Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS AUG 18, 2026

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: the Washington Post’s alarming discovery that four kindergartners out of a hundred now show up to school with a note from their parents instead of a shot record, which the Post filed under national emergency and which I would file under customer feedback; the zero Americans who have died of measles this year, a number that somehow did not make the story; why “increased awareness” is a complete and satisfying explanation for a three-hundred-fold rise in autism diagnoses but cannot explain a hundred extra measles cases in a single week; and then the document corporate media decided you didn’t need to see — a May 2021 email in which the Acting Commissioner of the FDA privately warned Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins that people were being injured in ways VAERS could not detect, that many of them were healthcare professionals and some of them were people she personally knew, that their complaint was nobody took them seriously and nobody knew how to treat them, and that industry would obviously never fund a study to find out; the four dots Senator Ron Johnson connected underneath it, including the FDA scientist who found the safety signals and was told to cease and desist; what a litigator does with a paper trail like that; and Fauci’s four-word reply, which he typed after quietly removing her from the list of recipients.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Well, our first unintentionally hysterical story, published in the Washington Post yesterday afternoon, seems like pretty good news. As the dramatic headline said, another record has been reached— and it is the public health establishment’s worst nightmare: hesitation. But the story was actually the latest example of public health using fear manipulation and kids as props to sell jabs.

The scrap of “news” was one number: U.S. kindergartners who invoked school vaccine exemptions in the 2025-2026, which nudged up by a tiny fraction (0.6%), increasing slightly from 3.6% to 4.2%. (The article did not disclose confidence intervals, standard error, annual variability, or data quality.) Now, we’ll take that tiny increase —which caps a glacier-like trend over the last five years— as unintentional good news.

But let’s be honest: With the non-dramatic exemption increase of only six per thousand, it’s not like pediatricians were staring at empty offices wondering where all the kids went.

But the Post took that single statistical blip, grabbed its Thesaurus of Alarming Words, and went to town, catastrophizing this barely detectable 0.6% movement as a “sharp increase” that “extends a years-long erosion” as “the country battles its worst measles resurgence in 35 years.”

Whew! Sharp .. Erosion … Worst resurgences … Battling a war. It’s an invisible crisis! WaPo stuffed all that hyperbolic rhetoric into a single sentence, and it was just warming up.

💉 It’s tempting to give this story the full treatment, but we have more to cover today, and I don’t want to get bogged down. Here’s the concise version. By its third paragraph, the story had already transitioned from the terrifying 0.6% Vaccine Exemption Apocalypse of 2026 to President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, the recent changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, and the awful threat that we could all die any minute.

Trump, Kennedy, and the schedule changes came after any of these measles cases or exemptions, of course. But never mind. Obviously, accuracy is an unnecessary distraction when we’re talking about public health.

The article’s hyperbolic quotes were priceless, especially those excreted by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. James Campbell, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Infectious Diseases, warned, “Measles and other infectious diseases don’t stop at the classroom door. That’s why school entry requirements matter: They protect and keep entire communities safe, and experience shows that when parents receive clear, trustworthy informationfrom health professionals, they’re far more likely to choose vaccination.”

The jokes write themselves.

But the figure the WaPo really leaned into was: “2,566 confirmed measles cases so far this year, 101 more than the previous week’s tally and already exceeding the 2,289 cases recorded during all of 2025.”

Cases. Not deaths. Not hospitalizations. Not outcomes. Just “cases.” Remember all the games the CDC played with covid case counts?

Small increases in case counts can occur just because the CDC is trying a little harder to find them. That’s all it takes. Like reminding doctors every ten minutes that they are “required” to report all measles cases, no matter how mild, to the CDC. Or sending pediatricians free test swabs. Or ‘tweaking’ the definition of what a case is. I wonder how many of these 2026 measles cases are, for example, asymptomatic.

The white-coated fraudsters happily find a complete explanation in increased awareness for astonishing autism rates that skyrocketed from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 12. But ‘increased awareness’ isn’t any part of the vocabulary when you’re discussing tiny increases in measles cases. That, my friends, can only be evidence of a vast and terrifying public health emergency.

