The Absurdity of Public Health

AUDIO:The Absurdity of Public HealthTheUnited States medical system, combined with the industrial food complex, kill and maim people on a colossal scale every single year.Heart disease kills over 683,000 Americans annually. Cancer kills another 620,000. Stroke, diabetes, chronic lung disease, sepsis, obesity-related metabolic disease, opioid overdoses, and preventable medical errors collectively account for millions of deaths, disabilities, and shattered families.And yet, if you browse the front page of the CDC website on any given week, there is a decent chance you will find public health officials issuing urgent alerts about backyard chickens, raw milk, pet turtles, or someone hugging a duck too enthusiastically.Seriously.At the very moment when roughly 1,870 Americans are dying every day from heart disease and another 1,700 from cancer, federal public health agencies are sounding alarms about salmonella from backyard poultry.The contrast has become almost surreal.One recent CDC warning involved 34 reported salmonella cases linked to backyard poultry across 13 states. Thirteen hospitalizations were reported. No deaths. Another CDC investigation from 2024 linked backyard poultry exposure to 470 salmonella cases and one death nationwide.To be clear, salmonella infections are unpleasant. Severe cases can absolutely happen, particularly in small children or immunocompromised individuals. Basic hygiene around animals and food handling matters. But the sheer disproportion between the magnitude of America’s actual health catastrophes and the obsessive messaging priorities of modern public health is impossible to ignore.Americans are drowning in chronic disease.Over 40 percent of U.S. adults are now obese. Diabetes continues to explode. Cardiovascular disease remains the nation’s leading killer. Cancer rates in younger adults continue to rise. Meanwhile, researchers from Johns Hopkins estimated that medical errors themselves may contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year, potentially making preventable medical harm the third leading cause of death in America.Yet somehow the institutional energy of public health repeatedly gravitates toward regulating raw milk farmers, warning people not to kiss chickens, and issuing carefully branded panic messaging campaigns over statistically tiny risks.Why?Because modern public health increasingly behaves less like a system designed to improve population health and more like a managerial communications apparatus. The goal is no longer primarily to build a healthier citizenry. The goal is to demonstrate vigilance, maintain bureaucratic relevance, manage narratives, and continuously remind the public that experts are monitoring every conceivable risk, no matter how trivial.And triviality matters here.A civilization that cannot seriously confront ultra-processed food, metabolic collapse, sedentary lifestyles, pharmaceutical overuse, hospital-acquired infections, or iatrogenic injury, but can mobilize nationwide media campaigns over backyard chickens, is not practicing rational public health prioritization.It is practicing theater.And now we are watching the same cycle unfold yet again with hantavirus.Every few years, the media rediscovers hantavirus and suddenly the headlines become cinematic. “Deadly virus.” “Mystery illness.” “Experts warn.” Cable news panels light up. Social media algorithms amplify fear. Reporters begin breathlessly discussing deer mice as if civilization itself is teetering on the edge of collapse.Never mind that hantavirus remains extraordinarily rare in the United States.Since surveillance began in 1993, the CDC has confirmed roughly 850 total cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in the entire country over more than three decades. That averages to fewer than 30 confirmed cases annually in a nation of over 330 million people. Yes, severe cases can be deadly. Yes, rodent infestations should be taken seriously. But the actual statistical risk to the average American remains microscopic. Meanwhile, heart disease kills that many Americans in less than twenty minutes.Yet the machinery of public health communication treats these events as prime opportunities for fear-based messaging campaigns. The public is encouraged to scan their bodies for symptoms, obsess over remote threats, and remain psychologically tethered to a permanent state of low-grade biological anxiety.This is not accidental.Fear is one of the few things modern institutions still know how to manufacture efficiently.A calm, healthy, self-confident population is difficult to manage. But a population conditioned to perceive invisible threats everywhere becomes highly responsive to authority, guidance, expert interpretation, and centralized control. Every new scare reinforces the same behavioral conditioning. Stay alert. Stay afraid. Wait for instructions.And importantly, these fear campaigns almost always focus on risks that are visually dramatic but statistically tiny. Rare viruses. Backyard animals. Isolated outbreaks. Consumer products. Individual behaviors.Why?Because confronting the real drivers of chronic illness would require confronting the institutions themselves.It would require asking difficult questions about the American food system, pharmaceutical incentives, environmental toxicity, regulatory capture, hospital-acquired injury, sedentary lifestyles, collapsing metabolic health, and the financial architecture of modern medicine.That is dangerous territory for bureaucracies.Warning people not to pet chickens is much safer.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The economist and political philosopher Murray Rothbard had a phrase for the experts, academics, media figures, policy advisors, and institutional scientists who attach themselves to centers of political power and provide intellectual cover for the expansion of bureaucratic authority: “court intellectuals.”The role of court intellectuals throughout history was not to challenge power, but to rationalize it. Kings had them. Empires had them. Modern bureaucracies have them too.  The United States Federal government is full of court intellectuals. Their job is to provide the appearance of expertise, moral legitimacy, and scientific authority for whatever the governing apparatus already wishes to do.In Rothbard’s formulation, court intellectuals are rewarded not necessarily for being correct, but for being useful to the institutions that sustain them. They translate state priorities into moral imperatives. They reassure the public that the people in charge are wise, necessary, and acting in everyone’s best interest.Once you see this dynamic, modern public health messaging begins to make much more sense.The fixation on backyard chickens, raw milk, masking rituals, playground closures, or endlessly sanitized consumer guidance is not primarily about reducing the largest drivers of disease and death. If it were, public health agencies would spend far more time confronting the catastrophic consequences of ultra-processed food, metabolic dysfunction, pharmaceutical overprescribing, hospital-acquired infections, sedentary lifestyles, environmental toxicity, and the economic incentives that quietly fuel chronic disease.But those are structurally difficult problems. They implicate large institutions, politically connected industries, government policy failures, and decades of bureaucratic complicity.It is far safer to lecture homesteaders about egg handling.Far safer to issue ominous press releases about raw milk.Far safer to warn parents not to let children snuggle baby chicks.Those campaigns create the appearance of vigilance without threatening the underlying machinery of modern industrial health policy. They allow agencies to perform authority while avoiding confrontation with the systems that are actually making Americans progressively sicker.This is where the absurdity becomes impossible to ignore.A nation where hundreds of thousands die annually from preventable chronic illness, medical injury, metabolic disease, and institutional failure is being governed by public health officials who increasingly behave like risk-management public relations consultants. The messaging often feels less like medicine and more like a permanent liability warning label attached to human existence itself.The result is a public conditioned to fear tiny, highly visible risks while becoming almost numb to the massive, slow-moving epidemics unfolding all around them.That is not an accident.It is the natural outcome of a system where court intellectuals serve institutions first, and the public second.They are serving Power. Not the Public.JGM/RWMThanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share

