When there is an effective solution, many times that is an inflection point for understanding the enormity of the problem. We found that out with micronized Ivermectin-Mebendazole from The Wellness Company.

🦠 The Hidden Burden: Foodborne Parasites

We tend to think of food poisoning as a bad shrimp cocktail or undercooked chicken — a few miserable hours, maybe a day, then back to normal. The Newsweek piece covering a new Lancet Global Health study shatters that comfortable assumption. We’re talking about 277 million illnesses annually linked to potentially foodborne invasive parasites, with roughly 171 million directly attributable to what people eat. These aren’t stomach bugs that come and go. These are parasites that set up shop in your organs, your brain, your heart — and stay there.

📊 The Scale of the Problem

The study examined 14 parasitic diseases across two decades (2000–2021), and the numbers are staggering. An estimated 4.89 million foodborne DALYs (disability-adjusted life-years) were associated with these infections. The biggest contributors were Taenia solium — the pork tapeworm that can cause neurocysticercosis, where larval cysts lodge in the brain triggering epilepsy — and Clonorchis sinensis, the Chinese liver fluke acquired from raw or undercooked freshwater fish.

Professor Lucy Robertson, the study’s lead author, put it bluntly: “Food poisoning is not only bacteria.”

Public health messaging has drilled bacterial contamination into everyone’s head — Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria. But parasites? They’re treated like a tropical curiosity, something that happens elsewhere. Yet the Americas carried the highest burden in this study, largely driven by Chagas disease, which most people associate with kissing bugs, not their dinner plate. Robertson notes that foodborne Chagas transmission actually produces more severe disease than the vector-borne route.

🔴 The Wakeup Call Nobody Asked For

Here’s what should make public health authorities uncomfortable: the overall burden of parasitic diseases was enormous between 2000 and 2021, and Clonorchis sinensis increased on the trend line. Robertson called it unexpected and said it “should be a wakeup call for relevant authorities.”

Testing will identify the serious infections that will require treatment other than IVM-Meb or Bactrim.

If you are developing new abdominal symptoms, consider the usual suspects: changes in food production and distribution, more international travel, and — critically — the growing appetite for raw or undercooked foods. Sushi bars, ceviche, rare steak, raw milk.

🧬 What Prevention Actually Requires

The article correctly emphasizes that prevention isn’t simple. You can’t just tell people to cook their food thoroughly and call it a day. Many of these parasites are zoonotic — they cycle between animals, the environment, and humans. That means a “One Health” approach is essential: veterinary surveillance of animal hosts, control of infection in livestock, safe water systems, proper waste disposal, and food-safety infrastructure that actually works.

Most doctors in developed countries aren’t trained to think about parasitic infection when a patient walks in with seizures or heart failure. That diagnostic delay means more suffering, more transmission, and worse outcomes.

From the list of parasites in this paper Ascaris and Trichinella are treatable with IVM-Meb. However in the United States their is a more responsive range of organisms:

It’s important to remember that the current outbreak this summer in the United states is from Cyclospora a protozoa, where the treatment is TMP-SMX in the Emergency Medical Kit from The Wellness Company.

🧠 What the Article Gets Right — and What’s Missing

The Newsweek piece does a solid job translating the study’s findings into accessible language, and it avoids the trap of sensationalism. Authors are both quoted directly, and the key statistics are presented clearly.

What’s missing — and this is a limitation of the format, not necessarily the reporting — is any real scrutiny of why parasitic disease surveillance remains so neglected. The pharmaceutical industry has little incentive to develop novel antiparasitics when the patients who need them can’t pay premium prices.

There’s also the uncomfortable reality that global food supply chains have made these diseases everyone’s problem. That ahi tuna steak in Manhattan could be carrying something that originated in a Southeast Asia. The boundaries that once contained these parasites are gone.

Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company

www.twc.health/focalpoints

📝 References

Robertson, L. J., et al. (2026). “Burden of foodborne invasive parasitic diseases, 2000–2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study.” The Lancet Global Health. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214109X26001440

Dewan, A. (2026, August). “Millions of Illnesses Linked to Foodborne Parasites, New Study Warns.” Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/millions-illnesses-linked-foodborne-parasites-new-study-warns-12332674

A few weeks ago I posted an essay on this newsletter (Senator Paul Should Ask Fauci Why Moderna’s 2016 Patented Gene Sequence Turned Up in SARS-CoV-2) about what appears to be smoking gun evidence that Moderna and NIAID were part of the cabal that created SARS-CoV-2 or at least a critical part of its genome around the year 2015.

Today, Moderna and its partner Merck announced positive interim results from the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial of intismeran autogene (also known as V940 or mRNA-4157), a personalized mRNA-based neoantigen therapy.

Moderna claims this is the first successful late-stage clinical readout for any mRNA cancer vaccine and the first time an individualized neoantigen therapy has demonstrated a clinically meaningful benefit over standard care in a randomized Phase 3 setting.

The therapy targets high-risk melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer—specifically in patients with completely resected Stage IIB–IV disease. Melanoma remains a significant public health challenge, with more than 1.5 million people in the United States living with the disease as of 2023.

After surgical removal of the primary tumor, many patients still face a substantial risk of recurrence or metastasis. Moderna claims that Intismeran is designed to address this residual threat by analyzing mutations unique to each patient’s tumor, encoding those neoantigens into an mRNA sequence, and delivering the personalized vaccine (typically up to nine intramuscular doses) so that the patient’s immune system learns to recognize and attack residual cancer cells.

In the trial, the vaccine was given in combination with Merck’s established PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda), the current standard of care in the adjuvant setting.

Moderna claims that evidence of effectiveness is compelling., touting that its pre-planned interim analysis of the 1,137-patient trial, the combination met its primary endpoint of recurrence-free survival and a key secondary endpoint of distant metastasis-free survival, both with statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements over pembrolizumab alone.

Moderna claims its Phase 3 findings build on earlier Phase 2b data (KEYNOTE-942), which showed sustained benefit at five years of follow-up: a 49% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death and a 59% reduction in the risk of distant metastasis or death compared with pembrolizumab monotherapy.

Regarding safety, Moderna claims Phase 3 results indicated that the safety profile of intismeran plus pembrolizumab was consistent with prior studies of the combination, with no new safety signals observed.

Moderna claims of its Phase 2 data that most treatment-related adverse events were low-grade and transient (fatigue being among the most common), grade ≥3 events related to the mRNA vaccine were limited (approximately 10–11% of patients), and there were no grade 4 or 5 events attributed to intismeran itself. Immune-mediated adverse events occurred at rates similar to pembrolizumab alone.

Moderna claims these data highlight intismeran autogene as a potential new standard for adjuvant melanoma treatment. The companies are already discussing regulatory submission. If approved, the therapy could become available as early as 2027, “offering thousands of high-risk patients a more personalized and effective means of preventing disease return.”

Finally, Moderna claims the success also strengthens the broader promise of mRNA technology beyond infectious disease vaccines, opening avenues for similar approaches in other solid tumors.

I suppose we shall see how this plays out. Authors Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, and John A. Catanzaro, NMD, PhD just published a paper titled Reanalysis of FDA Clinical Data for mFLUSIVA (mRNA-1010): Unfavorable Risk-Benefit Profile Supports Market Withdrawal in which they concluded that Moderna’s claims about the safety and efficacy of its mRNA influenza vaccine do not stand up to scrutiny.

Considering the abominable safety and efficacy profile of the Moderna-NIAID mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, it is only prudent to regard today’s news of a melanoma vaccine with skepticism.

Today’s stunning stock performance was not only the result of market enthusiasm for the announcement, but also of a major short squeeze, as 14% of its free float (roughly 49.8 million to 52.4 million shares were sold short prior to today’s news.

A witty friend has anointed Moderna the “Rasputin Stock” which made me laugh, as Rasputin has long struck me as one of the most mysterious charlatans in history. For those who are not familiar with his story, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869–1916) was born a peasant in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye. For much of his life he was a wandering pilgrim and self-proclaimed holy man. Though never ordained as a monk, he claimed to be a mystic, faith healer, and prophet, blending the occasional appearance of Orthodox piety with magnetic charisma.

He made his way to the Romanov court, where Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra’s only son, Tsarevich Alexei, suffered from hemophilia, a life-threatening bleeding disorder for which contemporary medicine offered little help.

Beginning around 1906–1908, and most importantly during a near-fatal hemorrhage in 1912, Rasputin was summoned to the boy’s bedside. Through prayer, a calming presence, and possibly hypnotic suggestion—or simply by discouraging doctors from administering blood-thinning treatments such as aspirin—he appeared to ease Alexei’s pain and halt the bleeding. The imperial couple became convinced of his divine gift, granting him extraordinary influence as a spiritual adviser and political confidant.

The Tsar’s personal correspondence reveals that he eventually wised up to the fact that Rasputin was an inspired charlatan, but the Tsarina kept her faith in the strange man. In one letter the Tsar wrote to one of his cousins (I don’t remember which one) who advised him to banish Rasputin from court, Nicholas II wrote, “Better one Rasputin than several fits of hysterics per day,” referring to his wife’s constant worry about the sick boy.

One of the strangest features of Rasputin was the mysterious effect he had on women, including aristocratic ladies in Saint Petersburg. Though accounts are probably colored by anti-royalist propaganda, it seems that many women really did find him fascinating. They especially enjoyed his combination of conviviality (he was often drunk) and mysticism. The “monk” is said to have had many lovers and also to have spent much of his time in brothels and bathhouses.

Prince Felix Yusupov concluded that Rasputin’s influence at court had gone way too far and was causing a national security risk by destroying the reputation of the royal family. Thus, on the night of 29–30 December 1916, Yusupov and some of his friends lured Rasputin to the Moika Palace. According to the widely circulated (and self-serving) account of the assassins, they first fed him cyanide-laced cakes and wine. When the poison produced no effect, Yusupov shot him in the chest. Rasputin collapsed, then revived, attacked his host, and fled into the courtyard, where he was shot again—once in the back and once in the head—beaten with a heavy object, and finally bound and thrown through the ice into the Neva River. Legend claims he was still alive and drowned only after struggling beneath the ice.

Forensic examination established three gunshot wounds—one to the left side of the chest, one to the back, and a close-range shot to the forehead that was almost certainly fatal—along with extensive blunt-force trauma to the face and body, a possible knife wound, and other injuries sustained during the attack. Rasputin thus died of gunshot wounds after enduring poisoning attempts that failed, multiple shootings, and a savage beating. The drowning was post-mortem.

Like Moderna’s stock, Rasputin became a figure of mythic resilience who died just before the collapse of the Russian Empire.

