The ACIP Case Gets Stranger

A troubling pattern emerges from the court record

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 7

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

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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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Inside the Irkutsk Plague Institute

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

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 6

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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

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

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 5

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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

American Academy of Pediatrics v. Kennedy. 2026. No. 1:25-cv-11916, Memorandum and Order on Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction (D. Mass. March 16, 2026). https://clearinghouse.net/doc/168702/.

Associated Press. 2021. “Biden Grappling with ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’” July 16. Syndicated at https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/biden-grappling-with-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated.

Barker, Eileen. 1984. The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing?Oxford: Blackwell.

Bartlett, Tom. 2026. “’I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated.’” The Atlantic, February. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/del-bigtree-pro-infection-polio-measles/686092/.

Boston Globe. 2025. “’God Is an Anti-Vaxxer’: Inside the Conference Celebrating RFK Jr.’s Rise.” November 10. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/10/nation/rfk-jr-anti-vaccine-mandates/.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 2025. “ACIP Shared Clinical Decision-Making Recommendations.” Last updated January 7. https://www.cdc.gov/acip/vaccine-recommendations/shared-clinical-decision-making.html.

Children’s Health Defense. 2024. “RFK Jr. Resigns as Chairman of Children’s Health Defense as He Anticipates Top Job at HHS.” The Defender, December 9. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rfk-jr-resigns-chairman-childrens-health-defense-hhs-secretary/.

CNBC. 2021. “Fauci Blasts ‘Preposterous’ Covid Conspiracies, Accuses Critics of ‘Attacks on Science.’” June 9. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/09/fauci-blasts-preposterous-covid-conspiracies-accuses-critics-of-attacks-on-science.html.

CNN. 2021. “Fact Check: Four Times Walensky’s Comments Were Out of Step with CDC Guidance.” May 21. https://ktvz.com/politics/2021/05/21/fact-check-four-times-walenskys-comments-were-out-of-step-with-cdc-guidance/.

Contagion Live. 2026. “Initiatives to Strengthen Vaccine Policy and Governance in US.” June 26. https://www.contagionlive.com/view/initiatives-to-strengthen-vaccine-policy-and-governance-in-us.

Coser, Lewis A. 1974. Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment. New York: Free Press.

Estivariz, Concepcion F., Ruth Link-Gelles, and Tom Shimabukuro. 2024. “Poliomyelitis.” In Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (Pink Book), 14th ed., chap. 18. Atlanta: CDC. Last updated April 17. https://www.cdc.gov/pinkbook/hcp/table-of-contents/chapter-18-poliomyelitis.html.

Festinger, Leon, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. 1956. When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hotez, Peter J. 2023. The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Kansteiner, Fraiser. 2025. “RFK Jr. Critic Paul Offit Iced Out of Key FDA Vaccine Panel.” Fierce Pharma, September 3. https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/rfk-jr-critic-paul-offit-iced-out-key-fda-vaccine-panel.

Kennedy, Robert F., Jr. 2024. “Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report (OGE Form 278e).” Nominee report, signed December 21. US Office of Government Ethics. https://extapps2.oge.gov/201/Presiden.nsf/PAS+Index/A56222F259495B0D85258C1A00565073/$FILE/Kennedy%2C%20Jr.%2C%20Robert%20F.%20%20final278.pdf.

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

Five Hospitals and a Denial

Update on Plague case in Siberia

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 5

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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.

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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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ACIP Goes Back to Court

The fight over standing, executive power and judicial reach

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 2

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

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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.

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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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References