Summary: Serving power, not the public


The CIA’s War on Oversight

The Rogue StateExplosive congressional testimony that the CIA manipulated COVID-origin intelligence, obstructed oversight, surveilled investigators, and reclaimed JFK and MKUltra files beyond the reach of Congress, the DNI, and even the President.Note that not a single democrat showed up for this hearing.The testimony of CIA operations officer James Erdman to Congress yesterday paints a devastating picture of a U.S. intelligence and public health establishment that manipulated COVID-origin analysis, retaliated against dissenting analysts, obstructed lawful oversight, and protected institutional interests, including what they know about the JFK assassination, at the expense of transparency and accountability.On a personal note, I have known James for a few years. He is a non-nonsense and honest person. He doesn’t embellish, and he doesn’t lie. He has put everything on the line to bring truth to power.Erdman, who served in the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence between 2025 and 2026, testified that elements within the intelligence community identified evidence supporting a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2 as early as 2020. Internal papers circulated by agencies, including DOE and the FBI, reportedly concluded that the conditions for a lab leak were present.Erdman describes how analysts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis were later marginalized while official assessments drifted toward politically safer “no conclusion” positions.Central to the testimony are allegations involving Anthony Fauci. Erdman says that Fauci inserted himself into the intelligence community’s analytical process during key phases of the COVID-origin review, providing a curated network of experts closely tied to himself, the “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” narrative, and longstanding NIH/NIAID funding relationships.Rather than acting as an independent public health adviser, Fauci is described as shaping the expert ecosystem that influences intelligence conclusions while publicly distancing himself from direct involvement.The testimony describes how post-9/11 biodefense infrastructure created a sprawling, opaque network linking intelligence agencies, public health bureaucracies, federally funded research programs, academia, and international laboratory collaborations. Erdman argues that these overlapping relationshipsproduced systemic conflicts of interest and an oversight-resistant culture incapable of objectively investigating the origins of the pandemic. I can attest to this, having worked in the biodefense industry for the past 25 years.Some of the most explosive allegations concern obstruction and internal surveillance. Erdman states that the CIA refused to provide records necessary to determine why analytical standards had allegedly been violated.He further elaborates that the agency illegally monitored the phones, computers, investigations, and whistleblower communications of DIG personnel while they were carrying out duties authorized by the President and the Director of National Intelligence.One CIA contractor assisting the DIG investigation was allegedly terminated one day after meeting with investigators.Most stunning of all, Erdman alleges that when the DIG ceased operations, the CIA reclaimed 40 boxes of Assassination of John F. Kennedy files and Project MKUltra documents that were reportedly being processed for declassification under DNI Tulsi Gabbard.Compounding these allegations is a subsequent public statement from the official CIA account on X, which reinforces the extraordinary degree to which the agency controls what information Congress and the public are ultimately permitted to review and discuss.This statement by the CIA underscores a broader theme running throughout Erdman’s testimony: that unelected intelligence institutions possess the practical power to delay, shape, limit, or obstruct oversight even when formal declassification orders from the President or congressional mandates exist. This is a rogue organization, that is out of control. An organization beyond the reach of the President of the United States, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and even Congress.It is fair to speculate that the CIA has become the world's most powerful organization.Taken together, the testimony reframes the COVID-origin controversy as far more than a scientific debate. Erdman’s allegations describe a national security crisis involving intelligence integrity, biodefense policy, censorship, bureaucratic self-protection, suppression of dissent, and the potential obstruction of lawful oversight at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The implications extend well beyond COVID-19 and strike at the heart of public trust in America’s intelligence and public health institutions.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareFor those that want to listen to some of the testimony. Below are four of the more important videos and transcripts.Video 1:Transcript:“I am a career CIA operations officer, and as you mentioned, I was on joint duty assignment at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Director’s Initiatives Group, or the DIG, between March 2025 and April 2026.I was responsible for leading the DIG’s investigation into COVID origins, anomalous health incidents, and unidentified anomalous phenomena.RWM Note: The Director’s Initiatives Group, or DIG, is reportedly a specialized unit operating under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). According to the James Erdman in this testimony, the DIG was tasked with investigating a range of highly sensitive national security issues, including COVID-19 origins, anomalous health incidents such as Havana Syndrome, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), and related oversight and declassification matters.In practical terms, the DIG appears to have functioned as a cross-agency investigative and coordination group rather than a traditional intelligence collection unit. Its role was reportedly to review intelligence assessments, coordinate sensitive inquiries across agencies, and examine matters involving potential failures of oversight, analytical integrity, and national security policy.Very little public information exists about the DIG, and no detailed official organizational description has been publicly released. The statements made in the following transcript reflect the views and allegations of the speaker.James Erdman: “I’m here today to discuss the COVID cover-up, the national security implications associated with the DIG’s investigative findings, and CIA refusal to comply with lawful oversight, as well as how we remedy these problems.Intelligence community leaders and senior analysts downplayed the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated as a result of a lab incident.Motives are difficult to define given the scope of the DIG’s review.Intentional or not, the IC’s actions resulted in a cover-up, wasted resources, and a failure to properly inform policymakers.Public health policy would have been very different had the American public been made aware that a virus from a lab in China was going to serve as the foundation for emergency use authorization mRNA products being mandated by the former administration.Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional.Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.This included some of the authors of the paper “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and other public health experts who have been in his orbit for the last 20-plus years.Some of the scientists were part of the Biological Sciences Experts Group, or BSEG, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence advisory body whose members often receive considerable funding from NIAID and public health agencies.The BSEG scientists influence national laboratory WMD research, policy decisions, finished analysis, and other intelligence matters, creating misaligned incentives and conflicts of interest, as well as counterintelligence issues.Since 2006, the BSEG consulted part-time on biodefense issues for the IC while conducting government-funded research and holding academic positions, as well as maintaining roles in public health institutions and serving as members of the National Academy of Sciences.They received funding from NIAID and other agencies for vaccine research, USAID’s PREDICT project, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, and even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies, pursuing vaccines.There was no oversight monitoring how this web of relationships influenced research, policy, and public health in any holistic way for over 20 years.In fact, several of the BSEG scientists helped Dr. Fauci rewrite definitions of gain-of-function in 2015 to lift a funding pause on dangerous research.Still others participated in planning Event 201 in 2019.This was a coronavirus pandemic tabletop exercise curiously similar to the events that played out during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was attended by Dr. Fauci and individuals with IC ties like former DNI Avril Haines.The CIA and DNI analytic managers responsible for examining the origins of COVID made decisions inconsistent with the conclusions of subject matter experts and analytic tradecraft, consistently favoring the theory of zoonosis, or natural origin.Following the CIA’s COVID relook that culminated in 2023, the CIA retaliated against analysts supporting the lab leak hypothesis.CIA analysts were not bribed.The analysts that supported the 2023 lab conclusion took every administrative measure available to them to address their deep concerns regarding the analytic integrity of their finished intelligence.CIA managers retaliated against them for their refusal to agree with management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment to a non-call judgment.Dr. Anthony Fauci’s influence over the IC’s COVID origin analysis, and the witting and unwitting role some BSEG scientists and IC personnel played in the cover-up, exposed why this issue is of deep concern.Failure to address the United States government’s inability to differentiate between public health and biodefense, and the oversight-resistant ecosystem of life science actors, has been fertile ground for increasingly dangerous continental United States gain-of-function research, as well as similar research conducted in U.S. government-supported labs abroad.Post-9/11 changes to public health and biodefense roles and responsibilities have blurred the lines between scientists, the military, and the intelligence community.It has resulted in a deliberately opaque and