☕️ SHOT SHOWDOWN ☙ Wednesday, December 10, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Media panics as FDA probes all covid jab deaths; Høeg hits infant RSV shots; SCOTUS eyes mandate clash; farmers win tariff aid, eased green rules, border water push, and estate tax relief; more.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! Your wildly wonderful, jab-tastic roundup includes: corporate media discovers that the FDA is also looking at ALL covid jab deaths, not just infants, triggering media freakout; newly appointed interim director Høeg lowers the safety-study boom on infant RSV shots; Supreme Court tees up showdown between states with jab mandates of any kind and the Constitution; school mandates questioned; healthcare worker mandates to be reviewed; family farmers finally get some overdue love from the nation’s Commander-in-Chief; tariff-fueled aid package; green energy requirements for farm machines relaxed; Trump escalates border water wars; and estate tax relief promised by the President.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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On one hand, this story is a long-awaited vindication. On the other hand, nearly every living American adult is aware of at least one person who died from the jabs, a fact that has transformed 2025 life into a surreal Kabuki theater experience. We know, but we have to pretend we don’t know. Either way, yesterday the New York Times ran an 8-word headline I have been expecting to eventually see since summer, 2021: “FDA Expands Covid Vaccine Inquiry to Adult Deaths.”

In one sense, it’s just a somebody said something story. All they have is a single sentence in an official statement. Corporate media has been relentlessly hounding the FDA ever since late last week, after Dr. Vinay Prasad’s leaked letter cited 10 pediatric deaths (out of 96 reviewed).

One can easily imagine the furious swarm of questions and demands reporters have been machine-gunning at the FDA ever since. Where is your evidence!! How dare you?? You’re killing grandma!!! Et cetera. Yesterday, Bloomberg was first to notice the four little words that were embedded like ticking time bombs in an otherwise bland, generic response from HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon:

HHS SPOX: “F.D.A. is doing a thorough investigation, across multiple age groups, of deaths potentially related to Covid vaccines.”

That noise you heard midmorning yesterday was reporters gasping in shock and horror. Wait … what? Across multiple age groups! You mean … adults??

(By the way, only in progressive America could news of an investigation into adult deaths be bigger news than dead children, but whatever. And, why didn’t they assume the FDA was looking into all covid jab deaths? Why is this a surprise?)

Having no more news than that single sentence, the story continued by throwing shade on HHS Secretary Kennedy and the vaccine committee, and valiantly trying to defend the precious jabs without knowing exactly what to defend them from. But the Times must be worried.

In what is no doubt a type of early CYA, the Grey Lady dragged out this recent quote from Peter Marks, the CBER’s director from 2016-2025, the man who approved every single covid shot and booster before he rage-quit in March (rumors say he was told to resign or be fired). Anyway, Marks said:

So they aren’t denying it, either. And, using logic, how hard is it to believe that, if pediatric deaths are possible, then adult deaths are also possible?

By the way, don’t feel too awfully badly for Dr. Marks, who upon leaving the FDA immediately went to work as head of infectious disease and senior VP for molecule discovery at pharma giant Eli Lily. A.I. estimated that Dr. Marks now makes between $2-$5 million a year, inclusive of stock options. What does it tell you that the pharma job was Marks’s second choice?

The fact that a broad, cross‑age‑group death investigation is now finally underway —after years of denial and minimization— is a major concession that the underlying safety question was legitimate all along, even if the agencies still insist the ultimate risk was very small.

Now, they’ve started the shift from minimizing the risk —which was Plan A— to minimizing the harms— Plan B. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. In the Times’s own words:

Ha. How many of those killed were “with covid” as opposed to “from covid?” But never mind. We are next racing toward the “net benefit” argument.

They will make (and have made) the utilitarian argument that, even if some people died, it maximized the common good. This is not a scientific argument; it is an ethical argument. Thus, it is easily countered if we avoid falling into the trap. They hope we will argue about the science —like the rates of injury, or causation— since the data pool has been hopelessly polluted and it will probably take decades to unravel.

