WISE ADVICE From the American Rifleman

Training

Criminal Clues

Steve Tarani

You don’t have to be the hardest target, but you don’t want to be the softest.

What most people believe about crime is wrong in a way that matters. They believe it is chaotic—that there is no rhyme or reason, that it is driven by impulse, desperation or some unknowable darkness that strikes at random. They hold this belief because it is comforting, because it removes responsibility: If crime is random, then preparation is pointless. If it is chaos, then there are no signals to read, no patterns to interrupt, no leverage points to exploit. But, that belief does not survive contact with reality.

Crime, especially the kind most people are exposed to everyday, is rarely random. It is recognizably patterned, selective and plainly observational. It unfolds less like a lightning strike and more like a silent scan. 

Predators are not wandering blindly into situations.

They are surveilling environments, reading people, seeking indicators and making decisions. These decisions are guided by a simple calculation that rarely fails them: Which option offers the highest reward for the lowest effort, risk and resistance? That is the entire decision process.

Stickers, decals and visible personal identifiers can reveal patterns about the [vehicle] owner’s life.

That calculation is constant. It happens in parking lots, on sidewalks, in neighborhoods, in shopping centers and on residential streets at night. It happens quickly, often subconsciously, and it is built on a language of signals, referred to as “soft-target indicators.”

These signals are broadcast through behavior, appearance, environment and routine. And, most people have no idea they are broadcasting anything at all.

This is the quiet crux of the problem. You are communicating constantly, whether you intend to or not. You are telling a story about your awareness, your capability, your predictability and your vulnerability. Your car is telling a story. Your home is telling a story. Your daily patterns are telling a story. And, the people who matter most in this context are the ones who are trained, through repetition and experience, to read those indicators quickly and act on them.

The uncomfortable truth is that many people are advertising themselves as soft targets (easy opportunities) without ever realizing it.

Start with the individual, because that is where most encounters begin. In public spaces, predators are not looking for just any target; they are looking for indicators. These are subtle, often fleeting cues that suggest a person will be easier to approach, easier to control or easier to exploit. It is not about strength in the conventional sense. It is about perception. It is about whether you appear aware, present and capable of reacting.

Keep landscaping minimalist and provide ample lighting to present a less attractive target to would-be home invaders PHOTO: GETTY

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Those flashy indicators of wealth send loud signals to criminals. PHOTO: GETTY

Watch how people move through the world. Many walk with their attention buried in a phone, headphones sealing off their environment, posture collapsed inward. Their pace is irregular. Their awareness is narrow. They are mentally elsewhere. To the predator, this is not just distraction. It is opportunity. It indicates delayed reaction time, reduced situational awareness and a higher likelihood that an approach will succeed before resistance can be mustered.

Contrast that with someone who moves with purpose, head up, scanning naturally without appearing paranoid, aware of who and what is around them. Nothing about that person needs to be aggressive or confrontational. The signal is simply different. It communicates presence. It communicates that this person is not asleep inside their own environment, that they could make things more complicated and are therefore a more difficult (hard) target.

The difference between those two signals is often enough to determine who gets approached and who is bypassed.

Then there is the matter of visible reward. Humans are visual creatures, and predators are no exception. Jewelry, electronics, cash and even subtle indicators of wealth can change the equation instantly. A person displaying high-value items in an environment with limited oversight is increasing the perceived reward side of the equation.

But, reward alone is not enough. Predators are not looking for the highest reward. They are looking for the best ratio of reward to effort and risk. A person with visible valuables who is alert and aware may still be bypassed in favor of someone with less visible wealth, but far lower perceived resistance.

There is also a category of soft-target indicators that is rarely discussed openly, but is widely understood among security professionals. Body language that suggests uncertainty, hesitation or impairment can shift perception dramatically. Someone who appears lost, disoriented or intoxicated is signaling reduced capacity to respond effectively. This does not make them deserving of victimization, but it does make them more likely to be selected by someone who is already looking for an advantage.

Humans are visual creatures, and predators are no exception. Jewelry, electronics, cash and even subtle indicators of wealth can change the equation instantly.

Vehicles extend these indicators in ways most overlook. A car is not just transportation, but also a mobile profile. It tells a story about what might be inside, how attentive the owner is and how difficult access will be.

A vehicle with valuables visible through the windows is not a mystery. It is an invitation. Bags, electronics, tools, cash or even loose change left in plain sight reduce the effort required to decide. The predator does not have to guess whether there is value inside; it is already confirmed. That alone can shift a passing glance into an actionable decision.

Unlocked doors take this further. They remove friction entirely. There is no need for forced entry, no noise, no time investment. The barrier between intent and action disappears. In many cases, predators will simply test door handles as they move through parking areas. They are not targeting a specific person. They are sampling for opportunity. The moment resistance drops to zero, the decision is made for them.

There are also more subtle signals embedded in vehicles that extend beyond immediate access. Stickers, logos, decals and visible personal identifiers can reveal patterns about the owner’s life. They can suggest when someone is likely to be away (like a military spouse), where their children go to school, what interests or affiliations they have, whether a firearm may be present and even what valuables might be stored at home. These are not just expressions of identity; in the wrong context, they become clues in a surveillance profile a predator builds.

Homes and property amplify all of this because they introduce time into the equation. Unlike a passing encounter on the street, a home can be observed, revisited and assessed over multiple days or weeks. Predators do not always act immediately. Many watch, waiting for patterns to emerge.

A house with no visible security measures sends a clear message—a positive indicator. No cameras, no alarm signage and no motion lighting suggests that detection is less likely, that entry may go unnoticed and that the risk side of the equation is low. Even the absence of something can function as a signal.

Lighting plays a critical role here. Darkness creates cover. It allows approach without visibility, reduces the chance of being seen by neighbors and increases predator confidence. A well-lit exterior, especially with motion-activated lights, disrupts that cover. It introduces unpredictability. It forces exposure during approach.

Landscaping is another overlooked factor. Overgrown shrubs, tall hedges, and cluttered yards do more than affect appearance; they create hiding places, provide concealment during approach and time for manipulation of entry points. A clean, open line of sight from the street to the home reduces opportunities.

Accessible tools like shovels, sledgehammers, ladders and even sporting equipment like baseball bats or a tennis racquet can be used to force entry.

Then, there are the signals of absence. Mail piling up, packages left unattended, junk mail stacked, lights that never change timing are not just signs of neglect, but also indicators that no one is home. Predators watching for patterns will notice when a house appears unoccupied during certain hours or days. That predictability becomes part of their decision-making process.

Boutique-store packages and fancy gift bags are enticing signals for anyone of low moral fiber who might glance into an exposed hatchback. Make use of covers and deck lids if a vehicle with a separate trunk isn’t available. PHOTO: GETTY

Entry points often require less effort to open than people assume. Unlocked doors, open windows, poorly secured garages and even pet doors can provide access without force. Each of these reduces the complexity of the task. Complexity—including time—is something predators actively avoid when easier alternatives exist.

Even something as mundane as trash cans become indicators. Boxes from new electronics left at the curb announce what is likely inside the home, removing uncertainty and confirming reward. It tells a story upon which someone may be willing to act.

You are telling a story about your awareness, your capability, your predictability and your vulnerability

What ties all this together is not fear. It is operational planning. The end game is simple. Predators seek the path of least resistance. They are not looking for the hardest target but seeking the easiest one that meets their criteria.

This is where most discussions about safety go wrong. They focus on extreme measures, on fortress-like solutions, on turning a home or a person into something that looks impenetrable. That is not necessary for what we normal earth walkers need. What matters is shifting your position within the environment. You do not need to be the hardest target; you need to not be the softest. That shift can be achieved through small, deliberate changes that alter the signals you are sending.

For individuals, it begins with awareness. Not hypervigilance, not paranoia, but simple presence. Head up. Occasional scanning of the environment. Awareness of who is near you and what is happening around you. This alone changes how you are perceived. It does not eliminate risk, but it reduces the likelihood of being selected.

Managing visible valuables is equally straightforward. What is not seen cannot factor into the predator’s initial calculation. Keeping items out of sight removes one of the primary drivers of opportunistic decisions.

When it comes to vehicles, the same principle applies. Locking doors is not just a habit. It is a barrier. It introduces effort where none would otherwise exist. Removing valuables from sight or taking them with you eliminates immediate reward. Even something as simple as parking in well-lit areas can shift the equation. None of this is rocket surgery.

Packages piling up are not just an invitation to “porch pirates,” but also are indicators the home is currently unoccupied and therefore a soft target PHOTO: GETTY

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At the home level, the goal is not to create an impenetrable fortress. It is to introduce uncertainty and increase perceived risk. Visible cameras, even basic ones, suggest that actions may be recorded. Alarm signage, whether or not a system is present, can act as a deterrent by introducing doubt. Motionactivated lighting removes darkness as a cover and creates exposure at critical moments.

Maintaining the exterior of the property matters more than most people realize. Trimmed landscaping, clear lines of sight, the absence of tools and sporting gear all contribute to the perception that the space is monitored and maintained. Timers on lights or devices can create the appearance of occupancy even when no one is home, disrupting patterns that might otherwise be exploited.

There is also a broader layer that extends beyond the individual property. Communities where neighbors are aware of each other’s patterns and notice anomalies, create an environment where predators face increased uncertainty. The presence of multiple observers, even informal ones, raises the perceived risk across an entire area.

None of this guarantees safety, as there are no guarantees in life (other than the proverbial death and taxes), but it changes the landscape in a way that matters. It shifts the balance of the equation. It makes your environment less attractive compared with others.

The core idea is not complicated, but it is often ignored. You are part of a system of signals. You are constantly communicating information about yourself, your habits and your environment. Predators read those indicators, whether you realize it or not. The question is not whether signals exist—they do. The question is whether you are aware of them and whether you are willing to adjust them.

Predators do not need a perfect target; they need an easier one. And when you understand that, when you see how small changes alter perception and shift decision-making, you begin to move out of the category of convenience to that of effort. And effort, in this context, is often more than enough to make a predator read their criminal clues and ask themselves, “Are there softer targets?”

Well Being: The Critical Mineral Most Americans are Deficient in

Magnesium: New research suggests its role is critical for health

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 16

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More than two-thirds of American adults do not have enough magnesium.

A 2026 analysis of U.S. adults participating in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that 67.8 percent had serum magnesium concentrations below 2.06 mg/dL, the threshold the researchers used for chronic latent magnesium deficiency. That number is remarkable, particularly because serum magnesium may actually be a relatively insensitive way of detecting inadequate magnesium stores.

Magnesium deficiency is generally assessed by measuring magnesium in the blood, yet less than one percent of the body’s magnesium is found in serum. Most magnesium is stored in bone and within cells. The body also regulates circulating magnesium rather tightly, meaning that serum concentrations do not necessarily provide a complete picture of magnesium stores. A normal blood test does not necessarily mean that the body’s magnesium stores are adequate.

There is an important issue concerning how we define deficiency. The researchers used a higher serum magnesium cutoff than is conventionally used to diagnose clinical hypomagnesemia. Their threshold of 2.06 mg/dL has been proposed as a better marker for chronic latent magnesium deficiency, based in part on studies showing physiological changes and increased health risks at magnesium concentrations that conventional laboratory ranges may still classify as normal. In other words, by the time someone crosses the conventional threshold for frank hypomagnesemia, we may be looking at the far end of the problem rather than its beginning.

There is even more reason to take the finding seriously. We already know from dietary surveys that Americans aren’t consuming enough magnesium. Analysis of NHANES dietary data found that 48 percent of Americans consumed less magnesium from food and beverages than their Estimated Average Requirement.

These are two different measurements asking two different questions, but they point in the same direction. One finds widespread inadequate dietary intake. The other suggests that suboptimal magnesium status may be even more common.

Why should we care?

Because magnesium isn’t a minor nutritional accessory. It is involved in hundreds of enzymatic reactions and some of the most fundamental processes keeping us alive. Magnesium is required for the production and utilization of ATP, the energy currency of the cell. It plays essential roles in protein synthesis, DNA and RNA metabolism, glucose regulation, muscle and nerve function, vascular tone, cardiac electrical stability and bone metabolism. In the brain, magnesium helps regulate neuronal signaling and synaptic plasticity, processes fundamental to learning, memory and cognitive function.

Low magnesium status has been associated with cognitive impairment and dementia, while experimental studies have shown that increasing magnesium concentrations in the brain can enhance synaptic plasticity and improve learning and memory. Much of the early work involved magnesium-L-threonate, a form developed specifically to increase magnesium availability in the brain. The evidence has now progressed beyond animal studies. 

Randomized, placebo-controlled human trials have reported improvements in several measures of cognition and memory, including working and episodic memory, following magnesium-L-threonate supplementation. What has not yet been established is whether these cognitive effects translate into prevention or treatment of Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias.

Human studies also suggest that magnesium status differs in people with Alzheimer’s disease. A meta-analysis of 21 studies found significantly lower serum and plasma magnesium in Alzheimer’s patients than in healthy controls. Perhaps more interestingly, postmortem studies of human brains have reported lower magnesium concentrations in Alzheimer’s-affected regions, including the hippocampal region, entorhinal cortex, and frontal cortex. These findings do not prove that magnesium deficiency causes Alzheimer’s disease. Neurodegeneration itself could alter magnesium metabolism. But prospective evidence makes the relationship harder to dismiss: in the Rotterdam Study of 9,569 initially dementia-free adults, low serum magnesium was associated with a 32 percent greater subsequent risk of dementia. 

