BRUSSELS' LONG WAR ON FREE SPEECH

There is a document you should read. It is 160 pages long, written by the staff of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and it contains something remarkable: receipts. Thousands upon thousands of pages of internal corporate communications, produced under congressional subpoena from ten of the world’s largest technology companies (Meta, Google, TikTok, X, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others), documenting in meticulous, damning detail how officials of the European Commission spent a decade quietly pressuring Silicon Valley to silence speech they didn’t like. Not illegal speech. Not dangerous speech. Political speech. Conservative speech. Speech about immigration, COVID-19, gender ideology, and election integrity.The Committee has now published two interim staff reports. Part I arrived in July 2025 and Part II in February 2026. Together they constitute the most comprehensive public accounting yet of what critics have long suspected, and defenders of the EU have long denied: that the Digital Services Act (DSA) is not a safety regulation. It is a censorship regime. One with global reach, designed and wielded with partisan intent, and one that has already shaped the outcome of elections on both sides of the Atlantic.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This essay summarizes what those reports found, surveys the subsequent evidence that has emerged, and makes the case that every American who cares about the First Amendment should be paying close attention.Prologue: The Philosopher-King of CensorshipBefore we get to Brussels, we should spend a moment in Palo Alto. Because the intellectual scaffolding for everything the European Commission has built, the justifications, the framing, the moral confidence, was articulated with unusual clarity by an American, on American soil, four years before this controversy reached its current boiling point.On April 21, 2022, former President Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at a symposium titled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm,” hosted jointly by Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation. It was a polished, hour-long speech, delivered with the former president’s characteristic eloquence and earnest self-assurance. It was also, at its core, a sophisticated argument for why governments must control speech to save democracy, and why people who resist that control are, at best, naive and, at worst, complicit in authoritarianism.“People like Putin, and Steve Bannon for that matter, understand it’s not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage.” - Barack Obama, Stanford University, April 2022Obama’s central thesis was that the free flow of information, the very thing the First Amendment was designed to protect, had become democracy’s greatest vulnerability. Social media platforms, he argued, were “turbocharging” humanity’s worst impulses, amplifying disinformation, sowing distrust, and creating the conditions in which autocrats flourish. He invoked Myanmar, Ethiopia, Russia, and Hungary. He mentioned Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon in the same breath as fellow travelers in the project of epistemological destruction. He declared that “people are dying because of misinformation,” citing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy as Exhibit A.The solution, in Obama’s telling, was for technology companies to “redesign” themselves under government oversight. Content moderation, he said, does not go far enough. Platforms have a “financial incentive” to keep dangerous content circulating and must be compelled by regulation to go further. He explicitly called for Section 230 reform, the legal provision that shields platforms from liability for user content, and argued that tech must be subject to the same kind of public safety regulation as other industries. Decisions about what is true and what is dangerous, he argued, should not be left solely to private companies. They must be subject to government oversight.Note what Obama was not saying. He was not calling for government bureaucrats to maintain a list of banned opinions. He framed his argument carefully, acknowledging the First Amendment, praising the “transformative power” of the open internet, and insisting he was merely talking about mitigating the “worst harms” of disinformation. He is too careful a lawyer and too skilled a politician to make the mistake of sounding like a censor.But the logic of his argument, followed to its conclusion, leads exactly there. If disinformation is an existential threat to democracy, and if platforms cannot be trusted to address it voluntarily, and if government regulation is required to compel them, then someone must be empowered to decide what constitutes disinformation. In a democracy, that someone is ultimately the state. And the state, being composed of human beings with political interests and ideological commitments, will exercise that power in politically interested and ideologically committed ways.Who decides what is disinformation? Whoever holds the regulatory pen. And the pen is never held by no one.Obama did not answer this question in his Stanford speech. He glided past it with characteristic grace, offering reassurances about independent oversight, journalistic standards, and citizens’ own responsibility to consume news critically. These are not bad ideas. But they are not answers to the structural problem his own argument creates.The European Commission answered the question for him. They decided who holds the pen. It is the Commission. And the Commission, as we are about to see, has wielded that pen with a specificity of political purpose that ought to trouble anyone who took Obama’s professed concerns about democracy seriously.The irony is exquisite and worth sitting with. Obama gave his Stanford speech, warning about the dangers of foreign authoritarian interference in democratic information ecosystems. He specifically named Russia’s manipulation of social media platforms as a threat to Western democracy. He called for regulatory frameworks to protect the integrity of public discourse. And the European regulatory framework that emerged from exactly that ideological tradition, built on exactly those justifications by bureaucrats who share exactly those values, has been used, as extensively documented by the House Judiciary Committee’s evidence, to cancel election results, suppress political opponents, and shape the information environment of European voters in ways that happen to favor the established political order.Obama’s Stanford speech is the ur-text of the censorship-as-democracy-protection ideology. It is thoughtful, earnest, and wrong in a way that matters enormously. Not because disinformation is not real. It is real. Not because foreign manipulation of social media platforms is not a genuine threat. It is. But because the cure Obama prescribed is more dangerous than the disease, for the same reason that has always made prior restraint on speech dangerous: you cannot give governments the power to define truth without giving them the power to define convenient truth.The story that follows is what happens when you do.I. The Machine Is Built in the DarkThe story begins not with the DSA itself, which passed in 2022 (the same year as Obama’s speech justifying this approach), but with a decade of groundwork. Beginning around 2015 and 2016, according to the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation, senior European Commission officials began convening a series of meetings with the major social media platforms. The stated purpose was anodyne: combating “hate speech” and “disinformation.” The actual purpose, the documents suggest, was something far more specific.Europe was experiencing the same populist insurgency that was rattling establishment politics everywhere in the Western world. Voters angry about mass migration, economic stagnation, and elite condescension were flocking to parties the European press described as “far right”, parties that in most cases simply held views that had been mainstream a generation earlier. The platforms, with their algorithmic indifference to editorial gatekeepers, were giving these movements a megaphone that bypassed state broadcasters and legacy newspapers.“The Commission worked to censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history, including the COVID-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues.” - House Judiciary Committee Staff Report, February 2026The Commission’s solution was to turn the platforms into enforcers. Over the course of more than 100 closed-door meetings documented in the subpoenaed materials, Commission officials pressed company representatives to tighten their content moderation rules globally, not just within Europe. The trick, the documents reveal, was that they understood a fundamental reality of how platforms work: you cannot easily run separate content moderation regimes for different countries. When Europe demands that a certain type of speech be suppressed, the practical effect is that it is suppressed everywhere.The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the process dramatically. In November 2021, the Commission reached out to TikTok, asking how the platform planned to fight “disinformation” about COVID vaccines, specifically in the United States, not in Europe. The Commission requested information about TikTok’s plans to “remove” certain claims about vaccine efficacy targeting American children. This was a foreign government bureaucracy directing an American company to censor American speech on American soil. It happened in an email.II. The Law That Made It PermanentThe informal pressure campaign was codified and supercharged when the Digital Services Act came into force in 2023. The DSA is, on its face, a platform regulation. It requires large platforms to assess and mitigate “systemic risks” to civic discourse, electoral processes, and public health. It empowers regulators to appoint “trusted flaggers”, approved organizations whose content removal requests must be fast-tracked by platforms. It threatens non-compliant companies with fines of up to six percent of their global annual revenue, a number that, for a company like Meta, could run to billions of dollars.The DSA does not just regulate Europe. It exports European speech standards to the entire world.The law’s extraterritorial ambition is the key to understanding why it matters for Americans. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, X, and TikTok do not, for practical reasons, maintain country-specific content moderation systems. Users travel. VPNs are ubiquitous. The cost and complexity of geographically precise moderation are prohibitive. This means that when the Commission pressures a platform to change its global community guidelines, as the subpoenaed documents show it explicitly did, telling platforms at a closed-door May 2025 workshop that “continuous review of global community guidelines” was a DSA compliance best practice. Those changes apply to users in Des Moines as surely as they apply to users in Düsseldorf.The Part I report contains a particularly striking example from a Commission workshop exercise. Regulators labeled a hypothetical social media post reading “we need to take back our country”, a phrase used by politicians across the ideological spectrum, including numerous Democratic Party figures, as “illegal hate speech” that platforms are required to censor under the DSA. This is not a fringe interpretation. This is what Commission officials were teaching platform compliance teams in a training exercise documented in internal corporate files.III. Elections: The Clearest EvidenceIf the broad claims about content moderation policy feel abstract, the election-specific evidence is harder to dismiss. The Part II report identifies at least eight European national elections in which the Commission activated what it called a “rapid response system”, a mechanism through which approved fact-checkers and government-designated “trusted flaggers” can file priority content removal requests against platforms in the days before and after voting.The elections named in the report span the Continent:• Slovakia (2023): Platforms reportedly censored statements including “there are only two genders” as hate speech under Commission pressure, removing content that had nothing to do with the election itself.• The Netherlands (2023 and 2025): Government bodies were granted “trusted flagger” status, enabling faster removal of content ahead of elections won by the populist Geert Wilders.