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The approval of mFLUSIVA represents a major escalation in the expansion of nucleoside-modified mRNA technology into routine, repeated vaccination. We concluded that the FDA’s own clinical data demanded an independent risk-benefit accounting before this product becomes entrenched as an annual vaccine. The result is one of the most severe benefit-harm imbalances we have encountered in a licensed vaccine program, and it warrants immediate regulatory reversal.

Our new manuscript, “Reanalysis of FDA Clinical Data for mFLUSIVA (mRNA-1010): Unfavorable Risk-Benefit Profile Supports Market Withdrawal,” directly reanalyzes the FDA briefing document and underlying clinical-trial counts used to support approval. Rather than accepting the regulatory presentation at face value, we placed the vaccine’s benefits and harms on the same absolute scale and asked the question that should have been made explicit before licensure: what is the human cost required to prevent one serious influenza outcome?

The answer is extraordinary. To avert ONE influenza hospitalization, approximately 5,017 adults had to receive mFLUSIVA instead of a standard-dose influenza vaccine, at the COST of:

~2 excess unexplained DEATHS

~278 disabling Grade 3 systemic reactions

~3,798 adverse reactions

Compared with the standard-dose flu vaccine, that amounts to approximately 1,454 ADDITIONAL adverse reactions and 233 ADDITIONAL disabling Grade 3 systemic reactions for every hospitalization prevented.

The broader safety pattern was just as one-sided. Unexplained deaths were 2.55-fold more frequent, Grade 3 systemic reactions were 6.15-fold more frequent, and every solicited symptom was more frequent in the mFLUSIVA group.

Neither pivotal trial included a placebo arm, and no properly adjudicated influenza-mortality endpoint was ever specified, collected, or reported.

This is the central regulatory failure our reanalysis exposes: the underlying numbers were available, but the benefit and harm were never presented together on the same absolute denominator. Benefits were presented primarily as relative efficacy, while harms were presented separately as event percentages. That leaves obscured the most important practical question in the entire approval decision: how many people must be exposed, and how many adverse outcomes occur, to prevent one serious influenza event?

Our analysis answers that question directly using the FDA’s own numbers. Once the calculation is made, the imbalance is impossible to ignore.

The manuscript sets out 17 grounds for reversal. The first nine arise directly from FDA’s regulatory record and trial arithmetic. The remaining grounds address the additional hazards of extending nucleoside-modified mRNA technology into annual lifelong administration, including published evidence involving residual DNA contamination, reverse transcription and genomic integration, ribosomal stalling and frameshifting, protein misfolding and proteostatic disruption, broad biodistribution, prolonged persistence, and cumulative biological effects with repeated dosing.

We decided that publishing these findings alone was not enough. We are undertaking the task of challenging this approval directly before it becomes another precedent for the unchecked expansion of mRNA products across infectious diseases despite an extreme risk-benefit profile.

Accordingly, we formally sent the manuscript and supporting information to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and officials at HHS, FDA, CDC, and NIH, requesting immediate withdrawal of the approval and a halt to distribution before widespread administration begins.

Below is the exact letter sent to federal health officials.

Letter Sent to Secretary Kennedy and Federal Health Officials

Subject: URGENT: Immediate Withdrawal of mFLUSIVA (BLA 125869/0) Warranted Based on FDA Clinical Data Reanalysis

Dear Secretary Kennedy,

As physicians and researchers who have reanalyzed the licensure record for this product, we respectfully request that the Department, in coordination with the Food and Drug Administration, initiate proceedings to withdraw the approval of Moderna’s mFLUSIVA (Influenza Vaccine, mRNA; mRNA-1010), BLA 125869/0, approved August 5, 2026, and halt its distribution pending that review.

Attached is our manuscript, “Reanalysis of FDA Clinical Data for mFLUSIVA (mRNA-1010): Unfavorable Risk-Benefit Profile Supports Market Withdrawal.” The analysis rests principally on FDA’s own regulatory record and on the clinical-trial counts submitted in support of licensure. The full manuscript is also publicly available on Zenodo at: https://zenodo.org/records/22016811

The findings are deeply concerning. In the pivotal efficacy trial, approximately 5,017 adults had to receive mFLUSIVA instead of a standard-dose influenza vaccine to avert a single hospitalization. On that same scale, the switch was associated with approximately 1,454 additional solicited adverse reactions, 233 additional Grade 3 systemic reactions severe enough to prevent normal daily activity, and approximately 2 excess unexplained deaths.

Expressed another way, among 5,017 mFLUSIVA recipients, approximately 3,798 would experience a solicited adverse reaction and approximately 278 would experience a Grade 3 systemic reaction, while the demonstrated clinical benefit is one hospitalization averted.

The mortality findings are especially difficult to dismiss. Unexplained deaths were 2.55-fold more frequent among mFLUSIVA recipients, and related pooled fatal-event terms were also significantly elevated. Yet no properly adjudicated influenza-mortality endpoint was ever specified, collected, or reported anywhere in the development program, and no autopsy was performed on any mFLUSIVA recipient whose death remained unexplained.

The broader safety pattern was similarly one-sided. Every solicited symptom was more frequent in the mFLUSIVA group, and Grade 3 systemic reactions were 6.15-fold more frequent than with the standard-dose comparator. Neither pivotal trial included a placebo arm, meaning absolute vaccine-attributable harm and background event rates were never established.

Our manuscript sets out 17 grounds for reversal. The first nine arise directly from FDA’s own regulatory record and trial arithmetic and do not depend on the platform-level literature. The remaining grounds address the additional risks inherent in extending nucleoside-modified mRNA technology to annual lifelong administration.

Importantly, the core case for withdrawal does not depend on accepting any platform-level concern. FDA’s own regulatory record and trial arithmetic establish an extraordinarily unfavorable benefit-risk exchange and multiple unresolved deficiencies in the evidence supporting licensure. The platform-level evidence only compounds an approval that is already unsustainable on its own terms.

Those additional concerns include published evidence involving residual DNA contamination, reverse transcription and genomic integration, ribosomal stalling and frameshifting, protein misfolding and proteostatic disruption, broad biodistribution, prolonged persistence, and the possibility of cumulative biological effects with repeated dosing.

The approval is further weakened by the fact that the highest-risk age group was not shown to have superior clinical benefit against the preferentially recommended comparator before licensure. The required confirmatory study is a noninferiority trial powered under an assumption of 0% true relative vaccine efficacy and can succeed without demonstrating clinical superiority or a meaningful absolute benefit.

The central calculations underlying our request derive directly from the FDA briefing document and underlying trial counts. Yet the regulatory presentation never placed benefit and harm on the same absolute scale. Benefits were presented primarily as relative efficacy and harms as event percentages, leaving uncalculated the most decision-relevant question: how much harm is incurred for each severe clinical outcome prevented. Our reanalysis performs that calculation explicitly using FDA’s own numbers.

This is therefore not a situation that can be corrected through stronger labeling, routine pharmacovigilance, or promises of future evidence. The evidence required to establish a favorable benefit-risk profile was not demonstrated before approval. Allowing widespread administration to proceed would convert unresolved pre-licensure deficiencies into population-level exposure while the government waits for answers that should have been obtained before licensure.

We respectfully request that you direct the appropriate HHS and FDA officials to reexamine this approval, initiate withdrawal proceedings, and halt distribution before widespread administration begins during the 2026-2027 season.

If the Department concludes that mFLUSIVA should remain on the market, the American public is owed a clear accounting of how one hospitalization averted per 5,017 vaccinations is to be set against approximately 1,454 additional adverse reactions, 233 additional disabling Grade 3 systemic reactions, and an unresolved excess of deaths of undetermined cause, on the same scale derived from FDA’s own data.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter of public safety.

Respectfully submitted,

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH
Epidemiologist, McCullough Foundation

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
President, McCullough Foundation

John A. Catanzaro, NMD, PhD
Chief Executive Officer, Neo7Bioscience, Inc.

We hope Secretary Kennedy and federal health officials make the life-saving decision to remove this extremely hazardous product from the market before widespread administration begins. In light of the evidence now before them, allowing mFLUSIVA to remain approved would be a grave mistake. The government has been given the data. It now has the responsibility to act.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

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I felt a fair measure of trepidation when he told me he was going to post our conversation on YouTube — the first time he has dared to do so — given the censorship and shadow banning I have experienced on YouTube.

Please support his Blaine’s new (and risky) YouTube venture by listening to our conversation and sharing it with your friends.

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In the pre-release publicity, Djokovic has stated the film reveals the ordeal he suffered at the hands of Australian authorities when he arrived in Melbourne in 2022 to compete in the Australian Open. After receiving a visa and green light to fly all the way to Australia to compete because he had already contracted and recovered from COVID-19, the Australian authorities rescinded his visa upon his arrival because he wasn’t vaccinated. He was then placed in a hotel-detention center and subjected to all manner of arbitrary, chicken-shit tyranny.

As I related in my interview with Tucker Carlson (in which I muddled Melbourne with Sydney) this was a deliberate act of sadism to humiliate the champion.

After he was finally released and allowed to go home, he was subjected to the most repulsive interview I have ever watched in which a BBC reporter stated that all he had to do was get the shot and he would be allowed to continue on his path to becoming the Greatest of All Time.

Though I didn’t mention Matthew 4:8–10, in which the devil takes Jesus to a high mountain, shows him the kingdoms of the world, and tries to tempt him, the story is exactly what I was thinking about, and Mr. Carlson had the same thought.

The attempt to force the COVID-19 vaccine on all of humanity was the work of a globalist oligarchy that has made the deal with the devil that Jesus turned down.

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As we age, virtually all of us will develop some degree of chronic stiffness and pain in our back, arms, hips, and legs. That is why we developed PureRelief from The Wellness Company.

🧭 The Daily-Approach Revolution: Rethinking Chronic Pain in Older Adults

For millions of older adults, pain isn’t an event. It’s a baseline condition—a constant hum of stiffness in the knees at sunrise, a dull ache in the lower back after an hour of gardening, fingers that won’t cooperate first thing in the morning. This reality is precisely why the standard “pop a pill when it hurts” model fails so many people.

💊 The Problem With PRN Pain Relief

PRN (pro re nata—”as needed”) painkillers like acetaminophen (Tylenol) and ibuprofen (Motrin), and especially prescription opioids, are built around a reactive philosophy:

• They chase symptoms rather than modulating their underlying drivers.

• They do nothing to resolve inflammation or support tissue repair—they only mute the downstream signaling.

