He was astonished at how well some of them could speak American English without an accent, and puzzled by the strange habit some had of wearing white socks with dress shoes.

Part of basic CIA training was to be wary of attractive foreign women who are unusually and unaccountably friendly. A good rule of thumb was expressed in the pithy saying:

If you encounter pretty young girl who really likes you and the situation seems too good to be true, that’s because it is.

I thought of Cold War honey traps yesterday when I saw the news of Jensen Huang’s misadventure with an attractive Chinese woman. The billionaire founder and chief executive of Nvidia has admitted to having an extramarital affair with a Chinese businesswoman suspected of working for Chinese intelligence.

Huang made his admission following investigative reporting by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. The big question now is whether Huang—whose company manufactures some of the world's most strategically important artificial-intelligence processors—was honey-trapped by Chinese intelligence with the goal of obtaining sensitive information about his business and products, or to influence American semiconductor export policy.

Though Mr. Huang’s has not stated his paramour’s name, he made the admission of infidelity after reports identified her as Alice Huang. Also known as Huang Le, she is a Chinese citizen who became a senior executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based company that purchases Nvidia processors and supplies AI computing infrastructure.

Megaspeed has reportedly purchased more than $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips over two years. The company has drawn scrutiny over allegations that advanced American semiconductors may have been diverted to Chinese customers in violation of U.S. export restrictions. Megaspeed has denied allegations of illegal chip transfers

According to the Financial Times, American intelligence officials have concluded that Alice Huang was indeed recruited by China's Ministry of State Security, the country's main civilian intelligence agency, to collect information about Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's business dealings with China.

The New York Times reported that a classified memorandum, directed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, circulated among senior Trump administration officials in the spring of 2026. The memo was reportedly based on electronic surveillance and described Huang's relationship with the suspected intelligence operative. These assessments have not been independently acknowledged to the public.

The circumstances in which Jensen Huang and Alice Huang met remain unclear. Photographs reportedly show them together at an industry conference in Taipei in June 2024. During the Computex technology exhibition in May 2025, they were captured on video together at a restaurant gathering hosted by Jensen Huang.

Footage reportedly shows Alice Huang kissing the Nvidia executive on the cheek, touching his lower back, and later departing in the same automobile. These encounters became highly significant after American intelligence reportedly identified her as a suspected Chinese operative.

Yesterday, November 8, Huang acknowledged his marital infidelity in an internal communication to Nvidia employees, declaring: “I was unfaithful to my wife.” He apologized to his family and colleagues. Nvidia simultaneously announced that independent directors, assisted by outside legal counsel, would investigate whether its chief executive had been targeted by foreign intelligence. The company declared it had no reason to believe its confidential information or American national security had been compromised, and no evidence of such as compromise has been reported. The Chinese government denies the espionage allegations, describing them as an attempt to discredit Beijing.

Huang has been an influential advocate of relaxing American restrictions on semiconductor exports to China, arguing that continued access to the Chinese market serves Nvidia’s commercial interests and helps preserve American technological leadership. His lobbying is said to have persuaded President Trump to permit certain advanced Nvidia processors to be sold to China.

Mr. Huang’s troubles reminded me of Neil Bush’s misadventures in China. In November 2003, it was revealed that Mr. Bush—the younger brother of President George W. Bush and son of former President George H. W. Bush— had possibly been honey-trapped while traveling on business in Hong Kong and Thailand in the late 1990s.

In Mr. Bush’s case, the possible honeytrap was decidedly unsophisticated. Attractive young women simply showed up at his hotel-room door, knocked, and said they were there to show him a good time.

He stated in a deposition during his 2003 divorce that these encounters happened on several occasions, that he did not know the women, and that he had not paid them.

The attorney taking the deposition expressed astonishment at the circumstances. Bush himself acknowledged that the encounters were highly unusual. Asked whether the women were prostitutes, he replied that he did not know.

The revelations drew special attention because of Bush’s lucrative business relationship with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, a Shanghai-based semiconductor manufacturer established in 2000. One of its founders was Jiang Mianheng, the son of Jiang Zemin, who served as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1989 to 2002 and president of China from 1993 to 2003.

Per a consulting agreement signed in August 2002, Bush was entitled to receive $2 million in company stock over five years, plus $10,000 for attending each board meeting. During his deposition, Bush acknowledged he had no training in semiconductor technology. Critical observers wondered if he received this generous compensation for his (non) expertise or for his exceptionally strong political connections.

The circumstances raised the possibility that Bush had been honey-trapped by Chinese intelligence for the purpose of obtaining compromising information or leverage over the US President’s brother, though these suspicions were never verified as fact—at least not publicly.

Like Neil Bush, Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Armstrong, and Larry Ellison, Huang has discovered the many attractive qualities of Chinese women.

The story has inspired me to write a potboiler novel (working title Chips & Honey) about the intersection of sexual desire, power, exploitation, and the quest for world AI dominance.

I’m finding creative inspiration in David Bowie’s dark 1983 hit, “Little China Girl”—the sort of super weird and disturbing song and video that only Mr. Bowie could invent and get away with.

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar work—especially the opening guitar riff (a dyad melody played over an E minor harmony)—strikes me as wonderfully creative.

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The most difficult question I get in clinical practice why are some people ostensibly fine after multiple mRNA shots and others are not.

🧬 How Does Pfizer and Moderna Get Broken Down in the Human Body?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that immunologists whisper about but public health officials bury: the innate immune response is one of the most genetically variable systems in the human body, and mRNA vaccines—unlike traditional protein vaccines—are engineered to slam directly into that system.

A traditional vaccine delivers an antigen. An mRNA vaccine delivers a genetic instruction encoded in a molecule your body has evolved to treat as a viral invasion signal. The moment those lipid nanoparticles fuse with your cells, your innate immune system doesn’t see “vaccine.” It sees “pathogen-associated molecular pattern.” And how your individual genome responds to that alarm is... deeply, profoundly individual. It is key to understand how your body could and will get rid of Pfizer and Moderna synthetic mRNA through the final pathway of RNase L.

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On November 5, 2026, a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London convicted British comedian, actor, and broadcaster Russell Brand of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, following a four-week criminal trial.

Brand was acquitted of two additional rape charges and one charge of attempted indecent assault. Sentencing is scheduled for November 9, and Brand faces a potentially lengthy prison sentence.

Brand denied all charges. He acknowledged having been promiscuous during the period in question, but he insisted that his sexual encounters were consensual.

The following are the offenses for which he was convicted and the circumstances in which they are alleged to have occurred.

Rape: The complainant stated that she met Brand backstage at a stand-up comedy show in early 2009 and then visited him in his townhouse in Hampstead, North London. She claimed the sexual encounter began as consensual but became nonconsensual when he forced anal sex.

Sexual Assault: The complainant claimed that, in the summer of 2004, at a bar in Soho, Central London, during her birthday celebration, Brand groped her breasts.

Sexual Assault: The complainant stated that in the summer of 2004 or 2005, at the Capital Radio building (Choice FM corridor) in London, Brand violently kissed and groped her (a Choice FM worker) in front of his entourage while she was at work.

Sexual Assault: The complainant stated that on a Channel 4 recording set, members of Brand’s entourage told her he would not film the production unless she massaged him. She claimed that she consented to giving the massage, but while performing it, he lunged at her groin.

Brand’s defense argued that the allegations had been reconstructed or reinterpreted many years after the events, following damaging media reporting in September 2023.

The task for the prosecution was to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Brand had committed criminal sexual acts. This was no easy task, given the passage of up to two decades and the limited amount of physical and contemporaneous evidence that could be presented that could verify the claims of the accusers.

The accusers were granted anonymity and shielded from view from Brand and the jury by a large blue screen, though Brand and his attorneys were informed of their identities, and Brand’s attorneys were given the opportunity to cross examine them.

The prosecution portrayed the incidents as examples of a recurring pattern: Brand allegedly exploited his charm, professional standing, and increasingly powerful celebrity status to obtain sexual gratification without the women’s consent.

All six women came forward to police after a September 2023 television documentary and newspaper investigation publicized other allegations against Brand. The complainants in the criminal trial were not the same as the complainants whose stories were told in media reporting.

What Evidence Was Presented in Court?

The most significant question at trial was if evidence could be presented to prove Brand’s guilt.

The Metropolitan Police acknowledged that there was no available CCTV or forensic evidence, and that the passage of time had severely limited the availability of digital records. The prosecution therefore based its case on the following.

• The detailed, graphic, and lurid nature of the alleged rape victim’s testimony. She told the jury that, although the encounter began with consensual sex, this ended when Brand flipped her over and anally raped her so violently that she struggled to breathe. She told the jury she begged him to stop but he refused, telling her, “I want you to feel my come.” She further testified that he chastised her for getting blood on his sheets and ordered her to clean up the mess before casually turning on the TV and instructing an assistant to escort her out.

• To support her testimony, the woman claimed that she confronted Brand in a text exchange approximately six months later. According to the woman, the text exchange read as follows:

  • Brand: “Because you are dirty and I want to push you further.”

  • Complainant: “I think you pushed me far enough; you treated me like an animal.”

  • Brand: “I’m sorry.”

  • NOTE: It is not clear from conflicting reports as to whether this text exchange was presented to the jury as original messages or screenshots that were authenticated and admitted as exhibits, or whether the exchange is a reconstruction from the woman’s memory of the exchange.

• Brand’s former flatmate, Mark Pinheiro, testified that Brand had told him he might have gone too far with a woman during the 1999 Labour Party conference. This concerned an allegation on which Brand was ultimately acquitted.

• Other acquaintances testified about his extraordinary sexual appetite and methods of persuading women to have sex. Such testimony portrayed his attitudes and behavior—but did not independently establish that a particular assault occurred.

