The Testosterone Cover-Up
A Landmark Study of One Million Men Exposed the Crisis—Then Buried the Cause
In August 2025, the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation published the largest systematic review ever conducted on male testosterone trends. Fifty-five years of data. 1,256 papers. 1,504 study groups. Over one million healthy men across the globe. The finding: testosterone levels are declining, significantly and persistently, independent of age and obesity. The methodology is rigorous. The statistics are robust. The peer reviewers approved it.
The paper confirms an alarming crisis while steering interpretation away from any cause that would require action against powerful interests. This is epistemic capture in plain sight.
Thanks to Cees, one of my readers, for bringing the 2025 Santi et al. systematic review to my attention.
What the Paper Found
The numbers are stark. Meta-regression analysis revealed a statistically significant negative correlation between testosterone serum levels and year of measurement (p=0.033). This decline persists after adjusting for age, body mass index, sample size, and the laboratory methods used to measure testosterone. It appears across all age groups examined—from men aged 18-30 through those over 70.
The researchers controlled for the obvious objection. Global obesity rates have risen dramatically over the past half-century, and obesity suppresses testosterone. But in this study population, BMI showed no significant change across the years of observation (p=0.617). The authors state explicitly: “our findings confirm a decline in testosterone levels that is entirely independent of obesity incidence.”
This is not subtle. Something is suppressing male hormonal function across populations, across decades, across age groups—and it is not weight gain.
The paper also found that luteinising hormone (LH)—the pituitary signal that tells the testes to produce testosterone—is declining in parallel (p<0.001). FSH, another pituitary hormone, shows no trend. This pattern carries significant implications for where the problem originates, which the authors acknowledge but do not pursue.
Testosterone prescriptions in the United States increased by over 350% between 2001 and 2011. Clinicians are recognising and treating testosterone deficiency at unprecedented rates. The phenomenon is real enough to generate a massive clinical response.
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What the Paper Didn’t Measure
The researchers attempted to assess environmental factors by incorporating data on energy production, consumption, trade, emissions, CO2 levels, and PM2.5 air pollution. When these variables failed to correlate with testosterone decline, the paper concluded that the trend “is apparently not related to environmental factors, at least considering the parameters available.”
This conclusion depends entirely on which parameters were chosen.
The paper did not assess individual body burden of phthalates—chemicals present in hundreds of consumer products from food packaging to pharmaceuticals to personal care products. A 2008 study noted that “evidence for significant impacts on human health is mounting” from phthalate exposure, with particular concern for reproductive outcomes.
The paper did not assess bisphenol A (BPA) or its replacement chemicals. The European Chemicals Agency has unanimously agreed that BPA is an endocrine disruptor. A 2011 study found that almost all commercially available plastic products—including those advertised as “BPA-free”—leach chemicals with oestrogenic activity.
The paper did not assess flame retardants (PBDEs), which animal research has linked to “thyroid hormone disruption, permanent learning and memory impairment, behavioural changes, hearing deficits, delayed puberty onset, decreased sperm count, fetal malformations and, possibly, cancer.”
The paper did not assess electromagnetic field exposure. Not once in fourteen pages does the term appear. Yet the 1971 US Naval Medical Research Institute bibliography documented more than 2,300 references to biological effects from microwave and radio-frequency radiation, including, specifically, “decreased testosterone production.”
The paper did not assess pesticide and herbicide exposure, despite documented associations between agricultural chemicals and reproductive harm.
The paper did not assess fluoride exposure. Fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland—directly adjacent to the hypothalamus that the paper’s own findings implicate. Nobel laureate biochemist Dr. James Sumner stated in the 1950s: “Everybody knows fluorine and fluorides are very poisonous substances and we use them in enzyme chemistry to poison enzymes, those vital agents in the body.” The WHO’s own guidelines classify fluoride alongside arsenic as a chemical “responsible for large-scale health effects through drinking-water exposure.” Water fluoridation rates vary geographically—a variable that can be correlated with testosterone data across regions. It wasn’t.
