Christine Cotton, biostatisticienne et lanceuse d'alerte sur les vaccins contre le COVID-19, est décédée le 1er juin 2026. Après un an et demi de souffrances insupportables et incessantes auxquelles la médecine n'avait pas su apporter de réponse, elle a eu recours au suicide assisté, qu'elle voyait comme la seule issue à sa douleur.

Christine était une femme exceptionnelle - l’une des rares, dans notre Hexagone à avoir résisté à visage découvert ; à n’avoir jamais dérogé à sa gouaille, à son courage, à son souci du professionnalisme, à son combat pour la reconnaissance des victimes, et à sa quête de vérité.

J’ai eu l’honneur de la connaître, de travailler avec elle, et d’être son ami, et je souhaitais partager avec vous quelques souvenirs d’elle, ainsi que quelques éléments permettant d’apprécier son travail.

Christine était née le 27 avril 1970, sur la Côte d’Azur, à Cannes. Nous n’avons jamais eu le temps de parler de son enfance - je sais seulement qu’elle a grandi dans une famille aimante, auprès de sa sœur.

Entre 1992 et 1993, elle obtient une licence en sciences à la faculté de sciences économiques de Toulouse. En 1993, elle entreprend un magistère d’économie et statistiques, qu’elle obtiendra en 1997.

En parallèle de ses études, en 1995, à 25 ans, lui arrive un “premier miracle” : elle est remarquée par un professeur de son Université qui a entendu parler d’elle, de son esprit d’indépendance, et qui lui fait rencontrer le directeur de la biométrique des laboratoires Pierre Fabre. Elle est engagée par ce dernier. Elle y apprend l’art du métier - et se prend de passion pour la biostatistique.

Un an plus tard, son directeur la présentait à son futur associé : le directeur d’une organisation de recherche clinique qui ne disposait pas encore de département de biostatistique. Ensemble, ils fondèrent Statitec, une société de recherche clinique.

Au cours de ses vingt-deux ans de carrière, elle a travaillé pour les groupes pharmaceutiques les plus connus : AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Ceva, Danone, Janssen, Merck, Novartis, Roche, Pierre Fabre, Sanofi, Servier, Takeda…

Dôtée d’une force de travail prodigieuse, elle a rédigé d’innombrables protocoles d’études1 : ces documents très codifiés, élaborés en collaboration avec les régulateurs, qui permettent de déterminer si un médicament fonctionne - ou non.

C’est elle qui a géré, notamment, entre 2013 et 2017, l’étude Phagoburn, attribuée à sa société par le ministère de la Défense.2

Le 30 juillet 2018, Christine a revendu Statitec. Elle voulait alors profiter de la vie ; fonder un éco-lieu - un domaine de 12 hectares qu’elle avait acheté dans la Bresse - y goûter la nature et jouir d’une liberté acquise après une vie de dur labeur. Et jouer de la musique, qu’elle avait apprise en autodidacte - elle était une pianiste, et une poli-instrumentiste, de talent.

Le 16 décembre 2019, Christine publiait, avec son groupe d’amis, “Ms Butterfly and the flying wolves”, leur premier morceau, “Sur les photos en noir et blanc”.3 Suivront “Elle veut juste”,4 “Le Love”,5 “Et même si j’suis pas Dieu”,6 “Mister Mauvais Temps - Mister Bad Weather”.7

Sont arrivés 2020, et le COVID. Christine a d’abord résisté en musique à un climat qu’elle attribuait davantage à l’excès de pouvoir qu’au souci de protéger les plus fragiles, et à la montée du totalitarisme sanitaire, en composant plusieurs odes à la liberté : “L’effet Pangolin”,8 “135 balles”,9 “Le Nouveau Monde”,10 “Le Jour du Dernier Jour”,11 “My Ave Maria”.12

En novembre 2020, les premiers résultats des vaccins Pfizer/BioNTech étaient publiés, et Christine, en biostatisticienne experte qui ne croit que dans les chiffres qu’elle a vérifiés elle-même, s’est consacrée à leur étude approfondie.

Entre novembre 2020 et avril 2021, elle avait acquis une connaissance approfondie des failles des essais des quatre vaccins qui seront validés : Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, J&J et AstraZeneca.

Elle fut aussi l’une des premières à analyser sérieusement le VAERS - et à constater l’état désastreux de la pharmacovigilance au regard de l’éthique professionnelle qui était la sienne.

Cinq mois plus tard, en avril 2021, Christine faisait son “coming out” en dissidence.13 Interviewée par France Soir, elle insistait sur le fait qu’aucune efficacité n’était alors prouvée, statistiquement, contre les cas graves, pour Pfizer et Moderna. Que la durée d’efficacité des vaccins n’était pas déterminée. Que le protocole de l’essai Pfizer, brouillon, laissait la place à différents jeux sur les définitions, entre “Laboratoire local et central”, “COVID suspectés mais non confirmés”, et autres failles méthodologiques - telles que de ne pas tester systématiquement, et à intervalles réguliers, les participants via PCR. Tous points directement sourcés, et expliqués avec patience par Christine.

En août 2021, Christine a rédigé pour le Conseil Scientifique Indépendant (CSI) une analyse des données VAERS,14 qu’elle a présenté aux côtés d’un autre lanceur d’alerte, Amine Umlil.15 Elle insistait alors sur la quantité alarmante de décès rapportés dans un délai bref après la vaccination, ainsi que sur la proportion anormale de fausses couches déclarées.

Elle admettait aussi - pour elle-même - qu’elle était devenue lanceuse d’alerte, au sens de la loi française : “Un lanceur d’alerte est une personne physique qui signale ou divulgue, sans contrepartie financière directe et de bonne foi, des informations portant sur un crime, un délit, une menace ou un préjudice pour l’intérêt général, une violation ou une tentative de dissimulation d’une violation d’un engagement international.”16

Elle s’est alors alliée à de nombreuses associations de lutte contre les mandats aux enfants d’un produit expérimental, comme les “Mamans Louves”, ainsi qu’à des associations de victimes, qui émergeaient dès 2021 ; “Verity France” par exemple. Christine se mettait à la disposition des victimes, qu’elle contactait elle-même ou avec lesquelles elle était mise en relation. À tous, elle accordait une oreille attentive, sa compassion, et les mettait en relation avec des médecins qui prenaient leur expérience au sérieux lorsqu’elle le pouvait.

En novembre 2021, Christine a contacté Frédéric Beltra, père de Maxime décédé au soir de son injection par le vaccin Pfizer, à 22 ans. Frédéric Beltra est devenu son ami, et son compagnon de lutte, dans le combat pour voir la responsabilité des fabricants du vaccin reconnue dans le décès de son fils.

En janvier 2022, Christine a bouclé un premier rapport approfondi de 110 pages sur ses travaux17 et a rencontré Mélodie Féron, future fondatrice de l’association “Où est mon cycle?”.18 Le même mois, elle a participé à une émission québécoise aux côtés de Jérémie Mercier et de l’avocate Gloriane Blais.19 Laquelle s’est appuyée sur ce rapport le 31 janvier, pour contester la vaccination infantile - ce qui lui a valu une convocation en conseil de discipline et une expertise psychiatrique, signe du poids de la doxa qui pesait alors sur quiconque questionnait les vaccins “sûrs et efficaces”.20

En février 2022, elle présentait ce rapport au cours d'une nouvelle interview avec France Soir.2122 Elle décidait aussi de s'engager sur les réseaux sociaux. Elle créait un compte Twitter23 et un canal Telegram,24 où des dizaines de milliers de Français, et des centaines de milliers de personnes à travers le monde, s'inscrivaient pour la suivre. Elle se consacrait à l'information du public en ligne,25 et était interviewée par le Dr Éric Loridan,26 qui allait devenir son ami. Elle ne délaissait pas le terrain pour autant : elle participait aussi à une conférence avec la députée Martine Wonner.27

Sur Twitter - désormais X - Christine s’est retrouvée confrontée aux médecins de plateau,28 au narratif promu par Pfizer,29 et au cortège de trolls, qu’elle traitait avec son humour ravageur. Aux meutes qui la traitaient “d’antivax”, elle qui avait consacré sa carrière à des médicaments et vaccins sûrs et efficaces, elle rétorquait auprès des Mamans Louves, qu’elle n’était pas plus antivax qu’elle n’était anti-lasagne ; mais que lorsqu’un plat de lasagne utilisait de la viande avariée, il était normal de le rappeler.30

Elle fut parmi les premières à attirer l’attention sur le cas de Maddie de Garay - une fillette de 12 ans participant à l’essai clinique aux Etats-Unis, dont la santé avait été dévastée après son injection Pfizer. Ses effets secondaires avaient été ignorés par l’investigateur principal de son site d’essai.31 Une semaine plus tard, elle avait déjà 16,000 abonnés.32 Elle interpellait divers media sur le rapport d’un nouveau décès d’adolescent de 15 ans, aux Etats Unis.33 André Bercoff, journaliste français célèbre, la conviait alors pour une première interview, le 24 février 2022.34

Hélas, l’attention suscitée par ses recherches déchainait en parallèle un flot de haine, de menaces abjectes, et de diffamation constante. Elle était devenue, sur Twitter, une exterminatrice de trolls d’élite.35

Elle confiait cependant, en privé, son atterrement devant le harcèlement constant dont elle était la cible - et dont elle avait recensé quelques extraits sur son site en rubrique “Mes critiques”.36

Le 13 mai 2022, elle était à nouveau invitée par André Bercoff.37

Le 24 mai 2022, elle faisait la présentation de ses objections à la commission sénatoriale en charge d’investiguer les effets secondaires des vaccins, l’OPECST.38 Son audition, à ce jour, n’a toujours pas été rendue publique -contrairement à celles de la plupart des autres intervenants. Aucune action concrète n’a été entreprise pour faire la lumière sur les nombreuses anomalies qu’elle avait soulevées - malgré d’innombrables confirmations ultérieures des points sur lesquels elle avait attiré l’attention.39

Le 4 juin 2022, j’ai échangé pour la première fois avec Christine, après avoir reproduit et mis à jour son analyse sur le VAERS.40 Elle m’en avait remercié, et nous avions échangé nos coordonnées. Elle était, le même mois, interviewée par Identité et Démocratie et par Ligne Droite, au parlement européen, avec Virginie Joron.4142

En octobre 2022, elle présentait ses travaux au Réseau des victimes d’accident vaccinaux (REVAV).43

En novembre 2022, j’ai commencé à travailler sur les données Pfizer, avec les équipes du DailyClout, de Naomi Wolf - avec lesquelles j’ai collaboré jusqu’à début mars 2023.44

Le même mois, Christine rencontrait Brook Jackson4546 - la lanceuse d’alerte de Ventavia, aux Etats-Unis, qui - directrice régionale de l’une des sociétés opérant l’essai Pfizer - avait témoigné de graves violations des bonnes pratiques cliniques.47 Christine attirait aussi l’attention sur le cas d’Augusto Roux - participant à l’essai dont la péricardite a été rapportée, en Argentine, par l’auteur principal de l’étude comme “pneumonie”. Augusto, lorsqu’il avait signalé ses effets secondaires à l’investigateur principal de son site Argentin, s’était vu accuser (par ce pédiatre) d’être paranoïaque et fou.48 L’affaire est en cours d’enquête en Argentine.

En décembre 2022, Christine & moi nous sommes avons échangé à nouveau, alors que je commençais à m’intéresser aux anomalies des données Pfizer - qui étaient publiées, après un ordre d’un juge texan, au fil de l’eau par phmpt.org. Capable de repérer les anomalies dans les données - mais sans expérience des bonnes pratiques cliniques, j’avais demandé de l’aide à Christine, qui avait immédiatement accepté, pour les interpréter. Nous nous sommes liés d’amitié, et avons commencé à échanger quasi quotidiennement - validant - ou invalidant - nos nouvelles trouvailles mutuelles.

Je l’ai présentée à d’autres chercheurs avec lesquels je travaillais régulièrement : Josh Guetzkow - Professeur à l’université hébraïque de Jérusalem, le Dr. Jeyanthi Kunadhasan, de l’équipe de Naomi Wolf, anesthésiste suspendue en Australie et experte dans les protocoles et données Pfizer, et d’autres collègues, anonymes, qui exploraient ces centaines de milliers de pages.

En janvier 2023, elle lançait une première plainte auprès des autorités françaises, au nom des victimes, pour empoisonnement.49 La plainte était classée sans suite.

En mars 2023, Christine faisait une nouvelle trouvaille majeure : le fait que Pfizer était au courant dès mars 2021 de la chute très rapide après injection des anticorps - que l’on présentait à l’époque comme l’un des principaux mécanismes de protection du vaccin.50 Le même mois, nous avions clarifié la mortalité pendant l’essai alors que de nombreux chiffres, qui la multipliaient par 30, étaient diffusés pour décrédibiliser la dissidence.51

Le 2 avril 2023, nous avons publié une analyse approfondie sur la chute des anticorps - analyse qui montrait que non seulement les anticorps tombaient, mais en outre, les mêmes mesures, sur les mêmes sujets, le même jour, avaient fait l’objet de plusieurs résultats drastiquement différents - une anomalie majeure dans un essai de cette nature.52 Le même mois, elle avait contribué, avec Josh Guetzkow et moi-même, à vérifier une nouvelle question grave : 301 identifiants de sujets - majoritairement concentrés en Argentine, et coïncidant, pour une bonne part avec le recrutement d’Augusto Roux - “disparus” des fichiers.53 Le 7 avril, elle s’entretenait avec la courageuse députée Michelle Rivasi - décédée depuis - et lui présentait ses conclusions.54 En mai 2023, elle rendait compte de ses travaux, devant la Commission d’enquête nationale citoyenne, au Canada,55 et à l’émission d’ “Elo veut savoir”.56

Le 8 juin 2023, sortait son livre en Français “Tous vaccinés, tous protégés ? Vaccins COVID-19, Chronique d’une catastrophe sanitaire annoncée”, aux éditions Tredaniel.57 Elle en annonçait la publication au micro de Radio Courtoisie le même jour.58 Pour l’occasion, son site internet, remis à neuf, et qui contenait ses travaux mis à disposition de chacun, était mis en ligne à l’adresse christinecotton.fr.59 Le 14 Juin, elle s’entretenait avec Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.60 Le 15 juin 2023, nous avons présenté nos principaux travaux à Pierre Chaillot de Décoder L’éco.61 Nous avons aussi présenté ces conclusions en anglais à Peter McCullough, ou au CSI.

Tout au long de 2023, elle a multiplié les prises de parole : Epoch Times et,62 de nouveau, André Bercoff en juin,63 “les Incorrectibles” d’Éric Morillot en juillet,64 encore Bercoff en septembre,65 puis TVL au micro d’Élise Blaise en octobre.66 En février 2024, elle présentait ses conclusions à Pierre-Yves Rougeron, du Cercle Aristote,67 et en mars à son ami et journaliste, Nicolas Bouvier.68

En mai 2024, nous avons publié un récapitulatif complet des points cardinaux de nos travaux - de nature à convaincre tout lecteur de bonne foi de la nécessité urgente d’un audit de la plupart des sites de l’essai.69

En avril 2024, je lui ai rendu visite, afin d’affiner une nouvelle plainte, pour tromperie, contre les autorités de santé. Nous avons travaillé, et partagé de bonnes bouffes, au milieu de ses amis, pendant plusieurs jours. Christine a continué à alerter - interviewée en anglais pour Planetlockdown.70

Le travail, ensuite, a continué - avec des échanges quasi-quotidiens.

En janvier 2025, elle m’a appris qu’elle se sentait mal, et s’était réfugiée sur la Côte d’Azur pour se reposer. A commencé pour elle un calvaire de plus d’un an, de spécialistes en spécialistes, en quête d’un diagnostic, et de solutions. Le 12 février, elle annonçait, sur X, et au micro de Tocsin, le dépôt de sa nouvelle plainte, et son retrait du débat public le temps qu’elle puisse s’occuper de sa santé.71

Le 1er novembre 2025, dans un message public, Christine livrait l'état de son épreuve. Depuis janvier, une maladie qu'aucun médecin ne parvenait à nommer la rongeait : brûlures sur la peau, douleurs atroces, tremblements, des symptômes qui ne faisaient qu'empirer malgré la noria de spécialistes consultés et les centaines de compléments et traitements essayés, tous restés sans effet. Le mal l'avait peu à peu coupée du monde : elle ne sortait plus de chez elle, prendre une douche était devenu une expédition, et elle avait dû abandonner la ferme où elle rêvait de bâtir son éco-lieu pour se réfugier auprès des siens. Autour d'elle, tout semblait s'éteindre en même temps - ses canaris, ses plantes, et jusqu'à son chien, qu'elle avait dû confier puis savoir euthanasié. À cette accumulation de pertes s'ajoutait le classement de sa plainte, malgré des preuves qu'elle jugeait irréfutables. Épuisée, l'appétit en berne, elle confiait penser souvent à la mort et n'être plus sûre de “gagner” cette épreuve.72

En janvier 2026, elle avait trouvé la force, au milieu de son calvaire, de publier une refonte de son rapport - porté à 432 pages.73

Le 1er juin, elle a mis fin à ses jours par suicide assisté, en Suisse. Elle avait 56 ans. Sa demande, déposée auprès d’une association à Bâle, avait été acceptée plusieurs mois auparavant. Le lendemain, un ami, sur ses instructions, publie sur son compte Twitter, son dernier post.74

Mes pensées vont d’abord à sa sœur, à ses parents et à ses proches, qui l’ont aimée avant nous tous, et à qui revient aujourd’hui le deuil le plus lourd.

Les hommages ont afflué du monde entier. Mais aucune veillée, si nombreuse soit-elle, ne comblera le vide qu’elle laisse - ni n’effacera, chez ceux qui l’ont aimée, le sentiment amer d’avoir failli à l’une des meilleures d’entre nous.

Reste ce qu’elle nous laisse : l’exigence de ne jamais transiger avec la rigueur, le refus de détourner les yeux, et cette gouaille qui désarmait la peur. Christine n’a pas seulement défendu des analyses ; elle a écouté des victimes que personne n’écoutait, tendu la main à des inconnus dans la nuit, et donné sa voix à ceux qui n’en avaient plus.

Elle écrivait, dans ses derniers mots, qu’elle n’avait jamais cessé de protéger la vie - végétale, animale, humaine. C’est peut-être là sa plus juste épitaphe.

À nous, désormais, de faire vivre sa mémoire et de poursuivre son travail avec la même probité. Le monde mettra du temps à mesurer ce qu’il lui doit ; ceux qui l’ont connue, le savent déjà. On ne remplace pas Christine Cotton - on tâche, humblement, d’en être dignes.

Christine Cotton, a bio-statistician and whistle-blower on the COVID-19 vaccines, passed away on June 1st, 2026. After a year and a half of unbearable, unrelenting suffering to which medicine failed to bring any answer - Christine sought assisted death as a final resort.

Christine was an exceptional woman - one of the very few, here in France, to have resisted with her face uncovered; never once abandoning her irreverent wit, her courage, her commitment to professionalism, her fight for the recognition of victims, or her quest for the truth.

I had the honor of knowing her, of working with her and calling her my friend, and I wished to share with you a few memories of her, along with a few elements that may help in appreciating her work.

Christine was born on 27 April 1970 on the French Riviera, in Cannes. We never had the time to speak of her childhood - I know only that she grew up in a loving family, alongside her sister.

Between 1992 and 1993, she earned a science degree at the Faculty of Economic Sciences in Toulouse. In 1993, she began a magistère (a specialized graduate degree) in economics and statistics, which she would complete in 1997.

Alongside her studies, in 1995, at the age of 25, came a “first miracle”: she was noticed by a professor at her university who had heard of her and of her independent spirit, and who recommended that she meet the head of bio-metrics at the Pierre Fabre laboratories. He hired her. There, she learned the craft - and fell in love with bio-statistics.

A year later, her director introduced her to her future partner: the head of a clinical research organisation that did not yet have a bio-statistics department. Together, they founded Statitec, a Clinical Research Organisation.

Over the course of her twenty-two-year career, she worked for the best-known pharmaceutical groups: AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Ceva, Danone, Janssen, Merck, Novartis, Roche, Pierre Fabre, Sanofi, Servier, Takeda…

A formidable worker, she drafted countless study protocols:1 those highly codified documents, developed in collaboration with regulators, that make it possible to determine whether a drug works - or not.

In particular, between 2013 and 2017, she oversaw the Phagoburn study, which was awarded to her company by the Department of Defense.2

On 30 July 2018, Christine sold Statitec. She wanted to enjoy life; to found an eco-haven - a twelve-hectare estate she bought in the Bresse region - to savor nature there and relish a freedom earned after a life of hard work. And to play music, which she had taught herself - she was a talented pianist and multi-instrumentalist.

On 16 December 2019, Christine released, with her group of friends “Ms Butterfly and the flying wolves,” their first track, “Sur les photos en noir et blanc.”3 Others followed: “Elle veut juste,”4 “Le Love,”5 “Et même si j’suis pas Dieu,”6 “Mister Mauvais Temps - Mister Bad Weather.”7

Then came 2020, and COVID. Christine initially resisted, through her music, a climate she attributed more to an abuse of power than to a concern for protecting the most vulnerable, as well as the rise of health totalitarianism, by composing several odes to freedom: “L’effet Pangolin,”8 “135 balles,”9 “Le Nouveau Monde,”10 “Le Jour du Dernier Jour,”11 “My Ave Maria.”12

In November 2020, the first results of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were published, and Christine - an expert bio-statistician who trusted only the figures she had checked herself - devoted herself to studying them in depth.

Between November 2020 and April 2021, she developed a deep understanding of the flaws in the trials of the four vaccines that would be authorised: Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, J&J and AstraZeneca.

She was also one of the first to conduct a serious analysis of VAERS - and to observe the disastrous state of pharmacovigilance in light of her own professional ethics.

Five months later, in April 2021, Christine made her “coming out” as a dissident.13 Interviewed by France Soir, she stressed that, at that point, no efficacy against severe cases had been statistically proven for Pfizer or Moderna; that the vaccines’ efficacy was of undetermined duration; and that the Pfizer trial protocol, loosely drafted, left room for various games with definitions - between “local and central laboratory,” “suspected but unconfirmed COVID,” and other methodological flaws, such as failing to test participants systematically and at regular intervals by PCR. All points directly sourced, and explained patiently by Christine.

In August 2021, Christine wrote an analysis of the VAERS data for the CSI,14 which she presented alongside another whistle-blower, Amine Umlil.15 She emphasized the alarming number of deaths reported within a short interval after vaccination, as well as the abnormal proportion of reported miscarriages.

She also acknowledged - to herself - that she had become a whistle-blower in the sense of French law: “A whistle-blower is a natural person who reports or discloses, without direct financial consideration and in good faith, information concerning a crime, an offence, a threat or harm to the general interest, a violation or an attempt to conceal a violation of an international commitment.”16

She allied herself with many associations fighting the mandating of an experimental product for children, such as the “Mamans Louves,” as well as with victims’ associations that were emerging in 2021 - “Verity France,” for example. Christine made herself available to victims, whether she contacted them herself or was put in touch with them. To all of them she gave an attentive ear, her compassion, and connected them, when she could, with doctors who took their experience seriously.

In November 2021, Christine contacted Frédéric Beltra - the father of Maxime - who died on the evening of his Pfizer injection, at the age of 22. Frédéric Beltra became her friend and her companion in the struggle, in the fight to see the vaccine manufacturers’ responsibility recognized in his son’s death.

In January 2022, Christine completed a first in-depth, 110-page report17 and met Mélodie Féron, the future founder of the association “Où est mon cycle?”18 That same month, she took part in the Québec programme “Science en conscience no. 20: Injection - what if the clinical trial results were wrong?,”19 alongside Gloriane Blais and Jérémie Mercier. On 31 January, the Québec lawyer drew on this report to challenge childhood vaccination - which earned her a summons before a disciplinary board and a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation, a sign of the weight of the prevailing dogma that bore, at the time, on anyone who dared question the “safe and effective” vaccines.20

In February 2022, she presented this report through a new interview with France Soir.21 22 She also decided to engage on social media. She created a Twitter account23 and a Telegram channel,24 where tens of thousands of French people, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, signed up to follow her. She devoted herself to informing the public online,25 and was interviewed by Dr. Eric Loridan,26 who would become her friend. Nor did she abandon work on the ground: she also took part in a conference with Member of Parliament Martine Wonner.27

On Twitter - now X - Christine found herself up against the TV-pundit doctors,28 the narrative promoted by Pfizer,29 and the procession of trolls, whom she handled with her devastating humor. To the packs that branded her “anti-vax” - she who had devoted her career to safe and effective drugs and vaccines - she would retort, to the Mamans Louves, that she was no more anti-vax than she was anti-lasagne; but that when a dish of lasagne used spoiled meat, it was only normal to point it out.30

She was among the first to draw attention to the case of Maddie de Garay, in the United States - a 12 year old girl enrolled in the clinical trial whose health had been devastated after her Pfizer injection, and whose adverse effects had been ignored by the principal investigator at her trial site.31 A week later, she already had 16,000 followers.32 She challenged various media outlets over the report of another adolescent death, a 15-year-old, in the United States.33 A famous French journalist, André Bercoff then invited her for a first interview, on 24 February 2022.34

Unfortunately, the attention her research attracted also sparked a barrage of hatred, vile threats, and constant defamation. On Twitter, she had become an elite troll-exterminator.35 In private, she confided her dismay at the relentless harassment she was subjected to - some samples of which she had cataloged on her site under the heading “My critics.”36

On 13 May 2022, she was again a guest of André Bercoff.37

On 24 May 2022, she presented her objections to the OPECST (the French Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices).38 Her hearing, to this day, has still not been made public - unlike that of most other contributors. No concrete action has been taken to shed light on the many anomalies she had flagged - despite countless subsequent confirmations of the points to which she had drawn attention.39

On 4 June 2022, I exchanged with Christine for the first time, after I had reproduced and updated her VAERS analysis.40 She had thanked me for it, and we had exchanged contact details. That same month, she was interviewed by Identity and Democracy and by Ligne Droite, at the European Parliament, with Virginie Joron.41 42

In October 2022, she presented her work to the Network of Vaccine Injury Victims (REVAV).43

In November 2022, I began working on the Pfizer data with the teams at DailyClout, Naomi Wolf’s organisation - with whom I worked until early March 2023.44

Also in November 2022, Christine met Brook Jackson4546 - the Ventavia whistle-blower in the United States who, as a regional director for one of the companies running the Pfizer trial, had testified to serious violations of good clinical practice.47 Christine also drew attention to the case of Augusto Roux - a trial participant whose pericarditis was recorded, in Argentina, by the study’s lead author as “pneumonia” - and who, when he reported his adverse effects to the principal investigator at his Argentine site, found himself accused (by a pediatrician) of being paranoid and mad.48 The matter is currently under investigation in Argentina.

