☕️ CUTTING AT THE STEM ☙ Tuesday, July 22, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Florida defies DC gatekeepers with historic stem cell law; FDA chief stuns with long-awaited truth bombs; and Fed Chair faces heat over perjury—and maybe a no-wipe golden throne; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! The Childers family is on the move again, so our roundup today is short but hard-hitting. In today’s vacation edition: Florida makes history, again, defying the federal biomedical gatekeepers and charting its own MAHA path; FDA chief says the things we’ve longed to hear and it was just as satisfying as I’d hoped it would be; and the Fed Chair is facing new problems after fighting with his architect over where in his private office bathroom to put the marble fixtures and his fancy, fully automated, Japanese no-wipe toilet. Or something like that.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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To think, my critics claim I never report anything good about medicine. But yesterday, Florida Politics ran a quietly controversial but history-making story headlined, “Florida expands access to regenerative medicine with new stem cell therapy law.” If you aren’t familiar with the issue, “stem cells” don’t actually come from dandelion stems or anything, which just adds to the confusion. But whatever you might think about the issue, Florida just gave the FDA the middle finger.

Stem cells don’t come from plants, they come from people. Usually, from placentas discarded after birth. (So, from moms.) Stem cell therapy is called “regenerative medicine.” It uses the body’s primordial building blocks —stem cells— to repair damaged tissues, reduce inflammation, and juice the healing process. Stem cells are like the body’s Swiss army knives; they can transform themselves as needed into other types of cells (like bone, muscle, nerve, or skin), making them uniquely helpful in treating chronic pain, orthopedic injuries, autoimmune issues, elder frailty, and some types of degenerative diseases.

Unlike surgery, stem cell therapy is minimally invasive, often outpatient, and enjoys almost no recovery time. Instead of cutting, excising, or fusing, doctors simply inject stem cells, and voilà, the body heals itself. It tracks the most holy of medical grails: healing without harm. Patients often report walking pain-free within days, ditching their opioid scripts, and regaining mobility after years of decline.

For instance, in a January interview with Joe Rogan, an only-slightly manic Mel Gibson said he took his 92-year-old father to a Panamanian stem cell clinic after the Mayo Clinic couldn’t help him anymore. After receiving ethically harvested umbilical-cord stem cells, Gibson said, “it was like he got a new lease on life. It fixed all his inflammation and pain and he started walking again… his cognitive powers improved, his eyesight improved… his heart [valve] healed.”

Because the FDA has tightly throttled domestic stem cell treatments —lumping them in with experimental drugs requiring ages of preauthorization clinical trials— for years, Americans seeking the treatment have been heading off for places like Panama, Mexico, Colombia, and the Cayman Islands. These clinics, often run by U.S.-trained doctors, operate in a legal gray zone with varying standards. Some deliver miraculous results. Others exploit desperate patients with snake oil and glossy marketing.

None are particularly convenient, unless you want to combine a Spring Break pub crawl with a stem cell tune-up. Thus, the often life-altering treatments have been limited to a well-heeled cohort of frequent flyers with both extra money and time.

🔬 A few weeks ago, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made headlines with a surprise stop in Aruba, where he checked in to a well-appointed stem cell clinic known for treating affluent Americans. It sparked speculation that a federal rethink of stem cell policy may be in the works. He also made the New York Times, which ran a typically sneering, skeptical headline:

Stem cells have been around for a while, and the issue itself isn’t particularly novel. By and large, charlatans excluded, the treatment seems relatively safe and well-tolerated. Nearly all legal clinics refuse to use cells harvested from aborted babies, which was an early, grisly, and problematic concern.

Last month, Florida passed SB 1768, which established a new historical milestone. It wasn’t the approval of stem cell use that made history. What made history is that Florida did it despite the fact the FDA has banned stem cell treatments except under certain critical conditions.

Florida’s bill marked a rare and historic moment in American healthcare: a state deliberately challenging sluglike federal inertia in a cutting-edge field, by creating its own regulatory infrastructure independent from the FDA. In essence, Florida just did for stem cells what some states have been slowly doing for ivermectin— but higher-profile, with even more public support, tighter ethical guardrails, and a clearer path to national influence.

In legal terms, Florida’s new stem cell law is an assertion of state sovereignty in a difficult regulatory zone. Stem cell therapy is mired in the spooky federal Upside Down. The treatment is technically a “biologic,” more like a supplement, but it’s regulated like an experimental drug. Florida just exploited that gap of ambiguity. In economic terms, it’s a moonshot for the Sunshine State: if it’s successful, it could ignite a boom in biotech startups, lab expansions, and high-end biomedical tourism— all under the salubrious banner of post-pandemic health independence.

In fact, it’s hard to overlook the post-pandemic fingerprints all over Florida’s stem cell pivot. After years of watching the FDA bungle public trust —from contradictory mask mandates to the heavy-handed suppression of off-label HCQ, antibody infusions, and ivermectin treatments— many Floridians, including lawmakers, now experience a deep, gnawing skepticism of federal medical gatekeepers.

