Why weight-loss drug prices finally fell — and who deserves credit



For decades, Americans heard the same justification for high drug prices. Pharmaceutical executives insisted those prices were unavoidable. Research costs required them. Innovation depended on them. The United States, as the world’s most open market, had to pay more than everyone else.

Then Eli Lilly cut the monthly price of one of its flagship weight-loss drugs, Zepbound.

If lower prices matter, then incentives matter more than bureaucracy. Competition and consumer access drive real change.

Nothing about the drug changed. No new scientific breakthrough appeared. The only thing that changed was competition. Once real pressure entered the market, Lilly found room in its pricing model that executives had long claimed did not exist.

The market responded quickly. Novo Nordisk, Lilly’s primary rival, lowered its prices soon after. This did not reflect a sudden gain in efficiency. It reflected fear of losing ground to a competitor.

That is how functioning markets work. When one major player moves, others adjust. The correction happens faster than any federal agency could hope to manage.

The irony is hard to miss. For years, the industry claimed margins were fixed and untouchable. Executives warned that any shift would damage shareholders and undermine global health. Yet the moment one company blinked, others followed. Consumers saw relief not because regulators intervened, but because competition exposed the old narrative as hollow.

Another force reinforced that shift. On Nov. 6, the White House announced a pricing agreement with major drug manufacturers scheduled to take effect in 2026. The agreement aims to narrow the gap between U.S. prices and those in other advanced economies and establishes a purchasing framework that makes reductions easier to implement.

That move marked a break from Washington’s habit of passively accepting industry talking points. The administration did not override the market. It amplified momentum competition had already created. Companies that once refused to consider cuts began to bend once the political cost of rigidity became clear. The announcement accelerated the trend, but competition started it.

A larger reality deserves attention. Major pharmaceutical companies have posted enormous profits for years. They have spent billions on stock buybacks and shareholder payouts while executive compensation soared. Market valuations across the sector reached historic highs. Lilly even became the first pharmaceutical company to surpass a trillion-dollar valuation.

Profit itself is not the problem. But competition forcing these firms to behave more like the quasi-utilities they resemble marks a welcome change from a system long treated as untouchable.

RELATED: The party that made life more expensive wants credit for noticing

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That system rests on a global arrangement in which Americans shoulder a disproportionate share of drug development costs. Wealthy nations negotiate prices or impose caps. The United States does not. The gap between what Americans pay and what others pay funds buybacks, dividends, and executive packages. Shareholders collect the upside.

The disparity speaks for itself. Drugs that cost hundreds of dollars overseas cost thousands here. The industry defended that gap by warning that research would collapse if prices fell. The current price cuts prove otherwise. Pipelines remain intact. Investment continues. Profitability holds. The model did not break when prices moved downward. It adjusted.

These developments expose a simple truth. Prices never reflected necessity. Incentives shaped them, reinforced by limited competition and political deference. Competition cracked open an inflexible model. The White House helped widen the opening.

Policymakers should learn from that sequence. If lower prices matter, then incentives matter more than bureaucracy. Competition and consumer access drive real change. The bloated regulatory machinery Washington favors often delays it. The market moved before Congress could even respond.

For Americans struggling to afford essential medication, that lesson matters most. Competition remains the strongest and most reliable force for bringing prices down.

It worked here. It can work again — if policymakers allow markets to function and pharmaceutical companies choose access over insulation.

Trump seemingly tries to split the baby on marijuana with new executive order



In a move anticipated by many in the medical industry, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would reclassify marijuana as a seemingly less dangerous drug.

On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order that would reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III drug, in accordance with the Controlled Substances Act.

'It's never safe to use powerful controlled substances in recreational manners.'

"I'm pleased to announce that I will be signing an executive order to reschedule marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance with legitimate medical uses," Trump announced from the Oval Office, surrounded by doctors, researchers, and others.

RELATED: RFK Jr. moves to ban transgender procedures for children: 'This is not medicine; it is malpractice'

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During the ceremony, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said that the executive order will allow "millions of Americans on Medicare to become eligible to receive CBD ... at no charge if their doctors recommend them."

According to a White House fact sheet, the reclassification of marijuana to Schedule III status will open up more opportunities for research to test the uses of medical marijuana.

