Better in their words…

Dr Prasad’s heroic effort cannot be overestimated.  Huge credit to him to come back to FDA after he was “disparaged”[?] by friend and foe alike. And huge credit to Marty Makary who brought him back. (Shame on Laura Loomer – we might be better off if we never heard from the likes of her again.)  mrossol

Source: GOLD RUSH ON MAIN STREET☙ Sunday, November 30, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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“The significance and importance of this cannot be overestimated.” Never fear; the debates over covid-era policies and the jabs remain very much alive. It isn’t over. Yesterday, NBC ran an unintentionally wonderful story headlined, “FDA claims Covid shots killed 10 children and vows new vaccine rules.” The sub-headline quickly tried to throw cold water on the shocking claim: “Vaccine experts said the memo was irresponsible and omits key details about how officials arrived at the conclusion.”

“Vaccine experts.” Wait till you see who those are.

Back in August, Vinay Prasad was fighting to keep his post as the newly appointed Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research —the FDA’s vaccine approval arm. None less than Laura Loomer had targeted him as a liberal mole. Prasad was temporarily ousted, but in a dramatic turnaround story, several weeks later, FDA Director Marty Makary reeled him back in.

This story should lay any concerns about Dr. Prasad to rest.

Yesterday, deep state ne’er-do-wells leaked a scathing, six-page, single-spaced internal memo that Prasad apparently sent to the entire CBER staff, inviting them to quit if they don’t like it. He did not mince words. He practically accused the CBER team of killing kids with their sold-out vaccine policies favoring pharma companies and ignoring evidence-based science.

The entire point of Prasad’s memo was to lay out his vision for reforming the way CBER approves vaccines, using the covid shots as a disastrous negative example of how badly the current procedures have failed. And he ended the memo with a curt suggestion: “Some staff may not agree with these core principles and operating principles. Please submit your resignation letters to your supervisor.”

💉 To give you an idea of how spicy the six-page memo was, it began with announcing (or reminding) the CBER team that, out of only 96 pediatric deaths reviewed by Prasad’s team of investigators, at least ten were directly linked to myocarditis, and almost certainly produced by the covid shots. Here is Prasad’s very first paragraph:

OBPV career staff have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination. These deaths are related to vaccination (likely/probable/possible attribution made by staff). That number is certainly an underestimate due to underreporting, and inherent bias in attribution. This safety signal has far-reaching implications for Americans, the US pandemic response, and the agency itself, which I wish to discuss here.

Cue the media hysteria! NBC quoted vaccine salesman and grandfatherly war criminal Dr. Paul Offit, who indignantly sputtered, “This is sort of science by press release is irresponsible and dangerous!” It wasn’t a press release, you moron, it was a private memo leaked by insubordinate staff. Disgraced former FDA vaccine director Peter Marks —who was fired by RFK earlier this year— cried, “This memo conveys a very troubling mixture of misrepresentation and lies!”

Offit and Marks were it; the complete cohort of “vaccine experts” quoted by NBC’s article opposing Dr. Prasad’s memo. So.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics directs journalists to “provide access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate.” But NBC did not link to Prasad’s memo. You don’t need to read it; we will tell you what to think. Haha. Fortunately, we have other ways to find things now. Here is the link to Prasad’s memo.

What NBC’s whiny vaccine experts did not do was engage directly with any of Prasad’s claims. At all. They didn’t even try to deny that at least ten kids were killed. They just whinged about VAERS (the system they created and use for lots of things, when it suits them, for crying out loud) and chirped angrily about “misinformation.” But we see them for what they are: white-coat pretenders.

Team Sanity had a completely different take. For example, mRNA pioneer and new member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, Dr. Robert Malone, said on his Substack that, “I am stunned, gobsmacked by his letter. The significance and importance of this letter in the context of US and global vaccine policy cannot be overestimated. This is a revolution, the likes of which I never expected to see in my lifetime.”

💉 You can’t find Malone’s ‘revolution’ mentioned anywhere in the NBC story, or any of the other corporate media reports, which were all as useless as gum on a boot heel. They tried to cabin Prasad’s memo into a tidy little box called criticizing the covid shots. But the memo was much bigger than that.

“It is not our role to lower evidentiary standards or mask safety concerns to create artificial financial incentives to make vaccines,” Dr. Prasad wrote to his staff. Instead, going forward, he said that, “CBER’s general approach will be to direct vaccine regulation towards evidence-based medicine.”

“We will revise the annual flu vaccine framework,” Prasad told staff, “which is an evidence-based catastrophe of low-quality evidence, poor surrogate assays, and uncertain vaccine effectiveness measured in case-control studies with poor methods.” He added, “we will reappraise safety and be honest in vaccine labels.”

That’s when he started tossing out science grenades: “At FDA, we have not been focused on understanding the benefits and harms of giving multiple vaccines at the same time,” Prasad wrote, but “staff will be tasked with writing guidelines to reflect these changes, and the mission of CBER will change to reflect this worldview.”