Which raises an obvious question.

Why are so many Americans apparently running short of a mineral this fundamental to human biology?

There isn’t one answer. The medical system likes to point out that medications, gastrointestinal disease, diabetes, alcohol use, kidney loss, and aging can all affect magnesium status.

But there is another explanation sitting directly in front of us.

The food industry removed much of the magnesium from our food.

Big Ag removed much of the magnesium from food

When we wrote Homesteading for Health, we spent considerable time examining something largely missing from modern discussions about nutrition. Food isn’t simply protein, carbohydrate, and fat.

Food contains minerals.

And the nutritional composition of our food is not fixed.

The nutritional quality of our food has changed. Evidence accumulated over decades shows that modern high-yield agriculture can produce more food per acre while reducing the concentration of minerals in that food. Historical USDA comparisons found substantial declines in several nutrients in fruits and vegetables between 1950 and 1999. Long-running agricultural experiments provide even stronger evidence. The Broadbalk Wheat Experiment in England, which has been continuously cultivated and studied since 1843, has documented significant declines in magnesium, zinc, iron, and copper concentrations in wheat grain associated with modern high-yield varieties. As crop yields increased, mineral concentrations often fell, a phenomenon researchers call the dilution effect.

But yield is only part of the story. Plants do not simply vacuum minerals out of dirt. Healthy soil is a living biological system in which bacteria, fungi, and plant roots work together to make minerals available to the plant. Modern tillage, heavy fertilizer use and other intensive practices disrupt those relationships, particularly the mycorrhizal fungal networks that extend the effective reach of plant roots. A soil may therefore contain magnesium and other minerals on a laboratory assay while becoming less biologically effective at delivering them into the crop.

What matters isn’t simply whether magnesium exists in the dirt. What matters is whether it makes its way from the soil into the food and ultimately into us.

Then we take the food we produce and process even more magnesium out of it.

We know exactly where much of it went.

Industrial milling removed it from our food

Again, in Homesteading for Health, we document that much of the issue stems from the production of processed flour. The wheat kernel consists of the bran, germ, and endosperm. The bran and germ contain a disproportionate share of the grain’s minerals, including magnesium. Making refined white flour removes those portions of the kernel.

The result can be a dramatic reduction in magnesium.

And then comes one of the stranger ironies of our modern food system.

We call the resulting product “enriched flour.”

Iron and selected B vitamins are added back after milling, and folic acid is added to most enriched grain products.

Magnesium generally isn’t.

We take a naturally magnesium-containing food, remove much of its magnesium, replace a selected handful of the nutrients lost during processing, and call the finished product enriched.

Then we make refined flour a foundation of the American diet.

Perhaps the magnesium problem isn’t quite so mysterious after all.

Where Did the Magnesium Go?

The best natural sources of magnesium aren’t particularly exotic.

Pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, almonds and other nuts, beans, lentils, whole grains and dark leafy vegetables are all good sources. Magnesium is, after all, at the center of the chlorophyll molecule. Green plants are therefore an obvious place to find it.

The modern American diet has moved in almost exactly the opposite direction.

Whole grains became refined grains. Beans and legumes became less central to many meals. Nuts and seeds became optional snacks rather than routine foods. Fresh vegetables increasingly compete with highly processed products made primarily from refined flour, starch, sugar, and industrial oils.

The result is an interesting nutritional paradox.

Americans can consume more than enough calories while remaining poorly supplied with micronutrients.

We can be overfed and undernourished at the same time.

Then There Is the Brain

For years, magnesium was discussed primarily in relation to muscle function, bone, cardiovascular health, and metabolism. Its role in cognition received considerably less public attention.

That has changed.

Magnesium is involved in neuronal signaling and synaptic plasticity, the process through which connections between neurons change in response to experience. These mechanisms are fundamental to learning and memory.

Animal experiments produced some striking early findings. Increasing brain magnesium concentrations improved measures of synaptic plasticity, learning, and memory, and experimental work with magnesium-L-threonate generated particular interest because this compound was developed to increase magnesium availability in the brain.

There are also observational human data connecting magnesium status with cognitive health and dementia. A 2024 systematic review examined three randomized controlled trials and 12 cohort studies. The cohort evidence suggested relationships between magnesium status and cognitive outcomes. Interestingly, the researchers also found a U-shaped association between serum magnesium and dementia or cognitive impairment, with approximately 0.85 mmol/L appearing to represent an optimal concentration in the available cohort data.

That last observation is important.

More is not always better.

The objective isn’t to consume enormous amounts of magnesium. It is to have enough.

Magnesium-L-Threonate and Memory

This brings me to the form of magnesium that I find particularly interesting: magnesium-L-threonate, commonly abbreviated MgT.

Magnesium-L-threonate was developed specifically to increase magnesium concentrations in the central nervous system. Early animal experiments reported improvements in learning, working memory, and both short- and long-term memory.

The evidence has now moved into humans.

A recently published randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial enrolled 100 adults aged 18 to 45. Participants received either 2 grams per day of magnesium-L-threonate or placebo for six weeks.

Compared with placebo, the magnesium-L-threonate group demonstrated greater improvement in the NIH Total Cognition Composite, with particularly notable effects involving working and episodic memory. Reaction time also improved. Not every endpoint improved, including several objective measures of sleep, but the study provides controlled human evidence supporting some of what the earlier animal studies had found.

This is the form of magnesium I personally favor when cognition and brain health are among the objectives.

Your Heart Needs Magnesium

Magnesium is also deeply involved in cardiovascular physiology.

It influences vascular smooth-muscle tone, movement of calcium and potassium across cell membranes, and the electrical activity of the heart. Severe magnesium deficiency can produce abnormal heart rhythms. Magnesium is important enough to cardiac electrophysiology that intravenous magnesium has long-standing medical uses for certain arrhythmias and other acute clinical settings.

But the more interesting question for most of us concerns the effects of chronic, less severe magnesium inadequacy.

A meta-analysis of 38 randomized trials involving 2,709 participants found an average reduction of 2.8 points in the upper (systolic) blood pressure number and 2.1 points in the lower (diastolic) number compared with placebo. In practical terms, a reading of 130/80 would decline, on average, to about 127/78.

Magnesium supplementation appears to lower blood pressure most in people who actually have high blood pressure, particularly those already being treated for hypertension. A 2025 meta-analysis of 38 randomized controlled trials involving 2,709 participants found that among people with hypertension who were already taking blood-pressure medication, magnesium supplementation lowered the upper blood-pressure number by an average of 7.7 points and the lower number by about 3 points compared with placebo. People who were magnesium deficient also experienced larger reductions, while those with normal blood pressure did not experience a statistically significant reduction.

Magnesium is also closely connected to glucose metabolism and insulin signaling. In a pooled analysis of 24 randomized trials involving people with type 2 diabetes, magnesium supplementation was associated with reductions in fasting glucose, HbA1c, and blood pressure.

Magnesium isn’t a miracle cure.

It is something more mundane and perhaps more important: a basic nutrient necessary for the metabolic systems we are asking our bodies to operate every day.

How Much Magnesium Do We Actually Need?

The recommended dietary allowance varies by age and sex. For most adult men, it is approximately 400–420 mg per day, while most adult women require approximately 310–320 mg per day, with somewhat higher requirements during pregnancy.

Those numbers aren’t particularly difficult to reach if someone eats a nutrient-dense whole-food diet.

That “if” is doing a lot of work.

The NIH identifies legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and green leafy vegetables as major dietary sources.

That list looks remarkably similar to the foods that have been displaced by the modern processed diet.

Food First. But Perhaps Not Food Alone.

Magnesium-rich foods should be the foundation. Eat green vegetables. Eat beans and legumes. Eat nuts and seeds. Choose whole grains rather than refined flour. Grow some of your own food if you can. Buy food from farmers who care about their soil. Reduce the amount of highly processed food in your diet.

But there is a problem with stopping the discussion there.

The food isn’t the only thing that changes as we get older. We change too.

Aging alters the gastrointestinal tract and can reduce how efficiently some nutrients are absorbed. Older people may also eat less food, have less varied diets, take medications that interfere with magnesium balance, or develop diseases that increase magnesium losses. Kidney handling of magnesium also changes with age. Proton-pump inhibitors are a particularly important example because long-term use can cause hypomagnesemia in susceptible individuals. Diuretics and several other medications can also alter magnesium status.

This means that the person who was able to maintain adequate magnesium status at 35 may not necessarily do so at 65 or 75 while eating essentially the same diet.

That matters because aging is precisely when many of the biological systems that depend upon magnesium become increasingly important: cardiovascular function, glucose regulation, bone health, muscle function and cognition.

So I don’t think “food first” should automatically mean “food only.”

For many adults, particularly as we age, magnesium supplementation is worth considering alongside a magnesium-rich diet.

The form matters. Magnesium oxide is inexpensive and contains a lot of elemental magnesium, but it is poorly absorbed and commonly causes gastrointestinal effects. Magnesium citrate is better absorbed and useful for people who also benefit from its laxative effect, but for others loose stool isn’t particularly desirable. Magnesium glycinate is widely used and generally well tolerated. Magnesium-L-threonate is considerably more expensive, but is particularly interesting because it was developed to increase magnesium availability in the brain and now has both animal and human evidence concerning cognition.

This is why magnesium-L-threonate is the form I personally favor when brain and cognitive health are part of the objective.

But supplementation shouldn’t become another exercise in the American belief that if some is good, more must be better. The NIH establishes a 350 mg/day upper limit for magnesium from supplements and medications in adults. Importantly, that limit does not include magnesium naturally present in food. It was established primarily because supplemental magnesium can cause diarrhea, nausea, and abdominal cramping. Much higher intakes can become dangerous, especially in people with impaired kidney function, because the kidneys normally eliminate excess magnesium. Magnesium supplements can also interact with several medications.

The objective is adequacy, not excess.

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We Keep Rediscovering What Food Used to Provide

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about magnesium is how unremarkable it really is.

It isn’t a newly discovered molecule. It isn’t a pharmaceutical invention. Human beings have required magnesium throughout our evolutionary history.

What changed wasn’t our need for it.

What changed was our food, and as we age, our ability to extract and retain nutrients from that food changes as well.

Modern agriculture bred crops for yield. Industrial food processing refined grains for texture, appearance, and shelf life, stripping the magnesium-rich germ and bran from wheat in the process. The result is an enormous processed-food industry capable of delivering abundant calories while removing many of the micronutrients that once accompanied those calories.

Then we got older.

We ate less. Our gastrointestinal physiology changed. Some of us developed diabetes or gastrointestinal disease. Many began taking medications that affect magnesium absorption or excretion. Yet our physiological requirement for magnesium didn’t disappear.

Nearly half of Americans now consume less magnesium from food than their estimated requirement. A new analysis suggests that more than two-thirds may have serum magnesium concentrations below a proposed threshold for adequate status.

Start with food. Eat the foods in which magnesium naturally occurs. Stop stripping those foods of their nutrients whenever possible. 

But particularly as we age, it is also reasonable to consider magnesium supplementation rather than simply assuming that a modern diet will provide everything we need.

We spend enormous amounts of money looking for complicated ways to remain healthy as we age.

Sometimes the answer may begin with something considerably simpler.

Make sure the basic machinery has what it needs to run.

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By: JGM/RWM

Fauci Took the Fifth One Hundred Eleven Times

Peter Navarro has the diary that explains why, and a federal prison number of his own. A review of “Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison”.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 15

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Fauci Took the Fifth One Hundred Eleven Times

Peter Navarro has the diary that explains why, and a federal prison number of his own. A review of Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison.

Book Review by Robert W. Malone, MD, MS

On July 29, 2026, Anthony Stephen Fauci sat down at a witness table under subpoena. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination one hundred eleven times.

A man who spent forty years explaining himself to the American public, in more television appearances than anyone can count, declined to explain himself under oath. Days earlier, Senator Rand Paul had released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s private diary to the world. Something in those pages made silence the better option.

Peter Navarro has read all 1,141 pages. He has also read the earlier volume, the one Fauci emailed to himself from a government server on July 11, 2015, covering the anthrax letters, the smallpox scare, the bird-flu wars, and Ebola. Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison is what he found.

I should tell you at the outset that I am not a neutral reader of this book. Navarro asked me to review the manuscript before publication, specifically the sections concerning me and the sections concerning Dr. Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko. I went at those sections the way I would go at a paper I had been asked to referee. I will come back to what happened when I did.

The two diaries

The book rests on a simple premise. Anthony Fauci wrote down what he actually thought. Then he went on television and said something else.

Navarro calls the older volume the Fauci Prequel Diary and the pandemic volume the Fauci Diary. He cites the second by date throughout. The provenance is unusual. Fauci did not release these pages, and no subpoena produced them. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who had written The Real Anthony Fauci before becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, took over the filing cabinets when he took over the department. By Kennedy’s account, his team spent eight months pulling the diary out of eleven separate government servers where it had been, in his phrase, sequestered and secreted.

Books built on leaked documents usually have a credibility problem, and it usually shows up in how the author handles the parts that do not help him. Navarro handles this in an Author’s Note at the back titled “The Record and Its Limits,” and that note is the reason I can recommend this book to people who will be looking for a reason to dismiss it.

