Unfortunately, Fauci’s memoir omits vital details about his failures as an administrator, an adviser to politicians, and a key figure in America’s public health response to infectious disease threats over the past 40 years. His life story is a Greek tragedy. Fauci’s evident intelligence and diligence are why the country and the world expected so much of him, but his hubris caused his failure as a public servant.

It is impossible to read Fauci’s memoir and not believe he was genuinely moved by the plight of AIDS patients. Since the first time he learned of the illness from a puzzling and alarming case report, his laudable ambition has been to conquer the disease with drugs and vaccines, cure every patient, and wipe the syndrome from the face of the earth. He is both sincere and correct when he writes that “history will judge us harshly if we don’t end HIV.”

When an aide in 1985 offered to quit when he contracted AIDS for fear of scandal at Fauci’s beloved National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci hugged him, declaring “Jim, you crazy son of a bitch, there is no way in the world I would ever let you go.” This was Fauci at his best.

But Fauci paints an incomplete picture of his attitude toward AIDS patients in its early days. In 1983, in response to a case report of an infant with AIDS published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci told the press that AIDS might be spread by routine household contact. There was no good evidence then and is none now to suggest that HIV is transmitted that way. But Fauci’s statement, prominently echoed in the media, panicked the American people, almost certainly leading many to physically shun AIDS patients out of an unfounded fear of catching the disease.

Fauci does not address this incident, so one is left to speculate about why he was attracted to this theory. One possibility is that there was little political support for government spending on AIDS when the public thought it only affected gay men. As the public came to understand AIDS impacted broader populations, such as hemophiliacs and IV drug users, public support for funding HIV research expanded.

Fauci was tremendously successful in eventually building public support for government spending on treating and trying to prevent the spread of AIDS. Likely no other scientist in history moved more money and resources to accomplish a scientific and medical goal than Fauci, and his memoir proves he was highly skilled in managing bureaucracy and getting his way both from politicians and from an activist movement that was at first highly skeptical about him. (One prominent AIDS activist, playwright Larry Kramer, once called Fauci a murderer.)

Fauci’s response to activist criticism was to build relationships and use them as a tool to push for more government funding. Fauci’s activist allies seemed to understand the game, staging attacks on Fauci, both playing their part to gain more money for HIV research.

By contrast, his treatment of scientific critics is harsh, crossing lines that federal science bureaucrats should not cross. In 1991, when University of California, Berkeley, professor and wunderkind cancer biologist Peter Duesberg put forward a (false) hypothesis that the virus, HIV, is not the cause of AIDS, Fauci did everything in his power to destroy him. In his memoir, Fauci writes about debating Duesberg, writing papers, and giving talks to counter his ideas. But Fauci did more, isolating Duesberg, destroying his reputation in the press, and making him a pariah in the scientific community. Though Fauci was right and Duesberg wrong about the scientific question, the scientific community learned it was dangerous to cross Fauci.

Fauci’s HIV record is mixed. The great news is that, because of tremendous advances in treatment, a diagnosis of HIV is no longer the death sentence it was in the 1980s or 1990s. Fauci claims credit in his memoir, pointing out that the NIAID developed a clinical trial network that made it easier for researchers at pharmaceutical companies to conduct randomized studies of the effectiveness of HIV medications. But any competent National Institutes of Health (NIH) director would have directed NIAID resources this way.

Furthermore, many in the HIV community have criticized Fauci for not using this network to test treatment ideas developed within the community—especially off-patent medications. Fauci is more reasonable when he takes credit for the 2003 creation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program (PEPFAR), through which the US sent effective HIV medications to several African nations.

Despite billions of dollars spent on the task, no one to date has produced an effective HIV vaccine or a definitive cure, and the virus remains a threat to the health and well-being of the world population. By Fauci’s own high standard, there is still a long way to go.

In the early days of the war on terror, Fauci became head of civilian biodefense, with the mandate to develop and stockpile countermeasures to biowarfare agents. This appointment made Fauci one of the most well-paid and powerful figures in the US government. Fauci leveraged his deep knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, streamlining federal contracting rules to issue “sole source contracts” and “rapid research grants” to create constituencies of companies and scientists who depended on Fauci for their success.

In 2005, avian flu emerged and spread among birds, chickens, and livestock. Also spreading were worries that the virus could evolve to become more transmissible among human beings. Fauci deployed NIAID money to develop an avian flu vaccine, leading the government to stockpile tens of millions of ultimately unused and unnecessary doses.

At this point, virologists persuaded Fauci’s NIAID to support dangerous scientific lab experiments designed to make the avian flu virus more easily transmissible among humans.

In 2011, NIAID-funded scientists in Wisconsin and the Netherlands succeeded. They published their results in a prestigious scientific journal, so that anyone with the knowledge and resources could replicate their steps. They effectively weaponized the avian flu virus and shared the recipe with the world, with Fauci and his agency in full support.

The idea behind this gain-of-function research was that we would learn which pathogens might leap into human beings, and that knowing that would help scientists develop vaccines and treatments for these prospective possible pandemics. Fauci, writing to molecular biologists in 2012, downplayed the possibility that laboratory workers or scientists studying these dangerous pathogens might cause the pandemic they were working to prevent.

He also argued that the risk of such an accident was worth it: “In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario—however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.”

The NIH did pause funding gain-of-function work aimed at increasing germs’ pathogenicity. The pause didn’t last long, though. In the waning days of the Obama administration, the government implemented a bureaucratic process to permit NIH and NIAID to fund gain-of-function work again. Fauci played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in reversing the pause, but his memoir provides almost no information about what he did. This is a gaping, telling hole, given the subsequent history with Covid-19.

Among the projects Fauci and the NIAID funded during these years was research to identify coronaviruses in the wild and bring them into laboratories to study their potential for causing a human pandemic. The work encompassed laboratories worldwide. Fauci’s organization funded an American outfit, EcoHealth Alliance, which worked with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In his memoir, Fauci goes out of his way to deny that any NIH money went to any activities that might have led to the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid. When Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) in July 2021 confronted Fauci with the possibility that Fauci’s NIAID had funded this work, Fauci resorted to cheap debate tactics to obfuscate his and the NIH’s responsibility in supporting this work. It is undeniable that Fauci championed pathogen enhancement for a decade or more.

While the molecular biological and genetic evidence for a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 is strong, many virologists disagree. (Their entire field would come under a cloud were it true, and many virologists’ careers have been generously supported by Fauci’s NIAID.) The debate on this topic rages on. A review of Fauci’s memoir is not the place to settle the dispute.

But in judging Fauci’s record as a scientist and a bureaucrat, it’s worth knowing that in 2020, Fauci and his boss, Francis Collins, failed to empanel public discussions and debates on this vital topic. Instead, they created an environment where any scientist voicing the lab-leak hypothesis came under a cloud of suspicion, accused of advancing unfounded conspiracy theories. As with Duesberg, Fauci sought to destroy the careers of dissenting scientists.

In his memoir, Fauci writes of a “right-wing…smear campaign [that] soon boiled over into conspiracy theories.” He asserts, “One of the most appalling examples of this was the allegation, without a shred of evidence, that an NIAID grant to the EcoHealth Alliance with a sub-grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China funded research that caused the COVID pandemic.”

But in Congressional testimony in 2024, Fauci denied that he had called the idea of a lab leak a conspiracy theory: “Actually, I’ve also been very, very clear and said multiple times that I don’t think the ‘concept’ of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory.”

This self-serving denial makes a lawyerly distinction between the possibility of a lab origin of the Covid pandemic and the NIH’s funding of EcoHealth Alliance to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronaviruses. These are neither “right-wing” nor “conspiracy theories,” and the likelihood of a connection between the two is, for good reason, the subject of active bipartisan congressional investigation.

Fauci was quick to gather all the glory of administrative achievements like PEPFAR to himself while decrying any possibility of blame for the origin of Covid. But if he is responsible for the consequences of one (the millions of Africans saved because of PEPFAR), he is responsible for the consequences of the other. This includes the tens of millions who have died due to the Covid pandemic and the catastrophically harmful lockdowns used to manage it. This is Fauci at his worst.

By any measure, the American Covid response was a catastrophic failure. More than 1.2 million deaths have been attributed to Covid itself, and deaths from all causes have stayed high long after the number of Covid deaths themselves diminished. In many states, particularly blue states, children were kept out of school for a year and a half or longer, with devastating effects on their learning and future health and prosperity.

Coercive policy regarding Covid vaccination, recommended by Fauci on the false premise that vaccinated people could not get or spread the virus, collapsed public trust in other vaccines and led the media and public health officials to gaslight individuals who had suffered legitimate vaccine injuries. To pay for the lockdowns recommended by Fauci, the US government spent trillions of dollars, causing high unemployment in the most locked-down states and a hangover of higher prices for consumer goods that continues to this day. Who is to blame?

Fauci served as a key adviser to both President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, and was a central figure on Trump’s Covid task force that determined federal policy. If Fauci has no responsibility for the outcomes of the pandemic, nobody does. Yet in his memoir’s chapters on Covid, he simultaneously takes credit for advising leaders while disclaiming any responsibility for policy failures.

Fauci implausibly writes that he “was not locking down the country” and “had no power to control anything.” These statements are belied by Fauci’s own bragging about his influence on a host of policy responses, including convincing Trump to lock the country down in March 2020 and extend the lockdown in April.

He discusses the extended closure of schools, now almost universally seen as a bad idea, in the passive voice, as if the virus caused the school closures on its own. In Congressional testimony in 2020, Fauci exaggerated the harm to children from getting infected with Covid, instilling fear in parents that their kids might suffer from a rare complication of Covid infection if they sent them to school. It is impossible not to recall Fauci exaggerating the risk of children contracting HIV from casual contact.

In May 2020, Fauci said that schools should reopen, conditional on “the landscape of infection with regard to testing.” But he also recommended six-foot social distancing, based on no evidence—a policy that made it nearly impossible to open schools. Fauci opposed churches holding services and mass, even outdoors, despite the lack of evidence that the disease spread there. His memoir provides little detail about the scientific data he relied on to support these policies.

All this background makes his discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration all the more galling. The Declaration is a short policy document I wrote along with Martin Kulldorff (then of Harvard University) and Sunetra Gupta (of the University of Oxford) in October 2020.

Motivated by recognizing that the lethality and hospitalization risk from Covid was 1,000 times lower in younger populations than in older, the document had two recommendations: (1) focused protection of vulnerable older populations, and (2) lifting lockdowns and reopening schools. It balanced the harms of the lockdowns against the risks of the disease in a way that recognized that Covid was not the only threat to human well-being and that the lockdowns themselves did considerable harm.

Fauci denigrates the Great Barrington Declaration as being filled with “fake signatures,” though FOIAed emails from the era make it clear he knew tens of thousands of prominent scientists, doctors, and epidemiologists had co-signed it. In his memoir, he repeats a propaganda talking point about the Declaration, falsely claiming the document called for letting the virus “rip.” In reality, it called for better protection of vulnerable elderly people.

Fauci asserted it was impossible to “sequester to protect the vulnerable” while simultaneously calling for the whole world to sequester for his lockdowns. His rhetoric about the Great Barrington Declaration poisoned the well of scientific consideration of our ideas. With brass-knuckle tactics, he won the policy fight, and many states locked down in late 2020 and into 2021.

The virus spread anyway.

Fauci does not mention the success of Swedish Covid policy, which eschewed lockdowns and instead—after some early errors—focused on protection of the vulnerable. Swedish all-cause excess death rates in the Covid era are among the lowest in Europe and much lower than American all-cause excess deaths. The Swedish health authorities never recommended closing schools for children 16 and under, and Swedish children, unlike American children, have no learning loss.

If lockdowns were necessary to protect the population, as Fauci claims, Swedish outcomes should have been worse than American ones. Even within the United States, locked-down California had worse all-cause excess deaths numbers and economic outcomes than Florida, which opened in the summer of 2020. It is shocking that Fauci still does not seem to know these facts.

Near the end of his memoir, Fauci writes that by March 2022, he knew “there would not be a clear end to the pandemic;” the world would need to learn to “live indefinitely with COVID.” He reasons that “perhaps the vaccine and prior infection had created a degree of background immunity.” This is as close as he comes in the book to admitting error.

A part of me cannot help but admire Fauci, but the extent of damage caused by his hubris gets in the way. He once told an interviewer, “If you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science….Science and the truth are being attacked.” Despite his career accomplishments, no one should give any man, much less Fauci, credit for being the embodiment of science itself.

If Fauci’s goal in writing this memoir is to guide how historians write about him toward the positive, I do not think he succeeded. He will be remembered as a consequential figure for his contributions to the American approach to the HIV and Covid pandemics. But he will also be remembered as a cautionary tale of what can happen when too much power is invested in a single person for far too long.

Republished from The Illusion of Consensus

About the Author

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Hundreds of documents — emails obtained under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits or Congressional subpoena, as well as Congressional interview transcripts — show Fauci’s institute protected EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering projects with the Wuhan lab.

At a congressional hearing this summer, Fauci cast EcoHealth and its president Peter Daszak — who are currently under proposed debarment by the federal government — as minor and rogue grantees.

But EcoHealth was among the first grantees that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases contacted as news of a novel coronavirus first swirled, and Daszak requested supplemental funds to respond to the crisis. In early February 2020, when NIAID began conducting weekly calls with a few experts about the novel coronavirus, Daszak was among the invitees. And at the height of pandemic confusion and controversy in the summer of 2020, EcoHealth maintained the goodwill of NIAID, which awarded EcoHealth two new grants totaling $19.8 million, weakening the leverage of other officials to obtain information from one of the US government’s only sources of insight into the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Fauci “asked how Peter is doing, as he often does, and he seemed to commiserate with him to a degree,” Fauci’s senior scientific advisor David Morens wrote in apparent reference to Daszak on Nov. 18, 2021.