In December 2022, Christine and I spoke again by telephone, as I was beginning to take an interest in the anomalies in the Pfizer data - which were being released on a rolling basis, by order of a Texas judge, through phmpt.org. I had a knack for spotting anomalies in the data, but no experience of good clinical practice. I had asked Christine for help in interpreting the anomalies I had found, and she had immediately agreed. We became friends at once, and began exchanging almost daily - validating, or invalidating, each other’s new findings.

I introduced her to other researchers I worked with regularly: Josh Guetzkow - a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan, of Naomi Wolf’s team, an anesthetist suspended in Australia and an expert in the Pfizer protocols and data; and other colleagues, who remained anonymous, working through those hundreds of thousands of pages.

In January 2023, she filed a first complaint with the French autorities, on behalf of the victims, for poisoning.49 The complaint was dismissed without further action.

In March 2023, Christine made another major discovery: that, as early as March 2021, Pfizer was aware of the very rapid decline in antibodies - which we were being sold, at the time, as one of the vaccine’s principal mechanisms of protection.50 That same month, we clarified the mortality during the trial, at a time when many false figures - inflating the real mortality thirty-fold - were being circulated to discredit the dissidents.51

On 2 April 2023, we published an in-depth analysis of the subject of the antibodies decline - analysis showing that not only were the antibodies falling, but that the same measurements, ossn the same subjects, on the same day, had yielded several drastically different readings - a major anomaly in a trial of this kind.52 That same month, she had greatly helped Josh Guetzkow and me to verify another serious question: 301 subject identifiers that had “vanished” from the files - concentrated for the most part in Argentina, and coinciding in good part with the enrollment of Augusto Roux.53 On 7 April, she met with the courageous Member of the European Parliament Michelle Rivasi - since deceased - and presented her conclusions to her.54 In May 2023, she reported on her work before the Citizens’ National Inquiry Commission in Canada,55 and on the program “Elo veut savoir.”56

On 8 June 2023, her book came out in French: Tous vaccinés, tous protégés? Vaccins COVID-19, Chronique d’une catastrophe sanitaire annoncée (“All Vaccinated, All Protected? COVID-19 Vaccines: Chronicle of a Foretold Health Disaster”), published by Éditions Trédaniel.57 She announced the publication on Radio Courtoisie that same day.58 For the occasion, her website - redesigned, and containing her work made freely available to all - went live at christinecotton.fr.59 On 14 June, she spoke with Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.60 On 15 June 2023, we presented our main work to Pierre Chaillot of Décoder l’Éco.61 We also presented these conclusions in English to Peter McCullough and to the CSI.

Throughout 2023, she spoke out again and again: Epoch Times62 and, once more, André Bercoff in June;63 Éric Morillot’s “Les Incorrectibles” in July;64 Bercoff again in September;65 then TVL, with Élise Blaise, in October.66 In February 2024, she presented her conclusions to Pierre-Yves Rougeron, of the Cercle Aristote67, et en mars à son ami et journaliste, Nicolas Bouvier.68

In May 2024, we published a complete summary of the cardinal points of our work - of a kind to convince any good-faith reader of the urgent need for an audit of most of the trial sites.69

In April 2024, I visited her at her home to help her refine a new complaint against the health authorities, for deception. We worked, and shared good meals, surrounded by her friends, over several days. Christine carried on alerting the public, and was interviewed in English for Planetlockdown.70

The work then continued - with almost daily exchanges.

In January 2025, she told me she was feeling unwell, and had withdrawn to the French Riviera to rest. There began for her an ordeal of more than a year, from specialist to specialist, in search of a diagnosis and of solutions. On 12 February, she announced, on X and on the Tocsin program, the filing of her new complaint, and her withdrawal from public debate for as long as she needed to attend to her health.71

On 1 November 2025, in a public message, Christine laid bare where her ordeal stood. Since January, an illness that no doctor could name had been wearing her down: burning skin, excruciating pain, tremors, symptoms that only worsened despite the procession of specialists she consulted and the hundreds of supplements and treatments she tried, all to no effect. The illness had gradually cut her off from the world: she no longer left her home, taking a shower had become an expedition, and she had been forced to give up the farm where she had dreamed of building her eco-haven, taking refuge with her family. Around her, everything seemed to be dying at once - her canaries, her plants, and even her dog, which she had had to give away and then learn had been put down. To this accumulation of losses was added the dismissal of her complaint, despite evidence she considered irrefutable. Exhausted, her appetite gone, she confided that she often thought of death, and was no longer sure she would “win” this trial.72

In January 2026, she had found the strength, in the midst of her calvary, to publish a thoroughly revised version of her report - expanded to 432 pages.73

On June 1, she ended her life through assisted suicide in Switzerland. She was 56 years old. Her request, submitted to an organization in Basel, had been approved several months earlier. The next day, a friend, following her instructions, published her final post on her Twitter account.74

My thoughts go first to her sister, her parents and her loved ones, who loved her before any of us, and to whom the heaviest grief now falls.

Tributes have poured in from around the world. But no vigil, however large, will fill the void she leaves - nor erase, in those who loved her, the bitter feeling of having failed one of the best among us.

What remains is what she leaves us: the demand never to compromise with rigor, the refusal to look away, and that irreverent wit that disarmed fear. Christine did not merely defend analyses; she listened to victims no one else would hear, reached out to strangers in the night, and gave her voice to those who had lost their own.

In her last words, she wrote that she had never ceased to protect life - plant, animal, human. Perhaps that is her truest epitaph.

It now falls to us to keep her memory alive by sharing and carrying on her work with the same integrity. The world will take time to measure what it owes her; those who knew her already know. One does not replace Christine Cotton - one strives, humbly, to be worthy of her.

Makis never addressed any of it seriously.

Instead, over the following two weeks, he reproduced - almost item for item - the behavioral pattern the article had described from his Alberta period: mass escalation, attacks on former allies, attacks on the nurses who had originally testified against him, DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) directed at anyone who asked questions, grandiose threats, mass blocking, and systematic deletion of evidence. In total, he deleted at least 21 X posts and an entire Substack article.1 The key difference was that this time the archiving infrastructure was already running. Every deleted post, every tampered screenshot, every threatening DM was captured.

What the record makes clear is that Makis does not belong to “any side” of the vaccines argument, or of the cancers treatments arguments. He is not pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. He is not a cancer expert, a medical freedom advocate, or anyone’s ally. He is a man who manipulates whatever system he inhabits - an oncology department for the short time he had one, a online movement when he found one - and who turns on anyone who exposes him, rejects him, or simply stops being useful. The targets change; the mechanism does not. He rode the institutional system in Alberta until it ejected him; he is now riding the online ecosystem, where the boundaries are far wider and the consequences far slower to arrive.

By April 14, Makis had publicly alienated, among dozens of others, Kelly DNP, Jikkyleaks, A Midwestern Doctor, Kevin McKernan, and Dr. Jessica Rose - five of the most respected names in his space - while discarding supporters who had personally referred patients to him. Even Scott Adams, then dying and now dead, was not spared. It's almost impossible for an external observer to track the nuances of Makis's reactions, so what follows is the day-by-day record.

March 30 - Article Publication & First Supports

The article went live at 02:02 on March 30. By 13:43, Kelly DNP, a prominent voice with over 166,000 followers, had publicly shared the announcement tweet, tagging Makis and inviting him to comment on the veracity of the elements advanced.2 Rather than address any of the documented facts, Makis immediately took to private channels. Within two hours, he was messaging Kevin McKernan on X, calling Lyndsey House "a saboteur" and warning him to "watch your back - keep your eyes open."3

The framing was familiar: the article was not an investigation to be answered, but an attack to be blamed on someone else. By 15:38, he had blocked Kelly - the first person who had publicly asked him to respond to the record.4 While our thread on X was spreading in vaccine skeptic ranks, LA, the Albertan lady who helped us with the first article, released it in the provaccine ranks.5

March 31 - Makis’s containment efforts backfiring

On March 31, as the article continued to circulate, several prominent accounts in the medical freedom space shared it publicly - Annelise Bocquet and David Cartland, for example. Fynnderella and Jikkyleaks, who had stayed out of the conflict, were nonetheless unfollowed and blocked by Makis.

One of the most striking testimonies came from Kathryn, a PhD researcher with over 40,000 followers, who had first been blocked by Makis in early 2023 after objecting to his habit of attributing every publicly reported death to the COVID shots. She later described stumbling upon a public conversation in which Makis was misleading a family whose relative had cancer into believing his protocol had a perfect success rate. When Kathryn asked for proof - blood work, PET scans, imaging - Makis temporarily unblocked her, claimed all his patients had documentation on file, then refused to produce any of it and blocked her again. She stressed that promoting a treatment as 100% effective in curing cancer was irresponsible and dangerous, and urged anyone misled by these claims to file complaints with the Florida State Medical Board.6

April 1st, 2 & 3 - Makis escalates while rare allies attempt damage control

On April 1, we began reaching out directly to Makis’s significant past supporters, while we unearthed the 2025 “conflict” between Makis and A Midwestern Doctor - a major figure in the medical freedom space with a Substack readership dwarfing his own - demonstrating that the pattern of burning former allies and branding them pharmaceutical assets was nothing new in the COVID space for Makis.7

On April 2, Dr Kathryn announced publicly that her husband, himself a physician, after reading the article, intended to write to the Florida State Medical Board.8 Unexpectedly, Brianna Ladapo, the Florida Surgeon General’s wife, blocked our X account after we politely brought the article to her attention.9 Dorit Reiss, a prominent provaccine advocate, discussed the article.10

Then, late that evening, Makis launched a Substack broadside against A Midwestern Doctor, again branding her “a Big Pharma asset” and “controlled opposition” because, last year, she had expressed concern that these alternative products were being presented as highly effective solo therapies rather than valuable additions to an integrative cancer protocol.11 Makis simply truncated the date out of the screen, making it look like he was reacting to a post made the same day.

On April 3, Sasha Latypova publicly rallied to Makis’s defense.12 We replied directly, noting the irony of championing a man with documented sexual harassment findings and a zoophilia admission on record, and who had never previously used ivermectin in cancer treatment - his actual clinical work at the Cross Cancer Institute had involved Lutetium-177, a costly palliative cancer therapy Makis instead portrayed as life-saving.13 Dr. Mark Trozzi also weighed in with a defense of Makis, listing his peer-reviewed publication history as evidence that the man deserved a platform regardless of the allegations. Numerous published case reports of partial responses to Lutetium-177 or a legitimate early career does not, of course, immunize anyone against findings of sexual harassment, a zoophilia admission, a vexatious-litigant designation, and a cancelled medical licence - none of which Trozzi thought to address.14

A Midwestern Doctor responded to Latypova’s defense publicly.15

April 4 - First Saturday Meltdown

April 4 was the day Makis did the most damage to himself, firing in every direction over the course of roughly fourteen hours in what can only be described as a public meltdown.

It began at 02:03, when he posted an attack on Jikky, declaring he was “done in the freedom movement” and accusing “his team of harassing the Florida Surgeon General’s wife” - none of which of course was true.16 By mid-morning he had turned on Lyndsey House and LA, accusing the latter of belonging to “a cancer patient killing team” and implying she would be shortly dying of her Type 1 diabetes.17

Minutes later, he was targeting Sarah Rayner again - one of the nurses he had sexually harassed a decade earlier and whom he still blames for testifying against him and producing pages of evidence. He posted photographs of her, alleged that she had filed fake complaints to secure a bigger office,18 and accused Sandy McEwan of embezzling more than $100,000 in cancer research funds and of having an affair with Marguerite Weiler, another witness to his professional misconduct.19

He replied directly to our account with various provocative messages,20 moved on to threaten a X user, vaccine injured, called Melissa,21 then told Mary Talley Bowden MD that Lyndsey House was a pharmaceutical infiltrator sent to damage McCairn and McKernan.22 He showed shortly after his contempt for vaccine injured individuals, implying that “spike protein to the brain has done more damage than she knows”.23 By the afternoon he had posted yet more photographs of Rayner, this time accusing her of conspiring to “murder cancer patients” for an office upgrade,24 25 launched a gratuitous attack on “Polly St. George” ( who had no involvement whatsoever in the story - having me blocked for two years,26 semi-threatened Charles Rixey and Kevin McCairn,27 and attempted to deflect the conversation onto Scott Adams being dead following the treatment administered by Patrick Soon-Shiong.28 At 16:13 he began quietly untagging himself from our threads.

At 16:40 he published a lengthy rant on Substack against Jikkyleaks & myself (along with Alex Berenson and A Midwestern Doctor), deleted it five minutes later - but not before Henjin had archived it.29

The article was a masterpiece of duplicity - cutting screenshots to make it appear as though Jikkyleaks had been responding to a different post than the one he was actually replying to, among other tricks. Unfortunately for Makis, it also contained too many indicators for his readers to find our article - and it generated a wave of subscriptions to our Substack, along with some embarrassing questions in his comments. He deleted it five minutes after publishing, making it the shortest-lived Substack article I have ever heard of.

Every single one of these posts on X, he subsequently deleted as well. Every single one had been archived. The reader will note that this is not a new pattern. It is the Alberta pattern - mass escalation, attacks on every available target, self-victimization, and hasty destruction of the evidence - reproduced in real time, a decade later, on a public platform, in front of the very audience he depends on for income.

April 5-8 - Aftermath

In the days following the meltdown, the consequences began to materialize. A Midwestern Doctor publicly recounted that Makis had “barraged her with threatening DMs” and that she had recognized the behavior from prior dealings with similar men.30 More damaging still, Sasha Latypova - who only four days earlier had publicly defended Makis - replied to A Midwestern Doctor, thanked her for the explanation, apologized for the misunderstanding, and disengaged. Latypova had been one of Makis’s most prominent remaining allies in the medical freedom space.31

Makis attempted to regain credibility by associating himself with a new ivermectin preprint from the Wellness Company - but readers quickly noticed it cited a paper of his that had been retracted for undisclosed conflicts of interest. By April 8, he was issuing threats again, warning Dr. Jessica Rose to “be EXTREMELY careful who you choose to help” and adding that “some of the so-called vaccine injured will do everything to take you down”32 - a veiled threat directed at one of the most respected biostatisticians in the space. He also turned on Kelly, accusing her of being “abusive.”33 He ended his April 8 remarks by suggesting, in a paranoid-sounding public warning to Dr. Jessica Rose, that prominent vaccine-injured critics had faked their diagnosis.34

April 9-10 - Collapse Of Makis’s Networks

On April 9, Makis blocked Kevin McKernan35 - a genomics researcher whose DNA contamination findings in the mRNA vaccines had made him one of the most credible and widely cited scientists in the movement. McKernan had been observing Makis’s behavior with growing unease since the article’s publication. In strategic terms, blocking him was an act of self-destruction: McKernan’s scientific standing dwarfs Makis’s own.

He was not the only one to push back. Dr. Jessica Rose responded publicly to the threat Makis had directed at her the previous day, making clear she would not be intimidated.36 Typhaine Pinsolle called Makis out openly,37 as did Le Collectif.38 Peter Gillooly, the Wellness Company’s CEO - whose company Makis had been courting while simultaneously disparaging it - publicly distanced himself from Makis’s conduct.39

On April 10, we published a second thread documenting Makis’s deleted pro-vaccine posts from late 2021, showing him actively pushing boosters only weeks before his pivot to “medical freedom” activism.40 The thread reached over 71,000 views and was shared by several other prominent accounts.

What followed was a cascade of firsthand testimony. McKernan, drawing on fifteen years of quality control in the cannabis industry and his sequencing of the first cannabis genome, recounted watching Makis redirect immunocompromised cancer patients toward a CBD provider with no legitimate lab testing - a company that hosted Makis’s unverifiable “patient testimonies” on its product pages, suggestive of a financial arrangement. Makis vehemently denied this conduct after which McKernan provided video evidence to the contrary.41 Any critique, McKernan said, was met with accusations of belonging to a shadowy anti-Makis cabal. He described the dynamic bluntly as “pure cult behavior,” noting that Makis’s documented record had never been addressed - only met with insults, blocks, and claims of victimhood.42

Jikkyleaks stated he was “disgusted” by Makis’s conduct since the article - in particular the decision to blame everyone around the author, including people uninvolved, and to send what he called “defamatory and predatory DMs” to mutual contacts. He supported right-to-try access to repurposed drugs for cancer, he said, but not behind paywalls and secret protocols.43 Hank Rearden, an MD-PhD who had spent the previous days defending Makis, reported that Makis had blocked him too - despite years of support and having personally referred stage-4 cancer patients to his protocols.44

Makis’s response was to post more screenshots of his anti-vaccine activity, ignoring the fact - documented in the original article - that he had been posting pro- and anti-vaccine content simultaneously during that period, deleting whichever side no longer served his narrative.45 He fell back on his preferred register: his critics were “paid accounts” whose goal was to “sabotage the care for hundreds of thousands of cancer patients.”464748

Shortly afterward, our X account was unexpectedly flagged with a “visibility limited” label and placed under restriction.

April 11 - Second Meltdown and Tampered Screenshot

April 11 was a second fourteen-hour spiral.

The day opened with Makis dismissing Typhaine Pinsolle - telling the researcher she could “cry as much as she liked” - while inflating his claims to new heights: 9,000 cancer patients already helped, 5,000 on a waitlist, a Florida clinic that would be “the largest in the world,” and clinical trials and patents “already being written.”49 He then turned on McKernan with sustained venom, calling him “a pathological liar,”50 “a gutless coward and spineless freak,”51 and suggesting he might have suffered a stroke or brain tumor - “did you end up taking a Pfizer jab or two after all?”52 This led into a lengthy monologue recasting Scott Adams’s death from cancer as a murder committed by mainstream oncology, with Makis positioning himself as the only person who had tried to help. The rant cycled through every stage of Adams’s illness, each punctuated by the same rhetorical question: “did that appall you?”53 As for the article and those sharing it, the explanation was the usual one: “Always follow the money. They’re getting paid.”54

That same day, Makis published a Substack article also branding McKernan and Rose as pharmaceutical industry agents, accusing Rose of “condoning the harassment of the Florida Surgeon General and his wife,” and declaring all of his critics “BANNED FOR LIFE” from his Florida cancer clinics - and any event he would be involved in.55

The article contained another of Makis’s damaging mistakes. He had included a screenshot of McKernan’s post - but had removed three paragraphs from it. The removed section was precisely the passage directing readers to the primary source material documenting Makis’s history.56

A side-by-side comparison of the archived original, which had accumulated over 20,000 views on X, with the version presented to his Substack subscribers confirmed the tampering instantly. When readers began noting the discrepancy in the comments, Makis started deleting their remarks.57

The rest of the Substack piece recast the Scott Adams case entirely in Makis’s favor - portraying Adams as an ungrateful patient who had quit after one month and attacked him publicly, and his death as a murder by mainstream oncology.

On X, the barrage continued. Between 09:45 and 12:21, Makis attacked former Alberta colleagues McEwan and Weiler again,58 declared that “none can take me down,”59 addressed us directly with increasingly agitated posts,606162 and claimed that McKernan “had a stroke”63 - a post he deleted thirty minutes later. Andrew Zywiec published a lengthy defense of Makis, but Makis was too busy fighting on every front to let anyone else carry it.64

Then the private channels went public. At 11:08, McKernan published his DM exchanges with Makis, exposing the tone of the behind-the-scenes pressure campaign.65

Makis responded within minutes - “You’ve completely lost your mind”66 - followed by a mock-concerned post urging people to “get Kevin the help he needs.”67

He then pivoted to yet another lengthy post about Scott Adams,68 before turning on Lyndsey House again, accusing her of having “allied herself with cancer patient murderers who harassed the surgeon general’s family.”69

At 13:33, McKernan returned with receipts and had his block lifted long enough to crush Makis’s arguments.70 Melchizedek, another X user, also published threatening DMs from Makis.71 And in the comments section of Makis’s own Substack article, a patient reported that he had sent money to Makis days earlier and had heard nothing back - a small detail, but one that spoke directly to the pattern described by numerous doctors of Makis leaving his patients without serious follow-up.72

April 12 - More DMs Go Public

Makis opened the day at 03:32 by telling a commenter named Kim to “get mental help”73 - a phrase he recycled almost verbatim for another user, Muhumaa, hours later.74 The insult-as-diagnosis was becoming a tic.

The more significant development came from the other side. McKernan published direct testimony from Scott Adams on Makis’s conduct that nullified most of Makis's deflection. Watching the full exchange, starting at the twenty-three-minute mark, is worthwhile; but for the purpose of this narrative, the extract below addresses Makis's preferred claim that Adams "only took it for one month."75

Makis responded with what amounted to a formal excommunication76 - declaring McKernan’s reputation dead, pronouncing him “unstable, unethical and caught lying repeatedly,”77 and announcing his intention to take him to court78 - adding to a litigation record an Alberta judge had once described as “metastatic.”

He launched fresh attacks on LA,79 then turned on Charles Rixey - a decorated former Marine and biodefense analyst - for the offense of having politely defended Lyndsey House. Makis declared that Rixey “stands with Satan,”80 mocked him for having taken the COVID shots,81 and attacked him across multiple posts.82

Meanwhile, the testimony kept arriving. At 08:34, Janice Tiessen published a firsthand account describing Makis’s mishandling of patients.83

The most consequential moment came at 10:56, when Dr. Jessica Rose published the threatening DMs Makis had also sent her84 - making public the private intimidation that had until then been only rumored.

April 13-14 - The Isolation Hardens

By the final days of the period, the pattern had become self-sustaining. Dr. Jack Kruse publicly expressed full confidence in McKernan,85 reinforcing his standing in the space. An X user, Kristina, published a detailed critique of Makis’s conduct and claims.86 McKernan continued dismantling Makis’s positions in an exchange with Dr. Henry Ealy.87 Amy Kelly, a prominent figure in the vaccine safety documentation effort, publicly called attention to the damning evidence against Makis.88

Makis, for his part, addressed us directly once more, claiming that our article had “ruined a claim for Sarah Rayner”89 - an assertion that, if true, would amount to an admission that the claim existed to begin with. He closed the period with another attack on LA90 - by now obviously a reflex rather than a strategy.

April 15 - The Sarah Rayner Obsession

The final day of this record brought another disturbing episode: a sustained, hours-long fixation on Sarah Rayner - one of the nurses whose testimony about his documented misconduct had contributed to his downfall in Alberta more than a decade earlier.

After we published a thread highlighting his latest behavior, Makis responded not by addressing the documented record, but by pivoting entirely to Rayner. Between 02:31 and 03:18, he posted a rapid succession of messages - at least five separate posts - all centered on the claim that Rayner was entitled to “$1-2 million in compensation” for having been coerced into filing complaints against him by AHS executives Rob MacEwan and Matt Parliament, and that our article had somehow destroyed her chance of collecting it.91 92 93 94

The posts were remarkable for several reasons. First, the implicit admission: if Rayner had a compensation claim arising from the complaint process, it would confirm the complaints and the institutional response they triggered were real - precisely the record Makis had spent two weeks trying to discredit. Second, the grandiosity: in the 03:12 and 03:18 posts, he listed over a dozen individuals he claimed to have personally elevated to wealth and power - Marguerite Weiler earning a million dollars, Don Cranston becoming President of the Law Society of Alberta, Verna Yiu becoming Vice President of the University of Alberta, Brenda Hemmelgarn made Dean, Ritu Kular made Chief Justice, Paul Belzil made Judge - a list so expansive it included at least fifteen names, all allegedly owing their careers to him. He closed with the claim that he had “made at least 20 new millionaires.”

By 04:43, he had escalated further - posting a photograph of Rayner, identifying her as “a daughter of a famous Alberta Physician,” disclosing that she had been 23 years old and one year out of nursing school at the time of the events, and sharing details about her entry into “one of the biggest cancer groups in North America.” The post was accompanied by the claim that “many cancer patients died” as a result of her actions (presumably due to reduced access to palliative Lutetium-177) and that AHS had spent over $10 million in legal fees on the fallout.95 Six minutes later, at 04:45, he posted again another photograph alongside a narrative offering two competing versions of Rayner’s involvement - one portraying her as a victim of executives, the other as a mastermind - while dangling the existence of “a $1-2 million reward waiting for her in a legal loophole that’s about to close.”96

A woman who had testified against him over a decade ago is being publicly identified, photographed, and discussed in terms designed to create maximum pressure - financial incentives, closing deadlines, and implied threats - all broadcast to his audience in real time. Whether intended as manipulation or intimidation, the effect is the same, and Makis’s conduct is reprehensible.

At 04:50, as if nothing had happened, Makis switched tone entirely - replying to the World Council for Health’s announcement of a Kevin McKernan conference in May with a falsely cheerful “I’m very much looking forward to this one!” followed by a winking emoji.97 The juxtaposition was jarring: an hours-long campaign targeting a former colleague, immediately followed by a casual public signal that he intended to show up at an event featuring one of the people who had just publicly denounced him.

By morning, the attacks had returned to familiar targets. At 09:22, he was targeting LA again - the Albertan woman who had helped source material for our original article - calling her “a stalker and severely mentally ill,” accusing her of faking a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis “to milk money on GoFundMe,” and declaring that “she needs to be sectioned and put in a psych ward.” The claim that a woman injured by COVID was fabricating her condition for donations simply because she had dared to call him out, coming from a man who had built his public persona on manufactured stories, required no commentary.98

At 11:02, a Czech user shared our article in Czech-language circles. Makis’s response was to call the author “a Czech pedo defending Canadian pedos” - a baseless smear deployed reflexively against anyone who amplified the documented record.99 Minutes later, at 11:19, he responded to another critic with a five-word “rebuttal”: “The people are with me.”100

At 11:43, he turned to Dorit Rubinstein Reiss - a law professor known for her work on vaccine policy - posting her photograph receiving a vaccine and labeling her “a vaccine addict,” adding: “Drug addiction is very serious.”101 The post was directed at the same user he had been sparring with throughout the day, and it carried the same signature: a personal photograph, a fabricated diagnosis, and a public insult.