• One complainant also testified that she reported the 2009 workplace incident to her manager. Such evidence could help establish circumstances and corroborate reporting, without necessarily proving the sexual misconduct itself.

• Inconsistencies in Brand’s accounts. According to police, Brand initially maintained that he did not recognize several complainants, but his recollections changed as the trial approached. Prosecutors argued that these changes undermined his credibility. Brand claimed the accusations prompted him to meditate on the period in question, which prompted him to recall the women.

• Prosecutors claimed that the women—who did not know one another—described broadly similar patterns of behavior, including abrupt sexual advances, disregard for objections, and apparently indifferent conduct afterward.

Defense Arguments

Brand’s barrister, Ian Winter KC, argued that sexual promiscuity, however distasteful, is not evidence of criminality. He challenged the complainants’ recollections, their failure to report the incidents for many years, and the possibility that the 2023 media investigation had influenced their subsequent interpretation of events.

The defense also questioned why some complainants had not physically resisted or immediately protested. The prosecution countered that victims respond to sexual assault in different ways and that the absence of resistance does not establish consent.

The jury’s verdict was mixed. It accepted four allegations beyond reasonable doubt but acquitted Brand of three others. It convicted him of sexually assaulting a woman at a birthday celebration in a London (Soho) bar in 2004 while acquitting him of raping the same woman during the same occasion.

Evaluating What Passed for Evidence

In my twenty years of investigating true crimes, I have consulted with many forensic scientists, prosecutors, and criminal defense attorneys. When trying to determine if an accused man is indeed guilty of grave crimes, it all comes down to the evidence. No matter how suspicious and unsympathetic we may find someone, we must remain focused on the proof of his guilt, and not our subjective perceptions and feelings about the accused.

My goal in writing this essay is not to proclaim Russell Brand’s innocence, but to point out what strikes me as grave deficiencies in the so-called evidence that was presented against him, the likelihood that the jury was prejudiced against him, and the likelihood that the jury felt considerable social and psychological pressure to find him guilty.

A central pillar of the Anglo-American criminal justice system is that accusations and denunciations are, by themselves, not sufficient to convict a man of grave crimes. The great English jurist, Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780) specifically addressed the danger of false accusations, malicious prosecutions, and wrongful convictions in his monumental Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in four volumes between 1765 and 1769.

Blackstone regarded the possibility of an innocent person being falsely accused and punished as a fundamental danger against which English criminal law must provide safeguards. He articulated the presumption of innocence and the principle that the state must establish guilt rather than require an accused person to prove innocence.

In Book IV, Chapter 27, “Of Trial, and Conviction,” Blackstone wrote:

For the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

This became known as Blackstone’s ratio, one of the most influential formulations of the principle that the criminal justice system should err on the side of protecting the innocent. Blackstone’s formulation expresses the conviction that the consequences of wrongful punishment are so serious that the law must impose a substantial burden of proof upon the prosecution.

At the time he wrote his monumental work, he reflected on the dark days of Europe’s religious wars and witch trials in the 16th and 17th centuries, when tens of thousands of people were persecuted for the crime of heresy on the basis of denunciations.

At the height of the witch hysteria, thousands of men and women were burned at the stake on the basis of lurid accusations with zero accompanying evidence that the accused were practicing witchcraft. Score settling, revenge, resentment, elimination of rivals, and scapegoating were common motives for denunciation.

I’m sure that Russell Brand was an aggressively promiscuous man during the period in question. He himself has admitted it. Thus, if he had been tried for being—at this earlier stage in his life—a selfish, sleazy, and arrogant jerk, it would probably be easy to adduce sufficient evidence to find him guilty as charged.

However, it strikes me as impossible to draw conclusions—beyond a reasonable doubt—about allegedly criminal sexual behavior that took place decades ago, with no supporting physical evidence such as medically documented injuries, no eyewitness testimony of the alleged acts, and only hearsay testimony from the victims’ friends and colleagues that is ambiguous and fragmentary.

Regarding the accusation of rape—by far the most serious charge for which Brand was convicted—the “reported” text message from his accuser in which she stated, “you treated me like an animal” may be plausibly evaluated as evidence that Brand made her feel like a cheap article of consumption and discarded as soon as his lust was sated. However, this is not evidence that he raped her. If he did rape her, she missed an opportunity to document it by not stating it in the text, not reporting it to the police, and not having a medical professional document her injury. No medical documentation of the alleged injury was presented at trial.

Brand’s “assistant” to whom she referred as escorting her out of the townhouse did not testify at the trial, and nor were any statements from him presented to the jury. One wonders why not, given that this assistant was—according to the woman—a witness of the immediate aftermath of the alleged crime and extreme trauma it inflicted on her.

The same can be said of Brand’s driver, whom the woman claimed drove her to a nearby Tube station and handed her tissue paper when he saw she was upset. Given that the driver could have served as a key witness of the woman’s mental state in the immediate aftermath of the alleged crime, one wonders why the jury heard no testimony or statements from him.

Were the police unable to find the assistant and the driver, or had they died in the intervening seventeen years? If so, it is an example of the difficulty of investigating and adjudicating an alleged crime after the passage of almost two decades.

One wonders why Brand was apparently so confident that he needn’t worry about the woman telling his assistant and his driver about the shocking crime that he had allegedly just committed against her. It’s a logical inference that, for all Brand knew, the woman would demand that his driver take her to the nearest police station.

The woman’s mother stated that the woman told her and her father about the rape and expressed fear that she may have contracted HIV from the incident, and therefore got tested for it. However, for some reason, the woman’s parents also chose not to report the incident to the police. That the woman’s father did not report the crime seems especially puzzling.

A former boyfriend of the woman stated in a 2025 police interview that the woman had told him about her anal intercourse with Brand, had been deeply upset by it, but that she had ultimately “come round,” suggesting that she had allowed herself to be talked into it. One of the woman’s female friends recalled the complainant saying she did not want anal sex but that Brand had assured her he would be gentle.

These witness statements added another element of ambiguity to what exactly happened in Brand’s bedroom seventeen years ago. The difficulty of evaluating the complainant’s testimony is further amplified by substantial scientific evidence that memory of events in the distant past tends to be reconstructive, heavily influenced by subsequent events and perceptions, and not a literal recording.

Another example of the extreme difficulty of evaluating the accusations made against Russell Brand is revealed in how the jury regarded the charge that he had sexually assaulted a woman in a Soho bar and subsequently “orally raped her” in the bar’s bathroom. The jury found Brand guilty of sexually assaulting her in the bar, but not guilty of “orally raping” her in the bathroom.

Given that the jury concluded that her claim that Brand “orally raped her” in the bathroom was insufficient to establish guilt, one wonders why it regarded her claim that he sexually assaulted her in the bar as sufficient to establish his guilt.

Brand claimed they went into the bathroom together to fool around; she claimed that he forced her into the bathroom. Brand’s defense attorney pointed out that she didn’t yell for help and that she got into Brand’s car after the alleged incident.

The woman acknowledged that she got into Brand’s car after the incident, but claimed she didn’t do so voluntarily, but was “shepherded along” and into the car without realizing it was Brand’s until she got into it. Nevertheless, she acknowledged that they went to another bar in Camden together. She claimed that, during the drive to the other bar, he again tried to force her to give him oral sex.

Brand’s defense attorney asked the jury how it was conceivable that a woman who had just been orally raped would get into her alleged assailant's car. The jury apparently concluded this was a good point, but still found Brand guilty of sexually assaulting her in the bar.

No eyewitnesses of the alleged sexual assault in the bar testified at the trial. The only testimony presented was that of hearsay witnesses whom the woman subsequently told about the incident. A man who attended the party testified that he recalled seeing Brand emerge from the bathroom, followed by a woman. He said Brand looked straight through him with a blank expression. He could not remember the woman's demeanor.

In the case of the alleged assault at the Capitol Radio Studio, none of the alleged eyewitnesses of the incident testified at the trial, and nor was any mention made at trial of any statements they may have made to the police.

The prosecutor’s claim—with respect to the sexual assault cases—that the absence of resistance or protest does not establish consent is perhaps true in the sense that some victims may be paralyzed by shock and fear. However, this raises the question of how precisely—in the absence of resistance or protest—a man can know that a woman does not consent to a sexual act.

By longstanding convention, men are usually expected to make the first move in sexual matters, but the conviction of Russell Brand suggests that any bold move to initiate sexual contact could be interpreted as a form of sexual assault if the advance is unwelcome.

This touches on our society’s schizophrenic attitude towards sex, vacillating between “hook-up culture” (in which celebrated men have access to innumerable eager partners) on the one hand, and outrage at male effrontery on the other.

The Timing of the Investigation and Accusations

According to the journalists who ultimately published the September 2023 report, they began their investigation in 2019 by seeking women who could and would relate their experiences of being sexually abused by Brand. This raises the following questions:

• What motivated these journalists in 2019 to investigate a period in Brand’s distant past? It strikes me as notable that journalists began to investigate Brand two years after he married his current spouse, split from his agent, and was working as an independent broadcaster. Why didn’t the British press investigate him during the much earlier period in question, when Brand had a current reputation for being a promiscuous cad?

• Upon finding women who claimed to have been abused by Brand, why didn’t the journalists encourage them to report the incidents to the police so that Brand would be officially investigated and judicially punished for his crimes? Reports indicate that the women they found did not want to endure the trouble of participating in a police investigation against a powerful man. While no one wants to participate in a police investigation, it’s extremely difficult to evaluate the veracity of accusations if they aren’t reported to criminal justice authorities.

• Why didn’t the Metropolitan police consider the accusations made in the media as sufficiently credible to serve as grounds for prosecution? According to published accounts, the Crown Prosecution concluded that the accusations made in the media could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, the accusations wouldn’t pass muster in court, but were sufficient for conditioning the British public, including potential jury members, to regard him as guilty.