At the time, officials at the National Institutes of Health’s central headquarters or “Building One” — at the demand of the Trump White House — had suspended EcoHealth’s existing NIAID grant and sought lab notebooks and unpublished genomic data as a condition of getting its funding back. This information could have shed light on the coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic.

But aided by allies within NIAID, millions continued to flow to EcoHealth, and Daszak would not ask his longtime collaborators in Wuhan for information sought by the US government until 20 months later, in January 2022 — two years after the pandemic began.

Some of the NIAID officials who helped Daszak were key to approving his coronavirus research in Wuhan in the first place, including gain-of-function research, research that can enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a pathogen. Some of these NIAID officials had spent years championing gain-of-function research as worth the risks, Congressional transcripts also show. Namely, Morens and another NIAID employee named “Jeff T.” were the liaisons between the scientific community and Fauci during the years-long debates about gain-of-function research leading up to the pandemic, one email shows. After the pandemic arose, Morens and another NIAID scientist named Jeffery Taubenberger wrote an editorial defending EcoHealth and referred to people concerned about gain-of-function research as “luddites” and “the complaining crowd.”

Thousands of pages of grant proposals and other documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know show that EcoHealth planned to use the new NIAID funding to continue research similar to the work that had brought the group under scrutiny, using the very same viral samples.

Most of the NIAID employees who helped Daszak maintain funding amid the pandemic still retain positions of influence at NIAID.

PUThe revelations come as the US Senate considers legislation championed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that would move regulation of the riskiest gain-of-function research out of the funding agency — which is typically NIAID — and empower an independent panel of scientists to determine when engineering new pathogens is worth the risk.

More than four years after the pandemic began, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated debarment proceedings against EcoHealth and Daszak, citing problems uncovered by government officials outside of Fauci’s institute and the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Funding to the group and its president has been suspended.

Daszak said he would contest the prospective debarment. He has continued to lean on influential allies.

None of the NIAID employees named in this story replied to questions.

‘A Friend in These Efforts…But Not Too out Front’

Daszak was among the first scientists contacted by people within NIAID when news first broke of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan.

Daszak spoke to his program officer Erik Stemmy, who broadly oversaw NIAID’s coronavirus research portfolio, on January 6, 2020.

“Definitely focusing attention on this, Erik,” Daszak wrote. “I spent New Year’s Eve talking with our China contacts and with ProMed staff in between glasses. I’ve got more information but it’s all off the record. Could I give you a call to fill you in?”

Yet he had stopped receiving updates on the emerging pathogen from his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology 12 days prior. He had last heard from Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan lab on December 25, 2019, six days before the world became aware of a new pathogen in Wuhan on December 31, 2019.

By the spring, speculation that the lab had been the pandemic’s source reached a fever pitch.

On April 17, 2020, Trump called for EcoHealth’s grant to be ended “very quickly.”

Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, got in contact with the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a Congressional report.

NIH Director of Extramural Research Michael Lauer in the weeks following sent letters to EcoHealth in an attempt to end and investigate the grant, culminating in a July 8, 2020, letter that suspended all activities under the grant.

The letters sought information about the coronavirus work underway at the subcontracted lab. Lauer asked that Daszak arrange for an outside inspection. The letter asked that “specific attention” be paid “to addressing the question of whether WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019.”

Lauer had previously spearheaded NIH’s response to the intellectual property and fraud concerns posed by China’s Thousand Talents Program, which Daszak noted with apparent annoyance to colleagues.

Daszak contacted NIAID for help.

David Morens and Jeffery Taubenberger

Daszak leaned on the advice of his close friend and a longtime senior advisor to Fauci, Morens.

“The fact that the determination letter came from ‘Building 1,’ that is, the NIH director’s office, and not NIAID, is telling,” Morens wrote on April 26, 2020. “There are things I can’t say except Tony is aware and I have learned that there are ongoing efforts within NIH to steer this with minimal damage.”

Morens said in another email that NIAID was a “friend” of EcoHealth.

“I have spent alot of time over the last few months…to try to undo the harm that was done to Peter’s grant, PREDICT, and related things,” Morens wrote on August 18, 2020. “Lots is happening behind the scenes…Given that I work for NIAID, and that Tony Fauci is my boss, I have to be careful and generally talk to reporters off the record, but I think I can say that NIAID, at least, is a friend in these efforts, just not able at this time to be too out front.”

Daszak was advised not to respond to Building One until the funding for a new multimillion-dollar project had landed in EcoHealth’s coffers.

“This is an affront to science,” Gerald Keusch, director of the Collaborative Research Core at Boston University’s maximum security lab, said on April 24, 2020. Keusch is the former director of NIH’s Fogarty International Center. “It must be challenged. The question is not only how but also when – certainly not before the EIDRC funding comes through. And then in a smart manner.”

He promised to lean on influential contacts, including former NIH Director Harold Varmus, Foundation for the National Institutes of Health President Maria Freire, and Research!America President Mary Woolley to vouch for him.

Keusch’s lab was set to be a collaborator on EcoHealth’s EIDRC project, grant documents show.

The acronym EIDRC, or alternatively CREID, stands for Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Center. EcoHealth was being considered as one of just 11 of these multimillion-dollar projects across the country.

Daszak had good reason to tread carefully.

A formally binding term of award for his new EIDRC project had not yet been issued by the time Building One came knocking. According to the NIH website, an “NoA” or notice of award is “the official grant award document notifying the recipient and others that an award has been made.” Daszak conceded the project could “just quietly disappear” before any funding was guaranteed.

“I am also very concerned that Trump could target our organization or me personally, leading to our EIDRC being nixed and we don’t even have an NoA on that, so it could just quietly disappear,” Daszak said.

Morens noted that people within NIAID “will be your advocates.”

Morens is “going to talk with Greg Folkers (Chief of Staff for Tony Fauci) to find out if Tony knows, and why it happened. He’s then going to let Tony know…We won’t respond to the termination notice (Michael Lauer) until we’ve found out more,” Daszak said on April 25, 2020.

An editorial coauthored by an NIAID virologist gave credence to Daszak’s cause.

Jeffery Taubenberger, chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at NIAID and a pioneer in the controversial reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, was carbon-copied on a May 2020 email strategizing about how to recruit leadership at the prestigious American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene to protect EcoHealth.

To that end, Morens and Taubenberger co-published a July 2020 op-ed in the society’s scientific journal, the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Taubenberger lent his credibility to the argument that the “theories about a hypothetical man-made origin of SARS-CoV-2 have been thoroughly discredited by multiple coronavirus experts.”

The virus that causes Covid-19 is “thus a virus that emerged naturally,” the article reads.

Morens described the article in an email to a Science reporter, cc’ing his coauthor Taubenberger, as a publication that “defends Peter and his Chinese colleagues.”

The reporter thanked Morens and offered to link it in a recently published article, an interview with Shi in which she refuted the lab-leak theory, demanded an apology from Trump, and deemed the suspension of the EcoHealth grant “absolutely absurd.”

Erik Stemmy and Emily Erbelding

On April 23, 2020, as EcoHealth first began to dodge questions from Lauer, an EcoHealth employee pointedly told him that “as usual we are in close contact with our program officer Erik Stemmy.”

Stemmy, Daszak’s program officer in the NIAID Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, and Emily Erbelding, the head of the NIAID Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, participated in Zoom calls with Daszak about his suspended research funding and flagged other alternative avenues of funding. Erbelding and Daszak had served together on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine forum together for years.

Although his existing grant was in jeopardy, Stemmy and Erbelding pointed Daszak to other funding opportunities and participated in Zoom calls with him.

“We are always interested in hearing about your scientific advances,” Erbelding wrote. “I hope that you have seen our rolling [grant] announcements, which might afford you an opportunity to continue progress under another grant number. I know that Erik [Stemmy], Diane, and Alan in the Respiratory Disease Branch would be happy to advise you on a potential submission.”

In May 2020, Daszak thanked them for their “support on this and other work.”

As the topic heated up on Capitol Hill in the summer of 2021, Stemmy and Erbelding met with Daszak again. The NIAID meeting occurred on July 16, 2021, a few days before Lauer requested more information from EcoHealth on July 23, 2021.

It’s clear from internal records that Stemmy and Erbelding were well aware of the lab origin controversy as they met with EcoHealth.

Erbelding had been dispatched by Building One to discover how many of EcoHealth’s grant dollars had been subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology when the grant first received attention from the Trump White House, according to emails and congressional testimony.

When Fauci met with EcoHealth collaborator and University of North Carolina coronavirologist Ralph Baric in February 2020 to discuss whether his research with the Wuhan lab had been properly regulated, Erbelding was in the room.

Of course, the EcoHealth controversy threatened to turn a spotlight on the earlier decisions of NIAID officials.

Stemmy had helped scientists from the Wuhan lab, including Zhengli Shi, obtain approval to visit the institute’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, in June 2017. As EcoHealth’s program officer, he helped facilitate EcoHealth’s gain-of-function research during a pause on most coronavirus gain-of-function research from 2014-2017 and did not recommend the work be evaluated by the Pandemic Potential Pathogen Committee (“P3CO”) put in place after the pause.

Stemmy had also not flagged that EcoHealth missed a September 30, 2019, due date to submit its progress report describing its work in the months before the pandemic’s outbreak, Congressional testimony shows. In response to Lauer’s letters, the progress report was submitted on August 3, 2021, after the pandemic had already emerged, when an immense incentive existed to not disclose experiments that could bring the group under further scrutiny.

Jean Patterson

Despite concerns about Daszak’s research in the media, in the White House, and in NIH’s Building One, his goodwill within NIAID had apparently not diminished.

By August 2020, new NIAID funding of $7.5 million surged to EcoHealth to create an NIAID Center for Research on Emerging Infectious Diseases, its most generous NIH grant to date.

Once the funding was formally awarded, Morens asked Daszak about receiving a “kickback,” a comment he would later describe as “black humor.”

“Ahem.… do I get a kickback???? Too much fooking money! DO you deserve it all? Let’s discuss….” he wrote. “Seriously, this is great news.”

After his NIAID grant was suspended, Daszak had pitched the idea of continuing the same research in Southeast Asian countries bordering China to circumvent the concerns about the pandemic’s origins.

“We’re working on a short draft of how we could have easily changed the geography to the countries adjacent to China, as we proposed to Erik Stemmy and Emily Erbelding,” Daszak wrote on April 25, 2020.

According to a press release on the EcoHealth website that has since been deleted, the new project expanded their controversial research beyond coronaviruses in China to several families of viruses in Southeast Asia. Draft grant documents describing the $7.5 million project obtained by US Right to Know through a FOIA lawsuit further reveal the shift in focus to Southeast Asia.

Daszak even leveraged his contacts at NIAID to push back on provisions of his new contract related to biosafety. Daszak found a sympathetic ear in Jean Patterson, then the head of translational research at NIAID’s Virology Branch, who oversaw the CREID grants.

“By the way, I’m currently in the process of dealing with unexpected changes to my Notice of Award for my new contract with NIAID. We had a para inserted that means we have send copies of subcontracts to NIAID, and explain our ‘Biosafety monitoring’ plans,” Daszak wrote to Morens in October 2020, a few weeks after the award was announced. “I spoke with Jean Patterson who’s running these CREID contacts and she had no idea what they were after. Clearly it’s the [NIH] director’s office interfering.”

Daszak also said he may alert the press of his outrage over this proviso.

“I’m going to try to deal with it quietly for now,” Daszak said. “But if they fuck me around, I’ll be talking with the press.”

Just weeks later, in September, NIAID obligated a further $2.3 million to EcoHealth for research on Nipah virus.

“I’m thrilled to share the good news that our proposal to study Nipah virus has been awarded!” Vice President for Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance Jon Epstein wrote on September 22, 2020. “The research has high relevance given the current pandemic.”

Anthony Fauci

Daszak praised Fauci’s statements to the press downplaying the possibility of a leak at Daszak’s partner lab — comments that Daszak in turn highlighted to Fauci’s employees at NIAID. Even as he expressed bitter resentment against Collins, Daszak expressed gratitude for Fauci.

Daszak flagged comments by Fauci “throwing cold water on the conspiracy theory coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab,” as they were summarized in the press, to Stemmy.

“We’re all very delighted to see that Tony Fauci came out publicly with a comment that dispels the lab origin theory of COVID-19,” Daszak wrote.

Daszak also highlighted comments Fauci made in a National Geographic interview headlined, “Fauci: No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab” in which he “stated that he doesn’t buy the ‘accidental lab release’ hypothesis,” to Morens.

“It’s a very worrying time for us here at EcoHealth, but knowing that you’re all out there working in the background and that Tony’s speaking truth to power is extremely important — a slight relief in a tough week,” Daszak wrote to Morens on May 7, 2020.

At a June 23, 2020, Congressional hearing when Fauci was asked about the grant being terminated, he did not defend the decision by others within NIH to seek data from Wuhan. He simply stated, “It was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it,” in an apparent allusion to Trump.

Three days later, House Democrats addressed a letter to HHS expressing concern about the termination of EcoHealth’s grant, citing press reports and Fauci’s testimony to characterize the grant’s jeopardy as part of a wider provocation of China by the Trump administration.