By establishing its own rules for ethical stem sourcing and lab certification standards, Florida effectively said, we trust our own doctors, thank you, not your bureaucracy. Don’t pass over that remarkable fact too quickly. Florida’s Republican legislature just defied the federal health bureaucracy and went its own way. That’s how profoundly the MAHA movement has affected the new consensus.

You’d have expected the push for stem cell freedom to come from the tree-hugging, panda-petting, granola-crunching left — the folks who used to tout natural healing and alternative medicine before they fell in love with coercive experimental mRNA. Instead, a wild political inversion took root: not from progressive enclaves but from the libertarian wing of the conservative base.

In a sense, the grassroots medical populism and authoritarian defiance that powered early resistance to vaccine mandates has graduated into an entire medical innovation movement —real medical freedom— one that’s more interested in outcomes than enforced orthodoxy.

The most significant development isn’t about whether you personally think stem cells are a good or bad idea. It’s about the freedom to choose (with ethical guardrails). Assuming the aliens don’t get us first, the future looks brighter than ever.

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There are also signs of life blooming at the FDA. “People have a right to be angry.” Last week, The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekeliak interviewed new FDA Chief Marty Makary (59:20) for his show American Thought Leaders. Makary said some very encouraging things.

CLIP: Marty Makary says the FDA is taking covid vaccine injury seriously (2:38).

It’s getting personal. “I don’t want people to think that we’re blowing off the safety signal,” Makary said. “I personally know of people who have been injured by the vaccine. I personally know of friends who have lost a loved one from the mRNA covid vaccine.”

The era of “safe and effective” is now officially over.

At one point, Jekeliak mentioned the terrific group React-19, which is a grassroots group organized to help covid-vaccine-injured folks, since the government won’t. “Vaccine injury is real,” Makary agreed. “I also think there are some cases of misdiagnosed long covid when it should havei been vaccine injury.”

Well, Moses, smell the roses. The head of the FDA’s morbidly obese body just said the words we’ve all been longing to hear for years now. We aren’t crazy.

We already knew that, of course, but hearing it is still quite nice.

Makary pleaded for patience. “I would ask people to be patient with us as we do this the proper and scientific way,” Makary said. “It’s easy to react. I was very angry when I learned that a friend’s father died from the covid vaccine. We (me and my friends and loved ones) are convinced it was causal.”

Patience isn’t easy. But we didn’t get into this mess overnight, and wrestling out of the biomedical tar baby will presumably require some not insignificant effort. So long as we’re making forward progress, patience is possible, even if it make us want to throw up our street tacos.

Even better, those kinds of comments from the FDA chief can’t be good for business. Once the darling of biomedical startups, Moderna is now garnering headlines like this: “Here's Why Moderna (MRNA) Fell More Than Broader Market.” (Media Malfeasance Reminder: when the headline promises a reason, it never delivers anything true.) The mRNA stock is now scraping along a dead coral reef at an all-time low.

Note that, before 2020, Moderna had no authorized products, and the stock is now trading even below that lamentable, red-ink-drenched period:

Not much room left down there at the bottom.

Money talks, but re-defined vaccine products walk. Sell!

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Yesterday, Fox News (and only Fox News) ran a story wordily headlined, “Fed Chair Jerome Powell hit with criminal referral by House GOP Trump ally.” Trump’s DOJ now holds the cards.

Anna doesn’t like liars.

Firebrand Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fl.) just stuffed an M-80 under the Federal Reserve by sending a formal criminal referral to the DOJ asking its prosecutors to investigate Fed Chair Jerome Powell for perjury before Congress. According to Luna’s letter, Powell lied to the Senate about the now-notorious Eccles Building renovations — the Fed’s sleek marble HQ undergoing a two-billion-dollar facelift while Americans juggle 8% mortgages and maxed-out credit cards.

Perjury might sound like a mosquito of a charge, but as I’ve previously explained, perjury is not like sedition or bribery — it’s one of the easiest federal charges to prosecute. No grand conspiracy required. No bribed witnesses. No tangled paper trail. Just show that the suspect made a knowingly false material statement under oath. And if Powell lied, it won’t matter that he runs the world’s most powerful central bank. Just ask Roger Clemens how his case worked out.

Not just Clemens — Roger Stone, Jenna Ellis, and General Flynn were all prosecuted for making false statements to the FBI or other officials. Poor Martha Stewart watched the DOJ drop her securities fraud counts, only to then convict her for making false statements to federal investigators during the investigation of her unprosecuted insider trading charges.

(Pro tip: Martha’s mistake was that she talked. Never talk to FBI agents without a lawyer. Never. Even if you’re innocent as a barn full of Amish nuns. But I digress.)

Jerome is already in political quicksand. Trump and his allies see him as a hostile holdover from the inflation-happy covid era; the man who green-lit four years of below-zero rates for Democrats, then janked them right after Trump’s election, and is now stonewalling Trump 2.0 on any rate cuts.

If DOJ acts on Luna’s referral, it will signal that Powell’s pampered time atop the Fed and its hyper-luxurious office building is not just limited. It’s over.

Will the DOJ act? Will it need to? Let me know what you think.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Parachute back down here tomorrow morning, for another delicious and delightful roundup of essential news and commentary.

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