• Before Brand’s trial, much of the British press had a field day with the lurid accusations against him, publishing little if any cautionary language about the presumption of innocence and the critical importance of supporting evidence. The marked slant of newspaper reporting conveyed the impression that the accusations are self-evidently true and that any questioning of their veracity is immoral and disrespectful of the alleged victims, as though expressing outrage for accusers is more important than observing due process for the accused. Reviewing these reports reminds me of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous remark in his 1830 review, “Moore’s Life of Lord Byron”—that is, “We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

• Given the media blitz of accusations against Brand in September 2023, how did the Crown Prosecution service conclude it could assemble an impartial jury in Britain?

• The probability that the jury was prejudiced against Brand was amplified by testimony about his generally promiscuous conduct that did not directly pertain to the crimes for which he was charged. The sexual assault charges such as breast groping with no eyewitness testimony also likely had a prejudicial effect on the minds of the jurors when it came to evaluating the testimony of the alleged rape victim.

The prosecution attributed significance to the fact that the complainants came forward independently from one another after viewing these media reports in 2023—as distinct from conspiring with each other to come forward.

Multiple media outlets reported the accusations in a coordinated fashion. One wonders if the accusers got the impression that someone with influence and resources—perhaps a senior media or public relations executive—welcomed their accusations.

A Concerning Timeline

• January 16, 2018: Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman interviews Jordan Peterson in which he challenges numerous British establishment pieties and orthodoxies. Cathy Newman comports herself in a way that is widely perceived as self-righteous, hostile, rude, and ineffectual. The video goes viral, thereby greatly elevating Peterson’s international profile and embarrassing Newman.

• February 14, 2018: Russell Brand interviews Jordon Peterson. Their collegial, serious, and thoughtful conversation is published on Brand’s podcast Under the Skin. As an independent media personality, Brand increasingly espouses views that many in Britain regard as “right wing” and challenging of British establishment pieties.

• 2019: Investigative journalists purportedly begin digging into Brand’s past.

• May, 13, 2020: Brand publicly questions Britain’s lockdown policies. In a YouTube video titled “Stay Alert! The Beginning of the End of Covid?” he asks whether the lockdown is justified and whether it should continue.

• 2021: Brand increasingly challenges vaccine mandates, government authority, and pharmaceutical-industry influence.

• November 25, 2021: Brand publishes Vaccine Mandates: THIS Is What History WARNS Us, criticizing governments’ response to protests against mandates.

• February 2022: In the lead-up to the delayed release of Disney’s Death on the Nile, in which Brand plays Dr. Windlesham, Brand intensifies his anti-establishment political activism on YouTube. He posts videos speaking out against vaccine mandates and questioning mainstream pandemic narratives. This clashes with Disney’s strict corporate stance and rigorous on-set safety mandates, creating substantial friction between the actor and the studio.

• May 12, 2023: Brand publishes his interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. titled RFK Jr. (Fauci, CIA Secrets & Running for President).

• September 16, 2023: Channel 4's Dispatches documentary and accompanying Times and Sunday Times investigation are published—a coordinated media action that resembles what propagandists call “flooding the zone.”

• September 25, 2023: The Metropolitan Police announces its criminal investigation of Russell Brand.

Why were British media outlets—and later the Metropolitan Police—so keen to investigate unsubstantiated allegations of Brand’s sexual misconduct in the distant past?

We know from the grooming gang scandal that British law enforcement has a record of being highly selective about investigating rape allegations. What motivated them to pursue such a vigorous investigation and prosecution of Brand, despite the paucity of evidence to support the accusations?

We also know from what happened to Julian Assange that high profile public figures who challenge powerful state agencies and political factions may be targeted for persecution. Accusations of sexual misconduct are a documented method for punishing and eliminating politically unpopular figures.

Is seems likely that all the media reporting about Russell Brand’s alleged sexual crimes and his trial for these alleged crimes has been a welcome distraction for innumerable powerful men—including multiple British media executives— mentioned in the Epstein Files. Russell Brand is not among this large cohort.

If accusations and denunciations—with little to no supporting evidence—are deemed sufficient for sending a man to prison, then any man may be subjected to such accusations, even if they are baseless.

From the experience of millions who lived under the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century—in which men and women could be thrown into a Gulag or Concentration Camp on the basis of a denunciation—we know the British people will ultimately be very sorry if their hard-won legal safeguards against possible false accusations are disregarded.

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Over the course of the pandemic, most would agree that the right wing parties across the globe have been more aligned with health sovereignty than the left. About a month before the US midterms, Dr Mary Talley Bowden issued an ultimatum to incumbent Republicans including President Trump, who was elected in part because of his union with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and the nascent MAHA coalition. Dr. Bowden is the founder of Americans for Health Freedom, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization. The group’s self-stated mission is to educate the public and representatives to champion individual medical freedom.

In response to the elections, I decided to review what has happened with Dr Bowden on a McCullough Foundation Twitter (X) live stream. Please enjoy these important insights.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

In a major safety announcement issued November 6, 2026, the FDA revealed that DNA delivered by Zolgensma had integrated into patients’ chromosomes in two tumor cases, involving the cancer-associated GLI1 oncogene. The agency explicitly described these findings as “confirmed reports of product-related insertional oncogenesis.”

Concerningly, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID shots use the same broad category of DNA-delivery technology as Zolgensma.

Zolgensma is a gene therapy designed to treat spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). It uses an adeno-associated virus (AAV9) vector to deliver DNA into human cells.

The FDA identified several concerning findings:

• Nine tumors have been reported among patients previously treated with Zolgensma, according to manufacturer Novartis.

• Two tumor cases demonstrated integration of Zolgensma vector DNA into the patients’ genomes.

• The integrated DNA contained a promoter inserted upstream of or within the GLI1 oncogene, potentially disrupting normal gene regulation.

The Connection to Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccines

Both Zolgensma and the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines use engineered viral vectors to deliver DNA into human cell nuclei.

The principal difference is the specific viral vector employed:

Zolgensma: Uses an adeno-associated virus (AAV9) vector carrying DNA that forms a double-stranded template inside cells.

Johnson & Johnson: Uses a replication-incompetent human adenovirus type 26 (Ad26) vector to deliver double-stranded DNA encoding the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

AstraZeneca: Uses a replication-incompetent chimpanzee adenoviral vector (ChAdOx1) to deliver double-stranded DNA encoding the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

All three technologies deliver foreign genetic material to the nucleus, where it can be transcribed into messenger RNA and subsequently translated into protein.

Although the vectors differ, both AAV and adenoviral vectors have demonstrated the capacity for chromosomal integration under certain experimental conditions.

The central finding is clear: a viral-vector gene therapy designed to deliver DNA without chromosomal integration has now been associated with confirmed insertional oncogenesis in human patients.

It appears it’s not just mRNA shots that can integrate into chromosomes, which we have previously shown:

This raises serious implications for viral-vector “vaccines.” It’s also surprising that the FDA performed its duty by announcing a risk of cancer associated with a genetic product. If only they applied the same level of scrutiny to the mass-administered COVID shots.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

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Please enjoy this update on Outside the Beltway with John Fredericks concerning early onset stroke in vaccinated US Senators, peptides, and testosterone replacement therapy.

A stroke before the age of 65 is clinically categorized as a stroke in a working-age or non-elderly adult. While medical literature often relies on the tighter "young-onset" bracket (ages 18 to 50), the age of 65 serves as a crucial demographic and clinical benchmark applicable to our congressman. If these four senators were afflicted with stroke after their public COVID-19 vaccination, which is known contribute to stroke, can you imagine how many ordinary Americans have been affected?

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) was released from the hospital on November 6, 2026, but will sit out Senate business for weeks while he undergoes rehabilitation for what has been described as a hemorrhagic stroke in the thalamus which is the pain center in the brain. My patients with thalamic stroke have tragically suffered with chronic limb pain for years. Both SARS-CoV-2 and mRNA induced hemorrhagic stroke has been described by Ota et al who found evidence of Spike protein in cerebral blood vessels.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company

Ota N, Itani M, Aoki T, Sakurai A, Fujisawa T, Okada Y, Noda K, Arakawa Y, Tokuda S, Tanikawa R. Expression of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in cerebral Arteries: Implications for hemorrhagic stroke Post-mRNA vaccination. J Clin Neurosci. 2025 Jun;136:111223. doi: 10.1016/j.jocn.2025.111223. Epub 2025 Apr 3. PMID: 40184822.

Please enjoy this brief response to the results of the November 4, 2026, where Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in a landslide “shellacking” in the midterm elections, dealing a major political rebuke to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But issues of concern for the medical freedom movement and MAHA were barely raised in campaigns. Could this have played a role in the political collapse? Dr McCullough reacts to conservative former White House correspondent John Solomon.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Chief Scientific Officer, The Wellness Company

England has recorded its highest annual number of cancer diagnoses on record, according to official NHS England statistics released on November 5, 2026.

A staggering 373,574 new cancer diagnoses were registered in 2024, averaging 1,021 diagnoses every single day.

• 373,574 diagnoses in 2024, the highest on record.

• 11,833 additional diagnoses compared with 2023.

• 3.3% year-over-year increase in recorded cancer diagnoses.

• 1.6% increase in age-standardized incidence, demonstrating that population aging alone does not explain the increase.

• 616,404 total cancers when common basal cell and cutaneous squamous cell skin cancers are included.

Prostate cancer remained among the most frequently diagnosed malignancies, with 61,115 new cases in 2024, an increase of approximately 4.1% from 2023.

Prostate, breast, lung, and bowel cancers collectively accounted for approximately 50% of diagnoses, excluding the common skin cancers.

