Everett Chiropractic Center Blog

Jason Rantz on Seattle Red@jasonrantzSeattle taxes jumped 172% since 2013 while population grew just 31%, new report findsseattlered.comSeattle taxes up 172% since 2013, far outpacing growth

Story One: A Revenue Problem or a Spending Problem?

Synopsis: Is Washington short on money, or spending too much of it?

A new report finds Seattle’s taxes grew 172% from 2013 to 2025, while population grew 31% and jobs grew 23%. Vijay notes the city’s collections went from $900 million in 2013 to $2.8 billion in 2026 and asks whether any service got better.

Now King County is adding a new countywide sales tax: the County Council passed it 6-3 without a public vote, and starting Jan. 1, 2027, it is expected to raise about $10 million a year for shelter, rental assistance, and family support, pushing Seattle’s sales tax to 10.56%.

At the state level, Ryan Frost of the Washington Policy Center says spending outside K-12 has grown nearly three times as fast as school funding since 2019, accounting for nearly three-quarters of budget growth. Supporters of the new county tax say rising family homelessness and limited shelter space demand more funding. Critics say families are already paying some of the highest costs in the state, and Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

From the Bookmarks:

Jason Rantz: “Seattle taxes jumped 172% since 2013 while population grew just 31%, new report finds.”

1:48 PM · Oct 7, 2026 · 4.69K Views26 Replies · 90 Reposts · 294 Likes

FOX 13 Seattle: taxes grew 172% between 2013 and 2025, “compared with 31% population growth and 23% employment growth.”

FOX 13 Seattle@fox13seattleThe report found that Seattle taxes grew 172% between 2013 and 2025, compared with 31% population growth and 23% employment growth.fox13seattle.comReport: Taxes in Seattle have grown 5 times faster than population

5:15 PM · Oct 5, 2026 · 90.9K Views142 Replies · 201 Reposts · 785 Likes

Vijay: “Yet is there anyone who believes that a single service got better in Seattle?”

Vijay@VijayInWA”Seattle’s tax collections more than tripled from $900 million in 2013 to $2.8 billion in 2026, outpacing population growth by over five times.” Yet is there anyone who believes that a single service got better in Seattle? Did school outcomes improve? Did crime go down?

FOX 13 Seattle @fox13seattleThe report found that Seattle taxes grew 172% between 2013 and 2025, compared with 31% population growth and 23% employment growth. https://t.co/ukMwaBdtga2:22 AM · Oct 6, 2026 · 50.8K Views53 Replies · 219 Reposts · 2.19K Likes

Beth Dutton: “King County just raised your sales tax. You didn’t get a vote.”

Future 42 lays out Ordinance 2026-0086.2, a new 0.01% countywide sales tax for shelter and housing.

Ryan Frost: “Lawmakers need to explain why the rest of state government costs $21 billion more per biennium than it did just six years ago.”

Matt McIlwain: “WA has a spending problem not a revenue problem.”

Matt McIlwain@mattmcilwainwhy voting Yes on I-645 is so important. WA has a spending problem not a revenue problem. state income tax not till 2028 and we already have MASSIVE tax increase.geekwire.comSeattle’s tax burden shifted to business as jobs slipped away, new report finds

7:40 PM · Oct 5, 2026 · 1.79K Views7 Replies · 32 Reposts · 145 Likes

Rip Wheeler on a three-day rental car: “That $149.94 rental became $186.06.”

A Revenue Problem or a Spending Problem?

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GeekWire@geekwireOpinion: Washington’s new state income tax must be repealedgeekwire.comOpinion: Washington’s new state income tax must be repealed

Story Two: Can a Governor’s Promise Protect Your Paycheck?

Synopsis: If the governor promises to protect the $1 million threshold, does that settle it?

Gov. Bob Ferguson says he’ll veto any lower threshold or higher rate while he’s in office, but Vote Yes 645 points out that lawmakers rejected writing those limits into the constitution, and future governors aren’t bound by today’s promises.

Brian Heywood highlights Sen. Manka Dhingra, a prime sponsor of the tax, who he says once wrote on her campaign website that a progressive income tax is unconstitutional; asked by KIRO 7 whether people might leave, she compared the tax to fee increases at Amazon and Netflix.

A GeekWire op-ed says the new income tax must be repealed, and the Citizen Action Defense Fund says its court challenge will be heard Feb. 5, 2027.

The ballot also carries five state Supreme Court seats, including Position 5, where Ferguson appointee Theo Angelis faces Judge Dave Larson. Supporters of the tax say it only reaches the very top. Critics say voters have rejected an income tax ten times in 93 years and should get the final word.

From the Bookmarks:

Vote Yes 645: “Future governors aren’t bound by today’s promises.”

Brian Heywood on Sen. Manka Dhingra: “on her campaign website until just earlier this year she asserted that a progressive income tax is unconstitutional.”

GeekWire: “Opinion: Washington’s new state income tax must be repealed.”

4:51 PM · Oct 7, 2026 · 28.4K Views21 Replies · 67 Reposts · 360 Likes

Citizen Action Defense Fund: “The fight over Washington’s income tax heads to court on February 5, 2027.”

Viet Nguyen: “WA voters have rejected state income taxes 10 times over the last 93 years.”

PNW Conservative: under Janus v. AFSCME (2018), Washington public employees can opt out of union membership and dues.

PNW Conservative@PNWConservativeIt should be noted that Washington law allows public employees to opt out of union membership. U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME (2018) gave employees the option to opt out of membership and paying the outrageous dues, which are just a money laundering scheme for

The Center Square Washington @TCSWashington5,000 Washington public employees left their unions last year. With dues often $1,000 or more a year, many not wanting to fund politics they disagree with.7:39 PM · Oct 7, 2026 · 5.07K Views15 Replies · 70 Reposts · 257 Likes

King County GOP on Supreme Court Position 5: Ferguson appointee Theo Angelis vs. Judge Dave Larson and his “18 years of proven judicial experience.”

Can a Governor’s Promise Protect Your Paycheck?

Beth Dutton@1BethDuttonTwo 16-year-old girls walked off the line in Camas rather than race a boy. Initiative 638 is the November vote. Yes keeps boys off the girls’ team. They shouldn’t have had to choose.

Story Three: Girls Walk Off the Line in Camas

Synopsis: What should a 16-year-old girl do when she’s told to race a boy?

Beth Dutton reports two 16-year-old girls in Camas walked off the starting line rather than race against a male runner. Five female athletes who say they faced male competitors or shared locker rooms with them spoke out in Vancouver ahead of the vote, the Columbian’s Matt Calkins reports.

Brandi Kruse is urging Washington voters to vote yes on I-638, and John Braun says Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has voted against policies that would keep men out of women’s sports. Supporters of I-638 say girls shouldn’t have to choose between competing and fairness.

From the Bookmarks:

Beth Dutton: “Two 16-year-old girls walked off the line in Camas rather than race a boy. … They shouldn’t have had to choose.”

Brandi Kruse @BrandiKruseSierra and Charlie are breaking their silence. The 16-year-old cross-country runners chose to WALK OFF the starting line rather than race a biological boy from Camas, Washington.1:15 AM · Oct 8, 2026 · 7.11K Views50 Replies · 152 Reposts · 897 Likes

Matt Calkins: “five female athletes who have faced biological males in sports and/or shared a locker rooms with them spoke out in Vancouver.”

Matt Calkins@Matt_CalkinsAhead of a historic vote in Washington state, five female athletes who have faced biological males in sports and/or shared a locker rooms with them spoke out in Vancouver.foxnews.comWomen who faced biological males in girls’ sports and locker rooms speak out ahead of Washington state vote

2:21 PM · Oct 6, 2026 · 27.9K Views16 Replies · 99 Reposts · 764 Likes

Brandi Kruse: “Vote YES for girls and for common sense.”

Brandi Kruse: “Gee, which one is the boy?”

John Braun on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: “She campaigns like a moderate and votes like a liberal.”

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The Roundup for Wed Oct 7, 2026 (Trump Accounts)

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 2:39 pm

The best of Washington on X: A wrestler goes to the Supreme Court, $1 million per household, Watching the count

NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 7

Rip Wheeler@WheelerRipWAThe weak minded half boys take scholarships, accolades, and pride away from these amazing girls. When will the experiment end? A Camas High School athlete raced on the boys’ cross country team, then switched to the girls’ team mid-season and is now ranked second among female…3:14 AM · Oct 7, 2026 · 480 Views6 Reposts · 17 Likes

Story One: Who Protects Washington’s Girls on the Mat?

Synopsis: Should a 15-year-old girl have to wrestle a boy without anyone telling her?

Kallie Keeler, a Washington teen wrestler, is asking the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency order after a federal judge and the Ninth Circuit refused to stop officials from matching her against male athletes this season.

She alleges a trans-identified male opponent sexually assaulted her during a December 2025 girls’ match, and she and her mom say no one told them the opponent was male.

Closer to home, posts describe a Camas High School runner who switched from the boys’ to the girls’ cross-country team mid-season and is now ranked at or near the top of the girls’ field. Brian Heywood says the teachers union is spending big against I-638, and Olympic rower Carol Brown is speaking up for girls’ sports.

Women’s groups have also filed a Supreme Court brief in the Olympus Spa case over Washington’s rules on sex-separated spaces. Supporters of I-638 say girls deserve fair play and privacy. Opponents, including the teachers union, are urging a no vote.

From the Bookmarks:

Jaimee Michell reports Kallie Keeler’s emergency request: “The district refused to promise she wouldn’t face a male again, or even to warn her mom first.”

Brandi Kruse: the Camas runner “went from being the 76th ranked boy to being the 1st ranked ‘girl’ … all in the same season.”

Rip Wheeler shares Clark County Today’s report that the athlete is now ranked second among female runners.

Brian Heywood: “The teachers union is spending big money to tell these girls to shut up and just train harder.”

Brian Heywood – That Damn Mormon@bkheywoodThe teachers union is spending big money to tell these girls to shut up and just train harder Boys do not belong in girls locker rooms, on their podiums, or taking their scholarships. Vote Yes I-638 to protect girls sports

Let’s Go Washington @letsgowaHere’s some of the girls the opposition wants to erase. They’d rather attack them and silence their voices than stand up for fairness in their sports. We won’t be silenced. Vote YES on I-638 to protect their sports and spaces.3:53 AM · Oct 6, 2026 · 1.73K Views5 Replies · 75 Reposts · 220 Likes

Brian Heywood shares an interview with Olympic rower Carol Brown on why protecting girls’ sports matters.

Erin Friday says women’s groups filed a Supreme Court brief in the Olympus Spa case, arguing Washington law opens “every sex-separated space” to males.

Erin Friday, Esq.@ErinFriday75490Today, Our Duty, DIAG, and Womenarereal filed a brief in the Olympus Spa case in which a male who claims to be a female wants to parade around naked with naked females who do not want him there. Washington non-discrimination laws make every sex-separated spaces open to males.…12:05 AM · Oct 6, 2026 · 33K Views29 Replies · 138 Reposts · 773 Likes

Who Protects Washington’s Girls on the Mat?

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Let’s Go Washington@letsgowaIt’s not a $1 million deduction per person, it’s per household. And if sitting legislators have anything to say about it, that amount will drop significantly and quickly. Stop their money grabs – vote yes on I-645.

Story Two: $1 Million Per Person, or Per Household?

Synopsis: Is the “millionaires’ tax” really about millionaires?

Let’s Go Washington points out the $1 million deduction is per household, not per person, and PNW Conservative says Washington Democrats are openly talking about lowering it to $250,000 per household.

Steve Gordon asks why, if no retiree makes $1 million, lawmakers removed 11 protections that kept retirement income from being taxed. Viet Nguyen reports $11.5 million is being spent to keep the tax, $10.4 million of it from unions, including unions that bargain with the state.

Vote Yes 645 notes voters rejected ten income-tax proposals from 1934 to 2010, and this one was passed without a vote of the people. Joe Wallin reminds readers that five state Supreme Court seats on the Nov. 3 ballot could decide whether income is property under the constitution.

Supporters of the tax say it reaches only the wealthiest. Critics say the line is already moving.

From the Bookmarks:

Let’s Go Washington: “It’s not a $1 million deduction per person, it’s per household.”

Joe Wallin @joewallinA $1 million deduction is a number in a statute. Rep. Cindy Ryu has already proposed reaching households at $250,000. Married couples share one deduction. Two paychecks, one threshold. The threshold can move. Vote YES on I-645.11:13 PM · Oct 6, 2026 · 1.94K Views1 Reply · 43 Reposts · 144 Likes

PNW Conservative: Democrats support lowering the threshold “from $1,000,000 per household to $250,000 per household.”

PNW Conservative@PNWConservativeWashington Democrats are openly supporting lowering the income tax from $1,000,000 per household 👇 $250,000 per household. They say $250,000 is “enough” for a family. Is it?1:20 PM · Oct 6, 2026 · 5.06K Views20 Replies · 27 Reposts · 65 Likes

Steve Gordon: “No retiree is making $1,000,000. So why remove the 11 protections that kept them from being taxed?”

Viet Nguyen: “$10.4 million of it is union money, including unions that bargain their contracts with the state.”

Vote Yes 645: “Lawmakers enacted a new income tax without first submitting it to voters.”

