☕️ PROBLEMATIC ☙ Thursday, September 17, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

BREAKING: BMJ finds FDA knowingly used a broken jab-signal system that couldn't see mRNA injuries, silenced its own data-mining pioneer, and called it "safety." Don’t let them get to AI.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Thursday! The news cycle is bursting, but an amazing development for which we have longed for years broke yesterday, and deserves our complete attention. The Reckoning is going mainstream, right in the Ivory Tower’s penthouse. The covid chickens are finally coming home to roost— in a thunderous and wrathful way. You’ll never hear about it in corporate media, though. Strap in for breaking news.

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Dear readers: all things considered, we have been extremely patient. It’s finally paying off. Today’s whale of a story confirms more legacy ‘conspiracy theories,’ and further puts the lie to what is beginning to look like the most deceitful political organization in human history. (Which is saying a lot.) We begin at the storied British Medical Journal, the gatekeeping “gold standard” of science, which occasionally stirs itself to actual journalism. Yesterday, it quietly published the result of its own investigation, written by a Pulitzer-winning health reporter, based on new disclosures, titled, “US officials knew covid vaccine safety system was flawed—but turned aside the FDA doctor who alerted them.”

In short, the BMJ just exposed the latest statistical shell game the Biden “public health” agencies played, fooling all of us rubes into thinking they gave millions of shots and saw no unusual safety signals in their data. For instance, in April, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said, “We have not seen a signal (for myocarditis), and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given.”

“That was false,” the article stated simply. They weren’t looking intentionally. They were looking with the lights off.

“US officials embraced an algorithm for detecting signals of harm from mRNA covid-19 vaccines,” the BMJ reported, “that they knew was broken and suppressed efforts to fix it.”

Allow me a quick moment to explain how they did it. It wasn’t particularly complicated.

💉 For ages, the FDA’s signal-detection system compared VAERS reports from any new vaccine to the other VAERS reports from different vaccines. It was a closed loop. But the Covid mRNA jabs produced so many reports it completely swamped the database of all previous vaccine adverse events. Over 90% of 1.1 million adverse event reports in the first year were reports from the covid shots. (You might call that a signal of its own. The FDA didn’t.)

So when they used their only statistical sampling method, it was basically just comparing Pfizer to Moderna and vice-versa. Thus, like the dosimeter in HBO’s Chernobyl that maxed out at 3.6 roentgen— no signals. In April, 2021, the CDC’s VAERS safety page reassured jab-takers that, “VAERS has not detected patterns in cause of death that would indicate a safety problem.”

Think of it like this. Let’s say Camel and Marlboro came out with a new type of cigarette using artificial, self-replicating tobacco. Before the launch, the FDA had a few hundred adverse reports over the years from natural cigarettes. But then the new fake cigarettes produced hundreds of thousands of reports. When you compare Camel against “everything else,” it is really just comparing it to Marlboro.

That’s bad enough. But the BMJ, reviewing newly disclosed internal FDA and CDC emails, found that they knew all about the data-flooding problem. “We were aware of this data mining limitation before and during the pandemic,” the FDA’s safety chief Narayan Nair wrote in a 2023 email to colleagues that the BMJ reviewed. They knew about the problem before the pandemic!

The FDA scientist who built the original data-mining system tried to alert everyone, and even developed an accurate way to sample the massive VAERS data to detect safety signals more accurately than simply comparing the two jabs. They shut her down.

On September 15, 2021, then-FDA vaccine chief Peter Marks wrote to his counterpart in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), complaining, “One of the CDER statisticians, Ana Szarfman, has decided on her own to do vaccine analyses using VAERS as part of her work at FDA. She is, however, not doing this in collaboration with our statisticians, and quite to the contrary, has been asked to cease and desist, because the strategy that she is using could create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric. This is creating an issue . . . This issue came up previously during the pandemic and it seemed to go away, but it is now back. Can we catch up about this sometime?”

(Peter Marks, the BMJ drily reported, did not return requests for comment. Nor did any of the other official ‘stars’ of this story. Ana Szarfman sat for an interview. Ironically, Marks’ noisy resignation letter last year accused Secretary Kennedy of “not desiring truth and transparency.”)

Now, haha, you might think that hardworking career scientists in the federal health agencies given the awesome responsibility of ensuring the nation’s safety during the massive rollout of a brand-new vaccine technology would pick a different way to detect safety signals than one they already knew didn’t work. You would be wrong.

In his 2023 email, Narayan Nair explained the FDA’s early decision not to use any other data mining method to detect signals. “We thought it would be problematic,” he said, “to use a brand new, possibly unvalidated tool in the context of an EUA.”

Then, and this is really the most darkly hilarious excuse of all, Narayan threw up his hands. Creating any different kind of analysis than the one they already knew didn’t work “would be beyond our capabilities at FDA.” Um. Ana Salzman, who built the data mining program, had been emailing them for two years.