The day’s final documented exchange came at 12:15, in a reply to Kelly DNP - the prominent voice who had first shared our article on March 30 and been blocked for it. Makis declared there was “no time to waste on people who abuse cancer patients or keep the company of people who abuse cancer patients,” before pivoting to his frequently used declaration of war: “There is a WAR on Cancer patients and many in the freedom movement are willingly destroying their careers and reputations to stand with people who want to hurt as many cancer patients as they can.”102

Sixteen days after the article went live, every documented fact remained unaddressed. The list of people attacked by Makis now includes nurses, researchers, genomicists, law professors, vaccine-injured advocates, and anonymous social media users across at least three languages. The archiving infrastructure continued to run. Every post was captured. And the pattern the original article described - escalation, DARVO, deletion, isolation - was performed for a different audience, with the same outcome.

Let’s be plain about what this record contains. A man confronted with documented findings of sexual harassment, zoophilia, a cancelled medical licence, and a vexatious-litigant designation responded by publicly targeting the nurses who had testified against him a decade earlier, posting their photographs, fabricating diagnoses for vaccine-injured women who criticized him, threatening researchers, tampering with screenshots, and declaring half the medical freedom movement “BANNED FOR LIFE” from clinics he may or may not actually operate. He did all of this in sixteen days, in public, online. The only thing that changed is that this time, people are watching.

It would be difficult to design a worse crisis-management strategy if you tried.

We consider the record complete - or at least complete enough. Between the original investigation and this chronicle, anyone who wants to evaluate Makis’s conduct now has what they need: archived posts, timestamped screenshots, leaked DMs, firsthand testimony, and a day-by-day trail of deletions that only makes sense if he understood exactly how this behavior would appear once preserved. We are not asking anyone to take our word for it. We are asking them to read.

Going forward, our active work shifts to something more useful than documenting the obvious: legal support for Makis’s victims. The nurses he harassed, the patients he abandoned or defamed, and the individuals whose medical conditions he publicly mocked - most of them have carried the cost of his behavior in silence for years, because until recently there was no consolidated record to point to. Now there is. The archiving infrastructure stays on, because Makis has shown no sign of stopping. But our efforts will go where they matter most.

Aside from (as always) the invaluable help of Arty and Lis, this article owes a great deal to LA, who has tirelessly blown the whistle on Viliam Makis. Any errors that would remain would be mine alone, and I thank all three of them from the bottom of my heart.

In recent years has become known for his disputes with Alberta’s medical authorities, his promotion of alternative cancer therapies, and his repeated claims that sudden deaths reported online were linked to COVID-19 vaccines. Barred from practicing medicine in Canada, he has nevertheless built a very comfortable online income, earning more than $50,000 a month from Substack alone, as indicated by the platform’s purple “Bestseller” badge.1 He also has 650,000 followers on X and is objectively one of the most prominent representatives of the “medical freedom” movement.

To be clear, the purpose here is not to attack alternative cancer treatments, but to expose a habitual liar. For many vaccine skeptics, Makis is a hero, supposedly persecuted by the authorities. For those outside that community who know his name, he embodies everything that is wrong with the “antivaccine movement.”

What follows is the gap between that mythology and the record.

The public version of Makis is that of a courageous doctor destroyed for speaking out. The documented version is something else entirely: a physician whose Alberta career steadily collapsed under the weight of his own conduct - intimidation, harassment, sexualized behavior toward staff, incessant grievance-making, and a compulsive tendency to recast every professional consequence as proof of a conspiracy against him. By 2017, the final blows to that career had already landed. Thereafter, rather than accept what had happened, Makis began suing, or threatening to sue, an ever-expanding cast of enemies, widening the circle of supposed persecutors until virtually anyone who contradicted him could be folded into the plot. That pattern would culminate in the most deserved of designations: vexatious litigant.

The same opportunism would later reappear during COVID. Depending on the audience and the moment, Makis could posture as provaccine in one thread and antivaccine in another, only to later delete whichever version no longer served the persona he was trying to construct. The details changed, the method did not: say whatever was useful, erase whatever was inconvenient, and present the resulting fiction as a coherent history.

There are many ways to approach the case of Viliam Makis. The most effective, however, is to present his version of events first, and then compare it with the record, showing how consistently it slides from distortion into outright falsehood.

Of the many hours of Makis interviews reviewed for this article, none was more revealing than episode #781 of the .2 Newman, a former professional hockey player well known in Canada, appears to be a decent man. He is also, just as clearly, not an experienced interviewer. He did no apparent homework on his guest, let him speak uninterrupted for long stretches, and never seriously challenged what he was saying. It is dreadful journalism, but it gave Makis a perfect opportunity to outdo himself. The full transcript can be consulted afterward;3 for now, let us begin with the shortest possible excerpt. The “lie counter” and the comments on the right are my additions, and each instance will be examined in turn below.

Because that is the central fact of this entire story: absolutely nothing in the record fits Makis’s preferred version of events. Not his fall in Alberta. Not the destruction of his medical career. Not the lawsuits. Not the reinvention that followed. The closer one looks, the less this resembles a dissident crushed by power, and the more it looks like a man who answered every exposure, every sanction, and every failure by enlarging the conspiracy and asking the public to mistake escalation for evidence.

From Slovakia to Montreal’s McGill University

Viliam “William” Makis was born in Žilina, Slovakia, in 1979,4 when the country was still part of Czechoslovakia. At age 9, he left with his family as they fled communism. He spent a year in a refugee camp near Belgrade, Serbia, where he learned English. His father, an engineer with a PhD, eventually secured the family’s immigration to Canada. They settled in Toronto, where his father obtained a university professorship.5

After earning a B.Sc. in immunology from the University of Toronto, Makis graduated from McGill University in 2005. He then completed specialty training in nuclear medicine at McGill and obtained Royal College certification in 2010. He moved to Manitoba with his wife and two young children to take up the post of Director of Nuclear Medicine at Brandon Regional Health Centre, where he practiced until 2013.67

2013: From Manitoba to Alberta

In June 2013, Makis began negotiations with Dr. Robert MacEwan, Director of Diagnostic Imaging at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, Alberta.8 On June 26, MacEwan offered him a contract with remuneration set at $646,335.00, together with a $10,000 relocation allowance to cover his move from Brandon, Manitoba. Makis signed the agreement on August 2, and Makis started working at the CCI on August 5.

This first contract was temporary and subject to several conditions: Makis had to obtain licensure from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA),9 receive an appointment to the AHS Medical Staff, secure clinical privileges at the Cross Cancer Institute (CCI), obtain medico-legal protection from the CMPA, and pass a security check.10

Having satisfied these conditions, Makis signed a second contract a few months later, on November 29, 2013. It consisted of a Medical Services Agreement (MSA) between AHS and Makis’s professional corporation, Makis P.C., together with a Contractor & Practitioner Agreement (CPA). Whereas the first agreement had been made with him personally in connection with his relocation, the November MSA formally transferred the financial arrangement to his professional corporation, which had been incorporated a month earlier, on October 30, 2013.11

This was a standard arrangement for physicians in Canada and typically offered significant tax and business advantages.12 The remuneration remained unchanged, and the contract was set to expire on October 31, 2016. Both parties entered it on the understanding that, absent exceptional circumstances, AHS routinely renewed such agreements.13

At that stage, the record shows Makis entering Alberta on generous and entirely conventional contractual terms.

2014: Clinical Work and First Turmoil

In January 2014, Brent Schaitel, a nurse, joined the CCI as a close collaborator of Makis.14 Around the same time, and at the request of Robert MacEwan and Alexander “Sandy” McEwan, who had until then been handling the necessary clinical work at the institute, Makis started seeing patients.15

By February, he was already complaining that he was overworked and needed “research days” on which he would see no patients.16

Relations between Makis and MacEwan began to deteriorate in July 2014. On July 29, after Makis again complained of being overworked, Robert MacEwan suggested that he manage his time more efficiently by delegating part of the workload associated with the clinical trial he was conducting with Sandy McEwan to nurses.17

The tension came to a head a week later. On August 6, MacEwan visited Makis’s office to discuss these workload issues. When he asked Makis to bring such problems directly to him, rather than copying four or five people on every email, Makis later claimed that he had “felt” he “was being interrogated... and threatened” by this “tall and imposing figure.”18

Two days later, on Friday, August 8, six minutes before the end of the day, Makis responded in his own fashion. He emailed AHS Director Quinn West - and nine other recipients, including Robert MacEwan - with his own instructions on how to “adjust the physician schedules,” a task that was, needless to say, MacEwan’s responsibility.19

The following Monday, August 11, Makis formally escalated the dispute. At 1:23 a.m., he sent Matthew Parliament, their mutual superior, via Parliament’s secretary, Salima Beattie, a lengthy account of how he had “felt threatened” by MacEwan during the August 6 incident.20

At 9:05 a.m., MacEwan replied to Makis’s provocation, reminding “everyone that it is a privilege to work at the CCI.”21

Twenty-seven minutes later, at 9:32 a.m., Makis bought and began carrying a voice recorder.22 At 1:41 p.m., he asked for a meeting with Matthew Parliament.23 By then, the pattern was already clear: grievance, documentation, escalation.

The next day, Makis reported the incident directly to Parliament.…24

… And, while his voice recorder happened to be running, he had another exchange with MacEwan.25

At 9:44 a.m., he again reported the incident to Parliament and,26 claiming that it had made him fear for his physical safety, began locking his office…27

The following day, he emailed Robert MacEwan to explain “how unbearable” he found the situation.28

Makis responded to these “grave developments” in his usual measured fashion: by filing a formal complaint against Dr. Robert MacEwan with Dr. Matthew Parliament and Dr. David Mador on August 20, 2014.29 By then, Makis had transformed the episode into a formal grievance process.

The reader may judge for himself whether Makis had any legitimate reason to fear for his physical safety, or whether he was instead trying to provoke - and remove - the man who had recruited him the previous year.

On August 22, 2014, Dr. David Mador responded to the complaint by indicating that he preferred to resolve the matter through “mutual understanding” rather than through the formal bylaw process.30 He asked Dr. Matthew Parliament and Dr. Bill Anderson to meet with Makis and Dr. MacEwan to address the concerns. The two sides, unsurprisingly, remembered the outcome differently: Makis claimed that the incident had been entirely covered up,31 while Parliament considered that the concerns had been addressed by dealing with Makis’s perception that he was overloaded, and by mentoring MacEwan on his communication style.32

No other major incident occurred in Alberta in 2014, at least through December.

Makis merely sued his former Manitoba colleagues, Salem Yuoness, Shaun Gauthier, and Prairie Mountain Health, on December 22 - two days before Christmas.33 He would later refer, with apparent satisfaction, to the distress he had caused them, something his office colleagues found intimidating should they ever complain about him.343536

Then, completely unsolicited, he sent a semi-nude photograph of himself (from the waist up) to Sarah Rayner, a nurse who was scheduled to be interviewed for a position in his department only a few weeks later, in early January 2015.37 Shocked, she replied: “You’re so not allowed to send me these sort of photos lol ridiculous.”

2015: Sexual Harassment and Escalating Misconduct

In January 2015, Makis first spoke to Brent Schaitel, the nurse working most closely with him, about his “sexual attraction to obese women.” Shortly afterward, he began sending Schaitel pornographic images accompanied by assorted comments.38 These events are described in Schaitel’s interview notes from late 2015, leaving little ambiguity about the pattern.

On January 26, 2015, Sarah Rayner successfully completed her interview, which had been postponed by a couple of weeks because of another doctor’s absence. On March 15, 2015, she joined Makis’s department. Makis quickly drew her into his circle of confidence, alongside Schaitel, and by July 2015 she too had become a target of his sexually obsessive behavior.39

On August 17, 2015, Makis sent Sarah Rayner an erotic image explicitly labeled with her name.40

Makis’s professional performance was also far removed from the image he later tried to project. On August 18, 2015, Dr. Robert MacEwan informed him that he had made a diagnostic error.41

On August 19, 2015, MacEwan followed up with another correction.42

Makis responded to this routine professional feedback much as one might expect. He lashed out at Joanne Snydmiller for the offense of asking him to spend ten seconds reviewing a patient scan before the patient was released, at a moment when he was celebrating a birthday in the office and Robert MacEwan was not around. Sarah Rayner, who witnessed the incident, was concerned enough to comfort Joanne afterward.43

He also responded by sending Quinn West another lengthy email, copying the entire staff, about what he portrayed as “organisational issues” and the “unprofessional behavior of tech assistants.”44

He also responded in a third way: by printing a poster and hanging it on his office door.

The poster triggered yet another confrontation, this time with Quinn West. When West came to Makis’s office to discuss his latest email, he was met with the sign on the door, which he quite properly regarded as completely unprofessional, not least because patients passed through that area.

Makis later described the episode as Quinn West “taking pictures of his office door without asking for permission and attempting to leave without explanation,” together with supposed “threats” either to cause him “disabling physical harm” or to “have him fired”.

At the time, however, Makis himself insisted that it was “simply a joke.”45

This sequence of incidents convinced both Quinn West and Robert MacEwan that recruiting Viliam Makis had been a mistake. Discussing the confrontation, MacEwan wrote plainly that he would henceforth advocate for the non-renewal of Makis’s contract.46

While West and MacEwan were concluding that Makis had become untenable as a colleague, his conduct toward Sarah Rayner was continuing to deteriorate.

By mid-October, Makis was still behaving grossly inappropriately toward Sarah Rayner. He again sent the semi-nude photograph labeled with her name to both Sarah and Brent. More disturbingly still, Makis told Rayner that he engaged in zoophilia and had “masturbated his cat.”47

He also showed her, on his office computer, a website about pregnant lesbians. Makis’s professional performance, as well as his relationship with his team, continued to deteriorate as 2015 drew to a close. After taking some vacation time in November, he came back and finally turned against Rayner and Schaitel, who had committed, in his eyes, an act of lèse-majesté by scheduling too many patient appointments for him.

True to form, rather than resolving the scheduling conflict quietly or speaking with the nurses directly, Makis fired off a mass email on November 27 titled “Therapy problems”. He copied the therapy nurses, clerks, and a wide distribution list of staff members - some entirely external to the issue - publicly berating the nursing team for what he claimed were "wait-list" and "dosing mistakes".48

The nursing staff, who had been bending over backwards to accommodate his erratic schedule and last-minute vacations, saw the email as a deliberate attempt to shame and humiliate them after more than a year of enduring an already toxic work environment. This time, they did not simply absorb the abuse. On December 3, 2015, nurses Sarah Rayner and Brent Schaitel, together with clerk Emmanuelle Frechette-Lemoine, submitted a formal complaint to Facility Medical Director Dr. Matthew Parliament and Dr. Robert MacEwan. They described Makis’s unprofessional conduct, his inflammatory communications, and his growing habit of publicly humiliating staff.49

In a final attempt to de-escalate the situation, AHS leadership arranged a meeting on December 10 with Makis, the nurses, Marguerite Wieler (PhD, MSc), and Dr. Sandy McEwan to address the scheduling disputes. The meeting was a disaster. Witnesses later recalled that Makis was visibly angry, rude, and condescending toward the nursing staff throughout.50515253

Later that same day, Makis took to Facebook and posted a photo of a “bloody Viking face” with the ominous caption, “so many betrayals to repay.” Brent Schaitel, who was Facebook friends with Makis, saw the post the next morning, took a screenshot, and shared it with Rayner. Given Makis’s escalating hostility, along with his frequent and boastful reminders around the clinic that he was actively suing his former colleagues in Manitoba, the nurses interpreted the bloody Viking image as a direct physical and professional threat. Makis deleted the “bloody Viking” the following day and blocked Rayner and Schaitel on Facebook a few days later.54

Sarah Rayner overcame her embarrassment and raised the matter, informing Sandy McEwan of the stream of pornographic images she had received. On McEwan’s advice, she escalated the issue on December 23, 2015, by filing a formal complaint directly with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA), attaching the inflammatory emails, the social-media threats, and five pages of the explicit photographs Makis had sent her.

Armed with both the internal staff complaints and the explosive CPSA filing, AHS leadership finally took decisive action. On December 29, 2015, the Acting Zone Medical Director, Dr. David Mador,55 officially notified Makis that a Triggered Initial Assessment (TIA56) was being launched to investigate his conduct.57

Makis agreed to a voluntary paid administrative leave until the TIA was concluded, the alternative being that AHS would immediately suspend his hospital privileges and take action. Makis was asked to relinquish, and did relinquish, his hospital identification, his CCI office keys, and access to his AHS email account for the duration of his “voluntary” paid administrative leave.

2016: Administrative Exile

From January 7 to January 19, 2016, the TIA team interviewed the complainants- Sarah Rayner, Brent Schaitel, and Emmanuelle Frechette-Lemoine - as well as the witnesses Robert MacEwan, Quinn West, Matthew Parliament, and Sandy McEwan. On January 20, 2016, Makis submitted to Dr. Mador and Dr. Anderson a 100-page letter devoted largely to attack Robert MacEwan.

The full 47-page TIA report, which Makis, for obvious reasons, was always careful to reproduce only in short extracts in his subsequent proceedings,5859 can be downloaded below.

Triggered Initial Assessment (TIA) June 14, 2016

3.68MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Two days later, Makis himself was interviewed. He was assisted by Donald Cranston, a Harvard graduate and, obviously, an excellent lawyer.60

During his January 22, 2016 interview with the TIA team, Makis employed a dual strategy of aggressive deflection and minimized admissions.

True to his pattern of narcissism, Makis vehemently denied being the aggressor, instead framing himself as the victim of a coordinated plot. He argued that Quinn West was an incompetent manager and insisted that West, Dr. MacEwan, and the nursing staff were actively sabotaging his medical practice.

He defended his habit of sending mass emails, arguing that they were entirely justified because the recipients were tangentially involved in clinical trials, and that this was his only way of escalating unresolved issues. When confronted with the menacing “bloody Viking face” Facebook post captioned “so many betrayals to repay,” Makis absurdly claimed that it was merely a coincidence, a reference to a television show, and harmless in intent. He likewise dismissed the aggressive poster he had hung on his office door as “a joke.”61

Despite these evasions, Makis was forced to acknowledge several damning facts. Most notably, he admitted to sending explicit pornographic photographs and inappropriate texts to Sarah Rayner and Brent Schaitel, while repeatedly making sexual “jokes” during office hours.62 He nevertheless attempted to excuse these serious boundary violations by claiming that he believed their “casual work” relationship made such communications acceptable, and by denying that any power differential existed between doctors and nurses.63

He also admitted to repeatedly telling staff members, “I have a good lawyer,”64 whenever they challenged his behavior - a tactic witnesses described as blatant intimidation. Furthermore, Makis had to concede that his colleagues’ knowledge of his ongoing, vindictive lawsuit against former colleagues in Manitoba might deter them from filing complaints against him, although he insisted that he had mentioned it innocently.65

Rather than quietly awaiting the TIA panel’s verdict, Makis flooded AHS executives with hundreds of pages of emails and letters, alleging that MacEwan and West were coercing staff into filing false complaints. This forced the TIA team to extend its investigation and re-interview witnesses. Unsurprisingly, the technologists explicitly denied having been pressured or traumatized by AHS leadership, thoroughly debunking Makis’s uncorroborated conspiracy claims.66

On May 11, likely realizing that his position was highly precarious, Makis formally withdrew from all clinical therapy work and research at the CCI, presenting the move as a sign of “good faith” toward the complainants.67

On June 1, Makis filed a lengthy formal complaint with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA) against Dr. MacEwan, accusing him of physical assaults, harassment, and sabotage of his medical career.68

On June 14, the 47-page TIA report was finalized and delivered to Makis’s counsel. The independent investigation rejected all of Makis’s counterclaims of conspiracy and sabotage as unfounded.69 The panel found well founded the allegation that Makis had sent inappropriate, intimidating, and pornographic communications to his staff - the only accusation that even his excellent lawyer could not meaningfully downplay.70

On July 8, Dr. Michael Caffaro dismissed Makis’s June 1 complaint against Dr. MacEwan, finding insufficient evidence of unprofessional conduct.71 Days later, on July 11, AHS Zone Medical Director Dr. David Mador formally issued his decision on the TIA. He offered Makis a consensual resolution: voluntarily relinquish his hospital privileges and agree not to seek renewal of his contract, in exchange for the TIA being halted. Makis rejected the offer.72

On July 15, a new physician, Kelly Chiu, was recruited to replace Makis - and his former office was given to her.73 On July 29, AHS sent a notice advising Makis that it wouldn’t be renewing the MSA at the end of its initial term.74

On August 11, Makis informed AHS that he no longer agreed to remain on paid leave, that he was ready, willing, and able to return to work, and that he would undergo whatever training the TIA panel recommended. He demanded the return of his hospital keys and access to his email account. In circumstances where three employees had made clear that they would resign if he returned, AHS firmly refused to allow it.75 On September 8, Dr. David Mador escalated the matter by formally referring Makis's conduct directly to the CPSA for regulatory review.

On October 7, the CPSA concluded its own investigation into the nurses' complaints. Echoing the TIA report, the College of course officially confirmed that Makis's communications and conduct toward staff had severely crossed professional boundaries.76

On October 27, four days before his contract expired, Makis launched a scorched-earth legal offensive. He sued AHS in the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench for $13.5 million, alleging breach of contract, negligence, wrongful termination, malfeasance in public office, and an elaborate conspiracy to destroy him.7778

In November & December 2016, despite filing a second CPSA complaint against Dr. MacEwan (which was quickly dismissed),79 and flooding the system with appeals, Makis quietly capitulated to the regulatory body. On December 17, 2016, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the CPSA, officially accepting their findings of his inappropriate conduct and agreeing to undertake mandatory boundary and communications courses, at his own expense.80

2017: Escalation, Paranoia, and More Self-inflicted wounds

Increasingly isolated, Makis spent the year lashing out in every direction: the University of Alberta severed its remaining ties with him; he bombarded public bodies with FOIP requests and complaints; and he escalated his litigation and grievance campaigns against anyone he could cast as an enemy. For example, Alexander “Sandy” McEwan, whom Makis had until then presented as another victim of Robert MacEwan alongside himself, also became, in his telling, yet another conspirator.81

The year’s most serious incident came in April, when, according to later tribunal findings, he confronted Dr. Marguerite Wieler in Toronto over her cooperation with the CPSA, accused her of lying, and threatened to destroy her livelihood - events he would later deny in their entirety.82

Over the following months, Makis transformed each setback into fresh “proof” of a supposed plot against him. On June 3, 2017, AHS offered him a $400,000 settlement in exchange for a full release of his “beautiful $13.5 million lawsuit.” Makis allowed the offer to expire by failing to respond by June 9, 2017.8384

Makis claimed that CPSA Complaints Director Dr. Michael Caffaro was the primary enforcer of Dr. Belanger’s retaliation. He alleged that exactly “six business hours” after he rejected the settlement on June 9, Dr. Caffaro launched a formal, fabricated CPSA investigation against him. As with most of Makis’s claims, however, his timeline and allegations of a coordinated extortion plot were entirely uncorroborated and collapsed under the most basic scrutiny. During the subsequent CPSA hearing, the evidence showed that the investigation into Makis, which stemmed from his aggressive confrontation with a former colleague, Dr. Marguerite Wieler, in Toronto, had actually been opened on May 8, 2017, by Associate Complaints Director Dr. John Ritchie - a full month before AHS even offered the $400,000 settlement.85

By autumn, the CPSA had completed its investigation into the April Toronto incident and determined that it warranted a disciplinary hearing.86 On October 16, 2017, CPSA legal counsel Craig Boyer attempted to serve Makis with a Notice of Hearing by registered mail to his home. Makis refused to accept the package.87 Instead, on October 20, he marched into the Edmonton Police Service and filed a witness statement absurdly alleging that Craig Boyer was delivering “forged and fraudulent government documents.”88 He then emailed the CPSA Registrar, demanding that the CPSA’s Complaints Director and Investigator be immediately removed from the premises and their computers confiscated to prevent “the biggest public corruption scandal in recent College history.”89

Observing his spiraling paranoia, Dr. Jeremy Beach of the CPSA wrote to Makis on October 27, 2017, gently suggesting a conversation to assess whether he might be suffering from a “relevant health concern” affecting his fitness to practice. Makis, of course, interpreted this standard physician-health inquiry as “intimidation towards himself from the College.”90

By the end of the year, having alienated the hospital, the university, and his regulatory body, Makis doubled down. In December 2017, he formally amended his $13.5 million lawsuit to add the CPSA as a co-defendant, ensuring that his legal battles would consume the years to come.91

2018: Disciplinary Action and Vexatious Litigant Designation

The consequences of Makis’s escalating paranoia and relentless retaliatory campaigns finally caught up with him in 2018. On January 15 and 16, 2018, Makis faced a CPSA Hearing Tribunal regarding the Toronto confrontation with Dr. Wieler. Acting as his own legal counsel (as he had alienated himself his former councils), he vehemently denied the incident and instead used the hearing to argue that the charge was merely part of a vast, institutional conspiracy to destroy his medical practice. He repeatedly presented his uncorroborated theory that the entire disciplinary proceeding was fabricated retaliation for his refusal of the AHS $400,000 settlement offer.92

In May 2018, AHS filed a formal application to have Makis declared a vexatious litigant, citing his relentless barrage of complaints - 106 proceedings in total - across multiple public agencies.93 Weeks later, on June 5, the CPSA tribunal delivered its verdict on the Toronto incident, completely rejecting his conspiracy theories and finding him guilty of unprofessional conduct for threatening his former colleague.94 During the subsequent sanctions phase, Makis - aptly illustrating the old saying that “the man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client” - refused to address the question of sanctions and instead… demanded that the guilty verdict be overturned.

He further escalated his erratic behavior by emailing the Complaints Director and CPSA counsel to… declare that their careers were over.95

He also filed complaints with the Law Society alleging that his own former counsel and the CPSA's counsel had attempted to extort him into falsely claiming a mental impairment.96 Unfazed by the various rulings against him, Makis launched a second massive lawsuit in August - this one demanding $22.2 million against several physicians and the University of Alberta for their alleged roles in his downfall.97

On October 29, the CPSA issued its final sanction decision. Highlighting severe, ongoing concerns for public safety and Makis's fitness to practice, the tribunal formally reprimanded him, ordered him to pay the hearing costs, and mandated that he undergo a multidisciplinary fitness-to-practice assessment. The tribunal explicitly ruled that failing to arrange or attend this assessment would result in the immediate suspension of his medical practice permit.98

On December 3, 2018, Justice T.D. Clackson issued a comprehensive ruling, formally declaring Makis a vexatious litigant.99 Noting his “metastatic pattern of complaints, lawsuits, and appeals,” the court imposed sweeping gatekeeping restrictions, barring Makis from initiating any further judicial or non-judicial proceedings (including complaints to professional or public bodies) without prior court approval.