Joe Wallin on Culliton (1933) and Quinn (2023): “Same Constitution. Different label.”

Joe Wallin@joewallin1933: Culliton held income is property, so the uniformity rule and the one-percent limit apply. 2023: Quinn called a tax on gains an excise. Same Constitution. Different label. The label decides whether the limits apply. Five Supreme Court seats are on your ballot. Vote by Nov 3.2:33 PM · Oct 6, 2026 · 558 Views2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 15 Likes

$1 Million Per Person, or Per Household?

Family Policy Institute of Washington@FPIWThe WA Governor and the Secretary of State have received notice of accountability from the Trump Administration: You will be held liable for elections that lack integrity. Thank you, Glen Morgan, for this report.youtube.comHarmeet Dhillon (DOJ) confronts WA Sec of State Hobbs with legal threats for illegal voters…

Story Three: Who’s Watching the Count?

Synopsis: Who will be watching when Washington’s ballots are counted?

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon says the DOJ Civil Rights Division is sending trained monitors for the midterms in what she calls the largest monitoring effort in history.

The Family Policy Institute of Washington, citing Glen Morgan’s reporting, says Gov. Ferguson and Secretary of State Hobbs have been put on notice by the Trump administration that they’ll be held liable for elections that lack integrity.

Benny Johnson highlights Scott Presler’s method in Pennsylvania: matching people disqualified from jury duty as noncitizens against the voter rolls, which led to thousands of removals. The Election Integrity Network urges families with loved ones in nursing homes or memory care to ask who helps residents vote and how consent is confirmed.

Supporters say more eyes mean more trust. Critics of federal monitors say states run their own elections.

From the Bookmarks:

Harmeet Dhillon: “This will be the largest monitoring effort in history!”

Family Policy Institute of Washington: the governor and secretary of state “will be held liable for elections that lack integrity.”

8:58 PM · Oct 6, 2026 · 17.9K Views8 Replies · 82 Reposts · 324 Likes

Benny Johnson explains how Scott Presler used non-juror records to remove noncitizens from Pennsylvania’s rolls.

Election Integrity Network: “Make one phone call today. Ask the facility who assists residents with voting, how consent is confirmed.”

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Influencing Olympia Effectively

A Proposed Rule by the Internal Revenue Service on 09/30/2026…

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A Desperate Campaign Spreads Rural Healthcare Lies

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: healthcare, philosophy, politics — doctordilday @ 2:19 pm

They say he cut rural care. The law he voted for is sending rural money here.

NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 7

A postcard landed in Eastern Washington mailboxes with a shout in big type: “BAUMGARTNER CUT YOUR HEALTHCARE.” Under that, a line about Ritzville giving up inpatient beds to survive. Then a local jab: “Our Republic community already pays $400,000 in local taxes to Ferry County Hospital. Michael Baumgartner wants you to pay more.”

Who paid for the scare? The fine print says the card was brought to you by eastern Washington residents and paid for by “Together for Working People” from a P.O. box in Seattle—a Seattle based political action committee manipulating elections in Eastern Washington.

The hospital that dropped inpatient beds is not in Republic. Ferry County Memorial Hospital is still a Critical Access Hospital. It is a 25-bed hospital with an emergency room, general medicine beds, and two cardiac and intensive care beds. Washington has one rural emergency hospital. It is not in Ferry County.

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Ritzville’s Trouble Started at Home

The postcard points at East Adams Rural Healthcare in Ritzville and treats the loss of inpatient beds as proof that Congress cut care.

In late 2025, that hospital faced a severe financial crisis. Leaders found $13.4 million in hidden losses from 2022 to 2024. The cause was administrative mismanagement and concealed audits. The CEO was terminated. More than 100 employees were laid off. A WARN notice in November 2025 warned of possible closure or bankruptcy by January 7, 2026.

Read the dates. Those hidden losses ran from 2022 to 2024. That debt was on the books before this Congress and before President Trump’s second term. A corrupt CEO and near bankruptcy is not the same as a vote in Washington, D.C.

To avoid collapse, the hospital took a $2 million grant from the Washington State Hospital Distressed Fund. It reclassified from a Critical Access Hospital to a Rural Emergency Hospital. Federal approval came in April 2026. The new designation raises Medicare reimbursement. It also requires the end of inpatient care and swing beds.

That was the trade the local board made to stay open. By early 2026 the hospital was back in the black. It ended 2025 with $190,000 in reserves and kept a reduced primary care clinic.

The Tax Gimmick They Do Not Want You to See

Progressive states found a loophole in Medicaid policy. They began taxing hospitals and medical providers at inflated rates. Federal matching rules then sent money back to cover that tax. The higher the state tax, the more Washington, D.C., paid. Federal rules already said those taxes must be broad-based, uniform, and not simply recycled back to providers. A safe harbor approved taxes up to 6 percent of net patient revenue.

The Working Families Tax Cut Act freezes that tactic. No new provider taxes. No increases. In Medicaid expansion states, including Washington, the safe-harbor cap steps down from 6 percent to 3.5 percent between 2028 and 2032. Nursing homes and intermediate care facilities are excepted. The phase-down runs over years, not overnight.

Olympia was gaming the system. The postcard sponsors are not concerned about rural health care. They are mad they got caught and mad the grift is ending.

Money on the Way

The Working Families Tax Cut Act also created the Rural Health Transformation Program. That is $10 billion a year from 2026 through 2030, $50 billion in all. States file plans. Money follows rural population and the number of facilities. Uses include access, workforce, technology, and hospital stability.

Washington applied and is receiving $181 million. According to the Baumgartner campaign, the congressman was briefed by the state. The money is on the way to rural hospitals in the district. Most are expected to receive roughly half a million dollars.

The mailer says Rep. Baumgartner cut rural care. The statute he voted for is sending rural health care money here now.

What the Record Shows

Rep. Baumgartner’s rural health work did not start with one bill.

He has backed the CONNECT for Health Act, H.R. 4206, so seniors and rural families can see a clinician without an hours-long drive. He is a cosponsor of H.R. 1585, the Conrad State 30 and Physician Access Reauthorization Act. Each state can place 30 foreign doctors a year in shortage areas. Washington has used that program every year, and many of those doctors have gone to Eastern Washington.

He has supported the Volunteer Transportation Network, neighbor rides that get veterans to appointments when winter roads would keep them home. In 2026 he received the National Association of Community Health Centers Distinguished Community Health Advocate Award. He secured $2 million for the Chewelah Expansion and Workforce Development Center at NEW Health, and $1 million for the Clarkston Family Medicine Residency Project at TriState Health.

The Working Families Tax Cut Act also blocked what the Baumgartner campaign calls the largest tax increase in history. It cut taxes on tips and overtime, eased the Social Security tax bite for many seniors, protected the child tax credit, and grants $1,000 for babies born from 2025 through 2028.

Judge the Record, Not the Mailer

A desperate campaign needs a scare. This one picked a hospital crisis that began before the Congressman took office, had losses hidden for years, then pasted the congressman’s name on it. A Seattle PAC paid for the card. The law the mailer hates freezes a progressive tax gimmick and actually sends Washington State $181 million for rural care.

You can believe the postcard. Or you can read the dates, the Working Families Tax Cut, and track the incoming support for rural health care. For the 5th Congressional District, the record points one way. Vote Michael Baumgartner.

Position Three: David Stevens

Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the chair of the Ferry County Republican Party. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. The opinions expressed in Dangerous Rhetoric are her own. Dangerous Rhetoric is available on Substack, X, and occasionally Rumble.

SOURCES:

1) Postcard mailer, “BAUMGARTNER CUT YOUR HEALTHCARE,” paid for by Together for Working People, Seattle

2) The Inlander, “Ritzville health leaders say hospital will remain open after closure warning following hidden debt discovery.” https://bit.ly/4zfuTEI

3) The Spokesman-Review, Jan. 8, 2026, “Ritzville hospital has righted the ship.” https://bit.ly/4j5HLZd

4) Washington State Department of Health, Ferry County Memorial Hospital snapshot (March 2026) and state Critical Access Hospital list, https://bit.ly/4xWQ7pL

We can change the Supreme Court… but you must VOTE!

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Position One: Scott Edwards

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Position Seven: Todd Bloom

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The Plague Grift

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 1:42 pm

When Fear of Plague Becomes the Product

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 8

Audio Version:

LISTEN NOW · 11:58

By Dr’s Robert W. Malone and Jill G. Malone

One unconfirmed plague death in Russia. No outbreak. No spread. But the fear merchants in the United States and elsewhere are already selling antibiotics.

A young laboratory worker died in Siberia following a reported laboratory accident. Russian authorities have refused to identify the organism responsible. There has been no confirmed plague diagnosis, no confirmed secondary case, and no evidence of an outbreak spreading beyond the laboratory incident. That is what we know.

What we have instead is a growing national and international panic about engineered plague, biological weapons, and the next pandemic. And wherever there is fear, there are people ready to make money from it. In fact, that panic is even being fueled by some in the conservative media for financial gain.

The death of Darya Shipilova at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute deserves a serious investigation. Reports describe a broken laboratory tube, a delayed diagnosis, and a twenty-eight-year-old woman who died after developing severe pneumonia. Nearly two hundred people were reportedly isolated or monitored. Russian authorities insist the situation is under control but have not disclosed what killed her.

That secrecy has consequences. Inside Russia, people are buying antibiotics. Outside Russia, commentators and companies are turning one unexplained death into a marketing campaign.

The pathogen has not been identified. The sales pitch has.

First, the panic

On October 1, Yandex recorded roughly 14,500 searches for чума, the Russian word for plague. By October 3, that number had reached nearly 685,000, a forty-seven-fold increase in two days. Google Trends showed searches for plague rising approximately 3,200 percent over the previous week. Residents of the Irkutsk region were among the most concerned.

The fear quickly translated into purchases. On October 3, journalists surveyed pharmacies in Irkutsk and nearby Shelekhov and found residents buying antibiotics used to treat plague. Some pharmacies had exhausted their supplies. Others could not obtain replacements. In Shelekhov, pharmacies reported selling out, with no resupply expected before October 5.

There was, and still is, no confirmed outbreak.

People were buying antibiotics because they were frightened, and they were frightened because their government would not tell them what happened. Moscow’s silence had created the very public anxiety its reassurances were supposed to prevent.

But the Russian government is not the only institution taking advantage of uncertainty.

Then came the American salesmen

On October 7, Dr. Peter McCullough posted a video stating that “Bioweapons-grade Yersinia pestis is likely to be more pathogenic than the plague organism of decades ago.” His accompanying Substack commentary carried the headline Bioweapons-Grade Pneumonic Plague.

The historical existence of biological weapons research involving plague is not in dispute. What is missing is evidence that the organism involved in Shipilova’s death was engineered, unusually virulent, antibiotic-resistant, or even confirmed to be Yersinia pestis.

No isolate has been publicly identified. No genomic sequence has been released. No evidence of genetic manipulation has been presented.

Yet the words bioweapons-grade pneumonic plague were already in the headline.

There is a commercial connection worth examining. The video appeared on Just the News and Real America’s Voice with a sponsorship banner for The Wellness Company, including a promotional discount. McCullough serves as the company’s chief scientific officer. The Wellness Company sells emergency medication kits containing prescription antibiotics, including doxycycline.

This creates an obvious financial conflict that audiences deserve to understand.

On October 6, CDM Press published an article titled The Plague? A Reminder The Next Pandemic Is Just One Accident Away. The article used the Russian incident to introduce the supposed need to stockpile antibiotics, then directed readers to The Wellness Company’s Medical Emergency Kit.

Two days later, on October 8, Breitbart published an explicitly sponsored article titled The Plague? One Accident Could Spark the Next Pandemic. It promoted the same company’s emergency medication kit, offering readers a $30 discount with a promotional code.

Conservative commentator Grant Stinchfield also released an episode titled Plague Before the Polls?, accompanied by promotion for The Wellness Company’s emergency kit and a personalized discount code.

The company’s kit has been advertised at approximately $300. Its marketing identifies doxycycline as useful for plague exposure, among other conditions.

So, hypothetically, what would one expect to pay for a prescription of doxycycline at a pharmacy?:

CHAT-GPT analysis of cash price for Doxy in the USA – although note that prices can vary widely

There is nothing inherently improper about selling legitimate emergency medical supplies. Antibiotics can save lives when appropriately prescribed, and preparedness is a reasonable subject for public discussion.

But consider the sequence.

One death in a Russian laboratory. No confirmed plague diagnosis. No confirmed spread. No demonstrated threat to Americans.

Within days, American media personalities and commercial outlets were using that incident to promote prescription antibiotic kits.

A woman died in Siberia. Americans are being offered discount codes.

The science doesn’t support the scare

The suggestion that respiratory transmission or antibiotic resistance establishes the biological weapons engineering occurred is scientifically unsound.

In 2013, a naturally occurring pneumonic plague outbreak in Madagascar infected twenty-two people. The responsible strain was resistant to streptomycin through a spontaneous chromosomal mutation. Researchers documented similar mutations arising independently in other natural plague strains. All nineteen patients who received antibiotic treatment recovered; the three who died had not been treated.

Multidrug-resistant Yersinia pestis has also been documented in naturally occurring Madagascar isolates, including strains carrying transferable resistance plasmids.