He sets out three rules. He quotes the diaries exactly as typed, misspellings and exclamation points intact, on the principle that you do not clean up a record in a book about the reliability of records. Where Fauci pasted a news article into an entry, Navarro labels it pasted press, a reporter’s account Fauci chose to keep rather than Fauci’s own testimony. And he states the record’s limits before his critics can: the pandemic release is incomplete, with gaps of months and a further installment referenced but absent, and parts of the earlier volume were written retrospectively, by Fauci’s own admission. Where Fauci’s dates are wrong, Navarro says so on the page instead of fixing them quietly.

Most polemics do not do this. This one does it in a section the casual reader will never reach.

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The chapter I would hand to a medical student

Chapter Eighteen is called “The Country Doctor.” It is about Zev Zelenko, and it is the chapter I would put in front of anyone still trying to understand what went wrong.

Zelenko practiced in New York’s Hudson Valley, caring for the heavily Orthodox community around Kiryas Joel for close to two decades. When COVID moved through that dense housing in March 2020, he did not send high-risk patients home to wait until they were sick enough for a hospital bed. He treated them in the first days, with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. His peer-reviewed series examined 141 laboratory-confirmed outpatients treated a median of four days after symptom onset (Derwand, Scholz, and Zelenko 2020).

What Navarro does with this chapter is the part I did not expect. He follows the paper trail up. Zelenko made a YouTube video appealing to the President on March 21, 2020. Mark Meadows called him the next day. Stephen Hahn, the FDA Commissioner, called the following week and routed him to Dr. Patricia Brennan, the Director of the National Library of Medicine. Brennan asked for his data. She got it. About a week later she told him the National Institutes of Health was not equipped to process real-world evidence, and referred him to a preprint server.

Navarro’s conclusion is sharper than the one his readers expect. Nobody suppressed Zelenko’s data. It was routed. Suppression requires a person to decide something. Routing requires nobody to decide anything at all.

This is where I have a professional stake, so I will state it plainly. Randomized controlled trials are the right instrument in many settings and an impractical one in others. In battlefield medicine, in austere field conditions, and in the opening weeks of a novel outbreak, the trial you want does not exist and the patient in front of you does not wait. Case reports, case series, and reports of direct clinical experience are evidence. They are weaker evidence than a well-powered trial, and they are not nothing. A public-health apparatus that has no mechanism for reading what a physician observed in his own patients has not built a higher standard. It has built a wall.

Zelenko died in 2022. He did not live to see this chapter written about him.

Where I come into it

In August 2021, Navarro and I published the first of three essays in the Washington Times arguing against universal vaccination and for individualized risk assessment. Facebook censored it. We opened the next essay by reporting that fact. The third essay, in January 2022, was the sharpest of the three, and it included a warning about myocarditis in young men.

Navarro uses that trilogy as a spine through the vaccine chapters, because the essays are dated and public and can be checked against what was known when we wrote them. That is the right use of them. The value of a contemporaneous document is that it cannot be revised after the fact, which is the same reason Fauci’s diary is the most dangerous exhibit in this book.

Now the disclosure I owe you. When Navarro sent me the manuscript, I checked the studies, the dates, and the regulatory record in the sections he asked me to review. I found real errors. One passage asserted a presidential executive order on hydroxychloroquine that does not exist. Another overstated the mortality finding in Zelenko’s own published study, which reported a strong signal on hospitalization and a mortality difference that did not reach statistical significance. A third described the March 2020 emergency use authorization in a way that implied outpatient prescribing had been made unlawful, which it had not.

Navarro fixed every one of them. The published text states the hospitalization finding and stops there. It describes the authorization accurately and makes the stronger argument available to him, which is that the government never had to ban the drug to stop physicians from prescribing it.

An author who takes that kind of correction from an outside reviewer, on material that weakens his own punch lines, is an author who wants to be right more than he wants to be loud. That is not the reputation Peter Navarro has. It is the reputation he has earned on this book.

The interludes

Five sections in this book are not about Fauci at all. Navarro calls them Crime and Punishment, numbers them I through V, and drops them between the parts. They are about the men he met in federal prison.

There is the young Puerto Rican bunkmate who built a paragliding tourism business, then picked up work in the drug trade, and is now five years into fifteen with three children in San Juan. Navarro does not use him for sentiment. He uses him to ask who actually chose the sentence. The prosecutor chose the charges knowing what they added up to. The jury found facts without being told what the facts carried. The judge, the one person the Constitution dresses in a robe and sets apart to judge, chose least of all.

These interludes are the most unusual thing in the book and the reason it is more than a polemic. A man who served four months in a federal facility is writing a book demanding prison for another man. He knows exactly what he is asking for. He describes the sixty-two-degree nights and the fork-comb economics of the place he is asking a court to send Anthony Fauci. He declines to go soft on crime while he is inside the fence, and he declines to pretend the machine that put him there is a just one.

The epilogue asks the question those interludes have been building toward. One man in this story has two misdemeanor convictions, a Bureau of Prisons number, and an appeal pending. The other has never been charged, holds a presidential pardon, and sleeps at home. Navarro asks which one is free.

The prosecution

The last part of the book stops arguing and starts filing.

Chapter Thirty-Five is titled “Venue Is Destiny,” and it turns on a single observation. The pardon Fauci accepted reaches offenses against the United States. It does not reach Florida. Navarro learned the lesson about venue in a District of Columbia courtroom, and he applies it here without pretending his motives are disinterested.

Chapter Thirty-Six is a charging memorandum. Chapter Thirty-Seven is a sentencing memorandum, and it does something I have not seen in a book of this kind. Navarro weighs the stacked statutory maximums against the seven hundred years the press tallied across the four indictments filed against Donald Trump. He runs the process and racketeering counts past one hundred thirty years before a single death enters the calculation.

Then he restrains himself, and the restraint is the tell. Homicide is charged one proved victim at a time, he writes: a named Floridian, dead of that virus, with a medical examiner’s causation and a culpable act behind it. Do not multiply by a county, or a state, or a nation. Count the graves the proof can carry. Florida buried its elderly by the tens of thousands, and Navarro says outright that the proof will not carry them all.

A writer working purely in the red-meat register does not add that paragraph. It costs him the biggest number on the page.

What I would flag

The title will cost this book readers who would have been persuaded by its contents. That is a deliberate choice by the author and his publisher, and it is not my choice to make. But the people most in need of the Author’s Note and Chapter Eighteen are precisely the people who will not pick up a book called Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison.

The prosecutorial frame is also a commitment. Navarro has written the indictment he believes the record supports. Whether any Florida state attorney files it is a separate question, and the book cannot answer it. Readers should hold the legal argument and the political prediction apart.

And the register is the War Room register. The nicknames run throughout: Playing God Tony, Cover-Up Tony, Lockdown Tony, Myocarditis Tony. Some readers will find that this keeps thirty-seven chapters moving. Others will find it grates against the documentary discipline the book shows elsewhere. Both reactions are fair.

Whom this book is for

If you lost a parent in a nursing home in 2020 and were told it was nobody’s fault, buy this book.

If you are a physician who watched a treatment decision get made by a press conference rather than by a chart, buy this book.

If you are a young man who developed chest pain after a second dose, or the mother of one, buy this book and read Chapter Twenty-Four.

If you are a lawyer who wants to know whether a prosecutable case actually exists under Florida law rather than on cable television, the last four chapters are the reason to buy it.

If you are looking for a careful scientific treatment of gain-of-function methodology, the immunology of the mRNA platform, or the regulatory history that produced the emergency use authorizations, this is not that book. That work belongs to others, and some of it is still being written.

The verdict

Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison publishes on October 13, 2026, from War Room Books and Skyhorse. You can pre-order it here: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Fauci-MUST-Rot-Prison/dp/1648213022.

The strongest thing I can say about it is the thing I learned by trying to break it. I went looking for the errors that would let Fauci’s defenders throw out the whole volume. I found three, I reported them, and Navarro corrected all three before the book went to press. What is left is dated, sourced, and quoted from the record rather than characterized.

On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci had the opportunity to explain those 1,141 pages under oath. He declined, one hundred eleven times. Peter Navarro has spent 240 pages explaining them instead.

Read them, and reach your own verdict. That is what the subtitle asks of you, and it is the right thing to ask.

.

Peter Navarro, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison: His Diary. My Diary. Your Verdict. Foreword by Stephen K. Bannon. War Room Books / Skyhorse Publishing, October 13, 2026. 240 pages, hardcover. Print ISBN 978-1-64821-302-1. Ebook ISBN 978-1-64821-303-8.

Disclosure: Peter Navarro is my co-author on three 2021 and 2022 Washington Times essays. He asked me to review portions of this manuscript before publication and to supply a cover endorsement. I appear in the book. I received no payment for the editing, review, or for this notice.

Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

References

Derwand, Roland, Martin Scholz, and Vladimir Zelenko. 2020. “COVID-19 Outpatients: Early Risk-Stratified Treatment with Zinc Plus Low-Dose Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin: A Retrospective Case Series Study.” International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents 56 (6): 106214.

Navarro, Peter. 2026. Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison: His Diary. My Diary. Your Verdict. New York: War Room Books / Skyhorse Publishing.

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Robert W. Malone worked as a carpenter and a farmhand before he was a physician and a scientist. He did the original discovery research on in vivo mRNA delivery and wrote the first patent disclosures for using mRNA as a drug including for vaccination purposes. He farms in Madison County, Virginia, and writes at malone.news with Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD.

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They Can’t Win the United Kingdom; So, They’re Dismantling It

Kennedy Can End Big Pharma’s COVID Immunity With a Signature

He promised to end the liability shield. Why is it still there?

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 14

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Erica Samp did what the government told Americans to do. In 2021, facing an employer mandate, she received two doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. She reports that her health deteriorated after the first dose and became dramatically worse after the second. She was subsequently diagnosed with encephalopathy and suffered serious vascular problems, vision and hearing loss, and debilitating headaches. Her medical bills eventually reached hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Samp also did what the government told injured people to do. She filed a claim with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program in February 2022, within the program’s one-year deadline. HRSA denied her claim in 2024, concluding that there was insufficient evidence that the vaccine directly caused her injuries. There was no appeal to an independent court, no discovery, and no jury.

So Samp did something else. She sued.

On May 19, 2026, Samp filed Samp v. Kennedy in federal court, seeking to force HHS to create the COVID-19 Countermeasures Injury Table required under the PREP Act. Such a table could fundamentally change the causation problem that defeated her CICP claim by establishing a presumption that specified injuries occurring within defined periods were caused by the covered countermeasure. HHS is now moving forward with that rulemaking, and the federal court has paused Samp’s lawsuit while it does so.

Her case brings us directly to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because the Secretary Samp is suing is the same man who, before the election, promised to end the vaccine liability shield altogether.

Kennedy Promised to End the Liability Shield

On September 25, 2024, Representative Paul Gosar introduced the End the Vaccine Carveout Act. The bill would have dismantled key liability protections created by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and removed COVID-19 vaccines from the PREP Act’s definition of covered countermeasures. People claiming vaccine injuries would once again have been able to sue manufacturers in state or federal court, with access to a jury, discovery, and the other protections of ordinary civil litigation (H.R. 9828, 118th Cong., 2024).

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed the legislation by name. In Gosar’s September 26, 2024 press release, Kennedy, then founder and chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense, accused the four American vaccine manufacturers of having paid tens of billions of dollars in criminal penalties and argued that the 1986 liability protections had removed an essential incentive to make safer products. His conclusion left little room for ambiguity: “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield” (Gosar 2024). That was six weeks before the election.

React19, which represents Americans reporting COVID-19 vaccine injuries, also supported the legislation. The significance of Kennedy’s endorsement was not simply that he wanted injured people compensated. He endorsed restoring their ability to take manufacturers to court. The administrative compensation programs could remain, but they would no longer stand between an injured American and the right to pursue a civil case before a jury.

What Kennedy Has Actually Done

Kennedy has taken three actions that affect people injured by COVID-19 vaccines. None ended the liability shield he promised to end.

The first was useful, but limited. In April 2025, FDA ordered Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna to strengthen warnings for myocarditis and pericarditis, with revised labeling approved in June. The prescribing information estimates roughly eight cases per million doses among people ages six months through sixty-four, rising to roughly twenty-seven per million among males ages twelve through twenty-four. Those numbers require context. 

Peer-reviewed studies have reported substantially higher rates in the highest-risk groups, particularly adolescent and young adult males following a second mRNA dose, with estimates ranging from roughly 50 to well over 100 cases per million and some product-specific estimates approaching 300 per million. The discrepancy reflects differences in vaccine formulation, dose number, age, sex, surveillance method, and risk window, but none of that is apparent to a patient reading the label. The revised warning is an acknowledgment of risk, but hardly a transparent or accurate account of the published literature (FDA 2025).

The label can nevertheless help an injured person establish causation. It does not compensate them or give them access to a court.

HHS also ended the COVID-19 emergency use declarations. That was widely reported as the end of the liability shield. It was not. Emergency Use Authorization and PREP Act immunity are separate legal authorities. The COVID-19 PREP Act declaration protecting manufacturers remains in force through December 31, 2029.

The third action remains unfinished. HHS is developing a COVID-19 Countermeasures Injury Table that would presume certain injuries occurring within specified time periods were caused by a covered countermeasure. That could make some CICP claims easier to prove. It still leaves those claims inside the same administrative compensation system Kennedy campaigned against as a substitute for access to the courts.

These are small changes to the system Kennedy inherited and are still incomplete. Big talk, small walk. The liability shield he promised to end remains untouched.

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Claims Are Rejected. The Payouts Are Minuscule.

