The HighWire

🚨 LIVE NOW | EP 484: Monsanto scores a major glyphosate win at the Supreme Court. @AaronSiriSG joins Del on what it could mean for your food supply, plus @JeffereyJaxen on AI falling short, and @DrAndyWakefield’s new novel, “The Bequest.” x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

"They had a jury problem. They had a you problem." This is it right here. @AaronSiriSG spells it out. Bayer sells about 10 billion dollars worth of glyphosate every year and had already paid out roughly 10 billion dollars for a single injury, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, from a single type of exposure. Their money bought influence over the executive branch and Congress, including an executive order declaring glyphosate a national security interest. What their money couldn't buy was a jury. Juries were the one place ordinary people could still hold them accountable. The ruling took that away.

Eyes on the Road, Camera in Your Face: Europe’s Surveillance Cars Are Coming for America Every new car sold in the European Union now comes with a mandatory camera pointed at the driver's face, tracking eye movement and head position on every single trip. Regulators say it's about safety. But the same regulation already spells out an expansion by 2027 that adds cognitive distraction monitoring and gives the car the ability to intervene on its own. Americans don't need to wait for Europe's version to arrive. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act already directs regulators to require passive impaired driving monitoring in new vehicles, with the ability to limit or stop the car entirely. Critics call it a kill switch, and regulators haven't denied it. This isn't theoretical. Flock Safety's license plate cameras already built a searchable travel history for cars across the country, and GM paid nearly 13 million dollars to settle claims it sold driver data to brokers. The camera is the easy part to install. What happens with the data is the part nobody is answering. Reporting by @ChelleWards and @tracybeanz. Full article linked below 👇 bit.ly/DriverSurveill…

@thefoodbabe @delbigtree We appreciate you, @thefoodbabe. Keep going.

@HighWireTalk Thank you @delbigtree for your incredible leadership and activism. The world needs more people like you.

7 to 2. Monsanto wins. Your food loses. Welcome to the pool. Everyone is in it now. The Supreme Court just ruled 7 to 2 in favor of Monsanto, striking down thousands of Roundup cancer lawsuits worth billions in damages. The ruling grants liability protection to the maker of an herbicide that hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs claim causes cancer. Corporations are now getting the same shield that pharmaceutical companies have had on vaccines for decades. If liability protection was fine when it applied to something you didn't personally worry about, today's ruling is a reminder that the same protection now covers what's in your food. When corporate interests drive the political system rather than human interests, that's fascism, not a republic. Regardless of party, the pattern keeps repeating. Corporate interests are winning, and the public is left with fewer tools to hold them accountable.

Peptides have become one of the most censored words on social media, right up there with vaccines. People are pulling the word out of their own posts just to avoid getting flagged. An upcoming HighWire panel is tackling the topic head-on, including GLP-1s. There are documented side effects on record, and there are also cases where they've reportedly saved lives. Are they good, bad, or somewhere in between? Drop your questions below. Whatever you want answered, the panel is covering it this week 💬

"Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," said Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering. He went further, admitting the company hadn't paid enough attention to the experience of its most knowledgeable engineers, the ones who'd been through multiple product cycles. So they brought them back. AI companies have been telling everyone that you can replace your experienced workers and let AI handle the rest. Ford tried that and had to reverse course. If this is what's happening at one of the largest automakers in the country, are other companies about to learn the same lesson the hard way?

A new executive order on regenerative agriculture contains its own admission: conventional crop chemicals are a risk to human health. That language comes straight from the order itself, directing federal research into technologies that reduce reliance on chemical crop protection tools. But the order doesn't ban or phase out a single pesticide. Meanwhile the EPA has fast tracked five PFAS pesticides in under two years, with the newest approvals covering wheat and citrus crops, published quietly in the Federal Register with no public warning to farmworkers or families. A Politico poll cited in this editorial by @JeffereyJaxen found 76 to 94 percent of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, want less exposure to harmful chemicals. The agency responsible for protecting them is moving in the opposite direction. Full article linked below 👇 bit.ly/RegenerativeAg…

Teachers in a Virginia county packed with data centers are being told to turn off their classroom lights. Electricity costs are climbing, and apparently, teachers aren't important enough to spare the expense. Maybe police and fire departments are next? Kids doing schoolwork by candlelight because there's a data center up the street isn't a hypothetical anymore, it's the plan. Who's voting on this? One or two county commissioners for the entire community?

The trip to Japan was wonderful. We would love for you to watch this video - it couldn't ever sum it up, but it's charming, and it gives all of you a great view of the trip. Japan is not built for rebellion the way America is. However, after all these conversations, one thing is clear: we need to keep standing up and talking to one another. It's the only thing that will preserve our freedom. And the sushi was amazing.