In other words, FDA will study and adjust to the combined risks from potential interactions or burdens of giving different vaccines at the same time. This has never been done— probably not accidentally. And needless to say, if the FDA concludes the safest route is to give kids vaccine doses one at a time, parents will not make 76 trips to the doctor for each kid.

That one change would probably drive vaccine rates into the basement.

But the sentence that really soaked Dr. Offit’s corn flakes was when Prasad promised, “we will not be granting marketing authorization to vaccines in pregnant women based on unproven surrogate endpoints,” but rather, “vaccine makers will have to show their products reduce infections, and not merely generate antibody titers.”

He was saying that, on his watch, the FDA would stop approving vaccines solely because they raise some lab marker (like increased antibody levels) that is assumed to predict a benefit, absent direct evidence of real clinical benefit and acceptable safety. For decades, the FDA and other regulators have used simplified substitute indicators to approve shots for pregnant women and other vulnerable groups, on the rationale that complete drug trials would be impractical.

To most lay folks, this violates the precautionary logic we apply in everyday life: if something can seriously hurt you, you only accept it when you can see that it actually helps, not just that it shifts a lab number. Regulators and pharma researchers, though, have built a whole framework that sometimes lets surrogate markers stand in for real‑world benefits, especially when trials would be expensive, slow, or ethically complicated.

For populations with low baseline risk and limited upside —like healthy children, young adults, pregnant women without major comorbidities— the gap between “raised the right antibodies” and “clearly reduced bad outcomes” matters a lot, because any non‑trivial harm can flip the net balance.

💉 Taken together, Dr. Prasad’s roadmap for CBER reform is, as Dr. Malone suggested, “revolutionary” and it “cannot be overstated.” This isn’t just a debate over how many of ten pediatric death cases should be attributed to covid vaccine side-effects. Prasad’s memo is nothing less than a direct threat to the entrenched vaccine regulatory-industrial complex. That is why the usual suspects have boiled out of their nests like angry wasps, loudly complaining like old men returning soup at a diner.

So that’s one reason to celebrate. The second reason to celebrate is that obviously the rancorous debates over covid jabs and pandemic policy continue in full force inside the agencies. So if you had ever been convinced by black-pillers that Kennedy and his team were co-opted, I humbly present Prasad’s memo as Exhibit A.

The war continues. Fiercer than ever. You just aren’t hearing about it, because media is ignoring the story.

After all, remember who the media’s real customer is. The customers are not readers or viewers. The audience, and its attention, are the product. Media’s actual customers —the ones who buy the product— are advertisers. Yet NBC’s story included no conflict‑of‑interest note regarding NBC’s or Comcast’s financial dependence on pharma ads, not even a lame statement about how firewalls are maintained between the advertising department and health coverage.

The fact that the media is beholden to pharma should be better known. After all, it’s been proven.

💉 In a 2019 study on pharma advertising titled, “Pharmaceutical advertising biases media reports on drug safety,” diligent sociologists —after a shockingly large amount of work— unsurprisingly concluded that “newspapers are less likely to report on a drug’s side effects if they obtained more advertising dollars from the drug’s producing company.” They even quantified the effect: “a newspaper that receives an additional $100,000 of advertising in the 14 days prior to the publication of an article on its advertising client’s drug is 9% to 20% less likely to mention side effects of this drug. This effect increases with higher amounts of advertising dollars.”

In other words, they used math. “Our results,” the researchers drily concluded, “indicate that pharmaceutical advertising reduces the extent to which the media reports on potential harms of their advertising clients’ drugs.” Thus, “as a result of the biased reporting, the public’s perception of drug safety is likely to be distorted and public health can eventually be adversely affected.”

Ha! In other words, the more money pharma pays media for advertisements, the less media reports on side effects or safety issues. It is simple. And that, my friends, is science. Do not be a denier.

Past generations used to understand this even without scientific studies, as evidenced by several ancient folk sayings that nobody living apparently learned anything from. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Florida old-timers would always say, laughing themselves silly, while feeding live chickens to alligators. Or if you prefer: He who pays the piper calls the tune. (The latter expression was coined by Samuel J. Piper, who went around during the Civil War with a pet monkey who would either play “Dixie” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on a portable organ, depending on who paid, until Piper got shot in a duel and the monkey ran off somewhere.)

Important historical context aside, the point is: nobody criticizes their biggest customers, or they won’t stay in business very long. And, just saying, more money was spent on covid jab advertising than on any other drug in history. So.

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The Democrats seem to have gotten themselves a little momentum on their amorphous ‘affordability’ gag, but can it last? Tech Buzz ran a story yesterday headlined, “Black Friday shatters records with $11.8B in online sales..” Womp. The sub-headline added, “Americans spent $11.8B online on Black Friday, up +9% year-over-year.”