excessively redundant biodefense research, policy, and financial infrastructure seemingly intended to escalate bureaucratic bloat.This is a national security crisis caused by the inability to provide real oversight.The systematic failures associated with muddled boundaries between biodefense and public health, and an overly complex infrastructure, have been exacerbated by documented efforts to circumvent oversight.CIA did not comply with lawful oversight during the DIG’s investigation.The behavior significantly impacted Director Gabbard’s implementation of several executive orders issued during this administration and tasked to the DIG.The CIA refused to provide information necessary to understand why analytical standards at the CIA were violated.The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers.These were Americans being spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the President and under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence.One CIA contractor assisting with the DIG’s investigation into the events that transpired between 2022 and 2023 was fired by the CIA one day after meeting with the DIG.When the DIG ceased operations, the CIA also took back 40 boxes of JFK files and MKUltra files being processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard.The legislative and executive branches will continue to be misinformed if this type of behavior is not addressed.The partial solution to dangerous gain-of-function research has already been laid out in Executive Order 14292, “Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research.”We need a comprehensive review of government-funded life science research and a move back to pre-9/11 definitions of gain-of-function and WMD research, particularly in the IC and DHS.More broadly, we need effective oversight.We must hold agencies responsible for failure to comply with Executive Order 14292.And oversight must have teeth.You must be willing to pull the purse strings and, if necessary, convene another Church Committee.The results of our investigation would have been impossible without whistleblowers willing to come forward.They are indispensable agents for reform.Despite statutory law, agency regulation, and training requirements, whistleblowers are almost never protected.Whistleblower protections always seem to protect the agency.Every time the CIA investigates itself, they coincidentally find no wrongdoing.When they do identify issues, they hold the system responsible.That last statement is a verbatim response from a Europe and Eurasia Mission Center lawyer when the CIA Office of Inspector General did identify shortcomings so serious oversight bodies were holding meetings about it three years after the events transpired.It was in response to the question: “Was anyone held accountable?”Apparently, the system is good enough.The only way we solve this issue is with real accountability for failure to comply with executive and legislative branch oversight, and an escape valve where whistleblowers can continue to contribute to mission success free from retaliation.All IG elements need to be removed from the agencies and fall under a separate entity controlled by the IC Inspector General.The personnel in IG elements should be 1811-certified, with regular DOJ and legislative oversight reporting responsibilities.”Senator Rand Paul:“Is it your testimony that there is still resistance from the CIA to comply with the law we passed to declassify all the COVID information?”James Erdman:“Yes.”Senator Rand Paul:“One of the things that I think is new today that I’m hearing from your testimony is that, from an early period of time, you believe, and the information you’re aware of is, that CIA scientists from an early time after the pandemic began, 2020 and 2021, were concluding that the lab leak was the most likely hypothesis.”James Erdman:“Yes, Senator. I’d like to offer some qualifications on that as well.A lot of the issues occurred in the interagency space at the National Intelligence Council, the individuals responsible for conducting or writing WMD analysis. Many of those individuals are on JDA from the CIA.But yes, very early, as early as 2020, there were agencies within the IC circulating papers that said, for example, DOE circulated a paper in May of 2020 stating that all the conditions were present for a lab leak.I could go through the timeline, but yes, my short answer is yes. Periodically throughout 2020 all the way to 2024.”Video 2Transcript:“Senator Rand Paul:“Yes, I think the arguments, pro and con, for what is the evidence on whether this came from a lab or came from nature are still important.For years, we’ve been asking the CIA to produce the scientists either in a classified setting or a public setting to discuss the arguments. I don’t see any reason why the arguments should be classified.One of the arguments that’s made publicly is that the source looks like it came from a single source of RNA, not like five different types of viruses or 20 different types like you had with SARS in 2003, but from one source. Virtually everybody argues that this sort of indicates a lab and not nature.Those arguments are important scientific arguments to have, but we’ve been prevented from having them. We’ve been prevented from getting all of the declassified information.But what I think is important and new today is that your testimony is that CIA scientists were concluding that it was a lab leak, but then when there was a 90-day study in 2021, and this study was led by NIC. Tell us again what NIC is.”James Erdman:“It’s the National Intelligence Council, and the individuals responsible for writing various WMD and biodefense-related issues led the effort.”Senator Rand Paul:“So when they had this study, they had CIA scientists telling them, ‘Look, the scientific evidence looks like it came from the lab.’ But then they brought in Anthony Fauci.Is it your opinion that Anthony Fauci was able to overrule the scientists or get NIC to conclude somehow that there wasn’t a conclusion to be had here? That they were going to be neutral, contradicting what the scientists were telling them?”James Erdman:“There are two questions there, and I want to break them up into two.One is: where were the injection points? Where and when did Dr. Anthony Fauci inject himself into the IC?And the other half of that question is: what happened with the change in analysis?So I’ll start with Dr. Anthony Fauci.There were two instances: 3 February 2020 and 4 June 2021. Anthony Fauci had contact with the interagency community.Broadly speaking, that contact was happily pursued within the IC. They wanted that contact, and he provided a curated list of subject matter experts, which coincidentally included the authors of ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.’So it’s not like he came in and said, ‘You have to do X, Y, and Z.’ He provided recommendations.It’s when you look at what has already been publicly released about Dr. Fauci, and then what you’re seeing behind the curtain at the IC, where you realize there is a narrative that was being generated by his contact not just with experts here in the United States, but experts in Australia and the UK.That’s the public-facing piece.He tried to keep his hands clear by saying, ‘I didn’t have anything to do with The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,’ but in the meantime, he’s pushing those authors and individuals who had been in his orbit into the IC as experts.I’ll jump to June 2021.We, as the IC at NIC, happily pursued those recommendations.In one email, which I’ll describe to you, the person in charge of leading the 90-day study introduced himself to the community and what they were supposed to be doing.He said, ‘Listen, we’ve got these people we should be talking to.’Another very senior NIC officer sent a direct email to him saying, ‘Hey, considering that Dr. Fauci is a public health expert, are you sure we should be relying on this? Shouldn’t we have a separate set of experts?’In this instance, the individual responded, ‘No, in this case, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a subject matter expert.’However, that directly contradicts his public testimony about not being a subject matter expert.Part of the job in intelligence when you interview someone is assessing their truthfulness, their potential biases, or conflicts of interest.”Senator Rand Paul:“Did anyone ever bring up that Anthony Fauci approved the research that went on in Wuhan, and that it might not be in his interest for the conclusion to be that it came from a lab he had funded? That there might be a conflict? Did anybody ever bring up that he might not be an objective witness?”James Erdman:“That was one example in an email.No one laid it out quite that clearly. You’re piecing it together.We were piecing it together from multiple emails, multiple agencies, and multiple documents.It was more subtle than that. Nobody said directly, ‘This is happening.’And unfortunately, I think they probably should have. It was all out there.”Senator Rand Paul:“But your conclusion is that changing from the scientific consensus of it being from a lab to a neutral position by the CIA was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci?”James Erdman:“It was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci injecting himself into the IC.And to go to the second part of your question about what happened during the 90-day study, we have documentation showing that as of August 12, 2021, the CIA was considering calling this a lab leak.Then that changed on August 17, 2021.Unfortunately, because the CIA would not provide us documentation we asked for, we have no idea why that changed.And they weren’t alone, because we know the FBI was coming to the same conclusion, that it was a lab leak.”Video 3Transcript:”The CIA refused to provide information necessary to understand why analytical standards at the CIA were violated.The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of dig personnel, their investigations and contact with whistleblowers. These were Americans being spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the president and under the authority of the director national intelligence.One CIA contractor assisting with the Diggs investigation into the events that transpired between 2022 and 2023 was fired by the CIA one day after meeting with the Dig.When the Dig ceased operations, the CIA also took back 40 boxes of JFK files and MK Ultra files being processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard.”Video 4:Let’s just end with this:Transcript:Senator Rand Paul:Is it your testimony that there is still resistance from the CIA to comply with the law that we passed to de-classify all the COVID information?James Erdman:yes…

