Now let’s get to the real news, tee’d up by a media mystery that provided President Trump with his opening. First, to set the table, it’s time to play connect-the-dots again. There’s a conundrum; the CDC was, apparently, a much more important target than anyone thought. Not only has corporate media continued the drumbeats over Trump firing his own CDC director for over a week now, but the articles have multiplied and metastasized and filled the newspapers like rabid Tribbles. I gave up trying to find just one; there were simply too many.
What could explain all this media obsession over a relatively minor personnel change at CDC?
Whatever else you might say about her, luckless Susan Monarez only served as the agency’s director for one month. In her 30 days of service, she did nothing particularly memorable, one way or another, as evidenced by the media’s complete disinterest in any of her policies or achievements.
At first glance, it looks baffling. How did the media fall so quickly and deeply in love with Dr. Monarez —a Republican appointee— that it is devoting weeks of coverage to her removal?
The sheer overkill of the Monarez coverage doesn’t match the facts on the ground. But it does suggest, perhaps, a terrified anticipation of something bigger coming soon. What if all this manufactured outrage isn’t about Susan Monarez at all, but is battlespace preparation for discrediting whatever Kennedy is about to do next?
But what could that be?
If there were a single thread running through all the overheated anti-Kennedy articles, that thread is his ideas about vaccines. The Monarez firing, the CDC resignations, even Sanders’ moronic op-ed— it all ultimately circles back to vaccines. That’s the nerve Kennedy has been striking for years, he even wrote a book about it, and now that he holds the levers of HHS, it terrifies the establishment.
Monarez had offered them hope. They thought she might hold the line, or at least blunt or delay the worst of Kennedy’s antivaxxing. But now she’s been summarily swept aside, and big pharma is freaking out. They fear an incipient Reckoning.
Obviously, I don’t know. But the fight over Kennedy is clearly not really about Susan Monarez, or even the CDC’s org chart. I’m beginning to think the whole thing is a proxy referendum, not on vaccines generally, but specifically on the pandemic vaccines. Maybe neither side realizes that yet, not fully, not consciously. But that’s what the furious argument is really about.
Consider the fact that, if Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism gains traction, then the whole pandemic narrative —mandates, lockdowns, “trust the science”— starts unraveling. So, defending the CDC and attacking Kennedy is a way to defend the mRNA vaccines without being too obvious about it.
It is an existential threat. As we’ve discussed before, if the covid ‘vaccines’ are ever revealed to be more risky than helpful, the Democrat party will cease to exist as a meaningful political force.
That’s not just a fantastic dream. Major parties can collapse suddenly and unexpectedly, like a high school football player having a myocarditis event during warm-ups. Let’s check in with history. There’s precedent.
In the 1850s, the Whig Party collapsed almost overnight. They weren’t a fringe group or some third-way party. The Whigs were one of the two dominant political parties in America, boasting presidents, senators, and towering statesmen like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. But when the central, polarizing issue of the age —slavery— blew up in their faces, the Whigs found themselves on the wrong side of history’s tracks. Their evasions and compromises had turned suddenly fatal.
Within a decade, the Whigs went extinct, replaced by Lincoln’s Republicans.
Fast forward to today: perhaps not explicitly, but as a practical matter, Democrats have staked their entire identity on the covid vaccines. Not just recommending them, but mandating them, moralizing them, punishing dissent, and branding themselves “the party of science.” If mRNA is ultimately revealed to be more harmful than helpful, the Democrats risk becoming the modern Whigs— leaders of yesterday’s failed orthodoxy, discredited by tomorrow’s unavoidable truth.
A party can survive bad policy. What it cannot survive is being on the wrong side of a civilizational dividing line. Like cornered animals, the Democrats may be sensing a similar kind of Reckoning is coming for them.
