The HighWire

This Thursday on The HighWire! One week after the midterms, something is shifting in the vaccine conversation. Is a renewed push already taking shape, and what does the sudden movement in media tell us about who controls the story? Del follows the signals here and abroad. Then, Epoch Times senior editor @JanJekielek joins Del in the studio with a new book exposing the organ-harvesting trade in China. Plus, @MikkiWillis brings his new film “Bad Medicine” to the show before it hits theaters nationwide, with a look inside what really happened to patients under COVID protocols. He’s joined by his teenage son Azai, whose own documentary asks what screens are doing to his generation. Tune in at 11 AM PT/2 PM ET at TheHighWire.com.

We have been reporting on the potential issues with GLP-1's for a while now, but the FDA is getting involved. The agency is now requiring new label warnings about NAION, a condition that can cause sudden, painless vision loss in one eye. That comes as studies have found a higher rate of NAION among GLP-1 users and lawsuits against Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly continue to grow. And vision loss is only one of the concerns now landing in court. More than 4,000 federal lawsuits are already pending over gastroparesis and other gastrointestinal injuries tied to these drugs, while hundreds of NAION cases are also moving forward. All of this is happening as GLP-1 use for weight loss continues to surge... Informed consent has never been more important. Read the full column by @smiddendorp22 here: bit.ly/GLP1-Eye-Warning

🚨 The U.S. and Iran reached a peace deal in June. Now the war is back in the headlines. What happened to that deal? @JeffereyJaxen goes back to the agreement and what came after. Watch The Download every Monday at 5 PM PT/8 PM ET, right here on X or at TheHighWire.com!

The fertility business shows no signs of slowing down, and with that comes less-than-above-board practices and promises. Women in their 40s and even early 50s are being told they may still be able to have a baby with their own DNA. The price tag can run $20,000 to $30,000 or more. The procedure is called “three-parent IVF,” and it was developed to prevent rare mitochondrial diseases, not to reverse age-related infertility. Yet clinics are now marketing it to older women even though researchers say there is little evidence it works for that purpose. One company claimed a 54% pregnancy success rate and 34 births, then removed those claims after STAT News started asking for evidence. Its primary partner clinic reportedly said it does not even collect the data needed to verify those numbers. And there are safety questions too. In some cases, the mitochondrial DNA the procedure is supposed to minimize has rebounded dramatically in the child. Selling hope to women who desperately want a baby is powerful. Doing it with an expensive experimental procedure and numbers you can’t substantiate is something else. Read the entire column by @smiddendorp22 for the details. LINK: bit.ly/ThreeParentIVF

Vani Hari watched good food policy make it to the White House...And then watched the policy die at the very last minute. Recently, the GRAS loophole was supposed to close, and finally we would have a definition for ultra-processed food - something that would have been amazing for other programs (like school lunch, for example). The food industry pushed back hard, and she was told to change her speech the night before. This is why the actual grassroots of MAHA means so much. People came together because they had common goals, and wanted answers on food, censorship, and medical choice. That coalition of people is still there, and so much still needs to be done.

Some of the last endangered whales on Earth, and the plan is to put AI data centers on top of them. There are only about 380 North Atlantic right whales and 331 Cook Inlet belugas left. DeepGreen Holdings has applied for federal permits to study tidal-powered underwater data centers off Eastport, Maine, and Nikiski, Alaska. Read the entire piece by @ChelleWards and @tracybeanz 👇 bit.ly/subsea-servers

A UK teen posted a photo of a local politician with bunny ears. Police showed up and arrested him. The UK's Online Safety Act says officials can require "the attendance for interview of an individual who is outside the United Kingdom." That includes Americans. We shouldn't need a new law to protect speech the Constitution already guarantees.

Vani Hari started by asking why American food was packed with ingredients that companies were already leaving out in other countries. Then she started naming names. Subway. Kraft. Chick-fil-A. Kellogg’s. Bayer. Blog posts turned into petitions, petitions turned into meetings, and eventually hundreds of thousands of people were showing up with her, demanding answers from some of the biggest companies in the food industry. “We’re not going to stop. We’re going to keep demanding change.” Food Babe may have been the name she started with. Food Warrior feels a little more accurate now.

