The Measles Booster Problem

Two decay curvesPeter Panum sailed to the Faroe Islands in 1846 to investigate an epidemic that infected some six thousand of the islands’ seven thousand eight hundred residents. The exceptions were the elderly who had survived the epidemic of 1781. Not one of them was reinfected sixty-five years later (Panum 1847).Influenza changes its surface proteins continuously, which is why last year’s antibodies stop fitting this year’s virus. Measles does not do this. It carries a single serotype and does not drift, so an antibody response raised against the wild virus of 1781 still fitted the virus of 1846 exactly. The durability question for measles is a question about the human immune system alone, uncomplicated by any change in the target.Vaccine-induced immunity behaves differently from what Panum found among the Faroese. Bianchi and colleagues tested 611 Italian students and hospital residents. Twenty percent of the twice vaccinated had no detectable protective IgG, against six percent of those reporting natural infection, with geometric mean antibody levels of 92.2 and 213.3, respectively (Bianchi et al. 2021). A 2022 systematic review in the Journal of Infectious Diseases put the general finding in its title: in elimination settings, measles antibodies wane after vaccination but not after infection. Kennedy and colleagues at Mayo reached a parallel conclusion on the differential durability of the measles and mumps components of MMR (Kennedy et al. 2019).Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareHow the body decides how long to rememberA B cell is a white blood cell carrying a single antibody design on its surface, generated by a random shuffling of gene segments before the cell ever meets anything. Each of us carries billions of them, and collectively they hold an enormous library of possible shapes. When a virus arrives, the small subset whose antibodies happen to fit some piece of that virus structure (a viral antigen) gets activated.Those cells do not begin producing antibody straight away. They migrate into a temporary structure called a germinal center, which forms inside lymph nodes, tonsils, and the spleen during an infection and dissolves afterward. Inside it, B cells introduce mutations into the genes encoding their own antibodies at a rate a million times higher than ordinary genetic mutation. They then compete for limited access to the virus antigen and for survival signals from helper T cells. A cell whose mutation improved the fit captures more antigen, receives more help, survives, and divides. A cell whose mutation worsened the fit dies. The cycle repeats for weeks, and immunity gradually improves over the course of an infection rather than appearing fully formed at the start. The antibody a patient carries in week four grips its target far more tightly than the one they carried in week one. Immunologists call that grip strength avidity, and it matters as much or more than the quantity of antibody present.  Antibody quantity is measured as titer and is easy to measure, which is why titer is what gets reported.  Antibody avidity is much harder to measure, and so is rarely reported except in academic studies and a few clinical trials.The germinal center produces two surviving antibody-associated B cell types, and the difference between them determines everything that follows.Memory B cells leave the germinal center and go quiet. They circulate for decades doing nothing measurable, carrying their refined antibody design on the surface, waiting. On re-exposure to the antigen they are primed to recognize, they activate, divide rapidly, and begin manufacturing antibody in quantity, a process taking three to seven days.  In vaccine terms, this is called a recall response.Long-lived plasma cells do something else. They abandon surface antibody production, migrate to the bone marrow, and settle into specialized niches where supporting cells keep them alive. There they secrete antibody continuously into the bloodstream for decades, neither dividing nor requiring further contact with the virus. A plasma cell seeded in a Faroese child in 1781 was still pumping measles antibody into that person’s blood in 1846.When a laboratory reports a “resting” measles antibody level (titer), it is measuring the output of that bone marrow population. Memory B cells contribute nothing to a resting titer because they are secreting nothing. Every seroprevalence study on this subject inherits the resulting ambiguity. A low number establishes that the plasma cell pool has thinned, and says nothing directly about whether the memory cells remain.How large a plasma cell pool a person ends up with depends on how much antigen the germinal centers processed and for how long during the period when this germinal center B cell “education” process occurs, which is the key characteristic that separates disease from vaccination.  This helps explain why “natural immunity” from an infection usually works better than vaccination for producing durable, long-lasting immunity.  Basically, like a lot of things, good B cell education takes time and experience.Why the vaccine cannot match the diseaseWild measles is a systemic infection. The virus replicates for days to enormous titers, spreads through every lymph node in the body, and feeds antigen to germinal centers across the whole lymphoid system for two weeks or more. The plasma cell pool that processes produces is very large, and because those cells persist without further stimulation, so does the antibody they produce.Attenuated vaccine strains are crippled on purpose. They were passaged repeatedly in cell culture until they lost the ability to replicate efficiently in humans, which is also what makes them safe. An attenuated vaccine strain (like what is used in the measles vaccines) produces a brief, limited, largely local infection. The germinal centers it drives are smaller and shorter lived, and the plasma cell population they seed into marrow is smaller in proportion. Antibody from a smaller pool falls below detection sooner as individual plasma cells die off.The vaccine's safety and its shorter durability are basically the same property viewed from two angles. That fact is uncomfortable for those who take the simplistic view of all vaccines being “safe and effective”.  It argues for a better product rather than against vaccination, but it does mean that vaccine-induced and “natural” immunity achieved through actual infection should not be described as equivalent.  They are not equivalent.  Naturally acquired immunity from measles is clearly superior, but it comes with a cost: the risks associated with a primary live measles infection.Two further consequences follow that typical oversimplified “public health” messaging tends to skip past. Until elimination, vaccinated people were regularly re-exposed to circulating wild virus. Those exposures were usually silent, producing no illness, but they restimulated memory cells and topped up antibody levels. Eliminating measles removed that free, silent booster, and universal vaccination program success unmasked the gradually waning memory-cell immunity that endemic circulation had been correcting for decades. Separately, infants of vaccinated mothers receive lower antibody levels across the placenta than infants of naturally immune mothers, widening the window of infant vulnerability before the first dose. Both effects are permanent features of the transition away from a naturally immune population.  Vaccination also has a “public health” cost, one that is never tallied in the approved pro-vaccination messaging narratives.Where the susceptibility accumulatesMeasles mortality does not track age in a straight line. It traces a U. Infants under one year carry the highest risk (particularly infants born of vaccinated mothers relative to mothers with naturally acquired immunity). The curve falls through early childhood, bottoms out between ages five and nine, then climbs again through adult life. The World Health Organization places the bottom of this U-shaped curve (adult inflection point) near age thirty (WHO 2026).Set that curve against the serology. Seropositivity is defined by measuring total circulating anti-measles antibodies. Recent Czech survey data put seropositivity at 61.5 percent in the 30 to 39 cohort, the lowest of any age stratum, while those fifty and older who were infected in the pre-vaccine era sat at 96 percent and above. The population accumulating antibody gaps is the same population moving onto the steeper arm of the severity curve.  In other words, the consequences of waning vaccine-induced immunity in the elderly are currently masked because they have natural immunity from being infected as children.  