If you’ve followed the very, very public career of MSNBC’s favorite COVID talking head, Peter Hotez, you’re mindful of his penchant for hyperbole, sanctimony and persistent self-aggrandizement. Hotez also displays matchless talent for morphing any displeasing action into a malevolent force arrayed against democracy and Western civilization.

However, it now appears that one malevolent force may be Peter Hotez himself.

A former dean at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research filed a civil rights lawsuit that claims the very married Peter Hotez conspired with her boss to get her fired after she rejected Hotez’s continual sexual advances to start an extramarital affair—flirtations that included Hotez’s professions of love for her while bragging about his prior philandering.

Hotez even texted her an awkward joke about all the Cialis he had purchased.

“I have proof to support the above, including documentary proof,” wrote former Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research dean Annette Lee in an email to her superiors. “Please I request an investigation.”

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Unrequited love, professional retaliation

Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research filed a motion days ago to request a district judge preside over the matter involving Lee, Hotez, and the institute’s chief executive officer, Kevin Tracey. According to Lee’s lawsuit, she has been colleagues with Hotez and Tracey since they all three trained together at Rockefeller University in the 1980s.

Lee says she had no significant contact with Hotez until they reconnected in 2019 at a birthday celebration for a mutual mentor. Lee later nominated Hotez for an award—named after this same mentor—that Hotez received at her institution in 2024. Following the award event, Hotez and Lee had drinks and “Hotez unexpectedly confessed that he had been in love with Lee since graduate school.”

In the following months, Hotez called and sent Lee numerous texts professing his love for her, as well as bragging about awards he had received (to impress her). He also invited Lee to accompany him to scientific conferences “even though they have no common research interests” according to Lee.

Lee rejected Hotez’s repeated requests for a sexual relationship, asking that they remain friendly.

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However, in September of that year, a fire broke out at the Feinstein Institutes, shutting down Lee’s lab and causing her extreme stress and conflict at work. Lee vented to Hotez about her work situation and he sent her a long text, repeating his love for her.

Lee responded to Hotez, in jest, that people had better keep her away from a gun. “Heading to the gym before work,” texted Lee. “Leaving the rifle at home for the time being.”

Hotez texted back that he was worried and wanted to talk. “I’m fine just very frustrated,” Lee texted in reply.

Kevin Tracey contacted Lee hours later to talk and she was directed to a conference room where she met with several institute administrators who asked about her texts with Hotez, gun violence, and her mental health. Lee was then placed on administrative leave.

A couple days later, Lee was invited to a virtual meeting with institute administrators. She then emailed them:

I was supposed to return to work today, but you notified me on Friday not to come in.

I am dismayed that my long-time employer seems to be crediting a high-profile man, Peter Hotez, over me, a woman who has dedicated her services to it for over twenty years. I have been an exemplary employee, with an unblemished record.

I tried to give you more information when we met on September 24, but you were focused on Dr. Hotez’s purported concerns and would not let me provide you information.

Prior to Dr. Hotez coming to Kevin Tracey with his purported concerns, he had repeatedly made sexual advances toward me that I did not entertain. In fact, days before he came to Northwell, on September 17, 2024, Dr. Hotez again told me he loved me. This is just one instance.

Dr. Hotez before this had also professed his love for me and that told me he wanted us to have a closer relationship. I declined, and said he was married. He told me about his repeated marital affairs and joked about how much Cialis he had purchased. I was disturbed by all the women he described and told him that being the high-profile person that he is, he should be more discreet and stay out of the backseat of cars. Dr. Hotez told me he would give up all these women for me and I declined and said I did not want to be more than friends and said that I did not want a sexual relationship.

This past summer, Mr. Hotez was in New York City and wanted me to meet him in the city. I refused and told him I had early meetings the next day.

Dr. Hotez is a disgruntled man who has been denied by me and I hope he is not successful at destroying my achieved career.

I have proof to support the above, including documentary proof. Please I request an investigation.

During the virtual meeting that followed, Lee was then terminated.

Lee is suing her research institute for terminating her employment. However, civil rights attorney Eric Sanders posted on X that her lawsuit raises a serious question:

When a powerful man complains about a woman who rejected him, does the institution investigate the whole story — or only the part that helps justify removing her?

Facts presented in Lee’s complaint also raise question about the commitment of Hotez’s employer, Baylor College of Medicine, to enforcing its own policy on sexual harassment. The medical institute defines sexual harassment as “an attempt to coerce an unwilling person into a sexual relationship or experience; repeated subjection to egregious, unwelcomed sexual attention.”

Baylor College of Medicine president Jakub Tolar did not respond to multiple emails asking if his institution had conducted its own investigation regarding the allegations of sexual harassment by Peter Hotez detailed in the lawsuit.

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I’ve been traveling quite a bit and still haven’t had a chance to read the thousands of new pages made public from Tony Fauci’s diary and other documents released by the Senate. I did write a brief piece on a few records from Fauci’s diary that caught my attention, such as his September 2022 entry about an interview I did with former CDC Director Robert Redfield in which Fauci called Redfield a “bizarre personality” and labeled me a “totally weird person.”

I did some quick searches of the diary and found that Fauci wrote about Redfield dozens of times, as well as dozens of entries about Michael Caputo, who was in charge of government communications and putting Fauci on TV during the pandemic’s start. With Redfield and Caputo, Fauci started off praising both, later disparaging them once they didn’t do what he wanted—something I believe is quite revealing about Fauci’s personality.

In short, Fauci only likes you when you give him exactly what he wants. And when you stop feeding his ego, he begins trashing you and trying to destroy you behind your back. This personality trait that is quite common in people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

Before we get to the podcast, I want to show you the documents Redfield, Caputo, and I discuss.

DOCUMENTS

1) In late 2022, I released an interview with Robert Redfield where we talked about his time running the CDC and his scientific opinion that the pandemic started from a lab accident in Wuhan, China. We also went over Fauci’s Senate hearing where he misled the Committee about his funding for dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

Big Tony was not amused, writing his diary that Redfield was a “bizarre personality” and that I was a “totally weird person.”

2) But in early 2020, Fauci wrote in his diary that he liked Redfield: “I like him.” So why the change? From the pandemic’s beginning, Redfield kept pressing the Trump administration to look at the possibility that the pandemic started in a lab, something that Fauci was trying to cover up behind the scenes. Because he had funded that very same lab and had promoted dangerous gain-of-function virus research.

3) Michael Caputo went through a similar transformation in Fauci’s diary, starting off as a beloved figure, before Big Tony then labeled him as a “con man.”

Caputo is a Republican politico who Trump had put in charge of communications at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which oversees FDA, NIH, and the CDC. Specifically, Caputo was managing the administration’s COVID response with the media and became the focus of Big Tony’s anger for not placing him enough on TV.

In May 2020, Fauci writes approvingly that Caputo is “one of my greatest fans” before blasting former Obama official Jenny Backus as an “asshole” because she didn’t put him on TV enough.

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4) Two months later in July, Fauci writes “Caputo is a con man who is completely full of shit” because Caputo was not putting Fauci on TV enough. Fauci sure likes to see Fauci on TV!

5) We also examine an entry in that same summer of 2020 where Fauci writes that he was going around Caputo to lobby Alyssa Farah to put him on TV. Alyssa Farah has a weird background, starting off as a writer for the far-right World Net Daily (run by her father) and now working at The View, a TV show steeped in Hollywood liberalism where Farah spends most of her time denouncing Republicans she once worked with.

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6) Several emails show that Fauci and others in the Biden White House were ignoring science and manipulating the CDC for their own political purposes. The irony is that, ever since voters elected Trump, the media has run wall to wall coverage that the Trump administration has ignored science and manipulated the CDC for their own political purposes.

It has long been reported that Fauci chose Rochelle Walensky to run the CDC for the Biden, and in one entry he claims to have been helping guide the CDC while he was Biden’s medical advisor. Fauci also writes that CDC employees “have hubris and are often incorrect”, something that Secretary Kennedy has said long before he started running the Department of Health and Human Services.

7) During the summer of 2022, Fauci writes how he and other political appointees got CDC Director Walensky “pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission.” Essentially, they manipulated her from stating something that was true about the vaccines, since these vaccines were never been tested nor approved to stop transmission or infection.

However, Fauci writes that MMWR, the CDC’s journal, “had the same original damning language” that they had stopped Walensky from releasing in a statement. For publishing this truth in the CDC’s journal, Fauci writes that Biden’s chief-of-staff, Ron Klain might “fire Rochelle” Walensky, thus admitting that Walensky was being directed by the White House to ignore science and publish political statements that the White House wanted.

8) Fauci’s diary also touches on the mask controversy. In March 2020, an NIH official emails Fauci about the best research on masks which finds they don’t stop respiratory viruses from spreading.

“Bottom line: generally there was not a differences in [flu rates] when mask were used.” She then cites a study on COVID transmission and masks but adds, “Overall, this doesn’t change my opinion.” Nonetheless, Fauci went on to recommend masks.

BTW, here’s a video of Surgeon General Jerome Adams making a useless mask out of a t-shirt. I’m not joking. That fool of a man really did this.

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9) Vaccines also appear in Fauci’s diary. In November 2021, Fauci writes about attending a book party at Café Milano for reporter Jonathan Karl, who has now written four books attacking President Trump. Entrée required proof of COVID vaccination, however, Fauci wrote that after the party:

When I went home that night I was nervous all night looking at the ceiling concerned about having gotten infected in that very crowded restaurant despite the fact that vaccination proof was required to get in. I’m well aware that many people who are vaccinated are still getting infected and that worried me a lot.

Yet at that same time, Fauci and others in the Biden administration were playing up the vaccines’ ability to stop people from getting infected and passing the virus on to others.

Shouldn’t people have been told what the Biden administration knew about the vaccines’ effectiveness? Especially older people, like Fauci, who were most at risk of dying from infection?

In fact, Fauci was so concerned about getting infected, even though he and others were vaccinated, that he considered cancelling an event the following evening at the French Ambassador’s house.

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10) In March 2021, Fauci wrote that Drew Weissman—who won the Nobel Prize for work on mRNA vaccines—was going to hold a press conference to discuss studies finding that mRNA vaccines caused inflammation in the amniotic fluid of mice. Surely pregnant women, who the Biden administration was pushing to get mRNA vaccines, would want to know this, right?

Surely these women had a right to know this? Right? Right!!!????

Nope.

Instead, Fauci writes that this safety information about mRNA vaccines from the guy who discovered mRNA vaccines “is going to create a huge mess” for public relations, and that he hoped there would be “studies to counter this finding.” This diary entry reads absolutely crazy. Fauci shows no interest in pregnant women and the safety of developing babies.

He adds that Biden’s chief-of-staff, Jeff Zients called him about the Weissman study, and he advised Zients to work with FDA to get counter studies out to the public.

11) In April 2020, Fauci writes that he and Trump advisor, Hope Hicks convinced Trump “to essentially put Easter on hold for a year.” Yet in several interviews in recent years, Fauci has denied that he was behind lockdowns. This diary puts that lie to rest.

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12) The Senate released hundreds of internal emails showing that Fauci worked with NIH staff and researchers he funded to get cash prizes. In one instance, he began to collaborate with Barton Haynes, a Duke professor who had received millions of dollars in funding from Fauci’s institute. Here’s one of those emails.

As I was about to publish this piece, the Trump administration released a new legal advisory making clear that federal officials cannot use their public office to solicit lucrative private awards for themselves.

13) Finally, an April 2020 entry finds Fauci discussing a phone call he had with Deborah Birx, who led the coronavirus task force for Trump. Birx called Fauci saying that Trump yelled at her that she and Fauci had destroyed the country with the lockdowns. (Remember again that Fauci has now denied any involvement in lockdowns).

Fauci writes that he told Birx “we are OK and at the end of the day she and I will be loved by the people we care about.”

What I found so odd is that Fauci doesn’t argue to Birx that they are making tough decisions, but serving the President wisely. Nor does Fauci explain to Birx that they are both doing the right thing to protect the public during a deadly pandemic.

Instead, Fauci argues that the people they like … will like them.

For someone whose job was to serve the American public, Fauci seems much more interested in Fauci being loved.

Here’s my discussion with Robert Redfield and Michael Caputo about these documents.

Enjoy the final days of summer!

Today’s guest essay comes from Jason Locasale who looks at academia’s embrace of authority over scientific data and evidence to preserve narratives and protect those in power.

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Anthony Fauci is now facing intense scrutiny. His diaries, emails, and testimony have raised fundamental questions about what he knew, what he then told the public, and how he exercised authority during the pandemic. Many outside of academia read these documents and view this moment as his fall from grace, while universities and medical institutions seem willing to ignore this new evidence and continue to celebrate Fauci as a heroic public servant with unmatched scientific authority.

Academics’ unconventional viewpoint cannot be ignored. Fauci matters not only because of his individual conduct, but because he exposes the institutions that produced, empowered, and continue to protect him—Georgetown rewarded him with a prestigious position after he retired from the government in his 80s.

The pandemic did not create the dysfunction inside biomedical science. It placed a magnifying glass over science institutions that had been decaying for decades. Grant politics, unfounded hype, administrative expansion, scientific gerontocracy, institutional self-protection, and the punishment of dissent were already pervasive. Fauci enabled the public to watch those forces operate through one person on television every day.

Biomedical institutions did not create a single Fauci. They created thousands. The pandemic spotlight simply made one of them famous.

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What the diaries reveal

Fauci’s diaries offer an unusually revealing account of how he understood his role during the pandemic. Written as notes toward a future autobiography, they show what he considered important enough to preserve about those years.

The diaries undermine the mythology of a reluctant scientist who was unexpectedly thrust into politics and celebrity. They reveal a bureaucrat celebrity preoccupied with attention, status, prominent relationships, TV appearances, reputation, his own place in history, and cash money.

His interest in how he was portrayed, whom he met, who praised him, and how his public image was developing consumes far more attention than any serious engagement with the complex science of COVID-19 and the pandemic. The office shrine, the concern with his portrait, the meticulous record of his fame, and the diary itself as material for an autobiography all expose the same fixation.

Those self-curated notes reveal his priorities. Science is less as an intellectual pursuit than as the credential supporting the public performance.

The related emails and documents complete the picture. Fauci sought nominations for cash prizes from influential friends and used federal employees to help him win those awards. These awards were then presented publicly as independent acknowledgments of merit.

One of the most important revelations in the new documents was the distance between private uncertainty and public certainty. Fauci and those around him privately discussed scientific possibilities that they publicly dismissed and even attacked as conspiracies. The authors of the Proximal Origin paper privately assigned a laboratory origin for the COVID pandemic as a substantial probability, then helped present that possibility to the public as impossible.

The same pattern appeared in pronouncements about masking, vaccine transmission, and other major pandemic questions. The issue is not hindsight. The issue is presenting uncertain claims as settled truth while privately recognizing that the evidence was unresolved.

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Authority substituted for scientific judgement

Fauci projected an image of authority, and for too many, image alone was sufficient. His title, confidence, and media presence substituted for careful engagement with data..

Masking, for example, involved questions of aerosol physics, fluid mechanics, particle size, droplet formation, airflow, filtration, leakage, and fit. These are concrete scientific and engineering questions. But Fauci’s own diary finds that he showed no interest in working through the scientific complexity before making definitive public pronouncements.

We can read in his own words that Fauci approached scientific disagreement more like a party in an adversarial legal proceeding than a scientist. Once an institutional position had been adopted, contrary evidence became an obstacle and dissenting scientists became opponents to defeat. The objective shifted from determining what was true to defending political ground and preserving authority.

This is the opposite of a scientific temperament. A good scientist is skeptical, including of his own conclusions. He is comfortable acknowledging uncertainty and may spend days thinking privately through a problem. He does not need a camera, a slogan, or the appearance of omniscience.

Fauci illustrates the difference between projecting authority and possessing a curious, scientific mind.

Scientific credentialism

Fauci majored in classics before earning an MD when medical education was driven by rote memorization and provided little formal preparation for scientific research. His degree was a clinical credential to treat sick people, not a degree for lab research.

When he entered laboratory research, molecular immunology was not yet a developed science and when academic physicians could obtain laboratory directorships early in their careers. He then became an NIH administrator at a relatively young age.

The issue is not that he began his career before modern technologies existed. Every older scientist did. The relevant question is whether an aging scientist continues learning, adapting, and making discoveries as the field develops.

