☕️ ANOMALOUS ☙ Thursday, May 1, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump holds 4th full Cabinet meeting; Kennedy drops HHS child-trafficking bomb; “radical” new vaccine policy stuns experts; media ignores giant magnetic hole in Earth’s shield.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Welcome to May. Your quick but hard-hitting roundup includes: Trump holds his fourth full Cabinet meeting and lets the entire media question the whole federal government; Secretary Kennedy drops a fact bomb about HHS and child trafficking; huge news from HHS over “radical” policy shift on vaccine approval requirements; and scientists ignore inconvenient, giant, gaping hole in the Earth’s magnetic field that you could drive Australia through.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, President Trump’s full Cabinet met for the fourth time since he took office. Once again, they did it in front of reporters and cameras, and they answered hundreds of reporters’ questions. The media’s packed attendance resulted in almost no articles. The New York Times didn’t report any of the meeting’s actual contents, but rather waxed philosophical with a David French highbrow op-ed headlined, “Trump’s Cabinet Members: A Rorschach Test for America.” Forget about the Times. Watch it for yourself:

FULL: President Trump’s full, televised cabinet meeting (2:02:46).

David French squinted at his Rorschach card and somehow saw a meeting of North Korean Generals. I’d bet Gavin Newsom’s entire stock of hair gel that David has never seen a North Korean Generals’ meeting. He seemed to love that metaphor and spent too much time on it. The point was, the Cabinet members were too positive about Trump’s policies, which annoyed David, who presumably thought they should be ripping Trump a new one.

Media acts like we all just landed on Planet Earth or have amnesia or something. Joe Biden held only nine Cabinet meetings in four years. Yesterday was Trump’s fourth Cabinet meeting in 100 days, which now exceeds Biden’s annual total during any one of his four agonizing years (President Autopen could only handle three a year). Biden’s meetings were carefully scripted, with Biden answering fewer than a dozen questions over his nine meetings.

Yesterday, President Trump himself took over one hundred questions from reporters.

Later, Press Secretary Leavitt asked pool reporters, “Can you ever remember a Cabinet meeting in which the media were welcomed into the room to ask questions of the entire federal government?” She waited a brief moment for any response from reporters. There was none. “No you can’t,” she answered for them, “because it has never happened.”

Each Cabinet member delivered a quick status report, pointing out achievements, their current focuses, and opportunities. It was all wonderfully encouraging; I could write a segment on each report. Everyone said something memorable and newsworthy. For just one example, RFK told the group that, based on what they’d uncovered, HHS had been “complicit” in child trafficking for “sex and slavery.”

You would think something like that would be a headline-grabber. But only one or two local outlets covered it. Headline from yesterday’s Jersey Shore:

Secretary Kennedy didn’t just say HHS was involved in child trafficking. He called HHS the principal vector: “We have ended HHS as the role, as the vector, the principal vector in this country for child trafficking," Kennedy said. "And we're very aggressively going out and trying to find these children—300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration."

A related statement from DHS yesterday announced that, so far, five thousand missing kids have been found and safely returned to family members or a reliable guardian.

It was aggravating but unsurprising that no major media platform reported any of Kennedy’s news.

Anyway, that was just a single point from one Cabinet member. Overall, one was left with the strong impression of not just a collection of individual politically connected appointees, but a coherent team. Not only that, but a team of unique, highly skilled folks who enjoy working together, and who seem to understand both the gravity of the moment but also the need for a sense of humor and a spirit of having fun. The members often cracked jokes and poked fun at each other.

For instance, at one point SecState Rubio quipped, “thanks to Robert, I’m afraid to eat anything.” When Elon Musk was getting ribbed for wearing two Trump caps at the same time, he joked, “I’m used to wearing a lot of hats; even my hats wear hats.”

If you have time, you should watch the whole thing. I will try to cover a few of the more important parts over the next couple days.

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Yesterday, the Boston Globe ran a story headlined, “RFK Jr. will order ‘placebo’ testing for new vaccines, alarming health experts.” What would we do without alarmed health experts? Is there any other kind? Anyway, not only was the Globe’s article another fine example of journalistic malpractice, but for careful readers, it accidentally cut the vaccine industrial complex’s femoral artery.