But over time, as the global elderly population will become dominated by those who were vaccinated rather than infected, the problems and risks associated with the relative lack of durable protection from measles vaccines will become more prevalent.Adult measles is a different disease from the pediatric version. Hospitalization runs several fold higher, and pneumonia dominates the mortality. Hepatic involvement has been reported in the large majority of adult cases. Encephalitis holds roughly flat by age at about one per thousand, but a patient with reduced physiologic reserve tolerates it far worse.Older adults are almost absent from current case counts, and that absence is immunity rather than resistance. Americans born before 1957 nearly all contracted measles as children. Whatever we know about measles in a seventy-year-old comes from scattered case reports, because no susceptible elderly cohort exists to study. That naturally immune generation is dying off, and what replaces it is a population whose protection decays on a schedule.The obvious remedyThe intuitive policy response to all of this is another dose. Serological modelers in Thailand proposed a third measles-containing dose at age eighteen to twenty, calculated to close the young adult gap. Korea is weighing a third MMR dose for young healthcare workers. Occupational health programs in most countries already do a version of this, screening staff and revaccinating the seronegative regardless of documented history.Extend that logic, and you arrive at the proposal worth examining. Give a third dose in late adolescence. Give a fourth somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five, when the serological data say a vaccinated cohort has spent decades decaying without natural boosting. The reasoning is coherent, the target population is real, and the delivery infrastructure already exists. Inconveniently, it also does not work.Why the boost failsAnichini and colleagues followed twenty-four individuals who remained seronegative for measles years after completing the two-dose schedule. Eleven seroconverted after a single booster, and thirteen required a second. Antibody levels were then tracked at one and three years. Booster doses in subjects with waning antibodies produced low IgG levels that declined significantly over three years, and neutralizing antibody stayed low in single- and double-booster recipients alike (Anichini et al. 2024). The paper’s title states the conclusion without hedging: seronegative vaccinees may not benefit from multiple booster doses in restoring immunity.Fiebelkorn and colleagues had reported the same shape in young adults given a third MMR dose, measuring neutralizing antibody, cell-mediated immunity, and antibody avidity before and after (Fiebelkorn et al. 2016). Levels rise and then return toward where they started. Korean investigators following seronegative healthcare workers two years after one or two booster doses found fewer than half retaining a medium or high neutralizing titer.The explanation lies in what a live attenuated vaccine has to do in order to work. It must replicate. A dose of MMR contains a small quantity of weakened virus, and the response it provokes depends on that virus multiplying enough to generate a meaningful quantity of antigen over a sustained period. Only sustained presentation drives germinal centers hard enough to seed new plasma cells.In a partially immune person, whatever antibody remains, even at levels a laboratory calls negative, binds the incoming vaccine virus and neutralizes it. The particles are cleared before they can establish an infection, and the germinal center machinery never fully engages. What happens instead is a recall response. Existing memory B cells recognize the antigen, wake, divide, and secrete antibody, which raises the measured level for a period of months to a couple of years. Immunologists call this an anamnestic response, and it is real protection while it lasts. But memory cells doing a temporary job is a different thing from construction of a new bone marrow plasma cell population, and when the recall response subsides the person returns to where they began.The result runs backward from what the policy intends. Boosting works best in people carrying no residual antibody, meaning those who never responded properly in the first place, and works worst in people with partial immunity, who are the population the exercise means to protect. A dose at fifty buys a few years of elevated antibody in some fraction of recipients. It cannot restore the durability that natural infection confers, because the mechanism generating that durability is structurally unavailable to an attenuated virus meeting pre-existing antibody.Clearly a better vaccine is needed.  One that immunologically acts more like an attenuated measles virus, but does not require viral replication.  That is precisely the rationale that I developed in the late 1980s for using nucleic acid-based gene therapy (DNA or mRNA) for vaccination purposes. The challenge both then and now is how to do this safely.The seroprevalence numbers also overstate the gapThe twenty percent figure predicts something we ought to be able to see. If a fifth of two-dose adults were genuinely susceptible, outbreaks would generate adult attack rates that nobody observes. Measles is among the most transmissible pathogens known, and a susceptible fifth of the adult population would show up in outbreak data immediately.The gap between plasma cells and memory cells explains the discrepancy. As previously discussed, serum antibody levels measure the first population and are blind to the second. Someone whose measured antibody has fallen below the laboratory threshold may still carry an intact memory compartment holding the high-avidity antibody designs refined during their original germinal center response.Timing decides whether that matters. Measles has an incubation period of ten to fourteen days between exposure and illness, and a memory recall response begins producing antibody within three to seven days. Someone with no circulating antibody but functional memory can therefore mount a defense before the virus completes its expansion, and will often experience either nothing at all or a mild, modified illness. This is why the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices declines to recommend routine antibody screening of documented two-dose recipients, a position defensible on the biology rather than merely being conservative or cost-driven.The threshold itself is also thin. The currently accepted working correlate of protection near 120 mIU/mL descends largely from a single college outbreak investigation, where investigators compared pre-exposure antibody levels against those who subsequently fell ill, and used that correlation to derive a number (Chen et al. 1990). An entire architecture of screening, revaccination, and occupational policy rests on that one study. Nobody has re-derived it in an elimination-era population (ergo, the current situation rather than a population with many who had natural immunity), and every argument about waning, this one included, inherits its uncertainty.What re-dosing can reasonably accomplishSome of the case survives. Targeted revaccination has defensible indications, though not the ones a fixed-age schedule would capture.As if all of this were not complicated enough, birth cohort is more important than chronological age in this case. The American two-dose schedule did not become universal until 1989, so people born between 1957 and 1985 may have received a single dose, and single-dose recipients carry documented secondary failure risk that twice-vaccinated recipients largely do not.Occupational, travel, and outbreak-response revaccination all remain sensible for this birth cohort based on the same reasoning that supports post-exposure prophylaxis. A transient antibody elevation is worth having when you can predict the exposure window, and worth much less when you cannot.One population no dosing schedule reaches. Adults on rituximab (a monoclonal antibody indicated for the treatment of B-cell malignancies and autoimmune disorders)or other B-cell depleting therapy, on methotrexate, on chronic corticosteroids, or with active malignancy face the highest measles risk among adults, and they cannot receive a live attenuated vaccine at all. Rituximab destroys the B cell compartment outright, erasing both memory cells and the capacity to respond to a new dose. Their protection depends on the immunity of the people around them and on post-exposure immune globulin. Any honest discussion of adult measles policy has to account for the group the policy structurally cannot help.The one cohort worth actually findingAn argument about waning immunity in the general population is a diagnosis. A narrower group in this country has a concrete policy ask that already exists, sits on the books, and goes almost entirely ignored and unexecuted by “public health” guidance and practice.Two measles vaccines were licensed in the United States in 1963. One was a live attenuated Edmonston B product. The other was a formalin-inactivated killed vaccine, marketed as Pfizer-Vax Measles-K. The killed Pfizer product did not protect, and it was withdrawn in 1967. Fewer than one million American children received it (CDC 2026c).Failure to protect was the smaller problem. Fulginiti and colleagues described what happened when those children met wild measles years later. They developed atypical measles syndrome: high fever, a rash beginning peripherally on the palms and soles and spreading inward, nodular pulmonary infiltrates, pleural effusions, and very high antibody levels (Fulginiti et al. 1967).The immunology behind that syndrome is worth spelling out. Killing a virus with formalin cross-links its surface proteins and distorts their shape, so the immune system builds antibodies against a deformed template. Those antibodies bind the real virus, but they bind it in the wrong places and with poor grip, failing to block it from entering cells. Antibody that attaches without neutralizing causes harm. Virus and antibody form clumps called immune complexes, which lodge in small blood vessels and in lung tissue and recruit inflammatory cells to attack them. Much of the lung damage in atypical measles is the patient’s own immune system reacting to those deposits. The helper T cell response was also skewed toward supporting antibody production rather than destroying infected cells, leaving the patient with the wrong tool for the job.  