The best scientists remain intellectually active later in life because they master new technologies and continue challenging themselves and their own field. Unfortunately, too many establish their careers by being in the right place at the right time, then coast for another twenty or thirty years through networks that make adaptation unnecessary.

By the time the pandemic arrived, Fauci had spent decades as a bureaucrat, dealing with budgets and manuevering through arcane government policies—far removed from frontline science. Nothing in that history made him a universal authority on masking, vaccine transmission, population epidemiology, viral evolution, or every other field on which he pronounced.

His real expertise was navigating institutions, consolidating authority, cultivating relationships, and projecting the image of a scientist to the public.

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The scientific gerontocracy

Fauci’s career fits a broader historical pattern created by universities and their research systems funded by NIH.

When the NIH budget doubled around the turn of the century, universities expanded their biomedical operations. Medical schools hired large numbers of professors whose income and laboratories depended on external grants—called “soft money” positions. Scientists who had attached their names to important genes or disease pathways during the previous era suddenly gained access to enormous new funding streams.

They built large laboratories, accumulated grants, generated indirect-cost revenue for their universities, and developed influence throughout NIH study sections, journals, professional societies, and university administrations. Money created authority, and authority attracted more money.

Many of these people later became department chairs, deans, institute directors, and even university presidents. A few continued doing important science, but most did not adapt as new technologies transformed biology. Their scientific contributions declined while their institutional influence continued growing.

The result was an academic aristocracy whose power survived long after the circumstances that created it disappeared. Seniority came to be treated as wisdom, incumbency as excellence, and grant accumulation as scientific achievement.

Fauci was the most visible member of this gerontocracy. Before the public knew his name, he had already spent nearly forty years controlling a major NIH institute, and there are countless others. The transformation of NIAID into a roughly $6 billion organization is not a self-validating accomplishment. Budget growth does not prove scientific success.

A serious evaluation must examine the priorities entrenched, the dissent discouraged, the opportunities lost, and the consequences of allowing one person to control a government agency for nearly four decades. In retrospect, J. Edgar Hoover served far too many decades running the FBI and history will likely not look kindly on Fauci’s term inside the NIH.

We must also ask what was not studied because Fauci had his thumb on the funding scales for so long. Basic questions about how sleep, diet, exercise, metabolism, stress, sunlight, and other environmental factors shape immunity received far less attention than Fauci’s preferred institutional agenda which was heavily focused on HIV.

The pandemic did not suddenly turn Fauci into a problem. It exposed the culture over which he had already presided for decades.

Scientific celebrity as product

The public sees a handful of scientific celebrities. Insiders know that universities manufacture them by the thousands.

Every major institution has its local circuit of people whose identities revolve around image, status, proximity to power, and the belief that they are stars. They perform the role of scientific authority even when they have shown little interest in science for years, if ever. Some convert the arrangement into wealth. Others are paid in prestige and deference.

These people are not scientists who reluctantly became administrators. They are administrators who use science as a credential. They become skilled at cultivating superficial impressions, repeating approved narratives, and moving through bureaucratic hierarchies. Their institutional rise is then treated as evidence of scientific judgement.

Fauci was the A-list version of this phenomenon. His media charm allowed him to become nationally famous, but his underlying career was familiar. He differed from thousands of university and NIH administrators mainly because he had a camera crew and never missed a moment to be on TV.

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Favor-trading as independent recognition

Fauci’s documented relationships with influential figures at Duke illustrate how the establishment reproduces itself.

Fauci reached out to his friend at Duke for award nominations. Duke receives hundreds of millions of dollars in NIAID funding. Organizations then rank Duke according to how much NIH money it attracts. Those rankings are presented as evidence of excellence, and Duke administrators are considered for senior positions within NIH.

Funding, nominations, endorsements, appointments, awards, and prestige circulate through the same small network. Each transaction is then presented as an independent recognition of merit.

This does not require a cinematic conspiracy with a mastermind issuing secret instructions. It just takes time and a bit of curiosity to read the documents laying this out. Aligned incentives, expectations of reciprocity, career dependence, and institutional self-preservation are sufficient. The network coordinates itself because everyone understands which relationships and financial streams must be protected.

And for all these exchanges made public in the news documents, thousands of similar arrangements remain hidden but just as concrete in study sections, professional societies, journal boards, university committees, philanthropic organizations, and government agencies.

Anyone who challenges the arrangement risks being marginalized or blacklisted. Those who participate are promoted as respected scientific leaders.

Narrative management replaces truth

Universities, NIH, journals, scientific societies, medical organizations, biotech, pharma, venture capital, and science media form a self-reinforcing network. Each organization looks to the others for validation. A prestigious paper creates enthusiasm. Academics repeat the narrative. Investors interpret that consensus as reduced risk. Companies raise capital. Advisors and board members reinforce the story. Pharma later treats the institutional excitement as evidence that the underlying biology is sound.

Everyone benefits from optimism until the science fails. Then the network moves on to the next target without confronting why they got the previous consensus wrong. Because self-examination might lead to loss of prestige, authority, or cash to keep the scientific enterprise afloat.

The same institutional structure rewards grant volume over insight, compliance over skepticism, and institutional pedigree over independent judgement. Peer review is not a neutral mechanism floating above these incentives. It is embedded within them.

Fauci made this process visible. Information was accepted or discarded according to whether it advanced the preferred narrative, protected institutional authority, or preserved reputation. Contrary evidence was not evaluated neutrally. It was treated as a political and professional threat.

Labels such as “conspiracy theory” became tools for dismissing plausible evidence without answering it. Institutional authority was used to define what could be discussed, and then the resulting silence was offered as proof of consensus.

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Mythology survives inside academia

Many outside academia say Fauci has fallen from grace, that his legacy is destroyed, and that his reputation has collapsed. Nothing could be further from the truth inside academic medicine and biomedical research.

Within universities, medical societies, and the organizations controlling credentials and prestige, Fauci remains a celebrity and hero. He continues to receive invitations, prestigious platforms, awards, and public praise. Major universities still present him as one of the nation’s most important public-health leaders.

The managerial class sees Fauci as the embodiment of itself. His career validates the qualities that it rewards: institutional longevity, bureaucratic influence, narrative discipline, media skill, prestigious relationships, and the ability to present authority as expertise.

Fauci is not merely protected by that class. He is its idealized self-portrait.

These institutions can maintain their own universe of facts because their revenue streams continue regardless of their performance. Taxpayers, donors, tuition, hospital income, grants, and endowment returns allow them to survive without admitting error. There is no effective mechanism of accountability.

The ship is not sinking because the public discovers misconduct. The ship can take on water indefinitely because someone else keeps paying to repair it.

Why Fauci remains important

I keep returning to Fauci not because I claim expertise in every aspect of the pandemic. I do not.

I return to him because he gave the public a rare view of how scientific authority is manufactured and protected. Most people never see the senior administrators, grantmakers, journal editors, society leaders, and local scientific celebrities who shape permissible narratives inside biomedicine. Fauci placed this old way of doing science with TV appearances and shaping of the media.

His diaries and records offer a watershed opportunity. The lesson should not end with deciding whether one man lied, exercised bad judgment, or deserves punishment. The more important question is why the institutions surrounding him showed so little interest in determining the truth and remain so committed to protecting his mythology.

Scientific integrity cannot be partisan. Every person should demand honesty and accountability from institutions that claim the authority of science.

Public-health messaging must be honest before it is clear. Real leaders explain uncertainty, earn trust, and rally the public toward sound action. Manufactured certainty is not leadership. Clarity without honesty is propaganda.

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What reform requires

The administrative machinery cannot investigate or reform itself. Its leaders know how to convert criticism into committees, reports, mission statements, listening sessions, and carefully worded promises while leaving the underlying structure untouched.

Reform requires enforceable transparency, external oversight, public accountability, and meaningful consequences for failure. Funding must move away from administrative empires and toward scientists capable of producing important knowledge.

The NIH-centered, large-institution model should face competition from smaller, independent research institutes with lower overhead, clearer missions, and greater accountability. Philanthropy should stop enlarging university endowments and begin building alternative institutions for science, education, and career development.

Scientific leadership should not become a throne occupied for decades. Older scientists should be judged by whether they continue learning, adapting, and contributing, not by the authority accumulated from work performed thirty years earlier.Dissent must be treated as part of science rather than a threat to institutional reputation. Uncertainty must be communicated rather than edited out. Scientific merit must be separated from grant volume, celebrity, political alignment, and bureaucratic skill.

Fauci is not the entire problem. He is just its clearest illustration. He placed the biomedical establishment under a spotlight, and they have failed to confront the harsh light.

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Jason Locasale is an American biochemist and former tenured professor specializing in cancer metabolism, nutrition, and the application of AI to health and longevity research. With over two decades in academia and more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, he is recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher (top 0.1% globally) for six consecutive years. He has held advisory roles with biotech firms, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health, and has contributed to textbook chapters and patents.

Politico reported that physician-scientist Steven Quay is going through final vetting to take over Tony Fauci’s job at the NIH, reporting that aligns with rumors I’ve been hearing from sources inside the administration for several months. Quay sat for an interview with me on the DisInformation Chronicle podcast last June to talk about changes NIH should make to ensure we don’t have another pandemic caused by dangerous virus research, and I ran an excerpt of his book “The Code As Witness: How the COVID Genome Reveals Its Lab Origins.”

The Politico leak comes as Fauci is in the hot seat with Senators passing a resolution yesterday morning that found him in contempt for failing to answer questions during a hearing last week. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has released thousands of pages of internal documents about the pandemic, including Fauci’s own diary which was found on government servers.

I’m on vacation and haven’t had time to go through all the documents—actually, I don’t’ think anybody has gone through all the new revelations—but I did discover that Fauci wrote in his diary that he didn’t like my 2022 interview with former CDC Director Robert Redfield. In a September 2022 entry, Fauci called me a “totally weird person” and complained that Dr. Redfield was a “bizarre personality” for telling me that he thought the pandemic started in a lab.

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I also ran across a surprising article in the New Yorker that belittled Big Tony for his self-obsessive diary where he seemed much more interested in fame and ties to celebrities than trying to protect the public from the COVID virus. Here’s one passage:

Fauci does not seem to see a relationship between the adulation and the villainization—to understand that he’s hated for being beloved, perhaps more than for loving the truth. One day, he is doing a podcast interview with Alec Baldwin (“Without a doubt, from a intellectual and substantive standpoint it was one of the best if not the best interview that I have ever given”). The next, he is confronted with a poll suggesting “that middle to right people want me to retire and are not getting vaccinated because I’m the messenger telling them to get vaccinated.” But the emotional charge of his celebrity defies his self-conception as a neutral arbiter. One of the sharpest ironies in the diary is how often the good press that he quotes praises him for his modesty and his lack of ego. The Fauci mythos was incompatible with the actual work of being Fauci.

The New Yorker long ago morphed into a die-hard cheerleader for Democratic Party interests and finding something so negative about Democrat’s COVID demigod is pretty shocking. Has Fauci lost his hypnotic hold over Woke reporters?

Even as the public has been buried in a ton of new Fauci documents, a Senate Committee revealed that they have a copy of Big Tony’s cell phone that he used during the pandemic. So this is not going to stop. Big Tony is on the run.

To learn more about Big Tony’s replacement, Steven Quay, see my interview with him, and check out his book excerpt where he details the science pointing to a lab accident as the cause of the COVID pandemic.

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Enjoy the summer!

Senator Rand Paul’s years-long crusade to expose former NIH leader Anthony Fauci as a liar and self-absorbed fraud smashed several legacy media fables in the last week with releases of Fauci’s private diary, proving he lied to the American public about the pandemic, and internal government documents showing Fauci lined his pockets with hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money during COVID—with the help of government employees and NIH grantees that he funded.

It’s all so revolting.

First, let’s look at Fauci’s private diary, which stretches for over 1,000 pages and documents his thoughts during the COVID pandemic.

I’m on vacation and haven’t been able to read the entire diary, but someone sent me a page where Fauci complained about my September 2022 interview with former CDC Director Robert Redfield. Redfield told me in the interview that during the first few months of the pandemic he tried to get a CDC team into China but was cut out of critical government meetings by Fauci. Redfield suspected that Fauci began to isolate him for saying the government needed to investigate whether the pandemic started from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Science reporters allied with Tony Fauci later labeled Redfield a “conspiracy theorist” for saying he thought the pandemic likely started from a lab accident.

“Tony and I are friends, but we don’t agree on this at all,” Redfield told me in the interview. “The potential for conspiracy is really on the other side. The conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community that has acted in an antithetical way to science.”

After reading my interview, Fauci wrote in his diary that Redfield was “crazy” for stating these views and that I was a “totally weird person.”

My interview with Redfield made a bit of a splash when it ran back in 2022, because it was one of the first times that Fauci had been called out for his dishonest manipulation of the government’s COVID response. Redfield and I also discussed Fauci lying to the Senate when he claimed that he had not funded dangerous “gain-of-function” virus studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Lying to Congress is a crime, and Fauci avoided prosecution for this crime when President Biden gave him a preemptive pardon during his final days in office.

This interview was behind a pay wall, but I’m now making it public because so much of what we discussed almost four years ago about Fauci’s dishonesty has finally become obvious as more documents have been released.

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In a second example from Fauci’s diary, he wrote about attending an event at Café Milano, a famous Italian restaurant in DC frequented by politicians, diplomats, celebrities, and their favored reporters. The book party was thrown at Café Milano for Jonathan Karl, a former White House reporter who has now written a several books denigrating Donald Trump.

The September 2021 book gathering occurred at a time when Fauci was telling people that the COVID vaccine stopped you from getting infected.

At least that’s what Fauci was telling the public in order to push the COVID vaccines. But his diary shows that he didn’t believe what was coming out of his own mouth.

“When I went home that night I was nervous all night looking at the ceiling concerned about having gotten infected in that very crowded restaurant despite the fact that vaccination proof was required to get in,” Fauci wrote in his diary about the book party. “I’m well aware that many people who are vaccinated are still getting infected and that worried me a lot.”

Fauci added that he was thinking about skipping a black tie affair at the home of the French ambassador because “I don’t want to go through the nerve-wracking experience that I did last night worrying about having gotten infected.”

In a third example from January 2020, back in early months of the pandemic, Fauci wrote that data showed the virus outbreak was not connected to a market in Wuhan—although he later promoted the market as the source of the outbreak relentlessly to the media, thus distracting from a possible lab accident.

“It now appears using [epidemiological] data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market,” Fauci wrote in his diary. “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.”

Or maybe it started in a lab as more and more evidence shows?

Fauci is in the hot seat today, testifying at 8:30 in the morning in front of the Senate about his history of lies. My guess is that Senate Democrats won’t bother to show up to defend Fauci and they will boycott the hearing. Because nothing good will come of it for them.

The facts showing that the American public was lied to during the COVID pandemic are now too damning.

Legacy media will ally themselves with the Democrats and follow their lead, likely ignoring the hearing as well. The New York wrote a rather incomplete, muffled account of the documents that try to frame the Fauci findings as an example of “politicized” discourse in America, instead of pointing the finger directly at Fauci for his lies and dishonesty and at Democrats and the New York Times for covering up those lies and dishonesty. While the documents have been spread all over social media, the only news outlets that seem to have covered the scandal in any professional manner is the Daily Mail and Fox News.

As someone who has been a reporter for over two decades, I find it bizarre to write that the Daily Mail and Fox News have better, more honest reporting than the New York Times and the Washington Post. But this is where we are at in the journalism profession.

The Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu even tried to defend Fauci, writing that the release of these documents was an “attack” that is part of a “campaign for vengeance.” Think about that for a moment. A reporter is unnerved that Congress disclosed government documents so that the public can read them.

But again, this is the world we live in with legacy media.

If you’re interested in learning more, you will have to tune in and watch Fauci testify before Congress on the Senate website, because I guarantee you that legacy media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic will boycott the hearing if Democrats do. Or these reporters will cover the Fauci hearing as a “politicized” food fight, without disclosing that they helped create this politicization with their years of biased reporting that twisted reality and often ignored inconvenient facts.

Sources inside the Trump administration told me last year that Senator Paul is sitting on millions of pages of documents that he got from the White House. So expect more revelations during the hearing, because I’m certain Paul has more surprises.

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Hope everyone is disregarding the news and enjoying their summer. But don’t ignore this!

Last week I ran an exclusive blockbuster that exposed failings at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) virus lab that made national news when I reported that NIH virologist Vincent Munster was caught smuggling deadly pathogens into the U.S.

