Is Mitch McConnell still fit to serve? Glenn Beck investigates Washington's silence



Senator Mitch McConnell was confirmed to have been hospitalized on June 14 for an unknown condition — but that was now weeks ago, and the people of Kentucky have received no meaningful updates about his condition.

Now, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is asking questions that Washington refuses to answer.

“Here are the rumors. And they’re rumors. If they’re true, they’re tragic. If the rumors are false, then somebody needs to step up and tell the American people the truth. Either way, this is not how a constitutional republic is supposed to function,” Glenn says.


According to these rumors, it’s been three weeks since the people of Kentucky have heard about the condition of Senator Mitch McConnell.

“His office has issued really carefully worded statements. He’s recovering. He appreciates everyone’s support. They don’t say what happened. They don’t say when he’s going to return,” Glenn explains. “They don’t answer even the basic question every citizen has a right to: Can he still do the job?”

“Is he still thinking? And this is not a cruel question, but the guy is a sitting senator, and it’s a question that matters, because this is bigger than Mitch McConnell. We watched America do this with President Biden,” he continues.

“Republicans are now the mirror image of the people they criticized,” he says. “You know, if your party has spent years demanding honesty about the president’s health, you kind of have an obligation to demand honesty about your own leader in your own GOP.”

“This is not about left or right. This is about representation,” he adds.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Anti-aging mogul who used son as 'blood boy' reveals his incurable diagnosis



Bryan Johnson, the transhumanist founder of the neurotechnology company Kernel, sold his digital payments company Braintree to eBay Inc. for $800 million in 2013, then pursued his bio-hacking obsession headlong, tinkering with his body in the hope of pausing the aging process and potentially even evading death.

In a 2023 interview with Bloomberg, Johnson revealed that in addition to staying out of the sun, he was preparing to invest at least $2 million on his body with the aim of having the body and organs — penis and rectum included — of an 18-year-old. To this end, he hired a team of over 30 doctors and health experts to monitor his every bodily function.

'My stomach is eating itself.'

"What I do may sound extreme, but I'm trying to prove that self-harm and decay are not inevitable," Johnson said just months before supplementing his usual supply of rejuvenating plasma from so-called blood boys with blood from his son.

Johnson, who calls himself "the healthiest person alive" and founded the "Don't Die" health cult, revealed last week that he has been diagnosed with an incurable disease.

"Bad news #1: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself," the middle-aged transhumanist wrote in an X post.

"Good news: I'm going to try and solve it," he added.

Johnson suggested that he developed autoimmune gastritis during a period in his life when he was juggling "stress and grind" and let his health slip.

Autoimmune gastritis is an inherited chronic inflammatory disease that occurs when an individual's immune system attacks their stomach lining cells. According to the Cleveland Clinic, this condition can lead to an increased risk of developing small neuroendocrine tumors in the stomach and an increased risk of gastric cancer.

RELATED: Transhumanism is coming to destroy the human soul

© CORBIS/Corbis/Getty Images

"I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it," the transhumanist said. "AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects."

Johnson indicated further that his supposedly healthy living regimen failed to address his low iron levels.

'Bro so busy trying to not die he forgot how to live.'

Autoimmune gastritis destroys the stomach's parietal cells, which reduces secretion of the gastric acid required for absorption of inorganic iron.

Only after the supposed "healthiest person alive" overhauled his medical team and underwent further testing was his incurable condition revealed.

While there is presently no cure for autoimmune gastritis, Johnson said that he and his team are "going to try and solve my AIG."

Johnson's non-terminal diagnosis appears to have only worsened his health obsession.

"We fill our days mostly on things that are trivial next to what we ultimately care about. We know, deep down, however, that in the noise of it all, health is easily forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters," the transhumanist wrote.

Bryan did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

Following his disease reveal, Johnson lashed out at those whose who, according to his paraphrase, suggested that "bro so busy trying to not die he forgot how to live."

In response, the transhumanist offered a pessimistic and reductive interpretation of the world, suggesting that people ultimately construct personas to shield themselves "from the terror of their inevitable death," then "to make this irreconcilable pain invisible to themselves, they dissolve themselves into the group and enact its rituals."

He proceeded to characterize himself as a heroic figure — the "abstainer" from "societal death rituals" who "reveals to the room that they are drunk."