1. American Academy of Pediatrics, et al. v. Kennedy, et al., U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Memorandum and Order on Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction, March 16, 2026. Judge Brian E. Murphy’s order stayed the January 2026 childhood immunization schedule memorandum, the appointments of thirteen ACIP members, and votes taken by the challenged ACIP.
   District Court order
2. American Academy of Pediatrics, et al. v. Kennedy, et al., U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, No. 26-1503. Appellate docket and filings, including the government’s opening brief, plaintiffs’ response, government’s reply, supplemental authorities, and October 6, 2026 oral-argument date.
   Georgetown Health Care Litigation Tracker and court filings
3. Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. ___ (2025), U.S. Supreme Court, June 27, 2025. The Court held that universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority Congress granted federal courts where broader relief is not necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs.
   Supreme Court opinion
4. Young v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 1:21-cv-02623 (D.D.C. 2022). Challenge to the Biden EPA’s removal and reconstitution of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and Science Advisory Board under FACA and the APA, including the claim that the reconstituted committees were not “fairly balanced.”
   Preliminary-injunction opinion
   Summary-judgment opinion
5. Union of Concerned Scientists v. Wheeler, 954 F.3d 11 (1st Cir. 2020). First Circuit decision addressing judicial review under the APA of an EPA directive governing membership on federal scientific advisory committees. Opinion by Judge William J. Kayatta Jr.
   First Circuit opinion
6. State of Arizona, et al. v. Kennedy, et al., No. 26-cv-01609-VC (N.D. Cal.), Order Granting in Part and Denying in Part Motion to Dismiss, September 8, 2026. Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed the states’ claims challenging the ACIP appointments for lack of Article III standing, finding deficiencies in injury, causation and redressability.
   September 8 order

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America Had No Income Tax Until 1913 — How Was the Government Funded Before That?

✍🏻 Federal Register: Trump Accounts

Let your voice be heard! Comments due 11//2026 ⏳

NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 2

READ IN APP

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

SOURCE: READ THE FEDERAL REGISTER HERE

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This is the IRS and Treasury notice of proposed rulemaking on Trump accounts, published September 30, 2026 (CC-00226466-26, RIN 1545-BR91).

The same text is already in force as temporary regulations (T.D. 10056). Those temporary rules apply to tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2026, and expire September 30, 2029.

Comments on the proposed rule are due about 60 days after publication (reported as November 30, 2026) at regulations.gov. The link to make a comment is below. ⬇️

Summary, in plain words

Congress created Trump accounts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025. A Trump account is a special retirement-style investment account for a child. The “growth period” runs until December 31 of the year the child turns 17. During that time, the money is meant to sit and grow, mostly in stock-index funds.

An earlier March proposal would have made parents file a form to open the account. Commenters said that opt-in path would reach only about half of eligible children. Treasury withdrew that plan.

Under this rule, on or about October 1, 2026, the Treasury Secretary opens an “auto account” for each eligible child who has a Social Security number, has not turned 18 yet this year, and does not already have a Trump account. Treasury estimates this covers about 73 million children in 44 million families, including more than 60 million children who would not have had an account otherwise.

The Bank of New York Mellon holds the accounts. The investments sit in one master trust, with a separate record for each child, so private account data is not handed out. 

A parent or guardian later “claims” the account by proving who they are and that they have legal authority. Until then, the account still exists.

Two kinds of money can go in during the growth period. First, a $1,000 pilot payment for certain children born from 2025 through 2028. Second, “qualified general contributions.” Governments or tax-exempt groups give money to Treasury. Treasury splits it in equal amounts among every child in a set class. 

A class is based on age, place, or both. A place-based class must cover at least 5,000 children. Gifts can also be stock of a U.S. company that trades on a national exchange and is not already locked up by securities rules. That stock generally must be held for five years, or until the growth period ends, whichever comes first. There are exceptions for things like mergers, tender offers, and certain rollovers.

The IRS also asks for comments on rollovers to ABLE accounts, how to pick geographic classes, exceptions to the five-year stock hold, and whether a person can refuse an auto account.

How this helps American citizens

It puts an investment account in reach of children whose parents would never hear about the program or finish the paperwork. Opt-in enrollment was expected to miss about half of eligible kids, and the kids most likely to be missed are the ones with the least savings. Auto enrollment is the fix.

The $1,000 pilot is a starter stake for babies born in 2025 through 2028. Equal class gifts let a state, a charity, or a donor add the same amount for every child in a large group, instead of picking favorites. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation pledge of $6.25 billion is the example Treasury cites of real donor interest. Stock gifts let a company or foundation put actual shares into children’s accounts, with a holding rule so the gift is not flipped the next day.

Index funds during the growth period give a child a piece of the broad U.S. stock market for up to 17 years. That is time for compound growth that a savings jar cannot match. A parent who wants control can claim the account. A parent who never files still leaves the child with an account on the books.

Concerns

The accounts are opened with Social Security data before a parent asks. That is efficient, and it is also a consent and privacy question. Families may not know the account exists unless outreach works. Until someone claims it, control sits with Treasury’s agent.