In early 2021, Daszak briefed NIAID, and may have briefed Fauci directly, another email indicates, on the World Health Organization-commissioned international mission to China. Daszak had advanced the conclusion that a lab leak in Wuhan was “extremely unlikely” as the only American citizen on the team, bringing him into conflict with the World Health Organization Director-General Adhanom Ghebreyesus Tedros, who argued the possibility had been ruled out prematurely without evidence.

But NIH officials outside of NIAID continued to ask EcoHealth about the Wuhan lab into the summer and fall of 2021. Daszak dragged his feet.

That year, the issue of a possible connection between NIAID and the pandemic’s origin became more salient because of a series of high-profile Senate hearings in which Paul questioned Fauci about it.

Morens apparently ferried information from Daszak to Fauci about efforts in Congress to investigate the pandemic’s origins.

In an October 24, 2021, email, Daszak asked Morens for input on a response to a letter from Lauer seeking, among other information, unpublished data that might shed light on whether the Wuhan lab housed a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

“Peter, from Tony’s numerous recent comments to me, and from what Francis has been vocal about over the past 5 days, they are trying to protect you, which protects their own reputations,” Morens wrote back.

The next day, in an October 25, 2021, email, Morens advised Daszak on a few points about how he should respond to Building One after speaking with Fauci. He did so through their colleague Keusch, as he had been advised by Fauci not to speak to Daszak directly. Daszak was advised to contact Stemmy to ensure he was “on board” with Daszak’s responses to Lauer.

“First, on the timeline to make it more specific with dates and details. Getting in touch with Stemmy is really important and being sure he is well informed, acknowledges the communications you mention, and is on board because he will certainly be questioned,” the email reads. “He also suggested that you discuss with him that…when you were aware that it was necessary to file the 5 year report the system shut you out and you presumed that was normal process as you were then into grant year 1.”

In other words, Fauci’s aide Morens, after speaking with Fauci, advised Daszak to confer with Stemmy on his explanation for the late progress report. Daszak has said that there was a technical glitch, so EcoHealth decided to forgo the final year’s report given some of this information had been reported in an application for an extension of the grant.

Stemmy denied speaking to Daszak to advise him on responses to Lauer in a congressional interview.

More of the Same

It was obvious to Fauci’s inner circle at NIAID that the new CREID grant mirrored EcoHealth’s prior work — just the sort of research that had alarmed the public and the White House in the first place.

Morens described the CREID endeavor to Folkers, Fauci’s chief of staff, as “PREDICT on steroids.” PREDICT was the name of EcoHealth’s grant with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which dovetailed with the group’s work for NIAID.

The group may have simply reappropriated samples from its PREDICT program for the project, according to draft grant reports.

Draft grant documents describing the $7.5 million project obtained through a FOIA lawsuit show the group intended to continue working with the viruses that had in part brought EcoHealth under scrutiny, namely viruses from Mojiang, a county in rural Yunnan, China.

The “Mojiang mine” is the test cave in rural China where the American-Chinese research collaboration discovered one of the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2. The mine is also associated with a 2012 cluster of respiratory illnesses.

Pressure campaign targets Francis Collins

Several emails reveal the quarrel between NIH Building One, which was attempting to obtain information from EcoHealth, and NIAID, which was helping Daszak. Daszak worked connections in the scientific community to turn up the heat on Collins.

Across many emails, Daszak and his allies expressed resentment against NIH’s Building One, especially Collins and Lauer.

“Good that he’s going,” Daszak wrote in response to the news that Collins would be stepping down as NIH director in 2022. “But he’s left our organization as a daily target for conspiracies, with death threats, media attacks, and legal actions against us. All this began when he decided not to stand up to political interference in NIH funding, under Trump.”

Daszak appears to have expressed no such resentment against Fauci, to whom he had a line through Morens.

Daszak put pressure on Collins to restore his prior NIAID funding in late August, around the same time the separate $7.5 million grant had been formally secured.

An August 19, 2020, Wall Street Journal story quoted Harold Varmus, the former NIH director whom Keusch told Daszak he would contact about his grant, denouncing the grant’s suspension.

After the story published, Collins wrote to Varmus, linking to an article describing NIH’s pressure on EcoHealth Alliance to provide records about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and another link to an article calling attention to RaTG13 and the Moijang mine.

“This EcoHealth grant and its connection to Wuhan has presented one of the most difficult and wrenching situations of my 11 years as NIH Director. Most of that is not appropriate for email,” Collins wrote. “There’s a lot more to this story than we have been able to talk about. Tony and I would like the chance to speak with you about this.”

Collins’ board of advisors also backed Daszak.

“Recent statements from numerous scientific organizations and leaders in the scientific community express grave concern about the termination of an NIH grant to Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance,” the statement read. “Members of the NIH ACD share the grave concerns expressed by the community.”

Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs, which sells restriction enzymes used in viral engineering, organized a group of Nobel laureates to oppose the suspension of the earlier grant. A letter of opposition signed by a coalition of scientific professional societies soon followed.

Daszak also recruited members of the press to pressure NIH into restoring funding without turning over key documentation.

Just 10 days after Daszak’s grant first generated controversy at a White House press briefing, Politico ran a story titled “Trump cuts U.S. research on bat-human virus transmission over China ties.”

Keusch tried to persuade the Politico reporter to continue to turn her investigative spotlight on NIH’s Building One.

“The spotlight needs to turn on NIH and what it has done and what that is unleashing,” he wrote.

“Pushing on this as I can,” the reporter replied.

In a similar vein, Daszak persuaded a BuzzFeed reporter to submit a FOIA request for Lauer’s records to investigate Building One. The resulting story faulted an activist group for having “tapped into partisan politics to make big problems for Fauci” over the EcoHealth grant beginning in April 2020, when Fauci had first become privately concerned about NIAID connections to Wuhan two months prior.

Other stories in the mainstream press also portrayed the termination of the grant as strictly political and scientifically unsound.

Despite Daszak’s ire, Collins was publicly dismissive of the idea that the pandemic could have resulted from EcoHealth’s research in Wuhan.

Under Collins’s direction, NIH apparently did not respond in detail to Congressional questions about its efforts to obtain more information from EcoHealth.

When Congressional Democrats asked for details about EcoHealth’s grant in June 2020, NIH stonewalled.

“We are going to draft a response to the letter that doesn’t actually answer the questions in the letter but rather presents a narrative of what happened at a high level, ending with the reinstatement and attaching the NIH reinstatement letter,” wrote then-NIH Associate Director for Legislative Policy & Analysis Adrienne Hallett on July 21, 2020.

“Sounds like a good plan,” Collins replied.

In addition, Collins’s office reassured a Congressional committee and the public in October 2021 that the viruses and experiments funded by the US could not be connected to the pandemic’s origin.

Collins’s public reassurances did not reflect the fact that NIH wrote to EcoHealth in a letter dated the same day asking for unpublished viral genomes.

Known Unknowns

Daszak never turned over genomic data about the viruses housed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or lab notebooks. He only asked them for them once.

Daszak sent the email to his longtime collaborators in January 2022, 20 months after Lauer first questioned EcoHealth about the Wuhan Institute of Virology in April 2020.

“We did try to get them by the way,” Daszak said in reference to the lab notebooks at a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on May 1, 2024.

“Well, ‘try’ might be a strong word,” replied the committee’s staff director Mitch Benzine.“You never actually requested the lab notebooks, you just forwarded the [NIH] letter. And you never emailed again?”

“Correct,” Daszak replied. “Clearly the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] is not going to reply.”

“It’s possible they have hidden away some viruses from us that we don’t know about, yes,” Daszak also conceded at that same hearing.

To the public’s knowledge, the US government has never accessed the coronavirus genomic data stored in Wuhan, some of which was collected with American funding.

“We determined at the time we could not resolve the WIV record problem,” Lauer told congressional investigators.

In July 2023, federal funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been temporarily suspended pending a debarment investigation. Two months later, in September 2023, the investigation concluded resulting in a 10-year debarment for the Wuhan lab.

Lauer was asked by Congressional investigators whether he had seen any similar situations with a grantee or subgrantee refusing to turn over lab notebooks.

“Yes, I have seen that,” he replied. “I’ve seen that in scientific misconduct investigations, where laboratory notebooks or other original files are requested and the parties concerned will state that they lost them, they don’t have them.”

EcoHealth’s NIAID grant was reinstated by April 2023, a decision reached by Lauer, Erbelding, and Fauci’s principal deputy, Hugh Auchincloss. The grant would proceed without collaboration from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with stricter biosafety and reporting standards.

Though NIH had given up on obtaining more information, journalists and Congressional investigators pried documents from EcoHealth through the Freedom of Information Act and Congressional subpoena.

Evidence emerged of other apparent violations of federal grant laws, including evidence that EcoHealth planned to conduct risky coronavirus experiments at the lab in Wuhan without adequate biosafety protections, while telling prospective funders at the Pentagon that the experiments would be performed at a more rigorous biosafety level in the US.

These revelations came in spite of Morens attempting to omit some of his emails with Daszak from their legally required public disclosure via FOIA and to obstruct the Congressional investigation, internal emails suggest.

EcoHealth and Daszak found all of their federal funding suspended in May 2024 and a debarment investigation was initiated, more than four years after Lauer sent his first letter to the group.

Emails used in the story were obtained through U.S. Right to Know FOIA lawsuits against the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, as well as other FOIA lawsuits and congressional subpoenas. Read all of U.S. Right to Know’s documents concerning the origins of Covid-19 here.

Timeline

January 6, 2020

As word of a novel coronavirus in China spread, Erik Stemmy, who oversees the coronavirus research portfolio at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, contacted EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak for intel.

“Definitely focusing attention on this, Erik,” Daszak replied. “I spent New Year’s Eve talking with our China contacts and with ProMed staff in between glasses. I’ve got more information but it’s all off the record. Could I give you a call to fill you in?”

January 8, 2020

Daszak spoke to Stemmy and Alan Embry, chief of the NIAID’s respiratory diseases branch.

Daszak reported that he had stopped receiving updates on the rumors from his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology two weeks prior. He had last heard from Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan lab on December 25, 2019, six days before the world became aware of a new pathogen in Wuhan on December 31, 2019.

January 14, 2020

Daszak informed Stemmy that the recently published genome of the novel coronavirus reveals it is similar to a virus collected by EcoHealth, “Rp3,” a likely reference to RaTG13, a bat coronavirus stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with 96 percent homology with SARS-CoV-2.

January 23, 2020

Daszak and Stemmy discussed supplemental funds for EcoHealth Alliance.

January 27, 2020

Daszak shared information about the novel coronavirus and his own work with David Morens, senior scientific advisor to Anthony Fauci, and Stemmy.

February 4, 2020

NIAID began hosting weekly calls about the “nCoV,” or novel coronavirus. Stemmy and Daszak were participants on this call.

April 11, 2020 

A Daily Mail story, citing research by animal rights group White Coat Waste Project, reported that “the Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of Covid-19 – and doing so with American money,” prompting questions from Congress.

April 14, 2020

Lawrence Tabak, then the principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, copied Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer on an email thread about the controversy.

“April 14, 2020: Larry Tabak (“LT”) loops in Mike Lauer (“ML”) on email string regarding Animal Rights and Congressional complaints,” Lauer wrote in his notes.

April 15, 2020

Daszak briefs NIAID on sarbecovirus gene sequences that he says help shed light on the geographic origins of SARS-CoV-2.

April 17, 2020

Fauci was asked about the lab origin hypothesis at a White House press briefing with former President Donald Trump present.

Fauci stepped up to the podium, and citing a recent scientific editorial, said the genome was consistent with a natural spillover.

Unbeknownst to the public, the March 2020 editorial in Nature Medicine Fauci cited to downplay the lab origin theory — “The proximal origin of SARS-Cov-2” — had been prompted in part by him, and he had been privy to its drafting. The authors’ private concerns about evidence for a lab origin and their lack of confidence in their key arguments were later revealed through FOIA and congressional subpoena.

Despite Fauci’s bravado, a few minutes later, another reporter pressed further on the possibility of a lab origin and the American grant that had funded coronavirus research at the lab at the center of speculation.

“Why would the US give a grant like that to China?” she asked.

“We’re going to end that grant very quickly,” Trump responded.

Daszak, watching the press conference at home, hushed his family in sudden panic, Science later reported.

April 18, 2020

Daszak forwarded two news stories about Fauci’s comments diminishing the possibility of a lab origin to Erik Stemmy, the NIAID program officer overseeing his grant. He copied Emily Erbelding, the director of the NIAID division of microbiology and infectious diseases.

“We’re all very delighted to see that Tony Fauci came out publicly with a comment that dispels the lab origin theory of COVID-19,” Daszak wrote.

Daszak sent the hyperlinks to two news stories about Fauci’s endorsement of “Proximal Origin,” one headlined, “Fauci Throws Cold Water on Conspiracy Theory Coronavirus Escaped from Chinese Lab.”

April 19, 2020

A letter suspending funding to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology was drafted by then-general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services Robert Charrow at the request of White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Tabak asked that Lauer send the letter. NIH Director Francis Collins was also part of discussions about this letter with Lauer and Tabak. The letter from NIH’s central “Building One” sought information about the Wuhan lab from EcoHealth as a condition of restoring the group’s NIAID funding.

The letter explicitly mentioned concerns about the pandemic beginning at the Wuhan lab.