This is an example of vaccine-induced disease enhancement, one of many.Clinically the syndrome runs backward from ordinary measles, which produces a rash starting on the face and moving down and out. Atypical measles starts at the extremities and moves inward, so a physician pattern-matching on the classic description will not recognize it.ACIP has recommended revaccinating this group for decades. Anyone who received killed measles vaccine, or measles vaccine of unknown type, between 1963 and 1967 should be considered unvaccinated and given at least one dose of live attenuated vaccine (CDC 2026c). Documented receipt of live vaccine in that window remains valid and needs nothing further. But finding documentation of which vaccine was given to whom decades ago is essentially impossible.Children vaccinated between 1963 and 1967 were born between 1953 and 1966. Those born before 1957 are presumed immune from natural infection anyway, which leaves a birth cohort of 1957 to 1966. In 2026, they are approximately sixty to seventy years old.They now sit on the climbing arm of the severity curve. Reduced pulmonary reserve and comorbid disease are common at that age, and so is immunosuppressive therapy for rheumatologic or oncologic indications. They are young enough that the pre-vaccine natural immunity of their older siblings does not cover them, and they would present, if infected, with a syndrome almost no practicing American physician has seen.Practically nobody holds a 1963 vaccination card. That is not an obstacle to the recommendation. It is the reason for it. Without documentation that the dose was live, the guidance directs revaccination, and one dose of MMR in an immunocompetent sixty-five-year-old is a cheap, well-characterized intervention. The screening question fits in a sentence, belongs in every adult primary care visit for that birth cohort, and is not being asked.  A rational public health response would be to make monovalent measles vaccine available for these people, so that they were not forced to receive unnecessary mumps and rubella vaccine products.This is the version of a re-dosing recommendation I would defend before a policy committee. It targets a defined cohort rather than a chronological band, and rests on a documented product failure rather than a modeled seroprevalence curve. No new guidance is required, because the guidance was written decades ago and has simply stopped being executed.What happens when the virus meets a susceptible hostClemens von Pirquet reported in 1908 that children with measles lost their reactivity to the tuberculin skin test (von Pirquet 1908). That test works by injecting a tuberculosis protein under the skin and looking for a raised area two days later, which appears only if the person carries T cells already primed against tuberculosis. Children who had that reaction before measles stopped having it afterward, for weeks. Their T cell memory had been damaged, and physicians of that era also watched tuberculosis itself re-appear after measles.Michael Mina and colleagues put numbers on the consequence a century later. They compared measles incidence against subsequent deaths from other infectious diseases in England and Wales, the United States, and Denmark, testing how long a delay best explained the relationship. The best fit corresponded to twenty-seven months, implicating measles in a large share of the pre-vaccine childhood mortality that had been attributed to other organisms (Mina et al. 2015).  In other words, live measles infection produces a short-term (approximately 27-month) acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.  Just so that Wikipedia editors and corporate media shills are clear, I am not saying that measles causes the AIDS disease classically associated with HIV infection.  I am saying that primary live measles infection in children causes a different form of an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.The same group (Mina et al.) later measured the damage directly. Their assay, VirScan, uses a library of engineered viruses displaying short fragments of thousands of human pathogens on their surfaces. Serum is washed over the library and whatever antibodies the patient carries stick to their matching fragments. Sequencing the captured fragments produces an inventory of everything a person’s antibodies recognize. Applied to seventy-seven unvaccinated Dutch children before and after natural measles, it showed elimination of between eleven and seventy-three percent of that inventory (Mina et al. 2019). Petrova and colleagues sequenced the antibody genes of B cells in a subset of the same children. They documented loss of previously expanded memory clones alongside incomplete rebuilding of the naive pool, which returned in an immature state (Petrova et al. 2019).  Read that last part again.  What that means is that recovery from this type of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome did not result in recovery of the lost “educated” memory B cells.  “Recovery” in this case means getting back to a population of B cells that are in a pre-educated, pre-immune stateRepertoire loss unfolds across two to three years. A separate and much faster failure accounts for the deaths.How does this happen? Measles virus enters cells by latching onto a specific surface protein, in the way a key fits a lock. Its principal lock on immune cells is a molecule called CD150, also known as SLAM. Distribution of that molecule determines what the virus can infect, and CD150 is displayed on activated and memory T and B cells, on dendritic cells, and on macrophages. These are the cells that get killed by measles virus.  Resting naive cells carry little of it. By the accident of receptor choice, the virus targets the cells that hold a person’s accumulated immunological memory.Acute measles produces a profound drop in circulating lymphocytes that resolves within one to two weeks, and the speed of that recovery is why the damage went underestimated for a century. Macaque work from de Vries and colleagues showed why the recovery misleads (de Vries et al. 2012). Lymphocytes repopulating the blood are overwhelmingly new cells generated during the response to measles itself, specific for measles and little else. A complete blood count reports how many lymphocytes a patient has, and cannot report what those lymphocytes recognize. The count normalizes while the range of things the immune system can answer does not.Simultaneously, the virus destroys the ciliated cells lining the airway. Those cells beat in coordinated waves to sweep mucus, debris, and inhaled bacteria upward and out. With them gone, bacteria that would ordinarily be cleared settle into the lower airway instead.So the patient with measles pneumonitis has an injured airway with no clearance mechanism, a hollowed-out immune memory compartment, and a complete blood count that reads reassuringly normal- which is what physicians are trained to focus on. Secondary bacterial pneumonia is the modal mechanism by which measles causes death, rather than an alternative diagnosis to it.  