As of September 1, 2026, the CICP had received 14,206 COVID-19 countermeasure claims, including 11,145 alleging injury or death from a COVID-19 vaccine. The program had decided 8,122 claims and found only 120 eligible for compensation. Just 63 had actually been paid. That is less than one percent (0.78%) of claims were determined to be eligible(HRSA 2026a).

But the rejection rate hides something more important. Of the 8,002 denied claims, only 1,640 were rejected because the claimant failed to establish causation or a covered injury. Another 3,387 were denied because required medical records were not submitted, 2,711 missed the program’s one-year filing deadline, and 264 involved products the program did not cover.

That means 6,362 denials, or 79.5 percent, never reached a medical determination. Nearly four out of five rejected claims were disposed of without the government deciding whether the countermeasure actually caused the injury.

Those are not scientific determinations. They are consequences of how the program was designed to fail the victims. The one-year clock starts on the date the countermeasure was administered, not when an injury is finally diagnosed, a brutal standard for patients who spent months or years being passed among specialists. The records requirement creates another barrier for patients whose physicians were reluctant to document a possible vaccine injury in the first place.

The compensation is equally revealing. The 63 paid COVID-19 vaccine claims total $7.55 million, but one thrombotic thrombocytopenia case accounts for $5.9 million of it. Remove that single award and the average falls to roughly $25,900. The median payment is just $4,918.75, and 48 of the 63 awards were under $10,000 (HRSA 2026b). The compensated injuries are overwhelmingly myocarditis and myopericarditis, with a small number of cases involving Guillain-Barré syndrome, thrombosis, anaphylaxis, angioedema, and syncope. Persistent multisystem illness is conspicuously absent because the program still lacks an accepted diagnostic category for it. Note the program doesn’t pay out for anything but severe adverse events or death, so the median payout of under $5,000.00, which includes medical expenses is shocking.

The program is approving claims somewhat faster. Between March and September 2026, it decided another 1,295 COVID-19 claims and compensated 19, an approval rate of 1.47 percent. That is still fewer than two compensated claims per hundred decided, compared with fewer than one per hundred overall. An “improvement”, perhaps, but hardly a meaningful one.

This is why Kennedy’s proposed injury table, while potentially useful, does not fix the CICP. It could help people whose claims turn on causation, but it does nothing for the thousands already rejected by the filing deadline or records requirement. It provides no judicial review, no attorney fees, no compensation for pain and suffering, and no relief from the one-year deadline. Dr. Joel Wallskog, who developed transverse myelitis after vaccination and has litigated against the program, called the proposed table “more appearance than substance” (Stieber 2026).

The numbers explain why. A better injury table may improve one part of the CICP. It does not repair a system in which nearly four out of five denials never reached the medical merits of the claim.

HHS Stopped the Work on Chronic Vaccine Injury

I served as vice-chair of ACIP and as a member of its COVID-19 vaccine workgroup under Retsef Levi. Contrary to claims that the committee did nothing for the vaccine injured, an enormous amount of work had already been done. Many people contributed thousands of hours reviewing the evidence, debating definitions, developing recommendations, and building a framework for federal recognition of chronic COVID-19 vaccine injury. By February 15, 2026, that work had produced a completed report. What we were not allowed to do was present it.

The report proposed formal recognition of post-acute COVID-19 vaccination syndrome, defined as multisystem symptoms persisting for twelve weeks or longer after vaccination without another explanation. We recommended three concrete federal actions: ICD-10 diagnostic codes, including a chronic-condition code modeled on the U09.9 code for long COVID; formal clinical diagnostic guidelines; and a national network of specialized treatment centers coordinated by CDC and modeled on the Children’s Oncology Group (Demasi 2026).

These were not academic exercises. They addressed one of the central reasons chronically injured patients disappear inside the CICP. The government demands compelling, reliable, valid medical and scientific evidence of direct causation, while the federal medical system still lacks a diagnostic code, an accepted case definition, and a clinical infrastructure for recognizing persistent multisystem vaccine injury. A patient cannot easily prove a condition the government has not formally defined, and an injury table cannot adequately include a condition the medical system has no agreed name for.

Then HHS stopped the process. The ACIP meeting scheduled for February 25 through 27 was removed from the calendar without a public explanation. Thousands of hours of completed work were suddenly left without a forum where it could be presented, debated, or voted upon. The report was subsequently leaked and published on March 14 and 15, over my objection. A rescheduled ACIP meeting on March 18 and 19 again placed COVID vaccine injuries and long COVID on the agenda, with votes possible. That meeting never happened either. On March 16, a federal judge in Massachusetts stayed the appointments of thirteen of the fifteen sitting ACIP members in litigation brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics, creating a second and separate barrier to the committee’s work.

There were therefore two obstacles, and they should not be confused. The court stopped the committee in March. HHS had already stopped us in February.

Vaccine-injured patients have every right to ask why so little has been done. But they should know that the work itself was done. A large group of people devoted thousands of hours to developing a federal framework for recognizing, diagnosing, and ultimately treating chronic vaccine injury. The report was completed. The recommendations were ready. HHS canceled the meeting where they were supposed to be heard, and no public explanation has been given.

Then the Government Failed to Defend Its Own ACIP

There is another part of this story that has not been publicly reported. Kennedy assistant Stefanie Spear told me directly that President Trump did not want ACIP meeting again until after the midterm election. Jill was present and heard the conversation. I am not aware of any written directive from the President, so I can report only what Kennedy told me. But that conversation became considerably more troubling in light of what happened next.

When the American Academy of Pediatrics sued to stop the reconstituted ACIP, the qualifications of Kennedy’s appointees were directly challenged. The Justice Department knew this. Yet the government did not submit my curriculum vitae or, so far as I can determine from the court record, the CVs of the other challenged members. Instead, it relied largely on abbreviated biographies published on the CDC website.

The judge noticed the missing record. In his March 16 order, he stated that the evidence HHS had provided was insufficient to establish the relevant experience of several ACIP members and acknowledged that additional evidence of their qualifications might exist. In my case, HHS left the court with little more than the abbreviated biography published on the CDC website. That is particularly troubling because I had strenuously objected to that biography when I joined ACIP, precisely because I believed it substantially understated my experience in vaccine research and development and my role in the early development of mRNA technology. HHS therefore had reason to know that the CDC biography was disputed and incomplete.

Yet when my qualifications were challenged in federal court, the government relied on that abbreviated biography rather than submitting my CV. The judge then went outside that sparse record to cite a 2022 New York Times article challenging my role in the development of mRNA technology. The contrast is difficult to miss. The court faulted HHS for failing to provide sufficient evidence of my qualifications, while introducing an outside newspaper article that cast those qualifications in a less favorable light. My decades of vaccine research, clinical development, regulatory affairs, and related experience could have been documented rather easily. HHS had the opportunity to provide that record. It did not even submit my CV.

I resigned from ACIP shortly after the judge issued his decision. What followed was almost as revealing. A number of people I had considered friends and colleagues simply stopped communicating with me. Others were more candid. They told me they were afraid that publicly supporting me, or even being seen as aligned with me, could anger the White House or Kennedy. I cannot know what pressures, if any, were actually being applied from Washington. I can only report what people told me and what I watched happen. But the effect was unmistakable: people who had worked beside me suddenly believed that association with me carried a political cost.

Submitting our CVs would not necessarily have defeated the lawsuit. The judge also found problems with the process HHS used to reconstitute ACIP, and those issues were independent of our individual qualifications. But that does not explain the government’s failure to build the most basic evidentiary record in defense of its own appointees. Our qualifications were under direct attack. The government knew they were under attack. It defended them in its brief, yet failed to submit the documents that would have allowed the judge to evaluate them fully.

The result was exactly what the plaintiffs had sought. Thirteen of the fifteen sitting ACIP members were sidelined, and the March meeting did not take place. By then, HHS had already canceled our February meeting, where we were supposed to present thousands of hours of work on chronic vaccine injury.

I cannot prove why the government mounted the defense it did because it did not want a rogue ACIP to discover evidence of mRNA vaccine injury, and I will not pretend that I can. But the sequence deserves scrutiny. 

Spear told me that President Trump and his West Wing team, under Susie Wiles, did not want the ACIP meeting again until after the midterms, fearing the likely controversy would hurt the midterm election. HHS then canceled the February meeting without publicly explaining why. When litigation threatened the committee itself, the government failed to place basic evidence of its appointees’ qualifications before the court. The resulting order stopped the committee from meeting.

Intent is a question I cannot answer without written documentation. The outcome is not. ACIP stopped meeting, and the work on chronic vaccine injury stopped with it.

Promises Made, Promises Broken

Kennedy has not done the one thing he explicitly promised to do: end the liability shield.

Under the PREP Act, the HHS Secretary has the authority to amend any portion of an existing PREP Act declaration through publication in the Federal Register (42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d(b)). 

Kennedy does not need Congress to do it. The statute also makes clear that such an amendment cannot retroactively strip immunity from conduct already protected, so ending the declaration now would not reopen every COVID-19 vaccine injury claim dating back to 2021. But it could change the liability protection going forward. Kennedy has not done so, and the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration continues to protect manufacturers through December 31, 2029.

Congress could go considerably further. Gosar reintroduced the End the Vaccine Carveout Act as H.R. 4668 on July 23, 2025, and Rand Paul introduced the Senate companion, S. 3853, in February 2026. The legislation would remove COVID-19 vaccines from PREP Act covered-countermeasure protection and dismantle key barriers preventing vaccine-injured people from pursuing manufacturers through ordinary civil litigation. Neither bill has advanced out of committee.

There is an additional irony. Kennedy has not rejected the PREP Act authority itself. In May 2026, he used it. HHS issued a new PREP Act declaration granting liability protection for medical countermeasures against Andes virus during the hantavirus response. The declaration demonstrates that this is not some forgotten statutory power buried in the U.S. Code. Kennedy’s HHS knows how to use it and has used it.

The question is why Kennedy will use the PREP Act to create a new liability shield, but has not used the same statutory authority to amend the COVID-19 shield he campaigned against.

Kennedy Promised Juries. He Is Strengthening the System That Keeps Vaccine Cases Out of Court.

Kennedy campaigned on restoring the right of vaccine-injured Americans to take manufacturers to court. Yet much of what HHS has done since then runs counter to that: improving and expanding the administrative compensation system that keeps those cases out of court.

In July 2025, Kennedy announced an overhaul of the VICP with the Justice Department and brought claimants’ attorney Andrew Downing into HHS as a senior policy advisor. In January 2026, he removed members of the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines, which reviews changes to the Vaccine Injury Table (Warren et al. 2026). Aaron Siri has separately petitioned HHS to add more than three hundred injuries to that table. These changes may make it easier for some injured people to receive compensation, and that would certainly be better than the system they face today. But compensation is not the same thing as accountability.

A claim resolved through an administrative injury table does not put a pharmaceutical company’s executives under oath. It does not produce internal emails, clinical trial records, safety analyses, or communications with regulators through discovery. It does not put that evidence before a jury or establish a public record through litigation. An administrative award can transfer money to an injured person. Civil litigation can transfer money and expose information.

That distinction matters. A more generous no-fault compensation system may help injured people, but it can also make the liability shield easier to defend and more politically durable. 

Kennedy campaigned on ending that shield and restoring access to juries. Improving the system that exists behind the shield is not the same thing. In an important respect, it strengthens the very structure he promised to dismantle.

What Could Explain Kennedy’s Inaction?

There are legitimate obstacles. Repealing the 1986 liability shield requires Congress and, as a practical matter, sixty votes in the Senate. Pharmaceutical money permeates Congress, making that an extraordinarily difficult political fight. Ending or amending the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration is different. 

Kennedy can act without Congress, but any attempt to withdraw manufacturer immunity would almost certainly face immediate litigation, and the change would operate prospectively rather than reopening claims from people injured years ago.

Kennedy’s defenders can therefore make a reasonable argument for fixing the compensation system first. A functioning injury table could put money into the hands of injured Americans while a congressional fight over liability might produce nothing. That argument deserves to be taken seriously.

But it does not answer the central question. Kennedy did not campaign merely on improving compensation. He campaigned on ending the liability shield. He claimed that his years of experience as a lawyer litigating cases against the federal government provided him the expertise to get the job done. If he has concluded that doing so is legally impossible, politically impossible, or simply bad policy, he should say so.

Secretary Kennedy, Why Does the Liability Shield Remain?

Kennedy has had the authority to amend the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration since the day he became Secretary. He has not used it. Two questions deserve answers:

• Why does the COVID-19 liability shield remain in place through December 31, 2029?
• What would have to change for you to amend or end it?

There may be defensible answers. HHS counsel may believe that ending the declaration would operate only prospectively, trigger immediate litigation, and do nothing for those injured in 2021 and 2022. The White House may oppose it. Kennedy may be building the evidentiary record through the injury table before confronting the liability shield, or he may simply have reconsidered the position he took before the election.

Any of those answers could be debated. What cannot be debated is that no answer has been given. There has been no transparency. 

Kennedy explicitly campaigned to end vaccine manufacturers’ immunity. He now holds an office that gives him the authority to amend the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration without waiting for Congress. If there is a legal, political, or policy reason he has chosen not to use that authority, the public deserves to hear it. 

It is easy to make grand political speeches. It is much harder to convert that into sustainable policy changes. 

The 14,206 people who filed COVID-19 countermeasure claims deserve an answer. So do the Americans who believed him when he promised to end the liability shield.