According to the transhumanist — who takes hundreds of pills a day, follows a strict plant-based diet, has injected some of his son's blood, and has spent a fortune in a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable — Johnson's critics aren't troubled by his decisions but by "their reflection in the mirror."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Crazy 'cat lady' parasite that decapitates sperm, affects 1 in 3, is grossly neglected: Study



Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can infect any nucleated cell in any warm-blooded animal and can cause a wide range of health complications — some fatal, such as miscarriage or inflammation of the brain.

This singled-celled parasite, which can survive up to a lifetime in a human body, is stereotypically associated with crazy "cat ladies" due to its presence in cat feces — cats are its only known definitive hosts — and its association with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suicidal behavior.

'Toxoplasmosis is just getting left behind.'

Despite its association with "cat ladies," the parasite is an equal opportunity invader. A study published last year noted, for instance, that the rapidly dividing asexual form of the indiscriminate parasite can "colonize and proliferate" within testes, decapitate sperm, and cause "oxidative stress leading to male infertility."

A study published on Thursday in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases warned that toxoplasmosis, the virus caused by the parasite, is not receiving sufficient attention from the scientific powers that be — certainly not the level that might otherwise be warranted by its impact and pervasiveness.

"Toxoplasmosis continues to be one of the most common parasitic infectious diseases affecting humans, and the leading intraocular infection worldwide," said the study.

Toxoplasmosis chronically affects nearly one-third of the human population and is present in every country around the globe. South America is home to the highest rates of infection, with some regions reporting up to 80% of their adult populations afflicted. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 40 million people are infected with the parasite in the United States.

RELATED: Foreign 'Fauci acolyte' and his African crony charged with smuggling monkeypox onto American soil

Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

"Yet, the condition receives limited attention on health agendas," continued the researchers.

In a comparison of data provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, researchers found that "toxoplasmosis research was funded at a level of $177 per disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) for the period 2018–2024, compared with research on trachoma and Chagas disease, at $283/DALY and $337/DALY, respectively."

"Key gaps persist across basic science, diagnostics, therapeutics, prevention, and implementation research," said the study. "No licensed human vaccine exists. Serological testing is widely available, but expensive for low-income scenarios and poorly standardized, complicating surveillance and estimation of the burden of disease. Treatment protocols lack robust comparative evidence, particularly for congenital and ocular toxoplasmosis. Environmental monitoring of oocysts remains technically demanding and absent from national programs."

"What we're seeing is that while there are these improvements occurring in the fight against other neglected tropical diseases, toxoplasmosis is just getting left behind," senior author on the paper Justine Smith, an ophthalmologist at Flinders University, told Gizmodo.

The researchers criticized the prevailing notion that the infection is "a zoonosis that is an unavoidable consequence of everyday human-animal interactions," stating that "accumulated evidence indicates otherwise: toxoplasmosis has well-characterized pathways of transmission and is preventable and controllable."

In hopes of addressing the "research deficit" and challenging the parasite status quo, the researchers proposed that the World Health Organization — which the U.S. officially withdrew from in January — officially designate toxoplasmosis as a "neglected tropical disease."

According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NTDs are called "'neglected' because they generally afflict the world's poor and historically have not received as much attention as other diseases. NTDs tend to thrive in developing regions of the world, where water quality, sanitation, and access to health care are substandard. However, some of these diseases also are found in areas of the United States with high rates of poverty."

An official NTD designation would prompt the WHO to mobilize global resources to tackle the parasite and unlock new funding streams for prevention and control measures, research, food safety measures, and environmental surveillance tools. The researchers noted further that an official designation "would facilitate technical guidance for Ministries of Health, helping Member States integrate toxoplasmosis into mother-child health programs, food safety systems, and primary-care protocols."

"That sort of recognition translates through to researchers being funded to work on things like vaccines, diagnostics, and curative drugs," Smith told Gizmodo. "There is no commercially available vaccine against toxoplasmosis. And the drugs we give patients can limit a flare-up of the disease, but there is no drug that cures it at this point."

While bullish on the WHO designating toxoplasmosis as an NTD, the researchers conceded that doing so "could strain resources that are already limited and dilute the efforts underway in existing programs for other NTDs."

Infection with toxoplasma gondii can result from foodborne transmission, animal-to-human transmission, mother-to-child transmission, and blood transfusions.