Currently, marijuana is in the same classification as drugs like heroin, LSD, ecstasy, methaqualone, and peyote, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The reclassification will place marijuana in the same schedule as Tylenol with codeine, ketamine, anabolic steroids, and testosterone.

However, this executive order will have no impact on the recreational use of marijuana, as Trump clarified at the signing.

Trump added, "I want to emphasize that the order I am about to sign ... doesn't legalize marijuana in any way, shape, or form — and in no way sanctions its use as a recreational drug. ... It's never safe to use powerful controlled substances in recreational manners."

"President Trump is committed to ensuring our seniors, our veterans, and all Americans have access to the best medical treatments and research infrastructure in the world," the White House fact sheet said.

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Former FDA official unveils pharma’s shocking depression lies



Most people assume a diagnosis of clinical depression involves objective testing — a blood draw, a brain scan, or some clear biological marker. According to Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, that assumption is wrong.

“They make you pick from nine symptoms. And it’s like if you have five out of nine of these symptoms — so it’s, like, low mood, anxiety, sleep problems … lack of interest in things … feelings of guilt. It’s just a very arbitrary list of symptoms that kind of make sense,” Witt-Doerring explains.

“They make sense for people who are depressed. And the way the people who wrote this diagnostic manual wanted to define depression was like, ‘Oh, well, if you just have any combination of five of them out of nine, we’ll say you have depression,’” he continues.


And there’s a reason for this lower standard of care.

“Where the big issue is happening in the U.S. and in much of the sort of the Western medicalized world right now is within family medicine. Because depression is so common, 80% of our prescriptions are being handed out by family med docs,” Witt-Doerring tells Stuckey.

“There are incentives that make it so the doctors want to see you in a very short period of time. So the aim of the game is billing insurance in this country. And so if you saw one person for an hour versus four people in an hour, and shorter visits, it works out that you essentially make double,” he continues.

The story behind SSRIs is no more comforting.

“Back in the 1950s, a drug was discovered called iproniazid, and it was being used as an anti-microbial for patients with tuberculosis,” he tells Stuckey, pointing out that while the drug was meant to cure people of tuberculosis, it also resulted in them perking up emotionally.

“They said, ‘Hmm, you know, they’re more energetic, they’re more lively, maybe this drug has some promise as an antidepressant. Let’s go and give to depressed patients.’ And so they went and they did that, and it worked,” he continues.

However, the official narrative that was born of this discovery could have “gone in two ways at this time.”

One narrative could have been that the drug has energizing properties that perked patients up, and what doctors were witnessing was a “drug effect.” The other narrative was that “maybe these drugs are actually helping these depressed patients because they don’t have enough serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine.”

“And so one narrative survives and the other dies. And so the narrative that survives is that the patients have these chemical imbalances. And the reason for that is because it’s a better commercial narrative,” he explains, before pointing out that after the brains of depressed people versus non-depressed individuals were studied, not a single biomarker had been found.

And rather than curing depression, they’re “simply masking symptoms.”

“You could have a moral argument and say, ‘Yeah, morally I disagree with that.’ But you could also just say, ‘Well, I don’t really care. I just want to feel well and I’m suffering.’ And I think that’s totally fair because we want people to feel better,” he explains.

“But then the issue is we don’t tell them about, ‘Hey, these are drugs just like any other drug. They’re going to wear off over time, and there’s also risks of prolonged use because our brains aren’t used to being on them,’” he says.

“It’s just a lie,” he continues. “You know, it’s just a misleading message about the safety of the drugs and how they work.”

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Killing drug ads won’t lower prices — it will kill innovation



The United States is one of the few countries that allows prescription drugmakers to speak directly to patients. That simple fact now fuels political calls to “ban the ads.” But restricting direct-to-consumer advertising would do more than change what runs during football games. It would shrink the flow of information to patients and push our system toward the bureaucratic throttling that has turned other countries into innovation laggards.

Advertising is part of a dynamic market process. Entrepreneurs inform consumers about new products, and when profits are high, firms have every incentive to improve quality and expand access.

The pattern is clear: The more Washington intervenes, the fewer cures Americans get.