• France (2024): Pre-election coordination meetings between Commission officials, national regulators, and “left-wing NGOs” discussed which political content should be moderated.• Ireland (2024 general election and 2025 presidential election): The Irish media regulator hosted “DSA Election Roundtables” with the Commission and platforms. Meta confirmed it had updated its “election risk assessment and mitigations”, with additional moderation steps implemented at regulators’ urging.• Romania (2024): The most dramatic case, discussed in detail below.The Commission’s response to all of this has been to call the reports “pure nonsense” and “completely unfounded.” But the documents are not the Committee’s invention. They were produced under legal compulsion by the companies themselves. The question is not whether these meetings happened. The emails prove they did. The question is whether they constitute legitimate election integrity work or partisan interference dressed up in the language of safety.The answer depends almost entirely on whether you trust the Commission’s judgment about what constitutes dangerous “disinformation”. That trust has been catastrophically eroded by what happened in Romania.IV. Romania: The Censorship That Cancelled an ElectionIn November 2024, a political outsider named Călin Georgescu unexpectedly won the first round of Romania’s presidential election with 23 percent of the vote, surging from single-digit polling in a matter of weeks. Romania’s intelligence services, the Constitutional Court, and the European Commission immediately pointed to TikTok: Russian-linked bot networks, they said, had artificially amplified Georgescu’s content and manipulated the platform’s algorithm. On December 6, 2024, the Constitutional Court made history. It cancelled the election results, the first time a European nation had ever done so on grounds of social media interference.The narrative was clean, compelling, and politically convenient. Georgescu was portrayed as pro-Russian and anti-NATO. His victory would have been an embarrassment for the EU establishment. The interference claim gave authorities the legal basis to void the result and ban him from the re-run election held in May 2025, which was won by a pro-EU candidate.Then the receipts arrived. TikTok’s own submission to the European Commission, documents produced under the House Judiciary Committee’s subpoena, stated that the company “ha[d] not found, nor been presented with, any evidence of a coordinated network of 25,000 accounts associated with Mr. Georgescu’s campaign.” This is the platform that was accused of being the vector of the interference. It found no evidence of the interference.TikTok told the European Commission it had found no evidence of the Russian bot network cited by the Romanian Constitutional Court to justify cancelling the election.Furthermore, Romanian investigative journalism outlet snoop.ro, citing confidential sources from Romania’s own tax authority, reported that at least one of the TikTok influence campaigns had in fact been funded by Romania’s National Liberal Party, a member of the mainstream establishment coalition rather than a foreign government.None of this led to the reinstatement of the election results. The re-run proceeded. The pro-EU candidate won. And the Commission, which had used the Romanian case as justification for its TikTok investigation under the DSA, has never publicly grappled with TikTok’s own denial of the core factual predicate.This is the most serious allegation in the entire debate: that the censorship apparatus built under the DSA was used not to protect an election, but to change one. Whether one believes Georgescu was a genuine threat or a legitimate democratic choice, the principle at stake is the same. Governments should not be in the business of deciding which election results to honor based on post-hoc disinformation findings that the relevant platform disputes.V. The German ParadoxThe German federal election of February 2025 is instructive precisely because the evidence confounds the simple censorship narrative, though in ways that raise their own troubling questions.Ahead of the vote, the Commission conducted stress tests with major platforms and convened roundtables with the German Digital Services Coordinator to discuss “risks.” Germany’s domestic intelligence service warned of Russian disinformation campaigns. A task force was established in the state of Hesse to “analyze and coordinate measures regarding opinions on social media platforms.” State officials warned police officers against membership in regional branches of the AfD, a party polling above 20 percent.And yet: independent research by Global Witness and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that TikTok’s and X’s algorithms were, in fact, amplifying AfD content disproportionately compared with other parties. Elon Musk used X’s platform to openly endorse the AfD, host its leader in a livestream, and tell his 220 million followers to vote for it. The AfD finished second with 20.8 percent. Then, months after the election, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency labeled the entire AfD, the main opposition party in the Bundestag, an “extremist organization” subject to enhanced surveillance. The designation was rapidly suspended pending legal challenge.What the German case demonstrates is that the DSA’s election integrity framework coexists with other forms of state pressure and does not prevent their use against opposition parties. The AfD was not suppressed on TikTok. It was suppressed in other ways: through intelligence designations, the refusal of other parties to cooperate with it legislatively, and an overwhelmingly hostile media environment. The DSA was simply one instrument in a broader toolkit.VI. What This Means for AmericansThe Trump administration has responded to these findings with unusual vigor. Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed visa bans on five European officials, including former DSA architect Thierry Breton, describing them as leaders of the “global censorship-industrial complex.” The State Department launched an internal investigation into DSA enforcement in early 2025. The House Judiciary Committee has continued to issue subpoenas, including to Meta, as recently as March 2026.The administration’s critics, including former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have called these responses overblown and politically motivated. But the underlying legal concern is not trivial. The DSA researcher access provision, as enforced in the Commission’s December 2025 fine against X, asserts the right to demand that an American company hand over data on American users to researchers approved by European regulators. This is an extraordinary extraterritorial claim over American citizens’ private information, made by an unelected foreign bureaucracy.When a European regulator tells a platform to change its “global community guidelines,” it is making content moderation decisions for Iowa as surely as for Ireland.More broadly, the structural reality of global content moderation means that the First Amendment’s protections are being quietly eroded by foreign regulatory pressure. This is not a hypothetical future threat. The subpoenaed documents show it has already happened: platforms changed their global moderation rules in response to Commission pressure, and those rule changes applied to Americans. The COVID-19 content labelled as misinformation in Brussels was also labelled as misinformation in Baltimore. The immigration discussion that crossed the line into “hate speech” by EU standards crossed that line for American users, too.The $120 million fine levied against X in December 2025, the first ever under the DSA, was ostensibly about blue checkmark transparency and advertising repositories. But Rubio called it “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.” Whether you share his confrontational framing, the principle he defends is straightforward: American companies serving American users should not be regulated by unaccountable foreign bureaucrats whose definition of acceptable speech is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.VII. The Censors’ DefenseIn fairness, the Commission’s defenders make several arguments that deserve engagement rather than dismissal.First, they note that the DSA contains no reference to targeting conservative, populist, or right-wing content. Its language is neutral: it addresses “illegal content,” “systemic risks” to civic discourse, and algorithmic transparency. European legal scholars point to the regulation’s first article, which commits to upholding freedom of expression, and argue that the law’s goal is precisely to prevent censorship of political speech, not to enable it.Second, they argue that the German example, where algorithmic analysis showed the AfD being amplified rather than suppressed, demonstrates that concerns about anti-conservative bias in DSA enforcement are at least partly unfounded. If the machine is supposed to suppress the right, it did a poor job in Germany’s biggest recent election.Third, they contend that the House Judiciary Committee reports are themselves political documents, produced by the Republican majority under Chairman Jim Jordan, a fierce Trump ally, to attack EU regulations that constrain American tech companies, whose executives have grown close to the Trump orbit. The timing of the reports, the critics note, aligns perfectly with the administration’s tariff negotiations and broader pressure campaign against Brussels.These are not frivolous objections. The committee’s framing is unambiguously prosecutorial. It does not wrestle seriously with the possibility that some of what it calls censorship is legitimate moderation of genuinely illegal content. And the political context, Trump, Musk, Jordan, the EU tech regulation fight, is impossible to separate from the evidentiary claims.But here is what is not in dispute: the meetings happened. The pressure was applied. The platforms changed their rules. And in Romania, a national election was cancelled on the basis of interference claims that the platform at the center of the story says it could not verify.VIII. A New Kind of WarThere is a framework that makes sense of everything described in this essay. It is not the framework preferred by the European Commission’s defenders, who present the DSA as a straightforward consumer-protection regulation. It is not even the framework most often used by the Commission’s American critics, who tend to reach for First Amendment arguments. The framework that fits most precisely comes from military doctrine. It is called fifth-generation warfare. And once you see the DSA through that lens, it is difficult to unsee it.Classical warfare, the kind studied at West Point and Sandhurst, is a contest between armies. Second and third-generation warfare added industrial firepower, maneuver, and combined arms. Fourth-generation warfare, the form that defined conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, erased the boundary between soldier and civilian, military and political, battlefield and home front. The state’s monopoly on organized violence was broken.Fifth-generation warfare goes further still. It erases the boundary between war and peace. In fifth-generation warfare, the primary battlefield is not territory. It is not infrastructure. It is the human mind. The target is not an enemy army but an enemy population’s capacity to perceive reality clearly, to form coherent political judgments, and to act collectively on its own interests. The weapon is information itself, or more precisely, the management of information. Victory is achieved not when the enemy surrenders but when the enemy population can no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, friend from foe, or its own interests from those of its adversaries.In fifth-generation warfare, the battlefield is the human mind. Victory is achieved when a population can no longer think clearly enough to defend itself.The concept was developed primarily in the context of non-state actors and foreign adversaries. Russian theorists call their version of it the Gerasimov Doctrine, after General Valery Gerasimov’s 2013 essay arguing that the lines between war and peace have blurred beyond recognition, and that informational, psychological, and political tools are now as decisive as tanks and missiles. Barack Obama himself alluded to this at Stanford, quoting Putin’s alleged insight that you do not need people to believe disinformation. You simply need to flood the public square with enough noise that citizens can no longer know what to believe.What has received far less attention is the question of what happens when these techniques are