Mercola.com: Why Have Vaccines Become a Religion?

Need To Know Publications
January 20, 2026

During a recent good natured conversation with an Australian cardiologist called Paul I was gobsmacked when he said, and I quote “What do you need to know what’s in the vaccines for…”

I tried explaining that I wanted to know what was being put into my body but to use an Aussie expression he wasn’t having a bar of it.

I hope he gets to read this because Paul you are a closed minded disciple of the vaccine religion referred to in this article, where informed consent be damned. 

Wakey Wakey Paul…

Regards

Phil

Mercola.com, Analysis by A Midwestern Doctor, December 12, 2025 

 

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• As more people awaken to the dangers of vaccines, they discover a persistent problem vaccine safety advocates have faced for decades: talking to vaccine zealots is like speaking to a brick wall. Regardless of the evidence presented, you cannot reach them — sometimes it feels like speaking to religious fanatics unwilling to consider the “blasphemy you’re spewing forth”

• This is deliberate, as vaccines have been enshrined as the holy water which baptizes you into the faith of Western medicine and became the “miracle” the superiority of modern medicine is based upon

• Because of this faith and the relentless propaganda accompanying it, a series of absurd and contradictory arguments have been established to assert vaccines are “safe” which would never be accepted anywhere else

• As a result, all vaccine research is designed around the assumption vaccines must be safe, and all regulatory decisions sharing this bias — thereby making it nearly impossible to prove a vaccine is harmful, regardless of how many people it kills or injures

• This article will review the absurd fallacies used to defend mass vaccination, the unsound mindsets that produce them, and the incredible opportunity we have to at last shift this dysfunctional dynamic

   

Once people awaken to vaccine issues, one question emerges: why does the medical field maintain such rigid ideological attachment to vaccination? This phenomenon reflects three converging factors:

•First, human society has always been defined by competing groups vying for status and wealth, and it is a very recent development that doctors have attracted the prestige and salary the profession commands.

This was accomplished through:

• Market monopolization (via the American Medical Association) and technological developments birthing an incredibly profitable medical industry that generated the funding to market a newfound faith in it to the entire world and required doctors (and faith in doctors) to serve as the keystone for the industry.
• Medicine creating a mythology that it rescued us from the dark ages of disease, and hence deserves its supremacy in the current social hierarchy.

As “vaccines ending infectious diseases” is a central part of that mythology, to maintain their existing prestige, those within the conventional medical system are essentially forced to double-down on the absolute supremacy of vaccines, regardless of the evidence against them, or the fact, as Secretary Kennedy brilliantly shows, there is no actual evidence vaccines were responsible for the decline in infectious disease the medical industry falsely claimed credit for.

 

 

•Second, as the Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates,² less competent individuals vastly overestimate their competence because they lack the knowledge to recognize their incompetence.

In medicine, there is a massive amount of information that needs to be learned, so in most cases doctors are forced to take short cuts throughout their training where again and again they assume if A is true then B is true without understanding exactly why A leads to B, how tentative the link can be, and in which situations it does not apply.

Likewise, when the public (especially members of the media) appraises medical information, rather than try to understand how A becomes B, they typically take the pronouncement of an expert (e.g., a doctor) that “A always leads to B” as all there is to say on the subject.

Since A often does not actually lead to B, and people do not like admitting they are wrong (especially if, like doctors, an incredible personal investment was required to attain the social status they hold), when confronted with inconsistencies in their beliefs, the typical response will be to double-down on their position rather than try to critically understand the additional data.

Note: The cognitive dissonance created by acknowledging vaccines they prescribed harmed their patients also makes doctors psychologically invested in dismissing evidence vaccines cause harm.³

•Third, a strong argument can be made that societies cannot function without some type of unifying faith or spirituality (particularly since in the absence of one, people will frequently seek out one to adopt).

In our culture, a rather peculiar situation emerged where religion was cast out by broad swaths of the society and replaced with science (under the belief it would create a fairer and more rational society) while the underlying need for a widespread faith was never addressed.

Because of this, science gradually morphed into the society’s religion, resulting in it claiming to be an objective arbiter of truth, but in reality, frequently being highly dogmatic and irrational as it sought to establish its own monopoly over the truth (which has led to many labeling the current societal institution of science as “scientism“).

As such, when science is discussed, religious terminology is often used by its proponents (e.g., “I believe in science,” “I believe in vaccines,” “anyone who denies climate change is reprehensible and must be silenced”).

 

 

The Religion of Medicine

Over the years, many have observed that medicine, by claiming dominion over life and death, has become science’s new religious foundation. Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn stated:

“Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion.”

In Mendelsohn’s 1979 book Confessions of a Medical Heretic, he argued that medicine was a dogmatic institution prioritizing authority and ritualistic practices over patient well-being.⁴

He then made numerous highly impactful television appearances, including a 1983 debate on vaccine dangers.

 

 

Note: 55 other previously aired news segments aired on vaccine dangers that would never air now can be viewed here.

Mendelsohn highlighted how doctors compulsively rushed to prescribe new drugs before side effects were known, many routine practices caused more harm than benefit, that medicine’s compulsion to “do something” was faith-based rather than rational, and that doctors challenging the faith were treated as heretics and cast out — all of which we collectively witnessed decades later throughout COVID-19.

Mendelsohn also highlighted specific techniques medicine appropriated from religion: doctors replaced priests; white coats replaced priest robes; hospitals functioned as temples; medical insurance resembled religious indulgences; drugs were treated like communion wafers; and vaccines became the holy water baptizing you into the faith. I would argue the final point is the most important as:

•Medical students and healthcare workers are required to be fully vaccinated — filtering out those not aligned with dogma and forcing submitters to push vaccines on patients. Likewise, as COVID-19 showed, many segments of the public will now excommunicate those who aren’t vaccinated.

•Vaccines significantly increase chronic illness likelihood (typically a 3-10X increase), causing recipients to become lifelong medicine adherents.

•The trauma of vaccination repatterns the nervous system to be less connected with one’s surroundings, thereby making the individual much easier to pull into a controlling materialist paradigm.