“The numbers,” the article said, “are staggering.” It wasn’t just online sales. Retail foot traffic rose +1.17% overall, retail sales (excluding autos) rose +4.1%, with department stores posting a solid +7.9% increase in discount seekers over last year.

I cannot attest to this personally, since I would rather undertake a series of dental surgeries than go shopping on Black Friday. But you get the idea. Americans are spending like drunk cruise shippers on a Tijuana shopping excursion.

It seems clear. Despite Democrats’ gloom and doom about ‘consumer sentiment,’ the National Retail Federation projects this year will be the first holiday season in history to rocket past $1 trillion in consumer sales. It’s good news about consumer sentiment, and it is very good news for retailers and retail workers. In other words: more Trump 2.0 records.

This is a great start, but remember what I told you. Cost-cutting is fine and dandy for the short term, but we can’t deflate our way out of the Biden inflation. Wages must rise. Now consider the next story.

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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific story headlined, “Data Centers Are a ‘Gold Rush’ for Construction Workers.” The sub-headline explained, “Surging demand means six-figure pay and more perks.”

Say what you like about Trump’s Artificial Intelligence moonshot. Feel free to gloomily speculate about entry-level jobs being eventually washed away by chatbots. But out in the real world, Trump’s AI project is actually delivering a gold rush of high-paying jobs— right now and for the predictable future.

“I pinch myself going to work every day,” gushed DeMond Chambliss, 51, who used to hang residential drywall when he could get work. “It’s like the gold rush,” he added, awed.

Marc Benner, who is 60, is pulling down $225,000 a year as an electrical safety inspector. “It’s my American dream,” Benner glowed. There simply aren’t enough construction workers around to satisfy the demand, so wages are booming, as the competition for labor gets white-hot. “There’s a labor arms race taking place in the world of artificial intelligence,” explained ABC’s chief economist Anirban Basu.

“In this industry, stability is a really big thing,” said Michael Damme, 43, who is now earning $200,000 a year overseeing concrete construction. “When I first started in the trades, you had to save up all your money in the event you had to sit for a month or two with no work,” Damme explained. But not now. “It’s increased my pay tremendously,” reported Andrew Mason, 53, an electrician who is making more than $200,000 a year overseeing around 325 workers at six data centers.

Even brand-new electricians are making $27 an hour as apprentices, and then start at $60 an hour as soon as they graduate from training.

“There aren’t enough people to build the magnitude of the work out there right now,” one contractor explained. “There’s only a set pool to pull from, and every general contractor in the country is trying to pull from it right now.”

That demand doesn’t just affect wages for workers in AI construction. Other industries must compete for the same pool of construction workers. So the effect is national, transcending geography or industry.

📈 One recruiter quoted for the story said that workers who shift into the data-center industry —from electricians to project managers— earn +25% to +30% more than they did before. “Data centers are ballooning in size,” the Journal reported, “and a single project can take years to construct and require thousands of workers.”

Blue-collar workers are even being offered perks they’ve only ever dreamed of before, like heated and air-conditioned break tents, free lunches, bonuses, remote work (for positions like project managers), and paid time off.

Tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft currently operate 522 data centers with another 411 in development. And it is just getting started. Once a hyperscale data center goes online, it reliably triggers three even bigger layers of follow-on development.

First are the direct support businesses, like maintenance firms (think HVAC, electrical, generator servicing), fiber and network providers, fuel suppliers, security contractors, landscape businesses, and staffing services.

Secondary development includes nearby hotels to serve the constant churn of technical visitors and vendors, quick-service restaurants and retail, light industrial and warehouses, office buildings, and training centers and trade schools. Thousands of workers will be involved for several years to bring each center online.

Data centers don’t just run servers. They bend local real estate around them like gravity.

In the longer term, there will be substantial residential growth near a hyperscale data center. It’s not that many workers are needed in the data center itself — those figures are shockingly low compared to its footprint — but in all the support infrastructure. Not only that, but in order to recruit a big data center, local counties must upgrade much of their existing infrastructure, like water, sewer, roads, and electricity, in what economists call the “utility uplift effect.”

Finally, data centers pay lots of local taxes, but use few services. Those additional tax revenues fund new schools, parks, roads, emergency services, and zoning improvements, all of which turbocharge local housing growth, which requires yet more contractors, electricians, builders, and so on.

Data centers don’t find cities that can support them; they build them outbecause of the support networks and infrastructure that must grow around them.

The public debate over AI focuses mostly on its effects on Wall Street—stock prices, white-collar jobs, coders—but overlooks the massive building boom driving up wages and quality of living on Main Street.

Kids don’t need to learn to code. They need to learn to build things.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you, once again, for your continuing loyal support. We’ll gather together again tomorrow morning —in December!— to kick off the last month of 2025 with a new roundup of essential news and commentary.

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