• They carry cumulative risk—chronic NSAID use is linked to gastrointestinal bleeding, kidney strain, and elevated cardiovascular risk; chronic Tylenol burdens the liver; opioids bring dependence, tolerance, and the well-documented downward spiral of escalating doses.

For someone living with daily stiffness and inflammation, this is a treadmill that runs in place. The pain returns the moment the dose wears off, because the pathology was never addressed.

🌱 Pure Pain Relief: A Fundamentally Different Category

Pure Pain Relief from The Wellness Company is not a fast-acting analgesic. It belongs to a different category entirely: a daily, foundational protocol that works upstream of pain, at the level of inflammation, nerve sensitization, and repair.

The Philosophy

Rather than suppressing a pain signal at the finish line, Pure Pain Relief aims to:

1. Modulate inflammatory pathways continuously, so the baseline inflammatory load drops over time.

2. Dampen the sensitization of pain pathways (central and peripheral), reducing the amplification of pain signals.

3. Facilitate tissue repair, giving joints, muscles, and connective tissue the raw materials and signaling environment to actually recover.

This is a long-term solution, not an immediate one. The honest expectation is weeks of consistent daily use—not minutes—before meaningful shifts in baseline stiffness occur.

🔬 Ingredient Breakdown: Why This Formula Is Built for Daily Use

Each ingredient here was selected for sustained, low-grade inflammation management, not acute analgesia:

🧬 Palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) — 400 mg

PEA is an endogenous fatty acid amide that acts as a master modulator of the endocannabinoid system and has substantial research supporting its role in reducing neuroinflammation and chronic pain, particularly neuropathic and inflammatory pain. It works by downregulating overactive mast cells and glial cells—the very machinery that sensitizes pain pathways. This is the workhorse ingredient, and 400 mg daily is squarely within the clinically studied range.

🌿 White Willow Bark Extract — 300 mg

The botanical precursor to aspirin (salicin), but delivered as a whole-plant extract that’s gentler on the stomach and provides a broader spectrum of compounds. It offers mild, sustained anti-inflammatory support without the GI burden of isolated salicylates.

🌸 Baikal Skullcap Root Extract — 150 mg

A traditional Chinese medicine staple rich in baicalin and baicalein, flavonoids with documented anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and neuroprotective properties. It complements PEA by targeting oxidative stress and inflammatory cytokines.

🫚 Ginger (T3 Supercritical CO₂ Extract) — 125 mg

A highly bioavailable ginger extract standardized for gingerols and shogaols, compounds with well-established anti-inflammatory activity. Supercritical CO₂ extraction preserves the heat-sensitive actives far better than conventional extraction, meaning you get more of the good stuff per milligram. Ginger has shown benefit in osteoarthritis and muscle soreness in clinical trials.

🧂 Magnesium Glycinate — 15 mg

Magnesium plays a role in muscle relaxation, nerve function, and hundreds of enzymatic reactions, including those governing inflammation and repair. The glycinate form is highly bioavailable and gentle on the gut (unlike magnesium oxide or citrate, which can cause loose stools). Note: 15 mg is a low dose—this is a complementary supporting role in this formula, and is fine for those of you who take much higher amounts of magnesium each day.

The Synergy

What matters here is not any single ingredient in isolation, but the multi-pathway approach: PEA modulates neuroinflammation, willow bark and ginger hit the COX/prostaglandin axis, skullcap adds antioxidant and neuroprotective depth, and magnesium supports muscular and nervous system function. This is a “surround the problem” strategy rather than a single blunt instrument.

⚠️ Honest Expectations: What This Is (and Isn’t)

Pure Pain Relief IS:

• ✅ A daily foundational supplement for chronic stiffness, inflammation, and age-related aches

• ✅ A tool for gradually reducing reliance on PRN Tylenol, Motrin, and potentially prescription painkillers

• ✅ A long-game investment in tissue repair and pain-pathway desensitization

• ✅ Generally well-tolerated, with gentler GI profile than NSAIDs

Pure Pain Relief ISN’T:

• ❌ A fast-acting acute pain reliever

• ❌ A replacement for your doctor’s care for acute injury or severe pain

• ❌ An overnight fix—expect 4–8 weeks of consistent daily use for noticeable baseline changes

🎯 Who Should Consider It

This product is best suited for the older adult who:

• Wakes up stiff and takes an hour to “loosen up”

• Lives with nagging osteoarthritis, old injuries, or general inflammatory aches

• Finds themselves reaching for Tylenol or Motrin more days than not

• Wants a proactive, root-cause approach rather than perpetual symptom-chasing

🏁 The Bottom Line

The Wellness Company’s Pure Pain Relief is a thoughtfully formulated, multi-pathway daily protocol for chronic pain and stiffness—not a band-aid. For older adults tired of the PRN treadmill, it represents a legitimate shift in strategy: treat the condition, not just the symptom. For those willing to commit to daily use, the payoff is a meaningful reduction in baseline pain and a breaking of the dependency cycle on as-needed painkillers. Functional nurses should consider this product in their arsenal of recommendations for patients with chronic pain and stiffness. To learn more about the field, visit The Functional Nurse Academy.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company

www.twc.health/focalpoints

📚 References

1. Gabrielsson L, Mattsson S, Fowler CJ. Palmitoylethanolamide for the treatment of pain: pharmacokinetics, safety and efficacy. Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2016;82(4):932–942.

2. Keppel Hesselink JM, Hekker TA. Therapeutic utility of palmitoylethanolamide in the treatment of neuropathic pain associated with various pathological conditions: a case series. J Pain Res. 2012;5:437–442.

3. Varrassi G, Paladini A, Marinangeli F, Racz G. Neural modulation by blocks and infusions. Pain Pract. 2006;6(1):34–38.

4. Shara M, Stohs SJ. Efficacy and safety of white willow bark (Salix alba) extracts. Phytother Res. 2015;29(8):1112–1116.

5. Li C, Lin G, Zuo Z. Pharmacological effects and pharmacokinetics properties of Radix Scutellariae and its bioactive flavones. Biopharm Drug Dispos. 2011;32(8):427–445.

6. Altman RD, Marcussen KC. Effects of a ginger extract on knee pain in patients with osteoarthritis. Arthritis Rheum. 2001;44(11):2531–2538.

7. Black CD, Herring MP, Hurley DJ, O’Connor PJ. Ginger (Zingiber officinale) reduces muscle pain caused by eccentric exercise. J Pain. 2010;11(9):894–903.

8. de Baaij JHF, Hoenderop JGJ, Bindels RJM. Magnesium in man: implications for health and disease. Physiol Rev. 2015;95(1):1–46.

Product link: Pure Pain Relief — The Wellness Company

David M. Morens served as a Senior Advisor to the Director (specifically in NIAID’s Office of the Director) from 2006 through 2022, and was also a long-time senior advisor to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The charges pertain to the notorious NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence that funded Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric et al. to perform their gain-of-function research on SARS bat coronaviruses with their colleague Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The gist of the federal criminal charge to which Morens pleaded guilty is, according to the press release:

Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2, and others conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the United States after NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant. NIH terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China. NIAID awarded the grant to Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the WIV.

Following the termination, Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. In anticipation that their communications would be requested through FOIA Requests, Morens, Co-Conspirator 1, and Co-Conspirator 2 agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.

The co-conspirators used Morens’s personal Gmail account to exchange non-public NIH information; correspond about their efforts to influence NIH to fund Company 1; exchange edits to drafts of letters addressed to NIH leadership for Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1; and “back-channel” information to Senior NIAID Official 1. According to court documents, each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems.

I perceive this criminal charge and guilty plea for conspiracy to defraud the US government as akin to Al Capone being convicted for income tax evasion. The real issue here is not the concealment of public records and communications, but the illegal creation and subsequent illegal concealment of a bio-weapon in a Chinese biosecurity lab that resulted in incalculable death and damage to all of humanity.

Though Morens will likely serve time behind bars, his guilty plea and his punishment for this particular act of fraud strike me as a distraction from the elephant in the room.

Morens was one of Fauci’s top advisors, and I find it highly conspicuous that he took such a keen personal interest in Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, which was reviewed by the NIH in January 2014—the beginning of the period covered by Dr. Fauci’s preemptive pardon, as I documented in my post President Biden’s Preemptive Pardon of Fauci.

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The recent FDA panel on peptides has created great enthusiasm in the health freedom and biohacking space, however, without large NIH trials or safety registries, the field will be left without the foundations of clinical evidence. I touched on this recently with Dr Gina Loudon.

🧪 FDA Peptide Deliberations: Importance of Route-of-Administration

The FDA’s Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC) just held its most consequential peptide meeting in years — July 23–24, 2026 — and voted to recommend BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, and MOTS-c for the 503A bulks list, with favorable votes on Epitalon (7-4), Semax (8-5), but rejected Emideltide (DSIP) (6-7), following on Day 2. The margins were tight: 8–6 with one abstention across the board, with MOTS-c squeaking through at 7–5–2.

But buried in the procedural drama is a question the FDA itself keeps circling without landing on: route of administration.

💉 Injectable Is the Default

Every single one of these seven peptides under review is primarily used as an injectable in practice. BPC-157, TB-500, MOTS-c, KPV — these are administered via subcutaneous or intramuscular injection, with some intranasal and oral formulations.

The FDA’s own briefing documents, released June 29–30, flagged this explicitly. Their four recurring concerns across all seven substances:

• Inadequate human safety data

• Characterization and impurity concerns

• Immunogenicity risk — this one is directly tied to parenteral administration

• Insufficient historical 503A compounding-pharmacy use

That third point — immunogenicity — is where route of administration becomes the unspoken center of gravity. Injecting peptides bypasses the gut’s immune-surveillance machinery and delivers foreign amino acid sequences directly into circulation. The FDA’s career staff hammered this: peptide impurities and sequence variations can trigger immune responses when injected that would be neutralized or simply not occur with topical or oral routes. The most expedient way of clarifying these concerns is for the National Institutes of Health to fund and conduct large prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trials in specific disease categories with adjudicated and objective outcomes. Intravenous therapies are very amenable to this approach.

🔬 The BPC-157 Paradox

BPC-157 is the poster child for this tension. It’s a pentadecapeptide fragment of BPC, a protein found in human gastric juice. Nature designed it to function in the gut. The original preclinical work — and there’s a substantial body of it, mostly out of Croatian labs — focused on oral administration for GI indications like ulcerative colitis and NSAID-induced lesions.

Yet the biohacking and wellness communities have almost entirely converged on subcutaneous injection as the standard route, even for systemic healing. The “Wolverine stack” — BPC-157 + TB-500 injected together — is practically folk medicine at this point.

