September 28, 2026
The Capture of MAHA
The corporations moved in. The outsiders were pushed aside.
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 28 |  |
By Dr.s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone
Audio Version:
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LISTEN NOW · 19:08Tomorrow, September 29, the second annual MAHA Summit will be held at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. Today, I looked at the speakers and was genuinely taken aback. Then the picture became considerably clearer when I took a gander at the sponsor list. This is being advertised as “a one-day gathering of the foremost leaders shaping the future of American health,” culminating with Vice President JD Vance and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But much of the day is not devoted to the physicians, scientists, farmers, parents, patients, medical-freedom advocates and independent researchers who spent years building the constituency that ultimately became MAHA. In fact, not a single one of them has been asked to speak. Instead, the program is heavily populated by executives from some of the largest health-care corporations in America, major hospital systems, health insurers, technology companies, venture-backed medical businesses and companies whose fortunes may depend upon decisions being made by the very federal agencies represented at the conference. The official agenda includes UnitedHealth, Elevance Health, AHIP, Walmart, GRAIL, ResMed, Compass Pathways, Definium Therapeutics, Hims & Hers, Noom, Advocate Health, Sutter Health, Anthropic and OpenAI, among many others. Senior officials from HHS, CMS, FDA, NIH, USDA and EPA are appearing alongside them. MAHA Summit 2026.
To understand why this is so jarring, remember what MAHA was supposed to represent. What Bobby Kennedy promised us. It did not arise because Americans believed that the health insurance industry needed a larger voice in Washington, that hospital conglomerates lacked influence, that Silicon Valley needed better access to government, or that venture capital was insufficiently represented in health policy. Quite the opposite. The movement grew because millions of Americans concluded that the institutions controlling medicine, food, agriculture and public health had become far too intertwined with the industries they were supposed to oversee. They watched regulatory agencies defer to pharmaceutical companies, doctors lose autonomy to enormous health systems and insurers, small farmers struggle under rules written for industrial agriculture, and dissenting scientists marginalized by institutions increasingly dependent upon government and corporate money. Whatever else one thinks of MAHA, its political energy came from that profound loss of trust. That is why the Summit program is worth examining closely. It raises a simple question that should not be dismissed merely because the people currently occupying HHS are people many in the movement supported: Who exactly is MAHA for now?
Perhaps nothing captures the problem better than the 10:40 a.m. panel titled “Affordability First.” The people chosen to discuss affordability are Wyatt Decker, chief physician for value-based care at UnitedHealth; Catherine Gaffigan, president of Health Solutions at Elevance Health; and Mike Tuffin, president and CEO of AHIP, the national trade association for health insurers. The moderator is a senior CMS official. MAHA Summit 2026 There is nothing inherently wrong with hearing from insurance executives at a conference on institutionalized health care. They understand their industry and should be required to defend its practices publicly.
But where is the other side of that discussion? Where is the independent physician spending hours fighting prior-authorization denials? Where is the patient staring at a five-figure hospital bill despite having insurance? Where is the rural doctor whose practice can barely survive the administrative burden imposed by insurers and consolidated health systems? Where is the economist examining what vertical integration has done to American medicine? Where is the physician trying to figure out how to code and document a vaccine injury in a reimbursement system that determines what gets recognized, treated, and ultimately paid for? Where is the patient whose claim has simply been denied? We all thought MAHA was founded to challenge entrenched interests has somehow convened a panel on medical affordability dominated by the insurance industry itself, while the physicians and patients who live under that system have been completely excluded from the discussion.
Perhaps the most tone-deaf choice on the entire program is the inclusion of UnitedHealth on a panel called “Affordability First.” Less than two years ago, on December 4, 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed outside a Manhattan hotel as he arrived for the company’s investor conference. Luigi Mangione is on trial for that murder and has pleaded not guilty to charges arising from the killing. But something happened in the days after Thompson’s death that should have terrified the health-insurance industry, and should certainly have been understood by anyone claiming to lead a populist health-reform movement.
A remarkable number of Americans did not respond primarily by defending UnitedHealthcare. They began telling their own stories about denied claims, prior authorizations, treatments delayed while patients became sicker, hours spent fighting insurance companies, and medical decisions made not between doctor and patient but by corporations deciding whether they would pay. Reuters described the killing as igniting an “outpouring of anger” from Americans struggling to obtain and pay for medical care. The reaction became so widespread that it developed into a national discussion about something much larger than the crime itself.
The incestuous nature of MAHA is becoming harder to ignore, and the conflicts of interest seem to multiply by the day. GRAIL is a marquee sponsor of the MAHA Summit while its flagship Galleri cancer test is before the FDA. Its CEO gets a seat on the Summit stage. Casey Means invested in Function Health, which now offers GRAIL’s Galleri test to its members. Meanwhile, the same small circle of people moves among MAHA Center, MAHA Action, MAHA PAC and MAHA Institute, while corporations with business before the federal health establishment sponsor the gathering alongside senior government officials. Any one of these relationships might be dismissed as incidental. Taken together, they demand transparency. MAHA was supposed to expose the revolving door between money, industry and government, not build its own.
GRAIL is a marquee sponsor of the MAHA Summit while its flagship Galleri cancer test is moving through the FDA approval process, and its CEO has been given a seat on the Summit stage. That is a conflict of interest that demands disclosure. How much did GRAIL pay? Which sponsorship package did it purchase? What did that money buy? Was the speaking slot part of the package? Did GRAIL have input into the panel topic, its composition, or the other speakers? Which HHS or FDA officials attended meetings, dinners, or private events involving GRAIL? MAHA built its credibility by exposing the entanglement of corporate money, regulatory access, and government power. It does not get a pass when those same relationships occur under the MAHA banner.
The psychedelic medicine session presents a similar problem. It is titled “Psychedelic Medicine, the Next Frontier” and features the chief executives of Compass Pathways, Definium Therapeutics and Helus Pharma. Compass and Definium also appear on the Summit sponsor graphic supplied by the organizers. Moderating the session is Matt Zorn, Deputy General Counsel of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. MAHA Summit 2026 Again, psychedelic medicine is a perfectly legitimate subject for scientific discussion, and promising therapies should not be rejected merely because commercial companies develop them. But this is an extraordinarily peculiar format for a movement that made conflicts between regulated industries and federal health officials one of its central grievances. The question is not whether company executives should be allowed in the ballroom. The question is why this conference organized around them.
And then Bloomberg reported what may be the most damning part of this entire affair. On September 19, Bloomberg Law revealed that prospective Summit sponsors were being offered packages reaching $300,000. At that level, this was not simply sponsorship. According to Bloomberg, the package included a guaranteed speaking slot, “meaningful input on the panel composition and topic,” and a private dinner for 30 guests with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz. Bloomberg Law investigation
Call this what it is. Corporate interests were being offered the opportunity to buy access, buy a microphone, and buy influence over who shared the stage and what that stage would discuss. This was not a $25,000 logo on a conference banner or underwriting lunch and audiovisual equipment. For $300,000, a corporation could reportedly help shape the conversation itself while gaining extraordinary proximity to two of the most powerful health officials in the federal government. MAHA rose to prominence by condemning precisely this convergence of money, access, industry influence, and government power. Now MAHA has morphed into what it was created to eliminate.
HHS has stated that its officials “were not involved in the planning or sponsorship activities” and were unaware of the arrangements described by Bloomberg. But that hardly answers what has happened here. This is not merely a transparency problem. It is a betrayal of what MAHA claimed to stand for. A movement built on exposing the corrupting relationship between corporate money, privileged access and government power is now holding a Summit where, according to Bloomberg, corporations were offered speaking slots, influence over panel composition and subject matter, and a private dinner involving the Secretary of HHS and the Administrator of CMS for packages reaching $300,000. The defense that Kennedy, Oz and other HHS officials did not know what was being sold in their names does not make this better. It raises the question of how an organization operating under the MAHA banner was permitted to commercialize access to them in the first place. The people who built this movement were promised an end to this kind of Washington influence-peddling, not a MAHA-branded version of it.
What bothers me most is not any single corporation on this list. It is who is missing. I know many of the people who spent years doing the difficult, often personally costly work that created the constituency now called MAHA. Physicians who lost positions and privileges because they refused to remain silent. Scientists who watched open scientific debate give way to institutional orthodoxy. Vaccine-injured patients and their families. Independent doctors fighting to practice medicine without becoming functionaries of enormous hospital systems and insurance companies. Farmers and ranchers struggling under a regulatory structure increasingly built around industrial agriculture. Small food producers and meat processors fighting rules that protect enormous incumbents. Researchers who documented financial conflicts throughout medicine and public health long before doing so became politically fashionable. Parents who organized, testified, protested and endured years of ridicule because they insisted that responsibility for their children belonged first to families, not bureaucracies. These people were not an interest group within MAHA. They were MAHA. Yet at the movement’s premier Washington gathering, they are remarkably difficult to find.
And no, filling the program with Trump administration officials does not solve that problem. Government officials are not independent MAHA voices. They are now the government. Look instead at the architecture of the day. Health insurers explain affordability. Giant hospital systems discuss prevention. Psychedelic drug companies tell the audience about the future of psychedelic medicine. Silicon Valley companies discuss building the AI health stack. Walmart explains real food at scale. GRAIL, with its flagship cancer test moving through the FDA approval process, receives marquee sponsor placement while its CEO takes the stage to discuss cancer detection. Federal officials are woven throughout the program.
Meanwhile, the dissident physicians, vaccine-injury advocates, independent scientists, medical-freedom activists, small farmers, patients and parents who actually built this movement are scattered so thinly through the agenda that their absence becomes impossible to miss. The outsiders who created MAHA have largely been displaced on its biggest stage by government, corporations and industries with enormous financial interests in the policies that government controls. That is not MAHA gaining a seat at the establishment’s table. This is the establishment taking over MAHA’s table.
