctor uninterested in the health of soil is as absurd, continued Berry, as a farmer uninterested in the health of people. In this view, healing is not a procedure performed on an isolated organism. "Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation." The feast is local. It requires a place that is intimately known, cared for with affection, and kept whole enough to keep giving. Love of place is not a shmaltzy slogan. It is the condition of knowledge and of care. You cannot properly care for what you do not love, and you cannot love what you refuse to know in its particularity. This is the lesson the health freedom movement must take from Berry without abandoning its core commitments. Medical freedom is a necessary defense against the Machine, but it is of little use if we don't know where our food comes from, who grows it and how, what a neighborhood looks like when the soil is alive, or what care looks like when it is not outsourced to distant systems that treat both land and body as inputs. Berry's answer was never a set of slick policies. It was faithfulness to a place and to the kind of labor that the love of a place requires. Berry left his native Kentucky to study at Stanford and teach in New York City, but he returned to Henry County, farmed it, wrote about it, and refused the careerist mobility that treats every locality as interchangeable. The ...

By Daniel Nuccio at Brownstone dot org. Knowing what's in your food or whether what you're about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There's no reason why the government should make it harder. But that's exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels. Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders. In technical terms, FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. More practically, people with IBS might want to be careful around most standard dairy items, honey, several cereals and artificial sweeteners, and a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and spices. When consumed, these items can lead to luminal distension by causing increased amounts of water to enter the gastrointestinal tract and increased gas production by bacteria living in the colon. In some individuals with IBS and other functional gut disorders, this may trigger or exacerbate certain symptoms of their condition (e.g., intense pain and changes in intestinal motility), possibly through neurons in the gut responding abnormally to these physiological responses to FODMAP consumption. Hence, some patients with these conditions choose to limit their FODMAP intake or are encouraged to do so by their health care provider. Some go on strict low-FODMAP diets long term. Others temporarily do so for two to eight weeks then work to reintroduce specific FODMAP-containing foods into their diet to determine what they can tolerate. Broadly speaking, a lot of patients with relevant conditions find that the diet helps alleviate their symptoms. Low-FODMAP diets though are generally considered sort of bland. They also tend to require a certain amount of time and education to be effective. Looking at a table of high- and low-FODMAP foods to make decisions about what to eat may not require an advanced degree in nutrition, but it is not difficult to imagine how having to break out such a table to evaluate every item you consider purchasing at the grocery store could become rather burdensome, especially if you're new to the diet. Fortunately, there are organizations and companies out there to help. Monash University, for example, has labs that both study the effectiveness of low-FODMAP diets and test food items for FODMAP content. Monash also offers several resources to help those on low-FODMAP diets make informed meal choices and works with companies that wish to offer low-FODMAP food options. If a company wants to submit a product to Monash for evaluation and Monash determines the item is low in FODMAP content, the company can then use a trademarked label to convey this information to consumers. However, as one US company learned, even if one of the world's leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn't exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States. In 2018, Ketan Vakil, after dealing with his own digestive issues involving FODMAPs, saw an opening in the market to cater to customers on low-FODMAP diets by offering diet-compatible broths and spice blends that could safely add some flavor to this notoriously bland diet. Hence, he founded Gourmend Foods, and, after getting a chicken broth and some spice blends low-FODMAP certified by Monash, Vakil and Gourmend proceeded to sell those items online and in retail using Monash's trademarked label. However, in 2022 when Vakil expanded Gourmend's product line with a low-FODMAP beef broth, he learned from the USDA while going through a pre-approval process for the beef broth's label that it would be illegal for him to in...