New, cheaper treatments need to be brought to consumers’ attention. Otherwise, people stay stuck with older, more expensive options, and competition falters. Banning pharmaceutical advertising would hobble innovative firms whose products are not yet known and leave those seeking medical care less informed.

Critics warn that “a growing proliferation of ads” drives demand for costly treatments, even when less expensive alternatives exist. Yet a recent study in the Journal of Public Economics finds that exposure to pharmaceutical ads increases drug utilization across the board — including cheaper generics and non-advertised medications. In short, advertising pushes people who need care to make better, more informed decisions.

A market-based system rewards risk-taking and innovation. Despite the many flaws in American health care, the United States leads the world in medical breakthroughs — from cancer immunotherapies to vaccines developed in record time. That success wasn’t created by government decree. It came from competition: firms communicating openly about their products, fighting for patients, and reinvesting earnings into the next generation of lifesaving discoveries.

Sure, some regulations are adopted with good intentions. But drug ads are already heavily regulated, and a full ban would create serious unintended consequences — including the unseen cost of innovative drugs that will never reach patients because firms won’t invest in developing treatments they are barred from promoting.

American health care is now regulated to the point of satisfying no one. Patients face rising costs. Physicians navigate a Kafkaesque maze of top-down rules. Taxpayers foot the bill for decisions made by distant bureaucracies. Measures associated with socialized medicine continue creeping into the marketplace.

Price controls in the Inflation Reduction Act are already cutting into pharmaceutical research and development. One study estimates roughly 188 fewer small-molecule treatments in the 20 years after its enactment. The pattern is clear: The more Washington intervenes, the fewer cures Americans get.

RELATED: Trump faces drugmakers that treat sick Americans like ATMs

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The answer to the problems in American health care isn’t more government. It’s less. Expected profitability drives investment in biomedical research. Imposing new advertising bans or European-style price controls would mean lower-quality care, higher mortality, and the erosion of America’s leadership in medical innovation.

The United Kingdom offers a warning. Once a global leader, it drove investment offshore through overregulation and rigid price controls. Today, only 37% of new medicines are made fully available for their licensed uses in Britain. Americans spend more, but they also live longer: U.S. cancer patients outlive their European counterparts for a reason.

Discovering new drugs is hard. Every breakthrough begins with the freedom to imagine, to compete, and to communicate. Strip companies of the ability to inform patients, and you strip away the incentive to develop the next cure. Competitive markets — not centralized control — will fuel tomorrow’s medical miracles.

How to win the opioid fight



Despite thousands of lawsuits against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma now being settled, the opioid crisis continues to devastate families and communities. This is why there are massive national efforts to expand addiction treatment, develop non-opioid pain alternatives, promote natural remedies, and confront the Mexican drug cartels flooding America with fentanyl. In recent years, opioid-related deaths have finally begun to decline, suggesting that those initiatives are starting to make a real impact. But that progress may already be slowing.

The introduction of work requirements for Medicaid eligibility under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is producing unintended consequences for people in addiction recovery. Early studies show that declines in Medicaid enrollment correlate with drops in the number of patients receiving treatment for opioid use disorder. Because Medicaid is the primary source for buprenorphine and addiction services, these enrollment changes threaten fragile but meaningful recovery gains.

Conservatives champion individual responsibility — but responsibility also requires ensuring that systems meant to help people reclaim their lives aren’t working against them.

Work requirements aren’t the problem — they’re sound policy to preserve the financial stability and original intention of the program. The real issue is Medicaid’s regulatory structure, which is too rigid and dysfunctional to absorb yet another layer of complexity.

This crisis didn’t begin with work requirements. Medicaid’s own structure, combined with state policies, had been restricting access to effective OUD treatment for years. Patients face prior-authorization delays, prescriber rules that block lifesaving medications, and certificate-of-need laws that stop treatment centers from opening or expanding. Policymakers often claim these rules protect patients or control costs. In practice, they have choked off reliable care and pushed people in recovery farther from the help they need.

In states where prescriber limits and facility restrictions already make treatment scarce, adjusting Medicaid eligibility has a serious impact on the availability of buprenorphine providers. The problem lies in creating a policy that requires personal responsibility within an already bureaucratic structure that actively slows treatment access. When enrollment pressures combine with supply constraints caused by CON laws and prescription rules, the result is fewer people getting the care that keeps them alive.