There is an enormous difference between bringing industry into the room and allowing industry to purchase the room. A genuine reform summit would put UnitedHealth onstage across from an independent physician who spends every day battling UnitedHealth. It would put GRAIL’s CEO beside an epidemiologist or screening expert with no financial relationship to the company. It would allow psychedelic developers to make their case while independent researchers interrogate their evidence. It would invite Anthropic and OpenAI while giving critics of centralized artificial intelligence an equal opportunity to question where this technology is taking medicine. That would be a debate. What appears on this program too often resembles a corporate sales presentation.
The truth is that institutional incentives matter. Financial relationships matter. Access matters. Who funds an organization matters. Who gets invited into the room matters. Who does not get invited matters. None of those principles suddenly expires because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Secretary of HHS rather than Xavier Becerra. A conflict that deserved scrutiny under the Biden administration deserves scrutiny under the Trump administration. Corporate proximity to regulators cannot become acceptable merely because the regulators are now people associated with a movement one supports.
Perhaps this is what happens when an insurgency finally reaches Washington. In the beginning there is no money, no access and certainly no power. Meetings happen in borrowed rooms. Scientists are dismissed as cranks, physicians as troublemakers, parents as extremists and farmers as irrelevant. Then the insurgency succeeds, and almost overnight the people who wanted nothing to do with it discover they were sympathetic all along. The lobbyists arrive. The consultants arrive. Corporate money arrives. CEOs who were nowhere to be found during the fight suddenly want seats on panels, introductions to officials and a place inside the movement. Invitations acquire value. Access becomes currency. And eventually the establishment figures out that it does not have to defeat the rebellion. It can buy its way into it. That is how capture works. It happens through money, access, relationships, and the gradual replacement of the people who built the movement with people who can afford to purchase proximity to it. One day the outsiders finally reach the table and discover something extraordinary: the people they spent years fighting have been kicked out of the room.
That is why tomorrow’s MAHA Summit matters. The people running MAHA finally acquired something they lacked a few years ago: power. And with power came the money, corporations, lobbyists, consultants and industries seeking access to the government officials who now carry the MAHA banner. The test was whether MAHA could enter Washington without becoming Washington. This Summit suggests that test has already been failed.
A ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria filled with cabinet officials, CEOs, venture capitalists and corporate sponsors is not revolutionary. Washington has been selling proximity to power for generations. What is shocking is how quickly a movement built to challenge that system appears to have reproduced it, complete with six-figure sponsorship packages, purchased speaking opportunities, influence over panels and privileged access to senior government officials.
MAHA was supposed to break the machinery through which money buys access and access buys influence. Instead, the opposite has happened. And where is Sec. Kennedy in all of this, collecting his 4$ million paycheck from sources unknown just prior to his dropping out of the presidential campaign and endorsing President Trump (but that discussion is for another essay).
MAHA was built around a very different proposition: that the institutions controlling American health must once again become accountable to the people whose lives they govern. To make America Healthy Again. That principle was easy to proclaim when MAHA was outside Washington, fighting institutions with vastly more money and power.
The real measure was always what would happen once MAHA acquired power of its own. We now have an answer. The corporations are sponsoring the conference. Their executives are occupying the stage. Their interests are helping shape the discussion. According to Bloomberg, access to government officials themselves was packaged for sale. Meanwhile, many of the physicians, scientists, patients, parents, farmers and activists who built this movement are barely represented. This is not the reform we fought for. It is the system we fought against.
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Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In
I wanted to move past COVID. The testimony of patients, families, and whistleblowers on the inside won’t let me.
| PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA SEP 28 |  |
Senator Ron Johnson’s panel titled “COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People” will take place in the Kennedy Room today at 1 pm, and will be live-streamed on the Senator’s website.
Lately I’ve joked with readers that Medical Musings has a new mission. Not entirely abandoning COVID and the corruption it exposed, but moving largely beyond it, toward what I believe is an even bigger story: the geohydrological shift. Over the past century, the chemistry of the world’s water has changed, and that change is quietly driving the food crisis now unfolding across the globe. I’ve written about it in my Stone and Water Series books.
Today is not that day. Today is the opposite.
Senator Johnson has once again asked me to help expose one of the worst catastrophes of this country’s pandemic response: what happened inside our hospitals.
Over the past several years, I have spoken with countless survivors and grieving families, and with the nurses and doctors who witnessed it firsthand. What they described was not isolated. It was pervasive, systemic, and cruel beyond belief. And it was almost entirely devoid of scientific inquiry: no questioning, no weighing of evidence, no willingness to change course as patients deteriorated. It defied logic, reason, and basic compassion. I credit Senator Johnson for dragging it into public view today, in a way I hope the country never forgets.
Here is just some of what they told me:
- Remdesivir infused over the documented refusals of patients and their families.
- Isolation policies that cut patients off from family and advocates, leaving them alone, defenseless, and without a voice.
- Every request for repurposed drugs, above all ivermectin, denied. Every plea for a change in treatment refused, even as patients deteriorated.
- Worse: ivermectin stopped in patients who were clearly improving after a caring doctor had started it.
- Vicious comments spoken to patients and families who had chosen not to be vaccinated.
- Patients placed on mechanical ventilators with no pressing need for it.
- Any doctor, nurse, or staff member who dissented was targeted, harassed, and driven out.
And that is only the beginning.
Ralph Lorigo, the attorney who sued on behalf of 200 patients denied ivermectin, is one of the central witnesses to the most egregious abuse of all: the near-total lockout of ivermectin, one of the safest drugs in all of medicine and one of the most effective treatments for COVID, if not the most effective.
I devoted years of my life to documenting how the world’s scientific and public health institutions worked to restrict ivermectin. That record became my book, The War on Ivermectin. I later came to see it as just one chapter in a much broader campaign against cheap, repurposed therapies, which led me to write the next book in the series, The War on Chlorine Dioxide. Today is a chance to bring that story to a much wider audience.
So I’m handing this post to my colleague Michael Capuzzo, the New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist who has covered Ralph Lorigo’s case extensively, along with ivermectin and the efforts Paul Marik and I made to guide the world in using it to save lives.
Please check out his post below; it is a must-read.
RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo
Ralph Lorigo and the American Dream
12 hours ago · 48 likes · 7 comments · Mike Capuzzo
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.
From the Shameless Commercialism Department:
I now write about minerals and water. Midway through writing my most recent books, I started a company that sells an aqueous mineral solution of the two.
Aurmina is a volcanic mineral water purifier that cleans water the way the Earth always has. Its chemistry is drawn from volcanic rock: an aqueous solution of twenty-nine individually measured elements, extracted — not synthesized — from a black mica documented to carry more than forty. Each is in sulfate form, which lets it dissolve and carry a charge.
Add it to a pitcher. The minerals bind the contaminants, the burden clumps and settles, and you pour off the clear water. Purity and mineral breadth almost always trade against each other. Unlike reverse osmosis, Aurmina keeps the minerals in — producing one of the purest and most broadly mineralized waters on Earth. Check out our new website here.
Primora Bio relies on the same mineral chemistry for the water that supports the things we grow and love: plants, gardens, fish, and pets.
The Stone and Water Series
You can purchase the book series, in whole or in part, from my website ( where all books are personally stamped with my hanko) or from Amazon.
© 2026 Pierre Kory
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In
I wanted to move past COVID. The testimony of patients, families, and whistleblowers on the inside won’t let me.
| PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA SEP 28 | |
Senator Ron Johnson’s panel titled “COVID-19 Hospital Protocols: Real Stories from Real People” will take place in the Kennedy Room today at 1 pm, and will be live-streamed on the Senator’s website.
Lately I’ve joked with readers that Medical Musings has a new mission. Not entirely abandoning COVID and the corruption it exposed, but moving largely beyond it, toward what I believe is an even bigger story: the geohydrological shift. Over the past century, the chemistry of the world’s water has changed, and that change is quietly driving the food crisis now unfolding across the globe. I’ve written about it in my Stone and Water Series books.
Today is not that day. Today is the opposite.
Senator Johnson has once again asked me to help expose one of the worst catastrophes of this country’s pandemic response: what happened inside our hospitals.
Over the past several years, I have spoken with countless survivors and grieving families, and with the nurses and doctors who witnessed it firsthand. What they described was not isolated. It was pervasive, systemic, and cruel beyond belief. And it was almost entirely devoid of scientific inquiry: no questioning, no weighing of evidence, no willingness to change course as patients deteriorated. It defied logic, reason, and basic compassion. I credit Senator Johnson for dragging it into public view today, in a way I hope the country never forgets.
Here is just some of what they told me:
- Remdesivir infused over the documented refusals of patients and their families.
- Isolation policies that cut patients off from family and advocates, leaving them alone, defenseless, and without a voice.
- Every request for repurposed drugs, above all ivermectin, denied. Every plea for a change in treatment refused, even as patients deteriorated.
- Worse: ivermectin stopped in patients who were clearly improving after a caring doctor had started it.
- Vicious comments spoken to patients and families who had chosen not to be vaccinated.
- Patients placed on mechanical ventilators with no pressing need for it.
- Any doctor, nurse, or staff member who dissented was targeted, harassed, and driven out.
And that is only the beginning.
Ralph Lorigo, the attorney who sued on behalf of 200 patients denied ivermectin, is one of the central witnesses to the most egregious abuse of all: the near-total lockout of ivermectin, one of the safest drugs in all of medicine and one of the most effective treatments for COVID, if not the most effective.
