Officials within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sought to end research into injuries linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, emails released by the Informed Consent Action Network suggest. Dr. Avindra Nath, a senior investigator with the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), had been preparing a study detailing 24 patients who developed neuropathy-like symptoms following their inoculation. The paper was sent to the then-Director of NINDS, Dr. Walter Koroshetz, who passed it along to Dr. Anthony Fauci. “There have been steady slow stream of reports to me of post vaccination neurologic conditions, seem to be mostly peripheral nerve disorders… maybe an occasional spinal cord issue,” Koroshetz’s email to Fauci read. “Avi has been collecting a bunch. He has a report sent out to publish.” Upon Nath’s paper being rejected, then-NIH Director Francis Collins asked Koroshetz: “Walter, what do you make of this? The draft letter doesn’t explain how these 32 patients were referred—leaving one to wonder whether this is common or rare.” Collins later told Koroshetz that he believed “collecting anecdotes and then trying to build a case isn’t scientifically compelling—and will have the main consequence of feeding vaccine hesitancy and social media overreaction.” Then-Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak told Collins that he did not understand why Koroshetz was not putting an end to the matter. Nath himself had tinnitus with hearing loss believed to be linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, the emails note. Although the emails do not explicitly state that the health officials directed Nath to end his research, they do suggest that “NIH leadership viewed [Nath’s manuscript’s] potential effect on vaccine confidence as a compelling reason to suppress its publication,” the Informed Consent Action Network wrote. “The manuscript was never published in a peer-reviewed journal and the preprint did not appear online until May 2022—a full year after it was originally written.” The released emails come as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) also released a more than 1000-page report revealing that the authors and scientists behind the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper doubted their own conclusions. The paper, published in 2020, sought to provide an explanation for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argued that “any type of lab-based scenario” was not “plausible.” Following the paper’s publication, authors Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes exchanged messages backtracking on their initial conclusions. The post Emails Suggest Officials Wanted to Sideline COVID Vaccine Research appeared first on American Faith.

A new study from NYU researchers has found that pregnant women with detectable levels of glyphosate in their bodies at mid-pregnancy were 37% more likely to deliver prematurely, adding to a growing scientific record around the world’s most widely used herbicide. The study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, tested expectant mothers for glyphosate through urine samples taken at 18 to 25 weeks of pregnancy. Women who showed the chemical at that stage were twice as likely to experience spontaneous preterm birth, the kind that happens without a planned medical reason. Preterm birth is the leading cause of death in children under five, according to the World Health Organization. “Our findings add to a growing body of evidence that exposure to glyphosate early in life may lead to health concerns that can echo throughout a lifetime,” said lead author Teresa Herrera, a doctoral candidate at NYU’s Department of Environmental Medicine. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, the Bayer-manufactured weedkiller used on farms and in backyards across the country. More than 80% of Americans over the age of six have measurable glyphosate in their systems, according to prior research. The chemical is present in soil, water, and a wide range of food products including honey, olive oil, fruits, nuts, and cereals. The Make America Healthy Again movement, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has targeted glyphosate as a likely carcinogen and a contributor to the chronic disease epidemic Kennedy has made central to his agenda. Bayer has proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits linking Roundup to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A hearing on the settlement was scheduled for August. The new findings complicate the political picture for the Trump administration. In February, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to ramp up domestic production of phosphorus and glyphosate, citing food security and national defense. The order noted that phosphorus, a key ingredient in glyphosate, is also used in military munitions and semiconductors. Kennedy declined to oppose the order publicly. “I support President Trump’s executive order to bring agricultural chemical production back to the United States and end our near-total reliance on adversarial nations,” Kennedy said at the time, according to the Associated Press. The NYU study found that exposure to AMPA, a byproduct created when soil microbes break down glyphosate, did not carry the same association with preterm births. Researchers said this suggests unprocessed glyphosate may be the primary driver of the observed effects, though the exact mechanism remains under investigation. Theories include endocrine disruption, oxidative stress, and inflammation. The findings apply only to mid-pregnancy exposure. Women with glyphosate detectable before 18 weeks did not show the same elevated risk, according to the study. The post New Study Links Glyphosate Exposure in Pregnancy to 37% Higher Risk of Premature Birth appeared first on American Faith.

