There’s a civil trial going on right now in the state of California that hasn’t gotten much attention at all. For the most part, the corporate press doesn’t want to talk about it, probably because it would upset some of their biggest advertisers. But if you have any interest in learning more about how the alleged “science” concerning vaccines actually works in this country, it’s one of the most important cases that’s ever been tried.
I’m talking about a product liability lawsuit that’s underway against the pharmaceutical giant Merck. The litigation relates to allegations that Merck concealed serious side effects of its “Gardasil” vaccine, which promised to protect people from getting HPV — a virus that can lead to cervical cancer in women. Merck of course denies the allegations, and the jury hasn’t returned a verdict yet.
But even without a verdict, the fact that this case has made it to trial, in and of itself, is worth talking about. Concerns about the Gardasil vaccine have been widespread for nearly two decades, since it was first introduced to the market. Here for example are two news clips from 2008 and 2009, related to the first version of the vaccine. Watch:
Put aside for a second whether Gardasil was indeed dangerous, or whether Merck lied in its advertising. Those are questions that I don’t pretend to be an authority on. That’s for a jury to decide. The really interesting question is why it took until 2025 for anyone to resolve, definitively, the question of whether this vaccine is actually as safe as advertised. The fact that the judge has allowed this case to go to trial means the allegations, at a minimum, probably aren’t frivolous. So how was this vaccine — which has been taken by countless people — allowed to escape this kind of serious scrutiny for so long?
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
That fact alone — the existence of an information blackout on such an important vaccine — is of course just one of many harrowing, unexplained failures of the public health establishment in this country. If you pull up one of the complaints against Merck, which was filed by the law firm Wisner Baum, you’ll find a lot of other very disturbing allegations too. One woman, the main plaintiff in the case, alleges she’s been confined to a wheelchair since the age of 16 because of the vaccine.
There are also allegations that Merck paid doctors and nonprofits thousands of dollars to promote the vaccine, as well as claims that Merck lied about the vaccine’s contents. Normally, allegations like this never see the inside of a courthouse, because the pharmaceutical industry enjoys a broad liability shield. This case is a rare exception.
I mention the lawsuit over the Gardasil vaccine because it came up yesterday during the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. That’s because RFK Jr. worked with the law firm that brought the case against Merck, and he stands to benefit financially from the outcome. In other words, RFK Jr. played a role in finding the plaintiffs for this very rare, and very important lawsuit that’s currently in progress against Big Pharma. Here’s how Elizabeth Warren questioned Kennedy about it. Watch:
What’s extraordinary about this moment is that Warren has built her entire career around the lie that she’s a populist — or at least, someone who’s extremely skeptical of entrenched corporate power, particularly when it’s held by banks. But in this case, Warren is pretty much indistinguishable from a lawyer for Big Pharma. She’s berating RFK Jr. because he took Big Pharma to court over the HPV vaccine. And even though he’s stated that he won’t pursue any lawsuits while he’s in government, it’s not enough for her. She wants him to commit to renouncing lawsuits that he’s already participated in, or that he might pursue after leaving office. And he wouldn’t agree to that.
I’m not going to speculate on Warren’s motivations. You can point to various campaign contributions she’s received from the pharmaceutical industry, as many people already have. Actually, on second thought, I am speculating that Elizabeth Warren is a bought and paid for shill for Big Pharma. Not speculating but outright accusing her of it. Still the truth is, this is a much larger problem than Elizabeth Warren. Throughout the hearing, RFK Jr. was repeatedly attacked by Democrats simply for questioning the safety and efficacy of various drugs that are widely prescribed. These are drugs we’re assured are effective, even though there are very real reasons to doubt that. And in particular, Kennedy was hit over his skepticism of SSRIs, in the most unfair and disingenuous way imaginable. Here’s Tina Smith of Minnesota, in one of the most egregious moments from this hearing:
RFK’s response at the end of that clip is obviously the right one. Remember the 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine? The shooter killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar. We still don’t know what, if any, drugs he was taking at the time of the incident.
The same is true of the trans-identifying mass shooter here in Tennessee. The Tennessee Star has reported, citing a search warrant, that Vanderbilt had prescribed SSRIs to the shooter. But we don’t know if the shooter was actively taking those medications, because neither the police nor Vanderbilt will tell us. And therefore, it wouldn’t show up in any “studies” that purport to show how many mass shooters were on SSRIs.