💉 But … is it? Really? For context, your chances of being among the 2,566 Americans who suffered from “a case” of measles this year are a barely countable 0.00075%. Only zero Americans have died from measles this year. “Zero” might sound like a lot to some doctors. But zero suggests we have a pretty good chance of making it through this measles pandemic. (I like these odds. Regular readers know what I’d bet on it.)

You have a better chance of catching projectile diarrhea from Taco Bell lettuce than catching a ‘measles case.’ You have a greater risk of spontaneously combusting than dying from measles. You are more likely to choke on a hot dog than die from measles.

Show me one public health regular warning us about inhaling oversized hot dogs. I will wait. Not forever, but do your best. (I did not include a public health advisory picture. This is a family blog.)

Measles is just the latest psyop —political agitprop that is literally the least of your concerns— yet the Twitter feeds are choked with lab-coated pretenders issuing dire warnings about measles. Warnings that they will switch off like an LED lamp as soon as it’s time to transition to the next manufactured crisis.

Former Biden Covid Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned, “We are on track to have the worst measles outbreak of this century, of the last 25 years.” Which is it? Pediatrician Dr. Emilie Morris dramatically told CBS News on July 24th, “The child is hunched over, mouth open, drooling, crying, maybe not even producing tears, because they’re so dehydrated.” Won’t somebody please think of the children!

Want to know why U.S. anxiety rates and depression drug sales are at all-time highs? The reason we have sky-high anxiety is that sky-high anxiety rates are what’s best for corporate media and its morbidly obese patrons, big pharma and the public health establishment.

Anxiety is the only public health crisis they never address. Because our chronic anxiety is not a problem; it’s the goal. People scared of invisible threats get more jabs. It’s that simple.

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Well, well, well. What have we here? A made-for-media story about the latest Fauci scandal, and it’s even worse than it looks at first. Which is why corporate media has so far completely ignored it. So we go to Sunday’s press release on Senator Ron Johnson’s website, headlined, “Senators Johnson, Paul Release Email Showing Top FDA Official Expressing Concern Over COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events.” The headline undersold the story.

Also Sunday, Senator Johnson appeared on Fox and explained, “They kept saying no red flags, no safety signals. They lied through their teeth to the American public.” (This story combines a Johnson and a Woodcock; don’t tell me the simulation lacks a sense of humor.)

It was everything you could ask for in a real-world smoking gun. On May 27, 2021 —mere months into the jab rollout— then-Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock sent an alarmed email to the human cockroach and his awful boss, Francis Collins. (Just another example, by the way, of the risks that come with giving your sons girl’s names.)

Let’s be clear: the three were the tippy top of both the national public health establishment and the de facto group running the covid vaccine response.

“I have been contacted by a number of people who have experienced adverse events from all three of the current vaccines,” Commissioner Woodcock began. “Many are healthcare professionals,” she continued, adding, “some of whom I know.”

Think of it: Jab injuries were so common that Janet Woodcock knew “some.” But I digress.

Then she dropped the first thunderbolt. “The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily evaluated with standard laboratory testing.” Then Woodcock raised the biggest red flag of all: “The problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect.” She added, “…or even a more sophisticated population-based active followup such as CDC has, or a medical record based system such as BEST.”

“No one takes these patients seriously,” she complained. “No one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”

“I think it will be worthwhile to do a study,” she finally suggested, stating the obvious. “If you let a problem fester, it will come back to bite you later.” Not these patients need help, fast! She was warning, this will become a political liability.

Almost as an aside, Commissioner Woodcock observed, “I doubt the industry would support (a study), for obvious reasons.”

Fauci’s response deleted Woodcock from the list of recipients and then said, “We cannot ignore her.” By cutting her from the send list, he was literallyignoring her. Priceless.

Fauci didn’t say, this is concerning. He did not reassure NIH Director Collins with our data rules this out. His very first reaction was we cannot ignore her, as if ignoring inconvenient reports were the standard initial box on the bureaucratic flow chart. His proposed solution? Bring in the fixer, compliant CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.

Later that Spring, Walensky would tell MSNBC, “We can kind of almost see the end. We’re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick…”

On November 4, 2021 —161 days after her email— Commissioner Woodcock assured Congress that the FDA and CDC run “a coordinated and overlapping approach for continuous safety monitoring using state-of-the-art technologies.”