This is especially true in Appalachia, which is ground zero of the opioid crisis. Pennsylvania explicitly prohibits off-site methadone “medication units,” while legislation has been floated in West Virginia that aims to ban methadone clinics. Local governments across the region routinely block zoning permits for treatment facilities, often caving to community pushback rather than addressing a staggering public health emergency. Many states still impose CON laws, restricting the ability of hospitals and clinics to add new treatment beds or open new treatment programs.

RELATED: Trump faces drugmakers that treat sick Americans like ATMs

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On the provider side, well-intentioned prescribing rules have created even more barriers. Despite a dire shortage of addiction specialists, many states limit the prescription of OUD medications to certain providers, leaving primary care doctors — who could dramatically expand treatment access — underutilized or prevented from issuing prescriptions. Lawmakers have inadvertently created a bottleneck: too few qualified providers and too many hoops to jump through for those who want to treat addiction.

As the Trump administration continues to build a populist coalition that includes voters from Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other communities deeply scarred by opioid addiction, it must confront this reality head-on. Doing so does not require abandoning conservative principles, nor does it mean reversing work requirements. Those reforms remain both necessary and widely popular. But a serious conservative health care agenda must recognize that Medicaid’s regulatory architecture is undermining progress against opioid addiction — and America cannot afford to lose ground now.

Conservatives champion individual responsibility — but responsibility also requires ensuring that systems designed to help people reclaim their lives aren’t working against them. Addressing Medicaid’s regulatory failures is not just good policy; it is essential to sustaining progress in one of the most consequential public health fights of our time.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.

FDA finally admits COVID-19 vaccine killed kids: 'This is a profound revelation'



Millions of Americans across the country were told during the pandemic to offer up their arms for the COVID-19 vaccines — the first-ever mRNA vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — if they wanted to keep their jobs, eat in public, stay in school, or visit their loved ones.

Government officials, the establishment media, and pharmaceutical representatives claimed that the vaccines were "safe and effective." Those who dared to suggest otherwise about the experimental drugs that were making liability-shielded vaccine manufacturers record profits were often attacked and censored.

Months after the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that "mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses," the Food and Drug Administration admitted in an internal letter that the COVID-19 vaccines killed numerous children.

'Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced.'

Dr. Vinay Prasad, chief medical officer at the FDA and director at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, noted in an email to staff on Friday that FDA Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance career staff "have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination."

In the email, which was reviewed by multiple publications and shared online by the Washington Post, Prasad indicated that the OBPV performed an analysis of 96 deaths between 2021 and 2024 and concluded "that no fewer than 10 are related. If anything, this represents conservative coding, where vaccines are exculpated rather than indicated in cases of ambiguity. The real number is higher."

"These deaths are related to vaccination (likely/probable/possible attribution made by staff). That number is certainly an underestimate due to underreporting, and inherent bias in attribution," wrote Prasad. "This safety signal has far-reaching implications for Americans, the U.S. pandemic response, and the agency itself."

RELATED: Pfizer COVID shot sales plummet after Trump administration ends universal recommendations

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Despite the strong improbability of a healthy child getting seriously ill from COVID, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, and other health officials championed injecting kids with the novel vaccines.

On Nov. 2, 2021, then-President Joe Biden's health officials gave final approval to Pfizer's COVID-19 shot for kids ages 5 to 11. Biden said at the time, "It is a major step forward for our nation in our fight to defeat the virus."

COVID-19 vaccination for children younger than 5 began across the U.S. in June 2022.

"These vaccines are safe, highly effective, and will give parents the peace of mind of knowing their child is protected from the worst outcomes of COVID-19," said Biden.

Prasad noted in his Friday letter that despite evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine put boys and young men at great risk of myocarditis, Biden health officials "did not quickly attempt mitigation strategies such as spacing doses apart, lowering doses, omitting doses among those with prior COVID-19."

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can manifest as various symptoms, including heart palpitations, chest pain, fainting, and weakness, and can also cause fatal cardiac arrest.

"Worse, the FDA delayed acknowledgement of the safety signal until after it could extend marketing authorization to younger boys 12-15," continued Prasad. "Had the acknowledgement come early, these younger boys, who likely did not require COVID-19 vaccination, may have chosen to avoid the products."