The judge also found Makis in civil contempt of court for his refusal to attend questioning, levying an additional $1,000 penalty.

2019: Appeals, Twitter Megaphone, And Licence Cancellation

By 2019, Makis was simply relocating the same persecution narrative from administrative bodies to the appellate courts and social media.

On February 12, his license was canceled for non-payment of the various legal fees he had accumulated with the CPSA.100

On March 26, 2019, the Court of Appeal refused to suspend the vexatious-litigant order.101

Meanwhile, Makis narrowly escaped further legal penalties. On May 31, a judge dismissed an AHS application to hold him in contempt for contacting prohibited individuals, generously concluding that he simply “did not understand the nature and breadth” of the court’s no-contact order.102

In July, the sheer scale of his paper warfare became impossible to ignore, with the Information and Privacy Commissioner stepping in as an intervenor while Makis flooded institutions with filings and requests. The IPC noted that he had an astonishing 35 active files with its office, all of which had been paralyzed by his vexatious-litigant designation.103

Later that month, on July 31, Justice Sulyma dismissed Makis’s application for judicial review concerning the CPSA’s refusal to discipline his former colleague, Dr. Robert MacEwan. The judge concluded that Makis had no standing, noting that he was merely “pursuing his own desired investigation on insufficient evidence” and substituting his own disagreement for legal error.104

Unable to file formal complaints freely, Makis took to Twitter, launching a relentless and highly paranoid social-media campaign. He spent the year tweeting thousands of times at politicians, journalists, and public agencies, promoting a bizarre and entirely fabricated narrative: that Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had orchestrated a $293 million conspiracy to sabotage his Lutetium-177 cancer trials in Edmonton in order to eliminate competition for a Vancouver-based isotope project. Naturally, he offered no credible evidence for this massive, multi-government criminal plot.105106107108109110

2020: The “Historic” Hearings

Makis spent the opening days of 2020 promising his social-media followers that January 9 would be a “historic” day at the Alberta Court of Appeal - one that would ultimately end former Premier Rachel Notley’s political career.111112

On May 1, the Court of Appeal released its highly anticipated decision on Makis’s vexatious-litigant status (2020 ABCA 168). The court held that, although Makis had plainly engaged in “obsessive conduct” and abused the system, the original 2018 order restricting his access to all non-judicial bodies - such as the police and the Human Rights Commission - was overbroad. It therefore set aside the blanket ban, giving Makis a partial victory. At the same time, however, the court maintained his case-management restrictions, continuing to bar him from contacting AHS employees or filing further police or CPSA complaints based on his conspiracy theories without prior judicial approval.113

The year ended with another closed door. On December 10, the Court of Appeal dismissed Makis’s continuing attempt to overturn the CPSA Complaint Review Committee’s rejection of his retaliatory complaints against his former colleague, Dr. Robert MacEwan. The court concluded, bluntly, that the College’s written review procedure had fully satisfied the required standard of fairness, demonstrating once again that Makis’s sprawling allegations carried no legal weight.114

2021: Relative Calm and Makis’s Double-Speech on COVID-19 Vaccines

Partly because of the pandemic, and partly because his legal options were running out, 2021 was a quiet year for Makis. On June 30, 2021, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) issued a Notice of Inquiry to Makis regarding his stalled FOIPP requests. These requests had previously been paralyzed because the initial 2018 vexatious-litigant order barred him from accessing non-judicial bodies.

On August 18, Makis was granted a one-month extension to prepare his “Initial Submissions” for the inquiry.

On September 13, Makis formally filed his written submissions with the OIPC. Relying on his partial appellate victory in May 2020, which had removed the blanket ban on his access to non-judicial bodies, Makis demanded that the OIPC compel the University of Alberta to process his five FOIPP requests.

Equal to himself, Makis’s 2021 OIPC submission was heavily laden with his usual uncorroborated paranoid theories. He claimed the University was illegally withholding nearly 2,000 pages of documents in a massive cover-up orchestrated by AHS’ and University of Alberta’s executives to hide their “sabotage” of his career and of his Lutetium-177 cancer trials.115

On Twitter/X, Makis spent 2021 hedging his bets on the COVID vaccines, which he seems to have understood would become one of the defining issues of the years ahead. Until December 2021, he posted both anti-vaccine content116 and pro-vaccine content,117 depending on the thread, sometimes only a few days apart, before later deleting the part that no longer fit his agenda.

One good thing about Viliam is that he is sloppy. Although he deleted the most incriminating post, he left his replies in the now-archived thread, and LA was able to obtain a screenshot of the post he wanted to make disappear.118

2022: Fruitless Proceedings and a Growing Audience in the “Antivaccine Movement”

In July 2022, Makis filed his initial affidavits in support of his applications to have the respondents declared vexatious litigants.

On July 26, Justice Inglis issued a case-management order setting filing deadlines. She directed that Makis’s applications would be heard on January 18, 2023, and scheduled the respondents’ cross-applications to strike or summarily dismiss Makis’s lawsuits for March and April 2023. Makis would later claim that Justice Inglis's refusal to adjourn the respondents' summary judgment applications during this July 26 conference was evidence that she was part of an “extortion conspiracy” against him - a claim the Court of Appeal later dismissed as being entirely devoid of evidence.119

On November 30, Makis filed a second, massive set of affidavits totaling 521 pages, together with voluminous exhibits. The new sources confirm that these affidavits contained few relevant facts and were instead filled with his personal opinions, beliefs, and arguments. Furthermore, he used them to improperly disclose third-party medical information and to make irrelevant allegations of criminal and legal wrongdoing against an AHS executive.120

2023: Collapse of the Lawsuits and Conditional Appeals

The only “positive” aspect of the year 2023 for Viliam Makis is that he started a Substack, “Makismd.substack.com”, on which, starting early February, he started to post paywalled “miracle Cancer cures” - which he accompanied by vibrant success stories (always posted by himself & always without direct patient testimony).121

In 2023 however, the procedural maneuvering of the previous year culminated in a series of devastating judicial defeats for Makis, effectively wiping out his major civil lawsuits. Conform to his established pattern, when faced with these summary dismissal hearings, Makis chose to boycott them entirely, emailing the court to declare that they were “fraudulent and vexatious” proceedings.122

On March 28, Justice Inglis issued her decision regarding the case management hearings held in January. She completely dismissed Makis's application to have the defendants declared vexatious litigants. Furthermore, she granted the respondents' cross-applications to strike Makis's 521-page November 2022 affidavits from the court record. The court found these affidavits improperly identified patients medical information, and were filled with irrelevant arguments, opinions, and uncorroborated allegations of criminal wrongdoing rather than with any actual factual evidence.123

On April 3, Justice Gill summarily dismissed Makis's massive lawsuit against the University of Alberta and several physicians in its entirety. Makis refused to attend the hearing. Justice Gill ruled that Makis's claims were bound to fail, noting that his academic appointments were clearly conditional upon him providing clinical services at the hospital - which he no longer did. The judge also found the lawsuit was an abuse of process, statute-barred, and essentially an improper collateral attack on UA administrative decisions.124

On April 21, Justice Lee summarily dismissed Makis's claims against the CPSA in his original Action 1603-18935 met the same fate. Makis again boycotted the hearing. Justice Lee summarily dismissed the claims from the bench, ruling that they were “without any merit and an abuse of process,” lacked any supporting evidentiary record, and constituted an improper collateral attack on the CPSA's administrative proceedings.

On July 7, the Court of Appeal made clear that Makis’s vexatious-litigant status now had real bite: before he could challenge these latest defeats, he first had to obtain the court’s permission to appeal. Justice Dawn Pentelechuk was unimpressed by his usual theatrics. She refused him leave to appeal the Justice Inglis orders, rejecting his claims of bias and “extortion conspiracy” as, once again, entirely unsupported by evidence. She did, however, allow him to appeal the summary dismissals ordered by Justices Gill and Lee, largely because those rulings had finally extinguished his lawsuits altogether, and because Makis had boycotted the hearings that produced them. Even that narrow procedural opening came with a price. Conscious of the costs already imposed by his baseless litigation, Justice Pentelechuk ordered Makis to post $20,000 in security for costs for each appeal by September 30, 2023, and made clear that if he failed to pay, the appeals would be dismissed automatically and without further order.125

2024: The Launch of the “Health Coaching” Business

During later questioning under oath, Makis admitted that in July 2024 he began operating a “health coaching” business from his home, offering online consultations by email and Zoom to thousands of clients, many of them cancer patients. As part of this business, he reviewed test results and medical records and proposed individualized protocols involving repurposed drugs such as ivermectin and fenbendazole.126 The contract he sent to these “clients,” obtained and corroborated through two separate sources, is reproduced below.

It is a remarkable document. While prominently displaying the titles “Dr.” and “MD,” it insists that Makis is providing neither medical care, nor diagnosis, nor treatment, but merely educational “health coaching.” It requires clients to assume full responsibility for their health decisions, to consult their actual primary physicians before changing medications or diet, and to accept the services strictly “as is.” At the same time, it grants Makis permission to use their anonymized records and test results for his own research, while requiring them to waive and release him from any liability, claims, lawsuits, or damages. In other words, cancer patients were invited to seek guidance from a “physician” using his medical title, receive personalized cancer-related protocols from him, and yet formally acknowledge that he bore no clinical responsibility for any of it. By recasting the relationship as a “coaching alliance” with a “client” rather than treatment of a patient, the document appears carefully designed to strip away the fiduciary duties, regulatory standards, and professional accountability that would normally attach to a doctor advising a person with cancer.

By 2024, Makis had developed another rhetorical reflex: when ordinary accusations of corruption or conspiracy no longer seemed sufficient, his opponents became pedophiles. At a June 2024 UCP fundraiser in Calgary, he attacked the CPSA by suggesting that it should be renamed “The College of Pedophiles and Child Sex Abusers of Alberta.”

True, when someone has admitted on the record to masturbating his cat and to flooding his nurses with images of obese women sitting on people’s faces, the bar for imputing sexual perversion to an opponent is already quite high.

The sordid facts behind this latest attempt to cast himself, yet again, as a victim were these: two physicians had indeed been charged in connection with child-sex offences. Both were suspended during the criminal investigations. One escaped sentencing on procedural grounds, but still saw his licence to practise medicine cancelled;127 the other, after serving time in jail, also saw his licence permanently cancelled.128 Of course, that is not how Makis framed the matter, and low-grade outlets like CairnNews helped him generate further outrage.129

The CPSA registrar publicly described the remarks as defamatory, disturbing, unfounded, and inflammatory, while noting the obvious fact that Makis did not hold a licence to practise medicine. The episode was not so much an aberration as a progression: having spent years recasting professional discipline as persecution, Makis had now taken to smearing his adversaries with one of the few labels still lurid enough to satisfy the scale of his fantasies.130

December 2024 also marked the creation by Makis by creating a Givesendgo to “fight the Trudeau-tyranny” - on which he managed to raise - by lying to his public on the root cause of the procedures against him - over USD $200,000.131

2025: CPSA Injunction and Unauthorized Practice of Medicine

In 2025, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (CPSA) launched direct legal action against Dr. Makis to shut down the “health coaching” business he had started in 2024. Because Makis’s medical licence had been cancelled in 2019, the CPSA argued that he was actively practising medicine without a licence and endangering the public.

On February 10, following inquiries from members of the public about Makis’s online cancer-treatment consultations, CPSA Registrar Dr. Scott McLeod sent him a formal cease-and-desist letter. The CPSA demanded that he stop holding himself out as a physician, radiologist, and oncologist, and cease providing medical services directly to the public. True to form, Makis responded with ad hominem attacks against Dr. McLeod and the CPSA’s legal counsel.132

On June 24, the CPSA issued a public statement warning Albertans that Makis was not a licensed physician. It explicitly cautioned that his use of the title “doctor” while providing medical opinions and advice about cancer treatments lacked regulatory safeguards and could lead to misdiagnosis or inappropriate treatment.133

On August 15, the CPSA finally asked the Court of King’s Bench to shut the operation down. Makis responded with a now familiar fiction: he claimed that he was not practising medicine at all, but merely acting as an independent researcher and “health coach” who provided information rather than medical advice, and therefore fell outside the College’s jurisdiction. Justice Yamauchi rejected the argument and granted an interim interlocutory injunction. Makis was barred from representing himself as a licensed physician in Alberta, from offering health services to the public - including advice or consultations about cancer treatment - and from using protected titles such as “doctor,” “oncologist,” “MD,” or “Dr.” in connection with those services. He was also ordered to remove the offending titles and abbreviations from his social-media profiles by September 22, 2025.134

Instead of complying with the injunction, Makis doubled down. During questioning under oath on November 3, 2025, he admitted that his health-coaching business had grown to 7,000 clients, many of them cancer patients. He conceded that he charged clients money, reviewed their test results and medical records, and provided them with customized protocols involving repurposed drugs such as ivermectin.

Makis attempted to skirt the injunction by using what the courts later called “weasel words,” referring to his patients as “clients” and his medical advice as “information” and “research.” Meanwhile, the CPSA continued gathering extensive evidence throughout late 2025 showing Makis launching a YouTube channel, posting on Substack, and boasting online about running “the largest Ivermectin cancer clinic in the world,” in blatant defiance of the August injunction.

That continued defiance set the stage for early 2026, when the CPSA dragged Makis back into court to have him held in civil contempt and exposed to the possibility of imprisonment.

2026: Contempt of Court, Permanent Injunction and Attempting to escape to Florida

2026 brought the result that years of grievance, evasion, and semantic trickery had long been inviting: contempt of court and a permanent injunction. After openly defying the August 2025 interim order, Makis was hauled back before the Alberta courts. In January, the Court of Appeal refused to stay the injunction and sent the matter forward for a hearing on both contempt and the CPSA’s request for a permanent order.135 At the February hearing, the CPSA produced extensive evidence that Makis had continued advertising himself online as an “MD” and “oncologist,” boasting of running “the largest Ivermectin cancer clinic in the world” with roughly 7,500 patients, and promoting drugs such as fenbendazole and mebendazole. Makis responded with the usual mixture of denial and word games, claiming that some posts came from impersonators, insisting that he merely gave “information” and “research” to “clients,” and suggesting that he was relocating to Florida, where he said he was licensed to practice.

On March 4, Justice Mah rejected all of it. In a ruling that was as unsurprised as it was unfavorable to Makis, the court found him in civil contempt, rejected his attempts to evade the injunction through what it called “weasel words,” and noted his characteristic looseness with the facts, including his misleading claims about being licensed in Florida. The interim order was converted into a permanent injunction: Makis was barred from using titles such as “Dr.,” “MD,” and “oncologist,” and prohibited from offering health services or cancer-treatment advice in Alberta.136

Concluding that an ordinary fine would not deter him, the court gave him a choice: comply immediately or risk jail. He was ordered to scrub the offending titles from his social media within 72 hours and to pay the CPSA’s legal costs at a heightened rate. Faced at last with a sanction he could not easily talk his way around, Makis retreated - while, naturally, recasting the outcome as persecution and assuring his followers, falsely, that his Florida licence was secure.

Conclusion

We could go on for quite some time about the countless lies of Viliam Makis.

At this point, the reader may well wonder why Makis claims that Trudeau - as antipathetic as he may be - was directly involved in his downfall. Having untangled Makis’s endless web of lies and grievances, we are in a good position to appreciate how difficult it can be to discern the truth amid the noise. In the end, however, the matter comes down to a very simple question.

In letters to public officials, Makis claimed that “Sarah Rayner had retracted her testimony.”137

That is the testimony accusing him of zoophilia and of bombarding his nurses with pornography featuring obese women - for which she provided 5 pages of evidence. We find that claim extremely difficult to believe. Assisted by an excellent lawyer, Makis was confronted with these accusations and made considerable efforts to minimize them - to say that he had merely “felt comfortable enough to talk about it” - but he did not deny the facts themselves. If these accusations are true, then much of the rest becomes secondary - and one can only observe that Canada is an extraordinarily tolerant country: in many others, he would likely have been dismissed the day such conduct was established.

On X, Makis went further still, effectively blaming Rayner herself and claiming that she had been bribed to testify.138

If, on the other hand, she truly retracted her accusations, then much of the rest is noise. It is the rewriting of that original story that sent him down his endless trail of lawsuits.

I therefore asked Viliam Makis, twenty-four hours before the publication of this article, whether he had any proof that Sarah Rayner had in fact retracted her statements. Had he produced such proof, this article would, of course, never have been published.

I had to use an alternate account, as he had blocked my main X account in December 2024, after I had uncovered that he was already earning $45,000 a month from Substack while claiming to be destitute.139

Makis first ignored my question. Then, when Lyndsey House took notice of my post and challenged him further, Makis went full DARVO on her and immediately deleted his original post about Sarah Rayner.

The post, of course, had already been archived, which means that anyone who pastes the original post URL into a browser can judge for himself how peaceful Viliam’s conscience really is…

I therefore take it that Makis will not be producing this crucial evidence that Sarah Rayner “lied and retracted her statement,” but rather that he was, once again, lying, blame-shifting, and casting himself as the victim.

But that is exactly why they deserve scrutiny.

Claiming to fight for truth is not proof that someone is telling it. Claiming to defend freedom is not evidence of integrity, rigor, or good judgment. In fact, the stronger the moral branding, the more careful we should be.

Over the last several years, many people lost trust in institutions that were supposed to be transparent, accountable, and evidence-based. Public health agencies, major media outlets, regulators, and political leaders often appeared inconsistent, defensive, or openly partisan. For many observers, that collapse in trust created a vacuum, and into that vacuum stepped a new class of voices promising honesty, courage, and independence.

Some of those voices did important work. They asked necessary questions, challenged weak arguments, exposed contradictions, and defended the principle that open debate matters. But alongside careful critics came a different type of figure: people who learned that distrust itself could be monetized, weaponized, and turned into identity.

That is where scrutiny becomes essential.

A person does not become reliable merely by opposing the establishment. Being dismissed, censored, or unpopular does not automatically make someone right. Nor does passionate rhetoric, outsider status, or - particularly - a large following. Bad institutions can be opposed by bad actors. False certainty can flourish outside official channels just as easily as within them.

This is one of the easiest traps to fall into in any dissident movement: the assumption that “our side” is closer to the truth simply because it is resisting power. But truth is not tribal. It does not change depending on who says it, who shares it, or who benefits from it. It has to be pursued through standards that apply equally to allies and opponents alike.

Those standards are not mysterious. We should be wary when screenshots replace sources, when emotion replaces argument, when suspicion outruns evidence, and when certainty grows even as the facts remain thin. We should pay attention when a public figure never corrects errors, never narrows claims, and never defends its arguments after being challenged. We should notice when a brand is built less on inquiry than on escalation.

That kind of behavior does tremendous damage. It confuses audiences who are already trying to navigate institutional failure. It discredits legitimate criticism by mixing it with exaggeration. It turns skepticism into performance. And it makes serious inquiry harder, not easier, because noise can protect falsehood just as effectively as censorship can.

If dissent is serious about achieving real-world change, it must hold itself to standards that survive contact with the world beyond its own audience. Its claims must be factual, disciplined, and capable of withstanding scrutiny from opponents, from courts, from science, and from any fair-minded inquiry. If our arguments fail the moment they are tested outside our own circles, then they will not deliver accountability, or reparations. They will only discredit the very cause they claim to serve.

A movement that says it cares about truth should - therefore - care deeply about method. It should reward restraint, precision, correction, and evidence. It should be willing to say, “This part is true, this part remains unproven, and this claim goes too far.” Without that discipline, the language of truth becomes branding, and the pretense of freedom becomes cover.

The real test is simple: do we apply the same standards to people we agree with as we apply to the institutions we distrust?

If the answer is no, then we are not defending truth. We are defending identity. And once that happens, freedom of thought gives way to faction, applause, and belief by affiliation.

People who claim to fight for truth and freedom should not be trusted less because they dissent. But they should never be trusted automatically because they do. If anything, they should be examined more carefully, because the stakes are high, the incentives powerful, and moral language can hide intellectual carelessness as easily as it can express conviction.

Why does all of this matter? Because behind the slogans, the factions, and the reputational games are people like Lexi and families like hers, left to carry losses that cannot be undone. When serious questions surround injury, coercion, adverse outcomes, and institutional failure, transparency is not optional, and accountability is not a luxury. They are the minimum owed to those who were harmed, to their families, and to the public. If the facts are strong, they should withstand scrutiny. If they do not, they should be corrected. But where there has been so much loss, uncertainty, and evidence demanding examination, silence and evasion are themselves a further betrayal.

Truth is not protected by loyalty. It is protected by scrutiny. So we will continue to make ourselves unpopular on this publication by scrutinizing even those among our allies who, after deep examination, prove more toxic than useful to our only end goals: obtaining reparations for those who were harmed, and restoring transparency.

As one of the earliest observers to document Sweden’s drop in birth rates starting in 2022, coinciding with the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, and having continued to study fertility trends since, the topic immediately caught my attention.

To summarize the authors’ claim, COVID-19 vaccination is not causally associated with a reduction in childbirth among women of childbearing age. Based on Swedish registry data and a target-trial emulation-style analysis, the estimates are close to null.

Well, that should settle the debate.

However, as pointed out when he first brought this study to my attention, things get - as usual with papers on COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy - very dirty as soon as we get a little into the weeds of the paper.

Which claims are they confronting?

According to the authors, it’s “widely circulating speculative claims” which incited them to look at the issue.

Which claims specifically? No idea - as usual, they don’t feel it’s necessary to provide references to support this kind of statement.

I’m aware of substantiated claims - namely, that COVID vaccines roughly double the baseline miscarriage rate (see Arkmedic’s reanalysis of Shimabukuro et al.,3 and Guetzkow et al.’s analysis of Israeli insurer data4). I’m also cognizant of grotesque claims circulating around this issue, notably Yeadon and Latypova’s poison pills,5 6 whose assertions lack credible evidentiary support.

So it would be helpful to know which claims, precisely, the authors believe they are refuting in this paper. If it’s the idea that COVID vaccines would cause an 82% miscarriage rate and a 300% increase in stillbirths, as claimed by Latypova, we’re happy to concede - without resistance - that it can be safely regarded as a claim that collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

If it’s the claim that authorizing COVID vaccines without an adequate safety basis or established benefit was a highly irresponsible decision - one that most likely resulted in a beyond-Thalidomide-level disaster - then settling that debate won’t be done by this study, as we’ll establish below.

Cohort Inconsistencies

As soon as we start reviewing how many pregnancies were studied, major inconsistencies appear. According to the abstract, the study concerns “a representative population of 369,000.” However, in the Methods section, the cohort is defined as “all women aged 18-45 who were residing in Jönköping County on January 1, 2021” (N = 59,773).

Throughout the rest of the paper and in the supplementary materials, 59,773 is the only cohort size that is clearly defined and used.

So where does the “369,000” figure in the abstract - the number most readers will retain - come from? It appears consistent with the approximate total population of Jönköping County (e.g., 368,856 residents as of December 31, 2023).7 If that is what the abstract is referring to, then it is at best confusing and at worst misleading, because it is not the population actually analyzed.

It took eleven authors to write and review this manuscript, yet the abstract still presents a cohort size that conflicts with the Methods. That does not inspire confidence in the care taken with other key details - especially for a paper making strong causal claims about vaccination and fertility.

Vaccinated versus Unvaccinated… Well, not really

In fact - and this is one of the study’s most problematic flaws - “vaccinated,” in the authors’ operational definition, means having received at least two doses, with follow-up censored at the third dose.

In other words, people who received only one dose are treated as “unvaccinated.” In a context where it is at least plausible (even if insufficiently studied) that a woman who experiences an adverse outcome - such as a miscarriage - after a first dose might be less likely to return for a second, this definition could introduce selection effects.

This is similar in spirit (though slightly less extreme) to the once-common practice of treating people as “unvaccinated” until 14 days after their second dose - an approach that became controversial because it distorts comparisons by misclassifying time at risk.

We can’t quantify the magnitude of any resulting bias from publicly available Swedish aggregate data, which lacks the necessary granularity.8

Nevertheless, this exposure definition is unacceptable as such, and should be handled explicitly and transparently, because it can (and will) materially affect interpretation.

At minimum, it changes the causal question from “vaccinated vs unvaccinated” to “completed the two-dose course vs a heterogeneous mixture of partially vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.” Ideally, “dose-1 only” recipients should be analyzed separately, or the study should also report an “at least one dose” definition alongside the two-dose definition.

11 authors and not one who can code?

In a purported effort at transparency, the authors provided the R script used for their analysis.9 The code is severely deficient, enough to call into question the validity of the entire manuscript in its current form, even as a draft.

A few of the most egregious problems visible in a quick review:

1) An “exposure” definition that directly contradicts the study’s headline framing.

Exposure (i.e., the vaccination status used in the model) is defined - lines 48 to 51 - as having a recorded dose-2 date (“FörstaVaccinationDos2”). That confirms the design flaw discussed above: women who received only one dose are treated as “unvaccinated,” even though the paper is marketed as a clean “vaccinated versus unvaccinated” comparison.

2) Another major design flaw: events before dose 2 among eventual vaccinees are effectively dropped

The code tries to build a time-dependent Cox dataset by giving vaccinated women two rows:

• Row A: unexposed from 2021-01-01 up to the dose-2 date

• Row B: exposed from the dose-2 date to end of follow-up (or censoring)

That’s a standard start-stop approach in principle.

But what it actually does (around lines 77 and onward) is this:

For a vaccinated woman, the “last row” (sista) is the exposed row (the dose-2 row).

If she conceived before dose 2, then on that exposed row Kontaktdatum < Exposuredatum, so that row is removed by the Före==0 filter.

The remaining unexposed row still exists - but later the script forces all non-last rows to status <- 0.

Net result: conceptions that occur before dose 2 among women who later receive dose 2 are not counted as events anywhere. They’re not counted in the unexposed interval, and they’re not counted in the exposed interval. They simply vanish from the analysis.