The Senate Health Committee postponed a vote Thursday on Dr. Erica Schwartz, President Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after committee chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) announced his support for her nomination. Cassidy said he was confident Schwartz would “stand against those who do not” follow the science when he opened the committee session. His endorsement is expected to be decisive in advancing Schwartz to the full Senate, but the vote was delayed due to attendance issues and is now expected to take place next week. “I’m confident that she knows what she is doing and will stand against those who do not,” Cassidy said, as reported by The Hill. The CDC director position has been without a confirmed leader for months. Schwartz’s predecessor, Susan Monarez, was fired after less than a month on the job following clashes with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his vaccine agenda. During Schwartz’s confirmation hearing last week, Cassidy pressed her on whether she could maintain the CDC’s scientific independence if Kennedy pushed her to take actions not backed by evidence. The question had direct historical weight: Kennedy directed CDC to alter its vaccine and autism webpage last year, removing a long-standing disclaimer that vaccines do not cause autism, replacing it with language calling that conclusion “not an evidence-based claim.” Cassidy said Thursday that HHS had since modified the page back as “a sign of good faith,” and he called it “a start” while saying more work remains to repair public trust in U.S. health agencies. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the committee’s minority leader, said he would vote against Schwartz. Sanders said he was “impressed” with her career as a civil servant but did not believe she would stand up to Kennedy. “Will we have people in the Trump administration who have the guts to stand up to people who are anti-science and into conspiracy theories?” Sanders asked. “I am afraid that right now, within HHS, we have a secretary who will not tolerate this.” The committee also delayed action Thursday on Sean Kaufman, Trump’s nominee to lead the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which oversees the nation’s emergency health stockpiles and pandemic response infrastructure. Kaufman drew sharp questions at his hearing last week about his views on vaccines. A committee spokesperson said “ongoing conversations with the administration” are continuing on how to advance his nomination. Schwartz is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate once the committee advances her nomination next week. Her confirmation would end the extended leadership vacuum at the CDC and set up a direct test of whether she can hold the agency’s scientific mission intact under Kennedy’s watch at HHS. The post Senate Panel Delays Vote on Trump’s CDC Nominee appeared first on American Faith.

A major doctors’ group is calling for Congress to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sweeping new power over dietary supplements. If they get their way, the vitamins, minerals, botanicals, probiotics, and specialty formulas millions of Americans rely on could be treated more like drugs than foods. Action Alert! Listen to the audio version of this article: THE TOPLINE The American College of Physicians is urging Congress to impose drug-style premarket approval, mandatory registration, and expanded FTC oversight on dietary supplements—a move that could reduce access to higher-dose, specialized, and innovative products. Supplements are already regulated under federal manufacturing, labeling, and safety laws. Rather than granting the FDA sweeping new powers, Congress should require the agency to use its existing authority more effectively against adulteration, contamination, hidden drug ingredients, and fraudulent claims. ACP’s safety case relies on adverse-event totals without adequate context, while mandatory product listing and pharmaceutical-level evidence standards could become tools to eliminate lawful products and censor truthful health information. What ACP Is Demanding The American College of Physicians (ACP) released a new position paper in Annals of Internal Medicine calling for Congress to “modernize” the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). ACP wants supplements to undergo FDA registration and premarket approval, including products already on the market. It also calls for more Federal Trade Commission (FTC) policing of supplement marketing. ACP says its recommendations are needed because more than half of American adults use supplements, while only about a quarter use products recommended by a healthcare professional. ACP also argues that some products may contain unlisted ingredients, unsafe dosages, illicit substances, or interact with medications. No one at ANH-USA is defending adulterated products, hidden drug ingredients, false labels, or fraudulent disease claims. Bad actors should be removed from the market, period. And both FDA and FTC already have ample regulatory tools at their disposal to make this happen. But ACP’s central proposal, a drug-style premarket approval system, would decimate consumer access to safe, natural products that millions of Americans rely on. Premarket Approval Would Crush Consumer Choice Drug pre-market approval costs can be recovered because drugs often receive strong patent protection and market exclusivity. Nutrients, herbs, and other natural substances generally cannot be patented in the same way. Requiring supplement makers to produce drug-style evidence before selling ordinary natural products would favor giant corporations with compliance departments and deep pockets. Smaller innovators would be