For a long time, the religious nature of vaccination has been a relatively unknown and taboo topic to discuss, but fortunately, in recent days that has shifted. Here for example, Tucker Carlson and Cheryl Hines gave millions of viewers one of the most poignant explanations I’ve seen for why vaccination is ultimately a religious ritual: x.com/MidwesternDoc

Vaccines have become the holy water we all receive at birth to become baptized into the church of modern medicine and chronic illness.

That religious devotion, many, like Tucker Carlson note is why so many people simply cannot consider any evidence vaccines are dangerous.🧵 pic.twitter.com/wJgVEOd2dq

— A Midwestern Doctor (@MidwesternDoc) November 26, 2025

Note: This is the mural deifying vaccination Tucker was referring to.⁵

 

Vaccines Amen

Recently Aaron Siri published Vaccines, Amen, an excellent book which makes the best comparison between medicine and religion since Mendelsohn’s 1979 work by showing how repeatedly:

•The words of a small number of (pharmaceutical-funded) trusted authorities are taken as dogmatic truth everyone copies — despite lacking evidence or logical support. Siri deposed the godfather (high priest) of America’s current vaccine program, showing critical gaps in his duplicitous reasoning that defined vaccination practice.

•Illogical and blatantly inconsistent positions are taken arguing vaccines are safe and effective with identical evidence types accepted if supporting that belief but rejected if refuting it. Siri highlights countless instances of glaring contradictions with the phrase “Vaccines, Amen,” something that also captures vaccine zealotry’s censorship of questioners and forced vaccination rather than logical persuasion.

•Vaccine safety research is layered with endless assumptions that vaccines must be completely safe, concealing actual harms, yet this research — which never actually proved safety (due to those assumptions) — is presented as ironclad proof vaccines are both safe and effective.

Note: I recently corresponded with a CDC employee who shared that he “read a 2021-2022 project proposal which discussed how they were seeing the first girls that got the HPV vaccines were showing higher rates of cervical cancer as they got into older ages. Instead of making the obvious observation that this disproves the central [but never proven] justification for HPV vaccines, they just said, we know the vaccine works so something else must be happening to cause the rise in the condition it was meant to prevent.”

The Absence of Evidence Is Not the Evidence of Absence

Due to the high toxicity of vaccines, real studies inevitably show significant injury. The medical community’s strategy hence has been to block studies comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated from ever being produced.

As such, placebo-controlled vaccine trials are vehemently rejected as “unethical” because they deny (placebo) children a “life-saving” vaccine — despite it being far more unethical to inject every child with vaccines of unknown safety. Yet when “ethical” studies show vaccine injuries are real, they’re rejected as “non-controlled” and met with demands for “controlled trials” (that are banned for “ethical” reasons). This absurdity continues as:

•When “non-controlled” datasets indicate safety, rather than be questioned, they are widely publicized.

•Large datasets that could “ethically” compare vaccinated to unvaccinated exist, but the public is never given access despite extensive efforts to obtain them.

•When individuals independently conduct such studies demonstrating harm, studies get retracted and investigators are often targeted by medical boards.

•Most recently, a physician agreed to conduct a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study to prove vaccines were safe and then publish the results regardless of what they showed. Once its data irrefutably showed vaccines were immensely dangerous,⁶ he refused to publish the study and apologetically admitted to a hidden camera he did that to protect himself.⁷

•Many other incriminating datasets are routinely buried. For example, a CDC whistleblower testified that the CDC buried data they collected showing vaccines cause autism,⁸ and when a court order finally forced the CDC to release the data used to track COVID-19 vaccine safety, it showed significant harm and that past publications of this data had hid that harm.

In short, an illogical status quo has been enshrined where “the absence of evidence” for vaccine harm is erroneously accepted as “the evidence of absence.” Building upon this, evidence-based medicine (the guiding principle for modern medical practice) was founded upon the premise that clinical decisions should be made with the “best available evidence.”

Unfortunately, industry redefined this to mean “large (expensive) double blind trials” (RCTs) published in top (industry funded) medical journals and positions endorsed by (corruptible) “experts,” rather than the best evidence currently existing on a subject.

Note: The FDA also rigidly demands costly RCTs for drug approvals, making it impossible for off-patent (non-monetizable) therapies to ever be approved. RCT fundamentalism (the refusal to consider anything besides randomized controlled trials) is particularly misguided as smaller observational trials typically yield the same results as large RCTs (proven by a definitive 2014 Cochrane Review⁹), especially if effects are significant.

As such, while the best currently available evidence (retrospective comparisons of vaccinated and unvaccinated children) shows significant harm from vaccines, it is dismissed for not being from RCTs (despite vaccine placebos being “unethical”) rather than taken as a sign “better” research needs to be conducted to disprove the harm the best available evidence currently shows.

 

 

Likewise, when Siri tried to obtain data proving vaccine safety (e.g., in depositions, lawsuits or Federal petitions), no one could identify a single study supporting the claim that infant vaccines don’t cause autism, despite all being certain “mountains of evidence” exist showing vaccines are safe.

In turn, the Institute of Medicine (IOM)’s 1994 and 2012 reports^10,11 (considered by many the definitive proof of vaccine safety) actually stated insufficient evidence existed to definitively support or disprove a link between vaccines and serious injury, and that this research should be urgently done.

Furthermore, Gavin DeBecker’s excellent book Forbidden Facts, focuses on how the IOM routinely whitewashes proven harms of toxins the government has a financial stake in (e.g., Agent Orange) and, as DeBecker discusses below (see the source document to watch the video – Ed), provides leaked records that show IOM members were told at the start that their final report could not provide evidence suggesting vaccine harm.

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Burying Evidence

Since RCT’s cost so much to conduct, the pharmaceutical industry has found a series of reliable methods to game them that are continually utilized.¹² This data manipulation is particularly brazen with vaccine trials. For example:

• In clinical trials, vaccines are monitored for very short periods (e.g., the studies for hepatitis B vaccines given to every newborn only monitored side effects for 4 to 5 days¹³), making long-term detection of the myriad of chronic illnesses vaccines cause impossible.

• The “placebos” used in vaccine trials typically cause a significant degree of injury, hence concealing the harm of the vaccine as the injuries observed in trials are “equivalent to placebo.” For example, consider this data from the HPV vaccine trial¹⁴ (which used a harmful aluminum adjuvant as “placebo” to mask 2.3% of trial participants developing a life-altering autoimmune condition): 

   

 

Likewise, in the initial Gardasil trials, out of 21,458 subjects, 10 vaccine recipients and 7 “placebo” recipients died¹⁵ including 7 from car accidents¹⁶ (which POTS — a common Gardasil side effect — can trigger by causing drivers to pass out).