“The scientific community believes that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans likely in Wuhan where the COVID-19 pandemic began. There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from Wuhan Institute of Virology of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19,” the letter read.” Given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of Wuhan Institute of Virology from participation in federal programs. While we review these allegations during the period of suspension, you are instructed to cease providing any funds to Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Lauer asked Daszak for a list of Chinese collaborators on his NIAID grant, “Type 1 and Type 2,” meaning both the original multiyear grant and its more recent renewal: “It would be helpful for us to know about all China-based participants in this work since the Type 1 grant started in 2014 – who they were and how much money they received. The sooner you can get us that information, the better. Best, Mike.”

April 20, 2020

An op-ed appeared in the Washington Post about State Department cables warning of safety issues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

April 21, 2020

Daszak apparently misled Lauer in response to his request for a list of China-based participants on his research grant.

He responded by email to Lauer: “I can categorically state that no funds from 2R01 AI110964-06 have been sent to Wuhan Institute of Virology, nor has any contract been signed. Furthermore we will comply with NIAID’s requirements, of course.” The email referred to a grant number that only applied to the group’s grant since July 2019.

Daszak may have “played semantics” to give a false impression that EcoHealth had never signed a contract with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or subcontracted funds there, according to a Congressional investigation. Daszak did not mention the extensive work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology under the “Type One” NIAID award that underwrote the research collaboration until 2019. Daszak would soon after describe the group’s relationship with “colleagues in Wuhan” as spanning 15 years.

Lauer responded to Daszak: “Many thanks Peter for your response. We note that: No monies have gone to Wuhan Institute of Virology on the Type 2 award and no contract has been signed. You agree you will not provide any funds to Wuhan Institute of Virology until and unless directed otherwise by NIH. All foreign sites for the Type 1 and Type 2 awards have been documented in the progress reports submitted to NIH. We appreciate your working with us. Best, Mike.”

April 22, 2020

Lauer sent Tabak detailed information about EcoHealth and WIV, according to his notes.

April 23, 2020

On April 23, 2020, an EcoHealth employee told Lauer that “as usual we are in close contact with our program officer Erik Stemmy.”

Daszak’s office again reached out to Stemmy and Erbelding at NIAID about NIH’s requests for documents, which Daszak mistakenly refers to as a “FOIA request.” The three apparently participated on a call the next day.

April 24, 2020

Lauer sent a letter to Daszak terminating the grant.

“I am writing to notify you that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an Institute with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has elected to terminate the project Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, funded under grant R01 AI110964, for convenience,” it stated. “At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities.”

April 27, 2020

EcoHealth scheduled a call about “potential for geographic expansion” and “advice on next steps” with Stemmy, Erbelding, and Erbelding’s deputy.

The email subject line was “EHA EcoHealth, NIAID, NIH Geographic Expansion Call.”

Daszak wrote later that he made a pitch to Stemmy and Erbelding to expand EcoHealth’s research to Southeast Asia as a means of quelling concerns about its research in China. Four months later, NIAID granted EcoHealth a $7.5 million grant for the “Emerging Infectious Diseases South East Asia Research Collaboration Hub.”

April 28, 2020

Morens helped Daszak edit a statement about the grant’s termination.

April 30, 2020

Stemmy reached out to Daszak with “two new funding opportunities.”

May 6, 2020

Lauer sends detailed information about EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “OIG OI / ONS,” according to his notes, likely the HHS Office of the Inspector General’s Office of Investigations and HHS Office of National Security.

May 21, 2020

A letter cosigned by 77 Nobel laureates protests the grant’s suspension. The letter was prompted by Rich Roberts, chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs.

May 22, 2020

The law firm representing EcoHealth notifies the NIH that it was appealing the termination.

May 25, 2020

Daszak writes to Stemmy and Erbelding to inform them that he is appealing the termination of his grant. He thanks them for their “support on this and other work.”

Erbelding points Daszak to new funding opportunities and says that NIAID officials can advise him on how to successfully submit a proposal.

“We are always interested in hearing about your scientific advances,” Erbelding wrote. “I hope that you have seen our rolling [grant] announcements, which might afford you an opportunity to continue progress under another grant number. I know that Erik [Stemmy], Diane, and Alan in the Respiratory Disease Branch would be happy to advise you on a potential submission.”

June 23, 2020

At a June 23, 2020, Congressional hearing when Fauci was asked about the grant being terminated, he did not defend the decision by others within NIH to seek data from Wuhan. He simply stated “it was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it,” in an apparent allusion to Trump.

June 26, 2020

Democratic chairs of the House Committees on Energy and Commerce, and Science, Space and Technology address a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services with “strong concerns” about the termination of the EcoHealth grant, citing Fauci’s testimony in order to characterize the grant’s suspension as part of a wider provocation of China by the Trump administration.

“The Administration has been pushing this [lab leak] theory despite scientific experts saying this path of transmission would be virtually impossible given what is known about the virus and lab safety protocols,” the letter read. “If this theory is the basis for the grant termination, it would be an egregious example of the Administration politicizing scientific decision making in order to further a politically convenient narrative.”

July 8, 2020

Lauer suspends EcoHealth’s grant and asks Daszak for more information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He writes that EcoHealth is out of compliance with laws regulating federal subcontractors.

Building One sought information about RaTG13, a closely related virus to SARS-CoV-2 collected with the assistance of EcoHealth, a third party audit of the lab, and other details about the coronavirus work underway at the partner lab. Lauer asked that Daszak arrange an outside inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The letter asked that “specific attention” be paid “to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019.”

July 21, 2020

Democrats send a letter to NIH opposing EcoHealth’s suspension, citing Fauci’s congressional testimony, putting Building One in a bind.

“We are going to draft a response to the letter that doesn’t actually answer the questions in the letter but rather presents a narrative of what happened at a high level, ending with the reinstatement and attaching the NIH reinstatement letter,” wrote then-NIH Associate Director for Legislative Policy & Analysis Adrienne Hallett on July 21, 2020.

“Sounds like a good plan,” Collins replied.

August 27, 2020

The Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases grant moves ahead, and EcoHealth received a surge of $7.5 million from NIAID without having to turn over data about the Wuhan lab.

Like Daszak had suggested, the grant involved shifting some of the same lines of research to China’s neighbors.

Another $8.9 million is also awarded to two coauthors of the “Proximal Origin” paper that Fauci cited to downplay the possibility of a lab leak at the April 17, 2020, press conference.

October 23, 2020

Lauer rebuts the letter from Daszak’s lawyers and requests additional documents.

February 1, 2021

Morens writes to Daszak to request a briefing for Fauci on the WHO-China mission to Wuhan, in which a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was described as being “extremely unlikely.”

March 3, 2021

Erbelding has a call with Daszak. “Confirmed: Call with EcoHealth Alliance,” the email subject line read.

March 10, 2021

Lauer resends two prior letters (July 8, 2020 and October 23, 2020) to Daszak.

March 17, 2021

Morens meets with Daszak and Keusch on Zoom.

March 29, 2021

Morens edits Daszak’s response to Lauer.

April 11, 2021

Daszak replies to Lauer but the reply includes none of the requested documents.

April 13, 2021

Lauer again asks Daszak for documents.

April 23, 2021

Daszak submits some documents to Lauer.

May 16, 2021

The NIH Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration and Office of the General Counsel finds “multiple deficiencies” in the documents, according to Lauer’s notes.

May 26, 2021

The Office of the Director of Extramural Research, Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, and Office of the General Counsel meet and suggest that the Office of the Inspector General audit EcoHealth.

June 11, 2021 

OIG notifies NIH of a planned audit of NIH and EcoHealth.

Meanwhile, Collins’s advisory group at NIH opposes the scrutiny of EcoHealth in a statement: “Recent statements from numerous scientific organizations and leaders in the scientific community express grave concern about the termination of an NIH grant to Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance,” the statement read. “Members of the NIH ACD share the grave concerns expressed by the community.”

July 16, 2021

Erbelding and Stemmy had another call with Daszak about his grant update.

July 23, 2021

In a letter dated July 23, 2021, the NIH requested that EcoHealth provide records “validating expenditures specific to R01AI110964 as well as any and all monitoring, safety, and financial reports specific to R01AI110964 that WIV submitted to EcoHealth, in order to analyze WIV compliance with the terms and conditions of the grant.”

The NIH also informed EcoHealth that it was delinquent in the submission of its progress report for the period from June 1, 2018 to May 31, 2019. The report was due on September 30, 2019. The NIH requested that EcoHealth provide the remaining documents and outstanding reports by August 27, 2021.

August 27, 2021

EcoHealth progress report submits some of the requested paperwork, including a progress report due nearly two years prior.

October 20, 2021

NIAID concedes that it funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan via EcoHealth Alliance, and it was not properly reported to NIH, as reflected in the newly submitted progress report.

Yet Collins may have misled Congress and the public when NIH asserted in a press release that “analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

The statement did not reflect that the very same day NIH had asked EcoHealth to turn over any missing viral data. The NIH requested that EcoHealth provide all unpublished data supported by the grant not already reported in its progress reports.

October 26, 2021

Daszak asked Morens to help him edit his response to questions from Lauer, including the request for unpublished data.

November 2021 

Lauer asked EcoHealth to provide missing lab notebooks and electronic files requested by NIH, which had still not been supplied by Daszak.

January 6, 2022

The NIH again requested that EcoHealth provide the lab notebooks and WIV electronic files.

January 21, 2022

EcoHealth informed the NIH that it had forwarded the NIH’s January 6, 2022, letter to their collaborators in Wuhan but that they had not heard back.

August 19, 2022

The NIH notified EcoHealth that it was terminating the subaward from EcoHealth to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

September 28, 2022

Erbelding and Daszak participate on a call. The subject line is “Aim Renegotiation Discussion.”

October 18, 2022

Erbelding and Daszak participate on another call. The subject line is “Aim Renegotiation Discussion.”

May 8, 2023

EcoHealth’s grant is reinstated in a joint decision reached by Lauer, Erbelding, Diane Post, and Fauci’s principal deputy, Hugh Auchincloss.

The grant would proceed without collaboration from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with stricter biosafety and reporting standards.

September 2023

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is debarred from receiving federal funding for 10 years.

May 2024

Prompted by a Congressional investigation, the Department of Health and Human Services initiates a debarment investigation into EcoHealth and Daszak that could bar them from federal funding for years. Both the organization and Daszak personally have funding suspended as the investigation proceeds.

Daszak vows to contest it.

August 2024

EcoHealth repeats its strategy of leaning on contacts in the scientific community to maintain funding as it contests the debarment, releasing a statement to “commend virologists speaking out against lab leak disinformation and the anti-science movement.” The statement praises Fauci and media articles downplaying the lab-leak theory a conspiracy theory. It calls upon scientific organizations and professional societies to do the same.

The former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) contracted the mosquito-borne illness but is expected to fully recover, a spokesperson told Fox News. The top COVID-19 official ran the NIAID for four decades and consulted both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s administrations during the pandemic before retiring in 2022.

“Tony Fauci has been hospitalized with a case of West Nile virus. He is now home and is recovering. A full recovery is expected,” the spokesperson said.

West Nile virus has become the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease since it first entered the U.S. in 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Symptoms include fever, headache, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea and rashes, although roughly 80% of those who contract it will not experience any symptoms.

There are no vaccines or treatments for the virus, according to the CDC.

In 2020, Fauci became the public face of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which garnered widespread criticisms from Republican lawmakers for his opinions on the origin of COVID-19 as well as his imposition of mask and vaccine mandates and lockdown policies.

Fauci testified before the House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic during a hearing in January where he admitted that the COVID-19 era restrictions were likely not based on data or science but rather “sort of just appeared.”

“After two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, many things became evident,” Republican Ohio Rep. Brad Wenstrup, Chairman of the subcommittee, said in a statement after the hearing. “During his interview today, Dr. Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come. He testified that the lab leak hypothesis — which was often suppressed — was, in fact, not a conspiracy theory. Further, the social distancing recommendations forced on Americans ‘sort of just appeared’ and were not likely based on scientific data.”

The former COVID-19 advisor repeatedly dismissed lab leak theories as conspiracy, despite the Biden administration reportedly shutting down a State Department inquiry in 2021 investigating the origins of the virus.

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Paul, R-Ky., told The Daily Signal on Tuesday that it’s “disappointing” to see no action taken almost three years after he began demanding such a probe. His accusations stem from the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director’s testimony to Congress about U.S.-funded virus research in China, a central topic of Tuesday’s hearing.

Fauci testified in May 2021 that his agency never funded risky “gain-of-function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but Paul has repeatedly highlighted records and emails suggesting otherwise.

“If you happened to walk in the Capitol on Jan. 6, [2021], you might get 10 years in prison,” Paul said. “But if you’re responsible for funding research that led to a pandemic and killed 15 million people, and then you lied about it to Congress, then nothing happens to you.”

Paul filed a criminal referral against Fauci in July 2021 and again in July 2023 over the perjury claims. The Kentucky lawmaker told The Daily Signal that the lack of a response from federal prosecutors indicates America has “two standards of justice.”

Paul added: “In some ways, I’m very disappointed, but it’s not that I don’t expect it.” The senator blamed President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, whom he said is “probably the most partisan attorney general in our history.”

Fauci did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Paul’s allegations.

Paul made the remarks shortly after virology experts testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The committee’s four witnesses gave varying narratives on whether COVID-19 was the result of a Wuhan lab accident or if it arose naturally among animals.

Paul said in an opening statement that Fauci and his “inner circle” acknowledged the likelihood of a lab leak in private messages that were released through litigation. “Despite these private doubts, publicly, these so-called experts and their allies were dismissing the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy,” he said.

Paul also told The Daily Signal last month that Fauci “could be indicted” for deleting emails about COVID-19’s origins to circumvent public records law.

