Opinion
By Jeff Childers
2/20/25
Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! In today’s roundup: tearing into the manufactured flu panic, the slow implosion of Big Pharma, and the MAHA movement’s latest victory as RFK Jr. launches an all-out war on chronic disease. Trump’s legal booby traps continue detonating, turning Biden’s own power grabs into weapons for the Deep State purge. Across the Atlantic, Europe is melting down even more hysterically after Trump’s latest diplomatic earthquake on Ukraine.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Quick, we need a new scary Greek monster name for this year’s flu variant! Maybe Fluzilla? Phlegemoth? Fartopulus? Slowed by the CDC gag order but not stopped, corporate media this week hyped the flu season. Axios’s scary story yesterday ran under the headline, “U.S. facing worst flu season since 2009, experts say.” Welcome back to infection and hospitalization rates. But not back to “overwhelmed” hospitals; this time, they are “clogged.”
I’ll give them credit, far-left Axios ran a skeptical section headed “between the lines.” Or maybe it’s just because it’s neither a Republican election year nor is there a Democrat in the White House. Either way.
First Axios reported that, “compounding the problem,” this year’s flu vaccine was even less effective (35%) than normal (45%). It is right at the placebo level (20-40%). When you read about low flu vaccination rates (which is false, but never mind), maybe it has something to do with the fact their jab product is all risk and no benefit.
Next, get this, Axios quoted an astonishingly honest admission by Carol McLay, president of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. The Queen of Experts.
I’m just joking. She’s probably very nice and not covid crazy. More impressive was her straightforward concession. McLay confessed, unironically, “We think because people were social distancing and using masks for so long during COVID that we have reduced immunity to the flu.”
Thanks again, experts.
I’ll squeeze in one more fact you might want to consider. In the New York Times’ fludemic article, simply headlined “Flu Cases Are Surging,” the Gray Lady ended its scary article by mentioning, offhand, as “good news,” that 2025 is also the mildest covid winter season in history. In other words, there’s less covid, but more flu— the flipside of the last five years. Cue my rolling eyes.
All of that said, the “worst flu season since 2009” was calculated using models. So, we’ll see. Fortunately though, I kept all my covid anti-propaganda in my junk drawer just in case I might need it someday. Behold, as an evergreen reminder, consider these even scarier influenza headlines from just a few years back in 2018:
- “California hospitals face a ‘war zone’ of flu patients — and are setting up tents to treat them.” (LA Times, January 2018)
- “Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients; Doctors Are Treating Them in Tents.” (Time, January 2018).
- “Hospitals Overflow as Flu Epidemic Spreads Unabated.” (Bloomberg, February 2018). The sub-head: “Deaths continue to rise as this year’s record season worsens.”
💉 Wait, I can’t resist. Let’s do some side-by-sides! Compare 2025 (San Francisco Chronicle):
…versus 2018 (Orlando Sentinel):
… versus 2022 (PBS) — could this year be worse than 2022’s terrifying tripledemic?
…oh, and let’s end with my very favorite of all (CNN, 2021), lest we ever forget:
In other words, they just endlessly recycle these headlines. Don’t buy it.
💉 I’m a lawyer, not a doctor, so I asked ChatGPT to compare flu shots to Vitamin D supplementation in the context of influenza prevention. Here’s what it came up with:
“At a public health level,” the AI concluded, “prioritizing Vitamin D sufficiency could be as effective—or more effective—than flu vaccines while being far cheaper and universally beneficial.” The machine admitted that isn’t likely to happen, though. You know the reason.
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Speaking of that same reason why cheap Vitamin D will never replace costly flu shots, the MAHA movement enjoyed another encouraging moment yesterday: a double declaration of war. Politico ran the story headlined, “‘Nothing is … off limits’: Kennedy lays out plan for HHS.”
CLIP: No stone will be left unturned (1:52).
Newly confirmed HHS Secretary Kennedy explicitly declared his first war— a war on the nation’s chronic disease problem. “Nothing, he said, “is going to be off limits,” even though “some of the possible factors we will investigate were formerly taboo.” The former lawyer and author emphasized, “I’m willing to subject them all to the scrutiny of unbiased science.”
Neither Politico nor any other corporate media article about his remarkable announcement quoted the most important part, where Kennedy listed examples of “formerly taboo” health areas where research was forbidden. The list is getting remarkably lengthy.
Kennedy said, “We will study the causes of the drastic rise in chronic disease … the childhood vaccine schedule, electromagnetic radiation, glyphosate, other pesticides, ultra-processed foods, artificial food additives, SSRI and other psychiatric drugs, PFA’s, PFOA’s — nothing is going to be off limits.”
“Our template,” he explained, “is going to be unbiased science.”
I think Kennedy is saying that he’s going to tell the white coats at the bloated health agencies to stop being lazy and cowardly by blaming the victims through unquantifiable hand-waving over diet and exercise. We’re sick, and we’re sick of hearing that.