In large part, you can thank the cancer-promoting mRNA injections now linked to increased risks of 7 major cancers via 35 distinct mechanisms:

By the end of 2022, 93.6% of residents aged 12 and older had received at least one mRNA dose, 88.3% had received two doses, and 70.2% had received a third or booster dose. The booster campaign overwhelmingly utilized Pfizer and Moderna mRNA injections.

There are consequences to administering oncogenic mRNA gene therapies to entire populations.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

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For days I wandered around the old city and its splendid architecture. Here I am on the Torre Tavira, an 18th century watchtower.

My favorite Spanish captain in history was Admiral Blas de Lezo (1689-1741). Nicknamed "Mediohombre" ("Half-Man") after he lost his left leg, right arm, and left eye in separate battles, he spent much of his career patrolling Caribbean and South American waters, hunting down and capturing pirate and privateer vessels.

In 1741 during the Battle of Cartagena de Indias, his small force of 6 ships and 3,000 men defeated a massive British invasion fleet of 186 ships and nearly 30,000 soldiers, preserving Spanish control of the Caribbean.

A monument in Cadiz depicts him on his peg leg with his saber drawn, apparently about to slash an English pirate to ribbons.

It’s tempting to think he is the inspiration of Captain Armando Salazar, the fanatical Spanish captain who seeks revenge against Jack Sparrow, played by Javier Bardem in the 2017 film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

British Navy officers were famous for their ability to handle their ships and work their guns, while the Spanish Navy was famous for the fighting quality of its boarding parties.

The history of maritime Spain is full of fascinating, adventurous, and incredibly brave men who are now largely forgotten. Reading it was a hobby of my carefree youth, before the world got so weird. Following the Freihafen conference here on Mallorca, I found myself wandering the waterside and wondering if any famous Spanish captains grew up here.

A little research turned up the story of gallant Lieutenant-General Antonio Barceló y Pont de la Terra (1 January 1717 – 30 January 1797). Of humble Mallorca origin, Barceló advanced on his merits alone, which was extremely unusual at a time when noble birth and connections were the rule for Spanish officers.

He fought against Barbary corsairs in the western Mediterranean, adopting their tactics to counter them, as served as a corsair hunter for most of his career. He later developed the Spanish usage of naval artillery and gunboats, leading to the creation of the fuerzas sutiles.

While writing this essay—waxing romantic about the gallant men and beautiful women of Spain—I was jolted from my reverie by a text message, sent from a friend, with the following announcement, issued by the Congressional Equality Caucus.

Is this a sign that I should remain in Spain?

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A major new peer-reviewed study conducted by MIT Professor Retsef Levi, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, and researchers at the Florida Department of Health, followed nearly 2 million adults for 12 months, comparing mortality outcomes among recipients of Pfizer’s BNT162b2 and Moderna’s mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccines.

They identified striking differences across four mortality categories.

PFIZER RECIPIENTS HAD HIGHER MORTALITY THAN MODERNA RECIPIENTS:

• ALL-CAUSE MORTALITY: 40% higher

• CARDIOVASCULAR MORTALITY: 57% higher

• COVID-19 MORTALITY: 91% higher

• NON-COVID-19 MORTALITY: 37% higher

The study analyzed 981,411 Pfizer recipients matched to 981,411 Moderna recipients. Participants were matched according to age, sex, race, ethnicity, vaccination month, vaccination location, and residential census tract.

Mortality was assessed over the 12 months following initial vaccination, using statewide immunization records linked to death certificates.

Importantly, the elevated all-cause mortality association persisted across age groups, while the cardiovascular and COVID-19 mortality differences were primarily driven by adults aged 60 and older. They also conducted negative-control and sensitivity analyses, reporting that their findings remained largely consistent after additional adjustments.

What Does This Mean for the United States?

Applying the study’s 40% higher all-cause mortality hazard to an assumed 150 million U.S. Pfizer recipients and a baseline annual mortality rate of 0.87% produces the following calculation:

150,000,000 × 0.0087 × 0.40 = 522,000

This yields a hypothetical extrapolation of 522,000 excess deaths from Pfizer alone.

A more conservative extrapolation uses the study’s directly observed absolute mortality difference of 221 additional deaths per 100,000 Pfizer recipients compared with Moderna:

150,000,000 × (221 ÷ 100,000) = 331,500

This produces an alternative estimate of 331,500 additional deaths relative to Moderna if the mortality difference observed in Florida were applied nationwide.

Both estimates represent catastrophic loss of life rivaling major wars. These lethal mRNA injections need to be REMOVED FROM THE MARKET IMMEDIATELY.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

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The answer, it seems to me, is that President Trump was widely perceived to have betrayed his “America First” campaign promises. Instead of maintaining his focus on policies that would serve patriotic American citizens who work for a living, he took a series of actions that seemed to be at the behest of his billionaire buddies and campaign contributors.

The perception that he is a man given to rude disloyalty was dramatically heightened by his treatment of Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene when they vigorously pursued the full release of the Epstein Files.

I’d been a steadfast Trump supporter for a decade, and to me, his preference for keeping the Epstein Files secret was the most spectacular example in history of a politician showing his true colors.

The only approximate precedent I can find was the discovery in 1792 that the fiery French Revolutionary, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau, had served as a paid court informant between 1789 and his death in 1791.

The trouble with the Epstein Class that President Trump wished to protect is that it is thoroughly repugnant to the increasingly narrow stratum of American citizens who may be classified as “middle class,” and who possess what the ancient Romans called “republican virtues.”

During the Roman Republic, these virtues were understood to be rooted in the mos maiorum (the ancestral custom or way of the elders) which emphasized a sense of duty to one’s family and the Republic, and having the moral discipline to choose duty over personal ambitions and pleasures.

The core republican virtues were as follows:

• Virtus (Manliness and Courage): Realized through active, brave service and leadership in defense of the res publica (the public affair or state), particularly on the battlefield.

• Pietas (Duty and Devotion): A deep-seated respect and sense of duty toward the gods, the fatherland (patria), and family/ancestors.

• Fides (Trustworthiness and Honesty): Keeping one’s word, reliability, and fidelity in public and private contracts and political relationships.

• Gravitas and Constantia (Dignity and Steadfastness): A serious, weighty sense of responsibility paired with unyielding persistence, mental endurance (patientia), and calm resolve in times of crisis.

• Frugalitas and Temperantia (Frugality and Self-Restraint): Rejection of personal luxury, excess, and corruption, favoring a simple, austere lifestyle anchored in the ideal of the independent citizen-farmer (exemplified by figures like Cincinnatus or Cato the Younger).

• Libertas (Freedom as Non-Domination): Freedom understood not as doing whatever one pleases, but as living in a free community protected from arbitrary power, tyranny, or monarchy.

• Industria and Prudentia (Hard Work and Practical Wisdom): Diligence in public business and the foresight required to navigate political and military challenges.

Institutional and Civic Principles

Beyond personal character traits, Roman republican thought emphasized systemic values:

• Selfless Service to the Common Good: Prioritizing the survival and flourishing of the state over personal wealth or factional loyalty.

• Equality Before the Law: A shared civic framework binding citizens—at least ideally within the citizen body—under common rules and institutions.

• Anti-Corruption and Oversight: A strong suspicion of concentrated or perpetual power, supported by mixed constitutions, checks and balances, and elected magistracies.

The American Founding Fathers were keenly aware of these virtues and regarded them as essential for the survival of the U.S. Constitutional Republic they framed. Such are the virtues of the people in our society who do the following:

• Diligently learn a trade or acquire a serious education, including an education in civics.

• Work consistently hard to excel in one’s trade or profession.

• Avoid dependency on the state.

• Get married and stay married.

• Invest in a home and real property.

• Raise children to have the same virtues.

• Remain loyal to one’s family, community, and country.

• Oppose corruption and tyranny whenever and wherever it appears, even in its nascent form.

Contemplate these virtues while considering the following data.

• Only 40% of the U.S. population (about 133 million people) are employed full-time

• Only 20–25% of the U.S. population consists of people living in married-couple, middle-income households with at least one employed spouse.

• 23.0% of American households with minor children are headed by a single (unmarried or divorced) mother.

• 8.8% of American households with minor children are headed by a single (unmarried or divorced) father.

• 27% of the working age American adults of working-age adults (ages 18 to 64) receive benefits from at least one safety net program (such as Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, or TANF.

• 27% of the American population is retired and most received Social Security and other federal assistance.

Obviously, the above state of affairs does not bode well for the future of the Republic.

The great vice of the Democratic Party is that it fosters dependency on the state in order to expand its political constituency. Dependent, dumb, and dysfunctional people are the easiest to manipulate and control.

The Republican Party pays lip service to the importance of policies that encourage and support middle class virtues, but what do Republicans (apart from a few notable exceptions like Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, and Thomas Massie) actually do to support the middle class?

Neither Democrats nor Republicans do much if anything to reduce the following:

• Expansion of the state, its power, and its regulation of every aspect of life.

• Expansion of debt.

• Foreign wars and the undue influence of the military industrial complex.

• Debasement of the currency, thereby favoring speculators over hard-working savers.

• The undue influence of lobbyists and the special interests they serve.

• The dilapidation of infrastructure and the ugliness of American public places.

• The widespread coarsening of manners and morals.

In the autumn of 2024, Donald Trump’s extraordinary political skills, energy, and ability to weather every storm his opponents threw at him resulted in what was arguably the greatest presidential victory in American history. With Republicans gaining control of both chambers of Congress, he came into possession of an extraordinary mandate.

By signaling his loyalty to his Epstein Class donors, and making the catastrophic mistake to wage war on Iran, he squandered his mandate and his America First legacy in less than two years.

Many readers will doubtless protest that, for all his faults, Trump and the Republicans are still preferable to the awful people who are now being shuffled into both chambers of Congress and who will now be given their own turn to abuse us in all manner of perverse ways.