On some future day, aging medical school doctors will look back on our time, and tell their fresh-faced students how, back in the day, pharma firms used to test vaccines by leaving them out overnight and seeing whether they were still there in the morning. If the wee vaccine fairies didn’t spirit the needles away in the small hours, then Bob’s your uncle: approved.

I exaggerate, but just barely.

Yesterday, Secretary Kennedy and HHS made what could be the simplest but most impactful announcement in American history (if you count in total life-years-saved). From now on, with limited exceptions (like the annual flu shot), the FDA will require all vaccines —including those already on the schedule— to be tested against an inert placebo, like pure saline.

“All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices,” an HHS spokesperson told The Washington Post.

Haha, you innocent doves are probably naive enough to think that’s already how it works. You were living your lives with aplomb, bing-watching reboots of 1980’s television classics with your loved ones, arguing about the meaning of life with AI chatbots, and generally minding your own business in the blissful ignorance of trust in scientists to use common sense, and believing to the core of your beings that of course they are testing all new medicines against placebos.

It’s not like they can go around comparing new shots to injecting people with bleach or arsenic, you probably thought. How else can they determine efficacy and safety?

You trusted that they were doing the work. You gullible dopes actually believed they weren’t just chanting “supercalifragilistic” ten times and hoping for the best.

💉 But no. Here’s the giveaway: despite the article’s main theme was about how testing against placebos alarms experts, the Globe never bothered to explain how vaccines are currently tested. If non-placebo testing is so wonderful, then why didn’t that information come first, right up front? But that bit was conspicuously absent, concealed behind empty technical jargon and meaningless buzzwords like “correlates of protection” and “biological responses.”

Nearly every other drug except for vaccines must succeed against a placebo. But under long-standing FDA regulations, vaccines are excepted. They are not tested against placebos. They are usually tested against other vaccines, or (I am not making this up) against heavy-metal solutions, creating a kind of jabby feedback loop. Old vaccines, already approved, are assumed to be safe and effective. So if your new vaccine’s side effect profile is no worse than the old vaccine you’re testing against, then shazam, you have a winner. It’s safe!

Sometimes, new vaccines are even tested against older versions of the same vaccine, and sometimes the FDA will allow pharma to test a new jab against itself.

Not only that, but they don’t even test for efficacy anymore by measuring whether the drug actually reduces the disease or prevents hospitalizations. They just test whether victims’ immune systems produce certain antibodies. If so, they assume that also means fewer people will be hospitalized for the disease, which is a classic but oddly-named logical fallacy called “begging the question.”

They know it’s circular reasoning, yet they all keep pretending “everything is going to be fine.”

But now it’s all over. Placebos are back! You are probably feeling relieved and thinking, good, at least we have that debate settled, glad we have all behind us now. Sorry! Au contraire, mon ami. We must now deal with the experts.

💉 The experts, you see, do not agree that any of this is common sense. It’s right in the headline: placebo testing policy alarms experts. But why? Why are they so alarmed? Wait till you see this.

“Vaccine and public health experts,” reported the Globe, “said the statement from HHS is misinformation.” So. The experts offered three basic arguments. First, they argued it’s unethical to withhold a “known” vaccine from people who need protection (they always offer kids and measles as their example). Second, placebo-controlled trials are expensive and take longer than antibody trials, potentially slowing vaccines’ time to market. And third, they unironically argued some drugs might not make it.

Michael Osterholm, the University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert on Biden’s transition team, said the change threatened the existence of coronavirus vaccines. I’m not sure Osterholm realized what he was admitting there. If covid jabs can’t survive a placebo-controlled trial, then… they shouldn’t be sold. Again, it’s common sense, doc.

Jab salesman and former FDA advisory board member Dr. Paul Offit viewed improved transparency and higher safety standards as threats. “You are watching the gradual dissolution of the vaccine infrastructure in this country,” Offit said, without any exaggeration whatsoever. But Offit’s quote was another accidental confession. If the entire system collapses under the weight of gold-standard testing, then what we had before wasn’t science to begin with. It was a house of gold-plated cards held up by blind trust in bureaucratic shortcuts.

💉 The Globe and the rest of corporate media studiously ignored a very basic problem with all the experts’ arguments: the simple fact that all other drugs require placebo testing. So any ethics concerns, delays in releasing, additional expense, and ‘risks’ of non-approval are equally applicable to all other medicines. Somehow, for all other drugs except vaccines, placebo testing is considered not just acceptable but de rigueur.