Antibiotic resistance is not proof of engineering. Neither is pneumonic transmission. And neither characteristic has been established in the Irkutsk incident.

There is a legitimate scientific investigation to conduct. Whole-genome sequencing, examination of resistance determinants, plasmid characterization, and comparison with known natural lineages could help establish what organism was involved and whether anything unusual had occurred.

Russia has not released the information necessary to perform that assessment.

That should be the story. Instead, speculation about weaponized plague is being packaged for an audience already conditioned to expect the next pandemic. Unfortunately, this is coming from conservative media.

The technique is familiar. The headline makes an alarming assertion. The article retreats into possible, consistent with, and cannot be ruled out. The qualifications provide protection when challenged, while the frightening headline does the work of attracting attention and garnering fear.

And sometimes, conveniently, there is a product to buy.

Fear is the product. Antibiotics are the upsell.

There is a difference between warning the public about a demonstrated threat and manufacturing certainty where the evidence supports none. There is also a difference between selling preparedness supplies and using an unexplained death in a foreign country to frighten consumers into purchasing them.

The Irkutsk incident may ultimately prove to be an accidental exposure to a naturally occurring plague organism. It may involve another dangerous pathogen entirely. The Russian government has not provided sufficient evidence to settle the question.

But the uncertainty itself has become commercially useful.

The Wellness Company’s appearance across multiple plague-themed promotions, including explicitly sponsored advertising and personalized discount codes, is not an imaginary connection. It is visible marketing of fear. Whether individual commentators were paid, received affiliate commissions, or simply promoted a company with which they were affiliated is a separate question that deserves disclosure.

The broader pattern is unmistakable. A frightening headline creates urgency. The urgency creates demand. The advertisement offers a solution.

This is not a new business model. Fear has always been profitable. What has changed is the speed with which an isolated incident halfway around the world can be converted into an American sales campaign.

There is one dead laboratory worker in Siberia, no confirmed plague outbreak, and no evidence of an engineered biological weapon. Yet the antibiotic kits are already being advertised with discount codes.

Russia owes the public an explanation of what killed Darya Shipilova. Those alleging biological weapons owe the public evidence. And those exploiting her death to frighten Americans into buying prescription medications need to stop. Disclosure does not excuse the practice. Turning an unconfirmed outbreak into a sales campaign is not public health, not medical preparedness, and certainly not science. It is fear-based marketing, and it is grifting.

So, let’s call it what it is.

Grifting.

Support Independent Investigative Journalism

One unexplained death in Russia, and within days American media outlets were promoting $300 antibiotic kits with discount codes.

That story deserved scrutiny, particularly when the people raising the alarm have commercial relationships with the companies selling the supposed solution.

This is why Jill and I do this work. We follow the evidence, examine the scientific literature, identify the financial interests, and ask questions that others would rather leave unanswered. Even if it sets us up for personal attacks.

If you value independent reporting that follows the evidence and is willing to challenge the fear merchants, including those on our own side of the political divide, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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References

Echo. (October 2026). “Russians Have Begun Searching for Information About Plague More Frequently.” Russian-language reporting on Yandex search activity following the Irkutsk laboratory incident. https://echofm.online/news/rossiyane-stali-chashhe-iskat-informacziyu-o-chume-v-internete
The Insider. (October 2026). Reporting on antibiotic purchases and pharmacy shortages in Irkutsk and Shelekhov following the reported laboratory death. https://theins.ru/news/297860
McCullough, P. (October 7, 2026). Video commentary concerning alleged bioweapons-grade Yersinia pestis. X.
McCullough, P. (October 2026). “Bioweapons-Grade Pneumonic Plague.” The Focal Points, Substack.

CDM Press. (October 6, 2026). “The Plague? A Reminder The Next Pandemic Is Just One Accident Away.” Article promoting The Wellness Company’s Medical Emergency Kit. https://cdm.press/news/health-freedom/2026/10/06/the-plague-a-reminder-the-next-pandemic-is-just-one-accident-away/
Breitbart News. (October 8, 2026). “The Plague? One Accident Could Spark the Next Pandemic.” Sponsored content promoting The Wellness Company’s emergency medication kit. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/10/08/the-plague-one-accident-could-spark-the-next-pandemic/
Stinchfield, G. (October 2026). “Plague Before the Polls?” Stinchfield with Grant Stinchfield. Podcast episode with promotional messaging for The Wellness Company’s Medical Emergency Kit. https://podscan.fm/player/stinchfield-with-grant-stinchfield/plague-before-the-polls
The Wellness Company. (2026). “Medical Emergency Kit.” Product information describing prescription antibiotics, including doxycycline, and emergency preparedness applications. https://www.twc.health/products/emergency-preparedness-kit
Andrianaivoarimanana, V., et al. (2022). “Pneumonic Plague Caused by Streptomycin-Resistant Yersinia pestis, Madagascar, 2013.” Clinical Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab606
Guiyoule, A., et al. (2001). “Transferable Plasmid-Mediated Resistance to Streptomycin in a Clinical Isolate of Yersinia pestis.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, 7(1). https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/1/70-0043-t1
Galimand, M., et al. (2006). “Multidrug Resistance in Yersinia pestisMediated by a Transferable Plasmid.” Research concerning antibiotic-resistance plasmids in naturally occurring plague isolates. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1610074/

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October 7, 2026

The ACIP Case Gets Stranger

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 4:07 pm

A troubling pattern emerges from the court record

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 7

By: Dr’s Robert W. Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Audio Version:

LISTEN NOW · 23:55

Yesterday’s Court Hearing

Yesterday, October 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard oral argument in American Academy of Pediatrics v. Kennedy. What was striking was how little of the forty-five-minute hearing was actually about vaccine science. The three judges kept returning instead to basic questions about standing, statutory authority, final agency action, and the extraordinary remedy imposed by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy. Chief Judge David Barron, an Obama appointee, was particularly persistent. He asked AAP attorney Andrew Pincus to begin with what he called “the narrowest part of the case”: Murphy’s order suspending the thirteen ACIP appointments. Barron wanted to know what statutory authority permitted Murphy to do that and what injury to AAP required such a remedy. When Pincus argued that allowing an unlawfully constituted ACIP to meet would make no sense, Barron cut through the abstraction with six words: “Well, it may not make any sense, but who’s it hurt?” That is the standing problem in plain English. Federal courts do not exist to stop government conduct simply because a private organization objects to it. A plaintiff must show an actual injury caused by the action being challenged, and the court’s remedy must redress that injury [Transcript of Oral Argument, American Academy of Pediatrics v. Kennedy].

Judge William Kayatta Jr., also an Obama appointee, attacked the standing problem from another direction. He asked Pincus to imagine that ACIP met the next day with all thirteen of Kennedy’s stayed members and adopted exactly the recommendation AAP wanted. Would AAP still have been injured by the alleged FACA violation? Pincus said yes, because the committee itself would remain improperly balanced. That answer exposes how expansive AAP’s theory really is. The claimed injury is not necessarily an adverse vaccine recommendation. Under AAP’s theory, the organization can be injured by the composition and existence of the advisory committee itself, even if that committee produces precisely the policy AAP favors. Kayatta also pressed both sides on the causal chain between an ACIP recommendation and subsequent government action, including whether a recommendation has legal consequences before adoption by the CDC Director. AAP identified the Vaccines for Children program as a possible exception, but the broader question remained: is AAP injured by who sits in the room, or by what government officials ultimately do with the recommendations that come out of that room? [Transcript, 26:43–30:41.]

Judge Joshua Dunlap, the Trump appointee on the panel, concentrated on another basic requirement of Administrative Procedure Act litigation: what exactly was the “final agency action” that Murphy was reviewing when he suspended the appointments? AAP offered two answers. It argued that Kennedy had effectively announced and implemented a new policy for reshaping ACIP, and alternatively that the composition of the committee itself constituted final agency action. Dunlap also questioned whether Murphy had really confined himself to judging the overall balance of ACIP or had instead examined individual members and made judgments about their qualifications. But perhaps the most revealing exchange came between Barron and Pincus over the legal authority for Murphy’s remedy. Section 705 of the APA allows a court to “postpone the effective date” of agency action. These appointments, however, had already taken effect. Barron stated the problem directly: “There already was an appointment. There’s nothing to postpone. So how could it be relying on 705?” When Barron later asked Pincus what authority actually supported Murphy’s order, AAP’s own lawyer conceded that §705 was “a little hard” for precisely that reason and suggested the authority might instead come from §706 or ordinary preliminary-injunction powers. Barron then pointed out the underlying problem: Murphy’s order itself does not clearly identify which statutory authority he was using to suspend the appointments. [Transcript, 7:31–8:46; 14:43–17:56.]

There is a larger Supreme Court precedent hanging over all of this. In June 2025, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. CASA, a 6–3 decision restricting the power of individual federal district judges to issue universal injunctions that extend relief far beyond the plaintiffs actually before them. The central principle is straightforward: a federal court’s remedy generally should go no further than necessary to provide complete relief to the parties who established standing to sue.

That matters enormously here. Murphy did not merely protect AAP and the other plaintiffs from particular vaccine decisions they challenged. He suspended the appointments of thirteen members of a federal advisory committee and effectively prevented that committee from functioning for anyone, anywhere. DOJ therefore argued on appeal that Murphy cannot escape CASA simply by calling what he did a statutory “stay” rather than an injunction. The Supreme Court left unresolved an important question about the separate statutory remedies available under the APA, so CASA does not automatically decide this case. But it puts the scope of Murphy’s remedy squarely in question: once the vaccine actions allegedly injuring AAP had themselves been stayed, what additional injury to these plaintiffs required a district judge to disable ACIP itself?

What was surprising yesterday was that the judges barely needed to reach CASA. DOJ devoted considerable attention to it in the briefs, but the Supreme Court’s universal-injunction ruling was not a major subject of oral argument. Instead, the panel found more elementary problems with Murphy’s order before ever reaching that larger question.

What injury did AAP suffer merely because these thirteen people were appointed?
What final agency action gave Murphy authority under the APA to review those appointments?
What statutory provision allowed him to suspend appointments that had already taken effect?
And why was disabling the committee itself necessary to redress whatever injury AAP claimed?

Chief Judge Barron eventually suggested that the First Circuit might not need to resolve the larger standing or FACA questions at all. It could conclude simply that Murphy failed to explain what statutory authority supported this extraordinary remedy and what specific harm the remedy was supposed to address. [Transcript, 34:10–35:07.]
That may be the most remarkable takeaway from yesterday’s hearing. CASA raises a serious question about whether Murphy’s remedy went far beyond the plaintiffs’ standing before him. But the First Circuit may never need to get that far, because Murphy’s order may fail on the more basic question of what gave him the authority to suspend the thirteen appointments in the first place.

The Original Case and Why It Matters

To understand why yesterday’s questions matter, it helps to remember just how far Judge Murphy went in the original case. The American Academy of Pediatrics is a private nonprofit professional association. ACIP does not regulate AAP, appoint its officers or direct its members’ medical practices. ACIP is an advisory committee within the federal government. Yet Murphy accepted AAP’s argument that it had sufficient interest in ACIP’s work to challenge not merely a particular recommendation, but the composition of the committee itself under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. FACA requires advisory committees to be “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed,” but Congress did not supply a formula for determining what “fairly balanced” means. There is no statutory allocation of seats among vaccinologists, epidemiologists, pediatricians, infectious-disease specialists, immunologists, statisticians or dissenting scientific viewpoints. Nevertheless, Murphy moved from reviewing whether HHS had complied with the law to deciding whether the people Kennedy appointed collectively represented an acceptable scientific balance.

That distinction is critical. The appointment of ACIP members belongs to the Executive Branch, with the HHS Secretary responsible for selecting the committee’s voting members. Murphy did not simply identify a procedural violation and send the matter back to HHS. He examined the qualifications of individual members, judged the expertise represented on the committee, concluded that Kennedy’s ACIP was not fairly balanced, and then suspended all thirteen appointments. The result was straightforward: ACIP could not meet. Nothing in FACA transfers the appointment power from the Executive Branch to the judiciary or provides a federal district judge with a formula for deciding which combination of scientists constitutes the proper balance. Judicial review of whether the Executive followed the law is one thing. A judge substituting his judgment about the acceptable composition of a federal scientific advisory committee for that of the official legally charged with appointing it is something considerably different.

There is also an important piece of history that makes the treatment of Kennedy’s ACIP difficult to view as some unprecedented problem created by this administration. Incoming administrations have removed and replaced members of FACA advisory committees before. In 2021, Biden EPA Administrator Michael Regan removed the existing members of two major federal scientific advisory committees, the Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and reconstituted them. Former members sued, alleging among other things that the newly constituted committees violated FACA’s requirement that advisory committees be “fairly balanced.” The challenge failed. When Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration again removed Biden-era members of EPA scientific advisory committees and began rebuilding them. The circumstances and administrative records were not identical to ACIP, but the basic exercise of executive authority was hardly novel: new administrations have reconstituted inherited scientific advisory committees before, and courts have confronted FACA challenges arising from those decisions.