The CDC says that to reduce risk of infection, Americans should:

  • freeze meat for several days before cooking;
  • use a food thermometer to cook food to a safe internal temperature high enough to kill the parasite;
  • avoid consuming unpasteurized goat milk, raw oysters, mussels, or clams;
  • cook or rinse fruits and vegetables under water before eating;
  • wear gloves when gardening or touching soil that may be contaminated with cat excrement;
  • wash hands with soap any time that they might be contaminated with cat feces; and
  • change their cat's litter box daily.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

True Fertility Care Treats The Whole Person, And You Can Help It Expand

Tell federal regulators what families need: care that treats the real causes of infertility, not just the symptoms.

Mental illness has become a political identity — and SURPRISE, it's on the left: Study



There have been numerous studies in recent years highlighting correlations between political affiliation and mental health.

A 2021 study published in the journal SSM-Mental Health, for instance, concluded — on the basis of an analysis of depressive attitudes among conservative and liberal 12th graders from 2005 to 2018 — that "conservatives reported lower average depressive affect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups."

'These findings have far-reaching consequences.'

A 2023 study conducted by Gallup on behalf of the Institute for Family Studies found that adolescents with "very conservative parents are 16 to 17 percentage points more likely to be in good or excellent mental health compared to their peers with very liberal parents."

A 2025 study published in the journal PLOS One found that "even after accounting for a variety of other factors, there is a clear propensity of conservatives to provide more positive assessments of their mental health in comparison to liberals" — although the researchers ultimately attempted to credit this tendency to stigma or survey terminology.

The American left's mental health issues show no signs of clearing up. In fact, while conservatives continue to enjoy relatively superior mental health, the sickness on the other side appears to be attracting sufferers into a political identity all its own.

In a study strongly recommending "replication and further exploration" that was recently published in the journal Political Behavior, Lauren Van De Hey of Utah State University found that "mental health identity has begun to function as a political identity for some individuals," particularly among "younger (Gen Z) and more liberal Americans."

RELATED: Actress Elliot Page mocked ruthlessly after trying to define 'healthy masculinity'

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Utilizing data from the national Cooperative Election Study administered by YouGov in 2022, the Utah researcher determined that a great many people now "categorize themselves as having had a mental illness, the vast majority of whom view mental illness identity and mental illness alienation as important to their sense of self."

"People who have experienced mental illness feel close to others who have experienced mental illness," wrote Van De Hey. "They are also likely to self-categorize as having or having had a mental illness, share a sense of group consciousness with others who have or had mental illness, and recognize the need to work together to change laws that are unfair to people with mental illness."

This obviously has political implications, explained the researcher, as it correlates with "support for increased state spending on health care, education, and welfare."

The study cited Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) as an example of a political elite for whom mental health appears to have become a "politicized identity."

Smith has on numerous occasions discussed her past experiences with depression, grouped herself with sufferers, and identified "mental health parity" as a legislative priority.

"Those more likely to categorize as having a mental illness are more likely to have a college degree; be a Democrat, liberal, and white; and have slightly lower family income," said the study. "For both the [Mental Illness] Identity and [Mental Illness] Alienation scales, the only consequential variable is ideology: Those with higher MI identification or MI Alienation are more likely to be liberal."

Van De Hey concluded, "These findings have far-reaching consequences for mental health advocacy and the role mental health identity will play in the political sphere — especially as Gen Z matures as a cohort."

Dealing with a sample of 860 respondents, Van De Hey found that 26% categorized themselves as having had a mental illness in their lifetime, 22% categorized themselves as having had a physical disability, and 168 categorized themselves as having had a serious chronic physical illness.

Of the 220 respondents who said they had mental illness in their lifetime, 70% identified as "liberal" or "very liberal," 24% identified as "moderate," and 32% identified as "conservative" or "very conservative."

Of the same 220 respondents, about half stated that their identity as a person with a mental health illness was "important" or "very important to them."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

RFK Jr.’s Push For Nutrition Education Could Save Taxpayers Trillions

Kennedy’s new educational program could change the course of America’s health crisis, one medical student at a time.

'Mindfulness' meditation is no match for the power of prayer — and science can prove it



Growing up in our house, prayer was non-negotiable. Before meals, before bed, and before tests. My mother prayed before she turned the ignition. Every single time. Backing out of the driveway to grab milk? A petition went up. Driving less than a mile to church? Another one. I rolled my eyes the way Hamlet brooded, often and at length.