What jab experts need to explain isn’t why placebo trials are ‘too risky’ — it’s why vaccines get a hall pass while new blood thinners, cancer drugs, and antidepressants must run the full gauntlet. If a heart drug that could save millions is required to beat a sugar pill in a fair fight, why not a shot you’re giving to a perfectly healthy infant?

It’s such a basic question that a child could ask it: Why should vaccines get different treatment from every other drug? And yet, not one corporate media outlet reporting on HHS’s new placebo standard dared to touch that critical distinction. Combine that with their complete omission of how vaccines are currently tested — or not tested — and it’s obvious: this wasn’t journalism.

It was institutional propaganda dressed in bylines and pull quotes. As a critical reader, always ask yourself: What obvious issue is the article conveniently overlooking?

The experts aren’t afraid that RFK Jr. is wrong— they’re afraid he’s right. They are terrified the public might start noticing how little scrutiny vaccines have actually received compared to every other drug on the market. If experts were confident in the science, they’d welcome placebo trials as vindication. Fine, go ahead and do your little placebo trials, you’ll see we were right all along. Their panic tells you they’re not afraid of being disproven — they’re afraid of being exposed.

This simple policy change was much more than a first step. It was a seismic move. With only a little luck, it could change everything.

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In a wildly underreported Space Story, the Farmingdale Observer ran an article yesterday headlined, “NASA is growing concerned as a massive anomaly spreads across Earth, scientists believe it’s linked to deep Earth forces.” They always know everything there is to know about how manmade carbon affects the planet, but they are baffled by whatever’s causing this.

In short, the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) is a blob-shaped territory up in the farthest reaches of the atmosphere, even above the International Space Station. It is a small continent-sized region where the Earth’s magnetic field is unusually weak (and getting weaker), allowing charged solar particles to dip closer and closer to the Earth. The SAA is a chink in Earth’s magnetic armor, already exposing satellites and spacecraft to higher radiation.

It hovers over South America and the South Atlantic Ocean— but it is slowly growing, dividing in two, and drifting northwest.

When I say slowly growing, I mean slowly from a human perspective. In geologic terms, it’s expanding faster than an amorous jackrabbit locked in a grain shed. And it’s unprecedented. Scientists guess the last time anything like this may have happened was at least 11 million years ago. Maybe.

The article eagerly assured readers everything is fine, no need to panic, and especially that there is no evidence this signals a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic pole. But their eagerness to discount that one possibility sort of gave away the game.

Scientists believe that historic shifts in the Earth’s molten core are causing the anomaly— but that doesn’t explain what is causing the core to shift. A shifting core is exactly what might happen if a pole shift were underway. What else could cause the planet’s molten core to surge around like a washing machine that drank too much Strawberry Ripple? SUVs?

All we know for sure is that, while the SAA is growing and drifting, the Earth’s poles are also practically sprinting out of their positions. Smithsonian Magazine, headline from January:

Yet, for some frustrating reason, scientists not only refuse to connect the dots, they won’t even talk about the dots.

For all their constant chattering about “following the science,” the climate priesthood goes curiously silent when it comes to the implications of geomagnetic field weakening, pole excursions, or the growing South Atlantic Anomaly. Why?

Maybe it’s because admitting that deep-Earth forces —like shifts in the magnetic field that affect solar particle influx, cloud formation, and cosmic ray penetration— might influence climate would complicate their death grip on the cash-flowing narrative that manmade carbon dioxide is the only climate variable that matters.

After all, you can’t slap a carbon tax on the Earth’s inner core. Nor can you sell indulgences for cosmic rays. So they pretend like these historic, unprecedented, planet-shaping forces are irrelevant— because there’s no money in it. And that means there’s no money in studying it, either.

But … should we be paying more attention? Ignoring a wobbling magnetic field and a growing radiation hole over the South Atlantic is like insisting there’s no dragon outside the gates because it’s festival day and the shops need to stay open.

Sigh. One problem at a time. We’re starting to fix medical science, maybe climate science will be next.

Have a terrific Thursday! Then get back here tomorrow morning for another installment of essential news and commentary.

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