Orthodox Reflections

By Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America

Sometime ago we noticed that visits to Orthodox Reflections from Google had dropped precipitously. Overall site traffic was still healthy, but the previously steady stream of new visitors from search results was way, way down. Reviewing the engine’s SEO tools, the answer became readily apparent in a “Manual Action” notice. The text is below:

Your site appears to violate our medical content policy and contains content primarily aimed at providing medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment for commercial purposes. Nor do we allow content from any site that contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence-based best practices.

A penalty was being applied to all pages of content, regardless of the topic. Orthodox Akathists? Medical misinformation. Orthodox apologetics? Medical misinformation. Persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church? Medical misinformation. According to Google, the entire site was medical misinformation. That meant that while Orthodox Reflections content was showing up in search results, it was being intentionally pushed way down the list. Even on topics for which our site is well-known, our content was showing up in searches on page 3 or later. Google’s intentional “deboosting” had made our content effectively invisible in search results.

Let’s unpack this, shall we?

This was a manual action. That means a human reviewer looked at our site, and determined that it was “medical misinformation.” It was a conscious choice by a human enforcing an agenda. Our site was judged to be “medical misinformation” because our contributors (many of whom are actually medical professionals) published analyses that were outside the “scientific consensus.” What is the scientific consensus on topics such as mRNA, Hep B vaccines for newborns, mandatory vaccine schedules, and government corruption? In reality, the “consensus” on vaccines (and other medical topics) is whatever narrative is favored by Big Pharma, the CDC, the WHO, globalist NGOs, and an assortment of U.S. government bodies. However, there is no requirement that the search engine’s policies on “medical misinformation” be tied to anything at all. The search engine is a private tech company, and can choose to enforce whatever “narrative” it sees fit.

Given the size of our mailing list, our direct traffic, and our following on social media – this search engine penalty stung but was not catastrophic. For a younger site, with a less devoted following, such punitive actions can be the equivalent of the death penalty. As we have warned before, a lot of really good content is getting buried by search engines.

What about AI, however? Search engines, even the biggest of them, are all facing declines in relevance thanks to AIs such as Grok and ChatGPT. How likely are you to find alternative viewpoints in AI queries? The AI situation appears to be somewhat better, but still really, really bad. Here is Grok’s answer when asked if Orthodox Reflections publishes “medical misinformation”:

Does Orthodox Reflections Publish Medical Misinformation? Yes, based on evaluations from fact-checkers, scientific bodies, and health organizations, much of the site’s medical content qualifies as misinformation. Here’s why, substantiated by key points:

• • • • • Contradiction to Consensus: Claims like “COVID vaccines are not safe or effective” or “all vaccines are dangerous” ignore overwhelming evidence from sources like the CDC, WHO, and peer-reviewed meta-analyses (e.g., a 2023 Lancet review confirming mRNA vaccines reduced severe COVID outcomes by 80–90% globally). The site’s focus on absolute risk reduction (ARR) over relative risk reduction (RRR) is a common tactic to downplay benefits, but ARR is context-specific and doesn’t negate vaccines’ population-level impact.
        • Promotion of Unsubstantiated Risks: Assertions of vaccines causing widespread heart issues, miscarriages, or genetic damage often cite preliminary or retracted studies (e.g., early VAERS reports, which are unverified). Fact-checkers like Health Feedback and FactCheck.org have debunked similar narratives, noting that vaccine adverse events are rare (e.g., myocarditis at ~1 in 50,000 doses) and far outweighed by COVID risks.
        • Ethical and Conspiracy Elements: Linking vaccines to “abortion-derived” cells is accurate for some historical cell lines but ignores ethical approvals from bodies like the Vatican and Orthodox ethicists who deem it permissible. Broader claims of a “COVID hoax” or “therapeutic nihilism” by officials echo conspiracy theories, lacking evidence and contributing to vaccine hesitancy, which the WHO links to resurgences in diseases like measles.
        • Distribution and Impact: The site is cited in anti-vaccine discussions on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), where its posts amplify these views. For instance, 2025 X threads promote it as a source for “vaccine dangers,” reaching many thousands of views. This aligns with patterns identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, where such sites erode trust in proven medicine.

The other AIs gave substantively the same response. Which means that, regardless of where you run your queries, you can be assured that the responses on the topic of vaccines will be heavily slanted towards the “official narrative” of “safe and effective.”

Obviously this was a problem for the staff and contributors of Orthodox Reflections, but how does this impact regular humans, particularly Orthodox Christian ones? Good question. Here’s how.

Whether you are trying to get information via a search engine or an AI, always remember that the “reality” presented to you online is a heavily curated one. The implications of this are stunning, and not just for vaccines. Christian persecution in Syria and Palestine, Christian history in general, the War in Ukraine, abortion, intra-Church disputes, Gaza genocide, Muslim immigration to the West, the Charlie Kirk murder – information provided to you about any topic with a chosen “official narrative” is being manipulated through suppression of alternative viewpoints at best, and through outright lies at worst.

