Washington Spent the Money.

TheWashington Posteditorial board has apparently recently discovered that Social Security and Medicare are in trouble, and they are shocked, shocked, I tell you!That part is true, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. This is a fact that anyone not living under a rock has known for a very long time. According to the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in late 2032. At that point, incoming revenue would cover only about 78 percent of scheduled benefits. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2033. These are serious problems that have been developing for decades, and Congress has known about them for decades. As have the we the American people.But in a remarkably biased editorial titled “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state,” the entireWashington Posteditorial board manages to take a story about decades of federal fiscal irresponsibility, demographic change and the extraordinary cost of American medicine and turn it into a story about seniors having too much money.The underlying fiscal problem is real. The editorial analysis of how we got here, and particularly who should now be made to pay for it, is considerably less impressive.The Money Wasn’t “Not Saved”The first bit of editorial sleight of hand comes almost immediately. The Post explains that for many years Social Security collected more in payroll taxes than it paid in benefits. Then it tells readers that “the government didn’t save that extra money.” Instead, Social Security bought Treasury bonds and the government spent the money.That formulation is technically clever and editorially sloppy. The Social Security surplus did not simply disappear. By law, the trust funds invested their reserves in interest-bearing obligations of the United States Treasury. The Treasury then borrowed and spent that money. Those are two different transactions, and collapsing them into the phrase “the government didn’t save it” obscures the most important part of the story.If I purchase a Treasury bond, the Treasury will spend the money I lent it. That does not mean my Treasury security somehow ceases to exist. It means the United States government owes me money. The same principle applies to Social Security. For decades, American workers paid Social Security taxes in excess of the benefits being paid to retirees. The federal government borrowed those surpluses, issued Treasury obligations to the trust funds, and spent the borrowed money elsewhere. Now Social Security needs those securities redeemed, which means Treasury has to obtain the money through taxes, spending reductions, or additional borrowing.That is a genuine federal fiscal problem. But it is not the same thing as saying the money was never saved, nor does it somehow make the Treasury securities held by Social Security imaginary assets.In fact, the accurate description is more damning. Washington borrowed decades of Social Security surpluses to help finance the rest of government. Now that Social Security needs the money back, the sages of the Washington Post editorial board tell us the problem is the “retirement state.”Medicare Benefits Are Not a Christmas PresentThe Post then informs us that a married couple earning around $100,000 and turning 65 in 2025 can expect to receive Medicare benefits worth 4.4 times what they paid in Medicare payroll taxes. It is an effective statistic because it makes Medicare sound like an extraordinarily generous gift bestowed upon retirees at the expense of everyone else. Except Medicare was never designed as an individual retirement savings account, something the Post itself acknowledges, and there is another rather important problem with this comparison (beyond the overt incitement of inter-generational conflict).The “value” of those Medicare benefits is largely a measure of what Medicare pays for American medical care. If a hospital charges Medicare $30,000 for a procedure, the elderly patient did not suddenly become $30,000 richer. The American medical system charged $30,000. Those are not remotely the same thing. Yet the Post uses the enormous cost of Medicare benefits as evidence of Medicare's generosity to its recipients, without spending nearly enough time asking why the underlying medical care costs so much in the first place.That omission matters because the United States has one of the most expensive health-care systems in the world. Drug prices, hospital consolidation, administrative overhead, specialty drugs, provider monopolies, site-of-service pricing and the increasingly complicated Medicare Advantage system all contribute to what taxpayers ultimately spend. Medicare Advantage payments for Parts A and B alone reached roughly $534 billion in 2025, and serious policy organizations across the political spectrum have raised concerns about overpayments associated with coding practices and other features of the program.There are obvious places to start reining in Medicare costs before asking seniors to pay more: attack fraud and improper payments, audit Medicare Advantage plans more aggressively, reduce administrative waste, move care to lower-cost settings when medically appropriate, and force down inflated drug prices. Dr. Mehmet Oz is already pursuing several of these at CMS, including auditing every eligible Medicare Advantage contract, tightening fraud enforcement, reforming payment for outpatient care and continuing Medicare drug-price negotiations. CMS reports that its program-integrity efforts produced $41.9 billion in savings in fiscal 2025 alone.Before deciding that Grandma is receiving too much Medicare, perhaps we should first ask whether taxpayers are paying rational prices for Grandma’s medical care. Those are very different questions. The Post focuses heavily on how much Medicare spends on beneficiaries while giving remarkably little attention to why the underlying medical care has become so expensive.Apparently, the Problem Is GrandmaThis is where the editorial’s underlying philosophy becomes much clearer. The Post argues that “a big chunk of Social Security benefits goes to people who don’t need them,” pointing out that more than one-third of benefits supposedly go to seniors with incomes above $100,000.Notice what has happened to the language. These are no longer Americans who spent 40 or 50 years paying Social Security taxes. They are now people who “don’t need” the money from the fund that they have paid into. The fact that they paid into the system throughout their working lives becomes secondary to the editorial board’s judgment about how much money they should be allowed to have in retirement.  Yet more incitement of inter-generational conflict.This would fundamentally change what Social Security is. Social Security has historically functioned as social insurance. You work, you pay into the system, your employer pays into the system, and your eventual benefit is calculated according to a statutory formula based upon your earnings history. The benefit formula is already progressive, but Social Security is deliberately not structured as an ordinary welfare program.The Post wants to move toward something quite different: a means-tested benefit for poorer retirees combined with compulsory private savings for everybody else. It explicitly praises versions of that model used elsewhere. That is a perfectly legitimate policy position, but it should be described honestly. This is not merely “saving Social Security.”Their plan would transform Social Security from an earned retirement benefit, financed by mandatory contributions over a lifetime of work and provided with the expectation that those contributions would produce benefits at retirement, into something much closer to a means-tested welfare program. That is not a minor adjustment. It changes the basic bargain under which Americans have paid Social Security taxes for generations.The editorial also barely considers an incentive problem. Imagine two people who earn approximately the same amount over their working lives. One spends almost everything. The other saves diligently, contributes to retirement accounts, pays off a home, invests carefully, and perhaps builds a small business. Both paid Social Security taxes for 40 years. When they retire, Washington looks at the second person and says that because she behaved responsibly and accumulated substantial assets, she no longer “needs” the Social Security benefit she paid into.We have now created a penalty for thrift. The irony is that the Post itself celebrates the enormous growth in private retirement savings as evidence that America has changed since Social Security was created. Americans responded to decades of government encouragement to save for retirement, accumulated wealth, and now that accumulated wealth becomes the justification for reducing the benefits they spent their working lives financing. That is quite a trick, but the Washington Post editorial board seems to have no self-awareness of their sleight of hand.Then Comes Medicare RationingThe Medicare proposal is even more revealing. The Post recommends limiting the addition of new services to Medicare because much of future spending growth will come from coverage of new treatments. It presents this as politically attractive because existing services would not have to be reduced. That language is wonderfully antiseptic, but what it describes is rationing.Today’s senior keeps today’s cancer treatment. Tomorrow’s senior may not receive tomorrow’s cancer treatment because Medicare decides it is too expensive to cover.  This is the chronic problem that pervades socialized medicine programs throughout the world.  Just ask seniors north of the border in the people’s republic of Canada. The Canadian government’s response to this problem appears to be their medical assistance in dying legislation (MAID). Perhaps some form of rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis really is necessary. No health-care system has unlimited resources, and there is a legitimate debate about whether every new drug or technology that produces a marginal benefit should automatically be purchased by taxpayers at whatever price a manufacturer demands.But the editorial board should at least have the courage to describe the policy accurately. “Limiting the addition of new services” sounds considerably nicer than telling Americans that Medicare may decline to cover future medical innovations because the government cannot afford them. The distinction is especially important when some of the fastest-growing areas of Medicare spending involve precisely these new drugs, biologics and specialty treatments.Having softened the language around restricting future care, the editorial arrives at its other preferred solution: “average seniors should be paying more than they currently pay.” There it is. The federal government has an enormous Medicare financing problem, and after remarkably little examination of why American medicine costs what it does, the Post concludes that ordinary retirees should reach further into their pockets.Well, that certainly benefits the medical-industrial complex.Seniors should pay for Congress's folly!What is most striking about the editorial is how quickly retirees become the obvious place to look for money. Where is the serious discussion of hospital consolidation and monopoly pricing? Where are the drug costs, administrative expenses, Medicare Advantage overpayments, aggressive coding practices, fraud and improper payments? Where is the serious examination of why the United States manages to spend so much more on health care than other developed countries?The Social Security discussion is similarly narrow. Legitimate arguments can be made about changes to the taxable wage base, payroll taxes, retirement ages, benefit formulas, labor force participation, economic growth, productivity, and immigration. None of these offers a painless solution, and that is precisely the point. A serious examination of Social Security insolvency should force readers to confront the costs and tradeoffs of the major alternatives.Instead, the Post offers a remarkably convenient progression. Social Security and Medicare face insolvency. Seniors have accumulated substantial wealth. Therefore, seniors should receive less Social Security and pay more for Medicare. That is not an actuarial conclusion forced upon us by mathematics. It is a policy preference about who should bear the burden, presented as though it naturally follows from the fiscal numbers.The “Retirement State”Perhaps the most revealing phrase appears in the headline itself. The Post calls Social Security and Medicare the “retirement state.” Not the federal spending problem. Not the entitlement-financing problem. Not the health-care cost problem. The retirement state.By the end of the article, America’s elderly have become “the nation’s wealthiest generation,” possessing “significant wealth to draw on.” That framing subtly changes the nature of the debate. Someone will have to take the fall, so let's make retirees the source of this evil.  A structural problem created by demographics, medical inflation, congressional promises, decades of federal borrowing, and the unwillingness of successive administrations to confront politically difficult choices becomes an intergenerational distribution problem. Older Americans have accumulated too much. Therefore, government should give them less and charge them more.There is also a larger ideological pattern here that the Post does not disclose. This is hardly the first time its opinion pages have portrayed older Americans as having accumulated too much wealth at the expense of the young. Just last week, the Post published an essay titled“Shift the safety net toward the young,”explicitly arguing that government redistributes too much from young people to old people. In July came“No more regressive subsidies for seniors,”which described Americans between 65 and 74 as the wealthiest age group and argued against giving them additional tax protection. In March, another Post opinion called for limiting Social Security benefits for affluent retirees, and last year its opinion pages complained that federal policy was favoring older Americans while neglecting younger generations.What all of this really reveals is a strong, consistent ageist bias at the Washington Post editorial board, beneath which resides a familiar subtext.  From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.  The hidden subtext is a fundamental tenet of Marxist philosophy.There is something deeply strange about this emerging redistributionist argument. Much of the wealth held by older Americans exists precisely because they worked, saved, invested, bought homes and contributed to retirement accounts for forty or fifty years. Of course a 70-year-old normally has more accumulated wealth than a 30-year-old. That is how a lifetime of saving is supposed to work. Yet the Post increasingly treats the successful accumulation of retirement wealth almost as evidence of unfairness, and then uses that wealth to justify reducing the benefits those same people spent their working lives paying for. This is redistribution by generation rather than simply by income, with responsible saving eventually becoming the justification for taking more from those who saved. The Post is entitled to advocate that philosophy. It should at least acknowledge what it is doing, but perhaps that is asking too much from this “progressive” narrative-enforcement engine, long characterized as “Pravda on the Potomac”.Social Security and Medicare absolutely need reform. Pretending otherwise is irresponsible. The 2026 Trustees put Social Security’s combined 75-year actuarial deficit at 4.42 percent of taxable payroll, and the dates at which the trust funds encounter serious financing problems are no longer safely buried in some distant future. Something will have to change, and pretending there is a painless solution is no more responsible than pretending there is no problem.But there is an enormous difference between acknowledging that reality and quietly deciding who should pay for it. The federal government spent decades borrowing Social Security surpluses. Congress ran enormous deficits under both parties. Washington tolerated, subsidized, and helped construct one of the most expensive medical systems in the world. Politicians repeatedly refused to confront Social Security and Medicare financing because doing so was politically unpleasant.Now the bill has arrived, and theWashington Posteditorial board has identified the problem.Apparently, America’s retirees just have too much money, and what is needed is a good dose of intergenerational wealth redistribution, ideally coupled to struggle sessions for the guilty elders.  Now, please remind me, where have we seen this movie before?  When the Washington Post editorial board clearly demonstrates their political philosophical bias, you should believe them.  By their actions, you will know them.JGM/RWMIf you value independent analysis that is willing to question the assumptions behind the headlines, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Research like this takes time. It means reading the original documents, checking the numbers, following the money, and asking the questions that too often disappear when an editorial position is presented as objective analysis.Subscribe nowWe do not have a corporate media company behind us, and we do not want one. This publication is supported by its readers, which means paid subscriptions allow us to remain independent and continue doing this work without answering to advertisers, political parties, pharmaceutical companies, or institutional gatekeepers. If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you. If you are not, and you find this work valuable, please consider joining us. Your support makes it possible.And of course, we always appreciate when people share, crosspost, or even republish our work on your own site (creative commons license - meaning please put in a link to the original article and acknowledge the authors).Share