I agree with this assessment, which makes me all the more despondent that Trump blew it in such a conspicuous way. Such is tragic consequence of betrayal. Most people are capable of forgiving a lot and taking the bad with the good, but their capacity for forgiveness reaches its limit when it comes to conspicuous acts of betrayal.

Contemplating Trump’s betrayed but still loyal supporters reminds me of Gustave Flaubert’s famous novel, Madame Bovary. The titular character, Emma Bovary, grows bored with her kind and devoted but dull husband, Charles Bovary, a country doctor. Longing for a more glamorous and romantic life, she has a series of affairs with men of greater means who subsequently abandon her, leaving her to her creditors.

Despite it all, Charles Bovary still loves Emma and is devastated by her suicide. Shortly thereafter he dies of a broken heart, leaving their daughter to live in poverty.

Flaubert, who came from a prosperous middle class family, claimed to despise the middle class for being unimaginative and materialistic bores, and he strongly identified with his character Emma. Though I agree that she is a far more vivid, engaging, and attractive character than her plodding husband, her story strikes me as a cautionary tale of what happens when middle class values are abandoned in the pursuit of glamor, wealth, and pleasure.

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In many ways the COVID-19 pandemic was presented to the public as if it was a war—an attack on humanity by a viral enemy and the pandemic response represented military countermeasures.

🎯 Focal Points: McCullough & Chaufan on the Militarized Pandemic Response

📋 The Conversation at a Glance

Host Dr. Peter McCullough welcomed Dr. Claudia Chaufan, full Professor of Health Policy at York University’s School of Health Policy and Management in Toronto, to discuss the sociological impacts of COVID-19 vaccine mandates — particularly on healthcare workers. Chaufan (a physician trained at the University of Buenos Aires, later a PhD sociologist who held positions at UCSF and arrived in Canada on a Fulbright Research Chair) brought a unique interdisciplinary lens spanning clinical medicine, sociology, and health policy.

🪖 The Central Analogy: Pandemic as War

The core intellectual thread of the interview was the militarization of the pandemic response:

• McCullough’s framing: The response bore “military-like characteristics,” including actual operationalization by the U.S. Department of Defense. In war, leaders “leave no room for ambiguity” — they declare and command rather than seek a range of opinions and debate.

• Chaufan’s “statecraft:” She teaches that public health and the army are “different tools of statecraft” — the state’s two instruments are war and public health. Public health can also use propaganda (she cites Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew) and both depend on suppressing dissent and manufacturing consent.

The key distinction McCullough drew: in a real war, civilians aren’t the ones responsible for outcomes. But in the pandemic, doctors remained “on the hook” for patients while the state issued authoritarian commands — an inversion that made the war analogy break down at precisely the point where responsibility was being evaded by officials.

💔 The Discovery: “Moral Injury”

Chaufan’s most significant intellectual contribution was importing the concept of “moral injury” into pandemic research:

• Origin: Developed by clinical psychologist Jonathan Shay in the 1970s while working with Vietnam veterans. Shay drew from ancient Greek accounts of warfare to describe soldiers forced to witness — or perpetrate — acts contrary to their “innermost ethical convictions.”

• The translation: Chaufan recognized the identical phenomenon playing out in healthcare, where workers were forced to do things they knew were wrong — telling patients the vaccine was safe when they didn’t believe it, going against “best clinical judgment,” presenting false certainty about things they knew were uncertain.

• The violation: She identified forced vaccination against one’s will — as potentially the deepest and most violating form of moral injury. One worker had a reaction after the first shot, a worse one after the second, and after the third suffered a full cardiac arrest requiring ICU care and mechanical ventilation.

• The stakes: Discarded workers faced job loss, license revocation, and destruction of careers. Chaufan emphasized the mundaneness of it all — bureaucratic, banal cruelty rather than dramatic violence — which she found both fascinating and deeply disturbing.

Her core methodological observation: nobody was neutral on the mandates, regardless of vaccination status. She interpreted this as a reflection of the “intensity of the moral message” — the framing that non-compliance endangered others (”you will kill granny”) effectively conscripted ordinary citizens as “foot soldiers.”

🧠 The Sociological Machinery: How Consent Was Manufactured

Chaufan detailed how the response was engineered:

• Focus-grouped messaging: Behavioral units (in the UK and Canada) “field tested” messages to find the most effective response to “the hesitant,” constructing the hesitant person as the problem — which then foreclosed all other questions.

• The equity weapon: The vaccine was framed as achieving equity. If you refused, “you’re against equity,” an immense rhetorical force deployed against good-faith people.

• Labeling and suppression: Dissenters were shamed, demonized, labeled (anti-vaxxer, right-winger), or suppressed. In Canada, dissent was “quite brutally suppressed” — including Members of Parliament who objected on Charter rights grounds.

• The Freedom Convoy: Chaufan noted millions of Canadians (herself included) supported the trucker convoy, yet the press portrayed participants as “the most dangerous people on the planet.”

🏥 Institutional Accountability Avoidance

• The bureaucratic shell game: Hospital policies declared unvaccinated staff “a threat to the community” without explicitly mandating. When workers challenged dismissals, courts refused to litigate the science, deferring to “public health” — which deferred to government-funded university doctors. “Everybody’s passing the ball. Nobody takes responsibility.”

• Shame tactics: McCullough described the red-sticker badge marking for unvaccinated students/residents; Chaufan compared it to the colored identifiers seen in the most totalitarian societies (e.g., license plates). For example Dr McCullough found North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) provides the most explicit, highly structured example of a color-coded license plate system used to segregate and control different social groups in a totalitarian state. [1] In North Korea, where private mobility is heavily restricted and fuel is rationed, license plate colors act as an immediate visual broadcast of a person’s caste, political rank, and relationship to the ruling regime. This system functions as a practical tool for traffic police to determine instantly who can be stopped, harassed, or extorted, and who must be given a mandatory salute.

• Irrational staffing decisions: Brilliant surgeons, ICU nurses, and cardiac nurses were cast out — despite an already-strained system desperately needing personnel. Chaufan cited Dr. York Hsiang – well-known Professor of Vascular Surgery at the University of British Columbia and Dr. Francis Christian is a Clinical Professor of General Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan and a who retired early or were severed from their positions over vaccine mandates.

📄 Her Research & Publication Roadblocks

• The survey project: Chaufan led a qualitative survey of ~100 questions; 189 healthcare workers responded with remarkable frankness. She deliberately collected respondents across vaccination statuses in Ontario and BC to understand both compliance and refusal.

• The moral injury paper: Titled with a compelling participant quotation, the paper organized findings around normative orientations to mandates and framed moral injury as driven by the mandate structure itself — something absent from the existing medical literature.

• Suppression of findings: A protocol was published, but the journal “doesn’t want to know anything about the actual results or findings.” Publishing the discursive strategies of hospitals has proven extremely difficult — a pattern Chaufan connected to the broader literature on suppressing dissent in science.

🌐 The Double-Edged Sword of Technology

Closing the interview, McCullough asked what would have happened if the pandemic hit in 1960. His answer: mass street protest. Chaufan’s: she would have been “doomed.”

Both agreed on the central paradox — social media enabled both the mass propaganda campaign AND the resistance to it. Without independent media and the internet, dissent would have had no platform. Yet the same reach amplified the official narrative to an unprecedented scope.

📢 Final Call to Action

Chaufan closed with a call for healthy skepticism and citizens taking learning into their own hands — listening to “other versions” and analyzing original sources rather than reproducing authority. McCullough added a pointed observation: even RFK Jr., two years into his tenure as HHS Secretary, has never faced a single question from an open mic — a standard that proper “lessons learned” forums and free academic discourse would demand.

Dr McCullough will be speaking in Ontario at The Health Under Fire Conference featuring Dr. Peter McCullough and Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) pastor/speaker Dr. Conrad Vine is scheduled for November 13–14, 2026, at the University of Toronto - Scarborough.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

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References

Chaufan, Claudia, Hemsing, Natalie and Moncrieffe, Rachael. "‘When I had concerns about my own patients…I was told to keep quiet’: experiences of moral injury among healthcare workers under Covid-19 vaccine mandates in Alberta, Canada" Open Medicine, vol. 21, no. 1, 2026, pp. 20261503. https://doi.org/10.1515/med-2026-1503

Yesterday they got together again to review the last five years, as well as the two books that Dr. McCullough & I have published together since 2022 — The Courage to Face COVID-19 and Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality.

Special thanks to Mr. Rogan for recognizing the value of Dr. McCullough’s ongoing efforts to investigate the reality of this greatest fraud in history, combined with the greatest assault on bodily autonomy and civil liberties in US history.

Check out the interview, and please like it and share it with your friend.

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Please enjoy this brief segment from the NEWSMAX the Finnerty Files on midterm election eve. The following day a sweeping midterm result will undoubtedly change the calculus for health freedom interests. Will this be good or bad for MAHA? On Focal Points we will be exploring this over the next several weeks. In the meantime, we are advising that if any administration ignores the concerns of the citizenry on issues of health sovereignty, they are likely to pay a price at the ballot box.

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

The measles vaccine, part of the MMR and MMR+ combinations, is a live attenuated vaccine meaning the virus that is injected is live but weakened. The package insert says the vaccine itself can cause atypical measles. If that is the case, can the vaccine and the infection itself have neurological sequelae that can be compared?

SSPE and Profound Autism: Two Post-Encephalitic States on a Shared Spectrum

Introduction

Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis (SSPE) and profound autism are, on their face, are two similar conditions on a spectrum. SSPE is a rare, uniformly fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by persistent wild-type or vaccine-derived measles virus infection of the central nervous system, typically emerging 6–8 years after the initial measles infection. Profound autism is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by intellectual disability, minimal or absent functional language, and lifelong dependence on caregivers occuring after administration of bundled vaccines including the live attenuated measles vaccine.