I devoted years of my life to documenting how the world’s scientific and public health institutions worked to restrict ivermectin. That record became my book, The War on Ivermectin. I later came to see it as just one chapter in a much broader campaign against cheap, repurposed therapies, which led me to write the next book in the series, The War on Chlorine Dioxide. Today is a chance to bring that story to a much wider audience.
So I’m handing this post to my colleague Michael Capuzzo, the New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist who has covered Ralph Lorigo’s case extensively, along with ivermectin and the efforts Paul Marik and I made to guide the world in using it to save lives.
Please check out his post below; it is a must-read.
RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo
Ralph Lorigo and the American Dream
12 hours ago · 48 likes · 7 comments · Mike Capuzzo
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.
From the Shameless Commercialism Department:
I now write about minerals and water. Midway through writing my most recent books, I started a company that sells an aqueous mineral solution of the two.
Aurmina is a volcanic mineral water purifier that cleans water the way the Earth always has. Its chemistry is drawn from volcanic rock: an aqueous solution of twenty-nine individually measured elements, extracted — not synthesized — from a black mica documented to carry more than forty. Each is in sulfate form, which lets it dissolve and carry a charge.
Add it to a pitcher. The minerals bind the contaminants, the burden clumps and settles, and you pour off the clear water. Purity and mineral breadth almost always trade against each other. Unlike reverse osmosis, Aurmina keeps the minerals in — producing one of the purest and most broadly mineralized waters on Earth. Check out our new website here.
Primora Bio relies on the same mineral chemistry for the water that supports the things we grow and love: plants, gardens, fish, and pets.
The Stone and Water Series
You can purchase the book series, in whole or in part, from my website ( where all books are personally stamped with my hanko) or from Amazon.
© 2026 Pierre Kory
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
September 27, 2026
Sunday Strip: The Face You Make
At death’s door.
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 27 | |
If you live in Virginia, be sure to vote now!
Virginia’s proposed constitutional abortion amendment goes far beyond preserving the state’s existing abortion law. That law already allows licensed physicians to perform abortions up to 26 weeks and 6 days of gestation. This new law would place a broad new “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” into the Virginia Constitution.
Although the amendment says the Commonwealth may regulate abortion in the third trimester, it also provides that abortion may not be prohibited when a physician determines it is medically indicated to protect the pregnant woman’s physical or mental health, without defining the limits of that mental-health exception.
Mental-health assessments may take into account a wide range of psychosocial circumstances, including financial hardship, housing instability, employment consequences, family and caregiving responsibilities, relationship problems, social support, chronic stress, access to healthcare, and an individual’s ability to cope and function. None of these examples should allow anyone to have a third trimester abortion.
A child is a child is a human. A child in the womb during the last third of a pregnancy is a human.
She laughs. She pees. She cries. She feels pain.
He laughs. He pees. He cries. He feels pain.
This is murder.
This new constitutional “right” also prohibits the Commonwealth from penalizing anyone (minors included) who aids or assists another person in exercising the constitutional right with that person’s consent. That means anyone who conducts an abortion in Virginia, not just health-care professionals, is exempt from prosecution by the state if something goes wrong.
BTW- this bill was funded by Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.
We are basically voting on legalizing evil in the state of Virginia.
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Below: A little video from our own farm – a couple of years ago…
Sweet memories of Gonzo and Gizmo:
With that, I now intend to get outside, do some much needed gardening, ride Jade and enjoy this cool fall day to the fullest!
By: JGM
Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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September 26, 2026
Zoomers Will Decide the 2028 Election, and Neither Political Party Is the Answer
Housing, Food, and the Decentralized Alternative
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 26 | |
Audio Version:
Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, and Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD
By 2028, millennials and Gen Z, otherwise known as Zoomers, together will make up more than half of American voters. Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, has changed its voting more sharply than any other age group over the last two years. In 2024, many young voters backed Donald Trump. Pollster Rich Baris finds that the president’s approval among voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine has since fallen by nearly thirty-three points. No other age group has moved as far (Baris 2026). By his tracking, the decline began as the administration shifted its attention from domestic concerns toward the Iranian war. In 2025, young New Yorkers helped elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-described “democratic socialist”, as mayor.
Trump and Mamdani would seem to have very little in common. Yet the young voters drawn to them may have been responding to the same underlying dissatisfaction: a political and economic order they no longer believe works for them. Their allegiance is not necessarily ideological, and it certainly is not settled. They appear willing to move across the political spectrum in search of something that breaks with the institutions, orthodoxies, and concentrations of power they have inherited.
There is, however, another tradition that neither party has seriously offered them. It is neither socialism nor the increasingly centralized marriage of government and corporate power. It has a long intellectual pedigree and a substantial history in practice. Its organizing principle is deceptively simple: economic and civic decision-making authority should reside as close as practicable to the people who must live with the consequences of decisions made.
Two Test Cases: Housing and Food
Housing is where the generational divide becomes difficult to ignore. The National Association of Realtors reports that first-time buyers made up just 21 percent of home purchases in its 2025 survey, the lowest share since tracking began in 1981. Repeat buyers had a median age of sixty-two, and nearly a third paid cash. The National Association of Realtors puts the median first-time buyer at forty years old. Mortgage lenders place it in the early thirties. Either way, a buyer in their twenties is competing against older buyers carrying decades of accumulated equity.
In food, the imbalance appears in the dwindling bargaining power of farmers and ranchers. Four companies account for about 85 percent of steer and heifer purchases in the United States. A young rancher raising cattle therefore faces a highly concentrated market with few potential buyers, while federal law constrains many of the alternatives. Yes, this is more regulatory capture by industry of the federal government, but that is a story for another essay.
Republicans and Democrats prescribe different remedies for both problems. Yet beneath those differences lies a common premise: authority should remain with institutions and officials rather than with the people who must live with the consequences of their decisions.
The Democratic Response: the City Becomes Landlord and Grocer
Mamdani is the Democratic Party’s most prominent answer to young voters. In June, his Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one to freeze rents on roughly one million NYC apartments. In July, he announced five city-owned grocery stores that will sell produce, meat, and pantry staples at a 30 percent discount.
Obviously, rent control doesn’t work. The most detailed recent study of rent control examined San Francisco’s 1994 expansion. Landlords covered by the new rules reduced their rental supply by fifteen percent, largely by converting buildings to condominiums and owner-occupied housing. The resulting contraction drove up rents elsewhere in the city. Existing tenants in regulated units benefited. Those who came later, many of them young, encountered a much smaller and much more expensive rental market. Rent control may work in the short term to corner votes, but in the long run, it is a failure.
The grocery plan presents another problem: other businesses and taxpayers must absorb the cost of that 30 percent discount. In August, a coalition of small, minority-owned supermarkets and bodegas sued the city to stop the plan. Their objection is straightforward. City stores will pay neither rent nor utilities, while the family-run shop down the block pays both, as well as taxes. Kansas City opened a taxpayer-funded supermarket and closed it in early 2025, while Chicago abandoned a similar proposal as impractical. The Soviet Union’s government-run food system became notorious for chronic shortages, limited selection, and long lines for basic goods.
Both of Mamdani’s policies operate at the local level, giving them the appearance of community control. But local government is not the same thing as local autonomy. In both instances, municipal authorities assume greater control over decisions ordinarily made by tenants, property owners, shoppers, and grocers. The scale may be municipal, but the governing instinct is familiar: replace individual choices with government ones, the defining logic of a command economy. The final result will predictably be disaster.
The Republican Response: Rules That Favor Incumbents
Republicans describe themselves as the party of free markets. Yet in heavily regulated industries, which is to say pretty much all major economic activity, the existing rules often work to the advantage of the largest firms.
Beef offers a particularly clear example. Under federal meat inspection law, a farmer can have an animal butchered at a small custom shop, but meat processed under the custom exemption cannot be sold commercially. The PRIME Act would allow states to permit certain intrastate sales from custom slaughter facilities. Members of both parties have introduced versions of it repeatedly since 2015, but Congress has never enacted it.
In August, President Trump called the concentrated processing industry a “nasty monopoly” and promised to give farmers and ranchers greater freedom to process their own food. On September 4, he followed with an executive order directing USDA to reduce unnecessary processing barriers and expand market access for smaller producers. But an executive order cannot rewrite the Federal Meat Inspection Act, leaving the fundamental statutory restriction in Congress’s hands. So, in effect, the executive order is all words, no action. Good for a midterm election quote, but not much more.
There is a broader problem here with Trump’s reliance on executive orders, in both his first and second administrations. An executive order can create the appearance of decisive action while leaving the underlying law untouched. Trump employed this device repeatedly during his first term, sometimes directing agencies to study, review, or reconsider a problem without changing the statute that created it. He has relied even more heavily on executive action in his second term. The political advantage is obvious: the president can announce that he has acted, supporters can point to a signed order, and the constituency demanding change receives something tangible. But when the obstacle is embedded in federal law, Trump’s executive orders are meaningless. Congress still has to change the law. And executive orders are readily rescinded when administrations change.
This exposes an uncomfortable contradiction in Republican free-market rhetoric. Regulations that impose costs on large corporations are frequent targets for repeal. Regulations that insulate those same corporations from smaller competitors usually prove remarkably durable. Economists have various names for this entanglement of private economic power and government protection, including crony capitalism and corporatism. Whatever the terminology, the result is the same: established firms acquire advantages through public policy that they would have to fight much harder to preserve in an open market.
The Old Problem of a Government-Created Monopoly
The founders knew the dangers of government-conferred economic privilege because they had lived under it. Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773 gave the British East India Company a favored position in the colonial tea trade. That December, colonists were so pissed off about this unfair advantage that they dumped the company’s tea into Boston Harbor. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, delegates rejected a proposal to give Congress the power to grant corporate charters, with monopoly power among the concerns raised in the debate.