My exclusive last week looked at internal NIH documents provided to me by a whistleblower that show Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) still doesn’t have a plan to treat someone exposed to deadly pathogens. If a worker gets bitten by a monkey, which happened last November, that patient is transferred about an hour away to St. Patrick’s hospital in Missoula “then must figure out where to go from there.”

Um, what? And they still don’t have a room suitable to quarantine patients!

I’m not joking. This is how they’re managing things at one of America’s top virus research labs.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories sits in the small city of Hamilton, Montana, the largest town in Ravalli County. Following my expose last week on troubling biosafety issues at RML, RML leaders are scheduled to give the local health board an update today on the facility’s problems.

NIH has not put out a statement regarding last week’s story, but an NIH employee contacted me to explain that NIH leaders have forced RML to fix some of the flaws I identified. In last week’s story, I explained that the RML’s procedures for bringing new viruses to the Hamilton facility has a gaping hole: their Field Sample room is not secure.

“There is no lock on the door, no prox access card,” a whistleblower told me. “It’s shared space, and the freezers in there also don’t have locks.”

Within 24 hours of my story going live, I was told that the NIH placed a keypad lock on the Field Sample room. NIH’s head of research also sent around an email claiming that, despite all the troubling news about RML, “established biosafety protocols were followed.”

But that just underscores the actual shortcomings: those established biosafety protocols have flaws, and those flaws that haven’t been fixed.

And NIH has yet to explain all the holes identified in RML’s protocols for managing employees exposed to dangerous pathogens. Those concerns first came to light last November, when a sedated monkey bit an RML employee.

Hey, accidents happen, but that’s why you need appropriate protocols to deal with them.

Again, many of the problems with current protocols still haven’t been fixed. You can find those failings detailed here.

If you attend the Ravalli board of health hearing and would like to speak with me about RML’s presentation, please send me an email: thackerpd@gmail.com. I also learned that NIH biosafety experts have flown from DC and are now at RML to inspect the Montana facilities.

If you have any information on what they found, please also contact me.

Virus Lab History

RML runs a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) lab, one of around a dozen operating in the U.S., to study the world’s most dangerous viruses. The federal government began pouring billions of dollars of funding to create more of these labs following the September 11 World Trade Center attack and the anthrax scare in the early 2000s.

I wrote about the increased funding for these labs in 2003 for the medical journal JAMA and remember that, even back then, researchers warned me that much of this money was likely being misplaced. BSL-4 labs are very expensive to build and operate, and prior to the BSL-4 building boom in the early 2000s, the U.S. had only two of these labs in the entire country. Several researchers told me that the spending spree wasn’t needed because we could get many of the scientific answers we need to protect society without BSL-4 facilities.

Looking back at this story, I realize that I had interviewed Heinz Feldmann, who is now in charge of Montana’s RML’s BSL-4 and the other NIH BSL-4 lab in Maryland. Feldmann is considered the NIH’s top BSL-4 lab expert. However, it now seems NIH leadership is having to step in to fix safety flaws at the RML lab that Feldmann has been running for decades.

I’ll keep you updated with any further developments. Have a great summer.

Internal documents from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spotlight growing public alarm about safety and the labs that perform dangerous virus studies. Last month, I broke a story that exposed NIH virologist Vincent Munster, who faced an FBI investigation after he was caught bringing back deadly viruses from Africa to his NIH lab in Montana, Rocky Mountain Laboratories. New documents show Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) continues to be plagued with safety problems, and NIH executives at the Montana site have yet to fix holes in their safety plan that had been revealed back in November when a monkey bit a worker.

I was given these new NIH documents by a whistleblower who said my May exclusive on Vincent Munster “blew up inside the NIH.”

“They don’t have a real protocol if you’re exposed to something at BSL-4,” the whistleblower told me about the safety practices at RML.

Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) is the highest safety protocol in virus research. Its precautions are used when studying the world’s most lethal pathogens—such as Ebola and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. The NIH has been sent copies of the whistleblower documents for comment, and I will update you with any response.

“They want to do the work at level 4 no matter the cost,” said the whistleblower. “Because they think it’s the most important work on the planet—that must be done, no matter what it takes.”

Earlier this month the Justice Department indicted Munster and one of his lab workers, charging both researchers with two felonies. Munster’s actions exposed a distressing pattern of cowboy conduct by virologists working on deadly viruses. According to the FBI’s criminal complaint Munster was caught at the airport smuggling in viruses. When law enforcement asked him if he had the required paperwork, he replied that he did.

“I do this all the time,” Munster told federal law officials in January. In fact, Munster did not have the required paperwork and has been charged with lying to law enforcement. And Munster’s statement—“I do this all the time”—raises questions of whether smuggling viruses is in fact something he does all the time.

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Alarming practices at RML

Munster works at the NIH’s RML in Hamilton, Montana, where he studies maximum containment pathogens, such as Ebola. RML is one of over a dozen labs in the United States that have a BSL-4 facility. The main virology lab has been operated for many decades by Heinz Feldmann, a leading expert on viruses studied under BSL-4 conditions.

Yet emails released by Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, raise concerns that practices at RML under Feldmann have long been sloppy. An email chain dating to 2011 finds several virologists—Munster, Feldmann and researchers with EcoHealth Alliance—discussing the logistics of shipping virus samples from Africa to the States. In the final email, EcoHealth Alliance’s Jon Epstein suggests to Feldman and Munster that Munster can hand carry virus samples on a plane after they are put in a viral transport and recovery (VTR) buffer, which keeps them alive.

“I think you can take up to 2kg with you on commercial flights,” emailed EcoHealth Alliance’s Jon Epstein.

In the final week of the Biden Administration, EcoHealth Alliance was debarred from participating in federal programs due to their problematic safety practices. However, the emails released by Senator Paul do not show if these virologists followed through and did in fact transport live viruses on a commercial flight back in 2011.

One email provided by the NIH whistleblower shows that Heinz Feldmann was transferred in August 2025 to run the NIH’s Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Maryland. A few months prior to transferring Feldmann, the NIH discovered safety violations at the IRF, which Feldmann was apparently sent in to clean up. This included a frightening instance—apparently a lover’s spat—in which a contractor cut holes in an employee’s biocontainment suit designed to protect against infection from viruses such as Ebola.

NIH leadership notified the FBI, which launched an investigation.

Since the NIH put Feldmann in charge of the IRF in Maryland last year to clean up problems at that research site, he has been splitting his schedule between Maryland and Montana. During that time, however, the Montana RML has been found to be plagued with its own safety snafus.

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Whistleblower documents

Sometime in November 2025, an RML researcher was exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever “through an accidental breach of personal protective equipment.” The safety incident was never made public, however, until a Montana newspaper reported on it months later in February 2026. “The individual remained well and showed no evidence of being infected,” an NIH spokesperson told the paper in February. “They have been back at work for some time.”

The NIH updated the Montana reporter with more information in May, detailing that the exposure incident was a monkey bite. The NIH also sent the reporter a statement that makes it appear the monkey bite accident was handled in an efficient, by-the-book process, without any hitches, or delays.

Furthermore, details about Providence Hospital in Spokane seem souped-up with government acronyms and biomedical jargon to make the monkey bite patient’s treatment appear extra professional and super sciencey.

Here’s that NIH statement reported in the Montana paper:

“A November 13, 2025 workplace exposure to Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV) occurred in the Biosafety Level 4 facility at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories. The worker is highly experienced, wore all required protective gear, and followed all established procedures at the time of the exposure. The employee was immediately decontaminated, isolated and evaluated by experienced clinical experts in coordination with highly trained safety professionals.

“The patient was transferred to the nearest Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center (RESPTC) located at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Washington.

“Providence is one of 13 Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR)-supported Level 1 RESPTCs, part of the tiered National Special Pathogen System (NSPS) designed to protect patients, communities and the healthcare workforce.

“Established procedures for transport, patient care, waste handling, testing and safety were followed by all involved, from lab staff and agency safety and health support to hospital care team and medical specialists.

“At no time was there any evidence of disease transmission or infection, nor was there ever any risk to staff, caregivers, or the public.”

However, NIH claims in May to the Montana newspaper about the “established procedures” in caring for the monkey bite patient are contradicted by documents provided by the whistleblower.

One document shows that Providence hospital in Spokane, which the NIH lauded in that May statement to the Montana reporter and a week later to reporters with Politico, was never part of the NIH’s plan for patient treatment, which seems to have been managed through improvisation. And notes from a June NIH meeting show the monkey bite patient’s transport—which involved approval from the governors of Montana, Idaho, and Washington—more closely resembled the 1987 road trip comedy film, “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” than established procedures for a health emergency.

According to NIH documents, the RML staff evaluated and treated the employee on-site after the monkey bite, before sending the patient to St. Patrick’s hospital, about an hour away in Missoula. However, that hospital had staffing problems and could only take the NIH patient for three days. NIH then transferred their employee to Providence hospital in Spokane, Washington. But transportation from Montana to Washington passes through the state of Idaho.

“Had to get the approval of all 3 governors for transport through states via Spokane hospital ambulance.”

When the hospital in Spokane wanted to discharge the patient, who was found to not be sick, NIH disagreed with the hospital and felt the person needed more days of isolation. “What do you do if they become symptomatic, etc.”

NIH then transferred their employee back to RML in Montana, to finish quarantine. “Had to coordinate transport again…with backup RML personnel and emergency personnel. Required intricate communication and used GPS tracking on cell phones for security/arrival time/etc.”

However, isolating their employee at RML required modifyng a room to allow the patient to stay those three days “with bedding, towels, food, entertainment” because the room is evidently not actually designed for quarantine.

“It’s better to call this a triage room, not a quarantine room,” said the whistleblower. “People are not supposed to stay there for days. It’s a triage room.”

RML officials also discovered complications in testing the patient daily to see if they had been infected with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and were producing viruses. The only lab apparently capable of testing blood samples for the virus is the CDC in Atlanta. This meant catching the only flight out of nearby Missoula to ensure the patient sample made it each day to the CDC.

“Only one FedEX plane leaves Missoula each day so that restricted testing at CDC.”

The NIH’s cheerful, jargon-filled statement to the Montana paper about the critical importance of the Providence hospital in Spokane is also contradicted by the RML’s plan that was in place to handle exposures to dangerous pathogens.

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That plan makes no apparent mention of the Providence hospital in Spokane which the NIH told the Montana paper last May “is one of 13 Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR)-supported Level 1 RESPTCs, part of the tiered National Special Pathogen System (NSPS) designed to protect patients, communities and the healthcare workforce.”

But the only hospital that seems to be mentioned in RML’s plan, in place at the time of the November monkey bite incident, is St. Patrick’s in Missoula.

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And notes from a June NIH meeting make clear that problems remain at RML, seven months after the November monkey bite incident. The June notes show that any potentially infected worker is now first transported to St. Patrick’s in Missoula “then must figure out where to go from there.”

And while the RML had to convert their triage room last year to allow a three-day quarantine for the monkey bite patient, RML is still trying to figure out how to “modify or build new isolation suite at RML for long term isolation.”

During the November monkey bite accident, the RML realized they couldn’t get daily testing done because there is only one FedEx flight each day from Missoula to the CDC in Atlanta. But to this day they have not figured out another lab that can provide these daily tests to see if an exposed worker has started to produce viruses.

“Also need testing contract for potential RML exposures.”

Other RML problems include how the research facility handles viruses after they arrive, such as the viruses that Munster was caught smuggling into the U.S. According to RML’s current SOP, field samples received at RML will be immediately taken to the restricted access Field Sample room (2B155B). “This lab is dedicated to handling field samples and all employees with access to this lab must be enrolled in the RML Biosafety Program,” reads the SOP.

Once the collected viruses enter the Field Sample room, each sample is then divided into smaller fractions called “aliquots”. An aliquot from each sample is then sent to the Maximum Containment Lab to see if the sample might contain dangerous viruses that should only be handled at BSL-4. Other aliquots from each sample are then inactivated to kill any potentially live viruses, so they can be further analyzed.

However, the whistleblower says this protocol has a gaping hole: the Field Sample room is not secure. “There is no lock on the door, no prox access card,” said the whistleblower. “It’s shared space, and the freezers in there also don’t have locks.”

Finally, an email from Marshall Bloom, a senior RML researcher, discusses a public meeting in June he attended in Hamilton, where he was asked by local officials and members of the public about recent accidents at the RML and the Vincent Munster matter.

RML employees first learned that Munster and his lab researcher had done something wrong earlier this year, said the whistleblower, when NIH police showed up at RML and escorted them both off the RML campus, taking away all their access privileges. They were also required to surrender any government devices.

However, federal employees are prohibited from speaking about ongoing federal investigations, and even the Justice Department generally will not confirm the very existence of an investigation before charges are filed. It was only when my story broke in May that RML researchers learned Munster was being investigated by the FBI after he was caught trying to smuggle in viruses. More details did not become public until June 2, when the Justice Department announced that both Munster and his lab researcher were being charged with felonies.

Yet Marshall told the audience in Hamilton that day that this issue “was now well publicized and working its way through the criminal justice system.” He added, “We demurred providing additional information and repeatedly stressed the presumption of innocence.”

“I don’t know why the presumption of innocence,” the whistleblower said. “Don’t weigh in; don’t say anything. First, we weren’t really told anything about what happened with Munster when it all started, but he set it up like scientists are now trying to circle the wagons.”

Marshall added that, in the public discussion, the audience brought up “biological weapons, Kris Newby’s book Bitten and some more general questions about safety.”

“There’s lots of good science at RML,” said the whistleblower. “But this is a shocking example where they have found problems, and they just kept going on, without any real plan. Hoping no one would get infected. It’s just ridiculous.”

The person added one final note: “A lot of people at RML are really frustrated.”

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RELATED STORIES

I put together two videos explaining recent stories I’ve reported here. The first concerns White Coat Waste Project’s Justin Goodman, who lied about an exclusive story that I broke concerning NIH researcher Vincent Munster who was caught smuggling viruses from Africa, while returning to his NIH lab in Montana.

After Goodman kept churning up bullshit on social media, he managed to bamboozle the New York Times, which reported that he and deranged internet personality Laura Loomer first reported the news—the news that I first reported. Credible sources have noted that Loomer has been committed involuntarily twice, and someone I spoke to said he is working to get her committed a third and final time.

Loomer is quite the character, and the entire series of events is infinitely risible. Something out of a comedy on journalism.

The second video discusses documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard which show Biden Administration officials deep-sixed an intel whistleblower report that stated Tony Fauci lied under oath while testifying before the Senate.

Unless you understand the machinations employed by federal appointees, you might not understand how these officials buried this whistleblower report to protect Fauci, but I walk you through the details.

What they did is actually quite sophisticated and clever.

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Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, released an email earlier this month that provides evidence that Scripps Research Institute’s virologist Kristian Andersen misled Congress when testifying under oath, a crime that is punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Even if the Justice Department declines to prosecute Andersen for this offense, the Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) could debar Andersen from federal programs that provide grants.

In March 2020, Andersen published the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper in Nature Medicine. The paper’s authors concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory scenario is plausible” absolving Fauci of helping to start the COVID pandemic. Within two years, Le Monde reported, Andersen’s paper was downloaded more than 5.7 million times and cited in 2,650 scientific papers. However, emails showed Tony Fauci was provided drafts of the paper for comment while it was being put together.

When questions about this arose during a 2023 congressional hearing, Andersen stated multiple times that Tony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins “played no role” in the paper.

But in the newly released email, Collins contradicts Andersen’s sworn 2023 testimony.

When Andersen sent NIH leaders a press release for the paper in 2020, Collins forwarded Andersen’s email to NIH officials, including Larry Tabak, who was the NIH Deputy Director.

“FYI, this is the work that Tony [Fauci], Jeremy [Farrar], Larry [Tabak], and I helped with…” Collins wrote.

Kristian Andersen did not respond to repeated requests to explain his sworn statements to Congress. Before examining the specifics of Andersen’s misleading behavior, let’s take a look at recent developments in virology.

Follow the documents

The last few months have been pretty rough for the “follow the science” virologists and their allied scicomm writers who violated public trust and misled the country about the COVID pandemic. The Department of Justice indicted former NIH official David Morens in late April for conspiring to destroy and conceal federal records concerning investigations into the start of the pandemic. Morens served for almost two decades as a senior advisor to Tony Fauci, whom Biden gave a preemptive pardon, backdated to 2014, for any COVID-related charges.