pushed out. Higher-dose, practitioner-grade, niche, and personalized products would be most vulnerable. The result would not be “better supplements.” It would be fewer supplements, more standardized formulas, less innovation, and fewer options for consumers trying to manage their health naturally. The USA would also lose its status as the global capital for research and development of dietary supplements. Supplements Are Already Regulated One of the most misleading talking points in supplement policy is that supplements are “unregulated.” They are not. Dietary supplement manufacturers are subject to FDA current good manufacturing practice rules. These rules apply to companies that manufacture, package, label, or hold dietary supplements. The real question is whether the FDA is using its existing authority effectively to address adulteration, contamination, illegal drug ingredients, and other bad actors. There have been periods when the agency appeared to tolerate the worst abuses in the supplement industry, seemingly in the hope that mounting problems would build support for repealing DSHEA and expanding the FDA’s power over supplements. What we oppose is using a few bad apples to justify giving FDA sweeping new authority over the entire supplement market. This is the same playbook we see being used against homeopathy and peptides: use isolated examples of bad products or bad actors to justify an attack on an entire sector. The “Safety” Argument Needs Context ACP cites adverse event reports to argue that current regulation is inadequate. But raw adverse event counts do not tell us how dangerous supplements are as a category. One 2023 narrative review cited in ACP’s paper reported 79,071 adverse events related to dietary supplements between 2004 and 2021 (about 4,651 per year on average). That number sounds alarming until we ask the basic scientific questions: How many people used supplements during that period? How many doses were consumed? How many reports were serious, and how many were mild (transient flushing or nausea)? A safety rate requires a denominator. Let’s do some quick math. If half of American adults use supplements, that’s about 135 million people. With an average of 4,651 adverse events per year, that means that 0.0034 percent of supplement users experience an adverse event. By contrast, about 8.3% of people receiving primary care experienced an adverse drug reaction. In other words, primary care drug reactions are 2,441 times more common than supplement adverse events. The FTC Is Already in Overdrive ACP also wants more FTC resources to police supplement marketing, especially online and on social media. But the FTC is already aggressively expanding its reach to censor supplement benefits: something we’re pushing back on in the courts. A National Database Could Become a Hit List ACP’s proposed national supplement database also sounds benign. Transparency is good. But a mandatory product listing system can quickly become a tool for elimination. ANH has warned for years that Senator Dick Durbin’s mandatory product listing proposal would give FDA a ready-made map of the supplement marketplace: ingredients, dosages, labels, and product identities. That could allow the agency to target high-dose supplements, supplements that compete with drugs, or products caught in FDA’s overbroad “new dietary ingredient” dragnet. ANH has also warned that mandatory listing could accelerate attacks on higher-dose supplements used by integrative doctors and informed consumers. Consumers should not have to fear that a “database” is the first step toward disappearing the products they rely on. An Assault on Your Health Freedom The FDA and FTC already have tools to act against adulteration, misbranding, illegal disease claims, contamination, and deceptive marketing. Congress should demand better enforcement against real violations, not hand regulators a sweeping premarket approval system that would make supplements less accessible, less diverse, and more expensive. ANH-USA will continue fighting attempts to turn supplements into drugs by another name. We will oppose premarket approval, mandatory product listing schemes that threaten access, and agency censorship of truthful health information. Action Alert! The post ACP’s Supplement Crackdown Would Put FDA Between You and Your Vitamins first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

From Michelle Perro, MD. Visit her Substack for more. Listen to the audio version of this article: Prior to this part launch, part rant, and of course, weed whacking, I need to give credit to my podcast producer, Anne Temple. We were prepping for the next podcast and she mentioned that in her neck of the woods, the air was horrific from the Canadian fires. She asked what happens to glyphosate when it burns? I thought I knew all things glyphosate, but I was stumped. I wasn’t sure, so I had to dig my way through the weeds and jump in the rabbit hole. This article is dedicated to all the wonderful Canadians I’ve had the pleasure to get to know through the most unfortunate circumstances, including those brilliant minds behind the development of the National Citizens Inquiry. Pictured left: Michelle Perro, MD.Image source: https://gmoscience.org/dr-michelle-perro-resources/ Here goes… It is July 2026. Over 900 active wildfires are burning in Canada across Ontario, Manitoba, and beyond while blazes in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters have crossed the border in both directions. Smoke has engulfed the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in an orange-gray haze. Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis have registered some of the worst air quality on the planet. Major League Baseball postponed games. The Soap Box Derby canceled events. The President is threatening tariffs. Millions of Americans from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic are checking air quality apps, sealing windows, and pulling N95 masks from drawers that hadn’t been opened since the pandemic. The models generating those air quality readings track one variable: PM₂.₅ mass per cubic meter of air. They do not ask what is on the particulate. They do not model what happens when millions of hectares of glyphosate-sprayed forest burn, and the smoke crosses a continent. No regulator in North America has ever asked that question. Not because it’s unanswerable. Because nobody has been required to. The Scale of the Spraying Canada does not track its own glyphosate use federally. No national database exists. What we know comes from patchy provincial data, often extracted through freedom of information requests. Sapinski & Surette (2023) paper on New Brunswick confirms: In Canada, no jurisdiction — federal or provincial — monitors glyphosate presence in the environment or in human populations. The only testing done is by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency who monitors levels of glyphosate residues in food. New Brunswick: Forestry accounts for 61% of all glyphosate use. Eighty-three percent is applied by helicopter. Roughly 0.5% of forested land is sprayed annually which may be small per year, but enormous when compounded across decades. New Brunswick sprays nearly ten times more forest than similarly sized Nova Scotia, ranking second only to Ontario in total area treated. British Columbia: Over 430,000 hectares sprayed since the 1970s, increased to 738,000 when re-sprays are included. Ontario: Rivals or exceeds New Brunswick. Precise figures are elusive. Quebec: Banned aerial forestry spraying in 2001. The industry survived. The practice is not essential. It is a choice. The dominant player in New Brunswick, J.D. Irving Limited, uses glyphosate to kill deciduous trees and accelerate conifer growth for pulp and timber. The economic logic is simple: spray the hardwoods, harvest the softwoods faster. The ecological logic has never been stress-tested against fire. The Chemistry Glyphosate (N-phosphonomethylglycine) decomposes above 198°C. At wildfire temperatures ranging from 600 to 1200°C, it breaks down almost instantly. But destruction is transformation. Narimani and da Silva (2020) mapped the pathway: glyphosate eliminates phosphorous acid, producing imine intermediates that react with water vapor to form simple amines and carbonyl compounds. Mackie and Kennedy (2019) went further, identifying sarcosine and dimethylamine (DMA) as decomposition products (their paper, tellingly, was commissioned to evaluate the safety of incinerating glyphosate stockpiles). Controlled conditions. Engineered temperatures. Scrubbers. A forest fire is none of those things. Smoldering zones burn below 500°C which is hot enough to volatilize glyphosate, but not necessarily hot enough to fully destroy it. The USDA Forest Service’s own review concedes the following from their abstract; Studies conducted on herbicides and insecticides indicate that hot fires (>500°C) thermally degrade most pesticides. Smoldering fires (<500°C) have the potential to volatilize significant amounts of some pesticides. Exposure analyses indicate that, even under conditions of smoldering fires, no significant human health risks occur from pesticides incorporated into or on forest fuels. …then dismisses the risk based on prescribed burn data. And deeper in the paper, they admit their risk analysis was based on burning herbicide-treated wood in a fireplace and that the safety margins they calculated assumed “unrealistically” complete volatilization. That’s their basis for dismissing the risk. A fireplace. Not 900 wildfires. Not megafires. Not decades of accumulated AMPA in the soil. AMPA: Worse Than Glyphosate Glyphosate degrades in soil into aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA). It is three to six times more toxic to aquatic organisms and far more persistent. Glyphosate’s soil half-life ranges from 1.5 to 53 days, lasting longer depending on soil conditions such as pH. AMPA’s: 26 to 45 days under warm conditions, up to 958 days in some studies. In one lysimeter experiment, glyphosate and AMPA together still constituted 59% of the original application 748 days after spraying. AMPA is also more thermally stable. Boiling point: ~358°C versus glyphosate’s 230°C. Half-life at 1000 K: 4 milliseconds versus glyphosate’s 0.1. In a smoldering fire, AMPA may volatilize without fully decomposing, re-condensing onto smoke particulate as the plume cools. The forest floor in sprayed zones carries years of accumulated AMPA. When it burns, all of it is up for grabs. Smoke as a Chemical Courier The idea that fire remobilizes soil-bound chemicals is documented, not speculative. Genualdi et al. (2009) measured pesticides (dacthal, endosulfan, and γ-HCH) in smoke from Siberian fires reaching Oregon and Washington. Soil analysis showed 34 to 100% of pesticide mass was lost from burned plots. Primbs et al. (2008) detected elevated pesticide concentrations at a remote Oregon observatory when air masses passed over fires in Alaska and Western Canada. A 2026 study of aged wildfire PM₂.₅ collected in Maryland which was over 1,000 miles from the source detected phosphorus-containing organic molecules. The researchers weren’t looking for glyphosate or AMPA. But both are organophosphorus compounds. Phosphorus in transcontinental smoke is consistent with what you’d expect to find if they were riding the plume. No study has specifically measured glyphosate or AMPA in wildfire smoke. The methods exist. The funding and the mandate do not. Our Children: The Lungs That Pay Children breathe more air per pound of body weight than adults which is roughly double. Their airways are narrower, and their detoxification systems immature as compared to adults. When wildfire smoke spikes PM₂.