Summary: Apparently, the Problem Is Grandma


New World Screw Worm, Cyclospora, and Salmonella: Three Concurrent Threats

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHAs our CDC considers to flounder on infectious disease outbreaks, America is looking for practical suggestions on how to protect oneself.  Please listen to this quick segment covering three threats:  New World screw worm, Cyclospora, and Salmonella. Courtesy Stinchfield Tonight.  Solutions are provided in Emergency Medical Kits fromThe Wellness Company.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.📝Please subscribe toFOCAL POINTSas a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHChief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Companywww.twc.health/focalpoints

Summary: Dr McCullough and Grant Stinchfield discuss practical preparation, prevention, and treatment


Clearer Exposition of How Drs. Fauci & Walensky Concealed the Miscarriage Risk of COVID-19 Vaccination

Yesterday, I posted a short documentary film detailing how Drs. Anthony Fauci & Anthony Fauci concealed from pregnant women the miscarriage risk associated with COVID-19 vaccination. Several readers wrote to tell me that the exposition was impaired by the video’s fast pace and small script that was hard to read. Others complained that the spooky sound effects detract from the true horror of this story, which should be allowed to stand on its own.In response to readers’ requests, I spent the better part of today working on the film to make the exposition clearer and less encumbered by distracting effects.I believe the film illuminates one of the greatest crimes in medical history. I therefore beseech my readers to watch this revised version, and to like and share this post with your friends. Many thanks!Subscribe nowShare

Summary: Please watch & share this short film about one of the greatest crimes in medical history.


Author John Leake Talks with Dr. Drew

On Monday I had a great conversation with Dr. Drew about my new book,Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions.Please Note: After YouTube deleted my May 19, 2021 interview with Dr. Peter McCullough and assessed me with an Orwellian “Community Guidelines Violation,” I have struggled to build back my Author John Leake YouTube page. The platform remains BY FAR the most powerful for sharing videos, so I would be most grateful if you would like and subscribe to my page and share my videos with your friends. Many thanks!Subscribe nowShare

Summary: A conversation about the contagious spread of irrational ideas, scapegoating, and the extreme danger of unconstrained central state power.


Can a Nation Be Irrevocably Ruined By Its Leaders?

Oh Deutschland, bleiche Mutter!Wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtetDass du unter den Völkern sitzestEin Gespött oder eine Furcht!Oh Germany, pale mother!How have your sons ill-served youThat you are scorned by all people—A thing of obloquy and terror!Bertolt Brecht, “Deutschland”In William Faulkner’s storyThe Bear,the protagonist, Isaac McCaslin goes on a series of hunting expeditions to kill a bear named Old Ben. However, when he finally gets a chance to take a shot, he chooses to let the splendid animal—that seems to embody what’s left of the disappearing Mississippi wilderness—live. Later he watches in horror as another hunter brutally slays the old creature with a knife.The story seems to be a meditation on how men may be given to greed, lust, and the desire to dominate and kill, thereby losing their souls. Especially disturbing is Isaac’s perception that, from the actions of the men who settled it, including his own family, his homeland of Mississippi has been irredeemably tainted.Bertolt Brecht conveyed a similar idea in his poem “Deutschland” that expresses the idea that the once great nation of Germany—personified by a “pale mother”—will never recover from the dishonor inflicted upon her by the dreadful conduct of her sons.There was a time not that long ago in the United States when our society still valued the concept of agentleman—an idea that traced its lineage back to classical Greece. The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus remarked that even a relatively minor form of misconduct is enough to ruin a man’s reputation forever. As he put it:A small thing may ruin and destroy all. There is no need of anything large to ruin us; to lose your self-respect, your integrity, your modesty, a single moment of intemperance or carelessness is enough.Increasingly, it seems to me that the people who own and run the United States possess the character traits that Isaac McCaslin perceived to have resulted in a fall from grace. They are conspicuously—even bombastically— greedy, rapacious, bloodthirsty, vulgar and seem to have no regard for the other peoples of the world or for even the younger generations of their own country.Has this coterie of awful people rendered America into “a thing of obloquy and terror”?The same question may be asked of Israel. In retaliation for approximately 4,000 Hamas assassins brutally killing about 828 Israeli civilians and 367 security personnel, Israel’s military has damaged or completely destroyed an estimated 82% of all buildings in Gaza and killed (according to a studyLancet Global Healthstudy) around 75,000 people and injured around 174,000. According to this study, women, children, and older people made up a majority of violent deaths.Just as the atrocious behavior of the German government (and people who played along with it) in the years 1933-1945 did irreparable harm to the reputation of ALL German people—including those not yet born—the reputation of the American and Israeli nations will likely be permanently damaged by the conduct of their current governments.We can try to defend the actions of our dreadful politicians till we are blue in the face, but it won’t change the factual reality that the rest of the world can plainly see, even if we are too willfully blind to see it ourselves.ShareSubscribe now

Summary: Reflections on how quickly a nation may fall from grace.