Fauci has claimed the U.S.-funded research suspected to have caused the leak, conducted through the EcoHealth Alliance, was not technically the “gain-of-function” research lawmakers have asked him about. He testified to a House panel earlier this month that the experiments didn’t fit “the regulatory and operative definition.”

That contradicted previous testimony from National Institutes of Health Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, who said Fauci’s agency did, in fact, fund gain-of-function experiments at the high-risk Wuhan lab before the COVID-19 pandemic.

(USRTK)—American researchers concealed their intention to conduct high-risk coronavirus research in Wuhan under lax safety standards from the Pentagon the year before COVID-19 pandemic, according to documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know.

A 2018 grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, coauthored by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and American scientists, has stoked concern that the pandemic resulted from a lab accident.

It proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as SARS and SARS-CoV-2. Most worrying to some scientists: The proposal involved synthesizing spike proteins with furin cleavage sites — the same feature that supercharged SARS-CoV-2 into the most infectious pandemic pathogen in a century. Indeed, some scientists have likened DEFUSE to a blueprint for generating SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.

New documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know now show that these experiments were proposed to occur in part in Wuhan with fewer safety precautions than required in the U.S. — apparently to save on costs. American scientists at the center of the “lab leak theory” controversy appear to have concealed this from their desired funder — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — in order to evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China.

The documents call into question the credibility of these scientists’ assurances that the pandemic could not have sprung out of their collaboration on coronavirus engineering research with the lab in Wuhan.

U.S. Right to Know has obtained an early draft of DEFUSE with comments from “PD” and “BRS.” Emails show these commenters to be “Peter Daszak” and “Baric, Ralph S.”

Daszak leads EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that discovers novel viruses. Baric helms a University of North Carolina lab with a focus on coronaviruses. Both Daszak and Baric have worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on gain-of-function research making coronaviruses more deadly or infectious.

The formal DEFUSE grant proposal states that Baric in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, will engineer the coronavirus spike proteins and test their ability to infect human cells.

But in a comment on an early draft of the proposal, Daszak clarifies that the Wuhan Institute of Virology will in fact do much of this work, but that this is excluded from the formal proposal to make DARPA “comfortable.” The comment is addressed to Baric and Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Zhengli Shi.

“Ralph, Zhengli. If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Daszak wrote. “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well…”

In another comment, Daszak said that he sought to “downplay the non-US focus of this proposal” to DARPA by not highlighting the involvement of the Chinese researchers, Shi and Duke-NUS Medical School Professor Linfa Wang.

“I’m planning to use my resume and Ralph’s,” Daszak wrote. “Linfa/Zhengli, I realize your resumes are also very impressive, but I’m trying to downplay the non-US focus of this proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.”

In addition to the national security risks, conducting coronavirus engineering and testing work in Wuhan entailed greater biosafety risks, the American researchers privately acknowledged.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has conducted research on SARS-related coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 in biosafety level two (BSL-2) conditions. Biosafety levels range from one (BSL-1) to four (BSL-4), with BSL-4 being the most stringent.

BSL-2 labs involve ventilated biosafety cabinets, with researchers in surgical masks and lab coats. Many scientists say viruses that may be transmitted through the air should at minimum be studied in BSL-3 conditions with ventilation and with researchers in more protective respirators.

An early draft of DEFUSE acknowledged that the engineering and testing of novel coronaviruses would occur at BSL-2. The proposal advertised this approach to DARPA grantmakers as “highly cost-effective.”

But “BSL-2” was edited to “BSL-3.”

In a comment on the document, Baric acknowledged that U.S. researchers would “freak out” if they knew the novel coronavirus engineering and testing work would be conducted in a BSL-2 lab.

“In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells,” Baric wrote.

Recombinant viruses are viruses made by combining different genetic elements of interest.

“In china, might be growin these virus [sic] under bsl2. US reseachers [sic] will likely freak out,” he said.

Daszak and Baric did not respond to emailed questions.

“That’s really damning,” said Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and co-founder of Biosafety Now, an organization that seeks tighter regulations for gain-of-function research. “These revelations are important because these specific experiments could, quite plausibly, have led to the genetic engineering and accidental release of SARS-CoV-2.”

“BSL-2 experiments are more convenient and less expensive than BSL-3 experiments … However, BSL-2 provides a far lower level of biosafety than BSL-3 does. This lower safety level is especially dangerous for experiments involving viruses that can be transmitted by air,” Kinney said. “It is very concerning that Daszak and Baric appear to have considered it legitimate to move high-risk experiments from BSL-3 to BSL-2. It is also concerning that they appear to have considered doing so in secret, instead of disclosing this important change of experimental plans and biosafety precautions in their grant proposal.”

The formal DEFUSE proposal states under “risk mitigation” that “experimental work using bats and of transgenic mice will be conducted at the BSL- 3 level in WIV, Duke-NUS, UNC, or [USGS National Wildlife Health Center],” without specifying an institution. It does not appear to mention the biosafety level in which high-risk research in cell lines will be undertaken.

DARPA rejected the DEFUSE proposal, despite the scientists apparently whitewashing the national security and biosecurity dangers.

The documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know suggest the gain-of-function work of concern was not funded before the grant submission in 2018. However, questions remain about whether the work was subsequently completed without the DARPA funding.

Daszak has insisted that the experiments proposed in DEFUSE were never carried out.

“The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple,” Daszak said last year.

However, Daszak had the ability to push forward with research without funding when a separate National Institutes of Health grant was halted, an email obtained by U.S. Right to Know shows.

A progress report for that NIH grant for the year ending in May 2018 shows that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and tested them in mice engineered to express human receptors.

‘Your luck may eventually run out’

Daszak has previously deflected concerns about the DEFUSE proposal in part by pointing to language in the final proposal stating that the gain-of-function research would occur at the Baric lab in North Carolina.

“This section of the proposal was written by collaborators at UNC in the U.S., where the work would have been carried out,” Daszak told Science earlier this year.

Wang has also said that the gain-of-function virology would occur in North Carolina.

The new documents show these statements to be misleading. In addition, Baric has in recent years called for “accountability” for labs in China for conducting risky experimentation with novel SARS-like coronaviruses at a BSL-2 level.

“As a sovereign nation, China decides their own biological safety conditions and procedures for research, but they should also be held accountable for those decisions,” he told MIT Technology Review in 2021. “If you study hundreds of different bat viruses at BSL-2, your luck may eventually run out.”

But Baric did not disclose his own foreknowledge and apparent complicity in the Wuhan lab’s lax biosafety standards.

While Shi was included in the email chain and addressed in Daszak’s comments on the draft proposal, it’s not clear whether Baric ever brought up the issue of biosafety levels directly with Shi or anyone else at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I would like to know if Baric had concerns about the risky live virus experiments being redistributed to labs operating at potentially low biosafety once funding was awarded,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute. “Seeing as how Baric recently described the pangolin SARS-like virus as an ‘optimal model’ for introducing a furin cleavage site into, is he at all worried that his collaborators might have carried out the experiments in DEFUSE independently of him and at lower biosafety?”

Daszak’s apparent effort to deceive DARPA fits a pattern of nondisclosure around the DEFUSE proposal. Despite its potential relevance to the origins of the pandemic, as well as Daszak’s role on the World Health Organization mission to uncover the origins, Daszak never disclosed the proposal to the public. It only became known to the world because of a leak to the independent online group DRASTIC.

The documents showing American collaborators may have concealed the extent of risky coronavirus virology happening in Wuhan follows years of revelations concerning inadequate biosafety precautions and trained personnel at that lab.

‘Freak out’

Evidence suggests Baric was accurate in his prediction that researchers would “freak out” about the coronavirus gain-of-function research underway in Wuhan’s BSL-2 labs.

When the novel coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, prominent scientists noticed with alarm that the gain-of-function work on novel coronaviruses occurred at an inadequate safety level.

“Performing these in BSL-3 (or less) is just completely nuts! IMO it has to be performed at BSL-4 with extra precautions,” Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen would observe privately in February 2020.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci — who had endorsed gain-of-function research and whose institute had helped underwrite the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance, UNC and the Wuhan Institute of Virology — asked in February 2020 whether certain experiments could have led to the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

He asked whether a technique called serial passage — in which successive infections speed up evolutionary changes — had been conducted in mice engineered to express human receptors called ACE2. Baric had shared transgenic mice expressing ACE2 — the receptor that both SARS and SARS-CoV-2 bind to — with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL2 lab?” asked Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health.

“Wild West,” responded Jeremy Farrar, former head of the Wellcome Trust and current chief scientist at the World Health Organization.

Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University virologist and former collaborator of the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology, told a reporter in an email that the work occurring in BSL-2 was “unacceptable.”

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology has worked with bat samples and cultured bat viruses at BSL-2. This is a matter of published record – materials and methods in two papers. This is unacceptable,” he said.

‘Mice don’t sneeze‘

Before the pandemic, Baric played a role in convincing the NIH to lift a pause on gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. A 2014 panel discussion about gain-of-function research regulations included Baric and involved discussion of polybasic cleavage sites like the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2.

“Mice don’t sneeze,” Baric told NPR in 2014 in opposition to the gain-of-function research pause, alleging mice could therefore not transmit coronaviruses.  However some viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can transmit through airborne aerosols.

The revelations about DEFUSE come on the heels of Congress passing a provision in an annual military spending bill last week that bars EcoHealth Alliance from using any defense funds in China.

The new documents also show the researchers intended to use less regulated SARS-related coronavirus research as proof of concept in order to extend their high-risk methods to more deadly viruses like Ebola, Marburg, Hendra and Nipah.

“While we are specifically targeting SARS-realted CoVS, this strategy will be applicable to ALL bat-borne viruses in future,”reads a comment apparently made by Wang.

U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents in this report from a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Geological Survey. Read all of the documents here.

Karolina Corin contributed reporting.

(Mercola)—According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the agency “is actively engaged in safety surveillance” of the COVID shots. They also claim that medical doctors and epidemiologists at the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “continuously screen and analyze” reports filed with the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) “to identify potential signals that would indicate the need for further study.”¹ Facts suggest otherwise.

Even officials at the FDA itself have stated that VAERS is not operating as intended, and that safety signals are not being addressed. Among them are Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Narayan Nair, the FDA division director who oversees VAERS.

Both spoke to investigative reporter Jennifer Block, whose article on the failures of VAERS was published in The BMJ in November 2023.²

“VAERS is supposed to be user friendly, responsive, and transparent. However, investigations by The BMJ have uncovered that it’s not meeting its own standards.

Not only have staffing levels failed to keep pace with the unprecedented number of reports since the rollout of COVID vaccines but there are signs that the system is overwhelmed, reports aren’t being followed up, and signals are being missed,” Block writes.

“VAERS’s standard operating procedure for COVID-19 states that reports must be processed quickly, within days of receipt. ‘Serious reports’ trigger the requisition of medical records and at minimum a ‘manual review,’ while deaths and other ‘adverse events of special interest’ may undergo a more ‘in-depth’ clinical review by CDC staff.

However, The BMJ has learnt that in the face of an unprecedented 1.7 million reports since the rollout of COVID vaccines, VAERS’s staffing was likely not commensurate with the demands of reviewing the serious reports submitted, including reports of death.

While other countries have acknowledged deaths that were ‘likely’ or ‘probably’ related to mRNA vaccination, the CDC — which says that it has reviewed nearly 20, 000 preliminary reports of death using VAERS (far more than other countries) — has not acknowledged a single death linked to mRNA vaccines.”

Unprecedented Influx of Reports Is a Clue in Itself

Before the COVID pandemic, VAERS received an average of 60,000 adverse event reports after vaccination each year. In the first year of the rollout of the experimental gene therapies against COVID (2021), reports skyrocketed to 1 million.

By the end of October 2023, the number of reports associated with the COVID shots was 1,605,764³ and, according to Block, nearly 1 in 5 of those reports involves a “serious” adverse event.

In 2021, few had ever heard of VAERS and medical staff were not instructed to file reports. In fact, there are many stories out there of medical staff being discouraged from doing so. Yet despite the lack of awareness and the intentional suppression of reporting, record setting numbers of adverse event reports were and continue to be filed.

That alone tells us something, and should have set off alarm bells at the FDA and CDC, which share responsibility for the VAERS database. Yet no bells have gone off, and both agencies nonchalantly insist that these data in no way reflect a potential problem.

Egregious Lies About VAERS

The video above features testimony from then-CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and then-director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci. Both claimed they had no idea how many deaths had been recorded in VAERS following the COVID shot — something which could have been done on the spot using a smartphone.

Even more egregious, Walensky claimed that “all” side effects are reported to VAERS. “So, if you get hit by a car shortly after being vaccinated, that gets reported in the VAER system,” she said. Fauci, apparently short on creativity, then repeated the same idiotic scenario to downplay the importance and value of VAERS as a pharmacovigilance system.

The fact of the matter is, there’s no artificial intelligence that automatically fills out post-vaccination stubbed toe and fender bender reports, and no one in their right mind would spend hours filing a report unless they suspected a link to a recently given vaccine. VAERS is a passive, voluntary reporting system, and the CDC was not encouraging, let alone requiring, anyone to file reports.

VAERS Is Shamefully Inadequate

Many who have tried to file a VAERS report have been struck by how difficult it is to use. Unless you have all your ducks in a row and every required piece of data at your fingertips, the system will time out, forcing you to start all over again.