Modern versions of this arrangement can be found in industries that bear directly on the lives of young Americans. In food, the beef concentration and inspection rules described above protect an already consolidated market – favoring foreign companies. In health care, thirty-five states and the District of Columbia require hospitals or clinics to obtain state permission, known as a certificate of need, before opening or expanding certain facilities or services. Existing providers can often challenge a prospective competitor’s application – another huge barrier to entry.
Technology presents a newer version of the same problem. OpenAI has endorsed the FRONTIER Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in July that would establish the first federal regulatory framework for frontier AI models. The largest technology companies can absorb the lawyers, compliance departments, reporting requirements, and other costs that come with an elaborate regulatory regime. A small developer cannot.
That distinction matters because open-weight models have dramatically lowered the cost of entering the AI field. A young programmer can download a model, modify it, build a product around it, and potentially compete without first obtaining permission from one of the dominant companies. Rules intended to govern the largest AI companies can therefore have a very different effect on the smallest: they can determine whether the next generation of competitors ever gets through the door.
What the Two Political Parties Share
The parties disagree bitterly on many issues, but they have remarkably similar instincts when the rules protect their own hold on power.
The Cook Political Report rates 366 of 435 House seats as solid, meaning neither party expects them to be competitive. In roughly five districts out of six, the people who drew the map settled the general election in advance. Each party condemns the other’s gerrymanders, and neither has passed a law ending the practice. Between them, the two parties divide up congressional representation the way a cartel divides a market.
Washington anticipated the danger. In his Farewell Address, he warned that the “spirit of party” could become a vehicle through which ambitious men subvert the power of the people. The Constitution he helped create does not mention political parties at all.
Nor are today’s two dominant parties ancient fixtures of the Republic. The Democratic Party emerged around Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828; the Republican Party was founded in 1854, nearly seven decades after the Constitutional Convention. Yet today, the two parties exercise a degree of control over Congress that the Constitution neither created nor contemplated.
A Third Approach: Who Gets to Decide?
In 1945, foundational Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek published “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The Austrian School begins from a proposition that seems obvious but has profound political consequences: no central authority can possess the dispersed knowledge held by millions of individuals making decisions every day. A farmer knows which field floods. A shopkeeper knows what stopped selling last week. A contractor knows which material has suddenly become scarce. Prices transmit fragments of that knowledge without requiring anyone to understand the whole system. The central planner, by contrast, works from information that arrives late, condensed into reports and filtered through layers of bureaucracy. Dispersed knowledge is one of the foundations of a free market. Centrally planned economies, no matter what pretty terms are used to put lipstick on them, are the opposite.
Another intellectual tradition reaches much the same conclusion from a different direction. Subsidiarity holds that decisions should remain with individuals, families, communities and local institutions unless there is a compelling reason to move them upward. Pope Pius XI gave the principle its modern formulation in 1931: a larger authority should not assume functions that a smaller association can adequately perform for itself. Higher authority has a legitimate role when the smaller institution cannot do the job, but its purpose is to assist rather than replace it.
Together, these traditions establish a useful presumption: economic and political power should remain close to the people unless there is a demonstrable reason to move it farther away. When authority does move upward, the institution exercising that power should also bear responsibility for its cost. Otherwise government acquires the power to make decisions while sending someone else the bill. Sound familiar?
Applied to housing, this principle points first toward zoning. Local boards routinely restrict what property owners may build, often at the insistence of existing homeowners who benefit from limiting new construction. The people who bear much of the cost are prospective residents who cannot vote in that jurisdiction because they do not yet live there. Returning more of the building decision to the owner of the property addresses the restriction at its source rather than attempting to repair the resulting shortage with rent controls.
Food provides an even cleaner example. Wyoming’s Food Freedom Act of 2015 allows producers to sell most homemade foods directly to informed consumers without a state license (Wyoming Legislature 2015). The law does not create a government program to help small producers compete. It removes government from transactions in which adults are capable of deciding for themselves what they want to produce, sell, and eat. That is subsidiarity in its simplest form: when people can make the decision themselves, government has no reason to make it for them.
The same contest over authority is now playing out in technology and surveillance. In an Annenberg survey fielded this summer, 70 percent of adults under thirty opposed a new data center in their area, the highest opposition of any age group. In a YouGov survey of more than twenty thousand adults in August, more Americans opposed automated license plate readers in their communities than supported them.
For now, some of those decisions are still being made close to the people who live with them. Local opposition has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in data center projects, largely through county and municipal land-use decisions. Town and city councils from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, have ended contracts with Flock Safety, a leading vendor of automated license plate cameras. The people who live beside the server farm or drive beneath the camera still have some power to say no.
That authority is already being contested. In 2025, West Virginia, with the backing of its Republican governor, barred counties and municipalities from regulating data centers. The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to accelerate data center construction and instructed the Commerce Department to challenge state AI laws it considers unlawful. The bipartisan FRONTIER Act would establish AI rules at the national level. Together with colleagues and collaborators, Jill and I articulated a different principle in the Declaration of the Rights of Persons, published July 4 of this year: technologies may change, but the presumption of human agency should not.
None of this is foreign to the American constitutional tradition. Madison wrote in Federalist 45 that the powers delegated to the federal government would be “few and defined,” while those retained by the states would be “numerous and indefinite.” American federalism thus supplies the constitutional counterpart to the economic argument made by Hayek and the social principle of subsidiarity. They arose from different traditions and addressed different problems, but each placed limits on the concentration of authority. The farther power moves from the people who must live with its consequences, the greater the justification for moving it should have to be.
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Where Gen Z Is Heading
Several surveys suggest that parts of this generation are moving toward self-reliance and traditional institutions. Gallup finds that 42 percent of men aged eighteen to twenty-nine now call religion very important in their lives, up from 28 percent in 2022 and 2023 (Gallup 2026). Nearly half of the four thousand respondents to a 2023 Homesteaders of America survey were under thirty-nine (Homesteaders of America 2023). Jill and I wrote Homesteading for Health for readers building that kind of household.
But this movement is not uniform, and the division between young men and women is particularly striking. Among women aged eighteen to twenty-nine, 29 percent call religion very important, a record low (Gallup 2026). Twelfth-grade girls are also less likely than boys to say they expect to marry, 61 percent compared with 74 percent (Pew Research Center 2025).
Those differences matter, but they should not obscure the more consequential political question. Young men and women do not have to want the same lives in order to insist upon the same promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The young man who wants land, a family, and greater independence and the young woman who wants a career, a family, or some combination of the two share the same fundamental interest: the freedom to construct those lives themselves, rather than having their choices progressively narrowed by (often predatory) institutions they neither chose nor control.
That may also explain something that otherwise looks contradictory about this generation. In Rich Baris article in Real Clear Politics, he argues that the young voters who moved toward Trump in 2024 were not becoming conventional conservatives. They wanted to overturn a political and economic order they believe has failed them, an impulse he summarizes as “Burn It Down.”
Now some of those same voters are moving toward democratic socialism. The direction has changed, but the appetite for disruption has not. They are looking for a way out of a system they believe has made homes unaffordable, concentrated economic power, diminished their independence, and left institutions increasingly remote from the people they govern. The danger is that they may mistake transferring still more power to government for dismantling the system that failed them. If the grievance is loss of control over their own lives, replacing corporate and bureaucratic power with even greater state power does not solve the problem. It only changes who holds the power.
Kennedy, MAHA, and Gen Z
Baris’s numbers measure what has happened between young voters and Trump. Polling on Kennedy and MAHA is thinner, but what exists is revealing. In an April 2025 YouGov poll, 39 percent of voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine viewed Kennedy favorably, while only 22 percent viewed him very unfavorably, half the rate among voters sixty-five and older (YouGov 2025). An NBC News survey of more than nineteen thousand adults found younger adults more likely than older Americans to blame the food industry, rather than individual choices, for poor health. Their attitudes toward vaccines are less clear. Younger Americans have not broadly rejected vaccination, but polling has not been done to establish whether they do or don’t support mRNA vaccines specifically.
That distinction matters. Young voters do not have to agree with every MAHA position to be drawn to its challenge to the status quo. Concerns about food quality, chronic disease, corporate concentration, environmental exposures, medical autonomy, and the influence of industry over government all speak to the same dissatisfaction Baris found among young Trump voters. They believe powerful institutions are making decisions that affect their lives without adequately representing their interests. The appeal of MAHA, like the appeal of MAGA in 2024, may therefore be less about ideology than about the promise to challenge those institutions and return some measure of control to the individual.
We know that Trump’s downward spiral with young voters came because of the Iranian war, which also led to an inflationary trend. That creates a problem for Kennedy as well as Trump. In February, Kennedy defended the president’s executive order supporting glyphosate, provoking open opposition from within the MAHA coalition. Federal vaccine policy, including decisions involving mRNA vaccines, has meanwhile stalled, shifted and at times contradicted itself. Often it is based on proposals and executive orders, rather than real change. Once again, lipstick, and Gen Z, having been raised on unfulfilled promises, has developed a sophisticated sensitivity to such ploys. Whether these issues have changed Kennedy’s standing among young voters has not yet been measured.
But Baris’s findings suggest a warning that extends beyond Trump: a generation willing to abandon one political home in search of disruption is unlikely to grant permanent loyalty to another. If MAHA Corp and MAHA.gov keep reaching accommodation after accommodation with the institutions they were supposedly created to challenge, young voters may simply keep looking.
What Comes After “Burn It Down”?
Gen Z has already demonstrated that its political allegiance is conditional. Many young voters backed Trump not because they had become conventional Republicans, but because they wanted to disrupt institutions that had failed them. Some are now looking toward democratic socialism for much the same reason. The ideology has flip-flopped. The impulse to burn it all down has not.