Like the other Trump initiatives, Kennedy is going all out. His list of “formerly taboo” topics was also an implicit declaration of war against the entire modern public health-industrial complex—vaccines, Big Ag, Big Pharma, telecom, and chemical manufacturers all in one fell swoop. No wonder Politico and the rest of corporate media carefully avoided quoting it. They don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.
RFK’s “nothing is off limits” approach is exactly what public health should have been always doing (damn their bespectacled eyes!) but from avarice, or cowardice, or both, hasn’t. Too many powerful interests profit from chronic disease. The system was designed to manage illness, not prevent it.
💉 It’s not just a rhetorical battlefield. Public health has been militarized.
We used to think regulatory capture was the big problem. But maybe the most disquieting pandemic revelation was the unholy marriage between Big Pharma and the U.S. security state. What once was the domain of white-coated scientists and corporate boardrooms is now irretrievably entangled with the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and a secretive global biowarfare infrastructure.
From Pfizer’s deep ties to DARPA and the DOD—which helped fast-track experimental mRNA technology under military contracts—to the State Department’s network of shadowy biolabs in corruptocratic places like Ukraine, Georgia, and Africa, the lines between public health and national security have been blurred beyond recognition.
The question we’ve begun asking is, why is the Deep State so deeply invested in the tools of “health”? Why are disease outbreaks now treated as intelligence operations? Why are health grants essential to the deployment of “soft power?” Why have pandemics become playgrounds for geopolitical influence?
Pharmakeia. The ancient Greek word for sorcery, poison, and drug administration—and the root of our modern words like pharmacy and pharmaceutical.
To the ancients, pharmakeia referred to witchcraft and the manipulation of alchemicals for power and control. Now, it perfectly describes what Big Pharma and the global biosecurity state have become: a system that doesn’t heal but ensnares, manipulates, and dominates through endlessly escalating cycles of medication and engineered fear of germs.
The pandemic tore the mask off the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, revealing a truth older than civilization itself—medicine can be weaponized.
RFK now has the access, opportunity, and motive to unearth the concealed corpses of corruption. It’s perhaps the biggest front in the war against the Deep State, and maybe the one offering the most promise of initializing the vaunted Golden Era. If all Kennedy accomplishes is halting the horrifying rise of chronic disease, it would be one of the greatest health achievements in modern history. But if he reverses those trends?
There will be statues. There will be museums. Universities will be named after him. LFG.
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I’ll bet you never expected to see this headline, published in yesterday’s UK Daily Mail:
At this point, it remains rumors. But the Mail noticed the lineup of officials being appointed and hired into the big health organizations, like Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra. We’ll see whether progressives “follow the science” when Republicans run the government. I doubt it.
You can argue the jab horse is long out of the barn. But public opinion appears to have shifted. Yesterday, the Boston Globe ran a story headlined, “During COVID, vaccines were the path to ‘herd immunity.’ Now, a growing number don’t want to be part of the herd.” The article began with a quote from Jessica Farren, 38. “I’m no longer going to let them stick me with a needle,” she said.
Five days ago, President Trump issued an order blocking federal funding from schools mandating covid jabs.
This morning, Bloomberg ran a story headlined, “Pharma Leaders to Meet Trump in Push to Tweak Drug Policies.” Tomorrow, President Trump meets with representatives of the largest pharmaceutical lobbying group, ostensibly to talk about drug prices and FDA approval policies. One possible sign they know they are on thin ice is that yesterday, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told reporters, “Do I think that we can convince them to do something bold in vaccines with Kennedy in HHS? Probably not.” But he’s optimistic about cancer drugs.
I know what you’re thinking.
Tomorrow, we’ll see what news emerges from the Trump-pharma meeting.
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CNN ran a remarkable story yesterday headlined, “Judge Chutkan rejects call from Democratic AGs for temporary restraining order blocking DOGE’s access to federal data.” Chutkan is the same DC Circuit judge who gave the J6ers such a hard time and was reversed by the Supreme Court. So you know that if she couldn’t find support for a TRO it was pretty bad. It was another I told you so moment.
Lawyers for 18 blue states had asked Chutkan to temporarily restrain Musk and DOGE from accessing government information systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Commerce. They also wanted the judge to block Musk and DOGE from firing any employees at those agencies.
But Chutkan ruled the states hadn’t shown “that they will suffer imminent, irreparable harm absent a temporary restraining order.” Regular readers will recall imminent, irreparable harm is one of the hardest elements to prove to get a TRO. So, that was good news. But it got much better.
Judge Chutkan—no friend to Trump—couldn’t find a way to justify a temporary restraining order. That means their legal case was embarrassingly weak—so weak that even the judge who handed down some of the harshest J6 sentences wouldn’t touch it. What did Judge Chutkan see?