🚨 LIVE NOW | THE DOWNLOAD WITH @JeffereyJaxen. Was MAHA rejected at the polls, or missing from the ballot? Jefferey weighs four paths out of the Iran war and looks at a synthetic cell scientists say can grow and replicate. Watch now 👇 xitter.twitterapi.xyz/i/broadcasts/2POMQYLXv…

The midterms are over, and the Iran war is now part of the postmortem. Republicans lost seven Senate seats, and support dropped across nearly every county. Vice President JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr. have both said the war as one of the reasons voters pulled away. A new HighWire column by @JeffereyJaxen looks at what Trump does from here, because there really are only a few paths left: hit Iran again, keep up the economic pressure, go back to diplomacy, or escalate. Every one of those choices creates a different problem. Read it below: bit.ly/iran-midterms

What if the emergency they’re preparing for isn’t war? Governments around the world are telling people to stockpile food, water and medicine. At the same time, G7 countries have reportedly been simulating AI-driven attacks on banks, while concerns about an AI market bubble and cyber vulnerabilities are growing. Jefferey Jaxen points back to COVID as the model: fear first, tabletop exercises, then the emergency. Maybe it is war. Maybe it is cyber. Maybe it is financial. Whatever it is, Del says he took the advice literally. “If they’re telling you you need some food stocked up, I’ll be honest, I went out and repacked up my meat freezer.”

Vani Hari was invited into Washington’s MAHA conversations, then things took a turn... What happened? What was she asked to do for the FDA? And what does she want President Trump to hear? The full Off the Record conversation with Del is free for everyone now at HighWire.Plus.

500 episodes. To hear so many people we respect take a moment to celebrate this milestone with us is incredibly humbling. We are honored, grateful, and more than a little emotional hearing what The HighWire has meant to people over the years. Thank you to everyone who sent a message, shared a memory, sang a song, or simply showed up to mark the moment with us. 500 down. And we are just getting started.

Over 500 episodes, a lot of people have stepped into this fight. Some came with stories. Some came with evidence. Some came with warnings. Some simply refused to stay quiet. This montage looks back at a handful of those voices who helped shape The HighWire and ICAN, and who are no longer here to see how far the work has come. Their courage, conviction, and willingness to speak still live in the work they left behind. “You will forever be remembered.”

“Don’t let them make us hate each other, because then they win.” Roseanne Barr says that was part of what she wanted to say when she brought Roseanne back. Families were already being pulled apart over politics, and she wanted to show people who could be furious with each other, disagree about everything, and still live under the same roof and love each other. Her description of what came next is a little less delicate: “It’s a unified field of shit.” But her point is pretty simple. If everyone stays angry, bitter, divided, and constantly fighting, nobody gets anywhere. “We are the right people at the right time with the right hearts... and we can do it.”

GSK settled a false advertising case over ads warning grandparents they could put newborns at risk if they skipped the Tdap vaccine. But the same basic message is still being repeated. CNN recently told readers that anyone around a newborn should be up to date on Tdap, citing the CDC. The problem is that the CDC’s own Pink Book says vaccinated people can still become infected with pertussis without symptoms and still transmit it. That was at the heart of the lawsuit. The ad campaign treated vaccination like a barrier against passing whooping cough to a baby. The research cited in the case says the vaccine can reduce disease while still allowing infection and transmission. GSK settled. The message kept going. Read the full story from @smiddendorp22 bit.ly/WhoopingCoughAds

Don't miss this one tonight at 8 PM ET on HighWire.Plus

Years ago, a journalist snapped at Del Bigtree: (SURPRISE!! 😂) “You’re not a journalist. You’re an activist.” Turns out, he agreed with her. Because when The HighWire finds something wrong, the goal has never been to just talk about it and move on. Sometimes that means reporting. Sometimes it means filing FOIA requests. Sometimes it means taking the government to court. And a huge part of that work has happened with @AaronSiriSG. 500 episodes later, those legal fights are woven into the show's history.

After everything that happened in Hollywood, Roseanne Barr says she was done. She had no interest in going back. Then her son asked her, “If you could do whatever you wanted to do and you were surrounded by people that loved you and wanted you to succeed, would you do a show?” “Oh, hell yes.” That’s how Meemaw happened. And then Drea de Matteo jumped in and got emotional talking about what it was like working with her. “I was on The Sopranos. It was huge, Roseanne. Huge. But being able to come and work with you just for two minutes felt like the most important thing I have done through my entire career.”

“COVID didn’t surprise us.” By the time the pandemic arrived, The HighWire had already spent three years digging into vaccine policy, government transparency, pharmaceutical influence, and the systems that decide what the public gets to know. Then everything accelerated. Lockdowns. Masks. Ventilators. Treatments. Operation Warp Speed. Censorship. Vaccine injuries. FOIA lawsuits. Millions of pages of government records. Congressional testimony. And eventually, the release of An Inconvenient Study. Through all of it, we kept showing up. “The truth is on our side.” 500 episodes later, that may be the clearest through-line of all. “We got big things to do.”