Summary: An out of control agency


Sunday Strip: Good Riddance -

Britain used to be run from Westminster. Now it feels subcontracted to panels in Brussels, Geneva, and Davos.If Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum had a child, it’d be Keir Starmer.Stamer’s UK(Rumor has it - he is now heading out the door, “on his terms”)Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareJGM

Summary: Starmer the harmer is out.


The Grift of Fear

In 1997 a security specialist named Gavin de Becker published a book calledThe Gift of Fear. It is a book about predicting interpersonal violence, and it has trained a generation of readers, mostly women, to recognize the behavioral signatures of predators before the violence arrives. Charm. Forced teaming. Too many details. Loan sharking. The unsolicited promise. Discounting the wordno. de Becker compiled them by working as a threat-assessment consultant for celebrities, executives, and government officials, and by talking, at length, to people who had survived attempts on their lives and to perpetrators who had been caught before completing them. The patterns are not subtle once you know what to look for. They are also, de Becker argued, recognizable in advance to anyone who has been given the vocabulary.The title pun was deliberate. Fear, the kind that arrives unbidden when a stranger gets too close on an empty subway platform or when a friendly-seeming offer of help feels off, is not a defect of evolved cognition. It is thegift. It is the brain doing exactly what it evolved to do: reading a small set of cues faster than any conscious deliberation could, and pushing the body away from danger before the mind has caught up. In de Becker’s case studies, the people who get hurt are almost never the ones who failed to notice the signals. They are the people who noticed accurately and overrode the signal. They had been trained to defer. They did not want to seem rude. They felt uneasy and could not articulate why, and so dismissed the feeling as paranoia.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This is the book that should have been on every desk during the COVID years. It was not.What I want to argue here is something I think the public-health establishment, the contrarian media response to it, and the broader culture that consumed both have collectively missed. The pandemic was not, primarily, a failure of expertise. It was a failure of recognition. The same psychological machinery that de Becker identified, the machinery that protects us against the charming stranger at the door, was being targeted at a population scale by institutional actors whose interests were not aligned with ours. And by some of the loudest dissident actors as well. The targeting was largely successful. The grift, on both sides, worked.The reason it worked is not that people are stupid. The reason it worked is that the institutions had access to communication channels with effectively unlimited reach, and the techniques they deployed were precisely the techniques de Becker had cataloged in 1997. Charm. Authority cues. Forced teaming (”we’re all in this together”). Unsolicited promises (”safe and effective”). The dismissal of objections as moral failures (”you’re killing grandma”). The refusal to acceptnoas an answer on any question deemed consequential. And, when those techniques met resistance, the social and economic costs were imposed on those who continued to saynoanyway.The dissident response, when it came, was sometimes calibrated and accurate. It was also, in important respects, the same kind of operation pointed in the opposite direction. The same charm. The same forced teaming (”we’re the ones who see through it”). The same unsolicited promises (”this protocol will save you”). The same refusal to update when subsequent evidence demanded updating. The same compliance extraction, dressed as resistance.Both versions worked on the same biological substrate. Both versions paid.Consider the unsolicited promise. De Becker treats this as one of the most reliable signals of a hidden agenda. A promise made when none has been requested usually indicates an intent to do exactly what the promise denies. The trustworthy actor explains. The unreliable actor reassures.“The vaccines are safe and effective.” This sentence was repeated at intervals that corresponded to no particular challenge requiring rebuttal for roughly three years. It was repeated by senior officials in television appearances, by manufacturers in advertising, by celebrities in scripted PSAs, and by employers in mandate communications. No one had asked for the reassurance. The reassurance arrived anyway. By de Becker’s framework, the question to ask was: what are these people preempting? What is the future criticism that the reassurance is being deployed to head off? Subsequent data answered the question. Internal communications produced in the years since, including the Pfizer and Moderna documents released under court order, the FOIA-ed correspondence among federal officials, and the Twitter Files showing the architecture of platform suppression around vaccine criticism, all indicate that the underlying claim was considerably weaker, at the time it was being asserted, than the public communication suggested. The unsolicited promise was, exactly as de Becker would have predicted, a tell.Or consider typecasting. de Becker describes it as a minor insult deployed to provoke engagement from someone who would otherwise walk away: “I bet you’re too stuck-up to talk to a guy like me.” The target wants to prove the label wrong by engaging, and the engagement is the predator’s foot in the door. De Becker’s defense is the simplest possible one. You act as if the words were not spoken. Any energy you spend disproving the label is energy you cannot spend evaluating what is actually being asked of you.“Anti-vaxxer.” “Denier.” “Conspiracy theorist.” “Grandma-killer.” “Covidiot.” Each functioned to make the recipient want to disprove the label by demonstrating compliance, which is exactly what de Becker said the move was intended to do. The recipient who insisted, “I’m not against vaccines, I just have questions aboutthisvaccine,” had already conceded the frame. The recipient who refused to engage with the label, who treated it as the manipulative move it was rather than a description requiring rebuttal, kept the question on its merits.By de Becker’s framework, this is not difficult to see. It was difficult to see only because the labels were issued by institutions the recipients had been trained to defer to. The pandemic-era equivalent of the predator’s “I bet you’re too stuck-up” was the public-health authority’s “anti-science.” Both work for the same reason. Both are defenses, by people whose intentions are not aligned with ours, against our intuitions about whether to comply.The same analysis applies to the contrarian side. The dissident communicator who described skeptics of his protocol as “shills,” “captured,” or “still asleep” was running the same operation. The label was meant to do the same work: to convert a question about the underlying evidence into a question about the questioner’s moral or epistemic standing. de Becker’s defense is the same in both directions. The labels are the cost the speaker extracts before you have evaluated the substantive claim.There is a deeper point in de Becker’s work that I want to bring forward because I think it is the right framework for understanding what the pandemic actually was.de Becker distinguishes fear from worry. Fear is calibrated. It is a response to a specific present signal that something is wrong, and it is accurate enough often enough that we should treat it as a protective intuition rather than a defect. Worry is something else. Worry is manufactured. It is sustained beyond the duration of any actual signal. It is frequently imposed by one party on another. It often functions as a substitute for action rather than as a guide toward it.The pandemic era was, primarily, a worry-generation event. The fear, where justified, was justified for narrow, specific groups under narrow, specific conditions. Elderly people with comorbidities in the spring of 2020 had something approximating a real signal. Most other groups did not, most of the time. The worry, however, was universal, undifferentiated, sustained, and continuously reinforced by institutional communication channels that benefited from its continuation.The institutional channels did this because they were funded, staffed, and incentivized to do it. The contrarian channels did it because they were funded, staffed, and incentivized to do so. Daily case counts were presented without context. Hospitalization graphs without baseline comparison. Modeling outputs whose subsequent revisions received far less attention than the original projections. On the contrarian side: vaccine adverse event reports without denominators. Individual stories of injury without representative sampling. Excess mortality projections whose disconfirmation produced no comparable retraction effort.Both versions cultivated worry in their respective audiences. Both monetized the cultivated worry. The mechanism is exactly the one de Becker identified, scaled from the predator’s manipulation of an individual mark to institutional manipulation of a population. The reason it scaled was that the underlying psychological machinery is the same. The brain that feels worry in response to a fabricated signal at the door feels the same worry in response to a fabricated signal on television, with the difference that the television signal arrives every day for years, and the friend at the door is gone in twenty minutes.This is the grift, plain. Thegiftof fear is the protective intuition that lets us detect signals of danger. Thegriftof fear is the systematic exploitation of that same intuition by parties whose interests in our worry are different from our own.Here is what I think de Becker would have said to anyone watching the pandemic communications, on either side, if he had been asked.He would have said: Notice the unsolicited promises. Ask what they are preempting. Notice the typecasting. Refuse to engage with the labels. Notice the forced teaming, the “we’re all in this together” and its dissident-side equivalent, “we’re the ones who see.” Ask whether the teaming is real or constructed. Notice the volume of detail in communications about uncertain questions. Ask whether the detail is proportional to what is actually known. Notice the refusal to acceptnoas an answer on questions deemed consequential. Treat that refusal as the most reliable available signal that the actor is not engaged in good-faith communication.And above all, he would have said: trust the unease. The people who got hurt in his case studies were not the people who missed the signal. They were the people who picked up the signal accurately and dismissed it because they could not yet articulate what they had picked up, or because the cost of acting on it was higher than the cost of overriding it. That cost, in the context of the pandemic, was a designed feature of the environment. The social and economic price of sayingnowas deliberately raised, on both sides, to deter the rational actor from doing it.The people who suffered, at population scale, were not the credulous. They were the ones who knew something was off and could not, socially, afford to say so.The question now is whether we are going to be a harder mark next time.The institutions that ran the last operation are still here. So are the contrarian operations that ran the parallel grift on the other side. They are funded, staffed, and ready. The next event will not look identical to the last one. The techniques, however, will. The unsolicited promises. The typecasting. The forced teaming. The discounting ofno. The compliance extraction dressed as either authority or resistance.The defense is the same in both directions. It is the calibrated skepticism that de Becker was trying to teach. Not paranoia. Not cynicism. Just the recognition that warmth and confidence are tools, and that the tools have signatures, and that the signatures are visible to anyone who has been given the vocabulary.The gift of fear is the protective intuition. The grift of fear occurs when intuition is hijacked. The recognition of the hijack is the main defense. de Becker has been telling us, since 1997, how to see it. We did not listen the last time. There is no reason, this time, that we cannot.Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence (Little, Brown, 1997), is the source for the framework discussed here. The specific de Becker indicators (”Forced Teaming,” “Charm and Niceness,” “Too Many Details,” “Typecasting,” “Loan Sharking,” “The Unsolicited Promise,” “Discounting the Word ‘No’”) are catalogued in the book’s central chapters and re-applied to institutional and dissident pandemic communications in our forthcoming book, The Grift: How Fear Became a Business — and Who Profited from Running It.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 my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: What Gavin de Becker taught us about predators, and how we should have used it.