The temporary rules were issued without a prior comment period. Treasury said delay would shorten the growth period. The proposed text cannot be relied on by itself. Final rules could still change, and the temporary rules die in 2029 if they are not replaced.

The $1,000 pilot is only for births in 2025 through 2028. Older children depend on later gifts. Ordinary families and employers are not the donors under this piece of the rule. Employer deposits are in a separate project. Gifts here must come through government or a tax-exempt group, go to a class of at least 5,000, and be split equally.

Index funds can fall. There is no cash or bond choice during the growth period. A big stock gift could leave many children holugding one company’s shares for five years. If that stock is later delisted, the trustee must tell the beneficiary, but the risk is real.

Running records for more than 70 million children is a large federal task. Errors, slow claims, and weak notice are the practical risks.

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YOUR VOICE MATTERS! TAKE ACTION TODAY 🚨

Three short comments, if you support the rule:

You can paste one (or more) of these at regulations.gov page linked at the button below. Put your name, city, and state on it.

Comment 1.
I support automatic enrollment for Trump accounts. A form that parents must find and file will miss the children who most need a starter account. Treasury’s own record shows opt-in enrollment would reach only about half of eligible children. 

Opening an auto account for each eligible child with a Social Security number is the fair way to carry out section 530A. Please keep automatic enrollment in the final rule, and please require plain-language notice so parents know the account exists and how to claim it.

If a parent does not want to claim the account, it should be held by the federal government for the child as a beneficiary until the child is age 18. 

Comment on the Trump Accounts

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Comment 2.
I support the rules for qualified general contributions, including equal gifts to a qualified class of children.  I would suggest that the minimum limit on the class size be set to the number of children in a political jurisdiction (state, county, city, etc) at the last census.

For example, I know of a small, rural, impoverished county in WA state, with a total population estimate in 2025 of 7519, with an estimated 19% under the age of 18. That is about 1400 children. This county has one major employer who might be willing contribute to Trump accounts for the children in this county. In this example, the minimum class should be around 1400 children (not ‘at least’). 

Under the proposed minimum class size of 5000, children in our most rural communities would miss out on a donation. 

Another reason to support a smaller minimum class size is that would allow smaller local businesses to participate in supporting families their rural communities.

I do support equal amounts to each account in the class in order to prevent donors from picking winners inside a community. A state, a county, or a charity should be able to add the same stake for every child in the growth period in that place. 

Please make the geographic-area rules simple and public, so rural counties are not shut out by a city-only design. Please finalize these rules so pledged gifts, including large foundation gifts, can move into children’s accounts without another long delay.

Comment on the Trump Accounts

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Comment 3.
I support allowing gifts of publicly traded stock of a U.S. company, with the five-year holding period or the end of the growth period, whichever comes first. Stock is a real ownership stake, not a one-time check. 

The holding rule protects children from a quick sale, and the exceptions for mergers, tender offers, and fractional shares are sensible. Please keep those exceptions narrow, require clear notice if a stock is delisted, and confirm that index-fund rules still govern cash contributions. 

Children should finish the growth period holding a broad stake in the American economy, not a forgotten form.

Comment on the Trump Accounts

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Thoughts from X: 

John Solomon@jsolomonReportsTreasury says it will auto-enroll millions of children into Trump accounts through new rulesjustthenews.comTreasury says it will auto-enroll millions of children into Trump accounts through new rules1:30 AM · Sep 30, 2026 · 49.1K Views49 Replies · 906 Reposts · 3.85K Likes

Michael Dell 🇺🇸@MichaelDellSoon 100% of American children will automatically have their own 530A Trump Account, even if they don’t know about it. 👶🇺🇸2:16 PM · Sep 30, 2026 · 255K Views245 Replies · 631 Reposts · 7.12K Likes

Michael Dell 🇺🇸@MichaelDellEven those with TDS 😂4:50 PM · Sep 30, 2026 · 15.4K Views32 Replies · 14 Reposts · 447 Likes

Matt@808_38hz@MichaelDell You did a great thing, even if it’s a big ole tax break. Truly wonderful. These Trump accounts are a fantastic idea and great legacy for our kids. Suggesting dissent with Trump isn’t deserved—morally, ethically, intellectually—makes me wonder wtf happened to you.10:08 AM · Oct 1, 2026 · 20 Views