The FDA's chief medical officer stressed that the OBPV's finding that the COVID vaccine contributed to the deaths of children amounted to "a profound revelation."

"For the first time, the U.S. FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children," continued Prasad, whose agency revoked emergency-use authorization for COVID vaccines earlier this year. "Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death. In many cases, such mandates were harmful."

Peter Marks, Prasad's predecessor, complained to the New York Times about the "political tone" of Prasad's letter and noted, "I would not be surprised if the attributions turn out to be debatable, as these cases are often quite complex."

FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary said in a "Fox & Friends" interview on Saturday that his agency would no longer "rubber-stamp things with no data," adding that such a "mockery of science" was alternatively "the M.O. in the Biden administration with the eternal COVID booster approvals for young, healthy kids."

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Trump faces drugmakers that treat sick Americans like ATMs



President Donald Trump struck a second deal last month with the world’s largest drugmakers, promising lower costs for American patients. The industry claims cooperation, offering help for consumers and expanded domestic production. Yet those same companies have raised prices on nearly 700 prescription drugs since January.

Big Pharma hopes the most unconventional president will fall back on the most conventional policy: granting the largest firms regulatory advantages, taxpayer-funded promotion, and freedom to keep ratcheting prices upward.

Trumpshould expose the game Big Pharma has played for years and force the industry to compete in a real marketplace.

Trump’s instincts are right. Americans pay inflated prices, and he has confronted the industry’s excesses. But Big Pharma spent decades building cartel-level dominance. Few industries mastered regulatory capture more effectively. The pharma industry wins higher prices while concealing the system that keeps costs rising.

The industry’s tactics follow a predictable pattern. With its right hand, Big Pharma announces a partnership with the White House. With its left, it secures guaranteed government contracts, political protection, and federally promoted products. Independent analysts warn that rebate schemes encourage price hikes. The dynamic mirrors a retailer inflating list prices before Black Friday to create the illusion of deep discounts.

The federal government helps tip the scales. Regulatory frameworks favor the largest drugmakers and block smaller competitors, keeping profits high and patients in the dark.

Patients pay the price

What the industry calls reform resembles a shell game that protects profits and punishes patients. The Food and Drug Administration created an “accelerated approval” pathway to speed lifesaving treatments. In practice, the system advantages the largest corporations. A 2020 study found that increases in FDA regulations boosted sales for major firms while cutting sales for smaller companies by 2.2%. Smaller manufacturers cannot absorb substantial compliance costs, which means cheaper or more effective drugs never reach the market or arrive years late.

Patients pay the price. Follow-up studies for expedited approvals lag for years, and many drugs never show clear benefits. Harvard researchers found that nearly half of cancer drugs granted accelerated approval fail to improve survival or quality of life. The FDA withdrew one in four such drugs and confirmed substantial benefit for only 12% of the rest. The drugs generated revenue, but they offered little hope to patients who paid dearly for treatments that did not deliver.

RELATED: The hidden hospital scam driving up drug prices, coming to a state near you

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Meanwhile, prices keep climbing. Since Trump left office after his first term, cancer drug prices rose faster than Biden-era inflation. Median list prices for new medicines more than doubled between 2021 and 2024, surpassing $300,000 a year. In 2023 alone, drug companies raised prices by 35%. The Rand Corporation found that Americans spent more than $600 billion on prescriptions in 2022 — almost triple what patients in other developed nations pay.

Competition, not cronyism

Families facing cancer now shoulder thousands more out of pocket while Big Pharma posts record profits. Trump deserves credit for recognizing how unfair practices and Democrat policies pushed drug costs beyond the reach of average households.

A better path is within reach. Real reform depends on competition rather than political connections. Trump can break the illusion by opening the market, lowering barriers to entry, and cutting regulatory burdens that keep smaller firms out. He should expose the game Big Pharma has played for years and force the industry to compete in a real marketplace.

Do you really have ADHD — or do they want to medicate you into conformity?



Everybody has a diagnosis these days.

Not just adults — kids too. It doesn’t matter if you're 8 or 38, there's someone somewhere waiting to explain away whatever's different about you.

Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.