Grand Rounds: Spike Protein Detoxification

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPlease enjoy this long format grand rounds with slides I gave for Dr Ann Marie Fine at theEnvironmental Medication Education Internationalprogram this summer.  This is great for sharing among other health professionals waking up to and grappling with Spikeopathies or diseases caused by the human exposure to and retention of the S-protein in the human body.Estimates are that about 97% of the world’s human population as been exposed to this protein engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  This is a useful guide you can share with family and friends.FOCAL POINTS (Courageous Discourse™) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth.AlterAImay be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHPresident, McCullough FoundationHulscher N, Procter BC, Wynn C, McCullough PA. Clinical Approach to Post-acute Sequelae After COVID-19 Infection and Vaccination. Cureus. 2023 Nov 21;15(11):e49204. doi: 10.7759/cureus.49204. PMID: 38024037; PMCID: PMC10663976.

Summary: Update on the core principles of managing long pandemic syndromes caused by Spike protein exposure and retention


RFK Jr. Raises Possibility Pennsylvania’s Reported “Measles Deaths” Were Fabricated

byNicolas Hulscher, MPHA major controversy is unfolding in Pennsylvania after Governor Josh Shapiro publicly announced two “measles-associated” deaths in Lancaster County—yet local officials say they cannot find evidence that anyone in the county actually died from measles.RFK Jr. put the discrepancy plainly:“They cannot find ANY measles deaths in Lancaster County.”Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons says he personally contacted the county coroner to investigate the claim.“I spoke at length with the coroner himself… they have ZERO cases of measles death.”Parsons said the coroner was aware of one patient who“died with measles, not of measles.”Whether Pennsylvania is counting that individual as a measles death remains unclear, and Parsons said officials still had essentially no information about the second reported death.Notably, Parsons said virtually no information was released about the two individuals other than that they were unvaccinated. That selective detail immediately placed vaccination status at the center of the story, indicating that the announcement was being used to frighten the public into taking hazardous MMR vaccines.The situation becomes even more troubling because, according to Parsons, deaths from communicable diseases in Lancaster County are required to be reported to the coroner. Yet after speaking directly with the coroner’s office, he was told there werezero cases of measles deathon record.RFK Jr. says the CDC has also attempted to obtain information from Pennsylvania but has been unable to verify what happened. He said Pennsylvania is refusing to cooperate with federal health officials even as the deaths are being widely reported by the media as established fact.RFK Jr. has nowappropriately raisedthe possibility that the announcement was not merely premature, but that the reported deaths“may even have been altogether fabricated.”If Pennsylvania has evidence confirming two deaths caused by measles, it should release enough non-identifying information to substantiate that claim.Where are the measles deaths?Nicolas Hulscher, MPHEpidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough FoundationSupport our mission:mcculloughfnd.orgPlease consider following both theMcCullough Foundationandmy personal accountonX(formerly Twitter) for further content.Subscribe now

Summary: Lancaster County’s coroner reports ZERO measles deaths despite Pennsylvania publicly announcing two “measles-associated” deaths.


Severe Diesel Shortage Coming Soon?

An odd feature of living in a highly developed, industrialized nation with abundant energy and food is that, most of the time, we have little understanding or even awareness of how it all hums along.Things just workand we don’t concern ourselves with all of the arrangements that make them work.When I was growing up, my grandfather had a small cattle ranch north of Dallas, and during summer recess, I worked a couple of days per week on the place, doing odd jobs. He kept a large diesel tank behind the barn for filling his two tractors, and one day he told me about the importance of diesel for agriculture, construction, and transportation of goods and services.“We put gasoline in our cars, but diesel is the lifeblood for growing, producing and transporting things,” he told me.Named after the German mechanical engineer, Rudolf Diesel (1858–1913) who developed the high efficiency internal combustion engine to replace the extremely inefficient steam engine.In my estimation, Diesel was one of the greatest inventors of all time, and he endured enormous hardship, litigation over patent disputes, and personal injury in his quest to build his engine that ultimately transformed agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and transportation.His death on the eve of World War I strikes me as deeply intriguing. On the evening of September 29, 1913 he boarded the steamer SS Dresden in Antwerp, bound for England for business meetings, including discussion of diesel use in British submarines.He dined, retired to his cabin around 10 p.m., and left instructions to be called at 6:15 a.m. He was never seen alive again. His coat was found neatly folded on deck; his bed was unused. His death was ruled a suicide, but I wonder if the Imperial German government was unhappy about him consulting the British navy about putting diesel engines into their submarines, and therefore sent an agent to make sure he didn’t make it to England.Speaking of diesel and war, I suspect that Americans are about to experience a very rude awakening about the cost of the US government’s senseless wars abroad if these conflicts aren’t resolved soon.Read more

Summary: With wars in Russia and Middle East throttling diesel supply, the real economy may soon be scrambling for fuel. Is this why CIA Director John Ratcliffe just made a trip to Moscow.


She Believed in It With Her Whole Heart

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPHIt was just a few years ago we saw Dolly Parton, age 77 in a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader outfit.  Now she is dead.⚰ The Quiet Irony of Dolly PartonDolly Parton died Tuesday at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. She was 80. The estate’s official line — delivered first by a nephew in a recorded video, then repeated by publicist Marcel Pariseau and “Team Dolly” — is that she faced “a brief battle with cancer” and departed surrounded by loved ones. What type of cancer?Not disclosed.Hospitalized four days prior with, per one outlet,kidney and autoimmune issues. And that’s the whole story the public is getting.For a woman worth a reported $600 million, with access to the absolute best medicine money can buy, the opacity is striking.Subscribe nowRead more

Summary: Dolly Parton's hope for the genetic vaccine was as pure as anything she ever sang — and then her immune system turned on her, and a "brief battle" took her away


BREAKING: CDC V-Safe Data Reveals 185,285 People Reported Long-Term Health Problems After COVID-19 “Vaccination”

byNicolas Hulscher, MPHAnew studyanalyzing data from the CDC’s V-safe surveillance system has identified 185,285 people who reported that their health remained worse three months or longer after COVID-19 vaccination and who attributed that deterioration to the vaccine.The findings come from an analysis by MIT researchers Retsef Levi and Nelson Lu of one of the largest active COVID-19 vaccine surveillance datasets ever assembled.V-safe enrolled more than 10 million COVID-19 vaccine recipients and repeatedly contacted participants after vaccination to ask about symptoms, daily functioning, healthcare utilization, and changes in their health. Unlike VAERS, which relies primarily on spontaneous adverse-event reports, V-safe actively prompted enrolled vaccine recipients to provide follow-up information over time, including at 3, 6, and 12 months.Among 9,904,924 V-safe enrollees aged 16 or older included in the analysis,185,285 (1.87%) reported prolonged worsening of their health that they believed was related to COVID-19 vaccination.Women reported the problem at an even higher rate:137,430 of 6,141,800 women, or 2.24%.Nearly Half Reported Disability, Hospitalization, or Severe Adverse EventsAt the qualifying V-safe assessment, conducted at least three months after vaccination, approximately half of those reporting prolonged vaccine-attributed health deterioration also reported at least one major health impact.19.98%–22.70%reported being unable to work or attend school.39.88%–41.70%reported being unable to perform normal daily activities.3.61%–4.05%reported hospitalization.16.74%–20.27%were classified as reporting severe adverse events.Overall,49.52%–50.87%reported at least one of these outcomes.The authors estimate that this corresponds to approximately1% of all V-safe enrolleesreporting both prolonged vaccine-attributed health deterioration and a serious health impact. Extrapolating this estimate nationally could correspond toseveral million people with chronic COVID-19 vaccine injuries.Neurological, Cardiovascular, and Multi-System ProblemsThe most frequently reported symptoms included:Fatigue:27%Headache:23%Joint pain:~15%Dizziness:~13%Shortness of breath:9.8%Muscle pain:7.1%Chest pain:5.5%Palpitations:4.6%Tinnitus:3.7%The prolonged-AE cohort also had higher reporting rates of neurological, musculoskeletal, cardiac, vascular, ear, eye, and reproductive disorders.Cardiac disorders were reported by10.29%of the prolonged-AE cohort compared with0.67%of controls. Reported terms included palpitations, atrial fibrillation, tachycardia, cardiac disorders, and arrhythmias.Cancer and Neoplasm Reports Were ElevatedThe prolonged-AE cohort contained2,708 reports classified under “neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified,” or 1.46%, compared with 15,474 reports, or 0.16%, in the control cohort—roughly a nine-fold difference in reporting prevalence.Reported terms included:Breast cancer:0.24%Malignant neoplasm:0.15%Lymphoma:0.05%Skin cancer:0.04%ConclusionMore than 185,000 people told the CDC’s own surveillance system that their health remained worse months after vaccination and that they believed the vaccine was responsible, and roughly half reported disability, hospitalization, or severe adverse events. This means that millions of Americans likely suffered the same fate.The CDC failed to do its job and never adequately investigated this enormous chronic health burden. Unfortunately, this new study indicates that America’s chronic disease epidemic will rage for years to come thanks to the mass-mandated genetic injections.Nicolas Hulscher, MPHEpidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough FoundationSupport our mission:mcculloughfnd.orgPlease consider following both theMcCullough Foundationandmy personal accountonX(formerly Twitter) for further content.Subscribe now

Summary: Nearly half reported disability, hospitalization, or severe adverse events at least three months after COVID-19 vaccination—and the CDC never adequately investigated.