The paper did not assess vaccination. Pfizer’s own trial documents, obtained through FOIA, show the company knew its vaccine ingredients “pass the blood-testicular barrier” and that “previous studies had shown that nanoparticles accumulate in the testes and cause reproductive harm by adversely affecting sperm quality, quantity, morphology, and motility.” Pfizer explicitly did not evaluate vaccine effects on male fertility during clinical trials. The childhood vaccination schedule expanded dramatically over the 55-year study period—from a handful of shots to dozens. Aluminium adjuvants, present in many vaccines, are biologically reactive and accumulate in tissues. None of this was examined.
The paper did not assess developmental exposures—what men were exposed to in utero or early childhood, when the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis is being established.
What the paper did assess—CO2 emissions, energy consumption, PM2.5 levels—maps onto climate change frameworks. These are the environmental parameters for which approved datasets exist. When they don’t correlate, “the environment” gets ruled out.
This is the streetlight effect at institutional scale. Search where the light is, find nothing, declare the area clean.
The Science That Already Exists
In 1991, scientists from biology, toxicology, and endocrinology convened at Wingspread in Wisconsin. The participants, including Dr. Theo Colborn, reached consensus on a statement that should have reshaped chemical regulation:
“Many compounds introduced into the environment by human activity are capable of disrupting the endocrine system of animals, including fish, wildlife and humans.”
They identified the chemicals implicated: “the persistent, bioaccumulative, organohalogen compounds that include some pesticides (fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides) and industrial chemicals, other synthetic products, and some metals.”
Dr. Colborn subsequently founded TEDX (The Endocrine Disruption Exchange), which by 2018 had compiled a list of 1,484 chemicals proven to disrupt the endocrine system—a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of chemicals in commercial use, most of which have never been tested for endocrine effects.
The TEDX overview states that “Endocrine disruptors have been found in every person tested, across world populations.”
Dr. Carol Kwiatkowski, Executive Director of TEDX, made a point directly relevant to the 2025 systematic review: “Genetic inheritance cannot explain the relatively recent and dramatic increases in many disorders which have been shown to be endocrine related.”
The same logic applies to testosterone decline. Whatever is causing this didn’t exist, or didn’t exist at current levels, when today’s 70-year-olds were young men.
Dr. Colborn’s 2012 paper with colleagues, Hormones and Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Low-Dose Effects and Nonmonotonic Dose Responses, challenged the foundational assumption of toxicology—that the dose makes the poison. Endocrine disruptors produce effects at low doses that are not predicted by effects at higher doses. The endocrine system operates with hormones circulating at parts per trillion. The assumption that there exists a “safe” threshold for chemicals that mimic or interfere with hormones has been experimentally demolished.
None of this research appears in the 2025 systematic review’s environmental analysis.
The Finding They Don’t Follow
The paper’s most significant discovery points toward its most significant omission.
Both testosterone and LH are declining together. If the problem were primarily testicular—if environmental toxins were damaging Leydig cells or interfering with testosterone synthesis at the gonadal level—you would expect LH to rise as the pituitary compensates for falling testosterone. That’s the classic pattern in primary hypogonadism.
Instead, LH falls alongside testosterone. FSH remains stable. The authors correctly note: “the testosterone decline does not primarily originate in the testis.”
They interpret this as pointing to the hypothalamus—the brain region that controls GnRH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone) pulsatility, which regulates LH secretion. They speculate about “a central resetting of the hypothalamic regulation of LH secretion for some still unknown reason.”
Unknown to whom?
Dr. Robert Becker documented in The Body Electric that EMFs affect the pineal gland’s production of melatonin—an organ adjacent to the hypothalamus in the endocrine control hierarchy. A 1980 study found that “a weak 60-hertz electric field (only 3.9 volts per centimetre) cancelled the normal nightly rise in production of the pineal gland hormone melatonin.”
Russian studies from the 1970s showed that “radio and microwave frequencies, at power densities well below the American safety guideline of 10,000 microwatts, stimulate the thyroid gland and thus increase the basal metabolic rate.”
Dr. Neil Cherry demonstrated that external electromagnetic radiation “resonantly interacts with these communication systems altering hormone balances and damaging organs and cells.”
The 1971 Naval Medical Research Institute bibliography documented “decreased testosterone production” among the effects of microwave and radio-frequency radiation—alongside altered sex ratio of births, altered fetal development, decreased lactation, seizures, and thyroid enlargement. Over 2,300 references to biological effects in a single document.