MAHA started as a political moment, but @peteevanschefx has always known it was something bigger. For most of human evolutionary history, food was a top priority. Somewhere in the last 50 to 60 years it slipped down the ladder. The MAHA Cookbook is his attempt to bring it back up. Evans was canceled, dropped from television, had his Facebook page permanently deleted, and was publicly mocked for talking about gut health, questioning pharmaceutical companies, and telling people to look outside the system. He knew there would be repercussions and kept going anyway. Many doctors he has interviewed believe 80% of chronic illness can be completely eradicated through lifestyle choices, and the greatest lifestyle choice, he says, is good diet. The cookbook covers what MAHA actually means, how to shop, how to clean out your pantry, ancestral diets, meal prep for fussy eaters, gut health and fermented foods, and regenerative farming practices, before getting into MAHA recipes built around real food: good quality meat, seafood, vegetables, fruit, and eggs, lower carbohydrates, and healthy fats. In the kitchen, he made three dishes in under an hour: hasselback sweet potatoes roasted in beef tallow with a fresh herb salmoriglio, a Meatzza, ground meat seasoned and cooked like a pizza base, topped with tomato, buffalo mozzarella, and heirloom tomatoes, and pears poached in coconut water with star anise, cinnamon, and ginger. Ten minutes of preparation across all three. "Food is medicine." The MAHA Cookbook is out now wherever books are sold. Full segment below 👇

Since 2001, the United States has lost more veterans to suicide than to combat. More than 6,000 die by suicide every year. A ProPublica analysis of 313 VA inspector general studies found repeated, sometimes fatal failures in behavioral care. For decades, the only tools available were pharmaceutical interventions whose harms were hidden, and millions of Americans with conditions that don't respond to those treatments have been left with nowhere to turn. President Trump signed an executive order directing HHS to accelerate research and access to psychedelic therapies, including ibogaine, psilocybin, and methylone. The FDA is issuing national priority vouchers to three companies and has allowed the first-ever clinical study of noribogaine hydrochloride to move forward in the United States. The scientific community's exploration of these therapies was shut down by political maneuvering in the early 1970s when the Controlled Substances Act lumped psilocybin and LSD with heroin and cocaine. Decades of promising research were sidelined. That work is now being picked back up. The studies are unlike anything coming out of pharmaceutical drug trials. A single treatment of Mystic, the ibogaine-magnesium protocol developed for special operations veterans with traumatic brain injuries and repeated blast combat exposures, produced remarkable reductions in PTSD, depression, and anxiety with large effect sizes, and the benefits held at the one-month follow-up. Every participant in that trial had to travel to Mexico to receive it. A BMJ meta-analysis found that psilocybin was nearly three times more likely than placebo to produce full remission of depression. A woman with advanced Alzheimer's who had been largely reduced to single words for five years received a single dose of psilocybin and within 19 hours began speaking spontaneously, recognizing family members, walking independently, and dressing herself. The grassroots fought for this for decades. The government is finally listening. Full segment below 👇

Hello, HighWire audience! We need your help! Next week on the show, we will be hosting an expert panel on peptides, and we want your questions, thoughts, comments, and experiences about them! What do YOU want to know about peptides? Have experience with them, good or bad? Comment below so we can bring your thoughts to Del for discussion with the panel!

Every major media outlet has the same message: sunscreen prevents skin cancer, wear it every day, and there is no safe tan. The HighWire went looking for the science behind that claim and found a more complicated picture. In 2019, the FDA proposed a full safety review of sunscreen ingredients. That review has still not been completed. In the meantime, an FDA-funded randomized clinical trial published in JAMA in 2020 found that all six tested active chemical sunscreen ingredients were absorbed into the bloodstream, with plasma concentrations exceeding the FDA's own threshold for requiring additional safety studies. Those elevated concentrations weren't just there after the application; they persisted for days. The Environmental Working Group's analysis of those same ingredients found strong evidence of hormone disruption and skin allergies in several of them. Only two ingredients, zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, do not absorb through the skin. They are the mineral-based options. The sun itself tells a different story than the one we are being barraged with. A systemic review of epidemiological studies found that chronic sun exposure is associated with reduced risk of colorectal, breast, prostate cancer, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. A Swedish cohort study found that all-cause mortality was approximately twice as high among people who avoided sun exposure compared to those with the highest sun exposure. A large UK study published earlier this year found that higher UV exposure was associated with lower all-cause, cardiovascular, and non-skin cancer mortality, and concluded that sunlight's benefits cannot be fully replaced by vitamin D supplements. The relationship between sun exposure and melanoma is also not straightforward. People who work outdoors with high chronic sun exposure have lower melanoma rates than people who work in offices. Burning is clearly harmful. But the blanket message that sun exposure causes cancer and sunscreen prevents it doesn't seem to hold up... Full segment below 👇