But “net benefit” is an ethical argument, not a scientific argument. Thus, it requires an ethical answer. Ethically, if the government insists people assume a small but real risk “for the common good,” then basic fairness demands robust, accessible, and generous compensation for the unlucky minority who are harmed. Instead, the PREP Act’s CICP structure delivers broad liability shields to government actors and pharma allies, but compensation to injured victims so minuscule it cannot be detected using electron microscopes.

In other words, not only don’t the jabs work, but they are a moral and ethical failure as well. Whenever pharma trolls invoke “net benefit,” respond with ethics and morality. Utilitarianism is a particular ethical framework, and applying it to vaccines is a moral choice. There are many other (better) frameworks.

But that was just the start of this week’s great vaccine news.

💉 Yesterday, I wrote about how the FDA career bureaucrats reacted like salted snails when they found out about Traci Beth Høeg’s appointment as CDER Interim Director. Well, she’s already acting. Yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Exclusive: US FDA launches fresh safety scrutiny of approved RSV therapies for infants.”

These RSV products are not called “vaccines,” but “therapies” or “treatments” because they are actually monoclonal antibodies designed only to provide temporary passive immunity. Critics claim these treatments sometimes produce seizures and increased risk of antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE. (Portlanders: ADE means the child becomes more susceptible to the RSV virus in the future.)

In the past, Secretary Kennedy has criticized including a passive treatment for a common seasonal virus on the infant vaccine schedule as over-medicalization. It is also widely believed that these products were not fully tested for safety in infants, with clinical trials more closely resembling a rubber-stamped smiley face.

On Friday, Acting Director Høeg cited data from four late-stage clinical trials involving two types of current RSV therapies that showed an “unfavorable imbalance” in mortality, with more all-cause infant deaths in the treatment group than in the control.

Back in June, vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone voted on the FDA’s advisory panel in favor of RSV vaccines for infants, but he’s coming around. “I voted in favor of the resolution based on the information and logic presented,” Malone wrote on his Substack. “That trust in the data presented now appears to have been ill-advised.” Womp.

So FDA officials have notified Merck, Sanofi and AstraZeneca that their approved protective RSV treatments for infants would be subject to fresh safety scrutiny.

Medical fetishists were incandescent. “Rolling back RSV availability based on baseless concerns harm American children,” Stanford University associate professor Jake Scott sputtered. “Perhaps more importantly, it would set a dangerous precedent as to how America’s scientific advisory-committee system might be undermined — or even co-opted— by peddlers of junk science.”

Notably, nowhere in the Reuters’ article was Høeg’s concern rebutted. They didn’t even try to dispute that more babies died in the treatment group. Nor did the doubly-first-named associate professor. All Dr. Høeg wants is a closer look, which is exactly how safety science is supposed to work.

These morons are still acting like it’s 2019. Nobody trusts them anymore. In the CDC’s 2023-24 study of 2,750 healthcare staff, only 15% said they got that year’s annual covid booster shot, with even lower rates for staff in nursing homes. Global Biodefense, November 2024:

When you’ve lost doctors and nurses, you have a serious trust problem. It’s not a “misinformation problem.” If jab defenders were sane, they would focus on their trust problem first, and stop wailing about anti-vaxxers and skepticism. Anti-vaxxers have been around a long time. The institutionalists should ask themselves what changed recently that resulted in anti-vaxxers being installed at the tops of the public health agencies.

Until the institutional side shows it understands why it so badly lost the public’s trust, and makes visible changes, its continuing outrage at vaccine skepticism is likely to keep backfiring. We just hear it as noise, as an obvious attempt to pathologize dissent instead of rebuilding the tattered remnants of their squandered credibility.

So that’s two. But there was another, even bigger, even better win. Guess who else is losing trust in the vaccine establishment (just like the rest of us)? The Supreme Court.

💉 Yesterday, far-left Slate Magazine ran a story with the distraught headline, “The Supreme Court Just Gave Anti-Vax Parents an Alarming Win. For everyone who’s been waiting impatiently for the Supreme Court to weigh in on vaccines— well, it’s beginning. “SCOTUS,” Slate warned darkly, “might be about to make herd immunity way tougher to acquire.”