Friday Funnies: Hantavirus Protection -

Seriously.Mainstream Media has gone from Hantavirus to Norovirus to Meningitis (in the UK) to Ebolavirus within one month.King Chuckles, the Compostable, could fit right into any Monty Python sketch:And there you have it…"My ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID"When King Chuckles above refers to “my ministers,” he means Keir Starmer’s ministers in the Labor Party. This is not Chuckles’ proclamation. He’s reading Starmer’s edicts, delivered to him by Sir Keir himself and then read aloud by Charles per the governmental protocol.Jolly ole Britain is a goner..Inquiring minds want to know: What has Congress done to change this?Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareOn the farm front…In the next month, we will have three foals born here on the farm.  Honestly, I can’t wait - our last foal was born on Christmas day of 2024, so it has been a year and a half since our last foal.  Newborn foals have to be the sweetest things on this planet.Due to our continued workload, off the farm, last year we downsized our breeding program. We sold four adult mares and now just have three broodmares.  The two older mares will be with us until they pass.  Caranja is now 19 years old, so aging out rapidly as a broodmare- this is probably her last foal, and her 14-year-old daughter, Tantra, who broke her pelvis when she was a filly, so is not rideable is here to stay.  Quieta - shown below is a lovely mare, also homebred, and as long as we have the other mares, she will probably be with us also.  Quieta, below - loves us, particularly Robert very, very much and we her.Although we have downsized our mare program, we actually have increased the number of breeding stallions and next year, will have frozen semen available for sale on most of them.We have kept four stallions from Jade - all buckskin.  Which we will exhibit together over the coming years.  Quartz is the oldest. He is very tall, athletic and powerful, so riding him takes a lot of skill. This week I began riding him in earnest, and he is a mind-blowing ride.  Our trainer is encouraging me to show him myself, starting at a rather high level in dressage.  I may just take her up on that…Next week, we go on a four-day trip to attend a conference in San Antonio, and then we are home until June 20th.Being home for long stretches of time makes my heart sing, particularly in the spring.JGM

Summary: Begins with earplugs


The Floating Petri Dish

Audio:The official storysurrounding the Andes hantavirus cruise ship outbreak keeps shifting, but one detail should make any rational person stop and think.Authorities quarantined healthy passengers for weeks aboard a confined expedition vessel while, at the same time,at least one corpse remained on the ship for nearly two weeks.Think about that for a moment.If your actual goal is to minimize the possibility of human-to-human transmission inside a sealed maritime environment, keeping a dead infected body aboard while confining hundreds of people into shared airspace seems like an odd strategy.The media, meanwhile, has focused almost entirely on the “rare human transmission” narrative while largely ignoring the far more obvious issue: ships are historically one of the most efficient rodent habitats ever created by man.Rats and ships go together like barnacles and saltwater.For centuries, maritime law, naval engineering, and port sanitation protocols have revolved around one basic fact: rodents thrive aboard ships. Cargo vessels, cruise ships, food storage areas, bilges, rope lockers, waste systems, mechanical spaces, and dock loading zones create ideal rat ecosystems. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is maritime history.And hantaviruses are rodent-borne diseases.Yet oddly, much of the reporting has downplayed the possibility of environmental contamination, food contamination, aerosolized rodent waste, or shipboard sanitation failures. Instead, the public is being pushed toward dramatic narratives emphasizing close-contact human spread.Why?Because “mysterious human transmission” generates headlines. Rodent control failures and contaminated food handling are much less cinematic.But from a biological standpoint, contaminated environments matter enormously.Hantaviruses can spread through aerosolized particles from rodent urine, feces, and saliva. In enclosed environments with shared ventilation systems, food preparation areas, tight cabins, recycled air, and limited deep-cleaning capacity during an active outbreak, those risks become difficult to dismiss.Andes hantavirus is a single-stranded RNA virus, which means it mutates relatively quickly during replication. RNA viruses are inherently error-prone. Every new infection creates opportunities for small genetic changes.Viruses evolve through replication and selective pressure from their environment.The more transmission events occur, the greater the chance for variants better adapted to human spread to emerge. That is basic evolutionary biology.A prolonged shipboard quarantine in tight quarters creates a uniquely compressed environment for this. Ships have historically served as amplifiers of infectious disease for exactly these reasons.Importantly, Andes hantavirus already has a documented human-to-human transmission pattern, although it is inefficient and not previously associated with sustained human-to-human transmission. The evolutionary barrier has already been crossed at least partially.That does not mean a “super strain” emerged aboard the Hondius. There is no evidence of that (yet).But scientifically, it is entirely reasonable to ask whether prolonged confinement aboard a tightly enclosed vessel could favor continued transmission and create evolutionary pressure for adaptation.  The WHO has indicated that it will not share viral sequences isolated from those infected with the United States in retaliation for the US exiting and withdrawing funding from the WHO.  The United States has many of the world's top genomics and viral evolution analysts.  That WHO policy position is short-sighted and petulant.Cruise ships are basically floating HVAC experiments.The Hondius polar expedition cruise ship was marketed specifically as an environmentally innovative vessel featuring advanced efficiency systems, centralized climate engineering, steam heating, humidity management, and tightly integrated power systems designed to minimize fuel consumption and environmental impact.The company proudly advertised that the ship used “LED lighting, steam heating, bio-degradable paints and lubricants, and state-of-the-art power management systems that keep fuel consumption and CO2 levels minimal (1).”That sounds wonderful from an eco-tourism perspective.But from an infectious disease perspective, one immediately wonders how these tightly managed environmental systems interact with pathogen transmission within a compact, sealed vessel carrying roughly 250 people in total, including passengers and crew.Humidity matters in infectious disease transmission. Air circulation matters. Ventilation patterns matter. Condensation matters. Shared airspace matters.Especially aboard a 353-foot polar expedition ship where people spend extended periods indoors in common dining rooms, observation lounges, corridors, lecture halls, and cabins while crossing cold and rough seas.This was not a giant open-air Caribbean party boat.This was essentially a floating enclosed ecosystem.Bring out your Dead.Which brings the story back around to that dead person stored somewhere on this same closed system, for weeks on end. Enquiring minds want to know, just where was this corpse kept?Shared air handling systems move air between cabins and common areas. Food is prepared centrally. Waste systems are centralized. Laundry systems are centralized. Sick passengers, healthy passengers, and crew often share recirculated indoor environments for days or weeks (1).And during quarantine? Everyone spends even more time indoors.Meanwhile, the press continues repeating phrases like “rare person-to-person transmission” as though that somehow excludes environmental spread. It does not.Both routes can exist simultaneously.But the environmental side of this story appears to have received remarkably little investigative attention compared to the far more sensationalized “human transmissible virus” angle.That imbalance matters because fear thrives in informational vacuums.The public hears “human transmissible hantavirus” and immediately imagines the next pandemic thriller. But asking hard questions about ship sanitation, rodent exposure, contaminated food handling, air circulation systems, humidity management, waste processing, quarantine logistics, and environmental contamination would require examining institutional failures that are far less politically useful than panic-inducing headlines.And then there is the body itself.Keeping an infected corpse aboard a quarantined vessel for extended periods may or may not have materially increased risk. We simply do not know. But common sense suggests that if authorities truly believed this was a highly dangerous human-transmissible outbreak, retaining human remains inside a sealed maritime environment while simultaneously isolating passengers raises legitimate operational questions.At minimum, the optics are terrible.Biased Media CoverageWhy has so much of the public messaging emphasized the “rare human-to-human transmission” angle while comparatively little attention has been devoted to environmental exposure, rodent ecology, ship sanitation, or aerosolized contamination risks aboard a confined vessel? Part of the answer may simply be media incentives. Human-to-human spread is dramatic. It generates clicks, ratings, social media engagement, and public anxiety in ways that “possible rodent contamination aboard ship” never will.WHO Conflicts of InterestBut there is also a broader institutional context that cannot be ignored. Public health agencies and international organizations such as the World Health Organization have spent years warning about the inevitability of the next pandemic while simultaneously facing growing political skepticism, declining public trust, and significant funding pressures. In a contentious midterm election cycle, with public health bureaucracies under scrutiny and the WHO confronting ongoing financial instability after major donor pullbacks, there are strong institutional incentives to frame emerging outbreaks around narratives that reinforce the continuing need for centralized global surveillance, emergency authorities, and sustained funding.A disease framed primarily as an environmental or sanitation problem aboard a ship does not carry the same political or psychological impact as one framed as a potentially expanding human-transmissible viral threat. This may explain why certain aspects of the story receive saturation coverage while others receive comparatively little attention.At worst, it suggests the people making decisions may not have fully understood the transmission dynamics themselves.Which is perhaps the most unsettling possibility of all.JGM/RWMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareReferences:m/v Hondius: Hondius is the world’s first-registered Polar Class 6 vessel and was built from the ground up for expedition cruising.https://chatgpt.com/c/6a086274-1324-83ea-b40a-9ef3d4204200

Summary: Why the official public health court intellectuals and the media got it all wrong