By “state-of-the-art technologies,” Woodcock was referring to VAERS, which she’d just told Fauci “would not be able to detect” the injuries.

Finally, I don’t need to remind any of you that, in May 2021, if Commissioner Woodcock had posted her report on social media, her account would have been nuked from orbit.

💉 Senator Johnson, bless him, then connected a few dots:

• By the end of May 2021, the release says VAERS contained 440,025 worldwide reports following COVID vaccination, including 8,650 reported deaths; and 3,350 of those deaths (39%) were reported within two days of vaccination.
• On March 1, 2021, FDA scientist Ana Szarfman warned FDA CBER Director Peter Marks that the algorithm FDA used to assess VAERS was masking safety signals. Szarfman’s monthly analyses identified dozens of signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, Bell’s palsy, and agonal rhythm. Agonal rhythm is the sound a heart makes as it is dying. (It is also a terrific name for a punk rock band. Just saying.)
• FDA officials ignored Szarfman’s findings, continued using an algorithm they knew was concealing signals, and sent her a “cease and desist.” That’s like smashing the smoke detector with a hammer to get it to stop chirping.
• Beginning in March 2021, NIH neurologist Avindra Nath led clinicians and researchers who were diagnosing and treating people described as severely injured after vaccination, and whose symptoms were suspiciously similar to the ones Woodcock had described.

Senator Johnson laid the dots out neatly in a row but carefully avoided connecting them, not explicitly. But I will. Commissioner Woodcock’s warning was not an isolated, abstract concern. It was no one-off. Fauci and Collins had plenty of corroborating data. Woodcock even identified the main institutional problem— industry would obviously not support a study.

She might have added that dozens of NIH scientists held patent royalties on the mRNA vaccine technologies. To this day, we still don’t know which oneswere getting royalty payments, or whether Fauci was among them. But at the rate they are dropping documents, I’d bet we are going to find out.

💉 To my litigator’s eye, combined with Senator Johnson’s other dots, this email is sufficient evidence to prove a cover-up, at least in a civil case. I could now prove to a jury by a preponderance of the evidence that Fauci and Collins were recklessly negligent. I feel pretty confident I could convince a jury they engaged in a conspiracy to deliberately conceal evidence of difficult-to-detect jab injuries.

It might not yet meet the more demanding criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, but it’s getting closer.

At a minimum, in either a civil or criminal case, Woodcock’s email combined with Fauci’s response would compel a court to order broad discovery. Fauci would be deposed and required to answer questions about what he and Collins did after Woodcock’s email and the other known signals, and why they kept swearing the jabs were the “safest vaccines in history” and pushed mandates.

So much for saving one life. Oddly, their myopia toward the harms caused by their interventions happened to align precisely with financial incentives. That alignment is a core fact a jury may consider when drawing inferences; such inferences are perfectly legal and even routine in most conspiracy prosecutions.

For example, the commentary to the Ninth Circuit’s model jury instructionsstates plainly that an agreement between conspirators “can be explicit or tacit, and can be proved by direct or circumstantial evidence, including inferences from circumstantial evidence.”

We find ourselves in a fantastic period of The Reckoning.™ We don’t know how much evidence is left, when it will become public, or how bad it will get. But what we do know is that they are doling it out to us in meal-sized servings; each course being just enough to digest before the next one begins.

The record is growing in installments. Each installment escalates the same three questions: what was known, who knew it, and what they did about it. I wouldn’t assume corporate media will keep ignoring this story forever; it usually hops on the bandwagon once it sees which direction the parade is going.

Corporate media is performing its best ostrich impression, but the ostriches are out of the barn. Social media is the new public square, and media gatekeeping is lying on the ground in a pile of shredded timber.

Acting Commissioner Woodcock told them exactly what would happen if they let it fester: ‘then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared.’Well? It’s later. They’re not prepared. Stick around, because it will only get better.

Have a terrific Tuesday! C&C will return tomorrow morning, with a fulsome new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. I’m going to try to quickly get through the C&C stack of stuff, which is starting to pile up. Covid accountability is not the only thing that is finally moving toward a happy ending.

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