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A convective thunderstorm develops when warm, moist, unstable air rises rapidly, cools, and condenses into towering cumulonimbus clouds. When the conditions are right, these clouds can grow from modest formations into enormous vertical structures reaching altitudes of 40,000 to 60,000 feet or more. Their defining characteristic is powerful vertical air movement, which can generate extreme turbulence, hail, lightning, icing, and violent changes in wind speed and direction.

The process begins when solar heating, converging winds, or an advancing weather front forces warm, humid air upward. As the air rises and cools, water vapor condenses, releasing latent heat that further increases the updraft. This positive feedback can produce extraordinarily powerful updrafts, sometimes exceeding 100 miles per hour. Within a mature convective cell, ascending currents coexist with descending currents of precipitation-cooled air, creating an unstable environment of rapidly changing aerodynamic forces.

For an approaching aircraft, the immediate danger is severe turbulence, including sudden transitions between powerful updrafts and downdrafts. These vertical air currents can produce abrupt changes in altitude, airspeed, and angle of attack, potentially exceeding the aircraft’s structural load limits. Especially dangerous are situations in which an aircraft is rapidly accelerated upward and then downward, subjecting its wings and fuselage to alternating stresses. In extreme circumstances, these forces can cause structural failure.

My brother has a buddy who, in his youth, flew for the Czechoslovak Air Force and who claimed to have once flown a MiG-21 directly through a large cell—just for kicks. He instantly regretted it as the aircraft was subjected to extraordinarily violent aerodynamic forces, and for a moment he thought the plane was going to break up.

Another hazard is the formation of hail within the storm. Strong updrafts repeatedly carry water droplets above the freezing level, where they accumulate successive layers of ice. Large hailstones can remain suspended until their weight exceeds the supporting force of the updraft. When they fall, they can severely damage windshields, wings, engines, and other aircraft components. Hail may also be expelled from the storm’s central updraft region and encountered outside the visible cloud, sometimes many miles from its core.

Convective cells also create dangerous icing conditions. Supercooled water droplets can remain liquid at temperatures well below freezing and freeze rapidly upon contact with an aircraft. Ice accumulation changes the aerodynamic shape of wings, increases drag, reduces lift, and can interfere with sensors and control surfaces. Although many aircraft possess sophisticated anti-icing systems, these systems are not always capable of protecting against the most extreme icing conditions encountered in deep convection.

Pilots approaching an area of convective weather must consider how rapidly a cell can develop upward. A cell whose cloud tops initially appear to be at 30,000 feet can grow thousands of feet within minutes, potentially overtaking an aircraft attempting to fly above it.

Moreover, the visible cloud top does not necessarily mark the upper boundary of hazardous turbulence. Powerful updrafts can overshoot the surrounding atmospheric stability layer, producing overshooting tops and turbulence above the main anvil. Consequently, attempting to overfly a developing thunderstorm can be considerably more dangerous than its apparent height initially suggests.

At high altitude, these hazards can be compounded by the relatively narrow operating envelope of jet aircraft. Near their service ceilings, the margin between low-speed buffet and high-speed compressibility effects becomes smaller.

A sudden convective updraft or downdraft can alter the aircraft’s angle of attack and airspeed, potentially bringing it close to aerodynamic stall or high-speed buffet. This narrowing of the safe speed range is commonly associated with the phenomenon known as coffin corner. Severe turbulence can therefore present exceptional control challenges for aircraft operating near their maximum certified altitudes. This particular hazard may have played a role in November 1, 2026 crash of the Learjet 60 in Florida.

For these reasons, aviation practice emphasizes lateral avoidance rather than attempting to climb over intense convective thunderstorms. FAA guidance generally recommends avoiding severe or intense thunderstorm echoes by at least 20 miles, recognizing that dangerous turbulence and hail can extend well beyond the visible cloud boundaries.

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More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

—Woody Allen, “My Speech to the Graduates,” The New York Times (1979)

As Ron Paul elegantly put it in the title of his essay today, “Republicans Deserve To Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve To Win.”

President Trump promised “America First” but then chose Washington’s business as usual of more war, more debt, and more inflation. The Democrats are dumb opportunistic wretches.

Regardless of which political party gains control of Congress or the White House, the American people—especially of the working and middle classes—are thoroughly abused by the US government. Both political parties serve shadowy, undeclared interests that have little to do with the interests of ordinary citizens.

To my surprise—given that I’d long thought of Hegel as wrong about many things—the situation strikes me as a perfect example of what he wrote about in his 1824 book, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in which he defined the relationship between institutions and the ethical principles that give them legitimacy.

As he explicated it, institutions are not merely collections of laws, procedures, offices, and traditions, but an expression of an ethical spirit—the living embodiment of justice, freedom, and the common good. When this animating spirit departs, an institution may continue to exist in its outward form while losing the spirit that gave rise to it.

In his view, the legitimacy of an institution does not only spring from its antiquity, legal authority, or established procedures. Legitimacy is conferred only when the institution continues to embody an ethical purpose.

The family, civil society, and the state are legitimate insofar as they give concrete expression to human morals and freedom. Their authority and activities are instruments through which these ethical purposes are realized, rather than ends in themselves.

Over time, institutions may become increasingly preoccupied with their own preservation and privileges. Officials may come to regard their activities as intrinsically valuable, even when they no longer serve the purposes for which they were created.

What began as a living expression of a moral or political ideal may calcify into an apparatus of administration and authority that serves no one but the officials and their cronies.

This distinction between living substance and empty form lies at the heart of Hegel’s understanding of history. Human societies evolve, and institutions that once embodied rational principles may become inadequate to changing historical circumstances. Their continued existence does not necessarily mean they continue to be legitimate. The persistence of an institution’s outward structure may conceal the fact that the historical conditions and ethical convictions that sustained them in the past are no longer operative.

Hegel’s discussion of the decline of Roman political life provides an illustration. Republican institutions and legal forms persisted after the civic spirit that had once animated them died, and the driving force in public life became the ambitions and whims of an increasingly selfish and reckless oligarchy.

Political participation became formal rather than substantive, while public authority became detached from the ethical life of the community. The preservation of institutional appearances could not compensate for the disappearance of their underlying ethical substance.

To be sure, Hegel did not regard institutional continuity as inherently suspect, nor did he believe that institutions should be discarded merely because they were old. On the contrary, he considered enduring institutions essential for the realization of freedom.

His concern was whether their established forms continued to embody a living ethical order. Reform or transformation becomes necessary when a contradiction develops between an institution’s professed purpose and its actual operation.

A government may retain its constitution, a university its academic ceremonies, a church its liturgy, or a court its elaborate procedures long after the humans who occupy these offices have ceased to believe in their founding tenets. In such circumstances, institutional continuity can become an illusion of legitimacy.

And so it is with the US government, which is now—with a few notable and decreasing exceptions—a coterie of ignorant and uncouth hucksters who neither understand nor care about the Constitution.

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It seems like everyone I know over age 65 is running into a problem in one or more of the large joints: shoulders, hips, or knees. So I decide to reach out to an expert.

📋 Focal Points Interview Summary: Dr. Peter McCullough × Dr. Erica Rowe Urquhart

🧬 Background: Dr. Erica Rowe Urquhart, M.D., Ph.D., MBA

• San Diego native — named “America’s Top Student Leader” by the NASSP and Science Student of the Year at the California State Science Fair before leaving for college

• Harvard National Scholar — B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, Harvard College

• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine — completed both M.D. and Ph.D. in molecular and cellular neuroscience in seven years. Met her future husband, Dr. Marc Urquhart (then an orthopedic surgery resident), at a brunch hosted by Dr. Benjamin Carson for newly admitted medical students

• Hospital for Special Surgery (Cornell-affiliated, Upper East Side NYC) — orthopedic surgery residency; national research fellowship during internship; OREF recognition for developmental biology research; completed residency as chief resident while having her son, Amari

• Private practice — joined her husband at Urquhart Orthopedic Associates in northern New Jersey for ~20 years of general orthopedic surgery and sports medicine. Daughter Alexis born 2006

• Oxford Said Business School MBA — earned after 15 years in practice to combat the insurance/billing bureaucracy

• Author — The Invisible Hand Wielding the Scalpel: The Hidden Cause of America’s Healthcare Crisis (private equity, consolidation, and the erosion of independent practice)

🎙️ Interview Summary

The Structural Problem in Orthopedics

• Epidemiology of chronic joint disease: The two dominant age-related shoulder conditions are osteoarthritis/arthropathy and rotator cuff tendinopathy or tears. Hips and knees are dominated by arthritis (osteo-, post-traumatic, or inflammatory).

• “We treat symptoms, not MRIs”: Urquhart’s most important clinical maxim — studies show huge proportions (over 90%) of asymptomatic adults have rotator cuff abnormalities on MRI. “We don’t treat MRI findings.” Treatment targets pain, limited motion, and lost function — not imaging pathology. Orthopedic conditions are rarely life-threatening, but the surgeries carry real complications (typically <1–2%, but “if it happens to you, that’s 100%”). Surgery demands corroboration between the diagnosis, functional limitation, and significant pain.

• The physical exam trumps imaging: Urquhart watches patients the moment they walk in — gait, posture, how they move. The exam is more important than the studies. But third-party payers force diagnostic confirmation (MRI) before approving treatment, which is why imaging gets ordered even when the clinical picture is clear.

• AI in the clinic: Her practice uses HIPAA-compliant AI ambient transcription for notes, freeing physicians to return to face-to-face patient interaction (versus keyboard-and-monitor charting). She draws a sharp distinction between machine learning (task-execution, transcription without improvisation) and AI (which is “taught to improvise” — hence hallucination, filling gaps with what it thinks happened).