The systematic review’s own finding—that the problem originates in the hypothalamic-pituitary axis rather than the testes—should direct investigation toward exposures known to affect this region. EMF exposure has documented effects on melatonin, thyroid function, and testosterone production directly. It was not measured.
Where the Paper Steers
The final paragraphs of the systematic review speculate—in a peer-reviewed medical journal:
“The question remains whether the progressive decline in testosterone and more generally testicular function is an adaptation to overpopulation.”
The authors continue: “if population dynamics play a role, the forecast of the world population growth with a reduction in global population (and pollution) in the next 5–10 decades should result in a reversal of the temporal trends in testicular function and the current decline in birth rates affecting modern society will lead to a new equilibrium.”
They describe the testosterone decline as potentially “an adaptation to the current disequilibrium, necessary to achieve a new population homeostasis.”
This framing transforms reproductive collapse from a crisis requiring investigation and intervention into a natural process—beneficial, even. The body, in this telling, wisely downregulates its reproductive capacity in response to crowding.
The framing aligns with documented institutional interests that long predate this paper.
The 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), classified until 1980, expressed US government concern about population growth in terms of “US political and foreign policy interests” and “national security.” It proposed strategies for “population moderation” focused on “developing countries where there is special US political and strategic interest.”
The 1968 Rockefeller Foundation annual report noted that “several types of drugs are known to diminish male fertility, but those that have been tested have serious problems of toxicity.” The same report announced funding for research into “immunological methods, such as vaccines, to reduce fertility.”
By 1993, a WHO Task Force on Birth Control Vaccines had “selected the pregnancy hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) as a target molecule for a contraceptive vaccine.” Clinical trials were conducted in India, funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.
A paper that concludes “maybe declining fertility is the body adapting to overpopulation” provides scientific cover for not investigating—or addressing—actual causes. It transforms an alarming trend into a talking point compatible with existing population-control narratives.
How Peer Review Functions
“But it’s peer-reviewed” is meant to end the conversation. The implicit claim: peer review ensures quality, accuracy, and the pursuit of truth.
In captured institutions, peer review functions as gatekeeping.
A paper concluding “the evidence strongly implicates phthalates, electromagnetic radiation, and pesticide exposure as primary drivers, warranting immediate regulatory action” faces different review dynamics than one concluding “the mechanism remains unknown but may represent adaptive population regulation.”
The former threatens industries—plastics, electronics, telecommunications, agrochemicals. The latter threatens no one. It documents a problem, gestures at mystery, opens doors to approved narratives about population and planetary limits.
The 2025 systematic review is methodologically sound. The data collection is impressive. The statistical analysis is rigorous. The peer reviewers had nothing to object to because the paper avoided asking questions whose answers would create objections.
This is how institutional science operates as simultaneously competent and captured. The measurements are real. The interpretive frame serves power.
What a Genuine Investigation Would Look Like
A research program genuinely curious about declining testosterone would:
Measure actual EDC body burden in subjects, not country-level emission proxies. Individual phthalate, BPA, and flame retardant levels can be assessed through biomonitoring. These measurements exist. They weren’t incorporated.
Assess EMF exposure given documented effects on the pineal gland, melatonin production, thyroid function, and—per the Naval Medical Research Institute—testosterone production directly. The paper found hypothalamic involvement and ignored the exposures known to affect the hypothalamus.
Examine developmental exposure windows. If the hypothalamic setpoint for GnRH pulsatility is established early in life, adult concurrent exposures matter less than what men were exposed to in utero and childhood. The paper looked only at conditions at time of measurement.
Follow the mechanism. LH and testosterone declining together while FSH remains stable suggests altered GnRH pulse frequency. What environmental factors affect GnRH neurons specifically? The question goes unasked.
Correlate with known endocrine disruptors by region. Water fluoridation rates vary by geography—and fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland adjacent to the hypothalamus. Pesticide application varies by agricultural activity. EMF exposure varies by urbanisation and infrastructure. These variations can be correlated with the testosterone data. No one looked.
Examine vaccination as a variable. The childhood vaccine schedule expanded from a few doses to dozens over the study period. Documented testicular accumulation of nanoparticles, aluminium adjuvant bioaccumulation, and the manufacturer’s own acknowledgment of reproductive harm signals—all warrant investigation. Vaccination status and history were not assessed.