I figured Mom was a soft touch for superstition. A nice lady with a nervous habit dressed up as theology. Turns out the habit was sound — and the theology even sounder.

You are not emptying the mind. If anything, you are spilling the contents before a higher power who already knew what was in there.

A recent study published in Religion, Brain & Behavior by researchers in Ireland looked at 628 middle-aged adults from the Midlife in the United States project, a long-running national study that has tracked the health of thousands of Americans since 1995.

They put participants through a standardized stress test and measured what their hearts and blood pressure did under pressure. They found that people who scored higher on private religious practices showed lower systolic blood pressure reactivity to the stressor.

Essentially, when life throws a curveball, the praying person's heart absorbs the hit.

Religious but not spiritual

The researchers separated two things most people lump together: private religious practices (prayer, Scripture reading, devotion at home) and what they called daily spiritual experiences (a general sense of the sacred, feelings of connectedness, vague "spiritual" vibes). Only the first category, the one with actual prayer in it, produced the cardiovascular benefit.

This matters because the modern wellness industry has spent two decades trying to sell Americans on a defanged, deracinated version of spiritual practice. Meditation retreats. Mindfulness courses. Breath-work seminars at $400 a weekend. All of it positioned as the secular, sophisticated alternative to what your grandmother was doing for free with a worn King James Bible.

But prayer and meditation are not the same animal. The wellness industry would like you to believe they are interchangeable, two flavors of the same practice, both leading to lower cortisol and better sleep. That is a lie.

RELATED: Secular bias, fake faith — beware the new chatbot 'Christianity'

Empty promise

Meditation, in its popular Western form, is largely about emptying the mind. You sit, you breathe, you observe your thoughts like passing strangers you owe nothing to, you achieve a kind of inner stillness.

The goal is detachment. You are training yourself to step back from your own mental chatter and watch it from a distance. The self is the subject, the object, and the audience all at once. If it works, you feel calmer. If it doesn't, you feel like you spent 20 minutes wondering if you turned off the stove

Prayer is the opposite. Prayer is a conversation. There is a Person on the other end of the line, and that Person is listening. You are addressing someone, asking, thanking, confessing, repenting, interceding for your sister’s job interview. You are not emptying the mind. If anything, you are spilling the contents before a higher power who already knew what was in there.

Meditation looks inward. Prayer looks up. Meditation is a monologue performed for an audience of one, who is also the performer. Prayer is a dialogue with the Creator of the universe. Meditation assumes the cosmos is indifferent and that the best you can do is make peace with that.

One assumes you are a bundle of neurons talking to itself. The other assumes you are a soul talking to its Maker.

That difference is the whole game.

Praying together, staying together

And the benefits extend well beyond the cardiac. A 2016 systematic review examined a dozen randomized trials and found prayer reduced anxiety in mothers of children with cancer, helped chemotherapy patients cope, and improved spiritual well-being across the board.

Then there is collective prayer, which deserves its own paragraph. Something happens when believers gather and pray together that doesn’t happen alone in your kitchen.

A hospital-based study published in ScienceDirect documented measurable benefits among patients and staff at an outpatient clinic that began every workday with group prayer. The faithful have known this for 2,000 years. Fears that felt enormous at three in the morning shrink to a manageable size when spoken aloud in the presence of people who love you and a God who loves you more.

Burdens get distributed. A timid believer hears a confident prayer spoken aloud and realizes that confidence is available, not reserved. A confident believer hears someone else struggle to find words and remembers that brokenness is not a disqualification. The result is a kind of mutual restocking.

Kneeling and dealing

Which brings me to the deeper point. America is in a mental health crisis. Antidepressant prescriptions keep climbing. In 2023, loneliness was declared a public health emergency by the surgeon general himself. Suicide rates among the youth are at generational highs.

Pundits offer theories that include smartphones, social media, economic precarity, and polarization. All are real, but all are partial. The fuller explanation is the one your pastor has been preaching for years. You cannot evict God from a culture and expect the building to stand. A nation that traded the sanctuary for the self-help aisle was always going to drown in despair. There is a God-shaped hole in the modern Western psyche; stuffing it with meditation apps and microdoses is like trying to plug a dam with Kleenex.

Prayer is older than the problem. Prayer is bigger than the diagnosis. The studies show it, and Christians know it.

Alarming levels of heavy metals found in protein powders, sparking investigation from Texas AG Paxton



Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Monday an industry-wide investigation into protein powder manufacturers following the release of a pair of damning reports that confirmed the presence of various heavy metals in popular powders and ready-to-drink shakes.