And Erica Samp Is Still Waiting

Erica Samp was injured in 2021. She filed with the CICP, her claim was denied, and no judge can review that decision. The proposed injury table does not erase the one-year filing deadline, create judicial review, or necessarily reopen claims the government has already closed. Whatever reforms arrive in 2027 may help the next Erica Samp. They may do very little for this one.

That is the unfinished business Kennedy inherited and then promised to confront. Thousands of Americans who reported serious injuries were routed into a compensation system that rejected almost everyone, usually without ever reaching the medical merits of their claims. The manufacturers remained protected from ordinary civil litigation, discovery, and juries.

We got big talk before the election, followed by small walk after the HHS cabinet secretary appointment. 

Nineteen months into this administration, that liability shield remains in place through 2029. Kennedy has the authority to amend the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration but has not. Perhaps there is a compelling reason. If there is, he owes the vaccine injured and the Americans who believed his promises an explanation. 

They have waited long enough

RWM/JGM

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Why We Can Publish This

This was not an easy essay for me to write. I supported Kennedy, served in the administration’s reconstituted ACIP, and devoted thousands of hours alongside many other people to work that I believed could finally bring recognition and treatment to Americans injured by COVID-19 vaccines. I wanted that effort to succeed. I still want it to succeed.

But loyalty to a person cannot become more important than loyalty to the principles we claimed to be fighting for. Kennedy publicly promised to end the vaccine liability shield. Nineteen months into this administration, that shield remains in place. HHS stopped the ACIP process that was preparing to address chronic vaccine injury. When our qualifications were challenged in court, the government did not even submit my CV. I resigned shortly thereafter, and watched people I had considered friends and colleagues distance themselves, some telling me directly that they feared angering Kennedy or the White House by showing their support.

That experience makes this essay personal, but it does not make the evidence less significant. If anything, it makes getting the facts right more important. The CICP numbers came from HRSA’s own tables. Kennedy’s promise came from his own published statement. His authority comes from the PREP Act. The court record speaks for itself. Readers do not have to take my word for those things. We provide the citations. Readers can check them.

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References

Children’s Health Defense. 2026. “RFK Jr. to Create COVID Vaccine Injury Table.” The Defender, July 10, 2026.

Cirruzzo, Chelsea. 2026. “RFK Jr. Proposes Creating Covid-19 Vaccine Injury Table.” STAT, July 8, 2026.

Congressional Research Service. 2025. “The PREP Act and COVID-19, Part 2: The PREP Act Declaration for COVID-19 Countermeasures.” Updated January 3, 2025.

Demasi, Maryanne. 2026. “Leaked Report to Federal Advisers Calls for Urgent Recognition of Covid Vaccine Injuries.” MD Reports, March 14, 2026.

Food and Drug Administration. 2025. “FDA Approves Required Updated Warning in Labeling of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Regarding Myocarditis and Pericarditis Following Vaccination.” Safety Communication, June 25, 2025.

Gosar, Paul A. 2024. “Gosar Introduces Legislation to Sue Big Pharma for Vaccine Injuries.” Press release, September 26, 2024. https://gosar.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=8582.

H.R. 4668. 2025. End the Vaccine Carveout Act. 119th Congress, introduced July 23, 2025.

H.R. 9828. 2024. End the Vaccine Carveout Act. 118th Congress, introduced September 25, 2024.

Health Resources and Services Administration. 2026a. “Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) Data.” Data as of September 1, 2026. https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data.

Health Resources and Services Administration. 2026b. “Table 4. CICP Claims Compensated (Fiscal Years 2010 to 2026).” Data as of September 1, 2026. https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data/table-4.

Paul, Rand. 2026. “Dr. Rand Paul Introduces the End the Vaccine Carveout Act.” Press release, February 2026. S. 3853, 119th Congress.

Stieber, Zachary. 2026. “RFK Jr. Plans to Create a List of Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines.” The Epoch Times, July 2026.

Warren, Elizabeth, Richard Blumenthal, Ed Markey, and Angela Alsobrooks. 2026. Letter to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Attorney General Pamela Bondi, January 28, 2026.

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Sunday Strip: “Where the White Women at?”

Wrong movie, wrong century.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 13

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Friday night we had dinner at Nina’s house, with most members of our little band of brothers there – that is, the group of . We are pretty much all die-hard conservatives and Christians. 
But there was a big Trump donor there, who truly believes that Trump’s promise of a $5,000 “dividend” will swing the midterms. Because MAGA will be thrilled by getting extra money- and it will swing the center voters, because it is all about the economy now. He was all over it – very passionate that this was Trump’s ticket to winning the midterms, having just met with various people in the Trump administration and having watched Trump’s speech in Texas.
I was very skeptical of this, as were others, and we had a rather active discussion.

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First, I did some research on recent polling: Trump has not lost his MAGA base, but the newest polling suggests that the broader coalition that carried him to victory in 2024 is beginning to fray. A September Quinnipiac poll found Trump still has 79% approval among Republicans, but only 62% strongly approve, while among independents his approval has fallen to just 22%, with 68% disapproving. 

UMass Amherst provides an even clearer warning: the share of Republicans identifying with MAGA fell from 77% in March to 68% in August, while those saying they are “not at all” MAGA rose from 23% to 32%. Reuters/Ipsos likewise finds Trump’s overall approval around 33%, with an extraordinary 40% of Republicans disapproving of his handling of the cost of living. 

The picture is therefore not one of a Republican revolt against Trump. The hard MAGA core remains remarkably loyal. Rather, the danger is that the outer ring of the Trump coalition, softer Republicans, independents, Latino swing voters, MAHA voters, and less-committed 2024 Trump voters, are peeling away, while enthusiasm (in other words, TDS) among Democrats is rising. In a midterm election, Trump does not need his base to switch parties to lose Congress. He merely needs enough of the voters who expanded his coalition in 2024 to stay home.

Then there is MAHA. There is no recent polling to show whether the Kennedy-to-Trump voters who joined the coalition in 2024 remain in 2026, particularly among independents and former Democrats. But I think the answer is obvious to those in the movement or who follow social media trends.

Anyway, back to Trump’s $5,000 dividend check…

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There are no national polls on whether people support the idea of a dividend (i.e., a payment) to each adult in the USA for a whopping total of 1.2 trillion dollars. So we ran a poll on Robert’s X page. 

Now, because of who follows that account, the responses are pretty much all Trump voters or ex-Trump voters (MAGA, MAHA, independents, and Conservatives). Almost ten thousand people voted. Here are the results.

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One major theme emerged in the comments:

“I’ll add it to my tariff check money and my 5k child tax credit… Oh wait”

The other consensus from the comments was basically that of the fiscal conservative: 

”We don’t want the government taking our money and giving it to other people.”

None of this is good news for the Midterm elections and, frankly, 2028.

The economy will not improve by November; the House is lost – all it takes is four seats to flip, and the GOP holding the Senate majority is up in the air.

The statistics aren’t on our side. 

Since 1994, there have been six midterm elections in which one party entered Election Day holding majorities in both the House and Senate. In five of those six elections, that party lost control of the House.Democrats lost the House in 1994, 2010, and 2022; Republicans lost it in 2006 and 2018. The sole exception was 1998, when Republicans retained their House majority during Bill Clinton’s second term.

Put another way, since 1994, a party entering the midterms controlling both chambers of Congress has retained the House only once in six tries, a success rate of just 17 percent.

No amount of pandering to the American public about future $5,000.00 payments or dividends will change the forecast. Although it might cause some conservatives to sit this election out.

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The hard lesson that Trump hasn’t learned in this election cycle is that he needs to turn to the right – and fast.

And fixing the economy is very different from promising to fix the economy when mid-term elections roll around.

Likewise, giving people money is very different than promising to give people money, when mid-term elections roll around.

People want to see results two years into a presidency.

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At that dinner party last Friday, after all the talk about what the Trump administration has done wrong and how they could do better. We all came to one final thought:

We all have no choice but to get our asses out there and vote for the Republican candidate in November, cause what the left has done and will do to the country when they get power again is way worse!

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I HATE MYSELF FOR VOTING BLUE! – Joan Jett PARODY Song #WalkAway

Congress Gave Big Pharma Immunity. Vaccine Victims Got the Bill

The compensation system built to fail Americans

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 12

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Two Americans can suffer serious injuries after receiving federally protected vaccines and find themselves in two entirely different systems of justice. One may enter a compensation program that has paid roughly half of the petitions it has adjudicated. The other may enter a program that has compensated fewer than one in a hundred decided COVID-19 vaccine claims. Neither person chose the system. Neither person was likely told there were two very different systems for vaccine injuries before rolling up a sleeve. Congress chose what compensation they would encounter if injured, years before either was injured. But neither are they told during the informed consent process that they would not be able to sue for damages in a regular court of law. 

Those percentages are not abstract. Behind every petition is a person whose life may have divided into a before and an after: before the neurological injury, before the cardiac damage, before the chronic pain, before the inability to work, before a spouse became a full-time caregiver or parents began wondering who would care for their disabled child after they died. These people do not disappear because an agency rejects their claims. Their medical bills continue. Their lost income remains lost. Their marriages and families absorb the strain. The government merely moves them from a column labeled “pending” into one labeled “denied,” and Washington congratulates itself on having provided a remedy.

This is the story of a bargain Congress made with the American people in 1986 and quietly gutted in 2005. The original bargain was not perfect, but it recognized a basic moral fact: if government protects an industry by taking away an injured person’s ordinary right to sue, government assumes a corresponding duty to provide a fair and meaningful alternative. In 2005, Congress retained sweeping immunity for big pharma, while substituting a narrower, harsher, less transparent program effectively beyond the reach of any court. The manufacturers kept the protection. The injured were left to bear the loss.

The Two Numbers

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or VICP, has received more than 29,000 petitions since 1988. It has adjudicated 25,652 and compensated 12,588, with total compensation of roughly $5.5 billion. That results in a compensation rate of near 49 percent for adjudicated petitions (HRSA 2026). 

The arrival of COVID-19 did not automatically place the new vaccines within the established National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Instead, the federal government treated them as emergency “covered countermeasures” under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. In March 2020, the Secretary of Health and Human Services issued a PREP Act declaration granting broad liability protection to the manufacturers, distributors, administrators, and planners involved in the federal COVID-19 response. That declaration directed people injured by COVID-19 vaccines away from the ordinary courts and into a little-known program created for medical countermeasures used during public-health emergencies: the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, or CICP.

The consequences were extraordinary. CICP has received more than 14,000 COVID-19 vaccine injury claims. Yet fewer than 1 percent of decided claims had been compensated, according to federal data current as of July 1, 2026 and cited by MCTLaw, a firm representing claimants and advising on pending reform legislation (Medical Daily 2026). The government had promoted and even mandated the vaccines, while placing those injured by them into a compensation program that rejects more than 99 percent of the claims it decides.

These figures use the same basic denominator: claims that reached a decision measured against claims that were paid. Pending petitions are excluded from both. The two programs cover different products under different statutes. The numbers of claims approved versus denied establish that these systems behave radically differently. When one program compensates roughly half of the petitions it decides, and another compensates fewer than one in a hundred, the discrepancy is minor; it is an injustice of the highest order. It is the predictable result of how Congress designed the programs.

A person covered by VICP, the established compensation program for routinely recommended vaccines, has three years from the first symptom or manifestation of injury to file. An attorney may take the case knowing that reasonable fees can be paid even if the petition ultimately fails, provided it was filed in good faith and had a reasonable basis. A qualifying injury listed on the Vaccine Injury Table may carry a presumption of causation. A special master hears the case, and the decision can be reviewed by the Court of Federal Claims and then appealed.

The person sent to CICP (COVID vaccine injuries) has 1 year from the date of administration of the countermeasure. There is no comparable injury-table presumption for COVID-19 vaccine claims, no attorney-fee provision, no compensation for pain and suffering, and no independent judicial review of a denial. The claimant must produce compelling, reliable, valid medical and scientific evidence while frequently ill, financially strained, and unable to hire counsel on economically realistic terms. If CICP denies the claim, the claimant may request reconsideration by the same program. After that, the decision is final. There is no independent appeal and no court authorized to review the denial. A “no” from CICP is, for all practical purposes, the end of the line for compensation.

This is the same country and the same federal government, invoking the same public principle that “rare” vaccine injuries may be the price society pays for access to protected medical products. Yet it has created two radically different concepts of justice.

The Bargain Congress Made

Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986 because litigation over the DTP vaccine had driven manufacturers from the American market and destabilized supply. The problem was real. Congress confronted a collision between two legitimate concerns: preserving access to vaccines and preserving the right of people injured by a product to seek compensation. It concluded that the existing tort system could not serve both goals on the existing terms.

What Congress built was an exchange. Manufacturers received substantial protection from ordinary civil litigation. An injured person generally could not proceed directly with a civil claim exceeding $1,000 against a covered manufacturer without first filing a petition under VICP and allowing judgment to enter (CRS 2026a). In return, the injured received something of value: an administrative forum, special masters in the Court of Federal Claims, an injury table that could create a presumption of causation, attorney fees for qualifying petitions, and a dedicated funding mechanism.

Congress financed the program through an excise tax imposed on vaccine manufacturers, producers, and importers. The original tax varied by vaccine, but in 1997 Congress replaced those rates with a flat charge of 75 cents for each disease a vaccine prevents. An MMR dose therefore carries a $2.25 tax, while an influenza dose carries a 75-cent tax. Congress has not increased or indexed that amount since 1997, allowing inflation to cut its real value roughly in half. The tax acknowledged that injuries were not imaginary merely because liability had been redirected away from the manufacturers.