Celebrity Endorsements of Pharma Products

Celebrity endorsements of various products have long struck me as one of the odder features of being human—that is, a tribal primate that lives in a conspicuously hierarchical social structure. Recently, while walking through an airport, I saw the following advertisement that made me wonder what the grandparents of old wine properties in France think of the American advertising endorsements. I once met an old countess who owned a chateau in the Loire Valley. I got the impression from her manners that she would struggle to come to terms with this association.In 2002, star college and NFL quarterback Ricky Williamsappeared onThe Oprah Winfrey Showto discuss his struggles with social anxiety and chronic shyness, and the great remedy he’d obtained by taking the antidepressant Paxil. He did NOT mention in the interview that he was being paid by GlaxoSmithKline to flog its product. About a year later, Williams stated that Paxil wasn’t so great after all and that marijuana worked better for him.Williams was one of many celebrities who spoke of their struggles with depression. Prozac, the first widely prescribed SSRI antidepressant, became a cultural symbol after its 1987–1988 launch. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1994 memoirProzac Nationframed the drug as both personal salvation and generational marker.In the early 1990s a wave of public figures—journalist Mike Wallace, Tipper Gore, novelist William Styron, and others—spoke about depression and treatment, thereby promoting the grossly oversimplified notion that depression is merely a neurotransmitter deficiency that can be easily corrected with a pill.In fact, depression is a complex mental condition that is partly an expression of the mind telling you that you need to make changes in your life, habits, and often the company you keep in order to achieve a more fulfilling life.Actress Carrie Fisher was one of the most consistent voices on treating her depression with a pharmaceutical product. After her death, her ashes were placed in a porcelain vessel representing a giant Prozac capsule.Viagra was another blockbuster drug that received numerous celebrity endorsements.Read more

Summary: Dolly Parton was one of many celebrities who have promoted products such as the mRNA COVID-19 shots, Prozac, and Viagra.


First Came the Measles Deaths. The Causes Can Come Later.