The systematic review contains over one million data points. The data supports far more granular analysis than the paper provides. The limitation is not the data—it’s the questions that weren’t asked of it.
Reading Institutional Research
The 2025 systematic review demonstrates how to read institutional science critically.
What was measured: Macro-level environmental parameters (CO2, energy consumption, PM2.5) that map onto climate frameworks. Not the specific exposures—EDCs, EMFs, fluoride, vaccines, pesticides—documented as endocrine disruptors.
What wasn’t asked: The paper’s own finding (hypothalamic involvement) points toward questions it doesn’t pursue. The data suggests a direction; the paper doesn’t follow.
Where interpretation steers: From “we don’t know the cause” to “maybe it’s an adaptation to overpopulation.” The first is honest uncertainty. The second is narrative.
What the conclusion protects: A finding that chemicals, electronics, and pharmaceutical products are damaging male reproductive function threatens industries. A finding that the mechanism is unknown and possibly adaptive threatens nothing.
The timing: This paper appears as fertility rates collapse globally and birth rates become matters of policy concern. A scientific paper framing reproductive decline as potentially adaptive serves interests already positioned on population questions.
The data is valuable. One million men, 55 years, robust methodology, real decline confirmed. Worth citing.
The interpretive frame—searching where approved data exists, finding nothing, leaving doors open to population narratives—is a document of capture.
The System That Built This
The institutions producing research like the 2025 systematic review were not built by neutral parties. They were built by eugenicists.
The Rockefeller Foundation—which today funds global health research, medical education, and population studies—spent decades financing eugenics programs on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rockefeller money flowed to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Germany, including the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. These institutions formulated the scientific framework for the Third Reich’s sterilization laws. The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny, which American eugenicists noted “reads almost like the ‘American model sterilization law,’” mandated compulsory sterilization of those deemed unfit to breed. Nazi doctors sterilized 400,000 people before the war began.
After World War II, eugenics became a dirty word. The ideology did not disappear—it rebranded. In 1957, the Honorary Secretary of the British Eugenics Society distributed a memo arguing “that the Society should pursue ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics.” The American Eugenics Society co-founder Frederick Osborn wrote in 1968: “Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.”
The rebranding was systematic. The American Eugenics Society became The Society for the Study of Social Biology, then The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology. The British Eugenics Society became The Galton Institute, then The Adelphi Genetics Forum. Eugenics Quarterly became Social Biology, then Biodemography and Social Biology. The American Eugenics Society moved its headquarters directly into the offices of John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council, from which it received its funding.
The same foundations that funded forced sterilization programs now fund population research, reproductive health initiatives, and global health policy. The same institutional DNA runs through the system. When a 2025 systematic review documents declining male fertility and speculates that it represents “an adaptation to overpopulation”—framing reproductive collapse as potentially beneficial rather than a crisis requiring investigation—it operates within structures built by people who explicitly sought to reduce human fertility and who rebranded rather than abandoned that goal.
The memo advocating “crypto-eugenics” exists. The funding records exist. The name changes are public record. A system built by eugenicists, funded by eugenicist foundations, operating under names chosen specifically to obscure eugenicist goals, produces research that confirms a fertility crisis while steering interpretation toward population-friendly conclusions.
The pattern is not subtle once you see it.
What This Means
Male testosterone levels are declining across populations, age groups, and decades. Established beyond reasonable dispute by institutional science’s own standards. The decline is independent of obesity. It involves coordinated changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. It corresponds with skyrocketing clinical diagnoses and treatment.
The systematic review confirming this decline systematically avoided the exposures documented as endocrine disruptors: the phthalates in every plastic product, the BPA in food containers, the flame retardants in furniture and electronics, the electromagnetic fields proliferating through every environment, the pesticides saturating food and water supplies, the fluoride accumulating in pineal glands, the vaccine ingredients documented to cross the blood-testicular barrier.
The paper measured what could be measured from approved databases, found no correlation, and speculated that declining male fertility represents an adaptive response to overpopulation.
This is not a failure of science. The methodology worked. The data is real. This is science functioning exactly as designed within captured institutions—documenting problems while protecting causes, confirming crises while foreclosing action.
The questions required to identify the mechanism were never asked.