The day Morens was indicted, I published an investigation into University of North Carolina (UNC) virologist Ralph Baric, reporting that the NIH had cut off his grants and UNC had placed him on leave. A senior official inside the Department of Health and Human Services told me that UNC was terrified of the public learning that they were complicit in creating the COVID virus.

“Baric designed the gun,” I was told. “But the Chinese built it, and then they pulled the trigger.”

Several weeks after my report, the federal government sent Baric notice that he was going to be debarred from receiving grants, and he retired from UNC this month.

And in early May, I exposed NIH virologist Vincent Munster, who was caught smuggling viruses in from Africa while on a trip back to his NIH lab in Montana, where he studies monkeypox and Ebola. The Justice Department announced their indictment of Munster on June 2, charging him and his lab researcher with two felonies that included conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox into the United States and giving false statements to federal law enforcement.

Kristian Andersen’s dishonesty has long been reported in the media. In July 2023, The Intercept accused Andersen of misleading Congress while testifying under oath about an $8.9 million grant he received from Tony Fauci after he published the “Proximal Origin” paper in Nature Medicine.

Published in March 2020, Andersen’s paper concluded that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” for having started the COVID pandemic. But while Andersen was working on the paper, he had a pending $8.9 million grant before Fauci.

During the 2023 congressional hearing, Andersen dismissed any connection between the pending Fauci grant and the conclusion of the “Proximal Origin” paper, claiming that the grant was already funded before he published “Proximal Origin.” However, The Intercept reported that, despite Andersen’s testimony to the contrary, grant documents showed that Fauci gave final sign-off on Andersen’s $8.9 million grant in May, two months after Andersen published the “Proximal Origin” paper in March.

During that same 2023 congressional hearing, Andersen claimed multiple times that Fauci and Collins “played no role” in the “Proximal Origin” paper.

“So, it is true to say that, yes, they played no role in this paper,” Andersen testified during the July 2023 hearing.

Andersen made similar claims when congressional investigators deposed him on June 16, 2023, to prepare for the coming public hearing in July. During that deposition, Andersen stated multiple times that Fauci and Collins played no role in the paper. For example, when asked during the deposition why Fauci and Collins were not acknowledged in the “Proximal Origin” paper, Andersen said this is because they played no role.

“[T]here would be no grounds for even acknowledging Drs. Collins or Fauci because they had played no role in the paper itself,” Andersen claimed in the deposition.

But new documents released by Senator Paul shows Collins emailed senior NIH officials a press release Andersen sent him for the coming “Proximal Origin” paper to be published on March 17.

On March 6, 2020, Andersen emailed Fauci and Collins the press release for the coming “Proximal Origin” paper. “[L]et me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions about the paper of the press release,” Andersen wrote.

Forwarding Andersen’s email, Collins wrote, “FYI, this is the work that Tony [Fauci], Jeremy [Farrar], Larry [Tabak], and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper.” Collins added, “I hope Senator Cotton notices this.”

The month prior to Collins’ email, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, complained in February 2020 that the COVID virus could have come from a lab in Wuhan, China.

“We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Cotton said, during a February 2020 interview. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

The Washington Post later labeled Sen. Cotton a “conspiracy theorist” for making this statement.

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Roll camera!

Years after Collins stated in a March 2020 email that he and Fauci had helped on Andersen’s work on the “Proximal Origin” paper, Andersen denied this several times to Congress. During his June 16, 2023, congressional deposition, Andersen claimed Fauci and Collins “played no role.”

Here’s some screenshots from that deposition, with Andersen providing answers to the questions.

Here’s Andersen at another point in his June 16, 2023, deposition

And during the later July 11, 2023, public hearing Andersen also claimed that Collins and Fauci played no role in the “Proximal Origin” paper. Andersen’s misleading statements were often backed up by his co-author on the “Proximal Origin” paper, Robert Garry of Tulane University.

House Democrats on the Committee sought to use the testimony of Andersen and Garry as proof that Republicans were on a wild goose chase to smear Collins and Fauci with claims the two helped direct the paper. To bolster their defense of Collins and Fauci, Democrats released a report and supporting documents that found Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar helped “organize and facilitate” and “led the drafting process of the paper.”

“Jeremy Farrar!” screamed Democrats. “Not Fauci! Not Collins!” Yet, in his email, Collins wrote that the people who helped with Andersen’s work were Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, Larry Tabak, and himself.

The Committee’s Ranking Member, Democrat Raul Ruiz of California, made the point that Fauci and Collins played no role in the Andersen’s paper in his opening statement.

CONGRESSMAN RAUL RUIZ: What’s more, my colleagues claim that Drs. Fauci and Collins orchestrated the Proximal Origin paper. Again, their own investigations has thus far revealed the opposite. In fact, the records and testimony of those involved in the paper reveal that Drs. Fauci and Collins, quote, played no role in the drafting of the paper, unquote.

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland also sought to distance Fauci and Collins from Andersen’s “Proximal Origin” paper.

CONGRESSMAN JAMIE RASKIN: But I have your paper, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV–2, in which you write: Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV–2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. Did Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins pressure you to come to this conclusion or to suppress the lab leak theory?

KRISTIAN ANDERSEN: They did not. That is fully a conclusion of the authors on the paper.

Democratic Congresswoman Deborah Ross of North Carolina highlighted that, in his prior congressional deposition, Andersen stated that Fauci and Collins played no role in the “Proximal Origin” paper. Ross’s statement prompted agreement from Andersen. Garry then backed up Andersen.

CONGRESSWOMAN DEBORAH ROSS: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Just this morning, the Select Subcommittee Democrats released a report to correct on the record the allegations that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins had involvement in the Proximal Origin paper. And I’d like to revisit some of the questions that Mr. Raskin asked about who organized and facilitated that paper. And I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that there’s anything untoward or nefarious about the paper or the events leading to its publications. But my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have made allegations today, unsupported allegations, that I believe misrepresent who did what for the paper and why.

Dr. Andersen, is it accurate to say that because this was not their area of expertise, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins attended the call with a goal of hearing what you and other experts, including your eventual co-authors thought of the virus’ genomic features?

KRISTIAN ANDERSEN: That is correct.

CONGRESSWOMAN ROSS: And in the period following the call, you and your co-authors began to work on what would become the Proximal Origin paper. Is that correct?

KRISTIAN ANDERSEN: That is correct.

CONGRESSWOMAN ROSS: The Select Subcommittee has reviewed thousands of pages of documents and communications between you and your co-authors. In our review, it became abundantly clear that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins had little to no involvement in the paper. For example, Dr. Andersen, when asked about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins’ role in the paper, you told the Select Subcommittee staff, ‘‘They played no role in the paper.’’ Is that correct?

KRISTIAN ANDERSEN: That is correct. I think it’s important to understand that we are talking about an international group of known experts drafting a paper. The whole idea that NIH directors would have a role in that paper is obviously false. So, it is true to say that, yes, they played no role in this paper. Of course, they appeared to have been interested in the paper because they were interested as known experts in the conclusions and the research itself.

CONGRESSWOMAN ROSS: Thank you. In my remaining time, let me turn to you, Dr. Garry. In the final stages of drafting the paper, you sent an email to your co-authors stating, quote—Jeremy Farrar, you were referencing him, had been an amazing leader. You also told Select Subcommittee staff that Dr. Farrar played a substantial advisory role throughout the drafting of the paper. Is that correct?

ROBERT GARRY: That is correct.

CONGRESSWOMAN ROSS: And did Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins ever influence the conclusions drawn in your paper?

ROBERT GARRY: Not in any way.

CONGRESSWOMAN ROSS: So it seems to me, when we don’t have the cameras rolling, even my Republican colleagues might concede that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins did not organize or facilitate the Proximal Origin. And that Dr. Farrar did instead.

As the hearing drew to a close, Committee staffers were allowed to further question the witnesses. Democratic Party Committee staffer, Giancarlo Pellegrini, got both Andersen and Garry to agree that neither Collins nor Fauci played any role in their “Proximal Origin” paper.

Both Andersen and Garry confirmed this statement.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY STAFFER GIANCARLO PELLEGRINI: I just wanted to ask a brief question. When we talk about the role of Dr. Farrar in the paper, I understand that as it relates to the direct drafting of the paper, his role was essentially limited to one particular ask for an edit, but when we talk about his role in the broader process of the paper, for example, Dr. Garry, there is an email from yourself, saying, Jeremy has been an amazing leader, should be an author. I think you both, when we talked in our transcribed interview, confirmed that that general premise, the phrase father figure when we talk about navigating the paper process, talking about different publications that might make sense for the paper to go, that sort of role in the process is an accurate description of Dr. Farrar’s role, I think. Either one of you can confirm that that’s——

KRISTIAN ANDERSEN: Yes, that is correct, and I think importantly too is that Dr. Farrar is on later papers. We have a paper in, I believe, in 2021 in the journal Cell, which is a review on the available evidence, and Dr. Farrar is an author on that particular paper.

STAFFER PELLEGRINI: And when it comes to that sort of a role in the process of the Proximal Origin paper, you both confirmed in our interviews, but I just want to confirm one more time, neither Dr. Fauci, nor Dr. Collins played that type of role or really any role at all?

KRISTIAN ANDERSEN: That is correct.

STAFFER PELLEGRINI: Dr. Garry?

ROBERT GARRY: That is correct.

STAFFER PELLEGRINI: I have no more questions.

If you have thoughts on whether the Justice Department will indict Andersen, or if HHS will debar Andersen as they did UNC’s Ralph Baric, please leave those comments below.

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Refer a friend

Hey everyone, I was on the Kim Iversen Show discussing my May investigation into NIH researcher Vincent Munster who was caught smuggling viruses from Africa back into the United States. Earlier this month, Munster and one of his lab scientists were both charged with 2 felonies: conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox into the United States and giving false statements to federal law enforcement.

More to come on Munster in the future. Enjoy this discussion with Kim Iversen.

Documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard show that an intelligence official blew the whistle on Tony Fauci for lying under oath about his funding for gain-of-function virus research at Wuhan Institute of Virology during May 2021 hearings before the Senate HELP Committee. But after Biden’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines was sent the whistleblower complaint in August 2021, Haines met with Fauci’s boss, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and then never forwarded the whistleblower complaint to the HELP Committee nor the HHS Inspector General for criminal investigation.

Lying or misleading Congress is a crime, punishable by up to 5 years in prison, and is generally investigated by the congressional Committee provided false information or by an Inspector General, and then referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Acting Inspector General of the Intelligence Community Tamara Johnson sent DNI Haines the whistleblower complaint on August 11, 2021. “The complaint alleges Dr. Fauci provided false testimony to Congress related to the conduct of gain of function research at the National Institutes of Health, thereby ”misleading the American people and Congressional oversight,” Johnson emailed Haines.

Johnson added that they considered sending the complaint to the HHS Inspector General for criminal investigation. However, they decided against that, in part, because some of information in the complaint was classified.

The General Counsel for the DNI then emailed DNI Haines some days later on August 16, with draft talking points Haines could use when speaking about the whistleblower complaint with Congress or Tony Fauci’s boss, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. The talking points discuss sending the whistleblower complaint to the HHS Inspector General and “ensuring that the HHS IG has access to the intelligence necessary to review the complaint.”

On August 19, the General Counsel for the DNI followed up with DNI Haines, recommending that Haines forward the whistleblower complaint to Fauci’s boss, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, rather than the HHS Inspector General.

“I think the key thing is that what we’ve seen is consistent with the point that Secretary Becerra made to you – that this is something they’ve considered and that Dr. Fauci has point he’s repeated about the NIH not funding gain-of-function at the WIV,” reads the August 19 email to DNI Haines. “We’ve thus updated the draft letter to note this point and to refer the complaint to Secretary Becerra, rather than the HHS IG.”

DNI Haines was apparently also provided an undated draft letter for DNI to send to Congress, notifying them of the whistleblower complaint. However, that draft DNI letter is addressed to members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, not Senate HELP, where Fauci was accused of lying under oath.

Although the whistleblower complaint does not specify the date of the congressional testimony in question, it may be referring to testimony Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, provided to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee on May 11, 2021, when he stated that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute.” (Dr. Fauci made a similar point during a July 20, 2021 hearing before the HELP Committee.)

The draft DNI letter to congressional intelligence committees adds that HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra has been consulted and will also receive the whistleblower complaint.

Months after DNI Haines failed to forward the whistleblower complaint to Senate HELP or the HHS IG for a likely criminal investigation, intelligence officials emailed an October 2021 Washington Post editorial in which the NIH had admitted to have funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

“I somehow missed this last week, but the NIH sent a letter to Congress basically saying that WIV did [gain-of-function research] after all,” emailed one intelligence official, in October 2021. Names and the agency have been redacted from the email. “Rand Paul then went on Axios on HBO and claimed this is proof Fauci lied to Congress. So…this is just never going to end.”

Earlier this month, Xavier Becerra won the Democratic Party’s nomination for Governor of California. Becerra will compete against Republican Steve Hilton in the November election.

I broke an exclusive story in May exposing an FBI investigation into National Institutes of Health (NIH) virologist Vincent Munster, who was caught smuggling viruses from Africa into the United States. The FBI is now leading this investigation, reads one January email I was provided. The spokesperson for the Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) could not comment about an open criminal investigation, and referred me over to the FBI for details.

“We decline to comment,” the FBI told me. But the FBI never comments during an open investigation. So I published the story, based on documents and what a nervous HHS official told me.

Days after my story hit, Justin Goodman with an outfit called White Coat Waste Project began circulating an anonymous “whistleblower letter” claiming a “full coverup” of the virus smuggling that I had reported the FBI had been investigating, then hooking up with internet loon Laura Loomer to amplify their hot “scoop” on social media.

Last week, Goodman and Loomer finally fooled the New York Times, as a Times journalist falsely reported that Loomer and White Coat Waste Project first disclosed the FBI investigation of Vincent Munster’s virus smuggling. The New York Times then corrected part of their story, which now doesn’t make any sense, but White Coat Waste Project has begun waving around their NY Times get as proof they had first exposed these problems inside the NIH—a phony trophy Goodman will no doubt market to hapless funders as documented proof of their dogged sleuthing and expert investigative skills.

I’m not joking. This shit happened. DC swamp creatures scream for your attention and credit card donations.

Here’s the details of this amazing social media circus.

(NOTE TO READERS: The Free Press reported, last August, that the Trump White House had had it with Laura Loomer, with several White House and Trump officials stating that what Loomer “says and does is influenced by lobbying firms and companies trying to advance their own interests.”

Trump’s close advisor Roger Stone has accused Laura Loomer of running “a lucrative business” taking money from corporations and special interests “to promote their causes or destroy their enemies” with her blogs and videos. A Trump official told me that they believe Big Pharma interests are influencing Loomer to attack the administration’s health policies, a charge Loomer has denied in the past. Loomer told the New Yorker she owns the Loomered Strategies consulting firm and if you have any knowledge of the special interests paying Loomer, please contact me by email or Signal.)

Vincent Muster is a bad dude

I found out about Vincent Munster while on a phone call with a senior official inside HHS. During the conversation, the official mentioned that Vincent Munster, at the NIH lab in Montana, had been caught smuggling deadly viruses back into the United States. They didn’t have all the details, however, because the FBI had taken over the investigation in January.

What this person didn’t realize is that news of this FBI investigation and Munster’s virus smuggling had never been made public. After I pointed this out, I could hear typing, Googling to see if this was true.

“You’re right.”

“Well, can I get the emails and documents?” I asked. The person said they were nervous about anything involving an FBI investigation, but then agreed.

It took me several days to get the story out, which I published on May 5: “EXCLUSIVE: NIH Virologist Vincent Munster Caught Smuggling Deadly Pathogens into U.S., FBI Investigating.”

The subtext to my story is that virologists have been behaving like drunken cowboys, breaking research rules without regard for public safety. Munster studies dangerous viruses in his lab, such as Ebola and monkeypox, and the President, HHS Secretary Kennedy, and NIH Director Bhattacharya have all stated that a lab accident started the COVID pandemic.

Yet, after 20 million deaths and crashing the world economy, have virus researchers learned anything? I don’t think so, because Vincent Munster is one of their own and he doesn’t seem to care about safety laws!

My story took off on social media, and I did a couple interviews about the details and what the Vincent Munster revelations meant for virus research safety. I also got contacted by a whistleblower inside the NIH who has been handing me off more internal documents for a coming story. Stay tuned, people. Something might be coming.