Pennsylvania announced this week what it called the first two “measles-associated deaths” in the Commonwealth in 35 years. Within hours, those carefully chosen words were disappearing. NBC News told readers that two unvaccinated people had “die[d] of measles.” Other news organizations similarly reported that people had died “from” or “of” measles. Governor Josh Shapiro quickly turned the deaths into an attack on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing Kennedy and the Trump administration of spreading misinformation with “real-life consequences.” There was just one rather important problem with this extraordinarily convenient narrative:Pennsylvania itself had not established that either person died from measles.That is not my interpretation of some obscure epidemiological distinction. It comes directly from the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Department press secretary Neil Ruhland explained that the state uses the term “measles-associated” when laboratory or epidemiological evidence of measles is present, but the official cause of death remains under investigation. In other words, at the time Pennsylvania announced two historic measles-associated deaths,the official causes of those deaths had apparently not yet been determined.That changes this story considerably. Measles can kill. It can cause pneumonia, encephalitis, and other serious complications, particularly among vulnerable people. There is nothing controversial about acknowledging that. But that is entirely different from announcing two deaths whose causes remain under investigation and watching “measles-associated” rapidly become “died of measles” in the national press. The former is a provisional public-health classification. The latter is a causal assertion. Somewhere between the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the headlines delivered to millions of Americans, that distinction largely disappeared.Pennsylvania could resolve much of the confusion by releasing a modest amount of anonymized clinical information. Instead, the Department has declined to provide the ages of the deceased, their places of death, relevant medical histories, comorbidities, clinical courses, or the complications that supposedly connect measles to their deaths. Governor Shapiro and Health Secretary Debra Bogen would not even say whether either person was an infant (or elderly), whether either was pregnant, or whether they belonged to one of Lancaster County’s Plain communities. None of that requires publishing names or addresses. Age ranges, relevant comorbidities and causes of death are routinely reported without identifying individual patients.There is also something rather selective about Pennsylvania’s newfound devotion to medical privacy. The Department says it cannot tell us the ages or medical backgrounds of the dead because doing so might identify them. Yet it had no apparent difficulty releasing one particular piece of private medical information:both were unvaccinated.Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons noticed the same contradiction. Vaccination status is medical information too. By remarkable coincidence, it was also the one piece of medical information most useful for converting two unresolved deaths into a vaccination message.Then There Is the CoronerThe story becomes considerably stranger when one turns from Harrisburg to Lancaster County itself. Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni told LancasterOnline thathis office had handled no measles deaths. Parsons subsequently contacted the coroner’s office and reported that it had “zero” cases in which measles was the immediate cause of death and one case involving someone who died with measles but not from it.That doesnotprove Pennsylvania fabricated two deaths. Not every death is handled by a county coroner. A person who dies in a hospital under physician care from an established disease process may have a death certificate completed without the local coroner ever handling the case. Coroner Diamantoni himself offered perfectly plausible explanations, including the possibility that his office had not yet received the information or that a critically ill Lancaster County patient had been transferred to Hershey, Philadelphia, or another specialized facility outside the county, in which case the death could have been certified elsewhere.But that reasonable explanation actually makes Pennsylvania’s silence more peculiar, not less. If one or both people died outside Lancaster County after being transferred for treatment, simply say so. If their deaths were certified by attending physicians rather than the Lancaster County coroner, say that. If another county’s coroner handled them, say that. Instead, Pennsylvania announced deaths that are both historically significant and politically explosive in Lancaster County, so the Lancaster County coroner said his office had no measles deaths, and the Department of Health declined to provide enough information to reconcile the two accounts. The public (and internet warriors) are left trying to assemble the facts while the governor is already delivering the political conclusion.There is also a real infant death in this story, but it illustrates why the state’s opacity is so dangerous. Coroner Diamantoni confirmed that his office is investigating the death of an infant who tested positive for measles and died after suffering a ruptured spleen.His office does not currently classify that case as a measles death, and the investigation remains open.Most importantly, there is presently no evidence establishing that this infant is one of the two people Pennsylvania announced as its “measles-associated deaths.” No one should make that connection when the authorities themselves have not made it.But think about how extraordinary the situation has become. We know that an infant with measles died in Lancaster County from a ruptured spleen; the coroner does not count that infant as a measles death; the state announces two other or possibly overlapping “measles-associated deaths,” refuses to provide their ages or causes of death, and then lectures the public about misinformation. Perhaps the first step in fighting misinformation is to provide information?Seventeen Percent Hospitalized? Look at the DenominatorThe same problem appears in Pennsylvania’s presentation of the outbreak itself. The Commonwealth reports 393 confirmed measles cases and 70 hospitalizations, producing a hospitalization rate of17.8 percent. Nationally, the hospitalization rate among confirmed cases this year is approximately 7 percent. Pennsylvania therefore appears to have a hospitalization rate roughly two and a half times the national figure. Those numbers deserve attention. They do not, however, necessarily mean that nearly one in five Pennsylvanians whocontract measlesrequires hospitalization. The denominator is not everyone infected with measles. It is everyone whose infection was detected, confirmed, and entered into the surveillance system.That distinction becomes particularly important in Lancaster County. Physicians there have warned that the actual number of infections may be considerably higher than the confirmed case count because people with relatively uncomplicated measles may never seek conventional medical care or undergo testing. That possibility is especially relevant in parts of Lancaster’s Plain communities, where healthcare utilization patterns can differ substantially from the population at large. This should not be caricatured as “the Amish aren’t reporting measles.” The point is simpler. A seriously ill patient who arrives at a hospital is highly likely to be tested, diagnosed and counted. A person who develops fever and rash, remains home and recovers without seeking medical care will never enter Pennsylvania’s database at all.That produces a classic ascertainment problem. Hospitalizations are difficult to miss. Mild infections are easy to miss, particularly in populations that almost universally avoid physicians for routine care and do not subscribe to health insurance. If the surveillance system captures a much larger percentage of severe cases than mild ones, the reported hospitalization percentage necessarily rises even though the biological severity of the disease has not changed. Pennsylvania may indeed be experiencing an unusually severe outbreak. Its case population may skew toward age groups more likely to require hospitalization. The Commonwealth may simply collect hospitalization information more completely than some other states. Or a substantial number of mild infections may be missing from the denominator. All are plausible explanations. What the existing numbers donotestablish is that 17.8 percent of everyone infected with measles in Pennsylvania required hospitalization.Yet the Department’s public messaging blurs precisely that distinction. Saying that nearly 20 percent of confirmed reported cases have been hospitalized is accurate. Saying that nearly 20 percent of “people who contract measles” are hospitalized implies something much broader: that the denominator represents everyone who contracted the disease. It does not. Once again, a qualified epidemiological statistic becomes a simpler and considerably more frightening public message. People are not stupid. They know what measles is and isn’t. This is precisely the type of propaganda that makes the public well aware that once again, they are being manipulated by public health officials.For Perspective: What Measles Looked Like Before the VaccineAnother piece of historical context is almost entirely absent from the current coverage. Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles was extraordinarily common in the United States, but by that point it was rarely fatal. CDC estimates that during the decade before vaccination became available,3 to 4 million Americans contracted measles each year, approximately 48,000 were hospitalized, and 400 to 500 died. Using those estimates, roughly1.2 to 1.6 percent of infections resulted in hospitalization, while approximately0.01 to 0.017 percent resulted in death. Put into more understandable terms, approximately one person died for every 6,000 to 10,000 people infected, while roughly one in 60 to 80 was hospitalized.Those historical numbers make Pennsylvania’s current hospitalization figure particularly striking. A hospitalization rate approaching 18 percent among confirmed cases is more thanten times the estimated hospitalization rate among measles infections in the decade immediately preceding vaccination. That does not mean Pennsylvania’s 17.8 percent figure is false. Seventy people were hospitalized, and 393 cases were confirmed. The arithmetic is straightforward. What it means is that the denominator deserves considerably more scrutiny than it is receiving.Either measles has somehow become dramatically more likely to require hospitalization (and in general, measles virus is genetically stable), Pennsylvania’s current case population differs profoundly from the millions of Americans infected before 1963, modern hospitalization practices account for a substantial part of the difference, or, as Lancaster physicians have suggested, surveillance is capturing the sick people who seek medical care while missing a considerable number who become ill and recover at home. Some combination of these factors may be operating. Simply presenting 17.8 percent as the risk faced by someone who contracts measles is not justified by the available denominator. Again, propaganda.For another comparison, consider influenza. During the severe 2024–25 influenza season, CDC estimates that approximately51 million Americans became ill, 710,000 were hospitalized, and 45,000 died. That produces an estimated hospitalization rate of about1.39 percent, strikingly close to the roughly 1.2 to 1.6 percent calculated from CDC’s pre-vaccine measles estimates. But the estimated mortality rate for that flu season was approximately0.088 percent, compared with roughly 0.01 to 0.017 percent for measles in the decade before vaccination. On those estimates, the risk of death per illness during the severe 2024–25 flu season was roughlyfive to nine times higherthan the risk of death per measles infection in pre-vaccine America.This is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Influenza mortality is heavily concentrated among older Americans, while measles before vaccination was overwhelmingly a disease of childhood (although we don’t know which age cohorts were dying prior to vaccination). What we have learned is that healthy, normal children are the least likely to die.  