deployed not by foreign adversaries but by governments against their own citizens. This is sometimes called reflexive control, a term from Soviet and Russian military psychology describing the manipulation of an adversary’s decision-making process by feeding it a carefully curated picture of reality. The adversary, operating on false or incomplete information, makes decisions that serve the manipulator’s interests while believing it is acting freely. The manipulation is invisible because the target never realizes its information environment has been shaped.Reflexive control: the manipulation of a population’s decisions by curating the information it receives, so that people choose what the controller wants while believing they are choosing freely.The DSA’s architecture maps onto this framework with uncomfortable precision. Consider what the law actually does in practice, as documented in the House Judiciary Committee’s evidence. It does not, for the most part, order the deletion of specific pieces of content by government decree. That would be too obvious, too legally vulnerable, too reminiscent of the censorship regimes that Europeans are supposed to have rejected in 1945. Instead, it creates a system of incentives and pressures that cause platforms to curate their own information environments in directions the Commission prefers.The threat of ruinous fines, up to six percent of global revenue, creates a powerful incentive for platforms to err on the side of over-removal when content is in a gray area. The trusted flagger system grants approved organizations, selected by government regulators, the authority to fast-track content for review in the critical days before elections. The systemic risk provisions require platforms to assess and mitigate broad categories of speech, including entirely legal speech, if regulators determine that such speech poses risks to civic discourse or electoral integrity. Compliance teams, knowing they will be audited and potentially fined, develop an institutional instinct for caution that consistently resolves ambiguity in the direction of less speech rather than more.The result is an information environment that has been shaped, at the margins, in ways that favor established political narratives over insurgent ones, institutional authority over popular skepticism, and approved experts over unofficial voices. Citizens navigating this environment believe they are encountering a natural marketplace of ideas. They do not know that the marketplace has been quietly reorganized by regulatory pressure applied in closed-door workshops between Commission officials and platform compliance teams. This is reflexive control exercised by democratic populations over their own governing institutions.Citizens believe they are encountering a natural marketplace of ideas. They do not know the marketplace has been quietly reorganized by bureaucrats in closed-door workshops.The psychological warfare dimension is not incidental to the DSA’s design. It is structural. Psychological operations, in the military sense, achieve their effects by shaping the information environment of a target population. Effective psychological operations are invisible: the target population does not experience them as manipulation but as organic reality. The DSA achieves the same effect through a legal mechanism rather than a military one, but the underlying dynamic is identical. When the Commission labeled the phrase ‘we need to take back our country’ as illegal hate speech in a training exercise for platform compliance teams, it was not merely making a legal determination. It was encoding a political judgment into the informational infrastructure of European society.The word ‘infrastructure’ is important here. Infrastructure is what you do not notice until it fails. For most of history, governments that wanted to control information had to do it visibly: banning books, shutting down newspapers, arresting editors. These actions were recognizable as censorship and generated corresponding resistance. The genius of the DSA model, whether intended or not, is that it operates at the infrastructure level. It does not tell citizens what to think. It shapes the information environment through which citizens form their own thoughts, without their awareness or consent.Military psychologists distinguish between first-order and second-order effects in information operations. First-order effects are direct: a piece of false information is believed. Second-order effects are more powerful and more durable: the target population’s epistemic confidence is degraded. It becomes less certain about what is true, more susceptible to official narratives, and more dependent on authoritative sources to interpret reality for it. The Commission’s disinformation framework, in its long-term operation, risks producing exactly these second-order effects on European citizens, not through enemy action but through the actions of their own governments.This is what makes the Romanian case so significant beyond its immediate facts. Whether Georgescu was genuinely propelled by Russian bots or by domestic political manipulation, the constitutional annulment of the election result sent a message to every voter in Europe: the outcome of an election can be reversed by state authorities citing informational threats that citizens cannot independently verify, using evidence that the platform at the center of the story disputes, in proceedings that are not subject to full public scrutiny. The message, whether received unconsciously or explicitly, is that electoral democracy operates within boundaries set by the state’s informational assessments. That is not democracy. That is managed democracy, the form of governance that Vladimir Putin, the man Obama identified as the master of information warfare, has practiced in Russia for twenty years.The Commission’s model risks producing the same second-order effects that military psychological operations are designed to achieve: populations that are epistemically dependent on official sources to interpret reality.None of this requires the European Commission to be consciously engaged in psychological warfare against its own citizens. The most powerful systemic effects are rarely the product of conscious design. The Commission believes, sincerely and not without some evidence, that it is protecting European democracy from genuine threats: Russian interference, algorithmic amplification of extremism, coordinated disinformation campaigns. Its officials do not consider themselves information warriors. They think of themselves as regulators.But good intentions do not neutralize structural effects. A regulatory framework that systematically disadvantages unofficial speech, that operates through closed-door pressure rather than transparent legal process, that treats political speech as a category of risk to be managed, and that has now demonstrated its willingness to invalidate election results on the basis of disputed informational claims, is functionally indistinguishable from a psychological warfare operation against the political autonomy of European citizens. The instrument is law. The effect is control. The target is thought.Americans watching this from a distance should resist the temptation to treat it as a foreign problem. The House Judiciary Committee’s evidence establishes that the Commission’s content moderation demands have already reached across the Atlantic and reshaped the global policies of American platforms. Fifth-generation warfare, by definition, does not respect national boundaries. An information environment shaped by foreign regulatory pressure is an information environment shaped by a foreign power, regardless of whether that power considers itself an adversary or a partner.The Founders designed the First Amendment precisely because they understood that governments would always be tempted to manage the information environment in ways that served the governing class. They had lived under a government that did exactly that, and they built a constitutional firewall against it. That firewall is now being flanked, not by foreign enemies but by allied bureaucracies deploying the language of safety and the mechanisms of law to achieve what tyrants historically achieved through force.IX. The Bigger PictureStep back from the partisan noise, and the picture that emerges is genuinely alarming, regardless of one’s political sympathies. Democratic self-governance requires that voters be able to freely receive and discuss information. Social media platforms have become the dominant venue for that discussion. And those platforms are now subject to a regulatory framework, enforced by unelected officials in Brussels, that gives government-approved bodies the power to fast-track content removal requests in the weeks before elections, that defines broad categories of political speech as “systemic risks” requiring mitigation, and that threatens companies with ruinous fines for non-compliance.Whether this framework is deployed with partisan intent or genuine neutrality, its structure creates a serious vulnerability. Whoever controls the definition of “disinformation” controls what voters are allowed to easily find and discuss online. The EU’s answer is that independent regulators and judicial review provide sufficient safeguards. The answer of the House Judiciary Committee, and increasingly of many European voices as well, from the Polish president who vetoed DSA implementation legislation to far-right MEPs across the Continent, is that those safeguards are insufficient and that the framework itself is the problem.The right answer probably lies somewhere between these poles. But the conversation cannot happen honestly if the Commission continues to insist that its actions constitute “pure nonsense” rather than engaging with tens of thousands of pages of its own internal communications.Conclusion: Read the DocumentsThe two House Judiciary Committee reports are available in full at the links below. They are imperfect documents, prosecutorial in tone, written for political effect, and produced by people with strong institutional interests in their conclusions. Read them with appropriate skepticism.But read them. Because whatever you think of the Trump administration’s motives, whatever you think of Jim Jordan, whatever you think of Elon Musk, the documents behind those reports are real. The emails between Commission officials and platform compliance teams are real. TikTok’s denial of the Romanian bot network is real. The Irish regulator’s DSA election roundtables are real. The global content moderation rule changes are real.A foreign, unelected bureaucracy has spent a decade trying to shape what you can say and read online. The question is not whether you like the speech it suppressed. The question is whether you believe unelected foreign officials should have that power at all.“Freedom of speech is the foundation of all other freedoms. When Brussels decides what is disinformation, it decides what is true. That is not a power any government should hold.”Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.SharePrimary SourcesThe following official documents underpin this analysis:• House Judiciary Committee: Part II Report (February 3, 2026): https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2026-02/THE-FOREIGN-CENSORSHIP-THREAT-PART-II-2-3-26.pdf• House Judiciary Committee: Part I Report (July 25, 2025): https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2025-07/DSA_Report&Appendix(07.25.25).pdf• Part II Press Release: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-exposes-european-commission-decade-long-campaign-censor-american• Part I Press Release: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/foreign-censorship-threat-how-european-unions-digital-services-act-compelsEDITORIAL NOTEThis essay is written as a summary and analysis of the House Judiciary Committee’s findings and related publicly available reporting. It reflects one viewpoint in an actively contested debate. The European Commission and a significant body of European legal scholars dispute the characterizations in the Committee reports. Readers are strongly encouraged to consult primary sources and multiple perspectives before forming conclusions. The factual claims in this essay are sourced from Congressional reports, peer-reviewed research, and reporting from Reuters, Euronews, EU Observer, TechCrunch, Friends of Europe, and other outlets.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: How the European Union's Digital Services Act Became the World's Most Sophisticated Censorship Machine, and Why Americans Should Be Furious


What are the Influenza Vaccine Risks?