And then things got … a little weird.

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SCOOP! Justin Goodman Ace Reporter

On May 7, two days after my story, White Coat Waste published a blog post “EXCLUSIVE” that claimed they had a “scoop” and an anonymous “whistleblower letter” disclosing that NIH’s Vincent Munster had been caught smuggling viruses from Africa, and the NIH was in “full coverup mode”. This blog post has been updated with other claims since that time.

In an anonymous letter recently obtained by WCW, a whistleblower alleges that Munster, who conducts animal experiments with dangerous foreign viruses, attempted to smuggle “dozens of vials in his baggage” on a trip back from Africa in January and lied to customs officials about their contents.

If you have access to a calendar, you may ask yourself, “How is it a ‘scoop’ to write on May 7 about information that was published on May 5?” Here’s some other questions: “How can the NIH be in ‘full coverup mode’ if the FBI has taken the lead investigating? Is this an allegation that the NIH is hiding information from the FBI, because that would be criminal?”

Seriously, just ask yourself those questions.

And if you’re a former Senate Investigator (like me!) who’s worked for years with whistleblowers and who worked for Chuck Grassley, the Senator who wrote most of our whistleblower laws, you may also ask, “Is someone a ‘whistleblower’ if the details have already been made public and reported in the media?”

If you’re now confused that’s because you’re not familiar with the information swindlers who hang out on social media, hoping for my followers by posting “EXCLUSIVE” for a story that has long been circulating.

Be careful on social media, people!

Plenty of nonprofits and DC lobby groups run hustles to puff themselves up, pretend they have access to undisclosed information, and sell themselves to forlorn donors as connected DC-insiders. Again, I usually just ignore this. But then these clowns began partnering with internet personality, Laura Loomer.

Once an influential Trump whisperer, Loomer now spends her days trying to convince naive reporters who lack White House sources that she’s still relevant. Last August, the Free Press reported that White House officials were suspicious that “drugmaker Sarepta Therapeutics may have paid Loomer either directly or indirectly” to attack Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official, Vinay Prasad.

I had been told similar stories from HHS officials about Loomer’s ties to the drug industry, but Free Press had the details. Loomer was running an online campaign last year against Prasad, and two days after FDA placed a Sarepta clinical trial on hold after 3 deaths and suspended product shipments, Loomer labeled Prasad a “progressive leftist saboteur.” Here’s the Free Press:

Loomer’s attack on Prasad came about five weeks after Sarepta hired the lobbying firm Michael Best Strategies to lobby the White House, Congress, and the Department of Health and Human Services on “rare disease therapeutic development and access,” according to a financial disclosure. Sarepta has been a familiar lobbying client in Washington over the past decade. Michael Best’s president is Reince Priebus, a former Republican National Committee chairman.

Trump officials told the Free Press that Sarepta and pharma payments seemed to explain Loomer’s crusade against Prasad, a charge that Loomer denied.

However, Loomer’s former mentor, Republican political operative and close Trump advisor, Roger Stone, torched Loomer’s credibility in a recent essay that detailed her long history of mental illness, noting that she is now cashing in on social media as “a propagandist-for-hire.”

“[T]hrough dogged hard work and general fearlessness, Loomer created a substantial online presence and audience,” wrote Stone. “She soon developed a lucrative business in which individuals, candidates, corporations and others could pay her to promote their causes or destroy their enemies.”

Another Loomer associate told me, “If Laura is writing about it, somebody is paying her.”

On May 11, Loomer released a “BREAKING EXCLUSIVE” that laundered Justin Goodman’s anonymous “whistleblower letter” that claims to have “first exposed” NIH researcher Vincent Munster “smuggling viruses.” Loomer also called this “my reporting on the letter.”

I’m serious. And I agree with Roger Stone: Laura Loomer is a tragedy.

Mind you, I had already reported on May 5 that the FBI was investigating Vincent Munster for smuggling viruses. So how is this “breaking news” on May 11? But it gets better.

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Hoodwinking the Hill?

White Coat Waste Project’s blabbering about their anonymous “whistleblower letter” alleging “full coverup mode” apparently hoodwinked Hill staff. On May 15, Senator Joni Ernst posted on X that White Coat Waste Project was alleging a “troubling cover-up” of “international virus smuggling.”

This is almost two weeks, after I had reported that the FBI had launched a criminal investigation into Vincent Munster’s smuggling of viruses. Can somebody explain to me who was covering up what, where, and when?

I’m not joking. This shit happened.

I wanna tell you something. I spent 3 ½ years on the Senate Finance Committee, dealing with corruption in science and medicine. Hill staff work long, punishing hours and are paid next to nothing. I probably put in around 70 hours a week, meaning I made about $21 an hour, to dig and dig through documents, and then listen to lobbyists and high-priced lawyers try to tell me why their clients didn’t do what they did.

Whenever pharma lobbyists showed up at Senate Finance to explain why I should stop investigating their clients, I sometimes opened the meeting with the following introduction: “Let me guess. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong, and we’re not doing it anymore.’”

It’s a thankless job.

But congressional staff take dozens of meetings each week. Nobody has time to really check stuff out on the Hill. You kind of have to trust that people coming into your office are telling you the whole truth.

During my time in Senate, I sometimes caught lawyers and lobbyist trying to fool the Senate Finance Committee, one time catching a lawyer trying to sell us a bill of goods about an FDA official. But this lawyer’s phone call with Senate staff went sideways, when I began asking who was paying for all this? I then placed the story about the operation they were running and documents we uncovered with Politico.

According to records, White Coat Waste Project spends about $10,000 every quarter lobbying the federal government, and Justin Goodman is their lobbyist.

Concerned that White Coat Waste Project might be selling a bill of goods to congressional offices, I asked Justin Goodman if he was aware that providing false and/or misleading information to Congress is actionable under 1001? I then sent him a letter I had written for Senator Grassley that went to an attorney and provides the specific language of the criminal code, after I caught him misleading us.

Justin Goodman didn’t respond, but I then received a threatening letter from White Coat Waste Project’s Jared Goodman, Justin brother. Jared Goodman also appears on White Coat Waste Project’s lobbying records. So I emailed Jared, “Jared, were you involved in any meetings that White Coat Waste Project took with Hill staff regarding Vincent Munster?”

But Jared didn’t reply.

But it gets better.

Loomer and White Coat Waste Project continued to float rumors into the middle of May that they had “just EXPOSED” Vincent Munster smuggling viruses into the United States. And then snagged a New York Times reporter.

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Rumored by Loomer

After a month-long barrage of a “full coverup mode” anonymous “whistleblower letter” bullshit and constant churning of Loomer rumors—!!EXCLUSIVE!!—Justin Goodman and Laura Loomer landed this circus in the New York Times.

I find it mind boggling how White Coat Waste Project and Laura Loomer can “disclose” an investigation based on anonymous “whistleblower report” after that FBI criminal investigation is ALREADY PUBLIC NEWS AND HAS BEEN ONGOING SINCE JANUARY!!!

What the hell is going on in the media?

So I contacted the New York Times reporter, and went round and round with her. I’m not joking. This shit happened.

The reporter at first tried to claim that it didn’t matter who first publicly disclosed the story, even though the story credited Loomer and White Coat Waste Project with first publicly disclosing the story.

So I explained to the reporter that her employer—The New York Times—states specifically in their ethical standards that Times reporters are supposed to credit other work: “Even when we have confirmed the news ourselves, as a matter of courtesy and candor, we should credit major scoops or exclusives to the organization that broke the news.”

I didn’t think it was so hard for a New York Times reporter to follow New York Times guidelines. But instead of correcting the article, and noting that I had broken the news first, she ran an “update” and removed the words “at first”.

Of course, now the story doesn’t make any sense. Loomer and White Coat Waste Project had not “publicly disclosed the investigation” by the FBI, because it had already been publicly disclosed many days prior with people in Montana tagging their elected officials. And again, how can you have a “whistleblower report”, as the New York Times claims, if the whistleblower is alleging “full cover up mode” about virus smuggling that the FBI has been investigating since they took the lead in January?

I actually pay for the New York Times, but what the hell am I getting for my subscription?

On a final note: I’m very interested in speaking to any Hill staff about what Justin Goodman or Laura Loomer may have told them about this anonymous “whistleblower letter,” the FBI investigation, and the “full coverup.”

Please contact me.

Finally, as I was finishing this piece yesterday, a House investigator sent me the letter the Energy and Commerce Committee sent the NIH demanding answers to some of the same questions I’ve been asking my NIH whistleblower. This is not over.

A scandal has been brewing the last several months at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where researchers were caught publishing poor quality studies—called test negative design—to promote vaccines. Following weeks of controversy, the CDC hosted a seminar last week to hash out and debate which studies are best to test vaccine effectiveness.

I’m not running a biostatistics seminar here, but if you’re interested in learning more about all the problems and biases with test negative design, see this interview I did with Oxford’s Carl Heneghan or take a look at this 2-page memo now circulating inside the Department of Health and Human Services: The Problematic Test-Negative Design.

The CDC seminar pitted Martin Kulldorff, a long-term vaccine advisor to the CDC and now the chief science advisor to the administration, against two scientists chosen by the CDC. The first to speak was Emily Martin at the University of Michigan, followed by Natalie Dean at Emory University.

However, I discovered that Emily Martin has a history of using poor quality research to draw scientific conclusions. To promote masks in a 2022 essay, Martin cited a study by Cochrane researcher Tom Jefferson. But Martin cited an early 2007 version of Jefferson’s Cochrane work, ignoring three updates that Jefferson published with Cochrane that used higher quality studies.

When I called up Jefferson and told him what Martin did, he started laughing and said that Martin doesn’t know what she’s doing. “She purposely cited the early version that she agreed with,” Jefferson said. “It’s citation bias. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for it, but they should be.”

Martin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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CDC research favors Big Pharma

The CDC scandal kicked off back in April, when the acting CDC director discovered that CDC scientists are using test negative studies to promote vaccines as effective. The scandal erupted in the pages of the Washington Post when CDC employees leaked these internal deliberations to try and win this scientific debate in the media and allow themselves to continue using bad research.

I interviewed Oxford’s Carl Heneghan last week for The DisInformation Chronicle Podcast, to discuss the scandal and why federal scientists should use better research techniques to give the public real advice about vaccines.

Heneghan is a physician-researcher, who has spent decades in the field of evidence-based medicine, which seeks out the highest quality peer-reviewed research to guide patient care.

“Your CDC has a particular problem—ideology,” Heneghan told me on The DisInformation Chronicle podcast. “They’re not testing whether something works; they’re trying to prove what they think works. In doing so, test negative designs are really good to do that.”

Heneghan said that the CDC needs to get away from observational research, like test negative studies, and start running randomized controlled trials (RCTs) which are more objective and less prone to manipulation by a researcher’s own biases. We then discussed why RCTs are better at determining whether something works—like a drug, medical device, or any other procedure or treatment—and why observational studies that the CDC uses are rife with potential bias.

Refer a friend

CDC reckoning on low quality studies

I didn’t have time to watch the entire debate, but I did get a chance to see Emily Martin defend the CDC current practices using test negative studies, instead of higher quality RCTs. Intrigued at Martin’s ability to ignore RCTs in favor of low quality observational research, I looked her up and found she had published a piece at The Conversation arguing “masks work” to stop viruses.

“We are infectious disease epidemiologists and researchers, and we have spent our careers focused on understanding how viruses spread and how best to stop them,” Martin wrote in 2022.

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Well, I know Martin’s essay is false, because I have interviewed Jefferson who wrote the series of Cochrane Reviews that found little-to-no evidence that masks stop viruses. Cochrane uses a systematic review process, which requires Cochrane authors to gather all the published studies available on a topic under consideration, and then reference the best available evidence, meaning RCTs. However, RCTs can be supplemented with observational studies if not enough RCTs have been completed.

Jefferson explained to me that Cochrane released their first review on masks in 2006, and updated that original review in 2007, 2010, 2011, 2020, and 2023. Each update improved the original review with better, higher quality research, as scientists published more and more RCTs studying masks.

So here’s an interesting question: How was Martin able to conclude that ‘masks work’ when we know Cochrane has reviewed the highest quality mask studies and concluded that they don’t?

Answer: Martin cited an early version that Cochrane published in 2007 and ignored the updates published in 2010, 2011, and 2020.

Here’s how Martin did this.

In her 2022 essay for The Conversation, Martin claims:

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers were studying the effectiveness of masks at reducing transmission of other respiratory viruses. Meta-analyses of viral spread during the original SARS epidemic in 2002-2003 showed that one infection was averted for every six people wearing a mask, and for every three people who were wearing an N95 mask.

Click on the link, and the source Martin cites as evidence that masks stop one infection for every six people wearing a mask takes you to the Cochrane Review on masks completed in 2007 and then published in the BMJ in 2008. As you can see the lead author is Tom Jefferson.

When Cochrane published this 2007 review almost two decades ago, very few RCTs had been done on masks, so the Cochrane authors had to rely on lower quality observational studies—the type of studies that Martin and CDC scientists favor. But as the years progressed, Jefferson and his fellow Cochrane scientists updated that review, referencing more and more RCTs on masks as they became available.

In short, the 2010 update was better than the 2007 Cochrane mask review, and the 2011 update was better than the 2010. And so on. By the time of the 2020 update, the Cochrane authors had enough RCTs that they no longer needed to rely on low quality observational studies.

Each update also found less and less evidence that “masks work” to stop viruses. By 2023, the Cochrane authors concluded that wearing a mask “probably makes little or no difference” in stopping viruses and wearing an N95 respirator “probably makes little or no difference” as well.

When I contacted Jefferson and asked him why Martin wrote a 2022 essay that relied on the 2007 Cochrane report and ignored the latest update from 2020, Jefferson said Martin cherry-picked the early version that referenced low quality studies because it gave her the answer she wanted. He then started laughing. “She chose the version that told her what she wanted to know,” Jefferson said. “The old versions are only there if you want to understand the history.”

The hilarity of Martin citing Jefferson’s research, and Jefferson saying that Martin doesn’t understand his research, reminded me of the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall.

Annie (Diane Keaton) and Alvy (Woody Allen) are standing in line to see a movie when an academic standing behind them begins bloviating in a loud, obnoxious voice about media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Alvy starts complaining about the blowhard professor who retorts that he teaches a class on media at Columbia University. “I think my insights into McLuhan have a great deal of validity,” the professor says in his defense.

“I heard what you are saying,” says McLuhan, stepping into the scene. “You know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.”

I have an interview with Oxford’s Carl Heneghan, on the scandal at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where researchers were caught publishing poor quality studies—called test negative design—to promote vaccines.

Please head over to the DisInformation Chronicle Podcast on Youtube and subscribe.

Another fake scandal orchestrated to promote Big Pharma erupted in the pages of the Washington Post last April when employees with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) leaked internal deliberations about a study being shut down because it promoted the COVID vaccine boosters. But if you bothered to read beyond the headline, the real issues wasn’t shutting down a particular vaccine study, but ceasing the way CDC employees having been doing vaccine research, and demanding they use higher quality evidence.

CDC employees have been using a study technique called “test negative” which seems almost predetermined to find results that favor vaccines. To try and win this scientific battle in the press, CDC employees have continued sending anonymous complaints to different media outlets that they are being censored, forcing the agency to draw the disgruntled leakers out into the sunlight, by holding a public seminar a couple days ago to discuss the matter according to basic scientific principles and guidelines.

To get to the bottom of this matter, I called up Oxford’s Carl Heneghan, a physician researcher and expert on evidence-based medicine. Heneghan explained that test negative studies are flawed, but some researchers like them because, unlike randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs), they give fast results that seem almost predetermined to favor vaccines.

“Your CDC has a particular problem—ideology,” Heneghan said. “They’re not testing whether something works; they’re trying to prove what they think works. In doing so, test negative designs are really good to do that.”

Heneghan said the CDC should switch to higher quality studies that require federal scientists to first publish a protocol so researchers can’t fiddle with the data on the back end. We also discussed the ins and outs of how to judge scientific studies and why we keep reading stories with scary headlines about measles, hantavirus, and Ebola, when few if any people die from these viruses in either the United States or in the United Kingdom.

When is comes to hantavirus, Heneghan explained, “We’ve had 12 cases in a decade and no deaths.”

See the interview below and suggest future guests in the comments. Again, please subscribe to the DisInformation Chronicle Youtube channel as well.