Children and the elderly with co-morbidities are more likely.The historical measles numbers are estimates from an era with very different hospitalization practices, while contemporary influenza burden estimates are generated using modern surveillance and statistical modeling. But those limitations do not make the comparison meaningless. They provide scale.In the decade immediately before vaccination, the estimated risk of hospitalization from measles was roughly comparable to the risk from influenza during a severe modern flu season, while the estimated risk of death per measles illness was substantially lower.That historical perspective does not establish what Pennsylvania’s true hospitalization rate is today. It does tell us that a reported rate of nearly 18 percent is so extraordinary that it demands explanation. Where are the mild cases? Who is being tested? Who is staying home? What are the ages and underlying conditions of the hospitalized patients? Why is Pennsylvania’s reported hospitalization percentage roughly two and a half times the current national rate and more than ten times the estimated pre-vaccine infection hospitalization rate? Those are not questions asked to minimize measles.They are exactly the questions epidemiologists should be asking when a modern surveillance statistic differs this dramatically from both historical experience and the current national rate.And this is becoming a pattern. “Measles-associated deaths” becomes “died of measles.” “Seventy hospitalizations among 393 confirmed cases” becomes nearly 20 percent of people who “contract measles” being hospitalized. In both instances, the underlying data contain an important qualification, and that qualification makes the public-health message less dramatic. Somehow, as the information moves toward the public, the qualification gets lost.We saw this same trick during COVID.“Died with COVID” became “died of COVID,”even when COVID was not the primary reason for hospitalization. Hospitals also received a20% Medicare payment increasefor qualifying COVID-19 hospitalizations. The distinction betweenwithandfrommattered then, and it matters now.“Measles-associated” does not mean “died of measles.”Then Governor Shapiro Found His VillainGovernor Shapiro did not wait for the official causes of death to be determined before finding a political lesson in them. He announced that he had spoken personally with Kennedy and had been “very, very blunt” with him. Shapiro accused Kennedy and the Trump administration of confusing parents and argued that their rhetoric was negatively affecting communities in Pennsylvania, with “real-life consequences.” National news organizations then supplied a particularly useful piece of political context: Kennedy had appeared in Lancaster County in 2021.There is also the inconvenient fact thatKennedy has repeatedly encouraged measles vaccination while serving as HHS Secretary.During the 2025 Texas outbreak, he wrote that the MMR vaccine was the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles,” deployed CDC teams to Texas, supplied state clinics and pharmacies with MMR vaccine, and said vaccination protects both individuals and the broader community. HHS continues to state plainly that“getting vaccinated is the best way to prevent measles.”Kennedy has insisted that vaccination remain a personal choice, but portraying his tenure at HHS as a campaign to discourage measles vaccination simply does not square with the record.That story has a problem, too.Pennsylvania’s own vaccination records do not support the simplistic causal narrative being constructed around Kennedy.Lancaster County’s two-dose MMR coverage among kindergarten students was already only 93.6 percent in the 2020-21 school year. It fell to 91.0 percent in 2022-23, 88.5 percent in 2024-25, and 87.6 percent in 2025-26. That is a substantial decline, and it matters epidemiologically. But it is also a decline over the years, rather than a sudden collapse caused by some recent Kennedy policy.  In fact, most recently, that decline happened during Biden’s administration. Indeed, the decline is remarkably steady, averaging roughly 1.2 percentage points per year, and the most recent year shows under Trump, if anything, a smaller annualized decline than the preceding period.More damaging to Shapiro’s implication is what happened elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Religious exemptions among Lancaster kindergarten students rose from 113 in 2020-21 to 260 in 2022-23 (again, under Biden), the period encompassing Kennedy’s Lancaster appearance. Taken alone, that looks suggestive. But Lancaster was not remotely unique. Luzerne County increased from 21 to 91, more than a fourfold increase. Cumberland went from 17 to 64, Westmoreland from 40 to 104, York from 53 to 130, Butler from 16 to 40, Berks from 43 to 89, Montgomery from 86 to 178 and Erie from 41 to 85. Several counties in which Kennedy made no comparable Lancaster appearance experienced proportionately larger increases. Of course, many of the exceptions were in response to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and had nothing to do with the MMR vaccine.  Public mistrust of public health policies will drive vaccine hesitancy, and for good reason during COVID.There was plainly a large pandemic-era shift in public attitudes toward vaccination mandates and public-health authorities, driven by many people and events. But the geography undermines Shapiro’s neat Lancaster narrative.Kennedy’s 2021 appearance did not produce a uniquely Lancaster phenomenon.Lancaster does not stand out when compared with counties where he did not appear. The increase was part of a much broader statewide pattern.The attempt to connect the outbreak to the current Trump administration is even more absurd. The federal executive order invoked in some of the coverage was signed on August 10, 2026, just15 days before Pennsylvania announced the deaths. By then, nearly all of Lancaster’s measured five-year decline in kindergarten MMR coverage had already occurred. The vaccination trend spans multiple administrations and shows no sudden 2026 inflection. The policy now being dragged into the story cannot have traveled backward through time and produced a vaccination decline that was already almost complete before the policy existed.The Problem Is Not That Measles Is HarmlessWhen confronted with this kind of government messaging, there is a temptation to argue the opposite extreme. That would also be a mistake. Measles is not harmless. Pennsylvania has documented 70 hospitalizations, and those hospitalizations are real regardless of what the true infection denominator ultimately proves to be. Both people Pennsylvania has classified as measles-associated deaths were reportedly unvaccinated (still not confirmed). No confirmed Pennsylvania case has been reported in someone who received both MMR doses. Those facts belong in this story too.  Recall that, if these were elderly and not children, the elderly generally were not vaccinated because they had developed superior natural immunity from childhood measles infections.  If they were in the age range where they received the early-1960s single-dose measles vaccine, then this would become a story supporting the measles risks associated with this cohort as they age.  Again, we need the actual data details to interpret the overall public health meaning.But acknowledging those facts makes the government’s behavior harder to defend, not easier.There is no legitimate public-health reason to exaggerate a disease that is genuinely capable of causing serious illness.If measles is dangerous, report its risks accurately. If two people died from measles, establish that and tell the public what happened. If 17.8 percent of confirmed cases were hospitalized, say 17.8 percent of confirmed cases were hospitalized. The moment officials begin sanding away inconvenient qualifications because the simplified version produces a more frightening headline, they cease educating the public and begin managing it.And that is what makes Shapiro’s attack on Kennedy particularly offensive. Pennsylvania had not released the ages of the deceased. It had not released their medical histories. It had not described their clinical courses. Its own spokesman acknowledged that their official causes of death remained under investigation. The local coroner said his office had no deaths in which measles was the immediate cause. The state had not explained that discrepancy. Yet the governor already knew whom Americans should blame.Think about that sequence.The medical conclusion was still unresolved, but the political conclusion was ready for television.If you enjoy our work, please share or republish our articles!ShareFrom Public Health to PropagandaThis is how public-health institutions destroy their own credibility and then blame the public for no longer trusting them. The problem is not that every statement Pennsylvania made is false. That would actually be easier to deal with. The problem is the careful selection and compression of facts. The state gives us the frightening fact but not the qualifying information. It gives us vaccination status but not age or comorbidities. It announces “measles-associated deaths” but does not tell us how the people died. It has weaponized this partial information to advance a predetermined political narrative.Instead, Pennsylvania appears to have reversed the process. The political conclusion came first. The frightening headline came second. The press amplification followed. The evidence disappeared behind claims of privacy. Then the governor lectured everyone else about misinformation.That is not public health. It is propaganda dressed in a white coat.Perhaps Pennsylvania will eventually release enough information to demonstrate clearly that both people died as a direct consequence of measles. If it does, then that is what the evidence will show, and the facts should be reported accordingly. But that is not what the Commonwealth has given us so far. What we have instead are two vaguely defined “measles-associated deaths,” virtually no clinical information, conflicting accounts about who died, an apparent disconnect with the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office, and a governor who managed to transform two barely described deaths into an attack on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. almost immediately.If Pennsylvania wants the public to believe that these deaths demonstrate the danger of measles, there is a remarkably easy way to begin.Tell us how they died.People ask how we can be so productive.  The truth is that we work long and hard. Robert and I got up at five this morning and soon began writing.  It's post 11 AM EST, not even noon yet, and between the two of us, we have put in 10 hours of work.Independent journalism means asking the questions government officials would rather not answer, checking the numbers behind the headlines, and refusing to confuse a politically useful narrative with established fact.Frankly, at times, it even means pissing off our friends in the Trump administration and industry.  Telling truth to power takes guts.Subscribe nowThis all takes time, research, and increasingly, a willingness to challenge stories that much of the media simply repeats.If you value this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Your support keeps Malone News independent and allows us to keep digging when the official story does not add up.References:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Measles Cases and Outbreaks.” CDC, updated August 20, 2026.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Measles History.” CDC. Historical estimates for the decade before measles vaccination: approximately 3–4 million infections, 48,000 hospitalizations, and 400–500 deaths annually.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “2024–2025 Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical Visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States.” CDC. Estimates approximately 51 million illnesses, 710,000 hospitalizations, and 45,000 deaths.Christensen, Jen. “Two Unvaccinated People in Pennsylvania Are First Measles-Related Deaths in US This Year.”CNN, August 25, 2026.Edwards, Erika. “Two Unvaccinated People Die of Measles in Pennsylvania Outbreak, Health Officials Say.”NBC News, August 25, 2026.Garber, Anne, and Dan Nephin. “Lancaster County Coroner’s Records Don’t Add Clarity to 2 Pa. Deaths Tied to Measles.”LNP | LancasterOnline, August 25, 2026.Leonard, Nicole. “2 Unvaccinated Pennsylvanians Die after Contracting Measles as Cases Grow.”WHYY, August 25, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “Pennsylvania Department of Health Confirms Two Measles-Associated Deaths.” August 25, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “Shapiro Administration Expands Measles Response Efforts Following Pennsylvania’s First Measles-Associated Deaths in 35 Years.” August 25, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “Shapiro Administration Launches Measles Dashboard to Keep Parents, Public Informed of Ongoing Cases.” July 14, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Rates.” 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2020–2021.” November 10, 2021.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2022–2023.” November 16, 2023.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2024–2025.” July 29, 2025.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2025–2026.” July 30, 2026.Lancaster County Coroner’s Office. “Frequently Asked Questions: Coroner.” Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Accessed August 26, 2026.Parsons, Josh. Statement concerning Lancaster County measles deaths and communication with the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office. X, August 25, 2026.Van Beusekom, Mary. “Measles-Related Deaths in Pennsylvania Mark First 2 US Fatalities This Year.”CIDRAP, University of Minnesota, August 25, 2026.Whelan, Aubrey. “Pennsylvania Reports Two Measles Deaths in Lancaster County, State’s First in Three Decades.”The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 25, 2026.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “Acute Inpatient PPS.” CMS. CARES Act COVID-19 inpatient payment provisions, including the 20 percent increase in the weighting factor for qualifying COVID-19 inpatient discharges.