That impulse should not be dismissed. A generation priced out of housing, entering markets dominated by enormous corporations, living under expanding surveillance, and watching decisions about war, technology, food, health, and money migrate toward institutions increasingly beyond its control has reasons to demand fundamental change. The mistake may lie not in wanting to tear down an arrangement that no longer serves them, but in believing that concentrating still more power in government will accomplish it.
The alternative to both Socialism and Corporatism is hardly new. The Austrian School of economics made the intellectual case for the free market: economic decisions dispersed among millions of people, coordinated through prices and voluntary exchange rather than dictated by central planners. The older tradition upon which the American experiment was founded, of individual liberty and limited government, placed private property, freedom of association, and voluntary exchange ahead of government control. Subsidiarity added the principle that political and social authority should remain at the lowest level capable of exercising it. American federalism supplied the constitutional architecture: divide power, restrain the center, and leave most decisions to the states and the people.
Applied today, those principles are surprisingly radical. A free market does not mean protecting the corporations that already dominate it. It means ending government privileges that insulate entrenched firms from competition and removing barriers that prevent smaller competitors from entering the market. Let people build homes on their own property, buy food from farmers and bakers they trust, start businesses without navigating rules written for huge corporations with woke HR and legal compliance departments, and decide whether they want surveillance cameras and data centers in their communities. When government intervention is genuinely necessary, require the larger authority to justify taking power upward rather than requiring citizens to justify keeping it.
This is neither the command economy offered by the new socialist left nor the corporatism too often tolerated and even promoted privately by the establishment right.
A free market is not a system in which government chooses which corporations succeed. It is a system in which government stops choosing. It does not require another bureaucracy to redesign society from above. Its premise is almost the reverse: return economic and political power to the people who possess the knowledge, bear the risks, pay the costs, and live with the consequences.
Perhaps that is what the politics of “burn it down” has been missing. Destruction is an impulse, not a governing philosophy. The question for 2028 is not simply where Gen Z moves next, or which party manages to capture its anger. It is whether anyone will offer this generation something more durable than another hollow promise to tear down the existing order. What Gen Z actually needs is the freedom and economic power to build lives of their own choosing.
MALONE.NEWS answers to its readers, which is subsidiarity applied to publishing. This essay opens a series on housing, food, and the choice Gen Z faces in 2028. To receive each installment and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
References
Annenberg Public Policy Center. 2026. “Opposition to Local Data Centers Rises Sharply, Annenberg Survey Finds.” Survey fielded June 16 to July 19.
Baris, Rich. 2026. “Young Voters Did Not Elect Trump for This.” RealClearPolitics, September 23.
CNBC. 2026. “Kennedy Defends Trump Glyphosate Order; MAHA Erupts as Midterms Approach.” February 19.
CNN. 2026. “New York City Minority Business Owners Sue Mamdani in Bid to Stop City-Run Grocery Store Plan.” August 24.
Cook Political Report. 2026. “2026 House Race Ratings.” Last updated August 25.
Data Center Watch. 2026. “$64 Billion of Data Center Projects Have Been Blocked or Delayed amid Local Opposition.”
Diamond, Rebecca, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian. 2019. “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco.” American Economic Review 109 (9): 3365-94.
Fortune. 2026. “Basic Economics Show Why Mamdani’s Socialist Grocery Stores in NYC Are Destined to Fail.” August 2.
Gallup. 2026. “Rise in Young Men’s Religiosity Realigns Gender Gaps.” April 23.
Governing. 2023. “How Much Could Younger Voters Affect Future Election Outcomes?” April 10.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519-30.
HFMA (Healthcare Financial Management Association). 2026. “States Overhaul Certificate-of-Need Laws.”
Homesteaders of America. 2023. “2023 Homesteader Survey.” Front Royal, VA: Homesteaders of America.
Houston Chronicle. 2026. “Texas Cities Ending Flock Safety Camera Contracts: See the Map.”
Madison, James. 1787. Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, September 14.
Madison, James. 1788. “The Federalist No. 45.” Independent Journal, January 26.
MultiState. 2026a. “State Data Center Legislation Faces Local Zoning Battles.” January 15.
MultiState. 2026b. “State Data Center Laws vs. Federal AI Push: 2026 Tracker.” April 14.
NBC News. 2025. “Poll: RFK Jr.’s Food Agenda Finds Appeal across Partisan Lines, but Vaccines Are a Different Story.” NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, fielded May 30 to June 10.
National Association of Realtors. 2025. 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. Washington, DC: NAR, November 4.
NYC Office of the Mayor. 2026. “Mayor Mamdani Unveils 30% Discount at New Municipal Grocery Stores.” July 27.
Pew Research Center. 2025. “12th Grade Girls Are Less Likely than Boys to Say They Want to Get Married Someday.” November 14.
Pius XI. 1931. Quadragesimo Anno. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Spirit of 1776. 2026. “The Declaration of the Rights of Persons.” July 4. https://thespiritof1776.net/the-declaration/.
Time. 2026. “Mamdani’s Promised Rent Freeze Approved in New York: What to Know.” June 26.
USDA Economic Research Service. n.d. “Sector at a Glance: Cattle and Beef.” Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture.
USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. n.d. “Cooperative Interstate Shipment Program.” Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture.
Washington, George. 1796. “Farewell Address.” September 19.
Washington Examiner. 2026. “OpenAI Throws Its Weight behind FRONTIER Act AI Regulation Bill.”
Washington Post. 2026. “Trump’s Pro-Glyphosate Order Draws MAHA Backlash, Exposes Pesticide Tension.” February 19.
WCAX. 2026. “CDC Vaccine Policy Recommendations Grind to a Halt under Health Secretary Kennedy.” September 25.
WSET. 2026. “Lynchburg Ends Flock Contract, but Camera Debate Isn’t Over.” September.
Wyoming Legislature. 2015. Wyoming Food Freedom Act. Wyo. Stat. § 11-49-101 et seq.
YouGov. 2025. YouGov poll, April 25 to 28. 1,597 US registered voters.
YouGov. 2026. Daily Question: Automated License Plate Readers, August 24. 20,563 US adults.
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September 25, 2026
Criminal mRNA Malfeasance by the CDC
And I am mad as hell about it
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 25 | |
Audio Version:
Something deeply corrupt has happened inside the CDC
The agency has just issued its COVID-19 vaccination guidance for the 2026–2027 season. Buried inside that guidance is an extraordinary admission. CDC recommends COVID vaccination through “shared clinical decision-making” for healthy children beginning at six months of age, while simultaneously acknowledging that vaccination of people six months through 64 years without a qualifying high-risk condition is off-label.
Read that again. And remember:
- FDA has not approved these vaccines for healthy babies.
- The ACIP did not approve these vaccines for healthy babies.
For Moderna’s Spikevax, FDA and the ACIP limited approval to below age 65 is restricted to people with at least one underlying condition placing them at high risk for severe COVID-19. Yet CDC has placed healthy children, beginning at six months, within its COVID vaccine recommendation through something called “shared clinical decision-making.” CDC itself now acknowledges that this recommendation extends beyond the FDA-approved indication.
I have a particular interest in how this happened.
I was vice-chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices when the relevant vote was taken in September 2025. I was sitting at the table. I participated in the discussion. And the proposition now being implemented by CDC is not what we were voting for.
What FDA Had Already Decided
Two months before the ACIP meeting, FDA had examined Moderna’s application to expand approval of Spikevax in children.
FDA’s July 9, 2025 decisional memorandum is remarkably direct. FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research asked whether there was sufficient certainty of net clinical benefit from vaccinating healthy children with this mRNA vaccine.
Its answer was no.
FDA noted that severe COVID disease, hospitalization and death had become extremely uncommon in children, particularly healthy children. It also noted that Moderna had never demonstrated in a randomized pediatric trial that vaccination reduced severe COVID-19, hospitalization, intensive-care admission or death. FDA therefore approved the vaccine for children with risk factors, but not healthy children.
The memorandum states the conclusion plainly:
“For healthy children that standard is not met.”
The standard being discussed was FDA’s requirement for sufficient certainty that the benefits of vaccination outweigh its risks. FDA said randomized trials measuring clinical outcomes and safety would be needed to change that conclusion.
That was the regulatory landscape when ACIP met in September.
What ACIP Was Told
This is where the current CDC recommendation can not be reconciled with the meeting at which I served as vice-chair.
The COVID-19 workgroup presented its guiding principles to the committee. The first was:
“Access within the FDA authorized population.”
The next was that benefits, risks, and uncertainties must be communicated as part of proper informed consent.
Only then did the workgroup describe its debate between individual-based decisions and group recommendations. That ordering of the discussion and vote matters.
The universe being discussed was not every American six months of age and older regardless of FDA indication. The workgroup expressly defined the boundary as the FDA-authorized population.
Then came Vote #4.
The motion concerned updating the pediatric and adult immunization schedules for administration of “FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines.” For people six months through 64 years, ACIP adopted “individual-based decision-making,” with an explicit warning that the risk-benefit balance was most favorable for those at increased risk of severe COVID and lowest for those who were not.
That was the framework we were voting on: individual medical decision-making within the population for whom FDA had approved the vaccine. This is clear in the ACIP transcript record that I have reviewed extensively this morning.
WE, the ACIP, did not vote to recommend off-label COVID vaccination for healthy six-month-old babies.
Individual Decision-Making Becomes Something Else
Then the administrative machinery took over.
On October 6, 2025, CDC announced that Acting CDC Director and HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill had approved ACIP’s recommendations.
His own statement recognized the FDA limitation. CDC Director O’Neill said FDA had granted marketing authorization to people with one or more qualifying risk factors and to people 65 and older.
Then came an extraordinarily consequential sentence.
CDC announced that “individual-based decision-making” would appear on its immunization schedules as “shared clinical decision-making.”
That sounds like bureaucratic wordplay. It isn’t.