I put together a short video detailing the history of Bill Gates’ undue influence on the National Institutes of Health, also explaining why I think nobody wanted to speak with me for a story examining the Gates/NIH relationship.

Down in one of the documents, a senior NIH official noted that the combined funding of Gates and the NIH “represent 57% of global health R&D.” If you’re a researcher complaining about the two entities that control over half of the funding for public health, where do you then go to get funding for public health?

So of course nobody wanted to stick out their neck and speak to me. Duh!

Enjoy!

Paul

Bill Gates has long been one of the most admired people in the world, especially since he stepped down from his role running Microsoft to devote himself and much of his fortune to philanthropy. That reputation has been tarnished recently, however, by revelations of the billionaire’s close relation with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and exposés on his own fraught relationships with women.

On the eve of Gates’ private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country’s health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.

At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates’ efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.

The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates’s extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, “What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?”

Emails and internal plans, for example, show that the NIH – the world’s largest funder of biomedical research – gave the Gates Foundation first billing for the joint workshops and meetings held on federal property.

The Gates Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The NIH also declined to comment.

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Leveraging Investments

Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation tries to grow its endowment through investments. Some of these efforts, especially its stake in vaccine companies, blur the lines between profit-seeking and the foundation’s mission to develop and deliver vaccines around the world. This symbiotic relationship between capitalism and charity also benefits Gates, whose power and position hinge in large part on the size of his foundation’s assets. Before the pandemic, The Nation magazine reported that the Gates Foundation had a $40 million stake in CureVac – this was not a grant but an investment. CureVac was one of many companies the nonprofit bought stock in that were working on COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

Around that same period, the Gates Foundation announced that it had begun to “leverage a portion of its $2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund” to advance the nonprofit’s COVID work. The Gates Foundation also turned a $55 million investment in Pfizer’s COVID vaccine partner, BioNTech, into over $550 million when it sold stock a couple of years later after the vaccine hit the market.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000 with an initial endowment of $20 billion and a primary focus on reducing global health disparities. Rather than working exclusively through non-governmental agencies, the Gates Foundation began contributing to the NIH through the agency’s own nonprofit, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Congress created the FNIH in 1990 as a firewall between NIH officials and outside donors seeking to influence federal research.

That firewall is not ironclad. In 2018, for example, NIH officials, funded by beer and liquor companies through an FNIH grant, were in frequent contact with the alcohol industry while designing a study that seemed predetermined to find alcohol’s benefits but not potential harms, such as cancer. The NIH also declined money in 2018 from drugmakers to support a proposed $400 million research program to discover opioid alternatives and addiction treatments. Like the alcohol funds, that drugmaker money would have also been routed through the FNIH.

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Major Grants to Government

In 2003, the Gates Foundation donated $200 million to the FNIH to fund NIH scientific programs, an unprecedented sum. Rice University researchers warned in 2008 that this Gates cash was shifting the NIH’s scientific priorities, even though the money was cycled through the FNIH. While FNIH manages and administers Gates money, they said, the Gates Foundation’s scientific board ultimately “oversees and selects the projects to be funded” at the NIH

After Gates gave an NIH lecture in 2013, NIH documents show that the agency began hosting Gates-NIH Workshops, eventually synchronizing federal research programs with Gates, to include coordinating grant funding and science policies across 10 NIH programs.

“Bill Gates, along with the NIH, the Wellcome Trust, it was this cartel,” the whistleblower, a former NIH official who requested anonymity, told RCI. “This is a globalist movement. And that’s something that I don’t think the public knows.”

The Gates Foundation held its second annual meeting with the NIH in July 2105, with both sides proposing new areas of teamwork, and later agreeing to cooperate on funding and research policies for global health. One area of overlap was the West African Ebola outbreaks. To align the Gates Foundation’s Ebola research with the federal agency, Gates routed money through the FNIH so that NIH employees could hire the McKinsey consulting firm.

According to the NIH’s summary of the 2015 workshop, McKinsey’s study of the Ebola field found 20 therapeutics, eight diagnostics, and eight different vaccines, concluding that the Merck and GSK vaccines were the most advanced.

At no point in the several dozen emails and documents provided to RCI did NIH officials appear to raise any concerns about conflicts of interest regarding their work with Gates, nor the hiring of McKinsey to shape federal research and development policies. McKinsey is a global consulting firm whose clients include dozens of foreign governments and some of the world’s largest corporations.

House Democrats released an April 2022 investigation that documented McKinsey’s conflicts of interest during the opioid epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans, finding that McKinsey provided consulting advice to both Purdue Pharma and the Food and Drug Administration from 2008 to 2019. In one example, the report surfaced emails with McKinsey employees congratulating themselves for influencing a 2018 speech on opioid safety by then-FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

When Congress brought McKinsey managing partner Bob Sternfels before cameras during a 2022 public hearing, he alleged that his firm did not have a conflict of interest when it gave simultaneous advice to both OxyContin’s manufacturer and the government agency that regulated OxyContin. Two years later, McKinsey paid a $650 million fine to resolve a criminal and civil investigation into the firm’s consulting work with Purdue Pharma.

“The NIH and BMGF have had a long history of interaction, particularly with respect to vaccines and drugs,” reads the NIH summary of the 2015 Gates-NIH meeting.

A longtime NIH official said that the agency’s leadership initially held Gates at arm’s length, but eventually gave in. “They were very suspicious at first,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “But they got caught up in, ‘Wow, he’s the richest man in the world!”

The NIH official added, “What I saw, which really, I think, extends until this day, is a complete merging of NIH and Gates. And I’ve never seen that written anywhere. I don’t think people realize this incredible symbiotic relationship.”

Bill Gates Is Coming!

Bill Gates added a bit of splendor to the Gates-NIH workshop series when he made his first personal appearance at the April 2016 meeting. As part of the meticulous planning for the event, NIH Director Francis Collins held a 45-minute teleconference 10 days prior to hash out the meeting’s details with Trevor Mundel, a former pharmaceutical executive in charge of global health at the Gates Foundation.

According to a list of key “milestones and accomplishments” sent at the time to Collins, the Gates Foundation was by then firmly entwined within the NIH ecosystem to include dual workshops, joint clinical trials, combined research policies, and collaborative funding efforts. For example, NIH staff and Gates employees worked together on clinical trials for TB treatment in Africa. Both Gates and NIH employees also began a joint study for TB with support from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

The night before the meeting, the NIH held a reception and a catered dinner, paid by the FNIH, for almost two dozen Gates executives at the Cloisters Mansion, a historic, stone castle in rural Maryland, where actor Will Smith married actress Jada Pinkett.

Emails show that the NIH continued scrambling that night to lock down the arrival of other attendees, which included Obama officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf.

To provide Bill Gates a luxury experience, NIH staff prepared Collins – a Nobel Prize-winning scientist – a minute-by-minute itinerary for the arrival of Gates and his retinue the following morning. NIH police were ordered to greet Bill at the facility’s entrance and then escort the billionaire’s three-vehicle convoy the final half mile to one of the main research centers, where the Director lingered in waiting. Such deference to power, said a senior Trump official when reading the Collins itinerary over the phone, is normally reserved for the president, first lady, or visiting dignitaries of state.

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“Dr. Collins will meet Bill Gates after he exits the car and steps inside of the building,” the itinerary read. After posing for a photo, Collins was bidden to escort the billionaire into the main auditorium and welcome the audience for Gates.

The agenda shows Collins and Gates Foundation’s Trevor Mundel gave a joint introduction before stepping aside for Bill Gates’s opening speech. Moderated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who would later lead the U.S. medical response to COVID, the first panel included a mix of NIH and Gates executives discussing microbial outbreaks and public-private partnerships to develop pandemic-preventive vaccines.

Collins then moderated a panel on “Research on Engineered Gene Drives and Vector-Borne Disease Control: Status and Next Direction.” Gene drive technology involves inserting specific genetic traits to spread rapidly throughout a population. Gates has long been a fan of gene drives to control mosquitoes, but the technology is highly controversial as it could also drive species to extinction and irrevocably alter ecosystems. The NIH’s scientific program to control mosquitoes with genetic technology was apparently started with seed money from Gates in 2003.

Beginning in 2012, a Bill Gates-funded nonprofit called Target Malaria began a gene drive technology study to eradicate malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in Burkina Faso. Last August, Burkina Faso’s government suspended Target Malaria’s project over safety concerns and worries about the excessive influence of Bill Gates on the country’s sovereignty.

Gates only stayed the morning of the 2016 meeting and left before lunch. “Bill Gates is escorted, by Dr. Collins, out of the building through the same hallway he entered,” reads Collins’ itinerary. “NIH Police escort Mr. Gates and staff to the exit gate.”

The meeting ended with a wrap-up and review of next steps, led by Collins and a Gates executive.

Later that year, the FNIH honored the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Pfizer with an award for supporting the NIH’s mission. Gates was recognized for $413 million dollars in donations and Pfizer for $73 million. In a press release announcing the honor, the NIH said, “Their gifts created cornerstone programs and paved the way for our partnerships with literally hundreds of other organizations dedicated to driving biomedical research worldwide.”

The FNIH continues to maintain close ties to pharmaceutical interests, a major NIH funder. The current CEO, Julie Gerberding, came to the FNIH during the COVID pandemic, having previously served as President of Merck Vaccines.

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In an interview on The DisInformation Chronicle Podcast, physician-scientist and entrepreur Steven Quay discussed his new book “The Code As Witness” explaining how scientific evidence shows that the COVID pandemic started in a Wuhan lab.

Science Magazine has published several false and misleading studies that allege the pandemic started in a market in December 2019, and then defended those deceitful conclusions and defamed critics in their news section. But even the head of China’s Centre for Disease Control, Gao Fu, has noted that the scientific evidence does not support inaccurate claims that COVID arose in a market.

Gao was involved in collecting samples at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market that Science Magazine claims was the pandemic’s origin. However, he told the South China Morning Post, “We first believed the virus originated in the seafood market, but now it looks like that the market is just another victim. The virus existed [before the infections happened in the market].”

Examining the virus’s genetic data, Quay also finds that the virus was circulating many months before it began spreading in December at the market in Wuhan.

You can purchase Quay’s book at this link on Amazon: “The Code as Witness: How the Covid Genome Reveals its Lab Origins and How to Prevent Future Outbreaks.”

An excerpted chapter follows, below.

Update: Last month, I reported that NIH virologist Vincent Munster was caught smuggling dangerous viruses into the United States while conducting research in Africa. The Department of Justice has announced that both Munster and his assistant have been charged with smuggling monkeypox into the United States and giving false statements to federal law enforcement.

Both NIH scientists now face a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

THE CODE AS WITNESS

CHAPTER ONE

Ground Zero

On my first trip to Wuhan in 2014, I knew little about the city. I was there to visit a laboratory testing site and negotiate a contract for research related to my work as the CEO of Atossa Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company mostly dedicated to finding solutions to the prevention and cure of breast cancer.

I had assumed that Wuhan might be something like Chicago: not the biggest city, nor the most important, but a big site for industry and a crucial center for transportation. When I arrived at Tianhe International Airport, I slipped into the underground Line 2 of the subway. I knew from looking at maps before the trip that the original, ancient city of Wuhan lies on the east side of the Yangtze River. On the west side lies the modern, sleek portion of the city, and when I emerged from the subway to find my hotel, it was immediately clear to me which side of the river Line 2 had brought me to.

I stood in the center of a city so modern that it makes Manhattan look like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. The glistening skyscrapers, bustling traffic, and high-speed trains seemed out of a postmodern utopian dream.

Wuhan itself is a major business hub for several international corporations. After checking in, I returned to Line 2 to travel eastward. I exited at the eleventh stop along Line 2, located near Optics Valley, where my meeting was to take place. You can think of Optics Valley as China’s version of Silicon Valley, as it is a hub for technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The zone retains forty-two institutes of higher learning, including Wuhan University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Within its planned area of 322 square miles and a permanent population of about 1.8 million, it holds fifty-six scientific research institutes at the national, provincial, and ministerial levels and more than 300,000 professional and technical personnel, which makes it one of the three most talent-rich areas in the country. It has also been recognized as a major hub for biotechnology and bio-industry. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s two locations are within Optics Valley.

During my stay, I continued to be impressed with beautiful, brand-new stations that dotted the subway system, and I was struck by how easy it was to travel from Wuhan to anywhere else in China—from the center of the city, one can easily travel deep into the rural southern province of Yunnan, or to an international airport, or north to Beijing. All this and more is connected via Wuhan’s hypermodern mass transportation system that weaves through and around the city with nine lines used by millions daily.

Line 2, however, is of particular interest to this story. Before the pandemic, Line 2 alone carried an average of one million passengers per day, commuters going into the city center and then home to the outlying areas each night. The line begins in the east at Fozuling, moves through Optics Valley Square, and travels a zigzaggy course, going under the river and then continuing sixteen miles north of the city center before terminating at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport.

Wuhan Tianhe is the busiest airport in central China, and one can easily fly nonstop from Wuhan to major international destinations, such as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Rome, Istanbul, Dubai, Sydney, Bali, Bangkok, Moscow, Osaka, Seoul, and Singapore. Terminal 3, which services international flights, has a whopping passenger capacity of thirty-five million passengers per year. This steady flow of traffic lends credence to the airport’s name, Tianhe, which literally translates to “sky river.”

So, when I began hearing rumors in early 2020 that a virus had broken out in Wuhan, a virus that was a close genetic relative to a virus from Yunnan in the south, I was suspicious of the idea that what would be named SARS‑CoV‑2 was the result of a natural process. I had experienced firsthand how far Yunnan—the geographic location of the origin of the closest natural virus based on the virus’s genetic sequence—was from Wuhan, and I had also experienced the dense, urbanized, impressiveness of the city. Rumors held that the virus had broken out at a certain wet market, and I also knew just how close this suspected wet market was to China’s, and arguably the world’s, largest coronavirus-research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting some of the most dangerous viral research in China at the time—research that some scientists outside China worried, well before the COVID-19 pandemic, would lead to pathogens escaping. Like the rest of the world, I hadn’t ruled out that the virus had a natural origin, but my gut told me that I should dig deeper and discover from where this virus had emerged.

When we look closely at Wuhan as the virus’s ground zero, we can clearly see that the most significant locations for tracing the early days of the virus run along Line 2. In a later chapter, I will show why I believe that Line 2 was the “COVID-19 conduit” that allowed the virus to leave Wuhan and spread throughout China and the world before we even knew it existed. But for now, let us ride the rails of Line 2 through Wuhan and see where it takes us.

General Hospital of the Central Theater Command Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army of China

627 Wuluo Road, Wuchang District Wuhan Metro Line 2: Baotong Temple Station

On December 27, 2019, a forty-four-year-old man developed pneumonia-like symptoms and was taken to the General Hospital of the Central Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army of China. The PLA hospital is located in the middle of China’s joint civilian-military operations, which were under development in the academic, scientific, and military facilities in this part of Wuhan. The medical staff tested him for pneumonia. Bronchoalveolar lavage, as this procedure is known, is common when diagnosing lung cancer, bacterial, viral, and fungal infections, and persistent coughs of unknown origin. What the lab found when it studied this man’s sample, however, was anything but common. It was unlike anything the world had seen before.

The patient was infected with a virus that we would soon come to know as SARS‑CoV‑2, and he was one of the first documented patients to develop the resulting disease, COVID-19.

In virology, the term patient zero refers to the (usually unknown) first patient afflicted with a virus that becomes an outbreak. This forty-four-year-old man was not the very first person to come down with COVID-19, so we won’t call him patient zero. As we will see later, our key witness, the virus genome itself, will report that it probably first entered the human population of Wuhan months earlier, sometime in the summer or early fall of 2019. While this man was not patient zero, we could effectively call his affliction Virus Zero.

Allow me to explain. The way scientists trace a virus’s progression is by looking at its mutations—single-letter genetic mistakes that it occasionally makes as it replicates itself. As a virus is passed from person to person or animal to animal, its genetic composition changes at a predictable rate. About twice a month, or every two weeks, the virus makes a random mistake when it copies the roughly 30,000 letters of its genetic blueprint. We call this its molecular clock. Because these mistakes are then copied into the virus’s progeny, we can use computer programs to walk back in time through the historical record of all the mutations that arise in a pandemic. This technique allows us to identify the earliest version of a virus that infected humans.