The FDA’s Russell Wesdyk flagged what he called a “foundational challenge”: the agency cannot actually define what these substances are. Different vendors selling “BPC-157” are providing peptides with variations in sequence, purity, and salt form (free base vs. acetate). When you inject a poorly characterized peptide mixture, the immunogenicity risk isn’t theoretical — it’s a direct function of the route. All of this could be clarified with product manufacture and provision in a randomized trials. Compounding pharmacies are not in a position to fund these trials, that’s the role of the NIH.

🧬 MOTS-c and the Mitochondrial Injection Question

MOTS-c is particularly interesting here. It’s a mitochondrial-derived peptide — 16 amino acids encoded in the mitochondrial genome — that regulates metabolic homeostasis. The academic work on it (mostly from the Pinchas Cohen lab at USC) has focused on metabolic disorders and aging.

The route-of-administration question for MOTS-c is even sharper than for BPC-157. Mitochondrial peptides aren’t supposed to be floating around in extracellular space at pharmacological concentrations. Injecting them subcutaneously creates a pharmacokinetic profile that bears zero resemblance to their endogenous signaling patterns. The PCAC voted to recommend it anyway, but the 7–5–2 split suggests real discomfort with what amounts to an uncontrolled human experiment via injection.

🏭 The Compounding Angle: Why Route Matters for 503A

Here’s where the regulatory mechanics intersect with the science. Section 503A compounding is for individualized patient prescriptions prepared by licensed pharmacies. The whole framework assumes a physician has weighed risks and benefits for a specific patient.

But if these peptides land on the 503A bulks list, the actual landscape will be:

• Telehealth platforms prescribing injectable peptides at scale

• Compounding pharmacies shipping pre-loaded syringes or multi-dose vials nationwide

• No requirement for large, prospective clinical trials or adverse event reporting — this is the crucial gap. FDA-approved injectable drugs have mandatory MedWatch reporting. Compounded injectables under 503A do not.

The Partnership for Safe Medicines and Public Citizen both raised this exact point during the meeting, framing bulks-list inclusion as a de facto “uncontrolled human trial without necessary adverse event reporting.” They’re not wrong about the mechanics, even if their motives are gatekeeping.

🧪 Oral, Intranasal, Topical: The Routes Considered Safe

The FDA deliberations paid little attention is paid to non-injectable routes. BPC-157 has oral and buccal bioavailability data from animal models. Semax is used intranasally in Russia with decades of clinical experience. KPV has been studied in topical formulations for wound healing. The Wellness Company’s REGENERATE combines BPC-157, KPV, and TB-500.

The FDA’s framework has evaluated narrowly specified indications (ulcerative colitis for BPC-157, wound healing for KPV), however, large NIH clinical trials are needed for broad applications. The FDA has not said: “This peptide probably has a better safety profile orally — let’s evaluate that route separately.” At TWC we believe REGENERATE is responsibly presented and administered allowing for topical absorption allowing its impact in the body to help heal tissues, particularly for musculoskeletal problems.

🔮 Where This Is Headed

The PCAC vote is advisory. The FDA’s career staff recommended against every single one of these peptides. Historically, the agency follows staff recommendations about two-thirds of the time — but the current panel was stacked with eight new members, several with peptide industry ties, which is exactly why the votes broke the way they did.

RFK Jr. at HHS has publicly endorsed easing restrictions and he oversees both the FDA and the NIH. If there is no trial or registry infrastructure, once these peptides are being compounded and injected at scale by a population that learned about them on podcasts, the first case of injection-site abscess, anaphylaxis, immune-mediated cross-reactivity, or death after infusion is going to test whether the FDA’s enforcement discretion was wise.

Large, prospective, double-blind placebo-controlled trials are warranted for the higher risk products to fully understand potential clinical indications and safety of the parenteral products.

Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company

www.twc.health/focalpoints

• FDA Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC), Meeting Briefing Documents, June 29–30, 2026. Federal Docket FDA-2025-N-6895.

• FDA, “Interim Policy on Bulk Drug Substances Used in Compounding Under Section 503A,” revised April 15, 2026.

• Associated Press, “FDA reviews BPC-157, TB-500 and other peptides favored by RFK Jr.,” July 23, 2026.

• FDA Law Blog (Hyman, Phelps & McNamara), “PEPTIDE-L WAVE! PCAC Approves Four Bulk Drug Substances for the 503A List,” July 24, 2026.

• NPR, “FDA panel supports broadening access to peptides popular with wellness influencers,” Will Stone, July 23, 2026.

• BBC News, “US health panel loosens restrictions for controversial peptides popular online,” July 23, 2026.

• Bloomberg Law, “FDA Panel to Revisit Biden Peptide Ban as It Weighs Looser Rules,” July 21, 2026.

• ArentFox Schiff LLP, “50 Shades of Legally Gray: FDA’s Juicy Peptide Cliffhanger,” July 17, 2026.

• Goodwin Law, “FDA Signals Potentially Evolving Stance Toward Compounding of Certain Peptides,” May 2026.

• Peptide News Digest, “What the FDA’s Briefing Documents Actually Say About Each of the Seven Peptides Going to PCAC,” June 30, 2026.

• Clinical Peptide Society, testimony submitted to PCAC, public docket FDA-2025-N-6895.

• Partnership for Safe Medicines, Public Citizen, and Collaborative for Evidence-Based Medicine, oral testimony before PCAC, July 23, 2026.

I am not troubled that we disagree about this subject, and I am confident that our friendship will be just fine. However, our disagreement prompted me to ponder the impasse between those who oppose foreign wars and those who support them.

War—that is, the business of killing people and destroying their property and exposing one’s own people and property to the risk of being killed and destroyed—has long been a divisive subject among the philosophically inclined.

I say for the philosophically inclined, because it seems that most people are easily swayed by war propaganda to support war. Because only 0.4% of the American population serves in the active duty military, most Americans perceive themselves to be very far (and safe) from the business of waging war. Their minds therefore have free rein to imagine this business however they wish to imagine it.

I am confident that most people would instantly reevaluate their advocacy of foreign wars if they and their children were obliged to participate in fighting them. As General William Tecumseh Sherman put it:

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.

I regard friends, associates, and readers as being entirely free to support America’s foreign wars. However, by the same token, I declare my individual freedom of conscience—enshrined by the First Amendment and recognized by the Supreme Court as a core principle of the Free Speech Clause—to criticize these wars.

I did not arrive at my posture of staunchly opposing foreign wars lightly. My position is the result of decades of studying military history and analyzing the costs and results of America’s foreign wars since 1945.

I also believe that the burden of proof for justifying foreign wars is not on those who oppose them, but on those who advocate them.

War propaganda grossly oversimplifies the causes of conflict and reduces the adversary to a comic book bad guy, dehumanizing him and totally disregarding the historical events and circumstances that produced his feelings of enmity.

I often receive scolding emails from people who know nothing about Iran, its people, or its history apart from things they have heard from American and Israeli propagandists. Many of these people call themselves “conservatives” and have frequently expressed disgust at the decadence and immorality of popular American culture and the dishonesty of the US government, especially during the COVID-19.

On the other hand, people like me who oppose the US government’s foreign wars can draw on a long moral and legal tradition on which the US Republic was founded. This tradition regards war as an extreme measure—one to be undertaken only after every reasonable avenue of peaceful conflict resolution has been exhausted.

History has shown the war rarely results in desirable outcomes, but usually begets more war. As Jefferson put it, “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”

This view is rooted in the Western just war tradition, adapted and institutionalized by the American Founders in both the nation’s founding documents and its constitutional design.

The just war tradition, going back to Augustine and Aquinas, holds that resorting to arms is morally permissible only under strict conditions. Among the most exacting of these is the criterion of last resort: force may be used solely when all other means of resolving conflict—diplomacy, negotiation, arbitration, economic pressure, or legal appeal—have been attempted in good faith.

This moral framework shaped colonial and early republican thought. Puritan writers claimed that the justice of any war must be “notoriously evident,” and Revolutionary leaders framed their cause in just-war terms. The Declaration of Independence follows the logic of last resort: it catalogs a “long train of abuses,” records repeated petitions for redress, and only then concludes that the colonists were compelled “to dissolve the political bands” and take up arms in defense of their rights.

I’ve yet to see a single coherent argument—drawing on our moral and legal traditions—that justifies the US against Iran, which began when the nuclear-armed forces of Israel and the US attacked Iran on the grounds that Iran was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon.

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This is a classic example of an overextended empire picking too many fights at once and trying to placate one opponent so that it can shift military resources to putting out a fire in another part of the empire.

In 2006, North Korea began successfully testing nuclear weapons. Since then, its dynastic dictator, Kim Jong Un—widely regarded as aggressive and unpredictable—has repeatedly threatened “shocking and unimaginable disaster,” and “total destruction” of the United States if it takes military action against North Korea.

In recent years, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has repeatedly issued stark threats against the United States, framing them as responses to perceived hostility, joint military exercises, or the need to expand nuclear capabilities.

These statements, typically delivered through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), emphasize Kim’s readiness to use overwhelming or nuclear force if provoked, though they often condition destruction on U.S. or allied actions rather than announcing unprovoked first strikes.

On or around December 31, 2023, Kim met with senior military officers and instructed that if the United States and South Korea opted for military confrontation, North Korean forces must “deal a deadly blow to thoroughly annihilate them by mobilizing all the toughest means and potentialities without moment’s hesitation.”

State media reported this language the following day, linking it to the need to sharpen the country’s nuclear “treasured sword” amid what Kim described as unprecedented U.S.-led pressure.

In August 2025, amid U.S.–South Korea joint drills, Kim again escalated rhetoric. He described the exercises as an “obvious expression of their will to provoke war” and an indication of hostile intent, while calling for the rapid expansion of North Korea’s nuclear armament to match the security environment. This continued a pattern of using drills as a trigger for warnings of strengthened nuclear readiness directed at Washington and its allies.

In early 2026, Kim signaled openness to coexistence with the United States only if Washington accepted North Korea’s irreversible nuclear status and withdrew its “hostile policy,” while simultaneously warning of readiness to respond to any confrontation and emphasizing the ability to inflict decisive damage (with particularly explicit language reserved for South Korea).

By mid-August 2026, as the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises approached, North Korean Foreign Ministry statements—aligned with Kim’s overall posture—vowed to frustrate “outsiders’ hostile acts with “the most powerful and overwhelming force,” respond to a “new level of threat with a new level of a deterrent,” and further strengthen nuclear capabilities. These came alongside missile tests and accusations that U.S. strategy risked pushing the region toward nuclear confrontation.