Shared clinical decision-making is an existing CDC category of vaccine recommendation. Keeping COVID vaccination inside that category preserved access through Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, the Vaccines for Children Program and ACA-regulated insurance. CDC expressly said so in the same announcement.
Thus an ACIP vote framed around individual decision-making within the FDA-authorized population became an official CDC recommendation with significant programmatic and reimbursement consequences.
And then the language broadened further.
By November 4, 2025, the CDC was telling healthcare professionals that the 2025–2026 COVID vaccine was “recommended for people ages 6 months and older based on individual-based decision-making.”
Frankly, I do not think any of us on ACIP understood at the time that CDC would mis-interpret our vote this way. It took going back through the transcripts, video, slides and subsequent CDC guidance, aided by AI analysis, to reconstruct exactly how the language changed and what the bureaucracy ultimately did with our vote.
Why didn’t we catch it at the time? Perhaps we were naive. We assumed that when the workgroup told us the recommendation applied “within the FDA authorized population,” that was what it meant. We did not expect CDC officials to subsequently interpret our vote as authorization for an off-label recommendation that we had never knowingly made.
That limiting principle presented to ACIP and which they voted on was: “Access within the FDA-authorized population.” The CDC ignored the very vote by the ACIP and even the director’s recommendations. They made up the wording themselves.
Now CDC Admits It Is Off-Label
Fast-forward to September 2026.
CDC’s new guidance finally makes explicit what the agency’s implementation means.
Spikevax is FDA-approved for people 65 and older and for people six months through 64 years with at least one underlying condition putting them at high risk for severe COVID-19.
And then CDC states:
“Recommendations for an age-appropriate COVID-19 vaccination in persons ages 6 months–64 years without at least one underlying high-risk condition are based on off-label use.”
There it is.
CDC is now expressly recommending, through shared clinical decision-making, an off-label use in the very population FDA declined to approve.
For children, CDC says a 2026–2027 COVID vaccine is recommended for moderately or severely immunocompromised children six months through 17 years. For all other children, CDC recommends vaccination through shared clinical decision-making between parents and healthcare professionals.
That includes healthy babies.
This Is Bigger Than CDC
It would be easy to treat this as another CDC controversy. I think that misses the larger problem. This is how the administrative state operates.
Congress creates agencies. Political appointees come and go. Advisory committees meet publicly, debate evidence and cast recorded votes. But underneath those visible structures sits a permanent administrative apparatus that writes guidance, interprets recommendations, maintains schedules, defines terminology, determines implementation and converts broad policy decisions into the rules healthcare systems actually follow.
That bureaucracy has enormous practical power.
In this case, FDA had examined the evidence and declined to approve an mRNA COVID vaccine for healthy children. ACIP then met under an explicitly stated principle of access within the FDA-authorized population.
Yet the system eventually produced a CDC recommendation encompassing vaccination of healthy children outside that FDA indication.
- No new FDA approval for healthy babies was required.
- No new randomized trial demonstrating clinical benefit in healthy babies was required.
- And there was no ACIP vote explicitly recommending off-label vaccination of healthy babies. And no CDC director approved this either.
Instead, the result emerged through administrative interpretation.
That should concern people regardless of what they think about COVID vaccines.
Follow the Institutional Incentives
There is another part of this story that cannot be ignored: money. A CDC vaccine recommendation is not merely medical advice. It drives clinical practice, insurance reimbursement, federal purchasing and access through Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and the Vaccines for Children Program. CDC itself emphasized that its October 2025 decision preserved coverage through these programs. Keeping healthy children inside the COVID vaccine recommendation therefore had substantial commercial consequences for the mRNA vaccine manufacturers.
That does not prove that Moderna or Pfizer directed CDC’s reinterpretation of the ACIP vote. But it makes the paper trail essential. Who inside CDC decided that a vote explicitly framed around “Access within the FDA authorized population” could become an off-label recommendation for healthy children?
- Did FDA agree?
- Did CDC lawyers review it?
And were CDC officials communicating with Moderna, Pfizer, their lobbyists, trade associations, consultants or organizations financially connected to the manufacturers about pediatric access, insurance coverage or preserving the recommendation?
Those are not conspiracy theories. They are basic questions of regulatory accountability. The emails, draft guidance, redlines, legal reviews, and meeting records exist. Produce them. If career officials transformed a public ACIP vote into something the committee did not vote for, while preserving a commercially valuable market for the manufacturers, the public deserves to know who made that decision and who was sitting on the other side of the table.
For the record, nearly one in ten American children, approximately 7 million children ages six months through 17 years, were estimated by CDC to be up to date with the 2025–2026 COVID vaccine by May 2026. How many of these children were vaccine injured? God only knows.
The Administrative State Has a Paper Trail
People sometimes imagine the administrative state as a conspiracy conducted in secret rooms.
Usually it is much more mundane than that.
It operates through definitions, guidance documents, footnotes, implementation memoranda, interagency clearance, staff recommendations, and interpretations written after the public meeting has ended.
That is precisely why these details matter.
ACIP meetings are supposed to provide public accountability for federal vaccine recommendations. Experts present evidence in public. Committee members question them in public. The committee deliberates in public. Members cast recorded votes in public.
If career officials can subsequently interpret those votes beyond the boundaries under which they were presented, the public proceeding becomes substantially less meaningful.
And in this instance the boundary could hardly have been clearer.
“Access within the FDA authorized population.”
That was on the slide.
FDA had already determined that its benefit-risk standard was not met for healthy children.
I was sitting at the ACIP table when we voted.
We did not vote to recommend off-label mRNA COVID vaccination for healthy babies.
The CDC has a great deal to answer for here. Frankly, if there were an organization genuinely committed to defending children, and if that organization had the courage to take on the federal public-health bureaucracy, another lawsuit against the CDC would already be underway. Sadly, that does not appear to be happening.
Please share this article far and wide. It is the only way we can get people to know what is going on within the “hallowed halls” of HHS.
The Cult of Bobby
And where is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while this is happening? He is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. CDC answers to his department. Yet under his watch, CDC is recommending off-label COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children as young as six months, even though FDA has not approved these vaccines for that population and the ACIP on which I served as vice-chair did not recommend vaccination outside the FDA-approved indication. CDC’s new guidance now acknowledges that vaccination of healthy children in these age groups is off-label.
Kennedy once promised sweeping scrutiny of the COVID vaccines. The mRNA COVID vaccines remain licensed. CDC continues recommending them in circumstances extending beyond their FDA-approved indications. And the federal reimbursement machinery continues supporting their use. Yet much of the medical freedom movement that spent years demanding accountability from HHS, CDC and FDA now seems remarkably reluctant to apply that same standard when Kennedy is the man running HHS.
I recently spoke with Dr. Mary Tally Bowden. She told me she has been communicating with Del Bigtree, and my clear impression from that conversation was that the organizations and people surrounding Kennedy want to move on from the mRNA vaccine fight and concentrate their efforts on autism. Autism deserves serious investigation. But autism cannot become a political permission slip to ignore what is happening with mRNA vaccines right now. One issue does not erase the other.
If that is indeed where Children’s Health Defense and ICAN now stand, then perhaps CHD and ICAN have run their course as an effective force on the mRNA vaccine issue. And if the same position extends to Del Bigtree and The HighWire, the same question must be asked there. Organizations that built their audiences, reputations and influence by demanding transparency and accountability from the federal public-health establishment cannot suddenly decide those principles are negotiable because their friends are now running the establishment.
That is the Kennedy exception in its purest form. The organizations that insisted no public-health official should be above scrutiny are increasingly unwilling to scrutinize this one. Kennedy runs HHS. CDC operates within his department. At some point, responsibility for what that department permits, recommends, and funds belongs with the Secretary himself.
The force of the cult of Bobby is strong.
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“All of a sudden I was better.”
An 82-yeaer old patient was in today for a follow up visit after waking up with a stiff neck last week. He only comes in when he has symptoms; and only followed up because after complete symptom relief after that first adjustment, his neck was a little stiff again yesterday, and he did not want it to relapse all the way.
Knowing he has been a patient all of the 40 years that I have been here, I asked him when he got his first adjustment. He could not remember but knew it was before age 19. He said that he knew about the chiropractor, but it was his, now also 82-year old, wife who suggested he go to the chiropractor (she was also a patient then, and is now…). So he went.
That is not the best part of the story. He said that he was suffering with Colitis at the time, had tried whatever was offered by the medical profession, and was not doing well at all. He got adjusted, and…”all of a sudden I was better.”
It was just a week ago that Chiropractic celebrated its 131st Anniversary and I got to tell the Harvey Lillard story again (I repeat it often, but always on the anniversary:-). A guy with hearing loss regained his hearing after getting adjusted, and a profession was born.
I love my job!
DrD
Friday Funnies: Ballroom Dance
And other true stories.
29 MINUTES AGO
Take the time to read the cartoon below – it is the best of the lot today, IMO.
Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share or crosspost it!
I love this video – and yet, no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t remember any of these great knots when it actually comes to putting them into use…
Yeah, this would be me (Jill). A long time ago, I discovered that long dresses make the very best house dresses. So on most days, I traipse around the farm in some sort of floor-length dress originally designed for a cocktail party, dinner, or other civilized occasion.
Apparently, somewhere along the way, I decided that formalwear was perfectly appropriate for feeding horses, checking the garden, chasing dogs, and doing laundry.
Why save the good dresses for going out?
(RWM- notice she forgot to mention the long AR? At some future time I may post some of the photos of her firing off her 20g Beretta semiautomatic…. Or the new Walther .38 easy slide “purse gun” I just got her. She does like blue, by the way.)
Have a great day folks!