Summary: Did they or didn’t they die of measles?


MALONE.NEWSMeasles Immunity: No Twice-Vaccinated Generation Has Reached Sixty-FiveSingle-dose cohorts cross that line in 2033. Two-dose cohorts in 2054.SummaryEvery American now over the age of sixty-nine was almost certainly infected with wild measles as a child. Every American under fifty-eight was born into the era of further-attenuated measles vaccination and has probably never been infected with the wild virus. The boundary between those two populations is currently passing through the seventh decade of life.The consequence is that measles in the elderly has never been observed in a substantial population whose immunity derives primarily from childhood vaccination, because until now no such elderly population has existed. Before vaccination, the question could not be studied either, since nearly everyone was infected by adolescence. We therefore have almost no direct evidence of what measles susceptibility, disease severity, or mortality will look like when vaccine-derived immunity reaches old age.There are already reasons to ask what happens as vaccine-derived immunity ages along with the immune systems of the people who carry it. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that, in elimination settings, measles antibody levels decline after vaccination but do not show the same pattern after natural infection. For decades, that decline may have been partly obscured by subclinical boosting when vaccinated people encountered circulating wild virus without developing clinical measles. Elimination largely removed that source of exposure.Measles itself raises a second question. Infection can erase a substantial portion of the pre-existing antibody repertoire, a phenomenon known as immune amnesia. In the principal study, children lost between 11 and 73 percent of their pre-existing antibody repertoire following infection. That work was conducted in children, whose accumulated immune histories were relatively short and whose capacity to rebuild immune responses was greater than it is in old age. What immune amnesia for other diseases after a measles infection would mean in a seventy- or eighty-year-old with a lifetime of accumulated immunity has not been studied.There is another major uncertainty. The serological threshold commonly used to define measles protection rests on remarkably limited evidence, beginning with a 1990 study in which only nine people had pre-exposure titers at or below the proposed threshold. A subsequent systematic review found the evidence supporting that threshold to be scant and concluded that it requires further characterization.There is another major issue. The serological threshold used to define measles immunity is based on nine people studied in 1990, and the field has formally acknowledged that it needs to be recharacterized. None of this predicts a catastrophe. It identifies a gap that becomes measurable around 2033, when the first single-dose cohorts reach sixty-five, and around 2054 for the two-dose cohorts. We do not have to wait that long to begin finding out what happens to vaccine-derived measles immunity as people age. That research is not currently being done.Public health officials and scientists have assumed that childhood measles vaccination provides protection throughout the human lifespan, even though no fully vaccinated generation has yet reached old age. Once again, an assumption has hardened into an article of faith without the evidence needed to support it.A note to readers:This is a technical document written primarily for a scientific and medical audience. It examines the underlying studies, immunology, epidemiology, and limitations of the available evidence in considerable detail. For readers who do not need that level of detail, this summary contains the central argument and conclusions and may be all that is necessary to read.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe 1957 LineThe Centers for Disease Control accepts birth before 1957 as presumptive evidence of measles immunity. The reasoning has never been serological. It is that measles circulated so completely in the pre-vaccine United States that essentially everyone born before that year was infected, and that natural infection confers protection lasting the remainder of a normal life.The CDC’s 1957 cutoff tells us why older Americans are presumed immune: they were almost certainly infected. It tells us nothing about how long vaccine-derived immunity will last in the generations born afterward.Carried forward to August 2026, the arithmetic is unforgiving. A person born in 1957 is sixty-nine. The Edmonston B vaccine was licensed in 1963, placing the earliest vaccine-era cohort at sixty-three. The further attenuated Schwarz and Moraten strains, which became the more reliable products, arrived between 1965 and 1968. The 1968 cohort is now fifty-eight. The two-dose schedule was recommended in 1989, making the first generation born into that schedule thirty-seven.No generation born into the modern vaccine era has yet reached sixty-five. The 1968 cohort crosses that line in 2033. The first generation born under the two-dose schedule crosses it in 2054.A smaller group complicates the middle of that range. Between 1963 and 1967, a formalin-inactivated measles vaccine was distributed in the United States before being withdrawn. Recipients were later found to have developed atypical measles upon exposure to wild-type virus. Those people are now in their late fifties and early sixties. They sit inside the band that will age into this question first, and their immune history is neither straightforward natural infection nor modern vaccination.Our understanding of measles in old age comes from a naturally immune population. The population now approaching old age is increasingly vaccine-immune. Whether measles behaves the same way in the two populations is a question we have never had the opportunity to answer.What Waning Immunity Looks LikeThe measles vaccine is not failing. Two doses prevent roughly ninety-seven percent of infections, and primary vaccine failure runs under five percent. The question is what happens to the remainder of people over fifty and sixty years.Mossong, O’Callaghan, and Ratnam analyzed measles antibody data from 1141 vaccinated Canadian children in 2000. Controlling for the significant variables, they found titers declining at a mean of 5.6 percent per year, equivalent to a half life of twelve years (Mossong, O’Callaghan, and Ratnam 2000). Three years later Mossong and Muller built an age-structured transmission model to simulate the shift from a naturally immune population to a vaccine-immune one. The model projected that eighty percent of vaccinees would become susceptible again fifty years after vaccination (Mossong and Muller 2003).More scientific evidence arrived in 2022, when Bolotin and twenty-three coauthors published a review and meta-analysis in theJournal of Infectious Diseases. They found that in elimination settings, measles antibodies wane after vaccination but do not wane after infection (Bolotin et al. 2022).Among the authors are Orenstein, Moss, Rota, Severini, Durrheim, Hahne, Jit, Funk, and Crowcroft. None of these study authors are contrarians or anti-vaxxers. They are serious scientists. This is a finding from the scientists and institutions responsible in the field of vaccinology.In 2024, scientists Robert, Suffel, and Kucharski fitted a model to every measles case reported in England between 2010 and 2019, stratified by age, region, and vaccination status. They compared scenarios with and without waning against the observed data. Only the scenarios that included waning immunity reproduced the number and age distribution of cases among twice-vaccinated people. The scenario without waning underestimated two-dose recipients among cases older than fifteen by roughly a factor of two and a half (Robert, Suffel, and Kucharski 2024).The estimated waning rate was slow, at 0.039 percent per year of age. The authors are explicit that the vaccine remains highly protective for decades and that most transmission still traces to unvaccinated people. Their conclusion is narrower and more useful. Breakthrough infection becomes increasingly frequent above age fifteen in people who received two doses, and because measles is so infectious, even slow waning raises the burden of an outbreak.One finding in that paper deserves more attention than it has received. Onward transmission from vaccinated cases ran at 83 percent of the rate from unvaccinated cases, with a credible interval of 72 to 91 percent. The standard reassurance about breakthrough measles is that it produces modified disease which does not transmit well. In this dataset it transmitted nearly as well.In practical terms, waning immunity does not have to produce widespread vaccine failure to matter. It only has to gradually enlarge the pool of vaccinated people who can become infected and transmit the virus when measles is introduced. That is already visible in younger adults. What we do not know is whether the same slow erosion continues for another thirty, forty, or fifty years, because no twice-vaccinated population has yet reached those ages. The England data do not answer that question. They show that it is no longer reasonable to assume there is no question to answer.The Boosting ProblemThe measles literature has recognized for decades that exposure to circulating wild virus can boost immunity in vaccinated people without causing clinical disease, potentially masking the underlying decline in vaccine-derived antibodies.In 1999, Mossong, Nokes, Edmunds, Cox, Ratnam, and Muller published a model of subclinical measles transmission in vaccinated populations with waning immunity. Their starting observation was that a substantial proportion of vaccine responders show an antibody boost, with mild or no symptoms, after exposure to wild virus (Mossong et al. 1999). Whittle and colleagues demonstrated the same effect in the field in West Africa, where subclinical infection boosted immunity in vaccinated children (Whittle et al. 1999).The magnitude of that effect is larger than most clinicians assume. A Dutch cohort followed 91 once-vaccinated children through a measles exposure. Two seronegative children developed clinical measles. Another nineteen, twenty-three percent of the cohort, experienced subclinical infection detectable only by serology (Nic Lochlainn et al. 2019). Roughly one exposed vaccinated child in four was silently infected and silently boosted.For four decades after licensure, vaccinated Americans lived among circulating measles and received repeated subclinical boosting. The antibody titers measured in seroprevalence surveys during that period reflected vaccination plus boosting. They were attributed to vaccination alone.Elimination largely removed that source of exposure. The United States achieved elimination status in 2000, and the Region of the Americas was declared free of endemic measles in 2016. A generation has now been raised in a setting where exposure to wild virus is uncommon and can no longer be assumed to periodically boost vaccine-induced antibody levels. Robert and colleagues note this directly, observing that waning of vaccine-induced immunity may be related to the time since the end of endemic transmission (Robert, Suffel, and Kucharski 2024). Immunological studies from Canada, Japan, and Czechia have also found declining antibody levels in young adults vaccinated more than twenty years earlier, without a comparable decline among those who acquired immunity through natural infection.This produces a result that is uncomfortable and, so far as I can determine, correct. Sustained measles circulation restores subclinical boosting in the vaccinated adult population. Antibody persistence observed when measles was still circulating cannot necessarily be attributed to vaccination alone, because some vaccinated people were periodically re-exposed and boosted.  