☕️ NONSERIOUS ☙ Thursday, August 27, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

CDC's own app collected 7.8 million free-text injury reports and published its papers on the checkboxes; a judge strikes down her own injunction; a second Lawrence Democrat charged with covid fraud.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! I’m working from the patio, and there’s a very slight but detectable chill on the air this morning. Feels like September is coming. Get ready for pumpkin-spiced nachos. Your roundup today includes: a judge who ran out of legal room and spent her last order teaching the losing side how to win, with ten weeks left on the clock; a second elected Democrat from the same small city arrested inside of two weeks, and what it tells you that the armor around sitting officials has stopped working; a Governor who called two deaths completely preventable before anyone could say what caused them, and a county coroner whose own files say he never saw them; and 185,285 Americans who did exactly what their government asked — downloaded the app, answered the surveys, typed the truth into the only box that would take it — and were never counted, because there was no box to check for what happened to them.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

Excitement ensued yesterday when an alert reader informed me that President Trump had reposted one of my recent X tweets. Unsurprisingly, it was “the list”— the long index of Administration Accomplishments that I drafted in response to Black Pillers complaining that “nothing ever changes.” The President didn’t comment on it, and the list is so long you can’t see the C&C News banner without clicking, but still. Though I admit the terrific satisfaction of being recognized by the President of the United States, it was immediately eclipsed by my very next thought, which was … but I was just about to start working on The List 2.0.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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For the third day in a row, we have an update on the USPS ballot-envelope-standard story. Shortly after I finished yesterday’s post about her strange order in the League of Women Voters case, Massachusetts federal Judge Indira Talwani entered another order, striking down her own injunction that was preventing the new rule from taking effect. The Hill reported, “Federal judge lifts nationwide block on mail-in voting restrictions.”

Here’s a quick recap for Portlanders and those joining us after a self-imposed screen-time diet. During the pandemic, the Democrats greatly expanded use of mail-in ballots. This became a controversy in November, 2020, after which we learned fascinating new terms like “ballot mules” and novel voting concepts of trading drug-addled homeless people cigarettes for votes and letting them use empty lots for their home addresses.

After Trump returned to office last year, Republicans devised two responses to this problem. The first was the SAVE America Act, a terrific proposed law that would require ID and proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, rather than relying on pinkie promises to confirm identity, as is the Minnesota custom. You probably heard of the SAVE Act, since corporate media giddily and fulsomely reported each time the Act failed to run the Senate’s filibuster gauntlet, which seemed like about every ten minutes or so.

Behind the scenes, the Trump Administration had also cooked up a sleeper— a quiet proposed rule for a new ballot-envelope standard that the Postal Service planned to implement for federal elections. The rule established a uniform size and markings and, most importantly, a unique bar code that would let USPS do two main things. (1) Verify the assigned bar code, twice. First, DHS provides states with a database of confirmed US citizens, and the states are welcome to compare it against their databases of approved voters.

This will partly solve the ID problem the SAVE Act tried to fix, but on the back end. Illegal aliens will be unable to get mail-in ballots, a problem you would assume is already locked down, but is a continuing challenge in many blue states. For some reason. These states passed laws that automatically register people to vote when they get driver’s licenses— fueled by a federal “Motor Voter” law. Then they passed different, totally unconnected laws letting illegals have driver’s licenses. Fiesta.

But the new USPS rule will require the states to cough up their databases of approved voters so that USPS can issue barcodes, which would reveal any non-citizens. Problema. Democrats seem allergic to this idea.

(2) Second, the barcode lets the USPS Track the envelope from the time it’s been ordered. Each time the Service touches a ballot envelope, that will be recorded. Which means that for the first time there will be a record— the very thing Democrats demand before they will concede that fraud is even possible, and which, until now, they have been able to say there is none of. For instance, if 200 ballots are delivered to the same address, well, Nick Shirley will know exactly where to haul his hidden camera next.

Are you with me? The USPS rule itself is simple and straightforward. But it’s catastrophic for Democrats when it comes to mailed ballots. (The SAVE Act is still needed to secure in-person voting, but vote-by-mail is a bigger priority at the moment.)

🗳️ So Democrats filed two lawsuits in the same court in Massachusetts, totally not judge-shopping. The first, a coalition of 23 blue states plus DC, was captioned California v. Trump. The second, filed by a group of progressive NGOs, was the League of Women Voters v. Trump. The cases were assigned to Judge Indira Talwani (Obama appointee).