Slate called the Court’s terse, procedural order —which didn’t actually rule onanything— “incredibly alarming,” “reckless,” “dangerous,” “a public health catastrophe,” and literally ten thousand times worse than Hitler on his grumpiest day.

The case before the Court on Monday was Miller v. McDonald, a lawsuit brought by parents of several New York schoolchildren and three Amish schools. It challenged a 2019 New York law that deleted all religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements, which in New York extend to private and parochial schools as well as public schools. (Recently, New York fined the Amish schools about $40,000 each for a single day’s defiance of the vaccine mandates.)

The plaintiffs, unsurprisingly, argued that the state’s non-exemptible vaccine mandates violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

💉 The federal district court denied the plaintiffs’ claims, finding that the state did not trample their religious freedoms, and the mandates were necessary to achieve “herd immunity” (which, by the way, is a utilitarian synonym for “net benefit;” see above). The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the district court, and the plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court.

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a two-sentence order, written by Justice Alito, that vacated the Second Circuit’s decision and sent the case back down to the original district court along with an instruction to re-consider the New York law in light of an earlier decision: a terrific case that issued only a few months ago in June, captioned Mahmoud v. Taylor. Here’s Monday’s entire order:

Those two sentences sounded a battle cry heard by every progressive media platform and every so-called expert in the country.

💉 The Mahmoud case —also written by Justice Alito (for the majority)— held that public school parents have a constitutional right to exempt their children from exposure to LGBTQ+ and trans materials. It reasoned that the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause “protects against policies that impose more subtle forms of interference with the religious upbringing of children.” (I covered Mahmoud at length in June.)

Slate —not at all prone to hysterical overreaction— complained the Mahmoud decision was “destabilizing” to public education because it “gave” religious parents “veto power” over offensive curriculum that “they disliked.” But Justice Alito took an extremely broad view of parents’ freedom “to direct the religious upbringing of their children.”

So you can imagine how spooked Slate that Justice Alito told the lower court to apply Mahmoud to the vaccine case. “If Mahmoud applies to immunization mandates,” Slate wailed, “as the court implied it does—then parents may have a constitutional right to send their children to any school, public or private, without having them vaccinated.”

Oh, no! Not that! Not personal choice about medical interventions!

It’s a jab-apocalypse.

💉 Forty-six states offer some degree of religious exemption to school vaccine mandates, with varying levels of requirements to qualify. In Florida, for instance, parents just check a box on a form, which is available online. (They need only do it once per child, forever.) Only four states, including New York and California, ban religious exemptions entirely, and life is flat miserable for many parents and children in those states.

Two painful types of vaccine mandates survived the pandemic. One is this school mandate, especially in the four defiant states. The other is the healthcare mandate, which requires hospital and nursing home staff to get annual flu and covid shots.

Well, guess what?

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court asked the DOJ to weigh in on a case brought by nurses challenging New York’s similar covid jab requirement for healthcare workers, which also lacks any religious exemption.

It appears the Supreme Court is considering all vaccine mandates, not just school ones.

There are more 9-0 Supreme Court decisions that uphold the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion than any other issue; maybe even more than all the other 9-0 decisions combined.

So, in one week, we have:

• The FDA is investigating covid jab deaths in kids and adults, shocking the media;

• The CDER is pressuring makers of RSV shots designed for infants for more safety data, which is apparently difficult for them to easily provide; and

• The Supreme Court is signaling it will likely confirm religious-based vaccine exemptions for both kids and adults throughout the country.

Look how far we’ve come! Not so long ago, the Supreme Court would have, like Justice Jackson cried, deferred to “credentialled experts” in the so-called sciences. But they’re not deferring now, Jack.

The pseudo-scientific jab defenders —the white-coat pretenders— and their pharma allies are finally being swamped by a tsunami of reason and common sense.

🔥🔥🔥

The week delivered plenty of promising news for family farmers. NBC ran a story yesterday headlined, “Trump announces $12 billion in aid to farmers.” Aid money is great, but it was much more than aid money.

Trump’s move was timely. Democrats have —for once— been championing the cause of family farmers, who’ve been crushed on the bottom side of the wheel of Chinese tariffs, immigrant labor, and green mandates that assume Iowa cornfields have subway access. Consider this October headline from the conservative Washington Times:

On Monday, President Trump finally focused on farmers.