OFFICIAL — GRAHAM HODSDON@GrahamHods23b🇺🇸 THE AMERICAN DREAM STARTS NOW. You can officially start investing in your child’s future with Trump Accounts and help build the next generation’s financial future. Download the official Trump Accounts app & get started today11:10 AM · Sep 30, 2026 · 35 Views1 Like

NEWSMAX@NEWSMAXThe Treasury Department will automatically create Trump Accounts for more than 60 million children who don’t have one, beginning on or about Oct. 1, under rules released Tuesday that end the requirement for parents or guardians to sign up.10:00 PM · Sep 29, 2026 · 110K Views76 Replies · 881 Reposts · 3.21K Likes

AnimeBarbz He/Him@AnimeBarbz2002@NICKIMINAJ Speak about the Trump Accounts with her interview with @LaraLeaTrump on @FoxNews @MyViewFNC saying that she is Blessed that happen it is a great wonderful idea to set up Trump Accounts to Their Kids that they can have their money until they are 18…3:25 AM · Sep 27, 2026 · 96 Views2 Reposts · 5 Likes

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

Leave a comment

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

SOURCES:

1. A Proposed Rule by the IRS and Treasury re: Trump Accounts. This document has a comment period that ends on Nov. 29, 2026.
2. Regulations.gov comment page for the docket.

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Friday Funnies: Pass the Grass

Cause Frankenfoods tastes so gud!

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE

55 MINUTES AGO

Pass the GRAS!

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I’ll just say what I think: Biden created this mess; the democrats will only add to it when they get back in power. But Trump hasn’t fixed it fast enough, and gas prices keep rising. The Iranian war was ill-timed and not easily remedied. This fact is going to bite the Republicans in the keester come November. 

After the election, President Trump is going to be toxic unless he pulls a rabbit out of the hat.

Stay tuned, things are going to get bumpy going into the Presidential race!

“Young Americans saw Donald Trump and JD Vance as their last chance to correct the listing of a sinking ship, to right the wrongs done by a system that failed them repeatedly. They call themselves “moderate” only because they reject labels. But make no mistake, there is little moderate about the views of these younger generations. They are radical, reactionary, and dare I say, revolutionary. They believe institutions revered by both sides are hollow and serve only to perpetuate a system that is rigged by an old order that feeds itself first and calls it governance, while they and their fellow citizens get shafted.

They elected President Trump and Vice President Vance to Burn It Down. They did not get the “retribution” they were promised, and Republicans were suddenly baffled because these voters had the audacity to expect what they were promised. Put plainly, President Trump and right-wing coalition candidates who rode his coattails were elected in 2024 by a younger, more diverse coalition than previous Republican coalitions. Yet, the Republican majorities governed as if they were elected by a shrinking minority of boomers glued to FOX News.

As a result, the Republican coalition is now shrinking along with the share of voters who identify with the very brand that made being a Republican Cool Again.”

-Real Clear Politics

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(Yeh – this is parody, but well-deserved parody)

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By: JGM

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Gas Prices Are the Bait — the Build-Out Is the Ballot · Get Jacked — 32 Days Out

A steel plant broke ground in Iowa. South Korea signed on to LNG and eight nuclear plants. Trump killed the phrase artificial intelligence. Meanwhile the other side wants you staring at the pump.By Adam Sturman & 2 others • 2 Oct 2026 View in browserFirst Lady Melania Trump participates in A Celebration of IndyCar’s Commitment to Fostering the Future event, Thursday, August 20, 2026, in the Rose Garden of the White House.