So, despite the Gardasil death rate (8.5 per 10,000) and “placebo” death rate (7.2 per 10,000) being almost twice the background death rate in girls and young women (4.37 per 10,000), much like the unprecedented spike in autoimmune disorders, the FDA wasn’t concerned since it matched the “placebo.”

• More remarkably, as Siri has shown, most vaccines use another vaccine (often one for a completely different disease) as the “placebo,” again making it possible to mask all the injuries observed from the vaccine. Likewise, in many cases, when you look up each consecutive vaccine trial, you will find that the very first vaccine in the pyramid scheme was simply never tested against a placebo but assumed to be “safe” (despite the injuries which occurred in those trials).

• In many instances trials will become unblinded. For example, in the COVID-19 trials, trial investigators testified (and published data indicated¹⁷) that the trial was not blinded, resulting in vaccine recipients with COVID like symptoms not being PCR tested for COVID-19 (thereby reducing their COVID cases and inflating vaccine efficacy), much in the same manner adverse events were not logged from vaccine recipients.

Note: This likely explains why the vaccine performed so much worse in reality than the trials suggested.

• In trials, it is almost impossible to report adverse reactions occurring that are not “expected reactions” being monitored for (typically minor side effects like fever or fatigue) — something we also saw through the COVID vaccine trials and within the CDC’s system that was created to monitor the vaccines for safety.

• Pharmaceutical companies being permitted by the FDA to reclassify injuries that occur to make them seem less bad (e.g., COVID trial participants testified that a severe cancer was reclassified as enlarged lymph nodes and a permanent disability was reclassified as “functional abdominal pain”) and principal investigators (PIs) having the authority to determine if the reaction was related to the vaccine — which they inevitably will conclude was not.

Sadly, as mentioned before, these issues are not unique to vaccines. For example, recently Secretary Kennedy shared a post highlighting the decades of suppressed evidence SSRIs can cause violent behavior:

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One comment on the thread¹⁸ caught my eye, as it illustrates how reluctant PIs are to tie an injury to a pharmaceutical, even if they can clearly see it occurring:

 

Regulatory Capture

Vaccines are the only consumer product which:

• Are mandated upon you for your own good.

• You are forbidden to see the safety data on and instead must trust “experts” to evaluate.

• You cannot sue the manufacturer if a defectively designed one severely harms you.

If you take a step back, that is completely absurd, and has only been possible due to the religious faith around vaccination and drug regulators abjectly failing their basic duties to protect the public. This failure results from:

• The religious zeal for vaccines having permeated the healthcare bureaucracy and preventing any real scrutiny of vaccines before or after they enter the market.

• The Federal government (which pays out vaccine injury claims) being strongly incentivized to eliminate any science suggesting they are unsafe or ineffective. For example, if a single HHS study found one in five autism cases were linked to vaccines, it could result in approximately $1.3 trillion in liability¹⁹ — for context, the entire 2017 federal budget was $3.3 trillion.

• A revolving door incentivizes healthcare bureaucrats to maintain the lie each vaccine is “safe and effective.” For example, the FDA and CDC fought for years to bury a deluge of severe injury reports for the HPV vaccine, after which that CDC director became a Merck executive and received over 30 million from Merck.

Likewise, Peter Marks, an FDA director who continually fought to conceal COVID vaccine injuries and rush the vaccine along without adequate testing so it could be mandated recently left the agency and became a Eli Lilly executive.

Similarly, in Vaccines Amen, Aaron Siri shows:²⁰

• FOIA’d emails demonstrate the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office head routinely communicated with the pharmaceutical industry to set national vaccine policy while stonewalling citizen groups advocating vaccine safety.

• CDC reports are heavily scrutinized internally to ensure they only release data supporting the notion that vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary.

• CDC members and advisory panels view vaccination industry authorities with such reverence that their claims rarely face basic scrutiny, regardless of how absurd they may be.

• Since lackluster standards exist for ensuring vaccine safety (no placebo trials due to “ethical” issues), the proposed solution is post-marketing surveillance. Unfortunately, since this is at CDC and FDA’s discretion and since they “know” vaccines are safe, signals of harm are virtually always dismissed — best demonstrated by what we saw throughout COVID-19.

• When irrefutable vaccine injury examples arise, the typical priority is covering up bad publicity rather than addressing issues (e.g., UNICEF worked with CDC to cover up backlash from data showing their vaccine program killed children, rather than changing the program itself).

Conclusion

Because vaccines have such a high rate of injury (and conversely such a small benefit), the only way the existing paradigm can be sustained is by having the majority believe vaccines are “safe and effective” and prohibiting debate, as the moment debate emerges, nonsensical contradictions justifying the paradigm become immediately apparent.

COVID-19 at last shifted this, as beyond the vaccines being mandated despite failing abysmally to prevent the infection, they severely injured millions of recipients,²¹ with robust polls since 2022 (detailed here), consistently finding a third of recipients had side effects, a tenth had severe side effects and half the population believes the vaccines likely caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.

For example, the most recent survey²² found 26% of vaccine recipients experienced “minor” side effects, 10% experienced “severe” side effects and 46% of Americans believe it is likely the COVID vaccine is killing a significant number of people — with 25% believing this is very likely.

Furthermore, since the vaccine brand was used to sell the experimental COVID-19 gene therapies, this tarnished the entire brand, creating a window for many others to begin speaking about similar severe injuries they experienced from other vaccines (e.g., Tucker Carlson recently told millions his son got Guillain-Barré syndrome from an [unnecessary] flu shot). The faith that protects vaccines is hence fracturing and leading to lawmakers at last calling out the absurdities used to sell everyone vaccines.

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Furthermore, last week, thanks to you speaking out, the completely unjustifiable newborn hepatitis B vaccination was removed from the immunization schedule — something many of us who’d fought it for over thirty years never imagined was possible. There has never been an opportunity like this in our lifetimes and it’s critical to get this message out and support people doing excellent work to shift this issue.