Roughly 15 years ago, Consumer Reports tested 15 protein drinks in a laboratory and found that all of the drinks "had at least one sample containing one or more of the following contaminants: arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury."

'Far too many corporations have snuck harmful ingredients in their products.'

The investigators determined that while the heavy metal levels detected in most drinks were in the "low to moderate range," certain drinks had enough to warrant concern if consumed multiple times a day.

Last year, Consumer Reports conducted a new round of tests, scrutinizing 23 protein powders and read-to-drink shakes from popular brands. The CR investigators discovered that the problem facing the protein products of yesteryear is now not only commonplace but supercharged.

"For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day — some by more than 10 times," said the report.

Lead is toxic to humans. Exposure in adults — for which there is no known safe level — can cause numerous health conditions including decreased kidney function, heart problems, infertility, and joint weakness.

RELATED: Disembodied human brains kept 'alive' for drug testing by controversial American startup

Alexandre Simoes/Borussia Dortmund/Getty Images

According to the Food and Drug Administration, "The most serious effects of lead exposure can occur during times of active brain development. High levels of exposure to lead in utero, infancy, and early childhood can lead to neurological effects such as learning disabilities, behavior difficulties, and lowered IQ."

The new CR investigation, led by chemist and food safety researcher Tunde Akinleye, found that the average level of lead in the protein powders was much higher than that observed in the previous CR tests and that there were fewer products with undetectable amounts of it.

Yesteryear's worst in show apparently have nothing on today's outliers.

According to the report, Naked Nutrition's Vegan Mass Gainer powder — the product found to have the highest lead levels among those tested — had twice as much lead per 315-gram serving as the worst product analyzed in 2010. It reportedly contained 7.7 micrograms of lead per serving, which is roughly 1,570% of CR's level of concern for the heavy metal.

Lead levels in a 90-gram serving of Huel's Black Edition powder — reportedly 6.3 micrograms of lead, or 1,288% of CR's daily lead limit — similarly raised concerns among testers, as did the levels in Garden of Life's Sport Organic Plant-Based Protein and Momentous' since-discontinued 100% Plant Protein powder, which allegedly contained lead between 400% and 600% of CR's level of concern.

The report concluded:

  • roughly 70% of the products tested contained over 120% of CR's level of concern for lead, which is 0.5 micrograms per day;
  • three products exceeded CR's level of concern for inorganic arsenic and cadmium — Huel's Black Edition powder, for instance, contained 9.2 micrograms of cadmium, which is more than twice the level that health experts say could be harmful to have daily;
  • consumers should avoid Naked Nutrition's Vegan Mass Gainer and Huel's Black Edition and limit consumption of Garden of Life Sport Organic Plant-Based Protein and Momentous' 100% Plant Protein to once a week; and
  • plant-based protein powders had, on average, nine times the amount of lead found in products made with dairy proteins like whey and twice as much as beef-based products.

Naked Nutrition's chief marketing officer James Clark told CR that his company takes "customers' health very seriously"; sources its ingredients from "select suppliers" that provide documentation attesting they were checked for heavy metals; and had requested a third-party test of its product Mass Gainer.

A spokesman for Huel stressed that the company was "confident in the current formulation and safety of the products," adding that its ingredients undergo "rigorous testing."

Will McClaren, a spokesman for Momentous, claimed his company had executed a "massive overhaul" of its lineup and discontinued the products that CR had tested, namely the company's Whey Protein Isolate and its 100% Plant Protein.

A spokesperson for Garden of Life US said the company's products were safe for daily use and that the company's limits for heavy metals were determined by closely following food safety guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other safety authorities.

Both Garden of Life and Momentous told CR that they tested their ingredients and finished protein products for heavy metals.

The Clean Label Project, an advocacy organization committed to greater transparency in product labeling, similarly found from a review of over 160 of the top-selling protein powders — according to Nielsen and Amazon best-seller lists — that heavy metals were a common issue.

The advocacy and research group stated in its January 2025 report that "47% of products exceeded at least one federal or state regulatory set for safety."

Texas AG Paxton said on Monday, "Protein is a vital macronutrient for human health, and Texans deserve clean protein powders without having to worry whether the products contain heavy metals or other harmful chemicals."