That is textbook immortal time bias: eventual vaccinees are implicitly required to remain event-free until they receive dose 2, because events before dose 2 are discarded.

This will distort the hazard ratio - often toward “no association,” though the direction depends on how vaccination timing and conception timing are distributed. The crucial point is simpler: it breaks the risk-set logic of a time-dependent Cox model.

A correct implementation would keep the event in the interval where it actually occurs (almost always the unexposed interval) and stop follow-up at the event time.

3) The conception date calculation is internally inconsistent

The paper claims that conception is defined as 280 days prior to birth in the main analysis, with 266 days used only as a sensitivity analysis. The published code doesn’t match that. It effectively hardcodes 266 by overwriting the first assignment (lines 38-39):

Befruktningsdatum <- Kontaktdatum - 280

Befruktningsdatum <- Kontaktdatum - 266

That’s not a “sensitivity analysis.” It’s a bug.

And it’s not harmless: shifting conception dates by two weeks can move a non-trivial number of events across the “vaccinated vs unvaccinated” boundary when exposure is time-varying. That can wash out a signal and push estimates toward the null. The authors need to state plainly whether the reported estimates are affected by this.

4) Removing everyone with a miscarriage from the childbirth analysis

Line 128, on a “specific analysis on miscarriages”, the authors do:

comb <- comb[!(comb$Personnr %in% Missfall$Personnr),]

This exclusion of every woman who had a past history of miscarriage is not a benign cleanup, at all. It is conditioning, on a post-baseline event, that can be affected by vaccination, correlated with fertility, and correlated with healthcare-seeking and coding - none of which the authors properly examine.

If vaccination influences miscarriage risk even slightly, then excluding all women with miscarriages is a classic way to induce selection bias and to artificially attenuate an effect on births (because you’ve literally removed a pathway by which births can be reduced). In effect, it changes the estimand to something like “live birth among women who never have a recorded miscarriage,” which is not what the paper claims to estimate.

5) Miscarriage analysis contains a serious logic error: shifting dates instead of filtering

Around lines 335-337, the authors write:

#Remove miscarriages within 22 weeks after study start

n <- -154

FörstaMissfall21_ <- within(FörstaMissfall21_, Kontaktdatum <- as.Date(Kontaktdatum+n))

This does not remove miscarriages in the first 22 weeks after the study start. It subtracts 154 days from every miscarriage date - shifting all events earlier - and therefore changes event times and their classification relative to vaccination and censoring. That is almost certainly a bug.

If the intent was truly “exclude miscarriages occurring within 22 weeks after 2021-01-01,” the code should have filtered records, e.g.:

FörstaMissfall21_ <- FörstaMissfall21_[Kontaktdatum >= as.Date(”2021-01-01”) + 154, ]

To make matters worse, later the script merges with Missfall rather than FörstaMissfall21_, which looks like another object-name error.

6) Confounding control is minimal (and code reflects that)

The only adjusted covariate in the model is age at study start. That is not “causal modeling” in any serious sense, despite what the abstract implies. And even if the time-dependent handling were correct (it isn’t), a near-null estimate can easily reflect uncontrolled confounding - especially since vaccine uptake is socially patterned and plausibly correlated with pregnancy planning, healthcare contact, and other factors directly tied to childbirth outcomes.

Conclusion

I could go on with a long list of additional bugs, inconsistencies, and unused objects - but the point is clear: this code was never subjected to serious review, neither by the authors nor the reviewers.

As shown above, even if the obvious bugs were fixed, the analysis would still be at high risk of immortal-time bias, because it discards events occurring prior to dose 2 among eventual vaccinees. That alone is enough to say that a strong causal conclusion like “no causal association of vaccination with reduced childbirth” is not supported by the analysis as implemented.

Worse, the study doesn’t even provide a coherent exposure definition consistent with its headline framing, and the script is riddled with errors.

This was published in Nature in 2026, and it illustrates once again my mantra that peer review without full, audit-ready transparency is a dead model. This paper should be pulled offline to avoid misleading the public - and we can only wonder why none of the reviewers flagged these major issues.10

And when you see “Victoria Male” among the reviewers, that largely explains why no major issue was spotted.11

Meanwhile, births in Sweden,12 normalized by women in age,13 - among the ~82% recipients of at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccines in the 18-49 age groups range14 - look like this (R):

While the Age Standardized Fertility Rate (ASFR) looks like this:

Could we please have a decent, anonymized, individual-level dataset released for public audit, so this extremely serious question can be settled under conditions of basic competence and transparency - rather than behind closed doors, by biased reviewers and authors of questionable skill?

4

Research Rebel

New Study: Higher-than-Expected Fetal Losses after mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Early Pregnancy

Dear readers, I am going to keep this short. I am delighted to share with you the fruits of a massive research project I’ve been working on, which is the reason why you haven’t heard from me in a very long time. I quickly realized after I started working on it that I would have to prioritize it at the neglect of posting here. I got so swept up in it tha…

Read more

a year ago · 277 likes · 42 comments · Josh Guetzkow

TL;DR

• Something changed structurally in NHS workforce health metrics around May 2021.

• That change is statistically verifiable through standard break‑detection methods.

• COVID infection stops being the main predictor of absence after widespread vaccination.

• There is no visible benefit to the vaccine at all.

• Statistical evidence alone cannot tell whether that’s direct vaccine toxicity, changes in reporting, behavioral burnout, or systems collapse - but it justifies a full, transparent inquiry with anonymized individual-level data.

Ian Copeland, one of those tireless defenders of pharmaceutical orthodoxy whose confidence always seems inversely proportional to his comprehension, recently shared an intriguing chart from “Tern”.

At first I verified that - for once - Tern hadn’t botched the picture with non-normalized figures or some other artifact. A quick check confirmed the rates were directly calculated by the NHS.1

That said, Tern’s “analysis” still isn’t analysis. It’s the kind of eyeballing any high-school student with Excel could improve - starting with a basic seasonal baseline and a quick look for structural breaks.

And since both keep invoking “antivaxxers” in the subsequent conversation2 - by which they seem to mean anyone who doesn’t dutifully line up for regular flu and COVID boosters, myself included - let’s do this properly.

I reproduced - and “slightly extended” - Tern’s plot (R):

This script takes the NHS monthly sickness-absence rate series (England) and smooths it with a six-month moving average (a quasi-centered window: three months before through two months after), so the underlying pattern shows through the month-to-month noise.

It then estimates an “observable norm” using 2010-2018 only by fitting an ordinary least squares baseline to the raw monthly rates, with a linear time term and explicit seasonality via month-of-year fixed effects. That baseline model is projected forward over the full period to generate expected values plus confidence and prediction intervals; for visual comparability, the expected series (and its prediction band) is also rolled using the same six-month window.

From there, the script computes deviations from the norm - both in absolute terms (per 100,000 staff) and in relative terms (percent above/below the rolled baseline). Structural change is then assessed using the Bai-Perron multiple-breakpoints framework applied not to the raw sickness rates, but to the baseline-adjusted deviation series (the raw deviation-from-norm).3 In other words, the breakpoints target shifts in abnormality relative to the 2010-2018 regime, rather than breaks driven by seasonality or the long-run secular trend already captured by the baseline.

The first confirmed COVID-19 cases in the UK were officially reported at the end of January 2020. But rather than litigate narratives, I’ll stick to one lens: what the data show.

Alongside that date, I’ve annotated the chart with hard-coded markers: the point when NHS staff vaccination reached 90% (near the ~92% peak)4; the announcement of a care-home worker mandate in November 2021;5 and the subsequent abandonment of those mandate plans in March and April 2022.6

Briefly:

a. The sickness-absence rate starts rising before the first officially reported UK COVID-19 cases and crosses a first break (“B1”) in September 2019 - already above what the pre-2019 baseline would normally allow, even at the winter peak. By the time cases are reported, the series has effectively overshot the expected seasonal maximum; it then surges again in April 2020, far beyond the observed winter norm.

b. A second break (“B2”) appears in May 2021, when the deviation from baseline shifts into a persistently higher regime - “worse than ever,” and suggestive of an additional factor entering the system.

c. A third break (“B3”) shows up in late December 2022, marking a transition into a downward trend - though the series still does not return to the pre-2019 baseline.

At first glance, two broad candidates plausibly contribute to these regime shifts and are worth examining:

• What is commonly framed as a “new pathogen” (COVID-19), including the rapid succession of variants (Delta, Omicron, and so on).

• The introduction of new pharmaceutical interventions deployed at scale.

Beyond that, it’s also worth tracking how the recorded reasons for absence evolve over time, and whether staff mortality indicators move in tandem with (or decouple from) the sickness-absence signal.

A new pathogen

In theory, if SARS-CoV-2 is the main reason NHS sickness absence departs from the pre-2019 norm, we should see sickness spikes move with the UK COVID-19 test-positivity rate - at least from February 2020 onward, when UK positivity data become available.7

A first script (R) downloads PCR-only positivity data and daily PCR testing volumes from UK Health Security Agency. It then aggregates the daily seven-day positivity percentage into a monthly mean, and computes the monthly mean of the daily seven-day average number of tests performed.8 9

A second script (R) plots the six-month rolling average of PCR positivity and monthly testing volumes, alongside the six-month rolling sickness-absence rate and the baseline projection established above.

From May 2020 to April 2022 (green background), there is a very strong positive association between the six-month rolling PCR-positivity series and the six-month rolling sickness series (Pearson r = 0.927; Spearman ρ = 0.893), with extremely small p-values and a tight Pearson confidence interval (0.836 - 0.968). In plain terms: over that period, the two lines mostly rise and fall together. At that smoothing level, COVID dynamics plausibly explain most of the abnormal sickness signal.

From May 2022 onward (red background), the relationship collapses and even tilts slightly negative (Pearson r = -0.199; Spearman ρ = -0.256), but without strong statistical support (p = 0.218 and p = 0.111; Pearson CI -0.481 to 0.120 includes zero). That pattern suggests whatever drove the tight co-movement earlier-pandemic waves and the associated absence dynamics-no longer dominated the sickness series in the later period, at least not in a simple monotonic way at this level of smoothing.

Testing volume did fall sharply. If NHS staff testing remained more intensive than population-level testing - and if the remaining PCR stream remained broadly representative of infection dynamics - then there is still enough signal to track major COVID waves.10 But the weakening correlation cannot be waved away as “less testing” without engaging with that representativeness question.

Nor are viral variants a satisfying explanation for the timing of the decoupling: Delta variant emerged in the United Kingdom in mid-March 2021 and became dominant by June,11 12 and Omicron variant emerged in late November 2021 and became dominant in December13 14 - well before the break in the sickness/positivity relationship is observed.

A set of new experimental products

At this point, since the “all-time high” in sickness absence appears to coincide with the vaccine rollout, it’s worth checking how tightly the two series move together.

Unfortunately, NHS staff vaccination coverage cannot be fully reconstructed month by month from the “Trust HCW” tab in the NHS “Monthly COVID-19 vaccination publications - January 2021 to September 2022”.15 16 By the time the breakdown becomes available (September 2021 at the earliest, based on an August 31 cut-off), 91.8% of staff already had at least one dose - so the steepest part of the roll-out is already behind us.

So I instead use official announcements as anchor points:

• The large-scale vaccination campaign for staff began around late December 2020.17

• 60% had received at least one dose in January 2021.18

• 76% had received at least one dose in February.19 20

• 80.5% had received at least one dose in early March.

• 87.8% had received at least one dose as of May 16.21

• 91.8% had received at least one dose and 87.8% had received two doses by the end of August,22 at which point the monthly reports can be used directly.

• By mid-September, the booster campaign was launched.23

The reconstruction model (R) converts these “snapshot” percentages into a day-by-day rollout for a 1.48 million - staff cohort,24 then aggregates the resulting daily counts back to monthly totals. First doses are interpolated between anchor points and distributed with a simple weekday/weekend pattern so delivery is not implausibly flat. Second doses are derived mechanically from first doses (rather than being guessed separately) using a hard 21-day minimum and a return-delay distribution (mean 60 days, sd 20), then rescaled to match the official end-of-month dose-2 anchors. Boosters are generated similarly from second doses, with a 90-day minimum; they are constrained to start after mid-September 2021 and scaled to the booster anchors. As a sanity check, the reconstructed series matches the first- and second-dose anchors almost exactly, with only minor (0.1 - 0.3 percentage-point) discrepancies where reported coverage itself briefly dips.

This makes it possible to plot, on the same timeline, monthly sickness absence, PCR test positivity, and the reconstructed administered-dose series (R).

I reran the dose reconstruction with median extra-delay values of 45/60/75 days (sd 20), keeping the hard minimum gaps (21 days for dose 2; 90 days for boosters) and re-fitting to the same official coverage anchors. Dose-2 anchor fit remains tight across scenarios (<0.3 pct-pt max error). Booster anchors show a small residual (~0.8-1.2 pct-pt) under monotone constraints. Importantly, the substantive inference is robust: the correlation between monthly administered doses (dose2+dose3) and sickness is stable across scenarios (overall r ~ -0.32 to -0.38; within May 2020-Apr 2022 r ~ -0.36 to -0.42). Peak timing shifts by at most ~one month.

Death Rates Across the Period

If you ask Tern what “deaths” look like among NHS staff, he’ll tell you people are *dying* more and more lately - based on plots he admits he can produce in a minute (without irony25).

Thankfully, we know better than to take anonymous (or not), code-free analysis at face value - especially when it leans on non-normalized figures to sell a narrative.

Here, staff deaths come from the “Reasons for Leaving” dataset,26 and workforce statistics provide the denominator.27 Because deaths are reported by financial year (1 April to 31 March) and split into quarters, I compute quarterly death rates using the workforce headcount at the start of the financial year (April) as the denominator for that year’s quarters. I then plot those rates alongside the quarter-average PCR positivity, the quarter-average sickness-absence rate, and the total administered-dose counts over the same quarter (R).

• Death spikes coincide with both COVID waves and vaccination campaigns.

• As with sickness absence, the staff death-rate signal stops being meaningfully correlated with COVID soon after the vaccination campaign is completed.

• However - unlike sickness, and unlike the impression conveyed by Tern - the annualized death rate shows something close to a return toward baseline. It remains elevated relative to the 2011 - 2019 linear trend, but it is broadly back in the vicinity of early-2010s levels (around 2012).

Absences by Organisation Type

The NHS publishes monthly staff sickness-absence rates split by organisation type (acute hospitals, ambulance, mental health trusts, etc.).28 We combined the historical files (they come in a few different formats over time - R) and plotted the trend (R).

What we see over time:

1) Before COVID (late 2019 to spring 2021): mostly stable, with one huge shock

• Sickness absence is fairly steady overall.

• The big exception is April 2020, which shows a major spike (the first COVID wave).

• In that period, higher COVID test positivity tends to coincide with higher sickness absence (which is what you’d expect).

2) Mid-pandemic (mid-2021 to end-2022): a higher “new normal”

• From around May 2021, the whole sickness-absence level shifts upward by roughly 15-20% compared with pre-COVID.

• There’s another clear high point around January 2022, lining up with a major infection wave.

• Organisation type shares don’t meaningfully change (acute and mental health remain the bulk). Some visible “changes” look like NHS admin reorganization (older bodies disappearing, new ones appearing), not real behavioral shifts.

3) After end-2022 (through end-2024): steadier, but still elevated

• Sickness absence starts high in late 2022, then settles.

• The big swings become less frequent.

• The level remains above pre-COVID, even if it’s a bit lower than the mid-pandemic peak period - roughly +15% higher.

What about vaccination?

• Vaccine roll-out happens late in the first window and ramps up in early 2021.

• In these monthly data, vaccine-dose volume does not move in step with short-term sickness absence (which could mean any effect is delayed, indirect, small relative to waves, or not detectable at this resolution).

Finally, we do not have administered-dose data for every month after B3, so any post-B3 “vaccine versus sickness” interpretation simply cannot be supported from these data.

Evolution of the shares of the reasons for absence

We also looked at a separate NHS dataset that breaks absences down by reason. It only goes back to April 2019, so the “pre-COVID baseline” is shorter than ideal.

Again, a first script (R) cleans, harmonizes, and normalizes the data across the historical file formats, and a second produces the plot below (R).

The broad picture is:

• Mental health-related absence is consistently one of the biggest categories - about a quarter of all absence - and stays high across the whole period.

• Musculoskeletal issues (back pain, other MSK problems) are also consistently large and fairly stable.

• During the stronger COVID/winter wave period (mid-2021 to end-2022), respiratory/infectious categories take up more share of total absence - which fits the idea of extra communicable disease burden on top of an otherwise stable baseline.

• After end-2022, recorded test positivity becomes less tightly connected to sickness absence.

“Cold/flu” vs Vaccines

If vaccination reduced everyday respiratory illness-related absence, you might expect the “cold/cough/flu” share to drop after roll-out. In this dataset, that drop doesn’t appear.

If anything, the Cold/Cough/Flu (S13) share is slightly higher in later periods than earlier ones - in a context of overall increase of the sickness rates. S13’s share increases across period averages: ~7.9% in the pre-rollout window (B1→B2), ~9.9% during the main roll-out/mandates era (B2→B3), and ~10.6% thereafter.

Some modeling fun

At this point, I made an effort to understand Ian & Tern’s worldview by testing a few scenarios using a small SIRS model (R).

In this first set of scenarios, COVID arrives when it is officially declared, and I test various vaccine-effectiveness assumptions across three scenarios:

1. COVID adds a static burden that doesn’t vary over time.

2. COVID causes exponential damage (the “Tern scenario”).

3. COVID behaves like a “normal” virus and its severity decreases over time.

While the third scenario outperforms the others (r = 0.44), we are still far from a realistic picture. Most annoyingly, because the SIRS model produces a realistic infection-spread curve, we completely miss the first wave and - except in the third approach - systematically overestimate the second wave.

That’s unsatisfying - because either we’re using the wrong model (and an SIRS framework should be well suited to a cohort of health-care workers exposed to high reinfection risk), or COVID didn’t arrive when we were told.

The next logical step, then, was to shift the “COVID arrival date” parameter to our B1 inflection point in September 2019. Lo and behold, Scenario 3 performs much better.

However, we’re not there yet. I therefore added a fourth scenario (R), in which vaccination increases recipients’ overall sickness risk. The result is self-explanatory: Scenario 4 dramatically outperforms all others. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE29) improves from 784 (best attenuating scenario) to 506.8 (a 35% reduction), and the correlation jumps from 0.46 to 0.643. In plain terms, the RMSE drop means the model’s typical prediction error is much smaller - its predictions land noticeably closer to the observed values on average.

The best-fitting model suggests that each vaccinated cohort contributes approximately 1,600 additional sickness absence days per 100,000 staff at peak, which then decays over time. With 814,000 staff vaccinated in January 2021 alone (55% of the workforce), that single cohort would contribute substantially to the B2 regime shift.

Of course, Tern and others will claim it’s COVID, not the vaccine. But if that were true, the phenomenon we observe - toxicity waning after the initial exposure - should be increasing exponentially. We observe the opposite.

The remaining misfit (correlation 0.64 vs an ideal 1.0) likely reflects the model still missing the sharp wave peaks: it captures the overall level well, but not the spikes.

Conclusion

Consistent with the patterns we observed in New Zealand,30 Israel,31 and the Pfizer trial,32 I find no evidence here that the vaccine roll-out improved the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything - while this dataset cannot establish causation - the signals are compatible with the opposite: the post-rollout period looks worse on the outcomes examined than the pre-roll-out baseline would have led us to expect.

By an irony of fate, a 95%+ vaccinated, 80%+ boosted workforce appears to be sicker - and to experience higher-than-normal death rates - after adopting the intervention that was sold as protection from a new hazard. More strikingly, the hazard itself does not vanish after a supposedly “95% effective” roll-out; instead, in the later period the excess sickness signal largely decouples from measured COVID positivity.

That is unfortunate, because it is not the theoretical behavior - nor what was marketed to the public.

It is also not especially surprising, if one has understood that these highly variable products33 should never have been authorized in the first place, and that informed consent was violated in multiple ways.34

And the broader pattern extends beyond COVID. The same platform applied to influenza - this time tested in a slightly less fraudulent clinical-trial setting, and with several more years of R&D - has recently produced a conspicuous failure.35 Strange how that works.

In the October 2024 campaign, 21% of NHS staff received a COVID vaccination, versus 40.6% receiving a flu vaccine.36 If “full protection” lasts only three months, then the simplest interpretation is that most staff have already drawn their own conclusions from lived experience - and became “antivaxxers”, like us.

Thanks to people like Ian Copeland, his colleagues, and to what may be the most consequential product failure in modern public-health history.

But don’t worry: according to a plethora of studies, the COVID vaccine also protects you from car accidents and other hazards (studies that, in my view, are not worth the paper they’re printed on).37 And remember: trust in “Science” is collapsing “because antivaxxers”.

In a next article, I’ll go after the root enchantment that sustains this delusion: the disastrous state of real-world data. I’ll show why many PhDs - who have never had to grapple with messy databases in production - consistently fail to understand real-world data flaws the moment those flaws become politically inconvenient, by examining what the official numbers say about the Pfizer vaccine’s performance in the Czech Republic.

35

MD REPORTS

Major journal under fire for omitting Pfizer’s failed flu data in seniors

This week, I reported that Pfizer’s mRNA flu shot offered almost no clinical benefit in adults aged 18–64 — and that the harms were more significant than the headlines suggested…

Read more

7 months ago · 181 likes · 52 comments · Maryanne Demasi, PhD

Prior to publication, I had, among my numerous re-readers, the article reviewed by two lawyers. One of them advised caution regarding two footnotes - pointing, among other things, to one of Sasha’s residential addresses - which I decided to include nonetheless, as the information was in the public domain, accessible directly via a Google search of Sasha’s name, and the sole available primary source for relevant details.

Sasha reacted on January 15 with her usual tactic of “distort, lie, amplify,” targeting - along with Jane Ruby - people who were relaying this “disgusting hit piece on her, which doxxed her home address, her family, her children and some of her co-workers”. Nothing unexpected from Sasha, who had actively doxxed anonymous activists a couple of weeks earlier (as she routinely does).

I used an alt account to ask her directly where I would have published “address, vacation home address, her children’s addresses and a lot of private information about her family”. After some efforts, she finally realized she was talking to me,1 and the article evolved to “a mostly flattering piece, with only 5 or 6 lies in it”.2

As I pressed her to clarify if we were, indeed, talking about a footnote accessible via Google, and which information was erroneous so that I could publish an erratum, I managed to get her to admit that she owned the Harvest Inn (rather than “could have invested,” as I had written),3 and that she used Telegram only to communicate with a few people.4 I stand corrected.

After a long (and rather unhinged) conversation - during which Sasha mostly devoted herself to her usual abusive behavior toward Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone (with whom I have never communicated) - Sasha challenged me to debate her via a Zoom call she would organize on Saturday, January 17, and of course I agreed.

On January 16, my comments section - which until then had received only laudatory feedback, along with a few no-virus comments - was visited simultaneously by Mary Talley-Bowden and Shannon Joy,5 who expressed their indignation at an article they claimed was empty of substance, while actively doxxing Sasha and her children.

I explained why the footnote was included, why “a daughter with a million followers instrumental in the ramping-up of censorship on Youtube just prior COVID” was relevant to the case, and I agreed to delay the debate with Sasha so that it would take place on her platform - with Dr. Bowden as moderator.

A moderator, even as visibly biased in Sasha’s favor as Dr. Bowden, seemed like a great addition to a conversation with Sasha.

Sasha thanked Mary Bowden - who had made the same offer than on Substack on X, and agreed to a debate she said I would likely avoid.6

Late that same day (in France), while I was happily arguing with Dr. Bowden - or, to be charitable, perhaps the social media manager operating her account - who was doing their best to appear like a neutral moderator,7 the article was “forcibly unpublished” by Substack’s moderation team, following Sasha’s efforts with their complaints process.

Sasha immediately exulted in my DMs, while maintaining her apparent desire to debate me.

The next day, still having heard nothing from Substack about which information had triggered the removal, I decided to re-host the article independently and asked Sasha to clarify which information she objected to on privacy grounds. Unfortunately, that didn’t fit her posture, so she respectfully declined.

On January 20, I republished the article on Substack in a stripped-down form so that the comments would remain accessible, along with a note announcing the forthcoming republication. Sasha also informed me that debating me - whether with or without Dr. Bowden’s “moderation” - was no longer on the agenda.

Substack finally specified that it was indeed those two footnotes that had led to the removal, earlier today, on January 21, 2026.

Without dwelling on the paradox of treating as “removal-worthy” information that is directly accessible via a Google search, the fact remains that Substack is free to determine what content it does or does not allow. I’m grateful for the dedication they showed to freedom of speech during the COVID period, so I understand if a dispute between two writers - one of whom has blocked pledges and the other is a best-selling multi-millionaire - is uncomfortable.

The fact also remains that I don’t like my articles to go offline without prior notice or discussion. All Substack articles will therefore, from now on, be mirrored on:

https://openvaet.info

You can read the article on Sasha (republished identically, minus the two disputed footnotes) by clicking the picture below.

Future articles that are exclusively about data analytics will be published simultaneously on Substack and on the mirror website. Articles concerning OSINT investigations will be published exclusively on the website, and announced on Substack via a page that will simply redirect to the website and allows users to comment.

If you have suggestions for improvements to the mirror website, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments - I’ll keep improving it when I have time.

This concludes this brief update. I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether Sasha’s posture of being “open to debate” her detractors really holds up - or if she was attempting to neutralize an annoying article with her usual clumsy amateurism.

This article was originally published on Substack on January 14, 2026. On January 16, 2026, it was “forcibly unpublished” by Substack’s moderation, following efforts by Sasha Latypova. It has been republished independently, with two footnotes redacted for privacy at Sasha Latypova’s request.

To read the article, click the picture below or here.

Said “Sense Receptor” had revealed (part of) his real name, “Matthew Hart”, a few days earlier - on December 12, 2025.

His article paints the picture of a sympathetic “pro-freedom” activist, whose awakening to the reality of the nudges in which we swim took some time.

This provides us with a useful exercise in OSINT, to verify what he may have forgotten to tell us…

A quick Google search “Matthew Hart” + “Nerdist” brings to his Linkedin profile - where we learn his middle-name, “Palleschi”1, and which shows that he occupied various “writer” jobs for online magazines.