Even as artificial intelligence is now being used to formulate drugs from scratch,⁴ one of the most important pharmacovigilance databases in existence hasn’t even been equipped with an intermittent save feature. Go figure.

Filing a VAERS report a time consuming process. It can take several hours for a trained medical professional to fill out a single report, and this is time that cannot be billed to anyone. As a result, side effects, including deaths, are massively underreported.

This alone makes filing a VAERS report an enormously time-consuming process. It can take several hours for a trained medical professional to fill out a single report. And, mind you, that is time that cannot be billed to anyone. If insurance were to reimburse doctors for filing adverse event reports, perhaps we’d get a clearer picture of the problem, but as it stands, vaccine side effects are notoriously underreported.

The fact that the COVID jabs have racked up more than 1.6 million reports in less than three years is in part due to the sheer number of doses administered (some 675 million in the U.S.) combined with the fact that the shots have an unprecedented harm ratio.

There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the 1.6 million reports account for most of the harm done. No, harms are still severely underreported. Before the pandemic, investigations concluded that only 1%^5,6 to 10%⁷ of side effects were ever reported.

COVID era calculations suggest adverse events of the jabs are underreported by a factor ranging from 20⁸ to 41.⁹ According to the CDC, COVID jab adverse effects in children, specifically, are underreported by a factor of 6.5.¹⁰

If we use an underreporting factor of 20, we could be looking at some 32 million Americans adversely affected by the shots, about 9.5% of the population. If we use a factor of 41, then as many as 65.6 million — 19.5% — may have been injured or killed.

If disability claims are any indication (and they reasonably would be), then the underreporting factor may indeed be somewhere between 20 and 41. After remaining flat between 2014 and 2020, disability claims suddenly jumped 15% between January 2021 and June 2023.¹¹

Anyone who thinks that’s a coincidence need to come up with a rational alternative that doesn’t include injecting a novel gene transfer technology into 81% of the population.¹²

What’s the Real Death Toll?

Block also highlights other problems with VAERS, including the fact that there’s a public front end, and a private back end that public users aren’t allowed to see. The biggest problem with that is that the public facing one only contains the initial reports. Corrections and updates on outcomes go into the private facing end.

As a result, we have no idea how many of the injuries may have resulted in death, weeks or months after the initial report was filed. In other words, the death count we see when we look at VAERS is the number of reports filed where death was the reason for filing the report in the first place.

We cannot see how many of those hospitalized or diagnosed with serious injuries ended up dying after the report was filed. Only the CDC and FDA have access to the updated reports.

The drawback of this should be obvious. It can leave the public with the false impression that deaths are less common than they are. We also don’t know how many injuries end up progressing and resulting in permanent disability, or how many of them resolve.

So, how many people have died over and above the 36,501¹³ initial reports of deaths filed as of October 27, 2023? We don’t know, because the FDA and CDC won’t tell us.

According to the FDA and CDC, the reason for not publicly sharing updated records is because data derived from medical records are protected by privacy laws. However, as noted by Block, the adverse event databases for drugs and medical devices overseen by the FDA both allow public access to the full datasets, including updates on outcomes, without breaking medical confidentiality laws. So, why can’t VAERS do the same?

FDA and CDC Are Ignoring Safety Signals

Worst of all, the FDA and CDC both ignore the safety signals blaring in the VAERS data. And because they don’t inform doctors about the potential side effects, doctors don’t make the connection between the shot and the health problems they see in their patients. As a result, they’re less likely to prescribe the correct tests, and less likely to arrive at the most appropriate treatment.

In a 2021 interview with journalist Alex Newman,¹⁴ Dr. Peter McCullough said he was baffled by the government’s nonexistent response to the thousands of deaths that by then had already been logged into VAERS, noting that the 1976 swine flu pandemic mass vaccination program was pulled after just 25 deaths and a few hundred cases of paralysis. Drugs are also yanked from the market at around 50 unexplained deaths.

The contrast in response is “alarming,” McCullough said. Fast-forward two years, and the publicly available death toll in VAERS has risen from some 3,500 to more than 36,500, yet the FDA still insists that the shots are “safe and effective.” Full stop. They’re so unconcerned they even added the COVID jabs to the childhood vaccination schedule, with the first jab series to be given to toddlers and babies as young as 6 months.

How the CDC Hides COVID Jab Dangers

Adding insult to injury, several investigations have shown the FDA^15,16 and CDC are also hiding, manipulating and/or falsifying data in a variety of ways that obfuscate the true extent of the harms. For example, in June 2022, the CDC paused its Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Reports (MMWR) to perform a “system upgrade.”

When it came back online two months later, large numbers of jab-related death categories had been moved, either into the COVID death category or a “holding” category for undetermined deaths, thereby making it appear as though deaths from cancer, heart attacks and strokes are far lower than they are.¹⁷ This gaming of the algorithm appears to have been automated as of that system update.

For the longest time, the CDC also refused to release the results of its Proportional Reporting Ratio¹⁸ (PRR) data mining, which measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

When the agency was finally forced to release the data, we discovered the PPR reveled hundreds of safety signals,¹⁹ all of which, according to the rules, require a thorough investigation to either confirm or rule out a possible link to the shots.

One of the few side effects of the COVID jabs that the CDC has actually acknowledged is myocarditis (heart inflammation), and a related condition called pericarditis (inflammation of the heart sack). Remarkably, the PRR monitoring results revealed there are more than 500 other adverse events that have stronger warning signals than either of those conditions.

Below is a summary list of some of the key findings from the CDC’s PRR analysis released in January 2023.^20,21,22,23

• In individuals aged 18 and older, there are safety signals for 770 different adverse events, and two-thirds of them (more than 500) have a stronger safety signal than myocarditis and pericarditis. Of those 770 signals, 12 are brand-new conditions that have not been reported following other vaccines.
• Topping the list of safety signals are cardiovascular conditions, followed by neurological conditions. In third and fourth place are thromboembolic conditions and pulmonary conditions. Death is sixth on the list and cancer is 11th. Considering the uptick we’ve seen in aggressive cancers, the fact that death tops cancer really says something.
• The number of serious adverse events reported between mid-December 2020 and the end of July 2022 (just over 19 months) for the COVID jabs is 5.5 times greater than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the U.S. over the last 13 years (approximately 73,000 versus 13,000).
• Twice as many COVID jab reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%), which meets the definition of a safety signal.
• The proportions of reported deaths, which was only provided for the 18+ age group, was 14% for the COVID jabs compared to 4.7% for all other vaccines. As noted by Fenton,²⁴ “If the CDC wish [sic] to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine adverse event results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines the onus is on them to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference.”
• In the 12- to 17-year-old age group, there are 96 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetency, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmia, thrombosis, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain and increased troponin levels (indicative of heart damage).
• In the 5- to 11-year-old group, there are 66 safety signals, including myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction, cardiac valve incompetency, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis and appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease, menstrual irregularities and vitiligo.

The CDC ignoring a clear signal for death is probably the most egregious example of its failures as a public health institution. As early as July 2021, Matthew Crawford published a three-part series^25,26,27 detailing how the CDC was hiding safety signals by using a flawed formula.

In August that year, Steve Kirsch informed the agency of these problems, but was ignored. Then, in an October 3, 2022, article,²⁸ Kirsch went on to show how “death” should have triggered a signal even when using the CDC’s flawed formula.

The CDC also hides the severity of side effects by using several categories for the same disease.²⁹ For example, “cardiac failure acute,” “cardiac failure,” “infarction,” “myocardial strain” and “myocardial fibrosis” are listed as separate categories, even though in real life they’re all potential effects of myocarditis.

By separating them, you end up with fewer frequency counts per category, thereby preventing the triggering of a warning signal. If related categories were merged, far stronger safety signals would likely emerge.

Resources for Those Injured by the COVID Jab

Data from across the world testify to a singular fact; that the COVID shots are the most dangerous drugs ever deployed. By turning a blind eye to the massacre and gaslighting the public with ridiculous and easily provable lies, the FDA and CDC are disqualified from making public health recommendations. You follow their advice at your own peril.

If you already got one or more COVID jabs and are now reconsidering, you’d be wise to avoid all vaccines from here on, as you need to end the assault on your body. Even if you haven’t experienced any obvious side effects, your health may still be impacted long-term, so don’t take any more shots.

If you’re suffering from side effects, your first order of business is to eliminate the spike protein that your body is producing. Two remedies that can do this are hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Both drugs bind and facilitate the removal of spike protein.

The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) has developed a post-vaccine treatment protocol called I-RECOVER. Since the protocol is continuously updated as more data become available, your best bet is to download the latest version straight from the FLCCC website at covid19criticalcare.com.³⁰

For additional suggestions, check out the World Health Council’s spike protein detox guide,³¹ which focuses on natural substances like herbs, supplements and teas. Sauna therapy can also help eliminate toxic proteins by stimulating autophagy.

• ^1, 2 BMJ 2023; 383: 2582
• ^3, 13 Open VAERS as of October 27, 2023
• ⁴ MIT Technology Review February 15, 2023
• ⁵ AHRQ December 7, 2007
• ⁶ The Vaccine Reaction January 9, 2020
• ⁷ BMJ 2005;330:433
• ⁸ COVID Vaccination and Age-Stratified All-Cause Mortality Risk (PDF)
• ⁹ Steve Kirsch Substack January 5, 2022
• ¹⁰ Steve Kirsch Substack January 6, 2022
• ¹¹ Eurasia Review July 28, 2023
• ¹² USA Facts Vaccination Progress
• ¹⁴ Rumble The New American 2021
• ¹⁵ Epoch Times September 10, 2022
• ¹⁶ Josh Guetzkow Substack September 14, 2022
• ¹⁷ The Ethical Skeptic, Houston, the CDC Has a Problem Part 2
• ¹⁸ All About Pharmacovigilance PRR
• ^19, 22 Epoch Times January 3, 2023 (Archived)
• ^20, 24, 29 Where Are the Numbers? Substack January 4, 2023
• ²¹ Josh Guetzkow Substack January 4, 2023
• ²³ Public Tableau PRR VAERS Data Summary 12/14/2020-7/29/2022
• ²⁵ Rounding the Earth Newsletter Part 1
• ²⁶ Rounding the Earth Newsletter Part 2
• ²⁷ Rounding the Earth Newsletter Part 3
• ²⁸ Steve Kirsch Substack October 3, 2022
• ³⁰ Covid19criticalcare.com
• ³¹ World Council for Health Spike Protein Detox Guide November 30, 2021

Here is Ron Unz’s exposure of the cover-up of the AIDS section of RFK Jr.’s book: “When hostile journalists seek to destroy a candidate, they naturally direct their coverage where they believe he is most vulnerable and do their best to ignore his greatest strengths. A shrewd campaign might use such biased reporting as a road-map, one that provides the photographic negative of the issues that should be emphasized. So if the Times and other media outlets seek to avoid the Kennedy assassination conspiracies, perhaps those are exactly the right issues to discuss.

But there is another incendiary topic on which the silence surrounding Kennedy’s position has been far more absolute across both the mainstream and the alternative media, so much so that probably only the tiniest sliver of Americans are even aware of Kennedy’s views. Based upon his extremely controversial writings, the candidate would seem so tremendously vulnerable that any such media coverage would immediately destroy his campaign and his reputation. Yet not a single hostile publication has ever reported those facts, suggesting that the true situation is actually quite different from what it appears to be. Perhaps this total silence implies that the Times and other media outlets dread that subject, fearing that it could destroy their entire media establishment if the facts came out and Kennedy were proven correct.

Until late 2021 I’d been only slightly aware of Kennedy, having vaguely heard that he’d become a leading figure in the growing anti-vaxxing movement. My own views on vaccines had always been quite conventional, not too different from those advocated by the Times, but I was persuaded to read his new book in order to get his side of the story.

To my utter amazement I discovered that the main subject of his text was something entirely different than what I had been led to believe. Kennedy had devoted nearly half the length—200 pages—to promoting the theory that AIDS did not exist as a real disease and was instead merely a medical media hoax concocted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his greedy corporate allies. But not a single one of those describing his book, whether supportive or critical, had ever hinted at this. Indeed, when I mentioned the true subject of Kennedy’s text to a couple of people, they almost seemed to think that I was delusional, considering it impossible that no one would have revealed such a startling fact.

Kennedy’s book quickly became the #1 Amazon bestseller and he soon drew extremely harsh media attacks, including a 4,000 word article produced by a large team of Associated Press journalists. But as I noted, although they denounced him on every other point none of them ever mentioned his explosive AIDS claims.”

Dr. Donald W. Miller, Jr., tells the story of Duesberg’s work exposing the AIDS myth: “Peter H. Duesberg (b.1936) is a molecular biologist. He is Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg questions, on a submicroscopic scale, two tenets of biology. One is the germ theory of AIDS. He contends that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. The other is the gene mutation hypothesis of cancer. Duesberg claims that mutations in genes are not the cause of cancer.

Admired as a “wunderkind” in the 1970s, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) awarded him a long-term Outstanding Investigator Grant; he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize; the U.S. National Academy of Science, in 1985, invited him to join the academy, a high honor among scientists, especially for one then only 49 years old; and in 1986 he was awarded a Fogarty fellowship to spend a year at the NIH studying cancer genes. But in 1987 Duesberg ran afoul of the establishment. He published a paper in Cancer Research titled “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality,” followed a year later by one in Science, “HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS.” Thereafter, Duesberg was subjected to the punishment now accorded modern-day heretics. The NIH ceased giving him grants (the NIH and other federal and state funding sources have rejected his last 21 consecutive research grant applications), colleagues labeled him “irresponsible and pernicious” (David Baltimore) and his work “absolute and total nonsense” (Robert Gallo), and graduate students at Berkeley were advised not to study with Duesberg if they wanted to go on and have a successful career in biology. He was branded a “rebel,” a “maverick,” an “iconoclast,” and by one writer, in an article in Science in 1988 titled “A Rebel Without a Cause of AIDS,” a “gadfly.” Blocked from receiving grants, he obtained private funds to maintain his laboratory at UC Berkeley, and he now spends part of each year doing research in Germany.