On Media Bias & AI Integrity

McCullough cites the Wikipedia analysis showing ~97% left-leaning editorial bias despite a 50-50 country, and warns about factcheck.org and similar “fact-checking” outfits entering language models. He uses Alter AI as the McCullough Foundation’s aligned AI because it vows not to inject bias — demonstrated by whether an AI answers the question posed or instead front-loads “safe and effective” promotion unprompted.

Elon Musk: Robots Replacing Surgeons in 5 Years?

Musk claims robots will replace the best surgeons within five years. Urquhart’s verdict: fascinating but the timeline is contracted — she’d say 20–25 years for truly independent robotic surgery. Robots already assist in total joints and spine (precise placement), and humanoid robotics (she cites Unitree in China, which she visited on a study tour — IPO ~$250B) are advancing exponentially. But robots cannot yet handle:

• Surgical judgment — knowing when not to operate (McCullough: Parkland’s 5-year general surgery maxim)

• Real-time complication management — bleeding, unexpected pathology, adhesions, sutures that don’t hold, an assistant handing the wrong suture, a patient crashing in another organ system mid-case

“Could a robot perform surgery independently without the supervision of a surgeon? At this point, no.”

🔴 THE CORE SECTION: Chronic Nontraumatic Problems (Shoulders, Hips, Knees)

🦴 Shoulder

Two dominant age-related conditions:

1. Osteoarthropathy (arthritis) of the glenohumeral joint

2. Rotator cuff tendinopathy / tears

Treatment spectrum:

• Rotator cuff issues → arthroscopic (camera) debridement/repair — same-day, less soft-tissue trauma, less pain

• Degenerative arthropathy → shoulder replacement. If the rotator cuff is also torn, a reverse shoulder replacement is needed, which requires opening the soft-tissue plane — a longer recovery with more involved pain management, though still possible in an ambulatory setting

Why the rotator cuff is so vulnerable:

• Vascularity — the tendons depend on blood supply for healing after overuse/inflammation. As we age, that healing capacity declines, so what might have been a minor reversible injury becomes a permanent one

• The musculotendinous junction — the margin between muscle and tendon is where the vulnerability lies

• Overuse is the #1 cause, though falls become more prevalent in older, higher-fall-risk patients

• Anatomy mismatch: the big muscles (deltoid, pectoralis) do the coarse, powerful work — pressing, overhead, abduction. The rotator cuff handles finer movements (internal/external rotation). Big lifts strengthen the big muscles; you don’t meaningfully “strengthen the tendons” — you strengthen the muscles. That’s why recovery from a supraspinatus tear (as McCullough’s wife is experiencing, and he has a marathon history) is so slow

Frozen shoulder (adhesive capsulitis):

• Comes up as a secondary problem after pain/injury — or seemingly out of nowhere in people in their 40s–50s (McCullough notes it’s well documented in diabetics)

🦵 Hip

Etiology of hip arthritis is multifactorial, not just “wear and tear”:

• Genetic predisposition, anatomy (ball-and-socket articulation problems — a patient “born with anatomy that doesn’t facilitate normal articulation”) other conditions that lead to life long poor biomechanics — leg length discrepancy, varus/valgus alignment, bow-legged/knock-kneed patterns; add excess loading with obesity and the result is a total hip replacement

• Post-traumatic — a fall years ago that injured cartilage, never treated, surfacing a decade later after pounds of weight gain over life.

Obesity’s dose-response effect on joint replacement:Journal: American Journal of Epidemiology / Public Health literature — PubMed 14580629 Design: Frequency-matched case-control, Utah, 1992–2000, 840 hip and 911 knee replacement patients (ages 55–74) vs. 5,578 matched controls

That’s a 16-to-19-fold increased odds of knee replacement in the severely obese. The knee effect dwarfs the hip effect — matching exactly what both Urquhart and McCullough said on air about the knee seeing a higher multiple of body weight.

The “is walking bad for your hips?” question:

• Activity is not the driver. People who run/walk their whole lives (McCullough’s 30-marathon history; his 93-year-old mother-in-law, a lifelong walker with zero hip pain) don’t automatically wear out their joints. There’s an inverse relationship in the literature — lifelong runners don’t line up for hip replacements.

• Williams’ National Runners’ Health Study at Berkeley Lab (“Effects of Running and Walking on Osteoarthritis and Hip Replacement Risk” Paul T. Williams, PhD — Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Journal: Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (2013) DOI link: PMC3756679 cited by Dr McCullough:

  1. Running reduces OA and hip replacement risk by roughly 15–50%, with the benefit mostly achieved at modest volumes and persisting even at extreme mileage

  2. Running is not riskier than walking for joint health — the high-impact concern is largely myth

  3. The protective effect is driven substantially by lower BMI (tying directly back to the obesity discussion) — but the mechanical/hormonal benefit of exercise appears genuine

Hip replacement — where it is now:

• Materials: no huge changes in ~15 years

• The real advance: robotic software/instrumentation for more precise, accurate prosthesis placement

• Ambulatory/outpatient surgery: the fastest-growing shift — roughly 30% outpatient/70% in patient. Enabled by:

  • Regional nerve blocks — more specific anesthesia

  • Local pain medication layered in at the surgical site by the surgeon

  • Patients bear weight and walk the same day (they have to, to get home)

• Pain is remarkably well controlled for the first days post-op as the body heals

🦶 Knee

Same principles as the hip — but amplified:

• Obesity plays an even bigger role in the knee because of mechanics — the knee sees a higher multiple of body weight with ambulation, stairs, etc.

• Outpatient split: roughly 60% inpatient / 40% outpatient (more knees done same-day than hips)

• Knee patients often present with a higher baseline level of functionality than hip patients

• Robotic assistance applies to knee instrumentation placement as well

• Materials last longer — patients live with their first knee replacement far longer than 20–30 years ago

Age limits:

• Urquhart’s practice hasn’t done elective arthroplasty in anyone over ~88 (speaking of elective joint replacement, not emergency hip fracture surgery). McCullough recounts his wife’s father living to 98 with bone-on-bone knees, lamenting that by the time knee replacement went “prime time,” he was simply too old — and trapped in the resource-constrained Canadian system

The flexion contracture problem:

• If patients don’t maintain their rehab range of motion, knees can develop a chronic flexion contracture — the patient can no longer stand erect. McCullough’s elderly mother, after two knee replacements, has exactly this: her knees are stuck in chronic flexion from years of not getting full extension

• Urquhart’s nuance: some older patients develop joint contractures regardless of surgery (natural aging), and those with memory issues/dementia are especially prone — elbow and wrist contractures happen too

🩸 Blood Clots & the Pandemic

McCullough pivots to DVT/PE risk, a topic central to his post-pandemic work:

• Urquhart’s experience: She has not seen increased clot rates in her practice — because prophylaxis is much broader now (more anticoagulants approved for prevention).

• McCullough’s counter: The secular use of novel anticoagulants (Eliquis, Xarelto, Pradaxa) has skyrocketed since the pandemic — due to broad exposure to the thrombogenic spike protein with SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination.

Kurdi et al “Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the prescribing pattern of oral anticoagulants in the English primary care setting: a population-based segmented interrupted time series analysis of over 53 million individuals” Journal: Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research (2025) — DOI 10.1080/17512433.2025.2473613 Date window: March 2018 – March 2024 (covers pre-, during-, and post-pandemic rates of anticoagulation use rose > 100%)

• ~97% of the population has had COVID; ~81% took a COVID vaccine that actively produced spike protein in the body long-term

• One patient has had circulating Pfizer vaccine in his bloodstream for 3.5 years, producing spike protein — and has suffered multiple DVTs, PE, and myocarditis

• Example: Jalen Hurts — had ankle surgery in 2018 with no thrombosis, then after 2021 vaccines developed superficial thrombosis, DVT, and PE

• Spike detoxification: natural fibrinolytic/anticoagulant products — nattokinase (oral thrombolytic) and bromelain (natural oral anticoagulant, also a prescription eschar-removal ointment) — 30+ product rows on Amazon for “spike detoxification”

🏁 Closing

• Urquhart emphasizes treatment doesn’t always have to be surgery, but as a surgeon she’s “biased toward clearly explaining to patients what surgical treatment would involve”

• Contact: DrUrquhart.com (personal) and UrquhartOrthopedicAssociates.com (practice), northern New Jersey

📝Please subscribe to FOCAL POINTS as a paying ($5 monthly) or founder member so we can continue to bring you the truth. AlterAI may be used to assist in searches, synthesis, and review.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

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A new wave of cyberattacks has struck supermarket refrigeration systems across Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Estonia, allowing hackers to remotely manipulate refrigerators and freezers and causing large quantities of perishable food to be discarded.

In some cases, attackers changed refrigeration settings to 50°C (122°F), disrupting temperature controls and triggering widespread food spoilage. The incidents occurred three weeks after a similar cyberattack compromised refrigeration systems at hundreds of supermarkets across France.

Refrigeration is essential for limiting the growth of food-borne pathogens in perishable products. Prolonged refrigeration failures can force retailers to discard substantial quantities of food.

Just weeks before this latest wave cyberattacks, Bill Gates stated during a CNN interview:

“Over the next year… we are going to have a lot of negative surprises. We’ll probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyberattacks.”

Days after that, Bill Gates said the COVID pandemic “didn't work the way I expected.” He proceeded to say, “over the next several years, certainly in the cyber domain, because there’s a business model there, you will see a lot of attacks different in terms of scale than anything we've seen in the past.”:

The World Economic Forum has already been war-gaming cyberattacks since 2019. Through its Cyber Polygon initiative, it has conducted international cybersecurity exercises simulating large-scale cyber threats, including attacks on interconnected digital infrastructure and supply chains.