It's not a quirk of your personality or a flaw in your character or a wound in your soul. It's a illness. Never mind that the symptoms are vague or the evidence that it's a discrete medical condition are lacking — a pharmaceutical cure will fix it.

Just pop this pill, and you will be like everyone else. Isn’t that what you want?

All the rage

All the kids these days have ADHD or autism. Which often makes me wonder if any of them do. Or if these conditions exist at all.

Autism certainly seems real in its extreme forms, but I am not at all convinced that it's at the far end of a continuum. I don’t really think being a little “on the spectrum” is a thing. Those people are just a little weird and need stronger guidance on how to get on in life.

I have a friend who was an engineer at Google. He told me half the people he worked with claimed to be “on the spectrum,” and according to him, it was all bull. They didn’t have medical problems; they had personal problems. They were guys who never learned how to interact normally, so they just ended up being kind of weird and rude.

As for ADHD, it's so obscenely overdiagnosed that it's essentially fake at this point. The market has been so oversaturated by ridiculous and erroneous diagnoses that whenever I hear about another kid with ADHD, it tells me more about the doctors and the “system” and less about the kid.

Boys will be boys

Are some kids better at sitting down at a desk for three hours at a time? Sure. Are more girls than boys better at doing it? Yes. Is there a gender factor here when it comes to diagnosis? Absolutely.

Boys don’t learn the same way girls do. But much of modern education ignores this fact. So when boys fidget or get bored, it gets chalked up to ADHD. This is more or less common knowledge by now. So the only thing a boy being diagnosed with ADHD tells me is that he doesn't get enough recess.

Of course, there are extreme cases. There are kids who genuinely don’t seem to be able to focus at all. Something like actual ADHD exists in a small number of boys, but that doesn't negate the broader truth: Instead of seeing people as individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, we decide to overmedicate when someone isn’t exactly like everyone else.

My mom worked with special ed kids. Some of them had mild disabilities, some more extreme. In some cases, it was clear they would need supervised care their entire lives. But in other cases, it wasn't clear just what, if anything, was wrong — besides a certain learned helplessness reinforced by doctors and parents.

Pill and chill

Nowadays ADHD diagnoses aren’t just for kids; adults are getting in on it too. Believe it or not, an increasing amount of men and women, especially women, in their 30s and 40s are discovering that they too have ADHD — a discovery that inevitably “explains everything.” My wife sees reels on Instagram all the time, along with ads selling various solutions.

What's that? You couldn’t focus at your computer, clicking on an excel spreadsheet, sending pointless emails for seven hours at a time? Shocking. No, you don’t need ADHD medication. You need to do something else with your life. Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.

Overmedicalization and overdiagnosis is a deep problem in our society. Not just because the result is an increase in prescription drug use, but because the individual human being is lost or suffocated a little bit at a time. Everyone is different. Everyone has skills, and everyone has weaknesses. Everyone learns in a different way, and everyone focuses on different things too.

RELATED: Drugged for being boys: The TRUTH behind the ADHD scam

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Free agency

Some people are just a little awkward, a little weird, a little absent-minded, or a little dry. Sure, they should try to meet society halfway in some reasonable sense — but that happens through early teaching, parental guidance, community expectations, and personal effort, not through a pill you pop every day. For most of the 20th century, we relied far more on those nonmedical supports.

All the pill-popping flattens our individualism and undercuts our own agency as humans. It presupposes that one cannot make oneself better, one cannot work to act right, and that one doesn’t have any control. This is a lie. Yes, of course, there are people who suffer with truly debilitating problems who need medication, and they should get that medication. But it is a small fraction of the population. Most people can make themselves better when they set their minds to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I'm not anti-psychiatry. I'm not into alternative medicine or any of the hippie stuff. I’m not denying that there are people with problems who are helped most effectively with medication. I’m thankful for the blessings of modern medicine and the advancements we continue to see every year.

But we have a problem with overdiagnosis in our country. We have a problem with losing sight of the individual. We have a problem with people who want to give up their agency and turn it all over to a pill, and we are worse off because of it.

Healthy as a horse: My journey into the ivermectin underworld



I was driving through Boise last winter when I heard about a new Idaho law that made the drug ivermectin a legal, over-the-counter drug.

Previously, it was prescription-only. But most doctors refused to prescribe it.