What are the actual Influenza Vaccine risks? A data-driven look at flu vaccine adverse eventsFederal safety databases document a range of side effects from annual influenza vaccination, from predictable and mild to rare and serious. Here is what the numbers show, what they mean for the policy debate over mandatory annual shots, and why the data sources themselves carry important caveats.Whenever someone raises concerns about flu vaccine side effects, the response from official sources tends to follow a predictable script: the vaccine is safe and effective, serious side effects are extremely rare, and the benefits far outweigh the risks. All of that may be true in aggregate. But it tells you almost nothing useful about whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should receive a specific vaccine formulation.A detailed analysis of federal safety surveillance data, drawn from the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), and Medicare administrative claims covering tens of millions of vaccine recipients, offers a more granular picture. The data reveal a risk profile that is neither alarming nor trivial. It is genuinely heterogeneous, varying significantly by age, vaccine formulation, co-administration with other vaccines, and the specific adverse event.For the ongoing policy debate over mandatory or near-mandatory annual influenza vaccination, this heterogeneity matters enormously. A risk-benefit calculation that makes clear sense for a frail 82-year-old in a nursing home may look quite different for a healthy 28-year-old office worker. Current policy treats both identically. The data suggest that risk-benefit considerations warrant closer examination.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The routine side effects: what to expectThe most common adverse reactions to the flu vaccine are neither rare nor surprising. They reflect a functional immune response: the body recognizing a foreign antigen and mounting a reaction to it. Injection site pain, arm soreness, and mild fatigue are the signature experiences of the day or two following vaccination.WHAT THE REACTOGENICITY DATA SHOWAmong healthy adults aged 18 to 49, approximately 30 to 60% report injection site pain, 14 to 16% report myalgia (muscle aches), and 1 to 2% experience a low-grade fever. Symptoms typically resolve within 48 hours.The enhanced influenza vaccine formulations recommended for adults over 65 produce noticeably more local reactogenicity: high-dose vaccines (which contain four times the standard antigen load) generate injection site pain in 25 to 45% of recipients and myalgia in 15 to 20%, compared to 10 to 25% and 5 to 10% respectively for standard-dose formulations. MF59-adjuvanted vaccines show a similar pattern, with injection site pain in 30 to 50% of older recipients.Critically, the higher reactogenicity of enhanced formulations in older adults isnotassociated with higher rates of serious adverse events. It reflects a stronger immune activation, which is precisely the goal.One important and counterintuitive data point: older adults generally experiencelessreactogenicity than younger ones from the same standard-dose vaccine. This is not because the vaccine is gentler on their systems. It reflects immunosenescence, the age-related decline in immune function. The same diminished immune activation that produces fewer side effects also tends to produce weaker protective antibody responses. Low reactogenicity in older adults is not reassurance; it is a signal of blunted immune engagement.For young children aged six months to two years, fever occurs in roughly 12% of vaccinations, and irritability is common. The rate is meaningfully higher when the flu shot is co-administered with other vaccines, particularly the 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) and the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis) combination shot. That interaction matters for the more serious adverse events discussed below.Serious adverse events: parsing the signal from the noiseFour potential serious adverse events have attracted sustained attention in the scientific literature: anaphylaxis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, febrile seizures in young children, and transient ischemic attack. Each has a meaningfully different evidence base, and conflating them under the general label of “rare side effects” obscures important distinctions.Table 1: Adverse event summaryAnaphylaxis: real but rareAnaphylaxis following flu vaccination is a genuine phenomenon, well-documented in the Vaccine Safety Datalink across 25 million doses.[1]The rate falls between 1.35 and 1.6 cases per million doses administered, yielding a number needed to harm (NNH) of roughly 625,000 to 740,000. That means you would need to vaccinate between 625,000 and 740,000 people to expect one case of anaphylaxis attributable to the vaccine.VAERS data capture only about 13% of true anaphylaxis cases, which is why researchers rely on the VSD for incidence estimation rather than on passive surveillance.[8]The underreporting reflects the general limitations of voluntary adverse event reporting, not anything unusual about anaphylaxis detection.Anaphylaxis is medically manageable when it occurs in a clinical setting with standard protocols in place, and fatalities are exceedingly rare. The event typically occurs within 15 to 30 minutes of vaccination, which is why post-vaccination observation periods are standard practice. For most vaccine recipients, anaphylaxis risk is negligible. For the small subset with known severe allergies to vaccine components, it warrants individualized clinical assessment.Guillain-Barre syndrome: a complicated pictureGuillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) is a rare autoimmune condition causing progressive weakness and, in severe cases, paralysis. Its association with influenza vaccination was first identified definitively following the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign, when roughly one additional GBS case per 100,000 doses was observed.Modern seasonal flu vaccines show a much smaller signal: approximately one to two excess cases per million doses, yielding an NNH of 500,000 to one million.[2]The epidemiological relationship has been replicated across multiple seasons and in multiple countries, so the association is considered genuine rather than artifactual.[3]THE COMPARISON THAT POLICY-MAKERS RARELY MENTIONInfluenza infection itself causes Guillain-Barre syndrome at an estimated rate of 17.2 cases per million influenza cases, roughly 17 times the attributable excess from vaccination. In a season where the vaccine prevents substantial influenza illness, it almost certainly prevents more GBS cases than it causes. The vaccine is likely net-protective against GBS in most years.The exception would be a mismatched season with very low vaccine effectiveness, where few cases of influenza are actually prevented.In those years, the benefit calculation shifts toward the adverse event side of the ledger, though even then the GBS risk from vaccination remains very small in absolute terms.GBS risk from flu vaccination appears to be specific to adult recipients. It has not been identified as a statistically significant concern in pediatric populations. Among adults, it is not uniformly distributed: prior history of GBS is considered a precaution by the CDC, though not an absolute contraindication, reflecting uncertainty about whether vaccination triggers recurrence at elevated rates.Febrile seizures in children: the 2026 warning label storyThe most significant recent development in flu vaccine safety monitoring came in January 2026, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued mandatory updated warning labels to all six influenza vaccine manufacturers. The trigger was a study published that month analyzing approximately ten million pediatric vaccine recipients during the 2023-24 season.[4]The study found an incidence rate ratio of 1.67 to 1.68 for febrile seizures in children aged six months to five years during the day of and the day after flu vaccination.An IRR of 1.67 means that febrile seizures occurred 67% more frequently in the two-day post-vaccination window than in control periods, a statistically robust finding at that sample size. This is not a new concern; elevated febrile seizure rates following flu vaccination in young children have been detected in prior surveillance cycles. The 2023-24 analysis was notable for its size and precision.IMPORTANT CONTEXT ON FEBRILE SEIZURESFebrile seizures in young children are frightening to witness but are almost universally benign. Current data indicates that they do not cause brain damage, do not significantly increase the risk of epilepsy, and typically resolve within a few minutes. The elevated risk in the post-vaccination window is real, but the baseline rate of febrile seizures is low, so the absolute excess risk remains small.The risk is meaningfully amplified when the flu vaccine is co-administered with both PCV13 and DTaP on the same visit. Parents who are concerned about this risk can discuss staggered administration timing with their child’s pediatrician. The FDA warning labels now require disclosure of this interaction.Unbiased studies that more rigorously examine the risks of vaccine-induced febrile seizures and other inflammatory risks to brain development associated with infant vaccination at various ages including cumulative adjuvant dose risk are needed.The January 2026 label update is worth noting as a marker of how post-market surveillance is supposed to work: a signal is detected in passive surveillance, confirmed in a large-scale active surveillance study, and translated into updated prescribing information. The system identified an elevated risk, and regulatory action followed.Transient ischemic attack: a signal in need of replicationA 2023-24 self-controlled case series analysis found a statistically significant IRR (estimated incidence rate ratio) of 1.29 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.05 to 1.59) for transient ischemic attack in the 21 days following flu vaccination.