Which is why physicians must be hyper-alert to the onset and treatment of bacterial pneumonia after measles infection, instead of relying on the old clinical saw of not treating a viral infection with antibiotics.West Texas as the demonstrationCDC reviewed medical records for 54 of the 60 patients hospitalized during the first two months of the Gaines County outbreak. Forty-nine were under eighteen, and forty-eight had no underlying condition. All were unvaccinated or of unknown status. Seventy-two percent developed pneumonia, and seventy percent required supplemental oxygen (CDC 2026b).Thirty-one and a half percent carried a documented co-infecting pathogen. Mycoplasma pneumoniae accounted for five, influenza four, respiratory syncytial virus three, and group A Streptococcus three, with further organisms recovered from sputum and blood cultures. Just over half received antibiotics (CDC 2026b). Infection and disease from those organisms are what an emptied memory B-cell compartment and a stripped airway produce.Two previously healthy unvaccinated children died in Lubbock hospitals, in February and April of 2025. A third death occurred in an unvaccinated New Mexico adult. Pierre Kory reviewed records released by the families and argued that both children died of bacterial pneumonia that was mismanaged (Kory 2025). He faults the antibiotic selection and the discontinuation of antibiotics on a readmission days after ICU discharge. He also faults a late sputum culture and the failure to consider hospital-acquired organisms until day six of eight. Those records have not been published in full, and no independent panel has adjudicated the reading, so the criticisms stand as hypothesis rather than finding.If the hypothesis is correct, what it claims is that the treating teams anchored on the viral diagnosis and were slow to pursue the bacterial one. That would confirm rather than contradict measles as the cause of death. Post-measles bacterial superinfection is the specific pathway measles uses, and a clinician misses it because measles occupies the diagnostic frame physicians are typically focused on. Most American pediatricians practicing in 2025 had worked their entire careers without seeing a measles case.The United States has now confirmed 2,566 measles cases in 2026, exceeding the 2,289 recorded in all of 2025 and standing as the highest annual count since 1991 (CDC 2026a). No one has died. Three deaths across 2,289 cases in 2025 works out near 1.3 per thousand, which predicts roughly three deaths this year, and observing zero carries a probability near four percent under a simple Poisson assumption. The hospitalization rate moved further and more convincingly, from eleven percent to seven percent (CDC 2026a). Ascertainment differences and community differences deserve a hearing, and the year is not over. My own reading is that clinicians changed, because the Lubbock deaths generated more argument about post-measles bacterial pneumonia than any American measles case in thirty years.  Unfortunately, three died; those deaths probably could have been avoided if the clinicians involved had promptly recognized the threat of secondary bacterial pneumonia, but the resulting widespread coverage in media (although predominantly misinformed) alerted virtually every US physician of the threat posed by post-measles bacterial pneumonia.The product, not the scheduleThe current vaccine cannot generate the bone marrow plasma cell population that wild infection generates, and repetition cannot make it do so, because pre-existing antibody neutralizes each subsequent dose before it can replicate.A better product would have to clear a specific bar. It must seed durable plasma cell memory without inflicting the lymphocyte depletion and memory loss that produce that durability in natural infection. It must remain immunogenic in the presence of residual antibody, which a replication-dependent platform cannot do by definition.A non-replicating platform sidesteps that problem. Because it does not need to multiply, neutralization of the inoculum does not defeat it. Deliver enough antigen in the dose itself, with an adjuvant to drive germinal center activity, and you can immunize someone who already carries antibody. Candidate approaches include adjuvanted subunit protein directed at the two measles surface glycoproteins, viral vectors, and nucleic acid platforms.Every one of those carries the shadow of Pfizer-Vax Measles-K. Atypical measles arose from exactly this design category: a non-replicating measles antigen generating binding antibody without neutralizing capacity, which skewed the helper T cell response the wrong way. Modern adjuvants and modern antigen design address that failure mode directly, and the immunology is far better understood than it was in 1963. The burden of proof still sits with the challenger. Any non-replicating measles immunogen must demonstrate high-avidity neutralizing antibody and appropriate helper polarization before it approaches a pediatric population, and must be followed for years afterward.  It will take many years to responsibly demonstrate “safety and effectiveness”.Live attenuated vaccine carries a warning from the opposite direction. WHO recommended high-titer Edmonston-Zagreb vaccine for infants in 1989 and withdrew the recommendation in 1992, after prospective African cohorts showed increased mortality among vaccinated girls (Garenne et al. 1991). In the case of measles, increasing the antigen dose is not a safe default with live-attenuated virus technology.None of it can be evaluated without a defensible correlate of protection. Developing against a threshold derived from one 1985 outbreak means developing against a number nobody has interrogated in forty years, while ignoring the memory compartment that appears to do much of the actual protecting. Re-deriving that correlate in an elimination-era population, with cell-mediated and avidity endpoints alongside neutralization, is the prerequisite work, and it will be expensive, but still cheap relative to what it would inform and the consequences of just continuing to ignore the problem.Why it will not get builtThe scientific case for a better measles vaccine is straightforward. The economic case against building one is stronger.MMR is off patent, manufactured at very low unit cost, and carries a headline effectiveness figure of ninety-seven percent after two doses. A challenger would need to demonstrate superiority against that incumbent, in an elimination setting where clinical endpoints are nearly unobtainable, across a trial population large enough to detect durability differences that take twenty years to manifest. No sponsor will fund that. No regulator has a pathway for it. The people who would benefit are forty years downstream and cannot express a preference today.This is a market that cannot price a benefit deferred past the planning horizon of every participant. Public health agencies respond to the incentive structure the same way manufacturers do. Acknowledging that vaccine-induced immunity wanes invites an argument they would rather not have, so the durability question stays unfunded and largely unasked. The result is a population trading a permanent, durable immunity for a decaying one, with no serious program underway to close the difference.The two-dose schedule remains the right recommendation for a child today, and the ninety-three percent of current American cases occurring in unvaccinated people is where the marginal dose does the most good. Both statements hold at once, alongside the observation that we have built an entire elimination strategy on a product whose central limitation we decline to study.While that argument waits, work is available that requires no new science, no new authorization, and no new money. The cohort is identifiable. Americans born between 1957 and 1966 are now sixty to seventy years old, and any of them vaccinated against measles before 1968 may have received the inactivated product. ACIP has directed for decades that such a person be treated as unvaccinated.I am in this cohort. I turn sixty-seven this year; my wife and partner Jill Glasspool Malone turns sixty-six, and neither of us can produce a vaccination record from the 1960s. Almost no one our age can. Under the guidance as written, both of us count as unvaccinated against measles. Were either of us to meet the wild virus, we would be candidates for a syndrome that no physician now in practice has seen outside a textbook.The question at the physician’s visit takes one sentence. Were you vaccinated against measles before 1968, and is there any record of which vaccine you got? Almost no one will have the record. That absence settles the question rather than complicating it. The existing recommendation turns on documentation of a live dose, and revaccination is the default when none exists. One dose of MMR suffices for most, two for anyone with elevated exposure risk through occupation or travel.  