Hey Dennis, thank you for your continued support.A steel plant broke ground in Iowa on Monday. South Korea signed on to LNG in Alaska and eight nuclear plants — four times what America has built in the last 20 years. President Trump signed a document officially killing the phrase “artificial intelligence.” It’s Super Intelligence now, “’cause it’s not artificial, it’s real.”Meanwhile, with about 32 days to Election Day, the other side wants you staring at the pump. That’s the fight this week: two systems at war, and a gas-price cudgel built to make you forget which one you’re in.10 people to the Polls. Folks, you gotta commit yourself right now to bring 10 people to the polls to vote. — Barbara BoydAnd besides 10 people to the polls, use whatever outlets you have to make thousands of people optimistic. — Susan KokindaAbout two hours. Jump a chapter below. And take the assignment at the bottom — it’s not optional this cycle.REPLAY — Thursday, October 1st Kitchen-Table Pain Is Real. It’s Still a Distraction.Nobody on this show waved the pain away. Daisy wrote in that gas prices aren’t just a distraction — they’re real to everyday voters, and the trillions coming in feel like they’re only enriching big corporations. Roger listed the damage: HVAC systems, copper wire, steel for barns, lumber, appliances. Home sales have plummeted. Vehicle prices are sky-high and quality has never been worse.Barbara and Susan took it head-on. Remind people calmly who did this. The Biden administration shut down refining capacity and waged a war on fossil fuels. The real diesel bottleneck is refining, and America is running at 98% capacity. A new refinery is on the books in Texas, but 2030 is the fastest it comes online. Our existing refineries were built in the globalization era for heavy OPEC crude. Newsom is still shutting plants down.Then Brett asked how tough we are as Americans. His answer: we are a people that are truly blessed, but dramatically spoiled and impetuous. We are at war. Paying more for gas today is a far smaller sacrifice than the rationing earlier generations lived through. Short-term pain is the price of a real rebuild.Not a Midterm Plan. An American Plan.Even Fox got the memo. Brian Kilmeade put it plainly: five weeks from an election, and Trump is trying to get things done in two years which normally take two terms.Susan framed it as decades-long history. These problems started 60 years ago. What’s being fixed now is not a midterm plan — it’s an American plan. Expect announcements from this administration every single day. A JD Vance clip from Texas made the same point: after 40 years of watching factories and shipyards close, Americans are watching their own neighbors build again.The other side’s answer? Susan cited Bessent’s line on the Democratic strategy: compensate the loser. You’ve been screwed for 40 or 50 years by their policies. Now they’ll throw you a few pennies and blame Trump.And the IRGC apparently likes that strategy. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard released a 25-page open letter telling American voters to reject Trump’s “empire of lies” at the ballot box. Add Canada’s admitted, politically targeted trade retaliation aimed at Michigan and Maine — which Peter Navarro called out. Susan’s read: this is globalist desperation. They know that if this productive spirit is unleashed, then none of their schemes are gonna work.Steel, Nuclear, Super Intelligence: Productive Identity vs. Staring at the PumpBarbara called this bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Super Intelligence, she argued, means we’re privy to the best thinking in human history — and we have to use it to create something better.Then a question from a supporter in Michigan landed. Her husband has spent 35 years at Steel Dynamics, and steel is the beginning of the food chain for the economy. Right now, bonus checks are up and they are hiring like crazy. Her question: how do you reach people who can’t stop yammering about gas prices?People gotta get jacked at this point. I’m really excited about what’s actually happening here. And if you think about everything that’s gone on ever since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s been to get you in this defensive on your back foot, having to explain things like an idiot to people as opposed to look at what we’re doing in this country. — Barbara BoydIt’s simple, she said. We had a war on energy to turn us into a bunch of insect-eating globalists. Now the whole map is changing.The American System They Erased From Your SchoolsBarbara laid out why so many Americans can’t see what’s happening: it’s not taught in the schools. You come out of history class thinking Adam Smith and John Locke founded the country. The last president fully conscious of the American System was McKinley — a tariff man who believed in reciprocal tariffs. The federal government ran on tariff revenue and needed no income tax, and McKinley built probably the most productive economy in the world.The team found the American System in the 1970s, coming out of the student left. Ben Franklin wasn’t a tinkerer. He was