His principle work on HIV/AIDS is Inventing the AIDS Virus, published in 1996. In this book, and in other papers he has written on the subject, Duesberg systematically dismantles, piece by piece, the germ theory of AIDS. This theory/hypothesis has two parts: 1) HIV causes AIDS, and 2) HIV is sexually transmitted.

With regard to sexual transmission, only 1 in 1,000 unprotected sexual contacts transmit HIV. One in 275 U.S. citizens has antibodies to this virus. Therefore, an uninfected person could have up to 275,000 random unprotected sexual contacts without acquiring sexually transmitted HIV. Prostitutes do not get AIDS, unless they are drug addicts; and wives of HIV-positive hemophiliacs do not contract AIDS from their husbands. Proponents of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis ignore these facts. The dire heterosexual AIDS epidemic predicted to occur in the U.S., Canada, and Europe twenty years ago has not happened, and the disease remains confined to the original two main risk groups – gay men (66 percent of all AIDS cases) and intravenous drug users, male and female (32 percent). The other 2 percent are hemophiliacs and babies born to mothers who used intravenous drugs during pregnancy. The easiest way to acquire HIV sexually is through receptive anal intercourse.

Unlike other viruses, which cause diseases such as smallpox, mumps, and herpes, a retrovirus is like a hitchhiker going along for the ride. It enters a cell, mixes its genes up with those the cell possesses and aligns its fate with that of the cell. Retroviral genes make up an estimated 8 percent of the approximately 35,000 genes in the human genome. It is not in the retrovirus’ self-interest to destroy the cell it lives in. Its survival is contingent on the host cell staying healthy. But HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), a retrovirus, supposedly causes AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) by killing the T cell it infects. Without an adequate number of T cells immunodeficiency results, rendering a person susceptible to AIDS. As Duesberg points out, however, two important facts argue against this model: HIV infects, at most, only 1 in 500 T cells. And T cells infected with HIV placed in a test tube (in vitro) grow and thrive. The cells do not die. Instead, they manufacture large quantities of the virus, which providers use to detect antibodies to HIV in their patients’ blood. For these and a dozen other reasons, the germ theory of AIDS is wrong. HIV is a harmless passenger on the AIDS airplane, not its pilot.

Perhaps Duesberg’s final statement on HIV/AIDS will be “The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition,” published in 2003. Rebel he may be, as Science avers, but Duesberg is not without a cause for AIDS. He wrote this paper with Claus Koehnlein and David Rasnick. I heard Dr. Rasnick, also a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, present this paper at the 2003 meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. They hypothesize that AIDS is caused by three things, singly or in combination: 1) long-term, heavy-duty recreational drug use – cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, and nitrite inhalants; 2) antiretroviral drugs doctors prescribe to people who are HIV positive – DNA chain terminators, like AZT, and protease inhibitors; and 3) malnutrition and bad water, which is the cause of “AIDS” in Africa.

AIDS appeared in young gay men in the early 1980s following an explosion of recreational drug use that began twenty years earlier in the 1960s. Male homosexuals are the highest users of recreational drugs. AZT, given to people who are HIV-positive, first used in 1987, is another cause of AIDS. As Duesberg and coauthors show in this paper, a chemical (noninfectious) basis for AIDS is supported by a lot of important data. One fact is this, which government spokespersons and the media do not report: HIV-positive people treated with antiretroviral drugs have a four to five times higher annual mortality rate compared to HIV-positive people who refuse treatment with these drugs – 6.6–8.7 percent vs. 1.4 percent. Duesberg writes, “AIDS is stabilized, even cured, if patients stop using recreational drugs or AZT – regardless of the presence of HIV. The drug hypothesis predicts that AIDS is an entirely preventable and in part curable disease.”

There are other, larger societal issues that resonate around AIDS. In AIDS: Virus or Drug Induced (1996), Duesberg writes:

The AIDS virus [HIV] also proved to be the politically correct cause of AIDS. No AIDS risk groups [e.g., gay men] could be blamed for being infected by a God-given egalitarian virus. A virus could reach all of us. Nobody would be ostracized. We are all in this together.’ Not so with drugs. The consumption of illicit psychoactive drugs implies individual and social responsibilities that nobody wanted to face… The perceived danger of an AIDS virus decimating the general public also provided the scientific and moral arguments for quick and unreflective action and for the complete dismissal of the competing drug-AIDS hypothesis.”

K. Lloyd Billingsley details Fauci’s efforts to ruin Duesberg: “Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but his bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry. In 1984, Fauci became head of the NIAID and in that role contended that AIDS was caused by a virus known as HIV. Peter H. Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, found no scientific evidence for that claim.

As Duesberg explained in “Inventing the AIDS Virus,” HIV is “one of the many harmless passenger viruses that cause no clinical symptoms during the acute infection,” and he was hardly alone. Scientists challenging the HIV-AIDS hypothesis included Nobel laureate Kary Mullis; Charles Thomas, former professor of microbiology at Harvard University; and biologist and science historian Robert Root-Bernstein, author of “Rethinking AIDS.”

Unable to refute Duesberg scientifically, Fauci did his best to “cancel” the distinguished medical scientist. In 1988, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour sent camera crews to interview Duesberg, but the PBS show pulled the interview and replaced it with a short segment of Fauci attacking Duesberg.

In 1989, Fauci complained in an editorial that Duesberg’s ideas were getting too much publicity. ABC’s “Good Morning America” flew Duesberg to New York for an in-studio interview. That same evening, the Berkeley professor got word that the interview had been cancelled. When viewers tuned in, they saw Fauci.

In 1993, Fauci tried unsuccessfully to get Duesberg cancelled from ABC’s “Day One” program. In 1994, Ted Koppel of ABC’s “Nightline” agreed to give Duesberg a hearing, but when the show finally aired, there was Fauci once again.

As Duesberg contended, Fauci was the government mouthpiece for “AIDS thought control.”

Fauci doesn’t want any public discussion of Duesberg’s views on AIDS. He said in 1994, according to a story in the Washington Post, “ “It’s extremely dangerous to all the educational efforts about safe sex and IV drug use,” Fauci said. “If they [the speakers at a conference of AIDS skeptics] were just blowing off steam and it didn’t matter, then we wouldn’t care. But these statements can take a terrible toll on the public health.”

Let’s do everything we can to support the heroic Dr. Peter Duesberg and end “Dr.” Fauci’s tyranny.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Article cross-posted from Lew’s site.

While most Americans have a healthy distrust for politicians, corporate media, and Hollywood stars, a strong majority of people got jabbed anyway for one huge reason: Most doctors were on board with the mass-vaccination program. Many might laugh when Bill de Blasio or Sean Hannity advise us to get jabbed, but with so many doctors echoing the sentiment, millions if not tens of millions dismissed their better judgment based on recommendations from medical professionals.

Studies and strong data points demonstrating the jabs were neither safe nor effective started coming out mere weeks after the rollout, so why did it take most doctors so long to get clued in? A recently surfaced copy of Kentucky Anthem Medical’s “Covid-19 Vaccine Provider Incentive Program” may offer the obvious answer:

They say money can’t buy you love, but it can buy silence, compliance, and loyalty.

Look at those numbers.

We have always known why the mega-hospitals and medical organizations got on board with massive payments from Big Pharma, but now it’s easy to understand why doctors in smaller practices played ball as well. The threshold to qualify for incentives was one injection. That’s it. These are awfully big payouts for doctors to do a 90-second procedure. And lest we forget, these are the incentives from the insurance company, not Big Pharma… unless you realize that the insurance companies and Big Pharma have been in bed with each other since Obamacare was launched.

Don’t Forget Fauci

With all of these shenanigans happening between doctors, Big Pharma, and the insurance companies, surely the medical watchdogs and corruption bloodhounds in our government can see the conspiracies and shut them down, right? If you believe that, you probably still get your news from MSNBC or Fox News.

As most of our brilliant readers know, government officials are in on it as well. Sometimes, they’re the orchestrators of the evil plans. Other times, they’re just the lapdogs of Big Pharma and the Globalist Elite Cabal. With Covid-19, the rise of Pandemic Panic Theater can be traced back to two men: Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.

Both of the longtime directors of the National Institutes of Health and its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are now conveniently retired to live off the spoils of their taxpayer-funded reigns of terror, but even their inflated salaries were minuscule compared to how much they were paid by the companies they were supposed to be regulating. A watchdog group recently dropped a bombshell about the Fauci-Collins con job.

According to Just The News:

Transparency watchdog OpenTheBooks.com on Wednesday published more than 1,500 pages of unredacted records identifying which companies paid which NIH scientists for which inventions and when, following a mostly successful Freedom of Information Act battle with NIH.

The 56,000 transactions add up to more than $325 million, according to OpenTheBooks, though the individual amounts for each payment and corresponding license are not listed in the records.

Fauci received 37 payments from three companies between 2010-2021: 15 from Santa Cruz Biotechnology, which creates products for medical research including antibodies and made the fifth-most payments in the royalty database; 14 from Ancell Corp., which produces immunology tolls; and eight from Chiron Corp., acquired by Novartis in 2006.

Novartis has received $17 million in NIH contract payments and $15 million in NIH grants since the acquisition. Fauci’s NIAID contracted with Chiron in 2004 to help develop an avian influenza vaccine. He was the highest-paid federal employee when Fauci retired at year’s end, with a $480,000 salary in 2022.

Collins, the NIH director who stepped down at the end of 2021 and then served as President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 czar, received 21 payments from four companies between 2010-2018, led by 12 from genetic research firm GeneDx, which has received $5 million in federal contract payments mostly from NIH since 2008.

Four payments to Collins came from Quest Diagnostics’ Specialty Laboratories, which provides biological testing services; four from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, originally named ISIS, known for RNA-targeted therapeutics; and one from Progeria Research Foundation, a nonprofit specializing in research for the congenital disorder.

OpenTheBooks said obtaining the names and license numbers for each payment, which NIH redacted before a court ordered that information made public, were crucial for “scrutinizing these records for potential conflicts of interest or public health risks.”

It will help determine whether Fauci was truthful when he told Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) at a hearing last year that “I doubt” Fauci received any royalties from any entity that received NIAID money overseen by Fauci, OpenTheBooks said.

As much as I like Senator Paul, I do not have high hopes that he’ll be able to hold anyone accountable. Fauci and Collins are Mafiosos in the globalist crime syndicate. They’re made men, protected from scrutiny and immune to justice. Being high-ranking minions of Satan has advantages… at least in this life.

Keep all of this in mind and spread the word to friends and family. They need to know about the incentives, kickbacks, and corruption that drove Pandemic Panic Theater because another round is likely just around the corner.

Leave your thoughts about this on my Substack.

In this video, I interview journalist Celia Farber about her recently republished book, “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS.” As a young reporter working for SPIN magazine, Farber started questioning the official narrative around AIDS, and this book is the outgrowth of her decades-long investigation into and writing about this “hot potato” topic.

Long before censorship went mainstream, Farber was put through the wringer. In 2006, she published an article in Harper’s Magazine titled “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science.” In it, she highlighted the work of virologist and retrobiologist Peter Duesberg, who insisted that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

In my view, Duesberg was brilliant, but like so many other brilliant scientists, he was widely discredited for not going along with the narrative promoted by the conventional medical establishment.

As a result of her reporting, Farber was vehemently attacked by leading AIDS researchers and activists,¹ so much so, she ended up suing three of the attackers for defamation. The New York County Supreme Court dismissed² her claim in 2011 and upheld the verdict in 2013. Still, she did not quit or back down, and kept searching for the truth.

‘The Passion of Duesberg’

As explained by Farber, Duesberg worked at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, one of the most well-respected scientific institutions in the world. After moving to the United States, he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1987, he published a paper in Cancer Research, proposing that retroviruses are not the cause of cancer, nor the cause of AIDS. According to his scientific biographer, this was the paper that “sealed his scientific doom forever after.” Farber notes:

“Duesberg mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses. So to him, yes, they were entities, but no, they didn’t do anything. They didn’t infect or kill cells. They were harmless. And he had phrases like, ‘HIV, that’s a pussycat. It’s not going to do anything. Saying that HIV is going to cause AIDS is like saying you’re going to conquer China by killing three soldiers a day.’

In other words, there’s no ‘there’ there. There was no cell death. And fascinatingly, or disturbingly, the HIV orthodoxy never contested that. So, I would say they had a supernatural belief in HIV. They would say, ‘We just know HIV causes AIDS,’ and anybody who doesn’t know that is dangerous, homophobic, murderous and so forth.”

Mid-Air Flip in the ‘Scientific Consensus’

As explained by Farber, up until Dr. Robert Gallo claimed he’d discovered HIV in his laboratory in 1984, and determined that it caused AIDS, the scientific consensus had been that retroviruses, as a class, were not pathogenic.

“So, there’s this very strange midair complete flip where everything changes overnight,” Farber says. “It’s like a revolutionary change, and the classical scientists of integrity were so thrown by this. They didn’t even attend the press conference.

They didn’t think there was any chance, as they said, that this would fly, this press conference where Robert Gallo announces that a so-called retrovirus is the cause of AIDS.

