Rational Ground by Justin Hart

Longtime readers know Vinay Prasad. We’ve been on his show. He was one of the few credentialed voices willing to say the obvious out loud when saying it cost you something, and he’s been a genuine force in Team Reality and later in MAHA. His path since is unusual enough to be worth stating precisely, because people keep getting it wrong. Rational Ground by Justin Hart is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Credit where it’s due: this one belongs to Catherine Herridge, whose independent reporting broke it, working from records Senator Chuck Grassley obtained from HHS. Here is the first line of a message sent on August 8, 2021 by Michael Osterholm — Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, and a member of Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board — addressed to “Jeff, Vivek, Tony and Rochelle”: Rational Ground by Justin Hart is a reader-supported publication.

We were told the masking of children was a minor inconvenience. A small ask. Kids are resilient. They’ll be fine. We never believed it, and we said so at the time — loudly enough that it cost some of us our accounts and a few of us our jobs. Rational Ground by Justin Hart is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. That wasn’t a hunch.

We spend most of our time here on documents — emails, depositions, subpoenaed records, black boxes. This week the argument moved somewhere else. It moved into the peer-reviewed literature. Three papers, four years, one Springer journal.

Yesterday we published the text messages from Anthony Fauci’s government iPhone. On January 25, 2021, he told the Surgeon General and the CDC Director that fever after the second dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” Rochelle Walensky replied two minutes later: “Definitely a good point, esp after dose two.” Vivek Murthy agreed forty minutes after that. Three officials, in writing, treating a reproductive risk as a real question worth raising.

Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first batch of text messages from Anthony Fauci’s government iPhone today. Four pages, out of a phone that reportedly holds some 34,000 messages and 522 voicemails. The first batch is about pregnant women. A group chat between three people: Fauci, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Murthy wants to know what to tell pregnant women.

Normally you cannot prove a redaction was abusive. You see a black box. The agency cites an exemption code. That’s the end of it. You can suspect, you can complain, and you have no way to check. Not this time. In four cases we now have both versions of the same page — the redacted release, and the same document later produced through litigation, a court case, or a congressional in-camera review. You can lay them side by side and read what the black box was covering.

First, h/t to Jeffrey Tucker for inspiration on that title! Let’s get the disclosure out of the way first, because it isn’t a disclosure so much as the reason this newsletter exists. Rational Ground by Justin Hart is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The origins of Rational Ground are tied directly to Dr. Scott Atlas’s efforts at the White House.

On August 5, FDA approved MFLUSIVA, Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine, for adults 50 and older. The number in every headline is 26.6% more effective. That number is real. It is also not efficacy, and the difference matters more than anything else in this story. Rational Ground by Justin Hart is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This week two people with large followings had the argument that everyone in America is having at a smaller scale. Matt Walsh, on August 5, to an audience of more than a million: the rise in grocery prices over the past six years is a mathematical reality, it hasn’t stopped or reversed, and conservatives had better come up with an answer that isn’t “learn to make cheap burritos” or they will get crushed.