This is the norm, when it comes to these academic papers on SSRIs. And as I’ve previously discussed, there’s another way that these “studies” hide the number of mass shooters who are on SSRIs. Basically, they include inner city violence in their tally of mass shootings. So if a bunch of gang members in the South Side of Chicago shoot up a birthday party or something, that gets added to the tally of mass shootings. And because those kinds of shootings happen every day in places like Chicago — for reasons that have nothing to do with SSRIs, like turf disputes and so on — the authors of these studies can make it seem like SSRIs don’t cause mass shootings. But they’re really just obfuscating the central question by flooding the data set with unrelated shootings. The core question — which is whether SSRIs cause otherwise law-abiding young students to shoot their classmates — remains unresolved in medical literature.
It’s not surprise and no secret that young angry males who grow up in the hood with no father figures and get involved in gangs and drug dealing by the age of 12 would turn to violence. There’s no mystery there. But there is a mystery as to why a child who has never been violent, who was not raised by a street gang, who is financially stable, would one day casually execute a dozen classmates for no reason that he can even articulate. Why is that happening? And why is it that so often these kids are on psychiatric medication?
MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+
There are definitely reasons to think SSRIs could play a role in this kind of violence. For one thing, you can look at the warning label on SSRIs, which states that the drugs can actually increase the risk of suicide and violent behavior in some cases. The drugmakers are telling us outright that these drugs can put violent thoughts into your head. They can make you want to lash out violently against yourself or other people. The pharmaceutical companies are telling us that directly. And yet when that thing happens, they will insist that the drug they said can cause it to happen, must not have caused it to happen.
Or you can look at the studies that show that SSRIs can increase the risk of violence in people who aren’t depressed at all. A few years ago, for example, researchers in Denmark reviewed experiments going back to the 1960s. And they found that, when healthy volunteers — meaning, people with no mental health issues — were given antidepressants, the drugs doubled their risk of “suicidality and violence.”
So why did that happen? Why might SSRIs make healthy people more violent?
The honest answer is that we have no idea. Just a few years ago, we learned that there’s actually no clear link between low serotonin levels and depression. This was the central claim that supposedly justified the mass-adoption of SSRIs in this country, and it’s completely false. We have no idea what these drugs are actually doing. So maybe we should pump the brakes a bit. That’s what RFK tried to say yesterday. Here’s the response he got:
Usually, you expect that in a confirmation hearing, the worst thing that can happen is that the nominee says something disqualifying. But in this case, the senator said something disqualifying. Let me be extremely clear about this: If you need psychiatric drugs in order to function, then you are not fit to serve at the highest levels of government. You’re not qualified to teach elementary school students or operate heavy machinery, for that matter. You simply cannot claim that you’re competent to govern if you need to regularly take psychoactive substances. Am I saying that every lawmaker on anti-depressants should be removed from office? Yes, I am absolutely saying that. That should be common sense.
More importantly, RFK is obviously right about SSRIs. When the peer-reviewed journal “Molecular Psychiatry” — one of the most prominent journals in the field — admits that depression isn’t actually caused by a serotonin imbalance, which is what happened in 2022, then it’s obviously worth taking a close look at a class of antidepressants that’s entitled, “Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors.” If a comprehensive review finds that we were wrong about these drugs for decades, then maybe we need some more information and studies before we prescribe them to millions of people — including children.
But of course, this is a pattern in the healthcare industry. Drugs are approved all the time when they don’t actually work — at least not in any way that we understand. As RFK Jr. said yesterday, it was a similar story for Alzheimer’s drugs. Some of these drugs received a lot of funding and fast-track approvals, only to turn out to be completely useless. In one case, the data supporting these drugs was actually faked. Watch:
By this point you can probably tell that this hearing didn’t go very well for Democrats. Later on, they tried to attack him for pointing out that Lyme Disease has some very conspicuous origins. Apparently we’re supposed to think — post-COVID — that it’s an outlandish conspiracy theory to believe that Lyme Disease could possibly have anything to do with government labs injecting ticks with various exotic diseases.