(And note the subject line: “FDA co-author for tinnitus paper.” They were writing papers with a tool that couldn’t see tinnitus.)

He described the only fix they could come up with: “As new non-COVID vaccine reports are added we think this limitation will be mitigated to some degree.” In other words, the FDA’s plan was to wait for other vaccines to hurt enough people to dilute the covid ones.

That was behind the scenes. But for the cameras, they kept assuring the public the jabs were the most studied and safest vaccines in history. Marks, less than three weeks after the September 15th email, assured a Zoom group of neurologically injured patients that FDA would query for “a neurologic signal”— then reported three months later, “we have not found a rate… that is higher than would be expected.”

He was ‘searching’ with a flashlight he’d been told had no batteries. Tarring and feathering officials is underrated.

💉 Here’s how the BMJ’s investigator summed up this sordid story:

Thank goodness for the CDC! Thank heavens for the FDA! Praise Beelzebub for the diligent career public health experts who just follow the science! They found a signal all right— Ana Szarfman’s signal of vaccine hesitancy.

They chased that signal enthusiastically.

You, a dumb non-scientist, might wonder why they didn’t just compare the rates of reported injuries in mRNA vaccines to rates in non-mRNA vaccines. They did! In 2022, the CDC finally got around to running a different statistical query against the old-style vaccines —trying to confirm FDA’s figures— and guess what? It lit up. They found scads of alarming safety signals! So of course they threw it out, since it didn’t match the broken test. In a weaselly letter to Congress, Walensky called her results “generally consistent” with FDA’s, and said they revealed “no unexpected safety signals.” Generally.

Get that? They didn’t just find myocarditis. In summer 2021, they’d already found signals for myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s palsy, tinnitus, and other ‘reported disorders’— a load-bearing catchall phrase that was doing a heroic amount of work. (Here in C&C, at the time, I documented so many reported disorders it would take a full post just to list them all.)

Just how many “other reported disorders” did the CDC find signals for when it ran the alternative safety analysis? Hundreds.

Hundreds! It was “a flaw,” the BMJ blandly reported, in prime British understatement, “that senior officials declined to rectify.”

A flaw! A flaw our senior public health officials declined to rectify. Declined! You’ve got to love the British wit.

💉 The classic feline, as they say, is clawing its way out of the bag. The BMJ reached back to a 2022 safety study the CDC and FDA published in the Lancet. BMJ located a quiet acknowledgment of the data-flooding problem in the study’s limitations section. An anonymous reviewer who actually read the preprint’s fine print had expressed astonishment. “The great majority of (total VAERS) reports was for the vaccines of interest,” he wrote. “If this proportion is over 90%, the possibility of identifying a signal was likely close to zero. So, why perform such an analysis?”

Why, indeed. (To their credit, the Lancet editors asked the FDA to justify the analysis or remove it before formal publication. They withdrew their names from the study and cut their paragraphs. In an email, the FDA scientists admitted “there is a considerable bias toward the null when using our data mining efforts.”)

The introduction of this unforgivable error ran all the way down the septic pipe: public health agencies → media → politicians. First, the experts announced the smoke detector was clear. Then the newspapers announced the experts had announced it. Then the politicians announced that doubting the newspapers made you a threat to grandma.

When an incredulous public pointed at 1.1 million VAERS reports, the official religion had a ready sermon: it was our own fault. Knowing their system was broken, they called our entries incomplete. They were unverifiable. (Phones not having been invented.) They were an anti-vax conspiracy. AP explained how activists “targeted” the tracking system. PolitiFact called VAERS a “breeding ground.” Headline from NPR, June, 2021:

The problem, we were told, was the users. We were the problem, not the agencies. Unlike us deplorables, the public health agencies were following the science. Meanwhile, according to the BMJ, they were sitting on safety signals of hundreds of types of injuries and sending ‘cease and desist’ emails to their own researchers who noticed.

The problem with VAERS was not the users. We were the only part that worked.

The FDA careerist Ana Szarfman, who tried to alert her superiors, was in many ways heroic. To her credit, she tried. For a while. She defied multiple orders to desist. She loudly insisted she’d found a signal for death and sudden death. But in the end, the top bureaucrats got to her. She ultimately ceased and desisted, as ordered.

And now she’s giving the BMJ interviews. She looks like Wonder Woman compared to the rest of the FDA and CDC.

💉 This betrayal of public trust is nearly indescribable. They intentionally chose a statistical system incapable of detecting any problems and used the lack of signal as the asserted evidence that no problem existed. Safe and effective.