In what the New York Times called an “extraordinary declaration,” the Director of the Office of Administration filed an affidavit swearing that Elon Musk is not even a DOGE employee. It also said Elon is just an advisor to the President— with no authority to make decisions by himself, such as firing anybody. Read the extraordinary declaration for yourself.
I told you: Elon is a decoy.
The news detonated like an M-80 firecracker flushed down a middle-school bathroom toilet. They are downplaying it, but it was devastating news. They’ve been chasing the wrong person the whole time. The billionaire they love to hate —nobody elected Elon Musk!— is just a special consultant to the White House. But if you go back and read and listen to Musk carefully, you’ll find that, while he may have hinted at authority, he never actually claimed it.
For those of you following the online chatter about this case, the Elon Affidavit also torched the plaintiffs’ Appointments Clause argument. They thought they were so clever wielding it against Trump, since Trump used the same argument against Special Prosecutor Jack Smith. But now their argument has vanished, poof! It is a dead letter.
The Appointments Clause (Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution), requires that “Officers of the United States” be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate if they wield significant authority. Since Elon wasn’t confirmed by the Senate, they thought they had him dead to rights. But ‘advisors’ don’t wield significant authority. Thus, the Appointments Clause doesn’t apply—and the plaintiffs just lost their big constitutional argument.
It was pure political aikido—using the enemy’s own momentum against them. They built an entire legal argument around a fundamental mistake. Trump’s team let the media and the blue states chase Musk around, and then ripped the rug out at the last second. Now their credibility is cracked, their legal strategy is lifeless, their narrative is nullified, and they’re clueless about who to chase next.
It was a strategic humiliation. Like a cartoon coyote, they set the trap for Musk, but the Acme anvil landed on them.
Trump 2.0 is playing a completely different game, and they still don’t realize how far behind they are.
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Back on January 16th, four days before Trump was sworn in, the New York Post ran an op-ed titled, “Biden booted me off a nonpartisan board — precedent for Trump to clean house now.” Those following the careful planning underlying the Trump 2.0 revolution will enjoy this clip from Glenn Beck’s recent interview with former Trump 1.0 Press Secretary Sean Spicer. In the clip, Sean explains how in 2021, Trump-aligned legal groups roped the Biden Administration into a judicial decision greasing the Slip N Slide for Trump’s current Deep State purge.
In 2021, Spicer was (obviously) no longer serving as Press Secretary, but Trump had appointed him to two positions, including as a member of the Naval Academy Visitor’s Board. In September 2021, with only three months left in his Congressionally-defined term, Biden sent Spicer an email notifying him that he’d been fired. He thought, well, that’s that.
It turned out that Joe Biden made history by firing all Trump’s appointees to nonpartisan service academy boards before their statutory three-year terms ended. It was unprecedented. It had never happened before.
Then Spicer got a call from America First Legal. They asked him to join a lawsuit intended to force Biden to argue he has the absolute authority to fire anyone in the Executive Branch, including appointees to boards with statutory terms.
The District Court dismissed the case, interpreting the statute in a way that allowed Biden to fire Spicer despite this three-year term. They appealed. In the meantime, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled, in a parallel case (Severino v. Biden), that a presidential appointee in a similar position was removable at will by the President.
And it was done.
The law firm, America First Legal, is a conservative legal advocacy organization founded in April 2021 by former Trump administration officials. Until July of last year, America First Legal was a member of the advisory board for Project 2025, which is widely believed to provide the template for Trump’s plan to drain the Swamp.
In other words, drawing a few obvious inferences, Trump began working on this plan immediately after Biden took office in 2021.
While corporate media was busy calling Biden’s historic 2021 firings a routine housecleaning, President Trump’s legal teams were already laying a legal landscape for his second term. Spicer’s case wasn’t about getting his job back—it was about setting a legal precedent to let Trump clean house on day one of his second term.
Biden fired Spicer, AFL sued, and the far-left DC courts predictably ruled Biden could fire termed federal employees at will. Now Trump can fire them at will, too.
This wasn’t just a lawsuit; It was a strategic booby trap—forcing Biden’s own DOJ to argue on the record that the President has unlimited authority to remove Executive Branch appointees, even those with statutory terms. They fell right into the trap.
I suspect that, as things go on, we’ll find more examples of how Trump took the Democrats’ worst excesses during the painful Biden years and turned things around on them. They thought they were cleaning house. Instead, they were clearing the runway for Trump. That is why the Democrats are in disarray.
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Prepare yourself for Russia, Russia, Russia 2.0. This morning, at the tippy top of the page, the New York Times ran a dramatic article headlined, “European Leaders Try to Recalibrate After Trump Sides With Russia on Ukraine.” The sub-headline explained, “The American president’s latest remarks embracing Vladimir Putin’s narrative that Ukraine is to blame for the war have compounded the sense of alarm among traditional allies.” It’s so bad the Europeans are hastily convening a second emergency conference.