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September 24, 2026
The First Amendment Was Forged in Virginia
The continuing fight over who gets to decide which freedoms government will allow
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 24 | |
By: Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, and Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD
Last week’s essay followed Virginia’s fight over religious liberty from jailed Baptist preachers and compulsory church taxes to the Madison-Monroe debate at Hebron in January 1789. This is part II and the final essay on the history of religious liberties in America.
Part I can be read here:
| The Night James Madison Froze for Your Religious Freedom |
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE·SEP 20 |
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The Cornerstone
On October 6, 1817, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe walked together across a worn-out field west of Charlottesville. Jefferson was seventy-four. Madison was sixty-six. Monroe was the sitting President of the United States.
They had come to lay the cornerstone of what would become the University of Virginia. The land had once been part of Monroe’s farm. Monticello was only a few miles away. Montpelier was about a day’s ride to the northeast. Three presidents, neighbors in the Virginia Piedmont, stood together that morning at the beginning of Jefferson’s last great project.
Twenty-eight years earlier, Madison and Monroe had been opponents.
In January 1789, almost thirty years ago from this day, they had met at Hebron Lutheran Church during a bitterly cold congressional campaign. Patrick Henry and his allies had drawn the district map to favor Monroe. Baptists and other religious dissenters were an important constituency, and Madison had taken the unusual step of campaigning in person to answer charges that he opposed adding protections for individual rights to the new Constitution.
The last essay ended there, with Madison and Monroe debating at Hebron and Madison winning the election by 336 votes.
Five months later, on June 8, 1789, Madison stood in the House of Representatives and proposed the amendments that became the Bill of Rights.
The jailed preachers, the petitions from Virginia’s dissenting churches, the fight over compulsory religious taxes, and Madison’s insistence that religious belief was a right rather than something government could merely tolerate had brought Virginia to this point. Now Madison had to write those protections into federal law.
The Dissenters Had the Votes
Madison knew exactly which voters he needed to convince to get those protections written into the Bill of Rights.
The congressional district created by Patrick Henry’s allies joined Orange County to Albemarle, Amherst, Culpeper, Fluvanna, Goochland, Louisa, and Spotsylvania. Five of those seven counties had voted against ratification of the Constitution. Madison had helped write that Constitution, and during the Virginia ratifying convention he had resisted demands that a declaration of rights be added before it took effect. His opponents now used that against him.
Religious dissenters were particularly important. The Baptists had spent years petitioning the Virginia legislature against religious taxes and the privileges of the established church. They had supported Madison during the fight over Patrick Henry’s proposed religious assessment, but they were not prepared simply to trust him now. They wanted protections for religious liberty written into the new federal Constitution.
Culpeper mattered most. At the time, Culpeper County included what is now Madison County, including the Robinson River and Hebron valleys. Charles F. James counted six and a half Baptist churches there in 1789, more than in any other county in the congressional district. Madison later called Culpeper “the critical county.”
For us, this is local history. Madison was not coming into unfamiliar territory to court strangers. He had grown up just across the county line at Montpelier in Orange County. The Robinson River valley was only a short ride from his own home. These were neighboring counties, connected by roads, churches, farms, families, and decades of arguments over religion and government. This was Madison’s home turf.
In July 2025, we stood in Madison’s home at Montpelier, looking at the desk where he did much of the work that became the Virginia Plan. Written largely by Madison and presented at the Constitutional Convention by Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph, the Virginia Plan became the working blueprint for much of the US Constitution that followed. The National Archives agrees with this assessment and says that Madison’s Constitution proposed a strong national government with legislative, executive, and judicial branches and “traced the broad outlines of what would become the U.S. Constitution. So, we have always felt that Madison has never gotten the credit he deserves as really the father of the American Constitution.
To this day, Madison’s desk still sits in Montpelier, and from Madison’s desk at Montpelier, his family’s homeplace, the Blue Ridge Mountains fill the western horizon. This was where he lived, read, studied governments that had come before, and worked through his ideas about what the new American republic should become.
And yet he could not take these voters for granted.
In January 1789, Madison wrote George Washington that he had taken the unusual step of campaigning personally in Culpeper and Louisa. He was trying to answer reports that he opposed amendments to the Constitution. At Hebron Lutheran Church, he met Monroe before a congregation whose own history was bound up with the same fight. The German Lutherans of the Robinson River valley had petitioned the Virginia legislature against compulsory religious support years before.
Madison won Culpeper. He won the election by 336 votes.
Those votes mattered for far more than deciding whether Madison or Monroe would represent the district in Congress. The people Madison had spoken to that winter had spent decades petitioning the Virginia legislature over religious taxes, the privileges of the established church and how that wronged other religions, and the right to worship without government interference. They had supported the new nation, but many remained deeply suspicious of a federal Constitution that contained no declaration of individual rights and no explicit protection for religious liberty. Madison had now assured them that he supported amendments to address those concerns.
When Madison left Virginia for New York in the spring of 1789, he was going to the temporary seat of the new federal government, where the First Congress of the United States had convened at Federal Hall. He arrived not simply as one of Virginia’s new representatives, but as a principal author and defender of the Constitution who had just won a difficult election in a district where demands for amendments had helped determine the outcome.
The religious dissenters of Virginia had spent years pressing their state government to recognize that freedom of conscience was a right the government could neither grant nor take away. Now Madison was in Congress, and the Constitution they had challenged for failing to protect that right could still be amended.
On June 8, 1789, Madison introduced a series of amendments in the House of Representatives that would become the Bill of Rights.
From Virginia to the First Congress
Madison had not originally believed that the Constitution needed a bill of rights. When George Mason proposed adding one during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the delegates rejected the idea. Madison believed the federal government had only the powers specifically given to it by the Constitution and questioned how much additional protection a written list of rights would provide.
But that position became increasingly difficult to defend back home. Virginia had spent years fighting over religious liberty, and many Virginians were not willing to trust the new federal government without explicit protections. The state had ratified the Constitution by a narrow vote and recommended amendments. Jefferson, writing from France, also pressed Madison about the missing bill of rights. Then Madison heard the same concerns directly from voters during his congressional campaign.
By the time Madison arrived in New York for the First Congress, he had promised to support amendments.
On June 8, 1789, he did.
Madison addressed the House of Representatives and proposed a series of amendments protecting individual rights. His original language on religion was broader than the First Amendment we know today. It protected religious belief and worship, prohibited a national religion, and declared that the “full and equal rights of conscience” could not be infringed.
Those words had a history for Madison. Virginia had spent more than a decade arguing over exactly what government could and could not do to a person’s religious conscience. Madison had been part of that fight almost from the beginning.
Now the question was what language Congress would actually put into the Constitution.
The First Amendment
Madison’s proposal was not the language that ultimately became the First Amendment. The House debated it, committees revised it, the Senate changed it again, and the final wording emerged from negotiations between the two chambers.
What survived was much shorter:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
For Virginia, there was something remarkable in those words. “Free exercise” was the language Madison had fought for thirteen years earlier.
In 1776, when George Mason drafted Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, he wrote that all men should enjoy the “fullest toleration in the exercise of religion.” Madison objected. Toleration meant that government had the authority to decide which religious beliefs and practices it would permit. Madison changed the language to declare that all men were “equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
That distinction had become the heart of Virginia’s long fight over religious freedom. Baptists and other dissenters were not asking the government to be more generous toward them. They were arguing that religious conscience was beyond the government’s authority in the first place.
Thirteen years later, “free exercise” appeared again, this time in the Constitution of the United States.
Virginia ratified the amendments on December 15, 1791. Its vote supplied the last of the three-fourths of the states required, and the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution.
The fight over religious freedom in Virginia was not finished. But the principle that had begun with a dispute over “toleration” was now written into the First Amendment.
Finishing the Job in Virginia
The First Amendment settled what Congress could do about religion. It did not settle what Virginia would do with the remains of its own established church.
One of the largest unresolved issues was the glebes. Under the colonial system, Anglican parishes had acquired farms and other property, supported in part through public taxation, to provide income and housing for their ministers. When Virginia ended the established church, those lands did not simply disappear. Those houses and farms remained property of the Episcopal Church.
The Baptists objected. They had spent years fighting compulsory support for another denomination, and they saw the glebes as property left over from the same system. In 1786, the Baptist General Committee considered whether the glebes should be treated as public property. By a margin of a single vote, it decided they should.
The fight continued for years. In 1799, the Virginia legislature declared that the former established church no longer had a legal claim to special treatment from the state. In 1802, Virginia authorized the sale of glebe lands when the remaining parish interests in them expired.
It was an important final step in a fight that had begun decades earlier. Virginia had stopped jailing dissenting preachers. It had ended compulsory religious assessments. Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom had established that no Virginian could be forced to support a religious ministry. The First Amendment now prohibited Congress from establishing religion or interfering with its free exercise. And finally, the property inherited from Virginia’s colonial church system was being dismantled as well.
Disestablishment: The formal ending of a government-supported or officially recognized church. In Virginia, it meant ending the Church of England’s special legal status, taxpayer support, and other privileges, and establishing that government could neither favor nor require support for a particular religion.
The established church was gone not only in law, but increasingly from the institutions and property the colonial government had created to sustain it.
What Separation Meant in Practice
On New Year’s Day 1802, President Thomas Jefferson received an unusual gift at the White House: a 1,200-pound cheese made by Baptist farmers in Cheshire, Massachusetts. The Baptists had long regarded Jefferson as an ally in their fight for religious liberty, and the enormous cheese was intended as a public expression of their support.
As an aside, the 1,200-pound cheese is a reminder that the early republic operated under somewhat different rules. Deliver a half-ton gift to a sitting president today and, before anyone found a large enough cheese knife, White House lawyers and ethics officials would be asking who paid for it, who organized it, what it was worth, and whether the president was legally permitted to accept it. In 1802, the Baptists simply hauled their enormous cheese to Washington and gave it to Thomas Jefferson.