[4]The study was conducted in a commercially insured population and represents, to date, the primary source of this specific concern.The finding has not been replicated. Concurrent analysis of 12.7 million Medicare recipients for the same season found no significant excess transient ischemic attack (TIA) risk, nor any significant signal for stroke, encephalitis, or transverse myelitis.[5]The discrepancy between studies is unexplained and has not been resolved in the subsequent literature.Standard epidemiological practice requires replication before a signal is acted upon, and in this case the more powerful Medicare study found nothing. The TIA finding warrants monitoring and investigation, but it does not currently represent a demonstrated adverse effect.The comparison that reframes the debate: NNV versus NNHAdverse event rates in isolation are difficult to interpret. The relevant question for any vaccine policy is how the risk of harm from the vaccine compares to the risk of harm from the disease it prevents. The standard metric for this comparison is the ratio of the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one outcome (NNV) against the number needed to harm to cause one adverse event (NNH).[12]NNV and NNH calculations use a simple formula: NNV = 1 / (baseline event rate x vaccine effectiveness [VE]). Because the adverse event rate is fixed regardless of season type, the NNH does not change when VE falls. The NNV does, and that asymmetry is the core of the mismatch season problem.Table 2: NNV to prevent one hospitalization, by age and season typeFor adults over 75, the NNV to prevent one hospitalization in a well-matched season is approximately 390 to 540.[13]Even in a mismatched H3N2 season, where effectiveness against the dominant strain falls to 20-25%, the NNV rises only to 650 to 1,100. Against an anaphylaxis NNH of roughly 625,000, the ratio remains above 570 to 1. This group derives robust benefit in essentially all season types, and the risk-benefit case for vaccination is unambiguous.Adults 65-74 show a similar pattern with slightly less favorable numbers: NNV of approximately 900 in a matched season rising to around 1,800 in an H3N2 mismatch. The NNH/NNV ratio for anaphylaxis falls from about 694:1 to 347:1, which remains strongly favorable. For adults 50-64, the matched NNV of 2,800 rises to roughly 7,000 in a mismatch season, with the anaphylaxis ratio falling from 223:1 to 89:1. Still favorable, but the margin is narrowing.The picture changes meaningfully for healthy adults aged 18-49. The matched-season NNV of roughly 8,000 rises to approximately 20,000 in a mismatched H3N2 year.[15]The anaphylaxis ratio falls from 78:1 to 31:1. That is not an argument that vaccination is harmful for this group; 31 hospitalizations prevented per anaphylaxis case is still a favorable ratio. But it is a ratio that deserves to be stated plainly rather than obscured in a population-level average that is dominated by older, higher-risk recipients.For school-age children and adolescents, the matched-season NNV to prevent one hospitalization exceeds 18,000, rising to roughly 36,000 in a mismatch year. The NNH/NNV ratio falls to approximately 35:1 matched and 17:1 mismatched. Young children aged six months to four years present a distinct case: their hospitalization rates are higher than older children (NNV approximately 2,900 matched), but they also carry the febrile seizure risk that has now generated FDA-mandated label warnings.These comparisons are based on the best currently available “official” data, but each of the data sources and analysis methods that underpin these data have biases and limitations as discussed below.Table 3: NNV to prevent one death, by age and season typeThe death-prevention NNV analysis sharpens the age gradient considerably. For adults 75 and older, the NNV to prevent one death ranges from approximately 4,800 to 11,000 in a matched season, rising to 10,000 to 26,000 in an H3N2 mismatch.[11]In either scenario, this remains substantially below both the anaphylaxis NNH (~625,000) and the GBS NNH (~500,000). The mortality benefit in this age group is real and meaningful.For adults 50-64, the matched-season NNV for death prevention is approximately 135,000. In a mismatched H3N2 season, it rises to around 450,000. That figure approaches the lower bound of the GBS NNH range (~500,000), meaning that in a severe mismatch year, the vaccine may prevent approximately one death per one GBS case caused in this age group. This is not a reason to avoid vaccination, but it is precisely the kind of nuance that a blanket universal mandate fails to capture.For adults 18-49, the matched-season NNV for death prevention exceeds 625,000, equal to the lower bound of the anaphylaxis NNH. In a mismatched H3N2 season, it rises above 2,000,000. Put differently: in a poor H3N2 year, vaccinating more than two million healthy adults aged 18-49 would be expected to prevent approximately one death, while vaccinating 625,000 to 740,000 of those same adults would be expected to cause one case of anaphylaxis. The math no longer straightforwardly favors mass vaccination in this group during mismatch seasons.H3N2 mismatch seasons: a closer look at the historical recordH3N2-dominated mismatched seasons are not rare edge cases. They represent the norm roughly one third of the time, and they have occurred in some of the highest-burden flu years on record. Understanding the specific mechanisms of H3N2 underperformance matters for assessing whether any given season is likely to fall into this category.Table 4: Season-specific H3N2 VE and derived hospitalization NNVThe 2004-05 season is the most extreme case in the modern record. H3N2-specific vaccine effectiveness was approximately 10%, producing an NNV for hospitalization prevention in the 65-74 age group of roughly 3,780, compared to the reference NNV of about 900 in a matched season. For adults 18-49, the NNV reached approximately 33,600. At that level of effectiveness, the vaccine still prevents some hospitalizations, but the benefit per dose administered is substantially diminished.The 2014-15 season is particularly instructive because it generated the most thoroughly documented interaction between vaccine mismatch and serial vaccination effects. Skowronski et al. documented that individuals vaccinated in the prior one to two years without an updated antigen showed near-zero or negative effectiveness, while first-time vaccinees retained modest protection.[15]The season-specific NNV for adults 65-74 of approximately 1,990 in that year masks this stratification: the NNV for serially vaccinated individuals was substantially worse, while first-time vaccinees experienced something closer to the matched-season estimate.WHAT H3N2 SEASONALITY MEANS FOR INDIVIDUAL DECISIONSIn most years, knowing in advance whether a season will be H3N2-dominated and mismatched is not possible at the time vaccination decisions are made in September and October. The CDC typically issues initial VE estimates in January or February, after vaccination campaigns are already well underway. This is an inherent limitation of the annual vaccine model, not a failure of any particular decision-maker.For high-risk groups (adults 75+, adults 65-74, immunocompromised individuals), the H3N2 mismatch scenario still produces a favorable NNV/NNH ratio. Currently available data supports the conclusion that vaccination is justified even without foreknowledge of season type.For lower-risk groups (adults 18-49, school-age children), the season-type uncertainty matters more. In a matched season, the NNV/NNH ratios are clearly favorable. In a mismatched season, they narrow toward territory where individual clinical context becomes the determinative factor. A policy that mandates uniform vaccination for all adults without any mechanism for adjusting to seasonal conditions cannot make this distinction.A note on the evidence: what these data sources cannot tell usAny honest engagement with this analysis requires confronting the methodological limitations of the surveillance systems on which it rests. These limitations do not invalidate the findings, but they affect how confidently any specific number should be held, and in which direction the biases are likely to run.Table 5: Summary of data source limitationsThe Vaccine Safety Datalink, which is the foundation for the anaphylaxis and most of the GBS estimates, is the strongest source used in this analysis. It uses active surveillance, has a defined denominator, and links vaccination records to medical outcomes. But its enrollment base consists of members of large, integrated health maintenance organization (HMO)-type health systems (Kaiser Permanente, HealthPartners, and similar organizations) who are systematically more educated, more affluent, and more consistently engaged with the healthcare system than the general US population.[6]Additionally, the healthy vaccinee effect means that people who choose to get vaccinated are healthier than those who decline, even after covariate adjustment. Both of these factors likely cause the VSD to underestimate adverse event rates in less advantaged populations.[7]VAERS, the voluntary passive reporting system, captures roughly 13% of anaphylaxis cases and even lower fractions of less dramatic events.[8]It cannot generate incidence rates without external denominator data, cannot establish causation from temporal association alone, and is subject to stimulated reporting surges following media attention. VAERS is useful for signal detection, but any analysis that uses raw VAERS counts to estimate incidence or to argue that a vaccine is dangerous should be treated with significant skepticism. This analysis relies on VAERS only to illustrate the underreporting problem, not to estimate rates.The Medicare self-controlled case series (SCCS) analysesby Shi et al. are large and methodologically sophisticated, but the SCCS design rests on an assumption that the probability of vaccination is independent of the outcome being studied.