That history makes Murphy’s remedy more consequential, not less. Kennedy did not invent the practice of replacing the membership of a federal advisory committee. What is unusual here is that a private professional association successfully persuaded a district judge to evaluate the scientific balance of the replacement committee, examine the qualifications of its individual members, and then suspend every appointment so the committee could no longer function. If that becomes an accepted application of FACA, the implications extend far beyond vaccines or ACIP. Every incoming administration that changes the composition of an advisory committee potentially invites private organizations that dislike the new membership to litigate what “fairly balanced” should mean and ask a federal judge to referee the scientific composition of the committee. Congress required balance. It did not appoint federal judges to choose the balance.

The Defense That Wasn’t Made

Which brings us to the strangest part of this case: the government’s own defense of ACIP. AAP put the qualifications and scientific balance of Kennedy’s appointees directly at issue. If HHS intended to defend that committee on the merits, the obvious response was to build a factual record showing exactly who these thirteen people were, what expertise each brought to the table, and why their combined backgrounds satisfied FACA’s requirement of a “fairly balanced” committee. Yet we have found no evidence that DOJ submitted the complete CVs of the thirteen members or constructed a comprehensive evidentiary defense of their collective qualifications. Instead, the government concentrated heavily on the legal argument that the Secretary had discretion over appointments and that courts should not be second-guessing those choices. Once Murphy rejected that argument and began judging the qualifications of the members himself, the factual record needed to prove him wrong appears not to have been there.

Robert Malone’s case makes the problem concrete. CDC itself publicly described him as a “Vaccinologist, Scientist, Biochemist, Contributor to mRNA Vaccine Technology.” Yet neither HHS nor DOJ asked him for his complete CV for submission in this litigation (CV attached here). Murphy subsequently reduced his relevant vaccine expertise largely to his early work on mRNA technology and discounted that experience because it occurred decades ago. A complete CV would have documented the work that followed, including subsequent vaccine development, clinical research, medical countermeasures and biodefense. Whether Murphy ultimately would have found that record persuasive is unknowable. What matters is that the government apparently never put the complete record in front of him.And now, after Murphy used the record before him to make factual judgments about the qualifications and balance of ACIP, DOJ has told the First Circuit something equally remarkable: “we’re not challenging any factual findings on appeal.”

The omissions do not stop there. The government did not make the previous reconstitution of major scientific FACA committees a centerpiece of its defense, even though the Biden administration had removed and replaced members of EPA scientific advisory committees and successfully defended the resulting litigation. DOJ anticipated that Murphy might interfere with ACIP’s membership, because it proposed as alternative relief that he stay only enough appointments to address whatever imbalance he believed existed while leaving the committee capable of functioning. Yet despite anticipating that possibility, the government apparently did not build the strongest factual record defending the appointments themselves. Murphy rejected the alternative and suspended all thirteen.

What happened next is harder still to understand. After Murphy disabled ACIP, proposed intervenors tried to obtain a stay of his preliminary injunction. The federal government apparently did not seek its own stay of the injunction that was preventing its advisory committee from functioning.DOJ instead sought to stay the underlying district-court proceedings while pursuing its appeal. Later, the government asked for expedited appellate consideration on the grounds that ACIP urgently needed to get back to work. Now, before the First Circuit, DOJ has deliberately confined its appeal largely to Murphy’s treatment of the appointments, while leaving other portions of his vaccine-policy relief unchallenged. The contradiction was obvious enough that Chief Judge Barron asked government counsel Matthew Zorn directly: “How come you’re not challenging the rest of the order then?”

Put the pieces together. No complete CVs. No comprehensive defense of the committee’s collective qualifications. No major reliance on the obvious historical precedent of other administrations reconstituting scientific FACA committees. No government motion that we can find seeking an immediate stay of the order disabling ACIP. An appeal that expressly declines to challenge Murphy’s factual findings. And now a deliberately narrow request for relief that would restore the Secretary’s ability to constitute ACIP while leaving significant portions of Murphy’s underlying vaccine rulings alone.

Any one of those decisions can be explained as litigation strategy. Lawyers make tactical choices. They narrow appeals, abandon arguments, preserve others for remand, and sometimes decide that the quickest route to a favorable judgment is not the broadest one. But taken together, these choices are much harder to explain.

The Hypothesis

There is one fact we have deliberately kept separate from the legal analysis until now. Before this litigation played out, we had been told that senior administration officials did not want ACIP meeting again until after the midterm elections because of the political problems its decisions might create. We have no document showing that the White House or HHS instructed DOJ to lose this lawsuit. We have no email directing government lawyers to mount a weak defense, and no evidence establishing that DOJ attorneys deliberately withheld arguments in order to produce an adverse ruling. Those are serious allegations, and the evidence does not presently establish them.

What we do know firsthand is that keeping ACIP sidelined until after the midterms had been communicated to us as an administration objective. And to that point, the late-winter ACIP meeting on the vaccine-injured was canceled because of the political ramifications, although the government never publicly admitted as much.

So what happens when that fact is placed alongside the litigation record? AAP attacked the qualifications and balance of the new ACIP, but the government apparently failed to build the strongest factual record defending those qualifications. It did not submit the members’ CVs; it did not even ask for them for the record. It did not make the previous reconstitution of scientific FACA committees a centerpiece of its defense. Murphy then suspended all thirteen appointments, accomplishing precisely what we had been told some within the administration wanted: ACIP stopped meeting.

Other parties tried to stay Murphy’s injunction, while the government apparently did not seek its own emergency stay restoring the committee. DOJ instead sought to freeze the underlying litigation. It later argued that ACIP urgently needed to get back to work, yet it now declines to challenge Murphy’s factual findings and has deliberately narrowed its appeal. None of this proves intent. But viewed through the lens of what we had already been told, a series of otherwise puzzling litigation choices begins to look considerably less random.

There is an even more uncomfortable possibility. Was sidelining ACIP the only objective? Or were some within the administration also content to let Judge Murphy’s stays of particular vaccine decisions remain in place? Chief Judge Barron put his finger directly on this problem when he asked DOJ at oral argument: “How come you’re not challenging the rest of the order then?” The government’s answer confirmed that it is not seeking to undo significant portions of Murphy’s other relief in this appeal. That does not prove that HHS wanted those vaccine decisions stayed. But it raises a question that HHS and DOJ should be able to answer plainly: which parts of Murphy’s order does the administration actually oppose, and which parts is it willing to leave in place?

This matters because there are two very different stories here. The public story is that the government lost an important case, Judge Murphy disabled ACIP, and DOJ is now fighting to restore the committee. The alternative hypothesis is more troubling: the court delivered an outcome that some within the administration already wanted, and the government’s litigation strategy was never designed to reverse all of it. That hypothesis remains unproven. But after reconstructing the original defense, following the government’s decisions after Murphy’s ruling, and listening carefully to yesterday’s oral argument, it can no longer simply be dismissed as implausible.

Perhaps there is an innocent explanation for all of this. If there is, HHS and DOJ should provide it. Why were the full qualifications of the ACIP members not put before the court? Why was the historical precedent for reconstituting FACA committees not aggressively developed? Why did the government apparently fail to seek immediate relief from the order that disabled ACIP? Why is DOJ leaving Murphy’s factual findings unchallenged? And why, when Chief Judge Barron asked why the government was not challenging the rest of Murphy’s order, was the answer essentially that it had chosen not to? These are no longer questions about vaccine policy. They are questions about what the government was actually trying to accomplish in this litigation.

After reading the briefs, reconstructing the original defense, and listening to the First Circuit argument, the government’s litigation strategy does not look like the strategy of an administration determined to defend every aspect of its own ACIP and overturn every adverse vaccine ruling.

It looks like something considerably narrower. The question is why.

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Donroe Doctrine Frees Brazil from Commies; Could Maryland Be Next?

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 3:16 pm

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Mother and Daughter Fight for Girls’ Sports

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October 6, 2026

Inside the Irkutsk Plague Institute

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 8:30 am

Mongolia, Marmots, Golden Eagles, and the ongoing plague investigation

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 6

Audio Version:

LISTEN NOW · 19:57

Washington DC · Dr.s Robert W. Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Plague is endemic along the Saylyugem mountain range, which runs along the border between the Russian Altai and western Mongolia. This is not a historical concern. Yersinia pestis (the Plague agent) circulates in wild animals across the region, and Russian and Mongolian teams find it there regularly.

The plague zone covers about twenty-nine thousand square kilometers, roughly sixty percent on the Mongolian side. The ground is high, dry, and treeless. The main animal hosts are grey marmots, long-tailed ground squirrels and pikas, along with the fleas that carry the bacterium between them.

Every summer, Russian and Mongolian anti-plague teams survey the region together. They trap rodents, collect and test their fleas, sample carcasses and examine remains found beneath raptor perches.

Golden eagles hunt this country, feeding on hares, marmots and corsac foxes. Upland buzzards hunt the same slopes for pikas, ground squirrels and young marmots. What the birds leave accumulates beneath their perches. The Russian surveillance term translates as “the remains of the table of birds of prey.” Field workers collect these remains fresh and mummified because a marmot that died of plague and was carried off can still yield the organism. A pair of eagles can cover more ground in a week than a trapping line covers in a season. We found no literature on whether golden eagles are susceptible to plague or act as vectors for its transmission, but we believe this issue should be examined.

In 2025, on the Russian side in the Kosh-Agach district of the Altai Republic, field workers collected material on the 14th and again on the 18th of August. Three samples came from grey marmots, including scavenger remains and a carcass. Another came from a long-tailed ground squirrel. Cultures came up on August 22, 27 and 29: four strains of Yersinia pestis, all of the main subspecies, the fully virulent form responsible for the historic pandemics.

Four strains are a productive season. Across the entire Russian Federation in 2025, the anti-plague service examined 41,559 rodent hosts and 124,380 vectors, including 110,960 fleas, and isolated thirteen strains. Plague cultures come from a handful of places, and few people handle them.

This year, the same teams worked the same ground from August 14 through 31 and studied more than two hundred samples of field material. On September 5, Rospotrebnadzor announced that the focus was showing high epizootic activity.

In the last week of September, Darya Shipilova fell ill. She was a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, which holds the reference collection of cultures from this borderland. She was hospitalized on September 29 and died on October 2.

We cannot establish what she was handling. Nobody outside the institute can. Most reporting on her death treats the institute as a black box, even though its territory, collection, seasonal workflow and diagnostic capabilities are published. Placing her death within the institute’s system for collecting, processing and storing plague specimens is more useful than speculation.

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A More Dangerous Plague Strain is Discovered

Two years before Shipilova died, Sergey Balakhonov published a warning about those mountains. He directs the Irkutsk Institute. His paper appeared in the proceedings of the Seventeenth Interstate Scientific-Practical Conference of CIS member states, held in Irkutsk in October 2024, which he edited jointly with Anna Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor.

The Gorno-Altai high-mountain focus had been under Russian surveillance since 1961. For half a century it yielded one organism, Y. pestis of the Central Asian subspecies, which kills marmots reliably and people rarely. In 2012 the main subspecies turned up there for the first time. It had come from Mongolia across the mountains, and it spread through the grey marmot population across much of the plague region.

Three residents of Kosh-Agach contracted bubonic plague between 2014 and 2016. Balakhonov’s assessment states that the borderland warrants maximum attention. It records extraordinarily high epizootic activity in the neighboring Tuva focus since 2012, marmots included, and names the risk drivers as uncontrolled marmot hunting and new settlements built directly on the foci.

What this anti-plague institute is

The Soviet Union built a system that no Western country has an exact counterpart to. Plague is endemic in rodent populations across a wide belt of Central Asia and southern Siberia, and the Soviet state responded by creating a standing scientific and field service dedicated to it. Research institutes sat at the top. Below them sat anti-plague stations, permanently staffed, assigned to specific natural regions, going out every summer to trap, comb and culture. Russia inherited the system intact and still runs it under Rospotrebnadzor.

The Irkutsk institute covers the Siberian and Far Eastern federal districts, which is to say roughly half of Russia by area. It operates anti-plague stations at Chita and Khabarovsk directly, and it directs the scientific and methodological work of the stations on the southern Siberian foci, among them the Altai station at Gorno-Altaysk and the Tuva station at Kyzyl.

The stations perform the fieldwork and primary isolation. The institute maintains the reference collection and performs the characterization: subspecies identification, molecular typing, and antibiotic susceptibility testing. Each year, the pattern is to collect in the second half of August, isolate within one to two weeks at the station, then refer confirmed cultures upward. Autumn is when the reference bench in Irkutsk receives the season’s work.

Between 1961 and 2023, the service isolated 2,621 plague cultures from the Gorno-Altai region: 2,438 of the Central Asian subspecies and 183 of the main subspecies. In Tuva, 1,793 cultures were isolated between 1964 and 2023 from roughly 201,000 small mammals screened. A published paper from the institute describes Gorno-Altai as the most active focus in the Russian Federation and notes that cultures are isolated there every year.

The Mongolian half

Mongolia classifies seventeen of its twenty-one provinces as plague-risk territory. Two people died there in 2019, in Bayan-Olgii province along the Russian border, after eating marmot. On July 25 of this year, the Mongolian National Center for Zoonotic Diseases confirmed another human case by bacteriological testing in Khovd province.