This man was infected with a strain of SARS‑CoV‑2 that was later named Lineage A. The specific Lineage A virus from this patient was called WHO04. For viruses, lineages are akin to ethnic groups while WH004 would be a surname for a family within that ethnic group. Although this SARS‑CoV‑2 virus was identical to known bat viruses in over 96 percent of the length of its genetic code, it still had over eleven hundred mutations that were different from any previously known coronavirus. That is over forty years on the coronavirus molecular clock.

This forty-four-year-old man was infected with what we will call Virus Zero because he was infected with the first known variant, or clade, of the novel coronavirus—a fact that made this middle-aged man among the earliest patients infected with what was called Clade A, a virus from an infected human that is genetically closest to it ancestor host, the bat.

The determination of which variant of a virus arose first relies on using the molecular clock as well: The more time a bat virus has to jump from host to host, the more mutations it will have, until its genome changes enough that it is able to spread among humans. Clade A and the next variant, labeled Clade B, became the first SARS‑CoV‑2 viruses to infect humans. Two mutations differentiated Clade A from Clade B, with Clade A being identical to bat viruses at those two positions, and Clade B had changed the code letter for each of those two spots.

Being the first infected was no honor, as other patients were soon to discover. On December 31, 2019, another sample was collected at the PLA hospital, this time from a forty-three-year-old male. The following day, another patient—a twenty-one-year-old female—became the hospital’s third known case of COVID-19. This patient is especially noteworthy because her residence lay on the east side of the Yangtze River, not the west side, where the wet market that many have pointed to as the origin point of the pandemic is located. This patient also lived within a short walking distance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University, both institutions with active coronavirus research programs. She was thus a potential candidate for having acquired SARS‑CoV‑2 from the laboratory she worked in. Finally, on January 5, 2020, a thirty-nine-year-old male experiencing pneumonia-like symptoms also made his way to the PLA hospital for testing. These three patients all had Clade B. By then, it was clear: The PLA hospital was experiencing the earliest patient cluster of sequenced SARS‑CoV‑2 viruses, and the virus was spreading quickly.

Chinese officials had been tight-lipped about the virus’s outbreak, and to piece details together, I began in February 2020 to sift through the dozens of scattered reports, internet genetic databases (places where scientists deposit the raw information, called Sequence Read Archive, or SRA, and final, assembled genetic sequences of viruses), and academic papers that had trickled out in reports from doctors on the ground.

The research process began with a publication out of China, authored by thirty-four Chinese doctors and one Australian scientist, Eddie Holmes. The paper states that “nine patients with viral pneumonia and negative for common respiratory pathogens, who presented to at least three hospitals in Wuhan, were included in this study.”

Nowhere in the paper do the researchers name the PLA hospital as one of the three hospitals. Theirs, however, was not the only paper with this opacity. The few published reports of early patients in Wuhan conspicuously omit information about the hospitals where patients were seen. Early reports include such vague statements as, “We report the epidemiological data of nine inpatients, from at least three hospitals in Wuhan, who were diagnosed with viral pneumonia of unidentified cause.” It took some serious digging through genomic databases to discover where the founder patients were treated.

I was only able to find the PLA hospital records because someone had uploaded the PLA patient samples to a server in Germany and—likely by accident—included the hospital’s address. If the information was posted by mistake, it was never made again. No other SARS‑CoV‑2 genome sequence from a patient at the PLA hospital has ever been made public.

Not only was the location later obscured, but also serious digging was required to find out that this cluster of patients even existed at all. There is also evidence that “problematic” patient records were simply changed or removed from databases completely. We can see an example of this in the first paper that describes the hospital course of COVID-19 patients. This Chinese peer-reviewed publication on SARS‑CoV‑2 was written by twenty-seven Chinese doctors, all of whom were working in the major Wuhan hospitals. They documented one patient with disease onset on December 1, 2019, and three with onset of December 10, 2019, and then noted that the first patient and three of these first four patients had no history of visiting any wet markets.

Their methods were rigorous, as they stated: “To ascertain the epidemiological and symptom data, which were not available from electronic medical records, the researchers also directly communicated with patients or their families to ascertain epidemiological and symptom data.”

Interestingly, this peer-reviewed paper was never corrected or retracted. Yet the subsequent WHO report that claimed to be based on this very paper deleted, without comment, any and all references to the three non-market patients. And nowhere in the WHO report is there a reference to the original PLA cluster. It seems as if someone wanted to create the impression that these four patients—all treated within the same military hospital, a ten-minute taxi ride from the WIV—or any patient who did not visit a wet market, never existed at all.

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Central Hospital of Wuhan

26 Shengli Street, Jianghan District Wuhan Metro Line 2: Jianghan Road Station

Thirty-three-year-old physician Li Wenliang had been working as an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital since 2014. The BBC reported that he was well-known as a “responsible doctor and a loving husband.” And his wife, Fu Xuejie, was a devoted mother to their four-year-old and pregnant with their second child.

During the last few weeks of December 2019, Li noticed seven patients who had come to the hospital with symptoms resembling those associated with SARS. Li had been a teenager when the first reported case of SARS emerged in 2002 in Guangzhou (about 621 miles south of Wuhan), and he had seen firsthand how bad a public-health crisis could get. He had witnessed the subsequent eight months, how the disease had killed 349 people and infected more than 5,000 nationwide by the end of 2002. By the time the Chinese government brought the disease under control, the SARS epidemic had caused a severe sociopolitical disaster for the Chinese leadership. In May 2003, China’s health minister and the mayor of Beijing were dismissed from their jobs as well as their Communist Party posts over the outbreak. A detailed inquiry into the ways the health minister tried and failed to manage the damage SARS caused to both his and China’s global image explains why he was ultimately fired from his post.

Seventeen years later, on December 30, 2019, Dr. Ai Fen, the director of the Central Hospital of Wuhan emergency department, treated a patient whose pathology report bore the words, “SARS coronavirus.” She circled the words and forwarded a photograph to a medical colleague. The image began making the rounds among certain specialists, and that evening, it hit Li’s phone.

Naturally, Li was concerned for his colleagues and friends, so that same night, he sent a message to a group of fellow doctors on the social media platform WeChat. He warned them to be careful because an outbreak of an illness resembling SARS might be underway. When later asked why he did it, Li responded, “It’s always better to be cautious and take protective measures.” And “there were discussions among our colleagues,” he said, “that SARS might come back. We needed to be ready for it mentally. Take protective measures.”

Several days later, police appeared at Li’s home and he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau in Wuhan, where local authorities chastised him for “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the public order.”

Before allowing Li to return to work, the police forced him to sign a statement that included the warning, “If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice—is that understood?” He inked the statement with a red thumbprint and wrote, “Yes, I do.”

Little did he know that with that simple act, he may have signed his death warrant.

Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market

207 Fazhan Avenue, Jianghan District Wuhan Metro Line 2: Hankou Railway Station

Squawking birds. Flapping wings. Wild yelps. Plaintive braying. The humid gurgle of fish tanks. The splash of water on blood-spattered cement. Stall beside stall beside stall. Friendly calls between sellers and customers. The tense patter of fast-paced bartering. The hot press of bodies in narrow lanes.

Pre-pandemic, this was daily life in the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market—a sprawling live-animal market, on either side of Xinhua Road and Jindun Street, nestled within the bustling Jianghan District. Covering twelve acres, the market contained the wares of more than one thousand sellers on any given day. It was the largest seafood wholesale market in central China, but many of its products had nothing to do with the sea. Poultry, livestock, and other exotic animals found buyers within the market’s walls. The wild-animal section in the market’s western zone was especially eclectic, boasting thirty-eight terrestrial wild species. These included everything from Siberian weasels, Chinese hares, and Malayan porcupines to red foxes, minks, and wild boars.

Many of these exotic animals were intended for luxury consumption, not everyday meals. The most expensive wild mammal sold for food was the marmot, which would put you out more than $25 per kilogram. Raccoon dogs and badgers sold for a slightly more modest $15–20 per kilogram, while hedgehogs cost $2–3 apiece. Indian peafowl was the most expensive avian food source, at $56 per bird, while the sharp-nosed pit viper was the most prized edible reptile, costing $70 per kilogram.

Other species, such as squirrels, were sold as pets rather than food. While a single squirrel cost only $25, luxury-pet owners might have been drawn to the captive-bred crested myna birds, which can imitate human speech. These sold for around $300.

The wild-animal section of the Huanan Seafood Market comprised only ten stalls, a small but veritable zoo, and it was widely known that such animals were capable of hosting a variety of zoonotic diseases. “Zoonosis” literally means “zoo disease” because it refers to a disease that arises in animals before jumping to humans. Because these diseases are new to humans, we have very little natural immunity, so they hold devastating potential. The good news about natural spillover zoonoses is that, at least early on, they have limited ability to cause a serious outbreak. This is a trait of natural biology: The viruses have adapted to their nonhuman hosts, and it takes some time and experimentation to adapt to humans and support robust human-to-human spread. In the case of a natural zoonosis, the time it takes a virus to adapt from an animal host to a human host gives the healthcare community an important opportunity to develop protocols for the diagnosis and treatment of the new affliction.

Nonetheless, after the first SARS epidemic, in which a SARS virus adapted to civet cats sold in wet markets jumped to humans, the Chinese government already had some protocols in place to prevent the spread of zoonotic diseases in the market. For example, Wuhan Forestry Bureau enforcement officers issued permits to market vendors, and policy dictated that animals must have an origin certificate and spend time in quarantine to ensure they didn’t exhibit overt disease symptoms before they were allowed into the market. Law-enforcement officers also had full access to trading practices, including the right to inspect animals for gunshot wounds or snap-trap injuries that might indicate the animals were captured in the wild. In China, wild animals are considered state property, and any trader convicted of selling protected species can face up to fifteen years in prison.

Unfortunately, these policies were rarely enforced. Animals were frequently stacked in cages in unhygienic conditions. A broad study of wet markets prior to the outbreak of SARS‑CoV‑2 revealed that many animals suffered from wounds, implying they were illegally sourced. Of seventeen shops surveyed during the outbreak, none posted origin certificates or quarantine certificates for their animals, which meant that their entire trade was illegal.

These certainly weren’t favorable conditions for health, and history has shown that the best way to kick off a devastating human pandemic is to start it with animals. SARS‑1, MERS, and modern influenza all began as zoonoses. There was a good reason that Chinese officials, vendors, and buyers should have been more cautious about the handling of animals in the wet market. And certainly, no matter where SARS‑CoV‑2 came from, the studies that have emerged out of the Huanan Seafood Market fiasco suggest that greater regulation enforcement is necessary to maintain public safety.

Still, none of this goes to say that wet markets are inherently “bad” places. Markets such as Huanan Seafood have been the beating heart of Asian cities for centuries, supplying residents with fresh food and cherished pets and providing a moving town square for friends to meet and exchange the latest news or gossip. These sites are deeply embedded in Chinese history and culture, and even though modern life has given us access to refrigeration and safe food-transportation networks, many people prefer to buy live or freshly slaughtered animals. In my opinion, we must find ways to minimize the risks of zoonoses without disrupting cherished traditions and customs.

In December 2019, business was progressing as usual at the Huanan Seafood Market. Despite some of the public-safety risks I have already mentioned, there was nothing to indicate that any animals were suffering from a new or unusual virus, even as reports of infected humans were beginning to emerge elsewhere in the city. It didn’t take long, though, for officials to grow suspicious and turn their attention to the market.

This made sense since civet cats sold in wet markets had been responsible for the rapid spread of SARS‑1, and camel markets had been the culprits behind the MERS coronavirus. On January 1, 2020, after performing extensive environmental sampling and spraying the facilities with a bleach solution, the Chinese authorities closed the market. In the media, the wet market quickly emerged as the de facto ground zero of the coronavirus outbreak. It all seemed to make sense that the source of the virus could very well be the Huanan Seafood Market. It was, indeed, my first assumption.

Market Theory Begins to Wear Thin

It soon became clear, however, that the most “logical” explanation for the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2 may not have been the correct one. An early clue that the market was not the source was the finding that although 66 percent of the early COVID-19 patients worked or shopped at the market, none of the live-animal vendors were infected with SARS‑CoV‑2.

Within mere months, experts suspected that the market was a red herring. Dr. George Gao, the Oxford- and Harvard-trained virologist and then-head of the Chinese CDC, said on May 23, 2020, “We first believed the virus originated in the seafood market, but now it looks like the market is just another victim.”

Although all agree that the host of the SARS‑CoV‑2 ancestor virus was bats, multiple investigations before and after the outbreak revealed that no bats were sold in the wet market, and bat was not a food source in Wuhan. Further, bats in Wuhan typically begin their winter hibernation in September each year. While it was possible that the virus spread through an intermediate host (as did the SARS‑1 virus, which jumped from a bat to a civet cat and then to humans), despite 1,380 specimens collected in the market, no evidence of virus genetic material or animal antibodies to the vrus has been found to suggest any intermediate host or that any animal other than humans had been infected.

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Wuhan CDC

24 Jiang Han Bei Lu, Jiang’An Wuhan Metro Line 2: Hankou Railway Station

All the focus on the Huanan Seafood Market as the likely source had temporarily obscured the fact that it was not the only possible disease vector located in that bustling neighborhood. Not far away stood two laboratories researching bat viruses; one was about 300 meters from the site of the Huanan Seafood Market, the Wuhan CDC.

In February 2020, a research paper supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China suggested that the Wuhan CDC, which regularly extracted tissue samples for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing from caged-specimen bats, was a more likely source for the virus than the wet market. Almost immediately, the paper was taken down, likely upon the orders of the Chinese government. Nevertheless, as anyone who has posted awkward photos on social media knows, it’s a fruitless task to try to erase anything from the internet.

Thankfully, that means that even after the paper was scrubbed, I was still able to locate these researchers’ claims online. Their paper pointed out several crucial details. First, the likeliest source of the coronavirus appeared to be a particular species of bats named Rhinolophus affinis, which live in the caves of Yunnan Province, more than 1,118 miles from the seafood market. To put it in perspective, that’s almost the distance between Washington, DC, and the Everglades National Park in Florida.

One study of the feeding habitat range of the Rhinolophus indicates that it travels only about 1.2 miles from its roost, which leaves an extremely low probability that the bats had flown all the way from a cave in Yunnan to the market in Wuhan.

It also appears that at least some of the technicians at the Wuhan CDC had been long aware of the potential risks of bringing virus samples from undeveloped caves in remote areas of China back to headquarters in the heart of Wuhan. For example, a promotional video released by the Wuhan CDC on December 10, 2019, shows scientists collecting viruses from isolated bat caves. Tian Junhua, an Associate Chief Technician from the Department of Disinfection and Pest Control at the Wuhan CDC, narrates the video, explaining, “In the past ten-plus years, we have visited every corner of Hubei Province. We explored dozens of undeveloped caves and studied more than three hundred types of virus vectors. But I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life” (emphasis added).

He warned that collecting viruses from bat caves can be extremely dangerous “because when you find the viruses, you are also most easily exposed to the viruses.” What is striking about the video is that, despite these clear indications of risk for the scientists collecting the specimens, many of the pictures show they are not wearing masks or gloves. One would have thought that for a promotional video they would have been on their best behavior.

In any case, the video ends on an optimistic note: “Nearly two thousand types of viruses have been discovered by Chinese CDC authorities over the last twelve years. Only 2,284 types of viruses had been discovered worldwide over the two hundred years prior to China’s discovery. China has taken the lead in the world in the field of basic research.” Junhua’s statement indicated his awareness that China’s extraordinary collection effort also meant that potentially up to two thousand viruses had been given the opportunity to encounter many more humans in a laboratory in the middle of a city of eleven million, next to a subway line that carried one million people a day.

It’s obvious that the Wuhan CDC lab not only could have had access to the bat coronaviruses that were the SARS‑CoV‑2 precursor, but that it had been culturing, growing, and harvesting those viruses, and it would have only taken one event to have enabled SARS‑CoV‑2 to escape into the populace.

Further, the outbreak happened to coincide with a planned relocation of the CDC’s lab. In anticipation of a move within Wuhan, the Wuhan CDC had submitted a waste-disposal procurement request on June 27, 2019, asking for help to dispose of two tons of medical waste that had piled up from 1994 to 2019.

This effectively places the CDC and all its medical waste a short walk from the Wuhan subway system. Could a leak during the removal and disposal of that much medical waste have been the process that kicked off the pandemic? The WHO report suggested as much when it noted: “The Wuhan CDC laboratory moved on 2nd December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan market. Such moves can be disruptive for the operations of any laboratory.”