[9]That assumption can be violated in both directions: sicker patients may avoid vaccination (creating apparent protection), while patients who experience an adverse event may be less likely to be vaccinated in subsequent years (creating apparent safety). The Medicare population is also inherently limited to adults over 65, and the null findings on neurological outcomes cannot be extrapolated to the very different immune systems, comorbidity profiles, and baseline event rates found in younger adults.[5]FluSurv-NET (CDC Influenza Hospitalization Surveillance Network), which supplies the hospitalization rate denominators for the NNV calculations, is not a random national sample. It operates through sentinel sites at academic medical centers in selected counties.[10]The network captures only hospitalizations where influenza testing was performed and returned positive, which likely undercounts the true burden of flu-associated hospitalization. That undercounting, paradoxically, means the benefit side of the NNV calculation is probably conservative. The true NNV may be lower (more favorable) than the numbers reported here, particularly in high-severity seasons.[11]Perhaps the most important limitation is one that is rarely articulated in either pro- or anti-vaccination discourse: the NNV and NNH estimates reported in this analysis are not derived from the same populations, the same seasons, or the same methodologies. Combining them into ratios implies a comparability that does not fully hold. The VSD HMO enrollee who appears in the anaphylaxis denominator is not the same person as the FluSurv-NET sentinel-county hospital patient who appears in the NNV numerator.[12]The directional conclusions of the NNV/NNH comparisons are almost certainly robust: vaccination in high-risk groups is strongly beneficial, and the ratio becomes less favorable as baseline risk declines. But the specific numbers carry compounded uncertainty from both sides of the calculation and should be treated as order-of-magnitude estimates rather than precise figures.What the aggregate framing obscuresFederal vaccine safety communications consistently present flu vaccine adverse events under a single umbrella: safe, effective, serious events extremely rare. That framing is not inaccurate for the specific claim it makes. It is incomplete as a basis for individual decision-making or for evaluating policy.1. Risk and benefit are not uniformly distributedThe current data indicate that the greatest benefit from flu vaccination accrues to adults over 75, where hospitalization and mortality rates are high enough to generate compelling NNV ratios even in mismatched seasons. It does not follow that the same ratio holds for healthy young adults or children, where the baseline risk of serious flu illness is substantially lower. Policies derived from aggregate population-level benefit estimates and applied universally may be making the right call for high-risk groups and a less clear call for low-risk ones.2. Formulation matters for risk, not just benefitHigh-dose and adjuvanted formulations recommended for adults over 65 produce meaningfully higher local reactogenicity than standard-dose vaccines. A patient who is told that the flu shot may cause a sore arm and then receives an adjuvanted formulation may experience a significantly more pronounced local reaction than that description would suggest. Informed consent requires formulation-specific information, not generic vaccine descriptions.3. Co-administration context changes the pediatric risk profileThe elevated febrile seizure signal in young children is amplified when the flu vaccine is given simultaneously with PCV13 and DTaP. A child receiving only the flu vaccine in a given visit does not carry the same risk profile as one receiving three vaccines simultaneously. Current immunization schedule guidance does not always reflect this distinction, and parents are rarely counseled on the option of staggered administration.4. The data sources carry known biases in specific directionsAs detailed above, the VSD likely underestimates adverse event rates in lower-SES populations, FluSurv-NET likely underestimates hospitalization burden (making the NNV calculations conservative), and VAERS is not suitable for incidence estimation. A well-calibrated reading of the evidence requires awareness of where these biases push the estimates, not just confidence that the aggregate numbers are approximately right.What this means and does not meanNone of the above constitutes an argument against flu vaccination for people at genuine risk of serious illness. For adults over 65, for immunocompromised individuals, for those with significant cardiopulmonary disease, and for household contacts of infants too young to be vaccinated, the evidence for net benefit remains strong across most seasons. Based on currently available data, the NNV-to-NNH ratio in these groups is compelling.What it does constitute is an argument against treating vaccine policy as a single-answer question applied uniformly across the population. The risk profile of any medical intervention, including vaccination, is not a single number. It is a distribution that varies by age, health status, formulation, season type, and prior exposure history. Current policy communications do not reflect that complexity. Current informed consent practices, in many clinical settings, do not either.A 625,000-to-1 NNH ratio for anaphylaxis sounds reassuring until you are told the NNV for hospitalization prevention in your age group is 20,000. The math still favors vaccination. But it no longer sounds like the question answers itself.The people most likely to be skeptical of mandatory annual influenza vaccination are not, for the most part, skeptical because they believe the vaccines are dangerous in some absolute sense. They are skeptical because the official communications about risk and benefit do not feel honest to them. They sense that the aggregate framing papers over genuine heterogeneity in individual risk-benefit profiles, and the data suggest they are not wrong about that.Meeting that skepticism with more honest quantification, including transparent acknowledgment of the limitations of the underlying surveillance data, would serve public health better than meeting it with dismissal. The case for vaccination in high-risk groups is strong enough to survive contact with the actual numbers. The case for universal mandatory vaccination policies is considerably more complicated, and both the adverse event data and the methodological constraints on that data are part of why.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareReferences1.McNeil MM, Weintraub ES, Duffy J, et al. Risk of anaphylaxis after vaccination in children and adults. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2016;137(3):868-878.2.Lasky T, Terracciano GJ, Magder L, et al. The Guillain-Barre syndrome and the 1992-1993 and 1993-1994 influenza vaccines. N Engl J Med. 1998;339(25):1797-1802.3.Baxter R, Bakshi N, Fireman B, et al. Lack of association of Guillain-Barre syndrome with vaccinations. Clin Infect Dis. 2013;57(2):197-204.4.Lloyd PC, et al. Safety surveillance of seasonal influenza vaccines, 2023-24 season: self-controlled case series analysis. Vaccine. 2025.5.Shi X, Hanson KE, Lloyd PC, et al. Safety of influenza vaccines among Medicare beneficiaries, 2022-23 season. Vaccine. 2024;42(15):3486-3492.6.Jacobsen SJ, Sy LS, Ackerson BK, et al. Influenza vaccine effectiveness in the Vaccine Safety Datalink: limitations of the test-negative design. Vaccine. 2019;37(32):4461-4467.7.Jackson LA, Yu O, Belongia EA, et al. Frequency of medically attended adverse events following seasonal influenza vaccination. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2010;19(10):1010-1016.8.Shimabukuro TT, Nguyen M, Martin D, DeStefano F. Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Vaccine. 2015;33(36):4398-4405.9.Farrington CP. Relative incidence estimation from case series for vaccine safety evaluation. Biometrics. 1995;51(1):228-235.10.Chaves SS, Lynfield R, Cheek JE, et al. The US Influenza Hospitalization Surveillance Network. Emerg Infect Dis. 2015;21(9):1543-1550.11.Thompson WW, Shay DK, Weintraub E, et al. Influenza-associated hospitalizations in the United States. JAMA. 2004;292(11):1333-1340.12.Schmid P, Rauber D, Betsch C, et al. Barriers of influenza vaccination intention and behavior. PLoS One. 2017;12(1):e0170550.13.Zhao Y, et al. Influenza vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization: systematic review and meta-analysis of 165 studies. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2025.14.CDC FluSurv-NET hospitalization surveillance. MMWR Surveillance Summaries. 2024;73(SS-6).15.Skowronski DM, Chambers C, Sabaiduc S, et al. A perfect storm: impact of genomic variation and serial vaccination on low vaccine effectiveness, 2014-2015. Clin Infect Dis. 2016;63(1):21-32.16.CDC Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness Networks. Past seasons vaccine effectiveness estimates, 2004-2026. cdc.gov/flu-vaccines-work/php/effectiveness-studies/past-seasons-estimates.html.This article summarizes published peer-reviewed safety surveillance data and reflects the state of the scientific literature as of March 2026. It does not constitute medical advice. Individual vaccination decisions should be made in consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.AcknowledgementsThe author acknowledges the ongoing contributions of the CDC Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness Networks and their academic collaborators, who have generated the surveillance data underlying this analysis. No funding specific to this review was received. The author formerly served as the vice chairperson of the CDC ACIP committee and chairperson of the influenza vaccine work group, but consequent to a recent court decision in the case of AAP vs HHS, no longer has any affiliation with the CDC or the ACIP and is unconstrained by federal FACA regulations and restrictions. The views expressed are those of the author alone, and do not reflect the opinions of the USG, HHS, CDC, or ACIP.Conflict of Interest StatementNo conflicts of interest are reported.


Who Owns the Seed?