Another quick search, on “Matthew Palleschi Hart”, tells us that he applied in October 2023 to become a US government contractor - with UEI RE69C65HDH18.2

His website in bio, sensereceptornews.com, saw the light early 2021.3 He relays there the typical Latypovian nonsense, along with the usual suspects Mike Yeadon, Karen Kingston, Astrid Stuckelberger…4

A company search tells us that in May 2022, while he had approximately 1,100 followers,5 he decided to register, under the n°0804586240, in Houston, Texas, a company dedicated to his communication enterprises, “Sense Receptor L.L.C”.6 The address is another residential home valued at $500K, that Matthew had bought with his then partner.

Who doesn’t register a L.L.C to monetize his online communication when he has 1.000 followers, in the midst of the COVID insanity, after-all?

Matthew kindly linked us his two proud achievements in the domain of video-making ; NASA’s Ark (August 20177) and “A Date in 2025” (June 20188).

Both video productions, generously relaying WEF talking-points and predictive programming on the necessity for man-kind to leave a dying earth, are, coincidentally, produced by the Hart & Palleschi families.

Garrett (Stephen) Hart is.. his father.

He appears, along with the “Hart-Palleschi Family Trust”, among the past owners of the luxury properties (now sold) that young Matthew has inhabited in the past.

Garrett, now a respected professor at Fullerton,9 retired from his job as a Paramount Pictures high level executive, to teach and to run his own production company, “The Canyon Road”.

He owns, with Patricia Palleschi, Matthew’s mother, a high-value property, estimated like many other in the area at USD 10 Millions, on the Pacific Palisades.

The Canyon Road counts among its esteemed clients10 Johnson & Johnson, for whom they realized several moving short clips.11 12

Patricia Palleschi, PhD, is a RH executive advisor for LA Firms,13 and her public Facebook profile claims that she now works for Bank of America, after working for Disney.14

Not much appears in the News-papers about Patricia. A small detail might be worth mentioning: her brother, William, was stationed at Langley while working for the United States Air Force in 1975, which might indicate a family proximity to intelligence services.15

It is of course possible for individuals to dissent from the ideological environment in which they were raised. Such ruptures, however, tend to leave visible traces: loss of access, professional cost, public disavowal, or material downgrade.

Of such costs, we find no trace. Rather, to recap:

• Matthew, who applied as U.S. government contractor in 2023, never held employment independent of the professional and material ecosystem into which he was born.

• His father, ex paramount exec, works for Johnson & Johnson and various high profile TV shows.

• His mother worked for Disney & now works for Bank of America.

• His military uncle was “stationed at Langley”.

• He appears to have always consistently lived in (costly) properties owned by, or financed by, his (very wealthy) family, or family structures.

• He made WEF & Neo-Malthusian ideologically-friendly clips, while following his Dad’s footsteps, up to a year prior COVID, before to become “red-pilled”.

• The “red-pilled” Matthew relays Sasha Latypova,16 Astrid Stuckelberger,17 Jane Ruby,18 Mike Yeadon,19 and other various sources of the highest quality.

A common denominator to the people he promotes the most… Pfizer did nothing wrong - “they just delivered the fraud they were asked for”. Focus your anger on the states and institutions - rather than thinking about how you can reinforce them, against the Neo-Malthusian lobbies and the pharmaceutical tycoons.

.. And don’t listen to these pesky anonymous accounts bringing all the receipts to prove that Pfizer went far further delivering the “fraud they were asked” - by not disclosing to the regulators, across the World, countless annoying facts.20

This closes this short portrait, which isn’t without reminding Deborah Platevoet’s.21 I must admit that with a profile like this one, renouncing to be anonymous, while hoping to stay credible, in Health Freedom surroundings, was quite courageous.

I don’t know what’s pushing our ruling elites to send their brilliant children do their nudge-classes in conspiracy-theorists networks - but would I be them, I would rethink the strategy.

The history of human reproduction has long been entangled with questions of power, hierarchy, and social engineering. From the earliest punitive castrations of antiquity to the coercive sterilization laws of the early twentieth century, some sought to regulate who was permitted to reproduce and under what conditions. Although framed as a scientific pursuit aimed at improving the “quality” of populations, eugenics rested on profoundly flawed assumptions about heredity, race, intelligence, and social behavior. Its key actors - Francis Galton, John D. Rockefeller, Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin; their heirs, via institutional networks supported by “philanthropic” founders - created an intellectual and bureaucratic apparatus that profoundly shaped public policy across the United States, Europe, and major parts of the world.

By the mid-twentieth century, the explicit language of eugenics had fallen into disrepute, particularly after the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Yet its core anxieties and objectives survived under new labels and within new institutional homes. Neo-Malthusianism reframed population control not as a matter of “racial hygiene,” but as a global imperative tied to economic development, environmental sustainability, and geopolitical stability. International organizations, philanthropic foundations, and national governments embraced family-planning programs - sometimes voluntary, often coercive - with the stated goal of reducing fertility in “high-growth” or “underdeveloped” populations. Much of this work relied on the same assumptions about who should reproduce, though expressed in the secular language of modernization theory, resource scarcity, and “responsible parenthood.”

Today, it is more important than ever to understand how these ideas evolved. The world is undergoing a rapid and unprecedented demographic shift: birthrates have fallen below replacement levels across most of the developed world, and even in many developing regions. The acceleration of this decline since the COVID-19 crisis - driven by economic uncertainty, social disruption, poorly tested experimental products,1 and long-term shifts in family formation - has reignited debates about fertility, state intervention, and the future of populations control. At the same time, biomedical science has entered a new era. Genetic-therapy-based vaccines, genomic editing technologies, and reproductive bio-technologies offer profound medical possibilities, but also reshape longstanding ethical dilemmas about bodily autonomy, consent, and state or institutional influence over reproduction.

Understanding the genealogy of eugenics - its intellectual origins, its institutional machinery, its global diffusion, and its modern re-branding - is not a historical exercise alone. It provides essential context for evaluating contemporary public-health strategies, demographic anxieties, and emerging genetic technologies. This article situates the evolution of eugenic thought within a broad chronological and global framework, tracing how ideas about “improving,” limiting, or directing human reproduction have adapted to changing scientific paradigms, political environments, and technological capacities.

In a world facing both drastically declining births and rapid advances in reproductive and genetic bio-medicine, revisiting this complex legacy is crucial for understanding how societies - past and present - construct the boundaries of reproductive autonomy, define “fitness,” and legitimize interventions into the most intimate aspects of human life.

Male Castration

Castration, the removal of the testes via surgery, was from times immemorial the most common way to sterilize males. It involved risks of bleeding, infection, and permanent hormone irregularities for the patients who underwent it2 - but with rudimentary surgical knowledge, was for a long time the only way to sterilize humans.

Before the mid-nineteenth century, when anesthesia and antisepsis were introduced, any abdominal operation designed to sterilize a woman - such as ovariotomy (removal of the ovaries) or hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) - carried mortality rates so high that it was almost the equivalent of a death sentence. As surgical historians note, abdominal hysterectomy was “almost uniformly fatal” and ovariotomy “almost inevitably fatal,” and was therefore attempted only rarely by a few exceptional surgeons, usually in desperate emergencies rather than as a planned method of fertility control.3

Castration in History

In parts of West Africa, several kingdoms employed castration as a judicial sanction and also produced eunuchs for service within royal court structures.4 Although the practice may have originated as early as the sixth century before the common era, it became significantly more widespread during the medieval and early modern periods. Eunuchs formed an integral component of palace culture across both East and West Africa, in Muslim as well as animist polities.

Court eunuchs fulfilled a wide range of functions, most notably serving as gatekeepers, personal attendants to the ruler, guardians of royal harems, and supervisors of palace treasuries. In West Africa in particular, they frequently assumed military responsibilities as well. African eunuchs were also employed extensively in imperial courts beyond the African continent, especially in the Near East and South Asia. From the twelfth century onward, a corps composed largely of African eunuchs served as guardians of the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb in Medina and of the Kaʿba in Mecca.5

Within the broader Islamic world, including the Ottoman Empire, large numbers of enslaved African and other boys were castrated for service as eunuchs in courts and harems; a substantial proportion died during or soon after the procedure.

A parallel tradition existed in imperial China, where castration (gongxing) constituted one of the “Five Punishments” and could lead directly to service as a palace eunuch. Offenders subjected to this penalty had their genitals removed and were subsequently assigned to eunuch service within the imperial palace. Simultaneously, particularly during the Ming dynasty, castration also provided a pathway into palace employment for impoverished men who chose to self-castrate in hopes of securing a position when becoming a eunuch offered the sole avenue to relative privilege.6

Castration in Slave States

In several American colonies and slave states, slave codes prescribed castration as the statutory punishment for enslaved or Black men convicted of attempted rape of white women.7 Slave owners also at times resorted to castration extra-legally as a method of disciplining enslaved men they deemed unruly, with the aim of rendering them more compliant.

Legal historians note that castration functioned as a standard, codified penalty for enslaved men accused of sexual offences against white women. In effect, the deprivation of these men’s reproductive capacity became normalized within the legal culture of the United States.

Darwinism and Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance

Across the eighteenth century, the notion gained currency that criminal behavior was primarily hereditary.8

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection profoundly reshaped contemporary understandings of both the natural world and human society. In 1864, the sociologist Herbert Spencer appropriated arguments from the first edition of “On the Origin of Species” and applied them to pre-existing racist and hierarchical interpretations of social life. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which subsequently became one of the central tenets of social Darwinism after Darwin incorporated it into the 1869 fifth edition of “On the Origin of Species”.9 10 Social Darwinism emerged as a particularly influential framework in Britain, France, and the United States, where certain political and intellectual leaders promoted policies designed to allow the “fittest” to flourish while preventing the “masses” of the urban poor from doing so.11

Concurrently, in 1866, Johann Gregor Mendel demonstrated that specific traits - such as flower color - followed predictable patterns of inheritance based on the interaction of “dominant” and “recessive” factors.12 In subsequent decades, American eugenicists misapplied Mendelian principles to humans, asserting direct genetic causation for complex behavioral attributes such as intelligence and for purported hereditary predispositions to particular diseases. This interpretive framework came to be known as biological, or genetic, determinism.13

Notion of Hereditary Criminality and Imbecility

In a paper presented on February 11, 1879, to the Social Science Association of Indiana, Harriet M. Foster argued that “imbeciles” and the “feeble-minded” frequently inherited their condition. Foster stated that “intermarriage of consanguineous persons and the intemperance of one or both parents” were the most common causes of such mental impairments.14

Oscar C. McCulloch, a clergyman in Indianapolis, conducted a study of a group of families he labeled the “Tribe of Ishmael,” using records dating back to 1840. McCulloch claimed that his research demonstrated the hereditary transmission of “human degradation,” concluding that mental weakness, pauperism, licentiousness, and “poor morals” were hereditary in origin.15

Fallopian tubal litigation and Hysterectomy of Women

In 1880, Dr. Samuel Smith Lungren of Toledo, Ohio, performed what is generally regarded as the first modern fallopian tubal ligation.16 At this stage, the operation was undertaken on an individual, ostensibly therapeutic basis - primarily in life-threatening obstetric situations or in response to severe pelvic disease.17 Nonetheless, the demonstration that a woman’s fertility could be surgically terminated entered the medical repertoire and provided one of the technical preconditions for the later use of tubal ligation in eugenic and population-control programs. The so-called “Pomeroy technique,” a simple loop-and-resection method of tubal ligation associated with Ralph Hayward Pomeroy, was described in 1930 and over subsequent decades became the most commonly employed method of female surgical sterilization.18

Hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), which from antiquity through the nineteenth century had been a rare and extremely high-risk procedure, also came to be used widely in the early and mid-twentieth century as a de facto method of sterilization. Improvements in anesthesia, antisepsis, and abdominal surgery - building on the work of surgeons such as James Young Simpson and Thomas Spencer Wells in the nineteenth century, reduced operative mortality to a few per cent by the 1920s, after which hysterectomy was sometimes performed in a more radical fashion than strict medical necessity required.19

Birth of Eugenics as a movement

Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, coined the term “eugenics” from the Greek “eugenēs” (“well-born”) in his 1883 book “Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development”.20 Galton believed that the principles of mathematics and statistics could be applied to describe and predict the inheritance of specific traits - such as intelligence - from parents and even more distant relatives.

He advocated improving the human population through selective reproductive practices, beginning with what he called “positive eugenics,” the view that individuals of allegedly “superior” genetic stock should be encouraged to reproduce through financial and other incentives provided by the government.21

Neo-Malthusianism

Neo-Malthusianism, often described as a sibling movement to eugenics, emerged in Britain with the formation of the Malthusian League in London after Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were prosecuted in 1877 for publishing a pro-contraceptive pamphlet.22 In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus argued that population tended to increase more rapidly than the food supply and therefore advocated “moral restraint” rather than artificial contraceptive methods.23 The Dutch Neo-Malthusian League later established what is generally regarded as the world’s first birth-control clinic in Amsterdam, whose success influenced subsequent international birth-control activism.

Both neo-Malthusians and eugenicists expressed anxieties about what they regarded as excessive numbers of births among the poor and the “unfit.” Neo-Malthusians focused primarily on limiting overall population growth, whereas eugenicists emphasized the supposed hereditary “quality” of the population. Many proponents in both movements shared the objective of reducing reproduction among those they classified as poor or “unfit”.24

Indiana’s School for Feeble-Minded Youth

In 1887, the Indiana General Assembly approved a bill establishing the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth at Fort Wayne to serve as a state institution for “idiotic and feeble-minded” children. It created a sex-segregated institution for individuals labeled “feeble-minded,” the very population that would later become the primary target of sterilization laws. An act establishing a Board of State Charities was approved on February 28, 1889.

The Board’s first three secretaries helped to embed heredity as a central explanation for pauperism, crime, and mental deficiency in official state publications. During their tenures from 1889 to 1922, the Indiana Bulletin, published quarterly, regularly presented cases in which pauperism, criminality, and mental “defect” were attributed to hereditary causes.

Alexander Johnson, appointed the first secretary of the Board of State Charities in 1889, had been influenced by the work of Oscar McCulloch, who also assisted in Johnson’s appointment. In his memoirs, Johnson wrote: “Generation after generation, many of the families to which these defective people belonged had been paupers, in or out of the asylum; their total number and the proportion of feeble-minded among them steadily increasing as time went on.”25

In 1897, a law governing the care and control of orphaned, dependent, neglected, and abandoned children - granting the state and counties expanded authority to remove children from “unfit” homes and place them in institutions or with guardians - was adopted. Ernest Bicknell, Johnson’s successor, released an official report in 1896 lamenting the supposedly hereditary nature of pauperism. Amos Butler replaced Bicknell on January 1, 1898. Under Butler, the earliest known reference to sterilization as a means of preventing insanity and the reproduction of “defectives” appeared in an official state document.26

By this period, sterilization had begun to lose its earlier association with extreme punishment and was increasingly framed as a preventive measure aimed at the unborn offspring of individuals labeled “undesirable.”

Vasectomy as “a more humane solution”

The vasectomy was developed in France, the United States, Sweden, and England beginning in 1857,27 initially as an experimental treatment for prostatic disease, particularly prostatitis.

The idea of employing the procedure for the purpose of sterilization - especially of those labeled “degenerate individuals” - as a purportedly more humane alternative to castration, because it preserved sexual functioning, was advanced by the Chicago physician Albert Ochsner. He published this argument in a 1899 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, from which Harry Clay Sharp learned of the technique.28

Sharp’s Initiatives and Experiments

Sharp, a surgeon, began working in 1895 as a physician at the Indiana Reformatory in Pendleton, Indiana, a state institution that housed convicted criminals and individuals classified at the time as “mental patients.”

Sharp reported that many inmates exhibited sexual behaviors he described as dysfunctional. In his writings on sterilization, he emphasized what he termed excessive masturbation and “spermatorrhea” - the involuntary emission of semen without orgasm - among male inmates. He claimed that these men experienced distress over their compulsive masturbation, which, he asserted, distracted them from their studies and daily routines, and that they approached him, as the institution’s physician, seeking treatment. These accounts, however, derive almost entirely from Sharp himself and were not corroborated by the prisoners.29

With the support of W. H. Whittaker, the superintendent of the Indiana Reformatory, Sharp performed his first vasectomy on October 11, 1899, on a nineteen-year-old inmate whom he said suffered from excessive masturbation. Sharp’s assertion that vasectomies could be performed relatively safely and at low cost provided rhetorical support to eugenics advocates - among them the National Christian League for the Promotion of Purity - which was seeking to secure passage of the first sterilization law.30

Mandatory Sterilizations in Indiana

On May 8, 1901, Governor Winfield Taylor Durbin approved a law supported by the Board of Charities that made unsupervised “feeble-minded” women aged sixteen to forty-five wards of the state, with the stated aim of preventing them from bearing additional children.31

Beginning in 1901, Sharp urged the governor’s office to enact a compulsory sterilization statute. He gained the support of Dr. John N. Hurty, Secretary of the State Board of Health, and together they examined why earlier efforts to mandate sterilization had failed.

As part of a renewed attempt to restrict the reproduction of those labeled “feeble-minded,” Durbin’s successor, Governor J. Frank Hanly - a prominent temperance and anti-vice reformer - approved a marriage law on March 9, 1905, that prohibited the issuance of marriage licenses to “imbeciles,” epileptics, and persons judged to be of unsound mind.

By 1907, Sharp succeeded in convincing Governor Hanly to approve the first compulsory sterilization law in the United States.32 In the years that followed, a number of other states enacted similar laws, sometimes in consultation with Sharp.33 Women were also sterilized on the grounds that they were “feeble-minded” or “promiscuous.”34

Sharp left his position at the Indiana Reformatory at the end of 1908 to open a private hospital, after performing 450 vasectomies on inmates; another physician succeeded him.35 In 1913, an inmate at the Reformatory, Eddie Millard - imprisoned for larceny - filed a complaint with the governor’s office alleging that Sharp had forced him to undergo a vasectomy. The complaint had no effect, as compulsory sterilization was legal under Indiana’s 1907 statute.

In Indiana, 2,424 people were sterilized. There was near parity by sex: 1,167 males and 1,257 females.36 Similar laws were enacted not only in numerous U.S. states but also in Canada, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland.

In practice, a disproportionate number of eugenic sterilizations were performed in the U.S. on women, partly because pregnancy made alleged “defectiveness” more visible and because women were viewed as the primary conduit for future generations. By 1961, 61 percent of the 62,162 recorded eugenic sterilizations in the United States had been performed on women, and from the 1930s through the 1960s, far more institutionalized women than men were subjected to sterilization.37

Racial Hygiene in Germany

In 1904, the German biologist Alfred Ploetz founded the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (“Archive for Racial and Social Biology”), the first journal devoted primarily to racial hygiene and eugenics. The journal promoted concepts of Nordic and Aryan racial superiority.

From this initiative emerged the Society for Racial Hygiene, founded in Germany in 1905, which became one of the earliest organizations explicitly dedicated to eugenics. Other similar institutions, such as the Galton Institute in the United Kingdom, were established during the same period.38

Davenport & the American Breeders’ Association’s Committee on Eugenics

Charles Davenport - one of the leading early-twentieth-century American eugenicists who misapplied Mendelian principles to human heredity - was a Harvard-trained biologist who became a central figure in the U.S. eugenics movement. Davenport espoused openly racist views and argued that complex traits, such as intelligence, were determined by strict hereditary mechanisms.

In 1906, the American Breeders’ Association established a Committee on Eugenics, on which Davenport played a prominent role. The committee provided him with an institutional forum for promoting his eugenic program of selective and restrictive human breeding.39

Eugenics Record Office

In 1910, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the philanthropist Mary Williamson Harriman, and the cereal manufacturer John Harvey Kellogg, with the support of Charles Davenport, established the Eugenics Record Office, which was placed under the direction of Harry H. Laughlin.40 Laughlin soon became a prominent advocate of eugenics, lobbying for legislation to restrict immigration and to authorize the sterilization of those labeled “defective.” Although the Station for Experimental Evolution initially declared its purpose to be the study of Mendelian inheritance patterns and animal breeding, the Eugenics Record Office focused in practice on human heredity and eugenics.

The Eugenics Record Office distributed questionnaires to families, constructed pedigree charts, and trained fieldworkers who traveled across the country to compile data on traits such as “feeble-mindedness,” “criminality,” and “alcoholism.” The office amassed records on thousands of families and sought to educate the public about the purported value of eugenics. Its publication, Eugenical News, was distributed nationally to promote eugenics research on fertility and related subjects.

In 1913, the recently incorporated Rockefeller Foundation, founded by John D. Rockefeller, began contributing funds to support the Eugenics Record Office.

The Bureau of Social Hygiene

In the United States and abroad, Rockefeller also funded the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which investigated prostitution, crime, and “delinquency” and supported birth-control and sex-education initiatives.

Rockefeller conceived the idea for the Bureau of Social Hygiene after serving on a grand jury in 1910 that investigated “white slavery,” the period’s term for forced prostitution.41 Frustrated with short-term public commissions that could only issue recommendations, Rockefeller created a private institution that he believed could address what he regarded as the era’s most pressing social problems. These included prostitution, political corruption, drug use, and “juvenile delinquency.”42 As one contemporary comment of Rockefeller puts it, whereas temporary public commissions “faded away,” a private bureau could shape policy and public opinion over decades.43

In 1912, the Bureau established the Laboratory of Social Hygiene at the Bedford Hills Women’s Reformatory. The Laboratory operated from 1912 to 1918, conducting examinations of female inmates for venereal diseases and performing physiological and psychological assessments aimed at defining a putative physical profile of the “criminal type.” After three years, it added a hospital for “mentally delinquent women” and sought to identify “inherited dispositions” toward mental illness and temperaments thought to predispose individuals to crime or sexual “promiscuity.”44 By 1915, the Laboratory explicitly attempted to detect hereditary predispositions to mental illness and “delinquent” behavior, thereby linking social hygiene, criminology, and eugenic theories of heredity.

Under Katharine Bement Davis, who became General Secretary in 1917, the Bureau expanded its focus from policing vice to conducting systematic research on sexuality.45 Her lobbying produced a collaboration with the U.S. National Research Council: the Committee for Research in the Problems of Sex (CRPS), launched in 1921. The CRPS became a central institutional channel for early sex research and later helped support Alfred Kinsey’s work through Rockefeller funding.

The Committee also later provided funding to Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, founded in 1921, the organization that eventually became Planned Parenthood.

First International Eugenics Congress takes place

The First International Eugenics Congress, organized by the British Eugenics Education Society, was held in London in 1912. Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, presided over the event.46 About four hundred people attended, including Winston Churchill, Arthur Balfour, and Alexander Graham Bell.

Charles Davenport, the statistician Raymond Pearl, and the eugenicists Bleecker van Wagenen and Reginald Punnett were also present. Van Wagenen later presented a report to the Congress summarizing recent American sterilization laws and proposals to “sterilize the unfit.”

Kansas and the first “Fitter Family Contest”

Where there were individuals classified as “unfit,” there were also those designated the “fittest.” The Fitter Families for Future Firesides program - commonly known as the Fitter Family Contests - developed out of the earlier Better Baby Contests. These competitions began at the Kansas State Fair in 1908 and, under the sponsorship of the Eugenics Record Office, were soon replicated at state fairs across the country through the 1920s.

Participating families were required to submit detailed records of hereditary traits. Physicians at the events conducted physiological and psychological examinations of family members in order to assess their overall “eugenical worth.” Judges evaluated children aged six to forty-eight months on their physical appearance and supposed “mental capacity.” The winning families were almost invariably white.47

Global Expansion of Eugenics organizations

Developments in heredity theory, combined with the upheaval of World War I, contributed to a renewed interest in using eugenics as a tool for social improvement.

By the end of the war, eugenics organizations had been founded in Hungary, France, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, and Czechoslovakia. Although each reflected its own national context, these groups generally promoted racial ideologies that positioned white Anglo-Saxons as a “superior” race.48

In 1921, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress, presided over by Henry Fairfield Osborn, the Museum’s president. Among the speakers was Harry H. Laughlin, who argued that European immigrants were inferior and that their birthrates posed a threat to what eugenicists termed the Nordic race.49

American Eugenics Society

The American Eugenics Society was formed in 1926 out of a committee established after the Second International Eugenics Congress in New York. Its founders included Harry H. Laughlin, Madison Grant - author of “The Passing of the Great Race”, a work later admired by Adolf Hitler - Irving Fisher, and several other prominent eugenicists.

The Society succeeded the Eugenics Record Office in sponsoring the Fitter Family contests and, from 1939, in serving as the primary institutional base for Eugenical News. At its height, it had more than 1,200 members, including Margaret Sanger.50

American Birth Control League

Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League became a key conduit between early twentieth-century eugenic theory and the popular birth-control movement.51

Through conferences on “Medical and Eugenic Aspects of Birth Control,” eugenics-inflected works such as “The Pivot of Civilization”52 and “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,”53 and a board that included leading eugenicists, the League explicitly framed contraception as a tool for reducing births among those classified as “unfit.”

Kaiser Willem Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics

Eugenics was gaining momentum in Germany, supported in part by American institutions. In 1927, the Rockefeller Foundation provided funds for the construction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin. Its director, Eugen Fischer, collaborated with Charles Davenport in the management of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. On the occasion of the International Eugenics Congress held in Rome in 1929, they drafted a memorandum to Mussolini encouraging him to advance eugenic policies with “maximum speed.” In 1936, Harry Laughlin’s “contributions to race hygiene in Germany” were recognized with an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg.54

Between 1925 and 1935, the Rockefeller Foundation spent nearly three million dollars supporting German eugenicists and related institutes in psychiatry and “racial hygiene.”

Raymond Pearl’s Critique

In 1927, Raymond Pearl, one of the prominent American eugenicists, became an open critic of the movement, denouncing eugenics as having “largely become a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, full of emotional appeals to class and race prejudices, solemnly put forth as science, and unfortunately accepted as such by the general public.”55

Pearl argued that eugenicists were guilty of hasty generalizations and propagandistic tendencies and that they used statistics poorly in order to dress up social prejudices as biology.

He was not alone. Several prominent geneticists and biologists - many of them former supporters of eugenics - developed similar criticisms, including Herbert S. Jennings, Edwin G. Conklin, William Bateson, and Thomas Hunt Morgan.

