Programming note: Join me tonight for the latest episode of our brand new Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a piece of speculative fiction from 1907 on the world of the twenty-first century.
~I rejoice in the confirmation of RFK Jr as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services (no thanks to longtime Chinese asset Mitch McConnell). "Make America Healthy Again" is the indispensable component of "Make America Great Again" - because the most obvious sign of what's gone wrong in the country is to take a walk down any main street. No one would bet the future on a country that has debauched its human capital the way the United States has. So here are the new cabinet secretary's remarks in full:
As Bobby Kennedy pointed out on The Mark Steyn Show, Americans are the most medicated people on the planet and are the unhealthiest in the developed world; in particular, as RFK also noted on our show, our children are the world's most medicated children, and have accelerating rates of childhood obesity, childhood diabetes, childhood heart disease. A grade-school diagnosis of diabetes can take up to two decades off your lifespan.
So what's the answer? Further enriching Blue Cross-Blue Shield? Americans pay more for health care than anybody else, and have lousier outcomes, starting with the most basic indicator of all - life expectancy: According to the UN, from the Swiss to the Australians, the list of peoples that enjoy an extra half-decade of life over Americans lengthens year on year. In the 2023 UN rankings, the United States comes in at Number Fifty-Five on the life-expectancy Hit Parade; for purposes of comparison, Albania - where the men smoke seventy a day and accessing the health-care system requires swimming to Italy - is at Fifty-Three. By 2022 America's annual spending on health care was twelve-and-a-half grand per capita; Albania's was under five hundred bucks - which is less than your co-pay on a Covid anal swab; the word "co-pay" does not exist in Albanian.
Four years ago, we first had RFK Jr on the show mainly because no one else wants to talk about this. If you're wondering why, it's because his late friend Roger Ailes, of Fox News, told him that in non-election years three-quarters of Fox's ad revenue comes from Big Pharma.
Five years ago, the state and the pharmaceutical companies joined forces for an unprecedented experiment on you - to damage almost every aspect of daily life, including even more damage to a generation of children. There has yet to be an accounting for that:
I will be reflecting on the vile, inhumane measures laid out by the fake @Conservatives Tory party... and the @labour party who wanted even tougher longer measures. I won't say what should happened to the people who pushed it through or I'll be arrested pic.twitter.com/TUdMMs3gsg
— leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ (@LeilaniDowding) February 13, 2025
We don't need a "Day of Reflection". Like Leilani, I am minded to suggest various alternatives - a Day of Hangings from Lampposts perhaps? - but worry that that might not be Ofcom-compliant. Don't worry, though, there is at last some accountability. Headline from my old chums at the generally dismal Daily Telegraph:
Moderna fined for 'luring children into Covid vaccine trials' with teddy bears
Biotech firm has discredited the pharmaceutical industry, UK watchdog says
Just as a matter of interest, how much was the fine? Stand well back, it was...
£44,000.
Or a little over 55,000 dollars. Or less than the "costs" the English High Court ordered me to pay Ofcom. Moderna's 2023 revenue: $6.848 billion. My 2023 revenue: just a smidgeonette less. So, if you wanted to tell Big Pharma you can "lure children" with impunity, this ruling pretty much does it.
I was also glad to see, in the above clip, RFK trash USAid, which was after all founded by his uncle. As noted earlier this week, it's now a near parodic example of the racket that the federal government has made of everything it touches. According to the above-mentioned Daily Telegraph, Trump has only been in office for three weeks but he's already killing grannies:
US aid freeze claims first victims as oxygen supplies cut off
Seventy-one-year-old woman dies after being sent home from USAID funded hospital.
This story is by Sarah Newey, the Telegraph's "Global Health Security Correspondent" in Bangkok. In my day, the Telegraph didn't have a "Global Health Security Correspondent" in Bangkok or anywhere else. It's not funded by USAid, is it?
Oxygen isn't really that expensive. A member of the Steyn team required it at an event in Colorado a couple of years back. It certainly isn't that expensive if you're the "International Rescue Committee" and have revenues of over a billion dollars per annum. Of course, like everyone else on the take from USAid, the International Rescue Committee pisses away a lot of its dough. It pays its president, David Milliband, over a million bucks a year. No, not Ed Milliband, the talentless prat who serves as His Majesty's Secretary of State for Net Zero. This is his brother, David, the talentless prat who was British Foreign Secretary back in the Gordon Brown era and parlayed that into a seven-figure salary with this IRC racket. As I always say, the "non-profits" are where the big bucks are:
The NGO that let the old lady in Thailand die because they couldn't afford oxygen is: International Rescue Committee (IRC)
IRC's CEO, David Milliband, has a salary of $1.2 MILLION. Big score for former member of British Parliament!
Other officers pulling $300k-400k. Also...🧵 https://t.co/Yh4DuJW4K4 pic.twitter.com/IOH79MHJ9x
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) February 13, 2025
A couple of observations:
1) It would be the work of moments for Milliband to say, "Well, until we can get that district judge in Dead Moose Junction to strike down the USAid freeze, I'll forego the hundred grand a month and try to get by on just fifty. Oh, and for the remarkable number of my colleagues raking in $300,000 plus, we're asking you to make do with a quarter-mil for the next few weeks. If that doesn't work, then we'll start offing the Thai grannies."
2) If you're this dependent on USAid, you're not a 'non-governmental organisation', are you? Well, except in respect of David Milliband's "market-rate" private-sector salary?
3) When the Covid bollocks started, we were told that the owners of small hair-salons and mom'n'pop diners had enough in their rainy-day funds to last maybe six weeks. Apparently, that's twice as long as all these lavishly government-funded "non-governmental organisations" budgeted for...
Whichever of the above you prefer, if like David Milliband you run your business so badly that three weeks into a government-funding freeze your "non-government" business has to embark on a Siamese killing-spree, you probably shouldn't be in that business. Or any business. Trump didn't kill this old lady; Milliband and his lavishly remunerated comrades did.
The racket goes on. Uniparty warmonger Victoria Nuland was last heard of on The Mark Steyn Show warning that the zillions of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine could easily fall into Russian hands. Why are American taxpayers outsourcing gain-of-function to Kharkiv and Odessa? Well, they're world-renowned experts in developing a new strain of monkeypox with fewer homophobic overtones...
The good news is that the all-war-all-the-time queen, who's even more bloodsoaked than David Milliband, has just been appointed to the board of the "National Endowment for Democracy". Ms Nuland is an expert in democracy, having ended it in Ukraine. "NED" was founded back in the Eighties, at taxpayer expense, to "export the American way of governance" - so that every nation may enjoy the blessings of paying former foreign parliamentarians a seven-figure salary to kill l'il ol' ladies.
That's the point. Whether you're a Thai gran'ma, a Ukrainian infantryman or a New Hampshire grade-schooler, Nuland-Milliband-Big Pharma government is killing you. I wish RFK and the other Trump 47-iconoclasts all the best.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