Despite Kim’s extravagant threats, most military analysts claim that he is a rational actor who understands MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) and therefore maintains nuclear weapons as a means of deterrence rather than suicidal aggression. However, this assessment is a revision from earlier characterizations of North Korea as irrational (or “crazy,” “mad,” “unpredictable,” or “erratic”) in U.S. and Western discourse during the decades when Washington sought to prevent or reverse its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea’s nuclear program and its aggressive rhetoric naturally bring to mind US relations with Iran. As I note in my new book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions.

One often hears the assertion that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was a religious fanatic for whom the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) does not apply. However, this appears to be more of an assertion than an established fact. Khamenei issue an oral fatwa (religious decree) against the production of nuclear weapons, in October 2003—reiterated in April 2010 and October 2019. He was also known to be strongly dedicated to his wife, six children, in-laws, and seven grandchildren.

The Iranian regime has a forty-seven-year track record of pragmatic survival behavior. It has not invaded neighbors, has used proxies and deniability to avoid direct regime-ending confrontations, adapted to sanctions, negotiated the JCPOA (2015) to ease pressure, and reacted to provocations with calibrated responses such as limited direct strikes on Israel after assassinations. In a 2012 60 Minutes interview, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan characterized the regime “very rational” and said it weighs implications carefully (The Spymaster: Meir Dagan on Iran’s threat,” 60 Minutes, CBS News, Sept. 16, 2012).

Rarely if ever mentioned in the western media is the possibility that if the Iranian regime indeed wishes to acquire nuclear weapons, it is for the rational purpose of deterring aggression from Israel and the United States, both of which are armed with nuclear weapons.

Here it is useful to compare Iran to Pakistan. The latter country is often accused by the United States of sponsoring terrorism and is strongly suspected of having provided a haven for Osama bin Laden for five years in a secure compound in Abbottabad, a military garrison town close to Islamabad. Following India’s acquisition and testing of a nuclear bomb in 1974, Pakistan began developing its own nuclear weapons against strong Israeli opposition. In 1981, the Mossad sent letter bombs to firms in West Germany and Switzerland that were assisting in the effort. Though Pakistan succeeded in acquiring and testing nuclear weapons in 1998, it has never threatened Israel with an atomic bomb attack. The government of Pakistan believes that possessing nuclear weapons is a deterrent against aggression from India and other nations in the region.

I recently performed the following Grok query about Iran.

What is the evidence that the Iranian regime is an irrational actor that does not recognize, and will not be governed by the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)? Has the Iranian regime taken actions that are consistent with suicidal irrationality?

Grok responded as follows.

There is limited, mostly speculative or rhetorical evidence that the Iranian regime is an “irrational actor” that rejects the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), and virtually no concrete evidence of state-level actions that demonstrate suicidal irrationality. MAD relies on the assumption that rational state actors prioritize national/regime survival above all else and will therefore be deterred from actions (especially nuclear first strikes) that guarantee their own destruction. Critics who argue Iran falls outside this framework typically point to its theocratic ideology, while most strategic analysts (including former Israeli intelligence leaders) conclude the opposite: Iran is a rational, if highly ideological and risk-tolerant, actor that understands deterrence and acts to preserve the regime.

Claimed Evidence for Irrationality / Non-Adherence to MAD

Proponents (often Israeli officials, U.S. hawks, and some think-tank analyses) cite the following:

• Religious ideology and eschatology: The regime is Twelver Shia, with a belief in the eventual return of the Hidden Imam (Mahdi). Some hardliners (especially in the IRGC) interpret major chaos or apocalyptic conflict with “infidels” (Israel/U.S.) as hastening this return, potentially making mutual destruction religiously desirable rather than deterrent. Martyrdom (shahadat) is glorified in official ideology, culture, and propaganda. Critics argue this creates a different cost-benefit calculus than secular rational-actor models.

• Specific statements suggesting asymmetric nuclear thinking:

  • Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (2001): A single nuclear bomb could destroy Israel entirely, while the Muslim world (with many states) would only be damaged—implying Iran might accept heavy losses in a nuclear exchange.

  • Repeated eliminationist rhetoric against Israel (e.g., threats to “destroy” Tel Aviv/Haifa or wipe out the “Zionist regime”) by leaders including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who blended this with Mahdist/apocalyptic themes.

• Historical willingness to absorb massive casualties: During the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, Iran launched “human wave” attacks (including child soldiers and Basij volunteers into minefields), accepting 500,000–1 million deaths rather than seeking early peace. This is cited as evidence of ideological fanaticism over pragmatic survival.

• Persistent nuclear pursuit and proxy escalations despite costs: Iran has endured decades of sanctions, sabotage, and strikes while advancing its nuclear program (enrichment to near-weapons grade at times) and arming proxies (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas) that conduct attacks risking wider war. Recent 2026 escalations—broad missile/drone strikes and proxy actions across multiple fronts—have been described by Israeli intelligence as “almost suicidal” or “off the rails,” driven by survival desperation rather than cool calculation.

• Rejection of Western deterrence logic: The regime’s theocratic/ideological nature (vs. Soviet-style pragmatic totalitarianism) is said to make it less sensitive to threats of annihilation. Some argue MAD only works between states that share a survival-first paradigm.

These points suggest Iran may not be “governed by” MAD in the same way the U.S. and USSR were—its leaders might calculate that limited nuclear use, proxy chaos, or even regime-ending conflict could serve divine/historical purposes or asymmetric goals.

Counter-Evidence: Iran Behaves as a Rational (If Revisionist) Actor

The weight of empirical analysis points the other way:

• Pragmatic survival behavior over 47 years: Iran has not invaded neighbors (unlike Saddam’s Iraq), has used proxies and deniability to avoid direct regime-ending confrontations, adapted to sanctions, negotiated the JCPOA (2015) to ease pressure, and calibrated responses (e.g., limited direct strikes on Israel after assassinations, followed by de-escalation windows). Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan explicitly called the regime “very rational” and said it weighs implications carefully.

• Nuclear restraint and deterrence awareness: Khamenei issued (or referenced) a fatwa declaring nuclear weapons (especially use) haram/forbidden, though critics note it is oral, focuses more on use than possession, and could be reversed under the Shia principle of expediency if regime survival demanded it. Iran has stayed at the nuclear threshold rather than rushing to a testable weapon—consistent with seeking deterrence without provoking preemptive annihilation. It has not transferred nuclear tech to proxies.

• No suicidal state actions: Proxy terrorism and suicide bombings are asymmetric tools (common in weaker actors), not regime self-immolation. The Iran-Iraq War casualties, while horrific, occurred in a defensive conventional war where both sides suffered massively—standard for ideological conflicts (compare WWII or other total wars). Recent escalations occurred under extreme pressure (strikes on Iranian soil) and reflect wounded-animal survival instincts, not proactive suicide.

• Brinkmanship, not madness: Iran excels at “gray zone” operations, proxies, and calculated risk to expand influence while avoiding existential retaliation. This is rational deterrence-by-denial and cost-imposition, not rejection of MAD. Kenneth Waltz and others have argued a nuclear Iran would likely stabilize the region via classic balancing, as survival remains the regime’s core imperative.

In short, ideology introduces higher risk tolerance and rhetorical extremism, and statements like Rafsanjani’s highlight an asymmetric view of destruction. But there is no behavioral record of the regime knowingly courting its own assured destruction. MAD’s core logic (survival first) appears to hold; the regime has repeatedly chosen preservation over ideological purity when the stakes were existential.

Bottom line: Claims of Iranian suicidal irrationality are more often policy advocacy (for strikes/preemption) than a description of observed reality. Deterrence has constrained Iran for decades and would likely continue to do so—even with nuclear weapons—though the ideological overlay adds uncertainty and demands robust second-strike capabilities and clear red lines from adversaries. The regime is fanatical in rhetoric and ruthless in tactics, but not demonstrably suicidal.

As President Kennedy vehemently asserted in his letters to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in April and May 1963, nuclear proliferation is inherently undesirable. It would therefore be far preferable if the US could induce Iran to give up its 60% uranium.

The trouble the US now faces is that it supported Iraq’s 1980-88 war against Iran, has itself twice attacked Iran, killed its religious leader and multiple members of his family, and threatened to end Iranian civilization forever.

Given these circumstances, it’s hard to image what the US could do to induce Iran to give up its uranium. One could make a strong argument that the most rational decision that Iran could now make is to move forward in developing a nuclear deterrent, following in the footsteps of North Korea, which was largely obliterated by the US Air Force in 1950-53.

At the end of his life, Air Force General Curtis LeMay told Air Force historians that 85% of North Korea’s buildings were destroyed and 20% of its civilian population was killed. Nevertheless, the North Korean regime didn’t capitulate. On the contrary, it survived and concluded it had best acquire nuclear weapons to deter further US aggression in the future.

As we see from President Trump’s Truth Social post, North Korea’s doctrine of nuclear deterrence has worked very well.

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Australia is preparing to round up 5,000 wild little penguins, inject each of them twice with an avian-influenza vaccine, implant microchips, and release them back into the wild in what amounts to the largest wild-bird vaccination experiment ever attempted. In total, it will involve roughly 10,000 injections and 5,000 implanted microchips across a free-ranging wild population.

The vaccine being supplied for Australia’s protected bird program is a Zoetis H5N2 killed-virus vaccine developed for poultry, while the virus now circulating in Australian wildlife is H5N1. The product was developed for chickens, not wild penguins, and Australia has acknowledged that experience using these vaccines in non-poultry species is limited. Yet authorities are now scaling this intervention up to thousands of free-ranging animals.

The plan requires capturing the penguins, restraining them, injecting and microchipping them, releasing them, then finding and capturing them again several weeks later for a second dose. This is an unprecedented pharmaceutical intervention in a wild ecosystem.

The evolutionary consequences are especially concerning. These vaccines do not necessarily stop infection or viral replication, meaning H5N1 can continue circulating while encountering vaccine-induced immune pressure. Influenza mutates rapidly, and under those conditions variants better able to evade the vaccine response can gain a selective advantage and spread.

Continued circulation under vaccine pressure can also accelerate antigenic drift and favor vaccine-resistant strains, while co-infection with different influenza viruses creates opportunities for reassortment and novel variants. In wild penguins, these risks are even less predictable because there is little real-world experience with mass vaccination of free-ranging populations.

There is also a notable financial connection behind the supplier. Zoetis has received nearly $30 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including funding involving poultry health, veterinary medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics. The Gates Foundation has also separately funded H5N1 avian-influenza vaccine development.

