Popular Rationalism

There is a profound difference between saying, “We did not detect a safety signal” and saying, “We used a system capable of reliably detecting a safety signal, and none appeared.” Those statements are not interchangeable.

CDC recommends two therapeutic doses of Vitamin A given about 24 hours apart in children with measles, with age-specific dosing of 50,000 IU for infants younger than 6 months, 100,000 IU for infants 6–11 months, and 200,000 IU for children 12 months and older. The rationale is not simply correction of pre-existing malnutrition: acute measles itself can depress vitamin A status, including in previously well-nourished children.

By James Lyons-Weiler, PhD September 2026 AI can make a bad protocol look finished. It can produce polished prose, tidy tables, and an apparently comprehensive reference list before the investigator has done the hard work of deciding what would disconfirm the hypothesis, which variables may be colliders, whether the endpoints were defined in advance, or whether a data field can identify a participant.

DE-CORRUPTING MEDICINE STARTS SEPT 15 - NOT SEPT 8 - YOU HAVE NOT MISSED THE FIRST MEETING! On paper, a pharmaceutical “speaker program” is easy to defend. A qualified clinician teaches colleagues. The audience is real, the work is documented, and the company pays a fair fee that it discloses. Insys Therapeutics kept that shell and changed its function.

By James Lyons-Weiler, PhD Somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed a quiet lie: that the season for learning something purely because it fascinates you has passed. School was for the young. The career years were for producing. And whatever curiosity you carried about how life actually works — the machinery inside a single cell, the logic of the immune system, why cancer happens, how your body reads its own genome — got filed under someday. I would like to make someday this term.

We were once told the corruption in medicine is too deep, too moneyed, too entrenched to touch. That the incentives are load-bearing. That the agencies are captured beyond repair, the journals bought, the guidelines written by the same hands that profit from them. We were told to be realistic, which in practice means: sit down. That was 2015, and after a decade of sustained effort, we have HHS and have vaccine makers scrambling to update their products for safety. Where will medicine be in 2035?

On September 1, 2026, Danish autism researcher Poul Thorsen pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a federal court in Atlanta. He admitted to a multi-year scheme that stole more than $1 million in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grant money intended for public health and childhood development research. Every one of the ten left-classified outlets in IPAK.NEWS’s locked roster ignored Poul Thorsen’s guilty plea.

By James Lyons-Weiler, PhD Popular Rationalism September 2, 2026 No one is saying that environmental exposures cause autism in everyone. But Newsweek took a narrow epidemiological finding and expanded it until it appeared to answer a much larger question. The study, published August 24, 2026, in JAMA Pediatrics, examined whether two urinary biomarker measures collected during pregnancy were associated with later scores on the Social Responsiveness Scale, or SRS.

By James Lyons-Weiler, PhD Popular Rationalism | September 2, 2026 Science located no antivaccine program in the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee’s new strategic plan, so Sara Reardon’s August 31 article supplied one by inference.

By James Lyons-Weiler, PhD Ask Google whether methylene blue can be taken with Alka-Seltzer and the answers quickly become contradictory. One result warns of a potentially life-threatening interaction. Another finds no interaction at all. Both answers can appear authoritative because the question contains a hidden error: “Alka-Seltzer” is a brand name, not a drug. Alka-Seltzer Original contains aspirin, citric acid, and sodium bicarbonate.