Dr. Big Brother

Yesterday afternoon, I got a breaking news alert that should have knocked me off my feet.

It didn’t.

Instead, I read it, shook my head, and thought: yeah… that tracks.

Which is a strange reaction to a report that the FDA blocked the publication of its own research showing vaccines are safe. But here we are.

According to the New York Times, FDA scientists—using data from millions of patients—conducted large-scale safety studies on COVID and shingles vaccines. The results were about as uneventful as you could hope for: serious side effects were extremely rare. In one study of roughly 7.5 million Medicare patients, researchers looked for things like heart attacks, strokes, and neurological conditions after vaccination.

They found nothing meaningful.

One potential signal—severe allergic anaphylactic reaction—showed up at about one in a million cases. That’s it.

The studies didn’t sit in a drawer somewhere unfinished. They were completed. Written up. Submitted to journals. One was already accepted for publication.

And then, according to the report, FDA leadership stepped in and told the scientists to pull them back.

Other related work—CDC research showing vaccine effectiveness, safety summaries on long-studied ingredients—met a similar fate. Delayed. Scrapped. Swept under the rug.

Let’s not pretend this is normal.

This isn’t a debate over messy data.
Or a flawed study getting corrected before publication.
This is the federal government blocking its own scientists from publishing research that reinforces the safety of widely used vaccines.

The official FDA explanation is that the conclusions were “too broad for the data”.

But when the outcome of that standard is consistently the same—when supportive data gets slowed down, softened, or buried—it stops looking like scientific rigor and starts looking like something else.

Call it what you want. To me, it looks like government censorship.

And that’s where I get stuck.

I don’t understand what the upside is.

I’m serious.

Strip away the politics, the personalities, the Twitter discourse—what does anyone actually gain from this?

Whether or not I agree with Trump’s administration and their decisions, it is usually pretty easy to understand why they are made. Everything is a transaction to the administration, and it’s never difficult to figure out what their end of the transaction is. But this I just can’t figure out.

If the vaccines are safe—and all available data still says they are—then publishing that data should be the easiest win imaginable. It reassures the public. It strengthens confidence. It reinforces the credibility of the agencies involved.

It even gives a big win to the drug companies that Trump has spent so much time buddying up with over the past year.

Instead, we’re doing the opposite.

We’re creating an environment where the government appears to be hiding information that confirms safety… while simultaneously claiming to protect the public.

That doesn’t add up.

I’ve tried to follow the logic here, and I can’t.

This administration has positioned itself as skeptical of vaccines, skeptical of pharma, skeptical of the entire medical establishment. Fine. You can have that view. Healthy skepticism has a place in science.

But skepticism is supposed to lead you toward better evidence.

Not away from it.

At the same time they are pulling this bullsh*t, they are legalizing peptides without any evidence whatsoever, influencing drug approvals, and removing bans on flavored vapes we know are awful for you.

If anything, you would think an administration that prides itself on “questioning the system” would jump at the chance to publish its own internal data and say:

“Look. We checked. Here are the numbers. Decide for yourself.”

Instead, we’re watching that data get buried.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it because it’s the only thing that really matters:

The entire American healthcare system runs on trust.

Not blind trust. But a baseline belief that the FDA and CDC are operating off hard data, not agendas. And that well-educated, career scientists with the public’s best interest in mind are independently making decisions. That when research is done, it gets published. And when conclusions are drawn, they reflect the full picture—not a curated version of it.

That belief is fragile.

And it’s getting weaker.

Because here’s how most people actually process a story like this.

They don’t read the methodology.
They don’t debate statistical significance.
They don’t weigh whether the conclusions were slightly overstated.

They just think:

What else aren’t we being told?

And once that question gets into people’s heads, it doesn’t stay contained to one issue.

It spreads.

To vaccines.
To medications.
To doctors.
To pharmacists.
To the entire system.

You don’t destroy trust in medicine with one catastrophic failure.

You destroy it with a slow pattern of decisions that make people feel like the system isn’t being straight with them.

This is one of those decisions.

And this is why it’s more important than ever to get your care provided by real human professionals who you know and trust.

The future of medicine is not an ai chatbot trained on the information (or lack thereof) being “officially” released by institutions. It’s an empathetic human being calmly helping you figure out what’s real and what isn’t. 

It’s up to all of us to make sure we don’t forget that before it’s too late.

And it starts with calling out flagrant abuses of power and censorship when they stare us in the face.

Giddy up!!!

Alec Wade Ginsberg, PharmD, RPh
4th-Gen Pharmacist | Owner & COO, C.O. Bigelow
Founder, Drugstore Cowboy