Like many people, I had taken illegal substances as a youth. Horse paste wasn’t technically illegal. But it sure felt like it was, holding it in my hand.

Soon, in Idaho, you could buy ivermectin off the shelf at Walgreens, just like you bought aspirin or dental floss.

Iver-who?

Ivermectin, in case you forgot, was thought to help cure or at least lessen the effects of COVID-19.

It was weird hearing about COVID again. It seems like nobody thinks about it anymore. We never hear about new studies or recent findings about the virus.

Have we mastered all the ins and outs of COVID? It doesn’t seem like we have. People report having “long COVID.” Is that a real thing? Nobody knows.

One thing you would think they would have figured out: Does ivermectin help against COVID?

People are still getting the virus, I assume. Do doctors ever prescribe ivermectin? And then report on the results?

If a drug is so controversial that states are writing laws about it, shouldn’t someone know if it works?

This could be a Big Pharma issue. The big drug companies don’t want people taking a cheap drug someone else invented over an expensive drug that they invented (and will make money on).

That would be the cynical view, I guess.

Meanwhile, medical people still want you to get vaccinated against COVID. Is that still the experimental vaccine from before, or do they have a new one yet that isn’t experimental?

And how is that experiment going, by the way? I guess it’s going well since you never hear about it. People don’t seem to be dying. Or even getting seriously sick. So that’s good.

Idaho fought the law (and Idaho won)

I was curious about this Idaho law, so I looked into it. I came across a funny quote from one of the state legislators. He said the biggest surprise during the writing of the ivermectin bill was that so many of the other legislators were already taking it.

He didn’t go into detail, but I assumed they were buying it in “horse paste” form. At that time, that was the only way you could get it.

I remember when I first heard about ivermectin. The rumor was that the Japanese had discovered/invented a new wonder drug. And it might cure COVID!

If you looked it up, you learned that the developers of ivermectin — one British guy and one Japanese guy — won the NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE in 2015. These two were thinking of ivermectin primarily as an anti-parasitic.

But people on the internet were claiming ivermectin could possibly do more. It might help with cancer. It could lessen arthritis. And most important: It might prevent people from getting COVID.

Many scientists had proclaimed ivermectin the most important and versatile medical discovery since penicillin. Others said: “If you’re not a horse, don’t take it.”

Hay is for horses

As the COVID pandemic dragged on, demand for ivermectin increased. People wanted to try it. They didn’t care what the establishment scientists said.

Ivermectin pills for humans did exist. But you had to order them from shady-sounding companies in third-world countries. And who knew if the pills were even real?

So people took their chances with the horse paste. And then they wrote about it online. It didn’t sound so bad. They said it tasted like apples, which is how they got the horses to swallow it.

For me, it was the possibility of the pills that made me consider taking ivermectin. I had become sick when the lockdowns first ended. I’d been in bed for a week. Judging from the unusual symptoms, I assumed it was COVID .

Even after I got better, I felt lingering effects that never quite went away.

I thought: If ivermectin really were a “wonder drug,” maybe it would help with these lingering symptoms. And maybe it would prevent other maladies in the future.

RELATED: Heroic COVID docs punished as Abbott, Texas lawmakers stay silent

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Yea or neigh?

So I called a Walgreens in Boise and asked if they had ivermectin pills on the shelves yet. The person on the phone, a young man, immediately began making jokes and mocking the governor and the new ivermectin bill. He called Governor Little, “Governor Spittle.”

When I persisted, he said that they didn’t have it yet. And he didn’t know when they would. He thought it would probably be a long time. If ever.

So I went online to see if ivermectin were listed at any other Idaho pharmacy websites. It wasn’t.

Eventually, I found a package of 12 tablets on an obscure website overseas. But it was no longer available and was very expensive.

It seemed clear that it would be a very long time before the pill version was available to the public.

But by now, I’d become excited about ivermectin. I’d been watching videos about it.

So then, just for fun, I looked up the horse paste on Amazon. It was much cheaper than the pills. And on YouTube, there was a doctor who had figured out the human doses and how much to take.

I laughed at myself. WAS I ACTUALLY CONTEMPLATING ORDERING IVERMECTIN HORSE PASTE OFF AMAZON?

And then I ordered it.