Author’s Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article which goes into greater detail on the points mentioned here and their profound implications. That article, along with additional links and references can be read here. Additionally, a companion article which reviews over a dozen suppressed studies that show vaccinated children were far more likely to develop chronic illness and how far more experienced subtle neurological injuries which profoundly changed society can be read here.

A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD’s exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.

- Sources and References

• ¹ Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History, Suzanne Humphries, CreateSpace, 2013

• ² Wikipedia, Dunning-Kruger effect, 2023

• ³ Wikipedia, Cognitive dissonance, 2024

• ⁴ Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Robert S. Mendelsohn, Contemporary Books, 1979

• ⁵ History of Vaccines, Diego Rivera’s Vaccine Mural in Detroit in the 1930s, July 12, 2021

• ^{6, 7} An Inconvenient Study, 2025

• ⁸ Statement of William Thompson, Children’s Health Defense, August 27, 2014

• ⁹ Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 2014, 2014(4), MR000034

• ¹⁰ Adverse Events Associated with Childhood Vaccines: Evidence Bearing on Causality, NCBI Bookshelf, 1994

• ¹¹ Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality, NCBI Bookshelf, 2012

• ¹² Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice and the Doctors Who Give It, Malcolm Kendrick, Chetnaa Publishing

• ¹³ The Forgotten Side of Medicine, A Midwestern Doctor, Substack, 2025

• ¹⁴ Gardasil Package Insert, FDA, April 2015

• ^{15, 16} FDA, 2006

• ¹⁷ BMJ, Peter Doshi: Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines — we need more details and the raw data, January 4, 2021

• ¹⁸ X.com, November 5, 2025

• ¹⁹ Amazon, Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines

• ²⁰ Vaccines Are Not an Amen-Religion: A Guide to Understanding Vaccine Science, Aaron Siri, Skyhorse Publishing, 2024

• ^{21, 22} Rasmussen Reports, Millions Experienced COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects, November 10-12, 2024

   

Source: https://principia-scientific.com/why-has-being-vaccinated-become-a-religion/

‘Board of Peace’ resembles a club that turns the world into the ‘law of the jungle’

Li Zixin
Jan 21, (Leer en espanol)

 US President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to impose 200 percent tariffs on French wines and champagne after French President Emmanuel Macron was reported to be unwilling to join his "Board of Peace" on Gaza, according to media reports. 

The so-called Board of Peace is part of a "20-point peace plan" proposed by the US to end the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip. According to the draft charter of this board, it will be chaired by Trump. Membership would be by invitation from the chairman, who would hold key authority over terms, renewals and removals. What shocked the international community even more was that the US plan openly priced the board's "permanent seats" at $1 billion each. This act of "privatizing" international affairs and "commodifying" regional peace not only disregards the will of the Palestinian people but also poses a huge challenge to the existing international governance system and norms of conduct.

The current Israel-Palestine conflict has lasted nearly 30 months, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues to worsen. The White House's push to form a "Board of Peace" is primarily aimed at demonstrating US influence over the situation in Gaza. However, this institution, which should be responsible for peace in Gaza, is a typical product of "transactional diplomacy." The nomination list is filled with US politicians and their cronies, but conspicuously absent is the most critical stakeholder - the Palestinians. This "absence" has drawn widespread criticism from the international community, with some even suggesting it reveals the institution's "colonial" nature - attempting to privately outline Gaza's future without the consent of the Palestinian people.

Even more shocking is the White House's explicit offer of a "permanent seat" for $1 billion. This move reduces the solemn cause of international peace to a game of money. Gaza's future should not be a commodity to be bought; under the influence of capital and hegemonic will, it will find it difficult to achieve true peace.

Judging from the proposed charter of the "Board of Peace," this mechanism is unlikely to resolve the current crisis and may even poison the political landscape of the Middle East. First, it has not prioritized the imminent humanitarian crisis in Gaza, instead focusing more on the capital operations of postwar reconstruction.

Second, this board seriously hinders a comprehensive and just solution to the Palestine-Israel issue. The US-led Gaza peace plan not only eliminates the political role of the Palestinian National Authority in Gaza but also establishes a so-called Board of Peace controlled by external forces above the Palestinian technocratic committee. In essence, this replaces sovereign governance with external intervention, undermining the political foundation of the "two-state solution." The US thereby deprives Palestinians of their fundamental right as a state to handle their own affairs, effectively further dividing the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and making a just and lasting peace even more unattainable.

Third, this move has severely impacted the global governance system. The current Gaza crisis is a brutal illustration of the disorderly state where "might makes right." If peace seats can be bought and major powers can arbitrarily establish their own systems outside the existing international order, the fairness of the postwar international order will be undermined. This "club governance" model reduces international law to a private contract among major powers, forcing the world back into the law of the jungle.

To truly resolve the Israel-Palestine issue, we must return to the international order of fairness and justice. Any arrangements regarding the postwar governance of Gaza must be discussed within the framework of the UN and must fully respect the fundamental principle of "Palestinians governing Palestine." Genuine peace should be built on the basis of the "two-state solution" and the restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, not on a "small group" privately established by a hegemonic power. The international community should be wary of the dangerous tendency to place geopolitical games above international law and ensure that the reconstruction of Gaza is the reconstruction of justice, not an expansion of hegemony.

The author is a research fellow with the China Institute of International Studies. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn 

 

 

Source: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202601/1353763.shtml

The vaccine schedule breaks the FDA Aluminium safety limit by 50 times

 

Phil Harper
January 21, 2026

In part one we looked at the official ‘line’ on why aluminium is safe to use in vaccines; it has been used for decades, and you absorb more aluminium from your food

Neither one of these statements stand up to even the mildest nudge of scrutiny.

If you were seeking informed consent on vaccines containing aluminium, those two arguments would be presented to you.

With them both utterly demolished, where can we go next?

Let’s wander further behind the curtain and see how deep the rot goes.

There’s one study that is actually cited as a defense of aluminium in vaccines, it’s called the Miktus paper. Published in 2011, it was a strategic, institutional response to a growing crisis of confidence in the American vaccination program.

By the late 2000s, questioning the vaccine schedule had gone mainstream with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey forcing the issue onto Larry King. Rumbling alongside this, the FDA was embroiled in a bruising legal battle over the safety of a vaccine preservative called Thimerosal.