This is where Klaus Schwab declared, “It’s high time for a Great Reset,” and warned of a “cyber pandemic” that could make COVID look like a “small disturbance” by “halting our power supply, transportation, and hospitals.”:

Meanwhile, multiple governments are now encouraging citizens to maintain emergency supplies of food, water, and other essentials to prepare for potential disruptions.

Something is definitely afoot…

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

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The conference was organized by Dr. Paul Brandenburg — an emergency and intensive care doctor who became a prominent critic of the German government’s pandemic countermeasures.

The morning after I arrived, I went for a walk on the beach and thought of Dr. Brandenburg—a wonderfully cultivated and engaging man—and how much I looked forward to seeing him that evening. Approximately 5 seconds later, I received a text notification that he had, on October 28, 2026, been arrested at Berlin Brandenburg Airport on allegations that he insulted and defamed Berlin’s Governing Mayor, Kai Wegner. (NOTE: Berlin is both an administrative state and a city, hence the title Governing Mayor).

Dr. Brandenburg was placed in pretrial detention because the Berlin public prosecutor’s office claims he is a flight risk. It seems increasingly likely he will remain in detention for at least two weeks (total) before his initial hearing his held.

According to a written statement from the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office (Staatsanwaltschaft Berlin), published on October 30, Brandenburg is accused of:

1). Criminal insult (Beleidigung) § 185 StGB

2). Defamation of a person in political life (Verleumdung gegen Personen des politischen Lebens) § 188(2) StGB, which carry a statutory minimum imprisonment of six months.

The prosecutor alleges that Brandenburg published statements on the internet between October 30 and December 17, 2025, accusing Governing Mayor Wegner of being a fan of the Berlin drag queen performer who goes by the name “Jurassica Parka.” (NOTE: In the drag queen community, the name Jurassic Park is widely used as a reference to older drag performers).

Parka was convicted of dissemination, acquisition, and possession of child pornographic materials in 2023, before being invited to host, perform at, or attend State and City of Berlin sponsored events.

The following is a timeline of relevant events:

“Jurassica Parka” (legal name is Mario Olszinski)

• Summer 2021: Appointed ambassador for queer Berlin as part of the Place2Be.Berlin tourism campaign, sponsored by Berlin Tourismus & Kongress GmbH, 15% owned by the State of Berlin.

• November 24, 2021: Parka uploaded a collage containing child pornographic material to Twitter (now X). Although the evidence of this illegal act was presented the moment Parka posted the images on Twitter, the Berlin police and prosecutor’s office took almost two years to take law enforcement action against him.

• 2022-2023: Berlin Police pursued some sort of investigation. Official case file was registered in 2023 (court file number 294 Ds 155/23) at the Tiergarten District Court. In notable contrast to the case of Dr. Paul Brandenburg, Jurassica Parka did not spend a single day in pre-trial detention, but remained free until he was convicted and ordered to pay a fine for his offense.

• July 3, 2023: Berlin's Governing Mayor Kai Wegner was photographed with Jurassica Parka (middle) at the Berlin Hoffest (the Berlin Court Festival) held at the Rotes Rathaus (Red Town Hall). NOTE: The Hoffest is co-hosted and organized by the Berlin Senate Chancellery (headed by the Governing Mayor of Berlin) in cooperation with Partner für Berlin, the city's economic development agency. Based on published reports, it is not clear if Parka performed at the event or was merely invited to attend.

• October 2023: Jurassica Parka was convicted of dissemination, acquisition, and possession of child pornographic materials. Following “a confession and expressions of remorse,” the Tiergarten District Court court assessed a reduced penalty consisting of a fine of 160 daily rates of €70 each, totaling €11,200.

• April 2024: Parka traveled to Tokyo, Japan, after being commissioned by the German Embassy in Tokyo to appear at the Tokyo Rainbow Pride event. During the visit, footage showed him doing face-painting and makeup on young attendees, some of whom appeared to be minors. As was subsequently reported, the German Foreign Office funded the appearance (covering flights, accommodation, and a €6,000 fee). When confronted about this, the Foreign Office stated it was unaware at this time of his October 2023 conviction.

• August 31, 2024: Parka was invited to perform as official stage host and master of ceremonies at the Queens & Flowers Festival in Berlin's Steglitz-Zehlendorf district. The Festival received €40,000 in public tourism funding.

• March 26, 2025: Berlin Police received information concerning new allegations against Parka.

• May 6, 2025: Berlin Public Prosecutor’s office initiated a second investigation of possession of child pornography.

• July 14, 2025: Parka hosted and moderated a diversity and LSBTIQ+-themed Berlin Police Charity Gala (“Gemeinsambunt”).

• July 24, 2025: Berlin Police raided Parka’s apartment and seized electronic devices containing videos and images of illegal child sexual abuse/pornography. Forensic analysis of the seized hardware revealed:

  • 131 video files totaling more than 5 hours and 25 minutes of footage.

  • 28 static digital images

  • Though the electronic devices were seized and criminal charges were subsequently filed, there are NO indications that Parka spent any time in pretrial detention.

• October 30 and December 17, 2025: Dr. Paul Brandenburg allegedly published posts in which he characterized Berlin Governing Mayor Wegner of being “a fan of child molesters” and a “pedophilia ruler.”

• September 23, 2026: The Tiergarten District Court (same in Parka’s first conviction) sentenced Parka to ten months' imprisonment, suspended on probation, for possession of child and adolescent sexual abuse material.

• October 28, 2026: Dr. Brandenburg was arrested at Berlin airport for “insulting” Berlin Governing Mayor Wegner. Unlike Parka, who remained free pending his two convictions, Brandenburg was placed in pretrial detention, where he remains as of this report’s publication.

The Berlin public prosector’s office claims that Brandenburg’s statements are defamatory assertions of fact rather than permissible political criticism or expressions of opinion.

Apparently Governing Mayor Wegner disputes Brandenburg’s characterizations. As Wegner apparently evaluates the matter, the fact that the State and City of Berlin—of which he is the supreme administrative authority—invited Parka to attend and even host events after Parka was convicted for dissemination, acquisition, and possession of child pornography does not mean that he is a fan of Jurassica Parka.

In a written response to journalist Alexander Wallasch on October 30, the Berlin prosecutor confirmed that Brandenburg was arrested at approximately 10:30 a.m. on October 28 pursuant to an arrest warrant issued by the Tiergarten District Court.

The prosecution claims that Dr. Brandenburg was arrested and put in jail (pretrial detention) on the grounds that he is a flight risk.

Dr. Brandenburg’s attorney, Markus Haintz, disputes the factual basis for describing his client as a fugitive.

Haintz states that Brandenburg was arrested while returning his ten-year-old child to Berlin and that he regularly travels to the city several times per month for family reasons. According to Haintz, both the Berlin police and prosecutors were aware of these visits.

Haintz and fellow defense attorney Viktoria Dannenmaier are seeking his release. Haintz characterizes the proceedings as a form of Majestätsbeleidigung (”insulting majesty”), suggesting that criminal law is being used to punish criticism of a political official.

German law expressly permits release on financial security (Kaution) or other conditions in place of pretrial detention. Section 116(1) of the German Code of Criminal Procedure (Strafprozessordnung, StPO) provides that a judge must suspend execution of an arrest warrant based solely on risk of flight when less restrictive measures can adequately achieve the purpose of detention.

Such measures include:

• Posting financial security.

• Reporting regularly to police or judicial authorities.

• Remaining at a specified residence or within a designated geographical area.

• Accepting restrictions on travel or movement.

The statutory language is important: when these less restrictive measures are sufficient, suspension of detention is mandatory, not merely discretionary.

The Berlin prosecutor claims the fact that Brandenburg spends much of his time in Switzerland is evidence that he is essentially a fugitive, but this assertion is inconsistent with Brandenburg’s frequent and regular visits to Berlin. Thus, it is unclear why financial security, travel restrictions, or mandatory reporting would be inadequate to ensure Brandenburg’s appearance for a scheduled trial.

Section 112(1) StPO requires both strong suspicion of a criminal offense and a legally recognized ground for detention. It also prohibits detention that is disproportionate to the seriousness of the case and the expected punishment.

Several circumstances make Brandenburg’s detention especially worthy of scrutiny.

• The six allegations concern statements published online rather than violence, threats of violence, or destruction of evidence.

• Brandenburg’s reported regular returns to Berlin, particularly for family obligations, weigh against the assertion that he was hiding from authorities.

• The existence of a foreign residence does not, by itself, establish that a defendant is evading prosecution.

If will be interesting to see if Governing Mayor Wegner will claim he had no knowledge of the investigations and convictions of Jurassica Parka in the years 2021-2025. Strangely enough, Berlin Police spokeswoman Lena Kniphals has stated that—at the time of the July 14, 2025 police gala of which Parka was the master of ceremonies and under investigation by the Berlin police that would raid his apartment ten days later— “Neither police leadership nor the participating partners possessed relevant knowledge or information [about the investigations and convictions] at the time of the event.”

On a historical note: the German Penal Code—of which “criminal insult” (Beleidigung) is paragraph § 185 —was passed on May 15, 1871, in the Reichstag and went into force on January 1, 1872.

Following the conventional customs, manners, and mores of the time, it was conceived as a judicial mechanism for punishing the act of making false public statements that injured a man’s honor. The rationale was to discourage the personal vendettas and duels that had been a feature of European society for centuries.

On the face of it, it strikes me as highly questionable that the Governing Mayor of Berlin’s honor was—as a matter of objective fact—injured by a few strongly worded X (formerly Twitter) posts from a dissident doctor.

If the Governing Mayor is so concerned about his honor, one wonders why he has presided over an administration that has consistently demonstrated not only extraordinary leniency, but also a celebratory posture towards Jurassica Parka—a man who posted images classified as child pornography on Twitter in November 24, 2021.

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