Free Republic

The Slovak government halted purchases of COVID-19 vaccines on Wednesday pending a review of their safety by the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Prime Minister Robert Fico said. Fico, a populist who has himself declined coronavirus vaccination, has long criticised the COVID policies of the previous governments, including vaccination campaigns before his return to power in 2023. Fico told a televised briefing that based on a 2023 agreement signed by a previous administration, Slovakia was still due to receive 300,000 more vaccine doses for around 5.7 million euros ($6.48 million). He did not name the suppliers. "We have an expert opinion...

Two service members have been denied religious exemptions to the flu vaccine and are at risk of being forced out of the military after they previously fought the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. A service member in the Marine Corps and another in the Air Force are facing separation from their respective military branches after submitting Religious Accommodation Requests (RARs) for the flu shot. Both men objected to the COVID vaccine mandate under the Biden administration and ultimately kept their jobs, but they may lose them under President Trump despite the routine approval of religious exemptions for vaccines before COVID. Marine First...

"I have grave concerns that not many people are going to be interested in that deal," said attorney R. Davis Younts, who represents military members and veterans. Former military members who left the service over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate have been offered the opportunity to return and receive the same rank and pay as before, but only if they claim their exit wasn’t coerced. Several say they cannot attest to that. While President Trump has said that he wants military members who were forced out of the service over the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandate to be reinstated, former service...

Under Joe Biden, approximately 8,000 service members were discharged from the military for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. In January 2025, President Trump ordered a full reinstatement to any service member who was expelled from the armed forces due to the COVID vaccine mandate, restoring them to their former rank with full pay. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Fox News to discuss efforts to welcome back these service members who were discarded and treated so badly by the Biden administration. Hegseth stated, “We’re psyched. This is one of the made promises kept from President Trump. We have followed...

The controversial Ethiopian politician and Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, practically begged the United States to rejoin the UN-run agency after President Trump made good on his vow to pull the plug on U.S. participation on his very first day back in office. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to formally withdraw the United States from the WHO, citing its failure to hold China accountable and its role in pushing radical globalist health agendas that undermine American sovereignty. Trump’s executive order halted all U.S. funding to the WHO, redirecting those resources to...

The senior CIA official who helped facilitate the Biden-era military Covid vaccine mandate has been fired. In 2021, then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin imposed a vaccine mandate for US troops. Joe Biden supported Lloyd Austin’s military Covid vaccine mandate. “The president agrees with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that the Pentagon should continue to require all service members be vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19,” then-National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters in 2022. According to Breitbart News, Terry Adirim, a senior CIA official and former Defense Department official under Joe Biden, was fired last week. Adirim was fired for her...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has missed its deadline for making a decision on traditional approval for Novavax's (NVAX.O), opens new tab COVID-19 vaccine, the company told Reuters on Wednesday. The delay comes on the heels of the FDA's top vaccine scientist Peter Marks' exit from the agency, which will be effective April 5. Marks, who played a key role in developing COVID-19 vaccines during U.S. President Donald Trump's first term, was forced to resign, according to media reports. His departure led to a selloff in drugmakers' stocks on Monday and some analysts said it could put pressure on...

A new peer-reviewed study links the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to long-term changes in genetic structures that can provoke an inflammatory response, and lead to the onset of cancer and autoimmune disorders. The study by 19 German scientists was published last week in Molecular Systems Biology. The researchers said their findings may account for “post vaccination inflammatory diseases which occur in a small number of vaccinated individuals.”

The EU Parliament has lifted the immunity of AfD foreign policy spokesman Petr Bystron because he shared a photo of Angela Merkel on Twitter in 2022. The reason? Bizarre: since Merkel is seen raising her arm in the image, it’s being interpreted as a Nazi salute – but only because Bystron posted it. Prosecutor: Waving is not a Nazi salute This farce has a backstory: In 2022, during a protest against COVID-19 measures, Bystron waved to the crowd. The public prosecutor immediately launched an investigation: “Nazi salute!” In response, hundreds of AfD supporters filed complaints against Angela Merkel, who had...

The U.S. is still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic with more and more long COVID cases emerging. Bird flu is a growing threat. Measles outbreaks have been occurring. Antibiotic-resistant organisms continue to spread in healthcare settings. So what do you do next if you are in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is supposed to protect the health of humans in the U.S.? How about lay off the entire staff of the U.S. government’s Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy?