"There's no way this can be it" Federal regulations require vaccine package inserts to summarize the clinical trial relied upon to license the product for safety. Here is what the Recombivax HB package insert says in that section. "In three clinical studies, 434 doses of Recombivax HB were administered to 147 healthy infants and children up to 10 years of age who were monitored for five days after each dose." There was no control group, five days of safety monitoring, and 147 infants in the trial. That's the data the FDA accepted to license this product for administration to millions of babies. @AaronSiriSG couldn't believe it, and neither could we.

Aaron Siri recently reflected on what it meant to stand on the stage at the Kennedy Center and talk about vaccine safety to a room that included senior officials from the FDA, CDC, and other agencies, along with a crowd of reporters. He didn't know it was a bucket list item until the opportunity came up. When it did, he recognized exactly what it was: a chance to speak directly to the people who had gotten it so wrong and tell them what he thought they needed to do to correct course, including a lot of them firing themselves. (🤣)

Canada's Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying has recommended indefinitely excluding patients whose sole underlying condition is mental illness from eligibility for state euthanasia. The problem the committee couldn't get past: suicidal ideation is itself a symptom of mental illness, which means a psychiatrist approving a MAID request and a psychiatrist preventing a suicide can be looking at the same patient presenting the same symptoms. "We may not be responding to an autonomous, enduring request for assisted dying, but rather to the voice of the illness itself." A 2017 study found MAID could reduce Canadian healthcare spending by up to $138.8 million annually. That number is in the same report as the ethical concerns. The full article by @smiddendorp22 who has been following this story closely for us is linked below 👇 bit.ly/mental-illness…

"There's a reason that people have an issue with vaccines. Not because they just woke up one day and decided they just wanted for fun to take a position that might get them called an antivaxer, a quack, anti-science, get their kids out of school, get them thrown out of their jobs, have them turned against their social circles, have their kids excluded from playdates. Who does that? When you abandon those people who trusted the system, that's what breeds distrust. I agree. We need to get vaccines out of politics. It should be purely medical. And the only way to do that — end mandates. By mandating a vaccine, you make it political. By using the argument that a vaccine is safe and effective to take away somebody's civil individual rights, you made the safety and efficacy of that product a legal and a political issue. And chronic disease, you want to do that, you got to address vaccines. That's the truth. Because if you look at the weight of the current available data, the weight of that science reflects that you better address vaccines if you're going to truly achieve the objectives that MAHA has. Mandates are the tool of bullies, criminals, and dictators. If a patient refuses a medical product after being conveyed its benefits and risks, then that is called informed consent. They were informed and did not consent. Mandating over this objection is immoral and illiberal." -- @AaronSiriSG

London Gadd was 12 years old. She played soccer, loved to read, drew constantly, and dreamed of flying for the Air Force. She is gone, and every parent needs to read this. Within 12 hours of admission to a psychiatric facility, a psychiatrist pushed Prozac. Her mother refused for three days. The facility told her London couldn't be released without it. A consent form later surfaced bearing her signature on a line marked for verbal consent, a document she says she never saw. London's dose was later doubled without her mother's knowledge. Injections of Zyprexa, an antipsychotic, were administered without her mother ever being told. Genetic variants that affected how London's body metabolized Prozac existed and could have been identified before discharge. No one tested for them. Pharmacogenomic testing for exactly this purpose has existed since 2006. Twenty-one days after discharge, London reached out for help. The adults who received her messages went back to sleep. She died the following day. Her mother Charay is now fighting for London's Law, which would require documented non-drug intervention before prescribing psychiatric medication to a minor, mandatory pharmacogenomic testing before any prescription, and real informed consent including the FDA's black box warning in plain language. "London paid the price for a system that labels first and investigates last." @ChelleWards and @tracybeanz wrote this one. It is not easy to read. Read it anyway. And pray for London's family. bit.ly/London-Gadd

Attorney @AaronSiriSG laid out what genuine HHS reform would actually look like. Public servants who want to work in government should commit to never entering the revolving door to industry afterward. All health data should be made public in de-identified form, and any study where that data remains hidden should be retracted for violating basic scientific method. Study protocols should be posted before funding is approved, and results should be published no matter what they show. On liability: the 1986 Act and the PREP Act immunities could be lifted by the HHS Secretary tonight with a stroke of a pen. "Secretary Kennedy could do that tonight with a stroke of a pen, but I don't think the White House would let him..."