Civil Defense Perspectives November 2025 (vol. 40 #6)
Scores of specific proposals are being promoted for Making America Healthy Again” (MAHA), but the most important goal is Making America Honest Again. Science, as opposed to “The Science™” cannot exist without scrupulous honesty, and without the freedom to challenge orthodoxies.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the response exposed long-festering problems. The fearmongering was based on dishonest models that ignored determination of the infection fatality rate and the extensive natural immunity that existed because the disease had been circulating months before it was recognized or acknowledged. Flawed diagnostic tests were imposed. The likely laboratory origin was denied and covered up (https://tinyurl.com/3csb8tcc). Patients were denied treatment with repurposed drugs (https://tinyurl.com/327pnwkb). Ineffective, destructive, unconstitutional non-pharmaceutical interventions were forced on people (https://tinyurl.com/druwwhua). Millions of people were mandated to take “vaccines” or lose employment or educational opportunity, while mounting evidence of serious adverse reactions was denied or minimized. (See CDP, January 2024, https://tinyurl.com/mryzzjkc).
Physicians who dared to speak out or who simply treated their patients with safe, long-approved drugs often faced firing, loss of hospital privileges, licensure board complaints, or revocation of specialty board certification. Government agencies teamed up with social media to block “misinformation” or “disinformation”—which included anything casting doubt on “safe and effective” vaccine as bedrock-of-public-health dogma.
RFK Jr.’s Dept of Health and Human Services
Many hoped that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., based on his past record, would immediately act on the very high priority of continued widespread use of mRNA gene therapy (redefined as “vaccines”). Safety signals vastly exceed those that got many other products recalled from the market.
The new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), appointed after Kennedy fired the previous one, merely weakened recommendations for COVID shots in children and pregnant women. In response, medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) filed suit (https://tinyurl.com/25jsjdvz).
An extremely significant accomplishment was to cancel $500 million worth of BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) grants for mRNA projects, at the recommendation of Steven J. Hatfill, M.D. Soon thereafter, Dr. Hatfill was fired from his position as Chief Medical Officer for ASPR (the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response). He reports that some 100 mRNA projects continue to receive NIH funding, recruitment for a “bird flu” vaccine clinical trial is underway, and Big Pharma continues to try to find a way to monetize MAHA.
Kennedy promised to announce the cause of the autism epidemic in September, and many expected prominent mention of the childhood vaccination schedule. Instead, use of acetaminophen (Tylenol™) during pregnancy got top billing, despite minimal evidence.
Older fathers, exposure to trace environmental toxins, microplastics, antidepressants, cerebral folate deficiency, and exposure to outdoor air pollution during pregnancy are suggested contributors, but observational studies of links to autism do not include vaccines as a confounding factor.
The CDC website, however, was modified. “Key points” now state that: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism” and that “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
The website still has the previous header, “Vaccines do not cause autism,” with a prominent asterisk: “The header has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee [Sen. Bill Cassidy, M.D., R-La.] that it would remain.”
The CDC acknowledgment appeared 3 weeks after the McCullough Foundation published a comprehensive review of the literature on autism titled “Determinants of Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Of 136 studies evaluating vaccines or their ingredients, 107 (79%) identified evidence consistent with a vaccine–autism link (https://tinyurl.com/52e9np36).
Diagnosis and Treatment
It is hard to disagree with the MAHA contention that Americans are chronically ill. It is easy and popular to claim that our environment is poisoning us. But what if things claimed to be healthy are harmful, and “poisons” are of negligible or dual effect, or have essential benefits that outweigh the risks?
Officialdom is quick to shout that “correlation doesn’t prove causality” if a favored intervention such as a vaccine is followed by harm, but is silent for environmentalists’ villains such as small particulates (PM2.5s [dust]) (CDP July 2015, tinyurl.com/52ne6z78) or glyphosate (see p 2). As statistician William Briggs points out, epidemiologists have sometimes claimed that X causes Y without measuring either X or Y (https://tinyurl.com/5bwxhhw6).
The nine Bradford Hill criteria for assessing whether an association is likely causal are: Strength, Consistency, Specificity, Temporality (cause before effect), Biological Gradient, Plausibility, Coherence, Experiment, and Analogy.
Chimney sweeps had 200 times more scrotal cancer than other workers, so chimney soot was determined to be a likely causal factor. Hill suggested that small associations could more likely be attributed to other underlying contributors (i.e., bias or confounding). Today, statistical significance is the accepted benchmark for judging the strength of an observed association (https://tinyurl.com/yc8d7mvd). Note that a very low p-value might be attached to an odds ratio just greater than 1.0 (i.e., a very small observed difference).
Briggs points out the fallacy of using this frequentist statistical approach to infer causality—e.g., one can show that the fluctuating distance between Jupiter and the Sun is causative of the number of secretaries employed in Alaska, with p < .01 (https://tinyurl.com/ynjzh7jb).
MAHA requires honest evaluation of all the evidence, with objective science and exclusion of vested interests.
Urgent Priorities
At the top of the list must be entities that affect the largest number of people, have the most severe consequences, and have inadequate evidence of safety over time. The new mRNA technology and all vaccines are qualitatively and quantitatively the most significant. These intentionally cause permanent changes to the body’s immune system and potentially induce genetic changes. Unlike with repeated industrial or consumer exposures to toxins, once may be enough. Effects may be long delayed.