"Far too many corporations have snuck harmful ingredients in their products, and I am committed to doing everything I can to help Make America Healthy Again," added Paxton.

Paxton's investigation will "examine whether companies falsely marketed or misrepresented the safety and contents of their products and whether they failed to disclose known information about heavy metal contamination in violation of Texas law."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Disembodied human brains kept 'alive' for drug testing by controversial American startup



Several years ago, a team of researchers obtained numerous pig brains from a slaughterhouse and revived them off-site for experimentation purposes. That team has since moved up the food chain. Now it obtains human donors' brains, restores their functions, and uses them to test experimental drugs.

Bexorg, a Connecticut-based biotech startup spun out of Yale University, boasts about having created a "platform that leverages the untouched potential of nature's most complex and enduring mystery: the human brain."

'It’s a remarkable brain bank.'

Whereas other researchers might be limited to experimenting on lab-grown, human pseudo-brains or cell cultures, the team at Bexorg meddles with "full mature, intact, and isolated brains for days on end" with the stated aim of advancing brain disease therapies.

Unlike the company's slick pitch, the reality appears to be something of a horror show. After all, the over 700 brains that have been subjected to experimentation at Bexorg so far were apparently far from inert.

Bexorg takes human brains from their newly deceased donors' bodies, places them in what are effectively vats, and feeds them liters of blood substitute and other fluids that provide oxygen from an artificial lung and carry away waste to a fake kidney. The tubes that carry the sustaining fluids are connected to blood vessels in the brain via four plastic ports.

RELATED:Famed neuroscientist claims he's disproven free will — but his peers say he failed miserably

RDB/Dukas/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

According to the peer-reviewed academic journal Science, the company's proprietary life-support system BrainEx keeps the disembodied brains alive and preserves their key functions so that they can metabolize experimental drugs and react to other stimuli.

After roughly 24 hours in a state of drugged limbo, donors' brains are cut up into hundreds of pieces for further study.

Although the brains are alive and reactive for the benefit of "drug discovery," Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja has stated that "higher-level brain functions are not restored."

According to a 2019 study in which Vrselja and other members of what became the Bexorg team used their technology to revive pig brains obtained from a food processing facility, "The observed restoration of molecular and cellular processes following 4h of global anoxia/ischemia should not be extrapolated to signify resurgence of normal brain function. Indeed, quite the opposite: at no point did we observe the kind of organized global electrical activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions."

To ensure against the re-emergence of consciousness among the subjects of their "wet-lab" experiments, researchers suppress the human brains' electrical activity with anesthetics, specifically the drug propofol.

Propofol apparently causes brain activity to become unstable until the brain loses consciousness.

"The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness," Brenand Parent, a bioethicist from New York University Langone Health who sits on Bexorg's board, told Science.

Despite the company's reassurances and use of multiple measures to block neuronal activity, some have raised serious ethical concerns about Bexorg's technology, which initially developed with the help of funding through the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative. A source familiar told Blaze News that the company is not presently receiving NIH funding.

"This is brand-new, and there's no kind of institutional oversight," Yale bioethicist Stephen Latham told ScienceAlert in 2019 regarding the earlier experiments on pig brains.

"This is not animal research, because the brain comes to the researchers from an already dead animal," continued Latham. "But if consciousness were somehow induced in the brain, we don't have ethics committees … that are constituted to even think about how to do the kinds of trade-offs you do when you do research on human subjects or on animals."

Vrselja claimed in a December 2025 study published in the Alzheimer's Association's journal, Alzheimer's and Dementia, that the 5-year-old startup's "perfusion‐based postmortem brain model can recapitulate the complexity of the brain at the cellular and systems level."

The December study claimed further that "utilizing human disease brains as a preclinical model promises to substantially increase the probability of success in developing new therapies for AD."

Bexorg did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Bruna Bellaver, a research assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, told Science that BrainEx is "a huge step up from mouse models."

Bruce Car, the chief science officer at Biohaven, one of Bexorg's collaborators, has used roughly 130 of the Bexorg-sustained brains to test drugs. Car told Science that one of the drugs, the intended use of which is to prevent toxic proteins from building up in the brain, didn't perform as desired in a mouse, but worked in the disembodied human brains at a lower-than-expected dose. This apparently saved Biohaven a year of development.

"It’s a remarkable brain bank," said MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, who instead uses pseudo-brains grown from human stem cells.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!