The scale of this should not be normalized. Five thousand wild penguins are being rounded up, double-vaccinated with a poultry-developed H5N2 influenza vaccine, permanently microchipped, and released back into an environment where H5N1 will continue circulating.

This is the largest wild-bird vaccination experiment ever attempted. It is a sweeping biological intervention with real evolutionary and ecological risks, and authorities are moving ahead despite limited species-specific evidence and no ability to know in advance what consequences they may be unleashing.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

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Nearly every day I encounter a patient who either cannot tolerate or does not have trust in the safety of prescription cholesterol-lowering drugs, namely statins. At The Wellness Company, we saw the need to fill this void.

Cholesterol Support — A Natural Answer to a Statin-Weary World

🫀 The Elephant in Every Adult’s Chest

Cardiovascular disease remains the single largest killer on the planet. It doesn’t discriminate by politics, wealth, or geography—it kills the banker and the bartender with equal enthusiasm. By middle age, a massive slice of the population is walking around with some degree of atherosclerotic burden, whether they know it or not. The question was never whether to address cardiovascular risk; it’s how.

Here’s the problem nobody in the white coat wants to admit out loud: a huge segment of the adult population cannot tolerate or does not trust statins. Muscle pain, brain fog, fatigue, elevated liver enzymes, and—for some—a genuine fear of the long-term metabolic consequences. The “statin-intolerant” population isn’t a fringe minority; it’s millions of people who got the prescription and quietly threw the bottle in the back of the cabinet.

For those people, the options have historically been thin: take the drug and suffer, move on to multiple other medicines, injections, or do nothing and hope. Cholesterol Support from The Wellness Company steps directly into that gap.

🌿 The Formula, Laid Bare

Let’s be clear about what’s actually in Cholesterol Support from TWC, because transparency is the whole point of the brand:

Unlike many products, the doses are actually disclosed at meaningful levels—which alone puts this ahead of 90% of the other supplements.

Bergamot at 550 mg is the standout. Bergamot (Citrus bergamia) contains a cocktail of polyphenols—most notably brutieridin and melitidin—that act on the same HMG-CoA reductase pathway statins target, but through a gentler, broader mechanism. The artichoke extract complements it by supporting bile acid output and hepatic clearance, which is how the body actually disposes of cholesterol rather than just suppressing its synthesis.

And the probiotic? That’s the part most people glance over. The KABP Metabalance blend is where the formula earns its “Support” name—because this isn’t just about a number on a blood panel.

🔬 Beyond the Number: Why “Cholesterol Reduction” Is a Red Herring

Here’s the conceptual shift that matters, and it’s one the pharmaceutical model has spent decades obscuring: atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk is not just a cholesterol problem. It’s also secondary inflammation, oxidation, and endothelial dysfunction.

Natural interventions reduce cardiovascular risk through mechanisms that have nothing to do with crushing LDL into the floor:

• Endothelial function — Bergamot and artichoke polyphenols improve nitric oxide signaling and vessel flexibility. Plaque doesn’t form in a healthy, compliant artery.

• Oxidative stress — Oxidized LDL (oxLDL) is the actual atherogenic particle. Polyphenols neutralize the free radicals that convert benign LDL into the oxidized, foam-cell-forming version.

• Inflammation — Atherosclerosis is fundamentally an inflammatory disease. The probiotic component addresses gut-mediated inflammation and systemic immune tone, which mainstream cardiology has only recently begun to take seriously.

• Bile acid metabolism — Artichoke’s cynarin and luteolin stimulate bile output, which is the body’s primary cholesterol elimination route. Statins don’t touch this pathway meaningfully.

This is why a natural formula can underperform a statin on raw LDL points and still support risk reduction actual cardiovascular outcomes. The biomarker is a proxy; the physiology is the truth. A 30% LDL drop achieved through oxidative and inflammatory suppression and bile acid modulation is worth a lot to holistic health.

⚖️ Who This Is For

• The statin-intolerant/averse adult who wants an evidence-based alternative rather than nothing.

• Anyone with borderline lipids who isn’t ready for a lifetime prescription.

• People who understand that risk is multifactorial and desire natural solutions.

• Those who want transparency—real doses, real disclosures on the product.

Cholesterol Support represents something the medical establishment has been slow to offer: a multi-ingredient genuine, mechanism-based alternative that treats the cardiovascular system as a system. This product goes well with other over-the-counter risk-modulators including omega-3 fatty acids (I recommend >2000 mg of EPA+DHA per day), dry aged garlic >1200 mg per day, and nattokinase >10,000 FU per day. All of these should be approved by the managing doctor and the individual risks including bleeding should be understood for the group.

✅ The Verdict

A tightly designed, honestly dosed, three-ingredient formula that targets cardiovascular risk at the level of inflammation, oxidation, and bile metabolism—not just LDL suppression. For the statin-averse and statin-intolerant majority who’ve been left without options, this is one of the more credible natural entries on the market and is well positioned for recommendation by functional nurses. If you are a nurse, check out the Functional Nurse Academy.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company

www.twc.health/focalpoints

📚 References

1. Mollace V, et al. Hypolipemic and hypoglycaemic activity of bergamot polyphenols: From animal models to human studies. Fitoterapia. 2011.

2. Gliozzi M, et al. Bergamot polyphenolic fraction enhances rosuvastatin-induced effect on LDL-cholesterol, LOX-1 expression and protein kinase B phosphorylation in patients with hyperlipidemia. Int J Cardiol. 2013.

3. Wider B, et al. Artichoke leaf extract for treating hypercholesterolaemia. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2013.

4. Bundy R, et al. Artichoke leaf extract reduces symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome but has no effect on plasma cholesterol. (Note: hepatic/bile pathways studied separately in hepatocyte models.)

5. Costabile A, et al. Probiotic modulation of the gut microbiota and serum lipids: a systematic review. (Lactobacillus plantarum strains and lipid metabolism.)

6. Ross R. Atherosclerosis—an inflammatory disease. N Engl J Med. 1999.

Note: Product-specific clinical data should be reviewed via The Wellness Company’s published materials. Consult a qualified clinician before discontinuing any prescribed medication.

The protection provided by the PREP Act is deliberately broad to enable and encourage rapid response during public health emergencies. This sounds good in theory if the nation is up against an extremely virulent pathogen that poses a grave risk to the entire population.

However, in practice against SARS-CoV-2, the liability protection enabled massive fraud and abuse. The primary trouble with the PREP Act is that it does not require the Secretary of Health and Human services to provide an objective factual basis for declaring and maintaining a public health emergency. This defect was especially evident during the Monkeypox scare, when the entire “emergency” was a mere media assertion reminiscent of the 2010 Simpsons episode House Cat Flu.

The sole statutory exception to PREP Act immunity is willful misconduct that proximately causes death or serious physical injury.

Willful misconduct is narrowly defined: an act or omission taken intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose, knowingly without legal or factual justification, and in disregard of a known or obvious risk so great that the harm is highly likely to outweigh any benefit.

Plaintiffs must prove all three elements by clear and convincing evidence, first exhaust the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, and litigate only in a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Fauci and Walensky’s attorneys will probably argue that they did not—in the spring of 2021—know that the risk of miscarriage outweighed the theoretical benefit of protecting the pregnant mother from COVID-19 illness.

In August 2021, Walensky publicly acknowledged that the COVID-19 vaccine does NOT prevent infection and transmission, which meant that any possible protection the vaccine conferred to pregnant mothers was entirely theoretical.

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Many of you have either first-hand knowledge of colonic diverticulosis (process of developing small outpouchings) or symptomatic diverticulitis (obstruction and infection) manifested by abdominal pain, fever, and colonic bleeding.

Diverticulosis, Diverticulitis, and the Fiber Deficit: How Diet Determines Destiny

Diverticular disease is among the most common gastrointestinal conditions in the industrialized world, yet it is almost comically misunderstood by the general public. Many people carry the vague impression that it is an inevitable consequence of aging — a sort of plumbing failure that strikes at random. The reality is closer to the opposite: diverticulosis is a disease of what we eat, and it tracks the Western diet with embarrassing precision. A colon fed primarily on refined starch and animal protein develops structural weaknesses; a colon fed on plant fiber remains resilient. What follows is an examination of how a lifelong high-fiber diet protects against diverticular disease, how meat and starch undermine the colon wall, and why processed starchy snack foods are the single worst offender.

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🥦 The Protective Anatomy of Fiber

To understand why fiber matters, you have to understand the mechanics of the colon itself. The large intestine is a muscular tube whose job is to squeeze, compact, and expel waste. That squeezing generates intraluminal pressure — pressure inside the tube. When stool is bulky, soft, and well-hydrated, the colon does its work with modest, evenly distributed contractions. But when stool is small, hard, and dry, the colon must generate dramatically higher pressures to move it along. It is this repeated high-pressure straining, concentrated at points where blood vessels penetrate the bowel wall, that eventually forces the inner lining (mucosa) to herniate through the muscular layer, forming the small outpouchings we call diverticula.

Fiber, specifically insoluble fiber from fruits and vegetables, is the primary determinant of stool bulk. Cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin do not dissolve in water; they pass through the gut largely intact, absorbing water and swelling into a soft, voluminous mass. This does three things:

1. Reduces transit time — waste moves through faster, so the colon wall is exposed to pressure for less time.

2. Lowers intraluminal pressure — a bulky stool is easier to move, so the muscular contractions are gentler.

3. Feeds the microbiome — the soluble fiber fraction (pectin, inulin) ferments in the colon, producing short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, which nourish the colonic epithelium and maintain the integrity of the mucosal barrier.

The epidemiological evidence for this is overwhelming and consistent. The classic observation, repeated in every gastroenterology textbook, comes from Burkitt and Painter in the 1970s: rural African populations eating 50–100 grams of fiber daily had a prevalence of diverticulosis approaching zero, while their Western counterparts on 10–15 grams daily developed the condition at rates exceeding 30–50% by age 60. When members of those same low-fiber populations migrated to Western cities and adopted Western diets, their diverticulosis rates climbed to match the locals within a generation. Genetics did not change; the food did.

Modern prospective cohorts tell the same story. The Health Professionals Follow-Up Study found that men in the highest quintile of dietary fiber intake had roughly a 40% lower risk of developing symptomatic diverticular disease than men in the lowest quintile. The protective association was strongest for insoluble fiber — the kind found in the skins and structural parts of fruits and vegetables. Notably, the protection was dose-dependent and independent of red meat intake, meaning fiber itself, not merely the absence of meat, was doing the work.