Assuming the BMJ’s documentary account is accurate, and nobody is saying it isn’t, this was not merely bureaucratic incompetence— it was a complete inversion of the public-health duty: known surveillance blindness was promoted as science, warnings were discarded in the name of —this is what they told Ana Szarfman— avoiding “confusion” and preserving “vaccine confidence,” and the resulting non-alerts were presented as reassurance.

No, that’s inaccurate. It wasn’t just presented as reassurance. The unfounded claims became the backbone of an industrial censorship regime enforcing deliberate obfuscation. Politicians, newspapers, social media companies— they all got squarely behind the non-evidence of safety that the agencies privately admitted was useless.

Let’s shift gears. These lying cowards are the same bunch who locked us down during the pandemic and now want us to trust them to lock down artificial intelligence.

🤖 The big push is on. Today’s alarming cover stories on the New York Times’ web page were not about this astonishing investigation in the “gold standard” of medical excellence. Never mind covid. They were about the latest international emergency —the existential threat of AI!— and how only the government can save us from this latest dire threat to human flourishing. Here are all the stories on the Gray Lady’s front page this morning:

• “OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior”

• “The Awesome and Alarming A.I. Visions of Anthropic’s C.E.O.”

• “King Charles Meets With A.I. Executives About Safety Risks”

The same New York Times that couldn’t find the BMJ story found room for the King of England’s thoughts on robots. (What happened to No Kings?)

Undoubtedly, AI is a disruptive technology with all the risks disruptive technologies always carry. But how in the world of sanity is this government the solution? Why shouldn’t all rational persons conclude that government control of AI would merely make the problems infinitely worse?

For example, we need AI to help process tens of thousands of CDC emails and FDA documents the Senate keeps disclosing about covid, Russiagate, and Butler. Set aside the pressing question of whether AI can be regulated at all. Does anyone believe that government would not, if it gains control of AI, quickly and brutally close off citizens’ ability to ask their AI to help discover damning evidence about government malfeasance?

But Jeff, I can hear the critics complain, that is a false dichotomy. The only options, they will insist, are not no regulation versus bad regulation. They sneer that I have neglected a third possibility— good regulation.

No. No, I didn’t.

I am not neglecting the third possibility of ‘good AI regulation.’ I am foreclosing it.

Given what the BMJ is now parsimoniously and tardily admitting about how the government lied and censored away the existence of hundreds of safety signals while bludgeoning us with “safe and effective,” please explain why we should trust those same officials with the means of total global thought control, when I wouldn’t let them regulate a cellphone repair kiosk.

No. Thank. You.

In one sense, today’s BMJ investigative report is nothing new. It merely once again confirms that our conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts. The covid horse is out of the barn and almost nobody is getting boosters, thank heavens. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton: what difference, at this point, does it make?

Today’s quiet, uncelebrated BMJ admission makes all the difference. It is finally evidence from inside the citadel that the elites cannot deny. When Paul Offit tweets about how many lives were saved by the covid shots, everyone should just send him a link to that BMJ report. They can’t say the shots were proven safe when they didn’t look for injuries. They must now be forced to account for how the rollout was handled, and cannot be allowed to blame it all on officials who’ve already resigned.

If it proves nothing else, the BMJ story proves the wisdom of the founders. The Constitution tried to limit the federal government to a few narrow enumerated powers like controlling the border, levying international tariffs, the military, and running the post office (badly). When it dabbles in things like public health and charity, what happens? Lies. Massive fraud. Cover-ups.

When it “helps” us with mandatory retirement schemes, what happens? A broke Social Security system. When it “serves” us with regulated healthcare plans, what then? American life expectancy that trails Costa Rica. When it “protects” us from environmental poisoning, what do we get? Regulated backyard puddles. When it “assists us” with evening the playing field, what happens? Diversity, equity, and inclusion. When it “advances” us by funding science, what result? Gain-of-function research in Chinese labs and a global pandemic.

In what extra-constitutional realm has the federal government ever unequivocally succeeded? Color me skeptical. I welcome the debate.

So, while I still have plenty of reservations about where AI is taking us and whether our collective IQ will shed even more points when we let the machines take over thinking, the last thing I want is for the same government that ran the pandemic to run AI. The real false dichotomy is certain doom versus government-managed artificial intelligence.

CLIP: This is what AI should be used for. Keep off the grass (1:27).

The BMJ —ground zero for scientific ‘consensus’— just, admirably, began to reckon with the institutional failures. It is fresh momentum behind the Reckoning™ we’ve been waiting for. One thing we can be sure of is that corporate media will not advertise their own failures as enthusiastically as they trumpeted the “safe and effective” lie.

The Reckoning landed in the penthouse. Getting it down to the lobby— that, my friends, is up to us.

Have a terrific Thursday! This special edition required me to leave tons of absolutely wonderful news on the cutting-room floor. Get back here tomorrow, and I will fill you in on all the encouraging essential news with traditional caffeinated commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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