The European Union is advancing a sweeping rewrite of its seed laws under the banner of Plant Reproductive Material regulation (PRM). We are told this is about modernization, safety, and disease control. That sounds reasonable until you look at what the policy actually does and who it benefits.What it does is shift control. What it benefits is scale. And what it tells us, if we are paying attention, is a great deal about how power now flows in the Western world.The Heart of the Matter: SubsidiarityThere is a principle older than the European Union, older than the American republic, older even than the modern nation-state. It holds that decisions should be made as close to the individual as possible. Catholics call it subsidiarity. Americans express a similar instinct through federalism and a preference for local control, or just common sense. It rests on a simple observation. The people closest to a problem usually understand it best, live with its consequences most directly, and have the strongest reason to get it right.Agriculture is the perfect example. A farmer in Provence knows his soil, his climate, his pests, and his market in ways no official in Brussels ever will. A gardener in Bavaria who has spent twenty years selecting a tomato variety for her specific plot knows things that cannot be captured in any database. A smallholder in Sicily adapting a wheat cultivar to drought conditions is doing real work, and doing it better than any centralized authority could direct.For ten thousand years, people have saved, selected, traded, and improved seeds through networks of farmers, gardeners and local breeders. This is not a quaint hobby. It is the foundation of agricultural civilization. Nearly every crop we depend on came from this quiet, decentralized work. The diversity in our fields and on our plates exists because millions of ordinary people, without asking permission from anyone, did the patient work of selection and exchange.The Plant Reproductive Material regulation turns this ancient order on its head. It presumes that seeds must be authorized from above before they can circulate below. It treats the default activity of human agriculture, the saving and sharing of seed, as something requiring a permission slip from a bureaucrat. This is not a minor tweak. It is a philosophical reversal. It moves the presumption of legitimacy from the grower to the regulator.Conservatives understand why this matters. Power concentrated at a distance is power removed from accountability. A village that governs its own seed exchange answers to itself. A continent that governs seed exchange from Brussels answers to no one the farmer will ever meet. The regulation does not just impose costs, though it does that, and severely. It transfers authority. It takes what was local and makes it central. It takes what was free and makes it licensed. That transfer is the whole point, even when nobody says so out loud.The Compliance Cost TrapThe way this transfer happens is clever in its indirection. The regulation does not ban seed saving. It does not send inspectors to kitchen gardens. What it does is set up a registration and certification regime whose fixed costs land with crushing weight on small actors.A multinational seed company spreads compliance across global product lines and billion-dollar revenues. The paperwork, the testing, the legal departments, all of it becomes a rounding error on the balance sheet. For a small regional breeder, a farmer-owned cooperative, or an individual who has developed a locally adapted variety worth sharing, the same requirements are impossible. The rules apply equally. The burden does not.This is how consolidation works in modern regulatory states. Not by decree. Not by nationalization. But by the steady piling on of compliance costs that quietly strangle everyone who cannot absorb them. The small operator is not forbidden from participating. He is simply priced out. The result looks like market forces but is actually the predictable outcome of rules designed to favor scale.Bayer, having swallowed Monsanto, now controls one of the largest seed and trait portfolios on the planet. Corteva and Syngenta round out an oligopoly that increasingly decides what gets bred, what gets distributed, and what ends up in farmers’ fields. This is not what superior seeds winning in open competition looks like. It is what a regulatory environment looks like when it rewards the kind of operation these firms run and punishes the kind of operation small nurserymen run. The PRM regulation tightens that ratchet another turn.The Disease Argument Deserves a Full BurialDefenders of the regulation reach reflexively for the disease argument. Seeds, we are told, can carry pathogens. Therefore they must be tracked, certified, and controlled. This argument gets tossed around so casually that it often escapes scrutiny. It should not.Seed-borne diseases are real. Nobody disputes this. Wheat bunt, loose smut, bacterial blight in beans, and certain viruses in tomatoes and peppers have been known for over a century. They are in every agronomy textbook. The question is not whether they exist. The question is whether they justify a sweeping expansion of centralized control over seed distribution across an entire continent.They do not. And the evidence against the argument is overwhelming.First, these diseases are already managed, and managed well, through targeted practices that have worked for generations. Hot water treatment for brassicas. Fungicidal treatment for cereals. Visual inspection and roguing. Certified disease-free stock where it matters most. Crop rotation. Resistant varieties. These methods work. They have worked for decades. They do not require a continental registration regime to function.Second, and more damning, the big disease pressures in modern agriculture do not come from gardeners trading bean seeds at a village market. They come from globalized industrial supply chains moving plant material at enormous volume across enormous distances. Xylella fastidiosa did not arrive in European olive groves because a grandmother shared cuttings. Tomato brown rugose fruit virus did not spread through heirloom seed exchanges. These pathogens rode in on commercial shipments, through industrial nurseries, through exactly the channels the PRM regulation treats as trustworthy while it tightens the screws on the channels that have historically been the safest.The science here is not ambiguous. Large, uniform, monocultural plantings are disease amplifiers. Genetically diverse, locally adapted, small-scale plantings are disease buffers. When a wheat blast outbreak hits a region where every field grows the same three varieties, the losses are catastrophic. When the same pathogen runs into a landscape of dozens of locally adapted cultivars with different resistance profiles, it burns out. Diversity is the immune system of agriculture. The PRM regulation, by privileging uniformity, weakens that immune system in the name of protecting it.Third, the disease rationale proves too much. If seed exchange among small producers really posed the threat claimed, we would expect to see disease outbreaks traced back to farmer seed networks. We do not. Decades of epidemiological data across Europe show that seed-saving communities and regional breeders are not significant disease vectors. The history simply does not support the theory on which the regulation rests on.Fourth, where seed-borne disease risk genuinely exists, it can be handled with proportionate measures. None of this requires a wholesale restructuring of European seed law. A scalpel is available. Brussels has chosen a sledgehammer.When a stated rationale cannot carry the weight of the policy it supposedly justifies, honest observers should ask what the policy is actually for. The disease argument is not the reason for the PRM regulation. It is the cover for it.The Commission’s Pattern of OverreachThe Plant Reproductive Material regulation  (PRM) does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives as the latest example of a governance pattern that has become impossible to miss for anyone paying attention.The European Commission is, by design, one of the most insulated major executive bodies in the democratic world. Its commissioners are nominated by national governments and confirmed by the European Parliament, which gives it a thin veneer of democratic legitimacy. But no European voter has ever cast a ballot for a Commission President. No citizen of any member state can remove a commissioner at the ballot box. The Commission proposes the legislation, shepherds it through passage, and then enforces it, all while sitting at a safe distance from the people whose lives it governs.This setup was defensible when the European project stuck to coordinating trade and reducing tariffs. It becomes a lot harder to defend as the Commission’s reach expands into agriculture, energy, speech, finance, migration, public health, and now the contents of a gardener’s seed packet.Consider the pattern.During COVID, the Commission oversaw the rollout of digital health certificates that conditioned free movement, one of the founding rights of European citizenship, on medical compliance. The system was pitched as temporary and voluntary. In practice, it showed how fast centralized authority could gate fundamental freedoms behind bureaucratic credentials when institutions decided a crisis warranted it.The Commission’s procurement of COVID vaccines, particularly the Pfizer contracts negotiated in part through text messages between Commission President von der Leyen and Pfizer’s CEO, remains shrouded in opacity. The European Ombudsman found maladministration in the refusal to release the communications. The European Court of Justice has since ruled against the Commission on transparency grounds. Billions of euros in public money, and the Commission fought to keep the paper trail hidden. This is not the conduct of an institution that sees itself as accountable to the public.On migration, the Commission has pursued infringement proceedings against member states, Hungary and Poland most prominently, whose elected governments enacted border policies reflecting the clear preferences of their own citizens. The message was unmistakable. Democratic mandates at the national level would not be allowed to override directives from Brussels, and failure to comply incurs financial penalties. National electorates, the citizens of these nations, were told, in effect, that their votes could be overridden by an institution they did not elect. And in the typical wrap-up smear, those governments that rejected the Commission’s edicts got labeled “far-right” by the European mainstream media, with American outlets dutifully picking up the trope.In speech, the Digital Services Act extends the Commission's authority over online content moderation across the entire bloc of nations, with censorship of political discourse, individual free speech, and press freedom that is only now coming into focus.On energy, Commission mandates for “green energy” solutions have driven policies that have caused both industrial and household energy shortages and price rises in recent years, with costs borne by ordinary Europeans rather than the officials who designed the policies.The PRM regulation fits this pattern precisely. An unelected executive body proposes detailed rules governing a domain that has historically been managed by farmers and local communities. The rules are dressed up in technical language that hides their practical effect. Compliance is enforced through penalties that fall hardest on those least able to absorb them. National parliaments have a limited ability to amend or reject regulations once they are adopted. The affected citizens, the farmers, gardeners, and small breeders, have essentially no direct recourse.This is not democracy in any meaningful sense. It is not even the constitutional republicanism that served the Western tradition for centuries. It is administrative governance by a body that has slipped the leash of popular accountability. The seed regulation is just the latest territory this governance model has claimed.Why Americans Should Be Watching CloselyIt is tempting for American readers to look at all this as a European problem. It is not. It is a preview.The regulatory architecture being built in Brussels does not stay in Brussels. It spreads through international harmonization efforts, through trade agreements, through the quiet coordination among agencies that increasingly defines global governance. When the EU sets a precedent for centralized seed control, that precedent becomes a reference point. When the EU shows that disease rhetoric can justify consolidation of agricultural authority, that playbook becomes available to regulators everywhere.Americans who doubt this should look at the patterns already visible in their own country.Raw milk, legal