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. An email arrived from a reader that posed a serious problem, a general one of which I was only vaguely aware. It deals with an issue deeply intimate to all family life. It affects the crucial cultural matter of the prolongation of legacy and human life itself. Her niece is expecting a baby. The child is due in three weeks, which means that it will be around for Thanksgiving holidays. Instead of treating this as a glorious opportunity for the extended family to marvel with delight over new life, hearts lifted all around, the mother is treating family as nothing more than walking and talking disease vectors. On the advice of her pediatrician, she is banning anyone from getting near the baby unless they have fully four shots: D-Tap, Covid, flu, and RSV. This is because the baby cannot be vaccinated with D-Tap for two months. The entire family is being told this and people are trying to figure out what to do. Some will refuse and be relegated to Zoom contact. Some will be masked and gloved. Others will go along and risk injury to themselves for absolutely no reason. The practice is called cocooning. It makes no sense at all. Cocooning is different from nest building, which is a normal sense of wanting time to bond and learn and care. This is different. It is a pharmacological innovation that implies that the basic immune system is deeply flawed without the injection of industrial products and therefore a newborn can only be around other maximally injected people. The Covid and flu shots are known to register negative efficacy. None of these shots can prevent transmission, an indisputable fact. Moreover, every pharmaceutical carries risks. Four at once carries more risk than one. In effect, the new mother is exercising soft power, blackmailing her family by denying joy to them unless they give money to the shotmakers. Think of it as an informal vaccine passport imposed by cautious new moms who have no idea they are being manipulated by powerful industrial interests. I was shocked by this email but apparently this is very common. It's a policy. Incredibly, the CDC itself recommends this: "A baby's family members and caregivers should be up to date on their vaccinations to help form a circle of disease protection around the baby." If you believe that, I've got a closet full of potions to sell you. It's a wonder humanity has survived so long without such exhortations! It's "social distancing" applied to pediatrics, without the same evidence in support, which is to say none. A maker of one D-Tap shot is GlaxoSmithKline. Ten years ago, they put out an advertising campaign for their shot called Boostrix. It featured a wolf holding a baby. The campaign was called Big Bad Cough. The message was that no young mother should let anyone without Boostrix near her newborn child. A class-action lawsuit was launched on grounds that the potion does not actually protect against spread. The company settled the lawsuit. Disbursements are now going out to people who took the shot under the advertising campaign's influence. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit had claimed "physical and emotional injury, the injection creating in their bodies a defective immunity to pertussis that will last the remainder of their lives, receiving a painful injection of various substances into their bodies that they would not have received otherwise, expending time and resources to seek out and obtain Boostrix, paying, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, for Boostrix, and after GSK led them to fear that without Boostrix they were in danger of spreading pertussis, receiving the product has actually rendered them more likely to spread pertussis and hence only increased the fear created by GSK." The courts did not ultimately rule. The company settled to prevent that for good reason. The jabbed accepted the payout rather than take the challenge all the way. We've only begun to discuss the complete fraudulence of the entire co...

By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org. The following is the result of joint work with Jaroslav Janosek, Tadeas Frycak, and Robert Straka. Since the registration trials of the Covid-19 vaccines, there have been no randomized studies to track the efficacy of these vaccines. The virus kept mutating and the convalescent fraction of the population has been growing. Thus, the original efficacy figures reported in the registration trials – dubious to start with – were clearly not valid when the mass vaccination campaign started in early 2021. Moreover, in the meantime we learned that the registration trials tested a different product than the one used in the mass vaccination campaign. This cast further doubt on the advertised 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection. The Israel 2021 summer wave of infections clearly demonstrated to the whole world that the "vaccines" do not protect against symptomatic infection in any meaningful way. Consequently, the goal posts were moved and the authorities started claiming that the "vaccines" may not protect against infection but they protect against severe course of infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid. However, there were (and there still are) no data from randomized trials to support this causal claim. This embarrassing gap in evidence was filled by a trove of papers that estimated the effectiveness of the "vaccines" from observational data. Most of these studies claimed the vaccine effectiveness was very high, often close to 100%. Rogue governments all over the world used these studies to force people into vaccination. Readers of this forum know very well that observational data are loaded with the so-called Healthy Vaccinee Effect. This is a type of indication bias that originates from healthy people having easier access to the vaccine. For example, people on their deathbed are usually not vaccinated, which means that deaths tend to concentrate in the unvaccinated group, making the vaccinated group much "healthier." At the same time, those frailest individuals who are close to the end of their lives are also those most susceptible to die from/with Covid. Healthy Vaccinee Effect (HVE) thus causes observational studies to vastly overestimate vaccine effectiveness against any endpoint (and vastly overestimate vaccine safety as well). The now legendary paper by Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, and