Judge Talwani issued injunctions in both cases freezing the USPS rule and declaring it could not be used for this November’s midterms. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck her injunction in California. The President’s lawyers immediately filed an emergency motion asking her to strike her second injunction in League of Women Voters.

Yesterday, she gave in to the inevitable and struck down her own injunction, writing “the court GRANTS Defendants’ Motion to Reconsider and VACATES its August 11, 2026 Preliminary Injunction.”

With that, the USPS rule may proceed unhindered by any injunctions. For now. The New York Times submerged the story below the human drama of a Nepalese flash flood.

🗳️ Despite appearances, Judge Talwani did not give up, exactly. She surrendered to the inevitable. She took the “L.” The short version is she knew SCOTUS would strike her League injunction, too, and that process would consume critical time, since the midterm clock is pounding like a bass drum. The USPS rule requires states to load their databases into the portal sixty days before the election. Time to stop the rule is running out.

Judge Talwani all but invited the states and NGOs to quickly file new lawsuits with updated arguments. She wrote, “Plaintiff Organizations have substantial arguments that might persuade the Supreme Court to reach a different result if they have an opportunity to present them.”

As if they were all in a covid-nurses line dance together, late yesterday the blue states and NGOs filed their new lawsuits, and Judge Talwani set an expedited hearing where she can issue new injunctions for next Thursday, September 3rd— one day before the USPS database deadline.

The states filed a new case, and the League amended its existing case. Oddly, even though cases are supposed to be randomly assigned “by lot,” the states’ new lawsuit, California et al v. USPS, was coincidentally assigned to Judge Indira Talwani. Shocking.

The game is still afoot. At this point, it is a game of chicken. The Democrats face a new obstacle: a tradition called the Purcell doctrine, where courts will refuse to change election rules too close to voting day. The Administration faces arguments that the USPS rule itself is a change too close to November 3rd.

Expect furious litigation and more Supreme Court involvement. And more ‘help’ from Judge Talwani.

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More Democrat arrests. More covid fraud. More accountability. Yesterday, CBS reported, “Massachusetts State Rep. Francisco Paulino charged with pandemic benefit fraud, money laundering.”

Yesterday, sitting Massachusetts State Rep. Francisco Paulino (D-16th Essex) was arrested in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He’s charged with pandemic benefit fraud and money laundering.

Federal prosecutors said Paulino, 46, fraudulently got more than $700,000 in Covid unemployment insurance benefits and small-business loans. He allegedly then used those funds for buying property, loaning money to clients of his tax preparation and mortgage businesses, and starting a donut franchise. I did not make that up as a mean body-shaming joke. All this was before Paulino was elected to the State House in 2023.

He’s been a busy boy. Federal prosecutors said Paulino used cutouts and other people’s identities “to funnel pandemic relief funds to his personal and business accounts” from April 2020 to December 2021. According to the charging documents —and I promise I’m not making this up either— Paulino allegedly talked a laundromat owner into filing a fake loan application, and then “borrowed” $200,000 back. A laundromat.

Paulino is the second high-ranking elected official from the area to be charged with fraud and money laundering this month. The first was Lawrence Mayor Brian DePena, who was arrested on Friday, August 14, also for Covid fraud related to his tire shop. (C&C covered DePena’s arrest in a criminal-justice-for-Democrat-officials roundup.)

“Both men are accused of treating the COVID-19 pandemic as their own personal cash cows at a time when job losses were fast and furious and so many people needed help quickly,” said Ted Docks, special agent in charge for FBI Boston.

In March, the Massachusetts office of the DOJ announced an “active and aggressive” crackdown on benefits and voter fraud. The official press release for Paulino’s arrest cited President Trump’s new fraud task force, chaired by Vice-President Vance. Democrats call it “weaponization,” but you can’t argue with prioritizing corrupt elected officials. They should be made into examples.

The wheels of justice usually turn slowly. They are spinning faster than the debt clock this month. As I mentioned last time, I find no historical comparison to this mass prosecution movement of sitting Democrat officials. Whatever protective political armor officials in office once relied on is crumbling.