The mechanism by which a high-fiber diet prevents diverticulitis (the acute inflammation of diverticula) is equally clear. Diverticulitis is thought to arise when fecal material stagnates inside a diverticulum, causing local ischemia, bacterial overgrowth, and micro-perforation. A colon with brisk, bulky, regular transit sheds these pockets continuously; a colon with slow, hard, infrequent stools allows material to lodge and fester. Fiber, in short, keeps the diverticula flushed.

🥩 The Meat-and-Starch Problem

If fiber is the shield, the standard Western pattern — heavy animal protein and refined carbohydrate — is the battering ram. The relationship between meat, starch, and diverticulosis operates through two distinct but compounding pathways: pressure and constipation.

The Constipation Engine

A diet built around meat and refined starch is, by construction, a low-residue diet. Muscle meat contains essentially no fiber — zero grams, regardless of cut or quality. White flour, white rice, and peeled potatoes have had their fibrous outer layers stripped away during milling and processing; what remains is almost pure starch, which is digested and absorbed rapidly in the small intestine, leaving very little bulk for the colon. The result is a small, hard, dehydrated stool that the colon must squeeze against with maximum force. This is the precise mechanical condition — chronic high intraluminal pressure — that drives mucosal herniation.

The Health Professionals Follow-Up Study quantified this directly. Men eating a “Western” dietary pattern (high in red meat, refined grains, and sweets) had roughly a 50% higher risk of diverticulitis compared to those eating a prudent, fiber-rich pattern. A separate analysis found that each serving of red meat per day was associated with a measurable stepwise increase in risk, an effect that held even after adjusting for fiber intake — suggesting red meat is not merely a marker of low fiber, but contributes independently.

Meat’s Independent Contribution

There are several proposed mechanisms for meat’s independent effect. Red meat is high in heme iron and undergoes nitrosation in the gut, generating N-nitroso compounds that are pro-inflammatory to the colonic mucosa. Red meat also alters the gut microbiome, favoring bile-tolerant, putrefactive bacteria at the expense of the fiber-fermenting species that produce butyrate. A colonic epithelium starved of butyrate is weaker and more susceptible to the mechanical stress that forms diverticula. The net effect is a bowel wall that is both pushed harder (by hard stools) and weakened (by inflammation and poor epithelial nutrition). This may come as somber news for MAHA keto-carnivore enthusiasts.

Starch deserves its own indictment. Refined starch is not inert filler; it is rapidly absorbed glucose that spikes insulin, promotes systemic low-grade inflammation, and — critically for the colon — leaves almost nothing behind as residue. The term “binding” in dietary parlance is not metaphorical: high-starch, low-fiber diets genuinely produce the small, tenacious stools that clinicians associate with straining and elevated colon pressure. Potatoes, rice, and white bread are the archetypal examples of foods that fill the stomach but empty the bowel of what it needs. Because starch is about 60% of the American diet in terms of calories, diverticulosis can be thought of as “bread-eaters disease.”

🍪 Processed Starchy Snacks: The Worst of All Worlds

If meat and refined starch each independently burden the colon, the modern processed snack combines them with additional harms, and it does so in a form engineered to be eaten in excess. Cookies, crackers, chips, pastries, and similar products represent a perfect storm for diverticular disease:

• Zero meaningful fiber. These products are built from refined white flour and/or potato starch, with any fiber stripped away and never restored. A serving of potato chips contains effectively no fiber; a pastry contains none.

• Concentrated starch plus fat. The combination of refined carbohydrate and industrial fat produces a highly caloric, highly palatable food that slows gastric emptying but still delivers almost no colonic residue — the worst possible configuration for stool bulk and transit.

• Added sugar and refined oils. Both promote systemic inflammation, which impairs tissue repair in the colon wall and worsens the low-grade mucosal inflammation that predisposes diverticula to become infected (diverticulitis).

• Displacement of protective foods. Every calorie consumed as a cracker or cookie is a calorie not consumed as a vegetable, fruit, or legume. The harm is therefore twofold: direct damage plus the opportunity cost of lost protection.

The association between processed-food consumption and diverticular disease is robust. Studies examining dietary patterns consistently find that individuals whose diets are dominated by ultra-processed foods — and specifically refined-grain snack products — have significantly higher rates of both diverticulosis and diverticulitis. The Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study both identified “Western” dietary patterns (of which processed snacks are a core component) as independently predictive of diverticulitis risk, with the highest-risk consumers facing roughly double the odds of low-risk consumers. The mechanism is not mysterious: these foods simultaneously maximize intraluminal pressure, minimize stool bulk, and inflame the mucosa — the three ingredients of diverticular pathology in a single package.

It is worth stating plainly: diverticulosis is not a random affliction of the elderly. It is a predictable, dose-dependent consequence of a low-residue, high-starch, high-meat diet, and the epidemic levels seen in Western nations are a direct product of that dietary pattern. The colon is a mechanical and biological system, and it responds to what it is fed. Feed it fiber from fruits and vegetables across a lifetime, and it handles pressure gracefully. Feed it meat, starch, and processed snack foods, and the wall eventually gives way.

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Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

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📚 References

Burkitt, D. P., Walker, A. R. P., & Painter, N. S. (1972). Effect of dietary fibre on stools and transit-times, and its role in the causation of disease. The Lancet, 300(7792), 1408–1411.

Painter, N. S., & Burkitt, D. P. (1971). Diverticular disease of the colon: A deficiency disease of Western civilization. British Medical Journal, 2(5759), 450–454.

Aldoori, W. H., Giovannucci, E. L., Rockett, H. R., Sampson, L., Rimm, E. B., & Willett, W. C. (1998). A prospective study of dietary fiber types and symptomatic diverticular disease in men. The Journal of Nutrition, 128(4), 714–719.

Strate, L. L., Liu, Y. L., Aldoori, W. H., Syngal, S., & Giovannucci, E. L. (2009). Obesity increases the risks of diverticulitis and diverticular bleeding. Gastroenterology, 136(1), 115–122.

Strate, L. L., Keeley, B. R., Cao, Y., Wu, K., Giovannucci, E. L., & Chan, A. T. (2017). Western dietary pattern increases, and prudent dietary pattern decreases, risk of incident diverticulitis in a prospective cohort study. Gastroenterology, 152(5), 1023–1030.

Crowe, F. L., Appleby, P. N., Allen, N. E., & Key, T. J. (2011). Diet and risk of diverticular disease in Oxford cohort of European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC): Prospective study of British vegetarians and non-vegetarians. BMJ, 343, d4131.

Peery, A. F., Barrett, P. R., Park, D., et al. (2012). A high-fiber diet does not protect against asymptomatic diverticulosis. Gastroenterology, 142(2), 266–272.

Please watch this brief segment where I am joined by nurse Adara Allen on NEWSMAX prime time with Rob Finnerty. Allen’s story is compelling and she is so grateful in the end she made the right choice.

Sadly many pregnant women were not so fortunate in 2020-2021 and were either deceived or forced into potentially dangerous genetic vaccination with Pfizer or Moderna mRNA when similar women just a few months earlier were excluded from randomized trials based on a dangerous mechanism of action and the lack of preclinical safety data.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

This morning I woke up to a post from my Focal Points co-author, Dr. Peter McCullough, titled First, Do Harm: NIH’s Chief Bioethicist Slept Next to the Architect of Mass Vaccination and Let Pregnant Women Pay the Price.

While lawyers can argue interminably about jurisdiction (federal or state) and which specific common law or statute applies, the evidentiary standard is obviously met (from text messages) for—at the very least—criminally negligent conduct causing severe harm (to parents) and death (to the miscarried fetus). Criminal negligence involves causing grave harm or death by acting with blameworthy carelessness. The accused does not necessarily mean to gravely harm or kill anyone. Instead, they ignore the obvious and severe danger that a normal, careful person would have noticed and avoided.

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Can one person, Dr. Anthony Fauci, be held accountable for all COVID-19 atrocities all over the world? Some say yes, because of his influence, captured in his own diary had global reach and unquestioned power. Many overseas said they trusted the US in taking the lead on pandemic response. Others would say Fauci had an extensive supporting cast, and closest to him was his wife, Dr. Christine Grady.

🩺 The Fauci Texts: When Bioethics Died on the Maternity Ward

Steve Gruber sat down with Dr. Peter McCullough on America’s Voice Live to unpack the bombshell Fauci text messages — and the conversation zeroed in on a figure whose silence may have been as damning as Fauci’s public lies: Christine Grady, Fauci’s wife and the former head of bioethics at the NIH.

📱 The Smoking Gun Texts

The texts reveal Fauci privately acknowledged a theoretical risk that second-dose mRNA shots could trigger miscarriages through fever and inflammatory cytokine responses, particularly in the first trimester. He texted CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about these concerns. Their response? They admitted they had no safety data for pregnant women. Days later, Fauci stood before cameras and declared “no red flags” for pregnant vaccine recipients. Walensky went further, actively recommending the shots at any stage of pregnancy.

The result was predictable and tragic. McCullough cited a Thorpe paper showing the COVID vaccines were 100 times more likely to cause miscarriage than the influenza vaccine. An earlier New England Journal of Medicine paper from the CDC itself indicated miscarriage rates could be as high as 82% — though McCullough noted they never pinned down the true number.

🔴 Christine Grady: The Bioethicist Who Said Nothing

This is where Grady enters the frame, and her role is devastating in its implications. As Chief of the NIH Department of Bioethics, Grady was literally the nation’s top authority on medical ethics. McCullough spelled out what every first-year bioethics student learns: you never administer an untested product to pregnant women. Period. Not tested in mammalian pregnancy models. Not tested for teratogenicity. The precautionary principle exists precisely to prevent what happened next.

Grady, living in the same house as the man orchestrating the largest mass vaccination campaign in history, raised no public objection. No whistleblowing. No quiet resignation. No op-ed. Nothing.

With Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal employees, the US government forced unsafe products into pregnant women who were employees at that time. Even North Korea, China, Russia, and Cuba did not do this to their people. I wonder if Grady teaches about the ethics of vaccine mandates at Georgetown.

Her silence was functionally an endorsement. Fauci and HHS leaders, emboldened by the implicit green light from the nation’s bioethics chief — who happened to be sleeping next to them — pushed forward with vaccinating pregnant women using a synthetic mRNA platform never before deployed in human pregnancy. This was a world first. An unprecedented experiment on gravid women, conducted without informed consent, under the banner of public health. One wonders if the Ignatian Volunteer Corps and the Catholic Standard would have showered Grady and Fauci with awards and press release if they knew the miscarriage story now exposed?