By exploring the history of this moment, and what led to the creation of the Miktus paper, we’ll come to understand how utterly broken the regulatory system really is.

The FDA ultimately ‘won’ the legal case, but they were forced to remove Thimerosal from their vaccines products. In the years surrounding the case, the mood at the FDA was defensive, because questioning their $20 billion vaccine industry was becoming a trend.

As attention shifted onto the other ingredients used in vaccines, it was clear many of them had been “Grandfathered” in. They’d been in use for so long that safety was assumed rather than demonstrated clinically.

Like any great salesman, the FDA pivoted this blind spot into a feature.

Effectively their line was “hey the reason we don’t need safety data is because we’ve been injecting aluminium for decades”. A defense they made official and still use today.

Whilst thimerosal could be removed from vaccines, it was just a preservative after all, aluminium is core to the functionality of their vaccines. If the aluminium domino falls, the $20 billion industry would be in big trouble.

The question the FDA needed to answer was really very simple:

“Your vaccine schedule means infants receive aluminium, a known neurotoxin. Sometimes an infant receives multiple aluminium vaccines on the same day.

Do you have data on what is a ‘safe’ amount of aluminium that can be injected into an infant in a single sitting?”

To this question, the FDA simply had no answer. We still don’t have a proper answer to this question even today. Shouldn’t we know the safety limit for injected aluminium?

With no response from the regulators, there was a doctor with a fairly decent answer to this question, but it wasn’t the answer the FDA wanted. Doctor Bob Sears had made a very astute observation: safety data did already exist on aluminium.

Sears found that the FDA already had a safety limit for aluminium in infants, and it was 5 mcg per kilo per day.

So…there was an answer after all!?

Exceed this limit, and the FDA themselves said aluminium can cause neurodevelopmental problems, impaired bone growth and bone mineralisation; it’s toxic basically. So how does this limit compare to vaccines an infant receives during the first 12 weeks of a baby’s life?

On the British NHS, when an infant goes for their eight-week health check, they’ll get the 6-in-1 and the MenB vaccine on the same day. Depending on the brands used, that could be as much as 1320 mcg of aluminium in a single day.

For an average 5kg baby, that’s 264 mcg per kilo, which is 52 times the safe limit the FDA had already set.

What? How is that possible??

It’s possible because the FDA, the industry they protect, and the scientists who do their work will use sophistry, bullying, groupthink, and a war of attrition to obscure what I just told you.

By the end of your honest venture into the data, you’ll be confused and exhausted. You’ll probably just given in trying to work out the answer. What they’ll tell you is the safe limit (which really is an FDA regulation) is different to the limit for vaccination, because an IV is different to vaccination.

The safe limit I’m showing you here, they’ll say, is utterly irrelevant to the dose babies receive during vaccination. When someone puts this argument to you, ask them this:

“Ok, then what is the exact safe limit of injected aluminium for an eight-week old infant, and how do we know what it is?”

The sophistry you’ll be faced with is a strategy of deflection to obscure the lack of data on this very important question. The truth is, the FDA’s 5 mcg limit is very relevant to the dose babies receive during vaccination.

To demonstrate why will require us to follow the FDA’s path.

How did the FDA come to set this limit?

It began in the 1970s with a crisis in kidney patients. Doctors noticed a mysterious, fatal condition in patients undergoing long-term dialysis who, previously mentally sharp, began suffering from stuttering, seizures, and rapid-onset dementia.

It became known as ‘Dialysis Dementia.’

In 1976, Dr. Allen Alfrey identified the cause: aluminum. The water used for dialysis contained aluminum which, because the patients’ kidneys weren’t working, crossed the blood-brain barrier and destroyed grey matter.

The results of the data was crystal clear: aluminium is unambiguously neurotoxic, it definitely causes dementia and alzheimers “like” symptoms, so the debate would have to shift towards just how much is toxic, and where in the body it must go before it produces toxicity.

The discovery triggered years of growing anxiety among pediatricians. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, they tried to sound the alarm that premature infants were physiologically almost identical to these dialysis patients.

Like them, premature babies have very low kidney function, and like them, they are often fed intravenously (IV).

The concern was that the IV feeds used for babies—complex mixtures of amino acids and electrolytes—were heavily contaminated with aluminum as a manufacturing byproduct.

For two decades, researchers argued that by feeding premature babies this way, they were bypassing the gut’s natural barrier which blocks 99 percent of ingested aluminum. It was delivering a known neurotoxin directly into the bloodstream of infants who couldn’t excrete it.

Finally, in 1997 the hypothesis was tested. The Bishop study was a randomised control trial in which one group of preterm babies were fed aluminium rich feed, and the other were fed aluminium depleted feed.

Those babies were then followed up at 18 months, and the results were stark. It was the validation of twenty years of warnings.

The babies fed with aluminium contaminated feeds had statistically significant impaired mental development. The study proved that when aluminum accumulates in a baby, it significantly increased their risk of having a Mental Development Index (MDI) below 85 —roughly 15 percent lower than average.

Bishop and his colleagues confirmed what had long been feared: they were watching a known neurotoxin damage the development of the most vulnerable population.

The study was the primary catalyst for the FDA creating a specific federal regulation (21 CFR 201.323) to protect infants from aluminum toxicity in intravenous feeding. In 2004, the FDA fully implemented this rule, which mandates that fluids used for IV feeding must not contain more than 25 micrograms of aluminum per liter.

The actual wording of the regulation created this remarkable statement:

“Research indicates that patients with impaired kidney function, including premature neonates, who receive parenteral levels of aluminum at greater than 4 to 5 µg/kg/day accumulate aluminum at levels associated with central nervous system and bone toxicity. Tissue loading may occur at even lower rates of administration.”

So the FDA knows that aluminium becomes neurotoxic at 4 to 5 mcg per kilo per day and crucially, it “may occur at even lower rates of administration”. The wording of their own regulation should have jolted the FDA and the medical establishment into action. Why?

Because their vaccine schedule contains multiple vaccines that contain high doses of aluminium, and at eight weeks old, infants can receive 264 mcg per kilo on a single day.

So let’s return to those who will contest these arguments, they’ll say, “see! That safety limit he is quoting is for Intravenous administration, which is not the same as vaccination!”