Then there was this moment, where one Democrat tried to make the point that RFK Jr. doesn’t believe that germs can cause disease. Then he refuted what she was saying, so she just “read it into the record” anyway. Watch:
These hearings are all like this. They’re not actually about getting any kind of thoughtful answer from the nominee. It’s all drive-by soundbites. It doesn’t even matter what he says.
But even by this low standard, there was one moment in yesterday’s hearing that managed to stand out. This moment comes to us from Bernie Sanders. Sanders began by asking RFK Jr. whether healthcare is a human right, and he said no, because no one — especially gluttons or habitual smokers — is entitled to anyone else’s labor. And then Sanders resorted to berating RFK Jr. for his support of anti-vaccine apparel — specifically, anti-vaccine onesies. Behold one of the greatest moments in modern congressional history:
This is the level of seriousness that Democrats are applying to these confirmation hearings. They barely even mentioned gender ideology, or how RFK Jr. plans to end the castration of children in this country. They weren’t remotely interested in his call for more transparent and accurate data in modern medicine. Instead, one by one, Democrats ran interference for Big Pharma. They talked about anti-vax “onesies” and demanded that RFK stop bullying Merck.
Democrats like to pretend that they stand against “corporate greed” and so on. But you simply cannot pretend to be an avenger for the working class standing against corrupt billionaires if you will also defend the pharmaceutical industry to your dying breath. There is no greater example of corporate greed than what we have seen from Big Pharma.
This is an industry that we know for an absolute fact has pushed literal poison on people, by the millions, and done it all for no reason other than pure profit. This is the industry that supplies actual castration drugs to 13-year-olds. An industry that got millions of Americans hooked on anti-depressants on false pretenses, based on a belief in a chemical imbalance that doesn’t exist. There are dozens of other examples just like this. And they are all things that Democrats don’t want us to talk about — and have in fact attempted to forcibly prevent us from talking about.
So whatever reservations conservatives have about RFK Jr., it’s very clear that he needs to be confirmed. We have a real opportunity to install someone who is skeptical of the junk science we’ve been relentlessly fed for decades, on everything from SSRIs to Alzheimer’s to gender ideology. And after yesterday’s debacle of a confirmation hearing, it’s clear we need to take this opportunity now, while we still have it.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
There’s a civil trial going on right now in the state of California that hasn’t gotten much attention at all. For the most part, the corporate press doesn’t want to talk about it, probably because it would upset some of their biggest advertisers. But if you have any interest in learning more about how the alleged “science” concerning vaccines actually works in this country, it’s one of the most important cases that’s ever been tried.
I’m talking about a product liability lawsuit that’s underway against the pharmaceutical giant Merck. The litigation relates to allegations that Merck concealed serious side effects of its “Gardasil” vaccine, which promised to protect people from getting HPV — a virus that can lead to cervical cancer in women. Merck of course denies the allegations, and the jury hasn’t returned a verdict yet.
But even without a verdict, the fact that this case has made it to trial, in and of itself, is worth talking about. Concerns about the Gardasil vaccine have been widespread for nearly two decades, since it was first introduced to the market. Here for example are two news clips from 2008 and 2009, related to the first version of the vaccine. Watch:
Put aside for a second whether Gardasil was indeed dangerous, or whether Merck lied in its advertising. Those are questions that I don’t pretend to be an authority on. That’s for a jury to decide. The really interesting question is why it took until 2025 for anyone to resolve, definitively, the question of whether this vaccine is actually as safe as advertised. The fact that the judge has allowed this case to go to trial means the allegations, at a minimum, probably aren’t frivolous. So how was this vaccine — which has been taken by countless people — allowed to escape this kind of serious scrutiny for so long?
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
That fact alone — the existence of an information blackout on such an important vaccine — is of course just one of many harrowing, unexplained failures of the public health establishment in this country. If you pull up one of the complaints against Merck, which was filed by the law firm Wisner Baum, you’ll find a lot of other very disturbing allegations too. One woman, the main plaintiff in the case, alleges she’s been confined to a wheelchair since the age of 16 because of the vaccine.
There are also allegations that Merck paid doctors and nonprofits thousands of dollars to promote the vaccine, as well as claims that Merck lied about the vaccine’s contents. Normally, allegations like this never see the inside of a courthouse, because the pharmaceutical industry enjoys a broad liability shield. This case is a rare exception.