In 1986, Congress took away part of the ordinary legal remedy and established an alternative system outside normal court processes, and there is no question that the one who benefited most was big pharma.

The People the Bargain Failed

Even the more generous of these two programs has never made every injured family whole. A payment statistic cannot measure the years spent fighting the government, the deterioration of a patient while a claim crawls through the system, or the difference between an administrative award and what a jury might have awarded after hearing the full story. VICP caps compensation for pain and suffering and for vaccine-related death at $250,000. That figure has not kept pace with nearly four decades of inflation, much less with the actual cost of catastrophic disability. A family facing lifelong nursing care, inaccessible housing, lost earnings, and the destruction of an ordinary family life quickly learns that a statutory remedy and full compensation are not the same thing.

The autism cases are among the most painful examples. Autism was not categorically excluded from the statute, and families were permitted to file petitions. Thousands did. In the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, six test cases were selected to evaluate three general theories: that MMR combined with thimerosal caused autism, that thimerosal alone caused autism, and that MMR alone caused autism. The special masters rejected those theories, effectively closing the principal VICP pathway for more than 5,000 families alleging vaccine-induced autism.

But at least part of the scientific record used by government counsel was seriously tainted. The government relied upon Danish epidemiological studies produced through a CDC-funded research program led by Poul Thorsen, who has now pleaded guilty to stealing more than $1 million from that program. The CDC scientist who helped construct the sole-source funding opportunity was in an undisclosed romantic relationship with Thorsen, accepted gifts from him, and co-authored research produced under the award. The legally required Danish human-subjects approvals were never obtained. When CDC officials discovered the problem in 2009, after two papers had already been published and while the autism litigation was underway, they helped obtain retroactive ethical coverage rather than notifying the journals or the special masters.

So, the studies used by the government to defeat vaccine-autism claims emerged from a research program compromised by theft, undisclosed conflicts of interest, missing ethical approvals, and an extraordinary lack of institutional accountability. CDC never appears to have commissioned a serious independent reanalysis of the study designs, data, statistics, or conclusions after those facts became known. The vaccine court moved on. The government moved on. The children remained disabled, and their families were left to carry the cost for the rest of their lives. The full documentary history is examined in “Stolen Money, Missing Approvals.”

This is where sterile discussions of “claims” become morally evasive. A denied claim is still attached to a human being. Some claimants were unable to prove causation, and some may have been mistaken about the cause of an injury. Others faced the nearly impossible task of proving a complex biological event with incomplete clinical records, limited research, and no access to the internal evidence that ordinary litigation discovery might have produced. Some were too poor or didn’t know how to obtain legal counsel. When government and industry insist that only a very small number of injuries are genuinely attributable to vaccines, they should be willing to operate a system capable of identifying and generously compensating those individuals. Instead, the same institutional apparatus that describes serious injury as rare often makes proof of a rare injury prohibitively difficult.

Had these cases proceeded in ordinary civil court, manufacturers would have faced discovery, depositions, expert testimony before juries, and the possibility of damages reflecting pain, suffering, lost earning capacity, lifetime care, and punitive conduct where warranted. Not every claimant would have won. But successful catastrophic-injury cases could have produced awards many times larger than the capped or tightly calculated amounts available under federal programs. Compared with that potential exposure, the billions paid by VICP over nearly four decades amount to pennies on the dollar for an industry granted extraordinary protection from the ordinary consequences of selling a defective product.

Nor were those billions paid directly out of pharmaceutical-company profits. They came from an excise tax attached to vaccine sales, embedded in the product’s price and spread across the market. And we as taxpayers get to pay for it all. The public underwrites the vaccination program, assumes the risk of injury, finances the compensation system, and then watches government lawyers contest the claims of the injured. Manufacturers have largely walked away from the courtroom exposure that every other major industry regards as a cost of doing business.

The Bargain Congress Broke

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005, enacted within Public Law 109-148, added sections 319F-3 and 319F-4 to the Public Health Service Act. Section 319F-3 grants immunity for covered countermeasures. Section 319F-4 created CICP, which COVID vaccine injuries are adjudicated. On paper, Congress again paired immunity with compensation. In substance, it preserved the part that protects manufacturers and eliminated the part meant to protect injured people.

The 2005 PREP Act shield is broad in every direction. It covers manufacture, distribution, administration, and use, and it protects manufacturers, distributors, program planners, qualified persons who administer the products, and the United States itself. It reaches claims caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the use of a covered countermeasure. The nominal exception is willful misconduct, pursued through an exclusive federal cause of action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia under a standard that has never been met in a reported vaccine case.

Congress designed CICP differently from the beginning. The PREP Act, enacted on December 30, 2005, limited compensation to serious physical injury or death, demanded proof of direct causation based on “compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence,” excluded pain and suffering, and placed the process under the control of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. When HHS issued the program’s implementing regulations in 2010, it added the one-year filing deadline, detailed the internal reconsideration process, and made clear that the agency’s final eligibility decision was not subject to judicial review. CICP was not a generous program that later became restrictive. It was built that way.

Again, the deadline is one year from administration rather than VICP’s three years from the first manifestation of injury. That alone can defeat someone who spends months seeking a diagnosis, being passed from specialist to specialist, or being told that the symptoms are coincidental, psychological, or unrelated 

Most physicians were discouraged or even reprimanded by employers and health-care institutions during the pandemic from documenting a possible vaccine injury in the medical record, leaving patients without the very evidence the government would later demand as proof.

There is no comparable injury table for those who are COVID-19 vaccine-injured. The claimant must produce compelling, reliable, valid medical and scientific evidence without the ability to pay attorney fees from the award. Compensation is secondary to other payment sources, lost employment income is capped, and pain and suffering are excluded altogether.

Then comes the feature that should offend people across the political spectrum: a denial cannot be reviewed by a court. An unsuccessful VICP claimant may seek review by the Court of Federal Claims and then the Federal Circuit. A CICP claimant may not appeal. Government has closed the courthouse door, designed the replacement process, set the evidentiary burden, decided the claim, and insulated its denial from independent judicial scrutiny. Calling that compensation for a vaccine injury is a farce.

In 2005, Congress kept the protection for manufacturers and abandoned the promise it had made to the injured.It preserved the half of the 1986 bargain that benefits manufacturers and reduced the half intended for injured people to an administrative gesture. The consequences remained obscure until COVID-19 transformed a little-known countermeasures program into the only legal recourse for injuries arising from an unprecedented national vaccination campaign.

And Then COVID Happened

During the pandemic, Americans were repeatedly told that vaccination was not merely a private medical choice but a civic obligation. Federal agencies promoted the products. State and local governments imposed requirements in many settings. The federal government, universities, hospitals, corporations, and the military made vaccination a condition of education, participation, or employment. People lost their jobs, careers, schooling, military status, or ability to enter public life if they refused.

When serious injuries occurred, those same people discovered that the system for justice was non-existent. The authorities that had insisted upon vaccination did not build a transparent, accessible, adequately funded system prepared to care for the injured. Manufacturers were protected under the PREP Act. Employers and administrators operated under emergency policy. The injured person was left with CICP, its one-year deadline, its formidable causation standard, no paid lawyer, no damages for pain and suffering, and no judge empowered to review a denial.

This is why the fewer-than-1-percent figure matters. A program rejecting more than 99 percent of decided claims while concealing much of its case-specific reasoning should have to demonstrate that it is separating valid claims from invalid ones rather than merely separating injured people from compensation. The government demands evidence from claimants while providing remarkably little evidence that its own adjudication is fair.

For people who lost their health after doing what government, employers, physicians, and public campaigns urged or required, the abandonment is especially bitter. Many did not oppose vaccination. They trusted the system. Some participated precisely because they believed they were protecting others. Once injured, they encountered a bureaucracy far more certain of its reasons for denial than many physicians had ever been about diagnosis or treatment. They became inconvenient witnesses to a policy success story that had no room for damaged lives.

Who Really Pays for the Liability?

A liability shield does not eliminate the cost of injury. It transfers it. A manufacturer avoids unpredictable tort exposure while the injured person absorbs medical expenses, lost income, disability, and pain the compensation system does not cover. Families provide unpaid nursing care. Private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, disability programs, charities, churches, and local communities absorb other portions. The injury disappears from the manufacturer’s balance sheet and reappears everywhere else in society.

Litigation also does more than transfer money. Discovery can reveal what a manufacturer knew, when it knew it, how safety signals were evaluated, what was excluded from a trial, and how risks were described internally compared with how they were described to the public. Jury trials place those facts in an adversarial forum outside the agencies that approved, purchased, recommended, or promoted the product. When immunity prevents litigation, it suppresses not only damages but one of the principal mechanisms by which information about defective products reaches the public.

The excise tax in the 1986 system was intended to place some of the financial burden back on the product. Yet that tax has remained $0.75 per antigen since 1986 and has lost roughly two-thirds of its real value. Congress has increased the rate vaccine manufacturers must pay. Manufacturer protection remained extraordinarily valuable while the monies allocated to help the vaccine injured steadily shrank.

No Immunity Without a Real Remedy

Reform should begin with a principle simple enough for any member of Congress to understand: no immunity without meaningful compensation. If government eliminates the ordinary right to sue, the replacement cannot be an office that rejects more than 99 percent of decided claims, pays no attorney fees, excludes pain and suffering, and answers to no court. An administrative system may be faster and more predictable than tort litigation, but only if it is designed to deliver justice rather than simulate it. Only if the process and discovery is as transparent as the court system it is designed to replace.

Every PREP Act declaration should therefore be conditioned on a compensation system meeting minimum standards: at least three years to file, reasonable attorney fees for claims brought in good faith with a reasonable basis, a transparent presumption mechanism comparable to an injury table, compensation reflecting actual economic loss and catastrophic disability, and independent judicial review. CICP denials should be reviewable in the Court of Federal Claims under ordinary administrative-law standards. The program should also publish deidentified decisions explaining the evidence, reasoning, and standard applied to every denial. If its work is fair, transparency will vindicate it. If it is not, injured people should not have to guess how the government failed them.

VICP also requires repair. The excise tax should be adjusted and indexed to inflation, and compensation caps should reflect present-day losses rather than the value Congress assigned to death and suffering four decades ago. Department of Justice attorneys should stop treating the program as though its principal purpose were to defeat claimants. Congress promised a humane alternative to civil litigation, not years of publicly financed warfare against sick people and exhausted families.

The PREP Act contains one supposed escape from manufacturer immunity: “willful misconduct.” But this does not mean ordinary negligence, inadequate testing, failure to investigate a safety signal, or even reckless conduct. A claimant must prove an intentional act or omission taken knowingly, without legal or factual justification, and in disregard of a known or obvious risk so great that the harm was highly probable.

The claim may be filed only in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, must satisfy special pleading requirements, and is subject to an unusually demanding evidentiary standard. The exception has never succeeded in a reported vaccine case.

Congress should either create a standard that a person with credible evidence of deliberately concealed harm can realistically meet or admit that manufacturer immunity is effectively absolute. What we have now is public relations written into law. If credible evidence shows that a manufacturer deliberately concealed material harm, an injured person should have a practical route to court. 

None of these reforms requires Americans to agree about vaccine efficacy, autism, COVID policy, mandates, or the wisdom of any particular recommendation. One can believe vaccines have prevented disease and still insist that a society benefiting from them owes a profound debt to those seriously injured by them. 

Indeed, the stronger one’s belief in vaccination as a public good, the stronger the obligation should be. A public-health program cannot ask individuals to accept a small risk for everyone else and then treat the unlucky few as collateral damage when that risk becomes their life or death.

The Government Cannot Take Away a Right and Call It Justice

State legislatures require certain vaccines for school attendance and sometimes for employment. Federal agencies recommend and promote them; they even buy them in bulk for free distribution for school-aged children. During emergencies, public officials may pressure nearly every institution in the country to require them.

Congress then closes the courthouse door to people injured by vaccines and substitutes a remedy of its own design. Each of these acts is an exercise of public power over a private person, and each creates an obligation on the part of the state toward the sovereign individual.

That obligation does not vanish because causation is scientifically complicated, because acknowledging an injury is politically inconvenient, or because a claimant has received a diagnosis the compensation program does not recognize as vaccine-caused. A child with lifelong disability still needs lifelong care. A previously healthy adult who can no longer work still has a mortgage, a family, and a body that no longer functions as it did. People who did what authorities asked of them should not have to beg those same authorities to acknowledge their existence and their injuries.

The government cannot have this both ways. It cannot describe vaccination as a collective duty when demanding compliance and then redefine injury as a purely private misfortune when compensation is due. It cannot tell the public that serious injuries are exceedingly rare while constructing a claims process seemingly designed to ensure that exceedingly few are recognized. It cannot shield manufacturers from discovery, jury verdicts, reputational damage, and punitive exposure while pretending that a minuscule administrative payment leaves an injured family made whole, when it isn’t. 

The 1986 Congress decided that big pharma needed protecting from lawsuits. It protected vaccine supply, protected manufacturers, and created a funded remedy for those who paid the human price. The 2005 Congress’s program to address vaccine damage was flawed. COVID exposed what that choice meant on a national scale: manufacturers received extraordinary protection while injured Americans encountered a program that compensated fewer than one in a hundred decided claims.

These are not anti-vaccine statistics or pro-vaccine statistics. They measure whether the United States keeps faith with its own citizens. Big Pharma received something worth incalculable sums: protection from the civil-justice system and from verdicts that might have forced companies to pay the full price of the injuries their products caused. 