Diet is also at the top of the list. But people are not dropping dead after a serving of sugary cereal colored with dyes derived from demon petroleum. The bulk content of the food must be examined. “Ultra-processed” foods generally contain industrially extracted seed oils (corn, soybean, cottonseed, rapeseed [“canola,” originally an engine lubricant], sunflower, etc.). These might be called “healthy” because they contain polyunsaturated fatty acids—but mostly omega-6s. Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids is thought to favor chronic inflammation (https://tinyurl.com/3ade89uy). “Ultra-processed foods” also tend to be high in sugar.
The U.S. government heavily subsidizes crops used for producing sweeteners (high-fructose corn syrup) and seed oil, and the FDA promotes vegetable oils to replace animal saturated fat, and carbohydrates over fat. We have millennia of experience with animal fat (DDP Newsletter, November 2025, tinyurl.com/62ecr2e8) and 100 years experience with seed oils—and epidemic coronary artery disease, obesity, and diabetes. Correlation doesn’t prove causality, but where are the controlled experiments?
Drugs, both prescription and illicit, are high on the list. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs, https://tinyurl.com/56v6aap5) have come to MAHA’s attention, as has polypharmacy. Nearly 70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug (https://tinyurl.com/5ya5rxmd). The Trump Administration, like many state and local jurisdictions, is liberalizing policy toward marijuana. Despite the many harms (https://tinyurl.com/y5hu3s3x), educational efforts are minimal compared with those for tobacco. Destroying a few boats trafficking drugs from Venezuela will have a negligible effect on a huge problem. What has MAHA suggested about the demand problem? How about using K-9s to locate drugs in schools?
Glyphosate
Advocates, including some from the “Medical Freedom Movement,” have been preoccupied with the herbicide glyphosate. RFK, Jr., has participated in litigation against Monsanto, (now Bayer), alleging that Roundup causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with billion-dollar verdicts and settlements.
The “foundational” 2000 study quoted to show that glyphosate does not cancer (https://tinyurl.com/46452khf) has been retracted because of being ghostwritten about manufacturer-conducted research (tinyurl.com/4n7mxjja). (There has been much less fanfare about ghostwritten articles on blockbuster drugs.) However, more than 3,300 studies support glyphosate safety, according to the European Crop Protection Association. The U.S. Agricultural Health Study, conducted by the National Cancer Institute and other agencies, has followed the health of more than 52,000 licensed private pesticide applicators (mostly farmers) and more than 32,000 of their spouses from Iowa and North Carolina for more than two decades. The study has found no glyphosate-cancer link, writes Paul Driessen. The International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC) is the only agency classifying glyphosate as a “probable” human carcinogen, based on two mouse studies (https://tinyurl.com/3u8u7kww).
A recent scary report (https://tinyurl.com/bdu2c4px) states that more than 10 cancers were linked to long-term exposuresto “safe” doses in rats. The study involved about 100 Sprague-Dawley rats in each of three groups (control and three exposure levels). The number of tumors for each type of cancer was one or two, but p was <.05. The difference in survival times between control and treated groups did not reach statistical significance. Authors conclude that their results support the IARC conclusion that there is “sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity [of glyphosate] in experimental animals” (tinyurl.com/rjbdtmwx).
Many other dose-dependent adverse effects are possibly caused by glyphosate. Human environmental exposures generally occur at the level of mg/kg body weight per day. The U.S. Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) is 1.75 mg/kg body weight per day (https://tinyurl.com/y5mcfk56). Concentrations have been measured in many foods, including those certified as “organic.” Levels as high as 1,150 ppb or 1.15 mg/kg in bread are reported (https://tinyurl.com/yzh44e7u). A 70-kg person would need to eat about 106 kg of that bread in a day to exceed the ADI.
The use of glyphosate has steadily increased, in step with neurological disorders including autism and other conditions (https://tinyurl.com/28ndry7h). Samsel and Seneff propose biochemical mechanisms, featuring manganese dysbiosis, to explain these and other conditions such as celiac disease and cancer (https://tinyurl.com/mr22abn2).
In commenting on this article, neurosurgeon Miguel Faria points out that many things correlate with the rise in diseases, including organic food sales, federal spending on low-income programs, obesity, and drug use. He notes that a “massive weight of unconnected data” does not establish causality. Before the recommended “drastic action” is taken, “more data needs to be collected by actual fieldwork, testing, and experimentation” (https://tinyurl.com/4ja5uwjr).
In response to Dr. Faria, Samsel writes that the claim that the dose makes the poison “is blatantly false and old school” (ibid.). As an “endocrine disruptor,” glyphosate allegedly has a triphasic response that wreaks havoc at very low and high doses while having minimal effect at moderate doses. Thus, even parts per trillion could be concerning, as it “destroys biology.” (See DDP Newsletter, May 2024, (tinyurl.com/bdzeytzk).
What would be the harm of a total ban? As Driessen points out (op. cit.), glyphosate, introduced in 1974 and licensed in 130 countries, “permits the high-yield farming that humanity must practice if we are to feed Earth’s growing populations, without having to plow under millions more acres of wildlife habitat. It reduces labor, costs, [and] fuel consumption.” While recent use as a desiccant sprayed on harvested crops needs to be examined, “drastic” actions could mean unaffordable increases in food prices and even starvation—not just lower profits to Big Ag and Bayer. And substitutes are likely to be more toxic. Acute toxicity is lower than that of table salt, vinegar, chocolate, or coffee.
As some speculate on harms from barely measurable amounts of long-used, unquestionably useful compounds, vaccines and novel mRNA technology are protected from liability and even from criticism, despite evidence of serious harm.
MAHA needs to start with stopping their immunity, establishing priorities, and insisting on scientific rigor.