I mention the lawsuit over the Gardasil vaccine because it came up yesterday during the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. That’s because RFK Jr. worked with the law firm that brought the case against Merck, and he stands to benefit financially from the outcome. In other words, RFK Jr. played a role in finding the plaintiffs for this very rare, and very important lawsuit that’s currently in progress against Big Pharma. Here’s how Elizabeth Warren questioned Kennedy about it. Watch:
What’s extraordinary about this moment is that Warren has built her entire career around the lie that she’s a populist — or at least, someone who’s extremely skeptical of entrenched corporate power, particularly when it’s held by banks. But in this case, Warren is pretty much indistinguishable from a lawyer for Big Pharma. She’s berating RFK Jr. because he took Big Pharma to court over the HPV vaccine. And even though he’s stated that he won’t pursue any lawsuits while he’s in government, it’s not enough for her. She wants him to commit to renouncing lawsuits that he’s already participated in, or that he might pursue after leaving office. And he wouldn’t agree to that.
I’m not going to speculate on Warren’s motivations. You can point to various campaign contributions she’s received from the pharmaceutical industry, as many people already have. Actually, on second thought, I am speculating that Elizabeth Warren is a bought and paid for shill for Big Pharma. Not speculating but outright accusing her of it. Still the truth is, this is a much larger problem than Elizabeth Warren. Throughout the hearing, RFK Jr. was repeatedly attacked by Democrats simply for questioning the safety and efficacy of various drugs that are widely prescribed. These are drugs we’re assured are effective, even though there are very real reasons to doubt that. And in particular, Kennedy was hit over his skepticism of SSRIs, in the most unfair and disingenuous way imaginable. Here’s Tina Smith of Minnesota, in one of the most egregious moments from this hearing:
RFK’s response at the end of that clip is obviously the right one. Remember the 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine? The shooter killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar. We still don’t know what, if any, drugs he was taking at the time of the incident.
The same is true of the trans-identifying mass shooter here in Tennessee. The Tennessee Star has reported, citing a search warrant, that Vanderbilt had prescribed SSRIs to the shooter. But we don’t know if the shooter was actively taking those medications, because neither the police nor Vanderbilt will tell us. And therefore, it wouldn’t show up in any “studies” that purport to show how many mass shooters were on SSRIs.
This is the norm, when it comes to these academic papers on SSRIs. And as I’ve previously discussed, there’s another way that these “studies” hide the number of mass shooters who are on SSRIs. Basically, they include inner city violence in their tally of mass shootings. So if a bunch of gang members in the South Side of Chicago shoot up a birthday party or something, that gets added to the tally of mass shootings. And because those kinds of shootings happen every day in places like Chicago — for reasons that have nothing to do with SSRIs, like turf disputes and so on — the authors of these studies can make it seem like SSRIs don’t cause mass shootings. But they’re really just obfuscating the central question by flooding the data set with unrelated shootings. The core question — which is whether SSRIs cause otherwise law-abiding young students to shoot their classmates — remains unresolved in medical literature.
It’s not surprise and no secret that young angry males who grow up in the hood with no father figures and get involved in gangs and drug dealing by the age of 12 would turn to violence. There’s no mystery there. But there is a mystery as to why a child who has never been violent, who was not raised by a street gang, who is financially stable, would one day casually execute a dozen classmates for no reason that he can even articulate. Why is that happening? And why is it that so often these kids are on psychiatric medication?
MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+
There are definitely reasons to think SSRIs could play a role in this kind of violence. For one thing, you can look at the warning label on SSRIs, which states that the drugs can actually increase the risk of suicide and violent behavior in some cases. The drugmakers are telling us outright that these drugs can put violent thoughts into your head. They can make you want to lash out violently against yourself or other people. The pharmaceutical companies are telling us that directly. And yet when that thing happens, they will insist that the drug they said can cause it to happen, must not have caused it to happen.
Or you can look at the studies that show that SSRIs can increase the risk of violence in people who aren’t depressed at all. A few years ago, for example, researchers in Denmark reviewed experiments going back to the 1960s. And they found that, when healthy volunteers — meaning, people with no mental health issues — were given antidepressants, the drugs doubled their risk of “suicidality and violence.”
So why did that happen? Why might SSRIs make healthy people more violent?