Nazi Germany and Eugenics Public Discredit

German eugenics took a markedly different and far more violent direction after 1933. Prior to the First World War, Germany’s racial hygiene movement shared many assumptions with eugenics programs in Britain and the United States.56 After the war, however, the German eugenics community radicalized. The enormous loss of life on the front and the severe economic crises that followed intensified concerns about the nation’s biological and financial future.57 These circumstances sharpened distinctions between individuals regarded as hereditarily “valuable” and those labeled “unproductive.” Commentators argued that many of the supposedly “valuable” had perished in battle, while people deemed “unproductive” - often those institutionalized in hospitals, asylums, prisons, or welfare facilities - had survived. Such claims resurfaced repeatedly during the Weimar Republic and into the early years of National Socialism, where they were invoked to justify compulsory sterilization and reductions in social support for disabled or institutionalized populations.

By the time the Nazis came to power, racial hygiene had become a significant part of both professional discourse and popular thinking. These ideas strongly informed Adolf Hitler’s worldview and that of other leading Nazis, who fused eugenic concepts with racial antisemitism to create an ideological framework for radical social engineering. With this combination, the regime established the political and intellectual conditions necessary to enact increasingly coercive measures in the name of “hereditary health.”

Racial hygiene played a central role in shaping many of the regime’s racial policies. Physicians, geneticists, and other medical professionals were deeply involved in identifying and targeting individuals whom the state defined as “hereditarily ill” - a broad category encompassing a range of mental, physical, and social disabilities. The Nazi state portrayed these individuals as both a biological threat to the nation’s future and an economic burden on the welfare system.

This outlook culminated in direct intervention in the reproductive lives of those so classified. One of the regime’s earliest actions in this area was the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which mandated compulsory sterilization for people diagnosed with a range of disorders, including schizophrenia and so-called “hereditary feeble-mindedness.” Under this law, roughly 400,000 individuals were sterilized. The state expanded these policies with the 1935 Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People, a marriage law that barred individuals deemed to possess “inferior” or “dangerous” hereditary traits from marrying partners considered genetically “healthy.” Together, these measures formed the core of the regime’s early eugenic program.58

Loss of Public Favor & Funding

Throughout the 1930s, eugenics continued to decline in credibility among both the public and the scientific community. Americans increasingly learned how scientists and officials in Nazi Germany promoted and implemented coercive eugenic policies - particularly the compulsory sterilization of individuals classified as “hereditarily ill” - and that some of these measures had been influenced by earlier sterilization laws in several U.S. states.

Concern about the scientific foundations of the movement also grew. In 1935, the Carnegie Institution convened a committee to evaluate the validity of eugenics research. Four years later, in 1939, Vannevar Bush, then president of the Carnegie Institution, terminated funding for the Eugenics Record Office, which subsequently closed.59 60

Japan’s Sterilization Programs

Japan, one of Germany’s allies, developed its own eugenic programs and research initiatives.

As early as 1915, the Japanese government created a leprosy (Hansen’s disease) control system based on segregation and reproductive regulation. Patients were rounded up and placed in leprosy sanatoria, where they were subjected to long-term isolation. Beginning around 1915, patients in these institutions were sterilized, and women were compelled to undergo abortions, practices justified by the erroneous belief that susceptibility to leprosy was hereditary.61

In 1940, the Konoe government enacted the National Eugenic Law (Kokumin Yūsei Hō), following the rejection of an even more severe draft known as the Race Eugenic Protection Law. The law also applied to colonial Taiwan and colonial Korea, including facilities such as the Sorokdo leper colony. Survivors from Sorokdo recall that, as in Japanese mainland sanatoria, patients were subjected to forced sterilization under colonial administrators.62

The National Eugenic Law formally limited compulsory sterilization to individuals diagnosed with “inherited mental disease,” encouraged genetic screening, and restricted access to birth control in order to promote reproduction among those considered “fit.” Historian Matsubara Yōko estimates that 454 people were sterilized under this law between 1940 and 1945.

Following Japan’s defeat, the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948 authorized “eugenic operations” and abortions to prevent the birth of “inferior offspring.” Between 1948 and 1996, approximately 25,000 people were sterilized, including roughly 16,500 who underwent the procedure without consent. Many were disabled or institutionalized individuals, as well as leprosy patients.63

Czechoslovakia’s Sterilization of Roma women

After the Second World War, almost the entire pre-war Roma and Sinti population of the Czech lands had been murdered; most Roma living there after 1945 were new arrivals, especially from Slovakia. Communist policy treated Roma not as a national minority, but as a “socially backward” segment of the population to be assimilated. The 1958 Act on the permanent settlement of nomadic persons forced the remaining nomadic Roma, particularly Vlach Roma, to settle; nomadism was banned, Roma cultural institutions were discouraged, and state policy increasingly aimed at demolishing Roma settlements and dispersing their inhabitants.64

During the post-1968 “Normalization” period, Roma were increasingly framed as a social problem, marked by allegedly high fertility, to be addressed through social engineering rather than recognized as an ethnic group with collective rights.65 From the 1970s to the late 1980s, Communist Czechoslovakia implemented a de facto sterilization policy aimed at reducing Roma birth rates. On the basis of a 1972 health ministry sterilization directive and later implementing measures, social workers and doctors systematically targeted Romani women with financial incentives, welfare pressure and, in many cases, operations performed without full, informed consent.66 Although Roma formed only a small proportion of the overall population, Romani women came to constitute a disproportionately large share of all women sterilized, making the program one of the clearest examples of racialized population control in late socialist Eastern Europe.67

Re-branding as “Neo-Malthusians”

Eugenics did not disappear when the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and its allies were exposed. Instead, it adapted. Many eugenicists re-branded their ideas within the more publicly acceptable framework of neo-Malthusianism, which argued that population growth had to be controlled to prevent mass starvation and social collapse.

This re-branding occurred by abandoning the term “eugenics” and relabeling their work as population and family planning, social biology, or human genetics. The underlying concerns remained the same - questions about who should have children and how many, and anxieties over “quality” versus “quantity” - but these were re-framed as issues of economic development, environmental sustainability, or public health rather than racial science.

Fairfield Osborn’s “Our Plundered Planet”,68 and William Vogt’s “Road to Survival”69 helped launch a renewed environmental neo-Malthusian movement: in this revival, overpopulation was presented as a threat to natural resources and ecosystems, not only to wages or living standards.

“United” Nations & Population Council

The United Nations was formally established on 24 October 1945, when the UN Charter entered into force following ratification by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the other signatories.70

In the early post-war years, a Population Division was created within the UN Secretariat (then located in the Department of Social Affairs, now part of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs) to collect demographic data and analyse “population problems.” It began producing global population estimates and, in 1951, issued the first set of what would become the World Population Prospects series.71

In parallel, the Population Council was incorporated in New York on 7 November 1952 by John D. Rockefeller III, following a 1952 Williamsburg conference on the “population problem.”72 From the outset, Rockefeller and other founders framed rapid population growth in the “underdeveloped” or newly decolonized world as a potential threat to economic progress and political stability - a classic neo-Malthusian concern.

The Council’s mission was to address the perceived dangers of overpopulation in “underdeveloped countries” by promoting smaller families through contraception and related measures. It quickly became one of the most influential private actors behind the global population-control agenda of the 1950s-1970s and played a substantial role in shaping UN and governmental population programs, especially in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Frederick Osborn, an early leading figure in the Population Council (and cousin of conservationist Fairfield Osborn), argued that “eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.”73 He characterized birth control and abortion as “great eugenic advances,” but insisted that they should be defended in terms of health, freedom and development rather than under an explicit eugenics label.

In 1953, the UN published The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, a major report that analysed the relationships between demographic change and economic development.74 While cautious in tone, it treated rapid population growth - particularly in poorer countries - as a potential constraint on development and suggested that governments might consider fertility-reduction policies among the instruments of economic planning.

Through the early 1960s, the Population Division expanded its collection of demographic data and projections, which became the standard reference for global population debates. UN reports and conferences increasingly cast high population growth in newly decolonized countries as a development challenge, reinforcing a neo-Malthusian view that “overpopulation” hindered progress. In response to growing concern about demographic change and the spread of new family-planning technologies, the UN created, in 1967, the United Nations Trust Fund for Population Activities. This trust fund was soon upgraded into the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, later renamed the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which became the central UN agency for population and reproductive-health programs.75

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

Established in 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the leading U.S. foreign-policy think tank, and its journal Foreign Affairs serves as a primary forum for elite policy debate.76

From the 1960s onward, Foreign Affairs and CFR circles increasingly discussed the “population explosion” as a strategic issue, alongside decolonization and Cold War geopolitics.77 Many key actors in the population-control movement were CFR members or closely tied to its networks, including Henry Kissinger, John D. Rockefeller III, and McGeorge Bundy, who later became president of the Ford Foundation.78

Historical reconstructions of U.S. population policy during the 1960s and 1970s show that elite advisory communities - such as the CFR, major foundations, and leading demographers - advanced the view that the United States required a global population policy as part of its foreign-policy and development-aid strategies.79

The influential National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200, 1974 - the “Kissinger Report”80), which remains official U.S. policy,81 argued that rapid population growth in selected “less developed countries” endangered U.S. security and access to strategic resources. It called for comprehensive family-planning programs in those countries. The document reflects the neo-Malthusian consensus prevalent in CFR-adjacent elite networks: population growth abroad was seen as generating political instability and resource competition, which in turn required management through contraception, incentives, and occasionally coercive measures funded through development assistance.

Limits to Growth & Club of Rome

The 1960s saw the rise of a modern “overpopulation panic,” brought to a wide public audience by Stanford’s Paul & Anne Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (196882) and, a few years later, by “The Limits to Growth” (197283), the Club of Rome’s commissioned report authored by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and colleagues. Both works were explicitly neo-Malthusian: they largely abandoned earlier hereditarian language but continued to frame rapid population growth as a primary driver of resource depletion and ecological crisis.

The Club of Rome, founded in 1968 as an international association of industrialists, scientists, and public officials concerned with “the predicament of mankind,” commissioned The Limits to Growth to model long-term interactions between population, industrial output, food production, pollution, and non-renewable resources. The report argued that the earth’s “interlocking resources” could not sustain prevailing rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, and recommended stabilizing both population and industrial output at “sustainable” levels.

These analyses fed into and resonated with early United Nations debates on environment and population in the 1970s, including the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest,84 and reinforced a broader “overpopulation” discourse in policy circles of the Global North. In this climate, they were often cited - or at least echoed - as part of the rationale for increasingly assertive fertility-reduction programs in parts of the Global South.85

The combination of neo-Malthusian resource-limit thinking promoted by the Club of Rome and the security-and-development framing advanced in elite forums such as the Council on Foreign Relations gave post-war population-control agendas - including, in some countries, coercive sterilization campaigns - a sense of urgency and intellectual legitimacy, even as concrete interventions were implemented by states, aid agencies, and organisations such as UNFPA, USAID, the World Bank, and the Population Council.

Mass Sterilization of Native American Women in the United States

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the United States witnessed a largely hidden but widespread pattern of involuntary sterilization of Native American women, carried out primarily through the federally administered Indian Health Service (IHS).86 This phenomenon emerged at the intersection of long-standing colonial medical paternalism, mid-century eugenic legacies, and the neo-Malthusian population-control climate that intensified across U.S. policy and philanthropic networks during the same period. Although the United States publicly distanced itself from explicit eugenics after the Second World War, the sterilization of Indigenous women demonstrates that coercive reproductive governance persisted within federal institutions well into the late twentieth century.87

Contemporary investigations, congressional hearings, and survivor testimonies indicate that thousands of Native American women - disproportionately young, economically disadvantaged, and often already mothers of several children - were sterilized through coercion, misinformation, or the complete absence of consent. Estimates vary, but several studies conclude that between 25 and 50 percent of Native American women of childbearing age were sterilized in certain IHS service regions between the late 1960s and early 1980s, with some estimates suggesting as many as 70,000 women.88 89

The mechanisms of coercion varied. Women frequently reported that consent forms were presented only in English, often during labor, under sedation, or immediately after childbirth, when meaningful comprehension was impossible. Others were told that sterilization was reversible, that their existing number of children jeopardized their access to welfare benefits, or that refusal could compromise future medical care. Some procedures were performed during unrelated surgeries, such as appendectomies or cesarean sections, without any prior discussion. Testimony collected in subsequent inquiries shows that many did not learn they had been sterilized until years later, after unsuccessfully attempting to conceive again.90

India’s state of Emergency

During the national Emergency of 1975-77, the government under Indira Gandhi, with her son Sanjay Gandhi playing a leading role, used police, local officials, and stringent numerical quotas to promote mass sterilization, overwhelmingly of poor men.91 Over the Emergency period, more than ten million people were sterilized; more than eight million procedures were carried out in 1976-77 alone, many within just a few months, and contemporary inquiries together with later research leave little doubt that a large share were performed under explicit coercion or threat.92

After the Emergency, the state publicly renounced compulsion but quietly shifted to a predominantly female-centered program of tubal ligation, implemented through target-driven sterilization camps and postpartum procedures in public hospitals. By the 2000s, female sterilization accounted for roughly three-quarters of contraceptive use. Documentation by Indian activists, Human Rights Watch, and others shows that many women - often young, poor, and recently postpartum - underwent sterilizations in unsafe camp conditions, with minimal counselling and no meaningful informed consent, resulting in hundreds of deaths as well as long-term complications.

Public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, including “Ramakant Rai v. Union of India”93 and “Devika Biswas v. Union of India”,94 and subsequent government reports formally acknowledged these abuses and ordered an end to mass sterilization camps. Nevertheless, recent studies and court cases indicate that coercive or non-consensual female sterilization remains a recurring feature of India’s family-planning system.95

Gursaran Talwar’s Research

In India, fertility-control research has not been limited to surgical methods.

Gursaran Talwar is an Indian-born immunologist. He was educated at the University of the Punjab, where he received his B.Sc. and M.Sc., and subsequently trained at the Pasteur Institute in Paris under a scholarship program.96 After returning to India, he founded the National Institute of Immunology (NII) in New Delhi, where he became known for his work in immunology and the development of “immunocontraception.”97

From 1972 to 1991, Talwar directed the ICMR-WHO Research and Training Centre in Immunology for India and Southeast Asia, an officially designated WHO-ICMR collaborative center. In 1972, he began developing the idea of creating an immunological method of birth control by designing a vaccine targeting human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), the hormone produced by the early embryo that is essential for implantation and the maintenance of pregnancy. Because hCG is a highly specific marker of early pregnancy and is indispensable for embryo implantation, Talwar reasoned that a vaccine inducing antibodies that neutralized hCG could block implantation and thereby prevent pregnancy.98

In a neo-Malthusian framework, this approach had appeal as a technocratic method to reduce fertility in high-growth populations - a strategy that appeared less politically volatile than mass sterilization campaigns while serving similar policy goals.99

Beginning in 1977, Talwar’s research received support from multiple international organisations, including the Population Council (via its International Committee on Contraception Research), the Ford Foundation, Canada’s International Development Research Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the WHO through its Task Force on Vaccines for Fertility Regulation.100 101 A contemporaneous Institute of Medicine report notes that the Population Council’s contraceptive research - immunocontraception included - was funded by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon foundations, as well as by USAID and the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).102

In 1985, Talwar completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the U.S. National Institutes of Health under a Fogarty International Center program.103

After several unsuccessful early attempts,104 feasibility studies for an hCG-based contraceptive vaccine were completed and published in 1997 in the American Journal of Reproductive Immunology under the title “The HSD-hCG Vaccine Prevents Pregnancy in Women.”105 Talwar subsequently pursued Phase I clinical trials in India, Finland, Sweden, Chile, and Brazil.106

China-wide one-child policy

From the launch of the one-child policy in 1979 until its relaxation in 2015, China’s birth planning system relied heavily on sterilization. Demographic studies show that by the mid-1980s, intrauterine devices (IUDs) and sterilization accounted for around 80-85 percent of all contraceptive use, and by 1985 more than half of couples using contraception relied on sterilization.107 108

In 1983 alone, during a national “birth planning year,” approximately 16 million women and more than 4 million men were sterilized, alongside tens of millions of IUD insertions and induced abortions; by the end of that year, sterilization accounted for roughly half of all contraceptive practice in the country.109

Over the longer period 1980-2014, official figures indicate that about 108 million people were sterilized and 324 million women were fitted with IUDs.110

Although the 2001 Population and Family Planning Law formally prohibited compulsory abortion and sterilization, provincial regulations and local implementation continued to promote the principle of “IUD after first birth, sterilization after second birth,” often tying officials’ performance evaluations to the number of procedures carried out.111

Human rights organisations and UN bodies have repeatedly documented cases in which women - especially in rural areas - underwent sterilization under intense pressure, threats of fines or job loss, or outright coercion, making sterilization a central instrument of the one-child policy rather than a fully voluntary choice.

Late 1990s-2010s Namibia Sterilization of HIV Patients

From the late 1990s through at least the early 2010s, public hospitals in Namibia subjected a significant number of women living with HIV to sterilization without their informed consent. Most of these procedures were bilateral tubal ligations performed during caesarean sections in state facilities, with “consent” obtained through English-language forms presented to women in labor or under threats that they would be denied surgery or other essential treatment if they refused to sign.112

Community-based research conducted in 2008 among 230 women living with HIV documented more than forty cases of forced or coerced sterilization, and a 2010-2012 Harvard-Namibia Women’s Health Network study concluded that such practices were widespread and ongoing.113

In the landmark LM & Others v Government of Namibia case, the High Court in 2012 - and the Supreme Court in 2014 - held that three women had been sterilized without informed consent, affirming their rights to dignity, bodily integrity, and family life, although both courts declined to find explicit discrimination on the basis of HIV status.114

These litigated cases - representing only a small documented fraction of what evidence suggests was a broader, systemic pattern - exposed how poor HIV-positive women were implicitly treated as unfit to reproduce. They remain a key African example of how post-apartheid health systems can reproduce eugenic logic under the guise of clinical judgement and public-health management.

South Africa - “You HIV people must be closed up”

Since the late 1990s, poor Black South African women living with HIV have reported being sterilized in public hospitals without their informed consent. The procedures were typically bilateral tubal ligations performed during cesarean sections or shortly after delivery.115

Women reported being presented with consent forms while in labor, in severe pain, or already on the operating table, often in languages they did not fully understand.116 Many stated that they were told they would not receive the operation, antiretroviral therapy, or future care unless they signed. Others discovered that they had been sterilized only years later, when they tried to conceive again. South Africa has comparatively progressive legal protections: the 1996 Constitution and the 1998 Sterilization Act require informed consent and prohibit non-voluntary procedures.

In practice, however, implementation has been inconsistent, particularly in under-resourced public hospitals. A study conducted for Her Rights Initiative (HRI) documented dozens of such cases; 18 of the 22 women interviewed reported being coerced into signing consent forms. The 2015 South Africa HIV Stigma Index found that approximately 7.6 percent of HIV-positive women surveyed - about 500 respondents - reported having been forcibly sterilized.117

These complaints prompted the Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) to open a formal investigation, whose findings were released publicly in February 2020. The CGE’s report confirmed that women living with HIV in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal had been subjected to forced or coerced sterilization in public hospitals and concluded that signatures obtained under these circumstances did not amount to informed consent, given the timing, pressure, and misinformation involved. Testimonies included statements from staff such as: “You HIV people do not ask questions when you make babies. Why are you asking questions now? You must be closed up because you HIV people like making babies and it annoys us. Just sign the forms so you can go to theatre.”

The CGE found that these practices violated rights to equality, dignity, bodily integrity, and freedom from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. UNAIDS and the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) publicly acknowledged the findings and called for redress and systemic reform. HRI and allied organizations are advocating amendments to the Sterilisation Act and stronger safeguards, including cooling-off periods, improved consent procedures, and monitoring mechanisms. In 2025, Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Health heard evidence that such practices have persisted for more than two decades and that most affected women have yet to receive compensation.118 A 2024 University of South Africa (UNISA) study likewise describes forced and coerced sterilization of HIV-positive women since at least 1997 as a systemic violation of reproductive rights.119

Chile’s Sterilizations of HIV Patients

In Chile, cases of forced and coerced sterilization have been documented among women living with HIV, particularly in public hospitals.120 The emblematic case is “Francisca” (F.S.), a rural woman who in 2002 gave birth to an HIV-negative baby by cesarean section (C-section) in a public hospital.121

Without telling her or asking for consent, the surgeon performed a tubal ligation during the operation, deciding that an HIV-positive woman should not have more children. Chilean law already required prior written informed consent for sterilization; Francisca signed nothing of the sort.

Her experience was not unique. In 2010, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Chilean NGO Vivo Positivo published Dignity Denied, based on interviews with 27 HIV-positive women in five regions. The report found that sterilization without knowledge or consent, or under pressure, occurred often enough and across the country to be considered systematic, even if not mandated by written policy.

Women recounted being discouraged from pregnancy, misinformed about transmission risks, and in some cases sterilized during C-sections or other procedures without being told. In 2009, Francisca’s case was taken to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) as F.S. v. Chile, alleging violations of her rights to non-discrimination, bodily integrity, and family life.

After more than a decade, Chile reached a friendly settlement before the IACHR in August 2021, accepting international responsibility and promising reforms.122 On 26 May 2022, President Gabriel Boric issued a public apology to Francisca, acknowledging that her involuntary sterilization was a serious human rights violation and committing to guarantee reproductive autonomy for women living with HIV.

2000s-2010s Canada - ongoing Indigenous cases

Alberta and British Columbia repealed their formal Sexual Sterilization Acts in the early 1970s, but Indigenous women remained over-represented among those sterilized up to repeal.123

Modern testimonies and reviews show that, after the 1970s repeal, sterilizations did not stop; they reappeared as “routine” tubal ligations in public hospitals, often framed as normal postpartum care but carried out without free, informed consent - especially in the case of Indigenous women.124

The situation came to light in 2015, when several Indigenous women publicly alleged that they had been pressured or harassed into tubal ligations immediately after childbirth at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon.

Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) responded with an internal policy review and then commissioned an external review by Métis scholars Yvonne Boyer and Judith Bartlett, focusing specifically on postpartum tubal ligations of Aboriginal women.

The Boyer-Bartlett report (2017) documented what was happening in the 2000s and early 2010s.125 The review was based on in-depth interviews with Indigenous women who had undergone tubal ligation after giving birth in Saskatoon hospitals, together with interviews with health-care providers and child-welfare officials.

Women consistently described being approached while in labor or immediately postpartum, often in severe pain, exhausted, or medicated; asked to sign forms, sometimes with little explanation; and told or strongly led to believe that they “had to” agree because of their life circumstances (poverty, addiction, number of children) or because Child and Family Services might apprehend their baby. Many did not understand that tubal ligation is permanent; they believed it was a reversible form of birth control.

The women depicted overarching themes of feeling invisible, profiled, and powerless; experiencing coercion; and suffering long-term impacts on self-image, relationships, and trust in the health-care system.

Testimonies of forced sterilizations appear as late as 2010.126 SHR’s own data, included in an appendix to the Boyer-Bartlett report, track inpatient postpartum tubal ligations at Royal University Hospital from 2010 to 2016 and show non-trivial numbers. Although the report does not provide a full ethnicity breakdown, the external review exists precisely because Indigenous women stated that their procedures in those years were not freely chosen.

Reports of abuses similar to those in Saskatoon are found across Canada.127 Federal briefing notes acknowledge at least six court cases (several of them class actions) alleging sterilization without proper consent from 1948 to the present, with Canada a defendant in most of them.128

China - Xinjiang (Uyghurs & other Muslim minorities)

Since the late 2010s, Xinjiang has shifted from relaxing birth limits - consistent with national trends - to adopting almost the opposite approach toward Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. The region has implemented highly restrictive and often coercive birth-control measures, including IUD insertions, sterilizations, and “birth-violation” penalties, while the rest of China has moved into a pro-natalist phase.129

Prior to 2017, ethnic minorities in Xinjiang were permitted one more child than Han couples, often two or three children compared with one for urban Han households. In 2017, however, Xinjiang amended its regional regulations to “equalize” birth limits across ethnic groups and significantly strengthened enforcement.

Under the “Strike Hard” and “de-extremification” campaigns, authorities began to treat “having too many children” as a potential indicator of religious extremism or political disloyalty.130 A 2017 regional directive on reducing fertility rates set explicit targets for lowering birth rates by at least 4 per 1,000 compared with 2016, especially in predominantly Uyghur southern prefectures.131

During this period, Beijing was relaxing family-planning rules nationwide - the two-child policy was announced in 2015 and implemented in 2016, and the three-child policy was introduced in 2021132 - but Xinjiang adopted a markedly different trajectory for minorities, in effect a regional “reverse policy.”

Research by Adrian Zenz, ASPI, and others reconstructs this policy shift using Chinese government tenders, budgets, and statistical releases.133 Government documents show substantial increases in funding for “family-planning surgeries” and targeted birth-control campaigns in southern Xinjiang from about 2016 onward. By 2018, approximately 80 percent of all net IUD placements in China (insertions minus removals) occurred in Xinjiang, which has less than 2 percent of China’s population.

County-level documents describe free IUD insertions, tubal ligations, and other “birth-control surgeries” as priority tasks in rural Uyghur villages, often with quotas for women to be “rectified.”

Testimony from former detainees and local residents - corroborated where possible with official documents - reports forced IUD insertions prior to transfer to detention centers; coerced sterilizations presented as the only alternative to punishment; and unknown injections or pills given to women in custody that halted menstruation for prolonged periods.134

As a result, violations of family-planning policy became tied directly to the security and “stability maintenance” system. Local regulations list interference with or violation of family-planning policy implementation as a potential indicator of extremism, and county-level plans indicate that such violations may lead to referral to “vocational skills education and training centers” (VETCs). Some county plans instruct Uyghur villages to “eliminate illegal births” and raise IUD or sterilization coverage to near-universal levels among women of childbearing age with existing children.

Using official Chinese statistics, researchers have found that Xinjiang’s overall birth rate fell from 15.88 per 1,000 in 2017 to 8.14 per 1,000 in 2019 - a nearly 50 percent decline within two years, far steeper than national trends. In minority-dominated southern prefectures such as Hotan and Kashgar, the decline was even sharper: in Hotan, the birth rate fell from 20.94 per 1,000 in 2016 to 8.58 per 1,000 in 2018.