Ideally, the physician would offer a monovalent measles vaccine, but those have been taken off the market for convenience in the childhood vaccination schedule.Ordering serology first is tempting, but it answers the wrong question. An antibody level in a sixty-five-year-old cannot distinguish childhood infection from a live vaccine dose from an inactivated one. The problem in this cohort is a response that was defective from the beginning, not one that decayed. Presumptive revaccination costs a single dose of an off-patent product with sixty years of safety data behind it. Screening costs a blood draw, a return visit, and a result that will not tell the clinician what to do.One exception carries over from the discussion of immunosuppression. Live attenuated vaccine cannot be given to a patient on B cell depleting therapy, on chronic corticosteroids, or with active malignancy, and those patients sit inside this same age band. Their protection runs through exposure avoidance, post-exposure immune globulin, and the immunity of the people around them, which argues for vaccinating their household rather than leaving the cohort alone.Every year this group ages further onto the climbing arm of the severity curve, and every year more of them acquire the comorbidities and the immunosuppressive prescriptions that would close the option. Adult primary care already sees them. Medicare annual wellness visits already provide the encounter.Nothing stands between the recommendation and its execution except the fact that nobody is doing it. The last time this country distributed a measles vaccine that did not work, it wrote a correction and then stopped looking for the people who needed it.Malone News is funded by readers rather than sponsors, advertisers, or grants. The argument above is that the measles durability question stays open because nobody with money benefits from closing it. The same incentive structure governs writing about it. Nineteen primary sources went into this piece, including a federal recommendation that has sat unexecuted on a guidance page since the Nixon administration. Free subscribers receive every essay. Paid subscribers are the reason there is a next one.Nothing here constitutes medical advice for any individual patient. Clinical and vaccination decisions belong to patients and the physicians who examine them.RWMReferencesAnichini, Gabriele, et al. 2024. “Seronegative Vaccinees May Not Benefit From Multiple Booster Doses of MMR Vaccine in Restoring Immunity.”Journal of Medical Virology96 (12): e70135.Bianchi, Francesco Paolo, Simona Mascipinto, Pasquale Stefanizzi, Sara De Nitto, Cinzia Germinario, and Silvio Tafuri. 2021. “Long-Term Immunogenicity After Measles Vaccine vs. Wild Infection: An Italian Retrospective Cohort Study.”Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics17 (7): 2078-2084.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026a. “Measles Cases and Outbreaks.” Data as of August 13, 2026. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026b. “Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with Measles During an Outbreak: West Texas, January to March 2025.”Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report75 (20).Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026c. “Chapter 13: Measles.” InEpidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases(Pink Book). Also “Measles Vaccination for Specific Groups,” https://www.cdc.gov/measles/hcp/vaccine-considerations/specific-groups.html.Chen, Robert T., Lauri E. Markowitz, Paul Albrecht, et al. 1990. “Measles Antibody: Reevaluation of Protective Titers.”Journal of Infectious Diseases162 (5): 1036-1042.de Vries, Rory D., Rik L. de Swart, et al. 2012. “Measles Immune Suppression: Lessons from the Macaque Model.”PLoS Pathogens8 (8): e1002885.Fiebelkorn, Amy Parker, Laura A. Coleman, Edward A. Belongia, et al. 2016. “Measles Virus Neutralizing Antibody Response, Cell-Mediated Immunity, and Immunoglobulin G Antibody Avidity Before and After Receipt of a Third Dose of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine in Young Adults.”Journal of Infectious Diseases213 (7): 1115-1123.Fulginiti, Vincent A., Joseph J. Eller, Allan W. Downie, and C. Henry Kempe. 1967. “Altered Reactivity to Measles Virus: Atypical Measles in Children Previously Immunized with Inactivated Measles Virus Vaccines.”JAMA202 (12): 1075-1080.Garenne, Michel, Odile Leroy, Jean-Pierre Beau, and Ibrahima Sene. 1991. “Child Mortality After High-Titre Measles Vaccines: Prospective Study in Senegal.”Lancet338 (8772): 903-907.“In Elimination Settings, Measles Antibodies Wane After Vaccination but Not After Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” 2022.Journal of Infectious Diseases226 (7): 1127-1139.Kennedy, Richard B., Inna G. Ovsyannikova, Amber Thomas, Beth R. Larrabee, Steven Rubin, and Gregory A. Poland. 2019. “Differential Durability of Immune Responses to Measles and Mumps Following MMR Vaccination.”Vaccine37 (13): 1775-1784.Kory, Pierre. 2025. “My Expert Review of the Medical Records of the Two Girls in Texas Who Purportedly Died of Measles.”Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings, April 11.Mina, Michael J., C. Jessica E. Metcalf, Rik L. de Swart, Albert D. M. E. Osterhaus, and Bryan T. Grenfell. 2015. “Long-Term Measles-Induced Immunomodulation Increases Overall Childhood Infectious Disease Mortality.”Science348 (6235): 694-699.Mina, Michael J., Tomasz Kula, Yumei Leng, Mamie Li, Rory D. de Vries, Mikael Knip, et al. 2019. “Measles Virus Infection Diminishes Preexisting Antibodies That Offer Protection from Other Pathogens.”Science366 (6465): 599-606.Panum, Peter Ludvig. 1847.Observations Made During the Epidemic of Measles on the Faroe Islands in the Year 1846. Copenhagen.Petrova, Velislava N., Rory D. de Vries, Colin A. Russell, et al. 2019. “Incomplete Genetic Reconstitution of B Cell Pools Contributes to Prolonged Immunosuppression After Measles.”Science Immunology4 (41): eaay6125.von Pirquet, Clemens. 1908. “Das Verhalten der kutanen Tuberkulinreaktion wahrend der Masern.”Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift34: 1297-1300.World Health Organization. 2026. “Measles.” Fact sheet, July 15.

Summary: Vaccine immunity fades, and another dose does not restore it.


Melanoma: Forty-Four Billion Dollars, No Numbers

M A L O N E . N E W SForty-Four Billion Dollars, No DataModerna and Merck say their personalized mRNA cancer therapy worked in a large melanoma trial. They have not yet shown anyone the data. The distance between those two facts is the story.By Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, and Jill Glasspool Malone, PhDOn the morning of August 19, Merck and Moderna issued a press release. It said that a large clinical trial of a personalized mRNA product, given alongside Merck’s cancer drug Keytruda, had succeeded in patients whose melanoma had been surgically removed (Merck and Moderna 2026a).By the closing bell, Moderna’s stock had risen 177 percent. The company’s market value went from about $25 billion to about $69 billion in one trading session. Trading volume ran roughly nineteen times its three-month average (Motley Fool 2026). Merck gained more than 12 percent (CNBC 2026). Headlines around the world announced that an mRNA cancer vaccine had finally worked.We should be plain about our interest before going further. One of us designed and implemented the core messenger RNA construct that remains in use today. He also developed the benchtop version of the manufacturing process the industry later scaled, and wrote the initial patent disclosures in the late 1980s covering the use of RNA as a drug and its application to vaccination. That is the documented basis for the claim to original inventorship of this platform. It rests on the patent record and its filing dates.It has never included a claim to have invented the COVID vaccines, or to have worked alone. Read what follows as the assessment of people who would like this technology to succeed, and who also read the fine print.The press release contains no numbers.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareWhat the product isSome vocabulary first, because the coverage has been sloppy with it.Every tumor carries mutations. Those mutations produce slightly altered proteins that the patient’s own healthy cells do not make. Immunologists call these altered proteins neoantigens, meaning new antigens. In principle, they are flags the immune system could learn to recognize.The Merck and Moderna product, now named intismeran autogene, works from that idea. A surgeon removes the tumor. A laboratory sequences it and identifies mutations unique to that patient. Software picks up to 34 of them. A custom mRNA molecule is then synthesized that instructs the patient’s cells to manufacture those specific flagged proteins, wrapped in the same fatty particles used in the COVID shots (Merck and Moderna 2026a).The patient receives nine injections over about six months. That is the Moderna component alone. Counted alongside the Keytruda infusions, the earlier trial asked patients for twenty-seven administrations across a year, and the current one asks for eighteen (Weber et al. 2024; Merck and Moderna 2026a). Claims circulating online that Moderna's product is itself an eighteen- or twenty-seven-injection course are wrong. Those totals include Merck's antibody drug, which has been in use since 2014 and is given intravenously.Keytruda does something different. It releases a brake that tumors use to switch off immune cells that would otherwise attack them. The theory of the combination is that one drug supplies the target and the other removes the restraint.Moderna no longer calls this a vaccine. The company calls it an individualized neoantigen therapy, and that is the honest description (Boston Globe 2026). Nobody is preventing melanoma with this. It is given to people who already had the disease cut out, to reduce the chance that it returns. Physicians call that adjuvant treatment. Most of the press has gone on using the word vaccine anyway, and that word is doing work in this debate that the underlying science does not support.What the announcement actually saidThe trial is called INTerpath-001. It enrolled 1,137 patients whose melanoma had been completely removed. Two-thirds received the personalized injections plus Keytruda. One third received Keytruda alone. Treatment ran about a year (Merck and Moderna 2026a).The companies report that the combination beat Keytruda alone on two measures. The first is recurrence-free survival, meaning how long patients go before the cancer comes back or they die. The second is distant metastasis-free survival, meaning how long before the cancer appears somewhere far from the original site.Now consider what the release does not contain. There is no hazard ratio, which is the standard measure of how much a treatment reduces risk. There is no confidence interval, which tells a reader how precise that estimate is. There is no p-value. There is no count of how many patients in each group actually relapsed. There are no survival curves. There is no breakdown by disease stage. The phrase used is “statistically significant and clinically meaningful,” which is a claim about numbers rather than the numbers themselves.The release is not short on language, only on data. Professor Georgina Long of Melanoma Institute Australia, the trial’s principal investigator, called the result “a landmark moment for adjuvant melanoma treatment” (AJMC 2026). Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive, described the findings as “a pivotal moment for the field of cancer research” (Merck and Moderna 2026a).Both statements may prove correct. Neither can be checked by anyone outside the sponsor, because the release supplies no figure against which to test them.A pharmaceutical company telling you its result was clinically meaningful, without showing you the result, is an advertisement. It may happen to be true. It may also fail to survive independent expert scrutiny.Two further details in the release deserve attention. The result comes from a planned interim look, taken before the trial finished. Trials reported at the first moment they cross a statistical threshold tend to overstate the size of the benefit compared with the final tally. That is a known property of the method, not an accusation.Interim looks are legitimate, and they exist for a sound reason.If a treatment is plainly working, it becomes hard to justify keeping the comparison group from it.But they are not free. Each look spends part of a fixed error budget, so whatever remains for the final analysis must clear a stricter bar, and trials are enlarged in advance to absorb the cost. The companies have not said how many looks were planned, how much of the budget this one consumed, or which threshold it crossed. Without those three figures, a reader outside the sponsor cannot judge how strong the result was. Only that it was strong enough to announce.Note also what did not happen. The trial did not stop.It continues to measure whether anyone lives longer. What ended early was the wait for a headline.Overall survival, the measure of whether patients live longer, is not yet available. The release states plainly that the study continues in order to assess it (Merck and Moderna 2026a).If you own MRNA or MRK, or watched Monday's move and wondered whether to chase it, the section you just read is the entire public factual basis for a 177 percent single-day gain. Everything below is what it didn't include.The 157-patient trial this whole program rests on, and the confidence interval in its first published result that touched the line of no effect. The 53 percent survival improvement now circulating in the financial press, and why the study’s own authors labeled that number exploratory and not statistically valid. The comparison drug has been in trials since 2015 without anyone yet demonstrating that a single patient lived longer, which is the regulatory foundation this approval will be built on. Bank of America’s own admission that its team spoke with management before writing the note that moved the models, while retail investors got a press release with no effect size. JPMorgan’s arithmetic showing the melanoma result was worth roughly 3 percent of Moderna’s valuation, against a stock that doubled and then gave back 20 percent the next morning.And the eight specific numbers to look for when the data are finally presented, which is when the market will find out whether Monday was information or enthusiasm.We do not give investment advice, and we do not take pharmaceutical money or advertising. What we do is read the primary literature and report what it says, which is the same job the sell side does for its clients and does not do for you. Paid subscribers are why the work exists.Free subscribers receive our public essays. Paid subscribers receive everything.The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers.Monday’s 177 percent move rested entirely on the section you just read. No hazard ratio, no confidence interval, no patient counts. Below the line: the 157-patient trial underneath the whole program, the survival figure the financial press is misreporting, the analysts who got a call from management while you got a press release, and the eight numbers that will decide whether that move holds when the data are actually presented. No pharmaceutical money. No advertising. No investment advice. Just the primary literature, read carefully.Read more

Summary: Bottom line on the Merck/Moderna immunotherapy product press release


Friday Funnies: Just One More Thing!

The British Home Officehas apparently concluded that asylum seekers arriving in the United Kingdom require a tutorial on what should be universal morality.This week, the government released“Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK: A guide for asylum seekers,”accompanied by a series of illustrated posters explaining some of the finer points of British life.Women are equal to men. Women may work, study and travel without a man’s permission. You may not hit or control your wife. Sex requires consent, including within marriage. Children under 16 cannot consent to sex. Do not follow strangers. Do not block their path. Do not make sexual comments. Do not whistle or make kissing noises at women. Do not photograph people in private situations without permission.There are even separate government posters devoted to“Age of consent,” “Consent,” “Child abuse,” “Domestic abuse,” “Gender equality,” “Harassment,”and“Photography and filming.”These are not memes created by some foreign bot account on X. They are official Home Office materials, published by His Majesty’s Government on August 19, 2026.Which raises the rather obvious question that polite society will presumably regard as impolite:Why did the British government believe these particular instructions needed to be written down?Governments generally do not spend taxpayer money designing illustrated educational campaigns reminding newcomers not to rape women, abuse children, beat their wives or sexually harass strangers unless someone, somewhere, has concluded that there is a reason to do so.Over the last decades, Britons have experienced very large migration flows from profoundly different cultures, which might produce “problems” of assimilation. These were routinely dismissed as xenophobic, racist or simply “far right.”For years,organized groups of men,disproportionately British Pakistani in several of the towns at the center of the scandal, groomed, trafficked and raped vulnerable girls in places such as Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Telford. Authorities had repeated warnings, yet victims were ignored, blamed or treated as troublesome teenagers. Subsequent (conservative) official inquiries documented catastrophic failures by police, councils and social services, including reluctance in some institutions to confront the ethnicity of perpetrators for fear of being called racist or inflaming community tensions.In Rotherham alone, the official inquiry estimated that approximately1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. Britain learned, at an appalling cost to thousands of girls, that refusing to discuss cultural differences does not make those differences disappear.Yet after decades of scandals across numerous English towns, the government’s own 2025 national audit concluded that the data were still so inadequate that Britain could not reliably say how many children had been victimized by grooming gangs nationwide.So, guess what mainstream media and the liberal parliament had to say about that?Apparently the Home Office, while not actually addressing the issue of rape gangs head on, has now decided that spelling out a few expectations might be prudent.Progress, I suppose? Not!How about actually arresting and deporting immigrants who break the law?Real progress, as Britain’s Conservative Party and Reform UK have both campaigned on, would mean dramatically reducing the enormous influx of migrants into a country roughly the size of Alabama, but withabout 11 times as many people packed into essentially the same land area.One might imagine that population density, housing, infrastructure and assimilation would eventually enter the conversation. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for jolly old England.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.JGM

Summary: Is there a modicum of self-awareness “creeping” into UK politics?