They weren’t asked because the answers would threaten interests more powerful than the million men whose declining testosterone this paper so rigorously documented.
References
Santi D, Spaggiari G, Furini C, et al. Temporal trends in serum testosterone and luteinizing hormone levels indicate an ongoing resetting of hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal function in healthy men: a systematic review. Journal of Endocrinological Investigation. 2025;48:2721-2734.
Colborn T, vom Saal FS, Soto AM. Developmental effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in wildlife and humans. Environmental Health Perspectives. 1993;101(5):378-384.
Vandenberg LN, Colborn T, Hayes TB, et al. Hormones and endocrine-disrupting chemicals: low-dose effects and nonmonotonic dose responses. Endocrine Reviews. 2012;33(3):378-455.
Swan SH. Environmental phthalate exposure in relation to reproductive outcomes and other health endpoints in humans. Environmental Research. 2008;108(2):177-84.
Yang CZ, Yaniger SI, Jordan VC, et al. Most plastic products release estrogenic chemicals: a potential health problem that can be solved. Environmental Health Perspectives. 2011;119(7):989-96.
US Naval Medical Research Institute. Bibliography of Reported Biological Phenomena (’Effects’) and Clinical Manifestations Attributed to Microwave and Radio-Frequency Radiation. 1971.
Becker RO. The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life. William Morrow, 1985.
Cherry N. Evidence of Health Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation, To the Australian Senate Inquiry into Electromagnetic Radiation. 2000.
Lester D, Parker D. What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong. 2019.
Cowan T, Fallon Morell S. The Contagion Myth. Skyhorse Publishing, 2020.
National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests. 1974.
Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report. 1968.
Talwar GP, et al. A vaccine that prevents pregnancy in women. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 1994;91(18):8532-6.
Pfizer. 5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports. Document obtained via Freedom of Information Act. 2021.
Corbett J. “They Don’t Want Your Genes in the Pool.” In: Reportage: Essays on the New World Order. 2025.
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Erm... "The paper did not assess electromagnetic field exposure. Not once in fourteen pages does the term appear. Yet the 1971 US Naval Medical Research Institute bibliography documented more than 2,300 references to biological effects from microwave and radio-frequency radiation, including, specifically, “decreased testosterone production.” [End quote]
Yes. *Interesting* how one of the the most toxic, damaging, and widespread environmental contaminants on the planet, has gone "missing" from the analyses. EMF poisoning of human and animal populations has been studied for over 60 years. Read my lips: Over sixty years.
There are now over *10,000 peer reviewed studies and Abstracts* linking electromagnetic induction to health damaging consequences. Example: https://www.saferemr.com/2018/02/effects-of-exposure-to-electromagnetic.html#:~:text=Links%20to%20download%20each%20set%20of%20abstracts
An example of a media article that few persons will read: The Effects of Pulsed Microwaves And Extra Low Frequency Electromagnetic Waves on Human Brains? Governments Routinely “Classify Information” Pertaining to the Manipulation of the Human Nervous System >>> By Mojmir Babacek >>> October 4, 2024 >>> https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-governments-around-world-classify-information-about-effects-pulsed-mirowaves-extra-low-frequency-electromagnetic-waves-human-brains/5839545
Let's ignore the obvious, and buy a new cell phone for our kids. Can't neglect the kids, ya know...
Rebecca Lee (maybeitsmercury)
Maybeitsmercury's Substack
just now
If you were going to poison humanity so that everyone gets chronically ill, and fertility tanks, then mercury poisoning is a great way to go! It causes over 250 symptoms, everyone gets something different, and you can't test for it directly unless you do a biopsy of a sensitive organ. When a person gets poisoned enough, the detox systems stop working and all the other crap in the environment builds up, too.
One of the first places it poisons is the HPA axis which is the control system from the brain to a bunch of downstream organs, among which the gonads, which produce the testosterone. Andy Cutler has a chart on p. 32 in Amalgam Illness showing mercury interfering at the point where the pituitary produces LH and FSH which are the signaling molecules that go to the gonads.
I am not allowed to reproduce that chart, you have to go buy the book, but I did write an article about it. It is mostly from the point of view of how mercury interferes between the brain and the adrenal glands, but it messes with the gonads as well. https://www.maybeitsmercury.com/how-mercury-messes-with-the-hpa-axis