ASPI’s Family De-planning report estimates that, under current policy trajectories, between 2.6 and 4.5 million fewer births among Uyghurs and other indigenous minorities may occur between 2017 and 2040 than would otherwise be expected.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in its 2022 report on Xinjiang, notes an “unusually sharp rise in sterilizations and IUD placements” compared with national trends, as well as a “steep decline in birth rates” in minority regions after 2017. The report concludes that these figures, in combination with credible testimonies of forced IUD insertions and sterilizations, indicate that coercive birth-control measures have been used against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.

The Chinese government strongly denies any coercion or targeted birth suppression. A 2021 white paper states that the Uyghur population grew from 10.17 million to 12.72 million between 2010 and 2018 and claims that minority populations grew faster than the Han population in Xinjiang.135 Official commentaries accuse researchers such as Zenz of “data abuse” and maintain that all family-planning measures are voluntary and aimed at balanced development.136

Critics respond that these cumulative figures end in 2018 - precisely when annual minority birth rates begin collapsing; that total population can continue to grow for a time even as annual births fall sharply due to cohort momentum; and that the central issue is not whether growth stops entirely, but whether birth rates are being deliberately and disproportionately suppressed among a protected group while the rest of China transitions toward pro-natalist policies.

Alleged use of Talwar’s “Vaccine against fertility” in Kenya

Kenya, like many African countries, conducted forced sterilizations of HIV patients.137 But the country’s recent history also exposed a concerning alarm of possible covert use of Talwar’s anti-fertility vaccine.

In 1995, a neonatal tetanus eradication campaign was planned in Kenya, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO), and targeting women aged 15 to 49 years - women of childbearing age. Dr. Stephen Karanja, an obstetrician, stated that “we were already giving tetanus injections to all pregnant women attending antenatal clinics to prevent neonatal tetanus. That was already part of the program in the country.” He added that the WHO insisted that vaccination should also be given “outside pregnancy.”

Aware of similar tetanus vaccine campaigns and concerned about possible risks to fertility, Dr. Karanja petitioned the Catholic Church, which runs a large network of health facilities in Kenya, to test the vaccine for β-hCG. Before testing could begin, however, the WHO withdrew the program. The campaign only received formal government backing in 2013, eighteen years later.

In 2014, Kenya’s Ministry of Health, together with WHO and UNICEF, launched a maternal and neonatal tetanus immunization campaign targeting girls and women of reproductive age (approximately 15-49), involving a series of five doses administered over time.138 The Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) and the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association alleged that the government and WHO/UNICEF were covertly conducting a mass sterilization campaign by “lacing” the tetanus vaccine with β-hCG, the hormone used in experimental contraceptive vaccines.139 140 They stated that, in March 2014, three independent Nairobi-accredited laboratories detected β-hCG in vaccine samples,141 and that in October 2014 six further vials were tested in six laboratories, with β-hCG reportedly found in half of them.142 143

Dr. Muhame Ngare, then spokesman for the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, argued that the campaign represented a “well-coordinated population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility-regulating vaccine.” He further contended that the vaccination schedule - five doses spaced six months apart - was unexpected for tetanus control.144

On 12 November 2014, WHO and UNICEF issued a joint statement strongly denying the allegations. They asserted that the vaccines used were standard tetanus toxoid from WHO-pre-qualified manufacturers, tested under established global safety systems, and that no evidence supported the bishops’ claims. Kenyan authorities and WHO stated that their independent laboratory tests found no β-hCG, and that some of the vials provided by the Church were not from intact or verifiable cold-chain storage, raising questions about contamination.145

Following the public dispute, Parliament’s Health Committee requested joint testing of the vaccine, to be carried out by a team composed of Ministry of Health officials, Church representatives, academic experts, and AgriQ Quest Ltd., a Nairobi laboratory accredited by the Kenya National Accreditation Service. Both the Ministry and the Church agreed that AgriQ Quest should perform the laboratory analysis.146

Two categories of samples were tested. First were Church-supplied “field samples,” including some vials previously tested by smaller Nairobi laboratories. According to later accounts, including the 2017 article by Oller et al. and statements by opposition leader Raila Odinga and by the Catholic Health Commission, AgriQ Quest again detected β-hCG in several of these field samples. Second were vials supplied by the Ministry of Health from official government stores: approximately 50-52 vials, reported to be from the same batch numbers used in the campaign. AgriQ Quest’s tests on these samples did not detect β-hCG.

In 2017, a group including members of the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association and several U.S. co-authors published an article titled “HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World,” claiming that ELISA testing showed β-hCG in some vials. The publication was targeted by substantial criticism.147 148

During the 2013-2015 period, Dr. Nicholas Muraguri served as Director of Medical Services and later as Principal Secretary for Health, acting as the Ministry’s spokesperson on vaccination and other health matters.149 According to later allegations, Dr. Muraguri asked AgriQ Quest to alter its results to state that the vaccines were safe for use. After the laboratory declined to modify its findings, WHO and the Ministry publicly rejected the Church’s claims and asserted that the vaccines were “absolutely safe” and free of β-hCG.

Government officials later argued that the Church’s samples may have been contaminated, while the Church argued that the hCG detected was in a chemically bonded form consistent with formulations used in research on fertility-regulating vaccines, and therefore could not have been introduced during handling.

In a documentary by Andrew Wakefield,150 unfortunately easy to criticize, due to its sensationalism and factual errors, by equally inaccurate “facts checks”,151 Frederick Muthuri further testified that the vials communicated by the government had been voluntarily mis-labeled - by hiding the original manufacturer information and batch numbers, to make them fit the batches collected by the church. Below is a five minutes excerpt of the documentary - focused on the essential witnesses testimonies for brevity.

The laboratory later threatened to sue the Kenyan government - and its official accreditation to carry such testings was withdrawn.152

Dr. Muraguri later became linked to a series of major procurement and governance controversies at the Ministry of Health, including the “Afya House” audit, the Managed Equipment Services (MES) leasing scheme, and the mobile-clinic procurement. Although he has not been convicted in court, parliamentary committees, journalists, auditors, and civil-society organizations have criticized his role, alleging obstruction of investigations, failure to provide key documents, and threats against reporters.153

An internal audit in 2016 flagged 5 billion Kenyan shillings in questionable expenditures. A Senate committee later described aspects of the MES project as a “criminal enterprise” and recommended investigations by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.

Conclusion

Across more than two millennia, efforts to control human reproduction have evolved from crude punitive practices to bureaucratic programs clothed in the language of science, development, and global governance. This historical survey has traced that evolution: from the physical mutilation of enslaved people, prisoners, and outcasts; through the rise of hereditarian science and state eugenics; into the internationalization of population control; and finally into the diverse modern forms of coercive or non-consensual sterilization that recur across continents.

Despite their differences in method, ideology, and institutional setting, these interventions are unified by a single underlying impulse: the belief that authorities - political, medical, or technocratic - can and should decide who is “fit” to reproduce.

While differing in intensity and intent, all share two consistent features:
the power asymmetry between those who decide and those subjected to the intervention, and the erosion of informed consent, often disguised as public health, welfare, or modernization.

The development of hCG-based fertility-regulating vaccines in the late twentieth century, for instance, illustrates how scientific innovation can align with longstanding neo-Malthusian goals. The global roll-out of genetic-therapy-based vaccines during the COVID-19 crisis similarly renewed the questions about trust, transparency, oversight, and the balance of power between pharmaceutical actors, governments, and the public. Although the scientific aims differ from past eugenics programs, the political conditions of authority - centralized expertise, emergency policy, and technological opacity - appears very close from the historical precedents we inventoried.

A society that does not understand the history of reproductive regulation is ill-equipped to evaluate the major ethical implications of modern bio-technologies.

81

Malone News

Population Control and Official USG Policy

Personally, I have been reluctant to wander down the rabbit hole relating to various “depopulation agenda” theories involving the COVIDcrisis. However, the odd concordance between a possible population reduction objective and the dysfunctional “public health” policies is obvious to all open minded thinkers. These policies include that the biologically…

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3 years ago · 686 likes · 160 comments · Dr. Robert W. Malone

It isn’t just an insult to our intelligence in a climate where antisemitism - like other divisive hatreds - is grossly and algorithmically encouraged by our benevolent eugenicists and globalist tech overlords; it is also completely baseless once you scratch the surface.

One thing about the “evil Jews control the world” crowd we meet online is that they never, ever verify a primary source. For them, the British or German royal families, the Rockefellers or Carnegies, the BIS or CCP, the alliance of secret services, banking interests, and Saudi fortunes are all negligible forces behind the trends we observe. In their worldview, it’s all the Rothschilds, or, eventually, Chabad-Lubavitch. And these are, in their eyes, also particularly respectful of the fate of their fellow co-religionists.

The following article addresses a few key reasons that allow us to say that Israel - made, in the words of Albert Bourla,1 the “world laboratory” by the will of one of the most corrupt heads of state alive, Benjamin Netanyahu - suffered a fate equally as sinister as that of most other countries with COVID-19 vaccination.

The roll-out in Israel has left a trail of devastation and injuries. In September 2021, one of the first documentaries to testify to these injuries was released, directed by Avital Livny.2

This trail of deaths, miscarriages, and injuries has - at least for a very under-reported fraction - found its way into VAERS. The batch references in VAERS’s foreign data make it clear that the lots distributed there were for the most part the same as in other countries.3

Of the 2,061 reports originating from Israel and submitted to VAERS, 1,613 concern the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. 1,056 of these reports have no lot information, and another 44 are labeled “Unknown”, which leaves us with 513 reports containing usable lot information.

The following table shows, for countries other than the US, where the 10 most common lots among adverse events reported in Israel are also found (Perl).

The pattern of certain lots appearing to be country-specific in VAERS is also found in other countries of similar size that we examined - Switzerland, for example - and is most likely due to the fact that, at the request of European regulators at the end of 2022, VAERS removed country-identifying fields from many manufacturer-submitted foreign reports, which effectively prevents analysis of EU countries by name.

In the paper Increased emergency cardiovascular events among under-40 population in Israel during vaccine roll-out and third COVID-19 wave by Sun et al., the authors highlighted a clear increase in emergency phone calls during the rollout - reproduced below for Acute Coronary Syndrome calls in the 16–39 age group.

An excellent preprint, Observed-to-Expected Fetal Losses Following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Early Pregnancy, by Guetzkow et al.,4 raised the alarm about the rise in miscarriages among women vaccinated against COVID-19, in Israeli insurer data. Prof. Josh Guetzkow described it in layman’s terms on his own Substack, in an article I invite you to read.5

And, as can be expected from these data, in Israel as in other countries, live births have fallen sharply post roll-out; the following plot presents cbs.gov.il’s data per 1,000 women by age (R).

The sharp drop compared with the linear trend 2013-2019, in 2020 - followed by a bounce-up in 2021, followed by a new sharp drop in 2022- is similar to what can be observed in numerous highly vaccinated countries; see this plot produced for a previous article.6

So, to conclude… what Israel proves, mostly, is that the jabs absolutely didn’t work as advertised, and that the studies which found there a miraculous effectiveness - which never existed, even in the trial7 - are highly questionable.8

Refer to this plot by Henjin below, red emphasis mine.9

Good luck trying to explain the early 2022 wave arguing that 80% of the population was vaccinated with a product 95% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 - or that this obvious disaster relates to waning efficacy, variants, short-lived protection, or any other fairy tale.

Good luck, as well, trying to argue that Israel had “placebo batches” or “special batches” - you’ll have no data to back that up, either.

It is a false debate, created to deflect from what really matters: everyone had bad lots, from products whose hazards are random and countless. It happened because the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) requirement of “uniformity from batch to batch”10 11 12 13 was not fulfilled by these products - as was obvious from the EMA leaks,14 explained by the “bait and switch” originally highlighted by Josh Guetzkow and Retsef Levi, and whose effects have been made evident by the work of Kevin McKernan and the multiple independent confirmations that followed.15

That is a reason for the immediate recall of these products - or it would be, in a world where regulators were doing their job and public debate wasn’t constantly contaminated by bad arguments.

5

Research Rebel

New Study: Higher-than-Expected Fetal Losses after mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Early Pregnancy

Dear readers, I am going to keep this short. I am delighted to share with you the fruits of a massive research project I’ve been working on, which is the reason why you haven’t heard from me in a very long time. I quickly realized after I started working on it that I would have to prioritize it at the neglect of posting here. I got so swept up in it tha…

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a year ago · 275 likes · 42 comments · Josh Guetzkow

(Twitter) is a friend of the mother of Alexis Budzon, who did me the honor of joining me for this article. She recently flagged another issue: some reports involving COVID-19 vaccines victims aren’t even linked to the COVID-19 vaccine despite explicit narratives within the reports- another sign of disastrous incompetence and indifference to safety data from the Public health officials.

Alexis “Lexi” Budzon was a 24-year-old nursing student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville - remembered as a bright young woman, hardworking, athletic, and close to her community.2

In 2021, she was reluctant to get vaccinated - she had done research - and was concerned by the potential for reproductive issues & the unknown long term safety risks.

Yet as the Biden administration, encouraged by Pfizer’s lobbying,3 promoted mandates and exclusion measures making life of unvaccinated individuals difficult, Lexi, who was just a couple of months from graduating, decided to proceed with getting vaccinated against COVID-19 & influenza, as was required for her hospital clinical rotations.

Lexi received COVID-19 vaccination, in mid-August 2021 and mid-September 2021, despite her own reservations about these new products. Following the first dose she experienced menorrhagia. After the second dose, she developed multiple symptoms, from which she never really recovered. These included persistent fatigue, headaches, and chest pain after attempting exercise such as jogging, which she had previously done regularly.

In November 2021, while finishing her final semester, Lexi's condition worsened. In addition to fatigue and headaches, she then endured urinary symptoms, gastrointestinal upset, a new rash on her arms and trunk, neck pain, and a low-grade fever. She flew home to Colorado to be with her family for Thanksgiving break, where she visited a primary-care clinician on November 22, 2021, and was treated empirically for a possible infection, but her symptoms persisted and intensified.

On November 29, 2021, Lexi was taken to the emergency department due to worsening vomiting and profound weakness. While there, she had a generalized seizure, underwent imaging and a lumbar puncture, and was transferred by helicopter to a tertiary center. Despite treatment, she became unresponsive and, according to the VAERS report, was declared brain dead around midday on December 1, 2021. She remained on life support for organ donation.

After her death, medical opinions about the underlying cause differed. Her autopsy reportedly noted intraparenchymal hemorrhage and hemorrhage of the upper spinal cord (C1–C4). The coroner ultimately attributed the cause of death to complications of an undiagnosed, asymptomatic Chiari malformation.

Lexi’s family, her primary-care clinician, and a doctor/lawyer team consulted by the family are convinced that the vaccinations she received only a few months prior to her death contributed to her decline.

Her mother, Kim, has since battled to make her daughter’s case known. React19.org published her story,4 and Kim was interviewed by CHD twice.56

They filed a VAERS report, which her mother submitted by phone, with the encouragement and support of Lexi’s physician, on June 24, 2022. The report has the VAERS ID 2331936-1.

The narrative within Lexi's report is extremely detailed, and shows the care that she took took in providing every possible piece of information.7

As can be observed, while “the Pfizer vaccine” is clearly mentioned, and while she took care of communicating each precise lot numbers, no Pfizer vaccine is included in the related products of the report.

Yet, Lexi’s mother clearly recalls filling for the appropriate products. Whether she did or not ultimately shouldn’t even matter. For serious reports - such as those involving death, life-threatening illness, or hospitalization - the CDC & FDA, co-administering VAERS, have a duty to actively seek and obtain additional documentation - medical records, death certificates, autopsy reports - by contacting health institutions, public health authorities, and the reporter. These materials should then be added to the case file under the corresponding VAERS ID while maintaining privacy protections.8 9

Obviously, in Lexi’s case, they miserably failed in that duty. If an associated product was missed or removed while the narrative was detailed and clear, chances are high that they missed or removed many others as well.

We extracted all the reports which mention “Pfizer” in their narrative (Perl), but do not list “Pfizer” among the reported manufacturers. As of November 1st, 2025, 9,212 such reports appear in the annual VAERS data files for years 2020 to 2025.10

Some of these reports are legitimately unrelated to Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccines - for example, Pfizer reporting incidents related to Moderna vaccines.

Reviewing the full volume of 9,212 reports would be extremely time- consuming, but we reviewed the 108 reports involving death, using a quickly designed custom-built interface developed for this purpose.

Of these, 59 reports involve death in which a Pfizer COVID-19 product should have been associated, either because it was the most recently administered vaccine or the last product received.11

Reviewing these reports highlights other of the numerous flaws of VAERS’s data processing errors. For an example (which is far from isolated12), VAERS ID 1642957 concerns a 48 years old male whose age (circled in red) isn’t set - and the associated product history reflects a product other than the product noted in the narrative (circled in blue).

Numerous individuals (1655865, 58 years old woman - 1683354, 48 years old male - 1999006, 50 years old female - 2082974, 70 years old male…) are indicated as having received Moderna vaccines - while the narrative is clear on the fact that they received Pfizer products.

Back to Lexi’s case… not only did the VAERS teams fail to administer basic report data, but they also failed with their duty to follow-up.

After submitting the initial report, Kim’s only interactions with VAERS were self-initiated.

She filed online, on July 11, 2024, an additional report to highlight the possible connection to the COVID-19 vaccines which - despite her earlier efforts - wasn’t appearing on the first report. The new VAERS ID was 2778730. She called VAERS again the next day, to ask how the reports would be cross-referenced, noting that no one had requested further information about the first submission. Her questions were met with silence - the only new bit of information she received was that VAERS had “just received the hospital records”. Two years and a half after the initial report, to transfer a few kilo-octets of data.

The system should link follow-up or supplemental reports to the primary report ID, ensuring that all relevant details are integrated under a single case. However, in this instance, the second report was issued under a separate ID, remains dissociated, leaving critical information from each report isolated and undermining comprehensive case analysis.

Kim’s painful experience reflects many similar accounts from individuals who report vaccine injuries and from bereaved families - perceiving indifference from those tasked with protecting them13 and feeling isolated when vaccines described as ‘safe and effective’ turn out to be hazardous, untested frauds.

It is, unfortunately, left to a mostly apathetic public to demand transparency - and to insist that public health services operate for more than show. We encourage our readers to contact their representatives and demand the necessary audits and reforms.

3

Lee Fang

Pfizer Quietly Financed Groups Lobbying for COVID Vaccine Mandates

In the midst of a contentious debate about Chicago’s plan to force employers to require their workers to take the COVID-19 vaccine, Karen Freeman-Wilson, president of the Chicago Urban League, appeared on television to dismiss complaints that such rules would disproportionately harm the Black community…

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3 years ago · 580 likes · 83 comments · Lee Fang

11

Vaers Pfizer Related Reports Unset 2025 11 01

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The result? Instead of showing the actual normalized infant deaths / 1000 births rising, legitimate reason to investigate the alert, as shown in the article…

… or the longer trend 2000-2020, 0.3% event, as shown by Jikkyleaks2…

… he presented what looked like a full-blown, 20-sigma, “extinction-level event” in the raw death counts for this age group. For reference: the green line below is what he proudly showed the world - and the blue line is what he claimed to have calculated, though in reality he simply cooked the numbers.

This fraud - like many other chaos agents propped up by bot farms and paid hype squads that keep them credible among well-meaning activists - carried a surprising amount of credibility among safety advocates.

So, as expected - and since I’m getting some practice at confronting some of the scene’s prominent players - this article, along with the Twitter thread announcing it, stirred up some backlash.

But while he’d blocked me on X over a year ago, and that he spent several days posting behind block, attempting to contain the damage, I had an advantage: there was one place he couldn’t avoid me - a very visible group chat, full of high-profile accounts and sharp analysts. Being exposed for fraud there would hurt his credibility badly, and “blocking” wouldn’t save him.

What follows is the conversation - anonymized when others chimed in, but with their participation preserved for context. It is an exact account of our conversation, timestamps in Paris time.

I consider it’s in the public interest to know these “behind-the-scene” details, hence its publication. It won’t amuse everyone to read the tedious take-down of an arrogant fraudster - and if that’s you, apologies. But for others, it’s valuable documentation.

I started with my usual offer whenever I publicly call out someone’s integrity: prove me wrong, and I’ll apologize and walk away from the scene, definitively, in shame.

All he had to do was share the spreadsheet or the code he used to generate his chart. But he couldn’t - because that would have proven my point: he faked the data.

Instead, he accused me of “doxing” him, spouted gibberish, hid behind fake arrogance, quietly edited his article to make it look like a .PNG version of his spreadsheet had been there all along, and kept shifting his story several times.

Meanwhile, various analysts either confirmed my findings that he had doctored the data, or denied ever reproducing his results - despite his claims. It all played out across several threads on X, which are easy enough to track through the clickable previews.

It ends with his voluntary exit from the chat - once he had nothing left to hide.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 01:34

- you blocked me for no valid reason a while ago, but I’ve unblocked you so you can reply. https://x.com/canceledmouse/status/1970270111169986911

I reverse-engineered your 0-4 deaths chart and exposed your fabrication here: https://openvaet.substack.com/p/us-data-census-flaws-alert-signals

I will publicly retract and apologize if you provide:

• Your exact data sources

• Your CDC WONDER export (so we can see the query details)

• Your spreadsheet or code showing the exact transformations you applied

Further, I’ll be happy to retire from the public debates, if you can demonstrate such a clear method to reproduce your analysis.

I hope you won’t argue “offended dignity” and run from such a beautiful opportunity to restore your reputation.

Until you do provide such documentation, tho, I’ll consider you - along with most people reading this chat - as a proven fraud - and I’ll keep saying so, loudly and publicly, because manipulating data to discredit real pharma safety concerns is worse than doing nothing at all.

Anonymous Participant 1 - 2025-09-23 02:20

You’re saying the epigenetic/generational inflection points are falsified?

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 02:21

In the case of his 0-4 deaths chart, yes, entirely as 2020 begins (while 2019 is reproducible - showing I made no math error).

The green line is his “excess deaths”. The blue line is reality. As births are going down and as he compares non-normalized figures, it’s basically impossible to get significant excess deaths (as you have less births)

I modeled the manipulations I observed. Which results in a near-perfect match. You can easily check my own excess death calculation - every source & script is on the Git.

Anonymous Participant 2 - 2025-09-23 05:55

I don’t know enough about statistics but I know Openvaet is very hard to prove wrong. Someone else will have to look at this that gets numbers

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 05:58

He is wrong on this

It is EASY to check. He is incompetent.

He also doxxed me, and has made his focus on me...

A serious concern.

Anonymous Participant 2 - 2025-09-23 06:11

I have not seen anything identifying you ES. If that’s out there floating around somewhere I am very sorry. It sucks.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 06:13

Openvaet has been sending my CV around telling all he can how I am a spy - and counter-intelligence, sent to mislead everyone.

I was a spy. In operations - the REAL DEAL.

Something is not right with Openvaet, and it gives me concern.

My first duty is to my family, and to protect them.

So I owe none of these raging fanatics my attention.

Anonymous Participant 1 - 2025-09-23 06:19

He did dox him. Thats uncool

That said, ES has two injured kids and that is his #1 priority.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 06:24

But you don’t target a specific person for harm and pursue them over a long period of time. That is the difference between a normal person, and someone off kilter.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:41

https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1970327368901284166

10 points for the reply behind block, buddy. Except that I asked a direct link to your sources, and your file. Who do you hope to gaslight here?

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:43

You do not need my database in order to assess this data. To contend that you do, or pretend with ‘R’, means you are not competent at this.

You lied to these people.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:43

Then, you’re also tragically misrepresenting that I “doxed you”. All I did was saying “holy cow” when someone brought me your spooky C.V. Then you mumbled something about your math reproducibility & blocked. Another blatant lie.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:44

and worse you targeted a person rather than focusing on the issue and asking questions.

I did not ‘mumble’ anything. I have an entire article outlining the approach, method and corroboration.

You keep implying it is just a stand alone chart. Another misrepresentation.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:45

Source.

Code.

Or show me someone who reproduced your 0-4 deaths trends transparently, please. I just showed you lied again, you pathetic fraud.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:46

You got embarrassed here.

https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1970350119238168602

Laugh all you want. I take this subject seriously. You are in a high school pissing contest.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:46

Yeah, I’m awfully embarrassed by your horizon of events mumbling. We won’t see a source or code & can end this painful self-humiliation exercise from you then 😂?

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:47

High school.

Immature.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:48

You got shown to be a complete fraud by a high-schooler, then. That’s sad, spooky. Show us the data resulting in a non-normalized 20 sigma increase in infant deaths from decreasing births, please.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:48

You crafted a fake baseline, that departed from a 25-year record, that was purposely buried in your ‘R-code’ to deceive.

and you used it, not for truth, but to continue to stalk me.

It is sick.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:49

I find you quite disgusting. Using infant deaths for propaganda purpose shows everything about you.

You also lied about your own children being injured, did I see in the chat? You’re daring to say “sick”..?

Would you accept a moderated debate? 3 independent, reputable judges ; the loser retires?

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:49

You are showing your dark colors.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:50

Keep telling yourself you’re doing good with your pathetic gas-lighting attempt, buddy. I provided every source & code. Tell me again where I altered the baseline please ; which script does that?

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:50

No, accusing me of lying about my children is malicious. That is gas-lighting.

I owe you nothing.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:51

A little DARVO session now.

Do you think you’re gas-lighting 2020 mutton here, dummy?

I proved you a liar twice in this short session ; why wouldn’t I suspect you to lie three times?

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:51

Just keep talking to yourself. I am done speaking with you.

You have proven nothing.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:51

We’re just starting, fraud.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:52

Just as I suspected. A stalker.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:52

If you think people can’t see that you’re blowing wind & crying victim to hide from your lies... Bad calculation.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:53

Darkness.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:54

Glad to meet you, Darkness. I’m not impressed.

Not just darkness, don’t be modest ; a good dose of stupidity, too. And cynicism, and massively inflated ego.

Ethical Skeptic - 2025-09-23 07:55

You lost. You are angry. I get it.

Openvaet - 2025-09-23 07:55

How do you regard normal folks, in your spooky universe, to be able to lie blatantly on infant deaths, hoping people will repeat your nonsense & get ruined in court or in peer review?

I’m so “angry”. Accept my offer of a moderated debate to show how much I’m the angry one, spooky.

If you really had half of a source & code to back your amateur analytics, you would have retired me twice already.