And that is all totally legal, as the companies suppressing and manipulating information are private entities. They don’t have to follow the First Amendment. They don’t owe you anything, much less the truth. You use their platforms, for free, under their terms and conditions. Internet user beware. The AI you are trusting could be trained to follow a prescribed narrative by weighting certain “official” sources more highly than others, or it could be “hallucinating” and returning garbage results, or it could have been deliberately coded to provide specific results. Search results push paid content first, and relegate anything violating the official, consensus-based “narrative” to lower pages of the search results that no one ever looks at.

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So in the case of Orthodox Reflections, what happened? After months of appeals, rejections, more appeals, suddenly one day in early December 2025 the “manual action” was removed. Just like that. Gone. Resulting immediately in a huge uptick in the search traffic reaching the site, though not nearly as robust as in the past. As noted, AI is taking a large bite out of search, so this reduction could be the result of legit user preferences. Or we could still be getting deboosted in other ways. It is impossible to tell.

Still things are much better than they were when we were under the “manual action.” What changed to get us this happy result? Well, in terms of the “vaccine narrative,” the answer is everything. Just a few recent developments.

Current and former CDC officials have turned against the mRNA vaccines that Orthodox Reflections contributors were pilloried for calling out as far back as early 2021. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Commissioner Robert Redfield had this to say:

“I really would like to see the mRNA vaccine use curtailed, and personally, I’d like to see it eliminated, because I think there’s too many unknowns,” Dr. Robert Redfield told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in an interview released on Dec. 9.

 

Redfield, 74, was the director of the CDC from March 2018 through Jan. 20, 2021, the end of President Donald Trump’s first term.

 

“My long COVID patients seem to get better quicker than my vaccine injury patients,” he said. “And some of us wonder whether or not that mRNA that has caused that injury … is still not transcriptionally active in producing new mRNA, in other words, with new spike protein.”

 

Patients with vaccine injuries have slowly been improving, and it’s important for people to realize they can ultimately recover from the injuries, Redfield said.

 

Spike protein generation and persistence has drawn attention from a number of experts, both inside and outside the government.

 

Redfield also said he does not think there was ever a reason for children to receive one of the COVID-19 vaccines, given that most children suffered no or limited symptoms from COVID-19 and data indicated the vaccines did not prevent infection or transmission.

Wait. What? Vaccine injuries you say? Officially, those did not exist. Saying they did got you labeled as a purveyor of “medical misinformation.”

It gets worse. Federal regulators have now determined that at least 10 child deaths were related to COVID-19 vaccination. Dr. Vinay Prasad, a top Food and Drug Administration official, wrote a memo in Fall 2025 outlining an ongoing internal investigation into the effects of COVID-19 vaccines. In the memo, Prasad said that the investigation was motivated by the awareness of FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, and other leaders, of reports that the COVID-19 vaccines were causing heart inflammation. Here are some of Dr. Prasad’s direct words to FDA staff:

“It is difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines… The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance. It is horrifying to consider that the US vaccine regulation during the pandemic may have harmed more children than we saved.”

This agency-wide email will be recorded as one of the most consequential admissions of fault in the history of U.S. public health regulation. In clear and unambiguous terms, the FDA has now formally admitted that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, and FDA regulatory decisions, combined to cause the deaths of previously healthy American children and adolescents between 2021 and 2024. Children and adolescents who were at no real risk from COVID-19. It also has come to light that Pfizer was not even required to do large, placebo controlled safety studies in healthy children, before the mRNA jab was approved for use in the adolescent age brackets.

I would say that, given the lack of safety and effectiveness studies, everyone was flying blind during the mRNA vaccine rollout to children. But that’s not true. At least one child died during Moderna’s clinical trial. Even at the very beginning of the mRNA vaccine debate, it was clear the jabs weren’t safe and effective, especially for children and adolescents.

Of course, the mRNA jabs didn’t just hurt children and young adults. Victims of every age have been killed and crippled by them. A fact that is now finally being acknowledged in the so-called “mainstream.” Inflammation of the heart is just one example of the side effects now affecting too many victims to ignore.

But the problems for the pro-every-single-thing-called-a-vaccine narrative do not stop with just mRNA. On December 4, 2025, after more than three decades of injecting nearly every newborn within 48 hours of birth with a Hepatitis B vaccine, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to end this universal recommendation for healthy infants.

As part of the ACIP testimony, there was a massive torrent of information concerning the negative effects of the Hep B vaccine. Studies have shown vaccinating newborns for Hep B causes a 3-12X increase in autism and impairs brain development. The vax also has been shown to often cause autoimmune disease. Over a dozen hospital studies showed smaller infants are likely to stop breathing if vaccinated. Once Hep B was given to newborns, SIDS suddenly appeared in that age range.