The victims received deadlines, caps, closed records, hostile burdens of proof, and far too often, rejection. Many were damaged for life. Some have spent years without meaningful compensation. Families caring for profoundly disabled children, including families who believed a vaccine contributed to an autism diagnosis or regression, were left to carry costs that no government ruling could make disappear. And frankly, people died from their vaccine injuries.

The bargain is not complicated. If the state takes away a citizen’s right to seek justice, the state assumes the duty to provide it. If industry wants immunity, it must bear the full and honest cost of the injuries caused by its products. Anything less is not public health. It is the privatization of profit and the profiteering of human suffering. Congress did not merely forget the injured. It built a system in which their losses could be denied, discounted, and ultimately ignored while one of the most powerful industries in America walked away protected.

This failure did not end with COVID. The liability shield now intersects with a federal strategy built around adaptable medical platforms, raising a new question: what happens when a manufacturer changes the genetic payload but retains much of the regulatory and legal architecture of the original product? 

That is the subject of the next essay.

RWM/JGM

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Investigations like this require time, document review, legal research, and a willingness to follow the evidence into places that powerful institutions would prefer remain unexplored. Malone News does not depend upon pharmaceutical advertising, government grants, or corporate sponsors. We depend upon our readers.

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Wudang Practical Tai Chi Chuan: Ian Cameron

DON’T KNOW, LETS GUESS.Paul Silfverstråle | Practical Tai Chi ChuanSep 12, 2026 View in app

Original post from Tai Chi Chuan Five Winds – Ian Cameron on Facebook.  I have often talked about the time I spent with Sifu Cheng Tin Hung and his students in the early seventies, the subsequent visits and how they went about their training. It was to give some idea of the environment and the attitude of his students toward their training. The reason behind my writing about it was in the hope that it might be approached in a similar way when transposed to these shores.It was very much a no frills school. Learning by doing was the way. Often after class, especially after Saturday morning training, it was off to a local restaurant for lunch and a bit of socialising.Never any talk or speculation about the where, how or the why or who zoomed who. It was just pleasant chat, then home. At that time there was no internet, forums, group chats or any other distractions, a blessing.The view from our apartment in HK was of a round fountain made up of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Each morning we would see a group of elderly women going through their swordform in front of this fountain. It was a pleasure to see them simply enjoying their morning exercise.The thing that always struck me was how matter of fact it all was. It was the same at Sifu Cheng’s gym, no theorising or analysing, just practice.Now however, we have endless opinions and chatter, mostly through these forums, of which I am happy to say, I hear about but have nothing to do with. There is no harm in enquiry, it’s when it turns in to speculation about what might have happened years ago between a student and teachers that things get out of shape. Did they get together to do this, that or the next thing? Who knows? If they did, why isn’t it known? No record of it so lets guess what might have occurred.The danger is things can become fabricated, exaggerated, what might have happened becomes ‘fact.’ People then begin to look for something that isn’t there, mysterious connections or some hidden ‘secret’ that never existed. People always love the mystery, the thing not being taught,what are we not being shown? Practicing Tai Chi isn’t enough, lets look for what we ‘don’t have.’Personally I have never had much time for so the called ‘secrets’ or the ‘hidden’ whatever. It was enough for me to just get on with what I learned at Sifu Cheng’s gym. He would show a technique such as White Snake Puts out its Tongue and the technique within it. It wasn’t a big deal he just demonstrated as matter of fact.Drape the Body, a ‘hidden’ technique? It is mentioned in a book by Xu Zhiyi (1958) and is called Drape the Body and Kick. Another technique from the same book: Cast Away Punch: Imagine the debate around that when it is simply Throw the Fist. This shows that names/language can change our perception of a technique. Drape the Body might just be describing the shape ofthe body prior to the kick. There doesn’t always have to be ‘mystery.’Everything is hidden until it is needed, then you will respond in some way, depending upon your level of training. Everything is ‘hidden’ in The Ready Stance.What we have right here is the practice and that should be the focus, not what might have or not taken place years ago. Tai Chi is all about practice and through practice we learn. No guessing needed, it is all there. Let Tai Chi be the teacher.If you look you can’t see it.If you listen you can’t hear it.If you grasp it you will lose it.Tao Te Ching.Ian Cameron

Congress Outlawed Cartels in 1890. It Has Run One Since 1929.

Most House races are decided before Election Day. Here is why.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE SEP 11

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Three hundred sixty-six of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are not seriously in play this November. The Cook Political Report, which handicaps congressional races for a living, rates them solid for one party or the other. Just twenty-one are genuine toss-ups.

Think about what that means. Five out of every six House races are effectively over before the first ballot is printed. In most of America, the decisive political act was not Election Day. It was drawing the district lines.

If you live in one of those 366 districts, your representative is extraordinarily unlikely to lose in November. The real danger comes in the primary, where turnout is a fraction of what it is in the general election. That changes who matters. Your representative answers first to the relatively small number of voters who actually show up for the party primary. If you belong to the other party, or simply skip the primary, you barely enter the political calculation.

You still get to vote in November, of course. You get the sticker. You get the ritual. But in practical terms, you have very little ability to fire the person supposedly representing you.

And here is where the system gets even more interesting.

Two private political organizations largely control whose names appear on those primary ballots and which candidates receive the money, infrastructure, endorsements, consultants, voter data, and institutional support necessary to win. Between them, they have divided nearly the entire American political marketplace. Neither organization appears anywhere in the Constitution.

Economists have a word for competitors who fight furiously over market share while sharing an enormous interest in keeping everyone else out of the market. They call it a cartel.

That is the part of American elections nobody is fighting about, and it is the part that matters the most.

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What the fight is about instead

The election integrity argument concerns the count. Voter identification, mail ballots, voter rolls, machine certification, audits after the fact. Those are real questions, and most of them belong to the states, where they have always belonged.

None of them touches the lines. Every congressional map in this year’s fight is constitutional. Districts come out equal in population to within a person or two, because the software that draws them is built to hit that number exactly. That is the entire federal standard. Count the people, make the numbers match. It says nothing about who drew the line, or why, or whether the winner was known a year in advance.

A clean count in a district drawn to produce a known result is a clean count of a question already settled.

Missouri’s eight days in court.

In September 2025, the Missouri legislature redrew the state’s congressional map in the middle of the decade, which is unusual, to eliminate the seat held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver. The new map would move Missouri from six Republicans and two Democrats to seven Republicans and one Democrat. It was not a general rule about how districts should look. The voters had not changed. The census had not changed. The politicians simply changed the electorate around the seat.

More than 305,000 Missourians signed petitions to force a public vote on the redistricting. Under the Missouri constitution, enough signatures suspend a law until voters decide. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins refused to certify the petitions and ran the August primary under the new map anyway.

On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Hoskins. The petitions had suspended the new map back in December, meaning it had never taken effect. On September 8, the deadline for printing ballots, Justice Kavanaugh rejected the state’s emergency appeal. Minutes later, however, a federal judge in St. Louis ordered Missouri to use the new map. An appeals court left that order in place. Two days later, on September 10, the Supreme Court blocked it in an unsigned order, with no explanation and no recorded dissents.

Missourians will vote in November under the lines drawn in 2022. But the August primary was conducted under the now-discarded 2025 map. That means some voters will vote in a different congressional district in November than they did in August, and some nominees will face voters who had no opportunity to participate in the primary that selected them.

Republicans did it in Missouri. Democrats did it in California.

Last year, California voters approved Proposition 50, setting aside the congressional maps drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replacing them with maps drawn by the Democratic-controlled legislature for elections through 2030.

Democrats defended the move as a response to Republican redistricting in Texas. Republicans defended Missouri’s redraw as part of the same national fight.

The pattern is difficult to miss. Neither party consistently opposes partisan redistricting. Each condemns it when the other party draws the lines and defends it when the advantage is its own.

Congress had the constitutional authority to intervene. It did not.

Instead, Missouri spent eight days bouncing between four courts while voters did not know which congressional districts would ultimately govern the election. The institution the Constitution expressly empowered to make or alter the rules never entered the fight.

Congress already has the power.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate congressional elections. Article I, Section 4 says the states set the times, places, and manner of those elections, but the very same sentence says Congress may “make or alter” those rules.

This is not a loophole or a modern interpretation. It is written into the Constitution itself, and the founders debated the provision publicly. Hamilton defended it in the Federalist Papers because leaving Congress entirely dependent upon rules made by the states could ultimately leave the federal government at their mercy.

Political parties, by contrast, have no constitutional role at all. The Constitution does not even mention them. The men who wrote it were deeply concerned about factions and the emergence of permanent political parties. Madison devoted Federalist 10 to the problem of faction. Washington later used his Farewell Address to warn against the “spirit of party.” The constitutional structure tied representation to states and congressional districts, not to two national party organizations dividing the country between them.

And Congress used the power the Constitution gave it. Beginning in 1842, Congress imposed federal requirements on how House members were elected. In 1872, it required congressional districts to contain roughly equal populations. In 1901, it required them to be compact, a restraint on the sprawling and contorted districts we now associate with gerrymandering. The 1911 law carried the single-member, contiguity, population, and compactness requirements forward.

Then Congress let those rules disappear. The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 made the allocation of House seats after each census automatic, ending the need for Congress to pass a new apportionment law every decade. But it included none of the previous federal standards governing how congressional districts were drawn. The 1941 law restored none of them. Congress finally restored the single-member-district requirement in 1967, amid concern about states using at-large elections.

The federal compactness requirement disappeared nearly a century ago. Congress has never restored it.

So yes, states normally administer elections. But congressional elections are constitutionally different. The Constitution gives states the first move and Congress the final authority to “make or alter” their rules. Congress once used that authority to set national standards for congressional districts.

It could do so again.

The Court tried to fix the problem and then quit halfway.

The federal courts eventually imposed the rule Congress had abandoned: equal population. By the early 1960s, some legislative districts contained vastly more people than others, while the legislators who benefited from those disparities had little incentive to change them.

In 1962, the Supreme Court opened the federal courthouse door to reapportionment challenges. Two years later, it required congressional districts within a state to contain roughly equal populations. The principle became known as “one person, one vote.”

But equal population governs the numbers, not the shape of the district.Every map in this year’s fight can satisfy the population rule while still being drawn for partisan advantage.

For decades, litigants tried to persuade federal courts to police partisan gerrymandering as well. In 2019, the Supreme Court said no. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts had no neutral, manageable constitutional standard for deciding how much partisan advantage was too much. Partisan-gerrymandering claims, the Court held, were beyond the reach of federal courts.

But Roberts did not say there was no remedy. He pointed directly back to Congress. The Framers had given Congress the power to address partisan gerrymandering through the Elections Clause, he wrote, and Congress had used that power before. “That avenue for reform,” the Court concluded, “remains open.”

Seven years later, Congress has not even attempted reform.

Why Congress prefers the system it has

The people with the power to fix congressional redistricting are often the people who benefit from leaving it alone.

Call your representative’s office and ask Congress to take up redistricting. You may be told that redistricting is a matter for the courts. But in 2019, the Supreme Court said federal courts would not police partisan gerrymandering. The responsibility circles back to Congress, and the circle closes.

Economist James M. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for developing public-choice theory, which applied economic analysis to political decision-making. His central insight was simple: politicians respond to incentives just as everyone else does. The people who write the rules have interests of their own.

That is the problem here. Neutral rules are easiest to adopt before anyone knows who will benefit from them.

Eighty-four percent of House seats are rated safe. A member sitting in one of them has little political incentive to make that seat more competitive. And the system protecting that member is the very system Congress would have to regulate.

The same incentive exists at the party level. The two parties would be writing rules that could take away districts they currently draw to their own advantage.

Congress has done this before.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed on September 14, 2001, three days after the attacks. It turns twenty-five on Monday. Five administrations have stretched it to cover groups that did not exist when it was written. Repealing it would take a majority and an afternoon.

The National Emergencies Act tells a similar story. In 1976, Congress gave itself the power to terminate a presidentially declared emergency by concurrent resolution, without a presidential signature. After the Supreme Court invalidated that kind of legislative veto in 1983, Congress amended the law to require a joint resolution, which the president can veto. Ending an emergency over a president’s objection therefore requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers.

The pattern is the same. Congress has constitutional and statutory powers that it can exercise, amend, reclaim, or restructure. When it declines to act, other institutions make the consequential decisions instead.

Congress holds a power, declines to use it, and somebody else fills the power vacuum. Nobody seized these powers. They were given away by Congress.

What Congress could do tomorrow

Congress does not need a constitutional amendment, a new agency, or new authority. It could write the rules now.

It could require congressional maps to respect county and municipal boundaries. Those lines were not designed for partisan advantage. They accumulated over generations around rivers, market towns, and courthouses, and often reflect communities that already conduct their affairs together. Carl Menger called institutions like these organic: they carry knowledge nobody planned and nobody can reproduce on demand. A county line tells us something about a community. A line drawn to eliminate one congressman tells us who drew it.

Congress could also repeal the 1967 requirement that every congressional district elect only one House member. That is what a “single-member district” means: one district, one seat, one winner. Gerrymandering depends heavily on that structure because mapmakers can manipulate who wins each seat by packing opponents into some districts and spreading them thinly across others. That becomes much harder when a larger district elects several representatives instead of just one.

Most important, Congress could make any new rules take effect years from now. A law governing maps drawn after the 2030 census would bind a future Congress whose partisan composition and political geography cannot be known with certainty today. A delayed start recreates some of the uncertainty that makes neutral rules easier to accept. It also addresses the immediate objection from either party: neither side has to change the rules solely for the other’s benefit.

