By A Midwestern Doctor
The Forgotten Side of Medicine
December 26, 2025
Due to the surge in readership of this newsletter (currently 302,000 subscribers) I no longer have the time to respond to all the correspondences I want to respond to while still being able to write here-which is really frustrating as I like helping people (e.g., for years I've provided online health advice across a variety of platforms) and I am incredibly grateful to each of you which has made this newsletter possible (something I never imagined could happen).
Since a significant amount of time in replying comes from getting to the comment or email rather than the actual reply, I felt the best solution was to have a monthly open thread where I could sequentially go through all its comments and anything that had not yet been addressed over the last month could be answered, and then pair it with a shorter topic I'd wanted to cover (so it was worth everyone's time to receive the emails).
Note: part of why I write longer articles here is because I try to address all the questions I expect to come up, and the majority of the questions I receive (e.g., on DMSO) are answered in the articles here. To assist readers trying to find specific context, I made an index of the articles published here I periodically update as more are written. To specifically search the archives here, the best option I've found (which I use all the time) is site specific Google searches which can be done by typing what you are looking for into the search bar and then following that with site:midwesterndoctor.com
Social Fragmentation
"I never cease to be amazed at how effective the system is at getting people who deeply agree on 90% of things to fixate on the superficial 10% they disagree on and perpetually fight each other over it rather than tolerating their differences of opinion and working together to fix the 90% that deeply affects the quality of their lives."
Over the years, I've come to accept that the marketing and propaganda apparatus (the public relations industry) has no scruples and will regularly engage in fairly appalling campaigns to promote a product or a sponsor's message.
Nonetheless, the division I saw sown beginning in 2016 was completely different from anything I'd seen before and escalated further during COVID-19, resulting in many longstanding friendships and family bonds being split apart over political disagreements. In tandem, a lot of it was so shameless, many still haven't forgotten it (e.g., consider the gift cards, lotteries, KFC, donuts which CNN [ repeatedly promoted] alcohol, illicit drugs and brothel sessions were given away as incentives to get the vaccine).
Likewise, one horrendous tactic the vaccine industry had pioneered with pertussis vaccine suddenly went into full throttle.
In theory, if a vaccine "works" you should be protected from individuals who are infected, including those who never vaccinated. Unfortunately, this is not good for vaccine sales as that doesn't win over people who don't want to vaccinate, particularly since a non-vaccinated cohort can serve as a control group that shows the dangers of the vaccine (e.g., the industry has done everything it can to stonewall trials of unvaccinated children, but when conducted, those studies consistently show vaccinated children have 3-10 times as many chronic illnesses).
To solve this, three sales pitches were developed:
1) Eliminating an infectious disease is only possible if a sufficient amount of the population is vaccinated (thereby creating herd immunity). This essentially has never worked (discussed further here), so as the years have gone by (and sometimes even within a vaccine campaign) once the populace can be made to accept the premise of "herd immunity," the percentage of people who need to be vaccinated is steadily increased, and harsher and harsher penalties are leveraged against those who still refuse to vaccinate (as harsher penalties become more politically viable once they target a smaller and smaller minority).
Note: the two major exceptions to what I just stated about a disease being eliminated were smallpox (which was eliminated primarily because the limited transmission of the disease made it possible to quarantine it into extinction) and polio ( because the environmental causes of it were eliminated and the remaining cases reclassified). Additionally, high vaccination rates are necessary for pseudo-herd immunity to measles (a vaccine that does "work"), but that situation is a result of our natural herd immunity to measles being replaced with a temporary vaccine herd immunity which results in measles rapidly spreading in communities the moment vaccination rates dip (or vaccine immunity wanes) and measles is introduced to the community.
2) Stating that even if you are vaccinated, it is not safe to be around someone who is unvaccinated (which is absurd as that effectively constitutes an admission the vaccine doesn't work). This ploy was refined with the pertussis vaccine and I've lost count of how many distraught grandparents I know who were told they could not see their grandchildren because the child's pediatrician said unvaccinated relatives would endanger the child. In turn, once this pitch proved itself, it was then weaponized against anyone who did not want to get the COVID vaccine, and I now know dozens of people who did not want to but did so they could "safely" be around vulnerable members of society (e.g., clients or relatives) and then developed serious complications from the vaccine.
3) Using similar logic to the previous two, argue that you had a duty to vaccinate so those who could not (e.g., the immunosuppressed) would be protected.
Likewise, Biden's illegal workplace mandates were justified under the rationale that OSHA had a statutory obligation to protect workers from dangers in the workspace. Therefore, it was necessary to force workers to vaccinate so their vaccinated coworkers could have a safe workspace (which is quite remarkable given that OSHA was created to prevent workers from being poisoned and killed by their employers but instead mandated the greatest workplace hazard in history).
Note: what is particularly grotesque about this is that both the COVID and the pertussis vaccine do not prevent transmission (as they only reduce symptoms-which if anything makes individuals, unaware that they are infected, more likely to spread the disease). Sadly this unproven (and highly divisive) theory has long been promoted by the medical authorities, but fortunately, ICAN suits successfully ended GSK's divisive pertussis advertising campaign and ACIP vice-chair Robert Malone recently shared that the new HHS will no longer promote "protecting" children by advocating for banning unvaccinated relatives from visiting them.