Even so, the CDC still is not the likeliest source, as it was not the lab doing synthetic biology to create “human made” viruses. Only one lab in Wuhan had both collected new viruses from distant caves in China, Southeast Asia, and as far away as Africa, and engineered new features into the genetic code of these natural viruses, making novel viruses that had never existed in the 310 million years since the first virus, the nudivirus, first infected early insects.

That lab was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology

44 Xiao Hong Shan, Wuchang District Wuhan Metro Line 2: Hongshan Square Station

The story of the Wuhan Institute of Virology began in an unlikely place at an unlikely time: eighteenth-century Britain.

In 1796, the English physician Edward Jenner caught wind of some Gloucestershire folklore. Milkmaids, laborers tasked with milking cows, were notoriously immune to smallpox. Because of their work, they were frequently in close contact with cows and a mild disease called cowpox, which was not fatal and left only a single pustule on their hands. Locals had begun to inoculate themselves with cowpox as a means of warding off the more deadly smallpox disease.

Jenner, intrigued by the science behind this folk remedy, collected a specimen from the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a young milkmaid, and injected it into the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps. He monitored Phipps and, in 1797, submitted a paper to The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge describing the experiment. He claimed that the method could provide immunity to smallpox. The society told Jenner that he required more proof, so he continued his experiments, even going so far as to use his own son in the trials. In 1798, he published the results and called the method “vaccination,” a term taken from the Latin word vacca, which means cow.

Jenner was widely ridiculed, but over time, the success of his ideas won out. Nevertheless, no one knew why the method worked until several generations later, in the mid-nineteenth century, when a French chemist and biologist named Louis Pasteur built on Jenner’s ideas and proved that tiny microorganisms called germs were responsible for infectious diseases such as smallpox. He tested his germ theory of disease using anthrax, an infectious zoonosis. Using a microscope and blood samples, Pasteur discovered microorganisms that he argued were responsible for the infectious diseases. Using a weakened sample of the organism, he experimented with inoculation and was able to prove that the anthrax bacteria was absent in the inoculated subject. To honor Jenner’s work, Pasteur called his own process “vaccination,” and it became the generic term for the technique.

In 1887, the Pasteur Institute was founded in Paris. It was dedicated to the study of microorganisms, diseases, and vaccines. That was an especially valiant mission at the time—infectious diseases were then the number one cause of death for anyone under the age of ten. In most cases, patients were left helpless, with no means of prevention or cure. Humans were subject to the whim of nature. For more than a century, the institute has been making discoveries that have allowed the world to control diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, influenza, yellow fever, and poliomyelitis.

The Pasteur Institute inspired other infectious-disease research institutions across the globe. In 1956, the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory was founded under the Chinese Academy of Science. Following the mission of the Pasteur Institute, the Wuhan lab’s work focused on taking specimens from sick patients, collecting microbes, looking at them under the microscope, and creating vaccines for those illnesses. The name changed several times during the following decades, before eventually landing on the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 1978.

For the majority of the twentieth century, however, the lab continued to follow this traditional research agenda.

As time passed, though, that decades-old agenda had become humdrum. By the 1970s, many in the medical profession, including my own medical-school professors, actually had the arrogance to believe that we had put infectious diseases behind us. I remember witnessing that hubris when an instructor referred to the Spanish-influenza epidemic of 1918 and told my class, “This is for historical purposes only because this will never happen again.” Little did we know infectious-disease treatment and vaccines were coming into their full importance at the same time that new, deadly viruses such as Ebola and AIDS were emerging. As if to directly contradict my teachers, Ebola showed up in 1976 in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan. A June 1981 report from the U.S. CDC on five young men with an unusual infection, Pneumocystis pneumonia, would be the introduction of the HIV virus and the disease AIDS to the world. AIDS would be the disease tied to Anthony Fauci’s rise to the head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1988, a position he held until his retirement in 2022. It was clear by the end of the twentieth century that the truth of the ever-present danger of new infectious diseases had replaced the earlier misplaced confidence of the medical community that these diseases were a thing of the past.

The coronavirus SARS—severe acute respiratory syndrome—was the first major zoonosis of the twenty-first century. Humans were already dealing with four coronaviruses, all of which were mild infections and made up about 15 percent of all common colds. SARS was different, however, because it was the first lethal one—it killed 13 percent of its victims. Plus, it was airborne and spread easily. So, when SARS broke out in southern China’s Guangdong Province in 2002, the scientists at the WIV charged down to the area to investigate. The WIV, alongside the U.S. CDC, played an instrumental role in determining that the virus, formally SARS-CoV-1, had passed from civet cats to humans. Even with what are now considered primitive genetic tools, it took only five months to proclaim the civet cat as the intermediate host. Note, at the time of this writing, there is still no credible evidence for an intermediate host for SARS‑CoV‑2.

By February 2003, the virus had spread beyond Guangdong’s borders. Kwan Sui-chu, a seventy-eight-year-old Canadian woman, carried the virus to Toronto; three young women took the disease to Singapore; and Johnny Chen, a Chinese American businessman, carried the infection to Vietnam, where he was admitted to the French Hospital of Hanoi on February 26.

Italian microbiologist Carlo Urbani was called to examine Chen, and Urbani realized that Chen didn’t merely have a bad case of the flu. Urbani was an experienced tropical disease expert and had received the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize as part of his work with Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Urbani sounded the global alarm, notifying the WHO that this was a new and highly contagious disease. He also managed to convince the Vietnamese Health Ministry to isolate patients and screen travelers, which helped slow the epidemic’s spread.

On March 11, on his way to a conference in Bangkok, Urbani felt feverish and realized he had contracted the disease while treating patients in Hanoi. Several weeks later, he took his last rites from a Catholic priest, asked that his lung tissue be donated for scientific research, and died.

Six weeks later, on April 25, 2003, twenty-two scientists from the U.S. CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, filed for and later received a patent application claiming ownership of the virus that killed Dr. Urbani.

SARS-CoV-1 was only the fifth known human coronavirus in the world, and it was unexpectedly deadly. According to the WHO, SARS was the first severe and readily transmissible new disease of the twenty-first century. The world had not been prepared, but thankfully, scientists were quick to act and limit the spread. By July 2003, the virus’s threat had been mitigated. In total, SARS-CoV-1 infected around 8,000 people, with 774 deaths. Yet, even though the epidemic was over, the disruption had just begun. The entire world of virology was upended by SARS-CoV-1.

NIAID Chief Anthony Fauci, flush with $1.7 billion in new cash from Congress to fund biodefense research, convened the Blue Ribbon Panel on Bioterrorism, which managed to link the viral diseases AIDS, Ebola, and SARS-CoV-1 with the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the anthrax letter attacks later that fall. All of this became the foundation for the creation of one of the largest federal bureaucracies ever, linking the research activities of NIAID to the Department of Defense in an effort to develop biodefense-research capabilities against future theoretical bioweapons.

By 2005, SARS‑1 had motivated an international collaboration involving Dr. Peter Daszak, a British-born zoologist then at the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York City; University of North Carolina-based virologist Dr. Ralph Baric, whose experiments using synthetic biology to create human-made viruses led him to become the world’s leading expert in the field; Dr. Linfa Wang, who was at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization Livestock Industries, Australian Animal Health Laboratory, Geelong, Australia and played a key role in the discovery of the deadly Hendra virus, which jumped from horses to humans in 1994; and Dr. Zhengli Shi, a Wuhan native and a senior scientist at the WIV.

The first paper by Daszak, Wang, and Shi described how they had collected specimens from 408 bats from four locations in China and processed those specimens at the WIV. Their research found that 28 to 71 percent of the bat specimens collected had evidence of prior coronavirus infections. Their paper, in October 2005, nearly three years after the SARS‑1 epidemic emerged, asserted that they had gathered enough genetic sequences from these viruses to determine that, although the virus passed from civet cats directly to humans, bats were the likely reservoir host of the SARS‑1 virus.

Their collaborative SARS investigation and subsequent paper led to a fifteen-year-long loose alliance of research by Wang, Shi, and Daszak, with occasional contributions from Baric, whose focus at the time was fixed on the creation and study of synthetic viruses made in his lab. Still, the collaboration led to a collection of thousands of viruses from some of the most remote areas of Southeast Asia, undergoing experiments that used ever more powerful synthetic engineering tools.

With bats now identified as the source of SARS, what we do know for certain is that at least one person on that team was dedicated to finding the next lethal virus before it found us: Dr. Zhengli Shi.

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Just posted my interview with Steven Quay, a physician-scientist and entrepreneur who advised the federal government on origin of the COVID pandemic.

Please head over to the DisInformation Chronicle Podcast on Youtube and subscribe.

Quay has published a new book that walks readers through the scientific evidence showing that the COVID pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence can be found by examining the genetic code of the virus’s DNA. He also details the reforms needed to ensure another lab accident doesn’t kill more people.

Another issue we talk about is the current media hype around viruses that began once the current administration pivoted away from dangerous gain-of-function virus research to focus on chronic disease studies. Only a few Americans have died in the last year from measles and around hundred from Hantavirus in the last decade. Yet stories about these viruses seem to flood the media every day.

We are now in the midst of an "Ebola crisis" in America, although only 15,000 people have died across the planet since Ebola first began infecting humans around half a century ago. Only 2 people have ever died in the U.S. from Ebola, and both contracted it while in Africa. Two nurses treating one of the patients also got infected, but both survived.

Meanwhile, around 12,000 American die every week from cancer, and infectious diseases are not even a top ten killer in the United States, according to CDC statistics.

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Tomorrow, I’ll be running an excerpt of Quay’s book, “The Code as Witness: How the Covid Genome Reveals its Lab Origins and How to Prevent Future Outbreaks.”

Stay tuned.

See the interview below and suggest future guests in the comments. Again, please subscribe to my Youtube channel as well. Enjoy the interview!

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I put together a short video explaining why Bill Gates’ billions of dollars thrown at public health distorts the messages we get on public health. I focus on Gavin Yamey of Duke because he’s a perfect case study. Yamey has been funded for decades by Gates and also receives money from organizations Bill Gates funds such as the World Health Organization, and the vaccine marketing organization that Bill Gates started called GAVI.

All this Gates money has tranformed Yamey from a puported academic researcher into a guy who never misses a chance to cheerlead for Bill Gates, the WHO, GAVI, and probably other Gates-funded groups I haven’t yet uncovered. Here’s one of Yamey’s disclosure that you can find online (if you know where to look).

The problem is that Bill Gates doesn’t do much to help people with all his spending, some of which has been invested back into companies that make Bill Gates even richer.

That’s why Gates needs academics like Yamey to give his financial investments a thin academic sheen. Anyways, enjoy the video.

Someone sent me a link to a story in the Le Monde that mentioned my reporting that first exposed UNC virologist Ralph Baric who got all his federal grants yanked and then put on leave by UNC. Your support makes this reporting possible.

Thank you so much!

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In a long expose last year I unmasked a handful of political zealots behind a years-long crusade to smear Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who had just been nominated to run the National Institutes of Health. These Democratic Party activists campaigned alongside Tony Fauci and included Yale University’s Gregg Gonsalves, Duke University’s Gavin Yamey, and Wayne State University’s David Gorski. (For those who have never heard of Wayne State, it’s a university in Detroit, internationally acclaimed as the “Harvard of Michigan.”)

None of the trio has ever published a medical paper worth a second glance, nor have they accomplished anything in public health meriting more than a university press release. Instead, all three use their academic titles to compete for both liberal journalists’ attention and renown amongst online leftist militants.

In that second competition, Gavin Yamey has seized the winning trophy. This underlines why Yamey’s career is a case study to explain the plummeting trust for public health. People view academic medicine and public health as rife with ideologues co-splaying as data-driven medical geeks, and they do so for good reason.

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Shortly after Cole Tomas Allen stormed past security at the White House Correspondents’ dinner to murder President Trump, people began scanning social media to figure out how a guy, whose friends described as a nerdy gaming enthusiast, became radicalized into a rageful ideological nutter. Digging through the leftist social media app Bluesky, online investigators discovered that Allen ran the @coldforce.bsky.social account where he amplified posts of rabid militants.

And who was one of the extremists captivating Allen as he prepared himself mentally over the last several months to assassinate Trump? Duke University’s Gavin Yamey.

CNN reported that Allen shared posts by extremists who compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and that he encouraged Trump’s critics to purchase guns: “Suspected shooter’s social media posts show shift from video games to political rage.”

Here’s what CNN reported on Allen’s Bluesky account where he promoted fanatics:

Allen appears to have started posting on the Bluesky social media platform in February 2025, a few weeks into Trump’s second term. That account frequently criticized the Trump administration’s policies and lamented that more powerful figures weren’t taking action against the president.

“Everyone already knows trump is a f**king awful person in multiple dimensions and no one has done sh*t,” the “coldforce” account wrote in April 2025.

Yamey did not respond to multiple requests for comment asking why he thinks the man charged with attempting to assassinate the President was a fan of his social media activity. But when others were confronted with this same question they lashed out.

On the Piers Morgan Show, Democratic Party activist “Jo Jo from Jerz” freaked when she discovered Cole Tomas Allen was a fan of hers and retweeted her social media posts.

When not posting extremist rhetoric on social media, Yamey has distinguished himself with a barrage of hate assaults against anyone calling to cut ties to the WHO and Bill Gates, without mentioning that he, Gavin Yamey, is swimming in WHO and Bill Gates money.

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Back in 20007, the Gates Foundation donated $1.1 million to launch the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, with Gavin Yamey as one of the senior editors. For a guy with questionable ethics, Yamey nonetheless had the gall to implore researchers to follow proper ethics. “Please help us in our mission by following our guidance on ethics and reporting standards,” Yamey warned, in an editorial.

In 2009, the Kaiser Family Mini-Media Fellowship in Global Health Reporting awarded Yamey a grant to examine healthcare in Africa. Quite a bit of the money for this program came from historical donations from Gates, Kaiser has disclosed.

In 2016, the Gates Foundation gave Duke University a $900K grant with Yamey as co-investigator. With this cash, Gates charged Yamey with developing policies that align with health goals of the United Nations and the Chinese government’s “Healthy China 2030.”

Not that Gates’s money has improved world health. In a remarkable series published in The Nation, reporter Tim Schwab documented in exhaustive detail how Bill Gates funding for academics and public health both enriches himself (“Bill Gates Gives to the Rich, Including Himself”) and does little for public health (“Are Bill Gates’s Billions Distorting Public Health Data?”).

Nonetheless, Since Gates began handing him that money, Yamey has transformed his academic position into an online Bill Gates lobbying campaign. Yamey promoted Gates with little regard for ethical consideration in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine and has served as the resident Bill Gates expert for several news articles appearing in The BMJ, run by his friend Kamran Abassi.

Buried in a journal article, I discovered Yamey’s funding. I was not startled to find oodles of Gates grants (red) as well as some United Nations (yellow) and World Health Organization-WHO loot to boot (blue).

Nor was I surprised to find that, when NPR needed dial-a-quote expertise last January to berate the Trump administration for withdrawing from the WHO, Yamey appeared like magic in the news piece (which did not disclose Yamey’s Gates and WHO funding, of course).

During a talk he gave at Harvard’s Global Health Institute, Tim Schwab explained the ethical swamp of Bill Gates funding for academics and why you see a Gavin Yamey type popping up in a news story to defend the WHO or Bill Gates, without learning that Gates pays Gavin Yamey.

“The Gates Foundation in recent years has become the second largest funder of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is part of the United Nations and is ostensibly organized as a democratic organization,” said Schwab. “But then you also have a private billionaire from Seattle who can come into the sidelines with billions of dollars in donations and shape what the WHO works on and what it doesn’t work on.”

I emailed Yamey multiple times, inquiring how much Gates money he has received over the years, and how much of that Gates lucre goes into his own pocket. Oddly enough, asking Yamey about Gates money has caused Yamey to go silent about Gates.

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If you’d like more background on the ethics at Gavin Yamey’s Duke University, see this piece I did on Dr. Ralph Snyderman, who was dean of Duke’s medical school. Snyderman was named multiple times in a state criminal complaints for helping Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family addict Americans to Oxycontin.

When a grad student figured this out, Snyderman then threatened him with legal action. Like Gavin Yamey, Ralph Snyderman remains a member of Duke’s faculty in good standing. Because of course.