Back to Peter. What he does that’s so monumental in the history of American science, post 1980s, is that he, first of all, dissents. And he has no idea that he’s doing anything dangerous, never mind career annihilating. And he’s conducting himself as a scientist should. He’s innocent in what he’s doing, and it’s like a building just falls on him.

Next thing you know, his name becomes synonymous with ‘wrong, dangerous, homophobic, murderous.’ And then this culture kicks in where it becomes a sport and a career advancement to trash Duesberg if you have anything to do with AIDS research.

It was gladiatorial. They went out of their way to come up with lurid and hideous things to say about him. And it went all over the international press. So, he became this scapegoat for the errors and crimes of [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s AIDS apparatus.

Meanwhile, over in AIDS land, everything they were predicting and terrorizing people with was not coming true at all, was not panning out, whereas Duesberg’s predictions and critiques were panning out exactly. And the more he was right and they were wrong, the more trashed he got.

So, in a sense, what I’ve covered is not just about the nitty-gritty of the science and who’s correct. It’s about this moment of where science becomes, under Tony Fauci, ‘woke.’ It wasn’t called woke then. It was then called political correctness.

So, in other words, ‘AIDS spreads like this or like that and is going to affect everybody,’ because that’s what we’re supposed to say politically, not because that’s true biologically or epidemiologically. So, we’re all stuck now in this brand new era where you get flogged for observing 2+2 = 4 …

The question fascinated me because I just couldn’t square the circle. How come these guys over here are all saying this, and then this top scientist is saying this, and then others rallied around him? Kary Mullis, who invented PCR, and was a staunch defender and friend of Duesberg, always said, ‘He’s absolutely right.’

So, the dissent movement was saying, ‘There must be proof in science.’ Gallo provided no proof that HIV was the cause of AIDS or a coherent pathogen. So, it just kept growing and growing, and with a few exceptions, I had the field to myself. Nobody wanted to interview these people because it was absolutely radioactive to your career, and I can certainly attest to that.

I actually didn’t realize it was dangerous. I was naïve. And I was already way too far out at sea when the bludgeoning began and I realized how dangerous it, in fact, was, and that the people we were up against were of a much more dangerous variety than I had realized.”

Fauci’s Legacy: A Lifelong Suppression of Science

Farber’s experience is proof positive that even four decades before Fauci sold us on his destructive COVID protocols, he had the power to destroy people and convince the entire country to support a fake narrative.

“Let me speak a little bit how he did that, having lived through it. Let’s say that an editor at a major magazine or newspaper became interested in a story and thought to get a reporter on it. Somehow, he had, I guess it was a surveillance network. He knew and went in there, and somehow the story dies. The reporter gets taken off it. The show gets canceled.

I had one friend who had a major local ABC show. It was a new talk show, and he had Duesberg on and myself. The next thing you know, the whole show is canceled, and he never worked again. It was GDR [German Democratic Republic] stuff and it was across the board. It was 100% consistent that anybody who touched it [was warned they’d be destroyed] … That was their word, ‘destroy.’

One top level AIDS researcher named John P. Moore sent out an open declaration of war [against AIDS] ‘denialists’ that said, ‘We will crush you. We crush all of you.’ So that was the climate of it. Now, after all these years, I’m realizing they were part of something much larger.

They were part of this new revolutionary, post-modern, 2+2 does not equal 4 science. ‘It is whatever we tell you it is.’ They created that empire of terror during AIDS, for sure.

It’s just that not that many people knew about it because it was still within the corridors of certain risk groups and some unfortunate journalists or scientists who got caught up in it. Then with COVID, they threw a much bigger net because … it was a little more difficult to get people into the trap.”

The PCR Scam and Suppression of Useful Drugs

As with COVID-19, one of the key tools used to promote the “HIV causes AIDS” narrative was the use of the PCR test, which the inventor, Mullis, was vehemently against.

The PCR was used to measure “viral load,” which was supposed to give you a sense of how sick or well you could expect to be. This kept HIV-positive patients going back to the doctor to get tested repeatedly. But it was nothing more than a numbers game, just as it was during COVID.

There are other similarities to what happened with COVID, including the vilification and discrediting of scientists and therapies that could effectively address the disease. Just like they vilified ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, even going out of their way to fund fraudulent studies to discredit these drugs, they did the same during the AIDS epidemic.

For example, bactrim was an inexpensive drug that effectively treated AIDS-related pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which was frequently fatal. This drug, like ivermectin, was withheld. Instead, Fauci insisted AIDS patients be treated with AZT, a horrendously toxic and expensive cancer drug that was never proven to work, and which killed hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients.

“AZT is one of the darkest, most shocking chapters. AZT was a chemotherapy compound that was shelved in the early ’60s for being too toxic for human use. For reasons that cannot be fathomed, they pulled that compound out of the drawer, put it in capsule form and made it the first drug to treat AIDS, a condition of immune devastation …

The estimate I’ve heard is that upward of 300,000, mostly gay men, died from high-dose AZT in the early years. That’s 1,200 to 1,800 milligrams. All of a sudden, Fauci drops the dose to 500 mg and people start dying less, which incredibly he spun into that he was saving lives because they lowered the dose of what was killing people.

So, a lot of these dark tricks are exactly the same as COVID. AZT was a black swan event, I would say, in medicine. But what it achieved, that we’re still suffering from, was this demolition of the formerly conservative FDA drug approval process, which was turned into something bad, evil. ‘You only support [the FDA drug approval process] if you hate people and you want them to die. You want it to take 10 years to test a drug? That’s cruel’ …

So, a lot of what we’re in today, like these insane ways of medicating and treating people without any regard for safety or possibility of death, a lot of these concepts were put into place during the AIDS epidemic.”

AIDS Activists Played Into Fauci’s Hands

Farber also reviews how AIDS activists empowered Fauci to circumvent historical safety protocols to get experimental drugs to patients as quickly as possible. AIDS activists also acted as Fauci’s foot soldiers or henchmen in that they helped him quash the opposition. In many ways we saw this during COVID as well. People brainwashed into believing masks could block viruses, for example, acted as civilian enforcers of Fauci’s clearly unscientific recommendations.

“It’s a good question ‘Who was Fauci in the beginning there?’ How did he transform into somebody so ruthless, so unaccountable? And I’m being nice right now. As an historian of all of this, I place a lot of credence in the symbiosis between Fauci and the AIDS activists, because the AIDS activists were revolutionary, and they did have a revolutionary creed, which was, ‘By any means necessary, we demand what we demand.’

And [Fauci] was a bureaucrat. A trained Jesuit … I think he’s a perfect general in a much bigger war that seeks to destroy many things outside of science. That’s my take on it. I think this is the big international war that seeks domination over human beings, period. Full stop. And these spectral virus diseases are a good revolutionary tool to get us there.

We made the mistake of seeing them as genuine outbreaks of something … I don’t believe any of that anymore. I think this is all part and parcel of the great leap forward.”

Fauci Spent a Lifetime Undermining Health Wisdom

Farber continues:

“One thing Fauci really honed over so many years is that nothing [but drugs or vaccines] makes a difference. There’s no terrain. Nutrition doesn’t matter. No research went to that, and it was absolutely scorned, again, both by Fauci and by the AIDS activists and so forth.

So, it was a culture of ‘You’re a machine, you’ve got this bad bug in you.’ It’s the machine model of biology. The bad bug is eating up your T-cells on an algorithm that’s inevitable and unstoppable, and nothing will influence that. Getting out in the sun, swimming in the ocean, eating well, what you think, whether you meditate or pray, none of that’s going to affect it.

So, in that sense, he’s advocating for a complete inversion of everything we all know to be true about health. And that’s really his legacy. He spent 40, 50 years getting Americans to think about everything else but how to stay healthy.”

How We Can Undermine the Public Health Tyranny

In addition to that, Fauci has also played a central role in furthering the ideology of technocracy and transhumanism, which aims to implement a One World Government under the veil of global biodefense. What we’re facing now is public health tyranny, in the sense that food and medicine are being turned into tools to control and manipulate entire populations.

“With AIDS, there was still choice,” Farber says. “You were heavily brainwashed. But if you got tested and you tested HIV positive, you still had a choice to take the drugs or not. What they are going to do next is, of course, what we’re all worried about.

I think people are largely woken up, very much so. But does it matter how awake you are if they have seized control of the whole apparatus of functional life? That’s what we have to stop, and I want to talk about how. How is that done? I think, by and large, it’s done by keeping your body healthy, keeping your mind clear, keeping your soul clear, and then you can go from there.

We can’t necessarily control whatever they’re going to try to do. But the good news is, to my mind, how stupid they are, how sloppy they are, how many mistakes they’ve made, and how much people hate them right now.”

More Information

To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS.” You can also subscribe to Farber’s Substack, The Truth Barrier.

• ¹ Courthouse News February 27, 2013
• ² Supreme Court Decision November 2, 2011

Article and video courtesy of Dr. Mercola.

That’s the vibe from a recent interview with Anthony Fauci. He admitted to supporting the textbook definition of gain-of-function research, then denied that it was gain-of-function research.

According to Breitbart:

Fauci stated, [relevant remarks begin around 1:12:35] “There [are] a number of experiments that need to be done on viruses. How are you going to know whether or not they’re capable of infecting humans unless you examine them? Which means doing something under certain circumstances that make a pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic, which some people refer to as gain of function.”

Corporate media said nothing, of course, but confusingly neither did many in conservative or alternative media.

Breitbart covered it briefly. Natural News did a story on it (below). But otherwise, I haven’t seen much from the right side of the media fence, echoing the silence that’s expectedly coming from the left side.

Let’s call it what it is. Fauci and his cohorts in and out of the NAIAD participated in or funded gain-of-function research. Chances are extremely high that this research resulted in Covid-19.

It’s no wonder that Fauci and Friends have been so adamant about blaming Covid on bat soup or whatever the excuse du jour is. They know what they did and they realize if the public found out, they’d be in big trouble.

Unfortunately, the public is not likely to find out definitively because even admissions like the one he made last week aren’t drawing enough attention. He has been very bad at slipping up and reversing himself over the past three years. Perhaps journalists have just become accustomed to it and don’t think it’s a big deal. Or maybe they’re just jaded by the lack of redemption that’s come to those who have been screaming about it for months or even years. Whatever the reason, this “buried bombshell” is likely to remain buried along with the other mountains of evidence that our own government participated in launching the pandemic.

Here’s the article by Belle Carter at Natural News explaining the Fauci situation further:

Fauci CONFIRMS Gain-of-Function Research Conducted on Pathogen Blamed for COVID-19 Pandemic

Infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has confirmed that gain-of-function research was indeed performed on pathogen behind the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director made the confirmation during the March 21 edition of “American Masters” on PBS.

“How are you going to know whether or not they’re capable of infecting humans unless you examine them? Which means doing something under certain circumstances that make a pathogen more transmissible or more pathogenic, which some people refer to as gain of function,” Fauci explained (Related: Rep. Jim Jordan: Fauci prioritized gain-of-function research, concealed real origin of COVID-19.)

However, Fauci was adamant that the gain-of-function research behind COVID-19 did not happen at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. The infectious disease expert also denounced Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for “insidiously” questioning the work done at the WIV.

“They’ve looked at various grants and they make something of it that it isn’t,” Fauci said. “The microbe [the WIV was] working on, not only was not SARS-CoV-2, it would be molecularly impossible for them to turn it into SARS-CoV-2.”

Fauci, Bowser rebuked while touring DC neighborhood

A section of “American Masters” showed Fauci and Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser visiting the neighborhood of Anacostia in June 2021. The two officials went house to house in the neighborhood to encourage residents to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

In a voice-over recorded prior to the visit, Fauci explained that Anacostia is a historically marginalized Black area with low determinants of health, poor access to care and high rates of COVID-19 cases and vaccine hesitancy as a result.

“They’re sort of the disenfranchised group that we’ve got to reach out to,” he said.

While some of the locals warmly received Fauci and Bowser, some had hesitations with getting vaccinated and peppered them with questions. But one man unloaded on both officials.

“The people in America are not settled with the information that’s been given to us right now,” the Anacostia resident pointed out, alleging that the the number of COVID-19 deaths is manipulated by the federal government.

“It’s about inciting fear in people. You attack people with fear. That’s what this pandemic is – fear.”

Fauci and his party eventually left, failing to convince the man to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The man explained that he would not take in “vaccines that were developed in a short span of time.”

Michael Kantor, executive producer of the “American Masters,” said: “Dr. Fauci is a very controversial figure, and there are going to be people who are going to voice – just as in the film – great displeasure about what he’s done and about his approach to things. But isn’t that the whole point of public media? It is intended to make that conversation happen in the best possible way.”

Not when there is censorship. But that’s another story.

Visit FauciTruth.com for more stories about the infectious disease expert and erstwhile government official.

Watch the exchange between the Anacostia resident and Fauci’s group below.

This video is from The Prisoner channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• THREE YEARS LATE: Energy Department finally concludes that COVID probably came from a Chinese lab.
• ReFounding America: COVID-19 and AIDS pandemics under Fauci’s watch share similarities – Brighteon.TV.
• Gain-of-function means bioweapon: Musk blasts Fauci for overseeing creation of COVID-19.
• Oversight on Fauci’s part allowed gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan to continue.
• Twitter slaps down Project Veritas moments after exposing major Fauci “gain of function” research lie with ban from platform.

Sources include:

• Breitbart.com
• NYPost.com
• Independent.co.uk
• Brighteon.com