Early last month, Secretary Kennedy made massively upsetting news, after he canceled $500 million in grants for mRNA projects. Headline from the New York Times, August 8th:
Two months before that, in June, Kennedy replaced all 17 members of the CDC’s ACIP vaccine committee and —most significantly— with people who’ve expressed anti-vaccine or anti–mRNA views. The new committee includes provocative figures like Robert Malone, Martin Kulldorff, and Retsef Levi, who publicly claimed there is “indisputable evidence” that mRNA vaccines cause serious injuries to young people. Headline from Reuters, June 12th:
Then, about two weeks ago, Kennedy installed that same Dr. Levi —the Administration’s most vocal mRNA critic— as chair of the CDC’s new Covid-19 vaccine working group. Dr. Maryanne Demasi’s substack post, August 20th:
So when you put the pieces together, a child could see it: an mRNA reckoning is on the way. You can be sure the Democrats and their pharma allies can see it coming from miles away.
And that technology —mRNA— is particularly vulnerable to close inspection.
Researchers first pitched mRNA as a platform back in the 1990s. But decades of effort to develop mRNA vaccines (for flu, Zika, rabies, and ‘personalized’ cancer treatments) repeatedly fizzled in clinical trials. Problems included instability of the RNA, excessive inflammation, and poor durability of the immune response.
Pharma giants like Merck and Sanofi invested substantial amounts of money, but then quietly shelved their mRNA programs when the results remained disappointing. By 2018, mRNA was regarded as a “nice theory” that couldn’t be delivered in practice.
The pandemic emergency gave the technology a last-minute reprieve— warp-speed funding, relaxed regulatory hurdles, and a massive guaranteed customer base. But Pfizer and Moderna never solved the platform’s technical problems. They just bulldozed them under in the name of urgency.
Because of that lightning pivot, mRNA’s closet skeletons were never exhumed: the nagging persistence of the payload (e.g., spike protein), its uncontrollable biodistribution, potential autoimmune triggers, oncogenesis, and lack of durability. Pre-2020 papers flagged all of these as serious obstacles. But they were never fully addressed; just overshadowed by the pandemic-scale rollout.
mRNA’s closet is practically rattling with bones. Either the technology miraculously (and invisibly) evolved away decades of well-known pre-pandemic problems, or (more likely) those problems are still hanging around, like overripe fruit waiting to be plucked from the diseased tree.
Now for the part you’ve been patiently waiting for. This morning —while I was innocently working on a nice piece about the progressive origins of Labor Day— President Trump dropped a bunker buster, maybe the biggest political bomb of all. It was nothing less than a declaration of war. Read for yourself:
It was a classic Trumpian third way. Allow me to summarize. Trump just admitted, for the first time, that the shots might not have been as great as he’s always thought. But not only that. The President just said:
- Some people fairly think mRNA stinks.
- The fight over mRNA is tearing the CDC apart — so it must be resolved.
- It’s not his fault — President Trump relied on Pfizer data.
- Pfizer hid the data.
- He allowed that Operation Warp Speed might not have been “brilliant,” and if not, he wants answers.
- He wants answers NOW.
Trump’s Truth wasn’t just venting or blame-dodging; it was political judo. By demanding immediately Pfizer release its “extraordinary” internal data, he boxed them in. If they produce the data, Kennedy’s team will dissect it. If they don’t, Trump will say, “See, they’re hiding something.” If Pfizer denies that it ever gave Trump secret data, then they open up the court of public opinion, and the trial begins.
Meanwhile, all of it allows for the possibility that Trump might’ve been tricked. He’s tilting in Kennedy’s direction.
Call it throwing down a gauntlet, letting a genie out of a bottle, or crossing the jabby Rubicon— whichever, Trump’s post is a tipping point of no return.
But maybe most importantly, Trump just ripped off the media’s bandaid of pretense that all the CDC hysteria is just about vaccines in general, or firing of directors, or anything else. He just nailed the debate to the church door: it’s about the jabs.
He has, once again, co-opted and occupied the media narrative. Nobody will want to talk about anything else now.