The Mongolian side is where the organism is thickest. In 2018, a joint expedition surveyed 2,668 square kilometers of the Mongolian part of the focus, in the Saylyugem and Kharlankhuu ranges at altitudes between 2,400 and 2,800 meters. The team examined 282 mammals and 261 ectoparasites, 257 of them fleas, along with fresh and mummified remains from raptor feeding sites. It isolated forty-seven strains of Y. pestis of the main subspecies, all from grey marmots and their fleas.

Forty-seven strains from one Mongolian expedition. Thirteen from the entire Russian Federation in 2025. The concentration of plague activity on the Mongolian side is striking.

The expedition was conducted jointly by the Irkutsk institute and Mongolia’s national and Bayan-Olgii zoonotic disease centers. The same Irkutsk institute that coordinates this cross-border plague surveillance employed Shipilova.

The other route

There is a way into this that does not involve a laboratory bench at all.

The institute’s territory contains active plague foci, and its people go into them. Everyone named in this story so far who caught plague caught it outdoors: the three in Kosh-Agach, the two in Bayan-Olgii, the Mongolian case in July. None of them worked in a laboratory.

A worker infected in the field rather than at the bench would present differently and would also reconcile the official language. Natural plague begins as the bubonic form. It becomes pneumonic secondarily, when the organism reaches the lungs, and only then does it transmit from person to person. That sequence would account for a contact list weighted toward a hospital rather than a laboratory, which is what the Irkutsk contact tracing produced.

Early reporting pointed that way. Shipilova was described as having returned from a work trip shortly before falling ill, and Alexey Tsydenov, who heads the neighboring Republic of Buryatia, wrote that she had died of plague before amending the post to say she possibly had.

On October 3, Tsydenov stated, citing Rospotrebnadzor, that Shipilova had not visited Buryatia and that there were no known areas of plague activity in the republic. The 2025 surveillance data support that statement. The nearest documented plague activity was in Tuva and the Altai Republic.

In the same sentence denying the Buryatia connection, he called her the woman who died of plague.

Nobody has said whether Shipilova traveled to Tuva or the Altai Republic, where plague activity was documented both this year and last.

What the institute can do

The central point is simple: the Irkutsk institute has sophisticated technology for detecting plague, including unusual strains that simpler tests might miss. Whether those tests could conclusively determine what infected Shipilova depends on what specimens were collected, when they were collected, and whether antibiotics had already been started. None of that has been disclosed.

In 2025, the institute issued a methods manual on rapid detection of pathogenic biological agents. For plague, it specifies commercial Russian polymerase chain reaction systems that test several genetic targets at once. One detects locus 3a on the bacterial chromosome, the caf1 gene on the pFra plasmid and the pla gene on the pPCP1 plasmid. A second real-time test detects pla, caf1 and lcrV. The manual states that virulent strains can be distinguished from avirulent ones by their plasmid profile.

That matters because Y. pestis can lose plasmids. Strains that no longer produce the F1 capsular antigen occur naturally, have been isolated from sick people and can escape tests that depend on F1, including rapid antigen tests and standard serology. A Rostov institute study of twenty-one such strains concluded that when culture and F1 testing are doubtful or negative, investigators should continue testing with chromosomal targets. The Irkutsk system does exactly that, testing a chromosomal target alongside plasmid targets.

Timing matters as well. Antibiotics can quickly reduce the likelihood of recovering live Y. pestis by culture. If appropriate specimens were not collected before treatment began, a later negative culture would not necessarily exclude plague. Molecular testing does not require living bacteria, but its ability to answer the question still depends on what specimen was available, when it was collected and what test was performed.

Rospotrebnadzor has stated only that no microorganisms associated with Shipilova’s professional activity were identified. It has not disclosed what specimens were collected, whether they were obtained before or after antibiotics, what tests were performed, or the PCR results, if PCR was performed.

The issue is therefore not whether the institute possesses the technology to investigate a suspected plague infection. It clearly does. What remains unknown is what samples were available, what tests were run, and what those tests found.

The Plague Vaccine Problem

One argument has run through much of the coverage, and we raised it in our earlier analysis. Anti-plague institute personnel are vaccinated against plague. Russia uses a live attenuated vaccine, the EV line, and vaccination of personnel who handle the organism is routine and longstanding. If Shipilova was vaccinated, the argument goes, plague should have been unlikely to kill her.

The institute’s own published data complicate that assumption.

Between 2016 and 2017, its scientists studied sixty previously unvaccinated volunteers in Kosh-Agach, at the center of the Gorno-Altai plague region. All received the domestic live plague vaccine produced at the Stavropol institute. Ninety-one percent showed seroconversion one month later. By six months, antibody titers had fallen significantly and no longer exceeded the diagnostic threshold. The same was true at twelve months.

Revaccination performed little better. Sixteen percent exceeded the threshold one month afterward and seventy-six percent at three months, with more than thirty-nine percent still above it at six months.

The vaccination schedule is annual. The institute’s own measurements therefore show that antibody levels can fall substantially well before the next scheduled dose. An independent study of vaccinees in Kazakhstan found a similar pattern, with protective titers in twenty-six percent at four months, fifteen percent at eight months and eleven percent at twelve.

Vaccination therefore does not rule out plague as the cause of Shipilova’s death. More broadly, the published data raise an important question about how much protection the vaccine provides throughout the full year between doses. It appears most vaccinated people may be unprotected for most of the year. That question remains relevant regardless of what ultimately killed Shipilova.

Plague is Treatable

Institute scientists tested fifty-one Y. pestis strains from the Gorno-Altai collection against eight antibiotics. They found no resistant strains.

The important finding is straightforward: the plague strains tested from this region are susceptible to antibiotics. That raises another unanswered question about Shipilova’s death. Was she treated for plague, and if so, when? If she was not, why not?

She worked at one of Russia’s principal plague institutes and became critically ill during the season when plague cultures from the surrounding regions were being collected and processed. The institute’s own research showed that protection from the vaccine could wane well before the next annual dose. If plague was suspected, effective antibiotics were available. If it was not suspected until too late, that raises a different question: how was the diagnosis missed?

We do not know whether treatment came too late or never came at all.

The Evidence Russia Has Not Released

The Irkutsk institute will host the eighteenth scientific conference of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the regional organization formed by former Soviet republics, on October 21 and 22. Delegations have been invited from ten capitals, including Beijing and Ulaanbaatar. The conference has a budget of roughly $160,000 and has not been canceled.

An institute capable of convening an international conference can release a PCR result. Difficulty is not the obstacle.

No international mechanism can compel it to do so. The Biological Weapons Convention has no verification regime, a limitation Under Secretary of State Thomas DiNanno described plainly in Geneva last December. The International Health Regulations require notification of events that may constitute an international public health concern, but the state itself determines whether an event meets that threshold. Russia has made no such notification.

That leaves a remarkable gap. From the institute’s own publications, an outsider can reconstruct its territory, plague collection, seasonal workflow, diagnostic capabilities, vaccine performance and antibiotic susceptibility data. What we cannot see are the clinical and laboratory records that would answer the simplest questions about Shipilova: what specimens were collected, when they were collected, what tests were performed, what those tests found, and whether she was treated for plague.

For decades, this system has trapped infected animals, isolated Y. pestis, characterized the strains and preserved the cultures. It can tell us when a plague strain was collected from a marmot in the Altai, what subspecies it belonged to and whether it was susceptible to antibiotics.

What it has not told us is what killed one of its own laboratory technicians.

RWM/JGM

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References

Arsenyeva, T. E., A. L. Trukhachev, E. A. Vasilieva, I. V. Morozova, and S. A. Lebedeva. 2014. “Osobennosti shtammov vozbuditelya chumy, ne produtsiruyushchikh osnovnogo kapsulnogo antigena F1, i aprobatsiya otdelnykh metodov ikh detektsii.” Universum: Khimiya i Biologiya. Rostov-on-Don Anti-Plague Institute. https://7universum.com/ru/nature/archive/item/1513.

Balakhonov, S. V., and A. Yu. Popova, eds. 2024. Aktualnye voprosy sanitarnoi okhrany territorii i snizheniya riskov rasprostraneniya chumy i drugikh opasnykh infektsionnykh boleznei. Proceedings of the XVII Interstate Scientific-Practical Conference of CIS Member States, Irkutsk, October 8 and 9. https://irknipchi.ru/mat_conf_0809102024.pdf. Includes Balakhonov et al. on the Central Asian plague natural focal zone, the 2012 arrival of the main subspecies in Gorno-Altai from Mongolian territory, culture counts for the Gorno-Altai and Tuva foci, and joint Russian-Mongolian anti-plague teams.

DiNanno, Thomas G. 2025. “Modern Tools for Modern Threats: Towards Strengthening BWC Implementation, Verification, and Assurance.” Remarks at a Biological Weapons Convention Meeting of States Parties side event, Geneva, December 15. https://geneva.usmission.gov/2025/12/16/remarks-on-msp-side-event-modern-tools-for-modern-threats-towards-strengthening-bwc-implementation-verification-and-assurance/.

Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. 2025. Ekspress- i uskorennye metody spetsificheskoi indikatsii patogennykh biologicheskikh agentov. Educational manual. https://irknipch.ru/express_2025.pdf. Specifies the multiplex PCR panel for Y. pestis: locus 3a, caf1, pla, and lcrV.

Korzun, V. M., S. V. Balakhonov, A. V. Denisov, E. N. Rozhdestvensky, E. G. Tokmakova, et al. 2019. “Epizooticheskaya situatsiya v Mongolskoi chasti transgranichnogo Sailyugemskogo prirodnogo ochaga chumy v 2018 g.” Problemy Osobo Opasnykh Infektsii. https://journal.microbe.ru/jour/article/view/1153. Irkutsk institute with Mongolia’s National Center for the Study of Zoonotic Infections and the Bayan-Olgii Center for Zoonotic Infections. Source for the 2018 survey area, specimen counts, raptor feeding-site remains, and the forty-seven main-subspecies strains.

Khvoinova, E. G., E. G. Tokmakova, O. D. Zakhlebnaya, S. A. Vityazeva, and S. V. Balakhonov. 2017. “Izuchenie antibiotikochuvstvitelnosti kollektsionnykh shtammov Yersinia pestis v Gorno-Altaiskom vysokogornom prirodnom ochage.” In Sovremennye problemy epidemiologii, mikrobiologii i gigieny, 149. Rospotrebnadzor IX All-Russian Conference of Young Scientists. https://irknipchi.ru/conference-materials.pdf.

Korytov, K. M., V. V. Voitkova, V. I. Dubrovina, S. L. Tagyzova, and S. V. Balakhonov. 2017. “Serologicheskii monitoring u lyudei, vaktsinirovannykh protiv chumy i prozhivayushchikh v Gorno-Altaiskom vysokogornom prirodnom ochage chumy.” In Sovremennye problemy epidemiologii, mikrobiologii i gigieny, 69. https://irknipchi.ru/conference-materials.pdf.

Mongolia National Center for Zoonotic Diseases, via Xinhua. 2026. “Suspected Bubonic Plague Case Confirmed in Mongolia.” July 25. https://english.news.cn/asiapacific/20260725/52ed7127c5df463bbf87b8dd272f6e13/c.html.

Popov, N. V., and L. D. Shilova, comps. 2026. “Epizooticheskaya aktivnost prirodnykh ochagov chumy na territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii v 2025 g.” Appendix, reference materials. Russian Research Anti-Plague Institute “Microbe,” Saratov. https://www.microbe.ru/files/Plag_foc_2025.pdf.

Tsydenov, Alexey, via i38.ru. 2026. “V Buryatii ochagov chumy net.” October 3. https://i38.ru/obschestvo-obichnie/v-buryatii-ochagov-chumi-net. Head of Buryatia, citing Rospotrebnadzor, that the deceased had not visited the republic and that Buryatia contains no plague foci.

Toktarov, M., et al. 2019. “Human Response to Live Plague Vaccine EV, Almaty Region, Kazakhstan, 2014-2015.” PLOS ONE. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0218366.

Zab.ru. 2026. “Na granitse s Mongoliei i Rossii zafiksirovali vysokuyu aktivnost ochaga chumy.” September 5. https://zab.ru/articles/8801. Rospotrebnadzor announcement of high epizootic activity in the Saylyugem focus, sampling window August 14 to 31.

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A Tale of Two Cults

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: autism, health, news, politics, vaccines — doctordilday @ 7:48 am

The vaccine wars have produced two rival orthodoxies, and neither tolerates doubt or dissent.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 5

A Tale of Two Cults

The vaccine wars have produced two rival orthodoxies, and neither tolerates doubt or dissent.

Robert W. Malone, MD, MS

It was the best of public health, it was the worst of public health. It was the age of molecular medicine and the age of magical thinking, the spring of Warp Speed and the winter of mandates. We were promised herd immunity. Instead, we lost public trust.

Charles Dickens wrote the original version about London and Paris in 1859, but his “superlative degree” describes the American argument over vaccines remarkably well. One camp insists that every licensed vaccine is safe and effective and that children should receive the recommended schedule. The opposing camp increasingly argues that vaccines cause more harm than the diseases they prevent. Both have little tolerance for doubt. Both have their authorities, articles of faith, heretics and financial interests.