Two things happened yesterday. First, the American and Russian negotiating teams met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and agreed to general terms of a three-part plan. Second, Trump said stuff that wasn’t nice about Ukraine’s Martial Law Administrator and Venmo Glutton Volodymyr Zelensky.
Well, technically, three things happened. Also, Zelensky flew to Riyadh and tried to crash the meeting. I am not making that up. The Saudis politely invited him to return later. But that was just an awkward sideshow.
This morning (midday in the EU), the flummoxed Europeans are noisily racing around like caged hens being pursued by a particularly aggressive wire terrier.
“It was a complete reversal,” the Times soberly informed readers, “that left many in Europe stunned and fearful.” They’re probably even more fearful than if they’d just learned the FBI had a giant fake dossier on them. “What’s happening is very bad. It’s a reversal of the state of the world since 1945,” quipped Jean-Yves Le Drian, the former French foreign minister.
In a companion article, the harried Times reported, “Mr. Trump is in the middle of executing one of the most jaw-dropping pivots in American foreign policy in generations, a 180-degree turn that will force friends and foes to recalibrate in fundamental ways.”
Mr. Le Drian angrily called the developments a “monstrous reversal of world alliances,” and also an “inversion of the truth.” The French President was also chatty. “Russia constitutes an existential threat to Europeans,” Macron told reporters yesterday. The usually cheerful bantamweight was not optimistic. “Do not think that the unthinkable cannot happen, including the worst,” he added darkly.
Presumably, by “the worst,” he meant the United States negotiating with Russia without the EU’s permission.
American neocons also had a lot of gripes. “It’s a disgraceful reversal of 80 years of American foreign policy,” complained Kori Schake, a former Bush national security aide and who now runs some shady, USAID-funded NGO or something. Ian Bond, deputy director of another sketchy NGO, the ‘Center for European Reform’, whined online, “Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”
Perhaps to cure yesterday’s invitational faux pas, French President Macron dropped his breakfast croissant and quickly announced he would re-convene his emergency summit, but this time with more EU members invited. This time the ministers mean it; they plan to talk even more harshly than they did at Monday’s emergency meeting.
One surprising side-effect has been that the normally parsimonious Europeans are suddenly and enthusiastically offering to pay more of their share of NATO expenses. Shrill EU president Ursula von der Leyen announced in a speech yesterday that she would immediately propose an “escape clause for defense investments.” (In other words, she’ll waive a strict financial requirement that EU countries never exceed 3% budget deficits.) “This will allow member states to substantially increase their defense expenditure,” she explained.
By substantially borrowing money.
Maybe. But just now is not a very good time for big-time borrowing. The Times noted that “many European leaders, including Mr. Macron, find themselves in fragile political and economic positions in their own countries.” A French expert quoted for the story added, “Not many governments have the political capital to spend on all this.”
🔥 Speaking from Riyadh, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained late yesterday that the negotiating teams had already nailed down the outlines of a three-part plan. First, the U.S. and Russia will re-establish diplomatic relations obliterated by the Biden Administration. For example, the mothballed Russian embassy in DC can re-open for normal diplomatic business.
Second, the US and Russia will explore brand new geopolitical and business opportunities together. Meaning, no more sanctions. And beyond that, it likely means new joint ventures, probably related to energy.
And third —last and least— they will discuss a structure to end the war in Ukraine.
At his press conference yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Trump shocked and astounded the worldwide neocon establishment by “downplaying” the Russian aggression.
CLIP: Trump triggers media over Ukraine comments (4:19).
“I hear that the Ukrainians are upset about not having a seat,” President Trump said. “Well, they’ve had a seat for three years. And a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, the loss of much land, or very little land. Without the loss of any lives. And without the loss of cities that are now just laying on their sides.”
Trump —who himself just won the popular vote— also dismissed Zelensky’s approval rating as flatlining “around 4%,” He also seemed to endorse the Russian argument that Ukraine needs to have democratic elections. It was another weird turnaround; the corporate media are forced to defend not having elections and the dictator Putin is insisting that Ukrainians be allowed to vote.
Zelensky, of course, opposes holding elections in Ukraine.
Then Trump asked the reporters, “Where is all the money?” That question did not bode well for the Ukrainians.
The media hoped or assumed that Trump’s rhetoric would be similar to the Biden Administration’s pugilistic rhetoric about Russia. But it has flipped, nearly evenly. Trump clearly thinks Ukraine could have avoided the war if it wanted to. So do I, for that matter, although nobody cares what I think.
Trump finished his comments saying, “I think I have the power to end this war.” That’s what we are all counting on.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! We will re-convene tomorrow for a non-emergency roundup of all the breaking essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