Once endemic transmission ended, that contribution largely disappeared. The durability of vaccine-induced immunity can therefore be observed more clearly now than it could when wild measles was still circulating.Estimates of long-term vaccine immunity derived from populations that continued to encounter wild measles do not describe populations living for decades without that exposure. That distinction becomes increasingly important as the first vaccine-era generations grow older.Immune Amnesia in an Aged RepertoireMina and colleagues studied seventy-seven unvaccinated children before and two months after natural measles infection, using VirScan to track antibodies against thousands of pathogen epitopes. Measles eliminated between 11 and 73 percent of the pre-existing antibody repertoire across individuals. Children with severe disease lost a median of 40 percent, those with mild disease a median of 33 percent. The effect appeared in measles-infected macaques and did not appear in MMR recipients. Antibody recovered following natural re-exposure to the relevant pathogens (Mina et al. 2019).In practical terms, measles erased part of the immune memory those children had accumulated against other diseases, potentially leaving them susceptible again to pathogens their immune systems had previously learned to recognize.Two features of that study population matter for the question at hand. The subjects were children with a mean age of nine, so the repertoire deleted held nine years of accumulated encounters. And recovery depended on re-exposure, which requires a functioning capacity to mount and store new responses.The situation in a seventy-eight-year-old would be very different. The antibody repertoire represents a lifetime of infections and vaccinations, some of which will never be encountered again. The ability to rebuild that repertoire must also contend with immunosenescence and the broader decline in immune responsiveness that accompanies aging.It is therefore reasonable to ask whether immune amnesia in an elderly person from a measles infection would result in greater losses and less complete recovery. But that has never been tested. Mina’s finding is from a pediatric population, and extending it to the elderly remains a hypothesis rather than a result. More importantly for this discussion, it has never been studied in elderly people whose measles immunity derives from childhood vaccination. That population is only now beginning to approach the ages at which the question becomes relevant.What the Current Outbreaks Cannot Tell UsThe United States has confirmed more than 2,700 measles cases in 2026. Roughly 93 percent occurred in people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown, and about 84 percent occurred in people aged nineteen and under. Four percent occurred in two-dose recipients.Those numbers will be offered as evidence that adult vaccine-derived immunity is holding. In fact, they are not evidence for or against that hypothesis.Transmission in 2026 has been concentrated in undervaccinated pediatric communities. Vaccinated adults in their fifties and sixties are simply not being exposed at anything approaching the same rate. The absence of breakthrough disease in a population that is rarely exposed tells us very little about how susceptible that population would be if exposure increased.The English analysis in the section above detected its signal only by examining a decade of national measles data stratified by age, region, and vaccination status. That is the kind of analysis required to separate waning immunity from differences in exposure.Current U.S. surveillance is therefore poorly suited to answering the question. A small number of cases among older vaccinated adults could mean that their immunity remains strong, or simply that very few of them are encountering measles. Until exposure and vaccination history are accounted for together, the case counts cannot distinguish between the two.What Can and Cannot Be ClaimedThere are important limits to what can be inferred from declining antibody levels.Antibody titer is not identical to protection. Memory B cells and measles-specific T cells can persist independently of circulating antibody, and Jacobson and colleagues found that measles-specific humoral and cellular responses were independent of one another after vaccination (Jacobson et al. 2012). Secondary vaccine failure also frequently produces modified disease rather than classical measles. And evidence from several datasets suggests that antibody decline slows over time rather than continuing at a constant rate toward zero.There is also considerable uncertainty about the serological threshold used to define protection. The commonly cited figure of 120 traces to a single 1990 paper. A school blood drive shortly before a measles outbreak allowed Chen and colleagues to compare pre-exposure antibody titers with subsequent illness. Of nine donors with detectable pre-exposure plaque reduction neutralization titers at or below 120, eight met the clinical criteria for measles. None of the seventy-one above 120 did (Chen et al. 1990).That small study became the basis for a threshold that has been used for decades. A 2020 systematic review screened 14,778 publications for studies that could support it and found only five that met the inclusion criteria. Chen remained the strongest of the five and the only one to reach statistical significance. The reviewers concluded that the evidence underlying the commonly used threshold is scant and that further work is needed to characterize it (Bolotin et al. 2020).The number itself also requires explanation. Chen’s 120 was a reciprocal dilution, not an antibody concentration. It was later extrapolated to 200 mIU/mL against the first World Health Organization International Standard and to 120 mIU/mL against the second. Other laboratories report 210 mIU/mL as the equivalent, and at least one group has proposed 300 mIU/mL as a conservative threshold for protection against severe disease. A neutralization titer of 120 and an antibody concentration of 120 mIU/mL are therefore not the same measurement. The apparent numerical match results from the reference standard and conversion used.There is a further limitation to what the threshold actually measures. Chen concluded that titers at or below 120 were not protective against clinical measles, but also observed that infection without rash could occur in people above that level. The threshold therefore does not establish a boundary between infection and complete immunity. Several of the studies reviewed by Bolotin identified symptomatic individuals whose pre-exposure titers exceeded it. A Dutch cohort placed the correlate below 345 mIU/mL and documented subclinical infection at substantially higher levels.Taken together, these uncertainties leave several possible outcomes. Vaccinated cohorts may reach their seventies with lower circulating antibody levels but retain sufficient memory B-cell and T-cell responses to prevent infection or serious disease. They may become more susceptible to infection while remaining well protected against severe disease. Or susceptibility may increase more substantially with age. The existing evidence does not tell us which of these will occur.We do not yet know how vaccine-derived measles immunity will perform after sixty or seventy years because the population needed to answer that question has not yet reached those ages. Beginning around 2033, the oldest cohorts from the modern vaccine era will enter the age range where that uncertainty becomes increasingly relevant. The answer may ultimately be reassuring. At present, however, it remains an unanswered empirical question.What Would Answer ItThe evidence gap could be narrowed well before these cohorts reach old age. None of the necessary studies requires new technology.Recharacterize the correlate of protection in a post-elimination population.The 2020 systematic review called for exactly this, and it has not been done. Every serosurvey discussed below ultimately depends on knowing what a given antibody titer means. At present, the relationship between the commonly used threshold and actual protection is poorly defined.Extend age-stratified measles serosurveys into the older vaccine-era cohorts.Most existing serosurveys do not adequately capture the ages that matter here. The 55-to-70 age band now spans the transition from predominantly natural immunity to predominantly vaccine-derived immunity, making it particularly informative. Measuring antibody levels across that boundary could show whether the two populations are aging differently.Add IgG avidity testing to those surveys.Avidity can help distinguish primary vaccine failure from waning secondary immunity. The distinction matters because never developing a durable response and gradually losing one are biologically different problems and may have different implications for revaccination.Measure cellular immunity, not only neutralizing antibody titers.If measles-specific T-cell and memory B-cell responses persist despite declining circulating antibody, the implications of waning titers change substantially. A serosurvey based on antibody alone cannot answer that question.Follow the early vaccine-era birth cohorts prospectively as they age.People born during the 1963-to-1968 transition are identifiable now and are approaching sixty-five on a known schedule. Following them longitudinally would allow changes in antibody, cellular immunity, breakthrough infection, and disease severity to be measured within the same individuals rather than reconstructed decades later.Link adult measles cases to subsequent morbidity using existing registries.Immune amnesia has been demonstrated directly in children but has not been adequately characterized in older adults. Linking confirmed adult measles cases to subsequent infections, hospitalizations, and other health outcomes could test whether the effect has measurable consequences later in life.Several of these measurements could be incorporated into serosurveys already being conducted. The registry analysis could be done largely with data that already exist. The central limitation is not technology or even necessarily cost. It is that the questions have not been made a research priority.The DeadlineTwo dates govern this, each addressing a different aspect of the issue.The early vaccine-era cohorts reach sixty-five beginning around 2028, with the 1968 cohort reaching that age in 2033. The first generation born under the routine two-dose schedule reaches sixty-five in 2054. The later date provides the more relevant test of the modern schedule, because two doses are the schedule now in use, and the 97% effectiveness estimate applies to it. The earlier date matters because it gives us the first opportunity to observe vaccine-derived measles immunity as a population enters old age.Most people in the early vaccine-era cohorts received a single dose, with roughly 93% effectiveness, and many have now carried vaccine-derived immunity for close to six decades. Recipients of the killed vaccine used between 1963 and 1967 also fall within this age range, further complicating their immune histories. These cohorts will provide the first substantial evidence of what happens as vaccine-era measles immunity reaches older age. What is learned from them during the 2030s will also provide important evidence before the two-dose generations follow decades later.The question of how measles behaves in an elderly population with vaccine-derived immunity will therefore become increasingly answerable during the next decade. But answering it requires measurements taken before the outcomes of interest occur. Without baseline measurements of antibody levels, avidity, cellular immunity, and vaccination history, later cases will be much harder to interpret. We will know who became infected, but we will have far less ability to determine why.Much of that baseline could be established by expanding serosurveys already being conducted and linking data that already exist. Beginning now would allow researchers to follow the transition prospectively rather than reconstruct it after the fact.There is still time to do that. By 2033, the first modern vaccine-era cohort will be sixty-five. Whether their immunity has persisted, waned, or changed in ways that matter clinically should be something we have measured before widespread exposure provides the answer for us.RWM/JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ReferencesBolotin, Shelly, Stephanie L. Hughes, Nazish Gul, Sumaiya Khan, Paul A. Rota, Alberto Severini, Susan Hahne, et al. 2020. “What Is the Evidence to Support a Correlate of Protection for Measles? A Systematic Review.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 221 (10): 1576 to 1583.Bolotin, Shelly, Selma Osman, Stephanie L. Hughes, Archchun Ariyarajah, Andrea C. Tricco, Sumaiya Khan, Lennon Li, et al. 2022. “In Elimination Settings, Measles Antibodies Wane after Vaccination but Not after Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 226 (7): 1127 to 1139.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026. “Measles Vaccine Recommendations and Presumptive Evidence of Immunity.” Atlanta, GA.Chen, Robert T., Lauri E. Markowitz, Paul Albrecht, John A. Stewart, Lynne M. Mofenson, Stephen R. Preblud, and Walter A. Orenstein. 1990. “Measles Antibody: Reevaluation of Protective Titers.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 162 (5): 1036 to 1042.Jacobson, Robert M., Inna G. Ovsyannikova, Robert A. Vierkant, V. Shane Pankratz, and Gregory A. Poland. 2012. “Independence of Measles-Specific Humoral and Cellular Immune Responses to Vaccination.” Human Immunology 73 (5): 474 to 479.Mina, Michael J., Tomasz Kula, Yumei Leng, Mamie Li, Rory D. de Vries, Mikael Knip, Heli Siljander, et al. 2019. “Measles Virus Infection Diminishes Preexisting Antibodies That Offer Protection from Other Pathogens.” Science 366 (6465): 599 to 606.Mossong, Joël, D. James Nokes, W. John Edmunds, Martin J. Cox, Sam Ratnam, and Claude P. Muller. 1999. “Modeling the Impact of Subclinical Measles Transmission in Vaccinated Populations with Waning Immunity.” American Journal of Epidemiology 150 (11): 1238 to 1249.Mossong, Joël, Chris J. O’Callaghan, and Sam Ratnam. 2000. “Modelling Antibody Response to Measles Vaccine and Subsequent Waning of Immunity in a Low Exposure Population.” Vaccine 19 (4 to 5): 523 to 529.Mossong, Joël, and Claude P. Muller. 2003. “Modelling Measles Re-emergence as a Result of Waning of Immunity in Vaccinated Populations.” Vaccine 21 (31): 4597 to 4603.Nic Lochlainn, Laura M., Brechje de Gier, Nicoline van der Maas, Rob van Binnendijk, Peter M. Strebel, Tracey Goodman, and Susan Hahne. 2019. “Additional Evidence on Serological Correlates of Protection against Measles: An Observational Cohort Study among Once Vaccinated Children Exposed to Measles.” Vaccines 7 (4): 158.Pan American Health Organization. 2026. “Update on the Review of Measles Elimination Status.” Washington, DC, March 2.Robert, Alexis, Anne M. Suffel, and Adam J. Kucharski. 2024. “Long-Term Waning of Vaccine-Induced Immunity to Measles in England: A Mathematical Modelling Study.” Lancet Public Health 9 (10): e766 to e775.Whittle, Hilton C., Peter Aaby, Badara Samb, Henrik Jensen, John Bennett, and François Simondon. 1999. “Effect of Subclinical Infection on Maintaining Immunity against Measles in Vaccinated Children in West Africa.” Lancet 353 (9147): 98 to 102.