Ground News and the Factuality Scam

There is a relatively new player in the news business that I have been watching with considerable interest. Ground News was founded in 2018 by former NASA engineer Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh around what, on its face, is an excellent idea: stop allowing an algorithm to decide which version of the news you are permitted to see.That is a much bigger problem than most people realize. Google News presents itself as an aggregator, but aggregation is itself an editorial act. Someone, or more accurately an algorithm designed and tuned by someone, determines which publications appear at the top of the page, and which are buried twenty stories down, and which effectively disappear. An analysis released by AllSides found that73 percent of the articles appearing on Google News in its 2025 audit came from publications it classified as being on the political Left. Just 1 percent came from the Right.Apple News was somewhat better, but hardly balanced: 50 percent from the Left and 2 percent from the Right. Yahoo is just as bad.The old newspaper editor deciding what belonged above the fold has largely been replaced by an algorithm deciding what belongs on your screen. The technology changed. The gatekeeping did not - in fact, it became much, much worse and more homogeneous across billions of Google, Apple, and Yahoo accounts.We learned how consequential that gatekeeping could become during COVID. Anyone who seriously challenged the official pandemic response, the vaccines or vaccine mandates risked being branded a purveyor of “misinformation.” The mainstream press overwhelmingly participated in that process, while conservative and independent media were far more willing to publish dissenting views. Google News and Apple News then aggregated an information ecosystem already heavily weighted toward one side of that debate, magnifying the effect.We experienced this personally.Robert was repeatedly attacked in the mainstream press for his role in the development of mRNA vaccine technology. The dispute was not some unknowable question of opinion. There are patents, patent disclosures, contemporaneous laboratory records, publications and primary-source documents. Yet major publications repeatedly framed him as falsely claiming to have invented mRNA vaccine technology.The New York Times sent a reporter to our farm for two days. We offered primary documentation concerning Robert’s work, which she refused to review. The resulting article nevertheless became another vehicle for attacking his credibility and disputing his role in the technology. Similar treatments appeared in The Atlantic and the Washington Post. Those articles then became sources for subsequent articles, fact checks, and Wikipedia entries. The secondary reporting gradually displaced the primary historical record.That experience matters because it demonstrates something fundamental about the modern information system. Once a major publication establishes a characterization, other publications cite it. Fact checkers cite those publications. Wikipedia cites the fact-checkers and publications. Search engines elevate the resulting pages. Eventually the sheer number of citations creates the appearance of independent corroboration, although much of the information may ultimately trace back to the same handful of original false or misleading claims.During COVID, this problem became institutionalized. A network of government agencies, public-health officials, academic “misinformation” researchers, NGOs and social-media companies developed specifically to identify, track and counter claims about COVID and the vaccines.One of the most important was Stanford'sVirality Project, which brought together the Stanford Internet Observatory and other organizations to monitor vaccine narratives in real time and exchange information with public-health officials, government agencies and social-media platforms.The CDC simultaneously published guidance for identifying and countering vaccine “misinformation,” while the Virality Project openly recommended greater government coordination and public-private collaboration with the social-media companies. The fundamental problem was that this machinery was operating while the science itself was still evolving. Questions about vaccine efficacy, transmission, natural immunity, adverse events, and mandates could therefore be classified as “misinformation” according to the official consensus of the moment, even when some of those questioning approved narratives were subsequently vindicated, or the topics proved far more complicated than officials had acknowledged.The government did not need to establish an official Ministry of Truth. It already had something uncomfortably close to one in CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. During the COVID era, the federal government developed an extensive system for monitoring what it called misinformation and disinformation, communicating with social-media companies and working alongside academic and nonprofit organizations engaged in the same mission. CISA became an important part of that broader government-private information-control infrastructure, while the Virality Project and others monitored vaccine narratives and maintained relationships with government agencies and technology platforms. The result was an extraordinary arrangement: government officials could identify information they considered false or misleading, outside organizations could track and flag it, and private technology companies could suppress, label or remove it. No formal Orwellian Ministry of Truth was required. Much of the machinery already existed, distributed across government agencies, universities, NGOs and Silicon Valley, with CISA sitting inside that ecosystem.After COVID-19, the fact-checking infrastructure did not disappear. It simply morphed again. What had begun, in part, as an apparatus designed to detect foreign election interference expanded into policing domestic election “misinformation,” then COVID and vaccine “disinformation,” and has now become institutionalized within the broader information ecosystem, including news aggregators and media-rating systems. The emergency may have ended, but the machinery built to police information during the emergency remains. In some ways, these organizations have become empty vessels waiting to be filled by the next national or global crisis, when government once again declares an urgent need to control “misinformation” for the public good. The subject changes. The infrastructure remains.But there is the fact-checking issue and, of course, the bias of big aggregators toward publishing only stories from the left on their front pages.  Effectively eliminating conservative voices.Ground Newsappears, at first, to offer an ingenious solution to precisely this problem. Instead of hiding the political orientation of the sources it aggregates, Ground makes that information part of the product. It groups reporting on the same event and shows readers how publications on the Left, Right, and Center cover it. Its “Blindspot” feature identifies stories receiving extensive coverage on one side of the political spectrum while being largely ignored by the other. Instead of pretending editorial bias doesn’t exist, Ground News exposes it and lets readers make their own judgments.The idea has caught on. Ground News says it now processes nearly 60,000 articles every day from more than 50,000 news sources worldwide. Its Android app alone has been downloaded more than a million times. It offers browser extensions, newsletters, and paid subscription products, and has established itself as a serious alternative to Google News, Apple News, and other major aggregators.There is much to like about its philosophy. Ground News says its mission is to help readers “break free from algorithms,” escape political echo chambers and discover reporting they otherwise might never encounter. The company is not owned by Google or a legacy media conglomerate. It says it is primarily supported by subscribers and a small group of individual investors. Its slogan is“See every side of every news story.”That is precisely why I started using it.For the basic purpose of seeing how different parts of the political spectrum cover the same event, I still think it is an excellent concept. If the New York Times, CNN, and Washington Post are describing an event one way while Fox, the Daily Wire, and Washington Examiner are describing it another, I want to see both. More importantly, if one side of the media ecosystem has collectively decided that a story is not worth covering at all, I want to know that too.But Ground News has incorporated something very different into this otherwise admirable attempt at transparency.Ground News tells its readers which news sources are factual.A couple of examples to illustrate the point:Alongside political bias, Ground News displays what it calls a“Factuality” rating. Publications are classified as Very High, High, Mixed, Low or Very Low factuality. Presented alongside news coverage, the obvious implication is that this tells readers something about the story's factual reliability.It does not.In its ratings of factuality, Ground News has not determined whether the article in front of you is factual. It has not checked the sources in that article. It has not verified the quotations, examined the primary documents, checked the statistics, or determined whether the headline accurately represents the evidence.If you dig deep into their Ground News Methodology page, which doesn’t come up automatically in their news section, they acknowledge this explicitly in their own methodology:“Scores apply to each publication as a whole, not to their individual articles.”This changes the meaning of the rating. It is not a rating of the individual news story, but of the outlet itselfA publication-level reputation score and an article-level determination of factual accuracy are two entirely different things. Yet the publication-wide judgment is displayed alongside individual stories under the extraordinarily authoritative label“Factuality.” Most readers would think that the actual article had been fact-checked, but it has not.Ground News has therefore solved one form of media bias while importing another directly into the solution. This is disingenuous at best.Worse, Ground News doesn’t actually make these factuality determinations itself. The rating is derived from outside media-rating organizations, principallyAd Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check. Ground’s own FAQ states that its staff does not participate in evaluating the Bias or Factuality ratings. It outsources those judgments and then incorporates them into the product.That would be less troubling if the outside ratings were objective measurements of whether publications publish true information.They aren’t.The problem becomes clearer when we look at what these organizations actually measure. Neither Ad Fontes nor Media Bias/Fact Check restricts itself to determining whether statements published by a news organization are factually true. Ad Fontes incorporates such things as language, headlines, expression, context, the distinction between opinion and straight reporting, and comparison with coverage from other news organizations. Media Bias/Fact Check incorporates sourcing, omissions, one-sidedness, adherence to what it considers established scientific