That same day, Jefferson answered a letter from another group of Baptists, the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. They had written to him about religious liberty and their concern that in Connecticut it was treated not as an inherent right, but as something granted by government.
Jefferson’s reply contained a phrase that would become one of the most famous descriptions of the relationship between religion and government in American history. The First Amendment, he wrote, had built “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Those words do not appear in the Constitution. They were Jefferson’s explanation of what the First Amendment meant.
Madison would later have the opportunity to show what that separation meant when he was the one sitting in the White House.
The Presidents – Together Again
Let us return now to that field outside Charlottesville on October 6, 1817.
Twenty-eight years had passed since Madison and Monroe faced one another in the congressional election that sent Madison to the First Congress. Jefferson had served two terms as president, Madison two terms after him, and Monroe was now in the first year of his own presidency. Political disagreements had strained their friendships more than once, sometimes badly. But on this October morning, the three Virginians, close enough to be considered neighbors, were together again.
They had come to lay the cornerstone of the University of Virginia.
Monroe tested the stone with a square, a plumb, and a level. The presiding Mason asked a blessing on “this and every other work undertaken for the benefit of the republic.” Jefferson and Madison stood beside him.
An aside on the Masonic ceremony: The square, plumb and level were not simply construction tools. In Masonic tradition, these tools carried moral meaning: the square represented upright conduct, the plumb moral rectitude, and the level equality.
Cornerstone ceremonies were common public events in early America, with Masonic lodges often called upon to dedicate important civic buildings. At the University of Virginia ceremony, Monroe tested the stone with the traditional instruments, and corn, wine, and oil were used in the ritual.
In traditional Masonic cornerstone ceremonies, the three substances symbolized basic blessings of life:
- Corn represented plenty or abundance, particularly the necessities of life.
- Wine represented joy, refreshment, and happiness.
- Oil represented peace, comfort, and healing.
There is also a historical trap here. Monroe was a Freemason, but Jefferson almost certainly was not, despite generations of claims that he was. Monticello has found no evidence that Jefferson ever belonged to a Masonic lodge. His appearance amid all the Masonic ceremony at the University cornerstone laying may actually have helped create the legend.
For men of that generation, however, the symbolism of the ceremony required no secret membership to understand it. They were laying a literal foundation for a university intended to help preserve the republic they had created. A stone tested for whether it was square, level and true was an unusually appropriate symbol for the occasion.
There is something remarkable about the scene after knowing what had happened among these men. Madison and Monroe had once competed for the same seat in Congress, in an election shaped in part by the demand for a Bill of Rights. Jefferson and Madison had spent decades exchanging ideas about religious liberty and the limits of government. All three had disagreed, competed, fallen out, and reconciled.
And now they were old men standing together on land that had once belonged to Monroe, laying the first stone of the university Jefferson had spent years trying to create.
Jefferson died nine years later, on July 4, 1826. He had written his own epitaph and instructed that it identify him as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia.
He did not include President of the United States.
Back to the Beginning: Hebron Valley
And that brings the story back home for us.
Stand in Hebron Valley and look toward the Blue Ridge. These are the same mountains Madison saw from Montpelier as he read, wrote, and worked through his ideas about the government the new nation would need. Montpelier lies just across the county line in Orange. Beyond it, to the south, are Jefferson’s Monticello and Monroe’s Highland. All three men lived within a day’s ride of this valley.
But the history of religious liberty here does not belong only to three presidents.
- It belongs to the Baptist preachers who were jailed for preaching without permission, some of them in Culpeper.
- It belongs to the congregations that petitioned the Virginia legislature rather than accept compulsory support for another church.
- It belongs to the German Lutherans who settled along the Robinson River and eventually stood outside Hebron Lutheran Church on a bitter January day in 1789 while Madison and Monroe argued for their votes.
- And it belongs to the Virginians who refused to accept that religious belief was something government had the authority merely to tolerate.
That last distinction may be the most important one in this entire story. Virginia began with an established church supported by law and taxation. Dissenters first fought to be tolerated. Then they demanded something fundamentally different: the free exercise of religion as a right, not a favor granted by government.
Madison helped put those words into Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in 1776. Jefferson wrote the Statute for Religious Freedom. Virginia’s Baptists and other dissenters kept pressure on the legislature. Madison won his congressional seat here in a campaign in which amendments to the new Constitution were very much at issue. Five months later, he proposed those amendments in Congress. And in 1791, Virginia became the final state needed to ratify the Bill of Rights.
“Free exercise” was now part of the Constitution of the United States.
Today, it is easy to encounter this history as a collection of famous names and documents: Jefferson. Madison. Monroe. The Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Statute for Religious Freedom. The First Amendment.
Living here makes it harder to see it that way. The famous men wrote the words, debated the laws, and held the offices. But ordinary Virginians kept forcing the question. They preached when they were told they could not preach. They went to jail. They refused to pay for churches they did not attend. They signed petitions. They organized their congregations. And when the new Constitution failed to protect their rights explicitly, they demanded amendments.
These were roads people traveled. These were churches where they worshipped and argued. These were neighbors, farms, county lines, and elections. Montpelier is just over the hill. Hebron Lutheran Church is still here. The Robinson River still runs through the valley. The Blue Ridge still fills the western horizon. And Monticello is less than an hour away.
The national story of the First Amendment happened here.
The Lesson Here: Our Current Fight for Liberty
Medical freedom should not depend upon whether a person can produce a religious objection acceptable to the government. The right to decide what is done to one’s own body is more fundamental than any exemption the government chooses to grant.
That distinction should sound familiar by now. The people of Hebron Valley and the religious dissenters of Virginia eventually rejected the idea that government should decide which beliefs it would tolerate. They demanded recognition of a right that existed independent of government permission. Medical freedom raises a similar question today. If bodily autonomy is a right, then government does not create that right by granting an exemption from a mandate.
This is why the fight over medical mandates is not over. Congress and state legislatures continue to wrestle with where government authority ends, and individual medical decision-making begins. Those of us who believe that medical decisions belong to individuals and families cannot treat a religious exemption as an adequate substitute for that principle. Medical freedom is a civil liberty.
The people who lived in this valley did not secure religious liberty by accepting toleration and asking government to be generous with exemptions. They kept demanding recognition of the right itself.
More than two centuries later, that may be the most important lesson they left us. There is a profound difference between a right and an exemption. One belongs to you. The other exists only so long as the government agrees to grant it.
Essays like this take time. They require digging through old records, reading the original letters and petitions, visiting the places where the history happened, and then trying to tell the story in a way that makes clear why it still matters.
Malone News is supported by its readers, not by corporate advertisers or institutional sponsors. If you value independent research, long-form writing, and our willingness to keep asking difficult questions about liberty, government power, and the rights that belong to us, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Your subscription makes this work possible. And as the people of Hebron Valley understood more than two centuries ago, preserving liberty requires people willing to defend it.
A final note:
Please also consider sharing these essays with your children and grandchildren. And on your next trip through the Virginia Piedmont, consider visiting Montpelier and Monticello. This part of Virginia is steeped in the history of our nation’s founding, with lessons that remain every bit as important today.
RWM/JGM
Jill and I can see the same Blue Ridge that Madison watched from his library window. Essays like this come from archives, county records, and long drives on back roads, and reader support is what makes that work possible. Subscribe free or paid for more stories from this corner of Virginia, which we are gathering into a book, Who Owns This Land?
References
American Battlefield Trust. n.d. “James Monroe.” https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/james-monroe.
Charlottesville Historic Resources Committee (HRC). n.d. “James Monroe’s First Farm.” Historical marker text. https://weblink.charlottesville.org/public/0/edoc/793338/James%20Monroe%20First%20Farm%20Marker%20Text_HRC.pdf.
Cocke, John Hartwell. 1817. “John H. Cocke’s Account of the Central College Cornerstone Laying, 5 and 6 October 1817.” Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-12-02-0057-0002.
Highland. n.d. “A Brief Biography of James Monroe.” James Monroe’s Highland, William and Mary. https://highland.org/discover-monroe/.
James, Charles F. 1900. Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia. Lynchburg, VA: J. P. Bell Company. Digitized by Cornell University Library, Internet Archive. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029255169. Full PDF also available at [INSERT MALONE.NEWS LINK].
James Monroe Museum. n.d. “Prelude to the Presidency.” University of Mary Washington. https://jamesmonroemuseum.umw.edu/exhibitions/prelude-to-the-presidency/.
Madison, James. 1811. Veto Message to the House of Representatives, February 21. Founders Online, National Archives.
Magnet, Myron. 2014. “Montpelier Restored.” City Journal, March. https://www.city-journal.org/article/montpelier-restored.
Masonic Report. 1817. “Masonic Report on the Central College Cornerstone Laying, 1 December 1817.” Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-12-02-0057-0004.
Monticello. n.d.a. “Visitors to Monticello.” Thomas Jefferson Foundation. https://monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/a-day-in-the-life-of-jefferson/museum-in-the-entrance-of-the-house/visitors-to-monticello.
Monticello. n.d.b. “James Monroe.” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/james-monroe.
Monticello. n.d.c. “Highland.” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/highland/.
Monticello. n.d.d. “James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. https://monticello.org/tje/4101.
Montpelier. 2021. “The Congressional Election of 1789.” James Madison’s Montpelier. https://www.montpelier.org/the-congressional-election-of-1789/.
NPS (National Park Service). n.d. “Ash Lawn-Highland.” Journey Through Hallowed Ground Travel Itinerary. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/Journey/hig.htm.
Wolfe, Brendan. 2020. “Ambrose Madison (ca. 1696 to 1732).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/madison-ambrose-ca-1696-1732/.
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