It’s true, but the reply is simple. “If we are content to give babies fifty times the dose of aluminium that’s toxic when given via IV, then we must have very strong clinical data to support this large dose right? What exactly is the toxic dose of aluminium when given via intramuscular injection?”

These were the very questions the FDA were struggling to answer throughout the 2000s. Aluminium had long been proven as neurotoxic, it was unambiguously poisoning people who were exposed to it.

Now people had realised the FDA already knew it was neurotoxic in babies when given intravenously. Furthermore, the childhood vaccine schedule was awash with high doses of aluminium.

Dismissing the Hollywood stars raising these questions as cranks was their primary strategy (hello informed consent), but what if the taboo lifted? What if the mockery stopped working? They would need an answer.

So what was the FDA’s answer? What clinical data were they in possession of which determines the safety limit for injecting infants with a proven neurotoxin? They just didn’t have that data.

Spoiler: they still don’t. Despite this, many advanced health economies are content to inject infants with a known neurotoxin, at 264 mcg of per kilo on multiple occasions. They have no clinical data to determine if that dose is poisonous or not.

I can feel the screams from people still wed to this regulatory system saying “but the vaccines are tested in placebo controlled trials, that’s the data we use”. Are they tested against placebos? We’ll return to that… but for now let’s remain in the late 2000s.

At the end of the first decade of the millennium, with all that had happened, the FDA were in desperate need of something. They needed a defense of their use of neurotoxic aluminium in vaccines… and this is how the Mitkus paper was born.

Imagine you’re the FDA. Imagine you’re trying to get ahead of this lingering safety issue. Aluminium is dotted across your burgeoning vaccine schedule and you realise your critics have a strong case; you’re blind to its toxic effects.

You have no real idea of its safety profile. You need to work out its safety profile, so you get to work designing a study. You don’t have to imagine the scenario, because subscribers to The Digger will know, I created a game that simulates this exact scenario.

It should come as no surprise that there’s a lot wrong with this study. The first and most obvious of these problems is the study isn’t a clinical trial. It didn’t gather any new data in in humans, it didn’t run toxicity tests on animals, it didn’t synthesize the hundreds of studies available on aluminium toxicity, it wasn’t a meta-analysis or a cochrane review.

So what was it? It was a simple mathematical model which simulated the rate at which vaccine aluminium might clear from an infant’s body, then compared the theoretical ‘burden’ of aluminium left against a known toxic dose… for eating aluminium rather than injecting it.

What’s worse, the data they used on how fast aluminium clears from the body had two major flaws. First, it was for a totally different kind of aluminium than the one used in vaccines.

The ‘clearance rate’ used was for Aluminium citrate, which is a soluble like salt and clears very rapidly, whilst the composition used in vaccines is aluminium phosphate, which is crystalline and purposefully designed not to dissolve.

Imagine the difference between how a salt would feel on your tongue vs the feeling of tiny insoluble crystals.

The second major problem was the clearance data came a single male volunteer. A chap called Nicholas Priest injected himself with 0.7 mcg of aluminium, which to my calculations is tiny.

An eight-week old infant receives 1900x more aluminium than this from the two first injections on the schedule. It was also a different formula to the one used in vaccines, and it was injected into a vein rather than a muscle.

The dose is so small it’s likely the body can clear it immediately without ever being overloaded, hence the very rapid clearance rate which could then be fed into the Mitkus model.

Injecting it into a vein, at such a low dose, allows the kidneys to start clearing it immediately, another thing that just doesn’t happen in a real injection.

Completely different formula, an order of magnitude lower dose, and a beneficial administration method.

Call me a cynic, but I can’t help coming to the conclusion that this Priest study looks designed to clear Aluminium from the body as rapidly as possible.

Such a finding would be very useful to the pharmaceutical and aluminium industry.

This is taken from a long document, read the rest here substack.com

Source: https://principia-scientific.com/the-vaccine-schedule-breaks-the-fda-aluminium-safety-limit-by-50-times/

Why American Big Oil isn't buying the Venezuela 'victory'

 

© Carlos Becerra/Getty Images

 Demonstrators protest in support of Nicolas Maduro • January 10, 2026 • Caracas, Venezuela 

Finian Cunningham
RT
Thu, 15 Jan

Despite all the effort and fanfare, the kidnapping of Maduro wasn't quite the regime change expected - and top energy executives know this.

Everything has gone beautifully in Donald Trump's Venezuela operation. An alleged narcoterrorist dictator was captured and brought to justice in a New York court, and the planet's biggest oil wealth is now owned by the US. At least, according to Trump himself.

"We're in the oil business," he said after declaring billions of dollars' worth of Venezuelan crude was now heading to the US. "You don't talk to the Venezuelans, you talk to me," he told Big Oil executives who gathered in the White House last week.

The trouble is, Big Oil doesn't see it that way. The chief executives of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are not rushing back into Venezuela.

Trump called the oil chiefs to the White House last Friday to urge them to invest $100 billion in upgrading Venezuela's petroleum and gas industries. Decades of US economic sanctions are reckoned to have caused the country's industrial infrastructure to deteriorate.

Venezuela's oil industry was nationalized between 2004 and 2007 by former socialist President Hugo Chavez. This policy continued under his successor, Nicolas Maduro, who was kidnapped on January 3 when US special forces raided his residence in Caracas.

After Venezuela's oil industry was nationalized and run by state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the US oil giants Exxon and Conoco quit operations in the country. They later sued in US courts, which ruled that Venezuela owes them $13 billion in expropriated assets. The third biggest US oil company, Chevron, continued to do business in Venezuela in partnership with PDVSA.

At the White House oil summit last week, Exxon and Conoco executives told Trump that they were not ready to return to Venezuela because of the risk to investment.

Exxon boss Darren Woods described Venezuela as "uninvestable":

"We have a very long history in Venezuela... We've had our assets seized there twice. You can imagine to re‑enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we've historically seen here and what is currently the state.

"If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it's uninvestable. And so significant changes have to be made to those commercial frameworks, the legal system, there has to be durable investment protections, and there has to be a change to the hydrocarbon laws in the country."

The Exxon CEO's comments were echoed by Conoco's boss, Ryan Lance, who said:

"We need to be also thinking about even restructuring the entire Venezuelan energy system, including PDVSA."