Cancel Culture
During Bush's presidency, the rhetoric of " you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" was trialed as a way to shut down any dissent on his controversial policies. During Obama's presidency, it kicked into full gear, particularly after Occupy Wall Street (e.g., BLM was created by the media 5 months after OWS started).
Many of us believe this was done because OWS represented a genuine threat to the America's business interests, which Obama was keen to defend (e.g., in private meetings with banking CEOs, in contrast to what he told the public, he pledged to protect them from public outrage against them causing a devastating financial crisis-which he then did). As such, Obama used a tried and true tactic from throughout America's (and the world's) history, pit the lower class against each other so they ignore their exploitation by the upper class.
Note: I believe this originated with the 1676 Virginia rebellion, where white indentured servants [slaves] and black slaves collaborated with each other against the colonial upper class owners, after which the upper class decided to permanently enact systemic policies to pit the whites and blacks against each other so that they would never again join together to oppose the rulership.
Note: I compiled a much larger list on Twitter (which can be viewed here) of many similar instances at this time where the media and academia created a hysteria about racism that conveniently occurred in tandem with massive corporate and government funding for DEI initiatives and housing prices skyrocketing to the point home ownership became unaffordable for much of the country.
As such, Corporate America was allowed to whitewash their crimes against the country (and poorer workers overseas) by having token commitments to social justice supersede all of that (which mirrored a previous practice known as greenwashing where egregious polluters successfully erased their bad publicity by promoting token environmental initiatives).
This in turn gradually fed into a climate (encouraged by left-wing universities) where, much like Bush's no debate on any of these topics was allowed, as it constituted dangerous 'hate speech' which should not ever be platformed. Before long, this branched out into other topics that challenged the new corporate-progressive orthodoxy (e.g., criticizing dangerous pharmaceutical products). Many in turn believe this rapid cultural shift played a key role in Trump's 2016 election as many were fed up with being silenced and Trump tapped into that anger by refusing to back down when the media pressured him to stop being politically incorrect.
This then kicked into overdrive during the Trump presidency. Most notably:
•Rather than debate Trump's policies, the left was encouraged to cancel, silence, and in many cases excommunicate anyone who stood for them as "Trump was Hitler" and hence should not be platformed since Trump's ideas were "an existential danger to freedom and democracy"-leading to the country being polarized and unable to rationally debate each individual policy Trump proposed (the standard means through which Democracies are supposed to identify the most sensible policies).
•Building upon this, during COVID, a key part of its PR campaign was to have any dissent from the official narrative be viewed as a danger to society akin to murder and hence also be impermissible to debate or platform. Because of this, numerous reasonable ideas that would have saved a lot of lives (but cost the pandemic cartel a lot of money) were cancelled.
Note: shortly before COVID-19, pharmaceutical lackeys such as Peter Hotez were given a national platform to argue anti-vaxxers posed an existential risk to America's health and had to be stopped with robust online censorship. As such, I strongly suspect this playbook was the one copied for the pandemic.
•Since there were so many issues with the experimental gene therapies (being marketed as vaccines), a decision was made to sell them by politicizing the issue so half of the country, to "win," would mindlessly take them with zeal and ignore all their major issues. I found this quite remarkable given that after the pilot mandatory vaccine campaign which swept America in 2015, media and industry publications had specifically warned against politicizing vaccination (e.g., see this 2015 and 2019 article), something I believe resulted from the fact the vaccine industry needed most of America to buy their products so they could not afford for half the country to politically turn against them and openly debate the subject (as there is so much more evidence of harm than benefit from mass vaccination).
Note: at this time, Democrat legislators voted in lockstep to adopt school vaccine mandates while Republican legislators listened to the significant protest they received and eventually voted against them-which was a red flag to me the Democrat party had completely changed under Obama.
Social Isolation
One of the particularly insidious things about COVID-19 was that its "emergency" was used to rapidly erode many of our foundational rights (e.g., the right to assemble with each other, to practice your religion in a communal church, to share ideas online which threatened the COVID narrative, to be with a dying relative or to not have your business closed without due process) as doing any of that would "kill people."
Note: RFK Jr. highlighted this gross assault on the Constitution here.
I believe this was done in part because it was easier to control people by isolating them (so they could not share ideas which challenged the narrative) and partly so that everyone would be so desperate to regain their freedoms that they would happily comply with whatever they were told would do that (e.g., getting vaccinated)—even though no one in history has ever complied their way out of tyranny.
Note: a key way the society gaslights you is by making you believe no one else sees the world the way you do so that you gradually begin to question your sanity, stop sharing your observations with others, and in time stop being able to even see them. In the case of COVID-19, the story they sold us was so at odds with reality, it was somewhat necessary to also isolate everyone so that they could not shatter that propaganda matrix by sharing any dissenting observations with their peers. In turn, virtually every public figure I've talked to in this movement has told me that the number one message their supporters tell them is that they are grateful for their content as it "lets them know they aren't alone" and hence "makes them feel like they aren't insane."
This tactic in turn was levied against each aspect of American life. For example, widespread school closures were initiated, despite children being at no risk of COVID-19 that were profoundly devastating for both those children and their families (e.g., many studies have since shown there was an unprecedented and sustained drop in their cognitive capacity).