evidence, and the judgments of outside fact-checking organizations. These may all be legitimate subjects for media criticism, but they are not synonymous with factual accuracy.More troubling is what happens when those methodologies are applied across the political spectrum. We took a preliminary sample of prominent left- and right-leaning publications and compared their current Ad Fontes reliability ratings using ChatGPT. The results were remarkably consistent. The left-wing publications in our sample averaged35.54 for reliability, while the conservative publications averaged30.74, a difference of nearly five points.One obvious explanation might be that we simply selected more extreme publications on the Right. But according to Ad Fontes’ own political-bias scores, the opposite was true. The left-wing publications in our sample averaged12.84 points from the political center, compared with12.37 points for the conservative publications. In other words, the two groups were almost identically ideological by Ad Fontes’ own measurement, with the Left actually slightly farther from center.Some individual comparisons are even more revealing:The last comparison is particularly difficult to explain as a simple consequence of political extremity. Ad Fontes considersJacobin farther to the Left than The Federalist is to the Right, yet Jacobin receives a reliability score more than10 points higher.We then tested the entire sample statistically rather than relying upon individual examples. After controlling for each publication’s absolute ideological distance from the political center, right-leaning publications were associated with an approximately5.2-point lower Ad Fontes reliability scorein this sample. The result was statistically significant. We can’t prove that Ad Fontes deliberately discriminates against conservative media, but it sure looks that way. And it does establish that the disparity exists in the publications we examined and cannot be explained simply by the conservative outlets being more ideologically extreme.Media Bias/Fact Check showed the same general pattern in our smaller comparison. Five prominent left-wing publications averaged2.72on its factuality scale, while five conservative publications averaged5.50(a higher score showing lower factuality). On the MBFC scale, lower scores indicate greater factual reliability, so once again the conservative publications received substantially worse ratings.That matters enormously when Ground News takes these publication-wide assessments on individual news stories and presents the resulting classification to readers as“Factuality.”Ground News is not beginning with a politically neutral measurement of whether the article in front of you is true. It is importing a rating system that incorporates subjective judgments extending far beyond factual accuracy and which, in our preliminary examination, produces substantially different outcomes for comparable publications on the political Left and Right.The result is a Factuality system tilted against conservative media before Ground News ever displays the first article. Ground News imports that bias, converts it into a simple label for individual news stories, and presents the result to readers as an objective measure of factual reliability.Consequently, Ground News takes those publication-level judgments and attaches their consequences to individual journalism.An article published by a conservative outlet can be completely accurate and rigorously sourced. Every quotation can be correct. Every statistic can be sourced. It can link directly to government documents, court records, or scientific papers. Nobody at Ground News needs to find a single factual error in it.The reader can still encounter that story beneath the designation“Low Factuality.”The judgment is without evidence.This is where the system begins to resemble what Nancy Pelosi once famously described as the “wrap-up smear.” The traditional version is straightforward. An allegation is introduced, usually in an unheard-of outlet, and often it is a “pay-for-play” hit piece - say, by the opposing politician, super PAC, or an industry under scrutiny. The press reports the allegation. Another newspaper republishes the allegation, citing the more recent news outlet as the source. Again, this can be a “pay-for-play” strategy. Then the existence of the press coverage is cited as evidence that the original allegation must have substance. The accusation is laundered through various news sources and eventually is determined by mainstream media to be “fact” - without any additional evidence whatsoever, just an accusation by some small-time media outlet. Finally, the newly minted “fact” makes its way to the AI Overview that Google now places above traditional search results and to Wikipedia.We have experienced that process firsthand as well.On a single podcast in the year 2022 or thereabouts, Robert discussed evidence suggesting that, in rare cases, mRNA COVID-19 vaccination could be associated with an acquired immune deficiency or immunosuppressive syndrome. The distinction is fundamental.Acquired immune deficiency describes a condition. It does not mean HIV infection or HIV-associated AIDS.Robert’s scientific training included early work in laboratories studying retroviruses and immunodeficiency during the period when AIDS itself was first being characterized. This was not an obscure distinction for him.But the distinction rapidly disappeared in the retelling. His comments were transformed into the far more sensational claim that“Robert Malone says the COVID vaccine causes AIDS,”carrying the obvious implication of HIV/AIDS. That characterization moved from publication to publication, with later accounts citing earlier accounts until the media’s description of what Robert had supposedly said became more authoritative than what he actually said.Eventually it arrived at Wikipedia, where Robert is described as having claimed that COVID vaccines were “causing a form of AIDS,” supported by citations to secondary reporting, not the original podcast (long gone from social media). It is a documented fact that these products are associated with immunoglobulin class switching, which represents a form of acquired immunodeficiency.  The reporting establishes the characterization, and that characterization is then cited as evidence that it is true. The implication of this in his permanent record on Wiki either makes him look like a fool or a fraud, neither of which is true.That is the wrap-up smear in action.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareGround News is now industrializing the wrap-up smear.Ground News is now industrializing the wrap-up smear. Conservative news organizations are repeatedly downgraded by fact checkers and media-rating companies until being conservative itself becomes associated with being less factual. Ground News then imports that biased reputational judgment and places it next to every article it publishes.The wrong publication is all that it takes to get a low factuality score on an article.  And that low factuality can be based on whether a news organization is conservative. How f*cked up is that?This produces an extraordinary paradox. Ground News was created, in part, to free readers from an information ecosystem in which algorithms and establishment media organizations decide which sources they should see. Yet its Factuality system allows outside fact-checking organizations, known to be statistically biased against conservative media outlets, to prejudge which of those newly visible sources readers should trust.That distinction becomes particularly consequential since conservative publications systematically begin with lower reputational scores. Ground News may display more conservative journalism than Google News, while simultaneously presenting that journalism beneath warning labels that tell readers the publications producing it are less factual.The consequence is that when a narrative written from a conservative or libertarian point of view has finally made it into at least one major aggregator, the Ground News organization has already told the reader how much to trust it before the reader has examined a single piece of evidence. That isn’t an assessment of the factuality of journalism. It is an assessment (made by biased sources) of the reputation of the journalist’s publisher.Ground News is perfectly entitled to provide such ratings. Readers may even find them useful. But they should be labeled accurately. Call themPublisher Reputation,Source Reliability, orThird-Party Media Outlet Rating.Do not imply that these ratings reflect the factuality of the news in front of the reader. Because Ground News itself acknowledges in the fine print that it has made no such determination.Deceitful is a strong word, but if the shoe fits…JGM/RWMIndependent journalism matters precisely because the institutions that once decided what you were allowed toseeare increasingly deciding what you are supposed tobelieve. The systems described in this article do not require censorship. They work by assigning credibility in advance, elevating approved sources while quietly warning readers away from those that challenge the prevailing narrative.Researching these systems takes time. It means reading the methodologies, checking the underlying ratings, comparing outlets, running the numbers and following the citations back to their original sources rather than simply repeating what another journalist has written.That is what your subscriptions make possible.Subscribe nowIf you value journalism that questions the gatekeepers rather than asking their permission, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It keeps this publication independent and allows us to continue doing the research that increasingly falls outside the boundaries of what establishment media considers acceptable to investigate.And perhaps most importantly, it meansno fact checker, media-rating company, government agency, advertiser or algorithm gets to decide what we are allowed to write.

Summary: How Biased Media Ratings Make Conservative News Look Unreliable


Sunday Strip: Flock You

A message from the other side of the aisle.When they tell you what they are going to do, believe them.I can understand someone thinking that this woman is crazy and a suitable place for her is a mental institution.What I cannot understand is the growing chorus of women determined to turn the murder of three children into yet another indictment of the “patriarchy,” inadequate husbands and bad fathers.Lindsay Clancy strangled Cora, Dawson and Callan. Their father came home to a nightmare and lost all three of his children, yet somehow he, men generally, and society itself are being judged as guilty by this cohort of liberal (mostly white), radicalized Nazi-feministas.Mental illness may explain what she did and may ultimately determine her criminal responsibility. But transforming the killer into the principal victim, the murdered children into scenery, and their grieving father into a convenient symbol of male failure is not compassion. It is disgusting.Metaphorically, this is what the government tried to do to the COVID-19 dissidents during Biden’s COVID reign.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe Ungrateful DeadJGMThese memes just don’t drop off trees. Being funny takes us a fair about of work! Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: Orwell called. He wants his cameras back.