to produce and consume for all of human history until very recently, is now a prosecutable offense in many states, enforced through armed raids on small dairies. The justification is disease. The effect is consolidation.Small-scale egg producers face escalating regulatory requirements that large industrial operations absorb with ease. The justification is disease. The effect is consolidation.Independent slaughterhouses have collapsed from roughly fifteen hundred in the 1970s to a few hundred today, squeezed out by USDA regulations whose compliance costs are trivial for Tyson and Cargill and fatal for the local butcher. The justification is food safety. The effect is consolidation.Cottage food laws vary wildly by state, with many jurisdictions restricting the sale of home-baked goods through byzantine licensing schemes. The justification is public health. The effect is consolidation.Backyard poultry flocks have been culled by the millions under avian influenza protocols, with compensation structures that favor large commercial operations over small producers. The justification is disease. The effect is consolidation.Furthermore, topical antibiotics for animal wound care have been removed from the market because the FDA needed to harmonize with the European Union. These U.S. regulatorsargued that export competitiveness and global alignmentrequired these products to be banned fromdomestic sales.The seed regulations have not yet arrived in the United States in the European form. Patent law, utility patents on seeds, licensing restrictions enforced by firms like Bayer, and the ongoing erosion of farmers’ traditional seed-saving rights through contract law have already done much of the same work through different mechanisms. The American path to seed consolidation has run through intellectual property rather than regulatory registration, but the destination is the same.And when the Europeans finish building their apparatus, American regulators will have a ready-made template. They will cite European standards. They will invoke harmonization. They will talk about disease, safety, and modernization. The arguments will be familiar because they are always the same arguments. The outcome will be familiar because it is always the same outcome.The American conservative instinct to defend local knowledge, local authority, and local self-sufficiency is not nostalgia. It is not a preference for the rustic over the modern. It is a recognition, grounded in hard experience, that when the capacity to feed yourself is surrendered to distant institutions, something essential about citizenship goes with it. A people who need permission to plant are not a free people. A nation whose seed stock is controlled by four corporations and a regulatory bureaucracy is not a sovereign nation, whatever its flag may say.What Is Actually at StakeThe seed is the smallest unit of agricultural freedom. It is also the most fundamental. Everything else in the food system, the farm, the market, the table, flows from the question of who controls the seed.For ten thousand years, the answer was simple. Whoever plants it. That answer built civilization. It sustained diversity. It produced the abundance we inherited. It let communities adapt to their particular conditions and survive shocks that uniform systems could not weather.The answer the European Commission is now proposing is different. Whoever registers it, certifies it, and pays the fees. That answer will, over time, hollow out the agricultural diversity of an entire continent. It will transfer the productive capacity of European agriculture from the many to the few. It will wipe out, through economic gravity rather than outright prohibition, the small breeders and regional varieties that have been the quiet engine of agricultural resilience.And it will establish the precedent, the legal architecture, and the rhetorical playbook for doing the same thing everywhere else.The garden is not a hobby. The farm is not just a business. The seed is not just a commodity. They are the material foundation of a free people’s ability to feed itself without asking permission. When that foundation is regulated out of reach, the independence built on it goes with it.If you think this will stay on foreign shores, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might want to invest in. Americans watching this unfold in Europe are not looking at a foreign curiosity. They are watching a dress rehearsal. The question is whether they will recognize the performance when it opens on their own stage, and whether, by then, it will still be possible to close the show.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.Share

Summary: The EU’s Quiet Assault on Agricultural Sovereignty


The Rise of Autism Becomes Clearer

Every so often, a paper comes along that does more than add another data point. It forces you to reconsider the assumptions sitting quietly underneath modern medical practice. This newly published study inMolecular Psychiatryis one of those papers.This large U.S. study of over 6 million pregnancies found that commonly prescribed medications that interfere with cholesterol synthesis during pregnancy were associated with a roughly 47 percent increased risk of autism in offspring.Roughly11 percent of pregnant womenwere prescribed at least one of these drugs found to be linked to Autism.Autism was diagnosed in3.8 percent of children overallThat rate rose to about5 percent in exposed pregnanciesUse of these medications increased from4.6 percent of pregnancies in 2014 to 16.8 percent in 2023And importantly, this is not a niche exposure.If you take the findings at face value and run the numbers, the scale becomes harder to ignore. In this dataset of 6.1 million pregnancies, about 11 percent of women were exposed to these drugs, and the autism rate rose from roughly 3.7 percent in unexposed pregnancies to about 5 percent in exposed pregnancies.That difference of about 1.3 percentage points translates into roughly 9,000 to 9,500 additional autism cases within the study cohort alone.Because this dataset represents about one third of U.S. births over the same time period, a simple extrapolation suggests on the order of 25,000 to 30,000 additional autism cases nationally over the past decade, or roughly 2,500 to 3,000 per year.These drugs have been on the market for much longer, and most have been prescribed during pregnancy for decades.  This increase in autism cases in this study only documents the rise seen during the last decade, as these drugs have increased in use.The drugs involved are among the most commonly prescribed in medicine:SSRIs: fluoxetine, sertralineAntipsychotics: aripiprazole, haloperidolBeta blockers: metoprolol, propranolol, nebivololStatins: atorvastatin, simvastatin, rosuvastatin, pravastatinOthers: trazodone, bupropion, buspironeRoughly11 percent of pregnant womenwere prescribed at least one of these drugs.Different purposes. Different specialties. Same underlying biochemical effect.They interfere with cholesterol synthesis.At first glance, the question seems almost too simple. What happens when pregnant women are prescribed medications that interfere with cholesterol synthesis? It is the kind of question that should have been asked long ago. Instead, it has largely been ignored.Cholesterol has spent decades cast as the villain in modern medicine. Lower it. Block it. Suppress it. That messaging has become so ingrained that it is rarely questioned. But that framing collapses when you look at fetal development. Cholesterol is not optional. It is fundamental. It is required for cell membranes, myelination, synapse formation, and the signaling pathways that guide brain development. The developing brain is one of the most cholesterol-dependent systems in biology.We already know what happens when that system is disrupted. Genetic disorders that impair cholesterol synthesis provide a clear window. In Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, where the final step of cholesterol production is impaired, developmental abnormalities are common, and autism is frequently part of the picture. Roughly three quarters of affected individuals meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder. That is not a subtle signal. It is a strong biological precedent.What this new paper proposes is uncomfortable in its simplicity. What if we have been recreating a version of that same disruption, not through genetics, but through routine pharmacology?The authors examined a class of medications that share a common effect. They interfere with sterol biosynthesis. These are not obscure or rarely used drugs. They include SSRIs such as fluoxetine and sertraline, antipsychotics such as aripiprazole, beta blockers such as metoprolol and propranolol, and statins such as atorvastatin and simvastatin. They are among the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States. They are part of everyday clinical practice.The scale of the study matters. More than six million pregnancies were analyzed, spanning all fifty states over nearly a decade. This is not a narrow or selective dataset. If a consistent pattern appears here, it is unlikely to be dismissed as statistical noise.And a pattern does appear. Exposure to at least one of these medications during pregnancy was associated with a forty-seven percent increase in autism diagnoses in the offspring. That alone would draw attention. What makes the finding more difficult to ignore is what comes next. The risk increases as more of these medications are used together. By the time four or more are prescribed concurrently, the signal more than doubles.That is not random variation. It is a dose response pattern. The more the pathway is disrupted, the stronger the signal becomes.At the same time, prescribing patterns have been moving steadily in the opposite direction of caution. The proportion of pregnant women receiving at least one of these medications increased from 4.6 percent in 2014 to 16.8 percent in 2023. That is a profound shift in how pregnancy is managed. What was once approached with restraint is now approached with increasing pharmacologic intervention.What makes this study particularly compelling is the convergence of its findings. These medications differ in their primary purpose.Some treat depression.Some manage blood pressure.Some target lipid metabolism.They are chemically distinct and clinically unrelated. Yet they share one biochemical effect. They interfere with cholesterol synthesis. The signal tracks with that shared mechanism.That raises a difficult question. Are we looking at a collection of unrelated associations, or are we seeing the imprint of a single disrupted pathway?The standard response is to invoke confounding. Maternal depression, anxiety, metabolic disease, and other underlying conditions are all associated with developmental outcomes. That is true, and it must be considered. But those conditions do not all converge on a single biochemical pathway. These drugs do. The consistency of the signal across different drug classes suggests that something more fundamental may be at work.This paper identifies a biologically plausible mechanism, demonstrates a large-scale population signal, and shows that the signal strengthens with increasing exposure.There is also a quieter point embedded in the paper. Many of these medications already carry warnings regarding pregnancy. Those warnings exist, but they are often buried in dense labeling and rarely translated into clear discussions about developmental biology. For many of these drugs, there is no warning label about ingesting them during pregnancy. The conversation is usually reduced to a simple phrase. The benefits outweigh the risks. Sometimes that is true. But that statement is not the same as saying there is no risk. And as it turns out, the benefits of these drugs most likely do not outweigh the risks, and tens of thousands of our children are paying the price for that bad advice.Who is responsible for that bad advice? Who will make it right for these kids and their families? Certainly not the pharmaceutical companies, which profited from prescription sales of these drugs during pregnancy. Profits that amount to billions of dollars for Big Pharma.What this study ultimately does is reopen a question that should never have been closed. If you interfere with one of the most fundamental building blocks of human development, why would you expect there to be no downstream consequences?Medicine has seen this pattern before. A widely accepted practice persists for years, sometimes decades, before its risks are fully understood. Because modern medicine is often not as benign as physicians and large pharmaceutical corporations like to pretend it is.What happens next depends on whether we are willing to follow the answer wherever it leads.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.Share

Summary: And the reason should stun everyone