What that means is that Venezuela is far from under US control.

Maduro may have been abducted, but the Venezuelan government continues under interim President Delcy Rodriguez and the same administration as when Maduro was in office. Rodriguez and her top aides, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, have condemned the US aggression and are demanding the safe return of Maduro and his wife.

Venezuela has not collapsed, nor has its socialist government been overthrown. The scores of warships and 15,000 troops, as well as 200 special operations commandos, deployed at an estimated cost of over $600 million to kidnap Maduro, seem to have brought a Pyrrhic victory.

From the viewpoint of Big Oil, it's not mission accomplished. Venezuela is 'uninvestable', which is the capitalist way of saying, there was no regime change to give the oil companies what they want - total control over Venezuela's hydrocarbon wealth.

Big Oil backed Trump's election campaign in 2024. Delivering Venezuela was part of the deal. But, from what the chief executives are telling the president, he failed to deliver enough for them to feel confident about going back into the South American country.

Hence Trump's irritated reaction over the weekend. On returning to Washington from Florida, he was asked by reporters about Exxon's reluctance to stump up $100 billion to go back into Venezuela. His response to reporters on Air Force One: "I didn't like Exxon's response... they're playing too cute." As a sign of his displeasure, Trump said he would block Exxon from returning to Venezuela in the future.

Big Oil just rained on the supposed victory parade about the Venezuela operation.

The spectacular raid did not change the government in Caracas. Independent journalist Camila Escalante, reporting on the ground, says the interim administration under Rodriguez is continuing the policies of Maduro. The Big Oil executives seem to be in agreement with this assessment.

If Trump wants to take control of Venezuela's oil wealth instead of hijacking a few tankers, he will need to send US troops into the country in a large-scale invasion to install a new regime. This will come with huge, likely unbearable political and military costs. 

 

Source: https://www.sott.net/article/504150-Why-American-Big-Oil-isnt-buying-the-Venezuela-victory

How Washington Abandoned Syria’s Kurds

Kevork Almassian
January 19, 2026

When people talk about the Kurds in Syria, they usually tell a story that begins in 2014 with ISIS, then ends with the SDF being portrayed as the heroic anti-terror force that “saved the world.” That story is not entirely false, but it is dangerously incomplete. And the incompleteness is not an accident. It is designed to hide the real tragedy: the Kurds did not lose because they fought ISIS. They lost because their leadership tied their national fate to American strategy, and American strategy was never designed to give the Kurds a lasting political future in Syria.

I want to be clear from the beginning. I have always had great respect for the Kurdish people, their culture, their resilience, and their sense of community. In my own life, Kurds were never my “enemy.” What I have opposed, for fourteen years, is a political approach by the Kurdish-led SDF that turned a legitimate Kurdish question into a lever for a foreign project against the former Syrian state.

And now, after the fall of Assad, we are watching the final act of that tragedy: the United States abandons the SDF, the Syrian Arab Army is dismantled, and Jolani’s al-Qaeda army marches into Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, and the oil fields, pushing toward Hasakah. The Kurds are left with nothing but bitter lessons that were predictable, avoidable, and repeatedly warned about.

The Kurdish Question Didn’t Begin with Washington

The Kurdish question in Syria predates the war, but the war accelerated it. And the first thing that mainstream narratives hide is that, in the early phase of the conflict, the former Syrian state was not at war with the Kurds in the north. On the contrary, in the first two years of the war, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the state provided tangible support and coordination to Kurdish areas and Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo, in Afrin, in Kobani, and in Hasakah.

That fact alone should force people to rethink the fairy tale that portrays the former Syrian government as uniformly and obsessively anti-Kurd. The Kurds were not treated as foreign invaders. They were part of the social fabric, and the state still viewed the north as part of a unified Syrian Republic: one state, many communities.

But wars evolve. And after 2012–2013, the war in Syria mutated into something far more internationalized and far more poisonous.

Turkey opened its borders for multinational jihadists. Gulf money and weapons flowed. The CIA’s pipeline—Timber Sycamore—expanded. The SAA, stretched thin and facing existential threats around Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, and the central corridor, began retreating from parts of the north and east.

Not because it “wanted” to abandon the Kurds, but because it could not defend every front at the same time. Hasakah and the northeastern borderlands became a vacuum zone, just as ISIS was rising and just as Turkey was turning northern Syria into a highway for foreign Takfiris.

The Kurds suddenly found themselves alone, facing a brutal reality: if the SAA cannot protect you, you must protect yourself.

This is where the Kurdish armed structures expanded. And at this point, any honest Syrian—including me—can acknowledge the legitimacy of Kurdish self-defense in the face of ISIS and the jihadist wave.

But the legitimacy of self-defense is not the same thing as the legitimacy of becoming a proxy state inside a state.

The American Entry: From “Support” to Takeover

Between 2013 and 2015, the United States moved into the vacuum. It began arming Kurdish units, not primarily because Washington suddenly discovered Kurdish rights, but because Washington needed a reliable ground instrument in Syria and a military unit it could control, fund, and direct without sending large numbers of Americans to die.

Then came September 2015, the turning point.

Russia intervened with airpower. ISIS convoys were bombed. Supply lines began to be destroyed. The SAA began regaining initiative. And what did Washington do?

It changed the plan.

One month after the Russian intervention began, the United States formed the “Syrian Democratic Forces” led by the Kurds, funded by the Pentagon, and presented to the world as a diverse, democratic, local force.

And let me say something that I always say: yes, the SDF fought ISIS. Yes, the Kurds paid with blood. And yes, credit is due for battles against the ISIS machine.

But if your budget comes from the Pentagon, then your mission is conditional.

Conditional on Washington’s interest, not yours.

A proxy force does not own its future. Its sponsor owns its future. And this is what Kurdish leadership refused to accept.

By the time ISIS was degraded into desert pockets, the contact line between the SAA and the SDF solidified along the Euphrates River: SDF on the eastern bank, the SAA on the western bank.

And that’s when the real strategic betrayal of Syria began, not only against the Syrian state, but ultimately against the Kurdish people themselves.

Oil, Wheat, Sanctions, and the Slow Suffocation of Syria

After the war’s heaviest phase, Syria was not only destroyed by fighting. It was strangled by sanctions and economic siege. And in that strangulation, the SDF became a tool.