Before Lincoln, the impending Civil War could still be narrated as a fight over union, tariffs, states’ rights— safe euphemisms that let politicians dodge the central issue. But when Lincoln floated emancipation, even as a theory, or under resettlement or compensation, the mask had to come off. The war was now about slavery. Once he named it, there was no stuffing the genie back in the bottle.
Trump just did the same thing, for the covid vaccines. Since the debate over Kennedy’s anti-mRNA stance began, the media tried to keep the frame muddled and broad: “science under attack,” “CDC chaos,” “Kennedy the crank.” Monarez was their frontline of defense, now fallen, but they’d reassured themselves that Trump would hold the line and never back away from Operation Warp Speed.
But this morning, when Trump essentially said, “Maybe Warp Speed wasn’t brilliant, maybe Pfizer’s hiding data, maybe the jabs themselves are the issue,” he named the unnameable.
That instantly redefined the entire conflict.
Let me be clear: this isn’t a fight to save a shelved vaccine technology. This is an existential fight for Democrats, and Trump picked the fight now, right as primary season is heating up.
In the 1850s, the fracture line was between free states and slave states, with each side legislating its way of life and daring the other to interfere. Today, the new Mason-Dixon line runs right through public health.
The new free states include Florida, Texas, and others that ban mandates, allow broad vaccine exemptions, and even make ivermectin available over the counter. These states assert the citizen’s right to medical bodily autonomy, just as the Civil War’s free states once asserted a different kind of bodily autonomy.
Below the new Mason-Dixon line, Big Blue strongholds now cling to mandates, restrict or ban vaccine exemptions, legislate collectivism, and keep cheap therapeutic drugs under lock and prescription. These states enforce a medical orthodoxy every bit as rigid as the antebellum South’s slave codes.
Like the slavery question, the mRNA question represents the obvious hinge of a binary value system.
Slavery posed a stark binary: either human beings could be owned as property, or they couldn’t. Period. There was no stable middle ground— every “compromise” only deferred the reckoning. The issue forced every American to pick a side, because at root the issue was about the fundamental value of human liberty.
mRNA poses a similar binary hinge. Either the shots were the triumph of modern science, or they were a catastrophic overreach that harmed millions. Either government coercion in medicine is justified for the “greater good,” or it represents the gravest violation of bodily autonomy. You can’t hold both positions at once, and like slavery, attempts to straddle the divide just make the eventual break that much sharper.
That’s why Trump’s implied question can’t be re-bottled. It’s not a policy tweak or a technical squabble— it’s the fulcrum of two incompatible value systems: one rooted in compliance to centralized expertise, the other rooted in skepticism and individual sovereignty.
Just as slavery defined 19th-century politics, the mRNA divide shapes ours.
The media’s hysterical coverage of Nobody Monarez is because if the SS mRNA goes down, the Democrat party goes down with that ship. If you thought President Trump stubbornly clung to the jabs, he’s flat indecisive compared to Democrats.
The jabs aren’t just part of Democrats’ policy prescriptions. They are the party’s identity marker. If mRNA is revealed as more harmful than helpful, then Democrats can’t pivot. They can’t say “oops, honest mistake,” not when millions lost jobs, children missed years of school, and dissenters were deplatformed. The party would be exposed not just as wrong, but as authoritarian and captured by the very pharmaceutical interests it claimed to regulate.
In politics, some mistakes are survivable— wars, recessions, dalliances with starlets, erotic escapades, and similar scandals. But staking your party’s moral legitimacy on a technology that may prove disastrous is existential. Just as the Whigs went down with their slavery compromises, the Democrats risk going down with their mRNA absolutism.
Thanks to Trump’s post, today —Labor Day 2025— just became another one of those unforgettable before/after moments. The sequel may play out slowly, but a new season has begun. We are finally going to start litigating the pandemic.
UPDATE
Two things happened yesterday following President Trump’s explosive Labor Day vaccine post. First, only second-tier media (CNN, CNBC, USA Today, Axios, etc) covered the story, delicately and tentatively. Second, and much more telling, the nonstop, wall-to-wall coverage of the CDC-Kennedy controversy completely disappeared. Shazam! Trump nuked the narrative. Let’s start with STAT News’s story, headlined, “Trump says CDC is ‘being ripped apart’ over Covid products, calls for drugmakers to prove their benefits.”