₅ by 3.82 μg m⁻³ across an entire country, the math is shockingly unforgiving: more particulate per breath, more breaths per minute, more years of accumulated damage ahead. The 64,300 chronic deaths attributed to the 2023 fires capture mortality. They say nothing about asthma diagnoses, emergency visits, missed school days, or the cognitive effects of chronic neuroinflammation from inhaled particulate. And none of the models accounted for what was riding on that particulate such as glyphosate, AMPA, dimethylamine, or phosphorus fragments: compounds never tested for inhalation toxicity in combination. Imagine that scenario in a five-year-old. The Institutional Gap Regulators approved aerial glyphosate based on a static model: chemical binds to soil, degrades before reaching water, exposure limited to the application window. Fire does not appear in any environmental impact assessment. It never has. New Brunswick’s Chief Medical Officer published a health assessment in 2016 concluding that existing measures were adequate. The report arrived during the IARC controversy when the WHO had classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” the year prior and was met with skepticism. But the deeper failure is structural: the assessment couldn’t model combustion exposure because the data doesn’t exist. No Canadian jurisdiction monitors glyphosate or AMPA in the environment or in human populations. No air monitoring. No water monitoring. No biomonitoring of exposed communities. No testing of wild-land firefighters who are indeed the canaries in this particular coal mine before, during, or after deployments on spray-zone fires. The USDA’s own review dismisses pesticide-in-smoke risks on the logic that the smoke itself is already so toxic the pesticide adds nothing meaningful. This argument works only if you accept the baseline toxicity of wildfire smoke as acceptable. It is not. And the populations breathing it never consented to that faulty logic. Quebec banned aerial forestry spraying in 2001. The industry survived. The rest of Canada chose otherwise. That choice carries consequences, and those consequences are now burning with a global impact. Regulators approved aerial glyphosate on the assumption that the forest stays put. It doesn’t. The chemistry says glyphosate and AMPA decompose under heat into amines, phosphorous acid, and carbonyl compounds. The atmospheric science says fire-volatilized pesticides travel thousands of kilometers on smoke. The institutional record shows no regulator has ever connected these two bodies of knowledge and asked what it means for the people breathing the smoke. The question isn’t whether glyphosate and AMPA decomposition products are in the smoke. The chemistry says they are. The question is why, after decades of spraying and years of mega-fires, no agency has ever measured them and what they’re afraid they’ll find if someone finally does. What You Can Do This is not a problem that requires new science. The analytical methods exist. The sampling protocols are standard. What’s missing is the political will to ask the question and that’s where you come in. Contact your representatives. If you live in a state or province affected by wildfire smoke and in 2026, that’s most of North America, ask your elected officials a simple question: Has any agency measured glyphosate or AMPA in the smoke I’m breathing? If not, why not? Demand answers from the agencies. These are the offices with the mandate, the data, or both: USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station — Flagstaff, AZ. Ask whether the 2000 fire-and-pesticides review has ever been updated, and whether its risk assessment applies to mega-fires burning through decades of accumulated spraying. EPA Office of Air and Radiation — Ask whether PM₂.₅ monitoring includes chemical speciation for pesticides or their thermal decomposition products. Ask why it doesn’t. Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada — Ask whether Canada maintains a national database of forestry pesticide applications, and whether it has ever overlaid spray data with fire data. BC Ministry of Forests — Ask whether the province has modeled glyphosate or AMPA fate during wildfire on its 738,000 hectares of sprayed forest. New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources and Energy Development — Ask whether the province has conducted any air monitoring or firefighter biomonitoring related to glyphosate — in the jurisdiction that sprays the highest proportion of its forests in the country. Support independent monitoring. Organizations like the Breathe Project and various university-based atmospheric chemistry labs have the equipment and the expertise. They lack funding. If you have the means, direct your dollars toward groups doing air quality monitoring that goes beyond PM₂.₅ mass (the ones asking what’s in the particulate, not just how much of it there is). Protect yourself and your family. While the institutions catch up and they will take years, invest in HEPA air filtration for your home. Wear an N95 or better when air quality indices spike. Keep windows sealed during smoke events. These measures reduce particulate exposure. They may also reduce exposure to whatever is riding on the particulate. We won’t know until someone measures it. Don’t wait for permission to protect your lungs. Action Alert! The post Forest Fires and Glyphosate: An Examination of the Unspoken first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.