Aaron Siri, a New York litigator, gave the first camp its name. His 2025 book Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines argues that vaccine policy has become a matter of faith, protected from the scrutiny applied to other medical products (Siri 2025). Siri also represents the Informed Consent Action Network, founded and run by Del Bigtree. That puts him in an interesting position: the lawyer who documented one vaccine orthodoxy also represents one of the most influential organizations on the other side.

There is a substantial academic literature on cults, ideological movements and systems of belief. It provides a useful way to examine both camps without first deciding which one is right. The question is not whether a group’s claims are true or false. It is how the group responds to dissent, conflicting evidence and challenges to its authority. By those measures, the similarities between the two vaccine extremes are difficult to ignore.

My own history gives me some experience with both. I researched and wrote the original patent disclosures on RNA as a drug and as a vaccine from 1986 to 1989, and continued this research through 2000. I continued to work in the vaccine field from both sides of the issue, well – I guess up to the present. I served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices until a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics invalidated that committee, and I declined to serve on its successor. MAHA Action, Inc., which Bigtree led as chief executive in 2025 (National Press Club 2025), paid me as a medical advisor until it terminated that relationship in June 2026. I remain a senior advisor to the Independent Medical Alliance.

What the Literature Means by a Cult

Sociologists largely stopped using the word “cult” casually decades ago. It had become a weapon, and the popular theory that people could simply be “brainwashed” did not hold up well in academic psychology or in the courts. What survived was more useful: a set of characteristics that describe how groups control belief and respond to dissent. They do not tell us whether the group is right or wrong. A group can be right about some facts and still behave like a cult.

Robert Jay Lifton developed one of the most influential frameworks after studying people subjected to Chinese Communist thought reform. He identified eight characteristics of what he called ideological totalism. Four are particularly relevant to the vaccine wars.

The first is sacred science. The doctrine becomes unquestionable truth, and its authorities become difficult to challenge.
The second is loading the language. Complicated questions are reduced to slogans and labels that shut down argument.
The third is the demand for purity. People are divided into the faithful and the suspect, with members repeatedly required to demonstrate which side they are on.
The fourth is the dispensing of existence. Those outside the accepted belief system lose standing. Their arguments need not be answered because they are no longer considered legitimate participants in the debate.

Other researchers described different parts of the same process. Janja Lalich studied groups including Heaven’s Gate, the religious cult whose leader and 38 followers died in a mass suicide in 1997 – the largest mass suicide event in America’s history. She called one of the forces at work bounded choice: people make choices, but within a world the group has already defined for them. Leon Festinger and his colleagues studied what happens when strongly held beliefs collide with reality. Committed believers often do not abandon the belief. They find a way to explain away the contradiction and may become even more committed. Lewis Coser described greedy institutions, organizations that demand extraordinary loyalty and weaken personal relationships that might compete with the group.

Political scientists have studied the related phenomenon of the cult of personality. Nikita Khrushchev gave the phrase its modern political meaning when he denounced Stalin’s cult in 1956. Max Weber had already described charismatic authority: followers grant a leader unusual authority because they believe that person possesses exceptional qualities, but the leader must continue demonstrating those qualities to retain their loyalty.

Lisa Wedeen found something even more interesting while studying Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. A leader cult does not require everyone to believe its claims. People can privately doubt them while publicly behaving as though they believe, and that public performance reinforces the system. Xavier Márquez describes what happens next. When loyalty to a leader becomes important, followers compete to demonstrate their loyalty. Yesterday’s praise is no longer enough, so today’s praise becomes more extravagant. He calls this flattery inflation.

The Church of Safe and Effective

The pro-vaccine absolutists have no single founder or leader. Their authority is spread across federal agencies, medical societies, academic journals and major news organizations. That does not put it outside Lifton’s framework. His original work examined ideological control within a state system, not a religious sect built around a single guru.

But the COVID era did produce something close to a personality cult. By April 2020, online sellers were offering Fauci bobbleheads, Fauci prayer candles and merchandise reading “In Fauci We Trust.” Anthony Fauci had become more than the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. To many Americans, he had become the public face of science itself.

Fauci made that identification explicit in June 2021. Responding to critics on MSNBC, he said, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” The problem with that statement should be obvious. Science is a method for testing claims and correcting errors. No individual scientist, public health official or government agency is science itself. Siri reaches a similar conclusion through depositions. The first section of Vaccines, Amen, “The Clergy,” describes vaccinologist Stanley Plotkin as a high priest and his students as disciples.

I saw how deeply this identification with Fauci had taken hold of friends and family in my own life. In 2021, I worked as an editor on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci. After the book was published, Jill posted the following on Facebook, quoting a passage I had written for the book. That single post ended a fifteen-year friendship. Our daughter-in-law’s mother, whom we had known well and considered a close friend, blocked Jill on Facebook and essentially stopped speaking to us. We never really reconciled before she died of heart failure in 2023.

Fauci’s loaded language is familiar to anyone who lived through 2021. “Safe and effective” became a phrase applied to products and populations supported by very different levels of evidence. “Anti-vaxxer” became broad enough to describe both someone opposed to all vaccination, and a parent questioning the timing or necessity of a single dose. The Merriam-Webster definition of “anti-vaxxer” now includes people who oppose some vaccines or oppose vaccine mandates. By that definition, a fully vaccinated physician who objects to a mandate can be called an anti-vaxxer. Once the label was applied, the underlying argument could be ignored.

Festinger’s pattern appeared early. On March 29, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told Rachel Maddow that agency data suggested “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Three days later, a CDC spokesperson told the New York Times that Walensky had spoken broadly and that the evidence on transmission remained unclear. The claim changed, but public health authorities continued to speak with extraordinary certainty and mainstream media amplified their voices.

Then came consequences for those who refused. On July 16, 2021, President Biden declared that “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.” The same day, he accused social media companies of killing people by allowing vaccine misinformation on their platforms. That September, the White House required vaccination for federal workers and contractors and announced a vaccinate-or-test requirement for employees of large private companies. The military ultimately discharged about 8,400 service members who refused the vaccine. As booster recommendations expanded, the definition of being fully protected changed as well.

Fauci has retired, and no individual has replaced him as the dominant public face of vaccine policy. Peter Hotez of Baylor campaigns against what he calls the deadly rise of anti-science. Paul Offit, co-inventor of the RotaTeq vaccine, lost his seat on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee in September 2025 and became one of the most prominent critics of the new direction in federal vaccine policy. Institutions have also stepped into that role. The American Academy of Pediatrics now publishes its own childhood vaccine schedule and successfully challenged the ACIP on which I served. Michael Osterholm’s Vaccine Integrity Project in Minnesota has assembled its own group of vaccine experts.

The old public health establishment may no longer visibly control the federal agencies, but little has changed beneath the surface. The same vaccine policies remain largely intact, as do the institutional networks and consensus that produced them.

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The Church of Unvaxxed and Unafraid

The other side of the vaccine divide is more organized around identifiable leaders and organizations. Children’s Health Defense began as the World Mercury Project. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chaired it beginning in 2016, took leave in 2023 to run for president, and resigned in December 2024 before becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services. Del Bigtree founded the Informed Consent Action Network in 2016 after producing the film Vaxxed. By 2024, the two organizations had become substantial enterprises. Children’s Health Defense reported $15.2 million in revenue and ICAN reported $15.3 million. Bigtree’s reported compensation that year was $242,289, in addition to having a gourmet chef on staff.

The language at the Children’s Health Defense conference in Austin in November 2025 showed how far the movement had traveled. Speaking to roughly a thousand attendees, Bigtree declared, “God is an anti-vaxxer, and he needs you to speak up.” Vendors sold infant onesies printed “unvaxxed unafraid.” Hats declaring that Kennedy had been right about everything sold out. This is the flattery inflation Márquez described. It is no longer enough for Kennedy to have been right about important things. Loyalty demands that he have been right about everything.

The demand for purity was visible at the same conference. Mark Gorton, head of the MAHA Institute, told the crowd that the movement needed to become more openly anti-vaccine. Mary Holland, chief executive of Children’s Health Defense, pushed back, insisting that her organization was not anti-vaccine but “pro-informed consent.” The distinction matters. A movement built around opposition to vaccine mandates and demands for informed consent was now confronting pressure from within to become explicitly opposed to vaccination itself.

Bigtree went considerably further a few months later. In February 2026, he told a reporter for The Atlantic that he wanted his teenage son to catch polio and measles. He said he had considered driving his unvaccinated family into South Carolina’s measles outbreak so they could be exposed, and described the pertussis vaccine as a crime against children. Fewer than one in a hundred polio infections in children result in paralysis, but no parent knows beforehand whether his child will be among them. Seeking infection deliberately is something quite different from arguing that parents should be free to decline a vaccine.

None of this makes every criticism coming from this movement wrong. Siri’s firm successfully fought the FDA over access to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine licensing records under the Freedom of Information Act. The plaintiff was a separate organization, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. In January 2022, a federal judge ordered the FDA to produce 55,000 pages every thirty days. Forcing those records into public view was a genuine public service. The point is not that a group exhibiting these characteristics must therefore be wrong. It is precisely the opposite: a movement can expose real misconduct, win important battles and still become intolerant of evidence or dissent that challenges its own beliefs.

Each Church Needs the Other

Neither side is particularly good at hearing evidence from the other. Lifton called this doctrine over person. When facts or experience conflict with the accepted belief, the belief wins. Dan Kahan’s research on identity-protective cognition helps explain why. People do not evaluate evidence in isolation. They also consider, often unconsciously, what accepting that evidence would mean for their standing within their own group.

Researchers have demonstrated this effect in the vaccine debate. In a 2014 randomized trial, presenting evidence that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism reduced belief in the autism claim. But among parents already most skeptical of vaccines, the same information also reduced their stated intention to vaccinate. Correcting one false belief did not necessarily change the larger conclusion. In some cases, people simply found another reason to hold their position.

The pattern works in both directions. Bigtree has dismissed the replicated studies finding no association between vaccines and autism by arguing that the researchers were committed to finding that result. On the other side, federal health officials were accused of minimizing evidence of myocarditis and other adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, an issue examined by a Senate subcommittee in 2025. The evidence and circumstances are different. The response is strikingly similar: evidence coming from the other side is treated as suspect before it is considered on its merits.

Coser’s work helps explain why this matters beyond the vaccine argument itself. Institutions that demand strong loyalty work to weaken relationships that might compete with that loyalty. In medicine, the relationships that matter most are between physician and patient, and between parent and child.

One extreme overrides those relationships from above through mandates and requirements imposed far from the examination room. The other undermines them by teaching parents that physicians and public health authorities cannot be trusted at all. Both the anti-vax and the pro-vax church demand that the parent’s decision be made in advance, by doctrine or edict.

The Comparative Degree

If you are a parent deciding whether your child should receive a vaccine, neither cult offers much room for an individual decision. Medicine (and medical practitioners) should. The question is always comparative: this vaccine against this disease, for this child, at this age, based on the available evidence and this child’s medical and family history. Sometimes the balance strongly favors vaccination. Sometimes it is a closer call. Sometimes there may be good reasons to wait or even not vaccinate at all. That requires a physician willing to say, “I don’t know yet.” It also requires a parent free to say, “not today” or even “not ever.”

Two principles protect that conversation and the patient or parent/guardian decision. The first is informed consent. A competent adult who understands the material risks, benefits, and alternatives of a medical intervention decides freely whether to accept it. Parents make those decisions for their children. Judge Benjamin Cardozo stated the principle in 1914: “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.” After the Nazi doctors’ trial, the Nuremberg Code placed voluntary consent at the center of medical ethics.

The second is shared clinical decision-making. The physician brings the evidence, experience, and uncertainties. The patient or parent brings medical history, values and circumstances that cannot be reduced to a line on a chart. They discuss the decision together, but the final decision belongs to the adult patient or, in the case of a child, the parent. The CDC already uses shared clinical decision-making for some vaccines, including HPV vaccination for adults aged twenty-seven through forty-five, where there is no blanket recommendation that everyone in that age group be vaccinated.

The two cults undermine informed consent from opposite directions. Mandates take away the voluntary part. Doctrine takes away the informed part. A parent told that every vaccine is poison is no better informed than a parent told that every vaccine is safe.

Dickens wrote about an age in which the loudest authorities insisted on seeing everything in the superlative. More than 150 years later, the vaccine debate has fallen into much the same trap. Vaccines must be either safe or dangerous, lifesaving or poisonous, something every responsible parent accepts or something every responsible parent refuses. Good medicine does not work that way.

The decision belongs to a parent, and in the examination room, a physician should be willing to discuss what is known and what is not, and to defer to a parent free to make the final choice.

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References

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Politico. 2025. “RFK Jr. Should Handpick Vaccine Scientists, Former Adviser Says.” February 19. Reporting on Bigtree’s remarks at POLITICO Playbook, “The First 100 Days: Health Care,” Washington, DC, February 19, 2025 (https://politico100dayshealthcare.splashthat.com/). Syndicated at https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-handpick-vaccine-scientists-164724856.html.

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October 5, 2026

IT’S OVER: IRGC Mistake Confirms Trump’s Hit on the British Empire

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 12:52 pm

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Five Hospitals and a Denial

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 10:48 am

Update on Plague case in Siberia

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 5

Oct 5, 2026 0900h Washington DC · Robert W. Malone, MD, MS and Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD

On Saturday, October 4, Russia’s federal health agency announced that nothing had happened at its plague laboratory in Irkutsk. No accident. No pathogen in the dead technician’s body. The epidemiological situation is stable.