Vinay Prasad showed that the reported 95% effectiveness of Covid vaccines against Covid-related death in Israel in 2021 was entirely due to HVE. In other words, had HVE been removed, the true vaccine effectiveness would have been zero. I still can't figure out how they got this published in the New England Journal of Medicine. We first noticed HVE in the middle of 2021 when Angelika Bazalova – an investigative journalist – had the brilliant idea to FOIA her way to the records on all-cause mortality of the clients of several health insurance companies in the Czech Republic. Readers (with an AI translator from Czech) can still see our initial confusion as we were reporting the data and proposing possible explanations (one of the articles was titled "The elixir of youth"). After some time, we made sense of all the data and reported it in a paper for the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and in a further paper in a Polish journal. My original conclusion that "this paper invalidates all estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on observation data" was changed to "In view of the presence of HVE, the baseline difference in the frailty of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in periods without COVID-19 must be taken into account when estimating COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness from observational data." But that is the Newspeak we all had to learn during the past years in order to get anything published in official journals. Since then, we have been trying to explain HVE to medical professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public. It has been frustrating. Most people think that the v...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. When was the last time your doctor actually examined you? I do not mean when someone checked your blood pressure, copied your medication list, looked at your laboratory results, or listened briefly through a shirt before returning to the computer. I mean examined you. Looked at you. Watched you breathe. Felt your pulse. Looked at your eyes. Examined your neck. Listened carefully to your heart and lungs. Palpated your abdomen. Watched you walk. Noticed the color of your skin, the movement of your hands, the expression on your face, and the thousand other small pieces of information that a human body offers to someone who has learned how to observe it. For most of the history of medicine, this was not an optional ritual performed before ordering the "real tests." This was medicine. Today, increasingly, it is treated as something quaint, inefficient, or unnecessary. I have spent most of my professional life taking care of very sick people. Critical care is one of the most technologically intensive areas of medicine ever created. I love technology. I have watched mechanical ventilators breathe for patients who could no longer breathe for themselves. I have used ultrasound, CT imaging, sophisticated hemodynamic monitoring, extracorporeal technologies, molecular diagnostics, and laboratory measurements that physicians a generation before me could only have dreamed about. I would never want to return to a world without these tools. But after decades at the bedside, I have also learned something that becomes more obvious, not less, with experience: technology is most powerful when it extends the physician's senses. It becomes dangerous when it persuades the physician that those senses are no longer necessary. Experienced clinicians understand something that is remarkably difficult to teach in a lecture hall or classroom. Sometimes you walk into a room and know immediately that something is wrong. You may not yet know what it is, but you know it before the laboratory does. The patient is breathing differently. His skin looks different. She answers a question a fraction of a second more slowly than she did several hours earlier. Posture, speech, facial expression, respiratory effort, or level of attention changes. None of these observations is magical. They are data, collected by a biological instrument trained through thousands and thousands of encounters: the physician. When I round in an intensive care unit (ICU), I can learn an enormous amount before touching the computer. I can see whether a patient is fighting the ventilator. I can hear secretions from the doorway. I can see accessory muscles contracting. I can recognize when someone who looked reasonably comfortable earlier suddenly looks exhausted. I can see peripheral perfusion, diaphoresis, agitation, abdominal distension, or a subtle change in mental status. None of this means I should ignore the arterial blood gas, the chest radiograph, the CT scan, or the monitor. Of course I need them. The mistake is believing that because those measurements are more technologically sophisticated, they are necessarily more real than what is happening directly in front of me. Medicine once began with the patient and proceeded toward testing. Increasingly, it begins with testing and eventually works its way back toward the patient. Abraham Verghese and colleagues have described this inversion of the diagnostic process, in which clinicians may encounter an image or electronic representation of a patient before encountering the patient himself. That change sounds subtle. It is not. Once the CT scan, laboratory panel, consultant note, medication list, and previous diagnoses have entered our minds, we no longer approach the patient without preconceptions. The data have already told us what we are supposed to see. This is one reason the physical examination should never be reduced to nostalgia. Its value is not that physicians once carried black bags and ...