the best scientist in the world when he helped bring about the American Revolution. These things were hidden from us and have been hidden from you.That’s why the team builds tools, not clickbait. Grab The Real Revolution pamphlet.The Real Revolution: The British and the Communists Are Trying to Kill AgainBarbara Boyd’s new 47-page briefing is free for paid Promethean Action members. It names the real enemy in the 2026 mid…Promethean Action•Barbara BoydToo Big to Rig, and the Leadership Past November 4Susan’s hypothesis: this administration has put real monitoring and security in place, and some election officials have already been arrested for registering illegals to vote. That reduces fraud but won’t eliminate it. The strategy stays the same: make it too big to rig.Also, don’t wait for November 3rd. Absentee ballots are already going out and early voting starts in a couple of weeks. Move the date up two to three weeks in your head. The hot phase is now.The flyers are in stock, but time to order is running short. Conversation starter: https://www.prometheanpac.com/2026_flyer_4And the Bootcamp isn’t stopping on Election Night. It gets renamed on November 4th and keeps going — recruiting new political leadership from citizens who want to take themselves seriously. Much of the legislative house cleaning a new system needs will happen at the state level.Your AssignmentWe’re in a psychological shooting war — designed to make you doubt, and to make you react to what’s in front of you instead of the direction the country is moving. Barbara’s answer is simple:Get 10 of your friends and take them to the polls and vote. — Barbara BoydCommit yourself right now. If you’ve got more energy, become a poll watcher or work the elections — a primary shield against fraud. We’ll give you the ammunition.Too big to rig.And besides 10 people to the polls, use whatever outlets you have to make thousands of people optimistic. — Susan KokindaHere’s what we covered (links jump straight to the chapter)Adam Opens: Gas Prices Are a Distraction — the frame for the whole show.White House App + Iowa Steel Overnight — skip the news firehose, go to the source.Super Intelligence Reframe — why Trump signed away “artificial.”Barbara: Bigger Than the Industrial Revolution — the scale nobody is talking about.1971 Break and the Physical Economy — where the rot started.Susan: City of London — and Unexpected Optimism on Fox — the messaging is getting supercharged.Brian Kilmeade Clip: Stop Whining About Gas — two years, two terms’ worth.Not a Midterm Plan — an American Plan — eight nuclear plants and counting.Tariff Investments Day After Day — the drumbeat of announcements.Susan: Bessent — Democrats Bet Against America — “compensate the loser,” plus the IRGC letter.Productive Spirit Unleashed — Globalist Desperation — Canada targets Michigan and Maine.Mamdani Housing vs Trump Build-Out — scarcity vs. building.Carney Turns Canada Into a Resource Colony — 167 projects, eight in manufacturing.Kitchen-Table Pain Is Real — Still a Distraction — Daisy and Roger’s hard questions.Midterm Bootcamp and the Long Game — the hot phase is now.98% Refining Capacity — Newsom Still Shutting Plants — the real diesel bottleneck.How Tough Are We as Americans? — blessed, but spoiled.Brett: Short-Term Pain for a Real Rebuild — gas vs. rationing.Barbara: Get Jacked — Don’t Get Defensive on Diesel — excitement turns naysayers.Moon-Landing Denial = Manufactured Pessimism — who profits when you stop believing.American System Erased From Schools — McKinley, the tariff man.Tools Not Clickbait — Real Revolution Pamphlet — what was hidden from you.Catching Cheaters — Too Big to Rig — monitoring, arrests, and the strategy.Bessent Hires: Judy Shelton and the Money Fight — gold-convertible Treasuries?Can We Build New Refineries? — Texas, 2030, and heavy crude.Trump Meets Refiners — Decades of Sabotage — how we got here.Bootcamp Recruits New Political Leadership — it doesn’t end November 4.British Empire vs American System History — Marx, Lukács, Gramsci.What If London Falls — China and Russia — the empire’s next move.Steel Mill Hiring Boom vs Gas Yammering — bonus checks are up.Look Around You — Everything Needs Steel — start of the food chain.The Lie About Hamilton — what they told you vs. what he built.Closing: 10 to the Polls — Make Thousands Optimistic — your assignment.Got a question for next Thursday? Barbara and Susan take them on air.Submit your questions now Next Midterm Bootcamp — Monday, October 5th, 8pm Eastern / 5pm PacificMonday, 8pm Eastern / 5pm Pacific. Connect with activists in your state. About 32 days to Election Day — under five weeks.SIGN UP HERE See you Thursday. Adam Sturman Producer, Promethean Action https://x.com/AdamSturman23❗Impersonators are still using our name and logo — including crypto / “QFS” pitches over Telegram. We never sell that, and we will never message you privately about it.Official accounts only: https://www.prometheanaction.com/action/. If you see a fake or stolen content, report it here: https://forms.gle/3HRUTd7q7sYWC9dr8Did you like this post? Give us a 👍 below and leave a comment!