The honest answer is that we have no idea. Just a few years ago, we learned that there’s actually no clear link between low serotonin levels and depression. This was the central claim that supposedly justified the mass-adoption of SSRIs in this country, and it’s completely false. We have no idea what these drugs are actually doing. So maybe we should pump the brakes a bit. That’s what RFK tried to say yesterday. Here’s the response he got:
Usually, you expect that in a confirmation hearing, the worst thing that can happen is that the nominee says something disqualifying. But in this case, the senator said something disqualifying. Let me be extremely clear about this: If you need psychiatric drugs in order to function, then you are not fit to serve at the highest levels of government. You’re not qualified to teach elementary school students or operate heavy machinery, for that matter. You simply cannot claim that you’re competent to govern if you need to regularly take psychoactive substances. Am I saying that every lawmaker on anti-depressants should be removed from office? Yes, I am absolutely saying that. That should be common sense.
More importantly, RFK is obviously right about SSRIs. When the peer-reviewed journal “Molecular Psychiatry” — one of the most prominent journals in the field — admits that depression isn’t actually caused by a serotonin imbalance, which is what happened in 2022, then it’s obviously worth taking a close look at a class of antidepressants that’s entitled, “Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors.” If a comprehensive review finds that we were wrong about these drugs for decades, then maybe we need some more information and studies before we prescribe them to millions of people — including children.
But of course, this is a pattern in the healthcare industry. Drugs are approved all the time when they don’t actually work — at least not in any way that we understand. As RFK Jr. said yesterday, it was a similar story for Alzheimer’s drugs. Some of these drugs received a lot of funding and fast-track approvals, only to turn out to be completely useless. In one case, the data supporting these drugs was actually faked. Watch:
By this point you can probably tell that this hearing didn’t go very well for Democrats. Later on, they tried to attack him for pointing out that Lyme Disease has some very conspicuous origins. Apparently we’re supposed to think — post-COVID — that it’s an outlandish conspiracy theory to believe that Lyme Disease could possibly have anything to do with government labs injecting ticks with various exotic diseases.
Then there was this moment, where one Democrat tried to make the point that RFK Jr. doesn’t believe that germs can cause disease. Then he refuted what she was saying, so she just “read it into the record” anyway. Watch:
These hearings are all like this. They’re not actually about getting any kind of thoughtful answer from the nominee. It’s all drive-by soundbites. It doesn’t even matter what he says.
But even by this low standard, there was one moment in yesterday’s hearing that managed to stand out. This moment comes to us from Bernie Sanders. Sanders began by asking RFK Jr. whether healthcare is a human right, and he said no, because no one — especially gluttons or habitual smokers — is entitled to anyone else’s labor. And then Sanders resorted to berating RFK Jr. for his support of anti-vaccine apparel — specifically, anti-vaccine onesies. Behold one of the greatest moments in modern congressional history:
This is the level of seriousness that Democrats are applying to these confirmation hearings. They barely even mentioned gender ideology, or how RFK Jr. plans to end the castration of children in this country. They weren’t remotely interested in his call for more transparent and accurate data in modern medicine. Instead, one by one, Democrats ran interference for Big Pharma. They talked about anti-vax “onesies” and demanded that RFK stop bullying Merck.
Democrats like to pretend that they stand against “corporate greed” and so on. But you simply cannot pretend to be an avenger for the working class standing against corrupt billionaires if you will also defend the pharmaceutical industry to your dying breath. There is no greater example of corporate greed than what we have seen from Big Pharma.
This is an industry that we know for an absolute fact has pushed literal poison on people, by the millions, and done it all for no reason other than pure profit. This is the industry that supplies actual castration drugs to 13-year-olds. An industry that got millions of Americans hooked on anti-depressants on false pretenses, based on a belief in a chemical imbalance that doesn’t exist. There are dozens of other examples just like this. And they are all things that Democrats don’t want us to talk about — and have in fact attempted to forcibly prevent us from talking about.
So whatever reservations conservatives have about RFK Jr., it’s very clear that he needs to be confirmed. We have a real opportunity to install someone who is skeptical of the junk science we’ve been relentlessly fed for decades, on everything from SSRIs to Alzheimer’s to gender ideology. And after yesterday’s debacle of a confirmation hearing, it’s clear we need to take this opportunity now, while we still have it.
“}]]