The experts are spinning; they haven’t quite yet decided what to say about the President’s vaccine post. Which means nobody’s told them the new narrative yet.
“Experienced observers of the Trump administration were uncertain what to make of the Truth Social post,” STAT reported, “viewing it as being akin to a Rorschach test.” In other words: “the anti-vaxxers love it, they think he’s saying Pfizer lied to him,” an anonymous ‘former official’ explained. “The public health people like it too, they think he’s trying to create daylight with RFK.”
But, “I would not want to be (Pfizer CEO) Al Bourla today,” the former official added.
John Maraganore, founding CEO of Alnylam, an mRNA biotech startup, chose to see the vaccine vial as half full. “I’m delighted that the President acknowledges the incredible data that has been generated with covid vaccines,” he bravely began, “and I think the challenge is that doubt has been sowed on the safety of these vaccines by the anti-vaxxer community.”
It’s all noise. The tell was that STAT News did not dispute President Trump’s recharacterization of the CDC-Kennedy contretemps as really being a fight over the covid vaccines. Trump’s post plainly said pharma created a MESS by failing to disprove harms over covid jabs, and that ‘mess’ is tearing the CDC apart.
The article never questioned Trump’s premise at all.
As for the big corporate media players— it’s not fair to say they completely ignored the story. To be sure, they didn’t report Trump’s post, but they dropped the rope on the exploding CDC narrative like they’d just realized they were holding the business end of a coral snake.
And, as we expected, conservative social media was completely consumed by Trump’s post yesterday.
There was one more point, which I overlooked yesterday. Trump didn’t just zero the crosshairs onto the real issue —the mRNA platform— he also yanked pharma out of the safe shadows. By naming Pfizer, he made it plain: if you want to keep selling mRNA, you don’t get to hide behind the CDC while Kennedy takes the heat. You get in here, show your data, and clean up your own mess.
Trump flipped the burden.
It’s not Secretary Kennedy’s job, to prove their shots are unsafe. It’s Pfizer and Moderna’s job to prove they’re safe— in public, under the lights, and without the protection of captured regulators. And to “do it NOW.”
Although Trump only named Pfizer (the household name), every other mRNA player heard the message, too, loud and clear. Believe that.
Here’s another bit of evidence that things are playing out as I predicted. Yesterday, former Operation Warp Speed scientist Brett Giroir responded to Trump’s post (without saying so) by defending mRNA tech in USA Today:
Brett Giroir’s USA Today op-ed proved Trump has already refocused the fight. Just a week ago, media swarmed Kennedy’s firings as a “war on science.” But yesterday, Giroir didn’t waste time defending bureaucrats like Susan Monarez, “science itself,” or even vaccines in general— he stuck his flag right on mRNA, praising the platform as being “as transformational as the internet,” and he warned President Trump to stop Kennedy from rolling it back.
In other words, the debate is no longer about Monarez, the CDC, satanic scientists, HEP-B, or “trust in science.” Trump yanked pharma onto the stage and nailed the issue to the wall: it’s the mRNA jabs themselves. From here on out, every defender and every critic will fight on that ground, where Kennedy is strongest and Pfizer has the most to lose.
If Giroir’s op-ed is any sign, Trump and Kennedy hold the high ground on the mRNA battlefield. Giroir’s op-ed was intellectually calorie-free: lots of glowing adjectives, but zero new evidence. All they have is mRNA hype: two decades of dead ends before covid, one rushed emergency product rolled out under crisis conditions and liability shields, and zero other successful commercial therapies to date.
That’s it. That’s all they have. The rest is pure hope.
Expect the debate to simmer down a little, as Kennedy’s enemies lick their wounds and wait for someone to tell them what to think. I doubt they’ll be as reckless as Giroir to make a frontal assault defending mRNA. But we’ll see.