Why Congress has not fixed it.

Congress can change these rules. The political incentives run in the opposite direction.

The people who would have to change the system include those who benefit from it. Buchanan’s objection was fundamental: ordinary legislation is a weak restraint when the people being restrained retain the power to rewrite it. Durable rules are easiest to establish when nobody knows in advance who will benefit.

That is the problem with redistricting. Of the 435 House races this November, 366 are currently rated Solid for one party or the other. In most districts, the decisive political competition occurs before the general election. A perfectly accurate count does not change the boundaries within which those votes are cast. Voter ID does not change them. An audit does not change them. The argument over election integrity largely begins after the political geography has already been decided.

Missouri and California are not opposing principles. Republican officials pursued a mid-decade redraw in Missouri; Democratic officials pursued one in California. Each case used different procedures and arose in different circumstances, but both demonstrate the same structural fact: political parties have powerful incentives to seek favorable district lines when the law allows them to do so.

That brings us back to where we started. The parties compete fiercely over who controls the lines. The harder question is who writes the rules governing the lines themselves. The Constitution gives Congress that power. For nearly a century, Congress has largely declined to use it.

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References

Apportionment Act of 1842, 5 Stat. 491.

Apportionment Act of 1872, 17 Stat. 28.

Apportionment Act of 1901, 31 Stat. 733.

Apportionment Act of 1911, 37 Stat. 13.

Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. 107-40 (2001).

Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962).

Brennan Center for Justice. 2026. “Declared National Emergencies Under the National Emergencies Act.” Last updated September 2.

Buchanan, James M. 1979. “Politics Without Romance.” Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna.

Buchanan, James M., and Roger D. Congleton. 1998. Politics by Principle, Not Interest. Cambridge University Press.

Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent. University of Michigan Press.

Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946).

Cook Political Report. 2026. “2026 House Race Ratings.” Last updated August 25.

Hamilton, Alexander. 1788. Federalist No. 59.

INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983).

Madison, James. 1787. Federalist No. 10.

Menger, Carl. 1883. Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences.

National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1601 et seq.

People Not Politicians and Richard von Glahn v. Denny Hoskins, Supreme Court of Missouri, September 3, 2026.

Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, 46 Stat. 21.

Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).

Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019).

Uniform Congressional District Act, 2 U.S.C. § 2c (1967).

Washington, George. 1796. Farewell Address.

Wood v. Broom, 287 U.S. 1 (1932).

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✍🏻 Federal Register: Comment on a Proposed rule for the Census

Comments due 10/13/2026

NANCY D CHURCHILL SEP 11

READ IN APP

The Census Bureau proposed new rules on September 10, 2026, for the 2030 census.

SOURCE: READ THE FEDERAL REGISTER HERE

The rule covers two things: who counts as having a “usual residence” for House apportionment, and what demographic questions can appear on the short-form questionnaire. Comments are due October 13, 2026.

There are two parts to consider:
I. Proposed Residence Criteria

II. Proposed Restrictions on the Inclusion of Certain Demographic Questions in the Decennial Census Operation

The core change is this: U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (green-card holders) would be counted where they lawfully live most of the time. Most other foreign nationals would not be counted for apportionment, including people here illegally and people whose legal status is less durable than a green card.

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What you should know:

Every ten years the government counts people so it can decide how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives. The Constitution says to count the “persons in each State.” For a long time the Census Bureau counted almost everyone living here on Census Day, including people who are not citizens and people who are here illegally.

This new proposal says a person should only count if they have a real, lasting home in the United States and a strong enough legal tie to the country. That means:

• American citizens count.
• People with green cards count.
• People here illegally do not count for the House-seat numbers.
• Many people here on temporary visas, pending asylum, or other short-term status also would not count.

The Bureau would use tax records, Homeland Security records, and other government files to figure out who belongs in which group. The proposal also says the short census form should not ask about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. It can still ask about sex at birth, date of birth, and who lives in the house.

The Bureau says this matches the original idea of “usual residence” from the first census in 1790 and later court cases that talk about allegiance and a lasting home.

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How the rule would help or hurt American citizens, and how it treats non-citizens in apportionment

How it would help American citizens

Apportionment decides political power: House seats and Electoral College votes. When large numbers of non-citizens (especially people here illegally) are added to a state’s total, that state can gain seats even if its citizen population is smaller or growing more slowly. States with fewer illegal residents lose relative power. Citizens in those states get less say in Congress and presidential elections.

This rule tries to stop that. It would count people who are part of the political community (citizens and those given durable permission to stay) and leave out people whose presence the government itself treats as unlawful or temporary. That is the point of the “allegiance” and “inhabitants / body politic” argument in the proposal.

It would also reduce the political payoff for policies that attract or retain large illegal populations. If those populations no longer add House seats, the incentive to treat them as a source of representation shrinks.

Using tax and immigration records instead of relying only on a self-reported form could also make the count harder to game and less dependent on neighborhood-by-neighborhood cooperation.

How it could hurt or create problems

The Constitution’s text says “persons,” not “citizens.” Courts have long allowed the Bureau to count residents regardless of legal status. This rule will be sued immediately. A long court fight could delay planning for 2030 or force last-minute changes.

Some people living here legally but without green cards (certain visa holders, students, refugees with pending cases) would be left out of the apportionment total even if they work, pay some taxes, and have lived here for years. Imperfect records could misclassify people.

Federal funding formulas often use total-population numbers from the census or related estimates. This rule is written for the apportionment count, not every funding stream, but critics will argue it still distorts resources. Participation could drop if households fear that answering will expose immigration status.

In short: the rule protects citizen representation in the House and Electoral College if it survives the courts and is implemented accurately. It does so by treating most non-citizens without green cards as lacking the “usual residence” and allegiance the Bureau now says the Constitution requires. That is a real change from 2020 practice, which counted foreign citizens “living in” the United States without regard to legal status.

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YOUR VOICE MATTERS! TAKE ACTION TODAY 🚨

CLICK HERE TO COMMENT by October 13, 2026! 

Keep comments polite, specific, and in your own words. These sample comments are drafts you can copy or adapt.

Comment 1 — Constitutional purpose

I support the proposed residence criteria. The decennial census exists first to apportion the House among the states based on the people who actually belong to the political community of each state. Counting people who are here illegally, or who hold only temporary permission, inflates some states’ numbers and steals representation from citizens in other states. “Usual residence” has always included an element of lasting tie and allegiance. People who the government itself says may not remain here do not have that tie. Please adopt the rule so the 2030 count matches the Constitution’s purpose instead of rewarding illegal presence.

Comment 2 — Fairness to citizens and states

American citizens should not lose House seats and electoral votes because another state has a large population of people who entered or stayed in violation of federal law. That is what happens under the old “count everyone living here” approach. The proposed rule correctly includes U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents and excludes illegal aliens and those with less durable status. That is fair to the citizens who vote, pay taxes as members of the body politic, and live under our laws. I urge the Bureau to finalize these criteria and use administrative records from DHS and Treasury so the count is accurate and not based on self-reports that can be gamed.

Comment 3 — Process and records

I support both parts of this proposal. The census should not be turned into a social survey about race or sexual orientation when its core job is a headcount for apportionment. More important, the residence rules should stop treating illegal presence as if it created a “usual residence” equal to that of a citizen or green-card holder. I am concerned that past counts mixed people with no lawful claim to remain into the numbers that decide political power. Using tax records and immigration files is a better, more objective way to apply the rules. Please keep the exclusion of illegal aliens and non-durable statuses and do not weaken it during the comment period.

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Thoughts from X: 

Foreign-born numbers fell — midterms (and the census) decide next

Synopsis: Hard numbers put immigration at the center of the midterms and the next census fight. The country saw negative net migration for the first time in about a century, with millions of illegal aliens gone and the foreign-born population down. Several posts push to exclude illegal aliens from the census. 

• @johncwright2001 lists the scoreboard: negative net migration for the first time in 100 years; about 6 million illegal aliens gone; foreign-born population down by about 3 million; Laken Riley Act signed; catch-and-release ended; record-low border encounters. 

John Wright@johncwright2001Just a reminder to the blackpillers: Negative net migration for the first time in 100 years. 6 million illegal aliens gone. Foreign-born population down by 3 million; Laken Riley Act signed into law. Catch-and-release ended. Record-low border encounters; Violent crime…7:55 AM · Sep 7, 2026 · 111K Views154 Replies · 983 Reposts · 4.1K Likes

• Eric Daugherty highlights the importance of this proposed rule:

Eric Daugherty@EricLDaugh🚨 BREAKING: The Trump administration just filed to have the US Census ONLY COUNT CITIZENS and permanent residents — not illegal aliens — which could carry massive consequences for the Electoral College and US House representation 2030 CENSUS IS HUGE. It will help determine the …7:22 PM · Sep 9, 2026 · 444K Views572 Replies · 4.86K Reposts · 24.2K Likes

• @profstonge argues illegal aliens should be excluded from the census. 

Peter St Onge, Ph.D.@profstongeExcluding illegals from the census should have happened a long time ago. Visiting tourists shouldn’t be in the census, and visiting criminals shouldn’t either.zerohedge @zerohedgeTrump Admin Proposes Excluding Illegal Immigrants From Census Count https://t.co/W0ovX7ImeX10:38 PM · Sep 10, 2026 · 35K Views48 Replies · 475 Reposts · 3.05K Likes

Let us know what you think of today’s newsletter: 

Leave a comment

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Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the lead educator at Influencing Olympia Effectively. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. You can also connect with her on Substackand X. The opinions expressed in Influencing Olympia are her own.

SOURCES:

1. A Proposed Rule by the Census Bureau. This document has a comment period that ends on October 13, 2026.

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Republicans do not have an accomplishment problem. They have an information problem. Midterms are coming, and too many Republican voters cannot easily name even three things President Trump has accomplished. Fortunately, he has done more in a year and a half than most presidents do in four years…

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Friday Funnies: Trust me

I’m from the Government

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE

SEP 11, 2026

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My liberal facebook friends are all into puppies (and horses), but children… not so much. 

I think that speaks volumes…

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The American experiment was never supposed to be an experiment in how much responsibility could be transferred from citizens to government. It rested on almost the opposite proposition: that a free people could govern themselves, care for their communities, solve problems locally, and voluntarily cooperate without waiting for direction from a distant bureaucracy. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this as one of the most remarkable characteristics of America when he traveled the young nation in the 1830s. Americans, he observed, were extraordinary association-builders. When they wanted a church, school, hospital, road, charitable organization, civic improvement, or political reform, they formed a group and did something about it.

This dense network of families, churches, voluntary associations, businesses, towns, and local institutions created a civil society strong enough that government did not have to occupy every corner of life. The American experiment was always about self-rule, otherwise known as self-sovereignty.

Volunteerism builds citizenship because people retain both responsibility and agency. Big government progressively replaces both. The American experiment depends not merely upon elections and constitutional language, but upon preserving a people sufficiently independent, prosperous, cohesive, and self-reliant to govern themselves. Once citizens become clients of the state and communities surrender their functions to centralized bureaucracies, we may retain the outward machinery of a republic while losing much of what made the republic possible in the first place.

But a culture must first understand the principles of volunteerism and the importance of governing itself. Self-government is not simply a constitutional arrangement. It is a learned behavior, passed from one generation to the next.

Ronald Reagan may have articulated the fragility of that inheritance best when he warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Liberty does not perpetuate itself. A nation is only as capable of self-government as its people are willing and able to assume the responsibilities that self-government requires. Citizens must understand that freedom comes with obligations: to family, neighbors, community, local institutions, and ultimately the nation itself. When those habits disappear, government (and in particular, the courts) inevitably moves into the vacuum.

This is also why immigration and immigration policy cannot be separated from culture. America has historically absorbed enormous numbers of immigrants, but successful immigration required something more than crossing a border and finding employment. It required assimilation into the American experiment. 

Orderly immigration gives a nation the ability to decide how many newcomers it can successfully absorb and provides newcomers the time and institutional structure necessary to learn the language, laws, history, customs, and civic expectations of their new country. That means they must want to become Americans and participate in the American experiment.

Flooding a nation with newcomers faster than assimilation can reasonably occur is something fundamentally different. Many immigrants may be admirable, industrious people seeking better lives, but they cannot reasonably be expected to arrive already understanding Tocqueville’s America: voluntary associations, limited government, local responsibility, constitutional restraint, private property, individual liberty, and the expectation that citizens govern themselves rather than look automatically to the state. Those ideas are culturally transmitted.

If immigration occurs faster than the receiving society can transmit them, America risks importing populations without successfully creating Americans in the civic sense. The issue, therefore, is that the immigration wave became so large and rapid over the past fifty years that the American experiment itself has been diluted before newcomers have even had the opportunity to understand it.

In the terrible days after September 11, 2001, Americans were reminded of something we had begun to forget: what it meant to be American. For a brief time, the labels that divide us mattered less than the country that united us. Flags appeared on porches, strangers helped strangers, churches filled, and firefighters, police officers, soldiers, and ordinary citizens became our heroes. 

We remembered that America is more than a government or a piece of land. It is a shared inheritance of liberty, courage, sacrifice, and responsibility to one another. Perhaps the lesson of 9/11 worth remembering today is that we should not need another tragedy to remember who we are.

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“And I proud to be an American…” God bless the USA”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0Japc8M8RQw?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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Let’s see who figures it out first!

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JGM

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