I keep saying the pandemic isn’t over. Connect the dots. The lure of generous, low-accountability pandemic grants proved too powerful for many Democrat officials to resist. You could call that a moral hazard. I call it a Reckoning.™

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The “Measles-Related Deaths” story continues developing, two days in a row. Yesterday, Secretary Kennedy all but accused Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro of “altogether fabricating” the deaths and, as I did, compared the dramatic press conference to Covid-era “fearmongering”:

It might be worth noting how quickly we’ve adjusted to social media from our elected officials. Here we have a Cabinet officer —Kennedy— trading barbs with a Governor in real time. Just saying.

Meanwhile, Lancaster County’s diligent vice-chairman and county commissioner, Josh Parsons, is demanding answers from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, which started the whole “measles-related deaths” story. After all, the County Commission is responsible for the health and welfare of its citizens. Apparently they were left out of the loop. Whoops.

Governor Shapiro wanted attention, and now he’s getting it. The CDC asked for the underlying data and Governor Shapiro refused. His story is falling apart faster than Fauci’s testimony at a Senate hearing. This story is getting spicy. Stay tuned.

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Thanks to the persistence of vaccine watchdog ICAN, the CDC was forced to hand over safety data it collected during the pandemic about the covid jabs. This will shock you, but the CDC apparently did not fully report severe side-effects. A new preprint study from MIT researchers reviewed the data and concluded that 2% of people using the CDC’s “new and improved” smartphone app reported serious and long-lasting side effects, which were never, until now, made public. The study is titled, “Reporting on Prolonged Adverse Health Impact Among V-SAFE Enrollees.”

The study’s primary author is Retsef Levi, an MIT Sloan professor of operations management and healthcare analytics, who is now serving on the CDC’s ACIP vaccine approval committee (stayed by a judge) and its Covid-19 vaccine working group.

Let me explain how the CDC’s “safe and effective” shell game worked.

When the shots started moving, with great fanfare, CDC rolled out something it branded as a smartphone app: V-SAFE, the “after vaccination health checker.” Registration opened December 13, 2020. Data collection started the next day. It was not quite an app. Oracle built it under a ‘donation agreement’ with HHS.

Enthusiastic jab-getters signed up on their phones, and the CDC texted a link to a web survey. Every day for a week, then weekly. How is the arm? Any fever? Did you miss work? Were you unable to perform normal daily activities? Did you see a doctor? If you said yes to medical care, a VAERS contractor might call. CDC later bragged about 10 million participants and 150 million check-ins, and treated the existence of the surveys as proof the safety system was working.

But, of course, there was a catch. The survey did the sorting for them. For the first week, V-SAFE handed users a short list of pre-specified checkboxes for innocuous side effects: sore arm, redness, itching, chills, headache, joint pain, muscle aches, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, belly pain, rash, fever. The expected stuff. Mild, moderate, or severe.

If anything else happened, users just got a free-text box, limited to 250 characters, to type it themselves. After day seven, the checkboxes went away entirely. Weekly and later surveys asked only whether anything new or worse had shown up, and dumped that into free text too.

💉 Here is the trick: the CDC’s published safety papers only ran from the checkboxes. So the agency glowingly bragged about the numbers of sore arms, and claimed that proved how “safe” the jabs were. The free-text boxes, about 7.8 million entries, sat in a secret CDC vault until ICAN sued under FOIA to pry it out. CDC’s own methods paper even noted the surveys were not built to track how long those free-text problems lasted. Apparently, despite all the bragging, CDC did not follow up on the free-text boxes, which was the only place all the bad stuff could be reported.

Well, Professor Levi analyzed the free-text boxes. Guess what? He found that 185,285 vaccine getters, nearly 2%, or 1 in 50, reported severe chronic symptoms. Of those, at the three-month mark, half explicitly reported being unable to work or do normal daily activities, a hospitalization, or a severe, potentially disabling event.

None of those had check boxes. None appeared in the CDC’s regular V-SAFE reports, which continued to describe all side-effect reports as mild and transient. CDC’s V-Safe administrator, Tom Shimabukuro, wrote in Lancet Infectious Diseases: “These data are reassuring that reactions to both mRNA vaccines are generally mild and subside after one or two days.”

💉 ICAN is the foundation set up by pandemic hero Del Bigtree. Its main lawyer is the equally heroic Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad.