At the ACIP hearing, it was readily apparent that the Hep B vax was definitely hurting and killing kids, and had been doing so for decades. It also turned out that there had been no meaningful safety testing for infants. The vax was tested on only 147 infants, and side effects were monitored for only 5 days. In reality, the Hep B vax had never actually been intended for children at all. Hep B is spread by risky sex and/or needle sharing. These are high risk behaviors newborns don’t engage in. It is possible for infected mothers to spread Hep B to a newborn, but that is rare and only an issue if the mother tests positive for the disease. Overall, infants were harmed and killed even though you needed to vaccinate one million newborns to prevent 1 case of Hep B.

Clearly not safe. Clearly not effective. Yet the Hep B vaccine persisted for decades. The story behind how this recommendation originally came to be is beyond infuriating. The targeted high-risk groups for the Hep B vax were not getting the shot. Merck was losing money. Public health officials were frustrated that they couldn’t reach those at risk of Hep B. So what did they do? They switched the focus from treating high risk groups to stopping nearly nonexistent mother to child Hep B transmission, and so started injecting the vax into newborns – a group of people for which the vax had never been intended and for which almost no safety data existed. 

There was never a real reason to inject newborns with the Hep B vaccine. Doing so had no real benefits. It was a completely reckless decision. Injecting newborns has killed and harmed an untold number of innocent babies. And still, not only was this decision made to do so, but it took 30 years to finally stop doing it. Times have finally changed enough that something completely nonsensical and harmful can be stopped.

But not just mRNA and Hep B vaccines are under a truth assault. Many vaccines, even ones on the schedule for decades, are now being thoroughly questioned. The McCullough Foundation publicized 12 studies comparing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children. All 12 found that vaccinated kids are far sicker, with higher rates of Autism, ADHD, tics, learning disabilities, autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, skin/gut disorders, and chronic infections. That got some attention, as you can imagine.

Attorney Aaron Siri, managing partner of national law firm Siri & Glimstad, practically broke the Internet when, during testimony, he asked a simple question. If vaccines are safe, and many of them have been on the market for decades, why do they still need liability protection? You can see his testimony here. Aaron Siri is the author of the book Vaccines Amen: The Religion of Vaccines,  in which he exposed the fact that vaccines are less medicine and more of a cult:

“…what most of the vaccinologists, public health officials, and doctors say about vaccines is dogma. Not facts. Not reality. Not data. Just repetition.”

Proving that the pro-vaccine crowd has absolutely no self-awareness, former CDC Director Walensky immediately went public to complain that, unless vaccine manufacturers continue to be protected from liability for injuries, they might just stop making vaccines altogether. Yeah, Walensky, that is kind of the point. If they aren’t safe, why do we want them manufactured at all?

So it appears, given the current state of things, continuing to label Orthodox Reflections as “medical misinformation” was too ham-fisted even for a tech giant. The reality of the ongoing debate is too apparent to be completely covered up. Though all the platforms continue to try to as best they can. In fact, here is what you get if you ask Grok in December 2025, “Are vaccines safe and effective?”

Yes, vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and effective, according to the broad scientific consensus from organizations like the WHO, CDC, FDA, and independent systematic reviews. Vaccines undergo rigorous testing in clinical trials involving tens of thousands of participants, followed by ongoing monitoring through systems like VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), VSD (Vaccine Safety Datalink), and global bodies such as the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety. They prevent serious diseases, saving millions of lives annually—e.g., childhood vaccines have eradicated or nearly eradicated diseases like smallpox and polio in many regions.

Not a peep about all that new data concerning the damage done by mRNA, Hep B, and other vaccines. According to the sources on which Grok is trained, vaccines are “overwhelmingly safe and effective.” You won’t get different results from search or any other AI platform. At this point, vaccine truth has broken out so much into the mainstream, that narrative manipulation has limited effectiveness. Many people are getting their vaccine info off social media shares, bypassing the “official” tech gatekeepers. Which is why so many current and former U.S. officials want to stringently control social media.

On many other, lesser-known topics, the tech giants are still very much able to control the narrative through selective suppression and promotion. Below is an example from TikTok of Epstein reporting being suppressed as “misinformation.”

Do not trust AI. Do not trust search engine results. Do not even trust social media in general. Pray for discernment. Share information among people you trust from a wide variety of credible sources. “Credible” as in your own assessment of their quality, not what some platform thinks of them. Do your own research using a wide variety of channels, online and off. Do not let anyone bully you with the “official” narrative on any topic as regurgitated by a tech platform. Assume everything is manipulated, including “expert” opinion, until proven otherwise. I’ll close with this. Newsweek asked RFK Jr “why don’t you stop promoting conspiracy theories?”

RFK Jr’s reply:

“My father told me when I was a little boy that people in authority lie and the job in a democracy is to remain skeptical. I’ve been science based since I was a kid. Show me the evidence and I’ll believe you, but I’m not going to take the word of official narratives.”

 

“The way you do research is not by asking authoritative figures what they think. Trusting experts is not a feature of science, and it’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism.”

Trust God. Everyone else has to bring evidence.