Golden goo

A week later, it arrived. I opened the box, and there was the same long, plastic syringe and plunger arrangement I’d seen on YouTube.

Like many people, I had taken illegal substances as a youth. Horse paste wasn’t technically illegal. But it sure felt like it was, holding it in my hand.

I went in the bathroom and washed and dried my hands. In the bright bathroom light, I opened the top of the ivermectin tube. I then carefully, slowly pushed on the plunger end of it.

A small blob of golden goo came out of the top. I carefully scooped the “pea-sized” human dose onto my index finger. To avoid tasting it, I put my finger in the far back of my mouth and smeared it on the back of my tongue. But that was unnecessary. It didn’t taste bad. It tasted like apples.

According to the British doctor, you were supposed to take this small amount on one day, then wait a day, and then take another small amount on the third day. After one month, you do that again. And then, presumably, you keep doing that ... forever?

I did it for two months, keeping track in my day planner. Then I got busy, and I forgot about it, and a couple months later, while digging around in my bathroom pantry, I found the plastic syringe.

Should I continue with the horse paste regimen? I wondered to myself. I took a dose. But then I forgot to take the second dose two days later. And it’s continued like that. Sporadic. Whenever I remember. Which is probably fine.

Back in the saddle

Since then, I have noticed that some of my odd COVID symptoms have significantly lessened. Is it the ivermectin? I don’t know. Probably not.

My dad was a doctor. He was old-school and thought your body did most of the healing. Not the drugs. Not the doctors. So maybe that’s what happened. My body was healing itself.

Anyway, I don’t regret doing it. The whole process was kind of fun. And now, whenever I see a horse, I give him a knowing nod, as if to say, I too have enjoyed that sweet apple horse paste.

Pfizer COVID shot sales plummet after Trump administration ends universal recommendations



U.S. sales of Pfizer's Comirnaty shots have taken a nosedive since the Trump administration updated its immunization schedules last month and dropped the universal collective recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines.

The pharmaceutical company's revenues for the third quarter of 2025 are down 6% — amounting to a $1 billion drop — compared to the same stretch the previous year.

'CDC's 2022 blanket recommendation for perpetual COVID-19 boosters deterred health care providers from talking about the risks.'

Pfizer indicated in its latest earnings statement that "the operational decrease was primarily driven by a year-over-year decline in COVID-19 product revenues largely due to lower infection rates impacting Paxlovid demand as well as a narrower vaccine recommendation for COVID-19 in the U.S. that reduced the eligible population for Comirnaty."

Sales of Comirnaty were down 25% in the United States, and sales of Paxlovid, an oral antiviral medication that treats mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults, were down 52%.

When his agency dropped the universal recommendation last month for Comirnaty — a controversial vaccine used at a time of population-wide immunity to treat an endemic virus fatal in roughly 1% of confirmed cases — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Acting Director Jim O'Neill stated, "CDC's 2022 blanket recommendation for perpetual COVID-19 boosters deterred health care providers from talking about the risks and benefits of vaccination for the individual patient or parent. That changes today."

RELATED: Naomi Wolf continues to expose COVID vaccine: 'A depopulating technology'

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

The CDC's decision came just months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration forced Pfizer to slap a damning warning on its Comirnaty vaccine noting the estimated unadjusted incidence of heart conditions following administration of the 2023-2024 formula of the shot, as well as the longitudinal results of a 2024 study concerning cardiac manifestations and outcomes of vaccine-associated myocarditis in American youths.

The FDA also required Pfizer to describe the new safety information in the adverse reactions section of its vaccine information insert such that it now notes that "the estimated unadjusted incidence of myocarditis and/or pericarditis during the period 1 through 7 days following administration of the 2023-2024 Formula of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was approximately 8 cases per million doses in individuals 6 months through 64 years of age and approximately 27 cases per million doses in males 12 through 24 years of age."

While the FDA has approved the drug for use in individuals who are 65 years of age and older or 5-64 years old who suffer from at least one underlying condition putting them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19, it revoked the emergency use authorization for the shot in August.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla reportedly suggested on a Tuesday call with analysts that the company is looking for opportunities outside the United States, stating that the company's catalog of vaccines constitute a "key area of focus in international markets."

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