Homesteading: The Great American Food Delusion

One of the more revealing thought experiments I envisioned recently began with a very simple question:What would happen if a household had a pantry containing:50 pounds of beans50 pounds of brown rice50 pounds of wheat50 pounds of soybeans50 pounds of rolled oats50 pounds of grass-fed tallowAlong with:iodized saltdry milkspicesgreens from gardening, foraging, or sproutingand two eggs a day per personCould a person or two people actually live on that?The answer is yes. Not only survive, but likely remain healthier than many Americans currently eating what passes for the modern “standard diet.”When the calories are added up, this pantry contains roughly 630,000 to 700,000 calories, depending on the exact composition of the oats, soybeans, and tallow. Supplemented with eggs, greens, dry milk, and sprouted foods, this reserve would sustain two adults for approximately 10 to 12 months at about 1,800 calories per person per day.What appears visually to be a relatively modest stack of bulk dry goods in a spare room or basement corner can quietly represent nearly a full year of food security for a couple.Now, meat is excluded from this particular exercise, as this is a basic survival plan for the existential emergency.  Some of us may have access to butchered animals, but not all.  If you do, consider yourselves lucky.  And most likely, you probably live in the country.That said, add in meat - and this is the diet of past generations.  And it isn’t all that hard to live on, as long as one has the cooking and preparation skills necessary.  And both are easily learned.The cost?Depending on whether one buys conventional or organic staples, somewhere around three to six dollars per person per day.That figure alone should force some uncomfortable reflection.Modern Americans routinely spend ten times that amount on food. Often more. Yet despite the extraordinary expense, the United States now suffers epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disorders, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic dysfunction.We are simultaneously overfed and undernourished. Yet this simple diet provides the calories, protein, carbohydrates, and nutrients a human body needs.The modern food economy is built less around nourishment than around convenience, novelty, branding, emotional gratification, and engineered hyper-palatability. Entire industries now exist to transform cheap commodity crops into brightly packaged edible entertainment products designed to override satiety mechanisms and maximize repeat consumption.This is not an accident. It is a business model.At 6 bucks a day, this organic diet costs $180 a month.or about $2,150 per person per year.Meanwhile, the humble pantry staples that nourished civilizations for centuries are treated as symbols of deprivation or eccentricity.Beans. Rice. Wheat. Oats. Eggs.Milk. Greens. Animal fat.These are now viewed by many Americans almost as “poverty foods,” despite the fact that they formed the backbone of countless traditional diets associated with physical resilience, lower obesity rates, stable family economies, and long-term food security.The truth is that staples feed people.Brands sell lifestyles.Rolled oats are a particularly interesting addition to this thought experiment because they solve multiple problems at once.They are inexpensive. They store well. They are calorie-dense. They provide soluble fiber beneficial for metabolic health and gut function. They are versatile. Oatmeal can be breakfast, bread extender, soup thickener, porridge, granola, or added to baked goods. Combined with dry milk, spices, and eggs, oats become an extraordinarily nutritious and comforting staple food.A pantry with oats also feels psychologically more complete. Humans do not simply require calories. They require rhythm, familiarity, and comfort. A warm bowl of oats on a cold morning matters more than nutrition spreadsheets acknowledge.Now, to be clear, this hypothetical pantry is not glamorous. Nobody is claiming that living indefinitely on bulk grains, legumes, oats, tallow, powdered milk, and eggs represents culinary nirvana. Humans crave variety. Appetite fatigue is real. Morale matters.That is where the garden, the herb patch, the sprouting jars, and the spice shelf enter the picture.Historically, cultures that survive on staple foods have learned to make simple ingredients endlessly adaptable. Garlic. Onion. Vinegar. Rosemary. Thyme. Chili powder. Curry. Mustard. Fermentation. Pickling. Sprouting. Bone broths. Fresh greens.The difference between deprivation and abundance often lies less in luxury than in skill.A pot of beans becomes chili. Lentil stew. Curry. Soup. Mash. Flatbread filling. Fermented paste. Rice changes character entirely depending on seasoning and preparation. Wheat becomes porridge, bread, pancakes, noodles, dumplings, or sprouted grain. Oats become breakfast, cookies, savory porridge, oatcakes, or a thickening for stews.Traditional households understood this intuitively because they had no choice. Modern consumers increasingly do not because food preparation itself has been outsourced.And this is where the prepper angle intersects with something deeper than disaster planning.Preparedness is not paranoia.Preparedness used to be called housekeeping or, even better, the domestic arts.For most of human history, resilient households maintained stores of staple foods, preserved fats, seeds, root vegetables, grains, dried beans, oats, and salt. They kept chickens. They gardened. They preserved surplus harvests. They knew how to cook from raw ingredients because daily survival required it.What many now call “prepping” was once simply normal adult competence.A household possessing:bulk staplesrolled oatsstored fatslaying hensa productive gardenpreserved foodsclean waterand basic cooking knowledgeis extraordinarily resilient compared to a household dependent on:daily grocery deliveriestakeout appsfrozen dinnersultra-processed snacksand fragile just-in-time supply chains.The COVID period briefly exposed how thin the illusion of abundance really was. Grocery shelves emptied rapidly. Supply chains faltered. Prices surged.Suddenly, millions of Americans discovered that they possessed only a few days’ worth of food at home and little practical knowledge of how to improvise when systems became unstable.The irony is that the solutions are neither exotic nor expensive.The old ways still work.Beans still store well. Rice still feeds billions. Oats still nourish. Eggs remain nutritional powerhouses. Animal fats remain dense, stable calorie sources. Gardens still produce food. Sprouting still converts dry seeds into fresh nutrition during winter months. Dry milk still provides calcium and protein cheaply. Salt still matters.There is also a psychological component that deserves attention.Consumer culture trains people to associate security with endless purchasing. But genuine resilience often comes from reducing dependency, not increasing consumption.A person who knows how to turn simple staples into nourishing meals is harder to manipulate through fear, scarcity, inflation, or supply disruptions.Self-reliance has always carried political implications.The modern economy depends heavily on perpetual consumption, dependence on convenience, and learned helplessness. Citizens who lose the ability to feed themselves from basic ingredients become permanently dependent on industrial systems they neither understand nor control.That dependence creates vulnerability.The prepper pantry thought experiment strips away the illusion and asks a simple question:How much food does a human being actually require to remain healthy?The answer is: far less money, far fewer processed products, and far more practical knowledge than modern society would have us believe.Our grandparents understood this. Many homesteaders still do.The pantry, the garden, the hens, the root cellar, the oats, the spice rack, the soup pot, and the mason jar are not relics of a backward past.They are technologies of resilience.JGM/RWMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareHomesteading for HealthAvailable for pre-order

Summary: Food security


The Acne Industrial Complex:

Audio:The story of how the FDA ignored a Whistleblower, Failed Teenagers, and Kept Millions of Carcinogenic Products on Shelves.I want to tell you a story about regulatory failure. It is a story about an independent laboratory doing the work that federal regulators refuse to do. It is a story about benzene, a known carcinogen, contaminating products used by 50 million Americans every year, with concentrations 880 times higher than FDA limits. And it is a story about the FDA’s stunning indifference to that contamination.This is not speculation. This is not fear-mongering. These are facts documented by one of the most credible independent testing laboratories in America, facts that the mainstream media, particularly Bloomberg investigative reporter Anna Edney, has been documenting for years while federal regulators sat idle. The laboratory is Valisure. The products are benzoyl peroxide acne creams. And the regulatory failure is so profound that it demands we ask: who is actually protecting American consumers?The Laboratory That Does the FDA’s Job Better Than the FDALet me establish the credibility here. Valisure is not some fringe operation. For the past 11 years, this independent testing laboratory has been conducting quality control on pharmaceuticals that the FDA itself failed to catch. Over that period, their findings have led to over $12 billion in product recalls. Think about that number: $12 billion. That very large number is a systemic indictment of federal regulatory failure.Valisure’s most famous case: they discovered nitrosamines, potent carcinogens, in Zantac (ranitidine), the blockbuster heartburn medication that hundreds of millions of people took without knowing it might be poisoning them. GSK ultimately paid a $2.2 billion settlement, and Valisure won a multimillion-dollar whistleblower award for their discovery (See:GSK Settlement Details).They’ve found benzene in hand sanitizers used during COVID-19, when people trusted government assurances that these products were safe. They’ve found benzene in sunscreens. They’ve found it in dry shampoos. Now they’ve found it in alarming concentrations in the acne treatments used by teenagers and young adults across America (see:the Dermatology Times report).The question is: where was the FDA while an independent laboratory kept finding contaminated consumer products? The answer is unavoidable: the FDA was slow-walking, equivocating, and defending regulatory inertia.The Benzene Problem: Vastly Worse Than AcknowledgedHere are the facts Valisure documented: Valisure tested 66 benzoyl peroxide products and found that, while FDA guidelines allow up to 2 parts per million of benzene, some products contained up to 12 times that level. Let me translate what that means: FDA limit is 2 ppm. Valisure found products with 24 ppm. Some considerably higher.Specific examples: Proactiv’s 2.5% benzoyl peroxide cream contained as much as 1,761 parts per million of benzene during stability testing, while a similar cream from Target reached 1,598 parts per million, and Estee Lauder’s Clinique hit 401 parts per million. 1,761 parts per million. That is 880 times the FDA limit.And this is not some theoretical contamination that only appears under extreme conditions. Valisure found that even an unopened Proactiv product leaked high levels of benzene when kept at 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of a hot shower or a summer day in Arizona, for approximately 17 hours. A hot shower or a warm day. The kind of temperature your acne cream reaches when sitting on the bathroom counter or next to the pool in a satchel. This is not a stability problem that requires specialized knowledge to exploit. This is a basic storage condition in the real world.The Leukemia Connection: Why Benzene MattersBenzene is not a minor concern. Benzene is a known carcinogen that can cause leukemia in high amounts, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And here is what is particularly important: the risk is not just about acute exposure. It is about chronic, low-level exposure over time. Recent research from the United Kingdom linked low-level chronic benzene exposure to an increase in mortality, with exposure as low as less than 1 ppm.Consider the epidemiology: we are talking about teenagers and young adults, and 86% of people aged 12 to 24 have some form of acne. Many of them use these products daily. For months. For years. Exposed to benzene contamination levels that are orders of magnitude above what epidemiological research suggests is safe.The latency period for benzene-induced leukemia is measured in years and decades. We are not going to see an obvious epidemic tomorrow. We might not see it for 10 years. But when we do, we will have known it was coming because an independent laboratory told us so in 2024.The FDA Response: Regulatory TheaterThe FDA’s response to Valisure’s findings has been, in a word, pathetic. When Valisure filed a citizen petition in March 2024 requesting the recall of the contaminated products, the FDA did not immediately act.Instead, the agency said it would “work to verify whether Valisure’s data was accurate.” Let me parse what that means: an independent laboratory with 11 years of successful product safety discoveries and $12 billion in recalls to their credit documents dangerous contamination in widely used consumer products, and the federal regulator responds by saying: we’ll check to see if they’re right. This is not agency caution. This is regulatory negligence dressed in bureaucratic language.By March 2025, a full year after Valisure’s petition, the FDA finally undertook its own testing of 95 benzoyl peroxide products. Even then, the agency’s response was defensive and inadequate. The FDA claimed that 90% of the products showed “undetectable or extremely low levels of benzene,” conveniently neglecting that 10% of products tested did show problematic levels. 10% of products means millions of contaminated units sitting in retail stores and medicine cabinets.And the FDA still did not issue a comprehensive recall. Instead, it allowed the recall to be conducted “at the retailer level,” which is code for saying: stores can remove them if they want, but we’re not going to make it mandatory. This is what regulatory capture looks like.The Woodcock Problem: How Former FDA Leadership Helped Create This CrisisBefore moving on, it is important to address the larger institutional problem. Bloomberg investigative reporter Anna Edney has repeatedly documented how the FDA allowed poor-quality and contaminated products to enter the U.S. market despite prior warning signs, overseas manufacturing violations, and repeated import alerts. Much of that failure occurred during the long leadership tenure of Janet Woodcock.Woodcock led the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) for decades before serving as acting FDA commissioner from 2021 to 2022. During that period, the agency became increasingly deferential to pharmaceutical manufacturers, particularly large generic-drug producers operating overseas. Rather than aggressively policing manufacturing quality, the FDA often appeared to rely on company assurances, negotiated remediation plans, and paperwork reviews instead of rigorous enforcement and independent verification.Janet Woodcock’s historical role in the COVID era was as a senior bureaucratic operator who helped institutionalize and accelerate an unprecedented emergency-response model built around pharmaceutical countermeasures. She was central in operationalizing Operation Warp Speed’s regulatory machinery: compressing timelines, normalizing Emergency Use Authorizations, and aligning the FDA with a whole-of-government campaign focused on rapid vaccine deployment.She enabled the FDA to shift from a cautious regulator to a facilitator of executive-branch public health objectives. The traditional posture of long-term risk assessment, independent review, and regulatory restraint gave way to speed, messaging discipline, and institutional alignment with federal pandemic policy. Her tenure was emblematic of a deeper transformation of the FDA that prioritizes emergency mobilization over transparency, skepticism, and regulatory independence.The FDA’s greatest failure during COVID may have been the collapse of genuine informed consent. Emergency Use Authorization products were promoted to the public as if they were fully settled science, while Americans faced unprecedented coercion through mandates tied to jobs, education, military service, travel, and public life.True informed consent requires free choice, full disclosure of risks and uncertainties, and open scientific debate. Instead, the FDA helped foster an environment where uncertainties were minimized, adverse-event concerns were downplayed, prior infection was often ignored, and dissenting physicians and scientists were marginalized or censored.Rather than acting as a cautious, independent regulator, the FDA became part of a coordinated government campaign to drive mass uptake of novel pharmaceutical products under emergency conditions. For many critics, that represented a fundamental abandonment of the ethical principles established after Nuremberg: no medical intervention without fully informed and freely given consent.This matters because the benzoyl peroxide controversy did not emerge in a vacuum. The instability of benzoyl peroxide and its potential to degrade into benzene under certain conditions was not an unforeseeable event. Furthermore, when consumers use these products with no clear warning labels, there is no true informed consent.It reflects a broader regulatory culture in which post-market surveillance became reactive instead of proactive. The result was an FDA that too often acted after independent laboratories exposed problems publicly rather than identifying them internally first.The FDA’s Campaign Against ValisureThe treatment of Valisure provides a particularly troubling example.As discussed earlier, Valisure gained national attention after identifying carcinogenic contaminants, including nitrosamines in ranitidine products sold as Zantac, as well as benzene contamination in sunscreens, hand sanitizers, and acne products. Their findings triggered recalls, lawsuits, and eventually major financial settlements.Instead of accepting or even acknowledging the laboratory’s independent testing efforts, the FDA inspected and challenged Valisure shortly after many of these findings were made public.A detailed investigation byConsumer Reportsdescribed how the agency accused Valisure of operating outside appropriate regulatory frameworks. However, Consumer Reports also raised significant questions about the FDA’s claims.The consequences extended far beyond bureaucratic infighting. Manufacturers cited the FDA’s criticisms of Valisure in court to undermine lawsuits brought by consumers alleging harm from contaminated products.In effect, the FDA regulator appeared to be discrediting one of the few organizations independently identifying dangerous contamination problems that the FDA itself had failed to detect.Representative Rosa DeLauro sharply criticized the agency’s handling of the matter, warning that the FDA risked “shooting the messenger” instead of addressing the underlying safety failures. DeLauro, who has long advocated for stronger drug safety oversight and mandatory recall authority, argued that Valisure’s work had exposed