The same day, Irkutsk closed five hospitals.

City Clinical Hospitals No. 1, No. 3 and No. 10 went under three-week quarantine. So did the Ivano-Matreninskaya Children’s Clinical Hospital and at least one maternity hospital. The Shelekhov district hospital, where Darya Shipilova died, was already closed. At the Irkutsk Aluminum Plant in Shelekhov, the chief executive ordered mandatory masking as a preventive measure.

Those two facts arrived within hours of each other, and they don’t fit together. Nobody quarantines a children’s hospital and a maternity ward for three weeks over one case of undiagnosed pneumonia.

This is an update to “The Broken Tube,” published yesterday, which ran the Shelekhov death through the six-layer Biological Weapons Convention verification framework that Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone, my co-author and wife of almost fifty years, and I have been testing since March. That assessment returned a moderate biosafety concern and a low treaty compliance concern. The developments of the past twenty-four hours do not overturn it. They sharpen one layer considerably, and they clarify what the remaining question actually is.

Three denials, carefully worded

Rospotrebnadzor is the Russian federal consumer protection and public health service. Think of it as the Centers for Disease Control, the consumer safety functions of the Food and Drug Administration, and a national workplace sanitation authority combined into one agency reporting to the prime minister. Anna Popova has run it since 2013. She flew to Irkutsk personally for this incident.

Its October 4 statement made three claims, and the wording of each one repays attention.

On cause of death. The technician was diagnosed with “пневмония неустановленной этиологии,” pneumonia of undetermined etiology. The agency did not name plague. It also did not rule plague out.

On the pathogen. Expanded testing “не выявили в ее биоматериале микроорганизмов, связанных с профессиональной деятельностью,” did not detect in her biomaterial microorganisms associated with her professional activity.

On the accident. “Комиссия по биологической безопасности также не обнаружила в институте аварийных ситуаций.” The biological safety commission found no emergency situations at the institute. That directly contradicts the account published by the Siberian journal Lyudi Baikala, which reported that Shipilova broke a tube containing the plague pathogen on September 25.

The agency also stated that the sanitary and epidemiological situation in Irkutsk Oblast and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov “remains stable.”

Yesterday’s essay noted that no official had named the pathogen and that no formal death notice had been issued. That is now superseded. Rospotrebnadzor has spoken, on the record, and what it said is more useful to the analysis than its earlier silence.

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What the region did instead

Irkutsk is a city of about six hundred thousand people. Over the weekend it closed a substantial share of its hospital capacity.

Patients at the quarantined hospitals are cut off from visitors. Only supplies and food may be delivered. Artem Fominykh, chief executive of the aluminum plant, announced the masking requirement and stated that identified contacts are under medical observation with negative test results.

The Insider reports something sharper. Physicians in Irkutsk are discussing plague openly among themselves while the hospital paperwork omits the diagnosis entirely. Sources told Lyudi Baikala that from October 1, FSB details have been escorting the ambulances carrying contacts to examination.

Two observations about the three-week figure. Primary pneumonic plague has an incubation period of one to four days, occasionally extending to seven. The World Health Organization recommends seven days of monitoring for exposed contacts. Twenty-one days is three times that window. It may reflect Russian protocol for particularly dangerous infections generally, which is broader than plague specifically. It is not a duration that plague alone requires.

When an institution’s words and its conduct diverge, the conduct is the better evidence. Words are cheap to issue and carry political cost when wrong. Closing a children’s hospital for three weeks is expensive, visible, and nobody does it casually.

Why the pathogen denial is narrower than it sounds

“Testing did not detect microorganisms associated with her professional activity” is not the same sentence as “she did not have plague.” The difference is microbiology, and it decides how much the denial is worth.

Shipilova spent three days in a district hospital with severe pneumonia before she died. Any patient admitted that way receives empiric antibiotics within hours of arrival. That is standard practice everywhere, including Russia, and the usual empiric regimens for severe community-acquired pneumonia include agents that kill Yersinia pestis efficiently. Doxycycline is a first-line plague drug. Fluoroquinolones such as ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin are first-line plague drugs. Third-generation cephalosporins including ceftriaxone work against it.

The Irkutsk institute published confirmation of exactly this in 2022. Testing thirty collection strains from Mongolia held lyophilized for thirty-one to fifty-nine years, Belkova and colleagues found all of them highly sensitive to streptomycin, ciprofloxacin and ceftriaxone (Belkova, Zakhlebnaya, and Balakhonov 2022). Her own institution had documented that the organism it holds dies readily to the drugs she would have been given.

A patient who has had several days of effective antibiotics frequently yields sterile cultures. The organism is cleared or rendered nonviable even while the patient deteriorates from the damage already done. Culture-negative in that setting is an expected result, not an exonerating one.

The word the agency used is микроорганизмы, microorganisms. Organisms. Not генетический материал or ДНК, genetic material or DNA. Polymerase chain reaction detects bacterial DNA whether or not the organism is still viable, and it stays positive well after cultures turn sterile. Serology detects the antibody response, which in plague appears within days and persists. Immunochromatographic assay for the F1 capsular antigen detects the protein rather than the living organism, and the Irkutsk institute uses that method routinely in its own published work.

Four tests exist. The statement is consistent with having run one of them.

None of this proves Shipilova had plague. It explains how the official statement could be literally accurate and still leave the central question open. The way to close it is to publish which assays were run, on which specimens, taken at which point relative to antibiotic administration. That is one paragraph of disclosure, and the agency has not offered it.

Who investigated whom

The Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East is not a university laboratory that Rospotrebnadzor regulates from a distance. It is a Rospotrebnadzor facility. The agency assuring the public that no accident occurred is the agency that operates the laboratory where the accident is alleged to have occurred.

The biological safety commission that found no emergency situations is the institute’s own commission.

American readers have a reference point for this. When Dugway Proving Ground shipped incompletely irradiated live anthrax to nearly two hundred laboratories across nine countries between 2005 and 2015, the Department of Defense investigated itself and produced a report. What made that report credible was everything around it: a Centers for Disease Control investigation running in parallel, congressional testimony under oath, a Government Accountability Office with subpoena power, and journalists who could file Freedom of Information Act requests and litigate the refusals. We examined that case under this framework in March and found systematic sterilization and oversight failure at a declared defensive facility. The finding was possible because the surrounding machinery forced disclosure.

None of that machinery exists here. There is a criminal case, reportedly opened into violation of sanitary rules resulting in death, and no primary Investigative Committee announcement confirming it has surfaced. If that case is real and proceeds, it would eventually compel the records that matter: workplace logs, biosafety documentation, the exposure report, witness statements. That is the one domestic mechanism capable of testing the agency’s account, and it operates inside the same state.

Self-investigation is not evidence of wrongdoing. It is the absence of verification, which is a different problem and the one this series exists to describe.

What has not happened

Nobody else has gotten sick.

Roughly one hundred eighty-nine contacts remain under observation. All are asymptomatic. All laboratory results reported so far are negative. Governor Igor Kobzev said as much on October 2, and nothing since has contradicted him.

That is the most important fact available, and it has now passed the point where it means something. Primary pneumonic plague incubates in one to four days. Shipilova died overnight on October 2. Her hospital contacts were exposed between September 29 and October 2. If pneumonic plague had transmitted to the people around her, the first secondary cases would be appearing now.

They are not appearing. Four days on, with nearly two hundred people under daily observation and every one of them being watched by a health service that would struggle to conceal a cluster of that size, there is no second case.

Two readings fit. Either she did not have transmissible pneumonic plague, or she did and the contacts received prophylactic antibiotics fast enough to stop it, which is what the isolation and the three-week monitoring would be for. Both readings are reassuring. Neither is consistent with an uncontrolled release.

For anyone in the United States wondering whether this threatens them, the answer is no, and the arithmetic above is why.

Washington’s answer

A State Department official said on October 5 that the United States is aware of reports of “a fatal case of suspected pneumonic plague in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia” and is “monitoring the situation closely with the CDC and our other interagency partners.” The official added that “many details have not been confirmed” and encouraged Russian authorities to share information “quickly and openly.”

The State Department deserves credit for that statement..

Consider what the Department could have done with the same facts. A dead plague researcher, a Russian laboratory, a denial nobody outside Russia can check, and a domestic audience primed by four years of war to believe the worst about Moscow. The temptation to lead that story was available and free. State declined it.

The Department did four things correctly. It used the words suspected pneumonic plague, which is what the evidence supports and which Rospotrebnadzor itself will not say. It stated plainly that many details have not been confirmed, which is true and which costs something to admit. It asserted nothing about origin, intent, or treaty compliance. And it asked for disclosure rather than announcing a conclusion.

That restraint is the discipline this framework exists to impose, arrived at independently and under more pressure than anyone writing essays will face.

The posture is consistent with what Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Thomas DiNanno has argued since taking the job. At a Biological Weapons Convention side event in Geneva in December 2025, DiNanno set out the case that modern biotechnology leaves digital traces in sequence databases, procurement records and publication patterns, and that systems able to read those traces at scale could begin to close the Convention’s verification gap. He named DNA synthesis screening and supply chain monitoring as the priority applications. That initiative is the policy reason this series exists.

An administration that announced an artificial intelligence verification initiative in September 2025 has now met its first significant foreign plague laboratory incident. It named the suspicion accurately, declined to overstate the evidence, and asked for data. That is how an independent international treaty verification capability would behave if one existed, which is a decent argument for building one.

It also demonstrates the limit. The strongest action available to the United States government, confronting a possible fatal laboratory-acquired infection with a select agent at a foreign state facility, is a polite request that the facility’s owner publish more.

What changes in the assessment

Two layers move. The composite does not.

Layer 1, genomic surveillance. Yesterday this layer held nothing and was unscorable. It now holds one claim: expanded testing detected no occupationally associated microorganisms. That claim comes from the facility’s owner, describes specimens of unstated type taken at an unstated time relative to antibiotic treatment, and uses a word that denotes organisms rather than genetic material. It remains unscorable, and the reason has changed from absence of data to data that cannot be evaluated.

Layer 5, behavioral and organizational patterns. This moves from 4.5 to 5.5 out of ten. An explicit official denial contradicted by five hospital quarantines, mandatory masking at an industrial plant, and physicians who discuss a diagnosis that their own paperwork omits is a wider gap than the earlier silence was. Reliability stays low, near 45 percent, because much of it still rests on single-source and Telegram reporting.

Layer 4, environmental monitoring, holds at 2.0. The quarantine expansion looks alarming and is not, on inspection. Contacts from Shelekhov were distributed into Irkutsk city facilities for isolation, and those facilities then closed. That is a cascade running outward through the healthcare system from a single index patient, which is the nosocomial pattern yesterday’s essay described. A release of consequence produces a geographically patterned cohort along a plume axis. This is still a hospital pattern, now with more hospitals in it.

The composite moves from 3.0 to approximately 3.2 out of ten. The classification is unchanged: moderate biosafety concern, low treaty compliance concern. The Shelekhov incident still scores lower on treaty compliance than two American facilities examined with the same instrument.

One scenario gains weight. Yesterday the distribution assigned seven percent to a non-plague etiology with the diagnosis wrong or misreported. Rospotrebnadzor’s statement, Gennady Onishchenko’s public skepticism, and the absence of any secondary case together push that to roughly twelve percent, drawn down from the laboratory-acquired categories. The offensive program scenario stays at three percent. Nothing released in the past twenty-four hours bears on it in either direction.

What would settle it

A plague laboratory investigated itself, announced that it found nothing, and closed five hospitals on the same day.

The gap between those two acts is not evidence of a weapons program. It is evidence that no process exists to check the work. Rospotrebnadzor may be telling the truth. The technician may have died of something else entirely, as her agency says and as its former director suspects. Or she may have died of plague contracted at her bench, with the organism cleared by the antibiotics that came too late to save her, and the laboratory’s own commission may have cleared the laboratory. From outside, those possibilities cannot be separated, and that is the finding.

Four disclosures would separate them, and each is small.

Which assays were run on which specimens, at what time relative to her first antibiotic dose. Whether she had received EV76, the live attenuated plague vaccine that Russia uses and that this institute historically manufactured. The occupations and home addresses of the isolated contacts, which distinguish a hospital cascade from a plume. The strain typing, if any organism was recovered at all, compared against the institute’s own collection accessions.

The institute performs that typing in-house. It publishes the results in its own conference proceedings. The work is a week, and no one can compel it.

The Biological Weapons Convention entered into force fifty-one years ago without a verification mechanism, and still has none. Every argument about whether this death was an accident, a weapons program, or an ordinary pneumonia runs into the same wall: there is no inspector, no protocol, and no standing. The American answer this weekend was to ask Russia politely to publish more. That is not a criticism of the State Department. It is the complete inventory of available tools.

We will keep applying the framework as material arrives, and we will report what it returns. Yesterday it returned a finding that should reassure, and today it still does.

RWM/JGM

Checking a Russian agency’s wording against Russian primary sources takes a morning that nobody pays for. Paid subscribers are why MALONE.NEWS can run an analysis to a low-scoring conclusion instead of a loud one. If the work is useful to you, consider a paid subscription.