⚖️ The Reckoning

McCullough called for prosecution on multiple fraud charges and mass negligent homicide, explicitly including the avoidable miscarriages and stillbirths. Three states, including Florida, are pursuing state-level charges outside the reach of Fauci’s federal pardon. McCullough suggested a special independent counsel.

Gruber closed with the question that hangs over all of it: how does a man write self-aggrandizing diary entries about being “the most loved person in the world” while women are losing their babies because of policies he championed? McCullough’s answer was blunt — Fauci and HHS have destroyed trust in medicine for a generation, and young doctors will carry that burden for decades.

Post-script: Dr Christine Grady’s bioethics failure wasn’t passive. It was the institutional seal of approval that made the unthinkable thinkable: injecting pregnant women with a novel genetic technology no one had tested on pregnant mammals, let alone pregnant humans.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company

www.twc.health/focalpoints

As a cardiologist, naturally the heart is the center of my medical world view. Dr Branko Furst came on Focal Points to shatter all of it.

🫀 The Heart as a Secondary Pump — Interview Summary

Host: Dr. Peter McCullough, Cardiologist
Guest: Dr. Branko Furst, Professor Emeritus of Anesthesiology, Albany Medical College

🌳 The Central Provocation

Dr. Branko Furst, a Slovenian-born anesthesiologist who trained in England before spending decades at Texas Tech and Albany Medical College, sat down with Dr. Peter McCullough to dismantle one of medicine’s most sacred dogmas: the heart is not the primary pump of the circulatory system.

Furst spent over twenty years researching this question after encountering the work of Rudolf Steiner, who in 1920 proposed that the heart doesn’t pump blood at all — it impedes and regulates blood already in motion. What started as a fringe idea led Furst to challenge the orthodoxy and produce a Springer-published book, multiple peer-reviewed papers, and a paradigm-shifting model of circulation backed by over 800 references.

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A new collaborative paper from the McCullough Foundation and Neo7Bioscience finds that both COVID-19 “vaccine” spike protein and lab-made SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are potent prion-like drivers of proteostatic collapse, pathological cross-seeding, transcriptional instability, and progressive tissue dysfunction across multiple organ systems.

The paper, titled “Recombinant SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein and Prion-Like Domains: Persistent Cross-Seeding of Amyloid-β and Tau, Transcriptional Instability, and Tissue Dysfunction,” was authored by John A. Catanzaro, NMD, PhD, Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, and Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (myself).

Spike contains intrinsic prion-like domains and amyloidogenic regions that favor β-sheet aggregation and can interact with and cross-seed host proteins including amyloid-β and tau.

We identify two critical intracellular processes that may amplify these effects. As spike moves through the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), it can induce ER stress and activate the unfolded protein response, promoting incomplete folding, fragmentation, and the release of aggregation-prone protein fragments. At the same time, ribosomal frameshifting and translational infidelity can generate abnormal, truncated, and chimeric polypeptides. Together, we propose that these mechanisms markedly increase the production of fibrous, aggregation-prone proteins capable of amplifying downstream protein misfolding.

We also examine how these mechanisms extend beyond the nervous system. Spike-related protein aggregation may contribute to amyloid-β accumulation, tau pathology, neuroinflammation, cardiovascular injury, amyloid microclots, and progressive multi-organ dysfunction. Critically, purified spike protein has been shown experimentally to convert fibrinogen into insoluble, amyloidogenic, fibrinolysis-resistant aggregates, demonstrating that spike alone is sufficient under experimental conditions to drive a circulating host protein into an abnormal amyloidogenic state.

We further examine the increasingly reported large white fibrous intravascular casts recovered during embalming. Surveys involving 808 embalmers across five countries found that 75.2% reported encountering these unusual structures, with an estimated occurrence in 23.4% of embalmed bodies. Raman spectroscopy of representative specimens identified β-sheet enrichment and other protein characteristics distinct from conventional postmortem thrombi.

Another major concern we examine is persistence. Spike or spike-related material has been detected years after vaccination. Our prior work documented vaccine-derived spike protein, residual mRNA, and plasmid DNA elements beyond 3.5 years in a documented case. Prolonged persistence may extend the period during which abnormal intracellular processing, aggregation, and cross-seeding can occur.

We have also previously documented transcriptomic instability following mRNA vaccination. Multi-omic analyses identified broad disturbances in gene expression involving mitochondrial function, ribosomal activity, cellular stress responses, immune regulation, and oncogenic and tumor-suppressor pathways. In the present paper, we connect these previously observed transcriptional abnormalities with persistent spike, intracellular processing errors, and disrupted proteostasis as part of a broader framework of long-term molecular instability.

We also discuss potential countermeasures aimed at directly degrading persistent spike and restoring molecular stability. Nattokinase has been shown to directly degrade spike protein in the laboratory, including the receptor-binding domain, in a dose-dependent manner. Serrapeptidase and bromelain provide complementary fibrinolytic and anti-inflammatory activity. In parallel, the aHI-PBIMA® platform is designed to identify dominant molecular instabilities and generate patient-specific ITI-PES peptides aimed at restoring downstream molecular order. Together, these approaches offer mechanistically distinct strategies for removing persistent pathogenic spike and addressing the molecular dysfunction it may leave behind. Further clinical validation is needed.

Taken together, our paper presents a mechanistic framework in which persistent spike is not merely an inflammatory antigen, but a prion-like, amyloidogenic protein capable of disrupting cellular protein homeostasis. Through ER stress, translational errors, abnormal protein aggregation, and cross-seeding of host proteins, persistent spike may contribute to progressive pathology involving the brain, cardiovascular system, circulation, and other organs.

Those responsible for unleashing synthetic spike protein on the entire global population must be held accountable.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

Lord Salisbury used to complain to his officials during Jingoistic outbreaks that it was like having "a huge lunatic asylum at one's back.”

—Andrew Roberts, Salisbury, Victorian Titan

The prodigious number of Iran war advocates who commented on my last post, “One Man”: Tucker Carlson’s Mission to Save the Republic,” reminded me of a post that I wrote a while back about Traumatic Brain Injuries.

When I was living in Menlo Park, California in the years 2011-2015, I knew an affluent, patriotic man who was a benefactor the VA hospitals in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. He introduced me to a psychiatrist with whom I got to be pals, and on a few occasions I was given permission to accompany him when he visited his patients.

By far the most common injury I saw was what neurologists call a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). According to the National Institutes of Health (Occupation and Risk of Traumatic Brain Injury in the Millennium Cohort Study) from 2000 to 2021, an estimated 449,026 active-duty U.S. service members experienced a TBI. These injuries were often caused by combat-related incidents, such as explosive blasts, and are considered a “signature injury” of post-9/11 conflicts.

The vast majority of these injuries are considered mild, but a “mild” diagnosis is cold comfort for those suffering from the syndrome and their family members, as mild symptoms include:

• Headache

• Dizziness

• Nausea and vomiting

• Fatigue

• Sensitivity to light or noise

• Blurred or double vision

• Balance problems

• Cognitive: Confusion or difficulty concentrating, memory loss or problems with recall, Difficulty with attention or problem-solving, and slowed thinking or processing speed.

• Emotional: Irritability or mood swings, anxiety or depression, difficulty sleeping, and changes in appetite.

• Other: Ringing in the ears, loss of consciousness (briefly), and seizures (rare).

The following 2023 news segment presents a pretty good overview of the epidemic. Note that, as of this posting, it has only received 235 views.

Though I haven’t analyzed it, I suspect that the TBI epidemic is related to the epidemic of suicide among U.S. service personnel. According to the 2021 Brown University Cost of War Project, since 2001, 30,000 active-duty personnel and veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died by suicide as of June 2021.

A remarkable feature of many severe cases of TBI is that they were not caused by a penetrating object such as shrapnel or a gunshot, but by the shockwave generated by a roadside bomb.

Most of the patients I visited had been diagnosed with moderate to severe TBI, and were profoundly debilitated. Their young lives—and the lives of their young wives and children—were totally destroyed forever.

I was reminded of the shattered young men I visited when, in August 2021, the US precipitously pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving it to the Taliban, after a twenty year occupation in which many of the poor fellows had been destroyed. What was the point of their sacrifices?

Roadside bombs—and their hundreds of thousands of forgotten victims—remind me of the new Syrian President—Ahmed Al-Sharaa (AKA Muhammad Al-Jawlani). Not so long ago, he was regarded as a top al-Qaeda, “specially designated global terrorist” with a U.S. government ten million bounty on his head.

On November 10, 2025—the official 250th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps and the National Forget-Me-Not Day (commemorating the sacrifices returning soldiers have made of body, blood, and limb)—President Trump hosted him for an official state visit at the White House.

Al-Sharaa was detained by American troops in 2006 for planting explosives along a road near Mosul in northern Iraq and imprisoned for five years. A former killer and maimer of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq was made into today’s new darling in Syria and got an official White House reception on the 250th anniversary of the US Marine Corps.

Are “We the People” really such terrible suckers?

Ahmed Al-Sharaa began his career with the the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIL), joining the group in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. For those that don’t remember ISIL: the group was formed in 2004 by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and was known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

U.S. Marine Corps veterans remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a key leader in the insurgency that fought the Marines during the first two battles of Fallujah in 2004—which included some of the hottest house to house fighting in U.S. Marine Corps history.

Indeed, the fighting got so hot during the first battle in March 2004 that President Bush decided to pause it—prompting the Marines to pull back from the city and give up their initial gains—because it was creating political blowback in the U.S., and “Dubya” was afraid it could hurt his reelection prospects. Two days after he was reelected in November, he sent the Marines back into the Fallujah meat grinder.

Following Ahmed Al-Sharaa’s adventures and prison sentence in Iraq, he shifted his attention to Syria. In 2012, he founded the Syrian group, Jabhat al-Nusra, and worked closely with ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria until purportedly splitting from the former in 2013 and the latter in 2016.

Ahmed Al-Sharaa remained on the U.S. Wanted List with a ten million bounty on his head until November 7, 2025—three days before his White House visit. By all appearances, the U.S. government perceives that he has experienced a “damascene moment,” referring to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.

Al-Sharaa’s “damascene moment” apparently occurred when he assisted in overthrowing former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

The U.S. military knows how to wage Blitzkrieg against an underdeveloped foreign nation, but when it comes to occupying the country to produce a favorable political settlement, our skills quickly reach their limits.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, key Bush administration policymakers such as Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz claimed that occupying Iraq would be like the successful post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan, revealing that they knew nothing about Iraq, Germany, or Japan.

I’ll conclude this post by inviting my readers who feel compelled to leave rude comments—with no instructive content—to read other newsletters.

If you don’t find my views informative, you will find no shortage of other media channels that agree with you.

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