The American occupation forces embedded with the SDF occupied around half of Syria’s oil and gas fields, and large sections of its agricultural wealth, including key wheat areas and border crossings.

Syria needed fuel for electricity, heating, transport, and reconstruction. Syria needed wheat to feed its people. But the former Syrian government—already under sanctions—was blocked from accessing its own resources.

And who enforced that reality on the ground?

The SDF, embedded with American troops, acted as the battering ram of an occupation project.

This is the part that Kurdish leadership and many Western commentators still refuse to face: whether the SDF intended it or not, the outcome was that it helped keep Syria poor, divided, and incapable of recovery.

Not because the Kurds “hate Syrians,” but because the American strategy was designed to deprive Damascus of leverage, to make the state collapse economically if it couldn’t be toppled militarily.

And then Kurdish leadership made the fateful decision: instead of treating this arrangement as temporary war logic, they treated it as the road to permanent political autonomy.

Damascus Offered a Deal, and SDF Gambled for More

Here we get to the core strategic mistake.

Assad’s Damascus offered the Kurds administrative decentralization: managing local affairs, education, language rights, cultural expression, and administrative control.

The SDF leadership rejected it.

They demanded political decentralization, meaning a constitutionalized political entity with de facto state-like powers.

And they made this demand while sitting on the border of Turkey, a NATO state with the second largest army in the alliance, a state that has twenty million Kurds inside its own borders and views any Kurdish political entity next door as an existential contagion.

If you ever want a simple definition of strategic illiteracy, it is this: demanding a Kurdish political autonomy in northeastern Syria while assuming Turkey will accept it.

Turkey would never accept it. Not under Erdoğan, not under any Turkish government.

And Washington knew it. Everyone in Washington knew it. Turkey’s red lines are older than the SDF.

So the SDF leadership bet on the Americans. They believed Washington would protect them and eventually deliver political decentralization.

This is what I called in the livestream: they misread the room. They misread the regional climate. They misread the hierarchy of priorities.

Because when the interests of planners in Washington change, a proxy is disposable.

Assad’s Warning, and the Curse of “America as Your Cover”

Assad warned them years ago. Many analysts warned them. Even in the Arab world, there is an old saying: if your only cover is America, you are naked.

The point is not that Damascus was angelic. The point is that Damascus was local. Syria is your home geography. Syria is your social fabric. Whatever you negotiate with Damascus, you negotiate with someone who has to live on the same land tomorrow.

But the United States? It can leave. It can trade you. It can “recalibrate.” It can decide you are an inconvenience.

And that is exactly what happened.

Bashar al-Assad to the Kurds in 2019: “The Americans will not protect you … they will use and trade you” pic.twitter.com/waxfxeLVaG

— Syrian Girl (@Partisangirl) January 18, 2026

The U.S. support for the SDF was never a Kurdish liberation project. It was a Syria destruction project: deprive Damascus of grain and resources, block reconstruction, keep Syria divided, and use the SDF as leverage. Once the SAA was dismantled and once the map could be redrawn through a new order, the Kurdish project became unnecessary.

The Fall of Assad and the Collapse of the Kurdish Dream

Now comes the moment where everything accelerates.

Assad falls. The SAA is destroyed. The national framework that could have negotiated and guaranteed any form of decentralization is shattered.

And what happens next?

The Americans abandon the SDF, exactly as was predicted, because Washington’s priority is no longer to keep multiple centers of power in Syria. Washington now wants one address, one phone call, one “sheriff” who can sign agreements and manage the territory, especially in a new Syria shaped by Turkey, Qatar, and U.S. officials.

Meanwhile, Jolani’s army, backed by Turkey and tolerated by the West, moves forward.

Raqqa falls. Deir Ezzor falls. The oil and border crossings fall. Jolani’s forces push toward Hasakah.

And the Kurdish leadership is left with the ruins of its own bet.

The SDF did not get political decentralization. It did not even secure administrative decentralization. What it got was surrender, defeat, and humiliation.

The tragic irony is unbearable: they rejected administrative decentralization from Assad’s Damascus—something they could have secured years ago—and now they face a far worse reality under a supremacist and sectarian Takfiri force that does not even pretend to respect pluralism.

As I said in the livestream, we are now watching statues of Kurdish female fighters who died fighting ISIS being torn down by the new rulers. This is not just symbolic. It is a message: your sacrifice belongs to our narrative now, and we will erase it when convenient.

The Final Bitter Lesson: Unity Was the Only Option

And this is where I arrive at the conclusion that is painful for many to hear, but must be said plainly.

The SDF and the SAA should have cooperated against Jolani’s al-Qaeda hordes when there was still time.

Not because the Kurds should have surrendered their identity. Not because they should have “trusted” everything Damascus said. But because they had a mutual enemy. They were fighting on the same land against the same foreign-backed jihadist machine.

A unified Syrian state—whatever its flaws—was the only structure capable of guaranteeing Kurdish cultural rights while maintaining national sovereignty.

Instead, the Kurdish leadership allowed itself to be used as an economic choke point against the rest of Syria. They blocked Damascus from oil and wheat under U.S. occupation logic, hoping for a political reward later.

And now, the state they weakened is gone, and the American protector they trusted is walking away.

This is not just a Kurdish tragedy. It is a Syrian tragedy. Because what was needed in the face of al-Qaeda was national unity, not fragmented ethnopolitics. As I said, everybody thought narrowly: sect, tribe, neighborhood, ethnicity. And the country paid the price.

Today, the SAA is dismantled. The SDF is being pushed back. Jolani is advancing. Turkey is shaping the north. Israel is carving the south. And the Kurdish leadership that bet everything on Washington has nothing left to bargain with.

This is what wishful thinking looks like when it collides with geopolitics.

History will not blame the Kurdish people for wanting protection. History will blame the leadership for mistaking American sponsorship for a strategy, and for rejecting the only realistic deal on the table when it still mattered.

Because in the end, the cruel truth of Syria is this: When your enemy is an al-Qaeda army, you don’t survive by waiting for Washington to save you.

You survive by building a national front before it is too late.

 

Source:  https://libya360.wordpress.com/2026/01/19/how-america-abandoned-syrias-kurds/