The headline grabber was President Trump’s announcement of $12 billion in direct payments to farmers, which is easily justified. Farmers suffered during our brief trade war with China, which temporarily halted purchases of American soybeans and other mainstay crops. Since the government created the problem, it’s fair —and constitutional— to compensate farmers.

Plus, Trump said the aid money will come from tariff revenue, so it won’t add to the national debt. (Oh, how tariff critics howled at this one.) I’m sure the aid will be welcome, but it won’t resolve all the farmers’ problems. Farmers face all kinds of obstacles, including bad weather, insect infestations, crop-destroying viruses, and awful progressive policies prodded by midwitted actresses who once played farmers in movies testifying at congressional hearings.

🔥 Fortunately, the aid was only part of it. Next, Trump announced a plan to reduce “green” requirements for farming machinery manufacturers, enabling them to produce better, cheaper products for farmers. The last sentence was perhaps the most interesting.

You never really know whether Trump is just improvising or actually giving us a peek into what’s really happening behind the scenes. Especially in Trump 2.0, the President often blurs details that his opponents could use against him and misdirects the media. But if the Administration is in fact quietly “trading” regulatory relief with manufacturers in exchange for promises to cut prices, well, that’s brilliant.

And Democrats can’t complain about easing green rules, since they’ve elevated affordability to a top priority position. Let them eat soybeans.

You know one thing that impacts affordability? Green regulations, that’s what. Oh, how I pray they make normal light bulbs legal again. That would help affordability. And my eyesight. But I digress.

🔥 Next, President Trump turned yesterday to the water wars. He vowed to impose additional tariffs on Mexico unless it complies with its treaties, like it promised.

“Mexico still owes the U.S. over 800,000 acre-feet of water for failing to comply with our Treaty over the past five years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Mexico has an obligation to FIX THIS NOW.”

Water is the lifeblood of farmers; water is to farmers like EBT cards are to Democrats, or like housing assistance is to Somali warlords. Add more water and farmers become happier. Biden let the Mexicans get away with ignoring their water treaty obligations for four years. Now they owe us a Hoover reservoir’s worth. The happy Mariachi music just came to a screeching stop.

Finally, and possibly most importantly over the long term, Trump teased changes to estate taxes, otherwise known as death taxes. “We’ll have no more estate tax,” he said Monday at a round table about farm relief. “How about that?”

“It seems to affect the farmers more than anybody else,” the President said. “You die, you leave your farm or small business to your children, you won’t have to pay estate tax.”

The estate tax currently kicks in at estates valued over $14 million, and charges 40%.

It all sounds very progressive and Robin Hood-like, but it doesn’t actually affect high-net-worth individuals, like billionaires, because they just hire brilliant tax professionals who design complex ways to (legally) evade these taxes. Farmers and small business owners, on the other hand, can’t use these techniques, and they get hammered. A family farm can easily exceed the $14 million limit, and so kids are forced to sell the farm when their parents die, to pay the death taxes.

Congress has had many chances to exempt farms and small business owners, but it hasn’t. Instead, it continues to approve exemptions for billionaires, usually costumed in philanthropic language designed to disguise the actual purpose, which is often to ensure that taxes don’t affect wealthy donors. The whole thing is so lopsided and unfair that one can reasonably conclude Democrats hate family farmers and small business owners.

It wasn’t exactly clear how he’ll end estate taxes. Trump can tweak the rules by himself, but ending them altogether will require help from Congress. At the rate we’ve been going, this seems as likely to happen as Kamala Harris legibly finishing a full sentence.

But I’m still hoping that the President —who has not publicly complained about the slow pace of legislation— and Congress have a plan. I trust they are just waiting till next year, when they will offer an amazing bill package as an incentive for Republicans and independents to vote GOP in the midterms. Go ahead, call me a hopeless optimist.

In any event, this week’s “farm relief” shows that farmers are not being neglected and are enjoying some presidential attention. Whether it will be enough to satisfy them for now remains to be seen.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Then drive your tractor back here in the morning, for a farm-fresh load of C&C’s essential news and commentary.

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