An international clinical trial has identified a medication that can help prevent symptomatic COVID-19 in people exposed within households. The results could be particularly important for families where someone is at high risk of serious complications from the illness. The drug, ensitrelvir, is already approved in Japan to treat mild to moderate COVID cases. The SCORPIO-PEP trial, however, has demonstrated that it also has the potential to protect against illness. Uninfected people who began taking the antiviral within 72 hours of symptoms first appearing in a household member were significantly less likely to contract COVID-19 than people who were given...

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials...

47% say life back to normal; 13% expect eventual full recovery, 40% do not 46% have received COVID-19 vaccine in past six months, 5% more plan to 28% say they have never been infected; 11% have had Long COVID Five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic forced nationwide closures of businesses and schools in the U.S., a steady three in five Americans say the pandemic is over, while almost as many worry that there will be another global pandemic in their lifetime. Nearly half of U.S. adults, 47%, report that their life is completely back to the normal...

The American media is doing its best to ignore the biggest news this week. Nope, not Covid’s fifth anniversary. You may have noticed that every legacy media outlet is reminding you it’s been exactly five years since the Little Epidemic That Could started its long chug into your lungs, or at least your upper respiratory tract. In reality, they’re as wrong about the date as everything else Covid. People started getting sick in Wuhan in December 2019. Or was it November? Maybe even October? Whatever, the Chinese have made sure we’ll never know. But it was March 11, 2020 when...

WASHINGTON (TNND) — As the world marks over five years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, its effects continue to reverberate across the United States. A recent Pew Research Center survey reveals that only 20% of Americans now view the coronavirus as a major threat, a significant drop from 67% in 2020. "For most folks, the public health threat is in the rear view mirror," Alec Tyson, Associate Director of Research at Pew Research Center noted. However, the pandemic's impact remains profound, particularly among younger generations who may have missed out on school events and may have...

US intelligence agencies remain divided on the origin of COVID, but at this point we're all aware that, at a minimum, there's a real possibility the virus that killed millions around the world escaped from a Wuhan lab. China has of course denied that possibility but two US epidemiologists have written an opinion piece today warning that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is still involved in potentially dangerous research with bat coronaviruses. In fact, the lab has discovered a new virus which it says could infect humans and could be even more deadly than COVID-19. It's research was just published...

“Head’s Up: Firing the National Archivist. More of how the new authoritarian regime is taking over. Control the press, control education and control what remains of the history of our country.” I pulled the quote above off Facebook this morning. I could have pulled a score more like it, most of them from educated liberal females (ELFs), all of them actual friends or relatives. This one impressed me for its concise summary of ELF concerns and ELF cluelessness. “What remains of our history?” Ladies, can we step back in time just five years and recall how eagerly you ceded control...

Almost five years on from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Social Security trust fund has financially benefited following the deaths of more than a million Americans. More than one million Americans died from the coronavirus between 2020 and 2023, meaning those premature deaths saved billions and billions in Social Security payments. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, around $294 billion has been saved as a result. The figure would have been higher if not for lost tax revenue offsetting the total by approximately $205 billion. Survivor benefits to children and spouses of the deceased contributed to the money saved...

Yale researchers released a study today that posits millions of Americans thought to have Long COVID may have been misdiagnosed and actually have post-vaccination syndrome caused by exposure to the spike protein in COVID vaccines. Spike protein produced by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines triggers the body’s immune response, and the FDA claimed in a 2023 Politifact fact check that vaccine spike protein is not toxic and does not linger in the body. However, Yale researchers report that some patients, who were never infected with COVID virus, were sick with post-vaccination syndrome (PVS) and had elevated levels of virus spike...

Researchers at the Chinese lab accused of leaking the COVID-19 virus have now discovered a new coronavirus in bats that closely matches the one that led to the deadly worldwide outbreak in 2020, according to a study. The virus, unearthed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, carries the risk of animal-to-human transmission, though the infection has not yet been identified in a living person, according to a study published in the scientific journal Cell. The bat virus, referred to as HKU5-CoV-2, uses the same human receptor as SARS-CoV-2, a strain of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The newly discovered bat...