major gaps in the FDA’s ability to safeguard the pharmaceutical supply chain.For many observers, the Valisure case became symbolic of a deeper institutional problem inside the FDA: an agency increasingly defensive about outside scrutiny, increasingly intertwined with the industries it regulates, and increasingly reluctant to confront systemic manufacturing failures in the global drug supply chain.The Alternative: Hypochlorous Acid and Actual SafetyNow, here is where this story could actually have a redemptive arc. Hypochlorous acid, HOCl, is a naturally occurring antimicrobial compound produced by the human immune system. It kills bacteria with precision. It does not generate free radicals that damage healthy tissue. It naturally degrades into simple saline (salt water) and does not form carcinogenic byproducts. And most importantly, the clinical evidence supports its effectiveness in treating acne. Studies have found that HOCl-based products are as effective if not more effective, than benzoyl peroxide, with a superior safety profile and fewer adverse effects.For a substance that has been used for years in wound care, postoperative infection prevention, and immune support, the clinical literature on its efficacy and safety is extensive. Note that Curativa Bay is registered with the FDA under a 510(k) medical device registration to sell burn care and wound care productsA study assessing the efficacy of superoxidized solution (essentially pharmaceutical-grade HOCl) in the treatment of mild-to-moderate inflammatory acne found no significant differences in outcomes between SOS and benzoyl peroxide, while HOCl demonstrated reduced keratinocyte cytotoxicity and improved wound healing.This is evidence-based medicine. HOCl works. It is safer. It does not turn into benzene.Why, then, is benzoyl peroxide still the standard of care?The answer is institutional inertia, commercial investment, and regulatory precedent. Benzoyl peroxide is entrenched. It is manufactured at scale. It has decades of marketing behind it. And the regulatory machinery that would normally function to protect public health has been too compromised to act.The Best of All Possible WorldsIf we were operating in good faith, if public health actually took priority over commercial interests and regulatory comfort, here is what would happen:First, the FDA would issue a comprehensive recall of all benzoyl peroxide products found to contain elevated benzene levels. Not retailer-level requests. An actual regulatory action.The FDA would require a black-box warning, carcinogen warning, or benzene-specific label statement for all benzoyl peroxide products: covering storage temperature instructions, expiration emphasis, refrigeration recommendations, or degradation warnings.Second, the agency would issue public guidance explaining the mechanism of benzene degradation in benzoyl peroxide and recommending that consumers consider alternatives, particularly HOCl-based products.Third, dermatologists would be presented with evidence-based information comparing benzoyl peroxide and HOCl side by side, with a clear acknowledgment of the benzene contamination risk.Fourth, the pharmaceutical and skincare industry would reformulate acne products to use HOCl as the primary antimicrobial agent.None of this requires extraordinary action.It requires the FDA to do its job: protect public health.But that would require the agency to acknowledge years of regulatory failure. It would require admitting that an independent laboratory has been more effective at protecting consumers than the federal regulator. It would require abandoning the defense of entrenched treatments. It is easier to move slowly and hope the problem goes away.The Lesson: Trust the Lab, Not the RegulatorHere is what I want to say directly: Valisure has earned credibility through 11 years of rigorous work and $12 billion in recalls driven by their discoveries. The former FDA leadership has not.If you have a teenager with acne, and they are using a benzoyl peroxide product, you should consider transitioning to an HOCl-based alternative. This is not speculation. This is not alarmism. This is a recommendation based on documented contamination, a known carcinogenic degradation product, and a safer, evidence-supported alternative (see the annotated bibliography below).The FDA will not tell you this. The pharmaceutical companies marketing benzoyl peroxide will not tell you this. The dermatologists trained in the standard protocols will likely not tell you this. But Valisure has told you this. And their track record over the past 11 years suggests they are more reliable than the regulators who preceded them.That is the state of pharmaceutical oversight in America in 2025. An independent laboratory with no government mandate and no regulatory authority is more effective at protecting public health than the federal agency that was charged with doing exactly that. That is not a critique of Valisure. It is an indictment of the former FDA leadership.Until we have regulatory leadership willing to prioritize public health over institutional comfort and profits, and willing to acknowledge that safer alternatives exist, teenagers will continue being exposed to benzene through acne products that the former FDA approved and continues to defend.Valisure did the work. The former FDA did not. Choose accordingly.Shop 25% off with Code ACNE— Robert W. Malone, MD, MSDr. Robert W. Malone is the Chief Medical Officer of Curativa Bay (CuraClean Technologies). He is a physician, scientist, and the inventor of foundational mRNA vaccine technology.He has served on multiple biotechnology and biodefense advisory bodies and writes regularly on pandemic preparedness, medical countermeasures, and public-health policy.An earlier version of this article was first published on theCurative Bay Substack.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.Annotated Bibliography: Hypochlorous Acid (HOCl) and Acne Treatment“Efficacy and Tolerance of Superoxidized Solution in the Treatment of Mild to Moderate Inflammatory Acne: A Double-Blinded, Placebo-Controlled, Parallel-Group, Randomized Clinical Trial.”Journal of Dermatological Treatment20, no. 5 (2009): 289–292.Available via discussion/reprint references:ResearchGate abstract and excerptsThis randomized controlled trial is among the earliest formal clinical investigations evaluating a hypochlorous acid-containing “superoxidized” topical solution for acne vulgaris. The study reported reductions in inflammatory acne lesions with generally good tolerability and fewer irritation complaints than commonly observed with benzoyl peroxide-based therapies. The paper is important because it established early clinical evidence that  HOCl provides antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory effects without excessive skin irritation. Limitations include modest sample size and relatively short follow-up duration.“Status Report on Topical Hypochlorous Acid: Clinical Relevance of Specific Formulations, Potential Modes of Action, and Study Outcomes.”Journal of Clinical and Aesthetic Dermatology11, no. 11 (2018): 36–39.PMC full text:PubMed Central full articleThis review article is one of the most widely cited summaries of topical hypochlorous acid in dermatology. The authors discuss the chemistry, antimicrobial activity, anti-inflammatory properties, and formulation challenges associated with HOCl products. Acne vulgaris is highlighted as a promising application because HOCl appears capable of reducingCutibacterium acnesburden while simultaneously decreasing inflammatory signaling. The paper also discusses the biologic relevance of HOCl as a naturally occurring oxidant produced by neutrophils during innate immune responses.“Sodium Hypochlorite 0.005% Versus Placebo in the Treatment of Mild to Moderate Acne Vulgaris.”Dermatology Practical & Conceptual11, no. 2 (2021).PubMed entry:PubMed abstractFull text:Dermatology Practical & Conceptual full articleThis placebo-controlled clinical study evaluated dilute sodium hypochlorite solution for mild-to-moderate acne vulgaris. Although sodium hypochlorite differs chemically from stabilized HOCl formulations, the study is relevant because both function through related oxidizing antimicrobial mechanisms. Investigators observed statistically significant reductions in inflammatory lesions with favorable tolerability. The study supports the broader concept that low-concentration chlorine oxidant therapies may reduce acne-associated bacterial burden and inflammation.“A Pilot Study to Assess the Efficacy and Tolerability of Two Hypochlorous Acid Formulations in Acne Vulgaris.”Pilot study/industry-sponsored report.PDF of study:Pilot study PDFRelated company announcement:Sonoma Pharmaceuticals study announcementThis pilot investigation evaluated two topical HOCl formulations in acne patients and reported reductions in inflammatory lesions along with favorable skin tolerability. The study provides practical clinical observations suggesting that HOCl formulations may reduce irritation while maintaining antimicrobial activity.“Hypochlorous Acid: Clinical Insights and Experience in Dermatology.”Biomedicines13, no. 12 (2025).MDPI full article:Biomedicines full articleThis recent review provides a broad overview of hypochlorous acid applications across dermatology, including acne vulgaris, eczema, seborrheic dermatitis, wound care, and post-procedural skin management. The paper emphasizes HOCl’s dual antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory effects, as well as its generally favorable safety profile. Of particular interest is the discussion comparing HOCl with conventional acne therapies such as benzoyl peroxide, topical antibiotics, and chlorhexidine. The review also notes the growing consumer interest in HOCl products following concerns regarding benzene contamination and irritation associated with some traditional acne medications.“Hypochlorous Acid: Blast From the Past.”Journal of Drugs in Dermatology23, no. 11 (2024): 1024–1028.Full article:Journal of Drugs in Dermatology articleThis review article provides a broader historical and mechanistic overview of hypochlorous acid in medicine and dermatology. The authors describe HOCl as a naturally occurring oxidant generated by neutrophils during the innate immune response and discuss its longstanding but periodically overlooked role in antimicrobial therapy. The paper emphasizes that HOCl possesses broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity while also modulating inflammatory pathways, making it particularly attractive for inflammatory skin disorders such as acne vulgaris, rosacea, eczema, and wound healing.Of particular relevance to acne treatment, the review discusses how HOCl may reduceCutibacterium acnesburden without the degree of irritation commonly associated with benzoyl peroxide and other topical antiseptics. The authors also address formulation chemistry, noting that pH and stabilization are critical determinants of biologic activity and shelf life.Importantly, the paper frames hypochlorous acid as part of a larger movement toward lower-toxicity topical antimicrobial strategies in dermatology, especially amid growing concerns regarding antibiotic resistance, skin barrier injury, and contamination issues involving traditional acne products.Shop 25% off with Code ACNE

Summary: When Regulatory Capture Meets Chemical Recklessness