ICAN sent its first FOIA to CDC requesting the full, de-identified V-SAFE file in June 2021. CDC first said it had no responsive records. Then, when pressed, it said that the data was not de-identified and risked breaching “privacy.” ICAN filed suit in December 2021, asked again for “all data,” and sued a second time in May 2022.

On September 8, 2022, the court ordered the CDC to cough it up. But what arrived on September 30 was five files of checkboxes. The free-text stayed in the vault. In a November 2022 joint status report, CDC said it would not produce those fields and would not even agree to a briefing schedule. The hidden data included about 7.8 million entries, 250 characters each.

A third case, Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice v. CDC, went to Judge Kacsmaryk in the Northern District of Texas. CDC argued forcefully that producing the text was too burdensome, so it should never have to. It argued that, given its staffing limitations, it would take 59 years to review the entries to delete personally identifying information. Catch-22!

In January 2024, Judge Kacsmaryk ordered the CDC to turn over all 7.8 million entries, with the first slice due by February 15, 2024, and the rest by a year later on January 15, 2025.

Judge Kacsmaryk wrote in his order that production would “permit independent researchers to put the government agencies to their proof by considering all of the available data.” Five years after ICAN filed suit, that is the file Professor Levi analyzed. Somehow, with encouragement from a court order, the CDC managed to do it in fewer than 59 years after all. It was another pandemic miracle.

💉 It took only a few minutes’ research to find the study whitewashing CDC’s V-SAFE skullduggery. In October, 2025, commissioned by the CDC, the National Academies of Science published this rancid take— but in hindsight, we find all the clues.

After commending the CDC on its “scientifically robust, timely, and effective monitoring and evaluation of vaccine risks throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” the article summarizing the study admitted the public wasn’t buying it. They noticed the CDC was constantly pushing jabs and not being a neutral, unbiased reporter. “The perceived overlap between ISO’s risk monitoring activities and CDC’s broader efforts to encourage vaccine use continues to raise public concerns about the objectivity of risk assessments.”

About V-SAFE, the Academies’ article conceded the “smartphone app” was never properly designed to monitor serious and long-term vaccine injuries, but was only designed to find “expected, nonserious postvaccination symptoms”:

Now they tell us.

Carefully, gingerly, doing its best to avoid giving offense, the Academy brought up the awkward inconsistency between what the CDC was saying publicly and what it had captured —without even trying— in V-SAFE’s 250-character free-text fields.

The CDC’s review process, the Academy noted, “occasionally led to concerns about the suppression or delay of legitimate scientific findings.” You don’t say. What was the Academy’s main concern? The gaslit vaccine injured? No. It fretted about the CDC’s image. “Such broad statements, without substantive backing, risked undermining public trust by appearing overly promotional rather than factual.” Hucksterism instead of science.

This wasn’t an accident. CDC already knew the rule. In February 2005 —2005!— an Institute of Medicine panel told the agency that confidence in the CDC’s National Immunization Program’s (NIP) decisions was “tied directly to the perceived independence, transparency, and fairness” of its vaccine-safety data. Shortly thereafter, then-Director Julie Gerberding pulled the safety shop out of NIP —the office that promotes shots— and said the split was to improve the safety branch’s “credibility and capability.”

Twenty years on, the National Academies just put the reason in one sentence: CDC’s safety department —the Immunization Safety Office (ISO)— left NIP “in response to concerns that the work of evaluating the risks from vaccines could not be done objectively if the staff were co-housed with the offices that promoted the use of vaccines.”

That was the 2005 finding. The CDC undid it for covid.

To the extent that anyone cares about the CDC’s vaunted “public image” —I don’t— the agency is lying in the bed it made for itself. The loss of public trust is a self-inflicted injury, an own goal, the equivalent of stepping on a rake on purpose. Giving the agency the benefit of all doubt as to its real motivations, the CDC made the short-sighted decision to use its institutional reputation to grease the rails of covid-shot-pushing. Public health can not now blame antivaxxers and misinformers. Not with a straight face. It knew exactly what would happen— and did it anyway.

They almost got away with it. Those meddling kids! But for one courageous Texas judge, the real V-SAFE data would have rotted in the CDC’s secure “privacy” vault. The Reckoning™ strikes again, using their own data.

Have a terrific Thursday! Get back here tomorrow morning, for Friday’s all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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