References

Al Jazeera. 2026. “Russian Lab Worker Dies of Suspected Plague in Siberia; US Monitoring Case.” October 5. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/5/russian-lab-worker-dies-of-suspected-plague-in-siberia-us-monitoring-case.

Balakhonov, S. V., ed. 2022. Aktualnye voprosy obespecheniya sanitarno-epidemiologicheskogo blagopoluchiya naseleniya Sibiri i Dalnego Vostoka. Proceedings of the Regional Scientific-Practical Conference with International Participation, November 15, 2022. Irkutsk: Irkutsk State University Press. https://irknipchi.ru/collection_materials.pdf. Includes Belkova, Zakhlebnaya, and Balakhonov on the antibiotic susceptibility of Mongolian collection strains.

DiNanno, Thomas G. 2025. “Modern Tools for Modern Threats: Towards Strengthening BWC Implementation, Verification, and Assurance.” Remarks at a Biological Weapons Convention Meeting of States Parties side event, Geneva, December 15. U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva. https://geneva.usmission.gov/2025/12/16/remarks-on-msp-side-event-modern-tools-for-modern-threats-towards-strengthening-bwc-implementation-verification-and-assurance/.

Lyudi Baikala. 2026. “Po odnoi iz versii, pogibshaya ot chumy v Shelekhove rabotala laborantkoi i razbila probirku s vozbuditelem infektsii.” October 2. https://baikal-journal.ru/2026/10/02/pogibshaya-ot-chumy-v-shelehove-rabotala-laborantkoj-i-razbila-probirku-s-vozbuditelem-infekczii/.

Malone, Robert W. 2026. “The Broken Tube: A Plague Death in Siberia and What It Does Not Prove.” Malone News, October 4. https://www.malone.news/p/the-broken-tube-a-plague-death-in.

Meduza. 2026. “Hospitals in Irkutsk Impose Quarantines after an Employee at an Anti-Plague Institute Dies.” October 5. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/10/05/hospitals-in-irkutsk-impose-quarantines-after-an-employee-at-an-anti-plague-institute-dies-russia-s-public-health-agency-says-she-died-of-pneumonia-and-the-epidemiological-situation-remains-stable.

Radio Svoboda. 2026. “Karantin v bolnitsakh, maski na IrkAZ. Vlasti ne podtverzhdayut chumu.” October 4. https://www.svoboda.org/a/karantin-v-boljnitsah-maski-na-irkaz-vlasti-ne-podtverzhdayut-chumu/33870054.html.

The Insider. 2026. “Kak minimum tri bolnitsy Irkutska vveli karantin posle smerti sotrudnitsy protivochumnogo instituta. Rospotrebnadzor govorit o pnevmonii.” October 4. https://theins.ru/news/297886.

The Moscow Times. 2026. “Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies From Plague.” October 2. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/02/nearly-200-people-under-observation-after-irkutsk-lab-worker-dies-from-plague-a93857.

World Health Organization. “Plague.” Fact sheet. Incubation period and contact monitoring guidance. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/plague.

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October 2, 2026

ACIP Goes Back to Court

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 12:14 pm

The fight over standing, executive power and judicial reach

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 2

By: Dr.’s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone

Audio Version:

LISTEN NOW · 16:13

The First Circuit takes up the limits of judicial power

There is an important development in the lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical organizations against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On October 6, three federal appellate judges will hear arguments over whether one district judge had the authority to effectively shut down ACIP. The case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and the underlying dispute is about much more than vaccines.

In March, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a preliminary order staying the January 2026 revision of the CDC childhood immunization schedule. But he went considerably further. He also stayed the appointments of thirteen members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and stayed votes taken by that committee. The practical consequence was extraordinary: a federal district judge effectively prevented the newly constituted ACIP from functioning. HHS and the Department of Justice (belatedly) appealed, and the First Circuit must now decide whether the district court had the legal authority to do that.

Kennedy’s decision to reconstitute ACIP was hardly unprecedented. In 2021, Biden EPA Administrator Michael Regan removed the existing members of two major federal scientific advisory committees, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and Science Advisory Board, and reconstituted them with new members. Removed Trump-era advisers sued, alleging that the Biden administration had violated FACA’s requirement that advisory committees be “fairly balanced.”

A federal district court rejected the challenged claims. The Biden administration similarly reconstituted the Homeland Security Advisory Council after dismissing its existing members. And when Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration removed Biden-era members of EPA’s scientific advisory committees and began rebuilding them yet again. Presidential administrations reconstituting FACA advisory committees is therefore not novel. The much more difficult legal question in the AAP case is why reconstituting ACIP produced a judicial remedy effectively suspending the entire committee when comparable changes in other administrations did not.

So why didn’t the government make more of the fact that incoming administrations have reconstituted FACA advisory committees before and that the courts have upheld this precedent?

This was not merely a distant historical analogy involving some obscure presidential commission; this happened in the Biden and Trump administrations. Yet that history does not appear to have been developed as a central part of the government’s original defense of the reconstituted ACIP despite the clear and compelling judicial precedent. Incorporating this into the defense would have established something important from the outset: reconstituting a scientific advisory committee after a change in administration was not, by itself, an unprecedented exercise of executive authority. Skeptics might hypothesize that what appears to be gross incompetence was actually a tell of hidden intent to delay an ACIP meeting until after the November election. Particularly prone to such speculation would be those skeptics privy to HHS internal communications suggesting it would be politically desirable to do so.

Before the appellate court ever reaches the larger question of judicial power, however, it must confront a more basic one: what gives the American Academy of Pediatrics standing to challenge who sits on ACIP in the first place? Article III standing ordinarily requires more than having an interest in a government body’s work or disagreeing with its decisions. A plaintiff must identify a concrete and particularized injury, show that the injury is fairly traceable to the government action being challenged, and show that a court can redress it.

AAP is a private nonprofit medical association. ACIP does not regulate AAP, impose legal obligations on it, or require its members to follow its recommendations. Yet Judge Murphy concluded that AAP and the other medical organizations have a “direct interest” in ACIP’s work because vaccine recommendations affect their members’ medical practices and because several of the organizations had previously participated in ACIP working groups. Under Murphy’s reading of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, an improperly balanced advisory committee therefore causes them sufficient injury to challenge its composition. That is an unusually consequential theory of standing: the asserted injury is not that ACIP directly regulates AAP, but that AAP and its members have a professional interest in the work of an advisory committee whose recommendations may later influence federal vaccine policy.

DOJ sees a fundamental problem with that reasoning. ACIP is an advisory committee. Its members do not regulate AAP, vaccinate AAP’s patients, or generally impose legal obligations on its physicians. They do not even make the decisions that regulate the AAP members.

ACIP makes recommendations. Those recommendations do not become official CDC recommendations merely because ACIP votes for them. They must subsequently be reviewed and adopted by the CDC Director. That creates a basic Article III question: what concrete injury to AAP is caused simply by these thirteen people sitting on ACIP? If the claimed injury arises only after the CDC Director adopts an ACIP recommendation, then why isn’t the proper target for judicial review that subsequent agency action rather than the appointments of the people who advised the Director?

That standing question has become even more significant because another federal judge recently considered a challenge involving the same ACIP appointments in Arizona v. Kennedy and rejected standing. DOJ promptly brought that decision to the First Circuit’s attention. AAP argues that its situation is different because of its relationship with ACIP, including its previous participation in ACIP working groups. But the disagreement gives the First Circuit a relatively narrow way to resolve this appeal. If the judges conclude that AAP lacks Article III standing to challenge the appointments themselves, they could reverse that portion of Judge Murphy’s order without deciding the much larger questions surrounding the scope of judicial power.

If AAP clears the standing hurdle, DOJ has another argument. The Administrative Procedure Act permits courts to review certain final “agency actions,” but DOJ argues that appointing an individual to a federal advisory committee isn’t the kind of agency action contemplated by the APA. That matters because Judge Murphy relied on §705 of the APA to “stay” the appointments. If an appointment isn’t reviewable agency action, §705 cannot provide authority to suspend it. There is another problem in the statutory language itself. Section 705 permits a reviewing court, under appropriate circumstances, to “postpone the effective date” of agency action while litigation proceeds. But these thirteen ACIP members had already been appointed and were already serving. DOJ therefore asks what, exactly, the court was postponing. Its argument is that Murphy wasn’t postponing appointments that had yet to take effect. He was effectively removing already-serving advisory committee members from their positions. Calling it a “stay” does not change the substance of the order: it removes sitting ACIP members from their positions.

That brings the case directly into the shadow of the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA. In CASA, the Supreme Court restricted the ability of individual federal district judges to issue universal injunctions providing relief far beyond the parties actually before them. The central principle is that judicial relief ordinarily must be tailored to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs rather than allowing one district judge to exercise general supervision over federal policy. DOJ has now expressly invoked CASA in the ACIP appeal.

The government argues that Judge Murphy cannot avoid CASA simply by describing his order as a statutory §705 “stay” rather than an injunction. Murphy had already stayed the challenged vaccine actions, relief that itself has consequences well beyond the plaintiffs in this lawsuit. But he then went further, suspending the appointments of thirteen ACIP members and effectively preventing the committee from functioning at all.

That raises a different question about the scope of the remedy: once the specific vaccine actions being challenged had been stayed, what additional injury to AAP required the court to disable the advisory committee that had recommended them? DOJ’s argument is not simply that Murphy’s order had nationwide consequences. It is that the additional remedy against ACIP’s membership was unnecessary to redress the injuries the plaintiffs claimed and therefore exceeded the limits on judicial relief emphasized by the Supreme Court in CASA.

And that raises another fundamental question: who gave a federal district judge the authority to decide what a properly “balanced” scientific advisory committee should look like? FACA requires advisory committees to be “fairly balanced,” but provides no mathematical formula for ideological, professional, scientific, or institutional representation. Yet Murphy concluded that the imbalance he perceived justified suspending all thirteen appointments.

And this case illustrates precisely why the issue of activist judges matters: one district judge did not simply provide relief to the plaintiffs before him. His order reached into the Executive Branch, suspended thirteen already-appointed members of a federal advisory committee, and effectively prevented that committee from functioning nationwide.

Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share it on social media, email, and please republish this article, with author attribution and a link back to the original article.

Who are the Judges?

We now also know which judges will hear the October 6 argument: Chief Judge David Barron, Judge William Kayatta Jr., and Judge Joshua Dunlap. Barron and Kayatta were appointed by President Obama; Dunlap was appointed by President Trump. But those political labels tell us relatively little about how this particular case will be decided.

The most interesting judge may actually be Kayatta, because he authored Union of Concerned Scientists v. Wheeler, an important First Circuit decision involving FACA and the APA. That case allowed judicial review of an EPA policy governing membership on federal scientific advisory committees, and AAP relies heavily upon it. DOJ argues that AAP is stretching Kayatta’s decision beyond what it actually held. Wheeler involved judicial review of an agency policy governing committee membership. It did not hold that federal judges could examine individual appointments, decide whether particular advisory committee members produced an acceptable balance, and then suspend those individuals from serving. On October 6, Judge Kayatta may therefore effectively be asked to define the boundaries of his own precedent.

The First Circuit therefore has several ways to resolve this appeal. It could conclude that AAP lacks standing to challenge the ACIP appointments themselves. It could decide that individual appointments are not reviewable “agency action” under the APA. It could conclude that §705 does not authorize a judge to “postpone” appointments that had already taken effect.

Or it could confront the larger question raised by Trump v. CASA: whether suspending all thirteen ACIP appointments exceeded the permissible scope of judicial relief. Any one of those conclusions could overturn the portion of Murphy’s order disabling ACIP without resolving the entire underlying vaccine-policy lawsuit.

But there is an even more fundamental question beneath all of this. FACA requires advisory committees to be “fairly balanced,” but Congress provided no formula defining the correct balance of scientific disciplines, professional experience, institutional affiliations, or scientific viewpoints. At the same time, the appointment of ACIP members was placed in the Executive Branch, with the HHS Secretary responsible for selecting the committee’s members. The statute imposes a requirement of balance, but it does not transfer the power of appointment from the Executive Branch to the judiciary. Nothing in FACA appoints a federal district judge as the nation’s referee of scientific balance, empowered to decide which experts belong on an advisory committee and then remove those he believes do not. Yet that is where Judge Murphy’s order ultimately leads: a single district judge substituted his judgment about the acceptable composition of a federal scientific advisory committee for that of the Executive Branch official legally charged with appointing its members. Judicial review of whether the Executive complied with the law is one thing. Judicially deciding what the committee should look like is something else entirely.

That is why October 6 matters. This case is no longer simply a fight between the American Academy of Pediatrics and Secretary Kennedy over vaccines. It is a test of the boundaries of judicial power. Can a private non-profit organization establish standing because it has a professional interest in the work of an advisory committee, persuade one district judge that the committee is insufficiently “balanced,” and then obtain an order suspending every sitting member and preventing that federal advisory committee from functioning nationwide?

If the answer is yes, the implications reach far beyond ACIP. Every change of administration, every reconstitution of a federal advisory committee, and every disagreement over what constitutes ideological, professional, or scientific “balance” potentially becomes an invitation for a federal judge to decide who may sit at the table.

The First Circuit is now being asked to decide where judicial review ends and judicial control of the Executive Branch begins.

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